Metrics & Measurement
One downside of the relentless push for metrics, outcomes, impact and purpose in the social change space is that it drives toward doing only what is measurable in the short term (and implies that the change we seek is linear and predictable).  But social change is rarely so simple.

Transforming Economies
During the past few years, I’ve worked with several communities and organizations on what started out as a “jobs” agenda, but wound up a much longer term effort to shift economies – either from extraction industries to sustainable ones, or to industries that make more effective of a region’s unique collection of economic, social, and environmental gifts.

Blueprint for Innovation?
Innovation is central to this shift – not just innovation inside of firms, universities or industries but innovation in the way regional economies are organized, the way neighborhoods meet their needs, and the way families find prosperity.

There is no blueprint for this kind of transformation. This does not mean we should not plan, but it does suggest the need for an openness to new ideas and organizing structures that enable greater participation by more people – networks rather than just organizations or advisory councils, for example.

Plans vs. Experiments
There is often tension between those who want a detailed plan and accountable implementation team and those who prefer a more iterative approach in which diverse community stakeholders are included in the reinvention process. Change agents face pressure to assign specific targets and outcomes to engagement opportunities specifically designed to allow ideas and trusting relationships to emerge.

Social network analysis can provide a bridge here – helping stakeholders measure new connections and relationships as outcomes on the theory that connectivity amongst people working on the same problems in different disciplines or jurisdictions generates more (and possibly better) and more broadly owned ideas than traditional planning processes, and promotes overall community resilience through enhanced social relationships.

Still, change work is hard. After three years with transformation projects in mid Michigan and Arizona, for example, we saw glimmers of the kind of changes we worked toward, but had to constantly defend the idea that connectivity (social capital or “whuffie” if you are Tara Hunt fan) is a good in and of itself, even as we worked diligently to channel it into key community priorities.

Based on the above video, Steven Johnson’s new book (Where Good Ideas Come From, which I have not yet read but have on pre-order) might have made our jobs easier (and certainly will going forward, even as my role has changed).

If you have any interest at all in innovation, community change or infographics (turtles, in particular – all via Cognitive Media, UK), give it four minutes.

It will make your day.

Washington, DC was first out of the gate in 2008, with Apps for Democracy, the brainchild of Peter Corbett (iStrategyLabs) and Vivek Kundra (then the District's Chief Technology Officer, now our nation's first Chief Information Officer).

Many cities and communities have since embraced similar efforts: New York, San Francisco, and Seattle among them.

This week, in conjunction with OSCON (O'Reilly Open-Source Convention and a programmers' paradise), Portland, Oregon honored its own Civic Apps competition award winners – Sara Sharp, Robb Shecter, John McBride, Andy Wallace, Edwin Knuth, Max Ogden, and Gary Kee.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams emceed the event. Dozens of tech denizens were in attendance, along with venerable OSCON host, Tim O'Reilly.

What the Civic Apps Movement is Really About

It's irresistably exciting – the idea that government could make data available to enable new intelligence, create new services, even spur new businesses that meet the real needs of citizens and residents. But there's also something more profound going on here: we are redefining what it means to govern.

Tim O'Reilly hints at this idea in the video below ("open source is not about what we thought is was about"), and Andy Wallace reinforces it.

Andy built PDXBus because he wanted to use it (apparently, so did a lot of other people, myself included). Before open source (the behavioral code, not the actual code), Andy might have shared the idea with TriMet and a few friends, but it may not have made TriMet's list of top priorities. And then, who knows?

Instead, TriMet made data available that Andy could use to build an application that we could all download onto our phones and never have to stand wondering what to do at a bus stop again.

This is one (tiny) example of a broader and ongoing renegotiation of roles between governments, residents and citizens, and businesses happening all around us.

Cities and communities that experiment with data and information sharing, engage residents in problem-solving, make it easy for diverse people to connect with one another and their government(s), and allow the lessons of small collaborative ventures to influence the larger structures of governing and managing at a mass scale are laying the foundation for gov – and community – 2.0.

And the winner?

It's us.

