Helping those that help themselves

Should we help those that help themselves or rescue those who are struggling? You can make an argument for either course, no doubt depending on the situation, but let us consider two cases.

A funding body, let us call it Lottery, only likes to pay for a proportion of a project: let us say 50%. They also have a rule that 'work done so far cannot be counted as match-funding in your bid'. This is understandable otherwise all those in possession of a picture by Leonardo da Vinci would never have to provide any match funding since the 'value' of the work done so far would be so transcendent.

What are the consequences of this rule?

An enthusiast finds a box of pictures in his attic and settles down to catalogue these, working many hours as a volunteer. At the end of the project, it appears that the collection is unique and there would be benefit in the collection and the catalogue being more widely available. He approaches Lottery for financial support to get them on line. But Lottery's rules kick in and it asks for match-funding which our enthusiast cannot afford. All his meticulous cataloguing work does not count. The project cannot go ahead.

In the attic next door is a canny individual who discovers another box of pictures. He opens the box, casts an eye over them, judges them to be worthy of publication and applies, immediately, to Lottery for financial support both to catalogue the pictures and to put them on line. 'Fine in principle', says Lottery, 'where is the match-funding?' 'Oh', says Canny, 'I shall catalogue them myself and that is the match funding.' 'OK' says Lottery, 'we will pay for them to be put on line.' The project goes ahead.

Which, as the prophet might ask, is the better case? Should Lottery be supporting those who have already shown effort and contributed volunteer effort, or should it be encouraging a dependency culture where no one does anything without putting in a bid?

It is galling for those of us who have shown effort and contributed voluntary time to be seeing neighbours who haven't, being fully funded for similar work. Talk about rewarding historic failure. They may need help but it does not do much for our morale or encourage us to put in more voluntary effort.

Christmas spirit

We do, occasionally, enjoy the wry. A recent email gave us much joy. It related to a 'Living Nativity' which was planned for our town. Contrary to expectations, this was not to be the sight of an under-age unmarried mother giving birth in a stable, but was a procession through the town with various 'stations' much like the stations of the cross.

'Can you help us?' started the email, 'the rabbits that were to appear in the Living Nativity are unwell and we need to replace them. Can anyone help?'

Now forgive me, it is is some time since we read the four gospels and our knowledge of the Christmas story is largely based on the words of various carols which we know are not original material, but we cannot, just at the moment, recall that rabbits featured in any significant way in the Bible story. That is not to say that there were no rabbits there, after all the Romans introduced rabbits to Britain and there is no reason to believe that rabbits were not domesticated and living in Palestine in the year 0 AD.

This email was followed a day or two later by another one with the programme. The sixth stage of the journey was to involve the 3 Wise Women and their horses ...

Well, in a modern world of equality, why should they not be Wise Women, despite the images of the stoning in the Life of Brian that come flooding to the mind.

Challenged after the event, the organiser admitted that the camels had actually been Alpacas. Well, at least he had got a camelid but not even our flexible approach to history could quite encompass the idea of a South American mammal having attended the Nativity.

We can't wait to hear the reaction to our Earnest Cleric's question at the next Sunday School: 'Now Johnny, who appeared at the Nativity?'

'Of course there is a lobster. Dnh!' You know the film.

Dealing with a customer

Dealing with a customer complaint is an art.

We have the great joy of running a car park. One day, when we have the time and energy, we will gather together some of the excuses that folks use to justify why they should not pay a parking fine and publish them here. Many produce the most wonderfully convoluted arguments which double back on themselves to avoid the simple admission 'OK, guv. It's a fair cop.'

The wind turns tickets face down or blows up through the air conditioning units to blow them into the foot well. Then here are the sob stories: 'I had two children and a pushchair and I had just got back from shopping and one of the children was screaming and ...'

Then there are the urban myths 'Your clock was wrong' or 'I only overstayed by two minutes and ...' not knowing there are actually fifteen minutes' grace. Or the malicious one 'The wardens are known to open car doors which have been left unlocked and ...'

But I digress. Here is one of our own about which we are still puzzling. It was from an investment house we will call simply Nice Unit Trust. To precis it, the story runs:

December 2012 - Us: Please close our account. Nice Unit Trust: Will do

March 2013 - NUT sent through the usual vast wodge of papers showing that we still had about £40. Us: Please close this account. NUT: Will do, here is a cheque for the balance

June - NUT sent through the usual vast wodge of papers showing that we now had £0.17 in our account

August - NUT: Here is a fascinating magazine all about how we invest your money. Us: It is awfully difficult to close an account with you, isn't it. Please close this account. Don't bother to send us the £0.17, simply give it to charity. NUT: Thank you for your instructions, here is a piece of paper confirming that we have closed the account

November - this is where it gets surreal - NUT: Thank you for your complaint (?). Please accept apologies for the delay in replying. we will 'investigate' your complaint. As your complaint was received 8 weeks ago mutter, mutter Ombudsman ... enclosed were a leaflet and a Complaint Handling Policy

NUT (in a letter dated two days later): Apologies ... appreciate your patience ... list of the dates on which things happened ... accept apologies for any inconvenience ... and here is a cheque for £25 'in recognition of the fact that we failed to investigate and respond to the complaint within an acceptable time period'

Collapse of stout parties. So we now have a cheque for £25 for a complaint that we did not make. Nice Unit Trust have spent far too much money chopping down trees and on postage and now they compound the problem by spending another £25. Know any good charities anyone?

