We’ve brought all the Projects blogs together in one place.

You’ll now find postings by the Connected Commuties bloggers at:

http://projects.rsablogs.org.uk/

Please remember to adjust your feeds.

If you still don’t know who you are going to vote for, you could do worse than read the manifestos of the three main political parties. I recently read the three tomes for the first time in my life and was impressed by their scope and level of detail.

With respect to yesterday’s blog on ‘The Big Society’, all three parties have policies relating to revitalising the civic sphere, but they differ in emphasis.

The Conservative Manifesto, subtitled: ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’, has a large section called ‘Change Society’ and relevant policy proposals include public service reform (changing the ‘civil service’ to a ‘civic service’- encouraging civic servants to walk the talk on social action; introducing a ‘big society day’- I guess it’s like a big picnic but more serious…; creating a National Citizen Service so that 16 year olds get inculcated into the spirit of volunteering and service.  There is also the intent to use sport in general and the Olympics in particular to strengthen social bonds. The Conservatives also promise to redirect National Lottery funds back to their original purpose of community development.

At a more macro level, they  see the family as the core unit of society, and they seek to support them accordingly, through tax credits and an extension of flexible working, as well as an interesting but underdeveloped promise to protect ‘childhood’, rather than just ‘children’.

The Labour Party seem to have decided to link communities to creativity, reflected in the section of their manifesto called: ‘Creative Britain: Active and Flourishing Communities’. Community activism is grounded in a commitment to arts, sports and culture….and the volunteering such activities engender.  They also promise to protect post offices and pubs as community ‘hubs’. Likewise they promise £235 million for ‘play areas’ like adventure playgrounds. Labour hope to encourage a vibrant voluntary sector and to develop a National Youth Community Service in which youngsters complete at least 50 hours of community service before 19.

I am surprised I haven’t heard more of their emphasis on ‘The New Mutualism‘ i.e. people buying shares in local pubs, football clubs etc so that they become stakeholders in key aspects of community life. This strikes me as a conceptual counterweight to ‘The Big Society’, but the first time I came across the idea was the manifesto, so either I have been looking in the wrong places, or Labour decided they didn’t need/want to push the idea.

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto makes no big thematic claim on the big society other than to reiterate their longstanding commitment to localism, and to emphasise, as all parties do, that strong communities are important. They do have a section on communities that focuses on crime, housing and immigration, and they promise to put more police on the beat, make the immigration system more transparent, rail fares cheaper, homes affordable, keep post offices open, protect and restore natural environment, and scrap council tax and make it on the ability to pay. They also propose a community owned energy scheme, but I couldn’t trace the details.

So with respect to building the big society, the parties are all the same… except for the ways that they are different. The Conservatives are explicit about ‘using the state to remake society’, Labour’s manifesto suggests that communities flourish most tangibly through sports and art, and the Liberal Democrats want communities to be ’strong’ and more politically active, with a host of policy proposals to make them so.

Two main reflections come to mind:

1) Obliquity. If all parties agree that we need stronger communities, a more vibrant civic sphere, or even a ‘big society’, does it follow that we should seek these things out? John Kay argues quite forcefully that we rarely achieve social and personal goals by seeking them out directly because the world is just too complicated. Maybe the Big Society is something that has to emerge indirectly from a succession of small gains rather than something that can be created on a national level.

2) Associational Life: In this respect, while all of the parties mention sport, none of them seem to place much emphasis on other forms of informal social life, mother and toddler groups, book clubs, chess clubs, writing groups etc. All parties seem to support the strengthening of social bonds that arise through these less glamorous forms of associational life, but there seem to be  few policies in place to support them.  In this respect, such aims may be informed by research at ‘My Tribe’, a site run by Henry Hemming which is  a Nationwide survey of Clubs, associations, societies and informal groups in Britain.  This survey will inform a book to be published in 2011, when we may or may not explicitly be trying to build a big society.

I am burdened by the abiding image of David Cameron electioneering in McDonalds and finding himself accidentally asking for  ”a big society with fries please”.  But seriously folks, if you read the transcript of David Cameron’s major speech on the Big Society, it seems to be quite a substantial idea, not just a sound byte,  so it is worthy of close attention, especially for a project that is about strengthening connections at a local level, and (re)building the social capital that Cameron seems to think we currently lack.

What follows focuses on making sense of the idea, the next blog will examine the idea from the perspective of the three main manifestos, and the following entry will attempt to understand how our project might contribute to making society ‘big’.

The idea, based on politically filtered facts,  seems to break down as follows:

State intervention helped to advance the cause of social justice in Britain until the late sixties, but less so thereafter.  The biggest expansion in state involvement has taken place since 1997, but inequality has grown, the incomes of the bottom 10%  fell between 2002-2008, youth unemployment has increased and social mobility has stalled. The state failed to tackle poverty in recent years because those in poverty lacked the education to take advantage of the opportunities of globalisation, and because the state was relatively blind to the social impact of economic reforms, e.g. when benefit structures serve to disincentivise work. The role of the state therefore needs to shift from one that primarily serves to create economic dependence to one that increases personal and social responsibility. As Cameron puts it, “We need to use the state to remake society.” He proposes to do so by increasing educational opportunity for all and, at by focusing on social enterprise, community activists, and, here’s the rub, everybody else. The fact that everybody needs to become involved in some or all of volunteering, associational life, local politics and service provision is why the vision is a ‘big’ one.

