Designing for Civil Society

Recent stories from socialreporter

I'm currently doing most of my blogging about social media, e-democracy and open collaboration over at Socialreporter.com. Here's some recent items

Citizen journalism: what happens if no-one comes?
Charlie Beckett wonders whether the potential joining up of citizens and pro journalists in networked journalism will happen if most people aren't interest in active participation online.

Costs of the BBC Action Network
A Freedom of Information request by Tom Steinberg reveals costs of £1.3 million plus

E-Democracy Centre “surprised by speculation”
The director of ICELE says she is surprised by discussion around the activities of the centre, and whether it offers value for money.

Ruralnet shows how to do distributed communities
Ruralnet has revealed the results of its co-design process to re-invent its business in the open, with a demonstration at the recent Collaborate|2008 event.

Inovation needs big and small players
Director of the Innovation Exchange John Craig provides an update on progress

Social media, creativity, and open collaboration

I presented at the Creative Juice seminar, explaining why I think games, events like social innovation camp and co-design processes like that developed by Ruralnet, are important for innovative design.

I've also been experimenting with instant video to the web using Qik, at some recent events.

CoPs at boundary of institution and innovation

Click to play also at blip.tv

Steve Dale designed the IDeA online platform that enables local government officers to share knowledge across a wide range of topics, and last week he invited me to a workshop with some of the facilitators who make all it all work.
Conversations at the workshop brought home to me how these online space may become the frontiers where the inevitable institutional formalities of government meet the challenges of innovating in service delivery, democracy and partnership working.
Steve captures that in his item about the event when he recalls someone saying:

“I’m not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation”

and adds:

I’d like to think that CoPs do empower people to make change, but the heavy hand of command and control is still evident in many organisations, and could in some cases snuff out that spark of innovation that is in all of us.

More positively, he heard:

“Someone read and commented on my first blog! I got a real buzz out of that - it’s not an ego trip or anything, I’m just so pleased that someone thought I had something interesting to say”

I was in a group who got around to discussing whether their community of practice could generate a newsletter and other content for local people they were serving. If so, what would be the process for vetting and agreeing the content? Would it all have to be authored on a wiki, and reviewed by everyone? I suggested enabling different people in the community of practice to find their own individual and collective voices through blogs ... but that would probably push the boundaries of what a local authority would allow. I was reminded by local government officers that IT departments may well block access to anything other than standard web sites. This means that while citizens , newspapers and broadcasters are increasingly using social media, local government is restricted in how it can communicate with us.
However, as you can hear in this interview with Michael Norton of IDeA, and Steve, they are pushing ahead with experiments to introduce different media into the system.
Overall I got the sense that local government Communities of Practice are becoming the place where people can both share day-to-day experience across boundaries of geography and discipline, and have useful conversations about how local government can innovate more effectively. Putting that into action may, of course, be rather more challenging in organisations that are not necessarily innovation and collaboration-friendly.
Update: listening to the clip reminds me a shouldn't try and do interviews in noisy rooms. Will do better next time.

New jobs in nonprofit e-learning and innovation

I've come upon a couple of interesting projects and jobs ... the Cass Business School in London has spent the last three years putting together plans and funding for an innovative programme to provide online learning for people in community and voluntary organisations who might not go down the route of the usual courses. Details here, including a chief exec post at £50,000.

We are looking for a dynamic individual to lead and direct the entire project, working closely with the Trust and Project Board to create a commercially viable and well-used e-knowledge network.
Your knowledge of the voluntary sector, social networking, e-knowledge transfer and experience of successfully developing and implementing start-up projects will give you the expertise needed to ensure the project’s success and to lead and motivate a team of people working with you. In addition, you will manage all marketing and advertising activities associated with the project.

Over at NCVO they are looking for a Sustainable Funding Enterprise and Innovation Officer.

You will lead on developing a programme of work to enable voluntary and community organisations to identify, develop, and value innovation. You will lead on establishing links and forming relationships with organisations that work around innovation and enterprise.
With a strong understanding of funding and finance issues in the voluntary and community sector, you should have experience in enterprise and innovation, and the ability to plan, manage and deliver projects. This post is a one year contract.

There is always a certain amount of bureaucratic overhead in these situations. Each job, in different ways, should test out how far it is possible to deploy new ways of doing things in the third sector. good to see those opportunities emerging.

Innovation camp needs imitators

I spent much of last weekend at the London Social Innovation Camp, and as I have written over at Socialreporter, I think we need more of these events that bring together social activists and techies to brew up bright ideas ... and carry them through to action. Using new stuff to do good stuff, in new ways.
The win by Enabled by Design was very well deserved. I experimented with live steaming video from my phone using Qik, and will be doing more of that tomorrow at the Ruralnet|UK Collaborate2008 event. You'll see what I and other produce here.
If you have a Nokia S60 phone you can try qik for yourself ... it is still in alpha, but I'm finding it works well and the Qik folk are really helpful in encouraging us to try their free service and report back.

