One of the joys of my job is meeting RSA Fellows. Last week, for example, I attended a New Fellows’ Evening here at John Adam Street, and I spoke at a Brussels RSA event attended by local Fellows and a group visiting on one of our popular ‘demystification’ tours. Talking to Fellows you are guaranteed two fascinating discussions: first, about the Fellow themselves – after all they have been nominated in part because of their achievements in life; secondly, about Fellows’ expectations of the RSA.

Of course, many people look forward to being able to use the excellent facilities on offer at John Adams Street and others talk about the lecture series, the Journal and the website. But there is another dimension to Fellowship that I am keen we promote and support. This is the idea of the Fellowship as a network of people not only committed to progress but also to acting to promote change.

From now on we will be putting ever more emphasis on this peer-to-peer dimension of Fellowship. The most high-profile and effective expression of this idea currently is the Coffeehouse Challenge (CHC), which we will be officially launching next month. Through the CHC, the RSA and Starbucks aim to bring people together to discuss local issues and explore the possibility of taking action together. The CHC has already been the springboard for initiatives ranging from a zero waste organic café to a campaign against knife crime to a charity to provide public places for elderly and infirm people to be able to sit and rest.

It is an important dimension of the CHC that it is up to people meeting in their local Starbucks to decide what the important issues are and how they should respond. Without wanting to lose this spontaneity, we want this year to also offer suggestions to local groups for ideas they might want to consider. For example, I was approached by the former MP Peter Bradley who is promoting the idea of creating Speakers’ Corners in major towns and cities as a focus for open and lively civic debate. This is the kind of manageable but potentially significant project that CHC meetings might decide to take on. We are exploring other ideas to showcase in the Journal and put on the CHC website. Over time, I would like people and organisations across the UK (and where we are strong internationally) to see the RSA as a powerful source of ideas, energy and commitment.

So the CHC is at the heart of our model of Fellowship activism. But there are other important dimensions. We are investing in our website, with a particular focus in strengthening the Fellows’ areas. We have launched our Fellow2Fellow web feature, in which we invite Fellows to share opinions and proposals. And, as we get more and more Fellows willing to provide us with information and allow us to connect with them online, we are able to provide a powerful service to people trying to get advice and support. A few weeks ago we were able to contact getting on for a 100 architect Fellows in and around London on behalf of a Fellow wanting to see a higher profile debate about the changing architectural shape of the capital. Just this morning I heard about the help we had given a Fellow who is chair of governors of a primary school. In thinking about his new school building, he had wanted advice on what are likely to be the next advances in school ICT. Drawing on our database, we contacted several Fellows, many of whom have responded with useful thoughts.

For me, the model of Fellow activism has the potential to address what I call the ‘social aspiration gap’. This is the divide between the kind of society we want to live in and the society we currently feel able to create (I may treat readers to a fuller account of this in a future blog!). The Fellowship was one of the main reasons I came to the RSA; the more I see of it in action to more excited I become about its potential.

I was great fan of the Eurostar until last Friday. I was among the people stranded in Paris when it was cancelled due to a fire near the line in Wandsworth. Eventually I got home via Calais and Dover but the people I felt sorry for were the young couples – lots of tearful faces – crestfallen at their plans being kyboshed.

The fire wasn’t Eurostar’s fault and no business is going to fold because a meeting gets cancelled, but maybe for the Friday journeys in particular they should go out of their way to offer an alternative route for those with their hearts set on a romantic weekend away.

I was in Paris as the ‘keynote’ (flattery will get you everywhere) speaker at the launch of EUCLID the first pan European network dedicated to third sector leaders. I told them there are powerful ideological, organisational and social reasons why the third sector is being so heavily courted by the political establishment in the UK and some other countries.

The ideological opportunity is presented by the emerging consensus formed by a right of centre that no longer thinks markets and individualism is sufficient to solve social and environmental problems, and a thinking left of centre seeing diversity of supply as a good way to bring innovation into public services.

The organisational opportunity comes from a recognition of the problems of communication, motivation and engagement in large bureaucratic organisations. The more devolved, ethically driven, diverse third sector seems to offer a better way to connect with people and provide services.

The social opportunity lies in a growing awareness that many of the most pressing problems we face are not amenable to answers which treat people as objects. Instead citizens must be the active subjects developing their own individual and collective solutions. As third sector organisations are generally created from the citizen up they seem more suited to this new way of thinking.

But with each opportunity comes a set of issues to be confronted. It is great that every political party wants to hug the third sector, but one of the important aspects of its role is advocacy, which sometimes needs to be outspoken and controversial. There is no inherent reason why charities can’t combine service delivery with advocacy but they need to think through the dilemmas posed.

Two issues are raised by the idea that third sector organisations are better suited to delivering certain social outcomes.

First, are they? I must admit to having sat through too many dispiriting and failed attempts to demonstrate that there is something about, say, a social enterprise – that makes it more responsive, dependable or innovative.

Second, if third sector organisations do grow they have to make sure they don’t simply become inflexible bureaucracies themselves. All large third sector organisations should have a copy of the last page of Animal Farm on their office wall.

Finally, the sector should see the social argument about needing to engage people more ambitiously and directly as a starting point for a wider debate. To develop what I have called a citizen-centric (rather then Government-centric) model of social change means reform beyond the third sector. It requires a rounded model of citizenship involving entitlements and expectations, a more participative democracy and radically new ways of working for the state.

