Social Innovation Camp: the story so far.  Started with an idea two years ago that the web is important because it helps people organize for themselves and impacts how we make things work; but in order to make that happen you have to bring people together who are interested in making it real.  We are all about moving ideas into something that might work and do so by running competitions and weekend-long prototyping events.  Think about 5 things: what’s the problem, what technology you’ll use, design sustainability, how will people come to use it and how will you distribute it.  Award a prize to those that show most potential.  Have run 3 competitions so far with over 300 ideas submitted.

Note: the “I” in the following is my capture of Anna speaking.

What We’ve Learnt

1. From cliques to talent scouts

A great idea is nothing unless you have people to get it off the ground, and those people may be anyone with certain attributes:

• people who can bring an insight
• practical optimists, can see things being different in the future (have to go find them)

We need to move away from “social entrepreneurs” and “socail innovation” towards “solve problems” and “make stuff” so that it’s more accessible.  It took us a while to learn this!  The first competition we had a slick website and everything else and had barely any submissions.  So, we went to talk people about it.  We brought people together around the same kind of idea and the buzz in the room was incredible, people realized they didn’t have to just complain about something but about making things the way you want.  So, we learned from that and now are conversation driven.  Our competitions are talent scouted: we go out and talk to as many people as possible, run workshops and trainings and get people to think about what they might solve and then submit.  I think we pay a lot of lip service to “user centered design” and so on, but sometimes we are talking about many different worlds colliding and a number of them are very problem focused and then solution focused groups.  So, when you have top-down definition of what you’re interested in and then bottom up creation it doesn’t work.  Create a “tentacle-based” approach.

2. From paperwork to relationships

That’s a lot of work. Is it worth it to go talk to all of those people and so on?  What we are doing when we talent scout isn’t just about creating a pool of projects but about starting relationships.  Normal application processes are very good for people who are good at writing or following a system.  But, are proposal based approaches good for finding people who are going to start new things?  Instead, you start to build relationships with individuals – find interesting people and working with them in incremental ways and build trust. And then find people to support and fund; particularly important when funding entirely new things.  It’s hard for those people to say what their impact will be when it’s something so new, so it’s hard as a support organization to believe in the project.  But, as a support organization that knows you are an interesting implementer of good stuff, it’s easier to make the decision to support them.  We do this through scouting and in the weekends as they are high pressure and fund and collaborative so you can really, really see how people work.  I think the world works like this anyway, we just don’t admit it.  What we should be doing is appreciating that and design systems that take into consideration the ways humans work.  This is how the investment world works: based on relationships and trust.

3. From advisors to connectors

What’s next?  What do you need other than money?  We asked our prototype projects what else they need. The answer was they need advice.  Organizations that are trying to support people to do new things know this.  What I’m suggesting is 2 things: first, giving all the advice yourself is not efficient or entirely valuable, so you should grow a community around the ideas where they connect; and second, the advice you need as a radically new group/project is very different as there aren’t models or examples, so the only way these projects will work is by changing behavior… How comfortable we are with meeting people offline we only know online, how we share personal data, etc.  These changes will have to happen in order for these projects to work.  Rather than having standard business advice but a place where they can experiment.  The way we move from advisors to connectors is that at the weekends where we get the great ideas, we go out and try to find people who can help them and bring them there.  Building an audience around the 6 ideas for the weekend.  If you come to a weekend, you come out with a training experience.

4. From grants to venturing

How do we change the different ways we distribute money?  Not about finding people to give it to or the decision process, but the different financial instruments we could use.  Early stage ideas need early stage risk capital and there’s a gap in providing that.  Something to show that a really good radical idea has a good chance.  We also have to find new sustainable ways to fund projects. Fundraise, grant, spend – it’s not efficient.  Finally, a lot of new ideas, the newness is the business model.  It needs a different way to be funded.  Need finance that’s responsive to business models that aren’t charities or companies.

What might that look like?

What if we ran a larger SICamp process that formed small teams around packaged ideas and take teams of 2-3 people and choose 10 groups and each a 15,000 stipend wherein they come and work in a shared space for 3 months.  Set targets and help to accelerate project development and build community.  At the end of the 3 months we have a demo day with possible funders and we we take a finders fee and also pay-back for the 15,000 starter grant.  Potentially creating a sustainable way of starting projects and recycling your capital.  It already exists in projects like Y Combinator.  We think it would be interesting to start a Y Combinator for social projects here in the UK.

