Yesterday, was quite an amazing day for me. Lunch with Livio and Lee @ Headshift was stimulating enough, discussions about the No Straight Line project, the implications of open source, networked automotive engineering – (here) and (here) and the wider implications of the networked society and economy on; how we work, and how SME’s could harness the true potential of the networked society to be truly successful.

Then back off home to have a round table discussion on the Cambridge Creative Economy Initiative. The discussion centered around bringing together a creative multi-disciplinary approach to stimulate economic regeneration. It was wide ranging and far reaching.

Anne Miller, who I enjoyed jamming with last night sent through a link to Theo Jansen’s work. Jansen’s work explores ideas through engineering. Jansen enables us to look at new possibilities, new solutions, new approaches to some of the issues we face. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in looking upon the world with fresh eyes, said Marcel Proust.

These moving skeletal structures, poetic, startling, disconcerting, are without doubt – transfixing. This film made by BMW, provides a very eloquent description of Jansen’s view of the world. It won’t persuade me to buy a BMW – but I thank them for financing a wonderful insight onto one mans mind. I think I shall have this as a great example of non-linear thinking.

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds – for me this is a bigger, more powerful metaphor – as Lee and Livio and indeed Anne Miller agreed we have reached the end of the industrial society, that presents us with unique and equally challenging problems. The imperative to create economics a-fresh, and provide a new way of working is vitally important. In addition, the ability to adapt to a world that is both hyper-local and super-global at the same time – necessary.

Here’s mine

Marie Curie was the author of that sound bite

It appealed to me

Especially when I think what could have happened if more work had gone into trying to understand the evolution of our recent past whilst it was still the future.

Insightful, visionary, implicit knowledge articulated as a piece of poetry.

Johnny Moore nice one.

I think this is in response to the recent Ofcom report

In the Craftsman by Richard Sennett, he points us to the philosopher Pico della Mirandola, who envisaged Homo Faber to mean “man as his own maker.” Richard Lester and Michael Piore describe the process of (meaningful) as communication as

Fluid, context-dependent, undetermined

Which also links into a Stowe Boyd post

1. People in a Web 2.0 network are not uniformly connected; some have more connections than others
2. Connections have directions; the number of inbound connections may far exceed the number of outbound connections, creating an asymmetric environment
3. This is particularly true of “default-public” networks such as Twitter; Flickr is also likely to evince similar behaviour.

What blogs and connected communities do via the mobile or the internet, or, both is to make available to us, the ability to publish, listen, share, scrape, respond, and, break the hegomony of media and political control – the trend is bigger and more systemic than many realise.

In the great cashcow in the sky, I mused that

the future is about Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. You can’t separate these anymore, without failing commercially. Any media that only has one way broadcast as its business model is going to find it harder and harder to survive.

You might argue that many newspapers have shied away from having a meaningful digital strategy, and have skirted the moral implications of journalism and what this means in this new more permeable and connected world. So its no wonder that the German newspaper Bild is offering a digital camera to potential citizen journalists, who Bild hopes will contribute images to its coverage.

The pocket-sized camera has 2GB of memory, can shoot still pictures and video, and costs €69.99 (£60). It comes with software and a USB port that allows “reader-reporters” to upload content directly to editors who will be assigned to review it for publication.

The Guardian reports that Vancouver-based NowPublic.com gathers photographs, video clips and news tips from the public and distributes them to news organisations. The trend is likely to continue as traditional news providers scramble to match the migration of readers and advertisers to the internet.

Of course the ever present comments on lowering of standards – that accompany citizen journalism, are not far behind. My only comment to that is go and have a look at Current TV or Flickr or iPhoto.

In Propublica versus the grocers, I wrote

Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News excoriates the owners of newspapers (describing them as Grocers) because their interest its not about community, its not about quality journalism is about one thing and one thing only – MONEY – PROFIT AND SHAREHOLDER RETURN. And that’s all well and good until the quality of the product is so inferior it devalues itself. This is life in a news factory says Davies whilst writing about one journalists experience of working for a local news paper. These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism. This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it.

A final thought, we do live in a world described as being; more connected, more flexible, more permeable, and the people formerly known as the audience have become the media.

We have done a great job in seperating commerce from community, stripping away the glue that binds us together in meaningful ways. In Medieval times village life was described has having high participation levels, but low skill levels. Hence eveyone became part of co-creating the experience, of co-creating the value, they reinforced the bonds of community and belonging. People embrace what they create.

