At Chapeltown Carnival

Me at Carnival 06
Originally uploaded by visctrix.

Thank you Suna for the photo (see her other photos here, or find other Leeds carnival photos on Flickr here). Congratulations to everyone who joined the Black and Dred (Harrison Bundey) troup - 71 of us on stage! - and everyone else who participated in the carnival - there were some fantastic costumes, though I didn't get to see much.

Congratulations also to Ruth who won best individual, and I'll give you another foot massage any time :-)

And to my readers: next year Leeds West Indian Carnival is 40 years old - it's the oldest Carnival in the UK - so come along, join in, dance and be happy...

The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK

I often encourage people to use more ethical Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, of FLOSS - including Libre) , and they ask me for more information.

I usually direct people to the OpenOffice.org website, and especially to the newsletter there (on Blogger). Most people mainly use computers for familiar office functions, and OpenOffice.org is a free community-developed alternative that offers many advantages to expensive proprietary solutions. The newsletter keeps track of developments and particularly of big migration successes.

There's also the Mozilla corporation, developers of Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email client), and news sites like Slashdot ('news for nerds, stuff that matters' - you have been warned).

In fact from Slashdot I found this link from the Computer Business Review Online, The State of the Nation: Open Source in the UK. It may be dry reading for the uninitiated, but I think it is an interesting and quite accurate investigation of some important developments. Returning readers may have picked up my commitment to FOSS and know that this blog is produced entirely on FOSS. Despite the fact that Linux has just celebrated it's fifteen birthday however (today - happy birthday!) people are not very familiar with using it on home or office computers.

There is a good feeling of the beginnings of a big change though. Over all these years of steadily developing FOSS, including the operating systems that make it all work (like Linux), it seems the big private players have been merely tweaking and adding minor aesthetic enhancements to their sofware (and then of course charging a fortune for upgrades). It hasn't been all that difficult for the FOSS developers to catch up then (this isn't true in the games arena). Now more and more organisations and individuals are realising that the transition to FOSS isn't all that big a leap. This article explores the current state of use of FOSS, and the voluntary sector should take note.

Drawing the line on advice

I haven't mentioned advice much on this blog (just in 4 or 5 posts). It's a bit of a tricky subject for advocates. I'd even go so far as to say that there's a bit of conflict there, although it's usually quite a friendly sort of conflict...

Certainly it's very common to see the statement, often in the middle of definitions of advocacy, that advocates don't give advice. I've always been at the forefront of arguing this point, partly because of the way I got into advocacy through more informal community work, and partly because of the way one local advice centre insisted that they did advocacy too, so there was no need for a separate advocacy scheme... Words fail me, almost.

Moving swiftly on, it is important that we differentiate our practice from advice work for at least two main reasons:

1. Advice work has become heavily regulated over the years. Now you need loads of training, loads of procedures, and loads of monitoring. Advocacy is, and needs to remain, simpler than this.
2. There's plenty of people out there wanting to hand out advice - proper regulated advice, professional opinion, or informal 'caring' advice. The problem is that the people who need advocacy can never get away from all the advice and begin to talk about what they really want. Advocacy needs to continue to support these voices.

On the other hand, despite the clear problems with falling into advice work, many people still find the separation from advice both difficult to understand, and difficult to do in practice. I've also recently had to admit coming across lots of situations where the line is a bit more blurred than I thought it was. Take these two examples:

• Working with someone who has been in the care system for many years: they've expressed a problem, explored a range of options, could be on the brink of making a decision, but they still insist on taking your advice...
• Or someone who just gets angry whenever they meet a professional: you can talk to them sensibly in private, but however much you plan together what to say, when it comes down to it they just lose control and ruin all their plans...

There are many more examples, but these are interesting because in the first example the advocate is being asked for advice against their will, and in the second example the advocate could easily get frustrated and want to impose more control than they would normally think reasonable.

There's at least a third general example too: when you are asked to do an independent check on a decision using a best-interests approach (especially in non-instructed advocacy, and what about if you want to bring a third option into the field?). I think this is the most problematic example, and it needs another post.

My conclusion when thinking about these issues and giving advice has to be pragmatic in the end: we should be able to work with people wherever possible, and we shouldn't let abstract principles get in the way unnecessarily. The first reason advocacy doesn't give advice is because it needs to remain simpler than the current state of advice work. For the same reason, we need to be able to identify for ourselves those boundary points where simplicity demands that we relent and start giving advice for a while.

Universal human needs

I found this in a little book written by some management consultants. Not my usual reading matter, and not very well written, but some interesting things nonetheless.

The book is The Thin Book® of Naming Elephants. It was about how to raise issues in organisations that no one wants to talk about, and it was interesting (if a little obvious) to hear how badly this affects businesses as much as social services, the NHS, care providers. It was a little short on practical advice though.

Anyway, right on the last page it had this little gem. They talk about what they call the 'three universal human needs.' Casting aside any difficulties we may have with the terminology here, it was very refreshing to not see those tired old platitudes of food and shelter; and what came out instead, from these management consultants of all people, is certainly worth mentioning. They list:

• Have a voice and be heard
• Be viewed as essential to a group
• Be seen as unique and exceptional

They also point to a couple of other alternative versions, including this:

• A positive view of self
• The desire to see oneself as competent
• The need to experience coherence and continuity

As an advocate I'm really happy to see 'have a voice and be heard' at the top of the list, and also the 'desire to see oneself as competent' seems to me a key issue. At the end of the day I obviously have issues with both of these lists, but I think it's been well worth my time thinking about them in the joint contexts of people with learning disabilities and people in multinational corporations; or people using mental health services and say the workforce of a small local company...

I wonder if anyone would like to suggest a list in a similar vein that could be used more directly in an advocacy context, hopefully both for our partners and for the organisations we work in.