Localopolis

55. Democracy Bytes

2013-05-17T15:32:00.001+01:00

Just as a byte is a unit of digital information so a democracy byte is a unit of digital democracy.

If we want to make traditional representative democracy more open, engaging and vibrant by digitising it (and we do) then we need to be clear, conceptually speaking, about what the stuff of democracy actually is. Democracy bytes are that stuff – democracy, broken down into its constituent atoms, so that it can be digitised and shared.

The argument here, which is about how we use digital to enhance local democracy, comes in four parts:

We should be talking about the local decision making process rather than meetings, organisations or even elected representatives although they are all relevant and important of course.
The local decision making process can be broken down into many separate democratic conversations that lead to decisions.
Democratic conversations can themselves be broken down into four basic and distinct types of democratic statement; questions, opinions, proposals and decisions.
Democratic statements can be digitised and shared with citizens as democracy bytes.

This post is a development of the ideas I’ve previously shared on Social Council Decision Making and is an aspect of the wider Digital Democracy Framework developed with Carl Whistlecraft. Carl and myself are part of the Localgov Digital Steering Group, where we are majoring on ‘redesigning local democracy in digital world’ and this is a part of our contribution to that work.

Democratic Conversations

If we want the public to be engaged in the local decision making process then we need to offer people simple routes into the decision making conversations that interest them. One big problem with the process at the moment is that local politics is, without an investment of time and effort, a mystery to most people. Lawrence Pratchett uses the metaphor of jazz to argue this point:

The argument here is that the institutions of local politics have become like jazz: without a high level of concentration they are incomprehensible to most people.... This is not an argument that says that most people are stupid and that politics needs to be ‘dumbed down’. Rather, it is an argument that most people are too busy doing other things to worry about the institutions of local politics: they do not want to work that hard to understand something that is often deemed peripheral to their lives (1).

As Pratchett notes, Jazz was effectively superseded by rock and roll, a form of music that ’stripped back this sophistication to a much simpler sound that was easier to follow and understand’. Not that Pratchett is arguing for simplification at the expense of the necessary subtleties of a political system but rather that the answer might lie with intermediary bodies such as the media or voluntary groups who might act as interpreters.

Democratic Statements

To define a democratic conversation we have to break it down into its constituent parts. In short we can say that a democratic conversation starts with a question, ends with a decision and includes opinions and proposals. Questions, decisions, opinions and proposals are all basic types of democratic statement where:

Questions are the start point of conversations. They are a statement of a problem and an invitation to an audience to participate (they may not always have a question mark). They can originate from anywhere but must be adopted by a decision making individual or group. Examples would include scrutiny topics, consultations or planning applications.
Opinions are statements that set out the view of a particular person or body in respect of a question. They will normally be supported by evidence or at least clearly stated reasons. Opinions belong to a named individual or group (e.g. Citizen, Cabinet Member, Council, Scrutiny Committee). They can be presented anonymously as part of a conversation but somewhere it must be known that they are owned by someone entitled to present them. ‘Facts’ enter the process as opinions, partly as every ‘fact’ has some element of subjectivity but more because the relative importance of a ‘fact’ for a question certainly is down to opinion.
Proposals are statements that make a recommendation about what an individual or group, responsible for a decision should do. They are directed to the specific individual or group who has the power to make the decision. Proposals are promoted by questions in as far as closed questions limit the range of possible proposals down to a minimum of two whereas open questions are less prescriptive.
Decisions define the ends of conversations. They are statements about what the council will do and relate to policies and services for which the council has responsibility. Decisions will be taken only by the individual or body that has the legal responsibility for that decision – the decision maker.

This is of course pretty much how it works already just stated in a more generic way. The intention is to define a language that applies whether we are talking about cabinet, planning, scrutiny or any other council function. Cabinet ‘conversations’, for example, operate within a clearly defined policy framework. Questions, often triggered by officers, lead to consultation processes that gather opinions and proposals before decisions are finally taken. Scrutiny inquiries follow the format of questions, evidence gathering, conclusions and recommendations. For planning process, applications are questions, objections are opinions, proposed amendments are proposals and decisions are, well, decisions.

The idea is that, by using a common language across all of these processes, we can generate one single flow of democratic conversations before providing them to citizens in a bespoke way; we can move from an approach that is committee centred to one that is citizen centred.

Democracy Bytes

Democratic statements linked in democratic conversations and made available digitally in a form that people can share and comment on, become democracy bytes. In one sense we can say that these are ‘digital minutes’; they are the open data of local democracy (the word minute actually means ‘chopped small’, which is exactly what we need the decision making process to be if we are going to make digestable it to the public).

How democracy bytes are shared is a matter for local debate – it could be a single site or a range of apps. Great examples already exist of course. Check out Ask Bristol or the Friction Free Democracy project for example.

By clarifying what democracy bytes are we can at least have a common understanding of what the stuff of local democracy actually is and a clear assignment for developers to work with. The challenge for local councils is to find the technical ways in which these democracy bytes can be shared. The day to say sharing of a democracy bytes will be, in the first instance, a role for democratic support staff. No, actually this will be an entirely new role for democratic support staff but that sounds like another post.

(1) Pratchett, L (2004) Making Politics Work in Stoker and Wilson (Eds) British Local Government into the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/2551172370/

54. Communities of Practice (civic solutions #2)

2012-11-16T12:14:00.001Z

This is my second post about how whole place partnerships might employ civic solutions to tackle wicked problems. By civic solutions I mean:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

My first stab at thinking about what civic solutions might look like in practice focussed on the public innovation literature and ended by looking at the ways in which whole place partnerships might harness collaborative innovation for problem solving.

I want to undertake a similar exercise in this post but this time I am drawing on the communities of practice idea that has grown out of the literature on learning and knowledge management and that is associated with Etienne Wenger in particular. Wenger has provided a general overview of the theory here. Wenger has also written a book with Richard Mcdermott and William M. Snyder called Cultivating Communities of Practice and it is from this I am getting most of the content for this post.

I first came across the term communities of practice when it was the name of the predecessor to the Local Government Association’s Knowledge Hub. I’m not sure if that was inspired by Wenger’s concept but there are certainly some elements in common.

Anyhow, to business.

Communities of Practice

Wenger et al's definition is as follows:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topics, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.

The idea is not a new one; in fact communities of practice are a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be observed throughout history. From the trade ‘corporations’ in Rome to the guilds in the middle ages right up to the tech networks of Silicon Valley in more recent times. We already belong to communities of practice even if we don’t recognise them as such; families, school communities, hobby clubs for example.

At the heart of the communities of practice concept is knowledge management as, according to Wenger et al; ‘knowledge has become the key to success’. Knowledge is collective, a dynamic social process and getting the greatest benefit means finding and utilising the right social structures – and this is where the communities of practice idea comes in. As communities of practice are in some senses natural the way to make them grow is through cultivation – creating the right environment and providing the right resources.

Getting this right can be of benefit to organisations and business in particular. Wenger et al argue that communities of practice have the potential to:

Connect local pockets of expertise and isolated professionals
Diagnose and address recurring business problems whose root causes cross team boundaries
Analyze the knowledge-related sources of uneven performance across units performing similar tasks and work to bring everyone up the highest standard, and
Link and coordinate unconnected activities and initiatives addressing a similar knowledge domain

It doesn’t take a much of a leap to see that similar benefits would be very desirable in a civic context. Indeed, while the primary concern is with private companies, Wenger et al are also keen to show how communities of practice can be applied to community problems. So, for example, the approach has been used to set up family services coalitions that address the bureaucracy surrounding ‘at risk’ families seeking government assistance in the US. The learning networks that were formed as a result achieved some valuable benefits such as new after school programmes and a dramatic reduction in the forms that families needed to fill out. The point here is that these solutions were emergent and developed from the bottom up – the leadership role was to facilitate the networks not design the solutions.

If we accept the argument of Wenger et al then communities of practice clearly have the potential to provide a means for whole place partnerships to address wicked problems. But what would this mean in practice?

Cultivating Communities of Practice to Tackle Wicked Problems

To help with the task of cultivating communities of practice Wenger et al break them down into three structural elements:

The domain which creates the common ground and the sense of common identity – affirming its purpose and value.
The community refers to the social fabric, the relationships and the human interactions.
The practice refers to the frameworks, tool and ideas, information, stories and documents that the community members share –in order to ‘proceed efficiently in dealing with its domain.

For whole place partnerships these elements can be translated as follows:

Domain = the outcome they want to achieve or the wicked problem they want to address
Community = the relevant practitioners, public and politicians
Practice = day to day delivery of projects, programmes and services

Wenger et al argue that ‘the most important factor in a community’s success is the vitality of its leadership’. In practical terms the role of ensuring that communities stay focussed on their domain, maintain their relationships and develop their practice falls upon the whole place partnership. Building on seven functions that Wenger et al suggest for the role of the community coordinator it is therefore possible to identify the core tasks for a whole place partnership that is seeking to cultivate communities of practice in order to tackle wicked problems:

Map the important issues that need to be addressed if the agreed outcomes are to be achieved / wicked problems solved
Plan and facilitate community events
Promote informal networking between members in the different communities
Foster the development of individual community members
Ensure that the formal organisations do not prevent communities from functioning – that they give people space, time and flexibility
Build resources to support practice such as a ‘knowledge base’, practice events etc
Regularly assess the health of the various communities and monitor their impact

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barkingdagenhamarchive/7545414066/in/set-72157630518709532

53. Local Government Blog Clubs

2012-11-09T13:24:00.001Z

There are many great local government blogs out there. If you don't believe me then check out this post from We Love Local Government. These blogs contain a wealth of ideas, thoughts and feelings. I'm not sure, however, if we are making as much of all of this as we could. In particular I wonder if enough local government people are blogging, if the right people are reading the right blogs and if bloggers are talking to each other enough.

I am writing this post as the author of a OWSAB (Occassionally Written Single Author Blog). Unlike multi author and frequently updated blogs it is more challenging for OWSABs to connect with an audience so clubbing together with other OWSABs seems like a smart thing to do.

It is partly for that reason I have been having a look at Triberr recently. Essentially the idea is that bloggers with similar interests 'tribe' together and agree to promote each others blog posts through social media and in particular twitter. The potential benefit is that you can extend awareness of your posts far beyond you own followers. The site automates this process in various ways. It is an intersting idea although I'm not sure the site itself works so well.

A better approach I think is the brilliant Weekly Blog Club which I came across recently. The way this works is that people tag links to posts on their personal blogs and they are picked up by the site and published incluiding as part of a weekly list. It's like a specialised local government blog aggregator although with human components (the site itself relies on different volunteers each week I think).

