I’m a bit dazed this morning by news from my friends Neal & Kathy in Maine that Kathy needed emergency surgery last week and that they’ll likely face a $50,000 bill (without insurance – they have a farm and food business out in the wilds). I know what the healthcare situation is in the US but it’s all the more shocking to me to see this close-up for good people who have offered me nothing but generosity over the years (Neal was one of my first podcasting buddies) and in particular when I was trekking across the country in 2011. They live for their family and local community, working as volunteer ambulance drivers and firefighters as well as running a farm.

Here’s some cheese Neal and I made together two years ago!

It would be bad enough here in the UK to have such a condition and to go through adbominal surgery and the effects of anaesthetic as well as the illness itself but to then have to pay for it, is just outside of my comprehension. We are so lucky to have the NHS and it’s so worth defending. I’m very fortunate to have never needed major attention so far knock on wood etc. but I’m sure that some close members of my family would not be here if we were having to ration our access to healthcare based on what we were likely to be able to afford.

I feel angry and helpless. I can’t guess at what they’re feeling.

I’m thinking about what else I can do to raise awareness and funds for them. If you can help the Foleys out, their campaign page is here.

Yesterday I gave myself a little time to muck about.

I saw Dan tweet about a collaborative google map about “Water Infrastructure Collapse”. I had a look and got the general idea to highlight instances where the infrastructure isn’t working. I’ve been interested in the concept of the mostly-invisible infrastructure stack since listening to Vinay talk about 6 ways to die and the work that Jay and others are doing around the idea of #stacktivism ie activism about the stack, it’s ownership, the political consequences etc.

I’d seen the Herne Hill flood in the news the other day, so I added that to the map. And then I searched for “burst water main UK” and found a number of other local news stories – if it’s big enough to stop traffic, it’s usually big enough to make the local paper, and that, these days, means it gets into Google News. So I added a few more, in Derby, Peterborough and S Norwood. [having just written that, I’m thinking now that what the map needs is something to show which water companies are involved…]

That got me thinking about leakage – surely someone must be monitoring this. Someone must be collecting data. So I had a look at the OfWat site and although I found the definitions of key performance indicators, I couldn’t actually find the data except by looking on each of the water companies websites. So I rang them up and put on my best information manager’s voice and asked whether anyone collated it all. No. They don’t, but they do require the companies to publish them and the woman I spoke to pointed me to the page where there are at least links to all the PDFs for this year. Once I’d downloaded all the PDFs I got to the bottom of the page where, “ta da!” there’s actually a summary spreadsheet for download. So I grabbed that.

And had a look. There’s an indicator for Leakage, it’s measured in Megalitres per day. That’s millions of litres per day – the range is between 4.2 and 646. But what’s a megalitre? The people on this friendly Australian forum tell me that an Olympic sized swimming pool might be 50m x 25m x 2m so 2500 cubic metres which would be 2.5 megalitres – so the smallest leakage is a little less than 2 Olympic pools per day and Thames water manages to lose more than 250 of the buggers. Per Day. This is news on the day that it gets announced. But the rest of the time we don’t think much about it, it’s just the way things are. What can we do? Should we do anything?

So then I got thinking about how much that might be per person. And the only thing I could find about populations served by each water company was this fact sheet from greenchristian.org.uk – thank you green Christians!

I put them together in this Google spreadsheet and that’s when my nightmares really began 🙂 It seems that the charts in Google spreadsheets are not very friendly to people wanting to make scatter plots and even less so if such people want to do some regression analysis add a line of best fit. The “Advanced Edit” is nothing of the sort. So I hacked something together.

That line of red dots is the line of best fit – the two companies way above the line are Dwr Cymru to the left and United Utilities (covering the North West) at about the 7 million people mark.

It’s a pretty good straight line (r2=0.88) which I interpret as meaning that they’re all equally bad at it – it’s not as if the little companies serving smaller populations are able to concentrate on it or that big old Thames just has a difficult time because it’s so big.

Anyway that’s as far as I got before my mucking around time ran out. Nothing to do with Social Artists Business Models or Hacking the Barbican, but I had fun!

Sometimes I don’t really know what I think until I write it down and show it to other people. That’s what happened with my blogpost yesterday – I realised how little I really had decided about this and how much more there was to define.

One thing is to get thinking about what social artists actually do. I’ve been thinking about how to express this for myself for a while of course. But I’ve given it some more attention lately while I’ve been rebuilding my personal web site.

In thinking about what *I* do, I’ve also been talking and thinking about how it applies to other people I know who do similar work.

