Credit where it’s due – good rubbish!
I’ve often remarked that people only take notice of services when they fail – e.g. nobody rings up the electricity company to say thanks for keeping the lights on without interruption for yet another day.
This is currently being reflected in the ‘mountains of rubbish’ stories on TV and in the press. In some places there’s now a backlog of refuse due to a combination of snow hampering collections in mid December, some environmental resources being diverted to gritting around the same time, and then gaps in the normal collection routines due to Christmas and New Year holidays. As a result, packs of rabid giant rats are now endemic across most of the UK, sweeping through neighbourhoods and devouring both urban foxes and the babies upon which would these would normally prey.
So I thought it would be nice if I broke the pattern and said thank-you to Dartford Borough Council. Speaking for my own road – collections were only slightly disrupted despite the heaviest snow I have seen in 20 years of living here, this included recycling and garden waste recycling, and the maintenance of normal service levels over the holidays means that collections this week are only one or two days later than normal. All of this is on top of the retention of weekly collections of non-recyclable rubbish – a result of a local referendum held by the Council. So well done Dartford. Thanks! Much appreciated. Not taken for granted… etc. etc.
Still – might not stop those packs of rabid giant rats migrating in from less well-maintained areas. Though low levels of rubbish do seem to keep the news reporters at bay.
Talk of ‘Nudge’ and its application to social policy has been around for a while now. The most recent outing of note was the story at the beginning of December around Andrew Lansley’s endorsement of nudge approaches, where possible, in public health as an alternative to regulation (the latter often made synonymous with “nannying”).
Give or take some nuance, the theory of nudge is that subtle cues, clues and not least incentives can be used to modify people’s behaviour in ways which are at least as successful as top-down regulation or head-on rational argument. Marketers have long known that purchasing decisions have as much to do with emotions, contexts, group behaviour and hard wired instincts as they do with conscious calculated rational decisions. Marketing has sought to identify and exploit these drivers, and the nudge school of marketing has gone from strength to strength in recent times. You will, of course, get many different accounts of what ‘rational decision-making’ is anyway, depending on which philosophers and psychologists you ask – we are notoriously bad, for example, at differentiating between the probability of an unpleasant event and the degree of its unpleasantness when making what might otherwise be seen as conscious rational choices about risk.
Social policy makers, of a variety of schools, like nudging for several reasons. It has been suggested that it may be more effective and cost effective in some areas than ‘heavy duty’ regulation, policing, ‘push’ marketing or remediation. So nudge fits nicely with the hope that government really can meet its ends in more intelligent, elegant, less intrusive ways and, therefore, that these ways will have the currently inestimable merit of being cheaper.
But it is even more beloved of those who dislike governments ‘telling people what to do’ or ‘ordering people about’… and who are most likely to deploy the term “nanny state”. They are thinking of a bossy, if benevolent, kind of nanny.
This is where the misunderstanding starts to creep in and where it may, at the same time, betray the underlying and unexamined mindset of a majority of pro-nudgers.
“Not telling people what to do” is not the same thing as “Giving people an opportunity to make an informed choice”. This becomes clearer if you consider that nudging is not just about steering people towards a particular means of achieving an outcome, it is about steering people towards desiring that outcome… or even towards behaving as though they want it, even though they might be totally unaware of it (whatever it is). At the same time, the judge of the nudge shouldn’t just be about whether it ‘works’ or not – there are all sorts of things that would also work spectacularly… at around the time that civil liberties tended towards zero. Nudging needs to be judged by some other criterion.
INTERLUDE – ‘SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!’
There’s another post that I have been meaning to write for a long time – but I’ve never quite managed to make the required 2×2 matrix stand still for long enough. It comes from wanting to combine insights that I have been given by two different friends at two quite different times. Both divide people into two types – and there’s an irony in this as you will see in a moment.
The first insight came from a friend who had observed that there were two types of reaction to any social, political or economic “issue” once identified. The more common of the two is for people to identify ‘what ought to be done about it’ – their contribution is to identify, perhaps arguing about the proposition along the way, actions that should be taken by Other People [topic dear to my heart as you know – Other People]. A politically active minority will attempt to exercise power in order to have this solution put into practice. The rest will be satiated by having mumbled, grumbled and perhaps blogged, or written to the paper. The other, much less common, reaction is for people to look at their immediate surroundings and options and say – ‘what can I do about this?’. ‘How can I help?’ ‘How can I understand more?’. So let’s call these the ‘Something must be done’ tribe and the ‘What can I do?’ tribe. [I make no secret of the fact that my empathy with the latter is what lies behind my desire to root Big Society thinking first in local action, and only then in emergent national policy].
