On Citizen Members

So I had a bit of a disaster with my comments form on this blog as I was trying to uninstall a certain comments application that was not working well and it proceeded to wipe all of my previous comments (or so I thought, until Dave Sabol swooped in like a handsome caped crusader and saved the day!) Yay! And, before everything was lost, I managed to cut and paste the comments from my Pondering Great Ideas post, and I thought, what a great opportunity to repost them here and see if anyone else had further thoughts on the theme of the member as citizen.

Just to recap:

Here's the thought. What if we could shift the theoretical focus from the membership model to the citizenship model - in other words, I am a member of Costco, but that's not being a "citizen" of Costco, is it! I can see being a citizen of an association. I understand that being a citizen has all the implications of wanting to volunteer, to participate, to give money and time, to be a content creator or a "sharer" or a commenter; and it has all the implied interactions inherent in being part of a group - the networking, the social, the face-to-face events, the learning, the professional development, the leadership, the belonging, the responsibility etc. And the value proposition becomes not just the individual bits of content that people pay for but the community that provides a safe space for all of these interactions to happen.

Here are the comments. There was more discussion on Twitter too. I'd love to hear your take, now that a couple of weeks have passed since the conference.

Adrian
I was wondering - when the concept of citizenship comes up, to me it's not just a matter of membership or participation. It's all these things, but also responsibility. What concepts of responsibility were brought up in the discussions about citizenship?

Good question - I think the citizen concept is all about responsibility, actually, and giving back, and being part of something where individual AND collective action benefits the whole. This also brings up the idea that the ASAE study Decision to Join talked about, where joining for the "good of the order" is as important to members as joining for their own personal benefit.

Peggy_Hoffman
Maddie - great recap and love the points re Twitter and crowdsourcing. On the first, I'd like to add that as a live twitterer at Great Ideas I met some new people (some who were following and some who were curious) ... so Twitter was also a community builder on 1:1. Secondly, I felt in twittering that I was also able to add to the content being delivered in that I and my fellow twitterers were in fact adding layers.

On crowdsourcing, my aha was let's crowdsource the next great ideas ... let's have all submissions be in the form a short video clip that we get to vote on.

Lastly the issue of citizenship is one that my AMC/Company has been talking about for awhile - great question from Adrian about concept of resp. In our viewpoint, when members make that transition to citizen they become active participants in the forces of the association and accept responsibility to care for it, nuture it, build it, protect it. And dues, like taxes, are just a part of the supporting and showing part ownership, not a subscription decision.

I've got some many great ideas to ponder - thanks Maddie for getting a few down on the "paper"!

Dave S.
Mads it sounds like the fundamental unraveling of the traditional association model as we have known it. It takes the old idea of the association as the message and the medium and relegates it to the facilitator of the conversation. Perhaps what you are seeing is the latent potential of members empowered through SMT and up until now being held somewhat captive by what associations provide them. I don't think it diminishes the role or importance of associations as the hub of activity and provider of vision and guidance but I do think it places the responsibility on them to get out of the way - in a matter of speaking - and let the creative ideas and endeavors of the members take central stage. There is more than one gem of wisdom here but this is the one that gets me the most excited.

Jeffrey Cufaude
I would counter Dave's observation a bit and suggest it is a return to how many associations got started as opposed to an unraveling of the model. When associations did not have staff and all the work was being done by volunteers, I think they had much of the citizenship model being proposed. I'm not in anyway suggesting that staffing is bad or wrong, but it does enable members to assume "someone else will take care of this."

Over time staff and the governance structure shift the emphasis to providing products and services rather than facilitating the community in the acts of creation and collaboration. Peter Block talks about this type of shift quite elegantly in his new book, Community: The Structure of Belonging. Though most of his focus is on local governments and community involvement, I find it almost completely transferable to associations.

I'm on board with the citizen metaphor, but am a bit concerned more member wordsmithing is likely to inhibit a real transformation, but perhaps not. Maybe we could just start treating members like citizens and organizing our efforts accordingly to see what emerges.

I think in a sense we've forgotten what it really means to be a member - so it might be wordsmithing, but changing the word we use to "citizen" could not only revive the original sense of what it was to be a member, but at the same time look to the future (or the present, really) where the member citizen is much more invested through the new community building imperative.

Matt Spencer
I love the citizenship concept and all of the comments as well, especially the concept of returning to the original structure of associations. The idea I'd like to echo is that in the US, all of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship flow directly from the "voice" of the citizen in elections. If membership organizations are to use a citizenship model, the must give their citizens a clear right to a voice in the operations and direction of the association.

Right! Anyone else have any thoughts on this?