Designing for Civil Society

If we talk, will Government listen?

Two contrasting approaches to UK e-democracy emerged over the last few days. On the one hand OurKingdom is promoting the idea of a massive online conversation leading up to a Citizens Summit to discuss the British Statement of Values, which I wrote about here.

I've been one of a small group offering ideas on how this might work, and OurKingdom is now inviting anyone else interested to join in. This isn't the big conversation itself, just how to plan it. The assumption is, if we talk sensibly Govenment will listen.
On the other hand Tom Steinberg, who runs the hugely successful mySociety organisation (Pledgebank, FixMyStreet, No 10 e-petitions) spells out their philosophy in launching Free our Bills, a new initiative focussed around getting Parliament to publish bills properly. It boils down to - don't expect Government to change except in very small ways, whatever you say.

In a post to the UK and Ireland E-Democracy Exchange, Tom says:

mySociety has traditionally worked on the assumption that it's basically impossible to ever get any part of any government to do anything of any real significance in the field of edemocracy, or in the wider field of greater access to data.
As a result we've always tried to pick projects that work as well as possible for the citizen without requiring government to do anything it didn't do before (think FixMyStreet, or WriteToThem). Picking a project that requires a bit of government to move a single inch in order for your project to work at all is a sadly proven path to failure. Unfortunately, our need to campaign today is a validation of this highly pessimistic approach. It is absurd that this campaign is even necessary, given that we tried so hard to do it the 'nice way' with meetings, gentle encouragement and nicely written word documents in Whitehall-speak explaining why it was useful and cheap and non-threatening. But where it counted the unelected officials who hold the relevent power here just weren't persuadable for reasons that we're having to FOI to find out.

Tom suggests a new approach to evaluating e-democracy. Instead of looking at what e-democracy projects don't achieve in terms of mass engagement, it is better to look at "pressure points, chinks in the armour where improvements might be possible, whether with the consent of government or not". He concludes:

Anyway, if this seems like a counsel of despair, it isn't supposed to be. I'm just saying that being realistic about the nature of actual progress in our field (tiny, incremental, currently peaking with things like TheyWorkForYou and Stemwijzer.nl ) makes for more interesting, useful discussions than comparing everything to the Holy Grail of True, Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy.

The OurKingdom approach does rather fall into the Mass Scale Deliberative Democracy frame. It started through a conversation between Anthony Barnett of OurKingdom and Michael Wills, the Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice responsible for the Citizens Summit, and Anthony gives a summary of the private discussion a group of us had, now public here. Buried in there are my reservations about how far it is possible to plan something like this in the abstract: I think you need to be very clear about what you are trying to do, with whom - and to do that in the room, with the client. Others more experienced in the ways of e-democracy were able to be more constructive and it turned out to be a quite interesting discussion.
However, the question for me - highlighted by Tom - is whether it is worth having big conversations with Government, local or central. The Minister and civil servants may be very well-intentioned, but it is going to be very difficult to manage, and to analyse ... and even trickier to get agreement with all the different interests within Government. I remember Tom at UKGovwebBarcamp, when asked for his three tags (keywords) of self-description, saying "code not talk". So - is it worth trying the big conversation, or is it better to focus on the small steps? Or can we afford the time, energy and public money for both? "Image what you could do for one million pounds", was thrown into the OurKingdom discussion as a hypothetical. You get a lot of mySociety sites for that.

Update: the BBC has a very interesting way of displaying comments and emotions in relation to its discussion Is white working class Britain becoming invisible? I wonder if something similar might be relevant for a British Statement of Values conversation if that did get started? Hat tip to Nico Macdonald for the link ... who then points me to Healthcare for London, which I see is done by my friends at Delib

Technorati Tags: governanceofbritain

Back the blogging bosses

It's a friendly place, the blogosphere. Following news here that that Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the organisation for nonprofit chief executives acevo has started blogging at Bubb's blog, a couple of more established bloggers have launched a support group.
First of all Shane McCracken set up a Facebook group, now Paul Caplan has a public page on his blog inviting more nominations and offering a badge.

I've pointed Paul over to Matthew Taylor at the RSA, and Andrew Brown's suggestion of Eric Carlin.
All good fun - with the very important underlying purpose, as Paul points out, of helping encourage the non-bosses to believe they can speak up too:

Some heros are breaking free and we salute them. There are brave men and women bearing the title CEO or Director of this, that or the other who are stepping up and talking as the passionate and interesting men and women they are. They are brave and forward thinking and they make it easier for those of us who are talking to the frontline troops in the public sector and saying: “Yes it’s OK to get out there and have conversations. Yes it’s OK to talk like a human being and tell stories.” Because now we can add: “… because look, your Boss is doing it!”

That's best answer to We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either. More examples of public or nonprofit blogging bosses over at Paul's place, please.

Technorati Tags: nptech, nptechuk

Not getting it may be a worldview thing

When people are unenthusiastic about social media and other Web 2.0 stuff it is tempting to be a bit sneery and say they don't "get it". Who can fail to see the benefits of publishing without publishers, and organising without organisations? The tools may take a little getting used to, but surely they are worth trying in pursuit of a better world?
Maybe for you, but not necessarily for them. It could be people do get it and don't like what they see, because your world view isn't theirs.
If they say We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either, it may be a reflection of organisational culture - or something deeper about the way thing work.
I remember a few years back reading an excellent piece by Jack Martin Leith about worldviews, and writing, in the context of participation and e-democracy:

He suggests it is important to understand whether we - and others - are seeing our world (organisation, neighbourhood, group) as a mechanism, a set of changing relationships, a system, or something even more organic and inherently messy. As he shows, that influences the sort of techniques professionals may use when they intervene.

