Megan Griffith Gray

This short blog post from Henley Centre Headlight Vision reveals an interesting snapshot of some research they’ve done into public attitudes about sharing data with government. Michelle Singer writes: “citizens’ first reaction is one of extreme wariness – no doubt exacerbated by recent media stories about data that has gone ‘missing in action’. However, when requests for personal information are sweetened by the promise of “better service”, the picture changes dramatically. Over two thirds of citizens are then happy to provide their details to government departments.”

Calling all membership organisations!

We are currently developing a programme of work to explore the future of membership with colleagues at the RSA, Ruralnet and David Wilcox. We expect this to include both research (including asking both individuals and organisations what membership means to them) and practical services and products to help membership organisations to plan for the future. We would like your help in shaping this programme of work, and have three questions that we would like to hear your thoughts on.

1. What are your own experiences of dealing with membership issues today? How is your organisation engaging with its members and are there any particular initiatives that you think are particularly exciting? What’s your view of the major challenges and opportunities for membership organisations in the 21stC?

2. What do you want to know? As this is a research and practice project we want to generate knowledge, ideas and tools that are useful to all membership organisations thinking about the future.

3. Social media: in particular we are interested in the interactions between new social media and membership organisations. What do you see as the opportunities and threats? How is your organisation making use of social media and new channels for engagement?

More on the membership project can be found here, here, here and here!

Hi Susan
Instinctively I think you must be right about the power of ‘preferred futures’. I think that most organisations in our sector have no problem communicating about what they would like the future to look like – that’s the essence of the vision and mission of organisations, and it usually permeates right through an organisation. However, for many organisation in our sector the desired future of ‘the vision’ is often a long long way from the present reality (hence why so many in our sector describe themselves as being in the business of change), and many of the barriers (eg adequate funding) can seem insurmountable. So for me, the key is to understand change and to respond in the best possible way to navigate your organisation towards the ultimate goal of the vision. So, I think we agree on this!

A very interesting post Natalie. I agree that creating scenario axes is very difficult. I’m feeling inspired by a conversation I just had with Caroline Copeman about how to think about the ‘so what?’ question (what impact will this driver have on my organisation?) and think that it has some relevance to the problem you talk about. Caroline was talking about a model which encourages organisations to think about how something external to the organisation impacts on the resources available to an organisation (which then impacts on the capacities of an organisation) – I forget whose model it was. Anyway, perhaps by focussing the axes on different resources it is easier to make them independent. To do this your scenario question need to be reasonably focussed – so whereas ‘cultural and religious futures’ may have been quite broad, some scenarios we developed on the future of the advice sector were comparatively focussed. In this case our two axes were reasonably independent because we focussed on different ‘resources’ (although that wasn’t how we thought about it at the time!) One axis was about staff and knowledge and the mode of delivery (remote advice vs face-to-face) and another axis was about how funding was organised and about the relationships with partners/competitors (rationalisation vs networks).

Karl and I just finished running a session at the NCVO Publishers Forum conference based on this think-piece. Some very interested thoughts emerged about how publishing in the VCS has changed and how it will change in the next 5 years. I’ve captured those thoughts and posted the powerpoint slides over in the events forum.

Karl and I just finished running a session at NCVO’s Publishers Forum Conference on new models for income generation (Karl did all the talking and I looked after the flip chart!)

The presentation was based on Karl’s piece about what the VCS can learn from the music industry.

You can have a look at the slides here.

We had a discussion with the participants about how publishing has changed over the last 5 years, and how they thought it would change in the next 5 years. Here’s what we discussed.

How has publishing changed in 5 years?

• From paper newsletters to downloadable pdfs
• From a one page inactive website to a interactive website
• Fewer paid-for publications
• An alert service for new web content
• From content written by a webmaster to content generated by all staff
• From an online journal which copied the print version to a dedicated and appropriate online journal, including video etc
• A wider audience, which expects to find content online

How will publishing change in the next 5 years?

• Paid for services will be wrapped around free content
• ‘Horses for courses’ – hard copy formats will be used where appropriate and web formats where appropriate
• From content (what we want to put out) to user experience (what they want to receive)
• ‘Digital natives’ will enter the workforce and move into senior position, having a big impact on how we use the web
• The ‘wheat will be sorted from the chaff’ in terms of online tools
• Web2.0 tools will be ubiquitous and email will still be ubiquitous
• Quality will have been compromised. Or… trusted brands will have been strengthened.
• Referral and recommendation systems will drive traffic to highest quality content
• More collaboration, but tension with intellectual property
• The librarian will have been reinvented as a way of getting exactly what you want
• More tailored web pages taking into account geographical locations of users (geo-mapping)
• Users may pay what they can afford for content, the better off subsidising the less well off

What have we missed here?

