These few thoughts are written from a position of relative ignorance. So, without  having to cover this by resorting to out-and-out humour, I’m going to make a virtue of my naivety.

I think I’m now clear what bothers me. It is the fact that institutions which are themselves just analysts (not public bodies, not money risking investment institutions) can have a significant effect on the thoughts and actions of sovereign governments just by, themselves, thinking aloud about a decision that they may be going to make in the future… about those governments’ credit ratings.

I would have thought that the primary purpose of a credit rating agency was to reflect reality as it stands. I don’t mean they shouldn’t be analysing the future. But when they’ve done that what matters, assuming it matters at all, is the rating that they assign to an institution right now. That’s what I’m supposed to look at, today, when making a decision about buying somebody’s debt. The agency is telling me how good that somebody is, for paying me back in the future.

I should say, there’s still a nagging doubt in my mind about the function that credit rating agencies actually perform. If you accept the market-based frame of reference in which these agencies are embedded, then the market is supposed to be an extremely efficient, emergent way of rapidly sharing information, calculation and sentiment about the value (and future value) of anything. If the market works as it is supposed to do, and is preferable to any other way discovered or attempted by humanity to allocate resources efficiently amongst even non-specialists, why do we need credit rating agencies at all… to compete with the market’s own signals? I have to suppose that the answer is that they are a facility for people who don’t have the time or disposition to read the market for themselves.

So let’s make that the case. These agencies are summarisers – boiling down the complex and shifting wisdom of the markets into a few simple indicators. Now – how do they make money?

They obviously can’t make money out of the big headline data that they put into the public domain… simply because we can all self-serve for those. These must be shop window dressing; evidence of the enduring and respected status of the agencies in the matter of BIG THINGS, thus tempting us inside to purchase more comprehensive and detailed data, and analytical consultancy, in these matters and also those of much smaller enterprises. Again – what we would pay for in these circumstances, is what the agency thinks now about the data and analysis it has compiled. That may include what it thinks now about the future. But I can’t imagine paying for a story about what the agency thinks it might be going to think, differently, in a few days’ time.

So why do the likes of Fitch issue statements about what their ratings might be going to be? Why do they do this about those big headline figures which, if I am right, are their shop window dressing?

I can only think of two reasons. The first is competition amongst themselves, and the second is a more common concern about the reputation of the entire credit rating sector.

The latter took a beating as a result of the big bank crashes. The agencies were criticised for ‘not seeing it coming’. So now, we are told, they are trying to show their ability to anticipate major volatile shifts. But, if my points above are right, you demonstrate this simply by being right… i.e. the rating you set NOW turns out to have been a correct assessment of risk, and then a little while later the rating you set NOW turns out to have been good, and NOW… and… NOW. Surely you can’t improve on this, regarding your reputation for foresight, by speculating about your own future beliefs and pronouncements. [If it's anybody's business to do that it would be a Credit Rating Agency Rating Agency!!!]

So that leaves us with the former. Presumably the agencies compete with each other for all that paying business further down the food chain. So could it be that they are competing for the highest perceived influence, by demonstrating their ability to provoke statements, or even actions, from the finance ministers of nation states… simply by speculating about what they might themselves be going to say and do? Incidentally, this future-self-speculation is the only commodity they can afford to wager in such a game. The actual ratings themselves, and the consequences of getting them more wrong than necessary, are too precious to hazard.

I think that must be it. Fitch and their peers make statements about their own possible future decisions – partly in a logically flawed attempt to repair the standing of their profession, but primarily as an exercise in PR and competition, to show who has most clout… in order to win business.

This is wrong!

Three reasons:

1. Because the decisions that governments make, in part conditioned by this public dialogue, affect the well-being and life chances of millions of people, possibly even the stability of some states. It seems totally disproportionate for a (quite small?) bunch of competing analysts to be able to influence those decisions more than, say, electorates do.
2. If the much vaunted market really is the best resource management tool going – then the ratings agencies’ superimposed judgements are actually obscuring and distorting the ‘pure’ signals of the total market
3. If it is the job of the agencies to analyse and rate the current situation, i.e. to reflect what the market is trying to tell us, then these public announcements introduce a feedback loop which free market/liberal economists should be experiencing as the most piercing of Hendrix-style screams. How can the agencies plausibly interfere in that which they are supposed to dispassionately describe?

