Anyone saw the giant rainbow over Bukit Timah?

Time for a totally frivolous post.

WOW. 25/Feb/2009

You can see a secondary rainbow to the right of the rainbow.

Continuing to respond to people’s comments on student societies. Today, we tackle the issue of documentation and it’s rocky relationship with training. We also look at the motivational factors and incentives which give people reason to join a club.

Documentation & Training

– Marcel: knowledge transfer between generations is difficult.
– Weiman: Students leaders use documentation because training isn’t viable. Specifically, there isn’t enough time to train; leaders have prior no knowledge in training; there isn’t any one to train; some specific tasks cannot be trained; no one actually reads documentation

Talking about training in recruitment gives a nice segue to documentation issues. Weiman pointed out something I never considered before, which is documentation as a last resort, and specifies the problems with training. Unfortunately, I have to fall back on a culture argument to save training (I generally dislike blaming ‘culture’ because it always seems like everything can be potentially explained by culture).

Generally, when NUS people think “leadership”, they think in terms of short-term “execution” rather than long-term “growth”. Leaders think of the how to do things, rather than the why they do things, and what things done promote the reproduction and growth of the society. For instance, they take for granted the effectiveness of a recruitment drive.

This in turn goes back to a manpower problem. Leaders in societies can be overburdened in settling the everday “how” questions instead of getting to the “why” and prioritizing the “what” to grow the organization.

Motivation & Incentives

– Kevin Lam: Ownership and satisfaction; simply fizzle out due to e.g fatigue, one-off convergence of timing, personnel and ideas?
– Writer-Economist: It seems reasonable to assume that people will only give to the society up to and as much as what they get out of their extra effort.
– Tidd: There also legions of students, 300 at the very least on my last personal count, excluding freshmen who aren’t inside yet, who take part in societies for their passion and not for CCA points or resume padding.
– Weiman: CCA points distorts the total incentive
– Thet: Alumni should feel feel gratitude to student society for what it has done for it
– Weiman: Member rights & benefits as incentive

I guess I’ll take the opportunity to talk about social enfranchisement in NUS societies. I think Tidd captured some of this as well: a good deal of people stay in societies because they’re socially enfranchised. By that term, I mean that they’ve got a right to socialise with people within the society.

However, there’s a contradiction within the society. Societies have an inherent need manpower. But, societies also don’t give social enfranchisement as fast as it can expand. One reason I can think of why this happens is that the “core” needs to maintain a singular identity and vision. Expanding the crowd too fast within the “core” social group dilutes the unity.

Another reason I can think of is that people who are socially enfranchised in the society have their social needs fulfilled and have no incentive to give out social enfranchisement. So societies really stay as big as naturally as people can form a community of which all members know each other.

I agree that people want something out of a society, and sometimes its more than just a social agenda. Then, it’s a simple mismatch of needs between people in the organization and external people who come with their own agenda. Thet’s idea of societies with “fun” in mind comes back in play. I guess then either people who want to achieve something beyond socialising have to either: (1) be the bigger person and give people the benefit of doubt and slowly work your way into the organization, or (2) find or start your own organization, if you can find other similar-minded individuals.

Next note: Nadiah writes a really good comment; and conceptual errors.

What people think about student society growth

i’ve gotten a variety of responses to the two articles I’ve written. Some of them were left on this blog, and others. I’m collating them all together into several categories to make them easier for everybody to make sense of, and also so that I can respond to similar issues at a one go. I’m also going to release a second and third note on this because it’s getting incredibly long.

Meant to Fail

– Thet: Student societies gives us the opportunity to learn more from failure than success.
– Thet: Some societies are just made for “fun”
– Thet: Student societies just an extended high school.

