Designing for Civil Society

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.

Neighbourhood problems? Try an online Fix-It.

The ever-inventive Tom Steinberg and crew at MySociety are now recruiting beta testers for their Neighbourhood Fix-It tool. If you live in the UK, you can sign up here.

Neighbourhood Fix-It is mySociety's next site. It is a simple service which allows people across the UK to report common local problems like graffiti, broken street lights, leaking pipes etc by sticking a pin in the map. What makes it different is that it will provide a public place where users can see what has been reported by other users, make comments on what's going on, and subscribe to alerts when new development occur.

Neighbouhood Fix-It has been funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, built by Matthew Somerville and cost £10,000. Whether this is something that will be welcomed by local councils as a neat way of aggregating complaints, or cursed as another route for residents to moan about problems we'll have to wait and see. The project's partner the Young Foundation says:

The website will allow people to do two things: to report broken infrastructure in their area to the local authority easily; and to start, or take part in public discussions about maintaining and improving the infrastructure and environment in their neighbourhoods. The pilot will involve working with two local authority partners to develop, test and launch the Neighbourhood Fix-It website in their areas.

It's not clear yet what happens to those of us reporting problems outside the pilot areas, but hey, it's easy to join in and we'll find out after the March deadline for tester sign-up.
Meanwhile, if you wish to raise issues at a national level, the MySociety E-petitions site at 10 Downing Street bubbles on. The top petition is currently Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy (638134 signatures), followed by Repeal the Hunting Act 2004 (22176 signatures).

On neighbourliness, real and virtual

There's quite a few things I've got scattered around to blog about, and I'm not going to get them done properly before going away for a week shortly ... so at least I'll put down some markers and plan to return later. Maybe a strand will emerge. Here goes.
My friend Kevin Harris now has Respect in the Neighbourhood published  - trailed here and here on his blog. He and the other contributors spell out why neighbourliness matters:

What happens if people stop recognising and talking to their neighbours? Why do nods across the street and comments about the weather matter? Ideas and evidence in this book suggest that if people stop being civil to one another where they live, a perceived crisis of respect in wider society will probably follow.

Kevin is one of too few people I know who manages to combine grass-roots insights, from his community development work and everyday life, with rigourous research and conviviality. You can trust the guy knows what he is talking about.
On a rather different front I'm trying to keep up with the growing flood of stuff about how nonprofits can use social media, because I'm putting together a guide for the NCVO Foresight team.  Fortunately the second (or something) law of internet research and sharing is kicking in ... which means that if you leave something for a bit someone else will do it for you. So Michelle Martin of the Bamboo Project Blog has started a Web2.0 and Nonprofits Best Practices Wiki which Beth Kanter has promised to contribute to. I've got the beginnings of wiki started too, and Beth and I are doing a workshop in January, so it should all join up.
Dave Pollard, who I interviewed when he was in the UK recently, has now posted a summary of the presentation he gave when in London, showing which social networking tools work best for what.
Nancy White is such a rich resource I know if I miss something on social media and online communities I can always go and find it with accompanying wisdom on her blog. She's looking at roles and is going to start tagging technology stewardship which, as I've mentioned before sort-of ties in with my ideas on being a social reporter.  I noted recently that Nancy is starting some work with Shawn at Anecdote (another favourite place) on three types of collaboration - team, community and network. I'm particularly interested in the idea of network collaboration which, as Nancy says:

... steps beyond the relationship centric nature of team and community collaboration. And this is where it gets interesting. Network collaboration starts in individual action and self interest and accrues to the network. Membership and timelines are open and unbounded. There are no explicit roles. Members most likely do not know all the other members. Power is distributed. This form of collaboration has been busted wide open with the advent of new online tools, a response to the overwhelming volume of information we are creating and number of people we can connect with. The tools both expose us to possibility, remind us of the overwhelming volume and offer us ways to share the task of coping with that volume.

Definitely messy, but potentially really rewarding if fresh insights and creativity come from crossing over boundaries and doing stuff with new people. My friends and I at Policy Unplugged are planning a series of events and online activities next year to do just that, so I'm delighted Nancy and Shawn are working on it. By the time we need it, they'll have worked it out.
I hope network collaboration will also be one of the practices that Bev Trayner and I will be developing on projects following on from some initial transnational work here. Bev is starting a new company called Eudaimonia for reasons that she explains here:

Although some people have translated Eudaimonia as happiness, it means much more than that. It's about flourishing and a complete life, manifesting in characteristics like courage, honesty, pride, friendliness and wittiness. It also includes friendships and intellectual knowledge. It connects human nature with reason, emotion, perception, and action in an ensouled body.

