Tickbox Innovation

Outside 'Tickbox Innovation' - Delivering to Standards in a Bigger Society

Realisation of a 'Bigger Society'

– Exploration of practicalities of delivering a Bigger Society

This document offers innovative perspectives as to appropriate interventions in the

current social narrative that may deliver a 'Bigger Society'.

A set of stories (of potential users and thus citizens of the current model of Society

and the one proposed) and use cases (for delivery agents – existing or emerging

institutions and organisation - of the proposed model) are outlined that acknowledge

and respect the resistance to risking systemic change but allow thinking about

solutions outside the confines of a tickbox method of thinking authorised by a cult of

professionalism.

The State of the CommunityTo define community is to give it limiting parameters. It implies that 'Community' is a

singular state.

The adage goes “The only constant is Change”. Equally it is safe to say that the

other constant is the resistance to change.

This document is an exploration of the inhibiting and facilitating factors towards a

particular state of Society. The need for the exploration is based upon recognition, to

be discussed, that both sets of factors have changed significantly.

Change has brought about a shift in the perception of the roles, responsibilities and

parameters of citizenship, communities, those who Govern them and the overarching

narrative of Society.

Proposals made by Central Authority that Society needs to change can affect

individuals that belong to it as the implication is that the behaviour they undertake is

either desirable or undesirable.

The models of Citizenship represented as desirable are a direct challenge to the

lifestyle and culture of many. The proposals suggest a shift in standards of behaviour

of individuals is required.

The standards of the individuals are linked to the standards of society.

Organisationally standards of cultural behaviour may be articulated in a policy,

manifesto or some such other centrally dictated document.

The social norms of the United Kingdom are potentially represented through the

standards of social participation articulated within the vision put forward by the

current Government. The State of Civil Society that is being authored by Central

Government is not the narrative of the current culture within communities or

recognition of the current behaviour of individuals. The state that is proposed then is

implicitly one that requires a change.

The proposed state is a 'Big Society' proposed by the Coalition Government (tk –

2010); the properties of which will be referred to within discussion of moving to a

'Bigger Society'. During this discussion certain impacts for communities will be

outlined.

Within this paper the word 'Community' refers to a collection of individuals, that share

common resource, or explicit or implicit intent.

The common resource can be organic landscapes, a built environment (a

geography), an ethnicity or a mutual oversight body and authority. The mutual intent

may be articulated in a document or during an event, or have been observed and

recognised by an outsider.

The challenge in defining 'Community' is that it requires the acknowledgement or

recognition of relationships between individual persons or resources. Relationships

are defined subjectively and thus the parameters of 'Community' are in flux.

It is not within the scope of this paper to define 'Community' but as the term is

necessary to undertake an investigation of realising the impact of Big Society then

the above definition felt necessary.

This description also acknowledges the underlying esoteric nature of political

discussion, where terms become nebulous at best, and multidimensional due to the

subjective nature of the terminology.

When speaking about 'Society' and seeking to understand what is meant and

required to make it bigger, as the proposal recommends, it is important to have

clarity.

The aim of this paper is to afford improved clarity for informed decision making about

the existing drivers of, initiatives for, and to anticipate changes and that which will

impeed progress towards a Bigger Society.

The insights are targeted at and likely to be found useful for official and unofficial

oversight bodies, in the form of institutions and governing bodies; and individual

citizens within communities.

Taking Community Outside the Tickbox

This author proposes that improved clarity as to stakeholders sentiment, a profile

constituting the view 360 degrees around a proposed or actual intervention within a

community by it's citizens is the first step towards delivering projects or services in

Society.

Clearer channels of communication open organic networks of interaction between

individual citizens. This enables the aggregation of ideas for service design or

consultation around the re-imagining of systems and processes.

Clarity within the community communication's infrastructure provides an opportunity

for the co-production which allows for better targeting and allocation of resources.

Communication practice is changing so rapidly that Communities will have changed

their mix of information exchange forums, information and knowledge transfer, media

and social media channels during the course of writing this paper.

Those very familiar with the need to constantly recalibrate communication channels

are Marketers seeking insight into the appropriate marketing mix.

The first phase of calibrating communication to reach individuals is challenge

enough. Seeking to crystallise and articulate relevant projects and services against

changing needs to meet changing standards within the changing parameters of

Community and the borders of recognisable core elements of Society is even more

challenging.

Capacity needs

To facilitate participation of individuals and have the services for the public respond

to changes in need, a system requires agility. The constituent elements, both human

stakeholders and components of the expert system must be able to access relevant

information.

To retain engagement the facilitating system for service delivery must go through the

process of seeking informed consent. For informed consent it must be able to

distribute or publish information to relevant parties in a timely fashion and have

mechanisms for inclusion of responses irrespective of barriers to communication.

A system for the delivery of services for the public must provide an agile response to

changing needs and retain constant awareness of the situation around it.

The intelligence to manage the volume of all sensory inputs for a single individual for

a single day that could manifest in potential needs is beyond the capacity of current

information communication technology (ICT). An individual does not consciously

track all such inputs and even when it does it can lose track and respond

inadequately.

Delivery of a 'Big Society', one that has empowered communities and thus

individuals, must enable with some facilitating system. The current model for delivery

of publicly funded Public services is failing to respond to needs. Central Government

lacks the capacity, resources and funding to provide the required volume of sensors,

the sensitivity and empathy of sensors and the contextual insight to calibrate the

sensors.

To deliver the standard of services for the public Central Government must seek to

empower outside of it's current delivery model to recognise and exploit assets and

forms of capital that would not be acknowledged by a traditional public resource

audit.

Who has done this before?

An approach from grassroots activity is 'Asset Based Community Development'

(ABCD) approach. ABCD makes a suggestion about the beginning of a development

effort or any intervention to change the current state of a community, and by matter

of a community's inclusion in the form, a change in the state of Society. The

suggestion for the community is that assets must first be surfaced and mapped.

This ensures the resourcing of a project does not seek external resource when it can

be found within the intervening project's means and extended influence.

The approach was developed for use in low resource states. The Coalition

Government finds itself seeking to delivery 'Big Society' during a period of 'fiscal

constraint', thus Governing a lower level of traditionally recognised resources.

Delivering services for the public within a community context to the standard that

individual citizens expect will require resources. Public funds are not sufficient to

author services with the immediacy or to the standard that would avoid an increase

in negative sentiment. Other impacts may be further citizen disengagement and

continued movement away from acknowledging civic duty and social responsibility.

The Coalition Government must fulfil the needs of the Public whilst in their current

lower resource state. Should they seek to follow an ABCD approach to meet the

proposals of a Big Society they must surface, map and exploit resources which have

not traditionally been mined by Central Governments.

