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

Neighbourhoods, governance and games

I'm looking forward to the conference on neighbourhood governance and community engagement organised for CDF by Kevin Harris next month. If that sounds bit challenging, but be assured that Drew Mackie and I will aim to liven things up with our Neighbourhood Governance Game. As Kevin reported previously, we had a lot of fun with a dry run last November, when groups invented semi-fictitious neighbourhoods and then planned improvements together .... or not very together.

As a simulation it was uncannily realistic. The policy people struggled with the slight vagueness of their brief and worked away at trying to clarify it without going to talk to the service reps or the residents’ groups. In one locality, the service and community groups began by swearing undying mutual support but before long had drifted apart. The community group in this case struggled very realistically to agree on things. At the other locality, the reverse happened: they began deciding independently what they were going to do, but in due course came together harmoniously and creatively. And on one side we had this exquisite example as participants worked on the timeline: in one locality in the fictional year two, the residents came up with a stack of initiatives (orange post-its - click on the image to enlarge) while the agencies' sole initiative was ‘Progress report and evaluation.’

Drew and I have since produced a brief report, which you can download as a zipped pdf here, including my favourite observation:

One participant honestly reported at the end: “we found it so difficult managing internal stakeholders we never got round to talking to external ones; we started consulting people at the end of the process as a way to generate consensus, not the beginning as a way to frame the task. Personally I was appalled by own behaviour - I started off accusing my colleagues of slipping into policybabble rather than plain english, and yet happily charged through to the end of the process without once asking anyone in the other room what they thought”.

The conference takes place at the Resource Centre, Holloway Road, London, 14 March 2006. As Kevin says:

The event will be chaired by Carol Hayden, Associate Director, Shared Intelligence. Speakers include Mark Hitchen, ODPM Neighbourhoods Team, providing an update on the government proposals; the Young Foundation's Paul Hilder giving an update on the Transforming Neighbourhoods programme; and Susie Hay, regeneration and participation consultant, discussing the importance of informal networking at local level.

On that form, the rest of the conference will be both lively and enlightening. Bookings and enquiries: Cheryl.Roberts(at)cdf.org.uk, 020 7833 1772. There's a leaflet here.

Sustainable engagement: more conversations, less committees

Kevin Harris has come up with a rather good model of neighbourhood change that ties in neatly with our recent discussions about Governance with the grain. Kevin's prescription comes down to more conversations and less committees, leading to stronger networks and, well, neighbourliness.
We had been talking with Steve Clayton and Chris Baker about the Castle Vale estate in Birmingham, where a housing action trust has successfully used over £300 million to bring enormous improvements since the early 19090s. The challenge now - as in many similar renewal programmes - is to shift from a committee-heavy style of doing things that may be necessary to handle money and big projects into something else. The "something else" still has to provide ways for residents and local interests to influence how the neighbourhood is run, not least because the UK government is pushing control of public services down to local level. However, a small and usually aging group of volunteers probably aren't going to continue to turn out to committees, forums and scrutiny panels now the big problems have been tackled, and the big money is gone. As Kevin writes:

It's obvious that neighbourhood governance makes huge assumptions about people's readiness to commit to community action. But I've stood in community centres watching people come in to find out what's happening and see who can help them; and I know they will sense and avoid any situation where they might be pinned to the wall and coerced into being treasurer of this or that committee for the next four years. If your everyday life is a complex muddle of errant kids and dodgy health, malevolent housing conditions and unpredictable income, you're probably not up for a 24 month committee commitment. If you can see how it relates to your problems though, you might be up for collectively organising something where you can see a beginning and an end. Is that obvious? Good.

What Kevin suggests, as shown in his diagram (click to enlarge), are actions that will help build people's confidence, increase the use of public places in ways that work for all, and more social interactions.

I think there are actions we can focus on to influence those conditions: dealing with disorder, promoting attachment, promoting walkability, stimulating social networks, and organising events and occasions - and maybe some others that I haven't thought of yet. Again, policy hasn't come up with this sort of list - disorder certainly, walkability occasionally, and organising events sometimes at local level. But what would policy look like if it sought to promote attachment to place (eg by addressing high levels of geographic mobility) and helped to stimulate social networks and encourage more conversations?
It does seem to me that certain outcomes are likely if we use these influences on the specified conditions. Boosting what I've called community confidence, local presence, and the frequency of conversations between residents will have a positive effect, I would argue, on getting sustainable community engagement (which of course has to be a rich mix of participatory opportunities, not a string of committees) and on community cohesion.

