Social design « Sociability

5 #bigsociety ideas

25 January, 2011

Recently I posted 5 Big Society questions which I felt needed answering if I could endorse the project wholeheartedly. Yesterday the Times ran a front-page story about how the movement is in crisis because of lack of definition and popular and third sector support, and I’m afraid I now agree with Matthew Taylor’s analysis here that “If the Big Society debate doesn’t get more substantive and granular quickly, it will feel like the only credible thing to do is knock the whole idea.”

I think this would be a great shame, since the Big Society project is creating a powerful space for new thinking to emerge and giving local government in particular a mandate for positive change and greater community engagement, all of which are good things. But to echo Matthew’s sentiments, there is far to much unsupported assertion going on and not enough evidence or testable hypotheses, and I am further troubled by the regular dismissal of issues and counter-evidence as “naysaying” or “negativity”, which is stifling debate in this area as many participants (including myself) try to act positive in the hope of being on the right side of funding decisions in the future.

I agree that we must be positive and collaborative about coming up with the answers together. I also agree that most if not all of the new infrastructure to run the Big Society must come from entrepreneurial solutions rather than government (such as this interesting new crowdfunding platform). But when I hear people who are not social entrepreneurs telling me how the social enterprise sector works, or politicians making bold claims about how the obstacles which currently exist will magically disappear without any explanation of how this will happen or acknowledgement of the value in the existing systems, then I can’t help feel we’re heading for a political trainwreck.

Last night I attended the RSA lecture with the generally impressive Sir Ronald Cohen, and asked him how we can ensure social enterprises can compete with commercial interests for lucrative government contracts, rather than picking up only the non-viable markets. His answer was hopeful rather than evidenced. He believes that social enterprises will win tenders because they are culturally better suited and have greater connections with their communities – but there is no evidence of this happening now, nor of a plan to shift the structure and culture of government procurement to make this more likely in the future. It’s a nice story, but there was no acknowledgement the lack of capacity for social enterprises to deliver critical national services, the bureaucracy of government procurement which favours those with the money to spend on navigating the process, the innate conservatism and risk-aversion of the public sector, and most of all the difficulty of scaling the kind of community and cultural factors which supposedly give social enterprise the edge. The reality, I’m afraid, is of large organisations bidding for large contracts which small community groups cannot feasibly deliver, social entrepreneurs spending months in negotiations for money which then disappears, commercial, academic and charitable interests mining smaller projects for their ideas, a lack of core funding or capital investment to enable social enterprises to scale up to meet these challenges, and a continual persistence of the attitude that the main advantage of the social sector is that we’re really, really cheap. All soluble problems, but what are we going to do about them?

Nick Hurd has issued a 12-page call for ideas from MPs and activists on how to make the Big Society work (or so the Times tells me: I can’t actually find it online). So with that in mind, here are five ideas that I believe are needed in order to create a thriving and meaningful “big society”:

Fix government procurement
Government currently awards large contracts to large corporations on the basis of efficient delivery of often dated and ineffective solutions designed in advance by bureaucrats who are not directly connected to the problem they are trying to solve. Social impact bonds point the way to a public procurement model that is based on outcomes and allows innovative providers to pocket some of the cost-savings for game-changing innovations, and if it works it could be mainlined into all government procurement. But the only way we will create a sustainable social sector is if social organisations are given preferential treatment in procurement, either by forcing all bidders to have a voluntary element to their bid (forcing the Capitas and PWCs of this world immediately into partnership with voluntary groups), or by giving preference in contract awards to recipients of Big Society Bank investments.
Build better corporate structures
Current vehicles for social enterprise are not fit for purpose: they don’t provide enough rigor to allow the charities commission to provide tax breaks, but also don’t provide the equity return for either capital investors or social entrepreneurs. We need a new model which sits in the for-profit sector but with certain conditions, for example a restriction on what proportion of profits can be given as dividends or when they can be withdrawn, a cap on salary distance between best-paid and worst-paid staff, or incorporation of charitable objectives in the responsibilities of Directors. Currently, social enterprises need a non-profit vehicle to own the assets and protect the mission (and in the case of Mindapples, to give proper ownership and accountability to the community), a charity to get the tax-breaks, and a trading arm to offer a return to founders and investors. It’s time to create a new integrated social enterprise vehicle that is fit for purpose, and for the government to offer hard financial incentives to philanthropists and investors to put money into the social enterprise sector.
Make private enterprise accountable
Banks and other high-yield for-profit entities do not, by their very definition, act in the interests of the whole population, but of the few. Private companies (and I speak as a Director of one) are duty-bound to act in the commercial interests of their shareholders, to the exclusion of wider social considerations. The result is a twofold madness: firstly, businesses prioritise the financial interests of their staff and shareholders over the improvement of the society those individuals live in, making us all richer in a poorer world, insulated from growing social problems by our similarly growing bank balances. Secondly, the full financial impact of businesses do not need to be considered by those taking the key decisions. The wider social impact of business remains an externality to the business transactions, something to be picked up by the government and the social sector in the form of, for example, massive recyling bills for processing excessive supermarket packaging, or social issues caused by low wages and redundancies. We cannot persist with a social model in which the public and third sectors perform palliative care to minimise the social impact of the private sector’s actions, and must beg for corporate donations to do it. A gentle solution would be to legislate that all shareholders must vote and publish the social objectives for their organisation, and make Directors legally-bound to fulfil these obligations. This at least would force companies either to be bound by their supposed CSR commitments, or to come out publicly and say they are only interested in profit. A harder approach though is that if social impact bonds can be used to create positive incentives for social providers, they can also be used to create negative penalities for making problems worse. If every time Sainsbury’s cost the local council large recyling bills, they were forced to pay a social impact bond that went towards paying public and social sector providers to fix the problem, they would soon think twice about whether their scotch eggs really needed those little trays.
Invest in infrastructure
We need to create the support structures and platforms to enable social enterprises to work and scale more effectively, which means we need a new fund (or a refocussing of existing resources) on infrastructure projects. If the government invested in infrastructure that the social sector could use, rather than trying to own systems and procure services not just for itself but for individual units of government, if you quickly give social and community groups the tools to reach considerable impact without needing investment. We need tools for organising volunteering activity, crowdfunding and donations, marketing and communications, accounting and payroll, recruitment, training and collaboration. We need spaces to work, better equipment, business advice, legal support, assistance with social impact (more on that below), CRB checks, accreditations, partnerships, access to capital and loan finance, tax incentives, support taking ideas abroad, and an array of other conditions and environmental factors for growth. All of these things cost money, but all of them are cheaper than the public sector’s current tendancy to buy the same services over and over again for itself and refuse to share. Let’s invest now in a shared infrastructure for public and voluntary sector partnership and start building this sector properly.
Invest in evaluation and learning
Most social enterprises and community groups know they are doing good because their communities tell them so, but they lack the resources to conduct rigorous evaluation or put their learning into a format that government or funders understand. If the Big Society Bank and the public sector generally is looking to the social sector to solve its problems, it needs to support innovative companies to understand what they are good at and where they fit into the government’s priorities. It’s all very well creating a social impact bond around a set of outcomes (for example, patient health indicators), but many of the most community-led and innovative organisations will simply not be able to prove that they can deliver on these metrics without spending heavily on feasibility studies and evaluation reports. Instead, the public sector should treat the social sector as its R&D department, and invest its own money (perhaps as part of the support infrastructure of the Big Society Bank) in scanning the sector, identifying and evaluating possible innovations, and working with social sector partners to share the IP created and take the best elements to scale. If it is up to bidders to prove why they can deliver on social impact bonds, the people best placed to do that will be Capita, PWC and other major corporate players who have the resources to do their own R&D and invest heavily in their own growth. And you can bet they’ll be looking very closely at what they can learn from the social sector.

Most of all, what the Big Society needs is an accountable design process for the project, in which all of us can participate in the debate about what is needed, what can be done, and who is responsible for making it happen. There are many things the government can do to help make the Big Society happen, but they need to listen to all the people involved, both online and via local community networks, and work with us to solve these problems, either by taking action themselves or giving their backing to others to do what is needed. Unless we have an open, critical debate about the practical steps needed, facilitated by democratically-accountable institutions and conducted in a transparent and constructive way, the whole project is in danger of becoming nothing more than a small handful of people sat in closed rooms telling stories about how everything is getting better, while outside things go from bad to worse.

11 Comments | business, communities, mindapples, Sociability, Social design | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

New Public Thinkers: My Nominations

10 December, 2010

My good friend and intellectual scratching post Dougald Hine has started a conversation here to identify the next generation of public thinkers, and has invited me to be part of it. Here’s what Dougald says:

“Radio 3 is currently looking for “a new generation of public intellectuals”. You can apply here – except that to be eligible, you must be studying or working inside a university. Now, call me self-interested, but by this criterion, the likes of John Berger or a young Karl Polanyi would fall through their net. I’m not comparing myself to those remarkable men. But as someone whose work gets cited by academics in a range of disciplines and is, I hope, beginning to make some impression in the public sphere, I’m disappointed to be excluded from consideration.

This isn’t just about me, though – there’s a whole network of people I’m aware of in the UK and beyond who are doing substantial new thinking from outside of academia – often in close and constructive dialogue with those operating from inside university departments. The way Radio 3 and the AHRC are approaching this project is going to miss out on a huge amount of the emerging intellectual culture of our generation – many of whose brightest minds saw what was happening to academia and chose to do our thinking elsewhere.

I’ve written to Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3, telling him this and inviting him to redress the balance. To help him, I’d like you to nominate your own choice of “new public thinkers” from outside of the university walls.”