So when knowledge management guru David Gurteen sent out a World 2.0 newsletter the other day I had Jack in mind.
David wrote:

Most of us understand what Web 2.0 is all about as we move from a read-only web to a read-write or participatory web.
And we are starting to come to grips with so called Enterprise 2.0 where the concept and technologies and social tools of Web 2.0 are moving from the open web into organizations.
It is still early days and there are many issues to be grappled with as we try to balance the structure and stability of the old world with the more fluid and complex nature of the new.
But the "2.0 meme" is starting to affect everything. In a talk in Kuala Lumpur I was asked how you implement Enterprise 2.0 and I was talking about some of the barriers when someone spoke up and said "We will never have Enterprise 2.0 until we have Managers 2.0!” In other words it was managers and their out-dated mind sets that was a major barrier to change,
And a few days later while giving another talk at the National Library in Singapore I found us talking about Libraries 2.0 and Learning 2.0. It then hit me that “2.0” thinking was permeating everything. People were also taking about Business 2.0 and Education 2.0.
So what does this mean in its broadest sense? Well, we are no longer consumers: of goods, services or education - we are all prosumers - we all have the opportunity to create and consume. For the first time we are participants in everything and not the “victims”. Fundamentally it is about "freedom".
We are moving from a world where we were told to do things and where things were structured or planned for us to one where we get to decide what works best for us. We are moving from a mono-culture to a highly diverse ecology.
We are moving from a simple world to a rich, complex, diverse one. One where power is less centralized and more distributed. We are moving from a command and control world to a world where people can do as they please within the boundaries of responsibility.

David offers a neat little World 1.0/World 2.0 chart.
And while I'm thinking about this I see that Jack has spotted it as well, and blogged his own piece, paying tribute in the process to David's excellent knowledge cafes and generous knowledge sharing. Very definitely a World 2.0 person.
Perhaps nudged by David's piece Jack has updated his own mid-1990s Worldviews, 1, 2, and 3 article which is now here. As a taster, here's Worldview 2.0:

Worldview 2 is the emerging worldview. In this scheme of things the world is seen as an ecosystem. These are some of the main features of W2:

* Effective when the environment is complex, turbulent, unpredictable
* Organisational life is governed by democracy and self-management
* Plan-do-review
* Adult-adult relationships (interdependence)
* “Create what you want” mindset
* Innovation through creating value for the whole system
* Beyond the metaphor of “the future is a place, change is
a journey”

The W2 worldview is based largely on complexity science and the various branches of systems theory, including the cybernetics of Gregory Bateson.

This is in contrast to Worldview 1:

Worldview 1, in which the world is seen as a huge machine, has been the dominant worldview for the last 300 years. These are some of the main features of W1:

* Effective when the environment is relatively simple, stable and predictable
* Organisational life is governed by bureaucracy and command-and-control
* Plan then implement
* Parent-child relationships (dependence)
* “Problem solving” mindset
* Innovation through tools and techniques

The W1 worldview is based largely on reductionism (attempting to understand reality by studying its constituent parts), a mechanistic view of the world and a limited, linear model of cause and effect.

Jack is a terrific Open Space expert, committed to helping people come together face-to-face and ...

.... discuss issues of heartfelt concern, share ideas, pool knowledge, reach agreement on the best way forward, and develop plans for collaborative action.

He - and others using similar methods - demonstrate that you don't need Web 2.0 to develop World 2.0 - though it does extend what you can do out of the room, and a bit more. What you do need for World 2.0 is people who are prepared to be open, collaborative - and recognise that life is messy. If you wish to explore:

• Free downloads from Jack Martin Leith
• Free downloads from David Gurteen
• My guides to participation, partnerships and social media and networking

Technorati Tags: worldview

Network to explore "civic function of news"

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, is launching an RSA Journalism Network over on the RSA Networks site.

The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.

Great topic - and maybe this network could provide an opportunity, among other things,  to explore what the BBC plans are in this field. As I quoted in that post, Stephen has said:

The BBC is dropping/has dropped the Action Network. It plans to do a number of other exciting things along these lines in the coming months. The Action network (previously iCan) was always meant to be an experiment. The BBC is right to learn from experiments and change course if that's what seems right.

As well as his position at Leeds University, Stephen is Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute, which maybe explains the connection.
The timing of the project is right, with growing interest in the shifting role of journalists, as citizens produce content for themselves. Charlie Beckett explored that in Networked Journalism: For the people and with the people. More in posts cited below.
I do, however, hope that Stephen makes a commitment to bring the network out from behind the RSA Networks login, as we did with The Membership Project once it had some initial RSA support and interest from Fellows (members). The RSA is running a terrific series of public lectures, free and open to anyone - why not follow the same approach online? I can't see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to "your place" to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.
I've argued the open approach and the case for distributed communities in the RSA, though I  can also see the case for private spaces for member-to-member discussions. In this instance I think that Stephen Coleman, the RSA and the Reuters Institute will provide more public benefit by sharing the conversation with everyone. Journalists would agree - wouldn't they?
Previously on Stephen Coleman, the BBC, and open-closed:

• BBC leads us behind the scenes on new media, if not news
• BBC plans to sustain citizenship and civil society. Please tell us how.
• TV voting scandals and poor e-democracy both destroy trust
• Do communities need boundaries?

Mashing up for social action: they need our votes

While projects are now chosen for the London-based Social Innovation Camp, voting is on for the equivalent US-based contest, and MySociety are drumming up support:

NetSquared (based in the U.S.) has launched their newest summer contest, the N2Y3 (that’s NetSquared Year Three) Mashup Challenge. You can see the 100+ projects that have been submitted here. One of mySociety’s projects, PledgeBank, is featured in one of the submissions: Social Actions. Peter Deitz is developing a way to lead any given user (an individual or an organisation) through the process of selecting a social action platform. Do you want to raise money? Do you need to integrate with a specific CRM? Do you need an online donation processing tool? Do you need a widget for your site? This mashup with combine 29+ (the list keeps growing) “action” tools (including PledgeBank) in that wizard, helping the average Joe or Jane figure out which tool would work best for them.

Of course, in order to move forward in the competition for mentoring and money, Peter needs your vote. To vote for this mashup (and at least four more — NetSquared is smarter than to just let everyone vote for one), just create a free account on the site and add at least five projects to your ballot. There are some really cool ones out there, so browse around a bit. The polls opened on Monday at 8am PST, and they will be closing on Friday at 5pm PST. The 20 mashup proposals with the most votes will attend the annual NetSquared Conference in San Jose, May 27 & 28, 2008. During the conference, the mashup creators will have a chance to pitch their projects to funders, foundations, and fellow nonprofit tech professionals.