Put like that, it all seems blindingly obvious, but it isn't the sort of thing that you see in the action plans. It is difficult to chunk up into projects that can be neatly budgetted and tendered to consultants. It involves local groups and agencies giving a lead in the ways that they relate to local people, and to each other with a strong emphasis on openness, accessibility, delivery.... getting out there and living it, not just attending yet more meetings to talk about it. I know many groups and agencies are good at that ... but quite a few aren't. From what I've heard of Castle Vale they may be just the people to show how to do things a bit differently. Kevin and I have been invited over to talk some more, and I'm looking forward to that.

Governance with the grain

One problem with big housing and neighbourhood renewal projects is that they necessarily demand a lot of structures for management and community engagement ... but when the money goes you can end up with a lot more breaucracy and committees than you really need.
This was highlighted recently in a fascinating discussion with a couple of officers from a big housing estate that has benefitted from some £300 million of public and private investment over the past 12 years. The 10,000 people living on the estate now have much better homes, a safer and more attractive environment, rising education standards and better employment prospects. It has been done through enormous hard work by local politicians, officials and many residents who became representatives on committees and forums, and volunteers running local projects.
They were motivated by the strong desire to tackle some really tough problems in the 1990s - and the chance to have a real say in how money was spent.
But as one of the officers said, in match terms it is really only half time. There's a lot more to be done in helping people feel their regenerated neighbourhood is a friendly and safe community, and to continue to care about the improvements.
To this end there is now a neighbourhood partnership, a trust with some money still to spend, a set of forums for education, environment, health and other issues, and a scrutiny panel for residents to keep an eye on how all this performs.
The trouble is that many people are suffering participation fatigue. The core resident volunteers and committee people probably number about 30 ... and most if not all are over 60.
How to re-energise involvement and bring new people in?
I was joined in the discussion by old friend Kevin Harris, who blogs knowledgeably about neighbourhoods, informed by his Local Level consultancy work.
For the past few years Kevin and I, with another colleague Drew Mackie, have been pushing the case for informal methods to help build communities: mapping social networks, storytelling sessions, using a mix of informal events and social software, as I wrote here and here.
We enthusiastically expanded on these ideas. Instead of trying to recruit people to committees, why not consider whether these are really needed. Could their functions be fulfilled in other ways?
What's needed is ways to offer people information, help them communicate and collaborate, tell their stories, get organised - and make their voice heard when something comes up that concerns them. This could be done in large part by mapping the many networks and communities of interest on the estate: friends and families, sports, hobby and church groups, school and work networks. From this is it possible find the natural 'connectors' in communities, see where the gaps may be, and develop or enhance channels for communication and engagement.
Ah, said one of the officers, sort of going with the grain of the community, instead of trying to impose more structures? Treat people as individuals instead of consultation fodder. Exactly.
And so we came up with 'governance with the grain'. The next step is a visit to the estate, meet the locals, and see if our theories stand up to a reality check. Some may turn out to be passionate about committee meetings, but I somehow doubt if that goes for the majority.
Update: Steve Clayton and Chris Baker says they are happy that we identify Castle Vale, Birmingham, as the estate. I've written more here prompted by Kevin Harris's Model of Neighbourhood Change

Talking about neighbourhoods

My friend Kevin Harris is producing some really thoughtful stuff over on his Neighbourhoods blog - and I don't say that just because of his kind words about the neighbourhood governance game we ran together recently. I'm behind in writing something myself on that, but meanwhile you can download a report.
Kevin has a report on the Young Foundation seminar last week - Community, consensus, and neighbourhood governance - news of fascinating mapping work with Social Tapestries in West London, a critical review of the evaluation of the Home Zones Challenge, and much more.
While the Government's official neighbourhood renewal site has lots of useful research, reports, factsheets and toolkits I think that it - and other government sites - would benefit from a few more front-line stories and conversations. We might get that if civil servants and Ministers are prepared to follow councillors in blogging about their work.

