In plain language, it’s insightful and creative with few assumptions or judgments.

We particularly liked the advice for the police to look at ways to “improve the quality of minor encounters” in order to “dramatically improve their relationships with communities”.

Our work has always been obsessed with the underrated role of small, everyday moments of social interaction in defining our feelings of self worth and belonging.

That the police’s relationship with its community may be prescribed by this level of interaction mirrors the work done around malpractice lawsuits in the US, which concluded that “the interpersonal aspects of care” were the most important motivating factor for lawsuits — rather than the quality of care itself. This level of interaction, like a doctor’s bedside manner or a police officer’s tone and body language, may really be the key battleground for public services.

However, around the process of fostering more cohesive local communities, the report made a common leap.

The Panel’s Neighbourhood Survey found that 61% of people did not agree that theirs was a “close, tight-knit community or that neighbours treated each other with respect”, which the Report rightly links to the low capacity of many communities affected by the riots to intervene informally and earlier in problems like youth disengagement or petty crime.

This pattern of diminishing or shifting levels of social capital, articulated so well by sociologists like Robert Putnam and David Halpern, has always been something we’ve tried to make central to our work, mapping the issues we examine against the strong or weak state of local life that inevitably sits behind them.

But, the report concludes that, to build up this social capital, local services need to give more attention to “creating and publicising opportunities for individuals to make a difference in their own communities”.

We’re much less sure of this.

This idea has always seemed like a “buy one get one free” for government and funders: equip and empower local people to participate in ways that increase community cohesion and deal directly with specific problems in that community. Or, in the words of the Report, helping local people to “better tackle the issues they face and improve cohesion.”

What the report might be missing, as does much of what comes out of Big Society thinking, is that the capacity of communities to collaborate and intervene in local issues is a way of cashing in social capital, not of building it.

Community problems, by their nature, normally bring different groups in an area into opposition: one group wants to build or bring in something that others do not; one group is causing disruption or damage that others resent; one group believes that everyone should do more about something, others believe that everyone should do nothing.

A complex web of strong associational life, high levels of trust, good leaders, impartial brokers and confident councils enables communities to work through these tensions and emerge with solutions that distribute benefits fairly. The reality of many communities in modern Britain is that these webs are often weak or do not exist. There are, of course, many strong local communities (as 39% of respondents to the Neighbourhood Survey attested) and other forms of community, such as online networks, are now stronger than ever, but, in general, people that live near each other know, understand and trust each other less and less.

Working back from this doesn’t have to end up with civic engagement initiatives, as it often does. Important as these platforms and mechanisms can be, no-one wants to engage with issues or progress in their local area if they don’t know, like or care about the people in that area.

Maybe we just need to create more things for local communities to do together and boost, rather than undermine, the things that are already popular and communal?

One of Putnam’s major conclusions in Bowling Alone is the disintegration of communal local entertainment – fun things, done together, regularly and naturally. Social capital flows as collateral from these activities that share space and time enjoyably. In turn, communal capacity to intervene and participate flows as collateral from higher social capital.

The Report’s recommendation that national and local authorities should “develop community involvement strategies, with volunteering at their heart” only seems to promise another layer of contrived opportunities that will rest on top of communities that don’t know or trust each other very well.

As high streets get emptier and TV, home internet and video games get better, creating compelling, regular, inclusive things for communities to do together should replace “citizen-lead community action” at the top of a lot more briefs – however good value for money the latter sounds.

Our UK Internet Buttons, launched last year and developed in partnership with the Nominet Trust, has been used in all sorts of environments to help and equip those offline or “digitally uncomfortable” to get onto and into the Internet. In the UK around 11% of adults never use the Internet and Martha Lane Fox’s Race Online 2012 has done an extraordinary job in bringing the impact of this exclusion to life. For us, the most powerful part of this impact was the link between social isolation and digital exclusion: over 3 million older people in the UK don’t see family or friends even once a week and digital access and literacy can play a major role in this.