I think that will do for now. I feel better. I guess for me it’s philosophy rather than economics.

What do you think?

Below is the text of my e-mail to him. It’s written in great haste – and therefore even windier than I would normally be. But if it makes the difference between your joining in and not… feel free to cut and paste, or just to send a one-liner to him citing what I have written and linking to this post. [It may also wrap a bit messily as i have cut and pasted from the e-mail]

Dear Mr Gough

I am contacting you as a result of seeing your details on the Wilmington Parish Council website – in connection with this proposed sale.

I live in Warren Road, Wilmington and have had 20 years to see the way the car park is used, and the amenity for my neighbours in the area.

I would like to express my concern at the proposed sale. My principle objection is on the basis of consultation. I am sure there are complex arguments for and against the sale – in the context of much wider local government finance and policy issues. But there are citizens living within a considerable radius of the car park who should be considered as stakeholders. Those stakeholders should have been actively and intensively consulted, and the arguments aired, before this decision was made. This is not a matter where the County Council should feel able simply to divest itself of an asset.

 If I were party to such consultation I would then make the following points: The car park provides capacity which would otherwise be diverted onto the surrounding, unsuitable, on road parking… as people will still be drawn to the shops, and the Sure Start centre, immediately adjacent. We already have a problem with people parking briefly outside the Co-Op, right on the traffic lights, and this could only get worse. The car park is a ‘quick stop’ facility for many people using the adjacent businesses en route – it’s closure would affect these businesses, by losing those customers for whom the added parking inconvenience was a deterrent. Have those businesses themselves being consulted, and what was the outcome? For many elderly people in the area the car park makes it possible to do their own shopping by making a *short* local car journey and transporting shopping that they couldn’t carry by hand, this included, until his death a few years ago, our neighbour who was able to stay independent into his 90s by doing this.

 If the future use is to be as a Pay & Display car park, under private ownership – then the County Council will effectively have pocketed the one-off capital proceeds of the sale in return for applying a new ‘tax’ to all those local stakeholders who use the car park at present. As we have seen with the recent huge increase at the Priory Centre surface car park, this one way transfer into private ownership permanently removes control of the land from local people and allows a third party to dictate charges and, of course, penalties such as fines and clamping or towing. Many people make such short stops here that Pay and Display would either be inequitable or such a deterrent that the car park may as well be built on.

Property development is the other option. What are your expectations that the necessary permissions will be forthcoming, and over what period? A strong possibility is that the land will be acquired for this and will then be fenced off (unusable as a car park, but not used for anything else) possibly for years – e.g. as part of someone’s land bank waiting for economic upturn. Or it may remain available for parking but, no longer maintained by the Borough Council, as private land, accumulate rubbish, debris, derelict cars… Other pockets of local land have been similarly cleared, fenced, but not developed – so there is precedent.

I would ask you to postpone the sale and to ensure that there is full and active consultation with local residents, businesses and third sector groups such as the Scouts. As part of that consultation I would ask that you set out the history of the County Council’s ownership of the land, making clear any covenants or conditions that historically apply to it, and how these are being adhered to. You should also consider whether there are local community organisations who could and would purchase the car park – perhaps being able to use it on occasion for events, community markets, street parties etc. Such organisations may be eligible for grant or other aid to do this.

Please treat this as a community issue, with stakeholders, and not as a simple asset disposal.

[Name and full address supplied]

If you live locally and agree that we should at least have been given wider notice, some explanation and some say… then please contact Councillor Gough too.

Both of them are about car parking – more specifically the preservation or affordability thereof – which tends to put you on the moral back foot these days. When we drive we all turn into these other people who are destroying the planet and arejust too feckless or anti-social to use public transport.

But actually I’m looking at this from the point of view of people who depend on their car in order to maintain an independent life – doing their own shopping by parking within trolley range of a supermarket. In the end, my line of thought arrived at a set of questions about common land, local government ownership of assets, and a claustrophobic future in which the only place we have an absolute right to be is in our own house and garden. The change of focus? From the transparency and accountability of local authorities (and more generally government – in the way that open data and “e-government” enthusiasts tend to obsess) to the transparency and accountability of private companies who have come to have rights over what may well have previously been “common land”.

