David Barrie

E-serendipity: Digital inclusion, social media and super-communicators

In super jargon, doomsday for the internet comes as cyberbalkanization - or fragmentation of people in to like-minded groups.

Hellfire then rages in the idea that the net discourages serendipitous encounters - accidental, involuntary, on-the-fly, human interplays that allow for take-your-breath-away, progressive, life-changing moments.

In the words of Harvard Professor Cass R.Sunstein in Going to Extremes:

In countless domains, the Internet produces a process of spontaneous creation of groups of like-minded types, fueling group polarization. People who would otherwise be loners, or isolated in their objections and concerns, congregate into social networks.

In other words, welcome to cyberspace, a place full of spaces to populate but with lines tricky to cross, much like the Kosovo/Serbian border. 

A passport to migration across digital territories is said to be collaboration between those online that tips in to large-scale community building: an activity flagged in a recent McKinsey paper as use of the internet that is neither mass content creation nor 'decision support'.

But a key barrier, as ever, is the fact that less than a quarter of the world's population are online. In the U.K., according to a presentation by Helen Milner, 23% of adults do not use the internet, 35% of households don't have access to the internet and 70% of people who live in supported housing aren't online.

But I'm confused.

Take Tiger Bay, or Butetown, an area in Wales that hosts the second poorest housing estate in the country.

36% of the area's 4500 residents live in council or assisted housing, 36% have no qualifications, a fifth of the population in 2001 were born outside of Europe and 62% of the children attending a local primary school receive extra support learning English. 

 
We have just carried out a survey for a project called Digital Butetown in to internet use by 11-19 yr old students who attend the most prominent secondary school in the area: Fitzalan High School.

Over 1300 people completed a simple survey and results were analyzed by Dr Kelly Page at Cardiff Business School.

Here are the headlines:

• 92% of students said that they can access the Internet/Net at home
• 46% use the web on average for up to one hour a day from home
• 46% use community access points, e.g. internet cafes and libraries
• 88% of respondents said they owned a mobile telephone
• 49% said that they sent over 50 SMS messages a month
• 55% said that they had taken a photo with their phone
• Favourite websites: YouTube, Friv and Google
• Favourite social network sites: MSN, Bebo, Facebook and MySpace

The results suggest some obvious things.

There's a generation of users at the most local level who are web-literate super-communicators.

Access to the internet is a limited measure of the digital divide.

And if sowing the seeds of experimentation is important to increasing the uptake of participation technology and polarization of opinion is a risk in the new online economy, it may reap dividends to hyper-target the young.

But then the challenges pull sharply in to focus.

Opportunities need to be easy to find, forward and act upon.

And how to channel online enthusiasm into specific, targeted activities that further an overall goal?

This stands to reason as one effective way forward for collectivized, non-polarized engagement - and was an important element in the success of the Obama campaign, according to a recent report by Edelman.

Some great first ideas on a forward process were raised at a workshop in Butetown last month. RSS-me to catch that update and join our Google Group for more. 

 

Images courtesy of ornithes, cabiria8, photojennic and Paul Corcoran.

Liberating the lone blogger: some resources

To quote the Canadian cyberspace maven Pierre Lévy in Collective Intelligence:

New communications systems should provide members of a community with the means to coordinate their interactions within the same virtual universe of knowledge. 

Yeah, right. So?

Well, if we buy in to this, and accept that the challenge of the net is to find ways and means to create a fully transparent market for ideas, arguments, projects, initiatives, expertise, and resources, we need to set to work not just on enabling people to get online but also finding ways and means to liberate and connect the lone bloggers - or people locked in the pleasure or pain of this flaming tomb:

 

There's amazing work going on in the UK just now devoted to encouraging people to win access to the net and 'connect the connected'.

The work is led by some key individuals like Will Perrin of Talk About Local, Helen Milner of UK Online Centres, David Wilcox of Social Reporter, Dominic Campbell of Future Gov and the team behind the social media handbook Social by Social, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts.

