Controversy on the blog

Someone has left a distressed comment on the post about self-healing systems. I've replied, appropriately I hope, but I feel like adding a couple of extra comments here.

1. Re-reading the bit that caused the distress I can see why, and in some ways I regret that I didn't write that bit more carefully. At the same time I've set myself some rules for this blog, and one of the main ones is that I write quickly and I don't go over and edit stuff. This runs the risk of me making mistakes occasionally and even upsetting people, but I think the advantages outweigh this (and it was only a tiny part of a long post that caused the upset - do read the whole thing if you follow the link). (Also many of the concerns of the commenter could have been allayed if they'd read some of the other posts, it does look like they only read the one post and didn't see any of my many comments on professionalism, my post on advocacy and therapy, or other reflections on practice and ethics.)

2. This blog is not about my professional practice, it's about testing the boundaries, it's about challenging myself first of all to reflect further on issues I encounter, and then challenging my readers - but mainly in positive ways by offering other unusual sorts of ideas that may fit in with advocacy practice or may be something to avoid.

3. As such, and this is my main point, I want to be challenged. This anonymous commenter has given me a chance to repair an error and think again about an old post. I like comments, questions, emails, suggestions, etc. I've said this several times before, but I've got plenty of readers and not many responses. A blog is potentially very one-sided, but it doesn't need to be, and you can help... (but please leave some sort of name so I can reply properly and follow your comments on other posts)

Thanks
:-)

Professionalism, stealth, and Sun Tzu

I know sometimes my posts get a bit long and rambling, and while I maintain that that is a vital part of my exposition (my practice, my methodology, my ethics) I do also accept that I need to try to offer some more bite-size chunks as well...

I've been discussing my thoughts about professionalism (hidden in the review of christmas and Street Angels) with a few people over the last couple of days and I've come to another couple of conclusions. Firstly that it could more simply be described as 'friendly professionalism' (if that's not a bit too cheesy for you), rather than 'stealth', which has its own advantages. At the very least I think most people can see the value friendliness has in aiding communication and this perspective can help us adapt our practice in different ways and give us new understandings of our physical and social environment (and the post about accessible computing is similarly about adapting to new technology).

Another friend immediately started quoting lots of classic Chinese and Japanese texts to me and I'm afraid I've forgotten most of them except Sun Tzu's The Art of War. I did remember a lot of the context though, gleaned from various places. The art of war is stealth (broadly) - you conquer your enemy without their even realising it - and the characterisation of stealth by Sun Tzu has found many other applications. Mark mentioned that people work with a good leader automatically (and I would add comfortably) and don't even question the leadership because it just makes sense. This approach has found applications in many fields over the last 2500 years, and it could be interesting to write something about The Art of Advocacy... (if anyone's got any ideas get in touch).

Accessible computing

Periodically I write about Free Software (also known as FLOSS or FOSS): this is important in terms of accessibility to all and is closely linked in to openly published standards. From an ethical perspective, an advocacy perspective, and a community perspective I find the free software movement interesting to keep up with and a useful comparison to similar developments in advocacy and society.

I think it's particularly important for people to know a little bit about this at the moment as some worrying as well as some positive changes are taking place which may have a big impact on our use of computers over the coming years.

First of all, let's be bold:

Free software will benefit disabled computer users.
OK at the moment the software isn't up to scratch, but over time free software is likely to be the fastest and most flexible way to respond to the diverse needs of differently disabled people. A more positive (if a bit technical) story is here, but see below why we need to support these developments. I also expect that Linux (the free operating system) in its embedded form running phones, TV decoders and washing machines is also being used for various tools and machines disabled people use.

Free software will benefit the poor.
This is more directly obvious, but it is particularly important if we consider the growing poverty gap and the effect of people not being able to afford computers or the legal software to run on them. Microsoft at the moment is threatening much tougher action against people who copy cds or dvds, download music, or use pirated software. These actions are going to affect a lot of people and cost a lot of money, and it will disbar many poor people who become even more cut off from society. Of course there are projects like the $100 laptop to 'revolutionise the way we educate the world's children', amongst many other benefits.

