Plus ca Change, Plus ca Meme Chose

March 6th, 2010

In a truly digital society there is no reason why any digitally included person should not participate in society, or in the economy. Yet, because we organise ourselves on an industrial basis those who cannot join the mass movement to centres of production on a daily basis are excluded from the economy and relegated to a dependency on the state. This represents a social failing on an unimaginable scale and at the same time a waste of talent which represents a cost to society and the economy.

The organisation of society on an industrial basis in a digital world means that innovation has become associated with centres of excellence fuelled by the idea of agglomeration of  like minded individuals in a creative environment. This ignores the potential for individuals adding value from a distance, the contribution of niche experts and the knowledge of communities that are peripheral to the core. It is not enough that we focus large resources on the centre we also take resources away from the periphery in order to feed the monster that is the city region. The periphery becomes devalued and its denizens come to accept second best as the best that they can expect. Excluded by default because they are perceived as being economically unviable and because their potential contribution is undervalued.

In a truly digital world neither of these things should be the case. Digital inclusion enables both economic participation, innovation and social justice. Despite the obvious society persists in promoting a dependency culture for those individuals and communities who are not able to participate because of this industrial age mentality. The desire to cling to the industrial power base can be seen in the attempts to control the channels of distribution of digital content in the name of digital rights and protecting the rights of the producer. We are prepared to sacrifice social freedoms in the name of an outdated economic model.

In a digital world communities are empowered. The old political model is being challenged, communities are demanding transparency and a voice that is heard. Despite this, the state seeks to maintain a dependency model in which digital inclusion is a means to create efficiencies and to provide access to services to those that most need them. In a truly digital world the demand for services could be less. What is more, valued communities not communities marginalised by geographical distance from the core, could take over many of the services that the state seeks to cut. Instead the desire to maintain the dependency culture to retain a hierarchy which dispenses services instead of enabling community activism denies the potential that a truly digital society can bring.

It is against this backdrop of social and economic myopia that I have concerns about our approaches to digital inclusion. I fear that Digital Inclusion has become a parochial activity where we have lost sight of the potential for being digital to unleash the creative human spirit and to break down the barriers between people. A world where creativity is the accepted norm. Instead we have to create lines of demarcation between the Netaratti and the digitally unwashed so that we might hand down the benefits of digital inclusion whilst we ourselves remain a digital veneer on the industrial society. Who in the modern world needs to ask “What does digital inclusion mean?”  when they should be asking what are the consequences for society of digital exclusion.

Unless we see digital inclusion in terms other than an industrial society then the fears of Jaron Lanier will be perpetuated. Lanier describes a spiritual failure where we redirect ideas of hope away from people and towards gadgets; a behavioural failure in which we promote anonymity and crowd behaviour and he describes an economic failure which is obsessed with the idea of free. Before we accuse Lanier of overstating the case remember that 2009 became the year of the social media guru, the i-phone was described as the gadget that everybody would have and “we” were described as the new government. The Neteratti are a small, well educated, middle class group and while intentions may be good I think it is time to re-examine the values that underpin the digital inclusion movement. Otherwise we may be seeking to include only to perpetuate the industrial status quo rather than to create a digital society in which each and every individual can fulfil their potential.

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Silver Bullets

February 11th, 2010

lone ranger

Silver bullets have a place in the popular consciousness; a silver bullet used to despatch the bad guys for the Lone Ranger, silver bullets are also useful if you need to dispense with a werewolf and silver bullets probably make great jewellery.  In “Systems Thinking, Systems Practise” Peter Checkland revisits the idea of Weltanschauung or world view. The idea being that before you think about a system make sure you understand your world view and that of the people with whom you are working. Working somewhere between Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) and Service Delivery Organisations (SDO) can give you an interesting view of the world.

The Digital Inclusion Action Plan  defines digital inclusion as “The best use of digital technology, either directly or indirectly, to improve the lives and life chances of all citizens and the places in which they live”.  With this in mind the irony of Jenni Russell’s Comment piece in the Sunday Times 24/01/2010   wasn’t lost on me.  It described an archetype of a family suffering multiple deprivation then offered a view based on the comments of a social worker that ICT wasn’t helping, in fact it was making the situation worse by tying the Social Worker to the IT system rather than letting them do the job that they’re trained to do. The implication was that the family suffered because of the use of ICT. Where does this leave digital inclusion as a strategy? Jenni Russell identifies the indirect use of digital technology in this context as, at the very least, unhelpful and the direct use of ICT to help tackle social deprivation not worth considering at all. 

While I had to miss both ukgovcamp10  and diunconf in Birmingham I found the discussions that came from both interesting and informative. The discussions continued even three days later which is a testament to the success of both events. What did start to come across, especially post event, was that people naturally enough talk about their experience which is not necessarily a shared experience. This has been noticeable recently following  the announcement of different national initiatives: The £30m for UK Online Centres to get another 1m people on line caused a few caustic comments not least from the older commentators in IDF50 South of the Thames. The laptops for children also raised an eyebrow or two, mine included, on both sides of the argument regarding value for money and ideas of doing “to” and not “with”. Most recently there was some uncomfortable shuffling about when a piece was published on Silver Surfers being well off  . People are focussed on their area of interest, not on the whole, just as in Jenni Russell’s Comment piece.

What does living with multiple deprivation and social exclusion look like, is the archtype that Jenni Russell described good enough? What role does digital play in redressing the balance? If we try to visualise the extent and depth of social and digital exclusion we can start to get a feel for the potential range of situations as visualised statistically. I’ll look at the same situation in a rural area, but consider that separately because it raises other issues, around sparcity, poor infrastructure provision and access to services, that as a rule don’t apply in the urban setting. The DigiTeam has put together a digital inclusion indDI Index explainedex by taking figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) on Deprivation (IMD) at the Local Super Output Area level (LSOA) and mapping these against an index of digital exclusion based on features such as access, take up and usage. By plotting the indices along an x/y axis it is possible to create a high level picture of the pattern of digital exclusion in a local government area. The higher the index of multiple deprivation the higher the level of social exclusion, the higher the digital exclusion index the greater the level of exclusion. An index of x=1 and y=1 would indicate a high level of digital and social exclusion. An index of x=-1 and y=-1 would indicate a high level of social and digital inclusion.

