Being Interesting

I spent a wonderful day yesterday at Interesting 2008, exploring interesting things with interesting people. It wasn't like any conference I've ever been to before: much more informal, more fun, more varied. It made traditional conferences look like what they are: sterile, mannered, orchestrated sales events. Thank God for people who are happy to sit in a big room and talk to each other about things they're passionate about. Why doesn't that happen more often? In some ways this was to conferences what blogs are to mainstream media. It's personal instead of abstracted, defined by the personality of the marvellous Russell Davies and his friends rather than 'brand values', and inviting lasting relationships. Lovely.

A few quick thoughts on why Interesting was so much better than most events (and I'm still trying to work this out so please do add your own thoughts if you want):

1. Short talks about simple things. No essays, no complexity - just 5 or 10 minutes for each speaker to get you interested in their thing.
2. Passion. Everyone was talking about something they loved and did in their spare time, rather than something they were selling. You can pay people to do things, but you can't pay them to be interested in them. And as Russell himself said, in order to be interesting you have to be interested.
3. Nice surprises. No-one knew what each speaker was talking about before they started, so no-one wanted to miss a word.
4. Bring your own. No lunches provided, and though sponsors brought cake and biscuits we came for the content, not the freebies.
5. Singing. And recorders. And electric guitars. And a ukelele. And other things that conferences aren't supposed to have.
6. Jokes. Conferences are so bloody serious - and being serious is not the same as being interesting.

There are more of course, and in some ways it's like a magic trick: I don't want to know how it works, because if there's a repeatable pattern then Glaxo and Nike could do it too. But there's definitely a lot I've learnt about how to run more "interesting" events. Big thanks to the ever-lovely Tessy for giving me her spare tickets, and to Russell for letting School of Everything do Interesting Things in the foyer.

So here's to fewer conferences, more Interesting, and huge respect to this guy, and this guy.

Too much technology, too much innovation

This cracking piece about innovation on BNET got Dugg recently and deserves a share. Whether it's replacing car keys with complex wireless authentication technologies, or grafting endless functionality onto otherwise perfectly usable software - innovation is becoming synonymous with new things you can do, rather than doing what you want more easily. It reminds me of something I used to ask a few years back: how come in science fiction, everything works perfectly? Hover cars don't break down, phasers don't need rebooting, spaceships don't get stuck. Technology is often presented to us as this unstoppable force that will make our lives so much easier. But for every finger-print ID door lock, there is a team of fingerprint ID door lock service engineers; for every automated grocery reordering system, there is a pile of misordered vegetables rotting in the distribution centre; for every matter transporter there will be a matter transportation workers union. The more technology we have, the more humans we need to make it work.

This week I've got Social Innovation Camp, followed by Disruptive Social Innovators, and then an RSA "civic innovation" event, not to mention chats with about a hundred people with "social" and "innovation" in the job/business names. Meanwhile everyone from DIUS to Channel 4 is talking about supporting innovation and the Innovation Nation. We're in danger of overdosing, elevating the new above the useful and throwing away past successes. And more importantly, we risk elevating the technology, the "innovations", above the users themselves.

A line in Clay Shirky's recent Q&A at the RSA comes to mind (slightly paraphrased): "It's not about novelty, but ubiquity. If you are looking for social scale change, it's adoption."

Social progress is often about making more widespread use of what works already, not just putting new things in their place. Car keys work perfectly well, thanks: they're cheap and robust, they never need upgrading, and most importantly, everyone can use them.

So let's focus our energies on making simple, easily-supportable things that everyone can use, and spreading the behaviours and technologies that already work. And fewer hoverboots please. (Although having said that, this is waaaaay cool...)

Freeschool Tools

I've been rambling on about Freeschools again. Here's me yesterday explaining how to turn any community into a school by the simple application of a few post-its and a bit of enthusiasm...

