The announcement in the Queen’s Speech that there would be new legislation to claim top-up payments broadly equivalent to gift aid, received a fairly mixed response. Writing on the Guardian’s Voluntary Sector Network, NAVCA’s CEO Joe Irvin called on sector leaders to be more positive and supportive of good news such as this.

Whilst I am prepared to accept that this is not bad news for the sector – and in the current environment, anything which isn’t bad is probably quite good. But I cannot get more positive than that and my own reaction was that it was ‘practically irrelevant’.

The Small Donations Bill will allow charities to claim up to £1,250 on donations a year, where individual donations are less than £20. Of course that amount can make a difference to the lives of people in need and for charities that operate on a shoestring (by far the majority of registered charities). But it is peanuts compared with the impact on the sector of the cap on tax relief for charitable donations.

Joe suggests “it's strange that there has been a less than full-throated welcome from sector leaders in the media”. I contend it’s nothing of the sort. It’s an absolutely appropriate response from people looking at the big picture.

How can we welcome the crumbs from the table of the Chancellor when he’s just announced his intention to take away a much larger piece of cake?

Joe, rightly, points out that most charities are small and they will particularly benefit from this new legislation. Perhaps, but they will also benefit from the grants made by charitable trusts and foundations which rely on substantial donations from benefactors.  And of course it is only registered charities that will be able to benefit from the small donations legislation. Whereas community groups which are not registered charities (but whose activities are charitable) would be able to receive funding from many grant makers. So for the hundreds of thousands of community groups who are not registered charities, there’s no benefit to be had here.

And not all registered charities will find they can simply claim the top up either. The details of the consultation the government is currently running on the proposals show that any charity using the scheme would have to have a record of claiming Gift Aid for the last three years.  That is bound to exclude a significant number of charities and I would be amazed if there were not more smaller charities who fell foul of this requirement than larger organisations.  And if that wasn’t enough, we mustn’t forget that the amount of Gift Aid that goes unclaimed each year is massive - regularly estimated to be in excess of £700m per year.

The more you look into it, the more holes there are in this ‘good news’ story. If you’re not a registered charity, haven’t been claiming Gift Aid for the last 3 years, don’t rely on grants from charitable trusts and a £1,250 windfall won’t help you maintain your activities, then there really is nothing to see here.

I have no problem with the principle of welcoming good news when we get it. But this announcement is so close to being irrelevant as makes no difference and that’s before taking into account the hugely damaging impact of the tax cap on donations. I’m still waiting for the good news here…but I’ll be sure to welcome it as soon as I see it.

14 Bills and 4 draft Bills represents a fairly modest legislative agenda – at least in terms of the amount of legislation being brought forward. But if it represents a real change from the previous government’s belief that legislation is the answer to everything, then that’s progress.

Since we’ve got used to successive government’s briefing the press of their plans in advance of occasions like the Budget and the Queen’s Speech, we shouldn’t be surprised that most of the content was expected. There was a time when briefing the press in advance of presenting in Parliament was considered a serious breach of protocol. In 1947 the Chancellor, Hugh Dalton, resigned after telling a journalist what was in the Budget before he gave his Statement to Parliament.

Coalition pledges

A number of Bills which were announced are things that were included in the Coalition Agreement and so have been in the pipeline for some time. The Green Investment Bank will finally be established to stimulate growth in the green economy through things like renewable energy. Let’s hope it take less time to set up than the four years it took from passing legislation to actually launching (what became) Big Society Capital.

The abolition of the Audit Commission, which was first announced by Communities and Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles back in 2010, will herald a new regime of local audits introduced. Budding armchair auditors prepare yourselves…your time is coming!

Quango Bonfire Watch

I suspect Ministers’ appetite for demonstrating their ‘bureaucracy busting’ credentials is unabated, but their plans this time around are fairly modest by previous Coalition efforts. The Competition Commission and the Office of Fair Trading are to be merged into a new Competition Markets Authority.

Fans of the ‘bonfire of the quangos’ shouldn’t start celebrating yet, as although the Queen’s speech announced the scrapping of two public bodies, we got two new ones to replace them – the Groceries Code Adjudicator and the National Crime Agency. Is this the quango equivalent of a fiscally neutral budget?