Yes I did! Hoping for time to read it next week…

Thanks Catherine – I like that!

Hi Stephen
We were considering a facebook group for a while but I wanted to find some time to think through what the benefits would be and how to make sure that it didn’t lie dormant (and haven’t yet!) Do you think a linked-in group would be good? What benefits would it bring?
Thanks
Megan

Here’s an interesting piece in the Guardian about how Norway has managed to enforce a law that 40% of company directors must be female. What’s particularly interesting is the supportive public and media attitudes to such affirmative action.

Yesterday we hosted an afternoon seminar at the NCVO annual conference. An excellent panel of speakers debated the ‘burning issues’ of climate change, bridging communities and the ways in which young people are associating.

The session began with a presentation from Lenka Setkova, who took us through the findings of the Carnegie UK Trust’s Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. Stuart Etherington (NCVO’s Chief Executive, who chaired the session) then invited the 90 strong audience to discuss and feed in their key messages building on the presentation. And this is what emerged. There’s a wealth of ideas here, which were generally expressed either as threats, opportunities, questions or calls to action.

Risks/challenges/threats:

• Fragmentation of society (building community/ies is very important)
• Collaboration v competition (seeing the big picture, working together. Public good is paramount)
• Implications of global warming
• Risk of communities becoming more distant from each other
• Third sector losing its independence – challenge and values subsumed
• Increasing obstacles to engaging with civil society
• Less participation, time poverty, individualism/atomisation, a tension between participatory and representative civil society
  Increased complexity of need
• The unintended consequences of policies to keep us safe
• Growing competition for resources (oil, water etc) results in militarism
• Decline in local association and increase in global virtual association
  Impact of the media and technology on the personal relationships that are the glue of civil society
• Fragmentation of society coupled with growth of surveillance
• Emptying countryside – migration to cities – shanty town economies
• Homogenisation of values, opinions, voices – insularity

Opportunities:

• Technological developments – both for organisations, civil society and individual clients
• Increased identification with local life
• Online communications to addess marginalisation of dissent and create new kinds of public deliberation spaces at a local and global level
• To reach out to other groups and influence change
• Global sustainability challenge results in solidarity and growth in civil society
• Expansion of use of social networking – eg flashgroups
• Position civil society as leaders in environmental expertise and in working with people for change
• Impact of the media and technology on the personal relationships that are the glue of civil society
• Networks and alliances

Questions:

• Can civil society associations rise to the challenge of working together – locally and nationally – to tackle head-on intolerance (generated/fuelled by the media, politicians) towards some of the UK’s most marginalized groups (eg drug offenders, destitute migrants, asylum seekers etc)?
• What happens to those individuals in society that do not fit into a specific agenda (eg sex workers, drug addicts)? How do they fit into the accepted ‘good’ society?
• Does technology take away from localism and being involved/participating locally?
• Will our independence be eroded if we become stronger as a sector
• How can we promote local awareness and discussion of these issues, across social and sectoral ‘boundaries’?
• How do we keep the third sector from being wiped out by the first and second sectors?
• How can we address climate change, which requires collective action while managing an inherent community cohesion/dissent tension, in a world where people have less time t oengage and fewer meaningful spaces in which to do so?

Calls to action:

• Civil society should define and exemplify new models and patterns of growth. Growth is not always good. Extra extra extra is neither equitable or sustainable – let’s look for ‘infragrowth’. The negawatt (energy saved) rather than megawatt (energy generated).
• Civil society needs to embrace online spaces more effectively, more often, mainstream it.
• VCS must revisit history and become the advocates for our liberties.
  If we could make growing older a positive experience we would at the same time find universal solutions for social coherence

Further to my comment above, today an ICM poll for the Guardian painted a slightly different picture, with 51% ‘not confident’ about ‘the economy, your financial situation, and ability to keep up with the cost of living’. The slightly different stats are most likely due to the different wording of the questions, and shows the limitations of polls, but either way confidence does appear to be falling. An interesting aspect of the Guardian poll is the difference in confidence between ‘the poorest’ (33% are confident) and those ‘at the top’ (64% are confident) – a gap which widened since a similar poll in December and which the Guardian take as evidence of a widening gap between rich and poor.

