There is no Big Society Big Plan – and that’s no bad thing

All reporting – even the making-sense, joining-up, helping-out social reporting type – should have some element of disclosure to keep it interesting. So here’s a secret about Big Society, on which I have written a lot recently. Remember, it was the cornerstone of the Conservative election manifesto, has been re-launched several times by David Cameron, and figures in the programmes of government departments. But …
There is no Big Society Big Plan, and no-one is in charge.
Unfortunately, in the journalistic sense, it’s not much of story. For that you need a “how shocking” quote in the second paragraph, and someone to blame in the third.
The fact that Big Society is somewhat under-organised may be surprising to those experienced in the ways of the previous administration, where programmes were driven, targetted, promoted, logo-ed and of course funded. But in current circumstances having a nonorg nonprogramme is no bad thing. I’ll quote you a RSA pamphlet later to prove it. (read more...)

Building Big Society giving and doing by making it easier to listen

Update and summary: Lord Nat Wei, one of the authors of the Big Society idea and Network founder, will no longer blog about the vision. He will be working as unpaid advisor to Government. Meanwhile, many people are talking about Big Society, but finding it difficult to get to the core idea and connect with each other. The network could make a virtue of listening, and encouraging many voices.

There’s been lots of discussion around Big Society over the past couple of weeks, as you can see from my bookmarks, the Twitter stream, and this smart way of displaying content generated in many different places.

Using paper.li you can agree a hashtag (keyword with # before it) then ask people to post links (URLs) of blog items or other content in a tweet containing the hashtag. Set up paper.li to search for the tag, and it displays both the tweets and the original articles – creating your own news page refreshed daily (thanks @evangineer). (read more...)

Social innovation reporting for Big/Good Society (I hope)

Summary: how I’ve now joined the Big Society Network team with the idea of becoming their social innovation reporter. First story idea: why we need the Big Society Store as well as the Big Society Bank.

I’ve been writing a lot on the coalition government plans for Big Society over the past couple of months, and the Big Society Network, as you can see from posts here. That’s been mainly through general interest in ideas about supporting neighbourhood groups and social enterprise, developing new cross-sector partnerships, and shifting from consultation to the co-design and co-creation of local services … something I wrote a lot about on my earlier blog Designing for Civil Society.
I met and interviewed Network founders Paul Twivy and Nat (now Lord) Wei at their launch on March 31, before the election, and felt then that something special could emerge. However, as I wrote at the time, I might have been a little less interested if it were not for the involvement of Steve Moore.
I’ve worked with Steve on and off over the past four years, and admired him as someone who is an amazingly generous connector of people across different disciplines and sectors, and the complete antithesis of the sort of top-down, target-driven, project-managed, funding-led, jargon-laden programmes that have in the past done a lot to take the creativity out of civil society organisations.
Anyway, Steve is now a board member of the Network, and I was delighted when he asked if I would work part-time with him,  Paul and others. So I’ve taken the Big Society Shilling.
I’m not quite sure yet how it will work out, but based on past experience the best approach is to join in the flurry of meetings, listen out, join up the conversations, pitch your ideas, and keep moving. (read more...)

A suitable role for social reporters – tellers of naïve stories

The big thing in marketing, politics, knowledge management – and of course social networking – is conversations and stories rather than boring old documents and data. Well, of course we need those too – but the way to communicate is (read more...)

Amplified Individuals in the Cloud

Some social media discussions may be getting a bit tired and inward looking, as I wrote here. However, events and meetings over the past couple of weeks have given me a fresh boost of energy and optimism. At the heart of this is the very obvious idea of focussing on the individual, not the tools, and what people want to achieve. Why has it taken me so long to reconnect with that? Too many shiny toys and apps, perhaps. (read more...)

Social reporters may be network weavers: if you trust them

Nancy White offers reflections on the recent “Journalism that matters” gathering in Seattle, including thoughts on how social reporting relates to mainstream and citizen journalism. Nancy quotes me as suggesting social reporting is “an emerging role, set of skills and philosophy around how to mix journalism, facilitation and social media to help people develop conversations and stories for collaboration” and goes on to say:

I suspect citizen journalism is a form of social reporting. For me the question is about transparency and how one chooses to be a social reporter. Is it as someone trying to objectively cover an event? Editorialize? Synthesize? Focus on particular outputs? Some of these transgress traditional journalist  practices and perhaps even ethics. My conclusion is that social reporting sits on the continuum that includes journalism, but often moves outside of its bounds and becomes more subjective than objective. If that is what is needed, that’s useful. Ethically it suggests we should disclose our intentions and agendas as social reporters!

(read more...)

Making social reporting an OpenBusiness

The UKgovcamp event on Saturday gave me a chance to extend social reporting practice by making interviews, and hosting a session, an integral part of an open research and ideas-generation process within a project. It’s a nudge towards an OpenBusiness approach.
The project is working with Consumer Focus to explore how to involve users in the design and development of digital public services. As explained here, we are using the SocialbySocial online community to start research and discussion leading up to a workshop. We’ll report that and develop the campaign for user-involvement promised in their earlier report on Directgov. (read more...)

Video of Monkeys with Typewriters seminar

As expected, I enjoyed Jemima Gibbons seminar last night on her book Monkeys with Typewriters. I experimented using the Qik video streaming iPhone app, and captured most of the event as it happened, then did a short interview afterwards.
You can see the videos that I streamed here. It worked reasonably well, except that on the iPhone SMS messages pop up with a preview that you can’t completely turn off, and it stopped the camera. This happened a couple of times, and the camera also went into stand-by a few times too.
I posted this to the Qik Get Satisfaction site, and was very impressed to get a response a few minutes later. Unfortunately it looks as if the problem is here for a bit. (read more...)

Do social reporters need to be accountability journalists too?

After suggesting yesterday that socialreporters might adopt Make Sense, Be Positive and Help Out as guiding principles – or even resolutions – I’m wondering whether to add Investigate if No-one Else Will.

Euan Semple kindly reblogged my diagram, prompting @mark_barratt to tweet “Where’s exposure of cant, lies?”
My initial response was, we can leave that to all the other reporters. But then thanks to @marshallk I read Clay Shirkey’s talk at the Shorenstein Centre. Not new (last September), but a wonderfully timely tweet. (read more...)t.

Socialreporter resolutions: Make Sense, Be Positive, Help Out

I came up with the term social reporter a couple of years back to bundle up my experiences in journalism, community engagement, partnerships, and social media. But what’s the essence? A neat little iphone mindmapping app (via Neill Williams) helped me distill three social reporting principles, as you can see here. Given the time of year they could be resolutions: Make Sense, Be Positive, Help Out. (read more...)t.