So far, 2010 has been a bit slow off the starting blocks, stuck in a snowy rut, wheels spinning, going nowhere fast.

We moved house, we did Christmas, we went to Budapest, we got stranded. It was meant to be a long weekend in Hungary, but we nearly had a week. Our flight to Gatwick last Sunday night was cancelled with no spaces available until Wednesday. We were literally frozen out of the UK!

Now the thaw finally seems to be happening and iKH can get back to work. First off, a seminar for The Society of Organisational Learning, which you can read all about over on the Monkeys with Typewriters blog.

Happy New Year everyone - I’m sure it’ll be fabulous once we get our skates on!

The meeting has kicked off with a summary of responses to the feedback questionnaire which was circulated by temporary chairs Bob Porrer and Tessy Britton a few weeks ago.

13:29 A discussion about the key activities of the Council led by Tessy Britton: we’re in a development phase as a new council. We don’t know what the plan will be. Maybe we can review what’s working best in six months time. Which model should we adopt, centralised or distributed? The overall emergent strategy was along the lines of leadership being “distributed and co-ordinated, promoting high levels of activity and developing a flexible structure to support this activity.

Comment: we don’t want to set up a whole raft of things and have most of them burn out quickly.

Tessy: maybe we should make a decision about a broad way forward and discuss the detail later.

General opinion in the room is that the emergent strategy outlined above seems reasonable.

13.38: Point 2 on agenda: what should be the difference between elected and appointed Councillors?

Matthew Taylor: It’s right that elected and appointed reps should have exactly the same status. Ultimately, ideally, everyone will be elected. We are at a transitory stage where the RSA is trying to respond to the complaint from Fellows that they are not listened to.

13:45: Summary from Bob: all elected/ appointed reps from each region/ nation should co-ordinate response/ feedback to that region between themselves.

Item 3: Do we need a chair and deputy chair?

Overall vote: yes.

Discussion about how long these roles should last. Generally agreed that a year seems right in principle with Deputy chair automatically becoming chair after one year. Thereafter elections would only be held for deputy chair. Discussion about whether chair and deputy chair should automatically become trustees (there are two vacancies on the Trustee Board). General consensus is that they should be separate/ “uncoupled”).

13:51: Comment: I’m a bit worried about complete lack of reference to regional chairs. Will regional chairs be feeling a bit marginalised?

Bob: The exact nature of the regional network is being reviewed at present and we would hope regional chairs are actively involved in that.

Comment: do we vote for Council chair/ deputy chair by show of hands or secret ballot? What if incumbent isn’t working out?

What should the election process be? Proposal is that FC members should self-nominate. Today we hope to have the chair and deputy chair elected, and the two nominations to Trustee board decided. Michael explains the election process (which will be proportional representation rather than first past the post).

14:00: Three minutes per descision.

Co-ordination and advance preparation for meetings? Yes; papers to be circulated 2 weeks in advance.

Transparency: unconfirmed minutes will be made available on RSA website to all Fellows within ten working days of meeting. Minutes to be confirmed formally at the next FC meeting.

Live blogging: already addressed at start of meeting.

Comment: Issue between live blogging and confidentiality still not resolved.

Should future meetings of the FC be observed? Suggested that current situation of live blogging with non-attributed comments and people flagging up confidential items beforehand, plus minutes available on website, is a good middle-ground; agreed that we could try live streaming if there is genuine demand.

Tessy: if young people want to come and observe meetings at later date, that should be an option at chair’s discretion.

Comment: we don’t want to be in danger of taking ourselves too seriously!

Bob: to conclude, live blogging and open minutes are acceptable for now as we are in development stage, but this could change at later date.

Comment/question: is there information that the trustees have that the council should also have access to?

Discussion: Trustees have a governance role but Fellowship Council is different.

14:12: Communications between members of fellowship council: proposal that we have a regular email newsletter: all agreed.

Problem of people hitting ‘reply all’ button in communications: Andy Gibson pointed out that Google groups or Yahoo groups where people can manage their own settings might be a better way of communicating.

14:17: Frequency of meetings: agreed that three meetings in 2010 would be better than two. Possibly March, June and October (as opposed to April and October)?