Three Wishes for Local Government Blogging

All of this is great, and there isn't really much to fix, but, if I had three wishes they would be:

1. Better Sharing inside Councils

In my council we just have started to use yammer and people are using this platform to share interesting blogs from elsewhere and I hope this develops. Even better, perhaps would be blog clubs for individual councils. Perhaps even internal aggregators for sharing (maybe even through intranets). Hey people could even meet up in real life to swap tips and give encouragement.

2. More Local Government Niche Blogging

As the number of bloggers increases it will be harder focus on the things that are of real interest. Hashtags are a great way to create smaller groups so maybe we need to be smarter about these? So for example we might want us #localgovHR #localgovSocServices etc. There may be better ways to do this of course.

3. More Inter Blog Conversations

Comments are great but I'd love to see more lengthy and considered responses turning into posts in their own right. In the academic world it is socmmon to see articles written 'in reply to' and I think there is scope for more of this sort of thing. As well as creating richer conversations it would strengthen relationships between bloggeres and takes people to blogs they might not ahve previously been to.

Have I got this wrong? Is it happening already? Let me know!

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/4727573694/

52. Collaborative Innovation (civic solutions #1)

2012-10-31T10:07:00.000Z

In my post about wicked problems I suggested that the answer to these problems might be civic solutions which I defined as:

Emergent strategies that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

In this post I want to look at collaborative innovation as one possible framework for thinking about civic solutions and consider what this approach might mean in practice for whole place partnerships.

There is a large and diverse literature on innovation and I’m not claiming that this post is any kind of a review. I’m going to draw mainly on just one recent paper that Sørensen & Torfing wrote as an introduction to a special edition of The Innovation Journal - it provides a nice overview and is of course well worth a read.

Innovation is a contested term insofar as there are a number of different ways to define it. While the literature has historically been concerned with innovation in the private sector in recent years there has been a growing interest in public sector innovation to the extent that this now represents a field of research in its own right. It is, however, important to understand the difference. As Hartley argues in this paper in Public Money and Management:

... there is an important difference in innovation between private and public sectors. In the private sector, successful innovation is often seen to be a virtue in itself, as a means to ensure competitiveness in new markets or to revive flagging markets. In public services, however, innovation is justifiable only where it increases public value in the quality, efficiency or fitness for purpose of governance or services. Moreover, in the public sector at least, innovation and improvement need to be seen as conceptually distinct and not blurred into one policy phrase.

Sørensen & Torfing define innovation like this:

Innovation is a dynamic process through which problems and challenges are defined, new and creative ideas are developed, and new solutions are selected and implemented. It is a complex process with many jumps and feedback loops. Innovation can be seen as an intentional, learning-based practice that incorporates occasional chance discoveries. It brings about qualitative change as it breaks with conventional wisdom and well established practices. Innovation is not always based on an invention, but may also involve identifying, translating and adjusting new ideas and solutions from other countries, policy fields or organizations.

Innovation in this context is an emergent strategy process that depends on bottom up and frontline activity rather than top down planned solutions. It is about recognising where public services need to be delivered differently, working through options ans implementing changes. As Sørensen & Torfing suggest, the greatest public value is generated when innovative processes are collaborative, not just limited to individual organisations:

... we propose that public innovation can be further enhanced by bringing together different constellations of social and political actors in collaborative processes that involves a constructive management of difference . A constructive exchange between different kinds of actors helps to identify and define problems and challenges in ways that capture their complexity and to develop new, viable strategies for dealing with this complexity. Collaborative interaction facilitates trust-based circulation and cross-fertilization of new and creative ideas, and ensures a broad assessment of the potential risks and benefits of new and bold solutions and the selection of the most promising ones. Finally, the implementation of the new solutions is facilitated by resource exchange, coordination and the formation of joint ownership.

Hence collaboration is a civic process in the sense that it involves public, politicians and professionals.

But what does collaborative innovation mean in practice for whole place partnerships wishing to employ it as a means of tackling wicked issues?

Again we can turn to Sørensen & Torfing who have mapped out the different roles that managers will have to perform if they are to overcome ‘the different barriers to interaction, collaboration and innovation’. They argue that managers must act as conveners, as mediators and as catalysts. Below I attempt to translate each of these roles into a set of concrete tasks for whole place a partnership.

Convening

Sørensen & Torfing suggest that:

...in order to create well-functioning interactive arenas with active and committed actors the managers must act as conveners. The convener motivates, empowers and brings together the actors, creates and frames the interactive arena, sets the initial agenda, clarifies the process and ensures a mutual adjustment of the expectations.

For the whole place partnership this could mean:

Identifying the wicked issues and setting out what is expected to change

Identifying the people who need to be involved in the collaborative process and inviting them to participate

Designing the innovation process i.e. as a one off event or a longer term project, determining the method that will be used

Securing resources; perhaps buying in external support

Investing in and managing collaborative events as part of the agreed process

Reporting back to participants at the end of the process

Giving account, for example to scrutiny or external auditors

Remember, the expectation here is that the process will not be hierarchical; the partnership has to trust participants in the process to design and implement solutions.

Mediating

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

...in order to encourage and facilitate collaboration between the stakeholders the managers must act as mediators. The mediator aims to create or clarify interdependencies, manages the process by dividing it into different phases, builds trust and resolve disputes by aligning interests, constructing common frameworks and removing barriers to collaboration.

This is an interesting point to reflect on – it is important to recognise that conflict (even if it is with a small ‘c’) will exist in local governance and will need to be managed. Sources of tension may include; competition for resources, funding relationships, issues of legitimacy between the elected and the non-elected; and tensions between organisational and partnership priorities.

The partnership tasks might include:

Recognising and understanding tensions and conflict

Defining what is shared in terms of values, vision, outcomes etc - but these must real for participants - they cannot be imposed top down

Managing conflict through the design of processes – using appreciative processes for example

Using overarching plans to provide a common framework

Intervening where strategies and plans overlap or are in conflict

Actively giving people permission to participate where they might otherwise feel constrained

Catalysing

According to Sørensen & Torfing:

... in order to spur innovation, the managers must act as catalysts. The catalyst exercises an entrepreneurial leadership that encourages re-framing of problems, brings new knowledge into play, explores existing and emerging constraints and opportunities, manages risks and encourages transformative learning and ‘out of the box’ thinking.

The point to reflect on here is that while members of the partnership cannot do everything, they certainly can be involved in the flow of the work and show ‘leadership by doing’.

This might include:

Getting directly involved as a participant inside and outside of events

Taking ownership of small projects

Acting as a sponsor / champion to encourage others

Talking up innovation and showing that they are relaxed about failure

Enthusiastically communicating to reinforce and appreciate successes

External facilitation might be good in this context as it gives members of the partnership a chance to act and be seen to act as participants rather than leaders.

Photo credit: Jon Fravel

51. Pop Up Local Democracy

2012-10-23T12:49:00.000+01:00

If we can have pop up shops and pop up restaurants then why not pop up local democracy? Actually I'm guessing this is already happening - I'd love to hear examples.

I've blogged before about the importance of weaving democracy into the urban space. At a time when there are so many shops, houses and other buildings sitting empty why not take the opportunity to bring local politics closer to the public.

In particular it's worth thinking about the techniques of pop up retail. Setting something up and blitzing the immediate area with publicity, people with leaflets and sandwich boards; using traditional and social media to generate interest.

These 'events' would be temporary - quick hits.

The kinds of things I've got in mind are:

Pop Up Scrutiny: Take over an empty shop in the city centre for a few weeks to open public access to a scrutiny review. As well as consultation materials why not locate scrutiny officers there so they are on hand to answer questions and record ideas.

Pop Up Consultation: For planning or anything else. The empty shop / house can be recreated imaginatively as an exhibition space using displays, models or whatever.

Pop Up Councillor Surgeries: Rather than the traditional community centre or town hall locations, groups of councillors could take over somewhere unexpected for a day to deal with casework or any other queries. The very fact of 'popping up' somewhere unexpected might just generate some additional public interest.

One advantage would be the ability to match the location with the topic; to go to where the public are. So, for example; a shop in the city centre for city wide issues; an empty house in a residential area for community issues.

Update: A couple of nice tweets in response to this -thanks guys!

@gaillyk @kdcasey87 @localopolis agreed I’d love to try and do a scrutiny pop up #localgov also use the pop up to get ideas for scrutiny
— Matthew Skinner (@Skinner_M) October 27, 2012

@kdcasey87 @gaillyk read @localopolis blog post re pop up #localgov- would like to try this out on the high street localopolis.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/51-pop…
— Matthew Skinner (@Skinner_M) October 27, 2012

Photo credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marmite_pop-up_shop_in_2009.jpg

50. Civic Solutions for Wicked Problems

2012-10-21T13:44:00.001+01:00

The concept of wicked problems is both important and tricky. Important because it refers to those intractable social and economic issues that most policy makers and practitioners are grappling with; issues like youth unemployment, childhood obesity or substance misuse. Tricky because the concept of wicked problems is itself ‘wicked’ and subject to differences in definition and interpretation.

This post sets out some thoughts about wicked problems and how they might lead to particular types of responses that I'm calling civic solutions.

Matching Problems and Solutions

A few weeks ago Megan Mathias from Kafka Brigade UK gave a presentation to our community planning conference on ‘Solving the Wicked Problems’. The purpose was to help inform the thinking for our city’s new Single Integrated Plan (that’s Welsh version of the community strategy). It was this presentation that got me thinking (always a good sign!).

Megan’s central point, I think, was that we need to be clear about what type of problems we are seeking to solve as this will inform in a major way our responses to those problems. Megan drew in particular on Keith Grint’s typology of problems and responses (see Keith Grint’s presentation here).
Grint argues that:

For ‘critical’ problems such as a major police incident, for example, we need a command response – one that is immediate, top down and decisive
Tame problems such as conducting heart surgery, launching a new product or relocating a business are complex but can be addressed ‘scientifically’ and hence can be solved through a management response
Wicked problems, such as knife crime, for example, cannot be solved through ‘management’. In fact they may not be completed solved at all, rather they may only be mitigated. The response required here is one of political collaboration – in other words leadership.

Wicked Problems

Grint offers the following characteristics of wicked problems:

Either novel or recalcitrant
Complex rather than complicated (cannot be solved in isolation)
Sit outside single hierarchy and across systems – ‘solution’ creates another problem
They often have no stopping rule – thus no definition of success
May be intransigent problems that we have to learn to live with
Symptoms of deep divisions – contradictory certitudes
Have no right or wrong solutions but better or worse developments
Securing the ‘right’ answer is not as important as securing collective consent.
Feasibility not optimality; coping rather than solving
Uncertainty & Ambiguity inevitable – cannot be deleted through correct analysis

If you are unfamiliar with the idea of wicked problems then the Wikipedia page (should that be wickedapedia *ahem*) is a good a place to start as any. Definitions tend to vary but they usually come in lists of characteristics - see this paper by Head and Alford (pdf) for more on this.