Initiative is fuelled by U.K. Government policy that's determined to broadband the nation, media organisations trying to realign themselves to "the people formerly known as the audience" and a bubble of evangelism for online social media.

But how to capture what Lévy called the potential of cyberspace to implement a form of computer-mediated civility?

How to connect the dots at the most local level - and for social good?

In the run-in to our online social media workshop in Butetown, Wales last week, a group of people shared examples of web-spaces that seek to liberate the lone blogger and aggregate content at the most local level.

Some were posted at the Digital Engagement website. Others at our Digital Butetown Google group. So I thought it useful to collect them in one place:

B13 - a site that aggregates information from blogs, feeds and other sources related to the suburb of Moseley in Birmingham, West Midlands.

Created in Birmingham - a site that links the city's creative communities online presence. 

Digbeth is Good - a blog looked after by Nicky Getgood who uses subscriptions and searches in her Google Reader and then feeds them into the blog via postalicious.

Hylocal News Wire - created by Jon Bounds, "a pipe I’ve created that attempts to marshal the content from hyperlocal blogging in Birmingham and allow people only to subscribe to feeds that interest them".

Kings Cross Pageflakes - created by Will Perrin that takes feeds from local websites and scrapes sites without RSS

The Londonist - a journalist-written blog whose breadth of source material speaks to the idea of aggregating a diversity of grass-roots content.

Vetnorblog and Pitsnpots (Stoke on Trent) which both aggregate some content and look and feel like replacements for local newspapers.

Planet Balham - a site that 'takes' feeds from a district of South London and its surrounding area. 

Everyblock - that combines photos, local government announcements, data and news items for 15 major U.S. cities.

Some of these sites speak to the idea of journalists as "community weavers" and the great American tradition of community media, digitally vitalized by initiatives such as the Knight Foundation's News Challenge.

But all establish and explore the value of aggregating content at the most local level and (potentially) look forward to a moment when, much like community partnerships in urban renewal, there may be an opportunity to network networks and create a local 'knowledge space'. 

The link between this work and social and economic renewal is now starting to be captured in a group called Local Communities.

We've started to see what we can capture in Butetown with a search on Addictomatic and search on Netvibes.

They don't collect much intelligence though. There's insufficient supply of locally-generated content and the platforms are controlled by outsiders. 

At our design workshop, we discussed a process by which Butetown might start to connect the dots and look to develop a 'hyperlocal' knowledge economy - something that I'll report back on soon but that also, critically, local net users need to decide to advance.

But in the meantime, power to the force that Lévy described as new proletarians, auxiliary workers devoted to effecting the mutual liberation of isolated thoughts.

Sources of first two images lost. Network mapping courtesy of netmaptoolbox. Digital Butetown is an initative supported by British Council Wales, igloo Regeneration and the British Telecom Group.

Clouds, platforms and the future of the planet (no less)

It's proving to be a Summer in which design gurus join up the dots - and it's fantastic!

First up was John Thackara who in a brilliant paper called Clean Growth for Design Innovation Scotland promoted the idea of enabling platforms as a way of mobilizing the masses.

In answer to the challenge of pulling people together in support of sustainability - and in part inspired (perhaps, maybe, dunno) by work we've done together - John urges an approach that starts with existing grassroots activity and then moves on

to creating frameworks that enable these actions to grow and develop. The concept of enabling platforms is key here. A variety of tools and techniques has been developed by global business in recent times that can be re-purposed for ultra-local use. These range from service design, to technologies of co-operation, and systems of resource allocation - ranging from people to water.



Next up comes the mighty Ezio Manzini, Profession of industrial design at Milan University, a pioneer of slow design who I've met just once and exchange emails with from time to time - but God, this man is inspiring!

In a new book on service design edited by Satu Miettinen and Mikko Koivisto, Ezio explores its role in an age of networks and sustainability - and forgive me, but it needs to be quoted in full:

The world is rich in potential resources. They are diffuse natural and social resources such as, for instance, solar energy and wind on the one side, and people's creativity and entrepreneurship, on the other.

Traditionally these resources were not considered, because the idea of economy of scale was blinding us, and we were unable to recognise their potentialities.