Fellowship Council meeting attendees (from RSA) will include CEO, Director of Fellowship, Head of Fellowship networks, COO, Director of external affairs and Director of projects/ research.

Fellowship council operations - contents of slide tbc.

14:35: Break

14:45: Nominations for Chair and deputy chair.

Tessy Britton nominated for Chair - uncontested.

Tessy Britton elected.

3 candidates put themselves forward for Deputy Chair (everyone wants to work with Tessy).

5 candidates have been nominated for 2 positions as RSA Trustees (1 withdraws due to clash of interests - sorry, not sure what, I think they’re also standing as deputy chair maybe?)

14:50: 4 candidates for Board of Trustee nominations give reasons as to why they should be elected; elections held for Board of Trustee nominations.

14:57: 3 candidates for Deputy Chair give reasons as to why they should be elected; elections held for deputy chair.

15:00: Networks, groups & projects
How to use issues, interest forums/ groups and projects to engage and communicate with Fellows, knit the network and activate fresh activity. Julian Thompson, new director of projects, will give some ideas to open/ stimulate discussion.

Julian: RSA projects aim to achieve and realise human potential. Broadly, current projects focus on:

1. Learning and education
2. Enterprise
3. The arts and design as creative tools that help us reconceptualise the world and act in the world
4. Ideas around communities and citizenship: how to live as social beings

There’s an exquisite tension between keeping projects on right track and being creative.

Transformation of fellowship and transformation of projects are implicitly linked.

Examples of some recent RSA projects:

1. Redesigning support services for people with long-term drug problems.
2. Network maps: mapping bonds between people in a community: showing people where their local connections are; proving to them that there is a network (despite the fact that sometimes people feel alienated/isolated within a community) and showing that there are opportunities/ ways to get things done.

RSA projects going through stage of consolidation and transition both at same time. Reaching conclusions on several big, important projects, but also trying to engage more with Fellowship.

Ideally Julian prefers hub and spoke model: hubs of activity around the country; becoming more self-sustaining, and developing spikes of activity around each one.

15:21: comment: a seamlessness in projects sounds heartening but I don’t hear much about the regions. It seems there is a separation between regional committee projects and there are central John Adam Street projects. I’m in the London region and there’s a slightly semi-detached feeling for the regions. It’s not so much about establishing the hubs as about making sure the connections are there.

15:23: Bob: Yes there has been a disconnect, I agree. But communication is key in changing that.

Julian: I’d like an online space where we could connect better with fellows.

Vote for open forum rather than group discussion (as a time-saver).

15:28: election results: Paul Buchanan voted Deputy Chair

Nominations for trustee board: Zena Martin and David Archer

15:30: Discussion around achieving the aims outlined by Julian. How do we create very local interdisciplinary forums?

Comment: yes, you need an “aims” framework, but that should come out of interaction with the fellowship.

Julian: we’re doing a formal evaluation of the Open Minds project but in terms of learning from past projects, I don’t know how easy that is to do. How much cultural memory of projects is there among fellowship, for example, and how do we capture it?

Comment: in terms of knowledge management, managing knowledge is incredibly different, but people need sense of who’s the right person to ask. (Back to ongoing issue of the fellowship database and how great it would be to have one…Belinda promises this will happen at some point).

Comment: We need more benchmarking, especially now that we’re seeing a blurring of boundaries between public, private and third sectors.

Julian: all our projects are online; you can dip in and see exactly what we’re working on at the moment.

Comment: we need to find was of being more motivating; encouraging fellows out there to get involved in the JAS projects; and vice versa; there needs to be some other way than going into all the regional Nings. Is there a forward plan of project priority areas? The fellows and regions need to have some influence…we need more democracy and citizenship and joined up-ness, and some serious mapping of who the Fellowship is (in Wales we have very incomplete and outofdate information).

Comment (Stephen Coleman): great mistake is to separate communication from the project itself. The way you make things work is to have a communicative infrastructure. You need to have evaluation built in from the beginning. Topics don’t need to be *either* regionally-based or topic-based - can be both. How should we approach this? (1) describe problems in a way that neither the media or existing government would describe them (2) decide how to generate/ facilitate discussion effectively between 27,000 fellows of RSA - in a way that nobody else is capable of discussing this (3) inclusion: how do we include people affected by projects in a way that respects them and listens to them? If the RSA can work out ways of doing that, that would be incredible. These are three principles of an approach to projects that I would like to see.

