Designing for Civil Society

Reaching out to bloggers? Admit limited transliteracy

I wrote recently about how large organisations may be able to reach out to bloggers to promote conversations in the public interest, and the sensitivites involved. Here's some news of a project along those lines that I and colleagues been working on recently for the BBC Trust.
It has given me some insights into what may be involved to make this type of blogger engagement work. Actually it could better be described as organisational engagement. More later on that, and the new-to-me idea of transliteracy which may be the space within which the engagement takes place.
The project also brought home to me what an extraordinary resource we have in BBC online - bbc.co.uk - and how very difficult it is to judge whether we are getting good value for the two per cent of our licence fee (£74 million) that goes on it. (Note to non-UK readers - each household pays more than £130 a year for BBC TV, radio and other services .... and bbc.co.uk costs about 36p a month of that according to this Wikipedia round-up).
No, that's not quite right. I've personally no doubt at all about paying that amount for the wealth of goodies on offer ... what's much more challenging is helping licence payers provide feedback via the Trust on just what mix the service should offer.
The Trust has taken over from the BBC governors as the body responsible for standing on the side of the licence payers, making sure we get a good deal, and that the people who make the programmes and run online services - the executive - stay on track to provide a splendid public service. But just what should that public service be?
The Trust - and the BBC - has recently been very taken up with staff cuts and other savings brought about because the licence fee isn't going up as much as the BBC wanted.
At the same time the Trust has been running the first of a long series of service reviews, during which the public (licence payers) will be consulted on the contractual agreements between the Trust and the BBC executive who provide the services. Before the Trust came on the scene no such explicit agreements were in place, so it is very new territory.
The first review is of bbc.co.uk, which the Trust started a few months back. There is an online questionnaire which takes us step-by-step through the issues the Trust is examining. (I'll return later to the work Lizzie Jackson, Ed Mitchell and I have been doing.)
The BBC's purpose is  " To enrich people's lives with programmes and services that inform, educate and entertain" with a vision " To be the most creative organisation in the world." It aims to create public value in six main ways:

• Sustaining citizenship and civil society: the BBC supports civic life and national debate by providing trusted and impartial news and information that helps citizens make sense of the world and encourages them to engage with it.
• Promoting education and learning: by offering audiences of every age a world of formal and informal educational opportunity in every medium, the BBC helps build a society strong in knowledge and skills.
• Stimulating creativity and cultural excellence: the BBC enriches the UK's cultural life by bringing talent and audiences together to break new ground, to celebrate our cultural heritage, and to broaden the national conversation.
• Reflecting the UK's nations, regions and communities: by enabling the UK's many communities to see what they hold in common and how they differ, the BBC seeks to build social cohesion and tolerance through greater understanding.
• Bringing the UK to the world and the world to the UK: the BBC supports the UK's global role by being the world's most trusted provider of international news and information, and by showcasing the best of British culture to a global audience.

The review of bbc.co.uk is looking at how that service serves the public purposes and, in particular, the citizenship and educational purposes. It is also looking - among other things - at how far it is distinctive and innovative, whether it extends the range of BBC's broadcast services, whether it enables users to search easily, leading users beyond BBC content, and whether it makes the BBC more accountable to licence fee payers.
The questionnaire takes you through these issues, with examples of what it would take to fulfil these requirements. There have already been several hundred responses, and consultation has been extended to mid-December.
Lizzie, Ed and I became involved because the Trust wanted to extend engagement further online ... to encourage more conversations as well as formal responses. It is difficult for the Trust to do that up front because it must be strictly neutral, so we spent some time with the Trust team working from broad ideas of what might be possible, towards a workshop with bloggers leading to wider online engagement.
We ran the workshop last week, and you can see how some noted bloggers picked up the challenge.

Charlie Beckett, the director of the new journalism and society think-tank POLIS, highlighted the difficulties of the consultation process, while wishing the Trust well in the process.
Simon Dickson, a new media consultant specialising in news and government work,  suggested the Trust had its own blog pulling together conversations from different places, acting as a neutral moderator.
Sunny Hundal, who is editor of Asians in Media magazine, and runs the Pickled Politcs site, raised the issue of how satisfactory, or not, the management of interaction is on bbc.co.uk.
Sue Thomas, professor of new media at De Montfort University, questioned whether the BBC is transliterate ... which is a term I'm ashamed to say I hadn't met before. It means the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks. Very relevant.

