Archive for the ‘Knowledge Society’ Category

Plus ca Change, Plus ca Meme Chose

Saturday, 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 We are prepared to sacrifice social freedoms in the name of an outdated economic model.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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Being Digital 2010

Monday, 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

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

Monday, 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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