The inter-university Third Sector Research Centre has produced a paper on ‘Mapping the Big Society’. The paper reviews some key elements of the quantitative work that the Centre is doing.

• Firstly, it considers the question of the geographical distribution of third sector organisations, focusing specifically on organisations which say they operate at the “neighbourhood” scale.
• Secondly, there is a summary of a work in progress on the idea of a “civic core”. Rather than focusing on headline rates of participation (e.g. in volunteering) this work attempts to quantify the relative contribution being made by different groups of the population to the total amount of effort given across three dimensions of pro-social behaviour (donation of money to charity, hours of unpaid help, and numbers of associations of which people are members).
• Thirdly, there is an analysis of the exposure of third sector organisations to public funding streams.

The paper concludes by considering likely developments which will impinge on our capacities to measure the Big Society.