More consumer power? Not so much…

A key recommendation of last year’s Independent Banking Commission report, to separate retail and investment banking will be brought forward. This is supposed to make bank bailouts a thing of the past, by keeping the riskier investment banking activity apart from looking after your money. What it won’t do – and what the government shows no signs of wanting to address – are the systemic flaws within our entire financial services sector.

But in a nice piece of tinkering on the periphery shareholders are to be given power to vote on the pay of directors. Although the Queen’s speech would have been agreed a week or two ago, the policy fits with the recent shareholder revolts we’ve seen at William Hill, Barclays and Aviva. Curbing excessive executive pay is no bad thing, but pension fund and investment fund managers already have plenty of influence should they wish to flex their muscles. This Bill will make a vote legally binding, but recent events have shown that when they express their displeasure over remuneration packages the position of the senior executives is practically untenable anyway.

Political hot potatoes

Much of the media spotlight from the Queen’s speech will focus on Lords Reform, probably because it is one of the more prominent ‘fault lines’ running between the Coalition partners. Although I support political reform to strengthen our democracy, I have to say I tend to side with those who feel we have more important things to address right now than something which clearly has little resonance with the public. If we have to choose between having a strategy to get the economy going again and reforming the House of Lords I know which one I’d go for. Having said that, it will be interesting to see how the Coalition manages the inevitable tensions in the coming months. And we’ll just have to wait to see if there’s an economic recovery strategy any time soon.

Another political hot potato will be pensions – reforming public pensions seems far more contentious than raising the pension age to 67 sometime before 2028. But perhaps people will start getting het up about that in a decade or so….or maybe we are collectively accepting of the need for longer working lives.

A Draft Care and Support Bill will, we are told, provide greater choice and more personally tailored services in adult social care. The government’s record in this area is rather patchy (to put it politely) and we will have to examine the detail carefully. But since it’s a Draft Bill, there bound to be plenty of parliamentary thrashing around before it comes close to seeing the light of day.

The introduction of new powers for the Police and the intelligence service to help themselves to your emails, SMS and other personal data online is likely to be met with fierce resistance. I wonder if this will propel the UK Pirate Party into the political mainstream, in the same way that their counterparts in Germany and Sweden have?

Charities to benefit from practically irrelevant new legislation

In a remarkable piece of insignificance….sorry, understatement, the aptly named ‘Small Donations Bill’ will allow charities to claim back tax on donations under £20. Oh and there’s a limit to the amount you can claim back of £5,000.

This follows the government’s decision to limit the amounts that philanthropists can donate to charity in a tax efficient way and the furore it’s caused. George has clearly not ‘given it back’ so much as proffered the sector the loose change from his pockets.

How to make local government elections more exciting was the challenge explored in an interesting post by A Dragon’s Best Friend (aka @puffles2010). That topic chimed with me and I certainly share the desire to see more high quality debate about issues and policies that engage people. We’ve heard for many years the anguished cries of academics, democrats and campaigners about the crisis of our democratic deficit. [Wikipedia suggests the term was first used in 1977!]. And yet for all the consternation and angst Party membership continues to fall, voting levels are at historically low levels (forget the occasional mini-revival, the overall trend is only in one direction) and politics remains a ‘minority interest’. I have all sorts of things to say about the consequences of a professional class of politicians, problems with limited political parties and the idea that we get the politicians we deserve…but I’ll save those for another day. The focus of this post is how social media could – and should – be opening up politics to a wider audience.

One of the highlights for me of the last general election was following the leadership debates on twitter whilst watching at the same time. The debate was in equal measure, insightful, intelligent, humorous and 'real'. I wonder whether we're missing a trick to simply shift the debate online, rather than seeking ways of bridging online and offline (face to face) debate?

At the launch of the 2010 general election there was lots of talk about the role of social media in campaigning. Remember Labour’s ‘viral’ animation that was shown at their campaign launch?

No? I’m not surprised. It was, in view, about as ‘viral’ as my home video clips of my children’s school assemblies.

