I’m constantly amazed at how creative people can be in a small group given a clear task, a framework and a few props. Today I went along to the conference of the Institute of Fundraising Technology Group to run a session on social media. The organisers were happy when I proposed a game session - and it went really well.
Within 40 minutes two groups were able invent a couple of very different scenarios (brand repositioning and a flood disaster), then come up with a simple social media strategy by choosing from a set of cards, and inventing some ideas of their own. People didn’t know each other - but were able rapidly to draw on their different areas of expertise to come up with some inventive solutions.
I started off with a brief presentation - but yet again it as the wisdom of the participants that was more compelling. I’ve put a brief report and all the material on the social media wiki here, so you can try it for yourself. Thanks to online fundraising guru Steve Bridger for suggestions on additional cards.
This weekend I’m at the Shine Unconference in London - blogging, shooting some video, and generally having a great time in conversation with social entrepreneurs and every type of innovator you might hope to meet. The photo show Alberto Nardelli explaining the UnltdWorld social network, and you can see it is a wonderfully informal environment at The Bargehouse on the South Bank.
We have an unconference blog, and we are streaming video to a qik event site here: click through the tabs at the top for the days. I’m really grateful to Mireia Fontbernat and the team at qik for guidance and support in setting up the site. It means that anyone who has signed up (free) with qik can use a Nokia S60 series phone to shoot video and have it up on the web within seconds, using either a 3g or wifi connection. If you can’t connect at the time, your phone will save the video and upload later. No editing and compression - it’s just there.
One of the most interesting conversations I had was with unconference organiser Jess Tyrrell and Tom Alcott, from the Social Network Company. They are experimenting at Shine with social network mapping, and we talked about how it could be applied more generally at events to help people make the connection they really want. Video here.
At Shine Steve Moore offered more details of the London digital festival planned for July 2 and 3. It was to be called 4Good, but will now be 2gether. I’ll be working on communications for the event, and hope we can introduce some of the social networking ideas that we discussed. I hope we’ll have a 2gether site up next week.
A new set of awards to promote the use of the social web to meet social needs was launched this evening in London with the backing of the Prime Minister … and I think they could help make a real difference to the way new technology is used for good.
Award schemes can too often be much hype and hoorahs up to the launch, then little action afterwards. Winners find the money doesn’t go far, and the contacts made don’t turn out to be that useful after all. The UKCatalyst Awards have been designed as a two-stage process in which projects first compete, and are then given support.
The Minister for the Third Sector, Phil Hope, was at NESTA to give the awards a formal send off, and was full of enthusiasm for the potential. Dan McQuillan of Make Your Mark, who are organising the awards, explained how they will work.
As you can see here, the award categories are more interesting than usual too, including the Shock for Good Award, Chalk and Cheese, and David and Goliath.
What was just as interesting as the awards was the cluster of people involved in the “web for good” field. As I wrote recently, there’s a lot happening in London at present, and a real sense of joining up and thinking through how to ensure ideas and projects are supported.
Phil Hope emphasised the aim of the awards is to bring to the fore good projects, and make connections. Dan McQuillan is one of the team who ran Social Innovation Camp, all now thinking how best to support not just the winners, but the other projects developed there. They and other have been talking to NESTA about how to draw on their wider experience of innovation processes to achieve this.
Despite keeping to the fruit juice I’m feeling a bit too weary at present to draw out all the strands I picked up tonight, but will be able to do more in working with Steve Moore and others on a digital festival planned in London on July 2 and 3, supported by Channel4. We aim to make development of the Festival another way to do some joining up. More soon when we get the web site up.
I think the Catalyst awards are important because they are just that - ways of bringing together good ideas, good people, innovative technologies. It all felt good - which is a great start towards doing good. How cheering to be among optimistic people in difficult times.
More video, shot on phone, here, here and here. Still haven’t figured a way to get better sound …hope you get the flavour anyway.
I’m delighted that my friend Simon Berry will be advising Government over the next few months on how to use new technologies and online tools for community empowerment.
