Designing for Civil Society

Clay Shirky today at the RSA

Clay Shirky gave a great presentation today on his book Here Comes Everybody. I was sitting in the second row of the RSA Great Room, so shot some video. The RSA will be putting the pro version up on its site sometime in the future ... but I know a number of people who were keen to hear Clay couldn't make it, so here's a taste.
Clay spent the first part of his talk giving three examples filling out what he says in the book:

Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.
In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.

The examples were of students organising through Facebook against the bank HSBC when it withdrew a free overdraft offer; young people in Belarus organising an ice-cream social in a square where gatherings were banned; Sicilian businesses organising online against the Mafia.
After the examples Clay provided some analysis, which is what I've captured in the video. He started by assuring us he wasn't going to promise a post-hierarchical paradise in which organiastions wither away; that story had been around for 10 years ... with a constant promise that it would happen sometime. Rather we are at the beginning of experimenting with the way that power shifts because of the ability of goups to communicate, and then to come together to take action.  There's a 40 minute video here from a talk Clay gave at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Update: Kevin Anderson has blogged an excellent paraphrase of Clay's presentation and the  Q and A.

Technorati Tags: collaboration

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

Now libraries are lending people

Librarians have been working hard to keep ahead in the Internet age, but it was only yesterday I learned that some will now help you borrow a person as well as a book or other information container. It turns out this is a smart way of re-introducing those ancient forms of knowledge transfer: conversation and storytelling.
My chum Kevin Harris passed on news of the Living Library seminar, on October 24. It's being held at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, so it is serious stuff. The flyer says:

‘Living Library’ gives direct access to someone else’s experience, by allowing people to ‘borrow’ someone who is an expert in their field, has significant experience to share, or is passionate about a hobby.
‘Loans’ take the form of a conversation, and can last for half an hour, a morning or an afternoon. The Living Library has been developed in a  number of countries and this seminar has been organised to share experiences from Australia and Belgium, which clearly illustrate the contribution that library, museum and archive services can make to community cohesion

Among the questions to be explored are:

• What ways can be found to link the topic ‘borrowed’ with existing, more permanent, resources?
• Should Living Library be mainstreamed?
• Is the MLA (Museum, Libraries Archives Council) sector the appropriate place for such initiatives?

Ah, not on offer in your local library yet, then. A little Googling leads me to a report in the Australian Daily Telegraph about a Living Library pilot in Lismore, which illuminates the reference to community cohesion:

Another living book is Aboriginal artist Albert "Digby" Moran who took part because he wanted to break down the barriers between "white and black". As he is a storyteller through his art, the 59-year-old finds it easy to tell people about his life including what it was like to grow up as an Aboriginal in a white school.
"Everyone has a story to tell, people just need to take more time to listen," Mr Moran said.

One of my favourite blogs is by the Australian consultancy Anecdote, who apply storytelling techniques to knowledge management and much else. They also favour mud maps, as I reported here. My friend Larry Stillman is over here from Melbourne in December, so I hope to learn more of innovations down under. Apparently colleagues have been adapting some of our games for information and knowledge management.
Meanwhile I commend Kevin's closer-to-home blog on neighbourhoods and community, where he manages his own blend of policy analysis and chat. I particularly like the frog sheltering from climate change.

The power of online-offline convening

A combination of Facebook, meeting room, pub and light-touch hosting last night demonstrated the social networking power of online-offline convening. A dozen of us gathered to talk about the potential for social media to help re-invent the RSA, sparked by my earlier post. We ended up with a micro-demo of how that might happen.
Ian Delaney, who hosted the event on behalf of NMK, has provided an excellent roundup of conversations that started online in Facebook, moved to Ian's workplace at the University of Westminster, and then to a pub around the corner.
As Ian explains, the RSA - Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce - is, on the face of it, doing well:

Established 250 years ago, it currently has about 26,500 Fellows. They can attend a very full and well-attended events schedule; they get the letters FRSA after their name; there’s no shortage of applications for its paid membership. Business is booming. And yet there’s a little bit of a problem.
The Society’s problem is that times have changed. Fellows are apparently expressing some degree of disgruntlement that they don’t feel involved with the programme or the Society. While in the past, a programme of well-planned lectures from eminent persons, nice premises on the Strand and a learned journal several times a year seemed satisfactory, that’s no longer enough. Today’s younger members want projects they can join, causes they can work with and more of a say, arguably, in what’s happening at the Society. There’s a feeling of empty hands that want to be filled.

As I wrote here,  organisations may well face challenges as their members find they can get benefits more cheaply and readily online. The RSA has seen that coming, and led by its chief executive Matthew Taylor is currently engaged internally in thinking through how social media and other changes can really harness the potential of its membership for both social action and personal learning and development.
Ian reports some of our ideas from last night, including a network in Facebook, and a sort of RSA version of Yahoo Answers, where Fellows could answer each others' questions. I think my friends at Ruralnet could offer some expertise from their development of Experts Online. Another idea was a really good searchable directory.
We heard from Anshuman Rane - who is Web and New Media Manager at RSA - that he and other staff are thinking along these lines, with plenty more ideas bubbling up for a wider discussion later in the year with Fellows. I hope we provided additional encouragement.
I was particularly interested by our discussion around the RSA's role as convenor, which Ian summarises:

Further discussion picked up around what the RSA’s brand values might be. One example of that was as an ‘excellent convener’. That it draws very brilliant and interesting people together. However, the RSA is keen that the Society was not just viewed a place or a publication, but also as an actor. That it allows for the creation of brilliant ideas and then also acts upon them. How to decide among those ideas for the ones to publically support is one problem (maybe the case for a prediction market). Another is the extent to which the Society might rightly claim some sort of part-ownership for creating that chemistry - not in a commercial sense, but in a branding sense.

Some Fellows - as I reported earlier - feel the RSA can seem rather smug and paternalistic .... a bit top-down, epitomised by the lectures in its Great Room. You have to put your hand up to ask  a question of the experts on the stage. If the RSA stays mainly in this mode, we can expect a "place" for discussion among Fellows behind a login. I agree with Ian:

In my own opinion, social media policy from the RSA can’t work on the basis of containing discussion within a particular forum or blog or social network. Nor can it claim ownership of ideas created through its auspices. Those discussions and ideas, as with any brand or grouping, cannot be contained or owned. They are and will happen anyway. What the Society might work to is the idea that having your ideas and business connected to it in some way earns kudos. Yeah, we came up with it/ met them at the RSA network/bar/forum mentioned a few times in business interviews and conversations as a point of pride, the same way certain members’ clubs and restaurants are spoken about, would do a great deal for the current and future value of membership. Like MySpace members adopting brands as friends, new and existing companies that friend the RSA in some way in the social media space may well be a way forward.
So they it needs a widget. And it needs a way to get people to adopt that widget. That’s the tricky bit, I expect.

