Groovy event corner: look out for the Blogs & Social Media Forum organised by VNU in London on May 17th.

Check out the programme and you’ll see the reason I’m talking about it. I’m facilitating an Open Space session with m’colleague Johnnie Moore during the day as an antidote to powerpoint pain and panel proliferation. But of course there’ll be interesting things going on as well. Booom! Booom!

The whole thing will be masterfully chaired by the newly liberated Euan Semple and we’re going to try as hard as possible to make this event stand out from the crowd and not be another dreary procession of the usual suspects.

Sign up via the booking form on the site.

Disclosure: as well as running the session, I am on the advisory panel for the conference.

See you there!

Tags: London & events & blogs & social media & open space & facilitation

[I feel the need to put this post straight a little. The following two paragraphs are not my view, I was one of those who disagreed with the tone and substance of Mena’s speech, and I was active in the backchannel before and after (my handle was perfectpath – you can see what I said), but while she was actually speaking I was writing the two paragraphs in the live-blogging style I’ve adopted before – so they’re now in quotes.

I’m writing something about civility and my experience of this episode to post later but this post is getting so much traffic from tara’s post that I thought it worth clarifying.]

“Mena knows that bloggers have a lot to say and we’re always looking for what they’re saying so the best way to be found is to have a strong voice online. But this has it’s ups and downs. If it bleeds, it leads can work wonders for your google ranking, but it has it’s dangers.”

“Civility and blogging – so finding an attitude of civility in blogging is difficult, but can we as bloggers be more civil? Someone will criticize Mena today – it’s just a part of what she does. What she’s really scared about is the IRC backchannel – it’s disturbing – you see things there that you’d never say to people’s face. The difference is that blogging is much more permanent. This is one of the reasons people are afraid of bloggers.”

“Jeremy Zawodny & the KTA spam episode” – OK this is where I zoned out. I felt like I was being told to be nice but more worryingly *how* to be nice and I don’t like that.

Oooh then it got hairy when Mena didn’t like being talked about on the backchannel and got into a skirmish with Ben (yeah, not that Ben, our Ben)

FrankMaarten Schenk has video yeah, who is Frank anyway?

tag: lesblogs & mena trott

I’m sure my literal translations of English idiom into French are amusing too, but I had to snigger when Gilles Klein introduced Adriana yesterday thus:

“The Lady, it’s a blogger”

This was before the pictures were shown of her out shooting commies in the forest.

tag: lesblogs & language

Finding it hard to concentrate – I have a stiff neck and a headache (bloody french food) and I’m struggling to keep up with the backchannel, the panel speakers and my own brain – now Loic just put up the pictures of Adriana shooting in Pennsylvania so I’m giving up on even trying to pay attention.

Moderated by Gilles Klein, Journalist, France

* Philippe Borremans,
Public Relations Manager, IBM, Belgium
* Georges-Edouard Dias,
Director of Internet & E-business, L’Oreal, France
* Michel-Edouard Leclerc, France
* Jaanus Kase, Skype, U.K.
* Adriana Cronin-Lukas, U.K.
* Martin Varsavsky, Fon

Settled into my seat at Les Blogs II, wifi working – the unofficial irc just became the official backchannel and made it up on the screen. Sadly, I can’t bluetooth my phone to my pc to post pictures immediately.

I’ve Rachel to the left of me and Nicole on the other side of Rachel.

Right now Scoble & Israel are wandering around the room having a Naked Conversation – make of that what you will.

tags: lesblogs

I’m speaking next week at Online Information, the huge VNU information management conference and show at Olympia. I’m going to be speaking on wikis in a session on Wednesday led off by Jimbo Wales. So, nervous and unconfident about what I’m going to have to say to add to the wisdom of His Worshipful Wikipedianess? Ha! Moi?

I’ve titled my presentation Why Wiki? Breaking barriers and Building bridges I shall probably blog a little more about it on the conference blog – but I shall be talking about the need that wikis fill – the collaboration imperative in the knowledge economy and showing how wikis have wider applications than the online reference book (however fabulous they may be).

I shall be taking the opportunity though, while I’m hanging around Olympia and have a speaker’s pass, to do as much live-blogging, podcasting and videoblogging as I can manage without in-room wifi (it’s in the lobby apparently). So be prepared for the usual spurts of binge-bloggery. The blogs and wikis stream will be fun, but I’m also looking forward to David Weinberger‘s opening keynote.

tags: online information 2005 & london & wiki

Suw has drafted me in to facilitate an evening of discussion about digital rights and ORG.  Apparently there’ll be networking and wine too!

