This report covers the period of January 2009 until December 2011. It is made up of some contextual background, brief outlines about the central project elements, two key stories, some figures, and a budgeted timeline. There is much more behind this report; to dive into more detail read Ed the author’s blog, or contact him directly with questions.

It is a big thank you to our funders, Tudor Trust, for giving Transition Network £50,000 for an unspecified and unknown web platform. We feel that we have used the money sensibly to build the new platform and open up new channels for the movement, and hope that Tudor feel that they made a good investment.

Another purpose of the report is to encourage other people responsible for web projects to do it themselves; take ownership of their project, accept the unpredictable outcomes and have a more resilient, affordable web system than an external service provider could produce.

(Picture: Most of Transition Network staff and board after web project approved, June 2009)

This blog post has the introduction and the context and role sections (without the nice pictures). It does not have the other sections on:

• The central project elements (Technologist group, core information directories, webhosts, content strategy, community emergence, web survey results, the Sharing Engine)
• Two case studies (Ingredients directory and Social Reporting ‘Stories’ project)
• Budgeted timeline
• Achievements and figures
• The big last thank you

For those you need to download the documents below:

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

Introduction

Working in complex situations on multi-stakeholder systems can be like being dropped into an intimidating forest, but seeking others to do your work isn’t the answer! In this sense, the report hopes to be like a breadcrumb trail in the forest, left by a group who mapped their context, and want to support others who doing the same thing.

The big lesson from our experience is that it would not have been possible to have predicted where we would be now, then. Because so much changes as you progress.

If we had produced a detailed and fixed project plan with a product roadmap (which we could have done) it could have felt reassuring in ‘the deep in the dark forest days’ of early 2009, but it would have been wrong for late 2011.

The web project we see now has grown out of experiences and connections from all of the stakeholders, working together in a ‘constellation’ on and offline, facilitated rather than project managed, in iterative technical and social loops hung together with communications and agility, rather than control at its core.

(Picture: Transition Technologist group meets for the first time, November 2009)

This is illustrated with the two case studies which show that our two biggest products were at best just twinkles in peoples’ eyes in 2009, and the result of exploring the connections between people and ideas and technology, rather than having a big vision, then trying to predict, control and micro-manage the future and the unknown.

This is also a thank you to all the staff at Transition Network, the Transition Technologist group, and all the Transitioners who got on board with the project, all of whom worked on an un-defined project that deliberately tried not to control the future, but share responsibility for understanding and optimising the present.

“It gives a wider perspective on transition activity than the local group can achieve. I think it is important to continue showing the bigger picture and offering encouragement to local groups as it can sometimes be a struggle to remain upbeat.”

“Helps us remember that we’re not alone, because it can be hard to keep up the big effort required.”

(2011 web project survey response)

Context and role

A great deal has changed since the web project officially began. Indeed it could be argued that ‘change’ itself is accelerating in a world that seems to get more and more bizarre and challenging every day.

Amid this context, the Transition Towns movement has grown rapidly in numbers and matured broadly in concept. Every day there is something new from somewhere new. Initiatives are springing up all over the world facing different challenges with different people trying different projects in different cultures, with different needs.

Needless to say, Transition Network offers pragmatic support for the emergence of the movement; it is grassroots led so we do not seek to control it. It is a highly charged and creative environment, making for intense professional and personal challenges. There is never a moment at which things are quiet, or ‘the same as yesterday’, or something is not urgent, or brand new and requiring immediate action.

Thus the web project began in an endlessly changing context. Unlike a standard organisation, it is keeping up with a movement that is moving too fast and unpredictably to second guess. This is a challenging situation, particularly if you try to predict what ‘web product’ a movement will need in the future.

In light of this, the web team focused on three interconnected things:

1. Identify the boundaries. Build a shared view of a Transition web ‘constellation’ or ‘field’ with all the various initiative websites, social networks, blogs, etc. and the flows between them, and do not put Transition Network in the middle
2. Work with the ‘field’. Build relationships with all types of users and facilitate the emergence of supportive social groups (editorial, technical, facilitation) across the field to share roles and responsibilities as they spring up
3. Produce a robust, flexible technical platform that any reasonable developer can learn about, and work on without too much trouble. See it as a hard working shared bicycle rather than a specialised work of art!