Today, we have learnt that, in the network society, things can be seen in a quite different way: diffuse resources can be valorised by distributed systems.

The Internet has made thinkable and practially feasible peer-to-peer organisational models that allow us to valorise diffuse knowledge and people's capabilities.

The result is that now we can see a solution in the richness of these diffuse resources, and most probably the only viable solution, to the current major problems of our Planet.

Wow!

But wow - to the power of two.

Why?

Because if you interleave these ideas alongside a definition of cloud computing by Luis Vaquero and recently cited in a paper by McKinsey, you start to see ways and means by which technology might support the delivery of a more sustainable tomorrow:

Clouds are a large pool of easily usable and accessible virtualized resources (such as hardware, development platforms and/or services). These resources can be dynamically reconfigured to adjust to a variable load (scale), allowing also for an optimum resource utilization. This pool of resources is typically exploited by a pay-per-use model in which guarantees are offered by the Infrastructure Provider by means of customised SLAs (service-level agreements).

Meaning: a radical and (perhaps) more sustainable idea of service provision is arriving and one which could have profound implications for certain industries, especially ones that have traditionally relied upon fixed assets - real esate for one. 

First image, source not known. Image of Manzini courtesy of Domus, anime dolls by Youngfook.

Digital Butetown: Building the community collective online

How can all of the excitement of sharing things on the Internet happen at the most local level?

How might online social media bridge communities and network local life in a collective way, much like an allotment site rather than a landscape of fenced private gardens?

Yes, there are community websites and local forums. Yes, applications like NetVibes. Yes, groups on Facebook. Yes, opportunities for networking via Ning.  And yes, lots of brilliant initiatives around the world that encourage digital activism, storytelling and new content creation.

But is there a process that can be rolled out over time locally that encompasses all of these things, brings them together, networks activity, pools interest, shares knowledge and could become a platform for collaborative local change in the future?  

These are some of the questions behind a digital design workshop that will take place in Butetown, Cardiff, in the Old Banking Hall, Bute Street,  July 24th 2009 (1000 - 1800hrs).

The workshop will pool the knowledge of people actively working on the development and application of social technology for social benefit.

It will be a practical session that maps existing online networks, matches them against offline communities and then comes up with a practical plan to implement what might be called - for a slightly hippy phrase - online community weaving. (with respect to June Holley and Network Weaving for inspiration). 

The event is being organised by Tom Beardshaw of Native Media, Jeremy Gould of Whitehall Webby and me. It follows research in to local internet use, analysed by Kelly Page of Cardiff Business School; and will be a backroom brainstorm in advance of an event in the Autumn which will invite local internet users to work with social media geeks to co-design a forward plan.

Butetown in Cardiff is home to 14,000 people and over forty-six different nationalities. It may be cash poor - but it is culturally super-rich.

There are many dynamic members of the community working together on renewal of the area and people keen to explore online media as a way of sharing information, experience and supporting local initiative.

Butetown has a Ning group, local people collect in Facebook groups, kids play games against each other online and there's busy file-sharing going on of music.

This is all great.

But the fragmentation of online social networking mirrors the fragmentation of real life - between new and old communities, diverse ethnic groups, communities of interest and different issues of concern.

If you believe in the power of communication and see the online space as a place that could be socially useful and productive, there's a job to be done to try and find a way to gather online activity effectively. 

And if you believe that a key to the future of public management is online public involvement, the digital space in a place like Butetown needs to be supported in such a way as to be ready and able to contribute to the social and economic planning of the area.

Please join our Google Group. Tell us there if you are interested in contributing to the event on 24th July. And look out for the hash-tag #digitalbutetown.

Digital Butetown is a British Council Wales project and part of a larger, pan-European initiative called OPENCities. And it is supported by igloo Regeneration, an investment fund managed by Aviva and described by the United Nations as "the world's first socially responsible property fund".

Street images of Butetown courtesy of  Paul Corcoran and Walt Jabsco.

digitalbutetown

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An Architecture of Hope

Over the last few months, I've fallen in love(ish) with fashion website Chictopia and been lurking at networked fashion blogs like Devote.se.

