Social enterprise is one of the fastest-growing sectors in our society, and I think it has a lot to teach the policy world, traditional charities and the commercial sector. The problem, as I see it, is this though: social enterprise is good at generating revenue through doing good, by selling products and services, delivering contracts for the public sector and so on. What it isn’t so good at though, is looking after the people who make it happen. The sector suffers a lot of burn-outs, and many people who are starting successful social enterprises can only do so because they have made money in the commercial world, or because they are able to live cheaply without overheads like children or sick relatives. The sector is thriving, but at the expense of the people at the heart of it – and without the money from the lucrative public and private sectors, much of it wouldn’t exist at all.

I think what’s needed is greater liquidity in the social enterprise sector, which starts with making it easier for successful entrepreneurs to set up their next venture. Social capital is great, but it doesn’t pay the bills while we work for free for a year raising funds and building brands. We need to make sure the people who have set up organisations with strong social impact get a return on their “sweat equity”, or the sector will always be parasitic on the commercial world and dogged by burn-outs and drop-outs.

I think there are two obstacles to allowing this “liquidity” to happen. The first is the psychology around “non-profit”: how can I as a social entrepreneur claim my financial reward when my project is based on goodwill and channelling profits back into the community? The second is structural: how can non-profits pay dividends on in-kind investment, in the way they pay a return on cash investments? Time invested for free in building an organisation should always be regarded as a loan, to be recouped with a reasonable return when the venture is successful. I don’t want to be a millionnaire, I just don’t want all my hard work to go unrewarded. And I think we need new corporate vehicles, and a new culture around money for good causes, to make this possible.

With Mindapples, my second social venture after School of Everything, I’m looking at ways to write in profit-shares and bonuses for founders and volunteers if we build a successful revenue model for our non-profit community organisation. Does anyone know any good examples out there of when this is done well that I could base our model on?

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?

Social media is changing the world in which we work, socialise and govern. From Twitter to eBay, Facebook to YouTube, new tools are emerging every year that place the connecting power of the internet in the hands of every one of us.

In this context, the expectations on councils to engage, work openly, be accountable and move more quickly on issues are growing. Meanwhile, councils are facing the biggest cuts in spending in the post-war period and are being asked to do more with less just as demands from local people are rising. Higher expectations combined with drastically fewer resources make the imperative to innovate critical. A new set of tools is needed to meet this challenge.

The pamphlet outlines how local authorities can use social media to achieve more for less. It also highlights the risk to councils if they ignore the technological advances of social media and the people using them, and the importance of government working sensitively with the community groups and social enterprises who are developing great new projects in this space, which is rather timely given the current MyPolice saga. It’s designed to be read alongside our 2009 book Social by Social which can also be downloaded from the Social by Social website.

You can download the pamphlet from IDeA’s site now, and also discuss the content on the Social by Social network too. There are some more links and examples on the IDeA website too, and printed copies will be available from NESTA and IDeA shortly.

The main thing to announce is that Social by Social is now in print and also available to download in PDF at socialbysocial.com. It’s a detailed practical guide to using social technology for social impact, and it’s intended to be especially useful for civil servants, social entrepreneurs and campaigners. It lists the best software to use, explains how to use digital tools to engage communities, and tells some stories of the what happens if you do. Thanks to contributors like Euan Semple, Steve Bridger, Dominic Campbell and many more.

My co-authors Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and I have also decided to put our ideas into practice by building an online community of people who are using social technology for social good. If you’re involved in trying these tools out, sign up to the SxS Network at socialbysocial.net and connect with others in this field, share best practice – and get personal advice from us too.

Mindapples is progressing well. Tom, Ana, Sangeet and I have been working on a new brand and a new website and we’ll have something ready for alpha testing next month ready for a beefed up PR campaign in December. The team is growing and we’ve been analysing the results to produce some interesting stories for public consumption. The next step is to secure some seed funding to accelerate the project, so please do introduce us to anyone who wants to fund public mental health education programmes. Read more on mindapples.org.

There’s lots going on at School of Everything too. This month we’ve launched School of Everything Gifts, which means you can buy your loved ones some lessons with hand-picked teachers in anything from breadmaking to Twitter lessons (with personal tutoring from yours truly).

And finally, I’m very pleased to be working with Futuregov on a consultancy project for the DCLG on ePetitions. We’re writing some data standards for all local government petitions systems to ensure our collective efforts to call the Government to account are processed and shared smoothly. More on how to get involved with that on the Futuregov blog.

So, lots happening, especially in my favourite areas of education, democracy and mental health. There’s more, including fun (and occasionally cheesy) things going on with the Courvoisier Future 500, plus interesting plotting with Luke Nicholson at Kept, and some new writing projects in the pipeline. Watch this space for more, when I have time to post.

In the meantime, a little plug for my friends at Castle Galeazza, where I will be spending a few days this weekend to unwind. Reading retreats in rural Italy – the perfect antidote to all this high-tech sociable London living.

Having recently published Social by Social, I didn’t want to focus on the details of the tools and how to use them – anyone looking for information on technology tools and how to deploy them should check out the book. Instead I focussed my thoughts on the new ‘social conventions’ being created by these tools, and the implications on our culture and power structures as a result of all these technologies. How does it affect my relationship with my audience if the audience can talk back, and talk to each other?

I began with a story my friend Charlie once told me about a speaking job he did in Finland. He arrived to find he was speaking to an audience of one man. He gave his talk anyway, as best he could, and was rewarded with a large and pleasing round of applause from this audience member. Moderately satisfied, he gathered his possessions to leave but was stopped by a cry from the man: “But you can’t go yet: I’m the next speaker!” Because that’s the thing about audiences: you never know who’s in them or what they might have to say.

I was speaking here to a silent audience in a darkened theatre: a common format for these events but actually a relatively recent convention. Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (thanks to Dougald for putting me onto this) narrates the shift in the 19th Century from performances where the audience talked and participated, to a new social convention of a silent audience. But in this talk, I had a Twitter feed behind me showing the things the audience were saying to each other about what I was saying. So what are the conventions for interacting with that? Is it rude of them to interrupt me, or is it rude of me to ignore their comments?

The point is, it’s not the tools that matter: it’s the impact they have on our social structures and conventions. The media has changed: we already have a completely new ecosystem of news. It’s changed marketing too, with sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and Skittles turning their website into a Twitter feed for conversations about their product acting as living proof of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations”. Organisations and work have changed too: my various friends and followers on Twitter act as a distributed consultancy and community of practice for me.

I see this as a time to play with social conventions and find new ways to interact, with and without technology. A conference is a set of social conventions of audience silence, expert performance and public conversations – and these can be played with, as we do at the People Speak with things like the Twitter stream visualisation, or the talkaoke table. A blog is another social convention, in which we agree to listen patiently to what the author has to say before making our comments on their ideas. Discussion forums are flatter, with no hierarchy except a custodian keeping the space active and safe. Twitter is more complex again, a vast multiplicity of asymmetric relationships, public and private conversations and even old-fashioned broadcast. With each of these new tools comes a set of new conventions, each of which – as Rohan Gunatillake rightly observes – eventually leaks back into the rest of our society.

So if it’s a time to play with convention, it’s also a time to challenge some of the 19th Century assumptions about how things “should” be done. At the same time as the silent audience emerges, so too does the culture of street silence, the shift from the noisy, sociable marketplace to the silent, impersonal shop as the context for commerce, and the shift from consumer-commissioning to mass production of products. Amidst technological revolution, economic recession and climate change, all of these conventions are now open to challenge.

School of Everything is a social marketplace for face-to-face learning. We’re moving from a 19th Century broadcast model of teaching to a social media approach where everyone can be a teacher. Similarly, Mindapples is about respecting everyone’s “expertise” about what works for their minds. As I say in the introduction to Social by Social, it’s about helping people do things, not doing things to people.

So for cultural organisations, what is cultural production when it’s not mass production? What are the conventions and power structures for facilitating social production of and around the arts? And what are the implications for expert practictioners when they are not stood in front a silent audience? Someone asked a question in the following panel about quality control on School of Everything, and also about quality in arts production, and my answer in both cases is that just because an organisation isn’t taking responsibility for quality control, doesn’t mean individuals aren’t doing it themselves. We can all take responsibility for assessing expertise, curating content and making our own judgements; and the price we pay for moving up the power chain is that we must sit through more poor quality material. Thanks to these new tools, the choice is ours.

I believe that social tools make the invisible networks of our culture visible, and therefore possible to engage with. A good arts organisation can rally a community around a cultural event, but all the ripples in the pond become visible too and arts organisations can engage with them. At what point does it become rude for them, and me, to ignore what the audience is saying? Cultural production can create meaningful culture, but it is social tools that embeds it and makes it diverse and relevant to a wider audience.

I think the biggest issue for arts organisations within these shifting social conventions concerns the role of performance. Social media is most certainly performative: when I Twitter I speak to a larger audience than were present at Friday’s event, so don’t for a minute think I’m not performing when I tweet. In fact, if you want to understand Twitter you could do a lot worse than read Keith Johnstone’s Impro. But there are times when it is appropriate to improvise together, and others when it is better to be silent and listen. I don’t want to send text messages during a play, I want to really watch the play (unless it’s a really bad play…).

Arts organisations, like the rest of us, now need to consider the role of silence and performance in all their work, and deploy appropriate tools to assist the performance and embed the culture it creates. But that doesn’t mean the moonlight sonata is improved by twittering through it.

The book, which was commissioned by Nesta and published by Openmute, is a practical guide to how to make use of the amazing opportunities of social and digital technologies for social impact. We’ve collected the most useful resources around and woven them together with some inspiring stories, practical advice and thoughts on the future.

The book is aimed at anyone working in the public or third sectors, plus campaigners, community groups and even concerned citizens. It’s 250 pages of practical advice and reference materials, and it’s available to buy here for just £7.99.

We’ve also released all the content free online under a Creative Commons license. Read and download it, add your comments and remix it for your own purposes now at www.socialbysocial.com. We want you all to make use of these resources in your projects and consultancy work, so as many people find out about these technologies and what they can do as possible.

After the launch itself, David Wilcox and Drew Mackie ran another version of the Social by Social Game, which introduces people to new technologies and helps them develop their own social by social projects. If you’d like us to run a similar event in your organisation, or if you’d like more tailored advice, please drop me a line.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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?

The event, called the Social by Social Game, was inspired by the Social Media Game and also by the book we’ve been writing for NESTA called Social by Social.

Rather than repeat the details here, those of you who are curious should check out David’s excellent blog post and videos documenting and explaining the event. The whole game is Creative Commons but still in development, so please take it and rework it, and let us know how it might be improved. And if you’d like us to run a similar event in your organisation or community, please do drop me a line.

As organiser Amy Sample Ward explains here:

The Social by Social game is a fun session to help people explore how social technology can be used for social benefit: whether that’s by a nonprofit, a social innovation startup, within a neighbourhood, or across a community. We’ll invent some of those places, then challenge each other in groups to develop plans using a pack of specially-developed cards and other props. It will be a mix of collaboration and competition that should give you lots of practical ideas that you can use in your own projects.

We facilitated a version of this game recently at SHINE09 and this should be a greatly improved second version. The game will be run by me, Amy and David Wilcox, and we’ll also give you news of the Social by Social handbook we’ve written, with Cass Business School, for NESTA.

Our intention is to link the game to the book content, which will also be available online under a Creative Commons license, so after developing your social technology plan in outline during the game, you can use the Social by Social content to follow through. The game is Creative Commons too.

* Date: Tuesday, 2 June
* Time: 5:30pm doors, 6 pm start
* Location: Charity Technology Trust – 1 London Bridge, SE1
* RSVP: London Net Tuesday group

The RSA has worked hard to embrace these values through the RSA Networks project, on which I was a consultant and volunteer. However the level of culture shift is great and the support of an engaged fellowship is essential. In standing for Council I intend to represent the energies of a young, digitally-savvy, ethically aware generation that is already reshaping the world in its own image.

I bring to this all my experience as a reformer and innovator in education, democracy and mental health. I am Founder of the Mindapples ’5-a-day for your mind’ campaign, recently featured in the RSA Journal, and a Co-founder and Company Director of the innovative education start-up School of Everything, which won both a New Statesman Award and a Prime Minister’s Catalyst Award in 2008.

I am also co-author of a forthcoming NESTA handbook on the use of social technology for social impact, a fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, a long-standing volunteer at Social Innovation Camp and a pioneer of new models of social enterprise, digital campaigning and democratic participation.

All my voluntary and commercial activities are directed towards building a fairer, healthier and more sustainable world. I challenge old structures and assumptions, not through opposition but by building more compelling alternatives. I hope that with my support the RSA can lead the charge and help us build the society we all want to live in.

I hope you will endorse my candidacy, or disagree with my ideas, by leaving me a comment below. If you’re an RSA Fellow, I hope I can also count on your vote next month. (I’ve always wanted to say that.)