DavePress

The Online Information conference is coming up again in December, and having attended it last year, I was determined to actually present something this time around.

David Wilcox and I have been talking a great deal in recent times about the ideas around ‘organisation lite’ - using social tools, whether on or offline, to help organisations get it right in terms of platforms, roles and worldviews. We thought this would make an excellent topic for a joint presentation.

So, we’ll be talking Shirky, Leadbeater et al, with plenty of real life examples and case studies.

So far, so pretty normal. But we want to try and walk the talk ourselves, and so we are developing our submission, paper and presentation out in the open on a blog. We’ve been doing bits and pieces on there already, but with a week to go till the submissions have to be in, we need to get this out and get others involved.

So, please visit the blog and leave feedback, suggestions and examples of stuff we might be able to use. As we write bits of the paper and develop the presentation, we will be publishing them on the blog for folk to comment on and, hopefully, improve. Everyone involved will, of course, get credit, and we’ll be publishing the finished stuff under Creative Commons, so hopefully everyone will be able to benefit.

Interesting post from MJ Ray on the need for organisation - which perhaps busts the myth that open source software development is a perfect model to follow for other types of groups:

Are free software users particularly bad at the basics of running an interest society (like welcoming and expiring members, calling meetings, publishing routine communications, and so on), have I been spoiled by cooperatives with their friendly Member Services departments or secretariats, or what? Is this why so many free software orgs seem to include self-perpetuating leadership groups? Is this a serious problem if, as reported, Software Development is a Team Sport [etbe]? Are there fully-working free software mass participation groups out there?

I feel a lot of these problems are caused by attempting to order our inherently entropy-filled world completely and insisting everything follows petty rules, such as refusing to answer a question because the “wrong” member asked it. The world will not become less random just because hackers try to impose arbitrary rules. Sometimes it’s good to put down minimum standards (because calling zero-day meetings is a mostly-avoidable way of excluding some members) but it will always be a poor alternative to trying to do the best you can for others.

The Department for Communities and Local Government have released something called a ‘Community Power Pack‘:

The Community Power Pack has been created to help local groups to organise and facilitate discussions on the topic of empowerment. The pack contains suggestions for the format of the meeting, advice for facilitators and organisers as well as detailed information about key empowerment issues. Your feedback will be used by Communities and Local Government to inform and shape empowerment activities, including the Empowerment White Paper.

It’s been created with Involve, and looks interesting. So what does it look like?

Well, first of all there is a 57 page PDF file. The introduction claims that it is published under a creative commons licence, but it doesn’t look like a CC licence I have ever seen before:

This publication, excluding logos, may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium for research, private study or for internal circulation within an organisation. This is subject to it being reproduced accurately  and not used in a misleading context. The material must be acknowledged as Crown copyright and the title  of the publication specified.

But never mind. It’s actually quite a nice idea, trying to get people to discuss issues around empowerment through their existing groups. The idea is that the results of the discussions will be a part of the eventual white paper on empowerment, and the power pack itself will be updated as feedback on the process itself is returned.

I do wonder why this wasn’t just done as a website, rather than a document, in the first place. For example, the method for returning views is a ‘Recording Sheet’ (in Word format, for goodness’ sake, what’s so hard about saving stuff in RTF?) which could have been simpler by just sticking in online. And if the power pack itself is going to change, why not just keep the most recent content live as a website? Would be much easier for everyone. To be fair, there is an opportunity for individuals to give their feedback at the DCLG forums but why not make an online response - through something other than a forum, preferably - the default?

The main content in the pack is a list of different activities can can be run at a get together to produce some answers as a group. It’s good stuff and nicely presented with plenty of supporting information.

I do just wonder how many people are actually going to be using these things, though! It does just seem an awful lot of work for folk to do. But at least it is an attempt, apparently, of the government trying to listen to people’s views - it just feels a bit controlling and overly processy to me.

