Designing for Civil Society

How to design engagement

If you want to consult or engage more deeply with a local community, or range of interests, there's no shortage of methods recommended for use by facilitators and their clients.  You may think about focus groups, workshops or roadshows backed up by newsletters and other documents. Fairs can offer fun, citizens' juries foster deliberation. Then there's all the more recent web-based processes.
The problem is which method to choose, how long to take, how to ensure you can respond to people's preferences ... in short you need to design a process. While a professional facilitator may know this well, it can be difficult to convince a public agency, for example, that it's more than a matter of choosing a tool and applying it.
I'm delighted to see that engagement specialists Dialogue by Design have now produced not only a free handbook on designing engagement processes, but also a dialoguedesigner. This online system helps you choose the right method for the right situation by asking four simple questions:

• what you want to achieve;
• who you want to consult with;
• how sensitive the subject matter or relationship is; and
• how much time you have to run the consultation.

Once you have provided answers to these questions you are offered a range of possible methods, with links to detailed explanations. I like the way that the system provides gentle rebukes if you don't take engagement seriously enough. For example, if you choose "gather views or opinions" as an objective, you are told:

While gathering views and opinions from people is often an important part of a consultation process it is not, on its own, consultation. If you really only want to gather views and opinions your project is a market research or opinion polling exercise. See the supporting information link for more information on these and some of the methods most commonly used.

The rationale behind this is explained in the handbook, which offer the spectrum of engagement (information giving, information gathering, consultation, participation, collaboration, delegated authority) as a model for thinking about the degree of influence.
In the foreword, Andrew Acland - who is co-director of Dialogue by Design with Pippa Hyam - reflects on the lack of emphasis on design elsewhere.

We think it is because people tend to choose their engagement method first and then fit the process to the method rather than vice-versa, as it should be. We also think it may be because theorists of public engagement focus on purposes and results while practitioners tend to concentrate on methods. Being both, we are inclined to notice gaps and do our best to fill them.

I'm particularly impressed by the handbook and designer tool because I've tried my hand at writing a guide to effective participation, and know how difficult it is to take people through the options. Drew Mackie and I are now developing a complementary approach through engagement games, in which people working in groups develop scenarios and consider possible methods. We now know where to signpost people once their interest in process design is aroused. Dialogue by Design offer a range of consultancy services to follow through the advice in the handbook and online designer. I can't think of a better way of demonstrating the potential value of these services, while also providing such excellent free advice. Smart engagement.

Technorati Tags: engagement

Evaluating participation, amidst political realities

My friends at the participation think tank Involve have published Making a Difference: A guide to evaluating public participation in central government - pdf download. It is written by my former colleague Diane Warburton of Shared Practice, so I'm altogether well-disposed, particularly when there's an admirably brief and clear set of web pages as well as a download. The intro explains:

Public participation has become a central plank of public policy-making. Increasingly, decision-makers at all levels of government build citizen and stakeholder engagement into their policy-making processes. Activities range from large-scale consultations that involve tens of thousands of people, to focus group research, on-line discussion forums and small, deliberative citizens' juries.
This guide to evaluating public participation is intended to help those involved in planning, organising or funding these activities to understand the different factors involved in creating effective public participation.
It helps planners set and measure attainable objectives, evaluate impact, and identify lessons for future practice. Using clear language, simple instructions, illustrative case studies and a glossary, this guide is a valuable tool for anyone involved in running or commissioning public participation in central government and beyond.

The guide has been published with the Department for Constitutional Affairs, who are promoting work in this field as well as e-democracy (including this game). I hope the good practice advice resonates throughout Government. This includes starting evaluation work early by setting up a design group to agree the objectives of the exercise, the methods, the scale and the scope. If that's done, it should help those actually doing the participation work define just how much participation is on offer. As the guide says:

As long as there is room for change in the policy and the results of the engagement will make a difference, it is worth considering public engagement.

There's a rather good diagram, which I've taken the liberty of reproducing on the right - click to enlarge.

