Earlier this week I attended a workshop in London led by the authors of a new book entitled ‘Social by Social‘, which provides practical guidance about using social web technologies for social good. The workshop brought together a number of people who work in central government, social enterprises or charitable foundations who are developing programmes to support the use of social media by local communities. There were also several practitioners present, a few academic researchers and a fellow local gov web manager. It was a very useful opportunity to make contacts, map some of the projects that are going on, discuss some shared issues and work out how to share knowledge and learning from projects in future. Hopefully the conversation will continue on the Local Communities network.

I got stuck into reading Social by Social (which was commissioned by Nesta) as soon as it became available as a free PDF download, under a Creative Commons license. The timing couldn’t be better as I’m about to start a project in a rural area of Cambridgeshire working with a local community, voluntary sector organisations and public service providers. We’ll be trying out some of the new technologies described in Social by Social with the aim to improve community relations and improve links with service providers.

The book starts with some basic principles and guidance and is written in a very approachable and encouraging way. There are loads of really useful links and before I knew it I found I had opened loads of tabs in my browser and was bookmarking web pages like crazy!

I was really pleased to find the authors advocate an iterative, user-centred design approach and techniques such as offline prototyping. But the authors do not overwhelm the reader and advise:

Don’t get too bogged down though: the most important thing is to spend time with your users and really get to know them, and keep on trying out the tools with them throughout the development process. In the early stages of the project you’ll mostly be talking to users and holding general conversations about what they need. As your tools and community develop, there’s much more you can do to evolve the technology.

Ten case studies are provided and divided into examples of ‘campaigning’, ‘communicating’ and ‘enabling’. The case studies offer pragmatic advice and tips from those involved in running the projects and demonstrate a wide variety of different approaches can be taken, depending on the context and desired outcomes of the end users.

One of the recurring pieces of advice from the case studies is to involve the end users (the community) at all stages and be prepared and flexible for the project objectives to change as the community takes ownership of the project. It may seem obvious but for some organisations with a more bureaucratic structure it can be hard to pass control to the user community.

Another useful observation from Nathalie McDermott (who worked with young travellers to develop the social network Savvy Chavvy) is:

Make sure the existing leaders in the community understand and embrace what is planned – but do not expect them necessarily to be the leaders online.

For me this is an extremely valuable piece of advice because it is not immediately obvious when starting an online community that the roles and power structures can be different from offline communities, as new protagonists take on leadership roles.

The final piece of advice I have found most useful from the case studies was to ensure a blend of online and offline activities and enough face to face contact to keep people motivated and focused. This is especially important where there might be issues of a digital divide because some of the community do not have the access, or skills, to make use of new web technologies. Some of the case studies also advocate the use of older technologies e.g. mobile phones to ensure digitally excluded groups are engaged.

Following the case studies the authors offer 38 value propositions – to reinforce the message that a particular mindset is needed when you decide to use web 2.0 tools for social and community projects. The authors do acknowledge that there are perhaps too many propositions, but what they propose is there for the readers to pick and choose from. I am hoping I can get the partners in the project I will be working on to agree a set of shared value propositions, which will steer us through the highs and lows during our project.

The rest of the book is basically a set of resources. There is a glossary of terms and key concepts. Very useful for ensuring project partners have a shared understanding of terminology and you don’t spend valuable time at the start of a project trying to define a shared vocabulary. The authors propose some emerging roles, although I feel these are likely to be very flexible depending on the circumstances and skills within the project team. There is also a lengthy section on different tools, techniques and ‘how to’s‘.

At the end of the book there is a bit of context setting, giving a perspective on “what it all means” for different audiences and key players, for example government organisations or activists.

A year ago I decided to start a personal research project looking at the perceptions of communities and local government to interacting via social media technologies. I realised I was getting a bit out of touch with what new tools were about and it can be very consuming to keep up with the pace of change on the social web. I’ve spent the best part of the last 12 months researching what tools are out there and exploring online engagement in different contexts (but mostly by local government or communities).

Having a resource like Social by Social last year would have been incredibly useful. But having it now is still a bonus and affirms much of what I’ve been trying to communicate to my colleagues, so much so that I sent a link to Social by Social to all the partners involved in the project I am about to start! I am hoping to re-mix some of the content and would encourage others to do the same.

As well as the PDF version of the book all the content is online in a commentable Drupal website and you can also order a printed version for the very reasonable sum of £7.99 plus postage, if you prefer old fashioned technologies.

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