Designing for Civil Society

New interactive digital divide website launched

Hats off to Andy Carvin and colleagues who have just launched an impressive new website for the Digital Divide Network.

DDN now boasts a wide array of interactive tools, encouraging activists to share resources, publish articles, host virtual discussions, establish online communities, and publish their own commercial-free Web journals, popularly known as "blogs." These resources can be used for communication and collaboration between the diverse groups who have a common cause to eliminate the digital divide.

The site is a major technical and networking achievement... and I'm not just saying that because it takes a feed from this blog. It's great when those talking about inclusion issues really use the social technology tools that they rightly say should be widely available. The network and site also helps those of us promoting the virtues of social software to show potential clients and collaborators what is possible. At a price in time and effort, of course.

Flash illuminates the urban tapestry

Giles Lane of Proboscis follows up my earlier item about neighbourhood communications with news that you can now view the results of the Urban Tapestries project through a flashbrowser. Once registered you can see how, during trials, people created text and image items to 'attach' to places in central London and view these by 'pocket', thread, and clickable map.

The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.
Urban Tapestries seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies, what they could do with them and how we can make this possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’ and 'mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.

I understand Giles is planning another project. I think he and his partners are onto something important about the potential for people to use new technology to interact with their environment. You can see a couple of animations that bring this home, linked from here.

UK Government pilot gives civic leaders blogspace

We shall soon find out just how enthusiastic UK local politicians and officials are about living e-democracy, rather than just talking it up, through a Government-funded blogging project. Readmyday offers civic leaders free blog space and support over the next six months. The project invitation says:

The project is about keeping an online electronic diary and will aim to benefit you by providing the 'know how' and coaching on how to do this effectively from experienced public sector bloggers. If you join you'll have the opportunity to start your own, individual and customisable blog as well as get involved in a community of bloggers who will share ideas, experiences and the civic leadership theme.

The invitation adds that the partners in the project include the Hansard Society, NorthLincsNet (North Lincolnshire Council) and contribution from experienced bloggers in Minnesota. The latter include Steven Clift and Griff Wigley. It is all part of the Government-funded local e-democracy project which I previously mentioned here.
One blog from Isobel Harding is already up, setting a high standard of personal chat and insider insights. It's not clear at this stage who is eligible to join the project, or where new blogs will be listed, but I should think there'll be an aggregator or blogroll to point the way.
There is a slight catch for those joining the project ... their output will be read by others and monitored. But then, for many of us knowing that someone is paying attention could be a big plus.

All-purpose partnership jargon

Simon Hoggart has a splendid Parliamentary sketch piece in today's Guardian All-new music brings jargon to the ears reporting Culture Minister Estelle Morris on helping people "access music" through "music partnerships"...

.....which used to mean Gilbert and Sullivan or Lennon and McCartney, but now refers to some new bureaucratic process, which involves "engaging in people with music".
There has to be constant "monitoring", plus "initiatives spread throughout the country", like the "music standards fund" and "organisations such as creative partnerships, properly funded at that point so then they can be rolled out nationally for engaging people in music".

Substitute health, regeneration, education for music and you have the all-purpose New Labour Ministerial policy-generator. As Simon adds:

Don't misunderstand me. I think Estelle is a fine and sincere woman who genuinely believes children should be able to listen to good music, go to art galleries and attend plays.
It's just that under New Labour all those noble ambitions get lost under a slurry of partnerships, stakeholders, initiatives, projects, best practice rollouts and the kind of language which would have had Dr Johnson spitting into his posset.

Is this the 'dark age' of community communications?

On his Neighbourhoods blog Kevin Harris wonders in The original space of flows whether we may be living in a 'dark age' of community communications...

.... where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory. There's stacks more to go into this, such as the 'isolating impulse' expressed in the use of personal stereos, shaded car windows, a non-conversational cash machine, how we feel about gated communities, and so on.