Knowing whether your community is strong or not

These days everyone seems to be in favour of community, cohesion, inclusion, engagement and so on at local level. Me too.... but how do you know if you've got it, and whether the work you may be doing is making things better or worse? Kevin Harris in Indicators of strong communities alerts us to some work published by the UK Government's Neighbourhood Renewal Unit that I think could be very significant.
The paper proposes how to measure 'community strength' against five main indicators. Interesting enough to researchers, but more generally significant, I suspect. This work may give some insights into the way government sees community development these days, and where policy and funding priorities will lie.
As Kevin reports:

There are five core indicators, which are presented as if carrying equal weight (although personally I favour the first two and am less concerned to see weight given to the last)
* Governance - percentage of residents who feel that they can influence decisions affecting their local area
* Cohesion and inclusion - percentage of residents who feel that their local area is a place where people from different backgrounds can get on well together
* Volunteering - percentage of residents who affirm that they carried out voluntary work in an organisation once a month or more in the past year
* Voluntary and community sector - percentage of VCS groups and organisations affirming growth in activity over the past year in terms of (i) financial turnover and (ii) volunteering
* Services - Proportion of services in selected public service areas delivered by VCS organisations on behalf of the local authority.
Each has additional recommended indicators, an explanation, example, and actions associated with them. Quite a lot of work has also been done on methods and questions for collecting the data, with a case study included.

Kevin goes on to question the way that some of the indicators are framed:

And does it have to be 'volunteering' and 'voluntary work'? What about ‘community activity’ (or even community involvement)? Turning up on a cold wet evening and sitting in a committee meeting, maybe without saying anything to anyone, is probably community activity to most people but not voluntary work.

I think there are a lot of other issues worth discussing. Suppose people are broadly happy with their neighbourhood, and aren't too worried about getting involved ... and most of their neighbours are from similar backgrounds. Is their neighbourhood weaker than one with greater diversity and concern about the way the council is doing things? Maybe strength has something to do with how far people an organise when necessary.
I'm personally rather sceptical about the extent to which you can measure "community strength" in quite the ways suggested. Where do the indicators come from ... are they drawn from work on the ground, reflecting people's perceptions of what matters in a community, or are a rationalisation of current government policy enthusiasms? Why is there no press release, or encouragement on the NRU site to discussion? Maybe that will come ... at least they are published and Kevin's vigilence has given us a chance to start our own discussions. That wouldn't have been so easy a few years back.

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Rebuilding the village in our hearts, or maybe heads

Stuart Woodin argues for more heart and feeling in planning our neighbourhoods, to complement the mainly rational approaches of regeneration programmes. We need to rebuild the Village in Our Hearts, he says in an article for New Start Magazine, now online. I go along with much of what he says, but can't help wondering if some of us are head people about how and where we live. Maybe there's some personality preference mixed in with circumstance. Stuart writes:

In most indigenous societies, place and community still play a crucial maintenance role deep in the psyche of the individual. In these communities the link between place (neighbourhood) and the land, home, work, social system (community) and spirit is strong and seamless. Are we now just too far removed from this dynamic or is it possible for such age-old links to be understood afresh and renewed?
The problem is that for a long time now these vital interconnections have been weakening in the UK. The link between the neighbourhood (village) and land was lost forever in the agrarian and industrial revolutions. And in the 19th and 20th centuries towns and cities grew so large that work in the neighbourhood was, for most, no longer a practical option.

Stuart - who is a consultant in the regeneration field (Word download) and closely involved with his own neighhourhood in south London - says that renewal policy has generally missed the 'felt' quality of village, crucial to neighbourhood renewal and community leadership. He offers some characteristics of felt neighbourhood, including a shared use of land, a sense of belonging, order and history, and symbols that are generally honoured by all - maybe an old tree, an ancient crossing point, a view.

It is often these felt qualities of neighbourhood that not only inform conscious and unconscious decisions about how we relate to the neighbourhood, but crucially whether we stay or leave. The tipping point may be something quite simple - the realisation that arriving home lifts your spirits or conversely the feeling that the neighbourhood is unsettling, unsafe or soulless.

New Start have entitled the article "Why we all want the village life", and although I'm not sure that's what Stuart is saying, it does raise the question of whether we have preferences for place that may reflect our personality types. Do extroverts - who, according to type theory, derive energy from their interactions with the external world - prefer buzzy places much of the time? Do cities provide more opportunities for physical exploration, for those who welcome this? Then there's the question of what we may prefer at different times in our lives, and how far we may or may not want the goldfish bowl feel of a small place, or the anonymity of a larger one.
John Major, when Prime Minister , enthused about the village England of warm beer, cricket matches and old maids on bicycles in his 'back to basics' speech. We discovered later that he had been up to something rather different with fellow MP Edwina Currie back in the metropolis. Different places, different passions.
Some people have the money and personal freedom to choose where they live, others are trapped in communities from which they can't escape.
I hope New Start follow up with more articles exploring the complex mix of people's personal preferences, the dimensions of place, and the choices now available through a mix of real and virtual travel. As a Demos pamphlet argued recently, people make places.