Thet messaged me online in a private conversation only, so i’m just summarizing most his argument. I must say this is where I we have to agree to disagree. I don’t think societies are “made” for fun, any more than a knife is “made” only for cutting — things have more than one use! Granted, student societies exist in an environment that potentially shields them from penalties from failing. It’s like a playground with padded floors and safety rails so if you fall down you don’t get hurt too much. (Of course, the university can’t bail you out all the time!) But, that shouldn’t limit student societies from achieving better. I’m not expecting every society to razzle and dazzle, but there certainly are mistakes that leaders every single year that keep them from being where the society should be and is where I am trying to figure out things.

Recruitment Issues

– Weiman: She proposed an alternative method of recruiting; directly from JC and Poly students
– Weiman: She pointed out exploratory/experimental uni clubs are disadvantaged in recruitment because they can’t provide the largeness
– Kevin Lam: It’s a problem on how to get “talented” people?
– Maryam Malek: Societies compete for scarce pool of talent, and ultimately bigger societies turn out as winners
– Maryam Malek: There are further difficulties because a one-academic-year term is too short to get anything done.

These responses generally agree that there exists a manpower problem. I guess outreach to JC and Poly can somewhat work, especially in areas of high-profile technical expertise like Rag. But it seems to me that’s out of the reach of most student societies, which ties in to Weiman’s second point. I’m looking for ways for smaller societies (with implications for bigger societies as well) to overcome manpower problems. I haven’t actually got to what I think may help yet, and I haven’t fully elaborated what I think about training yet. Training should be the strategy of smaller societies because generally the good people with the expertise are more likely to gravitate to larger, higher-profile clubs. Halls would also benefit from training because a sufficiently strong core of 100 people staying in hall over 3-4 years can actually achieve a lot.

Maryam’s point on one-year terms also is a very salient point. The next strategy of societies should be lock-down. We need to keep people who are in the society IN the society and an ACTIVE member of the community. Often times, the executive committee IS the society, and the rest of the ‘registered’ members don’t really know what’s going on. Even if they don’t go by a strategy of expansion, a society of 20 second year EXCO members can still grow to 50+ active members because of the former EXCO members being actively committed. Yeah, there are problems with this strategy, please feel free to discuss.

But at least we recognise there are different strategies that work differently, right? What strategies do people use, and what novel strategies can you suggest?

In the next note: Documentation and Training, Motivation and (Social) Incentives
In the following note: Orientation and Rag, Conceptual Failures and Nadiah’s note

How Would Student Societies Grow and Succeed? Pt 1

I’ve argued that student societies in NUS are worse off than they should be. They languish in mediocrity, unable to pass down leadership or technical skills. I had a friend who disagreed with me, citing that student societies can be expected to fail because its where unexperienced undergraduates test out their theories and ideas.

I replied here that it is indeed reasonable to expect success by students societies. Some student societies have indeed staged events and engineered structures beyond what we would normally expect out of fickle, selfish, and busy undergraduate students.

So the question is, why do some student societies fail and some succeed? I want to explain a generalised organizational theory of student societies which I call the Cycle of Manpower Poverty and the Cycle of Manpower Wealth.

The “Cycle of Manpower Poverty” is similar to the economic cycle of poverty. Let’s assume there exists a hypothetical committee in NUS. This representative committee starts out with a generally limited amount of manpower. Because it has only so few people and so many things to do amongst its regular duties, it is more likely to fail at organizing high-profile events because there isn’t enough organizational expertise, or enough layers of manpower to draw from to convert a potential success to an actual ideal success. This in turn worsens morale of the society and generally decreases the chance and quality of renewal to the organization because people aren’t attracted to it, and thus the organization remains at low levels of talent and human resource. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps societies down.

On the other hand, once a society breaks out of this Catch-22 cycle, it enters into a loop of self-reproduction. Instead of tending to undermine itself, tends to strengthens itself instead.

The idea of the “cycle of manpower wealth” is the opposite of the above catch-22. Once a student society grows past a tipping point, it is much easier for it to grow even larger. The scales tip in favour of expansion. With sufficient talent and manpower, the probability of organizing a successful event is significantly much higher. A successful event means that more people will be attracted to join the society because they identify with the society’s goals, because morale is higher, and because the society successfully provided a public good.

