Designing for Civil Society

Identifying, representing, leveraging knowledge ... by talking to each other.

I suppose most of us feel we should preserve and pass on old family photos and other memorabilia if we have them ... but is there a wider personal obligation to understand and tell the stories of our ancestors, and our community? Digital media and online research certainly make it much easier. The latest Gurteen Knowledge cafe focussed on this issue of obligation to entrust cultural knowledge for the future, under the guidance of Australian facilitator Helen Paige. It produced some terrific conversations, and offered a unthreatening way to explore the culture and heritage of other participants. Wine courtesy of Michael Quinton of the Australia Centre helped.

Aside from the wine, the standard knowledge cafe format helped a lot too. We had a bit of speed networking (two minutes each with three people), a discussion around the table, a  report back, further discussion ... break for wine ... off to the pub. David Gurteen always makes these events seem comfortable and challenging at the same time. As you can see from his website, David is free with his knowledge management expertise, as well as managing to get hosts and collaborators to help mount the cafes free. It seems to me a very practical demonstration of how these days giving away something useful online and face-to-face can be the best sort of marketing for professional services and and paid-for events. Everyone wins.

Many of the participants were highly-experienced knowledge management specialists, but the jargon count was very low, considering what KM is meant to be. (Wikipedia: Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices and techniques used by organizations to identify, represent and distribute knowledge, know-how, expertise, intellectual capital and other forms of knowledge for leverage, reuse and transfer of knowledge and learning across the organization.)
At the cafe we were just talking to each other ... so I asked David why he felt conversation was so important to KM. As you can hear, he made a strong case for  this most basic form of human communication being fundamental to any shared understanding and involvement - whether social or professional. He has expanded this in one of the articles on his site.
Helen Paige specialises in the 'human side' of knowledge management, and explained that when David asked her to add an Australian flavour to the event she had no hesitation in drawing on Aboriginal traditions of storytelling, rather than  beach barbecues.
Not that Helen ducks the hospitality side of things. Her card - Fun.food.Focus - offers a unique team building process in which "your team can enjoy shared learning while doing 'hands on' food preparation". Next cafe please.
As I mentioned previously, David has an impressive media player on his site with KM videos. More here on how it is being developed.
Previously:
KM embraces video.
Networking to give and to get

The professional digital divide: 80/20 the wrong way

It's reassuring, if depressing, to find global networker and commentator Dave Pollard reflecting my own more limited experience of the extent to which people use online tools. He identifies a 80/20 professional digital divide In Social Networking: Why are Conversation and Collaboration Tools so Underused?:

You've  seen it a million times: At a meeting with a dozen people, some of them  take notes and others don't, and if you have a chance to see the notes  afterwards you wonder if the people were actually at the same meeting.  The people connected in by phone or online were even more clued out,  somehow missing everything important that came out of the meeting. And  a month later, the minutes of the meeting come out, and you read them  and ask yourself: When during the meeting did we agree to do that?
One  of the purposes of the new flood of social networking tools is to try  to organize, facilitate and improve the effectiveness of conversations  and collaborative activities. The power and promise of these tools was  and is considerable, and a year ago Steve Barth  even predicted the demise of group e-mails (in favour of next-gen wikis  and other more dynamic tools). But most of these tools remain  underused, or hardly used at all.

My general experience is that maybe one in ten people in nonprofits and public organisations that I meet go beyond basic email and web. It's a bit higher in many corporate settings, I believe, and of course smart freelances and people in the business can be way ahead and escape the technology trap. Dave offers a more sophisticated analysis than the one in ten, and a useful table to organise these divisions:

Used by Most People
* telephone
* group e-mail
* face-to-face meetings without any personal documentation of learnings or decisions

Used by Those on the Right Side of the Digital Divide Only (say, 20%)
* Skype and other free global enhanced VOIP telephony tools
* discussion forums/groups
* weblogs
* face-to-face meetings with personal notes or mindmap documentation

Used by Power Internet Users Only (say, 2%)
* wikis
* Google Writely and other online document sharing tools
* sophisticated collaboration & coordination tools and 'spaces'
* face-to-face meetings using Open Space or other advanced highly-effective conversation and collaboration techniques