Simon will be seconded to the Department of Community and Local Government, that is producing a community empowerment White Paper in the summer. As you can see here from Simon’s blog the job will involve:
working with policy colleagues to develop specific policy options that use new technologies and online tools to support communities in shaping their local place and services. This will include undertaking cost/benefit assessments for specific policy options
developing CLG’s role in using new technologies to promote community empowerment and building alliances across government with Ministry of Justice, DCMS, the Cabinet Office & other relevant government departments
using new technologies as part of the policy development process
advising on delivery models for the new technologies policies and identifying in particular how new policies would work with technologies and approaches already being tried
I can’t think of anyone better for the job, since Simon has a strong background in community development, uses social media personally with panache, and is chief exec of Ruralnet|UK that has just developed a great set of empowering online tools through an open innovation process.
True to form Simon has announced the appointment using Twitter and said he was open to ideas.
My first suggestion was to do some mapping of the landscape - who is who in the field in and out of government. Even better, get together a bunch of well-networked people together for a few hours and have them draw the maps. Then work out a process by which you help them all connect up, and do the advisory job for you.
My other suggestion would be to help the civil servants involved get some experience of what new technologies and online tools can actually do. The problem in my experience is that they have limited access at work to social media, and also limited time to experiment. That puts them at a big disadvantage in responding to ideas. No good talking about blogs and video if they aren’t allowed on the desktop.
Fortunately Jeremy Gould at Ministry of Justice is developing a strong Whitehall webby network following on from the UKGovwebBarcamp and was one of the first to offer Simon some connections. I suspect the challenge will lie in bridging the gap between the increasingly-sophisticated social media types in Government, and the policy people.
On that front, I think the potential trap lies in ended up as an increasingly frantic messenger trying to carry recommendations from one group to the other. The real break-through will come if Simon can convince his new colleagues of the virtues of open innovation by which people learn from each other. I think there is a lot of goodwill among the social media and other tech communities, and lots going on including the 4Good Festival on July 2-3 as I mentioned the other day. I should know more about that by the end of the week.
One of my ideas for social reporting is to add some buzz to events by videoblogging and other ways of amplifying conversations - so it was great to get a job from the organiser of the National Digital Inclusion Conference to do just that. I was terrifically grateful that Dave Briggs could join me, because it turned out to be quite challenging on several fronts. You can read Dave’s report here, and some comments on our efforts from Shane McCracken here. Dave and I recorded our own summing up on the day.
Our brief (we were being paid) was pretty open: capture some informal video to complement the webcasts of presentations that public-i were doing.
The main challenge was that it was a conventional event format: presentations, coffee breaks and break-out sessions, attended mainly by public sector staff who did not expect to have video cameras thrust into their face. I thought that people were pretty responsive in the circumstances … but it is difficult to get good audio in a noisy room, and you lose the moment if you take off into corridors.
This means there’s a great temptation to record interview with exhibitors when everyone else is off being Powerpointed. Dave livened that up by recording me trying some disabling gloves at one of the most interesting stands that simulated various forms of disability.
Maybe we could have produced more interesting content if we had aimed to create some narrative from the conference … but it is difficult to do that at the same time as editing video and trying to line up the next opportunity. To do full coverage it really needs a team of three: one writer, one video blogger, and one person editing and uploading. Next week we’ll have content from public-i, and at that stage it may be worth taking more quotes from the video and weaving in into other content, including presentations and webcasts. Some people are having trouble with the videos, and I think I need to embed a different Flash player.
The main lesson for me is that good socialreporting at events needs to be designed in to the format: clear ideas of what you are trying to achieve, for whom, with logistics to match. It doesn’t work too well as an add-on. But then, you can’t design it in until you have a few examples to show organisers … so thanks again to Stephen Hilton for lining up the opportunity, and the rest of the DC10plus organisers for taking a chance.
The following day I was socialreporting at a Festival of Ideas for the Innovation Exchange, which was a less formal occasion. More on that later.
The buzz should heighten on July 2-3 at a major 4Good event sponsored by Channel4 and others. More details promised soon. There’s also new set of UK Catalyst Awards backed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown:
We’re looking for inspiring stories of people who help their community by using social technology in new and exciting ways. Can you or someone you know show how technology is already enabling people around them to connect with each other in new ways and do good things?
We’re especially interested in ideas that other people or groups might be able to use for themselves. With the right support, could your idea be reused throughout the country – or even the world?
The community you help might be people in your area, or people you know through your hobby, interest, work or any other connection. It might even be people you didn’t even know before you started!
You might have used an existing social technology or product in a new way, or you might have created a new one from scratch.
