Designing for Civil Society

Dreams and nightmares for Demos consultants in Glasgow jargon wars

Unless following Scottish news on the BBC - Think Tank attacks city's rebirth - those of us south of the border are likely to have missed out on a wonderful jargon-laden spat between Demos and the civic leaders of Glasgow.  The BBC plays it fairly straight:

Poorer parts of Scotland's largest city have been left behind by major regeneration projects, according to a new report.
Think-tank Demos found that high-profile regeneration programmes were failing to improve many people's quality of life.
The survey also found that many UK city leaders were running out of ideas to "deepen the urban renaissance".
Glasgow City Council dismissed the report as "an insult to Glaswegians".
The report - The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the power of mass imagination - called for "mass-imagination" programmes to "capture the aspirations and creativity of citizens".
It warned that without this, regeneration efforts which rely on iconic architecture, leisure and tourism would increase social division and erode trust and civic pride.

However, you really need to read Tom Shields a few days later in the Sunday Herald - Can we really soup up our city with acronyms, jargon and gobbledygook? Probably not - to get the full flavour. He picks up on quotes from Melissa Mean, head of Demos' Self Build Cities Programme, who co-authored the report with Gerry Hassan and Charlie Tims.

How galling it was for Glasgow's civic leaders to spend perfectly good council taxpayers' money on a report about the future of the city and last week be told conclusions they do not want to hear.
Melissa Mean, of Demos, the think tank which carried out the survey, said: "In terms of new ideas to sustain the urban renaissance, our cities are running on empty. The cultural arms race of mainstream regeneration policy has become formulaic and is delivering diminishing returns for people and places. When every city has commissioned a celebrity architect and pedestrianised a cultural quarter, our cities are at risk of all becoming the same."
Ms Mean referred to "the growing imagination deficit holding back UK cities". She was not talking just about our dear green place. But the remarks were made in the context of a report called The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the power of mass imagination. (There may have been a wee hint in the title of what the city fathers could have expected.) Ms Mean claimed city officialdom had a blinkered vision constructed of buzz phrases such as "step change and transformation", "world-class city", "opportunity and choice", "one voice, one vision", which were alien to the population at large.
What Ms Mean said was: "Told in jargon-laden language by a spidery organogram of organisations in a web of strategy documents and conference speeches, the official future is a set of implicit assumptions which constrain a city's parameters for innovation and decision-making." Which is niftily jargonesque in its own right.
The Demos people's first language appears to be a new age, touchy-feely version of consultancy speak. In their report, Demos speak of "the importance of story in imagining the future". They asked Glaswegians to make a wish for Glasgow. Freepost wish cards were bound into a wishbook - "an indestructible totem that will live for centuries".
Demos recommended "assemblies of hope", networks of individuals who could get together to help shape the city's future and find space for everyone from "alchemists to imagineers".
The use of such language and fanciful concepts enabled Glasgow City Council spokespersons to rubbish the report. It was condemned as "nothing less than an insult to the many Glaswegians who gave up their time to take part. Bizarre would be a charitable way to describe some of the report's conclusions". The Demos terminology was dismissed as "meaningless nonsense".
What we have here are consultants and council officials divided by a common language.

Tom says that there is no shortage of jargon at the City Chambers, and goes on to quote some ripe examples.
I'm definitely not taking sides here. I've spent some happy times working and socialising in Glasgow, and enjoy the hospitality of Demos at their various report launches. They've always seemed pretty sane to me - and I'm certainly with the idea of encouraging people's imaginings about their city as a counterpoint to consultancy reports.
I don't know what the inside story is here. It all started well, as Charlie Tims ruefully reflects on the Demos site in dreams and nightmares:

Interpretations of press releases and quotes etc have left Glasgow City Council's nose slightly out of joint which is a shame, as they have supported a risky and innovative project from the outset - the first attempt to imagine the future of a city through stories and storytelling anywhere in the world.  The book highlights an imagination deficit in urban policy making that sits across all cities, not just Glasgow, and far from being an "insult to the people" who gave their time up to be a part of this project, the book is a tribute to them. On this last point the book concludes with a manifesto for "The Open City", the prime focus of which is light touch interventions that give people the tools and freedom to improve their own city. The book itself is quite a tome combining a policy narrative, with stories produced during the project. You will be able to download a copy of the report here.

