Turns out what I am really interested in is civic spaces

I’ve had a really interesting week meeting all kinds of people – and as a result have had to talk a lot about what we are doing with the virtual town hall and the citizenscape product launch (I say had to – its very difficult to get me to stop talking as anyone who has met me will tell you).  Anyway – this has really distilled my description rather and I wanted to capture this – and it’s a nice change of pace from last week’s rather epic post….

My starting point is the huge need that I see to create virtual civic spaces that will outlast the next online fad.  We see all kinds of spaces being built online and we see great government services (at times) but we don’t see any civic space – somewhere that will support Habermas’ public sphere of debate.  Space matters – in the real world the nature of the public realm effects behavior and expectations and it is the same online – if we are talking the social web seriously then we need to think about what a civic web space will look like.  If we don’t then we are relying on the hope that the teenagers bedroom or coffee shop of Facebook and the like will turn into some kind of Agora.  I am not filled with hope of this.

The next thought is the one big difference between the social web and democratic decision making – identity.  Online identity is fluid and transitory – which is one of the reasons that people go there.  People want to explore other aspects of themselves or to be freed from the preconceptions that people have about them.  They may want to talk to complete strangers or perhaps not really think about it at all.  However accountability is at the heart of democracy – it really is the act of standing up and being counted – and we will have to find an acceptable and practical way of bringing this accountability into social web conversations – or find some other more statistical way of providing a decision making mandate.

And the final point that this all distills down is the need to create a practical space that actually delivers some efficiencies.  The promise of the social web will not be realized is this economic climate if we cannot link it to a conversation about how we deliver public services more efficiently.  This is not just a question of making tools efficient and cost effective so that we can deliver more and better engagement for a reducing budget but is part of the bigger question of how we renegotiate the relationship between citizen and government so that we ultimately make better decisions that we can afford to implement.

So – it turns out that my real interest is in trying to build these civic spaces and explore what a social web space built on democratic requirements might look like – who knew??

 

Community Ambassadors – bit of a rethink and a really long list….

The first set of Virtual Town Hall are hovering on the bring of launch – the development is all live but we are tweaking content and design – but they should be out in the wild later this week.  In the meantime I wanted to get moving on the community ambassador work. This has evolved a great deal in the course of the project to date and this post is about how we actually go live and proceed with these.

The initial view of the community ambassadors was that we were looking for people from the community to provide, to a greater or lesser extent, the interface between the social web and the Council. Their role would be as representatives of the process out on the wider social web and they would be asked to both encourage and moderate content from other participants. The advantages of this approach is twofold:

• Moderation is being done by the community instead of to the community
• Its a much more sustainable for the Council who are not going to be able to resource a huge moderation requirement

However – as we talked more and tested the idea with actual people it was clear that there are some flaws in this approach (quelle suprise). These centre both around practicalities and also around the overall approach. The light bulb moment was really when we realised that we were coming to be whole proposition as “The Council” rather than from the point of view of the participants. They don’t want to be pigeon holed into a job description of our choosing and really don’t want to be pinned down with a prescriptive todo list. As I type this really seems very obvious – and I am sure there are a lot of community activists and hyperlocal site owners who will put the do into doh on this one – but clearly it wasn’t obvious to us initially. Revelations over we decided what we need to do is to deconstruct the community ambassdor role into its discrete tasks – and then ask people which of these they want to take part in. the list below is not meant to be final – but it gets us started.

What I have tried to do is to relate the tasks to the stage of the process as per the informal / formal model I have been building. This also helps to guide things like the degree of risk/exposure that might be perceived. Risk is something I will need to come back to at some point – and I want to draw a strong distinction between actual risk and perceived risk as the latter is clearly greater than the former – and this can be evidenced by the general skittishness of most local authorities as they start to engage with social media – but this is for another post.

So – below is the break down of tasks as organised into the groupings which I am using to describe stages of behaviour (this relates to a much bigger descriptive picture which relates to engagement ladders etc – but this is enough to describe work for the community ambassadors I think)

Arena		Participation	Democratic participation
Rule of law: Spaces and processes which have legal and constitutional standing	Formal Democracy: Participation in the actual decision making process or in setting the agenda		Attend a formal meeting Start a petition Interact with a member Stand for election
	Formal Consultation: Contributing to the information gathering stage of decision making		Respond to a consultation Sign up to attend an event Comment on the discussion board (within VTH) Sign a petition
Wild West: the Wider social web, outside of spaces owned or managed by government	Informal Civic Participation: Expressing and acting on an interest in local issues	Comment on a blog (outside VTH) Comment on the discussion board (outside VTH)	Comment on a blog (within VTH) Comment on webcast Sign up for alerts Rate a comment on a discussion board (within VTH) Rate a comment on a blog (within VTH) Watch a webcast event Tweet VTH topics
	Informal Social Participation: Connecting to other people in the area or around a specific topic	Rate a comment on a discussion board (outside VTH) Rate a comment on a blog (outside VTH) Rate a YouTube clip Rate a webcast Comment on YouTube clip	Create a user profile Save something to your user profile Share something from the Virtual Town Hall with someone else