The second insight came from a friend who divided people, similarly on the basis of their response to political and social issues, into two schools of thought. One sort of person assumes that (here’s the paradox) there are two kinds of people – perhaps to be called the ‘aware’ and the ‘ignorant’. They will number themselves amongst the aware and, with more or less elitism and paternalism, they will consider what needs to be done for, or even to, those Other People [slightly different version of Other People here] for their own sake or, indeed, to stop them becoming a greater burden upon, or threat to, ‘people like Us’. The other type of person, again perhaps in something of a minority, resists this sorting of humanity into sheep and the goats, and regards everyone as fundamentally the same – the same in nature, in value and in potential as each other if not always, perhaps, in terms of circumstance and opportunity. Let’s call these the ‘Parents’ and the ‘Peers’.
In case you are thinking I’ve got this down to insanely clear cut distinctions, and have also already handed out Good Guy and Bad Guy badges, let me make a few quick but necessary qualifications. First – I am myself very prone to ‘Something must be done’ thinking and to adopting ‘Parent’ mode. These just happen to be things that I’ve become much more aware of over the last few years – not least thanks to having met all kinds of interesting and inspiring people – and they also happen to be things that I hope I have improved on over that time… now seeing myself as much more of a ‘What can I do?’ ‘Peer’ and, in some contrary way, taking more responsibility for my own wellbeing along the way.
I also believe that it is possible for someone to be a ‘Something must be done’x’Parent’ and still be acting on the very highest principles… of wishing good for every other person on the planet, and having a sense of duty, self-discipline or even self-sacrifice to go with it. It’s just not my world view – and therefore not something I would use to justify a course of action.
The matrix I keep trying to get my head around is the 2×2 combination of the two – since I’ve just snapped to the top left and bottom right cells as it were. So what do ‘How can I help?’x’Parent’ types look like. Is my real saviour hiding in ‘Something must be done’x’Peer’ thinking???? Hmmm… One day…
NUDGE (ACT 2)
Armed with the fruits of that digression – let’s go back to nudging.
I think my point is that nudging is no less the ‘nannying’ just for being low profile or elegant. Nanny can be cunning – she may get the kids to behave by good use of [what Terry Pratchett would call] ‘headology’ rather than by sternly enforcing rigid rules. But it’s not a jot less ‘nannying’ all the time that the kids are just that (i.e. kids) and all the time that it is nanny who knows best what is good for them. If anything, nanny’s nudging is more sinister in direct proportion to how effortless, invisible and effective it is.
So, does that mean I’m prepared to discard any or all ‘positive’ impacts of the deployment of nudgery? What’s my alternative? The answer may lie in making it personal. I need to lose some weight. All other things being equal – I think I would. But all sorts of circumstances militate against it and, on balance, my behaviour would suggest that my explicit acceptance of the fact that I need to lose some weight isn’t as strong as I think – because it’s not overcoming those circumstances. Another reading is that I need ways to sustain, through the tricky times, the clear and present desire that I have to lose weight when I am at my most clear-headed and calculating.
For ‘ways to sustain’ read ‘help’ or indeed “Hellllp!!!” This could consist of leaving messages for my future self in the form of habits, visualisations, tricks and reminders. Or it could mean pre-arranging with my friends and family for them to collaborate in all this – removing some temptations, reinforcing some thoughts, releasing incentives that I have voluntarily put into their gift… and so on. I can also sensitise myself to tune in more to, and derive incentives from, all the social norms and rewards that exist in the society around me that reinforce my goal, and I can de-sensitise myself to all the opposites – which also exist out there.
All of which sounds an awful lot like nudging, at the particular time that I need it to work for me, and much more powerful than my simply repeating the words of some rationally derived resolution. The difference is that I consciously own the objective, and that I have entered into some kind of compact, some explicit and transparent agreement, to be nudged… as often and as effectively as you like. Contrast that with somebody else deciding that losing weight is a priority for me, and ‘tricking’ me into doing so without my agreement or possibly even my knowledge.
So the first thing that I would like from the state, if it thinks some of my priorities are “its” priorities, is the opportunity to enter into a compact to be nudged… in full acceptance that this is probably more effective and economical than said state having to spend a load of money on repairing me later when my weight makes me ill.
But – in my value system – the state is Us. The state isn’t something different, or special or superior… as an entity or as an executive collective of human beings. It’s just the result of a division of labour whereby some of us end up having to organise things (govern), whilst others make things or look after people or grow food… etc. So if there are people who currently find themselves in a Government of the day, or closely associated with it, or even a converging political class who happen to agree on how things ought to be (including the body mass index of members of the population) AND if those people want me to share that opinion and apply it to myself… I think they have only one option, and it’s NOT to nudge my subconscious into that place. They need to present me with a rational argument and, if that’s too weedy, then they need to set me an example. They need to manifest the behaviours that they want to see from me, and they need to make me admire them… not by manipulating my marketing-receptors, but by being authentic, inspirational and coherent. Now that’s what you call a nudge.
In short – the nudging classes should, instead, seek to lead by example. Whether it’s in health, or sustainability, business ethics or parenting, they should perhaps first be the change they want to see. Where have I heard that before?
