Designing for Civil Society

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.

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.

What are collaboration "thingies" - beyond wine and pizza

Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work. I ended up pondering on how "thingies" might help - of which more later.
The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
What this means, as I understand it, is that the exchange wants to find social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and others with good ideas, and then support them in working with public bodies who might buy their products and services, and funders who could invest. At the same time they have to encourage organisations who may be conventional in procurement to be more adventurous. The first two areas of activity are supporting independent living and excluded young people.

My friend Simon Berry and I were along because we led a competing team to bid for the Innovation Exchange job last year. You'll can find the back story of John's appointment here, and a case study of what we are calling our most successful failure.

The evening was a great opportunity to wish John and his team every success in a challenging task, pitch in some ideas and identify some challenges. We talked a lot around the need to mix together the processes of encouraging innovation with specific activities to find and support innovators. In order to do this the team are meeting a lot of people, developing a more sophisticated online system, and planning some events - just as a start.

I had plenty of questions - but thought other people's might be even more interesting, so I asked my friend Tim Davies to pick up my camera and do a little interviewing. He and John were happy to oblige. The change in colour balance is due to a flare up in the stove rather than any heat in the exchange.

I came away thinking that one thing John and colleagues might do, to aid their work and that of anyone else trying to promote innovation for social good, is to set up a "collaboration thingy exchange". This would be a space where we could all pitch in those "something or others" that if you do them, both help make things happen and create some ripples.
Offering people wine and pizza for the evening is definitely a well-tried thingy, because it gets you into conversational rather than document-writing mode, you strike up some new relationships, and get the feel of who you could work with. If you follow-up with blog items, calls or emails you find who is responsive. It's best to do these meet-ups regularly, and it doesn't require a fixed venue. For example, Jeremy Gould has followed up UKGovwebBarcamp with meetings in the House of Fraser coffee shop across the road from his Ministry office. Lloyd Davis has established the Social Media Tuttle Club each Friday in the Coach and Horses, Soho.
Larger-scale things on the same lines are Open Space events, Barcamps, Unconferences - all face-to-face spaces where people are encouraged to think creatively, strike up conversations, form and reform groups to take ideas forward.
Online spaces can - with more difficulty - fulfill a similar function. Simon and I opened up a multi-author blog system to develop, in the open, our failed bid for the Innovation Exchange. The new Innovation Exchange will have a much fancier system.
You can add more spice to events by designing them as games, as my colleague Drew Mackie and I have done over here. One idea I suggested to John was to run some simulations where innovators and purchasers "changed sides" so they understood each other rather better.
What doesn't succeed, in my experience, is expecting these tools to work without some facilitation. Are people thingies? If so, what's needed both online and face-to-face are collaboration co-ordinators, as Shawn Callahan calls them. The role of these co-ordinators - or whatever you may choose to call them - is:

• ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field
• finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate
• helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools
• collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role
• connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish

The blog where Shawn and colleagues talk about the work of their company in Australia is itself a terrific innovation and collaboration exchange - with generous sharing of the methods they use, as well as insights gathered from elsewhere....
... which brings me to the best thingy of all, which is to open up. I'm sure John and colleagues feel under some pressure to "deliver" ... when of course success depends pretty much on the actions and attitudes of others (and as Dave Pollard confirms, attitude is hugely important). What's needed, in my view, is a whole lot of processes and activities that encourage innovators, investors and public bodies to co-design the improved services that we needed ... which reminds me of another set of thingies prepared by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff as a manifesto for co-creation.
Anyway, my best suggestion to John is to share the challenge that the Innovation Exchange faces by inventing it in public, as Simon is doing with Ruralnetonline. Keep offering the wine and pizza, and blog as you go.
After the evening I asked John for any further thoughts. He replied:

The evening was fantastically helpful for me, if challenging, so many thanks to those who attended. If I were to pick out two features of the conversation, they would be diversity and scale.
On diversity, there were some strong challenges about how the Innovation Exchange can reach different people across the system. The chasm between the people who buy services and those who use them means getting citizens' views is vitally important. Equally, different kinds of people in different roles will respond to the Innovation Exchange in different ways, and we need to cater for all of them.
On scale, there was an important question about whether we want to be encouraging the third sector to be 'innovative' or to be supporting particular innovations to grow. The conversations encouraged me to be loud and proud about the fact that we are focusing on the latter - not preaching at people about innovation but providing practical support for innovators who need it.
I hope people will continue to engage with us and challenge us.

Simon has now blogged about Why I believe in Open Innovation, putting it all very well from someone who has the much tougher task than I do of being open and innovative within a charity, with staff and trustees to convince. Seems to be working.
Update: Tim Davies has blogged some additional excellent ideas over here, and John's reflections are here

Technorati Tags: innovation, innovationexchange

How to make an online business from free (without the ads)

My friends over at ruralnet|online are making tremendous progress in their quest to re-invent their business in the open. As I reported the other day, they face the challenge of moving from a "walled garden" set of online services which they charged for, towards a more distributed system using a mix of tools to provide people engaged in social enterprises and nonprofits with information, communication and collaboration systems.
The challenge - as many commercial online providers have found - is that these days people are getting smart at searching for their own information, setting up blogs, wikis and other tools, using Flickr, YouTube and so ... all for free. They often learn the tools at home (or their children do). Why pay when they get to work, particularly if work is in a charity or small voluntary group? There's lots of issues, of course, about training, support etc for those less confident - but even the technophobes have figured you don't pay much for information and tools these days.

