Welcome to Scottish Fellows

The letter below has just gone out to all Scottish FRSAs - thanks to Louise Macdonald for organising.

.. so a big welcome to anyone looking in from north of the border (and elsewhere for that matter).

Do drop a comment here on how you would like to see networking improved, or any other topic. If you would like to author a blog post, just email admin@openrsa.net. You can also follow us on Twitter: explanation here

Dear Fellows,

Later this week a group of RSA Fellows and staff will be discussing future development of online networking and collaboration on projects, at a workshop in London. The OpenRSA group wants to extend the discussion to other regions and nations, and have posted an invitation to add ideas and issues on their blog

One of the ideas likely to be discussed is development of communication toolkits that help Fellows connect and collaborate by adding tools to those already available on the RSA networks site.

You find out more about OpenRSA here

http://openrsa.wikispaces.com

There's a webpage here that brings together all OpenRSA discussions, and feeds from RSA blogs

This is an excellent opportunity to engage at an international level in framing the way that RSA Fellows engage with each other and with the RSA.

Check it out!!

Judith Friedman
Outreach Coordinator, Scotland
RSA
+44 (0)750 088 5473
Judith.friedman@rsa.org.uk
www.theRSA.org

Skunkworks might speed RSA networking

Does progress on RSA online networking have to be slow - or could we help staff in speeding up developments? Over on the RSA networks site Mike Amos-Simpson writes in advance of Thursday's workshop:

Next week will be my first RSA event and despite this I already feel bogged down by how much mention is made of how long and slow the process has been - whether in fact there really is a process or if this is just something started on a whim and is now far off the radar. I wonder why a 250 year old tanker takes time to turn? If it has plenty of space and good drivers what's slowing it down? I know the discussions I've been involved in are biased towards change but there doesn't seem to be much discussion towards not changing (or is this happening elsewhere?).

Meanwhile another recently-joined Fellow Dave Briggs has offered (see comment) to help with online tools, and floats the idea of "skunkworks" by posting his recent blog item on this topic to the OpenRSA Google group discussion.

In his blog post Dave is talking about small teams working in "stealth mode" within the public sector, to get things done. He attracts support from other public sector techies in comments.

Dave is one of the most enthusiastic and skilled people using social media to help public service innovation - so I'm delighted that he might help on the RSA front. RSA staff are open to the idea of a connection toolkits for Fellows - so we all seem to be on the same track. Hopefully on Thursday we can find a challenge or project around which to organise some skunkworking.

Here's Dave's post:

My good friend Robert Brook - one of the most active and entertaining people I follow on Twitter - was recently interviewed by Chris Dalby, and it was caught on video.

In it, Robert discusses the work he does at the UK Parliament as a ’skunkworks’ - for those that don’t know, this is:

typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of innovation

Sounds like fun. The origin of the phrase is from Lockheed Martin, in case you are interested.

This way of fostering innovation and getting things done - by taking it under the radar - is an interesting one and something I have heard from others, who have spoken about organisations having a ’splinter-cell’ for social media, or describing innovative web stuff being done as ‘black ops’.

It ties in with a lot of the stuff that Cisco’s Guido Jouret said at the Cisco Public Sector Summit that I covered late last year. Some of the things that can stife innovation in large organisations, said Guido, include:

• too much money - projects lose focus
• too much time - projects drift
• too many people - not everyone believes in the project as much as they need to
• too much love - people get too attached to failing projects and
• too much hate - jealousy elsewhere in the organisation kills projects

As a result, innovation projects have limited budgets, timescales, small teams, spend a lot of time in ’stealth mode’ (skunkworks?) and people on teams are kept close.

A lot of the good work that goes on in the public sector with the web happens on the quiet, guerilla style. If thing are really going to change, then this needs to stop and we need these projects out in the open, not to have people worried about talking about them openly.

However, that needs a culture shift and it might not happen soon. In the meantime, we need to get stuff done, and if it has to happen in a skunkworks style, then so be it.

Update: Posting a comment to Dave's skunkworks blog post led to ponder what to call activities on the edge, getting stuff done in a challenging way. Badgerworks?

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.