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Potential

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Another day another mind-blowing conference – today it’s 2gether08 which feels a bit like I imagine it is to crawl around inside Steve Moore’s head. Hundreds of gobsmackingly smart folk talking big, talking social, talking good.

I’m thinking again about the potential for action that this sort of event creates. Loads and loads of people, talking big ideas, connecting disparate subjects and disciplines, talking about what they’ve done, what they’re doing, what they’d like to do. Ooooh yes, let’s do that, let’s do this, oh my god, can you imagine if we did that? Let’s talk about it, let’s make it happen.

It’s something that happens every week at the Tuttle Club. People get enthused about an idea or another person or their work and they talk animatedly about what they might do and how they might collaborate. A small number of those collaborations actually have come quickly to fruition. Sometimes this is because they’re at the level of “hey! what if we could mash up flickr and google maps and ‘ta-dah’ – you know” ie it’s not really a new idea, just new to the people involved. Other times it’s more about already busy people having great ideas bu they don’t have time, or money, or time to generate the money to do it.

However, it is a weekly experience for me and I’m getting used to seeing the realisation of awesome potential and the later associated deflation. That’s in a group of 30 or so people. So it’s not surprising that we get it in spades at conferences like today.

So. Much. Potential.

I feel it physically. It’s painful. I think sometimes it’s the thing that winds me up most about events – the raising of potential and the lack of resolution. I know I’m going to feel it again tomorrow. The only answer I have by the way is something Umair Haque said this morning: “Organise something” Y’know like “just do it” but no, really do it.

Irony Alert: this post lacks a real resolution

(and I’m cross-posting to the 2gether blog)

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How many CCTV cameras per person?

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One of the factoids that’s been repeated again and again in the recent civil rights car crash is that there is at least one CCTV camera for every 14 people in the UK. This from the wikipedia page on CCTV

“The exact number of CCTV cameras in the UK is not known but a 2002 working paper by Michael McCahill and Clive Norris of UrbanEye[5], based on a small sample in Putney High Street, estimated the number of surveillance cameras in private premises in London is around 500,000 and the total number of cameras in the UK is around 4,200,000. The UK has one camera for every 14 people.”

Can we do better than this? We don’t have to limit ourselves to a “small sample in Putney High Street” – Has anyone created an interactive map where you can submit known public and private CCTV sites? I think it would show large areas that are not covered by CCTV and many areas that are completely over-saturated.

Would knowing a more accurate number change anything? Would knowing that there’s actually one camera for every 7 people mean that we had any more power to stop the things being put there in the first place? I’d be interested to see what the tipping point is before we get so fed up that we start using paintball guns on the High St like Bernard Cribbins facing a dalek.

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Heat on the Tube

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25062008045The heat on the tube and the introduction of fans to keep people more comfortable was a little news blip yesterday. Annie had of course covered it a few weeks ago and I meant to comment at the time, but y’know… didn’t.

The issue that doesn’t seem to have come up at all is how much the temperature on the tube is currently being raised by the new batch of illuminated advertising pitches. I might try to find one of those flat thermometers to see just what the surface temperature is, but in the meantime just laying my hand on one (or my back, actually, when busking) proves to me that it’s quite a lot warmer than a paper poster 🙂 This goes for the animated doodads that line several escalators.

So how many of these screens are there now? I am not a physicist, so does anyone want to help me work out the effect a single screen might have on the ambient temperature? What is the cumulative effect of all the screens in one station, how about across the 24 stations that are getting them? And are CBS Outdoor, who are responsible for their installation, made any effort to counter the effects? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to be shouting about this if they were? And I’m not a green extremist, but what effect have these screens had on the tube’s carbon footprint as a whole – how much electricity is being used to run them?

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It was again – Interesting ’08

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21062008043Tired and very happy after a lovely day at Interesting ’08 – thought I’d try blogging it quickly this time – it’s that kind of a day.