It’s a compelling argument, and one which I wholeheartedly support. I have nothing against the academic world, having worked with many academics over the years including on Social by Social, but ever since my School of Everything days I have been convinced of the importance of breaking learning out of institutions and embedding it into society, and of the huge intellectual value created outside the academic world. And as one commenter pointed out, it seems odd that Radio 3′s criteria would actually exclude Antonio Gramsci, inventor of the term “public intellectual”.

Dougald has very flatteringly nominated me as one of his choices, prompting a flurry of blogging and tweeting from me as I try to live up to the moniker! So now here are my three initial nominations, although I’m sure I’ll think of more later. Interestingly, they’re all people who do things rather than write or talk about them, which perhaps reflects my growing belief that ideas are worth far more if they’ve been tried out in practice. So here goes…

Dougald himself – obviously I should return the favour, but over many years of collaborating with Dougald he’s been consistently years ahead of public discourse, introducing me to Ivan Illich when we were dreaming up School of Everything, writing about economic collapse long before the mainstream had the courage to do so, and creating new models for living and working which I believe will help shape the future of society for years to come.
Charles Armstrong – an entrepreneur by profession, Charles brings his understanding of ethnography and technology together to create new tools and infrastructure to help us live better, and has som incredibly smart ideas about networks, crowdfunding and the future of business and society. I’m nominating him particularly for his work on emergent democracy and the brilliant One Click Orgs which is introducing democratic structures into the corporate world.
Tessy Britton – another long-term collaborator of mine, I could nominate Tessy for the work she has done on learning and personal development which has shaped our work together on Mindapples. However, I’m particularly nominating her for her incredible work on Social Spaces, including the wonderful book Hand Made, and her bold action-research project of the Travelling Pantry, touring the country to test her ideas out in practice. Many PhDs have been awarded for far less.

So, who are your nominations? Please name your choices on your own blogs or webspaces, link back to Dougald’s post, and invite your friends to do the same. Let’s see what interesting people emerge…

1 Comment | Andy Gibson, blogs, collaboration, invention, learning, mindapples, School of Everything, Sociability, Social design, social projects | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

5 #bigsociety questions

9 December, 2010

Interesting news this month that Steve Moore has taken over as Director of the Big Society Network, and that the Network is poised “to launch a new series of events, projects and partnerships over the coming months which will showcase an array of new innovations in support of our remit.” Having worked a little with the Network already on their NESTA-funded Your Local Budget platform, I think it’s time I posted a few of my thoughts and questions about the Big Society project.

Like many others in the social innovation world, I’ve been tentatively exploring what the “Big Society” actually means and whether I want to be part of it. I think I have a general understanding of what the Big Society is (unlike most of my friends, who have never heard of it at all!), that it is about clearing the way and providing support for individuals and communities to solve their own problems, rather than waiting for the government to save us. Part of this I assume is about removing the regulation and bureaucracy that gets in the way of citizen action and involvement, and part of it is about creating the conditions for individuals and community groups to contribute more to the running and improvement of the society we live in.

This is all good stuff, and certainly my conversations with the individuals involved has confirmed my general sense that there is good work being done here by good people. However, I still have a few significant questions about how it will work in practice, and these are questions to which I need to know the answers before I would be happy to say the Big Society will be a good thing for this country. By posting them I do not intend criticism (and I’ll also post some positive Big Society ideas shortly), but to trigger a debate and get some answers, so that we can all be clearer about what we are supporting here. So here goes…

