Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

Cesi n’est pas une pipe

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The National Digital Inclusion Conference 2010 (NDI 10) was a better conference than last year. This was in part due to the involvement of larger numbers of individuals and groups that are engaged in delivery and in part due to the organisation of the event which was much more open than last year. Martha Lane Fox gave a presentation that was a rallying call: keep it simple and don’t become a self perpetuating industry, halve the size of the conference year on year as the need is met. Despite everything, NDI 10 still failed to achieve its potential.

There were emerging gaps that became apparent on day one that by day two were seemingly impossible to cross. On one side the clear Government message that digital inclusion was about efficiency and being able to deliver services to the most vulnerable in society to help tackle disadvantage. On the other side the dedication of the groups and individuals who help the different sections of the communities in which they operate to become digitally engaged. Between the two, there was me,  with a distinct feeling that I was in the wrong place. I wasn’t alone, but I wasn’t where I thought I ought to be.

Finally, I had a Grumpy Old Man moment. It was brief and, I confess, to the point but on reflection it symbolised the space between us. The session on Digital Participation was looking for promises. What simple thing could we promise to deliver that would have an impact on digital inclusion. The suggestion was that we make the registration of school place preferences a compulsory on line exercise and then support parents through the school to do this. This would be such a rewarding experience that parents who were previously disengaged would see the potential and become digitally included.

I had a number of problems with this suggestion. Firstly, it fails to recognise that the school community is the community of the school, it is not the wider community. Secondly, it positions the school as the mediator between an individual and a government service.  Is this why we have schools?  What symbolised the gulf between us most was the unspoken declaration that we could not find a compelling enough reason for individuals and groups to want to use digital channels and so we had decided to resort to compulsion by statute. If the great digitally unwashed couldn’t understand then we would force them, using their children’s education as the blunt instrument, to become digitally clean.

The tipping point was when the Chair of the panel smiled and one by one the members of the panel thought that it was a good idea, one of them, and I won’t name names, even used the word “great”. Whether it was serendipity, or kismet or whether I willed it to happen, the microphone came to me next – and the rest is history.

What happened to empowerment, communities in control, transparency, the use of technology to improve the life chances of citizens? These are the reasons I felt that I was in the wrong place. It was digital inclusion, but not as we know it. It was as if the argument had to be reduced to its most fundamental constituents. Why was this? Was it because we were all considered too simple to understand the wider benefits of digital inclusion? Has the government changed its mind? Is it no longer interested in the use of technology to empower individuals and communities? Has it come down to this: get poor people and old people on line, any way we can, so that we can reduce the cost of delivering services to them?

I believe in the potential for digital technology to contribute to improving life chances. Empowerment enables a voice, that voice can tell life stories and those stories can inform service design. Empowerment can create the conditions for collaboration and through collaboration communities can innovate and deliver some of the services that can no longer be delivered by government. Access to data through technology has the potential to make the function of government transparent and serves to improve the quality of our democracy. It is in these ways that we improve life chances, not by making it cheaper for government to deliver services as they always have.

I know that digital inclusion is not a magic bullet but equally I do not believe that digital inclusion is a means of doing the same thing but doing it for less cost. I know that there needs to be a starting point, I do not believe that the coercion of citizens into participating in centralised service delivery is the right one. People have disengaged, they have done so for a reason; they have created networks of support that reflect their beliefs and meet their needs more appropriately. Re-engaging them with a wider community through digital channels alone will not work. By simply constructing a digital facade over the thing from which people disengaged in the first place we will not create an inclusive society.

NDI 10 seemed to have lost sight of its long term vision, it missed an opportunity to restate that vision and chose instead to focus on a series of promises that will not bridge the gap but will maintain the divide. Will NDI 11 be a smaller conference as Martha Lane Fox suggested? Yes it will, It’s unlikely that I will be there, and I suspect that next year, once again, I will not be alone.

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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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You Don’t Have to be Big – Just Smart

Tuesday, 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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What Should Be In A Digital Inclusion Conference?

Monday, September 21st, 2009

I first wrote about this way back in May 2009 in response to the Digital Inclusion Conference 2009. which I thought was pretty good as conferences go. Given the discussion on Twitter on 21st September I thought it would be a good time to bring some of it back to the top of the blog list.

I will declare myself guilty to being self opinionated and state that I have touted these ideas as suitable for Digital Inclusion 2010. I apologise if I’ve bored you with some of this before.