Avoiding the temptation of self congratulation, the third sector should be at the forefront of this debate showing it is as driven by high ideals as by winning the next contract or spot on the Today programme.

So, there you have it. On the plus side you’ve avoided the fifteen minutes speech and read the argument in two minutes (which as readers of his Observer column know, will be a relief to my newest fan Henry Porter). On the down side you didn’t get the nice buffet, the lovely walk through Paris and the evocative pleasure of a windswept, deserted night ferry to Dover.

The debate over tackling climate change is interesting but a little confusing. I first heard of the Conservatives’ ideas about aviation arriving on Sunday morning at Sky News to do their paper review. I welcomed the idea of a personal aviation emissions allocation as this is broadly in line with the RSA’s own proposal for personal carbon trading.

The next day the FT suggested that my support for the Conservative idea – which is both green and redistributive – was some kind of rebuff for Gordon Brown ahead of his own speech. As it turned out the Chancellor, referring to the important deal negotiated by Angela Merkel, emphasised the need to take continental and global action on climate change.

Last week in Brussels David Cameron urged the EU to take a strong role in tackling climate change but at the same time revealed that his only partners in his putative new centre right European Parliament group is the Czech ruling party, whose leaders are apparently unconvinced that global warming is real! In a further twist, Brown favoured voluntary measures on domestic fuel efficiency over Tory proposals for regulations and taxes; a neat reversal of conventional political point scoring.

What should we make of all this? Obviously it is good that the politicians are putting climate change centre stage. After last month’s grim IPCC report (itself probably erring on the cautious side), there was nowhere left to hide on the issue. Environmental groups must feel like the only girl at the ball so assiduously are they being courted. Put both Brown’s and Cameron’s ideas together and you have a pretty serious action plan. Brown is right that action must be taken internationally; Cameron that the domestic requirements of such agreements will not be met by voluntarism alone.

But there is a danger in the environment being seen as a political fad. As the sociologist Stan Cohen brilliantly analysed in his book ‘States of Denial’, most of us rely on a capacity to turn our faces away from difficult truths. Thus were most Germans under Nazi rule able to deny responsibility for the Holocaust and even otherwise progressive white South Africans willing to live with Apartheid. And maybe it is how we can live affluent Western lifestyles while a few thousand miles away African children starve?

In persisting with denial we rely on certain mental tropes such as ‘it’s not really happening’, ‘it’s nothing to do with me’ or ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’. By making climate change feel like an issue of political point scoring rather than unarguable science and clear moral responsibility we run the danger of providing an easy route for denial.

Ultimately I believe we can tackle carbon emissions and have better lives, but in the short term we face some tough choices. Once this row is over, our politicians should try to find a basis for an agreed way forward.

I heard last week that the average readership for a blog is one so I am gratified to see that at least six people read mine:

Andrew and Praguetory – I agree there are some good blogs and I should stop talking only about the negative ones.

Ewan – yes, we need to think of new ways to use technology to engage young people in politics (something we will be discussing in our internet conference later this year).

Leen Petre is right to remind us of the digital divide, although it isn’t so big when you look at satellite TV or mobile phones.

Trevor – we are currently thinking about doing some work on prisons.

John – I liked the idea but I can’t say I hold out much hope that citizens would pay a voluntary tax to politicians however good their cause.

“In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network” (Kevin Kelly: Wired)

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to complain about it.” (quoted by Slugger O’Toole)

Thursday is a busy day for the RSA. As well as unveiling the long-awaited report of our Drugs Commission we will be hosting a major conference on the social impacts of the internet. Speakers include George Osborne MP, shadow chancellor who seems to be the leading politician with the best grasp of this issue; Mick Fealty, the aforementioned Slugger O’Toole; and Brian Appleyard, author and journalist. The quotations above define for me the big question. Why is it that the web which has been so transformative in so many parts of our lives has done so little to strengthen democracy and civic society?

For some this is inherent in the technology. Generating content and browsing the internet is the individualistic act of one person sitting at one computer. Why would we expect it to be suited to the collective tasks of deliberation and community action? But in fact while there has been an explosion of sites like MySpace which allow people to celebrate their individuality, there have also been innovations like the ‘wiki‘ and complex virtual worlds which only work because people collaborate on a shared system and outcome.

For others the fault lies in the political system which has simply failed to understand or respond to potential of the web. From this perspective things like the Downing Street website and e-petitions or David Cameron’s weblog are superficial and tokenistic; politics must be willing to go through the kind of re-engineering that has been experienced by the entertainment or travel industries.

I am dismayed by the passive aggressive tone of most political blogs, and wonder why the web seems so much better as a tool to mobilise protest rather than action. But I suspect the answer lies not in wishing people were different but in innovation which can tap into people’s latent desire to shape their own collective futures. While Web 1.0 may have simply reinforced ‘us and them’ political discourse, Web 2.0 offers huge scope for new forms of ‘us and us’ engagement. The wiki has huge potential as a policy deliberation tool but we need good applications (the RSA is working to develop one for our Fellows).

So, on Thursday, as well as discussing where we are now, I hope we give time to think about how the next wave of web innovation could help us work together to make our world a better place.