This calls for innovative approaches towards service delivery by Central

Government. For that to occur it must engage with ideas outside of it's traditional

pool of thought. Delivering Big Society demands 'thinking outside the box'. That

requires communication between state and individuals. There is a conversation to be

had.

The aim of this paper is to;

highlight the change that is occurring that may facilitate or inhibit the realisation of a

Big Society;

profile relevant solutions that speak to the need for delivery of services to the public

that meet standards of expectation;

make recommendations as to the form and function of a holistic 'services for the

public authoring enabling system' and a human approach to compliment it that

addresses the required cultural shift and behavioural change to interact with it;

and propose a position in the public ecosystem which offers such a system and

approach the greatest chance of success.

Changes

There are changes to and within the current political, economic, social, technological and environmental frames of Society that impact upon the potential for realising a Bigger society.

Some changes facilitate the realisation of a Society with more empowered individuals and thus communities.

Some changes inhibit the systemic and behavioural shift and imply an entrenchment in the status quo.

Culture and the structure of Society can move towards the Utopian goal of enabling both freedom for public users to author services for themselves, whilst retaining the security recognised by the benefits of oversight mechanisms and accountability to agreed delivery standards.

Opening access to the decision making process and offering transparency does not necessarily incur anarchy. Safeguards can be installed that not only insure against it but encourage wider public participation, clarity about social responsibility and an adoption and engagement with civic duty.

Changes mean that Society will soon be an alternative Society to the one currently recognised in the culture of our local communities and in the behaviour of the individuals around us.

What standards of expectation will citizens set for the services they need and want.

How and in what forums will they say this to those directing traditional public resources.

How much personal resource are they willing to pay and allocate when there is a shortfall.

What mechanisms, facilities and forms of institutions will hold and enable these empowering functions.

A 'Bigger Society' implies citizens have more power to design and author the narrative of this alternative Society. Central Government is not the single dictate and the cult of professionalism does not have ultimate influence.

The influencing factors are to be outlined in this paper, however the ultimate influence is to be within the court of public opinion.

Political

The proposals made by the Coalition Government within the 'Big Society' paper suggest that the governance system within the UK is to become more open to participation by local authorities, interested community organisations and through these empowerment efforts the implication is that the individual will become empowered.

This political climate and set of agenda provides greater opportunity for any mechanism, facility, institution or organisation; and to a certain extent individual desiring to lead, to have their vision for society realised.

This includes the realisation of services that better meet their wants and needs. For the public good this suggests that where they may have been a disconnect between the authors of public services and those using such services, the appetite now exists within Central Government to authorise and support more direct co-authoring and co-production of services.

The cultural litmus test would imply that it is a time where projects and services are more likely to be authored collaboratively and with greater equity between users, those who govern and have traditionally initiated services. This applies also to the projects that come out of the creation of a service or are the pre-cursors to a full services being embedded or established.

This appetite has been articulated in the 'Big Society' document. The public may hold the Government accountable and legitimately call upon public resources to support any initiatives that can be justified to realise the intent of a 'Bigger Society'.

The decision as to whether an initiative has relevance to the delivery of a 'Bigger Society' that precedes the release of funds however will lye with Government. Should there be continued attempt to meet public need by individuals or less recognised organisational forms, and continued denial by Government for the release of public funds, the resentment may make for a move by citizens to direct funds towards initiatives through an independent mechanism.

Dependent upon the perspective this could be seen as either a individuals rejecting state or embracing state by proxy of taking up the responsibilities and role of fulfilling public need outlined in the 'Big Society' document.

Economic

The trust of many citizens placed in financial institutions has been eroded by the near collapse of the banking system. Combined with the recent expenses scandal there is a fundamental challenging by the public as to who has insight into the management of finances. Particularly in the case of national revenue generated from taxes even citizens who otherwise are disengaged from the political process are seeking to understand where public money is going.

One of the attitudes that has emerged amongst communities is that public funding is

being mismanaged. Both the global, European and UK financial crisis re-enforces this. Although a nation in recession with a 155billion pound deficit may not seem to be a strength for the launch of any new initiative, the mistrust of current systems brings with it curiosity towards innovation around financial management. It also means that the scale of financial systems is being rethought with localised currencies recognising a smaller geographical zone and microfinance recognising more granular amounts of funding for initiatives.

For delivery of services for the public this allies well with the mass localism thought processes that permeate the Big Society objectives. Any shift that encourages community based thinking is a strength as to the timeliness of such a solution and thus an opportunity.

Social

The Big Society document comes out from Government, it has been released in part to due to a central need for support in public service delivery. Simultaneously it is also a document recognising need and demand from the public.

The mistrust of institutions mentioned within the description of economic strengths has meant that citizens have a growing desire for power and control over their own resources. An individual's resources includes their finances, homes, relationships, leisure time and a large variety of other consumables.

A citizen may have been dissatisfied by the concept of taxation, purely due to it being a depletion of resources. However, when public institutions and those bailed out with public finance fall short of standards expected by the public, a question may exist for the individual about whether investment via taxes is the most efficient means of contributing to the public good. It may not feel a relevant use of capacity or that the resource be directed to improved standards within Society. The call for account of Government by Citizens may become more intense.

The accountability that has brought about closer scrutiny of the mechanisms of governance has brought about an audit of public services and their relevance in meeting public need. The question implicitly asked is 'Do the authors of our current public services meet our needs to our standards and expectations?' and the answer seems to be 'No'.

The level of dissatisfaction has lowered the faith in the existing system of Government to the extent that citizens are seeking other means to deliver services traditionally seen as the jurisdiction of the Government to themselves.

This includes re-examining national infrastructure services such as health, public safety, local information provision, postal services, transport come into being; all these solutions are being delivered privately to a scale previously beyond the capacity of average citizens.

Do it yourselfThe ethos of Social Entrepreneurship and an increased attention on self-sustaining community activity and wider encouragement for voluntary action has meant that 'Making a Difference' is now a viable lifestyle and aspirational behaviour.

Combined with the cultural shift in individualism, personalisation and encouragement by the commercial sector to engage in closer relationships with products and services and the organisations that produce them, social media has opened up communication channels for user to enter into conversation with delivery agent. These conversations have been shown to provide benefits to the newly empowered user and to the delivering party who has been granted insight.

The lines between provider and consumer have blurred in commerce. Within society and governance and those that are governed the line has blurred also. Now if citizens are dissatisfied with what they are being provided they are becoming more likely to provide from themselves and their community.

