Neighbourhoods

Community development and digital inclusion – SMILEY baseline report published

The baseline report for the SMILEY evaluation of community development and digital inclusion (Social Media Initiatives in Local East York), co-authored by Alison Gilchrist and myself, is now available here.

The report explores the results of a survey carried out in Derwenthorpe and the neighbouring areas of Tang Hall and Osbaldwick.

Joseph Rowntree Foundation is developing a programme to deliver digital inclusion interventions and support existing digital inclusion initiatives in these areas. Our role is to assess the impact of the programme activities, which are intended to support the development of social links and networks between residents within and between these three localities.

Our results suggest a sharp contrast between those who recognise and appreciate the potential of digital media to contribute to local life, and those who do not. We found that for almost half of those who have been involved in a local community issue, this has come about as a direct result of online contact ('once', 'a few times', or 'often'). But at the same time, a significant 40 per cent of respondents did not see any potential in local community uses of the internet, either through connecting with active local groups, or as a way of raising and influencing local issues.

In several respects we found that approximately 20 per cent of respondents seem to experience digital exclusion. For example,

• eighteen per cent say they are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ comfortable trying out new digital technologies
• twenty-two per cent say they lack, or lack confidence in, their online digital skills
• one person in five does not expect that the internet could help them to keep in touch with friends or social contacts locally.

The baseline survey was conducted between November 2014 and January 2015. It was carried out by five community researchers in Derwenthorpe and the surrounding areas. Download the full report. There’s more on the SMILEY project here.

Our evaluation will go on to examine if and how JRF's interventions lead to the improvement of digital skills and literacy, generate a positive online identity for the area, and support community development and the integration of Derwenthorpe residents with neighbouring communities.

 

The ‘attentional commons’?

Many years ago, oh before your time surely, as a student of information science I recall a moment of minor enlightenment when I understood a key point about information in a consumer society: information consumes, and what it consumes is attention.

Several decades on I have just been intrigued by this article by Matthew B Crawford in the NYT. He posits an ‘attentional commons’ on the grounds that there is

‘a new frontier of capitalism, complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed.’

The short-hand term for this legitimised aggression is spam, e.g. all those spam phone calls you may still get, and the spam snail-mail through the door, the interference from the charity salesperson on the high street, spam information on public display boards and so on.

Crawford’s article feels like a worthy but desperate rear-guard salvo attempting to defend the collective during the assault on privacy. Is anyone interested? Part of the problem perhaps is that in a fierce battle around private attention intensified by personal networking technologies, to most people, collective social relations don’t seem such a big deal. Crawford suggests:

‘Of course, you can seal yourself off by putting on noise-canceling headphones, staring at a smartphone or opening a novel. But what is lost is the public space that is required for sociability, the kind that depends on people not being self-enclosed.’

Did we really have our own right to silence that it was possible to ‘sacrifice’? A couple of hundred years ago, strolling in London, you’d have been bombarded with spam of all sorts, with peddlers and beggars and tradespeople flinging demands and offers of all kinds at you. Go back further in history and reflect on any urban context, and you have to wonder how we can have come to assume a right not to be addressed. The class system did that, to an extent, otherwise there was an assumed right to spam others. Personally (ha) I would love to have the right not to be addressed, but I suspect it is a weak twentieth century social construct, and not robust enough to defend societies against the exclusionary momentum symbolised by gated communities, for example.

And I wonder if Crawford has been paying attention, if I may put it like that. There is a counter-argument, and I fancy Keith Hampton would be pointing this out gently – people are more likely to spend time together in public spaces than they were 30 years ago.

Something is going on here, and it may have to do with the shift from societies with strong normative centres to societies that are almost chaotically diverse. Try not to take it personally. As I noted some time ago, we still haven’t done our thinking about the changing nature of privacy.

 

 

Understanding digital exclusion: homeless people

‘I think for young people WiFi is almost a human right. You want us to succeed in the world and achieve our potential but nowadays that means accessing the internet for everything and we should be able to do this in a private and quiet space not just the communal area of a shared hostel.’

This comes from a new Lemos and Crane report on access, use and benefits of digital technology for homeless and ex-homeless people. The research uses two related samples – a questionnaire survey (the Lemos & Crane sample) and a survey conducted by Groundswell peer researchers. There are one or two striking findings. For instance:

73% of the Lemos & Crane participants said they used the internet to keep in touch with family and friends.

That leaves a whopping 27 per cent who aren’t.

47% of the Groundswell participants agreed that the internet had information ‘which can make you paranoid’.

This may be explained partly by the wording of the question, which seems slightly leading, but it’s still an indication of a sense of vulnerability.

Participants typically felt confident using Facebook and other social media sites ‘but found office and word processing programmes difficult.’

‘The majority learned by teaching themselves. Only 8% learned through training provided at services, typically older participants.’

‘Problems included people posting unwanted pictures or comments on profiles, having profiles hacked and people finding them using Facebook with whom they no longer wanted contact. These specific concerns were mentioned by respondents across all age groups.’

Using an open question, the researchers found that participants expressed concerns about losing face-to-face contact with people:

‘There were two aspects of this concern: that loss of face-to-face contact would reduce levels of trust and connection between people, increasing isolation (67% of Groundswell respondents agreed that phones or computers stop people communicating properly) and that complex online systems would make accessing services more difficult.’

There’s a summary and a full report here (simple sign up required). (I recommend the full report as the summary shows signs of haste and lack of editing).

 

What to do about local community information?

What’s needed to re-invigorate local democracy? Well we could start with an honest assessment of the state of local community information, and who contributes to it.

Some years ago Hugh Flouch and I ran an unconference at Ofcom for people interested and involved in local online networks (sometimes unhelpfully called ‘hyperlocals’) in London. A number of recommendations emerged for modest pieces of work – e.g. around standards, training in journalism and editing etc – which wouldn’t have required much funding to ensure they happened. As far as I know no funding was secured and none of this work was ever carried forward.

Despite the early enthusiasm and promise, and many remarkable examples of good practice, the local online networks movement can hardly be described as being in rude health; and I’m sure there is much reinvention of wheels. Meanwhile the state of local information provision around the country is dire. A new paper by Martin Moore for the Media Standards Trust notes that around the country, local council meetings now regularly go unattended and unreported.

Moore argues that:

• Innovation in local news and information is urgently needed to address the decline in local newspapers and to help support and reinvent local news and community information for the 21^st century
• Without such reinvention we risk weakening our civic communities and our local authorities becoming unaccountable
• There is a window of opportunity for the UK government to seed, through an independently run competition at no cost to the taxpayer, a flowering of innovation in news and information and civic technology at a local level
• The opportunity for innovation and growth will decline as non-UK technology platforms further colonise local media space.

There's a little hyperbole here - local authorities won't suddenly become 'unaccountable' - but the argument is sound. I would have preferred less emphasis on competitive funding schemes, which have arbitrary effects, and more on (i) small-scale targetted grants that add value across the sector; and (ii) the social, economic and governmental benefits of involving more citizens in the production of their own news and the discussion of their own issues.

I’ve recently been designing a questionnaire survey to be administered at a local level in east York, for a JRF-funded project. Among the questions we’ll be asking will be a few about local channels of information – how important are they? do local people contribute to them? and could local people be contributing to them more? Is a local resident-run website likely to encourage community involvement in local issues, or discourage it? Would it make for a more positive sense of local identity or a more negative one?

By taking a non-tech, community development approach to such questions we may gain insights that will be valuable in re-invigorating the neighbourhood online networks movement: that certainly seems to be needed.

 

Online networks in low income neighbourhoods

A report into the viability of local online channels in low income areas, which I wrote with Hugh Flouch for Networked Neighbourhoods, has now been published. It describes and reflects on four experimental projects we carried out during 2011-2012 in separate localities in England.

The basic rationale was to test whether resident-run online neighbourhood networks could be established in low income neighbourhoods and if they could be shown to bring social benefits.

One of the sites, in Low Hill, Wolverhampton, has lost momentum but the work has given rise to other promising online activity on the estate. Two other sites – at Littlemoor near Weymouth, and the area around Lings Wood on the outskirts of Northampton - are stable although they struggle to sustain active participation. The fourth, based in three villages in north Shropshire, is recognised as a very successful initiative which quickly achieved stability.

