More thoughts on small groups

March 3, 2011 by · 10 Comments
Filed under: The RSA 

So, more rather superficial thinking about small groups (for deeper ideas I can strongly recommend the comments I have received on earlier posts this week).

First some stats:

From the NCVO, a fascinating overview of participation in the UK today – the top line of which is that not much is changing. There is quite a lot of participation but it tends to be dominated by a core group of multiple participants, it is socially skewed towards the middle class and the retired. The paper has a useful distinction between public participation (engaging with the state in some form or another), social participation (engaging with other people), and individual participation (personal acts aiming to achieve social change, such as donating to a good cause).

Then some statistics from our lunchtime speaker, and author of Together, Henry Hemming on the rise of small groups, but not ones – as he emphasised  to the RSA audience – primarily based on locality. Henry is a great speaker and he is right, I think, to offer a balancing thesis to the assumption that social capital is in terminal decline (although I am not too sure about his apparently self-selecting methodology!) . 

This material has given rise to one thought. On the one hand, Hemming and others seem to agree with the idea I described yesterday that about a dozen is the best size for many small groups; big enough to have a range of people, capacities and perspectives, small enough for everyone to get to know each other and all contribute. On the other hand, the best way to increase the benign social impact of small groups is for not so much to increase the aggregate number but to get those which exist or naturally emerge to develop in various ways; to move from oppositionalism to creativity, to widen their focus and ambition, to be more inclusive and diverse, to connect to other similar groups to enable learning and network effects. But how do we balance the need to keep it small and to have momentum?

This suggest a new model in which growth and development comes from a continuous process of small groups spawning other small groups and doing this through the generation of interlaced networks rather than hierarchies. I am sure my learned readers will come up with historical and contemporary examples of just this form or organisation (and maybe why it failed). I think Transition Towns might be just such a model? And maybe if any FRSAs are reading you might comment on whether and how such a model could be applied to the RSA Fellowship?  

I’m off now to do an after dinner speech (at which I am pretty terrible so wish me luck) and then to a rather weird but fascinating Editorial Intelligence event in Portmeirion (which is also weird and fascinating).
Have a great weekend and keep commenting

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Can the RSA help close the digital divide ?

April 29, 2009 by · 39 Comments
Filed under: The RSA 

I am speaking this afternoon at an NCVO conference on civil society leadership. If I get the chance to talk about what we are trying to do at the Society, I’ll describe how I see the challenge of Fellowship engagement.

There has been some progress over the last year or so but from a relatively low base of activity. The challenge lies in trying to doing three things at once:

• lower the barriers to wider and more ambitious engagement
• grow the capacity needed for the Fellowship to be creative, networked and outward looking
• develop the right content propositions; what is it the Fellowship could actually do to make a difference?

The third of these has often felt the most difficult. Which is why a light went on in my head at yesterday’s National Digital Inclusion Conference.

I was really impressed by the many people I met involved in social media and community websites. As I  have said in previous posts, the best of these sites really add capacity and strength to a community.  HarringayOnline, for example, has 1500 local people signed up to a site focussing on just one ward. 

But running theses sites is in most cases a hand to mouth labour of love.  This is where the RSA  Fellowship with its skills, resources and connections could make a difference. So – working I hope with William Perrin whose Talk About Local initiative aims not only to support existing sites but to help set up hundreds more – my idea is to organise a training day at John Adam Street and to bring together enthusiastic Fellows from around the country with the mission of twinning up with existing sites or developing new ones. We’ll even try to find some money to provide a small start up funding pot.

On-line community media is a good thing in itself, giving people information and making connections.  But more exciting is the way in which this new collaborative infrastructure could provide the basis for a whole range of face to face initiatives. Not only is a very small portion of the country served by a good community web site but most sites that exist are only scratching the surface of what they could achieve once they have built up a significant local following.   

I’m never sure how many Fellows read this blog but I would be fascinated to hear what they – or anyone else – thinks.

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Coming clean about membership

February 19, 2009 by · 32 Comments
Filed under: The RSA 

Yesterday afternoon saw me in the City leading an NCVO seminar on the future of membership organisations. (I arrived late and, given the name of the venue and the use of blogging and twittering in the seminar, was open to the accusation ‘Taylor couldn’t organise a mash up in The Brewery’.)
 
From what was a lively session – part of an NCVO/RSA project on membership – three points particularly struck me:
 
1)      Organisations find it very hard to be honest about the task of managing and engaging with their membership. It was only after I was very open about how challenging this is at the RSA that other delegates started to open up. It turns out that the issues are very similar in many different types of organisations. Change involves simultaneously confronting barriers (such as activist capture, cumbersome governance and stuffy inward looking cultures), building capacity (finding new ways – particularly on-line – of engaging people) and developing new content propositions (what are we asking members to do and how can we make this an attractive and rewarding proposition).
2)      Creating a new culture and set of expectations among members and in the relationship between the centre and localities can be a major, time consuming and resource intensive change management process. Many organisations lack the confidence or resources to confront the issues, so they are continually brushed under the carpet.
3)      Very few new charities are creating democratic or quasi democratic membership structures. New philanthropists and social entrepreneurs have seen the hassle that can be involved and tend to plump for much leaner and more centralised forms of governance.
 
I have written in the past about the need for what I called ‘a new collectivism’. More than ever we need organisations that engage people not just in signing petitions or raising money but in shaping the way the organisation works and what it tries to achieve; this is practical citizenship. But the cultures of too many membership organisations are unsuited to modern expectations and challenges and can be off-putting to, for example, younger people. That’s why this NCVO/RSA project is important not just for the organisations directly involved but for the health of wider civil society.

For more information about the NCVO/RSA project, please contact either Katherine Hudson (katherine.hudson@rsa.org.uk) or Megan Griffith Gray (Megan.Griffith@ncvo-vol.org.uk).

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