Comment: a lot of lessons came out of RSA Networks project. What are the terms of engagement on RSA projects? These still aren’t clear. If I have a project I want to take to the RSA, how do I do that? Where is the transparency around RSA research?

15:50: Can’t we use the RSA lectures/ talks in a more dynamic way?

Belinda: in the new year, as well as fellows database, we are looking at doing a much more comprehensive mapping of the fellowship database. Next year we will have a seed fund to give money to fellows’ projects, which will be a great way of testing a lot of these issues.

Julian: important that everyone should note that the RSA no longer funds projects. All projects now are externally-funded - central government, private sector partners etc.

Comment: fellows want to meet local fellows - that’s the biggest thing that came out of a recent south-west regional meeting. Many fellows see the regional committees as blockers rather than enablers.

Belinda: fellows are starting up their own networks all over the world: we’ve had a group start up in Singapore, for example.

15:59 Discussion around views on new fellowship charter.

Laura Billings: the biggest thing about feedback has been the lack of feedback, the lack of engagement; there’s been confusion around the purpose of the charter; on the plus side, we’ve been consistently told by fellows that they want a charter; my main reason for bringing it back to Council is that the charter is really important in embedding the current cultural shifts within the RSA. We need to take it forward to present to the AGM in 2010; it needs to be redrafted. It does need to be a spur to action; we need to find out what works for fellows; is there anyone who wants to form a smaller working group?

Comment: there really is too much confusion about what this fellowship charter is. We’ve got a royal charter. What’s this one for? I personally dont see why we need a second charter, we have a charter, and we are quite adrift from that charter already. The project we should be doing as a council is the RSA - what is the RSA? This should be our first project. And from that project, other projects should emerge.

Matthew: we have a Royal Charter that was written 255 years ago. We have tested our current work against that charter and it is broadly in agreement. The Fellowship charter is a way to be clear about what fellowship means and the expectations that fellows have of each other. The Royal charter is one that is difficult to change; the Fellowship charter is expected to be a living document.

Comment: is it a cultural document, intended to inspire, or is it an operational document, that will be used, for example, to exclude fellows, to tell them why they’re not being funded etc?

Comment: I think people think, well, this all sounds very well, but what does it mean in operational terms.

Matthew: We’ve been engaged in this process for some time; many years ago fellows said that they felt they weren’t being asked to do enough; there was a feeling that fellowship should be a richer, thicker, more content-full thing; the idea of a charter emerged organically from that; fellowship is a donation, not a fee.

Comment: can we call it something other than a ‘charter’?

16:13: Working groups: everyone is asked to (preferably) volunteer for at least one of the following:

1. Regions
2. Charter
3. Project framework
4. Fellowship (supporting/ connecting/ mapping/ specialist networks)
5. Developing partnerships
6. What is the RSA?

+some further issues eg: gender balance, digital inclusion which are to be discussed.

16:25: Meeting is about to wind up and as Bob very firm about 16:30 finish, I’m about to log off! Just wanted to say that this seems to have been a really productive, action-filled meeting and Bob and Tessy have done fab work in setting a great agenda and driving decisions forward. In fact, it’s all rounding off with a big applause for Bob and Tessy’s excellent facilitation!

Can’t quite believe I started blogging here about leadership, work and Web 2.0 way back in June last year, trying to suss out exactly what I’d be putting in the book I was supposed to be writing. Well, I’m chuffed to say that the book is done, dusted and about to become reality - December 1st 9th is the publication date (fingers crossed).

Maybe unsurprisingly, the book, Monkeys with Typewriters, has taken on a whole life of its own, so it seems a good time to set up a dedicated blog for those critters. And to reclaim this blog for all other iKnowHow news and projects. So, if you’d like to follow the monkeys, they’re over here.

As for iKH, well, all sorts of exciting plans are in the offing. But I’m trying to get priorities right. During a recent chat with Luis Suarez (yeah, Luis with the great job at IBM, and the life on Gran Canaria), I found myself saying that we were relocating to a beach, too. For a few months at least. That’s, um, after moving house. So, first big project? Find somewhere new to live. Second? Track down that beach with wifi!