In this plan, the platform could be extended in many directions with a facilitation model to handle the social requirements arising and share the power among the users. Then, ultimately, the Transition Network ‘website’ could move from being a highly visible, central website owned by Transition Network toward a transparent web service, moderated by Transitioners to support and promote the initiatives websites.

(diagram to explain the wide array of Transition related activity on the internet, and how the Transition Network website is not in the middle of it, preferring to see itself as part of a ‘constellation’ supported by a ‘Sharing Engine’ using web standards and services)

This worked for us. Transition Network is comfortable with navigating the unknown, and changing plans when the need arises, rather than sticking to one grand plan.

Importantly, it also promotes the concept of accepting responsibility for unknown outcomes, successful or not successful, without blame. This means that individuals carry great responsibility in the team, but not fear of blame in case of failure; indeed ‘failure’ is seen as an entity where no learnings were extracted from an unsuccessful piece of work.

This is common sense to us, but we found that it is contradictory to most organisations’ web strategies, which are there to reflect a central institution’s self-image, and indeed, many people’s expectations; we are trained to respect centralised power. Our plan had been from the start to challenge centralised power – especially our own.

(Picture: Charlotte (Stories editor) and Mike (Newsletter editor) at the 2011 Transition Network conference)

After an initial burst of work to get the platform up, technical work was handled in focused phases with small budgets, delivering required enhancements and maintenance, identified by the users and prioritised by the web team.

“… It keeps me well intentioned, to create something that the world can believe in. I am so excited when I see my project featured on the side of the projects map, after adding content to my page. This keeps my project exciting, that there is a global network which my project is connected with, despite its small size. This is good, I believe, because despite its small size, the potential is there for great ideas to spawn. thanks, so much”

(2011 web project survey response)

…

For more, please download…

The whole report

• Download big pdf file of whole report (19MB) from Sendspace
• Download small pdf file size of whole report (1.14MB) from this site

Just the case studies sections

• Download modestly big case studies section (ingredients and stories) (5.53 MB) from Sendspace
• Download the smaller file size case studies section (ingredients and stories) (0.5MB) from this site

Here’s the blurb:

The questionnaire takes five minutes to complete, including questions on:

• Customer engagement strategy
• Tactics and initiatives
• Customer engagement and the economic climate

In return for your efforts, we will send you a link to a free full copy of the in-depth report just before it is published on the E-consultancy website in November.

Customer Engagement survey link

While all the news from the financial world is hair-raising, now is most definitely the time to buckle down and take your stakeholders seriously. If you don’t, they are bound to find someone else who will…

Jack Martin Leith gave a highly thought provoking 15 minute presentation on the subject covering a range of angles as broad as the history of PR to inter-personal relationships, and how ‘Engagement’ covers so many bases.

Discussions ranged from the highly emotional and personal meaning of engagement to employee engagement, stakeholder engagement, its roots and uses by different groups. Great stuff. Well done all!

… And here is a picture from ‘Third Sector’ magazine of the new Pudsey Bear logo, ‘designed to engage a new generation of supporters’… with a megaphone! I am sure Jack would see the funny side:

The next Bristol Gurteen K-cafe will be on the subject of story-telling, in late November.

To stay informed of Bristol Gurteen k-cafe announcements, please join the mailing list

With all the talk and early signs of an economic downturn the pressure on businesses to prove ROI on their marketing activities is greater than at any other point in the last twenty years. This changing climate will dictate not only where budgets will go but which companies will win and which will lose…

It will be on sale in printed form from 11th March, but it is a free download from the Winners and Losers website while stocks last. If you can get to the event on 11th March, I recommend it (details on the site) as well as the book.

I was going to write a short piece for it, but things didn’t end up that way, so here was the gist of what it was going to be:

Ed’s top tips:

1. Use Open Source software or free products wherever possible (not neccesarily with organisational single sign-on for example, but how about openid?
2. Use Open Source models and ideas reported elsewhere
3. Learn your lessons wisely and share the findings from your work with others freely
4. Embed the learning and resources in your organisation

This is how I work wherever possible. Most of my findings and lessons learnt from last year with CILIP, Amnesty, Media Sandbox (case study out next week) and others are available for nothing.

