The Campaign Company Blog

Empowerment to the People!!

Richard Wilson Director of Involve has posted an article on the Guardian Blog about the "empowerment gap" and gives an excellent overview of how the government has sought to tackle it over the last decade.

I commented on it and made 3 points, which I expand on in much greater detail here:

• As Richard points out there has been a lot of progress, but as a result of many of these initiatives being driven by individual government departments through the relationship with relevant local agencies there has been uneven empowerment development across public sector bodies within localities. So for example, some sections of local government (eg, planning) may be far ahead of other departments in the local authority as well as compared to other local bodies like Primary Care Trust's (PCT's). There would be nothing wrong with this if it were a conscious decision arising out of collective local priorities, but this has actually emerged through many, sometimes unconnected, decisions made at various times in separate Whitehall departments. The next stage could be to develop a combined empowerment agenda at Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) level, to enable local public sector and voluntary bodies to advance together and become collectively more accountable to the communities they serve. Ways to achieve this might include: LSP's to jointly commission single public engagement units in each local government area which would benefit from economies of scale with duplication of savings ploughed back into more engagement; agreeing common local standards to various consultations; strengthening the scrutiny function in local government as well as perhaps even developing a formal scrutiny function for MP's over their own local public services?
• Capacity building is vital and part of this requires greater investment in community leadership support and training at a local level. This should not just be aimed at Councillors but should also be targeted at less well-off communities. TCC has already done work on developing local community champions for communities covering specific policy areas like recycling, but also in a wider role. This approach can help develop the local leaders of the future and widen their representativeness and diversity. This would be a broader approach than rely simply on the electoral process in a locality to throw up a small number of individuals who might then receive training from their local authority. Early intervention here can widen the pool of local leaders thus helping to build wider local trust in institutions.
• TCC, in working with PCT's, has discovered that in reviewing services there is an issue around "low expectations" whereby people may say a service is fine because they have no way to compare it with the equivalent in another area: eg you may find that people say they are happy with GP services, even when they do not compare well with somewhere else. This can also be linked to the wider "Delivery Paradox" whereby people say they are satisfied with their local service, but feel the same service is as a whole declining. So far the government has generally relied on league tables and delivery incentives from the centre to drive up some improvement, but if expectations are low in the first place, there is much less local pressure from below on organisations to improve. Greater local democratic accountability is clearly part of the solution, but is probably not enough on its own. Training up "expert residents" in local communities to learn more about what is happening elsewhere and be able to assert themselves as part of a wider community champion scheme might be a way forward to help build a critical mass for higher local expectations. We have formal twinning between Council's in different countries across Europe and even with the developing world, why don't we have twinning within the UK so Council's twin with other Council's to share knowledge and good practice with much of the work being done online to ensure value for money. Most local authorities will have historic connections with many others across the country so the decision over who to twin with could be quite an interesting process in its own right. Twinning could also be taken further so good practice is shared between twinned LSP's and therefore services in areas like health are twinned too.

Increased social capital makes for a more socially cohesive society. Community Empowerment provides an opportunity to challenge complacency at the local level, whilst making people feel they can influence more at a national level.

As Richard says in his article, we don't need countless repeat measures to tell us that. What we need is to use the current broad political consensus in this area to make some clear progress in wider local empowerment in the coming years!

More from the "Web 2.0 and Beyond" Conference

This is my second post about this event. Further items of interest included:

• The current stats - 1.3 billion internet users, 400 million social network users, 120 million bloggers. When you add to this the 3 billion mobile telephony users, then in less than 8 years we have truly collectively created a global phenomenon.
• Google Alerts picks up about 75% of the web coverage on your organisation. There are paid for services like CyberAlert covers more.
• 20% of journalists blog. If you want to know who influences them, look at what they read on their blogroll.
• It was implied you can understand influencers by audit trailing them. TCC would probably disagree with this as the only only approach. We think the mix should also include quantitative and qualitative sampling to understand the motivations behind any audit trail. Later in the day reference was made to developing "knowledge currency" where you develop algorithms to measure usage quality and not just quantity. TCC would argue part of the quality is understanding motivations and the emotions that may drive them. This cannot be done automatically. Also later in the day mention was made of the creation of "social graphs" to track influencers - this already exists in a rudimentary form on Facebook.
• Online Videos can be very effective at spreading bad news. An example of a recent closure of a U.S. abattoir was cited. Videos can be very effective in backing up news blogs and can more effectively tell stories, thus strengthening your narrative. There is a trail off in viewers when a video is viewed, so the first 10 seconds are the most important.
• The name of an organisation or individual is likely to be used as a tag for sites like Flickr and Youtube, which means it will be difficult to control your visual image. Trade marking a name is unlikely to keep up with the rapidity of images being uploaded and distributed.
• Ted Talks is a great website on future developments in social tools. The Sir Ken Robinson lecture on children and innovation/creativity was mentioned and it makes important points as well as being extremely funny. The Ted conferences sounds like a U.S. version of the Hay Festival to me.
• Your new "first impression" in future is not as you walk through the door but your digital identity.
• Identity fraud is increasing. Have a look for what you can find about yourself and others on the web. Look at Wink, Zoominfo and QDOS and see how much of your identity is recorded on the Internet.
• Develop internal social networks. Visible Path is an example of this.
• Avoid simplistic metrics. Measurement of the success of web 2.0 products should be by business outcome not simple volume. Measure actual usage: edits and tags rather than just "hits". In other words measure the energy expended on using the webpage.
• Polls/Surveys of experience of a service should be immediate and not "moderated by time".
• If you are setting up a social network, pre-populate content as well as think of polls as well as customisable front pages to make it as interesting and interactive as possible. Reward contributions - develop a points system to encourage usage. Both the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns have this.
• In future parents might want to check out whether there was an available internet domain name when choosing the name of their baby. This may be the best way to protect online fraud?

