Designing for Civil Society

250-year-old think tank ripe for relaunch

Collaboration and collective intelligence are much talked about in tackling issues both global and local, and were recently further endorsed by the launch of a new centre at MIT. We'll certainly need all the wisdom we can manage to rise to the challenge of climate change. Fair enough, but how do you muster your fellow thinkers and doers? We may be seamlessly connected by the Net, but experience suggests that collaboration online does not come naturally.

I think I may have found an answer - or at least a testbed - in a 250-year-old institution tucked away in London's John Adam Street. It's the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, set up on on a manifesto "to embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine arts, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce". The Great Room - left - continues to host excellent lectures, but the more hidden talents of the RSA hold the greater promise, as I found the other day when I went along to an evening for new Fellows.
There are 26,000 Fellows, and I felt privileged to become one for a modest annual sub of £122 (more later on the privilege). The building is splendid, with bar, library, restaurant, meeting rooms and such like, plus lots of events and projects around five manifesto challenges: Encouraging enterprise; Moving towards a Zero-Waste Society; Developing a Capable Population; Fostering Resilient Communities; and Advancing Global Citizenship.
It certainly seemed the very model of an ancient and modern think tank, already applying itself to climate change with a challenge to Fellows and non-Fellows alike to reduce their carbon footprint to five tons. Chairman Gerry Acher confessed to 25 tons currently, and said he would be trying very hard indeed to cut back.
However, there is room for improvement at the RSA. The 24,000 Fellows in the UK, and 2000 around the world, represent a lot of intelligence ... but at the moment they aren't very collective. A couple of years ago a group of women Fellows began a bottom-up move towards greater involvement, now called FellowsVoicesRSA, but it is a limited voluntary effort (though none the worse for that).
Chatting the other evening to staff and Fellows I got the strong sense that change was due ... and possible. Matthew Taylor, former adviser to Tony Blair is taking over as chief executive. They are looking for a new head of communications. While the RSA's current web site is an admirable resource, complete with RSS feeds, it is a bit, well, institutional compared with Demos. And that's a general problem. The RSA wants to stay distinguished, but it also wants more Fellows who are younger, and more diverse in their background.
Here's where the "privileged to be a Fellow" bit comes in. Although people do tend to put FRSA after their name, and begin questions at lectures with "as a Fellow...", it isn't all THAT distinguished. You have to get a Fellow to nominate you, but I gather no-one gets turned down. Well, maybe there was that chap who had been inside for fraud ... but I think you will be in if you are a decent sort, and can pay the sub.
Note to self: must spend more time in the RSA bar library and Get Involved.
Update: as I write a charming email arrives from RSA Fellowship and Marketing Director Stephen Farrant, inviting me to one of their "lunch and learn" sessions to extend the conversation we started about blogging, Web 2.0, social networking and the like. I think I mentioned setting a social reporter loose among the Fellows. My enthusiasm to accept is only tempered by dim memory that I was one of the last to leave the Fellows evening, and generous hospitality encouraged a certain joviality on my part. Still, the staff were exceedingly good humoured on that occasion, and I'm sure lunch with emphasis on the fizzy water will put me into the correct frame of mind next time. I'll certainly be using public transport, Gerry.

Now for the social press release

I'm delighted that Beth Kanter has picked up my earlier musings with her own piece Is it time for a Social Reporter? She has some expertise in job labels, as well as the skills that go with them:

I used to think a lot of what my role and use different labels. Here's a few I played with from 1992-2002 during my time working with NYFA/Arts Wire.

• Electronic Bulletin Board Sysop
• Onlne Facilitator
• Online Community Builder
• Telecommuter
• Gophermaster
• Webmaster
• Webmistress
• Webster
• Web Manager
• Web Goddess
• Digital Creative Thinker
• Information designer
• Cybrarian
• Electronic Preservationist
• Telecollaborator
• Situated Trainer & Learner
• Nonprofit Technologist

As I found this list, I realized I'm adding something to the label Nonprofit Technologist. I'm not sure quite what. It goes beyond blogger and tagger. Citizen instructional mediamaker? Social media coach? Who knows ...

Anyone else got some terms to add?

