The “tragedy of the commons” is a metaphor used to describe (according to Wikipedia) “the depletion of a shared resource by individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, despite their understanding that depleting the common resource is contrary to the group’s long-term best interests”.

I noticed it creeping in at the Barbican yesterday for the first time.

The obvious shared resource at The Barbican Centre is space. And there’s loads of it. More than anyone could use. We don’t have a problem with fitting new stuff in when it comes to how much floorspace or airspace they might take up.

We also haven’t (yet) had anyone polluting the atmosphere enough to drive anyone out. I wasn’t sure whether it was Ian Willey’s Barbicoin experiment (contains ketchup!) that was getting a bit niffy yesterday or the lunch being served in the Lounge.

I’m not aware of anyone breaking the wifi so far. We should try harder.

No, the problem is the vibration of the atmosphere, in other words the soundspace, which is, in my view, being monopolised and exploited by a few to the exclusion of others. Yesterday, in the afternoon, and I expect the same today, there were three sound installations in different parts of the building all contributing to what the noise-lovers describe as “ambience”. I found it intolerably noisy, I couldn’t concentrate, hold conversations, read or write. I tried. I went outside and walked around a bit until I’d calmed down and went back in – I could just about sit there doing nothing but if I’m going to sit there doing nothing, I’d rather do it in the park.

I raised the question of reducing the number of noisy pieces on the mailing list. I received five responses, all basically saying: “no, I like the noise and I can work round it”.

I want to be clear, it’s not about not liking anything that was going on – individually I’ve enjoyed each of the works and I’m in no position to question their merit. Individually, I could have taken them, but exposed to them altogether I was no longer able to use the space. At the moment it seems as if most people don’t understand how depleting this resource is contrary to our long-term best interests. I recognise that I’m making assumptions about what our “long-term best interests” are. And given we’re 10 days into a four week project, the “long-term” is not very long! Yesterday I felt like I was saying “Global warming will have a long-term deleterious effect on biodiversity” and was told “Chill man, enjoy the sunshine like the rest of us”.

I may be unique, but I suspect that there are others who have found this difficult and who are deterred from sticking around because of it. There seems to be some evidence that tolerance of noise in spaces like this is related to introversion/extraversion – whatever the underlying factors we risk reducing the diversity of people taking part in the project down to those who are noise-tolerant or those who can be there early in the morning before the noise-makers wake up.

I’m not giving up, either in terms of continuing this conversation or in looking for other workarounds and solutions. If you’re interested in joining in, you know where I am.

UPDATE: While writing this, the minutes of last nights organising meeting came through. It seems the Barbican Library have complained about the noise too.

The public wifi access at The Barbican is provided by “The Cloud” which was acquired by BSkyB in January 2011. BSkyB is 39% owned by 21st Century Fox (previously part of News Corporation) whose Chairman and CEO is Rupert Murdoch.

Since seeing the kerfuffle about City recycling bins (now no longer) tracking smartphones, I’ve been thinking more about what data network-connected devices pass around and record.

Here’s the data they “may” hold on me

So I looked at The Cloud’s Privacy Notice in conjunction with my Account Details page, which together, for me, raise lots of questions. They hold:

• Information you have given us, including on our websites.
• OK that’s my e-mail address and password, Name, Surname, House Name or Number, Postcode, Date of Birth. And whether I’ve opted out of being contacted “about products and services you may like.”
• Well that’s the data that they remind me that I’ve given them on my account details, but I couldn’t tell you whether I filled other fields in when I first signed up years ago.
• Information about our services you’ve used.
• Looking at my details, I can see my last 14 logins going back to 25th June (including the time I absent-mindedly got on the Giraffe wifi in the Brunswick Centre but was actually in Starbucks)
• There’s a menu for “Product Device Management” but I don’t seem to have any.
• There’s also an empty screen for “Transaction History” but I think that means paying them anything, which I haven’t.
• Information provided by other companies who have your permission to share information about you
• Yikes! All those incorrectly ticked or unticked opt-out/opt-in boxes. The international conspiracy of marketing data collectors will be after me as will the lackeys of PRISM.
• Information we collect using cookies stored on your device. For more information on cookies and how to manage them, please see our section on ‘Cookies’.
• So looking at the cookies on the browser I was using yesterday there are cookies from thecloud.net and from service.thecloud.net – the first lot appear to be tied to Google Analytics. The others are called “jsessionid”, “mycloudid” & “routeid” – presumably these identify me as a previous user and tell you something about my latest session.
• Your IP address (this is a number that identifies a specific network device on the internet and is needed for your device to communicate with websites).
• Which is dynamically allocated by the router? But you keep a note of which one I was using for a particular session?
• Technical details about your computer or access device.
• Could be anything, but I’m assuming at least browser, OS, MAC address, device make & model etc. How about which ports I have open during a session?
• The times and dates of your access to our service.
• Naturally
• The locations of your access to our service.
• Yes, I’d expect so.

And this is how they will *may* use it

• We may use it for market research.
• You don’t say!
• We may also need to use it to pass to others so we can keep to any legal or regulatory requirements, to protect or enforce our rights or the rights of any third party, in the detection and prevention of fraud and other crimes, and for the purpose of protecting national security.
• Ah the “machines of loving grace”!
• We may pass your information to anyone who takes over our business for them to use for the purposes set out in this privacy notice.
• Phew! Couldn’t be anyone worse than Murdoch, surely 🙂

So do I stop using this service? Are we going to build our own mesh network and implement totally secure and commercially-independent communications networks for the time we’re here? I’m afraid it’s about as likely as me growing my own carrots and keeping a pig on our balcony as a way of avoiding the corporate evils of the supermarkets.

But it points to a gap in the market – ethical public ISPs that have a VRM attitude to our data.

Yesterday at Tuttle (in the Barbican) David and I had a conversation, which I then carried on with Tony about the similarities between the growth dynamics in co-working spaces and gentrification in urban environments (first the penniless artists move in because it’s the only place they can afford, they make the area attractive and then they start making money and the richer cool kids also discover the place and all move in etc.)

This first week of Hack The Barbican has felt a bit like the earliest stages of this, when there’s just a handful of people spotting each other in between the occasional temporary occupants who are used to coming in to eat a sandwich in their lunchbreak. But we know it’s going to grow, because we’ve been here before…

I was pleased then to see that Martin has just added this to the Visitor FAQ

“Think of it not as a centrally curated event, but as a slowly growing city that is gradually taking over the Barbican’s public spaces, with many imperfections, but also many moments of unexpected magic.”

Perfect.

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.