Guardian Activate 2010

Posted by Roo - 02/07/10 at 10:07:13 am

I went to Activate 2010 yesterday. It’s a conference about technology, society and the future (’changing the world through the internet’). This is the second time the Guardian have run an Activate event (Activate 09 was very interesting, though I see I mainly ended up writing about how the event embraced the Twitter back-channel by displaying a moderated selection of tweets on stage. They did it again this year and it seemed to work, and was much less controversial, though I’d say that this year a higher percentage of people had laptops, iPads etc in their laps anyway…).

The programme featured an impressive list of speakers from a range of disciplines. It was a real treat to be made to think by a range of futurologists, ethnographers and researchers. A day to wake up your brain and make it think about important stuff. Many of the sessions were split into multiple streams, so I missed some of the best bits of the day, but what follows is some of what I saw.

Emily Bell, in what I think was her last day as director of digital content at the Guardian, introduced the day and welcomed us to the first keynote panel, which set the scene for the day very well with its ambitious title of Society, Humanity, Technology and the Web. (’Using the power of connected networks, ubiquitous information, cutting edge technology and the spirit of the web to overcome the global challenges of our age’).

Ethan Zuckerman, founder, Global Voices gave a thoughtful and powerful eye opener. Especially for someone who had only landed in Heathrow 90 minutes earlier.

  • We need to point to, and amplify, repressed voices rather than attempting to represent them. It’s silly to speak for someone who is already seizing the microphones themselves
  • Social web = usually a place where you interact with people you already know. However, big cultural events are an opportunity to talk with strangers
  • Sending a million t-shirts to Africa (Million T-Shirts) is a bad idea. Donating clothes damages thriving local businesses.
  • TMS Ruge: “our voices count, and it would be good to partner with us – to have a conversation with us first – before any projects are started”
  • The Iranian ‘green revolution’ was mainly Iranian diaspora raising awareness in West. Twitter is not where you want to organise a revolution; the authorities read it too.
  • we need to listen to people in the developing world tell us what they care about

Jamais Cascio, The Institute for the Future is a self deprecating californian futuroligist with a TED talk and a book (’Open the Future’) under his belt.

  • technology is culture. It’s not a field, it’s a manifestation of our beliefs, norms and politics. To understand the future of tech we need to think about the future of how we interact with each other
  • 3 drivers: consumption (watching youtube, reading twitter, reading blogs, …) creation (writing/making things), and connection (how do we relate to each other)
  • consumption + creation = attention ecology: making and reading. Largely the world we have today
  • creation + connection = ‘Lego Land’: making and creating and sharing new forms to facilitate further development. creation as collaboration
  • connection + consumption = empathic spectrum: focus on reputation, empathy (rather than attention), slower and richer than the world we have today
  • ‘will technologies make us smarter’ is less important than ‘will they make us better people’
  • human + computer = human
  • technologies are not independent of us. we create them and control and determine what shape they take

Georgia Arnold, SVP for social responsibility at MTV & executive director, Staying Alive Foundation talked about how MTV uses their brand for social good.

  • TV is technology too. 1 trillion hours of TV is watched around the world each year.
  • MTV ‘Staying Alive’ campaign = HIV and AIDS awareness campaign. Staying alive foundation funds young people doing prevention work
  • ‘Shuga’ – Kenyan TV programme. cult viewing whilst also being informative. Multi-layered social campaign: website, FB page, radio, marketing, press, teaching guide, plus lots of fan=created communities. Creativity is vital
  • actors trained with messages and become ambassadors themselves
  • success: releasing results in AIDS conference in Vienna in a couple of weeks
    stats say that if you watch Shuga you are more likely to get tested
  • technology doesn’t work in isolation. Need to think about people
  • technology is the glue that connects people, it doesn’t replace people
  • social media is not yet the most prevelant or influential agent for social change, but social media will be revolutionary in amplifying voices
  • we create everything rights-cleared for everyone to be able to use (including broadcasters)

Dr. Aubrey de Grey, biomedical gerontologist & chief science officer, SENS Foundation gave a disarmingly blunt and comic introduction to regenerative medicine. His exasperation at people who fail to fully understand why living longer is a good thing was probably less useful than trying to actually convince us.

  • SENS foundation is US registered charity focusing on regenerative medicine
  • 2/3 of all deaths worldwide are due to causes related to aging (proportion is much higher in the west)
  • because aging is (was?) inevitable, we tend to put it out of our minds rather than become preoccupied by something ghastly

    • Three approaches: Gerontology (slowing and preventing damage), Maintenance (repair of damage), Geriatrics (preventing death after damage is done).

  • claim: the maintenance approach, focusing on damage, may soon achieve a big extension of human healthy lifespan
  • his book: ‘Ending Aging’
  • eye opening quote: “there’s not much point having a voice if you’re wrong”
After a presentation from mendeley.com (who won the Activate VC pitching day award the day before) there was an interesting, if buzzword laden, panel discussion about VC funding. Bingo if you had ‘groundsourcing’ and ‘crowdfunding’, but don’t forget to take a drink every time you hear the word ‘ecosystem’.

The panel was

  • Esther Dyson (angel investor & chairman, EDventure Holdings)
  • Julie Meyer (founder & CEO, Ariadne)
  • Anil Hansjee (head of corporate development, EMEA, Google)
  • Nick Appleyard (head of digital, Technology Strategy Board)

and was chaired by Charles Cotton (director, Cambridge Enterprise).

I struggled to care about VC really, and the only thing that stood out to me was Esther Dyson’s insights about solving one small problem that make other things easier being better than trying to do everything all at once.

(Why was this a plenary session? Felt like this one could easily have been swapped with a later steamed session). Anyway, I wish we could have had more tangible examples from this panel and less vague hand-waving about ecosystems. Rather than write about this panel, I’m going to recount a little more about Medeley, which helps researchers work smarter and makes research more collaborative by building a research database. A desktop app extracts research metadata (authors, abstract, citations, etc) and aggregates research in the cloud. It can then distill trends, give realtime insights into who is citing who. Very very interesting. Clearly not aimed at me, but it looks so interesting that it makes me want to have a reason to use it.

After the break were some Lightning Presentations (’Visionary sound bites from the brightest names on the internet on everything from the future of free to the power of unfettered information access to initiate a new world order’).

