Reflections on and wishes for the New Year - with a little help from the 60's ....

It has been an excellent Holiday break, and I hope you have all also had a great time with family and friends. Like many of you, I am sure, I was lucky enough to get some time on things that I do not usually get around to - mainly artwork and photography - and I set myself the project of creating a gallery of "good stuff".

I've been a long time user of flickr (images here) but only fairly recently found RedBubble. This site is an interesting mixture of art, writing and design - all to a high standard - and, like the best social network sites, it is very well self-policed. People politely ignore your junk, and if you don't stick to "RedBubble etiquette", well ....

So, as I was wondering about a New Year's message before returning to daily work, I was also organizing an online art gallery. And I found some inspiration from the 60's. I used to paint a lot - but one image came to the top of my mind, for which I had also written a companion poem. Both are a bit "of their time" so please indulge me, but the sentiments seem to sit perfectly well today.

In the 60’s, everything was possible: colour was everywhere, music and the arts were being re-invented daily, there was a little money in the pocket, education was opening up, civil rights came of age ... and things always smelt good. Yet politics was rubbish, and the world was on edge. Society was changed for ever by people who never realised what was impossible, who never wanted to fight, who just hoped to make things better and help everyone have a good time.

My wife and I both feel very optimistic about 2010, and this weekend's remarkable "blue moon" boosts that positive feeling. Still, it seems to me that a little extra "60's spirit" could help us all through this New Year.

So, with that in mind, here's the painting, the poem and the sentiments .... and on to a brilliant 2010.

-----------------------------------------

Walking with my girl

I see the scent of sawdust,
Moist with coloured inks.
I feel the fog and the trees
Singing in unison.
I taste the thunder of Heaven,
And paint the thoughts of flowers.
I hear the music of peppermint
And the melody of darkness.
I smell the sweet spray of contentment
And the voices of friendships.
But within all of these,
I sense the presence of God.

-----------------------------------------

Original artwork and poem are here, on RedBubble

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Seasons Greetings - and thoughts on twitter, Glastonbury, music and all that

Earlier this year, a group of people whose common interest was the Glastonbury Festival decided to meet the day the Festival started, last June. I don't think anyone had actually met before. It all started with casual chat on twitter about who had tickets, and what people wanted to see. In any event, thanks to @glastowatch, and a website called #twitterbury, about 75 people met at Brother's Bar, Jazz World. The event was hash tagged #twisto.

People from all walks of life (and ages) met. Cider was consumed, pictures were taken, and a good time was had by all. So much so that a small movement started - #twisto in London a couple of times, and then #twistosw (which revolved around a gig by The Bluetones in Taunton on December 10th). Oh, I should also add that the the Chicken Lady came with a mascot - a plastic chicken from China now called gregorypeck - who has featured on the web, twitter and even on t-shirts. He clearly has a great career ahead of him ...

And now, as 2010 approaches, other #twistos are being planned ... with the big event of course being at Glastonbury again.

I did blog about twitter earlier in the year - how people use it, why the idea will stick around. But why blog again? There are a few points that the #twisto experience underlines:

• First, the power of self-organization. An idea was born, people gravitated towards it, various folks stepped in to do things - and it just happened. It would not have happened without @glastowatch and a few others, but everyone got involved. No one made money, but all had fun. The rules were very simple, and evolved through discussion - even the hash tags were "voted on".
• Second, the power of music. That is what broke through all of the barriers - interests, ages, work etc etc. Not everyone likes the same music (just witness the good humoured debate raging as to whether to watch U2 on the Pyramid Stage in 2010 at Glastonbury - as many are for as are against;-). But everyone likes some kind of music. And, importantly, Glastonbury is one of the more eclectic Festivals, so it was a fertile base-camp for the whole adventure.
• Third, new technology. Would any of this been possible without social networks? I doubt it. I've been online for longer than I care to remember, from the good old days before bulletin boards - and certainly before mobile phones. But now we are all connected all of the time. I've been glancing through the ways people connect - via the web, iPhone, Blackberry, Tweetdeck, Mac, PC, Linux etc - at any time, from anywhere. And we get to choose - no-one tells anyone when or how to connect. And you can ignore what you like.
• Fourth, old-fashioned respect. On twitter, almost everyone is respectful of others. Some people are quite serious, some like to have a collective laugh. Questions are asked, help given, links suggested. Friendships form, debates are had. Just witness the impact of twitter lists, and directories such as Tweetdeck's, where common interests abound. The group is self policing - and no-one wants to get ejected (remember the old "kick" command in IRC?). But I think it is more than the fear of rejection - it is the desire to belong.

