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