Nowhere do I think this conclusion rings truer than in community participation and manifestation of The Big Society. Informing, making and overseeing the delivery of policies is not, of itself, an act of disinterested social investment or even sacrifice… it’s a day job. Get over it. Politicians and Ministers are not, thereby, exempt from the terms on which the rest of us are being asked to participate and invest in ‘society’ outside of our day jobs and our payday. [To be fair – there are MPs and Councillors out there who manifest that principle – and I would love to hear more about ways in which this can be detected and celebrated]. So – to mis-quote John Rambo – don’t nudge meeee! Go nudge yourself.
[And if they presume to seek to nudge me into being a more interested and active member of my own community… I’ll get really nasty! Oooh look! Buns!!]
Working in a Winter Wonderland
It has been very cold.
Many parts of the UK have experienced heavy snowfalls – unusually early in the year, though far from unprecedented. As a result, some people have been stranded in mid-journey.
And that’s the news.
Only it isn’t, because these events seem to have received an awful amount of coverage – and muddled excitable coverage at that, if my own random sample is anything to go by. [And if it isn’t – then it seems a no more disproportionate treatment of the news, than the news’ treatment of the weather.]
Muddled? In the same report you get:
- Reporter standing by the side of the road reminding us what heavy snow condtions are like. [If you’re in it, you know what it’s like. If you’re not, it’s of interest, but you know what it was like last time you were in it. If you’ve never experienced UK snow – you probably wouldn’t be looking to the mainstream news media to educate you at the expense of the 90+% who have.]
- Hints that the authorities may have been ‘caught out again’ – though no empirical substantiation here, especially as most authorities seem to be ‘fighting the last war’ having stocked up on extra grit/salt and new machinery that they know would have been invaluable last year
- Statistical stories about how ‘it’s the earliest in the year that we have experienced temperatures this low’ (try thinking through what that means) – hard on the heels of stories about how 2010 to date has been ‘the warmest year, on average, since records began’.
- Realism about the forward horizon of weather forecasting leading to curiously menacing truisms such as ‘we can’t see an end to this’… which transforms ‘it will be like this until at least Thursday as far as we can tell’ into something like the announcement of the dawn of a new ice age.
Why?
I suppose one explanation is that this is reactive coverage – and that the quality of analysis in most of our newsrooms is now such that different stories – weather forecasting, public service policy, climate change, practical warnings and geographically targeted advice, novelty and oddity – cannot be separated out and treated in a variety of different ways in the time available.
But (and I wouldn’t be a grumpy, critical, moral-drawing blogger if I didn’t) I see two other forces at work:
- An ever-growing media environment of drama and fear. Never mind the fact that there are facts (this has affected some people in some places, to this degree, and is may persist for this long – which is not massively interesting) and never mind that there’s some proportionate advice to tease out (those of you living in X, Y and Z would do well to assume that… but those of you in A, B and C are probably wasting your time) why don’t we just find spectacular images, some miserable and/or disgruntled people, and create the impression that this is probably going to happen to you some time soon, could last for ages and will be just as horrible as we have taken pains to convey to you. Also – let’s use emotive language – ‘n’ schools haven’t ‘closed’ in Yorkshire, they have been ‘forced to close’. Assuming that all this isn’t just down to journalists being sloppy and a bit short on considered analytical firepower (which I rearely do BTW) the only other conclusion is that they know that this is what their audience wants and expects… that the British, in particular, want to see signs of some greater doom unfolding,… ergo
- The fulfillment (by collecting the most extreme evidence that can be gleaned, in isolation, from anywhere in the weather imagery of the last few days) of a desire to believe that something big is happening. For some this is comforting – it’s the sense that we shouldn’t worry about the minutiae of our own lives because some much greater wave is breaking over us – so let’s hunker down, eat, drink and be merry in the way that our ancestors took each new winter to be a possible ice-death of the world. For the rest it is just another source of fear which, whilst uncomfortable, demands to be fed… the child has to keep looking under the bed for the monster, because somehow not knowing is even worse. We Brits – we like to be taken out of ourselves by a bit of impending doom – in spite of ourselves – and the media seem all too ready to feed the habit, to turn up the volume after the adverts, and to show us the rest of the audience getting carried away with the whole thing. So it’s our own fault then?
One last thought. With every decade that passes we are becoming more insulated (literally and metaphorically) by more efficient heating systems, new materials in glazing, roofing and wall building. We travel around in warm cars with safety devices, heaters, climate control, entertainment systems. Public transport, though still subject to many horrors, is also benefitting from these improvements. Shopping centres, after a short dash from the car, invite us to walk from shop to shop without leaving the maintained climate – even to sit in ‘pavement cafes’ between them. Many people have places of work which enjoy similar physical climate. I also often find that those who are still the most affected by winter weather – delivery drivers, emergency services, farmers and builders – are actually the most stoic, once they’ve told their particular (actual, not future hypothetical) story.
