Jersey’s economy beats rest of Europe

As exercises in wishful thinking go this is a pretty good example. The story relates to the fact that in 2014 the Jersey economy enjoyed its first growth since 2007, with gross value added (the island’s best equivalent to GDP) growing by five per cent and now totalling £3.9 billion.

But as the paper noted:

The increase is mainly due to the strong performance of the finance sector.

And as it added:

The statisticians say that in real terms, the average economic standard of living of Island residents has fallen by 20% since 2001, and by 19% since 2007 over the course of the recession.

In comparison, between 2007 and 2014, the average economic standard of living increased by ten per cent in Guernsey and was essentially unchanged in the UK – down by less than 1%.

The reality is, then, that in fact Jersey has been an economic wasteland this century. And even wastelands have to bounce occasionally, and in 2014 Jersey did. In that case it is fair to ask why that happened and the answer is obvious: the markets were rising so percentage based management fees to Jersey fund managers rose with them. And now markets are down again – by more than 10% with the last quarter being the worst for world markets since 2011. That means Jersey’s rentier economy that skims a living by a taking a small fraction off the funds flushed through its financial services sector will be down again this year.

It’s time Jersey realised that it really is on a road to nowhere. But Philip Ozouf, its assistant chief minister, was certainly not keen to share that view when we spoke this week. So events will have to eventually catch up with him. They always do.

George Osborne’s plans to tighten tax rules for wealthy foreigners living in Britain will leave many offshore trusts outside the UK tax net, according to proposals published on Wednesday.

The Treasury’s consultation on “carefully targeted” changes to the rules for “non-doms” — people who live in Britain but do not consider it their permanent home — would reassure clients after the chancellor decided to axe permanent non-dom status, tax advisers said.

David Kilshaw, partner at professional services firm EY, said the planned changes to the non-dom rules — which exempt offshore income from UK taxation unless it is brought into the country — “reinforce the message that the government is keen to welcome new non-doms without driving the existing ones away”.

So in other words we have a change that has no impact at all. I have yet to read the detail, but if offshore trusts are unaffected  by this move then frankly it is a waste of time: these trusts are the way that non-doms hide their income from the UK. If they’re outside the scope of the new regime the whole thing is little more than a sham.

The lesson would appear to be that, yet again, this is tax haven UK saying one thing and doing another. It’s the second blog on that theme this morning.

Wouldn’t it be good to have a Chancellor who actually wanted to collect the tax owing by those who live in the UK?

Marc Cohen, Senior Researcher at Oxfam America, is excited about the new World Disasters Report

Over the past two years, a boatload of reports and studies has pointed to the need to shift to greater local leadership of disaster prevention, preparedness, and response. In part this is driven by mounting humanitarian needs and the growing gap between those needs and the aid actually provided. There is also a related concern with the effectiveness of humanitarian action in an era of scarce resources. And for some, it is a matter of rights and justice, embodied in the principle of subsidiarity.

A number of national and international humanitarian agencies have pressed for greater attention to strengthening local capacity and working with local humanitarian actors on all phases of humanitarian action. This has led to such reports as the ‘Missed Opportunities’ series on the importance of humanitarian partnerships with local actors, and ‘Funding at the Sharp End’, looking at the resources that international humanitarian NGOs transfer to local partners.  Further, the Charter for Change has been developed – this seeks tangible commitments from INGOs on localisation, to be achieved by 2018.

For its part, Oxfam has recently argued that ‘shifting the centre of preparedness and response to the national and local level puts responsibility, decision making, and power where it should be: in the hands of the people affected most by crisis’.  Of course, we look at this through the lens of effective states and active citizens, in keeping with our rights-based approach and the approach of this blog. We’ve tried to put our money where our mouth is on this issue. Over the past decade, we’ve received multiple grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for emergency response and disaster risk reduction efforts, including capacity-strengthening of partners, in Central America. One of those partners is the Concertación Regional de Gestión de Riesgos (CRGR), a four-country regional organization aimed at increasing the capacity of vulnerable communities to prepare for and respond to disasters. In a demonstration of our commitment and that of our partners to effective capacity strengthening, in 2012, the Gates Foundation awarded $1.6 million directly to CRGR.

Now the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) – the world’s largest humanitarian network – has joined this debate. Through its 189 National Societies and the efforts of its 17 million volunteers who work through local chapters, the Federation reaches 150 million people worldwide. This year, IFRC is devoting its widely read World Disasters Report to the topic of local humanitarian actors, whom it characterises as ‘the key to humanitarian effectiveness.’

Federation Secretary-General Elhadj As Sy emphasises in his foreword to the report that calling for greater international recognition of, and support for local humanitarian actors does not mean that there is no longer a role for international actors: ‘ The international community still has a very important role to play, but a better balance needs to be struck.  International actors can provide specialized resources and technical expertise, brought with humility, trust and respect, and with a true commitment to building local capacity.’

Likewise, Dr Jemilah Mahmood, the Head of the Secretariat of the World Humanitarian Summit—which will take place in May 2016 in Istanbul—has noted that one of the strongest calls from the global consultations that have taken place in the run-up to the Summit has been for ‘countries, communities and local organizations, including the private sector, to manage natural disaster risk and response by themselves, building on their own knowledge and expertise’.

So, do we have consensus that localisation should top the humanitarian effectiveness agenda? Hardly.

In mid-September at the International Conference: A Quest for Humanitarian Effectiveness?, held in Manchester, UK, there was a lively debate on localisation. Proponents argued that local leadership is faster, cheaper, and helps more people than big, clunky, internationally-led responses. They pointed to the example of Bangladesh, which experiences far fewer deaths when cyclones hit thanks to substantial investments in early warning, better storm shelters, and disaster management bodies from the community to the national level. Critics wondered whether local actors can deliver health, water, and sanitation services needed in large-scale emergencies, and how local leadership works in situations of armed conflict when the government is implicated in the violence and has suppressed civil society.

This debate will go on, well beyond the Summit in Istanbul. But it is heartening that a big international humanitarian actor such as the IFRC has joined in the fray on the side of strengthening local actors so that they can take the lead.

[also worth reading: the The State of the Humanitarian System report, published today by ALNAP, echoes these conclusions, among others]

I’ve wandered throughout the building and I’m finding some favourite spots.  The Olivier cafe area between level 2 and 3 is quiet a lot of the time, but popular with chatty staff meetings.  The wifi holds up all over – it’s not great for VOIP, it seems to dip up and down too much for that (I’m sure there are smartphones trying to connect all the time.)

There are lovely outside spaces on the balconies and the weather has been perfect.

I realised this morning that it’s turned into a bit of a duty, I feel like I’ve got to be there in case people show up, which is ridiculous, but it’s really helped me to have more of a routine and somewhere to go.  It also is good for me to be overhearing staff conversations and remembering just how many people it normally takes to get seemingly small things done so I can let myself off the hook for not achieving as much on my own.

It will continue.

Common sense or the textbook?

Which way will he jump?

There is only one right option. Odds on he chooses the wrong one….

The summer has been a fun experience. I have seen some of my ideas adopted and promoted more heavily than before (although it is not, by a long way, a new experience). There is no person who spends much of their time, as I do, looking out of the window thinking about how a better world might be structured who would or could complain about that. If my job is to influence the political process (and like all tax justice and anti-poverty campaigners that has, necessarily, to be the case) then this summer has been a success.

I leave aside the political outcome apart from saying it has been fun to get to know Jeremy Corbyn and his family (who are a really delightful bunch of people) better. At a purely personal level I wish him well but my job is not to promote party politics. That job is to create ideas that others might use in the course of their own campaigning on the subject areas in which I work. Because I work on my own, in the main, my funders have always tasked me with reaching out to others to seek implementation of my work. At a purely pragmatic level I think I can say the last two months have achieved that goal.

More importantly three particular areas of work have advanced, maybe significantly.

The first is work on the tax gap. This has been subject to a high level of exposure and discussion. I am well aware that not everyone agrees with my estimates. But the very fact that the issue has been discussed and will, as a result, attract more research attention is, I hope, one welcome outcome of the debate. If action – from whoever is in power – were to follow that would be more welcome still.

Then there is the need to review the structure of HMRC. This idea, along with similar reviews of the Treasury and Bank of England, seemed to grow in Corbyn team thinking over the summer and I am surprised at the prominence it has now been given. I also welcome it. I argue in The Joy of Tax that we need a Ministry of Taxation as well as a minister dedicated to the task of being accountable for tax, both supported by an Office for Tax Responsibility. I hope to see progress with these ideas.

And then there is People’s Quantitative Easing. I think my funders thought there was little chance that this idea would ever get much public debate, but now it has. I again welcome that, and do not shy from the controversy the idea has caused. I believe that if we have another economic downturn (and I think that incredibly likely) then this policy tool will be high in the armoury of central banks around the world. Those dismissing it now are simply in denial about the state of the world we live in, in my opinion.

So, do I regret Jeremy Corbyn’s team borrowing my ideas in July and giving me credit for them? Of course I don’t.

But equally, I am keen to move on with what I might consider more ‘normal’ work. Doing five broadcast interviews in a day or so to explain my ideas is fun (I admit). But it’s wholly destructive of that quiet time looking out of the window and thinking ‘what’s next’? A little more balance would be quite welcome again.

The International Monetary Fund has warned that emerging economies and bond markets need to prepare for an increase in corporate failures if and when the US Federal Reserve and other central banks in advanced economies begin raising rates.

I have no doubt at all that this is right.

The same warning could be given within the UK: there will be corporate failures here if interest rates rise.

And household failures too: mortgage repossession rates will probably increase significantly.

On top of which there will be less investment, and so lower growth and more unemployment.

This is the price of economists hankering after ‘normal times’. For students of economic history the whole process of rate increases has a horrible feeling of FDR’s policy in 1937 about it, which he had to very rapidly reverse in 1938. Or to put it another way, it feels like economic folly foretold.

Not that this will stop markets demanding what is quite obviously not in their own self interest. They seem to have a self-destruct button built in, and a never ending urge to push it. It would be better for us all if there was a way of correcting for that, but right now we let those running markets get too near the powers of the state that could achieve that goal. Which is precisely why those powers need reviewing.

One can always hope that next time it will be different. 

Andy White, the Coordinator of the Rights and Research Initiative (RRI) introduces a new report.

A new, unprecedented legal analysis has revealed that despite using and inhabiting up to 65% of the world’s land, Indigenous Peoples and local communities—a population of about 1.5 billion—possess legal rights to barely 18%.

That’s a huge gap. And it’s a gap that explains a lot of widespread disenfranchisement, poverty, and conflict across the world. The right to land and natural resources is not just a basic human right, it is also linked to many key development indicators—from food security, poverty eradication, and gender equality to combating climate change, deforestation, and displacement.

For indigenous and local communities, the relationship to land is a vital component of culture as well as survival. When that relationship is trampled, the resulting disenfranchisement can become a gateway to social, often violent conflict.

It is no surprise then that according to the study, almost 100% of land in 10 out of 12 countries listed as fragile states by the World Bank is owned by the government or private sector, and not the people who have actually lived there for generations. In fact, disputes over land and natural resources are a major contributing cause of armed conflict across the world.

The study, conducted by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), gives us for the first time an international baseline of the amount of land that’s legally recognized as owned or administered by Indigenous Peoples and communities. It identifies the land area in 64 countries (over 80% of the world’s total land surface) that’s formally recognized under national laws as owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities. It covers drylands, grasslands, forests, and most other rural areas.

This study also establishes a baseline of country performance on legal recognition—finding for example that more than half of all of the countries studied have no legal avenue whatsoever to enable recognition.  It also identifies the countries that do have such court rulings or laws, but have yet to implement them. Ultimately, it shows us where we have solid potential for progress, and hands us a tool with which to measure it.

An Indonesia Constitutional Court ruling in 2013, for example, invalidated government control of the country’s customary forests. If and when this ruling is implemented, it could increase the amount of land owned or controlled by Indigenous Peoples and local communities from 0.25 percent of the national territory to approximately 23 percent—a real game-changer for millions of Indonesians.

Good for people; good for the planet

Past research comparing the impact of strong land rights on the health of rural lands and natural resources has found that Indigenous Peoples and local communities conserve the nature of their territories best, keeping the carbon in the trees and ground and thus slowing climate change.

For instance, indigenous reserves in the Brazilian Amazon have played a critical role in lowering national deforestation rates, and increased forest rights for farmers in Niger have added 200 million new trees over the past 20 years, storing an additional 30 million tonnes of carbon.

Here’s why that matters: Indigenous Peoples and local communities today have legal or official rights to at least 513 million hectares of forests, about 1/8^th of the world’s total forest and around half of the forests they actively use or claim. Collectively, this area contains approximately 37.7 billion tonnes of carbon—29 times more than the annual emissions of the world’s passenger vehicles!  Recognizing and securing local peoples’ rights to the remainder of their forests is an essential strategy to reduce deforestation and climate change.

Unfortunately, efforts to monetize and trade the carbon found in these forests on the open market has given national governments yet another reason to seize control from the local residents—even though those residents have kept the forests standing since before most governments even came into the picture.

A trigger for renewed efforts?

Here’s that potential for progress that gives us hope. Several countries in the survey have laws that could dramatically expand legal recognition for Indigenous Peoples/local communities if they were implemented in letter and spirit. One great example is India.

In India, we found that a landmark forest legislation Act passed in 2006 obligates the state to recognize the rights of approximately 150 million forest dwellers on at least 40 million hectares of forested land. We also saw that the districts with the largest eligibility for land rights recognition also contain the country’s poorest areas, signaling huge potential for economic progress. They are also the districts with the maximum number of land-based social conflicts.

So while implementation of India’s Forest Rights Act has been stalled for almost a decade, this year, the current government rejuvenated efforts to address the issue. As promising as this is, it remains to be seen if the government will fight off competing private sector interests and its own economic ambitions to keep up those efforts.

In fact, over the past two years, there have been numerous commitments from both governments and the private sector, from the New York Declaration on Forests to the Liberian and Indonesian governments’ pledges to recognize their local peoples’ rights. But so far, these remain promises. While the intent is laudable, the reality is that Indigenous Peoples and local communities in far too many countries still lack participation and ownership in decisions affecting their land, resources, and livelihoods.

Fortunately, there are now new tools and mechanisms in place, as well as a global call to action for all key actors to scale-up efforts on these commitments. We also have lessons to learn from countries that have implemented good land rights legislation and reaped benefits. It’s time to shift from rhetoric to action, and that’s what the upcoming international conference on community land and resource rights, where this study is being released, hopes to achieve.

The study is being released today at a conference in Bern, Switzerland, co-organized by RRI, the International Land Coalition (ILC), Oxfam, and Helvetas Swiss Intercooperation.

The response I gave was in three parts.

First, Corbynomics is great for honest businesses, which are the ones we want as they invest, pay living wages, offer apprenticeships and are dedicated to the communities in which they are based. These are also the businesses that pay their taxes. They want the tax cheats eliminated because they try to undermine such sound business practices by their short term exploitation in pursuit of a quick buck. The last thing the UK needs right now is quick buck business.

Second, with a focus on job creation in the UK through investment in construction, technology, IT and so much more a Corbyn government will provide a bonanza for business that they should be welcoming with open arms.

And third, the spin off from this will flow into every constituency of the country delivering growth whatever the size of the company.

How can a government that wants to invest within the means of the economy to do so be bad for business? Only a warped mentality that thinks paying tax is so bad that people would rather not make profit than share a part of it could ever come to that conclusion.

But we will hear it time and again.

The first is the clear rejection of gesture politics. George Osborne can legislate for surpluses, as Alastair Darling rather unwisely did before him, and it makes it no more likely it will happen. The truth is John McDonnell knows the chance of George Osborne achieving a surplus is incredibly low, and he also knows that if he did do so that John will also get no real chance to be Chancellor as the Tories are likely to win. So planning on the possibility makes no sense at all, and he is not wasting time considering the possibility. The days of confrontational politics where alternatives are  put forward are back, and from whatever part of UK politics you come that has to be good news. The consensus we have suffered has been stifling for democracy itself.

Second, there is a rejection of austerity. The alternative is growth, but based firmly on investing in our future. I hear already voices saying that people will need to be convinced this is possible. Of course it is possible: growth is what happens when you build homes people need, the IT infrastructure that is essential, the flood defences that will keep some key parts of the UK populated, and more. And when we have growth more people work, fewer claim benefits, pay increases (the type of inflation we need after decades when the reverse has been the case in real terms as a share of GDP) and so budgets tend to balance. It is a progression like night following day. Indeed, it is the only way to balance the budget in a modern state that accepts its obligations to its electorate.