I am proposing that there should be rules for next year’s conference. In no particular order:-

Rule number one – Just because you had a good experience doesn’t mean you have the answer. Present the experience, not the solution.

Rule number two – No PowerPoint slides with tick boxes.

Rule number three – there should be no exceptions proving the rule. We should celebrate success but not at the expense of ignoring the hard to do pile.

Rule number four – remember that the biggest consumers of public services are those people whose lives are most chaotic.

I suggest a twin track conference one for LSPs and Commissioners and one for practitioners. There should be active engagement of the third sector with special rates for them to attend and targeted items on one day so that they don’t have the expense of a two day event. I also suggest a slightly different format with an opportunity for fringe events and small, privately sponsored workshops so that individual projects can present their work to interested audiences.

There were a couple of emergent themes that I think should underpin the “out of the box” approach needed next time:

Innovation: We all know Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Do we really understand what it is to be innovative? The recent Vienna Report has a great sound bite “I2 Inclusive technical innovation and Innovative Inclusive Policies”. Where do innovative ideas come from and what is the journey that they go on? Do we understand innovation or do we oversimplify? Is there a place for horizon scanning?

Entitlement: What is people’s entitlement and do the VCS have a role in this?

Scalability, Duplication versus Replication: How do you break string without scissors? What is the best way, local up or down to local, how do you scale small ideas?

Empowerment: Doing it with not doing it to. Is there a difference between activism and empowerment? What is the role of locally created content? People can be supported to be producers.

Value: Lord Reith’s approach was giving the people what they need, not what they want. What is the role of Value chains in social inclusion? How do you add value in a knowledge society? What is the value chain? How do you create value? How do we connect advocacy to information? Is this adding value? What is the real value of partnership? Is the holy trinity of service design VCS/CVS + LA/LSP + empowered citizens?

Disability: What is the disabled experience? CLG have published a number of profiles on Adults with Learning difficulties and people who use mental health services. How do we bring these to life? What’s it like to be on the other side of the glass?

Access: Is Access still an issue? Should infrastructure be part of the debate? Should we talk about rural in a separate context?

The 2009 conference was, primarily, an event for Ministers. It was an opportunity to understand that Digital Inclusion is a real issue, that there are quantifiable benefits to come from a digitally included society, and that there is some Ministerial credit to be had by being actively engaged with the digital inclusion agenda. The conference was also about celebrating success. I’m all for that and there was a lot of success to celebrate and quite right too. However, try as they might, nobody got any closer to the real nub of the matter – the final third, or the final 29%. The “too hard to do” pile didn’t seem to get any smaller and the “yes we can” pile grew not one jot. That said, the best ideas often come from the most surprising places, the workshops threw up some hope for us all so recommendation that the workshops stay.

Which brings us to the future; what should happen next? When Matthew Taylor closed the conference with an invitation for next year I had a concern that another two days of celebrating success over the 71% (or will it be 75%) of engaged citizens would be re-played. This must not happen and so I have a couple of suggestions. Next year’s conference must concentrate on the things we cannot do, that we find hard, that we need to approach differently. I propose that we have the first half day to celebrate the achievements, it’s important to do that. For the remainder of the conference we should focus on the “too hard to do” pile and we should start the process of thinking well outside of the box. It’s time we left our comfort zone.

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Citizen Shock

Friday, August 28th, 2009

Citizen – Citizenship is the state of being a citizen of a particular social, political, or national community. – Citizenship status, under social contract theory, carries with it both rights and responsibilities. “Active citizenship” is the philosophy that citizens should work towards the betterment of their community through economic participation, public service, volunteer work and other such efforts to improve life for all citizens. In this vein, schools in some countries provide citizenship education. – Wikipedia

Shock – Acute stress over reaction (also called acute stress disorder, psychological shock, mental shock, or simply, shock) is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying event. It should not be confused with the unrelated circulatory condition of shock. – Wikipedia

Two things have prompted me to commit these thoughts to print: the idea that Social Media is nothing more than an enabler for Gov 20 – a comment doing the rounds of #Gov20 last week – and the idea that people have disengaged from politics and need to be somehow re-connected.