I see no difference here in what citizen journalism offers. The Craftsman is a citizen journalist who can speak the truth to power.

Finally, closed knowledge systems have tended to have short life spans

A great post on Barack’s campaign for the presidency which compliments some posts I have written

Since the dawn of mass media, the most obvious activity of political campaigns — especially presidential ones — has been image-making. You paint a flattering portrait of your candidate and an unflattering one of his or her opponent. In the 2008 presidential campaign “cycle” (as the professionals call it), the candidate with the best paint job so far (as of mid-August, when I’m writing this) has been Barack Obama. In “What Obama Can Teach You About Millenial Marketing” Advertising Age says ,…the unabashed embrace of select brands by millennials, from technology to beverages to fashion, has made this decade a true golden era of marketing for those who know what they’re doing. And “…when it comes to marketing, the Barack Obama campaign knows what it’s doing. Mr. Obama’s brand management, unprecedented in presidential politics, shows pitch-perfect understanding of the keys to appealing to the youngest voters…His success, it seems, is a result of both product and the branding behind it.”

Reading this I am reminded of Isaac Asimov’s distinction (in Second Foundation) between “the answer that satisfied” and “the answer that was true”. Because much of the Obama campaign’s success so far isn’t about branding, demographics, or even politics as we’ve known it for too long. It’s about using technology to make democracy work.

Reflect on this sentiment “The 19th century co-operative movements had their roots in people pooling resources to make, buy or distribute physical goods. Modern online communities are the new co-operatives.” And as Woodrow Wilson famously said, “The highest and best form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of free people.” A company called Blue State, is highlighted in the article which is well worth quoting at some length. This is as I have described over the years as a evolving socio-media ecology, or what as Manuel Castells describes as a Networked Society. Castells argument is this; our world is created within the “space of flows” – flows of people, capital, information, technology, images, sounds and symbols. And I argue that as a consequence we need a new logic and common sense to describe this world, because it is not built upon the same principals and logic of an industrial straight line world. We need a new philosophy and language, otherwise we keep making the same mistakes and will not build for the long view. For example…

Almost all of our tools put user interaction and user creation first. Take events management systems. In the past they were made so an organization could post its official calendar online. We said that’s great but not nearly as interesting as letting your supporters create their own calendars. So we created tools where the first priority was to make it easy for somebody coming onto the website to host a house party, or to arrange to pick up litter alongside a highway while wearing t-shirts for their organization: everything from the mundane to the innovative. We wanted to make it easy to create an event, schedule it, make it searchable, handle RSVPs, and for people to do their own fund-raising.

The two services we use most in the context of events are Google and Yahoo’s mapping and geocoding APIs. We’ll geocode your address with lon/lat, and use that to place nearby events.

We have lots of databases of other geographical information. For example, the lon/lat center of a Zip+4. Congressional districts for zip codes, census information, census tract, block numbers… If you’re just filling out a sign-up form, we don’t require you to put in everything. If you donate later, we can get your address then if you don’t want to give it at first.

The stack is LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. On the back end we use lots of open source libraries and tool kits. We use YUI, and Ext, which are javascript UI libraries. One of our developers is the creator of the Horde project, which is a big open source PHP framework.

We don’t like to re-invent wheels. So, for example, we don’t write our own database connection library. We’re using ADOdb, which is one of the more popular ones for PHP, and python as well. We use PEAR, which is PHP’s library of tools and utilities. We use PEAR modules for everything from sending email to doing caching… We use things like memcached. We use open source monitoring tools.

We use RSS all over the place: events, blogs… we use it to link parts of our own system internally, say to share information between two different client systems, or between two parts of our system. Wherever possible we try to build those interface points around accepted standards for interchange. If they need to be opened up, or if the client wants direct access to them, we say “go ahead and use whatever RSS library you have”.

If we’re working with a tool and add a significant feature to it, or fix a bug, we of course share that with developers and the project.

The front end, however, is all stuff that we’ve purpose — built for political and nonprofit organizations — or anybody that wants to engage membership with a bigger goal in mind.

And a recent post on Barack’s online activities

This disproportionality has been tested to destruction by the recent
hysteria of City incomes. The result is that, after a decade of
widening wealth differentials, they should start to narrow.
Non-economic components of what we vaguely refer to as the good life
will take more prominence. The hedge-fund speculator will learn, with
Voltaire, that it is best to cultivate one's garden. This will surely
be a good thing.

