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