The key issue is finding the additional value you can offer users. How do you find out what they want? Ask them to help you redesign the business. Chief Executive Simon Berry and a team led by Paul Henderson are doing that on a multi-user blog site and and through events including a focus group which I helped run last week.

As I reported on the site, we played through a co-design game in which groups invented two scenarios (a small village fighting for sustainability, and a large network of parish and town councils), then used a set of cards representing tools and activities to develop an action plan. Some of the cards offered high-value ruralnet|online services.
It went rather well ... except the groups didn't choose the ruralnet|online cards until well down their development plan. Oh dear - end of business? Absolutely not. Paul has come back with a set of ideas about how ruralnet|online can add some value to free tools, give some away, charge for some, and also offer personalised services. So far they aren't even looking at additional ads.
One of the key principles is, if the good stuff is happening elsewhere, don't try and compete, send people across and do some remixing. On that basis, I won't go on about this any more but suggest you pop across to my|ruralnet - first shot at what ruralnet|online might be and add to Paul's rich mix.
By the way, it won't be only rural - important though these services are for hard-pressed, often isolated, communities. There'll be Networksonline services for the rest of us urbanites.

Technorati Tags: ruralnetonline, ruralnet|online

Pitch up for social innovation camp

Paul Miller, Dan McQuillan and Christian Albert have given us first news of their plans for Social Innovation Camp in London, when ideas people, geeks, mentors and sponsors will gather for a weekend of intensive co-creation on April 4-6:

Innovation happens when diverse groups of people get together - individuals who can bring something different to the mix and help each other to look at problems in a new light.
We’re interested in creating unexpected collaborations between people, organizations and networks. The Social Innovation Camp will be an opportunity for all participants to meet people who think about things differently to them.
The weekend will be designed with this principle in mind. Social Innovation Camp will bring some of the best of the UK’s web designers and developers together with those at the sharp end of social problems. Throw in some people with the business and organisational knowledge needed to make things happen and we’re hoping to come out with some innovative solutions to enable social change.

Ideas for your innovative project have to be in by March 7, and you are told by March 17 whether you are successful. These projects are then developed collaboratively over the weekend:

Pitch your prototype. We’re hoping that by the end of the weekend you’ll be part of a group with a basic working model for a new venture. The event will close with a pitching process which will include some prizes for the winning pitches.
Start your venture. Social Innovation Camp is all about creating the relationships needed to start new projects and we hope your ideas won’t end with the weekend. We’re currently thinking about the best way to help you pursue your venture – or if it’s more appropriate, find someone to take it on for you. More on how this will work coming soon.

I think we are now seeing several different approaches emerging on how nonprofit organisations may use social technology (building on old structures) ... or how we can collaborate to do good stuff using new stuff (which is likely to mean developing new structures).
These different - maybe complementary - approaches were evident last year at the Newman Arms get together which I reported here. Some people were interested in enhancing the capability of existing community and voluntary sector organisations, others felt a new direction was needed. Dan McQillan - of the social innovation camp team - made it clear he felt charities are broken and later trailed the innovation camp idea.
Meanwhile there's still a lot to do helping existing organisation deal with the basics of computer and internet use. I'll be hearing more about that when I run a workshop with Laura Whitehead, Nick Booth and others at the UK Circuits Riders conference at the end of this month. Circuit Riders provide tech support to small organisations.
Earlier this week I went to a new Forum for Circuit Riders in London organised by London Champion Miles Maier. Unfortunately I couldn't stay for the whole session, but from the interesting stories of what life is like on the front line I got confirmation that there is a big stretch between the visions emerging from Web 2.0 social innovators, and groups still struggling to network their office computers. Are they left to struggle on their own as funding for technical support from Circuit Riders becomes more problematic - as seems likely? Should they just budget tech costs in with phones, print, rent and other overheads - and concentrate on convincing funders of the need for this in core costs? Should Circuit Riders pitch some innovative ideas to social innovation camp? Maybe time for a Newman Arms session.

Technorati Tags: nptech, nptechuk, sic

Re-thinking organisations as networks

Michael Gilbert launches the first edition of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society with a suitably provocative article on The End of the Organization?

In this he ponders whether the growth of internet-based communications means our traditional ways of organising for social good will change dramatically.
Michael's argument is that nonprofit organisations are in large part set up to fit in with past and current ways of raising funds, meeting government regulations, employing people, organising volunteers. We then end up with a hierarchical system of trustees and staff. Organisations also reflect past communication needs - but these are changing:

Relationships within organizations, between organizations, with constituents, the media, funders, policy makers, and others all have distinct patterns of communication that shape the structures of organizations and civil society.
Throughout the world, these patterns of communication are changing. Whether because of the plummeting costs of communication in the developed world or the historical leapfrogging of modes of communication in the developing world, more and more people who wish to communicate with each other, are doing so.
Some existing communication patterns, however local or small scale they may be, genuinely reflect people's motivations and are thus scaling up as barriers to communication are lowered. In turn, they are displacing and destabilizing other patterns, particularly the hierarchical and insular ones that characterize the modern organization.
Is this the end of the organization? Probably not by name and certainly not in the broadest sense of the term. But the traditional, tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change. The organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today.