What's equally important, I think, is the offline equivalent ... a recognition that anyone can pull together a group of people to start a conversation, in the spirit of the origins of the RSA in a Covent Garden coffee house.
What makes that possible is the more democratic, bottom-up convening power that mixing online and offline now provides.
A blog gave me the chance to air some thoughts on the RSA - gathered here - but Facebook provided the means to pull together a group online for a quick discussion. Ian then offered the offline convening capacity of NMK, more often deployed for larger industry-related events like the annual forum. What really made it work was the great mix of talents we had in the room. I thought we might need some "facilitation". Get into groups, write some post-it notes, prioritise topics. Nahh. We had a good chat - aided by NMK wine - went to the pub, and formed some groups there.
If RSA will provide the hospitality next time - with a similarly light touch - I'm sure we'll get another great flowering of ideas.
What I'm not quite sure about, for the moment, is what happens in between, and where we'll talk about it. However, I am pretty confident that one of the group will have a suggestion within a day or so ... and can easily set that up as a virtual coffee house, pub ... choose your metaphor. Your place or mine ... it doesn't really matter.

Technorati Tags: nptech, rsa, socialnetworking

Butterfly thoughts on innovation, engagement, open source and co-creation

Work and thoughts about open innovation, workshops games,  mixing face-to-face and online, Web 2.0 for non profits,  have led me into a lot of interesting conversations recently, and I think that they are joining up.
They include designing personal learning environments, re-inventing membership organisations, judging new media awards, open sourcing politics, building systems using free web apps from Google.
I wish I could say these are now paying jobs or viable projects, but it's more that I read a lot of blogs and can't resist free invites to events or a chat over coffee.  Anyway, I'm hopeful there's value in there somewhere, and was greatly cheered by a call from Leon Cych of Learn 4 Life asking me to do a podcast about Web 2.0 and learning.
I find it isn't until I have to do a presentation, interview, or article that I really pull some ideas together, so it was a good opportunity to extract some common strands from the above, and then continue reflection afterwards.
Leon gives his contributors a chance to talk a bit about their past as a lead in to the topic ... their learning journey ... which reminded me I did serve a spell as education correspondent of the Reading Evening Post many years ago before moving through more journalism, regeneration and public engagement consultancy before focussing on (well, wandering about) designing collaborations for social benefit. I hope.
At the heart of my conversation with Leon was the piece I wrote about a workshop at a London college with Roy Charles of Policy Unplugged. We ran a game to help staff think about moving from teacher-driven virtual learning environments to Web 2.0-based personal learning environments. That also led to reflections about journeys of discovery, planning and implementation, and how these are often best done openly and collaboratively. Leon and I talked about the unsuccessful but highly instructive process of writing an "open source" tender bid to Government for the Open Innovation Exchange.
I'll link to the podcast when it's up. Meanwhile here's some thoughts the interview helped trigger, and which are likely to be recurring themes in future postings. It's a bit link-heavy, and referencing will be easier when I get around to organising past posts on proper topic pages. Meanwhile please try the tags in the right sidebar for other topics. Here goes.
Be cautious (and then innovative) when asked for a proposal or an answer. It's always flattering when someone asks for advice, or a proposal. Fire off some wisdom, write the bid. But how often do we have "the answer?". Producing the bid for the Open Innovation Exchange with Simon Berry and many others showed how much more productive and fun it is to work collaborative, and to do that openly. You even end up in Society Guardian.
Help people design solutions for themselves. An extension or counterpart to open sourcing proposals is to offer those with the problem some simple tools that help them design their own solutions. That's the aim of the useful games that Drew Mackie and I have developed over the years. They show that getting people together for a few hours with some simple props produces rich conversations and ideas likely to be carried forward because everyone has some ownership. There are, of course, lots of ways of doing this, and Chris Corrigan offers us a list of the facilitation methods he uses.
Turn engagement and participation into collaboration. Another fascinating conversation I had recently was with the director of an organisation promoting public engagement processes through research, advice to government and consultancy. We agreed that a lot of the programmes aren't working because agencies don't listen, or can't deliver. As my colleague Drew wrote a few years back, we are Dancing While Standing Still. We are still. I wrote awhile back with Lee Bryant about the ways that new media may help us re-think engagement, and we have even played that through with civil servants. It now seems blindingly obvious to me that engagement doesn't work without collaboration - that is, the power-holding agencies or others managing the processes have to be prepared to commit to action. I think that's far more likely in (as above) an open process where people have been involved in designing the solution. Which leads to ...
Co-design engagement processes. As I've written here, the 250-year-old RSA is trying to re-invent itself with the involvement of 26,000 Fellows (members). It will - I believe - work much better when they get to the stage of bringing the Fellows in to the process. This is planned through a big event in November, but why not tell people what is going on, and involve some champions openly now in designing the process? Dialogue by Design have an online tool for that which complements our engagement game.
Think open source thinking. Remix. My friend Beth Kanter, who blogs about nonprofit technology from a US base, is a terrific advocate of open source thinking, which she describes like this:

Open source thinking is sharing and remixing. You've got to set your ideas free, you can't  control your content. It is a different mindset: "Ah darn, someone  else has got there first" versus "Great, don't have to do that, I can  build it on it!" For me, it's been the ability to think out loud with  colleagues on ideas and topics, share presentations, etc.

Beth is encouraging just that with a social media game we developed, and I'm delighted. Latest remix is from Italy.
Try paper prototyping before rapid prototyping. I recently chatted at some length to a company that wants to create an online community related to its business. They have a long list of functions ... news, forums, chat, profiling, buddies etc. I argued strongly for the sort of approach advocated by our friends at Delib during the Open Innovation Exchange process ... look to the Internet as your platform, be prepared to build a prototype and rapidly revise. Even better, before that, try it out on paper as we did with the e-learning game mentioned above. Either way, don't start with the tools, start with the people and the problem you are trying to solve. 

