Designing for Civil Society

Partnership problems? Get to know the people involved

I hear continuing rumblings about the challenges inherent in the UK Government's Changeup programme, where the aim is to create infrastructure support for nonprofit organisations, involving a lot of collaborations at national, regional and local level. The Home Office Active Communities Directorate is insisting that each area of support - like governance, volunteering, technology - should have only one lead consortium in order to get funding. That's already caused difficulties with one of the support 'hubs', and there's been more general criticism  of the model. Suddenly partnership - and how to make it work - is becoming fashionable yet again.

Brainstorm blogging e-government

Louise Ferguson reminds us of the Ideal Government discussion being run by William Heath of Kable as a blog brainstorm with multiple authors. William posed the question: "You're a web user. What do you think ideal e-enabled public services should look like?"
The discussion is nearing the end of its four-week programme, and there's now lots of good stuff on the site. Louise reports a public meeting last week where:

Some discussion revolved around user v citizen v 'consumer', and we made plain to all that user research is not all about focus groups. A major discussion issue was Ian Whatmore's remit and powers.

... which sounds interesting if a little tantalising. No matter, because William will be posting the presentation on the site as well as highlights from the blog discussion. The site - by the Big Blog Company - has clear categories, author archives, links to other resources, and of course RSS feeds and seems to me a better e-discussion space than most email lists or classic web forums. A relatively simple model for one aspect of public e-enablement, and a good one to show to Mr Whatmore - head of the UK e-Government Unit when they meet. I'll be looking out for other successful blog-based discussions like this, and the one on Delivering race equality managed last year by Headshift. I'm sure we'll see further follow through from the burgeoning IPPR Manifesto for Digital Britain, who feel they may have inspired the Ideal Government discussion. Next month they are holding a joint event with the TUC: Organising Online: where Next for Unions and the Internet?

E-consultation resources

E-consultancy have now produced a paper from the round table on e-consultation that I reported here. You have to pay for the full report, but there is a free download of the section of links and e-consultation resources on the round table page.

Collaborating in middlespace

Lilia Efimova uses the term 'middlespace' to describe where bottom-up meets top down, informal meets formal learning, taking control of your life, and leadership as releasing the energy of others. I don't know if the term is new, but it triggers a lot of thoughts for me about how to get out of 'either-or' and into creative collaborations with people who may be starting from a different direction and want to find synergies. Lilia has helped create an excellent real space middlespace as convenor of Blogwalks including one recently in London. I'm tempted to pursue the idea further, but there's other stuff to do, and I know middlespace will be one of those ideas that sits in the back of my head giving a creative nudge now and again, so no need. Thanks Lilia.

Promoting regeneration? First listen to your critic

Perhaps there's something about the traditional public lecture - and lecture hall - that brings out more of the speaker than the usual Powerpoint keynote. It's certainly difficult to find a hall to better the Great Room at the Royal Society of Arts in London, and at the end of this evening's lecture I felt I knew more about Jonathan Glancey than his subject The Re-generation Game. That's not necessarily a bad thing for inquisitive readers of The Guardian, where he is architecture and design editor, and may also be useful for any regeneration agencies interested in gaining Mr Glancey's attention. More on that later.

Invitation to start local e-democracy pilots

US-based Steven Clift started a campaign to promote e-democracy 10 years ago, and has been snowballing support around the world ever since. I'm glad to hear from Steven that he's now aiming to support some UK pilots, where local groups of citizens want to promote e-democracy.
Steven writes:
E-Democracy.Org is looking for citizens and Local Authorities in the UK interested in starting an online local public Issues Forum for their community. This new pilot project is part of the UK National Local E-democracy Project.
Our citizen-based model creates a facilitated online public space in the heart of real civic life. The pilots will leverage E-Democracy.Org's decade of experience in strategic and sustainable online forum development.
We will provide training, assistance, and the essential forum facilitation framework through a local Forum Manager and citizen steering committee. The new open source GroupServer technology will help us bring together a critical mass of local citizens by combining the best features of e-mail lists with user-friendly web forums.

Front page lies - and that's just the free offer

Time was that shock-horror news was what sold tabloids, but these days - at weekends anyway - it is the merchandising deals. But can you trust the promotions any more than the headlines? Today's Sun offers two episodes of The Office "no tokens, no fuss"... taking most of the front page to back up its TV ads. Worth 50p, I thought, with the background excuse (if needed) that these days the series is used in management training. Except the DVD isn't there. Turn to the small print on page 41. "This DVD is polybagged inside The Sun in Carlton and Meridian (TV) areas only. Elsewhere it is instantly redeemable at Blockbuster stores." There isn't one of those round the corner, so I'm not sure I'll bother. Tomorrow, says the Sun, its sister paper the News of the Word is offering "Sex and the CD Vol. 2". I think I'll pass.

Trusting that "no more" moment

Simon Hoggart of The Guardian is my favourite diarist, and he provides further delight today with a piece headed "Vote Labour? Don't bet on it" The flavour is enhanced if you know that Simon is also the Parliamentary sketch writer for his paper, and has toiled for years in the corridors of politics. This isn't outsider sniping. Simon writes:

What's the point at which you decided you couldn't stand this lot any more? For many people Iraq was the tipping point - if not the war then the revelation of all that faked, tweaked and tarted up intelligence. For others it will have been something smaller: Bernie Ecclestone's million quid, or top-up fees, or Peter Mandelson.
I guess for me it's been the decision to loosen the laws on gambling, so that every one of our cash-strapped cities can now be bribed to accept a vast casino, designed to suck money from those who can't afford it and ship it back to the US or offshore havens.

How to play the governance game

Governance is one of those aspects of organisational life difficult to describe but easy to recognise when it goes wrong...Board members leaving in frustration, executive director and chair in power struggles, client groups feeling they don't get a say, stormy annual meetings... and that's just in the nonprofits. At a recent conference Drew Mackie and I helped participants work through those and other challenges using a simple game. The workshop wasn't quite as brisk as the communities of practice session we ran, but I think participants achieved a lot in 90 minutes. If you want to try it for yourself, here's how we did it, with some results played back to the rest of the conference that was organised by the Foundation for Good Governance. Briefly:
* Split into groups of not more than eight
* Each group invents an organisation facing tough challenges.
* Exchange the scenario with another group - giving them the task of dealing with the challenges
* Ask the groups to take on Board roles while they develop plans, and report back to everyone else
* Then ask groups to reflect on the lessons learned to report back to the wider conference
You can download here a more detailed sheet of instructions developed by Drew Mackie.

Aha - just listening doesn't work well

Johnnie Moore, writing recently from an Improv conference, reported Thiagi providing a great confirmation of how people don't learn just by just listening.

He referred to research he's done on how much people learn whilst listening to lectures. He set a test at the end of a short lecture and found that people scored only about 19% after a normal lecture. Then he tried something different - using the same lecture but interspersing breaks. During the breaks, the audience formed groups and had to set questions for a quiz, based on the lecture, with which to test other audience members. In another variation, he actually ran the quiz too. With the question-setting built in (and without actually doing the quiz), the test scores soared to 82%. Actually adding the intermittent quiz moved the final results to 96% - so just the exercise of setting the questions had the most impact.

As Jonnie says - at the very least, a great way to improve attentiveness to a lecture, and a good example of the importance of creating interactivity in learning. There's more in Johnnie's item about what works in facilitation (flexibility rather than formulae). Following the Thiagi link led to a lot of free workshop games. Insight and goodies too. Thanks.
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