 Using the mapping devised by the Digiteam a high level view of digital exclusion can be represented as follows: in a large urban borough which statistically has moderate levels of deprivation and digital exclusion we can visualise an indices of exclusion where each symbol represents a community in Local Super Output Area. Symbols in the positive quadrant are areas of social and digital exclusion. There are all sorts of value judgments and assumptions here: does access to infrastructure make a group more digitally included? Should we talk in terms of more or less deprivation or is it justified to talk about moderate levels of deprivation; is there an acceptable level of deprivation?  How statistically valid is the analysis? All of these assumptions should be questioned but this is trying to illustrate a point hless prosp lb - circledere about how people view their particular area of digital inclusion work.

 If we enclose as many points of social and digital exclusion as we can, by making a very big assumption we can guess where a digital inclusion initiative might have an impact. Let’s take a silver surfers club, a social media surgery or a first steps back to learning group. Where might the impact boundry lie in the large urban borough with some social exclusion and some digital exclusion?

We could claim to be potentially providing access to digital experience to a dozen or so communities and hitting areas which evidence deprivation. If we are successful we open channels for self expression, we build confidence and we may even move people from first steps to next steps and we start them on the ladder to accessing skills and potentially better paid jobs and so on. This is great, it’s how it’s supposed to work.

In the next visualisation the blue dots in the lower left quadrant represents communities where there is little or no statistical evidence of social exclusion and high levels of digital inclusion. The borough with “moderate levels” of exclusion both digitally and socially is shown in red. The green symbols show an urban city which has communities sufcombined index with circlefering multiple deprivation and extremes of social exclusion and digital exclusion.

Using the same intervention discussed earlier, I’ve positioned the impact boundary roughly around the same communities that show the same statistical profile as the communities in the large urban borough. The intervention may work for those communities in the same way with the same potential benefits. However, the same initiative with the same (ish) communities doesn’t hit the majority of communities showing evidence of social and digital exclusion – where exclusion, both social and digital is deeper it needs a different world view.

We all have a lot of ownership in the projects that we do, rightly so, but I sometimes hear messages about the “answer” to digital inclusion. Project A worked in this deprived area of city B, let’s fund this project in city C and we’ll solve the digital exclusion issues and begin to address social exclusion. What this does is ignore the people who the project doesn’t hit and it ignores the other contributory features of any intervention: the community networks, the local movers and shakers and let’s not forget serendipity, that stroke of good fortune that put the right people in the right place at the right time. The failure to take a holistic view of successful interventions, to understand the world view of both the delivery partners and the beneficiaries means that we miss a lot of potentially important projects and we don’t join up effectively.

What happensrural counties with circle in rural areas? The following shows two rural counties in the West of England which demonstrate the impact of sparse populations on access to services.

The intervention impact shown by the circle represents the same use of resources as in the urban context described earlier. Once again, large numbers of socially and digitally excluded communities are missed by what is, to all intent and purpose, a successful intervention. What is significant here is that the digital exclusion statistics will be skewed by the poor levels of access to infrastructure. In terms of social exclusion it will be skewed by poor access to services. Under these conditions can we be confident that an initiative that was so successful in an urban area of moderate deprivation will have a similar impact here – should the world view have changed? If the answer is yes, and it is my belief that it should, then why do we persist in funding national initiatives based on a single solution and why do we fail, time and time again to acknowledge the spectrum of local factors that make a community project successful in the first place?

Politically, we are looking for a silver bullet and there will always be people who claim to have one because their world view tells them that they have. It’s time we started to understand that there is no silver bullet but there are lots of world views and being more holistic about why things succeed will help us to have a bigger impact when tackling social exclusion through digital inclusion.

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Rural Digital Economy is a Real Digital Economy

February 5th, 2010

I noticed somebody on Twitter earlier this week suggest that if people needed broadband and hadn’t got access to it then they should move. If we take this view we depopulate rural areas so that there is no economic infrastructure at all and we sound the death knell for rural communities. It shows a total lack of understanding of what the digital economy means and a level of ignorance about the impact of digital exclusion that defies belief.

Earlier this week my local council announced that it was seeking European funding for wireless infrastructure in the rural “not spots” in the County. I believe that this is the wrong approach, not that I don’t understand the motivation because rural businesses get to the point where anything will do, but I still believe it’s wrong.

There are, I believe, three elements to the proposal which are fundamentally flawed.

The first is the intention to use European funding – State Aid. State Aid requires four basic conditions to be met. The first is that there must be a clear market failure; the second is that any intervention must not distort the market; the third is that any solution cannot be technology specific and the final one is that the eventual solution must be open to the market. I know that State Aid has been granted for some major infrastructure projects in the past, but this is not a major infrastructure project, this is for the provision of very specific services in a very specific area and the two are not the same.

Let us take these one at a time. Firstly, I believe that there is a market failure. However, this is open to challenge in that the incumbent supplier could claim that it was willing to provide services eventually. Now, I know, just as everybody knows, that this is NOT broadband as we all understand it, but in state aid terms, it is and so, should the incumbent be sufficiently threatened by the market failure proposal they could, in my view, challenge it successfully. This argument also undermines the second condition in which the incumbent could argue that a state aided solution would prevent them from making sufficient return on their investment and make it unlikely that any other provider could enter the market. However unlikely this seems it would weaken the ex-ante case for state aid approval. Thirdly, the application for state aid could only specify the provision for broadband services, it cannot specify a wireless or any other solution so to say that one is applying for European funding for a wireless mesh network is nonsense. Finally, the solution must be available for the wider market, in other words you can only provide the infrastructure you must then get service providers to offer services. The kinds of services that can operate over a basic infrastructure such as might get state aid approval limits the revenue potential for any provider with the result that the sustainability of the network is at risk.

The second is the political impact of doing a project that meets the immediate need. The problem with accepting anything is that it ticks somebody else’s box. It means that rural areas have something and so they can be forgotten for a while longer. I experienced this in the mid 2000’s when there was a state aid application for the provision of broadband services to rural not spots in the West Midlands. The resulting service was satellite based, under capacity, under sold and didn’t deliver a true broadband service. The motivation fitted the criteria we see now; anything will do as long as it’s something. What was worse was that it enabled  regional bodies to say that there was 100% broadband availability in the region, it ticked a box. The agenda moved on and today there are still poorly served villages and not spots in various parts of the county.