Although the number of posts is so far small, they have started discussion ... with for example 20 comments on Sunny's site, and eight on Sue's.
We made suggestions to the Trust about how to carry the process forward, and already our client Anna Coghen has joined in the discussion on the blogs. On Sunny's site, Anna says she hopes that the Trust will run a bigger event later in the process with a wider invitee list.
The bloggers are also sharing ideas on how to collaborate between themselves, and with the BBC, so I'm hopeful we'll get a second wave of activity soon.
The process so far has reminded me yet again how far engagement is a process, not an event. I think the workshop went well, but in a few hours we barely had time to get to know each other and start some conversations. I hope more of those who attended post their thoughts, that Anna can find time to respond, and there may be further stimuli to discussion.
But maybe the main lesson is that it is possible for an organisation like the BBC Trust - which by its constitution is rather cautious and "official" - to get together with bloggers and do two things. First, invite involvement in topics of public concern and hopefully mutual interest, and secondly to say, in effect "we aren't entirely sure how to engage online. Can you give us some ideas and share your experience?" I think that admitting you aren't yet transliterate is lesson one for effective online organisational engagement.
More here in Wikipedia on transliteracy. Meanwhile, do please take a look at the questionnaire, and add your own views.
Update:
Anthony Mayfield writes on Citizen regulators: BBC Trust reaches out through blogs in its review of bbc.co.uk

Nico Macdonald writes on In the BBC we Trust

Technorati Tags: bbc, bbctrust, socialmedia

Slugger O'Toole explains why a good blog is like a good pub

I'm always looking for ways to explain the value of blogging to those who might otherwise characterise it as just soapboxing, diarising, or vanity publishing. I've now got a good explanation from ace political blogger Mick Fealty, best known as Slugger O'Toole: it's like a good pub conversation.
I met Mick yesterday evening at an event co-hosted with Paul Evans, co-founder of Poptel Technology, on the theme of improving the quality of policy discussions. We heard from Mick about the start of Slugger as a research project into Northern Ireland Unionism that grew and grew into a very lively site with guest bloggers and much commenting. The focus is on policy rather than personality, guided by 'play the ball not the man'.
Paul talked about a project to pull together on one site, by a sophisticated system of tagging, policy papers as they emerge from government, think tanks and other sources. This would be a boon to researchers, and hopefully help raise the level of policy discussion.
We met upstairs in the Edgar Wallace pub, and everyone was pretty constructive about the idea ... aided by the fact that Paul was buying the drinks. Paul developed Policybrief a few years back, but hit problems with technology and funding. He reckons he can get it right this time around. 
Click To Play and at blip.tv
I pulled Mick away from the general conviviality at the end of the session to ask him about the success of Slugger, and about the clue he gave us earlier on his inspiration for worthwhile exchanges. He explained that his father was a publican, and he grew up in a pub. The conversation could be light, could be heavy, and the publican knows that in order to keep order he has to anticipate where the disorder may come from, and be ready to deal with it. Mick extended the metaphor to blogging with other guests, and commenters:

My role is less about trying to police what people say - that opinion is in, that opinion is out - and rather police the freedom for people to express those opinions within the same civil space. It's that capacity to express diverse ideas within a single space that's crucial. If there's something that is unique about Slugger, that's probably it.

I'm sorry the audio is lousy, but I think the good humour and inspirational snatches emerge from the hub-bub. Just like any good pub conversation.
PS. If there are no comments, does it mean you are drinking alone?
Update: Mick links back here, and acknowledges an excellent 2003 Voxpolitics article by James Crabtree and William Davies as the source of Blogs are like pubs.
The article is still a good read. You can muse also upon Blogs are like ...Flower Gardens, A Good Job Doing, A Smile, Your Front Door, Cities, An Episode of Lassie, Live Jazz, Apples, Soapboxes, ALL BAR ONE, and Cocaine.
I like the comment from Maria Benet suggesting the archives of blogs mean they are also like an Attic or Garage.
Hmmm, makes me wonder if I should dig back and throw out the empties.

Technorati Tags: politics, sluggerotoole

Open source politics: will top policy bloggers now lead the way?

