Curiouscatherine’s Blog

I’ve been rather focused this week on getting the paper I needed to get finished in order to explain the Virtual Town Hall concept and finish recruiting people for the pilot.  I’ve spoken to a lot of people in principle and had some very positive noises – now is the time to actually get the detailed sorted out.  I then of course had to write a two page summary document as few people will want to read the whole thing!!!

The pilots should get going in October and we are looking for 4-6 councils who are happy to join a shared project where they can learn from each other during the 12 month period as well as trying out the Virtual Town Hall idea. I am hoping to create a good mix of participants from different types of councils on a number of different criteria:

• Type of council (District/County/Unitary etc)

• Geographical location

• Size

• Urban / Rural / Suburban

I’ve also been working on the initial questionnaire and one of the things which is currently exercising me is coming up with a list of formal democratic actions that I can then measure any increases in over the course of the project.  So far I have:

• Vote

• Attend a council meeting
• Attend a public meeting

• Attend a local community meeting

• Stand as a councillor

• Respond to a council consultation

• Respond to a council question

• Respond to a government consultation

• Sign a petition

But this does not seem quite right so I am now looking for pre-existing lists of such things as I can’t believe such a thing doesn’t already exist – I would be very grateful for suggestions on this.

I went to an interesting seminar today at the CLG where Prof. Lawrence Pratchett and Dr Catherine Durose from De Montfort University talked about a recent systematic review they have carried out of a number of different empowerment tools.  You can find the full report on the CLG site and its excellent to see someone looking at stuff that has already happened rather than running around trying to start something new the whole time.

The research picks up 6 tools but the 3 of these I am interested in specifically are:

• Participatory budgeting
• Petitions
• eParticipation

I think in the research and discussion it was clear that the first two of these are far more tangible and as such can more clearly be evaluated.  eParticipation was not defined well enough for my liking and seemed to talk too much about eForums which is such a small part of the potential.  Where things did get interesting however was in talking about the link between empowerment and co-design – which is a connection I see very strongly.  Co-design seems to be a necessary part of empowerment but this brings a few problems that need addressing:

• Does Local Goverment really want to share power?
• Do the citizens really want to be shared with?
• What’s the role of the representative
• Is it sustainable

These are very much in common with the problems that I want to address within the virtual town hall approach – and this makes sense as the project is in some way a response to the empowerment agenda.

The seminar also made it clear to me how inadequate a tool based approach to empowerment is – you need a clear idea of what you want to create and a strategic vision for achieving this that goes beyond the tactical.  This worries me because we are not even starting to have the debate around this with decision makers even though those of us thinking about these issues knows its essential.  However much we prefer to do this by stealth we need to lobby and educate on a far wider basis if we are going to make these changes happen and I am not sure who is doing this or how it will happen – answers on the proverbial postcard please!!!!

PS  The other tools were Citizen Governance, Redress and Asset Transfer – also all very interesting but I do try and stay on topic when I can!!

I was in Ireland this week helping to run a Citizenscape workshop in Donegal (one of the pilot sites). We are looking to involve Youth Councillors and other young people as community moderators (Just as an aside – I really struggle with what to call these folks as a group – “young people” makes me feel like we are talking about them as an alien race but what else do you use? For now I will call them the folks at Donegal and you’ll have to remember that they are all under 25!). It was a really enjoyable session and I am looking forward to working with this lot as they campaign around getting government buildings using sustainable energy and getting more cycling lanes in Donegal.

Anyway – this post is really an action research note on the workshop to help improve the format etc for next time and then highlight points for future research so brace yourselves – its long.

The aim of the workshop was threefold:

• Identify a topic that they wanted to work with

• Make sure they were all comfortable using all the technology involved – including filming short pieces to camera

• Get to a common agreement around how the site would be moderated and agree some immediate actions to get things moving

Overall the workshop was run very loosely as its difficult to know in advance where the participants would like to focus it. Next time I do this I will try and spend more time on the actual topic – we got rather carried away with the technology stuff which was fine with this group as they were interested but I will try and bring the balance back on the content. I think it would also be good to have a stand campaign template that people could start to complete in the workshop as a takeaway.

The first section of the day however was a discussion of current web tools that the team already use – so that we could then relate them to a citizenscape context. We organised the data in these catagories:

• 1 to 1 tools where you know the person (or people) you are communicating with well. These tools include: SMS / MMS / Email / Skype

• 1 to Many tools where you are is a shared space of people that you may not know in person. These broke down further into two groups: Social and Themed

• The internet out in the wild with no really social aspect. General sites and services included:  Google,Music Download, Yahoo

I am doing a more detailed analysis on this as the catagorisation fits in with my wider theoretical framework that I am using for evaluation. However there are a few particular themes I wanted to pull out of this session which I will pick up on in my focus groups for the project evaluation:

• Privacy / Safety – the group were reassuring aware of online safety and were careful about what details they revealed online.

• Identity – they were also sophisticated about the need to have different personae online and were comfortable with the idea that you might have a specific persona for a specific purpose.

• Space and place – in discussing the way in which we were catagorising the sites/services they had all listed there was clear agreement about the different social spheres that these worked for. There was a sense of appropriate spaces for different activities and when we started talking about campaigning we were able to talk about how we can use these different social spheres to contact different people.

• This is stating the obvious perhaps but there was a huge difference in the level of online skills when compared to an older group. I would like to explore this more and look at doing more mixed age groups.

