Activists - take to your blogs (and prepare for conversation)

My piece about Lewisham politics online - Local activists - take to your blogs - brought an interesting response from Richard Proctor writing on behalf of residents opposing major developments in the centre of this London borough.

There are issues going on in Lewisham that are vital to the future of Lewisham yet seem to be pushed to the back of the table.
I'm involved with a number of residents who are opposed to the Lewisham Gateway scheme as it stands at the moment.
Apart from a number of areas of concern, what may have started out as 'regeneration' and was taken up by a number of groups who had an idea that this may improve the centre of Lewisham (open up the waterways, provide more green space etc etc) has now descended into a developers feast to see how much money they can make out of the development and how high they can build the tower blocks to make a profit – and lets be in no doubt about this – at the expense of the residents and users of Lewisham.
It is a complex subject that requires effort to understand and be involved, an effort we, as residents, and not members of a political party, are prepared to make.
We are prepared to make this effort because we believe we are looking after the interests of Lewisham (in our own small way), and we are continually coming up against bureaucratic brick walls that need to be challenged.
So, what about us?
What about the people who don't want to affiliate themselves with a party – any party – that will gobble up our beliefs and put them into the 'regeneration' pot. (The same regeneration pot that has granted Manchester of "super casino")
Anyway, please visit our website at www.lewishamgateway.org.

The site has lots of explanation of the planned development, and why some residents oppose it. There are some neat before and after visuals aiming to show the impact of development,  and calls to action by petitioning and sending an objection to the planning department.
Richard asked for thoughts, and my immediate ones were that the effectiveness of the site would be improved if it were clear who was behind it (there were no names that I could see), and also if there were a place for commenting or discussion. In writing back to Richard on this, it struck me I was offering just the same advice I would give to a public body, developer or politician: develop an authentic voice, and be prepared to engage.
If activists want to make an impact online, I think that they have to move from rants to conversations too. Shifting to a blog with comments enabled would be a start.
Anyway Richard responding in good part, pointing out reasonably enough how difficult it is for residents to find time to campaign without budgets while earning a living as well, adding:

We're just people trying to get a voice and speak out against something that we not only *feel* is wrong, but in many ways we can *prove* its wrong.
By having a link on a blog such as yours we can spread our message.

I couldn't resist - so here's an opportunity to continue the conversation, here if not at www.lewishamgateway.org. Richard promises a further comment.
A quick search reveals former councillor Andrew Brown, who sparked my earlier piece, has touched on the Gateway in the past:

I wonder if the people who are currently behind the campaign against the Lewisham Gateway were a bit more Web 2.0 they might have a similar conversation with Kate and others who are on the housing list about the need for additional housing in Lewisham?  Perhaps if the council itself were a bit more Web 2.0 officers and politicians could contribute and facilitate it.

I detect just a hint of a contrary view, so I'm hopeful debate may rage meaningful exchanges will follow, somewhere.
Update: if I had taken the trouble to read more I would have seen Richard and Andrew have already met online, when the issue of who is behind the campaign was also raised by Andrew.

Comments

[Andrew Brown]

As you've seen Richard and I have had a reasonably amicable discussion about their campaign on my blog.

It'd be nice to be able to do some of that on their site, but that's down to them.

I'm not quite sure I understand what Richard means by "back of the table", as far as I can see scrutiny of council decision making by the public has never been more obvious, even if it is still by a small number of individuals.

Whether our mainstream local press and media reflect this renewed interest in local democratic decision making is open to question.

[Carl Reynolds]

Having once lived and worked in Lewisham I thought I'd chip in. I liked the site, as it was pretty comprehensive in its coverage of the documents and was candid about its partiality. As someone who spends a lot of time designing and facilitating engagement activities - mostly in the public and not for profit sectors - it struck me that LB Lewisham's consultations were pretty thorough. And that engaging several hundred people was a fairly good achievement, given the range of activities and the resource constraints that they probably work with. After all, how can you get 200,000 people to contribute effectively? And I don't count voting or surveys as 'effective'.

I'd have liked to have seen a clearly articulated counter-proposal; as the campaign site strikes me as being mostly antagonistic. I wasn't clear on what they were for.

I have no doubt that engagement processes need to be reviewed and adapted; and consider how they can become more collaborative, as opposed to consultative, if only to allow for dialogue to happen. It seems both 'sides' have something to learn.

[richard proctor]

Hi again

The role of our website is quite precise in that we are attempting to expose the truth (as we see it) behind the Lewisham gateway scheme. I don't think this is the forum for discussing that but I will say one or two things.

Andrew is right that we had an amicable discussion but I made my 'back of the table' comment (maybe back burner was the phrase that eluded me) because there is much information that is produced and distributed by the URL that is clearly misleading.

Also, in the community involvement that the Council and URL engaged in there was much that was requested and desired by residents that was ignored. The desire for green space and the opening up of the waterways are two clear points that have been ignored.

This brings me on to the danger of putting our discoveries into the public arena and why it has to be tempered with the knowledge that those facts may be used by recipients to aid their campaign of misinformation.

For instance, when we realised that within the Gateway there was a loss of several thousand square metres of open green space we published and illustrated that fact on our website.

Now the council are saying that Cornmill Gardens is the green centre of Lewisham. Apart from Cornmill Gardens being outside the Gateway area (it's in the Sundermead estate), there is no gain in green space here, it's simply a readjustment of the space to allow the new estate to be erected.

