Designing for Civil Society

We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either

The realities of introducing social media into organisations was brought home to me again yesterday at a conference in Cardiff for people in housing associations with responsibility for PR and communications. We had some fine presentations about developing the brand, dealing with media, using storytelling. These days tenants are customers, housing stock is homes - and quite rightly so.
I ran a couple of workshops on what blogs, wikis, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the like might bring to the mix, and how organisations could use lots of free tools from Google and other sources. I tried to focus on what this meant for organisations, as people become more able to find their voice to contribute ideas, experience - and of course complain if they were not happy with services.
New media tools can give housing associations better ways to provide information, and support communication and collaboration within and outside the organisation. However, if the tools are in the hands of the resident/customers, that changes power relationships. Things shift from "take it from us" to "we'll take it from each other".
That's where the difficulties arose. While many people in the workshop were excited by the possibilities, they foresaw difficulties which were summed up in two phrases. The first was "we can't do that" - which meant the IT department and senior staff won't let us look at certain sites, or use free tools. The second was "we can't let them do that" - which meant that within the culture of the organisation it would not be conceivable to help customers develop their own voice, except within quite tightly controlled circumstances.
These constraints did not apply to everyone, and of course there are ways to work these things through in organisations, as Colin McKay sets out in his excellent Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organisations. However, what struck me was the number of glum nods to these observations, rather than the number of challenges.
The consensus in the workshops was that significant change was a few years off, not least because the customers of housing associations were (as a whole) older, poorer and less media literate than the rest of the population. Introducing social media would not be a high priority in addressing their needs.
On the other hand the PR and communications people in the workshop did feel that they should, personally, be exploring what social media could offer. Problem is, will that be seen as a priority by their bosses?
As well as a presentation and discussion, at one of the sessions we played a new version of the social media game, which I think worked pretty well. I've put all the instructions and cards up on the social media wiki. Please feel free to download and try the game for yourself.
Any examples of organisations - housing or otherwise - that are prepared to help their customers or members find a voice would be welcome. We are now exploring those issues over on a new site for The Membership Project.
I'm off to hear Clay Shirky talk at the RSA about his book Here Comes Everybody, which explains how people are organising without organisations. Landlords beware.

Technorati Tags: membership, housing

Re-thinking organisations as networks

Michael Gilbert launches the first edition of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society with a suitably provocative article on The End of the Organization?

In this he ponders whether the growth of internet-based communications means our traditional ways of organising for social good will change dramatically.
Michael's argument is that nonprofit organisations are in large part set up to fit in with past and current ways of raising funds, meeting government regulations, employing people, organising volunteers. We then end up with a hierarchical system of trustees and staff. Organisations also reflect past communication needs - but these are changing:

Relationships within organizations, between organizations, with constituents, the media, funders, policy makers, and others all have distinct patterns of communication that shape the structures of organizations and civil society.
Throughout the world, these patterns of communication are changing. Whether because of the plummeting costs of communication in the developed world or the historical leapfrogging of modes of communication in the developing world, more and more people who wish to communicate with each other, are doing so.
Some existing communication patterns, however local or small scale they may be, genuinely reflect people's motivations and are thus scaling up as barriers to communication are lowered. In turn, they are displacing and destabilizing other patterns, particularly the hierarchical and insular ones that characterize the modern organization.
Is this the end of the organization? Probably not by name and certainly not in the broadest sense of the term. But the traditional, tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change. The organizations of the future will not look like the organizations of today.

