Participation as culture not tools ... though new ones help

If - like me - you believe that social media, Web 2.0, and social networking are fundamentally important to the ways both civil life and business will operate in future, you need some means of explaining to people who don't get it are still exploring the issues. I also need a way of responding to occasional requests about updates to the non-webby Guide to Effective Participation I did ten year back. Mostly I say "take a look at this blog" while realising the jumble of ideas here aren't very user-friendly.
A meeting tomorrow with Steve Moore and others in the loosely-joined Policy Unplugged family gave me a nudge today to start organising some thoughts. Old-style thinking: do a note to circulate and present. New-style thing: blog a piece that may get some responses and will be useful for other purposes.
The essence of the PU style is conversational, with social conferences and sites like this structured by participants around topics they want to pursue. In that spirit, here's some conversation-starters I jotted down ... a bit condensed and theoretical, but I'm sure I could pitch them into the sort of videos we are capturing at PU events - the latest with Channel 4 education.

• Successful participation is more about developing a culture, than using a set of tools. That applies to democracy, workplace collaboration, citizen engagement in public programmes, user-involvement in product and service design, and anything where doing things together is important.
• The main barriers to effective participation lie both in personal attitudes and institutions, and mainly revolve around desires for power and control.  The institutional barriers are embedded in hierarchical systems, the personal ones in beliefs that we only succeed by competing. Changing these and getting things done is doubly challenging.
• After several decades of policy consensus on the importance of greater participation, accompanied by hundreds of toolkits and scores of organisations promoting the idea, it doesn't feel as if we are much more participative on many fronts. Participation is more often an exercise in ticking boxes for tools used, than making cultural change.
• The social web and social media are profoundly important because they enable individuals to mix greater collaboration (we) with higher personal profile and influence (me). This immerses people in a new type of participative culture, with attitudes, tools and behaviours to match.
• The inter-mix of we and me in the new social web is shifting organising models from groups and hierarchies towards networks, within which teams, groups, organisations will continue to operate. However, to be successful they will have to be more participative because citizens and consumers won't stand for the old ways.
• Participation is not always the answer. Good leadership involves knowing when to enlist and direct, when to  facilitate and support ... and how to mix them all.

Comments, additions, disagreements very welcome. Im not sure how I'll expand these ideas. Maybe they could be basis of Changethis manifesto. I could put them up on a wiki like this one on social networking I'm planning to expand with more Web 2.0 thinking, and follow them up on the social networking site developing over here. The good thing is I don't have to decide one route .. and I know other ideas will develop from meeting Steve and friends. Old style thinking: produce a report. New style: converse online and off, convene a social conference, do some videos, drop out an e-book, keep on blogging, connect with new people, help them join in ...

Some previously posts below - and see also participation and engagement categories in the right sidebar

Face-to-face and online collaboration mix
Relationship-based engagement ... obviously
Web 2.0, participation and e-democracy
If Participation 1.x isn't working, let's develop Engagement 2.0
Participation is a culture, not a tick box

Comments

[Paul Evans]

I almost never see what I'm about to say discussed, but I think that the single biggest barrier to a participative culture is social class.

The greatest examples of poor government can be traced to the contempt that the professional classes have for the vast majority of the public. 'Political correctness' has made it very difficult for the mass media to advance negative imagery of groups that transcend class (ethnic minorities, sexual preferences, gender). As a result, middle classes have overcome barriers to their own advancement, and professionals have felt more inclined to take the step towards these groups that need to be taken in order to involve them in participative processes.

But every time you open a newspaper or turn on the TV, you see the working class portrayed as feral, violent, stupid and feckless. In the same way that people who read the Daily Mail are more frightened of street crime and immigrants, the middle-class users of almost every other strand of the media have an exagerated fear and contempt of the bulk of the British public.

I suppose that there are structural reasons that could excuse the mass media for this behaviour, but until it becomes as hard to use the word 'chav' as it is to use the word 'coon', this is unlikely to change.

I'm not, by the way, advocating an extension of political correctness. The reason that the white working class are more tolerant of black people than any other section of society has nothing to do with the way that bossy interest groups have stopped using the 'N-word'.

Until the professional middle classes can educate themselves to include and value contributions from the working class, public spending with be wasted on the wrong priorities. The same will be true until the professionnal middle classes can start divising routes for working class people into the professional middle classes.

So, David, I think you're absolutely right about participation being a cultural issue.

[Carl Reynolds]

I think you're right about the need for a cultural shift - I don't really think there's been one. The analogy I'd use is this - you can learn how to deploy participative methods, but if you don't understand and/or sympathise with the underlying ethos, it won't work, but you can still tick the box.

My experiences in the front line of working in participatory ways (on inter-ethnic conflicts, resident/ageny partnerships, eco-skirmishes) is that many of the agencies think they understand it, but they don't. Focus groups, Area Forums, surveys, etc. are not (in my book) participative ways of working - they create the illusion of choice, but these 'choices' are not negotiated and groups are often manipulated by the frame that they are set in. Going further along Arnstein's ladder past consultation either scares the pants of agencies (and many of those who work there) or they just don't get it and think it's like the native American pow-wow, quaint, but an inefficient waste of time.

As to the web 2 etc. It still ain't dialogic, so, for sure it makes some things possible, but I still can't see your face or the face of the people who read this; as you're all veiled by the web. Bring on VR.