There is a fundamental difference between England and much of the free world – we are a subject nation! We are all subjects of the Crown. This can be quite a leveller; just as I’m a subject so the Prime Minister and the Government are all subjects. Of course, some are more subjected than others. When America declared independence it established for itself an important principle:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

That self- evident truth is not written down in England. Don’t mistake me, I have more freedom than many people in the world: freedom to speak, and the right to vote  – I value those things, I appreciate the country in which I live, I am a loyal subject – but I have them because they are granted to me, not as an unalienable Right.

The other element to being a subject nation is that everything is undertaken in the name of the Crown. This is an important distinction. The American Constitution begins:

“ We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That simple phrase, “We the People” is pervasive. In American courts it is The People versus, in England it’s The Crown versus; in America it’s the United States Government, in England it’s Her Majesty’s Government.

These perceptions are so embedded into our National psyche that it’s influencing the way we talk about Gov 20 and the way in which we evaluate the impact of Social Media. To suggest that Social Media is simply an enabler for Gov 20 is to suggest that it has no value outside of engaging and enabling. The current obsession with data and apps is great, raw data presented to citizens in new ways that are useful and enabling. The new openness is great, once hidden documents now as open source wikis brilliant! But it’s not enough! What has happened to our desire for citizen voice, to let people be heard and listened to? Where did the dialogue go? The truth is that it’s not the people who have disengaged from politics, its politics that has disengaged from the people. It’s not we who have to be reconnected, it’s government.

The talk is of transformed government, efficient, accountable and non-interventionist. Services will be personalised and wherever possible localised. The enabling mechanism will be information technology, it will be the delivery mechanism, the organising force and it will be the channel of choice. Government at every level will speak to the citizens through their channels of choice and the citizens will interact with government in a way that is convenient, anytime, anywhere – Martini government.

The vast majority of statutory services (provided by government agencies or private sector partners) are consumed by less than thirty percent of the people. This thirty percent (let’s not argue about definitive figures now) the final third are also those who use technology the least for all sorts of reasons and so the idea of Digital Inclusion was born. There is some amazing work in the field of digital inclusion, work with individuals and work with communities. It is helping to create community cohesion, build social capital, grow innovative, bottom up solutions to local issues; but is it re-connecting the people with politics? Is it giving the people a louder voice? Whether you are in America or in England, or any other country for that matter I would suggest no, it isn’t – because nobody is really listening.

The Politics of Government long ago gave way to the Politics of Power. We are no longer governed by a set of beliefs which we hold to be true and which we put forward to be debated and evolved.  Politics is about keeping power and that has led our establishments to become hierarchical, inward looking, focussed on command and control and outbound messages.

 In hierarchical organisations the direction of the information flow is down, through the organisation. The impact of the command and control mentality is the creation of a series of glass filters. This means that only positive messages get fed upwards and problems are solved or managed at the base of the organisation. Such organisations tend to be inward looking, focussed on self promotion. The impact of being an inward looking organisation is seen in the need to own and to brand the channels of delivery. All messages from a hierarchical organisation will be outbound. They will advertise success. Hierarchical organisations find it hard to be innovative. Ideas flow down the command and control chain and not upwards. Innovations have to be branded and there is no recognition of the individual or group, so why innovate?

Invariably this organisation will want to maintain a status quo so, by definition, it will be protective of itself and its processes. In so doing this approach will reinforce the lack of innovation and focus the organisation in on itself. These organisations are dysfunctional organisations. The inability to change and to transform means that they cannot easily adapt and learn. In these circumstances people disengage and resort to the organisation only when they have to.

The rapid emergence of Social Media technologies over the last two years has given a new channel for the expression of citizen voice. Through the new channels of interaction knowledge can be shared, interest groups can form, quickly and easily. A collective voice can make a louder noise. The citizen voice wants to be heard, but the old hierarchy, focussed as it is on outbound messages and looking in on itself is incapable of listening. The result is Citizen Shock, a growing recognition that the world is not how it is meant to be, a sense of shouting in the wilderness or raging against the storm. There is a disconnect, but it is not of the citizen’s making.

An organisation that has the potential to transform is less hierarchical, it has empowered individuals and groups at every level, it embraces change and it uses continuous, targeted, two way communication; does this sound familiar? The potential of social media amongst citizens is that it creates groups of shared interest, shared knowledge and a common voice that holds the potential to be innovative. Information flows across the loose organisation and ownership is shared amongst the crowd. Groups look outwards, seeking to draw in membership, or to gain new knowledge and insight. Learning organisations hold social capital and social capital supports innovation.

