Designing for Civil Society

Insider gets Innovation Exchange job

I'm really pleased to hear that John Craig has been appointed to head up the Government-funded Innovation Exchange that "will find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
Until recently John was head of innovation at the Cabinet Office, and handled the tendering procedure for the Innovation Exchange ... where he's now got the job. I was part of a group that made a fairly innovative bid, produced by writing everything except the budgets on an open web site, inviting anyone interested to join in. We were short listed, but didn't win. Instead it went to a consortium centred around the Government-funded Innovation Unit.  We thought that was a bit inward-looking, and I wrote at the time:

I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However,  I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid.

Public sector Forums reported the story as Whitehall innovation: Proving the oxymoron.
It would be easy to see John's appointment as another inward-facing step.  However ... one of the best things about dealing with Cabinet Office during the tendering process was the great encouragement we got from John. He wasn't a career civil servant, having previously worked at the think tank Demos. While being scrupulously fair he gave us every encouragement and help in what must have seemed a pretty whacky bid to his colleagues. We felt he really saw us having a chance, and I guess the short-listing reflected that.
So my overwhelming feeling is delight that someone with real sympathy for innovative processes has got the job. Parent, midwife and now a good start in life thanks to the initial work on the exchange that's been guided by interim executive director Jonathan Robinson.
Here's the standard stuff from the press release:

The Chair of the Innovation Exchange, Baroness Thornton, said that John Craig’s appointment was “excellent news. John’s blend of skills will ensure that the Innovation Exchange gets the best possible start.”
Valerie Hannon, Director of Strategy at The Innovation Unit, said the role was a challenging one. She went on to say: “The Exchange is in uncharted territory. It is seeking to create new forms of collaboration across the sector. John Craig is returning to his roots in the third sector, but his experience in policy and government will be invaluable in ensuring that the lessons from the Exchange reach the widest possible audience.

John starts on January 1, and says:

I am delighted to be leading the Innovation Exchange and relish the chance to help the collective wisdom of the third sector to tackle social injustice in England. Between us I believe we can make a real difference for excluded young people and for those struggling to live independent lives – charities and social enterprises have the insight and the commitment to help make radical improvements in the services they receive.

The second-phase Innovation Exchange web site is being developed by Headshift, who won an award for their development of the Demos web site as a very conversational blog-based affair ... so we can hope that Innovation Exchange language will become a bit more, well, innovative. Here's John's posts on the Demos site.
There's already some discussion on the Innovation Exchange temporary site around the key themes of Supporting independent living, and Young people: the excluded, marginalised and the at-risk.
Previously: Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, open, openinex

Guides to make sure You Can Do

What are the important issues when you try and change your life, your neighbourhood, or help other people do that? Today the Scarman Trust launched a set of Can Do guides around just those topics ... but instead of the Powerpoint presentation we got a collaborative mindmap develop by everyone at the launch. (click above to enlarge)

We started off on tables discussing the practicalities of change, called out our conclusions, and saw the mindmap grow on a wall and on-screen with branches for vision, support, training, will power, understanding power, and so on. Then we all went and stuck some dots on the lines of greatest energy ... as volunteer activists, community or voluntary organisation workers, or agency staff.
Shirley Mason, from the Polar Bear Community gave me her personal guided tour through the map, as you can see here.

Click To Play or go to blip.tv

No surprises perhaps, but It was a great way to get everyone talking and achieve some shared understanding before moving on to the rest of the day.
The guides are based on years of work in local communities, and cover nine topics including Asset Based Community Development (think what you are good at), through community business, keeping going, training and technology. Shane McCracken of Gallomanor has done a great job on the marketing side, including a splendidly simple yet effective web site using Wordpress, so there's plenty of scope for commenting.
On the Scarman side, south west regional development director Jayne Hathway has been driving things forward, and she explained to me that the Trust are determined the guides won't end up as yet-another-toolkit. 

Click To Play or go to blip.tv

Each guide is made up of activity sheets, presentations, facilitator manuals and feedback forms. The guides are linked to training and support, and come with Creative Commons licenses so they can be used and developed by anyone.
No excuses now, You Can Do It. Not sure what IT is? Try the What You Really Want guide.