Perhaps the city council leaders took personally some points that Melissa meant to be more general.
I wonder if the lesson here is that, if you start off with an approach that focusses on people's stories and imaginations, and aims to create a narrative from that, it is a mistake to switch back into the polemic of press release and SocietyGuardian.
Anne Johnstone makes this point in The Herald:

Where it turns nasty is in the way that, having invited negative comments, it then sweeps them up and recycles them into slingshots to pitch at Glasgow City Council. En route it makes some truly monstrous generalisations about the way "high profile regeneration programmes are failing to improve the day-to-day quality of life of people living in Britain's major cities". This, one suspects, is the canoe it is really paddling. The city fathers are accused of "running on empty in terms of ideas" and producing a "formulaic" version of regeneration. It is true that some parts of Glasgow are lagging behind the city's new prosperity. It is also true that in Glasgow, as in every other corner of Britain, there is less social mobility in 2007 than there was in 1957. But that has more to do with the nature of globalised capitalism than the council.
The report boasts of its "innovative public participation methodology" - no tedious consultation exercises here. This turns out to have included sending teams on to trains to "capture" ideas from weary commuters on the hoof. Groups were invited to participate in what were termed "Socratic" dialogues. A colleague who attended some of these reports that, far from the intelligent intellectual sparring exercise implied by this term, it quickly degenerated into a low-grade caricature in which an upbeat interpretation of the city's history was immediately shouted down by those on the unreconstructed doom-and-gloom side of the argument.
Some participants gave their all and some of these events were worthwhile per se, but as a piece of policy research, it is self-serving. It lambasts rightly the corporate-style mission statements adopted by councils such as Glasgow but merely replaces them with its own platitudes. Demos attacks the civic jargon of "step-changes" and "social inclusion", then proceeds to substitute its own arcane gobbledygook: "alchemy", "assemblies of hope", "disruptive spaces". In the final report, the voice of the people it puts such store by is drowned out by such think-tank claptrap. Rather than empowering the people of Glasgow, it becomes merely a platform for those gifted the task of interpreting this mass vox pop.

Anyway, do take a look for yourself at the links below. Apart from Charlie's brief item I couldn't find any more commentary from the Demos team. Maybe they are keeping their heads down.  I would, of course, welcome comments here on the project or the more general challenges of taking a new approach to regeneration.
Glasgow 2020 - project site including project overview,  stories,  events image gallery,  del.icio.us bookmarks,
The Dreaming City - download of the report
Glasgow2020 video -  stories from hairdressers
Running on empty - Melissa Mean in the Guardian
'Formulaic' regeneration projects failing to improve quality of city life, argues Demos - press release
Think-tank attacks city's rebirth - BBC news online
Row breaks out over think tank’s 2020 vision of Glasgow - Glasgow Herald
A dear green place divided by the benefits of regeneration - The Scotsman article
Glasgow 2020: tale of seven cities - Glasgow Herald article
Glasgow is not short of 'mass imagination' - letter in The Herald
When dreams cross over into the real of fantasy - Glasgow Herald article
Can we really soup up our city with acronyms, jargon and gobbledygook? Probably not - Sunday Herald article
dreams and nightmares - blog item by report co-author Charlie Tims

Technorati Tags: engagement, Demos, Glasgow, regeneration, storytelling

Celebrating - and supporting - grassroots e-democracy

Discussion around e-democracy, online engagement and the like can become pretty rarified as consultants, commentators, researchers find it a fruitful field for ... well you know what I mean. The talking-about to doing-it ratio shifts while grass roots pioneers like oncom (about which more later) are left struggling. It was refreshing therefore to read this on the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange from Geoff Reid, following a rather arcane discussion of e-democracy benefits for government. Key point:

Why is it that central and local government think they should be the driving force behind e-democracy? Why isn't e-democracy being encouraged to grow organicly from the 'grass roots' level upwards, free from overcomplicated government influence?