The report adds weight to claims that local online channels can be established inexpensively in low income areas, that they can be made sustainable, and that they contribute to the quality of local social life.

The report is here. There is also a two page summary, and a post on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog.

 

 

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose: so involve neighbours

Royal Mail today announced that it will be rolling out its ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ initiative which I’ve mentioned a few times. With Ofcom’s approval, they’re pre-empting the consultation, for which the deadline is a week today.

I’ve just been talking to Nikki Bedi on Radio London about some of the neighbourliness issues. I made the point that some people will have genuine good reason not to be taking-in a neighbour’s packages, and we need to avoid their being stigmatised by the opt-out sticker (‘Neighbours not trusted here’) on their doorway. Technology, as I’ve suggested before, can surely be used to advantage, for instance through QR-coded digital instructions on the package.

The scheme obviously implies a potential increase in neighbour interaction. The Ofcom consultation document reminds us that ‘in the trial areas there was a reduction of approximately 40% in the numbers of undeliverable items that were returned to delivery offices’ (emphasis added). That might be interpreted as a non-trivial increase in the number of neighbourly conversations that might not have happened before.

Hopefully we’ll hear of more neighbourhoods with an informally ‘designated’ older person who is at home most of the time and known to the postal worker – and in return for the neighbourly service the recipients readily stop for a chat and catch up when they go round to collect their package.

Online technology has helped to reduce the number of letters we get, but contributed to an increase in the number of packages being transported. We live in smaller households and there is less likely to be someone at home during the day, so there’s an increase in the proportion of packages not being delivered.

Our letterboxes aren’t fit for purpose. The market solution is the external security box or parcel pod, with the deliverer placing the package into the unlocked container and usually being expected to ensure it is locked afterwards. This is part of the ongoing not-entirely-tasteful extension of secured privacy beyond the home, and Kev's Automatic Door Principle (which I referred to here) applies - another example of technology confiscating tiny social interactions.

I’m sure the market for such boxes is set to expand, although our house-builders and architects might yet come up with alternative solutions. I much prefer the simple social alternative of the ‘Delivery to Neighbour’ scheme.

Previously:

Further footnote on taking in neighbours’ post

Footnote on taking in your neighbour’s post

Neighbours not trusted here

20 per cent of us don't want neighbours to handle our post

Stimulating digital conversations in low income areas

Should we be investing in the potential of online networks in low income neighbourhoods? A recent study from the Young Foundation suggests it’s hard to generate online participation, claiming that:

‘The technology makes participation easier for most, but it does not affect the underlying behaviours and values that really motivate people to get involved.’

Meanwhile we’ve seen the publication in the US of an e-democracy.org report on an ‘inclusive social media’ project in two ‘high-immigrant, low-income, racially and ethnically diverse urban neighbourhoods’ in Minneapolis-St Paul. Some of the lessons here are about how digital conversations are seeded, and the need to have someone on the ground for a few hours a week stimulating interest face-to-face and online.

But it can be hard to get sites flourishing. There are real challenges to do with understanding marginalisation. Sometimes people who experience exclusion may perceive what others might think of as ‘empowering’ opportunities, with indifference.

Hugh Flouch and I have just published a review of the reports, with thoughts on the issues, over on the Networked Neighbourhoods blog.

 

Signalling with flags

Hard to tell from the pic, but I thought this was a delightful example of bunting, which I came across in a relatively affluent secluded street. All of it appeared to be home-made from cloth, none of it plastic and not a national flag to be seen. It suggests the residents got together and agreed that there were certain messages they did or didn't want to send out.

What you can't see from the pic is that in the large window in the house at the very end, there is a very large and defiant union jack.

 

Housing and social media

Yesterday I took part in a live panel discussion on social media in housing, for the Guardian’s housing network, and blogged a note about it here.

 

Picture this

Thanks to a fascinating academic meeting this week about ‘researching contemporary communities,’ I was directed to this striking image based on shopkeepers’ countries of origin. It comes from an ethnographic study of the Walworth Road in south London, carried out by Suzanne Hall, an architect. The illustration is dated 2006. It neatly captures what Doreen Massey meant by a ‘global sense of place’.

I like this particularly because of the immediacy of the story it tells. Rather like Donald Appleyard’s famous (1981) drawings of local social interactions on ‘light traffic street’ and ‘heavy traffic street,’ you get the message straight away, and it confirms what you are already likely to know, so it’s more reassuring than thought-provoking or challenging.

 

Sources of local information

Almost two thirds of American adults use at least three different types of media every week to get news and information about their local community, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Fifteen per cent of them rely on at least six different kinds of media weekly. Broadcast sources still dominate: 74 per cent say they get local information at least weekly from a local tv news broadcast and/or the website of their local tv news station. The figures for radio and newspapers are 51 and 50 per cent.

Only fifty-five per cent of adults say they 'get local information weekly or more often via word of mouth, from family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors' which is fairly disappointing since as a species we've had quite a lot of practice and the technological barriers are mostly manageable. Nonetheless, for 14 of the 16 local topics asked about, the survey found that word of mouth was the fourth most cited source or higher — usually ahead of radio.

The researchers have made a valiant attempt to keep categories clear and allow comparisons to be made, but the whole field of community information has always been hard to systematise. For example, the interpretation of 'local' is usually open; and the influence of a serendipitous information ecology, and the effect of push on pull, are enormously difficult to distinguish methodologically. Word of mouth is given significance but the survey questions don't distinguish personal emails or texts (presumably these count as 'word of mouth' in the way that informing someone by telephone might do).

The most striking finding seems at first sight to be this:

'41% of all adults can be considered “local news participators” because they contribute their own information via social media and other sources, add to online conversations, and directly contribute articles about the community'

- but this is not what it seems. The category of “local news participators” includes, somewhat generously, people who say that they 'share links to local stories or videos online with others' for example, or those who 'have commented on local news stories or blogs they read online'.

All the same, the survey finds that eight per cent of all adults (10 per cent of internet users) 'contribute to online discussions or message boards about their community.' Expect this figure to increase; and expect the Pew Research Center to be the ones to identify that increase as it happens.

 

Y dnt u cal?

I suppose in some ways this is a relief, it's not just authorities in the UK who work overtime to oppress and bully young people arbitrarily:

'Use of mobile phones has been banned by a local council in northern India. The reason given is to ban unmarried women from carrying mobile phones and also to halt romances between youngsters from different castes.'

Given the importance of cricket to Indians and the importance of mobiles to cricket betting, there's gonna be a lot of confiscated phones floating around the place.

(Belatedly) via the CeMoRe blog. Originally in TechWeek.

ʻDoes William Rose make faggots?ʼ Neighbourhoods seen through online timeslices

A few months ago, as part of our research for the Online neighbourhood networks study, Hugh Flouch and I began trying to find a way to assess the diversity of content of our case study sites (Brockley Central, East Dulwich Forum and Harringay Online).

We established three 'timeslices' - different six hours periods on separate weekdays during the research period - and examined most of the content that was posted within those times. Even though we are both familiar with thriving local websites - and Hugh is the founder of Harringay Online - we were struck by the diversity of material that came out.

The results are summarised in our latest paper, ʻDoes William Rose make faggots?ʼ We organised the material into thirteen categories, as follows:

• Built and green environment: streets, fencing, vermin, litter and recycling
• Transport and travel
• Local services, facilities and shops; monitoring and campaigning
• Homes and houses
• Exchange, lost and found
• Looking after children
• Governance and politics
• Disturbances and irregularities: antisocial behaviour and violence
• Entertainment and recreation
• Local news, local people and local history
• Wider world politics and current affairs
• Homespun philosophy: distractions that are not time-sensitive
• Meta-interactions and moderation.

No-one familiar with neighbourhood networks will be surprised at this range, and some may be able to suggest other categories not captured by our process. Nonetheless it is revealing - matters as serious as shootings, stabbings and rapes are as much the matter of the digital conversations we monitored as are local history, jokes, stories or indeed the question of what the local butcher can conjure from offal.

In our view it is this diversity of material, more than any single area of interest, that makes these sites rewarding to participants. This is what ensures that the sites flourish as local communication ecologies - environments sensitively managed which encourage growth and diversity, which are always changing while also, so far, remaining independent and sustainable.