Beth was a little uncertain about the "reporter" tag ... but there's certainly something happening around the PR/journalism toolset. Scanning down my blog feeds I found Nancy E. Schwartz highlighting a new press release format. Nancy writes:

Take a look at the announcement press release from Shift, which follows the new format. Put that and the format template in front of you, and you'll see the following elements that enable online release readers (who include many traditional journalists, as well as bloggers and your audiences) to easily take action:

• Full contact information with email, blog and instant messenger addresses.
• Succinct, news facts bullet points -- easier to digest than traditional narrative.
• Delicious page with links to related sources, updated regularly and available as a feed to your RSS reader, so updates come to you. In this case, SHIFT uses this page to link readers to coverage of their template release, and the agency itself.
• Downloads -- in the sample a photo, logo and the press release template.
• Links to spokesperson's LinkedIn profile.
• One-click buttons to add the press release to the readers Delicious bookmarks or to rate it via Digg.
• Technorati tags to improve search access via Technorati (mostly a blog-focused search engine).

Variations on this format are beginning to pop up but all share the common denominator of easy interactivity. Let's say it together one more time. Make it easy for your audiences.

I think it is great, and Nancy believes journalists are ready for these innovations, at least in the US. Over here Lunchtime O'Booze will be rolling in his grave.

Reality check on social reporting: people

In Social Reporting and Rich Records Lloyd Davis picks up my post about the role of Social Reporter, and offers some wise words drawn from his own experience (which is rather more than mine, I should say):

I'm taking a softly, softly, catchee monkey approach. I think (and my order book shows) that we have agreement that it's a "good thing" or at least a "nice thing" to have a richer record of a days proceedings and that blogs and wikis are a good way of producing that. What I agree we haven't done yet is get to the point where we're able to weave everything together to make it useful enough to participants that they want to do more than view the record.

But maybe that's not our responsibility...yet. I see a risk that we're pushing people too fast along a learning curve that we've taken a while to go along ourselves. I found last week that It is enough novelty for the average conference participant to deal with the fact that we've taken pictures, done some vox-pops with people and live blogged a keynote and they are up on the internet at the end of day 1! Maybe we should just let this aspect sink in for a little bit - if they want to interact as well, then that's fantastic and we should be ready for it when it happens, but in the meantime, perhaps we could be honing our reporting skills in this new environment.

This accords with the professional digital divide observations of Dave Pollard (maybe 2 percent are power users of collaboration tools), and those of my Portugal-based colleague Bev Trayner in Reality check - the new renaissance:

I have been taken aback with (fico suprendida com) how unfamiliar many people are with these new tools and technologies. Yet again I find myself living in two different mindsets.

On the one hand there is a world where online and offline connections blend, complement, compete and synergise. Time is not synchronous. Technologies are ubiquitous and "everyone uses RSS feeds". This world is not dominated by technologists, but by social entrepreneurs who see the potential of new technologies.

In another world intentions like "e-learning platform" or "knowledge portal" are heralded as badges of innovation and state-of-the-art accomplishments. In this world you still hear people insist that face-to-face is more complete than online, as if the two were in opposition. The frames of same-time same-place are unquestionable. People who know about technologies must be engineers, technologists or freaks.

Adding:

It has been a salutory lesson. And it reminds me of an ongoing design question I have (and that was stimulated by Nancy): how do you stimulate people's imagination to try out technologies? And also - how come some people see it and others don't?

If the ethos of the social reporter is to promote collaboration by standing on the side of the user/reader/viewer and helping them to contribute, we have to take this very seriously. Evangelising - come on in, it's wonderful - doesn't work any better than warnings - you'll be left behind if you don't.

Part of the answer is being clear about the purpose ... what real benefit will tech-supported collaboration bring - and aware of the prevailing culture which may not be receptive. I think it is also about respecting people's preferences. That's partly about personality, and partly about offering a choice of audio, video, text and so on.

All that means that social reporting, to be successful, requires a pretty full set of skills and tools. As Lloyd says, instead of pushing too hard we could be honing our reporting skills in this new environment. If we can't get the gigs, maybe we need some simulated rehearsing ... a sort of emerging social reporting conference, where we all practise on some willing non-tech participants. Any sponsors up for that?

