RSA Networks

RSA Networks and the blog...

The RSA Networks blog was active in the run up to the launch of the RSA Networks project. It has been superseded by the RSA Networks site. It was fun.

Telling it like it is...

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."

The power of conversation...

James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowd's critique that diversity of opinion and experience is a prerequiste for a crowd to be smart. Next is independence, ie people who are not likely to be swayed by people around them. Then decentralisation, where "power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner."

Finally aggregation, some means of determining the group's answer to the question, in this case: what might RSA Networks do and how might they deliver?

This last should begin to be determined through a number of outputs from the day, but the Open Space technology is a good match for Surowieki's first three determining factors. RSA Fellows, or at least this bunch here today, are indeed a 'smart crowd'.

At lunch time there was an incredible animated buzz with lots of conversations going on. Afterwards I drifted into and out of some of the open space sessions. You get a really strong sense of what happens when people who 'know stuff' get together with others who also 'know stuff' in the same area. For those of us working on our own, or as single innovators within a larger organisations, it is a precious commodity.

For instance, one group I sat in with briefly were talking about this issue of development in brown field sites. There were only four of them, but each was able to interject insight from different perspectives on and provide different sets of metrics to the same problem: how do you produce sustainable housing that works on a human scale.

One of the group, reflecting on what kind of utility an RSA Network might provide him suggested, that at the most basic level he wanted "other people to bounce ideas off: intelligent people with a depth of expertise in their own particular field".

And so it begins...

Good brisk start to proceedings at the RSA. The day here is to be run mostly along Open Space technology lines which is deliberately designed to allow the Fellows here to follow through the questions that are uppermost in their minds.

Matthew gave an interesting response to a question about the purpose of the day when he note that if this shift in the nature of the relationship between RSA Fellows and Staff will require change that is both bottom up and top down. Today is partly about finding out what fellows might want to do with a new networked approach, but also trying to understand what is required at the centre to facilitate that change.

I'll be posting lightly during the day, but the real meat should begin to become available tomorrow.

RSS feeds and the opening of deliberative space

Don't miss Saul's account of the pre-launch meeting for the prototype last Friday. In his encounter with something called the Talkaoke Table, has grabbed some notable thoughts from the meeting worth sharing here. I was particularly struck by Nico McDonald's suggestion deliberation does not have to be done on the same site. And in particular that "RSS syndication in cross-linking blogs, can turn the infrastructure of the blogosphere into a loosely coupled adversarial debating floor."

Building the online offering

In preparation for the meeting on Thursday, Saul and I thought it would be useful to give you a broader update here on our progress on the RSA Networks platform and prototype development.

We initially focussed our energies on making contact with the many people who have already been discussing the project, and trying to get our heads around everything that's been said so far.  We've also reviewed the giant stack of discussion online, including this blog and the various OpenRSA materials - for all of which, our huge thanks to you for such a huge mine of ideas. There's a lot to take in, and some contradictory messages emerging, but we've got a good idea now of where the passions and issues lie.

We've also reviewed the existing RSA online provision and the plans for the new site, and have got a good sense of where we can add value.  I don't know if Anshuman is going to be updating everyone about the progress towards a new RSA website, but the prototype we are developing is intended to inform the specification and development of this site. I hope we can get lots of discussion going on Thursday about how the prototype would need to evolve in order to support the new activities of the fellowship and the RSA, and also get a better idea of what might need to happen with the prototype after this week.

We've focussed on providing a lightweight system to create a seedbed for discussions and project ideas, and establishing connections between fellows and topics which can then be searched and filtered to create richer interactions. In broad terms, our two main priorities for the RSA Networks technology are: (1) to allow fellows to host discussions about possible projects; and (2) to create a richer and more open picture of activity within the RSA which can be explored and searched.

We'll aim to have as much to show you as possible on Thursday, and let you have a go on it yourselves. The technical team (Saul, Peter Brownell, Liz Turner) have already worked incredibly quickly and efficiently to construct the initial version, which was showcased at an informal event on Friday (16 November), in which a group of RSA fellows, non-fellows and staff had a very lively and broadly positive debate about the prototype and the wider processes it supports. For more info, check out Saul's excellent blog post on the OpenRSA blog - with nice photos too! We've used the information from Friday to refine our models of what we're supporting, ask a few questions of each other, and also to refine the prototype for Thursday.

