Big Society(2): What’s Blue and Yellow and Red all over?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital
If you still don’t know who you are going to vote for, you could do worse than read the manifestos of the three main political parties. I recently read the three tomes for the first time in my life and was impressed by their scope and level of detail.
With respect to yesterday’s blog on ‘The Big Society’, all three parties have policies relating to revitalising the civic sphere, but they differ in emphasis.
The Conservative Manifesto, subtitled: ‘An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain’, has a large section called ‘Change Society’ and relevant policy proposals include public service reform (changing the ‘civil service’ to a ‘civic service’- encouraging civic servants to walk the talk on social action; introducing a ‘big society day’- I guess it’s like a big picnic but more serious…; creating a National Citizen Service so that 16 year olds get inculcated into the spirit of volunteering and service. There is also the intent to use sport in general and the Olympics in particular to strengthen social bonds. The Conservatives also promise to redirect National Lottery funds back to their original purpose of community development.
At a more macro level, they see the family as the core unit of society, and they seek to support them accordingly, through tax credits and an extension of flexible working, as well as an interesting but underdeveloped promise to protect ‘childhood’, rather than just ‘children’.
The Labour Party seem to have decided to link communities to creativity, reflected in the section of their manifesto called: ‘Creative Britain: Active and Flourishing Communities’. Community activism is grounded in a commitment to arts, sports and culture….and the volunteering such activities engender. They also promise to protect post offices and pubs as community ‘hubs’. Likewise they promise £235 million for ‘play areas’ like adventure playgrounds. Labour hope to encourage a vibrant voluntary sector and to develop a National Youth Community Service in which youngsters complete at least 50 hours of community service before 19.
I am surprised I haven’t heard more of their emphasis on ‘The New Mutualism‘ i.e. people buying shares in local pubs, football clubs etc so that they become stakeholders in key aspects of community life. This strikes me as a conceptual counterweight to ‘The Big Society’, but the first time I came across the idea was the manifesto, so either I have been looking in the wrong places, or Labour decided they didn’t need/want to push the idea.
The Liberal Democrat Manifesto makes no big thematic claim on the big society other than to reiterate their longstanding commitment to localism, and to emphasise, as all parties do, that strong communities are important. They do have a section on communities that focuses on crime, housing and immigration, and they promise to put more police on the beat, make the immigration system more transparent, rail fares cheaper, homes affordable, keep post offices open, protect and restore natural environment, and scrap council tax and make it on the ability to pay. They also propose a community owned energy scheme, but I couldn’t trace the details.
So with respect to building the big society, the parties are all the same… except for the ways that they are different. The Conservatives are explicit about ‘using the state to remake society’, Labour’s manifesto suggests that communities flourish most tangibly through sports and art, and the Liberal Democrats want communities to be ’strong’ and more politically active, with a host of policy proposals to make them so.
Two main reflections come to mind:
1) Obliquity. If all parties agree that we need stronger communities, a more vibrant civic sphere, or even a ‘big society’, does it follow that we should seek these things out? John Kay argues quite forcefully that we rarely achieve social and personal goals by seeking them out directly because the world is just too complicated. Maybe the Big Society is something that has to emerge indirectly from a succession of small gains rather than something that can be created on a national level.
2) Associational Life: In this respect, while all of the parties mention sport, none of them seem to place much emphasis on other forms of informal social life, mother and toddler groups, book clubs, chess clubs, writing groups etc. All parties seem to support the strengthening of social bonds that arise through these less glamorous forms of associational life, but there seem to be few policies in place to support them. In this respect, such aims may be informed by research at ‘My Tribe’, a site run by Henry Hemming which is a Nationwide survey of Clubs, associations, societies and informal groups in Britain. This survey will inform a book to be published in 2011, when we may or may not explicitly be trying to build a big society.
Big Society(1): Is Society ‘broken’ because it’s not ‘big’ enough?
Filed under: Cohesion, Connected Communities, Social Capital
I am burdened by the abiding image of David Cameron electioneering in McDonalds and finding himself accidentally asking for ”a big society with fries please”. But seriously folks, if you read the transcript of David Cameron’s major speech on the Big Society, it seems to be quite a substantial idea, not just a sound byte, so it is worthy of close attention, especially for a project that is about strengthening connections at a local level, and (re)building the social capital that Cameron seems to think we currently lack.
