Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => On The Road => Topic started by: Philip Benstead on 04 April, 2018, 09:26:06 am
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In light of events did Simon Legg hit the nail on the head.
Coments welcomed
https://forum.cyclinguk.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=32984
User avatarSimon L6
Posts: 1382
Joined: 4 Jan 2007, 12:43pm
Re: Campaigning as a charity
Postby Simon L6 » 8 Dec 2010, 2:55pm
Campaigning – is it all over?
I attended a meeting of the London Region CTC last weekend. I’d not intended to go, because these occasions always inspire a degree of melancholy, brought on by a feeling that the LR CTC is a bit of a lost ship in an ocean of LCC activity, but the Midnight Dash to Bognor was iced off, and her nibs was away, so I braved the non-accessible stairs down to the dank cellar of the Fabian Society and re-acquainted myself with the faithful keeping the CTC flame burning in the capital. The second I walked in, my heart lifted – the LR CTC is home to people I count myself fortunate to know.
The ‘high’ point of the agenda was a presentation of the CTC’s campaigning strategy by Roger Geffen. I’ll tell you straight away that I gave Roger a hard time for about two hours. But, when you read the following, you might think he had it coming.
Roger told us that he’d consciously concentrated to what he called ‘national campaigning’ for the last eight years, but, with the demise of Cycling England and the Coalition’s ‘localisation’ of transport policy, the CTC would find local campaigning ‘very difficult’.
Now some of you will already have been bored to tears by my presentation to the CTC Council in January 2006 in which I wittered on about the third sector’s ability to mesh professional work with voluntary work. Drucker was called to mind. And some of you will realise that this meshing is something the CTC doesn’t do. Which, as I pointed out to Roger, is a pity, because if you want to campaign at a local level you need to be able to harness volunteer effort, expertise and knowledge. I admit I got a bit Lady Bracknell when suggesting that losing one RtR liaison officer might be unfortunate, but losing two in six months might be seen as careless, and all the more so because they both quit in search of meaning rather than mindless admin, but the general case I made is incontrovertible – the RtR network has been kept pretty much on a drip feed, and relies on the good intentions of John Meudell and the zeal and energy of a few good souls like Stephen Kinsella. And......the connection with local groups hasn’t been good, but with Adrian Lawson deciding that he couldn’t take it anymore, and the appointment of a part-timer with other responsibilities, it looks like we’ll be lucky to get membership lists, let alone help, advice and inspiration on campaigning.
I made the point in 2006 that the CTC was in the knowledge business. Campaigning depended on knowledge, and we had to ‘build’ knowledge by researching and sharing. Fat chance. We know next to nothing about urbanism, despite having experts in our midst. We know next to nothing about planning policy, despite having experts in our midst. Hundreds of councils up and down the country have written their Local Development Frameworks and we haven’t been involved. There’s been a re-writing of the Code for Sustainable Homes that was a massive step back in that it removed transport from the criteria, and we weren’t involved. In some London boroughs LCC reps comment on every single application of any size, and have, bit by bit, shifted planning policy to reduce car parking, and make transport strategies a requirement. They’ve harried TfL on junction works and shopping centre redevelopment. If any of this happens in the CTC it’s because a few individuals in Southend and Malvern take it upon themselves to learn themselves up, and not because there’s a fund of CTC knowledge and expertise to be drawn from.
There was some talk of cascades and structures. I’m afraid I got a bit shirty. Cascades don’t work outside of the Catholic Church. Knowledge doesn’t come down the mountain on tablets of stone – it’s a mix of theory and experience, and in campaigning it will move laterally if the means of moving it is there. Best practice – now that’s a different thing. Filtering for relevance, buffing up presentations, checklists – all can be built up and distributed from the centre, although, again, cascading is preposterous when you can send something out to 100 people just as quickly as you can send something out to 10 people.
I’m not optimistic. Roger places a good deal of faith in to the new website, which may or may not happen (it was due, I think, in May 2010). He says that it will take time to establish which RtR reps are still active, and didn’t seem to fancy my suggestion of turning the whole Council correspondence thing in to an open database, allowing people to pick up stuff as and when they wanted – but then again, we don’t do free-flowing information in the CTC.
It’s a few years since we had a ‘hit’. The 11,000 letters to MPs on the proposed revisions to the Highway Code was the last. Since then we’ve tried to tack ourselves on to the back of the 20’s Plenty and come up with a couple of catch slogans such as Stop Smidsy.
I’m not saying there isn’t purpose in lobbying, and I know Roger gets stuck in to the DfT via House of Commons committees, but the LCC has shown that you can make a big difference to towns by sustained local campaigning. Time and time again I go through towns and think ‘how the **** did this go so disastrously wrong?’ and wonder whether, just maybe, the CTC could have made a difference. It would be nice to find out, but I’m not counting on finding out for a long while.
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In light of what events? I'm clearly missing something.
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Don't ask him to explain, he's just a spammer.
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Don't ask him to explain, he's just a spammer.
That's a little harsh. He's not a spammer.
He's just really really interested in the minutiae of CTC dealings, to the extent that he can't comprehend how others might possibly not share his passion.
A bit like heavy metal fans and Christians.
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TLDR...summary?
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TLDR...summary?
