fisharepeopletoo

Building the lo-fi smart city

How would we do that then?

In Melbourne they have started by measuring smiles per hour.

Backed by evidence from the world health organiation.

If you want a smarter city ask a policeman #TEDxLeeds

I've noticed a few references to the Internet of Things recently, a phrase I haven't heard for about two years (Nicolas Nova notes its reappearance, in concept if not in name, here) and to Smart Cities, about which the Guardian weirdly had a pull-out advertising supplement a few weeks ago. I'm glad these ideas are back, just for fun if nothing else, because I like both of them.

In between this time around and the last time around though I've done a bit of work with a neighbourhood police team, and one of the things that experience made me think was that if you wanted a working example of a real-time sensor-enabled city-wide "smart city" system then 999 calls in a city full of people with mobile phones is it.

Think about it: you've got a very widely distributed sensor network, that's us with our eyes, ears and bodily presences which might be under threat, and that sensor network is being monitored in real time - we can ring 999 from anywhere because we have mobiles - and the alert from the sensor (us and our phones) triggers a response - flashing blue lights - that aims to restore the system to its balanced state.

And it's this restoring the system to a balanced state which is by far the most important and illustrative part.

The balanced state is a state in which no laws are being broken.

And what are these laws? They are the rule sets for how we live together. And they are technologies.

I'm not saying we have the right laws, or even that we need “the law” to live together, but we do need rule sets, many of which we act on without even knowing just from the look on someone else's face. I might also be misinterpreting (wilfully or through dumbness) Paul Romer's Long Now talk by saying he says rule sets are a kind of technology, but it's a useful idea, so if he didn't he should've.

And this technology for living together doesn't just fall out of the sky, even if it might as well do, for all the say most of us have designing it. We have to choose what laws we want, what balanced state we want the system to be in (though if you read about autopoiesis that idea of choice isn't quite so clear!). And it is the rules for making and enacting those choices, the rule sets for making rule sets, for governance, the rule sets that are the constitutions by which we make decisions about how we want to live together, which are the real smart city technologies.

A city isn't smart because it produces lots of data. Or even opens up that data to lots of developers. It's smart because it continually monitors itself and uses that feedback to maintain the state it wants to be in. It's worth remembering that the word “cyber” doesn't mean having metal arms, it means to steer. Cybernetics is the study of how to steer systems.

So what state do we want the system to return to and how do we steer it? What do we want our technologies of governance to give us? Wealth? Happiness? Innovation? Fairness? Long life? Environmental sustainability?

I don't know. You decide. Pick the ones you want. Then when we have deliberated, agreed and built those technologies - the constitutions and laws - we set up our sensor networks (made up of all sorts of technology - you can have a smart city without any rifd chips or data visualisations of real-time traffic updates whatsoever, just look at ancient Athens) to monitor the system and give us feedback so that we can adjust our smart city technologies - the rule sets of governance and the laws that are enacted - to give us more of what we want and less of what we don't. Or we can decide we want something else in which case we design new governance technology and enact new laws.

And it's these technologies that are most desperately in need of innovation. Because at the moment they are awful.

At the moment, how does the system of Great Britain, for example, decide what counts as the state it wants to return to?

Every five years or so around 40% of the people in the arbitrary and outdated unit of organisation called "Britain"* who can be bothered to vote, people who are quite possibly mostly living hundreds of miles away from most of the other 60%, get a poll result that is roughly what they hoped for without really caring all that much either way, and a simple majority from a group of around 600 men and women out of a total of 60 million - whose job is now to design technology (rules sets, laws) for the whole arbitrary unit but who really all owe their allegiance to only one city (usually London regardless of whether they are meant to be designing technology to benefit the people of, say, Sedgefield) - then tell all the other cities (systems) what counts as the right state for their system and how to achieve it for the next five years or so before the next poll which might or might not lead to the reversal some of the previous rule sets.

And that is a very dumb way to run a system.

