Curiouscatherine’s Blog

Interesting article today from the Guardian – talking about the fact the BBC are planning a major website re-write with social media at the heart of things.  You can read the article here.

At Public-i where we do a lot of work using video for democratic projects we really saw a huge boost from the iPlayer – it seemed to take the use of video mainstream in a way that YouTube didn’t.  I know that YouTube created the social network but it was still something your children would do not you – iPlayer is used far more widely demographically speaking.  This is of course an impression – I will dig about in the Ofcom numbers next year to see what they say on this.

Anyway – if the BBC are making social media a central tenet of their new site then this could be the signal for all those councils and government agencies to start using new technologies far more systematically and with more confidence – lets wait and see shall we?

Busy week as we had the kick off meeting for the Virtual Town Hall pilot as well as getting EU funding bids finalised. Both went well! I also met Liz Azyan who, part from being a huge source of knowledge about what people are doing online via her blog has the dubious honour of having actually persuaded me to try twitter – new widget on the side bar to celebrate!!

But this post is really about an intriguing article I read this weekend – I actually found it in The Times but couldn’t find a link – so here it is from marketing week.  But if you don’t fancy clicking on the link I can tell you that Sport England have signed a partnership deal with Facebook to create a sport hub on the platform to try and increase the number of people actually taking part in sport. Now, lots of things about this are interesting:

• Its the first major deal I have come across between Facebook and a government agency
• Its shows a lot of faith in the connection between the online and offline world – we’re not talking about getting people onto wii fit here – this is actual running around
• The article talks about the idea of a ‘hub’ – which seems to be a new kind of facebook furniture – but this is not yet clear

The quote from Facebook in the article talks about “using our social tool as a tool for social change” and this is perhaps the most interesting part of the whole thing.

Now – I have huge doubts about the integrity of an environment like Facebook when discussed in terms of social change. I think that underlying design assumptions are enormously important and I think that Facebook is based on the idea of selling advertising and not on the idea of helping people get away from their computers. However – like it or not Facebook is currently one of our largest networked publics (good article on this here) and as such we need to pay attention to this first foray by government into actually using it to effect social change.

PS  I couldn’t find an ‘official’ press release but will keep an eye out

PPS As you can see its a new look for the blog – I think theme browsing on WordPress may have been developed as the perfect time waster. Please feel free to let me know what you think of it!

I’ve been spending lots of time on petitions this week with a Consultation Institute round table on Thursday and a workshop for members in North Lincs. Both were really interesting with a lot of points raised. It does seem that with the Local Democracy Bill looking like it will get passed fairly soon people are starting to think about how to implement it.

What’s great about workshops is that you always learn something new from participants and this is what I wanted to capture here:

• There are some great connections to be made between the duty to promote democracy and the petitioning. Promoting petitioning supports the duty and leveraging petitioning to encourage other democratic activities then furthers this. Given the fact that the duty to promote democracy will cause some headaches as to how to achieve it I think this is a good connection to make
• We need to make sure members are aware that the signing or supporting of petitions is something that they need to declare – and it might be worth putting that in petitions guidance so that the petitioners are clear on what the Member can and can’t do
• In terms of members – the petitioning could be seen as a tool for them to use alongside the councillor call to action. Call to action will tend to be far more complex but they are both good routes for backbenchers in particular to get a space on the agenda.

As I have said many times my interest in petitions is based around how they are a formal piece of democracy that acts in an informal way. I think I am also seeing how they can be used to emphasis the role of members in these online democratic processes which helps us to mitigate the distinct social web risk of direct democracy overwhelming the representative process.

Just been at the eDem09 conference in Vienna – I will post properly once I am on a proper keyboard and not the phone one but just wanted to capture the headlines:

* lots of talking about social networks and I think a big question was posed as to whether or not politics and democracy can support an entire networked public or, as I believe, we need to be harvesting the discussions from exisiting sites
* The technologists are thankfully dominating the field less and there were great contributions from political scientists, sociologists and media studies/journalism folks
* lots of stuff made me think about ‘the tragedy of the commons’ – more on that later
* will be reading more about self-efficacy thanks to Peter Cruikshank

one last thought – these is still no real sense of which academic field all this falls into and I guess there won’t be one as we gradually drop the ‘e’ and start talking just about democracy and participation.

