Simon's Blog (the personal one)

Letter to the Editor - The Times

Photo credits: Drumchapel (left): Steve Wilson; Bearsden (right): James Fraser

Sir,

The consequences of running the lives of the poor are very much more serious even than Libby Purves points out (You're poor. We'll run your life for you. Mar 11). It's more than patronising - it's a matter of life or death. There are two housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow: Drumchapel and Bearsden. In the early nineties, life expectancy in Drumchapel was 10 years less than in neighbouring Bearsden, Glasgow's richest area. Today the Scottish Executive's website says that the difference is 11 years. Both areas are served by the same health service and the same general hospital.

A striking difference between Drumchapel and Bearsden is that in Drumchapel you are likely to be poor and you have other people telling you what to do. You are not in control of your own destiny, you are disempowered and you die an average of 11 years younger.

But am I getting disempowerment mixed up with poverty? Well no, I don't think I am. A study of male civil servants showed conclusively that those in the lower grade jobs (messengers, doorkeepers) had a three-fold higher mortality rate than men in the highest grade jobs.

This status-related risk factor was found to be more significant in determining death than smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. None of those studied were living in poverty, and all had access to the National Health Service.

People in control, in the higher level jobs, 'the empowered', were healthier than the lower grade employees who had things done to them, who often had skills that were under-utilised, lacked clarity in tasks they were asked to do and had very little control or idea about what the future had in store for them.

So, for the individual, empowerment is the biggest gift that can be given: quite literally a matter of life or death. By patronising people you're not just "making them feel lousy" you may literally be sending them to an early grave.

Simon Berry
Chief Executive
ruralnet|uk
Background and sources

[Well they aren't going to publish it, so I thought I'd publish it myself!]

Call Sign - Blog Sign?

This post is prompted by a comment by Ed Mitchell on one of my recent posts. Ed said:

2. The key has to be the ongoing aggregation of our distributed thoughts on our blogs by interest/practice focused hubs which gather our thoughts and then, when neccesary, we can come to the communal knowledge watering hole and kick off in small focused bursts around specific issues...

This gives us the independence we want when we want it and the communal many brains focus when we need it...

We must start using effective keywords and experimenting properly between ourselves!

Focussing on the last sentence. When you are granted a CB Radio licence you get a Call Sign which is unique to you. What if we all had a 'Blog Sign' that was unique to us? Then we could use each other's Blog Signs to tag things that we think particular people would be interested in. Then we could aggregate on our Blog Sign. Have I just reinvented email? Is this built into blogs already and I haven't noticed?

Let's see if I can start a trend. My Blog Sign is s1m0nb3rry.

The trouble with rural broadband

It is inconceivable to think now that just 5 years ago rural Britain faced the prospect of no access to broadband. The visionaries of the time, who mostly ended up playing an active part in the Community Broadband Network (established by ruralnet|uk and The Phone Co-op) and the Access to Broadband Campaign (ABC), could see that this would be a complete disaster for rural areas. They were right weren’t they? Anyone disagree? I thought not.

With the internet becoming a major delivery channel for nearly everything, including Government and other public services, how would the Government have coped with a group of people equivalent in size to a major city who were excluded from such services?

But it’s OK now. Virtually everyone has access to broadband. Or do they?

The trouble with broadband is that it is a rapidly evolving technology. It’s not like electricity or gas. Supply people with that and they’ve got it for life. With broadband, today’s broadband is tomorrow’s narrowband.

When I was project manager of the WREN Telecottage in the early 90s we were a trial site for ISDN and when the internet arrived and we hooked up an ISDN router, we thought we’d died and gone to heaven! Web pages loaded in an instant, just as fast, it seemed, as the stuff from our own server located 6 feet away. But you try ISDN today. You’d be VERY disappointed. Things have moved on.

We have a situation a bit like the deadly tryst that exists between hardware and software producers – faster machines beget more demanding software which demands faster hardware and so it goes on. In the same way, as ‘broadband’ gets faster so online service providers produce services which demand faster broadband speeds.

So what should happen in rural areas when the ADSL systems they have been provided with prove totally inadequate? Should organisations like the Regional Development Agencies meddle in the market again and fill in with whatever the next generation of broadband is? I don’t think so.

