Designing for Civil Society

Network to explore "civic function of news"

Stephen Coleman, Professor of Political Communication and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Citizenship, is launching an RSA Journalism Network over on the RSA Networks site.

The public’s declining trust in the news media is a worrying trend. The RSA and the Reuters Institute of Journalism are looking at how we can support the civic function of news. We’re particularly interested in how professional journalists and Fellows relate to the public’s ideas about news and what it is for.

Great topic - and maybe this network could provide an opportunity, among other things,  to explore what the BBC plans are in this field. As I quoted in that post, Stephen has said:

The BBC is dropping/has dropped the Action Network. It plans to do a number of other exciting things along these lines in the coming months. The Action network (previously iCan) was always meant to be an experiment. The BBC is right to learn from experiments and change course if that's what seems right.

As well as his position at Leeds University, Stephen is Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute, which maybe explains the connection.
The timing of the project is right, with growing interest in the shifting role of journalists, as citizens produce content for themselves. Charlie Beckett explored that in Networked Journalism: For the people and with the people. More in posts cited below.
I do, however, hope that Stephen makes a commitment to bring the network out from behind the RSA Networks login, as we did with The Membership Project once it had some initial RSA support and interest from Fellows (members). The RSA is running a terrific series of public lectures, free and open to anyone - why not follow the same approach online? I can't see how it is possible to have a useful discussion about media and citizenship in an old-style walled garden. You can link out - but people outside are then forced to come to "your place" to join in. This seems particularly inappropriate on this topic, where issues are so interesting precisely because the Internet has created a public commons.
I've argued the open approach and the case for distributed communities in the RSA, though I  can also see the case for private spaces for member-to-member discussions. In this instance I think that Stephen Coleman, the RSA and the Reuters Institute will provide more public benefit by sharing the conversation with everyone. Journalists would agree - wouldn't they?
Previously on Stephen Coleman, the BBC, and open-closed:

• BBC leads us behind the scenes on new media, if not news
• BBC plans to sustain citizenship and civil society. Please tell us how.
• TV voting scandals and poor e-democracy both destroy trust
• Do communities need boundaries?

Re-inventing your online business in public

This is the story of how you can move from a "build it and they (may not) come" approach to online places, to helping people create the places they really want to be on the Net. It involves re-inventing a business in public.
The other day I picked up an invitation to join the "Facebook for the cultural sector" issued by English Heritage, followed by one to UnLtdWorld, "a social networking platform that aims to empower and connect socially-minded individuals." This followed on news of MyCharityPage promoted as "Facebook for UK nonprofits". There was clearly a round of excitement among public agencies and funders a year or so back that is now leading to the roll-out of various places where, the promoters hope, we will gather and befriend each other, develop innovative projects, download resources, share services and so on. That's provided we aren't too busy on the real Facebook, on our blogs, or in a host of other online spaces.
It's not really fair to review the English Heritage Our Place, or UnltdWorld in detail yet, because they are still recruiting users and improving functions.
Still less My Charity Page.com, which says it "is an advanced social networking website with a unique combination of functionality for fundraisers and charities, maximising your fundraising potential at no cost to the charity or fundraiser". Ummm ... no it's not, it is a holding page where you can drop a comment. Maybe it will become a Change.org ... but not for a bit.
What interests me is that these sites still have the flavour of "build it and they will come", which didn't work a decade ago when new sites were more of a novelty. Just adding more functions won't attract experienced online users - because they are very critical and busy elsewhere - or the less experienced because weaning people off email and basic browsing is difficult if there isn't a compelling attraction. If there is a login to negotiate it is even more difficult.
These new sites may succeed if they have really good hosting and facilitation to build their community, linked to events and other activities. Maybe English Heritage and Unltd will be able to do that - if they have money in the budget to pay for the necessary staff. I-genius, which I didn't much care for when it launched, is still going with a fair strip of endorsing logos ... but then they have the attraction of a world summit for social entrepreneurs in Thailand in March.
If these sites do succeed, fine - provided they enable users to join up with what's happening elsewhere by bringing content in and out through feeds. As I argued in Do communities need boundaries? - drawing on Ed Mitchell's analysis of different types of online communities - it isn't helpful to build "walled gardens" on the Net while promoting the virtues of collaboration and innovation. I'm hugely encouraged by endorsement from knowledge management specialist Patrick Lambe who says that Enterprise 2.0 should be leaky.
There is another way, and my friends over at Ruralnetonline are demonstrating that you can both build your online offering with your users - rather than invite them in after the event - and also get away from the one-stop-shop approach aimed at a particular interest group.
For nearly 10 years Ruralnet has been running an online system linked to their work on rural community development and social enterprise. It has some core services, orginally run on FirstClass, with a facility to customise for different organisations or networks, but has been very much "come to our place". Over the past couple of years they have been experimenting with Web 2.0 tools, and moving some services across. Just before Christmas chief executive Simon Berry sought agreement from his colleagues to relaunch everything on their 10th anniversary in March.
What!!??? How do you do that and hope to get it right? Well, don't hope to get it right yourself - invite your customers in to help you re-invent your business. Make them co-creators instead of just "users".
Simon's colleague Paul Henderson is leading the way by creating a multi-user blog site where anyone can sign up and comment on proposals or add their own ideas for next generation services. (I declare a strong interest since I've know the Ruralnet team for 10 years, and I'll be running a face-to-face workshop next week to work through ideas with a focus group).
There are couple of factors that give Simon and his team confidence that they can do things this way. The first is that Ruralnet|UK is not just an online outfit: they do events, training, consultancy, and partnership projects which means they have strong relationships with lots of individuals, organisations and agencies . The second is that experience of the Open Innovation Exchange process we went through last year - creating a £1.2 million bid to Cabinet Office in public - revealed how energising openness can be. I've just done a short case study here on what we are calling our most successful failure of 2007. Successful because although we didn't win the bid, we got shortlisted and are convinced it is possible to do things differently.
As well as reinventing everything in public, the Ruralnetonline have shifted their business model from "come to our place" to one in which people can pick and mix which of their services they want. The forerunner of this has been an Experts Online widget that you'll find on sites campaigning to save post offices on the one hand, and also on one helping arts charities with governance issues.
I could go on ... but much better if you pop across to Ruralnetonline and let them know if your think it is possible a new online business this way. If you have something to add, I'm sure they'll aim to make their place your place too. Or the reverse ... it doesn't matter these days.
As I've written before (archived here), the RSA is also inventing a new online place for Fellows and collaborators, and on February 15 developers Saul Albert and Andy Gibson will be taking us through second stage development and discussion issues of how open or closed the system should be, among other things. They've done a great job in prototyping, and I think opinion is swinging towards open. The next challenge will be integrating the RSA Networks site into the main RSA site, and deciding what goes within the Fellows-only login. The question of how membership organisations deal with these tough issues will be explored in our re-inventing membership project. I hope some will be prepared to follow the leads offered by RSA and Ruralnet|UK and open-up to the people who know best what they need - their customers/users/members.

