NCVO ICT Foresight

Yesterday we had a fantastic day at NCVO discussing social networking, ICT and the voluntary and community sector.

Many interesting ideas emerged from our roundtable discussion (fortunately I recorded it!) Before we started I also put some quotes up on flip chart paper and asked people to respond by scribbling on post-it notes. Here are some of the results:

‘There is a new notion of networking emerging which is based more around individuals (e.g. blogging-based communities rather than forum-based communities” (from a conversation with David Wilcox about Nancy White’s work)

Responses:

• There is a concern that this will push us further towards single issue politics
• Are communities defined by technology or by aims/actions?

“Does ICT support the development of social capital? Or does social capital need to be in place already?” (adapted from Ben Anderson’s contribution to an NCVO/ESRC seminar on ICT, social capital and voluntary action which was also held yesterday)

Responses:

• Yes and yes! Can it speed and broaden social capital development?
• Relations must either be there or evolve
• Transactions are the key to developing social capital. Trust

“Being able to successfully participate in online communities has nothing to do with technical skills and everything to do with people skills” (from Jayne Cravens’ contribution to the same seminar)

Responses:

• Sort of - some technical skills required (even more important is good governance)
• This suggests a technical elite will emerge
• These skills/attributes may be different for forum and blog-based communities (see Nancy White)
• There are already technical divides in society, not always representing power differentials

“It is now easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice and informal networks” (from this post by David Wilcox about membership associations)

Responses to my questions about what this means for membership organisations:

• Membership organisations and associations can give these networks focus and impart skills
• Has a parallel with the music industry. Membership schemes need to offer something more, something exclusive to justify cost/relevance
• Branding theory seems relevant. Consider ‘crossing the chasm’. The key ideas are about aims, objectives, ways to affect change

“There is a simmering tension between ego-centric thinking and network-centric thinking – the tension between the institutional power that emanates from an organization and the transactional power that inheres in its members’ myriad interactions” (from this article by Jed Miller and Rob Stuart)

Responses:

• How do organisations maintain accountability? How do individuals evaluate and choose to direct their attention?
• Organisations should embrace this. The tension is in competition - that’s keeping vitality in the sector
• Depends whose side they are on
• How is this different from the tension between activing in your own self-interest and acting altruistically?

“Content sharing and other learning, knowledge-finding and knowledge-sharing are arguably the domain of Knowledge Management rather than Social Networking” (I was interested in exploring this discussion, alluded to in this post by Dave Pollard)

Responses:

• Knowledge is the currency of social networking
• KM is social networking
• Everyone is an expert on something
• Personal knowledge management will be more important
• People are inherently bad at knowledge management and good at communication. Bad advice from a friend will alwyas carry more weight than info that has to be researched and validated.

We are going to be carring on our discussion here - please come and join in!

We are starting work on an ICT Foresight report which will look at the ways in which some of the new information and communication technologies are shaping issues of accountability for the voluntary and community sector.

We are looking for research and ideas and we are particularly interested in:

• user empowerment - the potential for more genuine, transparent dialogues
• role of intermediaries - perception that a new type of intermediary (built on more widely available digitised data) is emerging and that these bodies are likely to play a role in making organisations accountable
• sharing and storing data - increased capacity to hold data and mash it with other sources generates potential concerns over monitoring and evaluation - do the new technologies have the capacity to address concerns regarding the burden of reporting…or will they introduce new styles of reporting (or even further emphasise the importance of quantification)
• other agendas we should be looking at?

We’ve been thinking about some general principles that inform the debate - greater visibility, more emphasis on ‘instant accountability’, changing scale of accountability (geographical/numerical), always-on…

Thoughts and references greatly appreciated!

David Wilcox has posted some interesting thoughts on the impact of ICT on membership associations.

It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.
In addition, the best ideas often come from crossing professional and interest boundaries. That means you have to pay quite a lot of membership fees if you feel conventional associations are the way to get these contacts. Or you join social networking sites like ecademy and LinkedIn as well as building your own networks, perhaps using new applications like the People Aggregator.
There’s nothing particularly new in these observations … except I suspect not many nonprofit associations see what may be coming over the horizon. And even if you do sniff something new and threatening in the air, what do you do about it? Most of your members are probably just about coping with basic email and web. You’ll be lucky if your staff and Board are up to speed on the changes that new technologies are bringing. Their mindset may well be: why change now when only the minority are doing it differently?

