Tag: Voluntary Sector

Community Docking

Unity-Zarya-Zvezda_STS-1061.jpgWhen I speak to council officers and civil servants about community engagement the conversation often conjures up mental images of docking space stations.

The officers are sincerely trying to picture interesting ways to approach the community, connect with it, create an airlock where they and the community can talk and then back into their own orbiters, reseal the doors, flush out the airlocks and return to business.

The conversation is so often based on the assumption that ‘services’ are separate from the people they serve. They have things to get on with regardless of what the folk around them do. The service is in its own orbit and conversation with the community is a nicety, not a necessity.

This mind set is riddled with contradictions which were exposed at last weeks fab Comunities & Local Government meeting to discuss social media and the forthcoming Community Empowerment White Paper.

The reason why this view perpetuates is because services are rarely delivered by the community they are intended to serve. They are rarely delivered by those who are already ‘engaged’. As one of the participants so elegantly put it – the government is trying to retail services when it should step back and structure itself as the wholesale part of the delivery chain. That would create huge opportunities for empowerment in the people led retails sector.

Of course local government has always been part of the retail arm of central government and increasingly local government is looking to create neighbourhood operations to push the retailing closer to the ground.

But these are organisations that still have a very different culture, or perhaps atmosphere from the groups of people they are designed to help. And until that atmosphere is breathable by both the service and served we will continue to dock when we should be engaged.

See Also:

Dan McQuilan’s excellent post on how the social web will make greater empowerment inevitable, the questions for government is how to relate to it.

Dave Briggs explanation of how social media will do this.

Journalism from the UK Parliament Twitter Stream

If you modestly define journalism as telling people what they need to know when they need to know it I think the various British Government twitter streams are getting into the swing of that.

UK Parliament Twitter Stream as source of news
This on David Davis and his resignation as an MP from UKParliament (which uses its biog to describes itself as “Keeping an eye on government, debating laws, raising taxes”) is a good example of what might have once happened in a newspaper – journo rings press office and asks: “so what exactly is the procedure for resigning from parliament?”, press officers checks details and piece is written and appears in paper. This is a modest example of journalism but it does show how much collective efforts press officers and journalists have wasted by duplicating bits of each others jobs. We don’t need the journo to do that anymore. They can do something more useful.

By the way here’s the link to the info on the Chiltern Hundreds.

Update:

Dave Briggs and Ewan McIntosh alerted me to Stratford on Avon District Council starting to use twitter. As Dave says “sometime you just have to give things a go. And it’s great that someone in local government is doing just that.”  What I like is that the council uses the description of the feed as “Short, simple news” which is a more honest description of how man bodies use twitter – subverting the orignial use of “what are you doing now”.

Another Video on Climate Change and Cutting CO2 in Birmingham

About the time we were making this video for Be Birmingham, Oxfam were putting up the one below, which uses examples of people in Birmingham who are cutting their CO2.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_1_jGBl550&e]

If your taking steps to cut you carbon footprint you might want to register what you’re doing here – so what you achieve can be totted up to create a city wide accomplishment.

Hat tip Jon Bounds.

Birmingham's Local Strategic Partnership on Youtube: Cutting CO2

[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=gvO4_oT5NQE]

Here’s a short film we made last week for Be Birmingham, the city’s recently revamped Local Strategic Partnership.
The film is a short piece which includes Dame Ellen MacArthur talking about the launch of the partnerships CO2 challenge for 2008 – that each of us should look for way to cut 100kg of CO2 in the next year. The yachtswoman is passionate about how we are wasting resources and used her own blog to say how impressed she is with the energy building up here in brum.

In the 100 seconds are also some tips from people on what you might want to do. If you start changing your behaviour to save CO2 you can also sign up here – so your tally is added to the cities huge target of cutting carbon by 60% come 2026. All part of last week’s enjoyable yet controversial Climate Change Festival.
You can comment on the film here and I’d love it if you did.