Here's the whole thing:

Much of the above conversation has produced loud whooshing noises a few inches above my head, return on investment, business cases, benchmarks and quantitive surveys....it's all Greek to me. This doesn't really surprise me as I'm not involved with e-dem in any commercial or official capacity, I'm just a rank amateur gulping for air in rarified atmosphere.
Just over one year ago I started a small web forum called Talkswindon, (www.talkswindon.org). I didn't start the forum for any other reason than I was quite irritated with one of Swindons two MP's who was, and still does, display an arrogantly dismissive attitude towards her constituents.
Apart from the local newspaper, which seems totally enthralled by our MP's, there was no effective medium in Swindon for people like myself to air their opinions publicly and enter into a publicly recorded exchange of views with their MP's and local councillors. Thus Talkswindon was born.
A few months of networking and getting to know local councillors has paid dividends. The forum is thriving, expanding at a sensible pace and good, worthwhile results are being achieved through interaction of councillors and members of the public. Swindon Borough Council has been using Talkswindon as part of its public consultation for the restructuring of the Residents Parking Scheme for the last 10 months.
To get a complete picture of how deeply the forum is entwined with local politics you'd probably need to spend several hours reading the forum, and I don't wish to bore you with a blow by blow analysis of the forum....I'm not qualified to do so anyway.
Is it e-democracy?, I don't honestly know.....unless e-democracy is enabling citizens to communicate easily with their councillors, and providing a venue where councillors can argue with each other, their ward residents and come to a better understanding of each others positions, then get a positive outcome in more cases than not....then it's e-democracy at some fundamentally useful level.
Does it frighten the councillors and MP's?....yep, exactly as it should do. Content is provided by the users of the forum, is unedited and the admin team operate a strict 'no censorship, no deletion' policy in all but the most dire of cases, (of which there has been only one in the last year), the forum moderates itself by peer pressure.
Anyway, this is a long post to break my duck with, and I don't wish to drag this thread too much off topic...I should really spend a few hours here before diving in I think....but I'll leave with one parting question.
Why is it that central and local government think they should be the driving force behind e-democracy?. Why isn't e-democracy being encouraged to grow organicly from the 'grass roots' level upwards, free from overcomplicated government influence?.

The online communities network oncom has been going for 10 years, and as I've mentioned here does a great job for local democracy. I interviewed oncom volunteer Jill Sanders and others at last year's e-democracy conference.  Oncom has been nominated for this year's New Statesman's New Media Awards. Jill makes the case:

There is nothing like Oncom, probably because there is no funding stream for such an independent network. The entire ten years have been on a shoestring but nevertheless through a mix of volunteer help, professional expertise, dogged persistence and goodwill, this local community network has gone far, far further than any other. It now has citizen journalists publishing news, events, campaigns, issues, concerns, direct to the network as well as the councillor pages, police pages, election projects, loads of local community, national and global links and much more. It is truly an e-community designed to enable ordinary people using the local web, and despite the lack of support from gov or local council - even though it does what they are always banging on about - it continues.... Why should Oncom win the award - because it's worth it!

I have an interest, and shouldn't promote any one project, but can say there is still just one day within which you can nominate, comment or rate projects. Do take a look through those already there to get some idea of the spectrum of official and grass roots activity in the different categories. Meanwhile, Geoff's post has sparked further discussion on the Exchange, which you can join here.
I think there's a real dilemma for grass-roots e-democracy - in common with much volunteer-based community activity. It can be hugely time-consuming and demanding for the (usually small) group running the project, while (hopefully) involving a wider group or network. Their strength lies in their independence, and their weakness in the likelihood of volunteer burn-out. If they get grant support from the council they risk being subject to pressure to conform. As Oncom has found, it is difficult to get funding from other sources. It's equally difficult to see how to run these projects as social enterprises (any examples?) without losing focus.
You can argue - as Bill Thompson does - that stuff no longer happens in one place. The network is the platform ... which is OK for Net sophisticates, but (as Bill acknowledges) challenging for many. No business model for (e-) democracy, nor should there be ... but how can we celebrate and support the grass-roots enthusiasts?
Update: Simon Dickson reflects on how much time it takes to run a political blog. A lot, to do it well.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy

UK Parliament now has online consultation

William Heath at  The Ideal Government Project welcomes news that Parliamentary consultation goes online:

Hooray. Parliament has got a consultation site, plugged into the Select Committee work. First up is Medical Care for the Armed Forces (Defence Committee) and Local Government and the Draft Climate Change Bill.  It’s taken a while, and it’s a slow start. Ross at Hansard Society points to the journey here, and the breakthrough when MPs themselves moderated this. Parliament is where consultation can make a huge difference (even if a number of MPs Don’t Get It). This should be an essential medium for NGOs. If it’s helpful and unofficious, it could go far.