Social media, social web, social networking ... time for the social reporter

Online forums need hosts and moderators, workshops need facilitators, networks require some weaving to develop links. But how, for example, do you do that fast around an event, capture content, and follow through afterwards? I'm pondering the possible role of the social reporter.
I'm interested from two angles. The first is the practicality of setting up and supporting multi-use blogs sites like this for people attending events, and so mix face-to-face and online. The ideal is to help people register, post their profiles, contribute through blogging and commenting, while at the same time being offered links to wider networks and good briefing material. Contributions at the event will be reported through blog items, audio and video. Afterwards there may be further contributions to other sites, maybe some joint work on a wiki.
Except ... it doesn't just happen. Unless the event is about social media few people will be comfortable with the tools. There isn't time to build a community gradually, nor the critical mass of users to get a lot of spontaneous contributions. Just seeding the space isn't enough ... more intensive gardening is required.
Of course, you may say none of this is worth the effort, and face-to-face events don't benefit from before and afters online, but for now let's say it is worth experimenting in different ways. If that's the case, then someone has to find external resources, spot stories of interest to participants, look for common interests in profiles and make introductions, post items an help others to so, shoot video ... and so on. I think it's a mix of facilitation and journalism.
My second interest is the journalism angle ... something I used to do in print. When someone asks these days what I do, I end up stumbling around ... "I use social media for social benefit ... help people collaborate in workshops and online .... you know, blogs and wikis and that sort of thing". It used to be much easier to say I was a reporter.
It occurs to me that I should try calling myself a social reporter; it feels more comfortable for this purpose than knowledge activist or technology steward.
For me it has the advantage of confirming some fraternal links with people like Nick Booth of Podnosh, who blogs and podcasts in his local community in Birmingham, while reflecting on what's needed to shift from the news values of traditional journalism to something more socially beneficial. We need to move from conflict, celebrity and criticism to collaboration, celebration, creativity.
It seems to me that the role of social reporter could be important as we see a shift from "all in one place" online communities to the sort of blog communities described by Nancy White. It chimes in with the work I'm doing with Bev Trayner in developing sites that may support communities of practice (and learning a lot from Bev along with way on CoPs). 'Social reporter" also reminds me I have a lot to learn from Beth Kanter on how to use the wealth of web and personal media tools now available. It ties in with work to explore what social networking may mean for nonprofits, over at the mediablends site. Maybe I'll end up with something useful to contribute to the exciting work on conversations and storytelling generously put into the public domain by the guys at Anecdote. They really seem to know how to mix face-to-face and online.
There are many other great examples of people doing really innovative work using social media for social benefit ... so much so it can be a bit intimidating. Hence the need - for me anyway - to find a way of describing the work that is a bit personal, a bit general. Social reporter may be it. As part of my rather cursory research I tried Wikipedia ... nothing there. I Googled the term and found a certain amount about people who audit the environmental and social impact of business. Hmmm. But then I found reference to others who seemed to get invited to a lot of parties. Phew, that's alright then. Don't want to lose all the traditional benefits.

Learning at lunchtime

The brief: provide a group of big-practice architects with some latest thinking on community engagement and social media. Time available 45 minutes. Budget: modest.

Solution: carefully crafted presentation and hand-outs? Not my favourite approach. Game with lots of props? Tight on time, and difficult to get right without a lot of research.
I was a bit stumped ... but the location and time-slot gave me the clue: lunchtime and a flexible corner of the office.
Time was when people in offices had enough time at lunch or coffee break to catch up on the gossip and also share some insights and news of what's going on in different areas. These days it seems to be grab a sandwich, get back to the cubicle, and keep ticking off the 15-minute slots on the timesheet.
So - why not re-invent the learning lunchtime?
Fortunately my clients, PRP architects, in the form of Alexandra Rook and Lesley Gibbs, were happy to try something different. Alexandra, in her previous post with the Civic Trust, had been a strong champion for the salon we ran there successfully ... but you can't bring in the bottles at lunchtime.
We came up with a simple formula: create the outline of an only-slightly-fictitious scenario about community engagement on a housing estate, then invite 20 people to split into groups once they had grabbed their lunch. Three people stood in for the development group: contractor, council and housing association. Others were residents, architects and evaluators.
Simple briefs explained that the residents were disgruntled after initial consultation raised expectations but didn't deliver good results - and invited each group, in slightly different ways, to think what to do next. You can download the briefing notes here, and a note about engagement methods (both pdfs). I also offer presentation notes from this item on Relationship-based engagement.
People quickly got into their groups roles, and the evaluators stirred things up with questions about how things might be improved. Alexandra, playing her real role of participation specialist , was pulled between development group, residents and architects ... which seemed fairly realistic
After half an hour we stopped to share some insights, and that sparked some stories about real-life programmes. I particularly liked the one about the team who used the talents of a cartoonist to develop big King Kong posters to advertise events and planned changes. The local kids whipped them off the notice boards and on to their bedroom walls ... parents got talking ... people turn up. The poster about the concrete-nibbling monster had crowds on the street awaiting the arrival of the demolition equipment.
I hope the modest exercise helped people make a few new connections in the office, and that other events may follow. Or alternatively, as someone who previously worked in the construction industry said: "We always had a tradition of going down to the pub at Friday lunchtime, and staying there. That way you always found out what was going on." Too simple, much too simple.

