“a non-profit group of Helsinki entrepreneurs started a website called Open Ministry to allow people of voting age to propose initiatives online. The website uses APIs from banks and mobile operators to confirm identities. Recently, the Finnish Parliament approved the platform after verifying that the electronic identification process is secure.”
Of course building a whole new one of these wouldn’t be so smart – borrowing from the one already built would probably be better
Futureshift: civic innovation in Birmingham and the black Country:
I’ve mentioned Futureshiftelsewhere – but if you have ideas for civic innovation in Birmingham or the Black Country this is the time and place to share them.
Elliot review of food safety comes to Birmingham – and we’re working on it alongside New Optimists.
My 10 Things about NHS Citizen – some reflections o a programme being pulled together by some of the best in the digital civic works – including our friends/collaborators Demsoc and Public-i. With encouragement from Tim Kelsey.
A section from Tinder Foundation’s Digital Nation Graphic – click on it to find the whole thing.
A helpful visualisation was published by the Tinder Foundation this month. It shows the digitally connected in the sunny highlands and the digitally disconnected on the other side of the divide – in the digital darkness. It tells us the economic cost to individuals if they don’t have the skills or will or tools to get online – and it shows us that the wealthy are online. Helen Milner – the chief exec at Tinder – blogged:
What’s really frustrating is that we do know what works. In the centre of our infographic is a tree of inspiration which has eight ‘leaves’ which cover how to do digital inclusion. They include outreach – helping people where they live work and play, hyper-local delivery in informal community spaces, local marketing, one-to-one support from volunteers and tutors, partnerships with trusted intermediaries to reach the hardest to reach, free, flexible access, and bite-sized, self-directed learning. No matter who I talk to about their programmes and schemes, these eight elements appear in some guise or another.
adding a plea…
It’s not just helping people to use digital, but using digital to help people. That’s about better use of data to provide personalised online learning that works for each individual. It’s about sharing data through APIs and using open source practices, embedding each other’s learning content, and working on platforms for co-creation to involve the learners in defining content and helping to produce it.
We also need to get cleverer about partnerships. We need to work together to amplify, scale and share the pockets of good practice. And to help us spread the word we need the ears of leaders in big and small businesses, local government, central government, innovative technology companies, social housing providers, further education colleges, libraries, think tanks, community organisations, Foundations and philanthropists.
All good stuff but not maybe that easy to pull off?
So what encourages collaboration like this?
Money certainly can. Often the way money is shared around is funders saying “offer us a solution to a problem and we’ll decided which of those on we we want to fund”. It is rarely put on the table simply to encourage people who already have solutions to have the time to invest in working together. Of course sometimes money distracts from collaboration. The relationships are framed around who will get which slice of the money – not what’s the best thing to do next and is it better if we do that together.
Working at the right scale matters. Asking to collaborate on solving large problems – lets get 11 million people online – tends to mean opportunities for organisations that have scale. Smaller groups of people are more likely to respond to “lets get my Nan and 9 other Nans a cheaper holiday this year”.
In many ways the business of doing more of the good things and doing them cleverer is something we already understand.
When we run a social media surgery we ask people what they are trying to achieve and then we show them things that will help them. A neighbourhood forum might be able to use a facebook group. We are focused on what they care about and in doing that we also get to do what we care about – which is growing the civic conversation online. We have resources we can share with them (skills and tools), we offer them the ones that seem relevant and only expect them to take up things that make sense for them.
So what if this were closer to the way we built partnerships and innovated? Perhaps a funder or a national org could ask those already doing things to bridge this divide what sounds like a damn fool question:
How can we help you?
The funder might have skills, a networks, new tools, money, knowledge, support in kind. They answer to the question might be ” give me a million quid” but will more often be “some publicity or half a salary for a year.” I don’t mean this question to be about intelligence gathering – I mean for funding orgs to use it as a means to distribute money and other assets. Do what a surgeon would do – and give the people you are helping what they ask for, when they ask for it.
People’s social networks were shaped by factors including ethnicity, class and gender, but personal characteristics, such as confidence, were also important in developing useful connections. Family and friends were seen as the basis for most relationships but there were low levels of awareness about wider social networks and how they might be used for moving on from poverty.
People’s links beyond their own ethnic community were important, but the added dimension of racism could prevent access to ‘mainstream’ influential networks.
Social networks tended to be ‘like with like’, so while they were used to access employment, this was often into low-paid jobs which relied on informal recruitment processes.
Strong bonds with family and friends helped mitigate the effects of poverty. However, developing bridging and linking ties with networks that could move people on from poverty involved risks and scarce energy and resources.
Voluntary, community and faith based organisations were seen as important for facilitating access to cross-cultural networks.
There were examples of good practice in agencies encouraging people to consider how their social networks could help them move out of poverty. However, there was no consistency in practice between agencies.
thanks for mentioning the social media surgeries as part of an approach which can help spread skills
The report reccomends:
Mentoring could be powerful in promoting positive use of networks for gaining work, setting up businesses and progressing to better jobs. There would be value in piloting peer mentoring within the workplace and for those finding a return to work problematic.
Employer action is required to address the negative ‘grace and favour’ aspects of networks in recruitment and promotion. Organisations should routinely review the extent to which informal workplace networks discriminate in access to employment and progression in the workplace.
As online access increasingly becomes the default for service provision, the need to promote digital fluency becomes more urgent. Social media clinics, with an emphasis on network aware ness, could be developed and linked to digital champions in Job Centre Plus.
The networks of service users were recognised as under-used resources in identifying training and employment opportunities, but there was no systematic agency practice. Standardised ‘toolkits’ could be developed for employment support agencies. Toolkits should enable people to map their networks, help build strategies for extending and using networks, and provide signposting to agencies that can assist in developing ‘bridging’ capital.
ESOL classes are critical for people from migrant and refugee communities seeking employment. They provide important spaces for cross-cultural networking that can lead to helpful inter-ethnic friendships and increased confidence in language and literacy.
Voluntary, community and faith organisations offer vital advice and services, and inform signposting and networking within and between ethnic groups. These resources need to be protected and recognised. The principles of the Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 should be incorporated into public service commissioning procedures, with contractors required to demonstrate added social value through access to community networks.
High quality volunteering helps develop links beyond family and community: its importance needs to be recognised, as does the diversity of motivations for taking up unpaid work in the community.
Lol being shown around the new West Midlands Police website by Digital Service Manager Stuart Davis
Working with the Community Safety Partnerships in Birmingham has allowed us to help partners start great conversations across the city.
In North Birmingham a whole host of police officers are now tweeting and community groups are starting to organise themselves online. In South Birmingham a whole spectrum of people from the Community Safety Partnership now blog & tweet to help inform their community of the things that matter to them. In East Brum? Well in East Brum we have Lol .
We’ve written about him before, but Lol Turstan is a resident who loves where he lives so much he hasn’t waited for any of the local partners to get online, he ran with it himself and created B26 Community – A hyperlocal website for the community of Sheldon, where Lol can help spread the message from his Neighbourhood Watch group.
Lol has been working to forge partnerships locally to make the most of his site for the local residents, including strong links with his local police team.
I caught up with Sgt Hanif of Sheldon’s Neighbourhood Police team to find out what they thought of Lol and working with the B26 Community Blog;
“Lol is a very active, influential, member of Sheldon’s community, and already has vested interest in our area, so when we saw the opportunity for our team to attend the social media surgeries he was an obvious choice for us to take along. When it was first suggested to him he couldn’t dream of being involved – he was scared his age would be a barrier to understanding the technology.
But he went along with some of our officers and a few weeks later when I saw him next I was just, well WOW! He’d set up a website and was doing everything he could to make it as useful as possible.
Every time we have a community meeting he brings handouts to promote the site and is always asking others to get involved. We’ve worked with Lol to share our messages and make other things happen in the area – but some credit has to go to our PCSO Steve McGrath too. He’s worked especially close to Lol to get things on the site.
Together they’ve coordinated local schemes like installing locks on residents sheds after a spate of break ins and and recruiting for the street and neighbourhood watch groups.
We forward everything to him not just police stuff but anything that’s relevant. It gets it out there and it works because people tell me they’ve seen it on the site – and this level of communication was especially important to us after a murder in a local public house.”
Reassurance
“The day after the murder took place, because of the nature of the incident, we had to get a reassurance message to the effected communities as soon as possible, and while technically it happened in our neighbouring ward residents don’t recognise those boundaries we had to act fast.
There had been a shooting, and a possible case of mistaken identity and we wanted to help allay any rumours. I was informed at 11am and within 2 hours we’d got key members of the community together at the station and gave them what information we could for them to share.. We had a time sensitive message to get across. We wanted community we had gathered together was to share that message with other people.
Lol used his website and the contacts he’s made there to circulate this for us. We know his distribution is vast so for us it’s a short cut to the community. An officer on the beat or any other member of the community by word of mouth may have only reached out to 20 people they bumped into – with Lol and B26 Communty we reached potentially hundreds in a short space of time.
Moving forwards, as his contact list builds we would like to work with Lol to use his website to spread other key messages – we can reach a much wider audience than before and as a result we have a better informed community – which means they can make safer choices for themselves.”
Direct Link to Local People
Hannah Fitzgerald, West Midlands Police East Birmingham Communications Officer had this to say about the usefulness of communicating through community websites;
“Having someone like Lol running a site like B26Community is really useful for Sheldon and East Birmingham as a whole. There is no really localised press coverage in that area so he’s a direct link to the people there.
He’s hosted our live webchats for us on his site. The last one we broadcast was around Anti Social Behaviour and as Sheldon Park has suffered from episodes of Anti Social Behaviour in the past it was good to be able to communicate directly with the community there.”
Richard Eccelstone, West Midlands Police Social Media Champion added;
“We used to promote our webchats on our Twitter and Facebook pages – but that would attract comments from the whole of the West Midlands even when we wanted to focus on a specific area – that would really dilute the conversation but by connecting to local blogs we were able to use their audience to focus the talk and make it more relevant. This is true of B26 and other hyperlocal websites across the midlands.
We are looking to focus more of our communications on a local level and working with hyperlocal blogs such as B26Community is a fantastic way of doing this”
What’s great about the approach the police are taking to local communication is how effective it is. Our work with all the community safety partnerships has proven that talking with local people using the tools they understand improves communication right across the neighbourhood and in turn improves the perceptions of safety in those areas and helps make things happen. The video below is of Safer Places Office Austin Rodriguez, he’s talking about how using digital tools to communicate locally has benefited his area – evidence that partners working with the community – talking to them at a local level, works.
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