Best practice malpractice

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I’d been asked to prepare a presentation for the “Someone’s Done That Already: the Best Practice of Using Best Practices” session of the June 2 Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp on Empowering Communities. So I reached out to a few friends who know far more about best practices in community empowerment than I do.

I told them my plan was to create a slide for each one who filled in an online questionnaire, and talk about the Top 3 to 5 resources that they’d recommend. Preferably, I said, the resources are available free online, but they could list resources in any medium.

I knew this little exercise was going to be fun when the first submission I got came from Kevin Harris, principal of Local Level, author of the Neighborhoods blog, with 20+ years working with residents and community development professionals, including years as an advisor to the UK government.

Here are the questions Kevin chose to answer:

1a: Name/Title/Author of Resource: Local people

1b: Link to resource (please include http://): Really quite close to where you are now

1c: Brief description of this resource. If you want to say why you recommend it, please do so.

Local people are quite capable of doing stuff if only those who have power that they shouldn’t have would get out of the way. This doesn’t mean that people don’t need services, run in a professional way, for which they rightly pay taxes. It means that those in positions of power need to address their own behaviour that disempowers ordinary people. This tends to be effected through bureaucratic procedures, references to regulations and health and safety conditions, excessive formalities in grant applications, inappropriate use of formal language, attention to their own work targets not community benefit, conveying a (completely false) sense of superiority, and a painful inability to see things from others’ point of view.

This box is for anything else you want to say.

Conceivably, perpetuating discussion about best practices might simply perpetuate the over-bureaucratisation (and unnecessary professionalisation) of community action. It could help to reflect on worst practices. The best community development role is sometimes to remove barriers, remain silent and/or just get out of the way.

Gee thanks, Kevin. And off we go! Next up: Richard Layman

Wrap-up: Coverage of Pew Research Center’s “Neighbors Online”

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Pew’s Neighbors Online report, published Wednesday, provides baseline data on neighborhood communications. Join the Q&A with author Aaron Smith, over at e-democracy.org’s Locals Online. Several media outlets reported on the report, and here are a few that did more than reprint the overview:

  • Chicago Sun-Times: Folks use digital tools to take role in community – “Leonard’s experience mirrors the findings of a study released Wednesday. Contrary to assumptions that people who go online hole up in their basements, the study showed the opposite: Internet users are more likely than non-users to talk face to face with their neighbors about local and community issues.”
  • CivSource: More going online to go local – “Steven Clift, director of E-Democracy.org – a nonprofit organization that works to develop civic engagement and online community building strategies – called the report an “excellent start,” in an interview yesterday. The report puts numbers to what we’ve instinctively thought about neighborhood activity online and I think it will certainly move the field of discussion along.”
  • Christian Science Monitor: The Internet probably won’t turn you into a hermit, study finds – “Far from being more reclusive, Internet users are more likely to meet their neighbors face-to-face and engage in community issues, a new study reveals. The findings suggests that talking in person or over the telephone remain the top two ways that people living close to one another keep up on community developments, even in an increasingly digital world.”
  • e-democracy: Neighbors Online – What have 27% of Internet Users Discovered? Women Lead the Way. Need More Inclusion – “So now we have numbers on the digital participation divide we must close: Only 2% of those with household incomes under $30,000 are on a neighborhood e-mail list; only 3% of Hispanics; only 2% of rural residents.”
  • New York Times: Friends, Neighbors and Facebook – “There’s no need to pine for a return to the pre-Facebook, cardigan-swaddled idealism of Mister Rogers and his charming “neighbors” and “friends,” but it is important for us to remember that tangible, meaningful engagement with those around us builds better selves and stronger communities.”
  • ReadWriteWeb: Neighbors Rely On Word of Mouth, But Online Gains – “The biggest effect that online tools have had on neighborhood interactions is in providing an avenue for learning about and interacting on local issues to individuals who might not engage in these issues through more traditional means.”

Although all of Pew’s survey respondents are from the United States, the report has global implications. See this analysis by UK-based Kevin Harris, author of the Neighbourhoods blog, reprinted here in its entirety with Kevin’s permission (thanks Kevin):

Online communication in neighbourhoods: not just people we know

The latest Pew Internet Project report has just been published, on the topic of ‘neighbors online’.

It’s based on telephone interviews with 2,258 Americans, and while I didn’t read anything that hit the wow-box it certainly helps us think about communication at neighbourhood level. The questions asked about face-to-face interaction with neighbours, telephone contact, and a range of local online resources.