Go to other people's places as well as creating your own. Related to the above is the now fairly standard advice (unless you are desperate to sell a system) that it is often better online to find where people are gathered and start conversations there. Bill Thompson explains here what's happening on Facebook. This also applies in the face-to-face world: before planning a stand-alone seminar find out if you can run a workshop at someone else's conference. It is much easier to go where people are, than get them to come to you.
Experiment with free web tools before building new. My son Dan and I have done quite a bit over the past year with the open source content management system Drupal. It has lots of different modules for blogs, forums, calendars, static pages and so on that you can mix and match for your particularly needs. It worked well for the Open Innovation Exchange. However, it does take quite a bit of maintenance to ensure modules are updated, and functions tweaked, and some effort to help users understand what's possible. These days I'm becoming more interested in what you can do using the many free or low-cost Web 2.0 tools, as Techsoup shows. (Thanks again Chris). I've recently been developing a set of linked free tools matched by a design game, and should be able to write about that soon.
Look over the (virtual) fence. One of the strong themes to emerge from my chat with Leon was that similar ideas bubble up in different disciplines, professions and sectors, but it still takes us time to recognise that because of different vocabularies and networks. This came through strongly to me at the recent launch of NESTA Connect, with the chance to hear about the 30-year history of user-based innovation from Professor Eric von Hippel. Leon gave me further inspiration during our chat, with references to what is happening in education and his work in Second Life. I'm constantly refreshed by contact with Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff who have produced an open sauce manifesto of co-creation for a marketing audience. Then there's David Gurteen in knowledge management, Michele Martin on scarcity thinking and the problems this bring for change (and much more), Simon Collister on PR in the Web 2.0 world .. but these are just a few of the inspirations available if you use blogs and the Net to look across at what others are doing and thinking.
But why bother to blog about it? For me because it is how I learn, meet people, kick start ideas and conversations, do some cross-fertilising, find some clients. I think in this game you have to be a butterfly as well as a bee.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, engagement, innovation, open source, openinex, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Knowledge sharing over a burger

I'm a great fan of David Gurteen's series of knowledge cafes, and the opportunities they provide to chat with people from many different background about what works in knowledge sharing and technology - and what doesn't. An invitation to a free knowledge barbecue in what used to be the Royal Naval College in Greenwich was therefore irresistible. Part of the college is now the University of Greenwich Business School, and thanks to Martyn Lacock and others working there we had  great food and chats.
Since the next cafe on July 11 is on the use of video, I couldn't resist pulling out my camera and catching David recalling why he started running cafes, and explaining how they are spreading.
Click To Play  Also on blip.tv
We chatted afterwards about how different settings help conversations - and how DIY technology helps you capture and replay conversations in different formats. David was rightly rather pleased he had recently learned how to turn his videos into a podcast. So having done that, he tells us how to do it. Overall it was another demonstration that knowledge management and sharing is much easier if you are prepared to be generous and sociable.
Previously: Need some knowledge sharing? Bring on the reintermediators!

Tough questions please about our open bid

After the delight at being shortlisted for the Innovation Exchange, our team is rehearsing for an interview at the Cabinet Office next Tuesday. We wondered how best to do that. Meet, of course - and we are doing that tomorrow thanks to the hospitality of Warwick Business School.
But do we keep our best final ideas to our ourselves? Nope. We've got this far by developing proposals in public - so why stop now?
We are developing a Q and A page on the Open Innovation Exchange site, and would really welcome some more tough questions, comments - or indeed answers. This is still co-creation.

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex

Reinventing the RSA together

The venerable Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (est 1754) has a good chance of becoming one of the few membership bodies that combines a great range of face-to-face events and lectures with sociability and knowledge-sharing online, harnessing both to make-a-difference external projects.
Last week's RSA seminar about the social impact of the web - reported by Robin Hamman, Simon Dickson, Andrew Brown - was interesting in its own right. Just as interesting for me was confirmation from chief executive Matthew Taylor that the RSA is launching a major programme to network the 26,000 members (known as Fellows), as I trailed last year.
The head of marketing and communication, Susan Butler, is leading an exploration into how best to do this, including a major event in October when the whole of the RSA HQ will be used by staff, Fellows and well-wishers for creative sessions to help design what's appropriate.
I believe my friend Steve Moore, at Policy Unplugged, is involved, so I'm confident it will be fun and productive. I met Susan for a chat and enthused about the scope for using workshop games to play through possible online systems, as described here.
However, what really made me feel it could all be rather special was the number of smart online people I met at the seminar who were saying ... the RSA seems to be an interesting place .... I was thinking of joining up. That's in addition to those who are already Fellows. Subscriptions are fairly modest at £135 a year.
If Matthew, Susan and others involved are prepared to make this a fairly open process, drawing on expertise of current and new Fellows, the RSA could fulfil its promise of becoming a real collective-intelligence think tank.
I do have one slight reservation. As I understand it, at present the aim is to network the Fellows somewhat independently of the staff. That's probably with the best of intentions, so we feel some independence from the institution, and ability to develop new ideas and projects. However, I think that assumption - if correct - should be reviewed. Instead of an old-style staff-volunteers-members mentality, how about thinking of the RSA - and its wider relationships - as one big system of knowledge and creativity, within which people can mix and match around their interests and activities. Matthew's Blog is called "The view from the 4th floor ..." while Fellows are most frequently found socialising or studying in the bar and library in the basement. I think it's time we all met up in the same space.

Technorati Tags: knowledgesharing, rsa, socialnetworking, socialtech

Proved again: being open gathers supporters

One of the main principles for getting people engaged in a project, programme, online community - whatever - is that early involvement  creates a sense of ownership and commitment. So I shouldn't really be surprised that the New Media Awards nomination for the Open Innovation Exchange has attracted a string of supportive comments.
Of course, some of these are among the scores of people who collaborated to develop, in public, a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office. In this case support from friends and collaborators is exactly what it is about, since the project we are bidding for is an innovation exchange.
In particular, I think the support is a bit different from the self-nomination and promotion criticised by The Register in the modernising government section ... isn't it?
Since all comments are public, I've taken the slight liberty of copying below. As I've written here, I'm one of the judges, but not for this section. You can still comment here. Judges meet for the  awards July 2, but interviews for the tender are June 12 ... so we might know before judging whether or not we have the contract. End of promo ... over to the commenters:

The Open Innovation Exchange bid process was really interesting to be involved in - and for me has already sparked off many new ideas and actions... hopefully it will have the chance to be put in place and to spark many more for many more...
Submitted by Tim Davies, 18 May 2007

Even playing a small role and exchanging ideas with one or two other participants was an interesting and stimulating exercise which allowed new connections to be made and other ideas to be generated. This is an approach I will use elsewhere.
Submitted by Paul Nash, 19 May 2007

At last - the opportunity to create without bending to the preconceptions of fund holders
Submitted by Barrie Duke, 19 May 2007