For me wicked problems are best understood as symptoms of wider social and economic structures. There is perhaps a danger that wicked problems might be thought of almost as having an existence independent from the ‘real’ world- like malevolent ghosts that have arrived from some mysterious other world.

It is important to remember that wicked problems are of course symptoms of deeper social and economic problems. To use a medical metaphor; they are like chronic conditions, some of which can be managed to the point that the individual leads an almost completely normal life as long as they can maintain the management regime required. Other chronic conditions cannot be managed as easily and the individual has to accept that the symptoms will continue to be challenging.

There is also something a little fatalistic in saying ‘wicked problems’ can never be completely solved. I’d rather say, like a doctor might, that these are conditions that can be managed until the cure is found. Take the example of child labour in 19th century Britain for example. At the start of that century it must have looked like an intractable wicked problem. Clearly it is no longer seen that way. Not in the UK in any case.

It is also important to understand wicked problems as issues that affect us all to a greater or lesser extent; whether directly as ‘victims’ or indirectly through the impact on the wider economy for example.

In the same way I would argue that everyone shares responsibility for wicked problems. I mean this both in the sense that we are all responsible for these issues in the first place to some extent, whether by action or inaction, but also that we are all responsible for the solution. Grint puts it well in this report on Total Place (pdf) when he says that a wicked problem:

...requires a long term collaborative engagement by the whole community. The trick here, then, is to ask the right question. Not, ‘how do we stop knife crime?’ but how do we get the community more involved in self-policing?

Civic Solutions

Which brings me onto to this idea of civic solutions by which I mean: Emergent strategies to tackle wicked problems that involve the whole community including public services and the voluntary and business sectors.

This is an approach that contrasts with traditional top down approaches. As Helen Sullivan argues:

An alternative model, talked about a great deal in the literature, but rarely applied, looks at ‘whole of government’ from the bottom rather than the top, emphasizing the merit of taking decisions and being responsible for them as close to service users and citizens as possible, and of connecting to others through flexible networks rather than reconstituted hierarchies. This poses a fundamental challenge to strategic thinkers who can conceive of strategy only in top-down, centrally determined ways, as it requires thinking about strategy as emergent, generated by interactions between the different actors involved wherever they are in the system.

That’s the general idea – the next step is to map out what these civic solutions might look like in practice and, more specifically, what they might mean for whole place partnerships and their single integrated plans.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/binkley27/306107180/

49. A Library of Local Politics Case Studies

2012-10-17T22:04:00.000+01:00

I’ve just come across a paper by Rod Rhodes. It’s called ‘The Lost World of British Local Politics?’ and was published in 1975 in Local Government Studies. It essentially provides a mapping of what was the then emerging study of local government.

The thing that caught my eye was a table showing the local government case studies that had been completed by academics up until 1974. A couple of them can be found on my page of local government classics. Here is a selection of the county boroughs to give you an idea:

I have no idea how many new studies have been completed in the nearly 40 years since then (or even if more recent maps have been produced) – but I do think it would be great to have an up to date version, say as an online database, which could be used to find all the academic case study work that had been done on any given council.

This would obviously be a really handy research tool but I also think it would have real benefits for local councils. Local government is not good at preserving its history and such a database would help councils to understand their own story. Case studies provide rich pictures of days gone by that some or all of the organisation may have forgotten about. Often we are not talking about that long ago.

These case studies can also provide useful external perspectives. They will include the conclusions and critical reflections of independent researchers and they might just offer some useful challenge. Who knows, they may even shed light on current problems or provide some relevant and useful evidence.
Project anyone?

48. A Journal of Welsh Public Service

2012-10-04T20:57:00.000+01:00

Shouldn't Wales have its own academic journal dedicated to public service? Well I think it should.

I know that there are sector specific publications such as the Welsh Housing Quarterly but, as far as I know, there is nothing that covers the Welsh public service as a whole.
Such a journal could focus exclusively on Welsh concerns and have peer reviewed academic papers (although not too many) alongside contributions by practitioner and early career researchers. It could provide a focus for relevant debates and facilitate dialogue between academics and practitioners. It could be open source, allowing free access to everyone with an interest. It should also be bilingual; promoting the Welsh language within wider academic circles.

Specifically it could provide:

A forum for critical reflection on public policy and service delivery
Critical evaluation of new initiatives
A focus for cross sector learning
A means for disseminating relevant research to a practitioner community
An opportunity to debate and develop public service challenges and innovations in the Welsh context

On this last point I would argue that Wales provides a natural community for such a journal. As the Beecham review argued, Wales has the potential to be exemplar small nation governance. It has a devolved government with an interest in evidence and research, it has national bodies with similar preoccupations and it also has university departments dedicated to public management and administration. It even has its own think tanks and pressure groups. Surely such an important research community deserves its own journal?

Update: looks like there is a Croatian model (CCPA) that this could be based on. Below are some nice tweets I had on this post. I partuclarly like the SHU site highlighted by Tamsin Stirling:

@localopolis #Localgov Great idea Dave! Running and editing a journal is hard work. Meanwhile, you can submit papers to #CCPA :-)
— Dr Vedran Đulabić (@vdulabic) October 4, 2012

@localopolis that's an excellent idea. You just need a group of people/ institutions to help achieve it.
— Filipe Teles (@FTeles) October 5, 2012

@crischarliepaul @localopolis @tamsinstirling1 @catherinefarre we need better connect btwn research & practice; does journal = way to do it?
— Megan@KafkaBrigade (@Megan_KafkaUK) October 5, 2012

@tamsinstirling1 @megan_kafkauk @localopolis @catherinefarre Online woud work well- have many ideas actually!
— chris paul (@crischarliepaul) October 5, 2012

Research and practice - I like the SHU on-line approach @localopolis @crischarliepaul @tamsinstirling1 @megan_kafkauk @catherinefarre
— Catherine Farrell (@CatherineFarre) October 5, 2012

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bslavin/2214558473/

47. A Design Checklist for Participatory Initiatives

2012-08-27T13:10:00.000+01:00

As I've mentioned before, my PhD research is concerned with local government and paticipatory initiatives. 'Participatory initiatives' meaning the citizens' panels, area forums, participatory budgeting projects etc etc that aim to give the public some influence in the local policy process.

One of the conceptual issues I face is tying down the precise characteristics of these participatory initiatives as they are all so different and are inevitably implemented in different ways.

For a broad typology I draw on Graham Smith's excellent Power Beyond the Ballot: 57 Democratic Innovations from Around the World - a report he produced for the Power Inquiry. You can download it here.

Smith's typology looks like this:

Electoral innovations- aim to increase electoral turnout. Examples include postal ballots, electronic voting, positive abstention, compulsory voting, reducing voting age, universal citizenship
Consultative innovations – aim to inform decision-makers of citizens’ views. Examples include public meetings, focus groups, planning for real, community visioning, standing forums, standing citizens’ panels.
Deliberative innovations – aim to bring citizens together to deliberate on policy issues, the outcomes of which may influence decision-makers. Examples include citizens’ juries, consensus conferences, deliberative opinion polling, America Speaks, national issues forums, study circles, deliberation days.
Co-governance innovations – aim to give citizens significant influence during the process of decision-making. Examples include Chicago community policing, youth councils, participatory appraisal, participatory budgeting, Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform, British Columbia.
Direct democracy innovations – aim to give citizens final decision-making power on key issues. Examples include New England town meetings, referendum, initiative, recall, citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition.
E-democracy innovations – aim to use ICT to engage citizens in the decision making process. Examples include e-voting, e-consultation, e-representatives, online deliberative polling, e-petitions, e-referendum, Minnesota E-Democracy, BBCiCan, HeadsUp

In order to help with a more detailed categorisation I've been collecting a list of variables that you can see in the list below. It is specifically set in a UK local government context but could be easily adapted for other contexts.

As well as its research use it might also be handy as a checklist for councils looking to set up a participatory initiative - a set of choices that can be made at the design stage. It's very much a work in progress - all comments welcome!

Design Variables for Local Government Participatory Inititiatives

Formal decisions are made on behalf of council [routinely, occasionally, never]
Preferences or recommendations are agreed [routinely, occasionally, never]
Preferences or recommendations are reported directly to council or cabinet [routinely, occasionally, never]
The role of local ward councillors [formal, informal, none]
The role of executive councillors [formal, informal, none]
How the membership is chosen [open, restricted (e.g. geographic area, age group), selection mechanism (e.g. nomination, election)]
Membership monitoring (e.g. to check representativeness) [formal, informal, none]
Training for the membership [formal, informal, none]
Set up by [community, council, Other body (e.g. voluntary group)]
Agenda setting. [council, membership, joint]
Expected level of public involvement [1-30, 30-60, 60+]
The method of engagement [face to face, remote, mixed]
Involvement of community groups or other outside bodies [formal, informal, none]
Council wide policy role [formal, informal, none]
Service improvement role [formal, informal, none]
Budgetary role [formal, informal, none]
Resources and support for the initiative [dedicated (e.g. specialist team), Integrated (e.g. built into to other roles), none]

Picture credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_drawing_board.JPG

46. Learning and Research Communities

2012-07-21T12:27:00.000+01:00

In this post I argue that public sector practitioners and academics need to be investing in semi formal communities in order to bridge the gap between their two worlds. Such communities can foster the interpersonal networks needed to generate the trust, common understandings and shared priorities on which effective co-learning and co-research can develop.

Bridging the Gap between Practice and Academia

As a full time practitioner doing a part time PhD I often find myself hopping between the worlds of local government and academia. I also like to visit some of the places that exist in-between. The Public Administration Committee conference, for example, is an annual theory and practice forum that I have personally found extremely useful as a place to develop my academic understanding and confidence (I sketched out the ideas for this post on the train after the last one).

The problem is, however, that events such as the PAC conference are the exception rather than the rule. I read with great interest this piece by Kevin Orr and Mike Bennett on the hidden politics of 'co-production' in research which confirmed my belief that one of the biggest challenges in this context is indeed ‘the distance between the academic and practitioner worlds’. This is something I picked up in a small way in this paper I did on local government attitudes to research degrees (pdf) that I presented to the PAC conference in 2009. In a similar vein this is my Prezi to a workshop for the annual Centre for Public Scrutiny conference in 2010. My general argument is that while local government doesn’t really ‘get’ academia, at an individual level it something we often value. Differences therefore relate more to misunderstandings that to something more fundamental.

This distance between the two worlds is a big missed opportunity in my opinion. While academics are increasingly concerned about the impact of their research so public sector practitioners are concerned about wider outcomes in the community. While academics are being asked to become more ‘real world’ by their funders and institutions so practitioners are under pressure to employ evidence and critical thinking more than they ever have done before. While austerity has severely limited local government’s ability to spend money on training, courses or events so those involved on the academic side live with uncertainty about whether they fit with the priorities of their institutions and wrestle with the future relevance of their disciplines.