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People (and some rules) make public places

Not only did Demos offer a better than usual launch last night for their research on public space, but the press release also offers a neat summary and so reduces the blogging effort for those attending. Double thanks, folks.

Car boot sales, supermarket cafes and municipal allotments are among Britain’s most-loved public spaces according to a report published today by Demos, the leading democratic think tank. People Make Places: Growing the public life of cities finds that across Britain’s cities, a wealth of characters – from ‘Mall Walkers’ and ‘Home Birds’ to ‘Displayers’ and ‘Public Spirits’ – are helping to shape public spaces in the most unlikely places.

The authors Melissa Mean and Charlie Tims did a lively double act at the launch with plenty of photos and not too many words on slides, and the panel were brief with comments and sparky in their response to the audience. Drinks before and after, and a video art installation that played our persons back on the walls with distortions alternately mellow and manic added to the buzz (right).
You can read more here, and download the book free. One of the main themes in the research is the need to strike a balance between over-controlled and arid public spaces, and spaces that may be lively, but in which their users are segregated by choice or management ... and so have little interaction. Rules like "no dogs" may do something for hygene but remove one of the main ways through which people find excuses to talk to each other. The report says:

“The current focus of both urban designers and city planners on creating grand plazas and iconic architecture ignores the role of the people who are meant to use them,” say the report’s authors. “A new town square can be carefully, expensively designed, but there’s no guarantee that people will come and use it. Architects and planners need to start with people; they must understand public space from the perspective of those who live and work in towns and cities.”

It adds that the research highlights a number of typical places found in British cities regarded by people as most welcoming. These included:

The car boot sale – Where people feel comfortable passing the time of day with strangers, but are also likely to bump into people they know. There is also a sense of novelty and surprise in the possibility of ‘discovering’ a bargain.
Supermarket cafes – People are drawn by the welcoming atmosphere, and find escape from boredom and are able to relax and linger as they take a break from the hubbub of shopping.
Allotments – Bringing together people of different generations and ethnic backgrounds, allotment regulars report a strong sense of companionship, coupled with the pleasure of learning, often done through trading gardening tips and produce.
The arts centre – Users appreciate the high degree of diversity, and the tolerance of people who are often not tolerated elsewhere. At the same time, cutting edge film and art helps confer a sense of status and esteem.

The report argues that the best public spaces are vibrant and welcoming because they are well used, and that this vibrancy is created by people and communities themselves. It is the use of public space, rather than its ownership, physical design or aesthetic appearance that makes a place public, and any space has the potential to play this role.

There was perhaps a little over-emphasis on do-what-you-will, which prompted George Nicholson, who has management roles both with the successful Borough Market just up the road from the launch, and a local park, to warn again the belief that doing away with rules will lead to safe places that work for all. George does good pictures too.
Steven Clift, e-democracy guru and champion of virtual public spaces, was with me in the audience and confirmed that it is precisely rules and agreed codes of behaviour that make community issues forums a success.
The report started lots of conversations - which was great - but I couldn't help wondering how long these would continue. The report's funder, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, produces enormous amounts of social research which can seldom be faulted on its methodology, scope, editing, or the generosity of free downloads. But does it make much difference?
The issue in many of the areas researched by JRF these days is not so much knowing the problem, but getting the public agencies who can do something about it engaged and working together. I fear that the more research you produce, the more Government and other agencies can say - "ah yes, we know about that and are working on a comprehensive strategy". Few people remember to come back a year after the launch and ask what actually happened. Most funders are correctly strong on funding evaluation of local projects to find if they were value for money. Is anyone evaluating the results of research programmes? Would any think tank propose that?(Addendum: JRF have funded a couple of pieces of work I have done, and they are Very Nice People).

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Participation language doesn't work either

After I wrote a piece on Participation often isn't working recently, my friend Alexandra Rook dug out an article she produced a couple of years ago, but didn't publish at the time.
Alexandra makes the point that not only are the processes of involving people not working, the language isn't either. Councils and other power-holders have taken on the words, but not the appropriate attitudes:

The old mantras of ‘bottom-up’, community-led, ‘experts on tap not on top’ are now coming from those at the top. And that’s the problem: it remains a top-down initiated process, demanding that ‘the community’ gets off its backside and participates. (I put ‘the community’ in parentheses because it has become a much bandied about, hackneyed and increasingly de-valued term. It’s become part of the regeneration jargon. Forgive me if I refer instead to ‘local people’, those ordinary individuals who live in a certain area or get together for common purposes-those ‘communities of place and of interest’.) Participation has become something of an end in itself. In the nanny state there is an imperative to get out of bed and be a good citizen (we don’t remind ourselves any more that technically we’re all still subjects).

