Designing for Civil Society

Networked fundraising

The online Pledgebank, which enables people to promote good ideas by saying "I will if enough of you will", has succeeded in helping launch a new campaigning organisation. It could have wider implications for the nonprofit sector and anyone trying to do good stuff without ending up driven off course by the wishes of funders.
Danny O'Brien's pledge was: "I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1,000 other people will too." Tom Steinberg, founder of the Pledgebank host organisation mySociety, is emailing around his friends with justifiable pride to say:

What makes this unprecedented is that a brand new campaigning organisation with a self-sustained funding stream has come into existence effectively from thin air, and, crucially, without the benefit of any one rich person or foundation dropping thousands into it.
Pledgebank was uniquely effective in situation because if someone had just said "Will you set up a standing order of a fiver a month to my account so I can set up a new organisation?" nobody sane would have taken part.

Tom follows up this demonstration of the fundrasising power of new networking technologies with some simple network marketing:

I need some of your expert advice ..... my question is this - how can I go about telling the voluntary sector about this new way of doings things? I am an accidental member of the voluntary sector, and I don't really know the first thing about magazines, websites, news bulletins, conferences or any other way in which news spreads. Can anyone give me any tips?

Who could resist helping? My suggestion - besides various magazines in the field - drop a line to John Howes at the VolResource newsletter, now blogging here, and Ruralnet's xPRESS Digest.
The Pledgebank approach clearly has implications for anyone in the nonprofit world tired of the old round of funding and grant applications. It provides a more robust financial base, and perhaps the chance to keep the aims of an organisation less open to influence by a small group of investors. There may, of course, be other problems if pledgers don't like the way that things are going and start cancelling their standing orders. No bad thing if it makes social entrepreneurs and others nonprofit leaders pay attention to their supporters. OK when the pledgers are those who benefit from the campaign - as in this case. More difficult when the pledge is to help others who won't have a vote via their contributions. Maybe mySociety has something cooking on networked governance... and anyway not so much and issue when the pledge is for action rather than funding support, as many are. I suspect the secret is to aim low and make it fun too.
Forest Gregg succeed with his pledge to "start a free web service that matches teachers and learners but only if 4 other local people will join me at a dinner to talk about the idea and consider helping out".

CampaignCreator site goes live

The CampaignCreator site and campaigning tools being developed by Bristol council with £395,000 of government funding is now live. Login accounts may be limited during the pilot phase, but meanwhile the site does offer a some excellent general advice developed with Friends of the Earth. You can download guidance on starting a campaign, developing your case, building support, raising funds and other aspects of campaigning useful whether or not you are using online tools. As I wrote earlier, e-democracy guru Steven Clift is working with the advisory group to review development. I couldn't make it to the group's meeting last week, but hope to see more about what happened on the project blog.
Once piloting starts, it will be interesting to compare the site with others spotted by advisory groups members, including Citizenspeak and Campaignwindow. Although these are far more modest, the Bristol project should be able to offer more value in the guidance and support provided for groups. I've been sceptical about how far councils will go in supporting potential critics in their communities, but piloting may well prove me wrong. The task then will be for Bristol to sell the idea to other councils, or bodies prepared to host and support more local CampaignCreators.

Democracy is how as well as what

Will Davies in evidence schmevidence? gives us the heart of his article in Open Democracy, examining what he calls the cult of evidence-based policy in Government. The issue he addresses is that people don't seem to value improvements in public services - even though there is firm evidence to show they are getting better. At the same time people may complain that things are getting worse when they aren't, as with some aspects of crime.
The trouble is that people want not just the facts, but the feel of the way that things are improving.

There is an important dimension to democracy that the evidence-based policy movement appears to miss. Democracy is not just about the desirability or otherwise of outcomes, but about the mechanisms used to select and achieve them. The government is bewildered that measured improvements in public services have not been noticed by the public, and that measured falls in crime have been accompanied by increased fears of crime, then tends to blame the media for excessive pessimism. But when policy is constructed and evaluated by anonymous statisticians, one cannot assume the public will share the government's assessment of it. In politics, it is not enough for something simply to be the best option; people must reach agreement that it is the best option, a process which then becomes constitutive of that option's value.

The processes of democracy are as important as the products ... it's not just what you do, but the way that you do it.

UK nonprofits acquire some technology foresight

Nonprofit organisations are in the forefront of social action and delivering innovative services - but often lag behind private and public sectors in the use of new technologies. Lack of funding and skill shortages are factors, but I think another barrier lies in relating new online tools to traditional ways of working.
Fortunately the National Council for Voluntary Organisations is building a bridge to the future by setting up a technology foresight project, and researcher Megan Griffith has usefully outlined how technology can change civil society's democratic role in four areas: collective action, social capital, skills and empowerment, access to communities.
In a little biased in favour of the project because I'm on the advisory group - but more importantly because Megan, fresh to the field, has started a project blog and also surveyed the group on our skills and preferences. It should be refreshing to work on a technology foresight project that is rooted in issues of social benefit rather than dashing off after the latest tools.

UK Government goes wiki

The eGov monitor reports that the UK Government has launched its first wiki, on the topic of e-innovations, adding:

Last week, e-Health Insider reported that NHS Direct is proposing to set up an online social care wiki to allow patients to contribute their experiences of coping with illnesses and offer a site to where they can find support and services.