The trouble with ‘market meddling’ is that is screws things up. All those rural communities who have been provided with ADSL in places where there was market failure are probably stuck with it for sometime as those who have invested will need to see a return on their investment, and that takes time.

So, should we just leave these rural communities to miss out the THE economic and social development driver of our time? No we shouldn’t and we should meddle in the market again but this time we need to do it properly and give these communities a lot more than the market is prepared to deliver at the time.

I think I am right in saying that a system of ‘fibre to the street’ (or village centre) and very very high speed wireless links from there is about as good as it can get, as far as broad band is concerned, for the foreseeable future.

So next time we meddle in the market let’s not do it reluctantly. Let’s do it with real enthusiasm and properly.

Related information:

• I have written about rural broad band before here: my 2004 posting.
• The book pictured, written by one of the rural broadband warriors, Lindsey Annison, can be purchased here as a paperback or download.
• Read more about South Witham Broadband and the Community Broadband Network.

See also:

• BBC: Broadband digital divide looms.

Communities of Practice and Web 2.0

I start this posting knowing that someone will read it and say "Where has this guy been? We all worked that out years ago." Despite this I am going to continue because if I've only just worked it out, there will be others like me who might find this interesting!

Those of us who have tried to support 'Communities of Practice' online will know that it is not easy, especially if it's got nothing to do with ICT or making lots of money or organising a sports team.

Why is it so difficult? A key issue is that, on many issues, it is difficult to get to enough people interested in the same thing to the same extent for long enough to sustain an online group. Like most people, I am interested in lots of things and could belong to loads of communities of practice. But in real life I end up on the periphery of all of them. My interest in any particular thing waxes and wanes. This is captured brilliantly in Jane Berry's* spiral of engagement (pictured) which she produced as part of the work on the Open Innovation Exchange.

OK, so how does Web 2.0 help? Well, on the one hand it would appear not to. Web 2.0 is very empowering for individuals and these days it is just as difficult to get Web 2.0 literate people to participate in an online group as it is to get the digitally excluded involved. The 'literates' are all doing their own thing in there own online spaces thanks very much. Why should they come and join your group?

But what Web 2.0 gives us is tags (keywords) and in the Web 2.0 world it is these tags that bring us together, or can potentially bring us together, in virtual online groups. So an alternative, to bringing people together and then expecting them to interact in a shared space, is to encourage individuals to write their own ideas in their own space (like I'm doing here) and to tag it. The tags then identify de facto communities of practice and draw the attention of individuals to the work of other individuals doing, and writing, about similar things.

"But," I hear you say, "I don't want make contact with people who just write about stuff. I want contact with people who are actually doing stuff." I agree. That's why we need to use the internet as our collective 'workbench' like Beth Kanter does so well over here.

* I have to express (great) interest here . . . Jane is my wife!

Empowerment - a matter of life or death

What's in a word? In an environment of jargon, cliché and political correctness the word 'empowerment' has suffered badly. Let's stand back, and elevate it to its proper place: arguably, empowerment is the key concept for people supporting community development.

There are two housing estates on the outskirts of Glasgow: Drumchapel and Bearsden. In the early nineties, life expectancy in Drumchapel was 10 years less than in neighbouring Bearsden, Glasgow's richest area (1 - PDF). The Scottish Executive's website says that the difference today is 11 years (2). Both areas are served by the same health service and the same general hospital (3). So, what is going on?

These statistics illustrate a hyposthesis: the more you control your own destiny, the healthier you are likely to be. Empowered individuals are healthier and live longer, the theory goes.

A survey in 2003 (4 - PDF) established that 16% of Drumchapel working population were unemployed and a further 14% were permanently sick or disabled. 22% reported some form of financial difficulty. As an unemployed person, you are less likely to live in a place of your own choice, and other people are more likely to be telling you what you can and can't do. You are more likely to be stressed and more likely to smoke, drink and take other drugs.

But what about those well-off people in high-paid, high-stress jobs who may also smoke, drink and take drugs? Interestingly, research amongst the employed appears to reinforce the empowerment and health hypothesis. A study of male civil servants showed conclusively that those in the lower grade jobs (messengers, doorkeepers) had a three-fold higher mortality rate than men in the highest grade jobs (5).

