A brief history of social housing

Carrying on from my previous post about what is social housing?, I'm doing this follow up on how social housing has developed over the years. 

A whistle stop tour of social housing

Social housing has existed in England since 1890’s, in fact much longer before then in one form or another. It really took off with the Housing and Town Planning Act in 1919 making it law for Local Authorities to provide council housing. The Liberal Democrat government at the time initiated the first sustained effort to provide low cost affordable housing. They set a highly ambitious target to build 500,000 homes and failed miserably building only around half this number during their time in power. The subsequent Conservative and Labour governments shifted the focus on to private housing. Home building didn’t stop in the period up to the second world war with another 580,000 homes built, but it was after the second world war that social housing really soared with over a million homes built, four fifths of which were ‘council housing’(Shapely, n.d.; Wheeler, 2011).

The subsequent decades saw a shift towards replacing slum housing, rehousing people into ‘gleaming’ high rise towers and out of town overspill estates spurred on by the lack of land available in the central council areas. This new promised land turned out to be pretty bleak with problems rooted in poor design and substandard construction, as well as a lack of consultation about what people wanted by the town planners (Shapely, n.d.; Wheeler, 2011).

This changed in the late sixties, with council tenants becoming frustrated with the poor housing conditions and with their opinions overlooked began to organise themselves. Tenant groups sprang up in different parts of the country to object to the housing conditions being imposed on people, with limited success. Ultimately the Local Authorities realised that they were losing public confidence and as a result, a few began to develop tenant participation schemes with the very first tenant participation handbook developed in the mid seventies (Shapely, n.d.).

The Eighties ushered a resurgence in social housing, with the Conservative government, exploring alternatives to council housing, supporting initiatives with grants and encouraging private finance in the sector. This was the ideal opportunity for not for profit housing associations to invest into the sector by tapping into finance not traditionally available to the government This period also saw ‘right to buy’ take off with over 2 million council homes sold to tenants from the 1980’s to the present day. This sale of council housing highlighted the need for increased social housing, with housing waiting lists feeling the strain. The 1998 Housing Act helped create the present system, supporting housing associations in attracting investment and making it easier for them to collect rent for people entitled to housing benefit (Heywood, 2010).

The two decades since have seen local authorities transfer council housing to large scale voluntary trusts to attract private finance to improve stock. In this period Housing associations have attracted finance to develop new homes and improve existing ones (Heywood, 2010).

The sector has experienced frequent changes in its regulatory regime over the past few years with the introduction of a new regulatory framework and the decommissioning of two principle housing bodies; the Audit Commission and the Tenant Services Authority by December 2011. This affects how RSL’s will be regulated in the future, “with the arrangements for housing inspections still unclear” (Inside Housing 2010).

The announcements in the comprehensive spending review announced in October 2010 have also affected the sector, with RSL’s capital budgets for affordable house building reduced by 60%. This means that 7,000 less homes will be built over the next four years (Inside Housing 2010; Ropke 2010). Changes to the housing benefit system coming into force in 2013 are also expected to affect RSL’s incomes because a high number of social housing tenants are economically disadvantaged and in receipt of housing benefit (Audit Commission, 2010; Parliament UK).

Like i said this was a brief look at social housing has developed to what it is today, feel free to discuss. You may want to have a look at one of my previous posts social housing 2.0, which outlines the direction I think the sector should be looking to move towards to improve its image. See you next time, when I'm starting my series of continuous improvement posts starting with customer intelligence.

References

AUDIT COMMISSION, 2010. Housing Inspections. [online] Available at: <http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/housing/inspection/pages/default.aspx> [cited 30 October 2011].

HEYWOOD, A., 2010, Investing in Social Housing, A Guide to the Development of the Affordable Housing Sector, The Housing Finance Sector [online] Available at: <http://thfcorp.com/investing/THFC%20-%20Investing%20in%20Social%20Housing%20230510.pdf> [cited 30 October 2011].

INSIDE HOUSING, 2010. The year that changed social housing forever. [online] Available at: <http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/> [cited 30 October 2011].

PARLIAMENT UK. 2010. Impact of the changes to Housing Benefit announced in the June 2010 Budget. [online] Available at: <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/> [cited 30 October 2011].

SHAPELY, P., N.D., Social housing and tenant participation. [online] Available at: <http://www.historyandpolicy.org/papers/policy-paper-71.html>

WHEELER, B., 2011, What future for social housing?, BBC [online] Available at: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14380936> [cited 30 October 2011].

