For the much of the past 10 years, Justine Jones has lived an isolated existence, often in agony and unable to move. Bedridden, her only respite was when a care worker would pop by to help prepare meals and give her some gentle exercise around the home.

Amazingly, Justine is only 24 years old and has had rheumatoid arthritis since her early teens. This pragmatic, articulate young woman decided the condition would not limit her zest for life and recently she applied to go on an individual budgets programme with Bromley council, so she could live a more independent life. She admits the decision transformed her life.

Justine is now able to make her own decisions, lead her own life and decide who she employs as home help and when they should work for her. Justine says the experience has been so liberating that she is now working as a champion with other people on the individual budgets programmes; to take people like her away from institutionalised care and bring them back into the community.

I spoke to Justine and many other people like her at a council information day in Bromley. Young people with disabilities, older people who are disabled and unable to cope at home on their own, these people rely on state help – often begrudgingly – because they have no alternative.

Theirs is a lonely life spent almost entirely indoors, prisoners in the own homes. Their only window on the world is an occasional visit by an overburdened and grossly underpaid care worker.

At this point I want to tie their lonely lot with the much wider debate going on about online networks, social media, the Big Society and a host of other initiatives to help bring a sense of community together across the UK. Much of this work is voluntary, and given the state of the country’s finances, will remain so.

Many of the projects now developing are noble. People around the country are setting up hyperlocal websites – small, neighbourhood projects – to try to bring disparate communities together to talk about important local issues. Unconferences – arenas where citizens can speak out about their lives and communities – are growing in popularity.

Here are a couple of initiatives:
http://neighbourhoodsonline.org/
http://journallocal.co.uk/2010/09/25/hyperlocal-cafes-continue-the-conversation/

The individuals behind these projects are naturally suspicious of big and small government. But they often fail to see that the public sector helps to create and maintain links with some of our most isolated and vulnerable people.

Meanwhile, local government is also getting involved with community building. Often savvy public sector web developers set up cheap wordpress websites to help people engage more with their local services. These employees are often frustrated at the way the corporate departments of local councils place a stranglehold on communications. So they set up their own sites, with or without corporate permission. Hackney’s wordpress site is a good example of this, as is the more developed Bedfordshire website.

http://hackneytrasc.wordpress.com/
http://www.letstalkcentral.com/about/

Unfortunately, initiatives by private individuals/groups and the local council seldom overlap. But this impasse will simply continue to hit some of the most needy people in society – people who would otherwise be active participants. Woman like Justine, Doreen and Audrey (all on video) are eager to lead more connected, active lives as a part of the local community and not live as peripheral outsiders looking in.

In my view that’s where private initiatives can dovetail with those of the public sector. Local councils are not able to act as a panacea for poor, lonely and disabled people – especially given their new funding constraints. So it’s probably time that the people behind the private initiatives talk actively to the public sector. Together they might just make a difference to many people’s lives.

How often do you see Bart, or Homer, online in the Simpsons?

Not that often.

Sounds like a trite point, but bear with me.

Their hometown of Springfield – founded in 1796 by Hans Sprungfeld who travelled west to found the New Sodom – is surely the best known, most perfectly sealed open society in history (totalitarian hell holes like Hoxha’s Albania and Kim Jong Il’s North Korea don’t count).

And the TV show should have its own hyperlocal site run by Marge, hacked into by Bart, rubbished by Homer and monetised by the evil Mr Burns.

I don’t want to spiel forth on proverbial egg sucking, but hyperlocalism is in our midst, is a force for change, a force for good, but belongs in Springfield, the Isle of Wight or even Rockall.

It’s about Krusty the Clown’s antics, about emptying bins, mending cracked pavements, making sure older people don’t freeze to death in the winter. It’s about giving a voice to you and me. All that mundane stuff we fuss about when we live our lives.

It’s NOT about helping central and local governments – and people who run them – to avoid their social responsibilities. It shouldn’t be used as a cost cutting exercise or as cornerstones of grand political campaigns.

Unfortunately, hyperlocalism and the movement for local services and democratic ideals could soon be wholly consumed by David Cameron’s Big Society. Much of this Big Society talk is simple political puff, although I suppose it should be given the benefit of the doubt before the doubt inevitably supersedes the benefits.

But as more local people sign up to Cameron’s movement, they should be mindful of the morass of national political infighting, local political rivalry and hyperlocal bitchfesting that will probably follow.