Some call it idealistic, but that’s fine by me. I don’t believe that ‘Knowledge in a box’ has much value, and that business plans built on hoarding IP are really sustainable any more. If you stuff knowledge in a box and hide it, you get a Schrodinger effect (quantuum knowledge anyone?).

It is better to share it, learn from it, converse around it and build upon it. See more on this from Miguel’s excellent analysis, or Verna Allee’s brilliant book The Future of Knowledge, which presents a variety of examples of how to share your product knowledge with your consumers in order to drive its development forward.

This approach has new assessment frameworks, sure, but these can be handled with approaches like Outcome mapping, currently used in the Development domain, which are far more participative and pragmatic than any of the other assessment models I have seen, much more suited to the basic fact that business is complex, and highly suitable to online community stuff.

If you want some uplifting thoughts on this subject I recommend reading Charles Leadbeater’s new book “We think: The power of mass creativity” (Thanks David), and combining those thoughts with those from the book “Enough” (Thanks Toby). That’s what I’m going to hint at at a couple of conferences this week.

I recently read some bits from ‘We think’ out loud to some strangers on the train it was so good, and thought I would share one here (I think I’m going to have to add a quotes category to this blog):

Markets trade products; communities breed knowledge. Ideas do not live in the minds of individuals but through a constant circulation as gifts. In the century to come well being will come to depend less on what we own and consume and more on what we can share with others and create together, especially as consumption becomes increasingly constrained by environmental concerns that mean we have to live more within collectively binding limits

This points firmly towards the original Cluetrain directions about the incoming integration of markets and communities through conversation and sharing.

Good work all!

I show the pictures about facilitation and moderation below to all clients (and anyone else who will listen) as the older I get, the more importance I associate with planning where neccesary. This post is largely based on the top of the triangles in the diagrams below; the strategy stuff. I chose a triangle to try to explain it because it seemed the most suitable. Possibly a spiral; whatever is the best visualisation technique, the most important thing is that strategy must come first.

Each client sees different things which I find fascinating; however, the core elements remain the same, which I hope I’ve captured here. As usual, I’m not saying this is the whole and secret truth delivered from a cloudy mountain top in stone tablets to a chap with a big beard in sandals – things like that are contextually tied, date instantly, break easily and are prone to hording by those who horde things and want power. And the elements continue to evolve every day.

Why do you do it?

Without a clear strategy you have no shared understanding, identity or language, no goals, nor purpose, no research questions, no desirable outcomes or KPIs, etc. etc. and all manner of excitment can ensue. Most problems I have had facilitating can probably be traced back to mis-understandings or mis-communications around the core point of the gig.

Whether you are preparing for a highly formal CoP environment or a wild-west bandy-legged open innnovation network, put time into the strategy bit. Plan where you can plan – even (perhaps especially) where you have your fingers crossed for that all hallowed ‘serendipitous emergence’.

What do you do and how do you do it?

It’s all about groundwork and foundations at the beginning. Start with your questions. What are you up to? What is it that you want? What does the sponsor organisation want? What will the participants want?

Why not start the immortal Kipling “I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.”?

What do you do diagram

There are many ways to go about identifitying and agreeing your strategy, from top down management-led ‘build and they will come’ processes all the way to a new set of engagement strategies centred around involving as broad a range of participants as possible. These two approaches are at opposite ends of the spectrum and have different stages associated with them.

Know where you are on this spectrum and be true to yourselves. Set the expectations, boundaries and purpose. People like to know what sort of relationship they are in, and if participants feel hoodwinked or let down further down the line, they will speak loudly or vote with their feet (both entirely understandable in my opinion). This can lead to ‘moderation’ actions which rarely boost’s a system’s confidence.

This is just as true for consulting and designing physical events as it is for birthing new online spaces; think about it – it’s humans we are dealing with here.

Whether you can produce a formula for strategic community modelling is up for debate; there are certainly common elements and decisions in the planning process which need to be discussed (and regular actions like newsletters later on).

