Community councils, participation, CoP and knowledge

Peter Cruickshank

Bruce Ryan

Centre for Social Informatics

The Communities of Practice model for

understanding digital engagement by

hyperlocal elected representatives

What are community councils

• Their purpose is to represent small areas within Local Authorities

• Powers are limited

– Mostly, the right to be consulted

– Some more direct input into planning processes

• Community Council members are unpaid volunteers

• Small to non-existent budgets

– Average annual income is around £400

– enough to hire a monthly meeting room, pay for some stationery

(Arrangements vary across the United Kingdom between England, Wales and

Scotland and Northern Ireland but share a common model)

IFIP EGOV EPART 2015

Community Councils


http://is.cngn.co.uk/CClocationFinderV2/

Not very active online

Inactive

CCs

Active with online presences…

Total

CCs …missing

…out-of-

date

…up-

to-date

Total 213 498 351 307 1,369

% of all 16% 36% 26% 22% 100%

%of active NA 43% 30% 27% 100%


Worse:

A high level of churn: 223 (34%) online presences degrading or disappearing altogether

Not very active online

• This level of use of websites compares adversely with the 98% of Austrian Gemeinden and 90% of Norwegian kommuner.

• Only 38 CCs (12% of active online sites) had information to support engagement with the planning process • despite this being core to their mission.

• Official support is one factor but not the story

• Low level of use of Facebook & Twitter – No simple relationship between urban/rural characteristic of LAs

and CCs’ online effectiveness

– Profile of the community councillors (eg age) is probably also significant


Challenge

• Essentially, Looking at a failed part of the political system

…an edge case

» Technology will not solve this problem

– BUT: It is interesting to look for cases where technology does make a difference

• Can models of practice be found and shared?


The project

This is e-participation:

• Focus on those who engage with citizens

– Representatives as content creators

– If this is not effective, then a link with representative democracy is broken

• Looking at online activity

– We are aware of multichannel context and importance of F2F communication in

local communities

• Framing the situation as a knowledge management problem

“How are the community councillors learning to use the internet?”


What is a CoP • What is a CoP

– “A CoP is a self-organized group of individuals concerned with a specific practice, who are learning how to improve this practice through regular interaction” (Brown & Duguid)

– It is “tightly knit” – with legitimation process (Lave & Wenger)

– Has process of introducing new members

– Has boundaries

• Conceived around a core-periphery model – Parallels with pyramid of participation

– Core members set agenda, act as facilitators / knowledge brokers

– Others move towards centre

• Provides a model for understanding how – learn how to do things

– create a community to share & build on this knowledge

Here: community councillors are acting in an open network with voluntary participation


The project approach

• Ethnographic / action research pilot

• Interviewing & working with three CCs

• Around 20 participants

• One intervention

• Gathering data on links and support networks


Results

• Mix of individuals and bodies

• Reliance on small number of key players

• Very weak or non existent links between many community councillors

• No intentional KM: CCs are (small) knowledge silos

• Links tend to be vertical, not horizontal

• We’re either looking at a proto-cluster – or ‘beyond the periphery’

• Impact of project: participant education


The optimistic view


Boundaries and transitions


Community of interest 1:

Interested in CCs

Community of learning:

Teaching and learning on how to use

digital comms for CCs

Community of interest 2:

Interested in digital comms

Potential Community of practice:

Using digital comms for CCs

Interested in digital comms and CCs

Transition into the CoP (via legitimated

peripheral participation?)

‘Churn’: individuals ceasing to engage

?

Need more understanding of transitions

• Results show that there are some links – But many features of a CoP are missing

– Another example of a project where the ‘dark matter’ of non-engaged participation matters

• Good example of need for caution on using the label “CoP” – It’s not an online forum

– It’s not people talking to each other

• Challenges – More to understand what’s going on & why this isn’t leading to links

– Can we design interventions?

• Next step: bigger, longer project


THANK YOU

Peter Cruickshank

[email protected]

@spartakan


mailto:[email protected]

Community councils, participation, CoP and knowledge

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