I made a couple of false starts with the posterous archives. I foolishly thought that because they said they were wordpress export files, that they’d just be straightforward to import. Well no. Quelle surprise! The wordpress importer doesn’t like them at all and the posterous import plugins I tried made a mess too.

The most obvious thing first of all was that everything came through in the “Uncategorized” category. I went round in circles with this one, but in the end came up with the following recipe.

This example uses the tuttle consulting blog, note that I use Ubuntu, it’s probably much easier to load the file into a text editor and do fancy search and replace stuff, but especially after I spent the weekend at barcamp, I was in the mood for command line shenanigans…

• Extract the export file and shorten it’s name for typing convenience. I called mine tce.xml (because it was the tuttle consulting export)
• [please excuse my hacking, there's sure to be a more elegant way of doing the same thing - do let me know if it's obvious to you.]
• run sed ‘s/>\t/>\n\t/g’ tce.xml > tce1.xml to insert a newline between all closing brackets followed by a tab otherwise it’s just all one line and grep doesn’t do anything.
• run grep -v Uncategorized tce1.xml > tce2.xml to strip out the lines tagging posts as Uncategorized
• run cat tce2.xml | tr -d ‘\n’ > tce3.xml to remove the newlines because the importer didn’t seem to like them
• if you don’t already have one sign up for a wordpress.com account, we’re going to use that to import and export in a friendly format.
• create a new wordpress.com blog tcposterous.wordpress.com
• create a new “tuttle-consulting” category and set it as the default for new posts
• realise that not all posts were written by me, I think the fix for this is to note all of the post authors names (they’re in a dc:creator tag in the xml file) and then create them as users on the blog.
• ask the wordpress.com importer to do it’s magic
• wait while wordpress.com did the import (for this file it was a minute or so, but larger files do take longer)
• export from wordpress.com
• import this file to my own wordpress on lloyddavis.co.uk
• stand back to admire your work
• Outstanding Issues
• commenters’ names weren’t exported properly in the first place. They are in the html files, but somehow didn’t get converted in the export file… this needs some work before the bigger ones get done.
• there are a few coding glitches – tags as <> etc
• an audioboo which I’d attached to one post didn’t turn up. I said yes to downloading attachments but I’m not sure what that’s actually doing
• one post with a photo from flickr came through alright (ie links back to flickr), but one didn’t there’s a copy in the archive and that’s now been uploaded to my server. I presume this is to do with how they were embedded in the first place.
• No guarantees or warranties, YMMV etc. All suggestions for improvement gratefully accepted.

]]> http://perfectpath.co.uk/2013/06/17/importing-old-posterous-blogs-to-stand-alone-wordpress/feed/ 0 Lloyd Davis http://perfectpath.co.uk/2013/06/17/barcamp-berkshire-day-2-thought-link-dump-bcb13/ http://perfectpath.co.uk/2013/06/17/barcamp-berkshire-day-2-thought-link-dump-bcb13/#comments Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:13:03 +0000 Lloyd Davis http://perfectpath.wordpress.com/?p=2031 ]]> I’m always tempted to stay overnight, but I’ve never actually done it. I may not have slept perfectly last night anyway, but I’m sure it was better than lying on a corporate head office meeting room floor.

People did come to my early morning session on “the future of blogging?” despite being up against an eight-year-old girl.

It helped me recognise what it is that I want – a bunch of people who are broadly interested in the same things, but actively eating their own dogfood. Tom Morris helped draw this out further in his session on indieweb. Tom, for example, has stripped back his blogging input box so that it’s almost the original Twitter “What are you doing ?” box – except it accepts Markdown and more than 140 characters There’s an indiewebcamp in Portland, OR, next weekend (June 22/23) and a UK one in Brighton on Sep 8th

The main reason I’m interested in a good RSS reader is not that I’m a writer who wants other people to read, it’s that I want to be able to find and read stuff in a non-fragmented way without having to scour FB, Twitter, Tumblr *and* Son of Google Reader.

It got me thinking too about archiving and my current ongoing project to draw all my stuff together under my own domain.

There was a small but lively discussion about bitcoin. Things got most heated during the discussion about forking…

I bumped into Ketan who’d brought in this and, usefully, an early viewmaster that had batteries to backlight the screen.

After a deliciously substantial lunch I did an impromptu (well, I did put it on the grid) meeting room gig, which was much like a house gig, but, y’know with a big table, uncomfortable chairs, a whiteboard’n'shit.

And I rounded off with a geek dive into Rail API data with Paul Freeman

A really good barcamp, well-balanced for me in terms of giving and receiving. I’m feeling refreshed, encouraged and inspired. Thanks to all who played a part in making it happen.

I confirmed for myself that I understand github well enough to use it (I thought I might have been missing something. I probably still am, but nothing serious.) So now this exists.

#hackthebarbican makes some people very very excited.

I miss Tomorrow’s World badly. Thanks to BBC Redux for making it possible for us to see Judith Hann demonstrating a nasal-spray contraceptive.

Barcamps are just full of good people, I’m really looking forward to spending more time with them tomorrow.

You still hear the darnedest things in little conversations inbetween.

For example, where else would you stumble over someone you knew who is trying to improve how Shakespeare’s plays are displayed on the web in Mandarin? That’ll be Terence Eden.

It’s really good to do a session where you get to say “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what the answer is, you tell me.”

why we’re doing it

• The Barbican Centre approached Charles Armstrong to produce something for the month of August while the concert hall and theatre space are being refurbished. Charles sensibly asked some of his friends to come together to think about it and they invited more people.

what

• during the month of August the indoor public areas of the Barbican Centre will be taken over by a self-organising, interdisciplinary experiment in creative collaboration – there will be residencies, events, talks, installations – the biggest limit on the list of things there’ll be is the law… and the fact that the Barbican is a Grade II listed building.

how far we’ve got

• We’ve had an organising group meeting every week since the beginning of the year. We’ve run a Bazaar weekend to try out how it might work. We’re just about to start doing weekly social collaboration sessions to help people who want to get involved to get to know each other better and talk about things they might do in August.

what we need now

• We need people to propose residencies and events. Those links are to pages with forms to submit ideas on the website. We also need people to get involved – take a look at the site and see what you think – you can join the mailing list.

