David Wilcox on social media, engagement, collaboration
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Mainly about engagement and collaboration using social media and events, with some asides on living in London. More about David Wilcox and also how the blog started.
Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, is launching an RSA Journalism Network over on the RSA Networks site.
The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.
Great topic - and maybe this network could provide an opportunity, among other things, to explore what the BBC plans are in this field. As I quoted in that post, Stephen has said:
The BBC is dropping/has dropped the Action Network. It plans to do a number of other exciting things along these lines in the coming months. The Action network (previously iCan) was always meant to be an experiment. The BBC is right to learn from experiments and change course if that's what seems right.
As well as his position at Leeds University, Stephen is Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute, which maybe explains the connection.
The timing of the project is right, with growing interest in the shifting role of journalists, as citizens produce content for themselves. Charlie Beckett explored that in Networked Journalism: For the people and with the people. More in posts cited below.
I do, however, hope that Stephen makes a commitment to bring the network out from behind the RSA Networks login, as we did with The Membership Project once it had some initial RSA support and interest from Fellows (members). The RSA is running a terrific series of public lectures, free and open to anyone - why not follow the same approach online? I can't see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to "your place" to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.
I've argued the open approach and the case for distributed communities in the RSA, though I can also see the case for private spaces for member-to-member discussions. In this instance I think that Stephen Coleman, the RSA and the Reuters Institute will provide more public benefit by sharing the conversation with everyone. Journalists would agree - wouldn't they?
Previously on Stephen Coleman, the BBC, and open-closed:
We now have a set of well-shot and edited reflections from the Circuit Rider conference, thanks to Marc Osten whose session opening session I videod here. I grabbed some observations wandering about the session - Marc was later able to interview people on the challenges they found introducing Web 2.0 technology into voluntary and community organisations and building online community.
Marc posted the video on his site, then emailed me the code from YouTube so I could embed it up here if I wished. Thanks Marc.
About the same time I spotted a "shout" (short message) posted by Matthew Edmonson to the UnLtdWorld site pointing to a post on his site embedding a video I had taken of him.
My videos are also up on the conference site, where someone has now done a transcript of the key points that I recorded. There's a shared set of photos on Flickr here.
This sort of sharing, and adding value, is possible if we agree to the principle of building on each other's work, ideally adding a Creative Commons license to make that clear.
There is is nothing very fancy in what has happened here - at least to those familar with the way that we can use Web 2.0 technology if we apply open collaborative principles. I could go on with more tools and examples ... but don't need to because Paul Caplan has just written an excellent free Social Media Guide for the Media Trust which you can download from here. Free. Thanks Paul.
I'm telling the story of the videos because one of the main problems people at the conference said they had was explaining to others the benefits of using Web 2.0, and the philosophies that go with it. It's one thing to point to great examples from the US - where they are rather ahead of us in adoption - but it is much more convincing when it is close to home, you experience it first hand and can show your colleagues and clients.
It may help when next time a group says "we need a fancy new site". Circuit Riders can explain that these days the network is the site, and they are demonstrating that.
While at the February 2008 Circuit Rider conference in the UK, I introduced Matthew Edmonson to Nick Booth on the basis that both of them had an interest in open collaboration. To capture the conversation I gave Matthew the camera - and after a shaky hand-over it worked really well.
I came back to find Matthew and Nick having a fascinating conversation about how capturing conference archive material, and making it available for editing, could create a new non-hierarchical experience for participants and others who couldn't attend. Of course, not all organisers will go for it ... because they want to protect and assert their brand.
Matthew Edmonson is a strong advocate for open source software as a way of offering sustainable IT solutions to the third sector. When we met at the February 2008 Circuit Riders conference in Birmingham, UK, we talked about how open source principles can be applied more widely. Matthew offered some lessons from software development that could be useful to anyone attempting open collaborative development work.
The easiest way to explain mass open collaboration online - to people who may not be familiar with the idea - is to mention Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit". I'm a big fan, and generally believe there's a lot of potential for extending collaborative editing to collaborative problem-solving.
As founder Jimbo Wales explains in this video, there's a complex system of governance behind the scenes including a "neutral point-of-view policy", and a core group of editors, so the whole thing operates as "a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in".
The king is now involved in some personal controversy about privacy, neutrality and governance. The Register is running a story Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia. It's about his relationship with Fox News pundit Rachel Marsden, how it ended, and how her Wikipedia bio was edited. Here's Jimbo Wales statement, and a report in Valleywag of texts about his possible influence.
I find it difficult to see any editorial wrong-doing from what's reported - however it does highlight the privacy and governance challenges of mass collaboration. It may add some buzz to the launch tonight of Charles Leadbeater's excellent book We-think, which works through the benefits and risks of an open approach:
We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.
Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.
It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.
But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.
It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.
Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.
Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.
You can down download the first three chapters here.The launch is in the form of a debate between Charles and Andrew Keen, who is promoting his own rather contrary view in his book The Cult of the Amateur. They will be discussing:
Will a new culture of mass collaboration lead to enhanced creativity and ultimately, to innovation, or are we simply providing a forum for the misuse of information and for the erosion of quality? Will a new culture of mass collaboration lead to enhanced creativity and ultimately, to innovation, or are we simply providing a forum for the misuse of information and for the erosion of quality?
