Simon’s Blog (the official one)

I am very pleased about this. Another first for a rural development conference in the UK. This will get the face-to-face networking at this year’s event off to a flying start.

We invite anyone to come and join us on the ruralnet|2008 crowdvine and invite your friends. It only takes a few moments to sign up and you can build your own network of friends, message them or comment on their profile, ask them questions - there’s already a car sharing conversation going on.

Please join us whether you’re coming to the conference or not.

This competition has really got me thinking . . . . here’s another idea.

What is your idea’s name
Neighbourhood Watch Widget
A short description of your idea
Making neighbourhood watch groups more effective by improving communications between members themselves and the police service.
Describe your idea. How does it work and who does it help?
Widgets are small areas on a website or blog which deliver information or services provided by a trusted third party. A good example is the JustGiving Fundraising Widget. This widget is tailored for the particular fundraiser and can be placed on his/her own website. The widget shows a progress bar (amount raised vs target), the comments made by the last 3 donors, information about the charity and a button to donate. See http://ruralnet.typepad.com/pride2007/ for an example

Neighbourhood Watch Groups are very effective at reducing crime, the fear of crime and increasing community cohesion. However they face real communication challenges especially when a large proportion of the community works away from the community (eg in rural areas) or do not have email or who are not online (eg the older members of the community living on their own).

The Neighbourhood Watch widget would deliver the following functionality to every community website, blog or neighbourhood watch website that wanted it. Its availability may even stimulate the creation of new community websites. This is what it would do:

1 - Allow website visitors to log incidents: petty crime, anti-social behaviour and suspicious activity in the neighbourhood
2 - Allow visitors to the website to register to receive notifications of such incidents in the following formats: email; RSS; SMS text to their mobile phone; SMS text-to-voice to their landline phone; via twitter
3 - Allow registered visitors to turn the notification facility off or pause it
3 - Display the last 5 incidents reported in the neighborhood
4 - Have a ‘Get Your Own Widget’ button which would take visitors to the central ‘widget generator’ and allow them to specify their location and get their own widget for their own website
5 - When someone registered an incident the widget would send the details to the Police. To do this the widget would need real-time access to Government data
6 - A beat officer (ha!) or Community Support Officer could also register to receive notifications to their mobile phones when they were on duty in a particular neighbourhood
7 - The widget would also indicate that if they are reporting an emergency they should call 999!

I was pleased to be invited to the launch of the Commission for Rural Communities’ (CRC’s) 10th Annual ‘State of the Countryside’ report at the RSA on Wednesday.

The CRC had taken an interesting approach to the launch by inviting people from outside the rural sector to give short presentations. These were:

• Tony Travers, Director of the London School of Economics
• Joe Saxton, nfpSynergy
• Anthony Walker, CEO, Broadband Stakeholders Group

I know Joe and Anthony and both gave very interesting presentations. But it was Anthony’s remarks about ‘next generation broadband’ that really struck and chord.

He spoke using ‘average statistics’ and indicated that ‘things weren’t too bad’ in rural areas with respect to access to ADSL. And this is true but it’s very unfortunate if you are one of the ‘have nots’ like my Sister-in-Law.

Anthony also mentioned BT’s recent announcement (15/7/08) regarding the ‘UK’s largest ever investment in Super-Fast Broadband‘. Anthony said that he thought that the only hope for rural areas if it is to keep up and not get left behind, is collective community action. I couldn’t agree more.

But we have been here before. In 2002 ruralnet|uk and the Phone Co-op were the joint founders of the ‘Community Broadband Network‘ (CBN) this joined up amazing, community-led initiatives that were taking a DIY approach to internet access. This community action was triggered by the statement from BT at the time that they were not going to upgrade many exchanges in rural areas. CBN was growing fast and was not only providing a broadband service in their communities but also triggering all sorts of other community activity . . . shelters for young people, local history projects, community websites, community TV and so on.

However on 27/4/04 BT announced it was going to enable the majority of rural exchanges after all. Although this was probably good news at the time for most rural residents it completely undermined the community broadband projects. Only the very strongest of them survived. This was a huge loss. The sad thing is that these communities were delivering the broadband of the future (ADSL through telephone exchanges was always a stop-gap measure, a mechanism to keep BT relevant in the broadband market).

