Thriving too

Dance Willesden

2012-01-22T13:48:00+00:00

Taking a little break in editing the Community Lover's Guide to Hackney, and reviewing plans for workshops and activities with parents at Furness Primary in Willesden. I've already been enjoying watching the sun rise above Willesden Junction station on my early morning trips to the school breakfast club. But I just came across Dance Willesden by Rose Rouse. Apart from the fact that watching a group of people dressed in bright red dance up and down the side of Willesden station is bound to bring a smile to your face, i think there are some interesting and important things going on here.

Dance Willesden Junction from Rose Rouse on Vimeo.

A lot of the projects that fascinate me are the ones where people don't wait for permission, or funds, or services - but who take small actions to change the world around them for the better. And do it in a way that keeps the door open for others to experience, collaborate and join in.

There is something quite magical about the moment a guy in a flourescent jacket does a tiny dance move, hanging back a little. And just wait until you see the bus driver let loose!

Rose notes something key to this way of doing things: "breaking down the wall between participants and audience dissolves the wall of criticism"

It's often the case that we see an 'us and them' situation - with services, us the taxpayers, them the council. With campaigner, us the downtrodden, them the ones holding power. With companies, us the consumer, them the producer. Dancing in the street might not be your thing, but there are a lot of other ways we can work together in a more equal and open manner.

Thank you Rose for being brave enough to dance in the streets and share it.

The Ad Hoc Enquiries: Do you have a new theory?

2012-01-05T07:06:03+00:00

Starting in February 2012 Social Spaces will be running a series of 12 exploratory new events at Hub Westminster.

The primary assumption for the project is that there is new knowledge to be built and that we need to find new collaborative ways of building it.

These weekly Enquiries are structured events designed to give people who have designed and implemented innovation local projects an opportunity to describe their work and their emerging insights to a group of interested and experienced peers. These innovation projects are required to be working specifically in the participatory paradigm where creative and strategic solution seeking and collaborative working are their most evident characteristics.

What happens at an Enquiry?

The evenings will begin with a sociable supper, during which the ‘theorist(s)’ will present their project, their theory of change and new emergent theory - followed by a number pieces of evidence to support their theory.

Each participant in turn will state their core disciplinary perspective e.g. science, philosophy, design etc and offers either a supporting or challenging statement for the theory, connecting with other knowledge bases to understand and interpret the new theory.

How will the Enquiries be documented?

Each week the event will ‘extreme’ recorded to a structured and pre-set format and set into a large format digital/on demand book including all participants names and responses. The events will be audio live streamed - and later converted into podcasts.

Why are they called The Ad Hoc Enquiries?

Enquiry

The name ‘enquiry’ goes some way to describe the format for the evenings. The name implies that the answers to our new questions are not currently evident and that some specific process is needed to draw out the ideas and examine the evidence.

The purpose of these events is a serious one, and the idea of calling it an ‘enquiry’ implies that some noteworthy and important work will take place during these evenings. ‘Enquiry’ is also an academic term to describe an investigation into a specific topic or question.

Ad Hoc

The word ‘ad hoc’ is a term used in a number of contexts including scientific and philosophical theory; national investigations; technology systems and networks theory. There is also a link to the term Adhocracy, described by Alvin Toffler in the book Future Shock to mean an organisational structure working in the opposite way to a bureauracy.

How have we developed the format?

We have used understanding of how thinking in a new type of social setting might take place to develop this new format. The events are structured to achieve knowledge creation through social and intellectual interaction and to be respectful of people’s ideas and the time they are offering to the project through the documentation and sharing process.

The format takes account of the different phases individual and collective cognition might take place: stimulation/processing/connection/discussion/synthesis/building further on emergent ideas.

The structure secures the serious aspects of the project's aims, and will therefor also allow a great deal of playfulness and fun to be injected into the evenings. We will be running these events in *very* strict order... possibly even using a gavel....

Call for new theories - do you have one?

The first stage in preparing for these events is to ask people to submit their ideas for a theory they would like to present.

1. Have you developed an innovative local project?

2. Does this project work in the Creative/Collaborative paradigm?

What we mean here is the work should not work in the Consumer, Representative, Charity or Challenge participatory paradigms. There may be some of these in the mixture - but overall the project needs to work more collaboratively with communities and local authorities, possibly reconfiguring existing systems and fundamentally changing the way the community interacts in some way (See here and here for more details on how we see the Creative/Collaborative paradigm)

Apply here!

