The Big Society – how to keep it social
Ok – so on a very positive note, that manifestation of The Big Society which is called Your Square Mile has walked up and grabbed me by the throat. It resonates with so much that I’ve written about (including updated precis via this blog) and striven to do (e.g. via UpMyStreet a few years ago, or via local online consultation communities in my Market Research career).
I can’t wait to find out what the next steps are with Your Square Mile – to be given my clues, tools and connections – and get stuck in to my own square mile.
But hang on. ..
The intro to the idea says that there are about 93,000 square miles in the UK. That’s probably true. But by another reckoning there are about 25 million of them – minutely overlapping of course, but each centred on one of the 25 million households in the UK. I live at the centre of a square mile and so do you. My neighbour lives at the centre of an almost identical one. But other people, near the edge of my square mile, live in one which has only about 50% in common with mine.
This looks like a trivial or nit-picking point. So I won’t even start asking if these are literal squares or if they are circles with an area of one square mile… etc.
But it’s not trivial! The very practical question is – “who’s going to define the square miles and tell me (that’s tell) which one I’m in?” – much as history and civil authority tells me which parish, post code unit, borough, county, constituency, PCT, country etc, etc, I’m in.
Wouldn’t it be great if I could nominate somewhere nearby – a landmark like a pub or community centre – choose that as the centre of my square mile, and others could then sign up to it too, or nominate their own. This is how something like FourSquare works – and, no, I’m not for a second suggesting this should be something which depends on the smartphone-toting GPS-tagging classes. On FourSquare if I go to create a new ‘place’ and find that someone else has already defined one that’s good enough for my purposes, I adopt it instead of defining my own.
What I’m getting at here is that this sort of constructive skeptical thinking, at the very simplest practical level of set-up for Your Square Mile, neatly defines the challenge for the rest of the project.
Are you going to tells us which is our square mile? Are you going to draw boundaries and assign us some rules and objectives and human ‘guides’? Or are you going to give us clues and tools for doing it ourselves in roughly the intended way, and with some scope for metamorphosis and innovation?
Of course, if you turn it into a formal democracy – then you just start to generate new parties, or alternative micro-local assemblies. Our Parish Council is great – with people who turn out and do things – so I certainly wouldn’t want to build a new by-pass round them, or raise extra revenue to do so.
I’m NOT doing a recutio ad absurdum job here. I’m actually highlighting the opportunity to do something genuinely different – where the principles of organisation and coordination are themselves actually chosen to reflect the underlying principles of devolved action and responsibility. That’s the challenge – I think it’s open to some radically creative solutions and, if they work, the impact will feed all the way back into the higher, older, institutions and assumptions. Even if they don’t work, I think some new energy will have flowed into existing, genuinely bottom-up, organisations which, whilst they may have stood the test of time, may also benefit from re-examining how they work together at a hyper-local level.
So – as you can tell from all my stuff about Us, Them, Other People, Local Champions, communal ties, and even “frankness”, I’m up for it!
What’s next? And when? Can I start yet? Should I even be asking? Read more…
April has largely been about having fun for me – celebrating my 50th birthday at length and in style – and enjoying our best spring garden for years.
That’s not to say that the election campaign hasn’t regularly thrown up individual performances, patterns and group behaviours that had me seething and close to writing a specific post about them. But the end is in sight and, in spite of 100% of the myself that I polled agreeing that I hate our current political and electoral system, I will be voting and I will be staying up on Thursday night to watch the results. That’s because the process and outcome is still fascinating – leaving me hope for some kind of dramatic moment. And it’s because this isn’t a game, and it will determine, to some degree over and above global forces, how we live our lives for the next few years. So I am going to satisfy myself with just a few soundbites, in true political manner, to vent the sum of all my April seethings. I am saddened by – Read more…
Browser Browsing and Internet Explorer’s market share
Reading yesterday’s TechTalk article by my colleagues brought back memories which I realise must constitute ancient history for some of them. Such ancient history that I have even had to check some facts against my own memory – happily confirming that dementia has not yet set in. I feel the muse of Alistair Cooke upon me…
It was the back end of 1997 and I was project managing the launch of BBC Broadcast Online (essentially http://www.bbc.co.uk) which was to join the established BBC News website and BBC Worldwide’s commercial http://www.beeb.com
Netscape Navigator, part of the Netscape Communicator package, was a force in the land (actually in many lands) and the upstart Internet Explorer had only been around for a couple of years, having really arrived alongside Windows 95… …remember that?
