UK Geocoding for Drupal

Interactive maps can be really effective ways of visualising information with a geographic compotent. For example, if you want to find participation workers near you making use of Hear by Right, the Local Network Map lets you see who is around far easier than any listing would.

Up until now, finding out the co-ordinates of a UK address to be able to plot address-linked information onto a map either meant paying a lot to commercial providers for access to a postcode or address database that could tell you – or putting (as the HbR Local Network Map does) with being accurate to within one or two miles by using free postcode databases and geocoders.

No more.

The lovely people at Google have somehow managed to get around the prohibitive costs to provide free UK geocoding giving street-level accuracy.

This makes a big difference to the sort of non-commercial geo-information services it could now be possible to provide for the UK. I'll certainly be looking again at whether we can finally exlore getting a good UK Fairtrade Map system working for local Fairtrade Town Campaigns.

Geolocating the UK in Drupal

Given my firm belief that the best possible Content Management System for almost all forms of web-application has to be Drupal, I've created an update for the Drupal Location Modules UK include files here which makes use of the new UK google geocoding.

Combined with my generic fallback patch which uses the fantastic geonames service to make sure Drupal returns a location wherever possible, this means worldwide geolocation coverage can be very workable indeed.

Still a way to go

Even though Google have made UK geocoding available to the masses, there is still a long way to go before we can really get the full benefit of UK geodata without being saddled with prohibitive costs. Even with the fantastic efforts of Open Street Map we still have no country-wide mapping data that anyone can freely print off to create a local community map, or to use for creative applications. Citizens continue to be charged stiffling fees for accessing public data. For more on the need to bring in big changes to the way public geodata and other data is managed – keep an eye on the Free Our Data blog here.

Consulting on the Local Offer, useful resources

A local community map developed using tools for consulting on the Local OfferI recently co-designed and fascilitated a series of dialogue events for The National Youth Agency (NYA) between young people, officials from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) and Parmjit Dhanda MP (then Minister for Children and Families). We focussed the dialogues, which were part of a broader UK tour by Parmjit Dhanda, on the Local Offer.

The Local Offer is a guarantee introduced through Section 6 of the Education and Inspections Act that gives young people the right to:

  • Two hours recreational leisure activity a week
    and
  • Two hour education leisure activity a week

This should be out of school, and local authorities are responsible for making sure there is provision, it is well publicised, and that young people can access it. Young people should also be involved in influencing what is provided under the Local Offer.

As we had three-hours for the dialogues, the first two with mainly young people – and the third with extra DfES officials and the Minister, we designed a process that:

  • Introduces the local offer
  • Creates a map of current provision under the local offer
  • Opens up discussions about how young people want to influence the activities that are provided, and how they think local authorities should be held to account for ensuring provision
  • Explores some of those methods of influence and accountability in more depth – exploring how potential barriers might be overcome.

The resources we developed for the session are fairly flexible – and so I thought I would share them here – as they may well be useful to local areas exploring the local offer, or others running consultation processes related to activity provision for young people.

I’ve included a bit of description about how we used the resources – but you are free to take them and adapt them as you wish. If you do make use of them, I’d be really grateful if you could drop me a line or leave a comment to share news of how… (tim@practicalparticipation.org.uk)

I’ve also suggested possible modifications to the resources… if you do make any of these, please do share your updated resources as well…

Local Offer Bingo: a name game

Local Offer Bingo CardWe used this set of 10 ‘Local Offer Bingo’ cards as our ice-breaker name-game.

Simply give everyone a card, and ask them to talk to each other and to write down someones name against an activity if that person enjoys that particular activity. Each name can only be used once, and you need to find someone for each of the 16 squares on the card. The first person to fill their card (i.e. to find 16 people’s names) shouts Bingo!

After you’ve completed the name game – you can use it to take about the sort of activities people enjoy – and how they now have a right to positive activities in their areas because of the local offer.

The list of activities came from young peoples suggestions in an earlier NYA consultation on Youth Matters.