How the government is encouraging people to get more involved in politics

Some observations on yesterday's news. It's about information, poverty and power.

First, I was struck by the extent to which the government's bullying of the BBC has pushed it to the right. BBC TV coverage of events in Westminster was almost devoid of any attempt to analyse why protestors were angry. The BBC has become afraid to say anything that might upset the authorities. Luckily for them, they had a couple of over-paid celebrities to get excited about. (Incidentally, it obviously wasn't just students, there were other citizens protesting. It suits the establishment to explain the protests as just young people being over-exuberant).

I'm perplexed though at the lack of attention paid to the abandonment of education maintenance allowance (EMA), which is a proven way of supporting young people from low income families who want to stay in education. Secretary of State Vince Cable described EMA as 'enormously wasteful'. Well, it helps poor people with the objective of trying to equalise opportunity, so why would this government want to fund it? The arrogance and complacency seem impregnable. And they're surprised that people are angry.

We don't get many opportunities to be proud to be British (and frankly I don't look for them) but yesterday sort-of counts. While Wikileaks has left most of America apparently supine in acceptance of the arrogant stupidity of its bullying powermongers, in London people have come out and shown the politicians and authorities that their stupidity is unacceptable. I use the word 'unacceptable' because the Haves have been queuing up to use that word with reference to yesterday's street performances. And I use the word 'stupidity' with reference to leaders in the US and UK who have completely failed to grasp the role of new communications media in these confrontations. It's laughable how the establishment feels that the old hierarchies built on hierarchical communication systems (most obviously the bible and the pulpit, but by extension the analog divide generally) can still be depended on to keep people in their places.

Yes, the old question 'why do we have such stupid people in power?' applies as forcefully as ever, but it's gratifying that ethical hacking globally, and the use of google maps to outwit the police in central London, are exposing the powermongers' attempts to deny social justice.

One of the tenets of community development is that nothing succeeds like adversity, and this is shown to apply at the national scale. Sometimes in community development we are disappointed at people's reluctance to get worked up about things; sometimes we are taken by surprise at the vehemence of the response. I count myself among those who have been surprised, and refreshed, at the sudden and fierce discovery of readiness to take political action. It has value which is increasing in proportion to the declining credibility of those in government.

 

'Fantastic and important' - the Online Neighbourhood Networks report

Tuesday saw the launch, at Mary Ward House in London, of a report on online neighbourhood networks which I co-authored with Hugh Flouch. In spite of torrid weather conditions, around 90 people showed up and we had a hugely positive day.

There's a four-page summary of the research, an extended summary, a full report, several video interviews and some background papers. Over on the NN blog we've posted an informative note about it: here I thought I would allow myself a few personal reflections.

I've probably put more into this report than anything else I've ever written. It is consistent historically with some things I wrote fifteen or 20 years ago, but the issues seem excitingly fresh, I suppose because they are less speculation and more evidence. And it's a report I've been wanting to write for years - at least since I met Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in Toronto ten years ago. I listened to how Keith was processing his findings from the pioneering Netville study and returned to the UK wanting the community development field to appreciate the implications of neighbourhood online networks and take a lead in developing the movement. Fat chance.

I managed to get some dosh from central government to get Keith to England in 2004, and he gave some inspiring presentations. In one post I wrote at the time I noted:

'Government is paying attention, but (apart from the interest of the Oxford Internet Institute) where were the academics?'

Maybe I was partly misled. I'm writing this from a hotel in Oxford, having been invited through the ever-enterprising Tim Davies to present our research to the aforementioned OII this evening. Only Tim turned up. Some students apparently have deadlines tomorrow. Staff have better things to do.

While an hour spent chatting to Tim is not the kind of opportunity I'd ever pass up, this is very telling.

Overnight I'd received an email from Keith Hampton saying that, having read our report, he thought it was 'a fantastic and important piece of work'. The OII, having no track record in taking the local social aspects of internet use seriously, is not even motivated to find out if he might have a point.

I do realise that doesn't really matter too much. It's not all that surprising to reflect that among the first people to be left behind by ideas or social change will be academics studying the internet. What's gratifying, and does matter, is that a load of practitioners get it. Hugh and I have had a flurry of reassuring comments: William Perrin described it as 'superb original research', Steven Clift refers to 'neighbourhood awesomeness coming out of the UK.' Most of all I appreciated some generous remarks from Richard McKeever:

'Recognising how people actually live in neighbourhoods and identifying the additional convening and organising power that can be added by the use of online networks is the right way round.'

More thoughts soon on some of the issues.

 

Locality, diversity, and internet use

A new study published by Keith Hampton and colleagues confirms that internet use has little if any negative impact on the diversity of people’s networks. There are now fewer and fewer voices claiming that internet use will lead to the rapid descent of the human race into dysfunctional incommunicative bestiality (religious leaders and academics like John Locke in his book The devoicing of society have tried to spread misguided alarmism). Things have settled down a bit lately and hopefully with this research, based on and reinforcing last year's Pew study (which I reviewed here), we can all get back to what we were doing.

(Image from).

The article assesses network diversity and technology use in relation to participation in traditional social settings including public spaces, semi-public spaces, religious institutions, voluntary groups, and through neighbourhood ties. It concludes that the use of social media primarily supports diverse networks through participation in these settings. On the whole, internet users have networks that are more diverse than those who do not use the internet, although causality cannot be demonstrated definitively:

There may be bi-directionality; use of traditional social settings may drive some technology use, which in turn drives more use of the settings.

The importance of local place is thoroughly re-confirmed, even without reference to neighbourhood online sites:

The findings show only limited evidence that place-based relations have less resonance with Internet users; this was in one setting (neighborhoods) for one type of technology (social networking sites) – and an alternative explanation, as has been found in other research (Hampton, 2007), is that those with few neighborhood ties are more likely to adopt social media... Place is not lost as a result of the affordances of new technologies, but place-based networks are reinforced and made persistent.

The authors go on to conclude that social networks may be more persistent now than at any point in modern history.

ICTs afford relationship maintenance in ways that reduce the likelihood that ties will ever become completely dormant. Unlike in the past, when networks of high school and neighborhood ties were abandoned with marriage (Kalmijn, 2003) or migration (Hagan et al.,1996), it is increasingly likely that both the relation and the content of the relation’s messages remain persistent over time as “friends” on social networking services and as data stored and engaged with online. As our finding about the use of social networking services suggests, this directly benefits network diversity and access to social capital.

 

Neighbouring ain't what it used to be

I sometimes feel I'm a bit of a lone voice in calling for an understanding of neighbouring that takes account of social change. Neighbouring ain't what it used to be, and that's only to be expected; most other things ain't, either.

Now here's Chris, who's thought about it a bit, commenting on this blog post about the Vermont network Front Porch Forum. Chris notes wisely that 'being neighborly' has been redefined:

'Many people today, in cities at least, just don’t feel the need to know and interact with people regularly simply because they live next to them. We’ve silently succumbed to the realization that we want better reasons to invest time in strangers...

'I may not know my next door neighbor but do I really need to just because he lives next door? What if we have no interests in common? Don’t worry, I’ll still call the fire department if his house catches fire and I’ll still watch for suspicious people in his yard (in addition to mine), but I just don’t care about his obsessive gardening because I don’t care at all about gardening myself.'

With the advent of the internet and global real-time communications, Chris notes, 'most people in the modern world have simply recognized subconsciously that making friends in person one neighbor at a time is just damned inefficient.'

Why neighbouring matters

I just opened the Facebook pages for '50 Ways to Meet Your Neighbour' and I'm looking forward to seeing people's ideas and suggestions, whether or not they are lyrically consistent. I'm keen to see whether anyone can improve on Nick Buckley's 'Just take in a parcel, Marcel'...

Meanwhile, here's the wordy justification bit in the background:

Not everyone lives in a neighbourhood, but everyone has the right to try to improve their locality by improving relations with those around them. This principle is seldom acknowledged in policy. Yet mutually-supportive connections that generate trust between residents can make an enormous difference for a wide range of social policy measures.

