McFilter: Thinking

Debating Democracy

While pottering around the workshop this afternoon building another Bubblino for a customer, I've had the Downloading Democracy 2013 debate on in the background. There were some really interesting points raised, particularly from Catherine Howe, but also from the other panellists and some of the audience. It's worth a watch if you're into citizenship or democracy.

Downloading Democracy 2013 - Archived Live Stream from John Popham on Vimeo.

I found it via a blog post introducing Lobbi from David Wilcox. I'm less convinced about Lobbi itself - my first impression is that it's someone throwing Web 2.0 buzzwords at politics, but I could be wrong.

There are real challenges with the digital divide, but also with building a system that doesn't just replace one elite with a geek elite instead - it's not just about getting people online, it's about who understands the technology at a deeper level, and ensuring that they don't gain an unfair advantage from that (and not by holding them back - more by informing and helping everyone else do the same).

All of which led me to wondering what sort of civic democracy discussions we should be having. And how we should be having them. I'd love it if there was a debate (or a series of debates) where a panel of Francis Irving, Dan Lynch, Maria Barrett and maybe one of the local MPs and some more "off-line" community members discussed some of the issues and started to tease out how we might move towards a more inclusive and better debate on society. Maybe chaired by David Bartlett or Stuart Wilks-Heeg.

Anyone want to organise it? Send me an invite when you get it sorted... ;-)

How (Not) to Get Picked

Seth Godin has had a good couple of posts about getting picked, or the alternative of picking yourself.

It reminds me a bit of one of the "strategies" in getting on with stuff that I'm fond of quoting (and mis-quoting). It's based on the view that "the Internet views censorship as damage and routes round it", and I tend to reappropriate it as applying "Internet thinking" to problems - see them as damage and route around them.

Lots of the societal issues seem deeply entrenched and hard to fix, yet rather than pour all our efforts into challenging the status quo, it's better to find ways round it that will (hopefully) in time create a new status quo where the established players find themselves irrelevant - at least with respect to the issue you were trying to solve.

It's not about them losing, it's about you creating something new. Focusing on being for that, rather than against the roadblocks has the handy side-effect of a more optimistic outlook, which feels more likely to succeed. It's more enjoyable along the way at least!

The other strategy to help you pick yourself is to follow what's interesting. Russell wrote about how to be interesting ages ago, and lots of it proves true.

Five years ago when I built Bubblino I was just following what interested me. Last week we had the prime location at the Internet World conference showing off Bubblino and a collection of other things.

When you do interesting things, people want to put you in interesting places.

Making the Civil Service More Technical

Russell has written an interesting blog post where he explains a bit about the team at GDS: the new, fashionable startup in London that just happens to actually be a part of the civil service - i.e. the Government.

In it he says:

From my perspective, a few steps removed (i.e. although I know quite a few people working at GDS, I've not had a conversation with any of them about any of this), this is just what happens when you get some people who are both passionate about what they're doing and who have the technical abilities to implement or understand it, and give them the authority to get on and build it.

It feels like this is us rediscovering what it's like to have people with good technical abilities in public service. As the existence of organisations like mySociety shows, there are plenty of geeks who aren't driven purely by a billion-dollar IPO, but the tendency towards outsourcing and private provision from big IT firms has meant that the scope for doing interesting and important technical work in the civil service (and in public service in general) no longer existed.

As a result, the civil service role had been reduced to a more managerial one, and you lose a lot of the practical knowledge. Couple that with a risk-averse environment, and you end up with the big - and by inference (though in practice size doesn't correlate with ability) safe - IT firms able to propose solutions which are skewed in their favour.

Hopefully the work at GDS will show that it's possible to have at least some of the technical team within the public sector walls, and with a more agile and responsive approach to building the services they can both be more flexible with working with private-sector teams and provide a better solution for less money.

I also wonder if this lesson maps onto other over-managerial parts of the public sector? Can we take this approach to free up the good, passionate teachers or the doctors and nurses who care about their patients above all else to do their best work?