What follows focuses on making sense of the idea, the next blog will examine the idea from the perspective of the three main manifestos, and the following entry will attempt to understand how our project might contribute to making society ‘big’.
The idea, based on politically filtered facts, seems to break down as follows:
State intervention helped to advance the cause of social justice in Britain until the late sixties, but less so thereafter. The biggest expansion in state involvement has taken place since 1997, but inequality has grown, the incomes of the bottom 10% fell between 2002-2008, youth unemployment has increased and social mobility has stalled. The state failed to tackle poverty in recent years because those in poverty lacked the education to take advantage of the opportunities of globalisation, and because the state was relatively blind to the social impact of economic reforms, e.g. when benefit structures serve to disincentivise work. The role of the state therefore needs to shift from one that primarily serves to create economic dependence to one that increases personal and social responsibility. As Cameron puts it, “We need to use the state to remake society.” He proposes to do so by increasing educational opportunity for all and, at by focusing on social enterprise, community activists, and, here’s the rub, everybody else. The fact that everybody needs to become involved in some or all of volunteering, associational life, local politics and service provision is why the vision is a ‘big’ one.
That is the idea insofar as one paragraph can capture it. The space Cameron wants to make bigger lies between the state and the citizen, which he seems to think is currently too small, and which is actually undermined, he believes, by the existing relationship between state and citizen. He seems to want to increase social, civic and political DIY, and the driving motivation seems to be that he wants people to feel and to be more responsible for their lives. As I have suggested before, in order to be ‘responsible’, you have to be able to respond, so certain key questions arise. We will return to the nuts and bolts of the idea, but for now here are some key generic issues/questions of a more philosophical nature.
As Mathew Taylor has already indicated, walking the talk of this idea is not straightforward, and thus far the Conservatives themselves don’t seem to have managed it. There are various sources of inertia that make it difficult to change our behaviour, even when we want to.
For instance, building trust at a social or civic level is not easy because as David Halpern has suggested, based on an international study of values, the British as a whole are “unusually afraid of strangers”. He also suggested that, relative to other European countries, we don’t value social solidarity very highly, and tend to be relatively authoritarian by nature.
How do you pay for it? This critical question was Madeleine Bunting’s key concern in The Guardian, and is obviously very pertinent. If the State is going to ‘remake’ society it has to pay for this make-over, and has to do so in a way that keeps itself at arms length; both difficult tasks.
The idea relies on a ‘big as significant’ metaphor, as outlined inMetaphors we live by. Making ‘big’ society’s root metaphor seems curious given that Cameron also suggests that we have a ‘broken society’. At the risk of manufacturing a neologism, he seems to be equating size with effectiveness(broken because not big enough), but one of the reasons for the perceived decline in social solidarity is the challenge of social scale, now that most people live in cities after all society often feels every bit as big as it is broken. I am not sure whether this is merely a semantic point, but it is also a fact that insofar as social solidarity depends on size, less is more.
Finally, a growth in the social and civic sphere also creates new forms of social pressure. For instance, Mathew Parris once spoke of this concern about living in a society of ‘twitching curtains’, and more generally any growth in society creates threats to individual autonomy.
So what do you think? Does the idea of the big society make sense? Is it desirable? Achievable? Does it fill you with optimism or horror? Look forward to hearing from you.
Is Rigorous Advocacy an Oxymoron?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
I gave a talk on the social and educational value of chess in Dallas, Texas recently. The person driving me to the event, John Jacobs, read on the blurb that I worked at the RSA, “a think tank in London”, and asked, in a melodious southern drawl: “I see that you work in a think tank. So what do you think about?”
I gave the quick elevator pitch for our project(social networks are a tool than can be visualised and used to assist in community regeneration), but the real answer is that we don’t just think, but also research and advocate. In fact the core tension in any think tank is between the rigour of your research and the relevance of your findings. You are obliged to pay allegiance to Truth, Validity, Reliability etc, but while you want the blessings of such celestial Gods, the success of your projects are typically judged by their impact on the terrestial Gods of Media, Funders and Whitehall. (And at the RSA we also want the participants in the research, the people ‘on the ground’ to endorse what we do).
This context explains the recent musings of our great leader, who accurately reflected the ambience of a meeting yesterday in which the Connected Communities Team showed Mathew a few emerging findings, subject to some important qualifications, and he told us which of the ‘findings’ had traction, and which ones needed more work.
