Designing for Civil Society

Need some knowledge sharing? Bring on the reintermediators!

I think everyone who works inside organisations - or across them - has knowledge management problems, but maybe don't call them that. They may be about how to find the information you need, get other people to tell you what they are doing, not re-invent the wheel because you know someone has tackled that tough issue before.
Maybe you say: if only we had a good database and information officer! If only the management would install a proper intranet and get everyone to use it! If only the systems in different organisation linked up with each other! If only we could collect and organise our information better! If only there was one place I could go!
Tonight another of David Gurteen's excellent Knowledge Cafes addressed just those issues, with a gathering at Ernst and Young of people whose day job it is to ... well, manage knowledge. We were privileged to have as guest Dave Pollard, whose blog How to Save the World I have long admired for wisdom across a wide range of topics, not just KM. His blog posts are longish, his arguments highly reasoned, his tables and flow charts are everything you might hope for. It's the sort of stuff you bookmark, and feel a little guilty you don't spend more time on.
Dave in person was even better, because he managed to give us the essence of his thinking on KM in about 15 minutes. By the end he had, I think, convinced - or maybe confirmed - us in the view that top-down approaches aren't likely to work. We may need databases, information workers, systems .... but the real solutions are personal rather than central.
Dave started by setting out three principles: things happen in organisations for a reason; people will generally find the best way to do their jobs; and the best way to share knowledge has always been by conversations. From that he explained the importance of peer-to-peer networking for exchange of knowledge and problem-solving, and understanding how people really do things in practice. Instead of thinking just about finding, gathering, collating, tagging information, think about how to find the people you need. It's about connection, rather than collection. The old adage about it's not so much what you know as who you know still holds true. Maybe we just forgot in the fascination with big data-driven KM systems.
So... goodbye centralised KM, hello personal KM. We need to get better at managing our own knowledge, and sharing it with others ... using tools like blogs and wikis. Enter also the idea of reintermediation. In the first IT wave we got excited by disintermediation - cutting out the intermediaries so customers and suppliers, producers and users, creators and audiences could deal direct. However, in the networky environment of personal KM some management is needed to observe, support, facilitate, add value by helping make sense. We need some reintermediation.
At this point I saw connection with discussions among a group of us bloggers talking about technology stewards in communities of practice, buzz directors in organisations, and social reporters in networks. Wow, we are in the right business! We are reintermediators!
At this point Dave encouraged us to turn theory into practice, and share some knowledge by talking to each other ... which is just what the knowledge cafes are all about. Dave gave us a few questions for starters, and our table talked a lot about the difficulty of making the case within an organisation to senior execs about the value of this bottom up approach. At it's (apparent) simplest, it could be "why we need a blog". But behind that lies the issue of who wants to talk, who wants to listen ... and who is allowed to have a voice in the style they wish. We also shared some insights about when wikis work (clear shared tasks) the differences between blogging inside an organisation, and "in the wild".
It all went very well, although I find feedback within the cafe format is always a bit of a problem. One person can't really summarise the views of a table: you either get a boring list of bullet points, or one person's perspective ... which is OK as long as they don't hog the microphone. It showed that eight people can have a conversation, but when you try and share that across 60 or so you probably need ummm, some reintermediation?
At the end Dave graciously delayed a trip to the pub to give me a few minutes of video. I managed to mess up the tape in my DV camera and run out of space on my other Nikon S1. Sigh. This reintermediation is just as hard as it sounds. Fortunately Dave managed to condense the key points to 90 seconds. That's what I call personal knowledge management.

E-democracy videos - now updated

Here's a round-up of the videos  from the recent e-democracy '06 conference - done now because early next week my friends at Headstar will be publishing an edition of the their excellent (and free) e-government email bulletin, including a report on the conference. If you haven't subscribed, you can do so here.  For those visiting this blog from the bulletin - or just chancing upon it - the videos require Quicktime, which you can download free here.

Full items on this blog

The challenge for e-democratisers: deliberation as well as demands
No 10 strategy chief challenges Matthew Taylor challenges e-democracy toolmakers to support deliberation

Not just e-democracy, new democracy, says MySociety founder
E-democracy toolmaker Tom Steinberg says we need a new philosophy of democracy, not just more tools

Blending participatory and representative democracy, with added e-
Mary Reid explains how two aspects of democracy can be integrated, drawing on local experience

Making e-democracy part of the everyday - even if that's YouTube rules
Researchers Molly Webb and Jo Twist say follow people's interests online and on the street

We have been warned: democracy can be hacked
Russell Michaels and Jason Kitcat on the vulnerabilities and doubtful value of e-voting

Additional videos

Below are additional videos for which I haven't yet written a full item. Items will follow later on this blog, or a forthcoming Headstar blog. Clicking people's names will bring Quicktime movies up in a pop-up.