Paul Evans at Never Trust a Hippy suggests that good blogs by those close to power may be more interesting than those in power. I think he has a point, and also that some high-level blogging around issues of climate change may provide opportunities to promote the open source politics and conversational democracy that politicians and policy people agree is desirable. Here's how.
Paul notes the new chief executive of the RSA Matthew Taylor has now started blogging:

This is a good thing, as he has a very good vantage point. He's been a big noise in the Labour Party, he's been the gaffer at the IPPR and has worked at No.10. And he's waded into discussions about how blogging impacts upon politics without - IMHO - really understanding how the blogosphere works. He's now running the RSA, and I hope that his blog will evolve into a ministerial proxy-blog.
Why anyone wants ministers themselves to blog, I don't know. The Chatham House Rule throws up more of interest than any ministerial statements ever do. Matthew Taylor can offer a deniable sounding board - and that's what I hope his blog turns into.

As Paul indicates, Matthew Taylor sounded off at the e-democracy '06 conference against political bloggers contributing to a "shrill discourse of demands", and called instead for more deliberation online - as I caught on video. He is now at the RSA, and recently chaired an event where Tory Shadow Chancellor George Osborne promoted open source politics and got some strong support for a more positive use of the web. Internally Matthew Taylor is working on how the RSA can make far better use of the collective intelligence of its 26,000 Fellows.
Anyway, back to Ministerial and associated blogging. Environment Secretary David Miliband has been diligent in maintaining his blog, and yesterday posted a detailed rebuttal of the claims made in the Channel 4 programme The Great Climate Change Swindle.

Several people have said to me that they couldn’t quite believe what they were being told in Channel 4’s programme last week on climate change – and I promised yesterday in my interview on the Today programme  to put the facts on my blog. Below I have set out what Defra scientists say about the 11 main allegations in the programme. You can read for yourself what the International Panel on Climate Change say or the statement of the Academies of Science of the 11 largest countries in the world.

On Monday Matthew Taylor started in on climate change on his new blog, reflecting on the twists and turns of Labour and Tory positions, and their coming together:

What should we make of all this? Obviously it is good that the politicians are putting climate change centre stage. After last month’s grim IPCC report (itself probably erring on the cautious side), there was nowhere left to hide on the issue. Environmental groups must feel like the only girl at the ball so assiduously are they being courted. Put both Brown’s and Cameron’s ideas together and you have a pretty serious action plan. Brown is right that action must be taken internationally; Cameron that the domestic requirements of such agreements will not be met by voluntarism alone.
But there is a danger in the environment being seen as a political fad. As the sociologist Stan Cohen brilliantly analysed in his book 'States of Denial', most of us rely on a capacity to turn our faces away from difficult truths. Thus were most Germans under Nazi rule able to deny responsibility for the Holocaust and even otherwise progressive white South Africans willing to live with Apartheid. And maybe it is how we can live affluent Western lifestyles while a few thousand miles away African children starve?
In persisting with denial we rely on certain mental tropes such as 'it's not really happening', 'it's nothing to do with me' or 'there's nothing I can do about it'. By making climate change feel like an issue of political point scoring rather then unarguable science and clear moral responsibility we run the danger of providing an easy route for denial.
Ultimately I believe we can tackle carbon emissions and have better lives, but in the short term we face some tough choices. Once this row is over, our politicians should try to find a basis for an agreed way forward.

Not many clues there yet to what's going on, but since the RSA has a major proposal for personal carbon trading, and the FT is commenting on Matthew Taylor's reaction to Tory plans, we can feel he is in the middle of it, and certainly talking to some key people offline.
There now seems to me a good opportunity here for Mr Taylor and Mr Miliband (who must know each other well) to lead the way in developing some of the online deliberation desirable around these complex issues ... as well as talking privately. The term "conversational democracy" cropped up when Paul and I bumped into each other at the RSA event, which reminded me that Stephen Coleman wrote a good pamphlet on that for IPPR and "the importance of building respect and empathy into the relationship between public and politicians". Matthew Taylor wrote a Foreword in which he said:

Stephen Coleman is right to urge a more sophisticated and ambitious use of ICT as a way of modernising and refreshing the representative relationship.