Another UK-based project to take a look at is Project Bija:       

The project will change how we look at the world, thinking spatially and in terms of layered interwoven societal drivers.

With a map as the primary navigation tool users can access information on local, regional, national and international scales about:

1. The challenges;

2. Available resources;

3. Who is working to overcome the challenges; and

4. How 1,2 and 3 can be synergised.

The project promoter is currently anonymous, but offering some clues:

I'm a UK lawyer specialising in digital social media so work with many clients in the private and non-profit sectors who use social media. For example, I advise Oxfam on their use of social media and drafted their blogging and social networking policies.

I also lecture at Westminster University and London Southbank University regarding social media law.

I guess the reason for anonymity is that law firms are somewhat restrictive in what their staff can promote in public. There is, however, more on the idea:       

The primary interface is a map api - eg google maps.

Divide the map on a country basis. Individual countries can be clicked upon. the second stage will divide those countries into clickable regions and the third stage dividing those regions into clickable local areas. Each scale provides more focus and filter.

Clicking on a country zooms into the country. On the navigation bar are a series of links (Challenges, Resources, Organisations etc. Links open up to further sub links which then lead to information feeds (feeds are either RSS or scrapped using dapper) for that country divided into:

1. Challenges.

2. Resources. 

3. Non-Profit Sector.

4. Private Sector.

Zooming into the map allows more detail of filtered results for example, local newspapers, closer detail of which charities and companies are working in the area.

Due to the greater detail required at local level users may log in to the site to add information via a wiki.

This is all a bit beyond my technical understanding, but checking in with my friend Paul Henderson at Ruralnetonline got a positive response to the idea,  with suggestions for linking up with things like Groups Near You  and National Rural. There's also potential in the rural community carbon Google map. As the guys at MySociety say, you don't have to choose between these two. I think they both deserve our votes, following instructions above.

Social Innovation Camp projects announced

The Social Innovation Camp organisers have now announced the six projects that will be developed collaborative April 4-6. Is that where the buzz will be about social media in UK nonprofits? And if so, what happens after the camp? First, here's the projects:

• Barcode Wikipedia
• Enabled by Design
• Personal development reports
• Prison visits
• Rate My CV
• Stuffshare

All very promising, but just as interesting are some of the other ideas mentioned in their post, and the notion of the Camp as a way of catalysing continuing innovation:

We had lots of suggestions for ways to better map and coordinate the voluntary and charity sector online which would tackle some of the big problems that existing organizations face: overlapping purpose; incomplete knowledge of others in the field; identification of sources of social need; lack of transparency and so forth. There were a number of suggestions for social networking for social organizations and web 2.0 tool kits. Some nice examples include Arjen Mulder’s COOpen.net, a social networking platform for international development organizations, and Andy Gibson’s Partner Up, which is designed to encourage the sharing of best practice and collaboration to help organizations get far more done with fewer resources. David Munir Nabti, Jessica Dheere, Patricia Nabti and Hala Makarem submitted a similar idea tailored specifically for the Lebanese third sector.

Camp organisers ( Paul Miller, Dan McQuillan and Christian Albert) say:

We’re hoping that many of the ideas which have come to the surface through this process will be given a home elsewhere. Even if we weren’t able to develop your idea further, please feel free to keep using our website to continue to discuss them. And if the event in April is successful, why not borrow our format, learn from our mistakes and set up your own Social Innovation Camp?

Now I guess we'll need some camp follower tracking to keep in touch. The Social Innovation Camp is in some ways an alternative to the idea for a UK Netsquared initiative discussed at the Newman Arms last year. Some people wanted to focus on supporting existing nonprofits, other were more in line with Dan McQuillan's assertion that Charities are broken, and the best route forward is through more disruptive innovations. What happens after the Camp? I'm sure, with that number of innovative thinkers in one place, ideas will flow.

Nonprofit chief executives get some encouragement to start blogging

Blogging about the voluntary and community sector in the UK can be rather unrewarding because few senior figures write about their work - or, I suspect, read blogs. There's not much blogosphere buzz. Maybe that's going to change now that Stephen Bubb, chief executive of the organisation for nonprofit chief executives acevo has got going with Bubb's blog.

Governance magazine can't resist a rather patronising piece highlighting the sectoral politics that it perceives between the lines:

In the olden days, before the internet was born, even Very Important People generally had to wait to be invited by editors for the opportunity to tell their public what they were thinking.
Not so today. With the advent of Web 2.0, anybody can set up a blog and share their innermost with the world. Which seems to suit Stephen Bubb, chief executive of acevo (pictured), to a T.
On Bubb’s new blog, at http://www.bloggerbubb.blogspot.com/, the chief executives’ chief executive promises readers will be treated to “the inside track of a third sector leader influencing in Whitehall, championing professionalism and causing a stir”.
He then goes on to treat readers to an intimate rundown of his week, complete with namechecks of Ed Miliband, Phil Hope, John Hutton, and even The Queen. It also contains a couple of glimpses into his private life.
He makes thinly-veiled digs at the NCVO (“Whilst others are debating whether to broaden out to civil society, acevo has always recruited members from housing associations, unions, and political parties”) and at Richard Gutch’s Futurebuilders, of which he is soon to become chair (“I need to do a good job steering Futurebuilders back on to track in supporting service delivery through the third sector”).
He congratulates Miliband and Hope on the work they did behind the scenes on gift aid to secure “a good Budget” for charities, and advises: “I do hope the sector will show appreciation for this instead of what we often do – whinge. Whinging has its place. However, so does thanks for a job well done.”
And on a personal note, he reveals that he is thinking of getting a dog, and that he has just been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Because of this (the diabetes, not the dog), he has to “get a grip on a proper diet and do some exercise”. How this will affect his notoriously busy networking schedule remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that thanks to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s marvellous invention, we shall undoubtedly be kept informed.

Governance say of their print magazine that it is:

.... the essential resource for charity trustees. It provides comprehensive yet concise coverage of all the issues trustees need to be aware of, and offers practical advice to help boards implement clear, well thought-out strategies that will ensure their charity’s success.