What excites me about the current round of developments is that they are not stuck in any one sector … people are coming together from Government, business, social enterprise and nonprofits. However, that means they don’t have a home. There is no one blog or web site … they are distributed (like so much of the Net these days).
In some ways I see a division between the new wave of tech-enabled social innovation and the traditional nonprofit tech crowd. There are quite a few personal connections - not least these days through Twitter - but not a lot of linking up with groups like Circuit Riders, as I found at their conference.
There was an attempt last year at the Newman Arms to set up a group loosely based on the US Netsquared community and conference, but that hasn’t moved forward as far as I know. I think it is partly because many of the social innovators are doubtful whether traditional charities are really up for it, or even broken as Dan McQuillan puts it.
Loose networking, and trying to organise without organisations as Clay Shirky has promoted, is all very well until you have to develop a business model, find backers, decide legal structures, agree leadership and so. You need at least some Organisation Lite at the project level … some way, as Dan says, of getting structure without losing passion.
That question is now emerging more strongly at the networking level: how to join up the various events, awards, projects without replicating the sort of civil society institutions that many social innovators are trying to escape.
As I researched (in a haphazard sort of way) the ins and outs of videoblogging I came across Rupert Howe at twittervlog, admired his use of a mobile phone, and noted with some anxiety that he was soon to move from London to Vancouver. Could we fit in a brain-picking meeting?
Fortunately Rupert turned up at the Tuttle Club yesterday, so I was able to chat about his experiences with video, and capture a bit. My son Dan is currently figuring out how to sync my N82 with an eeepc running Ubuntu (just to keep up with the geeks), so I used my Sanyo Xacti. Still need to figure out the best external mic to improve the audio … but then, that’s more kit to carry.
As Rupert said, the delight of using a mobile phone is that it is like having a movie studio in your pocket. You can capture the moment. When not streaming live with something like Qik, Rupert recommended editing shots on the phone and then emailing up to blip.tv. He also suggested using WordPress themes from showinabox.tv. Thanks, Rupert, see you on Twitter.
Dan McQuillan, who was also at the Tuttle Breakfast yesterday, has now blogged his perspective on the need for lightweight, dynamic and flexible structures to take forward the sort of projects merging from Social Innovation Camp and ensure their sustainability.
Our criteria for the camp selected for ideas that could be carried forward after the weekend. The winning projects have certainly showed dynamism and commitment; but how can they organize to get things done when it’s not (yet) anyone’s day job? How can they get structure without losing the passion?
Synchronously, similar questions & suggestions have cropped up in other discussions. In the Gaming for Good roundtable folk wondered how to apply the voluntary association & dynamic purpose of the World of Warcraft raiding party to the real world. At the Tuttle Club Breakfast, freelancers were feeling their way to structures that sounded to me most like medieval Guilds (an idea that Open Business has already written about) . And in an ippr briefing, the MP Tom Watson invoked the cooperatives of the nineteenth century as a good fit for organisations making a social use of the web.
Seems there’s a sea-change coming as organisational models are mutated by the web. With the emphasis on lightweight, dynamic & flexible structures, it seems to echo the radical architecture of Archigram back in the 1960s.
Whatever model we raid, from real or imagined history, there’s still the practical question of who pays the bills. Sustainability is the plan for all Social Innovation Camp projects, whether from a commercial business model, grant funding or a mix of the two. Can we also learn from open source, where companies pay staff to work on open source projects for part of their time because there’s a wider value to the employer? Social Innovation Camp had the backing of a sizeable posse from Headshift (thanks guys) - perhaps signposting a wider possible solution where commercial companies support social ventures with geek-time? As my colleague Peter Grigg has pointed out, companies need to go beyond CSR and get real about supporting pro-social activity; and what better way than to back projects like these ?
Picking up on historical allusions, this also reminds me of 1980s when I and many others looked around for legal and financial models that would enable community-based regeneration projects to package together funding, volunteering and revenue streams. We ended up with development trusts and similar bodies that were companies limited by guarantee with charitable status, sometimes with associated trading companies.
Those structures have worked well - and are now very widespread in the Third Sector. However, they do carry a substantial management and governance overhead. One additional option now available is the Community Interest Company.
It isn’t just about structure, though. One main things I learned in grappling with development trusts was that legal format was not the first thing to look at. You needed to be clear about purpose, activities, business model, people involved and lots more. There’s no off-the-shelf solution, even in the more virtual world. Archigram was fun - but how much was built?