Now it looks like the only way rural areas are going to keep up is if they mobilise yet again and help themselves. Many will be reluctant given recent experience.

BT’s announcement of huge investments in Super-Fast Broadband is conditional and I quote: “Plans dependent on regulatory regime and certainty“. Well I think community mobilisation should be conditional too.

We need a clear strategy so that organisations like ruralnet|uk can mobilise and support communities with some certainty that the rug is not going to be pulled from under their feet (again).

Related articles:

The villagers of Vindeln, in remote northern Sweden, are digging up their own roads to lay fiber so that every resident can have broadband access.

Other broadband related articles in this blog.

The Tweeters amongst you will already know that I have been offered (and accepted) a secondment to Communities and Local Government (the Department of) as ‘Policy adviser: new technologies & online tools’ in the Community Empowerment Directorate. Grateful thanks go to Jonathan Adams who emailed me 6 hours before the application deadline saying:

Dear Simon
I saw this and thought of RuralNet. You may well know of this, but I
would not want it to pass by unnoticed.
Very short notice, but I have seen it only this evening.
Yours,
Jonathan

I’m very excited about this as it is a real opportunity to influence government policy with a White Paper due in the summer.

I’ll be using all the trusted open innovation principles on this one. I’d be a bit daunted if I didn’t know that my ‘pop-up’ support network will do just that once I get started. The job description follows. More at the beginning of next week.

(more…)

Photo credits: Drumchapel (left): Steve Wilson; Bearsden (right): James Fraser

Sir,

The consequences of running the lives of the poor are very much more serious even than Libby Purves points out (You’re poor. We’ll run your life for you. Mar 11). It’s more than patronising - it’s a matter of life or death. There are two housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow: Drumchapel and Bearsden. In the early nineties, life expectancy in Drumchapel was 10 years less than in neighbouring Bearsden, Glasgow’s richest area. Today the Scottish Executive’s website says that the difference is 11 years. Both areas are served by the same health service and the same general hospital.

A striking difference between Drumchapel and Bearsden is that in Drumchapel you are likely to be poor and you have other people telling you what to do. You are not in control of your own destiny, you are disempowered and you die an average of 11 years younger.

But am I getting disempowerment mixed up with poverty? Well no, I don’t think I am. A study of male civil servants showed conclusively that those in the lower grade jobs (messengers, doorkeepers) had a three-fold higher mortality rate than men in the highest grade jobs.

This status-related risk factor was found to be more significant in determining death than smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. None of those studied were living in poverty, and all had access to the National Health Service.

People in control, in the higher level jobs, ‘the empowered’, were healthier than the lower grade employees who had things done to them, who often had skills that were under-utilised, lacked clarity in tasks they were asked to do and had very little control or idea about what the future had in store for them.

So, for the individual, empowerment is the biggest gift that can be given: quite literally a matter of life or death. By patronising people you’re not just “making them feel lousy” you may literally be sending them to an early grave.

Simon Berry
Chief Executive
ruralnet|uk
Background and sources

[Well they aren't going to publish it, so I thought I'd publish it myself!]

This post is prompted by a comment by Ed Mitchell on one of my recent posts. Ed said:

2. The key has to be the ongoing
aggregation of our distributed thoughts on our blogs by
interest/practice focused hubs which gather our thoughts and then, when
neccesary, we can come to the communal knowledge watering hole and kick
off in small focused bursts around specific issues…

This gives us the independence we want when we want it and the communal many brains focus when we need it…

We must start using effective keywords and experimenting properly between ourselves!

Focussing on the last sentence. When you are granted a CB Radio licence you get a Call Sign which is unique to you. What if we all had a ‘Blog Sign’ that was unique to us? Then we could use each other’s Blog Signs to tag things that we think particular people would be interested in. Then we could aggregate on our Blog Sign. Have I just reinvented email? Is this built into blogs already and I haven’t noticed?

Let’s see if I can start a trend. My Blog Sign is s1m0nb3rry.