No blog or feeds on their site, or commenting. Old-style come to us, we speak, you listen.
So I think that it is splendid that Stephen has taken the plunge, and in doing so is able to speak directly to others in the sector. Can it be long before Stuart Etherington, chief executive of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, feels he should join in?
If Stephen is looking for some blogger friends, there's a list of blogs and wikis in the non profit social media field on the social media wiki.

Meanwhile let's pop over to his place with a welcome to the blogosphere and a few encouraging tips. Every blogger needs an audience: let's start building one for Stephen.

Clay Shirky today at the RSA

Clay Shirky gave a great presentation today on his book Here Comes Everybody. I was sitting in the second row of the RSA Great Room, so shot some video. The RSA will be putting the pro version up on its site sometime in the future ... but I know a number of people who were keen to hear Clay couldn't make it, so here's a taste.
Clay spent the first part of his talk giving three examples filling out what he says in the book:

Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.
In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.

The examples were of students organising through Facebook against the bank HSBC when it withdrew a free overdraft offer; young people in Belarus organising an ice-cream social in a square where gatherings were banned; Sicilian businesses organising online against the Mafia.
After the examples Clay provided some analysis, which is what I've captured in the video. He started by assuring us he wasn't going to promise a post-hierarchical paradise in which organiastions wither away; that story had been around for 10 years ... with a constant promise that it would happen sometime. Rather we are at the beginning of experimenting with the way that power shifts because of the ability of goups to communicate, and then to come together to take action.  There's a 40 minute video here from a talk Clay gave at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Update: Kevin Anderson has blogged an excellent paraphrase of Clay's presentation and the  Q and A.

Technorati Tags: collaboration

We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either

The realities of introducing social media into organisations was brought home to me again yesterday at a conference in Cardiff for people in housing associations with responsibility for PR and communications. We had some fine presentations about developing the brand, dealing with media, using storytelling. These days tenants are customers, housing stock is homes - and quite rightly so.
I ran a couple of workshops on what blogs, wikis, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the like might bring to the mix, and how organisations could use lots of free tools from Google and other sources. I tried to focus on what this meant for organisations, as people become more able to find their voice to contribute ideas, experience - and of course complain if they were not happy with services.
New media tools can give housing associations better ways to provide information, and support communication and collaboration within and outside the organisation. However, if the tools are in the hands of the resident/customers, that changes power relationships. Things shift from "take it from us" to "we'll take it from each other".
That's where the difficulties arose. While many people in the workshop were excited by the possibilities, they foresaw difficulties which were summed up in two phrases. The first was "we can't do that" - which meant the IT department and senior staff won't let us look at certain sites, or use free tools. The second was "we can't let them do that" - which meant that within the culture of the organisation it would not be conceivable to help customers develop their own voice, except within quite tightly controlled circumstances.
These constraints did not apply to everyone, and of course there are ways to work these things through in organisations, as Colin McKay sets out in his excellent Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. However, what struck me was the number of glum nods to these observations, rather than the number of challenges.
The consensus in the workshops was that significant change was a few years off, not least because the customers of housing associations were (as a whole) older, poorer and less media literate than the rest of the population. Introducing social media would not be a high priority in addressing their needs.
On the other hand the PR and communications people in the workshop did feel that they should, personally, be exploring what social media could offer. Problem is, will that be seen as a priority by their bosses?
As well as a presentation and discussion, at one of the sessions we played a new version of the social media game, which I think worked pretty well. I've put all the instructions and cards up on the social media wiki. Please feel free to download and try the game for yourself.
Any examples of organisations - housing or otherwise - that are prepared to help their customers or members find a voice would be welcome. We are now exploring those issues over on a new site for The Membership Project.
I'm off to hear Clay Shirky talk at the RSA about his book Here Comes Everybody, which explains how people are organising without organisations. Landlords beware.

Technorati Tags: membership, housing

How any group can become a Freeschool

The School of Everything is a simple and cleverly executed idea by a web start-up company who say, only slightly tongue in cheek, that they hate the Internet.

The idea is that we all have something to learn ... and may well have something we can teach, informally if not formally. Why not use an online matching system to help learners and teachers get together? But instead of thinking that can all be done online, help people to meet up and get to know and learn from each other as fully as possible. The comic strip tells it all.

The "hate the Internet" line comes in because the School folk feel we should spend less, not more time in front of the screen. Let's use it to do smart stuff, not become eyeballs for the admen. Even so TechCrunch was impressed.
I knew most of this before going along to a workshop today on Designing for the 21st Century, organised by my friends at PRaDSA (Practical Design for Social Action).

 

What I didn't know was that Andy Gibson and chums at the School have now come up with a very neat little hack which shows how any group can become a school.

 

Andy invited us all do something really simple: stick post-it notes on a board with corners labeled social, action, free, and (I think I remember) paid for. It very quickly started us talking about what we were looking for, and what we could offer - which is a good-enough way of starting any sort of workshop. The neat hack is that Andy has now invited us to carry on the matching on a little Freeschool micro-site within the main School site.
I met Andy through the RSA Networks site, which he and Saul Albert have developed, and will no doubt see more of him at the Social Innovation Camp where I'm really interested in his Partner Up proposal ... but that's another story. There's only so much Internet-assisted learning I can take before bed-time.

Technorati Tags: school of everything

The network is the site

We now have a set of well-shot and edited reflections from the Circuit Rider conference, thanks to Marc Osten whose session opening session I videod here. I grabbed some observations wandering about the session - Marc was later able to interview people on the challenges they found introducing Web 2.0 technology into voluntary and community organisations and building online community.
Marc posted the video on his site, then emailed me the code from YouTube so I could embed it up here if I wished. Thanks Marc.

About the same time I spotted a "shout" (short message) posted by Matthew Edmonson to the UnLtdWorld site pointing to a post on his site embedding a video I had taken of him.

My videos are also up on the conference site, where someone has now done a transcript of the key points that I recorded. There's a shared set of photos on Flickr here.