This status-related risk factor was found to be more significant in determining death than smoking, high blood pressure, or cholesterol. None of those studied were living in poverty, and all had access to the National Health Service.

People in control, in the higher level jobs, 'the empowered', were healthier than the lower grade employees who had things done to them, who often had skills that were under-utilised, lacked clarity in tasks they were asked to do and had very little control or idea about what the future had in store for them.

So, for the individual, empowerment is the biggest gift that can be given: quite literally a matter of life or death.

For me, these principles can be applied at levels beyond the individual. Unhealthy families, communities or businesses are characterised by a lack of control over their own destiny. They have things done to them, they are not in control themselves. Failing communities usually exist in an environment - physical and non-physical - not of their own making. The way forward is to empower communities to take control of their own destiny.

Businesses usually fail because they are unable to manage aspects that should be under their control. Good business planning, timely access to information, just-in-time training and relevant, tailored support all enable businesses to be more in control of their destiny.

So, we use the word 'empowerment' with pride in the ruralnet|uk mission statement: To promote social inclusion and reduce deprivation in rural areas by empowering individuals, families, communities and businesses so that they able to control their own destinies and fully engage with society.

1: World Health Day 1996: The Who's Healthy Cities Programme
www.who.int/docstore/world-health-day/en/documents1996/whd2int.pdf

2: Building Better Cities: Delivering Growth and Opportunities
www.scotland.gov.uk/library5/finance/bbcs-05.asp

3:The myth of welfare dependency by Nicolai Gentchev
pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj69/gentchev.htm

4: Drumchapel Social Inclusion Partnership Board, Baseline Study, 2003 Update www.drumchapel.org.uk/downloads/baselineupdate2003.pdf

5: Marmot, Shipley and Rose, 1984 cited by www.workhealth.org/projects/pwhitew.html

Sustainable Rural Communities - what do we mean? Is this a pipedream?

There are problems with the word 'sustainable'. First of all, it's just an adjective and can be stuck on the front of anything: sustainable living, sustainable funding, sustainable farming.

So to say: “We are sustainable” is so ambiguous as to be meaningless. Do you mean you are earning enough to keep yourself or your organisation afloat. Do you mean you can keep going on, as you are, forever – perpetual motion on the way to Shangri-la? Or are we talking about striving to balance economic, social and environmental considerations in everything we do?

ruralnet|uk is a charity working towards 'Sustainable Rural Communities'. What do we mean? For us, sustainable rural communities are communities where there is a harmony between economic development and social cohesion and an on-going desire to reduce the impact of actions on the environment.

Even this will be interpreted in a spectrum of different ways according to who our audience is, and what they know about our work.

The term sustainability has become fashionable: it is used too broadly and is too complex to be useful in any practical way. It's a worthy vision, a responsible-sounding strategy, but how do you actually do it? Is there a simple yardstick we can use to guide rural communities to make them more sustainable?

There are often tensions between economic development, social cohesion and the environment. There need not be. And, big, big opportunities are missed when one of the three objectives are pursued without due regard for the other two.

Let us look at a selection of 'sustainable' initiatives to see if we can identify the yardstick we need.

Community Broadband Network

In 2003, when it looked like large areas of rural Britain were going to be denied access to ADSL broadband. ruralnet|uk worked with the Phone Co-op to establish the Community Broadband Network (CBN). At that time, a small number of rural communities were determined not to be left out of this strategically crucial development and decided to take a DIY approach. These communities got together, linked themselves up using blisteringly fast wireless technology and then shared among themselves the cost of linking this community network to the wider internet. The idea of CBN was to help these communities share what they knew with other communities who aspired to do the same thing.

These broadband communities were ground-breaking in many ways. First of all they took a collective approach, not an individual approach to the issue. Without exception this strengthened the social cohesion of these communities, with significant, non-broadband-related spin-offs. People got to know each other better, other community initiatives were started in the can-do atmosphere created. And finally, it established in many rural areas a foundation stone for the new knowledge economy, supporting jobs where weightless information is mined, harvested and moved around, rather than more traditional rural commodities.

CBN was essentially an initiative that was driven by an economic development imperative, but which had significant social and environmental benefits.