How all of us are changing the web: Part 2

In my digibored post 'How all of us are changing the web: Part 1', I talked about User Generated Content (UGC) and Crowdsourcing and how we have used them to change the web as we know it today. This is a follow up; I’ve picked out a few common ways that we use UGC and crowdsourcing. There are plenty of others, but for digibored I only need a few to highlight my points. If you want a fuller list, wiki the terms.

1. Ratings and Reviews - UGC
2. Tagging Stuff - UGC
3. Citizen Science - Crowdsourcing
4. Citizen Media - Crowdsourcing

Ratings and Reviews

This is probably one of the most common forms of UGC. A lot of us shop online (figure here). I know personally, every time I make a purchase on Amazon or Ebay, I’m prompted to rate and review what I’ve bought. I know I often check user ratings because it’s damn confusing with the sheer number of similar products on offer. And it’s just not shopping when I use my local public library service, reserving books online, again I have the option to rate and review my loans. So what we think of our purchases are a vital resource in the online marketplace.

For example, a study by Comscore revealed that online user-generated reviews influence one in four of us when we are purchasing a product or service online (2007). That makes our ratings, our reviews very influential, in fact Williams & Co. add to this saying that:

1. “Research has shown that many people trust other people’s reviews more than they trust expert opinion”

2. “There is a strong relation between positive reviews of a product or service and satisfaction with sales” (2010, p118).

Tagging Stuff

Have you ever tagged something online? No, are you sure?

What about tagging people in one of your pictures on Facebook? Or how about retweeting posts and adding hashtags to entries, on Twitter? If you have done, then, you’ve generated content online.  

We can assign keywords to various content, whether that’s a document on a intranet, a blog, a picture or a video that we’ve uploaded. This started off as a metadata tagging where we could choose a preset word in an online database to describe an item to help it be found again when we search for it. It’s evolved into folksonomy, where we can tag something with our own words which is what we tend to on platforms like Flickr and YouTube (Vander Wal, 2007).

Point is that tagging helps us to find things easier online and in the case of twitter and other social networking sites, it allows us to recycle and reshare content (Huang et al., 2010).

Citizen Science

What is it about the worked ‘citizen’ it just makes me think of worker ants…

Talking of worker ants, the science research sector has successfully tapped into crowdsourcing to help create citizen science. We all get a chance to be scientists finally; putting to use that home lab kit you got as a present from your mum or dad when you were nine. Well, you get to use for something other than blowing up your bedroom …Sorry Mum…  

Anyway back to the topic, ‘Citizen Science’ is about the average person helping with research on a range of scientific subjects. For example, in some companies are using services Innocentive to place scientific challenges to an open audience and awarding a prize fee for the best solutions. We can also contribute by sharing our spare computing power to help create a free online open-source lab for researchers for things like cancer research etc. by downloading World Community Grid Software (Howe, 2006; The Marketer, 2011).

      Citizen Journalism

There’s that ‘citizen’ word again. This time it’s being used by the media. ‘Citizen Journalism’ has become an extremely popular and vital resource in today’s day and age. It lets us report events as they happen. Essentially, citizen journalism involves “a wide range of activities in which everyday people contribute information or commentary about news events” (Educause, 2007).
     

Citizen journalism is used by major news providers like the BBC and CNN, as well as amateur news sites such as Cyber Journalist as well as blogs and video sharing sites. In fact Twitter posts are the main source of information via the Google real-time service (Educause, 2007, Google, N.D.).

Richard Sambrook, a BBC journalist summed up the benefit of citizen journalism in 2009 saying that “when major events occur, the public can offer us as much new information as we are able to broadcast to them. From now on, news coverage is a partnership”

Lets sum up

I’ve told you four ways that I think have helped us all to change the web, its nots a complete list, its not meant to be. In fact UGC and crowdsourcing aren’t the only ways that we are making web better, but like I said in my last digibored post there are two drivers. There are not perfect, in fact they have a few flaws i.e.  citizen journalism has been criticised for accuracy. The stories posted on  the CNN’s citizen journalism site iReport site “are not edited, fact checked or screened before they are posted” Despite their flaws, UGC and crowdsourcing are helping us to improve the web and its us using our ability to create content online that is helping to change the web. 


Hey, if you wanna read more about crowdsourcing, check out 'Here Comes Everybody' by Clay Shirky. A lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University recomended it to me and it really got me into this subject.

Next post -  I'm switching pace and topics with my next digibored post... see you next time!

References

CNN, n.d. CNN iReport. [online] Available at: <http://ireport.cnn.com/> [Accessed 15 February 2011].

COMSCORE, 2007. Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Significant Impact on Offline Purchase Behaviour. [online] Available at: <http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2007/11/Online_Consumer_Reviews_Impact_Offline_Purchasing_Behavior> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

EDUCAUSE, 2007. 7 things you should know about citizen journalism. [online] Educause. Available at: http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7031.pdf [Accessed 23 February 2011].