I would encourage you to read the whole article, and indeed subscribe to the Journal. You get a 300-page pdf for $18.95. Michael is mainly US-based, but the journal has a lengthy article by Geoff Mulgan and colleagues at the London-based Young Foundation, on "Social Innovation. What it is, why it matters, and how it can be accelerated". That's worth the price alone. I'm sure the ideas in the article will be further explored at Social Innovation Camp which Paul Miller and friends are running on April 6-8 at the Foundation.
I'm glad to say this is all very useful underpinning for the re-inventing membership project Simon Berry and I are developing with the RSA and NCVO Foresight team. That was inspired in part by an earlier article by Michael called The Permeable Organisation.
We'll shortly have a multi-user blog system up where anyone interested will be able to help us design the project.
I'm also encouraged by the way that blog comments suddenly pop up which serve to confirm a hunch. A year or so back I posted an item quoting an excellent piece by Lloyd Davis on how social media support the informal "shadow" side of organisations.
Now Philip Holden adds a comment:

I commented on Lloyd's blog because there is some well-established sociological theory that illuminates this.
I don't want to write an essay here (though I guess I should one day, at least on my blog...) so suffice to say that social structures (including companies and voluntary organisations) are just that; social structures.
Simply because they appear to be formal or self-evident doesn't give them any special ontological status. More importantly when they go unquestioned or even unnoticed it's a pretty good bet that they do so to someone's benefit.
Further, the power to recognise certain structures and to legitimise them rests with only some people (rich in certain forms of capital).
Dang! It's turning into an essay.
Can I put it simply? Well, the 'shadow' organisation (or society) has always been there (in Bangladesh as well as elsewhere) but only certain people have the authority to call it out of bounds.
Read Bourdieu!!

If we take notice of the informal as well as the formal, it's the blog comments as well as the journal articles that give us clues about what people are thinking and talking about around the globe.
So - which nonprofit organisations do you think will wither, and which will re-invent themselves?

Previously

• Another social technologist refocusses on ... people
• Putting a personable face on nonprofits
• Why bother with "membership" in future?
• Re-inventing membership online and off

Technorati Tags: innovation, membership, nptech, nptechuk

Re-inventing your online business in public

This is the story of how you can move from a "build it and they (may not) come" approach to online places, to helping people create the places they really want to be on the Net. It involves re-inventing a business in public.
The other day I picked up an invitation to join the "Facebook for the cultural sector" issued by English Heritage, followed by one to UnLtdWorld, "a social networking platform that aims to empower and connect socially-minded individuals." This followed on news of MyCharityPage promoted as "Facebook for UK nonprofits". There was clearly a round of excitement among public agencies and funders a year or so back that is now leading to the roll-out of various places where, the promoters hope, we will gather and befriend each other, develop innovative projects, download resources, share services and so on. That's provided we aren't too busy on the real Facebook, on our blogs, or in a host of other online spaces.
It's not really fair to review the English Heritage Our Place, or UnltdWorld in detail yet, because they are still recruiting users and improving functions.
Still less My Charity Page.com, which says it "is an advanced social networking website with a unique combination of functionality for fundraisers and charities, maximising your fundraising potential at no cost to the charity or fundraiser". Ummm ... no it's not, it is a holding page where you can drop a comment. Maybe it will become a Change.org ... but not for a bit.
What interests me is that these sites still have the flavour of "build it and they will come", which didn't work a decade ago when new sites were more of a novelty. Just adding more functions won't attract experienced online users - because they are very critical and busy elsewhere - or the less experienced because weaning people off email and basic browsing is difficult if there isn't a compelling attraction. If there is a login to negotiate it is even more difficult.
These new sites may succeed if they have really good hosting and facilitation to build their community, linked to events and other activities. Maybe English Heritage and Unltd will be able to do that - if they have money in the budget to pay for the necessary staff. I-genius, which I didn't much care for when it launched, is still going with a fair strip of endorsing logos ... but then they have the attraction of a world summit for social entrepreneurs in Thailand in March.
If these sites do succeed, fine - provided they enable users to join up with what's happening elsewhere by bringing content in and out through feeds. As I argued in Do communities need boundaries? - drawing on Ed Mitchell's analysis of different types of online communities - it isn't helpful to build "walled gardens" on the Net while promoting the virtues of collaboration and innovation. I'm hugely encouraged by endorsement from knowledge management specialist Patrick Lambe who says that Enterprise 2.0 should be leaky.
There is another way, and my friends over at Ruralnetonline are demonstrating that you can both build your online offering with your users - rather than invite them in after the event - and also get away from the one-stop-shop approach aimed at a particular interest group.
For nearly 10 years Ruralnet has been running an online system linked to their work on rural community development and social enterprise. It has some core services, orginally run on FirstClass, with a facility to customise for different organisations or networks, but has been very much "come to our place". Over the past couple of years they have been experimenting with Web 2.0 tools, and moving some services across. Just before Christmas chief executive Simon Berry sought agreement from his colleagues to relaunch everything on their 10th anniversary in March.
What!!??? How do you do that and hope to get it right? Well, don't hope to get it right yourself - invite your customers in to help you re-invent your business. Make them co-creators instead of just "users".
Simon's colleague Paul Henderson is leading the way by creating a multi-user blog site where anyone can sign up and comment on proposals or add their own ideas for next generation services. (I declare a strong interest since I've know the Ruralnet team for 10 years, and I'll be running a face-to-face workshop next week to work through ideas with a focus group).
There are couple of factors that give Simon and his team confidence that they can do things this way. The first is that Ruralnet|UK is not just an online outfit: they do events, training, consultancy, and partnership projects which means they have strong relationships with lots of individuals, organisations and agencies . The second is that experience of the Open Innovation Exchange process we went through last year - creating a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office in public - revealed how energising openness can be. I've just done a short case study here on what we are calling our most successful failure of 2007. Successful because although we didn't win the bid, we got shortlisted and are convinced it is possible to do things differently.
As well as reinventing everything in public, the Ruralnetonline have shifted their business model from "come to our place" to one in which people can pick and mix which of their services they want. The forerunner of this has been an Experts Online widget that you'll find on sites campaigning to save post offices on the one hand, and also on one helping arts charities with governance issues.
I could go on ... but much better if you pop across to Ruralnetonline and let them know if your think it is possible a new online business this way. If you have something to add, I'm sure they'll aim to make their place your place too. Or the reverse ... it doesn't matter these days.
As I've written before (archived here), the RSA is also inventing a new online place for Fellows and collaborators, and on February 15 developers Saul Albert and Andy Gibson will be taking us through second stage development and discussion issues of how open or closed the system should be, among other things. They've done a great job in prototyping, and I think opinion is swinging towards open. The next challenge will be integrating the RSA Networks site into the main RSA site, and deciding what goes within the Fellows-only login. The question of how membership organisations deal with these tough issues will be explored in our re-inventing membership project. I hope some will be prepared to follow the leads offered by RSA and Ruralnet|UK and open-up to the people who know best what they need - their customers/users/members.