However, I was reading this at the same time as I was picking up on the reported remarks of former cabinet secretary, and top Civil Servant at the Treasury, Lord Turnbull. In an interview with the Financial Times. He gave a frank assessment (not intended for quotation, he now maintains)  of the ways of Chancellor Gordon Brown, presumed to be our next Prime Minister. The Guardian summarises it like this:

In the interview, Lord Turnbull said that Mr Brown had a "very cynical view of mankind and his colleagues".
And he added: "He cannot allow them any serious discussion about priorities. His view is that it is just not worth it and 'they will get what I decide'. "And that is a very insulting process."
Lord Turnbull suggested that Mr Brown's style had an impact on the effectiveness of the government as a whole.
"Do those ends justify the means?" he asked. "It has enhanced Treasury control, but at the expense of any government cohesion and any assessment of strategy.
"You can choose whether you are impressed or depressed by that, but you cannot help admire the sheer Stalinist ruthlessness of it all."

I don't know Gordon Brown, or his views on public engagement. He may well be strongly in favour of processes that enhance the influence of citizen consumers, and so put pressure on public services for improved performance. But his remarks do highlight that in matters of participation attitude is at least as important as method. I looked in vain in the glossary to the guide for mention of Control and Culture, but maybe they don't need explanation.

There is, however, a section on public participation goals which reproduces the spectrum of levels of engagement:

Inform: To provide the public with balanced and objective information to assist them in understanding the problem, alternatives, opportunities and/or solutions.
Consult: To obtain public feedback on analysis, alternatives and/or decisions.
Involve: To work directly with the public throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.
Collaborate: To partner with the public in each aspect of the decision including the development of alternatives and the identification of the of the preferred solution.
Empower: To place final decision-making in the hands of the public.

From Lord Turnbull's remarks, the cynical may expect a Brown government to set engagement firmly at the Inform and Consult end of the spectrum. I hope someone someone can offer some evidence the other way. Political bloggers like Dizzy tend to say "what's new":

It is a commonly held view that in the control-freak stakes Brown is probably even worse than Blair.

... and then interpret Lord Turnbull's remarks as another round in the Blair-Brown feud:

Whilst some commentators make allusions to rapprochement and a thawing of the Cold War at the top, I'd rather make allusions to that being an illusion. It's interesting that Stalin should be invoked because frankly, it looks like a very Stalinist, ergo Soviet, détente.

There's participation (or not) and there's politics.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Participation culture: yes! But do tech and non-tech mean the same thing?

I used to find terms like participation and engagement used mainly by people in community development and public programmes. Their practice was - and still is - substantially around workshops and offline media, as I covered in a couple of guides a few years back. Even now, I find few of the practitioners are active online.  Trying to enthuse them about the potential of new tools and ways of working is difficult - though Lee Bryant and I had a go in our chapter for Involve's book on Post Party Politics.
Over the past few months, however, I've found a lot of online use of the terms. It's coming from technology enthusiasts promoting the role of new tools and open approaches in creating participatory, collaborative environments. There have been reports from the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Cooperation Commons, and the MacArthur Foundation (pdf download), to mention only a few.
I find the reports by searches and reading blogs. Seldom do they find me - until now.
No sooner had I posted my piece today about facilitation, with a link back to one about participation as culture not tools, than I get an email from Steve Borsch at Connecting the Dots, saying that in view of those items I might be interested in a free online report his company has produced on the Rise of the Participation Culture.
As it happened, I've been reading Steve's blog for a few weeks and had bookmarked the report as something I must mention. If you wonder why people are excited about blogs, wikis, social networking, Web 2.0, Flickr, YouTube and so on it covers the whole lot, and explains "Web as the new normal".
The content is excellent, but in responding to Steve's email I did say I found the format - long web pages, no download - a bit challenging on a laptop. I don't print much, but I would like to print this one (and I suspect less-online participation practitioners certainy will. Some of my best friends print emails ... and file them)
Steve responded saying the format was much debated, but they went for the only-online in part to make sure there was "a single version of the truth". It is, in itself, an interesting conversation starter with less-online friends. Me: Look - free, always up-to-date, links to other resources, easy to expand, use it to start online discussion. Friend: but I can't read it on the train. Me: well, with wifi and a laptop ... Friend: wasn't all this meant to make life easier?
Next report: engaging the techno sceptics. The Bamboo Project has made a great start in their piece on Engaging Nonprofits in the Tech, or as I put it Moving from Wow to how, sparked by Nancy White's piece on Second Wave Adoption.
That's enough. I can hear my less-tech friend in the background asking ... this participation culture is all very well, but do you have time to do anything else except write about it? Of course. I'm just off to talk about it with others at the first meeting of the London Social Media Club. Then I can blog about that, and link to all the other people blogging about it. That's participation, isn't it?
Update: Steve Borsch e-mails to say that folllowing prompts from a few dozen others, a pdf version of the Rise of the Participation Culture is now available as a pdf (6M download). Much appreciated ... that's service!

