Recruitment 001

John:

For me, the power of the system would be rooted in participation by members, lots of members beavering away finding out previously hidden data. As such, the problem to solve isn't technical it's a people thing - about attracting members to be involved.

Tim:

Re: people v technical. No tension or tradeoff there - in fact a positive relationship. If we have a good technical project (and IT/internet is basically the medium we will be operating in) we'll attract more participants, both techies and 'users' and those straddling those categories to varying degrees. Certainly we need to take initiatives to recruit people - there are lots of avenues to pursue there - I'll set up a thread - and we can do that in parallel with developing key IT infrastructure. One thing that occurs to me is that the idea of setting up a flat communications network for Momentum members would not only be an important end in itself, but if we succeed in becoming the default notice board/message exachnge centre for Momentum members, getting them to dip a toe into research/policy discussion/signing up to media monitoring team/whatever is going to be pretty easy, as is putting out calls for particular skill sets, types of contribution, etc. If we are right about the need for this kind of thing and the untapped energy residing in the membership (and we are!) then we will be pushing at an open door in trying to recruit people. I'll leave further comment (memo: e.g. on the importance of participant status, encouraging enabling & supporting people to take on responsibility, etc) for the recruitment thread.