Jill Sanders, a volunteer with Oncom, explains how local people can develop successful online communities. As I reported earlier,  this isn't always welcomed by the local council.

Ian Johnson, Head of Branch at the Department for Constitutional Affairs, reflects on e-democracy within Government, and adds in an e-mail follow-up "e-democracy is in its development stage. It's about experimentation, finding out what works and what doesn't in different contexts, listening to feedback, adjusting and learning. It's about sharing knowledge and encouraging others to have a try." Ian points out a slip of the tongue confuses blogging Minister David Miliband and his brother Ed.

Bryan Lewis explains the work of Westminster Digital in webcasting Parliament and, increasingly, other programmes and events. Their portable Streampac system enables inexperienced operators to produce their own shows.

Gavin Sealey explains his work in Newham with young people, and as a manager of the local issues forum.

Ben Whitnall and Gez Smith work for the leading e-democracy consultancy and developer Delib, so they are well placed to explain what tools for online deliberation are available to meet the challenge issued by Matthew Taylor

David Hunter runs Votivation, which aims to make make democracy fun by enabling people to develop and vote on views online. Cash and celebrities are involved too. David also explains here the importance of relating real world value to online social networking.

Carin Lennartsson was running impressive demonstrations of Readspeaker, which can speak your web pages without sounding robotic. She took time out to explain to me how it works, and the benefits it offers to people with literacy difficulties. In Lincolnshire they are using the system to create podcasts where people can check job opportunities.

Ross Ferguson, of Hansard Society, and Michael Cross of The Guardian  were talking together about the second wave of e-democracy. Hansard Society is working with government on the Digital Dialogues programme. Michael writes on -e-government and e-democracy. I chipped in and asked what was working well - and how widespread uptake of e-democracy tools was now. What emerged was that take-up was patchy, and as yet it wasn't clear what significant impact e-democracy would have on traditional representative democracy. Continuing experimentation, mixed with healthy scepticism was needed.

Carol Hayward is project manager for the e-democracy programme in Bristol - which has a reputation as one of the most innovative in the field. She explained that as well as developing its own projects, the council aims to empower others to develop and use their own tools. Councils can be nervous of losing control over activities - but only by being more flexible will they develop the relationships and trust necessary for real communication and engagement. This approach is evident in Bristol's Digital Challenge bid.

Comments and additional contributions welcome below. Thanks again to everyone I interviewed. I've been amazed and gratified  at events by how willing people are to offer up a couple of minutes on camera - and how coherent.  Next time I'll do better with the lighting and audio.

We have been warned: democracy can be hacked

If you don't follow developments in e-democracy, and haven't been involved in the e-voting UK pilots then you might think it a pretty obvious good idea. You just press some buttons in a kiosk instead of putting your cross on a ballot paper, and get a a quicker result, don't you? Must save money at the count, mustn't it?
It's not that simple, as I discovered at the recent e-democracy '06 conference. My rather dim recollections of controversy in the US and Ireland were brought smartly to the fore by a showing of the US film Hacking Democracy, and an interview with its co-director Russell Michaels. Then UK-based consultant Jason Kitcat weighed in with a withering attack on the whole idea. His message: stop now. Jason trailed the film a few weeks back:

'Hacking Democracy' is an 80 minute documentary film which completely lifts the lid on the corruption, fraud and ignorance surrounding e-voting in the US. Included in the film is an on-camera successful exploit of a certified e-voting machine. While for those who have followed the US developments in details, there may be few surprises, for most viewers the impact of seeing this stuff on film is going to be huge.

What's extraordinary about the film - besides showing how e-voting machines and their software can be hacked - is the three-year story it tells of how a US citizen Bev Harris was dissatisfied with the answers she was getting about e-voting, started investigating, and as distributors HBO report:

In the course of her research, which unearthed hundreds of reported incidents of mishandled voting information, Harris stumbled across an "online library" of the Diebold Corporation, discovering a treasure trove of information about the inner-workings of the company's voting system.

Last week was the deadline for applications from councils for the next round of pilots in England due for May 2007. We should soon know whether councils have heeded the warnings of Jason and others that the timetable is crazy, and it's all a bad idea anyway.

