THIS IS NOT A BLOG
I cannot blog, I've tried but I just can't. I cannot do daily posts and I am uncomfortable writing in journal style.
So this is not a blog: it's a place where I put drafts, links speaking notes for my talks, presentations, book reviews and notes on projects which might be useful.
THE SEARCH FOR A NEW CAPITALISM
A speculative essay for the Spectator, October 17th on where the financial crisis and consequent recession might take us can be found here
FIVE FUTURES FOR THE INTERNET
Text used for remarks to the board of the British Library on September 23rd on the future and impact of the Internet on society can be found here
UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL INNOVATION
Text for my talk to one of the launch events for the new Centre for Social Impact in Melbourne on September 16th can be found here
BOULDERS AND PEBBLES
The media landscape used to be dominated by boulders. Now it is a rising tide of pebbles. Notes based on a talk I gave to Ingenious Media on September 12th can be found here.
COLLABORATIVE CULTURE
Notes for the talk I gave on "With Culture" to Engage conference Glasgow September 11th can be found here
SOCIAL ENTERPRISE AND THE WITH ECONOMY
Notes for the talk I gave to the World Social Enterprise Forum in Edinburgh on September 4th can be found here
THE STATE OF RELATIONSHIPS AND THE WITH ECONOMY
A rough draft of ideas I have been developing with Participle on seeing public services through the lens of relationships is attached here. A work in progress.
SOCIAL INNOVATION AND THE WITH ECONOMY: SEPT 1
Slides I used in my talk to close the Young Foundation's Summer School on Social Innovation in San Sebastian on July 30th can be found here
GOVERNING COLLABORATION ON THE WEB
My response to David Weinberger's Publius Essay on norms, rules and self governance on the web can be found here.
SHARING ADDS MEANING/FIGHTING IN THE GARAGES: JULY 11th
Walking to Islington Police Station to get a piece of paper to confirm that my son's iPhone had been lost, I overheard this part of an exchange between two elderly women:
"You can still enjoy the moment when you are on your own, but you have no one to share it with and sharing it makes it so much more fun and you can carry on talking about it long after it's over."
Relationships, sharing and conversation provide experiences with meaning.
Later that afternoon as I walked down the lane to our house I came across - difficult to miss - a group of black boys gathered in the garages. A relfection of the panicked nature of the times I immediately thought there was about to be a fight. And there was but not of the kind one might expect. They started to stage a rap-off, signing, shouting, rapping. They were a gathering of garage poets. They were being filmed by their friends to be posted on YouTube later. They were in the media production business, like me. Just they were more talented.
I AM JUST AN INGREDIENT: JULY 9TH
At an interesting meeting with Will Gompertz head of media at the Tate, Will said he saw the Tate as an ingredient, rather than as a finished thing. If you see youself as an ingredient, it means you always have to be on the look out for other ingredients to work with and a recipe to combine them together. Think like an ingredient and you see you have to collaborate to get anything done.
A STATE OF RELATIONSHIPS: JULY 9TH
You can download the slides I used at a revent presentation to the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit on the future of public services here
The theme was that public services should be seen as relationships and their goal should be to sustain relationships: services that work with people rather than to or for them.
MEETING TIM BERNERS-LEE JULY 8th
On July 8th I had the pleasure of meeting Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web, over lunch and speaking at an event at Nesta in the evening. You can read accounts of Tim's talk and the panel discussion that followed from Roland Harwood and James Cherkoff. Some thought the panel discussion detracted from Tim's talk, others that the two complemented one another. You can watch the video and judge for yourself here. You can find out more about Nesta's partnership with the Web Science Research Initiative here
Personally I found meeting Tim spellbinding, his mixture of humility, passion and boundless creativity. The person I have met who is most like TBL in some ways, is most unlike him: Bill Gates. Like TBL, Gates can display an almost childlike enthusiasm for and optimism about technology, which can be infectious. Both are inveterate problem solvers. But Gates is an optimist about technology and a pessimist about people, what motivates them and how the work. TBL is not just an optimist about technology but also about people, their capacity to rise above narrow self interest and to work collaboratively to find better solutions to problems. Over lunch TBL was asked whether he could have come up with the idea for the web at a different time and under different circumstances. His answer, if I remember it rightly, was that something like the web would still have emerged but it would have been a quite different animal, with none of the collaborative logic he wrote into it.
The most telling comment of the talk was his final remarks in response to a question from Nico Macdonald about whether we are expecting too much from the web, yearning for it to solve all out problems. TBL replied:
"The web is merely a reflection of humanity. I think the danger is not that we expect too much of humanity, but that we expect too little."
CREATIVE THINKING/POWERFUL MINDS: JULY 3RD BATH SPA UNIVERSITY
Thanks to everyone for a great morning discussing creativity, learning and participation at the conference organised by 5 x 5 x 5. The slides I used for this presentation can be found here
WHAT I AM READING: JULY 3RD
Zygmunt Bauman's Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers?
EAST OF ENGLAND DIRECTORS OF CHILDRENS SERVICES CONFERENCE JULY 2ND CAMBRIDGE
My slides for this presentation on What's Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning can be found here
CBI PUBLIC SERVICES AND PERSONALISATION, LONDON JUNE 26TH
Slides for my talk on the personalisation of public services can be found here
WHAT I AM READING : JUNE 24th THE COMFORT OF THINGS
Daniel Miller's The Comfort of Things an anthropological study of a single London street, exploring the way the things people collect and display in their homes help to organise their relationships with their own memories and other people. People find comfort in things to compensate for the sadness of their lives. People who care for objects, also care for people. What most people want, and what treasured possessions give them, is access to realtionships. Society may indeed be too abstract a concept for most people to attach themselves to but that does not mean they are raw individualists. Instead most people try to locate themselves in sets of relationships with friends, family and peers. More than anything people are sustained by relationships and the "things" in their lives matter because they too help sustain these relationships.
GOOD GOVERNANCE AND THE NET: JUNE 24TH 2008
David Weinberger recently contributed a thoughtful essay to the Publius Project at Harvard University's Berkman Center for the study of the Internet. David's argument is the web is at its best governed by tacit norms; explicit rules are a sign of failure and a kind of social scar. My response to David's essay, which argues that good governance of all collaborative undertakings requires the right mix of norms and rules can be found here.
CO-INVENTION: JUNE 16TH 2008
The most interesting parts of Malcolm Gladwell's recent article in the New Yorker "In The Air: who says big ideas are rare?" about Nathan Myhrvold's Invention Capital project was his account of how many scientific inventions were multiples: several people ahd the same idea at about the same time because it was "in th air." Further evidence of the highly social, cumulative and often collaborative nature of invention and that what stands out about innovation is how ideas are developed not just created. Gladwell draws on a 1922 study by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas which found 148 major scientific inventions were multiples. The statistician Stephen Stigler pointed out that most scientific discoveries named after their "originator" actually relied on the work of many other people's discoveries. Gladwell's account is that Invention Capital is organised to orhcestra insight from diverse points of view and disciplines: making the most of diversity.
Gladwell then goes on to argue that in contrast to science, artistic genius is singular: Shakespeare owned Hamlet because he created him. But this seems to miss the point that cutlural creativity is as much collaborative as science, and usually draws from a large common pool of characters, stories and ideas. What distinguishes inventors, creators, writers is how they draw from this common pool and what they add back to it.
The With Economy: June 6th 2008
I am just finishing a report on the future of learning and education which is all about learning with people rather than from them or to them.
So much of the economy is organised around delivering, targetting, pushing things to people. Yet most of what we value are activities we do with people. Many of the largest, fastest growing areas of economic activity are "with" activities that depend on relationships - learning, care, health and other services. Relationship based economy rather than a production based economy.
Arts and Business, Kunztenzaken Matching Conference, Rotterdam June 4, 2008
Here are the speaking notes I used for my talk to this Kunztenzaken conference on creativity, innovation and business, the relationships between arts and business.
After the talk I led a workshop on creativity in which I asked people - a mix from business, cultural institutions and the arts three questions:
- when and where do you have good ideas?
- when and with whom do you have powerful conversations?
- what would a perfect innovation space look and feel like?
You can see my version of the answers they came up with here
Fujitsu Laboratories Europe, June 3, 2008
These are the very rough speaking notes I used for my presentation to Fujitsu Labs conference on the future of organisations.
Social Innovation: Lisbon Next Rev Conference, May 30, 2008
These are the speaking notes I used for my talk on Social Innovation and here are the slides.
Complete Creative Cities, March 17th/18th, Warsaw
A creative workship in Warsaw in March with people from a variety of East and North European cities. You can find the draft paper circulated for this conference here
The Web and the Avant Garde, Feb 4, 2008
Download the speaking notes for my talk at the British Library here about how the Web's leading lights borrow from the pre-war artistic avant garde's ideas on participation.
