Community engagement in local measures to boost economic growth

Community spirit is not lacking when there’s a cause, a campaign or a crisis, but please tell me; ‘What should I now be doing to enable ‘sustainable economic growth’, or ‘societal development’, or whatever it is that government now seems unable to enable?’

This ‘Big Society’ question is not easily answered. Those inclined to volunteering have mostly already volunteered. Those resourceful souls who create new ventures have already ventured far and wide in search of extra resources. Making savings, cutting back, doing less, is perhaps a less-attractive ‘getting by’ answer but, for economic growth and future well-being, how can we help more of us to do more for us?

Triggering action within any community is easier in times of physical crisis or threat – when the option of doing nothing is clearly inadequate. The problem with challenges like ‘economic growth’ or ‘societal development’ is that they are not seen so much as problems but as conditions that we mostly have to put up with. We do not feel empowered or informed enough to take action. We are not ‘them’ – ‘them’ what makes the rules.

If the roads aren’t good enough to get to work, if the broadband isn’t fast enough to make the Internet really useful, if the school is falling down, if the bank branch is closing, if the traffic is speeding, if the doctors surgery needs up-grading, if the trains seem always late, if the voltage is below 200 or sometimes not there at all, the very first thing any community needs is accurate information on just how bad, how urgent, the local situation really is.

Knowing this stuff doesn’t guarantee that corrective action follows – but it sure does prompt pressure for action and drive the determination to get stuff sorted out.   That is why simple tools to enable local people to share local experiences are a good first step.

As recent regulatory cases testify, the providers of services cannot always be trusted to report accurate information; all too often they do not know themselves just what is going on from a citizen’s viewpoint.   Anyone with an Internet connection can check the difference between what they’ve been sold and what they actually get.  Any house with a burglar alarm will most likely have a log of power failures.  Any community with a hand-held radar gun can measure traffic speed. What is missing are easy ways to share that information and pull the facts together for all in the local community (including local media) to see and to ponder.

Across every facet of our communities, local government could recognise their responsibility for placing and promoting easy-to-use data collection tools on their own local websites and mapping the results onto the Ordnance Survey’s digital maps that DCLG has just made freely available to them for precisely this sort of imaginative purpose.

It is not difficult to see how this would work in, say, the case of broadband infrastructure. It is really not difficult for a Community Study Group to promote the gathering of data from many broadband users and then use some simple analysis tools to put their local situation into context – to see the data in the context of comparable localities in this country or, for example, in Sweden or your ‘twinned’ town.

The community project might even stretch further by adopting the analysis methodology of the Oxford Said Business School and look at ‘future preparedness’ for the sorts of demand we will place on Internet access in years to come – for example a not-surprisingly greater emphasis on upload speeds and reduced latencies. The local community could take the national data from the Race Online project and make it meaningful in their local context. Local businesses and media organisations could check the reality of Access or Service Provider claims and, instead of waiting for some distant regulator to act, share the results with their local Trading Standards department. Communities that do this soon discover that ‘not far behind is not good enough’.

When it comes to finding ways to enable ‘economic growth’ or ‘societal development’ or ‘whatever’, communities and citizens need encouragement to get involved.  As a first step towards taking ‘local measures’ we need local measures.

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