The more recent incident was the discovery that the Sainsburys surface car park next to Dartford’s Priory Centre had hiked its prices from 50p to £1.50 with no obvious notice,  consultation or explanation. The image of a elderly lady repeatedly inserting a 50p coin and saying “it must be broken”, summed this up for me.

By turns I initiated, followed, or connected twitter conversations about the change – which followed this trajectory… ”Sainsburys… why did they do that? Why WOULD they do that? It’s counter-productive, they haven’t introduced a ‘refund for bona fide customers’ scheme (which would have suggested the ‘problem’ was people parking there to go elsewhere), so maybe
it was some dumb HQ decision universally applied, or a piece of ill-considered outsourcing”. Then “Sainsburys don’t own/operate the car park. It must be the Borough Council, which would make sense given the history of the site. Perhaps they’re trying to squeeze revenue out of all their assets to cope with the cuts – and screwing up local people’s use of the town in the meantime”. Then, finally, “It’s neither – the site is owned, or at least run, by APCOA… and Sainsbuys are as unhappy about the rise as anybody else.”

Once you get into that latter territory, there are two really striking things. Firstly – it takes a lot of googling to figure out [not 'who runs the car park' but] who actually owns and controls the land, as opposed to leasing, having a parking franchise etc, etc – so this is the transparency point. Secondly – it makes you realise that these sorts of relationships appear to result in amorphous private entities having carte blanche to set prices… and ultimately that means control or restrict access to large expanses of land in our town centres. So this is the accountability point. [I found the website of one company - having googled "ownership of dartford priory centre" and when I clicked on 'About Us' to see what sort of company they were, discovered that their business was "Creating value for clients"... that's cleared that up then.]

That brings me nicely to the earlier incident – which had already sensitised me to these issues. I read in a local free paper that a small local car park, adjacent to a block of shops, takeaways, cafe and the Co-Op, is about to be sold off. It’s only a small car park, maybe 20 cars if people park in a considerate way, but it’s where many people make a short stop, on the way home for example, to buy a paper, fish and chips, or a midweek shop. The site is ”owned” by Kent County Council and ‘operated’ as a free car park by Dartford Borough Council. Sale of the site will raise up to £200,000 for KCC and, we are told, it could be operated privately as a Pay and Display car park or [subject to all necessary permissions being granted] used for a residential development.

What particularly annoyed me was that this article, probably triggered by some PR from the firm of auctioneers, was the first I knew about it and the the fact that the Borough Council has said it “won’t be using the land” after Christmas Eve.

So, before the opaque Sainsburys example came up, I was already dwelling on these points:

1. It’s not the Borough Council that ‘uses’ that car park – it’s us!
2. There’s something wrong with the historical process via which it’s now normal to see the County Council as just another organisation that owns and disposes of assets when, again, they are assets for the local community – including the businesses around that car park - and the Council just owns them on our behalf.
3. The fact that selling the land puts it into a domain where there is no future community say in how it is used… including what charges are levied for parking,and what sanctions such as clamping and towing can reasonably be applied.

Car parks are public spaces – they aren’t glamorous or sentimentality persuasive – in the way that parks, playgrounds or natural habitats are. But if you can get past any uneasiness about “drivers” and traffic, they are at least as immediately important to the everyday lives of many people as those other spaces are.

Two things need to change.

Widespread consultation and notice should be as commonplace for these mundane changes as they are for more high profile projects. This should carry with it a re-assertion of the principle that local authorities are not enterprises which can simply sell assets on this one way journey out of public control.

Even more importantly, and we should keep sight of this when, as I say, we are obsessing about public sector transparency and accountability, it should be really really easy for someone like me to find out who actually owns a car park, to see the basis on which someone else leases or operates it and, in particular, to see whether and when it passed from public or community ownership into private control. One reason for this is that, at the time of disposal, the wheels are often oiled by applying conditions and covenants to the future use of the land, or some residual local authority or community say in this. It is these provisions which I suspect are oftenswept under the carpet… and which would be harder to treat this way if that information was easily accessed by ordinary people, with busy lives and little time for detective work.

My concern is that more and more common land becomes seen as ‘council land’ and that this in turn becomes ‘private land’… with our rights of access and use eroded in the process.

