This paper was first given to a conference organised by the Society
for Public Information Networks in November 1995, published in
Inventing the Future, Partnerships for Tomorrow, January
1996.
The INSINC report was published by
IBM in 1997 and is available at http://www.uk.ibm.com/comm/community/uk117.html
This paper is based on some of the
initial findings of a National Working Party on Social Inclusion in
the Information Society (INSINC) established by Community Development
Foundation and IBM UK in 1995. INSINC is considering in particular
those policy measures which will be required to ensure that community
groups and community organisations need not be excluded from the
benefits of the developing technologies, notably online
communications and multimedia.(1)
The context for community organisations, in spite of increasing
financial and political constraints for many of them, could be said
to be promising. The main grounds for optimism reflect the traditions
and culture of communication within the community sector, and the
contribution which the technology can make in this respect.
The new online environment offers two significant advantages:
Both of these reflect particular
strengths of community and voluntary organisations and so we might
expect them to take advantage of the new technology and exploit it in
significant and creative ways. Already many have, of course; but for
many others, various barriers (which may or may not be acknowledged)
remain, such as:
It follows that a key aspect of
inclusion for such organisations is support and development work
around access to and exploitation of IT: and local authorities have a
leading role to play in this respect.
In practice, community computing support has long been a relatively
inexpensive requirement which could lead to significant improvements
in the efficiency and effectiveness of the community and voluntary
sectors.(2) Only in a few cases has this strategic need been met, and
seldom has its provision been evaluated.
At present, this role is sometimes addressed in the context of
partnership initiatives which are being set up to develop the
information infrastructure within an area - the public information
networks. There are numerous examples of such projects at present,
most of them having two characteristics in particular:
first, of necessity they comprise partnerships of local authority,
private sector, academic and voluntary sector agencies, perhaps
seeking to exploit a new or forthcoming cable network, perhaps based
on a libraries network or in some cases some innovative
combination;
secondly, many of them are struggling with a new culture of
experimentation, which contrasts with traditional management
cultures.
I shall discuss these two characteristics further.
Involvement of community
organisations in partnership initiatives may prove to be crucial.
Social exclusion from the information society may well begin as soon
as partnerships are formed which do not represent local communities.
It's important to note that this means community groups and
organisations, not just voluntary organisations.
Authorities which consider that just talking to their local Council
for Voluntary Service constitutes consulting with their community,
are unlikely to achieve adequate representation and lay themselves
open to accusations of spurious consultation at best.
The rhetoric of community involvement is now widely accepted but the
practice appears still to baffle many authorities. Sometimes this
becomes apparent from attitudes towards 'community information'.
Library services which invest in community information often do so
very much in a top-down manner, collecting and making available in
their own terms information about agencies known to them; and yet
there is enormous potential for community organisations to
self-publish online once they have access to the systems. Enabling
such agencies to contribute should be an essential part of an
authority's information strategy.
Part of the problem here has to do with the perceptions of community
organisations and their appreciation of new opportunities. For most
such agencies, the day to day skirmishes of financial survival,
provision of critical services and other demands, leave little time
to be invested in initiatives of uncertain promise, which cannot be
applied directly to the organisation's short-term needs.
In consequence, at the outset they may be reluctant to participate,
and will require persuasion. Many community groups are only
interested in ownership and consultation on issues which they feel
comfortable with, issues which they know about. The authority's role
here, (or the role of the agency leading on the network initiative),
is not to take 'no answer' for an answer: to demonstrate the
importance of the proposed network as a social resource, and
therefore the incontestable requirement for community groups to be
involved.
Two issues are likely to arise:
the language used should not be technical and partners should be
prepared to outline all implications in terms comprehensible to
non-specialists;
it may be necessary to make adjustments to the proposed timescale:
community organisations must be on board, but very often they have
not the ability to go at the same speed as larger organisations and
businesses - they must be enabled to go at their own pace: in the
long run, this is in the overall interest of the community as a
whole.
Partnerships often founder on an appreciation of the differences in
organisational cultures. People accustomed to working in
bureaucracies may find frustrating the apparent preoccupation of
community groups with consultative procedures; but such groups
similarly may find it incomprehensible when someone within the
authority applies for a modem and this results in a complete overhaul
of the council's IT strategy. Time and understanding are necessary to
make partnerships work.