This obviously all needs to be written up more formally but basically is a way of interpreting the following actions and putting them within an analytic framework – and I am trying to involve online and offline actions – not just social media stuff. List of actions that we will be measuring / influencing are (in no particular order):

• Respond to a consultation
• Sign up to attend an event
• Comment on the discussion board (within VTH)
• Sign a petition
• Rate a comment on a discussion board (outside VTH)
• Rate a comment on a blog (outside VTH)
• Rate a YouTube clip
• Rate a webcast
• Comment on YouTube clip
• Create a user profile
• Save something to your user profile
• Share something from the Virtual Town Hall with someone else
• Comment on a blog (within VTH)
• Comment on webcast
• Sign up for alerts
• Rate a comment on a discussion board (within VTH)
• Rate a comment on a blog (within VTH)
• Watch a webcast event
• Tweet VTH topics
• Comment on a blog (outside VTH)
• Comment on the discussion board (outside VTH)
• Attend a formal meeting
• Start a petition
• Interact with a member
• Stand for election

I would be really interested in people’s views on this initial list as it is obviiously going to be a big part of the data collection. I would also be interested how/if people would weight this list.

One of the big improvements with this change from a formal role to a collection of tasks that people pick and choose is that it is much more compatible / complementary to the role of the elected representatives.  One of the things I want to do is to focus specifically with the team at Kirklees on how we expand this list to included the work of members as well so that we can represent some kind of composite picture.

Will take this all away and think more – there may be a tidier post lurking in this sprawl.

 

Guest blog – Social Civic nudge

The folks at Kent very kindly asked me to guest blog over at their innovation site – The post goes into some ideas around choice architecture and what this means for democratic spaces – all very relevant I think to Virtual Town Hall stuff.  Full post can be found here.

 

Co-production: nice phrase or something new?

Bit of a hiatus on the blogging – mainly down to the fact that I have a new job. Still at Public-i but have been appointed as Chief Exec (press release here if you want to the proof!). Its a huge privilege as we have an exciting year ahead – but its been a busy start to the year.

The other reason for general busy-ness however is the launch of the Virtual Town Hall pilot sites. The first of these are now live – but we are still sorting out the data migration and will be publishing the URLs as soon as this is done. I will of course blog when this happens but they are really starting to come together.

But this post is one I have meant to write for ages as I wanted to start a thread about co-production – something that I don’t think we have yet spent enough time on as part of the pilot projects (this is just the phase of the project I think but I want to start the thinking).

One of the motivations behind the Virtual Town Hall work is not only the need to respond to the pressures and opportunities that the social web makes for democracy but also to respond pro-actively to the challenges that democracy faces when trying to raise levels of participation and engagement. This challenge becomes more acute as decision makers face the fact that the current and ongoing economic situation for local (and in fact all) government that they will need to make unpalatable choices that will require an actual mandate from the public – not the technical one with a low turnout election provides. To do this we need to think seriously about how we change the nature of the way that we all interact in the democratic process.

Co-production (or co-creation) – the idea of all stakeholders participating equally in the decision making process is one way in which we can re-imagine the relationship between citizens and government. There is a really good discussion paper from NESTA / NEF here.  There are a lot of questions to be answered with respect of the role of the elected representative (which I want to talk the folks at Kirkless about) but there is a lot of think about here.

Within the field of eParticipation the concept of co-creation or participatory design has a dual heritage:

• The social web is driven by user generated content and the sharing of information and this content is networked together via the viral nature of the online environment. Eye witness reports become our first point of contact for breaking news and these are often un-mediated by the press. People flock to YouTube to watch other people’s home videos and deliberately created content. Political bloggers are gaining ground with the traditional media in terms of access and influence and mass collaboration online is being used by large corporations to support product research and development, by news organisations to create new content and by websites such as Wikipedia to create shared content outputs. Participatory design, whereby all users are involved in the design of a service, feature or outcome, is being used to improve products and services in all commercial fields and the increasing use of co-creation – of shared development of ideas across wide groups of people – online is endemic.