Dave goes on to give a list of explanations: the tools may be unfamiliar, unintuitive, or awkward in many contexts; people's poor meeting skills can make things worse; tech training doesn't offer the opportunity to experiment. We shouldn't forget the people we wish to collaborate with may not be online ... and anyway we may not yet know who are the "right" people. We need to find them ... which may be difficult if they aren't using networking tools. We end up talking to the 2 per cent.
As I asked myself a couple of years back, does any of this really matter? As Dave points out, it can mean a lot of wasted time, unnecessary travel, and exclusion of important interests. It also cuts to the heart of the big drive toward edemocracy. If there is to be a bottom-up reframing of democracy, and new approaches to engagement, then we are going to need a lot more than 20 per cent take up. There's a real danger that the 2 per cent of enthusiasts convince the 80 per cent of policy makers and officials that new online methods are a great idea, neatly sidestepping the continuing digital divide (just because people are connected, doesn't mean they can participate effectively). The 80 per cent won't challenge this if they don't really understand how everything works ... they won't want to show their ignorance.
Dave is not that optimistic about tackling this issue:

Many people seem to believe the answer is to  make the tools better and wait for the rest of the world (or the next  generation) to catch up with the 2% or 20%. But I'm not so sure. The  digital divide seems to grow ever wider, not narrower, and if a tool as  simple, free and intuitive as Skype can't replace the telephone even  for tech-savvy users, what hope is there for more complicated,  sophisticated tools?
And while better education and training  in conversational and collaboration skills, and in the use of enabling  tools, would certainly help, my guess is that we're too busy, or don't  consider it urgent or important enough, to make acquiring these skills  and tool familiarity a priority, so it just ain't going to happen. A  generation from now someone will write an article very much like this  one, and nothing will have changed.

Fortunately he has a positive suggestion:

So let's try an experiment  in online collaboration, using Google Writely, one of the right-column  tools, and see if we can come up, through conversation and  collaboration, with some better answers, or at least an understanding  of why social networking tools aren't going to change the world. You  can find a copy of this article on Google Writely here. 

Dave then goes on to invite you to email him so he can sign you up to Writely, and to contribute ideas and answers to some questions he poses. See his post for details.
So many commentators on social networking concentrate on the 2 per cent of enthusiasts, throw in more tools and exhortation, and I think can just end up making people feel yet more depressed an disempowered.... so I applaud Dave's reality check and practical suggestion. He also does a lot of face-to-face networking, so I'm hoping for a report from a workshop to address these issues too. Or maybe we could also do a bit of that and report back. One approach would be to encourage people to create some stories about how tools can be really useful in their situation. That might help bring how far use of tools relates to people's personality and preferences. Anyway, thanks for the conversation starter Dave. I'm signing up.

Update: Dave has now published the results of the Writely collaboration. I did sign up, but didn't join in because it was, well, messy. As Dave says: "The collective work-product of Writely, like that of most wiki tools, is truly ugly unless some uber-editor comes in and does clean-up work." I'm sure it works better if people have collaborated before, and have some protocols to work on... and anyway, there were some good ideas buried in there.

Engagement audit finds plenty of resources. But will people share?

Involve have now published the first results of their audit of resources for engagement and empowerment, and there's a fair chance it won't end up as I feared as just another toolkit. (download pdf).
Their audit confirms that there are already a lot of research studies, toolkits and other resources out there, however:

Their main focus is usually on participation in one sector, be it health care,  neighbourhood renewal etc, rather than the broader engagement field. There has been a tendency to "reinvent the wheel", with each research audit starting afresh and  not building on past findings. As a result the understanding of the problems is  relatively well developed whereas potential solutions are much less well understood.  Bringing existing work together to share common themes and develop opportunities for knowledge sharing should allow future research to maximise its added value to  the field. 

The audit also identifies practitioner networks, and a dozen online resources that act as information hubs. Again, they don't join up.

Whilst resource hubs do enhance the cohesion of their sectors, they reinforce the divisions in the broad engagement field as there is no evidence of them communicating with each other in any meaningful sense. 

The research suggests - not surprisingly - that people learn from each other, and that networks are particularly important. At the same time, local government staff are often given responsibilities for engagement work without any prior familiarity and find they are working in an environment that may not be helpful.

Cultural issues were seen as strong barriers to engagement, with hierarchical institutional culture being especially contrary to a culture of engagement.
Understanding of and support for engagement at managerial level seems to be key. Support from managers allows staff working in engagement to advance the agenda and gain wider support. Local authorities who were seen as most effective at engagement activities were those that place community engagement within the Chief Executive's departments. The least effective are those who include engagement in the press or PR departments, reflecting a lack of a deeper understanding of engagement.