David Wilcox twittered the other week:

chat with @davebriggs making me think we need some way to reduce the networking overhead. Too much New: roles, platforms, worldviews…

Which is an interesting point. There is a tonne of stuff going on at the moment, lots and lots of noise, lots and lots of honest endeavour and lots and lots of great ideas. There is, for example, the meetups and projects following barcampukgovweb, the RSA Networks, talk around the role of the BBC in participation, the Membership Project, discussions about the future of new media in a world of user generated content and reducing trust, the OurKingdom online consultation. But how much overlap is here? How much effort is being lost because those involved (at various levels) don’t have the worldview that can cope with these discussions? How many initiatives will fail as a result of key roles not being identified and filled quickly enough?

I’m interested in how the various strands of discussion can be tied together to bring down the levels of duplication, reduce the noise levels and allow people to involve themselves in projects that interest them while making the most of what is happening elsewhere. This is very much the thinking behind the etoolkit, in creating a learning environment in which organisations can determine their approach to social media and participation. I’m wondering whether discussions even wider in scope might be necessary.

Part of this is tied into Clay Shirky and the ideas espoused in Here Comes Everybody, as well as the discussions held in various places and in various mediums about forming loose associations of like-minded folk. We need some organisation, but not organisations. With organisation can come the roles, the platforms and the worldview required to make the most of the opportunities that face us. I have to say that this notion is an exciting one, and when we combine it with the open and collaborative projects such as those which David promotes, a model for increasing participation at all sorts of levels opens up: whether local volunteers, political campaigns, nationwide discussions or within individual organisations and companies.

Let’s have a look through those three issues David identified in his tweet that set me off on this ramble.

Roles

Roles are important, and they are changing, as I wrote here. There is a key role for people who understand the notion of organised non-organisations, who can filter their way through the cast amounts of available information, who can throw up a blog or a wiki in a matter of seconds to meet a need. The increased use of online tools makes the role of online facilitator vital, but it is one that is being ignored to a hugely detrimental effect. Without the people there to drive conversations forward, to draw folk with stuff to contribute into the discussion, your platform will whither and die. You don’t necessarily have to pay people to do this: you just need to identify who they are and empower them to perform the role for you. I know this because I am one of these volunteers: make me feel that it’s worthwhile and I’ll spend hours doing stuff for you.

Platforms

There are too many platforms, it is too easy to create new ones, not enough use is made of those that already exist. All of this is true, and yet there is still scope for new stuff to come through. It’s not about the technology, really, we all know about status updates, friend and follower lists and embedded video. It’s about the application of that technology in a way that is genuinely useful.

Choosing the right technology is important. Sometimes an email list is all you need, maybe a wiki or a group blog. You have to make sure that everyone is comfortable using the tools though, but most importantly that the tool fits what you are trying to achieve. Can it handle the content - and the interactions with that content - that you are likely to be dealing with? If you want discussion, a wiki probably isn’t the best way to go. If you are using a group blog, how can you ensure that outputs are tied together and the best use made of the various conversational strands? We can aggregate blog posts easily enough, but what about the comments, the responses to those posts?

There isn’t one perfect platform that will suit every purpose. With a strong idea of what that purpose is, though, it should be easier to make the right decision. And that right decision, of course, doesn’t have to happen right away. Experiment, try things, see how they go.

Worldviews

Now for the biggie. Even if you have the right people in the right roles with the right skills and the right platform, it isn’t going anywhere if those who are directing the endeavour haven’t got their heads right. Open, collaborative processes need to be organised by open, collaborative people. This means people who see the value in having contributions coming in from different people, with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives. It means not trying to control the topic under discussion and not trying to set arbitary standards on the quality of submissions.

This worldview is the hard thing to get right. It means significant culture change, especially for those in senior positions who might not necessarily be open to such a change. But any collaborative project is doomed to fail if those who are driving it are not willing to change their own culture to open things up to others.

Processes

I’d like to add a fourth item to the list, and that’s process, which for me encompasses an awful lot of the above, and some other bits as well. If we accept that open, collaborative working is A Good Thing, and that we have people with the skills, and a platform to use, and our bosses are clued up too, then we still need a method: how is this going to be achieved? I’m not sure how much has been done in this area. On the Membership Project, everyone blogs stuff that is of interest to them, without really paying too much attention to the needs of the project (at least, that’s how I do it) and David tries to pull it all together with regular summary posts, and project pages where themes are established and work can be done to try and get some of the ideas turned into deliverable work packages.