When you spend weeks collecting data and trying to make sense of it(especially social network analysis data), you realise that your ‘findings’ are actually constructed on a host of more or less problematic assumptions that are part of the choice architecture of any research project . But when you want to make a splash, and tell the world that you have a new model of social change, there is an understandable tendency to gloss over such details and focus on the strength of the core message, even if the strong core message is based on tentative foundations.
You only realise how messy social research is when you start trying to do some, and although you may want ‘evidence’, what you tend to get is concepts that are contested, samples that are more indicative than representative, methods that may or may not be replicable, correlations that may or may not be causal, and ‘findings’ that were created by looking in a particular way for a particular purpose. As any honest researcher will tell you, respecting such tensions is crucial if the research is going to be informative, or provide the basis for action.
Such rigour is not easy becuase most research is timebound and opportunistic. It is a huge challenge to feel confident that you have tapped into some truth about human nature or the structure of society. For instance, at a recent RSA event, Christakis mentioned that it took 25 years to collect the Farmingham public health data that provided the basis for our interest in social networks, and 5 years and 5 millions dollars to analyse it.
So here is the nub of working at a place like this. If you are passionate about an idea, you can be a vigorous advocate for it, but as part of a project research team, you are asked to be a rigorous advocate. You are asked to push an idea, and, often simultaneously, asked to support it with evidence, even when it is in the nature of evidence to be equivocal and open to interpretation.
The challenge is that robust advocacy is unequivocal and passionate, while reliable research is equivocal and cautious. So is rigorous advocacy an oxymoron? Or are there ways to feel at ease with the conflicting demands of rigour and relevance?
How many friends does one cyborg need?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, Social Networks
Yesterday’s RSA Thursday featured Robin Dunbar, Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford, but best known for having his own number (a sure sign of success), 150, which he argues is the upper limit on the number of people you can maintain stable relationships with.
The idea is powerful, but it’s not new. I first came across it more than a decade ago when it was already called Dunbar’s number (Dunbar’s first major paper on the idea was in 1992), but it was then a much simpler anthropological notion about optimal group sizes, i.e. the upper size that communities and organisations should maintain in order to retain the informal efficiency of mutual recognition, trust and stability, rather than creating cumbersome rules and regulations that we seem to need in society at large.
In this respect, Dunbar’s new book, How many friends does one person need? can be thought of as Dunbar 2.0, in which the idea has been revitalised as a corrective to the rampant polyphilia on facebook and other social networking sites. Dunbar 2.0 says loud and clear that you can have thousands of facebook ‘friends’ if you want, but there are constraints on how many of them can meaningfully be called friends.
There can be no uncontested notion of what ‘friend’ means, but Dunbar argues that humans consistently show a pattern of layering their social contacts, with a core of close friends around 5, 15 considered ‘good friends’, 50 as ‘friends’ and up to 150 as acquaintances. Jacob Morgan’s blog gives a powerful graphic for this idea and the discussion on socialmediatoday.com is well worth reading.
Dunbar’s work is highly complex and interdisciplinary, and his core claim is that there are two constraints on stable relationships. The first is cognitive, the neural density and processing power needed to retain detailed information on people, or ‘keep track’ of them as Dunbar put it yesterday. The second is temporal, the time we need to invest so that people to create mutual interest and regard, and so that such relationships don’t decay, i.e so that friends don’t become strangers all over again.
There are many things to say about this fascinating idea, but I want to raise one in particular. It might be true that human beings are limited by Dunbar’s number, but much of Dunbar’s work seems to be based on extrapolations on primate behaviour. He thinks in evolutionary terms that are framed principally by biology and anthropology. But I wonder whether he should pay more attention to technological change as part of cultural evolution, for 21st century human beings in the developed world are now suspended somewhere between primates and robots. Indeed, many, most notably Andy Clark, have argued that human beings should be thought of as cyborgs.
“We cannot see ourselves aright until we see ourselves as nature’s very own cyborgs: cognitive hybrids who repeatedly occupy regions of design space radically different from those of our biological forbears. The hard task, of course, is now to transform all this from (mere) impressionistic sketch into a balanced scientific account of the extended mind.”