Community Carbon Network

ruralnet|uk is now working with the Carnegie Rural Community Development Programme to look into replicating the principles of the CBN in a 'Rural Community Carbon Network' (RCCN) to raise awareness of community approaches to increased efficiency in energy use, including local generation of energy from renewable sources. Like its predecessor, RCCN would also promote and fund knowledge transfer, including peer to peer support both online and face to face.

Sustrans

Another example: at the ruralnet|2006 conference last week in Sherwood Forest, John Grimshaw, CEO of Sustrans and mastermind of the National Cycle Network pointed out that the UK was the poor man of Europe when it comes to the use of the bicycle (See below: Percentage of trips by bicycle by country).

   
Figure 1: Percentage of trips by bicycle

He then went on to make an alarming link between the levels of cycling in the UK and childhood obesity (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Cycling and obesity

People in colder, wetter and hillier countries in Europe cycle more than we do in the UK.

Cycling ticks more of the 'sustainability' boxes than you first expect: yes, it is non-polluting, and uses renewable energy, but it also impacts on health; encourages community projects and involvement in building, signing and maintaining tracks; helps reclaim and restore natural environments; and with the right planning and incentives, encourages local economic stability. It could do much more. John argues that we need to move around less and invest more in our own localities: to make the Trussocks as attractive as Tuscany.

Why not give visitor discounts to those who arrive by bike? Employers should aim to reduce car miles of their employees by 10% year on year through the encouragement of decentralised working. He even suggests that it should be legal to use place of residence as a criteria when recruiting. Many factors make cycling more viable and more popular: building safe routes is just one, and Sustrans also works hard to encourage more women to cycle and to ensure children adopt a life-time habit to counter the worrying trends in obesity shown above.

Local food

Food Links projects and Farmers' Markets are another example of activities that promote sustainability on a number of levels. They promote healthy eating, improve demand and markets for local food and reduce 'food miles' and the associated damage to the environment. Farmers' markets are viable for the farmers who participate in them because they make a significantly larger margin on what they sell directly to the consumers, rather than to supermarkets.

Think global, act local

All of these initiatives seem 'sustainable'. But they are initiated by different primary drivers: to improve living standards, services, or work prospects, a better environment, improved community cohesion or health. With just a little thought, planning, and the right incentives, many of these objectives can be combined, giving a triple bottom line: financial, social and environmental benefits. But what is at their heart? For me, what all these sustainable actions have in common is that they focus on the 'local': people getting together and harnessing both outside help and their own determination to make a difference. It is easy, when faced with seemingly huge and intractable problems – climate change; soaring energy prices; depleted communities - to feel disempowered, to think that small actions are worthless. But Patrick Geddes' aphorism: 'Think global, act local' (Cities in Evolution, 1915), taken up by E F Shumacher in the 70s and by many others since, is perhaps still our best yardstick for rural sustainability.

Rural Broadband - Is BT good for rural communities?

Everyone is delighted at BT's announcement on 27 April 2004 that they are abandoning trigger level campaigns. Like the proverbial good genie, BT is going to enable any exchange with a trigger level set. No more campaigning required. Most people will have access to ADSL by the summer of 2005. Our wishes have all come true. Or have they?

There is no doubt that this is a very popular measure, the sort of thing a government would love to do just before an election. In the short term ADSL will be fine for most people. As a rural regeneration charity, ruralnet|uk will be promoting the rapid uptake of the service as it becomes available. But that is not all we will be doing.

BT was reluctant to abandon the trigger level campaign as it involved more than 3,000 volunteers promoting ADSL; for nothing. Let's say, conservatively, that these have each put in 10 hours' work (most will have put in a lot more) and their time is worth a conservative £10/hour. That's £300,000. You can double that for the overhead costs which BT didn't incur, and double it again for non-paid sales bonuses. Which makes £1.2m. However, this is small change when compared with the costs that BT have been incurring through engineers having to flit from exchange to exchange, in a haphazard response to consumer demand.

Abandoning trigger levels means that BT can now control which exchanges are fixed, and when. They can thereby enable exchanges in an engineeringly efficient manner.

Bell Heads vs Net Heads

On the face of it, it seems perverse and churlish to criticise BT's initiative. Doesn't it? Well no actually. When a genie grants your wish, it's best to look hard at what you're really getting. Through this move, innovation will be stifled and competition reduced. Smoke has been thrown in the eyes of some of the senior decision makers who now believe, and will say, that the 'broadband issue' has been resolved. It hasn't and here is why.