Last week, I participate in a two-day event that brought together researchers, thinkers, urban leaders, policy professionals, and social innovators to share strategies for strengthening regional economies and improving the quality of life in the world's urban regions. Graciously hosted by Keshav Varma, Head of the World Bank Institute's Urban Program, the Innovative Cities' agenda was organized around the theme of competitiveness, but covered a wide range of challenges urban leaders face: intra-regional competition, social inclusiveness, positioning on the value chain, "smart" policies, transport and infrastructure capacity, and cultivating a healthy business climate.

Unfortunately, I had to leave for a flight just prior to the last panel – the summary panel. So I will offer my own top takeaways, based on no criteria other than personal resonance. I have not been able to stop thinking about these issues since I left the symposium.

1. Jurisdictional boundaries are rarely aligned with where problems need solving, but collaborative approaches can make a real difference.

The first panel (on intra-urban competition) featured economic developers and urban planners from the Washington, DC region: Gerald Gordon (Executive Director, Fairfax County Virginia Economic Development Authority), Steve Silverman (Director, Montgomery County Maryland Department of Economic Development), and Richard Reinhard (Deputy Executive Director, Downtown DC Business Improvement District). After a brief presentation from each on their approaches to development and key priorities, moderators Stephen Fuller (Center for Regional Analysis, George Mason University) and Greg Clark

(OECD, LEEDs Program) began asking hard questions about shared strategies and significant challenges. Transportation surfaced immediately, as did the incentive structures and institutional barriers to collaboration on long-term (read: expensive and shared) priorities. Rich Reinhard (attributing the framing to his boss) offered the following insight:

"Our policy and program tools exist at three levels: federal, state local. Our problems exist at three different levels: global, regional, neighborhood."

Therein lies the problem.

At the risk of sounding like I've got a hammer and have discovered a bevy of nails, I have since come to see so many contexts in which this misalignment impedes shared action: jobs policy, site selection/location, educational cachement areas, investments in higher education or business support programs, etc. Government services (and the policies that drive them) are nearly always tied to jurisdictions in ways that inhibit scale and discourage broad, public participation through which creative solutions can emerge.

A specific example was raised in the room: a DC-commuter admitted "slugging" (essentially, organized hitch-hiking to DC from northern Virginia) and wanted to know (quite rightly) why it is illegal and what the alternatives might be.

At one level, this is a commuter-specific issue economic development professionals tend not to want to spend their time addressing (imagine the safety and liability issues...). But it is also an example of a larger pattern of citizen-led innovation (enabled by technology among other things) that could inform regional policy approaches on transport and other issues. So many citizen-led innovations emerge as neighborhood-based social practices (and occupy a legal grey zone), that it is hard to link them to policy making, let alone share them across a region. Moreover, this is the kind of innovation that can be shared any any direction – advanced economies have as much or more to learn from emerging ones as the other way around.

This speaks to new role of leaders - it's less about being the one with the solution, and more about knowing how to cultivate, test, and grow ideas that work (see reivew of Open Leadership for more on this subject) collaboratively, at different levels, and on different time horizons.

2. We need many more conversations about the enabling role of technology in helping cities thrive (citizens and residents, not just governments) so that we can inspire new models of governance and leadership.

Relina Bulchandani (Cisco Smart + Connected Communities initiative, of which this blog is a part), Gerard Mooney (IBM Global Government & Education), and Debra Lam (ARUP) made important presentations about how shared data and information platforms, systems (and sensors) integrated into the built environment can change what's possible for city leaders trying to manage extremely complex systems.

Relina's presentation emphasized how ubiquitous connectivity and the proliferation of mobile devices give us the potential to reimagine many aspects of work, learning, commerce, and life. By partnering with cities like San Francisco and Amsterdam to redesign urban information architectures, Cisco is helping city leaders reinvent the way they collect data, turn it into intelligence they can act upon, and share it with citizens and residents who can apply it (and contribute to it) too.

Gerald described similar partnerships with urban environments in the context of IBM's SmarterPlanet initiative, an effort to help cities get smarter about systems that support water, health, public safety, and transport, and begin to place citizens at the center of their work.

ARUP is an employee-owned engineering and design firm helping to green the built environment. Debra's presentation focused on measurement and feedback systems in the built environment that can help influence behaviors of people and communities. She offered some terrific visualizations that made evident why data transparency and presentation matter. When her slidedeck is made available, I will link it here.