Over at Whitehall Webby Civil Servant Jeremy Gould looks at the reality of the process, and the difficult of integrating it with offline processes:

Online consultation across government is patchy and this development should set a good example to the rest of us to up our game. But there are a number of problems with this:

• Select committees call witnesses and take evidence from experts in their investigations, online consultation extends this questioning to a wider potential audience.
• Government departments, on the other hand, have a specific process to follow when engaging in consultation exercises (note on the following - I’m not a consultation expert) - a detailed published document with a series of set questions, a three month period for replies to be sent in, later on a published collation of the responses to the consultation.
• This latter procedure is optimised for the printed word, its quite formal in its approach and doesn’t translate well to the online world. Some have tried, with varying degrees of success, but fundamentally it doesn’t make best use of the medium (for the record, we offer the consultation documents as .pdf files and the list of questions as a MS Word document that can be emailed back to the consultation team). I understand that there is a piece of work across government working to modernise the regulations on formal consultation. But I don’t know how digital communication is being considered as part of that work.
• Although there have been some initiatives to improve the use of online tools in government consultation (in particular, Hansard Society’s Digital Dialogue programme) they seem to my mind flawed. Piggybacking a formal offline process doesn’t bring out the best in online - the consultation period is too long, the requested responses are too structured, and the choices often too limited to encourage genuine debate and discussion.
• A perennial problem of government digital communications - lack of resource and expertise - sometimes hampers online consultation. In my experience, moderation causes difficulties for consultation teams who seriously underestimate the time and effort this will require.

Jeremy adds:

Maybe government consultation, in its current form, can’t be successfully replicated online. Instead, perhaps we should look to the stage that precedes formal consultation - development of options to be put to consultation - as the opportunity to make best use of the digital tools available to us. We could call it something like online deliberation and provide a space to encourage genuine debate.

As long a significant proportion of the population do not/cannot engage online, and a more formal offline consultation process is required, then the less likely that we will be able to crack online consultation.

I think it is enormously helpful to have views from inside as well as outside Government, although this can be risky, as  SoSaidThe.Organisation reflects in Three Types of Government Blogger.

Encouragement from the BBC

Bill Thompson in his BBC column today gives us an overview of the political scene online as Gordon Brown waits to take over as Prime Minister, with some welcome encouragement for bloggers:

Recognising, perhaps, that Brown will be far closer to Blair in his policies than many of his followers would wish, the debate has moved up a level to address the processes, structures and operations of our flawed democracy.
And in a reflection of the changed times in which we live, much of the discussion is taking place online instead of in the traditional smoke-filled rooms or on the editorial pages of our finer newspapers.
Anthony Barnett, who founded Charter 88 nearly twenty years ago and has consistently argued for a written constitution, has seized on hints that the incoming PM may be receptive to a new constitutional settlement and launched OurKingdom to explore 'the destiny of Britain'.

Then this, which will give me some blogging motivation for a while:

Serious thinkers such as David Wilcox use their blogs to badger our representatives to think more carefully about the opportunities for collaboration, participation and transparency that network-based tools can generate.

And a sidebar link too! I await more visitors eagerly. Over at OurKingdom Jon Bright picks up the story:

What could the internet do for democracy?
A lot, in theory. Thompson muses on the possibilities of direct democracy - people getting more control over the policy making process, for example, by allowing large petitions to form the basis of ‘people’s bills’. Social networking sites like Facebook are providing simple ways of bringing together large groups of people with shared concerns. And, paradoxically, this truly global network could make a truly local politics again possible, providing influential forums for local issues as well as ways to engage your MP.
Thompson notes that George Osborne was onto open source politics for the Tories before Gordon Brown called for a new dialogue and he notes that OurKingdom is (thanks, Bill) helping to make the web part of the debate over the promised new settlement. He recognises that the internet is not (yet) universally available and no ‘IT solution’ is infallible. But his call is for the internet to be recognised as part of the landscape politics operates in, to “make it a core part of the political process just as the telephone and television are”. It’s not long, in my opinion, before it becomes even more fundamental than that.

I like the way that Bill underlines this point:

In 1994 I helped my then MP, Anne Campbell, to build her website and set up an email system for constituency correspondence. At the time it was a sensible use of her time and effort because Cambridge was one of the most-wired cities in the UK if not the world, but just having an email address did not mean that she stopped reading letters or taking phone calls.
But we can surely now begin to think about the way we organise society and the ways in which political power is exercised on the assumption that the network is here and can be used. Not by everyone, not all the time, but to a sufficient degree to make it a core part of the political process just as the telephone and television are.