The third is to do with sustainability. A basic internet service will deliver just that, basic internet. The potential for value added services such as VOIP, video conferencing, or IPTV are limited. Whilst I believe firmly that business is the key driver for new broadband services it is residences and entertainment that are the sustaining forces.

My final point is that much as I recognise the desperate need for good broadband services in rural areas I fail to see why rural communities should have to accept a second best solution to their urban counterparts. If we accept that it’s okay to provide 20% of the English population with second rate infrastructure because they are unprofitable, irrespective of the potential for social and economic injustice then surely we are all missing the point, just like the individual who suggested that we all move.

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Being Digital 2010

January 18th, 2010

In 1995 “Being Digital” by Nicholas Negroponte (Professor of Media Technology at MIT and founder of Media Lab) was a “must read” for anybody interested in how digital technology was having an impact on the world. The potential of digital technology as a catalyst for change was only just starting to gain traction in the mass consciousness. Ideas of personalisation, mobility, location independence were just glints in the developers’ eyes. It was a time when digital storage was floppy and 640k (with 360k Himem for drivers) was all you would ever need. I read a comment by someone, somewhere, recently talking about being digital and it motivated me to go and find a new copy of “Being Digital”. The new copy cost more to deliver than it did to buy (ironically, I couldn’t find an electronic version”.

The first thing that strikes you about the contents of this book is that it’s eerily accurate in its forecasts.  Professor Negroponte imagined everything – even micro publishing and time shifted television – except for the impact of social media, and I’m not sure how many people saw that one coming. So what can the perceptions of being digital in 1995 tell us about what it means to be digital in 2010?

In 1995 Professor Negroponte put it thus:

 “The best way to appreciate the merits and consequences of being digital is to reflect on the difference between bits and atoms.”

It seems self evident today, the fact that bits do not need to exist in a physical form in order to be bought, sold, stored or transported. They only need to exist when they are used and some can stay in digital form even then. It is because of this malleability of certain commodities that an information economy took form and the impact of portable, transposable information was felt even on those things that must have physical form, manufactured goods and physical media. The consequence of this was described by Professor Negroponte as creating “…. the potential for new content to originate from a whole new combination of sources.”

Fifteen years on we haven’t quite grasped the full potential of the difference between atoms and bits. We still have an industrial mentality to the creation of “goods”, even digital ones, and we bring people together around places of production rather than around tasks. This impacts upon our perception of what it means to “add value” because, by logical extension, for certain “things” we believe that we can only add value in certain places as opposed to points in the processes of creation.

I’m not denying the need to come together at certain times for certain things whether it be maintaining group cohesion or having the creative stimulus of sharing ideas and collaborating in person. Nor do I deny that some tasks cannot be done without a physical presence of some kind; manufacturing, farming or supporting people will always require a physical presence and being together will always support processes and creativity but – and it’s a big but – we have to seriously question the need for people who are engaged in the processing of information to be gathered in one building between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. The mass movement of people to accomplish information related tasks is a hangover from the industrial society. In this sense, we are not being digital.

The further consequence of this industrial mentality is a focus on city regions as centres of economic prosperity and a concept of innovation as only emerging from hubs of excellence. The “on cost” of this thinking is that we  withhold resources from other areas in order to feed these centres of production. In short we deliberately disadvantage almost a quarter of our population in order to support something that is the result of an industrial rather than an information mindset. Professor Negroponte puts it this way:

“The future will be a combination of intelligence at the centre and intelligence at the edge.”

While he is principally focussed on mass media the idea of intelligence at the centre is an industrial mentality. Moving intelligence to the edge allows for individuals and small groups to add value and allows for a view of innovation that is the result of crowd sourcing and individual creativity.  The world described by Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater  is one of inter-connected small units of knowledge, creativity and production. As long as we maintain an industrial mentality we will not reap the benefits of an inclusive, knowledge economy.  At the same time, we will suffer the disadvantages of an industrial one.  Professor Negroponte sees this as a transitional phase but identifies the need for a change in approach from industrial to digital.

“I am convinced that by the year2005 Americans will spend more hours on the Internet … than watching television. The combined forces of technology and human nature will ultimately take a stronger hand in plurality than any laws Congress can invent. But in case I’m wrong in the long term and for the transition period in the short term, the FCC had better find some imaginative scheme to replace industrial – age cross-ownership laws with incentives and guidelines for being digital”

While our economy is nominally “digital” we keep our society predominantly “industrial”. We do this for the purposes of keeping an economic advantage, protecting a market share and for political advantage. The Marxist  idea of power in the hands of those who control production would appear to still hold true and the vision of Fritz Lang’s  Metropolis remains the reality of the 21st Century. This is apparent in the current “Content Wars” which have found expression in “Digital Britain”. Infrastructure developments driven by shareholders that sweat the assets in city regions and copyright restrictions that favour large distributors.

I don’t object to paying for content. I do object to having to pay for content by being forced to use one channel. In Negroponte’s words: “Such a smorgasbord of incompatible set-top boxes is a horrible thought”. Once I’ve bought my content I want to use it how I want to use it. I want to watch it on my TV or on my laptop or on my mobile device irrespective of who manufactures it and independently of who produces the original content. Even in 2010, I can’t easily do that. The modern implementation of DRM is not about protecting content, it’s about protecting market share and history shows us that protectionism does not work. As Negroponte says: “Being digital is a license to grow ……..Being digital is the option to be independent of confining standards”. In this way we aren’t being digital we are clinging to the industrial past.

So what does being digital mean in 2010? Being digital means having the opportunities for true personalisation of services. It means access to content at times and through a medium that suits us. Being digital is being able to be innovative, creative and to add value in ways that are location and time independent. Being digital means having digital places in which to live, work and play. I believe that being digital involves something more fundamental, a mindset that realises the benefits of innovation and understands the contribution of knowledge society, not an industrial society in a digital world. Without a knowledge society the knowledge economy will fail. It is the need for a knowledge society that is the real driver for a digitally inclusive society. Being digital is not just about delivering services to disadvantaged groups it’s about the social justice of being able to participate and the social benefit of being able to contribute.