It seems Andrew was talking to Jimbo only last week about the flaws he sees in Wikipedia. Hope we get a recap.
There' a neat summary from Roland Harwood on the NESTA Connect blog about success factors for mass collaboration for innovation, based on Wikipedia experience.
More later on the session Laura Whitehead, Nick Booth and I ran last week at the Circuit Riders conference, about social media. Title: Naked in a Goldfish Bowl. As Laura reports, it was substantially about Beth Kanter's success in personal fundraising. There are upsides.
Hat tip to Bill Thompson for tip via Twitter
Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work. I ended up pondering on how "thingies" might help - of which more later.
The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
What this means, as I understand it, is that the exchange wants to find social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and others with good ideas, and then support them in working with public bodies who might buy their products and services, and funders who could invest. At the same time they have to encourage organisations who may be conventional in procurement to be more adventurous. The first two areas of activity are supporting independent living and excluded young people.
My friend Simon Berry and I were along because we led a competing team to bid for the Innovation Exchange job last year. You'll can find the back story of John's appointment here, and a case study of what we are calling our most successful failure.
The evening was a great opportunity to wish John and his team every success in a challenging task, pitch in some ideas and identify some challenges. We talked a lot around the need to mix together the processes of encouraging innovation with specific activities to find and support innovators. In order to do this the team are meeting a lot of people, developing a more sophisticated online system, and planning some events - just as a start.
I had plenty of questions - but thought other people's might be even more interesting, so I asked my friend Tim Davies to pick up my camera and do a little interviewing. He and John were happy to oblige. The change in colour balance is due to a flare up in the stove rather than any heat in the exchange.
I came away thinking that one thing John and colleagues might do, to aid their work and that of anyone else trying to promote innovation for social good, is to set up a "collaboration thingy exchange". This would be a space where we could all pitch in those "something or others" that if you do them, both help make things happen and create some ripples.
Offering people wine and pizza for the evening is definitely a well-tried thingy, because it gets you into conversational rather than document-writing mode, you strike up some new relationships, and get the feel of who you could work with. If you follow-up with blog items, calls or emails you find who is responsive. It's best to do these meet-ups regularly, and it doesn't require a fixed venue. For example, Jeremy Gould has followed up UKGovwebBarcamp with meetings in the House of Fraser coffee shop across the road from his Ministry office. Lloyd Davis has established the Social Media Tuttle Club each Friday in the Coach and Horses, Soho.
Larger-scale things on the same lines are Open Space events, Barcamps, Unconferences - all face-to-face spaces where people are encouraged to think creatively, strike up conversations, form and reform groups to take ideas forward.
Online spaces can - with more difficulty - fulfill a similar function. Simon and I opened up a multi-author blog system to develop, in the open, our failed bid for the Innovation Exchange. The new Innovation Exchange will have a much fancier system.
You can add more spice to events by designing them as games, as my colleague Drew Mackie and I have done over here. One idea I suggested to John was to run some simulations where innovators and purchasers "changed sides" so they understood each other rather better.
What doesn't succeed, in my experience, is expecting these tools to work without some facilitation. Are people thingies? If so, what's needed both online and face-to-face are collaboration co-ordinators, as Shawn Callahan calls them. The role of these co-ordinators - or whatever you may choose to call them - is:
ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field
finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate
helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools
collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role
connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish
The blog where Shawn and colleagues talk about the work of their company in Australia is itself a terrific innovation and collaboration exchange - with generous sharing of the methods they use, as well as insights gathered from elsewhere....
... which brings me to the best thingy of all, which is to open up. I'm sure John and colleagues feel under some pressure to "deliver" ... when of course success depends pretty much on the actions and attitudes of others (and as Dave Pollard confirms, attitude is hugely important). What's needed, in my view, is a whole lot of processes and activities that encourage innovators, investors and public bodies to co-design the improved services that we needed ... which reminds me of another set of thingies prepared by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff as a manifesto for co-creation.
Anyway, my best suggestion to John is to share the challenge that the Innovation Exchange faces by inventing it in public, as Simon is doing with Ruralnetonline. Keep offering the wine and pizza, and blog as you go.
After the evening I asked John for any further thoughts. He replied:
The evening was fantastically helpful for me, if challenging, so many thanks to those who attended. If I were to pick out two features of the conversation, they would be diversity and scale.
On diversity, there were some strong challenges about how the Innovation Exchange can reach different people across the system. The chasm between the people who buy services and those who use them means getting citizens' views is vitally important. Equally, different kinds of people in different roles will respond to the Innovation Exchange in different ways, and we need to cater for all of them.
On scale, there was an important question about whether we want to be encouraging the third sector to be 'innovative' or to be supporting particular innovations to grow. The conversations encouraged me to be loud and proud about the fact that we are focusing on the latter - not preaching at people about innovation but providing practical support for innovators who need it.
I hope people will continue to engage with us and challenge us.
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.