These sites are brilliant.

Because whatever their commercial imperative and however cynical their wiring, these places are personal, bright and fun - and they network people and their passions smartly.  

I've picked up on the value of all of this in an article in this month's edition of design magazine Volume.

With a nod in the direction of the epic, the edition is subtitled Architecture of Hope.

In the magazine, I'm not confessing to a fetish for liquid leggings or multi-colored Heelys shoes - you'll be pleased to know - but sharing some first ideas on ways to capture and link the energy, commitment, enthusiasm and speed we invest in online social media to cities, their development and expression.  

Why bother? Because if you take a look around, you'll see cities full of extraordinary human diversity and energy turned in to identikit latte landscapes that are planned monotone or badged inert.

I've designed and am now starting to run two online social media initiatives in Russia (Moscow) and Wales (Cardiff) that try to link and apply the energy and brightness of one to the other. 

In Volume, I've set out the project in Wales, a nine-stage Road to Damascus in which

a multicultural community is not bounded by walls and windows.

It's a project that tries to engineer a process that allows for

improved flows and exchanges of experiences between people and existing groups and seeks to establish a platform for growth by supporting distributed activity and innovation. 

Here are some sketch steps in the project plan:

• research current use of online networks by local people on the net and mobile telephones
• identify sources of local knowledge on different aspects of the area's way of life, such as its environment, sports or shopping
• provide these people with training in writing and editing blogs and wikis
• create a homepage for the area that takes feeds from diverse digital content sources, such as personal blogs, photo blogs and micro-blogs
• encourage knowledge sources to upload and share what they know online
• share this web space with others and allow them to add to or edit its resources
• over time, re-position the site as a space to prioritize local issues and collaboratively action plan
• offer local government the services of this platform and its community to create strategies for the future public management of the area

Arjen Oosterman writes in his introduction to Volume 19 that:

The inclination to see the current crisis as merely passing and the tendency to say "take cover, then we can get on with it" is great. Yet every day makes is less likely that this will be sufficient.

Arjen suggests that one answer is to advance contemporary practices of communication development.

He's right.

Advancing communication development in cities is a precondition to enabling a new architecture of hope.

Images courtesy of crazybeautiful and VanityMale at Chictopia, "the people's fashion destination".

Participatory culture, Twitter and a loading gun

 

I once spent a lot of time with a senior officer in the British army who served in the Falklands War. In the heat of The Battle for Goose Green, with his commander dying of wounds, a bullet came the way of this second-in-command. In his pocket was a book by the 20th century desert mystic Carlo Carretto. He claimed it "took the bullet" - and saved his life.

Now I don't want to be over-dramatic but last week three very annoying people were collected together in the London Sunday Times to have a go at the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Psychologists Oliver James, Dr David Lewis and writer Alain de Botton said that Twitter-ers are folks suffering from a lack of identity, narcissism and the service functions, according to Alain as

a way of making sure you are permanently connected to somebody and somebody is permanently connected to you, proving that you are alive. 

Two things come to mind: "No shit, Sherlock" and "Dear Waterstones the Booksellers, please close your branch in Hampstead High Street and give these chaps something else to worry about."

However, there is a bigger point.

As the U.K. Government starts to exact a price for bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland and the United States Government deals with a request for $21bn of additional financial support for the motor industry, the role and relationship of the state to not just the banking sector but all aspects of daily life is changing.

In England, disquiet in the ranks of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party push on localism suggests that debate over the purpose of the state has begun.

In the process of re-aligning the deck chairs, a new form of 'command and control' industrial economics and public management is taking shape.

Combined with the rent-a-quote where-am-I-in-the-bestsellers-list clever-dickery of James, Lewis and de Botton, there's a danger that the networked devolution of power that's been celebrated over the last few years and caught the attention of public managers across the world gets rubbed out.

