Thriving too

Social Collaborative Platforms: Scalable, Sustainable ... and Fundable!

If you’ve had a very imaginative idea but are struggling to scale up or duplicate through regular enterprise models and methods there is a chance you have created a Social Collaborative Platform without realising it. I have only recently come up with these observations, as always I am keen to know what you think.

Here's what SCPs could possibly look like

-       They are imaginative social ideas that a group of people were compelled to try out under their own steam.

-        Sometime over the last 5 years the idea was adopted by other groups of people from around the world. 

-       These ideas are replicated largely on a voluntary basis and are not social franchises.

-       The idea founders often encourge new groups to create their own logos, plan their own events, while creating some supportive infrastructure through websites, guides and advice.

-       These ideas are often strategic and have multiple effects in the communities where they are implemented.

- These ideas spread in a sustainable way by the founder groups adopting a high autonomy/high trust model of collaboration.

I have at least 6 or 7 examples that I think fit this description, by how they have been developed and how well they have scaled, but below are 4 that I know sufficiently well to describe.

Example 1 Social Media Surgeries

Started by Nick Booth & co in Birmingham.  An idea to set up free social media sessions for local community groups with a group of professionals working voluntarily. There are now 90 groups registered on their site which support the organisation of local events. 

Example 2 Sunday Soup

Started by InCUBATE, an arts based research in Chicago in 2007.  Sunday Soup is a ‘meal-based micro-granting' model.  The basic formula is that a group of people come together to share a meal and all the income from that meal is given as a grant to support a creative project. Everyone who purchases the meal gets one vote to determine who receives the grant. There are currently 66 groups across the world – the majority have been started in the last 2 years.  They have different names and logos.

Eample 3 Trade School

Started by Caroline Woolard & co in 2009 in New York. Trade School is a project that where people barter for instruction and offers everyone the chance to learn something new in exchange for skills, spaces or objects.  Laura Billings has just completed the first run of Trade School London, and there are Trade Schools being started in Cardiff, Milan, Singapore, Paris …. Trade Schools often have different logos and supported by the team in New York who are setting up the network as a co-operative.

Example 4 Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe

I put the book Hand Made together collaboratively in 2010.  The series has become the Community Lover’s Guide to the Universe – with nearly 50 local voluntary editors across the world collecting stories about new types of community projects to publish. Rotterdam was published last month and May will see the publication of Amsterdam, Birmingham and Hackney.  Editors are using the process of putting the books together to create supportive knowledge sharing networks. 

These projects are working to a different model and because they are a bit confusing and the funders are not recognising them sufficiently yet. 

-       They are largely voluntary – but they aren’t charitable.  They are about groups of people wanting to do something good in their communities and see something valuable in these ideas.  The groups recognise that the projects either help spread knowledge, bring people together sociably but productively and can be used strategically to connect people and build trust at local level.

 -       A group of people would likely be unable to pay some sort of franchise fee to the project originator because the group would be unlikely to see any sort of business model in the idea – but there is a social model.  The idea would therefore be limited in its spread by the ability of people to turn them into businesses or charities of some kind.

- Their value is often a secondary benefit and often difficult to measured (Social Media Surgeries are doing a brilliant job of capturing effects) e.g. connection and relationships potentially reduces unemployment or depression, or even crime.

These projects challenge the idea of scalability in that they are spreading because they don’t involve money. For example with Community Lover’s Guides if we had budgets we would have to limit the number of issues we created by the amount of budget we had.  The core of these projects is money free…. But people need to survive so how are they doing that? In a number of different ways:

1. Founders are achieving funding to develop the infrastructure around the project to support the networks of groups e.g. websites
2. Value and content is being created around the project from the learning and network – giving people an opportunity to help others with technical support or consultancy.
3. Local groups are supporting their projects by simply chipping in for refreshments or are using empty spaces … and generally gathering existing resources.
4. Sometimes people have other paid jobs and do this on the side. It may not feel the same as volunteering for a charity, but people still don't feel they have to be paid for everything they do - particularly if it does some good in the world.

But overall, desptite the difficulties, I wonder if there is sufficient evidence for funders to start to recognise this as a new model, that could start to sit more comfortably in their understanding of what works and why.  Sometimes it’s a social enterprise model, sometimes it’s a charity model and sometimes it’s a Social Collaborative Platform – that needs funding at the top – but not through every transaction.

If we want to see more of these very practical, very strategic and imaginative projects (which can be views as 'social tools') being developed we need to rely on more than the love that some of these projects are currently sustained on ... The model calls for funding at the top end for development and support - and smaller scale funding at community level to help with logistics.

Big Lunch is one of the few Social Collaborative Platforms which started on a fully funded footing, knowing from the start that where the funding was needed - but it would be great to see more. 

In the social innovation sector we worry about the difficulties of scaling a lot. I wonder if a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of when to use which scaling and funding models wouldn't help us all achieve a lot more?

If you wanted to you could argue that The RSA and the Hub share many of the characteristics of a Social Collaborative Platform, but they achieve funding through mixtures of membership, co-operatives, enterprise etc. But these two examples also create brands, ideas, tools, methods, start up funding etc, and foster networks and collaboration which enable others to start something (network, enterprse,etc) at local level - very successfully indeed.

I can think of 3 projects that are struggling to be social enterprises at the moment who should be thinking about becoming a valuable Social Collaborative Platform, but through lack of funding/sponsorship are unable to make what feels like an enormous leap…. To give it away (strategically) to grow.