So that would be my challenge for developing a Dunbar 3.0. Our minds and our technologies are increasingly part of continuim, with much of our memory and functionality stored in digital form. A person may only need a certain number of friends, or be capable of maintaining 150, but what of person-plus? What of the fact that we now live and learn and think with machines? What of the Cyborgs that we are becoming? We are so now thoroughly dependent on digital tools, and our sense of self interwoven with them, that it is far from unimaginable that future technologies will overcome the temporal and cognitive constraints intimated by Dunbar’s existing work.
Perhaps we are already doing so, because it is easier to keep track of people, and it is easier to invest time in relationships than it has ever been.
However, one of the many big suggestive points made yesterday was that we may need to physically touch people to remain close to them. The importance of touch for bonding is not fully researched yet, but it might be crucial- those handshakes, hugs and cheek-kisses may matter more than you know… and as Dunbar noted, it is hard to imagine ‘virtual touch’…but you never know…
Think Tank Clash
Last night’s Think Tank Clash at the South Bank Centre, organised by New Deal of The Mind was hopefully the first of many such events. Around 300 people were hosted by comedian Rory Bremner and the atmosphere was as playful as it was political, with a pint or two enjoyed by many of the audience, and most of the participants. Reviews of the Think Tank Clash format so far have been good, though I am sure if the event is repeated it has scope to be even better.
There were 8 think tanks involved: Progress, ResPublica, Fabian Society, Reform, Policy Exchange, IPPR, Demos, and of course, The RSA. You might not have thought of the RSA as a ‘think tank’ before, and indeed the organisation as a whole, with our fellowship, House, and Events programme, does not match that description very tightly. One way to square this circle is to think of the RSA Projects team as a think tank within the RSA, albeit one that places less emphasis on producing pamphlets and informing policy, and more on practical impact in the real world.
Each think tank had two representatives, the head honcho and their ‘witness’. I was Mathew Tayor’s witness, and I think the role of the witnesses more generally was to signal that the organisations involved are more than just their most public face and voice, an association perpetuated by the media reflex to seek comment from prominent and familiar faces.
We were pitched against Demos, represented by their Director Richard Reeves, and Stephen Scott, who looked a little bit like Kramer from Seinfeld. There was no Oxford Union style ‘motion’ to debate, but we were charged with convincing the audience that in the realm of big ideas, our work on social networks, particularly their role in community regeneration, was more important/pertinent/illuminating than Demos’s work on Character .
Needless to say, the debate involves a bit of a false binary, and is more about means than ends, because it makes little sense to be against character or networks. Demos argue that good societies need good people, which is a powerful point, and their claim that character is largely shaped by good parenting is carefully argued and empirically grounded. More specutively, they suggest that government should take a more proactive role in encouraging good parenting.
Our response is that networks are character forming, and that who your parents are and how they are is largely based on the nature of their social network. Moreover, character may be an important personal quality, but social networks can be thought of as a public good- a shared resource that nobody owns but that everybody can potentially benefit from. In short, our idea is more progressive.
The vote was close, but we won for two main reasons: 1) I emphasised that our research was grounded in fieldwork on the ground, and that we were literally ‘knocking on doors’ to make sense of the power of social networks in deprived communities, and 2) Mathew Taylor looked like “the sexy bad guy in a James Bond movie”
It’s NOT about ‘jobs’, stupid.
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
The RSA event advertised in our last post, Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty? was a rallying cry for Whitehall to get over their fixation with creating ‘jobs’ and start focussing on using technology to develop existing economic activity.
As Jerry Fishenden(Centre for Technology Policy Research) put it: “The state’s idea of what a ‘job’ is is constraining productivity” and Wingham Rowan(Silvers of Time Working) added that “local authorities are beaten up by Whitehall on job creation” (thereby constraining attempts to create more flexible labour markets).
The problem is not jobs as such, but untraded resources, especially time. The focus should be on how we better harness and develop existing economic activity and help people earn money, rather than how to create ‘jobs’.
So how can we help people earn money? Who are ‘they’, and what is stopping them? It seems they tend to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum, functioning in what Wingham Rowan called unfocussed markets, where the conditions for the demand and supply of labour are fuzzy and changeable, and buyers and sellers can’t find each other(the exact opposite of the more efficient targetted markets- the kind that traders operate in).
Think baby sitters, people wanting to borrow a bike, others wanting to borrow a tenner to pay back the next day etc. There is lots of such ad hoc economic activity.., things hired, time offered, money lent, and many can do work of this nature who can’t fit in to a job structure.
