Just Enough Internet through a civil society lens
Supported by Co-op Foundation and The Federation, in partnership with Luminate.
This work is part of the Collective Action Labs that Rachel Coldicutt, Iona Lawrence and I are running. You can read about the work in the last 4 blogs posts here.
Before getting the Collective Action Labs up and running we needed to bring together a group of civil society organisations — or community and voluntary organisations — to define what ‘Just Enough Internet’ looks like in their contexts. The design of this overall programme of work follows this logic —
- Civil society is rarely at the table with big business and government when it comes to shaping decisions about technology — how it’s designed, created, regulated and distributed — as it continues to seep through and underpin all aspects of our lives.
- This is often because many civil society organisations don’t understand digital, data and technology, and especially its power and the societal dynamics it creates or entrenches. And lack of understanding isn’t the only issue — confidence, the space to think longer term and an ability to imagine the second order consequences or cumulative affects are all barriers to civil society engaging in, and especially leading this conversation.
- Civil society not being at the table with big business and government to influence what happens in relation to technology and society is an issue. There is a huge amount of wisdom in civil society about the granularity of people’s lives and the needs people have. As we’ve seen in the Covid-19 response, it is civil society that has held together much of our social fabric and been able to respond swiftly and intelligently to people’s needs. In addition, civil society doesn’t exist to bring profit to private shareholders — it exists for the common good.
- During this time of rapid digital adoption — let’s be honest, using Zoom is not digital transformation* — is it possible to create spaces for reflection where civil society groups and organisations gain greater awareness of technology and its dynamics. And if we can facilitate that, can we support them to define what ‘Just Enough Internet’ means for them? What limits do they have in mind? What are the principles and values civil society wants to see influence technology?
The first two workshops we’ve done, which I describe below, have been an attempt to create that space. We’ll be experimenting with some other ways to do that too. The Collective Action Labs will then follow as a way to build up the confidence and understanding of civil society organisations to advocate for those values and principles going forward, and to find power in doing so together. This is about cooperation and collective action most of all.
The purpose of these initial workshops was for civil society groups and organisations to explore the questions below.
And having reflected on those questions be able to work out the following two.
What is the role of civil society in stewarding what good looks like?
What is civil society uniquely placed to help us do in the safeguarding, the compromising and the preserving?
The rest of this blog posts shares the materials and content from the workshops in more detail.
The Workshops
Prior to the workshop, we asked people to fill out a survey. Below are some of the responses.
Recognising that the current public health emergency is forcing a lot of digital transformation, can you name two new ways your organisation has started to use digital technologies in recent months?
Short term its been the obvious things like adopting zoom etc, internally WhatsApp was being used informally but slack is now gaining traction as a workplace tool. Longer term we are exploring developing elearning to support groups more virtually than just webinars.
We are using Zoom to keep in touch for more formal staff and meetings and will do for trustees too if possible. Using WhatsApp Video and Facetime for more informal catch ups. Encouraging MeetUpMondays to try these methods too. Some are giving it a go.
Moving many of our sessions with young people online — under the banner of the Working Class Room — where they get to set the agenda and run sessions (where they want to). Using the excuse of lockdown to have more regular video catch ups with internal and external colleagues. We should have been doing elements of this a while ago but this has been a good catalyst.
What are the benefits of this in the short term?
Greater ability to consult and listen to audiences via digital channels and mobilising communities makes consultation more meaningful, nuanced and a conversation not a transaction.
Its brought the digital strategy from a nice to have to a must have and IG has become even more valued!
Speed of assembling and organising tasks.
Enables us all to continue working and developing plans/has pulled a new team together.
We get to see each others faces and we get to stay in touch in the best recreation of real life available right now.
There are some colleagues — internal and external — I’m getting to speak to more frequently. The transition from off to online activities is a great moment to reflect on what is essential to a programme, what works and what probably needing changing anyway.
Less time travelling, easier to coordinate getting together when people travelling much less.
Are there any disadvantages?
The loudest voices on social media and online comms are rarely the voice of the majority. You need to remain active in ensuring all voices are heard and seek out areas where no response has been found.
Knee jerking into platforms people know and are comfortable with rather than whats best for the company, privacy or users longer term.