Free software promotes accessibility.
Despite the fact that it's free, the most important meaning of 'free as in free software' is that it's accessible. For the developer that means you can open it up and see how it works, but it also has other important implications for the rest of us. One important example is the Open Document Format (ODF). This was ratified by the International Standards Organisation as the first international standard for office documents. Many governments and large organisations are transferring to this standard (check the links in my earlier post), and they are transferring largely because of the accessibility features of the software and the opportunities it offers to build effective and appropriate services around them. Other important accessibility developments include systems for archiving and retrieval of information, user involvement and collaboration in the new Web 2.0 (blogs, MySpace, Wikis, photo and file sharing sites, del.icio.us, etc), network and server operation and maintenance, and the posibility of reusing and recycling old hardware more productively amongst others.

Free software is built around a principle of community.
This is very important. Proprietary (non-free) software is owned and marketed for a profit by corporations who primarily want to make money. Most end users of computers just want to get by in life ok, have some fun, avoid too many problems. Quite a few people like to avoid problems by sitting in front of a computer and making themselves busy (or entertained or whatever). After a while you meet others like you and you start to communicate, to work or play together. Out of this has evolved an enormous resource of software and support that is involving more and more people every day. Helping each other out feels good, contributing to something which other people are going to use and appreciate feels good, and many people are able to make a living or at least keep themselves sane by working on free software projects. It is instructive to compare the experiences of these communities to the different sorts of communities we often work with, and they provide some hope (if you're selective).

Free software is the future.
I don't mean that in a grand way, more like I would say that we have to continue as advocates to support disempowered people to speak out and make their lives better... Free software, like advocacy, is something I think it's important to speak out for. It's available now for most of us, and getting easier to use. See the links at the end of this post.

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And now the dark side!
Microsoft revolutionised computing with Windows in kind of the same way that Oppenheimer revolutionised war with the atom bomb. Things are certainly different and we have certainly developed a lot, but was it all a good thing in retrospect? I could go on for ages about the history of Microsoft but I won't, just remember the anti-monopoly ruling that was made against them by the European Court (which they pretty much flaunted as far as I can tell, see this Guardian article and just search google for many more examples).

Now Windows Vista is upon us and the situation is getting far worse. I was catching up on a few tech blogs this evening and it looks like there will be some big upsets in store in the near future (you may not even want to run a new computer).

I started on the blog of a moderator for the Ubuntu forums who said there is no escape from Vista, it's going to shake the world. This is complemented by this slightly more readable and comprehensive post which explains it's all about digital rights management (DRM).

Then I was reading various sites about OOXML, Microsoft's competitor standard to Open Document Format, which seems to be designed to confuse people into not using open source while providing a completely inappropriate alternative. Bob Sutor is Vice President, Open Source and Standards, of IBM, a company that has done a lot for open source and revitalised its once flagging business partly as a result. He provides a couple of shocking summary links to information about the impossibility of implementing MS's huge standard and the fact that MS has already released proprietary extensions that will maintain their monopoly.

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There's a lot more than that, but the key thing as advocates or nurses or social workers or whoever you are reading my blog is that open source really is accessible and nice, and is destined to become rapidly more so over the next few years.

This is a very interesting time because many IT industry specialists are saying that the free software movement is now a viable alternative to Microsoft based set-ups, and now Microsoft, by releasing Vista in such a controlled and expensive form, could well be shooting themselves in the foot and helping us to move more quickly along the path to freedom and collaboration.

I personally have been using almost entirely free software for almost two years now. I have an old computer (2001) running very happily and playing DVDs much better than Windows ever managed as well as being able to do almost everything else I want. I've also got various other advantages from even my marginal involvement in the community, and I've paid them back in kind here and there.

The following open source software works and is free and easily if you have a broadband connection (and you can get hold of it in other ways if you need to), so make a start soon:

Ubuntu Linux - alternative to Windows, works similarly, community driven and beginner friendly

OpenOffice.org - word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database, drawing, etc - more than an alternative to MS Office

Firefox - faster, more secure, community-driven web browser
Thunderbird - the email client from the same developers

There are literally thousands of programs, and many more in development. These are the main needs and you can start using some of them straight away - and do check out the Ubuntu Live CD...

Christmas and Street Angels reflections

This started as a reply to Kez Lama's post on the subject, but became too long and I felt in the end it would be inappropriate to post as a comment. I also wanted to be able to post these reflections here as they were interesting to write and are relevant to this blog. It's also relevant to my earlier post about Street Angels.