This sort of sharing, and adding value, is possible if we agree to the principle of building on each other's work, ideally adding a Creative Commons license to make that clear.
There is is nothing very fancy in what has happened here - at least to those familar with the way that we can use Web 2.0 technology if we apply open collaborative principles. I could go on with more tools and examples ... but don't need to because Paul Caplan has just written an excellent free Social Media Guide for the Media Trust which you can download from here. Free. Thanks Paul.
I'm telling the story of the videos because one of the main problems people at the conference said they had was explaining to others the benefits of using Web 2.0, and the philosophies that go with it. It's one thing to point to great examples from the US - where they are rather ahead of us in adoption - but it is much more convincing when it is close to home, you experience it first hand and can show your colleagues and clients.
It may help when next time a group says "we need a fancy new site". Circuit Riders can explain that these days the network is the site, and they are demonstrating that.

Technorati Tags: circuit riders

BBC leads us behind the scenes on new media, if not news

I've rather stalled in the exploration, started here, of how the BBC might be developing its new local multi-media services to fulfill its Charter remit of "sustaining citizenship and civil society". BBC people I bump into say I know as much as they do .... but then it is a big place.
I floated the idea of an event as part of RSA Networks, but was told staff were already working on something - please wait. Maybe not much will happen until the BBC Trust has completed its review of bbc.co.uk, leaving the way open for new ideas on local news.
Meanwhile Lucy Hooberman opens the window on work she has started at BBC Future Media and Technology, provisionally called Behind the Scenes. The project was announced last September by Director General Mark Thompson, when people were more focussed on editorial breaches in competitions and voting:

The Director-General informed the Trust that he has commissioned a major new online project which will enable the public to explore how contemporary media content is produced. The BBC believes this will be a major contribution to media literacy in Britain. Roly Keating, the Controller of BBC Two, and Chris Burns, Executive Editor, Factual Programmes, BBC Audio and Music, have been asked to lead this work. Both are senior programme makers with substantial and distinguished experience.

Lucy explains how she is looking at what other organisations are doing, tagging her researches on del.icio.us, and monitoring what others are saying about the BBC and its Internet blogging. She adds:

But I’d love to hear about what else is going on in this area. Who’s doing what? And any ideas about what you’d like to know about too.

This seems to be another good example of BBC staff reaching out directly to what used to be known as audience (now including content producers) to find out what we want, and what we can contribute. Will BBC Trustees - until now absent from the blogosphere - feel the need to join in?
Previously: What's the role of trustees now we are networked?

Update: Lucy has now written more on the BBC Internet Blog

Technorati Tags: bbccouk, bbcinternetblog

Create an open conference archive

While at the February 2008 Circuit Rider conference in the UK, I introduced Matthew Edmonson to Nick Booth on the basis that both of them had an interest in open collaboration. To capture the conversation I gave Matthew the camera - and after a shaky hand-over it worked really well.

I came back to find Matthew and Nick having a fascinating conversation about how capturing conference archive material, and making it available for editing, could create a new non-hierarchical experience for participants and others who couldn't attend. Of course, not all organisers will go for it ... because they want to protect and assert their brand.

Also:

• Reality checks on using Web 2.0 for social change
• Other conference videos

Technorati Tags: nptech, nptechuk

Spreading the open philosophy

Matthew Edmonson is a strong advocate for open source software as a way of offering sustainable IT solutions to the third sector. When we met at the February 2008 Circuit Riders conference in Birmingham, UK, we talked about how open source principles can be applied more widely. Matthew offered some lessons from software development that could be useful to anyone attempting open collaborative development work.

Also:

• Reality checks on using Web 2.0 for social change
• Other conference videos

Technorati Tags: circuit riders, nptech, nptechuk

Helping funders find you online

One of the other people running a workshop at the recent Circuit Riders conference was US-based consultant John Kenyon, who wrote afterwards:

It was exciting to hear about the different experiences of these consultants with nonprofit/charity organizations. As always when meeting with nonprofit consultants I am struck by the thread of commonality that connects us all. We all face similar challenges in communicating and marketing our services, creating work agreements, doing investigations, collecting data, determining the best intervention and helping organizations with managing change. Our clients also face similar challenges with internal capacity, improving their capabilities and especially in getting funding for technology initiatives.

During a break, I asked John about some of the US-UK differences he found. He explained that while there is less Government funding for nonprofits in the US, there are more foundations. Increasingly these are not responding to funding proposals, but going out and finding organisations that they wish to choose to support. That make online presence even more important.

John says you have to be up to date, with good content. That could be strong stories from those the organisation aims to serve. However, content is not enough ... you need to have a personal presence as well.
People don't just relate to content, people relate to people.
Previously: Reality checks on using Web 2.0 for social change

Technorati Tags: nonprofit, nptech, nptechuk, circuit riders

Reality checks on using Web 2.0 for social change

Is the potential for social media to change the world over-hyped, or are social change organisations too slow in seeing the potential? If change is coming, will nonprofits be by-passed as we start to organise without old-style organisations? Does it all depend upon context?

A new book, and recent conference sessions, raised these questions for me yet again.

Clay Shirky's book Here Comes Everybody leaves us in no doubt about his view of the potential for Web 2.0 to change the world:

Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.
In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.

It's another step on from Charles Leadbeater's We-Think ... We-Act together, differently. I've been reading the book, and Clay's blog, at the same time that I'm editing some video from the recent Circuit Riders conference. There's a big gap between Clay's vision for the future, and what I heard from people who are currently providing front line technology support to nonprofits that are in the business of social change. Who is more realistic? There's a video of Clay speaking recently here, and you can see him in person at the RSA on March 18.
Here's the videos from the opening session of the conference, where Circuit Riders talk about the reality of using new technology tools on the front line. The session were skillfully facilitated by Marc Osten from Summit Collaborative, and I asked him to provide me with a recap on the two questions he posed... firstly about whether Web 2.0 tools are available to change the world, and then whether Circuit Riders have the skills to satisfy the organisations they serve.

If you have problems with video play back, they are on YouTube here

Here then is video of the first session, where the question was whether tools are available. Some people felt they were, and were being used - giving as an example the recent Parliament roof protest where protestors used a mobile phone to talk to the world directly via news media. Others were more sceptical.

We then moved on to the second question - whether Circuit Riders had the skills needed to satisfy their client organisations.