I don’t think that’s the answer to everything.  You have to design your support process around the people you are working with.  What can we do with groups like Kiva?  What if we used that system to find projects to fund?  Or what about KickStarter’s model with pledging/small contributions/crowdsourcing?  What if we applied that to the NHS?  4ip is already doing some of this stuff, too, and it’s really interesting.

This talk was inspired by lots of conversations with people who are looking for support for an idea AND interesting people and organizations looking for projects to support.  There has to be an opportunity there!

What is it about the health community that’s different? It’s about death.  Why do we tell stories? Because it helps us deal with panic or impulses, it’s a gift.  The amazing thing about the web is what we can do with those impulses, stories, and gifts.

PatientOpinion was created as a gift economy.  Gift economies all have:

• Gifts are always free – If you go to someone’s house for dinner, have a great time, and at the end of the evening you say, “wow, can I write you a check for $56 because I think is about what it was worth,” you’ve just breached the principle of the gift economy.
• people are judged by how much they give, not how much they have
• the gift always tarvels/what does around comes around

We don’t own the stories, we are stewards of the stories.  And that’s true with health, too.  Research shows that if you give stuff every day you are less likely to be depressed.

Why now?

• the web creates visible real-time reputations
• the web collapses distance and set up costs
• information goods can be shared forever
• networks offer increaing returns to scale

Are gift economies undermined by the thought that someone, somewhere is making money off it? Absolutely. Once people start getting paid for things at different parts of the cycle or so on, the gift economy falls apart.  For example, PatientOpinion’s community could operate very different if it was a for-profit company instead of a nonprofit organization.

Decreasing returns to scale, aka ‘one more heave’ and ‘lessons must be learnt’ – As the number of people involved in the system increases, the returns diminish.  Decreasing return systems are tightly coupled:

• Prize consistency and coordination
• averse to variation and risk
• hierarchical, mechanistic
• extrinsically motivated, enforced

When you move to the web, you have increasing returns to scale, but the number of people involved to affect the increasing returns are at a much larger scale (many more people, etc.).  Examples: YouTube, eBay, Wikipedia, Google.  Increasing return systems are:

• digital
• loosely coupled
• intrinsically motivated
• network, horizontal
• variable, uncontrolled

Examples:

• Wikipedia
• MyObama
• PledgeBank

Why not just turn up and eat the food? Digital gift economies turn free loaders into “audience.”

A gift economy for the public sector?

• identify the thoughtfully passionate
• provide easy, incremental steps to involvement
• strength-based, internal motivation
• use the platform to increase local impact
• use the platform to drive local social movement
• abstract the learning plus improvements and data
• future users certify improvements are real
• rate the providers
• repeat x 1,000 groups per year
• business model that supports the gifts

Feedback to presentation:

would want to involve staff and services in the offline local events to share their experiences, too.  but that coul emean imposing a structure.  – don’t know if that’s true necessarily, could be determined by the partners putting on and participating in the event what kind of structure and context the event has.

there a high degree of facilitation that’s involved; there’s a natural fear from the service side of fear from the outside, so there has to be real facilitation to get sustainable change and not just reaction.  the patientopinion platform has tools that anyone can use, ie you are going to go out and do something, you tell us what you want, we build it and you pay for it, then we give it to you and you can go do what you want.

seems like people who had a bad experience would be more inclined to get involved with this…is that bad? it’s more of coming from a place of “we all want to be better and do things as good as possible” so it negates just being negative.

if you have a one size fits all solution then it’s a danger, you need to try to get feedback combined with other inputs and so on. it’s important that if someone has a bad experience that they get supporter but also that your solution to that bad experience doesn’t make it worse for other people.

Learn more at http://patientopinion.org.uk

Head of Community Management at FreshNetworks, previously at iVillage, Daily Mail etc.; most proud of job at an adoption charity

What do we mean by “community” – question asked to the participants:

• people
• support
• shared interest
• label
• conversations
• reciprocity
• belonging

When you think about “what is community?” do you think about online or offline? Do you think you are part of a community?

• We mean people
• we mean connections
• we mean support
• we mean similarity
• we mean social group
• we mean peers
• we mean a group being ‘led’

Community confusion:

• people rarely consider themselves part of communities offline
• people are rarely members of just one community
• communities can be physical and conceptual
• they can be permanent or temporary

What is an online community?