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A Holy Trinity

December 12th, 2009
The Care Wrap

The Care Wrap

 

 On Friday Martha Lane-Fox Tweeted: “RT NewStatesman xmas issue: @Marthalanefox has agreed to be our celebrity subscriber of the week : HELP, not feeling v funny or inspired!”

Along with I have no idea how many others I put forward my suggestions: access to the knowledge society as a fundamental right not as a privilege and the imperative of including the most excluded as a principle of social justice and pragmatic sense. It’s easy for me. I’m not subject to a deadline, nor am I in the public eye and having to watch everything I say I just felt that the inspiration for what needed to be said was all around the digital inclusion champion.

In a time when the Neteratti have been debating the future of content accessed through pay walls the notion of an egalitarian knowledge society has seemed a long way away. I’ve never quite understood why it is that the proponents of a knowledge economy do not call for a knowledge society. There appears to be a deep seated belief that the knowledge economy can operate on the same model as the industrial economy and that the laws of scarcity and value will still apply. The truth is that individuals have the ability to add value to knowledge and it is from there that collaboration derives it economic and social power.

It’s very rare that I agree with Andrea Dimaio who writes a regular blog for Gartner on government. I have, on occasions, let off steam in response to some of the things he says but it’s just a rage against the storm. Last week he wrote about the short comings of President Obama’s Open Government Directive on transparency in government and highlighted that the citizen backchannel was missing from the plan. In his piece “US Open Government Directive is Disappointing”   he points out that the mechanism for agencies to listen to citizens is not only missing from the plan, it’s positively discouraged. How can government services learn if they aren’t listening?

Early in December I did a presentation to a Local Strategic Partnership on Digital Inclusion and its impact on the delivery of services to people who experience both social and digital exclusion. After the presentation I helped facilitate a short workshop so that participants could put forward points of view and a broad consensus of ideas could be taken forward and developed into potential project ideas. Everything was so disconnected. It was the same place, with the same clients and, broadly speaking, shared objectives; to improve lives and life chances, but there was no communication. This isn’t unusual, it happens and even when communications are in place it’s at such a strategic level that it still doesn’t join up the operational opportunities that could make a difference. This is not to say that it’s not happening somewhere, it just isn’t happening everywhere.

The context here is the biggest users of public sector provided services whether they’re provided direct or whether they’re commissioned from private sector companies, not for profits or voluntary sector providers. These are individuals experiencing long term worklessness, victims of domestic violence, children at risk, people not in education, employment or training, homeless individuals, addicts, ex-offenders, single parents under eighteen and older people, people with disabilities, adults with learning difficulties, adults using mental health services and let’s not forget carers – young and old. I’m  not talking about people who write to Members of Parliament or people who are concerned about street lights not working I’m probably not even talking about people who are likely to vote. I’m talking about a huge group of people who use public sector services more than any of us reading this blog.

Let us be clear. It’s not as if people in this group have the same choices. They cannot choose, they have to take what they are given. As the biggest users of public services they are also the greatest cost to the public sector both in terms of the amount of resource they need and in terms of their capacity to contribute; let alone the question of social equity or the value that people who are excluded might bring if they were included. So, it is in everybody’s interest to enable people in this group, to build capacity amongst the members of this group and to improve their lives and their life chances; which is what digital inclusion is supposed to help to do.

These groups of individuals experiencing difficulties are not, as some might think, disempowered. They have very potent personal networks which help them to survive and to meet many of their needs. These networks also help them to deal with officialdom, organise benefits and solve day to day problems of child care, debt, care and so on. Not all of them, not every individual or family but many of them. The network of friends and trusted agents is powerful and provides a lifeline. That’s why friends and trusted agents are the first layer of care around the individual. Then there are the neighbourhood groups, the voluntary organisations, the national charities and then the statutory bodies. They all form a care wrap around those individuals and families who experience the greatest levels of deprivation and the greatest levels of difficulty in our society.

All of these people have a story to tell. Stories about the way they experience the services that they receive and the ways in which they access those stories. This leads to what I call the holy trinity of service design. The local partnerships who commission services, the third sector who deliver some of those services and have the knowledge of the communities in which they work and finally, empowered communities who have the confidence and the channels to tell their stories.

trinity

Paul Webster from NAVCA highlighted this after the DDI09 conference stating that carers and trusted agents were a route to engagement and also a pathway to digital inclusion – YES. By enabling the individual and listening to their story we can improve the services we deliver and let individuals find their way to add value to the knowledge in society. As Leadbeater would say, we can do with and not do to.

This brings me back to something else Martha Lane-Fox said earlier this week

“@cyberdoyle i think govt shld be worrying abt making sure everyone has internet skills + access to proper quality 2mb 1st + superfast 2nd”

I have to say, I disagreed. Next Generation Access should not be predicated on a universal service offering and an individual’s right to participate in the knowledge society. The two things are not related, well, at least they shouldn’t be. The right of the individual to participate should be fundamental; the infrastructure to support that participation should be incidental. With that thought I think that the digital inclusion champion will have lots to tell the readers of the New Statesman and I look forward to reading the result.

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Who are the Neteratti?

November 27th, 2009

Let me say at the start that I have never owned a Linn hifi. Nor have I, for that matter ever owned a Naim, Accoustic Research, Roksan or any other esoteric brand of equipment. I do own a Quad / Kef combination but it’s quite old and it’s currently in boxes because my current home is just not that big and the Other Half is just not that understanding. I do love music, all sorts of music, Jazz: folk rock, classical, rock and roll. I love it all, and I love it live from the Nantwich Jazz Festival to what’s on at the pub I just love it.

Now, I hear you say, what’s all this got to do with digital anything?

