Meeting, eating and giving
The new model for Fellowship is my obsession right now and there are some encouraging straws in the wind.
I have been a very poor member of Bloggers’ Circle, not having quoted a fellow blogger for weeks. But the other day I dipped into the always engaging Living with Rats, the blog of Julian Dobson. The post in question was describing a visit he had made to look at Incredible Edible Todmorden,a fantastic project in which community activists find and reclaim land so it can be made available for local people to grow their own vegetables.
When I see a project like this it inspires me with the vision of an RSA Fellowship which boasts fifty such brilliant projects in the UK and around the world. In fact, we here at the RSA have our own similar initiative as part of our connected communities programme and it’s something in which we aim to engage our Fellows.
I have sitting on my desk another good example of the gradual shift from RSA as social club to RSA as force for change. It’s an event to encourage people to become active philanthropists (at whatever level they can afford). On 5 October, the London Region, in conjunction with the Funding Network, have organised an evening on social change philanthropy, when three people, who give at very different levels, will talk about their personal experience. Three London charities will also be there. It’s taking place at at the Royal College of Surgeons and the entrance fee includes a starter donation to one of the charities. The organisers hope it this will be the beginning of a philanthropic group within the RSA. If you want to know more you can contact the Elinor Pritchard at: elinor@thevirtualpartnership.co.uk.
As I said last week, the RSA is committed to establishing next spring a social venture fund to back Fellows’ initiatives. I have given the Fellowship team at JAS the target of having at least six good Fellows’ projects to showcase ahead of launching the fund. This way we can bring alive what we hope to see.
Last night I was at a well attended and enjoyable event with the Oxford RSA City Network (for those of you who think I should avoid talking about my political past I might just point out that the group asked me to focus on my years in Number 10). But much as I enjoyed the evening and the excellent hospitality, I was frank with the audience of Fellows that social and networking events like this should complement a focus on the difference that RSA can make in the world outside. The social side of the Fellowship is the icing on the cake, but there must be a cake.
The Fellowship has the right values, attributes and skills to be able to generate and implement ideas as good as Incredible Edible Todmorden – we just need to raise our sights and provide Fellows with the right support.
Decision Time
No sooner do I finally get my article about human nature and political values published in Prospect than a key piece of research cited in the piece gets challenged. A study undertaken in New Zealand has questioned the conclusions of the work of Benjamin Libet, conclusions which had become the cornerstone of how we have come to think about the workings of our brain.
Put simply, Libet’s research, which has been repeated and refined by other neuroscientists, seemed to show that the part of the subject’s brain associated with a physical action, for example, pressing a button, showed activity significantly earlier (a few tenths of a second) than the subject became aware of making the decision to act. This research seemed to show that the idea of conscious choice is often an illusion. Whilst we do make conscious decisions which involve forward planning, our day to day actions are automatic. The sense we have of making conscious choices reflect the deep seated need of human beings to make meaning, but it is an illusion. As Robert Heinlen put it ‘man is not a rational animal but a rationalising one’.
But now research by Judy Trevena and Jeff Miller, neuroscientists based in Otago, has questioned Libet’s work. Their research involved replicating Libet’s experiment but with an important modification. While Libet asked his subjects to press buttons, the New Zealand team allowed subjects to choose whether or not to press. Trevena and Miller then found that the brain activity identified by Libet (so called Readiness Potential) occurred after the subjects had been prompted and before they were aware of making a choice – whether or not they then decided to press the botton. In other words, it is not that the automatic brain ‘decides’ to act before the conscious brain but that it creates a readiness to act which only gets turned into action by conscious intervention. Furthermore ,Trevena and Miller claim to show that the brain activity specifically associated with ‘deciding’ to act takes place after the conscious awareness of that decision.
Unsurprisingly, the New Zealand study is causing waves in the neuroscience community. Those who have always been sceptical about Libet are seizing on the new research, while others who claim to have undertaken experiments reinforcing Libet’s conclusions are questioning Trevena ands Miller’s methodology.
Although it can all get quite technical, this is a fascinating debate with social and philosophical as well as scientific ramifications. We are exploring whether we can host a debate here at the RSA. Indeed, if someone would just give us a few tens of thousands of pounds we would love to modernise an old RSA tradition and work with neuroscientists at UCL to replicate the research with a live video link to a Great Room audience.
Brighton team talk
Just back from Labour conference and the second of the RSA’s 2009 round of fringe meetings. The Labour speaker was Peter Mandelson who was in and out pretty quickly as his conference speech was this afternoon. Once again it was standing room only – which means of the five fringe events we have done in recent times every one has been full.
It is fascinating having Robert Chote from the IFS and Ben Page from Ipsos MORI on the RSA platform. Robert knows what must be done to get the public finances back on track and Ben knows what the voters are willing to accept. We could hand Government over to the two of them: the only problem being that – according to the RSA poll – there isn’t any overlap between the two answers!