... which promises well for any network collaboration.

Meanwhile Nick Booth alerts me to something completely different on his Podnosh blog ... a competition to win a Sony PS3 and support young homeless people. Nick says it isn't his usual interest, but came from an acquaintance he wants to help, and it will in mysterious way drive traffic to our blogs by getting more attention for the competition link. Nick is another social reporter type, so I'm glad to help out even if I'm not too sure how it works.

I've also been meaning to check what happened to another fundraising project Nick mentioned, where Micki in New Zealand set up a blog called Volunteer Evolution.

She is using it to ask people to help her raise $20,000 dollars to allow her to stop paid work and instead volunteer for a year in her local community (wherever she happens to be).

Nick contributed a month ago, wondering if he was being a virtual mug. Hmmm. Micki says only £80 raised, but 40 volunteers hours logged, so I leave a donation and encouraging message because ... well, I couldn't do what Micki is trying and the blog is getting interesting.
On the other hand the previously-mentioned Beth Kanter, prolific blogger and parent to two Cambodian orphans, has more than succeeded in a fund-raising campaign to provide a college education for Leng Sopharath through the Sharing Foundation. I guess the lesson is that networks work. Congratulations Beth ... and let me have your Getting Things Done tips sometime.
I should also report that I had the promised lunchtime conversation with staff at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, about how social media could help them tap the collective intelligence of their 26,000 Fellows. A great whirl of conversation about, well, promoting conversations in many different ways. Good things are going to happen, particularly around the Carbon Limited campaign that challenges us to reduce our carbon footprint not least by reducing use of home energy, cars and flying.
Phew. Writing up those different strands makes me feel better. Why? A few references made to friends I felt were due ... a few lines thrown out that may bring back comments ... a few things ticked-off the to-do list. There's so many reasons to blog - which reminded me of an item at Bamboo on Why Blog that led to the graphic here (click to enlarge)and a fuller report at CK's Blog. Those that responded to her survey were mainly marketers - but the central theme is finding a Voice which I can relate to. Who was it said that I don't really know what I think until I write about it? Me certainly. Or maybe, as Kevin might say, it's just about being neighbourly in the online world.
Update: I couldn't let this go ... the latest Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants has a round-up of Web 2.0 How-Tos and Examples. The Carnivals are a great way of pulling together good blog posts on a subject. There's a request for posts, you pitch yours in, the host filters the best. Unlike physical bring and buy, for example, no money changes hands, you keep what you give. You could just wait for the next one to come around to solve your research needs ... but on the other hand a good post might get you in the window. Another example of how the online neighbourhood works.

An architect gets close to his work

The best architects get close the users of their designs, so it was a delight today to chance upon Ken Creig, whose firm has been responsible for the £6.5 million transformation of London's 18th century Borough Market. He was in the far more modest environs of Whitecross Street, EC1, which this weekend held a food festival to celebrate its own improvements, also designed by Ken. As Islington Council tells us:

The market dates back to medieval times and being outside the City walls, was a favourite place for travelling pedlars and tinkers who were not allowed into the City where markets and prices were strictly controlled by the guilds.

I knew none of this when I paused by a stall to sample some very authentic-looking olive oil, and on asking the stallholder about his import business discovered the story even more interested than anticipated, as you can hear from the movie. The oil is great too.
Update: as I clear up a heap of papers I find a summary of a Joseph Rowntree Foundation research report: Markets and social spaces extolling their virtues, and offering guidelines on development:

for markets to function well as social spaces, various factors are significant. Essential attributes include: a diverse range of products fitting well with local needs and tastes; cafés or food vans on site or nearby; good access to the site, especially by public transport; an active and engaged community of traders; and a sense of the unexpected

Nice when the research bears out personal experience. Whitecross Street deserves to succeed.

Scavenging Media for Guerilla Public Authoring

Over the past 10 years Proboscis have developed an enviable reputation for using new media to develop creative projects around public authoring - including Urban Tapestries which I wrote about earlier. As Proboscis explained then:

The Urban Tapestries software platform allows people to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. People can add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

There was some sophisticated technology behind the project - so I was particularly intrigued to get an update from Giles Lane announcing that in future they will be using free online services - a kind of guerilla public authoring, as Giles calls it. They'll be experimenting, and producing a scavenging handbook.

