Print your own WikiHouse – the new Community Architecture

June 11, 2013 – 3:47 pm

Following my post about the relaunch of the 1987 book on Community Architecture, Charles Knevitt sent me a link to an excellent TED talk spotted by his co-author Nick Wates. There Alastair Parvin presents a simple but provocative idea …

… what if, instead of architects creating buildings for those who can afford to commission them, regular citizens could design and build their own houses? The concept is at the heart of WikiHouse, an open source construction kit that means just about anyone can build a house, anywhere.

“As a society we’ve never needed design thinking more,” says Alastair Parvin, but most people — particularly those in cities of growing density and poverty — can’t afford it. Parvin, who was trained in architecture but chooses to make a career looking for ideas beyond its conventional framework, wants to change that.

He is one of a team behind WikiHouse, an open-source construction set that allows anyone to freely share model files for structures, which can then be downloaded, “printed” via CNC cutting machine and easily assembled. Parvin calls WikiHouse a very early experiment, the seed of what he sees as design’s great project in the 21st century: the democratization of production.

WikiHouse project in New Zealand by Spacecraft

So – same underlying ethos as the original Community Architecture, but now technology enabled with the potential for a growing Wikipedia for design. I asked Charles what he thought, and he wrote back:

The possibilities today for extending the lessons of Community Architecture have been greatly enhanced by two things: radical new approaches which enable local communities to build for themselves; and new media, such as the Internet, which didn’t exist when our book was originally published in 1987.

As far as new approaches are concerned, Alastair Parvin’s counter-intuitive ideas have a direct and immediate relevance to those without access to professional advice, and offer democratic societies a right to build. The design team is “everyone”, the means of production is “everywhere”. Barn-raising by local communities is a precedent. But now we have “open-source” solutions, leading the way to what he calls a third industrial revolution.

Who knows, the need has never been greater. The year our book was published the world population reached 5-billion. Today it is fast approaching 7.1-billion. That’s an additional 2-billion mouths to feed – and people to house. And the fastest-growing cities are self-made cities – the favelas, kampongs and barriadas.

More here from Alastair, where he makes clear it is early days and so far only prototypes are under development in different locations around the world.

Alastair is part of 00:/, where co-founder Indy Johar and colleagues move lots more great ideas into practice. Other projects here, and join in with WikiHouse here.

 

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A lesson in co-design: why the walk to the river beats a trip to the well

June 9, 2013 – 2:20 pm

The importance of doing things with people, rather to them or for them, has cropped up a few times in my recent posts … whether designing technology for a better later life,  re-inventing a knowledge hub, or re-learning the lessons of community architecture.

The general point is that users, customers, residents probably best know what they want – and even if they don’t at the start, then testing of developing your offering will provide insights you may not arrive at yourself.

However, what’s often needed to get across the idea of co-design or co-production is a really good story, and I’ve just found an excellent one from the Colalife team in Zambia – or rather from Claire Ward, the film-maker who has produce the ColaLife documentary, The Cola Road.

The story, clipped from the film, is about an international nonprofit organisation with good intentions, mothers who walk a long way from the village to get water, a well … and why obvious solutions may miss the point if you don’t ask.

Simon Berry says in introducing the film clip:

Claire Ward followed us in August 2012 as we prepared for the current trial. While she was here in Zambia she was joined by two colleagues: Guy Godfree and Tracy Levy.

The voice on the clip is Albert Saka from Keepers Zambia Foundation. Albert manages the community-based marketing in remote rural communities of Kalomo and Katete.

I do recommend reading about the Colalife story here, because it provide bigger lessons about developing solutions with people. It’s about how Simon and Jane Berry had the apparently simple idea of using the sophisticated distribution system of Coca Cola to deliver medicines to mothers and their children in remote villages. The story shows many time over how simple ideas may well be complicated to implement, and the best way to deal with the complexity is to work with the people who have the many parts of the solution.

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Dropping into conversations about Community Architecture, 25 years on

June 7, 2013 – 4:52 pm

These days the principle of helping residents create the neighbourhoods they want is official policy – supported by Government-funded programmes like Communities First, the Lottery-funded Big Local and of course through the idea of Big Society, relaunched yet again yesterday by David Cameron.

Radical inspiration might be traced back to the Diggers and Levellers of the 17th century, and the plotlanders of the last century, but there’s a case to be made for saying that this type of initiative became mainstream through the promotion of the idea of community architecture in the 1980s.

Yesterday evening provide a great opportunity catch up with the pioneers, when Routledge relaunched the 1987 book Community Architecture by Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt.

Not only were Nick and Charles there, but also Dr Rod Hackney, who can claim parenthood of the movement through his work dating back to the early 1970s. By 1987 Rod had become President of the RIBA, and so was well-placed to provide official support, along with Lord Scarman, whose report after the early 1980s riots concluded it was essential that “people are encouraged to secure a stake in, feel a pride in, and have a sense of responsibility for their own area”. He wrote a foreword, and according to biographer Anthony Holden, the book also became a Bible for Prince Charles in developing his views on architecture.