Cut your friends, increase your effectiveness

It is commonplace to complain about the Internet overwhelming us with information ... now Nick Booth suggests that it may do the same with relationships, and we need to be a bit ruthless in who we want to know. In Web 2.0 or Why My Head Hurts he writes:

We have this image of other superhumans managing hundreds of fruitful relationships in dozens of countries, which is of course a myth. In my opinion those who heed common sense may well find the most productive ways to exploit the potential of web 2.0.

Nick then goes on to suggest that however fancy the technology, we have some built in limitations:

Research from the early 1990’s found a correlation between the size of a human neocortex and how many others we can succesfully relate to. Evolutionary Psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool University and others predicted that human’s would be able to maintain about 150 acquaintances – and this figure matched research on the size of neolithic villages (‘primitive’ comunities tend to split once they reach a figure of 150 members) and more modern personal networks.

There are substantial dangers in ignoring this, says Nick, focussing on the issue for nonprofits:

In a web 2.0 world voluntary organisations risk wasting huge amounts of precious effort on unproductive relationships with people who can now effortlessly associate themselves with your cause (press here if you want to join our ‘club’).

The real challenge is to build relationships which allow a virtuous circle of support and energy. This not only creates a huge pool of talent to tap, it also motivates those working immediately inside the organisation.

Nick gives some examples of choosing friends with care, making them work for as place in your circuit, and weeding for higher yield. People will thank you for it, because they will get one of your 150 attention slots. Of course you will often need to go beyond the 150 - and that's where it is important to know people in your 150 prepared to share their network.

Imagine a situation where you know similar organisations with equally potent networks of supporters. When you need to tap into a wider network for help these groups will be far more powerful than a database listing the email addresses of thousands of indifferent people.

There's the rub. Will other people open up their networks? Or will they carry on with their own empire-building?

Over at the NCVO ICT foresight blog, Megan Griffiths, after quoting Nick, takes some comfort from suggestions that the technology and associated information may be changing our motivations towards greater collaboration. Megan writes:

Back to the brain, and I was recently reading a piece on how technology is changing the manager’s brainin which Susan Greenfield argues that “the massive growth of electronicmedia is fundamentally altering our brains and central nervous systems” and that “as people’s brains evolve, their motivations andaspirations will shift accordingly. Our standards of satisfaction andfulfilment may be very different in the future”.

Adding ....Of particular interest to our social networking strand is this excerpt:

“Weassume that people want to work for other people - but that may not bethe case in the future. At the moment a lot of our pleasure is derivedfrom status, but I think soon that will be challenged - people justwon’t be motivated in that way. It’s just another arms race and I thinkwe’ll evolve to a point where people aren’t so status-obsessed.”

Thiscould spell the end for traditional, monolithic corporations, she says.As the various rationale for forming large companies - for example, toreduce the cost of gathering in materials - become less important,smaller, more virtual units will emerge that are independent but workthrough a variety of networks of other organisations, she insists.

All this is by way of contribution to discussion about social networking and nonprofits, set in process by NCVO and also under discussion at this blog. What's evident from the discussion so far is the benefit of having a group of people - brought together by Megan - prepared to offer insights into social networking drawn from their personal experience and their sifting of information on their personal radar. The Web gives us thousands of references on social networking ... we make sense of all that information through the filtering and enhancement offered by people we know, or gradually get to know through those exchanges.