Towards a More Equal Tech Culture

Given the timing of this blog post, it could come across as a response to the Adria Richards incident. It's not, at least not directly, I don't know what specifically (if anything) prompted the posts I'm responding to. For the best commentary on the Adria Richards debacle, see On being adult about childish behaviour... by Tom Coates.

Right. On to the matter at hand.

There are often blog posts and initiatives to encourage more women into technology, and as with all things I'm interested in what actions we can take to make engineering and technology more diverse.

I thought it was great that Alexandra (founder of Good Night Lamp, company I'm CTO for) kicked off a Tech City International Women's Day event and I'd love there to be a programme like the Etsy Hacker Grants here in Liverpool. See this talk on it for more details...

The companies I'm involved in at the moment aren't solvent enough to launch that right now, but hopefully in the future. I did suggest it to ACME/Liverpool Vision for their upcoming digital strategy for Liverpool. Maybe drop them a line to encourage them to do it if you think it's a good idea.

So what else to do? It's one of the (many) things that we worry about among the organisers here at DoES Liverpool. Our Dave ratio isn't that bad, but sadly that's because we don't have very many Daves.

I've always felt a bit paralysed on the issue but, indirectly from Suw's blog post agitating for a female Dr Who I found this post from John Scalzi explaining the issue in a way that I finally understood - Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.

In particular, in a follow-up post he included this:

It's about levelling the playing field for everyone, but not by making it harder for straight, white males - by making it easier for everyone else.

However, that's the only place (I feel) where Straight White Male isn't the lowest difficulty setting - working out what would help matters. We have, thought not as much as we could/should, tried things out: we had a women hot-desk for free to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, and the last two Barcamp Liverpool events have been Friday/Saturday rather than Saturday/Sunday so that people with childcare to think of can still attend some of it (which shouldn't be a women's issue, but tends to be proportionally so in the UK today).

Our, my, concern is that such attempts are missing the point, at best, or patronising, at worst.

Hence this blog post. What should we be doing to improve diversity at DoES Liverpool and in technology in general? If you're starting a meetup or want to celebrate the next Ada Lovelace Day (13th Oct this year) or International Women's Day or something more useful that I can't think of, and you think I can help, then get in touch.

Planning Indie Retail?

Julian Dobson's latest blog post, Shopping centres: At the heart of the community? reminded me of a thought that occurred to me recently, and what is this blog for if not holding random thoughts I have about regeneration and the like...?

It was sparked by the recently opened row of shops at the bottom of the new student accommodation block that's just been built at the end of my street. There are three shops open (with a fourth being fitted out I think) - a Greggs, a Caffe Nero, and a small Co-op supermarket. Not a terrible mix, but disappointing that they're all national chains.

At least the supermarket is a Co-op - providing some much needed diversity in the local supermarket scene. Of the supermarkets I could (and do) easily walk to, there's now one Co-op; two Sainsburys; an Aldi; four Tesco Expresses and two bigger Tescos. All bar the Aldi and bigger Tescos are of the smaller convenience store size. If I get on my bike, I can take in another Tesco Metro, Aldi and Asda. Anyway, the Tescopoly in Liverpool is a different issue.

It seems such a common pattern - new build goes up, all the retail is identikit chains rather than local businesses (I'm glossing over the fact that some could be franchises as that's just a middle-ground). Is it just because that's an easier sell for the developer? Or don't they get any local applicants because the lead time is too long?

I don't know, but for housing it's pretty common for a chunk of the new development to be mandated as "social housing" as a condition of the planning application. There are issues with that, but it's a step in the right direction. Could, should, the same apply to the retail units? What if a proportion of the retail units in any development had to be "indie retail", and could only be taken by independent businesses? That would be one way to encourage Julian's fourth suggestion, without having to rely on the benevolence of the shopping centre owners.

The Heart of Darkness and Dark Matter

This post from Euan shows exactly what's important and good and (possibly, hopefully) revolutionary about blogging. Blogging isn't disruptive because it lets some random Joe build their own competitor to existing media outlets - they're just finding a different route to become company men of their own.

