"If you’re a local council, selling off land to private developers is an easy way to raise capital. But the undermining of social liberties that comes with these sales is unprecedented. Take the construction of the Olympic village in Stratford for example. It’s an entirely privately owned complex. Although there will be public space, shops and entertainment, there will also be robotic CCTV drones monitoring everyone coming and going – thousands of cameras watching your every move, a ban on begging, busking, skateboarding, hoodies, public assembly, protest, loitering and much much more. Everything that makes our city so vibrant is drained out of the space and replaced with a 2D image of a city. Unless you're shopping you're not welcome."

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I got a bit overexcited last week when Sarah from Time/Image showed me a whole new bunch of British Council films that have been digitised from the archive.  I love them.  I'm still as excited seeing new ones as I was when Al and I looked through the archive in the first place.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I’ve had it with hibernation, even though snow arrived in London this weekend, it’s time for me to start moving and grooving again – Let’s do some work together! 🙂

I learned something really important in the last six months of last year: I’m really, really happy with this lifestyle – I like being in London, I like having a base here, but I also really like moving around the country a lot.  I also love working with people on what they’re doing.  Whether that’s facilitating large groups of people to get things done, or helping a smaller group to have interesting conversations (both of which I did at the recent UK GovCamp) or working with individuals one-to-one on what it is that they really want to do and supporting them in getting to do it, it’s the being there that is when I can be most valuable.

I’ve also really enjoyed performing.  I’ve done street busking again for the first time in a few years and I devised a show around last year’s American trip which I’ve done five or six times now.  I’ve got a new show that I’m trying out tomorrow night.

So that’s what I’d like to keep doing please, just with more cashflow associated with it 🙂

Give me a shout if you’d like my help with any of the following:

Facilitation for an unconference – I’m a very confident and competent holder of Open Space type events. According to Dave Briggs who hired me for GovCamp, I’m “a legend, a master facilitator and the most calming influence ever.“

I can do more structured and pre-planned stuff too, but I’m happiest working with people to create their own agenda on the day and help them do the amazing stuff that self-organising allows.  Maybe you should rethink one of the days of your upcoming team awayday?

One-to-one work – coaching, mentoring, business strategy, critical friendliness whatever you want to call it, I will spend a few hours with you regularly to help you get done what you need to do.  It’s not classic business coaching, we won’t create a rigid structure of visions, aims and goals and mechanical tasks to achieve them (I’ve seen that end in tears, including my own, too often) – I treat you as a human being and a peer and make gentle suggestions. Mike Oh of TechSuperPowers recently said “Yesterday, @lloyddavis helped me find the secret sauce for creating a ‘startup culture’ in my 20 year old company. Excellent session.“

I’d also like to try out “Human Scale Conversations” with some teams or groups within organisations.  It’s a development of this idea from a while back.  Again at GovCamp, Catherine Howe said “…I got a huge amount from his Human Scale conversation” and Martin Howitt said that the session “…challenged me in a completely unexpected way” and Philip McAllister stayed all day: “Thank you, that was enjoyable. It felt like a bold experiment and was really enriching.”  I think it’s most useful to people who spend their professional time trying to get others to talk to each other, or more generally people who’d like to improve their experience of being in meetings at work.

If you’d like me to come along and do a gig at your home or a local community venue, I’d love to talk to you about it, whether it’s straight ukulele and singing, “Please Look After This Englishman” or “All of Me“

I’m very happy to travel anywhere you need me as long as we can agree a fee and expenses. I’m not being as hardcore as before – I love staying with people I’m working with, but I’m happy to accept accommodation expenses if putting me up in someone’s home is too tricky.

PS this is not to say that I’m not open to anything else that you might have in mind for me, if you know what you want, talk to me.  If you don’t know what you want but think it might involve some “lloydness” talk to me. Just talk to me, I don’t growl or bite (if you call between the hours of 10am and 4pm).

Photo Credit: #ashroplad on Flickr

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

It’s just ridiculous, I come back to it every year, this numbering, this ever increasing number that is attached to me.  This morning it was suddenly 47.  What does it mean?  Everything and nothing it appears.

It does *feel* like a shift, I suppose it means “late forties” rather than “mid-forties” but still.  Anyway.

