Charles Armstrong Future of Membership Presentation

Member driven governance
made easy
Charles Armstrong
Director, One Click Orgs

BackgroundSPS at St John’s Cambridge (1993)CIRCUS foundation (1997)School for Social Entrepreneurs (1998)Mentored by Michael Young (2000)Trampoline Systems (2003) One Click Orgs (2008)

What’s the relationship between members and organisation?

Community groups & small non-profits
Everyone’s a member
Governance is collective
Expectation that members are active

Community groups & small non-profits
Everyone’s a member
Governance is collective
Expectation that members are active
Large non-profits
& NGOs
Division between staff & membership
Members don’t make decisions
Expectation that members are passive

Why the change with growth?
Harder to get people together
Expensive to distribute & count votes
Need for accountability

The cost of disengagement
Members are less motivated when they don’t have genuine responsibility
A central executive can lose touch with the concerns of its community
Diverse views and opportunities for debate are reduced

Technologies are appearing that enable large organisations to be governed by their members

One Click Orgs is the world’s first platform for virtual governance

What it provides
Constitution welded into electronic system
Governance processes are automated
Any member can make & vote on proposals
Log of decisions maintained automatically

1 Member submits proposal

2 Proposal distributed by email

3 Members vote on the website

4 Decision is logged

Project details
Associations platform already running with beta groups
Company Limited by Guarantee currently in development
Everything is open source
Advisory board includes Professor Oliver Goodenough (Harvard) and Joi Ito (CEO of Creative Commons)

Platforms like One Click Orgs enable organisations to go beyond “participation”

Be ready for new kinds of membership organisation
Google groups becoming self-governing legal entities
World of Warcraft guilds forming democratic corporations & owning assets
Single-issue movements with 100,000 members where everyone is involved in strategy

Chapter 14 “Emergent Democracy”

Thank you!
Twitter @oneclickorgs
Web http://oneclickorgs.com
charles@CIRCUS-foundation.org

Charles Armstrong Future of Membership Presentation

by Jess Farr on Jun 17, 2010

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Charles Armstrong Future of Membership Presentation — Presentation Transcript