Thanks to Princesscy on Flickr for the beautiful beach pic.

Last July the RSA held elections for a brand new Fellowship Council - the work of this council should mark a change in the RSA’s history. The RSA has around 27,000 Fellows worldwide and a central aim of the council is to form a conduit of communication between the Fellowship and the people who actually run the RSA on a day to day basis (ie the board of trustees, CEO Matthew Taylor and all the full-time staff).

It’s a grey Wednesday afternoon in October and the inaugural meeting of the new council has just begun. Most people have got the train or flown in from various parts of the UK this morning. We’ve been fed a nice lunch of beef bourguignon and butternut squash pasta, and had a bit of a chat, and everyone (I spoke to at least) seems very up for this idea and keen to get going.

14:30 Nearly all the newly-elected council members are here (around 35 people or so), plus key members of RSA staff, plus of course, Matthew Taylor, who is speaking at the moment. Taylor is talking about the ways in which the RSA has been trying to open up the organisation: projects like OpenRSA, RSANetworks etc (I’ll put in links to these later).
14:47 Debate about the nature of civic activism. Taylor gives example of “Opening Minds” - an initiative of the RSA now being taught in schools, but says it’s a shame that few RSA fellows are aware of this (especially if it’s their local school). RSA wants to give people support individually for the stuff they want to do in the community.
14:50 Stephen Coleman (Yorkshire) We tell everybody come and join get involved and then we bore them to death as soon as they walk in the door…we need to address this repeated failure to engage people.
Unknown (Scottish lady): We have to remember it’s a global network we’re dealing with (The RSA)
Dave Clarke: Online tools are a great way to engage fellows. It’s important to keep looking at the forest and not the trees
Taylor: The RSA is fundamentally about enhancing human capability: more engaged, more self-reliant and more altruistic - that’s fundamentally what we’re about
Ken: Matthew, you’ve said various things and honestly, you can’t deliver them - I think you’re raising expectations that the house can give help - it can’t! You’ve said there’s £100,000 venture capital available. It’s not venture capital. It’s seed capital. Don’t make promises you can’t deliver. You should be telling Fellows to set up their own activities, to do it themselves. We set up something called Shoot the banker - but no bankers turned up.
Taylor: I think it’s a false dichotomy. If people turn up here with good ideas we’d like to support them. Can we do an article in the journal? Can we film that event? Can we add a bit of money? Are there other fellows who are expert in this area that can help? Belinda can go through the list of fellows and find ones who can help you.
John Bale: reputational risk is a problem. We were right to sponsor one academy rather than many. It’s best to have one or two exemplar type projects in many diffierent categories.
Gerard: I don’t think failure is always a bad thing. We need bold endeavour.
Outgoing chair: The place is littered with RSA projects which didn’t succeed.
Matthew: The first three attempts to organise a Great Exhibition foundered. The fourth succeeded. You learn from your mistakes.

15:00 Man from Scotland: We need to look at communications and share best practice.
Lopa Patel: I’ve never spent an afternoon just talking about social change with like-minded individuals. But social change has to come from ground up and we need to make sure that we are representative.
15:05 We are becoming more representative: younger, more women. it is slowly happening.
Long-haired man: Where should the RSA be in five years time? We’d like to be able to say there’s an engaged fellowship and a real potential to exercise social change. This council could be an absolutely pivotal point in the history of the RSA. The council is here to build bridges - if we build bridges, the resources will be there for the things we want to do.
Anne: We need to find out what else is going on that can tie into the fellowship council.
Matthew: we’re carrying out various bits of research that will be fed back to you. At the moment it feels like it’s only meetings but that’s because we didn’t want to overwhelm you. We found groups of fellows who were acting together had hidden because they didn’t want the regional committees to close them down!
Rosie Ferguson: it seems to me that we need to be really clear about what’s on offer. All the talk is about groups of fellows coming together but how about fellows inspiring non-fellows? if so, that needs to be made more explicit. Don’t spend too much money in mapping and organising social change. Put resources into doing and enabling rather than organising.
15:10 Matthew: The govt had a ‘new deal for new communities’ programme but activism from community actually went down in the areas where this programme was implemented - so yes, I agree. All our fellows, because they’re fellows, are doing things, they’re already connected to the world. We’re not here for people to take their pet idea and push it through. It has to be a collaborative progress. This council is going to be an intellectually demanding process.
15:15 break for tea