This second question brought a rich discussion about the need for both technology skills and those necessary to help organisations plan and change. I think the discussion gives us some insights into ways we can address the questions I posed at the beginning - and consider whether they are the right questions.
Much of Clay's book is about how people who may not not have operated together before can use the Net for a whole range of purposes. Almost all the Circuit Riders discussion was about how to help existing groups adopt technology which is often unfamilar to them and may not have immediately obvious benefits.
I'm sure we will see more and more of the organising without organisations that Clay describes. At the same time, people will continue to organise by meeting and working together using a range of old and new communication tools. The issue is perhaps what works for whom, and in what circumstances.
I also ran a workshop at the conference with Laura Whitehead and Nick Booth. There's an excellent conference round-up from Laura here, and reports on the workshop from Paul Henderson and Beth Kanter, who joined us by video from Boston.
I also posted an item to The Membership Project, where I'm developing a new site, with others, to explore how the social web and other factors are changing the ways in which we may belong to groups and organisations. My posted was triggered by hearing at the conference one Circuit Rider say, a little ruefully, "The committee won't go for it". I guess the key issue then is whether you think we will continue to need committees or not. Even The Tuttle Club, where Lloyd Davis is organically growing a social media cafe, is getting a bit more formal with a move towards incorporation. Will there be virtual Board meetings?

Technorati Tags: nonprofit, nptech, nptechuk, puppy

Meeting Harry's friends at the social media cafe

I finally made it today to The Tuttle Club, the London social media cafe organised by Lloyd Davis. At present it is only open on Friday morning above the Coach and Horses in Soho ... but as Lloyd told me the aim is to develop a permanent space that will provide for a mix of sociability, work and learning.

I love Lloyd's approach. While others might have agonised about the business plan, membership criteria, and marketing, he has just got on and evolved it in the spirit of social media: prototype by focusing on the people and expecting the connections and creativity to follow. There's more about how it started on the Club blog, and you can sign up for future prototyping events here.
Lloyd explained that the club is named after Harry Tuttle, the Robert de Niro character in the movie Brazil. He's a freelance heating engineer in a dystopian world where freelance heating engineers are illegal, and he's treated as a terrorist. Lloyd says:

He makes things work, he makes things happen by poking around in the stuff without going through all the paper work. To me he's a revolutionary figure, working below the radar of everything .... and that struck a chord with me in terms of the sort of bloggy, podcasty, social media types that we are.

Me too - can you resist becoming a friend of Harry? And if you have any free or low-cost space where Lloyd and friends could take prototyping to the next level of working and learning, even better. It doesn't have to be permanent at the start - just a place to get together and experiment. You'll find Lloyd's main home and contact details over here, or pop in one Friday. Qype have sponsored the coffee and croissants.

Technorati Tags: tuttle club

Social entrepreneurs are not superheroes

One of the matters that was at issue in the unheated debate between Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen the other day was the balance between group creativity (promoted in Charles' book We-Think) and role of the individual, celebrated by Andrew.

This tension is sometime evident between social entrepreneurs (who don't go a lot on committees) and those in the community and voluntary sector suspicious of individuals raising large sums of money for good causes, sometimes without much evident accountability. Are they just in it to build their profile? Do the ends justify the means? But then, can you ever get anything done unless you cut through the bureaucracy?

Politicians and media love social entrepreneurs (unless they crash) because they produce great human stories and photo-opportunities ... but they can appear somewhat self-regarding, which is why I didn't much care for the style of i-genius when it launched. A bit too "get the T-Shirt ..."
They are currently preparing for an i-genius World Summit in Thailand, which certainly sounds super:

The conference will be held at the superb 5 star Indigo Pearl resort, which not only provides us with a stunning and inspiring venue, but is also eco-friendly, consistent with our desire to run an ethical event.
Our ethos is to create a place to meet amazing people and form strong partnerships, and to host an event where the participants create the energy to make great things happen.

Anyway, the School for Social Entrepreneurs has a nicely-balanced post on their blog, Superheroes and celebritisation, picking up on a piece in the Guardian by Rob Greenland in which he says social entrepreneurs are not superheroes. Rob - who also blogs at The Social Business - writes:

We all know that social entrepreneurs can be great storytellers, but I think we are in danger of believing our own hype. Social entrepreneurs are inspiring, but they are not superheroes. Indeed, they are all the more inspiring for not being superheroes. However, a superhero story is much easier to tell, so that is what we tend to hear at conferences and in marketing material produced to justify the significant investment in social enterprise support programmes. Nice, positive stories, easily digested by politicians and policy wonks - but do such comic-strip portrayals inspire anyone else, or do they leave the rest of us mere mortals feeling powerless?
There is also a danger in focusing on the sector's big-hitters. I love the Eden Project, Cafedirect and the like; I'm just bored of hearing about them. My clients are even more bored. In the last month alone, three clients - all from voluntary sector organisations making that painful cultural shift into charging for services - have asked me for examples that might inspire them. Each time I struggled. I could either give them the same old stories, or more complicated ones from my own experience of people like them struggling to adapt to that pick-and-mix world of income generation, grants, donations, service level agreements and contracts.
I am aware that in writing this I'm setting myself up as the sector cynic, but I assure you that is far from the truth. I am massively enthusiastic about social enterprise and social entrepreneurship; I just believe that the reality of social enterprise in 2008 is a little more complex than the picture that tends to be painted.

As usual it's not an either-or. After citing a couple of earlier posts here and here, the SSE author writes:

Basically, our take is that successful social entrepreneurs create networks, build movements, inspire communities (and involve and engage them), establish teams and so forth: there are no superheroes who do it alone, and most social entrepreneurs you speak to will always emphasise their team and the many people who help(ed) make it happen.
But (and this is one thing I'm taking from Andrew Mawson's book, review to follow), individuals do drive and lead change. Someone brings the group together, someone has the casting vote at the meeting, someone keeps things ticking over, and someone initiates things. There are risks in promoting individuals as the solution, but there are equally risks in endless committees, muddled partnerships, well-meaning talking shops and so forth.