The solution lies in new technology that we know to work well calledNEMs: National E Markets. Think Ebay writ large and better regulated. Slivers of Time working is an exmplar in this field, but merely one example of a much wider and still under-utilised phenomenon.
I liked the example given by Wingham Rowan:
If you suddenly need a baby sitter, you might be horrified of looking for one online, but you don’t need to merely post an add on a random website. Instead you have access to a focussed market where you can see existing baber sitters, be certain that they have the relevant CRB and ISA checks completed, have a certain amount of experience and references etc. You can aslo narrow your search to find baby sitters who have worked in your area, or with people you know. The technology can do all this hard work for you, and tell you exactly how much it will cost. You get meaningful data immediately- the kind you need to take a quick decision, just like traders do all the time… so, strange though it may seem, NEMs become a very safe way to get a baby sitter. And of course, from the baby sitter’s perspective, they are not locked in, not forever doomed and blessed to have the ‘job’ of being a babysitter, but being one as and when it suits.
How can such a system we brought into being? The most likely scenario would be that, as with the National Lottery, the private sector would fund these markets if Government could put the conditions in place.
The technology is not the problem, the problem is political will and bureaucratic inertia. The British welfare system has a binary view of being in work or out of it. If you can only earn £25 a week before your benefits are cut, you are implicitly encouraging people to work in the informal economy, or to put it more sharply, the black market. (And in this respect, Mathew Taylor commented that while working in goverment he noticed the strange reluctance of politicians and civil servants to even talk about the informal economy; “nobody wanted to go there”.)
The Government needs to work much more with the natural behaviour of people. Selling time and possessions, rather than products as such, is very difficult to regulate, tax etc, but it can and should be done.
Can Online Markets Tackle Poverty?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Digital Inclusion, inequality
Bill Gates has scattered quite a few nuggets of remunerative star dust over the years, but one quotation should be more widely known:
“The first rule of any technology used… is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Wonferful!
But is it true?
Discerning readers may have guessed that the dot dot dot above replaced ‘in business’, but Gates’s point might apply to the labour market. How efficient are the mechanisms that connect labour supply to labour demand? If there are generally inefficient, will using technology merely compound matters, or are we missing important tricks that might radically increase Britain’s porductivity?
These thoughts amount to a quick cyber shout to anybody watching about tomorrow’s RSA Thursday Lunchtime event:
How can we use online markets more effectively to ensure we create value and opportunity for the low-paid and unemployed?
The Speakers are Wingham Rowan, project director at Slivers of Time Working; Jerry Fishenden, founder of the Centre for Technology Policy Research and there will be a “contribution” (presumably verbal) by Rt Hon James Purnell MP. The event will be chaired by Mathew Taylor.
The blurb from the RSA events team is below:
E-marketplaces have developed exponentially in the last 15 years, and financial institutions now turbo-trade billions worth of assets every day. But the benefits of these new marketplaces are primarily concentrated at the top levels of the economy, and have neglected the resources that people at the bottom of the economic pyramid could sell. A new generation of marketplace could utilise the time, potential and skills of the less well-off or unemployed – simultaneously creating value for the individuals concerned, and flooding the market with hitherto untapped products and services.
Creating ‘modern markets for all’ should now be a priority, but the private sector can’t work alone to create the marketplaces needed. Is it time for policymakers to make modern, inclusive marketplaces a priority across multiple sectors at the bottom of the economy?
Inequality of Power
How much power do you have?
If you are struggling to answer that question, defining power and creating a suitable metric would be a good place to start. Neither task is easy, but Demos recently attempted both, resulting in: The Power Gap: An Index of Everyday Inequality in Britain, written by Daniel Leighton.
According to Demos, what makes a person powerful is a combination of three factors: the ability to shape one’s own life, to be resilient in the face of shocks and the arbitrary power of others, and the power to shape the social world. These three factors are measured in terms of eight power indicators: Education, occupational status, income, employment, freedom from crime, health, voter turnout, marginality of parliamentary seat.
The theoretical framing of power seems quite sophisticated, but the research, as far as I understand it, amounted to a large scale quantitative data survey, with several proxies used for the relevant measures. For instance, an individual’s measure of ‘personal power’ is a mixture of their level of academic qualifcations as a proxy for their critical thinking and choice of occupation, their income is a proxy for control over personal decisions, and their seniority as a proxy for control in the workplace.