We're going to be running introductory sessions throughout the day on Thursday so you can see what we've built and give us your detailed feedback. For an idea of what you can expect on the day, Saul's also been doing an admirable job of blogging the prototype development on the OpenRSA blog (thanks for all the comments we've had there too). There's a lot of information flying around at the moment, so here are the key pages, for those of you who are interested:

  Day 1 - the team and our approach
  Day 2 - the workflows
  Day 3 - the wireframes

Time pressures (Saul in particular has been burning the candle at both ends!) have made posting in two places a little tricky, so apologies for that. Hopefully now we can engage in some wider debate here, and signpost you to the detail wherever it happens to be. We're looking forward to meeting some of you on Thursday too, and if there's anything you really really need to tell me or you'll just pop, please e-mail me at andy[at]sociability.org.uk.

Are you happy?

If you have the time this PDFed presentation called "Are you happy?" from the New Economics Foundation is well worth a browse. Intriguingly its vision statement implies an intellectual back to basics approach:

"...we are re-thinking the way the economic rule-book works and reassessing economics in its original form, as a branch of moral philosophy. It means re-thinking the role of regulation, tax incentives, market mechanisms and structural and governance innovations. It means looking afresh at the financial system and why its current structures fail to invest actively in social purpose businesses."

One of the initiatives that caught my eye was the thriving communities programme, which is based on

"...community-led regeneration that builds rather than replaces the value and distinctiveness of local economies and communities. Local distinctiveness is wealth in itself, but it also underpins economic success – because, as with ecosystems, a diverse locality is resilient to shocks. People also want to invest or live in places that seem ‘real’. Equally important is the way that resources flow into and through a local economy. Who controls that flow? Who benefits from it?"

Real connections beat virtual worlds...

Tessy's got an excellent post over at the Open RSA blog. As well as stimulating a great conversation, she also points to Charlie Leadbeatter's We Think project. Tessy, who has just returned from a three day course with Jerry Stein argues that however lithe and intelligent the platform, online cannot in itself replace real human encounter:

"I am more convinced than ever that the face-to-face interactions in live communities cannot be replaced by online dialogue. While the online forums provide us with a fantastic starting point we need to explore how the online social networking will serve and enable the face-to-face."

What is it you want out of RSA Networks?

Most fellows involved in the RSA Networks project should have received a discussion paper this morning. It's fairly long and detailed, but I thought it might be worth teasing out some of the more 'provocative' detail in a series of posts here. For instance early on, the paper poses a series of questions we might usefully mull over between now and next Friday:

"Do Fellows really want a deeper kind of engagement with the RSA? 

"What is it that Fellows would like to change about the interactions between themselves and the organisation?

"These are $64 million questions, but over the course of this project we hope to be able to answer them with a greater degree of confidence and clarity. The event you are attending on the 22^nd November is a chance for us to work together on addressing these issues and will be founded on the key question: what might new RSA networks do and how might they deliver?"

It should be emphasised that most of the detail as posed as questions: it is neither a blueprint, nor a position statement. Indeed it emphasises that it is hoped that:

"...as Fellows, you are fully engaged at every step of the process, as collaborators and co-creators along with the staff of the organisation. So please treat the thinking here as a springboard for your own views and ideas: challenge it, develop it and add to it."

It then goes on to ask a series of questions about what you would like to achieve:

• Discovering a new project to get involved in?
• Proposing a project and finding some collaborators?
• Developing thinking around how RSA networks might work in the future?
• New contacts?
• Good conversation?

We can explore some of the answers to these questions, or even your own specific ideas under the loose heading of "none of the above"!

Incidentally, the format for the 22nd is going to be "Open Space", which for those not already familiar with it, is a participative technique formulated to allow individual participants can set their own agenda and connect with others of a similar mind. This account from Michael Herman is a good gentle introduction to the concept.

None of the discussion here or elsewhere is intended as definitive agenda setting, or prescriptive, but hopefully we can begin making 'connections' around content as well as process issues.

"It's a question of people wanting to be respected"

Professor Stephen Coleman is one of the UK's most passionate and erudite advocate for the intelligence of the mass public (Mencken's notorious quotation has had a lot of sticking power). Here, he talks to David Wilcox about how some of the mass approaches to e-democracy have actually led to a breakdown in trust between ordinary people and the political classes. Rather than going for what Bryan Appleyard recently described at an RSA event as 'hyper-democracy', Stephen believes that "we need a common, online space where deliberation can take place".