"Forget social!", says Robert McNamee at Ted, contemplating the trajectories of the digital world. "Social is now a feature, it's not a platform". That's to say, social has just been a leg up. The main game is now making those connections do something useful. It's time, say McNamee, for high value add content, highly differentiated content, to step up and have its day.
I recently moved to
Riddells Creek, a
small town to the north-west of Melbourne,
nestled into the foothills of the Macedon
Range. I have 4.5 acres,
blissful quiet most of the time, and with the unseasonal spring rain, a
great
deal of grass to mow. However, no amount of grass was going to keep me
from showing up at the recent community meeting to discuss the Macedon
Shire’s
Settlement Strategy. On the cards was a doubling of the town population
by
2036; I wondered what longer-term residents thought of this.
In the event, I
was a little late, held up by a conference call. But I quickly got the gist of
what was going on. The consultant was standing beside her
PowerPoint presentation, and had asked for questions from the audience. The
audience were proceeding to address everything else but the Settlement Strategy. The town was a fire trap, with few exits across the railway line.
Drainage was poorly designed and roads flooded. There were few footpaths. The
school was overcrowded. Past developments had been poorly planned and reactive
to developers proposals. There were too few train services at peak hours, and the recent extension to the car park was already overfull.
At a workshop of Conservation
Management Networks and Landcare groups, I was asked to contribute to a
discussion on the use of the Landcare logo ? the hands that hold Australia. I
thought it would be useful to talk about the relationship issues involved,
specifically the hurt and anger Landcare groups feel when their work is
appropriated by others. Here is what I had to say:
What do landcare members see when
they see the hands? They see their
hands, on shovels, driving tractors, carrying trays of tubestock. They see old
hands, that have done this before; they see cold hands out in the biting wind,
that would rather be at home; they see young hands, good to have around to help
with the load.
Local
communities are presented as the last hope in a mad and dangerous
world, the dreamland where people know each other and care for each
other. Life is not that simple. Local
communities are arenas of competing interests, constrained by and often
straining against what higher levels of government allow.
In the natural resource management field, facilitators are in the vanguard of innovation in the way we as a society make decisions for the common good. But they work alone, with few opportunities to talk with other facilitators, and they are hostage to a funding system that asks for engagement but often puts administrative convenience before good engagement process. So what are the prospects for NRM facilitators becoming the innovators in decision making that we need?
Engagement 