So it may be worth just to remember what's gone on over the last decade to embed the idea that aggregation of human expression, purpose and intent is a valuable foundation for social, economic and political progress:

The rise of partnership working, public-private partnerships and local asset-backed vehicles in urban renewal has established an ethos of collaborative working.

Privatization and outsourcing of public services, the rise of ‘joined-up’ government, consumer choice and technological innovation has shifted hierarchical organisation of government to more networked forms of public management.

The rise of ‘place’ as an organizing principle of local government and city planning now acknowledges that the built environment is more than just the organisation of the interests of land-owners and users but a web of experiences and physical, social, cultural and financial relationships.

Government emphasis on citizen participation, the Third Sector, democratic governance and inclusive economics has set on record the role of the community in the provision of public services.

Social and cultural entrepreneurs have become an increasingly important part of urban development, alongside landowners, speculators, planners and architects; bringing to economic development a new cast of characters who have an acute, populist mindset and combine skills in entrepreneurship, thought leadership, stakeholder management and project delivery.

The rise of Web 2.0 and online entertainment platforms have revealed a consumer appetite for informal, purposeful and semi-visible public networks.

The increasing use of co-design as a method for originating and developing ideas – from creating a new park to the development of open source software – has revealed an understanding of the opportunity and value of sharing emotional, as well as intellectual property.

Popular participation in voting for performers on television by telephone and text messaging has revealed that people like to engage with and not just consume products and services.

And popular take-up of Crazy Frog and online ‘widgets’ mark an appetite for viral advertising and the power of marketing by word of mouth. 

Now I am not going to write this list down and tuck it in to my shirt to absorb forthcoming bullets.

But if you - like me - are committed to advancing participatory culture and helping government and the private sector enter an age of social sustainability and interactivity, it might be worth you drawing up your own list and keeping it to hand.

Or keep a close watch on what's going on - and decide whether to bin all of this as history.

Mickey Mouse pictures courtesy of Rey Misterio.

Digital inclusion, social inclusion and thinking outside of the bubble

Over at the Policy and Performance blog of the U.K. Government think-tank IDEA, Ingrid Koehler is brilliantly pursuing the opportunities digital media offers government.  

In a recent post, Ingrid asks a crucial question linked to the Government's recent report on Digital Britain and countless initiatives - including Digital Mentor - that seek to apply social media to the delivery of public services:  

Does digital inclusion mean social inclusion?...If you give people the tools and build the infrastructure for digital engagement, will they just engage?

One answer has to be: it depends on what the infrastructure is - and who designs it.

A Call to Farms is one of the best books I've read so far this year.

It's a series of essays linked to a journey that a group of people took in 2008 through Illinois and Wisconsin in search of the Radical Midwest: places, people, community groups, artists, social activists who offer alternatives to "business as usual" in the land of corn and greed. (You'll find the project blog here; and the Midwest Draft Flickr pool here.)

In the book, Chicago-based photographer and artist Claire Pentecost opens one of her essays saying

I live in a laptop, I live in the Internet, I live in airplanes and airports, I live in my library, in radio broadcasts, I live in my camera and often in other people's cameras.

In a sentence, she expresses the immersion but also the 'penthouse and pavement' glitz-funk of the "digital revolution".

Pentecost then goes on to think about why the news media might lead government officials to roll out terror prevention programmes in ways more informed by the antics of Jack Bauer in 24 than lofty ideas of constitutional justice:  

People in power operate in a selective and sensational media world, a spectral bubble where they cannot feel the consequences of their own acts.

Wow!

This makes me think...

Digital inclusion may enable social inclusion - but who's setting the terms?

Is 'digital inclusion' simply about extending the availability of 'tools' that allow people to create the tight, self-referential networks that the media-savvy now have - and love?

And how 'inclusive' will these new networks be if there's little dialogue between them and no-one gives a toss about life outside of their, er, bubble?

No one doubts the value, joy and urgent need to extend the 'digital franchise'.

But is there a social responsibility dimension to issuing new equity that needs a bit of thought?

Because I assume that the last thing people want is trillions and trillions of new bits of inconsequential, closed communication.  

Bubble image courtesy of Jeff Kubina.

