internetartizans's blog
This weekend I'll be running a workshop for Transitions Online in Prague. It kicks off for a year long initiative to give NGOs in Central & Eastern Europe the web tools and strategies to promote transparency, anti-corruption & good governance. I think it's a pretty cool project because it's tapping into internet memes like crowdsourcing and applying them in a context where there's an urgent social need.
The project is also trying to seed learnings from the USA (Sunlight Foundation) and UK (mySociety) and build on local initiatives like Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza appealing to its readers to report on their experiences of Polish maternity wards.
I think it's vital that young civil society organisations learn to use the power of the web. I'll be passing on what I've learned about social media campaigning, but I'm also trying to think of other ways that these groups can get ideas and support. Maybe finding mentors from more experienced groups, maybe encouraging them to join UnLtdWorld as a way to stay in touch and find friendly help. Any other ideas gratefully received.
More details from the Transitions Online project spec:
Project: Interactive Tech Tools for Better Transparency
Project duration: 12 months
This year-long initiative seeks to provide NGOs in the new member states of the EU (Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and Bulgaria) with web tools and strategies that will better enable them to promote transparency and good governance norms in their respective countries. The Internet is a powerful tool for the dissemination of information to the public and policymakers; however, NGOs in this region have been slow to adopt Internet-based approaches and, as a result, a great deal of their socially-useful research remains unavailable or poorly organized, having limited influence on public policy.
In addition, rarely, if ever, have NGOs used innovative Internet approaches to recruit their members or the larger public into data collection or analysis – though these approaches have started to undercover public wrongdoing in North America and parts of Western Europe.
The core project activities include a training seminar in Prague, drawing together representatives from various NGOs in the region; three pilot projects to test the strategies discussed at the seminar; the creation of an e-learning course; and a closing evaluation meeting in Riga to access the lessons learned over the course of the year.
The pilot projects will take the form of “watchblogs” or online monitoring sites tracking key issues of importance, as well as a website aggregating the affiliated watchblogs and collecting feedback from participating organizations and the wider public. The “watchblogs” will be modeled after successful corruption-combating projects like FollowTheMoney.org, a website tracking the sources and uses of money to influence officials in the United States, and OpenCongress.org, a non-partisan resource monitoring the development of legislation, issues before Congress, and Congress members’ votes. These and other similar projects have been sponsored by the Sunlight Foundation , an organization that harnesses the power of the Internet to help citizens better understand and monitor what their elected officials are doing.
The proposed project also aims to acquaint NGOs with the concept of “crowdsourcing” as a potentially valuable strategy – specifically, recruiting the aid of the public in the analysis of data. Crowdsourcing has been effectively used by NGOS and journalists to promote transparency in the United States over the past several years: since 2006, the Sunlight Foundation, in coordination with other NGOs and newspapers, has invited the public to help uncover which members of Congress sponsor secret spending earmarks that direct taxpayers’ dollars to personally-motivated projects (see: http://earmarkwatch.org/). After a bill strengthening the Freedom of Information Act was blocked from reaching the Senate because an unknown senator placed a secret hold on it, the Society of Professional Journalists asked journalists across the country to poll their senators in order to discover who had placed the hold. (see: http://www.spj.org/ogahold.asp ). These techniques are especially useful for under-resourced organizations that would never be able to conduct such investigations on their own.
As of yet, the technique has been underutilized in Central/Eastern Europe, with one notable exception: in the summer of 2006, the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza appealed to its readers to report on their experiences of Polish maternity wards. The paper received 40,000 reviews of care standards, which were fact-checked by a team of 170 editors and volunteers. The project has since spun off into message boards with millions of posts, 200,000 uploaded photos, and local editions.
Mikey and Hektor from The People Speak have done us proud with Social Innovation Camp - The Movie! You can almost smell the coffee and the over-heating laptops...
Coming out of Social Innovation Camp, I've been wondering how the projects we helped to kick off can find sustainable structures for development.
Our criteria for the camp selected for ideas that could be carried forward after the weekend. The winning projects have certainly showed dynamism and commitment; but how can they organize to get things done when it's not (yet) anyone's day job? How can they get structure without losing the passion?
Synchronously, similar questions & suggestions have cropped up in other discussions. In the Gaming for Good roundtable folk wondered how to apply the voluntary association & dynamic purpose of the World of Warcraft raiding party to the real world. At the Tuttle Club Breakfast, freelancers were feeling their way to structures that sounded to me most like medieval Guilds (an idea that Open Business has already written about) . And in an ippr briefing, the MP Tom Watson invoked the cooperatives of the nineteenth century as a good fit for organisations making a social use of the web.
Seems there's a sea-change coming as organisational models are mutated by the web. With the emphasis on lightweight, dynamic & flexible structures, it seems to echo the radical architecture of Archigram back in the 1960s.