So could it be that there are now generations for whom the prospect that their insulated automotive womb may grind to a halt, or that they may (even worse) have to get out of it and brave the cold in clothes which inductively assumed no such thing could ever happen, really does constitute a dire threat… worthy of that excitable news coverage. This is in contrast to the days (of course) of my youth – when you assumed that cars would break down, or get stuck, and when, to be fair, you probably travelled less far and less often as a result. I think I may even be starting to join this ‘nesh’ generation myself.
It makes me think of some of the worlds of Isaac Asimov – where ‘weather’ was something that happened above the roof of a spherical man-made habitat that covered an entire planet. Where ‘weather’ was something that a few hardy souls, the equivalnet of extreme sports fans, experienced in special visits to semi-protected structures on that roof, and where the great majority of humanity enjoyed climates which were customised and finely maintained, without ever having to brave the ‘outside’.
Be careful what you wish for.
Some things I hope the Big Society isn’t
OK – I’ve said I want to stick to the doing and not do too much philosophising, and I’m going to stick to that. But there’s so much to read that, occasionally, you can’t help but be prodded into a response. Which means that it’s more often negative than positive. I’m going to quickly sketch out a few principles and then maybe they’ll stand for other occasions.
Here are some versions of the Big Society I don’t agree with:
- Reduction of the State per se. If I’m right about my version of the Big Society – i.e. changing the way we see our role in society – most simply and perhaps first in our local community – then there are all sorts of changes which may reduce the ‘turnover’ of formally constituted public bodies and services. But if it’s true it should be a natural outcome of something that is ‘good’ for its own reasons. That shrinkage shouldn’t be the prime mover or objective – otherwise the risk of the Big Society becoming a mere smokescreen is infinitely greater.
- Replacing local and national government organisations with (large? formal?) ‘charities’. An organisation is an organisation no matter what the ‘articles of association’. If the fundamentals of our approach to organisations don’t also change… then the function will shape the organisation much more rapidly than the ‘special’ nature of the organisation can change the function. As a contingent matter of transformation, a voluntary organisation in the first flush of youth may be a very valuable catalyst for challenging assumptions about what gets done and why – but a ‘mature’ voluntary organisation with a long-standing axe to grind and its own accumulation of vested interests will likely just take on the same organisational arthritis of a local authority or an ancient quango.
- Outsourcing. See all of point ‘2.’ above and then add the fact that somebody has to pay shareholders. Also take account of the fact that any procurement processes which adequately reflect the complexities and uncertainties of formally defined public sector functions inevitably create a bias in favour of very large businesses – because these can afford to maintain standing armies of people to write bids (more people to then pay out of the service charges of course) and who become good at bidding rather than necessarily at delivering. Small, innovative businesses with novel motivations tend to be squeezed out by big businesses who can go toe to toe with procurement departments.
- “Getting individuals and communities to do more for themselves” – a phrase which I think Suffolk County Council used to preface their apparent ‘outsource everything’ strategy. Actually – I might even accept “getting communities to do more for themselves” except that this proves to be meaningless… because depending on where you set the boundary of the “community” the work of a Council just is the formal business of a community doing things for itself, it just happens to be a County-sized community. I think the statement relies on a shared mental picture amongst sympathetic listeners that a ‘community’ is this ‘small enough’ village, or chunk of picturesquely embattled urban landscape, not to be in direct competition with the Council. And “Getting individuals to do more for themselves” is just plain wrong as an objective for the Big Society itself. “Getting individuals to do more for themselves” may be a helpful adjunct but, on a grand scale, it is antithetical to the notion of Society,… or even to the notion of a market for that matter. When I sell my services to another party, I may be being self-reliant in some way but I’m also doing something for someone else.
- All and only about “services”. It’s the concept of “services” that does us two big dis-services [pun intended]. Firstly it keeps us in this transactional and functional way of thinking – that this is about jobs that need doing. Secondly, and for this reason, it fragments the doing – breaking it down into law and order, welfare, health, education, environment… as though we all lived lives that were conveniently partitioned into these things. And if the Big Society is just about these services, if the Big Society is about how we deliver them, if the Big Society is about the historical menu of services divided up in the ways they currently happen to be, then it instantly abandons everything that lies in the gaps between, and it instantly disqualifies new, creative, ways of thinking about our lives that transcend, blur and blend these distinctions.
So what have I left us? What is this peculiar, seemingly personal, brand of Big Society that avoids all those pitfalls, sacrifices all those references to current practical challenges, and still manages to be in any way useful?
I think it is “People doing more for each other” and “People doing more for themselves together”.
I can see versions of this operating at a distance, amongst communities of interest and overlapping personal networks. I also recognise things which need to be decided and operated at a national level. But I think that if a coherent version of The Big Society is to have a chance of emerging it should first be tested on a local level, simply because some of the most important forces and instincts involved operate naturally on a face-to-face level, in your immediate physical environment. Similarly, the easiest ways to dismiss the idea operate at levels of remoteness, generalisation and abstraction.
I also believe that this is not about changing people. If I did I would pack in right now. I believe that it is about tapping in to those instincts and needs that people already have, and about removing some of the obstacles, reasons and excuses that sustain less satisfying behaviour.