I would encourage you to read the whole article, and indeed subscribe to the Journal. You get a 300-page pdf for $18.95. Michael is mainly US-based, but the journal has a lengthy article by Geoff Mulgan and colleagues at the London-based Young Foundation, on "Social Innovation. What it is, why it matters, and how it can be accelerated". That's worth the price alone. I'm sure the ideas in the article will be further explored at Social Innovation Camp which Paul Miller and friends are running on April 6-8 at the Foundation.
I'm glad to say this is all very useful underpinning for the re-inventing membership project Simon Berry and I are developing with the RSA and NCVO Foresight team. That was inspired in part by an earlier article by Michael called The Permeable Organisation.
We'll shortly have a multi-user blog system up where anyone interested will be able to help us design the project.
I'm also encouraged by the way that blog comments suddenly pop up which serve to confirm a hunch. A year or so back I posted an item quoting an excellent piece by Lloyd Davis on how social media support the informal "shadow" side of organisations.
Now Philip Holden adds a comment:

I commented on Lloyd's blog because there is some well-established sociological theory that illuminates this.
I don't want to write an essay here (though I guess I should one day, at least on my blog...) so suffice to say that social structures (including companies and voluntary organisations) are just that; social structures.
Simply because they appear to be formal or self-evident doesn't give them any special ontological status. More importantly when they go unquestioned or even unnoticed it's a pretty good bet that they do so to someone's benefit.
Further, the power to recognise certain structures and to legitimise them rests with only some people (rich in certain forms of capital).
Dang! It's turning into an essay.
Can I put it simply? Well, the 'shadow' organisation (or society) has always been there (in Bangladesh as well as elsewhere) but only certain people have the authority to call it out of bounds.
Read Bourdieu!!

If we take notice of the informal as well as the formal, it's the blog comments as well as the journal articles that give us clues about what people are thinking and talking about around the globe.
So - which nonprofit organisations do you think will wither, and which will re-invent themselves?

Previously

• Another social technologist refocusses on ... people
• Putting a personable face on nonprofits
• Why bother with "membership" in future?
• Re-inventing membership online and off

Technorati Tags: innovation, membership, nptech, nptechuk

Online communities may help democratise your organisation

Once members of an organisation have the means to talk to each other all the time - instead of at occasionally meeting -  they can organise to change the way things are run. I always hoped that would be the democratic result of online communities - now my friend Ed Mitchell provides some real evidence of the possibilities.
Ed's been working over the past year or so with CILIP, the Chartered  Institute of Library and Information Professionals, to develop online communities for sharing professional practice in a fast-changing world. I gather that's worked well, thanks to the strong commitment of Lyndsey Rees-Jones of the Membership Services Unit, and other staff. Earlier this week Ed and Lyndsey told the story of how member engagement also started to impact on the governance of the organisation. You can see their slides from Online Information on slideshare and here.

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Ed expands  on the presentation in his blog post about the Membership engagement story.

There wasn’t a communities team when we started, nor processes to ensure that issues arising from the communities were handled professionally and promptly and fairly. This was an important element of our work:
How to ensure that when issues come up in the communities, the members can get the influence and support from HQ they need when they need it?
This is a strategic management question which we think is on many organisations’ horizons. Since talking about this project publicly, we have found that there are very few ‘community’ teams in HQs which are pragmatically integrated into the membership communities, so we wanted to share our findings to help others.

The CILIP Membership Services Unit, addressed this issue, and started work closely online with members. Here's what happened:

This presentation tells a simple story about how the CILIP members chose to use one of the private membership forums as a ‘virtual hustings’ in advance of their council elections, and how they managed to get support from HQ when they needed it.
The website has an election page and the individuals’ manifestos, but no space to converse with the hopefuls and to kick the ideas around, so the members set up a thread in the forums, which proved to be exceptionally popular. It gave everyone a transparent opportunity to discuss their ideas and hopes for CILIP in 2008 which had not been there before.
The members agreed that they wanted to promote the elections as much as possible and identified all the channels of communication available to them (from their own blogs to the formal CILIP communications). They felt that the CILIP website itself wasn’t promoting the elections enough and pointed this out among themselves. Within one day, the web editing team in HQ had put a banner together and placed it right in the middle of the homepage.
This doesn’t sound like a revolution, but it was the first time that the members influenced the management and got space on the homepage under their own steam.
Most organisations’ homepages are tightly controlled spaces with rather formal processes for booking space on them; otherwise there would be great tension between departments seeking the all hallowed homepage slot. CILIP is no different.
The thing to note is that these processes reflect the needs of HQ, so the members getting a say in what goes on the homepage is really quite exciting.
This was enabled because of having a communities team in HQ who were aware of what was going on in the communities and who were actively influential in HQ and who could therefore advocate for the members where suitable.