Third, I heard the tax gap and related issues. It was all Sky wanted to talk about last night as if this was the basis on which the deficit would be closed: I refused to play Adam Boulton’s game on that and he got very grumpy as a result. But it is important. It is vital that a level playing field for business be built where the tax cheats do not get an advantage. That will have to happen if the mixed economy is to survive. This agenda is the most pro-business agenda there is now.

Fourth I heard about the rebuilding of the instruments by which the government intervenes in the economy. This is very welcome and massively overdue. Bob Kerslake looking at the Treasury is an inspired move: a non-Treasury civil servant is the right choice to look at how the Treasury can be put in its proper place. It has been too dominant for far too long, populated by a peculiar breed of thinking that is akin to that of the small minded accountant who only knows what cuts they can deliver. The courageous and entrepreneurial state has to be set free. That is the aim.

It’s the same with the Bank of England. No one is saying that the Bank of England need lose its independence if it has the right mandate, but giving it a remit based solely on inflation and suggesting its role is linked solely to monetary policy as if there is some total divide between that and fiscal policy is just wrong. The review has to be significant.

As it will be on HMRC where the questions to be asked stretch from top to bottom of the organisation, even if the top is where many of the problems seem to lie. It will need to be open-minded and welcoming of all suggestions and comments but as with the other reviews, the idea that current structures are sound has been firmly rejected.

And last I heard no new taxes on those not able to pay: progressive taxation is back. And we need it.

Faisal Islam of Sky put it to me yesterday that there was no policy in this speech. How wrong can anyone be? This was about rebuilding policy from the foundations up. It was not about silly tinkering or gestures. It was about fundamental change. Maybe some can’t recall such thinking. Well, it’s back.

If it had included the environment a little more it might have been better still. But it was a welcome step forward. The gaps will need to be filled, including on that vital issue, but for the first time for a long time it looks like change is possible.

As Jed Bartlett would say, what’s next? Now the SDGs are official, there will be big discussions on financing and a geekfest on metrics and indicators. Both are important. But to my mind the big task is to collectively think through what the SDGs are meant to change and how they can best do so – in other words a theory(ies) of change. Here are some initial thoughts:

Targets: Who/what are the SDGs supposed to influence? There are at least four:

• Developing country budgets and policies
• Wider social norms about rights and the duties of governments and others
• Aid volumes and priorities (i.e. a re-run of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were mainly effective as an aid lobbying tool)
• Developed country budgets and policies

Of these I think the first two are the most promising: aid is falling as a percentage of government revenue, while I do not think the SDGs are likely to have much influence on the policies of developed countries (hope I’m wrong of course).

Channels: for each of these, we need to think through how the SDGs could exert real traction. In the case of developing country budgets and policies, this could be through

• Peer pressure – already in New York, some ‘vanguard governments’ (Colombia, Gabon, Indonesia) were taking about internalising the SDGs in domestic processes. They could be effective sources of pressure on their neighbours and others to follow suit. What kind of platform or reporting process could help them do so?
• National media: always a good source of pressure on decision makers. What sort of data and media operation around the SDGs is likely to grab their interest at regular intervals over the next 15 years?
• Civil Society: what do national CSOs need in order to make the SDGs an effective part of their advocacy repertoire?
• Private Sector: how can the SDGs be relevant to progressive national and international companies and their business associations, so that they become part of the dialogue between them and government, or influence their operations directly?

Dynamics: Will SDGs have a steady drip-drip effect, or will their main impact be around ‘critical junctures’, such as scandals, crises or changes of political leadership? What does that imply for the design of the SDG system, eg if critical junctures are important, what kind of rapid response is needed so that researchers or advocates can respond quickly with a timely summary of the case for change? If, however, the SDGs are most likely to be effective via long term osmosis eg on social norms  around inequality and exclusion, a different reporting and follow up process is likely to be preferable.

Complexity: According to ODI’s Claire Melamed  ‘there won’t be one way the SDGs affect outcomes, there will be loads, and most are unpredictable at this point. For some governments, it will be comparison with others (so league tables) for others it will be domestic pressure (so whether SDGs are useful for domestic campaigners) for others more of a management tool. All are likely, and which it is will change with country/administration (and most countries will have several governments over the next 15 years) and goal (governments are likely to treat education differently to climate change, for example). As Craig Valters argues, that means taking a theory of change approach, rather than trying to settle on a single ToC for the whole SDG system. We could of course say ‘we have no idea how this will all pan out, so let’s just let a thousand flowers bloom and not bother with ToCs.’ But the system does have to agree on a bunch of procedures on monitoring, reporting, follow up etc, so it would surely help to make sure these procedures recognize and work with the messiness of how the SDGs are likely to be used in practice.

Review: For example, let’s assume that whatever initial conclusions those designing the SDG system arrive at are at best only partly right. How/when will everyone sit down, review what has/hasn’t worked, and make the necessary adjustments?

Where to start in answering these questions?

It would have been better to have had this discussion from the beginning of the process (as I said in this 2012 paper), but it hasn’t happened. Never mind. If people are serious about the SDGs having impact, I think some quick and smart research is required along at least two lines:

First we need a good literature review: what can we learn from the hundreds of international instruments that seek

If I could photoshop, this would read ‘SDGs agreed’ on the left and ‘world a better place’ on the right…..

to influence governments, change norms etc: 190 ILO Conventions, dozens of UN Conventions, the WTO, Regional Trade Agreements, Bilateral Investment Treaties etc. Which of them have gained traction on governments or norms, and how?  See May-Miller Dawkins’ excellent ODI paper on what the SDG crew can learn from other international agreements.

Second, can someone finally go out and do some decent research with developing country decision makers? By that I mean well designed interviews (no leading questions, please!) to find out what international instruments actually influence them, how and why. As a start, the ODI (what would we do without them?) has an excellent study by Moizza Sarwar coming out in the next week or so, exploring the implementation of the MDGs by interviewing senior planning ministry staff in five developing countries. (What took them so long?!)

Why would this help?

Armed with this kind of analysis, people in different contexts (UN, bilateral, national, civil society) would be better placed to think through how to implement the SDGs just agreed in New York. For example:

• How should target institutions like developing country governments be involved in the governance of the SDGs?
• Should reporting be national, regional or global? By governments only, with non-government inputs, or with right to reply from other bodies?
• Would annual league tables make sense?
• What is the best trade off between countries adapting the SDGs to their local context, and having global or regional comparability?
• Who are the best messengers to report back on SDG performance (ex presidents? Nobel prize winners? Fading pop stars?)

What do you think? A futile attempt to impose order on chaos, or a useful exercise?

Incidentally you could replicate the money system in a classroom where the teacher has the ‘authority’ say to stop the kids going to the school disco unless they pay their taxes and the taxes need to be paid in the teacher’s old business cards. When they ask how they get the business cards, the teacher says he will pay them for various jobs that need doing around the school. You could actually start a monetary economy (or a business card economy) where kids that didn’t want to work could obtain the cards from other kids by trading.

You could even allow them to start their own banks using their own tokens but then you would have to insist that the teacher’s cards get returned to the teacher by the bank when any taxes are paid. So in that scenario with excess cards in issue would the teacher borrowing them back offering an interest rate on the ‘loan’ be considered ‘debt ‘ ? Hours of fun.

Even thinking about it is fun.

McDonnell has promised he will review the role of the Treasury so that it focuses on fiscal policy and revenue collection. He will promise a drive to end corporate tax evasion and, like the party leader, will point to specific firms deemed to be involved in tax evasion.

He is likely to call for the 15-year-old mandate of the Bank of England to be broadened so that it has a wider brief to achieve economic growth, as opposed to keeping inflation under 2% a year. His aides insist he is not seeking to interfere with the Bank’s independence.

I am delighted about the review of the Bank of England mandate. This is simply out of date. Written in 1998, the division explicit within it between fiscal and monetary policy is now historic when monetary policy is now on its last legs after coming on for seven years of constant near zero interest rates, whilst the idea that inflation is the only issue of concern in macroeconomic management when the world economy is struggling to find any at all is, again, feeling deeply anachronistic.

The mandate needs an updating. At a minimum either growth or employment targets need to be added: maybe both are needed.

And, of course, the Monetary Policy Committee needs to be explicitly mandated to support fiscal policy by taking part in People’s QE (which mandate would not remove BoE independence: operationally they could decide when to do it).

Then there is tax, which it looks like John will address after my calls for him to do so in the Independent yesterday. This is good news. We hardly need to know all the detail, but a direction of travel would be good.

As would a commitment to reviewing HMRC (a Labour Party promise at the general election I would remind, based at least in part on my call for an Office for Tax Responsibility to be created) be very welcome indeed.

And what if the deficit? As I said ti Faisal Islam on Sky last night: George Osborne’s obsession with balancing his books is going to look increasingly like the almost irrelevant pursuit of a provincial bank manager with no understanding of the real needs of the economy over the next year or so. Balancing the budget when the edifice is falling down is an absurd objective: John is right for now to say it’s an issue he is aware of and will take due regard to deal with over an economic cycle but that first of all he has to make sure that the structures of economic authority are working properly and that then the investment that is needed to keep the UK on the right track has to be put in place.

If George Osborne wants to play at book-keeping exercises whilst these become the real agenda that will be a matter for regret: the UK needs a Chancellor who has his eye on the real issues of importance and I fear George Osborne has not. But if John McDonnell is going to remind him what those real issues are then that seems to me to be a useful job to be done by a Shadow Chancellor.

The question was about how unions could get into the new wave of small companies that are a feature of the 21st century economy.

The answer seemed obvious to me. I believe that unions might serve the interests of the employees of a business but that their presence is a major bonus to its management in numerous ways. Recognition builds trust. The openness in relationships required does the same. The belief that attempts are being made by all sides to do the right thing only builds on that.

And what is apparent is that unions have the skills, in employment law, contracts, health and safety, and so much more that many small employers need and do not know where to find at reasonable cost.

Why aren’t the union movement going to small employers and saying that if those employers will recognise the right of the union to help their members then the employer can gain by getting access to essential services as well, on these issues? There would have to be some ring-fencing, of course: one side can’t represent both in a dispute but the vast majority of union work is not about disputes as such, it is about getting things done properly. If many employers do not know how to do that, and I am sure they do not, why not sell it as a service to them that benefits the employees of the business they work for?

I float it as an idea. I’d call it the entrepreneurial union.

Dilbert does the World Bank (h/t Makarand)

Interesting stuff on Ebola

Fascinating example of positive deviance. Why were 284 villages with community-led total sanitation Ebola-free, despite being close to the centre of the outbreak?

How West African governments fought the epidemic. Report from the Africa Governance Initiative reinforces Doing Development Differently on national systems and PDIA (Problem-Driven Iterative Adaptation)

Gender Inequality

Tackling the gender gap could add $12 trillion to the world economy, according to a new study (= GDP of Germany + UK + Japan)

And if you’re in London this Friday, come along to the LSE for Gender inequalities: policy and practice perspectives, joint Oxfam/LSE public event,  2 Oct, 6.30.

Is booze a development issue? 12 Sub Saharan African nations are among the 20 countries losing the most healthy years to alcohol use

Chris Blattman loves Cash Transfers:

Reflections on what he learned on the CTs panel – what evidence persuades, CT tipping points etc

Is handing out $50k at a time in Nigeria (mega CTs?) the most effective development program in history? Shameless clickbait.

10 photographers try and capture global inequality. Great series

So, does this matter? First, let’s deal with facts. Fact one is that I do not think George Osborne has a hope of clearing the deficit by 2020. Even if we live through relatively uninterrupted ‘growth’ of the sort we have witnessed for a year or so that is not going to happen. It would require record business borrowing, record personal borrowing and near record improvements in overseas financial flows. I hope the first two don’t happen (if they do we will have a  crash) and the last is implausible. In that case George Osborne’s Fiscal Charter that promises budget surpluses is something he will deeply regret when in 2020 he goes before an electorate having delivered ten years of deficits.

Second, let’s talk economically. Deficits do not matter here either: the markets remain keen to buy all the UK gilts they are offered right now. We know that if that changes then QE (or, better, PQE) can be used to pay for the deficit instead. This is what is happened from 2009 to 2012 when there was no net government borrowing at all: every penny of it for most of those years was paid for by the Bank of England in an act that will never be reversed. In that acse, a deficit is no threat.

So, why the obsession with the deficit? This is short term politics: Goerge Osborne has spun a line that denies both the above facts and he has (undeniably) sold it well. The UK public believe, almost alone in the world now, that deficits are in some way a threat to well being. Actually they are not.

As I have already noted today, government deficits are both the foundation of private wealth and money itself. To suggest otherwise is factually incorrect. So in that case what else needs to be said in the context of this weekend’s discussion?

First, that I really do not think this issue will have the significance it has now in 2020. That’s slightly counter-intuituve given I suggest Osborne will have run ten years of deficits by then but reflects the fact that I believe events will have overtaken the deficit as the issue of concern.

We will have had another recession by 2020. The idea that we will have growth over this period when China is clearly in trouble, as are the emerging markets, and with some parts of the EU remaining deeply vulnerable (including Germany if VW collapses, as is plausible), is almost absurd.

The UK housing crisis will get much worse. The Bank of England is suggesting our banks may be vulnerable to a buy-to-let melt down and if the MPC increase rates they might just trigger that. The same increase in interest rates (if it happens) will also trigger increased home repossessions before an ignominious reversal and a resumption of QE.

The NHS, social care, and many other services, including potentially the police and court services, will be on the brink of collapse by 2020 if current plans are implemted.

Net take home pay will fall despite the so-called living wage. Benefit cuts will ensure that for many.
Loss of benefits exceeding £1,200 a year to swathes of working households will cause unprecedented stress in 2016, and massive resentment.

We cannot know as yet how the migrant crisis will develop.

The EU referendum poll could deliver Brexit as an anti-Cameron referendum and the fall out will be almost unmanageable for the Conservatives (an observation that I suspect will be true whatever the result).

And these are just the predictable issues.

Will the deficit narrative survive all this as the number one public priority? I doubt it. So it could easily be argued that simply sidelining it by refusing to give it the attention the Conservatives crave for it makes sense now.

But only in part. Just as I keep on stressing PQE is a strategy for a downturn sodowngrading the deficit issue only makes sense in three circumstances.

The first circumstance us to say in normal times it can be an issue, and to then say we are nowhere near normal times. Mention unemployment, under-employment, China, the housing crisis, the continuing failure of Goerge Osborne to balance the books, the Bank of England’s failure to deliver inflation: mention what you will, but say these are not normal times and so deficit debate is not the priority now and it’s time instead to talk other things.

The second obvious comment is to note that austerity has never worked. So it has to be said that if you want to balance the books in good times the only way to do it is take the action needed to deliver those good times and only policies to invest now to put people to work, to reduce under-employment, to increase real wage rates, to increase taxes paid as a result and to reduce beenfit claims not by cuts but because of increased incomes can deliver that good time prosperity. In other words, say the austerity narrative is a complete failure in its own terms and always will be.

And third, it only makes sense to talk about the deficit in the context of it being the wrong issue and that we need to be talking about the bigger ones all noted above which are going to blow it out of the water and make the monetisation of public spending an inevitable discussion in due course.

Now maybe the public agenda is not ready for these three points to be made as yet. John McDonnell’s decision to kick it into touch at this moment knowing circumstances will overtake it anyway may make complete sense in that case.

But my point is that unless a discussion on what needs to really be done to manage any one of the likely circumstances that are going to evolve between now and 2020 takes place we are in trouble. So I will be looking at those issues, PQE, the tax gap and other issues on this blog even if right now they aren’t likely to be the headline news. As I have argued, that is what I think the job of responsible opposition in the sense of opposing the prevailing hegemonic narrative is. And that is what I am engaged in.

——–

PS Can I remind readers of this that makes clear where I stand with Labour?

He is right. In a clear indication that he understands sectoral balances he said:

There is an economic illiteracy about this. If you have a surplus in that sense you are actually taking capacity out of the economy.

Let me elaborate a little. What a government surplus means is that the government is not borrowing anymore: it is repaying debt.

There are two consequences of this. The first is that because government debt is a private asset its repayment necessarily reduces private wealth. You cannot interpret this any other way: it is a fact.

And if the process goes on for too long cash is cancelled: in fact, we would have no money left and there would be no functioning economy.