I went to stream #1…

Danny O’Brien, internet advocacy co-ordinator, Committee to Protect Journalists was excellent. He ran out of time a little bit, so I asked him to fill me in on what he missed. The last couple of points below are what he would have said if he hadn’t needed to truncate himself.

  • Danny’s work at the Committee to Protect Journalists is especially around internet journalists. Half of the journalists that were imprisoned in 2009 worked on the net, many of which are freelance without the support of big institutions
  • how do we burn in protections and reverence for free speech when building media institutions, in the same way that TCP/IP has free speech burned into it
  • Global Network Initiative – ensuring privacy and human rights of people around the world
  • whatever you build, however trivial you think it is, people will use it for vital free speech. What should you do?
  • preserve the confidentiality of your users (including protecting data from state-level adversaries)
  • make your rules public and even-handed (common trick is for states to use the tools of control against the people they want to silence, complaints, by making the rules obscure people don’t challenge)
  • keep your door open (in as well as out) – give people back their data when they want to take it elsewhere
  • make struggling speakers in dangerous regimes a use case when designing
  • turn on SSL

Sharon Biggar, COO & co-founder, Path Intelligence talked about ‘google analytics for the real world’.

  • the falling cost of sensor tech means: online research and analytics innovations can move offline, more experimentation, less need for market research
  • online shops know what we look at and choose not to purchase. Offline: if you walk into a shop and leave, the store doesn’t know what you were looking at
  • Path Intelligence works by detecting mobile devices anonymously and aggregate data around where the device goes. Currently detecting 10M unique visitors every month
  • “a little bit of information about a lot of people” rather than ” a lot from a few people”
  • At this stage, I can’t tell if I’m intrigued or frightened. This could well be an Orwellian spoof. She’s acting, right? She’s working for Liberty or someone and this presentation is going to get increasingly weird and scary until we all want to do something about it. A creative way of delivering a dystopian message about privacy perhaps?
  • surveys tend to underestimate length of time people are shopping
  • Oh. Ok. It’s not a spoof. This is an actual sales pitch for Path Intelligence’s products and services. Gosh. Why are we watching a sales pitch?

Sobia Hamid, co-founder, DataGiving.com

  • Ventroy – took data from Kiva and CrunchBase to show how many micro-enterprises could have been funded by failed startup investments
  • DataGiving beta

    • This is more world-changing, but still I’m seeing a lot more ‘look at what I’ve made’ pitching this year than last year

Matt Stinchcomb, director, Europe, Etsy

  • Etsy: “even the servers were built by hand”
  • last year $190 million of goods sold (doubling each year)
  • $0.20 listing fee, 3.5% commission
  • no reselling allowed, you have to be the maker
  • people before products
  • we think a lot about he cluetrain manifesto: markets are conversations
  • More pitching, though it would be hard not to like Matt and his open delivery.

A keynote panel on Politics, Democracy and Public Life (’Mobilising democracy, streamlining government, improving access and empowering citizens through the internet’). Moderator: Tom Steinberg, founder, MySociety

Martha Lane-Fox, UK digital champion

  • 10M people in UK have never used internet. 2M have used it and not gone back
  • lots of organisations inviting digital engagement, and it always seems to be via the web
  • the UK could be the first country to have 100% use of internet by 2012 olympics
  • 500,000 computers are locked up in schools every night
  • computers have to somewhere you can get at them: doesn’t necessarily have to be in your home
  • don’t overcomplicate what it taks to get them online. Start with people’s passion. Focus on the benefits to them
  • People don’t yet know what the benefits are for them. Design services on line for people who don’t use them, not for people who do – start with the difficult customers
  • I think I’m a tiny bit in love with Martha Lane-Fox

Steven Clift, founder and executive director, E-Democracy talked about creating online public space for neighbours with common interest

  • every neighbourhood should have a local online space that connects people
  • Pew Internet research: 27% of US adult internet users use digital tools to talk to their neighbours. That’s 20% of adults overall
  • local voices matter, but you need the capacity to listen
  • civility matters. most people see and expect public conflict (flame wars) rather than civil conversation
  • by the way: putting up photos on the screen with ‘Creative Commns via Flickr’ as the attribution is not at all cool
  • real names work, creates reputation, builds trust and community
    inclusion matters
  • changing the neighbourhood rather than changing the world
  • e-democracy.org

Nigel Shadbolt, director, Web Science Trust & The Web Foundation talked about Open Government Data

  • politics is dog eat dog, but academia is the other way around
  • Since data.gov.uk launched, we’ve seen an ABSOrometer (how many ASBOs near where you are now). Was briefly the top free download app in the iTunes store in the UK
  • More worthy examples: UK dentists – find the nearest UK dentist
  • Showed Post Code Data newspaper as an example of what you could do with data if licensing wasn’t a problem
  • principles of public data: available in machine readable form for resuse including commercial reuse

Beth Simone Noveck, deputy chief technology officer, United States and director, White House Open Government Initiative talked about the US open government initiative, with a bit of healthy competition for data.gov.uk. Most interesting to me was a consensus on the panel that while anonymity is important, requesting first + last names, with explanation of why, creates sites in which the names mean more, with a focus on reputation and civility. I also now need to go and read the US government’s National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace proposals.

Final keynote presentations were grouped in the theme of Where Do We Go From Here? (’Where next for the web? Future technologies and their impact on society and humanity’)

Joe Cerrell, European director, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation talked about philanthrophy and technology.

  • “Devices have the power to change the way we interact with media and change the world”
  • Shared examples of investments in: mobile money in Haiti, room temperature vaccines, Evidence based advocacy
  • ‘living proof’ showcase of investment results

Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights, Frog Design seems to have the best job in the world. Jan (the man, sounds like ‘yan’) observes how products are used in the real world. He talked about ethnography and empathic design.

  • The poor can least afford poorly designed products and services
  • There will be 5bn mobile phone subscriptions by end of the year. 1.1bn sold every year. There’s a design responsibility that comes with that
  • Reputation has value. Reputation is collateral
  • The poor can least afford poorly designed products and services
  • And they know it
  • And now they know that you know it

Desiree Miloshevic, board trustee, Internet Society

  • How should the Internet be governed?
  • Who decides who decides?
  • Currently, mostly governed (controlled by) private sector interests
  • Used a Princess Bride allegory which I can’t relate in sufficient detail to do it justice, other than to say that the Internet = princess who is elegant and simple and virtuous by design, and there’s no clear outcome.