CILIP appear to be particularly open to sharing their experience with other organisations, and Ed reports that they have agreed to publish the lessons learnt document next year - previously only available to members.
Meanwhile discussion about member engagement continues at RSA, where Matthew Taylor is committed to putting the 27,000 members (known as Fellows) at the heart of the organisation. (Previous posts archived here).
After a very successful event for 250 Fellows a couple of weeks ago, project ideas are being developed by Fellows on a prototype RSA Networks online system. I've raised issues on the OpenRSA blog about how ideas about co-creation with Fellows, presented at the event, will be put into practice, and I'm hopeful we'll get some encouraging news shortly.
The shift from hierarchical to more networky structures in organisations is really difficult, and I've great admiration for the way both CILIP and RSA are tackling this. As I wrote last year, if membership organisations don't face up to the issues they could be by-passed as members do their own networking elsewhere.
For a US view of the issues see Six principles for designing an architecture of participation at the excellent We have Always Done it That Way blog. UK references on the challenges facing membership organisations most welcome. The NCVO Third Sector Foresight team have been doing some great work on the impact of technology on nonprofits, with a recent seminar reported here by Paul Henderson, but need another round of funding to keep this work going. Maybe CILIP or RSA could co-host an event with NCVO to share experience to date, and gain support for further investigation.

Technorati Tags: membership, rsa, rsanetworks

First meeting for OpenRSA

If you are interested in the process of re-inventing the RSA (250-years old, 26,000 members), there are a few places left for the OpenRSA meeting next Monday  - details here. A group of us are meeting to add an outside-in contribution to the vision of chief executive Matthew Taylor for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, which was originally started in the coffee houses of Covent Garden. Matthew wants to remake it as a network for civic innovation, with a strong emphasis on the use of social media to help members (know as Fellows) work together and with staff.
Matthew is inviting about 250 Fellows to an all-day event on November 22 to discuss and plan the way forward for the RSA. On Monday a couple of dozen of us are gathering for a warm-up to talk about what Fellowship can offer - and what it might mean in practice to work together on social action projects. Matthew is popping in to provide encouragement, and the RSA is buying the lunch and helping pay some costs.
I think the process of re-inventing the RSA may offer some interesting lessons for other membership-based organisations. As people make greater use of social media to find others with similar interests, organisations will have to work harder to show why it is worth paying a subscription. If members don't get a good deal, they can use the Net to organise.
My initial interest in the idea of OpenRSA was to press for a more open process, and greater engagement with Fellows. It's early days, but it looks as if we'll get that without any need for member-pressure. As Malcolm Forbes - who set up the OpenRSA Facebook group - put it, we are inventing from the outside in, and the inside out.

Previous items here on the RSA

OpenRSA wiki

The power of online-offline convening

A combination of Facebook, meeting room, pub and light-touch hosting last night demonstrated the social networking power of online-offline convening. A dozen of us gathered to talk about the potential for social media to help re-invent the RSA, sparked by my earlier post. We ended up with a micro-demo of how that might happen.
Ian Delaney, who hosted the event on behalf of NMK, has provided an excellent roundup of conversations that started online in Facebook, moved to Ian's workplace at the University of Westminster, and then to a pub around the corner.
As Ian explains, the RSA - Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce - is, on the face of it, doing well:

Established 250 years ago, it currently has about 26,500 Fellows. They can attend a very full and well-attended events schedule; they get the letters FRSA after their name; there’s no shortage of applications for its paid membership. Business is booming. And yet there’s a little bit of a problem.
The Society’s problem is that times have changed. Fellows are apparently expressing some degree of disgruntlement that they don’t feel involved with the programme or the Society. While in the past, a programme of well-planned lectures from eminent persons, nice premises on the Strand and a learned journal several times a year seemed satisfactory, that’s no longer enough. Today’s younger members want projects they can join, causes they can work with and more of a say, arguably, in what’s happening at the Society. There’s a feeling of empty hands that want to be filled.