That is the idea insofar as one paragraph can capture it. The space Cameron wants to make bigger lies between the state and the citizen, which he seems to think is currently too small, and which is actually undermined, he believes, by the existing relationship between state and citizen. He seems to want to increase social, civic and political DIY, and the driving motivation seems to be that he wants people to feel and to be more responsible for their lives. As I have suggested before, in order to be ‘responsible’, you have to be able to respond, so certain key questions arise. We will return to the nuts and bolts of the idea, but for now here are some key generic issues/questions of a more philosophical nature.

As Mathew Taylor has already indicated, walking the talk of this idea is not straightforward, and thus far the Conservatives themselves don’t seem to have managed it. There are various sources of inertia that make it difficult to change our behaviour, even when we want to.

For instance, building trust at a social or civic level is not easy because as David Halpern has suggested, based on an international study of values, the British as a whole are “unusually afraid of strangers”. He also suggested that, relative to other European countries, we don’t value social solidarity very highly, and tend to be relatively authoritarian by nature.

How do you pay for it? This critical question was Madeleine Bunting’s key concern in The Guardian,  and is obviously very pertinent. If the State is going to ‘remake’ society it has to pay for this make-over, and has to do so in a way that keeps itself at arms length; both difficult tasks.

The idea relies on a ‘big as significant’ metaphor, as outlined inMetaphors we live by. Making ‘big’ society’s root metaphor seems curious given that Cameron also suggests that we have a ‘broken society’. At the risk of manufacturing a neologism, he seems to be equating size with effectiveness(broken because not big enough), but one of the reasons for the perceived decline in social solidarity is the challenge of social scale, now that most people live in cities after all society often feels every bit as big as it is broken. I am not sure whether this is merely a semantic point, but it is also a fact that insofar as social solidarity depends on size, less is more.

Finally, a growth in the social and civic sphere also creates new forms of social pressure. For instance, Mathew Parris once spoke of this concern about living in a society of ‘twitching curtains’, and more generally any growth in society creates threats to individual autonomy.

So what do you think? Does the idea of the big society make sense? Is it desirable? Achievable? Does it fill you with optimism or horror? Look forward to hearing from you.

I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl:  “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”

I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).

This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of  a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.

When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change,  there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.

You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative,  methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose.  As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.

Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.

So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.

The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron?  Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?

Yesterday’s RSA Thursday featured Robin Dunbar, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, but  best known  for having his own number (a sure sign of success), 150, which he argues is the upper limit on the number of people you can maintain stable relationships with.

The idea is powerful, but it’s not new. I first came across it more than a decade ago when it was already called Dunbar’s number (Dunbar’s first major paper on the idea was in 1992), but it was then a much simpler anthropological notion about optimal group sizes, i.e. the upper size that communities and organisations should maintain in order to retain the informal efficiency of mutual recognition, trust and stability, rather than creating cumbersome rules and regulations that we seem to need in society at large.

In this respect,  Dunbar’s new book, How many friends does one person need? can be thought of as Dunbar 2.0, in which the idea has been revitalised as a corrective to the rampant polyphilia on facebook  and other social networking sites. Dunbar 2.0 says loud and clear that you can have thousands of  facebook ‘friends’ if you want, but there are constraints on how many of them can meaningfully be called friends.

There can be no uncontested notion of what ‘friend’ means, but Dunbar argues that humans consistently show a pattern of layering their social contacts, with a core of close friends around 5, 15 considered ‘good friends’, 50 as ‘friends’ and up to 150 as acquaintances. Jacob Morgan’s blog gives a powerful graphic for this idea and the discussion on socialmediatoday.com is well worth reading.

Dunbar’s work is highly complex and interdisciplinary, and his core claim is that there are two constraints on stable relationships. The first is cognitive, the neural density and processing power needed to retain detailed information on people, or ‘keep track’ of them as Dunbar put it yesterday. The second is temporal, the time we need to invest so that people to create mutual interest and regard, and so that such relationships don’t decay, i.e so that  friends don’t become strangers all over again.

There are many things to say about this fascinating idea, but I want to raise one in particular. It might be true that human beings are limited by Dunbar’s number, but much of Dunbar’s work seems to be based on extrapolations on primate behaviour. He thinks in evolutionary terms that are framed principally by biology and anthropology. But I wonder whether he should pay more attention to technological change as part of cultural evolution, for 21st century human beings in the developed world are now suspended somewhere between primates and robots.  Indeed, many, most notably Andy Clark, have argued that human beings should be thought of as cyborgs.

“We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.”

So that would be my challenge for developing a Dunbar 3.0. Our minds and our technologies are increasingly part of continuim, with much of our memory and functionality stored in digital form. A person may only need a certain number of friends, or be capable of maintaining 150, but what of person-plus? What of the fact that we now live and learn and think with machines? What of the Cyborgs that we are becoming? We are so now thoroughly dependent on digital tools, and our sense of self interwoven with them, that it is far from unimaginable that future technologies will overcome the temporal and cognitive constraints intimated by Dunbar’s existing work.

Perhaps we are already doing so, because  it is easier to keep track of people, and it is easier to invest time in relationships than it has ever been.

However,  one of the many big suggestive points made yesterday was that we may need to physically touch people to remain close to them. The importance of touch for bonding is not fully researched yet, but it might be crucial- those handshakes, hugs and cheek-kisses may matter more than you know… and as Dunbar noted, it is hard to imagine ‘virtual touch’…but you never know…