You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘What I’m doing’ category.
I'm trying to write about this, but I keep seeing films that I haven't watched yet and am getting lost in the joy and excitement of it all.
I just saw this and nearly wet myself…
There was a launch event at the BFI Southbank last night and we got to see four films on the big screen of NFT1. I'm enormously proud of what Sam, Sarah and Harry have done to get this project this far. They've gone far beyond my expectations in a very short time.
I think it's worth telling the story as I experienced it, "Success has many fathers… etc." but I really do think we were in at the conception 
It started in one of the conversations we did with Counterpoint and British Council folk all the way back in the summer of 2009, when we were trying to find social objects through which the council could engage digitally, someone from the Council said "Well we've got those old films in the archive…" and we pounced. Al Robertson and I had the great pleasure of sitting and watching a large number of the films directly on the gorgeous Steenbeck machines of the BFI and Al went and scoured the National Archives and wrote some lovely blog posts about it. There was a brief hiatus until Catherine Fieschi brokered a conversation with Martin Bright to get New Deal of the Mind in to form a team of young, unemployed graduates to work on getting the archive digitised and online for a wider audience. Quite early on, they managed the coup of getting Google involved in funding the digitisation process. I very much enjoyed running an Action Learning Set for the team, getting them together every month at the Centre for Creative Collaboration to discuss what they were learning from working together and from working with large, well-established organisations like the Council, the BFI, Google and New Deal of the Mind. Brian Condon and I were really pleased when they said that they'd like to come and carry out their work at the Centre and I was thrilled when, after our final Action Learning Set meeting, Sam and Sarah told me that they were going to create a company to carry on with the work and to branch out into helping other archive owners.
To me, Time/Image is one of the big stars of the Centre – I think they demonstrate the best of what we've achieved over the last couple of years, quietly getting on with it, playing a full role in the life of the building *and* creating bloody good work, resulting in something that I had great doubts could really be achieved given the political complexities of the organisations involved – I'm particularly impressed that the films in the collection are released under a Creative Commons Licence, which means that you (yes *you*) can download the films and re-use or re-mix them however you like as long as you fully attribute the source as the British Council Film Collection, you don't make commercial use of the film and you release any new works under the same licence.
I'd prefer a simple BY-SA to the BY-NC-SA (I understand that might have been a step to far) and I'm a bit disappointed that the films seem to be watermarked with the BC logo which might make some re-mixing efforts tricky, but you can't have everything…
I was encouraged last night by seeing that Briony Hanson the (relatively) new Director of Film at the BC seems to have fallen in love with the collection as whole-heartedly as I have. Look out for some creative ideas around re-use of the archive later this year.
And if you'd like a pop-up cinema presentation of any of the films, just give me a shout and I'll happily come and show them in your village hall/community centre/front room.
I just wrote my first Storify based on a trivial interaction we had today deciding who would go to a meeting. So I thought I'd try embedding it over here…
However, online timetabling for buses is run by National Express and the interface is primarily focused on bus routes rather than point to point navigation. That is, you have to know which bus route passes near to where you are now and which ones pass the place that you're going to and then you have to look up to see where you might be able to join them up. This might mean you have to go into the city centre, but if you're in the south of the city and you're going to the west, then perhaps there's one that cuts out the need to crawl into the middle of town. In any case, it requires a better knowledge of city-wide geography than most locals have let alone visitors or, say, people who were born there, but haven't lived there for nearly thirty years.
Messing with the structure of transport providers, public ownership or creating a new level of bureaucratic authority to deal with this seems over the top when the thinking behind integrating timetables online for a user-friendly perspective has already been done.
Ha! So I got this far with this post and then looked up transport authorities, because I was unsure what was in place. I found network west midlands and from there Traveline for the Midlands. I don't know how I didn't get there before. It's OK, but not very pretty. And it's a bastard on mobile.
Anyway, there's still a point in this. This is the sort of vertical integration I wrote about recently. We're used to the idea of open data, but what about TfL opening up the source of their journeyplanner for transport authorities in other cities. What if Traveline became an open source project that anyone could contribute to? Rather than creating something completely from scratch to make sense of the data, how about creating something that we can all join in on and improve?
Having already revealed my woeful research skills in this post once, I make no claims on the originality of the idea. I'm sure there are public transport and opendata geeks who've been talking about it for years. Sorry.
1. A selection of short archive information films from the British Council collection – see http://timeimage.wikispaces.com for the whole catalogue, I have copies of the following 1940s films with me:
- The Man on the Beat (1945) (Why we trust policemen, filmed in Ladywood and Birmingham City Centre)
- Student Nurse (1944) (The training of State Registered Nurses, filmed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital)
- Local Government (What councils do and how to become a councillor)
- We of the West Riding (everyday life in West Yorks)
- City Bound (wartime public transport in London)
- London Terminus (wartime day-in-the-life of London Waterloo Station)
- Any of the films that are already available on YouTube (assuming you have an internet connection)
- I may have others secreted about my person that I've forgotten about
2. My laptop & pico projector popup cinema combo
3. My charming personality, a love of film, history and a willingness to natter.
4. Optional ukulele
1. A light-coloured screening surface (a matt-painted wall will do) (4' x 3' – 1.33m x 1m) is not bad
2. A room that is deep enough to project onto the surface at size and preferably the ability to darken the room
3. Two mains power points
4. Refreshments (some people find it *impossible* to watch film without popcorn and icecream – I'll settle for a cup of tea)
5. An hour should be plenty of time
6. There is no fee for entry to the popup cinema, though I'll happily pass the hat for tips/donations if that is acceptable to you (this is unfunded work). As is often the case with me, this is all very last minute. If you want to do this, but can't fit it into the next couple of days, or if you're elsewhere in the country and would like me to come, let me know and I'll put you on the mailing list.Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous
I scribbled this diagram in a notebook while on the train sometime ago and have been waiting to find the time to install a drawing package to make it prettier (I found dia – it just works!). It's a gross simplification, but sometimes you have to take things up a level to see what's really going on and to start talking about things that matter. And it's all been said before in other forms, nothing spectacularly new here, just my take on what I've seen. I also recognise that this is still news to many people.
For those of you who weren't raised as a systems analyst, you might do this kind of thing to show the "client" the logic of what you've observed happening. They always say "Yes, but that's not how it really works" or "I think that's an oversimplification". That's good, it means you're going to learn something new about how they see the system.
About the Product/Hamster/Bait thing – people like to say in conversations about this "Wake up dude! You're the product!"*. And. I don't think it goes far enough. We're not just the product, we're a product that drives the engines, like hamsters in a wheel that puts electricity back into the grid, and (especially if we're particularly creative/interesting/hyperactive) we're the bait for more product/hamster/bait to come along and join in.
Anyway. Here's what I think when I show it to my internal client-side:
1. What about freemium services like Flickr? Am I not still P/H/B if I pay for a pro account?
2. There are overlaps, of course. Some owners, employees and customers will be P/H/B in their own time.
3. How does this map onto offline social "platforms" like meetups, coworking spaces and members clubs?
4. Might want to further distinguish between Owner and Investor.
5. Another interesting (but more complex) dimension is lock-in – how easy is it for you to get your data out, archive it, re-use or re-mix it/
*I know. I should stop taking part in conversations where people call each other "dude".
I ended up boring all around me with two regular rants. One was about agreeing on standards for data collection and ecosystem-wide metadata, the other was about thinking about horizontal standardisation rather than vertical integration when developing new software, to separate out how we dealt with each of the Data, Application and Presentation layers and to ensure that when we developed or procured something new, we could easily get the data out to reuse later. The hardest thing was getting people to understand that you could think about these things separately. They found it really difficult to think about data independently of the process for collecting it, analysing and presenting it. For a long time, people kept designing things where the data was locked in. I drew a venn diagram that showed all of the applications in current and recent use and pointed out that all our procurement was either partially duplicating something that was already there or else filling in ever-tinier niche gaps between existing applications. My point was that if we standardised our data management, we could focus attention on what we did with the data and re-use existing date to save some effort re-inventing the wheel.
I think that those of us who tell stories on the web using data are at a similar stage now. I think that means all of us who are writing or making media on the web, but also anyone who is using social tools. The $1bn sale of Instagram to Facebook today has been another wake-up call. My own Instagram feed is only a few days old, but I'm following people who have been there for a while and see almost universal disappointment among long-term users and a desire to find something else that isn't currently tainted by Facebook.
But shifting over to another service that still holds onto your content and helps you to manage your social graph isn't going to work for long. The lesson from Instagram is that if a service is any good it will get swallowed up by one of the big boys (probably Facebook) and if it isn't any good, well, you probably won't want to be using it. The time you'll have using the next platform will just get shorter and shorter as the bubble inflates – how many people do you think today have thought "Blimey, $1bn shared between 10 people in less than two years? I'll have a piece of that!" The value to me of the services provided has slipped below the break-even point. As long as I've felt I'm getting a good deal, I've been relatively happy to be a hamster in my cage. But I feel the prospects of getting a good deal from vertically integrated social applications is getting slimmer and slimmer. And every time we switch cages, we have to leave something behind. In Instagram for example, you may be able to extract your photos, but what about the comments and lists of likes? No matter what the promises about being able to get at "your content" most tech products don't see it as yours, it's theirs and it's their route either to revenue generation or to selling out to someone with deep pockets.
I don't think it's enough to say that I'm just not going to use Product X. We need to build a different model, one in which we hold and manage our own data stores and we have a choice of tools that we use to share that data with the world. I would rather pay money for an honest service that simply processed my data in interesting, useful and innovative ways than to pay for my experience by losing control over the things that I make and say and the online relationships that I have with people.
For the young 'uns among you, when Twitter started up it had an IM mode – you could add twitter to your buddy list and all the tweets from people you followed ticked away in a chat window and when you wanted to tweet, you just said something but of course you had to remember to keep to 140 characters. I loved it. I could work away and just keep an eye on the (slowly) flowing river of tweets. There were no hashtags and @-replies were a crowd-created shorthand rather than a hardwired part of the system.
Of course gchat conversations are automatically archived in gmail and although I'm sure I must have deleted many, I have just had a look and found that I have 534 sets of archived tweet chats from July 2007 to July 2008 some containing as many as 3,000 lines. Above is a screenshot from the earliest one I have – you can see that they're all timestamped too.
The question is, what to do with them all…?
hmmm…..
I'm having repeated problems uploading to Flickr from my phone – above is a recent "result".
I'm just noting it here in case anyone else has seen a similar effect. I think that it's a combination of uploading from my HTC Desire S to Flickr via the Tedious-Admin-G network at C4CC but I need to try somewhere else to see whether it's this network or a more general issue with the phone and Flickr.
I've been following Dave Winer's work on his outliner, the OPML Editor for sometime now, just reading what he says on his blog about it, getting interested, but never really getting involved because it only runs on Windows or Mac and I have neither at the moment.
For me outlining is a great way of thinking structurally. It mirrors mind-mapping. In the bad old days when I had to spend an awful lot of time writing Powerpoint presentations, I would always start with drawing a mind-map by hand, transfer that to the outline view in PPT and then fill in the gaps. It fits well with the way I think.
At the beginning of the year, I gave myself a weekend to learn how to set up a server on EC2 following Dave's "EC2 for Poets" howto. I was really pleased to get something up and running but the main purpose of it was to learn something new, I didn't have any particular end in mind other than just getting it running. Of course it came with a free gift inside! I now had a Windows machine (albeit one running in the cloud) with the OPML Editor installed as standard.
So I poked around in it and created some outlines. One of the things I wanted to do was to replicate Dave's use of the World Outline to create an online repository of Worknotes, but again, it seemed that meant I needed to get a desktop OPML editor working.
At the same time, I've been getting increasingly dissatisfied with the "appification" of my web experience. My microblogging is through Twitter and Twitter and I clearly have different ideas of what the service is about. My blogging has been through posterous, which has worked well and continues to work well for now, but then came the news that posterous was being acquired by Twitter and, well, that sounds like the end of posterous as a useful tool for me. Google Reader stopped being an optimal feed reading experience for me some time ago and the trajectory seems to be that things can only get worse (more vertically integrated and tied to Google Plus) And as for Flickr, oh Flickr I loved you once but then you ran off with those Yahoo!s and now you don't play nicely any more. In addition, I have a whole bunch of stuff on Libsyn, YouTube, Vimeo blah blah blah, to say nothing of my filched archive of old seesmic videos…
All in all, it's time to get back to owning my little corner of the internet again. I've learned a lot about how I like to think and work, what I like to do, how things get shared, but the bottom line is that I don't trust these corporations with my data. Now that wouldn't be a problem if it was just data, the thing is that what I call "my data" is also a very important component of all of my personal, social and working relationships and if I trust any corporation with those, I'm just being naive and careless – in the end those relationships will suffer in ways that I can't predict.
I also saw recently how much stuff that I've created on the web is just gone, or difficult to find or retrieve. I want to create my own archive in a form that means stuff can be found, re-used and remixed rather than it all being spread everywhere and kept or deleted at the whim of platform owners.
In the last few weeks some things have come together. Firstly I saw Dave and Adam Curry were doing a podcast again. This has to be a good thing. I had a listen, but they seemed to be straight into what sounded like deep detail. I had no idea what was going on, but I listened through to the first one and was convinced that there was something going on here. It felt very much like the second half of 2004 when podcasting was starting – and I knew from that experience that there probably wasn't that much to learn to get to grips with what they were talking about, but that I needed to get the software working so that I could really experience it.
Then I saw Adam talk about installing the editor under wine1.3 on Ubuntu and despite my nose wrinkling at the prospect of using wine, when I tried it myself, it worked very well (there's a cosmetic glitch where a couple of the menus are repeated in the menubar, but it works and it doesn't fall over)
I poked around enough to get a World Outline server running on my EC2 server, but I was struggling (still am) to understand the whole thing. What's the solution? Don't try to understand the *whole* thing, just understand the bit that you're looking at now and trust that the rest will become clear. After an afternoon of mucking around, I finally understood what a root was in the context of the World Outline and to see the effects of changing the nodetype. From here it was easy to get to the point where I could create my own worknotes site, (almost) just like the big boys. Of course just as I'd worked it out for myself, Adam published a screencast basically recapping everything that I'd learned that day. I could have waited and not had so much brainache, but I really think I wouldn't have learned as much from just being told how to do it.
With this under my belt, I felt prepared to go back and listen to the podcasts. And I just listened to all six of them this weekend, pretty much back to back. And what was completely over my head the first time, was now starting to make some sense. I felt braver about poking around and started to understand what's amazing about all of this: everything's an outline. Of course the content of a blogpost is an outline, but so is the code that creates each page, the css is an outline, the code that creates the system pages that let you set preferences and parameters are all stored in outlines. And so everything can be (is!) edited, customised and configured using the editor itself. This is open-source with a twist, you really can look under the bonnet and see how it works, while it's working. I think this is really cool.
I also think that right now is a great time to get involved, it's mature enough to have something that works, but it's still shaky enough to feel like you're really able to contribute. The mailing list feels like it's just moved to the next stage.
I'm going to be having a go at using the various tools in the suite to cover off blogging, micro-blogging, my feed-reader and narrating my work. There's more, but I think this will be enough for now.
Oh, just to see how it worked and to beef up my editing skills, this afternoon, I reformatted my #llobo reflections from last year as an online outline. It was very easy to do – see what you think.Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous
OK, so my head is full of cold but I thought I could wander out into Twitter and ask something that was puzzling me, but it seems I might have asked it at the wrong time or the wrong place. I got back answers that made me think people didn't understand the question.
So there's a formulation that I've seen on Twitter and blogs that is: "X is a thing now" or "is X a thing? Really?". I suppose I've internally translated it as meaning "X is a meme now". Except that the formulation seems to have become a meme itself. And that's what I was trying to ask – when (where/how etc.) did saying that "X is a thing" which means that X has become a meme, become a meme?
Also what effect does capitalising "Thing" have? What's the difference (if any) between "We could make that a thing!" and "We could make that a Thing!"?
PS I'm not just asking the question because I want to know. I'm also interested in how you *can* answer questions like this. It's not something you can search for easily, nor does it seem to show up on Quora… yet.
Buy My Time
@lloyddavis on twitter
- @LloydDavis Great stuff. @RosieBamboots needs to come and look round for a craft fair too. HebdenBridgeCQ (Creative Quarter)
- You all love @lloyddavis, right? They love him so much in Rotterdam, they've named a neighbourhood in his honour http://t.co/2UBYBTZj artistsmakers (Dan Thompson)
- Scorchio in SW11 @ Webbs Road http://t.co/Vupf2ICV LloydDavis (Lloyd Davis)
- Good old Dorking Signal Box #nerd @ Dorking (Main) Railway Station (DKG) http://t.co/152fs1mf LloydDavis (Lloyd Davis)
- I get involved because... @ Dorking Halls http://t.co/AR98saOp LloydDavis (Lloyd Davis)
Flickr Photos
|
ORG
Recent Comments