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.

I missed doing any sort of participant intros, it’s a good way to set up the day and it does more to make people feel part of the organisation than any amount of telling them that it’s all about them.

I confirmed for myself that I understand github well enough to use it (I thought I might have been missing something. I probably still am, but nothing serious.) So now this exists.

#hackthebarbican makes some people very very excited.

I miss Tomorrow’s World badly. Thanks to BBC Redux for making it possible for us to see Judith Hann demonstrating a nasal-spray contraceptive.

Barcamps are just full of good people, I’m really looking forward to spending more time with them tomorrow.

You still hear the darnedest things in little conversations inbetween.

For example, where else would you stumble over someone you knew who is trying to improve how Shakespeare’s plays are displayed on the web in Mandarin? That’ll be Terence Eden.

It’s really good to do a session where you get to say “I don’t know what to do, I don’t know what the answer is, you tell me.”

I gave people the lowdown on why we’re doing it, what we’re doing, how far we’ve got, what we need now:

why we’re doing it

• The Barbican Centre approached Charles Armstrong to produce something for the month of August while the concert hall and theatre space are being refurbished. Charles sensibly asked some of his friends to come together to think about it and they invited more people.

what

• during the month of August the indoor public areas of the Barbican Centre will be taken over by a self-organising, interdisciplinary experiment in creative collaboration – there will be residencies, events, talks, installations – the biggest limit on the list of things there’ll be is the law… and the fact that the Barbican is a Grade II listed building.

how far we’ve got

• We’ve had an organising group meeting every week since the beginning of the year. We’ve run a Bazaar weekend to try out how it might work. We’re just about to start doing weekly social collaboration sessions to help people who want to get involved to get to know each other better and talk about things they might do in August.

what we need now

• We need people to propose residencies and events. Those links are to pages with forms to submit ideas on the website. We also need people to get involved – take a look at the site and see what you think – you can join the mailing list.

Ideas popped up: Making a map of the centre in Minecraft, a Silent Disco, messing with the lights, messing with the plasma screen etc.

The first Big Picture Day happened on Saturday at the LimeWharf space in Vyner Street – it was an unconference/hackday/jam to work through stuff about improving unconferences/hackdays/jams.

0. This is a pattern that’s grown out of the #ukgovcamp community – write a blog post on the day after or as soon as you can, just getting the key things for you out of your head, rather than trying to write up everything “perfectly”

1. I had to leave way earlier than I wanted to, but probably later than I should, because I was overtaken by what started as a tickly throat but by lunchtime had made me a sniffly, headachy mess.

2. I’m still not 100% and the following may read as overly negative because I’m generally feeling down in the dumps. Forgive me if I sound whiney in anything that follows. Take what you like and leave the rest.

3. So first of all, majorly, wow! I didn’t expect as many people, I was thrilled to see people who’d travelled a very long way to be there. It felt really good to connect several communities that I feel part of and to meet some new people as well. Thank you for coming and sharing your experience. I hope everyone got something useful out of the day. I wish I’d seen Studio 45, the pictures look amazing. Big kudos to Vinay and Tom for co-curating and hosting. Big thanks to Tam for sorting everything else out.

4. I boobed with my talk big time. I hadn’t really thought through 10 minutes and ended up talking too much about what I was doing years ago (mostly #tuttle) rather than the interesting things that I’m working on now – #wewillgather, #hackthebarbican, #ukgovcamp and its many spinoffs.

5. The folk at LimeWharf have made a great space but…

• I find East London, well that bit of Hackney especially, depressing. This is about me, not about Hackney…
• I am not inspired by big, open, flat-walled, bare, concrete space. My idea of conviviality (and I suggest that conviviality is *vital* to these sorts of gatherings) is soft furnishings, warmth, small spaces for intimate conversations. I also don’t get on well with standing up while conversing.
• There was something weird about being served tea and coffee through the hatch. It’s lovely to be served and I get and appreciate the care that’s being offered, but it felt difficult to just help myself when I needed it. There’s a thing in OST about no coffee breaks but easy access to refreshment and beverages. That please.

6. I think we had too many different experiences of different kinds of gathering to say anything useful to all of them. I also think that while it’s useful to get these things together, a hackday is different from a tech unconference is different from a public service unconference is different from a cash mob is different from a self-organising festival. I felt sometimes like we disagreed about stuff because we were talking about different things without knowing it. I think some people were “feeling different parts of the elephant” than I was.

7. I think we tried to do too much by having the conversation and not settling on a methodology up front. I’m not so attached to open space technology that I can’t do anything else, but I think that opening up the conversation we did the equivalent of trying to rewrite the kernel while applications were running, or put another way, trying to redesign and rebuild the engine of a car while driving along the M4.

8. I think that trying to merge sessions as a group is a bad idea. In my view, a few individuals took control of the agenda to suit them. I heard people say “nine sessions in two hours is too many” I don’t believe this is true. I do believe that trying to collapse everything into two or three groups makes for too general a conversation. But I didn’t get to stick around long enough to properly find out. It probably worked out marvellously and I’m being an idiot.

9. Measuring complex human systems is a slippery slope – the kind of measurement we default to means assuming that the human system is like a machine that has measurable inputs and outputs – it’s a way of dealing with complexity by pretending it doesn’t exist. I just haven’t seen that work for anyone other than people who like measuring things or who make judgements without having skin in the game. It’s a distraction and it leads to people gaming the measurement system to look good. People told me this when I was part of the effort to introduce performance measurement to public services. I didn’t believe them. I was wrong about this then, they were right, I don’t think anything’s fundamentally changed.

10. We need to keep practicing this stuff. We’re actually really crap at having real conversations of any kind – people who’ve avoided having this beaten out of them through a combination of school, work and corporatised media are very very rare. But we are getting better and it’s really good to do it, it’s really powerful. Let’s keep doing it.