I’m delighted that NCVO and RSA have come up with a way to explore the future of membership organisations in a world where people may feel that paying subscriptions isn’t always worthwhile if they can easily get information, advice and connections online. It’s an issue that Simon Berry and I started to pursue with others through The Membership Project , with initial RSA and NCVO support. We generated a lot of discussion, but found it difficult to follow through without more funding. We were both interested in working on specific practical projects, and our

Membership is by no means a new fad. However, before the study quoted in the WSJ gets your board all fired up to institute a membership program, there are words of caution you may want to heed. Caution #1: Membership Membership dues are paid annually. Memberships tend Oh no, here it comes. When times are tough for Community Benefit Organizations, a single article like this one (originally from the Wall Street Journal, then quoted at the Chronicle of Philanthropy) can be enough to send boards and EDs scurrying to get ahead of the latest new fundraising

The following text, The State of the Alternative Exchange Movement , by Thomas Greco, is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of our book of the Week: The End of Money and the Future of Civilization . 8220;Exchange alternatives are not entirely new. Indeed, in times past, there were many different exchange media that circulated simultaneously—and for a time, each bank was responsible for Please note the book can be ordered here . Thomas Greco: “Exchange

Lessons for any blogging boss of a membership organisation: you can’t be half-hearted about social media. Over at the RSA another blogging boss, Matthew Taylor, is doing rather better in lively exchanges following a thoughtful post about the challenges facing membership organisations. A expect the CILIP exchanges to run and run. Bob McKee, CEO of CILIP - Chartered Institute of Library and and information Professionals - gets a roasting from Phil Bradley on a post “From the chief executive’s desk” which starts: There’s some twittering

Allen Butcher starts his essays on Communal Economics and on Time-based Economics , by stressing that sharing is NOT exchanging : Communal economics involves forms of time-based, plenty-paradigm economies while barter and monetary systems are forms of exchange economies. 8220;Time dollars” and “service credits” are also exchanged hour-for-hour as forms of “labor exchange,” while in communal economies A. Barter systems and local currencies have been used to increase local self-reliance, as well as to help monetary economies out

Centralised community: This is a diagram representing a traditional online community with a clear boundary defined by membership and related login. This model serves only a membership who are happy to log in to a central site, keep all their conversations therein, and, most importantly, dedicate 100% of their attention to the community. It has similar boundaries (membership) to the centralised community, but they Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral Network and community design and facilitation; event design and facilitation. Blog About Ed Projects Services Three types of community November 16, 2007 – 10:20 am This is a brief overview of three community models.

social network is “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.” final question to consider is which type of membership activity and where (giant component, middle layer or among singletons) most affects an online network? Group formation in large social networks: Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design Register or Log In Search Stories Ideas Forums People Events Jobs About February Issue, 2009

MySite: much cleaner UI, less form-like, softer blending of UI elements, typical stuff (name, presence, phone, etc), can use Business Connectivity Services to bring in HR data etc, free-form text for entry of ad-hoc information, redesign of middle section of MySite - tabs for organization, colleagues, tags, memberships etc) - supported by privacy settings. team site wiki:  as people move from documents to web pages as medium of information exchange, need to support this within team sites - rich text editor ... Notes from Christian Finn, Director, Social Computing 13 sessions

More about David Wilcox and also how the blog started . Search WWW [link] Archives April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 Blogroll Andrew Brown Beth Kanter Bev Trayner Dave Pollard David Miliband Johnnie Moore

Hell because in our multi-membership, we dilute relationship, become overwhelmed, or fall into group mind narrowness by only associating with those who think like us  - just because we can. After an hour or so, children were exchanging information about their seat locations, and were getting up and saying hi. This afternoon I’m spending a half hour on a Skype video conversation to share a bit of how I use social media. I