This is not cynicism for the sake of it. It’s hyper-reality if you like. Ho ho.

Hyperlocalism is in essence a grassroots affair that can be anything and everything. It is anchored in local reality. It’s a celebration of localism. It’s a forum, a panacea and an advertising vehicle, yes, it should be monetised so the people running it can make ends meet.

But, above all, it belongs in Springfield, the Isle of Wight and (if people fancy living there) Rockall.

Yesterday I spoke to Rosie who set up a hyperlocal site in her area of Cheltenham only two months ago. A year ago she knew nothing about hyperlocalism or twitter, now she’s a full time community manager, interviewing local politicians, speaking out about local education issues and encouraging people to enter local charity events. She’s proof that a lot can be done in just two months.

Below she talks about her project.

The local govt stakeholder engagement network is a secure video-based communications hub accessible to all staff, providers and users of services.

The programme opens a direct video dialogue between:
• directors
• frontline staff
• providers
• service users

It abolishes silos between departments, teams, services and communities.

It works across:
• social care
• health
• mental health services
• LD services
• Older People services

Each online community has its own channel and content manager and at the click of a mouse you can see what is happening internally and externally through video diaries and comment, internally and on location at outside events.

The emphasis is on recording human experience to produce better outcomes for people. The communications hub will help you:
• understand how the changes underpinning the individual budgets programmes affects all stakeholders
• to engage with isolated and vulnerable people in the community
• to engage and connect with a large multicultural community
• to hear from all stakeholders about the issues that affect their lives.

An editorial board meets to talk about content going onto the site each month. Each Thursday an email goes out to all registered users to give them highlights of the latest uploaded content. So it’s a managed, proactive network.

You can analyse all data on the site to see the most popular videos, most visited area of the site, most commented on videos and even add a monthly poll to ask people targeted questions. You can then analyse this data.

Importantly, the communications hub will also save you money. We sit down to find out what is spent on internal media, workshops, events, transport and communication costs, particularly around personalisation. We can then show you how we can cut costs by X% a year AND we can hook you up to a network that will involve all stakeholders. The idea is to get more out of less.

Below is an interview I did with Terry Dafter, director of adult services for Stockport, where he talks about how people inside and outside the council have to engage if services are to improve

http://www.andrewtalkingtoterry.com/

“I’ve seen the future and it works,” wrote American journalist Lincoln Steffens in a spurt of evangelical zeal after visiting the infant Soviet Russia in 1919. Poor deluded Lincoln, we all know how that turned out don’t we?

Nevertheless, a few days ago at an event no less evangelical in its attempts to change how people live, I glimpsed a future that WILL work.

The event was “Out of the Box”, a gift economy day put together by Patient Opinion at Birmingham’s Deaf Cultural Centre. The grandiose aim is to bring the benefits of social media and social networking to a wider audience comprising managers and workers from the NHS, social services and charities.

At its heart was the idea to make the world a better place for the disadvantaged and vulnerable people who live among us. Always a worthwhile endeavour.

Through speeches, workshops, wonderfully impromptu soapbox exhortations and chaotic speed dating sessions, the idea was to show people in public service how lives can be transformed through social networking, interactive engagement and video blogging.

A cynic would say there was much well meaning puff, but in the face of swingeing cuts in the public sector, directors of adult health and social care will be more focussed on retrenchment rather than driving change and building new engagement processes.

Well they’d be wrong.

The day highlighted that change in the way we communicate is not only desirable but necessary and long overdue. We have the tools for change, we now have to ensure that people use them for the good of all.

More importantly, using new ways to communicate can save everyone money and time. It should never replace face-to-face communications, but instead act as a natural corollary. It will make us better communicators – and make us feel better.

I found it incredibly enervating to see so many public sector professionals eagerly looking to see how these changes can and should happen.

