Designing for Civil Society

Government pledge to support online collaboration

Cabinet Office Minister Tom Watson has announced a new Task Force, headed by Richard Allan, to take forward proposals in the Power of Information report. Much of this was about the way that Govenment information is handled - important in itself. However, Tom also says that Hazel Blears Department of Communities and Local Government will be producing a White Paper on engagement this summer. He remarks:

Over 7 million electronic signatures have been sent, electronically, to the Downing Street petition website. 1 in 10 citizens have emailed the Prime Minister about an issue. The next stage is to enable e-petitioners to connect with each other around particular issues and to link up with policy debates both on and off Government webspace.
The challenge is for elected representatives to follow their customers and electors into this brave new world. Some of us have already taken that leap. As well as blogs, there are many more MPs using Facebook and Yahoo Groups to communicate their ideas and listen to other.
Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least.
But we need to make it easier for others too.

After declaring his belief in the power of mass collaboration, and support for initiatives like Netmums, Tom adds:

The power of information taskforce will work to support the endeavours of collaborative communities in the UK and beyond. New tools and ways of working are going to allow us to apply our collective intellectual capital to the seemingly impossible challenges of the modern age. I look forward to collaborating with them and you on this exciting agenda.

One of the strong themes in the Power of Information report - as covered by the BBC here - was that Govenment should collaborate with existing initiatives rather than setting up its own ... and it seems as if that approach is being adopted.
The BBC is following the same line, confirming on the site, as I reported earlier, that the Action Network is going to close after five years partly because so much else is now happening online.

Climbing out of the walled garden

As I remarked the other day, there's a number of new platforms wishing to claim they are the Facebook of the nonprofit sector, or generally suggesting they are the best place to be online. They often go for the old-style model of creating a "walled garden" behind a login, staking out territory in ways that reflect the competitive and territorial style of those anxious about retaining their membership and so their funding.
It was refreshing to meet up last night with the team behind the new UnLtdWorld site, which is taking a different direction. Yes, you do register, login, fill out your profile and start communicating with others within the system. However, as this slide full of logos show, the aim is to create a "collaborative ecosystem" whereby it is possible to join up with other systems in order to get content in and out.
I was at the launch event for the site, and sound levels didn't really allow for detailed technical explanations, though you can find some here. I was able to talk to both Alberto Nardelli, the Social Network Manager who directed development with the team from Curverider, and with the Chief Executive of Unltd, Cliff Prior. As Cliff says in his profile:

UnLtd is a charity which supports social entrepreneurs who live in the UK - people with vision, drive, commitment and passion who want to change the world for the better. We do this by providing a complete package of funding and support, to help these individuals make their ideas a reality.

I first invited Alberto out into Weston Street, underneath London Bridge Station, hoping for some quiet ... but found we were on a bus route. The lighting was pretty bad too. However, he and Paul Henderson of Ruralnetonline managed to carry on a conversation started inside The Bridge club.

Click to play

I later found a quieter spot to talk to Cliff, where he provided a convincing account of how UnltdWorld may - with its open approach - be able to achieve something others could not on their own. One of the great strengths of system is that it is rooted in offline networks of social entrepreneurs developed by Unltd over the past few years.
Click to play
On joining the system, I didn't at first quite understand how best to use it, because I was looking for somewhere to blog or otherwise makes substantial contributions. Cliff explained I really needed to fill out my profile more fully in order to connect with others of similar interests.
Then there's the "shouts" - postings limited to 300 characters. Short for a blog item ... but aha! think of it as a long tweet, the 140 character items you can post to Twitter. Social entreprenuers like to do more than they talk.