Overall this was a good event with lots of thought-provoking ideas. It was certainly a conference of the future with a lot of us blogging it straight on to the web like this posting as well as it being podcast too. It even had a great definition. Web 1.0 was "watching the television", whilst Web 2.0 was "going down the pub". Will this eventually lead to "binge collaboration"?:-)

More Live Reports from "Web 2.0 and Beyond" Conference

Following Ben Wild's Blog from the Web 2.0 and Beyond Conference yesterday, today it was my chance to attend.

A number of interesting points were made this morning:

• 70% of the US workforce are now knowledge workers.
• Knowledge Management is vitally important to deal with the plethora of information we now all face. Examples include evolving your knowledge systems rather than simply creating them fully formed and improving searchability of wikis.
• A value retail chain has benefited from blog/Facebook - which might sound surprising. It is possibly looked at by value conscious mavens/connectors collecting and distributing cost information. 100 Facebook friends each with an average of 100 friends spreads value. Echo chamber effect - 360% increase in referrals as a result of web 2.0 marketing. Cost of 12p per contact much cheaper than direct mail.
• With traditional media you have a list of contacts. In web 2.0 you have to research yourself who the influencers in the market you are operating in. This is exactly what TCC are developing as tools for our own use and to operate on behalf of clients.

How Web 2.0 reduces business over heads

It's striking coming through from many of the presentations is how Web 2.0 provides business tools at a cheap rate, Will Wynee from Arena Flowers makes several of these points especially around marketing...

• Marketing - You can spend alot of cash on Google Ad words but relative to traditional advertising it works at a wider variety of scales so more businesses can access far larger audience for less cash
• Content and knowledge management - What used to be IT systems that cost huge amounts for cash can now be bought off the shelf for free or a small monthly outlay
• Collaboration - working closely with people and orgs in other countries is expensive if you're flying people around the globe, if you can use web meetings/conferencing and wikis for co-production then this kind of international approach becomes accessible to small business and voluntary and community organiations.

From 'Web 2.0 and Beyond'

Blogging today from the 'Web 2.0 and Beyond' conference in Kensington, first presentation was from Lee Bryant at Headshift. A few points sturck me, firstly about e-mail, we know that e-mail isn't the best tool for much of the communication and knowledge transfer it's currently used for, instant messaging is a much more efficient tool for quick discussions 'are you free for a meeting tomorrow afteroon' etc and wikis are a much better tool for collaborating on docments.

But how do you shift people away from e-mails after potentially many years of it being peoples primary tool? Lee mentioned one person who simple has his e-mail client delete all messages that aren't sent directly to him (thus avioding the CC or FYI culture).. perhaps a little extreme for most people. However without being draconian some guidelines are perhaps necessary, such as if a e-mail is discursive or to more than one person then maybe the place for it is IM or a project blog? However for thse guidelines to have meaning for people they need to be based around examples (or use cases). Once people begin to follow these guidleines, hopefully, they find that they are working significantly more effectivgely and then don't look back!

Social Tools - Latest Books

Two books came out this weekend that may be of interest:

Charles Leadbeater (and 257 other people - as it says in in the inside cover) have finally published their wiki book "We-Think".

I have previously blogged over the development of this book, so I am pleased to see that it has been published.

On a similar vein: "Here comes everybody - the power of organising without organisations" is also just out.

This may actually be a misnomer as what it is probably describing are distributed organisations where the goats probably still get fed but where there are low entry costs of joining the organisation which is distinguished by:

- sharing (photos. music, campaign activity) as the anchor of the organisation

- Mass amateurisation

- Publish then filter

- Collaboration through different levels of contribution

- Viral communication

- Faster group activity

- New groups entering the market

- Creating both Bonding (drawing existing people closer) and Bridging (reaching out to other people) social capital

- Low coordination costs and a lower cost to failure

What is quite fascinating with the sectors these books describe is that for the first time we are seeing the creation of a public audit trail to see how collaboration operates and word of mouth issues develop.

Much of this is going to be important to areas TCC is working in such as public engagement over community cohesion as well as how traditional membership organisations communicate and organise.