Debra was also the first speaker to champion middle managers and experienced civil servants. While most of the symposium focsed on leaders and leadership, she argued that it is middle managers that make things work – these doers should not be overlooked as key agents of large-scale metropolitan change efforts.

3. We're not just reinventing strategies and tactics, but our fundamental approach to economic competitiveness and urban development.

Bruce Katz, Director of Brookings' Metropolitan Policy Program, launched the Symposium with some key observations about cities:

• They will drive the next economy and create low-carbon ways to work and live.
• They will grow in importance (because urban migration is increasing worldwide).
• They will insist on new approaches to common, urgent challenges like long-term infrastructure planning, trade policy, and regional development.

Many other speakers used these as a foundation for their own observations about important changes within and across cities – growth, aging, poverty, access issues (energy, water, food), etc. – and described approaches to their key challenges.

But competing paradigms did emerge, provoked in particular by Bijal Bhatt (SEWA), Deputy Mayor Jerry William Silaa (Dar es Salaam), Michael Joroff (MIT), TIm Campbell (UrbanAge) and Melanie Walker (Gates Foundation):

• Are we building clusters or making places? How are these agenda linked?/li>li>What role does human capital play in development?
• Is competitiveness about growth or about broader indicators of health, soul, and prosperity?
• Is development about sharing lessons from the US and Europe with the rest of the world, or about co-creating and sharing new models for sustainable working and living?
• Do leaders make places or do citizens?
• How do cities learn from each other (who doe the learning?)
• How do we think about integrating the poor in development strategies? Are there things leaders need to do differently to ensure engagement?
• How do we start measuring/comparing true costs of development, resource extraction?
• How do we scale approaches that work (and does that mean replicate? grow? network? or something else?)
• When (and how) are we going to integrate citizens and residents in not just policy review, but actual implementation – engaging citizens in placemaking as we do leaders?

We began defiing components of a "new operating system" for cities of the future.

And that's when I had to leave. I'd be grateful if another attendee could summarize the last session in the comments below. I will attach any materials I receive in the next week or so to this post.

Many thanks to Sabine Palmreuther, Jennie Datoo, Narmeen Iftikhar, Damon Luciano, Kashev Varma, and everyone else at the World Bank who helped organize the event, and the speakers and attendees who made it come alive

The Strength of Weak Ties

Mark Granovetter posited the strength of weak ties in 1973, launching a field of inquiry with a 1985 update focused on the problem of embeddedness - the idea that economic relationships are embedded inside social relationships. A follow-up in 2005 called for an interdisciplinary approach to the "black box" of social relationship so that their impact on economic behaviors and outcomes could be revealed and better understood.

The Science of Social Networks Applied

Most people understand the economic power of networks intuitively - and use them for job-hunting, learning, caring for their families and communities, and a myriad of other things.

Industry has long attempted to harness the power of networks for generating sales, recruiting talent, entering new markets, and cultivating and applying innovation - inside firms and industries, and more recently, through crowdsourcing.

And at the community level, scholars like Sean Safford have been able to show that the health of social networks have a significant impact on the ability of communities withstand economic disruption.

But social networks have been difficult and time consuming to document.

Enter technology.

Today, millions of people leave digital breadcrumbs that make their networks visible - from text messages on mobile phones to updates on Facebook or Twitter.

We are creating more efficient and effective ways to map, measure (and cultivate!) healthy networks, as evidence of their economic power continues to mount.

New Netwok Finds

Last week, these gems came across my radar:

1. Network Diversity and Economic Development (Nathan Eagle, Michael Macy, Rob Claxton in Science Magazine, May 2010 - summary visible with out subscription). Researchers analyzed cell phone data (in Britain) to reveal the social networks of cell phone users. They found that communities whose residents maintain diverse networks were more prosperous than communities with less diverse networks. Conclusion?

   “On a population level, the surprisingly strong correspondence we discovered between the structure of social contacts and the economic well-being of populations highlights the potential benefit of socially targeted policies for economic development.”

   (A plain-English summary of the same study is available at Futurity here.)
2. Social Enterprise: It Takes A Network (Raj Kumar, McKinsey Digital, What Matters). The author argues that the network is (potentially) a more effective organizational structure for meeting "bottom of the pyramid" needs when the goals is to assess impact and not just commercial sales. Significantly, this changes the model for "scaling up" and implies the need for alternatives to program- or organization-based measures as the primary indicators of success.