Thanks to the ever-sociable David Wilcox for the video, and for his excellent accompanying blog post. And why not join the Sociability Freeschool on our new experimental freeschools site? Let me know what you think of it, and what you could teach me.

Living from day to day

Very busy at the moment (plus ca change) but lots of interesting things in the pipeline.  Interesting Drupal developments afoot, of which more later, and School of Everything is speeding up like a herd of very purposeful buffalo. But most of my headspace this week has been taken up with this week's idea for Social Innovation Camp. Our daily habits are such a crucial part of who we are and how we relate to the world, so isn't it about time we started thinking about how they affect our minds? And can sharing and discussing our habits online make us more conscious of them, and help us be healthier and happier?

I'm hoping SI Camp can provide the springboard to launch this as a proper campaign, and potentially Sociability's first straight "social" project. So if you've got any comments, want to help, or wouldn't mind sharing your own five-a-day, let me know.

Friday cartoon

I've always been a fan of visual ways to explain complex things, so I'm very happy that the School of Everything now has it's own comic strip to explain what we do. Happy Friday!

Reinventing membership

I've just been invited to become a fellow of the RSA, and the work I've been doing with them on reinventing their fellowship networks, combined with some very stimulating ideas from David Wilcox, has got me thinking again about the concept of membership. David's point is an important one: in an increasingly networked and interconnected society, membership organisations must transform themselves if they are to continue to add value to their members. The big question now is how will they need to change? When it is increasingly simple (and usually free) to join new communities and connect with like-minded people, which aspects of existing membership offerings will remain valuable, and which are becoming rapidly out of date?

Clearly the thing which has lost much of its value is access to people. Once upon a time you might pay for membership of a club to meet the people therein. Now, you meet the people first, and then consider joining. In the case of the RSA, I know many of the fellowship already, and I'm active in many of the networks discussions, so the incentive for joining seems somewhat muted. The current question that's vexing us about the RSA Networks platform is how open it should be to non-fellows: if non-fellows can join in, then how are we adding value to fellowship? But if only fellows can join the discussions, can innovation thrive in a closed network?

I like lists, so I thought I would propose the following reasons for joining a (paid-for) membership organisation:

1. Access to resources: although information is infinitely replicable, access to physical resources is just as restricted as ever. Organisations offering access to physical space, or to events and services offered within physical space, this scarcity of availability can justify the membership fee. In other words, if only a few can get in, it's often worth paying to be one of the few.
2. Personal prestige: if membership is awarded on some basis of exclusivity or personal merit, then becoming a member can act like a personal brand, a short-hand way of evidencing your quality. Rather like a qualification, but without all the hard work. As it becomes easier to meet new people, discriminating between them becomes more important - so this sort of membership may be a growth area in the future.
3. Formalising the relationships: you get what you pay for, they say, and so if you really need certain levels of interaction with people in your networks, sometimes it's worth paying for someone to organise them. Organisations that can provide a solid programme of activities, opportunities, ideas and connections can charge for the work they do, and in many cases this can provide excellent value for money.
4. Pledge support for a cause: this for me is the most interesting one. As my friend Paul Youlten says of social networks, "what's in it for me, and what of me is in it?" Increasingly we seem to be paying money to support the organisations which we've already joined. "Members" and "supporters", at least for charitable societies like the RSA, are becoming more and more blurred. So perhaps membership organisations can increase their value by becoming more open?

There are the beginnings of a very interesting debate here. David has a compementary list on his blog, and check out the comments for follow-up posts and discussions too, as well as in the RSA fellowship networks too. I hope all these locations will provide a useful space for working out some of this stuff.

In the meantime, I shall of course also be considering the RSA's very kind invitation. But as I consider "what's in it for me" in joining the RSA, I'm also noticing how much of me is already "in it". I know many of the fellows, I attend their events, I know many of the staff - and that sense of openness makes me feel much more like joining than if the doors were closed to me. Perhaps this could be an interesting social experiment - I'll let you know how I get on.