We gathered for drinks in the RIBA bookshop, and some brief speeches, including one from Rob Cowan, who has been writing, designing and training in the field since the 1970s.  He gave a year by year account of how Governments have been appropriating community architecture and planning ideas, with more or less deference to the original ethos. It was also a pleasure to chat with Professor Michael Hebbert about the work he is doing on London governance, 50 years on from the Act to create the Greater London Council. I had a few anecdotes to share from my time reporting for the London Evening Standard in the 1970s.

Michael and Rob worked together on Vision for London, after the abolition of the GLC by Margaret Thatcher in 1986.

Rather than try for some formal interviews I just added a microphone, with permission, to the conversations. Rod Hackney is still busy, and his colleague Tia Kansara in Kansara Hackney provided an update on their international work on sustainable community architecture.

Charles Knevitt and Nick Wates

listen to ‘Re-launching Community Arcitecture’ on Audioboo

Professor Michael Hebbert and Rob Cowan

listen to ‘Recalling Vision for London’ on Audioboo

Rod Hackney and Tia Kansara

listen to ‘Rod Hackney and Tia Kansara’ on Audioboo

I think it is splendid that Routledge have republished Community Architecture. At £70 this edition is mainly aimed at libraries, but there will be an eBook at £24.95, and you can buy a PDF from Nick’s site. Do also take a look at Nick’s compendium of advice at Community Planning.

Back in the 1980s I was working on Groundwork Trusts – recalled in this publication – and on Development Trusts. A book for the Department of the Environment, Creating Development Trust, written with my then colleague Diane Warburton and others, sits on my shelf.  I don’t know whether HMSO could agree to any re-publication, but the essence of it was expanded into a 1998 Guide to development trusts and partnerships.

There are now hundreds of trusts around the country, supported by Locality, which is the successor to the Development Trusts Association.

I mention development trusts because Nick also started the Hastings Trust, where he lives. Just as I was leaving last night Nick said he’s now involved, as a trustee, in winding it up. There was a lot of creativity in urban planning and regeneration in the 1980s … but while the ideas may persist and grow, organisations are not forever.

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As the Knowledge Hub faces closure, might a creative Twitter mob help with re-invention?

June 6, 2013 – 12:31 pm

One of the main ways in which people in local government can share “what works” in these hard times of cuts and service reorganisation is likely to close – as I have written here. Or it may be that the Knowledge Hub may survive but without much staffing to facilitate conversations. Or it may be outsourced from current managers, the Local Government Association. Or there may be some other solutions in the wings.

Unfortunately there’s no framework to explore what might be possible – and that is making a creative solution really difficult, not just for local government, but anyone interested in sharing innovation at local level.

Maybe we need the equivalent of the Facebook and Twitter-based clean-up organising that followed riots in 2011 – but this time before the event. A sort of creative Twitter mob. More below on that … first the situation as I understand it.

What’s certain is that there is no structured consultation with the 150,000 or so people registered in the Knowledge Hub system, which seems rather strange when the practice of “consulting the residents” is fairly well established in local councils if big changes are in prospect.

Residents’ views may not always make much difference, but there is general recognition that their input can lead to better solutions, and at least avoid outright protest. The more innovative councils aim to co-design or even co-produce services with citizen and other organisations to share knowledge, a sense of ownership, and maybe contributions in kind. I know that things have moved on a lot since I wrote a Guide to Effective Participation back in 1994. For example, Lambeth is becoming the country’s first cooperative council.

That means in future the council will do things with local people instead of doing things to them. We believe that when you give residents more power, together with appropriate support, services from housing to street cleaning to care for the elderly will improve and our community will become stronger.

But what about the online world of local government? Is it doing with … or still doing to?

Yesterday I attended a meeting** of people formerly involved, like me, in the advisory group set up a few years back when the Hub was being designed as a successor to the successful Communities of Practice platform. I wrote then: Local Government knowledge hub – much interesting than it sounds. There were high hopes in 2009 that it would integrate with other social media, and also enable conversations with wider publics. In the event the vision and functionality were severely curtailed by LGA, when they took over the Hub, and the advisory group abandoned.

While we all did our best yesterday to come up with some helpful insights into how Knowledge Hub might be improved, repositioned, repurposed etc it was difficult without basic information on usage, costs and options under consideration.

At which point it occurred to me that this could be a great chance to turn a crisis into an opportunity.

One of the catalysts to organising in any locality is a threat or other challenge to life as usual: it may be redevelopment, closure of services, community safety. As the clean-ups after the riots a couple of years ago showed it is possible to do that through social media – and then turn the experience into a new set of tools for organising. More here on the work of Dan Thompson and others on the innovative We Will Gather.

So the threatened closure of the Knowledge Hub could provide a great opportunity to draw on the collective expertise of users – and others – to think not just about how to tweak the platform and business plan, but what place all-purpose “platforms” have in knowledge sharing when there are so many other networking opportunities. See earlier reference to social ecologies and links below to posts on the topic from Steve Dale, original lead designer of the Communities of Practice and Knowledge Hub.

As discussion yesterday showed, there is a need for closed, secure spaces for sharing some knowledge and data, and there is also a need for the online management of spaces, as provided by Hub staff.

