What if asking ‘What is the Big Society?’ is entirely the wrong question?

If it’s a process of devolving power to lower levels of government, or to areas outside of the state itself, including, shock horror, real everyday folk, then asking for guidance on it is like asking for guidance with something like the concept of love. There are areas around the edges that people can advise and assist with, but if you ask ‘What is love?’, then the answer’s going to be different for different people in different places and in different times.

Interesting too that the Consultation Institute briefing paper asks

How would new community led initiatives be monitored and by whom? Would local authorities need to pick up the burden of monitoring whilst being confronted by cutbacks themselves?

Later on it says;

Could it be that the government’s desire to move away from central influence could be reflected in not giving directives of this nature?

I suspect this latter point is entirely the case, especially if you look at an interview with Eric Pickles (Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government) over on Iain Dale’s blog a while back, where he relates a story of an early meeting with his civil servants.

I want to put this politely, but occasionally you do things that surprise them. For example when we got rid of the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA), we were just talking about it. They said: “You want to replace it with what?” Nothing. “Yes, okay. But what things do we want local authorities to be judged on? What’s the regime?” Nothing. “So just to be clear secretary of state, when you say nothing, what do you mean?” Nothing. I mean nothing, absolutely nothing. It’s pointless. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t get a bin emptied. No sure, of course we are going to inspect children’s services but it’s going to be in terms of life threatening right through to personal liberty. Those kinds of things are going to be dealt with. But some of the stuff was pointless. You just became quite good at filling the tick boxes. Nothing actually happened.

My suspicion is that this quote gets to the heart of the issue better than any briefing paper. When asking ‘What is the Big Society?’ there is no measurable or finite answer, and that in itself is entirely the point.

It’s going to be interesting watching the different layers of government, spoonfed with directives, guidance and targets for the last 13 years adapt to this new mindset.

This is a rule I’ve been using for a while now. Great for making web apps “good”, but can be used in other places too (product design, customer service, copywriting, advertising). Being “good” is a route to “win”.

80% practicality (“job done”); 10% glamour; 10% character.

So how does it work?

“Job done” practicality is the price of entry for your app (or product etc). You need to to give the user what they want, helping them achieve their goal easily and with minimal fuss. If you can’t deliver on this, the app or product will probably fail. It won’t be good, it won’t sell, it won’t gain users. You need to at least do what it says on the tin. That can be a lot of work, as rule of thumb, probably 80% of your effort.

Being ruthless about delivering practically is a great tactic for many reasons, including:

• can reduce your overall costs (by removing un-needed stuff that you have to make and support)
• benefits users (by decreasing the friction of using your app or product)

Practicality also has a couple of serious limitations:

• doesn’t distinguish you much from your competitors. Being better at “job done” might keep your existing customers, but it probably won’t create passionate advocacy and recommendation. Passionate advocacy and recommendation is great, it’s a route to “win”.
• practicality alone tends to lack warmth, soul, personality….the stuff that makes us human

Glamour make people feel smart, make things shiny, make people go ‘ooh’.

Emphasising glamour might sound shallow, but – take a peek – we can take glamour to mean beauty, elegance, chic, style; charisma, charm, magnetism, desirability (worth). The word ‘sprezzatura‘ might be better, but I’d be forgetting how to spell it

In a web app, glamour comes from the appearance of effortlessness. This could be things like outstanding graphic design or providing interactions that feel just great. Using javascript drag-and-drop to make a list much easier to use is glamour. Slideshows and lightboxes can be glamour. One way to increase glamour is by showcasing the user’s stuff and keeping your app out of the way – perfectly crafted background can enhance the glamour of a foreground subject.

Be ruthless with glamour. The goal is to flatter the user, not the designer. Make the user feel smart, make them feel they’ve made great choices. Glamour done wrong = tawdry, cheap, nasty, irritating, and might give you a rash.

