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A seminar series organised by HTA Architects Ltd Report of a seminar on
'E-connected communities - opportunities and challenges' Main conclusions
This seminar series is now organised by HTA Architects Ltd for the Sustainable Placemaking network. E-connected communities - opportunities and challenges Introduction - Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Ltd Information technology we believe is at the heart of the techniques we need to apply to solve some of the problems of making successful places. Bernard Hunt's piece on our website highlights two strands - what he calls e-construction and e-community. It covers the role of information technology in building community and building social capital - it is something we consider very important. We rolled out the idea in our competition-winning scheme for Greenwich Millennium Village. The proposition was that we should create a community intranet, a kind of village post board to enable people to make not only social contact but also to encourage non-financial transactions in the community and towards building community social infrastructure. That would be linked to a village website and be a vehicle for the village trust to enable management functions to be integrated very closely with the way people live. It would also publicise the place on the world wide web. We postulated that it should be a tool in the design process, not only in the design of buildings but also the community, so that buildings should be built in the way that would be very responsive to user needs. It would enable purchasers and renters to make choices on screen and buy off-plan on-screen - web vending. We didn't hang on long enough to learn whether the idea would work, but this year we have subsequently set up www.useronline.org which is our first independent foray into this technique. To make it immediately marketable it is built around the consultation processes that HTA uses on the projects we do anyway. Its central functions are to gather social research data, to act as an information resource for projects, and to flag up options to enable people to make choices. It is an interactive website so that people can engage with projects from the very outset, right down to customisation of kitchens, front elevations, colour schemes and that sort of thing. We are very enthusiastic about it. 30% of households nation-wide have web access - even in the more deprived areas we are finding it can reach 15-20%. The degree of transparency and the ability for the web to hold an easily auditable trail of the process is a really important tool. Our experience is that, very commonly, people come to consultation processes late, they leave, or have hidden agendas and attempt to manipulate information and gain a constituency: the existence of this transparent form of process is a very useful way of developing the process. We are happy to have launched our first one at central Oakridge (Sentinel Housing Group and Basingstoke and Deane District Council) and hope to launch another at Norfolk Park in Sheffield. We are also bidding jointly with Andersen to build one for the Ocean New Deal project. The potential of this technology spreads much wider into the community and has functions that will clearly help build the kind of social capital that we wish to see. Connected communities Julie Mercer has extensive experience in delivering innovative e-government solutions at a regional and local level. She recently led a team from Andersen business consulting practice to develop a feasibility study for the development of a community information exchange to support the SRB funded regeneration of Elephant and Castle in south London. Her colleague Glenn Carmichael also contributed. I work in the business consulting practice of Andersen and we cover a much wider area than just housing or regeneration. As a preamble, some of what I say you might not agree with, and some of you may say I haven't thought it through properly from your perspective - and I might not have done, because I do not come from a housing background. But we are concerned with how you can use technology to embrace everyone in the community across all the functions that the public services deliver - and the internet is at the heart of that. Using the internet covers a wide range of interests. For a very few people it is simply surfing. Many people have particular sites of interest that they visit regularly. Sending e-mails is a specific use. There are other uses such as buying, booking holidays and so on, and research. But clearly almost all of us use it for a purpose and we don't just look around to see what is out there - we tend to be looking for something. The internet is being used in many ways for communities.