Each group will have its own dynamics, context, routines, totems and behaviours. Many of these will emerge over time. Attempts at producing and promoting fake behaviours may work, but are more likely to be millstones around the facilitators’ neck later on because people don’t like doing silly things that they are told to do, and the facilitator will become increasingly desparate and isolated as the owner of the silly things and the distance grows between the system’s actors.

A quick diversion via Serendipity:

Don’t look longingly at a serendiptiously formed movement, or an anonymous anarchic one, and pretend that is what you are doing. That is what witless marketeers do and people can smell it from miles away. There is nothing wrong with planning.

Serendipity is a joyous thing; humans need to connect in ways they could never have imagined and the web affords that generously and beautifully. You can see patterns in retrospect and learn from them, but it isn’t possible to be them in this disguise – by the very nature of your planning.

Serendipity-wise, you have four choices:

1. Pretend your movement is serendipitious
2. Chase serendipity
3. Surf it when its wave breaks
4. Plan for a space which affords it

The third option is beautiful. I admire those spotters who see the crests and curls of rising emotio-energetic waves breaking in cyberspace, grab their virtual surfboards and lead a movement from the fore into the unknown with gall and daring. This is crazy brand and campaigning and sudden stuff. They opt for a distributed model.

Here is a gratuitous picture of ‘Serendipity’ extracted drunkenly from the notorious Matt Webb at Thayer Chinwag’s mega-bash last year when this Serendipity angle was going to be a whole blog post.

For planning purposes, I suggest the fourth is the only way to go.

And a cautious toe in the water of ‘emergence’:

Find out about David Snowden’s teenager party analogy if you fancy. It was big on the Knowledge Management circuit a few years ago and has left many of us with a feeling that you can over-manage un-plannable things.

In a nutshell, he said that you wouldn’t organise a teenager’s party with milestones, deliverables, flip charts and whiteboards; you would chuck a few ‘attractors’ in (balls, bats, games etc.), set clear boundaries and offer great fear of over-stepping them, and then let it rip (and go and drink real ale while watching rugby probably). Other approaches will stifle any ‘serendipitous outcomes’ in their obssession with order and control (which is essentially some form of Utopia, which is a worry, but let’s not start on that).

Using this analogy, once you have the core stuff sorted (more on that further down), set the boundaries and attractors, step back and light the fuse. But don’t then walk away to the real ale pub and watch rugby; watch, observe, engage, be involved, learn. See the patterns with your facilitator’s third eye, understand them and build on them. If participants don’t like particular bits of your community model, change them; if they find cool things they use without your planning, promote them. It’s their space.

The point of the Serendipity divergence is: at the strategy stage, you need to build in effective facilitation pattern to take this into account.

Back to: How do you do it?

Tools exist to help core teams assess and build their strategies. Dan Dixon and I run strategic workshops using pattern languages (more on them soon), David Wilcox has some great ‘games’ (simulation exercises), Nancy White does amazing graphic facilitation, Beth Kanter has loads on strategy thinking for the NGO sector, people build and use personas, psychological touchpoint analyses, content assessments, taxonomies, then stick to user-centred-design principles and there are much much more; the most important point is to build a common understanding of the model, shared language and socio-technical direction.

How do you do it diagram

There will always be a core team whether you are highly centralised or totally distributed; someone somewhere has to make some decisions, so identify this group for starters.

Get a clear understanding of your community model, patterns, purpose and related language. Use that language to express the community’s emerging identity to all stakeholders as the stakeholder landscape expands. The language can change, but make sure that when you say ‘community’, or ‘forum’, or ‘reccommendation’ or ‘banana’ that everyone knows exactly what you mean. Many mis-understandings have come from different interpretations of a word.

Having got the core team aboard, start thinking like a team. They usually weren’t a team before (see CILIP case study). Understand what you are up to.

If you are in an organisation, advocate within the organisation to recognise the team’s work, reward the team, and identify this practice and knowledge as a new and valuable practice. Miguel Cornejo Castro’s latest excellent paper on ‘the knowledge wave‘ has a lot on this which I highly reccommend. Then you can expand your stakeholder horizons.