• Methods of co-creation have been used within offline community engagement projects for some time. Co-creation is seen as an answer to the problem of how to engage citizens with the decision making process and is used with a wide range of citizen groups. Its main antecedent being the Arnstein ladder of engagement which describes different levels of citizen engagement in the deliberative process with a truly co-created discourse where citizens fully engage in deliberation and have power in the process at the top of that ladder and the overall objective of citizen engagement.

So there is a pressure from the social web which leads towards co-production – but as I said at the start I think the real pressure actually needs to be from the democratic process. Co-production reflects the participatory mood of much of the energy for democratic changes and also addresses government’s need to share the pain of difficult decisions.

But what is difficult to imagine is the path and process between where we are now – with an often paternalistic and consumer focused relationship between state and citizen – and a truly co-produced environment. The co-created nature of the social web makes this a good place to start, but as we are finding with the pilot process there are practical and cultural problems which Local Authorities need to overcome in order to build on this. Part of this is understanding and managing risks – both actual and perceived – and other parts is managing the new skills and processes that are needed to underpinned such a shift.

With the Virtual Town Hall we are taking it in steps – and the first one of these is to start listening to the social web conversations and actually interacting with them. We bring them into one place so that this can be done efficiently, so that we can see how people relate to each other and also so that we can establish identity – accountability being one of the biggest differences between social web and democratic decision making. Once this sense of shared space is established then the next step is to actually start connecting this space into the decision making process – but that’s for another post.

PS Much of this post was based on a paper I wrote for the eDem2009 conference in Vienna last year.

 

Chorley snow tweets

You’ll have noticed its been snowing….and there has been lots of twitter action at #uksnow (interesting article on this here).  I have been keeping a vague eye on the the council’s using twitter to communicate snow information as these kinds of ‘crisis comms’ needs is one of the ways we see the Virtual Town Hall being used.  However I wanted to note what Chorley have been doing as its the best practice I have seen and I am wondering if there is anyone else using twitter in the same way.  I’ve grabbed a couple of excerpts below (full feed at http://twitter.com/ChorleyCouncil but things I have noted are:

• The tone – its informative but also informal – just right I think
• They are responding to incoming tweets – and look at the times – this is not just 9-5
• They are giving real time information!
• There is a real sense of a human being here which I think makes all the difference – but they are not actually offering different info to the Council website – just doing it in a way that makes sense in the context of twitter

And also this:

I am sure that many people have seen this but I just wanted to keep a note of it as its such a good example.  I thought of doing this as a compare/contrast piece as there are a lot of council’s using twitter to put out press releases etc which I don’t think is nearly as effective as what Chorley are doing – and I started to get fairly judgemetal about the fact.  However given that far more council’s are not using it at all I think anyone who is giving this a go needs to be thanked – and I think its better to note the best practice and hope we can learn from it – must be the Christmas spirit!!

 

Social Police…..

I had a really interesting morning last week at the Policing Pledge conference which was aimed at best practice around the new policing pledge.  I ran two workshops and I wanted to share the slides here:

The groups where both very tolerant of both my crazed enthusiasm for the subject and also of my relative ignorance of the policing world, however as we got going it became clear that, not surprisingly, many of the concerns and issues are shared with Local Government.

You’ll see in the presentation a couple of excellent examples of best practice in this area.  You should definitely check out this video and have a look at http://twitter.com/hotelalpha9 from Podnosh

The big difference between the Police and Local Government is of course the democratic aspect – talking to these folks was far more ‘operational’ and while there is a real need an appetite for getting feedback from the community it is a very different prospect when this is not political (at least not to the same extent).

I also felt there was a different attitude to risk. We were all clear that there are real reputational risks that come with social web projects – however for most of the people in the room these were manageable and a necessary cost of ‘doing business’ in this way and for one contributor a lot more manageable than having to attend 600 community meeting a year! Perhaps this is a function of the fact that a PCSO is far more autonomous than many Council officers but I felt there was far more willingness to make these tools available to front-line staff than I see in many Councils. Now – this may be grossly unfair – and it certainly is if I think about the Virtual Town Hall pilot sites, and others, who are very bold in experimenting with social media – so I will need to think more about it – I reserve the write to edit myself once I have considered this more and met some more police folks….

I also want to point you at Mark Payne’s blog who is a Chief Inspector @ West Midlands Police Authority. This post really sums why the public sector need to get involved in this:

“Can anybody really look five years ahead and say that their force won’t need to be using social media? A whole generation of people – our communities – are growing up (or growing older) using social media as their primary communications tool. They are not going to stop. By failing to engage with them in this area, we are allowing people to become more and more remote from their officers.”

