Digital Engagement

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Comment by David Wilcox on July 6, 2012 at 14:22

@ Charlotte - is there a vision statement? It would be great to see it.

... and other candidates - how do we best take this discussion into the election forum so that we can (hopefully) get some agreement, and an early agenda item for FC?

Comment by Charlotte Britton on July 6, 2012 at 14:15

@John - some good points here.  I do agree that the lack of vision of what 'engagement' for fellows online has led us to this point.  I think how we resolve this will be down the the leadership from the fellowship and JAS  - and how these visions are aligned.  

The other thing is pace......unless we move promptly and quickly on empowering fellows, people will not really perceive that there is value in the membership outside London.

Building the online space for collaboration, engagement & empowerment is vital.  We need the Technology strategy board to take the vision which Jemima wrote and start thinking about how this can be realised.

Comment by David Wilcox on July 6, 2012 at 13:51

Thanks Ted ... all. I've been thinking further on what the Fellowship Council (FC) might do, so we can move some of this discussion across to the election forum as Jemima suggested. Here's a way of linking our conversation to official channels.

There has been a mention in this group of personas being developed by staff to inform system development. Here's a guide to how that is usually done.

The persona work is probably part of the technology strategy development helpfully reported here by Jemima. There Jemima says that the role of FC and this group is "to keep Clive and Carol (staff) on track in terms of what we want and how it’s all delivered" ... and adds some challenging points of guidance including "We must learn from the mistakes of the past: for example, engaging fellows as early as possible in as many aspects as possible is crucial."

I know there just could be issues of confidentiality about some aspects of system development, and wouldn't expect Jemima and other Fellow/Trustee representatives on the strategy board to breach those if they exist.

However, it does strike me that the personas could provide a very helpful bridge between "what the RSA is for" ... and "what different (types of) Fellow might need" leading to "what sort of systems should we build".

So, reverting to my previous metaphors for RSA/Fellowship space (free university, innovation hub, trading space, think and do tank, etc) I'm guessing there may be personas related to these. There may be thinker, doer, business networker personas under consideration. Or should be.

If you look at the link about personas, these typically include descriptions of needs, frustrations, behaviours etc. 

So my suggestion is that the Technology Strategy Programme Board publish the personas and the work associated with them - i.e. "engaging fellows as early as possible" and then we can consider:

1. Do we recognise these semi-fictional Fellows ... if not can we tweak the descriptions.
2. Then ask the Fellowship Council/Trustees to fill out the scenario in which these scenarios are operating: that is, the "what the RSA is for". Is it a free university And and business trading space And and Innovation hub And think and do tank.
3. Ask for some collaborative process by which the context and personas can inform system development.

There's lots of ways to do this. There was an early OpenRSA workshop in October 2007, attempting to provide some input to the first RSA networks initiative, and a further one in 2009.

More recently Drew Mackie and I ran a workshop simulating digital enabling in the fictitious commun.... 

Some members of this DE group have been developing first ideas about how we might run a workshop for RSA Fe... (in need of revision).

Does it make sense to put into the election forum?

Comment by Ted Waters on July 6, 2012 at 12:40

I can but agree with Paul Nash's comment that our priority should be agreeing 'what the RSA is here for' , and ways in which the RSA staff, Fellows and external organisations could work together, before we  devise better systems to support our current practices.
A start could be to task the Fellowship Council to devise a short, punchy and uplifting  RSA 'Mission Statement' that is motivating to Fellows , Staff, Organisations that we wish to influence and the wider public.
One national retail beauty chain's mission in the late 1990's was 'Making people feel better about themselves'.  I find this much more inspiring than our Charter Statement which David Wilcox quotes at the end of his July 6th comment .

Comment by John Oakley on July 6, 2012 at 8:53

Now if I were running this outfit I would expect the Trustees to state an explicit policy about the engagement of fellows including expected outcome then either establish a sub-committee to investigate and submit recommendations or to delegate the same work to the Fellowship council.

The rest of us shouting from the stands ( "bleachers" for my US colleagues) will achieve nothing other than spread further alarm and despondency. 

As for getting 200 Fellows together to raise an issue with the Trustees over this I've been unable to get more than 20 Fellows to agree on anything so I think we have to rely on the Trustees and Staff lurking on this forum to either recognise there is a problem greater than technology and do something like my suggestion above or to have a quiet word with all of us about the importance of following the elected governance protocols and just live with it.

Comment by Paul Nash on July 6, 2012 at 8:19

Charlotte has a good point here. It's not that I'm not enjoying all of the talk about strategy. systems and platforms I am and I acknowledge the importance of it but I think we're having more than one debate here.

I want to pick up on Charlotte's point about fragmentation. Yesterday I was in Birmingham and I was priviliged to be party to an informal discussion between people I would consider to be movers and shakers in the "<insert noun here> camp" and "unconference" movement. It was a two and a half hour discussion which covered lots of ground but focussed on why those particular approaches work so well. It became apparent that there are lots of similarities between what they were discussing there and what we are discussing here.

Increasingly, not just within the RSA, people are seeking knowledge in a different way. I don't beleive that this is properly codified yet, yesterday we ended up calling it "social knowledge" for want of a better term. What this means is that the starting point in our search for knowledge is becoming "rough concensus" often from amongst trusted, social sources. We then move from that foundation to specific sources.