Clay Shirky, professor, Interactive Telecommunications Program, NYU talked about Cognitive surplus.

  • Example of Kenyan election disputed. Media blackout. Realtime news via blogs eg Kenyan Pundit -> Ushahidi
  • human generosity + free time + platform for collaboration (specifically incremental building and sharing)
  • Wikipedia is 100M hours of humans thought. Television 200bn hours eveey year in US alone. Wikipedia every weekend just in adverts in usa alone
  • Hang on a minute Clay: it was 100M hours over two years ago too.. surely that’s gone up a bit since then?
  • The future is random: Infrastructure widely spread means mass rather than depth of participation is often most important. How many people use it is more important than how fancy is it.
  • ‘Design through lack of hubris’. People who are certain of what will happen next try fewer things. People who are willing to learn through incremental public failure often find the inobvious solutions
  • Geographic spread. Innovation coming from oustife traditional centres.
  • Future is harder to predict but easier to see (globally)
  • Paying attention is a valuable tool for understanding the future

Unfortunately, I had to miss the closing presentation from Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his interview by Alan Rusbridger. Real life got in the way and I had to jump out a tiny bit early. Here are the two videos of it though:

And for much more nitty gritty of what was going on and who said what this year, rather than just the bits I saw, the Guardian’s live blog coverage is what you need.

BeeBCamp 3

Posted by Roo - 27/11/09 at 08:11:00 pm

The first BeeBCamp was about 14 months ago (here’s what it’s all about and here’s what happened at that first one).

Today’s was the third such event, and opened up not only to more non-BBC guests than the previous one, but also to people who don’t happen to work in London. We had live video link-ups with Manchester and throughout the day, one of the tables in London had remote guests from The North virtually joining us at the end of the table. It was a great way of bringing the two locations together for fun, creativity and getting to know our colleagues and guests. These events serve to get people together from across the BBC (and beyond), build our networks, let us spend a day away from the normal work and think a bit differently about things.

Why do this sort of thing? As Philip Trippenbach, who produced todays event, says,

It’s not just the number of brain cells you’ve got; it’s the connections between them, and the strength of those connections, that makes intelligence and creativity possible. The metaphor applies to an organization like the BBC, with its thousands of employees in different fields. … Ideas and solutions that may be obvious to one team might be revolutionary to another. The trick is to get people together to talk about those ideas.

BeeBCamp 3 sessions Blogable/Unblogable (pretty sure these are spelled wrong) Dan Biddle and Paul Murphy Wii game demo BeeBCamp

What are people saying about it?…

Playful ‘09

Posted by Roo - 31/10/09 at 01:10:45 pm

Playful 09 was great.

Playful 09

I really enjoyed Playful 08 so was delighted to be asked back. Last year I demoed my Rock Band MIDI guitar hack. This year, rather than extend my P5 Glove project into another MIDI instrument, I decided to set myself the challenge of talking about games and films. This was perhaps a little foolish, as I know only a little bit about games and barely anything about films. However, the audience were mercifully forgiving of my ill-prepared nonsense and laughed in all the right places.

In case you missed it, here are my slides, complete with dodgy audio recording of the talk.

Playful 2009 – Roo Reynolds – Games And Films

Thankfully for all concerned, the rest of the day was much better. Here’s some of what happened:

Playful 09 Leila at Playful Robin Burkinshaw talks about Alice and Kev Daniel Soltis at Playful James Bridle's MENACE Rex Crowle at Playful

A great day with lots to take home and think about. Thanks to Toby Barnes and everyone else at Pixel-Lab for making Playful happen.

More people who have written about it: Suw Charman-Anderson, Leila Johnston, Howard Pull, Adam Davis, Lawrence Chiles, Libby Davy, Daniel Soltis, Priyanka Kanse, Melinda Seckington and more, plus the official record: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Interesting 2009 – forty even more interesting things

Posted by Roo - 12/09/09 at 11:09:24 pm

As is becoming traditional (2007, 2008), I’ve made a very brief list of what happened at this year’s Interesting

Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009 Bubblino at Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009 Hello, Interesting 2009