One of the things we found ourselves taking account of, as the Broadcast Online launch date crystallised, was the impending release of IE4 and, with it, the ‘Active Desktop’. The browser wars were well underway and Microsoft’s latest weapon, part of the continuing pattern of integrating the browser with the Windows OS, was this incorporation of HTML content into both the wallpaper and a configurable side bar of ‘Channels’ one of which was to be from the BBC.
What you have to remember is how static most web content was back then, and how much industrial effort it took to update that content on a conventional website – plus the fact that as a user you had to go back and check, again and again, to see if something had changed. In 1997 the idea of an always-on Active Desktop whereby your computer itself periodically checked for updates, was pretty hot stuff. Its logic anticipated the subsequent popular interest in RSS feed readers and in gadgets. Indeed, the Active desktop concept only really disappeared from Windows when Vista arrived and introduced its own gadgets.
There was some controversy too – because just about anyone who wasn’t accessing the web via a network at their workplace was probably using a dial-up connection to the internet! The other challenge was how anyone, other than the mighty BBC News engine, was going to come up with new content frequently enough to populate the Active Desktop’s updates in the age of one-way Web1.0 professionalised publishing.
So that’s my answer to “What did you do in the Browser Wars daddy?”. The wars took their course, as did Netscape, and for a time Internet Explorer reigned pretty much supreme, managing to make even the idea of an alternative browser look like a conversation topic for extreme techno-libertarians or, perhaps the same thing for a lot of that time, Mac users.
And yet now my GfK NOP colleagues have charted another shift; this time towards long-term pluralisation perhaps.
In the future, gifted web archaeologists may look back and find artefacts – little fragments which give clues as to the wars gone by. If so, one of them may light upon the significance of the BBC News ticker which has now been scuttling across the top of the BBC News homepage for over 12 years. A very smart team of people built that……. for the Active Desktop.
Putting the expertise back into ‘social media expert’
I like almost everything James Cherkoff writes anyway; I like his thinking. But this time he really has caught the mood and hit the nail right on the head.
The point about expertise is that it involves knowledge, experience, trial and error and good old fashioned hard thinking. If, in addition, that expertise is in something that is new and rapidly changing – something really annoying can happen when the pursuing pack catches up and starts repeating (what wasn’t then but has now become) the obvious as though it were something genuinely insightful. They may temporarily exploit the fact that there are plenty of people who haven’t heard anything about their ‘discovery’ yet – but they do this at the expense of the reputation of the genuine experts.
There’s nothing new in this – I always describe it to colleagues as the feeling the ‘mountain men’ must have had in north America when the railroad arrived from the east, along with the rest of ‘civilisation’, and they were forced to move even further west to escape it.
What can social media experts do today?
- Proclaim, without embarrassment, that this is what they have been going on about for (insert number of years) .
- Keep pushing on with that good old fashioned hard thinking. Be motivated to debunk the oversimplifications, slack terminology and over hype.
- Demonstrate, as James has done, that what the thinking and experience reveals is not slick/glib solutions but fuzzy, glimpsed possibilities… more questions… and the ability to revise some of our own past definitions and convictions.
So (I am not Spartacus but) – “I am a social media expert and I’m, still, proud of it”.
Thank you James!
Back again again.
Back again – in the sense of being actively online, reading, reacting and writing, though I’ve been back in the office and the ‘world of work’ for a week or two.
