But it does bring the question I asked up: is The Membership Project limited to not making money? The site mentions “Third Sector” and so on, but cooperatives seem almost entirely absent.

I’m not the one letting the CAPTCHA thing get in the way of what might otherwise be a worthwhile project. If I could remove that barrier to entry in a reasonably way, I would.

Maybe I’m just bitter. I’d like to try, but a couple of things stop me.

It certainly isn’t about making money, big or small. David and the others involved in the project are good folk working to make things better - see his other bloggings here and here. Don’t let the CAPTCHA thing get in the way of what might otherwise be a worthwhile project.

So is that blog seperate to this blog? Can you syndicate all or part of this blog to that site, in the style of http://cooperativemagazine.co.uk/ ?

I can’t tell whether the site is worth getting involved in and the jargon around it is confusing (had to look Clay Skirky up, for example), but that CAPTCHA (mostly useless for combatting spam but brilliant for obstructing security-conscious humans) is a big warning indicator that the site owners are probably a bit clueless about the web. Then again, more clueless people have made big money on the web…

I’ve sent in a question about whether it’s intended for all the Third Sector. I’ll see what comes back.

I appreciate the annoyance re: CAPTCHA but the way around it is to register with the site. A pain, I guess, but if something is worth getting involved in…

What’s it about? Well… The Royal Society started a project to look at how it could adapt itself to a world where social networks etc make membership organisations potentially less valid. It’s the Clay Shirky idea of organising without organisations. David Wilcox had the idea of opening the discussion up, because the findings could have relevance for all manner of orgs, not just the RSA.

So, he started the Drupal site as a collaborative space where people could sign up and leave blog posts or not sign up and leave comments. I think the aim is to keep barriers to entry low while trying to combat spam etc. David and friends have worked on similar efforts in the past, like the Open Innovation Exchange - an attempt to bid for some government money using an open codesign process - again Drupal based. They came second to a team from - I think - inside the government, so didn’t do badly at all.

What’s it about? If you sign up there, do you have to maintain Yet Another Blog? Does it connect to social bookmarking services and so on?

Point taken though. There are some interesting discussions happening around the role of organisations which you might be interested in at the Membership Project.

If anything, I think it might work better if we ran the organisations more like the main software development projects and less like hackers-playing-at-governments. Councils are often pretty inefficient anyway, and then some free software support organisations seem to behave a bit like a council run completely by new untrained councillors, but there’s no training provision because they don’t recognise the problem.