For politicians (and the rest of us) it is no longer a case of creating a website, blog or whatever and expecting people to come to us. The network is the place. You have to go where people are.
Now, I wonder if Bill would like to host my "how MPs can spend their £10,000 communication allowance game". Don't want to seem tooo serious.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, politics

Reinventing the RSA together

The venerable Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (est 1754) has a good chance of becoming one of the few membership bodies that combines a great range of face-to-face events and lectures with sociability and knowledge-sharing online, harnessing both to make-a-difference external projects.
Last week's RSA seminar about the social impact of the web - reported by Robin Hamman, Simon Dickson, Andrew Brown - was interesting in its own right. Just as interesting for me was confirmation from chief executive Matthew Taylor that the RSA is launching a major programme to network the 26,000 members (known as Fellows), as I trailed last year.
The head of marketing and communication, Susan Butler, is leading an exploration into how best to do this, including a major event in October when the whole of the RSA HQ will be used by staff, Fellows and well-wishers for creative sessions to help design what's appropriate.
I believe my friend Steve Moore, at Policy Unplugged, is involved, so I'm confident it will be fun and productive. I met Susan for a chat and enthused about the scope for using workshop games to play through possible online systems, as described here.
However, what really made me feel it could all be rather special was the number of smart online people I met at the seminar who were saying ... the RSA seems to be an interesting place .... I was thinking of joining up. That's in addition to those who are already Fellows. Subscriptions are fairly modest at £135 a year.
If Matthew, Susan and others involved are prepared to make this a fairly open process, drawing on expertise of current and new Fellows, the RSA could fulfil its promise of becoming a real collective-intelligence think tank.
I do have one slight reservation. As I understand it, at present the aim is to network the Fellows somewhat independently of the staff. That's probably with the best of intentions, so we feel some independence from the institution, and ability to develop new ideas and projects. However, I think that assumption - if correct - should be reviewed. Instead of an old-style staff-volunteers-members mentality, how about thinking of the RSA - and its wider relationships - as one big system of knowledge and creativity, within which people can mix and match around their interests and activities. Matthew's Blog is called "The view from the 4th floor ..." while Fellows are most frequently found socialising or studying in the bar and library in the basement. I think it's time we all met up in the same space.

Technorati Tags: knowledgesharing, rsa, socialnetworking, socialtech

E-learning, Web 2.0 ... and games as mud maps

This is the story of how I began to discover the way Web 2.0 may change learning for college students, the three journeys involved in building online systems, and why a workshop game may be a mud map. Oh, and how the Open Innovation Exchange model may be the way to tie a lot of these things together.
I recently ran a workshop at a college that is planning to develop its online learning system to take in more Web 2.0 tools - blogs, wikis, social networking and the like. Instead of material being developed mainly centrally, the idea is to harness the increasing capacity of students to generate their own content, and learn in part through sharing with others in the college and elsewhere. It's what many already do in MySpace and other sites, learning as I am here.

The key word is personalisation, and that means a big change for teachers, who become guides rather than instructors, as well as having to learn how to use a lot of new tools. It also presents a challenge to college management, who have to work through what it is acceptable for students to access and publish, and how potential employers will view this shift to more self-directed learning.
I was a bit anxious about running the session, because educational technology and e-learning is a huge field. I read the excellent edutech blogs of Ewan McIntosh and others, but there was no way - within time and budget - that I could research and develop a substantial presentation, or even invite in a co-presenter. I found a really useful explanation of the move from virtual learning environments and e-portfolios to personal learning environments by Ron Lubensky with a great little diagram. However I didn't feel confident about trying to translate that into the college situation, or pretending to be expert in something I'm not.

Clearly the solution was to follow the general principle of open processes, and believe in the knowledge and commitment of the dozen staff coming to the event. In fact, to model what we were talking about, and create a framework within which people could add their own content to some initial material that I brought along.