All of this suggests that there are great benefits to be achieved from joining up networks and resource hubs, and encouraging knowledge-sharing across sectors.
I hope it means that the clients for the research, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), will resist the easy option of commissioning yet another portal-type web site which just becomes the electronic equivalent of a toolkit. There's a suggestion of that in the terms of reference for the audit.
If they don't go down that route, the challenge will be to facilitate knowledge-sharing between the existing hubs and networks. Since all of those involved are, by definition, advocates of participation, engagement and empowerment one might think the prospects rosy. The difficulty, I suspect, is that they are also, to some extent, competing for Government and other funding, and are keen to preserve their identity and membership roles.
These days it is technically much easier to share resources online between sites, if they embrace blog-type content and feeds. The human, organisational, cultural commitment to share is of course something else.... and fundamental to new approaches to engagement and empowerment in the field. I hope that Involve and DCLG take a lead in promoting a new approach, and don't fall back into old-style toolkit/portal/all-in-one-place approaches. Next step - get people talking to each other. It can't all be done through research.
Small suggestion. It would really help if Involve would post updates about this work on their excellent blog, rather than just as pdfs, which are difficult to quote and link, and don't allow commenting. That might help start the knowledge-sharing too. Perhaps DCLG could join in ...

How to kill volunteer enthusiasm, officially

The UK government has never been more committed to citizen engagement at local level, through policy directives on participation and its plans for neighbourhood governance. But, just as I think participation isn't working and we need a new approach, my friend Kevin Harris offers a reality check in Neighbourhood governance: a top-down burden?.... or "I'm a volunteer, and I'm on overload."

With my colleague Martin Dudley I was talking to a community activist in Swindon today about how the context for meaningful neighbourhood governance gets developed. She immediately hit on a point that I have raised before: people are exhausted and disillusioned, they feel unsupported, and they can't see anyone coming through to take up the baton.
I asked her if I could visit her estate and talk to other members of her community association committee. She said, there's only four; one's very new, and she and the others are on the verge of resigning.
"It's the bureaucracy, the procedures," she said. Earlier we had heard about the exhausting and demoralising nonsense of reams of central, regional, and local government strategy papers, area agreements, local strategic partnership papers, neighbourhood management papers, and performance targets all over the place, and spurious consultation exercises; and the not-unreasonable feeling that these burdens were all sent to damn local people for taking an interest in their own localities.
Throw neighbourhood governance at this situation, and see if you can make it stick. You can see why people might think that it doesn't stand a chance because it is a top-down strategy, designed to sleight-over some desperate looming budget and social problems, which still has not taken into consideration the impact on its victims - local people.

The challenge for participation programmes and neighbourhood governance is that for them to succeed they have to take account of people, because ultimately engagement is about relationships.  Unfortunately government is much more comfortable with methods, procedures, structures. Community and voluntary organisations that would in the past have stood on the side of the participants (people) are now largely dependant on local and central grants and contracts for their survival, so so they get sucked into the same culture and keep their needs down. So too with many consultants - but not, fortunately, Kevin.
See also Playing through double devolution.

Death of online community ... again. Welcome to the digital pub.

If you are bewildered by blogs, chary of chat rooms, cheesed off with communities online, sceptical of social networks - and enervated by email - take comfort that things are changing (again). You may be able to say phoooey to all that, skip a techno-generation, and relax in the digital equivalent of your friendly neighbourhood pub. You always knew real people were what mattered, didn't you?
Of course it won't be that simple - but Robin Hamman sets off a liberating training of thought with an item entitled the death of online community as we knew it & i feel fine. It is particularly interesting when linked to the current explorations of blog communities by Nancy White following up her presentation on Internet tribes. They also been talking to each other for BBC Five Live.
Robin has been around the virtual block a few times as a researcher, commentator and manager of online communities and networks, not least in the BBC, so we should listen when he reflects on just what it takes to create online community, and its value:

We thought that if we built it, and built it right, they would come. Of course, they often did - in droves. And that's when the headaches of building and supporting expensive registration systems, content management systems, discussion platforms, exponentially growing bandwidth needs, the cost of moderation and hands on discussion hosting, etc etc all began to cause people to question the validity of the theory that all good web businesses - all business everywhere if you were a follower of the ClueTrain - needed a healthy community of users.