As social network mapping and analysis becomes simpler and more accessible, more of us can invest more time and energy in network weaving - building the social networks we now know really matter.

The last two weeks offered unprecedented drama in the UK, as the general election resulted in the resignation of Gordon Brown as the head of the Labour Party on May 11, and the establishment of a coalition government lead by new Prime Minister David Cameron (Conservative) and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (Liberal Democrat). The domestic agenda? Reducing the UK's £163B deficit and addressing the highest rates of joblessness in over 15 years.

And then there's Greece, flanked (in print) by the words "austerity" and "job loss" in roughly equal measure.

Jobs Issues are Central

The jobs issue is at the heart of some of the most difficult challenges cash-strapped governments face the world over (but in particular, where the tango between the finance and housing industries wrought the greatest havoc). Some of these connections are obvious: people who lose their jobs have less money to spend, reducing the government revenue they would otherwise pay in the form of income and sales tax and increasing their need for government services - unemployment insurance, training grants, food stamps, health insurance, transport, even public libraries.

There are also less obvious "costs" linked to unemployment ranging from an increase in public school enrollment as more parents have difficulty paying for private school, to widespread declines in risk-taking on the part of entrepreneurs, consumers, lenders, and even job seekers ill-matched with their current positions but fearful of leaving them. Never mind the longterm and potentially massive social costs.

Community Perspectives on Jobs

This past March, my colleagues and I at Corporation for a Skilled Workforce captured the experiences of workforce professionals at the National Association of Workforce Boards Annual Forum - they are the community faces of workforce policy in communities across the U.S. And they are very concerned about jobs.

Policy Levers for Job Creation

We also interviewed policy professionals and thought leaders representing a wide range of perspectives about the policy prescriptions they were advocating - from Dean Baker's (CEPR) ideas on job sharing to Jagadeesh Gokhale (Cato) on loosening credit and promoting self-employment to Heidi Schierholz's (EPI) case for a second stimulus. Most focused on federal-level interventions. (The entire set of 14 videos is in this playlist.)

Communities, too, are advancing solutions:

• Investing in innovation and growing sustainable industries through collaborative ventures;
• Economic gardening, regional resilience efforts, and other locally-focused development strategies;
• Promoting upskilling among workers and those looking for work;
• Reinventing placement services and supports;
• Experimenting with new (and revisiting old) approaches to training and  placement; and
• Using technology to make information more accessible and transparent,  and to connect job seekers with  resources, information and assistance outside of government - leveraging community resources and social  networks.

Over the next six weeks, we will be looking specifically at government policies, programs, and approaches that seek to accelerate job creation and promote prosperity, in a sustainable way.

What’s Community Agility?

Two years ago – when we launched the Community Initiatives Team – agility was on ours minds. Pre-recession, we were hearing flat, but seeing spiky. Our team members live and work in regions as diverse as Portland (OR), Tucson (AZ), Charlotte (NC), and all over Michigan. So while the U.S. economy at the time was widely perceived as booming, our communities were still smarting from the steep downturn a few year before. Yet, we were also bearing witnesses to infinitely creative responses to new challenges, and the beginnings of new kind of economy.

In our work, we were confronting significant structural challenges:

• Decreasing overall economic security for families despite job growth
• Industry-wide transitions changing job and skill requirements for large numbers of workers
• Lack of access to investment capital where entrepreneurs seemed to need it most
• Chronic budget shortfalls compromising basic public services in our communities, and
• Institutions, agencies, and organizations with clearly shared missions acting in isolation.

At the same time, we saw opportunities for collaboration (on and offline) and reinvention everywhere. We focused on building agility.