Adding o- instead e-

Adding e- to democracy, government, participation and other elements of civil society has brought some benefits, but also helped develop a new sort of digital divide . The new divide is not so much between connected and unconnected, but between the sceptical, puzzled and frankly confused and a perhaps slightly smug band of professionals offering what Clifford Stoll called Silicon Snakeoil 10 years back. I know, I've been guilty of "what you really need to try is..." and enjoying that slight sense of power that comes from brandishing a new set of tools and esoteric terms.
The problem is compounded when e-people say to not-very-e-people "of course, it isn't about the technology ... " but then have difficulty completing the sentence. It suggests there's a magic ingredient we can't tell you about, but if you take the medicine technology it will do you good. You may not like it much, but change is always difficult, isn't it?
At the same time, the new e- tools are important, because as I was arguing earlier , they can help us work collaboratively, can be used to challenge power-holding institutions, and do allow us to work in both groups and networks. That helps develop a culture of openness, do good stuff together, and begin to realise the potential of collective intelligence.
Which led me to the question, what would democracy, government, participation look and feel like if we added o- for open instead of e- for electronic? Pretty good, I believe, but then - would it sell conference seats and kit?
Thanks to Steve, Paul, and Nick for yesterday's conversation that helped gell these ideas.
Update: Graham Lally has picked up the issue in a comment here, and also over at Sphereless 

Participation as culture not tools ... though new ones help

If - like me - you believe that social media, Web 2.0, and social networking are fundamentally important to the ways both civil life and business will operate in future, you need some means of explaining to people who don't get it are still exploring the issues. I also need a way of responding to occasional requests about updates to the non-webby Guide to Effective Participation I did ten year back. Mostly I say "take a look at this blog" while realising the jumble of ideas here aren't very user-friendly.
A meeting tomorrow with Steve Moore and others in the loosely-joined Policy Unplugged family gave me a nudge today to start organising some thoughts. Old-style thinking: do a note to circulate and present. New-style thing: blog a piece that may get some responses and will be useful for other purposes.
The essence of the PU style is conversational, with social conferences and sites like this structured by participants around topics they want to pursue. In that spirit, here's some conversation-starters I jotted down ... a bit condensed and theoretical, but I'm sure I could pitch them into the sort of videos we are capturing at PU events - the latest with Channel 4 education.

• Successful participation is more about developing a culture, than using a set of tools. That applies to democracy, workplace collaboration, citizen engagement in public programmes, user-involvement in product and service design, and anything where doing things together is important.
• The main barriers to effective participation lie both in personal attitudes and institutions, and mainly revolve around desires for power and control.  The institutional barriers are embedded in hierarchical systems, the personal ones in beliefs that we only succeed by competing. Changing these and getting things done is doubly challenging.
• After several decades of policy consensus on the importance of greater participation, accompanied by hundreds of toolkits and scores of organisations promoting the idea, it doesn't feel as if we are much more participative on many fronts. Participation is more often an exercise in ticking boxes for tools used, than making cultural change.
• The social web and social media are profoundly important because they enable individuals to mix greater collaboration (we) with higher personal profile and influence (me). This immerses people in a new type of participative culture, with attitudes, tools and behaviours to match.
• The inter-mix of we and me in the new social web is shifting organising models from groups and hierarchies towards networks, within which teams, groups, organisations will continue to operate. However, to be successful they will have to be more participative because citizens and consumers won't stand for the old ways.
• Participation is not always the answer. Good leadership involves knowing when to enlist and direct, when to  facilitate and support ... and how to mix them all.

Comments, additions, disagreements very welcome. Im not sure how I'll expand these ideas. Maybe they could be basis of Changethis manifesto. I could put them up on a wiki like this one on social networking I'm planning to expand with more Web 2.0 thinking, and follow them up on the social networking site developing over here. The good thing is I don't have to decide one route .. and I know other ideas will develop from meeting Steve and friends. Old style thinking: produce a report. New style: converse online and off, convene a social conference, do some videos, drop out an e-book, keep on blogging, connect with new people, help them join in ...

Some previously posts below - and see also participation and engagement categories in the right sidebar

Face-to-face and online collaboration mix
Relationship-based engagement ... obviously
Web 2.0, participation and e-democracy
If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0
Participation is a culture, not a tick box

Involving resources ... hopefully Not Another Toolkit

I'm delighted to see that my friends at Involve have been given the job of bringing together publications, online resources, training materials and any other goodies they can find relating to community engagement and empowerment. As they explain on their audit page:

There are a wide variety of such resources currently available across a range of policy areas; including health, policing and sustainable development.
Getting an overview of these widely dispersed resources is difficult. By gathering the information in one place we hope that the audit will make it easier to find these resources in the future. The audit will gather information on resources that are currently available and will map resource gaps and provide advice to the government about the future provision of resources. The work will also highlight particularly useful ones through a star rating system.

The work has been commissioned by the Civil Renewal Unit, formerly at the Home Office and now with the new Department for Communities and Local Government. As I wrote recently, they are responsible for the Together We Can initiative, which is all about collaboration across Government, and with community groups and nonprofits.
Involve are certainly right to say that there are lots of resources out there, and it will be a great boon to researchers and practitioners to have some better way of finding them. I'll be sending in my modest collection of links and guides.
However I do hope that this doesn't end up as just another toolkit ... a publication and pdf that isn't updated, can't be copied into re-usable bits, or easily referred to except as a whole.
There are already scores - probably hundreds - of such publications around, and indeed Involve listed quite a few in their earlier publication People and Participation. All good stuff - but it seems to me that the new audit offers an opportunity to drag the management of engagement resources into the digital age, particularly since Involve says it will be advising Government on what to do in future. My immediate thoughts:

• Is the idea of "gathering the information in one place" any longer appropriate? It is of course useful to have a place offering resources and signposting others through links. But don't we need a host of places on the net cross-linking to each other, with authors taking responsibility for updating on their sites? Think networked resources, not old-style library.
• Would it be possible to negotiate with key resource providers the terms on which they are prepared to make materials available, under a Creative Commons licence? For example, a non-commercial share-alike licence would enable people to build on other people's work and put the results back into the pot.
• Could the resources be chunked up as far as possible, so that items can be tagged with keywords for easier searching?
• Overall, wouldn't it make more sense to think about developing a community of practice of researchers and practitioners prepared to share their resources, and ensure these grow dynamically? I seem to recall this collaborative networking approach was one of the early ideas when Involve was launched.

Involve are well-placed to promote new ways of sharing resources because they have a long mailing of contacts in the field, and work with Headshift - leaders in social software development, who build their excellent website.... which also reminds me of the chapter that Headshift's Lee Bryant and I wrote for the Involve Post Party Politics book, all about participation and Web 2.0. The audit offers a great opportunity to apply that thinking in house. If Involve take this route, I hope they can persuade their civil service clients that it is the way to go. It should fit well with the Together We Can ethos.
Meanwhile information here on how to send in your contributions.

Relationship-based engagement ... obviously

I've been writing for some time about how people - not methods, structures and procedures - are the basis for successful partnerships and participation. However, it took a seminar on collaboration software last week to jolt me into thinking more seriously about relationship-based engagement.
I've concluded that this term, which may seem tautologous (as in self-evident), could help us think about what's working, and what's not, in the field.
The seminar was organised by Inovem, where the team who originally developed Smartgroups have now created an impressive suite of email and web-based tools for information, communication and collaboration. Part of the day focussed on case studies within organisations, and part on wider public engagement projects.
My role was to kick-off with a keynote putting e-participation into the wider context of the theory and practice of engagement ... and I found it really difficult to write. I dumped the first effort- written for the seminar pack - in favour of a second effort here (both pdfs). The real insights - as usual - came from listening to other people at the event. Anyway, here's an explanation of my route to relationship-based engagement as a potentially useful term. Click the slide images to expand.