ORG is the Open Rights Group, the outcome of a long conversation that culminated with Danny O’Brien from the EFF starting a pledge drive for an EFF-like organisation in the UK on PledgeBank thusly:

“I will create a standing order of 5 pounds per month to support an organisation that will campaign for digital rights in the UK but only if 1000 other people will too.”

The evening will begin with a short presentation by special guest speaker Jonathan Zittrain, Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and then we’ll get chatting in an open space style. So though I have ideas about how best to capture what needs to be captured for those people who believe you have to capture something, I’m tending towards letting the group of 100 incredibly bright people decide for themselves what gets captured.

We’ll be at 01ZeroOne in Soho (corner of Peter St & Hopkins St) on Tuesday 29th November from 6pm to 9pm.  Numbers are strictly limited, so if you’d like to be one of the coolest 100 people talking about digital rights in London on that particular night, you should reserve a place by e-mail to: events@openrightsgroup.org

Incidentally, the above pledge still requires another 45 signatures to reach the magic 1,000 “other people” so if you believe this is a good thing and are willing to part with a fiver a month to make it a reality, you know what to do.

technorati tags: ORG, London, Suw Charman, Zittrain, EFF, Danny O’Brien, Soho, 01ZeroOne, digital rights, open space

If you want to gain trust in your profession, conversation is the best way to achieve it.

Nowadays we do much more talking than we did in the past but we haven’t studied conversation. Talk is different from conversation. In the beginning, people were scared to talk, it was dangerous to say the wrong thing, or to say what you think. But if you look at how people did talk when they started, you find that they are influenced by their social context. So people said what they thought other people would want to hear, which of course meant that nobody actually knew what you thought. We’ve now invented different types of talk: scientific talk – a pared down, unemotional, rational talk; academic talk – essentially argumentative a battle in which one side won and the other shut up; separation of the sexes – women encouraged not to talk to eat separately. So this is not something that we’ve always done, it is something new that we’re developing. The americans revolted against etiquette talk in favour of plain talking or straight talk. Of course this became ritualised and hypcritical over time. We have also proscribed some types of talk, racist, sexist.

Now a new kind of conversation – who it is you keep company with – a social activity not just the exchange of words. Now another kind is needed what a person is like, what they think and what we think too an exploration and a self-examination – a conversation about what is important in your life. Not only do you build trust by letting people in, you also borrow from that person some of the experience that they share with you and you then emerge a different person. So the big revolution of the last century has been the arrival of women in the public sphere and they have introduced stuff that previously were considered too intimate and emotional and conversation can never be the same as a result. His proposal then is that the things you think you can talk about are not enough for you to talk about and if you wish to be treated as an interesting trustworthy person you have to learn how to talk in what was previously considered a more private way.

You’re in corporations not only to make money but to bring people together to do things that they could not do alone. The new conversation is a method of creating a network and you can therefore see that the role of experts in conversation is not just transmitting information but creating something new.

Public opinion polls show that people don’t trust business to tell the truth. This has gone on for a long time – advertising has not worked and charity has not worked. The philanthropic activities which comprise a small section of the budget of corporations will be rethought and corps will see that they need to engage with the community in a very different way. The role of business leaders is the construction of new networkd – what is missing in people’s lives is networks. Survey question – if you got into real trouble who could you rely on for help? Only 55% said their parents would help them – a sign of the disintegration of the family networks. New ones are needed to supplement what is disappearing.

The new relationship between public work and private life. People are going to increasingly complain that they are not happy to do horrible jobs, doing work that does not enhance them as humans. The young recruits are demanding that the corporation change and engage with the community in more diverse ways. People want to expand in life not just be an instrument of others. So what we say about conversation is as applicable to our private lives as it is to our public lives. Moving towards harmonizing public and private, become more like a family. Of course, families are changing too, still learning to be honest and for men and women to talk, for fathers and children to talk and be friends.

Give the same attention to conversation as you do to looking after your body (!) We’re in a process of disintegration unless we do something about it. Studies show that conversation is a very powerful way of maintaining the brain.

It is not enough to know a lot and be able to talk narrowly about your stuff, you have to be able to communicate with people from different backgrounds in different contexts. So you have to broaden the kind of training you do to cultivate conversation. This is totally different from communication – conversation is an art, so there is no guaranteed way of becoming a good conversationalist and everyone develops their own style. Until recently people had to fit into fixed categories. Now the individual is accepted and the mystery is what is going on for you.

There is now an enormous opportunity for us to change the world and facilitate conversation. Learn the lesson of trains – two solutions for building railway carriages – a boatlike democratic space or closed compartments which encouraged the middle classes to segregate and conversation became cut off.

How can you learn to converse? At dinner tonight, we’ll have a menu of conversation and be seated in pairs – 25 questions about what is important in life for you and for others – to get you into real conversation rather than smalltalk. If you give a lot, you will get a lot back.