You can download the cards for printing as a PDF, or for modification as a Word Document.

Possible modifications: Add images to the bingo cards like in the local offer cards below…

Local Offer Cards

Local Offer CardsThese cards add a bit of colour, and list all 47 of the activities used in Local Offer Bingo along with a suitable clip-art image.

We used the cards for a community mapping excercise during which:

  • We asked groups to draw out key landmarks in their communities
  • We then asked the group to draw places where they did stuff
  • We then asked groups to pick up Local Offer Cards that represented things they enjoyed doing, and to place them on the map if there were places where they could carry out that activity.
  • We used the picture that built up to shape discussions around what was and wasn’t available in the local areas members of the group came from.

We also had some stickers with icons and words relating to different barriers that might stop young people accessing activities. Things like ‘cost’, ‘transport’, ‘time’, ‘traffic’ and ‘attitudes of adults’. For some groups we asked them to add these on top of the map to show where barriers to accessing activities existed.

The cards and mapping excercise were really useful in starting discussions and making sure that everyone could have a say, regardless of whether they were comfortable with the written word and verbal expression or not. I’m sure there are many other uses for the cards as well as in mapping; for example, using them to prioritise the different sorts of activities a group would be interested in having provided, or adding ‘costs’ to them and getting a group to try a budgeting excercise thinking about how they would ensure provision of a wide range of activities.

You can download the cards for printing as a PDF for printing, or for modification as a Word Document.

Possible modifications: Give each card a ‘cost’ score according to how expensive or resource intensive that activity is to provide (like in David Wilcox’s Social Media Game) and encourage a group to try an budgeting excercise to work out where their activity priorities lie.

Problem solving chart

Problem solving chart - designing for changeThis is a really simple tool – and I was suprised by how well it worked.

In our sessions we held an idea-storm with the group to ask:

  • How could you influence local authority decisions about provision under the local offer?
  • How could you hold responsible decision makers to account for provision under the local offer?

(we used different ‘translations’ of the questions depending on the focus that had emerged earlier in the dialogues… but these are the overarching questions we were getting at).

With the results of the idea storm, we picked out key themes for further exploration and then held an ‘open space’ style series of conversations around these themes. We ended up with conversations on themes like:

  • Holding meetings with a wide range of local offer stakeholders and young people invited
  • Using the law to hold decision makers to account
  • Creating a bond between young people and councillors so neither can spend money on activities without the others say so

We wrote the themes in the header box of these problem solving charts that we’d had printed on A1 before the event (rather than just scribbling them up on flip-chats) and, after introducing the charts, asked members of the dialogue to select which theme they wanted to discuss and to go over and have a conversation around it. As fascilitators, we just stepped back.

The charts appeared to really help most groups self-fascilitate and to record some really good points. In particular, encouraging the group to answer the question “What would this look like in practise?” with a narrative about how their ideas would work really helped them to work through the other boxes on the chart.

The charts could easily be used in other contexts and could be adapted with different questions – although I think that:

  • Having the charts properly printed up on large paper
    and
  • Having the first question invite a narrative

were important elements of the charts working as well as they did. They cost us just £1 each to get printed on A1, which was well worth it.

You can download the chart as a PDF here, or as a Word document for modifying.

Recording the dialogues

OK – so this isn’t a tool we created – but it was a tool we used. At each dialogue we took digital photos of all the flip-charts, community maps and recording charts and posted them on the photo-sharing website Flickr. That way we could easily share with others the authentic input given through the dialogues – with a clear accountable record of what went on…

Plus, if we were feeling really fancy, we could annotate all the photos, ‘geo-tag’ them to add them to a map to show the areas they represent, and could easily create a slideshow of them ideal for presenting to local authority officers or councillors with next-to-no extra work…

Attachment: Local Offer Activity Cards.pdf
Attachment: Designing for change.pdf
Attachment: Local Offer Bingo Cards.pdf
Attachment: Designing for change.doc
Attachment: Local Offer Bingo Cards.doc
Attachment: Local Offer Activity Cards.doc

The Network

Technology and discussions of technologies were notably absent from the Civicus World Assembly. Even the head of Africa's first mobile phone company speaking in a BBC World Service debate missed speaking about how bringing a mobile phone infrastructure to Africa creates a potentially massive platform for driving, evaluating and improving development.