What starts out as a gripe about parking charges, probably fuelled by a sense of unfairness, ends up for me as an issue about the fundamentals of community ownership and accountability. Looking back – and I’m sorry I haven’t had time to write a more concise version of this post – it strikes me that I’m making a fairly well-aired point… but that I got there via a route that’s likely to resonate more with people than some of the grand political theory does.

For Dartford the long running saga of the big St James’/Tesco redevelopment of Lowfield Street also takes those issues and writes them even larger.

Thus far only seen by my family, friends and colleagues [plus lot's of innocent passers-by of course, who can't claim damages for trauma because they don't know who I am] it’s now time for me to go MO2.0  [or is that 2.Mo?] and get out there on the social web. Please visit my personal page and make a donation at http://mobro.co/grimbold

In the words of the Mo-ganisers, far more eloquent than me, here’s why you should, and what to do:

It’s Movember, the month formerly known as November, now dedicated to growing moustaches and raising awareness and funds for men’s health; specifically prostate and testicular cancer. I’m donating my top lip to the cause for 30 days in an effort to help change the face of men’s health. My Mo will spark conversations, and no doubt generate some laughs; all in the name of raising vital awareness and funds for cancers affecting men.

Why am I so passionate about men’s health?
* 1 in 9 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime
* This year 37,000 new cases of the disease will be diagnosed
* 1 in 2 men will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime
* 26% of men are less likely to go the doctor compared to women

I’m asking you to support my Movember campaign by making a donation by either:
*Donating online at: http://mobro.co/grimbold
*If you want to go old school you can write a cheque payable to ‘Movember’, reference my name and Registration Number 1067820 and send it to: Movember Europe, PO Box 68600, London, EC1P 1EF

If you’d like to find out more about the type of work you’d be helping to fund by supporting Movember, take a look at the Programmes We Fund section on the Movember website: http://uk.movember.com/about

Thank you in advance for supporting my efforts to change the face of men’s health.

Online news stories often have the facility for readers to comment. So I may continue scrolling down and reading – partly as a ‘local’ and partly as a social media professional. Online comments, by the way, are a good example of why the facile identification of ‘social media’ only with Facebook, Twitter + 2-3 other platforms is just plain wrong.

What I have noticed is that in the great majority of cases (really!) the conversation takes the following course – with what I am starting to regard as saddening inevitability.

1. It’s  fresh news story. So a commenter will speculate about the nature of the collision, or claim to know something from an eye-witness etc.
2. This often takes the form of blame assignment – the dead driver/pedestrian is at fault, the other party is at fault, the layout is at fault
3. This may involve taking sides, stereotyping, and thus blaming an entire category of people – ‘lorry drivers’, ‘bikers’ etc.
4. Other people get involved, possibly close to the dead person, and make angry or grief-stricken rebuttals.
5. Argument and recrimination builds and the level of emotion escalates.
6. Other people try to make peace, make more generic observations, sympathise to offset the accusation… and so on.
7. All too often the core of this includes an assertion that it was, in some way, the dead person’s own fault… and the defending response comes from someone very close to that dead person – a parent, a sibling, or a close friend.
8. All of this happens within hours of the incident, and before there are full details or an official analysis of what has happened… the whole thing resting on a foundation of speculation.

Whatever turn out to be the rights and wrongs in a particular case, this is the last thing that somebody needs when they have just (literally just) lost someone close to them. They are dealing with shock, grief, anger, lack of a full story…  Of course they are likely to look at the article, to find out more, to seek some solace, to see what other people are being told. And now there’s a high risk that they will find a raging debate around the circumstances of their loved one’s death.

THEY DON’T NEED THIS!

Like those who get sucked into the argument itself – I find myself looking around for someone to blame for the fact that this spectacle is happening at all. It’s tempting to single out the individual(s) who made the baseless, or tasteless, comment in the first place. But we know these people are around. Offline – when someone we know suffers a bereavement we observe all sorts of norms – including what people used to call ‘a decent period of mourning’. This mutual respect has evolved over many generations. It is appropriate. We don’t go round their house, that day, and start a debate about road safety, or ask them if they think it was the victim’s own fault. But it’s a characteristic of social media that problems arise when the central characters are strangers, short-term ‘celebrities’ almost, and as a result some people lose the inhibitions that many (I hope) would still have in a face to face situation with ordinary people.

