11th May 2021. Futures | Libraries
Creating community futures; Libraries matter
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Creating community futures
I’ve just finished a project with Wales Community and Voluntary Action that was designed to help communities identify positive or preferred futuresand to start to organise to influence these outcomes. The pilot was funded by the National Lottery’s Emerging Futures Fund.
We adapted the template for what we did from the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes project in southern Africa, which set out to help communities find ways to be more resilient in the face of climate change, although for reasons of time, budget, and online delivery, we had to simplify slightly. We also—explicitly—had a slightly broader agenda, across the whole area of social justice.
But effectively, there are five stages here. The first is identifying and selecting the seeds of change, and turning them into ‘mature seeds’, which is a critical part of the process (a bit more on this below). The second is using futures wheels to explore the first and second order impacts of the seeds, followed by a synthesis stage where possible futures that have emerged from the wheels are grouped, and a smaller number of themes is selected, each representing a good outcome.
In a fourth stage, we used a three horizons process to identify pathways to the preferred future, and also the areas of action that would need to be addressed in the second horizon to influence outcomes in the direction of the preferred stage. There’s a final planning stage where the group focuses on what they need to do over the next 12-24 months to get things started.
In the pilot projects, we worked with three communities, in Aberystwyth, Ruthin and Denbigh, and EYST, a community of interest which works with minority young people across Wales. The results seem to have been good, and the Welsh Government has contributed some additional funding to improve the quality of the outreach from the project.
Russell Todd, a community facilitator and podcaster who was part of the team, has recorded a set of podcasts which introduce the project, with voices from each other communities. (The podcasts can be found at this link).
There’s also a Handbook in the final stages of production that was developed by Dafydd Thomas, who also worked on the project, and my SOIF colleague Johann Schutte.
(La Plajeta: a seed of the future from the Good Anthropocenes project)
It’s worth coming back to the seeds of change, because there’s a tweak to these (from the Good Anthropocenes project) that gives them real power—and which comes from the practice of the futurist Wendy Schultz. A lot of futures work looks to weak signals for signs of change (and also as evidence of change): pockets of the future in the present, and so on. These are what William Gibson was talking about in his famous line about “the future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.
But: the problem with doing futures work is that it is very hard to escape from the weight of the present, the everyday sense of how we do things round here. Weak signals are weak. So how, in other words, do you help people make the future tangible?
This is where the idea of the ‘mature seeds’ comes in. You take a weak signal (say: a green wall or a green roof) and you ask what this world would look like if it had become a ‘mature seed’ in which the ideas and values in the weak signal had become dominant and mainstream ideas in society. (As a mature seed it might look like this). And then you start with those at the centre of your futures wheels, so that, from the very beginning of the project, you’re already building on the future.
#2: Libraries matter
The writer and academic Sheenagh Pugh describes Richard Ovenden’s 2020 book Burning the Books—a “history of knowledge under attack”—as the most important published last year in a short review on her blog.
A quote from the book summarises why she thinks it important:
“In the UK in 2017-18, funding for public libraries fell by £30 million, over a hundred and thirty libraries closed and five hundred more were run by volunteers rather than professional librarians. We read with horror how the public library of Jaffna was deliberately targeted in an attack aimed at damaging the educational opportunities of a community there, yet all around us public libraries are closing.”
The book is a long history—it goes back to Nineveh and Alexandria—but it’s clear that forms of knowledge get lost in all sorts of ways.
Oppressive regimes now and in the past bolster their power by destroying knowledge or limiting access to it. Data is destroyed in the digital age because it is held by commercial organisations which don’t see archiving as part of their role:
when in 2017, YouTube destroyed thousands of hours of videos documenting the Syrian Civil War, “precious information was lost, much of it gone for ever”.
Archiving organisations that are publicly funded are easy targets for cuts in public spending. And data also decays:
In 2007, scholars found that “50% of URLs in the public website for the US Supreme Court were broken, suffering from what is called in the digital preservation community, ‘linkrot’.
Data and records are constantly being tidied up, but we don’t always know what will be of future value: Pugh references a story told in the book about the 650 years of grape harvest records in Beaune that have turned out to be of huge value to climate scientists.
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