Phew, we’ve been very busy and out and about lately.

CORE PROJECTS

We’ve been out of County Hall and working hard on delivering Help Out and Casserole.

Help Out is a new tool which helps people get out in their local environment and make it better. Surrey residents are rightly proud of the lovely place they live. We’re finishing off the technical development for the service this week, but as important, we’ve been out talking to residents and groups in Epsom and Ewell about how they’d like to get involved in contributing in easy, low-commitment ways to keeping it nice.  We’re launching a trial of the prototype in January – so if you know anyone who lives or works in Epsom, please forward this email, get them to sign up at http://surrey.helpout.org.uk or drop me a line at ingrid@wearefuturegov.com

Casserole – a project which reduces social isolation by helping local people share meals – is currently in trial in Redhill. Project manager Murtz Abidi has already been sharing some early lessons and there are opportunities for you to get even more involved. We’re planning a Saturday morning event in Redhill in mid-January drop Murtz a line or join the Casserole mailing list if you’re interested in finding out more or coming along to meet some of the cookers and diners.

HOW WAS IT FOR YOU?

Look out for a brief survey coming your way.  We’ll be asking you about learning points from Future Surrey.  It’s really important that we understand the impact of the work we’ve done together, for building and growth in Surrey and in other councils.  We’re looking for anything from “It helped me see things in a different way” to “I’m working with someone I met at SurreyCamp” – etc.  If a survey ain’t your thing, please feel feel to drop me a line and we can have a quick chat by phone, over a coffee or reply to this post.

FINAL EVENT AND A NEW SERIES OF EVENTS

We’ve been working with Surrey colleague Kate Mathews on a developing an open space series of events coming to you in the new year. The first will be supported by the FutureGov team and will be a chance to hear more about the Future Surrey projects and a recap of the programme as a whole and how you can take it forward. Look out for more information.

As part of the Help Out development, I’ve been talking to a lot of people around Epsom and Ewell about how they are or could help out in the local environment. We’re looking at how people find out about opportunities and what the benefits are of having increased participation in keep both town and countryside looking great.  Some of these benefits are hard to measure, but have some pretty sound theoretical underpinning.  Like the broken windows theory which posits that keeping urban environments nice and sorting things that aren’t right (litter, graffiti, etc)  reduces further damage and has an impact on other anti-social behaviour including criminality.

less of this please...graffiti in Epsom town centre

We hope another benefit of Help Out will be in its transparency and in the ability to view all the great stuff people are doing locally.  Right now it’s hard to see in one place where individuals, groups and local authorities are doing work rectifying problems or maintaining and improving the natural environment.  We hope that one of the benefits of help out will be in its social proof.  That is, your neighbours are out there helping out, picking up litter, etc – so that should encourage more people to do so and discourage others from dropping rubbish in the first place.  By linking Help Out actions to social media, we’ll be able to spread the word wider and hopefully influence more people to lend a hand, or at least not make things worse.

And other benefits…

But as I’ve been working on Help Out, I’ve found another benefit, too. One that I think I’ll struggle to articulate in a business case.

It’s connection to tradition. 

There’s something about valuing tradition. Sometimes the old ways aren’t the best, but I believe there’s something really connecting about understanding and taking part in old folk ways.

I’m not suggesting that everyone go out and join a Morris troupe (although as a foreigner, I never really understood why it gets such a bad rap). But one of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about the Help Out project is working alongside local residents and learning ancient land management techniques. Earlier in the autumn I learned about coppicing hazels and last week I was out with Epsom and Ewell’s countryside services laying hedges in Horton Country Park.

a volunteer trims up the laid hedge

Hedge laying is a technique used to create stock proof fences – made out of living trees. Basically you plant the trees densely in a row, let them grow, cut almost all the way through them, and then ‘lay’ them over.  In the Spring, the trees will send up new growth from the cut, which over time creates a thick dense hedge that no errant sheep or cattle can work their way through.  But hedges have other benefits, too. They’re an important home for wildlife, supporting biodiversity. And they’re part of the visual aesthetic landscape of the English countryside.

Stewart Cocker of the Epsom and Ewell countryside team binds in a hedge

I learned how to use a billhook (the hand tool used to in laying hedges). I’ve also learned how to identify new woodland species and learned things like how to identify ash in the winter and that it will burn more easily in the green than most wood.