We were told that social media would be a key election battleground as the Parties took a leaf out of the Obama campaign’s sophisticated use of social media to mobilise support. The reality was that all the Parties demonstrated a complete failure to understand how social media works, seeing it simply as an extension of traditional broadcast media. So we got lots of tweets and posts blasted out from on high to an unsuspecting audience, with very little active debate, meaningful engagement and interaction. All the main Parties continue to cling on to an outdated model of engagement and communications which seek to control the message and fail to understand that it is the ‘social’ in social media that makes it so exciting. I’m yet to see any evidence that this is view is changing, though I do accept that there are individual MPs who do ‘get it’ (Stella Creasy, Louise Mensch and Tom Watson all spring to mind).

Since millions of Britons use social media (though by no means everyone - and it's important that those of us who use social media don't fall into the trap of assuming everyone else does), it makes sense to take the debate to where people are at. On this basis it’s worth remembering that Facebook use still far outstrips Twitter and other platforms and so i'd be inclined to think about how best to use FB first (despite my own personal preference for the twitter over FB any day).

Thinking about local government elections, I’m sure there’s a role for hyperlocal websites to play here – where they exist – as they offer a natural constituency for those seeking to represent an area to engage with the community. Whilst the coverage of hyperlocal websites is still far from universal, the number of new sites is growing quickly and there is plenty of support available to people who want to set them up.

Local hustings or ‘question times’ with candidates are often held and can sometimes go beyond the usual mud-slinging and point scoring. But they are attended by very few people (relative to the size of the whole electorate) and generally by the already engaged. Rarely do they attract people who are unlikely to vote or ‘turned off’ by politics. Can we find ways to open up the debate in ways which fit more readily with the way people live their lives and in terms which are more directly relevant and meaningful?

For me the solutions are in connecting the power of social technology that growing numbers of people use regularly with the traditional methods of face-to-face politics. I may not want to go to a political rally, a public meeting or a local hustings, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested.

Surely there are some social tech people who might usefully turn their attention to helping our political parties become more sociable in the interests of democracy and political engagement?

Finally, after numerous announcements and fanfares, the Big Society bank, or Big Society Capital as it is now called, was launched today by the Prime Minister. The story the government would like people to hear is that this is wonderful news for charities, social enterprises and the public at large. As charities Minister Nick Hurd tweeted “£600 million to back social entrepreneurs and encourage more social investment. At no cost to taxpayer.”

*Sigh* if only that were even close to the truth.

Civil servants have been working on this for many years. Firstly there was the legislation – www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/31/contents" target="_blank">The Dormant Bank and Building Society Accounts Act 2008 - passed four years ago. Legislation does not happen for free. It’s expensive. And that’s just the legislation that was required in order to use dormant accounts and to set up the vehicle for delivering the money.

Then there’s all the work which has been done since then – including the inevitable review of policy when the government changed. I dread to think how much time was spent (and how much public money therefore expended) on changing the name from New Labour’s ‘Social Investment Wholesale Bank’ to the Big Society Bank and then Big Society Capital.

The bulk of the £600m invested in Big Society Capital (and it’s worth pointing out that it’s ‘up to £600m’ – Big Society Capital’s website states that “Capital transfers from dormant accounts could total up to £400m”) comes from dormant accounts. Whilst it’s true to say that this is not ‘public money’ it is money that, as a result of the Dormant Accounts legislation, is earmarked for spending on social purposes. It may not be public money insofar as it’s not raised by taxation, but it is public in the sense that it’s supposed to be used for public benefit.

Perhaps spending £400m on building the market for social investment is a good idea. But we don’t need to blithely accept that this is the only way this money could be used. It could have been used to support the thousands (hundreds of thousdands?) of charities and community groups that have seen their funding cut as a result of spending cuts, or even (as @damehilaryblume has suggested) to help pay off the national debt.