As I spent much of the day helping Russell to be slightly less worried, finding things for all the helpful people to do, filling up the water boiler and wondering about including audience participation in my slot I’m afraid I missed some of the startling, stimulating and assorted wonderful displays of interestingness. But…

Roo kicked off beautifully with some great historical images from that geek classic – Lego

Something about Horses and their blind spots. (Dave funkypancake picked up on “horse” later too while struggling against dead air)

I next tuned in to Collyn saying how she was bored with reality and expected more ferns and snails.

Not sure what happened then but next thing I knew, Dan Raven-Ellison was bigging up Geography and kicking History in the balls and then Michael Johnson was segueing from Django to Freddie Green to Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Jimmy Page and so on and so on with much pedalling and magical slide changing.

so Azeroth is about 16 12km in diameter and very, very dense according to James Wallis’s endearingly obsessive calculations – also something about chucking some bird off a tower and seeing how long it took for her to fall.

Phil Gyford reminded me of what fun mask work was, but also how difficult it is.

I think I caught some bits of Matt Dent’s lovely work on coin designs – I’m glad I met him at the sign-up table and got to tell him personally anyway.

Matt Webb told a lovely story about a South American mirror telegraph that might have been an hallucination, I really wished it hadn’t been, I like the idea of local physics.

Andrew Webb must have been next thanks to the matt-matt-webb-walkingshaw doo-dah. Oh yes – food – it’s all over the country, allegedly, and farmers are saying get *on* moi land!

Andrew Walkingshaw talked about having lots of names (like cats do) and uniqueness and ambiguity

Andrew Dick finally found how to get to sleep after years of insomnia – audio books of bad thrillers – not too exciting or interesting but also not too dull – also apparently the effect doesn’t properly kick in until you’re listening for the 2nd or 3rd time.

I bet Jenny Owen’s Churchill impression is even better when she has a cigar in her mouth – she gave us a bundle of interesting titbits about the great man though my blood sugar was plummeting as we got close to lunchtime.

To close the morning, Matt Irvine Brown displayed excellent headmaster skills getting 35 people to play the recorder – I qik’d it but it’s probably even more painful to watch on a mobile phone video than it was to witness in the flesh.

Then after lunch that fat baldy bloke from last year made us listen to him sing to a (very) small guitar and then made a mountain out of some molehills – other people will cover this slot better than me.

Simon & Curtis James & Ken Hollings did some weird thing about suburbia set to a radiophonics jam session.

Anna Pickard on why biscuits, flanges and gussets are funny.

Younghee Jung talked toilets – unfortunately this is when I managed to get to the toilet for the first time myself, so I had empirical experience, but I missed out on her theory.

James Bridle got me thinking about wine and evolution and talking about booze without talking about drunkenness.

Kim Plowright- oh god, Kim, I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.

James Houston showed us why he just got a first class degree.

Jim Le Fevre wowed the hall with his live zoetrope demo – at the start Jim asked if he could bring his equipment in which included a turntable, so naturally I was expecting something audio but it was decidedly more visual – Jim, I’d love you to meet Steve Lawson – @solobasssteve – you could make great stuff together

Gavin Starks – all I remember is dodecahedrons and something about music from n-dimensional hypercubes

Joel Gethin Lewis tries to get people in the moment, talking about something untranslateable into English from Welsh

Was George Oats talking about flickr or was that Kim? I think that’s when I popped out to get some more milk.

Lea Becker I’d have like to see and hear more about drawing from her. I’m not sure about the taxonomy of drawing approaches…

Leisa Riechelt is clearly a lovely mummy and reminded me of how interesting your first small person can be. The young man in question had a domain named after him before his name was on a birth certificate. Excellent.

I agree with Max Gadney that we will see some serious re-appraisal of the second world war the further we get from it.

Lots of lovely lovely lovely people in the audience – Tuttlers, Headshifters, Interesting07’ers to many to mention individually but lots are mentioned here.

So yeah, it was, again and I’m sure it ever will be.

What I've Been Doing

Videoblog Masterclass – Using video as a social technology

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I am the master
I thought I’d write about the stuff I took to my videoblogging masterclass last week. I’d like to repeat the process with other clients – and maybe a public one – it worked well in a small group of communications specialists and people from lines of business. I’d have liked to have done it all more openly too, but one of the requirements from the client was that everything was kept private (it was part of an internal conference on risk management)

I started with my background in social media as a whole and how I’ve been thinking about it helping internal communications and knowledge management for as long as I’ve been blogging.