Something worth picking up on in one of our future ICT Foresight reports which will look at social networks.

So far the following themes are emerging for this report:

• How ICT is impacting on the social glue that holds society together (including social capital theory)
• How ICT networks people and the impact that this is having on organisations and institutions (e.g. networks and hierarchies)
• Virtual volunteering

Thoughts and other ideas would be very welcome!

We have finally finished writing the first ICT Foresight report and it will be published in September.

It looks at the VCS’s crucial ‘voice’ and representation role, specifically through looking at how ICT is being used (or could be used) for campaigning and consultation. We don’t think there’s anything ground-breaking in there but it will hopefully will do what it aims to do - which is to help VCS leaders to think strategically about how ICT can help them achieve their missions.

After much discussion about a title we decided on something quite simple, so it will be called

ICT Foresight: campaigning and consultation in the age of participatory media.

As a taster, here is how the chapter on consultation kicks off…

Increasing calls for organisations in all sectors to be more accountable to a wide body of stakeholders has put much more emphasis on gathering different perspectives when making decisions or formulating policies. For governments and political parties this has been compounded by the decline in political and civic engagement, highlighted by falling party membership and declining voter turnout. As a result, there is significantly more interest in, and activity around, consultation and consultation processes.

Voluntary and community organisations are often integral to such consultation processes. By providing a voice for the marginalised, or by representing those groups difficult to reach via approaches designed for the mainstream, they provide a means for consultation processes, and ultimately the democratic system, to function more effectively.

This first chapter looks at the issue of consultation and how ICT is changing approaches and providing new learning on how to involve citizens and communities. An analysis of recent developments is complemented by case studies of current use, with a concluding section on issues to consider.

At a glance

What is happening?

• Declining participation in formal representative politics (e.g. membership of political parties and voting at elections)
• Increasing engagement of the public in decision making (e.g. in evidence to parliamentary select committees)
• Use of online tools to facilitate debate (e.g. pilots at a national and local level)
• Local government is expected (though not strictly compelled) to consider the voluntary and community sector in policy development

Risks

• Government wishing to bypass VCOs in order to reach ‘the public’
• Private and public sector organisations with more resources and expertise in using ICT moving into the ‘participation’ arena
• ICT making consultation too cheap, too easy, resulting in more poorly thought-through consultation

Opportunities

• Opportunity for VCOs to increase influence with policy makers by collecting and passing on the views of users (acting as an intermediary)
• Online consultations can be relatively efficient and effective
• ICT can enable more transparent consultation processes
• Opportunity to deepen relationships with supporters and users by openly taking account of their views and experiences, and then feeding results back

Further details when it comes out!

The sense trend index recently alerted me to Google trends, which allows you to compare up to 5 terms and see the volume of searches across a time period of your choosing. Search results are returned as a time plotted graph together with details of the city or region from which the search originated. Links to key news stories appear at peaks along the trend line.

This sounds like a great way to easily and cheaply monitor the impact of your organisation’s communications and campaigns.

For example, here are the results for:

• Make Poverty History
• NSPCC
• Father for justice

The era of mass media is giving way to one of personal and participatory media, says Andreas Kluth in the Economist’s recent supplement Among the audience – a survey of new media. A series of articles look at blogs, wikis, podcasting and journalism.

We will be exploring the impact of these for the voluntary and community sector in a series of four ICT Foresight reports. The first of these is being written as we speak – watch this space!

The speed of technological innovation is outrunning politicians’ attempts to keep pace, bringing radical changes to our lives before we can discuss the public interest issues, according to a senior government technologist, as reported by the e-government bulletin.

Ed Parsons, chief technology officer of the Ordnance Survey, was the keynote speaker at the launch of the Geospatial Group, a newly formed special interest group of the BCS.

Parsons told the meeting that in the near future ‘pervasive computing’ will combine with a rapid growth in geospatial applications to produce a world of smart objects that “know” where they are.