Prior to that I took a week out doing some business and career planning, as well as some admin and practical jobs around the house that allowed me to spend a bit of quiet time whilst my family were all at work/school. It’s a simple thing, but I recommend it to anyone who can find that week in a year… it pays you back the time, and then some, in focus and purpose. As a bonus you get lots of little jobs done that otherwise haunt you in the evenings and weekends of the busy working weeks…
I really got off to a good start though. I booked two nights away at ‘The Retreat at Witherdens Hall’ out beyond Canterbury. It’s not a retreat in the denominational sense of following a Christian or Buddhist programme. It’s essentially a detached annex to the owners’ house, a beautifully executed conversion of a farm building, provided on a B&B basis. Everything is organic and as local as possible – I loved the apple juice, sausages, eggs and, particularly, the freshly baked loaf I was presented with on arrival. Read more…
British military symbols, Spitfires, Churchill and the BNP
Four senior army officers went public today in opposition to the use of British military symbols and heritage by ‘extremist’ groups or political parties. The implication was that the political parties they had in mind included the BNP, as reported by BBC News Online.
In response, one of the things said by a BNP spokesman was “The Spitfire is nothing to do with the modern military. It is to do with Britons fighting during the Second World War against European dictatorship.”
I suggest we look closely at the decisions that the British government and in particular Winston Churchill ( himself a popular icon amongst the more right wing parties) made about conducting a war against a European power.
At several stages, and especially in the summer of 1940 after the Dunkirk evacuation and the onset of the Battle of Britain, Churchill had the option to abstain from the war. Indeed, Hitler was taken aback that this didn’t happen. Britain could have left mainland Europe to the Nazis, and to a straight fight between them and Stalin’s Russia… a power which Britain might equally have feared, and whose Communism today’s right wingers would no doubt condemn outright as an even worse alternative.
The longer-term would have been more difficult to call, for a Britain which wished to retain an Empire, but in the short term Britain might pragmatically have agreed terms with Germany, and the Battle of Britain would never have happened… a much more attractive prospect than fighting on, with a skeleton army short of everything, and risking invasion and total collapse.
But Britain didn’t do that. Churchill didn’t do that. It wasn’t Germany, it was Hitler’s Nazi regime in Germany… a fascist, nationalist regime. Churchill’s primary motivation, however much you might pick apart his social views as those of an upper class Englishman born in the 1870s, stemmed from the fact that he saw Britain as a standard bearer for “decency”, a concept that mattered most to him, and therefore as a bulwark against the values of Hitler and the Nazis. This had nothing to do with Europe, geography, or super-states. Churchill ultimately committed Britain to the terrible risks and privations of continued war on behalf of ‘decency’ against a totalitarian, racist and anti-democratic regime.
That’s what the Battle of Britain, and the Spitfire, and Churchill himself all signify. A truly British, but not ultimately an introspectively nationalistic, stand against fascism and intolerance.
I just think that anyone who adopts those symbols, to signify the values of their own organisation, should be aware of this. It is well documented. If they continue to use those symbols in full knowledge of those values, because they genuinely aspire to them (no bull!) then I don’t think that anyone should complain… unless, of course, those professed values repeatedly fail to translate into action.
I was set off on this train of thought by listening to the radio this morning. It was one of those quite rare occasions when even Radio 4 was able to annoy me with some sloppy wording.
The Consumer Prices Index (CPI), I heard, “rose by 1.1% last month”, and the RPI actually “fell by 1.4% last month”.
No they didn’t!!! If the CPI rose by 1.1% last month, that’s a terrifying 13.2% annualised rate – as bad as when the IMF was bailing us out and the economy was falling to pieces – and we should all be heading for the lifeboats. Conversely if the RPI fell by 1.4% last month (the difference is mainly due to the effects of housing costs on the index) then that’s got the cost of living falling at an annual rate of 16.8%. Five or six years of that and everything would be free – hurrah!