Learning and Research Communities

How then to build better bridges between practitioners and academics? I think the answer is to invest in the setting up and support of Learning and Research Communities.

This idea of community is borrowed very much from the world of social media (see my previous post on Social Bureaucracy). It implies something informal, fluid and flexible, something that has a focus on relationships between individuals rather than between institutions and social rather than contractual interaction. Communities can be porous, overlap and interact. They imply a sense of shared identity, purpose and belonging. These agile forms of working allow work to happen across organisational, departmental and disciplinary boundaries – something which is a challenge in both worlds. I think Patrick Dunleavy illustrates the way the world is changing in this respect from an academic perspective rather brilliantly in this presentation on the Republic of Blogs.

Learning and Research Communities could provide a new type of environment in which learning and research, whether formal or informal, would take place. The biggest difference would be support for networking and interaction outside of those more traditional activities.

Supporting a community would mean:

Providing the community its underpinning support, with a home organisation (lending a sense of credibility and legitimacy) as well identifying the individuals who will perform community roles e.g. admin, facilitator etc
Establishing a clear purpose and identity around a defined theme for the community such as ‘Welsh Scrutiny’ or ‘UK Directly Elected Mayors’. The important point is to have something that is meaningful and important both to academics and practitioners.
Determining the basis for membership - this might be through an application or may just be open to anyone with an interest. It also means defining the responsibilities for members and describing how they contribute to the purpose of the community – again this need not be anything grand, simply a short statement of expectation.
Identify the way in which interaction will take place; online and off. Social media sites such as the Knowledge Hub, Yammer or even twitter can do this. Face to face events are also important whether traditional conference style events or unconferences such as localgovcamp.

It is the community, and particularly the networking and sharing elements that provide the context for other activity to take place. For practitioners these would be spaces where they can engage with academia without cost or commitment in the first instance, where they can gain awareness and find out about opportunities. Perhaps most importantly spaces where relationships and trust can be fostered leading perhaps to joint projects. Similarly for academics communities should provide a space for them to gain a more nuanced understanding of the needs, wants and concerns of those engaged in practice and to be able to adjust their own ‘products' accordingly, to be able to explain what they have to offer and to adapt quickly to changes.

Of course the cost of resourcing these communities will be an issue particularly as membership should be free wherever possible. For me this requires working from a different business model, one where supporting communities is in some sense a loss leader for the other, more traditional, transactions that come after. This is the way that many web 2.0 services now operate; a free basic membership with the option to migrate to premium charged services later on.

The piece by Orr and Bennett is a reminder that if we want to foster co-learning and co-research initiatives then first we need to have in place relationships of trust and understanding between individuals. This cannot be done by a top down planning but requires putting our faith in something much less planned - something much more organic. There are, no doubt, many examples of informal joint working already out there that can be used to inspire confidence that this is the way to go. I suspect there are also already examples of Learning and Research Communities in action.

In summary, I think there are really exciting opportunities to be had if we take advantage of new ways of organising to fill the space between the town halls and the ‘ivory towers’ of academia. I am also going to suggest a name; the University of Public Life.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lselibrary/3833726778/in/photostream/

45. Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

2012-06-28T08:38:00.000+01:00

Today is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Jean Jacques Rousseau. To celebrate this most auspicious of days, here is my take on what Rousseau might say to anyone involved in community participation today.

Rousseau is my favourite political philosopher and The Social Contract (250 years old this year) is my favourite political book. If you are interested you can read The Social Contract online here or enjoy a couple of Harvard lectures about Rousseau's discourse here and The Social Contract here.

Obviously I can’t do justice here to the work of the great man in a short post – I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to even given the time and space – but here is, I think, in a nutshell, the core of his political argument:

The Social Contract

Rousseau’s central contention is that, in the modern world, people can only enjoy freedom thought direct participation in politics. Furthermore, we are free only when we obey those laws that we have made ourselves. For Rousseau, the moment you let someone else decide the laws you live under, whether it be a monarch, dictator or elected representative, you become no better than a slave.

How then can you only obey your own laws and yet live in a community with others? The Social Contract presents Rousseau’s solution to the problem. It represents a voluntary political association where everyone participates in the making of laws for the community interest (also known as the general will). The key bit is that the laws also apply generally, so that everyone is equally affected:

‘...as every individual gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all, it is no one’s interest to make conditions onerous for others’

Clearly, as Rousseau would also accept, the social contract is an ideal state which is unlikely to ever be seen in reality. However, it provides, I think, a fine political aspiration.

Community Participation: Five Tips from Rousseau

So, what might Rousseau say about modern community participation? Here are five lessons that I think can be drawn from the Social Contract.

1. Get everyone in the community to sign up

The social contract only works because everyone has signed up to it, it cannot be imposed. Similarly community participation needs the consent of the whole community (or an overwhelming proportion of it), whatever that community might be. It might be raised hands at a meeting or a signature on a form; what’s important is that voluntary act of association. If this cannot be achieved then maybe the community participation approach needs to be changed, or maybe community participation isn’t appropriate at all.

2. Only consider general principles

One thing Rousseau would definitely say is that community participation should only be concerned with general issues for the community, issues that affect everyone, if not exactly the same, then in a similar way. Particular issues, such as what happens in one street, or a planning application, will draw out particular interests and lead to conflict. Instead, general issues, such as the speed limit, the acceptable noise level or even the overall balance of spending in an area should be the focus. It is for the ‘government’, whether it be the local authority or another public body to interpret the general principles and put them into practice in particular cases. Once again, if the community as a group gets involved, it can only bring conflict.

3. Only ask about what’s best for the community

Like Rousseau’s general will, the community will expresses the interest of the community as a whole. The question to be asked is not ‘what is best for you?’ or 'what to you want?’ but ‘what is in the best interests of the whole community?’ For the community will is not the ‘average’ of all individual interests but the result of a careful consideration of what is best for all. The fact that everyone is affected more or less the same is important in this context.

4. Ask people to consider the issues as individuals

For Rousseau the general will has the best chance to emerge when citizens undertake their own careful consideration and are not bound by party allegiance or swayed by those with vested interests. So with the community will it is important that party politics, pressure groups or any other type of faction are kept at bay. Citizens should be provided with information and encouraged to debate but not to campaign.

5. Get everyone to participate

For the community will to emerge everyone, or nearly everyone, in the community need to be involved. Comprehensive participation also increases the likelihood that everyone will feel happy to be bound by community laws. Rousseau’s Social Contract was concerned with small city states where face to face participation was possible. There is no reason why communities could not be defined as small enough to make this happen. Alternatively, the use of social media and web technology could make the involvement of larger groups possible.

For me, Rousseau’s political philosophy can be used to underpin a distinctive approach to community participation, an approach that might be challenging in practice but a worthwhile aspiration nevertheless.

Picture credit (portrait): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jean-Jacques_Rousseau_(painted_portrait).jpg

44. Local Digital Democracy: A Five Point Checklist

2012-06-19T14:03:00.001+01:00

Back in February 2011 I wrote a joint post with the legendary Carl Whistlecraft setting out some thinking on local digital democracy and what it might look like. You can find the original post on Carl's blog here.

In the post we defined local digital democracy as:

Using social media to make a bridge between the formal world of local politics and the real world of real people
Being clear that local government is not just about services – it has a distinct and important democratic role with elected local councillors at its heart
Recognising that the world is changing. Social media is changing the way the world works – local democracy needs to catch up
Recognising that local democracy needs stronger citizen engagement
Building from the traditional ways of doing things and using online tools to make them work better and reach more people

We could also see numerous benefits including for decision making and for reputation, for councillors, officers and citizens.

In the post we identified the five essential features of local digital democracy. Here I have just tweaked them into a into a checklist of five questions. I think they provide a nifty little framework for assessing whether any given council 'has' local digital democracy. How does yours score?

Local Digital Democracy: A Five Point Checklist for Local Government

1. Are Councillors Online?

How many councillors are blogging, tweeting, facebooking etc?
Is training and support provided for those using social media?
Are awareness sessions provided for those who haven't yet put their toes in the water?

See CllrSocmed for much more info on this.

2. Is the Council's Online Decision Making Social?

Can online agendas, minutes and reports be easily shared via social media?
Are items broken down into bite sized chunks rather than published in unwieldy PDFs?
Is it possible for people to comment on decision making items via social media?

See my previous post on social council decision making here.

3. Are Council Meetings Social?

Do meetings have webcasts that allow engagement via social media?
Can councillors and citizens tweet at Council meetings?
Does an officer provide a formal live commentary on meetings via social media?

See the Kirklees experience for a great example.
Dave Briggs has also been looking at the issue of tweeting at council meetings.

4. Are Local Elections Social?

Do election teams make use of social media to promote the election process?
Do candidates share their election materials online or parties provide online manifestos?
Are results shared via social media?

Again, more wonderful stuff from Kirklees.

5. Is There a Local Digital Democracy Community?

Is the Council proactively supporting local digital democracy?
Are initiatives such as Local Democracy Week being used to support digital engagement?
Are there online communities supporting local digital democracy and looking at how it might be improved?

I've posted before on Council's producing democracy plans - what's needed is a digital version.

So, what does your Council score out of five? I'd be amazed if any actually scored five but, who knows, maybe one day...

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/3660047829/

43. The Six Roles of the Local Councillor

2012-06-15T12:09:00.001+01:00

I recently came across a leaflet that I was involved in producing for the Council a good few years ago. The aim was to explain to the public what councillors do by highlighting six different roles.

There are a number ways of doing this - I'm not claiming that this is the definitive version, although we did try to take the best of what others had done at the time.

Looking at it now I think it would be interesting to apply these roles in the context of social media - something that wasn't really around when this was made.

Anyhow, I thought it would be worth sharing so here is the text from the leaflet. You might want to credit the City and County of Swansea if you use it.

Local Councillors - What Can We Do For You?

Decision Maker
Your Councillor makes decisions about how Council services are run and may also be a decision maker for your local school, your community partnership or your community centre.

If you feel strongly about something that affects you, then you should let your Councillor know – they can make sure that your views are represented.

Community Volunteer
Your Councillor is likely to be involved in local community activities, projects and groups, giving advice, organising support and making sure that things are happening for old and young alike.

If you want to get involved in your community let your Councillor know – they can help you arrange some volunteering.

Signposter
Your Councillor will know a lot about the services offered by the Council and by other agencies. They can explain why things are done, the way they are done, and why decisions have been made.

If you have something that needs sorting out or you need some advice and you are not sure who to contact ask your Councillor – even if they don’t know they will probably know someone who does!

