The what, why, where and how of community empowerment
I’m speaking tomorrow at the International eParticipation Symposium in London about citizen empowerment. Joining Diane Downey from Sunderland City Council, Richard Wilson from Involve and Steve Dale of Semantix in a session entitled: Citizen Empowerment: Where do we begin?
Our take on this at FreshNetworks is that you can rush too often to ‘empower’ citizens in a way that neither helps them nor makes the most of the contributions they can make. One learning from the private sector is that you can focus customer interests and efforts to help solve either specific problems (such as is the case with Innocentive) or to help with ongoing insight and innovation into a brand or product. This can be done by market research but is best done through ongoing engagement and conversations with your consumers to build loyalty, gain insight on their terms and allow space and time for innovation. By doing this you can also create real advocacy for your brand.
Tomorrow I’m going to be presenting how some of these learnings and experience have informed our approach to citizen participation: the what, why, where and how of community empowerment. The basic overview of this is below – if you want to chat more about this let me know.
WHAT?
Open up a debate…
WHY?
…on an issue that people care about…
WHERE?
…on a platform that makes it easy for them to contribute when and how they want to…
HOW?
…and let them see the benefits of what they have contributed.
Taking this as a framework you can begin to think about how to empower citizens and how to make sure their contributions are useful to organisations and government. Turning this into a set of activities and processes is a more complex job, but something that can see real benefits. Empowerment lets us get insight into citzens and lets them insight into us. Through effective empowerment we can coproduce or cocreate real innovations in services. And finally empowered citizens become local advocates and can support and further what government is trying to do. Now that’s a situation we’d all like to get to!
I’ll blog more about the event after tomorrow.
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Elliot:
Hi Matt,
Thanks for a great blog. Thought you might be interested to hear some comments on community empowermnet from Dr. Graham Gardner made at an ‘Inspire East’ conference on the issue last week. He has a clear message to government that it should think of community empowerment as a ‘means’ not an ‘end. Have a look at the short clip at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWBTI0OpgPw
Feel free to distribute. Or to post a discussion on this.
You can also see more on the conference at http://www.expoclip.co.uk/inspireeast/
Thanks
Elliot
3 March 2008, 12:08 pm