The other aspect of the Big Society Capital spin that infuriates me (and has done since the PM first announced that he had ‘taken the money from the banks’) is the details of the £200m that the big four high street banks have invested. As part of the Merlin agreement between the banks and the government Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS have each agreed to invest £50m in Big Society Capital. This was originally announced as being ‘on commercial terms’ – with the banks seemingly seeking to profit from the deal. Since then there does appear to have been some movement with Big Society Capital’s website suggesting this is a permanent equity investment. But that does not mean that they won’t be expecting a return on their investment.

If Big Society Capital makes money then it can provide a dividend to investors – which will include the Banks at a rate which is proportionate to their investment. I’m told (by my social investment guru, Faisel Rahman) that the Chair of Big Society Capital, Sir Ronald Cohen suggested that the expected returns would be somewhere in the region of 4-5%.

Since the whole point of Project Merlin was supposed to be how the banks were going to increase their positive contribution to society, that’s not a bad return in my view. But there’s more….

As part of the deal the banks have also negotiated a few other things, such as a veto over any changes to what Big Society Capital does that they have a ‘material interest in’, So although each bank only has a maximum stake of 10%, they can veto any changes they don’t like. And they get a seat on the board of Big Society Capital. And they have a “right of preference”, which means that if things go badly wrong (and I’m sure they won’t), then the banks are the first ones to get their money back.

So, if there’s a profit to be had the banks get their slice of it. But if there’s a loss, then they are the last ones to be exposed. Sounds like quite a good deal to me!

I’m getting déjà vu here. When the banks win, they win. When they lose, we lose. Hmmmm…sounds familiar. Isn’t that what happened in 2008-09 with the bailout? Isn’t it time we stopped subsidising the banks?

The final myth that appears to need busting is the idea that Big Society Capital is going to fund social enterprises and charities. It isn’t – at least not directly. It’s a wholesale investor. Big Society Capital will be putting money into community finance providers – community development finance institutions (CDFIs) – who then lend money on to social enterprises and charities. CDFIs don’t cover all parts of the country and of course there’s no knowing which CDFIs will apply to Big Society Capital for investment. The reality is a long way from being ‘available for social enterprises’ whatever the government might say.

The launch of Big Society Capital is not bad news…but it’s nothing like the good news you’d be forgiven for thinking it was if you listen to the government’s spin.

On Sunday I went to Brighton and once I’d traipsed through the rain the long way round the Amex Stadium I found myself at City Camp Brighton. City Camps, if you don’t know, are gatherings of people working together to develop innovative solutions to social problems through the use of technology. Over the weekend people from the voluntary and community sector, techies, local government and the odd punk-rocker or two put their heads together to see what ideas they could come up with. After a couple of days exploring, discussing, designing and refining their thinking, at the end of the weekend people can pitch their ideas and the best idea (or ideas) are given money to take them forward.

Brighton’s second City Camp (following a successful foray into the genre last year) was organised by the Democratic Society and the prize money was put up by Brighton & Hove City council and NHS Sussex. I was asked to chair the panel judging the winners and have the pleasure of giving away someone else’s money to support good ideas J

There were a number of ideas that caught the eye and we ultimately agreed to fund 7 projects, with others being offered in-kind support to develop their ideas. The outright – and unanimous - winner was Gig Buddies, the brainchild of Paul Richards Bass Player from punk rock band Heavy Load. The idea is simple – aren’t all the best ones? – to connect disabled people  who want to go to gigs, with people who can help get them there (and home). When disabled people rely on carers to assist them getting around, it’s not uncommon for them to finish work at 9 or 10pm, meaning cutting short gigs and other evening activity. Gig Buddies will help connect disabled people with other people who are going to the gig already to help out. It was immediately obvious that the idea would make a difference to people’s lives. It also helped that they had the pun of the day in the Gig Society.

There were lots of other good ideas – and Wired has done a nice write up of the event and some of the winning ideas that’s worth a read.

Some of the ideas were truly radical – and offering them a £5,000 grant wouldn’t have even touched the sides in terms of what they needed. Others were rough diamonds that clearly had something about them, but needed more work to develop a clearer focus and plan to move them forward. Some, as is always the case when people get together to talk about innovation, were interesting and good projects, but not what I would call innovation. That doesn’t make them bad ideas…just not necessarily right for City Camp.