Demos are of course aware that such measures are approximations, and if your ambition is to map levels of something as intangible as ‘personal control’ over the whole country, it is hard to see how you could do much better. For several thousand individuals the data and the proxies will not adequately capture their power level, subjectively or objectively(whatever that means in this context) but in aggregate the data does seem meaningful and powerful. The map may not be the territory, but it’s a pretty impressive map nonetheless.
I found it a fascinating report to read, not least becasue The Connected Communities Project is based on a less formalised understanding of the inequality of ‘power’, and driven by attempts to foster empowerment through building social capital in deprived communities. When he was recently speaking at the RSA, John Kamphner said he didn’t like the word ‘empowerment’ because it sounded too ‘NGOish’, but it is not easy to find a suitable replacement. The question of giving individuals and communities more control over their lives and their environments is very much the heart of the connected communities project, and the Demos report, and I think ‘empowerment’ captures that idea quite well, NGOish or not. (Demos also use ‘resilience’ as a key component of power i.e. the ability to withstand shocks and arbitrary changes. Their proxies for resilience are health, crime and unemployment, while our main claim is that resilience is a function of the range and density of social networks).
Inequality comes in many guises, but the Demos report contends that the inequality that impacts on life quality most tangibly is the inequality of power. At first blush, inequality of power sounds like a tautology, because we are used to thinking of power in hierarchical or ‘power over’ terms, whereby power is a zero sum game, traded between boss and worker, state and citizen etc. But the power at stake in this report is principally the power to shape one’s own life i.e “The power of the effective agent to make things happen.”, as they put it in the report, or as Bertrand Russell put it even more succinctly, “The production of intended effects”.
The report is heavily informed by Amartya Sen’s work on Capabilities, who refers to the central importance of people having “The opportunity to lead lives they have reason to value”.
I refer you to the report for more detailed considerations about the relative power of different areas in the uk, but what I didn’t find there, and what I would like to have known, is how a map of the inequality of power differs from a map on the inequality of income; such a comparison would have been illuminating.
In terms of closing gap between the powerful and powerless, I think we need a deeper understanding of surplus powerlessness, an idea of Michael Lerner’s that was highlighted in the report: “Surplus powerlessness refers to the fact that human beings contribute to their existing powerlessness to the extent that their emotional, intellectual and spiritual makeup prevents them from actualising possibilities that do exist.” Lehrer is clear that such surplus powerlessness is a direct cause of real powerlessness i.e. that the inequality of power in socio-economic terms creates a vicious circle and becomes compounded by our psycho-social makeup. On this analysis, the inequality of power literally goes from bad to worse.
On a more optimistic note, at the RSA we believe that becoming empowered is about recognising that our autonomy increases as we recognise our interdependence. While we encourage policy makers to address the inequality of power at whatever levels policy can have impact (education, employment, health, law and order etc) we can begin to address surplus powerlessness by a deeper appreciation of our connectivity, and by accessing sources of power through available networks. Hannah Arendt puts the point more powerfully:
“Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together. When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power’, we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain group of people to act in their name.”
Reed’s Law
Filed under: Connected Communities, Social Capital, Social Networks
The main reason social research is so difficult is that human interaction does not lend itself to law-like regularities. However, after stumbling across ‘Reed’s Law’ (more on that in a sec) in an article about social capital, I was moved to examine wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws i.e laws named after people. These laws range from the serious, like Amara’s law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”, to the troubling, like Wirth’s law: “Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster”, to the wry, like Hofstatder’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law”.
In the context of social capital, a core concept of the connected communities project, Reed’s law is particularly pertinent. Like many of the eponymous laws, Reed’s law initially sounds like it came from ”The Department of the Bleeding Obvious’, becuase it simply states that networks grow exponentially i.e. the more people there are in a network, the more scope there is for sub groups that connect with other networks. Reed’s analysis amounts to saying more than that network growth is geometric(2,4,8,16,32 etc) rather than arithmetic(1,2,3,4,5 etc), because the key elements of a network are groups rather than individuals, and connecting with one group invariably means connecting with more than one group, if only because each individual member of a group typically belongs to other groups too.