It would be interesting to find out what other models for online collaborative working exist. Much depends on the platform, I guess, but then my argument would be that it should be the other way round: decide on process then choose the most appropriate platform!

Tom Watson posted up his speech announcing the Power of Information Task Force on his blog yesterday and it contained some really good stuff. I guess that those who want to can snicker about the notion of creating a task force to promote innovation (shouldn’t we be organising without organisations?), but I’m glad that there will be some folk looking into this stuff, and it would be nice if they do so in an open and collaborative way.

Only last week, the Prime Minister became the first head of Government in Europe to launch his own channel on Twitter, which I can tell you from experience, is extremely useful to his ministers at least.

But we need to make it easier for others too.

Hazel Blears with be leading this agenda when her department will address this in a White Paper on engagement in the summer.

But I want to take the Power of Information agenda further and do it faster. So today I am announcing the establishment of the Power of Information Taskforce. I’m pleased to say that Richard Allan has agreed to Chair the Taskforce. Richard has a vast breadth of knowledge in this field. He’s also an all round good guy and I know he will help us provide clarity to government departments as they contend with the power of information agenda.

Most interesting for me were the bits that focused on community engagement and participation. Let’s have a look at one or two now.

And in the week where the digital world went crazy over Mystarbucksidea.com (I’ve already voted for free Wifi), NHS choices launched a blog about diabetes, bringing together the people who treat the illness and the people who receive treatment. It’s a brilliant ideas and hopefully will foster a new information community who can work together to improve things.

I was diagnosed a type 1 diabetic about a year ago, so have quite an interest in this. I was 27 when I was diagnosed, which is a funny age I think, and led to it taking quite a while for the doctors to figure out if I was type 1 (meaning injections) or type 2 (meaning I had to eat less). I still haven’t got to grips with it yet: I’m supposed to inject myself four times a day but manage it twice at best, largely with the result that I feel pretty crap all the time. Last summer I was hospitalised twice and suffered a crippling bout of depression. I guess I am exactly the sort of person that this blog is supposed to be reaching out to: I’ve got the disease, I’m crap at dealing with it, and I like blogs. I hadn’t heard about it though, which renders it pretty useless. Still, now I do, thanks to Tom, I’ll engage with it, leave a comment or two and see what happens. The blog idea is nice, but I wonder whether more of a social network type approach would be better - linking me up with other diabetics who have been through similar issues.

My officials have been working up draft guidance on how public servants can use social media. And the Power of Information Report made a series of recommendations about this too.

I want the taskforce to ensure that the COI and Cabinet Office produce a set of guidelines that adheres to the letter of the law when it comes to the civil service code but also lives within the spirit of the age. I’ll be putting some very draft proposals to the taskforce to consider later this week.

Here, here. I wrote in the wake of the Civil Sef affair that Public servants should be blogging, or engaging through other social networking tools. Public servants are too often characterised as faceless bureaucrats and the more that can be done to dissuade people from that notion, the better. But to get more public sector workers being open, they need to feel safe to do so, and sensible policies will help to do that.

We will also look at, and learn from, the way people are communicating with each other.

The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.

This is a point I have been meaning to blog about for some time: the relationship between online collaborative communities and the co-operative movement. The point is that while the tools are new, the relationships aren’t, and people have been working together to tackle problems since the year dot. What the tools do is make the process easier and more transparent and because they also make it easier to do without forming institutions or organisations, they also remove some of the political undercurrents too. More needs to be written on this, I think.

And when we know we get a delivery channel right we should use the ‘collaboration’ part of Ed’s vision to best effect, to gain, social leverage, as Professor Shirky would say.

Let me use a recent story to illustrate this point. I recently registered my local Labour Party with groupsnearyou.com. This is a new site provided by the MySociety people. It’s a site for people who run small scale community focused groups.

