Reboot asks: can public service start-ups transform Britain?

June 30th, 2009

Paul Miler says YES WE CAN.

We’re still just at the beginning of understanding the relationship between government and the ways that digital technologies can help deliver public goods – sometimes through government itself and sometimes through new lightweight public service start-ups, argues Paul.

John Thackara talks about the need to make to make services light-weight and flexible – he describes a world that is heavy – in fact too heavy – his impassioned call goes like this…

We need systems and platforms – services that enable people to better cooperate together more effectively and enjoyably – from faster to closer – from context to deeper context. A culture of community and connectivity has to be fun as well as challenging, as well as responsible. An asthetics of service and flow should inspire us, NOT JUST SATISFY US.

To put that into context Paul tells, what I think is a true story of inspiration…

One weekend in April last year we opened the doors of the Young Foundation in Bethnal Green for the first Social Innovation Camp funded by NESTA. Some of the best coders and designers in the UK showed up but they got a surprise because this wasn’t like their day job. We forced them together with people who understood social problems that we wanted them to try and come up with a solution for in the space of a weekend.

In the previous six weeks we’d collected over a hundred ideas for websites that could change the world from people all over the UK and then narrowed those down to six with the help of some expert judges. Over the course of the weekend, the participants not only built prototypes of the services but also fleshed out business plans and ideas for branding and how the sites might spread. They took them from ‘idea in the pub’ to something that people – whether investors or potential users – could look at and say that it might just work. At the end of the weekend, the teams pitched against one another with a prize awarded to the idea that could show the best ‘proof of potential’.

We’ve now run Social Innovation Camp two more times in the UK (in London and Glasgow) and the idea has spread to several other countries. What makes it work is the mixture of ‘fun and fear’ – or collaboration and competition – and of course that the participants like the challenge of building something cheap and quick that could change the world.

Now how cool is that? Remember, people embrace what they create!

Paul says… This model of starting small is a characteristic of start-ups that I think government needs to understand better…

and he goes onto say,

For me there is no question that a flurry of digital innovation could lead to both the better public outcomes and economic vibrancy we need to create new jobs and wealth.

Without a shadow of a doubt Paul is prescient in his declaration – but it requires a different logic and ethos – Thackara says we should embed socialbility into all that we do… as the social innovation camps so clearly demonstrates the way to do that.

Paul also touches on a very important theme about the apparent separation of offline (analogue) – online (digital). Digital – “the shock of the new.” This is what Gibson says,

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn’t cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn’t spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don’t have Wi-Fi.

So then: grassroots, deep context, flows of information and cooperation, co-creation, embeded sociability, transforms Britain for the better. This is the read-write society, we are currently building, its a wonderful thing!

Reboot is a event happening next Monday [6th July @ the Savoy Place] exploring what and how Britain in the networked society could be and should be like. You should come along

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