Watchdog
Your Councillor keeps an eye out to ensure that local services are provided properly and that any problems are reported and sorted whether it’s faulty street lights, potholes, graffiti or abandoned cars. Councillors also have a wider scrutiny role which means that they can look at city wide issues and come up with solutions.

If you spot something that needs sorting out in your community let your Councillor know, it might be part of a wider issue.

Caseworker
Your Councillor sometimes deals with complex disputes that people have with the Council or with other agencies by providing confidential advice, suggesting solutions, and, in some cases, representing people at meetings and through letters. They may also hold regular local surgeries where you can discuss your concerns.

If you have a complaint or a dispute with the Council or other agency and you don’t feel confident about dealing with it yourself, let your Councillor know – they may be able to help.

Campaigner
Your Councillor may be involved in campaigning for changes in your community or city wide, in charities and in voluntary groups.

If you are interested in starting a campaign then contact your Councillor – they can give you advice and maybe even some support.

42. Cause Marketing for the Public Sector

2012-06-06T19:13:00.001+01:00

I saw this blog post from Richard Layman (via @greatemancipato) about some of the issues around parking provision in cities. The whole thing is worth a read but what particularly caught my eye was the proposal by Professor Donald Shoup, working for the city of Pasadena, that the higher parking charges he had suggested could be made more palatable to local businesses if they could see that the money was going back into the city centre:

To address the concerns of the proprietors of businesses in the commercial district, who preferred low-priced parking because they believed it to be key to the success of their businesses, he recommended to the city that they spend the bulk of the revenue generated by the parking meters on public space and other improvements to the commercial district.

It turned out that this approach worked as a parking scheme and was also acceptable to local business.

For me, the moral of this story is that when people pay charges or taxes they feel much better about it if they know where the money is going and agree with what it is being used for. OK, I don't have any hard evidence to back this up (a topic for further research perhaps?) but I know from my days working in the Housing Department how passionate council tenants were that the money they paid in rent was used only to benefit council housing (the law agreed as it happens). I'd also suggest that this connection between donation and use is an important motivation in charitable giving. Conversely I know that many people don't like the idea of their money going to 'the council' who they believe wants their money simply to grow rich.

Turns out that the parking story is an example of 'cause marketing'; something that is already a thing in the private sector. Take this example from the wikipedia page:

Following various pilot schemes in 1981, American Express developed a campaign which donated funds to a number of different non-profit organizations as part of the San Francisco Arts Festival. Essentially every time someone used an American Express Card in the area, a 2 cent donation was triggered and each time new members applied for a card a larger contribution was made... Card usage was reported as having increased significantly and relationships between American Express and their merchants also improved as a result of the promotion. From the charity's point of view, despite being a short-term campaign, $108,000 was raised, making a significant contribution to their work.

The idea of cause marketing seems like a useful one for local government, particularly the idea of stating where charges will go. Even it it is something that already happens it would make sense to make it more visible and advertise the fact. It doesn't even need to be the whole amount or a permanent thing e.g. "this month 50% of car park charges are going to support the local park". Other obvious areas where this might apply include leisure centres, theatres, museums and galleries. I'm sure there must be others.

I wonder if it might even apply to to council tax. Of course it isn't voluntary and council's often do provide a nice pie chart showing where everything goes, but maybe more could be done to give people a genuine sense of connection between the local tax they pay and the benefits that it provides. Maybe each year there could be a theme i.e. 5% of council tax could be allocated to healthy city initiatives or maybe to school literacy schemes.

Either way, strengthening the link in the minds of citizens between charges and taxes on the one hand, and public good on the other, can only be for the best.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/davedugdale/5457170804/

41. The I-Spy of Reasons Why

2012-06-01T18:09:00.001+01:00

In local government, why do we work in the ways that we do?

Why do we adopt new ways of doing things?

More to the point, do we know why we do what we do?

Well, this post is an attempt at a spotters guide.

I'm thinking specifically about initiatives; those local government ways of doing things otherwise known as programmes, policies and approaches. Off the top of my head I can think of Total Quality Management, Restorative Practice, Appreciative Inquiry, Performance Management, Results Based Accountability, Business Process Re-engineering, Systems Thinking, Programme Management.... there are many, many more – I’m sure you get the picture.

I like this quote from Richard Dawkins taken from a letter of advice he wrote to his daughter that you can find in ‘A Devil’s Chaplain’. In the letter he asks her always to ask people for the evidence that justifies their beliefs. He then says:

But now I want to move on from evidence, which is a good reason for believing something, and warn you against three bad reasons for believing anything. They are called "tradition," "authority," and "revelation."

I’ve used it as a starting point for an I-Spy list of reasons why we do things in local government (points reflect rarity value of course).

Five Reasons Why Local Government Adopts New Initiatives

1. Tradition (10 points)

Tradition is, of course, a powerful reason for not doing something new. If you are interested in the theory behind that statement, New Institutionalism looks at the ways in which informal rules shape behaviour (see the chapter on Institutionalism by Vivien Lowndes in this book for an overview). The phrase ‘rules in use’ captures well the idea that people are happy to be guided by those informal ways of doing things that are rarely written down. When ‘ways of doing things’ have been part of organisational life for a while, they become socially as well as formally embedded and people will often feel uncomfortable about the idea of change.

2. Authority (5 points)

Just like individuals, organisations do things because they are told to rather than because they choose to. For local government this might mean things determined by national government, for departments it might mean things imposed by the centre.

3. Common Sense (5 points)

This, for me, is the worst reason. Given the complexity of organisational and social problems we face it seems bizarre to me that people are still happy to reach for ‘obvious answers’ without checking for relevant research and evidence. Take the example of cycle helmets. They make you safer right? Well actually they might do the opposite and there is plenty of debate on this seemingly innocuous question. They might make you safer and they might not – the point is that this is a lot more complicated than it might first appear. I think you have to be very brave to commit to anything based purely on common sense.

4. Fashion (20 points)

Well, fashion might not be exactly the right word, but its close. In local government, as challenges are often so complex, we will often (understandably) reach for the latest thing, hoping it will solve all of our problems. Some people do like to be associated with new initiatives and the very newness of something can serve to energise – and there is nothing wrong with that.

I love this quote from John Le Carre’s ‘Smiley’s People’ which, set in the civil service, provides a more cynical take:

He had been the witness, or victim – or even the reluctant prophet – of such spurious cults as lateralism, parallelism, separatism, operational devolution, and now, if he remembered Lacon’s most recent meanderings correctly, of integration. Each new fashion had been hailed as a panacea: ‘Now we shall vanquish, now the machine will work!’ Each had gone out with a wimper, leaving behind it the familiar English muddle, of which, more and more, in retrospect, he saw himself as a lifelong moderator.

You can imagine a spectrum for these new initiatives with snake oil at one end and panacea at the other. In reality, of course, most will fall at one point in between – the important question is where.

5. Evaluation (50 points)

Ah yes, a careful review of the evidence leading to a considered decision. Of course not everything will be backed by gold standard research but at least an open, honest and balanced judgement can be made. It is reasonable, for example, to do something new on the basis that it is experimental and maybe even to include an element of research. Ultimately it's all about having a decent decision making process - I've posted along similar lines previously.

------

Many initiatives, include most of those I mentioned above, have much of value and I’m more than happy to subscribe to a couple. My point is that we should be clearer about why we adopt and maintain them. By being critical in this way we will have a better chance of success.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lwr/368278941/

40. Six Reasons to Use Social Media for Scrutiny

2012-05-11T15:02:00.000+01:00

In a previous post I developed the idea of social council decision making.

Here I want to make the case for using social media in my own line of work –overview and scrutiny (If you are not sure what that is - it's a bit like a local government version of parliamentary select committees – find out more here). Our scrutiny team has been blogging and tweeting for just over two years now without any problems and, as I have had a couple of people asking me about this recently, I thought it was worth sharing some of my own ideas about this. For those thinking about developing social media for scrutiny I hope this post will give some food for thought and, if needed, will help them to make the case.

There are already many great examples of scrutiny teams using social media; Kirklees, Bristol, Brighton, Harrow, recently Warwickshire all spring to mind and there are many others. The Centre for Public Scrutiny keep a list of tweeting scrutiny units that you can find on their twitter page here.

So, in no particular order, here are my six main reasons why scrutiny teams should use social media.

1. Research

Consultation and evidence gathering makes up a large part of what overview and scrutiny does. Social media tools such as blogs and twitter are great ways of supporting this. This might be directly though gathering comments, for example, or by advertising surveys and research events. Dedicated social media accounts are also great for disseminating the research that overview and scrutiny committees do. You can use twitter, for example to share findings and target relevant organisations.

2. Niche Marketing

The scrutiny function is non executive, in other words it operates independently of the Cabinet. It is, of course, not independent from the Council but it does have a distinctive role. It makes sense, therefore, for scrutiny committees to have their own distinctive channels for communication and social media can help with this. In a more general sense I fully subscribe to the idea that councils should have a wide range of twitter and other social media accounts as people can then follow their particular interests (within an overarching council brand). It is far better to reach a smaller number of people who choose to follow scrutiny than to reach a much larger group who don’t really care.

3. Public Engagement

Overview and scrutiny is intended to be a way for the public to influence decision making. Social media accounts can help this in two ways. First it allows scrutiny teams to provide a friendly and understandable running commentary on the work of the overview and scrutiny committees – through blogging in particular, but also the use of video, can help translate the inevitably jargonistic language of committee minutes, agendas and reports. Second, social media gives scrutiny teams the opportunity to answer questions and signpost information. To be honest we haven’t had a great deal of this type of engagement with the public but we live in hope! Of course any engagement of this type must take place within corporately agreed guidelines and people must know what they are doing, but this is simply the sort of professional behaviour you would expect in any case.

4. Network Building

Scrutiny teams work with a range of local organisations, think tanks, academics, other layers of government and other scrutiny teams in order to understand current issues and good practice. Social media provides a great platform for scrutiny teams to link in with current debates, ask questions and disseminate the work of their own committees which often have a wider value outside of the council in question. Relationships developed through social media can sometimes lead to people contributing to the work of scrutiny that might not have done otherwise.

5. Councillor Engagement

Unlike many other council services, scrutiny teams work directly with councillors and, as local politicians increasing make use of social media to connect with the public, so it makes sense for scrutiny teams to work through this medium as well. Providing information about what scrutiny committees are doing through social media makes it easier for the councillors sitting on those committees to share that information through their own networks.

6. Internal Engagement

One of the familiar challenges for scrutiny teams is the low levels of awareness amongst council officers about what scrutiny actually does. Even where twitter and youtube might be blocked sites, blogs and internal social media such as yammer might be used to reach an internal audience. Intranets can also be used to share social media content with staff and provide messages about what scrutiny is doing.