Technorati Tags: innovation, membership, online communities, nptech, nptechuk

Do communities need boundaries?

As I've mentioned before, the RSA is developing a site where its 27,000 members can work with each other on civic innovation projects, which comes down to Doing Good Things from tackling climate change to supporting prison learning, or encouraging greater participation in the arts. It's something the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce has been fostering for over 250 years and chief executive Matthew Taylor is determined to give these endeavours a big push using social media, collaborative working, development of collective intelligence and other fashionably 21st century approaches. It's pretty challenging.

One of the issues this raises is whether to do the traditional organisational thing and put these online activities behind a members-only login, or risk giving away some goodies (and exposing your work to worldwide attention) by joining other people on the Net. I think civic innovation can only work outside the login, because of the collaborations needed. On the other hand, if you are focussed on selling membership services a walled garden approach may be appropriate. Or you can have a mix of open-closed, public-private.

I was rehearsing these arguments with another RSA member the other day and she maintained quite strongly that while she saw the point I was making about collaborations, these depended on the development of shared understanding and trust. This could best take place within a community, and communities need some boundaries. That community might be an organisation, or people with a set of shared interests.

A few years back I might have agreed, but since then I've been blogging a lot, joining social networks, and have ended up with a lot of online relationships around issues of engagement, facilitation, organisational development and social media. From the work fellow bloggers put up in public, the conversations we have, and the endorsement of other people that I trust, I've got to the point where I would happily not only ask some of these new friends for their advice but also do a project together. It has already happened quite a bit.

If I walk into the bar of the RSA I know the other people are members or their guests ... but I don't know whether they would welcome me striking up a conversation, and whether they may turn out to be stimulating company or a bit of a bore. If I follow someone blogging I get a sense of their interests and values, not only from their own content but the comments of other people online that I may know. I feel more sense of community with my blogging friends than I do most RSA members because the possibility of relationship is more visible.

OK, I know here's nothing like a good face-to-face conversation to get to know someone, and the best connections come from a mix of online-offline, phone, texting and so-one. The RSA is exploring that mix and last year ran a terrific one-day open space event to kick the whole process off.

However, there is a danger that if you don't spend much time online and experience the potential of online networking, you may jump to a traditional bounded community solution and - perhaps as director of an organisation - instruct your web developers to put all the good stuff behind a login. You end up inluencing the open or closed, sharing or not sharing culture of your organisation by the architecture of your technology, probably without realising what you are doing. I hope Matthew Taylor doesn't do that; discussions are still under way.

What's needed, in my view, is a better way of understanding what it is to be an individual or organisation in many different places, using a mix of different media appropriate to the situation, and forming relationships that may be short-term of long-term. Belonging is becoming a rather complex business ... and so is community ... and so is membership. It's no longer one place, it is distributed.

Fortunately my friend Ed Mitchell is a not only a great online and workshop facilitator, he also spends the time needed to think all this through at both practical and theoretical level. He shares it on his blog, and recently wrote a couple of terrific posts on the issues. He's dealt with both three types of community - centralised, de-centralise and distributed - and also the challenges of facilitating them. He writes:

  With the advent of blogs and other personal tools, people don’t need to converge in centralised communities owned and maintained by publishers or associations or other bodies; they can build their own. Likewise, Social networking, focused around the individual rather than the community, has taken off and given individuals far more control over their public/private divide (although most social networking sites are still ‘walled gardens’).  

Also, there has been a cultural move away from identifying oneself as part of a ‘community’ - it’s all about networks and enlightened self-interest at the moment. This will swing back in a while; a middle ground will be found once the community spaces have made their boundaries more porous and learnt to allow a bit more individualism, third party applications, and more gaming/social networking practices in.

I really urge you to read both posts, and watch out for more on this from Ed. I'm looking forward to working together on our project about Re-inventing membership.

Previously

Who will decide on "open" - and how? - on the OpenRSA blog

2008, here we come. Where next for RSA networks by Sophia Paker

Other posts about RSA

innovation, membership

Insider gets Innovation Exchange job

I'm really pleased to hear that John Craig has been appointed to head up the Government-funded Innovation Exchange that "will find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
Until recently John was head of innovation at the Cabinet Office, and handled the tendering procedure for the Innovation Exchange ... where he's now got the job. I was part of a group that made a fairly innovative bid, produced by writing everything except the budgets on an open web site, inviting anyone interested to join in. We were short listed, but didn't win. Instead it went to a consortium centred around the Government-funded Innovation Unit.  We thought that was a bit inward-looking, and I wrote at the time:

I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However,  I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid.