 

More on those community ambassadors – and a picture

I meant to blog this at the weekend but annual tree decorating party got in the way. As the halls are now fully decked with boughs of holly (and a lot of paper chains thanks to extensive child labour) normal blogging resumes…..

I wanted to capture some thoughts about the community ambassador role which is fairly central to the whole Virtual Town Hall concept. In short – we are planning on creating a network of community ambassadors who will mediate between the wider social web and the civic space which we are creating. We want to do this for a couple of reasons:

• If the whole point of this is the fact that there are existing conversations that we want to invite into a shared space we should be connecting the people having these conversations!
• We think the public can moderate themselves – they don’t need government to do it for them
• It’s a lot more sustainable than expecting huge resources from council’s to do this work

You can read here what my first thoughts on this role and I don’t think the person description has changed much – buts but needless to say – having met some potential ambassadors it is clear that I had both over complicated and over simplified what might be needed.

This thought comes from a particularly useful meeting at Essex last week where I met some potential ambassadors and got their view directly on the project. They were largely positive – though expressing some concerns as to whether the Council really understood what they were getting themselves into and whether, if the project is successful it will be resourced properly. Hopefully we were able to reassure them – but I think it is a very legitimate concern as we are asking for them to commit time to the project. This also built on the work at the North Lincs meeting where we met some other potential ambassadors.

Before I get into details though a big piece of feedback that has come from all of the community folks I have spoken to which will need to be resolved by Councils I think:

• Be sociable: This is a person driven environment so make sure that you have identifiable individuals
• Postal based turnaround times will not be good enough – you need to think about how you can respond quickly – even if it is just with an acknowledgement

However the main point of this post is to highlight the fact that a community ambassador could be far more things than we originally started imagining it as. The diagram below shows the map so far but I expect this to grow:

A few observations about this:

• Why not. The reason we tried to define a role was to recruit people – we don’t need that definition if we are able to find people who are interested. We should perhaps instead focus on defining tasks and then ask for volunteers to do those
• That being said there is a need to give people an actual role of some kind so that they know when they are speaking for the Civic Space. Someone at the meeting suggested ‘Advocate’ as someone who would help other citizens navigate the democratic space
• If we start to rethink the community ambassador role we perhaps start to relieve some of the tensions that might have been set up between this and the role of the representative. If we think of tasks and not people then the role is not a representative one – though if you carried out all of the tasks you should arguably be standing for election. Perhaps this is where our 21st Century Councillors come from as we start to break down the process of democracy into measurable and discrete tasks and parcel it out – anyone who is prepared to take a large share of this should be able to stand for election!
• There is a marked difference between how we should be dealing with effective individuals – the social reporters – and people who are managing local community sites. Their motivations and concerns are really different and we have to reflect this in the roles that they have within the Civic Space.

 

And another workshop – Kirklees

Ok then – this is the last of this year’s workshop posts as I think the Redbridge session will fall into next year now.

We had an excellent day at Kirklees which also spent some time talking technology and trying to develop the fit with the existing 21^st Century Councillor work which is being undertaken.  Lots of opportunities there we think which I will detail once we have firmed it up a bit.  We also then ran through some detailed project planning and ideas for how we connect the Virtual Town Hall to other agendas which was very useful for me in terms of seeing the project rather than from my socio-techno-evangelist bubble.

We then had a workshop session with officers which was great – they really engaged with the idea and we talked out some of the nuances of the relationship between this work and the way that they are already looking at innovating around the customer relationship.  As a group they managed to balance a proper appreciation for exactly how radical this idea potentially with a sense of how to move it forward in a managed risk kind of way.  No surprise then that we had an excellent ‘scenarios of doom’ session and we have a first draft of a really manageable risk register for the project – I will do a post of the project risk register once we have got it all agreed with the participants and I check which of the risks they are happy for me to talk about here.

We then met with a few of the members who are part of the 21^st Century Councillor project.  We had a good debate here as well but I was very rightly pulled up on excessive use of jargon – I must find a way to talk about widgets which makes sense to people who are not into this stuff.

I think this really links to my thoughts after the North Lincs session and is a really timely reminder that we have to think through what this all means for people who are not digitally engaged as well as the people who are.  There is no point in a renegotiated citizen / government relationship with only part of the population.  It is all very well with a pilot project to look at the people who are already ‘opted in’ but we also need to be clear about the limits and boundaries of this approach in that you cannot expect everyone to want to engage in this way.

