Easy Barnet – a new relationship with citizens?

I have been meaning to write this post for a couple of weeks – ever since I saw an excellent presentation on the work at Barnet at a session at the SOLACE annual conference.  the workshop was shared between Max Wilde (who in the Barnet lead for the project) and Nicola Millard (who is the excellently titled BT futurologist).  One of the striking things about this combination was the balance between commercial / public sector.  What also leapt out at me was the fact that much of the work at Barnet is highlighting the tension between residents as customers and residents as citizens.

The Local Democracy blog has a good post on this which is worth a read and they also quote at length from the latest Barnet report which you can find here. The folks at Barnet are obviously trying something fairly radical – and as part of that they really do seem to be trying to “create a new relationship with citizens.”  But I guess my interest here is whether they are trying to create ’super-consumers’ who are individually engaged in creating the best services for them as individuals or whether they are able to transcend the customer relationship and start a conversation about community and about shared resources – are they actually engaging in democracy?

The Public Sector clearly has to innovate – radically  – in order both the save money but more importantly to stay relevant to people’s lives.  Local Authorities should be at the forefront of this because local government is the only kind that actually feels relevant to most people’s lives.  However, to connect these innovations entirely with an efficiency agenda is a very bleak prospect.  Sometimes, things we want for our community will cost money.  Community is not just about services – it’s about the connections between people which go beyond services.  If we only seek to innovate and to engage people in talking about these services then we are ignoring the fabric of the community which connects it all together.

There is so much in the work at Barnet that warrants watching and considering.  But I do go back to my underlying belief that design assumptions really matter – and that if you design a space and a process around the idea of cost efficiencies then this will be what you get.  No-one can deny that there is a need to do this – the process of government needs to be cost-effective – but if this your only design assumption then I think that you end up with something colder and less inclusive than the communities which many people want to live in.

I think its very easy to be decieved by the social web – it feels like a place where the individual creates the space and where intellectual freedom is paramount.  However for many people that is something of an illusion – many people really only experience the social web within spaces like Facebook which are entirely engineered in order to support the ad revenues which support the site’s existence.  Now – you can say that this is a fair exchange – free sites with a few adverts – but I really want something better for my democratic spaces.

Not really sure where this post is going – perhaps I read too much Howard Rheingold at a formative point – but I will carry on musing on it……

 

 

Virtual Town Hall – October Project meeting

We had our second VirtualTH project meeting yesterday so this is just a short update on that.  The pilot is now full with Kirklees and Redbridge joining Chorley, Essex CC and North Lincs as pilot sites.  We are also lucky to have Carl Haggerty participate as a ‘critical friend’ on the technology strand which is hugely helpful.  We have got an excellent balance of sites in the pilot now and I will document them in more detail at a later date.  The addition of Kirklees is of particular interest as we are running the VirtualTH alongside their 21st Century Councillor project – which is a great fit.

For th pilot however the focus right now is on two things:

• Technical build – getting the pilot sites up and running
• Recruiting the community ambassadors who are going to actually make these sites work

The technical stuff is moving along well and we had a fairly complete demo – including Ady making good on our claim that you can build a new page in 10 minutes.  More on the sites in a month or so once the team have had chance to get each of the pilots properly set up.

However interesting the technology is (and it really is if you like that kind of stuff) it is, in my view, clear that this is not the difficult part of the project.  The real issue is of course in the social stuff.  We are approaching this as follows:

1. Carrying out a ‘social web’ audit so that we can get a picture of what is going on already.  We’re breaking activity into News / Council content  / Blogs & social reporters / Social networking.  This exercise has clearly shown which sites already have relationships with the social web presence in their area and where we need to start making those connections
2. Once we have this in place then we need to identify the community ambassadors – real people who are going to be involved in spreading the word about the project using social tools as well as moderating some of the content.
3. We then need to get a draft social web policy in place for use with citizens, officers and members

We are now planning workshops at each of the sites which will help bring internal and external teams together as well as briefing members and generally getting people ready to use the sites.

There were a number of interesting debates during the day but the one which really struck me was around the social web policy.  Firstly, we have decided to have the same document for use by the external content providers as for officers and members.  I think this is an important change as it points towards the sense of co-creation which we are trying to achieve but by combining the internal and external audiences we highlight the issue as to how possible it is for officers to participate as citizens.  When we asked whether people felt that they could express their personal opinions online there was, I felt, a real sense that whatever the policy said about officers being free to express their opinions if they did it in the appropriate way that no-one thought that it would ‘work’ to take a position which was, however constructively, in opposition to council policy.  And this is a huge problem – officers are amongst the most community minded and engaged individuals in the community and if they are effectively silenced online then not only is that not democratic it is also missing a big opportunity to encourage and increase democratic activity.  I think this is an issue which we will return to as we tease out what the idea of virtual civic space really means.

Finally, we all agreed that part of the ‘education’ process that we need to undertake is around digital identity management – it’s about helping people grow a civic persona and make some choices as to how they do that.  A more sophisticated approach on this will mitigate the officer/citizen dilemma as well as help allay concerns which also emerge around the customer/citizen axis.