And it is the dumbness of the technology that makes me a little bit suspicious about the re appearance of smart cities (were they called smart cities last time, when it was that place in Korea? Maybe it was Ubicities?).

Is it just a way for big, multinational technology companies to fleece the dumb city?

Is it a way that by doing a bit of wining and dining of a few of the 600 people who at the time are designing the governance technologies, they can be persuaded to enact some laws to outsource, to these same big technology companies, something or other that we didn't even know we needed, in the same way in every city/system no matter how different, for dozens of years, because it's more "efficient". And call it "smart cities"?

I don't know, but it's worth looking at the names of the companies paying for the pull out newspaper advertising supplements.

This is a little bit like Adam Greenfield's argument in his book Everyware - this stuff is coming so we better debate it now while we've still got chance to decide what we want it to be like, because otherwise it will be decided for us.

But debating "advancing and emerging digital technologies", as they did at this seminar in Manchester organised by consultants, is debating the wrong kind of technology.

What we should be debating, and more importantly innovating with, is our governance technologies, the ways in which we decide the kinds of systems/cities we want to live in and the civic rule sets from which those systems/cities will emerge. If we do that, the rfid chips will look after themselves.

And the people who should be debating and designing the technologies for their smart cities are the people who live in them. And they should be able to to debate and design, as often as they want, everything. Every. Single. Thing. Because you don't get any meaningful innovation, enterprise, responsibility, energy, commitment, problem solving, or engagement if you don't have the power to do things and the risk of failure when you do.

And all sorts of people think it would be a good idea to innovate with governance technologies: Paul Romer, these bonkers Americans who want to live under the sea, the writer of this essay on local economics and places, and even this bonkers government minister saying we should have "home rule for cities".

Because compared to governance technology, having a wheelie bin that gives me whuffie points when I put some tin cans in the recycling, or a mobile phone that tells me where the traffic jams are, or even a smart electricity grid, couldn't be more trivial**.

 

* (if you don't think it is arbitrary why does the governance technology change just above Newcastle? The boundary for any system on the land mass of the UK is either the whole lot bounded by the sea or its constituent city-regions, not a line drawn two thirds of the way up.)

** As John Tolva, who is the director of “Citizenship and Technology” at well known philanthropic organisation IBM said at a city camp event the other day “burying the sensors in the pavement, that is easy”.

I'll Take My Fee In Green Shield Stamps

Having bollocksed up my first attempt to form a co-operative because I cut and pasted an out of date document off the internet, I decided to go and see Co-operatives UK and find out how to do it properly.

The reason I was first interested in workers' co-operatives was the democratic governance structure, meaning that the organisation we were setting up would have to be an ongoing discussion among its members, the workforce, about what to do.

Part of the reason I wanted to set up that kind of organisation was that over the last few years, I've started to think that at least one way to be creative is not to have any ideas at all.

Just to listen carefully to other people and the things they need solutions for, and then have a talk with them about what might be worth trying out. After that, tell yourselves as detailed a story as you can about what is going to happen, put it into practice based on that story, then learn from your mistakes. Whether it is creative or not mostly depends on whether you listen in good faith and how much effort you put into the story.

So is that a good way to run a company? When the first thing that needs a solution every day is what the company is and what it's going to do about it.

Could we make coming to work creative? And would that make the work we did more creative?

What I hadn't really given much thought to before is that one of the foundations of a co-operative is that it can distribute a bonus to its members if the organisation does well. A co-operative is a self-help organisation (self-help in this context meaning to fight against The Man), and if it helps itself effectively, the members should benefit from that. After all, they did the work.

Before my talk with Co-operatives UK, we were going to set up a cooperative community interest company (c.i.c). I like the c.i.c. structure because the legally binding community interest statement means that you have to think through and declare a kind of value that isn't just financial profit, and then live up to that.

But one of the things a c.i.c can't do is distribute a bonus.

At the moment, this is all a bit "what if" because there are only two founder members, but, what if the co-operative became modestly successful, and it could afford to distribute a bonus to its handful of members?