There was a brief item on the BBC News web site this week about CD player production ending at Linn. They have recognised that the future lies in streamed digital media and they are focussing their efforts on Studio Master Quality material for download. If you’ve ever heard a high end Linn system (they can cost up to £100,000) you will understand what they mean by Studio Master Quality. I’ve often bemoaned the success of the iPod. I’ve often bemoaned the success of a lot of MP3. It’s not that it isn’t good, it’s very good but we have sacrificed a lot of quality in our pursuit of cheap, easy to access music. Compressed dynamics, loss of spatial information, over hanging bass lines, screeching vocals that waft about the sound stage, in short, we’ve given up on real quality. I know that’s a Grumpy Old Man thing and it’s the music that counts, but if you’ve never heard a full spec Linn in all of its glory recreating a 3D sound stage with as near to full dynamic range as you can get, then you probably won’t know what I’m on about anyway. Back to my point; the Studio Master Quality material, like video, will use up a lot of bandwidth. People have stopped buying CDs because they can get music cheaply through existing bandwidth and its okay because they’re not concerned about the quality. Music is, almost, disposable. Here today, gone tomorrow and to some extent we’ve lost out emotional attachment to it – it’s become like static – we hear, we like, we buy (or steal, because the Internet is free, isn’t it) and then we throw it away. If we want Studio Quality Material, we will have to have bandwidth which means that it will only be available to people with bandwidth. Storage is cheap; bandwidth is only for those in the Cities.

Now, I hear you say, where’s he going with this? Surely not a rural rant.

Well, I could, but no, this is more about selective markets. I was very grateful for the excellent commentary that came out of the My Public Services Conference on Thursday. I couldn’t go, way too much on, but it was almost as good as being there. What came across strongly, to me at least, was the message that WE are the future of government services. That’s true but nobody seemed to pick up on the point that WE are a very select little group. On the global scale of things we are a self selecting Neteratti, well educated, committed, digitally literate, middle class select little group. We are no different to the people who can afford to buy a full spec Lynn and enjoy the experience.

What was that? Grow the group?

Well yes we could grow the group but that’s not the point. There was a very good piece this week by Stephen Collins from the Centre for Policy Development in Australia.  called “Culture in the New Order “. His view resonated with my own views about the necessity of culture change in government organisations.

  • a lack of a cohesive “whole of government” approach at any level of government
  • a view of accountability that inadequately rewards those responsible for success and innovation
  • inadequate trust and permission models across public sector management
  • a change to openness as a default, including removing reticence to participate or obfuscation of participation
  • a negative-only perception of risk

One of the things that people tend to ignore is that government organisations are not designed to be transformational. They are designed to be process oriented, reliable, auditable and while they serve all of us they are responsible for delivering services to the most vulnerable people in our society. With that as your key driver you don’t suddenly start transforming things just because a load of middle class Neteratti start shouting about it. The implication of this is that the core functions of local government will not change quickly or significantly over a short timescale. What will happen is that certain functions will move outside of government, and we see this happening already, and it will move into the realm of the Neteratti.

Well, that’s good, isn’t it? Yes and no.

The trouble is, as I see it, the Neteratti are a selective little group, privileged like the full spec Linn owners.  Their literacy is like the city’s bandwidth and their knowledge is the Studio Quality Master Material. There were a couple of other things this week that caught my eye. One was a Guardian Article “The Dark Side of the Internet” by Andy Beckett,   which was an excellent précis of Freenet and the implications of its wider use. I noted that someone in the Twitter stream commented that if the Government’s Digital Economy Bill goes through unchanged – and it will – more of us will become Freenet users.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

The non statutory government functions in the hands of a small select group navigating its way around the Internet unseen, non accountable and as for the rest? Excluded? Baileyhillmedia signposted an article by Joe Marchese “Why Facebook Applications will soon be History”. In it he wrote about the use of Facebook Connect APIs to enable applications to run outside of Facebook but using the Facebook Identity. Similar plans are in play for MySpace ID, and Google’s Friend Connect. In a sense it’s not unlike the E-Bay API which enables you to buy on E-Bay when you’re really buying from somebody’s on line catalogue. Brian Solis wrote about this a couple of weeks ago  the impact of portable identity on marketing. In short, when we access services we will do so in an invisible way. For many that might sound like a good thing: Seamless access to services using portable identity and delivered in a personalised, martini fashion.  I believe we run the risk that the people who control those services will also be invisible. For me it’s Gibsonesque! I’ve used that term twice this week and that’s what brought me to this place I suppose. William Gibson wrote a series of books in the 70’s which predicted the Internet of today: Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Count Zero, Johnny Mnemonic, The Difference Engine. In his books there was always a ghost in the machine that was the real control, insidious, hidden and self interested. When we shout loudly “WE are the future of government” I think we might take a little time out to understand who WE are and who isn’t there who ought to be and perhaps spend some time getting everybody there so that Gibson’s prophesy doesn’t become self fulfilling.

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Social Innovation and the Knowledge Society – Now is the Time.

November 16th, 2009

The announcement, on Friday, that our local council was considering cutting the most expensive bus routes  struck a chord with me. I remember when the bus services were centralised, it was a good example of target driven policy making. Community transport had been offering a service to people for years and they had it down to a fine art but when services were centralised nobody thought to ask them and now here we are with the most costly services running at £13.83 per passenger. At that price, nobody can blame the council for cutting the service but that’s not what is at stake here. When the services were centralised who asked the communities what they wanted, who asked the community transport how they did it and who asked the people what they could do to make the service viable? Well nobody. There was extensive consultation, but that was in the form of what the local authority was prepared to do and the question was whether the community agreed with it – agreed strongly even.

“Local authorities must engage more people in commissioning local goods and services. Citizens should have a say in how services are delivered, to improve decision-making and value-for-money.” Communities in Control, 2008

The Government’s Empowerment agenda is in trouble, believe me. Those Local Authorities who have signed up to NI 4. (The % of people who feel that they can  I can influence decisions in their locality), are back tracking. Empowerment is being reinterpreted in terms of the much less threatening, Engagement. I can imagine a number of reasons for this: organisational culture being the main culprit, an inherent fear of popular referenda being another. A tendency to see communities as part of a problem, not part of a solution and a lost understanding of what it means to consult. This is not about consulting with people, this is about managing expectations. Deciding what you are going to do and then asking people if they agree is not consultation.

Alongside the publication of the Comprehensive Spending Review of 2007 the Government made it  clear what its intentions were for encouraging local democracy. Through the Government White Paper and The Comprehensive Spending Review they laid out a strategic framework for the localisation of decision making about service delivery and economic development. To enable this at the citizen level they put forward an agenda for empowerment.