Good time to start. We now have a key politician blogging, and Mr Taylor leading an organisation committed to using social media more effectively to generate ideas and action, and a Big Issue. So I hope we will see, as a start, some linking and commenting on each other's blogs, and attempts to draw in others.
If distinguished politicians and chief execs just use their blog for declaration rather than conversation, we won't be any closer to open source politics or conversational democracy.  I'm flattered to see I'm in Mr Miliband's blogroll. That's the sort of encouragement we smaller fish in the blogging pond need - and I'm sure they do too . Put Mr M and Mr T in your news readers and blogrolls now, and let's throw them some comments and links.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy

Reality check on social reporting: people

In Social Reporting and Rich Records Lloyd Davis picks up my post about the role of Social Reporter, and offers some wise words drawn from his own experience (which is rather more than mine, I should say):

I'm taking a softly, softly, catchee monkey approach. I think (and my order book shows) that we have agreement that it's a "good thing" or at least a "nice thing" to have a richer record of a days proceedings and that blogs and wikis are a good way of producing that. What I agree we haven't done yet is get to the point where we're able to weave everything together to make it useful enough to participants that they want to do more than view the record.

But maybe that's not our responsibility...yet. I see a risk that we're pushing people too fast along a learning curve that we've taken a while to go along ourselves. I found last week that It is enough novelty for the average conference participant to deal with the fact that we've taken pictures, done some vox-pops with people and live blogged a keynote and they are up on the internet at the end of day 1! Maybe we should just let this aspect sink in for a little bit - if they want to interact as well, then that's fantastic and we should be ready for it when it happens, but in the meantime, perhaps we could be honing our reporting skills in this new environment.

This accords with the professional digital divide observations of Dave Pollard (maybe 2 percent are power users of collaboration tools), and those of my Portugal-based colleague Bev Trayner in Reality check - the new renaissance:

I have been taken aback with (fico suprendida com) how unfamiliar many people are with these new tools and technologies. Yet again I find myself living in two different mindsets.

On the one hand there is a world where online and offline connections blend, complement, compete and synergise. Time is not synchronous. Technologies are ubiquitous and "everyone uses RSS feeds". This world is not dominated by technologists, but by social entrepreneurs who see the potential of new technologies.

In another world intentions like "e-learning platform" or "knowledge portal" are heralded as badges of innovation and state-of-the-art accomplishments. In this world you still hear people insist that face-to-face is more complete than online, as if the two were in opposition. The frames of same-time same-place are unquestionable. People who know about technologies must be engineers, technologists or freaks.

Adding:

It has been a salutory lesson. And it reminds me of an ongoing design question I have (and that was stimulated by Nancy): how do you stimulate people's imagination to try out technologies? And also - how come some people see it and others don't?

If the ethos of the social reporter is to promote collaboration by standing on the side of the user/reader/viewer and helping them to contribute, we have to take this very seriously. Evangelising - come on in, it's wonderful - doesn't work any better than warnings - you'll be left behind if you don't.

Part of the answer is being clear about the purpose ... what real benefit will tech-supported collaboration bring - and aware of the prevailing culture which may not be receptive. I think it is also about respecting people's preferences. That's partly about personality, and partly about offering a choice of audio, video, text and so on.

All that means that social reporting, to be successful, requires a pretty full set of skills and tools. As Lloyd says, instead of pushing too hard we could be honing our reporting skills in this new environment. If we can't get the gigs, maybe we need some simulated rehearsing ... a sort of emerging social reporting conference, where we all practise on some willing non-tech participants. Any sponsors up for that?

Tories launch social networking - from the kitchen

The promised Tory social networking platform has now officially launched as webcameron, with an introductory video from the kitchen of David C, demonstrating that policians do need to YouTube. It's all rather carefully (un)staged, with one of the children of the family adding authentic noises off.

The site is a blog, with videos from David Cameron and guests, and the opportunity for anyone to register and contribute through the open blog. Inevitably comments on the initiative range from cyncial to dewy-eyed, but I go with Mick Fealty at Slugger O'Toole

Whatever you think of the Tories, this is web leadership. When Cameron has long since found his feet, the others will look like feeble amateurs.

As I wrote earlier, I think that this sort of social networking site is a step beyond most earlier e-democracy and e-paricipation projects ... you get a bit closer to the people involved, which means you can form better judgements about them and what they say.

I hope the Tory initiative will give the government a further nudge in their Digitial Dialogue experiments with Hansard Society, which - so far as I can see - haven't yielded any public blogs. The next phase will review environment secretary David Milliband's blog - not originally part of the experiment - where the latest entry reports his recent visit to Bolton Wildlife Trust at their new headquarters. This sounds interesting:

... appropriately a former petrol station, to provide a stimulating low carbon centre for education and community life. The wildlife element is centred on the lake and grounds at the back.