  1. Tom Loosemore on the race to sail faster than 50 knots.
  2. Jessica Greenwood on why the least interesting things about sport is the score (football, with all its attendant drama, is a $500B industry).
  3. Robert Brook spoke on being a gentleman (by birth, costume or behaviour).
  4. Toby Barnes on a brief history of cheating in video-games (cheating, when it involves other people, is wrong).
  5. Leila Johnston read some snippets from her very funny book, ‘The Enemy of Chaos‘
  6. Cait Hurley talked about Arthur Jefferson (Stan Laurel’s dad and an awesome guy).
  7. Alby Reid told us that everything we knew about nuclear power was wrong (How many people died as a result of Chernobyl? 56.)
  8. Katy Lindemann enthused about robots (Tweenbots are especially adorable).
  9. The very cute Bubblino made an appearance on stage (blowing bubbles across the stage every time ‘interesting’ was mentioned on twitter).
  10. Dominic Tinley explained why we don’t see the colour violet on our computers and cameras, as well as what Radio 4 would look like if we could see sound.
  11. Andy Huntington took us on a tour of keyboard instruments and explained ‘equal temperament’.
  12. Alice Taylor talked about ‘merchants vs craftants’ (give some love back to the crafters).
  13. Tim Duckett kindly taught us morse code in 10 minutes. For example: Z = Zinc Zoo kee-per =  - – . .
  14. Michal Migurski talked about maps and paper and a much-photocopied intersection map of San Francisco (paper wiki).
  15. Josie Fraser talked about psychological violence in UK 1970s and 80s girls comics (’it can be dangerous to mock a monkey’).
  16. Dan Maier talked about Sir Francis Galton (I now really want to read Galton’s book ‘The Art of Travel‘, and to a lesser extent his thoughts on ‘Africa for the Chinese’ (”one of the 5 most racist things I’ve ever read”, according to Dan) and ‘Arithmetic by Smell‘).
  17. Asi Sharabi showed us 6-8 year old children’s ideas of interestingness (which centered around technology, friends, motors and animals).
  18. Meg Pickard taught us about drinking rituals and associated customs (toast, cheers, your good health, chin chin, rule of thumb).
  19. Alex Deschamps-Sonsino got us to make a very complicated origami box.
  20. Tuur Van Balen talked about yoghurt and DNA synthesis (”I’ve never done bio-technology under such time pressure!”)
  21. Jon Gisby taught us how to conduct a symphony orchestra (”It’s like riding a horse at speed; fun, but with a significant risk of abject and public failure”).
  22. Jessica Bigarel discussed, and beautifully presented, her meta meta data data (capturing each flight of stairs travelled up or down was “an arduous dataset and it was very disruptive to my life”).
  23. Craig Smith talked about his dad (”he sharpens a drill bit better than any man in Huddersfield”) and showed us the types of water wheels (under shot, breast shot, over shot and pitch back).
  24. Tom Fishburne talked about innovation and cartoons.
  25. Anab Jain talked about her Indian superpowers.
  26. Naomi Alderman talked about greek tragedy and goats.
  27. Gavin Bell talked about the writing of his new ‘Social Web Applications’ book (wifi is a blessing and a curse).
  28. Emma Marsland shared the ponies she has loved, real and imagined, from since 1970
  29. Nick Hand shared his ongoing journey around the coast of mainland Britain (5000 miles in 100 days).
  30. We heard about the ‘BIL‘ unconference in Oxford next summer (BIL is to TED as Bar camp is to Foo camp).
  31. Mark Earls and his Darwinian Display Team demonstrated random drift.
  32. Robert Thomas demonstrated RjDj (’Music as Software’).
  33. Gem Spear talked about electric trains and underground creeks (GM’s inglorious part in killing off the inter-urban railway systems in the US, and a rather nice discussion of running surface runoff water through gardens rather then through underground culverts).
  34. Paul Hammond showed us how to win at Monopoly (if you can buy it, buy it; trade up to a full colour group asap; go for the oranges (stats!); unless it’s early in the game, stay in jail; create a housing shortage; don’t play house rules, as they’ll only make the game take too long; don’t play it at all, it’s a rubbish game. Instead, play German board games, which are not all German and not all board games).
  35. David Smith gave a touching and powerful talk about teaching (you can’t teach children well unless you love children).
  36. Richard Reynolds mentioned his Guerilla Gardening book and told a lovely story about planting sunflowers opposite Parliament.
  37. We watched Jim Le Fevre’s beautiful astrotagging film.
  38. Claire Margetts told us about the ‘Do’ lectures.
  39. Matt Ward showed us why frivolity is important by showing his plans for watching a bullet reach the top of its trajectory (”Understanding comes through doing”).
  40. Dan Germain talked about sunsets (”basically, when the sun disappears”, by which time it has apparently already happened) and asked why we persist in taking bad photos of them, pondering whether it’s because they remind us of death).

Interesting 2009 Matt David Smith at Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009 Interesting 2009

Another great job from Russell. Three years in a row, Interesting continues to live up to its name.

Guardian Activate 09

Posted by Roo - 01/07/09 at 11:07:40 pm

I went to Activate 09 today.

“an exclusive one-day summit providing a unique gathering for leaders working across all sectors to share, debate and create strategies for answering some of the world’s biggest questions.”

Activate 09

I was there for most of the day today, though I sadly had to miss a chunk of the afternoon. Here’s a taste of what I saw:

Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon talked about Amazon Web Services:

  • Last century, all sorts of companies had to invest in generating their own electricity just to be able do business. Quickly re-fitted to take advantage of electricity as a utility when it become available.
  • The same is now becoming true for computation. Moving from capital expenditure to variable cost model.
  • Cloud computing: reduces risk, reduces startup time for new ideas, lets you pay for what you use.
  • [sales pitch for aws.amazon.com]

Clare Lockhart, co-founder and CEO, Institute for State Effectiveness, co-author with Ashraf Ghani of book ‘Fixing Failed States’, talked about government:

  • Re-rebuilding Afghanistan: the UN has no manual for building a government, and the World Bank has no manual for building an economy
  • An army and police force, paid for by tax, paid by a population who has security and justice, which requires… (it’s a circle)
  • Problems with Afghanistan: no money went to police (because it wasn’t ‘poverty-reducing’), railways (because the country was ‘too poor’) or higher education.
  • Many failed states are offline and off the grid. many won’t have electricity for > 50% of their population for 10 years
  • Citizen centered design. Citizens are interested in using the net for market pricing and the transparency of putting budgets online

Arianna Huffington, editor-in-chief, The Huffington Post talked about business and politics.
Arianna Huffington at Activate 09

  • Raw data can’t be viral. You have to translate it into something that people will share, that will ‘catch fire’.
  • Were it not for the internet, ‘Obama would not be president’.
  • Mainstream media suffers from attention deficit disorder. New media suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder.
  • You consume old media sitting on your couch. You consume new media galloping on a horse.
  • The cost of launching a new business is now so low that sometimes it’s indistinguishable from starting a new hobby
  • The next interesting business to watch will be one which… ‘connects in order to disconnect in a hyper-connected society’ (e.g unplug and recharge, remember the value of sleep..)

Nick Bostrom, director, Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and founder of the world transhumanist foundation, talked about post-humanity and existential events. i.e. being wiped out by extinction or being left behind by the singularity.
Nick Bostrom at Activate 09

  • Some options for humanity: extinction, plateau of development, recurrent development and collapse, or advancement to post-humanity
  • Most significant dents in human population have been caused by ‘bad germs or bad men’ all the biggest risks are anthopgenic (i.e. caused by humans) rather than natural
  • 99.99% of all species that ever lived are now extinct
  • The Toba eruption 75,000 years ago may have reduced the population to ~500 reproducing human females
  • A ‘rather arbitrary definition’ of post-humanity: population reaches > 1 trillion, life expectancy becomes > 500 years, near-total control over sensory input for majority of people most of the time, psychological suffering becomes rare, … or something comparably profound
  • Singularity: an artificial intelligence explosion which leaves mankind behind. Proposed by John Von Neuman in 1958, developed by IJ Good in 1965 and subsequently by Ray Kertviel et al

Ed Parson, Geospatial Technologist (’in-house geographer’ at Google) talked about mapping.