You've probably read these thoughts before, but as a pre-Christmas reflection I think that #twisto is a brilliant example which illustrates these ideas in action.

Anyway, to continue to carry the #twisto banner, let me just wish everyone Seasons' Greetings, and the very best for 2010.

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Google Wave - Replacing e-mail? Challenges ahead?

From Bits, Bytes and Archives, by mopennock ...

"I’m lucky enough to have received an invitation to Google’s new communications & collaboration tool – Google Wave. Having previously avoided much of the hype, I’ve now found myself immersed in all things Wave – and, by default, all things Google. My Wave experience has so far been a fascinating (if a bit premature, because it really is very early days for Wave) glimpse into the future. It has the potential to be a *really* useful tool, significantly changing the way we communicate and collaborate electronically. And, if it takes off in the way Google expect it to – and at the moment I see no reason why it won’t – then it will also have significant implications for digital archives and archivists.

But first, a bit more about Google Wave itself, based on what I’ve read and experienced so far. You may be wondering, what is Google Wave, exactly? The best way I can describe it at the moment is as a communications hub. And it’s a communications hub that is still very much in an alpha release stage, but which has been made available to a small set of people for testing, criticism, and development – thus my earlier comment about it being a bit premature. Because it’s still in the early stages of development, functionality is limited and much of the conversation about Wave focuses around what it may be capable of supporting in the future rather than what it can actually do now. It’s also a ‘critical mass app’ that will only truly become effective for users once they have sufficient peers using it; given that it’s only been opened up to a small number of users at the moment, the critical mass hasn’t yet been reached so it’s difficult to get a full ‘wave experience’ just yet – you have to use your imagination.

What is it for? The core function of Google Wave is to create, share, and collaborate on ‘waves’ of information and content. Users create and share ‘waves’ between each other. A ‘wave’ is, in other words, a stream or thread of information that is collaboratively generated and managed. Waves contain ‘wavelets’, which are threaded conversations originating from an initial wave of their own, and wavelets contain ‘blips’, which are the single message units contributed by users.

Read the rest of the post ...

Connected Communities

From the RSA website, Jonathan Rowson's blog on "Connected Communities" ...

David Cameron’s speech at the conservative party conference indicated that the conservative party might be interested in the work of our connected communities project, so I decided to take a closer look.

The RSA is a charity, and strictly non-partisan, but Mathew Taylor [Chief Executive of the RSA] has previously given his thoughts on Progressive conservatism and it seems important to engage with the main ideas of the would-be next government as fairly as possible.

Cameron repeated one of his more memorable signature lines: “There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the State.” This line sounds like a suitably respectful departure from Margaret Thatcher’s most famous “There is no such thing as society” quote, but in fact, when you read Thatcher’s original, and typically decontextualised quote, in full, she was saying something quite similar (to Women’s Own magazine, October 31 1987):

“I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘I have a problem, I’ll get a grant.’ ‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’ They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It’s our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There’s no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.”

Ten years later Tony Blair spoke of the need to combine rights with responsibilities, which again makes you wonder if they all mean much the same thing, with only slightly different degrees of emphasis. However, the tone of Thatcher’s quote is rather different, and more combative in spirit than Cameron’s distinction, or Blair’s juxtaposition. When Thatcher says ‘there are individual men and women and there are families’, I don’t sense she is thinking of community, and her vision of the social world does sound relatively atomised.

Cameron clearly sees community ( “the ultimate warm fuzzy” as a recent RSA seminar attendee put it) as part of the picture of a healthy society, as he made clear in his speech:

"So no, we are not going to solve our problems with bigger government. We are going to solve our problems with a stronger society. Stronger families. Stronger communities. A stronger country. All by rebuilding responsibility".

Read the rest of the post ...

The Hub Mentality: Shifting From Business Transactions To Community Interaction

From ChangeThis, by Stephen Palmer & Carl Woolston

“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to catch the eyes of the consumer. Once you have them you have to keep them. Technology has transformed relationships between businesses and customers. Now, your job isn’t just to transact sales. Your job is to cultivate trust, build community, and interact with your customers on an ongoing basis.

Your job is to become a hub, a center of influence that creates value for your customers on their terms. Sales and profit are the result of fulfilling customer desires through educational, valuable content and remarkable products and services. Do this and your loyal community members become your advocates and evangelists

Go to the article to download the full manifesto ...

Why will twitter (or its children) be around for a while?