What actually happened is that the CPI rose by 1.1% in the 12 months to September 2009. Similarly the RPI fell by 1.4% in the 12 months to September 2009.
Now – before you all condemn me as a pedantic curmudgeon with nothing better to do – this matters. It matters because we all have enough trouble with percentages and estimates and absolute values as it is, without somebody who’s job it is to make things clearer making it worse. We had exactly the same problem earlier in the year when car sales were being quoted… e.g. “sales of Vauxhall cars fell by 24% last month” and so on.
Once my mind was set on this track I was reminded of the 75p debacle surrounding the uprating of the UK State Retirement Pension in 2000. What caught the headlines was that pensions were “only going up by 75p” that year. Everyone, media included, focussed on the absolute figure – 75p – and all the measly things you could buy with it. How could Labour government be so mean to the elderly? But 75p was simply the result of applying that year’s RPI to the single state pension – a mechanism intended, by and large, to do no more than maintain the real value of pensions. Nobody argued about whether the correct percentage had been applied (it had) – and almost nobody argued about whether the right index was used. A separate agenda – about the value of state pensions overall – was pursued by attacking the absolute value of the result of the ‘keeping it level in real terms’ uprating.
And it worked!
With an election in the offing (2001) the government made a commitment to uprate the State Retirement Pension every year in future by a minimum of 2.5% if the RPI was below this, and by the RPI itself if it was higher. That has been in play ever since.
I’m not debating, here. how much the State Pension should be, what it is for, how it should progress relative to average earnings, how it relates to income related top-ups for the least well off pensioners, how it should be funded, or any of that. But neither did many of the public or the media back in 2000.
The result is that next April, at a time when annual inflation could well still be negative, the State Retirement Pension will increase by a minimum of 2.5% – a real terms increase of possibly as much as 4% – at a time when drastic steps are being tabled to cut, let alone contain, public expenditure.
To bring this back to my quibble with a CPI which “rose by 1.1% last months”, I am not arguing the merits of the State Retirement Pension or its growing real value, I am pointing to the consequences of a policy which was set in response to an outcry about “75p”, which was able to get purchase because people couldn’t relate easily enough to annual percentage rates and to the notion of real terms value.. [So much so that I actually think that an increase of £0-0p in a year of zero inflation would have caused less controversy than the rise of 75p in 2000.]. So my plea is for journalists to keep everything as clear as they can (yeah right!) – and “give 75ps a chance.”
[Declaration of (dis)interest. During the 1990s I was a policy making Civil Servant in the DSS – the UK Department of Social Security and the precursor to today’s DWP. I dealt with the impact of benefits on living standards, work incentives and the distribution of income across different groups of people such as retired people, disabled people and families with children. If anyone is interested I can go on at length about the RPI and other indices such as the Rossi index, which is the RPI with changes in housing costs removed. I had first hand experience of how the perception of changes in benefits could affect policy, at the expense of debate of infinitely more complex and morally fundamental questions about equity, funding and often crucially about simplicity and efficiency of administration. HOWEVER – I was not a Civil Servant in 2000-2001, having already run away with the internet start-up circus.]
Witness. The power of the passive majority.
One of the emerging uses of a blog, drawing on its early form as a diary, is to look back and trace the development or the origins of your own ideas. It makes it very easy to check, for example, whether one is even consistent.
So, on the subject of neighbours and “Other People”, I was reminded of an extract from a piece I wrote in my old blog back in April 2007. [I’ve edited it slightly for readability, but not to change the meaning at all.]