Developing Methods for Change

With the aim of helping communities find opportunities to thrive while also managing through downturns, and with partners including the U.S. Department of Labor, the Council on Competitiveness, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, we developed methods and approaches for cultivating agility:

• Developing shared intelligence, by collecting and making meaning out of data that matters to multiple community organizations and agencies.
• Promoting network weaving, based on the theory that a whole host of benefits derived from well-networked communities (we had been studying networks for some time, but found Sean Safford’s early work at MIT – subsequently published in book form – very compelling). Later we partnered with June Holley to learn techniques for social network analysis.
• Facilitating collaboration across “silos”, so that people from across disciplines, departments, agencies, programs, organizations, and institutions find common ground and begin to share ideas, talent, and resources in ways that maximize wider community benefits.
• Encouraging public engagement, since real change happens in firms, schools, and neighborhoods, not just boardrooms.
• Advancing an entrepreneurship agenda that emphasizes not just new ventures, but entrepreneurial culture itself.

These methods emphasize the building of capacity—to collaborate and to innovate—so that communities can reinvent themselves over and over, not just build the next new thing. We worked with (and learned from) community leaders and project partners from five U.S. Department of Labor WIRED regions (Southeast MI, Mid MI, Southern AZ, Kansas City, and the Piedmont Triad NC partnership) and two BRAC regions (Ft. Bragg NC and Southwest OK), and a host of other communities in transition.

Checking In

Last week, our team met in person to review progress, and take a look at the current (and growing) ecosystem around community agility (now increasingly called resilience.)

New Trends

While we’d been paying attention to the emergence of new conversations and community innovation spaces individually, sharing this information helped all of us see that we are now in the company of more (and more diverse) people advancing some of the same goals. Here are a few we’re pretty excited about.

Social Innovation

The people who identify with “social innovation” are a wildly diverse, eclectic and exciting bunch, ranging from the academically-inclined Stanford Social Innovation Review crowd to the entrepreneurial community that is Social Edge (Skoll Foundation) to the activists, organizers, and media mavens who see new ways to make change through the social web. The new White House Office of Social Innovation will certainly accelerate interest in the field, which is now beginning to map itself. And interest in social innovation is appropriately global. The Young Foundation, SIX, and the Skoll World Forum, together with institutions like Ashoka and the Aspen Institute have nurtured social innovation networks around the globe for years. More recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has sponsored a host of initiatives designed to help innovators of all ages and stations leverage the power of social media and the web.

Video and Twitter have helped make much of this activity accessible and transparent. Last week, 900 people gathered at SoCap09 in San Francisco to figure out how to fund it.

Gov2.0

Government (at all levels) is also beginning to reimagine itself. The Obama campaign demonstrated the power of technology to enable self-organization in a campaign context, now we’re working through the implications of this kind of mass connectivity on governing itself. Catalyzed by Tim O’Reilly’s advocacy of “Government as Platform,” gov2.0 has become a rallying cry for transparency, participation, and just better, smarter, government  – among people inside government and out. This week’s Gov2.0 Summit brings together public servants and technologists and advocates and organizers, many of whom are already working together to build the next generation of public intelligence systems and platforms for participation.

The Resilience Movement

The resilient communities movement stems from two different though related sets of ideas: one relating to security, and the other to sustainability more broadly.

• The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploring Community Preparedness and Resilience in a variety of ways – the Community and Regional Resilience Initiative (CARRI), for example, reflects a partnership between DHS, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Lab, and a handful of communities in the Southestern U.S.
• The Institute of Urban and Regional Development at the University of California Berkeley (supported by the MacArthur Foundation) has established a Building Regional Resilience Network , which has published a variety of papers on different dimensions of resilience (environmental, social, economic).
• The Council on Competitiveness made the materials used in its Risk and Resilience workshop available to the public.

People are helping communities become more resilient outside the U.S. as well – parallel efforts exists in Australia, and a more locally-driven approach launched in England.

Smart Communities

Firms like Cisco are promoting smart cities from a data-connectivity point of view, and IBM is advancing its “internet of things” agenda. But people and processes matter just as much. The stakes are high, the promise, great, and the need, urgent. Brookings is tracking the impact of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) on cities and regions seeking to advance innovation or leverage structural change. Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Stanley Litow offer a manifesto for smarter, more connected communities.  John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison’s Big Shift focuses on change dynamics in firms, but their analysis offers insight relevant to communities, too.

Going Forward?

We’re taking a good look at this context in an effort to learn from others, and focus our efforts in ways that maximize impact.

We believe in the power of not just tinkering, but “…unbundling and reconstituting…”
– Don Tapscott