Some excellent thoughts from Headshift on the new white paper ‘Our Health, Our Care, Our Say: A New Direction for Community Services’ by Stuart Hall and Lee Bryant.

I think that this is a superb article. Truly stimulating stuff. I agree wholeheartedly that social technology provides the means by which social networks create the architecture of participation.

The other night as part of the white paper webchat with No. 10 Downing Street I posed a question as to how long it might be before we see policy authored collaboratively using a social technology such as wiki.

I am still struck by the cultural resistance many social networks I support show in colloaborating, especially when it comes to using social technology to support the collaboration. As I suggest in my own polemic on the debate surrounding the white paper perhaps this has a lot to do with the need to build trust. From my experience there’s no point hanging around for a sufficient level of trust to be established before collaboration can begin. Sometimes it’s best to get started on some action without fully developing trust. Chipping away delivering small changes and celebrating these achievements however small can form the motivational basis for more ambitious collaboration. As you say Patient Opinion is only the beginning.