In my first draft I focussed on the need to think about the purpose of any participation or collaboration, the people involved, and only then about process - the stages and methods. Context and culture is also crucial. Drew Mackie and I have used that model - adapted from one by Ann Holmes - in the Engagement Game, which helps people plan engagement processes and choose appropriate methods. These may be polls, surveys, face-to-face workshops - or online forums and panels. I went on to say that engagement is not just about methods, but relationships. In order to develop these we need to shift from formal ways of communicating and put greater emphasis on conversations and stories in order to build trust.

For the second draft I improved on this (I think) with a slide making much more explicit the proposal that engagement fundamentally depends on relationships and trust. As I said in the notes:

It is people who engage - or don’t. The foundation of any type of engagement is trust, which comes from developing a good relationship with the other party. We believe in trusted sources of information; we will listen and respond to options if we believe they are put forward in good faith; and we will only collaborate if we have confidence that the other party will deliver on their promises.

In addition, we need to think about engagement in terms of networks, rather than just one-to-one or one-to-many relationship between power-holders and participants, or core groups and wider stakeholders. 

We need to map these networks in order to understand them, create an open culture, identify and support connectors. We can then start to think about the range of tools - online and off - that are appropriate. We should become sensitive to the fact that some of them are essentially top-down and controlled by agencies who are broadcasting to us, or inviting us to contribute to options develop on their terms.

Other tools, created by intermediaries, aim to develop trusted spaces. The more recent tools for blogging, podcasting and publishing video provide the means for people to develop their personal voices.

At present a lot of e-participation and e-democracy projects developed by public agencies are based on officially-controlled sites. It's a bit like saying "please come to our public meeting, or respond to the survey that our interviewers are carrying out". Nothing wrong with that, provided (going to my first slide above) there is a clear purpose for engagement and the agency have taken trouble in understanding who may be involved and what their interests and communication preferences may be. 
This top-down engagement probably won't work, however, if the context is uncongenial. Maybe the agency hasn't listened and delivered in the past, for example. If public agencies don't create compelling reasons for people to engage, in places they can trust, I think people will increasingly use personal media for campaigning and influence and create their own places.
I'm not sure my presentation got these ideas across well at the seminar. I don't really like doing keynotes at the start of an event, particularly when it is about engagement and interaction. I would much rather join in conversations. I suppose one advantage is that it does force you to try and create some sort of narrative that may be the basis for later exchanges (comment welcome on this item of course).
I certainly gained some insights from the other presentations, all available here. There were impressive stories about how Inovem's software is being used for partnerships, consultation, and team working. I didn't get a fee for the presentation, so feel free to say I'm impressed by the way that the systems map on to the theory and practice of engagement as developed in recent years. There's a good article here about the work of Bath and North East Somerset Council, one of those presenting.
But here comes the slight rub. As I was leaving the event I fell into conversation with another participation practitioner who does a mix of face-to-face workshops and online engagement. He said something like this...

There was a lot in the presentations about the tools and systems, but precious little about the processes of building relationships. There's a real danger that as the technology gets better it will start to define participation methodology ... missing out the people. And it won't work.

This remark really brought to the fore some of the concerns I had felt during the event. Many speakers had made reference to people and cultural issues being crucial, but amidst all the Powerpoint we didn't have a chance to explore those. That needs conversations and anecdotes rather than bullet points. What we got was a lot about tools-based engagement ... hardly surprising, I suppose, because that's what Inovem is selling.
I suspect that the excellent case studies we heard were successful precisely because the organisations involved were attuned to the relationship issues, and could created trusted environments into which to bring good tools. That won't be the case in all circumstances, where the first methods to be used should be aimed at building trust and relationships. How to do that is something I'll continue to explore. At least I feel I've got a  working title.
Previously: Web 2.0, participation and e-democracy

Salon goes with a swing

Last's night Salon about public participation at the Civic Trust went really well ... subject of course to any contrary opinions participants might wish to add below. Our engagement technique was simple and well-tested - ply people with lots of free wine* and encourage them to circulate. We added a few props ... over-sized badges, and flags.