Update: I invited those I interviewed to add points if they wished, and Jason added:

I'm all in favour of experimentation and using technology. But e-voting is a difficult technology to get right which delivers little if any perceived benefit at great cost, both financial and in terms of trust.
As the 2007 e-voting pilots unfold I will be watching them carefully, reporting on my blog and campaigning through the Open Rights Group.
Additional video (very good):
Veteran Leon County Election Supervisor Ion Sancho explains the dependency that election officials come to develop for vendors and their personnel.
[Ion was the guy in Hacking Democracy who let his county's machines be hacked. Since then then ALL the major vendors have refused to supply him - they don't want their systems tested either. So much for competition.]

Making e-democracy part of the everyday - even if that's YouTube rules

Think tanks by their nature can appear rather academic and distanced from everyday life - but that certainly wasn't the case when I talked to a couple of researchers from Demos and IPPR at the e-democracy '06 conference recently. While Matthew Taylor was calling for a more deliberative approach to politics, and Tom Steinberg was reflecting on the need for a new political philosophy, Molly Webb and Jo Twist were very much focused on people's day-to-day concerns when I interviewed them. For some people the day-to-day might be concern about domestic violence next door, for others it might be working out rules for posting videos to YouTube. The message from both: go to where people are already engaging online, as well as thinking about new tools.
Molly Webb is web manager at Demos, and recently won an award for their site. It is notable for the way in which it enables staff to share work in progress not only with each other, but anyone interested. For some years Demos has promoted itself as "the think tank for everyday democracy", so that and their webby credentials gives them useful e-democracy perspectives. Molly felt that the main e-democracy focus on politics, government and citizens didn't fully acknowledge all the activities people engage in online to express their social concerns and aspirations. Politics is on the street - outside Whitehall.

Jo Twist is a senior research fellow at IPPR, heading up their Digital Society and Media programme. She's also been a BBC technology reporter, and has studied virtual worlds, so I wasn't surprised to hear her returning to their role as learning environments.

While politicians may take the political blog as the barometer of what's happening online, young people may be learning about governance by arguing through the rules of uploading videos to YouTube.
When I checked the video with Molly after the event, she added:

E-government shouldn't just take offline processes and digitize them. We should be thinking about how the trends online are opening up new possibilities for communication and collective efficacy.

... and reminded me of the Demos pamphlet Wide Open: Open source methods and their future potential, which applies open source ideas to policy.
Over at IPPR, Jo's colleague Kay Withers is working on Emerging Local Media and Citizenship in a Converged Digital Society:

As the idea of handing down power from Whitehall to the town hall, to citizens and local communities gains currency, the question which remains unanswered is how digital media and technologies can work more effectively at local levels to represent, enhance, and support real needs, as well as amplify voices and increase participation in decision making.

And also on Young People, Media and Social and Political Engagement

This project will involve a thorough audit of both the habits and attitudes of young people with regard media technologies, content consumption and production, and social networking online. It will consider what this means for the future of media regulation, public service content, the development of identity and social norms online, political engagement, and finally translating progressive ideas to a dispersed and dis-aggregated audience.

I hope we hear more at next year's conference, if not before.
Meanwhile, there's a very lively discussion taking place on the email list  UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange about the pros and cons of having some deliberative forums associated with the No 10 e-petitions site, with leading e-democracy thinkers and toolmakers weighing in on either side. You too can join in by signing up to the list, but otherwise it is out of public view, which seems a pity, since content can't easily be quoted or linked. With some trepidation, I'll raise the issue on the list. Or should I try a petition to the effect that this discussion should take place in public?

Blending participatory and representative democracy, with added e-

The question of what sort of political philosophy we need in the age of e-democracy - raised by Tom Steinberg - has been picked up by Mary Reid, another speaker at last week's conference.
I asked Mary, a former chair of the Local E-Democracy National Project, if she thought we are now entering a second phase of e-democracy, and she agreed we've moved from experimentation to a more mature use of online tools. She added, for example, that suburban commuters who can't get to local meetings in Kingston upon Thames - where she is currently Mayor - are particularly active online.
In a follow-up email discussion on e-democracy exchange, Mary - recapping her conference contribution - neatly summarises a model that she calls 'participatory representative democracy'.

