Designing for Civil Society

Ten Resolutions for Civil Change

The US Pew Partnership for Civic Change has a Smart Communities blog, written by their president Suzanne Morse, raising issues that have worldwide resonance. This week they offer Our Ten Smart Resolutions for the New Year. In summary they are:

• Keep kids in your community in school.
• Reduce the number of hungry people in your community.
• Get involved in some organization outside of your work or immediate circle.
• Find out about your affordable housing market.
• Make quality daycare accessible to all in your community.
• Be sure that every child in your community has a caring adult in his or her life.
• Revive and support rural communities.
• Let's put the civil back in civilization in the New Year.
• Let's really solve some problems.
• 2006 needs to be the year of working together. We have issues that can only be solved with a collective will and mission. Our goal for 2006 must be to create possibilities together.

Suzanne expands on each resolution and adds:

The evidence is overwhelming that when regions come together, organizations come together, or neighborhoods come together, then big things happen—not just one time but over and over. If you serve in an elected office—reach out. If you run a nonprofit organization—find a way to work with another organization. And if you are concerned about something or have an idea for change—find some people to talk with about it. Many of the challenges we face could be solved if we could work together. As Wendell Berry once said, "One's real duty to the future is to do as you should do now. Make the best choices, do the best work, fulfill your obligations in the best way you can."

I think all of that will resonate with community activists and policymakers in the UK, and the Pew Partnership commitment to blogging makes it easier to share experience on how to tackle these issues. We could do with a few leaders of UK nonprofits following suit.
Over at the NCVO ICT Foresight blog Milica Howell of the Hansard Society explains in If you've got it, flaunt it how they are working together with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations on the first strand of a project on Democracy, campaigning and activism.

The research is designed to illustrate ways in which information and communication technology (ICT) might empower charitable, community and voluntary sector organisations and their supporters and identify comparisons with citizen engagement in politics.

Maybe the research can offer busy chief executives an answer to the question "why bother to blog?". Meanwhile I'll see if Suzanne would like to provide some answers from her experience.

What's networky for top-down, bottom-up

When talking about the need to challenge hierarchies, promote more user involvement, support those with least influence but most need it is convenient to talk about being more bottom-up, less top-down. But I'm feeling increasing uncomfortable about using the term, because it implies that power relationships are easy to understand ... them and us, big and small, sensitive and insensitive.
In practice most situations are highly complex with lots of different interests with differing degrees of influence. Of course, people are marginalised, power shifts are often needed ... but as I've tried to say elsewhere we need to borrow from thinking about systems, networks and the Net to understand what tools and processes may be most effective in bringing change.
If we accept influence is partly about nodes, connections, knowledge flows - and these don't map on to simple architectures of top-down and bottom-up, what terms do we use in describing a shift in influence. More outside-in doesn't really do it.
Drew Mackie and I have been talking to organisations a lot recently about different types of networks - join us (really a hierarchy), join up (clusters), or join in (a more fluid mesh). Shown the diagrams and descriptions organisations developing networks usually say they want something flat, democratic and fluid.
But as soon as we start on the practicalities of who can do what, who can connect to whom ... who controls the communication systems for example ... we are usually back into hierarchy. When we have the language, we may have the culture shift.

Campaigning with good cheer

Inspiration, challenge and good cheer are not experiences I always associate with the annual general meetings of nonprofits, however worthy - but I found them all at last night's London Citizens event. It helped that we were hosted by the American University of Notre Dame, in their fine building just off Trafalgar Square. Some of the University's law students are volunteers - or interns as the Americans say - with London Citizens projects.
It was these projects that provide the inspiration. They ranged from a campaign for a living wage that persuaded Mayor Ken Livingstone to set the London level at £6.70; an ethical framework for the Olympics; and a review of the procedures of the immigration service at Lunar House, Croydon, that engaged the attention of senior civil servants and the Minister. The fight to keep the traditional feel of Queen's market, Newham, in the face of development pressures is ongoing, with a Citizens' inquiry unpicking the planning issues.
London Citizens operates by reviving techniques of broad based organising pioneered in Chicago in the 1930s by Saul Alinsky, and building its strength through coalitions of local institutions. Last night faith groups and trade unions were strongly represented, with schools and residents groups also involved. London Citizens staff organisers, working with leaders of the local institutions, can parade a membership of thousands in their campaigning - and when necessary get them on the streets or in front of County Hall. They can claim to be "the capital's largest and most diverse alliance of active citizens and community leaders".

Talking about neighbourhoods

My friend Kevin Harris is producing some really thoughtful stuff over on his Neighbourhoods blog - and I don't say that just because of his kind words about the neighbourhood governance game we ran together recently. I'm behind in writing something myself on that, but meanwhile you can download a report.
Kevin has a report on the Young Foundation seminar last week - Community, consensus, and neighbourhood governance - news of fascinating mapping work with Social Tapestries in West London, a critical review of the evaluation of the Home Zones Challenge, and much more.
While the Government's official neighbourhood renewal site has lots of useful research, reports, factsheets and toolkits I think that it - and other government sites - would benefit from a few more front-line stories and conversations. We might get that if civil servants and Ministers are prepared to follow councillors in blogging about their work.