Public sector Forums reported the story as Whitehall innovation: Proving the oxymoron.
It would be easy to see John's appointment as another inward-facing step.  However ... one of the best things about dealing with Cabinet Office during the tendering process was the great encouragement we got from John. He wasn't a career civil servant, having previously worked at the think tank Demos. While being scrupulously fair he gave us every encouragement and help in what must have seemed a pretty whacky bid to his colleagues. We felt he really saw us having a chance, and I guess the short-listing reflected that.
So my overwhelming feeling is delight that someone with real sympathy for innovative processes has got the job. Parent, midwife and now a good start in life thanks to the initial work on the exchange that's been guided by interim executive director Jonathan Robinson.
Here's the standard stuff from the press release:

The Chair of the Innovation Exchange, Baroness Thornton, said that John Craig’s appointment was “excellent news. John’s blend of skills will ensure that the Innovation Exchange gets the best possible start.”
Valerie Hannon, Director of Strategy at The Innovation Unit, said the role was a challenging one. She went on to say: “The Exchange is in uncharted territory. It is seeking to create new forms of collaboration across the sector. John Craig is returning to his roots in the third sector, but his experience in policy and government will be invaluable in ensuring that the lessons from the Exchange reach the widest possible audience.

John starts on January 1, and says:

I am delighted to be leading the Innovation Exchange and relish the chance to help the collective wisdom of the third sector to tackle social injustice in England. Between us I believe we can make a real difference for excluded young people and for those struggling to live independent lives – charities and social enterprises have the insight and the commitment to help make radical improvements in the services they receive.

The second-phase Innovation Exchange web site is being developed by Headshift, who won an award for their development of the Demos web site as a very conversational blog-based affair ... so we can hope that Innovation Exchange language will become a bit more, well, innovative. Here's John's posts on the Demos site.
There's already some discussion on the Innovation Exchange temporary site around the key themes of Supporting independent living, and Young people: the excluded, marginalised and the at-risk.
Previously: Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, open, openinex

Are charities broken?

Dan McQuillan, who has an impressive track-record of online innovation with Amnesty and other nonprofits, is now saying openly what others are muttering: the charity model is broken for many cause-related purposes.
He said this briefly at a recent get-together for a possible UK version of Netsquared, aimed at promoting web-enabled social innovation.
He has now filled out his thinking in a blog post advocating seedcamps for social innovation. These are competitive-collaborative events where entrepreneurs meet investors and mentors.

Dan writes:

I've heard quite a bit about seedcamp  and it's high octane approach to incubating web innovation. I wonder if the same model could be applied to social innovation? For sure, we need some new methodologies, because it looks like the old way of organising into charities and NGOs is broken.

UNDERMINING INNOVATION
At first sight, seedcamp is a purely business proposition, mentoring startups on competitiveness and providing injections of venture capital. What's that got to do with alleviating social problems?  But compare and contrast with the characteristics of many charities. In my experience, the amount of innovation that makes it out of the door of an NGO is a tenth of what it could be. And the limiting factor isn't rigerous testing of ideas against reality, but institutional conservatism. Anyone who's worked in the sector knows the score; anxiety-based leadership, a focus on internal politics, inter-departmental struggle and an unquestioning conflation of the issue and the organisation.

CATCH UP OR CATCH 22
But charities don't own social issues. And it's lazy behaviour for the rest of society to assume that bunging charities a regular donation is actually good value. We'll see what happens as more sousveillance and web-enabled transparency is applied to the third sector.  The web-savvy minority in nonprofits know that it's urgent for their organisations to catch up with the digital age. "If only the CEO would blog more, if only our campaigners understood facebook..." But are these the core issues? Or is the starker question that the inherent nature of charities as institutions makes them anithetical to the participative and post-deferential nature of the social web?

ROUTING AROUND BLOCKAGES
Personally, I'm more excited about the new modes of collaborative innovation  opened up by the web, and how these can be powerfully applied to solving social issues . I don't just mean web tools themselves, but the wider social modes and processes opened up, from the virtual organisation to crowdsourcing, and from open IP to self-organising networks. There are already examples of NGO startups; GetUp systematically applied the accidentally viral success of MoveOn  to the Australian third sector, and in six months had more members than Amnesty Australia. So if we want to encourage social innovation that leverages these possibilities we need ways to incubate it that are native to this space rather than native to the nineteenth century. Roll on, social innovation seedcamp.

I think Dan is right in doubting whether adding new social media to old models will work, as I wrote here when the Government announced plans for a Third Sector innovation exchange. We need a different approach - and Simon Berry, I and others, tried promoting that through an Open Innovation bid for the innovation exchange. We didn't win, but the process give us some insights into what a different way of doing things might be like. More here about the "official" innovation exchange that's now up and running.
I'm fascinated by the idea of an innovation development process that would mix seedcamp events, online exchanges and many other elements to really put some buzz behind different ways of promoting and supporting social action. I think it's what Matthew Taylor has in mind for the RSA, as I've covered in posts here (scroll down to start at the beginning). But can you innovate successfully from within such a venerable structure, or does the internal change process sap so much of your energy there's too little left for the real work outside? Dan has been brave enough to pose the question. More ideas please.