Neighbouring is already subject to policy influence. Decisions affecting planning, local transport, local trade, schools, welfare, safety, parks and so on, all have an affect on whether or not people encounter their neighbours and have something in common which they feel able to talk about.

Of course, individual choices also have an affect. If you only ever get into a car when you leave your home, you’re less likely to recognise your neighbours and have a supportive relationship with them. If you don’t have – or don’t use – a local park, café, pub, post office or community centre, you’re less likely to meet other local people in a safe, neutral space. You’re also less likely to know the young people who share your neighbourhood – who almost certainly occupy it more than you do.

One way to persuade policy makers that neighbouring is worth taking seriously is to focus in on the sort of actions that make it easier to meet other neighbours. The idea behind ’50 Ways’ is to make a loud statement about why neighbouring matters and what can be done to stimulate it.

Local sites and civic involvement

Last Friday Hugh Flouch and I organised a Networked Neighbourhoods roundtable discussion on civic involvement and local online in London. We took advantage of the presence in town of US e-democracy pioneer Steven Clift to bring a few interesting people together for some easy-going discussion and share some early findings from our London study.

Unaware that I was about to be knocked back by a short bout of flu (as I type this, coincidentally and characteristically, here's the Next-Door-Neighbour at the back-door asking am I better) there was even less chance that I might come up with any particular insights at the time; but it was at least a moment to try and relate local websites to the community organising and civic involvement expectations of Big Society.

Among the points I hope I managed to put across were these:

• The transformations to co-production of local quality of life and to a more conversational democracy are not trivial, but they are both within the legitimate aspirations of neighbourhood online networks.
• When we look at these sites and the effects they appear to be having, I don’t think we should be looking necessarily for effects that shore up the old ways of doing representative democracy. Nor should we be looking for the strengthening of strong ties and the creation of close-knit communities: local sites support fluid, overlapping networks of weak ties that incorporate sufficient trust to get things done.
• Those ways of getting things done might extend to Alinsky-style community organising, but you wouldn’t conclude from our material that the link is strong. I think it’s fairer to say that we can see a latent demand for informal, controlled-commitment involvement in local issues – people are creating as well as responding to local opportunities, online.
• These sites are places that accommodate the unclubbable alongside the clubbable. We’ve yet to appreciate the benefit of that.
• Essentially, these sites change the acoustics of the public realm: the voices of local people are increasingly audible, not because a few people shout louder but because conversations are generated, accumulate, and are transparent.

The pic of myself and Steve Clift was taken by Hugh and I rather like the reflected cycles round our heads.

There's a short report on the session on the Networked Neighbourhoods site here.

Local citizen-based websites

Alan Stanton, a Labour councillor who contributes occasionally to Harringay Online, speaking of the attitude of politicians to local websites:

"We shouldn't try to harness it. We can be part of it, contribute to it and listen to it but shouldn't try and colonise it."

This comes from a BBC News article by Jane Wakefield this morning, which also refers to Brockley Central and East Dulwich Forum, quotes Andy Williamson from the Hansard Society, and even has a few words from Hugh Flouch and meself. All part of the growing interest.

Online communication in neighbourhoods: not just people we know

The latest Pew Internet Project report has just been published, on the topic of 'neighbors online'. It covers the role of face-to-face, telephone and digital technologies in relations between neighbours. I've posted some thoughts about it on the Networked Neighbourhoods site here, including this suggestion:

Last year's Pew Internet Survey asked a question designed to ascertain whether the internet had affected people’s understanding of the word ‘discuss’ in relation to ‘important matters’ and ‘significant ties’. (The researchers did not find that it has). If they can do that, maybe they can work on the question of whether the internet may be affecting our understanding of the word 'know' in relation to 'neighbours'. And perhaps more importantly, we can start looking at how local online resources allow us to connect with people we don't know.

Twitter: the basis for a 'real' community?

As network society freaks would expect, Barry Wellman might have an interesting, and quite direct, take on the use of twitter. As of August 2009, Barry was following 114 people and being followed by 652. Among his mutuals is Howard Rheingold and, I imagine, Keith Hampton. His twitter network is the subject of a forthcoming paper he's co-written for American behavioral scientist which notes that:

'there is a possibility that Twitter can form the basis of interlinked personal communities – and even of a sense of community. Our analysis of one person’s Twitter network shows that it is the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities.'

Not exactly surprising, but absorbing, not least because it helps us think about how we populate multiple communities and networks.

Older people and local social networks

Last week I went along to talk to a review group working on elder care for the Centre for Social Justice. They wanted my views on how neighbourhood support can be strengthened, and why it should be, to help older people to age in place.

I put some stress on the unrealised potential of new technologies: not so much from the familiar applications like telecare, but more from the point of view of local social networks. It's remarkable how little attention has been paid to the contribution of social media in strengthening and sustaining local connections and thus supporting older people in their neighbourhoods.

Here's an example. Independent Age have just published a report on Older people, technology and community, with the totally misleading subtitle 'the potential of technology to help older people renew or develop social contacts and to actively engage in their communities.'

Unfortunately most of the report is about already-well-known barriers to and uses of technology, not about the development of social connections, although there are revelations for me among the case studies. A main theme for the report is:

Increasing awareness in the public sector of the issue of social isolation and loneliness and encouraging public sector organisations to make adaptations to technology-based services that will help address the problem.

This is all very well but it risks over-emphasising the negative, misses the potential for older people to play interdependent roles, and completely overlooks the opportunity of local citizen-based online resources.

How come this lack of awareness persists? Three years ago Danny Bull, who set up MyNeighbourhoods told me:

‘Our senior citizens have been integral to our growth, fuelled by the possibility of real-world communication as a result of initiating contact with others online. We’ve witnessed everything from elderly users trading books locally to a bit of light hearted flirting.’ (I published the comment here in 2008)

The potential has always been there but I'm beginning to suspect that much of the problem lies with the age agencies and the attitudes of professionals. Understandably perhaps, they seem too often preoccupied with technical barriers that diminish the quality of life of older people. The more you have to deal with those problems I suppose, the more you are going to look at them in mechanistic ways, rather than recognising organic social solutions. (As an aside, there's also a need to differentiate the important range of skills and experience represented by the term 'older people', even though there's been plenty of discussion about how the younger old can support the older old). Neighbours are seldom recognised as part of the solution to older people's care needs (so all credit to the CSJ for their awareness): and as this report shows, people can reflect extensively on technological applications without seeing the potential to stimulate neighbourly support.

Then again, I may be wrong and very little online-enabled neighbourhood support is actually going on. But that's not the impression I've been getting.

'Susannah isn't in Facebook'

From Nick Booth over on Podnosh:

'Up until now Susannah knew everything that went on in the village. But now she's out of touch.'

This is about municipal governance in the Spanish village of Copons, population about 300. So how much of the success is down to scale?

Neighbourhood websites: two new papers published

Hugh Flouch and I have published two papers today reflecting the first phase of our short study on neighbourhood websites in London, funded by Capital Ambition.

The first is an initial typology of the kinds of site that can be found, and attempts to distinguish and relate them according to purpose and interactive style.

The second is a more extended paper which attempts to summarise existing knowledge about community networks, online and social capital, and the engagement of online participants in civic issues.

Since preparing these papers we've carried out a number of interviews and focus groups. We now begin analysing our survey data and directing our attention to the implications of our findings for local council officers and elected members.

What makes a neighbourhood network?

How do local connections between residents get fused into an effective communicative network that comes in time to underpin everything else that happens?

I got into an interesting discussion yesterday at Balsall Heath in Birmingham, where I was lucky enough to be picking up wisdom from people like Paul Slatter and Hannah Worth from Chamberlain Forum, Ben Lee from NANM, Elke Loeffler from Governance International, plus Dick Atkinson and the folk from the famous Balsall Heath Forum.

I'd heard and read plenty about Dick and about what had been achieved at Balsall Heath, and this was my first visit. It's a hugely reasuring place, unpretensiously displaying the commonsense of ordinary people getting stuff done locally.

But I wanted to know, how come? There are active street 'stewards' (with or without the title) in 15 sets of 3-4 streets. I liked Dick's remark that

'With a bit of support and encouragement people do more than they think they can.'

