David Barrie

E-serendipity: Digital inclusion, social media and super-communicators

In super jargon, doomsday for the internet comes as cyberbalkanization - or fragmentation of people in to like-minded groups.

Hellfire then rages in the idea that the net discourages serendipitous encounters - accidental, involuntary, on-the-fly, human interplays that allow for take-your-breath-away, progressive, life-changing moments.

In the words of Harvard Professor Cass R.Sunstein in Going to Extremes:

In countless domains, the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.

In other words, welcome to cyberspace, a place full of spaces to populate but with lines tricky to cross, much like the Kosovo/Serbian border. 

A passport to migration across digital territories is said to be collaboration between those online that tips in to large-scale community building: an activity flagged in a recent McKinsey paper as use of the internet that is neither mass content creation nor 'decision support'.

But a key barrier, as ever, is the fact that less than a quarter of the world's population are online. In the U.K., according to a presentation by Helen Milner, 23% of adults do not use the internet, 35% of households don't have access to the internet and 70% of people who live in supported housing aren't online.

But I'm confused.

Take Tiger Bay, or Butetown, an area in Wales that hosts the second poorest housing estate in the country.

36% of the area's 4500 residents live in council or assisted housing, 36% have no qualifications, a fifth of the population in 2001 were born outside of Europe and 62% of the children attending a local primary school receive extra support learning English. 

 
We have just carried out a survey for a project called Digital Butetown in to internet use by 11-19 yr old students who attend the most prominent secondary school in the area: Fitzalan High School.

Over 1300 people completed a simple survey and results were analyzed by Dr Kelly Page at Cardiff Business School.

Here are the headlines:

• 92% of students said that they can access the Internet/Net at home
• 46% use the web on average for up to one hour a day from home
• 46% use community access points, e.g. internet cafes and libraries
• 88% of respondents said they owned a mobile telephone
• 49% said that they sent over 50 SMS messages a month
• 55% said that they had taken a photo with their phone
• Favourite websites: YouTube, Friv and Google
• Favourite social network sites: MSN, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

The results suggest some obvious things.

There's a generation of users at the most local level who are web-literate super-communicators.

Access to the internet is a limited measure of the digital divide.

And if sowing the seeds of experimentation is important to increasing the uptake of participation technology and polarization of opinion is a risk in the new online economy, it may reap dividends to hyper-target the young.

But then the challenges pull sharply in to focus.

Opportunities need to be easy to find, forward and act upon.

And how to channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further an overall goal?

This stands to reason as one effective way forward for collectivized, non-polarized engagement - and was an important element in the success of the Obama campaign, according to a recent report by Edelman.

Some great first ideas on a forward process were raised at a workshop in Butetown last month. RSS-me to catch that update and join our Google Group for more. 

 

Images courtesy of ornithes, cabiria8, photojennic and Paul Corcoran.

Liberating the lone blogger: some resources

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in Collective Intelligence:

New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. 

Yeah, right. So?

Well, if we buy in to this, and accept that the challenge of the net is to find ways and means to create a fully transparent market for ideas, arguments, projects, initiatives, expertise, and resources, we need to set to work not just on enabling people to get online but also finding ways and means to liberate and connect the lone bloggers - or people locked in the pleasure or pain of this flaming tomb:

 

There's amazing work going on in the UK just now devoted to encouraging people to win access to the net and 'connect the connected'.

The work is led by some key individuals like Will Perrin of Talk About Local, Helen Milner of UK Online Centres, David Wilcox of Social Reporter, Dominic Campbell of Future Gov and the team behind the social media handbook Social by Social, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Initiative is fuelled by U.K. Government policy that's determined to broadband the nation, media organisations trying to realign themselves to "the people formerly known as the audience" and a bubble of evangelism for online social media.

But how to capture what Lévy called the potential of cyberspace to implement a form of computer-mediated civility?

How to connect the dots at the most local level - and for social good?

In the run-in to our online social media workshop in Butetown, Wales last week, a group of people shared examples of web-spaces that seek to liberate the lone blogger and aggregate content at the most local level.

Some were posted at the Digital Engagement website. Others at our Digital Butetown Google group. So I thought it useful to collect them in one place:

B13 - a site that aggregates information from blogs, feeds and other sources related to the suburb of Moseley in Birmingham, West Midlands.

Created in Birmingham - a site that links the city's creative communities online presence. 

Digbeth is Good - a blog looked after by Nicky Getgood who uses subscriptions and searches in her Google Reader and then feeds them into the blog via postalicious.