Character is who we are. Who we are is a factor in having users come back to us, and in creating passionate advocacy and recommendation. Be ruthless with character – you’ll be judged by it. Be ruthless, but be generous. Character comes out in tone of voice, customer service, and (worthwhile) quirks. I could write more on this, but I couldn’t think of anything useful and I’m running out of time. You probably get it, ‘cos you’re smart people

– postscript —

This rule *is not* an 80-20 law, although it might look like one » Learn why.

This rule *is* effectively a variation of “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”

His case is that cutting ‘design’ can be a cost-saving measure. Using ‘design’ as a shorthand for ‘visual appearance’ and ‘style’, Gez questions specifically whether it’s worth paying extra to have the appearance of an app changed to perfectly match a corporate style.

I thought it was an interesting question to raise.

Design does matter of course.

The design of apps / software is fundamental. A ‘just-right’ design makes it easier for people to participate, results in a better user experience, and gets the best return on investment. The best design is the one that offers the best value – almost by definition. Anything else is either less than optimal, or just waste.

But when the basic design of an app is already good, is it necessary to do work changing it to perfectly match a specific appearance guideline? Nah. It’s just too expensive and not that big a deal. Consistency across an organisation’s websites is useful, but can be over-rated. People figure stuff out.

A perfect consistency might be desirable, but it isn’t necessary. It’s a luxury, a nice-to-have, and if (as some people are conjecturing) Peak State has passed, micro-managing the visual identity of an organisation shouldn’t be a spending priority.

The world of branding has moved on anyway. ‘Brand‘ is now understood much more as ‘what we do‘ and hardly at all as ‘our logo / font / corporate colours’. The traditional desire for tight control over visual identity doesn’t hold up – it’s too expensive and time-consuming.

Local authorities particularly will benefit from focussing on brand as ‘what we deliver’, not on ‘what we look like’. For hard-pressed staff it’s one of the easier cost-saving suggestions to implement: all that’s needed is to stop doing work to make everything fit to corporate identity / image. For management, officers and elected politicians, showing leadership on this issue is easy – just say “it’s ok”.

Back to changing the appearance of apps: well-designed apps have the built-in ability to make simple customisations. This makes customising some things very cheap. However customising stuff that’s not built-in is ‘really quite expensive’. This isn’t just for technical software reasons – it’s a question of value and designing for the total life-cost of a system; this would be useful and interesting to explore in future (doing it here would make this post too long)

For large (national) organisations, it makes more sense to have apps thoroughly customised to fit in with organisational identity. Where there will be hundreds of thousands of users over time then a full customisation may offer good value. More so if users expect a highly consistent visual identity from an organisation and build their trust on this. Still, there could be real cost savings in doing without perfect consistency with other websites operated by the organisation (and in having a more relaxed approach to corporate identity guidelines).

What’s our position in this? We’re advocating that there should be less spend on customising visual appearance….yet as a builder of apps, customisation is a source of income for us, so in one sense that might seem irrational. Perhaps, but we want to be part of the solution not part of the problem, and we just don’t think this work adds value in all cases. We’ve focussed on offering built-in customisations that are good value, and we think they’re the future (or even the now).

I’ll get off my soapbox and end with a couple of helpful links. This useful list of best practice tips from Robert Brook makes for good reading. It’s based on a rather more cross list of ‘worst practice’ that Adrian Short compiled. Finally, Webcredible have a straightforward report suggesting that council website usability is getting slightly worse. Food for thought.

Sometimes though, we get requests along the lines of ‘how much would it cost to make this entire system look exactly like our website?’. All well and good, but hard to quote for at times. How much do you want it to look like your site? How firmly are you going to embed it? Does it have to integrate with other systems you’re running?

Ages ago we looked at just replacing the CSS in a system, but the accessibility, usability and cross browser risks are just too great for that to be a sensible approach that’s going to be cost effective in the long run. So to do an in depth job to make a perfect match can add significant time and money.

