Can the RSA help close the digital divide ?
I am speaking this afternoon at an NCVO conference on civil society leadership. If I get the chance to talk about what we are trying to do at the Society, I’ll describe how I see the challenge of Fellowship engagement.
There has been some progress over the last year or so but from a relatively low base of activity. The challenge lies in trying to doing three things at once:
• lower the barriers to wider and more ambitious engagement
• grow the capacity needed for the Fellowship to be creative, networked and outward looking
• develop the right content propositions; what is it the Fellowship could actually do to make a difference?
The third of these has often felt the most difficult. Which is why a light went on in my head at yesterday’s National Digital Inclusion Conference.
I was really impressed by the many people I met involved in social media and community websites. As I have said in previous posts, the best of these sites really add capacity and strength to a community. HarringayOnline, for example, has 1500 local people signed up to a site focussing on just one ward.
But running theses sites is in most cases a hand to mouth labour of love. This is where the RSA Fellowship with its skills, resources and connections could make a difference. So – working I hope with William Perrin whose Talk About Local initiative aims not only to support existing sites but to help set up hundreds more – my idea is to organise a training day at John Adam Street and to bring together enthusiastic Fellows from around the country with the mission of twinning up with existing sites or developing new ones. We’ll even try to find some money to provide a small start up funding pot.
On-line community media is a good thing in itself, giving people information and making connections. But more exciting is the way in which this new collaborative infrastructure could provide the basis for a whole range of face to face initiatives. Not only is a very small portion of the country served by a good community web site but most sites that exist are only scratching the surface of what they could achieve once they have built up a significant local following.
I’m never sure how many Fellows read this blog but I would be fascinated to hear what they – or anyone else – thinks.
MPs allowances: the dangers of winning, the virtues of clumsiness
There is one thing worse than losing a political argument: winning it. Given that all policy is seen to fail sooner or later, those who oppose an idea know it is only a matter of time before they can say ‘I told you so’. But the person who presses their case and wins runs the risk of being left the isolated scapegoat. In true ‘In the Loop’ fashion Whitehall insiders have their own version of an old saying: ‘success has many parents, but failure is a bastard’. I lost many arguments in my time at Number Ten, but if ever I thought I might win I made sure I wasn’t alone.
It is, I suspect, only a matter of time before we hear competing accounts of whose voice it was that last week piped up at Downing Street to suggest Gordon Brown intervene again in the MP’ allowances argument. Could it have been the same person who advocated the now shelved attendance allowance scheme and then went on to suggest the Prime Minister make his case on YouTube? If so they, like another unfortunate advisor, will soon find lifelong friends calling them by their surname (I had tea last week with an ex-Treasury civil servant who giggled uncontrollably each time he found an excuse to refer to ‘Mr McBride’).
By the way, while we are on the YouTube debacle I can’t resist repeating Catherine Bennett’s brilliant description of Gordon Brown ‘giving the impression of an unusually intelligent alien who has made a careful study of human beings, without ever having had the opportunity to meet one’.
On the substantive issue I refer back to an earlier post, offering a cultural theory explanation for the ‘clumsy’ system of MPs’ allowances. I made the point that there is no neat solution to MPs’ remuneration that doesn’t create new problems of its own. Oh, if only Number Ten read my blog, how much embarrassment they could have avoided!
The irony of all the talk of new systems is that the present arrangements are, I suspect, only one small reform from being workable, and this reform is about to be implemented. As the Scottish system shows, making all expense claims immediately transparent largely takes the heat out of the issue; for two reasons. On the one hand, all but the most shameless MPs avoid making claims that will bring them into disrepute. On the other, the fact that the claims are publicly available takes away the journalists’ ability to ‘expose’ the information in a sensationalist way.
One of the perils of policy making – and dangers of political hubris – is overturning a whole system when minor reforms could have the desired effect (did someone say ‘Frank Dobson and the NHS internal market?’). There is no popular way to pay MPs – as Rachel Sylvester argues cogently, this reflects a deeper malaise in political discourse - but the present system plus transparency may well be the best we can realistically manage. Not that I’d want to be the one who tells Gordon!
Pointless and irrational but, hey, I’m hooked
This blog is very self indulgent. ’Really’, I hear you saying ‘and how exactly would that distinguish it from all the rest?’.
It’s been one of those days. It started with a speech at the QEII Centre this morning. I’m not saying I was brilliant, but I wasn’t that bad. But for all the positive response I got I could have been selling pork scratchings at a vegan convention.
It confirmed to me that the QEII is simply the worst venue for making speeches; its rooms are huge, featureless, echoing hangars with no natural light. To make it worse, my next gig was also there, chairing the opening session of the National Digital Inclusion Conference. Last year I also chaired the event and it was great. But this year – in the QEII – even with four, yes four, ministers on the platform getting the audience going was like trying to start an Austin Allegro on a January morning after you’ve been away for a month.
This afternoon we had talks with RSA Regional Chairs about the plans for an elected Fellowship Council. This is a radical and important step for the RSA as we build our Fellowship strategy. The Chairs have their concerns but are broadly supportive, seeing the need for a body with the legitimacy to challenge both RSA HQ and regions and local groups themselves to improve the engagement of Fellows. It looks like we are going to get plenty of people wanting to stand for election to the new Council.