Across the rest of Europe, where we are working closely with our partners at Liberty Global, the extent and consequences of digital exclusion are even more profound.

In Poland, 33% of adults have never used the Internet and in Ireland, where we launched this week, its 21%. These are substantial proportions with substantial social effects.

So what’s the best approach?

Public awareness campaigns have a role to play and there are plenty about, all over the EU, but we feel that digital inclusion flows most clearly from the incidental effects of useful, desirable and relevant products and tools.

Internet Buttons, we hope, can play as strong a role across Europe as it has in the UK because it is purely practical, converting interest into sustainable use, often via a trusted intermediary. This goes hand in hand with a series of other practical solutions in the form of cheap, simple broadband and cheap, simple hardware. There aren’t enough of either yet, but progress is being made.

Finally, and equally incidental, the market of online offerings needs to keep on evolving. Firstly, to reduce confusing, messy, over complicated user experiences and interfaces and, secondly, to provide more relevant destinations and communities for more diverse online audiences. To that end, we’re excited to experiment with how a practical tool like Internet Buttons can overlap with Historypin, a project that has proved a unique incentive for older “refuseniks” to come online for the first time.

“Who are you to end a war?” asks Invisible Children’s Director, Jason Russell, of a star struck teenage girl, “Who are you not to?”, was, specifically, the point I got to first time round.

I tried again a few days later, following the crowd.

10 minutes in and I was still convinced that Russell Brand was going to leap on for a verse of African Child at any moment.

But he didn’t and I did get to the end, along with at least a few of the now hundreds of millions of people that started it.

A week and a huge amount of debate later, I’ve ended up being genuinely inspired by the response to the campaign — both in the amount of people that wanted to watch it and the discussion that has followed.

Firstly, the scale of the video’s attention has given millions of people a window into the ability of evil men like Joseph Kony to perpetuate their terrible influence.

We have to stand back and agree that, as Ugandan Prime Minister, Amama Mbadazi has said, the response to the video “has demonstrated the fundamental decency which unites in concern right-minded people throughout the world when we see innocent people suffering.”

Secondly, the debate has cast light on the complexity of politics in this region of Africa and the perhaps even more complex role of Western intervention in these politics.

Overall, we would hope that this success doesn’t reinvigorate an outdated, counter-productive method: use mass public awareness campaigns to make the world feel sorry for Africa as a helpless, hopeless mess.

Despite the articulate criticism contained in articles like Charlie Beckett’s LSE Polis post, many campaign organisations will still want to use ‘Kony 2012’ as more evidence of what happens when you go for the most emotional denominator: vast attention, vast new income and response at a governmental level.

The “unbelievable way in which mobile payment and mobile commerce is going to change the way in which consumer buy things” will be, for most and for some time to come, about maximising profits.

However, this “seismic” activity also marks the arrival a huge opportunity for those looking build positive behavioural prompts and nudges into the consumer experience.

As our initial research and testing is showing, this opportunity is vast but it is not going to be easily realised.

Undoubtedly, there will be a lot of clunky “for good” behavioural solutions to begin with that could only ever appeal to the 1%.

It will be easier, for example, to integrate information about ethical, environmental and healthy consumer choices into the purchasing experience, but putting this information closer at hand won’t suddenly make everyone want to be chastised every time they buy something.

Moreover, additional information integrated into the mobile shopping experience will be overwhelmingly dominated by offers of similar or repeat purchases from advertisers, as it is online. This is going to become competitive new space and information like “the Wotsits you just bought have a carbon footprint of 72g” is going to lose.

So what developments could help us exploit this new area of consumer behaviour?

Online and mobile purchase integration — we’re surely a very small step away from having complete integration of our mobile and online consumer activity which will, eventually, account for most, if not all, of our purchasing. Bringing this information together will allow us to not only better understand and control our spending, day-by-day, which will have major benefits for personal financial planning and debt control, but will also enable prompts and nudges to be based on a full data picture

The relationship between pre-purchase scanning and buying — at the moment, barcode / QR code scanning is used mainly for price comparisons on larger items, but it seems inevitable that as in-store purchasing starts to revolve around our mobiles, pre-purchase scanning will become integrated and ubiquitous, making till point payments considerably more efficient or even unnecessary. Again, this integration will enable us to build in more effective pre-purchases nudges.