They seek less authorisation or permission to take action and the structures of Social Enterprise mean that they can financially sustain an activity based upon alternative channels of resource than those traditionally established by public finance flow. New forms of finance and investment in socially impactive initiatives are being acknowledged and articulated enabling a relative independence from cascading funds from Central Government.

The altered power structures affects the control and influence by Central Government and their instrumental institutions over performance management criteria and metrics within community based initiatives. This ultimately lends itself to a different way of valuing a service than traditionally being at the mercy of a Party agenda, as opposed to a Public agenda via audit and comparison against need.

Political

There is a state of global, European and UK economic volatility. Despite published suggestions that Central Government is ready to devolve power through Local Authorities, into community organisations and to individuals; there is likely to be resistance within the internal culture of public services. This resistance could also spread across all professionalised services whose role and responsibility has traditionally been to regulate or control markets. There may also be some resentment amongst those whose prior activity had been limited by existing standards and performance management methods. With a relaxation of these measures these parties may become resentful about less rigorously governed initiatives due to the treatment they received which may have caused them frustrations in achieving the delivery of the full service they initially conceived of.

Resistance may be explicit or it may be more subtle. These subtle expressions could include attempts to double regulate, by means of self appointed institutions, the market of activity that emerges as a result of Big Society propositions.

This new market of delivery agents and the projects and service they seek to offer may then also suffer from the same burdensome performance management that hinders delivery within the existing ecosystem of services for the public.

Although the assurance of quality is necessary to avoid total exploitation of public monies, it may bring about the suffocation of services that are valued by community

but due to a longer term scope of their impact are likely to be less able to demonstrate quantifiable results due to the granularity and incremental nature of their progress.

The self appointed regulators of this new market of delivery agents may construct performance indicators and criteria that reflect the perspective of the current paradigm what quality is. This may preclude agility in the redefinition of quality marks and thus lock services into a standard that makes them less able to respond to the consistently changing public need without jeopardising their status as an agent of quality.

Economic

The economic situation has had behavioural impacts upon many individuals in society. One of the reactions to the lack of predictability and greater challenges in predicting the stability of the market is an increased fear for the future.

At a time when Government is encouraging Volunteerism and engagement and participation in community action, people are accounting for their resources more carefully. This means assessing their time commitments, looking at the security of income, reviewing the validity of their financial outgoings and performing a general audit of what is necessary in order to preserve and secure their way of life.

The interpretation of needs and wants is subjective. However there can be a tendency during periods where the security of resources seems vulnerable to seek to minimise activity. To seek to cut back involvement and commitments and view anything extraneous to the immediately visible essential life support expenditures as excessive and unnecessary.

Big Society is the frame through which Government is seeking engagement with the public. This requires them to regard the proposed activities as necessary and within the confines of their essential commitments.

Participation in the community support mechanisms, such as Social Enterprises, require an openness to new forms of activity. By the nature of them being less known there is a requirement for imagination to even assess the risks, let alone to mitigate them. An effort is required. The claim that it is civic duty is not going to be enough to bring about the sustained engagement required to support a 'Bigger Society'.

Social

Social perceptions of the proposals are going to be the most threatening inhibitor to the realisation of a Bigger Society.

To deliver a Bigger Society requires the actions to be considered both virtuous and beneficial, even if only in a moral sense, thus granting an emotional return on investment; whilst also being convenient.

Charitable organisations reliant upon donations and philanthropy have recently sought to shift their perception from being 'worthy' activities and 'good' to partake in, no matter the austerity an individual must endure to meet their tithe; to a more transactional and accountable relationship with donors and stakeholders whereby they demonstrate the impact and service they provide to society and thus the payment is needed by those who benefit from well-being brought about by the conditions of society. At the same time they have sought to make donations convenient.

A perceptual shift is required for participation and engagement in community activity called for within the Big Society document; to move from duty and responsibility towards a pleasurable utility, personally beneficial and convenient. This is the political task set by the individuals of society, largely exacerbated by the social impact of the economic crisis.

Resourcing the sector and delivery agents that are charged with bringing about a Bigger Society; as they operate under the challenge of a fearful society, means the sector and thus the activities born of it are likely to be challenged to find financial investment. Also there may be difficulty in securing soft resources, in the shape of the capacity and skills that come with high calibre individual workers often attracted to well financed sectors.

The Big Society Bank will open next April. The intention is to offer microfunding into communities to catalyse more numerous ventures. The amounts being put forward are not sufficient to bridge the funding gap experienced by small organisations moving from the support afforded by seed funding and looking to grow towards self sufficiency.

The hope is that these organisations will be able to be self sustaining, as suggests the ethos of social entrepreneurship. These organisations will have to attract the capacity required to run these organisations, then retain and up-skill them to deal with the demands of the organisation as it grows. The sector will be competitive and under-resourced. With the contributing inhibitions brought about by a desire for security, the sector may not prove attractive enough to create a Big Society.

With demands upon citizens to; shop for their country, be green, politically correct, buy organic and further conscious consumption and personal awareness activities there is the danger of social fatigue setting in towards participation in civic duty before any the potential impact of collaborative action has occurred.

The resentment and rejection of engagement with community activity levels a challenge at Central Government or any mechanism seeking to bring about a Bigger Society to be very sparing with the available attention of citizens. This commodity is tied to available social capital to action decisions or propositions. The proposals of Big Society are in part promises and any abuse will cause a further degradation of trust and bring the authenticity of the governing mechanism further into disrepute.

Technological

The forum for a local context to author public services may be augmented by technology but that is dependent upon how and who calibrates the user interface for interaction with the system, and with other uses within it. Equally important is the choices of functionality and the level of automation associated with the processes performed by the technology solution. The level of automation has bearing upon how conscious a user of a system is of the influence exerted via it being embedded by the original system designers or their commissioners.

Organic power structures that have been long term inhibitors towards devolution of power and more equitable public service provision, could easily be repeated within a technological framework.

Recently the digital economy bill demonstrated the level of resistance by corporate entities and some unions towards inclusion of more parties within the media distribution industry. Peer to peer networks did and do facilitate illegal activity but the

response was disproportionate and gave an indication that this innovation of social interaction, which was occurring around the exchange of cultural artefacts, was only to be permitted were Government, via Internet Service Providers, to have the ability throw the off switch.

The exertion of power of the individual, and the influence of the state may seem to be diminished by empowering technologies but if central Political and Commercial powers retain jurisdiction over the infrastructure then they have ultimate influence over what can and cannot enter our homes; thus our minds, shape our thoughts and gradually change our behaviour. The data, media, information and knowledge citizens have access to is fundamentally linked to how politically empowered we are.