Technorati Tags: innovation, membership, online communities, nptech, nptechuk

Do communities need boundaries?

As I've mentioned before, the RSA is developing a site where its 27,000 members can work with each other on civic innovation projects, which comes down to Doing Good Things from tackling climate change to supporting prison learning, or encouraging greater participation in the arts. It's something the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce has been fostering for over 250 years and chief executive Matthew Taylor is determined to give these endeavours a big push using social media, collaborative working, development of collective intelligence and other fashionably 21st century approaches. It's pretty challenging.

One of the issues this raises is whether to do the traditional organisational thing and put these online activities behind a members-only login, or risk giving away some goodies (and exposing your work to worldwide attention) by joining other people on the Net. I think civic innovation can only work outside the login, because of the collaborations needed. On the other hand, if you are focussed on selling membership services a walled garden approach may be appropriate. Or you can have a mix of open-closed, public-private.

I was rehearsing these arguments with another RSA member the other day and she maintained quite strongly that while she saw the point I was making about collaborations, these depended on the development of shared understanding and trust. This could best take place within a community, and communities need some boundaries. That community might be an organisation, or people with a set of shared interests.

A few years back I might have agreed, but since then I've been blogging a lot, joining social networks, and have ended up with a lot of online relationships around issues of engagement, facilitation, organisational development and social media. From the work fellow bloggers put up in public, the conversations we have, and the endorsement of other people that I trust, I've got to the point where I would happily not only ask some of these new friends for their advice but also do a project together. It has already happened quite a bit.

If I walk into the bar of the RSA I know the other people are members or their guests ... but I don't know whether they would welcome me striking up a conversation, and whether they may turn out to be stimulating company or a bit of a bore. If I follow someone blogging I get a sense of their interests and values, not only from their own content but the comments of other people online that I may know. I feel more sense of community with my blogging friends than I do most RSA members because the possibility of relationship is more visible.

OK, I know here's nothing like a good face-to-face conversation to get to know someone, and the best connections come from a mix of online-offline, phone, texting and so-one. The RSA is exploring that mix and last year ran a terrific one-day open space event to kick the whole process off.

However, there is a danger that if you don't spend much time online and experience the potential of online networking, you may jump to a traditional bounded community solution and - perhaps as director of an organisation - instruct your web developers to put all the good stuff behind a login. You end up inluencing the open or closed, sharing or not sharing culture of your organisation by the architecture of your technology, probably without realising what you are doing. I hope Matthew Taylor doesn't do that; discussions are still under way.

What's needed, in my view, is a better way of understanding what it is to be an individual or organisation in many different places, using a mix of different media appropriate to the situation, and forming relationships that may be short-term of long-term. Belonging is becoming a rather complex business ... and so is community ... and so is membership. It's no longer one place, it is distributed.