Our concept of scavenging is to break down the core components of public authoring and devise a methodology for linking them together and sharing them. The method will be one that requires little or no expert knowledge to set up and which can be adapted to the local conditions depending on what resources are available to the community.

This is the sort of thing that techies might call mashup, though I think Giles's term is much more evocative, and fits their approach of shifting the focus from technology to the social and cultural practices by which people make sense of their surrounding, and add their own interpretations by analogue and digital means. While mashups often require programming skills, the Proboscis handbook will help people put together their own systems without too many tech skills. As Giles explained to me in a follow-up email:

The scavenging idea is a development of our original approach for  Social Tapestries, which was to look at each group or community we work with to see what were the appropriate technologies and  capabilities, and to adapt our approach to those. Whilst we have been developing new versions of Urban Tapestries over the past 2 years we  have struggled to secure the resources needed to deploy and maintain  such a service, to resolve significant technology issues and make it  available to the public. This leads us to think that whilst a dedicated system for public authoring is desirable, we should have alternatives that enable the fundamentals to be achieved that are not  dependent on a single service.

While the costs of developing custom systems is clearly an issue, things have changed dramatically over the past few years with the development of the sort of free services offered by Google and Yahoo. On a slightly different front, I'm impressed by the way in which Ismael Ghalimi is putting together what he calls Office 2.0 - a range of free and paid-for tools covering, well, just about everything from calculators and calendars to word processing and video publishing. Get scavenging!

How to kill volunteer enthusiasm, officially

The UK government has never been more committed to citizen engagement at local level, through policy directives on participation and its plans for neighbourhood governance. But, just as I think participation isn't working and we need a new approach, my friend Kevin Harris offers a reality check in Neighbourhood governance: a top-down burden?.... or "I'm a volunteer, and I'm on overload."

With my colleague Martin Dudley I was talking to a community activist in Swindon today about how the context for meaningful neighbourhood governance gets developed. She immediately hit on a point that I have raised before: people are exhausted and disillusioned, they feel unsupported, and they can't see anyone coming through to take up the baton.
I asked her if I could visit her estate and talk to other members of her community association committee. She said, there's only four; one's very new, and she and the others are on the verge of resigning.
"It's the bureaucracy, the procedures," she said. Earlier we had heard about the exhausting and demoralising nonsense of reams of central, regional, and local government strategy papers, area agreements, local strategic partnership papers, neighbourhood management papers, and performance targets all over the place, and spurious consultation exercises; and the not-unreasonable feeling that these burdens were all sent to damn local people for taking an interest in their own localities.
Throw neighbourhood governance at this situation, and see if you can make it stick. You can see why people might think that it doesn't stand a chance because it is a top-down strategy, designed to sleight-over some desperate looming budget and social problems, which still has not taken into consideration the impact on its victims - local people.

The challenge for participation programmes and neighbourhood governance is that for them to succeed they have to take account of people, because ultimately engagement is about relationships.  Unfortunately government is much more comfortable with methods, procedures, structures. Community and voluntary organisations that would in the past have stood on the side of the participants (people) are now largely dependant on local and central grants and contracts for their survival, so so they get sucked into the same culture and keep their needs down. So too with many consultants - but not, fortunately, Kevin.
See also Playing through double devolution.

Grassroots media podcasts Cameron

I'm glad to see that Nick Booth continues to expand the coverage offered by Podnosh, the Birmingham-based channel offering - as I wrote earlier - online recordings of local conversations and activities. Nick reports in his blog:

David Cameron was in Birmingham again today - to give a Chamberlain Lecture on how he sees the relationship between government and communities.
In fact the leader of the opposition was in my own neighbourhood Balsall Heath, an area he admires for the extent to which citizens and volunteers have taken control of their own streets. The Grassroots Channel programme I am the grass now reported on how people here would prefer to volunteer to keep their police stations open  rather than leave a vacuum in their streets.
The truth is that Balsall Heath's revival has been despite government, rather than because of it, and Mr Cameron belives there is much to learn from the people and the streets of this vibrant (yes it is fab) multi-culturural community. So where does that leave someone who wants to lead a Conservative government?  Confused or clear about how government can get out of the way and let people make good choices?
You can find out here. Listen to his speech by clicking on this link, read the speech by clicking here and find out what the good people of Balsall Heath had to ask David Cameron by clicking here.