I did that by modifying an earlier presentation that I had done on Web 2.0 for nonprofits, drawing on material from the socialmedia wiki, and creating a new game based on those Drew Mackie and I have developed over the past 10 years. You can find them here. They are all available for downloading, and further development, as I'm delighted to see the ever-inventive Beth Kanter is doing for documentary filmmakers.
I drew some additional inspiration (not for the first time) from the guys on the other side of the world at Anecdote. Shawn Callahan had written a piece about  Knowledge strategy - three journeys. It made me think that there were three stages for the college which mapped closely to theirs (which I summarise - do read the full post):

The first journey is designed to help the organisation's leaders develop a common understanding of what they would like to achieve and defining this end-state in broad terms, while knowing that detailed plans are unlikely to be achieved (the world is too unpredictable for a simple, linear view).
The second journey involves the rest of the organisation (or a representative subset) planning how they will get to the desired state.
The third journey is when the organisation actually embarks on implementing the ideas developed in the first two imaginary journeys.

What we were doing in the workshop was just starting on the first journey. As Shawn says (with the diagram above):

We encourage the leadership group to develop a rough mud map of the journey from the current situation to this desired end state while resisting the urge to fill in the details. The staff fill in the details as part of the second journey.

Got it! Games as mud maps. (I'm supposing that means drawing maps in the mud .... )

We had three hours for the workshop, and it ran like this:
First, a presentation  to explain the session, a bit about Web 2.0, and the way that we were going to run the game. You should be able to see that here, but if not go to slideshare where you can view this pdf full screen and download. It includes the game cards. There's also a Powerpoint version without cards.

Second, a run of the game, which (almost) went like this, as you can see from the presentation (which I have amended slightly for this post):

• Share our understanding of where the college, its students, staff and management are now, and then break into three groups each taking one of those perspectives.
• Take the pack of game cards that represent three things: possible approaches, development activities, and system building activities.
• Choose cards that will address the challenges you shared, within a budget of 15 points (development and building cards have 1,2, 3 points on each representing level of resource). Organise the cards in a way that enables you to describe to others what you are planning.
• Then in each group develop a storyboard of what happens from your perspective - a student, teacher, manager - over the coming months and years.

Thirdly, share insights from that discussion, and consider what is needed to continue this first journey and to plan how to move to the second.
In practice we didn't have time for the storytelling, and so moved to the "what next", which will involve development of a first report and continuing discussion online with a wider group of staff.
I was running the workshop as part of my work with Steve Moore and Roy Charles of Policy Unplugged. Roy knows the college education scene well, and as well as providing all the introductions made sure in his contribution and guidance that we were rooted in the current policy, finance and political realities.
We suggested that one of the ways that the college might like to continue it's first journey, and move to the second, could be by creating an open co-design process, rather like that we've been running at the Open Innovation Exchange, using a Drupal-based multi-blog system developed by my son Dan.
In this instance the college preferred to use it's own system, but the discussion really highlighted for me the potential of the three-journey model, using games as mud maps and an open process online.
Phew, it took me a few hours to put this post together, and as so often I didn't really know what I wanted to say until I had written it. Now I understand. I guess that's personalised Web 2.0 learning.
Please feel free to use the game with acknowledgement, or let me know what you think of it. I would love to hear from anyone in this field interested in improving it.
Update: Stephen Downes has produced an excellent video on creating you own learning environment.

E-Consultation and E-Democracy guides

Steven Clift's global e-democracy listening post picks up and offers us Reports - Local Council e-Consultation Guide (Australia) and E-Democracy in Bristol (UK):

First go down under, for an upside down view, or is that right side up?, with the 70 page Local Council e-Consultation Guide written for Australian local government put together by Jackie Bailey and Monika Merkes with Darebin City Council with Lucas Walsh at Deakin University. More details here. In general, Australia and New Zealand are great international B.S. filters (no wonder my posts get blocked … hmmm) - they sit on the edge of the world always importing and mashing together ideas with a sharply critical eye.
And next check out the 65 page E-Democracy in Bristol report produced by Kevin O’Malley et al.  It has a snappy 2 or 3 pages per concept covering over 20 e-democracy tools/approaches (for something not quite so pretty, see the complementary 15 “how-to” briefs on DoWire.Org).