Ann Holmes and David Wilcox’s consideration of engagement with my arrows expressing the process

Once you have your core understandings and processes, you have two choices:

1. If your technology is already decided:

Proceed directly to launch and run an inclusive discursive pilot phase (not forgetting the Serendipity bit) to help a representative group of participants charactise the space for themselves, discuss the rules, the processes etc. You are likely to need support in this activity so identify some champions to help you out.

Do this publicly, but maintain it as a pilot – everyone is learning and there is nothing wrong with that. Collect findings and opinions and buildthem into a new model more closely suited to the participants. This may involve changing the technology later, so have some resource for that outcome. Try to organise at least one open event for people to network, learn and share their opinions. As you progress down this path, keep a log for your organisation so that it can learn, and all your work can be shared if another group needs to be set up elsewhere.

2. If your technology is still unspecified:

Get real people into a physical space before you even say the word ‘technology’. Don’t even mention a computer; consider with your people, who they are and what they want and need. Educate them about the principles of networking with an easy and fun workshop. Help them express their activities and hopes in the physical world and map these to technical affordances.

This will give everyone a clear view and say, and thus ownership of the network/community/group model to co-design, understand and discuss.

This can be done with graphic facilitation, group mind-maps, open space led emergence etc. This is tricky and not as sleek as option 1; nor does it give the host organisation the control that option 1 has (which, when you are considering a community tool neccesarily linked to multiple membership databases is a significant issue).

It puts the decisions firmly in the hands of the people and is a thoroughly engagement-focused method most suited to pretty adventurous organisations. Things they want may not be possible which you may only find out later.

Be honest with people.

If for no other reason, do this because otherwise you will create aggravation later. Whichever process you chose, your decisions at this stage will have significant implications when you are facilitating and moderating.

Understand your ‘community’ as a being that will change over time – establish an effective organisational interface to handle this and take your engagement processes seriously.

An organisation who hosts an online community and mentions the word ‘engagement’ but is not actively involved in the space is not actively engaging. This may be fine for some models, but if your members expect engagement with the organisation, and are investing their time in the community space, you should make sure that your organisation will respond suitably as and when required.

This may make people who prefer to run things behind closed doors feel queasy, so if you don’t mean it, don’t do it.

Digital networks and computer systems remain obscure to most people until something goes wrong. What if everyone had a role in designing them and deciding how society used its digital technologies? This one-day workshop shares methods taken from performance and drama developed to engage people in thinking about technology and what they want from the designers of the systems that will surround us in The Not Quite Yet.
Link to event page

… And please tell me all about it.

This ties in with a long held passion of mine which is that we still don’t understand enough about what we mean when we start designing systems, and we aren’t involving the right people in the design process, or dropping them into unsuitable spaces and expecting them to behave. And when we wave the word ‘engagement’ around, it’s getting serious. And when we try to facilitate people in unsuitable spaces, of course it leads to issues…

We have inherited ‘social’ software from a history of people who tell us it is ‘social’ so there (at least it’s not big centralised enterprise systems, or heavily monitored communities we are told), but is it really that ‘social’? What does it mean? For whom? For what purpose?
Aren’t we now just throwing all the new widgets at a social requirement and hoping some of them stick? Shouldn’t we be understanding the requirements much more fully?

Are we sure that we aren’t still stuffing humans into communication technology frameworks from the top down that don’t give them what they need or want? Even if we adopt agile, get busy with UCD, drum up many use cases, throw personas around like billy-ho, watch punters through one way mirrors, and whatever new process is going, isn’t that still a bit abstract and top down?

It still doesn’t sound democratic and co-design to me. Still sounds like people being given stuff and told to use it – not necessarily for their benefit.
Where are the people in this process?

How can we connect with them in order to explain to them the implications of their decisions?

The gap remains and I think this workshop is part of the facilitation meets strategy puzzle.

Other people thinking about this include David Wilcox who has an excellent series of workshops designed to flatten the power laws of supplier-punter by cascading the right questions at the right times, and Nancy White with the Technology Steward idea, which takes online facilitation into this realm, and I’m sure others (hello!).

