Spreading knowledge: Embedding Social media into Community

Seminar to publicize and disseminate findings from the AHRC projects, 'Performing Abergavenny: creating a cohesive community beyond divisions of class, location and history' and 'Using Facebook to investigate local history: experience, value and policy implications in one town'. The project is designed to provide information gained from a study of one Facebook site, 'Forgotten Abergavenny' and to disseminate these findings to an audience of non academics, councils and community groups with the intention of spreading knowledge regarding how to embed Facebook as a social media tool into the communities these organizations and groups serve.

This project meets the FoF scheme aims and eligibility criteria by developing creative and innovative engagements with new audiences and user communities, by dissemination of findings of previous AHRC projects to non-academic users and by helping in the pressing need for non-academic audiences to achieve greater understanding of how to embed social media sites into the communities they serve. It is clear that councils and the voluntary sector require greater understanding of how to attract and maintain Facebook sites as places of access to users. Forgotten Abergavenny has demonstrated the capacity of such sites to enhance communal cohesion and to develop linkages across age and class barriers so to reach marginalised or home-bound citizens.
The benefits from the dissemination of this knowledge will be felt by users and providers alike. Providers will access the benefits of knowledge gained from the success of a unique website which through its 'open' nature offers possibilities and information simply not accessible from the majority of member only sites. Understanding Facebook partners have already benefited from this knowledge. Other libraries and museums as well as community groups will directly benefit from the impact of this seminar because they too will be able to develop a knowledge base of what works and what doesn't work which they can then apply to their own communities. It also satisfies a clear requirement of councils and statutory bodies for more information regarding how best to enhance their online services; how to build maintain audiences for those services and how to reach across current barriers that restrict participation. Cost efficiencies and reduced funding are driving the advent of these services and good practice will help to ensure that financial benefits of these online social media platforms are realised by both councils and community groups.
As an initial step the planned seminar and the use of the website built for the 'Producing historical Abergavenny: The cultural Value and role of Social Media In promoting historical awareness in one town' project, will provide a simple means for wide knowledge dissemination among key participants through the creation of a group of community and local practitioners from the seminar who in turn, as a result of knowledges gained from the seminar, will provide pathways for new knowledge learning and training in their varied organisations. Follow-up questionnaires distributed at the end of the seminar will demonstrate the impact of this seminar and website, as will the activity on websites in the organisations concerned. We will monitor and assist progress in this direction through personal contact and through the website which itself will provide a resource for future activity and facilitate impact.