Communities

📅 Daily note for 7 July 2024

A Sunday daily note! A rarity indeed. I’m not using my usual computer today, which means that I don’t have MarsEdit and thus this post does not sport any paragraph links. Let me know how little you care in the comments! 🙂

Following my wittering about online communities on Friday, I came across this post from David Durant⬈, which is very thoughtful and wise.

While catching up on David’s recent blogging, i also came across this post about GDS’s registers project⬈. It’s a really interesting read.

It’s a shame that David’s posts are on Medium – they are very good and deserve a wide audience. But I find the Medium reading experience diabolical these days.

I posted on Bluesky⬈ whether there might be a need for a multi-author blog, where occasional bloggers could publish posts, but on a platform that was open, and without all the guff that comes from Medium.

Technically it would be very simple, just a WordPress instance with a clean, clear theme on it. People could sign up and after a very brief vetting to ensure they are publicly spirited types, they could post to it whenever they felt the need. Could be like a training ground for new bloggers, who don’t quite want to take the leap of having a whole site dedicated to themselves.

I dunno, it’s an idea, I guess. Jukesie wasnt sure⬈, but I do wonder if it will help some folks, and most importantly, get others off Medium!

Vicky writes about the “lost practice of information architecture⬈”:

I increasingly see designers start designing complex websites or repeat-use services by going straight to high fidelity screens. To me, this suggests that they haven’t been told about the need to consider structure, and how to make tradeoffs on different tasks serving different user groups (to use an information architecture analogy, like designing a flow for a supermarket or shopping mall). I’ve also come to feel that if I can’t find a sitemap for an existing repeat use service it’s likely no one else thought about structure from a user’s perspective either.

📅 Daily note for 4 July 2024

Have added Google Analytics to this blog, via the Sitekit WordPress plugin. I guess it will be interesting to see the numbers, but it isn’t really why I do this, so maybe I’ll switch it off again once the novelty wears off. #

Audree Fletcher posted a little while back about Demanding predictable solutions for uncertain and complex problems⬈:

I understand it, truly, the desire to know specifically what you’re going to get for your money. It’s what people have come to expect of transactions with suppliers. I give you money, you give me a caramel chai. You give me money, I give you my time.

But it only works when you are really certain that the thing you’re buying is the thing you need to achieve the outcomes you’re seeking.

Straightforward for my posh tea in a high street coffee shop. Less straightforward in a complex adaptive system like, say, education.

Because the more specificity and certainty you demand in advance around what will be delivered in order to achieve the outcome, the lower your chance of achieving the outcome.

#

I posted an article yesterday about writing good strategies, based on some of the work I have been doing lately. Also copy and pasted it into LinkedIn, and will send it out on a newsletter at some point too. #

A lovely chat with James⬈ this morning, rather out of the blue. It was great to catch up and share stories about what we’ve been up to for the last 10 years, or however long it was since we last spoke. We talked a lot about online communities – particularly of practice – and shared a bunch of experiences and ideas. He reminded me of a few things I’d forgotten about, like the GDS community development handbook⬈. #

The community development framework⬈ sets out the things that communities need really well: people, programme, and platform. I do struggle with the latter, nothing seems to work terribly well, particularly when it comes to making it easy to extract knowledge out of discussions and into some kind of searchable archive. I’ve not expressed this very well, but I do wonder whether this is the sort of thing that a large language model type thing might actually be useful for. #

Have just come across this great blog⬈ from a local government technology person. They don’t mention their name on their blog, so I won’t do it on mine. Well worth a read and a subscribe though! #

Richard Pope⬈ has a book in the works⬈! Exciting! #

LINK: “Growing communities beyond the edges of the organisation”

In digitally mature organisations we are used to seeing strong communities of engaged, self-selecting members gathered around a shared purpose beyond that of their day to day jobs. Organisational communities thrive because they add an extra dimension to the organisational structure, and can increase the number of connections each individual has across the organisation’s network.

Original: https://postshift.com/growing-communities-beyond-the-edges-of-the-organisation/

LocalGovCamp 2014 thoughts #4 – communities

I found LocalGovCamp a really refreshing and cheering event this year. I’m going to spend a few quick posts writing up my thoughts.

Communities always come up a lot, in terms of engagement and also new methods of service delivery.

The trouble is that organisations such as local authorities like scalable, repeatable processes – and communities fit neither of those things.

Communities are messy, unique things. Even ones that sound the same are usually very different, depending on the history, the personalities. In one area, a service that could be delivered by one parish council couldn’t be delivered by another, say. One neighbourhood watch group is likely to be unlike any other.

What’s more – communities, whether formal ones of the type I just mentioned or more informal social groups, are pretty much all facing exactly the same problems that councils are – lacking money, lacking volunteers, facing the sudden need to make dramatic changes to everything they do.

I’m on the board of my local Citizens Advice Bureau and we are facing the fact that our core funding is being reduced, needing to find new sources of income, and needing to help our clients to move towards self service online over face to face interactions, so we can save money and time while still delivering a service. Sound familiar?

So, “community” isn’t a panacea – but it can be part of the solution. It won’t, however, be a simple solution, but one that is based on meeting the needs of the communities you are working with as much as it is those communities meeting yours.

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