I think the City Camp model is a good one, though I believe it’s still a challenge to make it truly accessible to grass roots groups. Using technology to develop social innovation has huge potential but I still feel it’s an invited space which non-techies are welcomed in to, to a greater or lesser extent. I can’t help feeling there’s more we can do to establish and support social spaces that put technology second to community action – merely tools to be deployed in furtherance of social aims. I know there are people out there from grass roots groups and communities whose radical ideas for innovation would benefit from technology and help those working with/in technology to use their skills and expertise to greater effect.

But I realise that there are currently a number of obstacles on all sides that don’t make that coming together an easy thing to pull off. Brighton have made a great start….now we need to push further.

I really enjoyed yesterday’s opening doors event – a one day seminar on open data and charities. Now, I may (and occasionally am) seen as being a bit of a geek when it comes to open data (though I promise you, I am absolutely not….as soon as things get technical I’m quickly left behind!) and I have been talking about open data for some time. But what was so great about yesterday’s event was that for once the conversation about open data wasn’t just, as Karl Wilding called it ‘a minority sport played by geeks’. It was a conversation held in daylight, out in the open, among people who could not be called the usual suspects.

It was great to see so many people from not for profit organisations wanting to engage in discussions about how open data can be used by charities and community organisations. The event was doubly oversubscribed – and I hope that another event will be held to enable all those who weren’t able to attend to have a chance to hear from the inspiring organisations that are leading the way. It’s clear that despite some notable exceptions, many charities are just starting to explore the crucial questions of what, why and how they use open data. We have a long way to go, but we have to start somewhere!

To date discussions about open data have tended to be the preserve of techies and social geographers – many of them in the public sector, though even they are in a minority. We cannot afford to leave open data to the data specialists – or what we’ll get will be designed in their eyes. Whilst that’s not a problem in itself, it is unlikely to meet our needs.

Whilst it was extremely encouraging to see so many charity people wanting to come and talk about open data, it was also slightly disappointing that there were relatively few chief executives among them. There were plenty of monitoring and evaluation people and some tech people working within charities but, on though there were some, chief executives in attendance were fairly thin on the ground. Like social media, open data needs organisational leadership. Without that it’s unlikely to become mainstreamed within organisations and become part of the organisational culture. Although leadership can come from anywhere, it is rarely likely to gain traction without the blessing (or actively involvement) of senior managers. We still need to do more to engage those who run charities to actively engage with and champion open data.

We have a long way to go within the not for profit sector to take advantage of the benefits of open data….but with Opening Doors we started the journey of a thousand miles, with a step in the right direction.

A look at what's happening in Whitehall as 2011 draws to a close...

Over at DCLG they must be breathing a sigh of relief as the Localism Act finally made it onto the statue book. This huge Bill took the best part of a year to make it through Parliament, but will now be implemented in April 2012. Despite some fierce lobbying in the Lords (particularly from the Countryside Landowners Association) the majority of the Bill’s provisions made it through intact, with the exception of proposals to allow local people to trigger a referendum on any issue. Although the referendum result would not have been legally binding, overwhelming public opinion might have been hard for any local authority to ignore. The question of who paid for this requirement was ultimately felt to be difficult to sort out and so the provision was dropped in the Bill’s final stages. The all important next step for the Act will be the Guidance (or Secondary Legislation) that will set out more details over how things like the Community Rights will be implemented, which is expected to be published some time before April. Given the government’s preference for light touch regulation, don’t expect too much prescription or detail, but hopefully we’ll get something that communities and councils can make sense of and use.

The Office for Civil Society must also be pleased to see a number of key programmes begin to see the light of day, after considerable gestation periods. The Community Organisers programme is now fully underway, along with Community First, the Social Action Fund and the Innovation in Giving Fund. Despite the Coalition’s keenness to distinguish itself from the last government’s predilection for initiatives, there seem to be an awful lot of new programmes happening….though perhaps we ought to be pleased there’s something happening to support the sector.