Podnosh offers a full recording of the lecture, and of the question and answer session afterwards. Cameron was talking about the need to rebuild social as well as economic well-being, and as the BBC reported wants to put the voluntary sector and local democracy "at the heart of a drive to restore local pride and give communities more control."
Podnosh works with the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network, and is a great (and relatively rare) example of how local community and voluntary organisations can develop their own voice online.
However a quick Google showed that (as usual) it is a mistake to believe "community" has one voice. Indymedia Birmingham has a highly sceptical report of Cameron's previous visit to Balsall Heath in January in the wake of tornado damage. They felt it was all a photo-op for Cameron to be filmed if not by national media at least his in-house team of publicists. They also take a pop at the local community organisation, the Balsall Heath Forum.

Whilst voluntary organisations like the Balsall Heath Forum have eulogised Cameron’s Tory Party’s newly found interest in the voluntary sector, it is also worth pointing out the role the Forum appointed for itself as a broker between local people and the City Council after the Tornado. Some have even gone as far as to say the Forum has effectively hijacked much of the initial grassroots interest in self- recovery for its own ends. Last year, the Forum hosted a series of events led by Dick Atkinson to solicit views from local people and traders about redeveloping the area in a focus group, ‘fantasy re-development’ scenario. Atkinson offered to collate and process ideas generated into a report to hand to the Council.
Atkinson’s report, however, differed substantially from the original ideas expressed by local people so much so that many people commented that his report reflected his own plans for the area and that of the Forum over local grassroots plans. A glaring omission in the report was a suggestion by local people to mobilise and demonstrate about the Council’s negligence over asbestos removal and other issues.

I don't know the ins and outs of the Balsall Heath community politics, but it seems wholly good for local democracy that different views of local and national affairs are emerging in media that are under local control. Every blogger - and indymedia channel - needs an audience, and there's nothing like a bit of argument to get people involved.

City makes the case for skyscrapers, sociably

Years ago I made a living writing about planning and property development in London, and an easy way to get headlines was to chastise the City Corporation - responsible for the financial square mile - for caring more about business than historic buildings and historic skylines. I now live in the City, and the Corporation is my local council, so it was doubly interesting tonight to hear a talk from chief planning officer Peter Wynne Rees about development in the past, and the way he sees things going in future.

Maybe the gentler art of blogging has blunted my journalistic senses, but I found him pretty convincing on the need to create buildings and spaces that will keep major corporations in town, and to build high to achieve that. He had a fine model to show us, with The Gherkin holding its own amidst the wider cluster of high risers. Apparently one of the next big ones has been dubbed the Cheese Grater, and searching for the reference led me to more examples in the fascinating Skyscrapernews.
There are only about 8000 residents in the City, and although we get excellent public services we aren't really a political priority ... mainly getting the benefits of an environment created for City companies and their workers. I don't mind that, particularly since there seems to be another spin-off coming our way.
One of the downsides of City living has been the lack of shops open at weekends, but that may soon be changing. Marks and Spencer and a few other stores have found that it is paying them to stay open six or seven days, because at the weekend people from surrounding boroughs are finding the City, devoid of its weekday workers, a lot quieter and better for parking that their local centres. There's now a move to promote the City as a weekend speciality shopping area. If that includes the continuing revival of Leadenhall Market, and a few more pubs and restaurants available beyond eight on Friday evening I'm all for it.
The talk was part of a networking event organised by Common Purpose for graduates of their London programmes, and I must say I enjoyed it a lot more than an earlier speed networking session. We were given a few props to encourage us to meet people we didn't know - three names and questions to ask - but the drinks and excellent hosting were enough to get everyone talking.

The City's Marketing Suite was a great venue for tonight's event. Where else could you turn from the model of the City of the future, and walk through a door to the remains a Roman amphitheatre.

I tried to re-interest the Common Purpose people in blogging as an aid to networking, but didn't find any takers. I guess they felt they were doing pretty well with good old face-to-face. On the other hand I think that the City can expect blogging to become an increasingly large part of the conversational mix that centuries back first created  banks from pubs, and insurance companies from coffee shops. We'll soon be getting blanket wifi throughout the City. If that comes in at £11.99 a month we could be seeing a lot more out-of-office networking in the square mile, with laptops and sandwiches in the parks. Bloggers for the City, anyone? I think we need another nice reception to kick it off...