This gives the forum a firm foundation of local people who are continually ferreting away at issues. OK let's be clear: we're talking about unpaid, unelected active local citizens, who 'have emerged out of street life' (Dick's words) in numbers that are sufficient to cover an area with a population of 14,000, loosely linked through neighbourhood management and an elected forum. According to the website

There are 22 residents groups, and 70 Street Stewards. So the whole neighbourhood is covered. Everyone knows someone and the sense of mutual self-help is fostered.

So I'm slightly enviously think about why this hasn't quite happened in Shipley, where I've tried to help out every so often over the years. Having a resident-employed resident, Abdullah, who supports the street stewards and takes some of the pressure off them, must make a difference. He tells us about the advantages of living in the neighbourhood where you work - you get a better response, people don't think you have a hidden agenda: 'they don't see me as a threat'.

And this can be very proactive work. We heard a story of two residents doorknocking because of an eyesore front garden, to discover a man on his own who badly needed, and was given, support.

But none of this, nor the recorded history of Balsall Heath Forum, quite explains how local networks grow and strengthen in some places and not in others. Informality is obviously crucial. But how come the initial connections, presumably between a few willing, motivated, slightly uncertain folk, have ramified and come to underpin a significant amount of what can be done now without the clumsy machinery of the city's formal services?

We didn't come up with an explanation, but I certainly came away with a clearer sense of the fundamental significance of an informal communication network in driving social change at neighbourhood level. For sure, if I'd been shown a unique ingredient I wouldn't have trusted it anyway.

If you need a plumber

Last night Hugh Flouch and I were talking with group of residents about their local blog. Some discussion about who participates and who doesn't, including the observation that young people prefer to use Facebook and don't appear on the site. Someone suggested:

'They'll follow the blog when they're old enough to need a plumber.'

Not unrelated - and linking back to the question I raised a few days ago about low-income and mixed-income areas - was an observation that when conversation has built up and there are well over 100 comments on a post, "there's usually the word 'property' in there somewhere".

Social inclusion and local sites

To Leeds today for the second Talk About Local unconference on local websites - a more relaxed event than the last, exuding a more confident, 'we know what we're doing' getting-on-with-it air. Nice pic of TAL founder William Perrin taken from the Cover It Live coverage here.

I got in a huddle with a few others to explore the contrasts between local sites in low-income neighbourhoods and in more affluent or mixed areas. There were about 10 of us, but it must have been a subject of interest because when we emerged, it turned out a separate group had formed to discuss the same topic. That's a risk with the unconference format I guess.

They were probably a bit posher than us, I'd say. I bet they had comfy seats.

I proposed the session because I'm interested in two possibilities:

• local sites in low income areas are realistic but may require different approaches, including sustained community development;
• local sites in mixed areas will appeal to, and be exploited disproportionately by those accustomed to power and influence - crowding-out those in the neighbourhood who might have the most to gain in terms of increased social capital.

Anyway we're not proud, so here are a few points (in no particular order) that I picked up or which occurred to me during our session:

1. Bad press (labelling) can be a provocation that gives rise to a local site.
2. There still seems to be little perception in the community development field of the potential of local sites. (Some weary head-banging on this...)
3. In a low-income neighbourhood, the other forms of media that are funded by advertising don’t apply to you, so what else have you got that might speak for you?
4. There may be a tendency to under-estimate levels of internet penetration in these neighbourhoods. (Some credit for the high levels was apportioned to Facebook).
5. A degree of inertia about issues locally suggests the need for an intense level of intervention (but see point 2 above).
6. Get people together in a room. The offline is as important as the online. If you live in a neighbourhood where you can't get people together in a room, you betta get some CD and hope you're not stuffed by point 2 above.
7. Beware the tyranny of text: this tech releases video and sound, so use it.
8. The behaviour in social media spaces is something that some people just don’t get. (Like trust – some people become immediately distrustful in online conversation).
9. We may have to make the case for amplifying the voices that otherwise don’t get heard (but see point 2 above...)

I had to leave after lunch but there's a real buzzy feel to this movement now. Back in 2008 I organised an event with CABE which led me to predict that 09 would be the year of local websites. OK, not far wrong.

Street reps, empowerment and statistics

When I ask the street reps I've been working with, do they feel they are able to influence decisions affecting their area, there is a bit of pondering but definitely no evidence put forward. A little probing confirms that they feel they can influence action - getting some rubbish cleared or maybe dealing with a flagrant drug-drop - but not decisions about how services are run or resources targeted.

These are active citizens who feel relatively powerless, partly because of their low visibility and in many cases the need to remain anonymous. For example, none of the group I was working with the other night would go to court and testify against another resident. If we ask 'what would it take to overcome this and raise their profile?' the answer obviates the purpose: it would be a peaceful, ordered neighbourhood where people showed respect for one another, and street reps were (in their terms) unnecessary.

Still, thousands of practice agencies want evidence that government investment is leading to citizens feeling more empowered. That's what the empowerment indicator (NI4) is for, and there's a lot to be said for it. NI4 tells us the proportion of people who feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area. But it's causing a bit of head-scratching.

For example, Inspire-East recently published an absorbing (if cunningly-hidden) report on behaviour in relation to NI4, but confused a few of us right at the start of their exec summary with this:

'measured through the 2008 Place Survey... in the East of England, as nationally, 29% of respondents agree they feel they can influence decisions that affect their local area... the Citizenship Survey shows that in 2008, nationally 39% of people agree they feel they can influence decisions affecting their local area.'

If you go to page 8 of the report, you get a sort-of explanation. They're different kinds of survey. But still, a 10% discrepency doesn't seem trivial. The next survey could ask, do you feel disempowered by statistics?

At the same time, the National Empowerment Partnership has published a document which seems to have very similar intentions to the Inspire-East report, attempting to explain 'what drives feelings of influence?' I've only read the summary, but it's told me some significant things. For instance, that among people who have been civically involved in the past 12 months, some 56% say they cannot influence decisions. This would include the street reps I've been talking to. Being involved, as the report says, 'is no guarantee that people will feel they can influence decisions' - indeed, feeling informed is a stronger driver of sense of influence than is actual involvement in decision-making.

The street reps go to meetings, and tell me they feel listened to, and that it's good to have the chance to give your opinions. But as the NEP report suggests, it could be that through the process of getting involved, people can gain greater insight into what they are not able to influence.

Practicalities of local online

Here's a handy and timely post on Talk About Local, starting a discussion about those awkward issues that can afflict local websites. Like anonymity (although the slight irony that contributions to the TAL blog are still, msyteriously, anonymous seems to have been overlooked); the ‘we’re too small’ problem; and the ‘we’re too big’ problem. Among the wisdom shared:

• when people are talking to you about their burning passion, ask them to write, take photos or videos about it. Most people don’t just write in when you ask them but they are happy to share their interests...
• make your methods of contributing as simple as you possibly can... Never mind snazzy technology, give them a beer mat to write on...
• don’t forget to ask people for help in really simple ways, don’t assume they know and just aren’t helping. People love to help, especially if helping takes the most minimal amounts of time...
• keep in touch with small traders. They know everything that is going on and generally a bit of time to tell it to regular customers.

Lending and sharing 'in a moderately uncheesy way'

Here's Streetbank, a site to support lending and sharing at neighbourhood level. All power to their elbows - it's a niche that the local websites haven't been big on, as far as I'm aware, based on the reflection that because we don't know our neighbours so well, we have more stuff than we need and don't lend and share when we might.

Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, it won't be the first time, but I think while neighbourhood sites encourage recycling, 'going to a good home', local trader recommendations etc and of course local social connections generally, few have got down to the nitty-gritty of instrumental reciprocity.

Thanks to Chris Gittins at Streets Alive for the headsup.

'We no longer need neighbours'

The EU PEOPLE programme has an event in the Netherlands on Wednesday this week on 'social and e-inclusion': more here.

There's a plenary session that caught my eye:

‘With ICT, we no longer need neighbours’

Ms. Drs. Astrid Huygen of the Verwey-Jonker Institute is to shed light on the thesis: ‘With ICT, we no longer need neighbours’ from the perspective of the end user. She performed evaluation research into the concept of ‘Time for One Another’ – a market place for neighbourhood assistance – and is involved in the European Incluso research project.