Hindman’s “The Myth of Digital Democracy” and Flichy’s “Is The Internet An Instrument Of Democracy?” (la vie des idees.fr )make for depressing reading. I believe that it is government that has to change, at all levels. It’s not enough to have a presence on “Twitter” or a “Facebook” page when all that is doing is giving an impression of dialogue when in fact it’s a cynical marketing ploy and the messages are still outbound. It’s not the people who need to re-connect, its government, and until it realises that it cannot re-connect and stay the same the people’s voice will be ignored.

The good news is that shock doesn’t last forever.

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Social Capital and Innovation

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

 snrdiagram

 

I like this diagram – I like diagrams generally when they tell a story, I like the collaborative generation of diagrams as a means of coming to a shared understanding of something complex. This particular diagram appeared in a Communities and Local Government piece on Sub-National Review; something that won’t interest a lot of people but the fall out of which will, in the end, affect us all – but “hey ho” to that, back to the diagram.
The reason I like it is not that it particularly describes my beliefs or thoughts or my approaches. It’s because it describes an approach which was meant to bring together approaches to economic development by recognising the contribution of everybody from the Regional Development Agency to the Third Sector and the Communities that they serve. Instead it had the unintentional side effect of creating an apartheid approach which marginalised community based approaches and social outcomes because it was seen as a twin track approach with the economic drivers at the top and the social drivers at the bottom.

I’ve dug this out because of all of the interest in Social Capital and Digital Inclusion recently and a comment I made on David Wilcox’s Blog piece about a NESTA event called Re-boot.

“Reading through blog posts and looking at this proposed event I am conscious that people move easily between social and economic as if they were the same thing. I don’t think that they are. They’re linked and have dependencies but they’re not the same so I can only appeal to people to be clear about what they mean. “

Thinking about this led me to dig out a think piece by John Field who was, at the time (2006), Deputy Principal of the University of Stirling, called “Social Networks, Innovation and Learning: Can Policies for Social Capital Promote both Economic Dynamism and Social Justice?” . I won’t go into the obscure route I came by this or why I read it but it does attempt to look at where innovation arises from social capital which in turn arises from learning communities and how this might be different, or similar, to innovation in a knowledge driven economy. There’s a copy here:  johnfieldfebruary2006 FYI but I’m not recommending it as a good alternative to the TV.

 

I also revisited Eric Von Hippel’s piece “Democratizing Innovation”. This was written in 2005 but still holds true today. Hippel attempts to look not only at how collaborative approaches lead to better innovation but also how innovation arising from social capital can cross over into the commercial world – a more holistic view of a knowledge society. There is a very good 15 minute video where he goes through this on the NESTA site:

Much of this works well with the things that Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater are saying now. The power of collaboration and the role of digital tools in making it faster and easier are making us re-visit the role of social capital building and the benefits to be derived from that. Leadbeater’s Core, Contribute, Connect, Communicate and Collaborate has echoes from Hippel’s Lead Users and Innovative Communities.

So what are the emerging themes? Well it’s very hard to do! Really! The bridging capital as well as the bonding capital that Will Davies refers to in his RSA piece is important. Social Capital has the power to isolate and to reinforce perceptions in a negative way just as easily as it can empower. Early writers on Social Capital saw it as a way of reinforcing social position and maintaining the hierarchy not as a way of engaging and including. It needs an appreciation of and a considered approach to risk, its outcomes are unpredictable, it can promote inequality, it can stifle innovation by re-enforcing expectations and its concepts and language are not well defined, as hopefully, this piece shows. What this means is that approaches by those people who know who they are working with are going to be best. Working with and not to, bottom up, not top down.

For me the big theme is to be holistic. Let’s not fall into the trap, intentionally or otherwise, of separate tracks of development, one for the economy and one for social capital. This is a knowledge society, not just a knowledge economy.

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Going Euro

Wednesday, August 19th, 2009

Did you get very wet this weekend? I stayed in and did stuff, however, it was an opportunity to catch up with this and that. I took time out to go Euro and spent some time on the ePractice site. The view of eInclusion is very different 20 miles over the channel and beyond. I’m not sure what inspired me – probably the lack of articles about social capital and communities and real people – so I penned a few words, borrowing from things I’d already done and posted it.

For the record it got 75 reads, one vote and 3/5 – but no comments.