The idea is a bit more subtle, but basically contends that connectivity feeds off itself, a point that becomes clearer by considering the morphology of networks. Broadcast networks are the most basic, amounting to a ‘one to many’ network. In this sense my network is everybody I know, and spreading the word across my network merely means broadcasting information rather than an exchange of information. Transaction networks, or one-to-one networks, are more complex, featuring an exchange of information between two people. However, the most powerful form of network is the many-to many network, also known as group forming networks or GFNs. These networks are at the heart of Reed’s law, because it is the connection to another group that significantly increases your resources. This kind of bridging or linking capital is the kind of connectivity we most need.
Reed expresses his own law in the following technical language: “Let’s say you have a GFN with n members. If you add up all the potential two-person groups, three-person groups, and so on that those members could form, the number of possible groups equals 2n. So the value of a GFN increases exponentially, in proportion to 2n. I call that Reed’s Law. And its implications are profound.”
Profond indeed, because it means that every time you aad a person to your network, you are really adding several people from several different ‘packs’. A fuller exposition can be read in a Harvard Business Review article aptly called ‘The Law of the Pack’.
I am not totally sure what Reed’s law means for community regeneration, but I think it suggests that, at least in network terms, the more people you know, the more access you have to potentially valuable sub-groups, and that the really valuable people to know are those who have the most connections to several networks. Such assumptions are already built in to our empirical work, which is designed to guage levels of connectivity in areas like New Cross Gate, without making any judgment on how valuable particular networks are. Our contention is that GNFs, group forming networks, are one of the most important antidotes to the pending public sector squeeze because we all need to become more adept at mobilising existing resources, rather than buying new ones, or waiting for the government to bail us out. Following from Reed, our claim is that the value of such resources has until recently been underestimated.
As I think I have said before, and as Reed’s law seems to confirm, it is not what you know nor who you know, but who they know that matters.
Global Consciousness?
Filed under: Connected Communities, Think Global Act Local
With the world’s attention beginning to focus on the Climate Change talks in Copenhagen, I felt this might be a good moment to ask what sense, if any, it makes to think of the ‘world community’ as a community, and asking this question with the aid of the ‘Global Consciousness Project’ seemed to be the least boring approach.
If you toss a coin a hundred times and find that you are getting heads every time, you would probably suspect that the coin was weighted in some way, or perhaps had heads on both sides. No wonder, because when something that is supposed to be random suddenly begins to show signs of order, we are inclined to look for an explanation.
So imagine if you had a machine that could randomly generate numbers every second of the day, and then you noticed that periodically these numbers became significantly less random, and that such moments corresponded with major world events. This curious correlation is precisely what a team of statisticians seem to have been discovering for several years, and they believe, with due scientific caution, that the ‘ordering’ of the random numbers may be related, in a statistically significant way, to those moments where a certain number of people pay attention to the same thing at the same time, for instance September 11 2001, and, wait for it, Lady Diana’s funeral.
The Project is led by researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA, but involves the collaboration of scientists around the globe, all of whom are engaged in forms of ‘data mining’. While by no means core to our work at the RSA, I feel this project is a useful one to know about whenever you hear somebody talk about ‘the global community’.
Many of the world’s spiritual traditions seem to converge on the idea that we are fundamentally one rather than many, that our differences mask some sort of deeper unity. Gens Una Sumus is the Latin expression. We are one people. But are we? Does it make it any sense?
If there is such unity at what philosophers call an ontological level, and not merely in a figurative way, then that level will almost certainly be consciousness, if only because there appears to be no concensus emerging on what is known as ‘the hard problem’ of consciousness, i.e. we don’t really know what it is, and so the claim that consciousness is something we all share or inhere in might be more literally true than the idea that we all ‘breathe the same air’ as JFK once put it.
While the Global Consciousness Project, conducted by a group of scientists around the globe, continues to collect and analyse data, many sceptics have disputed the statistical methods and conclusions, but more fundamentally people have critiqued the study for lacking a clear theoretical basis. For instance Robert Matthews suggested “The only conclusion to emerge from the Global Consciousness Project so far is that data without a theory is as meaningless as words without a narrative.” Others have said that the stock market is a better guage of the state of global consciousness.
But personally I find the idea that we share our consciousness quite compelling, and I hope the Global Consciousness Project can find a way to continue to develop their idea and methods, so that, at whatever level of community we care about, when people say ‘we are in this together’, they mean it in a fundamental way.
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