It was a brave step to take, and pleasing to see that it actually arrived at a result, with an open-ness of process that was both astonishing, rapid, and productive!
Submitted by Roger Greenhalgh, 19 May 2007

It was really good to be able to just challenge ideas and feed into improving the bid, without the requirement to 'carve out a slice' for my institution.
I could dip in and engage in the ideas, without devoting 5 days full time to bid writing. Great experiment. Deserves support. And what is an innovation exchange for if it's not about SHARING ideas.
Submitted by Andy Dearden, 21 May 2007

Whether or not the team win the bid or not, they’ve done something genuinely new. It’s one of the neatest institutional hacks I’ve seen in a long time.
Submitted by Paul Miller, 22 May 2007

A completely refreshing and original approach to writing a bid. They totally deserve to win!!
Submitted by Matt Stevenson-Dodd, 22 May 2007

A very innovative approach that encouraged reflection on the drivers of innovation
Submitted by Kerry McCarthy, 22 May 2007

It will be very interesting to see what results from this revolutionary idea. It deserves to succeed if only to embarrass all past and present bidders for not seeing that this is a way forward.
Submitted by Keyham Books - Rural Enterprise, 22 May 2007

If anyone wants to understand capacity building in it's real sense look no further.
The service development model that's been developed here turns current thinking on it's head. At last an opportunity for the sector to learn from itself through doing and developing new services. Much better than being trained to do by others.
Submitted by Simon Marshall - What's Your Point ?, 23 May 2007

An example of what can be done by people who are not afraid to try something different. Open Source in action and a worthy winner of the category.
Submitted by alex stobart, 23 May 2007

A model which, if widely adopted, has the potential to produce real change and save the time wasted in writing "failed bids"
Submitted by Peter Gray, 24 May 2007

Technorati Tags: innovation, openinex

Open Innovation Exchange starts to buzz

Since starting the Open Innovation Exchange a couple of days ago we've had a really gratifying response to our experiment in developing an open source bid for a £1.2 million Government contract. The aim is two-fold: first, to create an exception proposal for ways in which nonprofit can share knowledge, and improve public service delivery. Secondly, to demonstrate that it is possible to collaborate in a competitive situation, and so improve upon public procure processes. As I wrote previously:

The difficulty in tendering for complex and challenging projects is that you know your proposals may well turn out to be inadequate because there's no way of figuring out in advance  what will work. Ideally the solutions have to be worked out with those who are "the problem". But if you do go in with a proposal full of co-creation workshops with stakeholders, there's a danger you will be seen as fuzzy. It's all too easy to end up either in tacit collusion between consultants and funders to do something rather inadequate, or acrimonious disputes about failure to "deliver".

Quite a few people seems to agree, and are blogging and commenting on the site with enthusiasm. If you have a moment, do take a look, and join in. Simon Berry has put together a first model for our proposal, and will shortly be posting the work packages that will deliver this. We are exploring collaboration with a number of people and organisation, and would welcome more.  The site seems to be providing a further benefit - a space to talk about the general issues of collaboration, knowledge sharing, process evaluation and more. That's another lesson - if you open up, good stuff happens.

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, nonprofit, openinex

Doing it different with an open source bid to Government

As I mentioned recently, the Cabinet Office wants to promote innovation among UK nonprofits, and is offering £1.2 million to anyone who can come up with a plan for a Third Sector Innovation Exchange - and also put it into practice over three years.
My initial reaction was slightly sceptical, because despite brilliant work being done by extraordinary people there are many barriers to innovation in the sector, and even more to sharing. Why give away your best ideas when competing for funding? Why try and do things differently if that would mean getting rid of most of your trustees first? As a fall back, there's the fatal "We have always done it that way."
Then I got a few calls from people who were thinking of putting in a bid, and we fell to wondering whether it might be done differently. If one of the things that stifles innovation is the way that procurement of services is handled, couldn't we demonstrate a different approach while still meeting all the tendering requirements?
The difficulty in tendering for complex and challenging projects is that you know your proposals may well turn out to be inadequate because there's no way of figuring out in advance  what will work. Ideally the solutions have to be worked out with those who are "the problem". But if you do go in with a proposal full of co-creation workshops with stakeholders, there's a danger you will be seen as fuzzy. It's all too easy to end up either in tacit collusion between consultants and funders to do something rather inadequate, or acrimonious disputes about failure to "deliver".
One of the main aims of the Innovation Exchange is help improve the ability of third sector organisations to deliver public services. These days there's a lot of emphasis on the need to make this a collaborative process, as set out by Demos in its recent publication The Collaborative State. A few years ago they did an excellent publication Wideopen on open thinking, drawing on the inspiration of collaborative open source software development. The book Wikinomics argues the case for collaboration in what have been  commercially competitive situations. So why not invite people to develop a collaborative bid - and also commit to collaborating afterwards? Ah, said my friend Drew Mackie, when I relayed my conversations with others, "what we need is an open source bid".
Nice soundbite, but would it work in practice? I checked in again with my friends Simon and Jane Berry, who manage to be innovative, creative and very effective in delivery through Ruralnet UK and their associated trading company RNUK Ltd. The team there have a great track record of running learning and mentoring programmes. Could we do it open source? Yes, said Simon. In Bristol, Ben Whitnall and Andy Parkhouse at Delib, together with Steve Bridger and Ed Mitchell, had come up with their own ideas about mixing innovation online and off. My son Dan put together a Drupal-based site, where we could invite contributions and comments. You can see the result at the Open Innovation Exchange. Do join in there, and if you blog anything about it elsewhere, please use the tag openinex. There's a feed to the site.
It may fall flat. It may get a lot of interest and ideas ... but at least we are trying something different. Isn't that what innovation is about?

Technorati Tags: innovation, knowledgesharing, nonprofit, openinex

No 2.0 could be the reality check on Innovation Exchange

While I was attending and presenting at the UK nonprofits technology conference Pathways to success yesterday, the UK government announced the invitation to bid for a £1.2 million programme to help third sector organisations innovate by exchanging experience online and off. This further fuelled coffee-time conversations about what might be needed to support any technology-related change. General conclusion:  culture shift before tech adoption ... so keep it simple, small steps, focussed on real needs.
The conference was organised by the ICT Hub, which is one of six hubs funded by government under the ChangeUp programme. Others cover finance, governance, performance, volunteering, and workforce.
There were great workshops in the morning, and as the day went on I rather regretted agreeing to keynote after lunch on the role of social media. As I said in my presentation, I much prefer workshops, and chatting in groups, to from-the-podium presentation. More in line with the conversational benefits of social media too.
Anyway, you can see the presentation here, and come the time I enjoyed giving it. I'm not entirely sure how it went down with the audience, because there was such a wide range of experience in the room - some people familiar with blogs, wikis, social networks and so on, and others much less aware.

