Trans Media Action needs you for just one hour!

If you’ve been on Twitter during Channel 4′s series My Transsexual Summer, you’ll see that the hashtags (#transsummer and #mytranssexualsummer) have been going wild with comments, both positive and negative, about the trans community during the shows.

Trans Media Action is asking you if you’d like to volunteer an hour of your time during the last programme this Tuesday 29th to take part in a little experiment. We’re looking for 20 people and we want to see if we can generate some awareness about trans issues and our project by trawling through the hashtags and replying to people with a link to a brief message from us.

Here’s why.

The massive reach of a prime-time Channel 4 programme gives us a unique opportunity to look at how people feel and respond online in real time when they hear trans stories.

Some of the more horrific comments we’ve seen aren’t for the faint-hearted and we don’t necessarily want to engage with people who are downright abusive. But many negative comments have their basis in ignorance rather than malice, like, “these chaps are the most manly looking trannys (sic) I’ve ever seen, you’re fooling nobody mate #mytranssexualsummer”.

Conversation

We’d like to see if it’s possible to start a conversation with the negative commenters by replying to them and sending them to a link on our website telling them more about trans people. We don’t think we’ll change everyone’s minds necessarily, but it’s a good opportunity to try!

We also want to respond to the positive comments from people who might be new to trans, like this one: “Call me all the names you want but I’m really loving #mytranssexualsummer. I love how they are not afraid to be themselves” or “Really have fallen in love with this show. these people are just so real and so inspiring #transsummer”.

We want to thank these people for their support, follow them from our account and point them in the direction of our website and more information. We think that if more people feel involved with the movement towards acceptance and equality for trans people, the better chance we have of getting there sooner.

Details:

1. All you need is a telly and access to Twitter on Tuesday 29th from 10pm-11pm
2. You can do it from the comfort of your own home
3. You’ll be tweeting from the @transmediaaction twitter account and not your own for your own privacy and protection
4. There’ll be 2 groups – 1 replying to the negative comments and 1 replying to the positive ones and following them
5. You’ll take 5 mins afterwards or so to let us know how you got on
6. If you’re interested, contact nathalie@onroadmedia.org.uk with Twitter Experiment in the subject heading

Thanks!

Nathalie

One of those projects is Trans Media Action. We’re investigating ways to encourage the media to represent trans issues more fairly and accurately and, over the next few months, On Road Media will be supporting Trans Media Watch to come up with some innovative ways to do this.

One of our activities will take the form of a “social innovation camp”.  (For those of you who don’t know what a social innovation camp is, you can find out more here.) These events bring people from different backgrounds together to find solutions to difficult problems. In this case, we’ll be bringing tech people, media professionals and transgender people together to ask the question; how can we improve how transgender people are portrayed in the media? So our very own “Trans Media Camp” will be held at Channel 4 on January 13th 2011.

We had our first planning meeting for the camp last week at City University which consisted of a day-long workshop to break down some of the issues and brainstorm some of the areas we might ask people to address on the day. For some of Trans Media Watch, chatting about the prejudice, misunderstandings and abuses trans people face  felt like we were going over old ground. It certainly feels like we’ve been discussing these problems for a long time now, which doesn’t get any easier. But in order to involve more and more people in this story, we need to talk about this stuff until we’re blue in the face!

After we scoped out the problems, we chatted about some solutions and what success might look like and then started to draw up a guest list for the event. We’ll be sharing more about our plans in the coming weeks but please get in touch with us if you want to help or contribute.

Thanks!

Nathalie

This is why we’re helping to run some fringe Party Conference events this year with FutureGov and OPM.  We’ll be in Birmingham this Sunday talking to Liberal Democrats about ways they can use the web better to engage with communities. We’ll be in Liverpool on the 28th September and in Manchester on the 2nd October for the Labour and Conservative fringe events.

At the Single Homeless Project we discovered that this group desperately wanted to be understood and listened-to by councillors. And they should be part of debate that affects how the rest of society views them! Decisions are often made based on the opinions of people without first-hand experience of issues like crime and addiction and at SHP we found an eager group of people ready to throw their voices into the ring to shed some light on the reality of their lives.

Unheard Holler, a fledgling blog, was one of the outcomes of the first week.

If you’d like to get a flavour of what we’ll be doing at the fringe events (or come to them for that matter!), here’s a lovely short film (featuring moi) about what we’re up to:

Local | Social | Digital from FutureGov on Vimeo.

When our pals at FutureGov (doing brilliant things to help shape the future of government) called to ask us to take part in organising some fringe events at the Party conferences, well, we couldn’t say no.

So we’re off ! We’ll be helping to run Local | Social | Digital, a fringe event at each conference.

Dominic explains them beautifully here but basically, we’ll be running hour-long sessions that’ll explore how government can be doing better when it comes to using all things digital.

I’ll be there flying the flag for inclusion, although FutureGov and OPM (the third partner) will be across that too.

Inclusion should be at the heart of everything government does; not only because it’s fair but because it makes good sense that those at the margins are part of discussions that lead to decisions that affect us all.

I’m looking forward to having some useful discussions with potential collaborators!

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned, which may or may not be obvious to you, is that each person in the room has just as much insight and knowledge to share as the trainer. This is why training is often most successful when the group is diverse and can contribute from different perspectives. The more diverse the input, the deeper the learning.

This morning I spoke to someone coming to our Engaging Communities with the Web course next week. She works for a homeless charity and is coming to the course along with one of her clients who has had experience of homelessness.

Her initial concern was about the course content and suitability for her client – would it be too theoretical? I told her that as long as her client had some experience of using the web and social media (the course is about building communities online and engaging hard-to-reach groups) that he would be fine. After a chat with his key worker, they decided, as a team, that they would work with him in the 10 days before the course to get him up to speed with the social web as he was really keen to come.

This is a brilliant outcome and it is exactly the sort of thing that should be happening in training courses across the voluntary sector. Too often we see training rooms filled with people from the same background or from an organisation whose in-house culture is set. People can fear speaking up or contradicting each other if they appear, culturally, to sing from the same hymn sheet. They look to the trainer for insights while suppressing their desire to reveal their own.

A mixed group with an atmosphere of inclusion and creativity (which, I like to think we’re very good at creating!) leads to more useful discussion and learning.

To that end, we’re releasing 3 pairs of ‘Plus 1′ tickets for this course (Engaging Communities with the Web) *VALID UNTIL FRIDAY 17TH JUNE*. If you are coming from a voluntary sector organisation or a community group, we want you to come along with someone from your community or the group that your organisation supports. And you’ll only pay for one ticket.

This one’s on us because we’re keen to curate a brilliant group for this course. Contact elizabeth@onroadmedia.org.uk or call 0207 324 4790 for details.

I wanted to talk a little about the experience of prison that shaped my approach to our work at On Road Media and to do a little gentle promotion of our courses coming up next week. You can read the post here.

Engaging Communities with the Web is a course for those who want to learn more about building communities online and how to reach out to marginalised groups.

WELOVEFiLMING is a video blogging course that will teach you how to put together a killer video package for the web.