Deadline for applications to present a theory: 25 January 2012

More pics of our cubes

Social Business: A response to the Portas Review on highstreet revival

2012-01-03T20:53:31+00:00

(Photo credit London Shop Fronts blog by Emily Webber)

Over the Christmas break I read the Portas Review into the future of our highstreets - and I agree with the sentiment expressed that highstreets seem to be an often under-used or under-respected asset; and that in order for high streets and communities to thrive that we need a mix of commercial retail, with other cultural and social experiences; and that we would benefit from people making the shift from consumer to more active co-creator.

However, I found myself questioning some of the methods or solutions proposed - and here is some of my thinking why.

Representative 'Town Teams' to create shared vision of high street

I like the idea of a group of passionate people working together for the benefit of the whole high street. Bringing together retailers, building owners, Council and residents to collaborate and develop new possibilities. But I think that as we make the shift to 'co-creators' we are learning new roles, and new ways of working together that are unlikely to happen spontaneously in a classic meeting or planning setting. As Portas notes later in the report "quite often it is only the noisy minority that contribute" which can sometimes be an issue with small groups claiming to be representative of a whole community. We've seen the positive impact of leaving things 'unfinished' so that people can contribute in meaningful ways - perhaps if the whole vision is completed and curated by a small representative group this may hamper wider involvement and co-creation. I think that because we need a more sophisticated shift in thinking and acting, we need to move past getting people together to problem solve, and employ both new meeting techniques and some creative ways for people to engage in different ways. See Tessy's post for more on the differences between representative and creative collaborative paradigm.

Serving a community's needs and community consultation

The report states the role of a town centre is to serve a communities needs. But what if the role of a town centre were to be an asset, a resource for a communities aspirations, and a source of inspiration? It also says that people should be consulted on town centre development - with big corporates putting money behind a campaign to get more people involved in town planning. Getting more people involved is something I would agree with - but again I think that it needs to be more nuanced than traditional consultation (we listen and go and design what you want, then bring it back as a finished product for you to consume). What if instead of 'consulting' local councils were there to encourage and facilitate involvement, create connections and help make ideas a reality.

Community use of vacant properties and short term 'meanwhile' uses

While I agree with the need for highstreets to enable innovative, creative activities I think that hosting this solely in vacant or temporary spaces is perhaps not the best way forward. Why are we reducing the social uses to short term animation and temporary spaces? If we acknowledge that the high street needs to be a 'dynamic social place with a sense of belonging' we need to give people time to get to know each other, give the social elements time to bed down and be a permanent part of the mix. And by viewing the social simply as a colonisation method that can then be transplanted by 'real' business and full rates when it's successful in bringing in more people, new ideas and connections - begins to price the social out again, and keeps the current competitive profit driven model at top of hierarchy, potentially loosing the extra social value found in supportive co-creation methods.

Social as a secondary effect of economic activity

The report says that the high street is social space: people interact by chatting in the market place, or sharing an enjoyable consumer experience. Social connections and the positive benefits from this are seen as an important secondary effect of shopping on the local highstreet. I wouldn't disagree with this - knowing the name of my local green grocer feels like something important to my sense of place (but I'll be honest, in a decade or more of local shopping I've not made new friends through the experience, because a straight transactional relationship is not really conducive to this). So if the secondary (perhaps unintended) social benefits are clearly a valuable thing then why are we stopping there? Imagine the secondary effects of a truly co-created high street experience - what if people had the opportunity to meet over baking, growing, building, making. Building lasting relationships through shared activities - rather than chance greetings over transient commercial transactions.

The individual's role to shop locally

The report highlights our responsibility to 'meet, trade and shop in high streets' in order for them to thrive. I don't disagree - I personally chose to support local businesses as much as I can and feel much happier about my contribution going to Hassan and his family up the road, that the bottomless pockets of Tesco. But as noted above, I think that this consumer model that we know so well reduces us to simply economic players in the town centre. It is our role to be there and shop. We aren't expected to, and largely don't have the opportunity to create, or build it. We are there to consume - and it could be argued that is is this pattern of behaviour that created the out of town shopping phenomena, largely responsible for the decline in high street success, in the first place.

