Blogs

It was three years ago exactly when I first had my interview to be a Social Enterprise Ambassador and one of the questions posed to me was “How will you measure if you have been successful?”  The night before I had been watching Dragons Den and was furious  with their knock back of a nascent social enterprise.  They filed it neatly under “charity” and “not for profit” and did not understand  the potential for a company to generate a profit and make...

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The furore over the Facebook page set up for Raul Moat and the media frenzy it generated reminded me of many similar problems we faced at Cybermoor a few years ago, before Facebook had even been invented.  Our open discussion forums generated lots of comment from the community on issues affecting their everyday lives and in a tight knit community, some of these topics strayed into areas which were rather unsavoury. Our challenge was to balance the right of people to offer their views with ...

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The day's news has been full of how ordinary citizens should have a say in how public cuts should be made over the coming months.  Commentators have broadly lined up in 2 camps; don't trust ordinary people with the decisions as they will be biased towards their own circumstances and if you get ordinary people involved you will get some good ideas and everyone will feel that the pain has been shared. At Cybermoor we have carried out some exercises in on-line budgeting with our communi...

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I was sat on a park bench at a playpark today watching my toddler happily running around with some other kids when one of the young mums in the group said she was thinking of starting up a social enterprise.  I was astonished – I had not told anyone there that I was involved in running a social enterprise or that I was promoting them through my role as an ambassador so this was someone who had got the message…..  Her idea was to turn her waterlogged garden into a bogland nature res...

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