While it is good to see the wiki, it isn't the first. The Sustainable Development Commission had one last year, as I reported, though it is now longer up.

Tackling exclusion deserves an engaging approach

The UK Government's recent report Inclusion through Innovation has been generally well received, not least because it contains interesting examples of the social uses of technology, is the result of extensive research, and makes some bold claims. It deserves widespread discussion as well as recognition, but unfortunately the authors aren't offering us the chance to engage with them. I think that's particularly important in such a complex area.

Government Minister Jim Fitzpatrick says in his foreword that the report sets out to show "how ICT can be an enormously powerful tool for transforming not just the lives of the mainstream, but also of those who are on the margins of society." It's a claim we've heard a few times over the past decade, and hopefully we have learned from what actually happens that transformation isn't a technical fix.
While the report itself does say that "personal development and active inclusion in employment, social groups, and community participation can all be helped by technology" the action plan is mainly about ways in which local councils can extend e-government. It's generally about how government can get wider take-up of online services rather than how technology may, as it claims, transform people's lives. What it says about e-government services may be excellent - but it is only half the story. I think there's insufficient recognition that technology alone won't deliver transformation unless systems are designed with closer regard for those we aim to benefit, and the organisational changes necessary to bring changes into effect. It's pretty difficult to get that mix right through the research, consultation, analysis and presentation exercise indicated in the diagram, however well done. It needs working through with those trying to get it right on the ground. It needs continuing conversations as well as targets and tick boxes.
A few years back a report like this would have been discussed online by practitioners in forums like conet, once run by Communities Online. That forum has now disappeared - perhaps because one-time evangelists for community technology are now working within charities or as circuit riders grappling with the day-to-day problems of making the technology work. A good thing that is too.
In their place has arisen Citizens Online, which has been very successful in working with the technology industry and government in producing reports, running awards programmes, and developing projects like EverybodyOnline. I really admire what they are doing and their aim "to explore the social and cultural impact of the Internet on society". However in this case they appear to take the Government's rather narrow focus, and simply offer a ringing endorsement. John Fisher, chief executive, is quoted in the press release:

We very much welcome the Inclusion through Innovation report. It is an incisive document and there has been novel research, along with a useful capturing of in-depth issues and effective projects. We are pleased to see that Government has recognised the importance of the digital inclusion agenda. It must now grasp the opportunities presented in this report to ensure that the crucial joined-up work happens to make this a reality.

Both the report and the way it is being promoted feel a bit top-down and rather at odds with the subject matter. There's clearly room for debate here. I may have missed some crucial nuances in the report, misinterpreted the action plan - and misunderstood the whole thing. John may well be saying "good report - but we'll be watching to see if you can really deliver the social benefits". Unfortunately neither the SEU nor Citizens Online run a blog or forum where we - or any online citizens - can engage with them. It's presented as a done deal - now let's move on.
There is a proposal in the report for a new independent digital inclusion organisation "providing and stimulating leadership on delivery of good practice, and stimulating communities of users and leaders to promote discussion and understanding." Why not start that discussion now?
Disclosure: I was involved in starting Communities Online a decade or so back, so could be suffering from a touch of the 'good old days'. I'm about to start some work with Government departments on how civil servants can better engage with the public, so feeling more than usually evangelical on that front. I hope I can continue writing about public engagement while working with public servants, and encourage them to do the same. If Robert Scoble can blog across the boundary in Microsoft, it should be possible in the Whitehall village.
Comments welcome below, of course.

Socialsource gathers support from nonprofits

Today's Socialsource event promoting the use of Open Source Software in UK voluntary and community organisations provided a chance to check how far nonprofits are moving beyond essential office applications towards blogging and other uses of networky, social software. I think that's going to be particularly important because of the complex partnerships nonprofits have to form, and the need to engage more conversationally with their members, supporters and clients. My conclusion - it's early days, but the enthusiasts are gathering.
I was invited to run a small workshop because I was chatting to one of the organisers, Adrian De Luca, about some experiments my son Dan and I are doing in setting up Drupal, Wordpress, Pmwiki, Mailman and other applications using a Mac Mini as a low cost server. He kindly found us a slot in a crowded programme that showed how far the Socialsource project has come since its first meeting last year.
Dan's got everything installed, and we are working through configuring and developing a common look and feel - but as others in our workshop confirmed, the challenge lies in making it all easy to use, and joined up ... so you don't have to do too much logging in and out between the different applications.
We want a place to experiment, and eventually show clients what different applications can do so they can test for themselves what might work best.
Otherwise the danger is you go..."we need to spend some time really thinking about your needs, user preferences and so on, but when all's said and done what you need is !!! ""(!!! equals whatever you happen to be enthused by at present).
Only a few people in our workshop were already using blogs or other social software, so in retrospect we should perhaps have spent more time on that ratherthan the challenges of setting up particular OSS versions. As a number of people confirmed, the best route to adoption is finding people's passions or problems then following those, rather than pushing particular applications.
However, over lunch I did find at least half a dozen people working on OSS social software projects, so I think a small group will form. I had to leave early, but on the basis of the people I met I'm optimistic that the collaborative spirit of open source will lead to plenty of sharing of ideas and solutions. I think we should give ourselves the challenge of using some open source social software to do that.