The reality is that government debt is the basis for private welath.

And that government money has been the foundation on which the the rise of capitalism has been built.

So, if you want to ensure the economy has cash it needs to function and you want growing stocks of private wealth the last thing you do is run a government surplus.

And John McDonnell did make that clear. And he was right to do so.

PS There is, of course, more on this in The Joy of Tax.

3rd in this series of re-posts of the most read FP2P pieces over the summer comes from Ricardo Fuentes, who has

One of these men is Carlos Slim

since gone off to be big boss at Oxfam Mexico. Here he introduces Oxfam Mexico’s new report on one of Mexico’s many claims to fame – the richest man in history.

In his 2011 book, The Haves and The Have Nots,  Branko Milanovic asked a simple but quite illuminating question: who is the richest man in history? (Given the gender structures and distribution of wealth and resources across men and women, it had to be a man). To simplify comparisons across time and space, he used a common metric for wealth: the number of people that a rich person could hire in his society with a conservative return on his wealth.  Milanovic was following the thinking of Adam Smith, who wrote in The Wealth of Nations  “[A
person] must be rich or poor according to the quantity of labour which he can command.”

Milanovic found that the richest man in history was the Mexican Carlos Slim, who at the time of the calculation could hire 440,000 Mexicans with his income (not with his wealth). That’s a huge amount of people. By comparison, John Rockefeller could hire about 116,000 during the Gilded Era. Bill Gates could only hire a paltry 75,000 workers at the peak of his wealth.

How has that changed since the publication of Milanovic’s book?

Gerardo Esquivel, a Mexican economist, did a similar calculation for an Oxfam Mexico report launched yesterday in Mexico City.  The methodology is slightly different in Esquivel’s calculations. But see how it’s changed in ten years. In 2004, Carlos Slim could hire half a million Mexicans. Ten years later, he could hire 2 million (or about the number of officially unemployed people in the country). And just to be clear, this analogy  does not try to vilify Carlos Slim but to highlight a skewed system that allows this enormous disparities.

The report has lots of new findings. Another interesting one: using tax records to calculate the share of income going to the richest 1% (as Piketty and other have done in several countries) Esquivel finds that the top 1% in Mexico take 21% of total income. That’s the highest share for all the countries with available information.

Mexico is a vastly unequal country in a vastly unequal region (despite some recent progress)  so there is no real surprise there.  The shock is just how fast the wealth at the very top continues to grow while salaries stagnate and the economy tumbles with skeletal per capita growth rates. In other words, the Mexican economy is not working for anybody except a privileged few. For instance, in 1996, the wealth of the 16 billionaires was $25.6 billion dollars. Today, the same group controls $142.9 billion dollars. In the same period, poverty has remained stubbornly constant – in its broadest definition, the poverty rate in Mexico has been hovering around 50% for the last two decades. There is wealth creation in Mexico, but it’s going into a small number of hands. Mexico is experiencing a sort of trickle-up economics.

The report argues that, this is the consequence of different failures in public policy in Mexico. On tax policy:

“One of the big problems is that our tax policy favours those who have more. It is in no way progressive and the redistributive effect is almost non-existent. By taxing consumption—over and above income—poor families end up paying more taxes than the rich, since they spend a higher percentage of their income. The marginal income tax rate—one of the lowest among OECD countries—the fact capital gain in stock markets is not taxed and neither is inheritance, among other things, are examples of how the tax system benefits more privileged sectors”

There is also a close relationship between wealth and political influence that skews the system in the favour of the affluent. On this, the report says:

“The constant inequality and political capture by elites have serious economic and social consequences that are

Mexico City

also exclusionary. The internal market is frankly weak. When facing the scarcity of resources, human capital is curtailed and the productivity of small businesses is jeopardised.”

Mexico is a good example of the failure of trickle-down economics, just as the IMF also highlighted last week: per capita growth rates have been low but positive, between 1992 and 2012 they averaged 1.17%, but official poverty rates are back to where they were in the early 1990s.

So there is a huge task ahead to ensure that the economic and political system in Mexico delivers for Mexicans. The report suggest some initial steps: a genuine social state; a more progressive fiscal policy, improved targeting of expenditures, better wage and labour policies and enhanced transparency and accountability mechanisms.

There is nothing radically new in the proposals. What’s new is to have these conversations in a country with a long history of socioeconomic inequities.  Wealth creation is necessary if the poor, vulnerable and marginalized are to improve their lot, but wealth creation that goes only to a few billionaires is unacceptable.

Buena Suerte with sorting that lot out, Ricardo. Will you be approaching Carlos for funding?

Continuing the catch-up series for those who’ve been away/not been receiving email notifications, the 2^nd most read post from the last 3 months was this great response to a particularly one sided Economist piece.

Prachi Srivastava is one of the experts on ‘low-fee private schooling’ who was interviewed for last week’s remarkably one sided Economist Paean to the Private (my words not hers). She wants to set the record straight.

I have been researching low-fee private schooling for nearly a decade and a half. In fact, the term did not exist until I coined it.

The first time I dared to speak about low-fee private schooling at an international academic conference in 2004 I was told, not-so politely and somewhat patronisingly, to hush-up. We had more pressing Education for All goals to worry about.

‘But, what about the parents making sacrifices to send their kids to these schools?’, I asked. What about states that secretly support them to show increased universal primary education numbers? (Support is less secret now in countries like India, Pakistan, and Uganda). And shouldn’t we be researching this so that we know more about issues like relative achievement, equity implications, and wider impacts on education systems?

‘There, there, dear. They’re only a fraction of total provision. It’ll work itself out.’

If at that time, I had suggested that a donor agency like DFID (and perhaps others toying with the idea) would use public monies to fund corporate-backed private school chains, I probably would have been led out in a straitjacket.

But, nearly 15 years later, here we are, and I’m more worried now than I was when I started this work. Why? Because even though we have more evidence than before (albeit concentrated in a handful of countries, i.e., mainly India and Pakistan in South Asia and Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, and Uganda in sub-Saharan Africa), broader discussions and policy action do not reflect the literature.

Or worse yet, certain evidence gets filtered out. I recently experienced this first-hand when I was interviewed for a cover story and briefing on low-fee private schooling by The Economist (which, as the briefing notes, is 50% owned by Pearson, which in turn has stakes in Omega Schools and Bridge International Academies school chains). After nearly a two-hour interview, in which I took great pains to describe the nuances of the evidence on affordability, achievement, and the development of the sector, I was dismayed by the certainty of claims on the superiority of private provision.

Maybe this was because the lovely journalist who interviewed me and others, did not ultimately write the piece? Notes got garbled or mixed? Maybe not? Others, like Diane Ravitch, believe it’s because of the publication’s ideological stance.

Who knows? But, the fact is, in an age of quick fixes and silver bullets we are uncomfortable with long gestation periods for evidence to mature. We are uncomfortable with shades of grey. But like it or not, it’s complicated.

The low-fee sector: All things to all people?

I used the term, ‘low-fee private schooling’ for my academic study in India to operationalize what seemed to me at the time, a nebulous set of independently-owned and -operated private schools, financed wholly or nearly exclusively by user fees, and claiming to serve socially and economically disadvantaged groups. ‘Low-fee’ referred to schools that charged a maximum monthly tuition fee not exceeding the rate a daily wage labourer earned in a day. This worked out to around Rs. 70/month in rural Lucknow District and Rs. 100/month in urban Lucknow at the time.

Crucially, the term ‘low-fee’ was not used to mean fees would be considered ‘low’ by all, especially by the poorest of the poor — just that they charged tuition fees at a level lower than the more typical elite private schools we were familiar with at the time. This distinction is lost in much of the subsequent research, and many initiatives do not specify what they mean by ‘low-fee’.

This is true of the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund’s (PALF) portfolio. Nowhere does PALF state what constitutes the cut-off for an affordable learning investment. A cursory look at the published fees and costs charged by PALF’s investments in school chains showed that in March 2015 these amounted to about 62% of the income of one adult worker earning the lowest official wage in South Africa (SPARK Schools), 41% for Omega Schools in Ghana, and 8% for Bridge in Kenya.

A note of caution — any economist worth their salt will question these figures, and so they should. Fees are not

Rural low-fee private school in Lucknow District, Uttar Pradesh, India

reported consistently, and not all school costs are accounted for. We can also debate how to calculate proportional costs and household schooling expenditure — and people much better-versed than me should engage in this (if you’re interested contact me!). The point is that we need to be explicit about what we mean when we refer to ‘low-fee’, ‘low-cost’, or ‘affordable’ schooling.

So what do we know?

What does the research say? Does low-fee private schooling really offer the best chance for the ‘poor’?

Here are some (unavoidably simplified) findings based on a global review I conducted of the research. The review covered countries such as Ghana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Pakistan, Uganda, and others.

1. Affordability: Affordable for whom?

Affordability is not a one-time event. For the most disadvantaged households and daily wage earners, it is linked to insecurities related to seasonal migration for work, health (including orphaning due to AIDS), rising costs of food, among other issues. Furthermore, daily wage earnings are volatile, and most households have more than one child to school.

Evidence shows that the most insecure households, including those in Tooley and his team’s research in India and Nigeria (well-known private school advocate and co-founder of Omega Schools in Ghana, Beautiful Tree Trust schools in India, and the ancillary service provider Empathy Learning Systems in India), and most daily wage households cannot afford the ‘low’ fees charged. Furthermore, fees and costs are not the same thing. Tuition fees only constitute one part of the total out-of-pocket costs, which also include books, transportation, testing fees, uniforms, etc. Initial estimates across the literature show these can run anywhere from 3% to 30% of household income per child depending on the context.

In the face of all this, those who can, bargain or negotiate lower fees. In cases where those parents are successful, schools acquiesce because they don’t want to lose clients, since having a full school projects an image of popularity that, in turn, helps to attract more clients.

Of course, not all parents are successful. And those who aren’t, exit — usually to the state sector.

1. Equity: Who gets to go, and who gets left out?

Given the full costs of low-fee private schools, most disadvantaged households have to make difficult decisions about whom to send. This choice most often favours boys (also evident in Tooley and Dixon’s research in India) and aggravates gender inequities. Children from ethnic minority, lower-caste groups, and the bottom-20%-earning households have limited access (e.g., Härmä’s work in India).

Children disadvantaged by location also tend to get left out. Emerging work in India, where there is relatively more literature, shows that private schools tend to be in urban and rural areas that have relatively better public infrastructure (e.g. access to roads, electricity) (e.g., Woodhead et al’s longitudinal analysis; Pal’s work in rural areas). Private schools do not tend to reach children living in the poorest or most difficult-to-reach areas (e.g. Govinda and Bandhyopadhyay), and if they do, they are not sustainable over time. If these children have longer-term access to a school, it tends to be to a state school.

1. Quality: Are low-fee private schools really better?

The full portfolio of evidence is inconclusive.

On achievement: No study shows a universal private school advantage for every group of private school student, in every subject, across all contexts. Furthermore, private school advantage, where it exists, tends to diminish or disappear when background characteristics are controlled for. This is also evident in Tooley and his team’s research in India and Kenya, and in a randomized control trial, often dubbed the ‘gold standard of research’, in Andhra Pradesh, India by Muralidharan and Sundararaman. In some instances, as the 2009 ASER results showed, there was a negative effect of private school attendance on learning levels in local language. Crucially, as the DFID rigorous review found, studies show low attainment overall in government and private sectors. Impacts on higher order skills, like creativity and critical thinking, are not known.

On inputs: Evidence is mixed regarding school infrastructure. Low-fee private schools are better than state schools on some inputs, and worse on others. But overwhelmingly, studies show that the main way low-fee private schools keep costs ‘low’ is to hire unqualified, short-term contract teachers and pay them extremely low wages, sometimes below the minimum wage. The key is primarily to recruit teachers who are young, local women since they are ‘the cheapest source of labor’, as Andrabi et al. state regarding their work in Pakistan. This raises serious broader issues about the para-skilling of teachers and the potential exploitation of the female labour market, particularly in contexts where teaching is one of the only viable jobs for young women.

On official recognition as a quality marker: In most countries, private schools are meant to go through a process of recognition once they meet basic standards or quality norms. This is supposed to be a mark of baseline quality. However, studies in India (Ohara; Srivastava; Tooley and Dixon), Kenya (Stern and Heyneman), Nigeria (Härmä and Adefisayso; Rose and Adelabu), and Pakistan (Humayun et al.) find low-fee private schools may gain recognition through corruption and bribery. Delayed inspections, lost forms, postponed committee meetings, cumbersome paperwork, and complex land registration requirements, prompt many owners to pre-emptively open their schools without recognition, operate underground, or bribe officials without meeting set norms. This further undermines the education sector as a whole.

The growth of the low-fee private sector has been widely attributed to dysfunctional state schools. But state failure should not be tacitly accepted, certainly in light of the evidence. The fact remains that the majority of the poorest, most disadvantaged children in poor countries continue to access dysfunctional state schools. And all of us, including the private sector, have a role to play in making sure they get better.

Prachi Srivastava (@PrachiSrivas ) is an Associate Professor in the School of International Development and Global Studies, University of Ottawa. For more visit  www.prachisrivastava.com.

Other Summer Posts on Private Sector and Development

Unilever starts human rights reporting

How does Change Happen in global commodities markets? The case of Palm Oil

Impact investing: hype v substance, the importance of ownership and the role of aid

I’m planning to work in the public spaces of the National Theatre in London for the time being

and would love to have you along as a co-worker.  Check #TuttleCoWork on twitter, or you can SMS or DM me if you’re around and there are no details for today.

I wrote this last year about workspaces:

1. We’ll work anywhere
   We recognise that no environment will ever be perfect, but we can make the most of any space that comes along.  Stop worrying about making somewhere that fits every need – keep it simple and we’ll adapt.
2. But not necessarily the same “anywhere” everyday
   There is no single space or form of space in which people can best work.  There are times when conversation is required, there are times when the group needs to work quietly side by side and then there are times when everyone needs their own private space and total isolation.  So it can be anywhere, but it will not be the same anywhere all day everyday.

I can’t work at home.  I’ve tried, but there isn’t enough structure, there’s not enough room, there are too many distractions, too many little domestic tasks that could be done and do get done, in between dithering about whether to do them or do some “real work”.

Co-working spaces don’t work for me.  There’s just too much structure.  There’s probably a fee, which means I feel obliged to maximise my value for money – if the wifi stops working, I’m quickly and excessively indignant because I’m paying for a service.  If there isn’t a fee, then it’s too easy to become a cog in the machine of someone else’s business model.  It’s often hard to invite others in, informally.  There’s someone or something on the front door stopping just anyone walking in.

I moved Tuttle to the Southbank a couple of years ago and that works well.  We moved along the river this year to the National Theatre cafe, because it’s less likely to be disrupted than the RFH (which often gets rented out for big events), but also it’s slightly less welcoming (yeah, paradox!) and has more diversity in its spaces – there are tables you can work at and comfy bits and a cafe and they’re all pretty much all on top of each other.  It does have regular matinee performances which mean that the space is madly busy for about an hour at lunchtime, but otherwise it’s quiet with a gentle buzz.

So I’m experimenting with working here on weekdays for the time being.  And I’d love you to come too.

It’s an informal arrangement.  I don’t know how long it will last.  I don’t know how much time I’ll spend here, but I’m making a commitment to try it and an invitation to you to join me if I’m here, or work here alone if I’m not.

If you’re thinking of coming, it’s probably best to send me a text or DM me on twitter (my phone number is in the left-hand sidebar of this blog)  but I will also try to remember to tweet that I’m here, and which bit I’m in, with the #TuttleCo hashtag and tweet again when I’m leaving.

This is not (just) an invitation to conversation (Tuttle on Friday is a great place for that)  I shall probably have stuff to get on with and you should bring something too, but I promise not to just blank you and stick my ear buds in.

I’d be especially thrilled if people working elsewhere in the building decide to come and join me.

OK, Oxfam’s IT whizzes finally seem to have fixed a really frustrating problem – several thousand people who had signed up for email alerts about new FP2P posts haven’t been receiving them for the last 3 months. Many of them assumed Oxfam had finally got round to sacking me and/or I’d got fed up with blogging/gone under a bus. Sorry to disappoint – I’ve been churning out posts all along. So for them (and those of you who have been on holiday), over the next couple of weeks I will re-post the most popular pieces from the last 3 months, plus links to other posts on similar topics, with the acronym ICYMI (In Case You Missed It). 