We can argue about this point for some time but, as I said, I don't think this is the forum for that.

We have found that the traditional means of communication of printed paper - and talking to people - is still very effective, but time consuming. Online communication can be very scattergun and we have tried to focus our website on what it might to best at the moment with our limited time and resources. The main example of this is that you can go to our website, click on a link that will invoke your email application, already addressed to the council, and with a letter of objection in place.

One unequivocal letter of objection to the council is worth far more that one expression of support with conditions that are then ignored.

But even engaging with you here I am choosing to focus my limited time on something that may not have a perceivable beneficial effect on our campaign. Instead of running over old arguments with somebody whose mind is possibly not open to change is a waste of time when I could be doing something to enlarge our supporters group – and that doesn't involve a computer!

I think what I'm talking about generally here is an abuse of power – not that the Council hasn't ticked all the boxes, for instance, in community involvement – but when you look at the detail you find that the community involvement is a token gesture and the information that has been gathered is based on biased questionnaires and unprovable facts.

This may be why people are jaded and choose not too engage with issues and why it's easier to tick the 'yes' rather than the 'no' tickbox.

[David Wilcox]

Richard - thanks for explaining the approach behind the website. How do you feel about declaring on the site some of the people who are behind the campaign, so that is doesn't appear as a lone effort.

[richard proctor]

Thanks for that comment David – I'll put it to the committee!

[David Wilcox]

Thanks Richard ... excuse my asking, but is there anywhere, in print, on the web, some evidence that your group exists? Committee membership for example?

I'm not doubting your personal good faith, but I'm generally interested in "presence" and the extent to which it is possible to create that on the web with (or without) substance behind it.

If there's no evidence of the group anywhere, then the credibility of the campaign is reduced.

On the other hand, you could say that it is just a web site putting information into the public domain, and people can make what they like of it.

So - how do we know there is a committee?

[Andrew Brown]

Without wanting to turn David's site into a Lewisham only zonem, I want to take up one of Carl's points, the one about re-engineering the system to make the process more collaberative.

I wonder whether that would be an entirely good idea. I think there's some benefit from groups like Richard's being outside the process, at least to some extent.

They add external scrutiny, which creates pressures that can be beneficial to all parties. It helps the developer understand the concerns of existing residents, and may make them more transparent. It allows planners to try and screw better deals out of the private sector when they want to do this sort of development. And it means there's a channel for slightly less committed people to engage in the issues withouth having to do the same amount of reading as Richard has done. (But I have to say I'm against the sort of email campaign that Richard describes for the reasons the Hammers set out here.)

There are drawbacks as well. The developer can go the other way and become defensive, or decide not to do the development at all. The planners can feel caught between a cleft stick and fail to satisfy either side leading to poor outcomes. The public can feel as if it is constantly banging their heads against a brick wall and that no one takes them seriously.

Personally, I'm an optimist about these things and think that while Richard (or indeed other similar campaigns) are unlikely to get all they hope for they will probably help to make the planners and developers get and give more back to those of us who already live in the area.

[richard proctor]

Thanks for the comments Andrew.

We're still investigating many of the issues surrounding the Gateway development and I don't want to say too much about detail, and I don't want to make this a Lewisham discussion either! (However interesting that might be)

But you raise a good point about us being a 'non-organised-organisation' (not your words). We have found that there were perhaps a couple of dozen organised groups approached about this scheme. They were given 'official' presentations and by that we can assume they were given what, it was assumed, they wanted to hear. So they *wouldn't* have been given unpalatable truths, such as the development would comprise seven large buildings, some of which could be as high as the Citibank building (you might argue that the 'building massing' wasn't agreed at this point, but it was enough of a reality to have been strongly mentioned). Any response that was given will always be skewed because it's based on incomplete facts, and yet these facts were always used as showing public support for the scheme. In fact, what the results showed was that the results of the community involvement was manipulated to support the developers and councils argument.

I'm seeing quite clearly know that the decisions in this instance is based on chinese (no offence!) whispers and perhaps the developers, in part, are only reacting to what comes out of the end of the pipeline.

How does this discussion effect the broader issue of, in this case, the Lewisham Gateway?

I'm not sure.

It may help me in reassembling my thoughts, it may inspire you to take some kind of action, it may inspire David, or anyone else, to take some kind of action. If I perceive that action as having a negative effect on me and this particular campaign, I'm unhappy and I've wasted my time, if it has a positive effect then I'm happy.

It's all about time management . . .

[carl reynolds]

I'm getting the same feeling I get when I can't really have a dialogue. Text doesn't work as an effective medium, leaves too much out, gets misunderstood and so on.

What we seem to have come to is a critique of the quality of the opportunity (consulting on well formed ideas is restrictive) and the potential depth - given resource constraints how do you give wider opportunities, not just for representation of perspectives, but also for meaningful dialogues that people can see have adapted plans.

An analogy - if you're against a tram route and a tram per se, you'll campaign and knock the consultation as much as possible as part of your tactics. If you're for a tram, but don't like the route or aspects (eg stops, effect on traffic etc) then you might hope to be involved in a process that will enable you (with others) to ameliorate or develop initial ideas for implementing the tram.

I'm in the latter camp (I want a tram and I'd like to have the opportunity to influence its design/development), BUT I am left with the chance to see an exhibition, tick some boxes on a survey and add some comments. Not my understanding of participation.