Steven helpfully adds the table of contents from the Local Council e-Consultation guide:

1. About this guide 5
2. What is e-consultation? 6
3. What can I use e-consultation to do? 7
4. Why should local councils do e-consultation? 11
5. The tools of e-consultation 13
6. E-forums: Key elements 14
7. E-forums: Examples 18
8. Darebin eForum: A case model 21
9. E-polls and e-surveys 28
10. Resources necessary for e-consultation 31
11. E-forums: Step by step guide 35
12. E-forums: Moderator guidelines 46
13. E-forums: Rules 54
14. E-forums: Legal issues 56
Appendix 1: Sample forum rules and disclaimers 57
Appendix 2: e-Forums: Frequently asked questions (for council staff) 64
Appendix 3: References and useful links 66

And the table of contents for E-Democracy in Bristol:

Section 1: Information, preparing for take-off 5
1.1 Webcasting 8
1.2 SMS and Email Alerts 10
1.3 Consultation Finder Database 13
1.4 Blogs 15
1.5 Games and Simulators 18
Section 2: e-Consultation, revving the engines 21
2.1 Quick Polls 24
2.2 Online Surveys 26
2.3 E-Panels 28
2.4 Discussion Forums 31
2.5 Deliberative Polls 33
2.6 Live (VIP) Messaging 35
2.7 Interactive Voting 38
2.8 Street Kiosks 40
2.9 SMS Text Voting 42
Section 3: e-Participation, learning to fly 45
3.1 E-Petitions 48
3.2 Pledges 50
3.3 Photo Sites 52
3.4 Video Views 55
3.5 Local Issues Forums 57
3.6 Online Campaigns 59
Conclusion – Meeting the Digital Challenge 61

I'll look at the reports in more detail later - but my immediate thought is that Drew and I could develop a "designing e-democracy" game on the lines of others we have here, linked to the contents of these reports ... and so help get them out of the pdfs.

Proved again: being open gathers supporters

One of the main principles for getting people engaged in a project, programme, online community - whatever - is that early involvement  creates a sense of ownership and commitment. So I shouldn't really be surprised that the New Media Awards nomination for the Open Innovation Exchange has attracted a string of supportive comments.
Of course, some of these are among the scores of people who collaborated to develop, in public, a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office. In this case support from friends and collaborators is exactly what it is about, since the project we are bidding for is an innovation exchange.
In particular, I think the support is a bit different from the self-nomination and promotion criticised by The Register in the modernising government section ... isn't it?
Since all comments are public, I've taken the slight liberty of copying below. As I've written here, I'm one of the judges, but not for this section. You can still comment here. Judges meet for the  awards July 2, but interviews for the tender are June 12 ... so we might know before judging whether or not we have the contract. End of promo ... over to the commenters:

The Open Innovation Exchange bid process was really interesting to be involved in - and for me has already sparked off many new ideas and actions... hopefully it will have the chance to be put in place and to spark many more for many more...
Submitted by Tim Davies, 18 May 2007

Even playing a small role and exchanging ideas with one or two other participants was an interesting and stimulating exercise which allowed new connections to be made and other ideas to be generated. This is an approach I will use elsewhere.
Submitted by Paul Nash, 19 May 2007

At last - the opportunity to create without bending to the preconceptions of fund holders
Submitted by Barrie Duke, 19 May 2007

It was a brave step to take, and pleasing to see that it actually arrived at a result, with an open-ness of process that was both astonishing, rapid, and productive!
Submitted by Roger Greenhalgh, 19 May 2007

It was really good to be able to just challenge ideas and feed into improving the bid, without the requirement to 'carve out a slice' for my institution.
I could dip in and engage in the ideas, without devoting 5 days full time to bid writing. Great experiment. Deserves support. And what is an innovation exchange for if it's not about SHARING ideas.
Submitted by Andy Dearden, 21 May 2007

Whether or not the team win the bid or not, they’ve done something genuinely new. It’s one of the neatest institutional hacks I’ve seen in a long time.
Submitted by Paul Miller, 22 May 2007

A completely refreshing and original approach to writing a bid. They totally deserve to win!!
Submitted by Matt Stevenson-Dodd, 22 May 2007

A very innovative approach that encouraged reflection on the drivers of innovation
Submitted by Kerry McCarthy, 22 May 2007

It will be very interesting to see what results from this revolutionary idea. It deserves to succeed if only to embarrass all past and present bidders for not seeing that this is a way forward.
Submitted by Keyham Books - Rural Enterprise, 22 May 2007

If anyone wants to understand capacity building in it's real sense look no further.
The service development model that's been developed here turns current thinking on it's head. At last an opportunity for the sector to learn from itself through doing and developing new services. Much better than being trained to do by others.
Submitted by Simon Marshall - What's Your Point ?, 23 May 2007