Drs. Christabe Wybenga is the second speaker who will discuss the thesis ‘With ICT, we no longer need neighbours’ from the perspective of housing organisations. He is a consultant from Social Lime and has a lot of experience in the world of housing organisations and the use of ICT to improve liveability in neighbourhoods. At the moment he is working for a housing corporation as a project leader of a project, which is aiming at the development, and use of community websites. He will talk about his experiences in the project and will share his vision with us how social websites can contribute to the strategic vision, mission and the activities of housing organisations in neighbourhoods.

If like me you can't get there, you could eavesdrop and tweet.

Relax and speak into the intercom

The other day I met up with designer Tamsin Fulton, who helps local councils get their services right for residents. Back in 2007 I'd blogged Tamsin's idea of using bunting to display residents' views on a dispersal zone in south London.

Here's another Tamsin device which I'd missed - the use of intercom for 2-3 minute interviews with residents in low-rise apartment blocks. Preceded by a postcard through the door, it leaves the resident with a reassuring sense of control over a process which can easily seem invasive.

Up the wrong tree? Social exclusion in the network society

Yesterday, absorbed in that well-known activity of looking for something else, I happened across a book chapter on 'income inequality and the information society'. It argues that poor people stand to be excluded from the information society by being priced out of commercial information services,

'and left with an impoverished and over-stretched system of public provision which is increasingly unable to meet their needs.'

The second bit resonates at least, and it's a curious little discovery just after a colleague and I had a meeting in a borough which has challenging levels of poverty and low levels of technology use.

The author was the much-respected Graham Murdock and the chapter appeared in Excluding the poor, published in 1986 by the Child Poverty Action Group (still listed on their publications page).

It's a good example of the thinking at the time around what was called 'information poverty' and concerns over the levels of exclusion that would result from these things called computers, telecomms and databases. I was involved in a lot of the debates at the time and we thought the threats were very real.

But they did not really emerge. It's hard to say how much of that is down to the refreshing initiatives taken by the incoming Labour government in 1997. Perhaps it was even down to the influence on those policies of people like Graham Murdock. Or were we all just wrong about information use and poverty? Britain did indeed become information-intensive, but we stopped hearing arguments about the widespread denial of access to information for people in poverty.

Then we started to see adverts on the London tube with the mysterious letters 'www'. Around 1999-2000 I served on a government task group tasked to consider 'access to IT'. Suddenly the issue was about people on low incomes getting their hands on the technology which provided access to the information they weren't otherwise being denied. Then came an insistence in some quarters that people on low incomes weren't participating in this tech-binge because the diet wasn't to their taste, ie there wasn't enough content of the right kind.

This was accompanied and then succeeded by efforts to promote a more empowering, less philanthropical approach, which would necessarily mean stimulating self-publishing. Oh and then something called web 2.0 came along, and behold, before long people did publish stuff themselves. (See, in this respect, my thoughts about where local websites fit into this history).

So where are people on low-incomes in all this now? Sorted? If it wasn't about access to information sources; and it's clearly not about appropriate content if it ever was; and for all the rhetoric about 'digital divide' it's no longer significantly about access to the kit or connections; is there still a sense in which people who experience exclusion are constrained in their use of information and communication technology to address their own circumstances? Yes there is, as I and my colleague heard clearly while we sat in a town hall the other day learning about the difficulties of bringing social media to certain culturally self-excluding groups.

We were told about an area comprising mainly white working class families after the collapse of a dominant industry, where the dependency culture is deeply embedded, racist tension is high and levels of motivation to overcome disadvantage are very low.

The neutering effects of this culture are profoundly damaging. I think the central point is this: workers feel that people self-exclude from contexts of dialogue and engagement, so there is little advancement of thinking and no empowerment. This means that the openness of social media may be a non-starter.

From his study of contributions to neighbourhood email lists, Keith Hampton concludes firmly that a significant proportion of people in disadvantaged localities in north America are online and participating in discussions; and also that those contributions afford the formation of collective efficacy in ways that other media do not. This evidence is hugely valuable, but it still leaves us in the UK with a lot of people in low-income areas, who have a connection and spend time online, but are unwilling to participate in digital conversations with others or to engage with agencies online.

Perhaps in time, once again it will come to be seen that we've been barking up the wrong tree, but how do we identify the right one? I'm not aware of any studies at local level, since those I was involved in a few years ago, that are involving people on low incomes themselves in exploring the answers to these questions. I'd be keen to hear of any, cos that's what we need.

No, the tech doesn't weaken local social ties

The results of Keith Hampton's latest study, on Social isolation and new technology, have just been released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The study surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,512 adults in summer 2008. It finds that Americans are not as isolated as has previously been reported. People’s use of mobile phones and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. Internet use in general and use of social networking services in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

The researchers claim that the number of Americans who are truly isolated is at most only slightly higher than it was 30 years ago. Few people have no one with whom they can discuss important matters, and even fewer have no one who is especially significant in their lives. But they do confirm a more pronounced change, over the past two decades, in the size and diversity of people's core networks.

These paragraphs, I feel, are important:

Compared to the relatively recent past, most Americans now have fewer people with whom they discuss important matters, and the diversity of people with whom they discuss these issues has declined. There is a wealth of scholarship to suggest that the implications of this trend for individuals and for American society are starkly negative. Smaller and less diverse core networks diminish personal well-being by limiting access to social support. There are simply fewer people we can rely on in a time of need – whether it is a shoulder to cry on, to borrow a cup of sugar, or to help during a crisis.

Small and narrow core networks also impede trust and social tolerance; they limit exposure to the diverse opinions, issues, and ideas of others. If we increasingly rely and trust only a small inner circle of likeminded others, it becomes increasingly difficult to recognize, accept or understand opposing points of view. A great deal of research has shown that diversity within our closest relationships – even in the age of the internet – is vital for the flow of information, for informed deliberation, and to maintain the participatory ideals of a democracy.

As we would expect, Hampton and his colleagues clear up some of the thinking about the contribution of technologies to this trend:

What is the source of this change? We don’t know. But, we believe we have ruled out one likely source: new information and communication technologies such as the internet and mobile phone. Our survey finds the opposite trend amongst internet and mobile phone users; they have larger and more diverse core networks.

What about local social networks? The researchers conclude:

Our findings also suggest that there is little to the argument that new information and communication technologies decrease participation in traditional, local social settings associated with having a diverse social network. When we look beyond people’s core network, to their full network of relations, we find that most uses of the internet and mobile phone have a positive relationship to neighborhood networks, voluntary associations, and use of public spaces. There is some evidence that very specific internet activities, such as use of social networking services (e.g, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn), substitutes for some neighborhood involvement – the internet allows people to obtain traditional forms of neighborhood support from a social circle that extends outside of their neighborhood. Yet, internet users continue to give support to their neighbors, and the level of face-to-face contact with neighbors is the same for internet users as it is for non-users.

As we know, many people use the internet to reinforce local connections. The research finds that people who belong to a neighborhood discussion forum are far more involved locally than are others. (Previously: Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?)

From the press release:

“There is a tendency by critics to blame technology first when social change occurs,” argued Prof. Keith Hampton, the lead author of the Pew Internet report, Social Isolation and New Technology. “This is the first research that actually explores the connection between technology use and social isolation and we find the opposite. It turns out that those who use the internet and mobile phones have notable social advantages. People use the technology to stay in touch and share information in ways that keep them socially active and connected to their communities.”

Summary. Full report.

Downsides of local sites

Some of us are working to persuade local and central government of the merits of local sites and we're keen to get in front of some of the problems and downsides that might emerge, such as capture by specific interest groups, misleading or dangerous information, domination by doom-mongers etc. It's already too easy for council officers to justify non-involvement and decline to offer even the most modest support.

Here's one clear take on the way it can go, from an article about Sheffield Forum, written by John Peterson and published hard copy in Now Then Sheffield, a free magazine for the city. (Thanks Martin). (The Now Then blog is here):

'Conjecture uttered as fact seems to find its way onto the pages of SF with remarkable frequency with the potential to unfairly affect businesses, property prices in areas being denigrated and all kinds of social relations. On this point there are also a huge number of postings regarding issues of race and multiculturalism. Many of these take a highly negative view and are dressed up in that much-loved Yorkshire idiom of 'plain speaking'. Some are obviously active campaigns for far right groups such as the BNP, others are genuinely held (if sometimes ill-thought-out) opinions of forum users.'