Then, to my surprise it came back to haunt me in my RSS feeds as an article in e-Gov Monitor. So, I thought I would share for the record. You can read the actual article or you can read it below, for what it’s worth. As a point of interest I think I might add in some other Euro bits that I’ve come accross to see what people think.

Social Capital and Innovation in Public Service Delivery
By Paul Nash
Published Monday, 8 June, 2009 – 22:02
________________________________________
Some people would say I’m sure, that ideas about Social Capital have never gone away. Personally, I think that Social Capital has been unfashionable for a while now in the face of big projects and big initiatives at a national level.

So what has changed? Well, I think it’s because Empowerment is on the agenda. There is a desire to see re-engagement of communities in the political process and in decision making at the local level. E-inclusion has a role to play in that.

There will, no doubt, be a cynical few who point out that all you need to do is to have a political scandal at the highest level to get people engaged –well perhaps that’s right – but what we need is a sustained engagement. We all know that public services are in for hard times over the coming years and as a consequence local communities will have to take an increasing responsibility for the services that they receive. Communities will need to decide what is important, what they will pay for and what they can deliver for themselves and if the whole community is to be involved in decision making then they must feel empowered to do that. That will involve a considerable investment in Social Capital building at the local level.

There is a focus on how ICTs can deliver public services to create efficiencies and to benefit society. There is a case for thinking about the design of services to meet the needs of individuals. We have reached the point where we have to face up to the “too-hard-to-do” pile and to think about the 29% of citizens who are disengaged and are also e-excluded, these are sometimes our biggest consumers of public services, people whose lives are most chaotic and are therefore, potentially, our greatest beneficiaries. Given the need for whole communities to be involved in the process of decisions about public services in the locality the 29% are also the people who potentially will be disempowered. There is a holy trinity of service design which involves the public sector, the third sector and empowered communities and there is a role for ICTs and e-inclusion in bringing the trinity together and building Social Capital.

Within a community there are individuals who are accepted as being “in the know” either because of their social standing or because of some function they perform either as an employee or as a volunteer. The person(s) at the centre function as brokers in a social network by providing the connections between the client, the service provider and the location for a service transaction to take place. These are Clay Shirky’s “connectors”.

What we’re looking to do is to support the development of appropriate social capital. I say appropriate because social capital can, in the wrong hands, simply reinforce the status quo, and make people happy with their lot to the benefit of the hierarchy. This is the bridging capital between communities and between sections of a community and the linking capital that brings individuals together in support of each other. Thinking about this led me to dig out a think piece by John Field who was, at the time (2006), Deputy Principal of the University of Stirling, called “Social Networks, Innovation and Learning: Can Policies for Social Capital Promote both Economic Dynamism and Social Justice?” It attempts to look at where innovation arises from social capital which in turn arises from learning communities and how this might be different, or similar, to innovation in a knowledge driven economy. This is the social capital of Clay Shirky’s “Here Comes Everybody” where the power of the group can achieve things that the single person cannot and the “We Think” of Charles Leadbeater where innovation arises from participation of users in the development process – small pebbles looking outwards. I’ve recently revisited Eric Von Hippel’s piece “Democratizing Innovation”. This was written in 2005 but still holds true today. Hippel attempts to look not only at how collaborative approaches lead to better innovation but also how innovation arising from social capital can cross over into the commercial world – a more holistic view of a knowledge society. There is a very good 15 minute video where he goes through this on the Nesta site.

The Vienna Study on “Inclusive Innovation for Growth and Cohesion: Modelling and demonstrating the impact of eInclusion” also reflects on the importance of innovation through what it calls The I2 paradigm “Inclusive technological Innovation and Innovative Inclusive policies…” and puts this into the wider context of “broad based growth”

“the idea that ‘broad based growth’ is the only way to real and solid prosperity is now much more widely accepted. The expression ‘broad-based growth’ resonates in many of the writings and speeches of new US President Barack Obama, where it is often associated also to the need of increasing digital inclusion in society. Including more individuals is no longer exclusively seen as a moral imperative, a remedial policy, or a matter of showing the ‘charitable face’ of market economies, rather it is pragmatically recognised as being an economic opportunity tightly connected to sustainable and durable economic growth”

There is, then, within the realms of broad based growth, a strong link between social capital and innovation. This arises from the empowerment of individuals within communities by providing them with the tools not only for accessing information and for accessing services but also for self expression, for contributing to a community voice and building social capital.

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