These are just a few ways in which people are looking to connect communities using the internet. In the UK the government has said the country will be the place to do e-business in the future and is investing heavily. By the end of 2002 every library will be connected to the internet. Every school child is to get an e-mail address - 75% already have internet access - and every school will have high bandwidth access to the internet over the next couple of years. It is part of a big drive in the public sector to connect everybody. We carried out research in south London which showed that something like 3% of the population are involved in community projects but that drops to zero under the age of 30. But of you look at internet access in the UK it shows that something like 82% of 16-24 year olds use the internet but when you get beyond 75 it drops to 4%. When redeveloping areas you tend to talk to the older adult population which uses the internet less but by the time you have actually redeveloped the area, those adults will have moved on. It is the younger people who will be creating the communities of tomorrow. That is something that we sometimes forget in the consultation process and in planning. People have limited time and it is a big world wide web. There are billions of sites out there and people tend to go to places they understand and know. We have come up with the idea of a 'local wide web', creating something where people can go to get access to information that is relevant to them in their local setting. I think that is what sustainable placemaking is about. Certainly the website that we developed for Elephant and Castle tries to do that and create local community spirit. And it is not just about the redevelopment because there is a community beyond the immediate vicinity which impacts upon it. It is a matter of addressing the people who work in and travel through the area, who are also going to be affected by the redevelopment. I have searched through the internet to see what other connected community sites I could find - I came up with about 150,000 hits. In an online book about sustainable communities I found an article about a website in America called the Well, which is a thriving parenting website that people regularly visit because they find the information that they want. Online chat rooms connect people in many different places. One lady had fallen very ill in Nepal. This quickly got round this virtual community and within two days they knew which doctors in Nepal to speak to, where she could get the blood transfusion, how they could transfer cash and get her back to America when she had stabilised. While that is a grand scale story, at a local level can be a very powerful thing. Think how many more connections you have with people who live close to you. We need to take account of this when building websites. In 20 years time the internet will be just like the telephone and television - people will use it without really thinking. If you look at the top end of the housing market today homes are being built fully enabled. You can check your security system through the internet from your holiday or let the postman in to the garage to leave a package without having to stay at home with uncertain delivery times. You can turn your oven on, turn your lights on, and draw the curtains. Of course this is happening at the top end of the market. But 20 years ago you would have had to call BT in to install telephone and television points - now they are installed in all homes as standard. There is no reason to think that is not going to trickle back down the market as prices come down. In the future all houses will have some of those technologies incorporated into them. Consortia involved in regeneration projects need to think about these issues. The question to ask is: how do you start to plan now for things that will not exist for another five or ten years and make sure that technology - which moves at a much faster pace than anything that we have been aware of before - will be up to date. I think we underestimate people from all walks of life in terms of their ability and their interests in using the internet and making things easier. There are great opportunities for joined-up working between redevelopers, housing associations, and utility companies to create a local wide web that just doesn't rely just on the internet for access but uses digital TV, telephone, mobiles and a whole range of other technologies that are being developed currently. In this way we can ensure that people can get the information they want anytime, anyplace, anywhere. And it is not just information: they should contribute to the process. As I indicated young people miss out. The risk is they become disillusioned and don't want to be involved. Young people have got an amazing sense of what is possible and what the world is going to be like in ten to twenty years time. We need to create something that allows them to become engaged, and also gives the opportunity to engage older people as well. We are working in North Yorkshire with the county council to see how you can connect some of the most rural communities in the country to have access to the electronic age. Most members of the council are at least 75 and generally white males. They all have computers, given to them when they are elected. When papers come out, the members' secretary rings them up and tells them that they have been posted on the internet. The trouble is they then ask for the papers to be printed out and sent in the post. When I recently talked to them about the e-government strategy one of the things that came out there is that they all have got families with children and grand children who love using the internet. What we need to do is to get young people to show older people what can be achieved. What they can do is introduce their elders to subjects which they are likely to find interesting. For instance, being a rural area, fishing is a popular past-time - they can help them investigate the subject from the material available through their computers. Discussion Local Governance I am curious to discover more about e-governance. Could you explain what difference it is going to make to local government in particular and whether the use of IT is going to create opportunities for integrating some of the things that are relevant to us like housing management and issues around regeneration. Ben Derbyshire, HTA Architects Tony Blair might like to believe that IT is a UK-based change. But if you look what is happening in the