Robin acknowledges the many sites with lots of users - whether in forums or social networks - but doubts the long-term commercial value of past models. He also also questions how far they constitute "community", and so how far they satisfy people's social needs.

So did it work? I've been thinking about this for some time and I actually have a difficult time thinking of any large online community that functions as a single, identifiable community.

Questioning the big online community model isn't new. A couple of years ago Amy Jo Kim - author of one of the best books on developing online communities - created a few ripples by declaring that forums, email groups and chat rooms are "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs and social networks.
What interests me in Robin's thinking is the clues he offers to what comes next. He uses the analogy of pubs, with the big drinking halls offering cheap deals to a mass of drinkers but not attracting regulars, and comparing these with neighbourhood pubs with a regular clientele.
Robin suggests that instead of investing hugely in big places for all-comers, we should be thinking about smaller places with their own character:

So who creates the neighbourhood pubs of the social networking world? Users do. And that's my point. No longer does it make sense for big brands to try to build big online social spaces where hundreds or thousands of users engage in conversation. Instead, they should be trying to create the tools that allow niche communities to create their own social spaces using those tools.

Robin continues:

So how to navigate these stormy waters, particularly if you're not a website or brand in the web 2.0 technology business?

    * learn to engage with your users wherever they are (whatever services they are using)
    * become platform independent
    * be nimble and move with your audience(s) as it (they) move from service to service, platform to platform
    * extract value by helping your audience find third party audiences you've allied with and by learning from those third party audiences

Most of this second strategy can currently be achieved through blogging: either through setting up organisational blogs (that embrace blogging as a tool AND a technique) or by simply engaging with the blogs that already exist out there. Online community can, these days, more often then not manifest itself as a group of users who cluster around a blog or a few blogs. This is our new target audience.

Online community, at least as we once knew it, is dead and most social networking technologies will inevitably follow it there. No longer does it make sense to try to build the next big thing, nor to buy it or even figure out what it might look like. The real successes of web 2.0 will be those who put most of their effort into building relationships with user communities and who don't worry too much about, or invest too heavily in, whatever platform(s) those users happen to be using at the time.

I'll be checking in with Robin and Nancy's blogs to see if they can elaborate these new models further for us.

Planning an Olympic fringe in the park

The style and spirit in which projects start can set the tone for the way in which they continue, so I have high hopes for the results of a modest get-together in Hyde Park the other day. We all sat on the grass to talk about what fun, sociability and non-sporting games might spin off from the 2012 London Olympics with a little help from digital media and creative industries.

It was stylistically a world away from Government's new Culture and Creativity Advisory Forum where Senior Arts World Figures Pledged Support for a Cultural Olympics, and reported:

... members made clear that they believe that the 2012 Olympics in London are a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to showcase the very best of Britain's arts, culture and creativity to a world-wide audience and to encourage excellence and greater participation by children, young people and communities across the country.

The group in the park - brought together by Steve Moore of Policy Unplugged and Frank Boyd of Unexpected Media - also thought there was potential for tremendous spin-off, but hoped for something rather less formal. I particularly liked Ed Mitchell's hope that people might stage an impromptu mass Hokey-Cokey and Frank Boyd's aspiration for city-wide games of a not-necessarily sporting kind.
Lloyd Davis has already given us  his thoughts on the event. As he says, we talked a lot about welcoming people ... yet are we up for it?

.... as I walked across to Marble Arch I couldn't help thinking that the park was already full of guests from all over the world today - how welcome do they feel? What do we do to help them out? Do we talk to them? Do we even recognise that they're there? And I started to feel a little more uneasy about the preparedness we have to share our culture with visitors. I think it's going to be fun trying to turn that around.

Anyway - you can hear for yourselves. Here's the contributions from Ed, Lloyd and Frank. Click to play - or see links at the end.

Dan Dixon was hopeful that the intangible spin-offs from an Olympic fringe would yield some social as well as physical capital, and Richard Stubbs explained that over in Newham, East London, volunteers were already getting organised for their role as local hosts. Leon Benjamin has written a book as well as a blog about Winning by Sharing, and so had his ideas well organised on how now's a good time to think about the role of events like the Olympics in promoting international collaboration. View Dan, Richard and Leon below.

The whole event was very relaxed with people coming and going, including Melissa Mean and colleagues from Demos. They could legitimately point out that they've been thinking about the role of the Olympics in culture, diplomacy and social legacy for a little while ... but this time it wasn't a competitive thing. Videos next time, I hope.

