UPDATE 27TH JAN: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN MERGED WITH THE APRIL EVENT IN CHICHESTER AND WILL NOT BE TAKING PLACE
The first Regional Open Space event is being planned for Wednesday evening 6th February at Bedales School, Petersfield, Hampshire. This event is inspired by the event on the 22 November at John Adam Street and aims to create an opportunity for Fellows living in the area to start sharing ideas of how they would like the RSA network to benefit local communities and meet other Fellows. Bedales School have very generously offered the RSA the beautiful Olivier Theatre for this new event, which continues the RSA's innovative networks project.
The iniative is being arranged by the Chichester and Portsmouth LEG (Local Events Group), which forms part of the South Central Regional Committee. John Adam Street are enthusiastically supporting this event with practical advice and RSA representatives will be attending. It is intended that the evening include an on-screen demonstration of the RSA Networks new site.
This event will be followed by a further Open Space event in Chichester on the 7th April.
Invitations will be going to Fellows week commencing 21 January for postcodes in a catchment around Petersfield. If you would like to attend either event please contact Greg Slay or myself, Tessy Britton.
UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS BEEN MERGED WITH THE APRIL EVENT IN CHICHESTER AND WILL NOT BE TAKING PLACE. ALL THOSE REGISTERED WILL BE CONTACTED DIRECTLY.
You can connect to this event and comment on the RSA Networks site *here* . We would be extremely interested in further developing an on-line and off-line forum for sharing experiences of these newly created regional opportunities in order to collaborate on developing unique methods and ideas for connecting Fellows to communities and local projects.
5 comments:
Tessy - what a fantastic initiative and possible model for supporting Fellowship outside London. You wrote:
"We would be extremely interested in further developing an on-line and off-line forum for sharing experiences of these newly created regional opportunities in order to collaborate on developing unique methods and ideas for connecting Fellows to communities and local projects". How could we help on that? Will there be an opportunity on the day for Fellows to co-design the sort of forum they would like? Here's how we did that with Civil Servants.
The RSA Networks site is fine for flying ideas, but is suspect something more fine-grain is needed for local networking. Glad to share ideas ... maybe with a cross over to our re-inventing membership project
Thanks David for your enthusiastic response! We are really excited about it. I am hoping that as part of the development on the Networks website that some sort of 'groups' function will be considered to enable more local RSA Fellow and non-Fellows to cluster... hopefully with a view to looking at working together on a more granular level in their communities.
Currently in the regions many Fellows don't know other Fellows very much, and getting to know one another has to be starting point. By building understanding and trust and making whatever processes and methods very human in focus, it is much more likely that the network will evolve into a really dynamic organism.
I will have a good look the re-inventing membership project you mention with great interest :)
Tessy - I couldn't agree more that "getting to know one another has to be starting point ... it is much more likely that the network will evolve into a really dynamic organism".
This perhaps gives an additional clue on Andy's question about next steps in development of the system. If we need relationships before ideas, and ideas before projects ... then we should have easy routes in through people and topics, not just projects as at present. Projects will then emerge from the dynamic organism.
We have a meeting with RSA staff on Wednesday about the membership project - so more news after that.
Hi Tessy,
This looks like a great idea, especially as the whole RSA Networks project really makes more sense for fellows UK and world-wide.
With regards to the idea for a new 'groups' feature, well - it's in production.
The beta version 2 of the site will allow the creation of groups by skill/experience, and by topics of interest extending the existing user tag feature. It should be easy to find other people and projects using these two taxonomies, you'll see how when we get it up and running in the coming week.
Another feature that should be useful for regional groups is the 'nearby fellows' page, which will map and list your geographically proximate fellows.
I hope those sound like useful additions to the system - they come along with many other tweaks and improvements suggested by users of the site.
I hope to publish a full list and breakdown tomorrow, there are just (as always) a few issues to resolve before I can state unequivocally that we can implement them all.
Cheers,
Saul.
Saul - thanks so much for the information. Sounds fantastic, can't wait. =:-)
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