I can imagine that the yearly bonus day in an organisation is very good for collective spirit and motivation, especially if the organisation is one where members have as much invested as they do in a workers' co-operative that they manage for themslves. People will feel it is a reward for shared effort and endeavor, earned by working together, and they will go on into  the following year ready to use their individual and collective energy and initiative to develop the organisation further for the good of themselves and each other.

That individual responsibility for shared endeavor is a much better way for an enterprise to organise itself than top-down dictates from management. If the enterprise is a self-organising system, in which the parts of the system take responsibility for being innovative at all levels all the time, then the job of the leadership, elected from the members, is to define the system, to put a boundary round it by asking questions rather than issuing orders.

But what systems need, if they are going to regulate themselves, is feedback, and a bonus is a blindingly good feedback mechanism, that can be easily read by everyone involved. Bonus is up this year? What are we doing right and how can we do more of it? It's down, what are we doing wrong?

But what about the wider public purposes that are written into the legal bones of a c.i.c.

Our cooperative will exist to "develop and implement new ways to use mobile and internet technology for public participation and civic engagement." Which is a bit wordy but I can't do better at the moment.

If we become a c.i.c. we will be legally bound to do that in the interests of the community as we define it, and we can be held to account if we don't. And because a c.i.c exists to benefit a community that is wider than just its own members it can't distribute any surplus.

Which is fine for me. I'm a founder member and it's my principles that the structure is founded on. Everyone who bought into it at the time (all two of us!) knew what we were getting into and why.

But what about the people who join afterwards? I'd hope they might agree with those principles, and it might even be a reason for wanting to join the organisation, but they don't really get much of a choice. They are bound by my decisions whether they like it or not. Which is fine for people with well paid and fulfilling jobs in the creative industries, why wouldn't they put a bit of commitment into their work? But what if the organisation is modestly successful enough to employ, say, a cleaner? I'm sure the cleaners in the old NHS took pride in being such an important part of a great and worthwhile collective effort, and that affected the way they did their work. But cleaning is still a boring, unfulfilling job. I know, I've done it. And I'm not sure I'd like to ask someone to forgo a little bit of extra personal reward in order to uphold my principles for me.

And more than that, is the law the best way to make those principles meaningful anyway? Is the best way to inform how an organisation acts to have it legally bound to act that way?

I'd hope that any organisaton that is a co-operative considers a value beyond just financial gain, and offers something to a wider community than itself, but shouldn't the guarantees of that be its own internal principles of self-education and participation, rather an article of law set in stone?

Isn't it better to allow the organisation to repeatedly decide that for itself through the collected individual choices of its members, who might agree to accept less than the maximum financial reward in order to contribute something to the wider civic world in which they live, however that contribution is defined.

But that should be their choice, to be made and remade over and over again, and the remaking of the choice (or not) will be what defines the character of the organisation. If it decides in the future not to make the right choices, that will reflect a failure of leadership (as opposed to management), or maybe an unescapable entropy.

Everything comes to an end, after all. It's what happens on the way that is important.

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.

Who Would Play Gordon Brown in the Film?

If you read it as a story, which for most of us it might as well be, then the big character in the middle still feels like Brown.

He's the one who has got the most to loose. Not so much his job as of himself.

Look at his face. That has got to be a man who is lying there awake in the middle of the night, and he cant even turn the bedside lamp on because he doesn't want to wake his wife up, and he couldn't concentrate to read even if he did.

And what he is thinking about in the dark is that everything that he thought he'd done for the best might be judged a failure because of his own decisions, and in 100 years time there will still be people writing books arguing about how much he was to blame for a culture that brought the world to its knees.

A few weeks ago, he made a speech feebly blaming "lobbying" and "pressure from the Conservatives" for deregulation of the banks, which suggests he is already beginning to try and find a way to tell himself about his choices, but it will be all the harder to bear the answers because he will tell himself he made the choices in good faith, with good intentions, in order to use the tax revenues to do good.