Ideas popped up: Making a map of the centre in Minecraft, a Silent Disco, messing with the lights, messing with the plasma screen etc.

0. This is a pattern that’s grown out of the #ukgovcamp community – write a blog post on the day after or as soon as you can, just getting the key things for you out of your head, rather than trying to write up everything “perfectly”

1. I had to leave way earlier than I wanted to, but probably later than I should, because I was overtaken by what started as a tickly throat but by lunchtime had made me a sniffly, headachy mess.

2. I’m still not 100% and the following may read as overly negative because I’m generally feeling down in the dumps. Forgive me if I sound whiney in anything that follows. Take what you like and leave the rest.

3. So first of all, majorly, wow! I didn’t expect as many people, I was thrilled to see people who’d travelled a very long way to be there. It felt really good to connect several communities that I feel part of and to meet some new people as well. Thank you for coming and sharing your experience. I hope everyone got something useful out of the day. I wish I’d seen Studio 45, the pictures look amazing. Big kudos to Vinay and Tom for co-curating and hosting. Big thanks to Tam for sorting everything else out.

4. I boobed with my talk big time. I hadn’t really thought through 10 minutes and ended up talking too much about what I was doing years ago (mostly #tuttle) rather than the interesting things that I’m working on now – #wewillgather, #hackthebarbican, #ukgovcamp and its many spinoffs.

5. The folk at LimeWharf have made a great space but…

• I find East London, well that bit of Hackney especially, depressing. This is about me, not about Hackney…
• I am not inspired by big, open, flat-walled, bare, concrete space. My idea of conviviality (and I suggest that conviviality is *vital* to these sorts of gatherings) is soft furnishings, warmth, small spaces for intimate conversations. I also don’t get on well with standing up while conversing.
• There was something weird about being served tea and coffee through the hatch. It’s lovely to be served and I get and appreciate the care that’s being offered, but it felt difficult to just help myself when I needed it. There’s a thing in OST about no coffee breaks but easy access to refreshment and beverages. That please.

6. I think we had too many different experiences of different kinds of gathering to say anything useful to all of them. I also think that while it’s useful to get these things together, a hackday is different from a tech unconference is different from a public service unconference is different from a cash mob is different from a self-organising festival. I felt sometimes like we disagreed about stuff because we were talking about different things without knowing it. I think some people were “feeling different parts of the elephant” than I was.

7. I think we tried to do too much by having the conversation and not settling on a methodology up front. I’m not so attached to open space technology that I can’t do anything else, but I think that opening up the conversation we did the equivalent of trying to rewrite the kernel while applications were running, or put another way, trying to redesign and rebuild the engine of a car while driving along the M4.

8. I think that trying to merge sessions as a group is a bad idea. In my view, a few individuals took control of the agenda to suit them. I heard people say “nine sessions in two hours is too many” I don’t believe this is true. I do believe that trying to collapse everything into two or three groups makes for too general a conversation. But I didn’t get to stick around long enough to properly find out. It probably worked out marvellously and I’m being an idiot.

9. Measuring complex human systems is a slippery slope – the kind of measurement we default to means assuming that the human system is like a machine that has measurable inputs and outputs – it’s a way of dealing with complexity by pretending it doesn’t exist. I just haven’t seen that work for anyone other than people who like measuring things or who make judgements without having skin in the game. It’s a distraction and it leads to people gaming the measurement system to look good. People told me this when I was part of the effort to introduce performance measurement to public services. I didn’t believe them. I was wrong about this then, they were right, I don’t think anything’s fundamentally changed.

10. We need to keep practicing this stuff. We’re actually really crap at having real conversations of any kind – people who’ve avoided having this beaten out of them through a combination of school, work and corporatised media are very very rare. But we are getting better and it’s really good to do it, it’s really powerful. Let’s keep doing it.

That aside, I see three of my pals engaged in the closing stages of their campaigns and I suggest you have a look and see if there’s anything there that floats your boat. They’re all fun and worthy of support in my view – I present them here in closing date order – if you can give them all a fiver it would make me smile and make some goodness happen in various bits of the world. Thankyou.

So I’m trying it out. I mean, I’m trying out the wordpress functionality – I’ve been playing with Fargo for a little while now. It has all the thought-organising outlining power of the OPML Editor but it just sits on a web page and stores the actual text file in my Dropbox account. This means I don’t have to start up a separate app and I can keep a bunch of outlines open at all times in the place where I’m doing most of my work – the files are autosaved every now and then (I just saw “SAVE” pop up in the sidebar)

Another thing I really value is the way new features are introduced. I haven’t had to install anything new (just give the page my blog details) and nothing is broken since earlier on today before the new version came in – I just reopened my browser and my outlines were there, just the same.

This from the Bromsgrove Messenger in December 1982, I guess. I do mostly remember this production for the thing the reviewer picked up where we repeated 14 pages of the first act because we got lost. I’m pretty sure I was hamming it up appallingly, and I probably was doing a lot of “face acting” but it seems to have gone down well.

I think it was during rehearsals for this that I had a meeting with the headmaster, who tried to drive any silly ideas about working in theatre out of my little head. “Much better to keep these sorts of things as a hobby.”

Here we all are:

Nonetheless, I have a lot of sympathy with those who are picking away at their old wounds.  If you’d asked me in November  1990 (while I was honeymooning in Malta and desperately trying to find out what was really going on back in London)what reaction I’d have if she actually died, I’d have probably given you a list of reasons why I would enjoy dancing on her grave.

