The main theme of the address from CEO Matthew Taylor at last night’s RSA AGM was Convening and Change – which further encourages me to think that the project a group of us pitched last week could contribute to the Society’s mission … and the RSA to ours.

In summary, I suggested at an RSA Ideas event that we could bring together some of the 8000 London RSA Fellows who are committed to social change, with community groups and networks developing bottom-up support systems to complement official centralised resources.
We are convening a co-design event in November, and developing online conversations and support. Here’s our work in progress document on the event structure, developed with Drew Mackie and Matt Scott.
I think our approach fits well with another theme highlighted by Anthony Painter, Director of the Action and Research Centre – think like a system, act like an entrepreneur – as well as past RSA work on Connected Communities.

What could be more systemic than co-designing civil society support systems? And we have certainly been entrepreneurial in developing a vision of London as a Networked City with modest resources.
Anthony was promoting the model of Cities of Learning – “an experimental place-based mobilisation of formal, non-formal and informal learning assets and resources”. That’s a good fit too. I think it will appeal to London Metropolitan University, who are hosting the event, and where I joined Matt last week to talk at the community work course he teaches.
The RSA has various systems for supporting Fellow-led projects, and I’ll follow up my initial enquiries about what might be on offer with a suggestion that we discuss how we can align with the ideas presented last night, as well as those of the community networks we are working with. I think there is potentially a good fit.
The full set of slides that I shot last night is here. I’m checking whether there is an official set, video, and scripts.
In summary, I suggested at an RSA Ideas event that we could bring together some of the 8000 London RSA Fellows who are committed to social change, with community groups and networks developing bottom-up support systems to complement official centralised resources.
We are convening a co-design event in November, and developing online conversations and support. Here’s our work in progress document on the event structure, developed with Drew Mackie and Matt Scott.
I think our approach fits well with another theme highlighted by Anthony Painter, Director of the Action and Research Centre – think like a system, act like an entrepreneur – as well as past RSA work on Connected Communities.
What could be more systemic than co-designing civil society support systems? And we have certainly been entrepreneurial in developing a vision of London as a Networked City with modest resources.
Anthony was promoting the model of Cities of Learning – “an experimental place-based mobilisation of formal, non-formal and informal learning assets and resources”. That’s a good fit too. I think it will appeal to London Metropolitan University, who are hosting the event, and where I joined Matt last week to talk at the community work course he teaches.
The RSA has various systems for supporting Fellow-led projects, and I’ll follow up my initial enquiries about what might be on offer with a suggestion that we discuss how we can align with the ideas presented last night, as well as those of the community networks we are working with. I think there is potentially a good fit.
The full set of slides that I shot last night is here. I’m checking whether there is an official set, video, and scripts.
Previously
- Pitching Connecting Londoners and co-design of civil society communications to an RSAideas session
- Joining up the dots to show OurWayAhead
- How to move TheWayAhead into the networked age by Connecting Londoners
- RSA Networked Cities aim to make tech serve citizens – let’s co-design with people and communities #RSACities
- Discovering how our work on Connecting Londoners can benefit from @thersaorg research into communities RSACities