However, the online field is moving incredibly fast, and it may be that we need to put more emphasis on mini-Hubs and connecting different Hubs and networks. It doesn’t make sense to have a local government-only space nationally when locally the reality is lots of different partnerships and networks across sectors, and with citizens, on the lines Lambeth and others are developing.

In practice what has happened with the Knowledge Hub is that there was a press leak about closure, followed by an invitation to send an email about what you think. There was then some off-site blogging and discussion on Twitter, a piece in the Guardian, and Hub staff stepped in to set up an on-site group for discussing the future. They helpfully summarised discussions so far, and created space for ideas.

While welcome – and an excellent demonstration of the importance of facilitators – there are two problems. First, it is clear that the formal consultation is about staff redundancies, and discussion is a feed into that, not an independent exercise. Secondly, there has been no invitation to Hub users to participate … and it isn’t possible on-site to instigate that if you are not a manager. There are currently only 89 members of the group.

If we turn to that classic model for citizen participation, Sherry Arnstein’s Ladder of Participation, the LGA stance looks rather like Placation. That’s when the Consultation gets a bit grumpy, but you don’t want to move up to Partnership. Offer the opportunity to contribute, without any clarity about the context or whether your views will make any difference.

The point here is not that any party is behaving badly. I’m sure that there all sorts of protocols dictating how LGA management and staff should operate, and they are responsible to the politicians who govern LGA. Everyone is following established procedures – and so I guess any change is ultimately a political decision about where cuts should be made, and in what way. I have great respect for those faced with such tough choices – but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t suggest some other ways of doing things, while reducing costs.

The likely result of the current approach is that the Knowledge Hub will just close, or drift into some further iteration that will be less satisfactory than the current setup.

If organising the immediate riot clean-ups had to go through council committees it would have taken weeks. Of course, the substantial work that followed did require systematic organising … but citizens were also able to work with public agencies.

OK, clean-ups are a rather limited analogy, but they did show what’s possible with social media … and how that can subsequently be refined with development of new light-weight apps. There are score of other examples of innovative development by people like Futuregov.

As a freelance social reporter it is much easier for me to throw in a few provocations than it is for local government employees (though all credit to those who are on Twitter #khub or blogging as well as contributing to the on-site forum).

In that provocative spirit, I’m tempted to suggest that the most creative route for discussions might not be “How can we save the Knowledge Hub” but “How can we do without the Knowledge Hub” inspired by self-organising initiatives like We Will Gather.

If Knowledge Hub doesn’t close this time, it may well do so in future.  As Steve Dale, Harold Jarche and others argue, in future digital literacy will involved the ability to seek, sense and share content across many spaces. We have to become network literate, and not rely too much on others to do that for us.

Alternatively, perhaps the politicians who control LGA will give staff there more opportunity to follow the “cooperative council” model and involve the resident users of Knowledge Hub, and others.

As Carl Haggerty, writing as a local government officer, says in #KHub’s potential closure an analogy for #Localgov, in these tough times it is appropriate to review continuing operation of services. He uses another analogy for innovative change – Futuregov work on Casserole Club.

After all as a local government community we will all be questioning what on the face of it will be sensible solutions and sensible services but when budgets are being cut your only choice is to completely rethink how the same outcomes can be met.

So with that in mind, I actually think the LGA’s decision to question the continuation of the Knowledge as a centrally funded platform is a sensible one and actually shows real leadership when in the face of everyone else it may not appear a good decision.

I would like to think that more of these types of decisions can start to be made…after all as an analogy this is the kind of thing that FutureGov’s casserole project is counting on and rightly so…we need to question and rethink how meals of wheels are provided and if you maintain the same existing platform it becomes financially challenging so a different model needs to be engaged and this might not be how people originally thought the service should be provided but the same outcomes for a large majority of people would be unaffected.

The one issue I do have with the LGA’s approach with this is that in order to close down the Knowledge Hub, they need to play an active part in the decommissioning of it and allowing something else to emerge in its place so that the sector as a whole doesn’t suffer.

I hope what I’ve written here is see as a constructive contribution. It is a sensitive situation with the jobs of people at stake who everyone applauds for their work on the Hub. However, as Carl says, hard times may require a change of approach.

If you keep on doing the same old things in the same old ways you get the same old results. Can we change creatively without a riot? What’s the constructive online equivalent?

I wonder what would happen if only a few hundred Hub users took a #khub campaign forward on Twitter and blogs – since they can’t engage others widely in the Hub. That creative and well-intentioned Twitter mob could both drive discussion into the Future of Knowledge Hub group, and also start to explore how to operate without the Hub in its present form, but with a wider range of interests. That might require a pop up Community of Practice on the lines Dave Briggs mentioned in a comment, since there are restrictions on who can join the Knowledge Hub,

Just off to see if We Will Gather might be a way to get started …

** I should add that these are my own ideas, and while sparked by excellent discussion yesterday, are in no way a summary of our considerations.

Update: as one Knowledge Hub user points out in response to my re-post of this over there, he’s not allowed to use Twitter at work. So we have Twitter users who might like to share with local government people but can’t use Knowledge Hub, and vice-versa. That confirms my belief we need to look at the why and who … to achieve what … before tweaking the how.