There's more balanced thinking in the post, ending with " ... people should judge organisations by their transparency, the quality of what they do, their stated governance and so forth."
Not sure who wrote the piece: it's just Posted by SSE. I think they could risk a bit of celebrity:-)
Photocredit Randy Son of Robert

Technorati Tags: socialentrepreneurs

Climbing out of the walled garden

As I remarked the other day, there's a number of new platforms wishing to claim they are the Facebook of the nonprofit sector, or generally suggesting they are the best place to be online. They often go for the old-style model of creating a "walled garden" behind a login, staking out territory in ways that reflect the competitive and territorial style of those anxious about retaining their membership and so their funding.
It was refreshing to meet up last night with the team behind the new UnLtdWorld site, which is taking a different direction. Yes, you do register, login, fill out your profile and start communicating with others within the system. However, as this slide full of logos show, the aim is to create a "collaborative ecosystem" whereby it is possible to join up with other systems in order to get content in and out.
I was at the launch event for the site, and sound levels didn't really allow for detailed technical explanations, though you can find some here. I was able to talk to both Alberto Nardelli, the Social Network Manager who directed development with the team from Curverider, and with the Chief Executive of Unltd, Cliff Prior. As Cliff says in his profile:

UnLtd is a charity which supports social entrepreneurs who live in the UK - people with vision, drive, commitment and passion who want to change the world for the better. We do this by providing a complete package of funding and support, to help these individuals make their ideas a reality.

I first invited Alberto out into Weston Street, underneath London Bridge Station, hoping for some quiet ... but found we were on a bus route. The lighting was pretty bad too. However, he and Paul Henderson of Ruralnetonline managed to carry on a conversation started inside The Bridge club.

Click to play

I later found a quieter spot to talk to Cliff, where he provided a convincing account of how UnltdWorld may - with its open approach - be able to achieve something others could not on their own. One of the great strengths of system is that it is rooted in offline networks of social entrepreneurs developed by Unltd over the past few years.
Click to play
On joining the system, I didn't at first quite understand how best to use it, because I was looking for somewhere to blog or otherwise makes substantial contributions. Cliff explained I really needed to fill out my profile more fully in order to connect with others of similar interests.
Then there's the "shouts" - postings limited to 300 characters. Short for a blog item ... but aha! think of it as a long tweet, the 140 character items you can post to Twitter. Social entreprenuers like to do more than they talk.

Technorati Tags: puppy, unltdworld

Pimlico School Anti-Academy Protest: Lloyd reports

Lloyd Davis has a great piece of blog reportage from last night in London:

On my way home tonight, passing Pimlico School, I saw a couple of policemen inside the gates. I prickled, thinking poor them, it’s so cold and they’ve got to go in there and find someone who’s disappeared over the fence or something.It turned out there was something less dramatic but just as interesting and exciting going on. A group of ex-governors are protesting against the demolition of the school and its transformation into an Academy. They were helped by some anti-grafitti artists who used a high-pressure hose to clean off the words “Anti Academy School” on the front wall.

Watch the through-the-bars interview with a former governor who ends up in debate with a passing pupil about the virtues or otherwise of the iconic/brutalist architecture, and whether it could be renovated rather than demolished. Here's Melissa Benn in the Guardian last October, and the Westminster City Council press release. Will anyone else cover last night's events? Maybe, but I doubt with such a human touch.

Tags: education, socialreporter

Reports from the e-democracy symposium

I didn't go to last week's e-democracy and empowerment symposium in London, but there are now some reports from those who did, plus webcasts.
Richard Wilson and Alice Casey of Involve gave us some context. They blogged at the Guardian, noting the government is keen for local government to harness technology to revolutionise its services, but concluded a culture change is needed first:

For e-democracy to work more than anything else, yes even more than money, we need an injection of staff time. Staff time to experience working in new ways. Staff time to listen, engage and understand all citizens, and time for staff themselves to become properly supported and empowered. Then, and only then, can they start to empower others.

Over on the UK and Ireland e-democracy exchange, Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, was not impressed by the keynote speech from Secretary of State Hazel Blears:

Even by the standard of other Ministerial statements in which politicians clearly have little to say, this seems to have been an extraordinarily vacuous speech. Hazel Blears refers to how online 'dialogue helps us make a better policy that really reflects what people need and want', but did not give a single example of how such public input has led to policy that is in any way different, better-informed or more representative. Referring to the Number Ten e-petitions, Hazel Blears cites 'Burma, Capital Gains Tax, The police pay deal' as examples of important public input. The questions she needs to answer, if her commitment to e-democracy is to be taken at all seriously, are i) how have these e-petitions contributed to government policy-making; and ii) how does she know what contribution they made in the absence of any evaluation of the Number Ten e-petitions project?
Although Hazel Blears' speech was short on detail, it was revealing for a couple of issues not mentioned. Firstly, amongst the successful e-democracy projects cited (Netmums, MySociety), there was no mention of any of the projects launched by the government as part of its national local e-democracy project. It would have been interesting to hear how many of these are still going and are seen as contributing to government policy-making at any level. Secondly, there was no reference to the government's own e-democracy centre (ICELE), which is odd considering that this is probably the main area of government spending on e-democracy. I suspect that these non-references were the most important part of the speech.

Shane McCracken has blogged three items. Part one: blogging and facebook; Part two : Avaaz and NGOs; Part three : Norfolkblurb and youth participation. It sounds as if that final session was one of the few genuinely participative ones.
Steve Dale was presenting on the first day...

...on the topic of building communities in the local government sector, using metaphors to describe how village communities developed around meeting places such as the village hall in by-gone years, and how communities of practice can flourish once a domain of interest is established (I used the Gosport Allotment Holders association as a contemporary example, where the mix of gardening experts and novices find mutual benefit in belonging to a collective). The key point being that just because we now have much better on-line collaboration tools and technologies, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's the people that make communities (of interest, or practice or whatever). A message that was probably lost on a speakers platform that was almost exclusively devoted to Web 2.0 technologies as the panacea for enabling more effective citizen engagement with the public sector. Reinforced of course with a veritable blizzard of 'e' prefixes - e-Collaboration, e-Empowerment, e-Participation, which never fail to give the uninitiated the impression that we're all in the technological fast lane (though some of us suffer from deja vu when we recall a similar e-word blitz associated with the previous dot-com era of the mid-90's. It meant nothing then, it means nothing now!).