Technorati Tags: empowerment, mindmap

Online communities may help democratise your organisation

Once members of an organisation have the means to talk to each other all the time - instead of at occasionally meeting -  they can organise to change the way things are run. I always hoped that would be the democratic result of online communities - now my friend Ed Mitchell provides some real evidence of the possibilities.
Ed's been working over the past year or so with CILIP, the Chartered  Institute of Library and Information Professionals, to develop online communities for sharing professional practice in a fast-changing world. I gather that's worked well, thanks to the strong commitment of Lyndsey Rees-Jones of the Membership Services Unit, and other staff. Earlier this week Ed and Lyndsey told the story of how member engagement also started to impact on the governance of the organisation. You can see their slides from Online Information on slideshare and here.

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Ed expands  on the presentation in his blog post about the Membership engagement story.

There wasn’t a communities team when we started, nor processes to ensure that issues arising from the communities were handled professionally and promptly and fairly. This was an important element of our work:
How to ensure that when issues come up in the communities, the members can get the influence and support from HQ they need when they need it?
This is a strategic management question which we think is on many organisations’ horizons. Since talking about this project publicly, we have found that there are very few ‘community’ teams in HQs which are pragmatically integrated into the membership communities, so we wanted to share our findings to help others.

The CILIP Membership Services Unit, addressed this issue, and started work closely online with members. Here's what happened:

This presentation tells a simple story about how the CILIP members chose to use one of the private membership forums as a ‘virtual hustings’ in advance of their council elections, and how they managed to get support from HQ when they needed it.
The website has an election page and the individuals’ manifestos, but no space to converse with the hopefuls and to kick the ideas around, so the members set up a thread in the forums, which proved to be exceptionally popular. It gave everyone a transparent opportunity to discuss their ideas and hopes for CILIP in 2008 which had not been there before.
The members agreed that they wanted to promote the elections as much as possible and identified all the channels of communication available to them (from their own blogs to the formal CILIP communications). They felt that the CILIP website itself wasn’t promoting the elections enough and pointed this out among themselves. Within one day, the web editing team in HQ had put a banner together and placed it right in the middle of the homepage.
This doesn’t sound like a revolution, but it was the first time that the members influenced the management and got space on the homepage under their own steam.
Most organisations’ homepages are tightly controlled spaces with rather formal processes for booking space on them; otherwise there would be great tension between departments seeking the all hallowed homepage slot. CILIP is no different.
The thing to note is that these processes reflect the needs of HQ, so the members getting a say in what goes on the homepage is really quite exciting.
This was enabled because of having a communities team in HQ who were aware of what was going on in the communities and who were actively influential in HQ and who could therefore advocate for the members where suitable.

CILIP appear to be particularly open to sharing their experience with other organisations, and Ed reports that they have agreed to publish the lessons learnt document next year - previously only available to members.
Meanwhile discussion about member engagement continues at RSA, where Matthew Taylor is committed to putting the 27,000 members (known as Fellows) at the heart of the organisation. (Previous posts archived here).
After a very successful event for 250 Fellows a couple of weeks ago, project ideas are being developed by Fellows on a prototype RSA Networks online system. I've raised issues on the OpenRSA blog about how ideas about co-creation with Fellows, presented at the event, will be put into practice, and I'm hopeful we'll get some encouraging news shortly.
The shift from hierarchical to more networky structures in organisations is really difficult, and I've great admiration for the way both CILIP and RSA are tackling this. As I wrote last year, if membership organisations don't face up to the issues they could be by-passed as members do their own networking elsewhere.
For a US view of the issues see Six principles for designing an architecture of participation at the excellent We have Always Done it That Way blog. UK references on the challenges facing membership organisations most welcome. The NCVO Third Sector Foresight team have been doing some great work on the impact of technology on nonprofits, with a recent seminar reported here by Paul Henderson, but need another round of funding to keep this work going. Maybe CILIP or RSA could co-host an event with NCVO to share experience to date, and gain support for further investigation.

Technorati Tags: membership, rsa, rsanetworks