Shops can be more than just shops

I read through 55 pages to find the bit that most interested me, right at the end...There is a suggestion that an ideal would be "big shops being more than just shops" and the examples cited are book shops in cafes, or a running club meeting point in a sports shop. And perhaps a 'swap shop' for different skills, and work hubs.
This sounds more like it to me... we need to bring back the social to the highstreet in an integrated, co-created way. From the grass roots up, skillfully facilitatied by those who know their way round the red tape and systems - be that local authorities, landlords, or retailers.

What's the alternative?
I think that if we are a bit braver in our expectations of the high street, more critical of the impact of our current repeated patterns of behaviour, and made the best of our opportunities to reimaging the assets and resources contained in it, we could begin to create a much richer social space ogether.

If instead of another service that is provided for us to consume, (albeit by a new wider group of players than previously) we could be genuinely involved in the creation of social, cultural, and educational experiences. Instead of reducing the social to occasional spaces or secondary effects, I think we should aspire to create a truly integrated social high street.

Putting it into practise
Mary Portas ends by recommending that several trials and pilots are initiated to take this report forward. If anyone would like to offer a highstreet to start putting this into practise, do get in touch - we'd be more than happy to get stuck in...

Design competition - create a book cover by 31 December 2011

2011-12-14T20:53:23+00:00

The Community Lover's Guide to the Universe is still growing...! We've just welcomed Lorna on the Dudley edition and Karlijn, who is doing a Netherlands food edition, and stories are starting to come back all over the UK and internationally. Maurice is gearing up for our first edition to be published in Rotterdam early in the new year.

So we need a super duper book cover! Would you like to design one?

It needs to...
Have a consistency across the series
But some elements that can distinguish each edition
Work with the colourful template we are using inside, based on Hand Made - see here.
And have the text 'The Community Lover's Guide to PLACE by EDITOR'S NAME'
The book is 17cm by 17cm square

In return...
You'll have your details in an international book series and online as a thank you (Hand Made is up at 60,000 view so far, so we hope a lot of lovely people around the world will see your work).

And while we don't have funding for this yet - we will have some surprise prizes (which may or may not include copies of the book, dinner, invite to launch... more - we're working on it!)

Deadline
Send us your design by email by 31 December 2011 (doesn't need to be absolutely finished - concept is ok).
We'll be sharing them all with the CLG editors, and asking them to vote on their favourite.

Social Spaces: In Praise of our Skills Game

2011-12-11T11:35:37+00:00

A few weeks ago I blogged In Praise of Lego Serious Play about how we use this methodology in our community workshops as a visioning and co-design tool.

We wanted now to also share a little about the Social Spaces Skills Game that we developed originally for the Travelling Pantry workshops, but now that it is tested and fully developed, wish to give away for communities to use.

What it is

The Social Spaces Skills Game is a very simple game indeed. I collection of skills are printed on 100 cards, which are read out by a workshop participant, and with the help of the group are sorted into:

- skills that the group can do

- skills that their friends can do

- skills that to their knowledge neither they nor their friends can do

How and why we designed the game

When the initial Travelling Pantry workshops were designed, they specifically wanted to avoid traditional problem-solving methodologies. Instead, the intention of the workshops was to test the idea of shifting mindsets in the following ways:

- direct problem solving --> secondary effects

- single projects --> strategic transforming vision for the community

- needs --> assets

- first step funding --> first step revealing and connecting ideas, resources etc

On the day before the first workshop I wrote:

"There are a number of really very inspiring community projects which focus on maintaining (or even better refurbishing) the community - and making your environment beautiful for the community is a wonderful and creative thing in itself. The difficulty with the problem-solving format in a workshop situation in my experience, particularly if you start with grass cutting, is that typically, at community level at least, all these roads lead to ‘maintenance thinking’. Once you have started, it becomes a list of pot-holes and dog mess, road works and graffiti and litter … and half an hour later you are talking about ‘hoodies’ being loud and rude and how lonely elderly people are and how bad the NHS is, and why aren’t trains on time, or the leaves collected quicker … and before you know it you are a sad heap of exhaustion and frustration just thinking about the terribleness of it all.

So we didn’t think we would do that."