I don’t even like the use of the term ‘volunteering’ in this context – even though I am somewhere between respect and awe for what people achieve every day in roles that are unpaid and unimposed. That’s because, for many, ‘volunteering’ implies duty, sacrifice, paying your dues, giving something up in order to be virtuous… even though this may lead to thanks and acknowledgement.
To the contrary, I believe that many of us suffer some degree of impoverishment in our lives which results from not having the opportunity (time, access, permission, knowledge, support) to get involved in more communal activities and to use our strengths to the benefit of others. The Big Society should be fuelled by the fact that if more of us were able to do more of this, there would be at least three benefits which don’t look much like self-sacrifice and therefore don’t need heavy marketing.
- The ‘givers’ would just feel better, more complete, more fulfilled – and would discover avenues for personal development that don’t exist in other parts of their lives.
- With more such ‘givers’ the probability that each of them would also become a ‘receiver’ increases.
- Communities, as a whole, would just get ‘better’ because of the material and psychological effects of all those extra interactions – not least because of what happens in the gaps between “services” when people choose and grow these activities from the ground up.
It’s still a bit abstract. It needs lots and lots of chances, examples, failures in order to become concrete. I’m sure a lot of those examples exist out there in community development and long-established projects… the Big Society didn’t just spring into existence earlier this year. But that’s OK just now – this abstraction – because this post is my self-indulgent bit of once and for all philosophy.
So, for me: The Big Society is about finding or creating more ways in which people can do more for each other (or for themselves-together) in a way which, ideally, would reduce to some degree the hours that they need to work in order to fund that same ‘doing’ via taxation, in turn allowing them to spend more time on diverse activities which enrich their own lives and those of their neighbours, friends, families. The only real act of faith this requires is a belief in the net positive balance of underlying human nature, when the environment permits, and especially when face to face with real individuals rather than stereotypes.
If that was right, what should The Big Society be for the purposes of politics and public administration? It should be an agenda through which the ‘government of the day’:
- Creates the means for people to act on a community level – networks, rights, networks, support, networks, examples, networks, templates, knowledge sharing and of course,,, networks. [For some reason that looks banal – it probably lacks something like the provision of ‘platform’ for inspiring charismatic practitioners, and the popular, emotive, celebration of successes.]
- Remains resolutely agnostic about the size and cost (and categorisation) of public administration and public services at this level. Neither the shrinkage of the state nor the net reduction of expenditure should be a necessary condition – rather a well-founded hope that they will be a contingent consequence of these changes
- Standing ready to offer propositions about when and how this local activity can join up with existing government, civil and 3rd sector organisations – including propositions about how these need to change to accommodate that joining up.
- Similarly a story about when and how to accept that something more than the local is necessary/appropriate – and to offer a plausible story about how the necessary aggregation of decision making and management at these levels can be achieved without just throwing all the real power back to elected party politicians, the executive as we know it, and permanent officials.
- Sufficient patience to allow the bottom up examples to emerge, evolve, spread, die out, before seeking to declare the total success, or otherwise, of the Big Society model.
- In order to make 5. possible, demonstrate an unprecedented suppression of party political tribalism around the concept – having ‘our’ version and ‘their’ version, at national party level, that have to be glorified and vilified by turns. Let alone the quasi-religious mission to identify and claim the origins of the One True Big Society.
Above all – then – the recognition that if this is a real change it will be derived from things which most/many people discover that they already want and need to do (tentatively and maybe suspiciously at first) and not handed down to people as a branch of policy, using old familiar language, dichotomies and mechanisms… or EVEN ‘nudges’.
The message to governments and politicians – watch, listen, help (on our terms) and adapt.
Right. Back to doing (the day job today as it happens) and an even stronger resolve not to theorise for a bit – even if provoked by stuff I strongly agree with.
So here’s the basic message to my square mile.
So the story so far is that I have realised an online space is actually central to putting my hypothetical idea into practice and that, right now, I am trying to decide exactly what platform to implement – quickly! – so that I can just get on with it. I’m tempted, on some advice, to start with a simple blog format… but I have bouts of worry that if I do this I may lose some people if I discover I need to migrate to some more ‘devolved’ platform.
Platform dilemma or not, most of the other vagueness that came in the wake of my resolution has now been dispelled. Let’s just regard it as part of the design process. Moreover, help is on its way because I am attending two events – one tomorrow (Tuesday) and one on Saturday. Both of these bring together groups of people, with their own local projects and online spaces, most of which I didn’t even imagine existed when I wrote my ‘…starts here, now’ declaration a few weeks ago. Isn’t the web fantastic on so many levels? Tomorrow it’s Growing the Big Society – hosted at the Communities and Local Government department and convened by the Community Sector Coalition. On Saturday it’s the London Neighbourhoods Online unconference, hosted by Ofcom and organised by Networked Neighbourhoods.
I think I’ll be hyper for weeks after that lot!!