  • Ambient location finding, “the choice to know where we are”.
  • Our children will probably never know what it’s like to be lost. They will take this for granted. It’s no longer a big deal to know where you are.

Jon Udell, evangelist at Microsoft talked about an aggregation tool he’s been building at http://elmcity.cloudapp.net/ which shares local communiy events from eventful, upcoming etc, with links back to source.

Tom Steinberg, founder and director of mySociety threw away his talk about MPs expenses last night, and instead talked about new media vs old media: “this new media revolution is not the reolvution you’re looking for”

  • Joke: do you know the difference between the fall of the berlin wall and the twitter revolution in iran? The wall fell.
  • Amazon didn’t change the publishing industry by writing in industry journals about how the publishing industry could be better. It just starting doing things better.
  • What could change politics and society? 1 – the next generation of public servants could refuse to comply with current norms and conventions. 2 – or, radical change in computing which makes it harder to keep secrets. 3 – some sort of law that smuggles new ways of distributing and allocating power
  • Highly usable and simple credit card forms. (how did I buy that book? that was so easy! More people donating to obama because it was easy)

William Perrin, founder, Talk About Local talked about local campaigning using simple (and ‘unfashionable’) publishing tools

  • kingscrossenvironment.com gets 300 unique visitors per week, but considering it’s intended readership is one small part of london, it has the proportion as a national audience of 1M+. i.e. getting the same audience proportion as Newsnight in his community/ward.
  • Perfectly normal people publishing effectively using unfashionable technologies, which percolate out into wider society. More examples: Sheffield Forum, parwich.org, Digbeth is Good, Pits ‘n Pots.
  • Funding from C4 to train and support local community networks

Thomas Gensemer, managing partner and founder, Blue State Digital talked about how his agency ran Obama’s digital campaign:

  • How do you know you were effective? Because 80% of donations were raised by the online campaign
  • simplicity of giving, simplicity of volunteering
  • Blue State Digital previously worked on Ken Livingston’s mayoral election, and have worked with various trade unions, but contrary to some press reports, isn’t currently under contract for Labour
  • Ask yourself: if you had 100 of your supporters in the room, what would you ask them to do for you today? If you can’t answer that, forget about twitter, facebook etc
  • faking it is much worse than not doing it. Ted Kennedy isn’t on Twitter but it doesn’t mean he’s absent from online spaces. He participates in ways that are authentic and comfortable for him

Adam Afriyie, shadow minister for science and innovation on the role of technology in democracy, [and was the only speaker to read from a prepared speech]
Adam Afriyie at Activate 09

  • internet empowers citizens, raises expectations and reveals secrets
  • it’s not about whether you’re from the left or right, it’s about whether you ‘get it’ or you don’t
  • we need to meet expectations of transparency and connectedness without compromising privacy and security
  • conservative party has more friends on Facebook than labour and lib dems combined [useful metric?]
  • social media won’t clean up politics on its own.

Tom Watson, former minister for transformation

    Tom Watson at Activate 09

  • only 60% of government statistics are published [I'm not sure if this is a fact, an estimate or a joke]
  • civil servants who want to be on Facebook, Twitter etc at work should be able to be. It’s useful, and it shouldn’t be up to an IT or HR manager.
  • it is ‘totally unacceptable’ for the Ordnance Survey not to provide maps suitable for the digital economy
  • agrees with Adam Arfiyie that adoption and acceptance is a ‘generational issue’

Matt Webb, CEO, Schulze and Webb, as part of a panel, talked about design of digital and physical objects. [I always find Matt to be consistently quotable]

  • when my phone rings, it’s like a baby crying. I want my technology to be gossiping with me. I don’t want my washing machine to be a shitty flat-mate
  • we need to think about inviting products into out lives like inviting friends into our lives. Maybe our digital cameras are nosey. Maybe I have an abusive relationship with my email.
  • our consumption is out of proportion to our creation. This can start with putting on plays for friends and family, and knowing when our friends are around us so we can talk to them. I try to reinforce relationships with friends rather than meet stranger.

Charlie Leadbeater, founder, Participle / author, We Think / fellow, Nesta talked about African education and ‘learning from extremes
Charlie Leadbeater at Activate 09

  • we’ll learn more about the future of education not by going to where schools are, but where they aren’t
  • the biggest challenges will be in developing world cities. Cities with > 1m people, 86 in 1950, 550 in 2015
  • developing world says that Education (+ Technology) = Hope

Sugata Mitra, professor of educational technology, ECLS, Newcastle University talked about his hole in the wall experiments

  • children don’t need to be taught how to use it, or even the language: “you gave us a machine that worked in English, so we taught ourselves English”
  • clustering around a shared computer proves more effective than having a laptop each. Discussion and sharing key to learning. ’self organised mediation environments’
  • “I’ve put some interesting information which is in English and very hard in the computer. Will you look at it?” 2 months later, they’d looked at it every day, and claimed to have “understood nothing”, but when pressed admitted “apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we haven’t learnt anything”
  • children’s understanding of their own learning is different from our understanding of their learning

John Van Oudenaren, Director, World Digital Library Initiative, The Library of Congress talked about the World Digital Library though I failed to take more notes than that. The site looks interesting though.

Dr. R.K. Pachauri, chairman, IPCC & director general, TERI talked about the scary reality and significant risks of climate change. [and it turns out that it's worse than we thought, thanks to James for the link]

  • internet is estimated to represent 5% of world’s total electricity consumption (more than half of which comes from computers). ICT sector contributes 2.5% of greenhouse gases
  • energy efficiency and changes in users’ behaviour can reduce these numbers significantly
  • but ICT can have positive impact: remote sensing, information dissemination, …
  • Ghandi: speed is irrelevant if you’re going in the wrong direction

Bradley Horowitz, vice president of products, Google talked about
Bradley Horowitz at Activate 09

  • Google Apps is ‘NSA’ (Google-speak for ‘not search or ads’)
  • There is no master plan for the internet. It’s made up of billions of contributions. It’s a gestalt. It’s more like an ant colony than anything else
  • Ideas (or ‘memes’) are being selected for in natural selection. Great number of web 2.0 startups have not survived [see Meg's excellent post which illustrates this]
  • To double your success rate, double your failure rate” – Thomas Watson (IBM founder)
  • The importance of killing projects (the time wasn’t right for Google Lively) and protecting them (Wave team was ‘given free reign to develop a platypus’ outside the normal development constraints)

One of the interesting features of the day was having Twitter on-screen on the stage at various points during the day. Regular readers will know that I’ve long been fascinated by backchannels and how they’re used at live events. The tool the Guardian were using today (developed in-house?) and the way they were using it is probably the most mature and best example of using Twitter at a conference I’ve seen to date, for three reasons.

