How do we measure the success of RSA networks?

Comments can get buried on a blog, so I think it is worth pulling to the top some points from the thread here. Justin Kirby has been throwing in some useful provocations ... Elizabeth said she had got great benefit from Fellowship and networking ... but has now removed her comment. Strange.

I said I thought that more help was needed for Fellows, particularly outside London, to connect ... and that a key issue was, as always, what's the purpose?

The issue as always is who benefits? Is RSA for staff, Fellows .. or making some beneficial change in the world? That's where leadership is needed, I think. Matthew has likened the RSA to the RAC of civic activism .... but I'm not sure that's how most Fellows see it.
I guess problems solved, rescues made would give some measure though.

Justin followed up with:

What I really really wanna know is how they plan to measure success. If Matthew T truly sees the RSA as being the RAC of civic activism then they are going to have to nail some kind of Social Impact Assessment/Evaluation Criteria to their mast or else its just more useless sloganeering.

In fact, I'd love to see what evaluation criteria was used to justify the funding of this initiative and where they are at as far as achieving their goals.

I'd also like to know whether some kind of Social Impact Assessment was part of their original funding proposal, because the likes of NING, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, would have been far more cost effect ways of facilitating a member meets member programme as would a decent bar/cafe at their HQ.

Any ideas on how we do measure success? Is it about helping Fellows network ... and/or making a difference in the world? NESTA commissioned an evaluation, and the interim report is here.
However, the final report was turned into lessons learned, so I don't think we have any final evaluation against funding criteria. Can anyone from RSA or NESTA help on that?
Update: just to make clear there is a full report, which you can download here and decide how far it is an evaluation.

RSA is "the RAC of civic activism" - Matthew Taylor

Part of the evaluation by NESTA - who funded development of RSA networks - involved video interviews and clips from events, and they've been promising for a while that these would go up online. Their site gives an interview with chief executive Matthew Taylor as a taster.

RSA - A new vision for the RSA from NESTA Connect on Vimeo.


Towards the end of the interview Matthew likens the RSA to a kind if civic RAC, where you might find some experts prepared to help you out with a problem.

One of the ways in which I characterised the RSA ... the model I had at the very beginning ... was I wanted us to be the RAC of civic activism.
When you needed a group of people, people like us, reasonably high powered people from different kind of of backgrounds, quite self confident people, with a set of skills, - and you needed a group of people to come together to solve a problem - ring the RSA.
Wherever they are, they are that kind of people and they have got that kind of network. That is ultimately my aspiration.

You can also hear what Matthew said at an OpenRSA event in October 2007 over here.

RSA - Setting the conditions from NESTA Connect on Vimeo.

On the NESTA vimeo account you can now find more videos, including this interesting explanation from Laura Bunt - who leads on RSA networks development - about how things were planned internally among department. Laura and Laura Billings from the Fellowship department will be giving us an update at the workshop on Thursday.
I'll be taking a camera, and hoping we can get a progress update on video. Written reports are fine, but I think that the videos by Eleanor Ford and Simone Jaeger give a far better idea of the vision and challenges of the past eighteen months.

Starting discussion on future RSA networking

Here's some of the issues those attending the workshop later this week want to talk about - please add a comment to this post if you have some of your own.

• Gathering lessons from the past eighteen months of development of RSA networks, and OpenRSA.
• Creative exploration of how RSA networking can develop in future.
• How to collaborate online in developing projects.
• Building working relationships with other professionals through RSA.
• Finding out what will be offered to Fellows by RSA in future - and what might be expected of them.
• Developing communication toolkits to help Fellows connect with each other and develop projects.
• The impact of social media on leadership.

About 30 Fellows, friends and RSA staff will be attending the workshop on February 19 - details here. There are a few places still available, and you can sign up here.
I've pulled together some background material here, about RSA network development over the past 18 months, and OpenRSA.
Laura Bunt and Laura Billings will introduce discussion from the RSA staff perspective;
Malcolm Forbes, who helped start OpenRSA, will give his view of developments; and we'll also hear from Eleanor Ford, who will give the main points from NESTA's study on the RSA/Fellowship and networks, offering the practical recommendations from the report.
NESTA supported RSA networks with £100,000 of funding, and their evaluation - by Sophia Parker and Eleanor - offers some valuable principles for networked organisations. Here's the summary from NESTA's site, where you can download the full report.

Principles for networked innovation

• Start with relationships not transactions
• Be clear about the invitation
• People need to be seen and heard
• Follow exciting leads
• The online presence is integral to the mission
• Understand patterns of participation
• Not every networked idea is a good idea
• Revel in reflected glory
• Let networked innovation models change the hierarchy
• Don’t lose the human touch when going to scale

Principles for managing disruptive change

• Embrace chaos
• Co-design change
• Prototype, incubate, learn
• Mix mavericks and managers
• Go beyond staff compliance

We've also posted the principles in more detail on our wiki.
We aren't aiming to set the agenda for the workshop beforehand, but it would be really useful to have a sense of what other's are interested in at this stage of RSA networking.
I'm particularly keen to explore how Fellows and staff might work together to develop communication toolkits, which add additional tools to those available on the main RSA networking site.
In order to help with that I've used Pageflakes to create a page where you can see feeds from all the main RSA blogs, and from Open RSA: you'll find it here.

Re-starting this blog

After the lively developments of RSA networks in early 2008, this blog has been quiet while a new online system has been installed on the new RSA site, and staff responsibilities have changed.
However, things are now warming up again with a workshop next week where RSA staff, Fellows and friends will collaborate to develop new ideas for the future. Event details here, and more in a later post on what ideas are emerging. You can see online discussion here and sign up to join in.
Over the past year RSA chief executive Matthew Taylor has increased his blogging, and RSA projects the Social Brain and Connected Communities have also launched blogs.
NESTA - who funded the RSA networks developments - have published lessons learned from programme evaluation.
There's a round-up of online resources here.
Now to more recent developments.