Learning from the Extremes
Published early in 2010 by Cisco, Learning from the Extemes examines how social entrepreneurs around the world are devising new approaches to learning in extreme social circumstances - favelas, slums, informal settlements - when there are few teachers, schools, text books. The radically innovative approaches they develop challenge conventional wisdom about schooling and provide new insights into how the developed world should reform its education systems. Available here. The executive summary is here
Cloud Culture
Cloud Culture published in the Spring of 2010 by Counterpoint, the British Council think tank, explores how the rise of cloud computing could change our culture and asks whether it could provide the platform for a new, more cosmopolitan global culture which is both connected but diverse. It charts the rise and power of cloud capitalists, the likes of Facebook and Apple and concludes with a manifesto for the open cloud. Available here.
On similar themes you can find my long draft response to the British government's Digital Britain report here
Five Futures for the Internet: Notes for a talk I gave to the British Library The Internet and Society in the 21st Century - can be found here.
Are you a Boulder or a Pebble? Notes for my talk to Ingenious Media can be found here.
The Future of Capitalism
We need a different kind of capitalism. One that less unstable, destructuve, unequal and unaccountable. One of the best ways to generate ideas is to retrieve ideas long discarded. This pamphlet Digging for the Future was published by the Young Foundation in spring 2010. It argues people searching for a different kind of capitalism should look back to the ideas of the English radical Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers in the 1640s, to inspire an approach that would emphasise mutualism, localism, social justice and radical democracy. Available here.
Some of my other recent writing about the financial crisis and its implications for the nature of capitalism can be found here.
The Search for a New Capitalism: an essay for The Spectator, can be found here
The Best Things in Life Are Free: an essay for the New Statesman on the stranglehold that money has on our imaginations can he found here.
For, With, By and To
In the spring of 2010 I began work on a project called For, With, By and To, which argues there are only four main ways in which we organise most social activities or address social changes. For solutions are delivered to us. With solutions we devise cooperatively with other. By solutions depend on self motivation and DIY. To solutions depend on instruction, command and coercion, to get things done. Crudely speaking the 20th century was shaped by the rise of more complex, powerful and sophisticated For and To solutions in virtually every walk of life, at the expense of With and By solutions, cooperation and self help. This dependence on For and To solutions has come at great costs, not least the ability of those delivering to abuse their power. We need to redress this imbalance and develop more effective With and By solutions in virtually every area of life, from learning and health, to ageing and dying, to politics and the environment. As I develop material I will post it here. Meanwhile here is some of the writing on With approaches I've already published.
Why relationships are central to innovative public services solutions: a state of relationships
The Art of With : whether the web is creating a more open, participative and collaborative approach to culture can be downloaded here
Social Innovation: With not To - rough text for my talk at the new Centre for Social Impact in Melbourne can be found here.
Draft notes for my talk to the Engage Conference about culture and collaboration can be found here.
Notes for my talk to the World Social Enterprise Forum can be found here
Slides I used to close the Young Foundation's Summer School on social innovation in San Sebastian in July can be found here
With: A draft of an article about seeing public services through the lens of relationships - a theme of What's Next? - can be found here.
For, With, By and To is a work in progress. I will post more material here as it emerges.
The ideas in For, With By and To are informed by and underpin the work of Participle, the public service innovation agency, which I helped to found. You can find out more about Participle's work here
Coming soon...How Britain Dies: Rewriting the Script.
Confronting, managing and experiencing death and dying are among the most difficult, painful and troubling issues we face. Death and dying is also almost a public policy vacuum. As people live longer the way we die is changing. Death is increasingly a drawn out process of gradual loss. This project funded by Help the Hospices will be published late in 2010 by Demos based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research to explore the case for alternative ways for people to organise their deaths.
My School of Life school of life sermon on seeing life from the last three years backwards, provides some of the background thinking which got the project going.
What's Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Education
What's Next? my report for the Innovation Unit on the future of learning can be downloaded here and copies of the slides a used at the launch event here. What's Next is based on case studies of six innovative schools and sets of schools and interviews with local authorities around the country.
You can read an article from the New Statesman magazine based on the report here, an article from the Guardian Education supplement here, since picked up in the Taipei Times, and coverage from the Times Educational Supplement here.
The Innovation Unit website has some more detail and links here.
We Think
We Think was published by Profile in March 2008 after a long period of development which included sharing a draft of the first elevn chapters online. This was downloaded thousands of times and I got hundreds of comments from people, most of them very helpful and some that changed the way the book was written.
You can download the first three chapters of the book from the We Think section of this website and leave a comment.
This video based on the illustrations done by Debbie Powell and animated by Tim Cowie explains the main ideas in the book.
You can find video of me talking about the ideas behind the book here and here.
My TED talk on collaborative innovation is here
This is a selection of the commentary on the book.
Spectator Interview with Matt D'Ancona here
Pat Kane's Review in the Independent here and Andrew Keen's response to the book here and Management Today here
Some of my other recent publications include:
The Completely Creative City was the working title for a project with the British Council and a network of north and central European cities to explore and experiment with what makes them creative. The project kicked off with a creative workship in Warsaw in March. You can find the draft paper circulated for this conference here
The final report, Breakthrough Cities, was published by the British Council and the Young Foundation and is available here
I drew on much of that thinking to write Original Modern published by Nesta which looks at the achievements of Manchester in the last decade and the challenges the city faces in the years ahead to generate more socially inclusive forms of growth. Cities will increasingly have to focus on culture, people and social networks as much as buildings and infrastructure to bring about change.
Making It Personal an exploration of the case for self directed public services based on personal budgets. Making It Personal looks at the rise of personal budgets in social care and examines the potential for self-directed services to spread to other areas. You can download a copy of the report here. And you can get presentations from the launch conference on by Ed Miliband, here.
The Difference Dividend argues that immigration and diversity are vital to Britain's capacity for innovation, especially in services, cultural and creative fields. This Nesta Provocation draws together research on the role of diversity in innovation and creativity with research on immigration. A copy can be downloaded here
Remixing The City argues that successful cities enable a mass of collaborative innovation and that new public service infrastructures for cities will have to enable mass participation in problem solving, using Web 2.0 style organisational models to reform systems for learning, transport, health, care and community safety. City Remix is an agenda for cities to lead social and public innocation in a new way, drawing on open soruce models of development. Download the report, published by the US group Ceos for Cities here
Social Software for Social Change is a report for the UK Government Office of the is Third Sector on the potential for social software to bring about social change by enabling new kinds of campaigning and citizen activism. One outcome from this project will be a Social Innovation camp run by the Young Foundation in conjunction with Nesta in early April. A copy of the draft report can be downloaded here
Social Enterprise The Next Ten Years another report for the Office of The Third Sector exmaining some of the forces that might shape the future of social enterprise is available here
Atlas of Ideas II: following the successful launch of our Atlas of Ideas report on the rise of science and innovation in South Korea, China and India, the second phase of the Atlas project was launched in late 2007 with flagship projects on science in the Islamic world, Brazil, and new roles of super regions in the world economy. Find our more here.