There are, it seems, always concerns about responsible use of social media by staff but scrutiny teams, as it happens, are used to working in a politically sensitive environment and can therefore adapt with ease to the ‘publicly sensitive’ environment of social media – and do this within the context of any overarching communications strategy.

Yes, there may be occasions when things don’t quite work as planned but the potential rewards surely far outweigh any risks – especially when you consider that the financial cost is often zero.

Finally, I want to point scrutiny folk to this post by Helen Reynolds where she argues that we should be thinking of using social media primarily in terms of the increased influence it brings:

As far as terminology goes, 'influence' makes a bit more sense when you consider its synonym 'authority'. We are local authorities and we want our communication to have 'authority' in that it has high credibility and currency.

'High credibility and currency' - if that isn't what we want for scrutiny, then I don't know what is.

Photo credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BLW_Telegram_Table.jpg

39. Moot Halls

2012-05-01T21:19:00.001+01:00

I was reading some G.D.H. Cole recently, out of passing curiosity really, and I came across his idea of Moot Halls and I thought it was a great one to include on this blog.

G.D.H Cole was a left wing academic with a strong belief that you could change the world through education. You can find his Wikipedia page here.

Cole’s Democracy

Cole’s democracy could perhaps be characterised as an aversion to big government and a preference for smaller associations, either at work or in the community. For Cole local government in urban areas, because of its size, had become as distant from ordinary people as national government. In the face of this, the problem for Cole was ’to find democratic ways of living for little men in big societies’. For him:

Democracy can work in the great states...only if each state is made up of a host of little democracies...

Three of his assumptions in particular are interesting for local democracy:

That democracy requires that people know each other personally, as neighbours or comrades, for example, so that a genuine bond of sympathy and empathy exists
The belief in natural associations, in other words those groups that form around work places, churches, neighbourhoods, hobbies etc, as the basis for a living democracy
That we have to accept messiness in the democratic system – an almost anarchic willingness to build democracy on the 'natural' building blocks of associations and to be unconcerned about even or regular state structures

Moot Halls

Cole describes the idea of Moot Halls in his 1941 essay ’The Essentials of Democracy’:

I am suggesting that there ought to be for every street, or little group of streets, for every block of flats, and, of course, every village and hamlet a regularly recognised, neighbourhood group, with a right to discuss and resolve upon anything under the sun. I am not merely suggesting that this should happen: I say it ought to be made to happen. Every new group of streets we build ought to have its little Moot Hall for such assemblies of its people, ought to have its little centre for their communal affairs.

Wider than their democratic purpose, Cole suggested that Moot Halls should have other functions such as childcare centres, cafes, bakeries, and social clubs. In this context Moot Halls sound similar to many of the centres opened through modern regeneration projects - although these don’t have the democratic function (perhaps they should).

Personally I love this idea and would like to see it considered as something that might be included in every new development; a kind of democratic planning gain.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cornelluniversitylibrary/3855917845/

38. Agile Partnerships

2012-04-15T20:34:00.000+01:00

I’m arguing in this post that we should apply the same flexibility to partnerships that we are beginning to see applied more and more to public sector working practices. Before I get onto that, let me say a little a bit about current attitudes to partnerships.

The Partnership Problem

Partnerships, especially the formal ones have a pretty bad press. The dominant narrative is, in a nutshell, that there are too many of them. This can be broken down into a number of specific criticisms:

Many partnerships meet unnecessarily including those that have continued beyond their sell by date
Too much precious resource is used supporting them
Many lack clear focus or purpose
The same people meet again and again in different partnerships
They lead to unnecessary complexity
Accountability is unclear – they can create a ‘democratic deficit’

This type of critique (although I have yet to see it properly evidenced – correct me if I am wrong) has led to governments pursuing partnership rationalisation. This was one of the aims of Local Strategic Partnerships in England and now informs the thinking of the Welsh Government (see this recent consultation). The argument that follows is that we need to reduce the number of partnerships, simplify structures and create hierarchies so that accountabilities can be strengthened.

The Joy of Partnerships

I want to argue from a different perspective. I think partnerships are a good thing. They involve people coming together around a single issue or shared concern such as community safety, health inequality or literacy. In fact, in many ways, partnerships make much more sense to me than organisations such as local authorities or health boards.

I remember someone from social services once telling me that partnership meetings were usually productive and often motivating; a good use of time. It was the internal meetings, of which there were many more, that she wished didn’t keep taking her away from her ‘real’ work.

So, for me the ‘partnership problem’ is that we apply organisational thinking (and quite old organisational thinking at that) to something that needs to be fluid and flexible. Remember, partnerships are not usually organisations in the sense that they formally control resources or people. And yet we can’t help formalising them, agreeing terms of reference, producing minutes and establishing reporting mechanisms. I’m not sure that all this is necessary.

Agile Partnerships

I’m really interested in the current ideas around agile working and I think they should be applied to partnerships. Agile working includes things like home working and flexible working but, at heart, is about being more concerned with the outcome than the process. Here is one definition from Paul Allsopp:

Agile working is about bringing people, processes, connectivity and technology, time and place together to find the most appropriate and effective way of working to carry out a particular task. It is working within guidelines (of the task) but without boundaries (of how you achieve it).

An agile approach to partnerships would have the following features:

Spontaneity - partnerships form wherever and whenever they are needed; there should be no limit on the number. This should also apply to the ending of partnerships. People must feel free to walk away when partnerships are not longer working / necessary. Ironically, more rigidly organised partnerships are harder to end.
Informality Rules – regular reporting, minute taking and partnership agreements should be avoided. If something needs to be noted or shared then just do it. Partnerships don’t have to be bureaucratic.
Voluntary Participation – it seems to me that the success of partnerships depends on the passion and purpose of the participants rather than the rules we establish to make them work. If people have to be ‘signed up’ before they can participate then, in my book, it’s not a partnership.
One Purpose – However you want to define them, partnerships work best when they concentrate on a single outcome such as reducing domestic violence or the number of young people outside of education, employment and training. ‘Sector’ partnerships, such as for health and wellbeing or children and young people, risk being overly complex and can struggle to prioritise.
Personal Accountability - for me the answer to the problem of accountability in partnerships can be solved by locating accountability purely with the individuals involved. It is impossible to ignore the fact that people already bring their organisational accountabilities with them but this can be a virtue rather than a problem when people are able to find partners with shared aims.

Ultimately, I think, the secret is for organisations to invest their trust in the people that work for them and to let partnerships become a natural way of pooling resources; part of the natural ebb and flow of public professional life. These agile partnerships are surely better than the pseudo-organisations that many partnerships have become; generating the mistrust of professionals and elected representatives alike.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/anat_flickr/4377123623/

37. Co-production Trusts

2012-03-25T20:27:00.001+01:00

In this post I want to argue for an approach to community programmes very different to the approach I've been used to.

Specifically I want to suggest that, instead of setting up community regeneration partnerships or projects that look to fix something about a community, we should instead be looking to set up organisations that look to fix the way services are provided to that community.

We Need to Talk About Community Regeneration

When we use the term ‘community regeneration’ we are immediately implying that the problem is with ‘the community’ and that it is ‘the community’ that needs to be fixed. The term is already taking our attention away from society as whole and ‘system wide’ issues such as inequality.

As a consequence interventions will often be special activities that are only applied to that community such as partnership boards, community centres, capacity building projects etc etc. While I’m sure these things are all valuable in their own right, what the Marmot Review tells us is that, if we are serious about tackling inequality, then we need to be thinking about proportionate universalism, not interventions that focus only on the most deprived.

It is also worth pointing out that the effectiveness of community regeneration programmes is highly questionable. As Alasdair Rae argues, Governments have not been good at learning from research. If they were it might help them to locate area based programmes much more effectively in broader social programmes. As a result objectives have often not been met.

The Co-Production Deficit

For me co-production means that all public services depend on the contribution of both the service provider and on the contribution of the public. It is the relationship between provider and public which determines the extent to which the assets of both are utilised and the subsequent effectiveness of the service in question. If you start from this perspective it comes as no surprise that services ‘delivered’ equally to all can nevertheless result in an inequality of outcome. What you get is a co-production deficit because some people are able to get more out of services than others.

Hastings and Mathews have been doing some really interesting research that highlights the various ways in which the middle classes are able to reap the benefits of services more efficiently than the working classes through, for example, joining groups such as parent teacher associations, complaining effectively and interacting with bureaucrats, teachers, doctors etc who are usually middle class themselves.

On the other side of the coin I was really struck by this piece by Clare Galloway. It illustrates perfectly what happens when the relationships between providers and public break down. More than that it shows how an inflexible and judgemental service delivery culture can actively work against effective co-production by stifling attempts to make things better. There is also a well made point in this piece about people being expected to work as unpaid volunteers to sort out community ‘problems’; work that we normally expect paid professionals to do.

Co-production Trusts

My argument is that, instead of regeneration partnerships, we need co-production trusts; organisations that seek to reduce the co-production deficit by working on behalf of deprived areas so that they can see the same service benefits as middle class areas, that they can achieve equality of outcomes. Such bodies would be consistent with proportionate universalism and would contribute to system wide approaches.

I have three suggestions about what co-production trusts might do in practice.

1. Advocacy

The trust would act as a lobbying agency on behalf of the community, campaigning for equality of outcomes and higher levels of service where this is needed, ensuring that policy makers are fully aware of the community and its needs. Making sure that environmental services are targeted in the right way, getting involved in the planning process and arguing for accessible facilities. As with any advocacy, this work would be done by specialists who work to the instruction of their clients; the community.

2. Referrals

The trust would act as a ‘dating agency’ for referrals. Again, acting only with the permission of those affected, arranging appointments and even attending alongside if that is something people wanted. More generally the trust would be able to identify potentially useful services and share this with the community. This all about ensuring that services are getting to where they are needed and to where they can have the most impact.

3. Changing Relationships

The trust would act as ‘marriage guidance counsellor’, seeking to improve the overall relationship between providers and public. In part this would be about awareness raising and training for public workers (something Hastings and Mathews have suggested), in part this might be about offering advice to residents about how to get the most out of their services. This might also be a form of mediation; getting people together to explore how things might work differently.

As organisations these trusts should be democratically connected to the communities that they are working for including being properly linked to local politicians at all levels.

The one bit of this I’m sure isn’t right is the name 'co-production trusts' - lets just call them something else when we are out in the real world...

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artefatica/4630521467/

36. Four Conjectures about Local Government and Public Participation

2012-03-03T12:15:00.001Z

Jim Bulpitt once said that ’like a well-established, and well loved, music hall act, participation and local government are words often found in partnership’.