A mean blade: the billhook

These are all things that I’d like my son to know about. Because I didn’t grow up here, these aren’t things I knew already, but now I can teach him.

Connection to community:

I’ve also really enjoyed meeting all the volunteers and communing over tea and delectable brownies made by Gill Sanders – a helper-outer who also writes a cool conservation blog.  I can see that they’ve developed a real sense of connection to the land and to the community through their efforts. And even though I’m more of a participant observer, I have, too. It’s an amazing feeling knowing that the work you’re doing is on a hedge planted by boy scouts 15 years ago and that another group of volunteers laid the hedge the first time and another group in some years time will go back over the work that I did in Horton Country Park with volunteers and the countryside team from Epsom and Ewell, too.

Delicious brownies demolished at tea break

I’ve been out and about in Epsom and Ewell, meeting lots of people, attending Christmas fairs, driving the wrong way into a tip on my way to the depot, helping the police with their enquiries, petting dogs while chatting to their owners, clearing ditches and laying hedges (more on that later). All of this in service of Help Out.

So what is Help Out. It’s a new approach to helping people help out in their local environment. It’s a web based application that will:

• visualise the existing work that volunteers do keeping town and countryside well maintained
• help people identify possible opportunities to help – either in group activities and planned tasks or in single one-off activities they can do on their own, like litter picking
• help groups publicise and recruit people to planned tasks – such as countryside management or group activities in parks and neighbourhoods, like a street cleaning or a graffiti clear-up ‘party’
• provide a place that individuals can report defects in the environment or opportunities to make things better.

Growing up in America in the 70s, I was inundated with anti-littering messages.

• Woodsy the Owl told me, Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute!
• The crying Indian, [heavy handedly] guilted us all into realising we were destroying our country with our casual littering. (YouTube video)
• And then there was the one that played on the sensitive cultural stereotypes of my home state: There ain’t no lower class than Tennessee Trash.  (YouTube video)

What strikes me now is that these messages sort of stop with personal responsibility to NOT litter. There’s not a clear call to action for helping to clean up and help out with the local environment.

Although the Tidy Britain cinema and tv ads of the 60s and 70s weren’t a part of my growing up, a Surrey park user told me about them yesterday.  There’s a really interesting difference between the US and UK versions.  Although they also play up the guilt angle, there’s something else there, too. The idea of people taking action. (Like this COI video with its Litter Defense Volunteers)  Or how there’s more than one negative impact from littering, such as the draining of the public purse.  (Like in this video where New Seekers singer tells her bandmate that cleaning up litter costs £25 million each year)

But it seems to me that there’s isn’t much of that same call to action now. Where there is, it’s largely limited to the “just don’t mess things up” rather than we all have to help out to keep things nice.

Surrey has a beautiful environment. Its residents are rightly proud and have high standards. But the environment is something that always needs looking after, even if everyone behaves well. Leaves fall, things decay, weeds grow. But there’s not as much money   Surrey’s residents will need to take a more active role in keeping this area a fantastic place to live and work.  We need low cost easy-to-use tools that make it easy for people to help out in the place where they live through micro-volunteering and to low-commitment casual volunteering on organised schemes.

The funny thing is, there’s lots of this going on in Surrey already. But it’s not easy to find out about it and it’s not always obvious what the effects are. Not because they aren’t good, but because they’re not always shared as well as they could be.

As part of the Future Surrey programme, we are working on some ways to address these issues.  Making Surrey even lovelier and showing residents how their neighbours are helping out.

Introducing HELP OUT

Help Out is a tool which will help people

• find one-off opportunities to support their local community by improving the place where they live
• report problems in the local area (e.g. graffiti, fly-tipping, dirty street signs, fallen leaves and opportunities to beautify the area.)
• see what issues have been reported
• claim issues they’d like to fix or make better
• see what other individuals are doing
• see what the council and community groups are doing to improve the local area, including responding to reported issues
• find opportunities to work with existing casual volunteering programmes run by local volunteer trusts, countryside services and park rangers among others.

How we’re Helping Out: 

Working with practitioners across Surrey and with residents in the Borough of Epsom and Ewell, we are using a rapid prototyping process which allows us to flexibly design and develop the whole service: tech, communications, social media integration and delivery.

