Social Media Cafes and other Tuttle-inspired events

As you probably know, I encourage people all over to start their own social media cafe rather than trekking to the nearest big city and then moaning about how long it’s taken to get there.

I want to be absolutely clear, I own nothing here. I have no control over or responsibility for anything that these groups or their members do or say. Neither do they owe me or the Tuttle Club any allegiance – any affiliation is purely informal and may be as tenuous as the fact that one of the founders may have once said something to me about being interested in what we’d done. I have a feeling though that if I’d tried to franchise the idea with contracts and fees and branding and such, they wouldn’t be springing up quite so perkily.

We’re all in it together, kid.

Outside the Central London group (that’s us) I am aware of the following social media cafes, tuttles and tuttle-inspired events. I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone out. If I’ve left something in that died long ago, let me know.

In the UK, working roughly upwards from the southernmost (though my geography isn’t *that* good) …
Cornwall
Devon
Brighton
Hove
Lewes
Tunbridge Wells
Rochester
Twickenham has kukutana
Thames Valley
Oxford
Bath had a meeting and there’s a facebook group but not sure if there’s any more.
Cardiff has Trydan
Cheltenham
Cambridge has Twig
Coventry & Warks
Solihull
Birmingham
Lichfield
Black Country
Derby
Manchester
Edinburgh

In mainland Europe, I’m only aware of:
Barcelona

In the Land of the Free:
Boston, MA
Long Beach, CA
@langley started something in Denver, CO but it appears to have closed…
Chris Heuer has run a social media cafe at Citizen Space in San Francisco, CA
New York City, NY

So who’s going to get going on Asia, South America, Australasia, or Antarctica…?

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr cc-by

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The story so far…

We’re making something.

It’s a place. A place where people like us, people who “get” this social media, blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, online social networking stuff and are using it in interesting ways to make things happen in businesses, government and in our own lives.

There are places like this in other parts of the world, but we want one in our town – London. So we’re making it.

Althought it’s been rolling round in my head for a while, I first wrote about it in August 2007. Read that. Not much has changed to affect that original vision.

Since then…
I set up a facebook group and a couple of hundred people joined.
I spoke at Web2Open, BarCampLondon3 and BarCampUKGovWeb
I settled on prototyping as a method of developing what we wanted to achieve.
We had an initial meeting.
We had a flashmob.
We did a couple of mornings at the Coach & Horses in Soho.

At the last one, I realised that we needed to be a bit more serious about our online presence. While I’m not very good at serious, this blog is intended to be the focal point for stuff. You should be able to get pointers to where we’re doing things from here. Other good places to look right now are the wiki, the google group and the flickr group but there’ll no doubt be more as we go along.

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