Trouble is that this has not been a particularly successful partnership, at least not in terms of participation actually influencing local policies and decisions in any meaningful way. Despite more than 40 years of experimenting with participatory initiatives in the UK such as citizens' panels, area forums and focus groups, there has been very little evidence to suggest that there has been any real policy impact.

The interesting question for me is why this relationship hasn’t worked out as many have hoped. If we knew why then maybe we could fix it, or, if it can’t be fixed, we could do something more productive with our time (that's probably a pretty fair summary of my PhD).

This is a question that has been neglected in my opinion. Partly this is because the ‘participation’ literature has tended to be more interested in the process of getting people to participate in the initiatives or the operations of the initiatives themselves. Partly because explanations are not in one place - you have to go out and look for them. Aside from the local government and participation literatures you need to look in a number of places such as democratic theory, state theory and institutional theory for example.

I want to make the business of explaining the relationship between local government and public participation more manageable. To do this I have proposed four conjectures which are intended to cover the major possibilities. All four are plausible, in my opinion, although they can’t all be right.

Here then are the four conjectures (I have borrowed the ‘conjectures approach’ from Klijn and Skelcher who set it out in a paper that you can find here):

Transitional
Local government is in transition between a purely representative form of local democracy and a new hybrid version enhanced by participative initiatives. This transition is evidenced by the good practice that exists in many local councils and the proliferation in participatory initiatives sponsored by local government over recent years. The failure to influence the policy process is simply a question of poor institutional design – we simply don’t have the right mechanisms yet with which to connect up initiatives with the policy process. This will come in time – we should just keep on experimenting.

Incompatibility
Only elected, representative local government is appropriate for our large scale and complex nature; modern democracy is necessarily elitist. This conjecture draws on elite democratic theory and highlights the practical problems associated with any attempt to construct a hybrid form of democracy. Despite the good intentions of the officials that support them, the outcomes from initiatives can only be given a low value by local politicians who will see them as little more than symbolic. Either we need to radically redesign our local democracy or we should lower our expectations significantly.

Instrumental
This conjecture draws on Marxist theory to describe the way in which local government uses participatory initiatives cynically as a means of managing the urban population. It starts from the position that local government is an institution which administers economic and social policies on behalf of the central state. Participatory initiatives are used as pro-active management tools used to gather information and to deal with protest. While the prospects for achieving outcomes are nonexistent it may still be possible to use initiatives as a platform for protest.

Resistivity
The word ‘resistivity’ is borrowed from physical science where it refers to the extent to which a material opposes the flow of an electrical current. It draws on institutional theory and focuses on the way in which the behaviours of people in local government are shaped by entrenched (formal and informal) rules and norms. These ‘old rules’ may work against the new ways of thinking and working that come with participatory initiatives – they tend to ensure that outcomes are resisted. These ‘old rules’ are not fixed, however, and can be changed by individuals acting in the right way. This is no easy task, however, and it may be better instead to work through external or new organisations, more open to new ways of doing things.

As I said these are all plausible theories – there is evidence to support each. It is of course important to know which is (most) right - particularly if you want to see participatory initiatives influencing policy and decision making and if you have responsibility for making them work.

The detailed version of these conjectures can be found in my article: UK Local Government and Public Participation: Using Conjectures to Explain the Relationship – Public Administration, 2011

Update! Thanks to the good people at Wiley Politics, the full article is FREE to download until the end of July 2012. Thanks guys!

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfriver/416847745/

35. Reduce Inequality with Universal Services

2012-03-01T21:37:00.000Z

Proportionate universalism is a very, very important idea in my opinion.

It is one of the key concepts to have come out of the Marmot Review. If you are not familiar with this review then, well, why not? It is a comprehensive and thoroughly well researched statement of what causes health inequality and what we have to do if we want to reduce it.

The report that came out of the review, Fair Society, Healthy Lives, argues that inequalities in health cannot be tackled effectively if we only focus on the most deprived:

To reduce the steepness of the social gradient in health, actions must be universal, but with a scale and intensity that is proportionate to the level of disadvantage. We call this proportionate universalism. Greater intensity of action is likely to be needed for those with greater social and economic disadvantage, but focusing solely on the most disadvantaged will not reduce the health gradient, and will only tackle a small part of the problem.

Here are a couple of charts which seek to illustrate the point (I have borrowed them from a presentation by Dr Fu-Meng Khaw that can be found here):

Instead of thinking about equality of service output, as local government has traditionally done, we need to be thinking about equality of service outcome. Even more than this, remember that services are already universally in-proportionate by virtue of the fact that the middle classes are able to draw down public services more effectively than those lower in the social scale. This research by Matthews and Hastings is a really interesting exploration of exactly that issue.

How Can Universal Services be Made Proportionate?

As Llaria Geddes points out in her presentation to the Greenwich Health and Wellbeing Partnership (that can be found here), practitioners and professionals get proportionate universalism as a concept but find it less easy to understand how it can be put into practice.

Using some of the examples in that presentation I want to offer some tentative suggestions about how proportionate universalism might be applied in practice. In part this is about breaking down services into types according to the way that they are delivered.

Seven Strategies

1. Invest in Services that are Intrinsically Proportionate

As Llara Geddes notes in her presentation, some services have proportionalism built in. Some services, such as GP services for example, are tailored to individuals and should automatically respond to levels of need. Other services, such as the provision of green spaces in urban areas, can be more attractive for those who need them most and will have less of an impact on people with the resources to travel or to live in greener areas.

2. Specify Service Zones

For ‘place based’ services such as street cleansing, street lighting and planning, outcomes can be ‘equalised’ by concentrating services at different levels in different areas. ‘Service zones’ would work just like planning or environmental areas, conferring a particular status on a geographic area with maybe three or four levels. For street cleansing this might mean having different frequencies of service depending on the level of risk for an area. For other services it might mean different speeds of response times for repairs or dealing with graffiti etc. For planning it might mean more intense advice or consultation in areas less likely to have the resources to engage with planning processes.

3. Build the Right Referral Systems

For services that are provided directly to households or to individuals (e.g. benefits advice, pest control and home energy advice) referrals can be used to ensure that access is increased amongst those less likely to ask for services or respond to advertising or marketing campaigns (it may be better not to do these at all). Referrals can take place across any services but ‘first line’ services such as GPs and health visitors will be particularly important.

4. Provide Enhanced Services

The presentation gives the example of the fire service giving additional support for vulnerable people. In the same way any service provided directly to households / individuals can include triggers for extra layers of service.

5. Carefully Target Population Groups

Providing services to certain population groups will have a proportionate affect because of the nature of those groups. The presentation gives the examples of providing effective contact to, and support for, young people who are not in employment, education or employment. Carers and care leavers are other examples of these types of group.

6. Ensure that Service Centres are Community Sensitive

Many services are delivered via physical centres - in other words from a building within a community. Examples include health centres, schools, libraries, leisure centres and community centres. The way that these centres provide their services can be varied, whether in terms of opening hours, access, associated groups (PTAs, friends of), community involvement or facilities. A proportionate approach would ensure that centres are sensitive to the needs of the community where they are located and that their services are adjusted accordingly. They can also provide an excellent point of referral for other services.

7. Provide New Service Centres

It might be that existing service centres are not enough to ensure that access is being ‘equalised’. Sure Start centres are an example of an initiative that concentrates universal services. The spatial distribution of these types of centre can ensure a proportionate approach.

34. Evaluate the Policy Outcomes from Public Participation

2012-02-24T17:23:00.001Z

If I want to describe the force of an earthquake I can use the Richter scale, if I want to describe wind speed I can use the Beaufort scale but if I want to describe the impact of public participation on local government policy and decision making (and I do – it’s what my PhD is about) what can I use?

The answer is nothing as far as I know.

The purpose of this post, therefore, is to share the crude scale I’m using to describe the value of the outcomes from participatory initiatives on policy and decision making. It is very much a work in progress so please feel free to suggest improvements!

My Kind of Outcomes

Public participation initiatives, such as citizens’ panels, area forums, focus groups etc, will normally consider issues, relevant to policies or decisions being considered and will produce outcomes. By outcomes I mean opinions or proposals that might be captured formally through minutes or reports, or informally by decision makers, perhaps councillors, being present and taking conclusions away with them. These outcomes are the policy products of participatory initiatives.

Evaluating Public Participation Isn’t Simple

While I am only really interested in those outcomes relevant to policy and decision making there are of course a wide range of other outcomes that can be evaluated, sometimes it seems, to the exclusion of the ones I’m interested in.

I’m not going to get into the whole thing here. If you want to see the whole picture then Tina Nabatchi has produced a very useful ‘Manager’s Guide to Evaluating Citizen Participation’ that you can download here. It gives a very good feel for the challenge of evaluating public participation, as she says:

Public participation is an inherently complex and value-laden concept. There are no widely held criteria for judging the success and failure of citizen participation efforts. Some advocates focus on the intrinsic benefits of participation and believe that its instrumental outcomes are irrelevant. Others focus on its instrumental outcomes for citizens, communities, policy, and governance. Critics often doubt both sets of claims.

Nabatchi’s guide also highlights some of the specific challenges associated with evaluating the specific type of outcomes I’m interested in:

...there are difficulties in demonstrating causal links between participation and policy outcomes, in part due to the time lag between processes and policy or public action, as well as intervening events. There is also considerable ambiguity about what would constitute a substantial impact, which means that impact must be considered in relation to the initial goals of the participatory program. Finally, scholars and practitioners are still devising methods with which to better examine the links between public participation processes and public policy changes and action.

This then, is my attempt to try and address those challenges.

A Simple Evaluation Scale

For my scale I have borrowed from this paper by Paul Burton on measuring the benefits of public participation. In particular two of the ‘strands’ he argues need to be considered when conceptualising participation.

The first strand is the level or scope of the decision: Burton describes the possible range like this:

At one end of the continuum are decisions that affect everyone in a particular constituency or jurisdiction, while at the other end are those affecting only a few.

I’ve adapted this a little bit and have divided decisions between those that are strategic, affecting the whole local authority area, and those that are local, affecting one community or population group.

The second strand is what Burton calls the participatory relationship, in other words:

the relationship between those people who choose to or are invited to participate and those who retain formal responsibility for making the decision in question. At one end of the spectrum formal responsibility for taking a decision is handed to all participants, for example in a referendum, while at the other end participants are allowed only the most cursory degree of involvement and in ways that have no meaningful impact on the decision taken.

Again, to simplify, and to place this in a local government context, I’ve distinguished between those cases where the difference made is decisive and where the initiative has been informing.

From a councillor perspective these two categories are the flip side of two classic representations of the councillor role. For those councillors who see themselves as trustees, in other words, elected to follow their own judgements, the informing relationship is likely to fit more comfortably. For those that sees their role as one of delegate, closely representing the views of the public, a more decisive influence might be more likely.