And now everything that he may or may not have achieved before it will seem uninteresting to history compared to the crash. That's what he is now, as a public figure. The Bankers' Crash, guilty or not?

And that is quite a shift in what he can tell himself about himself in the last 24 months or so.

There is only one job in the whole world in which he can do anything about that, in which he can take action to change the ending of the story written about him, and of the story he can tell himself with any honesty. And that job is Prime Minister.

That is what will be torturing him. That perhaps as soon as tomorrow he's not going to be able to do anything else about changing the end of the story. If he looses the job then all he can do, from his new job at Oxford or Havard or wherever, is wage an undignified campaign for his own reputation, not change the future on which that reputation will rest.

Compared to that, Clegg and Cameron don't have much of themselves at stake. Cameron will probably get the knife if he can't deliver a coalition, but wanting to be the next Tony Blair isn't a failed ambition that anyone would find it too hard to recover from.

And as for Clegg, if he makes a tactical mistake he'll suffer only according to the strength of his principles, which ought to be what guides him anyway. If he follows them, he can't blame himself too much if it doesn't work out, and he's the only one of the three who is certain to be around for the next election with chance to try again.

That's why the big scene is, or has already been, when Brown understands, or is made to understand, that he has to let go, and when he knows that this time there isn't any more fight to be had. To work as a scene you'd have to write it such that he had real self knowledge and honesty, which he may or may not have.

But if the character of Gordon Brown has that self knowledge and honesty, then that is the scene when we'd watch a human being suffer at the hands of the only thing that can't ever be changed, our own choices in the past.

The Instruments of Happiness

Take a look at our country though the lens of these eight evidence-based scientific instruments.

Draw the necessary conclusions. Don't kid yourself. Don't let yourself hide.

Act on them.

You will be happier. Because we all will.

1. Self-defeating work should be discouraged by suitable taxation.

2. Producers matter as much as consumers. They should be incentivated by professional norms and not by ever more financial incentives.

3. We should not promote the search for status, and we should limit dysfunctional advertising.

4. Income should be redistributed towards where it makes most difference.

5. Secure work should be promoted by welfare-to-work and reasonable employment protection. Secure pensions may require a state earnings-related scheme.

6. Security at home and in the community will be reduced if there is too much geographical mobility.

7. Mental health should receive much higher priority.

8. We should actively promote participatory democracy.

from Richard Layard "What would make a happier society?"

The Story You Tell Yourself Is The Most Important Lesson You Will Ever Learn

We make sense of our lives by telling ourselves life stories.

If we learn good storytelling skills, we can rely on them when we have to face up to, and get beyond, the things that happen to everyone every so often in life that, quite properly, make us unhappy for a while.

Having this mature, practised storytelling skill is part of what makes us grown ups (at the final stage of "ego development") and is how we create and preserve our eudaimonic well-being, the belief that life is meaningful and worthwhile. [Narrative Identity and Eudaimonic Well-Being - Bauer, McAdams and Pals]

If storytelling is something everyone has to learn in order to be happy, then the value of participatory media is clear.

You only need to read Secret Tweet or One Sentence for a few days to recognise that it is people rehearsing difficult chapters in their lives, trying them out as a story. And also just trying out storytelling - not everything on One Sentence is about difficult moments by any means.

This storytelling practise doesn't even have to happen in places that have been designed for publishing. What else is World of Warcraft, for example, if it's not a training ground for practising narratives.

But the storytelling we have to do isn't just about the process. Doing it, in itself, isn't enough to create eudaimonic well-being.

It has to be a good story. And good is an objective measure of literary quality. Badly written life stories won't help as much.

A couple of years ago I did some work with psychologists who were interested in rumination - the unhelpful dwelling on ourselves and the past that we do when depressed rather than just bog-standard unhappy. The psychologists found that depressed people tended to remember in abstract, unspecific terms - "I'm always making mistakes, that's why I'm a failure." rather than using real, concrete details - "Getting drunk and photocopying my arse at the Christmas party wasn't the best way to get promoted."