“We want to shift power, influence and responsibility away from existing centres of power into the hands of communities and individual citizens. This is because we believe that they can take difficult decisions and solve complex problems for themselves. The state’s role should be to set national priorities and minimum standards, while providing support and a fair distribution of resources.” Communities in Control, 2008

The rational for this was clear:

“Unless we give citizens similar choices in our democratic system to those they have in their everyday lives – and the same rights to demand the best – we will see a further erosion of trust and participation in democracy…..” Communities in Control, 2008

How does the need for trust sound today in the light of the Parliamentary expenses scandal? This was not just about giving people what they felt they ought to have by right, there was a clearly perceived added value for service delivery. There was also a quid pro quo, people wouldn’t just want a say in how thing were run, they wanted to be heard, to know that they were making a difference:

Now, we hear that in the most deprived wards of England we are to see Local Intensive Engagement!

“Giving people a voice— Local people must have the chance to express their worries and know that someone will act on their behalf. I want to enable an open debate about what the challenges really are in these areas—even if this raises difficult and uncomfortable issues. This means giving people the space to air their grievances to political and community leaders. Alongside measures to increase the visibility of more formal leaders, individuals will be encouraged to act as community champions or tenants and have a bigger say in local issues. This will help build up the confidence and self-esteem of residents so that they feel that they can regain control over their estates, their lives and their futures.”

We are, effectively, funding what people should have anyway a real voice, a say in how things are done. What I find most disturbing it the lack of faith in the people and the lack of courage in local authorities to trust the people. In truth, people in communities are already empowered. They have their networks of friends and trusted agents. There are community brokers, community representative both official and unofficial and individuals who can speak with the community voice. There is a social capital in all communities what we don’t have is the channels for those voices to be heard by those that are making the decisions.

“But while people want to have a greater say, they need also to be convinced that their involvement will make a difference. If they speak up, they want to know that their voices will be heard. This is  what empowerment is all about – passing more and more political power to more and more people through every practical means.” Communities in Control, 2008

In order to make this happen the Government recognised that they would have to create routes and channels for people to have their say and to make their wishes known and one such route was through modern media:

 “A strong independent media is a vital part of any democracy. We will continue to support a range of media outlets and support innovation in community and social media. We will pilot a mentoring scheme in deprived areas on using the Internet.” Communities in Control, 2008

What the Government saw was that innovation in service delivery was urgently needed and that re-designing services to meet the need of the citizen could only be realistically achieved by involving the citizen in the design of those services:

  “Encouraging innovation – reduced central prescription will allow more space for localities and public sector professionals to respond to local needs and citizen input to the design and delivery of services and through a commitment to the sharing of good practice across delivery partners.

Achieving outstanding performance in the public sector cannot be done without substantial devolution to unlock the initiative, creativity and motivation of leaders throughout the system.” Local Performance Framework, 2007

 One of the biggest losses to local government service design is a failure to capitalise on the holy trinity of service design: the local authority, the third sector and the community. 

 “the enablers of innovation and improvement, such as the quality of partnership working, effective strategic commissioning, strong political leadership and community involvement; negotiating and influence to prepare excellent LAAs and managing risks to outcomes;” Local Performance Framework, 2007

 We seem to have lost, somewhere along the way, the knowledge that arises from the emergent stories that communities tell. Out of those stories, whether they are told on line, in real time, in hard copy, in words or pictures comes the knowledge that describes outcomes of current service delivery and informs the re-design to improve the next generation of services. The belief that everything must flow from the centre and that citizens are recipients, not participants ignores the potential for social capital to create value out of service delivery. The centralisation of community transport was a classic example of this.

 None of this foresaw the economic crisis of 2008/9 and the unprecedented expenditure of taxpayers’ money by the Government. Already, local authorities were contemplating massive cuts in public expenditure now they were faced with making difficult decisions about service delivery. Now we come to a place where the problems that our society faces can only be solved with the wisdom of the crowd and the opportunity to capture the wisdom of the crowd has been suppressed through lack of understanding on the part of local government. We need a knowledge society.

In 2004 Professor Ann Macintosh at Edinburgh Napier University proposed a progression to citizen empowerment through the use of ICTs; engagement, participation and empowerment. She saw this as a way to reach a wider audience to enable broader participation and to support participation through a range of technologies “to cater for the diverse technical and communicative skills of citizens.”

In short, she saw the potential in ICTs not just to inform and engage but to enable participation and empowerment. With the rapid growth of Web 2.0 we have an even greater opportunity to realize the potential for citizen empowerment. Charles Leadbeater points out that in Social Enterprise and Social Innovation we can approach public services in a way that is “more personalised, engaging, joined-up, adaptable – providing better outcomes and value for money.” Dominic Campbell has recently pointed out that “Social innovation exists at the intersection between government business and social action, both taking on and improving government services and/or meeting a unmet need” and proposes a fourth strand to the relationship with government and service delivery: social innovation.

The result is that the potential resource of innovative thought remains untapped and local authorities try to deliver what they can’t possibly deliver. What’s wrong with saying to people: this is how much money we have, this is what it will buy, what do you want to keep and what can you deliver yourselves? People have strong views about what they want for their community and if there are things they can do for themselves they will.

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You Don’t Have to be Big – Just Smart

November 10th, 2009

On the first Monday in November I went to “Birmingham’s Big Debate”. IT was held at the ICC in Birmingham, one of my favourite buildings. The subheading for the event was “Can the creative sector save the UK economy?” I went because I received an invite through colleagues at Digital Birmingham and I am interested in all things Digital, particularly in how they relate to people. Events like these are a good opportunity to catch up with old friends and hopefully make a couple of new ones. I managed the former, I’m not sure if I achieved the latter.

There were some interesting speakers at the event which was peopled predominantly by representatives from Birmingham’s Creative sector. Charles Leadbeater highlighted the small pebbles theme, the importance of rebels in the innovation process, the dangers of centres of excellence that end up as a home for lime coloured bean bags and the need for places (not necessarily permanent, purpose built places) for people to collaborate and to exhibit.