I joined the Labour Party at the age of 18, toward the end of 1983, partly in response to the horrendous election result in June of that year.  I think I was told at home to “stop moaning about it and go and do something about it”.

As a recent school-leaver without a job and as a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists, I was active throughout the following year in campaigns to support the printworkers in dispute with Eddie Shah and supporting miners on strike through 1984 and ’85.

So all through the eighties I was involved and awake to what was going on.  And all through that period, I hated Thatcher and the rest of the Government.  But I can’t do that any more, it stopped working for me.  This isn’t piety, it’s self-preservation.

Next Wednesday, while a coffin-bearing gun carriage trundles down Fleet Street to St Paul’s  I’d like to do something other than the obvious choices of cheering or jeering.

I think we need to focus rather on the release of resentment and ways to find reconciliation, preferably without talking about MHT or her colleagues at all.  So I’ll be holding Human Scale Conversations on those themes.  If you’re interested in doing something different on that day, come along.  I’ve not settled on a venue yet, but somewhere away from Whitehall and The City – maybe the weather will be kind and we can go somewhere in Hyde Park.  I’ve put up a #wewillgather event and see what happens.

BTW this explains Human Scale Conversations.

UPDATE/AFTERTHOUGHT I’m doing this in Central London, but if you’re not here on Wednesday, I’d strongly encourage you to organise you’re own event in a similar vein.

All were welcome and the right people were the ones who came.  It was a really interesting and at times challenging experience.  Just when I thought I was used to the uncertainty of the unconference format (after all, even the most wacky groups have a limited range of social interactions and odd ideas) we go and try doing one … with kids!  I appreciated it being small enough to remain one conversation for most of the day.

The thing that struck me most was the similarity between the conversations we were having about unschooling families engaging with schools and education authorities; and those we have at other times about self-unemployed people engaging with corporate entities.

In both conversations, the people know that they’re doing something useful and valuable in working in a different way.  Both sets of people believe that others would enjoy and prosper from following their way of life if they knew that it was an option.

The conversation went round in a few circles.  Substitute the word “school” with “corporate” and you’ll see what I mean: “What should our relationship with schools be ?  Should we be going in and using their facilities?  What value might schools get from having us visit and work there?  How do we do what we know is right and at the same time make enough money to pay our bills?  If we don’t engage with schools but form groups of families to learn specialist things together, then aren’t we just becoming a school?”

So it got me thinking about what social aspects of my self-unemployed life map across.  I don’t know, you tell me.

#tuttle-like meetups – I think that most home-schoolers do this kind of thing, getting together in a coffee shop and annoying the staff by sitting there all day.

#jelly and co-working – I’m not sure how much this happens, the equivalent would be people working on their own learning but having others nearby to help out, perhaps now and then co-operating on joint-learning projects.  I think it would be interesting to create a C4CC-like space for unschoolers, but would that just be like a Summerhill-y kind of school?

unconferences – of course these start to bridge the gap between the employed and the self-unemployed – it would be good to see some young(er) people at unconferences in some other role than prodigy or  hack-cannon-fodder.  I’d also be interested to see an unconference that just was under-eighteens only.

consulting – the things we’re learning by being outside the system *are* valuable to those inside, but it’s sometimes difficult to quantify that value and to set up a contractual arrangement to exchange value that suits both parties well enough.  I think we started to get there, especially with the first round of the Tuttle Consulting work.  It’s more about knowledge-sharing perhaps.

0.  I miss posterous because it really made it easy to getting people blogging after an event – the follow-up posts have been fewer this year and I’m sure it’s something to do with not being able to just grab a space and do it even for people without a regular blog.

1. Spam twitterbots are ruining the use of Twitter as a backchannel for events in real-time.  As a record afterwards it’s OK but something must be done if we want real-time conversation around a hashtag.

2.  The conversations could have been edgier for my liking.  I worry that there aren’t enough “let’s kill this sacred cow” sessions being pitched, not enough argument, fighting, death threats, throwing of furniture, etc.

3. I think this is partly related to the fact that many people in this community started out as rebels and now they find themselves mainstream.  It’s a difficult shift to handle and each individual reacts in their own way.  If you have a keen eye for what’s not right, and are ready for resistance, it gets really difficult when people keep saying “yes, you’re right, let’s get on with it”.  It’s a nice problem to have, but that doesn’t make it any easier.

4.  I want more slots on the grid so that the keen people can chat away while the rest of us have dedicated space for napping and playing ukulele together.

5.  I really should leave the gags to Dave Briggs, he does a smashing job, I end up going down embarrassing rabbit-holes.

6. I’m glad I recapped on the principles of open space at the beginning.  It’s easy for us to slip into thinking that some of the rituals and traditions we’ve accumulated over the years have to be part of the process, they don’t, we should always be questioning whether they serve us, today.

7.  I missed having Paul Clarke and Jeremy Gould around.

8.  I’m really glad to see service-specific camps springing up, I’ve been to a #librarycamp and #bluelightcamp.  I’m looking forward to #housingcamp.  I’ve also been talking to people recently about running unconference/open space for individual organisations as a means to stakeholder engagement or for organisational learning.

9. Please don’t make me choose between Chicken Curry and Bangers and Mash for lunch.

10.  This will be remembered as “the one where Lloyd played his ukulele to an audience of stuffed rats while a man danced  the Charleston.”

On both of these recent occasions the channel has been disrupted by an invasion of spambots, to the point that the stream became unusable temporarily for those actually interested in the topic.

These bots latch onto the trending hashtag, saying something inane like “I can’t believe this!” plus a spammy link and flood the stream.