Hylocal News Wire - created by Jon Bounds, "a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them".

Kings Cross Pageflakes - created by Will Perrin that takes feeds from local websites and scrapes sites without RSS

The Londonist - a journalist-written blog whose breadth of source material speaks to the idea of aggregating a diversity of grass-roots content.

Vetnorblog and Pitsnpots (Stoke on Trent) which both aggregate some content and look and feel like replacements for local newspapers.

Planet Balham - a site that 'takes' feeds from a district of South London and its surrounding area. 

Everyblock - that combines photos, local government announcements, data and news items for 15 major U.S. cities.

Some of these sites speak to the idea of journalists as "community weavers" and the great American tradition of community media, digitally vitalized by initiatives such as the Knight Foundation's News Challenge.

But all establish and explore the value of aggregating content at the most local level and (potentially) look forward to a moment when, much like community partnerships in urban renewal, there may be an opportunity to network networks and create a local 'knowledge space'. 

The link between this work and social and economic renewal is now starting to be captured in a group called Local Communities.

We've started to see what we can capture in Butetown with a search on Addictomatic and search on Netvibes.

They don't collect much intelligence though. There's insufficient supply of locally-generated content and the platforms are controlled by outsiders. 

At our design workshop, we discussed a process by which Butetown might start to connect the dots and look to develop a 'hyperlocal' knowledge economy - something that I'll report back on soon but that also, critically, local net users need to decide to advance.

But in the meantime, power to the force that Lévy described as new proletarians, auxiliary workers devoted to effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts.

Sources of first two images lost. Network mapping courtesy of netmaptoolbox. Digital Butetown is an initative supported by British Council Wales, igloo Regeneration and the British Telecom Group.

Digital Butetown: Building the community collective online

How can all of the excitement of sharing things on the Internet happen at the most local level?

How might online social media bridge communities and network local life in a collective way, much like an allotment site rather than a landscape of fenced private gardens?

Yes, there are community websites and local forums. Yes, applications like NetVibes. Yes, groups on Facebook. Yes, opportunities for networking via Ning.  And yes, lots of brilliant initiatives around the world that encourage digital activism, storytelling and new content creation.

But is there a process that can be rolled out over time locally that encompasses all of these things, brings them together, networks activity, pools interest, shares knowledge and could become a platform for collaborative local change in the future?  

These are some of the questions behind a digital design workshop that will take place in Butetown, Cardiff, in the Old Banking Hall, Bute Street,  July 24th 2009 (1000 - 1800hrs).

The workshop will pool the knowledge of people actively working on the development and application of social technology for social benefit.

It will be a practical session that maps existing online networks, matches them against offline communities and then comes up with a practical plan to implement what might be called - for a slightly hippy phrase - online community weaving. (with respect to June Holley and Network Weaving for inspiration). 

The event is being organised by Tom Beardshaw of Native Media, Jeremy Gould of Whitehall Webby and me. It follows research in to local internet use, analysed by Kelly Page of Cardiff Business School; and will be a backroom brainstorm in advance of an event in the Autumn which will invite local internet users to work with social media geeks to co-design a forward plan.

Butetown in Cardiff is home to 14,000 people and over forty-six different nationalities. It may be cash poor - but it is culturally super-rich.

There are many dynamic members of the community working together on renewal of the area and people keen to explore online media as a way of sharing information, experience and supporting local initiative.

Butetown has a Ning group, local people collect in Facebook groups, kids play games against each other online and there's busy file-sharing going on of music.

This is all great.

But the fragmentation of online social networking mirrors the fragmentation of real life - between new and old communities, diverse ethnic groups, communities of interest and different issues of concern.

If you believe in the power of communication and see the online space as a place that could be socially useful and productive, there's a job to be done to try and find a way to gather online activity effectively. 

And if you believe that a key to the future of public management is online public involvement, the digital space in a place like Butetown needs to be supported in such a way as to be ready and able to contribute to the social and economic planning of the area.

Please join our Google Group. Tell us there if you are interested in contributing to the event on 24th July. And look out for the hash-tag #digitalbutetown.

Digital Butetown is a British Council Wales project and part of a larger, pan-European initiative called OPENCities. And it is supported by igloo Regeneration, an investment fund managed by Aviva and described by the United Nations as "the world's first socially responsible property fund".

Street images of Butetown courtesy of  Paul Corcoran and Walt Jabsco.

digitalbutetown

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Building digital bridges

The U.K. Government has recently published Digital Britain, a plan that seeks to establish the framework for the roll-out and use of broadband technology in the country in the future.

