Thursday, 01 October 2009

Neighbourhood networks workshop

It's clear that neighbourhood online networks will increase in their reach, influence and value. How should people in local government respond?

Workshop game 1

Yesterday I was working with Hugh Flouch of Harringay Online and Martin Dudley who helped set up and run Bish.net for many years. London Councils had asked us to run a workshop for their Capital Ambition programme to surface the issues and start getting at the kinds of question that will need to be answered if local officers and elected members are to work out how they engage with local online networks.

Hugh and Martin gave very informative presentations about their respective sites. These were preceded by a wide-ranging introduction from Hugh, who has stitched together some absorbing material - including for example, new data showing that referral from social network sites to government sites is increasing - amounting to a compelling case for local authorities to pay close attention to local networks.

Sandwiched between discussion sessions, there was time for a workshop game that I had devised to explore what happens when issues of perceived importance to local people erupt on a fictional online network. Three groups each worked on an example of a real issue taken from the archive of an existing local site - to do with a local disturbance, a park that needs smartening up, or conflicts over school fundraising.

Philippa

We gave each group a set of 25 character cards representing local residents, councillors and officers. Some of the characters came with short descriptions, others were open to interpretation or development by the participants. On the back of each card was an indication of the individual's level of online involvement: absent, lurker, cautious contributor, occasional assertive, or active contributor.

The task for each group was to develop the story of the issue as it evolved (blew out of proportion, became entangled in other issues, became the cause of open slander or the subject of Machiavellian machinations etc). They were asked to describe what happened in the locality - on-list, off-list and offline - as a consequence of the original post and any subsequent comments. Groups did this using a flip chart sheet, post-its, cards, drawings and their fertile imaginations. I dropped in a news flash about a related mini-crisis to spice things up where necessary.

Game group 3

Exercises like this are always accompanied by a flickering frisson of risk, but this one went very smoothly as all participants had an understanding of how these digital conversations go in the real world, and they grabbed the opportunity to be inventive. I was impressed by the number of clear generalisable points that emerged during the feedback as each group told their story.

For instance, watching an issue erupt or slowly develop, how do council representatives judge whether debate will tail off or reach a critical point at which they have to respond? And is this an appropriate attitude anyway in the new networked democracy? Numerous questions like this were raised and we'll start sifting through the material very soon.

Previously:
Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Online networks and neighbourhood action

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

'Digital engagement'

BeLocal workshop game

It's the human ecology stupid

Local 2.0 workshop

What’s missing is communication, not information

1 Oct 2009 16:36:04 | Citizenship and democracy, Governance and participation, Information and communication

1 Comment

There's a participants' view from Clara Maguire of 00 Architects, here -
http://architecture00.wordpress.com/2009/10/02/digital-neighbourhoods/

Posted by: Kevin Harris | Saturday, 10 October 2009 at 13:38

The comments to this entry are closed.

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We didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it Talk About Local unconference 3 October 2009 I got involved in social uses of technology in 1986 when I joined the Community Computing Network (which at the time was chaired by none other than Bill Thompson). In the late 80s and through the 90s there were numerous forums and meetings and discussions and documents about ‘this stuff’ – the convergence of computers and telecommunications – and what it might mean for unprivileged folk. We talked about the potential for self-publishing but we weren’t sure of what. We thought this stuff could empower local people but we weren’t sure how. We thought it would promote horizontal communication and mean we were less vulnerable to vertical communication, but we weren’t sure what that would look like. Much of the time I was straggling along behind David Wilcox as we sought some kind of clarity that wasn't spoiled by political reality. There were nay-sayers. I remember one well-known individual in the community development field protesting that the technology was divisive because ‘no-one is communicating when they’re at a computer’. The inability to see beyond next week was scary. Ludicrous proclamations about the death of the local, or the disastrous consequences for face-to-face interaction, seemed to stifle some people’s ability to reflect. And things went askew on the way. In particular, too many smart people moved in and created the digital divide industry, determined to make money out of something politically fashionable. Their behaviour was and remains distasteful. The same sort of thing now seems to be happening under the heading of ‘digital engagement’. And there are efforts to introduce things like ‘digital champions’ and ‘digital heroes’, to invent new hierarchies while the rest of us are busy carting off the old ones. Believe it or not, some of us felt that the global would not invalidate the local. We felt that there is a complementarity, not a disconnection, of offline and online; and wherever you live is a good place to start appreciating that. It turns out we were right. And this was confirmed today at a memorable meeting about hyperlocal sites, organised under the aegis of Talk About Local. Lots of folk running or supporting local sites from around the country got together in reassuringly unfashionable Stoke on Trent, to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss, about what they are inventing and developing. They talked about relations with councils, how to deal with negative comments on their sites, how to encourage fellow-residents to become citizen-journalists, and so on. Back in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t know what it would look like, but this is it. It may need some new language, but the values are all there - inclusion, empowerment, local people taking responsibility for their own communication environment. And those values are not worn self-consciously like badges, they’re simply ‘what we do’. As my mate Martin Dudley of Bish.net put it, the risk with these events is that you get a stream of cyberbabble from the tech addicts, and a...

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