Appetite for an informed choice — even if most of us don’t want to be judged, we do often want to avoid being confused when we’re actively looking for information. Product information on packaging is limited, complicated and controlled by the brand. Healthy choices is a prime example and our testing has shown that its almost impossible for consumers to make genuinely informed choices about eating healthily, not least because ‘healthy” means so many different and sometimes mutually excluding things. If we want to be buying food that will not overload our blood sugar levels for example, then purchase-specific, neutrally brokered information on this will be much easier to build in.

Government intervention — with the success of David Halpern’s Behaviour Insight Team, the government should have a good appetite to get involved in new areas like mobile payments and mobile finance more generally. As Halpern says, the government has a valid role in giving people “more information about the consequences of their choices for themselves and others.” To this end, within this new world of mobile payments as in many other commercial spheres, the government has to negotiate and legislate a balance between information that makes us buy more stuff and information that helps us make more personally, socially and environmentally positive choices.

Charlotte Ashton from Radio 4, as part of her series on British social enterprises, asked whether it should be acceptable for social businesses like ours to make large amounts of money and make our Directors very rich on the back of successful social and environmental work.

Essentially, if we’re saving the government substantial amounts of money or enabling new economic growth by reducing ill-health or increasing social capital, for example, should we be due a gold-plated slice of that value?

I said that I hoped that would never be the case and that some things we were too important to make lots of money from.

First, this wasn’t a moral statement or part of some sort of latent anti-capitalism. I don’t object to people making lots of money. I do think the vast gap that has emerged between the top and the bottom earners in countries like the UK is extremely damaging and am a huge advocate of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s work on these effects. But I don’t think that everyone should be living on a kolkhoz or anything like that.

Moreover, it’s not a sweeping statement about the relationship between different types of value and reward in a post Thatcher-Reagan world. Something precious was misunderstood and eroded during that time and perceptions of social value shifted in a strange direction, but much more intelligent people have said many more intelligent things about these broader changes than me. So I’ll leave that to them.

Really, it just relates to the small world of our work at We Are What We Do.

We spend a lot of time with our partners in communities looking at the social issues that affect them. And we also spend time round tables with more partners analysing the behaviours that shape these issues and working on ideas that might make a positive contribution.

As we’re working in these communities and round these tables, being an individual, a team and an organisation that is not there to get rich is absolutely vital. That motivation would drastically undermine our ability to collaborate and co-operate with all those partners on profound social issues.

We have experience of being round tables with some parties there to deliver maximum value for shareholders and others there to deliver maximum social benefits. Whether or not there is a market-based, intellectual argument that these motivations can align, in practice it does not work. It breeds mistrust, imbalance and, vitally, disengagement from a common purpose – to be replaced by a focus on distinct personal or organizational purposes, from all sides.

The motivation of substantial wealth generation has to be removed from these tables for genuine progress to be made when it comes to important social issues.

Not coincidentally, big social issues are also too important for people working on them to be paid too little. Not only does it often mean that you can’t have the best people round that table, because the lifestyle sacrifice is too big, but it also means that money becomes an issue.

For true collaboration around social issues to take place, the influence of money has to be neutralized.

For example, when we bring together groups of good people to work on particular issues – at, say, a day of planning sessions – some we invite well may be happy to be there for free, while others working on the ground in communities may have a day rate of £150 and others may be highly paid consultants on day rates of £2,000 or more.

The only effective way of bringing out the best of this group is to remove any lingering doubts about who is being paid more than others and pay everyone the same – either a standard, reasonable rate or a set of rates with a relatively small ratio between top and bottom.

This applies just as readily to teams of premiership footballers or divisions of stockbrokers, but its more sensitive and consequential around these issues.

There is lots of grey area within all this and what a “reasonable” amount to be paid when working on important social issues is often complex and relative.