Technorati Tags: innovation, nonprofit, nptech, nptechuk, rsa

Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Earlier in the year I was involved, with Simon Berry and others, in attempting to win a £1.2 million government contract by writing an "open source" bid for an Open Innovation Exchange in public. We were shortlisted, but didn't win ... and now we can see what the successful team are offering. I have to say it is looking good, and may have some lessons for another innovative initiative, at the RSA.

The Innovation Exchange has been launched to foster innovation within the third sector and to find ways of improving relationships between social innovators, public service commissioners and investors. We have just announced the first two themes around which we seek to build networks, develop innovative capacity and further relationships between innovators, investors and commissioners. Our first two themes are supporting independent living and excluded young people. Please join the conversation online around innovative practice in response to these challenging themes. This is just the beginning. We wanted to get started quickly with launching the network online, with a view to working with you and the growing community in shaping all that we can do together. We’re building up to the launch of an ambitious online networking and collaboration platform by Spring 2008 - we’d really like to hear from you with ideas.

More here on the launch. The main partners in the Innovation Exchange are The Innovation Unit, acevo and social software specialists Headshift. We knew that Headshift would be pitching in with some pretty sophisticated ideas for the website: they won an award for the Demos site last year and have done a range of other innovative projects using a mix of blogs, wikis and other tools.
However, the Innovation Exchange team have not (yet, anyway) fallen into the trap of spending enormous sums of money on a highly complex system which may not get used. Instead they have set up a modest but effective blog-based site with the aim of moving to a more more substantial collaboration system in Spring 2008 once they have more experience of what's needed.
Once you register on the site you can add your own blog posts under the two themes of independent living and excluded young people.
The interim executive director is Jonathan Robinson, who has done so much to make The Hub in London and elsewhere such a brilliant model for incubating social innovation.
There's an outline of how the exchange will work - through networks and a Next Practice programme

The Innovation Exchange will establish and support Innovation Networks – large social networks focused on tackling specific social problems. Innovation Networks will be open to innovators on the demand side (public service commissioners and managers), on the supply side (practitioner innovators from any sector trying to tackle the problem) and to social investors from any sector (philanthropists, CSR funds, Foundations or government funds) interested in tackling the social problem. Over time we will look to evolve these networks to help scale up innovative or ‘next’ practice across the third sector.
Emerging from each Innovation Network will be a Next Practice programme to provide bespoke advice and brokerage support to fledgling innovation projects. The Next Practice Programme will focus on a sharper and more refined version of the problem set by the original Innovation Network. Each programme will be sponsored by a panel of social investors, public service commissioners and policy makers who will provide direction, focus and an external audience for the participants in the programme.

Meanwhile the RSA, which is engaged in its own programme of innovation involving its 27,000 Fellows, has set up an RSA Networks blog hosted by Mick Fealty, perhaps best known as Slugger O'Toole. You can see an interview with Mick here, from earlier in the year, where he likens hosting blog conversations to running a pub. He's been dealing with my slight provocations on site with outstanding good humour.

On the blog Sophia Parker wants to check how far Fellows will commit to the innovation programme, and asks for ideas about moving from networks to projects:

The first (question) is the extent to which we as the Fellows are up for this - by which I mean Matthew's vision of turning the Fellowship into a 'network for civic innovation'. How many of us will find the time and energy and commitment to work together in new ways? My hope and aspiration is that enough of us want to do it to really begin to make a difference. What do others think?
At this point, my thoughts are that this project is not about turning every single Fellow into a civic innovator. It is about giving people multiple 'ways in' to their organisation. For some, that will be finding other like-minded Fellows. For others, it will be about coming together in a local area to change something. We must find better ways of enabling these kinds of connections between Fellows. But it is also true that the RSA cannot directly support every single initiative that Fellows begin.
And that leads to my second question - how does the RSA decide in an open and transparent way which projects it should put serious resources behind? I feel strongly that the Fellows themselves should be involved in this process - but the question is how this happens: how can Fellows themselves shape the agenda that the RSA sets through its large-scale projects?

NESTA is funding the RSA programme,  and is one of the partners in the Innovation Exchange, so there may be a chance to connect productive and innovative thinking about networks on both fronts.
I'm also glad to say that the OpenRSA initiative that a group of us have been promoting in support of the "official" RSA initiative has just got some unexpected recognition. The California-based team at Wikispaces, who host our site, have chosen OpenRSA as their space of the month.
The RSA Networks site could benefit from some additional functionality, as Mark and I have suggested, so perhaps its time to join up.

Technorati Tags: openinex, openrsa, rsanetworks, rsa

Engagement isn't marketing, members are more than customers

I believe much fresh thinking and innovation emerges from cross-overs between sectors, disciplines and cultures, and so I was fascinated to sit in on a presentation last week about engaging and expanding membership of a charity, given by a team from a major retailer. (Is there such a big difference these days? I'll come back to that).
The challenge given to the retail team was to help the RSA in its re-invention process towards a network for civic innovation (previous RSA postings here). They interviewed staff and members (Fellows), and looked at other organisations (possible competitors for members). They came up with an engagement plan, shown here, starting before the big event planned by the RSA for Fellows on November 22**, following through to further activities. There was a lot of emphasis on promoting the vision of the chief executive, Matthew Taylor.