An example that came to mind was my [own] response to a scene in the film ‘Witness’, set mainly in an Amish community. The Harrison Ford tough cop character, John Book, is posing as an Amish in order to hide out from forces unknown who are out to eliminate a witness to a murder. He has to travel into town on an errand, dressed in Amish clothes, and he and a companion are picked on by the local bullies. Taking advantage of his assumed Amish non-violence they push him around, knock his hat off and, eventually, when they go “boo” in his face, he snaps and punches the bully out. There’s such an exultation, such a catharsis, and such satisfaction in the bully’s shocked reaction to this unexpected resistance, that this remains one of my favourite movie moments. But was it the right thing to do, the smart thing? No – his anger was mainly about the humiliation of his companions, not his own ego, but in his retribution he risks exposure, he risks alienating his hosts, corrupting his companion’s faith in his Amish lifestyle – he gains nothing. Do I realise this analytically? Yes. I’ve realised this fact for 20 years. Has this changed my reaction? No.
But once I got on to thinking about ‘Witness’ I thought, in contrast, about another of my all time favourite scenes – from the same film. At the end [alert – plot spoiler!] John Book has discovered that his main enemy is a corrupt cop, a former buddy. There’s a big fight which ends with this guy holding a shotgun on him. The villain has the gun, he’s got the status to allow him to fake the evidence (once Book is dead) – but the Amish are converging on the scene… quietly, calmly. It’s not that they would rush this man and kill him. But they can see him – they can bear witness (there is, of course, a theme of ‘bearing witness’ in different senses throughout the film) and, as Book asks him, “Are you going to kill all of them too?”
This, too, is a very striking image, a sequence of action that would require far too many words to sum up the points. Many people, non-violent by their very culture and faith, are converging on someone who, despite holding a weapon and wielding considerable corrupt influence, cannot get away with his crime for so long as he is in plain view and these people are prepared to bear witness to what they see.
I think that very nicely sums up the thinking that I am now revisiting. To be clear, it’s not just about the extreme example of major or violent crime. On the contrary, most of the time it’s going to be about petty crime, incivility, vandalism and littering… all those things that chip away at the quality of life and send the signal that it’s “Other People’s” job to clean up.
I also think that the motivation to bear witness has something in common, at bottom, with that much more visceral, violent, and ultimately ill-judged reaction that we see from John Book in that clip.
The dust is starting to settle on this story, of events two years ago, which regained prominence due to a Coroner’s Court hearing. There will, though, be an IPCC investigation into the handling of events.
I waited a while, because it’s always wise to ensure that most of the facts have emerged from beneath the summary headlines. But now I feel that this is another example of what I’m becoming more and more preoccupied with.
The focus of the judicial scrutiny, and definitely that of the reporting, has been on what the various ‘Agencies’ did or didn’t do – the Police, Social Services, Doctors and the NHS, and so on. As a result, the focus of the response has equally been to criticise those who somehow failed. Any reaction to this, in turn, will therefore no doubt be about processes and structures… and ‘roles’ and ‘guidance’ and…
The aim will be to ensure that something sufficiently similar doesn’t happen again – and this can be difficult, especially if you concentrate on processes, because the next time it will be a bit different. In fact, it’s quite possible that some of the process that got in the way of helping Fiona Pilkington was, itself, the product of recommendations and changes resulting from one or more bad cases in the past.
I’m not saying that there shouldn’t be such reviews, they may well do some good. But I think that, in line with what I’ve said before, there are two problems which will persist if we are always drawn to systems and to picking over institutional failings. Both of them stem from the “Other People” problem.
The professionals involved in the case are all “Other People” insofar as they were fulfilling certain duties on behalf of the rest of us. We sub-contracted the duty of care for vulnerable members of the community to them, and they discharged this duty in line with formally defined roles. Those roles define and constrain their reactions – for example, by encoding the level of seriousness of the case and somehow prioritising it – often, to be fair, in the face of very high caseloads. It’s the system, too, which we now somehow expect to taken on the burden of coordinating the responses of the different agencies – perhaps through ‘flags’ and databases and the ubiquitous form. Much of the time this must suppress people’s instinctive judgements or their ability to pick up the phone and have a chat about someone.