Adding o- instead e-

Adding e- to democracy, government, participation and other elements of civil society has brought some benefits, but also helped develop a new sort of digital divide . The new divide is not so much between connected and unconnected, but between the sceptical, puzzled and frankly confused and a perhaps slightly smug band of professionals offering what Clifford Stoll called Silicon Snakeoil 10 years back. I know, I've been guilty of "what you really need to try is..." and enjoying that slight sense of power that comes from brandishing a new set of tools and esoteric terms.
The problem is compounded when e-people say to not-very-e-people "of course, it isn't about the technology ... " but then have difficulty completing the sentence. It suggests there's a magic ingredient we can't tell you about, but if you take the medicine technology it will do you good. You may not like it much, but change is always difficult, isn't it?
At the same time, the new e- tools are important, because as I was arguing earlier , they can help us work collaboratively, can be used to challenge power-holding institutions, and do allow us to work in both groups and networks. That helps develop a culture of openness, do good stuff together, and begin to realise the potential of collective intelligence.
Which led me to the question, what would democracy, government, participation look and feel like if we added o- for open instead of e- for electronic? Pretty good, I believe, but then - would it sell conference seats and kit?
Thanks to Steve, Paul, and Nick for yesterday's conversation that helped gell these ideas.
Update: Graham Lally has picked up the issue in a comment here, and also over at Sphereless 

Participation as culture not tools ... though new ones help

If - like me - you believe that social media, Web 2.0, and social networking are fundamentally important to the ways both civil life and business will operate in future, you need some means of explaining to people who don't get it are still exploring the issues. I also need a way of responding to occasional requests about updates to the non-webby Guide to Effective Participation I did ten year back. Mostly I say "take a look at this blog" while realising the jumble of ideas here aren't very user-friendly.
A meeting tomorrow with Steve Moore and others in the loosely-joined Policy Unplugged family gave me a nudge today to start organising some thoughts. Old-style thinking: do a note to circulate and present. New-style thing: blog a piece that may get some responses and will be useful for other purposes.
The essence of the PU style is conversational, with social conferences and sites like this structured by participants around topics they want to pursue. In that spirit, here's some conversation-starters I jotted down ... a bit condensed and theoretical, but I'm sure I could pitch them into the sort of videos we are capturing at PU events - the latest with Channel 4 education.

• Successful participation is more about developing a culture, than using a set of tools. That applies to democracy, workplace collaboration, citizen engagement in public programmes, user-involvement in product and service design, and anything where doing things together is important.
• The main barriers to effective participation lie both in personal attitudes and institutions, and mainly revolve around desires for power and control.  The institutional barriers are embedded in hierarchical systems, the personal ones in beliefs that we only succeed by competing. Changing these and getting things done is doubly challenging.
• After several decades of policy consensus on the importance of greater participation, accompanied by hundreds of toolkits and scores of organisations promoting the idea, it doesn't feel as if we are much more participative on many fronts. Participation is more often an exercise in ticking boxes for tools used, than making cultural change.
• The social web and social media are profoundly important because they enable individuals to mix greater collaboration (we) with higher personal profile and influence (me). This immerses people in a new type of participative culture, with attitudes, tools and behaviours to match.
• The inter-mix of we and me in the new social web is shifting organising models from groups and hierarchies towards networks, within which teams, groups, organisations will continue to operate. However, to be successful they will have to be more participative because citizens and consumers won't stand for the old ways.
• Participation is not always the answer. Good leadership involves knowing when to enlist and direct, when to  facilitate and support ... and how to mix them all.

Comments, additions, disagreements very welcome. Im not sure how I'll expand these ideas. Maybe they could be basis of Changethis manifesto. I could put them up on a wiki like this one on social networking I'm planning to expand with more Web 2.0 thinking, and follow them up on the social networking site developing over here. The good thing is I don't have to decide one route .. and I know other ideas will develop from meeting Steve and friends. Old style thinking: produce a report. New style: converse online and off, convene a social conference, do some videos, drop out an e-book, keep on blogging, connect with new people, help them join in ...