Through the site, I found West Bromwich Freecycle.

I’m the Member of Parliament for West Bromwich East and I didn’t know about an important recycling initiative going on in my own patch. This information now means that a bag load of clothing for a small child and a habitat sofa are about given a second chance to give pleasure.

Nice example, not least because of the use of an existing network to connect with others. The delivery channel - in this case the connecting of local groups - does not therefore need to be created by the government, or the Labour Party, rather by interested folk, doing things in an open and collaborative way like MySociety does.  This taps into another long running question of mine which asks whose responsibility is it to push for improvements in civic life using social tools? Is it the government, at whatever level? Is it organisations like MySociety? Or is it every individual with a laptop and a broadband connection? I am beginning to suspect the answer is the latter - individuals pushing the boundaries and demonstrating where the value is, with the institutions following up once the point has been proved. Organisations like MySociety can help but they aren’t necessarily needed

Overall, a great speech to hear from a cabinet minister. I look forward to seeing what happens next.

David Wilcox has taken the bull by the horns and created an open thread on the OpenRSA blog calling for a more collaborative approach to the discussion on jounalism being carried out on the RSA networks platform. This debate is one which takes into account trust in news media, and could also pull in issues around the role of the BBC in civic life.

I’m personally most interested in breaking out of the old media professional boundaries because I think greatest innovation - and citizen empowerment - is likely to take place as old cultures are challenged, openly. It’s time the newspeople stopped seeing those that they write for as “news users”, now we are producing a lot of our own content online.

The issue at the RSA is not one of platform - the Drupal based system used by the Networks is superb - but of worldview. David and I were the most consistent contributors to the discussion, but I felt my time there was up when a message was posted by a project leader confirming that the desire was to keep the debate ‘on topic’ and ‘informed’. As neither a journalist nor a fellow of the RSA, I guess this counted me, and anything I had to add, out.

I’ll be following the debate through the comments to David’s post, and anything else tagged with civicjournalismuk. I have my platform here, which I am happy to use to contribute with - or when the time is right for a dedicated platform to be created, I can use that - as long as it is open!

There is an interesting project underway at RSA Networks, the social network for Royal Society fellows, and, for the moment at least, anyone else who fancies joining in (that’s the category I belong to, by the way). It has been proposed by Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication at the University of Leeds, and goes by the name of the “RSA Journalism Network”:

The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.

This is a great idea, and an important and interesting area for discussion. The web is a perfect place for the coversation to be held in, of course, because online developments are a part of both the problem and the cure for the relevance of news to people’s lives.

David Wilcox has commented on his blog about this project - again supportive of it but questioning the closed nature of the discussion on the RSA Networks platform. As anyone not a member of the network will find out, when clicking my link above, you can’t see anything without first logging in.

I can’t see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to “your place” to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.

David has started a similar thread within the project space on the RSA Network too. I’m fully supportive of his stance, having been happily involved in open online collaborative projects such as the Open Innovation Exchange, RuralNetOnline, the Membership Project and the etoolkit.

It’s far better to have these conversations out in the open, where people can read and find out more before they decide to dive in, and where people can add their thoughts whether they are a member of a specific network or not. The civic role of news is something that matters to everyone, not just RSA members, or whatever.

One of the ways that the web can help us to bring conversations together is through the use of tagging. By using tags effectively, people can write about a subject on their own blogs without needing to join another platform. All you need is  way of bringing them together, easily achieved by mixing up Technorati or Google Blog Search with RSS. Services like Pageflakes or Planetaki can then be used to publish the results.

Another way is to create the new platform, but make it open, rather as David does with his Drupal-based group blogs. Anyone can join and have an input, even if it is just to point to what they have written elsewhere. Indeed, David has taken this further by incorporating a Grazr-based widget displaying relevant content from various external blogs within the Membership Project group blog. In this way, those that have a blog can write there, and those that don’t can contribute directly to the group blog.