Technology has the capacity to empower us but just as the proposals within Big Society require a devolution of decision making towards the individual, the decisions about what to access through technology and what activities to include ourselves in must also be entrusted to the individual.

The undermines that trust within the relationship between the traditional and emerging authors of services for the public. The success of the transition and the level to which the existing mechanism can facilitate the installation of one more conducive to the task in hand, of delivering a change in the state of communities, has high impact upon the perception of authenticity of the proposition of a Bigger Society.

Whatever mechanism exists to provide public with the ability to voice it's desires, the facilitating technology must illustrate these clearly within itself and to others within the community and enable explicit and permitted listening by oversight bodies but not the capacity to censor or conduct surveillance.

Print journalism and communication broadcast tools and networks have had this challenge of the integrity of the medium, the users of the available newer technologies must be aware of the benefits but be equally, if not more aware of how this could inhibit the public good if exploited.

Environmental

The Copenhagen summit this year saw the major nations of the World come together to address a global issue. The United Nations have framed the climate crisis as a security issue which supports a more urgent engagement with measures to tackle the threat.

Whilst this collaborative action speaks well to the aims of mass collaboration and encouraging Social Responsibility and general awareness, whilst simultaneously opening and consolidating channels to and between networks of active community leaders, the Climate issues, as with the Economic issues are a Global crisis.

Delivery of a Bigger Society requires, at it's initial phases at least, focus on individual wants and needs, and contextually grounded community concerns and local issues. The weakness with the nature of the agenda is that it requires a shift in focus away from global concerns.

Should an individual be given the choice, which is the case in a free Society, to exercise their social responsibility by engaging in 'saving the world', or participation with action on your doorstep, the former can certainly seem more glamourous, impactful and attractive. Local action with neighbours and interaction with those

down their immediate street can be an activity that individuals actively avoid. It certainly is not the default in the UK's current social behaviour and culture.

The recognition of global concerns may pull attention away from local matters, and with this attention goes the attraction to the cause. An unattractive cause receives little resource. A Big Society seems to move down the priority list next to global security.

It is possible that as with the Transition Towns movement that the answer to the Global Climate Crisis, particularly energy and water concerns, lies with being more locally focused and improving the resilience.

The Bigger Society proposals do speak to this ideal of independence of smaller units through a cultivating of an understand of interdependence across the whole. However clarity of communication is critical to behavioural change. Any mechanism and supporting campaign must be projecting a consistent community image. A vision, or way of representing an integrated set of multiple versions of society authored by communities. There seems an improved chance of realisation should the national narrative be congruent and not demanding individual attempt to focus on the multifaceted and shifting priorities of community scale issues and simultaneously an increasing breadth of global scale issues.

AnalysisThe ability to innovate upon the way the public perceive and receive services could be inhibited by the way the standards of those services are regulated and the expectations of their function and form.

Redefining the parameters to be more responsive to the shifting conditions that Political, Environmental, Social, Technological and Environmental change bring means finding a more inclusive means for the public to participate in the authoring of those services.

Individuals are closer to the point of delivery. They have richer contextual insight, and provided they have access to a facilitating mechanism they can authorise the release of aggregated private resource.

Through such a framework a more direct contact with other stakeholders of a local service can occur without the bindings and time consuming process of moving through a traditional standardisation protocol.

Traditionally the requirement for the authoring of services for the public an account of proposed changes and action must be brought to Central Government, local authority or an oversight body. Their existing performance management measures or accounting mechanisms may not be able to authorise the service before the public need has changed.

The potential opportunity cost coupled with the cost of installation and maintenance of new projects and services that are redundant before activation can infuriate the public and further degrade the trust that there is a working relationship between citizens and governing bodies.

The consequence could be that the next interaction with the central authority is even more challenging due to the expectation of conflict, attrition and friction. This attrition slows the process of communication. Again compounding the phenomenon of authoring irrelevant services that meet a need that has past.

Potential the opportunity cost of risking more decision making power with individuals is less than the continued systemic failure of poor reaction times and embedding and then maintaining for a period of commitment something which no longer is for the public good.

Allowing individuals and communities to fail and taking an iterative and personally accountable learning approach to authoring services for their own local context is a potential solution.

The changes in the global situation have meant that various disciplines have sought to author solutions to enable themselves to navigate the inhibiting factors and exploit the facilitating factors.

This paper will group these solutions into three main forms to produce a typology of what exists in the market. The overview of types is a frame that then facilitates the profiling of a sample set of specific solutions available to stakeholders.

The intent being to give insight into the properties of the tools that can support them as they become delivery agents of a Bigger Society. Also to investigate what issues these tools have already addressed and how they can be re-purposed for untested contexts, use cases and user stories.

The three metafunctions considered to be the needs of prospective users seeking to engage with a system are:

Project and Resource management

Knowledge (information and ideas) management – Articulation and Navigation

Frame creation and attention evaluation – Behaviour and Culture mapping, engagement, persuasion/Drive

These will be considered separately and explored through the profiling of case studies and schools of operational function.

Profiles of relevant solutions

Project and Resource management

Commercial organisations are incredibly adept at seeking a competitive advantage. As their projects are clearly articulated to seek out examples of management of resources within an active project context the Corporate setting has a great deal of solutions that could be applied to the delivery of a Bigger Society.

The reason for looking outside solutions targeted at the larger Corporate organisation market is that the mechanism of Big Society is to be utilised by individual citizens and the delivery agents that are largely managing projects within smaller operational realms on a community basis.

Thus the criteria for selecting tools is those that have been used to an appropriate scale of management of time, people and financial flows within a community setting.

Another area that will yield relevant tools is newer forms of personal informatics that provide users with a form of individual journal mechanism. These journal tools are managing less clearly articulated projects on a much more granular scale but still

require the functionality to track the relevance of activity to project aims by comparison of resource consumption against performance indicators, and to evaluate the project's success on the same basis.

Any system that enables community must be able to generate reports to all stakeholders. One of the key differences within the Bigger Society narrative is that the recipients of reports, and information about activity are not simply the executive teams directly accountability for the activity of the project, but also those who resourced the projects.

Resourcing can occur directly by donation, or investment or less directly through mechanisms like taxation, that enters the mutual fund of the public fund to be distributed by the Treasury.

It is true to say that some corporate project management tools allow for investor relations. However addressing the challenge of allowing reports to the variety of demands for active information that all the individuals of a community may request is not one addressed in the same way by Corporates. Their flow of reporting on active projects is compounding of information up an organisational chart to a Board of fewer numbers than individuals on the ground. Their requirements for information as set prior to the outset of the project and must be agreed by consensus amongst a small group.