Unsurprisingly (and as last year’s Pew Internet study demonstrated) internet users are just as likely as non-users to discuss local issues face-to-face. People in higher income households and with higher educational attainment are more likely to talk face-to-face with neighbours about local issues.

Between 4% and 11% of all those surveyed exchange email with their neighbours about local issues, read a blog dealing with local issues, or are signed up to a locally-focussed online forum or social network. This is baseline data, hopefully Pew will repeat the questions every now and then.

For me the most interesting finding was this: (more…)

Building the Big Society, in a big society way

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[From this article, reposted in its entirety with the permission of Julian Dobson, author of Living with Rats, founding editor of New Start magazine, Fellow of the RSA, and a voluntary board member at the Centre for Local Economic Strategies. - Thanks Julian.]

The Big Society is here – at least in the sense that it’s official policy. And it’s been here for years, in the real action being done in thousands of neighbourhoods across the UK to improve places and create better opportunities for people.

Today New Start magazine and the National Association of Neighbourhood Management got a group of people together to look at how we can build on what’s been learned to ensure the Big Society ideas fulfil their potential.

We had people who are making social action a reality in places like Manton in Nottinghamshire and Church Street in Westminster; people with years of experience in community development; activists and academics; and people who are promoting creative ways of telling stories and developing conversations.

Whatever the Big Society becomes, there are pitfalls it needs to avoid. I posted some thoughts here a few weeks ago; Kevin Harris has shared some important insights on his blog; and Gabriel Chanan and Colin Miller have written a helpful analysis of the Big Society from a community development perspective.

Here are a few of my opening thoughts from today’s discussion [click here to see the discussion on ScribbleLive]:

  • First, the Big Society is not a painkiller. The savings to be expected from empowering communities won’t offset the effect of £6bn of public spending cuts, with much more to come. That doesn’t mean fostering more community control isn’t worthwhile. It’s just that if the prime objective becomes saving cash, it won’t work.
    The impact of the public spending cuts hasn’t really sunk in. People will lose their jobs. Often they will be people in households who are already struggling to get by. When the dirty work of deciding what should stay and what should go is passed down the line, there will be unpleasant and difficult choices.
    In that context, active and empowered citizens are not an alternative to decent public services. But a culture of community action will help us to become more resilient – to cope better with the shocks of spending cuts and create the smarter local infrastructure we’ll need in a more frugal age. A Big Society could nurture a generation of doers with the courage to show real local leadership.
  • Second, it needs to be based on evidence. If we want healthy and strong communities we need to examine what’s happened in the past. There is a wealth of information available, from academic evaluations of government programmes to local case studies. We need to use it.
  • Third, the learning has to be shared. There is little value in keeping it in a collection of obscure websites that few people use. But bringing it together and keeping those links, personal as well as virtual, up to date and relevant is a big job. It won’t just happen. And that sharing needs to take place in a variety of ways to ensure learning takes root: online, in print, in face to face exploration and more.
  • Fourth, a culture of sharing demands networks, not empires. We’ve had too many attempts to pool learning that have been stifled by the dead hand of proprietorial interference or simply neglected. We need a Creative Commons approach where learning is gathered but organisations and groups are then free to reuse, adapt and repurpose what has been done.
  • Fifth, there is no year zero. There’s always a temptation for a new government or a new wave of activists to imagine the rule book can be torn up and a new future created from the cauldron of creativity that results. That doesn’t happen. Trying to apply the principles of creative destruction to communities and social networks is, generally, a bad idea: you just end up with the destruction. So we need to recognise history, story and roots, as well as futures and opportunities.
  • The sixth point is that we’re here to help. Those of us who got together today, and many others who didn’t, have abilities to digest, communicate, facilitate, analyse and inspire and we need to work collaboratively to make sure this happens as a new generation of community activists emerges. There’s a huge amount of goodwill out there. We have to build on it.

The challenge for the Big Society Network, and for those seeking to engage with it, is to bring this all together in a way that recognises and respects its value, and then apply it in a way that inspires and motivates not only potential community organisers but also the people in local and central government who need to work with them. It’s a tall order. But we need to take that risk while there’s still an appetite for working in new ways.

See also: NANM director Ben Lee’s recap: Action not just Reaction; transcript of the liveblog at regenfuture (watch that space for the full report)