It is inconceivable to think now that just 5 years ago rural Britain faced the prospect of no access to broadband. The visionaries of the time, who mostly ended up playing an active part in the Community Broadband Network (established by ruralnet|uk and The Phone Co-op) and the Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC), could see that this would be a complete disaster for rural areas. They were right weren’t they? Anyone disagree? I thought not.

With the internet becoming a major delivery channel for nearly everything, including Government and other public services, how would the Government have coped with a group of people equivalent in size to a major city who were excluded from such services?

But it’s OK now. Virtually everyone has access to broadband. Or do they?

The trouble with broadband is that it is a rapidly evolving technology. It’s not like electricity or gas. Supply people with that and they’ve got it for life. With broadband, today’s broadband is tomorrow’s narrowband.

When I was project manager of the WREN Telecottage in the early 90s we were a trial site for ISDN and when the internet arrived and we hooked up an ISDN router, we thought we’d died and gone to heaven! Web pages loaded in an instant, just as fast, it seemed, as the stuff from our own server located 6 feet away. But you try ISDN today. You’d be VERY disappointed. Things have moved on.

We have a situation a bit like the deadly tryst that exists between hardware and software producers – faster machines beget more demanding software which demands faster hardware and so it goes on. In the same way, as ‘broadband’ gets faster so online service providers produce services which demand faster broadband speeds.

So what should happen in rural areas when the ADSL systems they have been provided with prove totally inadequate? Should organisations like the Regional Development Agencies meddle in the market again and fill in with whatever the next generation of broadband is? I don’t think so.

The trouble with ‘market meddling’ is that is screws things up. All those rural communities who have been provided with ADSL in places where there was market failure are probably stuck with it for sometime as those who have invested will need to see a return on their investment, and that takes time.

So, should we just leave these rural communities to miss out the THE economic and social development driver of our time? No we shouldn’t and we should meddle in the market again but this time we need to do it properly and give these communities a lot more than the market is prepared to deliver at the time.

I think I am right in saying that a system of ‘fibre to the street’ (or village centre) and very very high speed wireless links from there is about as good as it can get, as far as broad band is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

So next time we meddle in the market let’s not do it reluctantly. Let’s do it with real enthusiasm and properly.

Related information:

• I have written about rural broad band before here: my 2004 posting.
• The book pictured, written by one of the rural broadband warriors, Lindsey Annison, can be purchased here as a paperback or download.
• Read more about South Witham Broadband and the Community Broadband Network.

See also:

• BBC: Broadband digital divide looms.

I start this posting knowing that someone will read it and say "Where has this guy been? We all worked that out years ago." Despite this I am going to continue because if I’ve only just worked it out, there will be others like me who might find this interesting!

Those of us who have tried to support ‘Communities of Practice’ online will know that it is not easy, especially if it’s got nothing to do with ICT or making lots of money or organising a sports team.

Why is it so difficult? A key issue is that, on many issues, it is difficult to get to enough people interested in the same thing to the same extent for long enough to sustain an online group. Like most people, I am interested in lots of things and could belong to loads of communities of practice. But in real life I end up on the periphery of all of them. My interest in any particular thing waxes and wanes. This is captured brilliantly in Jane Berry’s* spiral of engagement (pictured) which she produced as part of the work on the Open Innovation Exchange.

OK, so how does Web 2.0 help? Well, on the one hand it would appear not to. Web 2.0 is very empowering for individuals and these days it is just as difficult to get Web 2.0 literate people to participate in an online group as it is to get the digitally excluded involved. The ‘literates’ are all doing their own thing in there own online spaces thanks very much. Why should they come and join your group?

But what Web 2.0 gives us is tags (keywords) and in the Web 2.0 world it is these tags that bring us together, or can potentially bring us together, in virtual online groups. So an alternative, to bringing people together and then expecting them to interact in a shared space, is to encourage individuals to write their own ideas in their own space (like I’m doing here) and to tag it. The tags then identify de facto communities of practice and draw the attention of individuals to the work of other individuals doing, and writing, about similar things.

"But," I hear you say, "I don’t want make contact with people who just write about stuff. I want contact with people who are actually doing stuff." I agree. That’s why we need to use the internet as our collective ‘workbench’ like Beth Kanter does so well over here.

* I have to express (great) interest here . . . Jane is my wife!