It's really about professionalism in different contexts, and about trust, so it should make sense:

From an anti-capitalist and anti-christian perspective, but as someone who is dedicated to different experiences of community and sees ritual and ceremony as important parts of life, christmas is a strange time.

I had a similarly communal and voluntary experience, and I've enjoyed many christmases with various diverse groups of people over the years. This year I spent the day with Urban Space again. I really felt I spent the day with lots of old friends, and they really are friends, even though I've met most of them 'professionally' through their lack of capacity to deal with problems in their life and their involvement with local services and support groups. The great thing was its unpretentiousness. Everyone just seemed to feel free to be themselves, and happy to be together talking and having fun.

I also enjoyed being a Street Angels volunteer, meeting other volunteers, talking to people in the streets, joking about Ru and the Bishop going into Wildcats, and seeing that we clearly provided a useful service that should continue. It was interesting to be in the city centre at that time of night but not being out, as it were. I usually like to think I'm quite aware of what's going on around me when I'm out (I've had a few lapses), but wearing that huge fluorescent yellow coat, coupled with our responsibility to be observant and learn how to blend in and operate effectively still impressed a new perspective on me. I think the main observation I made was that life on Westgate is actually much more safe and enjoyable than I expected. I'm not so sure about the music policies generally, but I'm much more likely to go out in Wakefield after this experience (and avoid the hassle of travelling to Leeds).

I think my conclusion as I write this is that perhaps we should understand professionalism as a sort of stealth movement... That if we are professional enough at our work then the 'professionalism' should become invisible, disappear: whoever we are working with will feel comfortable, should see us as just another (albeit friendly) person, and feel that it's worth their while talking to us; the more familiar barriers of professionalism, often including a mixture of suits and formal clothing, jargon and other formal language, potentially multiple caveats about what we do, who we are, confidentiality and when we break it, complaints procedures, equal opportunities policies, etc., and other more personal barriers like never accepting a cup of tea, not liking dogs or being vegetarian — all these other professional barriers should disappear. Then our dislike of dogs is dealt with professionally and unobtrusively and no one even notices, we will be able to sense when it would be appropriate for our client's comfort to accept a cup of tea from them, and we will be able to slip in the necessary bits about confidentiality exactly at the right time so it's not too mechanical and can be listened to and understood... Maybe we can't get there yet, but it seems to be a reasonable direction to try to head in.

Now is the time to reflect on the experiences of Street Angels, to think about how we worked, what worked, where the gaps or problems are, and how we respond to all this and prepare to start again. I'm sure you and I are not the only people to recognise the specific role Street Angels volunteers found themselves in, and I feel there is an opportunity to capitalise (if I can use that word) on this experience by encouraging volunteers to 'blend in', to be able to give professional support when required, but to make the people they are working with feel comfortable with whatever support we're giving them.

The other thing that comes with this approach is trust. Blending in requires intuition and flexibility, and people will practice it in different ways that suit them, but trying to regulate this in formal procedures doesn't really work. I don't really see this as a big problem though, as we already have a pretty good team of reliable people and we know we can work together. There are various points for discussion, and I think the idea at this stage is to have another Sunday afternoon gathering soon where we can all share feedback and start to plan for the future. Hopefully we can find a way to build on this experience and support and develop our good practice rather than impose too many procedures and expectations that may only serve to create more unhelpful barriers before the people we're trying to work with.

I can't finish without saying something more about trust. Many people say we are living in a less and less trusting society, I don't know if this is true but it certainly seems trust is an attitude that is sorely missing. I see it in the police, who spend so much time being lied to they hardly know anything else and rarely seem able to trust people; in benefits agency and job centre plus staff who are under pressure to stamp out benefit fraud; from mental health professionals who are constantly doing risk assessments; from social workers who think advocates are going to complain and make their lives a misery; from service users who are so used to the veil of objective professionalism and the repeated disappointments over the years that anger often comes out instead of trust... the list goes on.

The sad response to the lack of trust today is often to add more layers of bureaucracy and professional and moral policing to try to cover for the lack of trust, but surely it's obvious that not trusting people breeds distrust and untrustworthiness. On the other hand trusting someone almost always helps to make them feel at ease, and the more responsibilities you trust them with the greater their chance of growing in confidence and skill. Once you trust people, management becomes a collective process of observation, feedback and analysis that provides its own safeguard and lets project coordinators identify issues and resolve them.