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Much discussion about networking local government – now how about the rest of civil society?

June 1, 2013 – 10:05 pm

The story about closure of the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub – which I covered here – has gathered momentum over the past week, with various behind-the-scenes moves to keep it going or develop an alternative, and a gathering of some members of the former advisory group planned this week.

There has been extensive tweeting and blogging, and the Knowledge Hub team of online managers and facilitators have again shown the value of their role by summarising discussion so far on the value of the hub, how it makes a difference, the risks of closing, and importance for local government of enabling collaboration online. Here’s their gathering up of  ideas for the future action.

Suggestions for future action/use

  • Increase the market base for Knowledge Hub and “sell” it to other parts of the Public Sector: Health, Police / Criminal Justice, Civil Service, LEPs etc.
  • Reduce the cost by doing it more cheaply either by expecting the maintenance etc to be done more productively and / or reduce some of the functionality.  What are the most used parts?
  • Would there be some way of paying a subscription to try to keep it going or would we simply not be able to afford it?
  • I’m currently gauging the interest in having a F2F meeting with the original KHub Advisory Group in order to solicit ideas that can be consolidated into a more formal response.
  • Go back to CoP, alternative funding (e.g. Local Authorities contribute, advertising), alternative hosting/support (e.g. Google)…..
  • I would have thought that to let the Hub run without technical development would be an acceptable compromise
  • Look at the whole range of options both in terms of funding and alternative platforms and then get users to vote (not sure, can we use the ‘Ideas’ section for this?)

A week ago I think the Hub team were rather overtaken by events when news of the closure leaked, and initially there was no provision on site for discussion – hence the tweets and off-site blogging. There is now a discussion group on the hub about it’s future. I’ve captured some of last week’s Twitter discussion in a Storify here.

In writing about the Knowledge Hub closure I revisited the challenge of networking civil society … that is, how to help voluntary and community organisations, and volunteers, who are often working closely with local government, to share their experience and learn from each other.

The government’s Big Society policies rather depended on this to be effective, but in the event spending cuts led to the reduction rather than expansion of networking support. We don’t hear hear much of BS except as awards, and helpful though those are for groups they aren’t a substitute.

The Knowledge Hub is mainly limited to local government. If the aim locally is more cross-sector collaboration, shouldn’t this be reflected nationally?

I’m not necessarily suggesting that we need one big all-purpose  networking platform. In my earlier piece I also picked up on Steve Dale’s suggestions of a different sort of social ecology architecture that blends specialist platforms with Twitter, Google Plus and other networks. Steve is the original designer of the Knowledge Hub, and as he explains here and here that sort of integration was envisaged in the Hub before elements were cut by LGA.

Anyway, we are where we are: with everyone agreeing that knowledge sharing and collaboration is very important particularly in hard times, but government local or national failing to support the infrastructure needed to achieve that … or even facilitate a sensible discussion on what’s needed. Who might do that?

Last time I wrote:

Meanwhile I have been exploring alternatives to the knowledge hub model in recent posts, prompted by ideas for a sort of civic Facebook or similar system developed by the new Lobbi initiative. The original vision there has been for a system to connect politicians, officials and citizens to tackle local issues and revive local politics. I love the enthusiasm behind the idea … but if a big outfit like LGA can’t make a knowledge hub work with fairly digitally savvy professional users, with shared culture and practises, is it realistic to think it possible to do something big with a far more diverse set of users?

In any case, whether or not sustainable knowledge hubs can be maintained, they won’t do everything, and anyone aiming to use digital technology for social good will need a set of personal literacies and tools to do that: hence my exploration of Creating a whole kit (and caboodle) for community enablers and agents of change and What’s digital life like for a community enabler?

I did write in an earlier post that I thought whatever challenges Lobbi faced in developing a platform, it could have an important role in acting as a convenor and catalyst for a wider movement for social technology for social impact, linking politics and local social action. Maybe it’s time for a get-together around the new architectures, roles and skills needed to meet The Challenge of Networking Civil Society, as I wrote a year back. It’s not getting easier.

Unfortunately I can’t follow up with a report that Lobbi is likely to step in here. The Linkedin group for a Lobbi Squad of supporters is very quiet, and although I attended an advisory group a couple of weeks ago I don’t know whether our suggestions are being taken up. As I reported after that meeting, there was more support for enabling change agents than building a sort of civic Facebook … but a Lobbi platform may still be in favour. I’ll let you know if I hear more.

You’ll see from a second Storify that I created on Networking Civil Society revisited that quite a few people active and well connected in the field joined in discussion on Twitter … among them Dave Briggs, Shirley Ayres, John Popham, Catherine Howe, Cormac Russell and also Karl Wilding who I should congratulate on his appointment as NCVO director of public policy.

Karl and Megan Griffith Grey brought a group of us together in the early days of social media for some very creative discussions leading to a number of useful publications. I wonder if NCVO could offer a room for some more structured discussion on today’s challenges – perhaps with Community Development Foundation? That would help reflect the interests both large and smaller organisations, as well as the enthusiasm of the free agents and connectors.