However, in the packed programme there was one session that took at look at technology. Co-ordinated by Igloo the session was primarily exploring tools for fascilitating communication between dispersed teams of researchers or practioners. A lot of what was said about building network and communities of practioners was really useful – but, it was this slide:

Slide from IGLOO talk at the Civicus World Assembly (Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial)

 

that really made it worth going. The slide itself may look fairly plain – but in showing how the rise of the network as an organising principle has arrived, enabled by technologies of connection – parallel to the rise of bureacracy, enabled by technologies of control – it provides a coherent framework for explaining and understanding the changes we're grappling with right now.

We're in the age of the network. The network is new (in the scheme of things). And the network reconfigures our social and organisational relationships – not just our technologies.

Given that the majority of delegates at the World Assembly spent their formative years before the rise of the network, it is not suprising that using networked strategies for promoting development and accountability had a low profile through the event. Both the leaders and the stakeholders/beneficiaries of Civicus's member NGOs lack an internalised understandings of networked working environments. By contrast, Youth Assembly Delegates (18 – 25 year olds who met before and then took part in the World Assembly) often had at least an unconciously internalised understanding of the network, and one that significantly shapes their world views – yet, as the slide above showed me – we lack a comprehension of the place of this understanding in the current rapid development of the history of thought and organisational structures. Crucially, both young and old are low on the practical skills to operate effectively in networked ways.

I know this needs change. It needs a response. Yet I've had this blog post waiting for completion for almost a month as I can't see clear to pull together enough threads of thought yet to even get close to sketching a response. And that's the challenge – the network and the information age seem to change ways of knowing – and ways of learning. So rather than look for some conceptual conclusion to this post – I will simply let it arrive on my blog as part of an exploration in progress. A seemingly significant conceptual stage on a learning journey. And a post with a picture full of all the different shades of the colour blue I really like…

The joy of trains (and offline rss readers)

I've made it. I've whittled the cloud of 600 blog posts and links that have been hanging over me for a fortnight down to just 17 that I need to follow up when I finally make it back home. Things started getting bad when the deadlines for launching the new Participation Works gateway co-incided with preparation for The Youth Summit, the tail end of Actions Speak Louder and running the final 3D dialogue – bizzarly being held on the set of Hollyoaks.

The trouble with bloggers is they keep on posting fantastic nuggets of wisdom and ideas even when I've not got the time to read them. And the really interesting people I'm reading, keep on pointing out other really interesting people who I could learn a lot from as well – and soon my news-reader is bursting at the seams with condensed learning, inspriation and peripheral knowledge.

The upside, however, of an accumulation of a never-ending-flow of blog posts is that is makes delays on the train a positively helpful and positive experience. I'm writing right now from Peterborough Station. Peterborough is definitely not on the route from London to Leicester… apart from when all the trains from London to Leicester are cancelled, and you have to meander home the long way. And such a meander provides just the time I need for catching up on my personal learning and blog reading.

Peripheral knowledge

Knowledge garnered through all the interesting things that I find myself reading and links I find myself following that don't have any direct relevance to what I'm working on right now, but might just come in handy one day…

An essential component of synergies and interdisciplinery inspiration…

The Grantmaker

Over the last two years I've worked with YouthBank UK and the YouthBank network of Community Foundation Northern Ireland to develop a Management Information System to support youth led micro-finance. The software I developed ended up very customised around YouthBank, but with the rise of the Youth Opportunity Fund, and other growth in youth led grantmaking there appears to have been a real need for a more general information system supporting such projects.