But, for me, this is why social business is so exciting.

We have the capacity to take on these challenges and remove the limiting effect of money at either end of the scale: avoiding the suspicion that donors and funders have for anything but very modest salaries in the charity sector and the all encompassing influence of shareholders and profit margins in the private sector. The achievements of both those sectors far outweigh what has come of the very young social enterprise sector thus far, but there is so much potential there.

In the face of objections to corporate employment of free youth labour and demands for restraint on the subtle privatization of the NHS, the current government is at a point where this interaction between social change and profit-making is as tense and relevant as ever. And I hope that this becomes a moment for serious debate around it.

We obviously understand that this kind of list has to be representative, rather than comprehensive, and there have already been plenty more people and organisations added through the surrounding debate on the Guardian site.

Most exciting for us, this is a chance to start some new conversations with other people on the list and, over the next few weeks, we’ll be making a point to reach out to some people like Andy Bradley, Dougald Hine and Michael Acton Smith to talk about where the stuff we’re doing might overlap in interesting ways.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected,” he starts.

Corporate missions, vision statements and moments of philosophy have the habit of melting into one big self-deluding façade.

Enron infamously established amongst its core ideas that: “We treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves…Ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don’t belong here”, which has proved rich material for scriptwriters ever since.

But, there is much more to Zuckerberg and Facebook. It is, in some ways, the ultimate example of incidental social change. It is the most loved and used digital tool ever created and built into it are behaviours that make us more social and connected.

“We hope to rewire the way that people spread and consume information…We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate”, he continues.

But how profound is this stuff?

There is more and more academic work being done on Facebook’s societal impact and that of online social networks more generally, but it’s far from conclusive.

At We Are What We Do, we’re most interested in the behavioural prompts that Facebook has introduced or accentuated, rather than simply mirrored.

Some people do some very good things on Facebook – like collaborate on solar technology or donate lots to charity – and some people do some very bad things – like groom children and bully work colleagues.

But this activity isn’t taking place because of Facebook and Zuckerberg can neither take credit for the good stuff nor be blamed for the bad stuff.  Facebook isn’t a community defined by people doing wonderful things or terrible things. It’s a community defined by people doing ordinary things.

Before Facebook, people shared banal titbits about their lives, gossiped about other people’s titbits and used titbits to chat people up. After Facebook, people will continue to do this – the content of social interaction has not been changed by Facebook.

But the fact that Facebook creates more community and generates considerably more connections around this day-to-day stuff is where its potential to affect society lies. Around this, there are two key questions that are worth more investigation:

Bridging vs bonding social capital

The effect on levels of social capital is at the heart of Facebook’s collateral effect on society. It clearly generates a lot of connections, but of what type and what value? Ellison, Steinfield & Lampe (2007) felt that bridging social capital – the more valuable sort that acts between heterogeneous groups — on Facebook was more prevalent than bonding social capital – between homogenous groups — right through from its initial effect on Harvard’s campus onwards. But their definition of heterogeneous seems a bit ropey. Yes, not everyone at Harvard has the same surname, but its students are unequivocally socially homogenous. Moreover, Facebook’s appeal and growth was founded on exclusive access to social circles. That Facebook networks are dominated by school, college and work friends would suggest that a meaningful effect across social groups – the most valuable – cannot yet be assumed.

Local vs remote connections

There are piles of research into the effect of increased online connections on levels of offline connections. Haythornthwaite and Kendall’s 2010 work, for example, concluded that “online communication always reinforces local relationships and local identities that build networks of interacting individuals who are mutually aware of each other.” But the existence of strong online to offline force seems counter-intuitive when it comes to Facebook as it stands. The site draws you into networks of people you know, regardless of where they live. There are very few forces, overt or latent, that lead you to create new connections with people who live in your neighbourhood but you don’t yet know. This would, undoubtedly, be a very positive force if it did exist.