The most widely read post for the whole period was actually a book review:

The Politics of Results and Evidence in International Development: important new book

The results/value for money steamroller grinds on, with aid donors demanding more attention to measurement of impact. At first sight that’s a good thing – who could be against achieving results and knowing whether you’ve achieved them, right? Step forward Ros Eyben, Chris Roche, Irene Guijt and Cathy Shutt, who take a more sceptical look in a new book, The Politics of Results and Evidence in International Development, with a rather Delphic subtitle – ‘playing the game to change the rules?’

The book develops the themes of the ‘Big Push Forward’ conference in April 2014, and the topics covered in one of the best debates ever on this blog – Ros and Chris in the sceptics corner took on two gung-ho DFID bigwigs, Chris Whitty and Stefan Dercon.

The critics’ view is suggested by an opening poem, Counting Guts, by P Lalitha Kumari after she attended a meeting about results in Bangalore, which includes the line ‘We need to break free of the python grip of mechanical measures.’

The book has chapters from assorted aid workers about the many negative practical and political consequences of implementing the results agenda, including one particularly harrowing account from a Palestinian Disabled People’s Organization that ‘became a stranger in our own project’ due to the demands of donors (the author’s skype presentation was the highlight of the conference).

But what’s interesting is how the authors, and the book, have moved on from initial rejection to positive engagement. Maybe a snappier title would have been ‘Dancing with Pythons’. Irene Guijt’s concluding chapter sets out their thinking on ‘how those seeking to create or maintain space for transformational development can use the results and evidence agenda to better advantage, while minimising problematic consequences’. Here’s how she summarizes the state of the debate:

‘No one disputes the need to seek evidence and understand results. Everyone wants to see clear signs of less poverty, less inequity, less conflict and more sustainability, to understand what has made this possible. Development organizations increasingly seek to understand better what works for who and why – or why not. However, disputes arise around the power dynamics that determine who decides what gets measured, how and and why. The cases in this book bear witness to the experiences of development practitioners who have felt frustrated by the results and evidence protocols and practices that have constrained their ability to pursue transformational development. Such development seeks to change power relations and structures that create and reproduce inequality, injustice and the non-fulfillment of human rights.

And yet some of these cases also recognize that the results agenda can, in theory, open up opportunities for people-centred accountability processes, or promote useful debates about value for money, or shed light on power dynamics using theory of change approaches. Some participants at the Big Push Forward event argued that greater emphasis on evidence has led to more intelligent consumption of data.’

Guijt identifies the success factors behind what you called call ‘really useful measurement’: the methods employed must be feasible, useful and rigorous, accompanied by autonomy and fairness, generate time and space for reflection on evidence of results, and agile. She goes on to explain the meaning of those rather motherhood and apple pie terms. A few excerpts:

‘Particularly detrimental is the wasted effort invested in collecting incorrect or unused results data’. She argues that by contrast, ‘soft data’ can be particularly useful, such as programme managers personally listening to the views of children and young people.

What is Rigour?: ‘While much of the rigour debate focuses on whether data is rigorous, we should focus on seeking more rigorous thought processes and method selection and use … the term ‘rigour’ needs to be reclaimed beyond narrow method-bound definitions to encompass better inclusion of less powerful voices and improved analysis of power, politics, assumptions and resource allocation’.

‘Results and evidence approaches should strongly emphasize reflection about what is known and what needs further inquiry. Asking people to transcribe results data rather than making sense of that data is increasingly seen as an entrenched problem.’

She finishes by setting out a positive agenda of seven strategies

‘Develop political astuteness and personal agency’: ‘people’s ability to use the results and evidence agendas positively makes them activists within their organizations, and with funding agencies and partner organizations’

‘Understand dynamic political context and organizational values’: learn to advocate within your own organization

‘Identify and work with what is positive about the results and evidence agenda’:  this is the meaning of the book’s subtitle ‘playing the game to change the rules?’

‘Facilitate front-line staff to speak for themselves’: always powerful as a results focus can technocratize issues and diminish the voices of those on the ground

‘Create space for learning and influence’

‘Advocate for collective action’ – the good guys need to work together to perform the kind of ju jitsu on the results agenda set out in the previous strategies

‘Take advantage of emerging opportunities’: don’t just complain; embrace new converts in the mainstream, despite their irritating habit of claiming that they of ‘doing development differently’ first……

Some previous posts on the measurement debate here, here and here

[Some insider gossip: Irene Guijt is taking over from Ricardo Fuentes as Oxfam GB Head of Research – v exciting]

And here are the other book reviews you may have missed

Aid and Development: A Brief Introduction. Book review of handy new bluffer’s guide

Embracing Complexity – a good new book on systems thinking (and action)

The Origins of Political Order: Review of Francis Fukuyama’s impressive history of the state

Fukuyama’s history of the State, Book 2: Political Order and Political Decay

Geek Heresy, by Kentaro Toyama: book review

The crescendo of discussion and debate over the successor to the Millennium Development Goals reaches its climax this weekend in New York, with the Sustainable Development Summit. The Guardian has a good scene setter.

I’ve ploughed a contrarian furrow on the SDGs so far, so why stop now? Here are some things you might want to keep in mind over the next few days, with links to past FP2P posts on the issue.

First, who is ‘we’? You will hear hundreds of statements along the lines of ‘we can end poverty’. Great aim, but who, exactly is we? This from a great 2013 post  by French development guru Pierre Jacquet:

‘It is altogether amazing how wishful and incantatory discussions on global issues have become. We seem to be content with passionate statements about what “we should”, “we need”, “we must” consider and do. Have we reached a sort of “end-of-History” development approach in which we believe that everyone agrees on some final objectives and we collectively know how to get there? Or is it, rather, that we try to exorcize our impotence and helplessness, while buying ourselves a conscience?’

Second, there is remarkably little evidence that the MDGs achieved very much at national level, although globally they made the case for more aid and better data. This is probably the most ubiquitous example in international development of confusing correlation with causation – poverty has halved, well done MDGs! But most of that is down to China – are you really saying that Chinese decision makers leap out of bed every morning asking themselves ‘how can I achieve the MDGs’?

What is particularly baffling is that almost no serious research has been done to establish the truth about causation, for example, by a rigorous survey of developing country decision makers on which aspects of the international system influence their policies (asking ’are the MDGs a good thing?’ really doesn’t count). When Columbia University’s Elham Seyedsayamdost did so she got, from the UN’s point of view, the wrong answer. Surveying 50 countries’ implemention of the MDGs, she found that whether the goals were reflected in plans or not, they did not have any apparent influence on how governments spent their money.

Third, moving on to the SDGs, I have become increasingly alarmed over the last few years and wrote a bah humbug paper on this back in 2012. The discussion has been dominated by a large group of UN technocrats debating metrics and indicators, and a huge panoply of NGO and other lobbyists, trying to shoehorn ‘their’ issue onto an ever-expanding agenda. At no point did anyone ask what kind of design might enable the SDGs to exert traction at national level – the acid test for me is ‘will a decision maker in Bihar or Dhaka or Kampala do anything differently because of the SDGs?’.

Nor is anyone asking what lessons could be learned from the success or failure of hundreds of other global conventions and agreements (the ILO alone has 190 of them). One honourable exception is an ODI paper by Exfammer May Miller Dawkins on what lessons can be drawn from international human rights and environmental agreements.

It may be that once the goals are agreed, the discussion on implementation will fully address this problem, which would be great. But my fear is that the technocratic approach thus far will continue – lots of discussion on metrics and indicators, but not much attention to getting traction on national governments. Will, for example, each government sign up to report on their progress (or lack of it) every few years to a UN Committee, which (to prevent whitewash reporting ) is allowed to collect information from other sources such as UN bodies or NGOs, as in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child? Nothing that I’ve heard suggests that will happen. See what I mean about learning from other instruments?

I hope I’m wrong. As Claire Melamed argues, the SDG process has generated a massive global conversation on our shared future and maybe that will continue. But I worry that ignoring power, politics and (dare I say it?) How Change Happens in New York this weekend will mean a global moment will not produce the long term impact we need. There’s that ‘we’ again. Sorry.

[Welcome back email subscribers – and heartfelt thanks to the IT wizards who sorted out the glitch. More on this tomorrow]

Europe’s refugee crisis:

The cartoonists are having a field day [h/t Helge Torvund] 

The Onion has a satirical go with an 11 step guide to how migrants reach Europe (step 6: Trudging; Step 10: Angela Merkel bestows each migrant with their new German name)

Fascinating, and v moving: refugees unpack the contents of their bags

‘You are Safe. The City of Vienna’. Sign in railway station [h/t Melissa Fleming]

In other news:

Owen Barder summarizes the case for making cash transfers the default mode in humanitarian response & the findings of a high level panel on same

Garment factories or marriage? Intriguing, charming film on choices facing young women in Bangalore

The best courtroom exchange ever….

This doesn’t apply to bloggers, of course: Don’t date journalists, warns China Daily – “They may be narcissistic, patronizing and find it hard to accept advice” [h/t Katrina Hamlin]

Avoid Mount Stupid, Also doesn’t apply to bloggers, obvs [h/t Raza Rumi]

OK, the Rugby World Cup has started, so please don’t expect me to do any work for a few weeks. First up, the evolution of the haka (Maori war dance performed by All Blacks before games): from silly to scary in just 90 years [h/t Chris Brooke]

Choosing a generator depends on its features, power sources, fuels and uses, while infrared heaters can be classified by their wave length bands and their types. There are many websites that offer valuable information about these products and can help you decide which to choose. You can find such a website for check this comparison and top rated products as well as the information on how to use and maintain such devices. Generators can be gas, propane or diesel powered. Even though diesel generators don’t use flammable fuels and can be employed in many industries, gas and propane generators are more popular due to their affordable costs.

Generators have different features so you should know what you are looking for before making a decision. A generator has to be easy to use and provide simple features that will give you the necessary electricity supply fast and easy. It should also be durable (no matter if you choose a new or a used one), and easy to maintain. For this, you can choose portable generators that have brushless options or the ones with a built-in hour meter that lets you know when the device needs to be cleaned. The size of the generator is also important, as larger ones can provide more electricity.

Whether you choose heat lamps, ceramic infrared systems, quarts lamps, gas heaters or carbon heaters, infrared heaters can have short, medium or far infrared emissions.

Like other devices, infrared heaters also have multiple uses. They can be used both indoors and outdoors depending on their size and power, as well as your needs. Indoor infrared heaters are generally used to heat up your entire home or just the rooms you select. There are more advantages in using a portable heater, as you can place it next to you so that it doesn’t warm up the entire room and helps you lower your heating costs. Moreover, infrared heaters are not toxic and have a protective seal which makes them safe to use around pets or small children. Apart from keeping you and your house warm, portable infrared heaters can bring you the benefits of a sauna. They are easy to use and you’ll be able to enjoy a spa treatment at your own place. Outdoor infrared heaters can be electrical or powered by natural gas or propane. They are generally used for drying paint or to create a comfortable environment in your own yard.

[The IT guys tell me they’ve finally found a fix on the email notification problem. If you get an email about this post for the first time in months, please either leave a comment, or vote in the poll to the right, to tell us it’s working]

Debbie Hillier, Oxfam’s Humanitarian Policy Adviser  reviews The Disaster Profiteers: How natural disasters make the rich richer and the poor even poorer, by John C Mutter

I really, really wanted to like this book.  As someone who has worked on disasters for some time, in an organisation whose focus is inequality, this seemed like the perfect book.

The basic thesis is that whilst disasters affect everyone, rich countries and rich people are protected by their wealth and can even profit.  Rich countries have more scientists, good early warning systems, better emergency response systems; in the aftermath, an elite few make out-of-sight decisions about rebuilding or not rebuilding, about who will benefit from the lucrative reconstruction contracts.  Poor people live on marginal lands away from productive resources, are more likely to be in debt, do not have savings or insurance, and receive poor government support.  They are politically, socially or economically excluded and hence have little access to resources, influence, information or decision-making power.

This is not a new argument.  Crises are times when change can happen – as expressed by Milton Friedman, and described very well in Naomi Klein’s powerful book, the Shock Doctrine, which argues that crises open the door to ‘disaster capitalism’ – private companies making good use of the chaos for their own commercial benefit, grabbing money and power.

The book contains some very well-drawn and thought-provoking descriptions of the impact of specific cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis, and there are also some interesting ideas in here:

• The book challenges our assumption that disasters are always a bad thing by introducing the idea of Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’ – whereby disasters destroy old inefficient capital, clearing the ground for new and better capital, and forcing technology upgrades. And there are examples of this.  But this clearly overlooks the human cost and really only benefits the rich.  And even where this does happen, surely there is an opportunity cost?
• There are surprising parallels between the official response to Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (a poor country with a military junta) and Hurricane Katrina in the US (a rich country with a democratic government). In both cases, the authorities downplayed the scale of the event, with inaction stemming from a deadly mixture of indifference, incapacity, and fear. Then they acted defensively, concerned more about mitigating political and reputational damage, and in Katrina’s case, using the social unrest to deflect from bad government performance.  But whilst Nargis was unusual, hurricanes regularly hit the southern US states and there was no forecaster’s error on Katrina.  The real cause of that disaster was much more to do with inequalities, racism and poor disaster risk reduction.
• The corruption-disasters link is well made. Corruption in the building industry is the leading cause of earthquake mortality, particularly in South Asia, where building codes are violated and inspectors are paid to look the other way.  ‘Yes, buildings collapse because they are poorly built, but to say buildings kill people is like saying that guns kill people, when it is people with guns in their hands who kill people.’
• Technical appendices show how a disaster’s economic impact depends on how fast or slow the economy is growing. Surprisingly, robustly growing economies – such as India or Brazil – might be the most vulnerable to disasters.

My main frustration with the book was the lack of long term analysis.  The book makes the point that the media focus is only on the disaster whilst it is more important to focus on what happens before and after the event, which is absolutely true.  So why is there so little in the book on the long term impacts of disasters?  The one exception is Hurricane Katrina, where the author draws on a vast literature of analysis to show that it is the wealthier – and whiter – neighbourhoods and businesses that are thriving in New Orleans; the poorest, and mostly African-American, areas of town remain vacant.

To really prove (or not) the link between inequality and disasters, what is needed is more study of disaster areas 3 or 5 years on.  For example, six months after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, rich people had started to recover, whereas the poorest people were still losing assets and getting poorer – suggesting increasing inequality. Yet national inequality rates didn’t change between 2001 and 2012, and actually fell slightly in urban areas – so maybe the earthquake didn’t deepen inequality?  What we need is the full picture of the recovery process over several years – who benefited, who didn’t, and how can we ensure that lessons are learned so that the disasters and development communities can design recovery processes that specifically improve equality.

And please, please, can we all stop using the phrase ‘natural disasters’ – the hazard is natural, but – as this book describes very well – the disaster is very much man-made.

You can view and/or download my presentation on Slideshare. I wish to thank the Royal Society of Medicine for this opportunity. A video of the presentation will be available on the RSM Videos site in due course.

View on Slideshare

We are very pleased to confirm that the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) will be the majority funder of the Kit Yamoyo Scale-up in Lusaka Province, Zambia. The project is called KYTS-LUSAKA (Kit Yamoyo Transition to Scale in Lusaka). This is a significant milestone for ColaLife and comes two years after the end of the ColaLife Operational Trial in Zambia (COTZ) which produced compelling results.

This is the first post-trial funding we have had for full commercial scale-up in a significant market. We have had two lots of other post-trial funding: 1) transitional funding from DfID and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen EMEA enabled us to keep the flow of kits going into the trial areas where carers had come to depend on being able to buy them in their local shop and 2) KYTS-ACE funding to supply the locally produced Kit Yamoyo (for the private sector) and new Government-branded ORS/Zinc co-packs to 14 of the most remote Districts in Zambia. KYTS-ACE is on-going.

The KYTS-LUSAKA project budget is as follows:

The DfID support for KYTS-LUSAKA comes from the UK Aid Direct Programme and it is significant to note that this programme required 25% match funding in cash (not in-kind) from the applicant. So we would not have been able to bid for the project if we hadn’t won the GSK and Save the Children Healthcare Innovation Award. £140,299 represents 58% of the total GSK and Save the Children Award prize and we have used it here to leverage a further £416,911 from DfID. We are also grateful to individual ColaLife supporters who have donated the money for the voucher fund element of the project. Fundraising for the voucher fund is on-going here.

Although ColaLife will be responsible for the delivery of this project we will be in a counter-parting role supporting our frontline partner remotely and through quarterly support visits. ColaLife will draw £58,000 from the project over 2.5 years. The rest of the budget will be spent locally in Zambia.