Firstly, it wasn’t using a totally automatic feed; it allowed for local moderation, i.e. the stream was curated, with spam, off-topic and overly negative or offensive content all weeded out. The aim was to publish everything that enhanced the conversation. Meg Pickard explained the approach: “Curation for public view applies a filter which helps signal v noise” because “open access publishing to public screen is a red rag to plenty of bull“.

Secondly, several Guardian staff were present in the room and on Twitter, informally ‘hosting’ the Twitter discussion by answering questions, re-tweeting key points and generally being interesting and interested participants.

Thirdly, the Twitter stream was not shown on-stage continuously, and was only switched to when the main screen wasn’t in use with another presentation. This worked very well, with the gaps between sessions and the during questions became the obvious and appropriate moments when the comments and observations from Twitter came to the fore for the people without open mobiles or laptops.

Twitter at Activate 09

This meant a totally open back-channel continued as normal on Twitter, while the appropriate stuff was also highlighted for the hallowed ground of the stage at the right times.

I didn’t ask which, if any, of the Guardian staff twitterers were doing it formally, and which were just volunteering and helping out because they were there and it felt like the right thing to do. Perhaps a bit of both? Either way, it all felt pretty natural and was very effective. Meg, Chris, Kevin, Simon (and probably others I’ve missed) were all able to answer questions and either provide or relay additional info from the room (nice example from Simon regarding when the video will be online).

Regardless of whether you think the culling of one particular negative comment was justified and sensible or just an overly knee-jerk and defensive moderation decision, the fact that Chris and Meg were willing and able to join the discussion undoubtedly stopped the issue from escalating and overtaking the backchannel, and I noticed that it was immediately appreciated too.

Overall, the use of Twitter was excellent, and has given me plenty of ideas. Most of all, I’d like their code. :-) Instant update: Chris says they’ll be open sourcing the Twitter code next week. Hurrah. Oh, and says it again in the comments below. Double hurrah.

More links:
Guardian Activate 09 [programme, speakers]
‘#activate09′ Twitter hashtag
‘activate09′ tag on Flickr
‘#activate09′ images via Twitcaps
my photos

Notes from C21 Social Media Forum

Posted by Roo - 22/06/09 at 08:06:18 pm

C21’s Social Media Forum said that the event would provide

a creative workshop that defines and develops how the producers channels and rights owners can work with social media platforms to develop business and extend creativity. And generate new revenue streams today!

Despite not being desperately bothered about generating new revenue streams,  I was sufficiently interested by the rest of the description to book a place. Of course, I wasn’t really expecting it to deliver on its promise of being a ‘creative workshop’, and it didn’t. The event was more of a traditional conference, with speakers and time-for-questions. Overall, it was quite useful though, especially the morning sessions. Here are selected notes from some of the more interesting slots:

Opening keynote: Building brands with social media, Ann Longley (Digital strategy director, Mediaedge:cia)

  • how do we use social media, and what it means.
  • “You’d have to be living under a rock not to notice Twitter these days”
  • “What’s happening in Iran shows the power of social media beyond entertainment|
  • “press coverage of Twitter signals the ‘mainstreaming’ of social media”
  • What is social media anyway? Quote from MEC Guide to Social Media – “all online activities, tools, platforms and practices that allow users to collaborate, create, …”
  • “Traditional broadcasting model is breaking down”
  • social media is dominated by UGC: creating, sharing and remixing content
  • campaigning – e.g. NUS vs HSCB, M&S bra size cost, 13k on FB. There’s no such thing as local news any more.
  • organising protests has never been easier
  • finding out what people are saying about your brands online: “Many brands have fans online, even without actively cultivating it. It happens naturally.”
  • “smart brands cultivate their fanbase”
  • “smart fans influence brands” (or at least, influence brands which listen)
  • (while brands can avert crises by listening (Sony Bravia defusing negative story around Paint advert by monitoring online before it turned into a problem)
  • “…and invite their customers to help them”
  • What makes a good social media strategy? At the heart of any campaign you need a good product or service. Examples: Obama – being everywhere, T-mobile – UGC, Skins – energising their fanbase, Sony Ericsson – pocketTV, Dell – going from Dell hell to Idea Storm
  • content, communities and conversations = conversion (to £ or eyeballs)
  • social entertainment: social media enriching experiences. creative industries engaging audiences across channels
  • some examples of Alternative Reality Games (“it’s kind of a geeky thing, seen as quite left-field and not compelling for a mainstream audience…”, but interesting anyway) – cited McDonalds’ The Lost Ring, Superstruct, Penguin’s We Tell Stories
    A Swarm of Angels….
  • earned media: word of mouth from friends and trusted people
  • Whuffie: in a post scarcity economy, reputation and social capital rule.

How to work with Joost to extend your entertainment brand, Henrik Werdelin (Chief creative officer, Joost)

  • people are increasingly consuming an audience online, but how do people find the stuff to watch?
  • social discovery is underdeveloped. The whole internet seems to be centered around Google and SEO
  • the web is bad at helping people find stuff they didn’t know they wanted to watch
  • new content discovery methods are algorithmic (amazon, joost, iplayer)
    and equivalent to zapping / channel-hopping (i.e stumbleupon)
  • “you should watch this show about pandas” vs “28 of your friends really love this show…” – Joost uses FB connect to help with this sort of social discovery
  • ‘ behaviour generated content’ AKA ’social triggers’: generating user content without having to do anything. e.g. FB activity feeds from status changes. Going from single to married used to be just a metadata change is now an item of activity in a feed. And an important one.
  • personalisation: subscriptions & data visualisation
  • realtime-web: co-watching. what are your friends doing right now?
  • 2% creators, 8% particpators, 90% lurkers/passive viewers. How do you move the 90 into the 8 and 2?
  • Paradox of Choice
  • Joost design based on ‘freedom from choice’, i.e. preventing people feeling overwhelmed.