Economists will move away from their failed models to study human history and behaviour. Britain might inch up the University of Michigan's world happiness survey from its present miserable ranking of 21st, below Mexico and the US.

Read more here

We might even see a resurgence of the "happiness" movement of the early
1970s; of Schumacher's "small is beautiful" economic theory. We might
find a new appreciation for the king of Bhutan's edict on the
importance of "gross national happiness", and for John Ralston Saul's
remark that the American mission of "life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness" was nothing to do with money. Saul called for a more subtle
understanding of contentment, "to escape the 20th-century idea that you
should smile because you're at Disneyland".

Here's to hope

I do say that Americans have looked long and hard at the candidates
this past month and are now minded to conclude, in the fine phrase used
by Garrison Keillor of a speech he heard the young Kennedy give long
ago, that Obama just has more keys on his piano than the other guy.

Writes John Kettle

I agree with Kettle – McCain looked out of depth, and out of ammunition in the presidential debate, oh and my other fave comment

 His name is Joe Wurzelburger," McCain said, getting his Wurzelbachers in a twist.

No doctor I said, prick his boil!

By mentioning him more than 13 times in the first 10 minutes of
Wednesday night's third and final presidential debate, the Republican
candidate, John McCain, sent Wurzelbacher into a media stratosphere the
likes of which most publicity-starved brands can only dream of. Groups
sprang up on Facebook with names like Joe the Plumber for President and
Fans of Joe the Plumber.

Or is that Wurzelburger?

Right now I am reading Jeffrey Sachs – Commonwealth. Economics for a crowded planet

Fascinating – and sitting at the kitchen table tonight I reflected on a quote by Jared Diamond in Collapse

Human societies and smaller groups may make disastrous decisions for a whole sequence of reasons: failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceive, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

 This quote is mentioned in Commonwealth – and I thought I would use it in the context of what is challenging so many businesses today.

So much has happened in the last 3 years- you can't fart without the word social network or social media coming out. Or dare I say engagement. Though the trouble is when reflecting on Jared's quote is the quality of the response. Just look at the banking crisis a systemic failure.

So in terms of marketing and business, if we can accept that we now live in a "pull economy" – a world of all information tagged and described in a miscellaneous soup of the long tail, a world of widgets and networked distribution, why are we still trying to shoehorn to the old way of doing, making and selling stuff in the old way.

But as Diamond wrote…

failure to anticipate a problem, failure to perceive it once it has
arisen, failure to attempt to solve it after it has been perceive, and
failure to succeed in attempts to solve it.

He writes

Throughout the modern age we have subordinated the interests of people to those of technology, an approach that has led to the unthinkable destruction of traditional cultures and the undermining of forms of life that we judges once, to be backward… we believed that the assembly line and standardization would make the world a better place, yet along with efficiency came a dehumanization of work.

Barbara Ehrenreich in Dancing in the Streets writes

The loss to ordinary people of so many recreations and festivities is simply incalcuable

She argues that festival is not made for the people but by the people, and that in fact we poured ourselves with great passion and energy into the planning of festivities – festivity she argues is a social good worth fighting for.

But what on earth has festivity got to do with Social Networking? or the world of We Media – simple if we pause to think about it.

The laws of the growth of digital communities and social networks are about self-organisation, grass roots and participation – where we derive personal and collective joy – in a variety of ways.

Yesterday I was at MoMo in New York to hear a panelist pronounce that Facebook had captured the “social networking space” with one or two others – As in job done. Christ, no wonder people are struggling to find models to monetise in this space.

This is what really gets me – such a frenzy around social networks yet few really seem to have taken the trouble to really understand what underpins all this activity?

People are social animals with an innate need to connect and collaborate – the mass media, and the mass society does not accommodate these principal needs. The logic and philosophy is different. Shoehorning a mass media approach into such a different ecology just wont work.

And yet again social networks will be monetised via advertising $$$ – well no.

Its a hybrid model – where successful markets are created out of knowledge and information exchange, commerce and entertainment and so it has always been thus.

The repression of festivity, or the notion of collective joy is a byproduct of a calvinistic approach to capitalism, we defer gratification for discipline. Which means – people are using the digital environment to get back to some of that good shit – doing stuff that makes them happy, makes them feel they are in control and and contributing to a process.

Thackara argues that understanding why things change – and reflecting on how they should change are not separate issues.