Technology News
Private actions, public consequences
What One Alfred Place can teach us about how to treat your membership in the age of social media.
The private members club One Alfred Place is a very nice institution. I’ve had delicious lunches, relaxed teas and friendly drinks there, and admired the congenial, professional atmosphere and the people I’ve met.
But there’s trouble in paradise: the new Chief Executive, Sharon Brittan, has been forced to publicly apologise after emailing members to tell them their memberships have not been...
Techie trends - flash in the pan or key tools for your work?
It’s the turn of the decade and predictions abound. The Evening Standard recently produced its version: what impact will technology be having on our lives in 2020 ? You’ll be able to control the TV with your mind, play games telepathically, and even have your fridge make your shopping list for you. Sounds like this will all make for a great weekend, but how is it also relevant for your working week?
The Power of your mind
How can using the power of your mind to control machines help you...
I am what I read?
For a while, my news mainly came from the RSS feeds I chose to come into my netvibes account. This was a form of personalising the news I received grouped into things more likely to interest me (so tabs for politics, culture, the third sector, technology etc) – still in the main from news providers and journals, but divided up by topic not source. Then I started to use my network on delicious to find my way to articles that friends and colleagues had bookmarked as being of interest. ...
Social media and membership organisations
The apparent threat (or opportunity) that social technology presents to membership organisations is summed up in the subtitle to Clay Shirky’s zeitgeisty book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of organizing without organizations. If ‘everybody’ can organise action by themselves (or rather, together), what possible reason is there for organisations to exist?
The first answer is, of course, that ‘everybody’ is not coming quite yet. Older people in particular – precisely those who,...
Teasing out the technology drivers
If I started a conversation with you by stating ...
online revenue, cloud computing, social media, ubiquitous connectivity, data handling, on-demand services & the real-time web
... besides looking at me askance, you'd probably assume I was talking about technology.
You'd be correct, but in fact these are just some of the most significant drivers we've singled out for further analysis from the 58 initial technology and internet trends we've spent the last month looking at here at 3S4.
58?
I know.
T...
Free: what membership organisations can learn from newspapers
Simon Jenkins wrote persuasively in yesterday’s Guardian about the future of the paper and of the newspaper model in general. I read it online, for free, here. It’s also in print, but that would have cost me 90p [the fact that I had to look this up exposes the last time I felt the need to buy a daily paper] and it’s this problem – "Why would you pay when you can get the same thing somewhere else for free?" – that he’s addressing.
And the answer he provides is simple – “ensure that "the...
Community in times of adversity
Coming together
There’s been a lot in the news recently about shares and markets, but what about the price of a different type of share? The Eden Project’s recent Big Lunch initiative puts a high value on community sharing. A slightly hamfisted connection there, or one with some credence? Billed as an event ‘to put a smile on Britain's face’, the support for the Big Lunch may have been because of its timing. Several of those commenting (see for example Steve Bridger’s piece) have drawn the...
Next left
Last night saw the launch of Open Left , Demos’ counter to its Progressive Conservatism project (outlined here by Natalie).
Much of the discussion seemingly hinged on language – James Purnell MP noted the faultlines in his party around questions of choice, and an important theme was the need to reclaim the language of the left (this was seen, particularly by Will Hutton, as an important counter to the BNP), particularly notions of fairness and an accurate and precise sense of what...
Ctrl+Alt+Delete for Britain
Yesterday I attended Reboot Britain, this year’s NESTA – funded successor to 2gether08. The event looked at “the challenges we face as a country and the new possibilities that a networked, digital world offers to overcome them” (from http://www.nesta.org.uk/reboot-britain/).
We are all familiar with the problems – and with many of the solutions. But there was also the odd new discovery, namely (for me) MixedInk, the White House’s tool for understanding population responses to policy. This...
Cooperation is better than conflict
Good news! Cooperatives UK has just reported a big rise in the number of registrations of new cooperatives registered this year (as reported in this Third Sector article).
Cooperatives (legally defined by that bastion of cooperation, Wikipedia as ‘a legal entity owned and democratically controlled equally by its members’) are one extreme of membership organisations (at the other end of the continuum would be a traditional company or charity model where membership is only paid lipservice). ...