David Harris gave an industry perspective on the economic potential of creative industries and how creativity sat low on the educational agenda. He posed a very important question which seemed, to me, to get lost; what happens if you put creativity at the core of everything? David was accompanied at the podium by Toby Barnes who runs a successful gaming company. Toby’s presentation tried to pull together the potential for the future, particularly of digital technology.

The event then moved into facilitated discussion groups and, for me at least, it entered a state of mass denial as it appeared that the messages from the front of house had not been heard. I don’t think it was just my table, at least not judging from the bullet point list that arose from all of the discussions. There were some good people on my table, engaging, intelligent, and important but seemingly unable to see the bigger picture. There was deep conviction that the city was to be the focus of activity – what happened to collaboration as a route to innovation? The West Midlands is a large and diverse place -. There was a call for centres of excellence as place to exhibit national collections. Why did they bother to invite Charles Leadbeater if nobody was going to hear a word he said? There was a re-run of the Birmingham City Council website fiasco and the excellent riposte from local activists with their DIY site but then a complaint that the council still wasn’t listening and engaging with them – Err, your point? But what was most disturbing was that nobody, as @Cyberdoyle would say, got IT. Nobody appeared to understand the wider implications of a digital world.

Charles Leadbeater covered the ground from “We Think” but there is a paper which he wrote for Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2009 called “The Art of With” where he describes the culture of companies (and governments) that do things ‘for’ people and ‘to’ people. In creative terms it equates to art ‘at’ us. For Leadbeater the logic of ‘with’ underpins changes in people’s relationship to information and to one another. “The barriers to entry into creating media content are falling.” This is part of what was missed by the people at the Birmingham event; it was clear from the comments that the participants saw themselves as doing things for and to and not recognising the new economy or the new opportunities that arose from doing it with.

It’s time I stopped buying the Sunday Times. It’s a bad habit; I’m used to settling down with it for an hour after breakfast on a Sunday. It’s the only time I buy a traditional paper.  Rupert Murdoch doesn’t get it either, I’m referring to his insanity viz Google indexes, yet conversely there was this article in the Culture section last Sunday.

times

The article was a brilliant example of how small pebbles, collaborating, allowed musicians to share their art, make a living – and that includes all of the support organisations – with not a single rant about DRM. The irony wasn’t lost on me but I don’t suppose that Mr M reads his publication, well, not on a Sunday.

What the people in that debate were missing was the same point; the internet has changed the goal posts, the world is no longer just flat, it’s joined up. Eric Schmidt, in a recent Gartner interview stated that “It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources; unsurprisingly, for Schmidt, Learning how to rank that ” is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes “Google can solve that problem” because Google tends to listen to some people more than others. In the next five years, if a company does not exist on the internet, it does not exist in the world. Those companies with an eye to capturing the content market will have their identity firmly on the web 2.0 and web 3.0. Those companies with art to exhibit and art to sell will do so in ever changing, ever flexible, ever on line spaces and their market place will be the web. However, it’s more than this, because not only does the web provide the place to share and sell it also provides the place to receive thoughts, to gain inspiration, to collaborate, it is the art of ‘with’ that Leadbeater talks about.

Within five years a web persona will be as important as a real world identity. Brian Solis recently wrote about Portable identity in the evolution of the social web. “Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.” – Brian Solis – The world will know you by your web persona, in the internet of things you will be a connection and every device you use will be node on that connection. Bigger entities, like companies, will just be bigger networks.

Having the faith to put yourself into the hands of the people and trust them. That’s what’s wrong. There is no faith and no trust. There is an underlying fear that people will ask for something that the system can’t deliver and so it has to manage expectations. I was humbled recently when I read an article by Radha Rao on Technology and the Intellectual Life of the Poor where he looks at the inability of society to consider excluded people as just having a creative life, we have to see them as both creative and excluded: “How do we begin to look at the technological lives of people beyond developmentalism and take into account the way it changes aspirations and subjectivities?” – Radha Rao –

I’ve talked here about an event with the creative sector but it applies equally across all businesses. Unless business embraces its audience, its customers, unless it seeks to understand the art of ‘with’ and has the faith to accept that a wider collaboration will yield benefits irrespective of  whether they’re from the creative quarter or not then the creative or any other sector will not be able to save the UK economy – I doubt it will save itself.

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Media Literacy

October 27th, 2009

Have you ever been to one of those workshops which begin with the words “I want you to tell us something about yourself that nobody else in the room would know” I‘m not going to have a grumpy old man moment about my views on this but I will confess to something that not a lot of people know; I used to be a school teacher. Many years ago, admittedly, but I was that teacher. I say this because one of the subjects that was taught way back then was Media Studies. I have deconstructed images, highlighted the sub text, framed the picture, explained a “tracking shot” created that sound effect and recorded the play. This was all about understanding mediation, that the media was not a window on life but a point of view with an underpinning set of values that we somehow felt young people needed to recognise and understand. 

What we didn’t have then was the internet. We witnessed the first micro computers and their development (we really believed that 640k would be enough for anyone), the  9600baud modem, e-mail (we couldn’t imagine what anyone would want to use it for either), networks (so you could share expensive peripherals like NLQ dot matrix printers and high capacity (sic 10 Mb) storage, colour, tcp/ip and then the mosaic browser and with it a sudden dawning of what it all could mean. By that time I had left teaching and the government of the day had declared that media literacy was no longer necessary as a subject. What was important was literacy, numeracy and science. Soon to be added to the list was IT. 

Now, it seems, we have come full circle, as is the way of things, and we have a Digital Participation Consortium under the auspices of Ofcom. 

AOL   Cabinet Office   DC10plus
BBC   Champion for Digital Inclusion (Race Online 2012 Team)   DCMS
Bebo   Change Agency   DCSF
Becta   Channel 4   Digital UK
BIS   Cisco   Digital Unite
British Library   CLG   Directgov
Broadband Stakeholder Group   Community Media Association   e-skills UK
BSkyB   Oxford Internet Institute   Get Safe Online
BT   Portland PR on behalf of Apple   Google
Tate   Post Office   Intel
Timebank   QCDA   ITV
UKCCIS   Research in Motion (BlackBerry)   LearnDirect
UK online centres   Scottish Government   Media Literacy in Scotland
Virgin Media   SkillSet   Media Literacy Task Force
Wales Media Literacy Network   Museums, Libraries and Archives Council   Media Trust/Community Channel
Welsh Assembly Government   Mobile Broadband Group   Microsoft
YouthNet   MySpace   NIACE
Northern Ireland Executive   Northern Ireland Media Literacy Network    

 The big difference between then and now is that then there was a definable media. Big organisations which had vast resources making content for the rest of society. They’re still there and the principles of mediation and the underlying values of large scale producers still apply. These are Charles Leadbeater’s large stones on a beach. What we have now are the small stones, the collaborative, hyperlocal publishers of content.