Fortunately my friend Ed Mitchell is a not only a great online and workshop facilitator, he also spends the time needed to think all this through at both practical and theoretical level. He shares it on his blog, and recently wrote a couple of terrific posts on the issues. He's dealt with both three types of community - centralised, de-centralise and distributed - and also the challenges of facilitating them. He writes:

  With the advent of blogs and other personal tools, people don’t need to converge in centralised communities owned and maintained by publishers or associations or other bodies; they can build their own. Likewise, Social networking, focused around the individual rather than the community, has taken off and given individuals far more control over their public/private divide (although most social networking sites are still ‘walled gardens’).  

Also, there has been a cultural move away from identifying oneself as part of a ‘community’ - it’s all about networks and enlightened self-interest at the moment. This will swing back in a while; a middle ground will be found once the community spaces have made their boundaries more porous and learnt to allow a bit more individualism, third party applications, and more gaming/social networking practices in.

I really urge you to read both posts, and watch out for more on this from Ed. I'm looking forward to working together on our project about Re-inventing membership.

Previously

Who will decide on "open" - and how? - on the OpenRSA blog

2008, here we come. Where next for RSA networks by Sophia Paker

Other posts about RSA

innovation, membership

Re-inventing membership online and off

I'm going to spend some time this year on why we join-in activities, join-up with other people - and whether doing this online will drive big changes in civic institutions. If you've got hundreds of friends in Facebook, and plenty of other ways to learn, socialise and work online, what extra benefits do membership subscriptions bring you? There will of course continue be some benefits - but I suspect that  they will need to be rethought if organisations wish to retain online members.
I started thinking about this a while back, writing:

It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.

Last year Matthew Taylor's ambitious vision to transform the 250-year-old RSA (membership 27,000) opened up a live test-bed for these issues: past posts archived here. At the core of Matthew's plan is an online platform, RSA Networks, that could help re-mix the best of traditional membership benefits with opportunities for RSA members, known as Fellows, to collaborate online.
Fellow Fellow (couldn't resist that) Simon Berry and I are using the platform to propose a wider exploration of the future of membership:

Membership organisations and associations are fundamental to civic life - but may be bypassed as online social networking grows. This project will invite organisations - and anyone interested - to join with RSA Networks to explore practical ways to meet the challenge.

You can register on the site to see more details and discussion, and see it here on the OpenRSA wiki.
We have been joined enthusiastically by our friends on the NCVO Third Sector Foresight team, Megan Griffith and Karl Wilding, and will get together with them and RSA staff in a couple of weeks. After that we'll organise an open meeting for anyone interested, and an open site. Meanwhile Megan offers their perspective on the 3s4 site, with reminders of previous investigations on their ICT Foresight report and recent seminar. Megan writes:

Here are some initial ideas we've thrown into the mix:
* Membership has been commodified – by which we mean that membership is increasingly viewed as a good or service that we buy and dispose of, rather than as a commitment. Have membership organisations been complicit in this, trying to buy members off with an increasing array of (useless?) discounts?
* 'Direct-debit citizenship' - the flip-side of this commodification is what has been described as 'direct-debit citizenship'; the idea that you can discharge your responsibilities as a citizen by paying £10 a month.
* The ease of online networking – aspects of membership that are based around mutualism, shared knowledge and friendship, have unsurprisingly migrated online.

Over on the RSA Networks site, Michael Ward has offered a simple yet compelling way to think about people's attitudes, which I used to categorise
a list of activities and services, started by Simon:

1. People who are members for what they can get out of it for themselves
* discounted/special products and services
* special events/places
* personal learning
* kudos from membership

2. People who share benefits equally with other members
* collaborative learning
* collaborative projects
* improved social/network capital (we not just me)

3. People who wish only to benefit others
* volunteering
* supporting campaigns

Under 1, we could put a lot of clubs and professional associations. I think Matthew Taylor hopes that RSA will develop under 2. Category 3 includes a lot of cause-related organisations.
As part our "re-inventing member" project I expect that we will be developing this classification further, and then looking where, and in what ways, operating online will make a difference.
If you are interested, do drop in a comment here or on the RSA site. However, don't expect a rapid response, because I'm on holiday in North Cornwall without a landline, where even a phone call involves driving to the top of the hill. Makes you appreciate the value of your neighbours.

Update:
Andy Gibson, who is one of the developers working on the RSA Networks project, has added his thoughts on reinventing membership, including a list of the possible reasons for paying to join an organisation

1. Access to resources: although information is infinitely replicable, access to physical resources is just as restricted as ever. Organisations offering access to physical space, or to events and services offered within physical space, this scarcity of availability can justify the membership fee. In other words, if only a few can get in, it’s often worth paying to be one of the few.
2. Personal prestige: if membership is awarded on some basis of exclusivity or personal merit, then becoming a member can act like a personal brand, a short-hand way of evidencing your quality. Rather like a qualification, but without all the hard work. As it becomes easier to meet new people, discriminating between them becomes more important - so this sort of membership may be a growth area in the future.
3. Formalising the relationships: you get what you pay for, they say, and so if you really need certain levels of interaction with people in your networks, sometimes it’s worth paying for someone to organise them. Organisations that can provide a solid programme of activities, opportunities, ideas and connections can charge for the work they do, and in many cases this can provide excellent value for money.
4. Pledge support for a cause: this for me is the most interesting one. As my friend Paul Youlten says of social networks, “what’s in it for me, and what of me is in it?” Increasingly we seem to be paying money to support the organisations which we’ve already joined. “Members” and “supporters”, at least for charitable societies like the RSA, are becoming more and more blurred. So perhaps membership organisations can increase their value by becoming more open?