What sparked my interest straight away was that it sounded almost exactly like judgements about good and bad writing.

The difference between good and bad poetry, for example, is pretty much down to two things: firstly using abstractions and generalisations instead of concrete descriptions; and secondly not being careful with words as things - all words bring tones of voice and echoes with them, and these have to be handled.

So the first rule of writing a good life story is be concrete not abstract: what really happened? What are the details only a witness would know? (If you want to practise try this. You'll find it's a lot harder than it sounds, but you'll be a better writer for it.)

The second rule is that there are already a lot of stories out there.

Bauer and his colleagues looked at a lot of life stories reported by Americans and found that they were, in a nutshell, very Hollywood. The Hero (in this case the person telling their own story), is a rugged, self-reliant individual, and uses their own god-given resources to overcome obstacles outside of themselves, in order to triumph in the end, and ride off into the sunset. Growth and progress are important narrative structures for life stories (the folk wisdom for this would be "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger"), but Bauer points out that this is a very culturally specific template, modelled on the cultural products of one society, and might not suit other parts of the world, even though those products are exported everywhere.

And if the people with the power to control mainstream stories give them all the same worldview, a worldview that says powerful people got there because they earned it, then those might not always be helpful models for the rest of us. What if our rugged individualism and god-given resources don't triumph? Trying to hammer our life stories into the shape given by the X Factor, for example, might not lead to eudaimonic well-being. We can't all be Susan Boyle after all.

So the third rule of life-storytelling might be "There Can't Always Be a Happy Ending".

A book that reads "Once upon a time we all knew it was going to be all right in the end." isn't going to be much of a page turner. To feel eudaimonic well-being we need a sense of narrative structure, not just a personal history. And narratives need an uncertain future that the reader thinks forward into - "The hero is hanging from a cliff edge on Mars by her fingertips! When I tune in next week will she be rescued by the space-eagles or fall to her death on the rocks below?!"

This is why even though religious conviction is strongly predictive of happiness, I don't think religious life stories are well written: "Once upon a time God said it was going to be all right in the end. The End. For ever and ever amen."

Eudaimonic well-being can and does survive bad, unfair and meaningless things happening, and in a way, without the possibility of these events it can't exist - life is just blissed out hedonic happiness. What we do at these moments is rewrite our life story to accommodate the bad thing in the narrative, often as the value of understanding about ourselves and the world that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

But the danger is that there might be some events that are so overwhelming that we won't have enough storytelling resources to form a story from them, or that no one could have. The space-eagles might not arrive in real life.

It's this danger that drives our learning and practising of stories - reading a book, going to the pictures, hearing a joke, playing World of Warcraft - and it must have an evolutionary force behind it.

But some people, through no fault of their own, are more at risk of meeting overwhelming events, or meeting them more often, or finally running out of resources and resilience, than others. In some kinds of story that might be called bad luck, but more often it is to do with how we all, between us, choose to organise our world to the advantage of some of us and not others.

Fate makes everyone's life a page turner,  but we have a responsibility to make sure we all have a fair chance to tell a good story to ourselves.

Playmakers and Rule Sets #playmakers

I watched the documentary Playmakers last week.

It's a very entertaining and funny film that brings together lots of good reference points for "pervasive games" or "playful social experiences in public space".

(The subject is still so happily undecided that there is no name to cover even Barg/iglab/Sandpit and all the things that could be at home there.)

One of the questions the film asked was "Why now for this stuff?" and answering "why now?" was a part where I might have added more than is in Playmakers.

The reason being that I think the answer to "why now" is portable gadgets, going right back to the Sony Walkman and ghetto blasters (and for fun why not include skateboards?), because they've made people sharply aware of the unsaid, invisible, unconscious rules of acting in public spaces.

Everyone has these experience daily - the rules are being negotiated, or not, on the fly.