TImes have moved on though, and it’s pertinent to ask, why bother anyway? With apps like our consultation finder, you can just take content from it using RSS and automatically publish that content in your existing site. Have a look at what Bristol City Council do with data that comes from here and feeds into here. No reskin or design costs needed, the content looks like part of the existing website, because it is part of the existing website.

This trend is growing across the web as well at the moment. Check out Flipboard , an app that takes content from existing Twitter and Facebook accounts, and presents it in a much more intuitive and readable manner. Really quite awesome.

So this may be the way things are going now then. Rather than trying to design a perfect site, why not just open up the data in the site and allow people to apply their own designs to it, or use the data as part of their own website?

It’s a quick win in these times of smaller budgets needing to be made to go further.

The exercise threw up some surprising and some not so surprising results (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/10504916.stm).  Obviously, some of these are diametrically opposed to already-announced spending plans (the ring-fencing of foreign aid, for example).  Many would feel that this makes it considerably trickier for councils to get on with tackling the difficult decisions they need to realise £1bn in savings.

We hear our fair share of this kind of skepticism from public sector staff about particular consultation processes – ‘local elections are where the people say how they want the budget set’, ‘the public aren’t expert enough to contribute meaningfully’, ‘asking for people’s suggestions is just a way to incur more expense’ etc etc – and some of it is justified – particularly where consultation processes are divorced from actual decision-making processes.

However, this skepticism cannot be allowed to stymie public engagement and consultation on budget cuts altogether.  Because what is surely vital across the board is that people feel connected to the decisions being made, and that they were given an opportunity to participate.  What is not going to fly is councils making unilateral decisions – see, for example, the story in my earlier post from Panorama about Wirral Council, who had to ultimately reverse a decision to close libraries because they hadn’t consulted their residents at the outset.

Further to this general principle of connectedness, we’re approaching the point where if there’s no facility to get involved specifically online, you’re denying people a massive opportunity to participate.

Frankly, this is what Budget Simulator was built for.  It’s designed to support the work of deliberative engagement with citizens, giving them a really easy opportunity to both learn about budget issues and express their priorities.  There are other ways to engage your community about budget-setting, of course, and Budget Simulator is often used as part of a wider scheme but 10 councils and other authorities are already using it this year because getting a cheap, quick, proven way to connect people with budget decisions online is an easy win.

You might have reservations about the immediate task of connecting with the public on budget cuts but the benefits of doing it, and the risks of not doing it, are too great to ignore.

So, crowd-sourcing has come of age.  It’s moved from the realms of innovation to mainstream.  It’s now part of the everyday workings of an organisation – whether it’s business or government.  And it’s moved into the mainstream largely because it works.  It’s not a fad but a fact.  And that’s because the basic model of crowd-sourcing is so simple: many ideas from multiple minds are better than few ideas from few minds.

But the simplicity of the crowd-sourcing model only works if you do it properly.  And this is where the “or not” bit comes in.  As if you don’t do crowd-sourcing properly you end up with an unscaleable idea mountain.  If all you do is ask for ideas in a completely unstructured unmanaged way, then instead of “harnassing the collective intelligence of the people” (to quote President Obama) you end up “pillaging the minds of the masses” (to quote me).

As the smartness of crowd-sourcing lies in the empowerment of the crowd to help solve the problem for you, not simply in providing a bottomless ideas suggestion box.  And this empowerment comes from the tools provided.  Any meaningful crowd-sourcing process will use an app which allows the crowd to not only suggest ideas, but to also rate, comment and tag other people’s ideas.  And it’s the last bit – the tagging, where much of the value lies, as community tagging allows the ideas to become so much more useful – especially in a scenario where you’ve got 10′s of thousands of ideas, which will rapidly become impossible to make sense of.

So, yes crowd-sourcing is exciting.  Yes, business and government should be doing more of it.  But, this all comes with a warning – don’t under-value people’s ideas by running a poorly structured and managed process, otherwise there is a threat that your whole process may be devalued and the virtues of the crowd may turn.

