No matter how famous you are, it doesn't mean a thing if people haven't heard of you.
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it isn't: it's just another of those reality checks, and it's closely linked to
the last one.
Yesterday I was chairing (and speaking at) an event for local government staff in Bradford. It was billed as a workshop on 'digital futures', and covered everything from social media and its uses to the growth of the digital economy.
The purpose was to help council officers think about how the brave new world might affect them, and how they might need to change their work and their thinking to make the most of it. You can only scratch the surface of that in one morning, but we had a good variety - from the experiences of
Digital Birmingham to the way hospitals in Airedale were using telemedicine to work with nurses inside Full Sutton Prison.
But first, that reality check. Hot on the heels of
Reboot Britain, I thought I'd test how familiar our audience was with some of the thinkers and thinking that Reboot Britain took pretty much for granted.
Out of around 40 council officers there, four had heard of the
Digital Britain report. Three had heard of
Charlie Leadbeater, one of the keynote speakers at Monday's bash. As for
Clay Shirky, author of
Here Comes Everybody and every aspiring social media guru's guru, he drew a blank. (There's a link to one of his talks
here, if you're interested).
What this emphatically doesn't mean is that the people at yesterday's event were ignorant. Far from it: they were intelligent, educated people doing important, if unsung, jobs. Many had strings of qualifications and memberships of professional institutes as long as your arm.
The point is that you can't as a matter of course expect people who have busy lives that demand focus and attention to acquire detailed knowledge of issues that don't appear to impact on their work. It might be desirable, it may often be necessary, but we shouldn't assume. A case has to be made about why this matters.
That's a message the Reboot Britain crowd, the strategists in the new Department of Business Busyness (or whatever it's called today), and the education, skills and culture people need to take on board.
My
previous post dealt with the distance between these people and those who tend to be lumped together as 'digitally excluded': the poor, the unqualified, the unemployed. Yesterday's workshop underlined the distance between the London Twitterati and, I'd suggest, the bulk of the professional middle class.
There are lots of ways of bridging that gap, and, despite my reservations about Reboot Britain, many were on show in London on Monday. I'm excited by the possibilities of
Social by Social, for example; and I recognise that many were inspired by what they heard and did there (one attendee rightly took me to task on this). But, as
comments on my last post suggested, much of what's most interesting - like
Harringay Online or
Talk about Local or
Digital Butetown - are happening anyway, and the links that matter most are being made at local level.
That doesn't mean we don't need Clay Shirky. The figureheads are helpful, because they can get people in high places to change their thinking: they're fortunate enough to have a longer and broader reach than most of us. What interests me, though, is how we change our thinking in the other places - the ones where people live, work, socialise, have kids, eat and sleep.
Three insights from yesterday struck me as helpful. First was the continuing importance of place. As Michael Osborne from Arup commented,
Ilkley Moor is one of Bradford's greatest economic assets. People will go to Bradford and Airedale for the quality of life, if they know they can do business there and be among sharp, imaginative people. The geeky stuff is just a toolkit, albeit a rapidly changing one.
Second was the need to tolerate failure. Dave Harte, economic development manager at Digital Birmingham, described the world of new technologies, and social media in particular, as the 'Wild West'. We're in a melting pot, and we'll get some things wrong. That's OK. Accepting that it's OK is possibly the biggest mental change for local government. But it's better to be like the greasy spoon café under the railway line in Birmingham and gamble on offering free wi-fi to the local white van man (see picture, below, from Dave Harte's presentation) than to assume this stuff is for other people.
Third was a comment by Liz Wallis, who runs
ict active, a scheme to encourage property owners to equip buildings to fit the requirements of high-tech tenants. Navigating and understanding the digital maze, she suggested, is about developing wisdom and discernment. In other words, testing, probing, trying out and making judgements - deciding what is of value and what is worthless. Those skills will prove for more valuable in the long run than any strategy or blue-sky thinking.