The approval process for KYTS-LUSAKA has been lengthy and much more involved than any other grant we have ever received from DfID or elsewhere. We submitted our bid more than seven months ago and the due diligence process has taken five months:

We wish to thank the UK tax-payers, GSK and Save the Children and our individual donors who have made this possible. We will not let you down.

Onwards and upwards.

Thankfully with the role out of the integrated Donate Now button to non profit facebook pages there is now a fairly simple way off taking Paypal donations via your page and we’ve even put together a quick guide to help you.

Before you start though, if you want to use Paypal to collect donations you need to have an account set up just for that so that you don’t fall foul of their charges, information can be found on their site.

How to add Paypal to your Donate Now Facebook button.

Search Paypal for the “Donate Button” page, or alternately click this link here, it will take you directly to the page you need.

Log in with details of the account that will be receiving the donation.

NB: It is important that this account is set up for your organisation, using a public email address as this will be visible on the donate page.

You will then see the following screen;

Work your way through the following settings:

Choose a button type. Leave this set to donation

Organisation name/service: Add your organisation name or the cause you are taking donations for in here.

Customise Button: Don’t worry about this – your not actually going to use a visual button anyway.

Currency: Make sure the currency is set to what’s relevant. It should already be on GBP if you’re in the UK.

Contribution amount: Choose whether you want to let donors set their own donation limit, or set your own.

And leave the rest as default

Once you are done – click Create Button

You’ll then see a page that includes a text box with code in it that looks like this:

Choose the email tab:

And then copy and paste the link that is now is in the text box into your donate button settings on facebook.

If you don’t know how to do that you can follow our guide here.

Then you’re done and ready to start taking donations. Now when your supporters click on the Donate Now button they will be taken to a Paypal fast pay screen where they can use their Paypal account – or debit/credit card to donate to your cause.

Note: Paypal have the following disclaimer on their site so please us this guide in conjunction with their rules:

 This button is intended for fundraising. If you are not raising money for a cause, please choose another option. Not-for-profit organisations must verify their status to withdraw the donations they receive. Users that are not verified not-for-profit organisations must demonstrate how their donations will be used, once they raise more than $10,000 USD

In 2013 Facebook rolled out a “Donate” button  limited to specific charity partners.

Now Facebook has made it possible for all charities to add a  Donate Button on their facebook page (if you’re still using a profile or a group for your organisation’s main Facebook activity this won’t work for you).

HOW TO SET UP YOUR DONATE BUTTON

We’ll talk you through how by using a local Birmingham Charity – the fantastic Birmingham Conservation Trust with the their Coffin Works – as an example.   (Transparency – Nick Booth used to be a trustee of BCT)

The donate now feature works through the pages call to action button, but the donate option is only available to pages that are set up as non profits. So to begin check what you have your page set up as.

Log into facebook and visit the page you want to set up a  “donate now” button for. You must be an admin of the page to have access to this.

Underneath the page title it will tell you what your page is set up as, in the case of Birmingham Conservation Trust (in the example below) they are already registered as a Non-profit – but if you’re not it’s easy to change.

Go to your pages about section:

Select Page info and look for the category – hover your cursor over this section, The edit button will appear. Change your page category to Non-Profit and click “Save changes”

Now you’re ready to add the “Donate Now” button. Look at your header image and click “Create Call to Action”…

…If you’ve previously set up a different call to action, click on the button and select “Edit Call to Action” from the drop down list.

Either way this will open up a separate dialogue box for you to add/edit this option.

Under choose button, click on the link to open the drop down menu and select “Donate Now”

Have the URL for where you want the “Donate Now” button to redirect to ready. This could be your Justgiving Page, Virgin Money, or a page in your own website, Wherever you want it set up to be. Paste the address into the website text box – and then click create.

That’s it your button has been created, Facebook will then ask you if you want to promote your button, the will require you to pay for any promotion. You can either choose to Promote it or click Not Now to get rid of the dialogue box.

Now when people visit your page they will see the Donate Now call to action right at the top of your page.

This does come with a disclaimer though as, when fans click the “Donate Now” button on a non-profit’s page you are first alerted that the organisation is “Not endorsed by or affiliated with Facebook” and then you’re redirected to the page’s external site:

This is just Facebook covering their backs and is no reason not to donate  – Visitors just need to use their judgement when redirected.  Just check  are you being taken to a reputable site, think of fundraising pages such as JustGiving, Virgin Money etc or the charities own website.

BUT Simply having a donate button on your page isn’t enough. Think about how you use Facebook? Do you visit pages often, and when you do, do you pay any attention to the header or do you just consume the information that comes into your newsfeed? So what can you do to encourage donation?

HERE’S 5 IDEAS TO MAKE THE MOST OF, AND PROMOTE YOUR DONATE BUTTON

1.  This one is obvious – tell your fans it’s there. Encourage donations by mentioning the “Donate Now” option in your news posts, and consider creating new content that makes users aware of the button.

2. Change your header image to draw attention to the Donate button. You don’t want something too wordy but include arrows, text, or anything else you can think off to point to the button.

Canva is a handy tool for creating Facebook header images – it has a selection of stock images and graphics you can use for free and it comes with a visual guide in the correct dimensions too.

3. Post photos and show people where and how their money is being spent.

4. Celebrate achievements and milestones. Set fundraising targets for specific causes / programmes / items and celebrate on your page with your fans when you hit them.

5.  And this is important as it matters to the long term goals of your organisation.  Remember your page should NOT just turn into a call for donations with every post being about that.
Your content comes first, and the right content matters as will pave the road for  more valuable long-term relationships – so mix it up.

It felt a bit like going home. It was in Beerse where our relationship with Johnson & Johnson and Janssen began when we were the first external organisation to be recruited into their ‘Innovation Boot Camp’ and subsequently successfully pitched our idea for the trial in Zambia to a panel of Vice Presidents for support. The Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust were the first to commit funding to the trial in Zambia (COTZ – the ColaLife Operational Trial in Zambia).

The feedback from the Townhall presentation on our Facebook Page was very positive, including:

Amazing story! It’s incredible what you can achieve with relentless (com)passion and motivation. And saving thousands of African children along the way… Speaking about impact on the lives of many families… what a success! Good luck with all your future endeavours. I hope they will be as successful as this one. Very happy and proud that J&J and Janssen were able to contribute to this project.

Great presentation of an inspiring project! Still a long way to go but an incredible achievement so far. Thank you so much for sharing the ColaLife story with us Simon!

“It’s not about what they need, it’s about what they want…”
Truly inspiring – thank you!!!

It was also a privilege to be able to contribute to a Management Board meeting and a discussion with the Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health Team. Although you wouldn’t expect any commitments to be made during visits like this I am sure we will have some impact on the way some people will think within Johnson & Johnson especially with the company’s move to consider ‘impact’ as a key performance indicator not just ‘profit’. We will continue to build our already strong relationship and will wait and see what happens.

Key lessons

So how was it for Janssen? It was very interesting to read a summary of the day produced by an employee for the Janssen intranet. This summary pulled out the following learning points:

1. It’s about listening to target customers
   • Patient centric design – design with target customers through early consultation.
   • It is not about what the population needs but about what they want.
   • Aspiration, awareness & branding are key.
2. It’s about creating value along the value chain
   • The product is affordable but everyone who touches the Kit Yamoyo product along the distribution chain adds value and makes a profit.
   • ColaLife has used a ‘cost plus’ approach rather than a ‘price minus’ approach to pricing with the price set at a level that the majority of target customers can afford.
3. It’s about building a wide ecosystem
   • ColaLife has engaged with hundreds of stakeholders along the way both at international level with big global health players as well as local retailers in rural Zambia.
   • The breadth of this engagement has allowed ColaLife to bridge the commitment of the ‘Global Access to Medicine Community’ to the reality on the ground.
4. It’s about iterative innovation
   • The packaging and the design of the kit has been an iterative process. From testing the concept of piggy backing the Coca-Cola supply chain to realizing that the pull of the supply relied in creating value and designing a desirable product.
   • ColaLife has experimented with different approaches, different packaging, different model of supply chain, different manufacturers.
   • It’s not about getting it right straight away to prove your concept, it’s about improving your concept along the way.
5. It’s about collecting evidence
   • ColaLife has invested a lot of time and resources in collecting evidence, tracking impact and improving their model. The founders have given a particular attention to documenting their journey from pilot to scale.
   • All impact data collected (quantitative and qualitative) are being collated in a “how to” manual.
   • The aim is to use the model as a catalyst for change and disseminate the data to inspire others to adopt and adapt the kit to further improve access to medicine at the last mile.
6. It’s about open innovation
   • ColaLife has been a firm believer in the open innovation process – where you don’t come forward with a finished idea but you share an initial concept widely for people’s input and feedback.
   • ColaLife has dedicated time and investment in defining a business that is open-ended and continuously improving.
   • The aim was to build a strategy and a plan that shows continuous innovation, leading to follow-on complementary and transferable solutions well into the future.
   • ColaLife is not looking at expanding but believe that the model can be transposed by local organisations working within the health/food ecosystem in a given country.
   • ColaLife’s strategy for impact is to make their findings freely available to others so that they can adapt them to their own circumstances to solve the problem of access of ORS and Zinc.

I wish to thank the people at the Johnson & Johnson Corporate Citizenship Trust and Janssen Pharmaceuticals for all the work they did organising this visit and making me feel so welcome.

I’ve had lots of lovely feedback, thank you.  But it does show for me that we’ve got a long way to go in thinking about decentralized models for anything at all.  Our experience of decentralizing media, for example, has been that we started out with high hopes of revolution and found that what happened was  our tools were co-opted by the big players and new players came along who used blog technology to build a new kind of newspaper – cheaper to run, but still along the same lines: we’re going to collect all the stuff and sell advertising off the back of it and we’re in competition with everyone else who tries to do the same.

I do think that decentralizing finance is a different matter, but maybe we’ll just build decentralized markets that are supposed to belong to the participants but then get taken over by the incumbents.  That’s what we’re trying to guard against with the stuff around mycelia.  Maybe extractive capitalism is just too strong, or maybe we just need to get better at helping people think in decentralized models.  I’m aware of the irony that the partially decentralized publishing platform that paid me for writing it is folding after 21 months.

1. The Kitchen Aid Artisan Series Stand Mixer KSM150PSYP

This is a top performing classic model that is not only flexible for use, but also very attractive and smartly designed. It blends many colors such as cobalt blue, yellow pepper, purple and many others. It offers the exceptional results and excellent mixing of all recipes to perfection. It is a high class maker that has a beater, dough hook, whisk and smartly designed pouring shield. Its bowl has a quality handle to help in pouring. Its use is simple since it has some speed settings that help in operating it perfectly.

2. Breville 5-Quart Die-Cast Stand

The Breville Five falls in the category of best stand up mixers. It is simple in nature and highly valued because of its excellent recipe mixing abilities. It has a state-of-the-art scrapping beater, standard paddle, whisk, dough hook and a professional splashguard. The bowl of this mixer has a handle to make your work much easier. Its head is designed to lock to the right place. It is easier to fix and use without any poor connections. It has an easier to control dial button that helps people get the best results. Its digital timer makes it one of the highly valued mixers in the market.

3. Cuisinart 5.5 Quart Stand Mixer

This is a professional mixer that is well known for its abilities to perform multiple functions such as; mixing batter, cream and making cookies. It has a DVD guide for its use. It offers many users reason to learn and understand more about its connections. Its 5.5 quarts simply managed to handle atleast 12 cups of quality prepared floor to help in the preparation process. Its starts slow to offer users the best results.

4. Viking Professional 7-Quart Stand Mixer VSM700BR

It is known as an excellent machine that beats cakes batter and the cookie dough. When you purchase it, you also get a dough hook, whisk and beater. It can simply handle five pounds of good floor with its seven quart type of bowl. Its speed setting button is perfect and works excellently. It comes in different colors and you have opportunities of selecting one that meets your style and taste.

These are some of the highly valued best stand up mixers in the market and their use has proved to be perfect, easier and excellently. They are easier to operate and they are always long-lasting due to their quality and classy results.

Mycelia is Imogen Heap‘s name for her project to reboot music production and publishing as a “Fair Trade for music environment with a simple one-stop-shop-portal to upload my freshly recorded music, verified and stamped, into the world, with the confidence I’m getting the best deal out there, without having to get lawyers involved.”  That quotation comes from the first of two articles published last month on Forbes.com.  If you’re at all interested in the music business, you should read them both.

My interpretation of it is this – artists will have a way to share their work while retaining control over credit for the works; the assignment of rights of copying, distribution and sale; and how payment by listeners makes its way fairly back to those who made the work.  It implies to me a blockchain-based smart contract platform (don’t worry too much about what that means, the important bits are it is not centralised, transparent and very hard to tamper with and which can have rules embedded in it about eg ownership, rights, payment etc) for metadata about music.

It’s a distributed metadata commons for musicians (and possibly a model for other artists too).

That’s great.  As long as it’s musicians doing it for themselves.  But they are not the only actors in this scenario.  Music Industry Professionals (the ones who have been running the business side of things rather than the creative) stand to lose out here.  Again.  The involvement of the old-skool corporate music biz raises the fear of a tragedy of the Mycelia commons and hard-coding of 20th Century practices into our new fair network-based thing.

I believe that this thing needs to have the chance to grow without commercial interference from corporations, so I’d like us to discuss how that could happen.  How can we defend, govern and manage this emerging metadata commons?  What sort of licencing could or should apply to re-use of the data, for example?

I’d like to get some people together to talk this through (yes probably in one place at the same time and that means London) and take the thinking forward as soon as we can, and preferably before this event at the end of September.

I think we need:

• Working musos who have successfully ridden the first wave of disruption;
• Lawyers with an interest in music rights;
• Academics looking at new models for creative industries;
• Representatives from organisations interested in open data and digital rights; and
• Technology experts who get how this might all hang together.

Is that you?  Can we get together soon?  Get in touch.  I’ll be looking for a venue and trying to set a date over the next week.  Could you provide a venue?  Great!

Do you understand this better than me?  Where are you writing about it?  If you haven’t written anything yet, could you please write something and link to this post?

Thank you, lovelies.

Postscript: 

Why is this a thing, why does something so cool need defending?  Because it’s open and most vulnerable to influence by vested interests early on.  When we started #tuttle it was like “everyone come along and be part of it, you can do whatever you want” and so some people be like “woah there’s this great open thing where I can do whatever I want so I’m going to hard sell my shit and use this thing to capture new customers and their eyeballs forever!”  and so we had to establish that even though it looks like there are no rules, there are some things that you need not to do in order to let the commons bloom and continue to be fruitful for everyone.  That’s what I’m aiming for here, not fighting anyone, but setting up some expected norms as defences against the natural urges of capital.

Athletes are mainly in need of a special kind of treatment which is nothing but sports massaging. Athletes might face different kinds of health troubles at the time of playing sports and those troubles can take serious forms if they are not being treated immediately.

Therefore, this form of messaging can also be regarded as a special messaging that can treat emergency health conditions. Injuries can be prevented and relieved immediately as a result of these therapies. Both psychological and physical benefits can be derived from this kind of therapy.

If you think that this treatment is only for athletes, then you are wrong as non-athletes can also have the same for getting rid of unwanted chronic troubles especially pains, soreness and other related ones. www.swintonphysiotherapy.co.uk can cater you more and more intricate facts about this kind of therapy so that you can realize the actual facts.

Why sports massage is needed?

Special kinds of medicinal oils are being used in this regard and these oils are mainly used manually so that targeted areas can be effectively stimulated. These oils are usually being extracted from different kinds of medicinal plants or herbs that are having higher health values. If you are having tremendous muscle sprains or pains, then only sports massaging can cater you instant relief. In fact, the nerve troubles can also be alleviated by these therapies. These pains are very much relaxing and you can enjoy a soothing ambience as well.

Your mind will get freshen up quickly by the massaging therapy. Though people think that this kind of therapy is similar to that of other massaging therapies, then you are wrong. Though some points and benefits are similar but there are some differences in procedures. Stress is quite annoying in nature and it arises mainly due to highest pressure. If you are having highest sports pressure, then also you can opt for the concerned treatment option. This is a natural pain relieving method as a result of which as a proper balance can be maintained in between hypothalamus and pituitary glands.

