Of course I signed up straight away… have you met me?
Oh ya! I was in the first seven and a half-thousand users you know…
At first glance, after first coffee, but still before first light in this part of the world in December, I’m not wild about the implementation. There are a couple of things that make it look like this is only for a certain kind of person, who lives in a certain kind of place and can afford a certain kind of technology. Oh and can afford a certain liberty with their own data and that of their contacts (or as the app has it “their people”). I’m becoming more cynical and sceptical about it the more I write.
this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.
I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends.
Throw in a clumsy use of flags (Good morning, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish friends!). I’m not even sure what that one is. (oh and you’ll need to be on WhatsApp to get the notification.)
whose fleg is dat?!?
Your plans had better be in a code that your friends will understand, as you only have 24 characters.
“keynoting at the symposium on K”
The granularity of location is the other problem. Letting people know that I’m going to be in “London, UK” isn’t much use. Which points to the use case being international travellers in select cliques for whom London obviously means “my parents place in Primrose Hill”. But if you know people *that* well, are you going to use a separate app for it, or are you going to have a Whatsapp group?
I may also have a chip on my shoulder because my little old iPhone SE won’t show the left and right edges to some screens.
Eh. Will wait and see who else turns up.
PS the wordpress featured image for this post is AI generated and does not represent an accurate representation of the Mozi interface.
marginally less pathetic than my Spotify For Artists 2024 stats.
I’ll never be a consistent weeknoter – at least in the sense of consistently posting week by week. I’m consistent in my irregularity – I just looked and it’s almost exactly a year since my last one.
So this is December 2024. I’ve been looking forward to this (in the way that people say to their proctologist that they’re looking forward to their next appointment) for a while. I’m now into the last few weeks of my fifties. After the weekend I’ll be saying “I’m now into the last fortnight of my fifties.” That’s how I’ve been dealing with it. Doing a time check every now and then through this year in an effort to make the passing of time feel slower. I’m pretty sure it’s the anticipation that’s doing me in. Once I’m there and I have a badge that says “I’m 60 (you might have to speak up a bit!)” or something, then I’ll be OK with it. That’s what’s always happened in the past with so-called significant birthdays anyway.
The main difference with this one is that it comes with some small benefits, not just free NHS prescriptions but also the start of my Audit Commission pension. It stems from my employment there between 1996 and 2002 when 2024 still seemed a long way off. Nothing huge, but still, it’s money every week for the rest of my life (the end of which, currently at any rate, “seems a long way off”)
On Monday I went to a Hard Art meeting. It was exhausting. Lots of people said so afterwards, although I always find it exhausting, so I’m not sure what was different from them. I’m pleased to see that lately we’ve adopted more Open Space ways of working (without it being *me* who’s pushed it to the fore). There’s lots more to think about in terms of how we work on stuff together and I’m a bit depressed that I haven’t been able to give that as much attention as I’d like this year, but when I pause and look back, I recognise that we’ve made progress.
I’ve been experimenting with republishing my micro.blog entries in a digest here. If there isn’t a digest that’s because I didn’t write anything. I use micro.blog as the place I write stuff that will end up on BlueSky/Threads/Mastodon. Everything gets cross-posted to those three (plus my old faithful tumblr). I have a script that runs just before midnight and checks the RSS feed for my micro.blog and puts them into a reverse-chronological list with a timestamp that links to the original – as always, it’s a prototype for something else. What I want is a digest of all my microblogging activity – a record of the little conversations I’ve had that day – but those are fragmented across the three platforms and although federation is coming (probably in a slightly sub-optimal way for the two newer ones) it’s still hard to catch it all. It’s also not mission-critical. My main aim at the moment is that it doesn’t piss people off.
I started to feel that thing where the natural world round here is slowing down getting ready to pause and reset, but the human world is speeding up, desperately trying to get stuff done before any sort of pause.
I’m not rushing, but I sent a few emails to tidy things up and clarify when we’re going to do some work and when it can be billed for etc. I’m very grateful not to be having the kind of end of year where it’s unclear just how we’re going to make it through to January. My condolences and solidarity if you are having that kind of end of year – it sucks.
On Wednesday, I remembered that micro.blog will host audio for you, so I made a little podcast about podcasting and cross-posted it here.
