I’ve taken on a voluntary role with Mindshare, helping to upload and manage the Writing area of the site. 🙂 I’ve been involved as a contributor since the site was launched, you can see some of my work here. I really like the ethos of the site, the idea of giving people a voice and developing an online community. They also have facebook page here.

“mindshare is a unique space that allows mental health consumers and their supporters a place to creatively tell their stories. It is a community dedicated to de stigmatising mental illness through shared experiences” 

– Louise Pascale, Digital Media Officer.

Those of us involved had a meet up on Monday to talk about the site and possible improvements. One of the downsides of the lovely uncluttered front page they have is that while new blog posts are always posted on the front page, the other new creative content such as photos, writing or music don’t always show on the front page, so please have to go looking to see if there’s new content. Unfortunately there’s no way with the website structure to automate a front page update, but one of the volunteers is going to try and manually rotate all the new content through the front page when they can to help people find it. Another new development was opening up comments on all of the content – previously comments were restricted only to blogs. It can be a little disheartening to send work out and not get any response, so I hope this step will help to strengthen the sense of community on the site.

So, for all those of you with something to say – a story to share, a poem, an experience to write about, a complaint, an idea, a suggestion, type it up and send it in. (to the Mindshare email please, not directly to me!) We need posts for the blog, we need music, art, photos, poems, whatever you have that’s in digital format. We love to be posting several new things every day so we need people to send us new material. All the details are on their Get involved page. You can be anonymous if you wish, just chose a pen name and send in your work with that name on it. If you’d like to add a short biography of who you are, we’d love to attach it. If you have a website or blog of your own, we’re happy to put a link to it, just let us know.

For those of you thinking about Peer Work, this is another great opportunity to tell your story and reach a large audience. I promise that writing an article is a lot less stressful than giving a talk! For those of you thinking about starting your own blog, this is a great chance to hone your skills and become familiar with the format before you jump into managing your own.

On that note, we are planning to offer a workshop soon on how to write for a blog, and I plan to offer a quick walk through of starting a new blog of your own with the Blogger platform. There’s also talk about new training to learn how to use different technology and be able to make your own movies, vlogs, and podcasts, which I am very excited about! Stay tuned for further details!

And a last quick reminder about the SmART training this week – get in quick if you were thinking about it! See all the details at What’s On.