The idea of the badges was that people added a few words about things they might wish to discuss with others. My designer friends at the Civic Trust took to the idea enthusiastically, and provided people with mini-placards which certainly did the job effectively.
The flags idea was something Drew Mackie and I have done before to help people cluster into groups ..... find a few other people with a shared interest and you get a paper flag to write your interest on and wave to attract more people.
In the event everyone was so gregarious that not much was needed to encourage circulation. We got into the appropriate frame of mind right from the start with some excellent jazz piano from Charles Condy, husband of the Trust's Heritage Days Manager Katya.
The Trust has been around for nearly 50 years, encouraging high standards of planning and architecture. It's had its up and downs over the years, but I sensed a lot of energy among its staff. The Trust's director Peter Bembridge has a technology background, unusual for an organisation in the planning and environment field - so I'm hopeful we'll see more of the Trust's activities reflected online. I know there is interest in equipping the hundreds of local civic societies, supported by the Trust, with better communication methods.
Amidst all the fun we also talked about participation, engagement, co-creation and such. Apart from one dissenting voice there was general interest in how to mix online activity with face to face workshops and other techniques, and I promised to set up a site where anyone interested could try blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools. My son Dan is grappling with Drupal modules and Flash plugins, and we should have a sort of online salon running soon. Quite what we'll do about the wine, I'm not sure.
* Thanks to sponsor David Prichard of Metropolitan Workshop

Technorati Tags: engagement

Explore Engagement 2.0 at a London salon

There's an opportunity later this month to explore the issues I raised in If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0 at a salon in London organised by the Civic Trust. It's free, with wine and nibbles thrown in too.
I rashly agreed to help with the salon a month or so back after a delightful tea with Alexandra Rook and Stuart Woodin, and the need to pull together some new ideas was one of the reasons I wrote the blog item. You can download an invite for the October 25 event here (pdf). It says about the salon programme:

We hope these occasional events will attract interested citizens and members of the public, our supporters and members in business, public service or civic societies, concerned with the quality of life in our urban environments and wanting to debate and draw out future trends and their implications for policy.
We are delighted David Wilcox has agreed to open the series with a discussion on community engagement. It will explore why it is often difficult to go beyond the usual suspects and whether simply more of the usual methodologies will combat consultation fatigue and apathy.
With community involvement at the heart of government policy, there is an imperative for all of us involved in making places to understand how best we can adopt new approaches and technologies to improve communication and develop collaboration.
David has been working in the field of regeneration partnerships and participation for over 25 years.
His October menu will include workshop games, storytelling, blogs, wikis … and how these may help foster the trust, transparency and authenticity needed for effective engagement and local democracy. Audience participation will be encouraged…

Phew. It's frightening when these things come back from the designers ... but then salons are about encouraging people to converse, so I'm hoping there'll be a good turnout of just the sort of people whose ideas I've been repacking over the years, ready for another round. Advance ideas, comments extremely welcome.
It's 6.30 for 7pm at 1-6 Essex Street WC2, just off the Strand. Finish 8.30pm, or maybe just move to one of the excellent pubs nearby. Space is limited, so please book a place by emailing scoleman@civictrust.org.uk

Technorati Tags: engagament2.0, participation

If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0

It's easy enough to say 'participation isn't working' - but what comes next? I think we need more than an upgrade in the ways that public bodies and nonprofits relate to citizens and service users - we need a new version as well as a new vision. Let's call it Engagement 2.0, as shorthand for participation + openness + Web 2.0.
I've got a strong hunch, but not the detail, so instead of trying to be too analytical I thought I'd tie together something of the things I've been writing, and heard elsewhere, and see if that starts some conversations.
Here's my first attempt.

Technorati Tags: e-democracy, engagament2.0, engagement, Engagement 2.0, web2.0, Web_2.0

Time for a participation guide with participants

There are stacks of guides and toolkits designed to help professionals engage with patients, service users, and wider communities affected by public projects and policies. But what is there written from the point of view of the participant? Not much, unless I'm looking in the wrong places.
I've been writing recently on the theme of "participation isn't working" - items here - and coming to the conclusion that change now is most likely to come from people starting old-style campaigns for improvement to services, and maybe using new-style digital technologies to help. For example, citizen journalism is entering the mainstream as Simon Waldman wrote recently, and in Teesside Steve Thompson is showing the way for some bottom-up e-democracy. mySociety is building terrific digital tools like Pledgebank and WriteToThem, and the BBC is doing its bit.
That meant I was particularly interested when an editor of learning materials called up to see I can could contribute a training and self-study module about how to represent other public service users on official committees, and to get fellow users, patients or carers involved in seeking improvements.
Before agreeing a brief, I did some Googling and found research by the National Association for Patient Participation which cites two pieces of work: Training and Facilitation Resources at the University of Birmingham, and the National Consumer Council's Strong Voice programme. The latter offers a substantial toolkit and induction programme to trainers for a £500 licence, and is based on years of development and testing. As a sample page shows (pdf here), it covers some key issues for participants, and suggests that representation is about:

a voice for others
obtaining information and passing it back
being involved in decision-making
accountability
access to the views of others (being represented)
developing a consensus (or not)
experience of users
effective advocacy – getting the message across accurately.