Then I took a look at the technology. I started with the obvious – get a DV camera, point it at someone and record what they’re saying. I then showed how to simply take that footage, edit it quickly using Windows Movie Maker, add a title and some credits and create a movie file. I think this is simple now and there are tutorials all over the web, but I forgot how complicated it can seem if you’ve never seen it before.

Then I looked at video clips as conversations, using seesmic as an example. We looked at some conversations and saw how being informal helps to convey more information. I talked about how the community had grown up and about my experience of meeting and building relationships with people I’d known about before, but never got to know properly until we “met” on seesmic.

And finally we looked at mobile video – briefly touching on using your phone to record files, edit and transfer to the web like this master, but focusing mainly on live streaming, using qik as an example. I’m very grateful to Jackie at qik for shipping me an N82 so that I could demo this properly (and I seem to have really gotten the bug since then!) I’m not sure that the whole group in the class fully understood what was going on but one or two were gobsmacked and very excited by the potential of this.

We spent the second half of the morning talking about the cultural impact of doing this sort of thing, the risks involved and the kinds of practical applications that they could envisage. And then (oh noes!) we got onto why any use of video would be difficult (read “nigh on impossible”) in their current IT environment. This also led onto an interesting discussion about broadcast versus narrowcast and an understanding that not everything that gets published needs to be accessed by everybody else.

So yeah, give me more of these please.

london, What I'm doing

Mastering Social Media

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Suw & Leisa and I are putting together a series of events this summer under the banner of Fruitful Seminars – Suw was the bravest and is doing hers on Friday 27th and now I’m ready to come out with my offering.

UPDATE: Due to a little misunderstanding the seminar will take place one week later, on Weds 16th July, same time, same place, just a different day.

Here’s the blurb:

Social Media and Online Social Networking are transforming our business and personal lives. Few people can have escaped entirely from some exposure to the power and benefits of this revolution in how we communicate and collaborate. But even fewer can claim mastery over the tools and techniques or fully understand how to apply them to achieve specific business goals. Anyway, how on earth can you find the time? What about your “real work”?

In this masterclass you’ll get to work with Lloyd Davis, one of London’s most popular and experienced social media experts. Lloyd will help you understand what social media’s really all about and how to build rich and productive online relationships using simple tools. You will also gain some practical experience of creating some social media and get help with applying what you’ve learned to your personal business context.

The day is designed for marketing and communications professionals who want to understand better just how social media and online social networking can work for them. With no more than 9 participants, you’ll be assured of individual attention. Most participants will already have some experience of at least one aspect of social media, but will want to become more comfortable and confident with a wider range of tools. You should bring along an example of a business issue that you’d like help with.

We’re deliberately keeping these small so that they’re good value and participants can get to learn from each other as well as from me.

You all know someone who will benefit from spending a day in One Alfred Place with me – so kindly escort them (and their credit card) to the button above which will convey them, by means of the magical hypertext transfer protocol, to the booking page.

Photo by Ewan McIntosh

What I'm doing

Hello!

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Light on blogging but writing a lot and making stuff happen, though currently in a Pimlico basement instead of the 7th Floor.

Just wanted to say, ‘cos I know there are lovely people who worry when I go quiet here 🙂

What I think

Reading… this is reading

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[the title by the way will probably only mean something to travellers on the Great Western Railway]

Suw just commented on my tuttle post on open spaces that we might have a book-reading session, which reminds me that I was talking to Laura North the other day who is working on the National Year of Reading – yes, it’s now, it’s happening.

My first idea was to get people together to do some play reading – a comedy, preferably, probably something intellectually stimulating too. And short. The Real Inspector Hound for example, or maybe some Orton. I don’t know, anyway, I thought it would be fun and easy to do and eminently bloggable. Anyone?