[Plug alert: for awesome policy crowd-sourcing toolery, check out www.Dialogue-app.com]

From speaking to local authorities across the country, it’s very clear that the next round of budget consultations will be some of the most difficult and most important that most people have been involved in.  I think it’s fair to say there will be lots of demand for guidance on best practice, or at least some examples of public sector organisations who’ve been there and done it before.  Given that, I thought it’d be helpful to share some practical examples from our experience of people using an online component in their budget cuts consultation.

We were fortunate enough to work with 3 councils facing cuts last financial year who chose to use our Budget Simulator to consult their residents online about how they should meet their deficit.  Whilst the quick case studies below are all of people using the same underlying app, they also each customised it to their particular situation:

Isle of Wight

Isle of Wight faced a challenge of achieving a £5 million in savings. They needed a budget consultation tool that reflected their corporate initiatives of achieving this: either through reducing spend or increasing charges.

Residents were informed about the savings-approach of the consultation exercise, but were allowed to submit budgets that didn’t achieve that £5 million target. This allowed for a high response rate and the council was able to report on the consultation as a whole, along with how those who achieved the savings target opted to do so.

http://www.budgetsimulator.com/isleofwight

Exeter

Exeter had to achieve a 5% decrease in spend of their overall budget in ’10-’11. They had consulted on the budget successfully before, but this time wanted to put it out to as many residents as possible because of how important the conversation would be. They needed a tool that collected responses of how people would achieve that shortfall.

Delib built Exeter a Budget Simulator in which residents could raise or lower spending in each areas. However, an overall saving of 5% had to be achieved in order for the respondent to submit their budget. In doing this, Exeter ensured that every single response they received had successfully tackled the necessary cuts.

http://www.budgetsimulator.com/demo_exeter

Barnet

London Borough of Barnet had set out the mission to keep council tax as low as possible for residents in the forthcoming financial year. This meant that they had to be realistic about spending, and they wanted to convey this to residents.

We built them a Simulator customised to only permit residents to cut funds from spending areas. This allowed the authority to manage expectations as to the nature of the forthcoming budget and gather understanding of which services residents felt it was most important to retain funding.

http://www.budgetsimulator.com/demo_barnet

This customised apps approach is really our ideal model: we think apps plus service is the best way to support consultation professionals who need to get something done quickly and affordably, but that’s also appropriate to their area (which they’ll obviously know better than we do).  Subtly modifying a ready-to-go app means you get a proven tool that’s cheaper and easier than commissioning something from scratch but also adapted to the nuances of your situation.

Of course, this is all taking the ‘internet’ part as a given – but then, it surely should be by now: the demand for, and benefits of, public interaction being available online make it pretty much impossible to ignore.  Our aim is always to make it easy for government to better connect people with their decisions – and budget-setting is going to be a crucial decision this year, with the internet a necessary channel for public consultation.  We’re expecting to see many more examples of effective online consultations on budget cuts over the coming months!

If you’ve got any questions, would like to find out more about these case studies or about Budget Simulator, just drop me a line: adam.cardew@delib.co.uk

That said though, issues that get in the way of it moving forward even further emerge from time to time, and I think we may have found a new one in the last week.

It’s a classic ‘old practice meets new practice’ issue, and it centres around internet security.

Classically, any data held online, or in any digital form, must be held securely and in accordance with the Data Protection Act, which is pretty explicit on this area. I remember even in GCSE IT lessons back in the day, the safety and ownership of data held digitally was a major point of discussion.

All well and good, and the law speaks as much sense now as it did back then. That said, what about when this data security rubs up against the newer trend of online data freedom?

We’ve found two interesting examples of this in the last week that are worth considering.

First of all, we’re getting our e-consultation platform fully security tested at the moment. The company who are doing the testing have done a bang up job of going over the system so far, and we’re happy to say they haven’t found any notable issues.