However, both of these resources, are written for trainers - not participant/users. I also found an excellent guide for professionals called "Asking the experts: A Guide to Involving People in Shaping Health and Social Care Services" (disclaimer, it does quote from a guide I wrote a few years back). It provides an extensive overview of the issues, and lots of guidance .... but again it is for professionals.
There are lots of courses and books on the separate issues involved - like being on committees, organising with others, communicating effectively, developing your confidence. But I couldn't find anything which brought those issues together with the challenges of finding your way through the bureaucracy, and deciding how far to go along with the type of participation on offer. I wonder why? Is it because there's an easier market in developing kits for trainers ... and the organisations that fund this sort of work may be disinclined to give too much help to citizens and service users who may challenge them on the services that they offer?
The nearest thing to a guide that I found was on the BBC Action Network: How you can get involved in improving NHS services in England, though it is by its nature fairly broad-brush, and concentrates on signposting.
I'm going to write around a few people who have taken a radical position on user empowerment in the past, and see if they know about something I missed, or might be interested in helping developing something new if there is a gap. Any ideas welcome - add a comment, or you can find me here. I've bookmarked my researches in a rather haphazard fashion - main tags are participation, and health.
My immediate conclusion is that the editor who approached me is right - a new guide is needed. However, a major challenge will be to create something that really works for the reader/user ... with navigation to suit different situations, skills, styles and roles. How to do that? Well, my suggestion would be to involve some users in the development of the guide, in workshops and also online. Otherwise there's a danger that in our enthusiasm to produce a guide for users we becomes just another example of 'experts know best'. Of course experts may know best, if they get the question or problem right ... but how can they do that if they don't ask the users in the first place? I'll suggest the task is to produce a guide with users.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Participation is a culture, not a tick box

I've just caught up with an article by Nick Wilding which elegantly connects three key themes important in participation: developing more participatory organisations; power-holders letting go of control; and adopting an ecological worldview that sees "a radical inter-connectedness between all things". In Slow down... go further he warns that for professionals faced with polices for engaging with the public, "participation could easily become the next thing to do on a check-list in a busy day in a rushed week".

Participation is about much more than a tick-box. It's about a radical challenge to a culture that isn't working at local, regional, national and planetary scales. A culture that has valued profits over people and planet, and limitless consumption over sustainable relationships between people and places. The emerging, participatory, ecological culture requires that we find the time for community and conviviality. Practically, that means getting together with our friends and colleagues who we can trust to learn together about both doing participation and being participative. It means having the confidence to tell each other stories that matter to us in our job-roles as well as people concerned for people and the planet. This needs some practice. And practice needs good, reflective time and a good, reflective space.

Nick then expands on the three themes, and concludes:

This article has been about creating a participatory culture of learning by doing where failures are understood as the best teachers. This is a culture of celebrating successes, of projects that emerge organically as participants slowly build the confidence to accomplish small things first, and then be surprised at how the seedlings flourish over months … years … decades. This is a long-term culture, a culture with its feet and hands in the soil - and its heart and head working together to nurture ecological and community regeneration. This is a culture where the expert is ‘on tap, not on top’. Most of all, this is a culture of (as the Buddhists might say) ‘beginner’s mind’ – that is to say, a culture of learning and inquiry where it’s not the answers that matter but the quality and depth of the questions that we learn to ask of our own practice.

Nick Wilding is a culture change consultant and action research facilitator, and a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology. The article was originally was published in Scottish Natural Heritage's annual publication, 'The Participant'.
Earlier here:

• Participation language doesn't work either
• Participation often isn't working. Anyone listening?

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Participation language doesn't work either

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

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

Alexandra adds:

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

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

Participation often isn't working. Anyone listening?