US, Australia, Singapore, France, Germany, the Nordics you can see that all of them realise that they have to employ these new technologies to improve their information provision and their customer service. What has changed is that new technologies are available. Organisations like Direct Line, the banks, Tesco and Sainsbury have set our expectations not only about what good service is, but also the minimum level of acceptable service. Government has to respond to this or they will be left disenfranchised. Much of local government is beginning to realise, though not exclusively, that unless they can respond meaningfully and add value they will not have a remit - and not just by simply offering the statutory services. They are also worried about regionalisation and those other aspects that might be brought to bear. Local government is responding by changing their governance arrangements such as introducing cabinets and considering elected mayors. Linked to this, we find they are beginning to consider themselves as an organisation as opposed to groups of departments each of which is individually run. No longer can the housing department just do housing and if you want anything else you have to phone a different number. There will be long hard fought battles to make the transitions. The technology is relatively straightforward - the rest is about politics, culture change and process re-engineering. Officials are beginning to understand that customers are important and beginning to refer to them as 'customers' and 'citizens'. They are beginning to respond to that and realise that because of their inaction over 10 years, people do not know what local government does. Consider consultation. Tower Hamlets got feedback about joined-up government - the jargon: people felt that it meant that if they went to the doctor they might be seen by a policeman. That was the perception. The answer implies that people have so little understanding of the local government remit that they think that might be the result. That is not good. Joined-up services are about understanding what people need. If I move into an authority I may have to tell 28 different departments and authorities that I am in that area. The leader at Tower Hamlets is exploring what he calls the third sector strategy. This is considering how to delegate service delivery to places where it is effectively done. So instead of having a homelessness unit it may delegate that to, say, a Bangladeshi men's hostel which connects and understands homelessness issues in Tower Hamlets. And that third sector strategy is in the ascendant. There are all kinds things happening, all of it is changing in varying degrees. It is going to take us to all sorts of different places as people explore. It is about what it means for the community, what it means driven by their politicians, what their customers actually want. Glenn Carmichael, Anderson Consulting Creating Community We recently launched a website which is all about getting people more engaged and to become more active citizens. We all use the internet but I wonder how many of us are part of an online community. I use the web every day and I am not. Agency One of the things we are quite clear about is that just an internet site with a chat room is not going to create real community. What you can use the internet for is a really good repository information, a way of sharing information and ideas, collecting ideas and building a database that you can analyse. This lends itself well to things like consultation. But not everybody wants to communicate over the internet. It is useful because people can use it whenever they like because it is always available. Some people though, will always be more comfortable lifting the phone and asking a question. We cannot ignore some of those other traditional ways, such as reading it on paper. Other experts say that most people will access the internet through their digital television and by 2010 every household will have a digital TV. Julie Mercer I agree that it will get bigger and bigger. In Wales the community is very strong and there is interaction between the people. But I feel that the internet could be another nail in the coffin because it could reduce that face to face interaction. The more channels you have the more the risk that people will become couch potatoes. Developer/contractor I travel 45 minutes to work by train. When I get on in the morning I say 'good morning' to the 10 or so people when I get on at Cobham, but no-one talks to anyone after Surbiton when the train is full. You have got these layers of trust. In parts of Wales and parts of Surrey the trust is easy and you have 'permission' to talk. With a website we are working at a very strange distance - low trust. What works is if you can give permission and lower the barriers in areas where people do not talk to their next door neighbours. I believe that if it does not contribute to people interacting it has failed. The only purpose for deploying any technology for consultation is to find out how people are getting on. Finding the ways to do it is the real key. Glenn Carmichael Involvement I think we can't put too much importance on the need to get young people involved. We are involved in a pilot homezone project, but we can't get kids interested. If the internet is going to work for them they have got to have access. Their parents are not well off. And it has got to be relevant to them. Housing association I think that is right. On the Elephant and Castle project we aimed to create the interest factor to make people want to get involved, not just because they want to be consulted, but because it is a useful place. So we have set up communities to link up with the schools - children can post their artwork or photographs of local areas. We encourage older people to tell us their life story and how the area has changed over the last 40 years. We need to build around partnerships. The commercial partnerships make schemes viable, but at the same time other partnerships are needed in the local community to start breaking down some of the barriers about young people, and involving and working with the schools. We talked to the education business partnership in south London. With a local theatre group they have developed something called Webplay where they took a play to a couple of schools in the area and created a community online for them to get together. In some regeneration areas where we are working, the people who are living in the areas tend to come from very poor and culturally mixed backgrounds. I think one of