Freeschools

Here's a video of a talk I did for my friend and Sociability Associate Saul Albert back in October, explaining my Freeschools project. It's a bit long and more than a little rambling, but some of you might find it interesting, if only for the fluffiness of my hair.

[googlevideo=http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-581629410176628745&q=%22Peer+Education+briefing%22&pr=goog-sl]

It picks up from about 7 minutes in. (There's also a transcript and some interesting marginal discussions on our Freeschool Commentpress site.)

The Freeschools concept is my favourite "social technology" project right now because it's so simple. Through the simple application of two colours of post-it notes and some simple "social software", it is possible to turn any group of people into a learning network. We're starting to spread this concept via the School of Everything now, and already people are beginning to run these evenings all around the country. If you'd like to have a go at starting your own freeschool, the instructions are here.

The Freeschool concept is based on the experiments of the Palo Alto Free U, on which the School of Everything is based and which I explain a little in the talk. You can see a Freeschool experiment in action in the second half of the video. I think as a social research project, it demonstrates two very important things: firstly, all people need to begin sharing their skills is a clear process for sharing what they know, and what they need; and secondly, you never know what people know.

Freeschools are more than just experiments for me though, they are a good example of an emerging methodology for designing social interactions, once called "social engineering" but which might now be termed social design. In modelling processes for constructing interactive software applications, we are discovering new ways to model all the other interactions in our lives too.

In each strand of my work at the moment, my underlying purpose seems to be to reduce what we're doing to the simplest format possible. For the RSA Networks we reduced the process of incubating projects to "propose -> discuss -> support". For Croydon Council last week I was modelling citizen-led campaigning as "Be heard. Get involved. Make change." My colleague Mary recently reduced the process of a peer-to-peer project support group to "what are you doing, and what do you need help with?"

It may feel like oversimplification, human interactions are surely too rich to really be defined in such crude terms. But that's the joy of complex systems: a few simple rules can have huge and unpredictable consequences. After all, Go is a very simple game. So is football for that matter. Freeschools are a very simple idea, but their potential for impact is complex and far-reaching. And most importantly, they demonstrate that you don't need the internet to have social technology.

Getting real

Sociability Associate and The People Speak co-founder Saul Albert recently pointed me in the direction of this post by Dan McQuillan about the relationship between social networks and social action. Saul and I are currently developing the second phase of the RSA's new networks platform to help their fellowship collaborate on action-based social and civic innovation projects. It's a fascinating project and I'd agree with Dan that this kind of system seems like the next step for social networking. Someone from Yahoo asked me earlier in the year what exactly I do with LinkedIn. Once you've collected all your contacts together, met a few extra people and got to 100% in the "profile complete" stakes, well... it all just sits there, doesn't it? I'm more connected than I've ever been, but so what?

Of course, online knowledge-sharing and relationship building is important for all kinds of activities; the point is, at some point it needs to leave the virtual world and "get real". There are good examples of social technology being harnessed to stimulate action, such as My Society's nifty (and Facebook-enabled) application, Pledgebank, but aside from a few notable exceptions the majority of online tools for social enterprise currently seem to fall into two main camps: raising awareness by joining "campaigns" or supporting "causes"; and donating money so that other people can make things happen with it. Of course, this fits with the two main uses of the internet since day one: exchanging information and exchanging money. But with so many new collaboration tools emerging, how can the internet be harnessed to actually get things done?

One excellent example of networks being harnessed for collaborative action is open source software. A distributed group of people get together using online tools to collaborate in the creation of something tangible the benefits of which are then shared openly with the community. It works, it's more powerful than anything commercial business can come up with, and surely provides some useful models for the third sector. The other, of course, are the activist networks, distributing responsibility for action among a community and sharing information about what's planned and what's happening. The latter are the most interesting to me, because they move between online and offline - between the virtual and "real" worlds.