The Tuttle Club gathered again yesterday in the rather smart OneAlfredPlace, and a group of us considered the realities of organising without (much) organisation.
Tuttle organiser Lloyd Davis and and club member Steve Moore had prevailed on Rob Shreeve, who runs OneAlfredPlace, to turn over one of their splendid gathering spaces to social media types for coffee, croissants and creativity. Rob is seeking members, and after a look around yesterday I’m really tempted.
We did the usual networking, with more space than Friday at the the Coach and Horses, then moved to some mini-open space: pitch an issue or idea and see who gathers around. As Lloyd reports there was a good spread:
Building a list of interesting folk to talk to BERR (Jane O’Loughlin)
Combining relentless creativity with social media (Steve Lawson)
Turning your passion into something that makes money (Pippa Crawford & Dan McQuillan)
Finding new clients online (Rebecca Caroe)
Business podcasting (Mike O’Hara)
Organisation Lite (David Wilcox & Jemima Gibbons)
In the organisation lite group we talked around a number of issue, ranging from Clay Shirky’s work on organising without organisations using social media, through to the practicalities of Lloyd’s vision for a permanent place for the Tuttle Club that combines workspace, learning opportunities and sociability. Here’s what I added as a comment to Lloyd’s post:
On the one hand we were taking inspiration from the open source movement which has evolved ways of organising without heavy-weight structures … on the other hand recognising that when it comes to taking leases, employing people and so on, the State places on us various responsibilities and regulations that can’t easily be avoided.
In both cases you need leadership, and varying degrees of trust and collaboration. If structure and regulation is lite, trust and collaborative commitment is doubly important.
I thought that Anecdote recently provided us with a useful framework in their white paper on teams, communities and networks - blogged here at the Membership Project where we are discussing these issues.
The key question for me, is how to make practical progress on this through our voluntary contribution to Tuttle evolution. I think it might be done by blending what someone called primary and secondary purpose and and interest. That is, we’ll do something for Tuttle and the cafe if it also has some spin offs for our businesses, networks, organisations.
How about a workshop where we play through the Tuttle development scenario - taking on property, recruiting members, setting up a company (or something) - in a way that provides useful insights for other organisational development. See if we can interest a social media lawyer and some other professionals interested in connecting with us. It would be another step in prototyping.
Organisation, lite or otherwise, comes after considering context, purpose, stakeholders, and a host of other factors. I think the best way to deal with the complexity is to get some experienced people into the same room and play it through. As well as prototyping organisation we could be fulfilling the learning aims of Tuttle too.
The valuable primary and secondary purpose idea came from Adriana Lukas, and I’m hoping to continue the conversation with her, Jemima Gibbons and others at the regular Tuttle meeting at the Coach and Horses. If you want to come, just sign up on the wiki. The only uncertainty is whether there’s a sponsor this week for the coffee and croissants … otherwise good fun, excellent conversation and new friends guaranteed.
My creative friends over at Delib have launched a tool to track online conversation, and used it to give us insights into the buzz around Boris, Ken and others in London Mayoral election. You can read the analysis behind the diagram here - Boris is getting talked about a lot, but there’s general discontent among voters.
Brand Republic provides more background on the tool and its uses:
The technology behind the Opinion Tracker uses spider programs similar to the robots and crawlers used by popular search engines to scan the web for specific clusters of keywords on blogs and other areas where internet users interact.
The data collected by the spiders is aggregated, and then sampled and processed by a team of analysts at Delib, to provide end analysis and metrics.
The metrics collated by Opinion Tracker are organised into different categories, including “buzz”, the level of noise created by internet users; “mood”, where public sentiment lies; and “what’s hot”, a summary of the main topics inciting chat among internet users.
“Live conversations” provides examples of what users are saying online.
Chris Quigley, managing partner at Delib, said “With the increased usage of social media by the general public, its now possible to find out what people are saying and thinking without running a straight opinion poll or focus group.
“Using a service like Opinion Tracker can help organisations keep an eye on what’s being said about them across the social internet and the levels of buzz they’re generating.”
Other research firms provide online tracking, but I think we can rely on Delib to make it fun too. They specialise in online engagement and e-democracy, with a mix of serious forums and games, as you’ll see here. I thought of letting them know about this post, but I expect they pick it up anyway …