• I’ve put my work into four main areas:
• Social Art & Research
• This is the stuff where we’re pushing boundaries and finding new things out. Tuttle was like this at the start. It probably still is really. Tuttle2Texas and Please Look After This Englishman were research projects looking at social capital and the value of social networking etc.
• Consulting
• This has been my core business skill. For a while it was focused on social reporting and making media. More recently it became closer to coaching for individuals or small teams. I’ve not done so much of late mainly because I prefer to work in a team rather than alone. Making something useful of the Tuttle Consulting work we did remains a goal.
• Events & Entertainment
• Tuttle, yes, but also the unconference and open space facilitation that I do. And events as research or consulting product – for example with Please Look After This Englishman I devised a one-man-show to present afterwards.
• Publications
• This has been an aspiration for a while. I think what I’m drawn to most in this project is seeing how people who write a lot and take pictures a lot and make music a lot can turn those things into products, create their own long-tail of books, e-books, posters, prints etc. both by creating new work but also re-using an re-mixing what we’ve already done.
• What do you think of these four areas?
• Do they work for you as a way of organising your own work?
• I’ve used them to start to organise my website – have a look and give me some feedback.
• What other categorisations do you use?

I have a residency for the rest of August at Hack The Barbican which is a month-long experiment in creative collaboration in the public spaces of the Barbican Centre – the hashtag for the whole thing is #HTB2013.

The aim of the group as a whole is to make the most of the mix of people involved in art, technology and entrepreneurship that seems to be coming together in London at the moment.

I’m interested in all these things and so I’ve proposed a research project to investigate new business models for networked and technology-savvy creative people.

As usual, I’m starting my thinking in public, so much of this will look poorly-thought through at first. Join in. Let me know what you think.

What does it mean?

• Well, the industrial approach to creative work is dying away on all fronts. Creative people are finding new ways of co-creating value and meaning in networked environments. 3D printing will mean that the production of huge classes of physical goods will be subject to the same pressures as music, books and film have struggled with for the last decade. Nobody really knows what works best, where and for whom. There’s disagreement about how radical a shift this really is. Much of the discourse about this subject is dominated by the industries that are dying and those who thrived from the old models. So what do artists themselves think? What new forms of art are being made as a result? What new organisational forms do we need? How can we keep making good art that benefits from technological advance and still make a good living?

What I want to end up with

• I want to create some sort of model that supports us having this conversation; something that helps people working in a particular field to see what they have in common with others and help people think about how they might apply our thinking to their businesses.
• I want to experiment collaboratively with forms of digital distribution and print-on-demand.
• I’d hope that we’ll form a community of people interested in continuing the conversation, perhaps we’ll have an unconference later in the year.
• I shall be trying to use my own creative practices and business as a way to demonstrate and test so me of the ideas that come up
• Maybe we’ll form a new collective organisation to keep playing with these ideas.

How you can get involved

• Share your experience
• Point me to other people’s work on the subject
• Bring a critical perspective to what I’m writing
• Come in and have a conversation, don’t wait to be invited, take this as an invitation, let me know when you want to come.
• Have a conversation elsewhere and make something

Wait! What is this, Google Mail? Another helpful inbox redesign to enhance my productivity? Why thank you so much!

Or maybe this one will be just as “useful” as those weird yellow labels with chevrons in them.

A gentle reminder to me every morning that you can read my mail and arrange it however makes sense to you, while pretending to make my life easier.

How do I turn it off?

(Quite simply, as it turns out, just deselect all the tabs – except Primary)

PS Never underestimate that panty guy.

TL;DR there’s some debate about how we might make the annual barcamp for public-service types even better. I have some opinions…

For those who don’t know…

• This is my first contribution to a debate that I first saw starting on Friday morning about how to do UKGovCamp better.
• UKGovCamp is the annual big unconference for people interested in government and the web – it started out as BarCampUKGovWeb in 2008. It seems I did sessions on something called a “Social Media Cafe” and did a demo of some web service called “Seesmic” 🙂
• It’s happened, by the sort of tradition that springs up so easily in such circles, at the end of January, in London (except when January has been too snowy).
• It’s great, people love it. The original description was “creating a shared understanding and commitment to the vision for UK government web activity and helping establish the UK government Digital Network to bring together the community of webbies within central government and the wider public sector.” It did that and the balance has since shifted more towards the wider public (and increasingly voluntary) sector, especially our friends in Local Government.
• It’s also great that people want to improve on the experience and that anyone can get involve in the improvement. The best way we have available at the moment is to keep talking through our blogs and twitter and the mailing list.
• Disclaimer: I believe I’ve attended all the camps but for the last three (four?) years I’ve facilitated the day(s) in return for a (discounted) fee (leading open spaces is one of the few things I do for a living). That doesn’t mean I’m in charge and I don’t believe that should give me any more or less influence over how things are improved. I don’t think it means much more than that I have a commercial interest in the event’s continued success. You can think what you like of course.