But there’s a much more serious “Other People” issue here. Perhaps I should have put it up front. It’s the question, “Why was this problem left to the ‘Agencies’ and where were the neighbours?” Read more…
Dinner Lady sacked for telling parents their daughter had been bullied
So here, helpfully, is a practical example of the big rather theoretical principle I’ve just been talking about.
Here’s the BBC News Online coverage, and I’m also relying on the girl’s father’s first-hand testimony given on GMTV.
The facts, as reported so far (and I stress that), are that a seven year old girl was tied up by a group of children and tied to a fence, then hit with a skipping rope.
The school dealt with the incident by informing the parents of the children responsible. But the letter home to the girl’s parents stated only that she had been (in the father’s words) “injured by a skipping rope”.
The dinner lady who dealt with the incident is a volunteer with the local Beavers and, on meeting the parents there, told them more about the incident. The father contacted the school… as you might imagine.
Subsequently the dinner lady was the subject of a disciplinary hearing and has, I believe, been dismissed – for a breach of confidentiality.
Assuming I have all these facts right, and that there are no other special circumstances to be revealed, the temptation is to react to this decision on its own terms… not least to question whether the school committed some corresponding breach of duty, or even falsified information… I wonder what the relevant entry in the accident book says, and who signed it. I wonder what duty the school has to ensure the parents have all the information needed to help the girl deal with the incident – there’s a good chance the girl was too intimidated or embarrassed to tell her parents. And what about the general example being set to children, where surely the principle is that bullies must always be exposed?
But I’m not going that way. Why? Because to do so is to accept that community ties are overridden by the outsourcing of moral and social interactions between people to ‘authorities’, to ‘Other People’ in a regulated environment, where ‘confidentiality’ is one of the undisputed kings. This isn’t a doctor or a lawyer in 1-1 private consultation we’re talking about. It’s a sequence of events in a communal space, a school, where children learn how to be part of a community, as well as how to do English and Maths.
I think my reaction to this story, and what I hope is the reaction of many others, stems from this demotion of communal connections and relationships. The ‘natural’ resolution of this situation, between parents, children, teachers, support staff has been fragmented by the intervention (or at best the interpretation) of formalised roles.
In my eyes this increases the sense that each of us, or at least each household, is being pushed towards an isolated status, where we can only be trusted to deal with each other through rules and processes. Note that I say rules and processes – not broad principles (which I’m all in favour of, so long as they are open to debate and discussion). The dinner lady’s other connections, through friendships, through out-of-school voluntary activity, have been annulled by her formal role as a public sector employee subject to a set of contractual terms and conditions. That’s the only basis on which she seems to be being judged, an example made and a message sent.
My alternative? Give some weight back to the full range of communal ties, networks of relationships, non-institutional roles, judgement and common sense. Trust people not to react disproportionately. Trust ‘Us’ to deal with it, and to calm the situation, if there are such hasty reactions. If we don’t get to exercise those skills, including the self-restraint – they will fade away and then only institutional/authoritarian controls will be left. Let the bullies get used to the idea that they are part of a society (that they are members of an ‘Us’) that might recognise them and disapprove of their actions, rather than that they are subject only to a formal ‘policing’ by ‘Them’… a policing which only takes hold if you are caught by ‘Them’, and not if your actions are seen by (the much more numerous) ‘Us’.
My reaction is conditional on finding out more. But my principle isn’t. Let’s see how this one turns out. If it was actually a minor incident – then that just cuts both ways.
But if I’m right about it – what can we do, what can that dinner lady do? What can/should the local community do – and how can local views best be brought to bear on this sort of case? What does a generic, NoBull, way of dealing with such cases look like and how can it push back the bureaucratism without also damaging some if the useful principles within the law and civic mediation?
On that last note, my pre-occupation with Bull, the school’s main response (probably forced upon it by yet more formal processes, pending appeal etc) is only to say that its priority remains to provide the “best possible education” for its pupils. Better, surely, just to say nothing than to say something meaningless?
Nick Buckley : Practically Mindful 