Last week, I heard that Nick Booth had died and as with so many others who knew him even slightly, it stopped me in my tracks.
A couple of weeks before I’d heard that Ben Whitehouse had also passed away. I only met Ben once in person yet through Twitter I felt I knew him far better. As @benjionthetrain, he tweeted his commutes.
Ben was a kind man, often thinking of other people and his tweets being a thorn in the side of New Street management showed what Nick Booth often referred to as a ‘Git Citizen.’ Someone who was using technology to make organisations more answerable.
I’ve been reflecting these past few days as I’m sure anyone who knew Nick even a little bit has.
Nick taught me a lot. A former BBC journalist, he was a passionate advocate for using technology to bring people together and in his words, making the world slightly less s**t.
Nick was the first person to show me what Twitter was and how social media could revolutionise my job as a press officer. “We no longer,” I recall him saying that day, “have to go through the Priesthood of journalists to talk to our residents.” As someone who was a journalist and is still in the NUJ today that was iconoclastic as it was exciting.
Nick Booth, or @podnosh as he was also known online, had a profound impact on the public sector. Along with Dave Briggs he showed people how the internet could be used as a power for good. The late John Popham was another. All those people opened so many doors in the early years of social media from 2008.
As I reflected on that first day I heard Nick speak, I reflected on what he said that day. He live tweeted to ask Twitter how the a council could use it. John Popham and Paul Webster replied and my mind was slightly blown.
He showed how Birmingham Post reporter Joanna Gearey had used Twitter to check out reports of an incident at New Street Station. Joanna went on to work for The Times, The Guardian and Twitter itself.
He also showed a video shot by a Birmingham Councillor Martin Mullaney highlighting the problem of graffiti tags. So, today, I dug out the clip on YouTube and watched it back.
Clumsy and unedited, Martin held the video camera in selfie mode to talk to the camera and show the problem in a way I hadn’t seen before.
Looking back, Nick’s presentation that day was in itself a masterclass. Here are three ways social media will be used. This is going to happen, he said. He switched on a lightbulb over my head that changed the trajectory of my career. I set up what was the fourth ever local government social media account. I started blogging. I ended up going freelance.
When I went freelance Nick was supportive. He came over to Walsall with the late Steph Clarke to give some basic advice. “Don’t work with w*****s, know the value of your worth and give a s*** about what you do.”
At Steph’s funeral, the vicar removed his dog collar to recall how Steph had told how proud she was that she did a job working with Nick here she gave a s**t and made a difference. It was a remarkable funeral for a remarkable woman.
So many of those early pioneers are no longer with us. We stand on their shoulders yet where are the blue plaques for them?
As I reflected on Nick, I searched YouTube to find a clip of him speaking to remind myself of his voice. A born storyteller, his time as a journalist allowed him to understand what made a tale. His deep drive to make the world a better place and to bring others along with him.
The clip I found on YouTube was Nick in his pomp speaking of two stories. Both cut to the centre of who he was. In 10-minutes he tells the story of two Birmingham bloggers deciding to build a better version of the £2.7 million Birmingham City Council website in a day with other people’s help. The bccdiy project embarrassed the council by showing how badly they’d been had by their suppliers.
The second was the Social Media Surgery project. This span out from an idea from Birmingham blogger Pete Ashton. It sat volunteers who knew how social media worked alongside community groups who didn’t. Many Facebook pages, blogs and Twitter accounts were set up as a result.
You can see the clip here:
Watching it back, it reminded me how the internet can be a force for good if good people use it with a common purpose.
Scrolling online, I was struck by how many people had met Nick and had had their own individual moment of revelation thanks to him. It seems grotesque that he’s no longer here. If I think that I can only imagine what his family and close friends must be thinking. I hope they take comfort from what high regard he is held by. I loved what Lloyd Davis wrote. I love that his family have looked at some of the messages. I hope that the love for him is felt by them in the path ahead.
Yet, Nick was not an earnest person. He was fun to be with and was pleased to see you.
I’m sad that after Impact Hub in Birmingham closed I didn’t bump into him so often.
Scrolling through old messages, as many have I’m sure since hearing the news, this caught my eye. We were talking about the closure of Impact Hub in Birmingham. This had been a co-working space and venue for likeminded people to meet-up. It’s closure had reminded my of the film ‘The Commitments,’ I told him on a conversation in Messenger. The band breaks-up. Surely, it’s been a failure? Not at all. Its success can be judged by what those people went on to do, I’d suggested.
He responded:
The people he had an impact on and what they did should absolutely be part of Nick’s legacy.
Steph Gray, who founded Helpful Technology and ran UK Govcamp for several years, the other week was kicking around the idea of exploring ways to capture important content from expired websites. I do hope podnosh.com can be one of the first projects. I’d chip into that.
Creative commons credit: Nick Booth at commscamp 2013 by Paul Clarke.
So sorry to hear of both Nick and Ben. We need more people like this. Thanks for this lovely tribute.
Very nice, Dan. I hadn’t spoken to him in years. But I have such fond memories of him.
This comes as hard news. Out of the country I knew nothing about Nick Booth’s death. I met him in 1999 when he directed and produced a documentary TV programme ‘Losing the Plot’ about how despite the popularity of urban allotments, plots are being lost to building. The film drew on evidence from several sites including ones in Birmingham. The programme finishes with Nick ‘trespassing’ on the Victoria Jubilee Allotments (VJA) site in Handsworth to find a old local man’s abandoned plot before the site is cleared for housing. ‘Losing the Plot’ was aired in the early days of a campaign for the VJA that began in 1999 and Nick’s film made a vital contribution to the opening of the largest new allotment site in the country since WW2. For 15 years after that film and until I started to live abroad he and I met once a year to shoot the breeze (Nick a much better shot than I). I also ensured that he was a fixed speaker – informative, pioneering and entertaining on the seismic shift from broadcasting to narrow-casting – at my university. For me and many many others Nick was the inventor of the podcast in the early years of the 21st century. As the Greeks say ‘May the Earth lie lightly upon him’
share=copy Enjoy hearing his eloquent and powerful commentary on the film that began our long friendship. His words on his film will be, for me, his memorial.
One of the silver linings of the dark cloud is to stumble across Nick’s contributions in other places. Thanks for sharing this, Simon. You are quite right. It’s things like this that he did that will persist. I hope his friends and family see clips like this and watch them back when they are able.