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The big society – meeting at Downing Street

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Update 20 May:  I finally got around to scanning in the piece of paper with the seating plan given to me before entering the room.  The angle from which pictures were taken meant that some folk were not visible.  There has been some interest in the attendee list which hasn’t made it out yet – i should imagine that cabinet office are simply ridiculously busy – so i hope this helps.

Today the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister kicked off the big society work with a seminar in No10 around the cabinet table.  I was privileged to be there with fellow hyperlocal web person Ally Tibbit of Greener Leith and web campaigner Martha Lane Fox.  There were a host of luminaries from the community activism sector about 20 in all . I’ll follow up with the some detail later, but this is an impressionistic write up shortly after the event (mainly written in the back of a taxi picking up a new cat from Battersea).

For me, as an old Whitehall hand (my day job before talk about local) this was the first time the coalition thing has really sunk in.  It was remarkable to see two leaders of different political parties sit opposite each other at the cabinet table and govern together.  The big society is perhaps easier common ground, the deputy prime minister said that the liberals and the conservatives had been talking about the same thing but with different labels.  For the DPM a big society that embraced community grass roots action and self empowerment was core liberalism.  The Prime Minister said that he wanted a major part of his legacy to be a government that ‘laid the foundations for the big society’.
The PM and DPM were in listening mode and responded positively to the attendees.  I made points about how the web can help people be more effective and active citizens by bringing engagement into the modern age from the C19th, the importance of open data to transparency and accountability and the importance of Martha’s work on digital participation.

The last couple of months, all the big society chatter in the civic society and volunteering sectors has been ‘do they really mean it?’. Nat Wei has been highly effective in the background convincing people one on one.

In the theatre of Whitehall, symbolism is important.  You don’t get a much more symbolic commitment than your issue being the first joint outing on policy issue by the new prime minister and deputy prime minister.  So today was a strong symbolic ‘yes’.  As ever with any government, especially a new one you need to be vigilant and hold them to their word and i shall do my share of that.

Martha Lane Fox has already tweeted that ‘I am putting aside all cynicism’. I believe that a massive increase in civic activism and engagement would have a profound impact on making Britain a better place.  It’s great to see such committed government leadership on the big society and i am happy to play my part.

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William Perrin

Founder of Talk About Local, Trustee of the Indigo Trust, Tinder Foundation, 360Giving, co-founder Connect8, former member of UK Government transparency panels, former Policy Advisor to UK Prime Minister, former Cabinet Office senior civil servant.Open data do-er, Kings Cross London blogger. Loves countryside. Two small children.
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  1. “Big society” is great if it does mean power into locally-accountable hands, especially where information distribution is facilitated and encouraged in order to help the process.

    But if it is just an underlying abrogation of essential services in time of bank-enhancing recession …

    No, we voted for change on May 6 and by golly we got it, didn’t we?

  2. Today’s Society Guardian refers to ‘little platoons’ as a terminology of the Big Society.

    Importance of ‘open data to transparency and accountability and… work on digital participation’.

    – These little platoons augmented by technology..

    Does it seem that these platoons are to have recognised/centrally accredited leaders?

    By this I mean – Are elected or appointed by ladder climbing officials to be recruit platoons?

    – Or are the platoons to form through recognising a local need and decide when they require the organisational coherence of having a decision making system.. then perhaps be allocated the resource of a centrally accountable leader?

    I’m sure the answer is both – however the tendency that emerges from the neutralised discrepancies within the coalition around agendas of:

    Spinning existing public services out into social enterprises
    OR
    Inducting and adopting social enterprises…

    ..is going to be impacted by who are the leaders of the initiatives – and the route into leadership.

    The stakeholders of the service are going to react differently to leaders who’ve walked the public sector line as opposed to the grassroots community action line
    – and the hope for endorsement of ‘big society’ may mean that the once effective platoons that operated in a guerilla format with closer to ground level contextual insight are constrained in the same way local authorities can be through the oversight of central gov.

    And when performance management procedure and reporting conventions seep out.. which workforce is likely to have capacity to implement?

    I agree that digital participation will help with altering the challenges posed by scale, volume and abstraction from delivery.. but the user requirements of the tech that will mesh below the big society seems likely to be dictated by the user requirements of the platoon.