But unless you are an RSA activist or the marketing director at the QEII, I realise this is not exactly fascinating. Which is where the self indulgence comes in. Even though it’s way past the time of day when it’s worth doing a blog, I just can’t allow a weekday to go by without a post.
Now, this might be for two different reasons. Either I am totally dedicated even to the point of writing blogs that no one will read. Or I am terrified that if I miss one day it will be a slippery slope; I will lose discipline and end up – like most organisational bloggers – doing it once a week at best.
I have been meaning for ages to write a blog about blogging; to pluck up the courage to ask, is it really worth it? Perhaps, after all, this is it.
The pro-social council – what is to be done?
So here, in outline, is the argument I made to the Association of County Council Chief Executives yesterday morning….
This week’s budget confirms we are entering a long period of public sector austerity, yet needs – particularly those associated with population ageing – will continue to rise.
Even without the specific fiscal challenges we anyway faced what Professor Niall Ferguson described as a ‘trilemma’ (a situation where you can have two out of three outcomes but not all three). Ferguson’s trilemma (and he was addressing his arguments from a right of centre perspective) is between open market globalisation, social stability and a small state.
Public opinion finds it hard to accept this reality, which is why opinion polls suggest people want a Swedish welfare state paid for by American tax rates (although, judging by the generally favourable response to the budget tax increase for the wealthy, this may be changing).
The future looks depressing and even frightening unless we can close what I described in my first RSA speech as the social aspiration gap. To create the future most of us aspire to we need citizens who are:
• More actively engaged in collective decision making at every level
• Living more self sufficiently
• Contributing more to the collective capacity of society
More and more evidence tells us that the crucial determinant of citizens’ ‘prosociality’ is the thickness and range of social networks they belong to and quality of social support they receive. This evidence comes not just from sociology but from evolutionary psychology and behavioural science.
So the question for local government as it seeks to protect (or even improve) social outcomes with shrinking public investment is: how can it grow prosocialism, particularly through the fostering of stronger social networks. Another way of putting this is: how can public investment achieve a stronger social multiplier effect?
Here – in a highly abbreviated form – is a six point checklist for a council genuinely committed to this goal:
a) Spend less on opinion polling but seek to gain much more insight into how people actually live their lives and how they frame their social reality
b) In seeking to strengthen social networks start from those that already exist and seek to support and stretch them rather than trying to create new social infrastructures dependent on time limited public funding streams
c) Mainstream social network building. Don’t let this agenda feel additional to all the other targets and pressures; do the tough intellectual work of disclosing how stronger social networks can contribute to existing public service outcomes (like raisings school standards or improving public health)
d) Social networks are about relationships, behaviours and conversations. Behaviours matter more than words. If local authorities want to promote deeper more generous relationships between citizens then councils’ own practice must reflect this. Local Strategic Partnerships, for example, must be truly transformative spaces in which service leaders are willing to see beyond their own organisational imperatives to the fundamental needs of the locality
e) Engage local councillors in a redefinition of politics and social change, moving from a government-centric to a citizen-centric model. Support and incentivise councillors to be capacity builders (if this sounds crazy, there are places it is happening)
f) Understand that the evidence of greater cohesion and capacity lies not in everyone agreeing with each other or with the council, but in people disagreeing creatively (see cultural theory blogs passim).
It was a great session yesterday. My ambition now is for the RSA to develop a consortium of local authorities signed up to this kind of radical agenda and willing to work as an innovation set (each council committing to innovating and learning from others’ innovation).
And, by the way, there is also a lesson here for central Government: it has potentially an important strategic and network-hosting role in fostering this kind of practice in local government. But when it comes to the complex, locally-grounded, task of community capacity building, central Government intervention is much more likely to be damaging than constructive.
The crisis is an opportunity but only if public sector leaders are willing to think big and be brave.
Beware Taylor’s Law …
I am on my way back from Bath – my talk at the Association of County Chief Executives conference seemed to go quite well. This was a relief – not least because I suffered once more this morning from ‘Taylor’s Law’. This states that whenever one has put aside the time of a journey to do some final preparation for a speech or presentation, it is guaranteed that an old friend will walk into the plane or train, thus making preparation impossible. I know this sounds obscure, but it has now happened to me so many times that I am convinced there is something going on. While it was more fun than preparing for my speech to chat to my old No. 10 colleague, Peter Hyman, I did wonder whether the chief executives noticed that my list of six points contained only five!
I did have some time for preparation last night, but only after listening to Zarine Kharas, founder of Justgiving.com and this year’s winner of the RSA Albert Medal. Zarine gave a great speech, telling us about not only the founding principles of Justgiving, but also the progressive and innovative way her organisation works – she is a worthy winner.
In introducing her, I mentioned to the audience in the Great Room that £430m has so far been raised through Justgiving. I also took the opportunity to remind people of my own Justgiving site. So far, I haven’t quite met the £500 target I have set myself to raise for the Alzheimer’s Society but I have a secret plan (OK, not so secret) to raise the target to £1000.
That’s it for now – I will try to blog again later about my six (or was it five?) point plan for the ‘pro-social local authority’.
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