Stress hormones can be easily released by this massaging therapy. You can get a proper blood circulation and regulated body heat and temperature. Muscle soreness and swellings can be prevented by the same. Even if you are having a pain due to any ligament trouble, then also that can be easily and efficiently dealt by sports massaging. You can also practice regular exercising in a daily basis so that powerful impacts can be acquired. On the other hand, both lymph and blood flow can be controlled as a result of which muscle fatigue can be prevented. This kind of therapy is also very much cost-effective in nature.

Today I chatted with Vinay Gupta about the impending (when? when?) arrival of full white collar automation.  Along the way we talked about ethereum, smart contracts, social attachment to jobs as a means of making one’s living and the internet of things.

This is part of my work on my Contributoria article “The City of London. Eaten by Code, Replaced by Robots?” which will be published at the beginning of September.  If you’d like to be interviewed for this piece or you know someone else who could represent the views of non-tech City workers, please let me know.

Other useful links for you to click as you listen:

• Vinay on Twitter
• The ethereum project
• Augur – Predictive Market
• The Shockwave Rider
• The City of London – Eaten By Code, Replaced By Robots?
• HFT
• 1986 BBC Documentary: The Billion Dollar Day
• Amazon warehouses
• Imogen Heap on Mycelia
• Boys from the Blackstuff
• Hephaestus
• The Nerd Reich
• Captain Crunch
• Peers Inc
• AirPnP
• Casper
• Smart Contracts
• Mentat
• The Knowledge
• Crossbow – a medieval WMD
• James Hester

 
I got together today with Helen Keegan (we last podcasted together 10 years ago!) to give you an idea of what to expect on the weekend.

During our chat you’ll hear references to

• hackthebarbican and tuttle
• Truphone
• Are The Androids Dreaming Yet?
• ODI Devon and Simon Gough
• Red Poll Cattle
• LJ Rich

and most importantly of all how to Book Your Tickets!

Rooster Recorded by Mike Koenig
Cow Recorded by BuffBill84

The Cola Road trailer

The film

The Cola Road is an independent film made about our work. It was not commissioned by ColaLife.

In Aug-12 Claire Ward spent 5 weeks shadowing the ColaLife team as we prepared to launch a trial in Zambia to see if the Coca-Cola distribution system could be used to distribute an anti-diarrhoea kit, called Kit Yamoyo, and make it as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola in remote rural communities. This is her story.

Since the film was made, a 12-month trial was run (Sep-12 to Aug-13) which produced compelling results. See: Seven of the headline findings from the ColaLife trial in Zambia.  The flow of kits has continued into the trial areas after the trial ended and we are now working on a national scale-up under the name of KYTS – Kit Yamoyo Transition to Scale.

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Film excerpt

The trouble is, you never consulted us 2:28

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The Cola Road on the internet

The Cola Road on Facebook
The Cola Road on IMDb

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About the film’s maker – Claire Ward

Claire Ward now works for Vice News as a documentary filmmaker and journalist. She travels the world from a base in New York City.

Her videos have appeared on Maclean’s, Al Jazeera English, NYC-TV, the New York Times blog and the Local East Village.

Claire won Best Director (Documentary) at AOF Festival 2013, Monrovia, California for The Cola Road and received an Honorable Mention, Sidney Gross Memorial Prize for Investigative Journalism (2013).

A dual citizen, Claire hails from Nova Scotia, Canada and was raised in the Netherlands. She holds a Master’s in documentary filmmaking from New York University.

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Support for screenings

The film prompts a lot of questions and a lot has happened since the film was made. Through prior arrangement Simon and Jane Berry can be available over Skype (or phone) to answer questions following group screenings. We can also provide a tailored set of Powerpoint slides to update viewers on progress since the film was made. To arrange a Q&A session following a screening please email act@colalife.org.

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Download the film

The Cola Road can be downloaded from Vimeo here using the following password: ambuya. The film is available in two different resolutions:

• Standard Definition (SD). Suitable for viewing on a PC or laptop (640×360 / 220MB).
• High Definition (HD). Suitable for big screens at communal events (1920×1080 / 1GB).

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If you download the film and watch it, please add your comments below.

That last one is the most important factor, I think.  If I had insisted on hitch-hiking with total strangers rather than relying on the kindness of my existing network (albeit many friends-of-friends or people who didn’t actually know me well) I’d have had a very different experience.  If I’d been found in the woods outside a small town in Louisiana, dismembered and decapitated, quite a few people would have said “I told you so”  (because yes, they did tell me so).  I used to hitch-hike in Worcestershire in the early-eighties but pretty much everyone who gave me a lift back then told me that I shouldn’t be doing it.  It’s only got more dangerous and it’s always been considered more hazardous for women than men, let alone small robots with a limited vocabulary.  So I’m tempted to say that running an experiment like this is a bit like sending a young child out hitch-hiking.  Most people would look out for them, but sooner or later, they’d meet someone nasty.

Much has been made of the fact that it survived around Canada and Germany but the journey ended in the USA (particularly the irony of it ending in the “city of brotherly love”, Philadelphia).  Well yes, the irony is always there whenever any harm being done to anyone in Philadelphia, ever.  But that doesn’t stop it happening.  I’ve seen Americans beating themselves up for the fact it happened in their country and making this mean something about the USA.  I wouldn’t leap to any conclusions about national cultures.  Also I do think this was always going to be a time-limited project, the robot was defenceless and entirely dependent on who it met.  When I did my trip, I’ve no idea how many times I made a decision to go with one group of people rather than another, and I could always have talked my way out of trouble or run off even if my actual fighting, self-defence skills aren’t tops.  I felt as safe in the US as i have done in any European city and much more so than in some parts of some cities here.  So no, I don’t think it’s about the USA particularly – bad things happen to good robots everywhere.

I also doubt whether machines can build personal social capital within a human network.  They’re just too different.  Yes we think it’s sweet and its interactions through social media seemed to mimic those we have with people we don’t know very well.  It acquired some fans, though not quite enough to keep it carried safely.  I relied on some people who I had known for many years and I had also built up capital through many small interactions and bits of help of service.

The aim of the #hitchBOT experiment was to “see whether robots can trust humans”.  I don’t think that’s been disproved.  Trust is reciprocal, though that goes without saying in human circumstances – I trusted in my network not to chop me up into little bits in the woodshed and they people who helped me trusted me enough to let me into their homes and meet their families.  Trust comes from perceptions of your actions and your motivations.  For there to be reciprocal trust between humans and robots, those pesky robots are going to have to actively do trustworthy and helpful things for people with no expectation of rewards.

It’s just shows that patience and persistence pays off and something we find all the time: that the skills you help someone develop today can turn into fruitful activity much later. Bravo Cllr Alex Buchanan for taht persistence.

So, #Tuttle turned 7 years old, six months ago.  There have been times when I’ve walked away from it and let others carry the show, but for most of those seven years, I’ve been showing up every week and helping something beautiful happen.

The conversations these days are not so much about social media, they’re more about how work is changing right now and how technology is affecting that.  And just like when we started in 2008, growth in our technological capacity is outstripping our social capacity to understand and deal with it.  We don’t know how it’s all going to work out.  And free-form conversation like you get at #Tuttle is the best way I know to address that situation.

During the last seven years, many of you have supported my projects through crowd-funding and by participating directly in them.  I’m grateful for all of that.  I thought that #Tuttle would lead to new stuff and it has done, but the thing itself, the Friday morning meetups haven’t gone away.  Now I’m asking you to support the ongoing work of keeping #Tuttle useful and expanding the range of activities  I can do.

Patreon has been around for a while now as a platform.  It does all the bits that are difficult for me to do on my own and lets me get on with making cool stuff happen.  I’m hoping that it will also help me to do more to hold the community together – that’s what the Goals in the left-hand sidebar are about.  The process has also helped me to get clear about what I want to do – summarised in this video.

It’s not make or break.  I’m going to keep doing this stuff because it’s my calling, it’s become who I am and every time someone comes back or turns up for the first time and I see that look in their eye, that says “Thank you for making a space for me to be nourished in today”, I know that I’ve just got to keep doing it.

You can contribute as little as one US dollar per month (there’s no choice on currency unfortunately) but there’s a scale of rewards for more generous contributions.  If you can’t or don’t want to commit to a monthly payment, you can cancel at any time or there’s a range of options for a one-off donation here.

Most importantly of all, if you can’t afford to give anything, the best thing you can do is send me a note of solidarity and maybe come and see me on a Friday morning, I need you much more than I need your money.

For archive purposes the MP3 is also available on ColaLife’s sound archive on SoundCloud.

Listen on SoundCloud

When Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, indicated that her government would use corporates like Coca-Cola to deliver aid, it caused quite a stir. The report in The Guardian (Australia) attracted more that 600 comments, including one or two from me.

This Guardian report and the BMJ debate that preceded it also generated this well considered article by Sam Byfield on the DevPolicy blog. An interesting discussion followed this blog post, to which I also contributed.

On Friday (24-Jul-25) I was invited to join a panel to discuss this issue further. The panel discussion will go out live and nationwide on the ABC Radio Sunday Nights programme.

The other panel members are:

Tim Costello, CEO, World Vision Australia
Ruwan de Mel, former Head of Strategy at The Global Fund
Paul O’Callaghan, CEO, Caritas Australia.

I will contribute from a studio behind BBC Broadcasting House in London from 1pm UK time. A podcast of the show should be available by 4pm UK time tomorrow (26-Jul-15) from the ABC Radio website.

At last we have a dashboard of key performance indicators to bring to life all the frontline work going on to support retailers and provide invaluable management information. I wish to thank Abbott Katz, the man behind spreadsheetjournalism.com for his significant voluntary effort on this and DataKind who linked us up. The dashboard is generated automatically within Excel. Excel gets the data it needs from the CommCare system where all the data is uploaded from the tablets used by the frontline staff supporting retailers. To ensure that the Excel dashboard is using the most up to date data, CommCare automatically generates the data needed every 24 hours and the Excel spreadsheet downloads this data and updates the ‘widgets’ (charts and tables) on the dashboard. Very clever stuff. The dashboard takes about two minutes to download the latest data and do the analysis. Doing this by hand would take more than a day (I know I’ve done it, several times!).

This annotated slide explains the content of the dashboard:

In summary, the dashboard consists of three rows of charts and the middle row also has one table in it.

The first row monitors the progress towards our target of contacting all retailers at least once a month. The first pie chart is for comparison with the others and shows the proportion of the month that has elapsed. The other pie charts show the proportion of retailers contacted so far this month in each province. Retailers are contacted by phone or through a face-to-face visit. If we are on target then the green segments in all charts should look the same. If the green segments of the provincial charts are smaller than that in the first chart then we are behind schedule, if they are bigger we are ahead of schedule. The yellow segments in the provincial charts represent retailers who we have tried to contact without success. I believe that striving to contact retailers every month is really crucial at this stage of the scale-up. Not only does it provide us with this management information but it also flushes out issues retailers may be facing and reminds retailers about the Kit Yamoyo product.

The second row quantifies the number of retailers contacted, calculates average reported sales in the last week and average wholesale and retail prices. All bar charts displaying averages or percentages include the sample size on which the calculation is based to give an indication of how representative the calculated value is. The average sales calculation includes zero sales.

The third row provides information on stock levels and more detail on wholesale and retail prices. The average stock level includes those reporting zero stock and the percentage reporting zero stock is given in the second chart in this row. The last chart gives more detail on wholesale and retail prices. Price information is only collected from retailers reporting sales in the last 7 days to ensure that it is as current as possible.

Any comments or questions?

Last week I spent a couple of hours at a consultation in Birmingham run by the Press Recognition panel, which is the regulator set up to oversee the creation of (a?) new press regulator(s) following the Leveson Inquiry and the Royal Charter. (I know this has already got a bit “what?”, but stick with me.)

I was there because I’m interested in what it means for hyperlocal websites (which we have helped people set up over a number of years).  Especially the implications for those run for the love of their community,  sites like B31voices or WV11 –  not run for the money. Talk About Local has already questioned whether hyperlocals fall within Leveson and I wanted to be clear one way or the other…

So this is how my thinking has evolved…. if you find an asterix next to an assertion I’m not 100% sure this is right – or that I have conveyed it correctly (some things may be accurately reported but are factually wrong!)

This is a disaster!

This is what I picked up from the press recognition panel.

• Under the new law a publisher is someone(two) who publishes either online or in print and has two or more authors.  So according to this a publisher would include a number of no pay hyperlocals.
• In the autumn the law of how a libel action is brought will change for publishers.
• If you are part of a recognised Royal Charter approved press complaints body – complaints against you will come through that and will be resolved through mediation.  If someone does sue you they will be required to pay both their’s and your legal fees*.
• If you are not part of a recognised complaints body people can sue you and you will be required to pay both yours and their legal fees.

This leaves two or more person hyperlocals that are not in it for the money very exposed. The conversation, involving myself, Dave Harte and others, at this consultation included various thoughts that I took down in note form…

The mere threat of bankruptcy can stop people publishing,  Does this mean we need a hyperlocal regulator to provide this protection to hyperlocals?  Who pays for it, do the hyperlocals need to pay for it? How to create one as cheaply as possible?  Could there be a cooperative? Are hyperlocals aware of their potential exposure?

This also seemed to have implications for student journalism and perhaps even for sites like Birmingham Newsroom – blogs published by public services.  two or more people writing them?  Then they are publishers.

The two people from the press recognition panel were very clear that hyperlocals fall within the change of law.

Oh hang on. Phew, I think…

That was last Wednesday evening and I left worried about the future of hyperlocals.

On Thursday I spent the morning at #commscamp15 and popped along to the legal session run by David Banks.  He was talking about other changes in libel law and I shared what I thought I had learnt from the night before – and my concerns about it.

Someone else in the session looked a bit more closely at this.  Kelly Quigley-Hicks dug out the legislation and (I think) established that the understanding I (and others) had gleaned from the consultation was wrong.  The hyperlocals I’m concerned about are exempt… this is what she writes:

What is the definition of a ‘publisher’? If you have more than two people publishing news-related content, you may be defined as a publisher and be sued for libel as outlined in the Crime and Courts Act 2013. Exceptions include public bodies and charities publishing “news-related material in connection with the carrying out of its functions.” and multi-author blogs that come under “microbusiness” definitions

Checking her working I find the law says “exclusions from the definition of relevant publishers” include:

Public bodies and charities

6   (1) A public body or charity that publishes news-related material in connection with the carrying out of its                  functions.

(2) “Public body” means a person or body whose functions are of a public nature.
Company news publications etc

7   A person who publishes a newsletter, circular or other document which—

(a) relates to a business carried on by the person, and

(b) only contains news-related material on an incidental basis that is relevant to the person’s business.
Micro-businesses

8  (1) A person who, in carrying on a micro-business, publishes news-related material where either condition A or condition B is met.

(2) Condition A is that the news-related material is contained in a multi-author blog.

(3) Condition B is that the news-related material is published on an incidental basis that is relevant to the main  activities of the business.

(4) “Micro-business” means a business which—

(a) has fewer than 10 employees, and

(b) has an annual turnover not exceeding £2,000,000.

(5)  The number of employees is to be calculated as follows—

(a) find the total number of hours per week for which all the employees of the business are contracted to work;

(b) divide that number by 37.5.

(6) “Employee” has the same meaning as in the Employment Rights Act 1996 (see section 230 of that Act).

(7) “Multi-author blog” means a blog that contains contributions from different authors.

So this appear to mean that most hyperlocals are not included.

So questions to resolve….

1. Is this right, are most hyperlocals excluded, therefore don’t need to join a press complaints body?
2. If this is right what is the libel law that now applies to hyperlocals (who pays the legal bills)?
3. Does this exemption apply to student publishing online as part of their course?  After all universities are not micro-businesses.

Any answers?

Update….

Kelly  found this, which suggest others think there is confusion…  http://www.englishpen.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Who_joins_the_regulator_5_Nov_2014_English_PEN.pdf

@podnosh @willperrin @daveharte I came across this: http://t.co/xF6hpTJTC4 not familiar with org of origin though

— Kelly Q-H (@KellyQHicks) July 13, 2015

There’s (at least) one question in every important relationship, whether it’s your lover, your mother, your best mate or your favourite client, which can trigger the most almighty meltdown of communication. Something that seems to be taking a lifetime to resolve. Something that presses her buttons and presses yours just as hard. You know what it is. He knows what it is. You both know not to touch it, but every now and then one of you forgets and drifts into this dangerous territory.

Whatever it is you are unlikely to resolve it by talking it out just one more time. It represents something important that needs to be worked out through your experience of relating to each other, not through words. So, no matter how tempting it seems when they say “I know we’ve been over this, but could we just…” Smile, remind them (and yourself) that you love them and get on with being the solution not trying to explain it.