I've been using twitter for a couple of months now - and I admit I am getting a little addicted.

But, stepping back, I can see that people use twitter for different things, and that is why it appeals. It seems to have got serious critical mass, because of these many and varied uses:

• gathering news from different services, both general (e.g. BBC, CNN) and topic specific (e.g. photography).
• selling their services - especially in the social media arena
• building their brand - either via image and content enhancing tweets, or responding to customers
• internal communications in big organizations
• creating a network of folks with similar interest (e.g. I am deep in Glastonbury Festival at the moment!)
• or just plain chatting, with old and new friends

But however you use it, it seems to me that there a few fundamental characteristics of twitterespace that will last a while

1. It is a "generous" environment, where content, sharing links, movies and pictures is the key - and where re-tweeting (the comments of others) is a major pastime.
2. It is a "friendly" environment - people are polite, flame wars are very rare - and when spammers try to take over the twitterspace closes ranks fairly easily and quickly.
   
3. It is a "concise" environment, where the 140 character limit actually helps define and frame issues and comments in an extremely efficient way. Everyone seems to think quite carefully before posting.
4. It is a "gateway to networks of all kinds", rather than a destination in itself. It links people with many different external sites and activities
5. It is an "instant" environment - always on, and requiring real time attention.
6. It is "fully searchable" - to find out more about individuals you meet, links they propose, references they make.

No wonder that the CEO of Google said this week that Twitter is winning in instant communication ...

Outsourcing Fabulous: The Personal Brand Assistant

Chris Meyer (co-author of Blur, It's Alive) and I had a great conversation about this idea a couple of weeks ago. Now, from Peter Hirschberg's weblog on disruptive technology ...

"I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today. Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.

So I decided to write a job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."

I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap Craig's List joke that comes to mind...) So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the newest of all:

Personal Brand Assistant: Can you help make this brand fabulous?

Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief: in order to be me, to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance.

As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report on parties and post embarrassing photos. Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook. You'll make my twitter followers feel special, because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic".

Read the rest of this article ....

Time Management in the Age of Social Media

From David Allen, on the Business Week Blog

"These days I'm asked frequently about the role of social media in personal and organizational productivity. The question is timely, as the major social media applications have millions of users and are still growing fast. Also, the phenomenon is closely tied to e-mail, which itself has presented major challenges to professionals in time management and keeping an appropriate focus in their work and life.

The most obvious issue about social media: Is this a useful way to spend your time, or is it a sinkhole of attractive distraction? It could very easily be one of those one minute, and the other the next! It all depends on why you're doing it, and this must be evaluated moment to moment. It's an important distinction to make for yourself, because focus is probably your greatest asset that you can control. You must be judicious about where you place it and what you let grab it, thus reducing your effectiveness.

Bear in mind that the most potentially productive activities (e.g. meetings) can undermine your control and focus if they're not carefully managed. And some pursuits that are commonly viewed as "time-wasting," such as random Web surfing or Facebook socializing can be productive, if you use that term in the broadest sense of achieving something you want.

Someone noticed that I was now on Twitter and said: "How can you be productive on Twitter?" My simple answer: "If I want to have Twittered, then it's productive!" I wasn't trying to be facetious. The truth is, if you're taking a vacation to relax and you don't relax, then it's an unproductive vacation.

Why would I (or anyone) want to "have Twittered," or be involved with any of the social media at all? There is inherently some sort of magic between the lines in much of it that seems to have struck a chord in so many of us. I attribute this to the transparency, connectedness, and immediacy that social media offer, which are key attributes of quality relationships—something humans crave at a basic level.

Looking at if from a more tactical, practical perspective, it seems there are three main reasons that it can serve people well:"

Read the rest of the article ...

Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

From the BBC website ....

Companies should not dismiss staff who use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo at work as merely time-wasters, a Demos study suggests.

Attempts to control employees' use of such software could damage firms in the long run by limiting the way staff communicate, the think tank said.

Social networking can encourage employees to build relationships with colleagues across a firm, it added.

However, businesses are warned to be strict with those who abuse access.

'Intuitive interaction'

Firms are increasingly using networking software to share documents and collaborate in ideas, the research found.

And while more work-specific systems, such as LinkedIn or bespoke in-house software tended to be used for work matters, the likes of Facebook, Bebo and MySpace still had a place.

Read the rest of the article ...