I know nothing about the creation of twitterbots, but I assume the accounts are programmatically created and they sit listening for trending hashtags and then throw themselves into the stream with the hope that from the large number of people taking part, there’ll be one or two who end up clicking on the link or even (yikes!) following the bot themselves.  Today I’ve seen them swarming around the #uksnow hashtag, the other day, when the trumpeter Kenny Ball died, his name was mentioned in spambot tweets.  It’s ridiculous.

At both the events recently, I’ve witnessed the bot tweets have died out over time, during the day, but it’s not clear whether this is simply because the tag became unusable and so stopped trending from non-bot-traffic or because Twitter noticed and did something (but see point 1. below) or because people following the stream reported the bots quickly.  I’m guessing it’s a combination.

So we’re all asking, “What can we do?”

0) Use another platform for the backchannel.  hmm…  any suggestions that have the ease of use and userbase of Twitter?

1) Get Twitter to sort it out.  Good luck with that one.  I’m sceptical of the idea that Twitter are actually able to do anything – the bots are all over the #sxsw stream right now for example.  Surely, if Twitter could kill this sort of thing easily, they would be doing it routinely on the tag associated with the biggest social media event of the year. Twitter also have shown themselves to be repeatedly clueless about what’s really happening on their network.

2) Build better filters – as Twitter increase the amount of metadata associated with tweets, perhaps there’ll be ways of identifying the little monsters quickly and removing them from searches.

3) Start a bot war – fight bots with bots. The most tempting, it’s kind of like point 1, but we do it rather than leave it to Twitter, but who’s the we that’s going to do this?  And like any war, it might remove the present symptoms, but does it just lead to retaliation and escalation?

Sorry, that’s all I’ve got right now.

If you’re in one of those categories and you read this blog, a) I’d be surprised and b) get over to her site and have a look, go on.  It firmly places AFP and her hubby as the goto motivators for creative people of the here and now – “Make Good Art …and… Let People Pay You For It!” 

Anyhow, the first time I heard her talk about her experience as the eight-foot bride and how that informed her relationship to her “audience” now, what I said on twitter in response was “thank you for reminding me that being a street performer is more than OK, it’s a job”

It’s a job, it’s part of my work.  It’s part of my overall contribution to the happiness of my community, and I’m rewarded in many more ways than the pile of coins in my uke case.

I’ve been meaning to write something for a long time (actually it occurs to me every time I go out to play) about what busking has taught me about my business.  But I couldn’t find a decent frame for it – it kept coming out as a translation from what I knew to be true to the sort of language that “business people” understand (yikes!) and too much was being lost in translation.

So here’s what it’s really been like for me.  You do your own translation.

My first sober, adult experience of busking was on the tube.  It’s not the same as the street, but I had a licence for a year and it gave me a good grounding in just standing there with my ukulele, showing up, playing, singing, getting tipped, getting ignored, getting occasionally and very mildly abused.  I also got to meet a few other buskers at the swap-over time, made some friends, was able to talk about the common nuisances of being a tube-busker.  And I heard a story over and over that made me uncomfortable.  It was that people are horrible, they hate buskers, they don’t want us there, they think we’re beggars, they’re mean and ungrateful and we give much more than they reward.   Which wasn’t really my experience, I’d already clocked that the best way to get through a two-hour session playing at, say, Bond St, where you’re in a tunnel between the platform and the escalator hall, so everybody’s always zipping past, is to lock-on to people and smile and give your performance to them, give your all to that one person right now and when they’ve gone, let them go.  And yeah, some of them are grumpy and embarrassed and ignore you or tell you to “Shut up!” or “Get a Job!” but then when I had a job and I was always on the way somewhere else and I saw someone spending their time doing what they love, I probably was a bit grumpy too.  The other thing is, you’re in the middle of one of the busiest transport networks in the world – people don’t go there for entertainment, they go there to get somewhere else, quickly.

Still, the money was rubbish.  And I kept trying to find some correlation between what I was doing and what ended up in the pot.  And there wasn’t any really, one day certain songs would “work”, the next day the same songs would bomb.  Some days I’d get an endless stream of 10p and coppers, others, nobody would give anything except for one guy who tossed in £5.  I kept telling myself to give up trying to work it out, but then when I was there on the pitch and my stomach was rumbling and I’d already laid out for a tube ticket and I somehow had to fix it so that I could make them get that money out of their pocket and into my uke case.  But that never worked.  I gave up my tube licence mainly because of the way the scheme was managed, but also it was just too hit and miss as a means of income.

And so I left it.  I stopped busking for a couple of years.  And in the meantime I did other things, I put into practice lots of ideas I had about organising without organisations, I tried out crowdfunding for projects and I couchsurfed and I went coast-to-coast across the USA twice with the help of my online social network.  And then I went completely homeless and hobo-style and spent a year on the road going where you and the digital world took me and paid me and fed me and gave me (some very nice) rooves over my head.

And while I was on the road that year, I picked up the busking habit again.  I’d found in the USA that carrying my uke around everywhere was a great social opener, so why not put it to use when I was on my own?

And this time it was different.  I was different.  I had a different attitude.  I can’t pretend that I instantly transformed, I still had a rumbling tum and empty pockets much of the time and I *was* doing it for the money, but I was less attached to making it happen, making them get their money out, making them put it in the pot.  Something just clicked, on the street, in a way that I hadn’t felt in the tube, that the amount in the pot was none of my business until I got to the end of the set.  And how it got there was none of my business either.  My job was to entertain these people to the best of my ability and trust that I would be rewarded.  It took some practice, I’d often drift off into control-mode again, but I kept pulling myself back, like a meditation, to remembering that my job there is to collect smiles – to get as much eye-contact and human connection as possible in the few moments from when they approached to when the passed.  And I regularly make about twice as much as I ever did on the tube.

