Designing for Civil Society

Journal issue on Designing for Civil Society

Andy Dearden and Steve Walker - who organised the workshop that sparked off this blog - are co-editing a special journal issue for publication in November 2004. It will cover "the challenges of designing systems to support democractic participation in civil society.
"Democratic participation is not merely an issue of electronic voting, but also of campaigning, organising and participation in policy formation through a wide variety of groups."

mySociety plans really useful Net projects

Congratulations to Tom Steinberg for getting his "Civic Hacking Fund' - flown at the Bath workshop - off the ground. Well, into the pages of the Guardian, and recipient of a £10,000 first donation, which is pretty impressive for six weeks work.
Tom's ideas for funding civic society software are now now rebranded as charitable project mySociety.org. Tom says in the Guardian: "We are trying to bring together great project ideas, enthusiastic developers and visionary funders to produce cheap, effective services with a demonstrable real world impact. Projects are only limited by the need to have clearly positive social outcomes, and to have costs that barely increase when more people use them." The mySociety website provides a lengthy FAQ and opportunity to submit proposals. The winners will be announced late November. In the second phase mySociety will raise funds and build development teams. Tom cites UpMyStreet.com, FaxYourMp.com, Timebank.org.uk and LiftShare.com as examples of the type of project mySociety would like to foster.

Online community building lessons from Armenia

Nancy White couldn't make it to the Bath Workshop because she was training in Kazakhstan. She's now sent her inspirational story of how Project Harmony in Armenia is planning a series of online events to connect people in a country with low Internet usage and isolated communities. She reports: "I can’t recall any other project with such ambitions. They plan over 20 online events with concrete outcomes over the next 5 months that touch every “Marz” or region in the country."

Who wants to play a design game?

As Ann Light reports, some of those at the September 8 workshop were interested in playing the technology planning game that I described - download here - or see Making the Net Work for more on games. If you are interested in joining a group to play a first version of the game and participate in further development, please get in touch.

Final discussion - where next?

Tom Steinberg facilitated the final session at the September 8 workshop. He first of all asked us to respond to the challenge "We'd all be better off if we..." We responded with...

1) ... had somewhere trustworthy go for advice.
2) ... could learn effectively and cheaply from each other.
3) ... shaped, rather than were shaped by, the technology we use.
4) ... had a fund for developing socially focussed, scaleable software projects.
5) ... had an intermediary between the techies and the NGOs
6) ... had designers who served the poor
7) ... had a community of practice
8) ... could encourage campaigners to spend some of their time on advertising the value which is already out there.

Position papers and movies

Here are downloads of papers submitted for the workshop, and Quicktime movies taken on the day (player download). Files around 500-600K. Thanks to Daniel J Wilcox for smart editing - they were much larger.

Andrew Ackland - how Dialogue by Design runs large-scale online consultation.
Paper. Movie.
Andy Dearden - sharing experience through a pattern language. Paper. Movie.
Ann Light - communities in Fiankoma, Ghana and Brighton, UK share experiences. Paper. Movie.
Chris Bailey - supporting social movements in Bulgaria. Paper. Movie.
David Casacuberta - e-learning for e-inclusion. Paper.
David Wilcox - workshop games for users to plan systems. Paper. Movie.
David Wortley - the impact of digital technologies on society. Paper. Movie.
Mark Blythe - online shopping for older people. Paper.
Miranda Mowbray - how online and offline organising are linked. Paper. Movie.
Steve Walker - ICT-mediated collaboration among European trade unionists. Paper. Movie.
Wendy Olphert - the potential of interactive digital television. Paper. Movie.
Tom Steinberg - proposal for a Civic Hacking Fund. Paper. Movie.
Nancy White - inspiring story of online and off community building in Armenian Paper.

Mailing list details

Hi all,

I don't know if everybody got the details of the 'social movement informatics' mailing list, which I mentioned at the workshop. If you'd like to join, to help the exchange of news and ideas, it's accessible as social-movement-informatics@jiscmail.ac.uk - you can sign up here http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk.

Steve

Workshop poster

The conference organisers asked us to produce a poster at the end of the September 8 workshop - so we took pictures and asked everyone to produce a speech bubble. Click on this thumbnail to see more... though it is a bit fuzzy and it would help if people could add their comments now, below

Article in Usability News

Check out the excellent article about the Bath workshop in Usability News here Usability News http://www.usabilitynews.com

Questions from the Bath Workshop

During the workshop many questions were raised.

The questions were written on cards and participants ‘voted’ for which questions we most wanted to discuss in the afternoon.

These questions received many votes and were taken forward for discussion on the day.

How do we develop highly usable, scalable, socially useful technology?
How do we make people value & desire what ICT can offer?
What are “appropriate” ICTechnologies in the 3rd world?
How do we engage the pool of talent?
How do we develop processes to combine technology, organisation and people?
How do we get the right conceptual design of participatory processes?
How to share experience?
How do we enable marginalized groups to get involved in shaping the technology?
How to enable a local community to discover their talents?
How do we combat stakeholder fatigue?
How to design technology to foster inter-dependence?
How does relevant content get created?

This file details the full set of questions that were raised.

BathQuestions [RTF]