Party Means Fun

Some people love going to parties because they get to have some fun and show off their outfits, at the same time. If you want to have fun as well, you should make an effort to look good. One of the best ways to do that is to wear the right dress.

The right plus size party dresses are just out there waiting for you to find them. They are not even hard to find all you need is a little patience and resourcefulness.

Experiment a Little

When looking for plus size party clothes it would be a lot more fun and exciting if you can experiment a little. If you have always worn black colored dressed because you think they make you look slimmer, it is about time to change that point of view. Black is okay, but choosing other colors will surely add a little more spice to your character.

Also, if our wardrobe is mostly consist baggy outfits; maybe you should start dressing for your shape rather than for your size. Do not be afraid to show off your full figure. Get a dress that would hug that body and not swamp it. Of course, you should be careful not to choose a dress that is too tight-fitting at that may not look too good for you; and not too comfortable too.

Ask for Recommendations

If you have no idea as to what plus size party dresses would look good on you, it wouldn’t harm you to ask for advice. If you are shopping online, you can browse for blogs that talk about how to dress up if you are on the heavy side.

If you are doing your shopping offline, you can ask the salesperson about what they can recommend. Be wary though as some would probably tell you that anything you choose would look good on you. Just ask them to be honest and you must also try to take compliments and criticisms well. You already know you are not perfect – no one is anyway. So, you should listen to what they will say. For instance, if there is one style that you really like and you are not sure if that would be good on you, ask for an opinion. If they say it doesn’t suit your figure, be thankful for the honest view and try to look for something that would match your figure more.

All in all, shopping for plus size party dresses should not really ne that hard. If you do not want to be too conscious while doing it, take a girlfriend with you. It would be much fun and you would have your own critic by your side.

It’s a bit slow to start and despite my protestations that “It’s really quiet for a Friday” there’s plenty of background traffic noise, but I’m really quite proud of ten years ago me, stepping out and doing what was normal for me (but seemed bonkers to most), walking around London talking into a recording machine and publishing what I’d said on the internet.

We had no Twitter that day, or Facebook. YouTube was a couple of months old and video still seemed out of reach to me. Most of us had phones whose only non-voice function was SMS. The photos that I took and put on flickr were taken with my Pentax Optio compact. All I had was my blog and a podcast.

The day before I’d been at home waiting in for an engineer to come and install my broadband and TV. And so when I could I got back into town and carried on and tried to talk about forgiveness and peace.

Here’s the flickr set

———————-

Senior leaders in the city know that they need to help their teams focus on the values that shape what they do. It’s hard to do though, hard to lift the head from process to values. Here some simple ideas from the people we have worked with and the experience we’ve had over 10 years at Podnosh:

1. Be useful and helpful:
This is a statement of the obvious, This is the whole point of public service, isn’t it? So often we meet people embroiled in public services that simply seem to be a process. If the process is useful to anyone it often feels like it’s the people who designed it. Have you created a service which allows the people on the coal face to say what’s the most useful thing I can do now? And then they can do it? Can they ask themselves how can I help here and have the permission to do the next most sensible thing? If not who is it for and is it likely to be wasting public effort ? So less like a mobile phone operator trying to prevent you closing your account and more like a neighbour who’s sharing their oven when yours is broken.

Good examples:

Pregnancy Outreach Service
Timebanking

2. Act like citizens:
Citizens tend to spot bullshit where bureaucrats don’t. Citizens tend to do what makes sense for their community, not their organisation. Citizens tend to get active about complacency or waste, not wearied by it. Why can’t workers also think and behave like citizens some or all of the time?

Cotteridge Park *
B31 Voices *
NHS Change day*
Young Rewired State*

3. Keep it simple – where you can:
Complex problems often lead to complicated processes to help solve them. We can easily get bogged down in the complicated. So how far can you get by doing simple things that can just be done?

Social Media Surgery*
#hellomynameis
New Optimists*
Hyperlocal Bloggers
Casserole club
Greaves Hall coffee mornings
Big Lunch
Park Run

4. Good relationship make for better services:
Collaboration is a product of good relationships, so concentrate on the relationships.

Community Policing
21st century public service*
Creation of a regional super council?
Birmingham Open Spaces Forum*

5. Be Generous:
Give so you can receive. If you want to collaborate with people in Birmingham to create public good start by giving what you can. Co-production is born from relationships, not wishful thinking. Open data is a generous act, it is trusting that, if you share, people will do good with this stuff.

Nat West/Entrepreneurial Spark
Birmingham Data Factory
#SU4Brum
Makeshift in Wolverhampton – supporting community activity, mentoring
Livebrum

I don’t pretend that this will solve all problems and the analogies I use won’t apply to all people. But I do think that framing public service using these principles more often will free up more resources for the very difficult or very complex problems.

Tranparency: The examples included here are just that, there will be many more and some you might dispute. Where there is an * asterix us lot at Podnosh have either worked on this or been involved with it.

From the pitch: “is it reasonable to expect Financial and Professional Services to undergo the same kinds of disruption and rejigging that the web brought to film, TV, newspapers and music? And if so what happens to all the people who ‘do something in the City’?”

Contributoria is a journalism site where the articles are written, chosen and collaborated on by members of the community.  In my opinion, it’s managing to inspire and curate some really good writing on subjects that you won’t necessarily see in more mainstream media.  The choosing function is like crowd-funding but you allocate points that you get through membership rather than your own actual cash, but if enough of you give me your points, I get to write the article and I get paid.  You may remember that I was interviewed for one of Jon Hickman’s pieces there about a year ago.

So it’s like all those other crowd-funding things I’ve asked you to support, but this one won’t cost you anything, instead you get to play with the Guardian Media Group’s money – yay!

Here’s what you do:

1.  Sign up at contributoria.com – you’ll see that there are paid options (including one that gets you a print copy, if that floats your boat) but you get 50 points to play with if you go for FREE.

2.  Find my proposal page

3.  Pledge as many of your points to me as you like (obviously I would like all 50 please!)

4.  Tell all your friends to do the same (there are handy social share buttons for FB & Twitter)

5.  If you’ve any left over do have a browse of the other articles being proposed and pledge for them too.

6.  Sit back and wait till the end of the month when you can start to read my drafts and guide my writing if you like, or wait until it’s published on 1st September.

7.  Also, probably get ready for me to ask you to ask all your friends again toward the end of the month, when I’m frustratingly close but not quite at the target!

Thanks my lovelies!

I used this blog to tell you what I’d been doing but also to say “Hi, I’m here, but I’m ready to be somewhere else, do you have some work I could do?”  It was a great exercise, a stretch for me.  I gained humility and confidence in the value of my work.  I learned how to ask for what I needed and I learned about what happens when you present yourself as in need.  Throughout the year, people assumed that openly asking for help like this equated to helplessness.  And then I experienced three basic forms of reaction:

• Identification: “Yes, I feel helpless about this too.”
• Rescue: “Oh you poor thing, let me sort you out.”
• Attack: “You lazy bastard, get a job like everyone else.”

It’s a well-recognised and strong dynamic.  But the year, in the end, turned out to be a daily practice to step out of the whole drama triangle dynamic, to let go of being helpless and with it let go of being bashed or rescued.

ColaLife invites you to a Summer Drinks Reception and Screening of the award-winning, independent film documentary made about out work – The Cola Road – by Claire Ward. The event is free but ticketed and all are welcome. Click here to book your ticket on Eventbrite. We are looking forward to seeing old friends of ColaLife and are interested in introducing new people to our work so please bring your friends or, if you can’t come, please forward this email to them.

The key details are:

Date: 27-Jul-15
Time: 6pm to 9pm
Venue: TLT Solicitors, 20 Gresham Street, London EC2V 7JE (map)
Book now on Eventbrite

The running order for the evening will be:

06:00pm Arrival (coffee and tea will be available).
06:30pm Welcome and introduction. Andy Chapman, ColaLife Chairman.
06:35pm Film screening. “The Cola Road” by Claire Ward.
07:15pm Update on progress and next steps. Simon and Jane Berry.
07:30pm Questions and answers.
08:00pm Drinks reception and networking.
09:00pm Close.

If you have seen the film already and don’t want to see it again you are welcome to join us from 07:15pm.

Hope to see you there.

We are grateful to TLT Solicitors LLP for hosting this event.

• virtual reality;
• weak artificial intelligence;
• drones & robots; and
• blockchain.

It’s been rolling around in my head ever since.  Of those people who are working on any of these, I think they’re mostly focused on a single silo as core – so when a VR company does something controlling drones, they’re probably just using drones as a use case rather than thinking “We’re in the Virtual Reality Drone Business.”

I think.  I don’t know enough of them to know.

But I do think this stuff is worth knowing more about because they all feel like unstoppable strands of the near-future.  They all feel like the internet did twenty years ago – yes you’ve heard of them, you know people are doing stuff with them but what really is that going to do for me?  And the combinations with other technologies are quite hard to think about because of this.  Even fifteen years ago the people saying that the future of the internet was mobile phones seemed to be few, probably right, but possibly nuts.

Here’s what I think is interesting about each.

Virtual Reality: means we can visualise and interact in some way with stuff that doesn’t or can’t exist in reality or we can make things that do exist look different, easier to interact with or more palatable.  Using sensors in the real world we can also mix things up, what we call “augmented reality”

Drones & Robots: I heap these together with devices on the network whose primary function is not computing (or computing as we know it)  they are machines that do stuff for us and replace some part of undesirable human labour, ultimately allowing us to do stuff we just could barely imagine before.

Artificial Intelligence: the “weak” modifier is important here, we’re not talking about sentient computers, rather things like voice recognition, machine translation, helpers like siri.  This is the software version of human-replacing robots.  Get a machine or a network of machines to replace some thinking-like function: decision making or sensory recognition or pattern matching.

Blockchain tech has started off by replacing currencies, but it’s becoming clear that the generalised form of bitcoin – a distributed ledger that gets its authority from the consensus of the network is a candidate for replacing all sorts of centralised databases and thus making all sorts of human activities in firms look horribly inefficient and redundant.  The best corporations may turn out to have been relatively inefficient cyborg machines weighed down by their meatware compared to a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation.

Within these silos, each of these technologies are on the road to being mainstream – it’s those combinations that make me think.  A robot that senses and makes decisions about its environment through a virtual reality interface but ultimately controlled by a DAO sounds Terminator-ish.

But there’s another thing.

In all technology, we face a tension between our desire to make life easier by replacing human labour with code or machines and our attachment to human labour as the primary sense-making tool of life and the means by which most of us get the things we need to live.

We seem to understand that work is changing but most of the #futureofwork stuff I’ve seen assumes capitalism based on corporations as a given.

I do have an opinion on this, I think we need fewer jobs and to really accept that people don’t need any more to work as hard or as long doing stuff to justify staying alive.  What I want to do more though is point out the incongruity that our tech efforts go into replacing human labour but our politics, culture and society, our communities and social interactions assume that everyone should have a job or some easily understandable means of income like owning or a company or assets that create value.

I spent a year a little while ago not living how most people live.  I lived out of a couple of suitcases and moved around, asking for work and places to stay through my social networks.  More than once I was asked “What if everyone wanted to live like this?”  At the time, I took this as an admonishment mostly, as a way of saying “You’re taking advantage of our work which has gone into acquiring this space for our use.  You’re working and storing it in social capital rather than in bricks and mortar or a career path, but we can’t all do that can we?”

Well, what I’m asking now is “What if we all have to do that?”  What if we make a huge leap in replacing types of work? What if, in the British economy, we made things that made our Financial and Professional Services as “not economically viable here” as coal-mining, steel work or mass manufacturing – the things that were the cornerstones of our economy when I was a child?

Whatever happens, it will be in the context of big demographic change too.  A lot of the way our bit of the world looks is down to the post-war baby boom.   All the boomers are over fifty now.  They’re going to die in the next twenty, thirty, forty years (me too!)

How’s it all going to work out?  Is this all what we really want?  Would knowing how the world is now have helped us at all forty years ago?  Can we just pause and check?

I think we need to talk a lot more about these things.  Tuttle is one place, but I’m going to be making time for other ways to engage over the next few months.  Please join me.

Debate: Should we welcome multinational companies’ connection to projects to improve child health?

Partnerships with multinational companies in child health programmes can work to help save lives, write the co-founders of charity ColaLife in The BMJ this week. But an academic argues that connections between multinational companies and child health projects present an ethical minefield.

ColaLife, a charity formed by British couple Simon and Jane Berry, worked with Coca-Cola to learn about the distribution channels the company uses in developing countries. With this knowledge, they devised a system to ensure life saving treatments reach children with diarrhoea in remote parts of Zambia.

Within a year, their programme sold to community retailers 26,000 Kit Yamoyos, which contain oral rehydration salts (ORS) and zinc treatment for diarrhoea. Treatment rates increased from less than 1% to 45%, a “prize for collaboration”, write the authors. Mean distance to ORS access was reduced from 7.3 km to 2.4 km.

They say that connections with companies, such as theirs with Coca-Cola, can combine the “best of what each partner has to offer—knowledge, expertise, reach, and resources—and bring them together in pursuit of collective development objectives.”

Kit Yamoyos are now manufactured in Zambia and cost about $1 from local retailers.

“With treatment rates still at less than 1%, diarrhoea is still the second biggest killer of children aged under 5. So, the question is, do we leave them without access to proved treatment? Or do we try something different and manage the risks of the ethical minefield?” they ask.

But companies are in business to sell products, not to promote child health, and the connection with multinationals such as Coca-Cola presents an “ethical minefield”, argues Nick Spencer, Professor of Child Health at the University of Warwick, UK.

Although Kit Yamoyo has no obvious connection to Coca-Cola at retail level, Spencer argues that the charity provides legitimacy to a company that sells some unhealthy products for huge profit while contributing to the rise of obesity and diabetes.

He notes that Coca-Cola is ranked 11th in tax avoidance among some US multinational companies, according to a report by the US Senate published in 2012. ColaLife also counts the alcoholic drinks giant SABMiller, Coke’s bottlers in Zambia, as a partner. SABMiller has been accused of structuring its business to avoid paying tax in Africa, something it completely refutes.

If such tax avoidance were to occur in countries like Zambia, Spencer hypothesises, this could lead to a loss of tax revenue that could instead help the government’s distribution of free ORS and zinc and fundamental public health measures such as infrastructure for water and sanitation.

What do you think?

Mentoring and Befriending Foundation now part of the NCVO.

Keeping people with learning difficulties safer online –  I had a fab conversation with Tim Davies from Camp Hill Milton Keynes.   They are focussing on refining how they use social media both to promote their residential and support work and the theatre they run.  Paul Webster mentioned this from the Foundation for People with Learning disabilities  – as a resource on stayong safer online – i like it for it’s cealr visual layout.  http://www.learningdisabilities.org.uk/publications/safeonline/

It turns out that Gill from the brilliant tool @whooseshoes may have benefited from what we do…

https://twitter.com/WhoseShoes/status/610458913658511361

Tips on micro-volunteering can be found here  http://knowhownonprofit.org/how-to/how-to-engage-people-into-microvolunteering.

We are honoured to have been chosen as the beneficiary charity for the raffle at this year’s event for the second year running. Last year the raffle raised £2,000 for our work and gave a us big publicity boost.

There will be 5 prizes and three have already been found so we are looking for two more – can anyone help? Last year the prizes had an electronics theme and were valued at around £100-150 (Chromebook, Go-Pro, Beats by Dre headphones etc). But a magnum of Champagne would be equally good!

If anyone can help with a prize please contact me: simon@colalife.org

Thank you very much.

Click on the image to book on the eventbrite page

Creative Citizens is a project that’s been running for a couple of  years bringing together research and activity around hyperlocal websites and active citizens.  There’s some fine people involved, including Dave Harte (an old friend and collaborator of ours) and one of the researchers has also been investigating motivations behind the brilliant WV11 blog run by our own Steph Clarke and her very fine husband James.

So there is going to be a fair for active citizens and creative citizens organised as part of this programme.  To get a free ticker go here  www.creativecitizensfair.eventbrite.co.uk.

What to expect?  Organiser Jez Turner says :

Thousands of citizens in the UK take part in community projects every day, from citizen journalists to breadmaking collectives, cycling social enterprises to craft makers. If you run a community project, are thinking of starting one, or are just interested in meeting like-minded people, join us at the first Creative Citizens Fair.