Andy says he is considering an invitation from the RSA to become a Fellow.

Update 2
Our partners RSA and NCVO are providing some funding for us to develop an open process to design the project, and pitch for more investment. More soon on that. This is going to be a good one!

Technorati Tags: membership

Online communities may help democratise your organisation

Once members of an organisation have the means to talk to each other all the time - instead of at occasionally meeting -  they can organise to change the way things are run. I always hoped that would be the democratic result of online communities - now my friend Ed Mitchell provides some real evidence of the possibilities.
Ed's been working over the past year or so with CILIP, the Chartered  Institute of Library and Information Professionals, to develop online communities for sharing professional practice in a fast-changing world. I gather that's worked well, thanks to the strong commitment of Lyndsey Rees-Jones of the Membership Services Unit, and other staff. Earlier this week Ed and Lyndsey told the story of how member engagement also started to impact on the governance of the organisation. You can see their slides from Online Information on slideshare and here.

| View | Upload your own

Ed expands  on the presentation in his blog post about the Membership engagement story.

There wasn’t a communities team when we started, nor processes to ensure that issues arising from the communities were handled professionally and promptly and fairly. This was an important element of our work:
How to ensure that when issues come up in the communities, the members can get the influence and support from HQ they need when they need it?
This is a strategic management question which we think is on many organisations’ horizons. Since talking about this project publicly, we have found that there are very few ‘community’ teams in HQs which are pragmatically integrated into the membership communities, so we wanted to share our findings to help others.

The CILIP Membership Services Unit, addressed this issue, and started work closely online with members. Here's what happened:

This presentation tells a simple story about how the CILIP members chose to use one of the private membership forums as a ‘virtual hustings’ in advance of their council elections, and how they managed to get support from HQ when they needed it.
The website has an election page and the individuals’ manifestos, but no space to converse with the hopefuls and to kick the ideas around, so the members set up a thread in the forums, which proved to be exceptionally popular. It gave everyone a transparent opportunity to discuss their ideas and hopes for CILIP in 2008 which had not been there before.
The members agreed that they wanted to promote the elections as much as possible and identified all the channels of communication available to them (from their own blogs to the formal CILIP communications). They felt that the CILIP website itself wasn’t promoting the elections enough and pointed this out among themselves. Within one day, the web editing team in HQ had put a banner together and placed it right in the middle of the homepage.
This doesn’t sound like a revolution, but it was the first time that the members influenced the management and got space on the homepage under their own steam.
Most organisations’ homepages are tightly controlled spaces with rather formal processes for booking space on them; otherwise there would be great tension between departments seeking the all hallowed homepage slot. CILIP is no different.
The thing to note is that these processes reflect the needs of HQ, so the members getting a say in what goes on the homepage is really quite exciting.
This was enabled because of having a communities team in HQ who were aware of what was going on in the communities and who were actively influential in HQ and who could therefore advocate for the members where suitable.

CILIP appear to be particularly open to sharing their experience with other organisations, and Ed reports that they have agreed to publish the lessons learnt document next year - previously only available to members.
Meanwhile discussion about member engagement continues at RSA, where Matthew Taylor is committed to putting the 27,000 members (known as Fellows) at the heart of the organisation. (Previous posts archived here).
After a very successful event for 250 Fellows a couple of weeks ago, project ideas are being developed by Fellows on a prototype RSA Networks online system. I've raised issues on the OpenRSA blog about how ideas about co-creation with Fellows, presented at the event, will be put into practice, and I'm hopeful we'll get some encouraging news shortly.
The shift from hierarchical to more networky structures in organisations is really difficult, and I've great admiration for the way both CILIP and RSA are tackling this. As I wrote last year, if membership organisations don't face up to the issues they could be by-passed as members do their own networking elsewhere.
For a US view of the issues see Six principles for designing an architecture of participation at the excellent We have Always Done it That Way blog. UK references on the challenges facing membership organisations most welcome. The NCVO Third Sector Foresight team have been doing some great work on the impact of technology on nonprofits, with a recent seminar reported here by Paul Henderson, but need another round of funding to keep this work going. Maybe CILIP or RSA could co-host an event with NCVO to share experience to date, and gain support for further investigation.

