OpenRSA.....

The RSA is the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce and 'works to remove the barriers to social progress'. It is however a "members only" club. The OpenRSA group is facilitating member/non member networks as well as the use of social media within the RSA (Yours truly is not a member, but got interested in what this group was trying to do after reading a post about it from Ian Delaney and joined the Facebook group).

Anyway, this was a 1/2 day workshop to look at how social media can be used by and for the RSA. It is an organisation that is in the process of changing itself, so it was interesting to think about how social media can be used in such a workshop environment.

The first session was about how to use social media, and the various working parties came up with a useful composite model - in essence an "Intellectual sharecycle” using:

- appropriate tools – "dating" profiles a la facebook for member locations but more interactive comms than Facebook uses for comms, projects.

- Use "wikinomics" – leverage the power of networks, members as resource networks, as much as individuals

- Use this to drive the idea space, ideashare, discover and stimulate – coalesce around ideas. Also use Social media tools around the various conversations (about ideas & projects)

Issues to be managed are:

– Info overload, too much stuff

- Importance of ensuring offline is represented - Reaching older/offline members and working with them

- Don’t rely on FB – not perfect, not forever

Tip of hat to Bill Thompson for these notes. The second session was a "select your topic and go host it" style, we talked about tools required for the OpenRSA to work. The bigger discussion of course turned out to be around "what do you want this all to do", and that turns out to be to allow members (and others) to find kindred spirits and coalesce around proposals for action. And that, fundamentally, is about creating and engaging communities of interest, prioritising competing projects, and securing resources. Interesting discussion, classic conflicts emerged between:

- Functionality vs Ease of Use
- Completeness vs Complexity
- Facilitated Service vs Self Regulation
- Push vs Pull information of people's interests.
- Trust (fewer) vs open-ness (many)
- Export data to other platforms vs platform for importing diverse data

As well as the technical / operational discussions, other issues raised were:

- How to judge project desirability - and potentially secure resources - some very creative ideas including Seedcamp style pitching, "wisdom of crowds" voting, and - simplest approach - see how many people sign up to it and how much activity there is)
- How to project manage various projects online
- How to facilitate trust in the network, and reward contributory behaviour.

All good questions, and much food for thought for the next session one hopes....

Postscript - vodcast of Matthew Taylor, the RSA CEO's address to the group is here on blip.tv