So what lessons can we learn from these about how social networks can be used to stimulate action? The RSA has built up a big head of steam around a huge range of projects, and the next step is to turn some of them "real". If we can crack this one, we'll really be going places.

Controlling the conversations

I was revisiting some of Seth Godin's work today, and one phrase in particular got me thinking. When discussing Hallmark's e-cards website, he observed of the customers: "many of them aren't looking for Hallmark to have a voice in the conversation, so they're not listening to any news Hallmark might want to share." If the internet gives you the opportunity to have global, distributed conversations with friends, customers and strangers, then if you want to create a platform for this to happen, working out your role in those conversations strikes me as essential. So off the top of my head, here are four roles you can play as the host of online conversations:-

1. Get out of the way: how often have you heard from the creators of Facebook? If you are providing a utility to allow other people to talk to one another, then they really don't want to be bothered by you. It's like your local pub landlord constantly butting into your conversation with an old friend to tell you about the pub quiz next week, or the special offers for Christmas parties. If people are coming to your website to talk to one another, don't get confused and think they're there to talk to you. Just concentrate on clearing the glasses and responding quickly and unobstrusively when they ask for more nibbles.
2. Chair the meetings: sometimes, strangers and business associates need structures to support their conversations and make them more constructive. In these situations, your role as host is to provide facilitation, moderation and definition to each conversation, by setting the agendas clearly and providing tools to help people focus, interact and reach decisions. Digg, for example, limits the conversation topic to "news", and then to particular subject threads, and also provides users with systems to decide which stories are most important, and to moderate disagreements to keep things constructive. Sometimes, as on discussion forums, this is about direct interventions in the conversations; but often it's just about framing the meeting right and giving people enough post-its.
3. Join in: in some cases, particularly in private communities like local societies or the fellowship network Sociability are developing for the RSA, the people running the platform actually have a great deal to contribute to the conversation themselves. Charities and membership organisations in particular usually have paid officials who lead the organisation's activity in a particular area, who carry authority in any conversation with members and volunteers because of their expertise and their access to organisational resources. But is this the same as the users wanting to hear from the organisation? Of course not. It's not about the organisation at all, it's about the people in it. The best way for an organisation to join in conversations is for each staffmember to participate as an individual, just like everybody else. Drop the corporate front and gain the ability to condition the space through your own actions and add value to the community, and your organisation. Stop treating your staff as separate from your online community, and set them free to join in and meet their customers.
4. Deus ex machina: at the end of many badly-constructed plays, movies and novels, the deficiencies of the plot are resolved by the sudden introduction of an improbable new element, the Deus ex machina who descends from above, halting the action and setting things right. Of course there are times when you need to talk to everyone who uses your website, the "time Gentlemen please" of your distributed local pub. But just remember that, when you do, all the other conversations will stop as your booming voice echoes across the stage. And when you do that, you better be saying something worth hearing.

The challenge, of course, is how do you tell (and sell) things to the community if you can't broadcast corporate messages to them. That's the challenge of course, and not a straightforward one. But if you can build a community of people around particular topics, a shared vision or a pleasant social environment, then you are closer to your customers than ever before. So, perhaps the next step after that is to ask them what they need?

The Future 500

I'm in the Observer today, as one of the Future 500 "rising stars" to watch for the future. Well, strictly speaking I'm in the "next 400" (under Science and Innovation) for those who didn't get a full biog in the main supplement, but it's still very flattering to be part of a list that includes such impressive names as Geoff Mulgan, Joanna Shields, Richard Reed and Seedcamp's own Ryan Notz. My mum is very proud of me, and I'd like to thank the Academy etc. etc.

Interestingly, inclusion in the Future 500 comes with access to a network website where I can interact with other "ones to watch" online, meet, swap ideas and plot world domination together. The "exclusive network" is an increasingly prevalent phenomenon these days, and something which I'm increasingly being asked about as a consultant. Harnessing the power of a community to take action and solve problems is becoming a key theme in my work. But it also prompts me to ask: in an age of endless networking and connectivity, are these "gated communities" now more valuable than the open networks?