Civil Society Minister, Nick Hurd, and his boss Francis Maude came in for criticism from the Public Administration Select Committee’s (PASC) report on the inquiry into Big Society. The PASC said Cabinet Office Ministers had failed to realise that people didn’t understand what Big Society was and more needed to be done to explain the idea behind the PM’s big idea. Perhaps they ought to have looked at our Big Society Essential Facts. Another of the PASC’s big ideas was that there ought to be a Big Society Minister. Quite why we need another Minister at a time when public spending is being cut is baffling. Surely, with all this devolution and localism going on, we could save a few quid by getting rid of a few, not having more? And anyway…isn’t the PM our Big Society Minister-in-Chief?

There was an outbreak of bi-partisanship in the Commons recently, in no small part due to the efforts of civil society lobbying, particularly by Social Enterprise UK. Shadow Civil Society Minister, Gareth Thomas, withdrew his amendments to (Conservative MP), Chris White’s Social Value Private Members Bill, that had jeopardized the Bill’s chance of being introduced. The Bill has now passed to the Lords where (just to reinforce the cross-party love in) Lib-Dem Peer, Lord Newby, will be taking it on through there.

DECC displayed a shocking (or perhaps illuminating) lack of understanding of how consultation is supposed to work with its handling of changes to the Feed In Tariffs (for small scale renewable energy production). Worried about the growth in this industry and the incentives the scheme offered to people adopting more sustainable energy supply, the Department launched a public consultation on plans to reduce the price offered to households selling their surplus energy. The consultation deadline? 23^rd December. Date for implementing the new plans? 12^th December. Hardly surprising the High Court ruled yesterday that the plans were, errm, flawed. Who’d have guessed?

Today I went to a Big Lottery Fund seminar on People Powered Change, facilitated by their social-reporters-at-large, David Wilcox, John Popham and Drew Mackie. It was a really lively event with energetic and interesting people who were very engaged and full of ideas. (You can find out more about what went on in this Storify that John’s put together).

I arrived to find myself on the delegate list under ‘Organisation: ‘Very lively online’ – which I quite liked, but I think Shaun Walsh (BIG’s Deputy Director of Communications) was slightly embarrassed…he clearly doesn’t know me J

I joined a discussion about peer-learning and telling stories and the focus of the conversation turned to what could be done to share learning better within the VCS (and what BIG could do to encourage this).

I suggested, much to the amusement on one of the other tables (when my point was tweeted) that BIG might consider creating incentives for failure to be more honestly reported.

The problem, as I see it, is that despite the talk about learning from mistakes there’s currently very little incentive to be honest about when things go wrong or we make mistakes. Not horribly, incredibly pear-shaped. Just a bit wrong. If we say ‘oh we didn’t actually achieve what we said we would’ and went on to explain why, we worry it harms our reputation and prospects of future funding. So we don’t. We pretend everything is wonderful and we kid ourselves that’s true. And we don’t learn and nor does anyone else and no doubt someone makes the same mistakes again in the future.

So, how can we create incentives for people to be more honest about failure? Or as Roxanne Persaud puts it how can we really create a culture which recognises ‘the Glory of Failure’?

As one of the biggest funders in the country BIG has the chance to make a real difference by how it approaches things. I remember when they really started getting serious about outcomes, it changed how many not for profits think about outcomes (and also a number of other grant makers). Surely BIG could turn their attention to honesty in learning and play a similarly ‘shaping’ role?

One obvious way of creating an incentive to change behaviour is with funds. [And before all you behaviour change experts start telling me that extrinsic incentives, like money, aren’t as effective as intrinsic rewards….I know, but I think it’s a slightly different situation]

What would happen if BIG gave money to people who made mistakes and admitted them? Clearly that’s absurd. Public money can’t just be given to people to mess up. So what about if there was money for people who made mistakes, admitted them, and demonstrated they’d learnt from the experience and changed things as a result? That, in my view, begins to get closer to something that might have merit.