Storifies of related tweets

Here previously

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Ten pillars of wisdom: a manifesto for a better later life

May 30, 2013 – 3:43 pm

There’s lots of research, programmes and even innovation funding to address the challenges of later life, as our team of socialreporters detailed in a recent exploration for Nominet Trust. However, most of this is about doing things FOR older people. What would it be like to switch the professional emphasis towards doing things WITH older people?

I spent yesterday in Bristol at the SW Seniors Assembly getting some ideas, and I’m quite sure I’ll pick up more from a NESTA event with Vickie Cammack this evening. I’m nearby and so can attend, but it is also being live streamed from 6pm.

Meanwhile I can’t resist sharing some thoughts I developed from the assembly discussions, and then bounced off Tony Watts, who is chair of the SW forum on ageing, and Bryan Manning, visiting professor of compunetics at the University of Westminster. We turned my 10 provocations into a draft manifesto, and Tony suggested Ten pillars of wisdom, which I like, since it reflects a lot of the discussion around the wisdom held by older people, but perhaps not sufficiently valued by the “ageing industry”.  Point 4. The manifesto reflects some of the 10 propositions generated by the Nominet Trust work, but this time without so much of an emphasis on technology.

Ten pillars of wisdom: a manifesto for a better later life

  1. Enable older people to do as much as possible for themselves. We can’t afford to do otherwise.
  2. De-professionalise the communication of ideas, options and policies around ageing so that everyone can engage in the conversation.
  3. Apply good design to simplify technology that will benefit everyone. Codesign with users.
  4. Respect and use the wisdom of older people. They are the only people who know what it is like to be old.
  5. Develop communities and networks with older people for influence and learning.
  6. Recognise that ageing affects people differently, and that only by understanding the diversity of barriers faced can we develop the choices needed to enable people to live the lives they want.
  7. Switch the digital inclusion framework from “how do we get more people online” to “how do we encourage and enable people to use whatever technology meets their needs and preferences”.
  8. Question whether it is really useful to teach older people how to use traditional computers. Tablets, smartphones or smart TVs may be easier and offer what’s needed.
  9. Switch funding from research and “good practice” about ageing into supporting action led by older people, and sharing knowledge through social learning.
  10. Recognise that a connected society is a healthier and more harmonious society, and that ageing is a challenge suffered individually, but best addressed socially.

Here’s an interview with Tony and Bryan.  It is also available on Audioboo here with a couple more from the assembly.

What do you think of the manifesto? I’ll be developing a more rigorous framework with Tony, Bryan and others, and also developing ideas on how to put some of this into practice, building on the work we did for Nominet Trust on technology in later life. Now off to NESTA.

Update: There’s a very relevant new item on NESTA’s excellent list of projects – the Living map of ageing innovators: it is the Wisdom Bank which “provides a platform for people approaching retirement to share their skills and insights with those that need their advice”

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Re-visiting the challenge of networking civil society as Khub closes

May 25, 2013 – 1:07 pm

News that the Local Government Association is closing its Knowledge Hub as part of a £2 million savings plan provides a reminder of how difficult it is to maintain big one-stop-shop knowledge-sharing systems. And smaller ones too.

Dave Briggs has launched a rescue bid, and I’m sure Dave has the skills and helpers to develop a lighter version if he can persuade the LGA (and users) to collaborate in a handover, and can develop a new business model. There’s the rub.

It may be the Knowledge Hub, with 18,500 users (correction – apparently 150,000 registered but not clear how many active) could have continued if LGA hadn’t faced a big cut in support from Government, but I suspect there is more to it than that. Knowledge hubs take a lot of work not just to manage the technical system, but also to continue to recruit users and facilitate interactions. I know that Michael Norton and others at khub have been excellent in doing that, and have attracted many compliments amidst the news of closure. But it is a skilled business, and it costs. You can recruit some volunteers for different groups, but they need support too.

Steve Dale, who designed the Communities of Practice predecessor to Khub, and then conceived the new design, has recently been writing about Social Ecologies as a a different sort of architecture to tackle “the key challenges and opportunities for anyone who wants to survive and thrive in this emergent social ecosystem”:

  • Social media is generating enormous amounts of unorganised content: how to make sense of that.
  • Social networks enable a wider range of connections: how to find people and develop relationships.
  • New forms of collaboration are made possible by social media and networks: how to organise and manage.
  • There are a bewildering variety of methods and tools: how to choose and learn to use.
  • The new ways of making sense, connecting, collaborating, and using technology throw up the need for new skills: what are the new roles and the new skills?
  • The emphasis on open access and sharing changes where value may reside: so what are the new business models?
  • Social capital is becoming increasingly important in establishing trust and credibility in the virtual world: how do we increase or measure our social capital?

Steve and I have discussed this a lot, and I drew on that for a paper with Nick Wilding last year for the Carnegie UK Trust, about the future for rural networking. Part of the challenge was how to develop new business models for smaller Communities of Practice, like the Ning-based Fiery Spirits system that had been supported by the Trust. Because of a change of emphasis in their work, they were looking for a new home for the system.