Whatever model we raid, from real or imagined history, there's still the practical question of who pays the bills. Sustainability is the plan for all Social Innovation Camp projects, whether from a commercial business model, grant funding or a mix of the two. Can we also learn from open source, where companies pay staff to work on open source projects for part of their time because there's a wider value to the employer? Social Innovation Camp had the backing of a sizeable posse from Headshift (thanks guys) - perhaps signposting a wider possible solution where commercial companies support social ventures with geek-time? As my colleague Peter Grigg has pointed out, companies need to go beyond CSR and get real about supporting pro-social activity; and what better way than to back projects like these ?
I'm really starting to think that games are one of the magic ingredients in getting this new wave of social change off the ground. When I was at Amnesty I wanted to use games to raise awareness, but maybe we should just make more actual stuff in to games if we want to get a result.
After a the excitement of last weekend's Social Innovation Camp I wondered if part of its magic was that it was a game. Applying competitive teams, rules and time limits to a bunch of hackers & creatives really did the trick.
Last week's How I fell in love with Wikipedia article quotes its first employee saying "it's almost more like an online game, in that it's a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that's a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, etc".
In this week's updated post on Thinking out of the (x)Box: Gaming to expand horizons in creative writing Ewan McIntosh reports myriad ways in which "Certain games are incredibly effective at generating more expanded horizons in students imaginations when they are writing and speaking creatively or transactionally", And his references to "the moral dilemmas and complexity of decision-making in more long-term games like Sim City or Rollercoaster Tycoon" indicate how games could impact the youth enterprise agenda of my day job.
But it was Charlie Leadbeater's invocation of I Love Bees in Social Software for Social Change that switched me on to the exciting social potential of alternate reality games (ARGs), a trail I followed to Jane McGonigal's World Without Oil. As Jane says; 'Reality is broken. Why aren’t game designers trying to fix it?'.
So with all this incoming synchronicity I was delighted when David Lundblad invited me to the Gaming for Good event he's puttiing on with Johnnie Moore on Wednesday, April 16, 2008 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm at NESTA: "An informal gathering of people who think that organisations and society can benefit from a deeper appreciation of the upside of gaming - whether that's online mutiplayer games or real world games..." According to David, they see the three main themes as gaming to improve products & services, gaming to improve organisations, and gaming for social good. As per Ewan's stuff, we should add gaming for education. Then you've got yourself a pretty broad swathe of social impact where games could be a magic ingredient.
Whereas Games for Change (G4C) uses gaming as a way in to social issues, it might be that the bigger long term impact comes from a general spread of a gamer attitude. Research tells us that young people in the UK already treat social media as a multinodal game; so the gamer attitude could spread to online/offline projects for social impact, bring with it the energy, imagination and lateral thinking that makes solving problems into fun.
Social Innovation Camp happened this weekend, and it rocked.
Inspired by a mashup of netsquared, barcamps and seedcamp, it brought together a diverse bunch of hackers & social change activists to cook up prototype projects over the space of a weekend.
And it worked. People brought dedication, passion and skill. They had some fun. They went without much sleep. (I wrote my half-way analysis at 2am; Live from Social Innovation Camp, the laboratory of buzz).
Two things stood out for me; first, it proved (again) that the social web is a generative platform for social impact; and second, that it's possible to do events that go beyond talk and lead to real projects and social businesses. But of course, that's the business of netsquared as well :)
Our small organising collective is now recovering, er, aiming to help the projects sustain and grow. There'l be a lot of write-ups, inteviews, videos etc coming out of the camp - more of this later. In the mean time here's a flavour (more materials at Social Innovation Camp materials):
David Wilcox says Social Innovation Camp: imitations, please and thinks that it "will make a big difference in the way that we think about doing good stuff with new stuff".
A full narrative from Bobbie Johnson, our embedded Media Guardian blogger:
- Kicking off
- Coding and barcoding
- Future me
- Designer - solve my problem!
- Help me work!
- I’ve got it, you want it
- Breakaway
- Show and tell
- And the winner is…
A view from partners The Yahoo Developers Network.
Enthusiasm from a sponsor (which is nice!) at Accelerating Social Innovation: lessons from SiCamp where Roland Harwood says "On of the big lessons for me of the weekend was how limited organisation can unleash ideas, which is counter-intuitive for many".
"Teamwork, Quick!" by participant Huey Nhan
Videoclips and mini-interviews by David Wilcox at Qik
YouTube videos tagged with “sicamp” and “sicamp08“ (mostly by The People Speak team)
All the feeds from our backnetwork (warning: includes tweets!)
Amazing amount of buzz at today's Social Innovation Camp. A diverse bunch of dedicated folk has alighted at the Young Foundation ; and Simon Tucker 's welcome last night made it clear we're continuing Michael Young's tradition of disruptive social innovation.