Using online narrative and social media to drive commercial value, Andrew Piller (Fremantle Media)

  • new media strategy: recycle, extend and create
  • era of self-expression & the rise of the prosumer
  • audience is broader than you think (not just 16-24 year olds) and niche communities are valuable
  • rules for content: personalised, participatory and narrative (if there’s no story, how will the audience engage?)
  • ingredients: linear narrative (lean back mode), non linear (lean forward / real-time), interactivity, community
  • “all of our experiences are underpinned by community”
  • Freak (goes live July 20th.) is a Freemantle co-production with MySpace currently in production (story from Broadcast Now) is the first UK online drama from MySpace. “We’d never let the audience decide the story but how they get there, the everyday decisions, can be affected and influenced by the audience”.
  • Lead character is a girl gamer. Brand partners include P&G (Tampax) and Red Bull. Brand opportunities for music, fashion, games, …
  • producer from Coronation St, director from Hollyoaks, creative prod from serial drama, AP is very young, we have a community manager.
  • Brands want new ways to talk to their customer
  • Brands (think they) want community “but don’t know how to create it”
  • Q: where did the idea come from? A: In house creative team for d
  • Q: how do you work with other social networks? A: YouTube platform where you can view the content too, but the experience is bespoke to MySpace. In the dream world you’d hyper-syndicate and use it to drive back to MySpace.
  • Q: do you need MySpace? A: Brands are nervous about the space, so it’s easier if you have a distributor on-board. Industry needs a gamechanger to prove the model. Kate Modern & Lonely Girl were good examples, but the scale and production values were not there.
  • Q: how does the international model work? A: Not geo-blocked. We’ve cleared the rights internationally, but we’re not going to promote internationally. We think we can take the format to US market or European territories later.
  • Q: who owns the content and format? A: Intellectual Property is owned by Freemantle, but the UK series is co-owned by MySpace.
  • Q: is a TV series on the agenda? A: It’s not the on the agenda, but it’s talked about.

How Xbox used the social media space at E3, Maurice Wheeler (co-founder and planning director, Digital Outlook)

  • Microsoft asked us if we’d go out there and create a social media explosion around Xbox at E3. With 3 weeks notice. Gave us a view of what they’re presenting and announcing at E3.
  • we wanted to get the interesting info to social media power users / mavens / connectors
  • aggregation: wanted to focus people on our conversations. Listening to what people are saying. Consolidating to a stream of content which comes out of the social media cloud. “Sucking out the interesting and exciting content”. Feedback loop
  • providing content to a social media savvy audience in a way that they’re happy with an comfortable with
  • flew 5 influential gamer bloggers and 5 social media power users (including Charlie, to E3).
  • primary platforms: twitter, youtube, audioboo, kyte, flickr
  • secondary platforms: qik, 12 seconds, facebook, seesmic, bambuser, blip.tv, moblog, wordpress.com and many more
  • Q: how much of that would have happened without you? A: we can tell from the hashtag we used that we affected it [I'd agree. Just. Compare xboxe3 vs e3]
  • tips: create a #tag, have a distribution channel established, pick the right people, understand local technology constraints (e.g. make sure you’ve got wifi coverage), have a plan B, C and D

SXSW panel snippets – ‘EA Dead Space: A Deep Media Case Study’

Posted by Roo - 15/03/09 at 05:03:00 pm

Andrew Green (Online Marketing Manager, Electronic Arts)
Frank Rose (Contributing Editor, Wired Magazine)
Ian Schafer (CEO, Deep Focus)
Chuck Beaver (Senior Producer, Electronic Arts)
Ben Templesmith (Director, Singularity7)

Abstract: This in-depth case-study reveals the method and the madness behind Electronic Arts use of cross platform marketing to communicate separate, self-contained elements of the much anticipated release of their first survival horror game, Dead Space. For this release, EA packaged a comic book, a prequel DVD, and an online experience in order to build, create, and cultivate an audience around the Dead Space brand prior to the official ’street date’ launch.

  • Rose: We’ve had a century of linear storytelling, now the internet makes a new kind of narrative possible. Not just watch, but participate. Entertainment can be immersive. e.g. Battlestar Gallactica tells its story through TV, online video, multiple blogs, etc. EA has a new strategy, IP cubed, rich storylines that can be extended into other media, not just as spin-offs but as a core way of telling the story. Dead Space was the prototype. It’s an example of Deep Media.
    1. Comic book
    2. Animated feature
    3. ‘No known survivors‘ web experience
    4. The game itself
  • Green: Challenge – how do we build a community and build an audience around 500 years of back story? Content that also works as marketing. Each component should stand on its own. The marketing is the content.
  • Templesmith: 6 episodes make the comic valuable thing in its own right. It wasn’t perceived as pure marketing.
  • Q – Which element was most successful?
    A – (Green) The comic and the animated short. Website was deep and rewarding, but the comics made use of dissemination. easier to port & share content (youtube etc). Much wider viewership by creating value everywhere. Website, as linear narrative, is only going to give you so much benefit. Microsites are always inherently limited because they are a destination. If you have to drive people to a destination, it’s important that its coupled with content that allow it to be shared
  • “The content is the marketing” – someone in the audience thought that was ‘pretty insightful’. [Personally, it makes me concerned for people in marketing who don't think this way already.]
  • Shafer: in this case, the story was art. In other cases we can listen to the community, understand what they want and be nimble enough to change based on their input.. that will drive success in the long haul.
  • Q – How much resource does each component take? Can you do it without all the components.
    A – (Green) I don’t think you need any budget. You need a community platform with a passionate, creative centre. Give it to the community and allow them to participate and create around it, and maybe even help write it. It’s all about starting. Start building a community.
  • Q – Would you do the website again?
    A – (Green) Yes. From ROI perspective it was high. Also useful to get the analytics, which you wouldn’t get from offsite services.
  • Q – for the website, what were the biggest sources of traffic?
    A – Editorial mentions creating organic traffic. Getting on Kotaku and the link from Wikipedia.
  • Q – Does the website still get traffic?
    A – (Green) Yes. We still get 100-200k visitors from main website. 10k new visitors a week
    A – (Schafer) One fifth of the traffic to site has come after launch of game.
  • Q – How important is having premium downloadable content
    A – it’s become a consumer expectation.
  • Q – How hard is it to break new IP in games industry?
    A – it’s risky. That’s why EA has (up to now) built a career on licensed IP. Budget levels for new games are hard. It’s also a sequel business.