So I turn my thoughts to the online publishers who are providing the space in which the comments are happening. They’ve been doing this long enough to observe, just as I have, how some people will behave. Until more people have learned to apply offline standards of behaviour to social media, why don’t the media managers simply turn off the comments facility beneath stories which are reporting a very recent accidental death? This could be done for a set period of time – to spare the families this extra trauma at the worst possible moment – or until some trigger event – such as a public statement by the authorities about the circumstances of the accident. There may, at some point, be a legitimate case for a platform supporting public debate about the road layout, planning decisions etc that were relevant. But that’s not served by kicking this off within hours, and when there are only sketchy details. Nor can the media argue that the offsetting benefit of allowing some readers to post tributes, is worth the risk of instant mob inquests.

That’s the challenge to online editors of publications, large and small. Please suppress comments on items reporting recent accidental death? At least for a decent period of time? Why wouldn’t you?

UPDATE: I just revisited the most recent example which, yesterday, prompted me to write this post. It’s gratifying to see that the comments have now been suppressed. So for some editors my question is now   ‘… immediately, as a matter of automatic policy. Not once you see what is written, and the harm that has already been done?’

The leaflets simply say who I am, where I live, and what I look like… in the hope that I’m recognised when I turn up on the doorstep. They make the very basic proposition – “I want to test the idea that if more people in a neighbourhood know each other, and have easy ways to communicate and cooperate, everybody’s quality of life improves… if only a little bit”. I don’t even mention the internet – that’s how set I am on people not judging this as an ‘internet thing’. One of the first solutions I want to ‘street-source’ is how to make communications just as efficient for people who want in, but don’t want to use the web, as they are for those of us who are online. I then say I want to come and call on them for 10 minutes to explain a bit more, and to listen to what they think, and how they would like to see things develop. Finally I give them as many contact methods as I can for me – from a note through my door to a text or a dedicated e-mail – and three options. If they don’t want me to bother them… let me know. If they’re happy to talk… do nothing, or let me know a good time. If they actually want to help, and give me much-needed local encouragement… let me know straight away.

It didn’t take long to drop the leaflets once printed (NB – that’s not cheap – given the price of printer ink!) – and btw they were redesigned by my younger daughter, and rendered up into landscape powerpoint. She’s one of the few people I can forgive for pointing out the obvious shortcomings of my dense and over-long portrait Word documents.

I learned a few things. More accurately I was reminded of a few things I learned in 1981 whilst doing the Census. 1) At least 90% of all letterboxes are badly designed, especially if the purpose is to make it possible for a third party to get a document into your hallway. 2) I could never be a postman – as the one knuckle I have that is chronically subject to eczema is the one that takes all the stick when  negotiating letter boxes and 3) The houses with the scariest sounding dogs always have the letter boxes which require you to stick several inches of hand through their nylon bristles, if you are going to get your document to drop inside… probably a waste of time, since said dog will probably then destroy or even ingest the leaflet.

I was struck by how determined I was to get the leaflet to land inside the house and not to become a slot-blocker like so many of the pizza delivery fliers. I’m under no illusions (indeed I should have a T-shirt printed with ‘I am under no illusions’ on the chest) about the proportion of these leaflets that are going to be consigned straight to the bin along with junk mail and all that information vital to ‘The Occupier’, but I still wanted to give each one the best chance, like a hatched turtle heading for the sea.

I didn’t feel as conspicuous doing this today as I did the other day when I was just walking about making notes. I think that’s because ‘leafleting’ is a conventional activity – it happens all the time. It’s also one of the things which makes politics (which this project isn’t btw) do-able. Politicians are expected to drop leaflets, knock on doors, be welcomed or reviled, praised or argued with and then, when elected, they can slip into lots of other conventional activities such as meetings, votes, committees, legislation and press releases. You know where you are with all that – even down to the shortcut self-definition that Party can give you. Not so with suggesting that your neighbours should get to know each other a bit better and then start to find new ways to share, protect, help or even just have fun. There aren’t many route maps for that.

Nor did I feel some big sense of event once I’d done it… even though this is a piece of line crossing, however modest, that I have been building up to for years, Perhaps I should. There are a bunch of people just down there, now, who have a picture of me, know where I live, and know that for some strange reason I want to change things a little.