According to a recent populus poll for the times, 94% of the public are confident that they will be able to keep up with their rent or their mortgage in 2008, while four out of five say they will be able to reduce their non-mortgage debt in 2008. Populus report that this confidence chimes with recently released repossession data which showed that there were actually 10% fewer repossessions than predicted in 2007.

It’s great to see a good discussion going here! There’s also a lot of discussion on the RSA Networks site here that you may like to join. We had an excellent meeting last week with David Wilcox, Simon Berry and colleagues from the RSA and the project really has some momentum behind it now – I’ll keep you posted!

Pete alerted me to this post from Peter Franklin on the Conservative Home blog which talks about the blogs that influence those in Westminster. The oldest and most influential bloggers are still independent individuals (he cites Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale and Conservative Home). However, he sees the mainstream press reasserting its previous dominance as many journalists get the hang of writing good blogs, which are becoming increasingly influential (eg Comment Central from Danny Finkelstein and colleagues at the Times and the Spectator’s Coffee House blog)

One of the key strategic questions for an organisation is whether to grow, and if so, how? A recent report from the Young Foundation, In and out of sync: the challenge of growing social innovations details 11 case studies of social innovations which highlight four necessary conditions for growing innovative products, services and models:
1) ‘Pull’ in the form of effective demand
2) ‘Push’ in the form of effective supply
3) Effective strategies that connect ‘pull’ to ‘push’
4) Learning and adaptation to ensure impact
The executive summary also highlights another interesting aspect of growth, namely how ideas and knowledge are protected and shared. It describes a spectrum of approaches: at one end innovation is controlled and contained within one organisation, at the other innovation spreads with no-one exercising ownership or control. Clearly the appropriate point along the spectrum depends on a number of factors. Interesting stuff…

Thanks for sharing this Helena. I really like your idea of using PESTLE and SWOT together like this as a way of getting people to focus on implications. Do you think this is easier because they are both familiar tools that your organisation feels comfortable using already? Also, by giving the ‘homework’ (as Jake calls it) after the exercise rather than before, I imagine that this helps to keep the conversation going after the meeting, rather than have it end once the table is filled in.

Ah yes, I use the open rights group as an example of the long tail working, and pledgebank as a type of new online organisation dedicated to bringing together these new groups/communities of interest. It’s true that their natural supporter base is likely to be experimenting with the new sites, but presumably it will broaden out over time.

Thanks Tony, I’ll take a look. I wonder if we need a driver on the site about privacy issues, either specifically to do with social networking, or more broadly (eg ID cards?)

Responding to a news post on ICT and public services, Tony from Bolton Citizens Advice Bureau, made the following comment

“We’re looking into how we could use tools like podcasts as a vehicle for information and limited advice delivery and we have some examples on our website.
I’ve been considering how we might use social networks but I have concerns about some of their terms of service which effectively seem to assign to them any and all rights to do whatever they like with any content that is uploaded, which I am a little wary of in regard of our information and how it might be represented in other ways and also what might develop should a service provider be taken over by another organisation.
Similarly, I’ve thought about how we might use environments like Second Life, but identity and confidentiality are key and critical factors in our dealings with clients and I can’t see how we can securely establish and maintain those in such an environment.”

I think Tony’s right to be concerned about identity and confidentiality in relation to social networks. This is a concern that is under-recognised generally I think, but it is obviously crucial when talking about a field of work like giving and sharing advice.
I think that the power of social networks in advice is something worth thinking about though, as you have been. In our work with Advice UK on the future of the advice sector (see links in post above) we talked about the potential power of new technologies to facilitate peer support. Arising from that we considered concerns about the quality or credibility of such information and questioned whose information people will trust in the future (thinking about drivers on declining deference and trust in institutions, as well as the growth of recommendations and peer information in online environments). Identity and privacy are issues we didn’t touch on, but an important addition I think.

Members may also like to know that we will be holding a seminar at NCVO’s annual conference in February 2008 which will follow on from the Futures for civil society conference. We will be exploring some of the ‘hot topics’ identified by phase 2 of the Carnegie Inquiry into the future of civil society in the UK and Ireland. We will send out further information nearer the time.

I think it is Natalie. I think its also becoming more accepted/prominent as a way of people taking action. This prompts a question about how VCOs can convert these individual consumer actions into a collective, as Stella Creasy discussed at the recent NCVO research conference

I am beginning to scope out a piece of work on the future of membership. If anyone is interested in getting involved or finding out more, please contact me.

You mention corporate citizenship, which sounds interesting but I’m not sure what you mean. Could you explain some more?