1 small lesson for organisations about supporting network innovation

Two organisations in the U.K. - the Royal Society of Arts and NESTA - are carrying out research in to how people can innovate in networks, rather than either on their own or simply with the person the other side of the waste basket.

In another part of the park, J.D. Stanley at Cisco has been working hard for several years on Digital Swarming: or how to combine inputs from people, machines and other data sources, digitize them and place them on to networks. 

All of this work falls in to the category of trying to understand how people can create, collaborate and share new ideas across dispersed places and spaces.

It's exciting, important and without a doubt what matters in a world in which the connectedness of people, information and technology is all-pervasive. But is there something missing?

Sometimes, animals don't relate but share stuff and copy one another.

At other times, states or experiences change by accident or projection.

In other words, some relationships form on the basis of what writer and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry once called sympathetic vibration and saw in the behaviour of a violin:

The A string of a violin is designed to vibrate most readily at about 440 vibrations per second: the note A. If that same note is played loudly not on the violin but near it, the A string may hum in sympathy.

Put another way, what may matter in networked innovation is not just mechanics or structure, but also tone - a tone that's set not just by trust but also momentum, and the design of a stage upon which people feel able and want to perform.

Image of Eliasson installation courtesy of Anna Maria Leon, horses by grandylion, window reflection by lux fecit.

Moscow, Nokia and harnessing the power of citizen participation

I've been in Moscow the last few days, designing a project that seeks to foster a spirit of social enterprise and help the city become a better, positive and even more appealing place.

A scary peak of the visit was a lecture to an audience of 400 courtesy of the Center of Contemporary Architecture. You can find it here.

It's up to Moscovites to decide whether their city is enterprising or appealing enough.

And up to the Government to decide on the role of social enterprise in its new commitment to human capital and innovation.

What I know is that I met an astonishing cast of people who'd turned old factories in to arts centers, created successful internet start-ups, busy welfare organizations, dance companies and creative schools.

All of these people have pursued their dreams and aspirations, acquired specific knowledge of a specific field, turned it in to either a job or way of life and created their own unique micro-climate.

In Silicon Valley, 9000 kilometers away, the head of Nokia's research center, according to reports in the Financial Times, is working on ways in which the mobile telephone can tackle the problem of forecasting the weather.

It's unparalleled in history that we now have this distributed computing platform - 3.3bn mobile citizens worldwide.

The challenge for scientist Henry Tirri is to find a way to capitalize on the possibility of humans, equipped with phones that carry a battery of sensors to relay changes in physical conditions over a wide area.

The challenge is in part expressed by the change in the weather you might experience on a 60-mile road trip from Marin County to the depths of Silicon Valley:

There are 186 micro-climates from Sausalito to San Jose.

And Nokia's first move is the Mobile Millennium project - an initiative that aims to recruit up to 10,000 motorists in the San Francisco Bay area to report on traffic conditions via GPS chips in phones.

Moscow. Silicon Valley. Mobile phones. The head-teacher of an innovative school. What's the connection?

It's simple: but the answer is only available if you engage with another two questions...annoyingly!

How to tap and pool the knowledge of the dispersed entrepreneurs of Moscow and use that experience and understanding to enable others in the City to follow their own interests and passions?

How to aggregate intent, map the micro-climates and change the weather?

One answer has to be to create third-party events and devices to pool knowledge and strengthen weak social, economic and cultural ties.

But another is to recognize that the entrepreneurs in Moscow, like the folks on their phones cruising the Bay Area, are all data-gatherers. 

Both are harbors of knowledge.

And in every move they make they are gathering information and experiences that in aggregate could be of value.

Throughout the world, public authorities are inventing or using 'vehicles' for assembling and extracting value from land assets.

They take the form of public-private partnerships, 'special purpose delivery vehicles' or the opportunity every four years to host the Olympics. 

What vehicles could we create to maximize and capture the value of social and creative assets?

In the field of city development, how can we create public-private partnerships or renewal corporations that are about assembling people, ideas and enterprise, as well as land and structured finance?