Hopefully Street Angels will be able to continue to capitalise on its trust in people and get back out on the streets as an effective and satisfying experience for everyone.

An advocate's winter menu

I've just spent a thoroughly enjoyable day cooking, something I should do more of really. I do regularly cook for myself, almost always from fresh ingredients, and I try to be good to the environment as well as my body (although I do have quite a few bad habits...).

Anyway today's food was a bit special and unusual, and hopefully I will be able to make your mouth water as you read about what we ate:

• Celery and celeriac soup: put in very big chunks into a casserole with stock and some extra flavourings and baked for 4 hours on a very low heat before being roughly blended - very tasty cooked slow like that!
• Stoved jerusalem artichokes with walnuts, almonds and cashews
• Braised red cabbage with anise, cardomom, cloves, juniper berries, cinnamon, and lemon
• Steamed broccoli tossed in Tamari sauce with toasted sesame seeds
• Baked sweet potatoes
• Organic italian brown rice

I actually had a very abstemious christmas because I've been feeling a bit poor and unemployed, but this was an absolute feast and thoroughly delicious. The fact that I cooked everything (except the rice and broccoli) so slowly and in advance and then reheated it when we were ready to eat made it even more full of flavour.

Hopefully this marks the beginning of a year of doing more entertaining and experimenting with more delicious flavours...

Bon apetit!

Advocacy principles

In my post about relationships yesterday I mentioned the benefits of advocacy approaches that are needed to be able to form successful trusting relationships. I actually referred to some old unfinished work I did on producing some quality standards for advocacy in Wakefield, and I thought I should actually remember on this blog the eight principles I set out then:

• Empowerment
• Loyalty and tenacity
• Inclusion and respect
• Effective communication
• Independence
• Sustainability
• Quality
• Advocacy dilemmas

These are based on the principles set out in the Advocacy2000 Principles and Standards document, and they take into account various things including the Advocacy Charter and Rick Henderson and Mike Pochin's book (much better than the Advocacy Charter).

I won't add any more commentary here or I could end up going on for ages. The full (draft) standards are available on the Advocacy Action website here and there are various comments in and around the standards.

For now, I just found it nice and refreshing to see the principles again, and you can make of them what you will...

Relationships

I agreed in an article for Planet Advocacy (March 2005, pp.10-11) that advocacy was all about 'relationships, drama and expression'.

It's not really possible to pick out one of these terms and stress it above the others, but I do want to say a few words about relationships at this point. I'm talking about 'professional' relationships between advocate and partner, and I'm also thinking about other types of professional relationship (e.g. doctor-patient, etc.). I also wonder what we can learn from our experiences of all kinds of relationships (including with friends or children say), although sexual relationships are far more complicated and I'm not thinking about them here.

Firstly we do form some kind of relationship as soon as we meet someone. Sometimes we immediately find ourselves in some kind of conflict, occasionally we seem to have a meeting of minds, but mostly there is an initial period of getting to know each other. Whatever, if we are engaging or communicating with someone, there is a relationship.

Very often today as soon as we start to think about relationships in a professional context alarm bells start to ring: there have been so many scandals and abuses of trust that professional relationships are clearly prescribed and objectified - in particular they must be objective and dispassionate.

I think this is the wrong place to start: I've already argued that we need to protect vulnerable people from objectivity, and surely a working relationship should be about identifying some shared goals first of all, and, as advocates know well, this is often irreconcilable with having a dispassionate and objective relationship (where a 'person' inevitably becomes known as a 'client'...)

On the contrary, advocacy has a history of being partial, of being on the side of the partner: the primary goal is to form a relationship of mutual understanding and trust. This is very important as it's the only way to get to be able to really communicate with someone. It's very hard to break through the barriers of distrust and suspicion that many service users harbour, and we need all the benefits of independence and sympathy, loyalty and tenacity, inclusion and respect to be able to support people properly. Yes, boundaries need to be clear, but they come after (or at least during) the informal negotiations about trust.

All I'm going to do in this post is to open up and question the role and type of relationships. They certainly form a key part of advocacy practice, yet I think their role and the way we work with them is far more complicated than most people have acknowledged in writing about advocacy.

Food for thought hopefully...?

Publish, publish, publish!

This is a post for my next blog really, but I'll write a draft as a sounding board here...