My immediate reaction to the presentation was "you've got it wrong - this is just marketing", moderated to "you've got some of it right", through to something about "it depends where you are sitting, and your view of the world".
The retail team were presumably chosen as advisers because their stores suffered a potentially catastrophic downturn in business a couple of years back,  and are now on the way up thanks to the drive and vision of a new chief exec. Matthew Taylor is trying for major changes at RSA, including expansion of membership from 26,000 to 100,000 in a few years. He wants Fellows (customers?) to be at the heart of the organisation, not the edge. You can see the video here.
The retailers offered eight principles of good engagement:

1. From the horses mouth
2. Timely, transparent and full disclosure
3. A concept you can pass on
4. One big idea
5. Delivered with energy and personality
6. Dialogue and discussion
7. Hand over ownership to the audience
8. Next steps, easy, clear and booked in

They said that their new chief executive was brilliant at achieving this in big events with managers, sending them back to their stores to enthuse staff. They said it was very important to give managers clear guidelines on how to do this. They had tried leaving it to managers to choose their own methods, but it hadn't been too successful. The implication - for me anyway - was that on November 22 Fellows need to leave the event fired up with missionary zeal to put Matthew's vision into practice.
Maybe I misunderstood the detail - but I started to feel uncomfortable because it seemed a pretty top-down approach, and didn't fit well with the idea of Fellows creating networks for action using social media and other distinctly peer-to-peer models. In the spectrum of engagement, is seemed to sit up the inform and consult end rather than collaborate and empower ... which is where the RSA narrative is.

Anyway, I didn't write about the event straight away, but let the ideas ferment for a few days. That led me to think that maybe the retailers had got some of it right - perhaps the part that they would understand best. The RSA does need to improve and market its services to Fellows - the bar, library, restaurant and so on. Otherwise people will start to wonder whether they are just foot-soldiers in Matthew's New Army of civic volunteers ... and why are they paying £130 or so a year for that? The other thing they got right is that any telling-selling-engaging process shouldn't stand or fall on one big event. It is a long process ... so November 22 is just one milestone.
What didn't seem right was the overall emphasis on "selling" a vision ... when anyone in the nonprofit sector knows that ultimately volunteer activists do what volunteer activists want to do, so it is important to get some alignment of interests. Ideally you should co-design programmes with them.
It was at this point of musing that I reminded myself how important the culture, context and background is in understanding, quite literally, where people are coming from. The retailers had been through a few scary/energising years of decline and resurrection, and their presentation featured lots of press cuttings about "slide goes on" ... "faces more storms ahead" ... then ... "stunning sales" and "eight year peak". Of course they would draw upon this experience when faced with the challenge of re-inventing the RSA.
Similarly, Matthew Taylor must have in mind some of his experience in the Labour Party. As Simon Dickson points out, there's a passage in the video I did of Matthew where he talks about his idea for a network of civic for innovation. He says:

Part of the reason I was enthused by this idea is that I tried to do it at the Labour Party for ten years - and it was totally impossible. I spent ten years saying ‘can’t we turn our members into civic entrepreneurs? can’t we actually look like we believe in progressive change on the ground, rather than just knocking on people’s doors?’ The party leadership and party stakeholders were utterly resistant to this idea.

I certainly don't think that replaying that experience more successfully is the main motivation behind the vision ... but I guess you can't spend 10 years or so in the service of the New Labour modernising machine without being touched by its less-than-empowering culture. It's a great tribute to Matthew's versatility that, if there, it isn't too evident.
In order to put all this into the context of engagement theory, I cast my mind back to some excellent work undertaken by Jack Martin Leith a few years back when he charted engagement and ideas generation methods against worldview - you can find it here.
Put simply, within Worldview 1, the world is a machine and methods you are drawn to  are fairly mechanistic. Under Worldview 2 the world is a system, while in Worldview 3 it is a field of energy and consciousness ... and undoubtedly a lot messier, as I've touched on here and here.
I suspect that part of the difficulty the RSA faces is that the different interests involved have different worldviews, and don't have a way to talk about this. I hope that NESTA Connect - who are funding the current exercise - have work-in-progress monitoring in place to see how things play out, because process is as interesting as outcomes in engagement. There may be lessons for that from Diane Warburton's work on evaluation of public participation.

Phew. I didn't expect to spend quite as long on this piece as I have. It shows (for me) how interesting the RSA is at present. I'll hang in as long as it gives me stuff to write about. I suspect many other Fellows have their own rather diverse interests and motivations as well.
Perhaps the most telling exchange during the RSA-retailer event was when someone pointed out that most of the engagement processes discussed were aimed at managers. How did they know whether their customers were engaged or not? "Well, if they don't like us, they don't come to the stores" was the reply.
Not a bad lesson - if you remember members of charities aren't just buying, they are contributing ... so they require even more care and attention. It is interesting to listen in to the re-invention process ... it would be even more motivating to play a more active part.
** The part that Fellows can play in the process has been un-clarified by a message to those who signed up following the November 22 event invitation, believing that would ensure a place. Unfortunately this isn't so, and Matthew now tells us "we will be making our final selection of registrants shortly to ensure that we have as representative a group of Fellows as possible here on the day".
However, all is not lost for those who may be disappointed. An earlier mailing to those interested inadvertently displayed some 260 e-mail addresses, thus giving any Fellow the opportunity, for the first time, to contact directly others interested in the re-invention process. Nobody has yet, which suggests either a high degree of satisfaction with the way things or going, or a generally low-level of social media awareness ... or maybe a feeling of "let's see how it goes, don't rock the boat". Just in case that changes, I suggest the event organisers take a look at Communities Dominate Brands, by Alan Moore and Tomi T Ahonen. As I reported here, Alan has a compelling metaphor, warning brands about complacency once their customers can find each online:  "once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job."
The retailers didn't mention that one.