David is actively facilitating the Membership Project by posting regular updates and transferring the points that are made in the blog posts into a project timeline and associated work packages, thereby creating outputs from the organic content created through the group blogging process. This will be vital to keep the project moving forward, and is a great example of online community facilitation.

Taking this approach would therefore create a far more useful project, or network, than the current arrangements for the  RSA Journalism Network. I think this is too important a topic for discussion to be held behind closed doors, and for the moment I would like to suggest the use of the common tag civicjournalismuk to hold the conversation together for anyone who would like to have a say. We can figure out what to do with it all later. Let’s see how our open approach can feed into and add to what’s happening within the walled garden…

Steve Dale writes about the need for organisations to consider the cultural as well as the technological issues around collaboration and communication using the web”

An excellent posting from Shawn over at Anecdote about fostering a collaboration culture. A good corollary to my recent postings about what I see as growing and misplaced belief that Web 2.0 is the solution to more effective knowledge sharing. They key point I was trying to make is that technical solutions (blogs, wikis, RSS) by themselves do not create, nurture or develop learning and sharing communities, or improve engagement between government and citizens. I emphasised the importance of people in the equation, both in terms of skilled facilitators (those who support and encourage conversations and collaboration) and the willingness of the users themselves to actively engage (e.g. a shared domain of interest). Shawn refers to fostering a culture of collaboration, which I think is quite often overlooked by those who are rushing headlong into implementing Web 2.0 facilities in order to achieve better knowledge management.  To put this into perspective, the investment (time, cost and support) for the ‘people and process’ side of the communities of practice being developed across local government exceeds the cost of the technology by a factor of ten or more. Furthermore, this is recurrent cost and not a one-off capital expense.

I’m delighted that Steve is already signed up with the etoolkit project wiki, as getting this balance right is key to the success of the project. The toolkit we are developing will make clear the complete costs of implementing a social media solution to a problem, including people’s time and training, as well as the financials. Social media and web 2.0 are quick and easy to do, but not so quick, and not so easy to do well.

I wondered last week about the ways we can use online tools to collaborate on projects - I had on my mind the etoolkit that David Wilcox (and now Beth Kanter, Emma Mulqueeny, Alex Stobart, Nancy White and Steve Dale…) and I are developing in the open.

My issue was that while wikis are perfect for putting stuff together and bringing together thoughts and resources, they aren’t that great for conversations or throwing out ideas, which is where group blogging can have a great impact. The trouble is that a standard WordPress (say) blog is rather an unwieldy beast for this task, making you sign up for the blog, log in, go to the admin panel, then click write post etc etc…

There’s an obvious solution here, and that’s the Prologue theme for WordPress. Makes it dead easy for people to contribute ideas, with the possibility of threaded conversations using the comments. Perfect. I have started one for the etoolkit here. It’s hosted at WordPress.com which means that while allowing others in to contribute is a little clunky, there’s little harm done or money lost if nobody uses it.

David Wilcox and I had a meetup earlier this week, where we talked about the different ways that organisations need to be approached in terms of how they might make use of social media and web 2.0 stuff - or not, as the case may be.

We touched on David’s work at the RSA and the subsequent collaboration for membership organisations; as well as some of the outputs of events like the Social Media Big Day Out and the barcampukgovweb.

Wouldn’t it be nice, we thought, if there was a toolkit out there which provided the materials needed for an organisation to work through the options, decide what their issues are and figure out how they can meet those issues with a mixture of on and offline responses.

So we did the only thing a pair of self-respecting social hackers do, and set about creating such a thing - and all in the open, of course. You can find it all at the etoolkit wiki. Don’t worry, that’s just a working title.

It is envisaged that the toolkit will be made up of 3 elements:

1. The toolkit itself, a prepared pack of information
2. A facilitated workshop
3. A dedicated network space for post event support and discussion

The toolkit itself will be made freely available, probably under creative commons. It will be open enough to be easily bespoked for a sector, whether charities, local gov, membership organisations or whoever. People can pick the toolkit up and facilitate the workshop within organisations; or consultants could specialise in delivering it themselves and charge for it.

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and please do sign up with the wiki and start to contribute your ideas if you would like to.