 

Social Spaces: Business in Beta

I tell this story about how Social Spaces started at nearly every workshop - people seem to like the unexpected sense of joie de vivre it introduces.  David Gauntlett and I had been working on this idea for several months - it went something like this "people are doing things differently, they are showing us that the traditional ways of doing things in communities needs to change".  We spoke to funders, considered a research bid... etc.  Then one day, inspired, infected almost, by the stories of the projects I was getting in for Hand Made, I had an idea while doing laps in the pool.  I wasn't going to wait around any longer, I was going to take these ideas on to the road, in a mini, and see how people responded to these new ideas ... see what happened...what could be learned ... and that's what I did for 6 months, travelling 20,000 miles, in 40 workshops with about 1000 people. I had no funding at all.  The communities that requested free workshops helped to cover petrol ... and they kindly put me up over night.  I found myself in student digs, sofas, *terrible* hotels ... and beautiful guests rooms. It was an incredible experience ... and didn't feel very much like prototyping new concepts ... which is what it was all about.

Time goes on and we are always looking forward.  But yesterday I was emailing this very nice lady at IDEO Patterns about Community Lover's Guide to Rotterdam  launch and I had reason to look over the list of patterns they have been highighting.  The very first edition was in 2009 called Business in Beta - Don't wait for perfect, launch and learn - by Colin Raney- and I had forgotten all about it.  Looking back I think that this issue was one of the single biggest influences on taking the ideas on the road in the Travelling Pantry in 2010... and reading it over yesterday made me think how much of this attitude is now in everthing we do ... and everything we encourage for community projects to do as well ... sort of in our DNA now...And it is really adictive working in this unbounded way.

Here were their suggestions on taking action:

1. Go early, go often

Building experimentation into your business is harder than you think. Start small and stay focused. Try everything, but don’t try it all in one prototype.

2. Learning by doing

Build value for the business as you prototype. If you fail, what will you have learned? What will you salvage?

3. Inspiration through constraint

Don’t exhaust yourself searching for money and resources. The tighter your constraints, the more creative your prototypes will be.

4. Open to opportunity

Look for unanticipated ways customers are using your offering. Their improvisations may be the future of your business.

So, just wanted to say a big thank you to IDEO for Patterns... and giving this project the inspiration it needed at exactly the right moment it needed it!  And it has turned this project into a open, collaborative adventure... 

And if you are intested in news ways of developing business and ideas the Design the new Business film released this week (and embedded below) is really fascinating. 

Unfinished Business

In the last two weeks a particular quality of community projects and spaces which seem to be working particularly well, has became clear to me: being unfinished as built in quality to engage people.This is counterintuitive to the way we have think about services or our public spaces. They are built around things being in order, sorted out, and meticulously planned out. (Social) Designers are very much consciously aware of this. They have all kind of possibilities of designing in, mostly unaware to us, a particular and desired kind of behaviour. Dan Lockton’s set of card ‘Design with intent’ offers 101 examples of things designers can do to influence our behaviour through design. His set of cards can be found here. Leaving things unfinished isn’t part of his extensive repertoire.

Thinking about changing people behavior through design has recently got a big push through the work of Thaler and Sunnstein on nudging. Their concept of a choice architecture deals with the same thing. Through this design thinking has been introduced to both a more general public and to a much wider variety of domains.

One thing we should remember is that people don’t always use the way things are intended. They deviate from the way things were meant to be used. A nice example in public space is offered by this picture (on the highly recommendable blog Urban Bricolage by Eric Hooge, a collection of people tinkering with urban space)

The caption of this picture reads: 

“A desire path (also known as a desire line or social trail) is a path developed by erosion caused by animal or human footfall. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width and amount of erosion of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire paths can usually be found as shortcuts where constructed pathways take a circuitous route.”

This deviating behavior already points to an openness in every design for users to explore particular ways of using it. But this deviant behavior is mostly seen, especially from the perspective from the designer or the planned world, as undesirable. But what if this openness is exactly what helps define a good public space or community project? And is keeping things unfinished as a design choice a way of designing in this openness? To explore this first two examples which made me realize ‘being unfinished’ might be a particular quality you could use and could help us explain their value and what it offers different from services.

The first time this became clear to me was while visiting the Arcola Theater during a study trip organized by Inspiring Cities. During this visit Ben Todd gave a talk explaining how the theatre came about and how it operates. There were many interesting things happening at this place, but one remark stuck with me ‘we try to keep the project unfinished to make people feel able to relate to it’. By keeping things open, you give people the opportunity to not only act as a user, a client or a customer. You give them the possibility to appropriate things, make them (part of) their own. From a user you are given the opportunity to co-own something. This doesn’t mean that you do not offer anything. It’s not about offering nothing; it’s about keeping a particular openness for people to relate to objects or spaces in a different manner than consumer mode.

 



The second recent encounter with the value of being unfinished occurred to me while visiting socialspaces.be at the Media, Arts and Design Acadamy in Genk. One of their researchers, Ben Hagenaars told about a former project of his, Animation Vegetation. In this project he has created 3D jute dolls filled with soil and grass to drop in the public space. Inspired by the graffiti movement, the dolls aim to generate more green spaces in public spaces. What makes this project interesting is that Ben has put a tutorial on his website which enables everyone to make their own. So he gives away a template to intervene in public spaces, thus enabling others to do something with it. Again this is a nice example of the added value of leaving something unfinished.

Leaving things unfinished invites people to engage with things in a deeper, more personal manner. It is an invitation to appropriate something, to make it your own, to add value and meaning to it. Moreover it hands over responsibility, ownership and control to people. It asks them to make something, not out of nothing, but at least make something happen. They can add their skills, knowledge, experiences and dreams. By keeping it unfinished people who join in later can still add something.