I’m working with Dan Dixon on a workshop applying Pattern Design principles to a new system before we even use the ‘community’ word, which we will be writing about in due course…

Umm. Yes, well. Err. There you go. Soap box moment over. Go to the workshop, and let me know.

Lyndsay Rees-Jones (CILIP Membership Support Advisor) and I gave another presentation about the CILIP membership communities at Online Information yesterday. It was fun and we hope everyone enjoyed it.

You don’t have to read all this post; you can go straight to slideshare from here:

See the presentation on slideshare

We had already focused on the social models and technology in other public presentations, so this time we decided to look into how the ‘communities’ team within HQ had evolved to meet the purpose of the communities as a whole.

There wasn’t a communities team when we started, nor processes to ensure that issues arising from the communities were handled professionally and promptly and fairly. This was an important element of our work:

How to ensure that when issues come up in the communities, the members can get the influence and support from HQ they need when they need it?

This is a strategic management question which we think is on many organisations’ horizons. Since talking about this project publicly, we have found that there are very few ‘community’ teams in HQs which are pragmatically integrated into the membership communities, so we wanted to share our findings to help others.

In parallel to this, in the introduction to this year’s Customer Engagement Survey, Richard Sedley writes:

“… organisations do not always manage to assign individuals or departments to taking ownership for implementing and monitoring engagement strategies.”

So we’re seeing something similar; organisations want ‘engagement’ but are not necessarily sure how to go about facilitating it. And for membership associations, this is the core of their being.

We are not saying this is the one and only way to achieve this form of collaboration between members and HQ, but it worked for us and we feel it’s a good story to illustrate the issues. If you have found another model, please let us know – the communities are in a constant state of evolution.

So; to the story…

This presentation tells a simple story about how the CILIP members chose to use one of the private membership forums as a ‘virtual hustings’ in advance of their council elections, and how they managed to get support from HQ when they needed it.

The website has an election page and the individuals’ manifestos, but no space to converse with the hopefuls and to kick the ideas around, so the members set up a thread in the forums, which proved to be exceptionally popular. It gave everyone a transparent opportunity to discuss their ideas and hopes for CILIP in 2008 which had not been there before.

The members agreed that they wanted to promote the elections as much as possible and identified all the channels of communication available to them (from their own blogs to the formal CILIP communications). They felt that the CILIP website itself wasn’t promoting the elections enough and pointed this out among themselves. Within one day, the web editing team in HQ had put a banner together and placed it right in the middle of the homepage.

This doesn’t sound like a revolution, but it was the first time that the members influenced the management and got space on the homepage under their own steam.

Most organisations’ homepages are tightly controlled spaces with rather formal processes for booking space on them; otherwise there would be great tension between departments seeking the all hallowed homepage slot. CILIP is no different.

The thing to note is that these processes reflect the needs of HQ, so the members getting a say in what goes on the homepage is really quite exciting.

This was enabled because of having a communities team in HQ who were aware of what was going on in the communities and who were actively influential in HQ and who could therefore advocate for the members where suitable.

The slides show how this team emerged over a year and how we hope it will continue to evolve in the future.

See the presentation on slideshare

As always, many thanks go to CILIP for being good eggs and agreeing to share their findings. Jill Martin (head of the department of Knowledge and Information) says we can publish our lessons learnt document next year (previously only for members), so keep it up all – sharing is caring.

This bit is the first to chew on (for me anyway):

“… 70% consider building a sense of community around their brand essential or important, but…
… only 20% plan to engage with target customers in social networking sites that they do not own…”

Which puts the thinking around how to approach the three types of community (centralised, de-centralised, and distributed) into an interesting organisational context. And ‘Ownership’. And ‘Control’.

Which makes me think about what Eric Schmidt said in The Economist yearbook for 2007:

“… The past few years have taught us that business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity…

The direction is clear…

Simplicity is triumphing over complexity.
Accessibility is beating exclusivity.
Power is increasingly in the hands of the user…”

All good stuff for brain exercise. Thanks to the survey owners for going out of their way to research and publish this invaluable information, which you can download from the cScape website:

Download the Customer Engagement Report (.pdf; needs registration)