I was in a cafe the other day where there were lots of people working on laptops, me included, with phones on the tables, so this was a place where the agreed rules clearly are "this place has been colonised by people who come here to work, which means they'll need to talk on phones sometimes", but when one bloke's work-related conversation went on past what seemed to me, without having any idea how long it had been, like a reasonable length of time I started to get pissed off, thinking "why don't you go outside? There are people trying to work in here!".

But how on earth were we going to find out exactly what the rules were in order to stick by them, or not?

The rules aren't new, they were always there, and we don't need them written down, we never have, but portable gadgets make us conscious of them, everywhere, all the time.

A mobile phone is an X ray machine for the rules of public spaces.

Quiet coaches on trains are an example of what happens when these negotiations on the fly come up against rules to make the rules non negotiable.

I hate sitting in quiet coaches because you always know that someone is going to break the "no mobiles" rule, which means everyone else is going to feel like they ought to say something to them, not because they are bothered by mobiles, but because of an instinctive sense of fairness - if I have to stick to the rules, so do you.

That makes it sound like mobile phones challenge the "rules" in a trivial way, and that not using your phone in the quiet coach is just bowing down to The Man.

But in fact it's the other way round.

This emotion of wanting to punish rule breakers connects with game theory as it's understood in biology, economics and politics - that we've evolved to cooperate, and are very good at it, and don't need anyone except ourselves to police cooperation, but one of the conditions of cooperation is to punish "defectors", people who try to get the benefit of cooperation without paying the costs (for example if you want to conserve and share irrigation water amongst small farmers, what you need is either lots of policemen with guns and a legal and prison system, or a long standing traditional rule set for making clear, agreed quotas and for publicly shaming people who break them - this year's nobel prize for economics was for the study of rule sets for collective action).

One of the things that I like about Charter Cities is that it brings an awareness of the power of rule sets, and the way they operate - that the outcomes are always emergent, and you can never write enough rules to proscribe all the possible outcomes - into politics, saying (this is my sneaky paraphrase) that you can't dictate good ends, just put good rule sets (good means) in place and wait to see what happens.

And if you looked at contemporary Britain, what you'd probably say, if you were honest, was "it's not fair." The rule set has got messed up somehow. Or ignored. Or it's too easy to defect and get away with it.

In fact, once you start looking at the world through a lens of looking for rule sets, it's quite hard to stop seeing them all over the place, everywhere from nature to how we act in cafes. What is so coherent and timely about Barg/iglab/Sandpit is that they let us rehearse, and have fun with, our observation and negotiation of rule sets.

I know that is quite a lot to claim for a mobile phone to have revealed. But I guess if it's an iphone?

The Rules of Civility on the new New Road

This  is not a pedestrianised street.

If you want to drive down it at 30 miles per hour you are perfectly, legally, welcome.

There are no signs telling you you can, and no signs telling you you can't.

It's been designed to allow people to be civil to each other:

"if you move to an environment based on what we think of as, ‘allowing regulations’ designed to support normal, good, civil behaviour you get a very different picture. You still have to learn these normal rules (like giving way to those more vulnerable than you, avoiding collisions with each other etc) but these are life rules that you need for all of your daily activities and are worth learning. They do not require enforcement because negotiation is carried out on the spot and resolved. There is a reward for compliance because your actions contribute to supporting the wider community (and you will usually receive a smile at least for your trouble). It fully employs our abilities to move amongst each other (look at how people negotiate space in a busy station concourse or busy shopping street). Most importantly it supports good community interaction."

- Martin Stockley, who designed this road, amongst many other things.

 

Telling people what to do doesn't work. But leaving them to work it out for themselves does.

Church Halls are Participatoriums

Church halls are good reference points for participatoriums.

They can be home to lots of rule sets - for table tennis clubs and band nights, campaign meetings and Cubs.

Governed by overall rules of civility - stack the chairs and do the washing up when you are finished.

They are one big room.

But it can be reconfigured - for band night put the amps at one end, for a jumble sale put the trestle tables round the edges, for a film screening put the chairs in rows.

There is common investment and ownership, with negotiation and compromise over use.

They are landmarks, and membership is open to everyone who lives round here.