Organisational culture will have a
significant effect on the adoption and exploitation of IT. In some
ways, community and voluntary agencies are more likely to be able to
take advantage of the flexible, friendly systems and services which
are becoming available, than are other kinds of organisation.
Over the past 10 years or so, small unprofessionalised agencies have
had to grapple with rigid, linear computer systems which require
mandatory combinations of keystrokes and which force the user down
paths with few or no options. Today's graphical interfaces are suited
to a different kind of temperament - more creative, more flexible,
less mechanistic.
The mouse is the metaphor for this new kind of familiarity in
computer use, and those who take to it may be those least comfortable
with hierarchical and command-driven systems - those people and
organisations who have no difficulty thinking laterally, reacting
quickly and innovatively.
Associated with this is a more temporary phenomenon, to do with the
legitimacy of experimentation. In the management of many community
and voluntary organisations, the notion of experimentation is
difficult to countenance.
The scarce resource of time and the relentless demands on primary
services (especially in the field of community care) often limit
activities to direct priorities only. But the character of current IT
developments, regarding both the information highway and multimedia,
tends to confound strategic approaches.
In the short term, inclusion in this society calls for organisational
cultures where the need to give time to exploring the potential and
pertinence of systems and services is recognised and legitimised. It
is possible, after all, to be strategic about experimentation, in
terms of planned time, work programmes and so forth: and the
technologies are now more about discovery than about tasks; more
about communication than about repackaging.
The notion of the information society
has seen the revival of some concepts, often associated with
community librarianship in the 1970s - labels such as 'information
poverty' and 'information have-nots'; and the slogan 'information is
power'. To some extent, such language reflects sloppy thinking, but
it also reflects legitimate concerns which need to be unpacked.
It seems to me to be misleading to suggest that some people are
information 'have-nots'. People have a greater or lesser need for
information, just as they have greater or lesser awareness of its
usefulness or applicability. To imply that information is of
comparable importance and usefulness to everybody is questionable:
there's an assumption that access to information is somehow crucial
to our survival and development in this future society.
This may appear valid for the networking classes. But for self help
groups, for women's groups trying to confront drug and crime issues
on a peripheral estate, for groups struggling to get health or
transport or play facilities in a rural area, the notion that just
getting information will somehow empower them is silly and may be
offensive. As George Orwell put it, 'you'd have to be an intellectual
to believe that: no ordinary person would be so stupid.'
What's interesting is not so much the question of whether having
information (or not having it) can affect the distribution of power
in society - obviously it can, but not independently of other more
dominant factors such as economic disadvantage, access to sources of
political influence, and so on - but the nature of the information
culture from which such language arises.
This culture is characterised by being middle class, articulate and
educated, and by being based in a kind of Victorian collectors'
culture, where information is something almost tangible which you
acquire and store and keep around you. It does not favour informal
information or informal communication and it does not favour
information sharing.
We really have to recognise the decline of this culture if we are to
exploit the new opportunities, and come to understand what kind of
information culture is taking its place. My suspicion is that, not
for the first time, campaigning organisations have something to teach
us. The kinds of information use associated with Road Alert for
example, or Friends of the Earth, are quite different to the
traditional information culture; a culture where the characteristics
of the communication are as important as the content.
We need to consider in a different light the role of information in
social and community contexts. For example, instead of speaking of
'information poverty' (which is a label we should avoid using), we
should be referring to people's 'information capability' - their
ability to acquire and use information for their own ends.(3) This
capability may not be well-developed - that is the task - but it is
latent and may be a key factor in the strength and pluralism of the
information society.
Information capability comprises more than just access to information
(which is the element upon which the library and information
professions have become fixated): it also comprises information
awareness; and the skills to exploit information once it has been
acquired. The information society is unlikely to be socially
inclusive in any meaningful sense if the development of information
capability is not addressed.
1 The observations in this paper are mine and do not necessarily
represent the views of the Working Party.
2 Press enter: information technology in the community and voluntary
sector: report of the IT and Communities Working Party. - London:
Community Development Foundation, 1992.
3 Freedom of access to information / Kevin Harris. In: Informing
communities. - Community Services Group of The Library Association,
1992.