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I just wanted to let you know how things are going since the last update – many, many lovely people have been in touch and are keeping in touch. I’ve had more calls and messages of support than I could have wished for.
In terms of micropatrons I’ve received £460 in one-off donations and now have £80 in monthly contributions. Everyone ticked the no-publicity box so I won’t go into details. Thanks too to those who’ve bought me lunch 
This meant I was able both to get to Daren’s #openhouse on Friday night and to go down to Bude for a few days of excellent New Orleans Jazz. I got plenty of sunshine, did some busking in the mornings which lifted my spirits and more than paid for the campsite charges.
Steph Gray sat down with me on Friday and we worked out a plan for tuttleclub.org to give me some thinking space about community projects. We also are looking at a better web presence for Tuttle Consulting.
Still open to offers on practical stuff and interesting things we might do together. You know where I am. I don’t believe one can say thank you too much. So, y’know, thanks again.
Thanks to everyone who’s said “Hi!” on twitter or elsewhere in response to Friday’s plea for halp!
I believe that if you ask for what you need then what you get is what you need. So clearly what I truly need is to know that I have the love, respect and goodwill of my family, friends and peers. That love is what’s of primary importance, everything else is secondary and I know it’s on its way – thank you.
In terms of responses beyond (the most welcome) moral support, I’ve had offers of help from a couple of people by DM to sit and work some things out. Since they chose to contact me privately I’m not going to name them here but thanks to them for that extra effort, we haven’t fixed anything but I’m hoping to meet soon.
I’m meeting someone on Friday to work out what to do with a community site for Tuttle to make joint projects like Tuttle2Texas easier.
The other items on my list from Friday still stand – I’m still open to offers. I know that many people in my primary network are facing similar situations but I’m hopeful that the retweeting and keeping talking about it will help me find the right people.
@cataspanglish wrote a thoughtful response to my post, which helped clarify some stuff for me.
I’ve acquired two new regular micropatrons – one is my good friend @paul_clarke and the other prefers to remain anonymous. That brings the gang up to four – click the links in the sidebar to get in at the ground floor!
I’m hoping to get the first bits of art up for sale here in the next day or so. I’m learning fast on paypal buttons and shopping carts.
I’m upbeat and hopeful. Very much living one day at a time. I have enough for today and although my rent for this month is now late and other bills are looming, I’m pressing on and working hard and having fun. I’d hoped to get down to Bude for the Jazz Festival this weekend for some proper R&R but I don’t have the train fare yet.
I’m saying a lot that this is a scary bit of the road which looks impassable and at which point I have, in the past, done a little u-turn, taken a compromise soul-destroying job, abandoned dreams, gone away and hidden, told myself off for being so silly. I’m not doing that this time (at least not today) because I have come to see that I’m likely to keep returning to this place until I find a way through. Doing a u-turn just postpones the difficult steps forward.
Thanks for listening and watching and cheering me on.
So after I graduated, in the summer of 1996 (see there’s a whole story there about why I was graduating in 1996 at the age of 31…) I went back as a Research Associate, no, do you know what? I don’t think I was a Research *Associate* because that was a defined job for people with more experience and stuff, I think my title was actually Research Assistant. Anyway I went back and settled into doing very similar work as I’d done when a student, except for half as much money again and on a study of public libraries and with the knowledge that I was probably here to stay.
Until I saw an advertisement. I don’t know exactly when it was but it wasn’t long in. There was an internal advertisement for Information Manager for the newly-formed Joint Reviews of Social Services, a team to be jointly managed by the Commission and the Department of Health. A team had already been working for a year on developing a methodology for carrying out wholesale reviews of an Authority’s Social Services function from a service-user’s point of view. The idea was to blend the “professional judgement” of the Department with the “analytical rigour” of the Commission.
The project director was Andrew Webster who went on to become Director of Social Services at Lambeth and Surrey. I asked people in the pub about Andrew and the project and what I should do. And got a whole-hearted shove in the right direction. I felt terrible about jumping ship so quickly, but the job really did have my name written all over it. It was to design and manage information systems to collect data both from national statistical collections and from individual reviews and provide data analysis support to the professional social workers and auditors who formed the review teams.
I got the job and started work on the team in a little office in Grosvenor Gardens, next door to the Peanut Council of America and other luminaries.
Just before I started, my (now ex-) wife was diagnosed with breast cancer. The kids were 3 and 5 and although I’d just got a dream job iI faced losing my partner and bringing the children up on my own. I took as much time off as I could while she had her surgery and recuperated. She, we now know, lived long enoughh to become my ex-wife 10 years later and continues to thrive cancer free. At that time, however, I had no idea how this was going to turn out. My reaction was to throw myself into work. In the time up until Christmas, I worked on an analysis tool for the team to be able to get a statistical picture of an authority’s performance before a review started.
I pulled it altogether in a spreadsheet containing a database of the core performance indicators that the team had identified as important. For most of these indicators we had three years of data. the Commission had, at the time, defined “families” of authorities for profiling, putting similar authorities (based largely on demography) into groups.
My tool presented the data for a particular authority in the context of its family group and a particular indicator in the form of a boxplot for three years. You could see quickly, once you understood the format, what trend an indicator might be following in relation to other similar authorities. You could also see where an authority fell within the middle half or above or below the quartiles for its family and statistically where they were outliers (this really needs an illustration doesn’t it?). The central team loved it, got it straight away. It took a bit longer for some of the other reviewers to catch up.
Interestingly, as I’m thinking about what you say and what you don’t and considering how to flesh out the story of me online, this weekend it was announced that the Audit Commission is to be abolished.
The Audit Commission was a big part of my working life. Did you know that? Probably not, there might be fleeting references to it, but to an extent, when I left in 2002 I drew a line under it as an experience and moved on. So as an interesting exercise in backstory writing (ie creating panels before the first panel – and of course a gutter between) what did I do there?
I arrived at the Commission’s Vincent Square headquarters on 1 August 1994. It was coincidentally the day that Commission staff were all moving back into VSQ after refurbishment, so it was a more laid back introduction than I’d expected and everyone else had a little air of being new themselves. I was there as a placement student for a year as part of my degree in Computing & IT at Surrey University.
My role as a student was to provide data analysis support to study teams in the directorate of Local Government Studies. I found myself allocated to a number of studies, but primarily a team just starting to look at the education of children under five. In the course of the year I got more and more excited by the prospect of understanding public services by collecting data and going out and talking to people.
The classic commission study contained a comprehensive and thorough narrative exploring the area of interest coupled with facts and analyses to support the argument. In addition there was usually an audit tool of some sort which would allow local auditors to carry out a value for money audit in the services affected.
So much of my time was spent following the study team around, carrying bags and getting to understand what they were doing and seeing where I could spot things that could be measured and interesting stories that might be told based on thbe data. It wasn’t up to me to come up with the stories, more to spot interesting avenues of investigation and then, if the study team agreed then to look further.
A running joke was that study teams always found there to be “significant variation between councils’ performance in X” for a number of Xs. Spotting variation was only the beginning. Explaining why variation occurred and what managers could do to improve their performance was much more important.
Not much was expected of us as students, but I loved bringing large sets of data together and seeing what you could tell from it. So I set about recording all of the data we were collecting, right down to attendance patterns in nursery schools into one big database that I could play around with.
The key output of this was a spreadsheet that allowed an auditor to compare the data they collected in an individual educational setting, or across a local authority, with national averages. My innovation was to present this data in the form of a “cost tree” for cost per child per hour.
A figure for cost per anything is usually one big number divided by some other big number, so in this case the total cost of provision divided by the number of child hours provided. Now this might vary for a wide range of reasons but by laying out the factors that go to make up the costs and those that might vary in the calculation of the total number of child hours (a policy decision, for example, to limit the number of hours 3-year-olds might get) it was much easier to see where differences arose.
It was very simple in the end but effective. It gave people something to think about, something to discuss and help them put a local picture into a national context. As well as helping the study team understand the dynamics of costs and differences between the costs of types of setting, it would help auditors to show councils where they might make improvements.
I went back to university for my final year, but was very pleased when the people in the study team lobbied for me to be recruited following graduation. But that’s a story for another day.
OK – what does this tell you about me? How does it help explain what happens next? Does it explain anything at all? Or is the gulf between this and what you know of me today too wide for you to suspend your disbelief that they’re the same people (*I* struggle..!). Do you want to give up, or carry on? Have I jumped too far from yesterdays post for you to understand what I’m trying to do here?
I’m playing a new game called Empire Avenue it’s a very interesting way to look at the combination of social web activity and market sentiment about you as an “influencer” Early days, but there’s enough complexity in there to make it quite fascinating. It’s open to all and as with all these things getting in early is an advantage.
I need to leave a code here EAVB_TKMMDBRQZW to help verify that this is my blog. If you’re playing the game, it would help if you could endorse this for me to finish the verification.
“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” Camille Pissarro
“The artist is meant to put the objects of this world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance which is the light of our consciousness and which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, reveal.” Joseph Campbell
I need your help with something.
You may have seen my work as Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration (C4CC). The definition of social art that I work with is “The process of skilfully bringing people together in such a way as to create a sense of beauty and attraction in those that see or participate in it”. My time at the centre has meant that the team hit several of their first year targets in a few months and I have encouraged a culture of conversation and online presence there. I’m just about to complete my first six months there and the University has just agreed a further six months extension.
I’m now looking for a simultaneous and complementary residency with another partner for least for the next six months (and possibly longer with the right organisation). I’m hoping that you can help me find such a partner organisation.
Why might you benefit from having me as a social artist in residence?
I believe that many organisations need more of their people behaving as social artists to create beautiful situations in their working lives and to allow creativity to blossom wherever it is needed. I see people obstructed and cut off from the people they need to be connected to. I see silos where people in another department or function are seen as too different to bother working with. I see industries decaying and ultimately falling apart with people knowing deep down that the old ways aren’t working for them, but unclear on how to find a new beginning. I see people inside organisations starved of inspiration and opportunities to reflect on and appreciate what they already know that can lead them out of where they are stuck.
As a manager and as a consultant myself I’ve tried to introduce new processes and tools to deal with this problem. I rarely saw the radical change and creative inspiration that was needed. I believe that real, lasting change happens in the gaps in-between the formal processes of an organisation. I’m offering myself as a social artist in residence to help fill those gaps with interesting and useful stuff that helps ease some of these difficulties.
If this all sounds like hand-wavey nonsense to you, then thank you for reading this far, it’s probably not for you. But if any of this resonates with your experience of work, then perhaps we can do something together.
How do I work?
I work with individuals and groups to encourage them to take their own first steps in social art. By definition, I don’t work in isolation, but t also won’t impose myself on anyone who doesn’t want to be included. I also rarely tell someone exactly what to do, preferring to let them discover it themselves. My work usually revolves around conversation, giving people the chance to engage in different kinds of talking and to recognise that they have the answers already but that the answer is sometimes just buried deep. I can’t guarantee you specific outcomes, but I am certain that you will be able to dscern a positive effect afterwards. This is art, not consulting, so I don’t have a structured methodology or a toolkit that you can scrutinise beforehand, however I can arrange conversations with people who’ve worked with me in this way if that helps.
What is it then that I actually do?
I will usually spend at least one day per week on your premises or directly working with your people. I spend some time at first just observing what is, how the organisation really works, what stories people tell about it, where people feel blocked and hopeless, where people feel hopeful and passionate. I may write about it and make connections with other things I’m currently working on. Soon, I will start doing. I will experiment. I will get people together to talk about something and I use different forms of conversation to help people see what they might do differently. I’ll also bring other parts of my practice in – perhaps inviting other artists or collaborators from C4CC to take part in conversations and sometimes, I’ll just sit around and make stuff – draw or write something – I go with the flow of what is needed. I also document as I go along – preferably on a public blog to help people see how things are coming along.
Hmmm….
Perhaps you like the idea but a commitment to a six-month residency isn’t for you? There are other ways that I can help.
You might like to get involved in a one-off social art field trip project such as Tuttle2Texas by sponsoring some element of it. I can also facilitate creative conversations to generate ideas, inspiration and potential collaborations. Or maybe you’d like me to run a workshop or two on how your people can use some of these techniques to develop their own capability to engage in creative conversation through social media. I’m also available for a limited number of one-to-one mentoring/coaching relationships. Let me know if you’re interested.
I love demolition sites. Not for the potential new building that will take place there, but for the old view, blocked out for so many years, that gets set free again. Sadly, the view is usually lessened by the big hoardings that keep out people who might get up to no good, and then, sooner or later, some other ugly pile of bricks, glass or concrete will be shoved up and obscure the sight line again. It’s called development and I understand the economic imperative. But.
Someone asked me recently “What would you do if you just had shedloads of money, more money than you knew what to do with?” I really thought about it for once. Or rather I didn’t think, I just let something tumble out of my mouth. And when I heard it, I knew it to be the truth.
“I’d buy up old, ugly, useless buildings in the city and knock them down. Then instead of building something new on the site, I’d make it into a park, a green space, perhaps with a tree or two. And no-one would be allowed to build there again.”
Wouldn’t that be nice? Wouldn’t that be a better legacy than putting up yet another building (however beautiful or well-designed) in a city that already feels like it has too many?
I think so. I also think it’s too good to wait until I’ve got shedloads of money, more money than I know what to do with. I never say never, but it might be a long time coming. I think a better idea is to crowdfund it. How much would we need to raise to buy something small (but ugly) tear it down and make something beautiful and natural in its place? What sort of organisation would it take? What planning obstacles might there be? Anybody want to take it on as a juicy co-operative social enterprise? Anybody already doing it?
I’m going to ask you to be my friend.
This isn’t about whether the use of “friend” on online social networks is appropriate. Neither is it a heart-warming, tear-brimming story about one of my mates, how fabulous they are (though I have a few stories like that to tell) and how I’d like you to be one of them.
It’s about a specific use of the term “Friend” as used by arts organisations to mean someone who gives regular financial support in return for the value they get from that organisation.
As I become more comfortable with being a Social Artist, I’m offering my own version. So I got thinking about value and of course I asked people to help me out. I set up a survey to ask people what they would get if they had £5, £10, £20 or £50 and they came back with the following answers:
For a Fiver
Flowers for the missus; A trip on the Cardiff Waterbus; A trashy magazine and a packet of starmix; Comics from the bargain bin;
iTunes; Take-away for lunch; Either a beer with a friend or dessert with a friend; a magazine or book; A really really good ice cream: at a 1950s ice cream parlour in Broadstairs overlooking the sea – Morelli’s is the one http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Seaside.html ; Go to Hawkins Bazaar. Enjoy!
For a Tenner
A “push the boat out” bottle of wine i.e. one that’s more than a Fiver;
An edition, or back edition of Special ten – Ultimate goodness http://www.specialten.com/ ; A couple of good steaks; New comics; Beer, supermarket special offer most likely; Books from Oxfam; Pack of smokes and a beer with a friend; new knickers; Your favourite trash author has published a new book. You pretend to your friends you don’t read this stuff. You can wait, as you usually do, for the cheap paperback edition to appear on Amazon or a second hand copy from Abe Books. Or, you can splurge £9.99 on the hardback, discounted, offer at your local bookshop. You can walk in and buy it. Yes!; Fish and chips for two and cups of tea on the beach at Whitstable in the winter.
For £20
A bottle of single malt (you have to wait for them to come on special); Cheap bottle of Moet rose – usually on offer in Tesco, owner of all land; A bottle of wine and ingredients for dinner for my boyfriend; A mix of comics, old and new; Cinema tickets for two, sweets with the change; Doctor Who DVDs; Dinner with a friend;
241 cocktails with friends in cardiff (wouldn’t get much for £20 in london); Spend it on flowers – from Steve at Chapel Market, near Angel – do a deal you can get lots for £20; Look at Moleskine notebooks. Go on, you know you want to.
For £50
Dinner; Lunch, or dinner in my FAVE cantonese in the UK ever in ever of historian style ever – http://www.riversidecantonese.com/; Taking my boyfriend out for dinner; Big comics (or graphic novels, as they’re known); Meal for two, out at restaurant; Stick it in an ISA! If that’s not available, solar powered electro-gubbins; New sex toy to be used…..with a friend!; a new frock; Take 4 friends to the movies in Leicester Square; or the poshest cinema in your area and buy them popcorn. Ace!; Go to your local railway station. Tell them you’ve got £50. Say “A cheap day day return to somewhere nice please. Where can I go?”
Now obviously this represents a wide variety of tastes and geographies as well as some clear preferences based on gender, but it gives you a pretty good idea. So, I’m offering the same rates for regular donations each month – maybe you see me as “comics from the bargain bin, a take-away lunch or a really good ice cream” once a month – in which case you’d go for the £5 option. Or, at the other end, maybe to you I am “solar powered electro-gubbins, a cheap day-return to a mystery destination or… a new frock” – then I’ll put you down for £50pm. See?
But that’s not all. I’m not just asking for cash because you think I’m like an ice cream (?) I’m offering the following benefits in return for four levels of monthly payment.
£5 – a link and a public thank you on the social networking site of your choice, plus the warm glow of knowing that you’re supporting Social Art. Oh, and acknowledgement when I see you next – shoulder squeeze for the gals, manly shoulder punch for the guys.
£10 – as £5 PLUS a postcard from me saying thank you and an invitation to an annual party for other tenner friends
£20 – as £10 PLUS a postcard-sized piece of original art from me twice a year and an invitation to a special summer picnic and a mid-winter feast
£50 – as £20 PLUS a copy of Tuttle Chronicles – a new quarterly publication for such special friends and a quarterly meetup with sparkling conversation.
I’ve made links to recurring payment plans via PayPal.
£5 per month
£10 per month
£20 per month
£50 per month
UK friends – paying by standing order avoids paypal fees – e-mail me and I’ll send you the bank details.
If you’re going for anything higher than £10 I’ll need a postal address for you to send you goodies.
PS thanks very much to Jon; @chkn; Kathryn; Pete; @tookiebunten; edent; WankerGirl; lynsey; and Brian for their ideas
PPS if you’re not my “friend” you can still be my “friend” and you can definitely still be my friend.
I’ve been Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration for four months now. I love it. It’s great to have somewhere to focus my practice around – not just so that I have somewhere to park myself to work, but to contribute to a mission while doing my stuff.
I set out here to make new connections between the centre and the various communities that I have a presence in; to create synergy between the work of the centre and other projects I work on; and to encourage others to join in by writing about what I’ve done and speaking about it widely.
It’s been more successful than I’d anticipated (I know, for example, that the majority of people who’ve come through the doors of the centre have done so because of my efforts), which is great, particularly given that this is a startup environment which doesn’t officially launch until later this month. We haven’t talked yet about what happens to my place here after the initial six month agreement, though I’m hoping to stay involved in some capacity.
I’m now looking for another residency to complement it. I’m interested this time in finding something that’s different. I’d like to try what I’m doing in a differently challenging environment, one where there’s an established status quo – somewhere regimented, hierarchical and silo-bound. An organisation that’s struggling to make sense of or come to terms with a shift in their market or operational environment. In short somewhere where I have something to push against.
Any ideas?
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