Participation just isn't on the mind map

Why does a lot public participation fail? Doodling with some mindmapping software the other day brought home to me - again - that it may be because, for most people most of the time, that sort of exercise is literally off their mental map. Public participation, community consultation and stakeholder engagement are the stuff of programmes to develop social capital and community cohesion. Facilitators try and wow their public sector clients with their latest workshop techniques, and researchers gather them up into toolkits. I know, I've done it - but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with the business for reasons discussed in items here.
Nevertheless the idea of participation is one route into a number of civil society issues, and the other day I was doodling with some mindmapping software to tease out how they cluster. Click on the image on the left to see the result.
It then struck me that it might be interesting to redraw the map from the point of view of the participants - the people that facilitators try, and increasingly fail, to get along to workshops so that their institutional clients can tick the participation box on their funding bid. Click the image on the right. Various reasons are given for people's lack of interest in these exercises: fatigue through too many programmes; lack of trust in bodies; scepticism about whether anything will be delivered. The mindmapping exercise brought home to me that it may just be that participation is peripheral to the way most people lead their lives. They/we are mostly concerned with relationships - with friends, family, workmates, interest groups and so on. Public officials, politicans and their facilitator helpers are at the edge of vision, unless there is a big threat or opportunity..... new airport planned, neighbourhood renewal proposed, school threatened with closure. Then we get interested. But when we get the pamphlets, go to the meetings, do we find things explained in the same ways we might talk to our friends, family or team-mates? No - probably lots of jargon which puts the agency and the facilitator at the centre, not the participant.
I used Novamind for these doodles, and there's a listing of more programmes I found here.

Hands up if you are a knowledge activist

If your job or passion is to do good communications work using new technology, how do you think of yourself? Others may call you variously a blogger, online journalist, community manager, information worker, editor, researcher, even hacker. Perhaps we'll find some shared interests wearing the badge of knowledge activist.
The term has been floating around those in knowledge management interested in bottom--up systems, and the use of personal media ranging from digital cameras, mobile phones and PDAs to personal websites and the latest open source tools for activism, and technologies that will change the way we learn. It arose at a recent workshop on personal knowledge management (PKM), and there's even a Knowledge Activist's Handbook which says "The role of the knowledge activist is to be unreasonable, to identify and combine those small grains of truth that have the potential to become pearls."

Professorial support for civic networks

One of the things that struck me at the Grassroots and Networks event that I reported earlier was how eloquent and enthusiastic Professor Stephen Coleman was in advocating the role of civic networks in renewing democracy. When he was with the Hansard Society his main focus was, I think, on the ways that Parliament, government and local government could use the Net to engage citizens.... and he feels these top-down institutions are doing reasonably well. Civic networks - whether local or reflecting interest groups - appear to be his current bottom-up passion.
The big engagement failure lies with political parties, which he predicted could be dead within 20 years if they carry on treating the members as voting-fodder.
Online activists have been pressing their case since the Freenets of the 1980s. It looks as if they are now in distinguished company.

Models for a civic commons

Over the past couple of weeks I've heard at least five different possible models for an online civic commons mentioned at various meetings about online communities and e-democracy, and I think we need somewhere to talk about them. Here's the models - and I'm sure there are more:
* A Government-supported Civic Commons in Cyberspace, advocated by Jay Blumler and Stephen Coleman
* The BBC iCAN! site for campaigns and discussion
* An online market for trading time-based service
* A commercial model like UpMyStreet conversations
* A site that would aggregate discussions taking place in online civic networks - an idea floated at yesterday's meeting on grassroots and networks

Getting representatives on to the e-democracy ladder

Richard Allan MP offered in effect a new version of the ladder of participation at yesterday's IPPR event on Grassroots and Networks - this time from the point of view of the elected representative faced with the more bottom-up elements of e-democracy.

Passive resistance - ignore it and hope you won't be noticed.
Active resistence - try and continue as a gatekeeper, blocking direct access to Ministers and meetings.
Co-option - infiltrate online networks to promote your ideas and Party
Co-existence - recognise the mutual benefits of collaboration between what e-democracy guru Professor Stephen Coleman called two different Internets - that of corporates and institutions mainly in broadcast mode, and that of online communities.