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Really interesting point Pete.

It points to one of the big elephants in the room when we talk about membership as participation - often we want to measure how much members engage or participate. Since engagement is hard to measure, we use something simpler - consumption. It's a real risk, particularly when we are looking at this from a policy perspective which understands membership as a short-cut to health wealth and happiness (aka high social capital levels on many measures)...

Matt, Dave, many thanks for your very interesting thoughts.

It’s telling that between you, you point to a tension: is Labour a values-based movement (which by its nature works best in opposition), or a membership organisation with a fee given for a benefit (such as voting rights or a magazine). It is of course both – and this is where tensions come from.

Dave, your points on oppositionalism are interesting, and I think the question here is (in part) what does success look like. You ask about cases of campaigning groups who have achieved victory and I think this is where political parties fail, often at the first rhetorical hurdle. If we compare something like Amnesty, Greenpeace or the Fawcett society, even with legislative victories they are able to assert that there are still many more battles to be won and use successes as a spur to keeping and driving up membership. On the other hand, political parties are so focussed on gaining electoral power that they fail adequately to convey that forming a government is the beginning rather than the end of political struggle. The conservative party’s structural difference between opposition and government strongly reflect this.

Incidentally, Progress has recently called for a radical reduction in membership fees for joining members as part of a drive to reinvigorate the membership. It would be interesting to know how many of the new members are indeed new members and how many are rejoiners.

Barney, Kathryn, I think your comments on the role of the expert are extremely interesting.

An argument I have been making (for example in the forthcoming Future Focus 8 is that membership organisations are - like the old-school newspapers - in a strong position to attract people who are willing to pay. As sources of information grow and grow, we are going to want to know what to trust, and are likely to be willing to pay for such information. As consumers, we are currently in a very welcome position where even authoritative providers offer information and services for free, but with the first movers - such as Murdoch's group - starting to create paywalls, this is unlikely to last long.

There's a lot of coverage of this area - take a look at http://delicious.com/katherinehudson/futureofnews for [an incomplete list of] links to useful articles.

A further update - an example of a successful paywall for local news just announced by the Guardian.

* update *

Particularly interesting perhaps for local and regional infrastructure organisations is the relationship of local news (I wrote a bit on hyperlocal news here) to its readers.

Today local newspaper group Johnstone Press has started trialling a subscription model for its online content, with either trails to online news behind a 'paywall' or only limited amounts online, moving the reader to the paid-for hard copy.

Taking a look at the 'Have your say' part of the BBC's website on this story will give an indication of what some parts of the population feel about such models - perhaps early market research for membership organisations thinking of adopting similar ideas?

Many thanks for your comment David,which exposes the problem of writing online - namely, one does so on the basis of limited research and then releases it to an audience including people who have written the book on the subject. I've read - and found extremely interesting and useful - your posts on both problems of and designs for personalised media.

I think what I was trying to get across was that as we change our reading habits we need to be aware of the fact that we are reading a subsection of information, filtered through a lens. It's not something that should concern or worry us unessarily, but that dangers come at a population level when we start reading - for example - a Littlejohn or Monbiot article and take it as unopinionated fact, and the same applies with our own reading when these come from limited sources.

(NB if you're following the links to David's blog and are confused by the dates, it's because he uses the Long Now dating system, designed to get us to think in longer timescales [even further than 3s4...] and also to avoid a technical glitch due to hit in 8000 years time).

Thanks for your comment Claire - and your question!

It's a very tough area. I think it's a model - not necessarily the one to go with. I think the thing these trends suggest is that we cannot (as large membership organisations) cross our fingers, shut our eyes and hope it will be ok). It seems to me that there are two main options:

1. Adopt the free membership/paid services model, and accept that you will need to reduce costs if there is a drop in income, but plan for this income to rise again and end up higher than it would otherwise have been.
   1. Create benefits that are so valuable that people want to pay for them through membership, or in other words create something people want to be a member of. In this sense, it is the intangible offer (the sense of belonging and identity I referred to in my earlier post) which is what we choose to pay for - something that 'money can't buy'...