And so we’re going to have dinner… and you’re not – I’ll tell you what it was like some other time

Intelligent Agents Adaptive Systems – centralised networks and the effects of congestion.

Examples: Small World network – six degrees of separation and ordered network with a few random links. Scale Free network characterised by most nodes having very few connections but a few having many – like the www with hubs and super-hubs. Exponential network – roads.

The Hub & Spoke Network – when is it best to go around the outside and when to go through the hub. Slime Mould and Mycelial fungus do this all the time in a self-organised way. Also management structures, do you go through the structure or find your own path? Economists would say Game theory. but as the number of bodies grows it becomes more and more difficult to predict.

So large number interacting agents; hererogeneity; agents act to maximise their utility; feedback and repeated iterations.

Application example: e-mail perception of users is that cost of transport equals the cost of email which appears to be zero. So make the users aware of the real cost.

Say Cost of e-mail received is £3 but since the scale isn’t linear, congestion can be very expensive. So perhaps have dynamic pricing – cost of email set to reflect load on network. Make people aware of the price right now.

Life in the metaverse – 30 days in ActiveWorlds.

Shows us a demo of ActiveWorlds with lots of caveats about the clunkiness of the interface and the cheesiness of the music. He walks around the world and meets people.

The default avatar for people who haven’t paid sucks and people who have paid aren’t very nice to people who haven’t paid.

Everything is self-built so stuff at the centre comes from 1995 and then as you go out bits of land got claimed over time. Now 4.4 times the size of California. In 1999 it was really neat – shall we do a research paper or shall we just go into the virtual world?

People see it as a place where you can say what you want and do what you want. Actually not true they also watch for key phrases and may throw you out (sometimes after a warning) So there are rules. What would happen if we opened up a world without any laws – so he got a licence. A world about the size of Soho, a blank green space. Put in walls and doors and trees and said there’s no laws. His intention was to then watch over what happened.

Day 0 a massive poster 50′ high with pornographic shot hyperlinked to his mother. So he cleared it and put up some welcome signs and then just hoped that people would just be nice.

Day 1 6430 objects placed in the world, the world has structure and users, all text and building is logged. Fascinating to float above and watch people running around and making stuff while chatting and linking with each other. People interested in why it was there.

Wanted a more human face, so put his webcam on and put himself at 0,0. People stayed in there all day, everyone found it fun to claim land and put up their houses with sofas and log fires. About 40 people all seemingly with faith that it was going to stay and people were nice to each other and got on fine.

Day 4 Attack by the ActiveWorlds Terrorist Group – the leader AKA Jero placed 85,000 objects over 5 hours. Server closed. Cleared out his work. Email threats received to close down the world completely. Re-opened the world and logged in – everyone was waiting and cross because they thought that he’d done it deliberately. It does take time to create a new house.

World placed on DefConOne status. Attack reports reach Press Association News site, so contacted ActiveWorlds and traced his IP, contacted his ISP who told them who he was and the 15-year old boy had his computer taken away by his father. He logged in and said “for god’s sake, you told my dad. He’s not pleased” “You’ve upset the wrong person” within half an hour he’d lost all access to his machine as Jero had hacked in through the PWS.

So cleared out, re-opened world. And it just ran – people coming in and chatting. He became completely immeresed in the world. Gave him and others a sense of purpose. Lots of people with health problems or unemployed – it gave them a friendly face. Interesting how quickly people confided personal stuff. He’s god – but he hadn’t thought it all through.

Lady in Holland starts sending pictures of herself in “compromising purpose” Aaah no. Then she was talking about getting on a ferry and coming over for “a chat” Wanted to make a distinction between virtual life and “real” life. She went a bit quiet but it was fine.

A guy built a plinth with webcam on all sides and avatars all around with their hands up and watching him. He then asked Andrew to come to his lounge (a very big one) and ever wall was plastered with pictures of AHS. “So you’re not keen on my lounge then…” Realised he hadn’t thought about the implications – all of his personal details are online. Turned webcam off at this stage. Next day there’d been a call to the office asking for the webcam to be put back on. Went into the world and talked about it, but people couldn’t see his point of view. The line had been crossed.

Christmas came and they typed/sang xmas carols around the tree. The woman from Amsterdam bought him a Porsche.

People build amazing things – why? They built things that in the real world they wanted. A road network, satellite writing, a little town emerged. Lovers Lane for pictures of themselves and partners. Put in a planning application to demolish Lounge Guy’s house. All the pictures now had little hitler moustaches. He also built a church – used for meetings with a real world church.

The month ended – decided to run it for another year. Two people who met in the world wanted to get married, but the groom died before the wedding so they had a virtual funeral.