My conclusion was fairly blunt: it is difficult to see how that sort of system can be maintained independently without a lot of funding, or volunteer effort. I know the latter is difficult to maintain from my own experience with similar systems. The alternative, I suggested, is that it can be part of a bigger system of online networking associated with an organisation, if they are going down the route of becoming a Networked Nonprofit on the lines described so well by Beth Kanter and her co-authors.

The Plunkett Foundation has now taken on Fiery Spirits and I hope they are able to integrate it with their other ambitious developments. That would be a good demonstration of migration from old to a new organisation-based model.

I don’t know what model Dave in mind, but do know of his past work in online learning, where people are prepared to pay fees, so perhaps there’s an option for blending free and paid for.

I’m interested in looking at things from the other end – that of helping people become their own knowledge hubs within the wider knowledge ecologies Steve Dale explores in an excellent second post on the topic. As well as developing personal digital literacies, in the social ecology we’ll need digital curators to help make sense and join up conversations and people: what I’m calling social reporting. Digital curators are working “in the wild” rather than as online community managers on knowledge hubs, which of course raises another business model challenge. How do we earn a living? And how do the curators cooperate within a field to make things as easy as possible for others? That’s for another post.

Meanwhile I have been exploring alternatives to the knowledge hub model in recent posts, prompted by ideas for a sort of civic Facebook or similar system developed by the new Lobbi initiative. The original vision there has been for a system to connect politicians, officials and citizens to tackle local issues and revive local politics. I love the enthusiasm behind the idea … but if a big outfit like LGA can’t make a knowledge hub work with fairly digitally savvy professional users, with shared culture and practises, is it realistic to think it possible to do something big with a far more diverse set of users?

In any case, whether or not sustainable knowledge hubs can be maintained, they won’t do everything, and anyone aiming to use digital technology for social good will need a set of personal literacies and tools to do that: hence my exploration of Creating a whole kit (and caboodle) for community enablers and agents of change and What’s digital life like for a community enabler?

I did write in an earlier post that I thought whatever challenges Lobbi faced in developing a platform, it could have an important role in acting as a convenor and catalyst for a wider movement for social technology for social impact, linking politics and local social action. Maybe it’s time for a get-together around the new architectures, roles and skills needed to meet The Challenge of Networking Civil Society, as I wrote a year back. It’s not getting easier.

Update: I’ve just come across a post by Steve Dale, initially the lead consultant and architect on knowledge hub, setting out what it was meant to be. It looks a if cut-backs during development removed integration with other social media, and led to poor user experience.

Update 2 Steve Dale provides more background and a vision of what a user-controlled knowledge hub might be like here

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What’s digital life like for a community enabler?

May 23, 2013 – 10:59 am

Following my rather theoretic post about developing a how-do kit and networks for community enablers I’ve had a couple of exchanges that fill out the reality. Here’s an amalgamation of those, combined with my experience and workshop discussions.

The voluntary sector community enabler’s story

I’m a development manager in a voluntary organisation that supports local groups, so I work with colleagues and volunteers on training, providing information, helping with fundraising, dealing with the council and programmes funded by Big Lottery and other agencies. Life is too many meetings, too many calls, too many emails, too much paperwork.  I enjoy it, but would love to find ways of using technology better to be more effective.

We need to be on top of the latest information nationally and locally, and already use sites like KnowHow NonProfit, KnowledgeHub, Locality, Getlegal, Directory of Social Change for advice. Then there’s Zurich’s Community Starter site for groups planning action, and Community HowTo for digital tools.

Despite all that it is really difficult to put together help for people that I support – and manage my own personal information. I’ve got an iPhone but know I only use a fractional of what’s possible, and on my computer I’ve ended up with collections of bookmarks, lots of pdfs in different folders, spreadsheets storing contacts. I know I should transfer to our website and share with others, but there’s never the time.

Communications online is a mess. One large project is using Basecamp, some groups have Facebook pages, and Twitter is OK for quick messages, but not for groups. Mostly we end up with lots of cc emails.

I’m interested to see what Urban Forum found in their survey of social media use, and might try Yammer when I have a moment … but it’s no good if others won’t use it.

As well as managing our own communications we have to try and help some local groups who have been told that they must set up blogs to report how they are using funding under one of the big national programmes. That’s pretty challenging for volunteers who may be excellent at face-to-face relationships and newsletters, but just don’t have skills or confidence to do much online beyond email and standard websites. A few did manage to use the simple Posterous site, but that was bought out by Twitter and closed and they had the nightmare of trying to transfer elsewhere.

It’s tempting to think that some sort of new platform for everything might help … wasn’t Your Square Mile aiming to do that as part of the original Big Society plan? The problem is getting people to move from the familiar, particularly if their friends aren’t there and they are doubtful whether it will be maintained.

I would love to see someone trying to develop useful ways to help people like me and the groups I support – and would do what I can to help.

But it can’t be one-size-fits-all, and it shouldn’t duplicate what’s happening already. We need better connecting of existing resources, and ways in which people can pick and mix the simplest set of tools they need, with some confidence that they will continue to be available. Of course it’s not just about the tools, it’s about developing digital literacy as well as all the other literacies we need in this sort of role.

Where can I find other people like me interested in learning together?