Technorati Tags: puppy, unltdworld

Re-inventing your online business in public

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

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

Do communities need boundaries?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously

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

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

Other posts about RSA

innovation, membership

On stealing virtual sex beds, and the risks in Facebook groups

An evening of presentations and discussion on Internet law may not sound gripping, but I'm really glad I went along the other day to an event organised by Lizzie Jackson of e-mint, and lawyers K&L Gates.
E-mint is a 500-strong association mainly for managers of online communities ... the people who host, moderate, encourage and occasionally police our behaviour when we get together in one place on the net. Anyone interested in online communities can join in. Since you might wonder, it's named after The Mint where a few people got together in 2000 for a drink and came up with the idea.
Lizzie has been around online communities forever (well, at least 10 years), leading the way at the BBC and currently doing a PhD on "hosted space" at the University of Westminster.
E-mint has played a large part in discussions about creating safe spaces for children on the Net, and has a partnership with CEOPS (The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Force). It's partly thanks to them we have codes of conduct and industry self-regulation rather than legislation on these and other issues.
Anyway, Lizzie met up with Paul Massey of K&L Gates, who offered to talk to e-minties about the risks and liabilities that hosts and managers of online communities may face, recent cases like the one between Viacom and YouTube/Google, copyright, terms and conditions for your website, when to take down offending content ... libel, defamation, obscenity, harrassment and much more. At first it looked as if it might be a Covent Garden pub's upstairs room get-together, but City hospitality prevailed, and we ended up with stacks of canapes and plenty of liquid refreshment at L&G Gates.
We all learned lots, with substantial presentations from Paul, his colleagues Dominic Bray and Sarah Stone, and Q and A after. I'm not a great fan of text-heavy Powerpoint, but they did give us great advice, and hand-outs. Will they be up on Slideshare, I wonder? That would be an additionally generous offering to the online community. And if there is a next time, maybe some chance to talk to each around tables, as in the excellent Gurteen Knowledge cafes.
Among the stories we heard was the one about a man in the Second Life virtual world suing another for copying and then selling his (virtual) sex bed. Then there was the case of the childcare expert threatening to shut down Mumsnet because of remarks by contributors.
One of the big issues for people hosting and facilitating online places is precisely the risk that community members will say something defamatory.  If you just let people say what they like, there's a risk that objectionable content will be posted and viewed. However, if you do moderate, your involvement could open you up to action if something gets through.
This issue sparked some discussion on the e-mint mailing list under the heading Damned if we do and damned if we don't.
I asked at the meeting whether someone who sets up a group on Facebook could run the same risk, and it seems that is a possibility.
Apart from the interesting content, it seems to me that the event was a great example of the mutual benefit that can come from social media professionals meeting specialist advisers informally. The e-minties learned a lot from the lawyers, and the lawyers were able to get the latest buzz from a rapidly-moving field. And of course, when we hit that problem in Facebook or elsewhere we'll know where to go. On second thoughts, let's just be careful out there. The law isn't too clear in some area, and that means the potential for a lot of legal time on the clock. I'll dig out those handouts.

TrustedPlaces offers lessons on community: it's all about passion or problems

I went to NMKForum 2007 yesterday to get a full blast of Web 2.0 stuff from the commercial end, and it felt like a day off. No pressure to blog because so many people like Robin Hamman, Simon Collister, Bobbie Johnson and Jemima Kiss  were doing it.
The opening keynote was from Jason Calacanis, who has launched the web search Mahalo.  This has real people (not mechanical "spiders") researching links, so you get a few good ones instead of pages and pages. The big news yesterday was that through Mahalo Greenhouse they are going to open up the job of doing this to anyone who can show appropriate skills, paying $10 - $15 a link. The bad news for us is that the current focus is US, and the general researcher profile is out of work actor/screen writer in LA. Bobbie was sceptical:

Right now I remain unconvinced by Mahalo - which not only seems like portal listing 2.0, but must also be acutely labour-intensive and inherently problematic - but then again, he's got a big bunch of investors behind him, so perhaps I'm missing out on something.

Too right. Jason says he doesn't have to worry for a couple of years whether it makes money ... he just has to concentrate on building volume. Hmm, different world.
Looking for something a bit more real than virtual, I ended up sitting next to the charming Walidd Al Saqqaf, co-founder of TrustedPlaces, who only had a modest £500,000 start up ... but seems to be doing pretty well with it.