15:35 back from tea break
Belinda Lester: talks about the Exhibition: a graphic illustration of the RSA’s draft Fellowship Charter. It looks very beautiful and detailed but I haven’t had the chance to have a look at it yet. One of the jobs of our council is to finalise this charter (from what I understand it’s so far all been put together by fellows). Three main elements: to inspire, to support and to enable. The exhibition itself will change over time, but the three main elements will remain the same.
Long-haired man: you need to look at the text in context of the international fellowship.
Bob (Scotland): I look at documents like this and I say ’so what’? We need to think of ways of strengthening it. How do we make this ‘real’?
Andy Gibson: I think two of the areas of work could be almagamated - they’re the same thing. Also, what’s the difference between ’support’ and ‘enable’? I think just ‘inspire’ and ‘enable’ is really strong.
Laura: Enable was meant to be a practical toolkit
Andy: Maybe connect a better word
15:45 Kevin: How come the fellowship charter is already in draft form? This is the first I’ve heard of it! A lot of fellows haven’t been involved. Why was there no letter? We’re going to do a new charter etc. How does this charter fit in with the RSA’s Royal Charter?
Man in pink shirt and stripey tie: Isn’t empower a better word than enable? Building social capital needs to be represented. It’s very London centric.
John Bale: people are from very broad range of backgrounds but have a common commitment to these three goals. We must be careful not to raise expectations.
Andrew: I like it. I like the three words. I think very often you have an over strong message. I think this sets expectations perfectly.
Frances: I like the fact its not a set text page, there is creativity, there’s movement…but I think it’s a shame there’s not the global dimension there. Congratulations for doing something different.
Zena: I think the exhibition is beautiful. But there is a perception of the loftiness of the RSA - but no reflection of the society that we are trying to change. It’s very much about ‘us’.
Lopa: There’s a few things missing for me. The word ‘action’ for example. It would be good to see a timeline. We’ve got the street view and above, but what about the basement view? Children down coalmines, people working in their garages, basements etc?
Gerry: we don’t want to create a whole load of structures, bureaucracy as I said earlier.
Belinda: I want to spend a good 20 mins in our groups chatting about what’s possible. What is it that we can unlock? What are the practical actions we can take? How can we help fellows talk to each other? How can we evolve the fellows charter?
Matthew: this is an enormous organisational change for us.
1600: group discussion

16:30 Feedback: Big themes of group discussions included: how to get grassroots projects off the ground in local communities, how to identify great projects, how to simply structure and application processes (RSA has pot of money it distributes every year - a chunk of this is traditionally allocated to regional committees but this is now being questioned as it’s not always clear where money goes) and how to deal with obstructive fellows (eg a member of regional committee who refuses to work with a project that hasn’t come through his/her committee), also communication between fellows is key and one point (made by Andy Gibson) that we should have some kind of ‘parish newsletter’ for Fellows Council so we all connect better between meetings. Rosie Ferguson points out that RSA seems quite elitist and on the illustration of the RSA fellowship charter there is no ‘door in’ to the organisation.

16:45 Belinda and Matthew say thanks. Now we get a 15 min break before AGM starts at 5pm.

Nice ideas to come out of discussion include ‘bring a friend’ events where fellows always try to introduce a potential fellow to the RSA when they come to events

It’s nearly over! As you might know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, or if you’ve ever had the misfortune to bump into me after a hard day’s graft, for the past two years I’ve been working on a book looking at social media at work.

It started out with a focus on leadership…and then morphed a bit - because you can’t look at “leaders” without taking “followers” into account as well.

So it’s turned out to be a bit of a socio-cultural, anthropological snapshot of the contemporary workplace, with some practical business stuff and future-shaping trends thrown in. All looked at in the context of the digital/ social media/ Web 2.0 revolution.

The title is “Monkeys with Typewriters: myths and realities of social media at work” and the publication date is 1 December. There’ll be a launch event at Cass Business School on 9 December.

Why the monkeys? Well, it was probably Andrew Keen who got me started on that. He warned that monkeys with typewriters are authoring our future. And the more I looked into the monkeys with typewriter idiom, the more I liked it.

