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Designing for Civil Society

David Wilcox on social media, engagement, collaboration

Recent stories from socialreporterApril 16

I'm currently doing most of my blogging about social media, e-democracy and open collaboration over at Socialreporter.com. Here's some recent items

Citizen journalism: what happens if no-one comes?
Charlie Beckett wonders whether the potential joining up of citizens and pro journalists in networked journalism will happen if most people aren't interest in active participation online.

Costs of the BBC Action Network
A Freedom of Information request by Tom Steinberg reveals costs of £1.3 million plus

E-Democracy Centre “surprised by speculation”
The director of ICELE says she is surprised by discussion around the activities of the centre, and whether it offers value for money.

Ruralnet shows how to do distributed communities
Ruralnet has revealed the results of its co-design process to re-invent its

CoPs at boundary of institution and innovationApril 13

Click to play also at blip.tv

Steve Dale designed the IDeA online platform that enables local government officers to share knowledge across a wide range of topics, and last week he invited me to a workshop with some of the facilitators who make all it all work.
Conversations at the workshop brought home to me how these online space may become the frontiers where the inevitable institutional formalities of government meet the challenges of innovating in service delivery, democracy and partnership working.
Steve captures that in his item about the event when he recalls someone saying:

“I’m not sure that we have permission to innovate in our organisation”

and adds:

I’d like to think that CoPs do empower people to make chan

New jobs in nonprofit e-learning and innovationApril 9

I've come upon a couple of interesting projects and jobs ... the Cass Business School in London has spent the last three years putting together plans and funding for an innovative programme to provide online learning for people in community and voluntary organisations who might not go down the route of the usual courses. Details here, including a chief exec post at £50,000.

We are looking for a dynamic individual to lead and direct the entire project, working closely with the Trust and Project Board to create a commercially viable and well-used e-knowledge network.
Your knowledge of the voluntary sector, social networking, e-knowledge transfer and experience of successfully developing and implementing start-up projects will give you the expertise needed to ensure the project’s success and to lead and motivate a team of people working with you. In addition, you will manage all marketing and advertising activities associated with the project.

Over at NCVO they are looking for a Sustainable Funding Enterprise and Innovation Officer.

You will lead on developing a programme of work to enable voluntary and community organisations to identify, develop, and value innovation. You will lead on establishing links and forming relationships with organisations that work a

Innovation camp needs imitatorsApril 9

I spent much of last weekend at the London Social Innovation Camp, and as I have written over at Socialreporter, I think we need more of these events that bring together social activists and techies to brew up bright ideas ... and carry them through to action. Using new stuff to do good stuff, in new ways.
The win by Enabled by Design was very well deserved. I experimented with live steaming video from my phone using Qik, and will be doing more of that tomorrow at the Ruralnet|UK Collaborate2008 event. You'll see what I and other produce here.
If you have a Nokia S60 phone you can try qik for yourself ... it is still in alpha, but I'm finding it works well and the Qik folk are really helpful in encouraging us to try their free service and report back.

Professor questions the value of e-democracy centreApril 2

Professor Stephen Coleman, guest blogging at Connecting Bristol, an acknowledged leader in local e-democracy, has now turned his questioning gaze on the government-funded International Centre for Local e-Democracy (ICELE). After listing a range of well-known e-democracy projects in the UK, he says they will be judged by the quality of their outputs.

In the case of ICELE it has been difficult to arrive at any judgments because I simply don’t understand what they are aiming to achieve. Is it new research and understanding? Or new tools to be used by governments? Or critical debate about the merits and values of e-participation? Perhaps someone can tell me what ICELE is for and why considerable amounts of public money should be spent supporting it?
The pilots that were funded by the national project for local e-democracy seem to have disappeared without trace, with the exception of the local issues forums (which survive largely because of the commitment of Steve C