So where does this leave us. Should we just do nothing and leave it up to people to fill in all those things which we leave intentionally unfinished. No, that would be pushing it. Instead we should be looking at ways in which we could strategically built in the unfinished. To help me articulate this and finish off this post, I want to refer to a text by Joop de Boer en Jeroen Beekmans. They run a website 'The Pop-Up City' collecting examples of temporary and flexible Interventions in urban space. In the recently published book ‘The spontaneous city’ by Urhahn Design, they have written a text in which they argue that in a sense spontaneity is overrated, or maybe it’s too optimistic a view on how to work with and on cities. Instead they argue that we should not expect things to happen spontaneous by nature, we should try and induce spontaneous action in people. They call it ‘Artificial Spontaneity’. Although a good party has a spontaneous feel to it, it requires a lot of preparation. What this implies for designers is thus that is not about ‘the spontaneity of the intervention, but about giving rise to the spontaneous social interaction’. Leaving things unfinished is one way of creating such artificial spontaneity. I leave it at that, maybe unfinished, but ready for you to take it further wherever you want to. 

 

Innovations in Consultation, Engagement ... and possibly Democracy

I wanted to write to share some reports on two fascinating events I recently attended focusing on community engagement, consultation and democracy.

The first was two weeks ago hosted by Involve and NCVO at an event focused on Local Engagement and Democracy, based on their superb qualitative research paper produced on Pathways to Participation.

Some of the key findings from the Pathways to Participation report was that from the 100 in-depth interviews conducted for the report there wasn’t a single report of a person being happy with a local consultation:

Interviewees’ experiences of formal public consultations were almost entirely negative. Concerns included:

• Consultation processes feeling tokenistic or repetitious, with lots of consultations on similar issues and no sense that anyone was bringing together the results.

• Decisions already having been made prior to the consultation, which was only carried out to meet a legal obligation or as a public relations exercise.

For many interviewees, these negative experiences reinforced an existing ambivalence and lack of trust in political processes in general. As a result of this lack of faith in the system, people often stopped attending consultations and public meetings and sought to express themselves in different ways; one interviewee’s experience of a consultation concerning the closure of a local hospital was that:

‘. . . it was so poorly done that you could say that’s why I went on the march in the end because I felt your voice wasn’t being heard as part of that [consultation] thing.’

This point was further re-enforced by Rhion Jones from the Consultation Institute at the LGinsight event on Tuesday ‘Improving Community Engagement’.  Rhion Jones argued that government was moving away from ‘evidence-based’ decision-making – to ‘permission-based’ decision making, where the rise in campaigning and activism was altering these dynamics in a purposeful way.

Personally I consider the poor consultation and permission-based decision-making described a very unsatisfactory scenario going forward – and as I commented at the Pathways to Participation event – it isn’t a status quo that we should be prepared to accept as the way to improve things in the future … that we need is to be more radical and self-critical about ensuring both democracy and good-decision making – which should go completely hand-in-hand. 

My comment on this included:

“Good decisions come out of everybody’s knowledge being pooled together. The citizens don’t know everything and the local authorities don’t know everything, but I think that good decisions come out of blending those two together. That it is quite a difficult thing to do. Poor decision-making can lead to unnecessary levels of local activism; there are necessary levels of activism and then there are unnecessary levels of activism, and those normally come about through bad decisions. Not only that, I think bad consultation actually wastes the very genuine opportunity to collaborate and design projects and services that draw on the intrinsic strengths of both citizens and government. That isn’t just about skills or knowledge or time. I think that we need to start to think much more about pulling on the imagination of citizens and local authorities alike. And that I think is why consultation is so important.”

.... But things are changing for the better - most exciting of all we are seeing Local Authorities that are taking a much more collaborative approach – moving forward the practice of consultation and engagement into the creative/collaborative space it needs to take if the full potential of citizens and government and professionals are to be utilized for social good over the long term.

Lambeth Council

Rebecca Eligon, Head of Strategies and Equalities, spoke on Tuesday about the ‘Co-operative council’s’ very practical and strategic efforts to engage in a new relationship with citizens, arguing that LAs need to expand their repertoire of research strategies and methodologies to really understand and surface citizen knowledge and capacities. This was exemplified by their swift actions following the riots – where the Town Hall became a vibrant and engaging space for residents to share their concerns and offer the ideas and talents to improving the places where they live.  Lambeth Co-operative Council is leading a much larger group of councils who are developing this new approach which looks to co-produce both services and communities.

Reading Council

In September Reading Council conducted 30 ward-based 2-hour workshops with local residents.  Using innovative, rich-research ‘talking tools’ and methods the workshops aimed to genuinely understand the concerns and desires of local residents, to paint a collective picture of what sort of communities people wanted to live in, but also aimed to change the conversation between residents and council staff to one less about linear services… and more about what transformations might be achieved by working together. The workshops were delivered by 30 council staff ranging across all departments trained specifically for the project. Resident feedback on the workshops ranged very positively from between 4 and 5 out of 5.

Norfolk County Council

Presented by Anne Tansley Thomas, Senior Consultation & Involvement Officer and Matt Dobin from Discovery, the work of  the council again looks to change the conversation significantly. Taking a workshop approach, using innovative activities, the council presented the work of the council to residents in a new way – resulting in a long-term piece of work that has gone a long way to effectively engage residents in knowledge sharing and decision-making.

Harrow Council

Harrow Council have been taking a very novel approach to consultation.  As described by Lindsay Coulson, Head of Communications, the council have taken to the high street with pop-up living rooms and gardens where local councillors have been invited to talk to residents in a very new-style of surgery.  Their Let’s Talk campaign has been integrated into much of their work and has received a great deal of praise from residents.

Perceptions of Place Report

If you get a chance please do have a read of the research report Perceptions of Place report by Keep Britain Tidy, presented on Tuesday by Joanne Butcher.  Of particular interest was the data on complaints from deprived communities being ‘the tip of the iceberg’… while in less deprived communities the level of complaints is more likely to be representative.

Are there other Local Authorities that are engaging with citizens in ways that genuinely attempt to change the relationship to a more creative and collaborative one - let us know - everyone is interested ....

How do you think consultation adds or harms real democracy and good-decision making?