I also went to the dentist. She confirmed that I do need another crown to replace the mishmash of fillings on the upper left side, but that it’s not super urgent (but could easily become so if unattended).
My dentist is on the other side of Guildford town centre. I’m glad that I gave myself space to walk into town, but not so glad to find that a suspicious package had closed the train station, so I chose to get a slower but less crowded bus home rather than the faster, crammed one.
We gave in and handed a list of odd jobs to a chap who is much more able to do these things than either of us are. So now we have pictures on the walls; all the downlighters in the kitchen work; we have working lights in both the attic and garage; and best of all, he fixed the handle on the dishwasher so that I don’t have to scrape skin off my fingers trying to open it first thing in the morning.
I’m working on a first product to put out on metalabel. It’s an annotated version of the Tuttle Annual Report that I wrote in 2009. It’s fun to do and to noodle over what all that was about back then. I did get round to creating a Tuttle Club label page and the emptiness of that is motivating me to have something to put up there. I’ll be opening up conversations about collaborative working to share there in the New Year.
I’m aware of my tendency to make up systems to make stuff and then be too exhausted to implement those systems. But I’m doing some of that kind of stuff too – (hopefully with more of the actual making stuff and without the exhaustion).
I liked dopplr – in 2007/08, I mostly liked the idea of dopplr, it let me fantasise that I was able to travel the world, dropping in on friends, while in their town to speak at one of those shiny conferences they had then, being able to help out people in my network wherever I happened to be. By the time I’d actually built my network a bit (only a year later…) and was able to do that kind of thing, the service had been swallowed whole by Nokia, as part of the smartphone wars. It went quiet and died.
I also gradually had less of a desire to show off at big conferences and more of a yen to connect with people directly in smaller groups. My focus went more local and hyperlocal. But since working on Black Elephant, the pendulum has swung back suddenly to give me a global perspective again. It’s not that I’m going to be suddenly hopping on planes and living that fantasy life, but I heard a colleague say the other day that he thought that “being generous in supporting local community can cut you off from how the rest of the world is changing” and that rang true for me. Doing this work is opening me up to people I’ve neglected because they were far away, as well as introducing me to new folk in places I’ve never heard of before.
We’re working on two versions of the Black Elephant product (“parades”) at the moment. You can sign up for a virtual parade that happens on Zoom, but we’re also introducing more in-person events that are a bit longer and over dinner. Obviously those give you more of an opportunity to get to know other participants and they’re the best way to introduce people to the concept, but they’re relatively expensive to organise. Also, diversity can suffer. For all parades, the level of diversity at them is some function of the diversity of the host’s own network, but my gut feel is that it’s still easier to gather a group of widely diverse people online than it is in-person simply because of the logistics of getting people together in meatspace and the bigger pool of folk who are available in a range of timezones, as opposed to who’s in, say, Barcelona right now.
So that’s why I’m thinking about dopplr again. I need a tool to tell me where I know people or rather, who’s currently in a particular place or easy travelling distance – I see Mike Butcher using his FB to ask this sort of question occasionally, but I’d rather have a more geographically-aware network so that if someone’s trying to set up a dinner, I can honestly say “No I don’t know anyone in Tblisi right now” or “Yes, you should speak to my friend X, they know everyone in Bogotá, let me introduce you.
Which raises the other important point – this only works if my friend X in Bogotá is happy to have me share their location. dopplr and foursquare, et al may have let everyone manage their privacy to some extent, but the shortcomings inherent in that privacy model (mainly that it such openness is much much easier for rich white straight dudes than it is for everyone else) meant that most people just couldn’t afford to play.
I don’t want a fully-automated system that only builds the value of my network at the expense of my friends. So for now, it will all have to be “manual” and slow, and rooted in conversation, and talking to people directly, making introductions the way we always have done, even if that doesn’t scale as quickly as we’d like. The model I work with is generally this:
Friend1: “Oh, do you know Friend2? I’d really like to speak with them.”
Me: “Sure, I’ll let them have your details, if that’s OK, and they can decide whether they want to be in touch, let me know how it goes”
Maybe it will always have to be like that, in order to maintain the trust, or maybe, by paying close attention to what we’re doing we might find a way of doing it in partnership and for mutual benefit.
