The Membership Project

Over the next couple of days we have the NCVO Membership Schemes Conference, followed by a team meeting ... so there will be a lot more here by the end of the week.
However, just to recap, the aim of the project is "to explore changes the social web and other factors may bring to groups and organisations ... and to "belonging" in a networked society".

As Simon Berry summarised here we see three strands of work emerging:  read more »

Megan and I met this morning and talked about the research dimension of this project. I've just updated the research page so you can see where we got to.

We also discussed the question of how to engage other key people in membership organisations in our discussions and thinking. I'm sure we'll have a chance to discuss more when we meet face-to-face in a couple of weeks' time, but for now I thought I'd just share our ideas as food for thought.

We know that in order to encourage people to participate there has to be a clear 'ask' and clarity about the terms of engagement. How about creating a series of boxes (or something) on the front page with the key questions we're interested in. So for example:  read more »

Writing a comment to Simon Berry's item here pretty much took care of this update. As I said there - after a deliberately messy start followed by some getting organised we are now becoming creative, and ready to move to production of work packages.

Simon reminded us that we aim to have project proposals completed by April 30 to put to funders and other potential collaborators. That's possible because different people's contributions are coming together. This was always meant to be a collaborative process - and it is working.  read more »

Here's the second update on this Membership Project. We've spend the last three weeks finding out more on what people are saying about social media and organisations, and developing project plans, as reflected in the project timeline.  read more »

Although we started this project by Throwing mud at the wall, I think we are coming to the point where we need to address the Cat Question, from Alice in Wonderland:

In other words, what and who is this project for, in the digital wonderland. We have said that it "explores how the social web and other factors are changing the ways in which we may belong to groups and organisations" - but we'll need to be more specific if we are to engage people, as we hope, in a collaborative exploration that produces something useful at the end. I've found two main strands emerging: one with a research focus, and the other around products and services. I think we want to end up with:  read more »

Here's the first round-up of how the Membership Project and the site has developed in our quest to "explore changes that the social web and other factors may bring to groups and organisations ... and to our ideas of belonging in an increasingly networked society". These updates will be archived here.  read more »

I've been thinking a lot about how we can get The Membership Project started in an open, innovative way, and coming up with a few ideas. Here's first thoughts:

1. The best way of doing things would be to have another team meeting and work through our objectives, the tasks, who does what, the milestones etc. But that would delay thing for a few weeks if we organised it face-to-face. We could try doing it synchronously online, but it would still take a bit of organising.  read more »