Blogging is disruptive because it allows people like Euan and me to share thoughts, make connections and have conversations that wouldn't ever make it into mainstream media, because that's not the point - it's about compressing the geography and dis-jointed timescales and letting a million niches of misfits work out that they're not alone, and support each other as they try to do things differently.

And to draw in another thread from the excellent Dan Hill, when we start to engage with the dark matter of the company men in the existing institutions then maybe we will be able to shift the world to a place where it's easier to get ahead without giving up your soul.

Signing Your Work

Last week I was pointed at this blog post about the work of Tayler and Green. Tayler and Green were two architects who upped sticks from London to move to Norfolk in the late 1940s and ended up developing their own slant on modernism, much more grounded in traditional housing through an ongoing relationship and work for one of the district councils there.

There's lots of interest about architecture and place-making in there, but the bit that prompted this blog post was this section...

"For unassuming types there's a lot of branding on T&G's work. Their name pops up a lot, not just on formal plaques but carved into special bricks or inserted subtly into a decorative wall, as if they were making it easy for architectural pilgrims to seek out. Despite the seeming modesty of their designs, the architects were very aware of its quality."

It reminded me of one of my favourite parts of shipping products - the fact that there are then things out in the world that you were part of. I first encountered it in visits to Halfords in the the mid-90s, where their point-of-sale tills were running code from my time at RTC; then even more so with Psion Series 5s, or any of the Sony mobile phones from the late 90s, which contained chunks of code that I, and the team around me, had spent months and years developing. There was always some little indication to those in the know that we were involved and these days, where possible, it's literally etched into the back of anything to leave the MCQN Ltd studio...

It's not a new idea - the case of the original Apple Macintosh famously includes the signatures of the team who designed it, and I'm sure the engines of Bentleys used to have a plaque with the name of the person who built it - though I can't find a reference for that right now.

That's beside the point, I just wonder if the world would be a better place if more people were more willing to sign their work. Wouldn't we end up with better quality work, and less "ooh, that's terrible, I had no idea other parts of the company were [insert dubious or illegal practice here]..."?

Openness and Creativity in Cities

As part of their Open City project working with European Capital of Culture Guimaraes, Watershed have published an excellent piece about openness and creativity in the context of cities from Charles Leadbeater.

"Creative cities are too large, open and unruly to be regulated in detail, top down by an all-seeing state or experts. They have to encourage collective, voluntary, self-control. A city that could be planned from the centre would also be dead."

Of course, Liverpool is four years ahead of Guimaraes in looking at how the Capital of Culture helped the city. The cultural legacy has been pretty successful, but we need to expand the creativity from the narrow confines of cultural offering to find ways to make the city more resilient and more diverse - both in embracing different elements of society and in the variety of ways to engage with the challenges and advantages of the city.

Data Commons Licensing?

At the Open Internet of Things Assembly recently, one of the topics that came up repeatedly was about how we handle the amount of data being generated, particularly when it's often personal and near-impossible to anonymize.

The issues were less to do with the technical difficulties in handling all that data, and more to do with the privacy and ethical concerns, and the commercialization of the resulting findings.

This article in Nature magazine covers scientific data in general, rather than the Internet of Things, but does a good job of explaining some of the problems and challenges.

In reading through that, and during some of the sessions at OpenIoT, I wonder if there's an opportunity here for something individual/citizen-focused to flourish and help start to address some of the problems.

Commercialization of data and science isn't necessarily a problem, but naturally any legal document drawn up by the companies looking to profit will tend to favour and protect the rights of the company as a first priority, as well as allowing the company to maximize its profits.

Dealing with occasions where the actions of those using the data diverge from what the people "generating" the data feel is acceptable is likely to be slow and adversarial. Creating new laws is (should be?) necessarily slow and thought through.

["generating" is in quotes to show that there are problems with just defining easily where the data is from. At the Open IoT Assembly we ended up with the term data subjects to refer to those to whom the data refers - which may be distinct from those using the data, or even those who gathered or generated the data (installed the sensors, etc.)]

What if we were more proactive about setting the terms for using and sharing all of this data being generated? That could allow us to have a range of approaches which would reflect the range of attitudes to how this data should and shouldn't be exploited.