Click To Play

His site enables you to search for and review restaurants, cafes, pubs, and clubs. When you join up you whizz through a little quiz on what sort of food, music, people and places you like. That enables you to see whether your tastes are likely to be similar to those of the reviewer. You can also check what your friends are recommending, and use the site to reach a collaborative decision with a group on where to go.
You will soon be able to interview your waiter or waitress (if they are willing) and load that to the site.
It all looks rather addictive, so I shot some video in which Walid explains it all much better than I can. We had to adjourn to the stairs for some quiet, and I'm not sure my over-the-shoulder screen shots are very informative, but I think you will catch the enthusiasm.
Walid had one line with, I felt, wider application than his current project. There are two things, he said, that pull people together into online communities: sharing passions, and resolving common problems. That was a good enough learning point from the day. Trusted reviews may have to wait till the weekend.

Talking about logos, in many different places

Ben Whitnall, over at the online engagement and collaboration specialists Delib, has a nice take on the big logo row 2012 branding 'inspires' public debate online 

As you're no doubt aware, the logo -- sorry, 'brand' -- for the 2012 London Olympics was officially unveiled yesterday to an acrimonious avalanche of public opinion.  I'll try and resist getting drawn into the debate here and rather stick to the key point: the public opinion is already out there. Within hours, there were 1,500 comments on the BBC's 606 forum, 450 on the Guardian's sport blog, hundreds of people rushing to join groups on Facebook and people generally making their feelings known through their own choice of communities and channels -- there's even an online petition at gopetition.co.uk.  And I guess that really highlights my point: will the people responsible for this public event, outlay and brand, who will want to make a lot of noise about accountability, involvement, ownership and all that jazz, be happy to engage with the debate where it is already happening? Or will they insist on 'owning the space'? Would it make a difference if the e-signatures went through the number 10 e-petitions system instead? Will there be official forum threads established in obscure corners of government websites? Will there be an official consultation set up long after everyone's already said their piece?  I don't know what the thoughts of those in high places are on these issues and I don't want to simply be cynical by default...so my question, which is genuinely curious and not accusatory, is: what, if anything, is wrong with using non-official channels to feed back to official bodies?

What I particularly like is Ben's enthusiasm for being in many places online, and going where people are. That's the way things are these days ... but there's still a lot of agencies trying to convince clients they should just concentrate on building "the place". I really hope we win the Innovation Exchange bid. One of the many pleasure I anticipate (amid the challenges) will be working with Ben, Andrew, Gez and the crowd at Delib.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, socialtech

Government explores going where people are ... online at least

The UK Government's interest in using social media and external sites for public information and engagement has now surfaced officially in a press release from the Cabinet Office. It was previously trailed in the Guardian and elsewhere, with an emphasis on possible funding for civic online projects.
On reflection, what is just as interesting is that Ministers and Civil Servants are  becoming aware that presence on the Net is no longer a matter of creating - and controlling - your own web space. It is a matter of going to the places where people already are, and so ending up in many places at the same time. Paul Caplan offers an excellent explanation of the implications of live rather than static web for communicators in work he is doing for Government.
The press release itself is fairly bland. (I've added links):

Minister for the Cabinet Office Hilary Armstrong wants Government to harness the phenomenon of internet advice sharing sites and empower people with information that could help improve their lives.
Hilary Armstrong has asked for a report to assess how Government can help citizens using this new form of citizen to citizen advice with better information from Government. It will look at how non–personal public sector information can be re–used and reinvigorated outside of government to generate public and economic value.
Websites like Rightsnet and NetMums are examples of how people are using the internet to share information, advice and help. Now, a review will look at the benefits such online communities are creating for their members, how they relate to major areas of government policy or focus, and whether there is a case for involvement at any level by Government.
Hilary has appointed Tom Steinberg, Director of MySociety and Ed Mayo from the National Consumer Council to take forward the review. They are being supported by a team of government officials from Cabinet Office.

