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Clapham Junction Station, London SW11
BFI, Stephen St, London W1
Tottenham Court Road, London W1
BFI, Stephen Street, London. W1
Waterloo Station Ticket Hall, London. SE1
I want to be clear that I think that anyone who has a go at running an event in central London for a couple of hundred people to try to understand something about how this real-time web stuff changes the way the world works deserves our admiration and gratitude, so salutes to Ande, Kate and the rest of the media140 team.
Now about the wifi – and it’s probably not what you think.
In my view, wireless connectivity to the internet for the modern conference is up there with electricity and hot and cold running water as an essential utility that guests should just expect to be there and working. Its lack is not as immediate a physical risk as for those other utilities, where we’d be bumbling around in the dark or stepping gingerly through each other’s waste products but it is a major inconvenience in a world where participants in events have come to expect the ability to upload content, see what others have uploaded, reference material that’s being talked about on stage and talk to each other in backchannels.
No wifi means we can’t play in a big part of the game. It’s as if we’d had a power cut and tried to carry on with candlelight. It also has consequences for quality reporting of what’s going on to those who couldn’t make it along and longer term for people trying to understand something that they heard in the middle of someone’s speech but can’t quite remember what it was or how it was nuanced.
So surely it’s the conference organizer’s fault when it goes wrong. I don’t think so. I think that if we’d turned up at RIBA and there happened to be a power cut in that part of W1 and no prospect of electricity for the rest of the day, we certainly wouldn’t have taken a swipe at the production team, instead a couple of things might have happened – firstly, I would expect insurance to have been taken out for such a thing to cover the costs of refunding participants and the costs of the conference on the day. Secondly, we’d (well some of us would) have probably nipped over to Regents Park and held an impromptu conversation along the lines that we’d previously intended.
I’d also expect RIBA as a conference centre to be dealing with it, not dumping it on the organizer.
But let’s put that aside for a moment. Let’s assume that there’s a great supply, with reserves and generators in the basement to make sure failure of the national grid doesn’t kill the ability to host something.
The trouble is, to the wifi supplier, a conference like media140 is the 21st Century equivalent of a hair-dryer salesman’s convention in the 1930s to the fledgling electricity companies – all sorts of nutcases march in with power-hungry devices, all wanting to show off what their gadget can do and scrambling for the power sockets as soon as they get into the room. Even worse than that (and I suspect this is the real culprit) they bring hair-drying devices that automatically grab hold of power as soon as they come into the building – even if they’re in the owner’s pocket or briefcase. Can you imagine?!
There was a time when conference organizers were constantly reminding people to turn off their mobile phones. Perhaps we should be asking people now to just make sure that you keep your wifi-enabled device on 3G only until you really need to connect quickly and that all automatically wifi-grabbing applications are killed before you enter the building.
So iPhones are the new Handy Hannah – that’s what I learned at #media140
Photo by Paul Clarke
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I also asked Tom why people should care about what goes on at the summit and he explains the importance of what the bloggers were doing to help us all make sense of the high-level economic stuff from our own perspectives.
Tom is one of the earliest adopters of online social tools among national politicians and he uses them to complement the doorstep manner that makes him a popular local MP. I remember hearing about his early blogging through Tim Ireland in 2004. He’s matured well with the rest of us – he’s a top choice to follow on twitter, skillfully navigating the line between speaking as just another tweeter and speaking as an MP and Government Minister.
Tom sat with us on the G20 Voice desk all day, even when he was in danger of being crushed by the hack-pack when Bob Geldof passed by.
Still not entirely sure what to do with this opportunity. My instinct is to look for the stuff that other people aren’t covering or noticing. So I included in my intro tags #hiddenstories.
So I expect mainstream media to lead on soap opera stuff between Brown, Obama and Sarkozy.
I expect many people to lead on the sorts of things being talked about here by Oxfam – a rescue & financial stimulus package for poorer countries.
I’m interested in how social media is actually being used to open up the conversation – you may have seen a reference to me in Rory Cellan-Jones’s post yesterday and it’s the middle bit that is interesting, how “ordinary people” who aren’t directly involved in the summit and who aren’t interested in throwing bricks at bankers can take part in the important decisions that are being made at the moment. I’m not suggesting that we can be a direct line between you and the Prime Minister or Mr President but can we be more of a two-way medium? Can we, should we, how should we be doing more than either being a reporter or being a lobbyist?
Keeping thinking and talking and listening here.
I was just reading David Weinberger’s excellent notes of Doc Searls’s Berkman lunch and realised what I was talking about at the VRM thing last November I’m sorry it’s taken so long.
What happened was I went through my wallet looking at all the different loyalty cards and coffee shop stamp cards I have and I said I want to be able to manage all of this better and from my own perspective. Maybe the people listening understood better than I did.
What I realised this implies is that we all have our own loyalty card (which somehow gets automagically updated from the cloud) which is accepted by and useful to every “vendor” that we choose to allow access, no matter what the service.
And, most importantly, I can also view, aggregate and filter all my data on there in various visualisations whether it’s how much I spent on coffee altogether this month or which coffee shops I frequented most or maybe it’s my medical record and the prescriptions I’ve had filled recently.
I was at Demos today listening to Richard Thaler talk about his book Nudge and he used just the same thing as an example – full disclosure of information from credit card companies about the penalties and extra costs on your bill which you could then feed into some analytic site on the web to understand better how to cut your costs.
I don’t know if I’ve said anything new here but it feels like *I* understand myself a little better…
There’s another opportunity to join in the fun and games defining and evolving VRM at the Open Space that I’m facilitating for VRMHub on Monday. Come & play.
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