My own ‘Square Mile’ starts here, now.

Just another school-summer-holiday-day, but a big day for me.

Today marks the start of my own ‘My Square Mile’ project. It’s been in my head for a very long time, and recognised as a good fit with My Square Mile, and aspects of the Big Society, for several months. A few people will have heard me pontificating about it.

But today marks a simple practical shift. With the agreement of my employer – GfK NOP (who have been very supportive) – I am reducing my ‘day job’ by 40% in order to spend two days per week working on personal projects… a big part of which will be this necessarily very local My Square Mile project. It also involves taking a deep breath and accepting that I’ve just reduced my income and benefits by a corresponding 40% because, initially and by definition, these will be unpaid projects. Something may emerge which becomes another job or social business, but it is fundamental for me that, at the start, there are no conditions about this… I simply have to do the work and allow the answers to emerge and, of course, for those answers to become interwoven with my local friends, neighbours, not-yet-known neighbours and local institutions. Any thought of this being another part of what I do for a living has to come later and last.

I want this post to be a simple, clear, story about what I’m going to do, and why – so I won’t recap all the stuff about my underlying personal philosophy and its resonance with Big Society ideas or My Square Mile. I’m just going to make some bullet points to mark the start line.

• Neighbourhoods benefit from an increase in what it has been fashionable to call ‘social capital’.
• Defining social capital is a popular sport. I think an increase in social capital includes – more connections between people, more hours clocked up by people doing things together and sharing ‘stuff’, more people who are inclined to be involved in the state of their neighbourhood and the well-being of their neighbours, more people spending some time thinking about belonging to a place and, through this, about having something in common with those living around them. Overall I think this may also mean more people joining existing local organisations (in the very broadest sense – and I’m totally agnostic about what these are), participating in them, strengthening and developing them, or creating new groups where they feel that there’s a gap.
• I believe that the overall effect of such increases is positive – but I’m too old and experienced to be naive about possible bad outcomes too.
• I want to understand the social capital that my neighbourhood already has.
• I want to understand the connections therein (offline and online) – and personally to connect with the most active local ‘agents’
• BTW I also want to avoid lots of jargon like ‘agent’ but I know I’ll fall into this trap over and over again. Professional practitioners… please forgive me when I re/miss-coin a technical term by accident.
• I then want to start to explore whether, how and why people might like to become MORE connected
• Then I want to know about how they would use those connections. [Whilst acknowledging the “observer’s paradox” fact that their ideas and inclinations might keep changing as they become aware of more information and opportunities]
• Then, and only then… I want to start finding ways to create and support that increased connection, and the resulting activities. This is where a lot of people may be starting right now – using their own prior knowledge/experience/beliefs/allegiances as foundations. So I’m sure they will race ahead and I can continue to learn from them. But for me it’s really important that this happens in Phase 2, at the earliest.
• I don’t want to lead anything – I just want to help things to come out and take shape.  I hope (believe?) that things can ’emerge’ [in the philosophically precise sense of the word] and that they can continue to be ’emergent’ in terms of how they are sustained. So I really do want to avoid becoming yet another of those ‘Other People’ to whom everyone else feels that they can outsource involvement, responsibility and risk.
• I ought to declare that I believe this sort of emergence is now much more possible because of online services and tools and that I will be paying a lot of attention to how they can help – whilst not letting this define the essence of the project.

Two final principles:

• What is my neighbourhood? I am wilfully and intentionally centring my own square mile on Me, here, at home. In fact I’m placing the point of the compasses on the manhole cover in the middle of the road outside and drawing a circle of radius 993 yards (feel free to check the maths). There are a couple of reasons. First, I challenge the Big Society Network’s notion that there are 93,000 square miles in the UK. This is only true if  ‘Other People’ draw the grid for us, leaving us to discover which box we are in and cope with their boundaries and rationale. [I know they didn’t intend this kind of precision – but the underlying principle is actually rather important].   I see 24 million square miles in the UK – each centred on a unique household. Adopting this mentality sets us very free, and makes this as bottom-up as you can get. But it leaves us with the problem of how we connect and aggregate all those overlapping square miles. Rather than retreat into analysing this paradox I’m plumping for the household square mile and I’m going to record and deal with the practical issues and challenges as they arise. I’m sure that  ‘why should I have anything to do with your square mile?’ will be one of the first. So I’m going to be glancing from my own square mile to bigger projects, Big Society assistance, political debates etc, and back again – over and over again – and reporting on how the big stuff is showing up on my patch and what impact it is having.
• Which leads to the final point. The essential part of the first phase of this project is to listen, capture and share… with as few pre-conceptions as practically possible to become amongst other things, and using the insightful term coined by David Wilcox, a ‘Social Reporter’. initially that will be my voice, but I hope to then add other local voices as time goes by – so I imagine there will soon be a multi-author local blog. This kind of sharing itself becomes part of the local social capital, as shown by people such as Will Perrin via the Hyperlocal principle… another source of inspiration that I should acknowledge.

And so the TODO List?

1. Write and promote kick-off blog post. Done.

2. Find ways of capturing, mapping and visually representing My Square Mile. [Any tips on how to use online mapping tools in simple ways to do this most welcome BTW – I’ve found an add-on to draw and tag a circle within Google maps.] This is going to be called ‘Oakfield Square’ btw since that’s a nearby park/school/hub which doesn’t opt for a divisive choice of place name such as Wilmington, Dartford or Tree Estate… all of which partly intersect with my circle. For the present – if you want to find my patch just search for DA1 1PS.

3. Identify (confirm prior research on) some of the most active individuals and groups in that space and make (increase) contact with them. Set up some meetings, phone calls, and send some e-mails.

4. Produce a very simple manifesto for what I am doing which passes the ‘rambling nutter’ test. i.e. if I was to pick a random house within that area and knock on the door, how would I explain what I am doing, and what sorts of responses I’m seeking from people, in a way which makes sense and gets me a cup of tea and a chat rather than an invitation to “***,  or **** off” along with all the other cold callers, politicians, religious evangelists, ‘curtain twitchers’ or con artists that people are conditioned to send on their way. Done – twice – second time being in June 2011

I’ll be back tomorrow with the first draft of 4.

Meanwhile – maps, crayons, e-mails and phone calls.  ;0)

[Footnote – even at the risk of embarrassing them, it’s worth re-stating my gratitude to GfK NOP, and in particular to my boss, CEO Richard Jameson, for being flexible enough to give me the means to scratch this itch. I know that evidence suggests my 3-day-per week focus will result in much more than 60% of my past priority objectives being met, and that we will all benefit from the influx of energy and creativity that I undoubtedly feel this morning… but it’s still an experiment and one which has invested faith in my ability to balance these different ways of working and being. Without that agreement this just wouldn’t be happening at all – and there are maybe some lessons in this for the bigger Big Society.]