The other thing is that I think I’m close to having a sane and concise proposition to put to local people. Conceptually, it’s about getting down to something that could be put on a flier, or in a short letter – doing just enough persuade people to come and view the site, whilst ensuring they have some prior idea of what it’s all about. At the moment it fails the literal flier test… it’s too long and too formally constructed. But it’s close to what I want.
Here it is below – and I would be really grateful for any feedback about how I could make it better and shorter – whether that’s comments from people who are active in this field (some of whom I may meet in the next few days), or from people who are new to all this and can give me the benefit of the ‘I haven’t a clue what you’re on about’ test. Let’s see if I can render this down into something really effective, and which also reflects some consensus amongst my newly discovered hyperlocal peers.
An invitation to visit Oakfield Square.
Are you interested in getting to know a bit more about your neighbourhood and maybe meeting a few more of the people who live there?
Do you sometimes feel you would like to do a bit more for, and with, your neighbours – but realise that you only have a small amount of time to spare, and that you don’t want to over-commit yourself, or to seem a bit odd or pushy?
How do you feel about the idea that there are things we could do for each other, or things that we could organise for ourselves, that might lead locally to
- more fun
- more help for each other and sharing
- a better local environment
- a stronger sense of security and belonging?
My name is Nick Buckley and, because I’ve been thinking a few of those things myself, I’ve set up a very simple website that you can visit at to meet other people in the area and to discuss these ideas with them… considering what we might do together.
You are probably wondering what counts as a neighbour or a neighbourhood. Earlier this year I read about something called Your Square Mile. The idea, rather than try to put the world right, is to start with the square mile you live in. You also look for other people in that square mile and work with them. ‘Making things better’ means whatever works for those people together – things you can see, experience and touch, rather than arguments about ideas.
So that’s what I’ve done – I took them at their word and drew a circle around my house, with an area of one square mile. And now I’ve set up the website to share news, information and dicsussions for people who live or work inside that circle, or have some other responsibility for what happens there. I hope that it will lead to things happening offline, in the real world, with events and activities.
I didn’t want to set myself up to own the connections for ‘Wilmington’, or ‘Dartford’ or ‘The Tree Estate’. Everyone has their own circle of course, and to be honest we can worry about what to do about all those overlapping circles once we’re better connected. The same is true of all sorts of organisations and people who already do things and run things inside this circle. I’ve called it Oakfield Square, because that’s a recognisable place – with the school and the park – without being an ‘official’ area.
I don’t know where this all leads – it’s not for me to say, or to push some plan or agenda – for now I’m just happy to connect to some new people and listen to them.
So what happens now? If you are even slightly interested in being better connected or more involved locally and, ideally, if you live inside the circle on the map, then you should visit …url here… and read more, make yourself known, start talking to other people, and suggesting projects or ideas that we could tackle.
Right from the start there will be some local information and news on there, together with links that you might find useful. You can imediately start adding your own links, news and issues.
You will also find some ‘Questions and Answers’ from me about the background to why I am doing this, what people in other parts of the country are doing, and how it all fits in with (or without!) central and local government.
One last thing. You are probably wondering what’s in this for Nick? It’s a long story – but what I can say is that I’m not selling anything, nobody is paying me to do this, I’m not representing a political party or trying to become a politician, and I’m not secretly trying to push some religion or other.
I hope to meet you on …url here… some time soon,
Nick Buckley.
Where am I? (Part 2)
So much (in Part 1) for how a few weeks’ thinking has taught me to concentrate on action, for fear of being swept away by the great Big Society debate. But what has the same period of time taught me about what to actually do? See my ‘kick-off’ post if you’re wondering “do about what?” at this stage.
The main thing is that I have had to reverse a prejudice.
I knew that I had to have a boiled-down, realistic story about how and why I wanted my neighbours (i.e. everyone in a circle of area 1 square mile around my home) to consider becoming better connected with each other and what sorts of things, thereafter, they might want to do together. I had to have a version of this that dispelled the notion that I was just some kind of nutcase – however harmless. I’ve pretty much done that – and the rendering down and trying out on people has been worthwhile and important. I’ll post the final version in the next day or so.
But my prejudice was that, at the next step, I should avoid putting a social media project centre stage. I kept talking about how it was important for me to relegate social media to the status of a valuable tool, or a way of making things quicker and easier… maybe using the growing familiarity of social networking as a way to make people feel less reticent about the awkward business of becoming more neighbourly.
But I was wrong! At the point where people say “Yes – I buy that. Now what?”, unless you want to organise big ungainly face-to-face meet-ups by phoning a load of people, or by collecting and using their e-mail adresses – you have to have somewhere for them to go… somewhere for them to hang out for a while whilst enough other people catch up, somewhere for them to say hello to each other, remind themselves of what it was you’d got them to buy in to, and somewhere they could use to consider and suggest options for action. The last one is quite important. Even if you could convene enough effective church-hall meetings you would have to accept that bringing such events to order would probably require that you take a degree of control, narrow the agenda, hold people’s concentration for a fixed space of time in the real world. [All, of course, skills and preferences that make for a traditional politician but not for a facilitator or match-maker.]