I also have way more fun and if there is any key factor that correlates with how much money is there at the end, it’s how much fun I had.  I’ve learned too to just let people give.  Some people want to give me food and drink – when I started out, I’d decline, politely, letting them know that I can’t eat cookies, for example.  Now, I take it all with a smile and thanks and pass on the stuff my digestive system can’t cope with to the guys and gals who are sitting out on the street who don’t have a ukulele or a talent for singing.

So what I’m really grateful for, Amanda, is the reminder that my job is not what I think it is.  My job isn’t to rake in the dosh.  My job is to collect smiles, human connections, hugs, and  to generate conversation, laughter at or laughter with and to ignore the hecklers. No matter what it is that I’m doing, those are the metrics that count.

I’ve become comfortable lately saying “I don’t do *anything* full-time”.  And I certainly couldn’t busk full-time, my fingers and voice wouldn’t hack it.  But I like to get out there from time to time and I’m looking at ways of doing street-like performance that gets the intimacy but doesn’t require me to freeze. And so I try also to carry the spirit of my street performance into all the work I do, give my best and let people give back what they want to.   

Thanks, see you on the street.

Does anybody have a lloyd-shaped hole in what they’re doing around the weekend of 30th that would help me justify a trip up?  Perhaps at the end of the week before, given that the Friday is Good Friday.  For the uninitiated, most lloyd-shaped holes include working with groups of 2 to 200 (or more!) to have amazing conversations and get amazing things done and/or ukulele-accompanied warbling and/or talking about creating value through social media/networking/technology/conversation and many other things besides.

The ideal solution would include a fee, accommodation & travel expenses and of course I’d love it if you’d come with me to see Dr Who and The Master lock horns on Saturday afternoon!

Yes, you can see social media as a channel, but if you treat it like the other “channels” that you’ve had in the past (TV, radio, press) you’re missing out on the secret magic.

What’s importantly different about social media is that they encourage many-to-many connections rather than one-to-one or one-to-many connections.  The counting that goes on is all 1:1 or 1:M – how many followers do you have, how many people saw this tweet/ad/page/article/video.  But what really counts, what really makes a difference is relationship, including the relationships that you foster with your media but aren’t part of yourself.   This is social object territory – make stuff that other people use to connect with each other.  Most traditional comms efforts are still focused on creating a relationship between the creator and their audience whereas the real value for the community as a whole is the potential for connection between members of the audience and that’s what the internet and social media unlock.

This is the magic of unconferences and #tuttle-like meetings too.  They are designed to create connections between participants rather than building a dependent relationship between participants and the organiser.  Traditional conferences want you to sit and listen and know how brilliant the organisers are so that you will buy subscriptions to their publication or pony up to come to the next event.  They grudgingly give you more networking time because you are connected people who understand the value of having many, diverse, connections and you understand the power of conversation.  But there’s a payoff in this for organisers – they want you to have just enough networking time to have your conversation-hunger satisfied, but not so much that you start to think that you can do without them and omniscience.

At an unconference or #tuttle though the whole point is about making connections and building relationships.  Most newbies, when you ask them, think that they’re coming for information, but by the end, most know (even if they can’t articulate it) that what they  really got was the benefit of conversation with fellow human beings and the potential for new actions that arise from the new connection.

Just quickly a bit of maths – In any group, the number of potential pairings is n(n-1)/2

(check it if  you’re not used to this sort of numberwork – If I’m in a room  containing n people, I can make n-1 pairs with others and there are n of us who can all do that. My pairing with, say, @danslee is the same as @danslee’s pairing with me, so divide by two)

At #commscamp13 there were 135 people – in traditional terms this would be quite a small gathering because we’d only be able to get our message to 135 people.  But by focusing on connections and the relationships that result from that, we get (135 x 134)/2 = 9,045 – nine thousand potential connections being nurtured feels a lot more valuable than 135  people receiving the message through the channel, doesn’t it? Is it surprising that from those nine thousand pairs some amazing conversations happened?  And that’s not even taking into account the three-way or four-way conversations that could have happened too.

That’s  why I spend my time creating spaces where people can connect without being told what to talk about or when to talk and when to listen.

Having spent some time at a couple of unconferences this week, both of which focused in on the experiences of professionals working in public service (Commscamp for Communications folk, LibCampLdn for library peeps) and preparing (mentally) for next weekend’s mammoth, all-encompassing, UKGovCamp, I’ve noticed a bit of a pattern emerging.

Sessions held at both events this week contained a theme that can be boiled down to: “How do we as professionals who’ve seen the light of digital revolution, survive and thrive in corporate bureaucracies that refuse to change?”

I think it’s allied to what Emer Coleman has written about this week in her valediction to government saying ”When you take the red pill everything looks like The Matrix”

I often say that my own “red pill” moment was in the board room of the Audit Commission, with Euan in 2002 but I’d seen others before that who seemed to be able to fly, do things incredibly quickly or smash through walls at will without hurting themselves – there was something going on here, but I didn’t know what it was, did I, Mr Jones?

But what is it really?

Isn’t it “just” that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy? By which I mean, isn’t it that connection through the network is destroying the control and decision-making structures and putting tremendous pressure on organisations to stop pretending that they’re machines and start being more like people?

About a year ago Liam Barrington-Bush, (a regular at #tuttle who started out as Steve Lawson‘s mate whose employers might buy coffee one week, but quickly emerged as a red-pill man through and through) interviewed me about the early days and what I’d been trying to do.  He was going to go off to Mexico to write up a book on how social media and social movements can help your organisation to be more like people.

Well he went and he wrote it and he sent me the draft of his chapter that talks about me and #tuttle.

One of the things he wrote that had me cheering was this:

“When we don’t have specific aims, we are freer to be ourselves. When we are freer to be ourselves, we can let our minds wander. Tuttle – like so many naturally occurring conversations in our lives – demonstrates what can emerge when we make the effort to release ourselves from the responsibility of aims, goals, and targets.”