The work I've been doing for the RSA also raised this issue of "openness", which is a particularly thorny issue for a members club intent on fostering innovation. My natural inclination is towards being open and collaborative because I believe that is where new ideas are born, so is joining a members' club a betrayal of those principles? And how does money fit into all this?

There is undeniable value in being part of something that is only for a privileged few. In an age where much information is freely available, people invest huge amounts of time and money on getting the latest, up-to-the-minute, exclusive information on everything from new music to financial news. In fact, being the first person to circulate something new has become so integral to our social self-expression that marketeers are tapping into it to sell chocolate. But in the midst of all these overlapping networks and communities, are new forms of social exclusion being created?

So, how can the internet retain the open, collaborative spirit which made it great, whilst still tapping into the power and possibilities of the esoteric web? And is who you know, and what they can tell you (before it hits the mainstream), actually the new social currency? Are we all cultural insider traders now?

I'll ask the Future 500. And then, if you're good, I might tell you...

More of everything

Fiendishly busy at the moment, particularly doing some very interesting work for the RSA on their "networks" project to harness the power of their fellowship to achieve civic and social innovations. It's particularly nice to be working with Saul Albert of The People Speak again so soon after our recent talk on peer education. Thanks also to David Wilcox for helping me make sense of the back story - and for the fine apple danish too. Saul and I are experimenting with some new ways of collecting user feedback, and working with Pete Brownell and Liz Turner on a Drupal-based prototype to model the generation of project ideas organically within a community (think Innovation Exchange with teeth). Saul's blogging the development process at openrsa.blogspot.com if you're curious. There may be mileage in this one.

Meanwhile, the School of Everything just hit the big-time, blog-wise. Cracking summary of the concept by Sean Flannagan of Deeplinking - and a very unexpected but welcome endorsement from web legend Esther Dyson. (Nice photo of my colleague Paul too - very smart jeans there Paul.)

Blimey. More soon.

If:blog

Last week I gave a talk on peer learning with Ben Vershbow of NY think-tank if:book. He's been doing some fabulous things in collaborative reading, which I think could have big implications for the way blogs and discussion forums interact. If:book have developed a hack for the Wordpress platform which places comments to the right of each paragraph of a blog post. It's based on marginalia in old-fashioned academic texts and is intended to allow collaborative annotation of academic texts - but it's such a simple tool that I think it's got much wider implications.

We've been playing with an installation of the system based on the talk we gave at www.futureofthebook.org/freeschool, with some success.

The software itself is available for free at www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress. I strongly urge you to check it out and put it to good use!

Everything, Now!

The School of Everything is now open to the public. We officially opened our doors at Minibar last night, and although it's still early days there's lots in there to help people advertise classes and find teachers near them. It's a community site so please do sign up and join us, even if you don't want to teach yourself. At the very least you should meet some interesting people.

Take a look now at www.schoolofeverything.com, or say hello to us at hello[at]schoolofeverything.com.

Open Learning, Open Technology

I had a fantastic meeting this week at the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, who were generous enough to show me some of the incredible software they've been developing. I think the standout product was the fantastic Compendium, a software tool for mapping and analysing arguments. It's free to download and I can already see incredible applications for it in user experience modelling, process analysis and team collaboration. I'm really looking forward to trying it out in some real-life situations.

They also had some brilliant remote-working tools, including FlashMeeting - probably the simplest and most effective video-conferencing tool I've seen - plus a couple of other tools for making people in remote locations feel part of a collaborative community. Great stuff.

The OU are also leading the way in open-sourcing their learning curriculum with the OpenLearn project. If you haven't seen it already, please do take a look: as usual, it's amazing what you can get for free these days. We're looking into how we can promote their content via School of Everything now.