Putting the two strands together generates four types of value and looks like this:

I then translate this into a four part scale as follows:

1. High Value (Strategically decisive)
Outcomes either substantially change the intended decision / policy or bring a clear direction where the way forward was in doubt. We would expect this to happen in connection with council, cabinet or even strategic partnership meetings.

2. Medium Value (Locally decisive; strategically informing)
A substantial change or a clear direction is affected at a local level through say an area committee.
Alternatively the influence is council wide and the outcome has been clearly taken into account but as one of many considerations of which others were decisive.

3. Low Value (Locally informing)
The outcome has been clearly taken into account by local councillors or officers acting locally but it cannot be said to be decisive.

4. No Value (Neither decisive nor informing)
Nothing has happened as a consequence of the outcome.

I appreciate that this scale is a crude one that plays fast and loose with many subtleties and is likely to be highly subjective in its application. No doubt it could also be improved. Nevertheless I believe it at least goes someway to describing something which has (probably) never been properly described before.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/playingwithpsp/2280744328/

33. The Public Servant: A Local Government Biz Book

2012-01-22T20:45:00.000Z

This idea is a proposal for a book, one that I think is missing from the market, a local government ‘biz book’.

I started thinking about this after a couple of exchanges on twitter with Mary Mckenna (no relation!). Mary leads a company called Learning Pool that provides e-learning for the public sector. She told me that she often reads biz books and found one of them – From Good to Great – so valuable that she bought a load of copies for the company and got everyone at Learning Pool to read it. While there is a real industry around ‘how to’ guides for the private sector manager, there isn’t really a public sector equivalent – we agreed that there should be.

So, here is my take on what that book might look like.

The core concept of my book is to take Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ and update and adapt it for the present day public sector manager. Instead of The Prince I call it The Public Servant. Instead of advice on ruling a city state it will provide advice on managing a service or policy area.

The Prince

The Prince is almost exactly 500 years old. It is a very readable and relatively short text - well worth having a look at.

The purpose of The Prince was to provide advice to the autocratic rulers of the time, particularly the new ones, about how to rule successfully. Machiavelli has a reputation for promoting the dark arts of politics but his intention, with this book in any case, was to present a realistic view of the political world and to offer advice accordingly. As a one time senior civil servant in Florence he knew what he was talking about.

The Prince was controversial for its advocacy of ‘immoral’ methods in certain situations and for its distinction between public and private morality. There has been much debate over the years about whether the book should be taken at face value not least because Machiavelli himself is widely believed to have been a republican.

Leaving all that to one side, I reckon I can borrow a number of useful things from The Prince for The Public Servant including:

The use of examples from the classics although where Machiavelli referred to Greek and Roman classics I will be referring to the local government classics
A realistic view of the world – in this case the world of contemporary local government
The concept of fortune, in other words the constant change that those in local government are exposed to and need to respond to
The concept of virtue – in other words, independent of universal moral codes, the values needed in the role to respond to particular circumstances

The Public Servant

The Public Servant will have four main chapters.

1. The Meaning of Public Service
The value of public service, recognising the value of what the public sector does, the central duty of the public servant to protect and promote the service or policy that they are responsible for.

2. How to Protect Your Service or Policy Against Change
The nature of change in local government, the different types of change, the values needed in different circumstances to protect your service or policy.

3. How to Promote Your Service or Policy
Why the public manager needs to be constantly promoting their service or policy, the different methods to be used and the circumstances to use them in, internal and external arenas.

4. How to Build Your Team
The qualities of a good team, the way to appoint and retain good staff, the way to lead a team and ensure loyalty and commitment

Sound like a bestseller?

Photo credit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Machiavel_Offices_Florence.jpg
Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blue_mountains_library/6415559533/

32. Proper Methodology

2012-01-21T18:07:00.000Z

If you follow me on twitter you might have heard me moaning about people who use the word methodology when what they really mean is method. You probably think this is just some grumpy middle aged bloke being pedantic and, well, you are probably right.

Anyhow, I do wonder whether 'proper' methodology has something to offer for council decision making. Before I explain what that might be, here is my go at defining methodology - forgive me if you already know this stuff - you can skip to the last bit.

Methodology in Research

In broad terms methodology refers to the consideration of methods (survey, focus group, participant observation etc etc) and is a word normally found in the context of research. Specifically it tends to refer to a discussion of why certain methods were chosen over others. If you have ever produced a dissertation for a course you will probably have written a methodology section (you know, that bit about quantitative and qualitative methods – you probably wrote it last).

A methodological discussion in the context of research would normally include:

The aim / purpose of the research

Your philosophical assumptions – such as how you view the nature of reality (ontology), how you think things can be known (epistemology)

The different methods available

The resources available to undertake the research and any other practical limitations

Ethical considerations – if your research involves children, for example.

The characteristics of the group, people or things being researched –researching an elite is different to researching the public for example

Having taken all these factors into account the researcher can then justify the choice of research method and how set out how the research will proceed. A clearly stated methodology provides transparency and supports rigour. By setting out your choices it is possible for others to challenge poor decisions and see if your reasoning is consistent. This point about consistency is why it is important to set out your philosophical assumptions even if these things may seem ‘academic’ and are ultimately difficult to prove one way or the other.

A Proper Public Service Methodology

Boiling it right down, methodology is simply an aspect of decision making and this is why I think it can be applied in the public sector which is, after all, constantly considering methods. If you think about it, many of the questions that go to local government cabinet and council meetings are about choosing methods e.g. ‘which method should we use to deliver this service?’ or ‘which method should we use to achieve this policy aim?’.

Why not include a methodology section, similar to that used for research, in every report that considers this type of question?

I am not suggesting that every council report should spell out the author’s philosophical assumptions (although, why not!) but, while many factors are explained (aims, needs etc), there are some important assumptions that inform decision making that often go unstated such as:

Assumptions about human nature and how people will behave

Assumptions about what people want

Assumptions about staff behaviours, capabilities etc

Ethical assumptions

Exactly how this might happen in practice might need some further working out but I hope you get the gist.

Let me give the example of sickness absence policy to show what I mean.

Essentially there are two views of human nature / behaviour that can underpin this policy each having very different implications for the methods that get used. One is to assume that people want take advantage of the organisation and ‘pull a sickie’ given the opportunity. This assumption lead to policies such as increased monitoring by managers and use of disciplinary procedures. The alternative is to assume that sickness is genuine and that employees want to be in work. This assumption leads to investment in occupational therapy, stress counselling and the like. A third option is to assume that both types of behaviours exist and this implies that both strategies need to be used but is this really possible? Does one set of strategies cancel out the benefits of the other? To be honest I don’t know but if these assumptions were set out clearly then the implications could be tested and debated.

So, by introducing proper methodology into council decision making we should get a more transparent, rigorous and ultimately effective process.

It's the democratic equivilent of showing the working out.

And, if I have used the term methodology incorrectly – please feel free to tweet me :)

Photo credit (presentation): http://www.flickr.com/photos/fumi/2740537902/in/photostream/
Photo credit (blackboard): http://www.flickr.com/photos/gianpierre_soto/5505213117/

31. Appreciative Community Planning

2012-01-18T22:11:00.000Z

Community planning (a.k.a. producing a community strategy for a local council area) is one of the things I’m involved in doing for my own authority. If you have been involved in this type of process, either supporting or as a ‘stakeholder’ you will know what a challenging area of work it is. The expectation is that local needs will be mapped, the public consulted and all relevant agencies and organisations engaged. This is, as you might expect, quite a challenge. While producing a community strategy is actually relatively straightforward. Producing something that is meaningful and that makes a difference is a lot, lot harder.

I would point to two particular problems. The first is that community strategies tend to be all encompassing and will include all of the priorities of the major public bodies in an area without every really prioritising or creating a genuinely new focus. They often don’t prioritise at all. The second is that they tend to be generic. It is hard to distinguish the vision, themes and actions plans in one area from another – maybe this is because everywhere has the same problems but maybe it has something to do with the process.

Recently I’ve come across an organisational development method called appreciative inquiry and it is something that I find really interesting. The idea here, then, is to apply this approach to community planning to come up with a different type of process – let me know if it has been done before.

Appreciative Inquiry

I’m no expert on appreciative inquiry but, if it is not something you are familiar with, and it sounds of interest I’d urge you to research it further.

Essentially it is an asset based rather than a deficit model of development. In other words instead of asking ‘what’s wrong and how can we fix it?’ the question is ‘what’s good and how can we have more of it?’.

Here is part of the Wikipedia entry (there are loads of other things to look at but I thought that this was quite a nice starting point):

Appreciative Inquiry attempts to use ways of asking questions and envisioning the future in-order to foster positive relationships and build on the present potential of a given person, organisation or situation. Applied research has demonstrated that this method can enhance an organisation's internal capacity for collaboration and change. Appreciative Inquiry utilises a cycle of 4 processes, which focuses on what it calls:

DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well

DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.

DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design

The basic idea is then to build - or rebuild - organisations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn't. AI practitioners try to convey this approach as the opposite of problem-solving. They take a positive focus on how to increase exceptional performance instead of improving poor skills and practices. AI assumes that this line of reasoning is motivational. Progress does not stop when one problem is solved: it naturally leads on to continuous improvement.

Appreciative Community Planning

Appreciative inquiry applied to community planning turns the process on its head as community planning is definitely a deficit model of development – it asks ‘what is wrong with our area and how can we fix it? Appreciative community planning, on the other hand, asks ‘What are our assets and how can we make the most of them?. It implies the following stages:

DISCOVER: Finding out what is good about an area, what the public like, what services and initiatives work well, what are the strengths of the local economy

DREAM: Similar in some ways to the visioning process associated with community planning but done properly. Rather than trying to boil down every aspiration down into a single sentence (‘a healthy, green, prosperous, fair and equal place’), giving people a chance to express themselves and collecting a wide range of ideas.

DESIGN: A regularly updated statement of the services and processes that need to be valued and supported and of the new projects that can develop the assets (in the widest sense) that an area values.

DELIVER: The activity of doing the things that have been agreed.

There are a number of things that I think will be helpful about this approach:

The discover and dream phases lend themselves particularly well to public engagement whereas the later stages would sit well with ‘professionals’ – the process might provide a clear division of labour which I don’t think community planning ever has
By focussing on what is good about an area the planning process would promote distinctiveness rather than uniformity
The process would be one that continuously unfolds – I’m not even sure the ‘statement of priorities’ would be a fixed plan or set of actions / targets
The process would be much more motivating for those involved

As with old style community planning, appreciative community planning doesn’t prevent the majority of services in an area being delivered as usual and the things that need to be done by law would still get done. It is an evolving means of social and economic development in which the whole community can be involved. Well, that’s the theory anyway.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/la-citta-vita/5921677886/