Things that anyone responsible for a local site may fear, I suspect, without always knowing quite what is needed to keep them from happening. We need to be bringing these and other negative aspects (actual or perceived) to the surface, and examining them, the better to understand how to pre-empt or eradicate them. All eyes turn to Talk About Local to play an important leading role (no pressure guys).

 

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 load of righteous blather which translates as ‘these poor people, we must help them connect’. He and I have both sat in plenty of meetings which oscillated between these themes. But today we were outside London, and it was a Saturday, which probably partly explains why we were spared.

I suppose that, as with inclusion and engagement, there’s a risk that the suits will swill into this field and contaminate it, but this time something – expertise – is already owned and held by local people. And yes, there’s a question about ‘who’s not here?’ (It was a uniformly white and predominantly middle class gathering). But these are early days.

Huge credit is due to William Perrin and his TAL colleagues for opening this topic up in just the right way at the right time.

*Update: David has uploaded a video of me saying some of this stuff. Among the other clips, observations from Tom Steinberg about the future of local sites as news sites.

Previously:

Against the digital divide industry: of champions and charters

Social inclusion and digital inclusion through community centres

Social exclusion, social capital, and local online centres

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?

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.

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.

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

Grassroots social justice

Occasionally you happen upon a house like this, where the tiny frontage is used for awareness-raising, communication and the creation of opportunities to get involved - leaflets to take, notices to read, petitions to sign, plants to buy, a box for donations. One person in one space quietly driving their take on democracy and human rights.

Knowledge, local

Two young women and a buggy. As I passed I overheard, 'I didn't know. It's the first baby I've had.' Thinks, that's an unusual way of putting it.

As a foster carer I find myself reflecting more than I might otherwise on the access that young parents have to knowledge about parenting. We tend to assume that in the murky mythical past of close-knit local communities, packed with chirpy extended families, the concentrated wisdom of handling babies and rearing children was constantly available. Indeed, it may have been unavoidable, young mothers were bombarded with it. What to do if this or that happens - someone would tell you, and you'd be ostracised if you didn't take the advice.

Now here's the modern mum saying, 'I didn't know'. What should she know, how should she know it? Has the geographical distribution of families and the perceived decline of neighbourhood networks stifled the flow of information for new parents?

Is it right in any case to think of the neighbourhood as a source of knowledge about child-rearing? Surely yes, we should be depending less on formal services shouldn't we, and more on the self-regenerating social capital of local informal networks? So we want to be able to take advice from those around us with experience to share.

Well, just to say, in recent weeks, in various conversations with local matrons with a bairn at hand, on four occasions I've been given advice or told things that were simply wrong, things that I as a fifty-something bloke knew to be wrong. Like, no, this one is not teething (at three months?? Stroll on). I must admit, my confidence in the quality of informal local information has taken a battering.

33% believe people would not pull together to improve neighbourhood

The Citizenship Survey generates a lot of useful data that is helpfully repackaged by CLG. A topic report on community cohesion and social networks, from the 2007-08 survey, has been published today. It covers views of the immediate neighbourhood, views of the local area, and fear of crime and anti-social behaviour. The main headline is that 82 per cent agreed that their local area was a place where people from different backgrounds get on well together.

Another finding claims that

'Most people (68%) agreed that people in their neighbourhood would pull together to improve it.'

That doesn't sound too high to me, so I checked the tables, which confirm that 33% 'tend to disagree' or 'definitely disagree'. There's an interesting 14 per cent discrepency with the headline cohesion figure, presumably mostly comprising people who think that those from different backgrounds get on well together in their neighbourhood as things are, but wouldn't be bothered to act collectively to bring about change.

Other findings -

• Pakistani (85%), Indian (80%) and Black Caribbean (79%) people were more likely than White (75%) people to feel a strong sense of belonging to the neighbourhood.

• Meanwhile, Chinese (50%) people were less likely than White (75%) people to strongly belong.

• Meaningful interaction with people from different backgrounds was highest among those aged 16 to 24 years (93%) and lowest amongst those aged 75 or over (52%).

• People with no religion (86%) were more likely than those with a religion (78%) to have regular meaningful interactions with people from different backgrounds.

In the section about 'social networks', as far as I can see all the questions are about friends, which suggests a rather limited interpretation of social networks. I know you gotta start somewhere, but the risk with these kinds of authoritative statistics is that people start quoting them all over the place as gospel. 'Friendship networks' might have been a better heading.

Maybe neighbourhood blogs reflect neighbourhood demographics?

A week back the ever-alert Nick Booth linked to this article claiming that 'Neighborhood blogs drive participation in city planning'. (Thanks to Hugh for nudging me onto it).

The city of Seattle has been encouraging residents to fill out a survey to provide their feedback on the growth plan for each of their neighborhoods. How sensible. And it turns out that those neighbourhoods with a high level of responses 'already have a really strong blog presence in the neighborhood'.

“There’s a lot of people already engaged in neighborhood issues through the blogs, and I think that’s what’s driven a lot of people to respond.”

A reasonable assumption - so let's all jump to the conclusion that having a local online presence results in increased civic participation. Lots of us would like to believe it.

But wouldn't it help to step back and think about the degree to which populations predisposed to offline civic participation (this is often closely associated with educational attainment) were getting active in neighbourhood online networks? Could it be that those more likely to be active in civic affairs are more likely to be active in neighbourhood blogs?

To put it another way, isn't it just possible that people in the areas where a higher proportion are less affluent, less connected and less accustomed to having influence, might have neither the time and motivation to establish neighbourhood blogs nor the collective confidence or readiness to engage with civic structures? Just curious.

Communicating with other dogwalkers

This graceful note was pinned to the gate of a field much-used by local dogwalkers.

Access to local statutory information

Over on the Planning blog, Domenic Donatantonio is discussing evidence that people do not check the statutory notices in local newspapers. Gosh. Should authorities be obliged to publish? Yes, but where?

DCLG believes councils could save £35,000 a year through reducing their statutory advertising commitments.

And newspapers do not help their case by often burying notices deep in the latter pages of a publication. Though not a resource to everyone, increased internet accessibility will give residents quicker perusal of an application in their neighbourhood.

Local area data

The data from the national indicator set provides useful material for prioritising and monitoring progress on quality of life issues, as the Place survey headlines show.

But the geographical scale is set at the highest tier, so the Commission for Rural Communities has set up an interesting initiative to help make the reporting of quality of life outcomes more local. They say that around two-thirds of the data used by the national indicator set is available at a more local level, typically for districts but sometimes for neighbourhoods.

More here.

Friends and screens

Just in case there's a quiet period newswise, journalists know how to get religious leaders to say provocative things to kick off debates. So the catholic archbishop of Westminster makes comments about friendship and about social networking sites, risking a martyrdom of jokes from atheists about having imaginary friends, and from the connected about confessions and screens.

Zapping via Google (mum, look at me) I find some of his words joyfully misinterpreted, and various commentators following the problematic tendency to generalise very broadly about young people when the issues are quite subtle, fluid and important. But still, it's not too impressive if a prominent religious figure has only just detected a 'rise in individualism'. Does news not travel quickly in Westminster?

Nonetheless I'm interested in, and I welcome, the way the archbish touched upon some themes that have bothered me lately in talking to young people: the idea of loyalty, the question of 'transient' relationships (not sure about his phrase 'impoverished friendships'), and the part played in this by the dominance of consumption as a way of life.

Not all young people struggle with notions of loyalty - to brands, media, friends, football teams or whatever - but I wouldn't be surprised if there is an issue here that we should be exploring. Many youngsters don't see much loyalty around them - their families change, their teachers change, their environments change, their expectations get changed for them. Society doesn't seem to expect any of us to stick with anything.

I too have wondered out loud recently about shallow relationships - I'm not really qualified to call this one either, and I certainly wouldn't pin it to social media; but I don't want to be ignoring the issue when I've found that it resonated with teachers I've spoken to.

And if we look back at a few decades of hyper-consumption, spectacularisation of culture and systematic deconstruction of what is 'public', would we really be surprised to find a thread running through and connecting these trends?