They were looking at the system with a fresh pair of eyes though, with little context on what it does or what it’s for, and so have flagged up the fact that our consultation database allows users, whether public or administrators, to download an entire list of the consultations held in the system in a .csv file at any time, start dates, end dates, contact details, the lot.

Now, we’ve put this in because administrators often need it for monitoring purposes, and since anyone could request it under FOI requirements anyway, we made that functionality public. So we’re happy with it not being a security concern, but you can see how, from a security perspective, it may seem odd to open up system data like that and thus see doing so as a concern.

On another project we’re working on, our Dialogue App is getting security reviewed. As those who have seen the App will know, it generally works best when it doesn’t  ask for much in the way of personal data from participants, generally just a username, password and possibly a demographic question or two work fine. As a result, most of the data it collects is publicly visible, as any user can see any other participants username and ideas they have submitted into the site, we only hide the password, email and any demographics answers. It’s a public dialogue after all.

The thing is, we’re running into concerns about making sure the data collected is held in absolute security. Now of course the data shouldn’t be able to be accessed through the backend database, or even worse edited through that either. Nor should people’s personal details such as email address or demographics be able to be accessed by anyone but a nominated data handler. That’s all fine.

But there is a tension here, that a lot of attention is being paid to making sure that data cannot be accessed through the web, when the vast majority of this data is publicly readable due to the very nature of the project itself.

In both cases, there seems to be a tension between the amount of security that is right and proper, and a degree of security paranoia that has crept beyond its original intended boundaries, into worries about keeping all data private at all times, regardless of what it is.

Security concerns are right and proper, public trust cannot be built without paying real attention to them.  But I think we’re going to see them increasingly come into tension with openness about government data over the coming year or two. Perhaps we could all give it some thought, and nip this tension in the bud sooner rather than later?

So it’s nice to be able to talk about one project we’re doing at the moment that’s going really well. It’s an e-participatory budgeting pilot with the Bristol Partnership, which we’ve covered here before for those new to it, and it’s going great guns.

In essence, the Partnership had been, and indeed still is, running public meetings to decide what some of the neighbourhood budgets should be spent on across the city. However, they wanted to take that opportunity online, with a view to engaging the participation of more people, and ideally from a younger demographic too.

Results as of ‘half time’ for the project a few weeks ago show that both of these things have been more than achieved. 130 people had registered on the site by that point, and 30 ideas had been submitted, a participation rate that, whilst small in terms of the internet, is substantially larger than participation in offline public meetings held to date. Both figures have grown since this data was published too.

Interestingly, and perhaps as we might have expected, the site hasn’t seen a massive flood from the ‘young people’ (under 18) demographic, as the idea that ‘the internet = young people’ is as much of a myth as it’s always been. That said, the bell curve for age demographics has moved down about 20 years in age compared with attendees at meetings, showing the project has indeed worked to get ‘younger people’ involved.

Location was another thing that the site asked respondents to state, and this has shown a happy clustering of respondents from around the three wards in which the pilot funding will be spent. So people are engaging in their local area, but others are having their say too, just as intended, especially given one of the pilot wards covers the city centre, used by pretty much all Bristolians from time to time.

One final point to note, which may be of especial interest to local authorities moving to a more customer focused approach at the moment. A sizable proportion of the ideas submitted turned out not to need funding after all, and could be got on with more quickly. These ranged from ideas actually being issues that were able to be passed directly on to council officers for action, to users being able to help each other. In one instance, one user suggested it would be good to fund having bus timetables on your mobile phone, and another replied saying that they’d already worked out how to do it, and gave instructions on how to do so!

The council has thus benefitted both from opening another channel for listening to customer feedback and encouraging the wisdom of crowds, in addition to the intended benefits provided by the pilot project itself.

So, the project’s working, the client’s happy, and if you fancy having your say as someone who has ideas for improvements in Bristol, then head over to www.itsmybristol.org and sign up!