When the railways came along nearly 200 years ago, this spelt doom for the operators of the canal network. However, we did not nurture the new technology by suggesting that railway tracks should be laid along tow paths. We did not put the horses out to grass and shackle the new trains to canal boats. Neither did we make trains go through locks! But this is what we are doing by our current obsession with ADSL delivered through the antiquated telephone lines.

ADSL was recently described by a senior BT manager as a 'nurturing technology'. This is shorthand for "it's not very fast and will be redundant in a few years' time". Like ISDN before it, ADSL will soon be the slowest boat to China. And, like ISDN today, it will not support the applications most people and businesses will want to run.

ADSL is promoted by the 'Bell Heads'. Those who have gained their experience or have a vested interest in the telephone network.

Throw off the shackles of the telephone network, start talking about proper, future-proof broadband delivered by visionaries, using the latest technology, and it gets very very exciting indeed. This is the territory of the 'Net Heads' and the tragedy of BT's ADSL announcement is that the Net Heads have had the rug pulled out from under their feet. But don't feel sorry for the 'Net Heads'. They will go off and apply their enthusiasm, vision and entrepreneurship to something else. We need to worry about ourselves, the inhabitants of rural areas. Because when the Net Heads go, so does the prospect of future-proof broadband: we will be committed to a world where bandwidth is rationed and throttled in the interests of delivering shareholder value. Nobody is against shareholder benefits if there is a level playing field. Which of course there is not.

Real Broadband

So what have these Net Heads got in their box of tricks? Once you stop thinking broadband has to be delivered through telephone lines, then it is amazing what you can do. And you can do it now and affordably. Community broadband projects split broadband into two. They build very very high speed community networks in a local area, and then they plug these into the internet with as fast a connection as they can afford. The high-speed community network can support desktop video conferencing (for everyone), CCTV, health and care applications, proper distributed working, local (video) phone calls, live video links to anywhere in the community, applications which properly integrate the local schools into their community, real integrated service delivery and many more applications that we haven't thought of yet, but will as soon as we get our hands on this technology. The more people in the community that use these networks, the faster the link can be to the rest of the world. If most of the community is seduced by the promise of ADSL then community networks can be seen, by outsiders and potential funders, to be non-viable. However, this is a serious misconception. Selling ADSL, like the community does in the Calder Valley, can provide community broadband initiatives with the foundation they need to roll out real broadband. This is of interest to those who can't get ADSL now and those who do not want to go through ADSL initiation on their way to real broadband.

The Community Effect

As we have seen, BT Wholesale has very cleverly used the power of the community in its trigger level campaigns. However, this can be moved to an even higher level. If local people and businesses are properly engaged in determining what the service should be and how it should be run, the commitment that results generates innovation in the development of new applications, social inclusion, very high levels of local take up and commitment that results in very low 'churn'.

Business Broadband

The 'A' in ADSL is important. It stands for 'asymmetric' this means that the high speeds talked about only work in one direction, that is into your home or business. Outward speeds are only a fraction of the broadband speeds quoted. This is OK (just about!) if you are a consumer of information services but no good at all if you are a producer and need to get your services out to others as quickly as possible. So ADSL is no good at all as a basis for encouraging the development of knowledge-based businesses in rural areas.

The message for gatekeepers to broadband funding The message is simple. Don't abandon the Net Heads. If you want your region to be in the top ten in Europe then you need to invest in, and partner with, the Net-Heads not the Bell-Heads. This is where the vision and the future lie. The broadband issue has not been solved by BT's announcement. Maybe they've granted the first of your three wishes, but keep thinking hard about the next two: internet telephony is one genie that's now out of the bottle - and it isn't going back in.

Acknowledgements
Malcolm Matson for the canal/railway analogy.
The many community broadband activists that I have been inspired by the Community Broadband Network - see www.broadband-uk.coop
The ruralnet|uk team for providing the platform for ruralnet|uk's broadband work - see www.ruralnetuk.org
Jane Berry for her significant contribution to the first draft.
The members of the Community Broadband Network for their comments on the first draft.

Simon Berry
Chief Executive, ruralnet|uk
Chairman, Community Broadband Network