Essentially, the model pairs high levels of citizen participation with strong elected representatives. Strong representatives are needed to balance the inevitable attempts at dominance by the loudest voices, to draw out the full range of views, to empower citizens to find their voice. But the representatives are the ones who are ultimately accountable for the decisions that are made.
This works best where all councillors, not just Cabinet members, have decision-making power. We have achieved that in Kingston through our Neighbourhood (Area) Committees which have a range of executive powers and substantial budgets. All councillors make decisions about issues that directly affect their wards, and are seen to do so in public meetings where any citizen can contibute.
I also described some real practices in my Neighbourhood in which citizens get involved in working parties with council officers that analyse problems and propose the solutions.  The citizens then consult with their neighbours on the possible solutions. The role of the elected representative in this process is to ensure that the processes work smoothly and that the working party is as representative as possible. This approach ensures that the detailed impact of proposals is understood and that specific needs are met.
With this model of participation we need e-tools that:
1. provide a space where many types of information can be stored and be made easily accessible and searchable by anyone, e.g. reports, proposals, background information, timelines - ideally these should be geographically related and support annotation
2. provide a discussion forum where ideas and views can be exchanged
3. provide simple consultation tools with graphical online analysis
None of this is new, of course.  In fact, we've been doing offline democracy like this for many years in Kingston, and it's quite easy to add on the e-elements to enrich the processes. The question is whether we can develop tools that themselves edge citizens - and more importantly, Councils - towards this kind of model of democracy.

It seems to me that we need this fine-grain practical attention to the way in which representative and participatory democracy can be combined, in order to provide the basis for using new tools as an additional channel. In her conference contribution - download pdf - Mary set out in more detail how consultation, participation and devolution work in Kingston, where residents can set the agenda for tackling local issues through neighbourhood working groups. She says:

The e-tools, of course, build on but do not replace other methods of communication. They increase the reach and encourage participation from groups that might not be able to attend meetings.
But perhaps e-democracy does have another role. Working the other way round, it can act as a catalyst for change.  It can start a debate amongst councillors and officers about participation in council meetings. It can give tools to citizens that will help them to pressurise for greater involvement. It can encourage councillors to try new ways of communicating with their residents.
Maybe e-democracy can be the lever for democratic renewal.

Mary is now on the Board of ICELE - the International Centre of Excellence for Local eDemocracy. However, as Mary says, e-tools are not a substitute for other traditional methods, and after our interview she dashed off to fulfill her Mayoral duties in Kingston switching on the Christmas street-lights ... and write her own blog.

Not just e-democracy, new democracy, says MySociety founder

Tom Steinberg and his crew of smart developers at MySociety have produced e-democracy tools that manage to win plaudits from politicians, civil servants and citizens. Tony Blair joined Pledgebank and got more than a hundred other public figures to agree to become patrons of community sports clubs, for example.
So when I met Tom at the e-democacy '06 conference yesterday I rather expected him to want to talk about the e-petitions system that enables you take your collected signatures to Downing Street without having to knock on the door in person. Nope. As you'll hear from the video, his horizons have moved from how do we do e-democracy, to why are we doing it.
Once you have managed to achieve the funding for tools, fix the bugs, get people interested it's time, says Tom, to reflect on what changes we might want to see in the system, as well as in policies. What should we be pushing for, and what are the dangers in doing that? After the rush to practical solutions, it's time for some theory.
Put around the other way "what could be the wrong philosophy of representative democracy that would lead to us all building and spending time on tools that were actually unhelpful".
Tom wants people who are building sites in the e-democracy field to start talking about what sort of democracy they are building those tools for. He's happy to meet, host discussions, or get things moving in any other way.
Maybe there's some common ground with Matthew Taylor, who earlier in the conference was urging a rethink of the role of e-democracy tools - and in particularly urging tools that assist deliberation. I'm sure they'll find somewhere to talk about it. Online?

The challenge for e-democratisers: deliberation as well as demands

As the BBC was reporting a big response to the No 10 e-petitions system - 500 in the first couple of days according to the team in Downing Street - the Prime Minister's strategy adviser was urging those assembled at yesterday's e-democracy '06 conference to help people be more deliberative and collaborative.
Matthew Taylor was keynote speaker, giving us a wholly engaging (no Powerpoint, no notes) appraisal of the unhealthy elements of the relationship between citizens, media and politicians - and the often shrill discourse that results. The media sells outrage, citizens fail to recognise the tough choices they have to make in their lifestyles, and politicians work hard and mainly honestly to balance priorities in a highly complex world. I summarise outrageously. The BBC has a full report, including:

At a time at which we need a richer relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had, to confront the shared challenges we face, arguably we have a more impoverished relationship between politicians and citizens than we have ever had. It seems to me this is something which is worth calling a crisis.