So what happens now? I suppose I might get one or two messages, positive or negative, but what I mainly expect to happen is… nothing. I just have to hope that nothing happens… for the right reasons. I won’t know that until I start knocking on doors. That starts on Friday.

[Meanwhile I'm honing my toolkit, a bit of what a market researcher would call a 'topic guide', and also a list of examples of things that people could do together - or have been done elsewhere in the world. I hope I'll find time to blog a little about those tomorrow or Wednesday, although it's now time for the day job to take over again.]

So I found myself out in the street, with a notepad in my hand, walking slowly and making notes. It felt quite odd, and slightly uncomfortable.

I’ve walked up or down my street thousands of times – going for a walk (usually with someone else), going to the shop, visiting a friend – but I was always passing by and I always had a purpose. I’ve never lingered.

Similarly I’ve ‘done’ other people’s streets – such as when I was a census enumerator back in 1981, and perhaps first caught this slow-burning fascination with the way a hundred people with so many different stories and hobbies and jobs can live within a few yards of each other and never be mutually aware. If it’s someone else’s street and you have a reason – that’s fine too. People walk around my street, with or without badges or leaflets or notepads and data loggers. They are ‘official’ and they are strangers… so it’s OK.

For me, the discomfort came from being neither a stranger nor just an inhabitant. I was a hybrid, somewhere between not belonging enough and belonging too much to be walking so slowly past my neighbours’ houses, looking at them and writing things down. All of this was internal of course; it was a quiet time of day and the few people who were out there took no notice of me. They were doing what I normally do – “passing”. I think my most awkward moment would have been to meet a neighbour that I already knew ‘just a bit’, enough for them to wonder, but maybe not ask, what I was up to. Would I explain? Would I prematurely launch into my pitch? It never arose.

There’s a ‘close’ half way up the road – it carries the Warren Road name, whereas the continuation of the road, bending around the top to avoid the A2, has a different name, was built later. I have looked into that close as I walked past the end many many times – but I have never walked into it. I found myself doing so – in order to log the house numbers – and discovered the unusual layout, some very large front gardens at the end, and the mysterious land where the odd numbers stop and the even numbers start, but without tallying up properly. It felt odd to walk into a cul-de-sac with the purpose only of walking back out again. I would have been even more self-conscious if I hadn’t had the notebook, however small, to flourish. “Look – it’s OK – I’m not just standing and looking – in a place where I couldn’t be just passing through”. The close has a different character to the hill – I know that character now – it’s immediately become part of how I experience my street, differently, when I look out of the window and up the hill. I know it’s there, and what it’s like, and I didn’t know the latter for the last 18 years. In a very tiny way, the street will never be the same again.

I now know that there are 114 properties in Warren Road, semis and detached, bungalows and houses, and a couple of short rows. I know how the numbers work. I have noticed for the first time that the detached properties at the bottom of the road have names but not numbers, because number 1 starts further up, in one of the older-looking rows. I know that there is no number 84, but there is a gap and a fence, in the close, which hints at the missing address, like a missing tooth, and maybe a little mystery. I have walked in my street in a certain new way, attended to it differently, and in a small but perfectly noticeable way it will never be the same street again.

And that’s just the hardware! The houses, fences, signs and corners. What’s it going to be like when I start meeting more of the people, and they start meeting more of each other, and maybe doing some quite small things together? Will it change for them too? Or is this just me doing street-mindfulness?

In short – I did a lot of grappling with possible online applications, to support the simple opening idea of more awareness, more communication and a little bit of un-nudged deliberation amongst neighbours. I was hyper-sensitive about putting people off, by indirectly asking them to sign up to other unfamiliar things in order to gain access to a shared online space. I also fretted about anything that might make this an existing-confident-internet-users-only phenomenon. I dabbled with the idea of creating something new – to fit exactly my instincts about the end user requirement – then decided this would be too much of a diversion.

At the same time, partly as a bi-product of this search for support and solutions, I found that I kept getting drawn back to the debate that I had attempted to eschew… e.g. by writing once-and-for-all point of view posts. This is the debate between different interpretations of the Big Society, between those pro- and anti- the Big Society idea (whichever one they chose to react to), and then to ‘Your Square Mile’ as maybe an offshoot which was closer to my interests and hopes. That also brought me to ‘Our Society’ and all manner of ideas, people and projects. Some of the stuff I saw on there – and I make no claim to this being a representative conclusion – made me feel that even Your Square Mile had a top down, paternalistic (even if in a nice way) flavour to it and, more importantly, seemed to be sticking too close to old structures and old ways of thinking [BTW - why do I dislike the word 'activist' so much?.]

