The need for micro-participation

A theme I’ve been returning to on a regular basis in the talks I’ve been giving lately has been about the need for government to make participation easier.

I’ve blogged in my usual half-assed manner about the participation deficit before, and it strikes me that this is an important issue that is both not going away and also is probably going to get worse.

I tend to highlight myself as an example of the problem here, in that despite being one of the very few people in the world who actually find government interesting, I never actually engage myself. I’ve not been to a council meeting, responded to a survey or questionnaire, and never given feedback through another route.

Why is this? It’s not that I’m lazy (keep quiet at the back), nor that I don’t care. It’s mainly that the instruments of local democracy just don’t fit in with my lifestyle.

The most obvious culprit here is the meeting. It strikes me that the dominance of meetings pretty much means that anyone with a family and a job (or perhaps even just one of those) is excluded from the process.

Read the boy a story before bed time, or go to the town hall to talk about a planning application? Not a difficult choice, but the answer means that participation is always going to be low.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity here to learn from the micro-volunteering that is becoming increasingly popular. An easy, quick way to get involved in civic activity that fits into people’s lives the way they are lived now, not fifty years ago.

After all, I may not be able to give up two (or more!) hours of an evening to attend a council meeting, but I’m sat in front of a computer almost all day, and could easily take 15 minutes or longer out to get involved, perhaps by answering some questions, providing ideas, or identifying problems.

Even better, with a smartphone and a bit of geo-tagging, why not tell me how I can contribute from exactly where I am?

Getting involved and participating shouldn’t be a chore. As I mentioned in my post about councillors, we need more people doing less, rather than the situation we have now where only a few people do far too much.

I don’t think this needs massive upheaval, or some kind of revolution in local democracy (although that might be nice). A bit of tinkering around the edges would, I’m sure, go a long way.

What I’m doing next: launching Kind of Digital

It’s a new financial year, and that seems an appropriate time to share my plans for the future.

Following a really enjoyable couple of years at Learning Pool, we’re going to reshape my role as Community Evangelist to enable me to focus on some other stuff.

In particular, I’m launching a new business.

Kind of Digital is that business, where I’ll be putting into practice everything I have been writing about here for the last few years. In other words, answering the question “how can we use the internet to make government more interesting?”

Services

How will I be doing that? Through a mixture of training, strategic advice and development work.

The training I see as a real priority at the moment. In many ways the arguments for more engaging use of the web by public service organisations are accepted by most – but the skills to get the strategy right, and to deliver it effectively, are all too rare.

I’ve got a range of training programmes designed which include face to face training and online support – and if you’re interested for your organisation, whether for staff or politicians, please do get in touch.

On the strategy side, if you need help putting together your organisation’s approach to digital engagement or just need some ideas for a campaign, I’d love to help out.

Developing new tools and engaging sites is another area of work I’m keen to get stuck into – with work already started on a couple of interesting projects that I’ll be able to discuss shortly.

Projects

It’s not just client based work though, I’m also looking to get involved in delivering some cool projects, exploring innovation in public service delivery. Again, conversations are underway on a couple of things and I’ll talk more about those soon.

If you have anything in mind though, it would be great to collaborate!

It’s not just Dave

Last time I worked for myself, I was pretty much a freelancer – it was just me. This time though, inspired by the time I spent hanging out with Mary and Paul at Learning Pool, I’m wanting to build a scalable, sustainable business.

As we’re just starting out, I’m going to be doing a lot of the doing to begin with, but I’m hoping to add people to the team to deliver projects in the future. If you’re interested, particularly if you can work on an associate basis, do get in touch.

I’m delighted that I’m being joined at Kind of Digital by Catherine – otherwise known as @davebriggswife. To say that she is the brains of the operation whilst I am the mouth is an understatement. Catherine will be helping me out with all the stuff I’m terrible at – admin, the financial stuff, project management, making sure stuff gets done. I’m incredibly relieved that she’s on board!

Kind of Digital and Learning Pool

All this doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Learning Pool, just that I’m going to be doing (even) less work there in the future. It’s not the sort of team that is easy to leave – and nor would I want to. I’m dead chuffed to still be working on various projects with LP, and I’ll always be happy to promote their products to the people I meet.

In fact, there are already a bunch of projects where KoD and LP can collaborate to provide a really great, unique service to public sector organisations to help them innovate using technology.

I also know that Mary and Paul’s considerable business brains will be a great asset to me as I build up the company – their advice will be vital if I’m to make a success of this thing.

And finally…

Obviously, given the business I’m in, there’s plenty of social media action going on with Kind of Digital. You can connect to the company by subscribing to the blog – RSS or email – or by following us on Twitter or Facebook. In fact, anyone that does so with either of those channels over the next two weeks will get entered into a draw to win some awesome KoD goodies, including t-shirts, pens, laptop stickers and other tat Catherine has ordered from the internet.

Am I bribing you to follow my company on social networks? You bet I am. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a recession on…

Bookmarks for February 23rd through April 4th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Civil sector learning event: Exeter, 8th April

Learning Pool, in collaboration with Cosmic, are running an event in Exeter on 8th April to talk about how civil sector organisations can meet their training needs in this age of austerity.

Paul McElvaney will be showcasing My Learning Pool – the ludicrously cost-effective new service from Learning Pool that delivers over twenty high quality learning modules for a bargain £25 per year – a price that goes down with bulk purchases.

Julie Harris from Cosmic -the ethical IT company – will be giving details of a brand new service from Cosmic for VCO’s and Social Enterprises.

Find out more details and book your free place here.

More on e-petitions

Excellent stuff from Fraser Henderson who has published a summary of some research done into the use of e-petition facilities in councils.

I’ve embedded the presentation below:

Fraser also links to some interesting evaluation of the europetition project, which is well worth a read.

Load more posts!