Thanks again to all who took part – am looking forward to the workshops and also the promise of sausages and mulled wine at our next meeting!!

 

Social contracts for social websites

Though I am getting very excited about the technology for the virtual town hall (sad I know) the real challenges are I think in the social elements of creating a permanent civic space – a local public sphere (yes – lots of Habermas read this weekend).   There are three main social challenges in my view:

• The need to involve community ambassadors and all the challenges that working with volunteers and community activists brings (as well as the challenges for them of working with government!)
• The need to find a way to unlock the dual roles of the council officer /  citizen and to help them to find a voice and a role in these new spaces
• The need to put in place a social contract that will let the civic space include unmoderated comments from external sites without compromising the quality or effectiveness of these spaces – and without becoming an unmanageable risk for government

This last one is the issue that I am focusing on most at the moment as we are currently finishing the social web audits for each pilot site and this means that we are starting to get a picture of the social web activity at each location.  With that in mind we can now start to approach community groups and individuals to ask them if they want to be involved and have their content connected to the Virtual Town Hall (VTH) – at the same time as accepting a ‘democracy widget’ for their site.

Now – I think it is critical that this content is not moderated in any way by the host (in this case the local council) as it is essential that the VTH space is co-created and not ‘owned’ by government.  All of the pilots agree this but there are still issues of risk and appropriateness to be managed as it is naive to think that the council can host this without some kind of  process in place to managed to type of content.  It’s all about balance.

Our solution will be in social web contracts which will be agreed with each of the sites which have a presence on the VTH.  The main elements of these contracts will be:

• A common code of conduct in terms of language and behaviour – all the usual stuff about not swearing , being constructive and not getting personal
• Something about the degree to which party politics should be involved – clearly these sites are political but one of the biggest concerns that we are hearing is the idea that the sites will fall into the trap of party political point scoring – and this is a legitimate risk that needs to be managed in some way
• An indication of what the social contract will achieve – what the council is offering in return.  This will be in the way of confirming access to politicians, assistance with process or perhaps just better feedback and information.  I think this element is one of the most important but will need a discussion on a site by site basis.
• A clear process for what happens if the contract is breached
• Some due diligence about IP and copyright etc

We will be basing some of this work on the existing social networking policies which are already in place (see post below) but obviously this is all fairly new and any views would be very welcome!

 

What do I actually mean by the virtual town hall?

I realise that I keep mentioning it but haven’t actually described what I mean. Here are the main points of the kind of space I am imagining:

• Its designed to incorporate and respond to the next online fad – and the one after that. Its just not efficient for you to keep reinventing your strategy and infrastructure every time the internet herd starts grazing somewhere new. You need a strategy which gets the best out of new technologies and uses new social spaces but always with the aim of bringing the democratic conversation home to a place where it can be had effectively. This really means a native web 2.0 architecture.
• It’s a co-created space. This doesn’t mean its all top down – for a space to be truly democratic it needs to be co-created with all stakeholders having a sense of ownership and stewardship over the space. A single destination for all democracy and engagement activities Your virtual town hall is somewhere where the citizen goes online to act like a citizen – to carry out their civic role. This means it has to have certain ‘rules of engagement’ as does any well run debate.
• Its moderated and managed – by all of the stakeholders.  For the sake of sustainability (you can’t moderate all this content with offices) and to reinforce the sense of co-creation you need to have those rules negotiated with and then managed by members of all the stakeholder groups – yes you need community moderators.
• Content is accountable and transparent. Council’s (or other democratic bodies) can’t make decisions on the basis of how many people join a facebook group – you need to know who is saying what. This doesn’t mean you can’t use screen names have people stay anonymous to the general public – but there has to be the sense that you are accountable for what you say in the civic space.

This is turning into something of a manifesto!!  I’ll go away and see if I can streamline things a bit more

 

Conferences and co-operation in The North

I have been out and about again over the last couple of weeks and the deadline for my research proposal is looming hence the lack of posts. I spent most of the weekend in the back of a VW campervan (hired from the excellent VWCampervans) on the Isle of Wight checking citations for the proposal so now seems like an excellent point to try and add a couple of thoughts to the blog. Its a beautiful day and as long as I can persuade my husband to make me another cup of tea then all will be well!

The week before last we were at out review for the eParticipate project which happily went very well and before that I was up in “The North” talking to a couple of councils about webcasting and also the virtual town hall pilot we are trying to pull together. In the course of this I met the excellent folks at Chorley who are doing some really good trials and experiments with social websites (check out their YouTube video). They seem to have hit just the right tone with this – its still council communications but it fits with the channel they are using really well.

This week I was once again in the North but this time it was Sheffield for the annual LGComms conference. It was a really good conference and I hope the team are pleased as it went very smoothly. We did some short reportage pieces from the event which you can view on YouTube and will be doing a longer edited piece as well. I did a workshop on social web stuff as well which I think went well (though clearly you will need to ask the participants!). The session was aimed at trying to put together some kind of strategic response to the now familiar “what are we going to do about Facebook” question. I think enough councils have experimented with these sites now for us all to need to start thinking beyond the thrill of getting 300 new friends to a strategic response which will still be relevant in three years time. Crucially this cannot just be a technology response – we need to have fit for purpose technology but we also need a strategy that addresses the social element of the web. At one level what we are really talking about is a strategy for the networked society.