There's a quote from Hilary Armstrong:

We know people feel, and are, empowered when they can access advice and help easily and directly online; the growth in web sites such as NetMums proves this. If Government can improve the experiences and lives of people using such web sites by providing information and advice through these channels, we should do so – but in a way that helps and not hinders this phenomenon.

There's some discussion in the E-democracy exchange, where Tom Steinberg is expanding a little on the review. Answering a query about reuse of existing information, and discussion on external sites "which could/should be looped back into government more actively" he says:

Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head yourself, Steve, it is about both. The review is about both traditional public sector information questions, like what's valuable and how it should be accessed, plus the newer ones of how people use online communities to fix things in their own lives.
Where the overlaps between the two halves happen is interesting, too.

Tom expressed keen interest in one story offered by Sophia Collins:

I told the story on our blog about accidentally being in Nepal for the revolution. I met a guy from the British Embassy who thought it was ridiculous that he couldn't post travel advisory information on the  Lonely Planet forum. That was where travelers were discussing the situation, desparate for info and clarification, but it wasn't foreign  office policy to join in.

If the review does lead to civil servants and politicians offering information and joining in discussions on "unofficial" sites it opens up lots of possibilities. It would be a welcome change from the usual ways of conducting public engagement, in which the power-holders generally insist on people coming to "their" events, and responding to their consultation documents. It might also give a nudge to nonprofit organisations and what social networking might mean for membership. If you are an organisation offering people online information and interaction, it may well be important in future to engage government in your spaces ... or find the action has moved elsewhere.
The big challenge for government is moving from a hierarchical, controlled environment into one where anyone can have a say.
In a follow-up message referencing the blog post,  Sophia - who is Producer at I'm a councillor, adds:

I get the impression posting on forums is regarded with deep suspicion by older/more senior civil servants and the younger ones who get it aren't in a position to challenge that idea.
This creates a very artificial barrier between citizens and government. It must also create a strange disjunct for the staff concerned - who would use sites in a personal capacity, but have to pretend they can't see them at work.

MySociety develops terrific online engagement tools, so I wonder if we will see both more examples of Tom, Ed, and others getting "out there" to talk about the review, and perhaps a preview of the conclusions where we can add comments and further ideas. MySociety did rather a good tool for this on the Power inquiry - more here, although the CommentonPower site has now gone. It would be an interesting test of how open the Cabinet Office is feeling about all this.

Update: Tom Steinberg responds in the E-democracy exchange:

David, the review is being done so quickly that it won't actually have an interim findings report to put out. However, please don't assume that that means I'm not going to try out possible recommendations on you guys :)

... where a lively discussion continues. You can view messages and contribute here, after first registering here.

Technorati Tags: engagement, onlinecommunities

Digital Dialogues report offers guidance for online engagement

The Digital Dialogues Report by the Hansard Society - now available as web pages - provides some useful insights and guidance for anyone interested in the prospect of more public engagement online, flagged up by yesterday's Guardian story on possible funding. There's welcome scope for commenting.

The report covers pilot projects run by the UK Government last year. Further pilots are in progress. The interim findings from the first phase are realistic rather than evangelical:

• Public engagement can enhance policy making;
• Public engagement enhances citizens’ and government’s efficacy;
•  The use of online resources presents significant logistical, data gathering and transparency benefits not always present in conventional, offline methods;
•  People attracted to participating in online consultation and political deliberation were regular internet users. The majority had not been active in politics previously. It was the online mechanism (combining with an interest in the subject matter and the opportunity to deliberate with policy makers) that attracted them to engage in these case studies;
• Citizens were asked to engage with complex issues, deliberate and begin to find solutions together and with government representatives;
• Most of the people who used the websites preferred to spectate rather than participate in the deliberation, but did visit and logged-in regularly;
•  Feedback attested to a satisfaction with text-based deliberation but expressed interest in greater use of audio-visual content;
• Scepticism amongst the public about the value of engagement in the policy process can be addressed as it begins by clearly setting out the potential for influence over outcomes. This must be matched by commitment to feedback processes at the end of an engagement exercise;
• Public engagement around policy must be led by ministers and policy officials, whilst ensuring that technical expertise is sourced from communications, IT and web teams;
• Simply building a website does not equate to online engagement. Site moderation and facilitation of the deliberation is crucial and must be led by officials with the depth of knowledge and ownership over the policy areas;
•  If the breadth and depth of participation is to be enhanced, a marketing campaign must be put in place to drive traffic to a site, maintain interest and publicise outcomes;
• Participants may be unused to deliberation. Therefore, guidance and information resources will benefit the engagement process;
• Online engagement activity is not a replacement for conventional offline methods. It should be used as a complement and is best placed with a multichannel engagement campaign;
• Blogs are suitable where engagement is ongoing over a long-term period. Forums are good for periodic, structured deliberation with large groups. Webchats are useful as one-off real-time events (but may be combined in a series or with other applications);
• Participant bases created around one exercise should be maintained and encouraged to take part in an ongoing dialogue at appropriate junctures around the policy cycle;
• Online engagement exercises should start small and should be scaled-up in response to demand;
• Both the government and the public have had a long-standing interest in greater interaction online. The technology is now catching up with this aspiration;
• Planning and sufficient lead-in times are necessary to the success of online engagement activity;
• Discussion rules, terms and conditions, and moderation policies must be clear, easy to follow and published on the site;
• Consistency, personality and responsiveness are important in good facilitation of deliberation online;
• Opportunities to engage in the policy process online should be open to all, wherever possible. However, so long as the process is transparent, it is acceptable for government to select stakeholders;
•  Further, longitudinal evaluation is required to gather data which can be used to inform long term online engagement strategies and procurement.

The section on next steps makes a point familiar to anyone involved in public engagement, online or off - that people will get involved only if they think they will be taken seriously.

During the case study consultations, citizens were asked to engage in complex issues, deliberate and begin to solve problems. Amongst the public participating in the case studies, we witnessed enthusiasm tempered with a healthy scepticism. Whilst the opportunity to interact directly with policy makers and deliberate amongst peers has been welcomed, there remains wariness about how genuine these government efforts are and what degree of influence the public can have on the decision-making process. This has directly influenced levels of take-up and participation.

Based on qualitative feedback, the more that government is able to show that it takes online participation seriously the more people will be prepared to get involved in the future. Sustaining opportunities will also help participants develop deliberation skills that will improve the content and structure of their contributions.

The next phase pilots, currently under way, are outlined here. The report explains they are using a range of tools:

New case study leaders will be offered the tools utilised in Phase One ofDigital Dialogues – blogs, forums and webchats. In addition, Phase Two will make available innovative applications that are beginning to see mainstream use – wikis, podcasting, file-sharing directories, audio-visual blogs, mapping software and virals. New case study leaders will also be encouraged to combine applications – for example, converging polling software with forums, or photo-sharing with mapping tools.

The guidance section of the report has some useful draft documentation, including sample registration form, user survey, terms and conditions. The facilitation guidance section identifies five roles

• Host;
• Manager;
• Referee;
• Librarian;
• Reporter.

... and explains them all in this context:

Facilitation roles are best understood as strategies which should be adopted to achieve different objectives in moderating an online deliberative exercise. Not every role is adopted in the course of a consultation; some consultations require different degrees of moderator intervention and role application. Indeed, in some consultations there may be no moderator activity in the actual consultation space; instead moderators are only carrying out ‘off-stage’ administrative duties.

