And so...?

There is a wealth of technical talent out there, but energy currently being driven towards creating ‘the new Facebook’ or ‘the next iPhone’ could instead be given an alternative, social outlet. We need fewer cool tools and more useful, effective software to improve our society. As social innovators begin to engage in this new world, the impact on our lives could be huge.

The opportunity is there, but to take it will require a shift of mindset, mandate and expectations on the part of social innovators, charities and public institutions. Because once upon a time, there were captive audiences, things we wanted to tell them, channels for reaching them, a group of people who were waiting to be ‘serviced’. Now that’s all changed.

If you can no longer assume that an audience will engage, then your task becomes different. Rather than deciding what you want to tell people, you must find out what people want to talk about. Rather than forcing people to come to you, you must go to where they are already. It’s not about doing things to people, it’s about helping people do things.

And from there, everything shifts. Commissioning, project planning, procurement, risk management, evaluation, business models, staffing, branding, mindset, relationship to users, relationship to technology, and so on.

This handbook lays out a route map for how to approach this new kind of project. It is an early attempt at a beginners guide for how to use communications technologies to bring a community together to do something practical of social benefit. It gives answers and instructions when the route is known, and suggests a direction of travel where the path is still unclear. Everyone has to find their own way, our aim here is to point to the main staging points.

It’s not really about technology. Technology is a trigger, and an enabler, allowing us to do something we wanted to do but previously couldn’t (Simon Berry’s Colalife campaign, for example). So it is the starting point, but it isn’t the end point. We want to show you how to use these technologies without losing your way or missing what’s important – and give you a model for what ‘good management’ actually looks like.

This is new stuff, and we don’t have all the answers yet. This is just the beginning, a starting point for a new conversation, about how to help the people around us by bringing them together to help themselves.

Welcome.