It's not right to dump the blame or responsibility for any of these on young people. It would have been helpful if the archbeak had recognised the contribution of his and my generation, and of politicians and the media, to the erosion of loyalty, the cheapening of relationships and the wretched diminution of the public realm.

More importantly perhaps, instead of pontificating (is that the right word?) about bullying uses of Bebo he might better have used his ability to get an audience, by calling for a forum in which young people themselves reflect upon the extent to which the communications media they use is related to the fact that some feel excluded, become depressed, and commit suicide.

I think it would also help more if we spend some time understanding whether there is some kind of widening divide between those young people who have had the chance to explore their own potential and social relations, and those who haven't. And it may be worth referring back to a piece JRF published a while ago which rightly stressed both how local, place-based social networks affect aspirations and behaviour; and the need for young people to be aware of and access opportunities beyond their immediate neighbourhood. This does not justify continued investment in either a 'backseat generation,' screen-dominated upbringings or school catchment policies that work against the value of local connections.

Oh and finally could people please stop talking about online systems as if they exist in a vacuum?

Previously: Kids these days

Criminalising kids: questions about risk and respect.

 

Local services and priorities matter

I'm never quite sure about Ipsos MORI. The last event of theirs that I managed to get into featured the Home Secretary among the speakers, security was high, and there was some strange interference on my phone when I tried to use it just before the start.

Nah, sure there's nothing in that. Nor in the fact that they wouldn't give me a place at the launch of their Local report recently. Still, the next time one of their researchers came to the door (the second in a couple of weeks) and didn't offer any interesting reflections on neighbourhoods I decided I didn't have time for his questions. (And as noted here in passing, they don't always do good stuff).

Anyway here's what the MORI folk have done with the existing place survey data, augmented with some other stuff they got their hands on, and there are interesting messages put forward:

• Local services really matter to a sense of place: satisfaction with local services seems to be strongly related to overall views of the area and other key outcomes.

• Taking visible action on local priorities is vital. The more people feel that their priorities drive local improvement, the better perceptions are of local public service providers.

• There are clear signs that the biggest impact on perceptions of influence would not be actions that involve a small number of people very deeply, but rather better communications that reach a much wider group.

• There is a clear theme around seeking out views and acting as a result of seeking those views. This is particularly pertinent to crime and antisocial behaviour. The areas that are seen as doing best are those also proactively looking for feedback.

• The feeling that local people treat each other with respect, and, related to this, that parents have good disciplinary control over their children, come out as important to a number of key outcomes. A focus on young people and family/parental support seems likely to yield particular dividends in resident satisfaction.

Conversational democracy and neighbourhood online networks

Nesta have organised a substantial event in London next Monday called Reboot Britain, which is about how we can

'punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services.'

Paul Evans has organised a stream of sessions on political innovation. I'm speaking at one of these, alongside Nick Booth, William Perrin and Edward Welsh, which is on the broad-enough topic of Locality: Councillors, Journalists, 'active citizens', community websites and local government communications.

I think I'll focus on the ‘active citizenship’ part of the topic, keep the tech at a respectful distance, and ask ‘What's needed to stimulate active citizenship at local level?’

It'll need a rough distinction between informal and social participation on the one hand, and formal civic and political participation on the other. We need the former in order to stimulate the latter. (Well I know some people do political participation without doing social participation: I've even met folk who voted for them, but we won't have time on monday for the nuances).

To my mind, it doesn't work to suppose that people can be prodded and coerced into civic or political participatory roles when their experience of social participation is impoverished. So it would help if we can develop a thriving communication ecology at neighbourhood level, and get some conversational democracy we can depend on.

In the nick of time, with local democracy gagged and tied to the tracks and the train of public spending cuts thundering down the line, along come gallant dynamic al-action neighbourhood online networks. Hurrah. Let's get out of this metaphor and ask a few questions:

Does the economic logic of these nets imply a more appropriate geographic scale for democratic involvement than currently exists? (Consider, for example, how much difficulty some authorities have in trying to establish meaningful area forums).

Does the inbuilt interactivity imply more conversation?

Does online conversation stimulate offline activity?

Should local authorities be enabling the development of these networks? (Dunh?)

Rationale - Adventitious. Causality - Contingent

As part of a project looking at the digitisation of archives and collections held by members of the public, I've been wandering around an absorbing example called CAIN, which is about conflict and politics in Northern Ireland.

Many important collections are established by ordinary citizens of course, because the institutional view of history is so partial and sometimes in denial. The potential contributions of resources like these to present and future understanding is enormous.

On sites like these you can linger over memorial quilts, reflect on the faces of children killed in the troubles, or learn lots about murals.

And just when you're comfortable receiving data in the usual formats - images with a bit of digestible explanatory text - you click onto something that makes you see things in a different light. From this page you can see a 'Spreadsheet of Deaths Associated with Violence in Northern Ireland, 1969-2001, (Version 1; dated 16 June 2009)'. In fact it goes up to 2005, listing 3649 fatalities.

I stare at a lifeless name, and the screen spells out:

Rationale:Adventitious
Causality: Contingent
Context: Explosion

Here's the list of punitive categories for the dataset:

Internal Security
Enforcement
Intimidation
Reprisal
Factionalism
Retaliatory
Victimisation

It was compiled by Michael McKeown, a retired teacher from North Belfast. The word 'painstaking' comes to mind.

A game about community resources

I devised and ran a game the other day for library staff and community sector representatives in Cornwall. It was part of a workshop over two days and the purpose was to explore the implications of and context for a civic/community resource in the centre of a town. What follows is a short description of what happened.

We began in plenary by inventing a town with certain features, and a few neighbourhoods with a range of unspecified social problems. We then turned our attention to trying to describe the features of an ideal neighbourhood for the residents of that town: somewhere safe, clean, friendly, informed and connected, with a viable local economy, quality housing, good levels of health and so on. We grouped these 'attributes of community' into four headings: social and community, local economy, learning and recreation, and communication.

Next we explored the institutions at work in the town - some, like the college, operating town-wide and some, which I dealt as cards to each of three groups, at neighbourhood level. All participants helped plot the roles of the institutions (a drug advice centre, a mother and toddler group, youth centre, police community support officers, and so on) in relation to the four groups of desired attributes, plus the partnership links between them. As someone suggested and the pic seems to confirm, in this fictional world, everything's joined up.

Then they got to work describing in more detail the rather unfortunate particulars of their grotty and deprived neighbourhoods - levels of crime, disorder, educational under-attainment, mortality, poor housing, the works. They scored each area for the four attributes on a matrix of 'fragile, stable, or robust': almost entirely fragile at this stage.

When this was done we went from table to table passing each neighbourhood and its problems to the next group, so that each inherited a new locality with its challenges to be addressed. I asked them to take on these challenges within a five year timeline, making reference to the role of the institutions whose laudable partnership work was by now graphically blu-tacked to the wall. What they were striving for was to work out how the existing range of local agencies, together with groups of residents, could somehow lift the neighbourhoods in a few years from their low scores on the matrix through 'stable' towards 'robust'. Ah, if only.

By this time we all had some idea of the gap between what could be achieved in the town and the aspirations for ideal local quality of life. So it was time for an announcement about a new source of funding for an agency to occupy a disused civic building in the centre of town. Participants were asked to work together to develop a bid to address the shortfall, including statement of purpose, critical success factors, proposals for management and governance, and an outline of specific projects and client groups.

This worked better than I'd dare hope. In order to prepare their part of the bid, participants had to get up and move between their groups to find out what the other groups were preparing; and they did.

Even better, those working on client groups and projects came up with something quite special. They invented a kind of community sector ideas incubator ('The Place'), where the initiatives of diverse community groups are nurtured and developed, occupying no permanent space in the venue but being nurtured there. Groups would come to and form around The Place, get help with connections, with sources of help and funding, and move on, on a community development model. Why such a role should not be seen as related to the role of a community library I don't know. I still think it has mileage, although even by the time I left the following afternoon, and we had worked hard on the meanings and potential of 'community library', those who had invented it still needed persuading of its worth.

What we had achieved I think was a mutual reassurance that a library can be a place that collaborates intensively with local people in promoting community cohesion and empowering people to get involved in local life on their own terms.