Alexandra adds:

‘The community’ is expected to not only identify its needs (relatively easy), but to prioritise those competing needs for limited resources (not so easy) and then to come up with solutions to those prioritised needs (much harder). Wasn’t it Tony Benn who said if democracy worked, they’d abolish it. Well, we don’t have much experience of participative democracy as opposed to representational democracy, and we all know what people think of that, because they’re voting with their feet. So we’re struggling with participation and the need to be ‘inclusive’, to reach those who were deemed to be ‘hard to reach’ or the 'hard to hear’ (recently re-badged, I noticed, as ‘the hard to find’; they must be running as fast as they can from the regeneration field).

Alexandra works for the Civic Trust, who do excellent work in regeneration and community engagement, so her views - while entirely personal - are based on wide experience. You can read the whole article below. It resonates with the research I was quoting, and also with an article written a few years back by Drew Mackie Dancing While Standing Still. I'll be looking out for more reality checks on participative democracy, and how to address the problems revealed - which is much easier if people like Alexandra and Drew help by being honest about the issues.

Online neighbourhood information may increase wealth gap

Research by Professor Roger Burrows suggests New neighbourhood information websites 'risk widening the gap between rich and poor', as xPRESS Digest reports.

A new generation of internet information services that enable house hunters to select their 'ideal' neighbourhood have the potential to widen the divide between the richest and poorest places in Britain. A report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warns that sophisticated new Internet-based Neighbourhood Information Systems (IBNIS) could lead to a more segregated society by not only guiding buyers to the best schools or lowest crime figures, but also helping them choose areas with the kind of existing residents they would most want as neighbours.

The BBC in Internet could widen wealth gap has a quote:

"It is entirely possible that people will start using them to sort themselves out into neighbourhoods where their neighbours are less diverse and more like themselves," said Professor Roger Burrows, who led the JRF research team from the Universities of York and Durham.
"While no one would want to prevent public access to neighbourhood information, we should recognise the potential implications for disadvantaged neighbourhoods and the people who live in them," he added.

While over at Potlatch William Davis reflects:

It strikes me that the internet is likely to do for housing markets what networked computing has done for all sorts of other markets: make them more accurate as pricing mechanisms, but also more volatile in response to shocks. For instance, technology has more or less erradicated information assymetries in bond or insurance markets, because the distribution of information is more or less perfect. Human beings still exercise judgement and develop narratives, but they no longer distribute the facts and figures, which makes for more predictable markets. The same will eventually be true for housing markets: estate agents will be responsible for developing a narrative around a certain area (as if they don't give enough chat already...) but will no longer be sources of information on the housing market, which will be entirely transparent online.
But equally, networked computing can create volatility: think of how 'hot money' flooded out of South East Asia in 1997 with unprecedented speed. The tipping point between optimism and pessimism is far more dramatic, once everyone else is more accutely aware of market tendencies, and has a speedier opportunities to act. Vicious and virtuous circles ensue. I guess what Burrows is arguing is something along these lines, that the new agility and transparency that is available to house-buyers means that those with market power can take ever better decisions, thereby further weakening the market position of those without the same power.

Flash illuminates the urban tapestry

Giles Lane of Proboscis follows up my earlier item about neighbourhood communications with news that you can now view the results of the Urban Tapestries project through a flashbrowser. Once registered you can see how, during trials, people created text and image items to 'attach' to places in central London and view these by 'pocket', thread, and clickable map.

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.
Urban Tapestries seeks to understand why people would use emerging pervasive technologies, what they could do with them and how we can make this possible. It seeks to enable people as their own authors and agents, not merely as consumers of content provided to them by telecoms and media corporations. The project centres on a fundamental human desire to ‘map’ and 'mark’ territory as part of belonging and of feeling a sense of ownership of our environment.

I understand Giles is planning another project. I think he and his partners are onto something important about the potential for people to use new technology to interact with their environment. You can see a couple of animations that bring this home, linked from here.

Is this the 'dark age' of community communications?

On his Neighbourhoods blog Kevin Harris wonders in The original space of flows whether we may be living in a 'dark age' of community communications...

.... where at the moment we have neither the benefit of dense overlapping networks in our neighbourhoods, nor the potential of an online resource for the accretion of community memory. There's stacks more to go into this, such as the 'isolating impulse' expressed in the use of personal stereos, shaded car windows, a non-conversational cash machine, how we feel about gated communities, and so on.