So what were the main points to come out of the day:
• New ways to tell your story. Social media can bring human experience to a vast audience. People can tell their stories through video blogs. Vulnerable people need a voice, people going through reablement programmes, getting over serious illness need to tell their stories, about their services and the people who work with them. They need to feel engaged with their doctors, carers, social workers, families. Social media can do this. It will then help directors down to social workers, care assistants and GPs improve those services.
• The message. It’s the people behind the message that are now driving the so called Big Society through social networks. If local government and NHS directors and managers took a lead on this, politicians would have to follow.
• Mitigate risk. Risk is inevitable when faced with any kind of open communication. But it’s important to manage the risk from the outset rather than let the risk dictate your policy. Bunker mentality never won any wars (‘scuse the cheesy war metaphor).
• Get tweeting. With social networking and Twitter, everyone can be heard. People need to be made aware of these tools and local government and the NHS need to show people how to use them and on which sites to use them.
• Campaign for change. It is now much easier for people to collaborate, build communities and campaign for change – just do it.
• Giving isolated people a voice. Social media can help to bring people out of isolation. Let them have a voice online and make their world a better place offline. It’s not rocket science.

As an aside, I’m working with Bromley council on a live day event which will involve isolated older people, and people with learning disabilites and mental health problems. We plan to connect them across the borough through a common social media platform, streaming the days events into homes, libraries and day care centres so everyone is involved.

The world needs more events like “Out of the Box”, we need to get to the widest possible audience with the help of media savvy people inside and outside local government, the NHS, charities and even the private sector. Let’s face it, central government and politicians can never be trusted to make change happen. It’s up to us.

There you have it. I suppose I’ve just written a manifesto. Pretty revolutionary stuff and it’s going to change everyone’s lives for the better. Eat yer heart out Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Josif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.

I’ve penned at length about the social media engagement programme we’ve been working on with Stockport council. But I’ve never fully explained the reason why Stockport have taken on such a radical (certainly for local government) means of engaging with staff and the wider community.

So here’s a bit of background…

Most councils around the UK have been instructed to change radically the way adult social care services are received by the public. In the acronym-strewn world of local government this translates as the mercifully short IBs (individual budgets).

It’s therefore ironic such a little acronym can herald such a huge break from existing social care practices.

It’s not my place here to write about the whys and wherefores of IBs, but it’s suffice to say that it will involve a colossal change in the way all agencies involved with adult social care run their operations. To give you some idea of the extent of the upheaval here’s a short list of some of those bodies and people affected:
• adults social services
o including all directors, managers, front line social workers, social care staff, office administrators, financial auditors etc (hundreds of thousands of people, in fact)
• children’s transition services
• people with learning disabilities
• people with mental health problems
• older people
• all providers of services incl:
o charities
o social enterprises
o agencies (those providing traditional meals on wheels, for instance) for all of the above services
o public sector bodies
o quangos.

The knock-on effects of such momentous changes to so many people will also necessarily involve NHS services and funding. So the network widens.

You can clearly see this will affect the lives of millions of people. And given that most of us act as carers sometime in our lives, I reckon this will touch every person in Britain at some point.

Not wanting to labour the point, these changes are BIG!

So no pressure…

Back to Stockport, the comms platform aims to tie all these disparate elements together in a single portal that works predominantly through video blogs, as well as written and audio material. The idea is to help record the experiences of people – staff and people using the services – so everyone has a voice and has the ability to participate in this culture change.

Last week Stockport formally hired their community manager for mental health services. Christopher Reeves is an ex-service user who will now go into Stockport and Greater Manchester to help build the online community. It’s a hugely ambitious and exciting project, but I’m sure it’s one that will be rewarding for Chris and the mental health community in equal measure.

Here’s Chris introducing himself to the network.

Christopher Reeves from careknowledge on Vimeo.

Go online and key “social media” into google.

Actually don’t.

You’ll read 109 million times that social media is the ibuprofen for the age of the global heartburn.

Social media is a new religion, a God drawn up by prophets as diverse as doctorate students and bedsit web surfers. All of them are converts; all of them are evangelists. Heretics beware.

So that probably makes me a heretic; I scoured the results list and I didn’t figure anywhere in the 109 million urls. Does that make me an unrated loser rather than a 21st century Lollard? Hey ho.

Which is a shame because I reckon the social media engagement pilots I’ve set up (with my team of media savvy oompa loompas) are breathing entities refreshingly cleansed of marketing hyperbole, professorial didacticism and general social media theoretical guff.

Next week we launch our stakeholder engagement portal for Suffolk Country Council. We’ve not written endless white papers on how social media will improve lives or about the risks involved with encouraging community networks.

We just sat down with communications manager Chris Pyburn and did it.

It’s a managed portal, a bottom up entity using interactive media such as Flip cameras and digital audio recorders. It will help record all the changes happening in adult social services among the staff and out to all the people using the services.