More academically I think this links to something that I need to be really careful of in my research work – it’s important that my enthusiasm for this idea and this approach does not effect what should be a neutral assessment of the factual outcomes of the pilot.  I need to ensure that I do not introduce bias into this process though my own (strongly held!) opinions.  I think this is one of the things which makes it much more difficult to be a practitioner / researcher than to be a more neutral academic – but I also think it can lead to a much richer understanding of  the results.  I have some driving time this week and I think it will be spent thinking about a bigger picture which encompasses online and offline and starts to look at this as one of the boundaries we are trying to effect along with the move from informal to formal participation.

 

Virtual Town Hall Workshop: North Lincs

The workshop at North Lincolnshire was slightly different to the others because it also involved some potential community ambassadors for the first half of the day.
The team had put out a general notice about the event and so we were joined by a range of people from the council (including someone who works with local volunteers which was great), a couple of town/parish councillors, a local blogger as well as a Local PCSO. This made for a really different debate as a lot of the focus was on discussing the right mix within a team of community ambassadors. We looked at the following factors within this discussion:

• Socio-economic background
• Life circumstances – we want people with young families, retired people, single people etc etc – a real mix of service users
• Age
• Rural / Urban – basically a good geographic mix across the area
• Ethnicity
• Gender (this one was mine but the team let me keep it in!)

I think there is a real debate to be had as to how the community ambassador role interplays with the role of the member – and I know the team at Kirklees are looking more closely at this. In terms of having town councillors there I think this could be a really interesting development as their role is fairly limited at present and could be really enhanced with more online engagement – though this may then set up tensions with other members.

Once again we had the reassuring experience of all the participants agreeing with the basic premise of the project – but as this is a self-selecting group it is perhaps not surprising. Once the sites are live then I think we need to do more work around how we find the people who aren’t immediately sold on the concept and to find out how (and if) they would want to be involved. Once idea has been to have an online representative of a community that prefers to stay offline. This makes me think of the work that Peter Cruikshank is doing on self-efficacy which worth taking a look at as we start to try and understand why some people choose not to participate at all – let alone online.

The team at North Lincs had done a great job with the social web audit – partly because they had really dug down to use ‘real’ words for the location searches.  Their report shows the increased activity if you drill down from North Lincolnshire, to North Lincs, to Scunthorpe and finally to Scunny – which is where they found most results.  I think this is a tip that all the other sites should take advantage of.

We also had a really good discussion of the social web contract – which will be shared by members, officers and citizens who participate in the space – and I think we will have a working draft of this very soon.

The day finished with a crazed 20 minute brainstorm which has resulted in a name for the site – we all agree that “Virtual Town Hall” is good for the project but not for the specific sites – more news later on what this actually is!

 

Virtual Town Hall workshop @ Chorley

Just a quick note on my excellent day in Chorley on Monday. We were running through the internal workshop agenda for the Virtual Town Hall project which is aimed at:

• Project management stuff:

1. Getting the internal team fully briefed on the project
2. Getting support from senior managers and from key members
3. Giving an overview of the technology and thinking through which widgets are to be used

• Trying to decide what to call it!!!
• Reviewing the social web audits
• Discussing the social web contract – this is a single document for Members, Officers and Citizens which also covers details of what the actual democratic promises being made on the site are
• Deciding on who to approach to be community ambassadors

This question of what to call the web spaces is increasingly vexed. Virtual Town Hall works really well in very defined areas but has a risk firstly of sounding too ‘council’ and secondly of alienating anyone who feels that live in another town that we are trying to reach and ‘Citizenscape’ is rather esoteric. I am trying to issue a moratorium on using words and phrases like ‘Involve’ and ‘Have your say’ as these have been rather done to death but at this point we get stuck!! Next plan is to speak to the community ambassadors and ask them what they want to call it.

In terms of the social web audits – we are currently breaking these down into these areas:

This is to try and make a distinction between formally managed content and citizen generated content as well as making a differential between active individuals and active groups. These are further divided into ‘networked publics’ and online communities as these have very different characteristics. I will post more another time about how we do the research for these.
Part of the session discussed the issue of digital identity and what would be needed in order to free Officers in order to be able to participate firstly as officers but also as members of the community. This is an issue across all sites and at present we are moving forward cautiously. This first step is to ensure that the project teams can all engage online as representing the council – the next step will be exploring the use of ‘experts’ within the council in order to respond to specific topics and consultations. The thorny issue of officers actually being able to respond freely is yet to be addressed but will stay on the agenda.

Good session with members which as ever helped to remind me that these spaces are going to be, and should be, political and that we shouldn’t be afraid of this.

We finished with my favourite ‘scenario’s of doom’ session were we all try and think of the worst thing that can happen so we can get a risk management plan in place – excellent doom from Chorley all of which is now in the risk register!!!!.