Now, the rest of the book is about other folk much more exciting and interesting than me.  Liam is fundraising to publish the book himself – I’m right behind his decision to do this and to keep as much control over the content as possible.  It’s really important that truly independent voices like Liam’s are heard without going through the filter of a publishing house, no matter how well-meaning.

So I encourage you to pop some cash in the pot.  You know that every little helps, but especially if you can contribute on behalf of an organisation, some of the higher-priced perks that involve conversation with Liam himself would be top-value.

Sometime in 2010 I subscribed to e-mail notifications from the Transmedia Artists Guild blog – it looked interesting, it probably helped me to hook up with Transmedia-interested people at SXSWi 2011 while I was #plate11-ing.

I remember at some point seeing a notification that said something like “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”  So it was over, forget about it.

And then.

Then notifications started popping back up in my e-mail, but with titles like “Limiting sofa time adds years to your life”.  Hmmm…. it turns out transmediaguild.com has now home to a poorly-written blog about how fabulous exercise is with links out mostly to a certain startup gym company – I’m assuming that they’re doing this to generate some “natural” search engine optimisation, by um… writing about themselves on a domain name that has nothing to do with the parent company.   Which is why I’m deliberately not linking to any of this stuff.

Thankfully, I’m only aware of it because I left a feedburner e-mail subscription running, so I can turn it off.

But with a little searching, I can see though that at least serve2011.org, nationalnano.org, bluedogdemocrats.com and tellmeaboutyourselfanswer.com are being used in the same way by the same people…

Can someone who knows more about SEO shenanigans explain what’s going on?

UPDATE: A little bird suggests that googling “Dropped domains SEO” might be useful.  Yes it is, it points me to this – it’s a thing, a ridiculous (to me) thing, but using expired domains for SEO is a well-known thing.  Still don’t know whether this is a well-executed example or not.

She: “I think you should come with me to yoga now”

I: “For the sake of the group’s serenity, I don’t think I should attend until I am able to bend more than 30 degrees at the waist without shrieking “I’m going to die! I’m going to die”

She: “Perhaps the natural inhibition of being in a room with 30 others (mostly fit young women) would  prevent you from shrieking.”

I: “That’s not ‘natural inhibition’, that’s FASCISM!”

I’ve found that one of my jobs as a facilitator is to remind people that the event is about the people in the room, not those who couldn’t or wouldn’t make it.  The draw to give power away to people outside the room is strong, it’s expected in lots of meetings  where we’re essentially delegates for the rest of our team or organisation.

Here are 5 ways in which I’ve seen us (me included) do that:

1. Working on the agenda beforehand

Open Space and unconferences start with no initial agenda, just a purpose, a common interest that we want to talk about and a bunch of people who have something to contribute.  It’s tempting to make the day “more efficient” by having lots of conversations online setting out your stall for what you want to talk about, getting feedback, but it inadvertently gives power to people who aren’t in the room.  It sets an expectation, at least for those who have a look at this “prep work” that these are the things we’ll talk about.  It leaves the door open to people who want to influence the agenda without committing to a day in the room, because we tend to fall in with what’s already there.  If I come late to the online conversation, especially if I’m not terribly au fait with the subject area, I will look to see what norms have been established about subjects so that I can fit in well.  I don’t want to propose something that has people looking at me in a funny way.

It also gives disproportionate power to those who have, for whatever reason, more time to spend on preparation in the run up to the event than others do.  I think it probably also affects the number of people who show up ready to be “spectators”.  I can see that there are plenty of clever people with a much stronger grasp of the subject than I so I think I’ll just keep my silly little idea to myself.

2. Trying to represent your team’s wishes

They’re not here.  You are.  You’re one of the right people to be here.  They’re not (because they’re not here!) Stop worrying about what so-and-so would say if they were here and say what you want to say.  This goes too for paying too much attention to people who manage large departments or organisations.  The fact that they lead programmes employing hundreds of people costing millions of pounds doesn’t mean that they know any more about the problem in hand than you do.  They may well know less.

3. Going to sessions because “you should”

I know.   It’s really hard.  There are 10 sessions all going on at once and you want to go to three of them but you ought to go to one of the others and stay there because it’s directly related to your job – what will your manager say if she sees that this was on the agenda and you didn’t go?  I think the best way to deal with this is to remember, for today, that your job is to learn and to contribute.  Pop into the “should” session to see whether you missed anything but otherwise, keep using the law of two feet to find the places where you can best learn and/or contribute.

4. Letting technology get in the way

It’s great to have an audio or video record of a session.  It’s really cool to have a live-stream so that people who couldn’t make it can watch along in real-time.  It’s really useful to the whole community if people can live-tweet and live-blog sessions.  But.  All of these things have the possibility of becoming more important than the conversation we’re actually having.  Common adverse effects are people unconsciously censoring what they say because they know they’re being reported or recorded or people saying things deliberately to make sure that they are on record.  The other difficulty arises when the interactivity of twitter and live-streaming take over.  This can take the form of trolling from outside or something as apparently benign as people outside asking that people speak more clearly for them to hear on the stream.

5. Thinking too much about the future

In this case, the “people not in the room” are “future me” and/or “future other people”. I worry about what future me will think of what I’m saying.  I worry that future me will be somehow disadvantaged because I say something stupid.  And then I worry about what future other people will think when they get home and they reflect on the day and “oh my god what was that dickhead, Lloyd, saying???”  They’re not here, they’re not real, they don’t get to decide what gets said in the room.

PS I generally don’t like writing list-based posts but today I’ve done two – my thinking may be becoming dangerously structured!