Along the way I was trying to make the balance work between my day job and these community aspirations of mine, creating a social media workshop to help raise money for this project, and doing other things like being ill now and again, getting tempted to catch up on neglected DIY or long term admin and finances…

In the end I have come out with some conclusions – not least because all of this has helped me to question and re-state my original premise.

1. I can’t wait for ideal technology any more. I’ll find it when I need to and, in the first instance, I will find a way to make do with e-mail and a public, one-author-many-comments, blog.
2. I either have to spend all my allotted time trying to engage with a large and complex network of practitioners, theorists, writers and politicians – in order to ensure that I call everything by the right name and align with the right things – or stay almost completely away from it. I have chosen the latter and, again, if I’m going to be doing the right sort of thing, my natural allies and logistical supporters will find me once I’m doing something worthy of attention. So long as I write the odd post and tweet the odd tweet.
3. I don’t want to try to cast what I’m doing in some well-fitted aspect of Big Society or Your Square Mile. So I have to find my own vocabulary and model.
4. I need to do this with people I can initially be face-to-face with, and understand their own ideas and responses, before I use online to make networking and collective deliberation/sharing etc ‘more possible’.
5. I have to do this in a setting which is personal for me – has ramifications for me – not a hypothetical neighbourhood that is comfortably diffuse or arms’ length-able.
6. Even a circle of one square mile in area is too big to do that with at first.

So I’m going to start with my street – every single house – face to face and then online, so long as enough people are OK with the latter. From the outset I will pose the question to those people who buy in and *are* comfortable online, ‘how do we keep everyone who is offline, but still wants to ‘belong’, inside the circle?’. Doing something literally up my street? Close friends and former colleagues will see something either ironic, or inevitable, or both, in this fact. [It also has echoes of projects in the early days of the web, to put every house in a street on dial-up, and so on].

I really do start tomorrow – putting leaflets through the doors of the first quarter of Warren Road’s 114 houses. Leaflets long in the drafting, in an effort to maximise the principle that less is more, but only enough is enough. I’m as keen to identify those who just want nothing to do with it (at least for now) as I am to find those who want to help, and not just participate. The leaflets state the very basics of what I want to do, show people what I look like (for when I turn up at the door) and give anyone the chance to opt out of even speaking to me, from the start.

I will be recording the whole experience via this blog. But I will be respecting a great deal of the privacy of my neighbours – so don’t expect to be suddenly peering in through their lifted rooftops. But the diary will be here – what happened, how it affected me, what works, what doesn’t, how many of my skeptical instincts are confirmed, and how many of my optimist’s hopes are equally rewarded. The starting premise?

“There’s a theory that, on average, if more people in a neighbourhood actually know each other, and have better ways of communicating and cooperating, *everyone* there has a better quality of life. I want to try that out and I want to know if you, my neighbour, are interested in helping me to make that happen”.

I have some questions to ask, some practical examples up my sleeve, and an absolute openness to listen and learn from everyone that fate happens to have brought together by the having of a Warren Rd address in June 2011. Here, too, is a practical outlet for ‘50 ways to meet your neighbour‘.

One last acknowledgement I really must make. One of the biggest influences and inspirations that has lead me to this particular model at this particular time is Peter Lovenheim. I blogged about him a while ago, exchanged a couple of e-mails, and pre-ordered the paperback version of his book ‘In the Neighborhood’. OK – so America is different, his street is different, with big houses and a population of surgeons, lawyers and real estate agency owners, but two things resonated with me over and over again. The first is the personal, one to one, nature of the most valuable contacts (you can’t scale this past a certain point, but you should aim to build anything more online/remote on top of it as a foundation, if you seek to talk about ‘community) and the simple courage that it requires to approach strangers who live yards away from you. The second was that Peter kept discovering a real hunger in people for greater connectedness with their immediate neighbours, right alongside the belief that “other people” would find this intrusive or a bit eccentric. Whilst I may not (who knows?) be going to Peter’s lengths of asking to sleep over in his neighbours’ homes, my practical plan is really his, with some online amplification grafted on top. I hope he derives a sense of my gratitude from this post, and will keep in touch as things progress. Obviously there’s a tension between being able to open up in ‘personal’ ways and being able to share and communicate with a larger group – but that’s one of the things that Peter acknowledges and explores along with the recognition that it’s not just in ‘problem’ neighbourhoods that people need support, or experience extreme difficulties and personal tragedies, and who need people close by that they can trust either in such a crisis, or just to help make each others’ lives run more smoothly and with a touch more fun.