All this led me to starting work at the start of this year on TheGrantmaker, a flexible web-based Management Information System for youth led grantmaking, based on top of the Drupal Content Management System. Mike Smith, my brother in law, took on role of chief coder, and has developed all the foundations for a top-notch system. However, things have got really busy here with the upcoming launch of Practical Participation – and time and money to develop TheGrantmaker further have dried up for now. So – I thought I'd drop a quick post here in case there was anyone interested in exploring ways to bring development back-to-life.

Right now, what I think is needed, is either some dedicated voluntary effort to turn TheGrantmaker into a high-quality open source product – or a business model that can support at least a couple more months of developer time to turn TheGrantmaker into a cost-effective product for Youth Opportunity Funds and other grantmaking groups.

If you think you might be able to help, drop me a line: tim@practicalparticipation.co.uk.

A short burst

Thanks to signal failures a rather long train journey home I've managed to catch up on completing a few blog posts that have been waiting… so a short burst of posts that should really have appeared a couple of weeks back follows…
Normal levels of activity (or inactivity) here will be resumed shortly..

Open Spaces and Effective Participation: A comparative exploration

At the Youth Summit last this week Steve Moore from Channel 4/Policy Unplugged injected a hour-long 'Open Space' session into the more formal structure of the event. Open space ideas also heavily influenced the session design I developed for a series of recent dialogue events between young people, DfES officials and the Minister for Children and Families (at that point, Parmjit Dhanda) looking at the Local Offer. This has got me thinking about what 'Open Space Technology' has got to offer to participation practitioners, and what factors we need to be thinking of when exploring its use.

[Skip to the conclusions ]

Open space 'pure': Youth Summit

An open space session does not come with a set agenda, but invites participants to set their own topics of conversation, and to self-select the groups they want to work in and the conversations they want to have. As such – it can give rise to unexpected ideas and important discussions that get missed when too much structure is presented. In the open space session at the Youth Summit, we found young people raising questions about monitoring forms and the length of time change takes. Both topics that were not on the 'agenda' for the main event – but important topics.

Elements of open space: 3D Dialogues

In our dyes Dialogue Days (the 3D dialogues as we called them) were heavily facilitated and structured. But included elements that enabled earlier parts of the dialogue to shape the agenda of later parts – and encouraged self-selection of later discussion topics. Each session included three hours of 'dialogue'.

We spent the first hour of each of each sessions on contextualizing activities – using a 'name-game bingo' activity to explore what the local offer is, and then using a facilitated mapping exercise to create discussion about whether the activities young people have a right to under the local offer are actually available to them.

In the second hour, we used a conventional 'idea-storm' activity to invite ideas on ways in which young people wanted to influence the provision of activities in their local areas – and the ways they wanted to hold local government to account for what is provided. This session ended by inviting groups to prioritise the methods of influence and accountability they felt most important to discuss further.

For the first two session, young people tended to work in groups with those they had come to the dialogue event with (we had up to 30 young people at each event from 3 – 8 different regionally dispersed projects).

Over a break, the facilitates picked out four or five key themes emerging from the idea-storm and priorisation, and selected these as themes for the third hour of discussion. In this way, themes emerging from young dialogue participants influenced the agenda – although the facilitates mediated this process, factoring in considerations of which of the prioritized potential discussion would be likely to have the most relevance to policy topics or official present – or which were 'new ideas' which clearly deserved deeper discussion.

In the final hour – during which the Minister and additional officials joined the sessions – the themes were replayed to the group – and individuals encouraged to choose the theme of most interest to them. Recording flip-charts were given to each group to give some structure to discussions on that theme. Young people were encouraged to select and stick-with a theme, although officials and the Minister were enabled to move around the themes according to interest and relevance. All those gathered around a theme were encouraged to dialogue on it – using the questions on the recording flip-charts as a guide.

Some reflections

I believe participation work is about promoting the ability of those affected by decisions and action to influence those decisions and actions. This involves enabling their voices and views to be heard with authenticity, but also enabling them to engage in practical dialogue on a topic at an appropriate level of complexity. I am continually conscious of the tension between providing the context and structure an individual or group may need to be able to engage with complex questions – and ensuring such context and structure does not harm the authenticity of the views expressed (i.e. does not over-prescribe the range of views that can be expressed and so illicit views from people that they do not genuinely hold*).

