Posts Tagged ‘Social Capital’

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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Posted in Knowledge Society, Public Services, Social Capital | 2 Comments »

Democracy is Communal

Tuesday, 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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Posted in Social Capital | 2 Comments »

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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Posted in August 2009 | 1 Comment »

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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Posted in June 2009 | No Comments »