Rose’s thoughts on Dead Space as Deep Media can also be found in this post on his Deep Media blog.

SXSW panel snippets – ‘HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!’

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 09:03:00 pm

Merlin Mann (43 Folders, You Look Nice Today)
John Gruber (Daring Fireball)

Abstract: John Gruber (DaringFireball.net) and Merlin Mann (43Folders.com) discuss the current state of blogging as a medium for creative expression, weighing the opportunities and challenges of building a thoughtful online presence in a world where everybody owns a printing press. They’ll consider the ascendance of Digg-friendly “problogs” and debate the subtler pleasures of careful writing that reaches smaller, but potentially less “profitable” audiences.

Acknowledging the silliness of their title, Merlin and John did a great job of being entertaining whilst also being interesting and useful. Well worth listening to the podcast of this one, whenever it comes out.

Snippets:

  • Mann: Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’ talks about ‘the ideal reader’. Others call it ‘the first reader’. Have a picture in your head, the face in the monitor. Who are you writing for?
  • Mann: I think social media is important enough to take seriously. Social media is not about what you have to say, it’s about having the tolerance to cope with what people say to you. It’s a giant set of extremely sharp knives. You can use it for good or for ill.
  • Mann: How do you know you should start a blog? Because people keep telling you to shut up. You just won’t shut up about a subject. “You love the Cowboys so much? Either gay marry them, or start a blog”. It’s OK to have a strong voice about something. The opportunities are not through the ads, they’re through being awesome at what you do. Ancillary revenue streams and opportunities …
  • Gruber: human attention is valuable and limited. There’s nothing you can do to give yourself more attention in a day. “You can’t pay your rent with attention … but it has value. You’d be surprised at what you can do with it when it builds up.”
  • Mann: Don’t have a blog about star wars, have a blog about Jawas
    in fact, have a blog about that one Jawa who is only the scene for a minute. It’s going to be so much easier for you to dominate.
  • When writing, include not just what happened, but what does it mean, what do you think about it. There’s a ton of people who can tell you something happened.
  • Gruber: relating Mann’s tips for success:
    1. Give away more stuff than you think is sensible, and make it easy to get to.
    2. Focus on diverse rev streams and always be looking for new ones
    3. Don’t do stuff that seems profitable but potentially messes up the reasons people like you

Update: you can listen to the session on 43 Folders and read what John has to say about it too.

SXSW panel snippets – ‘Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?’

Posted by Roo - 14/03/09 at 04:03:00 pm

danah boyd (Researcher, Microsoft Research)
Judith Donath (MIT Media Laboratory)
Alice Marwick (PhD Candidate, New York University)
Siva Vaidhyanathan (Assoc Professor, University of Virginia)

Abstract: While many assert that “privacy is dead,” the complex ways in which people try to control access and visibility suggest that it’s just very confused. Rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water, let’s discuss people’s understanding and experiences of privacy and find ways to 2.0-ify it.

Some snippets from the four speakers:

Siva Vaidhyanathan

  • Writing a book: The Googlization of Everything
  • Myth: privacy is the opposite of publicity
  • Putting information about yourself on websites doesn’t mean you don’t care about what you don’t share. ‘Over-sharers’ still want control over how they’re represented
  • Myth: privacy is a substance that can be traded away. He’d been frustrated by recent “people are willing to trade a little bit of privacy for a better user experience” quote from Google, but this assumes it’s something you can trade in little bits
  • But: personal information is a form of currency

Alice Marwick

  • Need to recognise the value of sharing, but also that it’s useful to data miners
  • Information can be aggregated into valuable profiles
  • Microcelebrities are different to real celebrities because they know who is reading their blog etc, but there’s still a power inequality.

Judith Donath

  • Your history is to online as your body is to the physical-world
  • We’re largely unaware of the information companies hold on us.
  • Need to design spaces in a way that makes it obvious how much is public, and what is seen by whom
  • If we saw it we’d make more intelligent choices.
  • Your data trail is invisible to you. We need an every day experience of our data selves, in the same way a mirror provides a reflection of our physical self
  • Children don’t regard their home as private, because they don’t have control there

danah boyd

  • Information is currency not just in economic sense, but in social sense
  • We’ve gained a lot by sharing information about ourselves and our thoughts, but current design is not allowing us to negotiate control of context
  • See Jane Jacobs on surveillance – we invite a level of surveillance that is useful to us.

At this point, with about 10 minutes to go, I was becoming frustrated that it had not opened up for questions. I don’t think I was alone, because while Vaidhyanathan complained about the way that Facebook can “unliaterally change its policies” without having to act in a way that was accountable to its users people in the audience were desperate to join in the discussion, literally shouting “but they did!” from their seats. Finally, when questions from the floor were invites, Jeff Jarvis was straight up. Voicing what Tom Coates was obviously also thinking, Jeff said

“we have to see the positive here. there is economic widsom in giving us visibility and control over our data.”

and you should read Jeff’s post about the panel too.

I love Donath’s digital mirror concept. Also, I need to read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

PaperCamp

Posted by Roo - 24/01/09 at 07:01:18 pm

It’s been a whole week since PaperCamp (a fringe event to Jeremy, Russell and James‘ BookCamp) organised by Matt Jones.

Tagged: PaperCamp 09

I drifted between the two events (meaning I missed a couple of things, including Karsten Schmidt talking about fiducial marker generation and machine readable origami markers). I mostly stayed at PaperCamp though, so here’s a handful of what I did catch…

A very good time was had by all. I hear that a PaperCamp is happening in New York in a couple of weeks. Whatever you do, don’t miss it if you’re in NYC on 7th and 8th of February.

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