Not even a picture, though. Next time, can we expect a bit of footage shot by the minister? That would be a nice one: politician behind the camera for a change.

Groups vs. networks ... forums vs. blog communities

George Siemens in Groups vs. Networks quotes Stephen Downes to offer an insight into the difference between groups and networks, and I think by extension the difference between place-based online communities (forums) and the blog communities that Nancy White has been exploring. George writes:

Stephen nails it perfectly: "Groups require unity, networks require diversity. Groups require coherence, networks require autonomy. Groups require privacy or segregation, networks require openness. Groups require focus of voice, networks require interaction. The group I am with right now is very intent on being a group. That doesn't interest me. I have no wish to lose my identity and my freedom, my empowerment. Because a group is subject to this very objection - backlash, groupthink, the works. But a network is not."

George continues:

I have struggled with this theme in my own writing for the last several years. I like the individuality that a blog affords - my writing, my thoughts, my space. I don't mind collaborating with others...but only if I don't lose my voice and identity in the process. Our education system is based on groups...but it should be based on networks. Groups don't scale, and the urge to focus and move a group forward in one direction results in marginalizing certain voices in order to pursue the "common good". I'm not comfortable with that. A network (as I've been saying with connectivism) imbues individual nodes with personal voices...and finds it's value in aggregating, not overwriting (marginalizing) nodes not in line with the thinking of the majority.

Sanford Dickert, commenting on the news that the Tory party is to set up a social networking site endorses my point about the need to mix online and offline:

Sticking in one medium will limit the pool of involvement - better to extend across the space and find involvement tactics that involve and incorporate in multiple ways.

... and also emphasises the need to go where people are, rather than simply set up another place:

Funny thing, 100M+ MySpace members, close to 1M SecondLifers and the explosion of social networking sites is a ripe space to grow involvement. I think that the Tories action, while interesting, is again trying to create another space that they control. Better to go where the voters are (like, say, SoFlow or A Small World) and build from within, rather than from the outside. Use the community within and develop the community - and then grow the space for the community to be involved in. Do you need features that are not already available in the sites today? And if they are not there, could you find ways of meeting the needs without software development (like a forum or a mailing list)? Give it some thought and see what can happen.

All of this confirms to me that attempts to promote collaboration can't be either/or in the approach or media. Some people will prefer groups (forums), others will prefer blogs and networks, just as some like text, others audio or video. The challenge is to (of course) be clear on what you are trying to achieve with whom, and then be prepared to use a mix of methods over time.  That will often mean going to "their" places - blog, forum, club, event - and inviting people into "your" place - short-term forum, blog aggregator, event. Hmmm.... it used to be so much easier when we knew where places were.

BBC helps start local blog communities

My first interest in social technology came from seeing in the mid 1990s the Freenets and community networks developed in North America, and for a few years it seemed that "getting local communities online" through a mix of access provision, training, support and portals might take off. There are still good example around of these projects, but a couple of years ago it became evident that the growing use of personal media and social networking was taking us in a different direction.
I was reminded of this the other day by a comment from Ingrid Koehler, responding to an item about blog communities. She wrote:

I think there's at least one other kind of blog community...and it's geographical - based around a city or a state, with people who really act as a community - sometimes meeting up, sometimes not. I don't think I've seen this in the UK (yet) but I've certainly seen it in the US. Sometimes these were started around an influential individual - but have carried on.

I don't know of any UK examples either - but it now looks as if the BBC might be helping create something on these line in Manchester. Robert Paterson reports via an item by Jake Shapiro:

Here is the summary  of what got my eye:-

Robin Hamman, senior community producer for BBC English Regions New Media, explained the initiative in an interview with paidContent.org: “We aren’t sure if it’s aggregator, a citizen journalism project or a media literacy campaign - it probably cuts across all three.”
This is a three-month trial launched last week by BBC New Media Central and BBC Manchester:
* Between 10 and 20 volunteers are being recruited across the city.
* Through workshops, participants will be guided through the BBC’s editorial guidelines and production values and then referred to commercial blogging platforms to start their own sites.
* The BBC will monitor RSS feeds from these blogs and highlight the best content.
* Pre-existing local bloggers/Flickr contributors are also invited to submit work or tag content “bbcmanchesterblog” so it can be picked up.
…As for the workload, Hamman optimistically envisages this as a one or two hour job each day for BBC staff — skimming the RSS feeds and wrapping editorial around the best. The rest of the task is to promote the blog to BBC journalists as an efficient source of content about Manchester.