What’s in a word? In an environment of jargon, cliché and political
correctness the word ‘empowerment’ has suffered badly. Let’s stand
back, and elevate it to its proper place: arguably, empowerment is the key concept for people supporting community development.

There are two housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow: Drumchapel
and Bearsden. In the early nineties, life expectancy in Drumchapel was
10 years less than in neighbouring Bearsden, Glasgow’s richest area (1 - PDF). The Scottish Executive’s website says that the difference today is 11 years (2). Both areas are served by the same health service and the same general hospital (3). So, what is going on?

These statistics illustrate a hyposthesis: the more you control your
own destiny, the healthier you are likely to be. Empowered individuals
are healthier and live longer, the theory goes.

A survey in 2003 (4 - PDF)
established that 16% of Drumchapel working population were unemployed
and a further 14% were permanently sick or disabled. 22% reported some
form of financial difficulty. As an unemployed person, you are less
likely to live in a place of your own choice, and other people are more
likely to be telling you what you can and can’t do. You are more likely
to be stressed and more likely to smoke, drink and take other drugs.

But what about those well-off people in high-paid, high-stress jobs who
may also smoke, drink and take drugs? Interestingly, research amongst
the employed appears to reinforce the empowerment and health
hypothesis. A study of male civil servants showed conclusively that
those in the lower grade jobs (messengers, doorkeepers) had a
three-fold higher mortality rate than men in the highest grade jobs (5).

This status-related risk factor was found to be more significant in
determining death than smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol.
None of those studied were living in poverty, and all had access to the
National Health Service.

People in control, in the higher level jobs, ‘the empowered’, were
healthier than the lower grade employees who had things done to them,
who often had skills that were under-utilised, lacked clarity in tasks
they were asked to do and had very little control or idea about what
the future had in store for them.

So, for the individual, empowerment is the biggest gift that can be given: quite literally a matter of life or death.

For me, these principles can be applied at levels beyond the
individual. Unhealthy families, communities or businesses are
characterised by a lack of control over their own destiny. They have
things done to them, they are not in control themselves. Failing
communities usually exist in an environment - physical and non-physical
- not of their own making. The way forward is to empower communities to
take control of their own destiny.

Businesses usually fail because they are unable to manage aspects that
should be under their control. Good business planning, timely access to
information, just-in-time training and relevant, tailored support all
enable businesses to be more in control of their destiny.

So, we use the word ‘empowerment’ with pride in the ruralnet|uk mission
statement: To promote social inclusion and reduce deprivation in rural
areas by empowering individuals, families, communities and
businesses so that they able to control their own destinies and fully
engage with society.

1: World Health Day 1996: The Who’s Healthy Cities Programme
www.who.int/docstore/world-health-day/en/documents1996/whd2int.pdf

2: Building Better Cities: Delivering Growth and Opportunities
www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/finance/bbcs-05.asp

3:The myth of welfare dependency by Nicolai Gentchev
pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj69/gentchev.htm

4: Drumchapel Social Inclusion Partnership Board, Baseline Study, 2003 Update www.drumchapel.org.uk/downloads/baselineupdate2003.pdf

5: Marmot, Shipley and Rose, 1984 cited by www.workhealth.org/projects/pwhitew.html

There are problems with the word ’sustainable’. First of all, it’s just an adjective and can be stuck on the front of anything: sustainable living, sustainable funding, sustainable farming.

So to say: “We are sustainable” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Do you mean you are earning enough to keep yourself or your organisation afloat. Do you mean you can keep going on, as you are, forever – perpetual motion on the way to Shangri-la? Or are we talking about striving to balance economic, social and environmental considerations in everything we do?

ruralnet|uk is a charity working towards ‘Sustainable Rural Communities’. What do we mean? For us, sustainable rural communities are communities where there is a harmony between economic development and social cohesion and an on-going desire to reduce the impact of actions on the environment.

Even this will be interpreted in a spectrum of different ways according to who our audience is, and what they know about our work.

The term sustainability has become fashionable: it is used too broadly and is too complex to be useful in any practical way. It’s a worthy vision, a responsible-sounding strategy, but how do you actually do it? Is there a simple yardstick we can use to guide rural communities to make them more sustainable?

