You may have heard of the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam where he surveys the decline of social capital and suggests how it can be revived. The evidence base is generally drawn from American sources, however the points he make are very much applicable to other developed democracies.
Putnam conducted a lot of research for his book, but many working in their community trying to assess social capital for their area do not the time or the academic resources Putnam had.
Perhaps there is a web 2.0 solution?
If you are reading this article, there is a good chance you use Google or another good web search engine. If you use Google a lot you may be aware of many of its search facilities. One of the most interesting is if you type a full postcode in you get many internet entries associated with that geographical area.
As someone who was a Councillor for 20 years, I was fortunate in having a pretty good understanding of the social geography of my area. As a result recently I started typing in postcodes for some of the wealthier areas of my borough and some of the poorest.
The results were reasonably predictable. In areas that were quite wealthy you would find postings for people who ran their own businesses or were in community groups. In poorer areas you would generally find websites that related to wider public sector bodies but little community or small scale enterprise activity. At times I found up to 10 times as many pages for a relatively well-off residential road with no other facilities compared to a poorer area of flatted social housing.
Of course some might say it is all about access to home computers between poor and well off areas and that in poorer areas it is the mobile phone that has much more usage. A fair point. However in this much more connected world access to and participation on the internet can be a reinforcing factor for developing social capital in wealthier areas. The fact that the gap is so wide in the number of Google pages is a useful proxy indicator for quickly assessing levels of basic social capital and social connectedness.
What can we do about this?
One idea I had was that Local Strategic Partnerships (LSP) could trawl every postcode in their locality and ensure they are connected with every group listed. I suspect there is good software that can automate much of this process. This in itself might go some way to increase the overall stock of social capital across a local authority area as more groups and individuals would be connected to key local stakeholders. A far-sighted LSP might even seek to connect people within a community together through encouraging the development of geographical based social networking software similar to Residents HQ that I have previously blogged about.
Another thought was for Local Strategic Partnerships to identify 10-20 postcodes with low Google pages and perhaps conduct a pilot survey of them regarding internet access. It may be that residents are not using free facilities in local libraries? Some extra publicity and perhaps even the sort of doorstep engagement that TCC recommends for many projects could be easily provided. This could be linked to an offer of simple computer training.
This sort of approach might go some way to connecting people up and creating the sort of network effects that can perhaps start to increase the stock of social capital in some poorer communities.
This is absolutely fascinating - and even though I use the google search engine tens of times a day on most days I had never thought to do this. I tried my own postcode - and it's an even better tool for the nosey neighbour than the aspidistra!
Just some examples of what I found!
House prices - not many sales in the last two years which confirms the 'stability' I aready pretty much knew of my neighbourhood;
Businesses that are run by my neighbours from their own homes - including full details of a model shop being run from the basement of the house next door!
That a neighbour (who married a schoolfriend) has patented a lateral pipe adaptor!!
Several members of the local rotary club - foster mums - and a wealth of chiropodists
And several references to what I have been up to!!
Absolutely bears out Charlies point about what you'd expect to find in a reasonably well off area.
Posted by: Anna Chester | 27 January 2008 at 07:56 AM
Glad it was help. Think what a local authority or Local Strategic Partnership could do with this sort of publicly available information. It could first of all understand the sort of social capital in its wealthier areas and then, having benchmarked that level of local social capital for its area, it can then survey its poorer postcodes and understand better the difference between them and the work it needs to do there to improve them.
Combine this free information with a purchase of a databse like Mosaic, which would give you a more scientific benchmark, and LSP partners can do very targeted local interventions at postcode level.
As well as local authorities and LSP's, MP's and Councillors could use the free postcode data to build much better pictures of their locality for their own community engagement.
I am sure if this is combined with the socio-political influencer toolkit we are developing, TCC could develop a useful methodology for LSP targeted intervention work.
Posted by: Charlie Mansell | 27 January 2008 at 12:42 PM