A kaleidoscope of viewpoints across the county.

And like all great ideas that look simple, the launch will be the result of months of internal and external work with the various communities in Suffolk (special praise goes to my colleague Mark Watson for much of this leg work). It has involved encouraging a culture change among staff, training events using flip cameras, setting up an editorial board and analysing different services, including:
• mental health
• learning disabilities
• older people
• workforce development
• transformation management (sounds naff, but these are seriously changing and challenging times in adult social services)

It also involved building links with local agencies and partners like Age Concern that work with Suffolk County Council; they provide services to people who are old, infirm, disabled or have mental health problems.

And all that is only the soft launch of phase 1…

Above all, though, the programme is about helping everyone, from staff to users of all services; to tell each other how they live their lives. That can’t be a bad thing.

So if social media can achieve all that in just three months – then count me as an evangelist.

Below Chris Pyburn talks to me about the engagement portal.

A while ago I used to meet up with a young bloke who slept in the underpass around Waterloo station – I’ll call him Paul. He was thrown out of his home by his mum when he was 19 years old because he had grand mal epileptic fits several times a day.

His family could no longer cope. He had no friends.

“No one wants to be around someone like me,” he whispered over his coffee (he always spoke in whispers). “I wake up and have no idea what will happen to me during the day – even where I’ll end up.” It was the worst case of epilepsy I’d heard of and his homelessness was clearly causing a lot of stress and making it worse.

That was back in the early 1990s. I wrote his story for the Big Issue and then, unfortunately, lost contact with him.

For people like Paul I doubt much has changed in the past two decades. Nevertheless, I do know that people working in mental health services are trying to make a difference, trying to shine a light on the blighted lives of people like Paul. Trying to bring them back into the community.

We recently launched our own community portal for Suffolk County Council. The idea is that it will eventually have a reach that will include all the people living across the county.

Given the need for local government to reach out to communities, I reckon it’s a pretty good start at helping people like Paul reconnect with you, me and everyone.

I know this probably looks like shameless self promotion, but what the hell! I really believe in what I’m doing so here’s an online demo of the existing community portal in Stockport.

http://vimeo.com/6864122

Ever since the Lib Dem leader saw off his political foes in the live debate seven days ago, I’ve been a voyeuristic rider on the Nick Clegg storm.

I’ve learned of his family history (his great grandfather was an Imperial Russian count), his next door neighbour (former Tory foreign secretary Lord Carrington), his school friends (Louis Theroux) and his first employer and mentor (Tory EU commissioner Leon Brittan).

In just seven days he went from zero to hero in the nation’s media spotlight and then back to zero again. For Nick, a week is indeed a long time in politics.

On twitter I stumbled over MrsNickClegg, who is a delightfully sassy, risqué, salsa-loving Spanish tweetstress who rants on endlessly about “her Nick”, the election and other latin-tinged idiosyncracies.

She talks of dinner parties with Eno (he talks endlessly of Bono, Bono, Bono), hiring film star Chrisopher Walken to scare off “filthy Tory” and believes that today’s Telegraph coverage of Clegg’s cash payment misdemeanour is a “a tiny storm in a glass of Rioja”.

Some of her rants are very funny, close to the bone and almost certainly not by Mrs Nick Clegg. But the dialogue is clearly someone with Lib Dem sympathies or possibly someone in the Lib Dem camp. It would be a canny piece of social network marketing and electioneering to keep the Nick Clegg profile high by inventing a wifely doppelganger.

Just possibly, though, she could actually be Mrs Nick Clegg.

Furthermore, with the perfect storm of anti-Nick Clegg headlines on the front pages of the right wing media today – the Sun, Express, Telegraph and Daily Mail all having a go at him or his policies – an ingenious perfect storm of ironic reaction swept through twitter networks to emerge later onto office emails, intranets, facebook accounts and latterly into the Guardian as a hastily written column http://bit.ly/aF5w4n.

Out of nowhere #nickcleggsfault was the most popular hashtag in the UK. It had gone truly viral. In a popular revolt against the national newspapers, a wonderful outbreak of British caustic wit blamed Nick Clegg for everything from the death of Diana and missing your exit junction on the M69 to “my wife wants a divorce and it’s…”. All these misfortunes and much much more were #nickcleggsfault.

Surely never have so many right wing newspapers given such a helping hand to the very object of their derision. Media commentators stress that editors and politicians are unruffled by social networking sites. But they ignore them at their peril. Much of the content can swiftly catapault into the real world.