I will end this by quoting Rhion Jones from Tuesday “"wanted: more candid consultation - tell the truth"

Big thanks to Rebecca Eligon and Neil Wholey, from Westminster Council and Chair of LGinsight for their invitation to ‘speed workshop’ on Tuesday – phew! ... and to Tim Hughes and Simon Burall at Involve for inviting me to comment on Pathways to Participation –  even suffering the odd joke! 

Social Spaces: Why Pie?

When the lovely people over at Westminster Hub asked us to hold some sort of event for their Changemakers’ Fayre on the 27/28^th October we thought long and hard about what sort of event we could do that would fit with the Hub’s ambitions to seed thousands of new conversations during the Fayre … and also our own ideas and work.

Our first thought was to shape an event that brought together some of the amazing people we know to share some of the research, strategies, and other transdisciplinary emergent community stuff our heads are currently immersed in.  Which of course would have been lovely… and we hope to be doing a lot of that sort of event in the coming months.

But instead we decided to do a PieLab event for the whole day on the 28^th  – thanks to some bright thinking from Laura Billings.  This means that we will just to be hanging out at the Hub, sharing free pie and chatting to everyone that wants to pop by.

In all our workshops we talk about PieLab in Greensboro Alabama – one of our most inspiring projects.  The Changemakers’ Fayre gives us an opportunity not only to talk about PieLab, publish books about PieLab … but to actually ‘do’ PieLab.

We talk about PieLab for two very important reasons:

There are no short cuts

PieLab is a brilliant example of how a project can (and should) start from the smallest point of contact between people.  When we look at the Theory of Change and assumptions that people are working to on many existing community projects we often see that a common ‘failure to engage’ is often caused by a ‘failure to start small enough’.

And with so much talk around at the moment about taking over community buildings and services, and even social enterprise, it is easy to see how in our haste we could forget that absolutely nothing happens in communities without the relationships that drive any ideas and projects forward. 

PieLab started by holding free pie events, with the simple proposition that ‘life can be bad, free pie isn’t’ …. And now have permanent premises in the high street out of which they still produce pies, but also have created an amazing community space through which all sorts of enterprising initiatives have emerged – from BikeLab to apprenticeships …

Below is the PieLab piece that they wrote for  the Hand Made so you can read their story for yourself.

Social is Social Change

So while we might see that building on relationships can be a great strategy for developing bigger more transformative projects, for many people the social can be the social change they really need.  We spent some wonderful time last week in Oldham, Manchester with a group called the Friends of Stoneleigh Park, that had started by focusing on their local park (which is beautiful), but now hold a lot of events for the community more widely.  We found that the level of care that this group are showing as they plan their events really inspiring – right down to picking elderly people up from their homes to attend a coffee morning or book swap… and even making sure they had someone they knew to sit next to.  Bringing people that might otherwise be isolated or lonely into enjoyable and comfortable contact is vital and valuable social change in itself.

Noel Hatch mentions the PieLab in his post here, quoting Toby Blume's post 'Food is Love' "If the ultimate act of love is to nurture another human being, then how can providing nutritious and delicious food be anything other than a hugely caring and generous deed?

My friend in the US, Jack Ricciuto in this interview extract  talks about exactly this point – saying that when you have a lot of money you can be preoccupied with scaling up as fast as possible, but when you want to engage people in the community it is the ‘small acts’ which really make a difference.

Invitation to PieLab

On Friday myself and Laura Billings will be bringing lots of pies (some we will even have made ourselves) to the Westminster Hub and we hope that many people will stop by and talk to us about their ideas and plans for social change – what they think community is all about and how we can all ‘do’ community in our own places and spaces.

A Big Thank You

We also wanted to give a big thank you to Tim, Alice and Indy at the Hub for letting us loose on their formally pristine greenhouse meeting room to bring in our This is Community installation - pics here and here.  Thanks for the confidence and trust… and above all the sense of creativity and fun you’ve allowed us… and of course to make something beautiful, visual and tangible out of our ideas and work.

And thank you also to all the lovely folk over in the US who created PieLab from the beginning – especially Megan Deal and Amanda Buck  who have wished us a lovely day on Friday and have always been so supportive of the Social Spaces project!

 

Update: Nice commentary piece by David Wilcox reporting the event

 

Open publication - Free publishing - More community

Pendrecht University: a foolish gesture from a jester

Having met Tessy during a recent trip of hers to the Netherlands I organized (which she has blog about here and here, she has given me the opportunity to ‘ think out loud’ on this site. I am trained as a philosopher, am in the final stages of finishing my Phd studying practices of citizen participation, and am now an independent researcher and organizer of ‘positive urban connections’. In my blog posts I will combine these worlds in theoretical musings on some of the interesting practices I have visited during my research or meet in my day to day work. Having been trained in writing academic papers, writing blogs is a new experience for me.  But they say you only learn by doing, so here we go … 

‘The jester brings vitality and wit to make us laugh. Yet the comic mood of the jester’s clowning only sets in sharper relief something else we know. The jester has a serious side and allow us – if we will but look and listen – to laugh at ourselves, to see ourselves as others see us, to take that crucial step in developing the focus of inquiry whereby we expose ourselves to ourselves (Torgerson, 1992, 233)

The South of Rotterdam, home to 200.000 people has recently been described as one big deprived area with problems of ´undutch proportions´ given its scale and longevity. Not the place one normally associates with important innovations in democratic governance. Or than again maybe it is. Whereas the well to do have only scarcely to do with government, it is in these difficult areas that residents have a lot to do with government. And so it is here that they experience firsthand the fact that our governance system developed in the 19^th century, is largely inadequate to deal with 21^st century challenges. It is here therefore that the need for democratic innovation might by biggest. And from needs grow experiments.