Of course, this is a highly stylized ideal form of student societies. There are of course intervening variables within and without the society that cause student societies to jump from the lower cycle of manpower poverty to the higher cycle of manpower wealth and vice-versa. There are plenty of other factors too that help student societies persist but are not viable methods for growth. However, I’m postulating this because I think it’s best starting point to think about how student societies grow. It would be worthwhile commenting on the intervening variables, but I’ll take the rest of this post to comment on the factors of student society persistence in NUS.

What made me come to this viewpoint? It’s derived from my experience in Singapore Model United Nations (SMUN) and the Political Science Society of NUS (PSSOC). I observed that SMUN was the key driving factor for recruitment at PSSOC. After my stint as Undersecretary of Delegate Affairs at SMUN, the following elections at PSSOC had plenty of SMUN staff alumni running for office. Somehow, SMUN built up the social capital and got people to invest themselves into PSSOC. We also had one of our SMUN participant alumni enrol into NUS and join the PSSOC as well. Even now, PSSOC is being run and sustained by a great deal of Model United Nations participation and SMUN-related activities.

However, if you’re still skeptical, I don’t blame you. As anybody knows, the main methods for recruitment in NUS societies are nowhere near this idealised “manpower wealth” form. Instead, NUS societies rely on:

1. recruitment drive; and
2. orientation.

In my opinion, I don’t think recruitment drive and orientation are consistent engines of organizational growth. The emphasis is on growth because these twin strategies are sufficient for reproduction, which is not the same thing as growth. Reproduction ensures that there is always someone to occupy the post; growth implies that more posts need to be created to cater to expanding organizational functions (due to a growth in membership).

Generally, recruitment drives aren’t that great because they rely on non-information. People don’t know people who are in the society who can introduce them into the society, so the society has to introduce itself to people instead. People sign up because they don’t know better about the society and generally are taken to whatever the person at the booth says at face value — which includes covering up the politics behind the scene, how big (or small) the society really is, and how well (or badly) the society is doing financially. The people you get to the welcome tea aren’t that great either — if you can get them to come at all — they are all looking to test the water. They’re checking if the principles of your organization match their own personal goals. Otherwise, they leave. This means that whether people join your organization ultimately is up to chance. You’re pulling the rod before the fish has bitten the bait.

With that being said, orientations as a method of recruitment overcome some of these shortcomings. They serve as a platform for socialization, which means participants already have a pool of people whom they know they can work with. Even though nobody will admit to it, there are “winners” and “losers” in orientation. The winners are the ones which the outgoing committee “arrows” or persuades to run for office because they see in them some kind of desirable quality exhibited during orientation (or it may be just that through orientation, the councilors just gained enough social clout to persuade freshmen to run). The problem with orientations is that you’re going to be drawing exclusively from the pool of freshmen who tend to have little political and technical experience navigating the social topography of NUS. Furthermore, orientations as social platforms don’t usually socialise the goals of the orientation into its potential members, which mean that the orientation-recruited members won’t necessarily act and think for the benefit of the organization.

The upshot of all of this is that (if the “cycle of manpower poverty/wealth” is true) orientations and recruitment drives are poor strategies of growth because of the quality of people that are recruited is simply substandard. You’re not getting the people that you should be getting for the effort you’re putting in. If you want to have a large pool of committed members who can be relied to sustain large projects, this isn’t the way to go.*

So now that I’ve criticised, what suggestions can I make to help the situation? Well, it’s time for another highly idealised theory. This post is already hitting 1k words, so I’ll just leave it for Part II.

* Note: I’m sure orientations serve other functions which are equally important. I’m just saying you can’t simply rely on it for expansion.

“Here Lies Love” review lies here

“Here Lies Love” is this year’s Kent Ridge Hall’s annual play. (it’s annual because they can’t stage more.) I don’t know if I have a valid opinion since I feel terribly out of the scene and nobody associates the word “auteur” with me. But I feel compelled to say a few words about the play, so I promise to myself I shall keep my opinions to a hundred words short beginning after this sentence.