Does anyone ever get paid? If good work is now to be done on a voluntary basis, then what is the future for those of us who currently earn money improving society? I believe that if we can make improving society something that financially sustains and rewards those who do it, we will get a lot more good done. For many years now, I have been proud to be part of the social enterprise movement, working to create new ways to use business principles and revenue generation to achieve greater social impact. Yet now almost every week I seem to be approached by another public sector organisation asking me to give my time for free to help them transform their business, because “it’s a good thing to do”. So is money now only to be used to reward people who are not delivering social benefit? Must we all become lawyers and bankers to fund our expensive habit of improving the world? Or should we look instead, as Windsor and Maidenhead have proposed, to alternative currencies to support ourselves? And do we really know what the socio-economic impact of all this will be, particularly on the voluntary sector and the social enterpreneurs that the Big Society claims to support?
Who’s in charge? One of my consistent surprises about this Government is the top-down nature of many of their announcements, which seem to be the continuation of New Labour’s behaviour change programmes rather than the traditional free-market Conservative approach I was expecting. If the Big Society is to flourish, it cannot be led by the Government, or the credit claimed by the politicians. The role of the State should be to support the activities of communities and create the conditions for the activities they want to encourage, and make things easier – through funding, infrastructure, resources, support. Yet it often feels as though by launching this initiative (and particularly in a time of radical cuts) the Government is calling on citizens to work for the State, to help out with public sector projects, deliver public services. So do we, the Big Society, work for the Government to help them achieve their aims, or will public servants become what their name suggests, and support us to do what we think needs doing? And if it’s the latter, how do we decide what the State should support?
Who is accountable? Schools, hospitals, policing and the like are the responsibility of the state: we pay our taxes on the expectation that critical services will be provided to all of us on a fair, equitable and democratically-accountable basis, presumably because we grasp that the wellbeing and prosperity of the people around us is important for our own health, wealth and happiness. Ensuring greater involvement from service users and community groups in public services is fantastic, but it takes time and money to get right, and proper democratic accountability to ensure vulnerable people remain protected. Volunteers also have their own agendas and problems to worry about, particularly in a recession, and the Government still remains ultimately accountable if things go wrong, so are they just creating more problems for themselves later by not taking responsibility now?
Who pays for volunteer management? Volunteer management is a complicated task and requires a considerable amount of work to get it right: not voluntary work, but full-time work by reliable staff who aren’t making their money elsewhere – and this work must be paid for. My experience of running voluntary projects (and I’ve run a large one, unpaid, for two years now, in Mindapples) is that getting people to volunteer is the easy bit, especially in the internet age; the hard part is finding time to tell them what to do and make their efforts join up properly. I don’t need more volunteers, I need money to pay for staff to organise them and scale up our efforts. The Big Society Bank is excellent, but the sums being proposed are tiny compared to previous state funding for the voluntary sector, so what is the plan for sustaining and strengthening our existing voluntary infrastructure in a time of social change and fiscal constraints? Unless we have a plan for how this is going to be paid for, I will be relying on the only people who have any spare cash (or Nectar points) these days: wealthy philanthropists and large corporations. And that isn’t the Big Society, that’s Victorian England.
What happened to democracy? The Big Society aims to “take power away from politicians and give it to people”. But the State is us. The public sector exists to represent the views of the whole population, serve the interests of the many whilst protecting the interests of the few, and answer to the people for its actions. How have we become so alienated from our State institutions that private, independent organisations seem now to offer more possibilities for putting ‘the People’ in charge? Democracy and equanimity are difficult and expensive to achieve, and by cutting away these layers we may achieve greater efficiency, but do we leave ourselves vulnerable to increased social injustice, and subservience to the needs of the wealthy and the confident? There are tools for ensuring this of course, democratic organisational structures and community governance models, but when I hear talk of creating “the U.K’s biggest mutual: to which all citizens will be able to belong”, it feels like we are trying to rebuild the State in parallel, not because it will be any better, but because we have lost faith in the current system. And replacing it… well, that sounds very expensive indeed.

I believe in the aspirations of the Big Society. I believe that the people of the UK are the state, and the Government serves us and should help us achieve our goals. I believe people are basically good and can be trusted, and that current public service culture disempowers vulnerable people and makes it hard for individuals to contribute to their own lives and communities. I believe that passionate individuals and grassroots organisations outside the Government should step in to solve problems which cannot be tackled by top-down authoritarian solutions, such as community and social care, public health promotion, invigorating communities, guiding the cultural and social development of our children, monitoring the activities and efficacy of the state infrastructures. However, I do not think that this work should be free, nor that paid civil servants can hand over their jobs to volunteers and remain in their lofty positions. And I continue to believe that the running of our state infrastructure is ultimately the job of a democratically-elected body of paid agents acting in the service of the people.

These are just my current questions: I have heard many others, and doubtless others will emerge as we go. The message for some time has been that we are in charge and we must find the answers to these questions. As Steve says, “it is a work in progress”. However, if the Prime Minister and other prominent figures are prepared to say the Big Society is a “Good Thing” for Britain, I’m presuming they must have thought these issues through first? If the leaders know the answers, please let them share them with us – after all, they’re part of this Big Society thing too. If they don’t, then I would question why they are telling us how great this will be when so much remains uncertain. Either way, I believe these questions need to be answered, and that means we need to get on with it together.

The devil, as they say, is in the detail.

to launch a new series of events, projects and partnerships over the coming months which will showcase an array of new innovations in support of our remit.

1 Comment | Andy Gibson, communities, mindapples, Social by Social, Social design, social projects | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Hand Made Communities

25 September, 2010

I settled down this morning to have a proper read-through of my dear friend Tessy Britton’s extraordinary new book, Hand Made, and feel inspired to write a post about it. In fact, two posts – you can see my thoughts on it from an individual and health perspective over here.

Inspired is the perfect word for this book actually: a collection of hand-picked stories from all manner of collaborative and creative projects the world over, which collectively represent an “emergent new community culture”. From more familiar examples like The Big Lunch, to lesser-known gems like Maurice Small’s Community Gardens project, and one of my favourite projects ever, Jerry Stein’s Learning Dreams (disclosure: Mindapples is also included), Tessy has unearthed an amazing set of stories of creative, positive projects that are bringing people together and building connection and community in startlingly effective new ways.