It feels pressured sometimes. There is an element of performance.
We are finding it harder — though not impossible — to engage young people online. It is though a little early to tell as the lockdown has covered a lot of school holiday time so far. Many of the young people we work with don’t have Wifi or enough devices at home. We’ve been racing to get them tablets and data packages where possible. Online sessions with young people help remind you of the subtle things you do offline to make our work work. For example, being offline it’s easier to pick up the mood of the room, people’s body language and have side conversations. It’s harder to have the looser less structured part of being with colleagues and young people. The impact of these moments are more noticeable now they’re absent — from side conversations with colleagues that generate new ideas to a young person being able to take someone aside to disclose something serious.
How would you feel if you were still working this way in a year? Would that be a positive or a negative change? How about in 3 years? Or 5 years?
I think it’s part of a range of options, not the only answer
Some positives and some negatives. Less travel and more time at home, but lack of social connections and encounters with others debilitating.
It would be just part of what we do to communicate with each other but never replace it.
I think some of the problems above would decline a little if we’re doing things online but not in a lockdown where young people can’t leave their home. So far we are working online with young people we already know. Developing those relationships and the necessary trust online will be a challenge, not impossible but very different to how we’ve worked to date.
It would be impossible to deliver our objectives as an organisation.
A lot of our work is about making connections with young people, them seeing what they share with each other — despite different neighbourhoods, family heritage and so on — and helping them become comfortable being in and around the local & national corridors of power while being themselves. One of the things I find hardest to work out is how much of that depends on being in the same room. I feel it’s really important but I find it hard to pin down so I also want to make sure I’m not being needlessly cautious/conservative.
Encouraging people to reflect on and have more awareness of how they were using technology during this time was an important precursor to the workshop.
The workshop started with Rachel giving a run through of the Just Enough Internet concept, using the example of a cashless society to examine and reflect on what that means for people and communities.
The slides for the workshop are here.
The first activity we asked people to do was in small groups identify a technological shift they could see happening during Covid time. In the groups people then discussed the pros and cons of this at an individual and a community level.
One group looked at a shift of ‘all public services are now only available online’ and the other group focussed on ‘social connectedness only happens online.’
In the next part of the workshop groups discussed the questions below.
What can we safeguard?
- The humanness of our interactions
- Be more regularly connected, as a result of realising what’s possible with technology
- The not going back to ‘normal’
- A belief and mindset that things we didn’t think were possible have been shown they might be
- The confidence of using technology more routinely, whilst reducing unnecessary travel
- Challenging presenteeism and being more accepting of flexible working
- The shifting relationship between trust and control, and the acceptance of uncertainty
- The joint working and collaborative approaches continue beyond the emergency response
- Acts of neighbourliness and citizenship
- Caring for digital objects — eg. photo albums — how do we preserve and care in a digital age?
What can be compromised?
- The degree of control over personal data
- Our own agenda versus the collective — we can see the need to compromise on the former for the latter
- Boundaries between private life and public life —the liminal space between the two is where many of us are operating. What does confidential look like in this moment?
- How effective technology is to develop meaningful relationships, beyond the virtual. Some compromise of emotional intelligence.
How do we remember what to preserve?
- Make visible who and what was most essential during this time
- Moments for reflection aren’t common or necessarily easy to come by
- Remembering the value of different roles within organisations in times like this, and how they are compensated
- Is it too early for us to understand this? Something we might want to revisit
- What do we definitely not want to preserve? The inequality, the injustice, the nostalgia etc.
- Ensure the right people are weighing in on what should be preserved
- Codependency: How do we ensure people are able to transition away from the support services currently available once they stop providing those services?
- Different groups will experience intimacy in different ways — with those perhaps further behind, left further behind.
- Public life feels dense and that is important.
As we continue to gather reflections through this work — with some shorter workshops, calls and surveys — we will keep coming back to the questions shared earlier in this post. want to get to are answers to the following questions —
What is the role of civil society in stewarding what good looks like?
What is civil society uniquely placed to help us do in the safeguarding, the compromising and the preserving?
As we come to understand this, we can use the Collective Action Labs to mobilise civil society around the answers.