Professor questions the value of e-democracy centre

Professor Stephen Coleman, guest blogging at Connecting Bristol, an acknowledged leader in local e-democracy, has now turned his questioning gaze on the government-funded International Centre for Local e-Democracy (ICELE). After listing a range of well-known e-democracy projects in the UK, he says they will be judged by the quality of their outputs.

In the case of ICELE it has been difficult to arrive at any judgments because I simply don’t understand what they are aiming to achieve. Is it new research and understanding? Or new tools to be used by governments? Or critical debate about the merits and values of e-participation? Perhaps someone can tell me what ICELE is for and why considerable amounts of public money should be spent supporting it?
The pilots that were funded by the national project for local e-democracy seem to have disappeared without trace, with the exception of the local issues forums (which survive largely because of the commitment of Steve Clift and his colleagues) and some rather under-used councillor blogging tools. What became of the other government-funded projects? How much money was spent on the now-abandoned Voice toolkit, described by ICELE as ’a web-publishing toolkit and an online community network rolled into one’? At the very least, a fully transparent evaluation should be made available.
Incidentally, I don’t write this in a spirit of negativity. Some projects will fail and we should learn from them. It’s the failure to be open about or learn from such experiences that worries me much more.

Ouch. Will ICELE feature this in their news section? I don't think they have a blog ....

Chance to blog with Stephen Coleman

A post from Shane McCracken let's us know that Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, is guest blogging on the future of politics and citizenship at Connecting Bristol. This is an unusual opportunity to engage online with Stephen, so do pop over. I've covered the topics in more details on socialreporter.com. Great discussion starting, and a reminder to keep in touch with Stephen Hilton and his team in Bristol who do such great e-democracy work. This is not always the case elsewhere, as Ian 'Cuddles' Cuddy reported a few months back in Public Sector Forums - Local E-democracy: Dead, Alive, or in Hiding?
Over on the Bristol blog Stephen Coleman asks if anyone would be interested in discussing ICELE, our International Centre for Excellence for Local e-Democracy. I've said yes please.

Technorati Tags: edemocracy

BBC trails their version of networked journalism

A few weeks back I posted a lengthy piece about possible BBC plans to fulfill its public service remit for "sustaining citizenship and civil society", after hearing of a preview by Controller of BBC English Regions Andy Griffee. His demonstration provoked strong criticism from regional media interests, but promised some benefits for citizen journalists and others producing their own content.

Now confirmation of the closure of the BBC Action Network - which I first wrote about last October - has produced more details from the BBC. They say they will ..

.... launch a new service which will give people access to all the BBC’s content across tv, radio and online on a range of topical issues. Many of these topic pages will reflect the same issues that have been central to Action Network, from healthcare and schools, to public transport and policing.
Each topic page will offer the latest news stories on an issue, including TV and radio programmes, while linking to the wider debate through people’s blogs, campaigns and websites.

I'm now writing about networked journalism and related topics over on a new blog: socialreporter.com. You'll find more on this story over there, plus some discussion of what might be the values of networked journalism.
Designing for Civil Society has worked well for nearly five years, but doesn't seem such a great blog title in the networked world. May be time for closure and moving house here too. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: bbcinternetblog

Government pledge to support online collaboration

Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has announced a new Task Force, headed by Richard Allan, to take forward proposals in the Power of Information report. Much of this was about the way that Govenment information is handled - important in itself. However, Tom also says that Hazel Blears Department of Communities and Local Government will be producing a White Paper on engagement this summer. He remarks:

Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
The challenge is for elected representatives to follow their customers and electors into this brave new world. Some of us have already taken that leap. As well as blogs, there are many more MPs using Facebook and Yahoo Groups to communicate their ideas and listen to other.
Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least.
But we need to make it easier for others too.

After declaring his belief in the power of mass collaboration, and support for initiatives like Netmums, Tom adds:

The power of information taskforce will work to support the endeavours of collaborative communities in the UK and beyond. New tools and ways of working are going to allow us to apply our collective intellectual capital to the seemingly impossible challenges of the modern age. I look forward to collaborating with them and you on this exciting agenda.

One of the strong themes in the Power of Information report - as covered by the BBC here - was that Govenment should collaborate with existing initiatives rather than setting up its own ... and it seems as if that approach is being adopted.
The BBC is following the same line, confirming on the site, as I reported earlier, that the Action Network is going to close after five years partly because so much else is now happening online.