Technorati Tags: membership, rsa, rsanetworks

RSA launches re-invention, gracefully

If you are interested in the process of re-inventing the 250-year-old RSA,  which is being led by Matthew Taylor, do take a look at the OpenRSA blog where I've posted videos from the Networks event last week.

Some 250 members (Fellows) spent a day in Open Space sessions facilitated by Sean Blair, and in that time came up with scores of projects for the planned civic innovation network that is Matthew's vision for the future.
I thought that the whole thing went extraordinarily well. It had been planned for months by Susan Butler and other staff, and project ideas will now be taken forward by Fellows assisted by network facilitators. There's an online system developed by Saul Albert and Andy Gibson where Fellows can propose projects, discuss, and organise meetings. As you'll see here, Saul and Andy put a lot of effort into prototyping.

There's a lot of issues to be resolved, including how far the online system is open or Fellows-only, (for now registration is open) and how far Fellows will self-organise to move things forward. As Charles Leadbetter reminded us in an opening presentation, there's a lot of social structure needed for effective mass collaboration ... but dealing with those challenges is all part of the collaborative re-invention process, which is funded by NESTA as part of their Connect programme.

It wasn't all serious. As Mick Fealty reports on the official RSA Networks blog:

The plenary last night in the Great Hall was abuzz from start to finish, but last word goes to Angus Stewart who noted that it had been a great day and that everyone was polite and pleasant. "But the one thing that's missing is any disgraceful behaviour. There seems to be an assumption that this place has always been a mausoleum, but when I joined as a young man in the early sixties, it was full of life with politicians and other public figures running about the place. They were people who had been through the war and they knew the value of their own life, and they weren't afraid to say what they meant."

At which point we removed to the vaults for a drink, and some practice.  Well, maybe next time. It was a long day.
If you want to join in, here's where to go. If you are just interested in how an old-style membership organisation can use a mix of face-to-face and online social networking tools to re-invent themselves, we will offer a window through OpenRSA blog and wiki. Personally I reckon it is worth a £140 membership fee for a front seat (US readers check in here.)

Previous posts here on re-inventing the RSA (scroll to the bottom to start)

Technorati Tags: openrsa, rsa, rsanetworks

Are charities broken?

Dan McQuillan, who has an impressive track-record of online innovation with Amnesty and other nonprofits, is now saying openly what others are muttering: the charity model is broken for many cause-related purposes.
He said this briefly at a recent get-together for a possible UK version of Netsquared, aimed at promoting web-enabled social innovation.
He has now filled out his thinking in a blog post advocating seedcamps for social innovation. These are competitive-collaborative events where entrepreneurs meet investors and mentors.

Dan writes:

I've heard quite a bit about seedcamp  and it's high octane approach to incubating web innovation. I wonder if the same model could be applied to social innovation? For sure, we need some new methodologies, because it looks like the old way of organising into charities and NGOs is broken.

UNDERMINING INNOVATION
At first sight, seedcamp is a purely business proposition, mentoring startups on competitiveness and providing injections of venture capital. What's that got to do with alleviating social problems?  But compare and contrast with the characteristics of many charities. In my experience, the amount of innovation that makes it out of the door of an NGO is a tenth of what it could be. And the limiting factor isn't rigerous testing of ideas against reality, but institutional conservatism. Anyone who's worked in the sector knows the score; anxiety-based leadership, a focus on internal politics, inter-departmental struggle and an unquestioning conflation of the issue and the organisation.

CATCH UP OR CATCH 22
But charities don't own social issues. And it's lazy behaviour for the rest of society to assume that bunging charities a regular donation is actually good value. We'll see what happens as more sousveillance and web-enabled transparency is applied to the third sector.  The web-savvy minority in nonprofits know that it's urgent for their organisations to catch up with the digital age. "If only the CEO would blog more, if only our campaigners understood facebook..." But are these the core issues? Or is the starker question that the inherent nature of charities as institutions makes them anithetical to the participative and post-deferential nature of the social web?

ROUTING AROUND BLOCKAGES
Personally, I'm more excited about the new modes of collaborative innovation  opened up by the web, and how these can be powerfully applied to solving social issues . I don't just mean web tools themselves, but the wider social modes and processes opened up, from the virtual organisation to crowdsourcing, and from open IP to self-organising networks. There are already examples of NGO startups; GetUp systematically applied the accidentally viral success of MoveOn  to the Australian third sector, and in six months had more members than Amnesty Australia. So if we want to encourage social innovation that leverages these possibilities we need ways to incubate it that are native to this space rather than native to the nineteenth century. Roll on, social innovation seedcamp.

I think Dan is right in doubting whether adding new social media to old models will work, as I wrote here when the Government announced plans for a Third Sector innovation exchange. We need a different approach - and Simon Berry, I and others, tried promoting that through an Open Innovation bid for the innovation exchange. We didn't win, but the process give us some insights into what a different way of doing things might be like. More here about the "official" innovation exchange that's now up and running.
I'm fascinated by the idea of an innovation development process that would mix seedcamp events, online exchanges and many other elements to really put some buzz behind different ways of promoting and supporting social action. I think it's what Matthew Taylor has in mind for the RSA, as I've covered in posts here (scroll down to start at the beginning). But can you innovate successfully from within such a venerable structure, or does the internal change process sap so much of your energy there's too little left for the real work outside? Dan has been brave enough to pose the question. More ideas please.