Three virtues – NEA

• I think that a key reason that UKGC and BarCamps in general have succeeded is that they share the virtues with those of the internet that Doc Searls and David Weinberger wrote about in World of Ends – ie NEA, that is “Nobody owns it, Everyone can use it, Anyone can improve it” Seriously, if you haven’t read that article (it’s been around for about 10 years, what’s your excuse?!) go and read the whole thing.
• Nobody owns it
• Not Jeremy Gould, not Steph Gray, not Dave Briggs, not GDS, not me. I think it helps to look at the World of Ends article and think about what it means if we think of UKGC as an “agreement” not a “thing”.
• One way that people or organisations can exert influence that makes it look like they own it is by putting more focus on the work of organisation rather than on the day itself
• The way we restore that balance is by giving huge power to the people who turn up – the openspace-based format we use means that nobody gets to dominate the agenda and even things that were decided beforehand can be thrown out on the day.
• We also maintain the balance by being unorganised 🙂 Suggestions that I’ve seen of expanding the event by creating local events and co-ordinating between them suggest the sort of organisation that can quickly and easily turn into a self-serving machine.
• Everyone can use it
• This is one of the ripest areas for “improvement” – not everybody can come. We want more people to be able to come. We want more diversity in the attendees.
• But we still want it to work. And we don’t want to put people off who’ve attended before because it’s going to be so different. So how do you do that? Well just as the way to grow the internet was not to give everyone an account on ARPANET but to build other interconnected networks that used the same protocol, I think we need more public-service unconferences – either focused on niches of interest or generic but happening in other places at other times. Let UKGC get on with being the national government barcamp that it wants to be and create others to do the thing that you want to do. Remember, nobody owns it, that means you can do it.
• I often hear talk about why it’s on a Saturday and talk about doing things in your “own time” or “work time”. Not everyone recognises such a distinction – my work time is my own time 🙂 But again, if you want an event on a weekday make it happen – that’s what #commscamp13 and #mailcamp have both done.
• I also think that it’s important to recognise that it’s not just for those people directly employed by a public body – many discussions are based on the assumption that attendees are either civil servants or local government officers. I think what makes it good is that anybody could turn up.
• Anyone can improve it
• How do you “improve it”?
• The best way to improve UKGC is to turn up, be helpful, present something you know or have done or want to find out about, and go to other people’s sessions and be an active participant.
• The other way is to create workable useful new “agreements” or traditions about how we do things, just as long as they embody the NEA virtues themselves.
• Here’s some that I’m thinking of:
• There’s a BarCamp rule that we don’t adhere to because it sounds a bit too directive. This is “no tourists” ie if you come along, you’re a participant and you should be up for presenting just like everyone else, there’s no presenter/audience/organiser distinction. I think we could be stronger on this and encourage as many people as possible to contribute a session however humble.
• I also believe in regular rotation of organising roles and the infusion of new people as much as possible – this is facilitated by keeping things simple and making sure that each person only has a small job to do.
• I’d like to see more rooms (so more spaces on the grid) and more flexibility on the length of sessions. Hour long sessions with 1/5 of the group there can easily create a traditional conference vibe where one or two people talk to the masses all the time and these things feel even more difficult to escape no matter how much you want to use the law of two feet.
• We do individual introductions plus 2 or 3 tags as a speedy warm-up – this has benefits beyond the sharing of information, it’s a social thing, but it can be merged with pitching if *everyone* pitches something!
• And there are some things that just won’t work
• I generally say “no” to “improvements” to the agenda setting process – what I think we’re aiming for is the Open Space ideal, anything that takes us in that direction might get my backing.
• No keynotes, no visiting celebrities, no stars. Nuff said.
• I’m in favour of us reaching as wide an audience online during the day as possible, except when to do so constrains what happens in meatspace.
• The most important thing for me is that using the open space-ish format gives us enough leeway for change on the day, if we want to make improvements, the best way is to try them out there, for real, with everyone getting a say in whether they think they’ve worked or not.
• We can do whatever we want to do.

I have downloaded a number of my posterous blogs and they’ve been sitting there looking at me. I also made a resolution recently to get as much of my stuff together under lloyddavis.co.uk. That meant some faffing with domain registrations, hosting and DNS but I finally got that sorted out last week.

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.

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.