Prison visits and creative tensions
Working with the Prison visits team (I like my projects to be gritty :) was fascinating. For me, it surfaced some of the tensions implicit in the Social Innovation Camp mission, as we discussed our way passed the idea of creating a better information site or helping NGOs to coordinate better. And there's some merit in asking whether nonprofits, designers, and techies can talk to each other . (The answer, by the way, is yes).
Benign Ruthlessness
There's also a creative tension between the breadth of the social mission and the endless possibilities of technology versus the need to produce a working prototype in less than 2 days. Time to apply Michael Young's principle of "benign ruthlessness". With a bit of prompting from Greenman we settled on a simple user review system as our technical nugget. As Jeremy Gould pointed out, we can emulate MySociety projects by offering users more opportunites to get involved as later steps. And since the potential for big vision advocacy relies on building the community, we wanted an easy and useful hook to get it all started.
photo of prison visits team by jeremy gould
Campaigning by doing
As someone complained that the Government should be doing this stuff anyway, I remembered one of my personal aims for setting up Social Innovation Camp; a notion I'd call 'campaigning by doing'. As our friends from the Prison Advice & Care Trust pointed out, prisoner's advocates can argue till they're blue in the face without any response from The System. But with the low barrier power of the social web, we can do something small right now to tackle a problem by tapping in to the experiences of those who are affected. And if that snowballs, like Patient Opinion, it becomes something that institutions have to take notice of.
Adapt or die: the accelerated historicity of the Camp
As I wandered around all the projects I was struck by the different approaches; from an attic of half-a-dozen geeks to a discussion circle of eighteen worrying about trust, from massively detailed user stories to balloon metaphors. It seems to me that the Social Innovation Camp is a laboratory, fast-tracking the kind of fall-out that startups experience, and raiding the recent history of the social web (from wikipedia to netmums) in search of conceptual templates. I'm sure that Aleksi Aaltonen will have more to say post-Camp about the patterns of co-creation that emerged.
Lines and Circle
When Mikey from The People Speak was interviewing me about the Camp he reported his observation that the geeks tended to sit in straight lines. And I saw plenty of discussions happening in circles. Should lines and circles be the new logo of Social Innovation Camp?
I was excited to discover Ushahidi.com, a mashup tool for people who witness acts of violence in Kenya. You can report the incident that you have seen, and it will appear on a map-based view for others to see. I'm a long-standing mashup fan, & I bet loads of other web-obsessed activists like me were thinking of something exactly like Ushahidi while watching Kenya disintegate on the news.
But another side of me is getting grouchy and cynical about mashups and social change. I can't help thinking 'so what?' - so what happens now, now that the violence has been mapped, or the corruption of representational democracy has been graphed? It's a funny feeling to have, because I can see how the simple power of visualisation could jolt people out of apathy. And it's awkward, because I need to vote in Netsquared's Mashup Challenge before the end of tomorrow - and Netsquared is an initiative that has inspired me a lot.
I think my gripes with mashups are both evolutionary ("we should go to the next level") and foundational ("there's a fundamental difference between the action of assembling data and the reality of social change").
IMHO, mashups would evolve by being more actionable. Many are collaborative, (people can contribute data) but not actionable - there's no clear plan for how the aggregation of data is going to change the reality it describes. Will the data in Ushahidi be used to hold the perpetrators to account, via the kind of analysis Patrick Ball did for Kosova?
And is there a realistic connection between mashups and social change anyway? I love the way a mission-based geek can pull together a proof-of-concept overnight. I love the sense of possibility that comes from an internet overflowing with information and data. But, chatting to a street activist friend from wayback (who's also turned geeky) I found we were both uneasy about the contrast between coding and community activism. Coding a mashup can be fast and frictionless - community activism is usually time-consuming, sometimes boring and occasionally confrontational.
But I can dredge up a memory from those days that would've made a good mashup. Hackney Community Defence Association supported many local people who had been wrongfully arrested by police. It was via a thorough correlation of incidents with the shoulder number of the officers involved that HCDA exposed drugs trafficking, planting evidence and perversion of justice by police at Stoke Newington in north-east London. An HCDA mashup could've combined a web-based reporting tool like Ushahidi with thorough cross-checking and statement recording by legal volunteers.
I think that, as more geeks overlap with people close to social issues (a la Social Innovation Camp), there will be more mashing up of tech and gritty social impact. In the mean time, mashups stand up for transparency and that's one of the web's most powerful memes. And probably, as I plough my sleepless way through Netsquared's Mashup entries I'll have to eat my cynicism because loads of creative people will have innovated beyond my limited idea of what mashups can do :)
Hat tip to Pete Cranston for putting me on to Ushahidi and apologies to Milan Kundera for mashing up his book title.