Because, of course, we are the monkeys!

Since 1999, Dr Otto Scharmer has been running workshops on Presencing and Theory U - concepts he’s developed as a tool kit for stimulating “conscious evolution” and change in business leadership.

Dr.Scharmer is a senior lecturer in management at MIT in Boston, USA. His extensive private client list includes national governments, international institutions and multinational companies such as Daimler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Fujitsu, and Google.

This week, Dr.Scharmer is in Munich, Germany. But he’s found half an hour to chat to me on Skpe. It’s half three in the afternoon, Dr.Scharmer’s just flown in from the US, and I imagine he’s pretty tired, but all that comes across in the call is great positivity and boundless enthusiasm.

Dr.Scharmer is part of the new hippie mainstream. The roots of his work can be traced back to the mid sixties. Dr.Scharmer believes that, since around 1965, through the last third of the 20th century, there has been “a new impluse going around the world, which really had to do with a profound [social] renewal and that came in a variety of different movements.”

These movements or “streams”, he says, appeared in three different ways: firstly in the environmental movement, secondly in the movements for social change (such as the Women’s and Peace Movements) and, thirdly, in “a deeper process that has to do with shifting our level of awareness from where we operate [now] to a higher level of consciousness.”

In the late 20th century, believes Dr.Scharmer, these three streams diverged and headed off in very distinct directions; now, however, they are re-converging:

“What I see happening now is that, almost on an underground level, we see these three streams coming more and more together and being reintegrated. That’s what’s beginning to happen in many places. That’s what we see [emerging] as a conscious consumer movement, that’s what we see [emerging] as a conscious investing movement. We see [this] in many different forms.”

Dr.Scharmer sees two forces at play: on an external level, concerns about the environment, about the ineffectiveness of established institutions and about individual careers and livelihoods falling apart. But on an internal level too, through close observation of behaviour in his workshops, Dr.Scharmer claims to have witnessed a “deeper longing” - particularly amongst younger participants - for “engaging with each other in different relationships and engaging with oneself in a different relationship”.

“This inner opening, this kind of inner predisposition to access a deeper level of self knowing, that is the other source: [the desire to] wake up to another level of awareness, of consciousness, as an individual - but also as a community.”

I think Dr.Scharmer’s vision sounds great but possibly a wee bit Utopian? What would he say to someone unable to sense the presence of any “deeper longing”?

“Certainly you could tell a different story that would make everyone depressed, right? I can tell that story as well and then you and I can both be depressed…but we [must work] with mindsets and attitudes that empower us, rather than making us more depressed.”

I like his point. Like motherhood and apple pie, it’s a tough one to argue with.

Dr.Scharmer may be full of positivity about humankind, but his mood grows darker when I ask about the web - and social media in particular. His view is that our current technologies have great potential, but we must be wary:

“There has always been the belief that technology transforms social relationships and that that will set people free. [But] that is not what happens. What happened in history was that technology became the tool for even better control, new forms of control - and [these were] used by the establishment to establish a more firm grip on the social structure, rather than transforming the social structure and empowering the marginalised groups to shape and create their future…we should be mindful of that.”

“[The web] has a great promise but [positive changes] won’t happen automatically. It will be a very co-creative process and I think, in our age, the new media, the new technologies, the new web technologies, need to be complemented with a new social technology. And it’s the social technology that allows us as groups, as collective entities across organisational boundaries, to shift our quality of attention from downloading, which is just doing more of the same, to co-creating together, which is really kind of accessing the collective creativity that we could utilise.”

We know it’s up to us to make the change. Technology alone can’t make the breakthrough. It’s up to us to put in the leg work and ensure we build something worthwhile. Time for anyone who’s good at motivating others to take the initiative.

Sorry blog, I know I’ve been neglecting you all these weeks, and I promise to make amends. What with trying to get the book finished, and popping off on holiday for a fortnight, things have been rather quiet on the iKnowHow front.

We had a fabulous time away (the pic is of Lila and me at the Colosseum in Rome) and it’s nice to feel well-rested. Standing amongst monuments that have been around for the last 2,000 years puts a great perspective on things.