I have been involved in a research project (together with Henk Wagenaar) over the last couple of years searching these kinds of experiments and innovations in democratic governance. One of the most interesting practices I encountered during this research project was the Pendrecht University. Pendrecht is one of those deprived areas in the south of Rotterdam mentioned earlier. When former minister Vogelaar drafted a list of the worst 40 neighborhoods in the Netherlands who would be eligible for extra financial support, Pendrecht came in second (for a more positive depiction of Pendrecht by one of its residents Mario Bosch).

 

In these testing circumstances, and born out of a joke and a tragedy, residents created the Pendrecht University, based on one basic rule: residents are the professors of the university and the professionals and public officials working in the neighborhood are its students. Before exploring the implications of this basic rule through Torgerson’s notion of the jester quoted at the beginning, a bit more on how a joke and a tragedy together can lead to democratic innovation.

Because the story of the Pendrecht University starts from a reaction to a big tragedy. After the shooting of a small boy while throwing snowballs, the neighborhood received a lot of bad press and became a national symbol for all what was wrong in our most deprived areas. Born out of frustration with this, residents organized a memorial service and a joined inter-faith Christmas party. It became obvious to residents that there was a lot of positive energy available in the area, if only they created the right opportunities to let it come to the (visible) surface. Exactly such an opportunity was created out of a joke.

 

At that time some students from a Dutch university where doing field studies in the neighborhood concerning safety. On one day they had to take exams at the University and do interviews with residents during a ‘pancake party’ organized in a particular street. Given the physical distance between the two locations, this seemed impossible. It turned out to be the start of something beautiful. For one of the most active residents, Bien Hofman, approached one of the primary schools in the area to see if they had a spare room in which the students could take their exam. They had, and after securing permission for the students to actually take their exam of campus , the director of the school jokingly said to the residents: ‘now we have our own university, the Pendrecht University’. This joke stuck inside the head of Bien and together with other residents and the community worker developed a plan for the Pendrecht University.

The Pendrecht University became a platform for many activities in the neighborhood, giving residents the opportunity to take the lead in what the discussion in the neighborhood should be about. Organizing meetings, theater plays, a search for the soul of Pendrecht, and even hosting the Pendrecht Olympics, are just some of the examples of what has transpired over the years under the banner of the Pendrecht University. And in all of these, in one way or the other, they try to give form to this basic rule which turns citizens into professors and professionals into students.

The effect of this reversal of roles can most easily be seen when we look at the kind of public meetings – on topics such as safety in the neighborhood, the role of the media, the redevelopment of the housing stock, and the economical development of the main square – they have organized. The Pendrecht University, by putting citizens first, gives the floor to the residents first, who thereby set the stage for the meeting. It offers a script which allows residents to play a much more active role in talking about their neighbourhood, giving room to personal stories, anecdotes, emotions and actual dialogue. Through reversing roles, on reflection, what you see happening in the Pendrecht University, is a challenge of all kinds ‘standard operating procedures’ ingrained in the way we think of and design our public meetings. It challenges what counts as important knowledge, and thus who is an expert. By putting resident – literarily and figuratively – up front their knowledge takes center stage. Instead of abstract figures, generative concepts, or technical plans, local knowledge gains an important position.

 

And this brings us back to the jester  whit whom I started this post, For as Torgerson states, the fool, Torgerson’s latter name for the jester, ‘obliquely bears witness to unwelcome insights that test the limits of what may properly and safely be said. When employed in the administrative sphere, carnivalesque language and logic generate unconventional perspectives that promise to enhance creative problem solving in the face of complexity' (Torgerson, 2003, 128). And this brings out the challenging element of this ‘foolish gesture’. By turning things around, reversing what is top and what is bottom, they not only reveal new possibilities, but also lay bare the limitations of more traditional tried and true solutions. The carnivalesque idiom, Torgerson argues, ‘might provoke unwelcome insights that could expose established power as irrational rationality, thus placing on display an emperor without clothes' (Torgerson, 2003, p. 128). But rather than showing that the emperor is wearing no cloths, as Torgerson states, I would say that the Pendrecht University shows us that the emperor is out of fashion and in need of a new wardrobe. Not in the form of haute couture in the sense of democratic theory, but in the form of practical things one can wear on a daily basis.

(in 2010, the Pendrecht University won the Voluntary Prize of Rotterdam)

• Torgerson, D. (1992), Priest and Jester in the Policy Sciences: Developing the Focus of Inquiry, Policy Sciences, Vol. 25, pp. 225-235
•     Torgerson, D. (2003) Democracy through policy discourse, in Hajer, M.A. and Wagenaar, H., Deliberative Policy Analysis. Understanding Governance in the Network Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Big Society: IDEO.org to launch in September

"Drawing on what IDEO has learned through its work in the social sector, IDEO.org will seek to have impact in three ways: By partnering with organizations on design projects focused on poverty alleviation in the areas of health, agriculture, water and sanitation, financial services, and gender equity; by spreading human-centered design through storytelling, platforms, and new networks; and by fostering future leaders through a fellowship program that will bring together residents from IDEO and people from the design, business, and social sectors."

Can't wait! This is very good news indeed!

Big Society: Artists, Transformation and Collaboration

It took artists Jaap Verheul and Kamiel Verschuren two years to get the wording of the contacts right, but now they manage a project in Rotterdam called the NAC Foundation. The foundation now looks after 200 previously empty or squatted houses and lets artists occupy them as studios for a small service charge.  It has taken 10 years overall to develop the project to where it is now… and it started by approaching a Rotterdam housing association with an idea to start improving an area. In the Netherlands housing associations are vitally important, having built and managed whole neighbourhoods after the war.  Some of these neighborhoods have since been pulled down and replaced.  But they cannot pull down without a plan and funding in place to re-build immediately.