One of the slides was an update on this post which asked Are you Yes 2.0 or No 2.0 ...

Yes 2.0

• A human voice
• Willing to share
• Open source thinking
• Share responsibility
• Basics covered
• Ready to experiment
• Tell good stories

No 2.0

• Official voice
• Anxious to control
• We own it
• Central vetting
• Audience not online
• Unwilling to invest time
• Publish reports

.... the point being that if were No 2.0 then you probably wouldn't get on with social media. One chief exec who was present responded by saying that she want to be Yes 2.0, but the climate in which she and her organisation operated meant she has to compete for funding, keep tight control on operation, doesn't have any slack, and has to satisfy a not-Web 2.0 set of interests. It provided a very honest reality check.
I had based some of my presentation on the excellent Third Sector Foresight report on how nonpropfits can best use social media and social networking, which was helpfully available on people's seats. At the end of the conference I was able to bring together report author Megan Griffith with Head of the ICT hub, Nicola Thompson, and Paul Webster, who works on ICT support at the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action.
I asked them how - from different local, national and future perspectives - they saw nonprofit use of social media. They all reckoned there was great potential, but as Megan in particular emphasised the challenges will come as senior staff in organisations consider how far they want to control messages centrally, and how collaborative they can be in a competitive environment. Nicola and Paul said that many organisation were still struggling with the basics - though they could make progress once this was fixed and they saw the benefits. Click the  thumbnail to play in Quicktime, or here at Google video.
This led me to think more about the proposed Innovation Exchange, which ties in with the Government's desire to see third sector organisations delivering more public services, set out last December in a Cabinet Office action plan. The invitation to tender summarises the requirement:

The innovation exchange will pilot new approaches to fostering, exchanging and replicating third sector innovation, ensuring that public services benefit from the approaches they pioneer. The innovation exchange will seek to connect innovators to one another, to those who might benefit from their work, including public service, commissioners and third sector organisation, and others who might invest in their work.

It goes on to explain:

The innovation exchange will be set the following objectives: (i) Enable third sector innovators to identify possible collaborators, build networks and come together to engage in collaborative development work. (ii) Bring together third sector innovators and those who might benefit from their work to develop and prototype innovations. (iii) Support the best innovations to develop their work and to grow or to spread their innovations to other areas and organisations. (iv) Help third sector innovators to access the investments they need to support their work. (v) Develop learning on how to achieve(i) to (iv) and help generate a momentum for enhancing the role of third sector organisations as catalysts in public service improvement.

It looks as if, for the Innovation Exchange to succeed on and offline, it will have to overcome exactly those cultural barriers I heard much about in conversations at the conference. It assumes that third sector innovators are naturally keen to collaborate - and move from No 2.0 into Yes 2.0.  I'm sceptical. Individuals - like the chief exec who spoke - may well be, but the current third sector climate is against them. Prior-to-contract issue for the Cabinet Office: what innovative changes might be needed in funding and other procedures to help create a more innovative environment.
(P.S. - nothing's perfect. Who wants to develop a consortium bid?)

Technorati Tags: collaboration, innovation, knowledgesharing, nonprofit, nptechuk

Beyond conversations and unconferencing

Unconferencing is term used mainly by techies to describe events  where there are few presentations, many conversations, and lots of opportunities to move from group to group. If there is a free wifi connection and refreshments on tap, so much the better. It is low-cost, and relatively easy to organise if you can spread the word through e-mails, forums and blogs - hence the appeal to the geek community. It is good for people who are socially confident and favour informal learning ... but not for those who like structured presentations and a big package of stuff to take home.
But ... after all the buzz, what happens next? And does that matter? The question pops back into my mind after writing again about one of Policy Unplugged's buzzy events, this time at NESTA and focussed on innovation and collaboration.
It was a terrific mix of people ... and I think for those involved it was enough to hear some admirably brief presentations, join group discussions, and then socialise. It was free, with drinks at the end. So who could possibly complain?
However, I did hear a few people asking why NESTA was running the event, and what would come of it. I don't think there were any formal notes taken, and no feedback at the end. In this case it probably didn't matter, because staff were making the contacts they needed, and it will be very easy to follow up with other smaller get-togethers online or face-to-face.
Unconferencing can look to the more developed events methodology of Open Space for tips on how to add just enough structure. There's an explanation here, with pictures and video showing how Johnnie Moore did this at another Policy Unplugged event last year, and more here about working with PU to mix online and face-to-face.
The standard response from an Open Space facilitator to the question "what happens next" is likely to be - hmm, interesting issue, why not find some other people who want to talk about that. In addition, the event may well contain more structured opportunities to report back and develop ways forward.
All this is just thinking in progress, and a conversation with myself. Please join in by commenting below. My conclusion so far is that dissatisfactions may arise at unconferencing events if people can't answer the question "why are we here", and if those who want to take something forward find there is no space to do that.
People like Johnnie Moore, and Steve Moore - who facilitated at the NESTA event - make it look easy, and in my experience leave participants wanting more. Is that more Moore? Groan. I've just got a hunch that less experienced facilitators may start to give unconferencing a bad name. Want to share your experiences of conferences, Un or not?
If you do like more presentations, there's a different style of Policy Unplugged event at the RSA tomorrow. Oops, three posts on PU events. Need to turn to something different.
See also: Tips for participatory conferences - first, think social

Technorati Tags: nestauploading, unconferencing

Gossiping seriously about Google tools

This evening's Gurteen Knowledge Cafe produced the usual rich mix of conversations, this time around social media. The most memorable for me went something like this (condensed version):

Me: Hi - I'm a freelance doing some work on communities of practice... setting up a system for people in different countries to share information and ideas about their projects. What are you working on?
John: well, my company has just been taken over, and I'm one of the casualties. Don't mind though, it's going to be messy. One group uses Notes, and one uses Exchange, and there's no way to get them to integrate.
Me: well, I spent a lot of time last year working on open source systems like Drupal which developers say can do pretty much anything you want ... blogs, forums, file libraries, profiles  ... you just add another module. But .... now I'm not so sure it is the all-in-one solution we need. It requires quite a bit of customising and maintenance, and people have to learn something very different from their day-to-day tools. I'm impressed by all the free or low cost tools coming out ...
John: Ahh! Google! We've been trying the enterprise solutions that tie together a start page, Gmail, instant messaging, calendars, web page creation and so on. It's going to take my company a year to decide which way to go on their systems, and by that time Google will have a suite of tools that will do the job. We have been looking seriously at just going the Google route.
Me: Seriously? In a large company? This isn't just for individuals and nonprofits....?