• it used to mean ‘message boards’ and not much more
• for a while, people meant ‘facebook’ although that’s a social network of people you already know

What Twitter isn’t… Twitter isn’t a message board, or a social network of people you already know… So, is it a community?

What Twitter is… twitter is a platform, it’s about connections, it’s the direciton we’re heading in; it’s a micro-community that is different for every individual.

What Twitter gives us:

• freedom
• it’s blown away old rules
• a boost to existing communities and content on the web
• keeping people in touch and highlighting existing communities

One word to describe a good online community experience: nice, warm, friendly, friendship, welcoming, assistance, funny, reassurance, welcoming

People want warm and welcoming, but that it isn’t always what they get with online communities. So how?

Getting Started

Identify a community

• who are you providing a platform for?
• build it and they will come… doesn’t work
• do these people want or need a space to communicate?
• who are they?

What are the concerns of the community?

• do they need to speak anonymously?
• do they need to share images?
• do they need to be protected?
• do they have barriers to understanding technology?
• do they have fractured interests?
• are there opposing viewpoints and needs?

Sexy or quick?  there are 4 attributes to a good online community:

• easy
• safe
• secure
• sticky
• sexy can wait!  it’s great if it has all the bells and whistles but that can come later, what’s most important is that it’s usable, meets community needs etc.

Vibrant, ugly: it’s okay if it’s not perfect to look at; between timely and perfect, choose timely.  An example: Criagslist.org

Where will you host your community?

• do you have an online presence that can be enhanced?
• do you need to build community elements into your next iteration?
• do you have the budget and resources to build from scratch – and manage?
• should you set up a space where your audience already is?
• don’t automatically reject free tools like Ning.com
• what about hiring someone to maintain and participate in that space as a community manager?

How do we keep our community safe?

What do you mean by safe?

• safe from offensive material
• safe from ‘trolls’ and trouble-makers
• safe to chat without fear of personal attacks
• safe from ‘real-life’ crossover
• safe from spam attacks

Control – and lack of it: you cannot control people, but you can steer, guide and react; you must establish ground rules, and update them regularly.

• no one is solely interested in one topic – nor should they be
• single-issue parties don’t win elections; single-issue communities, don’t thrive – we don’t have only one interest
• connections are what’s important, give people the freedom to connect – start small, only 3 or 4 sections or topics and then let the community drive the development
• tools like CAPTCHA

Keeping your organization safe: if someone writes a lie about a celebrity on a community that you host, when are you liable?  The minute it goes up.  Mumsnet case study: some moms posted to Mumsnet that Gina Ford was too harsh with her practices, etc. and Gina took them to court.  Mumsnet said that they don’t moderate as there are too many message to handle and so on.  The best approach is to plan for that and have a take-down policy; encourage members to report malicious content and give them way to do so easily.

Who will keep your community safe…and vibrant?

• moderation
• welcoming members
• stimulating discussion
• removing spam and offensive content
• who is liable? – If you use something like Ning does that platform share a part of the liability? Yes. If you make it explicit on your site in your terms of use that your site is not moderated then you are not liable, according to some.
• “Can the receptionist do it?” – maybe, if they want to, but moderating and welcoming people and getting involved isn’t just for anyone; it takes someone that has the time and the interest to do.

Q&A

What’s been your biggest challenge in building a community? Launching the adoption community, it had a very intersted and active membership that communicated through local support groups and a buddy scheme but not online with many members anti-internet and people in the organization who were skeptical.  Had to prove that it was as well as, not instead of. That it could help people find the organization and provide easier access for people with limited mobility or other limitations who couldn’t get to the offline activities.  Now as a membership they see it core to the organization and have a stake in how it develops.

Have you any tips about how to deal with bad apples? sometimes turning good is the most important thing. if people are complaining and talking about how things should be use it as an opportunity to explain why you did things the way you did and ask for more ideas about how to make things better. some people are trying to get attention, often the way around that is to give them a little attention and encourage them to behave the way you’d like – engage and help, but don’t give in to what they are doing.  sometimes there’s spammers and rule breakers, so make sure you explain the rules they are breaking and explain your actions to moderate their behavior – give 3 strikes and you’re out.

Have you experience with usefulness with combining writing communication with video communication? depends on the set up, whether you are building communities in ning or drupal or from scratch, building in the ability for users to include video and so on is easier. but, other forms of communication might not be appropriate to the community.