Ultimately, Facebook has an inherent obligation to defend their users’ privacy and security within the network, but they don’t have an inherent obligation to make more of any of its effect on bridging social capital, local connectedness or any other areas that it could add its considerable weight to.

But, Mark Zuckerberg has done two things to affect our expectations in this area.

Firstly, he has been consistently and, for me, inspiringly, committed to his social mission. This means that neutral incidental effects aren’t good enough.

Secondly, he has wholeheartedly harnessed this collection of 800 million people and 100 billion connections for advertisers. Regardless of his idealistic spin on fostering products that are “personalised and designed around people”, the relationship between users and brands on Facebook is highly advantageous to the latter. Thanks to Facebook, they know more about us than ever before and can exploit this knowledge to integrate themselves into our social networks. This may be a natural step and it has been done very intelligently, but it means that Facebook certainly isn’t a neutral social space, free from external behavioural prompts.

These combine to make the next phase of Facebook fascinating as we watch to see if Mark Zuckerberg can fulfil his commitment to having a genuinely positive effect on society.

Personally, I think he’ll surprise us all. Unlike Bill Gates, who separated his business work from his do-gooding work, I think Zuckerberg will get braver with what Facebook can achieve through its core services.

One of the influences behind this new work has been the opportunity to collaborate with Tom Chatfield, the author of Fun Inc — Why games are the 21st Century’s most serious business, amongst other things. I was at college with Tom (and he is still far, far cleverer than me) and we’ve ended up with the chance to work together ten years after graduating because of the growth of our Historypin project, which is perfectly placed for a whole load of playfulness in its next stages of development.

Beyond this Historypin work (which the Historypin blog will keep you posted on), we’re going to be applying some gaming principles to other social issues that we’re working on.

The first step of this work will be to make sure that we avoid the things that so often go wrong when gaming meets do-gooding and seeking out the right reasons and methods.

On the things to avoid side, you don’t have to look very far and the whole idea of edutainment has something odd at its core.

Firstly, it separates education and entertainment and appoints itself as an innovative meeting place for the two. But when has education ever been good without being entertaining?

Secondly, and mainly as a consequence of the first problem, it presents one activity as fun and the other as boring. So, the logic follows, you can start with some boring ingredients and add a few fun ingredients and end up with something palatable. Unfortunately, what you actually end up with is something clearly pretending to be fun and that children would happily eat their own fingers off to avoid having to “play”. As a result, edutainment crime rates climb every year.

On the flip side, you find the best examples of games with positive social and educational benefits where their creators haven’t separated the two. A lot of the time, they have simply set out to create something engaging, rewarding and intelligent and the incidental educational or socially positive benefits have flowed naturally from this.

Minecraft is a great example. I was introduced to the game by an 11 year old who, by sharing his love of the game, found himself sharing his sophisticated understanding of alloys, compounds and elements, as well as explaining the need for a subtle balance between competition and co-operation. Within formal education, teachers are exploring these features of the game and many more.

Minecraft, and other games like it, can achieve profound, progressive collateral effects on users and society because it is really good and people love it (over 21 million people in fact).

Setting out to create something that is really good and that people love is, as always, where we will start.

We’ve just started working with Sky on some internal leadership events that they run each year and, once again, my budding obsession with the social power of customer service has been given another prod.

Sky has 10 million customers and 6,000 customer service agents.

Sainsbury’s, one of our other close partners, has 20 million customers and 17,000 colleagues working on tills.

Between just two companies, that’s billions of social interactions between customers and employees every year.

Both of these big, successful brands understand the value of these interactions for almost everything that defines their business – sales, customer loyalty, customer satisfaction and many more – and both have been investing more and more in training every year.

But how else could we harness the power of this vast (and growing) mountain of daily human contact and build some social change into customer service?

