Steal This Idea, Part 1: Partner Up

Social Innovation Camp unfortunately haven't selected Partner Up as one of their final proposals, so it's time to take this forward by another route. Thanks to John Craig, PRADSA, School for Social Entrepreneurs, David Wilcox and others for all your positive comments and offers of support. There's definitely some momentum to this one and it would be a shame to lose it. The trouble is, I really don't have time to lead the project myself, just to provide ideas, positive energy and design direction. So the next question is, who's interested in taking the project forward? UnLtd World, the Office of the Third Sector, the Charity Commission, Companies House, Innovation Exchange - please step forward. There are hundreds of charities, social enterprises, public bodies and commercial companies who need ways of working together, and maybe we can help them.

So please, steal this idea! Drop me a line at andy[at]sociability.org.uk if you're interested in "partnering up", or leave a comment here.

Simple simple simple

I love this...

stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/03/05/simplicity

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.

School of Everywhere

The School of Everything went international yesterday. We launched in New York at the NY Tech Meetup, which is terribly glamorous of course, but the exciting bit for me was the process back at Everything HQ of getting our new international locations system working. We've implemented the open gazetteer source Geonames as our locations database, so rather than using the very UK-specific "postcode" lookup we're now handling everything based on names of localities. You enter your location, such as "Clapham" or "Felixstowe", we look it up in Geonames and assign you a location on the map. If Geonames picks the wrong Clapham, we've added a neat disambiguation tool so you can choose which Clapham is right for you.

The data is easy to change in the Geonames database (via their site), which means if your location isn't listed currently, you can add it. We're hoping that over time we can encourage lots of web projects to standardise on Geonames, so that in time we can refine it to be a really comprehensive, open geolocations system for everyone to share.

Take a look at www.schoolofeverything.com now, create a teacher profile, have a play with it and let me know what you think. And if you've got friends around the world who have something to teach, tell them about us!

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.

Social Innovation Camp

My friends Paul Miller and Anna Maybank are hard at work at the desks next to me developing Social Innovation Camp. The idea is to bring hackers and social innovators together to use "web 2.0 tools" to solve social problems. I've just submitted my first idea - Partner Up: prosocial networking for organisations. Any comments welcome, and please do submit a few ideas of your own and make my co-workers happy. I'm going to put a few more into the mix over the next few weeks. It's shaping up to be a rather nice event.

Tools I Wish Existed, Part 1: Placebook

I've been playing with Platial this week to see if it can give me the functionality I've been wanting for the past year, for geographic bookmarking. I've been playing around with this concept of "Placebook" for some months now, which would be a Facebook app to allow me to bookmark places I want to remember (via my mobile), tag them with metadata like "quiet drink" and "business meeting", share them with only my Facebook friends (or keep them entirely private), and recall them on my mobile when I'm wandering around trying to remember "where that great little bar was that thingy took me to that time when we had the fish. You know?" I'm very happy to say that Platial looks pretty neat and doesn't get bogged down in shackling my places to "official information" such as Google local or UGC venue data - which means I can actually call things "My house" and "The tree where I had my first kiss" and so on. Great news for all you psychogeographers (or "neogeographers") out there. It's also a good interface and seems sufficiently playful, despite some slight clunkiness with the categories and geo-location stuff. (I haven't yet checked what they're using for location data, but I'm really hoping it's the lovely Geonames.)

The bad news though is that, like all these sites, they insist on sharing. I've been saying for a while now that there are some commodities that don't follow the usual rules of the social web, specifically all those which are limited in quantity, such as physical space, or trendspotting. I've been rather ponderously calling this the esoteric web, which simply means any information which needs to be kept secret from the many and shared amongst the few. Put simply, if you tell everyone about your favourite restaurant, the next week you can't get a table. And I definitely don't want to tell everyone else where I live, or where I had my first kiss. Social sites like Trusted Places tend to be full of places we like, but rarely places we love.

So please, dear Platial, here's what I want for Christmas:

• let me add private bookmarks that only I, or selected loved ones, can see the places that are important to me;
• plug yourselves into the Facebook/Open Social thang so I can use my existing networks to control my sharing, rather than creating yet more blasted online "buddies"; and
• give me a nice neat mobile app so I can bookmark places on the move, and find them again quickly when I'm lost in Soho again and my date is shouting at me.

Come on, you know it makes sense. Please don't make me have to build it myself, I've got too much to do already.

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.

Growing up in public

So, 2008 is upon us and we're all a year older and a little wiser. As things start to wind up again (slowly) after the Christmas and New Year break, one thing has struck me: it's nice to be back in these conversations again. In 2008 I intend to have more interesting conversations, online and offline. I hope you'll all join me. I'm particularly happy to be spending more time this year on School of Everything, which has really kicked up a gear since Christmas. We've just launched a new, tidier version of our alpha site, so all feedback very welcome. It's not the finished article yet though - far from it - and this has left me pondering the implications of releasing our early versions into the public eye in such a bold way.

The "release early, release often" motto is a good one, and I'm discovering something important at the moment: it's okay not to get things right first time. The work we've been doing with the RSA recently is a great example of that: we produced a prototype which does one thing well, and from that we've grown a community and justified spending more time refining it and adding requested features. It's a very healthy way to grow a system: grow the technology alongside the community, and it certainly brings down those pesky barriers between community facilitators and the members themselves.

But openness comes at a price. By showing our users something which isn't finished, we risk leaving them frustrated, possibly so much so that they never coming back, or bad-mouth us to their friends. We're not exactly following the standard cautious processes for online brand-building (closed alpha, restricted beta, invitation only etc.). But if we don't trust our users, how can they trust us? And surely if we trust them, they'll see what we're aiming at and help us get there with them. Sometimes it takes that naked honesty to really convince people you're worth helping.

Fingers crossed anyway. Here's to a hopeful, collaborative, honest 2008, to more interesting conversations, and to the School of Everything - growing up in public.

Public = private?

It's funny how Facebook is being used for business. I get messages from people I don't really know personally, inviting me to register for their websites or come to their events, and their picture is of them half-naked with their girlfriend at a beach party. Hardly the old world of pin-stripes and formal business presentations, is it? Meanwhile, corporate blogging is making business more human and blurring the personal and the professional even further. On the one hand, I'm glad to see the back of all the false pretensions of old-fashioned business: it's nice to hear people telling the truth for a change. But on the other hand, what are we losing by blurring the boundaries between public and private? What's good for business may be bad for us as individuals. Are we losing ourselves in our work, or just becoming more ourselves in every area of our lives?

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.

Facebook pages

Sociability has a new Facebook page at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7882228102, to accompany the Facebook group at www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5894324067. Please do come and find us, join us, become a fan, write on our walls and all the other myriad things you can do with asynchronous communications these days. I'm still not quite sure what to do with all these different channels mind you, but I'm determined to play around with them nonetheless - and I'm also quietly intrigued to see what Facebook's tools for business will do. It promises to be an interesting year ahead.

Free collaboration tools

With more and more tools available either free or for small sums to help people collaborate and share information, I've been compiling a list of the best ones I've come across. (Thanks to Saul Albert and the School of Everything team for their contributions to this list.)

• FolderShare: my favourite, a simple application which turns any group of un-networked, web-enabled PCs into a virtual shared drive (backed-up onto all machines, available offline, and it even includes good version control).
• FilesAnywhere: free tool for sharing documents and files online, including version control and multiple workgroups functionality.
• Skype: an obvious one, the most common internet telephony service also offers handy chat functions, plus Skype Prime for video conferencing.
• Wordpress: collaborative blogging can be a powerful way to collaborate and develop a project; Wordpress now allows private blogs accessible only to selected users. (It also produces nifty little websites like this one...)
• PhpBB: vanilla free bulletin board software, often cited as the open-source standard.
• Google for Domains: particularly their e-mail and calendar tools for project management.
• Google Docs: excellent for collaborative concurrent authoring of documentation and project plans.
• Wikispaces, Wikidot, Stikipad: free wiki tools for recording ideas, meeting notes and decisions collaboratively in a shared space. (See also the neat new Facebook wiki tool, Wikimono.)
• Del.ico.us: the most well-known bookmark-sharing system is increasingly popular with organisations for sharing useful links
• Feedburner: the free RSS aggregation and subscription tool, now including e-mail broadcasting (subscribe to this site for a demo)
• Hiveminder: a simple-to use but powerful task management tool, with support for groups and email integration.
• 37 Signals: these guys offer some classic project management tools, including Backpack, Tadalist and Basecamp.
• Zoho: a range of online project and collaboration tools including wiki and task manager.
• Huddle: yet another new project collaboration engine, but slick and with many features.
• Openworkbench: basic Gantt and project planning charts, editable and shareable online.
• MindMeister: powerful collaborative online and offline mindmapping software
• Gliffy: diagramming and project planning software online.
• Rememble: social site for timelining and sharing a range of media, from text-messages to photos. Useful if you have too much communication! (Disclosure: my friend Gavin actually runs this, but I was recommending it before I knew him.)
• Compendium: excellent if rather technical tool from the OU for mapping discussions and capturing decisions.
• Surveymonkey: simple, free survey tool for basic questionnaires and consultations.
• Highrise and SugarCRM: cheap and effective contact management tools for managing wider engagement (Highrise is actually provided by 37 Signals).

So, anything I've missed? There are new tools emerging all the time and I make no claims to completeness, so if you've got anything to add please share it in your comments below. Happy collaboration!

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.

Consultancy 2.0

There seems to be no end to the number of things to which we can append "2.0", but at least consultancy undoubtedly deserves it. Interesting idea from Nesta about consultants who deliver their own projects. I think it's really important to do this, hence why I make sure the main focus of my work is the projects I am delivering myself. If I wasn't doing this stuff myself, how could I possibly advise others how to do it themselves?

http://blogs.nesta.org.uk/connect/2007/10/why-dont-consul.html

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!