Matthew was appointed to the Labour Party in 1994 to establish Labour's rebuttal operation ... so one might expect some weariness with both Press and petitioners.
However, Matthew's main focus was on the need for us to work through the complexities of political choice for ourselves, and not expect easy fixes from politicians. He cited citizens juries, familiar from his time as director of the think tank IPPR. There people who are not experts in a subject hear evidence, discuss the issues, and try and reach a conclusion. Often people with opposing views find common ground.
We need these deliberative processes not just with others, but with ourselves, because we need to balance our private wants with common goods.
The Internet, said Matthew, had helped people to mobilise. It offers new methods of search and exposure. But does it yet really help people engage with dilemmas and challenges, and work their way through to conclusions? He presented that challenge to developers and advocates of e-democracy tools.
I was official conference video blogger, which felt very important and was great fun, but rather reduced my incentive to take proper notes - so I was pleased Matthew offered a well-crafted recap before he left.
Matthew shortly moves from No 10 to become chief executive of the 250-year-old Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. As I reported recently that organisation is renowned for serious deliberation, and is now thinking about how better to engage its 26,000 Fellows more effectively. Sounds a great testbed for some of the new tools Matthew wants.
More conference video here shortly, and then on a dedicated blog.

Seems the Tories really do get the Net. Isn't that news?

I've just caught up with the speech by shadow chancellor George Osborne on Politics and Media in the Internet Age, nudged by several non-Tories saying this shows the opposition have got the Net. Webcameron was the popular front, this is the serious back end. Open University professor and Internet observer John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, agrees in Comment is free:

A shadow chancellor embracing the internet revolution? Whatever next? In his Olsen Lecture last night, delivered in St Bride's, Fleet Street, to an audience of journalists, bankers, lawyers and other low-life types, George Osborne extolled the virtues of modern communication technologies - which represent, he says, a profound cultural shift that politicians (not to mention journalists, bankers and lawyers) ignore at their peril. He also managed to slip in an assertion or two to the effect that the Cameroonies have got the message and the Blair-Brownites haven't.
It would be churlish to infer that Mr Osborne may not be quite as familiar with this stuff as his text implied. Not many teenagers would use Limewire for video and BitTorrent for tunes, for example, but we will let that pass. As Dr Johnson (a celebrated denizen of Fleet Street in his day) might have said, the wonder is not that the speech was done well but that it was done at all. The shadow chancellor has dined with the CEO of Google and met Tom Anderson, the first "friend" every MySpace user acquires. He knows that there are 57 million blogs and that an exabyte is a one followed by 18 zeros. He knows about Linux and Wikipedia. He's heard of Bebo and Friendster and may, for all we know, be a secret YouTube addict. At any rate he knows that "every minute, 15 new user-generated videos are uploaded" to that intriguing site. And he knows that all this Means Something.
Like what? Well, everything must be more "transparent" because nothing is hidden from Google's all-searching eye. So HMG should have a website which enables taxpayers to Google the government's squandering of their hard-earned cash. And official services should all be available online - because if they're not, citizens might use their new social-networking skills to organise nasty demonstrations and bring down the government. And so on and so forth.

I can only join my friends in urging you to read the speech, and maybe pass it on ... not for party political purposes, but because it is so extraordinary to find someone in a traditional political role explaining the importance of search, personalisation, social networking, and collective intelligence. Googling the speech didn't show up coverage in the traditional media, but then, should we be surprised?

Talking social media at an unsocial event

Tonight's  meeting of the London Social Media Club, convened "to discuss the latest in tools, technologies and success stories" was a ... ***?!**