So in one particular area of Rotterdam the buildings had been neglected and become a problem with squatting, some with artists… but also with prostitution and drugs.  So the proposition that Kamiel and Jaap gave to the housing association was to transform the area into a place where artists could live and work.  And the housing association agreed, on condition that they had one organization to deal with…and so began the drafting of the first user contract that took 2 years to get right.

 

It also involved asking a lot of people to vacate the houses they were squatting in.  Jaap describes it as a ‘tsunami’ of bad feeling that was directed towards them during this period, but ultimately what they have achieved is completely stunning.   They have transformed the area into an oasis of beauty and calm.  Taking each house in turn they were renovated and made safe, sometimes in a whole street at a time.  The area was best described as a ghetto previously – low education and 44% unemployment.

They have reserved a number of houses as common spaces, which anyone in the local community can use for free.  These have become venues that 'generate a public life’ that was completely missing before.  People use these social spaces for events and meetings, workshops and art showings.

The foundation has spread to working in other nearby areas, setting up community gardens, after school education, language lessons (the area is only 20% Dutch).

So they have cleaned up the area and created a cheap and beautiful place for artists to live and work. They have transformed a ghetto through their imagination and grueling hard work.  And very importantly they have also been supported all along the way by the housing association.  The trusting relationship they have developed is a model for how authorities and citizens might work together in new ways to create thriving communities.  The value is evident to the housing authority: Jaap and Kamiel have transformed the area in a way they never could have. They give new meaning to the term 'social artist'.

In the post earlier in the week I questioned whether neighbourhood revitalisation of this sort, citizen initiated, rather than developer-led, still counted as 'gentrification'.  As I said - I am not sure it is - because it seems to reflect a new sense of value people are putting on 'contributing neighbourhoods', places where people are intrinsically involved in shaping the area.  It probably did move some of the problems onto another area, but it changed a neighbourhood from almost unbearable to sustaining in a very real and meaningful way.  I also described Willem's and Nol's project in Rotterdam where a 'presence' can be used to spread a warmth and sense of welcome that makes a neighbourhood feel different. Whatever these 2 projects are doing - they are doing something very inspiring in my view.

*Thank you* to Kamiel and Jaap and Maurice for giving me so much time to show me around and describe the project!

Big Society: Bring your own Restaurant

How could anyone not love Bring Your Own Restaurant.  A public demonstration of social honesty and inclusivity... and just plain fun!

{IOWs = building social capital though participatory creativity and citizen-led public urban design}

"In early May of 2009, four friends planning a Friday night on the town faced a common dilemma. The art openings at Holyoke’s Paper City Studios, located at 80 Race Street, were a sure bet. But in a city where downtown dining options dwindle after 5 p.m., where would they eat beforehand?

Instead of choosing a restaurant, Holyoke residents James F. V. Bickford, Rachel L. Lawrence, Daphne Board and Stan Glodes cre- ated one.

They set up a table and chairs on the sidewalk overlooking the second-level canal on Dwight Street. They each brought a dish to share. A tablecloth added a touch of formality. Glodes wore a bright pink tuxedo coat.

“During dinner, we brainstormed locations and how we could invite other people to take part,” said Board, a custom shoemaker who, with Glodes, is renovating two houses in Holyoke.

With that, Bring Your Own Restaurant—a bi-weekly event billed as “a plein air potluck on the streets of Holyoke”—was born."

See also Permanent Breakfast

 

 

Big Society: Gladwell, Twitter & Greensboro ... Alabama

I consider Malcolm Gladwell to be an intellectual giant.  I went to see him speak with my daughter last June in Brighton... on knowledge and 'overconfidence'. 

So it is some hesitancy that I review and add to some of the statements he recently made in his New Yorker article on activism and social media entitled “Small Change - Why the revolution will not be tweeted’.

In summary Gladwell puts forward the case that Twitter and other social media encourage ‘weak ties’ and that proper activism of the ‘real’ social change variety, in his view, requires strong relationships.  I agree with this basic assertion.  Real social change requires real work, real work requires real relationships. 

However, what Gladwell misses are two things I believe:

1. That social media adds a layer of complexity that only full immersion can hope to understand properly.
2. That social action comes in a much wider range of forms than he suggests… and it is changing.

 Gladwell has been criticised for not using social media and not understanding the dynamics intimately.  Gladwell in this case has done a lot of research, looked for patterns and analysed.  However social media is no ordinary thing, it is complex and therefore deserve immersion learning to fully understand.  Stephen Downes uses the diagram below to show the difference.  And it is the bit that is missing from Gladwell’s article… the deeper understanding and nuances needed to appreciate not only how social media fosters non-hierarchical networks and  ‘weak ties’… but also how social media can also deepen and broaden friendships… that help them work and collaborate together. 

Gladwell compares mass Facebook participation with the Greenboro, North Carolina revolutionary sit-ins on February 1 1960 – four black college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworths in the seats reserved for whites. They refused to move and this event sparked a whole series of sit-ins across the South.

It is interesting that Gladwell describes social activism almost entirely in this article in terms of ‘direct action’… a particular form of activism. He also writes with the voice of someone who has never tried to *do* social action out in the world today... where social media enables all sorts of things that were never possible before... It certainly takes more than a lot of reading of history and Clay Shirky to understand social media and social action! (OMG - did I really say that?)

What I want to do here is offer a different current vision of deep social activism – which is reflective of our times, times which use and rely on social media.

In Greensboro, Alabama, three states over from Greensboro, North Carolina, there is strong evidence of a very different form of social action.  Two projects are bringing life and community to the capital of Hale County, a town of 2,700 with high numbers of elderly, disabled and poor.

The first is PieLab,  an initiative, which came out of Project M Lab, a group of designers for social good.  The project started as a pop-up pie shop, which sold very cheap pie and encouraged community conversation.  This has become a full-time pie shop, a training place for young people and a totally integrated social space for the community.  PieLab describes their story in Hand Made.