The other activities that we designed for the workshops were all included to create a sense of possibility – for people to leave the workshops feeling excited and capable. All the activities were also designed specifically to ‘reveal’ aspects that are often invisible, such as ideas (via the LEGO), resources and talents. We were also aware that many projects never get off the ground because ‘projects’ are seen to require difficult skills such as writing constitutions, opening bank accounts or writing funding bids and we knew that in most new-style community projects that these particular items that put people off getting involved, represent a fraction of what is needed.

Like all simple and successful things, the thinking and inspiration behind the game came from multiple sources. We were at the time immersed in design thinking, prototyping … particularly trying to make visible and tangible concepts and ideas as well as inspired by the work of Albert Bandura on self-efficacy and beliefs. Having worked with Lauren Currie on Mindapples ideas, I was very inspired by her awesome ability to make things physically real. Crystal Campell and Saskia Van Oosterhout had described how they incorporated cards into their Narrative Ecology and this had worked well. David Gauntlett and I could see how all this added together could help workshop participants ‘reveal’ their talents and skills in a light and enjoyable way, which did not embarrass them by making them feel boastful.

We were also very inspired by the work of John McKnight and John Kretmann at the ABCD Institute, who had in 1993 developed a Capacity Inventory that community development workers make use of in interviews with residents in the community to create a database of skills in the community. Although we were not using this idea in the same way, but rather trying to increase a sense of resourcefulness in a workshop setting, we found this inventory very inspiring. We borrowed about 50 of the Inventory’s 200 skills, added 50 new ones of our own, including some humorous ones such as ‘sit in the lotus position’, ‘chatting over coffee’… and ‘making people laugh’.

We printed them up through marvelous Moo… and took them on the road…

What we discovered

Through workshopping with over 1800 people in the last 14 months we have discovered that this activity, but some miracle, did exactly what we hoped it would.

- Without exception everyone enjoys this game – people always laugh and joke their way through the game which takes about 10-15 minutes – we have even had frequent demonstrations of ‘sitting in the lotus’ position.

- It is informal and people interact in light ways that help them get to know one another better.

- Of the 100 activities a group of 4 or more will be able to do, or have a friend do, over 90% of the skills. The percentage between how much an individual group can do themselves varies on size of group, but generally speaking most skills can be done in the community.

- It does make people feel capable – we have frequently had groups spontaneously applaud themselves at their collective cleverness.

- It genuinely surprises them how much can be done around the table – and through this are also blown away considering how much skill is lying dormant in the community.

We have found that the Skills Game is great to end a workshop - but others who have experienced it, including Nick Bird, have thought it would work well also at the beginning as an ice breaker and to set the tone of the workshop right from the beginning.

If you think you might like to try the skills game you can buy a set on the Social Spaces Shop – BUT before you do, please be aware that you will be able to request a free PDF of the Social Spaces Skills Game in the new year, which we are making available free for community's use via a Creative Commons [Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs] licence.

Pic above from the workshop held in Torwood on the 22 October 2010

The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self Interest

2011-11-28T17:49:59+00:00

I am enjoying hearing about this new book Yochai Benkler from Harvard University, also author of the Wealth of Networks.

The argument he makes is that humans are not purely self-interested creatures. In this interview the question is asked "How did we even get ourselves into a position where we have to make that argument?"

Benkler replies

"If we look at the 40 year trajectory you might think of as scientific selfishness. From about the late 50s until early 90s we see a progression across many disciplines, economic obviously taking the lead, but also science, evolutionary biology, some aspects of psychology, continuously basically saying 'look we all talk about morality and fairness but that's not serious - serious people look at mathematical models, and they tell us that at the end of the day, if you want to get things done you have got to get the incentives right. Incentives mean material incentives and if you want people acting you need to monitor them, reward them if they do good things, you need to punish them if they do bad things.

All these other things that the mushy people talk about are peripheral in terms of getting things right in terms of incentives.

Developing in various academic disciplines, but we also saw it developing in companies and company policies with the rise of scientific management. We are at the point now where we can step back and say that what is not serious is that we are not being well represented by a self-interested model - we are much more complex than that. We need to build systems for this new complex view of ourselves as, to some extend self-interested for sure, but also concerned with empathy and solidarity, concerned with what we think is right, what we think is fair. Capable of being trusting and being trustworthy ... and that's what we need to understand now."