There are often tensions between economic development, social cohesion and the environment. There need not be. And, big, big opportunities are missed when one of the three objectives are pursued without due regard for the other two.

Let us look at a selection of ’sustainable’ initiatives to see if we can identify the yardstick we need.

Community Broadband Network

In 2003, when it looked like large areas of rural
Britain were going to be denied access to ADSL broadband. ruralnet|uk worked with the Phone Co-op to establish the Community Broadband Network (CBN). At that time, a small number of rural communities were determined not to be left out of this strategically crucial development and decided to take a DIY approach. These communities got together, linked themselves up using blisteringly fast wireless technology and then shared among themselves the cost of linking this community network to the wider internet. The idea of CBN was to help these communities share what they knew with other communities who aspired to do the same thing.

These broadband communities were ground-breaking in many ways. First of all they took a collective approach, not an individual approach to the issue. Without exception this strengthened the social cohesion of these communities, with significant, non-broadband-related spin-offs. People got to know each other better, other community initiatives were started in the can-do atmosphere created. And finally, it established in many rural areas a foundation stone for the new knowledge economy, supporting jobs where weightless information is mined, harvested and moved around, rather than more traditional rural commodities.

CBN was essentially an initiative that was driven by an economic development imperative, but which had significant social and environmental benefits.

Community Carbon Network

ruralnet|uk is now working with the Carnegie Rural Community Development Programme to look into replicating the principles of the CBN in a ‘Rural Community Carbon Network‘ (RCCN) to raise awareness of community approaches to increased efficiency in energy use, including local generation of energy from renewable sources. Like its predecessor, RCCN would also promote and fund knowledge transfer, including peer to peer support both online and face to face.

Sustrans

Another example: at the ruralnet|2006 conference last week in
Sherwood Forest, John Grimshaw, CEO of Sustrans and mastermind of the National Cycle Network pointed out that the UK was the poor man of Europe when it comes to the use of the bicycle (See below: Percentage of trips by bicycle by country).

Figure 1: Percentage of trips by bicycle

He then went on to make an alarming link between the levels of cycling in the
UK and childhood obesity (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Cycling and obesity

People in colder, wetter and hillier countries in
Europe cycle more than we do in the UK.

Cycling ticks more of the ’sustainability’ boxes than you first expect: yes, it is non-polluting, and uses renewable energy, but it also impacts on health; encourages community projects and involvement in building, signing and maintaining tracks; helps reclaim and restore natural environments; and with the right planning and incentives, encourages local economic stability. It could do much more. John argues that we need to move around less and invest more in our own localities: to make the Trussocks as attractive as
Tuscany.

Why not give visitor discounts to those who arrive by bike? Employers should aim to reduce car miles of their employees by 10% year on year through the encouragement of decentralised working. He even suggests that it should be legal to use place of residence as a criteria when recruiting. Many factors make cycling more viable and more popular: building safe routes is just one, and Sustrans also works hard to encourage more women to cycle and to ensure children adopt a life-time habit to counter the worrying trends in obesity shown above.

Local food

Food Links projects and Farmers’ Markets are another example of activities that promote sustainability on a number of levels. They promote healthy eating, improve demand and markets for local food and reduce ‘food miles’ and the associated damage to the environment. Farmers’ markets are viable for the farmers who participate in them because they make a significantly larger margin on what they sell directly to the consumers, rather than to supermarkets.

Think global, act local

All of these initiatives seem ’sustainable’. But they are initiated by different primary drivers: to improve living standards, services, or work prospects, a better environment, improved community cohesion or health. With just a little thought, planning, and the right incentives, many of these objectives can be combined, giving a triple bottom line: financial, social and environmental benefits. But what is at their heart? For me, what all these sustainable actions have in common is that they focus on the ‘local’: people getting together and harnessing both outside help and their own determination to make a difference. It is easy, when faced with seemingly huge and intractable problems – climate change; soaring energy prices; depleted communities - to feel disempowered, to think that small actions are worthless. But Patrick Geddes’ aphorism: ‘Think global, act local’ (Cities in Evolution, 1915), taken up by E F Shumacher in the 70s and by many others since, is perhaps still our best yardstick for rural sustainability.