The second project in Greensboro is the HERO project, “a non-profit housing resource center, HERO provides community resources and housing education.”  HERO was started by Pam Dorr, an ex GAP product developer, who left to create her own brand of social action. 

Both these projects exemplify emergent examples of new style activism: creative and clever and which require full-time committment.  They are projects which use social media in all sorts of ways, twitter, facebook, flickr…. They are the tools of a generation of people working in deep ways in communities to alleviant suffering and help develop communities in positive ways.

I think that 'immersive learning' is the only way to 'really' understand complex, human-related dynamics and it is an approach that I have applied frequently ... somewhat heavily to the Travelling Pantry series of workshops.  The idea is to learn as much from the people who are working in communities as we are offering new ideas... a double exposure of you like.  Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, quoted famously (no, no that one..) : "The way to do fieldwork is never to come up for air until it is all over".

A further fascinating perspective on Gladwell’s article is the very good piece by Maria Popova called Malcolm Gladwell Is #Wrong. 

Leading ladies

So last night I was speaking at the Women's Social Leadership Awards 2010, hosted at the RSA. And what an amazing event! The room was stuffed with brave, assertive, inspirational women - and well done to Servane for creating such a positive supportive atmosphere.

Winners were:
Jobeda Ali from Fair Knowledge - bringing voices from the fringes of society to the mainstream of debate and knowledge

Irit Rosenblum from New Family - working to support family rights in Israel

Samantha Collins from Aspire Foundation - developing leadership skills in women through mentoring schemes

And that last one was particularly exciting because I have just been accepted as a mentee on the Aspire programme... am I about to become a leading lady? I will let you know.

Tech Missions

Good Magazine are publishing a set of posts under the heading 'Ideas for Cities'.  I like all of them so far, but particularly this one on Tech Missions.  

The idea is: 

"Technology evangelists and coaches could function as a mobile “genius bar,” going out to every neighborhood via exploration buses and provided technologically enabled training and support 24/7. This is an active campaign (or “mission”) to achieve the highest technology aptitude in the world. Tech evangelists are volunteers and part-time workers. Their services are available on a sliding scale; free to many, and supported by a $99-a-year membership fee for those who can afford it."

So, I'm thinking about the *brilliant* Social Media Surgeries being organised for community groups and charities in Birmingham..... and wondering if we can't buy them a funny looking van? Trailer... much better!

Impressive New Social Innovation Lab Website Launched!

The Social Innovation Lab for Kent has had its stealth site made live.  It really is pretty marvellous! There are lots of ideas and working methods as well as case studies and videos.

I wish the project every success!

Via: Choose Nick AKA Nick Marsh

1 small lesson for organisations about supporting network innovation

Two organisations in the U.K. - the Royal Society of Arts and NESTA - are carrying out research in to how people can innovate in networks, rather than either on their own or simply with the person the other side of the waste basket.

In another part of the park, J.D. Stanley at Cisco has been working hard for several years on Digital Swarming: or how to combine inputs from people, machines and other data sources, digitize them and place them on to networks. 

All of this work falls in to the category of trying to understand how people can create, collaborate and share new ideas across dispersed places and spaces.

It's exciting, important and without a doubt what matters in a world in which the connectedness of people, information and technology is all-pervasive. But is there something missing?

Sometimes, animals don't relate but share stuff and copy one another.

At other times, states or experiences change by accident or projection.

In other words, some relationships form on the basis of what writer and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry once called sympathetic vibration and saw in the behaviour of a violin:

The A string of a violin is designed to vibrate most readily at about 440 vibrations per second: the note A. If that same note is played loudly not on the violin but near it, the A string may hum in sympathy.

Put another way, what may matter in networked innovation is not just mechanics or structure, but also tone - a tone that's set not just by trust but also momentum, and the design of a stage upon which people feel able and want to perform.

Image of Eliasson installation courtesy of Anna Maria Leon, horses by grandylion, window reflection by lux fecit.

Consumers Drive Corporate Responsibility?

We have talked about it for a long time - consumers using their purchasing power, or more correctly their purchasing discernment, to motivate companies to make more ethical and greener products, and to put more back into communities. But the dynamics are shifting rapidly - the primary drives that I can see are:

- economic recession - advertisers are looking to make their spend go further and not be ignored

- the internet - the ease of researching products and of expressing dissatisfaction on line.

- greater social and ethical awareness - green issues and working conditions and pay in particular

In an article in Good Cliff Kuang describes how consumers are bypassing advertising in print and TV:

"Against that background of flailing ad effectiveness, companies are shifting their ad budgets, one tiny step at a time, towards meaningful P.R., dedicated to noble causes. But what’s stopping a massive company from working at a grander scale, to really do something?"

The problems that Kuang goes on to describe are a number of companies who are making great strides in reducing toxins in their products, but are too fearful to promote their progress because of the fear of criticism,

"..an industry watchdog told me of a European cell phone maker that is almost a decade ahead of its peers in eradicating toxins from its products—but won’t advertise that fact because it’s afraid that some tiny, unforeseen aspect of what they’re doing that isn’t 100% right might fuel a nightmarish boycott."

But that seems a little extreme.  Those companies should be removing toxins regardless of the promotional benefits to the company. However, the real point that Kuang makes is really important.  We need to find ways of rewarding companies for doing good.

Daniel Goleman's new book, due out in the spring is called 'Ecological Intelligence' talks about some of these issues. In an article he recently wrote for Edge, Goleman talks about having software in your phone that can identify products when you are shopping and being able to find out exactly their manufacturing profile.  His example: the soles of running shoes is pretty shocking.  

So we are already able to both punish and reward companies .... and consumers are already driving changes.

The other aspect is about companies taking social responsibility seriously - enhancing brands by associating them with good works etc.  Some of this has been criticised... the RED campaign for example is still seen by many as feeding materialism and consumerist thinking.  Adbusters keeps a watchful eye on companies using 'good works' to manipulate.