Holding executing parties accountable via the publishing of reports that are agile enough to respond the the changing informational demands of a large volume of individuals, is a set of functionality rarely embedded in a corporate system.

For tools that allow the publication and distribution that will enable Public or community accountability and transparency adaptations and bespoke elements need to be injected.

The level of accessibility required to avoid barriers to participation lend themselves to Cloud software. System as a service (SaaS) products allow for mechanisms to have multiple users without a single site of installation. Provided users have access to the internet and are granted access to the project environment then they can collaborate to track and evaluate projects via the generation of reports, and interrogate or submit information should they hold that responsibility or feel they have relevant knowledge to submit.

The relationships between intervening project team and their executive role, the activity of observer, and that of participant within a community project, either active or passive, have become blurred. This is largely due to the capacity to phase between roles dependent on how engaged you feel and what level of participation you feel motivated to adopt.

Case studies required:

Knowledge (information and ideas) management – Articulation and Navigation

The concept of project transparency and accountability can be partly fulfilled by knowledge management solutions and intranet practice. This again is prevalent in the corporate world, especially within larger organisations seeking to share information between departments to exploit good practice internally.

The requirement is for users to be able to both submit and navigate through information to view or extract the relevant elements that supports their application of the collective knowledge in active projects.

These media aggregation tools that pool, design to order and allow for interrogation of a repository of information based on knowledge from collection of individuals, allows a user to navigate through this body of knowledge to the end of better articulating a concept or understanding that will provide a more informed decision.

The distribution and display of relevant media in a timely fashion means that a project can improve the efficiency of decision making and thus complete on actions with less lag time between awareness of an issue and production of a solution.

The functionality that requires enhancement for application in a Bigger Society is the ability to surface issues and articulate them. Without the natural incentives embedded in the framework of a commercial project, and without the dedicated attention of an academic study, there must be either an element of persuasion to engage or something that forces compliance.

Stakeholder consultation traditionally requires an articulated proposal. Those seeking to intervene in the current order of things will either commission research or be approached by an organisation or individual with an awareness of a community issue.

With current current public services not meeting the standard of expectations of the public there is reasonable cause to examine how adequate the initiating process for projects is.

The first step to authoring a service or project is running an assessment and diagnosis of a geography or set of individuals to establish the need. The current stakeholder consultation process is reactive rather than proactive.

The local area forums could be considered as a proactive means of reaching out into community to surface needs and support them in articulating solutions. However few of these forums are taking advantage of the opportunity granted by technology, especially real time technology. Therefore systemically there is a divide between available facility and capacity of the forms of engagement with community.

Being responsive to need requires being aware of it. There seems a need for a mechanism to recognise community needs before they are articulated anything more than a set of individually exchanged incidental anecdotes.

Making sense of these, recognising themes and finding meaning can be done easily within a physical forum where people can respond whilst attention is held in a face to face dialogue. A mechanism is needed that emulates and augments that naturalistic knowledge accumulation within a group sharing mutual aims in a physcial space so that the interaction that occurs face to face can transfer relatively seemlessly taking advantage of the scale and remote interaction benefits of ICT.

This would enable the creation of a forum to support authoring of preventative

services making a more comprehensive systemic support for the public. Should this be overly ambitious it can seek to offer more targeted solutions and pre-approved interventions that meet needs before they become of crisis proportions and require either the authoring of an entire service or the application of large scale or volume of resources.

A Bigger Society not only demands management of knowledge during the lifecycle of operational projects, but also the articulation and recognition of knowledge of needs and even better contextual insight that will support informed decision making about projects or services that can be authored to meet those needs.

The best way to do so is authorising the public individuals to control the services. A mechanism seeking to support the ecosystem of delivering a Bigger Society needs to enable citizens to; recognise issues, advocate and illustrate issues they have recognised.

Individuals then need to be enabled to track other knowledge resources from the community that will facilitate the projects success via more informed decision making.

Finally citizens require a common evaluation of the report via self authored performance indicators allowing them to refine projects should they be scaled or replicated or taken into the portfolio of local services.

Being able to phase between knowledge management and project management means that between the components profiled in these two metafunction sections a community and its citizens will be better able to recognise needs and bring about solutions to them in a proactive responsive fashion.

This better targets the installation of solutions that reduces the application of resources to needs that may have passed and projects or services that no longer or never did serve the public good.

It makes progress towards the existence of a portal through which they can seek out blueprints for projects that have been successful in other contexts that addressed issues they are noting in their context and also to more rapidly recognise emerging themes so as to respond to potential community pain before it even emerges.

Frame creation and attention evaluation – Behaviour and Culture mapping, engagement, persuasion/Drive

The document proposing a Big Society was an articulation of what the Coalition Government is seeking to bring about by means of a model for civil society. It makes proposals as to how it intends to do so and what resources will be applied.

There are implicit and explicit roles outlined for Citizens and delivery agents in the change from current state to the Big Society. Changes in behaviour, culture and perspective are necessary to achieve this state shift.

To deliver a Bigger Society a proposition of what is possible and how it can be achieved is required. However it is necessary to consider what occurs to the attention of the audience of the proposal once the Big Society document has been read.

Central Government has begun a campaign to frame the model of Big Society, and to realise communities they have concluded by are desired by the individual Citizens they represent.

The campaign seeks to motivate citizens to the initial action required to engage with the proposals and to encourage the continued participation required to author projects and services. This includes adopting and integrating the challenging levels of empathy, support and trust demanded for the measures the Government must take to revive the United Kingdom, specifically the economy and address the public deficit, both fiscal and in terms of capacity to deliver.

This paper makes recommendations as to the function and form of a new alternative system. For any mechanism to enter the space traditionally exclusive to the public services, it must gain a reputation for a higher standard of delivery than is currently expected than those delivered or authored by Central Government.

This is necessary or no one, even though many individuals and organisations are seeking an alternative to the ability to participate in the authoring of services and projects for the public, will continue to use the system. Use is required to justify a systems existence and perpetuate its place in the ecosystem of service delivery for public.

The reputation must be upheld and re-enforced. Although this seems to be a case of prioritising and evaluation of perception of the mechanism itself, and that is partly the case, it is necessary to recognise that the process of sentiment analysis of these newer alternate mechanisms is also a gauge of public opinion towards the broader activity of partipation in socially responsible action and adopting civic duty.

In order to measure a citizen's acknowledgement and adoption of a role in delivering a Bigger Society other individuals must be able to hold one another accountable. Once it is clear who has an has not adopted a role the next task is one of persuasion that such involvement is necessary and desirable for them.