Some previously posts below - and see also participation and engagement categories in the right sidebar

Face-to-face and online collaboration mix
Relationship-based engagement ... obviously
Web 2.0, participation and e-democracy
If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0
Participation is a culture, not a tick box

Placeblogging

Robin Hamman in place blog aggregation - how to make it interesting tips us off about about a new aggregation site that will pull together feeds from blogs that are place-specific ... thus answering a question I'm sometime asked: "where can I find interactive web sites about local communities". What's more interesting, he suggests, is aggregation of blogs within a locality .. which placeblogger may or may not do. Robin is working on a project with the BBC and local bloggers in Manchester.

Here's Robin's take:

Lisa Williams has posted an invitation for a sneak peek under the hood of placeblogger, a project she's been working on. Placeblogger will be a searchable directory and aggregator of placeblogs which she explains are:

Placeblogs — sites that focus on geographical communities — are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council.

There's a screenshot of the site, currently undergoing development work, on flickr. So will it work? Well, there are already lots of sites out that there agregate placeblogs, GlobalVoicesOnline being my favourite example but there are also tons of national and city blog aggregators like britblog and LondonBloggers (which organises blogs around a tube map).

So would I go to a site like Placeblogger? Maybe to have a look, but I can't imagine that if I lived in a specific city or town in America, I'd really be interested in people in other places blogging about school fetes, a house fire in the neighbourhood, or a scandal involving a local priest. It just wouldn't be relavent to me.

Aggregation is great when it helps people find stuff that's relevant but, in this case, I suspect all the aggregation will do is fill the page with stuff that's exactly the opposite of that - stuff of little interest from places I may or may not have ever heard of before. The directory aspect of it, however, would be of interest to me, particularly if the site allowed me to pull in headlines from JUST the placeblogs in my area, as well as things like feeds for place specific keywords on technorati, local papers, local discussion forums, local email groups, etc.

I guess I'm imagining something like Squidoo's Lens service but where much of the work of building a lens is either done for me already or done collaboratively. I'm looking forward to seeing if placeblogger does any of this stuff or if it misses the mark by focusing too much on multi-place aggregation and not enough on focusing on the local stuff I'm really interested in.

Tories (and Google) embrace DIY TV

Another example of the Tories embracing new media: after Webcameron we have "politics for adults" in a mix of streaming video and blogging, as Slugger O'Toole reports in Doughty Street Goes Live!.

Long trailed by Iain Dale, and subject of a comprehensive blog on Comment is Free, you can get the Doughty Street TV station now online. It’s being billed as Tory TV, and it is true that that is where the money is coming from and where the mainstays hail from. But Tim Montgomery sketches out its wider identity as anti establishment on Channel Four. I will even be putting in an occasional report on matters Irish.

That other high-ranking political blogger Guido Fawkes observes that the Tories are much-taken with Google.

Staff flow from Google to CCHQ and from CCHQ to Google. Google's boss Eric Schmidt spoke at the Tory conference (giving the most intellectually stimulating speech).

Over at The Progreessive, home for Labour bloggers, Dan Fox bemoans The Amazing Missed Opportunity of Mrs Pitchard, a TV drama in which a supermarket manager played by Jane Horrocks, angry at the state of politics, stands as an independent and ends up as Prime Minister. Dan offers a critique of political dramas over the past decade.

In many ways, those responsible for drama are simply reflecting the culture of their colleagues in news and current affairs, where the path of least resistance in representing politics is not so much naturally taken as actively sought with a GPS system and master atlas. Stories over substance. Personalities over issues. Entertainment over information.

The Tories have decided on the value the DIY approach ... something Google have put money on with their $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube. That broadcast-yourself  site didn't exist a couple of years ago. Robert Paterson explains the importance for business and participation here and here.

So for all those analysts who miss it - value today has two dimensions - the transaction revenue as per always and now more importantly the participation factor that does away with all the normal expansion and brand protection costs. To get the right kind of participation the enterprise has to create an ecosystem in which the participant can do things that help expand his or her identity. Where the action expands and deepens their relationships to others.

At one time political parties offered people an eco-system of goodwill, some shared values, debate, stimulation. Now we look elsewhere. I think the Tories have understood that.