But through all this there does need to be a path where companies can promote ethical products, with low environmental impact, to people that need or want them.  Finding a way to positively influence companies to act socially, ethically and environmentally can only improve things on all fronts.

A very interesting research report by Cone and Duke University examined the behaviour patterns of different consumers related to Cause marketing. The report looks at different types of consumers and their response to campaigns involving social good or charitable giving, and shows that we respond in very different ways.  

One example shows that 18- to 24-year-old Millennials are more receptive to cause marketing: 88 percent would be likely to switch from one brand to another brand, about the same in price and quality, if the other brand is associated with a good cause. (Ironically pictured looking at shoe in the report!)

Millennials:

45 percent are more likely to donate money to the charity (compared to 36% for all adults) 

36 percent are more likely to participate in the charity’s programs and event (compared to 29% for all adults) 

32 percent are more likely to volunteer  (compared to 23% for all adults) 

Nice aren't they!

Lots to thinking about for everybody. My thoughts always seen to swing back to leadership...

Go at Mach3 with your hair on fire!

Well you didn't think I was going to post something boring and serious for my first blog on my beloved Thriving did you?!

This will be the first thing up on the wall at Enabled by Design HQ when we get one. Inspired and inspiring!

Great work Tom and Cathleen at For Impact.

Social Artists

 

David Wilcox came back from Powering a New Future conference last week, and shared some inspiration from Etienne Wenger  (best known for Communities of Practice).

Etienne said:

"The key success factor we've found is learning citizenship where learning citizenship is a personal commitment to seeing how we are as citizens in this world. Let me give you an example: I know an oncological surgeon in Ontario, Canada who asks himself how to provide the social infrastructure for patients to learn about cancer. An act of learning citizenship is to be able to use who you are to open this space for learning. I've come to call these people social artists, people who can create a space where people can find their own sense of learning citizenship.
"I love social artists. In fact I worship them. First because social artists know how to do what I only know how to talk about; and second because I care about the learning of this planet. I think we are in a race between learning and survival. We live in a knowledge economy where any expertise is too complex for any one person. One person can't be an expert so anyone who can give voice to that need to work together is a social artist."

This resonates so much - and how lovely to regard social innovators as artists...

Pic: Make Art Public

Us Now

Us Now is going to be shown at the RSA London on the 3rd December..... and at NESTA on the 10th December.

**Very Inspiring**

Via: Damien Debarra

"Us Now is a ground-breaking documentary project about the power of mass collaboration, the internet and its potential impact on society.  Directed by Ivo Gormley, the film explores how the web is changing the ways we can organize ourselves.  From the democratic football club where the fans pick the team to the lending service where everyone can be a bank manager, Us Now tells the story of new technology through human eyes, and for the first time brings together the leading thinkers in the field of participation and web culture to describe how mass collaboration could change society."

Fantastic Techy Tools for Social Good

Two new sites, Message in-a-box and Mobiles in-a-box, bring enormous knowledge to everyone wishing to use technology and new media for social good.  

"Tactical Tech's "Message in-a-box" is a set of strategic guides to using communications tools for social change, together with a suite of open source tools to get you making your own media. The toolkit is designed for small and medium-sized NGOs, advocates, and citizen journalists to help them create and distribute content for their advocacy efforts while exploring the constantly evolving world of campaigning and communications."

Beautifully designed too!

Looks great  @Libby

The Video Republic

In a fascinating new report by Demos, the Video Republic examines how video is giving young people the tools of democratic participation. The report looks at how the Video Republic, as they described it, is giving young people a new place to debate, a new basis for citizenship, and a new model for change. This substantial work also includes wide ranging recommendations. They introduce these by saying:

Starting from the principles of free speech and equal access, this chapter [recommendations] will outline ways that we could support a more mutually beneficial relationship between the Republic and the institutions it threatens to destabilise. While the Video Republic’s separateness is an inherent part of its appeal for the ‘route- around kids’, we believe there is much to be gained from forging a more meaningful connection. The remainder of this chapter suggests ten principles to help us do so. We explore issues such as access to the Republic (1–2), how the Republic is regulated and governed(3–6), and how tapping into the energy locked inside might help us to build a more expressive democracy(7–10).

Social Innovation Camp Needs Your Ideas

The deadline is looming for submitting ideas to Social Innovation Camp. Hurry, Hurry, Think, Think.... Enter Here by the 7th November....

Mentoring and Social Networks

Horsesmouth is a really impressive online mentoring website which seems to be growing so quickly, and with good reason. As I write there are 5028 mentors registered with the site, with 1986 thank you's sent. Without all the hassle of arranging to see someone about an issue this type of mentoring looks to be really effective and I look forward to watching Horsesmouth's continued success!

Alex Johnson recently wrote an article for Rapport - The Magazine of the Mentoring and Befriending Foundation, about social networks and mentoring projects. Alex asked me what I thought about social media in this context.... isn't that nice of him? You can read what Alex wrote by downloading the magazine here, and seeing the article on page 20/21.

First Chain Reaction Event

The first Chain Reaction Event is planned for the 17th - 18th November in London South Bank. Chain Reaction forms part of the programme for the Prime Minister's Council on Social Action, which is led by one of my favourite people, David Robinson: Community Links, We Are What We Do.

Chain Reaction is about bringing people together to:

Connect — we are all connected and the actions of each of us impact on the lives of others.
Collaborate — none of us on our own can change the world, not governments, not business, not communities. We succeed when we work together.
Commit — every single one of us has the power of our own actions. If our actions are reflected in the actions of organisations and businesses, and supported by governments, together we have the power to change the world.

This looks to be a really great event with about 500 people expected over 2 days.

Looks fantastic. Register HERE!