All posts by Lloyd Davis

anti-academy, generational divide, pimlico, pimlico school, protest, sw1

Pimlico School Anti-Academy Protest

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hg10 590On my way home tonight, passing Pimlico School, I saw a couple of policemen inside the gates. I prickled, thinking poor them, it’s so cold and they’ve got to go in there and find someone who’s disappeared over the fence or something.

It turned out there was something less dramatic but just as interesting and exciting going on. A group of ex-governors are protesting against the demolition of the school and its transformation into an Academy. They were helped by some anti-grafitti artists who used a high-pressure hose to clean off the words “Anti Academy School” on the front wall.

I went and filled their hot-water bottles for them – it’s bloody cold out there and then came back for a chat. They were keen for me to climb over, but the combination of my inflexible legs, the anti-climb paint and my general scaredy-catness meant that I conducted my interview from the other side of locked gates. One of the protestors, Hank, very kindly rigged up an alternative ladder combo to help me, but I gratefully declined.

I spoke to Anthea Masey about what they were doing there. The interview petered out as we were interrupted by a year 10 pupil from the school who was passing but didn’t want to be seen on camera but had a lot to say in praise of the school as it is.

I have no opinion on this issue either way – I personally think the building’s ugly. I can imagine how uncomfortable the classrooms are when the sun shines. I know nothing of the academic record or merits of the case for the current regime, Westminster Council or the protestors, but I’m happy to lend a hand to people who are passionate enough to spend a night under the stars on a freezing February monkey-ball-freezing March night in order to have a say on what they believe in.

Much is written about generational divides, mostly about frightened older people disturbed by young hoodies. Tonight I witnessed a different one where the spirit of protest lives on in those over 50 while 14-year-olds think making a stand like this is pointless and stupid.

documentally, friends, generosity, podcampuk, seesmic

Christian Payne

For those who don’t know him already, I want to introduce you to Christian Payne, documentally, our man inside. I met Christian briefly at podcampuk, I logged him as a cheeky midland photo geek, nice guy, dry humour, keep an eye out for him etc. but then he popped up on seesmic.

I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that he is seesmic’s brightest star. I only feel comfortable calling him that because I see a lot of genuine humility in him and don’t think he’ll take it the worng way. Just in terms of numbers of posts Christian as out-seesmiced the best of them, but he also shines as an inventive, imaginative curious naughty funny experimenter with a great visual style.

I just love watching him and so does everyone else. I really hope he gets to reap some reward from all the effort he puts in. While seesmic is in development it’s still difficult to easily share what he does there, but watch him if you can, he’s bloody good.

This week, however, I had cause to write the following tweet: “@documentally slow down and do one thing at a time man, one thing at a time. don’t go all jimmy dean on us” but unfortunately the next thing we saw was this. I’m glad to say that Christian himself was largely unhurt, but the Land Rover he was driving is kaput. Now he’s written more about it and posted a video showing what he’s doing to get himself mobile again.

I’d urge you to nip over to Christian’s site, laugh at his video, wonder at his WIN, S.H.A.D.O. and SPECTRUM stickers and generously bung him some dosh towards a new mean machine.

canon hg10, video

Back in the video saddle

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Not much to see here, but I’m glad that this was a little less painful than my previous foray into HD.

For those not intimately following my every move, the simple version is, my camera broke, a nice friend lent me one, I used it at BarCamp but screwed aspect ratios, nice friend needed to have camera back, nice people at canoncamerabuzz (well, nice lady in particular – “Miss Jones”) said yup ok popsie, you can be in our review programme and have a Canon HG10 to play with.

This is what it spits out pretty much with all the defaults.

More over the weekend and coming month where I’ll be trying to stretch it a bit.

conferences, events, friends, goingsolo, lausanne

Solo? Going?

Going SoloOne of the things twitter has taught me is how fragmented our social networks are. Not everybody who reads this blog knows everybody who reads this blog. So there will be some folk who don’t know Stephanie Booth in fact she teetered on the edge of my network mostly through the european KM folk until twitter made us all feel much closer.

When I last saw Steph, in Berlin at the girl geek dinner, she had a twinkle in her eye and shortly thereafter announced the reason to the world – Going Far is going to be her vehicle for running cool events and the first of these will be on May 16th in Lausanne – Going Solo a conference for people who work by themselves (and with others) on a freelance basis, covering how to run things in a business-like way, how to market, how to charge…etc.

The thing I like about this is that it’s another example of the demand side supplying itself – the speakers already announced are Suw Charman, Stowe Boyd, Martin Roell and Laura Fitton rather than some list of people you’ve never heard of organised by people with no idea of the industry and totally pwned by their sponsors.

