Saturday saw me heading to Stockton-on-Tees to speak to a joint Durham University/RSA conference entitled ‘There is such a thing as society’.  I heard some fantastic presentations from inspiring people doing great things in the community.

Iain Caldwell was fascinating about the transformative work of Hartlepool Mind and his reference to the ‘human givens‘ approach to therapy has opened up a new literature to me.

Reverend John Elliston told the story of the 700 Club in Darlington; from its humble origins asking 700 citizens to give or loan £50 to buy a terraced house for emergency accommodation for the homeless to its current dilemmas about how to retain its radicalism and responsiveness while also relying on public grants.

I also listened to RSA activist Patricia (‘Paddy’) Deans who had worked with other Fellows to first persuade and then support her local health practice to build a state of the art, fully sustainable, health centre. Paddy is modest about her contribution but it is clear the RSA was the catalyst, even if the work was then done by the health practice, architects and the North East eco-centre.

I suggested to Paddy that we might develop an RSA Network dedicated to giving Fellows advice and support in seeking to make local new buildings fully sustainable. I’ve put this to our networks team here so watch this space.

Now, thanks to the miracles of modern technology I’m able to continue posting my blog while out of the office. But I wanted to publicly thank Laura Bunt in particular from the Networks team, who did such a stunning job of organizing last night’s event.

Andy Gibson FRSA also made an excellent job of facilitating and I was gratified to see so many staff members turn out to support the RSA Networks Exchange initiative.

There were many ideas buzzing around and the event reinvigorated a lot of Fellows following on from the event we had in November.

This is a perfect example of what Networks is about – it’s about bringing Fellows together, both virtually and in ‘real life’ to develop effective networks for delivering (and dealing with) positive social change.

There were a number of excellent projects proposed, and people were asked to make commitments as to how they would take these ideas forward. So here’s one from me. I think that we should commit to holding a similar event (around the country) at least once a month.

I’d love to hear from more of you who would like to be involved in an exchange event, or for those who attended, ways in which you think this event could be more effective.

What would be great is if, together, we could create a culture of collaboration, in which people with similar ideas could develop one fantastic project, taking the best elements of what each person has to offer. A sort of open source project for social change, which takes as it’s premise that no one person has all the answers or bright ideas, and that we all have something to share and learn.

Again, well done to the team who made this event happen and in particular to the Fellows who showed such commitment and enthusiasm last night!

In a world that is increasingly digitally enhanced, how do we ensure that people can be included in the conversations that are happening on the internet – or even at a more basic level can take advantage of cheaper car insurance (which seem to be available through internet only deals)?

This is true not only for society as a whole, but closer to home, as part of this society.

Roughly a third of Britons are considered ‘digitally excluded’. I’m chairing a conference on this tomorrow which will be looking at how we can reach this final third. No doubt I’ll be sharing my thoughts on this later in the week. But it made me think about what we’re trying to do here with the RSA Networks.

Tonight there will be an RSA Networks Exchange event here at JAS. The event is designed to mirror the experience Fellows have at our growing (and under construction) online platform. They can propose, discuss and support innovative projects. In essence it’s the physical manifestation of the virtual experience.

The idea is that not all the projects discussed tonight will be taken forward, indeed, not all the projects should be taken forward.

In our society we have an aversion to failure. This makes a lot of sense, failing makes us feel bad. But one of the capacities we need to be promoting is that of resilience. The ability to say ‘ok, this idea wasn’t so great, but I’m glad I put it out there, now I can move on and do something else.’

The other point of putting your ideas out there is that you can link to other people who are interested in similar things, and then together you can have even better ideas.

The beauty of the internet is that it creates a place for iterative project development. To borrow from recent speaker, Jonathan Zittrain, it’s a generative process. Together we can create something that is better than any of our individual ideas.

As I’ve said many times, our Networks project is about bringing together Fellows, so that they  can work together on projects which will support social change. But it occurs to me that not all our fellows are part of the ‘digitally included’. Of course with this blog I’m preaching to the converted, but it’s worth thinking about. How do we engage more Fellows in the online debate?

Have a look at this from Clay Shirky, who seeks to answer the question non-digital people always ask which is ‘Where do you find the time’.