Disclosure: I'm have no relationship with Google or any other supplier, but I do have a hunch that things are changing fast when it comes to setting up online systems for collaboration. The conversation gave me another nudge. The reasons are two-fold (at least):
First, it takes a lot of planning, time and expenditure to  develop a customised system - particularly if you are working across different organisations or groups. To do it properly you need to do user profiles, use scenarios, wireframes (paper mock-ups), test sites and so on before you build the system. Then you have to get everyone engaged, trained, facilitated, stewarded, maintained. The time and money you should spend on the people gets eaten up by the technology ... and it may not work.
Secondly, a lot of smart knowledge management people advise a more organic process of developing communities online. Enlist the champions, work with them, spot enthusiasms and opportunities, evolve as you go. That's much easier when you have a suite of tools like those offered by Google (and others). You can start with one thing ... maybe the calendar and groups ... then bring in others. You can offer everyone a Home page to bring things together. You still need to look at the different users, scenarios and so on, but it is potentially much more flexible.
Thirdly, helping people use Google tools, or Yahoo, and other free or low cost web apps is going to be useful outside the specific project. They can start to develop mini-systems for themselves.
What I wasn't sure about was whether it might be a serious proposition that could be scaled up. My conversation this evening made me think it worth investigation on at least one of my projects. We may need a Drupal site in the middle to provide a framework, but I don't think it is where we should start. It would be interesting to see how far we could go with Google, then what extra is needed. OK, this needs a lot more thinking through, but often it is the bit of gossip that offers the big insight. Isn't that what social media is about? Including face-to-face, of course.
What are the pros and cons?
Here's a discussion group on Google Powered Office Tools, and the Wikipedia entry on Google tools.
Previously: The Great (almost free) Web Office Experiment

Update: Google has just announced a Premier edition of Google Apps - reviewed at Read/WriteWeb. It costs $50 a year per user account. Comparison of free and paid-for is here and here.

Learning at lunchtime

The brief: provide a group of big-practice architects with some latest thinking on community engagement and social media. Time available 45 minutes. Budget: modest.

Solution: carefully crafted presentation and hand-outs? Not my favourite approach. Game with lots of props? Tight on time, and difficult to get right without a lot of research.
I was a bit stumped ... but the location and time-slot gave me the clue: lunchtime and a flexible corner of the office.
Time was when people in offices had enough time at lunch or coffee break to catch up on the gossip and also share some insights and news of what's going on in different areas. These days it seems to be grab a sandwich, get back to the cubicle, and keep ticking off the 15-minute slots on the timesheet.
So - why not re-invent the learning lunchtime?
Fortunately my clients, PRP architects, in the form of Alexandra Rook and Lesley Gibbs, were happy to try something different. Alexandra, in her previous post with the Civic Trust, had been a strong champion for the salon we ran there successfully ... but you can't bring in the bottles at lunchtime.
We came up with a simple formula: create the outline of an only-slightly-fictitious scenario about community engagement on a housing estate, then invite 20 people to split into groups once they had grabbed their lunch. Three people stood in for the development group: contractor, council and housing association. Others were residents, architects and evaluators.
Simple briefs explained that the residents were disgruntled after initial consultation raised expectations but didn't deliver good results - and invited each group, in slightly different ways, to think what to do next. You can download the briefing notes here, and a note about engagement methods (both pdfs). I also offer presentation notes from this item on Relationship-based engagement.
People quickly got into their groups roles, and the evaluators stirred things up with questions about how things might be improved. Alexandra, playing her real role of participation specialist , was pulled between development group, residents and architects ... which seemed fairly realistic
After half an hour we stopped to share some insights, and that sparked some stories about real-life programmes. I particularly liked the one about the team who used the talents of a cartoonist to develop big King Kong posters to advertise events and planned changes. The local kids whipped them off the notice boards and on to their bedroom walls ... parents got talking ... people turn up. The poster about the concrete-nibbling monster had crowds on the street awaiting the arrival of the demolition equipment.
I hope the modest exercise helped people make a few new connections in the office, and that other events may follow. Or alternatively, as someone who previously worked in the construction industry said: "We always had a tradition of going down to the pub at Friday lunchtime, and staying there. That way you always found out what was going on." Too simple, much too simple.

Article analyses the online/offline mix around events

John Smith and Bev Trayner have an article in eLearn magazine that combines excellent practical and theoretical insights on how to mix online collaboration with face-to-face events - something I'm currently working on.

The article is based on experience in the development of communities of practice, and uses the CPD framework of community (participants), shared interest in a body of knowledge (domain), and the development of practices that support further learning (practice).

It takes three main phases - online ramp-up (preparation phase online), face-to-face meeting, and online follow-on (post-meeting online phase) - and details issues likely to arise. Here's the first two of ten as a taster:

Phase: Getting into the online space

• Launching into various preliminary interactions, usually involving Web pages, emails, phone calls, and payment which have the function of bootstrapping other points of contact.
• Engaging with this new online experience balances uncertainty and extrapolation from previous experiences.
• Finding other people "there"—a glimpse that it may be worthwhile.
• Feelings of familiarity or frustration, despair, or delight.

Phase: Finding your way: asynchronous discussions

• Dealing with technical mechanics and overcoming social obstacles,both online and in a context around the computer at home and/or at work.
• Discovering that an asynchronous medium has a rhythm that intersects "real life."
• Getting to know (or not) how to use different pathways or facilities to participate in an online discussion.
• Figuring out the "right thing to do," acquiring social learning skills or technical mastery and taking some initiative (or not) as aresult.

I'm doing some work with Bev on a Drupal-based site where some 30 people are preparing, in half a dozen languages, for a meeting in a couple of weeks time, and anticipate exploring in greater depth what lies beneath the bullet points. More on that once things have got going.

I think there are some similarities in John and Bev's model to Gilly Salmon's Five stage model developed from work at the Open University. Although both models have been developed to inform the creation of learning communities - formal or otherwise - I think the principles apply in many other settings. The consistent theme, as John and Bev say, is "learning comes about through informal engagement with other people". It's about conversation and relationship, not just assembling and ingesting chunks of knowledge.

John maintains the the learning alliances blog, and Bev keeps a blog called Phronesis. John has now set up a feed to capture content from others in the CPsquare community of practice (CoP) about CoPs which you can find here.