Seen collectively, the projects tell a story of a new model for community-development – or perhaps an old one that we have somehow forgotten. They are all positive, constructive and creative, based on people designing and building the world they want to live in, and finding others to join them in this work. They route around existing systems and do it themselves, using the assets they find in their communities to build and strengthen their communities. And most importantly, they all start from individuals taking immediate action to shape the world around them and change things for the better. Hand Made is a book that reminds us we have far more control than we think over the world around us, and shows us that the best way to engage people is to help them do what they want, and build what they need.

Everyone seems to be talking about “community” at the moment, particularly in the context of the “big society” – and there is much that can be learnt by policy-makers from this humble little book. If the Government is serious about supporting and nurturing community development, it needs to build an infrastructure and a supporting culture for the kind of creative, inspired people – what David Barrie calls the ‘militant optimists’ – that are featured in Hand Made. We need to build a cultural and economic context in which human-centred, positive, creative projects like these can thrive and grow, without telling people what to do or what they need. This will take a serious reinvention of the culture and mechanics of government. As Tessy observes in her introduction, “our existing systems can supress creativity and [attract] individuals with management mindsets rather than including essential creative or community-building ones”. Someone told me recently that the policy world doesn’t understand humanity, it only understands statistics, and community-building is human work. It’s easy to forget that when you spend all your time looking at the big picture.

I’ve been reading Visa founder Dee Hock’s extraordinary autobiography One From Many, about which more in future posts. His definition of community particularly appealed to me: “the essence of community, its very heart and soul, is the nonmonetary exchange of value. The things we do and the things we share because we care for others, and for the good of place.” Community is relentlessly, unapologetically voluntary. It does not correspond to the tools of the state, the mechanics of the economy or the mindset of management. In Dee’s words: “It arises from deep, intuitive understanding that self-interest is inseparably connected to community interest; that individual good is inseparable from the good of the whole”. You can’t build this common interest – this “community” – through top-down commands and centralised management: all you can do is create the conditions for growth and support what people want to do.

This isn’t the harsh world of the open market though. This is not a free-for-all in which the state rolls back and a thousand entrepreneurial flowers bloom: this is about creating a nurturing, managed space in which the projects and people who are enriching our lives and strengthening our communities are supported and cared for. Community development of the type described in Hand Made does not take place in the wild, competitive scramble of the jungle; but nor can it be found in the safe, highly-regulated, controlled worlds of the zoo or the factory. Instead, it is found in the garden, the managed space where the conditions for growth are carefully maintained, but growth itself is not controlled. When building digital communities, or developing Mindapples, I have developed a habit of saying to myself: you can’t make flowers grow faster by shouting at them. Gardening is not an industrial process: it is far more powerful than that, and much, much messier.

If this Government is serious about stepping back and allowing communties to take more control of their destinies, first it must accept that its role is to support people without commanding them, and protect them without controlling them. Its role is, in short, to serve – and let us lead.

1 Comment | collaboration, communities, mindapples, Sociability, Social by Social, Social design, social projects | Tagged: Andy Gibson, big society, community, gardening, mindapples, policy, society, volunteering | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Change world have fun

24 April, 2010

One of the best things about my job at the moment has been spending lots of time with people who work in consumer branding and marketing. No, wait, really… hear me out.

Yes, I work in the internet, and specifically how to use it to achieve social change through grassroots campaigning and providing better services. I’ve also been part of the social enterprise sector for a few years, and written a few bits of policy advice, and between all these worlds I’ve met a lot of amazing people who want to use the power of business and media to change the world.

What’s striking though is how little awareness there is in the social sector of the tools and techniques that are used every day to launch and grow international brands. It’s almost as if, just because it’s good for you, it has to be boring. Or, if it’s commercial, it can’t be changing the world.

But why can’t a better world be fashionable, or aspirational, just like a new bar or a great pair of trainers? Why can’t social enterprise be as fun as www.springwise.com? And more to the point, why can’t we harness the awesome skills and powers of big brand marketeers to sell things that heal the sick, help the poor, or make our society work better for all of us?

I used to look down from my worthy pedestal on my friends in advertising, lifestyle magazines and brand management. Now I’m asking for their help. With Mindapples, we’re asking everyone to choose a 5-a-day for their minds, with the ultimate aim of making looking after our minds as natural as brushing our teeth. It isn’t a social project, it’s cultural: we’re building a new social trend, starting conversations, influencing culture and habits to change the way people live. Looked at from the right angle, Mindapples is actually a rebranding project: we’re taking the concept of “mental health” and turning it from something frightening and depressing into something everyone wants to buy.

As we get closer to another election, someone said to me recently that the Government like to think they run the country, but really they’re just the janitors. They make sure the heating’s turned on, and the bins are emptied. If you want to influence the hearts and minds of people, speak to Nike, Ikea, or Pepsico. Just imagine what might happen if all those channels for influence were being used to build the world we all want to live in?

Leave a Comment » | business, mindapples, Social design, social projects | Tagged: behaviour change, brand, communications, mindapples, social enterprise | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Real world marketing

11 June, 2009

I’m at b.tween in Liverpool today speaking on a panel with Adam Gee at Channel 4, Andy Bell from Landshare and Lucy Willis from Battlefront. We’ve been talking about using online and broadcast media to create action in the real world, in relation to School of Everything and other “social by social” projects.

My main point was about the intersection of social tools and media content. Battlefront helps young people campaign and then tells their stories on TV and online, and so creates action in the world. Meanwhile, School of Everything is creating action by building tools to enable and inspire people to teach and learn from each other: the existence of the tool is the trigger for creating the stories. Landshare is the model I can see emerging between the two: an integrated commission of TV content and social platform, with TV content to inspire people to grow things on spare land, and a social tool to help them find and use land near them. In other words, the TV content is creating a culture in which the tool will thrive, and providing marketing for the site.

Web 2.0 can also feed back into traditional media by creating and locating stories for cultural programming. Whatever the model of commissioning, if you are fortunate enough to be creating real activity in the world, you can use that activity to create a feedback loop which rallies more and more people to your movement. Here’s how it can work:

Create a tool which helps people do something in the world – share land, teach each other, campaign for change, or whatever. Write the stories you want your tool to create, and build it so it supports those things to happen, smoothly and simply.
Collect stories of the activity that results by engaging with your community, and share these stories back with the community through newsletters, blogs, Twitter etc. – and also with the public through any media channels available. Tell these stories in a way which makes audiences feel they could do it too.
Give users a way to share and promote their activities too, to amplify the effect of the activity and let your users help you market the tool. Help the people who have figured out how to do it share that with their peers.
The stories and media activity then become valuable resources in recruiting more users to the platform, which creates more activity to use in promoting the movement, and so on. By creating activity in the world, you create news; and by telling the stories through the media, you create a culture in which that activity is commonplace.

That’s what we’ve been doing at School of Everything: we talk to our users (or rather Claire does), find out what they’re up to, and tell those stories to encourage more people to join in. The media, social or otherwise, helps us turn the isolated interactions into a social movement.

As for media commissioning, I think there’s a rich seam here for media companies to invest in start-ups, and also in media content to tell the stories they support. The question of legacy is problematic – Landshare and Battlefront are commissions that need to generate stories, so what happens to their community when they have to stop “broadcasting”? So I think you also need a business model to sustain the existence of the web platform (School of Everything relies on real-world transactions for its business model), and finance it as an autonomous start-up that isn’t dependent on the continuation of the commission. We need more integrated partnerships between broadcasters and start-ups. And with the mutual benefit a well-designed broadcast and social campaign can bring, a TV-financed web start-up with broadcast tie-ins looks like an increasingly smart business proposition.

So all we need then is to come up with ideas for really compelling things we want to happen in the real world, that are interesting enough to make good telly. Anyone?

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, communities, Social design, social projects, events, Social by Social, web 2.0 | Tagged: marketing, School of Everything, btween09, battlefront, landshare | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

45 Social by Social Propositions

6 April, 2009

When I’ve not been living it up in Texas, I’ve been co-writing a book with David Wilcox, Amy Sample-Ward and Cass Business School on how to use web 2.0 and digital technologies for social projects. It’s going to be called Social by Social: a practical guide to using new technologies to deliver social impact and it should be published and distributed by NESTA next month.

The centrepiece of the book is a set of fundamental principles to follow to help make a social technology project successful, and I’d like to share them with you now and hopefully get your feedback before publication.

The 45 Social by Social Propositions

A set of principles and guidelines which we believe underpin the most successful ‘social by social’ projects.