At first glance, I think open space has potential to be a weight on the authenticity side of the balance. Forcing us to think critically about whether we really need to provide so much structure for young people to be able to participate and engage in effective dialogue. In the first 3D Dialogue session we ran, we had expected to need to facilitate the final hour of thematic discussions, but found that the groups were far more productive self-facilitating – at least in part because they had chosen the topics out of their own interests.

One concern I have, however, about open space methods is that, unlike some of the more structured activities we had developed, they have a strong bias towards enabling the most articulate and confident to direct and control discussions. I'm sure visual tools and on-verbal processes can be introduced into open spaces – but the need for planned and prepared facilitation and activity to enable disadvantaged groups to participate in a dialogue is often an important element of youth participation. Of course, in an idealistic open space process, we might wish that participants self-facilitate and develop tools to ensure all voices are heard and involved – but expecting this to emerge or occur in a short session is, in almost all cases, unrealistic.

Some conclusions

Open space methods can empower young people far more than many conventional participation processes – but don't empower all equally. Open space then, I believe, has a place in the participation practitioners toolbox – but, in most cases, as part of a broader process.

In our 3D dialogues, we could have opened up the third hour more – prepared for the agenda to be more directly set by participants, and equipped participants better to all engage in the dialogue that followed. But we should not abandon the preparation, contextualization and use of creative non-verbal methods that built up to this stage.

And if we are going to use open space tools, we do need to think about where the outcomes go. An open space used as part of a consultation needs to have a clearly defined range of topics – as it is likely to be unhelpful to let conversation range over topics not within the domain of the consultation – and is certainly likely to exacerbate the criticism that many participation processes do not lead to change or even meaninful feedback to those involved.

I'm certainly going to be exploring open spaces more… and I'm sure this isn't the last exploration of its influence on participation that I'll post here…

Getting T-Shirts printed? Make sure they’re Fair Trade…

A common checklist for planning an event or promoting a new project:

  • Think up a name [CHECK]
  • Design a logo and brand [CHECK]
  • Find someone to print t-shirts with the logo on [CHECK]
  • Check that the t-shirts are made with fairtrade cotton……. um, check?

When I started campaigning for Oxford University to only sell ethically traded clothing back in 2003, we had to dig around and research a lot to find out how to source ethical clothing. The FAIRTRADE Mark for cotton didn't exist then – and choosing ethical clothes meant a six-week lead time and a lot of extra cost.

FAIRTRADE Mark

Things are different now. You can get ethically sourced and FAIRTRADE t-shirts printed for minimal extra cost – easily arranged and quickly delivered through any number of suppliers. And yet – and many events I go to – even those organised by 'ethical' organisations – I find I'm handed a t-shirt made by 'Fruits of the Loom'.

I was planning to use this blog post to share research I did three years ago on where to source ethical and FAIRTRADE t-shirts, as I thought it must still be tricky to find the right suppliers. But, looking at that document I realised a) that it's out of date, and b) a quick search for fairtrade t-shirt printers turns up almost all you need to know.

Top of the list right now, T-Shirt and Sons, certainly come recomended as I've been nothing but happy with service from them in the past, but chances are you can also find a local supplier near you now offering Fairtrade garments. In fact, I was pleasantly suprised to find Shirt Works in Oxford now also offer Fair Trade options – eliminating the final excuse of Sports Clubs and Societies in Oxford who formerly claimed it was too complex to opt for ethical when getting team tees printed.

And even if you find yourself with a complex purchasing need for a large number of ethical goods – there are people around to help. Salta Sustainable (formerly Fair Trade First) are, in my experience, certainly really helpful in supporting ethical procurement.

So, next time you're at a project meeting where someone says 'We need t-shirts' – just make sure you CHECK that they will come with the FAIRTRADE Mark…

P.S. If you're wondering why this is important, you can do worse than to start by looking at the Clean Clothes website here.