These are some the things that are rolling round in my head as a result. Not all of them come directly from experiences at CommsCamp13, they may be things I’ve wanted to rant about for some time, and now seems to be as good a time as any. Some of these may turn into longer pieces, although it’s more likely that they’ll just sit here taunting me, saying “Why don’t you explain what you really mean there Lloyd?”

0. People are amazing. Groups of people are amazinger.  Groups of people allowed and encouraged to talk about the things that they really care about are the amazingest.

1. Lloyd! Stop trying to be right.  I find it really hard, but I try to keep following the golden rule: “Be prepared to be wrong, even when you’re right”.  Having said that, many of the following points read as pompous declarations of my unshakable will.  Prepare your pinch of salt.

2. If you don’t like this thing, start your own thing.  Nobody is gripping onto this “brand identity” nearly as hard as you imagine.  If you don’t like the fact that there’s only one UKGovCamp a year and the same 200 people always seem to go, set up your own (you might even get a grant to help). If you want a #jelly or some tweetup in your town or region, do your own. Use #wewillgather for smaller things if it helps.

3.  Run sessions your way.  This is a development of the previous point – nobody has decreed, nor do they have the right to decree, that all sessions at a camp have to be sitting round in a circle having a therapy session.  We can do whatever we like – some of the best sessions I’ve been to at other camps have been “I know nothing about X, please come and enlighten me” or “Let’s make a Y in 45 minutes”.

4. No spectators.  I felt that we’d lost this a bit – it’s much harder in a one-day event and using traditional conference venues but we had 25-35 potential sessions and 140 people attending, so even with every session leader doubling up we’d only have half of the group able to lead even if they wanted to.  The no spectator rule is there, imho, to ensure that we don’t get into an us and them situation – encouraging everyone to have something even in their back pocket is an important part of pre-camp that we forget.  We saw a special case of this on Tuesday which was a lack of women pitching for sessions in the first round, fortunately there were some brave enough to point it out and I think we fixed it, but still, I think it would  help to make it clearer that there’s an expectation that you bring something to talk about, that it’s just part of the process.

5.  We’re all just folk here.  This is hard at UKGovCamp, but it was even harder this week – leave the corporate ego at the door – remember that everyone else is in the same boat as you, no-one has all the answers, we all have an equal responsibility for the success of the event.  Some people are effectively paying to be there, not everyone has a job that either treats this as part of your development or paid leave.

6. I love “Fuck it” moments.  One of the best stories I heard was from Rae Watson talking about her experience of doing the right thing once she’d heard she was being made redundant.  Lovely, nothing to lose attitude which inspired me to call for a rolling programme of redundancies across the public sector

7. “The future is …not very evenly distributed.” You think?  This may come under the heading of “stop trying to be right” but really, the world *has* changed, hyperlinks really do subvert hierarchies, this is what is going on here, the institutions we work in are struggling and collapsing because the network crosses their boundaries without permission and with great ease.  I heard way more people than I expected to still talking about messaging and selling social media to senior execs.  Keep the focus off technologies and put it on power and service structures.

8. A camp is not about information dissemination.  It probably will happen as a by-product, but the purpose of the day is to encourage conversation and the resultant building of relationships. These are vital elements of the networked world – the ability to have good conversation and the richness of relationship that emerges therefrom.  This is where the value is, both to us as participants and to the organisations we’re part of.

9.  It’s your process. I know I’ve got it right when you don’t credit me and you say “we did this”.  It’s one of my favourite bits of the Tao Te Ching – Chapter 17

“The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words.
When his task is accomplished and things have been completed,
All the people say, ‘We ourselves have achieved it!’”

10.  It’s a 3-day commitment for me.  There’s very little traditional prep and follow-up but I need a good half-day before to warm-up and clear out the rest of the world and then a full day afterwards to recover.  I need to reflect this in my diary-planning and in my fees.

11. We *will* break your wifi.  John Popham has already summed up the connectivity issue for most conference venues. Related: spambots may break your hashtag…

12. The view from the front.  That’s the title I gave the picture above.  It shouldn’t be like this.  There’s no reason to put everyone else face-front: we embrace circles when we go into sessions, we should do the same in plenary.  I think it would do a lot to reduce the sense of us-and-them.

13.  Stop trying to please everyone.  Media folk in public service have to juggle the goodwill of elected representatives, organisational managers, journalists and the public.  You can’t please all of these groups all of the time.  If you have to pick one, pick the public.

Turns out there’s thirteen, which is good since I’ve noticed many events this year have 13 in the title for some reason…

A bunch of lovely folk turned up this morning to do the same lovely thing as ever: talk, drink coffee, laugh, talk, meet new people, have a moan, whatever it is that you all do, I don’t know, I just wander around grinning inanely.

First thing this morning, Rob O’Callaghan showed his appreciation for #tuttle (which inspired his Tunbridge Wells group:  (#twuttle and its various spin-offs) by treating me to breakfast at the top of the Gherkin in the City.  Because it was something he could do.  It was great.  I’ve never been up in any of these super-tall structures before and the 40th floor with it’s 360-degree view is amazing.  Thanks to Rob and Phil Macleod who hosted us.

Back down at the RFH #tuttle buzzed its way through three hours (at least).  I was asked, by people who’d been around for a while and new people too, what I got out of doing it.  It’s a question that obsessed me at the beginning, but the answers aren’t what I expected back then.

It hasn’t made me rich or particularly famous.  I’m skint most of the time and I have been for five years, but I’m happier than I’ve ever been and anyone who wants to tell me that it’s all a failure because it doesn’t make money is missing the point of life, in my opinion.

About six months in, I decided that  I would commit to just showing up and welcoming new people  and I knew then that I wasn’t ever going to make money directly from #tuttle and that it wouldn’t thrive for long if I made it all about me and used it as a vehicle to get well-known and cash-in from there.  And I wanted it to thrive for a long time.  I still do.