Google, n.d. See what's new for Realtime Search.[online] Available at:  <http://www.google.com/landing/realtime/> [Accessed 24 February 2011].

HOWE, J., 2006b. The Rise of Crowdsourcing, wired magazine. [online] Available at:  <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html> [Accessed 21 February 2011].

HUANG, J., THORNTON, K.M. and Efthimiadis, E.N., 2010. Conversational Tagging in Twitter, HT’10, pp13–16, [online] Available at: http://jeffhuang.com/Final_TwitterTagging_HT10.pdf [Accessed 1 March 2011].

SAMBROOK, R., 2009. Citizen Journalism and the BBC, [online] Available at: <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reportsitem.aspx?id=100542> [Accessed 25 February 2011].

How all of us are changing the web: Part 1

As a 'digibored' person and an all round slow adopter, the fact that my presence on the web helps to develop it, hasn't completely escaped me. Sure I'm a little late to the party but I’m still contributing to the web by creating user generated content, in fact lots of us are!

Like it or not, we are a hot commodity, there's plenty of organisations and institutions that have clocked the impact users like us have on the web. And they are asking for our help to develop their businesses in a variety of ways.  So this week, I’m going to talk about how all of us are helping to change the web by creating user generated content and how companies are harnessing that change through crowdsourcing.  

Where do i begin?

Let’s start at looking at the web and what we could or couldn't do until recently. When I started surfing I was in the world of Web 1.0 it was a view only web, where information was pushed to users by a small number of content creators/experts. It was like jumping on a bus, where for the most part you let the driver tell you where you were going.  

Then shiny Web 2.0 came along, being driven by us. It’s enabled us to collaborate with one another other and make contributions to it. Services on this web are now our platform, with the likes Blogger, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube encouraging us to create, recreate, mashup and share content. If user contribution and collaboration have made web 2.0 a possibility, User Generated Content and Crowdsourcing can be considered amongst its drivers (O'Reilly, 2005). (I'm not going to mention Web 3.0, I don't think we're there yet, we'll talk about it in another digibored post).

What’s User Generated Content (UGC)?

OECD defines UGC as “content made publicly available over the Internet, which reflects a certain amount of creative effort and which is created outside of professional routines and practices” (2007, p.4).

Clay Shirky (2010) reckons that we are changing the way we spend our free time, replacing passive participation in front of a TV by actively participating, creating content on the Internet. This cultural shift has increased our personal ambitions to express ourselves in a way TV cannot offer. So as a result, we are creating user generated content. Its not a new concept, people have created UGC pre-internet i.e. writing for the Newspaper reader sections and producing programming on public access channels on American cable television.

However on the ‘collaborative’ web, UGC has exploded, helped along by Technological, Social, Economic and Legal factors. Technological developments include faster online access, accessible software tools and an increase in UGC hosting websites have contributed to increase participation i.e. Blogger, YouTube etc. Social attitudes have also changed with the emergence of the ‘digital natives’ who have grown up with the Internet (Shirky, 2010; OECD, 2007).

Lower costs associated with UGC have helped to create new business models i.e. Threadless.com. Flexible approaches to copyright i.e. Creative Common licenses have also allowed easier adaptation and distribution of UGC (Howe, 2008; OECD, 2007).

So what’s crowdsourcing then?

Jeff Howe coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for Wired magazine. He says that’s crowdsourcing “represents the act of a company or institution once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call…” (2006). 

He says that “Crowd-sourcing isn’t synonymous with user-generated content, but it often involves building a business around it” (2008, p.177). In essence, UGC refers to content created by users independently whereas crowdsourcing involves companies persuading the crowd to perform tasks traditionally done by employees.

So this was a look, albeit a brief one at UGC and Crowdsourcing, I’m aware that I’ve thrown a lot of definitions at you. There will be a part two to this blog entry, where I’ll outline four ways UGC and crowdsourcing have enhanced the way that we use the web.

References

HOWE, J., 2006, Crowdsourcing: A Definition. Crowdsourcing, [Blog] Available at:   <http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html> [Accessed 9 October 2011].

HOWE, J., 2008. Crowdsourcing, How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. London: Random House.

OECD, 2007. Participative Web: User-Created Content. [online] OECD. Available at: <http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/57/14/38393115.pdf> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

O'Reilly, T., 2005, What is Web 2.0, [online] O'REILLY.COM. Available at: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html> [Accessed 10 October 2011].

SHIRKY, C., 2010. Cognitive Surplus, Creativity and Genorisity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin.