I’m getting back to work, but for that to be really true, I really need to be blogging regularly. So here we go.

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Someone asked me the other day, what I’d do differently if we got to have a Centre for Creative Collaboration again. The question’s been rolling round in me ever since.

My simple/simplistic answer is that I’d bring an Open Space frame to the new space that we found ourselves in – I’d want to start every day with a circle and check-in and keep a wall with the current issues pinned up all the time. We (whoever was there) would take that time to reconnect to whatever we’d done the previous day and decide together what we were going to do. We talked a lot in 2010 about C4CC being an ongoing unconference, but that was more of an organising metaphor than a set of practices that we used every day.

Speaking of which, here’s David Wilcox’s clip with me at UKGovCamp in January 2010 soon after my appointment had been announced.

I remember that feeling of liberation that came from not just using the term Social Artist to describe myself, but to have it as a “job title” conferred by someone else (thanks Brian!)

I’ve got used now to summing it up for people as “making beautiful things out of people (pause for chuckle)” but back then we were still working out what it meant and how to talk about it.

It’s also good to remember that it’s a convenient shorthand now to say that I helped run the Centre, but I was doing something slightly different from the rest of the team and if someone wanted a new Centre, I would want to be there in a similar role. Or put another way, I might talk about wanting to recreate C4CC, but actually what I’m after is another long-term residency, working closely with a leadership team.

And as with any other Open Space, the big work up front is in crafting an invitation and working out how to get it under the noses of people who might turn out to be the right people.

To be clear, nobody is actually asking this right now, I’m just getting clear on what I think so that when the time comes (how could it not?) I’m more ready and able to talk fairly coherently rather than looking startled and burbling.

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The online versions of Living Culture Coffee Mornings are going great. It’s a really useful beat in the week for me. It would be lovely to see you in a small Zoom window on my computer this Friday!

Last week we did it face to face and the conversations are growing nicely, the snacks are always varied and quite fancy (it’s London innit) and new people often read the invitation fully and bring stuff along that they feel make the space more convivial – Catriona brought bunting… with tassels!

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I got to hang out briefly with some people from eurosky on Monday – they’re a project coming out of the thing that started life as Free our Feeds. I’m still not sure what I think about the fractured mess of feeds that all say they’re not competing (ATProto/ActivityPub/RSS I guess) but who do kinda seem to want to win. I think RSS is easy to see as being a building block of the web, I can publish RSS, I can read it and I don’t need an account or a special server to do so – in contrast with the others that have more of a one-way feel and are really clunky to switch between. See this is why I need to write more, because my thinking is really fuzzy.

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But because I’ve been poking into ATProto stuff a bit more I came across Leaflet which, as Richard MacManus says, feels refreshingly like a 2003-era blogging community.

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I have a big backlog of links that I’ve saved to raindrop.io – I feel like I should be linkblogging these immediately rather than putting them in a big bag for chewing on later (but I don’t know whether I want to do that here necessarily). I do still have a tumblr, I suppose…

Two insights into how agent-assisted work feels in my feeds this week:

Matt Jones writing in the frame of how the new technology is affecting our relationship to time (as new tech always seems to have done). I don’t know whether I’m rationalising this after the fact (probably) but I did feel a little unease while reading this, which I think I put down at the time to envy of anyone who can pull multiple ideas and sources together into a longish piece like this. The Colophon at the end was something of a relief, knowing that perhaps I’d heard a familiar voice mixed in with Matt’s, the voice of Claude. But it’s a weird mixture – not entirely Jones (I’ve been reading him for 20 years or more) but also not entirely chat-bot.

and then Jay Springett on his current process:

The work now is to mostly select from the surplus, exercise ones taste, and decide what can be left out. It’s in this sense that writing becomes a process of reduction. To use a metaphor from the kitchen, it’s like making a roux or vegetable stock.

Both seem to me to be pointing to a way of working that’s like having an indefatigable, bright research assistant who gets your way of thinking and expressing yourself, providing a much better first draft than you might expect. And as with taking on a real-life assistant like that, your work shifts to being able to express your intentions clearly, point the kid in the right directions and then polish up/reduce down what they come back to you with.

We’ve been having coffee (and often cake and biscuits) on the first Friday of every month at Essex Hall under the heading of “Living Culture Coffee Mornings” for just over a year now. It works brilliantly for some people, not so well for others. And, of course, there are people born every day who haven’t even heard of it.

We’re going to keep doing them in person on the first Friday, but I will also open up some space for the conversation online so that we can include people who can’t necessarily make it to London (specifically WC2) for a couple of hours.

The online version will be on Zoom at the same time – 10am till midday on all the other Fridays except the first… maybe. There won’t be a hybrid one on First Fridays – hybrid just doesn’t work for this kind of conversation – but if we find there are people who come every week online, and there’s someone who can hold the space then that can go on at the same time as the in-person one.

The main differentiator between this and all the other bazillion coffee mornings I’ve tried to use as a tool for transforming ourselves and society at large is that we start by reading some questions that Dougald wrote for his online course about Regrowing A Living Culture.

What does it mean to speak about a living culture?

What does doing this say about the ways of living that most of us grew up taking for granted around here lately?

What are the first moves of regrowing? The simple practices that we can start with in the places we find ourselves in now?

What are the daring moves that might be called for?  The places it might just be possible to intervene within the big systems of the world, as we have known it, to help create the conditions of possibility for presently unimaginable futures?

How do we find each other and stay sane and face the depth of the trouble the world is in without letting that just paralyze us?

They’re meant to set the scene, you don’t have to come with specific answers to these pacific questions. There is no homework.

There are announcements at 11am (unless I forget)

So this isn’t exactly the freewheelin’ online Tuttle that we did during lockdown. Or maybe it is and I don’t know shit. I want it to be different though. The in-person mornings have been different. I think they all probably need a bit of you in the mix. Sign up on Luma to get the Zoom details.