Storming the Bastille

Alan Moore has a compelling metaphor about the way that consumers and citizens are starting to behave towards companies and institutions now that the Net is making it much easier to find out what other people are thinking - and say what you think too: "once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job."

As I mentioned before, I think the book Communities Dominate Brands by Alan and co-author Tomi T Ahonen has a lot of relevance to public engagement. They are mainly writing about the way that word spreads fast about good and bad products and services, and the implications that this has for brands. As Alan writes in his latest posting:

What happens when the both the supply and demand structures that have served us so well over the last 50 years start to simultaneously decouple from our most recent past?
Well, we get a revolution or what could described as a gradual evolving historic act of liberation And, history tells us that once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job. In this instance, the day job is the consumer as an uninformed, unconnected, passive, ignorant, non-participative, controlled individual that will happily consume what is put in front of them.
But it's not only that that has changed, traditional media is unbundling whilst the structural nature of consumption of information and content are in a state of flux. Significantly, we are entering a world where content will be increasingly delivered through internet and internet-mobile-protocol-based networks that are non-linear, on-demand and entirely self-scheduled. In that world, the viewer - not the broadcaster - whoever that may be, will decide what is consumed, when, and how.

I'm looking forward to meeting Alan later this week to talk through the importance of these insights for democracy and civil society, where I think in many instance participation isn't working. Robin Good has republished the original article setting out Alan's thinking Marketing Communications Future: The Twilight Of Interruption, The Dawn Of Engagement Marketing
More on the Bastille and image credit.

Government funds two youth participation web sites

The Hansard Society has launched a new youth participation website for young people, supported by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.

Being Heard is a unique site, designed by young people for young people. It aims to encourage young people to learn, question and engage with political ideas and practice. It tackles political issues that affect them, in language that’s clear and appealing, and bridges the gap between young people’s well-argued opinions and the adult decision makers they want to hear them.

A few weeks back a partnerships of nonprofits launched Participation Works, funded by the Department for Education and Skills.

The gateway will help all those wishing to increase children and young people's involvement in public decision-making. The gateway is the first interactive one stop shop on participation, enabling users to share expertise and access resources. At the click of a button users can search an array of topics, from research evidence, legislation and children's rights to innovative ideas and training packages.

The two sites appear to be neatly complementary, with Being Heard offering a voice to young people, and Participation Works focussing on advice about engaging young people. Phew, no duplication there then. Nor any obvious cross-linking that I could see ...

Congratulations Headshift

It was a presentation on bottom-up knowledge management by Lee Bryant that really got me thinking about the power of blogs to help support and shape the way that communities develop - whether in corporate or community settings. I've learned much more over the past couple of years from Lee and Livio Hughes at Headshift, not least because they practice what they preach by blogging so thoughtfully themselves.
It was particularly good therefore to see that they had won the Innovation in Knowledge Management 2005 award for the Knowledge Community which they developed for the National Institute for Mental Health in England.

Both Lee and Livio have strong personal interests and backgrounds in politics and nonprofits, and manage to combine that with doing business in a pretty competitive environment. It's that sort of cross-over that makes social software people interesting, and as the award shows their role important beyond the tech tools they develop.

Attitude is more important than experience in collaboration

Whatever methods and structures you come up with for partnerships and involvement with other interests, it's always down to the people concerned to make it work - or not. So who do you need? A new study, reported by Dave Pollard, explores what it take to create The Ideal Collaborative Team.
The conclusion is that most people experienced in collaboration would rather have inexperienced people with a positive attitude than highly experienced people who lack enthusiasm, candor or commitment. Dave reports from his work with Mitch Ditkoff, Tim Moore and Carolyn Allen:

Two criteria, enthusiasm for the subject of the collaboration, and open-mindedness and curiosity, are rated as the most important criteria by virtually all segments of respondents. More than half of all respondents rated these qualities as indispensable in a collaboration partner. By contrast, five experience-related criteria (proven trustworthiness, collaboration experience, previous familiarity with other members of the team, reputation in the field of the collaboration, and business experience), rate at or near the bottom of the 39 criteria assessed by participants.
Candor, courage and timeliness of follow-through are also rated very important qualities in a collaborator, along with strong listening, feedback and self-management skills and diversity of ideas.
These findings, most of which are based on responses from experienced collaborators, seem to suggest that just about any group of appropriately motivated people can be effective collaborators, and that good collaboration is more art, and perhaps chemistry, than science.

Dave and his collaborators also struck up a conversation among themselves to reflect, from their experience, on the essentials of collaboration. They developed it on a wiki. This and the full report offers insights relevant to all forms of relationships, working and personal. If you've wonder what's the difference between coordination, cooperation and collaboration, there's a table to explain and this summary:

Collaboration entails finding the right group of people (skills, personalities, knowledge, work-styles, and chemistry), ensuring they share commitment to the collaboration task at hand, and providing them with an environment, tools, knowledge, training, process and facilitation to ensure they work together effectively.

In order to turn the survey findings into practice, Dave suggests - and I summarise - that you need to establish clear objectives for the collaboration and the commitments required of team members; decide on the appropriate collaborator selection process; review the composition of the team against the objectives, commitments and criteria; and allow the members of the team to get familiar with each other.