As I wrote here,  organisations may well face challenges as their members find they can get benefits more cheaply and readily online. The RSA has seen that coming, and led by its chief executive Matthew Taylor is currently engaged internally in thinking through how social media and other changes can really harness the potential of its membership for both social action and personal learning and development.
Ian reports some of our ideas from last night, including a network in Facebook, and a sort of RSA version of Yahoo Answers, where Fellows could answer each others' questions. I think my friends at Ruralnet could offer some expertise from their development of Experts Online. Another idea was a really good searchable directory.
We heard from Anshuman Rane - who is Web and New Media Manager at RSA - that he and other staff are thinking along these lines, with plenty more ideas bubbling up for a wider discussion later in the year with Fellows. I hope we provided additional encouragement.
I was particularly interested by our discussion around the RSA's role as convenor, which Ian summarises:

Further discussion picked up around what the RSA’s brand values might be. One example of that was as an ‘excellent convener’. That it draws very brilliant and interesting people together. However, the RSA is keen that the Society was not just viewed a place or a publication, but also as an actor. That it allows for the creation of brilliant ideas and then also acts upon them. How to decide among those ideas for the ones to publically support is one problem (maybe the case for a prediction market). Another is the extent to which the Society might rightly claim some sort of part-ownership for creating that chemistry - not in a commercial sense, but in a branding sense.

Some Fellows - as I reported earlier - feel the RSA can seem rather smug and paternalistic .... a bit top-down, epitomised by the lectures in its Great Room. You have to put your hand up to ask  a question of the experts on the stage. If the RSA stays mainly in this mode, we can expect a "place" for discussion among Fellows behind a login. I agree with Ian:

In my own opinion, social media policy from the RSA can’t work on the basis of containing discussion within a particular forum or blog or social network. Nor can it claim ownership of ideas created through its auspices. Those discussions and ideas, as with any brand or grouping, cannot be contained or owned. They are and will happen anyway. What the Society might work to is the idea that having your ideas and business connected to it in some way earns kudos. Yeah, we came up with it/ met them at the RSA network/bar/forum mentioned a few times in business interviews and conversations as a point of pride, the same way certain members’ clubs and restaurants are spoken about, would do a great deal for the current and future value of membership. Like MySpace members adopting brands as friends, new and existing companies that friend the RSA in some way in the social media space may well be a way forward.
So they it needs a widget. And it needs a way to get people to adopt that widget. That’s the tricky bit, I expect.

What's equally important, I think, is the offline equivalent ... a recognition that anyone can pull together a group of people to start a conversation, in the spirit of the origins of the RSA in a Covent Garden coffee house.
What makes that possible is the more democratic, bottom-up convening power that mixing online and offline now provides.
A blog gave me the chance to air some thoughts on the RSA - gathered here - but Facebook provided the means to pull together a group online for a quick discussion. Ian then offered the offline convening capacity of NMK, more often deployed for larger industry-related events like the annual forum. What really made it work was the great mix of talents we had in the room. I thought we might need some "facilitation". Get into groups, write some post-it notes, prioritise topics. Nahh. We had a good chat - aided by NMK wine - went to the pub, and formed some groups there.
If RSA will provide the hospitality next time - with a similarly light touch - I'm sure we'll get another great flowering of ideas.
What I'm not quite sure about, for the moment, is what happens in between, and where we'll talk about it. However, I am pretty confident that one of the group will have a suggestion within a day or so ... and can easily set that up as a virtual coffee house, pub ... choose your metaphor. Your place or mine ... it doesn't really matter.