Common knowledge

Kevin Harris, whose Neighbourhoods blog connects people and policy at street level, has written a terrific essay about everyday life and conditions on the Havelock estate in Southall, London. Kevin has been working there with Giles Lane of Proboscis, and Bev Carter from Partners in change, over the last 10 months.
Government these days is putting a lot of emphasis on devolving control of public services to local level, and has high hopes that citizens will play a more active part in their improvement. However, Kevin's essay brings home just how difficult it is in reality  for people on the estate to make a difference to conditions.
Here's the abstract of Common knowledge: community development and communication on a housing estate

Residents striving to improve conditions on a low-income estate face a range of problems, some of which severely constrain their ability to act collectively. This essay offers an impressionistic view of conditions on the Havelock estate in Southall, west London, based on an assessment of the communication and information ecology, with the aim of clarifying the role that Social Tapestries might play in stimulating information flow and the sharing of ideas and knowledge.
The essay offers a snapshot of the physical conditions, low levels of social interaction, and "civic absence" that characterises the neighbourhood. It notes the sense of weakening community presence in the face of unresponsive environmental services and a looming drugs threat. It attempts to explain why participation in community initiatives is sometimes very difficult to establish or sustain, and it contrasts this reactive, fragmentary style of urban life with the contemporary image of lively urban consumption.

The essay itself is a lively read, and is published by Proboscis in their Cultural snapshots series. You can find it directly here.

Playing through double devolution

The go-between wears out a thousand sandals, according to a Japanese proverb. In deepest Holloway last week that fate befell those playing the role of councillor in our game simulating the government's new neighbourhoods policy.

As conference organiser Kevin Harris reports, the game aimed to simulate what will happen in a few years when "double devolution" takes hold, and public service delivery moves down the ladder beyond councils to offer more contracting opportunities to nonprofits, and more opportunities for active citizens.

Drew Mackie and I were relieved when participants readily agreed to move from presentations to interaction, to form groups, and develop descriptions of fictitious (but pretty realistic) neighbourhoods. To spice things up, they threw in plenty of problems and then passed the challenge to another group, while inheriting someone else's neighbourhood. After that, their task was to come up with ways in which different agencies, organisations and community groups would plan and carry out improvements. It was a revised version of our first run last November. As Kevin reports:

The first version of the game had been uncannily realistic but we had struggled to integrate the policy role. On this occasion we diluted it but Drew introduced a role for ward councillors - and it was fascinating to watch how, in two of the three groups, the councillor ended up being a butt for complaints from the community groups and systematically ignored or by-passed by the service agencies. Watching one group was like watching a game of tennis, and reminds me that I've often been puzzled as to why anyone would want to become a councillor. It just doesn't seem a pleasant way to spend one's evenings.

Earlier Kieran Drake, from Neighbourhoods and Citizen Engagement at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, had provided a full briefing on how policy is developing, and explained the enhanced role councillors might have. They would move from the back benches to the front line, becoming leaders of communities and empowered advocates, while calling on support from council officers running neighbourhood management. You can download the presentation here, together with others from Gabriel Chanan and Paul Hilder.

It all sounded fine in theory, but then things don't always turn out the way the policy makers hope. Games are one way of testing out what may happen. In this case it seemed that councillors could end up being pulled in two directions, trying to build bridges but just as likely to get in the way. Is that a mixed metaphor? I'm not sure, but it was all pretty hilarious since people managed to have fun exploring the future of Slaghampton.

Kevin highlights the complexity of what the government plans:

Presentations and discussion at the conference, as well as the game, confirmed that this agenda packs a hugely complex set of issues. The scope and power of agencies, the formality of neighbourhood agreements with service providers, the skill-levels of councillors, the worries about burn-out among activists, and so on - all sorts of unanswered dynamics and tensions. To their credit, the ODPM have long-since recognised the importance of strengthening local government and enhancing the role of councillors.

While there were clearly a lot of tough issues, I found some support for the way things may develop. I asked two people from what could easily become opposite sides of the fence what they thought. Folake Segun works for Croydon Voluntary Action, and Theo Fasoyiro for Croydon Council. They were very positive about the new policies and the benefits they may bring. However - and this to me is the key issue - they emphasised that it is because the public and nonprofit sector have a good working relationship at present. Where different sectors don't get on so well the new arrangements are going to be pretty challenging, and the role of councillors particularly so. In that case, start ordering sandals now.
More pictures here