• Also stating the obvious there was a big skills gap between the participants and the youth workers which would need to be addressed in future iterations. Happily the officers for this group were also really enthusiastic and used the event as a real chance to learn – but this could be a barrier with other sites and needs to be looked at

• There were no gamers in this group – but they said this was not typical and we should keep an eye out on other groups.

The other thing to note is that the two of the main propositions around citizenscape – that you can use the Social Web to find people who are interested in stuff and that you need a specific place to talk about ‘civic’ issues both stood up to scrutiny here which is reassuring.

If anyone is interested I can share the workshop plan etc.

PS If anyone from the workshop is reading then I am very concious that I have not met the interesting blog criteria of having photos and I know this is too long – I promise I will try harder next time you you know know how I like to talk!!

I have for some time now been struggling with the idea of Twitter. At first I was worried that this was a sign of aging and I had reached my personal limit in terms of new innovations but thankfully I am still filled with excitement about the idea of the new Palm Pre and the possibility of a Google OS netbook – I have also managed to form my Twitter objections into a coherent argument rather than a short grumble so all is not lost. Twitter had troubled me on two main fronts:

• Its yet more noise. I (like many people) spend a lot of energy trying to make my life quieter and simpler and the idea that everyone I know could be giving me constant updates on what they were up to fills me with horror – it just feels like noise. Now, obviously all the people I know would only tweet with great profundity but even so – that’s a lot of information I don’t think I actually need

• I am not sure that anything important can be said in only 140 characters.

That being said there have been some striking examples of Twitter being used – in particular around real time news and this move to real time web is perhaps the crux of what is interesting about Twitter. It speaks to the idea of pervasive technology and a confirmation of the underlying assumption of constant connectivity.  Have a read of this as its another take on this thought.

But as ever I wonder what the use is for Local Government – how can we use it – and I think Twitter should be thought about in terms of listening and not in terms of talking and this makes things make much more sense.

If people want to tweet then let them knock themselves out! The most accessible description of Twitter I had was in relation to the way in which flocks of birds communicate – one cheep at a time!! If we can develop ways to listen to these cheeps and tweets, and to select the right ones to listen to then we can can listen and learn to the public. Search companies are already trying this with big global topics like swine flu but if Twitter, or other real time web tools, continue to grow then it should start to be true on a local level as well. Interesting…..

Its a bit of a segue but has anyone else noticed that the Wimbledon commentators have all been talking about players needing to ‘change up’?  Is this a sign that Henman et al have been getting all street from watching The Wire???

Brace yourelf – its a long one…..

I am working on the theoretical framework for my thesis at the moment and so trying to establish its firm roots in the idea of a ‘network society’. The idea that we have moved into a post-industrial information age is well entrenched in current thinking (Webster 2006) with the ‘informationisation’ of the world advanced and increasing in pace and I am clearly positioning my work well within this sphere. The choice of technological, spatial, cultural economic approaches to this space are all appealing in different ways but I feel that the physical metaphor of the virtual town hall is leading me towards a spatial approach where I look at the network effect and its relationships in spatial terms rather than in economic ideas of exchange or a purely technological reading of the world. I think this allows me to more easily connect the ideas associated with localisam which I think are essential to the reinvigoration of democratic participation. This is not to say that I ignore cultural or indeed economic interpretations (though I may well trash the idea of a technological filter for the world) but the main thrust of the way that I view the network society is via the lens of connections between people and the changes in barriers of time and place. Cultural changes such as the malleability of identity can, I believe, be viewed mainly through that lens as a consequence of the spatial changes rather than a first principle effect. People use identity in a more malleable way online primarily because they can’t be as easily observed – i.e. a spatial effect – rather than any economic benefit for example.

But I also think that we need to look at more than a spatial analysis and consider the impact of changes in the way that timings of events can be changed. I have referred before to the idea of internet dog years – the point being that ideas move faster online in the same way as a dog year is the same as 7 human years – because I think that this speed effects outcomes. I talk about the ‘wildfire’ effect which is the way that the viral nature of the online world means that when ideas do take hold they move faster from person to person and as a result rapidly bombard us from multiple locations – and perhaps get greater credence as a result of this. And to move back to a spatial analysis objectives moving quickly startle us because of their speed and not necessarily their size or shape.

But what does this mean in terms of how I would go about building the virtual town hall?

• Firstly I think it means that we need to consider time as well as place when we describe the virtual architecture. In trying to create the ‘lift off’ effect needed in the sense off enlivening an online community it is not only the number of posts that needs considering but also the temporal proximity.
• We also need to build for the terribly short length of current attention spans online – at the same time as drawing people towards longer and richer interactions.
• One of the other consequences may be that I need to pay careful attention to within the metrics is the time spent on specific activities and that things taking longer are valued more highly enroute to engendering the more active citizen – interesting when you think that one of the benefits of petitioning is the speed with which you can do it and that one of the drawbacks is the dangers of mob rule over measured debate.

All of this may boil down to the fact that I think very visually and tend to imagine ideas in terms of shapes and relationships – and that I prefer the idea of evolution of society in the same way as I choose to live in a really old house with really good broadband to a new build with the same technology. Either way I think that a spatial / temporal analysis of the world will help to visualise and connect the ideas of the virtual town hall to actual communities as I start to develop the framework of engagement.