People want control. If you give them tools for taking more control of their lives, they will pay you back in attention, support and even hard cash.
Empowerment is unconditional. Telling people what they can and can’t do with your platform is like an electricity company restricting what its power can be used for.
People make technology work. Think about mindset, language and skills before you think about tools, features and screen designs.
Know your limits. Technology can solve information problems, organise communities and publish behaviours, but they can’t deliver food or care for the sick.
You can’t learn to fly by watching the pilot. If you want to understand new technologies, start using them. Dive in.
Start at the top. Get the boss blogging or talking on YouTube.
Don’t jump for the tool. Be clear on who your target audience are and what you will do for them. Choosing technology is the last thing you should do.
Start small. It’s always better to build too little than too much. Beware of specifying costly systems until you are absolutely familiar with the tools and know how people would use them.
Planning ahead is hard. Find cheap, easy ways to try your ideas out with real people in real situations before committing lots of resources.
Expect the unexpected. Be prepared to develop tactically, evolving as you go, and learn to maximise possibilities.
Give up on the illusion of control. In a networked world, organisations can no longer control what people think or say about their products and services. If you’re worried, get involved.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The more you open things up, the less risk there is of damage to your reputation. And restricting access can severely reduce usage and innovation.
Keep it messy. Design to support conversations, relationships, stories – not to organise documents. If everything’s neat and tidy, it’s because no-one’s there.
In user-centred design, everyone is right. Evolve any tools and systems with the people who will use them, and respect their complaints. Bring them in and let them help you.
Never assume, always ask. You can’t know what your community wants from you without asking and they are waiting for you to ask. Be specific, define the issue, problem or idea, and let the answers pour in. but be transparent about your next moves and highlight the answers that informed your next steps.
Design for real people. Tailor your offering to the real skills and characteristics of your users, not how you’d like them to be.
Keep it simple. Every time you add a feature to your toolset, you make the existing features harder to use.
Don’t centralise, aggregate. Do you really need data centralisation? Well do you? Use lots of different, disconnected tools and then pull the content together into a central location.
Be a pirate. Don’t make things yourself; make use of what others have already shared.
Empty rooms are easier to redecorate. Be fast and loose with evolving your platform in the early stages, but be cautious of changing things once people start using them.
Build it and they may well not come. Build relationships and they probably will.
The world is a noisy place. Getting people’s attention means offering them something valuable.
Go where people are. Experienced users have plenty of existing places already, and newcomers are difficult to recruit. Go to see them and say hello.
Learn to listen before you start talking. Good conversations require good listeners more than good talkers. Learn how to say things that people want to hear.
Be consistent. Whatever you say in public, remember you are talking to everyone, all the time, so stay true to your principles.
You can’t force people to volunteer. Contributing content and spreading the word are voluntary activities, so learn how to create good invitations and actionable opportunities.
Respect how people choose to communicate. Some will write, others take pictures or make movies. Most people will just listen and view, and maybe comment.
Enthusiasts are more important than experts. Attitude beats ability when tools are cheap and easy.
Be realistic about who will create content. It’s about the same proportion as put their hands up at question time.
Put your energy where their energy is. Support the early adopters rather than chasing the sceptics, and they will become your evangelists.
All energy is good energy. If people are taking the time to criticise you, they are engaged. Don’t waste that.
Throw a good party. Make it fun and sociable as well as worthwhile to get more commitment.
Be a good host. Make people comfortable and then get out of the way.
Don’t forget the tables and chairs. If you want people to communicate or collaborate online, bring them together face-to-face too.
Keep your powder dry. Set aside as much money for design, copy and user testing, and for marketing and community engagement, as you do for software and hardware.
A marathon, not a sprint. Launching the service is just the beginning; the hard work starts once you have something for people to engage with.
Content is king. Providing great content, whether it’s resources, information, connections or conversations, means new users will find you and others will stick with you. Give people the means to share this content too, freely and openly.
Eat your own dogfood. If you aren’t using your own services, why would anyone else? And you can’t influence the community if you aren’t in it.
Your users own the platform. If they feel own it, they will trust it, help sustain it, and find ways to use and improve the tools; if they aren’t interested, no amount of pushing will help.
Let people solve their own problems. As the amount of work grows, so does the number of workers.
Someone has to pay. Although many online tools are free, everything has costs of time if not money. If possible, make sure the money comes from the core purpose of the project.
Don’t confuse money with value. Look at the other assets you have in your community, like skills, volunteers and goodwill, and put them to use in sustaining it.
No-one knows anything. The only thing worth watching is what your users are actually doing.
Failure is useful. If you want to know what works, look at what didn’t. Fail often, fail usefully.
Say thank you in public. People don’t need to have something hand-written on headed paper to feel recognized. Use your tools to acknowledge the people who helped make them in a visible way.

These propositions are a starting point for a new conversation about using technology to improve the world we live in. So, would you sign up to them? We may be wrong. And that’s fine. Let us know your thoughts, share them with other people you think may be interested, and we’ll be putting them out more widely for discussion, additions and edits once we’ve figured out the right format. You can also add your links, articles and comments on the School of Everything Scrapbook for Social by Social too.

And stay tuned for announcements on the book launch, I’ll keep you posted here.

19 Comments | Andy Gibson, Social by Social, Social design, social projects, technology, web 2.0 | Tagged: andygibson, davidwilcox, nesta, netsquared, propositions, Social by Social, social media, sxs, web 2.0 | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Andy Gibson explains Mindapples.org

16 February, 2009

Thought it worth reblogging this from Mindapples.org.

Craig at the O’Reilly GMT blog has very kindly posted a video interview with me explaining the Mindapples project and talking a bit about how far we’ve got.