This means we’re be talking with local people about their attitudes to the place where they live. What makes them proud. What makes them want to contribute. And how they want to engage.  And by the 19th of December, we’ll have something to show potential users and practitioners and be able to make some clear decisions about how and whether we’ll fully develop Help Out (but we think this is a goer).

Help us out with Help Out:

To find out more and keep informed about Help Out sign up at http://surrey.helpout.org.uk or contact Ingrid Koehler at ingrid@wearefuturegov.com

We’ve heard a lot of great ideas from people who work at Surrey as we’ve been developing the Future Surrey programme at SurreyCamp and in conversations with Members and staff.  Some of these ideas are big and potentially game changing: re-designing services to put users at the centre of the design process and delivered to take advantage of the benefits of the social web.  Some of the ideas are smaller, but important.  Ideas about the way that public services in Surrey can be more open and engaging so that incremental improvements and efficiencies can be achieved – or they might be about small changes that make a huge difference.

We want to help you put these ideas into action, which is why we’ve developed the Future Surrey network. And we know that at Surrey County Council staff want to easier ways to make connections to share ideas and knowledge. The Future Surrey network can help you do this with everyone interested in improvement and innovation across Surrey public services.

But we need your ideas on what we’re doing, too.  For the rest of our time in Surrey, our two main projects will be focused on addressing social isolation and helping people take action locally to make the place where they live better.  What we’re thinking is:

1. Social isolation: Working with local people to think about how we can re-invent or re-configure existing services to support people to live richer and more independent lives, to build better connections between neighbours and create a network of support for vulnerable adults. This could be about visiting people in their homes or helping them get out. Maybe through new services or maybe by re-designing old ones.   Here’s what folks at SurreyCamp came up with, but we reckon we can push this idea even further. What do you think? Tell us here or register on this site (top of the right hand side bar) and join the social isolation project group.
2. Environmental reporting and civic/resident action:  We can make much better, quicker use of the information that’s already out there about road and weather conditions or if there are any adverse events like flooding, snow or an overturned syrup truck on the A3.  And agencies in Surrey could make much better use of ears and eyes on the ground – local residents.   But beyond just distributing information better, we can also help distribute good will. Can someone help out? If it’s snow, do you have a 4X4 and help someone get to a hospital appointment?  Would you be willing to clear up rubbish in a local park or over paint some graffiti?  Here’s what folks came up with at SurreyCamp.  What do you think is the best way to put this into action? Tell us here or register on this site (top of the right hand side bar) and join the Help out! project group.

We’d love to hear from people who would like to help us work on these projects whether this is your service area or not. And if you can’t work on the project but you have an idea of who we should talk to or how it could go down, we want to hear your ideas.

Another SurreyCamp idea.  This is part of a series of write-ups from SurreyCamp.  This one is from Ben Unsworth a policy lead at Surrey County Council.  The group he was working in developed an idea around emergency management.

In case of emergency… web and mobile application for official updates, crowdsourced news and a way to offer your help in an emergency.

The co-ordination of information to residents in an emergency (or even when things are just a little out of the ordinary) is one of the most difficult tasks faced by public services. For residents it can be very confusing, especially now there are so many sources of information. Where would you go to find up to date news? The BBC? The Council website? Twitter?

At its simplest, the app would aggregate confirmed news feeds from key agencies during times of crisis. Residents would look at the website or the mobile app to see the most recent information from across the County (provided by the Council, emergency services, the BBC and other key agencies). To get a more local update residents would enter a postcode or switch-on their device’s GPS. This would enable location-based news, providing the nearest update. As a social app, it would also encourage users to update their own view of the situation.

Using a simple registration and profile system the application could provide personalised alerts – such as news that affects your commute, your children’s school or the village your parents live in. You would also be prompted to indicate how you could help in different scenarios. Perhaps you have a 4WD car and could assist in extreme weather or live in a very rural part of the county and could relay up to date news? The profiles would match volunteers with opportunities to help out in their local area.

The group developing this idea recognised the complexity behind this application. Clear communications protocols, the separation of official from crowdsourced news and the need to protect vulnerable people were all issues raised during the discussion. Notwithstanding these hurdles… we think this idea has legs.