the ways to engage some of them is to create 'twin' communities and connect them to others in other countries perhaps - maybe where their families have come from - or to link London to rural Devon or Yorkshire where life is very different. Perhaps in this way you can start to engage people in what makes a community. This is a problem: one of the issues that has come up in the UK is involving anyone in public life. It has been demonstrated by the number of people who bothered to vote in elections. Julie Mercer Providing Internet Access This is all about one form of interaction or another but perhaps what drives it best is organisations and their desire to provide a service out of which they will get benefit, financial or otherwise. This means the business case for generating the kind of infrastructure that is going to enable people to make connections of one sort or another, which will make them more effective than they are now. Housing associations are thinking about integrating information technology and what it might mean for residents, tenants, rent collection, repairs and so on. It seems to me that it means building an IT infrastructure among the population, driven by the need for service delivery. We see more of it among housing associations than local authorities. Ben Derbyshire We are very interested in this. We are starting to survey our tenants and residents about what they want and what they have already by way of access. And it is quite staggering how quickly things are moving. Three years ago we found that the level of interest was high, though access to hardware was just 10%. But now it has reached 40%, partly generated by children and schools. It is certainly very attractive for us to link up dispersed stock in rural areas. People don't want to travel a long way to meetings or spend the time. They see technology as one way of doing it. We are struggling with how you actually enable them to engage online. Do you give them the hardware? It is difficult enough providing the white goods. Housing association The rural nature of North Yorkshire is driving the e-agenda. For instance, it could help officers avoid travelling half a day across the county for perhaps an hour's meeting. The council is working with the RDA to look at ways of investing public money in creating a broadband network that will link eventually link with every home. They have appointed a telecom consortia to help them roll it out. To create a sustainable cost effective solution in a single estate for a local authority is very expensive. But if you have an RSL with 5-20,000 plus homes, you can start to make it work. And you can link up a local area network with other agencies. You can have an online rent book. In Knowsley residents can report faults online directly into the system. They are beginning to automate those procedures which take up time and effort. Julie Mercer Knowsley can't be unique. Do you think housing associations will take it up? Ben Derbyshire I think we will - there is inevitability about it. Our tenants' expectations will rise to that. The constraints are the cost of the infrastructure against other financial pressures. Housing association There is a company Housecall that provides a service. So there are people out there who are starting to provide the service and sell it to organisations. Rory Bergin, HTA Architects My naïve impression is that the cost of the hardware is not going to be on the service provider because people buy it to watch digital films and choice TV. Ben Derbyshire But some people are considering it. At Ocean Estate they want to consider how that model might work, providing the whole internet package right through. The economics involves the local authority's internal efficiency. You might borrow ideas from free newspapers, it might be the economics of training and development - some of which is government funded - or it might be advertising, sponsorship or philanthropy Glenn Carmichael I think that the economics of the internet is the economics of free provision. That is to say I don't think you are going to pay for this. It is about people who want to make contact with each other for all kinds of different purposes. It is a load of connections which are made by people who want to provide services for each other or make money somehow. The issue for us is: what does it cost for organisations not to take part? We have been putting money into it to get onto the bandwagon because we presume there is a cost of not getting involved and not being right there when it becomes possible to communicate in the way that is necessary. Do any housing associations feel like that it is almost an article of faith that you just have to be up there are running? Ben Derbyshire It is a question of keeping up to date and I believe you lose business if you are not. One of the problems seems to me that it is always difficult to keep web pages up to date. I think this is an important aspect of communication. I think that it is the important thing that it is not a turn off - I think we have got to work on that. The wider implication is: can we really engage our customers - and also engage younger people? We are trying to develop jointly in Sutton with Metropolitan and the local authority - I think it is a about critical mass - and we have deliberately gone not to have three organisations with three different sets of standards. The other aspect on regeneration is the need to avoid confusion. In reality most people don't engage and don't get involved through a web page. For instance, most people don't understand plans - I am quite interested in virtual reality - perhaps people will understand those better. Housing association My foray into regeneration has been quite recent and one of the things I notice is that the people who take part in consultation meetings are often the usual suspects. I am not convinced that they necessarily represent all of the people in the local community. They often come from small groups frequently representing single issues. I know that the way HTA carries out its consultation is to make sure that they don't just use the groups that are already up and established, but create something else. I am always very aware: have we really asked Mr and Mrs Average and not just the people who are actively and openly engaged in community life all the time? We need to try to get behind some of the agendas - that might be quite controversial. I do think that there are voices that we just don't engage for a whole range of reasons. Experience in London is going to be very different