An example of what can be done by people who are not afraid to try something different. Open Source in action and a worthy winner of the category.
Submitted by alex stobart, 23 May 2007

A model which, if widely adopted, has the potential to produce real change and save the time wasted in writing "failed bids"
Submitted by Peter Gray, 24 May 2007

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex

Asking the wrong questions about collaboration

The RSA invited me to write a conversation-starter about collaboration for their Fellow2Fellow feature  as you can see here, and below. It's part of their programme to promote more discussions on key social topics online and face-to-face. It's all making this 250-year-old think tank really buzz.
Anyway, I duly wrote something  ... then as soon as I saw it realised I had asked the wrong questions. This thought was prompted by reading a piece at the ever-excellent Anecdote. Shawn recounts how a team that had lost all its old staff plans to invite them back to a working re-union for a question and storytelling session. He then goes on to give some general tips about good questions to ask, including this:

One of the things we said is, “use 'when' and 'where' questions and avoid 'how' and 'what' questions.” Questions like “When have you been inspired at work?” tend to elicit stories. While questions like, “What do you think about your work?” tends to elicit abstract opinions.

Oh dear, my RSA piece is full of woolly how and why questions. Maybe I should have asked: when did you have really good (or bad) experiences of collaboration  ... and then maybe followed up with the why you think that was the case.
The RSA forum is closed to non-members, but any reflections welcome in comments below.
My thoughts: collaborations have worked well for me with people I know and trust ... with new people when there's been a chance to meet face-to-face ... or when I've been following their blog for some time. Collaborations haven't worked when it's been unclear what we are trying to achieve (or people have different undeclared aims), or what are the benefits above doing things separately.
Here's the piece on the RSA site:

The RSA Coffeehouse Challenge is a model for making things happen by getting people talking, finding some shared interests, and then thinking what to do. Engage, collaborate, act. The think tank Demos proposes in The Collaborative State that working together can transform public services. In their book Wikinomics Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams argue that mass collaboration - made possible on the Internet - will transform the way that we do business. Wikipedia demonstrates how thousands of people can work together on complex topics to develop a knowledge resource ... and the RSA is trying the same approach with its own programme wiki.
As a consultant working on collaboration and engagement programmes, online and face-to-face, I would like to explore with other Fellows their experience of what it takes to make collaboration work.
It is people, not organisations, that collaborate - so their personalities and preferences are hugely important.
How do we better understand that, online as well as off?
Organisations create the cultures which may or may not encourage sharing.
Will blogs and other social media really help change that, when senior managers are often reluctant to use new tools?
Conversations and stories work better than bullet points to get people talking.
So why are many meeting rooms still dominated by immovable Board tables, and conferences by Powerpoint?
Effective collaboration requires trust, relationships and understanding that take time to develop.
Why are so many online systems still developed on the basis of "build it and they will come and work together" ... ending up with empty Forums and a lot of money wasted?
Collaboration isn't easy - but I believe that new media is starting to make a big difference, not just in providing new tools, but new ways of thinking. The collaborative development of free and open source software inspires us to explore how that approach can work elsewhere.
Instead of thinking enviously "I wish I had done that" we may be able to respond more creatively with "that's something I don't have to do, now I can build on it".

Previously: 250-year-old think tank ripe for relaunch

Technorati Tags: collaboration, storytelling

Now I know what I am - an institutional hacker

After I moved from journalism into the fuzzier fields of consultancy, facilitation and process design years back my mother used to say: "I understood your job when you were a reporter .... now I can't explain what you do to my friends". I still haven't got a good one-liner, but Paul Miller from Demos and The School of Everything may have cracked it for me.
He's picked up on our Open Innovation Exchange and the nomination for the New Media Awards:

Nick Booth (of the mighty Podnosh) has written more on David Wilcox's open source bid to the Office of the Third Sector. He's also nominated them for an award, which I think would be thoroughly well deserved.
Whether or not David and the collective win the bid or not, they've done something genuinely new. It's one of the neatest institutional hacks I've seen in a long time.

I now have the line ... used to be an old media hack, done a bit of new media hacking, now an institutional hacker. Thanks Paul!  Could you just repeat that over on the nominations site, please? Nick likes the term - need to check what Simon Berry, who did a lot of the real work, and the rest of the team think on the exchange site.

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex