Tag: Politicians

20th May 2007

Could you use an Institutional Hack?

“Institutional Hack” is a delicious, contradictory new phrase for me. Paul Miller (of the School of Everything and from time to the think tank Demos) used it earlier today in this post on his personal blog.

At first you might think an Institutional Hack is one of those cynical folk, the type who’s skill, energy and expertise is focussed on working the politics of their organisation principally for personal gain.Not so. Paul’s idea is the opposite.

His “institutional hack” is the the bold, adventurous action which can cut through the atrophied arteries of organisation. Paul uses it to praise a group of people who have invented just such a hack for the key issue of how government innovates.

The Open Innovation Exchange is a loose coalition of organsiations and individuals who got together to bid for a £1.2 million pound government contract. Their innovation has been to eschew conventional commercial wisdom and collaborate online and in public to write their bid. (Just think about that for a moment!)
Yes that’s right, their competitiors could watch what they were doing. Their competitiors could take their best ideas and use them themselves.

The genius of the approach is that everyone and anyone is welcome to contribute, in this case drawing ideas and input from hundreds of minds, a refreshing and energising alternative to the more normal bid written behind closed doors. It all happens in the open, so credit is clear and credit is shared, hopefully generating a virtuos cycle of generosity with knowledge and ideas. If they win the collaboration goes many steps further. The bid says that one of the first things they’ll do is talk to their competitiors.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, exploring whether this is a New Model or New Madness (the link also takes you to a short audio interview with one of the team).

But here I simply want to come back to Paul Miller’s notion and ask you how could your aims benefit from the spirit of the “institutional hack”?
This was first posted here. Thanks for the reference.
technorati tags: institutionalhack

18th May 2007

Open source tendering – New Model or New Madness?

Scroll down and you can listen to David Wilcox talking about what I suspect is a unique experiment in producing an online open source collaborative tender for the £1.2 million Cabinet Office programme to create an Innovation Exchange for the Voluntary Sector. David explains the process with relevant links here , and you can see where the online collaboration took place through this link. The picture (find it here) is of Simon Berry of Ruralnet UK delivering the bid documents last week. The smile says a lot.

So what’s it all about? The Third Sector Minister Ed Miliband was looking for “a partner to deliver a new £1.2m Innovation Exchange – a programme to support the third sector’s capacity to innovate. The Innovation Exchange programme aims to provide third sector innovators with access to the people and potential capital they need to make their ideas a reality”

In short share knowledge to improve the way the sector delivers public services.

As David explains in the interview he and others wondered why such a bid couldn’t be created collaboratively and in public. As he says, their consortium thought about playing some cards (their best cards) close to their chest, then chose to go the whole hog. Everything they were proposing could be seen, and evolved in public. So what can we make of this:

New Madness?:

Clearly competitors know what you’re proposing and can nick the best ideas and neutralise or undermine others. The collaborators though placed copyright restrictions. Anything lifted from the bid had to be credited. If it was then developed and evolved competitors were asked to put that back onto the site. Naieve? Perhaps, we’ll know eventually.
Who does the government deal with? A shifting collaborative process has many stakeholders, but ultimately the people handing out the money will want to know who’s head is on the block – who is resonsible for delivering. hat may give and internally generated single organisation a stornger hand.

After that though I’m struggling with the problem of madess because for me it is a really a
New Model:

Closed doors, closed minds. Cards to the chest bidding can lead to bidders being blind to the best ideas. The open source tender had at least 500 minds involved.
Planning and delivery are different.… Often the people who will have to deliver are not involved in the bid. Someone comes along to them afterwards and says we thought you could do this for this much money. The open process could solve many of those problems earlier.
It raises everyones’ game. With an open source bid in the frame all the competitiors have find ways of beating that bid in terms of ideas and value for money. that can be good news for the public.
It builds flexibility into delivery. By collaborating openly at all stages it should be much easier to innovate along the life of the contract. It also creates transparency in delivering, which should make it easier for full feedback whilst the contract is delivered.
The winner can still involve the losers. As david says, if their bid wins one of the first things they’ll do is talk to the losers. likewise if another bid wins it may make sense for them to approach the consorium for input.
You never know where the ideas will come from. Online collaboaration improves the chances of bright new notions coming form unexpected places.
It challenges old ways of working – which with government can often be a great thing.
Losing is a good thing – well not really, but if an open source bid fails a much wider range of people have learnt from the process and learnt from the failure.

So all of this is why I’ve nominated this project for the Modernising Government category of the New Statesman New Media awards. Anything which brings more minds and more doers to the business of solving public problems is good in my book.

The bid partners are

RNUK Ltd, Delib Ltd, nfp 2.0, Partnerships Online, UnLtd and Warwick Business School. Contributors included Policy Unplugged, Sheffield Hallam University, National Rural Exchange, Common Purpose, Team Rubber, Work Empowerment Foundation, Unique Social Enterprise, Matrix Research & Consultancy, Switch On Shropshire, Local Level and others.

15th May 2007

Showdown at Black Patch Park – a new podcast on the Grassroots Channel

OK so a slightly dramatic headline as you can see from the smiling photo. This programme is one of those occasional episodes when we manage to bring an active citizen together with the politician who’s thwarted their efforts (you might like to listen to Albert Bore and Natalie Brade).

For four years Simon Baddeley (the tall one) has campaigned with other Friends of Black Patch Park to protect this urban green space which is in Sandwell but sits just on the boundary with Birmingham. Sandwell Council had zoned some of the land for industrial development. The friends campaigned widely – including making their own media on youtube and using Flickr and Wikipedia to keep tabs on facts and images – until finally something moved. Earlier this year Councillor Bob Badham (cabinet member for Transport and Regeneration) said the council would review those plans, with the aim to preserve the park as a park.

This podcast is the first time the politician and the campaigner have had a chance to really talk, and I have to say that is part of what we try and do from time to time, create a space where relationships can grow a little.

We also mention a event coming up to explore neighbourhood policing in Birmingham. The Chamberlain Forum is hosting the Chief Constable of the West Midlands and Bishop of Birmingham to explore how policing is responding to what communities want. You are welcome to come to the free event in Digbeth on the morning of June 13th. Details of how to book can be found here.

The power inquiry uses Youtube

Pam Giddy at the power inquiry has been in touch to tell us about a handful of films made to challeneg the process of reforming the Lords. You can find them through these links to www.makeitanissue.org.uk.

– Alex Hardy and Phil Hall’s ‘The Road to House of Lords Reform’
– Mark Wrainwright’s ‘The Trouble with Lords’
– Duncan Tilly’s ‘House of Lords Fudge’.

Pam also sets out arguments for the adoption o fhte hayden review on party finances:

Party funding, as it exists today, gives parties less incentive to cultivate membership because they can rely on large donations, lends itself to the perception that party members have less influence than super rich donors and focuses spending at the national, rather than the local, level…..If the main parties continue to reject caps on individual donations and total spending at elections, they will knowingly allow some of the most damaging sources of disengagement to continue unchecked.