We’re going to start looking more closely at this and these are some of the things that might get us thinking…

- There are 1.2 million “socially excluded” older people in the UK, who are vulnerable to depression and isolation

- More than 1 in 10 Britons feel lonely “often”

- Helplines like The Samaritans, Childline or Citizens Advice Bureau always need more experienced, patient people on the end of their phones

- The last conversation someone has defines the mood of the next conversation

- The theory of Consequential Strangers and the important role of “weak” social ties and interactions

- My gran, who has a floor covered in ongoing correspondence with customer service departments and only really cares whether or not they’re nice to her (the £3.50 she recently got refunded from Npower gave her no real satisfaction — “the lady was on the telephone very curt”)

Less easy to tune out of is the barrage of fundraising appeals for Africa and this year they seem to be more shocking, emotive and forceful than ever before.

There’s no doubt that life for millions of Africans is very hard or very short. Around 300 million Africans live in poverty and the 28 bottom nations in the United Nations’ Human Development Report 2011 are all African. One in eight children in Sub-Saharan Africa die before their fifth birthday.

There’s also no doubt that the work of organisations like Save the Children in Africa is intelligent and often extraordinary, mixing short-term relief of disasters like the current East African famine, with longer term solutions, lead by local people.

But are their TV appeals intelligent?

They are certainly a desperate response to desperate levels of suffering and is motivated by a passionate belief that we have to do everything we can to relieve this suffering.

But they aren’t intelligent, they’re simplistic. This bombardment of Christmas appeals from organisations like Save the Children, WaterAid and ActionAid — the vast majority of which is not connected to specific disaster relief — presents Africa as a permanently starving, disease ridden continent that needs our help to survive.

During some recent work we did in schools in East London, we talked to 100s of children about how they saw charity and particular causes. When asked about what they saw when they looked at Africa, every response, exclusively, reported visions of poverty, suffering, disease and famine. The odd reference to members of Girls Aloud or Chris Moyles cradling dying African babies was in there too.

Do we get to move on from this destructive, misleading vision of Africa soon?

The real African story has evolved and continues to. The Guardian’s recent report on Africa’s growing middle-class helped tell this story as did The Economists’ “The Hopeful Continent” feature.

The collateral effect of the endless wall of images of helpless Africans, from charity brands that has our trust and respect, is the popular perception that Africa is a place that we give to and feel sorry for, not buy from and invest in. Every economist (and probably most people at organisations like Save the Children) will tell you that it is balanced, well distributed economic growth, not charity, that will lift hundreds of millions more African’s out of poverty and into the middle-classes.

There is always vital work to do to relieve the suffering that disasters bring, all around the world, but this work doesn’t need to come with one sided social marketing that has such damaging, long-term side effects.

Sally Richards is the mother of Jackson West, a young, Canberra-based entrepreneur with a disability, and I was lucky enough to have her as part a group of around 200 people at the We Are What We Do workshop organised by Disability ACT and BLITS last week in the Australian capital.

This audience are all involved in working for better inclusion of people with disability and were made up of campaigners, carers, practioners, teachers and some (very impressive) students.

Cause and effect within this inclusion work is complex and subtle, which made some of the ideas we’ve been working on very relevant – much more so than I realised when I was first offered the chance to run the workshops.

We spent a lot of the sessions discussing what forces within culture and society are incidentally inclusive for people with disability and which are incidentally detrimental to this inclusion.

An example that fell on both sides of the debate was the Paralympic Games, soon to be appearing in London just after the Olympic Games next year. This timing, as well as a series of other issues, were at the heart of the discussion about the Games’ overall effect, which, oddly enough, was elaborated upon by The Guardian just after our sessions, following research carried out by Scope which found that 42% of disabled people did not believe the Paralympics had a positive impact on public perceptions of disability.

Before this, Sally wrote to me with some thoughts which, we felt, couldn’t have summed up the debate, or our work, better.

This month, we’ve launched the draft of our new approach paper – The Incidental Effect — which aims to start some conversations about new ways of changing the everyday behaviour of millions of people.

These new methods lean less on messaging and more on the power of products, tools and services to contain new behaviours, incidental to their inherent usefulness, desirability and credibility.

This blog will be where we’ll have those conversations and over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be offering up potential evidence and potential flaws (more of the former, admittedly) and we’ll look forward to hearing what you think.