But I’d already learned this from blogging – that you get your rewards *because* of the things you do, not *for* the things you do.  So what are the things I got?

Well doing this thing changed the whole way I see my life and work and it changed how I am perceived by others.  I no longer think of myself as any kind of consultant,(though I will still happily take consulting fees!) I’m an artist, I make beautiful things, and #tuttle is one of them.  The biggest thrill I got today was being told by a newcomer that “it was beautiful”.

I’ve been able to do things that I didn’t think possible.  I’ve traveled and written and photographed my way coast-to-coast (and friend-to-friend) across the USA twice and then hobo-ed around the UK for a whole year living and working with people I’d met on the internet who’d got to know and trust me because I did #tuttle.

I got to call myself Social Artist in Residence at the Centre for Creative Collaboration and then spend a couple of years really thinking about what the hell that meant.

I got to work with a group of the simultaneously nicest *and* smartest people I’ve ever met on creating a new approach to business consulting, a process that resulted in some fabulous open data and the creation of at least one company.

My recent work on #ourdigitalplanet and #wewillgather (I’m considering amending my bio to say just “I work on hashtags”) has been successful because of this weekly deep experience of organising without an organisation.

And I got to meet you all and share in your journeys.  I got to see you grow and be encouraged and build your lives and projects and businesses.  I got to listen when you were down and depressed and couldn’t see the light just around the corner.   I saw hungry young things take flight and soar and become industry stalwarts. I saw a certain entrepreneur meet hardcore users of his product and get real user insights into the thing he’d later sell for millions.  And I got to partake in the multitude of fascinating soap-operas of our intersecting lives, laughing and scheming and crying and dreaming and, conversation by conversation, reaching a far better understanding of this social web thing together than we could ever have done on our own.

Thank you all, everyone who’s been along on a Friday morning, even just the one.  Thanks to everyone who picked up the idea and started one in their own town (otherwise how would I have ever known to visit Long Beach?!?) Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions and guidance on making it better.  Thanks to the trolls who spewed and stewed and (thankfully) repeatedly went hungry; please, if they wake up, don’t start feeding them now…

OK, that’s all, go back to what you were doing.  See you next week.

Lots has been written about the new House of Cards which is not being shown on regular TV.  It’s on Netflix-only, and the 13 episodes were released all in one go last week.  Mostly though people are focusing their attention on the novelty of the release rather than the programme itself.

Which is a shame, because it’s very good.  I haven’t gone full throttle into TV addiction yet so I haven’t succumbed to the temptation of just watching the whole thing in a 13-hour marathon, but I’ve managed the first three episodes and we’re getting used to the characters and seeing some of the storylines start to firm up.

I was initially disappointed to realise (it came in the first few shots when Kevin Spacey turned and started talking to camera) that it’s the Michael Dobbs/Andrew Davies House of Cards remade in today’s US political scene.  Disappointed only because the original was *so* good, so captivating, so of the time and shockingly near to what we suspected the inside of party politics was like, long before The Thick of It.  And because Ian Richardson was so compelling: simultaneously adorable and despicable.  And because I’m rarely won over by American remakes of British TV.  Where I am at the end of episode 3, Spacey hasn’t quite reached Richard III levels of despicability but he’s getting there and I fully believe that he pulls it off by Episode 13 and Robin Wright is an able Lady Macbeth.   Part of the draw for me is seeing how the other recognisable characters might turn out – although it’s pretty much a question of how they will meet their various sticky ends rather that whether they do (I hope).

I like the graphic overlays that denote when people are texting each other.  It lets the acting continue without cutting away to a close-up of the phone screen.  I haven’t seen it done as authentically before.

It’s very interesting to see it transplanted into American politics and the DC village rather than the Westminster one.  Though I am wondering why it took 23 years for this story to be acceptable to a US audience.  Is American politics in a similar place now to where we were at the end of the Thatcher era?  I guess there are similar levels of disillusionment with the system, but has that come about recently? Is it a new thing?  If we got any faith in the system back in 1997 we’ve lost it again since.

One thing that does crop up with the all-in-one release thing is that it makes it hard to have an online social experience around it and so it’s hard to write about without some spoilers – it’s neither like a movie (which you’ve either seen or you haven’t) nor like a standard TV series (where you might allow people to be a few episodes behind, but pretty much you expect everyone to be up to date or avoiding any reviews).  And of course it’s also a remake.

But do I hate spoilers so I shall wait until a significantly larger number of my friends are admitting to having seen it.

When it came she heard a laugh, well, more of a snigger, but not a cruel one.

“Your soup matches your dress!”  The guy sitting at the next table was grinning and looking at her.  She tried to work out whether he was being an idiot or just inappropriately friendly for this part of south London.  She saw a heavy, large-print Bible, it’s pages covered in annotations and faded highlighter, lying open in his lap.  She smiled, but decided against further engagement.

She stirred her soup and looked at it intently.  So did he.

He sniggered again, “I saw a movie yesterday where something just like this happened.”

“A quiet morning on the street, the rain hasn’t yet kicked in but the cold wind tells you that it isn’t far off. It’s time for the town’s drunks to converge on the Spar to buy their first tins of the day.

Not their first beers, mind, they needed a beer at home to get out and about but this will be the first they part with cash for.

Ten minutes later “Babyface” appears. He hasn’t saved enough from last night to go in the shop, so he hangs in front of the Spar asking for change until someone buys him a single can of Tennants which he downs almost in one.

A dark haired man in a track-suit walks slowly up from the Morgan Arcade. “Listen to me good. No, you listen to me ya fat c**t I’m calling you now, so just listen…”

A fat bald man, in a grey hoodie and white shorts with black slippers on his feet, goes to the cashpoint. His head is so fat he has to move the phone from his ear to his mouth when he speaks.

Babyface bumps fists with a straggly bearded dwarf and they walk off together.”