The term 'persuasive technology' describes tools utilised in behavioural change projects. These are more advanced within organisational change management but are becoming more prevalent in bringing about cultural shifts desired by a particular Government agenda.

Health and stop smoking campaigns often seek to engage the stakeholders of an individual's lifestyle to enlist them in supporting the central target of the behavioural

shift. This may mean directing communication at children in order to influence parents to exercise for example.

A Bigger Society devolves responsibility to those outside of the traditional system of decision making. The act of devolving responsibility is not the same as delegating. Those who are invited to become active participants in the delivery of the model for society currently have no framework of obligation or compliance other than law. There is no legal requirement to participate, yet.

Compulsory voluntary service is imminent for young persons however for the remaining individuals, unless they arrive at the conclusion that a Bigger Society is personally beneficial or they have altruistic beliefs to bring about involvement in activity to the benefit of the other, then it is a task of persuasion.

However this is not yet in place and even when it is, it will address the next generation of Citizens and influence more the narrative of Citizenship for future society rather than supporting the transition to it. It is a longer term measure. For now a different frame for participation is required.

Neither is there any great financial incentive other than the potential for financial gain offered by the new market of delivery agents for Big Society.

Without obligation or incentive there must be either recognition of an incentive or belief that there is an obligation through duty to community and the wider public good. This is the the belief and value individual's must be persuaded of for a Bigger Society to be realised.

That persuasion must begin by being engaging. It must entertain continued involvement. It must validate, re-enforce and maintain relevance for those donating their resource and who are choosing to do so when it may be more worthwhile financially and more personally productive for them to have their resources invested in other projects.

To attain a state where Society engages Citizens naturally and individual behaviour is such that they organically entertain the authoring the future state of Society individuals need to believe they have the attention of the collective and also permission of Society to realise that which they express.

The publication of the results of projects relates to finding the participation rewarding. Prior to finding success then the form in which people give and contribute must be found to be relevant to the level of participation they are comfortable with. Initially individuals must be met where they are on the participation ladder. Perhaps later this can be upscaled, this relates to the demands on any delivery agent to persuade, encourage or enforce.

Some Citizens seek convenience in their interactions with Civil Society. Some seek challenge that brings about personal development and insight, perhaps allowing a greater resilience for themselves as a unit.

Regardless of the motivation that is surfaced by engagement with the individual, there must be a gauge of relevance of the activity to each participant. The activity must be appropriate but also useful to the contributors skillset, issue and facilitating tool literacy and other resource related capacity. These resource capacity include time available, physical impairments or other forms of perceived limitation that may cause them to resent demands foisted upon them rather than a less manipulative request for volunteering their involvement.

This has been something more recently recognised in philanthropic activity. It has been noted by, especially the larger charitable organisations, that often a donor's money is not the most valuable resource. An individuals time or knowledge may be a more valuable commodity and more timely and relevant to the project.

Reward and gain within the process must be two way. A Win Win. The participant in Bigger Society must be able to find the relevant project to find the engagement with it rewarding or they won't find it entertaining. Participation may not be convenient and they could disengage from the project tasks, then the system and thus from Society resulting in a breakdown of communication.

The wider consequences of this are a breakdown in communication is that the channels necessary for informed consent, feedback and decision making are damaged. Once affected a certain trust in the integrity of the old system must be restored or the perception of a newer system must reach such a state where Citizens are prepared to invest again.

In states where trust has broken down between participants then the conversation stops. Individuals, institutions or organisations seeking to author projects or services for the public will find co-production halts and enforcement must become the driving factor to production rather than intrinsic motivation.

Any intervention or solution to a need will become dictate and thus the relevance of these authored solutions is likely to decrease as due to the lack of communication from those experiencing these interventions the calibration, form and function they take will be assumptions.

In addition to the lack of relevance of services, to further stifle their delivery, voluntarily donated or catalysed resources in the form of social enterprise may lose it's drive and drop away.

This slack is not something that the UK Central Government can afford to pick up right now and the impact upon services for the public will be that there will be a shortfall in available resources. This could contribute to a drop in standards and this innovation begins to seem less charged due to the lesser level of interest and expectation of failure.

In such a demotivated state the impact is not only upon Centrally authored solutions. Any alternative system, no matter how inclusive or accessible will find itself in a culture with a perception and expectation close to certainty that any system that suggests it can perform functionality close to that of the traditional system of authoring services for the public.

This disengagement and lack of use of any alternative service increases the potential to fail the community and individual due to the closing of the feedback loop required to calibrate proposals, general communication to contribute and design ideas and the overall lack of contextual insight and situational awareness.

There will be no common operating picture and thus mutual operation and collaboration will be frustrated at best and at worst a fertile crescent for dictatorship.

Recommendations for a holistic 'services for the public authoring enabling system'

To deliver services and projects to the public that meet the standards of stakeholder expectation, at the minimum all of the metafunctions described must be possible.

Design principles such as 'UTATC' (Using Tried And Tested Components) suggest that curation of pre-existing solutions may be a way to meet needs within the UK's current low resource state, and enhance the nation's ability to encourage wide-scale innovation around social solutions, without the need for widescale quality assurance.

The assurance of quality would be required when seeking to integrate a solution into a holistic system, but the process may be less intensive for more localised meeting of contextually grounded needs. Much the same way as the scrutiny of a tender or procurement process is more important when an element is being scaled or replicated for systemic roll out.

Within a local system however, so long as local stakeholders are able to receive and submit information, knowledge and perspective within a form of trusted communications infrastructure, then they can participate both in the design and the assessment of any published proposals in a more meaningful fashion.

This means they are closer to real time simultaneous involvement with the aggregation of needs, potential solutions and general thoughts articulation that traditionally has occurred behind closed doors. The individual Citizens are included in a participatory creative process with consultation agencies that can apply expertise and experience to refine development models and masterplans.

Who undertakes this initial acquisition process is highly important. It links to the issue of power and control over the impact authorised by any oversight body, even if the oversight body is an unofficially constituted set of individuals acting in collaboration around a technical solution.

There is need for participation of stakeholders within the initial choice of 'services for the public authoring system'. Equally important is their involvement in the calibration of this alternative solution through deliberation around the functions available. Also within the continued performance management of the new system, and the design of the criteria and indicators for the review, audit and accounting of the service.

Co-production of the selection criteria for the functionally that will be integrated into the holistic service authoring solution will be vital to owning a common solution to community issues.

To deliver a Bigger Society the lead document from the coalition document cannot be the only frame looked to for the forms of innovation and services that communities need and will create. Neither can the regulatory solutions come purely from Central Government.

With great power comes great responsibility. Citizens must regulate their own culture and behaviour. They must persuade one another of its value or realisation of even the most granular solution to a need cannot be assured.