Wibble
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Don't ask him to explain, he's just a spammer.
That's a little harsh. He's not a spammer.
He's just really really interested in the minutiae of CTC dealings, to the extent that he can't comprehend how others might possibly not share his passion.
A bit like heavy metal fans and Christians.
Really Flatus, have you been stalking me in Tune Association again?
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;)
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What happened to the supposedly friendly forum?
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What happened to the supposedly friendly forum?
OK, post removed, twas a jest
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I think it's hard to be friendly to posts that resemble an End User Licensing Agreement.
My personal reaction is to glaze over and move on.
Unfortunately, this can result in loss of content and sentiment.
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Going by past experience, I'm not convinced Philip actually wants discussion or debate.
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I think it's hard to be friendly to posts that resemble an End User Licensing Agreement.
While Philip Benstead certainly has form for those, he is usually - at least in theory - doing the community a service by publicising information that isn't available elsewhere.
I'd suggest that his lack of editorialising and above all failure to engage with subsequent discussion has cost him much goodwill in this forum, and many of us now skip them on the principle of 'TL;DR', or make snarky comments. We're all capable of skipping threads about subjects that are of no interest to us, so posts discussing the minutiae of Where The CTC Went Wrong aren't inherently a problem. We have other regular posters whose style is equally impenetrable (albeit in different ways), but who we persevere to understand because they are active members of the YACF community.
But this particular post is different. It's a comment and link to a perfectly decent and on-topic post (that you may or may not agree with) by someone on a publicly accessible forum. IMHO it didn't need to be quoted in its entirety without explanation - it doesn't seem to be at particular risk of deletion or anything. I also reckon it would have benefited from some more context. Do we really care if Simon Legg hit the nail (what nail) on the head? We might be interested in discussing whether the approach of national-scale lobbying is as effective as localised campainging, and whether - in places where there isn't an LCC or a Pushbikes to fulfil that role - CyclingUK has a duty to provide structure for that level of organisation. Or we might (quite reasonably) prefer to wander over to the CyclingUK forum to have that discussion.
ETA: When I wrote this, I didn't realise the post was from 2010.
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We are Cycling UK is the snappy, yet totally unmemorable name now used by the CTC.
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Could it be that Philip Benstead and Simon leg are in fact the same person?! :o
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They very much AREN'T!
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Simon Legg could have been re-branded?
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or reincarnated except that's outside my belief system.
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I am not sure what it was that Philip wanted to bring out but I followed the link back to Simon's original post. It should be noted that Simon's post on the CTC forum is dated 2010, before the change to charitable status and the related issues.
Philip has titled this thread as "In light of Recent Events" maybe he would be so kind as to detail what these events were as those of us who are not directly involved in the minutia of current CyclingUK internal events are oblivious to why he has chosen to copy a comment by another, known and respected, individual to this board 8 years after the original content was created.
However given Philip's history with this forum I don't expect him to return to the thread to provide that context.
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What happened to the supposedly friendly forum?
Post removed. Not entirely sure if you are referring to my post, but no matter, it was probably somewhat unfriendly. It’s not the first such thread, y’see.
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Does CUK support local campaigns in any way (training, advice on planning, etc.)? From what I've seen it looks like their regional development officers are more focused on developing community cycling groups than on the scrutiny of transport plans.
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I left the CTC during the charity conversion, which was done for all the wrong reasons and in an undemocratic manner (the majority of those who could be arsed to vote, voted against; the motion was only carried by the "don't knows" allowing the chair to use these as 451 extra votes "for"). The rebranding, stealing Macmillan's crappy typography, was a joke, they got rid of Chris Juden and the website is hopeless. They can disappear for all I care.
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Don't ask him to explain, he's just a spammer.
That's a little harsh. He's not a spammer.
He's just really really interested in the minutiae of CTC dealings, to the extent that he can't comprehend how others might possibly not share his passion.
A bit like heavy metal fans and Christians.
I visited the replica Stave church in Bergen earlier this year
(https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/a7/e4/18/fantoft-stavkirke.jpg)
The original was burnt to the ground by a Norwegian "Black Metal" Artist
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I left the CTC during the charity conversion, which was done for all the wrong reasons and in an undemocratic manner (the majority of those who could be arsed to vote, voted against; the motion was only carried by the "don't knows" allowing the chair to use these as 451 extra votes "for"). The rebranding, stealing Macmillan's crappy typography, was a joke, they got rid of Chris Juden and the website is hopeless. They can disappear for all I care.
The rebrand is hopeless, I'm forever getting them mixed up with British Cycling now.
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The rebrand is hopeless, I'm forever getting them mixed up with British Cycling now.
Maybe that's why Chris Boardman is working with them [CTC/CyclingUK] now??
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I quit the CTC two years ago
Our "ride to the pub" group - which is buoyant and has a dozen plus participants all year round has disaffiliated from the CTC
Last week I wrote to my MP on the back of a Chris Boardman / BC tweet about accident insurance limits
The CTC is dead
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I dunno; a lot of the touring bits of the CTC seem to have split off from DAs into affiliated groups, so that bit might be considered dead, but as a campaigning charity CUK are IMO still the best we've got (which isn't to say that Chris Boardman isn't awesome, but BC is as an institution sports-cycling-focused).