“The play was some hits, some misses and a good deal of “whaaaaaaaaaaaaat?” I could genuinely see there were some production values in the play; most of the singers could actually sing so casting was well done, the “director” character was overacted to a positive effect, costume design overall worked, some songs were catchy, I like the elevated platform and the writing clearly had some artistic planning — repetition of form, abstraction, direct address, multiple roles, multiple storylines coupled with an in media res plot. Ambitious indeed! However, I left the musical still puzzled of what the writers wanted to say about love. Was it something about love dying to ambition, or clouding it? Or one love dying out of competition to another? Rather heavy for a musical! I also felt that the stage direction should have been more dramatic, in the sense that it should have started and ended with a larger bang and spectacle. The initial cabaret scene was too tame, I couldn’t make myself care about the characters in the first half and the part right after the intermission sagged a bit. Was there a climax in the entire story? I guess the double murder and the mystery revealed counts. Overall, I give it somewhere between a B and B+. I’m not disappointed and it really has a lot of potential compared to the standards of other hall plays. Given that they have to work within hall limitations, it really needs an extra push to make it go far.”

I generally have high standards. Otherwise, won’t they be poor standards?

Can We Expect Student Societies in NUS to Grow and Succeed?

Can they soar or should they always fall?

After four years of being in NUS and participating in multiple societies, is it reasonable to expect student societies to expand in skill, size and scope? After all, students are tied down by their regular academic workload like tutorials, lectures, and project meetings, if not theses and final year projects. So why would we expect that any student society go above and beyond the necessary (or unnecessary) grind for points?

First, we know that undergraduates at other universities have been able to produce and continually expand their organizations. For example, Harvard Model United Nations (HNMUN) attracts 2,500 participants every year. I went during my freshman year, and truly, the scope of the entire 4-day conference was a logistical nightmare.

Founded in 1955 only a decade after the United Nations, Harvard National Model United Nations (HNMUN), is the largest, oldest, and most prestigious conference of its kind. Staffed entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, HNMUN brings over 2,500 students and faculty together from colleges and universities around the world to simulate the activities of the United Nations.

History of HNMUN

I know this from first-hand experience because the next year, I was the Under-secretary for Delegate Affairs for Singapore Model United Nations. It catered for 300 students — soon, the entire staff at HNMUN got acquainted with Murphy’s Law. The delegate placards weren’t printed by the first day; participants had to leave in the middle of the conference; rooms and toilets were mixed up because Logistics wasn’t functioning too well — many of these problems could have been avoided if we had more resources, more experience, more manpower. I don’t know how Harvard does it, and if I did, SMUN would probably be more successful otherwise.

This is barely a tenth of the crowd at HNMUN 2006; the largest hall in the hotel couldn't fit the 2000+ delegates so many people had to stand

While a purely-American run event can be deemed to be less comparable, maybe a Malaysian one can be considered so. the Malaysian Student Leaders Summit (MSLS) has been held two years in a row by a committee of Malaysian students calling themselves the UKEC — the United Kingdom and Eire Council of Malaysian Students, which is the national-level body for Malaysian societies.

MSLS gives place for 500 students at a 2-day stay-out conference held in a prestigious five-star hotel in Kuala Lumpur. It often invites many notable luminaries in respective fields, especially politics and business. I remember last year’s summit had a Young Members of Parliament forum, the (in)famous Khairy Jamaluddin (BN), Tony Pua (DAP) and Nik Nazmi (PKR). It’s entirely student run and FREE for all participants due to heavy sponsorship from commercial interests. The same summit also had the Prime Minister of Malaysia speaking the day before.

I’m sure that there are comparable organizations in NUS as well. HPAIR has achieved a reasonable amount of success, so I hear. I’m really quite proud of the trebuchet building competition in NUS as well since it facilitates learning. NUS RAG is something I feel that it could do much better, since that build-up of skill isn’t there, but yet marginally succeeds due to the institutionalization of the Rag tradition in halls and faculty clubs. (I’ve heard that a 100% completion of a float is idealistic; in the ‘real’ world, I highly doubt this would be acceptable.)

NUS RAG: I wish all of them were as good as this, and continually got better

The scale of these events absolutely require certain amounts of foresight and organizational skill to put up. Inconceivably, the undergraduates that run these events also have their academic commitments and personal concerns to deal with! Yet, they are are able to maximise their use of time, skill and disposable resources to hold these immensely high-profile events annually — which indicates that they do indeed have got more things right than wrong. They demonstrate that it IS reasonable to have lofty goals and expectations. After all, who starts a CCA with the expectation to fail?

It’s only partially a question of limitations. Yes, the CCA system is against us. Yes, our academic system encourages a “race to the bottom”. Yes, people really are there to socialise. Yes, people are fickle and unlike the real world, have no penalty for being unreliable and inconsistent. Yes, our juniors have their own weaknesses. Finally, yes, nobody stays long enough at university to make a difference.

I won’t deny that student societies fail. I’ve failed my fair bit. But we should be understanding why they tend to fail, rather than be content with an expectation of failure. However, pragmatically speaking, we shouldn’t expect the system to always be in our favour. I think the best way to approach student societies is not only recognising limitations to growth, but also finding ways around them. Our juniors can ultimately benefit from our knowledge of mistakes — that’s called progress.

I’ll be approaching those limitations in another post, but let me end on a teaser of one of these limitations: meddling. I see meddling as poor leadership in the outgoing committee because it’s an indicator that the leadership didn’t bother to build leadership qualities and point out common mistakes to an incoming committee during their term in office; thus, they make up for it by meddling ex post. I like the system of understudies used at The Ridge because it mitigates this effect of meddling by providing a legitimate period of teaching/meddling. (Elections are held about early in Semester II, and the winners of the election only totally take charge after the academic year ends). It shows that it is actually quite feasible to pass down leadership and technical skills. This is probably why the Ridge is slightly better than most campus publications.

This won’t be my final reply to the question, and not the one I’ll be sending to the Ridge. I’ll put up a second part, “How Would Student Societies Grow and Succeed?” in a second post.

Sidenote: I don’t interfere with my juniors. I ran for president and I failed; and I could have chosen to linger and meddle; but I gave it up and moved on to the Ridge. I occasionally talk to those people still in the society and it suffers from the same old problems as ever. Sigh.

Thoughts on Labour Politics, NUS

I like Labour Politics, the fact that I prepared for it and people were actively bringing up issues and talking about them. Prof. Buchanan is especially insightful when he thinks out loud.

I am rather sad that we didn’t actually go terribly deeply into the readings. Olin’s inverse-J curve modelling the relationship between capitalist interests and workers’ interests is fascinating, especially because its based on game-theoretic modelling, which may also suffer from a functionalistic weakness. I also suspect that the assumptions that Olin makes in sketching the inverse-J curve may not hold in certain countries because of historical events.

Przeworski is brilliant because of how he develops Gramscian hegemonic theory. I guess that’s what Kate Nicholls was looking for when she told me my essay only takes Gramsci superficially. If I had got to these Przeworski readings much earlier last sem, I could have hit an A- for my essay on Malaysia because she had that understanding of how Gramscian theory develops. Putting consent as manufactured within the working class rather than the general public seems to be the point I missed.

On the other hand, when I think about contemporary Malaysia, it seems to be extremely difficult to intepret Malaysian politics within a Neomarxist framework. Somehow I can’t see the Malaysian general public as “workers”, or the conflict between Pakatan Rakyat and Barisan Nasional as completely structurally-driven either. On the other other hand, I can’t take the ordinary political rhetoric as given either.

Thailand’s got it even worse so as it reacts in a typically Marxist fashion as the peasant class constantly votes against the urban-bourgeois-dominated candidates, and the monarchy as a vestige of feudal economic relations transformed into part of the capitalist class.