The Virtual Town Hall project is intended to be a response to this strategic need because a keystone part of any strategy will be the need for Local Government to own the relationships with citizens rather than just chase them from site to site. Another part of a longer term strategy will be how the council organises themselves in order to support this new way of interfacing with citizens (at the same time as keeping the offline methods working too). Three main observations about this:

• In the same way as every conversation with a member of the public is a communication opportunity (how many times have you been asked about rubbish collections while in the pub!) councils will need to equip all staff who are online to talk to the public appropriately
• You will not be able to manage all of the moderation within Councils – citizens will need to be involved and used as a resource to do this (which links in very well to the idea of co-creation.
• The citizen relationship has always been managed from multiple locations within the council but with a shared environment like Facebook you will need to get organised – this probably means a loose coalition of democratic services, community engagement, communications and customer service in order to make this really work

 

The Network Society and a whole new load of reading….

Busy weekend with lots of literature review as well as proposal writing for EU funded projects.  I have also been reading around ideas of co-creation as well the Network Society this weekend.  Both of these are going to be fairly central within my literature review.

The network or information society is a way of describing the intrinsically connected way in which society now functions in terms of data, processes and increasingly people.  These terms are being used in the same way as the agricultural and then industrial revolutions are discussed and is widely regarded as a paradigm shift in the way which society works.  What is less clear of course is what this shift way which is why Frank Webster’s book “Theories of the Information Society” is so interesting as it critiques a number of different interpretations of what the fact that once we are online we can reach so many people and ideas actually means.  I am focusing on two main thinkers in this area – both of which I will need to write more on:

• Jurgen Habermas and his ideas of the existence and importance of the “Public Sphere” where social discourse should happen.
• Manual Castells and his ideas around  the implications of our main exposure to politics being exposure the media

This is obviously vastly over-simplifying things but these two thoughts are both ones which I am now reading more about.

Co-creation is also a central tenant of the CitizenScape approach I am advocating as it describes the way in which I believe that the sites that support democratic discourse need to be truly co-created by all contributors – both government and citizens.  Co-creation can be approached in two ways;  firstly as a tool of citizen engagement of the kind discussed in the seminal Arnstein article or as mass collaboration described in the crowd sourcing crowd pleaser wikinomics.  I am attempting a kind of ‘meet in the middle’ argument with these two ideas as I make the case that mass collaboration techniques need to be applied to democratic discussion in order to ensure that citizens are properly engaged in democracy.

 

Council rules of engagement for the social web: V0.0

Well the good thing about this research proposal writing is that it does get me thinking about other things in a massive work avoidance scheme. That and the fact the day is so beautiful means that progress on the main project is slow!!

Anyway, I have been thinking more about the tension that councils face between the need to set content free online in order to respond to the people’s expectations around “web 2.0” (and to benefit from its potential) and the equally strong need to ensure that this content is managed responsibly. This is a major cultural shift for most councils – away from a ‘command and control’ stance and towards something far more collaborative. I am just talking here about democratic and consultative content though there is also a conversation to be had about web 2.0 transactional services I am not the person to have it!

Its very easy to say that its all public content and so should be made publicly available because this is obviously true – but that doesn’t really get us anywhere. The difficulty comes in the complexities of the information and the fact that dealt with out of context many parts of the democratic conversation can be confusing and misleading. Data is only information when people understand it.

There is a huge amount of experimentation needed to work though the question as to how Council’s should present themselves online but I think that there needs to be at least an initial ‘rules of engagement’ conversation within the council so that all the people involved – officers, members and citizens – are engaged in this experimentation. This is the perpetual beta after all and the more people you get testing the better….

So – to start building those rules of engagement these are the questions and principles I would get a council to consider (some of these are from the earlier post of webcast meetings):

• There is a basic principle that public content should be public – and online this means it should be portable and reusable

• Context is important – it does not help the democratic debate if people do not have access to the full discussion and its complexities. Therefore content needs to be made portable in a way which keeps the integrity of the discussion intact - perhaps by chopping content into agenda items for instance and keeping links to explanatory documents

• There needs to be traceability and the means to draw the viewer back to the formal civic space to react to the  content if they want to.  It would be a shame to get more eyeballs and not use them democratically
• Think about the behaviours you want to encourage as much as the behaviours you want to avoid
• Individuals as well as content need to be identifiable and traceable – and therefore accountable. This means citizens as well as officers and members
• Debate is important wherever it happens – but if you want it to end in a decision or action then it needs to be in a format and place that the decision makers can respond to
• Any moderation must be done in conjunction with citizens and if at all possible by citizens. This is best way of achieving a co-created debate as well as the most sustainable model in the long term

I think these ideas need to be debated with citizens as well as elected representatives and I think council officers need to facilitate them. We are doing something along these lines with Citizenscape so I will report back on progress there once we have run a few of the workshops. Am sure I will change my mind 3 times in the course of that process so will report back on that as well.