Technorati Tags: innovation, nonprofit, nptech, nptechuk, rsa

Innovation Exchange and the RSA develop networks for social change

Earlier in the year I was involved, with Simon Berry and others, in attempting to win a £1.2 million government contract by writing an "open source" bid for an Open Innovation Exchange in public. We were shortlisted, but didn't win ... and now we can see what the successful team are offering. I have to say it is looking good, and may have some lessons for another innovative initiative, at the RSA.

The Innovation Exchange has been launched to foster innovation within the third sector and to find ways of improving relationships between social innovators, public service commissioners and investors. We have just announced the first two themes around which we seek to build networks, develop innovative capacity and further relationships between innovators, investors and commissioners. Our first two themes are supporting independent living and excluded young people. Please join the conversation online around innovative practice in response to these challenging themes. This is just the beginning. We wanted to get started quickly with launching the network online, with a view to working with you and the growing community in shaping all that we can do together. We’re building up to the launch of an ambitious online networking and collaboration platform by Spring 2008 - we’d really like to hear from you with ideas.

More here on the launch. The main partners in the Innovation Exchange are The Innovation Unit, acevo and social software specialists Headshift. We knew that Headshift would be pitching in with some pretty sophisticated ideas for the website: they won an award for the Demos site last year and have done a range of other innovative projects using a mix of blogs, wikis and other tools.
However, the Innovation Exchange team have not (yet, anyway) fallen into the trap of spending enormous sums of money on a highly complex system which may not get used. Instead they have set up a modest but effective blog-based site with the aim of moving to a more more substantial collaboration system in Spring 2008 once they have more experience of what's needed.
Once you register on the site you can add your own blog posts under the two themes of independent living and excluded young people.
The interim executive director is Jonathan Robinson, who has done so much to make The Hub in London and elsewhere such a brilliant model for incubating social innovation.
There's an outline of how the exchange will work - through networks and a Next Practice programme

The Innovation Exchange will establish and support Innovation Networks – large social networks focused on tackling specific social problems. Innovation Networks will be open to innovators on the demand side (public service commissioners and managers), on the supply side (practitioner innovators from any sector trying to tackle the problem) and to social investors from any sector (philanthropists, CSR funds, Foundations or government funds) interested in tackling the social problem. Over time we will look to evolve these networks to help scale up innovative or ‘next’ practice across the third sector.
Emerging from each Innovation Network will be a Next Practice programme to provide bespoke advice and brokerage support to fledgling innovation projects. The Next Practice Programme will focus on a sharper and more refined version of the problem set by the original Innovation Network. Each programme will be sponsored by a panel of social investors, public service commissioners and policy makers who will provide direction, focus and an external audience for the participants in the programme.

Meanwhile the RSA, which is engaged in its own programme of innovation involving its 27,000 Fellows, has set up an RSA Networks blog hosted by Mick Fealty, perhaps best known as Slugger O'Toole. You can see an interview with Mick here, from earlier in the year, where he likens hosting blog conversations to running a pub. He's been dealing with my slight provocations on site with outstanding good humour.

On the blog Sophia Parker wants to check how far Fellows will commit to the innovation programme, and asks for ideas about moving from networks to projects:

The first (question) is the extent to which we as the Fellows are up for this - by which I mean Matthew's vision of turning the Fellowship into a 'network for civic innovation'. How many of us will find the time and energy and commitment to work together in new ways? My hope and aspiration is that enough of us want to do it to really begin to make a difference. What do others think?
At this point, my thoughts are that this project is not about turning every single Fellow into a civic innovator. It is about giving people multiple 'ways in' to their organisation. For some, that will be finding other like-minded Fellows. For others, it will be about coming together in a local area to change something. We must find better ways of enabling these kinds of connections between Fellows. But it is also true that the RSA cannot directly support every single initiative that Fellows begin.
And that leads to my second question - how does the RSA decide in an open and transparent way which projects it should put serious resources behind? I feel strongly that the Fellows themselves should be involved in this process - but the question is how this happens: how can Fellows themselves shape the agenda that the RSA sets through its large-scale projects?

NESTA is funding the RSA programme,  and is one of the partners in the Innovation Exchange, so there may be a chance to connect productive and innovative thinking about networks on both fronts.
I'm also glad to say that the OpenRSA initiative that a group of us have been promoting in support of the "official" RSA initiative has just got some unexpected recognition. The California-based team at Wikispaces, who host our site, have chosen OpenRSA as their space of the month.
The RSA Networks site could benefit from some additional functionality, as Mark and I have suggested, so perhaps its time to join up.