compared with the south west. People are often afraid to go out in the evenings and so if we can create an opportunity where they can have a say in a different way, then I think you will begin to engage more people. Julie Mercer I think it is important to ask the question: do all local authorities and housing associations really want their customers to become empowered? Bernard Hunt, HTA Architects We must be careful that just because it's there we should use the internet - we should not use innovation for innovation's sake. We also have to be careful not to disenfranchise people because we are not using other systems. The challenge for management of housing associations is to be at the leading edge but not at the bleeding edge. We need to take into account of the full cost including time. If you don't run the website properly and people don't have access you might just as well publish a newsletter and not bother to put it in the letterbox. There are people out there who don't have access and can miss out on something. There is an element of choice as we go through this transition period. We have to give choice and be careful not to jump on the bandwagon just because it's there. We have to be careful to assess the benefits properly. Housing association If, when we are consulting through the internet, we are only dealing with 10-15% of the population, that amounts to double the number of people we engage with during our face-to-face discussion, meetings and so on, so even in the short term we see benefit. Rory Bergin I would never suggest that the answer is just to create a website. You can't just say that's the answer to everybody's problems, that's the panacea. You have got to remember that 60% of the population does not have internet access and you have still got to engage them. You have got to stick with some of your traditional ways of communicating. One of the things that came out at Elephant and Castle was not that you need to connect every single home, but to make sure that every household has access if they want it. In high density housing you can have a community area which has internet access. One other thing they jumped on was the idea of electronic posters - billboards near schools to reach the large numbers of people who stand outside every day waiting for children. People interact there - mothers talk. Getting information to them at the school gate was considered a very interesting way of doing that. It also provides a facility that the school can use. You still have to look at the business case. You have to look at the population you are serving, to look at what other agencies are doing in your area and partner up with them. If the council has just invested heavily in a network, then you want to try and get onto that rather than put another network in, which - except for the last 50 yards - goes along in parallel to the council's. As Glenn said, one view of joined-up government is that people think the GP is going to be the local bobby. It is about communication and making people understand what something means. I think the internet provides a real opportunity to create capacity. But unless you are customer centric then there is little point in taking on some of these things. Julie Mercer Training We are involved in the Ocean Estate. In partnership with Hackney Council we run a website advertising site for unemployed people in construction. That has been tremendously successful. I don't know where they are getting their access to the internet, but they are finding jobs through that medium. So it has been a success. But it is a targeted audience. Certainly in a regeneration environment, I think it has tremendous potential. Contractor/developer Everything that is being discussed at the moment is about how you engage communities and I think anyone involved will totally support that. We have been talking about the infrastructure - yes, we can put the technology in. But the issue for me is about training: how do you to engage the people, how do you then train those people so that they can engage? In a lot of projects where we have put in intelligent wiring systems some of the feedback has been: 'that's fine, but we never use it'. It is not simply skills - it is about building confidence, permission and support. Contractor/developer Perhaps it should involve young people who can volunteer to help older people to give them confidence and access - not just to access prepared services but to show them the football results or whatever appeals and get them engaged doing that. It will start from schools, the world will change. We have all sorts of interventions I think it is more about aligning them and giving them confidence. A recent TV programme centred on a self-build housing scheme. It provided the participants with decent homes and skills. They got jobs - not necessarily in decorating or bricklaying - because they were confident. It sparked how these people's lives were transformed. Glenn Carmichael All our training centres have IT suites and as part of the training for bricklayers they have to fill in computer-based answer sheets. We also gave them an introduction to the internet which helps people who wouldn't normally gain access and understanding. Contractor/developer There are lots of ways of drawing in public money. In North Yorkshire, as will be the case with others RDAs, through Yorkshire Forward they have been able to draw in money so that all of the staff gain basic IT skills for a lot less than it would otherwise cost. We see training as absolutely fundamental. At Ocean, we aim to get a group of people to become our sounding board, give them computers and training and let them help us do some of the research about what Ocean Online should look like, what it should it include and cover. And as Glenn was saying, that empowers them. They become confident and show their families and friends what to do. That snowballing effect is very powerful. Julie Mercer This seminar series operates on a 'Chatham House rules' basis. However, many of the participants have already expressed their willingness to have their contributions credited to them. In the other cases, speakers have not yet given clearance - no inference should be drawn from this. Anyone wishing to quote the speakers should speak to them direct for their permission. For further information, contact Chris Bazlinton, Editor on 01279 771468. HTA Architects Limited 79 Parkway London NW1 7PP telephone 020 7485 8555 fax 020 7485 1232 email hta@hta-arch.co.uk ISDN 0207267 0061
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