Robert then follows up with more detail through an interview with Robin, which reveals that the idea stemmed from "digital citizens" sending  their content to the BBC:

So after the Tube bombing there were 7,000 emails and pictures coming over the transom into the news room at the BBC. After the Fuel Depot explosion there were 25,000 by noon! There was a staff of 7 who were overwhelmed by this.
The infinite scale and the infinite Noise created by having an open door was becoming apparent to the Innocents who then asked - how much will this cost to keep this type of interaction going? Can we in reality sift through all the noise to find the diamonds? Is this really participation? How could we find the quality as the noise builds?
These were the questions that Robin's team asked when they asked for permission to try a different track. By asking this type of question - they got the green light. They had exposed the unsustainable nature of and open door and no filters in a world where content was going to reach for infinite.
So what are they doing? They are creating a Space where they will have a Host.
The Host will select what goes into the space. Really a new kind of editor - see the link to the old?
So who are the contributors? They have gone into the local community (This is regional BBC) and found the best bloggers. They have met with them several times. Beer has been drunk. They have an offer for them. If they want to be picked up in this space by the host, they have access to a wide range of training - first of all about what is the BBC way for journalism ethics etc and secondly they offer all sorts of technical training. If you want to make a better video - we will help you etc.
All keep their own blogs but offer an RSS feed. There is a static hosted BBC site that filters this content. When the host is running with a story, the Host will not run a full story from any source but will use a number of excerpts as most bloggers do now. So the etiquette of the 'sphere applies and the work of finding material mainly defaults mainly to the aggregator. The material includes of course, text, stills, video and music. The offer includes help in all areas. So not only does this build community but also competency.

This experiment seems to me highly significant because it is exploring several issues:

• The changing role of big media (BBC) in relation to small media (digital citizens) ... in this case actually amplifying and empowering them. Would it were always so.
• Creating a community space by aggregating individual spaces (the blogs)
• The relationship between physicially-defined community (Manchester) and its online citizens
• The new facilitator-editor roles this demands.

I think there are some issues in common with the development of blog-based communities in relation to face-to-face events that I raised earlier. I'll be watching Robin's blog to see if he offers us more.
Then I wonder - why do I need to pick up news of what's happening in Manchester from Robert blogging from Prince Edward Island, Canada. But then, why not. And why not post something about this in the discussion about Nancy White's(Seattle) paper on blog communities, hosted in Australia. What's local, what's global these days?

Official blogs and wikis needn't be boring

While the Defra wiki - trashed by libertarian politicos and then relaunched - continues to be mentioned as a warning to government servants of the perils of online collaborative tools, a linked blog and wiki is doing rather effective service for the local authority improvement and development agency IDeA.

The wiki, appropriately enough, is about partnership ... or rather Performance Management in Partnership. Hmmm, sounds a bit dry, particularly when you read on and find reference to procurement, coordinating systems, and risk management. But that's where the blog, and the chatty email updates from policy officer Ingrid Koehler come in. There's commentary on policy developments, reports on events, useful links ... and Ingrid's holiday snaps, both blogged and Flickred. I liked The Burg(h)ers of Calais.

If Ingrid is away, Adrian and Vicki help out. You feel there are real people in there. Their conference reporting makes you believe other officials are human too:

David Cook had the best "back to the floor" type tip. He regularly listens in on randomly selected customer calls to the council on tape on his drive home. This helps him get a finger on the pulse of what the main customer issues are, and also on how customer service is being handled in the council.

The technology is not fancy. The wiki runs on a commercially-hosted service, Editme, and the blog is on Blogger. As always, it's the people who make the difference.
Meanwhile, over at the Defra wiki, the Defra science strategy team have popped in a rather intriguing article on political philosophy:

The idea is known as One Planet Living. It’s rather simple really: if everybody in the world lived as we do in the UK, we would need three planets to support us. It is often presented as the latest fad in Green political thought. In fact, it's an idea that dates back several centuries.

