"As disengagement and dissatisfaction with the public realm has spread, so the emphasis on reconnecting people with public institutions has naturally grown.

As a result, heavy scrutiny has fallen on the ability of politicians and public services to deliver. But people will not be satisfied by what the public realm has to offer until they themselves become more active in shaping it.

While services are increasingly focussed on the problems they must solve, community organisations start with people. They are able to create ‘communities of participation’ which bring the public realm to life, helping people to play a greater role within it.

As civic intermediaries, community organisations forge connections to the public realm that are meaningful to individuals and generate the hope and optimism that animates whole communities. In the process, these organisations are identifying the ingredients of a potent recipe for active citizenship. And the secret of this recipe is something politicians are increasingly desperate to discover.

This study, commissioned by the Big Lottery Fund, proposes a number of measures which would enable funding bodies to develop their roles as pro-active supporters of community organisations. From match-funding local people’s efforts to raise money, to unlocking the knowledge of local professionals, we argue that lottery funders can build on their growing capacity to experiment and learn.Start With People also raises a wider set of questions about the environment in which community organisations operate.

It suggests that greater value needs to be created from popular participation in public services and democratic institutions, by enabling community organisations to play a stronger role in local decision-making."

Notable mainly because my entrepreneurial co-author, Paul Miller, has taken the kernel of one of our ideas and turned it into the soon-to-be world dominating tech start-up www.schoolofeverything.com, this pamphlet explored the conflicting pressure on organisational leaders, torn between a workforce that yearns for more autonomy and an external environment that seems to demand more control.

The downturn will no doubt suppress this conflict for a while, as those still in jobs focus solely on hanging on to them. But in the longer-term, I think the conflict we describe will remain a key issue, especially in customer-facing businesses.

"Changing expectations of working life have created a new tension at the heart of organisational strategy. Employees want more human organisations with greater autonomy and flexibility. They want an experience of work that fits with their values. They want a greater say in the future of the organisations they work for. In short, they want organisations to ‘disorganise’.

At the same time, organisations are facing external pressures. Competition shows no sign of waning, new demands for accountability and growing concern about security are all forcing organisations to take greater control, ‘hyper-organising’ to cut costs or guard against potential failure.

So far there are only case studies of organisations experimenting with ‘disorganisation’. While these ‘case study companies’ may represent a relatively small part of the corporate sector, they can be seen as surface manifestations of an underlying desire for employees to feel just a bit less organised.

This report looks at how organisations can manage the desire among employees for a greater sense of ‘disorganisation’ in an ever more competitive and complex environment.

Based on new data from polling of employees and business decision makers, Disorganisation argues that to stay organised in the deep sense of engaging their employees in a shared project, organisations may have to disorganise to allow people more freedom to express their personal values and individual identity."

Networks are the most important organisational form of our time, but are often mis-managed and misunderstood. In this collection of essays, leading thinkers including Manuel Castells, Fritjof Capra, Howard Rheingold and Geoff Mulgan show how we can unlock their full potential.

From the Internet to Al Qaeda, the teetering electricity grid to old school ties, we live in a world of networks. A profoundly disruptive shift has occurred in our societies, making networks the most important organisational form of our time and reshaping the activities of families, governments and businesses.

Our public response to these changes has so far been partial and fragmented. Although social, political and technological networks hold our modern world together, we lack the language to apply them to solving our common problems.

But if we can learn more accurately to understand the patterns and impacts of networks, we can begin to tap their full potential for organisation and decision-making, and to make possible new forms of coordination and collective action.

In this collection of essays, Demos seeks to address that challenge. Drawing on some of the world's leading thinkers on networks across a range of disciplines, we seek to distil the most important lessons from the study of networks and address some of the critical questions that our 'network society' presents: from the distribution of power and inequality to the future of civic participation and the impact of new technologies.

Embracing this network logic will help us to change not just our tools of intervention, but our ways of seeing the world.

Written five years before the global financial crisis, this pamphlet now seems both prescient and shockingly naive. It rightly anticipated that complexity and the unduly narrow focus of regulatory regimes were storing up trouble for the future. But its prescriptions, which emphasise 'regulated self-regulation' and trust-building, now seem more than a little optimistic.