I'm really pleased to hear that John Craig has been appointed to head up the Government-funded Innovation Exchange that "will find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
Until recently John was head of innovation at the Cabinet Office, and handled the tendering procedure for the Innovation Exchange ... where he's now got the job. I was part of a group that made a fairly innovative bid, produced by writing everything except the budgets on an open web site, inviting anyone interested to join in. We were short listed, but didn't win. Instead it went to a consortium centred around the Government-funded Innovation Unit. We thought that was a bit inward-looking, and I wrote at the time:
I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However, I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid.
Public sector Forums reported the story as Whitehall innovation: Proving the oxymoron. It would be easy to see John's appointment as another inward-facing step. However ... one of the best things about dealing with Cabinet Office during the tendering process was the great encouragement we got from John. He wasn't a career civil servant, having previously worked at the think tank Demos. While being scrupulously fair he gave us every encouragement and help in what must have seemed a pretty whacky bid to his colleagues. We felt he really saw us having a chance, and I guess the short-listing reflected that.
So my overwhelming feeling is delight that someone with real sympathy for innovative processes has got the job. Parent, midwife and now a good start in life thanks to the initial work on the exchange that's been guided by interim executive director Jonathan Robinson.
Here's the standard stuff from the press release:
The Chair of the Innovation Exchange, Baroness Thornton, said that John Craig’s appointment was “excellent news. John’s blend of skills will ensure that the Innovation Exchange gets the best possible start.”
Valerie Hannon, Director of Strategy at The Innovation Unit, said the role was a challenging one. She went on to say: “The Exchange is in uncharted territory. It is seeking to create new forms of collaboration across the sector. John Craig is returning to his roots in the third sector, but his experience in policy and government will be invaluable in ensuring that the lessons from the Exchange reach the widest possible audience.
John starts on January 1, and says:
I am delighted to be leading the Innovation Exchange and relish the chance to help the collective wisdom of the third sector to tackle social injustice in England. Between us I believe we can make a real difference for excluded young people and for those struggling to live independent lives – charities and social enterprises have the insight and the commitment to help make radical improvements in the services they receive.
The second-phase Innovation Exchange web site is being developed by Headshift, who won an award for their development of the Demos web site as a very conversational blog-based affair ... so we can hope that Innovation Exchange language will become a bit more, well, innovative. Here's John's posts on the Demos site.
There's already some discussion on the Innovation Exchange temporary site around the key themes of Supporting independent living, and Young people: the excluded, marginalised and the at-risk.
Previously: Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change
The Cabinet Office has chosen a Government-funded unit to lead development on the Third Sector Innovation Exchange. This is the project where a group of us tried to be innovative by running an open process to develop the project, and were shortlisted for plans for an Open Innovation Exchange.
Work on the £1.2 million project will now be led by the Innovation Unit. Press release and advert for the £60,00 a year job of director here.
The Unit was set up in 2002 by then Prime Minister Tony Blair to promote innovation in education, and is now funded by the Department for Education and Skills. Their partners are the voluntary sector chief executives' body ACEVO and social software developers Headshift, who created the award-winning site for Demos.
I don't want to sound a note of sour grapes here. This is clearly a very strong and competent consortium. However, I feel that innovation among nonprofit organisations (and elsewhere, as I wrote here) is most likely to come from open, collaborative processes, not just from inside. Of course, the innovation unit may well be planning something really innovative here. Maybe they could now post their winning bid. You can see our (failed) one here, as well as the process by which we developed it.
We haven't given up on open source innovation, and will now be developing an exchange focussing on new media. I do sincerely offer congratulations to the winning consortium, and have no doubt my friends at Headshift will do them another whizzy site ... so we'll certainly be able to see what's happening.
The Open Innovation Exchange is through to the finals of the New Statesman New Media Awards, which is great news for Simon Berry and the rest of us who collaborated on an "open source bid" to run a Third Sector innovation exchange for the UK Government. We got shortlisted there too, but didn't win. Announcement expected soon on who did.
Although I was on the judging panel yesterday, my fellow judges quite rightly asked me to leave the room when they came to consider the OIE ... so I didn't know the result until I got an email from organiser Charlotte Eisenhart today.
Nor did I know that my fellow judges, otherwise very ably chaired by Kathryn Corrick, pulled a bit of fast one and switched OIE from the Modernising Government sector where it had been nominated by Nick Booth, to Contribution to Civic Society.
We can happily sit in either - although the notion of slightly subversively modernising government from the outside by challenging the way that bids and programmes are developed appealed to us strongly.
The rather less welcome news is that the shift puts us in contention with three other very strong candidates: the "politics for adults" Internet TV station 18 Doughty Street; the really useful FixMyStreet site from MySociety; and No. 10 Downing Street Petitions also from MySociety.
The two MySociety projects are also in Modernising Government ... so if one of them wins there, it improves the odds. Maybe we'll just have to content ourselves with being in good company. I honestly don't know the result.
Meanwhile, the least I can do is say thanks to the New Statesman for a very well run affair, look forward to the awards ceremony later this month, and support Charlotte in her fundraising Hike to the Himalayas, demonstrating how new media actually does help you do something useful.
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