At this point I want to mention how I view creativity and idea-creation – or at least how I develop ideas and new thinking. When I have an idea, I don’t really expect that idea to be a game changer…in fact I rarely expect it to be viable. So I am not seriously saying that the BIG should just give cash to people who screw up. But, from that turning things on their head to tackle a problem, an idea emerges which I (or whoever I’m with) can build on – or spin off from – and play with to see if there’s something in it that could be useful. By the end (and I don’t think I’ve quite got there yet with this one) the bonkers idea that had the table at the back laughing [you know who you are…!] was becoming something that you could sort of see there was an idea in there worth thinking about. The way my brain works really only mirrors a tried and tested creative thinking technique that Edward De Bono (no less) advocates of turning things completely to their opposite and seeing where that leads you.

Peter Wanless, BIG’s chief executive (who I briefly ran my half-baked thoughts by at the event) tweeted shortly after ‘like idea of BIG paying for learning from failure if helps inform future. Less sure about more cash so same people can have another go’. Now I’m with him on that one….but I think what Peter was saying (and he can correct me if I’ve got this wrong) is that there may be a germ of an idea in there about some sort of financial incentive for learning from failure.

There are all sorts of issues that would need to be worked through – not least accountability to Parliament for spending public money – but perhaps there’s a way forward.

Maybe BIG can play a role in establishing a new approach to learning and more honest about failure in this way? And if they do, I’d like to think my suggestion had contributed just a little, whilst amusing some people along the way.

David Wilcox, who has been doing social reporting with John Popham as part of the Big Lottery Fund's People Powered Change programme, asked me to write something about our ideas and experience for the Social Reporters blog. Here's what i came up with....

People power change is what we do at Urban Forum. Supporting communities to play a leading role in what happens within their communities. We believe that improved local outcomes must be based on citizen’s own vision for their area and that with a bit of support and some creative thinking a huge amount can be achieved. That does not, in our view, mean that communities should be abandoned by the state - far from it. Even with the spending cuts in the public sector, it’s worth reminding ourselves that we still spend a huge amount of public money in the UK. If we can align resources to be more responsive to local needs and ambitions public bodies can play a hugely important enabling role and support co-design and co-production.

Urban Forum is also very interested in social reporting and as an evidence-based organisation we see knowledge as one of the most important assets for ourselves and for communities. However knowledge comes in many different forms and resides in different places. We, like many organisations conducting research, have traditionally relied on distilling the findings from surveys, interviews and focus groups and presenting them in reports. Whilst we might feel we present this information in a more accessible way than most, we still tend to do it in a fairly traditional way. With the technological advances of recent years and the explosion of social media and multimedia use, we feel the time is right to find new ways to conduct research and present evidence.

‘Community Sector Tales’ is our first foray into the world of digital curation. We’re are inviting our members to share their experience and views of life in the local community sector today, with their photos, videoclips, audio, drawings and written words. We’re using the hashtag #VCSTales to curate content from across the web. We then plan to use this to create a montage of content depicting the community sector today, which we also plan to use in a report that the Office for Civil Society have commissioned us to produce on Big Society and the community sector.

Here's a taster from Chorlton Good Neighbours - Pumpkin pie, and spotted dick for pudding 

With Urban Forum's 900 members engaged in such a wide range of exciting and valuable People Powered Change, we think these stories and images will help build connections and inspire us to learn and share across the sector. We all know how powerful a picture can be, so it seems appropriate to start incorporating this into how we work.

We hope that our experience – and that of the many visual artists, storytellers, social reporters and other people and organisations using creative ways to present information – can help others to explore these ways of working. Perhaps Big Lottery Fund might like to think about accepting evaluation reports in the form of a video or photos? Or there might be ways they could help people powered groups to gain skills and confidence to begin using these approaches? If we start by accepting the benefits of using more visual ways of presenting information, then ideas about the ways to support them will, I suspect, flow quite naturally. First we need to overcome some cultural biases about the value of pictures and stories – a theme I picked up in a recent blog.

I’ll leave the final word to the Nobel-winning scientist Peter Debye: ‘I can only think in pictures…..it’s all visual’.

The last couple of weeks have seen two European Prime Ministers resigning in response to their countries’ economic plight and the growing clamour for political change. Much of the pressure for George Papandreou and Silvio Berlusconi to quit has come from outside their own countries.