The design process of the authoring system must be agile also to reflect the ethos of a responsive community. The users must reflect on the relevance of functionality in how they author systems and the system must allow for participatory recalibration. This inclusive of communities and individuals; also more localised bodies or institutions of authority.

The function and form of the system must support self regulation throughout the lifecycle of a project, from conception, through delivery and to evaluation. Evaluation enables for the reflection that encourages a user community culture of system and solution reiteration.

This gives better chance for resilience and continued relevance of the system and the solutions it authors. The potential should exist for refinement or replication or scaling of the project and the service implied by the existence of a project.

There needs to be awareness of the current situation and the ability to gain depth of contextual insight or gain an abstracted overview. The reports generated need to be curated and adapted to the literacy level of an individual user. Literacy is used here to imply level of pre-existing understanding or insight.

For an informed decision to be made by a governing body, whether that be a pre-existing community group or a newly forming institution that has no official organisational form or structure. A massive collaboration of individual requires a common operational picture. This is not the same as a shared vision for the future. This picture is a narrative that is understanding of the multiple perspectives of individuals within community, and supports integrated insight into what journey society will have to go through to realise another state.

This supports strategic allocation of resources and also interventions by any stakeholder, executive, governing or those choosing just to be impacted as more passive and low impact participants of their environment. The empowerment required to exert influence implies that individuals recognise their power and they are permitted to express it.

A Bigger Society means all of the individuals that make up the society need to be acting on the same page and authoring from the same pen when implementation and execution of a project occurs. Until such point multiple user awareness is required and the scope of interaction needs to be as broad as possible.

Once a decision has been made a singular vision is required to realise the project. Treating the entire Big Society vision as a project, it is necessary to have the functionality to have granular and micro level action with macro level contextual insight.

With the Open Data movement there is enough information to garner a decent level of understanding about the needs. Thus this element of the process of authoring or refinement of services for the public should be of greater ease.

The service can also be resourced through the same mechanism, thus traditional clearance levels of authority are only relevant when allocating and directing legally defined taxation, thus dealing with public money.

In a private system, managing private resources the ability to realise private projects can be a valuable asset to Central Government. The level of insight afforded at a local level to frontline service users, and the freedom to act without centrally dictated

and the investment means that there is the equivalent of a new investment fund one that does not need Government resource to manage or direct and does not require public funds that have been garnered by taxation to resource it. Thus the integrity of the Government directed Publically available fund remains intact.

The funders of this new private mechanism will expect only use of the service they author as a return on investment and will hold themselves responsible and accountable for system failures. They own this authoring system and the consequential solutions that are caused, inclusive of their ongoing impact.

Their investment in the process, combined with the vested interest of being the subject and simultaneously author of the services is sufficient to allow for an iterative process.

This ownership of solution, process and system provides a more equitable delivery mechanism for a Bigger Society and thus perhaps a more relevant solution to the delivery of the Big Society aims than Central Government who sought to interpret the needs of the public and then empower them.

The factor that is unclear now is whether Central Government can devolve power and authentically allow for social innovation. The signs that this is occurring will be through the decisions that they place in the direct responsibility of parties beyond their direct control, and the amount of resource that they allocate to the projects and contexts that self-verify a local need.

The most important is whether they can broaden the scope of the 'Tickbox'. The system enables citizens to regulate their own co-production process. Whether Central Government will trust regulation of resources it has released by releasing resources without placing suffocating stipulations about the quality of delivery through performance management mechanisms or more subtly through supporting quality marks remains to be seen.

Although Central Government are accountable to the public for publicly generated funds, if the public have validated an accountability mechanism and embedded it with the system they are using and in their communities, then the ownership of this common solution requires not authorisation or permission to act within specific parameters of safeguards by Central Government. Namely the laws of the land.

The holistic authoring system, inclusive of its associated behaviours and the initiatives that come about through that ethos require the space to undertake an iterative process in order to better understand the public it serves. Then the system can become more agile and responsive through testing and continuous calibration and realignment for better congruence between available resource and the need for application.

Within the technological framework, alpha and beta testing mean that a system can only improve by being exposed to users and through being tested against the stories and use cases they generate.

Though Government has been formed along the same principle, to move governance and authoring systems and the authored solutions towards the real-time adaptation that technology allows, and benefit from the responsiveness that agile development of services implies, then participants, contributors and those impacted by the system, and the services it authors must be able to self regulate. This includes failure without an external tickbox imposing frames around it's potential.

Form

To be truly relevant in Society the authoring system that the public authors must gain a reputation of being trustworthy.

Trust can only be gathered by the installation of trust. Currently, trust in the capacity of Central Government to deliver services for the public to a standard they expect is very low. Therefore perception of an alternative service is that is can only be better.

It has the ability to be both a better solution and if permitted, to be better able to serve Central Government through informing the direction of it's funds.

The system due to it being external to Central Government functions will not be able to direct taxable income, but it can inform Government decisions about resource allocation with a granularity and level of local contextual insight rarely afforded to an oversight body.

The potential then is that there can be collaborative resourcing where the private equity raised from private resources, once the public have demonstrated sustained value of a project or service, can be a public priority recognised by Government and funding can be matched and resources can be released. By this approach a truer co-authoring can occur.

However to reach this point projects, resources and knowledge must be managed effectively and the attention required to gain the required creative energy for an authoring system must be framed.

The frame for this managed authoring activity requires a form that harnesses complimentary behaviour. For guidance around the form of such a system designers can look to existing forms in the public ecosystem of decision making and consider where the metafunctions of an alternate system are largely being met.

Then the issue is one of positioning. Where can an authoring system be positioned to best exploit the existing frameworks of civil interaction. This requires an exploration of community assets and where and why tacit knowledge flows through them well.

The next step is then to understand how to compliment these to allow a community and its individual more holistic and comprehensive local influence over what is authored for their public use, so they can better serve their own needs.

Proposition for position in the public ecosystem - Conversion strategy via perception.

The form of the system must hold authority. It's placement in the ecosystem of communities and society must be akin to existing forms of interaction with authoritative decision making.

For a trusted system to emerge, and for the system to be regarded as a means to author relevant services for individuals as well as a broader public, it must take a form that is recognisable to the public for this function.

The form cannot be identical as it must transcend the trust issues that Central Government and traditional authoritative institutions have. However it cannot throw the baby out with the bathwater by seeking to take a radically different and virtually unrecognisable form and position within the public sphere of how individuals seek to meet their needs.

The system must seek to take a position in society that means it is an authoritative forum for discussion, action and realisation of services that is more relevant to public needs than the traditional mechanisms. It must be as findable as Post Offices once were, and be a landmark form within the public landscape.