Technorati Tags: openinex, openrsa, rsanetworks, rsa

Engagement is all the rage ... at least in theory

The push towards a new politics of greater citizen engagement and volunteering get a strong nudge from Sophia Parker in the current edition of the RSA journal. She notes that politicians are increasingly arguing that our social wellbeing cannot be delivered solely from the centre:

We, the people, are all the rage. In a passionate speech to the NCVO, Gordon Brown argued that “it is people who are engaged in changing the world that will be the next momentum for change”. But it’s not just Brown who is trailing this agenda. The day after Brown promised a series of citizens’ juries to open up policy processes, David Cameron launched a proposal for a ‘national citizen service’ for young people, to help them “feel that British society is something they want to be part of".

Sophia offers an historical perspective on the current enthusiasm for more bottom-up action, from Beveridge to Blair, through Margaret Thatcher's declaration: “There is no such thing as society…too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it.”
We started with a post-war 1940s belief in the State, moved through the consumerist look-out-for-yourself phase, into a world of top-down performance targets for public services mixed with requirements on agencies to engage, consult and empower. It's now time to work out what can be "delivered" and what depends on people's involvement for lasting solutions and wellbeing. As Sophia points out:

Whether it’s managing long-term conditions, living sustainably or tackling gun crime — all issues dominating the press recently — these are not things that can be delivered to passive citizens by formal services alone. Their ‘solution’ relies as much on how we as individuals behave, and how we interact with the world around us, as it does on how the government responds. In other words, this new-found interest in the role of citizens in change is not only ideologically led, but deeply pragmatic too.

The journal article is in support of the vision of  RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor for an  organisation where the 27,000 members - called Fellows - develop a network for civic innovation. Sophia, who has previously worked at Demos, is now busy on the programme to engage Fellows, focussed initially around an event on November 22. Previous posts on that indexed here.
Fortunately for those interested in the "how to" of engagement, my friends over at Involve have just launched a very splendid new web site People and participation.net. It has been designed by social media specialists Headshift, with funding from a couple of Government departments, and includes an interactive tool which helps you select appropriate participatory methods depending on your circumstances. That's a bit like the Dialogue Designer I wrote about here. As well as a database of methods, case studies and resources, there's a section where you can post a question to Involve experts and so get specialist advice.
The site was launched by Communities Secretary Hazel Blears as part of the Government's 'Empowerment Action Plan', which Involve says:

... sets out how the Government will deliver on its commitment to empower communities through a range of activities, including more community power to trigger petitions, citizens' juries and an increased say for local communities over local budgets....

A few years back I would have been whooping for joy at all this official support for public and community engagement ... and I do believe it is essential whether within membership organisations like the RSA, or programmes for community regeneration. And yes, it is brilliant that Involve has pulled together so much excellent advice.
My reservation is that it's one thing to talk about engagement, and an entirely different matter to make it work ... because change depends not just on methods but on attitudes. I rambled on about that here and here, arguing that not only do power-holding organisation have to be prepared to listen and deliver their side, they have to start early in the process of engagement. They need to open up, form new relationships, and work things out with key interests from the start. Engagement doesn't work unless it is collaborative. I hope Involve are already working on a sister site: organanisationsandparticipation.net ... and that the RSA will prove a good case study.

Technorati Tags: engagement, rsa

Engagement isn't marketing, members are more than customers

I believe much fresh thinking and innovation emerges from cross-overs between sectors, disciplines and cultures, and so I was fascinated to sit in on a presentation last week about engaging and expanding membership of a charity, given by a team from a major retailer. (Is there such a big difference these days? I'll come back to that).
The challenge given to the retail team was to help the RSA in its re-invention process towards a network for civic innovation (previous RSA postings here). They interviewed staff and members (Fellows), and looked at other organisations (possible competitors for members). They came up with an engagement plan, shown here, starting before the big event planned by the RSA for Fellows on November 22**, following through to further activities. There was a lot of emphasis on promoting the vision of the chief executive, Matthew Taylor.

My immediate reaction to the presentation was "you've got it wrong - this is just marketing", moderated to "you've got some of it right", through to something about "it depends where you are sitting, and your view of the world".
The retail team were presumably chosen as advisers because their stores suffered a potentially catastrophic downturn in business a couple of years back,  and are now on the way up thanks to the drive and vision of a new chief exec. Matthew Taylor is trying for major changes at RSA, including expansion of membership from 26,000 to 100,000 in a few years. He wants Fellows (customers?) to be at the heart of the organisation, not the edge. You can see the video here.
The retailers offered eight principles of good engagement:

1. From the horses mouth
2. Timely, transparent and full disclosure
3. A concept you can pass on
4. One big idea
5. Delivered with energy and personality
6. Dialogue and discussion
7. Hand over ownership to the audience
8. Next steps, easy, clear and booked in

They said that their new chief executive was brilliant at achieving this in big events with managers, sending them back to their stores to enthuse staff. They said it was very important to give managers clear guidelines on how to do this. They had tried leaving it to managers to choose their own methods, but it hadn't been too successful. The implication - for me anyway - was that on November 22 Fellows need to leave the event fired up with missionary zeal to put Matthew's vision into practice.
Maybe I misunderstood the detail - but I started to feel uncomfortable because it seemed a pretty top-down approach, and didn't fit well with the idea of Fellows creating networks for action using social media and other distinctly peer-to-peer models. In the spectrum of engagement, is seemed to sit up the inform and consult end rather than collaborate and empower ... which is where the RSA narrative is.

