Comments on: Fellowship – some big questions

By: The RSA mission and brand - responding to the debate : Matthew Taylor’s blog

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:31:07 +0000

[...] the development of the Fellowship Charter, is helping to surface some of these tough dilemmas. I described three last week of which the most challenging is making engagement with Fellows a powerful way to achieve social [...]

By: David Wilcox

David Wilcox — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:17:17 +0000

Hi Laura
1. Engagement face-to-face: I’ve confirmed that http://www.thetuttleteam.com/ are keen to develop ideas for Tuttle-type formats. Worth a chat with @lloyddavis? Tuttling tomorrow Friday 10am at an in-the-park venue http://bit.ly/XeeDi … all welcome, of course.
2. Engagement online: I’m conscious I’m taking over MT’s commenting …. is there, could there be, another RSA open space online for this sort of discussion? Just a simple WordPress blog for Fellows as an interim measure? We have the regional Ning sites, but nothing central outside a login. I love Matthew’s blogging, but we can only comment, and not initiate.

By: David Wilcox

David Wilcox — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:03:58 +0000

To complement Marco’s deliberative process, how about a joint staff-Fellows innovation zone to develop ideas on what RSA is for/can do …. unfettered by 250 years of organisational silt … ahem, tradition. Inspired by this http://bit.ly/WEovt (h/t @edmittance, @jackmartinleith)

By: Marco Verweij

Marco Verweij — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:15:46 +0000

Hi Matthew:

It seems to me that your twin goals of giving the RSA a clearer profile and involve the Fellows more can be reached in a relatively straightforward manner. This process would start with the RSA leadership and Fellows outlining a (perhaps small) set of concrete and pressing social ills in the UK. The next step would then be organizing extensive deliberations among interested Fellows (and perhaps other people as well) as to which governmental policies, NGO activities and forms of (social) entrepreneurship would seem to solve these ills in an efficient, equitable, effective and widely acceptable manner. In the course of that process, it should/may become clear as well which role, if any, the RSA could play in any implementation phase. Increasing the deliberative quality of political debate in the UK would be a very important role the RSA could play, and would give it a clear profile. (I do believe that bifurcated nature of the UK parliamentary system is not always conducive to reasoned, deliberative debate – and that’s putting it politely). Using its extensive network of interested, knowledgeable and motivated Fellows to do much of the deliberating would rope the Fellows in as well. In social science, quite a few techniques for such deliberative processes have been developed. One description of such a process can be found in chapter 8 of the ‘Clumsy Solutions for a Complex World’ book that Mike Thompson and I co-edited (the chapter on ‘Floods and Fairness in Hungary’). But for this purposes perhaps the most suitable tool is ‘deliberative polling’, developed by Stanford professor James Fishkin (see: http://cdd.stanford.edu/polls/docs/summary/). The conclusions of such deliberative processes could then be written in reports published by the RSA – to be picked up (or, of course, ignored) by the government, political parties, social entrepreneurs, etc.

Cheers,

Marco

By: Richard Katz

Richard Katz — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:04:36 +0000

Matthew

Having read yesterday and today’s posts, it might help to focus minds if you could answer in just a few words ‘What is the RSA for?’

Many thanks and best wishes

Richard