We've selected the ideas that will be developed at the Social Innovation Camp, 4th-6th April 2008. A big thanks to all those who contributed to the more than 70 ideas we received, and to the advisory board for helping us decide on the six that the Social Innovation Camp can accelerate for the most impact.
The ideas are:
A site for storing user-generated information – such as carbon footprint, manufacturing conditions and reviews - against a product, identified by its barcode number.
A resource for anyone looking to make adjustments to their lives, be it as a result of disability, injury or impairment.
- Personal development reports
An online system that supports young people to identify their personal skills and qualities.
A tool to support the families of prisoners coping with the experience of being apart from a loved one.
A site for helping jobseekers using Web 2.0 tools, with a special focus on the needs of migrant workers.
Freecycle meets Street Car: a stuff club.
You can find out more about the decision process on our blog. The write-up also describes the different ways people interpreted the opportunity e.g. as a way of improving NGOs, or helping government reach people. I think the most interesting possibility is for disruptive innovation; for the people strongly affected by an issue to participate in solving it with the help of web tools. I'm starting to think of this as community hacktivism.
Where do you find performance art, geeks, and a bunch of older people with attitude? At last week's ‘On the Margins of Technology’ Symposium, part of The Not Quite Yet exhibition at SPACE Media arts.
I delivered the keynote presentation, which I've uploaded to slideshare;
I'd never thought about using performance art as a way in to technology, but I'm wondering now if it could be a missing link, a way to open up participation to groups that are far from being digital natives. This came across really strongly as both the exhibition and the symposium had a focus on older people. The flip of perspective to the older age was great as well, because I spend so much time looking at what the kids are up to with tech.
According to Lois Weaver, the use of performance for participation leans on bringing out personal and fantasy elements - there's an overlap in my mind with the general nature of the social web (blogs etc.) and in particular the Alternative Reality Gaming I'm finding so interesting at the moment.
But the biggest buzz of the day for me was The Geezers, a self-run group of senior men from Tower Hamlets who'd worked with artist Loraine Leeson on a project to harness the tidal power of the Thames. I'll leave it to The Geezers to tell their own story (in the words of their 'GeezerPower' leaflet!) - but it was a privilege to encounter them and other sussed participants, such as community mentor Vi Davies from Senior AGE. Basically, The Geezers ROCK - I want to join - where do I sign?
"We are The Geezers, a self-run group of senior men based at Age Concern in Tower Hamlets. Artist Loraine Leeson has been working with us on a project that started as research by Queen Mary University of London into the way that new technologies are normally invented by the young. Older people have more experience of life, yet this knowledge is seldom able to inform technological innovation. We may be past our sell by dates, but we still have a lot to offer – and a special interest in how the world will be for future generations.
When we thought about how technological development might be used to improve life on this planet, it occurred to us that perhaps the tidal flow of the Thames could be used to provide power for London. This isn’t new, as centuries ago a water wheel was attached to London Bridge. In our living memories tidal technologies have been developed, but then set aside in favour of wind farms. Now the threat of nuclear energy is on the agenda again. We think it is time to let the Thames power London and we, the Geezers, supported by Loraine and others, intend to make it happen.
We have been doing our research! Starting with the older technology, we visited the water wheels of Three Mills and discovered how they alone could potentially power seventy houses. Between us we know quite a bit about engineering, mechanics, history, politics and the like, so our ideas developed and we took some advice. As a result we went to see a new form of wind turbine at Rainham Marshes which could be adapted to tidal flow, since it can turn in two directions. Then we looked at the Thames Barrier, a ready-made barrage across the river, and ideal for siting a string of turbines, since only a few lanes are used for shipping.
A visualization by the artist has helped bring all these ideas together. We don’t intend to stop here however. The next stage will be to find resources to investigate the viability of the technology, look at different designs, consider where it could be sited and what the economic potential could be. We need some specialists on board and perhaps a postgraduate student or two to try things out. Even if we could just provide power for some homes for the elderly, or for the street lighting, that would be an achievement. The world now needs as many sustainable resources as it can get. It’s time for GeezerPower.
Geezer Club: Dennis Banks, John Bevan, Eddie Brown, John Day, Tom Diss, John Griffin, Ray Gipson, Bill Hardy, John Hunter, Tony Johnson, Danny Langdon, Ted Lewis, Con McCarthy and Alan Pullen."
More Geezer info from Ray Gipson (ray.gipson AT acth.org.uk) or Loraine Leeson (l.leeson AT uel.ac.uk).
I'm very pleased to announce the call for ideas for our first Social Innovation Camp .
"What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out. In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges."
Over the next few days we'll be adding more and more to the site and, hopefully, kicking off conversations about Social Innovation Camp. We'd like to see it as a mashup of barcamp, netsquared and a few other mongrel ingredients - but what it will become is largely UP TO YOU.
So please get stuck in, and help spread the word.