Core services must improve and periphery services must emerge to include. To include previously excluded members of society who have not only not been able to access services but had little say in the design of future service. This bringing about the situation where there is little chance of their needs being met in the future as the services are being authored without their feedback or input, let alone consent over how the finds they assign to the serving of their needs through taxes are being directed.

They must be able to access the form and for that the position must be relatively easily navigated to, without being seen to be as repulsive as some existing landmark civic interaction forums.

The whole process of designing the system and the authoring of services that it enables must be inclusive to as broad a set of citizens as possible. Society must feel Bigger through it's use, and the position it takes must provide a vantage point that creates that perspective.

To offer such a mechanism and approach the greatest chance of success there must be a parallel drawn between the way individuals interact with the system and those existing already.

The more granular nature of the input and publication touchpoints that advances in ICT have allowed, and the occurrence of convergent items, allowing for media channel integration, makes for opportunities for more comprehensive individual oversight of public projects than has traditionally been available.

This ubiquitous nature of newer tools broadens the inclusion framework for stakeholders to include individuals. Individual Citizens alone may not be as influential as larger delivery agents, institutions or large businesses who take up the majority of attention within a traditional stakeholder consultation.

The governance body to governed masses conversation and relationship does not have a great deal of equity at the moment. Partly this is due to the lack of trust and faith in the direct link between the conversation stakeholders are invited to

participate in and the decision making around the services authored.

An alternative service must recognise the self-sabotage that would occur should they begin to stop listening or not install safeguards that prevent the system purveyors from overriding decisions made in the community about the solutions authored or indeed the calibration of the system itself relative to user needs. In some sense the system must be released into public ownership for it to be truly owned.

Individuals Citizens form the collective society and should they perceive that a service not have relevancy or value then the continued lack of use or resentment towards it can result in investment being pulled from the service. As a service can die on the vine, so can a system designed to consult with the public. This could be the fate of the alternative system as has been the challenge of Civic forums that find engagement increasingly challenging and a culture of ongoing participation an even bigger obstruction to co-authoring communities.

The findings and reports generated from a forum that has little interaction from citizens is largely redundant. As targeting community needs is the first phase in authoring a higher standard of services for the public and in delivering a Bigger Society, the system and it's touchpoints must be positioned in such a way so as they capture, publish and distribute information and knowledge along optimally calibrated channels of communication.

In traditional marketing one seeks to find the appropriate 'mix'. This is the portfolio of media types to reach an audience. In the case of this system the 'mix' of type of media distributed is also important to ensure it meets with the literacy and barriers to access of citizens. Just as important however is where, how and when a citizen can feedback upon the communication they have received.

Traditional community mechanisms historically have formed organically through governance systems seeking to articulate the regular decision making and communication forums of communities. These were mechanisms such as the Town Hall, the local paper, the town crier, the public square and for informal knowledge transfer institutions such as the Public house.

Decision makers recognised communication hot spots and acknowledged them with an official function. An authority would embue these points where communities interacted with the capacity to capture information. There would be investment in the recognition of the frame either with the creation of a physical location and set of four walls or the assignment of a figure of authority to facilitate the proceedings.

ICT has allowed a forum to be articulated with extremely low cost and be dismantled and relocated if required should another location be more appropriate to exploit the more fluid interactions of a community. Thus the communication opportunities described above mean a forum can be formed responsive to changing communication habits and a community has the agility to author a more relevant infrastructure to garner public opinion or open a channel to broadcast information about an impending event, or perhaps to publish a newly aggregated knowledge set to support informed decision making among stakeholders.

Decisions about project authoring are an early stage in the realisation of something on the ground. Collaborative action will develop to the stage where it moves beyond ideas and knowledge gathering, past the scoping phase and into a resourcing phase.

Traditional mechanisms such as Public Subscription, allowed private citizens to act

in their communities interest without the intervention of Government. Authoring of a relevant project that they themselves had recognised or a service could occur swiftly in response to a local context requirement without an oversight body even needing to be informed, provided sufficient resources were privately available. The solutions themselves were then more agile as the users of the services were already connected and they had vested interest in recalibrating the service to need should it prove not to be meeting demands.

A system must be positioned within the societal and community ecosystem with an identity that provides both the authority of traditional decision making, resourcing and service authoring functions within the public perception, whilst also avoiding the sentiment that causes disengagement from Political process, systems and less respected institutions.

The services for the public must be able to be formed at the speed of trust. The pre-existing connections and vested interest brought about by co-authoring projects or solutions through public subscription allow communities a responsiveness, agility and consequential resilience that is to be vital given the current economic and environmental situation. ICT offers the opportunity to empower social faculties such as public subscription to allow access to far most vast sets of resource and insight allowing for a greater intelligence to be brought to bear on the design and a fuller resource to be pledged to the solution decided upon. This concept of public subscription 2.0 will only be possible however if the perception of the mechanism facilitating it manages to traverse the canyon of public opinion on a tightrope that promises a potential descent into reputation of mistrusted politics and unreliable, under-resourced, poorly motivated local action.

A delicate balance can be struck and a new form that exploits the opportunity of functionality at scale that is responsive and agile can be highly impactive on Societal well being. The opportunity is largely afforded by ICT, but authorised by the political and economic conditions, and the social demand. In part all of this underwritten by the sense of mass collaboration brought about by shifts in perception of society and communities relative to environmental issues.

Society seems to be perceived as 'Bigger' even without the agenda of the Coalition government after individuals are beginning to be receptive of the concept of community giving us an invisible connection. Acting and being in unison, and responding to a greater ill-defined need even without the permission of authority is a concept that has been broached with the public.

Individuals are recognising a wider responsibility and seeking to engage in a relevant way. The forums they can enter and the convenience of the form of touchpoints do not meet the functions they expect to be able to perform to a standard they want.

Should an individual want to participate in community and deliver a Bigger Society the least that can be provided is a mechanism to manage their response to the issues they perceive. Even if they chose not to resource such a solutions they should be able to step onto the first step of the ladder of participation and be able to contribute and engage with dialogue, discussion and the public debate and conversation about the narrative of society.

The shape of the response as the authoring of more targeted and relevant services for the public has yet to be determined by the public, as have the criteria for managing the performance of them. However the facility that enables the agility and functionality can be seen in the profiled components and a holistic proposition can be seen in the proposals and recommendations of this paper.

A more detailed proposal will follow of a single solution that moves towards that holistic solution.

The FAQuests (Frequently Articulated Quests) system based upon the Ask Be

Communicate Do framework.