The article goes on to say that great thinkers like Max Weber, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke were all acutely aware of ‘green’ political issues, and serves to show that no one political tradition has sole green credentials. This has prompted one commenter, signing in as Matt Qvortrup, to remark:

If the Greens are to consolidate their gains and expand, they need to recognise that part of their message is a conservative one. It is deeply attractive to certain conservative instincts and this should not be a matter for embarrassment but for celebration.

I shall monitor the page closely for signs of the return of Guido Fawkes and his co-conspirators. I sense the Defra civil servants might welcome a bit of action. There's no point having a blog or wiki if you don't get noticed.

Blog communities: Nancy White explains being in many places at once

Nancy White, recently in London  talking about Internet tribes, has now written an article about blog communities and how they differ from forums, email lists and other ways we communicate with each other and relate online: Blogs and Community – launching a new paradigm for online community? at The Knowledge Tree.

If you aren't a social technology person, don't switch off ... because behind the tech stuff are some profound issues of how we do things as individuals in our own spaces, how we collaborate in groups, and how we get together in communities.
In the non-internet world architects, planners and developers often determined how public or private, congenial or not our places may be. The more handy DIYers among us build our own. Organisers, wardens, police, colleagues, friends, brokers all assist or control our relationships in localities or across far-flung networks.
I think Nancy's article is important because she offers us an understandable way of looking at how the social architecture of the internet is changing. More and more people are taking the DIY route by creating their own places (blogs) and talking to others from there ... instead of going to  the equivalent of the pub, the match, church or community centre. However, the physical-online analogy of place soon breaks down, because as Nancy explains, these days you can be in many places at once:

Until recently, the term ‘online community’ implied a community who interacted online within some bounded set of technologies. In the early years, bulletin board systems (BBSs) and forums (also known as discussion boards) joined email lists as tools that enabled a defined set of people to interact around some shared purpose, over time. These were usually clearly bounded communities. The boundaries were created by the tools themselves – usernames, passwords, registrations or joining of a list. The technological act of joining was the most visible indicator of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the community. Communities could be public or private and visible only to those who joined. Many of us interested in the application of online community to learning and work, ‘grew up’ in this era of bounded communities. We often brought with us our assumptions that online conversation, a core to our learning and work, would naturally happen in forums or email. We happily played with wikis as shared writing or repository spaces. We adopted blogs as personal publishing platforms, but community always found its infrastructural roots in forums and email lists, tools that many of us felt defined online conversation. Then blog adoption accelerated.
People began to blog in specific niches, from gaming, to politics, to third grade classroom curriculum, to chocolate; ecosystems of people writing about things they cared about. They started finding each other, commenting on each others’ blogs. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and feedreaders began to offer new possibilities about how we discovered and read blog posts. Other Web 2.0 tools such as tagging and mashups created ways to aggregate and remix the individual offerings into a unique package, customised by each of us to our own preferences.
The game had changed. And with it changed some of our assumptions about what online community looks like, how individual and collective identity, power and control show up in these communities, and, at the core, the balance between the individual and the group.

In order to explain what's going on, Nancy develops the ideas she set out in London. First she suggests that there are three types of blog community - those around a solo blogger, those around a topic, and those developed on the same platform. Nancy then takes the idea of blog communities as networks, enhanced by different functions and types of participants identified by Ramalingam:
    * filters
    * amplifyers
    * convenors
    * facilitators
    * investors and
    * community builders.
As Nancy says Ramalingham’s (2005) six functions echo some of the work of Cross and Parker who describe types within a social network, i.e. Central Connectors, Unsung Heroes, Bottlenecks, Boundary Spanners and Peripheral People.
(The article gives excellent references as well as glossary of terms.)
Nancy goes on to give us an analysis of how the three different types of blog communities operate in terms of power, identity, modes of interaction and scalability.

In the social architecture, we see the most signficant set of differences around the issues of control/power and identity. This is a classic expression of the tension between the individual and the group that shows up in all social formations. From a design perspective, how might we intend the balance between individual and group to show up? If we want an individual focus, blogs give some of that in all forms, but has primacy in the blog centric formation.
Interestingly, all three offer a range of interaction options, although the power dynamics changes with the relationships in those dynamics. For example, while anyone potentially could comment in any three forms, the blog centric blogger could most easily prevent that interaction within the community. Power is key here. The topic centric community has the most distributed power. The boundaried community power distribution ultimately depends on the choices of the site administrator. In the single blog centric power clearly sits at the centre, as does identity.