So, having intentionally suppressed my reflex for wanting to jump straight to an online space of some kind, I ended up concluding that this was what I needed pretty much first… or at least once I had <reverb> The Proposition </reverb>
Yes.. I know, I know… “DOH!”. But it’s all a bit circular. It’s my collectivism gene that made me susceptible to social media in the first place, so then over a period of years I got to see all kinds of positive examples and see all kinds of possibilities that I now take for granted. OK, the worst that happened is that I have discovered again from first principles, all over again, that it really is this 2.0 stuff that has made it possible to contemplate new ways of looking at civil society; and that these possibilities get stronger with every day that more people go online, more people start to use social tools, and more people go web-native and start to feel at home with all sorts of behaviours and new relationships to other web users.
Right now, then, I need a platform. Along the way I’ve discovered wonderful people and networks in recent months such as Networked Neighbourhoods, Gloucester Likal and Talk About Local, who you can now see in my list of Tools over on the right there. I’m also going along to a couple of events in the next two weeks which seem to have been created just to help me out. But it’s still worth my articulating the decision and the requirements.
The basic decision is blog vs forum vs network/community [… vs something I never even thought of]. There’s maybe a second decision around totally templated out of the box, vs needs-a-bit-of-configuring out of the box, vs something a bit more custom… and the corresponding options for hosting. But, believe me, whatever it is it’s going to have to be about as ready, and easy to roll, as a wordpress.com blog like this one.
The requirements?
- An online place where people can show up as a result of having said ‘yes’ to my generic neighbourliness proposition
- Somewhere that they can show up with the minimum necessary barriers to access.
- Somewhere that the other people who have said ‘yes’ can immediately be visible to each other. Not necessarily with all kinds of profiling – but at least recognisable as real people, and countable, to make it clear that we are many. [Well, many-ish]
- Something that looks clean and professional – intuitive. Neither overly official nor something that looks like a portal to the afterworld of My Little Pony [You all know what I mean!]
- Something that reminds people what it was they said ‘yes’ to – ideally including a clear, but not necessarily dynamic, map of the neighbourhood.
- Somewhere to record and discuss ‘possibilities’ – i.e. things to make and do… that I may have discovered or suggested, or that they may now want to propose, or that third party organisations would like a response to.
- A means of acting as a source of information – some static (history, geography, services, organisations) and some dynamic (events, news…)
I reckon that would be enough to get started. I’m not too worried about future-proofing it for all sorts of other options such as sharing via multi-media uploads, or a range of self-sorting groups, personal blogs and peer-to-peer private dialogues. But maybe I should be? At present I look at this question and think that if, in a year’s time, there’s a viable group of people, regularly engaged and active, complaining that we’re going to have to port a whole load of content and data onto a new platform so that they can do all sorts of new and complex things, then I can die a happy man.
One other point to make is that I am happy, in choosing a type of platform and thus shapingthe type of interaction that takes place there, to do something that’s a little bit ‘me centric’. Why? Because that gets me off the whole circular square mile hook. This is me doing something, in response to the challenge of the Square Mile, to foster something within my operating range – my me-bourhood. So I don’t have to worry too much about place names and boundaries. It’s much easier to be the self-appointed kick starter of my square mile online, than it is to be the self-appointed convenor of Wilmington or Dartford or wherever.
That’s all just me thinking out loud I suppose; and creating a bit of a waypoint. There’s lots for me to read, and lots of existing examples to look at and play spot-the-platform. But some collaborative filtering wouldn’t go amiss.
Professionally I’ve been here many times before of course. But I’ve always had a development budget of >£0. And this just feels different!
Answers on an electric postcard please.
[Note to self – really must start doing some images and more interesting formatting. These things are starting to look a bit dull]
Where am I? (Part 1)
Over the last few weeks I’ve become better and better tuned in to what feels like a really big network (small ‘n’) of people who are discussing, assessing, responding to, and even defining the Big Society or, as I most often seem to encounter it, #bigsociety.
This has made me aware of quite a few things
- There are people who have lived and breathed this stuff for years – often as part of an even wider political and philosophical agenda.
- There is so much material being generated on this topic that just keeping up could consume all the time that one has available for anything outside ‘the day job’.
- For some people this is a big part of their ‘day job’.
- Some of the people who are seeking to clarify and validate/judge the Big Society spend a lot of their time actually trying to do and achieve things on a personal/community level, or with issues that are directly personal for them. These are the people who seem to invest the most hope or anxiety in the debate. But they are also the ones who most often put forward the thought that “we’re doing something like this already” and who are the guardians of the principle that, whatever this new perspective is, it needs to be bottom up. These commentators have a hawk-like focus on the big society undergrowth and can spot the slightest movement of top-down paradoxes, contradictions and slips.