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Being right

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I find it very productive to sometimes think “What if I’m completely wrong about this?” You know, “What if this tightly-held, well-evidenced belief is actually not true?” Even if it does turn out to be true, it can be an illuminating exercise to consider what the world would be like or what our experience of the world might be or what decisions we might make differently IF it weren’t the case. It goes as well for global situations “What if the world isn’t actually flat even though that’s how my senses perceive it?” as well as the more personal: “What if it weren’t true that everyone hates me?”

An equally productive development of this rhetorical exercise is to ask “what if, rather than believing that everything about this situation is wrong, what if everything were just right?” In effect this is asking “What if I’m wrong about everything in my life going wrong?”

That’s what I was writing about yesterday. “What if the innovation edge conference was actually perfect in every way?” What does that tell me, what can I learn about it, what might I do differently myself as a result of experiencing it and experiencing my discomfort?

So today, as I begin another day with No Fixed Abode and seeing other people’s fear and insecurity when I explain to them what’s happening and being tempted to fall into that spiral of panic and busy work that I well know makes for little progress, today, I ask myself “What if I’m wrong that not having a permanent place to live is the worst possible situation to be in?” “What if it’s absolutely right and perfect that I’m flat-sitting for a friend?” What might I do in response to that, how would I think and act, what might it mean about me? And why might I have brought myself to this place?

And as I reflect on all that, a paradox becomes clear to me. This week I have had the recurring feeling of being safe and at home – *wherever* I am. I was in Epsom yesterday and went to the Post Office and walked along the High Street and it was all lovely and suburban and I thought “Oh yes, this is home, perhaps this is where I should live all the time” and then this morning I was in Pimlico and walking around the gardens of St George’s Square and had *exactly* the same feeling.

From which I take that it was in order to fully appreciate that I really belong here, wherever “here” is, to fully understand that I’m at home wherever I am and that my physical location is purely a matter of choice, that I had to bring myself to this experience of “homelessness”.

So, phew! Having gotten that out of my system, I think I’ll choose a period of greater stability 🙂

events, london

Passing notes in school

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Ugh I’ve had a kind of emotional hangover since about lunchtime yesterday. I feel rotten about getting stuck in a cynical snarky frame of mind. To blame twitter would be like blaming my exercise books for having blank sheets at the back that were perfect for writing notes to pass in class. To blame anyone at NESTA would be like blaming Mr Liberal for not being able to control his pupils. And to blame any of my fellow participants would be saying “they made me do it, sir”. Oh bugger, now I’ve got the Grange Hill theme running round in my head.

But anyway that’s what I did yesterday, I regressed into can’t-be-bothered schoolboy (the one who ended up with average O-levels and piss-poor A-levels), a role I reprised at university as smart-arse know-it-all (who had to pull far too many all-nighters to get a 2:1). People found some of my twittering amusing but it wasn’t really a productive use of my time to sit there snarking, steadily becoming more frustrated and in the end getting, well, a bit depressed really. In fact I felt just the same as when we had that backchannel hoo-ha at LesBlogs2.0. Stuck in a room with far too many smart people not able to say anything while some other smart people sat on the stage and weren’t able to say enough. But I have to recognise that that’s just how I see it, it doesn’t mean that everyone else had the same reaction.

The thing I can take responsibility for is that I went into it entirely unconsciously – I didn’t really look at the programme, as was evidenced by my shock on arrival at the scale of the whole thing. If I had thought about it, I would have known that I was likely to rebel against the keynoting and panelling and would have planned to do something entirely different and positive with the opportunity instead of sitting there and trying to disrupt it. The only bit I behaved in was Bob Geldof’s bit – he’s a great performer and I’ve loved him ever since he tore up that picture of John Travolta on Top of the Pops.

So I’m sorry NESTA for poking you with a stick. I’m sorry Jonathan Freedland for calling you names on twitter. And I’m sorry to myself for using up a valuable day so miserably.

Ho hum. On to better things. I’ve sat in similar events and said “We can do better than this” I don’t think that’s true – it was a great event, but the programmed content was not for me. What I will say is “We can do something other than this – in fact we already are” That’s where my effort’s going today rather than in trying to pull somebody else down.

Bonus Link: The bit that Geldof quoted from WH Murray

I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.