Designing for Civil Society

Storytelling explains tech tools to nonprofits

The ICT Foresight blog is looking at ways to help nonprofits understand the possible benefits of new technologies, which in my experience can be quite tough. In A new way of campaigning - a story Megan Griffith highlights an article by Tom Steinberg in which Tom shows how a typical, medium sized charity could move from its current way of doing business to something more innovative. Tom writes:

Currently the role of the internet for most established charities falls pretty neatly into three activities:
* Providing a donations box through which money can be given
* Providing information on a charity’s activities
* Building and maintaining as large as possible an email list to encourage supporters to use 1 and 2
These activities are not to be scorned: they’re tried and tested and in cases such as the 2005 Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina appeals have been enormously effective.
However, many charities are starting to feel that there must be more that can be done to use the internet in more effective and powerful ways. Meanwhile some members of the public are starting to feel more and more like cattle being ever more efficiently farmed for money by increasingly impersonal, professionalised and automated charity engines.
Outside the voluntary sector use of the network is heading in a different direction. Instead of people feeling increasingly like tiny cogs in big machines, personalisation is the order of the day, making each person’s experience of the internet more tailored to their interests and needs.

Tom then goes on to explain how new tools - some provided by his own charity mySociety - could make more impact on several fronts for a charity launching a policy campaign:

• Signing up online to meet locally for a meeting
• Collaborating online
• Peer review by voting online
• Recruiting fund-raisers
• Mobilising volunteers

The ideas are very practical, and the storytelling format makes it really easy to show how new tools would bring benefits. The article links back to the blog for comments.... which is another neat demonstration in itself

Spin kills trust

I believe many of the fundamentals that make or break partnerships, collaborations and engagement programmes are common across public, private and nonprofit sectors. They are the 'people issues' like shared understanding, commitment and trust. As I wrote last year, if you don't get these right it is difficult to agree on the goals and processes to make things work.
A lot of attempts to create shared understanding and commitment through vision and value statements founder because people are rightly cynical about what lies beneath. They sense there may be little substance - or hidden agendas. They don't trust it. They want straight talking in terms everyone can understand.
Shawn Callahan, writing at the Australian-based Acecdote - where I'm finding so much good stuff these days - illuminates this wonderfully with an anecdote Describing your company values. I like the key line - no spin. I wonder if less polite terms were also used in conversation. Shawn writes:

In 2004 I helped a large bank conduct a narrative project to examine trust in a call centre. They had just finished working on their corporate vision and values a few months earlier. Their list of values included the usual suspects: integrity, professionalism, respect. What I found interesting was that when we collected the anecdotes there was repeated, explicit and verbatim inclusion of only one of the values in the stories they told about themselves: tell it like it is, no spin.

This colloquially-worded value had established itself as a successful meme and was often extolled during meetings when someone was obviously pussy-footing around a topic - "tell it like it is, no spin" they demanded. I don't think we heard explicitly about any of their other corporate values.

Tell it like it is, no spin resonated. Everyone knew what it meant. It was in their language - it was how they spoke.

Reframing (e-) Democracy

I've just caught up on Lee Bryant's Dan Dixon's thoughtful item at Headshift on The characteristics of e-Democracy in which he starts some rethinking on bottom-up and top-down relationships in a networked society - something I've touched on recently.
Lee Dan reports on a recent e-democracy event, highlighting Professor Stephen Coleman's keynote characterisation of top-down and bottom-up e-Democracy.

Top down, legitimizing the process or appropriating the process?

• The appropriation of democracy - making it work for the ones on top
• Politics as a form of ecommerce. (people are buyers of politics, consumers of political packages, more of a marketing approach)
• The public as audience - broadcast, institutional aspect of it
• The replication of dull and obsolete practices - Inflicting existing processes

Characteristics of bottom up or interactive e-democracy

• Democracy as a public conversation - civilized, moderated, not hateful, meaningful
• Representation as a direct relationship - plebiscitary or ventriloquist model, we don't need to have someone speak for us. We can do it ourselves.
• Connecting grass roots networks - mysociety, action network, netmums
• The politics of everday experience - politics can be carried out in lay language, it is a part of everyday life, not pompous like central politics.

What Web 2.0 means for nonprofits

The excellent US-based Techsoup site that provides tech advice to nonprofits has published an article on What is Web 2.0 anyway? covering blogs, RSS, tagging, social bookmarking and AJAX. The author Alexandra Krasne writes:

Web 2.0 tools are important, but their impact goes much deeper than their gadget-y novelty might suggest. Individuals and organizations alike are finding new and increasingly effective ways of connecting through Web 2.0 technology. This is the human side of this technical transformation.
Even the smallest organization has a story to share and voices to amplify. Web 2.0 can help you be heard. This new Web of connections is already allowing nonprofit supporters to build movements for social, environmental, economic, and political change. Don't let your movement leave you behind.

As I wrote recently, I believe Web 2.0 is also important in providing new ways of thinking about engagement and networks, as well as providing a new range of tools.

It's been the year of the digital citizen, says BBC

Jo Twist argues that 2005 was the year of the digital citizen - when citizens shaped the news, media and the world with their digital technology. In an article for BBC online Jo cites citizen journalists sending digital photos to news media, video bloggers producing content for politicians, and community activists podcasting.

The UK has long worried about the relationship between government, media and the public. The erosion of trust and democracy is feared above all.
The question is what happens to social cohesion in this quickly evolving landscape and how can the government negotiate consumer-led media.
Some might argue that the remaining ties binding government, media and the public will be eroded further by the decentralisation of media.
Greater choice of what to watch, what news means and who produces it, as well as the shift from broadcast to on-demand media, could increase people's ability to opt out of public and democratic debates if they want to.
Alternatively, the changing nature of news offers a diversity of voices, sources, and choice to enhance democratic potentials and lets anyone join in global and local conversations.

Jo completed a PhD on virtual communities before spending several years with the BBC, and is now a Senior Research Fellow leading the Digital Society and Media team at the think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research.