There will be benefits, he said, such as making it easier for parents to know where their children are. But there are also dangers. “Without realising it, aren’t we falling into a situation where we’re always being tracked?” asked an attendee. We cannot rely on MPs to spot these dangers with enough time to debate them in Parliament and pass legislation if necessary, said Parsons. “In a sense it’s too late, because the technology is already out there,” he said.

It seems important to me that voluntary and community organisations are aware of, and if necessary campaign on, the negative (and often unintended) impact of new technologies for individuals and society. But it is clearly an immense challenge to keep up with the fast pace of change.

I posted a while back on the potential for VCOs to use open source software. I sounded a cautious note about whether organisations were ready to use open source and David Wilcox also raised a few challenges:

• How far are staff in voluntary and community organisations likely to take the time and trouble to use social software unless there is a compelling benefit?
• How likely are they to use open source software, which may be free and desirable for various reasons, but presents otherchallenges of installation, configuration and unsupported use?
• How likely are they to share?

Which is why I’m so glad to read these accounts of the experiences of the organisations participating in the East of England FOSS in the VCS project.

Many participants are using both open source and their usual MS systems on different machines but most seem pleasantly surprised by the experience of using open source. I look forward to reading more as the project continues…

Discussions about e-democracy usually start from the perspective that the UK (and other western societies) is suffering from a drop in electoral participation and poor levels of trust in political institutions and politicians. The Power Inquiry, an independent inquiry into Britain’s democracy, has published its final report and recommendations.

The Executive Summary doesn’t explicitly recommend an expansion of e-democracy processes, though it does recommend “creating a culture of political engagement in which it becomes the norm for policy and decision-making to occur with direct input from citizens”. ICT can facilitate this, as we will discuss in our first ICT Foresight report on democracy, campaigning and advocacy.

Paul Miller and David Wilcox have already blogged about the report elsewhere. David thinks the whole process was a bit top-down:

Where did the recommendations come from? How did the Commission move from analysis of evidence to recommendation? It took six months…. but how? Was it a matter of the staff and advisers drafting and redrafting, running Commission meetings and away-days? Or were there some procedures by which emerging ideas were tested back with those who submitted evidence? I couldn’t see anything in the report about that … though it may well be in the backup material, and the conference will provide an opportunity to find out more… Anyway, if it was an entirely internal process it does, for me, raise a question about whether the Commission is walking the talk, practising what it preaches, and so on. Is it really “downloading power” - as it advocates - or is it simply offering JACE - Just Another Consultation Exercise?

Paul thinks they’ve performed a valuable role by raising awareness of the problem and is looking to the future:

The question that I’m now turning to is what comes next. I think we need to accept that political parties are never going to be as dynamic and vibrant as they were in the 1950s and 60s and that voting is only a part of democratic life. As Paul Ginsborg points out, “we will perhaps vote (an activity of some three minutes) 12 times at a national level and the same number at a local one - some 72 minutes in all, perhaps one-third of the television viewing we do daily.” What I’m interested in is people who are taking democracy into their own hands. People who are delivering democratic outcomes outside of formal politics by either taking decisions or delivering services themselves.

Meanwhile, mysociety have developed a site that allows people to comment on the Power Inquiry recommendations.

How can VCOs use ICTs to work more collaboratively? Ruralnet’s I-See-T project seeks to answer this question. They are running some free workshops to help voluntary and community organisations find out, try out and feed back on ways of using ICT for collaboration. The ICT Hub and NCVO’s Collaborative Working Unit are also commissioning some case studies of VCOs using ICT to work collaboratively, which should be interesting.

However, though ICT may provide useful tools, organisational culture, individual attitudes and skills gaps could provide barriers, as David Wilcox explains. As Eleanor Burt said in a comment on another post, “we have to be wary of viewing ICTs as ‘driving’ … This suggests some innate characteristic within the technology that forces us along one particular trajectory or to a particular outcome, when actually we have choices.” This reminds me of the force field analysis tool in our planning toolkit; change usually involves both positive “facilitating” forces and negative “blocking” forces.