I'd be interested to know what you think...

Update:

Future Gov have now posted Emer Colman's excellent presentation (and not just because of the Wire reference) on the future shape of local government. Take a look here. Slides 2 and 7, both comparing 'traditional' to newer, more communicative, forms of government, are particularly interesting/useful.

Further to the above, CooperativesUK, the umbrella body for cooperative groups, has announced a rise in the number of members of cooperatives "by 4.5% to 11.3 million people (one in five of the population)", alongside a 5% year-on-year rise in profits.

While a lot of financial growth seems due to strong presence in the grocery market, there has also been a development within the financial market, through the merger of Co-operative Financial Services and Britannia Building Society. Since this was voted in by the Building Society's members, this suggests a democratic movement in response to disatisfaction with traditional banking models and a perception of their being responsible for the credit crunch-led recession.

The growth in the model suggests an increasing appetite for mutualism and collectivism as models of shared ownership, which has positive implications for interest in membership organisations more broadly. However, it also suggests that membership that doesn't offer real benefits or power might be an increasingly less attractive offer.

You can find the full report here.

One other question - is Twitter up to the increase in traffic? This article in techcrunch points out that twitter has had to disable some of its features in order to keep up with demand for the twitter search functionality in a day of big high-profile obituary news. It will be interesting to see whether twitter is robust enough to deal with the high expectations of its users and potential users. But as this editorial in the same blog suggests events are increasingly being reported second hand without attribution in the mainstream press, so the traffic on twitter and other online sites is only set to rise.

There's an interesting post by a former colleague and very perceptive analyst of social media, Matt Rhodes. Here, he looks briefly but coherently at the different characteristics (and therefore best times to use) of facebook-like connections and twitter-like following.

Less blue, more rainbow?

The Independent today summarised its poll which shows the Conservatives as having lost a great deal of ground to a spread of minority parties due to the increasing mistrust borne out of the expenses scandal (more details of the survey are here). This would increase the likelihood of 'No Overall Control' councils.

In terms of Cabinet-level reorganisation, it will be interesting to see whether Darling can keep hold of his job, given the recent exposure of his expenses claims and the understanding that Brown is keen to replace him with Ed Balls. This seems relatively unlikely, as the party faithful are apparently mistrustful of the extend of Balls' own leadership ambitions, but were Brown to trust his own instincts, it would lead to a change in financial direction at the treasury and leave an opening in DCSF, both of which would impact on the sector.

As I mentioned in my comment on Megan’s blog post I too think that the value of social lending will continue to grow.

Rohan and everyone at NESTA Connect offered some interesting events around this question earlier this year and the results of their work can be found on the webank website – recommended! I was particularly interested in how (as with many online social networks) there was a heavy debt to traditional models (see for example, the ROSCA-based Kubera): this seems again to be an example of online technologies facilitating a move away from institution-led systems to more personal and social models of [economic] interaction.

This budget is troubling, because it offers a short-termist psychological response to recession rather than a rational longer-term answer.

In practice this means a flurry of cliches, with short termist attitudes of battening down the hatches and firefighting taking precedence over the longer-term view. Continued low-level investment in infrastructure (a stitch in time saves nine…) is ignored in favour of expensive emergency interventions . This is most glaring in the real-term drop in infrastructural investment – which will have a noticable effect on the third sector in terms of grant allocation, whilst simultaneously putting more pressure on the sector in terms of increased social need – being countered with the much-trumpeted Hardship Fund.

The one potential positive comes not from the state but the public: with interest rates so low, and depreciating real value of savings a genuine possibility, investment – particularly social or peer-to-peer investment – will seem an increasingly attractive option. And the increasing number of peer-to-peer finance models, particularly online, seem well placed to support this.