I couldn’t help noticing an uncanny similarity between the mood and message in Brighton and the half time team talk given by the coach of my son’s football team yesterday morning. Balham Blazers under 17s were 3-0 down, mainly due to some goalkeeping howlers. The coach said what he had to say. ‘We’ve made mistakes. But we played the best football and we can still win. If we pick up our heads and our game we can still do this. We just have to put the other team under pressure, then we’ll see what they are really made of ’. Some of his message got through but you could see the players found it hard to believe their luck could change. And however much they tried to comfort him, it was impossible to hide that they had lost confidence in the keeper.
I’ve been asked not to use this blog for political commentary so I won’t explore Labour’s message except to say that it is just as predictable as the coach’s. Everyone on the conference floor is pretty much sticking to it and Labour strategists will hope that it gets through to the voters despite all the other distractions.
With Labour adopting a more traditional left of centre perspective it will be interesting to see how the Conservatives respond next week. Will they occupy the fairly large gap on the centre right now left vacant by the other parties (the position successfully adopted in Germany by Angela Merkel) or continue to try to occupy the centre?
By the way, despite a plucky second half performance Balham Blazers under 17s lost 4-1
PS I was, of course, delighted to see that I appear 55th in the Daily Telegraph list of the most influential people on the British left. An old friend came up to me in Brighton; ‘Matthew’, he said ‘it’s so unfair that you are 55th’. Before I could modestly reassure him that these things really don’t matter to me, he went on ‘no one in the Labour Party has thought of you as being on the left for years’. Too true, comrade, too true.
Virgin donations
In Liverpool this morning to speak at the autumn conference of ACEVO (the organisation for third sector CEOs). Preceding me was Jo Barnett, Executive Director of Virgin Money Giving (VMG). This is a new not for profit business set up by Richard Branson with the explicit aim of challenging the dominance of JustGiving. It is a big venture, with VMG having agreed a multi million pound lead sponsorship of the London Marathon for the next five years.
Currently JustGiving has over 90% of the online donations market. It has been a powerful innovation and people see it as a simple and reliable way to raise and give money. This year the RSA gave the Albert Medal for Social innovation to JustGiving co-founder Zarine Kharas. But JG faces two criticisms.
First that it makes a profit and that to do so it charges fees that are too high (5% on donations and gift aid I think)
Second, that it has not been able to increase the share of online giving as a proportion of overall donations to charities (running at only about 2% apparently)
VMG aims to restrict itself to a fee of 2% on donations and nothing on gift aid. It says it will do this by being more efficient and through charging for advertising on sponsor sites.
It will be interesting to see how VMG does. A few years ago I was on the board of the Lottery operating company, Camelot. Richard B was forever criticising Camelot for being profit making and saying that he could do a better not for profit job. But when it came down to it he never persuaded the National Lottery Commission that his case stood up. The Camelot profit is tiny in comparison to the costs of the Lottery and presumably those awarding the franchise were unconvinced that an arm of the Virgin empire could do better.
JustGiving takes a bigger slice of donations than Camelot does of lottery sales so the case for a not for profit makes more sense. Also, it must be good to have some competition; it may make JG more creative and drive down their fees.
Having said which, I’m not sure I would want my donations site plastered with advertisements for Virgin credit cards or whatever.
What won’t convince me is an argument that it is inherently better to have a not for profit company providing this service. It’s not the governance or form of ownership that matters – but the quality and cost of the service.
The internet society – time to get real
The internet is neither neutral nor inherently liberating. It operates in the context of existing social conventions and power structures. Its impact is real but often subtle and unexpected.
Yesterday we had a fascinating event with Evgeny Morozov, a US based expert on how political regimes use technology. Contradicting the lazy cyber utopianism of many politicians and commentators, he showed how authoritarian regimes like China, Russia and Iran are using the internet as a tool of reaction and repression. From Russia’s experiments with e-consultation, to the Iranian and Chinese regimes using crowd sourcing to identify dissidents, to the use by various regimes (including Israel) of private companies to manipulate online polls and Google searches, bad people in high places are proving as good at using the internet as good people blogging for freedom from their basements. Indeed, these regimes have been as good at using the internet to foster nationalism and pro-regime extremism among the young as the opposition have at mobilising protest.
Morozov also questioned the idea that the internet encourages democratic engagement showing, for example, that Chinese young people are even more likely than those in the West to use the internet primarily for entertainment (adult or otherwise). It is as much a new opium for the people as a catalyst for democratic awakening.
By coincidence, just before Evgeny’s talk, I had a fascinating meeting with Matt Locke (FRSA) who makes up half the tiny but brilliant team at C4 commissioning multimedia youth content. He has some very interesting insights about how young people operate online and I am hoping we can get him to the Society soon to discuss the pros and cons of trying to encourage young people into more creative and constructive online engagement.
Then, this morning, I read a Guardian piece by Jon Henley which suggested that a large part of the explanation for the current crop of court cases and press stories involving teacher-pupil relationships is the way that remote communication (through SMS, e-mailing and social networking) had enabled much more contact (much of it unwelcome) out of school hours.
The web is changing culture, relationships and organisations. Its effects are real and important. Sometimes they are good and sometimes not. The exaggerated claims of those who say the internet is inherently a destroyer of organisations and hierarchies or that it is bound to lead to greater democracy and collaboration are an unhelpful distraction from the important study of the internet’s real impact on real lives.
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