Does this ring true? As I wrote yesterday, enablers might be councillors, community organisers, people running local groups, citizens developing a campaign and/or generally working to revive local democracy. Do please drop a comment, or email me and I’ll fictionalise if you prefer. Then we can run a workshop like this one.

I have embedded links to most of the references above, but they aren’t showing up too well. I hope to fix that shortly.

Thanks to the enablers who shared their digital lives. More please!

 

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Creating a whole kit (and caboodle) for community enablers and agents of change

May 22, 2013 – 3:12 pm

Discussion at a strategy group about the new Lobbi initiative prompted me to write yesterday about an online/offline kit for local change agents, with references to my previous work with colleagues on kits and the use of social tech for social impact.

Here’s the first of a series of posts on what that kit (and caboodle)** could be, as a set of resources for people I’m calling community enablers, with added networking. That’s the all-important caboodle.

As I said yesterday, enablers might be councillors, community organisers, people running local groups, citizens developing a campaign and/or generally working to revive local democracy. This account is a bit of a ramble, but if I try and get every nuance right it won’t get done. Comments welcome. I’ve put most links at the end.

I’m not suggesting this would necessarily be a Lobbi kit, since it develops from other work I’m doing with colleagues anyway, and the Lobbi vision is still emerging.

First the local context as I see it. Whether under the banner of community development, organising, enabling, building, volunteering, or social action lots of people have been doing good stuff locally for decades – and of course before that without the labels. Councillors and professionals work in support of this, and in addition councils and other public services mount extensive programme to consult and engage with citizens. There have been stacks of how-to kits, lots of consultants and nonprofit networks, but resources fall out of print, websites wither, people move jobs or burn out, networks fold.

David Cameron wanted to encourage more of what he called Big Society (without really acknowledging it was fairly big already), but then cut many of the support systems developed over the past decade or so without enabling alternatives effectively. There are good programmes like Big Local and Community First, organisations like Locality, innovative programmes like Transition Towns, to name only a few. However, coverage is patchy, and there’s a tendency to brand rather than share how-to resources because everyone is competing for funding.

This is just the sort of situation in which social technology, coupled with good curation and facilitation, could help in gathering resources, enabling people to share, promoting both peer-to-peer networking and direct agency-to-citizen support. A group of us tried, as volunteers, to do a bit towards that vision under the banner of Our Society, using an online platform, but without resources it was too much of a struggle to maintain. I should offer congratulations to NatCAN for keeping going, but generally I don’t think the conversation/knowledge hub model works too … about which more later.

Now to the real purpose of a kit. I should emphasise that I’m using kit as shorthand for something that would help anyone seeking to organise or enhance community activity using a mix of traditional and more recent tech-enabled methods. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook groups  are no substitute for newsletters, meetings and knocking on doors. Not everyone has access or is confident online, and some stuff has to be done face-to-face.

At the same time it is waste of enabling power not to use technology as a bigger part of the mix in finding and sharing information, telling stories, collaborating between meetings, crowdsourcing funding and so on.

Unfortunately I see something of a divide between those with deep experience of community action who tend to favour face-to-face, and those who see and use the potential of online organising but may not be so comfortable on the door-step or in the community meeting. There are shining exceptions to this distinction working at local level, including my colleague John Popham who has just announced a WOW bus to take some digital enabling on tour. There are many digital enablers operating in larger organisations and as social entrepreneurs, but I think it fair to say digitally savvy community enablers are thinly spread around the country.

So – what could be done to help anyone acting as a community enabler blend tech into their work, develop digital literacies, and also help others do the same? And how could this also be a way to help enablers and others access scattered resources about traditional methods, share experience with others, and build confidence in new ways of doing things … and keep up their motivation? I think it involves development at several levels, personal, organisational, and systemic, with an understanding of communities, technologies, development processes and networks.

What’s the real value of a kit (and caboodle). I believe that addressing the issue of how to enable enablers, by adding some social technology, could help at several levels.

  1. The most obvious is that it would be a way to bring together scattered how-to resources, and add some technology tools to the kit, provided there were support in developing digital skills – something the Big Lottery Fund is investing in more widely. Maybe there could be support there.
  2. However, a how-to kit with added tech won’t do much unless it also helps develop some common ground and frameworks among the various organisations working in this field, who are each creating their own kits and methodologies. There are differences between community organising as promoted by Locality and Citizens UK, ABCD community building, the Transitions Towns and others – but there are bigger areas of similarity. Teasing out a framework to underpin a kit would demonstrate how they all involve similar aspects of process with different degrees of emphasis: listening, mapping assets, building relationship and networks, organising events, raising funds etc.
  3. The further benefit could be networking with the common challenge of learning about tech. Toolkits don’t necessarily enable action on their own. Some people are happy just to read the manual and apply it … but I guess most of us like to have someone to ask and help.  A framework for community enabling (point 2) could provide the basis of shared practice. Learning about technology could provide a further shared interest and common ground. From that it might be possible to add the caboodle – the networking of enablers, or more probably networking of networks.