We (the digeratii?) do this naturally because we have, as yet undefined, expectations about the scope and diversity of potential knowledge about our subject of the moment whether that be a person, a place or a belief.

Now, I'm not enough of an amateur psychologist/sociologist to understand why this is so but as an explanation of why people are not engaging within specific on line contexts but are engaging in a wider "social knowledge" space it makes sense to me; and hence I thought I would share it here.

To reassure everyone, as Moulder says, "we are not alone" the problem(s) that we are discussing here are the same, not just in other forums but - according to our hosts yesterday - the world over. There is a proposal on the table for a "Gov Campus", simultaneous gov camps, across a 5 hour time zones, in the style of each nation, in one 24 hour period. This is an experiment intended to open up the discussion on a world wide scale. I believe that what we are discussing here is symptomatic of this wider phenomena.

So, with apologies for a rather long posting, where does that leave us? I think the debate about strategy, systems, procedures and platforms is important and it should stay on record to be taken forward. However, I think the wider implications of what we are discussing should give us pause for thought and some consideration of how we might move that forward otherwise I suspect that in two years time we will be having the same debate again, just with better systems.

Comment by David Wilcox on July 6, 2012 at 8:16

Thanks John - totally agree. I posted my comment before reading yours, which make my point about purpose evens more strongly.
Now to the Enquiry ...

Comment by David Wilcox on July 6, 2012 at 8:10

Hi Ted, Charlotte
I agree wholeheartedly about the need to review current online assets, and the purpose of items of content.
However, I wouldn't like to lose the initial focus on the purpose of the Fellowship.
There are two RSAs - staff and Fellows - operating in very different ways, with communications taking place within each and between each. It's a bit like council and local community in Eileen Conn's model http://www.socialreporters.net/?p=740
Except in this case the community of Fellows is meant to have some shared purpose ... with more emphasis in helping each other, developing project collaboratively etc.
At the moment the council (RSA staff) design and manage citizens (Fellows) communication systems.
Before deciding on what systems, we need, as John says, to decide who OWNS the problems and potential solutions: who defines the purpose of the Fellowship, and then who owns the process for improvement.
I agree with Andy that this can only be done face to face.
An Enquiry into the Nature, Benefits and Obligations of the Fellowship of the RSA?
At the moment all we have is the charter statement from 2010, which seem to me a rather inadequate brief to underpin the sort of rigour Ted is suggesting
"We form a unique combination of committed people and diverse ways of working in our efforts to find innovative practical solutions to pressing social problems" and "We support each other by working collaboratively and creating an enlightened space in which to tackle the challenges of the 21st century".

Comment by Andy Williamson on July 6, 2012 at 8:05

Well put John, I have to admit I instantly disengaged when this thread started turning into a discussion of platform.

The platform is not the issue nor is it at this stage anything to do with the solution... we need to keep the focus on how we engage Fellows. Any (and every) platform will fail unless the underlying social and cultural values are understood and aligned.

The technology is at best tactical... this conversation needs to remain strategic for the time being or we will miss the opportunity to really understand what it is needed.

The most pressing challenge at the moment is to focus on who owns the problem and how we can take better engagemet forward as a critical agenda.

Comment by John Oakley on July 6, 2012 at 7:55

I think deciding on a technology platform before we move forward is putting the cart before the horse. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If you meant can we decide on a platform to DISCUSS this subject then I would use the imperfect LinkedIn, because it is robust, hosted, going to be around for much longer than the Ning platforms and is limited enough in its function to stop enthusiasts from diving down pretty rabbit holes.

It allows discussion, polls, private communication links and external links. That, in my opinion is all we need for Job One - to define what our NEEDS are! 

It is conceivable - but I admit unlikely - that to meet the needs we need nothing more than email! We could then agree to use that and get on solving the real problem which is how can we leverage the power of the large body of skills, expertise and passion in a significant percentage of 27000 FRSAs.

If I see yet another thread developing to discuss product A over product B or platform Y over platform Z then I will subscribe the perpetrators to Hacker News where they can "my dad can beat your dad" to their heart's content.

In my opinion we have a fundamental problem that many of us want to be more involved, there has been a loose governance pronouncement that Fellows will be more involved, a staff that is overloaded and can provide limited support and some that think it is a tool issue.

It is not. It is a failure for the Trustees to clearly define the policy, the failure for the executive to clearly state the objectives that they will work to to implement their part of policy compliance and the Fellowship's failure to negotiate with the executive the roles and responsibilities for them to do their part.

The fact that we are a "member" organization must be recognized and that the staff cannot and should not dictate the limitations of how the policies are met - unless there is a specific policy from the Trustees that has delegated that responsibility to the staff.

I understand the Society only started engaging staff as a service function to handle the administration back in the 1700s. The decisions and "good works" were the responsibility of the membership.

Where is the audit trail to show when that changed? If it exists then lets see it up front and centre so we can see it and stop this incessant bickering and get back to what the Society is about.

If we ALL agreed about the current roles and responsibilities  then we can talk about NEEDS rather than WANTS...

There is no magic bullet... 

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