He caught me on the hop a bit: no time to do my hair, although I did manage to dress up a bit.

Here’s the video from YouTube below. Please do reblog it, Twitter it and send it round to friends and associates, and help us get a bit more attention.

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, mindapples, Sociability, Social design, social projects | Tagged: Andy Gibson, mindapples, Sociability, video | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Clay Shirky at LSE

5 February, 2009

On tuesday night I heard Clay Shirky talk at LSE, courtesy of the lovely Amy from Netsquared. I’ve been busy writing a handbook for NESTA with Amy on using new technologies for social projects (on which more later), and I’ve been using Clay’s ideas a lot. He’s a great speaker and had some fascinating points to make, but I did find some of it a bit frustrating. Here are a few of my personal highlights, and questions.

Clay’s main thesis in his book Here Comes Everybody is that collective action just got easier. His first example was the student campaign against HSBC’s overdraft changes last year, which used Facebook to force HSBC to reverse their decision. The bit that stuck out for me was that the students posted instructions on how to transfer your overdraft to Barclays, giving everyone a way to take action rather than just talk. The model Clay described was basically that “once one person gets something right”, if they take the trouble to document it, then everyone can get it right too. It’s very close to this idea of behavioural publishing that I was peddling last year. The difference between old media and new though is that whist the old forms simply offer information (“I thought you might like to know”), the new way adds an invitation to act: “Here’s something you can do about it. Now join us.”

He also made lots of good points about structures and agility, parallel development, the reputational risks of rallying a crowd to support you (“The US public understand that just because your name is on it, doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it.”). And he had a great word of warning for organisations who aren’t adapting quickly enough: “If you go too slow, the smart people split and go where they can get more done.”

But I was most interested in what he said about My.BarackObama. He argued that the site was deliberately developed to give people “an unsatisfying online experience”, so that they would still be motivated to take action in the real world. Some campaign sites, Facebook Groups and petitions give people the feeling of satisfaction at having taken action on a cause, when in fact all they have done is joined a group or talked about doing something. The notion of designing online tools that deliberately leave people wanting more was really fascinating, and gave me a lot to think about in relation to School of Everything.

The point where I got a bit frustrated though was that he seemed to be distancing himself from the idea of citizen self-organisation as the future of democratic government. His main argument centred around the Change.gov poll after Obama’s election. The US public were invited to propose and vote on the top issues they wanted the Obama-Biden administration to tackle – and promptly voted legalising medical marijuana the number one issue. It’s clearly not the most pressing issue facing the US right now, and doesn’t do the crowd any credit, but I was disappointed that Clay then drew the conclusion from this that if we allow the people to make decisions “you get that,” and consquently we need “checks and balances” to protect us against mob rule.

Doubtless there’s more to it in Clay’s mind than he presented here, but there seemed to be a crucial flaw in this argument. ‘The people’ weren’t being asked to make any decisions themselves: they were simply being offered a way to get attention. It is unfair to claim that people weren’t taking responsibility for the power given them, because fundamentally, they hadn’t been given any power, just a channel to talk those in power. And they knew that those in power were free to ignore everything they said. If there had been an absolute guarantee from the administration that they would enact whatever the crowd voted number one by the end of the project, the debate – and the people in the debate – would have been different.

Clay presented a clear and compelling case that our media has become more democratic, but I heard very little evidence that governance has actually changed. It is easier than ever for the public to mobilise and get attention for a cause they believe is important, and so hold the government to account; but the government is still in charge, making and implementing the decisions. The media has been bringing the government to account for decades, from Watergate to Sarah’s Law; our media may be social now, but the relationship between the media and those who govern has remained relatively unchanged. And that’s not necessarily a problem. Democracy in its worst forms can easily become the dictatorship of the interested. Isn’t it appropriate to elect representatives to take decisions for us, provided we have the power to call them to account on the issues we consider truly important?

I’m also increasingly frustrated by the strange tendency for the web 2.0 debate to swing between the naive utopianism of trusting the people to run their own world perfectly, and the reactionary sense that people are dumb and need to be protected from their own stupidity. The truth is far more pragmatic: people screw up 90% of everything – and we need to trust them anyway. Sure, we may vote for the wrong things, get distracted by shiny objects and even do dumb, evil things from time to time. But unless we are trusted to make mistakes we will never learn. And you can’t make judgements about the capacity of the people to rule themselves based on unrelated experiments in self-expression and ‘lobbying 2.0′.

If you want to know how people behave in power, look at how we run our organisations, our communities, our families, our relationships. If I wanted to conduct experiments in web 2.0 and popular self-governance, I wouldn’t start with a nation: I’d look at the democratic organisational models developed by Ricardo Semler and others, add the technology to systems that already work offline, and work up from small structures to larger decisions. It’s very tempting to start marching into Whitehall and Washington – but we need to learn how to crawl first.

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Posted by Andy Gibson

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