The report adds:

Facilitation is a discipline in evolutionary flux. As online consultations move from their developmental phase and become a feature of legislative institutions, there will be increased pressure for regulation of moderators’ qualifications and skills. This will be difficult to achieve in a way that will be suitable for all applications of moderation. Nevertheless, a set of core skills may include:

• tolerance
• integrity;
• empathy;
• objectivity;
• capability to carry out conceptual thought;
• good listener;
• attentive;
• observant;
•  attention to detail;
• composed nature;
• confidence in mediation abilities;
• strong problem-solving ability;
• high level of ICT literacy;
• cross-cultural awareness;
• excellent researcher;
• strong communicator;
• fluency in written language;
• confidence in group and interpersonal communications.

Looks to me like the set of skills and attitudes that we might welcome in politics and government in general.

Local online: changing models

Local community sites and blogs seem to be getting more attention at present, and the model is changing. On the one hand the admirable Oncom set of sites covering Richmond and surrounding areas announced last month that it is closing after 10 years despite great effort by volunteers. Fund raising efforts are in hand, so there's a chance of relaunch.
About the same time Tom Steinberg of MySociety floated the idea on the e-democracy exchange mailing list of a map-based system by which any local blogs, email lists and other online activities could be signposted to get more attention and cross-over. In the US the Placeblogger project is doing that on a national basis. Communities Online - an early UK initiative - has some listings but these haven't been updated recently. Jon Udell is planning to use his sabbatical - and considerable Net expertise - to set up a community website using a set of open source applications. BBC Click reports on a Parisian experiment Peuplade in creating online neighbourhood sites linked to face-to-face meetings.
The early models of local online communities - like Oncom - aimed to replicated physical proximity online. "Please come to our your space and contribute ...." Some local interests did, many didn't, and it proved difficult to get a sustainable mix of funding, advertising, and volunteer effort. I hope Oncom shows it is possible once you have a core of enthusiasts and supporters. I'm just not sure it is replicable (which doesn't mean it isn't right for Richmond)
On the other hand, now that more and more individuals, groups, organisations, companies, public bodies are creating their own sites in town, cities and villages - and they can be joined up - a different model is possible in which the nature of sustainability changes. Search engines enable users to find local content, particularly if there is one dedicated to do this - as in Brighton and Hove. As more and more sites produce RSS feeds, not just static pages, it is much easier to link and showcase what is happening, as John Udell plans to do and I think Tom Steinberg is suggesting. I hope MySociety rise to the challenge.
Earlier: Proxicommunication - or technology at local level revisited

The price of local democracy - a bit of "street clutter" (about Oncom)
BBC helps start local blog communities

Reality check on social reporting: people

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adding:

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

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

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

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

Placeblogging

Robin Hamman in place blog aggregation - how to make it interesting tips us off about about a new aggregation site that will pull together feeds from blogs that are place-specific ... thus answering a question I'm sometime asked: "where can I find interactive web sites about local communities". What's more interesting, he suggests, is aggregation of blogs within a locality .. which placeblogger may or may not do. Robin is working on a project with the BBC and local bloggers in Manchester.

Here's Robin's take:

Lisa Williams has posted an invitation for a sneak peek under the hood of placeblogger, a project she's been working on. Placeblogger will be a searchable directory and aggregator of placeblogs which she explains are:

Placeblogs — sites that focus on geographical communities — are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council.

There's a screenshot of the site, currently undergoing development work, on flickr. So will it work? Well, there are already lots of sites out that there agregate placeblogs, GlobalVoicesOnline being my favourite example but there are also tons of national and city blog aggregators like britblog and LondonBloggers (which organises blogs around a tube map).

So would I go to a site like Placeblogger? Maybe to have a look, but I can't imagine that if I lived in a specific city or town in America, I'd really be interested in people in other places blogging about school fetes, a house fire in the neighbourhood, or a scandal involving a local priest. It just wouldn't be relavent to me.

Aggregation is great when it helps people find stuff that's relevant but, in this case, I suspect all the aggregation will do is fill the page with stuff that's exactly the opposite of that - stuff of little interest from places I may or may not have ever heard of before. The directory aspect of it, however, would be of interest to me, particularly if the site allowed me to pull in headlines from JUST the placeblogs in my area, as well as things like feeds for place specific keywords on technorati, local papers, local discussion forums, local email groups, etc.