When I got this, 25th October 2010 seemed a very very long time away. It was still a massive novelty to be saying 2000-and-something and being in the noughties, let alone considering the second decade of the 21st Century.
I can’t remember why I renewed it when I did. But I’m guessing that it was something to do with my then impending 10th wedding anniversary (yes folks, in a couple of weeks it’ll be 20 years since I got married!) – I think we went to Paris for the day. I certainly had no idea at that point, what the next 10 years would hold: that I’d no longer be married, that I’d be self-unemployed for the majority of the time, that I’d have lost about 80lbs in weight, I’d have grown a beard and that we’d have a Tory-ish government again by now.
Or that popping over to Paris would have become so ordinary for me. I mean, I’m not over there every weekend, but every time I go, it feels more like a commuter trip than the big expedition it once was.
I’ll be in Paris at the beginning of December again for LeWeb (I’m an official blogger again – proper post about that coming up soon) and although I’m excited about being there, my focus for adventure is on gadding about the UK and then zipping across the USA – kinda beyond the wildest dreams of Lloyd Davis, aged 35, Information Manager for the Best Value Inspection Service at the Audit Commission, married for 10 years, two children, comfy home in Surrey…
Mind you, that Lloyd may have winced at the price of a passport renewal, but he knew where the money was coming from and he knew he’d have it in time for the trip. Excitement and adventure do come at a price 🙂
So here’s my poorly thought-out, unplanned, half-baked, undetailed, but totally awesome idea for the Spring of 2010.
I’ll be attending SXSWi in Austin, Texas again. My panel was not picked, but emotion aside all that means is that I’ll have to pay $blah or so for a ticket. So I’m definitely still going to go – it’s just well, you know, too lovely and awesome not to.
Last year we flew over a few days before and had some holiday time hanging out and getting acclimatimed and then flew back the day after interactive closed.
This time I want to take it a bit more gently. Here are the bare bones of the evil plan, which I’d prefer to do with a gang of tuttle-istas if we can find ways of funding it:
1. Find the shortest flight to North America possible (does that mean least-polluting? I don’t know but that seems like a good aim to bear in mind) and fly at least a week before SXSWi opens ie arrive March 5th at the latest.
2. Devise a series of train journeys from wherever I land, down to Austin, preferably going via New Orleans to visit that good friend of Tuttle, Mr Taylor Davidson and see how his Crescent City adventure is panning out. Yes, you read that right, train journeys. I understand that the US train system is not quite as beautiful or efficient as its European sisters. However, train travel rocks, it just does.
3. At stopping places throughout the journey hold Human-scale Conversation sessions with local people talking about differences between US and British culture – not trying to solve anything particularly, just getting the subject out on the table and seeing what comes of it. There will be heavy-duty social reporting of these conversations. Note that the format has been refined since July with some extra flourishes – this is how I introduced something like it at the Tuttle/Counterpoint event in December.
4. Once in Austin, continue to hold Human-scale Conversation sessions on the same subject and present #kebab-style what we heard, found, learned, saw along the way.
5. Make our way back to the east coast overland again, putting together a documentary film from the footage shot during the first part of the trip, so that we have something ready to show when we get back to London.
Howzat grab ya?
Here’s 8 ways you can help (and I’m sure you’ll come up with more)
1. Tell me how you’d improve on the plans and make them even more exciting.
2. Tell me why this is oh so very wrong-headed, misguided and stupid (I won’t listen very much, but I’d rather ask you for this than you just provide it out of the blue!).
3. Help me work out rough costings for each variation.
4. Provide money (just loads of it, regardless of the costs!)
5. Suggest routes and interesting stopover points, tell me why you think it’s interesting.
6. Volunteer to tag along and tell me how we’d pay for that.
7. Find other supporters with more money than time who’d like to see this happen.
8. Introduce me to sponsors who might provide help in terms of cash, food, shelter, transport as well as social reporting equipment.
UPDATE (18/01/10): The planning for this trip is now going on over here Come see!
I'm the founder of the Tuttle Club and fascinated by organisation. I enjoy making social art and building communities.
Perfect Path 