A colleague of mine said the other day that "there's more policy directives on community participation than ever before, and more toolkits and consultants ... but somehow it feels as if things are getting worse and people are engaging less". The fact that "try harder" isn't working for participation comes up quite a bit in conversations I have with people in the field - and now there's some research that seems to confirm that, and help explain why.
The question now is: how much more research do we need? What do we do about it?
First the research: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have just published Effective participation in anti-poverty and regeneration work and research, by Peter Beresford and Martin Hoban, with these key findings:

* Powerlessness is central to people's experience of poverty and disadvantage. Conventional bureaucratic and managerial 'top-down' approaches to participation have very limited success.
* Existing experience identifies barriers to people's participation at four levels: personal; political and institutional; economic and cultural; and technical. All need to be addressed for participation to work.
* People are much more likely to get involved in work if they have a strong sense that something tangible and worthwhile will come out of it.
* Supporting independent organisations which people themselves develop and control, at local level and beyond, is a vital building block for effective participation.
* Capacity building to develop people's confidence, self-esteem and understanding supports their empowerment and participation. It is not the same as skill development to equip people to work in the way that agencies traditionally work.
* Such capacity building is particularly helpful in encouraging diverse involvement and ensuring the participation of black and minority ethnic groups.

Technorati Tags: engagement, participation

Western Australia demonstrates innovation in community engagement

I've just caught up with Tom Atlee's report on a wealth of innovative deliberation techniques demonstrated at a recent conference in Perth, Western Australia, where the government has been pioneering what Tom calls a "committed experiment in democratic collective intelligence".

The conference, organised by Janette Hartz-Karp, immersed participants in demonstrations of methods including 21st Century Town Meeting, Deliberative Polling, World Cafe, Mind Mapping, Citizens Jury, Wisdom Council, and Dynamic Facilitation.
Panelists also provided a list of suggestions on how to ensure people are included in deliberative processes, among them:

* Learn the historical and cultural factors important to the populations you want to reach.
* Understand the dynamics of oppression and how factors such as race, level of education, economic status, disability, sexuality, gender, and religious background can combine to exclude people from being chosen or, once chosen, from speaking up and being taken seriously -- and work to counter such suppressive factors.
* Identify and engage the key players and opinion leaders in those populations.
* Explore how physical, geographic and economic factors may play a role in people's ability to participate, and compensate for these (such as by providing transportation, child care, payment, etc.).
* Find out what kinds of interactions they've had with other such projects, with officials of various sorts, and with mainstream society.
* Make it clear how their participation will make a difference. Be honest and don't making promises you can't keep or be too grandiose in your proposals.
* Provide enough time and realistic information for them to consider your project.
* Use random selection, with special efforts to reach such people if they don't turn up (e.g., don't have phones).
* Give them opportunities to speak in their own way and to be well heard and respected for what they contribute.
* Increase public employees' and officials' awareness of these factors and improve their ability to handle them.

Tom is also facilitating development of the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation wiki, which provides more detailed explanation of methods he mentions. Discovered via Happenings - Thataway

Urban regeneration in theory and practice

David Brake in Urban regeneration in theory and practice alerts us to a study of the regeneration of a Sheffied housing estate that highlights how difficult it is to make community engagement and partnerships work in practice. What's different about this study is that it concentrates on the experiences of the individuals involved, rather than just the procedures:

Laurie Taylor in his excellent Thinking Allowed radio programme recently interviewed Simone Abram at length about her anthropological study of tenants' experiences of "urban regeneration" in Norfolk Park, Sheffield (she has produced a film about this as well with accompanying website). The programme also features interviews with the residents themselves. Strangely enough she concludes that even with the best of intentions the connection between consultation and results on the ground can be very tenuous - especially when a public private partnership (or a tangle of overlapping partnerships) is involved!

The Listen Again link on the BBC site was down when I tried it, but a publication is promised on the website. I can't say I'm entirely surprised that best intentions are not always fulfilled on these projects. As I've written before, I think that for partnerships to be successful you have to work on three aspects: the outcomes, the procedures and the relationships between different interests. It sounds as if the Sheffield study could give us some real insights into the challenges that presents.
Update: I alerted Radio 4 to the link problem and was very impressed by a swift reply offering to copy the interview to a CD if necessary, followed by acknowledgment that there was a problem that had now been fixed.