Open Innovation: public sector forums pick up the story

As I wrote recently, those of us involved in the Open Innovation Exchange bid were naturally disappointed not to win, but then even more saddened to see that the Cabinet Office has chose a group close to Government to carry the initiative forward.
Public Sector Forums has now picked up the story, but unless you work in the sector you can't get full privileges on the site to read the feature (you can, however,  sign up here for Public Sector Forum newsletter).
I'm grateful  to have permission from editor Ian Cuddy for permission to reproduce it here in full.

Whitehall innovation: Proving the oxymoron

Published: 7 August 2007

Unpleasant mutterings have, we've afraid to say, been doing the rounds over the last week about the Cabinet Office's awarding of a prestigious contract - worth a cool £1.2m - to create what is billed as an 'online Innovation Exchange for the Third Sector'.

Our saga officially begins back in May when the Invitation for Tender first appeared, seeking a partner for a 'three year pilot' aimed at "fostering, exchanging and replicating third sector innovation" to bolster nonprofit involvement in public services.

This was, however, to be no ordinary procurement.

In a first for a government tender, a group of individuals came up with a truly ground-breaking approach to constructing the tender bid in an open forum online, inspired by collaborative 'open source' software development.

Putting to the test the premise of Web 2.0 bible Wikinomics -  ie 'Collaborate or die' -  the group, known as the Open Innovation Exchange, set up a multi-user blog using open source software. Anyone could contribute if they wished - and over 90 people did in the space of weeks. Acting as a largely virtual, distributed network, everything was done in a completely open and transparent way - even the various drafts of the bid were published openly on the web for all to see. Into the mix came podcasts, YouTube videos, wikis and 'folksonomies'. It even had a Facebook group. Simon Berry, Chief Exec of Ruralnet which led the bid, commented on his blog: " This is an innovation in its on right and is the first time this has been done. It is in stark contrast to the traditional 'cloak and dagger'  approach to bid preparation."
To top things off, the approach was nominated as finalist on New Statesman New Media Awards (though being one of the judges probably helped). And when their team made the final four shortlisted bids for the contract, the world of what some call Non-Profit 2.0 - think Web 2.0 meets voluntary and charity work and where phrases such as 'social mediaspheres', 'crowdsourcing'  'widgetised connective tools' are the watchwords of the day - was ablaze with excitement.
Unfortunately, the Cabinet Office announced last week it had decided to award the contract for the Innovation Exchange not to them but to the Innovation Unit, a government-funded body set up by the Department for Education and Skills. Its partners in the consortium were named as software consultancy Headshift and the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary organisations, aka Acevo.
The news was not particularly a surprise to Mr Berry, who had this to say following an apparently un-promising interview with the Cabinet Office:

"John Craig [Head of Innovation at the Cabinet Office] has indicated to me that they were looking for a partner that already knew what needed to be done and had specific actions to make it happen. It could be argued that this reflects more traditional thinking ie "we know how innovation works, this is what needs to be done and this is how we are going to do it."

I also think that they had problems with our approach to the web presence for the Innovation Exchange and would have preferred more complete designs to be presented. This was exactly what Ben Whitnall of Delib thought would happen. In the video after the interview he said: "We weren't about trying to build a proprietary, monolithic new system to bring everyone to us, we just wanted to leverage what was out there already. Unfortunately, I don't think that makes for a very sexy pitch . . ."

Obviously, I am really disappointed with this decision but have to say that I am not surprised. There was a "lack of chemistry" during our interview. Jane Berry said afterwards I don't think they want innovation [in the delivery of the Innovation Exchange], they just want somewhere to put it".

At the end of the day we didn't want to do what they wanted and the customer is always right!"

The Open Innovation Exchange's discussions bid, available on its website, had already flagged up several issues. Of some concern was that the Innovation Exchange envisaged by the Cabinet Office appeared to focus solely on public sector examples and on models based on the thoughts of Geoff Mulgan, Tony Blair's former head of policy and prior to that the Cabinet Office's ex-Director of Strategy and Innovation. The OIE noted in their final bid that a report by Geoff Mulgan, titled Ready or not? Taking innovation in the public sector seriously was published alongside the Invitation to Tender, and appeared to be "very similar" in their thinking. In perhaps not the most diplomatic move, they highlight the following quote from the aforementioned report:

"People who have seen the trials and tribulations of past innovations are much better placed to make judgments than generalist officials or Ministers."

Their bid goes on to note that Mulgan's tract refers a 'confidential draft' of the Audit Commission's recent report on Innovation in Local Government, which they again unfortunately were not allowed to see until the official publication date. The delicious ironies keep on coming, don't they?

Commenting on the contract award, David Wilcox, who helped to put together the 'open source' bid remarked:

"I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However, I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid."

All this brings to mind what PSF said recently about the Cabinet Office's recent Power of Information Review, the recent clarrion-call to Whitehall to 'get with' Web 2.0-type social media movements, tap into their innovations and harness the benefits of engaging of non-government networks.

We remarked of this admirable goal at the time: "The problem is of course, we're dealing here not with sane, web-savvy persons at all but with the topsy-turvey, Alice in Wonderland world of Her Majesty's Government and that's where all this falls down." We hate to say we've been proven right!

I think Ian puts it very well, apart from a couple of minor points: I stepped out of the New Awards judging for the section where the OIE was nominated; and the Facebook group is a more recently addition, where we are promoting the idea of a New Media Innovation Exchange.
There's now more on the Innovation Unit site about the exchange, but not - as far as I can see - what the plans are in any detail. Why not publish the winning bid - without figures if necessary?

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