We’re determined to improve democracy and governance by making it really simple for public sector bodies to run more effective consultation, engagement and participation processes online.  A big part of that is our selection of apps.

One of the interesting things about an apps-based model is that you’re building one tool to work for lots of organisations in lots of situations.  We’ve found that this invariably gives rise to an interesting tension between the goal (achieving the key, pretty simple outcome) and the play (doing all the little bits of work as you’ve been told to – ‘right’).

When we’re keenly aware of the nuances of our own particular work situation, and very familiar with the processes/duties/tasks of doing work, we tend to lose sight of the bigger picture.  This is often necessary; it’s very hard to, for example, drive the length of the UK by just looking at a world map; giving a bunch of people a ball and telling them to ‘go and score a goal’ is not a useful team talk – gazing only at the bigger picture can stop us from taking action.

The problem is that we then get into the habit of focusing solely on the play – the component parts that somebody once worked out were good practices in scoring a goal and not letting one in (or, in our field, consulting the public without making a faux pas).  We learn how to pass, to tackle, to juggle, to head, to call for the ball, to retain possession, to keep a tight line etc – or to file, to enter data, to write reports, to type, to call people, to organise meetings, to not send anything out without quadruple-checking it etc.   These are all helpful tools and it’s great to build up skills in the work of governance… but not if we forget the goal.

There are two main ways this problem manifests itself: the first I’m calling the Arsenal temptation.  This is where you become so obsessed with doing all the component parts right, being thorough and even beautiful in your efficiency at the play that you try and ‘walk the ball in’ and take your eye off the goal.  This is epitomised, hilariously, by the clip below.  Outside of the football metaphor, this is where we get people asking if we can make our app do 101 nice-to-have things, things that would help them do their specific job, things that would better match their branding for this campaign or that project, interesting extra ways to slice the data etc etc.  In the end, there’s so much focus on all the possibilities of the stuff to do along the way that you’d lose the app’s original ability to achieve a simple goal effectively.

The second I’m calling the Liverpool (or perhaps more accurately the ‘Benitez’) anxiety.  This is where you become so obsessed with not losing, not conceding, with being in control that you orient your whole play around not conceding a goal and barely even think about how you’re going to score one.  This is epitomised by, well, by picking Lucas and Mascherano in the same team, frankly.  In the world of democracy apps, this translates as clients wanting to use an app but then modify almost everything about it to mitigate anything perceived as risk.  This risk-averse, cautious approach, e.g. locking out everyone but named users or choosing not to participate themselves or preferring disclaimers and caveats to dialogue and conversation, invariably nullifies the potential of the app to achieve its initial goal.

With our apps, and indeed all our work, we want to make sure it’s always about the goal first and foremost – about accomplishing the goal as simply and effectively as possible, seeing the opportunities to rapidly and rewardingly realise the purpose of the work.  To my mind, this is exemplified by the clip below:

Of course, it’s great if you can have both, if you can make sure the work is thorough and safe and elegant and the goal is reached effectively, a bit like this:

But it’s always, always about the goal first and foremost.  Budget Simulator, for example: the goal is to make budget consultation more simple, engaging and widely available online.  We will improve the play where it helps accomplish that goal more consistently, effectively, reliably or easily – so we’ll provide an introductory page where you can, briefly, explain the purpose and value of the consultation exercise because it helps make sense of the process and increases participation.  Will we, though, give you a 60 page content-managed ‘microsite’ surrounding the central tool where you can tell the entire back-story of this year’s budget in minute detail?  Almost certainly not, however thorough that play may seem, unless you can make a compelling case as to how it helps us put the proverbial ball in the net.

As I say, a simple principle but one all-too-easily, or too-often, forgotten.  It’s always about the goooooooooal!

In a similar vein, check out this lovely ‘user-centred design’ infographic from our friend @jazzpazz: http://www.paznow.com/ucd/