I have to declare a personal interest, since I've been working with Steve Moore and friends at Policy Unplugged over the past few months on what Steve calls social conferencing. That usually takes place with the benefit of some substantial prior organising, a facilitator and a weather-proof venue, so I asked Steve what he felt had been achieved on the grass, and what happens next. On the last point the immediate plan was simple - take a stroll to the pub. In the slightly longer term I gather that Frank Boyd and colleagues will be organising more under the auspices of Insync at Zero One. I'll add details when available.
The movies above should open in a pop up with Quicktime. If you prefer Flash, try these links. Ed Mitchell, Loyd Davis, Frank Boyd, Dan Dixon, Richard Stubbs, Leon Benjamin, Steve Moore.

Why bother with "membership" in future?

I had a fascinating conversation the other day with the director of a UK nonprofit organisation that has about a thousand individuals and organisations paying annual fees for online services, newsletters, events and all the other stuff that goes with association membership.
As a pretty entrepreneurial outfit the organisation also has dozens of projects on the go with scores of public, private and nonprofit partners. Then there's the host of other people who just want to keep in touch, all making a great cloud of contacts and relationships that are more or less active at any time.
It costs the organisation a lot to maintain these relationships. It costs the members quite a bit in annual fees. We talked about the ways that things could be improved - but the core question we ended up with was: "What's the nature of association membership? What's the point of it these days?"
It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.
In addition, the best ideas often come from crossing professional and interest boundaries. That means you have to pay quite a lot of membership fees if you feel conventional associations are the way to get these contacts. Or you join social networking sites like ecademy and LinkedIn as well as building your own networks, perhaps using new applications like the People Aggregator.
There's nothing particularly new in these observations ... except I suspect not many nonprofit associations see what may be coming over the horizon. And even if you do sniff something new and threatening in the air, what do you do about it? Most of your members are probably just about coping with basic email and web. You'll be lucky if your staff and Board are up to speed on the changes that new technologies are bringing.  Their mindset may well be: why change now when only the minority are doing it differently?
I recommend looking at a blog and forthcoming book appropriate entitled "We Have Always Done it That Way? which offers 101 ideas for associations in the future. It won't offer off-the-shelf solutions to my questioning director friend, because it is based on US experience and does assume fairly high tech competence among association members. The non-tech ideas require some translation into the UK culture, and our legal and funding regimes. I think those translations will be made, and have recently bumped into a few people from the social software and knowledge management fields lucky enough to have nonprofit clients waking up to the challenge.
Meanwhile I'm happy to spend a fair bit on membership of the distinctly upmarket Institute of Directors (as well as other lower-cost nonprofits) even if I don't agree with their political line most of the time. Why? Well, there's the free meeting facilities in different cities, excellent seminars, legal and other services, and the generally excellent level of service. I feel looked after.... and you get half a case of fine wines if you recruit a new member. Anyone want to sign up and split that?

E-typing dices up the Digital Divide

A new method of classifying the UK population into 23 "e-types", linked to where people live, could influence how public money is spent in addressing a more sophisticated version of the Digital Divide.

As the BBC reports the e-types developed by a research team include mobile explorers, the e-committed and the rational utilitarians. Others are cable suffices, technology as fantasy, and e-bookers and communicators. More here on the study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of their e-society programme, and the groups in detail.
Analysis of consumer lifestyle surveys and public domain databases has been used to construct the 23 groups, and these have then been mapped onto neighbourhoods.
Under the heading "Ever wondered how technologically enabled your neighbours are?" the researchers invite you to feed your postcode into their site, and see if you agree with the way that you have been classified.
A background research paper - download link here -  sets out the methodology and explains that the purpose of the research is:

creation of a quantitative model whereby any  adult in Great Britain could be evaluated according to their likely level and manner of  engagement with electronic technologies.

The paper later explains how the classification could be used in policy development and funding:

The maps shown in Figure 4 were produced for work for the London Borough  of Camden, which used them as evidence to support a bid for central government funding  in support of small business start ups. As such they illustrate how detailed understanding  of localities can be used to inform initiatives designed to improve local e-engagement,  and the maps are consistent with other studies of the fragmented social structure of the Borough.