Identifying, representing, leveraging knowledge ... by talking to each other.

I suppose most of us feel we should preserve and pass on old family photos and other memorabilia if we have them ... but is there a wider personal obligation to understand and tell the stories of our ancestors, and our community? Digital media and online research certainly make it much easier. The latest Gurteen Knowledge cafe focussed on this issue of obligation to entrust cultural knowledge for the future, under the guidance of Australian facilitator Helen Paige. It produced some terrific conversations, and offered a unthreatening way to explore the culture and heritage of other participants. Wine courtesy of Michael Quinton of the Australia Centre helped.

Aside from the wine, the standard knowledge cafe format helped a lot too. We had a bit of speed networking (two minutes each with three people), a discussion around the table, a  report back, further discussion ... break for wine ... off to the pub. David Gurteen always makes these events seem comfortable and challenging at the same time. As you can see from his website, David is free with his knowledge management expertise, as well as managing to get hosts and collaborators to help mount the cafes free. It seems to me a very practical demonstration of how these days giving away something useful online and face-to-face can be the best sort of marketing for professional services and and paid-for events. Everyone wins.

Many of the participants were highly-experienced knowledge management specialists, but the jargon count was very low, considering what KM is meant to be. (Wikipedia: Knowledge Management (KM) refers to a range of practices and techniques used by organizations to identify, represent and distribute knowledge, know-how, expertise, intellectual capital and other forms of knowledge for leverage, reuse and transfer of knowledge and learning across the organization.)
At the cafe we were just talking to each other ... so I asked David why he felt conversation was so important to KM. As you can hear, he made a strong case for  this most basic form of human communication being fundamental to any shared understanding and involvement - whether social or professional. He has expanded this in one of the articles on his site.
Helen Paige specialises in the 'human side' of knowledge management, and explained that when David asked her to add an Australian flavour to the event she had no hesitation in drawing on Aboriginal traditions of storytelling, rather than  beach barbecues.
Not that Helen ducks the hospitality side of things. Her card - Fun.food.Focus - offers a unique team building process in which "your team can enjoy shared learning while doing 'hands on' food preparation". Next cafe please.
As I mentioned previously, David has an impressive media player on his site with KM videos. More here on how it is being developed.
Previously:
KM embraces video.
Networking to give and to get

Saloneering in Smithfield

The other evening a few of us got together to reflect on what sort of events we really enjoy, and in particular whether salons fit the bill. The impetus for this came last year from an event about design and society that we all attended, and ended up grumbling about in the bar afterwards. It wasn't a bad event - we just wanted more talking to each other than being talked at, more intimate conversation, less public cleverness.
I had met Ann Light before at the workshop that helped launch this blog, and she introduced me to Kathryn Best and Christina Li. After a little stimulating converse and a few drinks we decided that what we needed was a series of salons.... I think it was Kathryn who inspired us with tales of 18th century Parisian gatherings, also documented here in wikipedia.

A salon is a gathering of stimulating people of quality under the roof of an inspiring hostess or host, partly to amuse one another and partly to refine their taste and increase their knowledge through conversation and readings, often consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "to please and educate" (aut delectare aut prodesse est). The salons, commonly associated with French literary and philosophical salons of the 17th century and 18th century, were carried on until quite recently in urban settings among like-minded people of a 'set': many 20th-century salons could be instanced.

I was sufficiently enthused to run a salon with my friends at the Civic Trust, where I learned that free wine and a jazz pianist were useful ingredients. On reflection the over-sized badges and rally-round flags were a bit over the top, but one must experiment ...
Anyway, the four of us eventually got around to gathering with a few others for our first salon: about salons. It was a Smithfield bar (appropriately called Meet) rather than a drawing room, but fine for the purpose. I can recommend the alcohol-free "You're so cool" cocktail, though in the interests of conviviality switched to more traditional salon-fare after one.
It seemed a little over-formal to take notes - though there was one handheld scribbler. Difficult to know if he was catching the odd bon-mot or catching up on the day's email. I do recall "trusted .... empathy ... party where you can hear people .... not just more networking .... being intellectually generous".
Things did get a little tense at one point because of a division of opinion about whether events need to achieve anything. Shouldn't there be some purpose beyond just meeting and talking? Isn't a format important? No, was the majority opinion. That's not a salon.
At this point we began a round of reflections on different people - and in particular personality types as profiled by the Myers Briggs Type Indicator.
Would buzzy salons appeal to introverts, or mainly extraverts? Would intuitives favour salons for inspirations and explorations, while sensers find them a little short on factual content? In particular was it the judging types who wanted control and closure, compared with the more flexible perceiving types? My paraphrase doesn't do justice to the discussion, and certainly not to Myers Briggs ... but the topic certainly raised the volume quite a bit. Seems like a good salon theme.
At that stage we decided we could only take so much high intellectual discourse, and retired to the nearby Sutton Arms for a pint of lager and a packet of crisps. I think we decided something, but that's the trouble with salons...

Hands up if you are a knowledge activist

If your job or passion is to do good communications work using new technology, how do you think of yourself? Others may call you variously a blogger, online journalist, community manager, information worker, editor, researcher, even hacker. Perhaps we'll find some shared interests wearing the badge of knowledge activist.
The term has been floating around those in knowledge management interested in bottom--up systems, and the use of personal media ranging from digital cameras, mobile phones and PDAs to personal websites and the latest open source tools for activism, and technologies that will change the way we learn. It arose at a recent workshop on personal knowledge management (PKM), and there's even a Knowledge Activist's Handbook which says "The role of the knowledge activist is to be unreasonable, to identify and combine those small grains of truth that have the potential to become pearls."