Fourth Sector Network

Check out the Fourth Sector Network

A critical mass of organizations is gathering within, or transitioning toward, the emerging Fourth Sector. But this activity is sustained mostly by the support infrastructure of the public, private, and social sectors. In order for Fourth Sector organizations to thrive and grow, there is a clear need (as well as a market opportunity) to develop a supportive ecosystem that is tailored particularly to their needs. This includes elements like capital markets, common standards, legal and tax structures, support services, measurement and reporting protocols, and education and training.

The Fourth Sector Network (FSN) has been formed to accelerate the development of such an ecosystem. It is a cross-sectoral, cross-disciplinary enabling network of individuals and organizations who through their work contribute to the advancement of the Fourth Sector in a variety of ways, including:

• Connecting and engaging stakeholders of the Fourth Sector
• Studying and learning about the emerging Fourth Sector
• Educating and informing stakeholders and the general public
• Supporting and empowering Fourth Sector participants
• Supporting transitioning organizations in other sectors

FSN initially came together in spring 1999 as a small but diverse group of organizations in North Carolina's Research Triangle area. It has since grown to a distributed network of participants who are unified around a shared vision of healthy, sustainable communities achieved through the advancement of Fourth Sector principles. One of the significant magnets that has drawn together FSN participants is that the Fourth Sector allows their organizational interests and personal passions to be aligned with the interest of the community at large. This means that by orienting themselves individually and organizationally toward the Fourth Sector, participants can maximize their own quality of life while maximizing their organization's success and their community's health.

Read more about it ....

Learn at All Levels

From Fast Company, by Marcia Conner

I'm a voracious learner. In addition to reading magazines, books, blogs, tweets, and faces, I persistently look for patterns, connections, anomalies and what's new. I tolerated school only because it was where my friends were and because occasionally I could talk with adults who seemed to know a bit about topics that might someday matter.

The Internet's debut seemed better suited for my unmitigating curiosity. The sites I tunneled to represented people with knowledge and perspective I could learn from around the clock. My brainspan soared. Still, I knew there was more, locked inside people's heads, unfolding in the little moments between the times they took to post something profound.

Although my professional life often focuses on helping organizations understand learning across generations, my personal time is spent testing my theories in my own social environment, with my colleagues, with my family, and sometimes with those in line at the market or boarding a plane.

My real-world lab validates ample research people are learning from one another all the time. While we learn some details, theorems, and history from people who are school teachers, corporate trainers and college professors, more than 75% of what we learn comes from experiences outside of any formal education program and from people we know outside the walls of any class.

It was from this perspective I felt disoriented as a perspective client used Compete Inc.'s analysis of what people do on Facebook as proof (proof?) it's not a place where people learn. The manager was echoing nonsense I hear from educators and business people alike who argue social networking does not constitute learning and that a platform like Facebook is too immature to foster authentic education.

Is it even possible to look through a personal profile or status update and not at least learn something? Do people still believe only big heavy formal intentional topics count?

A highschool student sees what his friends did last weekend. A college student reads about and then signs on to a rebuilding trip in a hurricane-damaged city. A genNext employee discovers a conference where she can market the company. A boomer businessman finds a group of fellow entrepreneurial spirits. And a parent watches over her children without intruding into their lives. Each finds a place and a space on Facebook to learn.

Facebook provides a compelling outlet for people who enjoy learning, and it helps those seeking something else to accidentally and informally learn along the way.

As we build relationships with other people, we tap into their networks of knowledge and sense, creating learning webs, making our compound knowledge more valuable than compound interest.

Read the rest of the article .....

My book. Let me show you it ...

From Clay Shirky's blog - an ingenious way to get "attention"?

"I’ve written a book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, which is coming out in a month. It’s coming out first in the US and UK (and in translation later this year in Holland, Portugal and Brazil, Korea, and China.)

Here Comes Everybody is about why new social tools matter for society. It is a non-techie book for the general reader (the letters TCP IP appear nowhere in that order). It is also post-utopian (I assume that the coming changes are both good and bad) and written from the point of view I have adopted from my students, namely that the internet is now boring, and the key question is what we are going to do with it.

One of the great frustrations of writing a book as opposed to blogging is seeing a new story that would have been a perfect illustration, or deepened an argument, and not being able to add it. To remedy that, I’ve just launched a new blog, at shirky.com/HereComesEverybody/, to continue writing about the effects of social tools.

Also, I’ve convinced the good folks at Penguin Press to let me give a few review copies away to people in the kinds of communities the book is about. I’ve got half a dozen copies to give to anyone reading this, with the only quid pro quo being that you blog your reactions to it, good bad or indifferent, some time in the next month or so. Drop me a line if you would like a review copy — clay@shirky.com"

Interesting ...