Now back to my car park letters: 'And precisely why did you leave your Doberman in your car with your parking ticket in its jaws ...?'

The Life of Brian

Are we the only people who have spotted the irony of the Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC saying that the nation has become so irreligious that we would not understand the jokes in Monty Python's Life of Brian? It’s no laughing matter: Britain has become a nation of religious illiterates 'who are baffled by Biblical references in Monty Python film The Life of Brian'

There was a great fuss when the film came out which culminated in one of the great television debates of the age when Cleese and Palin met Muggeridge and Stockwood. Muggeridge and Stockwood vs Cleese and Palin

The idea that we should learn about religion to understand the jokes in a film which was condemned by leading churchmen when it came out, rather than for any moral improvement has a special educational charm.

And if we have to learn about religion to understand the jokes then what about Romans go Home? Come on you Latin teachers, join the fight.  Only someone with a grounding in Latin - preferably from Kennedy's First Eating (sic) Primer, but from the Cambridge Latin Course if you are younger - would begin to understand the scene. Surely this is a reason to learn Latin as well as RE 'so that we can understand the jokes in the film.'

How times change; or Tempora mutantur as Latinists might say. Definitely one for the Vicar of Bray.

Translation required ...

The following arrived today

Knowledge Co-Creation between Organisations and the Public
Call for Participation in the XXX Workshop which will be held on [Date] in YYYY

Inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised knowledge, or leverage human cognition and creativity. In supporting these approaches, organisations are often provoked to make their data and processes more open, and to be inclusive of differing motivations and perspectives from inside and outside the organisation. In doing so, they raise new questions for both designers and organisations:

How are systems designed to manage data, attribute work, or draw boundaries between  ”official” and externally generated knowledge? How can openness support collaborations across organisations as well as with the public where there are shared interests?

How can the professional framed context and metadata standards be connected with the just-in-time, emergent nature of amateur online collection and curation? Is the role of the professional changed by these innovations?

How can systems be designed to leverage complementary or differing motivations, and how do we conceptualise these in design? How to prompt amateurs’ contributions that may be of value for institutions and users?

Any offers on what it means?

The email attached to it ended '... one of the most relevant conferences on social computing. Hope you will find it of interest!' Um ...

Lacking in vision?

A current favourite is a poem by Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings. This argues that the old sayings have stood the test of time and are much better guides than following the call of the market: Kipling in his reactionary phase, perhaps.

It contains some wonderful lines which are so appropriate for some of the funding bodies, agencies and bureaucracies with which we deal. The best is the verse:
We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn 
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
How often we are told the obvious as if it were some new discovery ...

But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.
How could we possibly think that bureaucrats were 'lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind ...'?
Unheard of. They have lists of boxes that need ticking.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place ...
Good customer-responsive stuff then. Or try:
With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch ...
By now you should be beginning to say yeeeees! ...

Love the lines; we just wish Kipling's conclusion was not so backward-looking.

Belbin strikes back ...

... or the rise of the Monitor/Evaluator.

We have just been reading through a thrilling 340 page document called a Business Survival Toolkit. This includes some 69 different rather 'tools' for business planning drawing largely on the works of various academics. For those of us who have been around a bit, it is notable that few of the basics have changes much from the work of the great business thinkers of the post-War generation: people like Hawthorne, Herzberg and Maslow whose work was so able summarised by people like Charles Handy and others. A new generation must have its say, however (Smith & Jones 2013).

Somewhere deep inside this riveting document is a quotation from someone called Richard Piper of the NCVO (National Council of Voluntary Organisations). He says:

Some people in our sector concentrate more on the technical problem of measuring outcomes, and less on the strategic problem of achieving them. This is a disease, an affliction, and we can call it measurement anxiety. It can paralyse us and it seems to be contagious. 

It goes on to describe an exercise in which he asked 50 people to word associate with 'outcomes' and 48 of them mentioned something about assessment or measurement.

Now this is interesting for three reasons. The easy one is that we all know it has happened and has become endemic over the last twenty years leading to paralysis of action. The word Ofsted is enough to send quivers through any teacher's bloodstream as Accreditation should in the Museum world: inspection and measurement by those who can't of those who can and are doing their damnedest to do better.

We have mentioned before Einstein's remark that Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted. This should be written over every Monitor/Evaluator's desk.

The second is that someone is brave enough to say it out loud, knowing that a whole cohort of assessors will round on him from a great height and claim that they are absolutely convinced that achieving objectives is the Most Important thing and that their systems are designed to be Entirely Helpful... a this will hurt me much more than it hurts you response.

The third is that he seems to have been quoted as saying it and this suggests that the report writers approve of what he is saying. This is a document of 340 pages almost wholly given over to the thoughts of academics setting out the 'best practice' way of doing things which, you guessed it, include lots and lots of monitoring and evaluation. And being the work of academics even the most banal or self-evident remark is referenced (Smith & Robinson 2013) but that is a topic for another time (Mumblings, date to be announced).

Every Belbin group needs its different role-players, even including Monitor/Evaluators, but when they start to impose their vision of how business should be done, acting as judge and jury, we do feel inclined to agree with the old ladies in Arsenic and Old Lace, that they would be much happier with a nice dose of elderflower cordial which, you may recall, contained something less harmless to end the existence of those who were lonely or did not have a fulfilling life. It would do wonders for this particular disease or affliction.