There’s a few days left of early early bird discounts but even after that the fee’s under £200 for another month. Should be manageable from most parts of Europe. And unlike many such conferences, you’re likely to learn enough from it to make it pay for itself quite quickly. If you can’t currently recoup the cost of the day, travel and accommodation in a couple of days of consulting, then you *definitely* need to go and learn how to 🙂

Just to be clear – I’m not involved in the organisation of this in any way beyond friendly chats with Steph from time to time – but I have great faith in those involved that they will make it a really special day. I’ll be booking my place just as soon as those invoices get paid 🙂

Bonus: You can see Steph talking about it herself in the corridors at LIFT08 last week.

advertising, capitalist piglets, clueless, marketing, matterbox

Matter Box Contents

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Matter Box Contents

Originally uploaded by Lloyd Davis

Others have covered this more quickly than me, but I thought I’d say something beyond what I said on Seesmic last week – http://seesmic.com/v/6XRvg23fSW

Charlie said he didn’t want samples. I do. I’m much happier with my shower gel and play-doh than with a plastic monster a calendar and a badge in the shape of a vodka bottle. If something that comes in this isn’t useful, it had better be completely, mindblowingly, gobsmackingly beautiful – cereal box shaped like a book? Nah.

While the crayons made of soap are potentially also useful, the thing that made my brain scream more than anything was the lametrocious rubbish written about it:

“A set of crayons that are really soap tell a story about how Nissan’s not what you expect.” which in my very very humble opinion is the biggest load of self-justifying, bollockshite I’ll read in the context of advertising copy this year. God I hope so, I couldn’t bear anything more slimy and contrived.

Like Roo, I like the recyclability of the packaging, but I’m looking forward to much cooler and less wanky stuff next time please.

UPDATE: in the comments on the picture on flickr, mike heath says:

“That is really funny that you got Black and White playdoh in your Sony Bravia promo item. err… ‘Colour like no other’ LOL! That is probably a collectors piece, like a misprinted stamp 🙂 Bit of a Homer Simpson moment at the packing factory!”

Uncategorized

LEON

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coffee one – leon

Originally uploaded by russelldavies

They are lovely. I wish there was one in the West End as expansive as this one in Spitalfields. I tried the new one in (upper) Regent Street today and it was lovely with predictably lovely staff but I really wanted to spread out a bit and stretch my legs

The tight conditions though did have a good effect. I had to share a table with (gasp) a stranger and because I was in Leon and everybody’s so happy and friendly, we couldn’t help just talking as though we weren’t hardened London sociophobes after all. Y’know small talk about what a nice place it is and how good and healthy the food feels, nothing too deep, but a very odd experience for me in that part of W1.

friends of harry, london, lsmc, social media, social media café, soho, tuttle, tuttle club, Uncategorized

Social Media Café as Platform

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PolicyUnplugged 085At our first prototype meeting, I perceived a tension between the people who were interested in making a profitable business and those whose interest was solely in the community possibilities and opportunities for collaboration. I came away unsure of what legal structure would work best – a traditional shareholder-owned limited company or a non-profit company limited by guarantee. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then.

On the same occasion I said something along the lines of: “What I want to create is a platform that enables people to create value for themselves.”

The inspiration for this comes from the tech world – CP/M & MS-DOS, the IBM PC, the Internet, the Web, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Ebay, Facebook – what they all have in common is that no matter how they get paid for or how they’re organised, or whether or not they make money for their inventors, they have also given other people the opportunity to create new relationships, markets and businesses that weren’t possible before (btw, I use big examples so that people will recognise what I’m talking not because I think our little project will be on that scale.)

I want everything we do to in some way support people doing cool stuff on their own. I don’t think we have to own *every*thing and I certainly don’t want to create a walled garden. We’ll get a lot more done by creating the conditions for people to

So turning back to the legal structure, the choice seems to come down to a limited company (or a partnership) which exists to create value for it’s shareholders (or partners) or a company limited by guarantee which exists to… well do whatever we decide it should do – I think it should serve the needs of people interested in Social Media in London – if that’s not too wooly (or too specific) – but I’m open to suggestion. There was broad agreement that limited by guarantee was the right route for us but the aim and purpose does need to be boiled down to something that expresses what we want and allows us (as a group) to do as much good as possible.

So if that is sorted, my mind then turns to the structure of this business. I’ve always talked about the three bits – café, learning, working. But that might not be all we want to do together – other ideas for services have come up in meetings too. Can we make the Tuttle Club our base platform? With no direct services except to facilitate cool stuff happening. Then the first cool thing it does (quickly) is to set up a Social Media Café or perhaps the café space, a learning space and a workspace could each be individual, but co-located businesses. And then it can do other things too as they arise. Or am I making it too complicated?