Talks will run throughout the day from community and voluntary projects, sharing their experience and tips, with plenty of time for questions.

In the Fair space you can:

• talk to some of the organisations
• take part in activities and workshops
• see the Creative Citizens photo exhibition
• find people to collaborate with
• find out about the Creative Citizens research project
• grab some lunch and coffee

More details at www.creativecitizens.co.uk

The venue is the Impact Hub in Digbeth, which is another home for creative citizens.

Out of the woods, into the City!

I went to the Ethereum Meetup last night. A suitably informal tuttle-ish mess of conversations about blockchain applications. Developers, startup founders and me, the social artist elephant in the room, wondering what this all means for the milling crowds of financial services workhorses I’d just passed through at Liverpool St Station.

It’s early enough for the “scene” to fit into the upstairs room of an Aldgate pub. And the talk reminds me of the way the web was in the mid-nineties. “All of this sounds great, it’s conceptually beautiful, but after working in a bank, actually running a business, trying to sell this stuff to people, it’s all just so messy!” said one participant.

It may be a long way off, but there is a feeling of inevitability about it, the way that it was obvious that our manufacturing industry would be replaced by some form of technology or sent somewhere else, but we just didn’t want to talk about it. I do feel a bit like someone standing in Longbridge in the late 1970s saying “You’re going to be a robot. You’re a robot. You’re a robot…”

So I denied myself a walk in the woods over the weekend but by Monday it was irresistible and when I got there, these words fell out of my mouth.  Here’s video and audio for those who still subscribe to the podcatching form of distribution.

There was a time when this was a radical statement.  We were doing something new here by putting the focus on the personal relationship rather than the exchange of information.  You come along, you talk to people, you have ideas, you go away together and do stuff.  As opposed to: We meet, we exchange data, I give you a line in my database and hope that you’ll reciprocate, then our customer relationship management systems spam each other until one of us gives in.

I haven’t seen so many business cards on Friday mornings lately.  But when we closed down C4CC I found that the kindly folk had been preserving my card collection and so it was one of the few things I took away at the end.

This weekend, I sat down to look at them all. Now, not all of these are from tuttle, I will have picked some up from other meetups or through working with people at C4CC but there’s a lot of them.  I met a lot of people since 2008.

The first thing that jumps out is the weird branding choices we were making five or six years ago.  Mainly in the form of oddly-spelled business names and kooky sounding job titles.  I’m not going to single anyone out because we all did it in one form or another.  I suppose it was part of a whole bunch of people creating their own personal brand for the first time through trial and error.

There were a lot of people who are now Facebook friends or whom I follow on Twitter.    We’re connected, I can get in touch with them, I know who they are – was there a time when they had to give me their card?

And then there are the hundreds of people who I have no idea about at all, I don’t remember their name, I don’t remember their business, I kind of understand why I might have bumped into them, but the handing over of the business card was the last I knew of them (presumably because neither of our customer relationship management systems were that hot).

We talked about exchanging tokens last Friday.  A general conversation about cryptocurrency turned into a more specific “What would a TuttleBuck be like, what would it be for, how would they be created, what would they be worth, how long would they last, would there be unexpected consequences?”

I’m interested in the idea of creating something that marks attendance and then seeing what happens to it.  If you accumulate 20 Tuttlebucks in the next six months what would you do with them?  It’s not meant as an incentive, it’s not for the purpose of increasing attendance, but wouldn’t it be interesting to see what effect it has?  Which points me to thinking “What are the questions to ask when you’re creating a currency like this?”  Because there are going to be a lot of them and we’re going to have to get used to dealing with other more sophisticated forms of contract than cash.  Is there a checklist of things you have to think about?

I’m noting that one issue is political parties’ separation from culture which means they’re unconsciously driven by cultural trends rather than being on top of them.  Long words made shorter: this election was not a fight between political parties but between re-enactment societies.  We were asked to choose between present-day representations of aspects of the 20th Century.

So Labour offered the Spirit of ’45 – the party of the NHS and the broader Welfare State.  UKIP are Mosley’s blackshirt re-enactors, while the Tories and LibDems present the Downton Abbey tableau, respectively taking the stereotype roles of firm but fair toff and the wild idealistic toff.  Actually the LibDems also still have a strong social democratic streak and so get blurred with some Wilson-esque “White Heat of Technology” stragglers.  The Greens are probably the most present of the bunch but that’s just because it really is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius!  Or something.  Still, to most people they’re muesli-knitting Greenham Common protesters with an “Atomkraft? Nein Danke!” bumper sticker.

And that’s as far as I got when the first shock came.  It was like hearing something that sounded like a car crash outside your house just when you were expecting visitors – things slowed down as I raced (while marvelling at the haircuts and overall maleness of the BBC coverage) to understand what might have happened – surely it would be alright, don’t be silly, go to bed, it will all seem better in the morning.  I stayed long enough to see the Tory win with only a tiny swing to Labour in my constituency.   It was going to be bad.

It was.  In the morning, the BBC was (correctly as it turned out) forecasting a Tory majority.  This was really not what I’d expected.  I hadn’t even thought of that as a likelihood, to me it had all been driven by the opinion polls pointing to a neck-and-neck race, so all the talk was about what compromises would have to be made.  Now we know that the only compromises that will have to be made will be within the Tory party.

I thought, this morning that, I felt disappointed.  But disappointments pass – I saw people pick themselves up, dust themselves down, start all over again, but I didn’t feel able to do that.  I went to Tuttle and we picked over the bones of it – it was good to not be alone with my head.  Then I walked all the way home and had a cry and had a sleep.

When I woke, I realised what I was feeling.  It feels like grief.  It feels like someone died.

It’s not quite grief for the Labour Party, that died for me in the early nineties, Blair never worked for me although I have continued to faithfully vote for them (and I still will until something better comes along).  I’ve marveled at people who said they needed to think about who to vote for.  I’m just not that sort of person and no amount of information, reasoning or shouting abuse will move me, save your energies for someone else.

No I think what I saw dying overnight was the Welfare State.  We, as a country, voted against the Welfare State yesterday – the NHS is the most obvious part of that but, as a country, we said yes to the Bedroom Tax and no to a Mansion Tax.  Saying “I believe in the Welfare State” used to sound ridiculous to me, as ridiculous as saying “I believe in sausages” – sausages just are, there’s no believe or not believe.  And, in truth, the idea has been dying since 1979 but now it really feels like it’s gone.  We’re going to have to come up with another way of looking after each other.

I can see the positive in there, because I’ve held on to ideas and behaviours that needed to die and eventually gone through the process of letting them go and finding that there’s something so much better on the other side, but I’m afraid of going through it and I’m afraid for other people who might not be as strong as I am.

We are going to have to come up with another way of looking after each other.  Because the state isn’t going to do it and the market isn’t going to do it and the Big Society isn’t going to do it and if we don’t do this we stop being civilised.

Dougald wrote some great notes today.  Including: “11. This is not just a battle of ideas, it is a battle for the soul.” For me, the root of this is “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”.  Easy to say, hugely rewarding to practice, bloody hard (though not impossible) to do.  There aren’t any quick and easy ways through this, but accepting that it’s here and that the solution is within us is the key.

In the meantime, I’m going to look after myself the best I can, talk about things, preferably in a more human way than writing blog posts and posting to Facebook, be as excellent as I can be to everyone around me.  And I shall be looking out for those who are suffering too.  Especially to anyone with mental health issues, disabilities or long-term illness who might feel like hope has gone, you’re not alone, we’ll get through this together.

I can also use my phone to watch TV versions of comics that I read as a child.  I could probably, but don’t, get digital copies of those same comics to view on whichever device I choose.

I can find and play just about any piece of music recorded (just about) just by asking my computer and I can record my own music and make it available to you in the same way.

Wow! Still haven’t got over this.  Wow!

I went to see the latest Avengers flick this week.  I’d been looking forward to it but felt a bit dissatisfied at the end, it was a bit like Christmas, so much anticipation and it was fun while it lasted, but then… then well back to the future.

Every now and then I’ve seen artists asked “What do you think you’d be like if you’d had access to YouTube when you were a kid?”  I have no idea.   It would have been so different.  How could I tell?  I expect I’d be very different.  I mean, all of the above is still wowing me but my way of interacting with culture through my teens was to engage intensely with a (relatively) small pool of stuff and to do so over and over again.  Listening to records until I knew every note and cassettes until they literally wore out.  Reading comics and novels over and over, finding more each time.  Getting hugely excited by a re-run of some beloved TV or film.  Let alone organising all free time around the contents of the Radio & TV Times.

Which I guess is why, when given the choice, I’m listening (again) to some Italian-American guy from 1956.

This is mostly a request for help from people who were familiar with or directly involved in the project, but I’m up for feedback from all sides.  In fact, just writing that has helped me see that I’d like to make it much easier for people to read who had no exposure to the project at all, but that might be a longer-term goal than getting the final report submitted with the final invoice!

This section is meant to sum up the Key Successes.  I’d like to know whether:

• you agree that these are indeed the key successes – and if not what you’d add or take away;
• you think there are better ways of saying what I’ve said;
• you have better examples than the ones I’ve used to illustrate the success; or
• any of it doesn’t make sense at all to you.
• Or, y’know, anything else that would make it better.

Thank you!

Key Successes

Reactivating the High Street
We made a difference to how the street felt to local people and to how people thought about using empty spaces.

Sittingbourne High Street has lots of empty shops, especially towards the eastern end where workshop34 was. We immediately brightened this area, simply by cleaning the exterior, removing fly-posting and putting the lights on. Once we opened the doors for business and hung the bright yellow sign above the doorway we made a real difference to the feel of that end of the street – many people would simply come in to see what was going on because they were so surprised to see anything happening there.

We had good relations with neighbouring shops from the start. The owner of one local jeweller visited in the first week and we got to know especially well the local cafe owners, encouraging shop users to buy their lunches, cakes and coffees in one of the three nearest ones.

We encouraged Belinda Gyampa, a local hairdresser specialising in African haircare, who had become a regular user of our shop first to visit and then take on one of the retail units for hire in the building opposite.

Led by Community
Many spaces supported by ReCreate designed an offering and then fitted local people into it. We took the opposite approach – asking people what they wanted to do and then saying “Yes, do it!”  As a result we squeezed a wider range of activities into the short time-frame than we might have otherwise done.  

While we know a lot about what works in pop-up shops and creative collaboration spaces, we are also strongly committed to doing things with people rather than for or to them. During the month of November, Lloyd sat in the shop most days and simply talked to people about what they would like to do ithere. He almost always said “Yes! Please!”, partly because there was little time to be fussy and turn down stuff, but also knowing that only a small proportion of people would come back.

The other reason for giving power to the community from the start is that it makes it much easier at the end of the project. Lloyd works on the basis that the best success is when the group believes that they did most of it themselves.

We also wanted to break the dynamic of dependence – the cycle of someone with grant-funding coming and doing something for the community and then disappearing without empowering anyone doesn’t help in reactivating the High Street. So we stepped outside of giving people what (we think) is good for them and gave them what they wanted: space to work together, the power to decide and the power to change their mind if it didn’t work.

Building Confidence
Together we all grew in confidence as we tried things and they worked. Most obviously, some people showed and sold their creative work for the first time, but others benefited in more subtle ways.

Giving people the responsibility of deciding what to do and of delivering it means that they get to do things they might not have done before. Even those who had run or worked in the previous pop-ups gained from being able to focus on making good work and selling it, rather than the tedious admin and management responsibilities.

People in Sittingbourne are used to people saying “No” to them. Saying “yes” to everything meant that we were able to reduce scepticism and support a much larger number of artists than expected. And for every artist who put their work on sale there were probably twice that who didn’t bring anything in, but who went away encouraged and reminded of their creative dreams.

We were grateful in particular for the opportunity to work with young people from Sheppey through the YAF project and help many of them show their work for the first time, make decisions about how to present it and price it for sale. The festival’s poster was designed and laid out in the shop with one of the young people working alongside an older experienced designer/photographer.

Several artists, regardless of age, showed and sold their art work for the first time ever in workshop34 and while selling is not the primary motivation for most people, they did feel added validation when one of their pieces was bought.

Sharing Space
In most spaces, one vision has to win – here we chose to help the vision emerge from hearing everyone’s point of view equally.  People learned valuable skills in negotiating a common vision.

A challenge for this disparate group of artists, entrepreneurs and those who volunteered in the shop was to let everyone to do what they wanted and needed to do, but without preventing others from doing the same.

This was hard. People expected either someone to make all the decisions or else to be left to get on with what they’re doing and ignore the rest of the group. In workshop34 we encouraged them to negotiate conflicts over space usage. Whenever Lloyd was approached to decide who was right or who had the better idea, he always pushed it back to the group and got them talking to work it out for themselves. As a result, more things happened, people gained new skills in negotiation and learned to let go of their attachment to winning at all costs.

Creating Financial Flow
We didn’t want to just be a subsidised space that gave everything away. While we believe the High Street is more about health than wealth, making money is an important part of reactivating community.  Many of the people involved made money, and made progress developing business ideas.  We made great progress towards being self-supporting.

It was important for us to put the project on a commercial footing from the start rather than starting with everything free and then had to impose charges. Lloyd took the approach again of letting the space users lead this. We quickly established a 20% commission deal with no hanging fee for artists but whenever someone wanted to run a workshop or hire a room we talked through what they could realistically afford – most people were running events for the first time, or just starting a business and rather than put pressure on by insisting on a standard fee, we were able to work with them to find the best deal for all of us.

As it was, from the beginning of December onwards, we ended up taking just over £3500 in sales and workshop fees/room hire, three-quarters of which went directly to the artists, makers and workshop leaders.

Anyway, it made me think yesterday when I wrote the following:
“Think of your favourite creative person, the odds are that you can quickly see that they required collaborators in one form or another even if those ‘others’ are not normally credited, whether it was a supportive spouse or life partner, a teacher, a muse, a tireless editor or a creative partner who brought something to the work that one person couldn’t achieve alone.”

And I thought, “I wonder who people would think of as their favourite creative person.”

And so I asked my Facebook friends

“Which creative person do you most admire or envy? All disciplines. All of history. Go!”

and they told me.

There were a few names that came up more than once:

Leonardo da Vinci x3
Pablo Picasso x3

Frida Kahlo x2
Miles Davis x2
Patti Smith x2

Here are the others in lazy alphabetical order of their first name (some of them only have one name!) There’s at least one married couple in there and more than a couple who are well known for not getting on very well. I haven’t counted how many are dead and how many alive. Some are characters from creative works themselves. A quick scan suggests they are mostly musicians, painters and writers, but there’s also a footballer, a chef and a carpenter. I might go back and look at the gender split – how many women chose men and how many chose women and vice versa.

I’d be surprised if you knew them all, I certainly didn’t – but I’ve added wikipedia links to help us all rise out of ignorance.

Ada Lovelace
Alan Turing
Amanda Palmer
Anton Chekhov
Arthur Smith
Augustus Pugin
Bessie Smith
Billy Childish
Billy Wilder
Bjork
Bob Dylan
Bob Marley
Charlie Brooker
Clive James
Cory Doctorow
David Bowie
Dennis Bergkamp
Dorothy Parker
Douglas Adams
Duke Ellington
Eddie Izzard
Edward Hopper
Frank Gehry
Frida Kahlo
Geoffrey Perkins
Georgia O’Keeffe
Gilbert & George
Guy Savoy
Harry Tuttle
Iggy Pop
Imogen Heap
Jack White
James Brown
Janis Joplin
Jesus
Joe Strummer
John Coltrane
Joni Michell
Jordan
Katharine Tynan
Ken Robinson
Leonard Cohen
Leonardo da Vinci
Louis CK
Marguerite Patten
Marina Abramovic
Michael Jackson
Miles Davis
Milton Glaser
Mitchell Baker
Moebius
Neil Gaiman
Nickie Wildin
Oscar Wilde
Pablo Picasso
Patti Smith
Philomena Cunk
Prince
Rembrandt
Richard Feynman
Samuel Beckett
Sandra Bernhard
Scheherazade
Sir Harold Nicolson
Steve Jobs
Suzette Haden Elgin
Takeshi Kitano
Thomas Pynchon
Tom Tykwer
Tony Hart
Tony Sale
Virginia Woolf
Viv Albertine
William Blake
William Gibson
William Turner
Yuri Pysar

Oh and I was interested to see that people weren’t quick to go with “envy” rather than “admire”. I don’t think it’s very easy to admit to envy anywhere, even Facebook.