Steve Dale also seemed underwhelmed by  Government offerings:

I'd like to think that the government is investing in the right 'e-programmes', but I can't help feeling that their inherent lack of agility and the propensity for the big consultancies to sell them hugely expensive and over-complex Web 2.0 solutions will mean yet more missed opportunities. In the mean time, us citizens get on with life as best we can!   

It'll be interesting to see what the Governance of Britain team over at the Ministry of Justice has planned by way of events and online discussions leading up to a Citizens Summit about a proposed British Statement of Values later this year, which I reported here. Will they go for a big site/big consultancy approach to reach a wide range of people, or try and achieve that with more emphasis on existing online forums and networks, coupled with a hub site to aggregate and keep things moving? Will they have the time and staff to deal with responses,and analyse them?
The latest on Britishness from the Government comes from Margaret Hodge, speaking at an IPPR event.

Technorati Tags: edemocracy

Web critic calls We-Think "a grand narrative"

Last night NESTA hosted a debate between Charles Leadbeater and Andrew Keen, to launch Charlie's book We-Think. This promotes the collaborative potential of the Web, as Charlie explained here:

An idea is set in motion by being shared. The scope available to use for pooling, exchanging and developing ideas determines the extent of our innovation and creativity and so fundamentally our prosperity, well-being and hope for the future. Ideas grow by being articulated, tested, refined, borrowed, amended, adapted and extended, activities that can rarely take place entirely in the head of an individual; but which invariably they involve many people sharing different insights and criticisms. The web allows shared creativity of this kind to involve more people, discussing more questions from more angles with more ideas in play, at least it does as long as people organise themselves in the right way. We have only just started to explore how we could apply this collaborative, participative culture to social challenges.

Charlie started his contribution with a wry reflection on his failure to engage his 12-year-old son with a YouTube video he made. Here's the video:

And here's Charlie:

Click to play

The surprise of the evening came from Andrew Keen, who has been a fierce critic of Web 2.0 in his book Cult of the Amateur. He is billed as "the antichrist of Silicon Valley" and in 2006 he claimed:

... we are teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Blogs, wikis and social networking are, indeed, assaulting our economy, our culture and our values. Web 2.0 is pushing us back into the Dark Ages.

In the book he argues that the Internet is killing our culture, and threatens our traditional media. He told Times Online last year:

In a world without newspapers, publishing houses, film studios, radio and TV stations there’ll be nobody to discover and – no less important – to nurture talent. The result could be no less catastrophic than Pol Pot’s decision to eliminate talent and expertise in Cambodia by mass execution.
“Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media – with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters and actors – can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril,” says Keen.

Last night Andrew's line was rather different. He called the book great, and a grand narrative, as you can see here:

Click to play

While Web 2.0 has its faults, Andrew was hopeful, even optimistic, that in the future the professionals will reclaim their traditional territory.

The reality is that web 3.0 is actually going to be a moment when the experts, professionals, grab back the levers of power, the tools of creativity. When I wrote my book I was fearful that the masses were taking over and the future of the world was wikipedia. I actually think that the future of the world are professionals, doctors, academics, even politicians who will use the tools of the Internet like anybody else to distribute their wisdom and exertise. So I'm actually much less pessimistic in the way I look at the world about the future.

Perhaps this was not wholly in contradiction of Andrew's previous views, where he emphasised the role of the individual in innovation - rather than the group "we" of Charlie's book. He is now more confident of the capacity of professionals to stand out from the "amateur" online crowd.

Click to play

The whole event was very friendly, and doubly useful as an opportunity to meet some of the people who had contributed to the wiki where Charlie developed the book collaboratively. Nothing like a good NESTA reception to make some potentially collaborative connections, as I previously found here.
You can download the first three chapters, see the first draft, and more background, on the book site.
Update: On the NESTA Connect blog Roland Harwood has provided a summary of Charlie and Adrew's different perspective and this insight:

The most interesting part of the discussion for me was that the web, a platform that lends itself to sharing and arguably the 1960s greatest legacy, is now the platform for modern commerce which is based on individual ownership and competition. So the key challenge will be how will big organisations, whether private or public, will adapt to this collaborative world? Interestingly the debate around the impact of the web in the US tends to be mostly focussed upon the economics, but the debate last night focussed as much on the social and political implications. The consensus from both speakers was that organisations are critical and require a core engine that makes the rules and combines both top down and bottom up solutions.

Technorati Tags: we-think

Storytelling for change: another collaboration thingy

If you want to help people understand each other and collaborate for change you may need some "thingies" as I wrote the other day - social events, games and simulations, online spaces, co-ordinators. Somehow I left off the role of stories, perhaps because I didn't have in mind how they could lead to action.
Then last Friday I met up with Louise Harris and Christine Wilson, at a conference organised by Community Housing Cymru. Before going along to their workshop I tried one other thingy - posting a video of development manager Sioned Hughes, asking people to send ideas on using social media in organisations to the conference blog. That was a great success, as you can see here if you browse the comments. Thanks to Lloyd, Paul, Michele, Beth, DK, Paul, Simon, David, Jeremy, Menka, Nick, Paul, Tim, Ian.
Anyway, back to storytelling, of the digital kind. Louise Harris runs the Big Learning Company, and Christine Wilson works at the Centre for Research and Innovation in Care Services, University of Glamorgan. They recently contributed to the first Public Sector Narrative Conference: Storytelling for Change, which was a collaboration between Public Service Management Wales, ENLA and the Wales Centre for Health.

Click to play or view here

The essence of their workshop was that by videoing, picturing, podcasting or otherwise recording the experiences of service users and managers you can, with their agreement, use stories to promote change.
One story we heard was that of a nurse who was interrupted while dispensing drugs to a patient. She gave the wrong thing to the patient, and was so mortified she couldn't sleep that night. In the morning she offered to hand in her resignation: even though the patient was OK she felt it was a terrible lapse in professional practice. Fortunately her manager turned the incident to advantage, and encouraged the nurse to share her experience with the rest of the team on the ward. As a result they came up with a solution - a sash nurses c