"I think the reason why the self-interest model was so powerful combines several factors. The first one is that we have to admit that it is at least partly true... It is not completely false ... but it isn't the whole story. It is also partly that we love clear, simple explanations, sometimes called by psychologists 'cognitive fluency', something that's easy for us to digest. It turns out when you look as people we are very complicated. It is a lot simpler to say that we can collapse it all into a simple, mathematically describable model that says 'if I add more money I get the behaviour I want - if I punish I won't'. So it's simple and easy to absorb."

Benkler goes on to describe how the rise of this thinking coincides with the period of the cold war and that these clash of ideologies - principally collectivism and capitalism, made it easy to adopt the model because we had a 'then and us' situation.

The case that Benkler makes is not entirely new - but I like the way that he describes his thinking and I do think that this book makes a hugely valuable contribution to trying to shift the mindset away from designing policy and systems which call on the more negative human qualities. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has also contributed to this thinking. First published in 1976 The Selfish Gene suggested that although as human's we often behaved in socially supportive ways - this was always a conscious battle against our innate instincts. Dawkins received criticism when he ended The Selfish Gene with the following words:

"We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators. (Dawkins, 1976, p215)

In the 30th Anniversary copy of Selfish Gene, Dawkins defends his original statement by explaining:

…it is perfectly possible to hold that genes exert a statistical influence on human behaviour while at the same time believing that this influence can be modified, overridden or reversed by other influences. (Dawkins, 2006Ed, p331-332)

Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes (Dawkins, 2006Ed, pxiv)

Frans de Waal, one of my favourite researchers has fought Dawkins for many years. Having studied primates for most of his life he strongly disagrees. In Primates and Philosophers he argues against 'Veneer Theory':

"Since Darwin saw morality as an evoluntionary product, he envisioned an eminently more livable world than one proposed by Huxley and his followers, who believed in a culturally imposed, artificial morality that receives no helping hand from human Nature. Huxley's world is by far the colder, more terrifying place."

Daniel Pink in Drive also gave us lots of research examples where the self-interest model had failed - from blood drives to toxic waste - introducing self-interest and incentives can suppress cooperation.

It is important stuff - more important than we probably imagined. These self-interested models have driven huge pay increases at the top - sometimes even leading to unethical behaviours - and I believe it can also lead to 'consumer activism' rather than co-production and creative problem solving at local level.

If we said that we are capable of both fair and unfair behaviours - we have ample evidence that the way we design our systems promotes the behaviour of one or the other.

Thanks to David Archer for pointing me to the interview!

Australia to Zimbabwe, and back to Hackney

2011-11-25T13:25:41+00:00

This week I had a really lovely email, and it cheered me so much I wanted to share. I've had a Flickr account for a while now, adding photos of my travels and experiences. And they are all up online under Creative Commons - so anyone can get in touch and use them non-commercially.

And this week, someone did. I got an email from Ruth Fitts in the USA, who is writing and self-publishing a book of poems called "Australia to Zimbabwe: A Rhyming Romp Around the World to 24 Countries". Each poem has around 25 photos accompanying it, so around 600 in total. And the whole project is designed to help American children learn more about different communities, countries and cultures.

My piccie above (of a vase in Hue) is going under 'V for Vietnam'. I can't tell you how excited I am to see the finished article next summer!

I found it interesting to see parallels with the Community Lover's Guide series as well. We are a group of over 35 volunteer editors around the globe, all seeking examples of inspiring community activities to share. Each editor asks someone from the project to contribute words and pictures for inclusion.

I am editing the London version - but I have been procrastinating. Firstly I decided that London was too big for one edition - so took the decision to break it down into boroughs. Then I decdied to start in Hackney and Tower Hamlets - where I live and work and do a lot of things. And then I got a bit stuck. I was worried about asking people for their time and efforts - what if they said no? I was worried about not leaving anyone out - how would I cover everything?

Well not any more! Thank you to Ruth, and your lovely words (some of which I will end on). I am unstuck and raring to go. invites to be included in the first edition of the Community Lover's Guide to Hackney are going out this afternoon. And if you're doing anything, know of anything that should be included let me know. Or... if you want to find out more about creating an edition in your area of London, get in touch! Here's to Ruth's amazing project. And here's to collaborative creativity.

"It has been so meaningful to connect with people from around the world, in order to create a book about the world. I thought my travels had cemented my faith in the generosity of the human family, but this has amplified it. Knowing I don't need to leave home to feel very concretely the presence and support of the world community reaffirms every reason I am passionate about helping kids to see the world in the same light."