- Other commentators seem more to be part of a third sector ‘industry’ and are primarily concerned with judging how the application, by Central Government, of principles with the Big Society label attached will affect the flows of funding into different programmes and projects. All I know about these discussions is that they make me uncomfortable, suspicious, in a way that I don’t yet have clarity/time to analyse and express. [Though I am compiling a list of what I consider to be “charitable oxymorons”]
And from all this?… I conclude that the Big Society debate, on a national and theoretical level, just points us unerringly back at the great big questions about the state and the individual, structure and emergence, cathedrals and bazaars, open source and proprietary, analytical and instinctive. David Cameron’s statements about the Big Society constitute a position on some of these things, and amount to a refreshed articulation of them, but unsurprisingly they aren’t a solution to those big dichotomies. Perhaps the most charitable (sic) interpretation is that, applying big society principles to the Big Society project itself, Cameron is conceding on behalf of top-down government that there aren’t any unified answers… and is inviting people to volunteer (sic) a variety of responses to the UK’s current needs, whilst offering to create an ecosystem that will better support and enable those responses.
I’m a beginner in all this. There are lots of things I’m not a beginner in but, if what I’m now starting to do is best understood as a Big Society ‘instance’, I concede I’m a beginner compared to many people who have blogged, tweeted and published on this subject. It’s precisely my conviction that those questions are intractable, perhaps even undefinable, from a top-down and national perspective that first made me want to concentrate on a) doing and b) localness-hood.
So my practical conclusion is to take the slider on my hypothetical time management application and shift it from 50% doing and 50% reading/debating, to 80% doing and 20%
reading/debating. I’ll just have to hope that when I come back to ‘volunteer’ some of what I have learned, the carnival hasn’t moved on to a new pitch or even changed its name. In fact, given that some of that 20% will now be spent learning from the network of ‘doers’ to whom the Big Society has led me so efficiently, it’s even possible that I will discover that it’s not about the Big Society at all.
That’s where I am.
Want to meet your neighbours? Just ask if you can sleep over.
Thanks to Kevin Harris yet again. His contribution on the ’50 ways to meet your neighbour’ Facebook group, and his past blog post, brought me to the inspiring and moving story of Peter Lovenheim.
Kevin points to the article in the New York Times from June 2008 which tells the story. It also explains his initial premise in a way which had me nodding furiously in recognition. The story is about the way he then put his conviction into practice by asking neighbours, sometimes simply having rung their doorbell, if he could come and sleep over some time. Almost half just said yes, and events led on to a new network being formed.
You can find out more about Peter, and the book he subsequently wrote, on his own website here.
My plans now seem half-hearted (in two senses) by comparison. But what an inspiration!
Reticence
I’ve been mulling over that basic My Square Mile proposition to my neighbours today, with a little help from Gumtree.com’s State of the Neighbourhoods Report. This has promising news about both the existing level of neighbour contact and about the appetite for more, especially amongst young people.
But I also decided to take a walk to the edge (a circle only has one) of My Square Mile world, along one of the main routes – just for inspiration. I noted a few of the places along the way; the pub, two residential care homes, the Anglican church, the memorial hall (which houses several organisations and had some interesting posters) and the A2 cutting its noisy swathe through the circle. I think this reminded me of the variety of ‘entities’ I will be dealing with, in addition to private houses and flats.
But I was more struck by the fact that I only said ‘hello’ to one person. I encountered about a dozen, but all bar one of them avoided any kind of eye contact. I watched how they did it as well – in most cases this wasn’t preoccupation… I’m sure… it was a deliberate dropping of the gaze, feigned attention to a mobile phone or, in the case of one loitering couple, a slow subtle rotation of the body so as to present their backs to me during my transit… almost as though they were committing a crime and didn’t want witnesses!
I’ve written about this before and about why and how much it bothers me. Assuming that it’s not just that I am hideous or very scary (I’m not, I assure you… well, not scary anyway) what I am observing is normal behaviour, and therefore behaviour that seems to make sense to people. Whilst some of it may be about ‘avoiding trouble’ I’m sure more is down to increasingly thin skins and reticence – a mutual conspiracy not to appear nosey or intrusive.
Just one guy, who had posted a letter, did exactly what I do – a brief glimpse to check for mutual eye contact… we connected, said a suitably brusque but hearty ‘helloalright’ and passed. Simple mutual recognition, but a very different feeling from all those non-connections.
Conclusion – that’s a first order challenge to my proposition, to get over the reticence – some of which I myself felt just on account of walking along a village street without a real destination/excuse – and to give people reasons/excuses to be comfortable about connecting with me. It’s also one of the outcomes – a) simply greater incidence of acknowledgement and greeting in the area, leading to b) an increase in the number of people who recognise each other the next time, and maybe even get to talking… however superficially.
What a simple but profound thing!
Judging from Gumtree’s report, at least it’s not just me.
Back to developing that simple message then…
[Later – 9th August – here’s an encouraging voice thrown up by WordPress’s magic]
Nick Buckley : Practically Mindful 