#nickcleggsfault is a reaction to a possible huge own goal by sections of the media and could signal the arrival of social media as an emerging political force (albeit a gag-strewn one) for change. Whether the Lib Dem’s comms team set up #nickcleggsfault or not is beside the point. If they did, it worked. If they didn’t, it worked.

The question media studies bods are asking is can twitter be more than just a network for gossip and viral marketing? Can it encourage participation and dialogue for social change?

Maybe we’ve just seen evidence of that.

It was former Times editor Harold Evans who once said the Sun is so widely read because the people reading it know they’re cleverer than the people writing it.

I was chatting with Ed Balls yesterday (yes, really), quizzing him about children’s services, and how he intended to make a better world for people in Britain. Above all, I told him I was a wavering voter (probably not true) and what could he say to help make up my mind to vote labour.

The Sure Start programme will make a difference to thousands of lives, he said. Bringing children and parents together in preschool communities, sharing ideas and helping each other.

I know Sure Start will make a difference to the 3,000-odd people involved, but let’s face it that’s a very small population. Most preschools and nurseries rely on charity and donations to exist, people who work there often work for peanuts, or nothing.

The local authority tends to overlook such institutions when it comes to funding, yet Ofsted is keen to ensure that standards are maintained for the country’s tots. So ironically these places are not funded, but they need funds to meet Ofsted regulations. People who work there are not paid, but need to go on paid courses to work there.

What, Mr Balls, are you doing about that?!! Sure Start is small potatoes in comparison to most preschools and nurseries around the UK.

It was at that point that my new friend Ed decided not to continue with the discussion. You see as I would probably never get chance to chat face to face with Ed Balls, I decided to collar him on Twitter (he’s famous for his evangelistic tweets).

Yes, Twitter.

Once upon a time politicians spoke AT you at mass rallies, cosied up to handpicked audiences in TV studios, and answered letters and more recently emails (if you’re lucky). With the advent of social media they now answer to you on Twitter if they want your vote (and if they’re savvy enough to understand the medium).

Funny, it’s amazing how Ed Balls can still come across as smug, lofty and self important in just a few characters, but that’s politics for you.

But it also illustrates how everyone should start engaging in social media to help transform the world around them. People still scoff at me when I tell them to get a Twitter account. To all those naysayers, if you want to chat with Ed you know where to go.

Below are several reasons why they should sign up.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2010/02/10/twitter-can-save-your-life/

I was at a workshop yesterday at the King’s Fund, jointly organised by the UK Faculty of Health Informatics and Sue White, Professor of Social Work at the University of Lancaster, who is also a member of the Social Work Task Force.

The workshop was aimed at one particular area raised by the Task Force’s report, relating to the underpinning information systems and technologies. The report wants information systems to enable “social workers to carry out the vital tasks of record keeping and datasharing safely and efficiently, and which allow them to inform and influence the introduction of new systems, so that these suit their needs and the needs of good social work”.

The event brought together a number of people from a range of backgrounds, and is very much a stage in an ongoing process. Prof Sue White and Prof David Wastell gave presentations which looked at aspects of the Baby Peter case, the Integrated Children’s System, work in Kensington and Chelsea on developing their own ICS, and the design of systems.

There was a enthusiastic debate, with plenty of criticism of ICS (‘debacle’ and ‘you could not make it up’) and the processes which led to its development and implementation, and the time it took to flag up the problems with it. There was agreement on the need for systems which are fundamentaly designed to help the practitioner in their work with service users, and to support their decision making, and from which data is aggregated for management purposes, as opposed to top-down systems designed to support performance management and policy monitoring.

There was clarity over the cultural and political environment in which social workers practice and its impact on the way systems are used, and the extent to which rising demand, and rising awareness of risks and concern over protecting one’s own liability and in meeting targets, rather than focussing on the successful outcomes appropriate to each case.

It was an interesting day, and a complement to FutureGov’s Safeguarding2.0 workshop I was at a few weeks ago. The workshop, thanks to the experience of Mike Lauerman, avoided the pitfall of simply being a talking shop, and three priorities were identified (see the video below). There will be a Ning network set up to take this work forward. If you’re interested in contributing, contact Bruce Elliott (bruceelliott@nhs.net).

I took the opportunity to grab a couple of video interviews.