    Thus the first question is who will make up those platoons?
    (the answer to which is likely to come from their source environment and the natural capacities thereof)

    I’ve posed many questions but my main request is:

    Will some lucid Nostradamus tell us what happens next?
    (with the clarity to see that the expectations will influence the realisation – whosoever they belong to)

  3. I notice that the men-to-women ratio at the Big Society launch reflects the imbalance in the cabinet. Is this to be a trend trend in the new govt?

  4. Thanks Will for sharing the seating plan – it’s useful to know who was there, and as David Wilcox said, we can rely on you for open data!

    Thanks
    Rob

  8. The Big Society launch

    Launches are dangerous things, with unintended consequences and sub-texts. The organisers think they’ve covered everything, but only once the launch is out in the glare of the public spot-light do they realise they are wearing no clothes to cloak their prejudices, assumptions and limited worldviews. That’s not say the organisers are bad people, just limited and human like those they seek to represent. I’m sure they mean well and will provide lots of schemes to help the poor, the marginalised, the disaffected, those living in the shadows. But none of them were round the table to give their views, so we’ll have to wait and see, won’t we.

    The statistics are a bit of a give away as to the unintended assumptions, which will almost certainly guide how The Big Society will be: round the table there were 22 people: 90% white, 73% male. Hmm. There were a lot of Chief Executives and Directors, too, but I gave up counting. There didn’t seem to be any young people there either.

    I can think of several women who would have had the rest really sitting up and taking notice. Women who have set up small organisations to help women and children in their community, having learnt English themselves as a second or third language and having come to this country with nothing. Or who act as unofficial mediators on housing estates, diffusing trouble and supporting people who might otherwise sink.

    I’m not saying anything against those who were there at the launch – good luck to you and I hope you get lots of budget which you can channel in the direction of people already supporting their small communities. But two things make me suspect that you won’t.

    One is a comment which I’ve read or heard from someone (maybe even David Cameron himself) saying: ‘now the work begins’. Well, sorry, but the work has been going on for years and years, in small ways around the country, by people who operate in smallscale practical ways. If The Big Society ignores, overlooks or denigrates what they are already doing, then it is doomed to failure.

    The other is the structure and composition of that launch.

    Details of attendees:

    left side of table:
    Neil Jameson – London Citizens
    William Perrin – Talk About Local
    (Lord) Nat Wei – The Big Society Network
    Francis Maude – minister for the Cabinet Office
    Martha Lane Fox – Antigone
    David Cameron – Prime Minister
    Camila Batmanghelidjh – Kids Company
    Geoff Mulgan – Young Foundation
    Dawn Austwick – Esmee Fairbairn Foundation
    Ally (Alastair) Tibbitt – Greener Leith
    Rob Owen – St Giles Trust

    right side of table:
    Paul Twivy – Chief Executive, The Big Society Network
    David Robinson – Community Links
    Lord Victor Adebowale – Turning Point
    Adele Blakeborough – CAN Breakthrough
    Dick Atkinson – Balsall Heath Forum
    Nick Clegg – Deputy Prime Minister
    Hilary Cottam – Participle
    Nick Hurd – Minister for Civil Society
    Ray Mallon – Mayor of Middlesborough
    Rolande Anderson – director of what was formerly The Office of the Third Sector
    Stephen Howard – Business in the Community

  9. It’s significant that community media were not represented at this meeting. With 235 stations with FM broadcast licences, many more on the Internet and a growing number of local TV stations.

    Just think what coverage they could give to the Big Society?

    We are ready and waiting for the call.

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  1. […] The big society – meeting at Downing Street For me, as an old Whitehall hand (my day job before talk about local) this was the first time the coalition thing has really sunk in. It was remarkable to see two leaders of different political parties sit opposite each other at the cabinet table and govern together. The big society is perhaps easier common ground, the deputy prime minister said that the liberals and the conservatives had been talking about the same thing but with different labels. For the DPM a big society that embraced community grass roots action and self empowerment was core liberalism. The Prime Minister said that he wanted a major part of his legacy to be a government that ‘laid the foundations for the big society’. […]