Technorati Tags: nptech, rsa, socialnetworking

Blog (and organisational) obituaries

 

Beth Kanter has a blog obituary post enhanced by this great image. Beth writes:

Did I scare you! No worries ... this is not a blog equivalent to a myspace suicide note. Just a pointer to an interesting post from Michael Gilbert on his authentic organization blog called Organizational Obituary -- that I have morphed into:
Write down your blog’s obituary. How would it read if your readers were to write it? How would it read if other blog's in your field were to write it? What would the world look like if your blog didn’t exist? If you were to stop tomorrow, who would miss your blog and why? Have you made any real difference for your readers?

I like Michael's original too:

Write down your company’s obituary. How would it read if your stakeholders were to write it? How would it read if other organization’s in your field were to write it? What would the world look like if your organization didn’t exist? If you were to close tomorrow, who would miss you and why? Have you made any real difference for your stakeholders?

Good question - but how often is it asked in the nonprofit and public sectors? Competition usually kills off weaker companies (for good or ill) but too often the nonprofit and public sector response to possible closure is just a fight for funding without sufficient thought about whether a changing environment is offering some important messages. A few too many blogs in the world isn't too much of a bother. Lots of redundant organisations fighting for territory (and public funds) is another matter. But then I'm just a freelance, and used to uncertainty. It must feel different inside.

Planning a networky organisation? Just invite everyone

I was recently advising friends starting a new charitable organisation whose aim is to promote public engagement - so naturally enough they wanted their structures to be participative too. (Well, not naturally enough since there are plenty of nonprofits who preach one thing but seem to practice another. Not this time, fortunately).
The challenge in general is that charities need boards of trustees to govern, paid staff to do things, as well as volunteers on projects and probably advisers and supporters with rather undefined roles. There may be consultants doing a mix of pro bono and paid for, and members. There will certainly be funders.
If the staff aren't careful, they can spend most of their time involving all of these helpful people but not delivering to those for whom the charity was - or should have been set up - the beneficiaries, also known as customers in other circumstances.
In worst cases the Board micromanage the staff, the advisory group try and tell the Board and staff what they should be doing, the volunteers are baffled, members drop away and everyone feels both overworked and frustrated.
I have to say that my inclination is to have a board of trustees of not more than six to eight really good people, avoid advisory boards, get advisors, consultants and volunteers focussed on projects, and be clear about whether members are the same as beneficiaries - if you have members. Then be really entrepreneurial in mixing fundraising with projects and services that earn you money. You may need an associated trading company.
My friends agreed with much of this - and also wanted to be a really networky organisation, working online, developing communities of interest and much else favoured these days in the fields of organisational development, knowledge management and social software... or at least that which is blogged about.
I've been pushing that approach hard, so when they asked what that would mean for the organisation I drew the diagram you can see here. I got a bit carried away in Omnigraffle, but hope it makes some sense, at least as a conversation starter.
I suggested that they think of anyone potentially involved as being part of their network - beneficiaries, funders, advisers and so on, with the Board and staff in the middle of the cloud. Then concentrate on developing the relationships and activities that deliver to beneficiaries.
As much activity as possible should be organised around jobs to be done, projects to be developed, services to be delivered - with Board, staff, advisers etc working in mix and match teams. The Board would, of course, set the overall direction of the organisation and fulfill their legal responsibilities as trustees.
It would be essential to set up communication systems so that people could get information, communicate, collaborate, publish and manage as needed.
Projects and services would be developed on a spectrum from free (email newsletter, sponsored events) to paid for (high-value information, expert advice, high-level communication access). These projects would be developed with network members, where appropriate, rather than always run for the greater glory of the central team (another cause of dissent in my experience). The emphasis would be on creativity and fun while getting things done, and keeping both funders and beneficiaries happy.
My diagram was used at the first Board meeting, and I was a little apprehensive because a few of the trustees had actually written books on this stuff. However, sometime a picture is worth 200 pages, and it went down well enough.
The real challenge now is how to do it. My follow-up advice was to start in the centre with an away day for Board and staff so they get to know each other. Some work on personalities types and communication styles could help with understanding about runnings meetings online and off. Improv work or games could add some fun. I can think of just the people to do it ... maybe even free if that opened up possibilities in the wider network.
The core team will also need to work through the mix of email, blogging, and wikispace they - and the network - will need. Again, there are people ready to help.
What soon becomes evident, of course, is that networky working takes a pretty strong commitment to doing things differently and helping others come along with you. It's tempting to think we now need a network development plan, a training plan, as well as a business plan and a marketing plan. That could easily tie up six months.
In practice I think it is a matter of getting started with good people, taking advice in avoiding pitfalls, learning as you go along, and building up a strong sense of trust and commitment. Not a bad learning process for an organisation in the business of promoting engagement.
If any Omnigraffle users would like to improve the diagram, download original here, or there's the pdf here.
More in this site about people, partnerships, participation and networks.
As an experiment in attribution ... thanks for ideas and inspiration to Lee Bryant and Livio Hughes at Headshift, Johnnie Moore, Simon Berry of Ruralnet, and Ton Zijlstra ... even though they may not know I was listening, or even entirely agree.
Previously posted at Partnerships Online
Update: Richard Wilson, director of Involve, says he is very happy to confirm that they are the networky organisation in question - and already applying the ideas to project development. Now for some work on what that will mean online and in other ways.