... though the maps were missing in the paper I downloaded.
I certainly feel that the simple idea of the Digital Divide ceased to be useful some time ago because it encouraged us to focus on who was connected to the Internet, and pay too little attention to people's skills, confidence, needs and use of different types of technologies. Is a heavy mobile talker and texter more or less a digital have or have-not than an occasional dial-up online shopper? Is a business user - but leave-it-in-the-office - more or less connected than a bedroom online gamer?
As the researchers from University College, London, indicate, it is important to understand the different usages if we are concerned about the links between digital inclusion and social inclusion, the role of e-participation in democracy - and also, of course, if we are interested in who is likely to buy what.
A better model is certainly needed ... I'm just not sure if this is it. Part of the problem is that there is a big gap between the academic  language of the research report, and the press release and stories that it is generating. The e-society site offers an email newsletter, but no scope that I can see for any discussion. Not very engaging.
I think further discussion of the model is important because it could be terrifically useful, for example, for local authorities competing in the UK Government's Digital Challenge competition (disclaimer: I'm doing some work on how the engagement game may be used in the process.)
Competitors in the challenge, and for other programmes,  could use the datasets and maps - as Camden already has - to support their bids for funding to promote digital inclusion. Look, they'll say, we have lots of "Elderly marginalised" ( or "Mobile explorers" or whatever) in this neighbourhood, and what they clearly need is a strong dose of (add project idea from the growing Digital Challenge network toolkit.)
That's more sophisticated than the earlier Wired Up Communities initiatives, that focussed on giving people hardware. However, I am rather concerned that it could be rather formulaic unless there's an opportunity to move beyond postcode branding of groups towards individual requirements.
Though on reflection, it could be rather a good way to get some lively discussion going with the neighbours. "Did you know that this survey has us down as 'Too old to be bothered' and 'Technology as fantasy'? I'm not standing for that ... why don't we start a digital petition..."

Involving resources ... hopefully Not Another Toolkit

I'm delighted to see that my friends at Involve have been given the job of bringing together publications, online resources, training materials and any other goodies they can find relating to community engagement and empowerment. As they explain on their audit page:

There are a wide variety of such resources currently available across a range of policy areas; including health, policing and sustainable development.
Getting an overview of these widely dispersed resources is difficult. By gathering the information in one place we hope that the audit will make it easier to find these resources in the future. The audit will gather information on resources that are currently available and will map resource gaps and provide advice to the government about the future provision of resources. The work will also highlight particularly useful ones through a star rating system.

The work has been commissioned by the Civil Renewal Unit, formerly at the Home Office and now with the new Department for Communities and Local Government. As I wrote recently, they are responsible for the Together We Can initiative, which is all about collaboration across Government, and with community groups and nonprofits.
Involve are certainly right to say that there are lots of resources out there, and it will be a great boon to researchers and practitioners to have some better way of finding them. I'll be sending in my modest collection of links and guides.
However I do hope that this doesn't end up as just another toolkit ... a publication and pdf that isn't updated, can't be copied into re-usable bits, or easily referred to except as a whole.
There are already scores - probably hundreds - of such publications around, and indeed Involve listed quite a few in their earlier publication People and Participation. All good stuff - but it seems to me that the new audit offers an opportunity to drag the management of engagement resources into the digital age, particularly since Involve says it will be advising Government on what to do in future. My immediate thoughts:

• Is the idea of "gathering the information in one place" any longer appropriate? It is of course useful to have a place offering resources and signposting others through links. But don't we need a host of places on the net cross-linking to each other, with authors taking responsibility for updating on their sites? Think networked resources, not old-style library.
• Would it be possible to negotiate with key resource providers the terms on which they are prepared to make materials available, under a Creative Commons licence? For example, a non-commercial share-alike licence would enable people to build on other people's work and put the results back into the pot.
• Could the resources be chunked up as far as possible, so that items can be tagged with keywords for easier searching?
• Overall, wouldn't it make more sense to think about developing a community of practice of researchers and practitioners prepared to share their resources, and ensure these grow dynamically? I seem to recall this collaborative networking approach was one of the early ideas when Involve was launched.

Involve are well-placed to promote new ways of sharing resources because they have a long mailing of contacts in the field, and work with Headshift - leaders in social software development, who build their excellent website.... which also reminds me of the chapter that Headshift's Lee Bryant and I wrote for the Involve Post Party Politics book, all about participation and Web 2.0. The audit offers a great opportunity to apply that thinking in house. If Involve take this route, I hope they can persuade their civil service clients that it is the way to go. It should fit well with the Together We Can ethos.
Meanwhile information here on how to send in your contributions.