In the meantime, Matthew and Andrew, my editors at Triarchy Press, have been looking through the manuscript, and they seem pretty happy.

Now it’s one final slog down to the final, final deadline on September 28. But I’m going to try and be good this time, and blog some posts in between. Hopefully you’ll hear from me shortly!

I was hoping to record some Audioboos last night at the RSA London Fellows’ monthly gathering, but typically arrived late and managed to miss much of the action.

It wasn’t a bad turnout - around 30 fellows, potential fellows and some I guess just there for the free drinks. There were a good few animated discussions taking place, and lots of uber-networking - not surprising when you’ve got nine candidates for the new RSA Fellowship Council trying to politely convince people to vote for them.

There was one key disruptor present who (no doubt to the great relief of the RSA powers-that-be), won’t be standing for election - Henry Gewanter, the man now famous for breaking the MPs’ expenses story.

Just to give you a flavour of the conversation (and in case you haven’t seen it already), social reporter David Wilcox has done a great interview with Henry. Click on the embedded video above to see it.

Henry L.Gewanter - what a name! What a guy! It goes without saying that his career in (ahem) corporate communications is over, but with those Newman-esque eyes and rotweiller character, surely a role as media luvvie beckons?

This summer was going to be tough: deadline looming, heatwave simmering, credit crunching. Luckily, help has arrived in the form of the fabulous Deborah Dignam from Galway, Ireland, who’s been helping me with research and other stuff for the final draft of the Leadership 2.0 book.

Deborah is studying for an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths University, and has a background in arts management, fundraising and theatre production. Among her many achievements, she set up and ran the Kinsale Arts Week, an international festival in Cork, Ireland.

I’m grateful to the lovely Sian Prime for introducing us!

Aung San Suu Kyi’s birthday 2008: http://www.flickr.com/photos/toastyoneuk/

Beneath London’s Strand, in one of the brick lined tunnels that used to enable boats to dock and goods to be unloaded in order to serve the grand houses, offices and hotels above, Burmese campaigner, Khun Saing, is talking about his love and respect for a woman 6,000 miles and many worlds away - Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Burma’s democracy movement.

“I feel so much discomfort and misery that she is now facing an unfair trial facing a maximum of five years in prison,” says Khun Saing.

He is referring to Suu Kyi ‘s current situation where she has been arrested and charged with “allowing” an unknown American to swim across the lake around her house, thereby “breaking the terms of her house arrest”.

Khun Saing remembers a party many years ago where he met Suu Kyi, already a pro-democracy activist and clearly someone who was being watched closely by Burma’s military regime. Anxiously, he asked her if she planned to stay in the country.

“ ‘Oh yes, of course. I have to stay,’ she replied, calmly and in perfect peace…I suddenly sensed she had already been thinking of that question many times herself… Her response was firm with no loss of composure…I felt the answer came from the bottom of her heart.”

A few months later Suu Kyi was arrested and imprisoned for the first time. Khun Saing was also arrested and thrown in jail. His fellow prisoners told him they had been building a house that was intended for Suu Kyi to live in. This was a clear sign that the regime planned to sentence Suu Kyi to further imprisonment.

“She always tried to change our country from military dictatorship to democracy by peaceful means,” says Khun Saing. “She always wanted to talk to the dictatorship.”

“20 years is enough. She has been harassed, humiliated and insulted. Through these years she has shown grace and dignity. She could have left the country at any time. She could have compromised with the regime for her own self-interest but she hasn’t sacrificed the needs of the Burmese people.”

“I feel guilty and ashamed of myself for putting that question to her and for leaving the country myself…I admire her courage and simplicity.”

Sitting in the audience at the RSA, where Khun Saing is telling his story, I can see that everyone is moved. Suu Kyi has committed no crime, yet she is growing old in prison. She is a leader without a hierarchy, a leader despite the years of abuse and attrition and emotional torture from her captors.

Suu Kyi is a symbol of hope for her people, but also a symbol of the struggle for human rights everywhere.

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Today, is Aung San Suu Kyi’s 64th birthday. We should do all we can to remind Suu Kyi and the Burmese people that their plight is not forgotten. Please change your profile picture, blog, tweet and spread the word. To read more about the situation in Burma, see The Burma Campaign’s official Suu Kyi birthday site.