I guess I'm imagining something like Squidoo's Lens service but where much of the work of building a lens is either done for me already or done collaboratively. I'm looking forward to seeing if placeblogger does any of this stuff or if it misses the mark by focusing too much on multi-place aggregation and not enough on focusing on the local stuff I'm really interested in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robin continues:

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

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

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

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

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

Internet tribes examined ... sociably

Internet users contributing content can appear to be rather different tribes. There are the independent bloggers who are single voices loosely linked, and the hoards gathering together in forums and chat rooms. Then there are the social networkers using  platforms that provide blogs and other facilities in one place - for example, ecademy for business and myspace for younger networkers.
It can be very confusing, particularly if you are trying to work out which way to go to help people talk or work together online.
Fortunate the professionals who work on these different models have generally resisted the sort of techie wars that can so easily develop, and this was very evident at tonight's meeting of emint, originally set up by online community managers. We had news that emint is formalising its constitution and making some close links with an organisation representing social networks. There may be funding in prospect. I think I got that right ... but this was maximum sociability in a Covent Garden pub, so we may have to wait for a more formal communique.
Meanwhile we had Nancy White, over from Seattle for a few weeks in the UK, directly addressing the question: "What happens when you talk about Blogs and Community in one breath?"
To quote from the invite  "Nancy is an internationally recognised expert in understanding and practising online group facilitation of distributed work, learning and community groups - work which requires her to fluidly take on the roles of presenter, writer, teacher, coach, facilitator, and rapporteur."  She knows the business. Until a few years ago she was in the "communities" tribe, and - she says - only took up blogging to demonstrate to herself that it wasn't much use. She found otherwise ... a few posts and she was overwhelmed with "welcome to the blogosphere" comments and links, making explicit a social network much wider than she expected.
Nancy says she currently sees three types of blog-based "communities":

• people who cluster, comment and blog around one strong voice - perhaps a political commentator
• bloggers with a shared passion who link to each other and operate as crowd. Apparently foodies are very strong online in the US.
• bloggers who use one multi-blog platform for their shared interest. Nancy gave the example of parents of premature babies sharing their stories at March of Dimes.

Nancy also threw in a a reference to the six non-exclusive functions of networks, drawn - I think - from the work of Richard Portes and Stephen Yeo. These are explained here as filter, amplify, Invest/provide, convene, build communities, and facilitate.
I had to leave part-way through the ensuing discussion, but it seemed to me that we were beginning to get some really useful ways of thinking about communities, networks, blogs in terms of what we hope that they will achieve.

Robin Hamman who co-organised the event with Lizzie Jackson, was wielding a serious microphone on behalf of Radio Five Live's Up all Night: pods and blogs so we may get a more definitive account of the evening. The main lesson from these occasions, of course, is that you can't do it all online. It takes networky people, a good venue and your networking juice of choice.
Why emint? Well, the first meeting was in The Mint.

Update: Robin Hamman has blogged the event here, and Lizzie Jackson has explained on the emint list that emint is indeed formalised in that it has a steering committee and constitution. Funding will be on the agenda at the next annual general meeting.
Nancy has now put up a full version of her talk, in five blog posts starting here and ending here.

Virtual communities conference cancelled: too 'old-skool'?

Last year Amy Jo Kim, one of the experts in managing large-scale communities on the Net, declared that these forums, chat rooms and email groups were now 'old-skool'. Some confimation of decline in professional interest comes this week with news that the annual UK virtual communities conference has been cancelled. Nancy White, who would have been one of the speakers, reflects:

It is ironic, because I've seen a healthy resurgence of interest in and use of online groups and communities, but in a sense quite different from the scene which sprouted all these conferences in the first place. The field has matured in very interesting ways.

Nancy matches expertise in managing online communities with lots of blogging and general sociability, so it's a great pity we won't have a chance to meet again in London in November to talk about the changes in progress. Last time was fun.