There has been a tendency to think of hyperlocal as a benign benefit to communities and as a way of broadcasting the community voice, giving it a platform and making it heard. I share that view. However, I would also like to share with you a recent experience that the need for media literacy has never been greater. I was having a light hearted conversation via Twitter with Lewis Shepherd in Washington about whole food and socialism along the lines of “What’s socialist about whole food?” when a re-tweet appeared in the stream: 

“3rd Red Scare? RT @penval @lewisshepherd Socialism apart – what’s not capitalist about whole food?” 

These things appear and disappear all of the time but given that I was thinking about the whole media literacy piece I took time out to investigate a little further. A check on the profile of the sender brought me to this:

 redscarebot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While I usually ignore the automated stuff I was intrigued so I had a look at the web site and found myself here:

Digital Hisory Page

This site is allegedly fronted by the University of Huston. It doesn’t appear to have been updated since 2006 and, if the contact page is to be believed it has been subjected to some vigorous spam attacks. On the face of it this is a factual web site which provides information and worksheets for teachers about American History. Some of it is quite good, I learned things. When you start to dig it becomes somewhat more insidious. Certain groups in the US are labelled, specifically: Italians, Irish and Asians, they are migrants. Other groups are omitted, specifically indigenous Indian tribes. African Americans and the Civil War are a mere footnote in history. Jewish people are “non-Christians”. According to this web site indigenous Americans are white, middle class and Catholic.

 None of this is explicit, it’s all inferred and it’s all supported by “facts”. It’s quite amateurish and you would have to be rather crass not to see the issues that are raised here but it does serve to remind us that there is an element of internet media literacy that we didn’t have to deal with when the “media” was a clearly defined, easy to see, big stone.

The people and organisations who sit on the Ofcom Digital Participation group are as good a representational body as you are likely to get. I wish it well and have faith that they will consider the full impact of the hyperlocal revolution in all of its forms. This is not just about making us all more aware in  a digital world, it’s fundamental. Recently the European Union issued a communication on Media Literacy where it said:

 “Democracy depends on the active participation of citizens to the life of their community and media literacy would provide the skills they need to make sense of the daily flow of information disseminated through new communication technologies.”

COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION 20.8.2009 on media literacy in the digital environment for a more competitive audiovisual and content industry and an inclusive knowledge society

 This, for me, says it all and because this is a sentiment to which we all subscribe I think we should be mindful of the media literacy issues that will arise from our hyperlocal endeavours.

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Democracy is Communal

October 6th, 2009

When those of us engaged in the bottom up, democracy space complain bitterly about those in the top down democratic organisations perhaps we should remind ourselves about political mandate and statutory function. Hierarchical local government organisations will focus on those things for which they can be seriously held to account: a vulnerable youngster left outside a school because their transport didn’t arrive, an elderly patient left lying on the floor of their home because the care worker didn’t turn up or a child at risk not taken into care and being seriously harmed. While the day to day irritants of life that result from the inefficiencies or failures of local government cause the majority of us the maximum grief the local authority will focus its efforts on the biggest users of its services (with good reason) and we will be left raging against the storm.

None of this is to say that local government shouldn’t be responsive. Nor should it mean that those with the political mandate to deliver those services in a particular way should be allowed to hide behind the wall of officialdom. Far from it, but the conversations are taking place in different spaces. What then are the dynamics that change the spaces? Social Media should not be about instant referendums; precisely how they implement the “Public Reading” proposals outlined for the Conservative Conference will be interesting. Social Media should be about conversations between individuals in communities and the creation of consensus. A political understanding arises from the conversation and it is the consensus of the crowd that moves us to a place where we can influence government. We may have to use the other channels, the official ones, but we do so with the strength and conviction of a community. Once a consensus exists it also becomes a powerful vehicle for consultation and then the top down space starts to merge into the bottom up.

I finally had time recently to read some of “Rebooting America” the collection of essays put together by Allison Fine, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy. The very first piece by Zach Exley struck a chord with me; “Democracy is communal”, a theme taken up by David Weinberger in his piece on Echo Chambers where he says that conversation shapes democracy.

Social media exists in different conversational spaces. Where you are having the conversation will dictate the kind of response you get. Here, the conversations are where I think they exist, I hope that others will put them elsewhere and articulate their case for so doing.

 Spaces

Participation can be democratic or it can be subversive. It can be bottom up or it can be top down. Local government exists in the democratic, top down space. Social Media can exist in the democratic bottom up space. What matters is that we understand that the conversation spaces are more varied. We rarely think about astroturfing but in the political influencing stakes it’s a powerful weapon. In the on line world hackers can make their voice heard in very subversive ways. How should we consider the Googlearchy? If the voices of communities cannot be found, they cannot be heard, does this make the Googlearchy a subversive force? Where does the power really lie?

“Talk About Local 09″ Unconference on Saturday 3rd October wasn’t Woodstock but it was an event. Excellent workshops and spontaneous presentations with lots of passion. Social Reporting is defining itself as a particular group that is demanding a status in respect of mainstream media. There are sound, practical reasons for this as well as an expressed desire for legitimacy. The day also reflected the other side of Social Media, the participatory, activist, cohesive communities side. The elements that make up these communities of practise can complain bitterly about the institutional deafness that local authorities exhibit when confronted with their failings. It may just be that the conversations are happening in the wrong place. The power of social software in a networked world to build social capital, articulate consensus and create innovative solutions means that this could, some would say should, become one of the means to achieve the duty to inform, involve and consult because through consensus it empowers communities. That being the case then the digital inclusion agenda becomes even more crucial if we are to involve the biggest users of locally delivered services.

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