"Growing complexity means that a new model of regulation will be needed in the years to come.

Regulation in the post-privatisation era has been described as ‘holding the fort until the competition arrives’. Regulators have tried to encourage new market entrants while preventing dominant players from exploiting their position.

As a result, regulation is often seen as a polarised battle between companies acting in their shareholders’ interests and regulators acting on behalf of the consumer. But what about the public interest?

In most regulated sectors such as utilities or financial services, companies are not just delivering a product. They are providing financial security in old age, warmth for our homes or a sustainable environment for our children.

These multiple objectives are hard to balance and therefore cannot easily be reduced to an economic calculation. That’s why regulation is now increasingly regarded as an issue about public value, not just economic value.

But because public value is hard to quantify, regulatory regimes have tended to focus on things they can quantify – such as price. Increasingly complicated regulatory regimes are emerging as a new rules are created to solve existing problems.

This reduces trust between regulators and regulated companies, who may be encouraged to indulge in ‘creative compliance’ – obeying the letter rather than the spirit of the law.

This report argues that rather than playing cat-and-mouse, regulators and regulated companies could be encouraged to be play ‘the long game’, where trust develops and opportunities to create public value are encouraged.

‘Regulation has achieved a fundamental transformation of Britain’s economic landscape, but its continued success depends on regulators having the courage to embrace new relationships with firms, and identify approaches that will allow these relationships to flourish.’"

This pamphlet, which generated more media coverage than all the others put together, took a fresh look at a familiar challenge: a rapidly ageing population as the baby boom generation reach later life. It urged policy-makers to look beyond the sheer numbers to the cultural traits and characteristics that will make this generation of older people unlike any other.

We live in a rapidly ageing society as the large post-war baby boomer generation reaches retirement age. This report explores the challenges the retirement of the baby boomer generation will present to our society and begins to develop a long-term strategy for the ageing society.

We live in a rapidly ageing society, as life expectancy increases whilst birth rates stabilise or decline. By 2007, the number of Britons aged over 65 will exceed the number of those aged under 16 for the first time.

The public debate about this demographic revolution has mainly focused on the impact an increasingly old population will have on the future of pension provisions and the potentially negative impact for welfare and care services.

However, what has largely been ignored is that, in connection with this demographic revolution, we will also experience radical attitudinal changes, as the large post-war baby boomer generation reaches retirement age within the next twenty years. The baby boomers, having throughout their lives been at the forefront of radical attitudinal and social change, are different to current generations of older people and will redefine the meaning of retirement.

In order to understand the implications and consequences of the baby boomers' retirement and to make the transformation a positive experience for all, we need to understand the baby boomers, their attitudes and values.

'The New Old' is an agenda setting report presenting the initial findings of a joint project between Demos and Age Concern. The report explores the challenges the retirement of the baby boomers will present to society and begins to develop a long-term strategy for an ageing society.

My very first pamphlet for Demos argued that the A-level assessment and qualifications framework was failing students, and called for a better balance between assessment for learning and assessment of learning.

“Qualifications should qualify you for something - and that something should be further learning."

From this simple idea flows an incisive analysis of our educational assessment system which is showing obvious signs of strain. The A-level crisis in over the summer of 2003 was an early warning signal from a system under intense pressure.

The time has come to ditch our ‘dogmatic commitment’ to the A-level gold standard, and with it the high stakes approach to school assessment which produces exam stress for all involved.

As this report explains, the pressure on educational assessment stems from the multiple demands placed on the system. But attempts to make the assessment system more reliable in the wake of the A-level crisis may have the unintended effect of reducing the validity of test results.

The increasing demands for assessment information range from the government trying to measure overall school performance to parents trying to decide where to send their children.

Notable ‘free riders’ on the assessment system are universities which rely almost entirely on A levels to manage their admissions.

The powerful and often competing demands of these customers for assessment information have reduced the ability of the system to fulfil its primary purpose: assessing students’ learning.

By starting over from this first principle, the author argues for a very different kind of educational assessment system. The amount of external testing would be dramatically reduced, with teachers and even students directly involved in devising and administering assessment.

Testing-on-demand and individual learning pathways would help to create an assessment system which is adaptable enough to equip every student for a lifetime of learning.