More anon

We need to remember that if we are going to make the virtual town hall work we have to always remember that its all about the people and we need to make this work in the messy realm of people compromises rather than the tidy world of technology.

One of the underpinning assumptions of the virtual town hall pilot is the idea that we will work with members of the community and train them to be moderators of CitizenScape sites. There are two main reasons for this:

• Communities will respond far better to moderation from within than to moderation from government

• There is no way that Local Government can take on the work of moderating a successful social environment so its best not to build with this as a requirement – it will just limit growth in the future

I have been discussing and thinking about this role a great deal recently and want to capture some thoughts before they disappear into next week’s todo list. We need to come up with a repeatable process for recruiting and then managing these moderators but before we do that we need to clearly define the role and manage the risks as this is a new type of engagement in an online context.

In an offline context there are precedents for working with community representatives which connect back to the ideas of the Arnstein ladder and its top rung of community control. Community representatives have been used extensively to intermediate with the decision making process and connect to the formal environment. This is not a straightforward process as you need to engage with the right people, keep them motivated and then, one the relationship is working, avoid the ‘Usual Suspects’ problem where the community representatives become more similar to your organisation than to the community they are there to represent. You also need to be clear that this is community and not democratic representation and ensure that you are still including elected representatives in the conversation.

[as an aside I really want to look into more detail at the way that these citizen relationships are handled in councils – isn't it odd how far adrift community engagement is from democratic engagement?].

In the online context there is a slightly different role – called moderators – who are responsible for managing and encouraging the online conversations in a particular space. Often people are given moderator status once they have shown themselves to be ‘good citizens’ of a web space and many communities function brilliantly essentially self-moderated by volunteers.

It is this idea that was in my mind when I designed in the idea of community moderators into the Citizenscape proposition and I still think its the right idea. However I was asked an excellent question about the role the other day that really clarified things and made me realise we need to do more work on this: Will they (the moderators) be filtering or moderating content? Of course I thought – in a democratic context there are two roles, as per the community moderators, and we will need to be very clear as to whether the participants are community representatives or community moderators. Apologies if this seems screamingly obvious to you.

So, here is a first description of the role which I will next discuss with the Virtual Town Hall project team:

• Firstly – lets not call them moderators and representatives – the role is something between these two ideas and calling it either things confuses things. At the moment my thought is that we call them Community Ambassadors

• Current thinking is the Community Ambassadors would do four main things:

• Help with offline publicity

• Help to raise awareness of the space out in the wider social web and take part in existing conversations

• Invite relevant conversations from the wider web into the democratic space to connect to the formal process

• Moderate any discussions which are being held on the Citizenscape space

• We need to make sure that succession planning is built into the role – partly to keep things fresh and avoid overburdening individuals but also because we want to avoid the usual suspects problem

• We need to get contracts in place – they will be acting for the council so we need to get the parameters clearly in place

• We need to do the social media guidelines in place as well as the code of conduct so the Community Ambassadors have a clear picture to moderate against

• We need to put some structure around training and ongoing mentoring. The idea is that someone from the council will co-ordinate a team of Community Ambassadors and so we need to figure out the infrastructure needed around this

• We need to ensure that we don’t trip over other community engagement programmes

We probably also need to come up with a profile for the role to help us recruit. I think the basis of this is:

• People who are natural communicators – viral marketers call them sneezers and Robert Putman talks about them as people who provide social glue in Bowling Alone.  We want people who naturally tell their friends and families about what they are doing

• People with existing community networks. Ideally we are plugging into existing networks rather than building new ones

• Civic minded people – they have to see the value in connecting people to the formal process and be able to deal with the frustrations this may bring!!

• Comfortable though not necessarily familiar with technology – we don’t expect to find experienced social networkers (though that would be a bonus) – but we do need them to be willing to learn

I think this forms the backbone of this strand of the project – we’ll flesh it out more when we start work next month.