Technorati Tags: participation

Insights into organising online

The IPPR Manifesto for a Digital Britain is gathering pace with a full calendar of events and associated papers. I couldn't make it to "Organising Online - where next for Unions and the Internet", but Will Davies has now published the paper he wrote, and some of the insights have general relevance. Will suggests that campaign organisers may find the Internet helpful:

* Where there are obstacles to a campaign scaling –e.g. affiliates or members are very geographically scattered
* Where the mainstream media are not very responsive – e.g. the fuel protests were not taken seriously by the press until after it had already scaled up.
* Where a campaign wants to scale very quickly, often for a short time – e.g. a ‘flash protest’ where protests come out of nowhere, then disappear again.

Partnership problems? Get to know the people involved

I hear continuing rumblings about the challenges inherent in the UK Government's Changeup programme, where the aim is to create infrastructure support for nonprofit organisations, involving a lot of collaborations at national, regional and local level. The Home Office Active Communities Directorate is insisting that each area of support - like governance, volunteering, technology - should have only one lead consortium in order to get funding. That's already caused difficulties with one of the support 'hubs', and there's been more general criticism  of the model. Suddenly partnership - and how to make it work - is becoming fashionable yet again.

Window wiki - the new low-tech discussion tool

Last week's Blogwalk 4 yielded a new tool (for me anyway) of the Wiki Window. I was a bit late arriving, and bloggers had been discussing issues that can arise in getting blogs and wiki introduced in companies. The upper room of the Old Crown pub in London's New Oxford Street didn't offer easy wall space for the Post-it notes, so reasonably enough they were posted on the window, topped with the title Window Wiki. It was a bit more, well, transparent than a flip chart.
Some of the items were about blogging as such (every bloggers need an audience), but many others were more general... improved networking...risk...vulnerability...need for commitment to share...culture change. It struck me that blog and wiki discussion had indeed provided a window into a set of issues around change - something I also picked up in discussion about the technology trap.
The whole day was a wonderful opportunity to explore these issues with people from different backgrounds and jobs. A bit of tech crept in - and very useful it was - but my sense was that the value of blogging (and bloggers) lay in the way it enabled individuals to make more of a difference than might be expected in large organisations, and small, and explore in the process all the issues that change and innovation brings. We walked as well, of course, and there are a few more pictures here of our more physical exploration of Bloomsbury. There's another metaphor in there somewhere, too.
More on blogwalk from those who were there
Update: Suw has now transcribed the window wiki