What could be the contents of a kit. At this point the temptation might be to gather together the various kits, and sites about community action and enabling, add social tech how-to, create a networking site and launch. Or rather, put together a funding bid first, hoping that the funding agencies have forgotten how kits and networking sites have failed many time in the past to make much impact.

I suggest instead taking one of the strongest lessons from community enabling and applying it to a process of developing the kit and caboodle: stuff works best if people have a hand in designing and developing, because it is then what’s needed, and they own it. One way to do this would be to build on the work that Drew Mackie and I started last year, when we invented the town of Slapham, with its neighbourhoods, organisations, enablers and citizens. We ran a workshop in which we all invented some enabler characters, the challenges they and the citizens of Slapham faced, then played through how enablers could use social tech as part of their work. We’ve done this subsequently for real with an organisation recruiting community enablers, and it worked really well.

The next step is to do a bit more work on Slapham (which we are renaming Slipham since that’s a bit less in your face), fill out the draft components of a kit, and run some more workshops to develop content.

At this point the objection might be raised – isn’t this going to be a very big kit, which people won’t read or use? In development so far, we have been working on the basis that the front end of the kit can be as simple as a set of cards, like those developed by the Transition Towns network to support their Companion, or the set created by the Group Pattern Language Project, with ideas and help on running creative events. We’ve used a similar approach in the Social by Social social media game.

I’ll develop more ideas in a later post about the kit, cards and what in the past we’ve called a social app store of back-up how-to resources. I see the kit as an open source/creative commons resource, so people can rework the material for their own purposes, with attribution and links back to the original.

Now for the caboodle. You’ll see in the links below a lot about the challenges of networking, and building knowledge hubs. The problem – as I reported in a briefing paper for the Carnegie UK Trust – is that it is really difficult to get people to move to a new platform when there are so many online spaces already; it takes a lot of professional resource to facilitate and manage a site if you do get people there; and there aren’t easy ways to generate revenue. I raised these points in a post about the initial Lobbi vision. A further post here will be on the idea of instead facilitating social ecologies, which is being explored by Steve Dale.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in being involved do drop a comment or get in touch. This post is by way of setting the scene. I hope things will make more sense as we draft some of the kit, and run a workshop.

** The whole kit and caboodle: A kit – is set of objects, as in a toolkit, or what a soldier would put in his kit-bag. A caboodle (or boodle) – is an archaic term meaning group or collection, usually of people.

Earlier posts on the community enabler exploration

Big Society, Our Society and networking civil society

 

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Developing a Lobbi kit for local agents of change

May 21, 2013 – 2:44 pm

Following a Lobbi strategy group meeting yesterday – which I trailed here – it looks as if one strand of development will focus on a kit of technology tools to support local change agents … that is people doing good stuff in their community.

Those change agents might be councillors, community organisers, people running local groups, citizens running a campaign and/or generally working to revive local democracy. The tools they use (or could use) might be existing ones used by groups like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Eventbrite, Evernote, Dropbox … as well as email, texts and phones, of course.

The tools may also be new ones like the many mobile apps under development – perhaps including some by Apps for Good, who train young people to be developers.

Lobbi’s mission – led by Hussain “Hoz” Shafiei and Steve Moore – is to promote citizen engagement and action through social technology, and as I wrote earlier ” bring politics into the 21st century”.

I’m particularly pleased about this possible strand of Lobbi’s development because it ties in with some work I started last year on community enablers (for want of a general terms), and earlier ideas for a social app store further developed by John Popham. More links below on the background, and what follows.

I’ve used the term “change agents” because during our workshop discussion one group made the point strongly that it’s no good assembling a kit of technology tools to offer to community enablers unless you have some idea of how change happens. That may be through campaigning, working with elected representatives, crowdsourcing funding for new projects, building new networks and a host of other activities. You need a theory of change, and models for how stuff happens. I particularly like the thinking of Tessy Britton and Eileen Conn on that.

So far Lobbi has focused on developing a major web platform that would enable citizens, their elected representatives and officials to interact. In my earlier post I raised issues of what it might take to attract people to the platform, manage and fund it. I suggested a couple of early angles, now emerging:

First, if looking for a niche, consider focusing on how to digitally enable the enablers who help build communities. What help do they need in the personal use of technology, how can they help others, how can they enable their organisations. Go person-centric.

Second, take an asset-based approach nationally. Map who is doing what in this first, and aim to build connections both personal and technical. Use that knowledge both to advise and build kits for the enablers, and to create a strong community and movement for technology-enabled social action.

The ideas went down OK with Hoz and with Steve, who kindly tweeted encouragement:

At yesterday’s strategy workshop we agreed that developing a kit that helps you make a change in your community, with a mix of tech and others methods, could be a good start towards much wider engagement of citizens and their representatives.

The second point I raised – above – could be met by mapping who is doing what already, and developing a network for enabler/change agents to support each other.

What next? I’ll be following through on the exploration and development I’ve already started, with a view to an update on the workshop that we ran last year, which made a start on scoping out a kit. I hope to interest others in the emerging Lobbi network to develop a plan for testing and evolving a kit, with some “for real” local testing, and review that with Hoz and Steve.

Update: I’ve expanded here on the ideas behind a kit in the first in a series of posts

 

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