Anyway, I didn't write about the event straight away, but let the ideas ferment for a few days. That led me to think that maybe the retailers had got some of it right - perhaps the part that they would understand best. The RSA does need to improve and market its services to Fellows - the bar, library, restaurant and so on. Otherwise people will start to wonder whether they are just foot-soldiers in Matthew's New Army of civic volunteers ... and why are they paying £130 or so a year for that? The other thing they got right is that any telling-selling-engaging process shouldn't stand or fall on one big event. It is a long process ... so November 22 is just one milestone.
What didn't seem right was the overall emphasis on "selling" a vision ... when anyone in the nonprofit sector knows that ultimately volunteer activists do what volunteer activists want to do, so it is important to get some alignment of interests. Ideally you should co-design programmes with them.
It was at this point of musing that I reminded myself how important the culture, context and background is in understanding, quite literally, where people are coming from. The retailers had been through a few scary/energising years of decline and resurrection, and their presentation featured lots of press cuttings about "slide goes on" ... "faces more storms ahead" ... then ... "stunning sales" and "eight year peak". Of course they would draw upon this experience when faced with the challenge of re-inventing the RSA.
Similarly, Matthew Taylor must have in mind some of his experience in the Labour Party. As Simon Dickson points out, there's a passage in the video I did of Matthew where he talks about his idea for a network of civic for innovation. He says:

Part of the reason I was enthused by this idea is that I tried to do it at the Labour Party for ten years - and it was totally impossible. I spent ten years saying ‘can’t we turn our members into civic entrepreneurs? can’t we actually look like we believe in progressive change on the ground, rather than just knocking on people’s doors?’ The party leadership and party stakeholders were utterly resistant to this idea.

I certainly don't think that replaying that experience more successfully is the main motivation behind the vision ... but I guess you can't spend 10 years or so in the service of the New Labour modernising machine without being touched by its less-than-empowering culture. It's a great tribute to Matthew's versatility that, if there, it isn't too evident.
In order to put all this into the context of engagement theory, I cast my mind back to some excellent work undertaken by Jack Martin Leith a few years back when he charted engagement and ideas generation methods against worldview - you can find it here.
Put simply, within Worldview 1, the world is a machine and methods you are drawn to  are fairly mechanistic. Under Worldview 2 the world is a system, while in Worldview 3 it is a field of energy and consciousness ... and undoubtedly a lot messier, as I've touched on here and here.
I suspect that part of the difficulty the RSA faces is that the different interests involved have different worldviews, and don't have a way to talk about this. I hope that NESTA Connect - who are funding the current exercise - have work-in-progress monitoring in place to see how things play out, because process is as interesting as outcomes in engagement. There may be lessons for that from Diane Warburton's work on evaluation of public participation.

Phew. I didn't expect to spend quite as long on this piece as I have. It shows (for me) how interesting the RSA is at present. I'll hang in as long as it gives me stuff to write about. I suspect many other Fellows have their own rather diverse interests and motivations as well.
Perhaps the most telling exchange during the RSA-retailer event was when someone pointed out that most of the engagement processes discussed were aimed at managers. How did they know whether their customers were engaged or not? "Well, if they don't like us, they don't come to the stores" was the reply.
Not a bad lesson - if you remember members of charities aren't just buying, they are contributing ... so they require even more care and attention. It is interesting to listen in to the re-invention process ... it would be even more motivating to play a more active part.
** The part that Fellows can play in the process has been un-clarified by a message to those who signed up following the November 22 event invitation, believing that would ensure a place. Unfortunately this isn't so, and Matthew now tells us "we will be making our final selection of registrants shortly to ensure that we have as representative a group of Fellows as possible here on the day".
However, all is not lost for those who may be disappointed. An earlier mailing to those interested inadvertently displayed some 260 e-mail addresses, thus giving any Fellow the opportunity, for the first time, to contact directly others interested in the re-invention process. Nobody has yet, which suggests either a high degree of satisfaction with the way things or going, or a generally low-level of social media awareness ... or maybe a feeling of "let's see how it goes, don't rock the boat". Just in case that changes, I suggest the event organisers take a look at Communities Dominate Brands, by Alan Moore and Tomi T Ahonen. As I reported here, Alan has a compelling metaphor, warning brands about complacency once their customers can find each online:  "once you have stormed the Bastille, you don't really want to go back to your boring day job."
The retailers didn't mention that one.