Whoa! Pause there.  The social reporter is meant to be collaborative and celebratory rather than critical, and I'm feeling a bit challenged on how to do that.
Start again.
The second Club meeting was hosted by PR company Fleishman Hillard London, and they did us proud in the board room with a table laden with beer, wine and nibbles.  Our hostess kicked off the conversations with some challenging questions about the role of blogs and other tools in the world of PR, and the 20 plus people there all had a chance to chip in their stories.
That's all true, but am I being honest? No. Here's another attempt.
Architecture is important in buildings, on the web, and at events. Board rooms, cafes and bars are designed for different purposes. Blog communities and web forums offer different types of conversations and relationships. Pre-programmed conferences, with slots for Powerpoint presentations, offer a very different experience from social conferences - or unconferences as some people call them.
Styles of hosting and/or facilitation are hugely important too, whether as dictator, conductor, or chameleon.
Among the most interesting facets of social media and things Web 2.0 are self-publishing through blogs, the development of self-organising networks through feeds and links, together with a willingness to be open and informal. You can choose who you talk to, how you do that - text, audio, video - and what relationships you foster. It's a very bottom-up sort of online club in which the participants evolve the rules and set the agenda ... leading to a participation culture.
For those reasons I had high hopes of the Social Media Club as a place to chat face-to-face with other people on topics of our choosing ... with an architecture of flexible space, and light-touch hosting. Maybe a mini version of the open space conferences I've been involved in with Policy Unplugged.
It wasn't like that. We had a board room with seats tightly arranged around the table, and facilitation as gentle inquisition. Our hostess asked questions and we responded. OK, it was all pretty informal, but we had one conversation at a time instead of maybe half a dozen in parallel. The initial introductions round the table gave me three or four people I would have loved to talk to ... but there was no way I could get to them.
I tried asking why we were talking about Web 2.0 using an Event 0 format, and got the offer of another drink. I clearly didn't explain myself well ... which is why I'm blogging it here. Maybe everyone else was happy? No - several others left for the pub after an hour. Maybe it all changed before the end? If so, I'm glad, and hope to read about it.
However, if future meetings are going to be run the same way, I suggest calling them round tables or something similar. Alternatively try something like the excellent Gurteen Knowledge Cafes.
Of course, it could be me - and Groucho Marx.  I shouldn't try and join any club that would have someone like me for a member.
Tomorrow I'm conference videoblogger at e-Democracy '06 with my son Dan, and on best behaviour.
Update: the more clubable social reporter Lloyd Davis comments below that it did all get more social a bit later ... so I hope Jackie won't take my comments to hard. I just couldn't resist the analogies.

Participation culture: yes! But do tech and non-tech mean the same thing?

I used to find terms like participation and engagement used mainly by people in community development and public programmes. Their practice was - and still is - substantially around workshops and offline media, as I covered in a couple of guides a few years back. Even now, I find few of the practitioners are active online.  Trying to enthuse them about the potential of new tools and ways of working is difficult - though Lee Bryant and I had a go in our chapter for Involve's book on Post Party Politics.
Over the past few months, however, I've found a lot of online use of the terms. It's coming from technology enthusiasts promoting the role of new tools and open approaches in creating participatory, collaborative environments. There have been reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Cooperation Commons, and the MacArthur Foundation (pdf download), to mention only a few.
I find the reports by searches and reading blogs. Seldom do they find me - until now.
No sooner had I posted my piece today about facilitation, with a link back to one about participation as culture not tools, than I get an email from Steve Borsch at Connecting the Dots, saying that in view of those items I might be interested in a free online report his company has produced on the Rise of the Participation Culture.
As it happened, I've been reading Steve's blog for a few weeks and had bookmarked the report as something I must mention. If you wonder why people are excited about blogs, wikis, social networking, Web 2.0, Flickr, YouTube and so on it covers the whole lot, and explains "Web as the new normal".
The content is excellent, but in responding to Steve's email I did say I found the format - long web pages, no download - a bit challenging on a laptop. I don't print much, but I would like to print this one (and I suspect less-online participation practitioners certainy will. Some of my best friends print emails ... and file them)
Steve responded saying the format was much debated, but they went for the only-online in part to make sure there was "a single version of the truth". It is, in itself, an interesting conversation starter with less-online friends. Me: Look - free, always up-to-date, links to other resources, easy to expand, use it to start online discussion. Friend: but I can't read it on the train. Me: well, with wifi and a laptop ... Friend: wasn't all this meant to make life easier?
Next report: engaging the techno sceptics. The Bamboo Project has made a great start in their piece on Engaging Nonprofits in the Tech, or as I put it Moving from Wow to how, sparked by Nancy White's piece on Second Wave Adoption.
That's enough. I can hear my less-tech friend in the background asking ... this participation culture is all very well, but do you have time to do anything else except write about it? Of course. I'm just off to talk about it with others at the first meeting of the London Social Media Club. Then I can blog about that, and link to all the other people blogging about it. That's participation, isn't it?
Update: Steve Borsch e-mails to say that folllowing prompts from a few dozen others, a pdf version of the Rise of the Participation Culture is now available as a pdf (6M download). Much appreciated ... that's service!