Part of the plan is to establish ways and means by which the 'digitally excluded' can have access to the vast resources offered by the internet, rather than become the untouchables of the knowledge economy.

There's a huge amount going on in the field of Digital Participation just now - and some of the biggest shouts have to be reserved for the grassroots activism of Will Perrin, Talk About Local and the Digital Engagement network in the U.K., the ideas being generated by the Network Weaving group in Ohio, Australian academic Marcus Foth's work on how 'interactive systems' can be designed to support social networks in urban neighborhoods and, as ever, the guiding lights of Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater.

But as young people's digital engagement consultant Tim Davies writes in his post on the website of the Royal Society of Arts' Connected Communities program:

sometimes it seems like there can be a gulf between the economics focussed vision of Digital Britain, and the social justice discourse coming from grass roots and hyper-local social media and digital inclusion projects.

Meaning: there's a huge amount going on just now on the framework and supply side of digital inclusion but there's a gap in the middle.

Implication: if we don't sort out ways, means and opportunities to connect the dots of public involvement online, alongside boosting participation and access to technology, society and culture won't capture maximum benefit.

This is an image of a bridge that I helped deliver in Castleford, West Yorkshire. It's a major piece of new infrastructure for a small town that has won awards. Yes, it was designed by an architect. And yes, it was paid for by the state. But underpinning its commissioning and design evolution was a process that aggregated community effort and organization across the entire town and which spawned the formation of a new community group who acted as client and key driver of the bridge project. 

This is a composite image of an event held in the town of Middlesbrough, North East England in 2007 that was attended by 8000 people and was the culmination of a process through which over 60 different community organizations grew food in over 240 different spaces and places across the town.

A framework for participation and a narrative was established, then local people elected to get involved, then more and more people got involved, participating on their own terms and, in the end, their aggregated effort has had important impact upon the future of their community.

These projects demonstrate two things that I think are relevant to innovation around digital inclusion.

Both have been successful in generating a community return and triggering new external financial investment - the bridge has been central to Castleford leveraging over £200m ($320m) of new investment, Middlesbrough a new £4m ($6.5m) program linked to supporting a healthier town, with urban agriculture at its center. 

But more importantly, both have established mid-level platforms or enabled processes that have collected up existing local initiative, networked them, helped consumers establish a vision for their community and created a narrative that has allowed other groups and people to self-organize.

Now none of this is brain-surgery: those experienced in community organization and urban renewal have been doing similar things for years, boosted by the need to mobilize volunteering, the privatization of public services and the need for smaller towns and cities to construct business cases for investment around a mixed bag of diverse and fragmented land assets.

I have also posted on this theme quite a lot - forgive me! - linked to networking data-gathering, approaching development sites as 'ecosystems' or the value of middle-up innovation in local government.

So what's the relevance to Digital Britain?

• There needs to be acute focus pulled on building the community collective online, if what's been called 'digital maoism' is not to create another billion community activists, this time online, who are as disenfranchised as those in the real world
• It would be helpful for policymakers to link to those involved in community organizing in urban regeneration and renewal, since they have expert experience at creating and enabling what's known as 'bridging capital'
• Whether our romantic streak likes it or not, economic and urban policy nowadays is devolving to the regional and metropolitan level. This system demands localism but suggests that hyper-localism might benefit politically and economically from being joined up somewhere higher in the local political order
• Community organization in urban renewal and the delivery of urban policy benefits from a thematic, non-stove-piped approach to the design and delivery of public services. In digital participation, the provision, receipt and generation of news as a public service seems to be emerging as a key to delivering this. 

All of this leads to two questions:

• What's the infrastructure that can act as both frame and driver to digital participation in the future?
• What's the hook that will encourage people to use the Internet for positive actions or what Clay Shirky has called "online barn raisings"?

In urban renewal, the hook is the opportunity to contribute to improving your prospects and the world outside your front door.

If we believe that social technology can have social benefit, it might be useful to be led by this and think harder about promoting the immediate benefits of online existence.

On one level, humanity is already doing this, using Twitter to get the message out from the streets of Teheran and Moldova and then news networks and academics picking up on the use of digital media as an instrument of expression and freedom. 

But perhaps on a more mundane level, policy makers and digital practioners might think more on the line of networking existing online social media activity. 

If this effort were connected with the larger process of economic improvement of towns, cities and commuities, it's uninpsired name would be the phrase  'digital renewal'.

Images courtesy of knittingskwerlgirl, McDowell Benedetti & Partners and the Design Council.