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]

Andy Dearden's workshop slides

Slides from the presentation: Sharing experience through a pattern language
APatternLanguage

Introducing the Bath Workshop

These slides were my introduction to the Bath workshop
Bath Workshop Introdution part 2 (PowerPoint file)

Apologies and Slides

Download file

Hello all,

I'm afraid I won't be able to attend the workshop as my wife is ill and we have a very young baby. I'm very sorry to be missing this workshop, I'm sure it will be a great day - the position papers were all so interesting. I've uploaded the slides I was going to use (I think). If anyone has any comments or questions please email me (m.blythe@psych.york.ac.uk). Or maybe we could discuss them here?

Regards

Mark

Promoting a virtual community

I find deeply interesting the aims behind both this blog and the workshop

>For myself, I think my aim is to identify and connect up (rather than create) a community of >nterest/community of practice in this area. I certainly don't want to duplicate existing networks.
I couldn't agree more. Communities should be connected and not created.
Then the point is that I believe we are a certain amount of people working in social IT issues, specially for NGOs, and it is a real pity that we don't know each other and what everybody is doing, so it is quite common to duplicate efforts, to try out things that someone else found before that ain't working and so on.

I would say that there is not such a virtual community on these issues, at least not in a European level, so maybe we can start establishing connections towards it here

I broke one of my toes recently, so I won't be able to join you in the workshop, but I hope we can have some discussions here and continue this share of knowledge after the workshop.

Don't have too much fun during the workshop! ;-D

Best wishes

David Casacuberta
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Transit Projectes

What are my aims

For myself, I think my aim is to identify and connect up (rather than create) a community of interest/community of practice in this area. I certainly don't want to duplicate existing networks.

However, as David suggests, I perceive things like 'communities on-line' as being mostly about geographically neighbourhoods etc., whilst democracies on-line or e-government emphasise relations to formal political processes. My interest is more in buillding & sharing knowledge /experience in areas such as:

1) innovative uses of IT by NGOs, campaigning & voluntary groups
2) effective organisational practices for using IT by such groups
3) low cost & usable tools for use by these groups

My intention in the call for papers was to try to find out who was doing what already. Maybe this community already exists and recognises itself somewhere else. I have no fixed ideas about the right way to develop things from here. I hope the workshop will help us to explore this area.

Workshop action plan

Will the 'Designing for Civic Society' workshop lead to any action - or just rehearse again discussions of the past five years about how the Net might make a difference? One idea is to develop a network or community of practice linking academics and practitioners. Is that realistic? Should we concentrate on joining up existing networks?

Designing for Civic Society - workshop details

The workshop in Bath on September 8 will bring together campaigners, practitioners and researchers to examine the use of technology by the organisations of civil society, such as trade unions, NGOs, campaign groups and charities. Conference details here