There are several starting points for this idea:

• Organisations seem to be very wary of publishing things (maybe becasue they are scared of being judged, or losing out somehow commercially?)
• This blog is an opportunity for me to publish snippets of half-formed ideas, or bits and pieces that may or may not be useful - this is a very interesting sort of opportunity, and I think it's valuable to be able to do this. I would like to see a place where many people could collaborate in a similar way (probably more consensual). One example I thought of is prison advocacy: it would be good if there was a webspace where anyone could publish ideas about this (however vague), find others who are interested, and over time develop a collaborative resource out of the ideas. Very different format from this blog, but quite open and unpressured still. Subjects in this space would be wide ranging, but easy to find.
  
• The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community are an interesting model. The alternative is proprietary software where companies like Microsoft protect their intellectual property and charge a lot of money for the software. FOSS developers share the intellectual property and give it away for free, but at the same time they solve problems and improve things as a community, and they make money in other ways, e.g. from selling support (services) instead of software (products).
  
• Advocacy can benefit from this model by recognising, for example, that if we shared good practice and published our policies, that many more people could benefit from good quality advocacy, and well-run projects would still have a good chance of winning contracts and remaining sustainable.
  

I suppose it's the glass half empty or half full situation. I find it a bit sad that a lot of organisations who work with people who are entitled to social care are so careful about publishing things and sharing them. I think we could create an opportunity for shring good practice in many common areas, celebrating different approaches to our work side by side, and opening up new areas which aren't written about (or at least published) because they're too new or exploratory...

I'm still going to be thinking and writing about this in the next few weeks, in amongst hopefully more direct material about advocacy.

Keep on skanking

Hey hey. 2007 is moving on already, and I've been busy doing things I want to blog about and not having time to write (actually I've got two quite long drafts from the last week, but haven't been able to finish them).

At the same time, I'm managing to get a bit of consistency back with my posting, and this seems to be rewarded with more hits and more returning visitors: nothing amazing, but gratifying just the same, and also some positive comments. In return I feel like I need to be keeping people satisfied with new content...

Skanking means moving to me, but with a bit of flava. I'm looking forward to getting back to dancing next week, and our teacher always wants us to ‘ben' up’: keep on moving, but not in too straight a line, not with a straight back at all...

This blog is about dancing a similar bent-back dance, while circling vaguely and persistently around a centre known as advocacy. In some ways this crazy bent up dance of advocacy keeps on tempting me in different directions. I'm thinking at the moment of trying to sort this out and create some alternative spaces that would be more appropiate for those sorts of thoughts, other kinds of dances. One of these alternative spaces at the moment would be more experimental and philosophical (based on visctrix.net), and one would be more strict, accessible and sensible (the advocacy community site).

Hopefully that will leave this for more focusing on advocacy in a quirky and independent way. I've had a good conversation tonight about upsetting people: my friend thought that although she loves me, maybe I upset people unnecessarily. In the end we agreed that there are some people who I should be free to go on upsetting: this is partly the necessary sacrifice (for me) to be able to work successfully with and gain the trust and understanding of vulnerable people and others I already know and work with; and it's partly to avoid the grey area where I could try not to offend anyone and end up completely bland and with nothing interesting to say.

So I think this blog will stay a personal space for me to try some challenging ideas and remain philosophical, but I'll try to be a bit more focused on advocacy in the future. I would also like to make it a more integral part of my work and be able to devote some core time to it instead of mainly writing late at night when I'm tired. That should also give me more chance to write responses to publications of various types (not just the videos I mentioned in my plans for 2007). Finally for now, this will be more of a sounding board for ideas that may be written more carefully and inclusively in other places.

I hope this makes sense... the key is to keep posting I guess, but in the meantime any comments or thoughts or any sort of feedback will be appreciated :-)

Quick 7-step stress management technique

It would be nice to think that everyone is feeling relaxed after the recent holidays, but the sad fact is that all the expectations around christmas, coupled with all the over induldgence, often makes it quite stressful.

Maybe the advice I was sent by email last year could be helpful:

1. Picture yourself near a stream.



2. Birds are softly chirping in the cool mountain air.



3. No one but you knows your secret place.



4. You are in total seclusion from the hectic place called "the world".



5. The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.



6. The water is crystal clear.



7. You can easily make out the face of the person you're holding under it...

Hopefully you'll already be feeling in a better mood, and I do think there's a place for these sorts of meditations, although to be honest I think the cure for stress is probably best found in other ways... ;-)