Nancy emphasises that she is really just setting out some ideas, raising questions, and inviting comments.... and offers us more than the article as a launch pad. You can find some of the research collect under the tag blog_communities on del.icio.us. The article offers a link to a live gathering and conversation on September 25/26 (depending on time zone). You can read the article as blog item, or download as a file. You can listen to Nancy's podcast of the whole thing. All here.
The research has clearly made Nancy rethink the importance of new-style blog communities compared with old-style online community. She wrote recently:

I have been seriously thinking about totally redesigning my online facilitation workshop because we have entered a new phase of online interaction and many of the old assumptions are insufficient, the modalities are far more diverse .... and the challenges of multi-membership and what that means to our time and attention is significant.

This has echos of Robin Hamman on the death of online community, and earlier Amy Jo Kim saying forums were "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs. Something is definitely going on ... new territories are emerging. Nancy is giving us some early maps.

Death of online community ... again. Welcome to the digital pub.

If you are bewildered by blogs, chary of chat rooms, cheesed off with communities online, sceptical of social networks - and enervated by email - take comfort that things are changing (again). You may be able to say phoooey to all that, skip a techno-generation, and relax in the digital equivalent of your friendly neighbourhood pub. You always knew real people were what mattered, didn't you?
Of course it won't be that simple - but Robin Hamman sets off a liberating training of thought with an item entitled the death of online community as we knew it & i feel fine. It is particularly interesting when linked to the current explorations of blog communities by Nancy White following up her presentation on Internet tribes. They also been talking to each other for BBC Five Live.
Robin has been around the virtual block a few times as a researcher, commentator and manager of online communities and networks, not least in the BBC, so we should listen when he reflects on just what it takes to create online community, and its value:

We thought that if we built it, and built it right, they would come. Of course, they often did - in droves. And that's when the headaches of building and supporting expensive registration systems, content management systems, discussion platforms, exponentially growing bandwidth needs, the cost of moderation and hands on discussion hosting, etc etc all began to cause people to question the validity of the theory that all good web businesses - all business everywhere if you were a follower of the ClueTrain - needed a healthy community of users.

Robin acknowledges the many sites with lots of users - whether in forums or social networks - but doubts the long-term commercial value of past models. He also also questions how far they constitute "community", and so how far they satisfy people's social needs.

So did it work? I've been thinking about this for some time and I actually have a difficult time thinking of any large online community that functions as a single, identifiable community.

Questioning the big online community model isn't new. A couple of years ago Amy Jo Kim - author of one of the best books on developing online communities - created a few ripples by declaring that forums, email groups and chat rooms are "old-skool" with the buzz moving to blogs and social networks.
What interests me in Robin's thinking is the clues he offers to what comes next. He uses the analogy of pubs, with the big drinking halls offering cheap deals to a mass of drinkers but not attracting regulars, and comparing these with neighbourhood pubs with a regular clientele.
Robin suggests that instead of investing hugely in big places for all-comers, we should be thinking about smaller places with their own character:

So who creates the neighbourhood pubs of the social networking world? Users do. And that's my point. No longer does it make sense for big brands to try to build big online social spaces where hundreds or thousands of users engage in conversation. Instead, they should be trying to create the tools that allow niche communities to create their own social spaces using those tools.

Robin continues:

So how to navigate these stormy waters, particularly if you're not a website or brand in the web 2.0 technology business?

    * learn to engage with your users wherever they are (whatever services they are using)
    * become platform independent
    * be nimble and move with your audience(s) as it (they) move from service to service, platform to platform
    * extract value by helping your audience find third party audiences you've allied with and by learning from those third party audiences

Most of this second strategy can currently be achieved through blogging: either through setting up organisational blogs (that embrace blogging as a tool AND a technique) or by simply engaging with the blogs that already exist out there. Online community can, these days, more often then not manifest itself as a group of users who cluster around a blog or a few blogs. This is our new target audience.

Online community, at least as we once knew it, is dead and most social networking technologies will inevitably follow it there. No longer does it make sense to try to build the next big thing, nor to buy it or even figure out what it might look like. The real successes of web 2.0 will be those who put most of their effort into building relationships with user communities and who don't worry too much about, or invest too heavily in, whatever platform(s) those users happen to be using at the time.

I'll be checking in with Robin and Nancy's blogs to see if they can elaborate these new models further for us.