Let’s talk about this at the next prototype – but there are many who aren’t able to join us there so let’s do it in the google group as well.

busking, london, tube, vote

Vote Vote Vote for Me!

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OK, here’s a bit of fun.

The London Paper and Capital Radio who sponsor the London Licenced Buskers Scheme are having a data collection exercise Competition for your favourite Busker.

I couldn’t possibly influence your choice of course, I simply lay the following information before you and let you make your mind up.

First a warning. You’ll need to register (grrr…) here in order to enter, but you can opt out of getting too much crap from them. You’re all grown-ups and you can decide what to do with your personal data. I will understand if you feel this is too much to ask.

I would also point out that I’d like to keep my licence please so try not to piss the organisers off with fake data. There are also draw prizes every day for people who enter which you’d miss out on if you gave a false id.

Once logged in you need to go to my profile and click on the voting button. You can only vote once per day but since most people I know are online at midnight, doing it at 11.55 and 12.05 every other day should make it more efficient for you, if less easy to remember. I think you get a notification then of where I am in the chart. Naturally, you should also feel free to vote for any busker you wish. I just hope you can live with your conscience.

announcements, catalyst, coaching, digital coach, digital coaching, for hire, mary poppins, social media, social media tart, web2.0, What I'm doing

Digital Coaching, Catalysts and Sitting on Your Hands

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MacBraynes Bus by conner395

I’ve been reflecting on some of the social media work I’ve done over the last year and seeing where I might improve my offering. The model piece of work that I’ve sold to people has gone as follows: “You tell me you want to have a go at this new fangled social media mularkey, but you don’t know where to start. So I’ll start for you and show your people what I’m doing. We’ll start off with me doing everything but my involvement will taper off as your team’s involvement increases and by the end of the project, you’re folk will be doing it all for themselves.”

Great. Sold. But….

What has actually happened is that people have had some great blogs from me (natch) but there hasn’t actually been much change in what they do, the comms teams I’ve worked with have liked the idea but as long as I was doing it *for* them it was too easy to sit back and continue to say “Yes, that’s nice, I wish I was able to do that”. I think there’s still a space for doing live-blogs of events as discrete pieces of work, but more ongoing stuff needs to be done differently.

So I’m looking for a better model. And over coffee with Jonathan Laventhol of Imagination I understood what it might be. He said to me “You need to sit on your hands more” And he’s absolutely right. Just as when you’re helping someone to learn to drive it’s not good to keep grabbing the steering wheel, I think there’s much more value that I can offer as a non-doing coach or catalyst for action.

In their excellent book on decentralised networks, The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom talk about the difference between two roles that Julie Andrews made famous.

“In The Sound of Music, Maria enters a dysfunctional family, teaches the children a valuable lesson, convinces the father to pay attention to his kids, and shows the family how to get along. Likewise, Mary Poppins visits an equally (albeit charmingly) dysfunctional family, gets equally adorable children to behave, urges equally clueless parents to pay attention to their kids, finds equally effective ways for everyone to get along, and sings equally catchy tunes.”

“At the end of The Sound of Music, though, Maria, after falling in love with the children and the father, sticks around. It’s obvious that from now on she’ll be the one running the show. Mary Poppins, on the other hand, chim-chim-in-eys right out of London. It’s not that Mary Poppins has a fear of commitment. From the very beginning, it’s clear that she’s come to do a job. Her job is complete when the family can thrive on its own. Once she accomplishes her goal, she rides her umbrella into the sunset.”

I’ve tried both models, but like Mary Poppins, I’m much better as a catalyst. Going in, making change happening and moving on to where I’m needed more, rather than working my way up, establishing an empire and sticking around for the long haul.

Then I saw Seth Godin writing about Digital Coaches

“What’s a digital coach? A freelancer (individual) who usually works with entrepreneurs, small groups or companies to teach them how to dramatically improve productivity or market presence using technology. For example, a digital coach might hook up your cell phone to be more powerful or teach you how to use blogs and Facebook to connect to your audience.”

I think for me it’s a totally bottom-up approach – aimed at individuals inside and outside organisations who want to beef up their personal productivity using web 2.0 and social media tools. They might have a social media project hat they need to contribute to, but would also generally benefit from catching up with what’s arrived in the last year or so and someone to help them think it through in their own personal or business context. The focus is on enhancing productivity, preferable in simple, measurable ways.

When I’ve mentioned this to people, some have said “Wow, yes please” and others have said “Oh, I kind of thought that’s what you did already” So I think it’s probably right. 🙂

Photo credit: conner395 on Flickr licenced with cc-attribution