I’m not quite in real time blogging mode yet. Tomorrow I will follow up with a piece about what it was like simply to be walking up and down my street with no official excuse and just a notepad and pen in my hand. I was just counting the houses and checking the types, numbers, boundaries, but I actually felt quite exposed… I’m very excited, and I’m just a little bit scared.

I wonder if by creating organisations we have, at least in years gone by, emphasised the notion of a problem. There are old folks to be concerned about, addicts to rehabilitate, criminals to reform and generally people to be worried about. I wonder if this can even be traced back to often shared roots in a Christian notion of ‘salvation’, or restoration to a normal state.

At the same time this tendency would populate those problem categories with stereotypical people – I come back to ‘old folks’, in the language of my youth, or to ‘disabled people’. I’ve got a tickly feeling that each of those groups has been put in an annex, however benevolent in intention, and thus distinguished from ‘ordinary life’ and ‘ordinary people’. There are all sorts of echoes of this in some articulations of The Big Society, and many challenges that result.

If I had to say where I thought this came from it would be a paternalistic, top down, hierarchical society… from an original paternalism which still persists within the culture of ‘help’, because it created the infrastructure, even though many of the responses themselves are now more democratised and grass-roots. Personally, and with the luxury of not having to mobilise a response myself, I don’t think there are groups that need help – I think that there are just people who need more or less help, or even just contact and a good listener, for combinations of reasons, and at some times in their lives more than others. I wonder if we are capable of expressing our desire to help others in ways that don’t create sectors, groups and corresponding organisations and brands… or if this could even work, what the new infrastructure would be… if any? Again – this is where transformative thinking about The Big Society has to start, and not presume anything about pre-existing institutions, channels or even habits. [Maybe especially habits!]

Catching my thought about this persisting hierarchical culture, I also wondered if this was why there were many people out there who define themselves as being ‘other’ to this; outsiders, non-participants and wielders of ‘alternative’. My initial worry was that, in doing so, they just create another group and a convenient stereotype for other people to put them in, another annex… for dreadlocks and skinny dogs, or for balaclavas and bricks. Surely that old hierarchical thing is dying – from a wound it copped some time during WWI? If so, giving it a form in order to oppose it just helps it live a little longer… The System, The Establishment,… Capitalism?

Hang on!

That last one worries me. Has an oligarchy just discarded some of the old institutions and trappings, and taken up more blatant residence in financial institutions, and holding companies, private equity firms etc. Am I naive to think that there’s a natural decentralisation doing its slow good work… because of things like literacy and, now, new communications and networks? I’ve always found ‘cock-up’ much more plausible than ‘conspiracy’ if only because of entropy. If I’m mostly right in that, then maybe the less scary conclusion is that the anti-Capitalists are just succumbing to human nature – a tendency to see intention and dark forces behind otherwise random or emergent activity… a kind of hard-wired paranoia. [Though, on reflection, not unlike the tendency which, when funneled towards Jewish people, lead to The Holocaust.]

Even if anti-Capitalists are right – and the old paternalism still holds sway through a massive conscious aggregation of commercial interests, it would be too big to tackle… by definition.

People often cope these days by not trying to tackle things that we know are overwhelmingly large. Hence the popularity of notions such as Ghandi’s “Be the change you want to see”. One such overwhelmingly large phenomenon is ‘nature’ itself. We accept it as an environment – and we deal with the bits that are most immediate to us. If it were truly human nature to be paranoid, to see intention where there is none, we would, instead, all go round thinking that there is a conspiracy behind ‘nature’ that works against. And we don’t do that do we?

Yes

We do.

A long time ago we gave that paranoia a name. ‘The Gods’.

This was created using “Spell with flickr“