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.
Comments