Models for a civic commons

Over the past couple of weeks I've heard at least five different possible models for an online civic commons mentioned at various meetings about online communities and e-democracy, and I think we need somewhere to talk about them. Here's the models - and I'm sure there are more:
* A Government-supported Civic Commons in Cyberspace, advocated by Jay Blumler and Stephen Coleman
* The BBC iCAN! site for campaigns and discussion
* An online market for trading time-based service
* A commercial model like UpMyStreet conversations
* A site that would aggregate discussions taking place in online civic networks - an idea floated at yesterday's meeting on grassroots and networks

Presenting to promote conversation

Geoff Mulgan, former head of Tony Blair's strategy unit, this evening provided a striking lesson in how to do a presentation that favours the audience - by chunking the content in a way that stimulates conversations. It was all the more effective because there was no Powerpoint, no exhortation, and no evident ego. Clearly some people can survive a tumble in the No 10 spin machine.
The occasion was a meeting of the Tomorrow Network, a free, loose association of about 2200 people treated by the Tomorrow Project to end-of-the-day meetings every few months, mainly in London. Not all at once, of course.
Tonight's topic was 'The future of the electronic media', which is usually a great temptation to fancy slides and baffling techie references. Instead we got 10 stories that provided different windows into the issues, based around technology, business, geography, power relationships, civil society, mentality, community, children, morality, time. The content was a crisp mix of anecdote, analysis, and hunch, all in 20 minutes. I'll do more later on one or two of them. My point here is that the presentation was - it seemed to me - designed specifically to prompt some conversations (and incidently offer at least 10 neat blog items). It occurs to me you could also take the structure and use the 10 categories for further research... a good jump start to some Spurling perhaps. Or do a mindmap - here's a start.
As it was, after some question and answer, we moved to more traditional knowledge-sharing over a free drinks in the splendid building of the Royal College of Physicians. There was no problem finding something to talk about.
The other speaker, futurist Dr Wendy Schultz, had some great ideas too, but suffered from.... uhhh, electronic media. Her Mac-based Powerpoint didn't fare well on a PC lacking Quicktime, so most slides featured big white spaces telling us about TIFFs, missing compression gizmos and so on. She promised us a multimeg, multimedia download - later. It seemed like a telling metaphor about technology, people and communication, with Wendy triumphing over the limitations of her technical aids.
Geoff is now director of the Institute of Community Studies, which has a 50-year track record of social innovation initiated by its founder Michael Young, who invented the Open University and Consumers Association. Lots more ideas will follow, I'm sure. They may even be accessible too.
Free membership of the Tomorrow Network - details here
Update: Hands up if you are a knowledge activist

Spurl: super webtool with service too

The online bookmarking tool Spurl reached version 1.0 last week, and looks like a must-use tool for anyone organising and republishing their bookmarks. Spurl enables you, when browsing web sites, save online the location together with a description and other information. Useful enough if you want to access bookmarks from different computers, or research sites with colleagues and create a shared list.
However, the exciting features, for me anyway, are that you can both categorise and tag your sites and create an RSS feed from the list, and also publish your collections of links.
Suppose you manage a web site where you want to show useful resources as lists of links. Usually they get done once and it is a pain to edit and update them. With Spurl you research sites, categorise and tag them, then insert a feed (or a bit of Javascript) into your links page. When you find something on other site, add that to Spurl, and it gets added to your site automatically. If you find a site has changed, edit the information in Spurl and the change ends up on your site.
If you find inserting the feeds tricky, you can publish some or all of your bookmarks...Spurl creates a publicly-viewable page, excluding bookmarks you have marked private. So you could just put a link from your site to that.
One additional treat is that if you have an account with del.icio.us - which also saves your bookmarks online in a different way - the sites you tag in Spurl also end up on del.icio.us, where they go into the growing pool of tagged sites.
Here's another plus: service. I spent some time with Spurl yesterday, and it all seemed fine until I tried to get feeds from categories. Some worked, some didn't. I emailed support, and within a couple of hours had a response from Spurl founder Hjalmar Gislason, doubling up on help desk, saying he had fixed it. "Happy spurling, and spread the word," he said. Glad to.
When I have a bit more time I'll document using Spurl and del.icio.us (the help system is a bit lacking and out of date). Meanwhile I just wanted to get the word out, and maybe pick up some comments or links from others trying the service. Oh, and it's free. Interviews with Hjalmar explaining how here and also here.
Update: I've been back to look at the other major online bookmarking system, Furl. It promotes the ability to save a page when you bookmark it, which is worth doing if you think the item may disappear. Spurl does this too, if you choose an 'advanced' setting. Furl doesn't have tags, but you can do multiple categories (unlike Spurl) and you can configure manually RSS feeds from categories, as the help system explains. Not so easy as Spurl, and you don't get the Javascipt to insert into web pages. Nice to have choice and competition among free services.
Update: comparison of Furl, Spurl and del.icio.us features: download pdf

People + networks = collective intelligence?

George Por - who led a London collaboration cafe earlier in the year - has posted an item on his blog about how we can raise the collective intelligence of a group or network, and also the ability of the participants in six key areas: intention; reflection; competence; recorded memory; support; trust and social capital. I'm particularly excited because the model, and George's wisdom, is very relevant to the problems of partnerships I wrote about yesterday, and the challenges of developing networks. My title equation - People + networks = collective intelligence - doesn't do justice to George's item which he entitles What Is My Collective IQ? - Boosting CI from Within. But then, as some of the blog comments indicate, the ideas can be a little difficult to grasp. It's a bit chewy to take at one gulp, but that's no bad thing.
I'm so excited by the ideas that I know if I don't write something I'll feel frustrated all day, so I'm just doing a brief mention to further alert the blogosphere to the item, and then turning back to work I'm doing on network development, with sideways glances at George's item for inspiration. I'll then post more later. On refIection, I think that's in line with George's suggestion for collaborative learning exploration, so it's working already.

Nonprofits fall out over tech support

In my experience nonprofit organisations can be just a tiny bit combative and territorial among themselves, while showing the world a smile of compassion and collaboration. It comes from having to compete to get so much of their money from funders, sponsors and donors.
The UK Government isn't helping in the way that it is handling funds for the Changeup programme to improve the way nonprofits deliver services, with its plans for specialist 'hubs'. An acrimonious dispute has now surfaced between two consortia seeking to deliver technology support to other nonprofits. I wrote about this in June, and since then matters seem to have got worse rather than better. Third Sector magazine reveals that nine organisations have complained to the Home Office about the way that the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) is behaving.

Forming communities of practice fast? First visit the toy store.

Can 200 people work out what they are interested in, find others with shared concerns, form groups, and decide what to do next - all in 35 minutes? I now know the answer. Yes, knowledge sharing by milling about does work.... if you have a few props from the toy store,
As I wrote earlier under that heading, my colleague Drew Mackie and I were offered the chance of trying this collective speed-dating at a conference on nonprofit governance last Friday. A Government Minster, scheduled to keynote, had pulled out at short notice - probably to spend more time helping plan this week's Labour conference. An understandable emergency call, though inconvenient. However, instead of substituting another exhortation from the lectern, conference organiser Christine Morrison bravely asked us to mobilise the collective wisdom of the conference participants. Well, do as best we could, after lunch, in the slot usually reserved for rest and reflection.
In the event the participants were magnificent. Here's how it went.