As the leaders of Germany and its Eurozone partners, the US and elsewhere try to get to grips with the continuing Euro-crisis, we’re routinely told that ‘the market’ has responded either positive or (more commonly) negatively to developments. It’s now fairly obvious that ‘the market’ has been instrumental in ousting the elected prime ministers of Greece and Italy. Now, I’m not fan of Berlusconi, and nor am I an expert in European politics, but I do start to worry when democratically elected leaders are being forced to resign by unelected and unaccountable powers.

Of course this is not an entirely new phenomena and the International Monetary Fund has a history of imposing its will on nation states. The UK had to be bailed out in 1976 and Treasury spending plans were put under the microscope, but this was in the days before Thatcher and the widespread privatisation of public services. More recently in the late 70s and early 80s the Latin American debt crisis resulted in loans from the IMF conditional on rapid and wholesale liberalisation of markets – opening up to western firms able to profit. In 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang presents compelling evidence of the damaging effects of this approach.

Most recently the austerity measures imposed on Greece in return for its bailout – increased taxes, selling off state assets and huge cuts to their public sector – has resulted in an immediate fall in productivity amounting to approximately 10% of output over the last 12 months. Silvio Berlusconi refused to play ball – rejecting the conditions of an IMF loan – but with his departure, it’s surely only a matter of time before these measures are accepted.

But, in addition to the dubious role of the IMF and geopolitical institutions, there is a wider issue about the power of ‘the market’. What is this ‘market’ thing?

The market is essentially the structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange goods and services. The term comes from the ‘marketplace’ and is, at least in theory, similar to the street markets where producers sell their wares to local citizens. The market is a way to connect those who have money and those who have something to offer in return. As surplus capital is invested in companies and shares, derivatives and commodities begin to be traded, so the ‘market’ we recognise today begins to emerge.

But when the ITN News reports that ‘the market got the man they wanted’ (as Italy’s new PM) one begins to wonder who it is that is expressing the opinion on behalf of the market?

Institutional investors have become so large that they are now in effect ‘the market’, operating in a way reminiscent of the Union block-vote at Labour Party conferences. One might contend that this accurately reflects the value of their wealth and their influence is therefore proportionate. But this overlooks two things.

Firstly, much of this ‘wealth’ is not theirs but ours. Our pensions, savings, stocks and shares are all managed by institutional investors on our behalf, with a tiny minority of people taking any interest in where their money goes. A small (and admittedly growing) number of people are concerned enough to choose ethical products which may avoid investing in the most destructive industries – but this operates at a very macro-level, with little choice over specific investments. Despite some progress – and the work of Fair Pensions deserves a special mention here - the choice of ethical investment products is still very limited and tends to have fairly dubious ethical credentials. When the market expresses a view on whether or not the democratically elected prime minister of a sovereign state ought to resign, it is doing so with the implicit backing of countless people who would be uncomfortable with this interference in democracy.

Secondly, while it may be unpopular to say so, the role of the state in the market is not necessarily to interfere as little as possible. Governments across the world are currently trying desperately to get to grips with the Eurozone crisis, stalling growth, sovereign debt, rising unemployment and the risk of banks collapsing. But they are doing so under terms dictated by the market.

States have not just allowed the situation to develop; they have actively encouraged it, through the global pursuit of market liberalisation under the banner of ‘free trade’. The IMF, World Bank and the World Trade Organisation have relentlessly pursued this agenda with the blessing of the largest and most powerful states – including the US and EU member states. Now these same countries are reaping the fruits of their labour…an out of control ‘market’ that is allowed to dominate democracy and dictate events in countries across the globe.

In some ways, perhaps this is a good thing, as it highlights to those of us in the West precisely what the developing countries in the South have experienced for some time. It’s easy to favour market liberalisation for someone else, safe in the knowledge that this won’t ever happen to us. It’s a whole different ball game when the markets come after those who thought they were immune from the fallout of these policies.

In the 1990s there were numerous protests against the spectre of globalisation, often aimed at the WTO under the banner of ‘anti-capitalism’. These tended to be rubbished as being absurd and naive by the majority of our political classes. Today their protests appear to have been rather prescient.