I’m just going to get on and enjoy another day, occasionally liking the lovely Wall posts on Facebook that remind me how wide and amazing my network of friends is; hanging out with a beautiful woman; watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, because it is…

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

Here’s something.  I wrote this last month when making the transition to settling in London for a couple of months.  In fact, writing it helped confirm the transition for me, it seemed to mark the end of something.

Enjoy. Pass it on to anyone who you think might get something from it.  Let me know what you think. etc.  I’ve made it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence so you can redistribute it, remix it, produce it in new formats, sample from it, whatever as long as you say where you got it from.

reflections.pdf Download this file

I’d like to make it available in other formats.  I need some collaborators to help me understand this self-publishing lark a bit better and to actually get it out of the door. If e-books and paper self-publishing is something you’ve done, and you’d like to help, give me a shout.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I’ve been hanging around this place called the Centre for Creative Collaboration for a couple of years now.  I think I’m just about getting the message: you can dig deeper, bigger (and depending on your definition, more interesting) holes in the sand if you do it with other people. Doh!

The two big projects I’ve worked on while here: Tuttle2Texas and Please Look After This Englishman have been looking at generating a new kind of narrative, blurring the distinctions between audience, funders and participants and presenting the results in a variety of formats and media.

I want to take this a bit further, applying the general methodology that I’ve aspired to follow:

• come up with something interesting to do with interesting people;
• blog about it as you go taking some direction from people on the internet;
• create content in various media as you go;
• present what happened in some summary form or forms (a play, a book, a film, an e-book etc.)

So far, I’ve defaulted to doing things myself, although I’ve had some great collaborators, my tendency has been to keep it small and only ask for help when it was really really needed.  Now I want to open them up much wider and make collaboration the norm. 

I’ve at least three projects that have been bumbling around in my brain for a while that I want to apply this to.  I want to get going on them, but I don’t want to do them just by myself.  So I’m going to write up briefs for all of them and then ask for volunteers to help in the following areas (there may be more!):

• talking things through, open up hypotheses, react to the idea, tell us where it’s wrong, where it’s right, what you’d  do with it if you were able to give it time;
• looking at the themes that emerge, identify new audiences, funding streams, participants and other interested parties; 
• work on creating content, writing things up, shooting video, recording audio, taking pics, curating outside content relevant to the themes and writing about it on the blog;
• editing and producing said content;
• recruiting participants and building relationships with them;
• designing and producing “end content” ie taking what we have and productizing it;
• desiging ways of rewarding contributions in financial and other terms;
• managing all the bits and bobs: documenting decisions, managing cashflows, keeping track of contributors and remuneration; and
• reviewing and improving the process and overall methodology

My intention is to publish “Calls for Collaborators”  (an important principle is that collaborators needn’t necessarily be based in London or even the UK) and that we’ll refine this approach as we learn how it works.  In the meantime, your thoughts on all of this (ie your collaboration on the final bullet point of this last list) would be most welcome.  Talk to me, people.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous

I applied for a job a week or so ago (I know!) As part of that I had to update my CV.  I’ve become a bit stupid about that, thinking I somehow didn’t need a CV, that my Linked-in profile was good enough, given I’m a forward-thinking social web geezer. Stupid, not only because you can never have good enough well-targeted, easy-to-read marketing materials, but also because the process of updating one’s CV is a valuable exercise in thinking about one’s experience and how to frame it, how it makes sense now that one is a little bit further down the road.

Anyway, I included the following under “Key Skills and Knowledge”.   They’re all important bits of what I can do, what I like to do, what I’m really good and well-practiced at.  And they’re all things that I shrug off because they’re easy and straightforward for me.  What I forget is that the things that are probably most valuable in my portfolio of talents are those things that I find easy but lots of otther people find very hard – duhh!

Breaking New Ground – comfortable at the edge of innovation and the dealing with the uncertainty of commercial and not-for-profit startup environments by iterative prototyping. Happiest doing those things that “everyone knows” can’t be done.

Facilitating Collaborative Work – a prodigious networker, relationship-builder and subtle facilitator. Creating, managing and developing highly effective inter-disciplinary teams. Coaching and mentoring individuals in personal productivity and effectiveness.

Building Inclusive Community – proactively managing relationships within an organisation as well as with customers, collaborators, service-users and wider stakeholders.

Originally posted on Lloyd’s posterous