Author: Nick Booth

19th March 2013

Why don’t we trust networks to do things at scale? #ukgovcamp13 #lsis13

A picture of a traditional set opf scales with german writing — Image thanks to vividbreeze on flickr

I’ve had a bonkers busy few weeks – meeting and talking to a wide range of people and it’s helped me start thinking through a problem with networks: they tend not to be trusted to reliably deliver solutions at any sort of scale.

Let me share how and why I’ve started looking at this (and I’m sure I’m not the first).

Catherine Howe (her govcamp piece here) and myself were both in a session at the fabulous ukgovcamp last Saturday. It was the end of the day and I think (I came in late) it was on what makes cross sector collaboration work and convened by Jag Goraya with a big dose of help from Saul Cozens.

A problem of scale?

The bit of the discussion that helped me went along the lines of. “The answer to a lot of public sector problems do sit in developing healthy networks and developing and encouraging the cultures which help networks thrive. Do that and people tend to do what makes sense, rather than what is prescribed.” I was trying to understand why achieving this is so difficult and suggested that it was a problem with scale, something along the lines of…

Large budgets and large problems tend to lead to large things being created and commissioned.
These have a direction of their own and – on the whole – need to be seen to succeed.
Networked activity is different – it is often lots of small activity with little or modest innovation – that doesn’t appear to be capable of delivering at scale.
So large organsiation charged with sorting large problems are loathe to trust to a networked approach.

In truth I think networks can deliver at scale. A city is such a thing, the families that make up a community likewise. The benefit for using networked approaches for sorting big problems is we don’t need to invest everything in one large solution then persuade ourselves it has worked.

Dollops and cock up

Instead we need to learn how to recognise the pattern of networked progress: plenty of success, a good dollop of treading water and a decent slice of cock-up, indifference, waste and failure.

I think way forward collectivity this will improve on social problems more steadily and in a way that people can more easily get involved with than a large scale service offer tends to do. It’s also relates to why I’ve had problems with unrealistic expectations – that setting expectation too high leads to harming social movement – zero expectations encourage success – high expectations make even achievements look like failures.

That was the gist of where ukgovcamp had got me to. It was built on other things recently:

Listening to a conversation the week before at a conference I spoke at for the Hampshire Association of Local Council’s digital conference (again with Catherine Howe) amongst a group of councillors from some of the larger
At the LSIS Governance conference in Manchester late last week I started talking to a Clerk to a Further Ed college that had been asked to improve educational attainment in a particular neighbourhood. They wanted a steady approach that built community links, strengthened social capital and relationships and built aspiration in the community. The funders wanted rapid change – so what they are likely to buy is intense extra activity with the students about to take their GCSE’s – one is the big and brittle – v the modest but maybe meaningful.

Capturing the subtle incremental change that comes through networks is partly why we have been working with Gateway Family services and Birmingham Settlement and Nominet Trust to develop an impact assessment app which measures and organises the modest – as well as the sometimes downright remarkable – shift that happens in people and places. But turning this into something that politicians and policy makers will trust to deliver is an interesting problem.

Any solutions?

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The non launch of the Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham (get it today)

The Community Lovers Guide to Birmingham – a simple book of stories of the ways volunteers, community and social enterprise are changing relationships in the city. We finally have the book ready for release.

It fits in with the work we did with the Grassroots Channel – capturing the stories of active citizens. In many ways (inspired by another book called Hand Made) these are stories about militant optimism: about people doing things because they care, sometimes against the odds and often with little formal support.

People like the Friends of Cotteridge park, a group who saved their local park from decommissioning and went on to make it bigger, better and who tell us that “having fun is what makes it work”. “The feeling you get when you are part of a group who’ve achieved something you thought was impossible is a lovely feeling…the long term result is a better community and nicer place to live.”

People like, Birgit Kehler of Change Kitchen, Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker of Urban Harvest, Tom Baker of Loaf and more who all share their stories with us in this collaboration.

Most of the work pulling these stories together was done by our Steph Jennings and in the New Year we’ll be getting a few people together to launch it officially. It will also be available online as a series of chapters soon. If you fancy a good honest book to hold for yourself or your loved ones for Christmas it is already available to order from Blurb today. If you order before 13th December using the “SANTA2012” code you can get 20% off.

Also thank you to everyone who contributed towards the book. They were, in no particular order;

Emma Woolf, Friends of Cotteridge Park
Birgit Kehrer, ChangeKitchen CIC
Eleanor Hoad & Nigel Baker, Urban Harvest
Tom Baker, Loaf
Jon Bounds, Big City Plan Talk
Chris Unitt, Created in Birmingham
James Yarker, Stan’s Cafe
Karen Strunks, 4am Project
Naseem Akhtar, Saheli Women’s Group

7th December 2012

Hyperlocal folks in South Birmingham – a few notes from the first social media surgery in Kings Norton.

This picture shows three hyperlocal bloggers all come together through yesterday’s first Three Estates Kings Norton social media surgery.

On the left is Lynn Horsnett of the Friends of Kings Norton Park. She came along for some tips – having started a blog. We helped her make it more blog like – activating comments and looking at trackback (the way in which when one blog links to a post of another blog it appears in the comments section) and writing google friendly titles for posts. We also helped her change her twitter account and improved the prfile a little. She is though in her own right a hyperlocal blogger – but he local is a park in south Birmingham.

Lynn’s feedback was that the surgery..

helped Friends of Kings Norton Park to open its blogspot up for conversation and helped set up a twitter account, hopefully meaning we can now hear from the important people, the wider community. Love the ideas of interlinking community groups and widening networks. Social media workshops are really positive experiences.

In the middle is our own Steph Jennings – a hugely experienced hyperlocal blogger around to offer tips about her work on www.wv11.co.uk.

Beside Steph is the amazing Sas Taylor – listen here to why she and her husband Marty run the B31voices local blog. Sas was sharing her expertise with a range of people at the surgery, including Kizzy Bent of Birminghsm City Council’s Environmental Health team.

Kizzy commented after the surgery:

Sas showed me how Environmental Health can promote the work we do in Northfield District on her blog and twitter sites to ENGAGE with the residents. I was amazed and will definitely be sending regular updates to the site. The Podnosh meetings have boosted my confidence using technology and highlighted social media is the way to go to connect with a wider section of the community. Thanks I will be encouraging my colleagues to do the same.

Austin Rodriguez – of the Birmingham South Community Safety Partnerships – is working with us to run surgeries in south Bimringham, blogs in his own right on the site

http://bhamsouthcommunitysafety.com/

which brings together a lot of social media activity in South Birmingham plus news of their work. Austin helped his colleague Lewis O’Rourk.

Lewis said after the surgery

I was initially a little bit wary of social media. The session has provided me with a decent insight into the simplicity of using this mode of communication. It is easy to use, a fantastic way of engaging with people and cost effective. I will certainly be using social media in future for various projects and media campaigns.

The best thing though by miles was bringing these people together in one place – one place where they could start to share not just skills but ideas and work together. Social media surgeries are about much more than technical skills – they are about confidence and relationships and building trust to make things better.