Something similar to Creative Commons licensing but for data rather than creative works would allow individuals to donate their data to the scientific commons under terms with which they're comfortable. CC licensing allows you to choose whether or not the people using it can alter it to make derivative works; whether they can use it commercially; and whether they need to be named as the creator of the work.

What attributes would a Data Commons licence cover?

Anonymity

This would restrict whether the licensee could use the data to identify individuals or not

Commercialization

Whether the data can be used commercially, or not

Derived-patents

This is maybe an intermediary step in the commercialization attribute - where licensees are allowed to use the data commercially, but not allowed to use it to generate patents

The last is probably the most contentious version, but I'd hope that over time the availability of a (much?) bigger dataset available to be used commercially but not for patents would improve the commercial viability for funding companies that weren't driven by exploiting patents.

Maybe there are other issues that should be explored, such as its use in creating weapons, although as noted by Matt Biddulph (if memory serves) in one of the OpenIoT panels: one of the strengths of the CC licences is that they settled on a small family of licences - enough to give some flexibility and choice without creating too much fragmentation.

So, who's going to define the set of Data Commons licenses I can start using to share my data?

How to Be More Like Berlin?

Dan Hill has posted an excellent report on a wander round some of Berlin.

Lots of food for thought there, not that I've drawn any conclusions yet.

The pavement gardening is yet another example of the sort of stuff bubbling under the surface here in Liverpool, with projects like Cairns Street in Toxteth, and the almost-but-not-quite-yet groundswell of urban farming from projects like The Mediated Garden.

And the civic engagement and "YIMBY" (rather than NIMBY) attitudes and projects provoke "how do we replicate that here?" pondering, but the report on acceptance and diversity at the end is, as Dan says, brow furrowing. One of the concerns I have with both the slow gentrification (or is it re-gentrification, given the original occupants of these houses?) of the Georgian Quarter (that I'm as much a part of as anyone else), and moves to clear out the cheap-lager-fighting-rings of Concert Square is where all the people currently inhabiting and using the spaces are supposed to go? Out of sight, or into some area away from the city centre, so we can easily avoid them aren't good enough answers.

Thoughts on Craft and Manufacturing

This video is a nice bit of manufacturing pr0n, which shows mostly how some cufflinks are made in a pretty industrial manner with a nice automated CNC machine. However, it also shows that there's a human scale attention to detail with the quality checking of the finished items.

AliceMadeThis: Promotional Film from Brickwall Films on Vimeo.

If you head over to the website for the company that's responsible for them, you get a more craft-based feel from the copy:

So, they're using the latest (well, actually that CNC machine doesn't look all that new...) industrial processes but using them to make something where the scarcity and quality provide the value.

A thousand of something on a global, or even just a Western economies, scale still means you're unlikely to encounter someone else with the same item; yet it's more than an individual artist or craftsperson would want to make by hand.

This is the first example I've seen of this sort of hybrid approach, but maybe that's just because it's not very visible. If I'd only seen the website I'd have assumed that the manufacturing process was much more traditional and hands-on - my initial reaction to the text was that it was almost disingenuous... hiding the industrial process so as not to alienate the customer.

That might just be me, but if it is true, then surely there's scope for opening things up and showing how there's a continuum of processes from handmade, local craft all the way through to the mass-produced in sweatshops in China. Maybe then we'll see more people moving into the middle ground, like Alice Made This have, providing both increased prosperity for craftspeople and more employment in local manufacturing?

Tags: laptopsandlooms manufacturing craft makersguild

Jonathan Meades on Regeneration

Uncomfortable watching for anyone in Liverpool or Manchester in places, but an excellent dissection of the regeneration industry. Hat tip to Mike Chitty for sharing it.

Blog All Dog-Eared Pages: Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling

Although I went to the launch of the Italian version of Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling way back in 2007, it wasn't until recently that I owned a copy, and only last weekend that I started reading it. I'm sad to say that it wasn't the Italian version, but at least that meant I could understand it...

It was a very quick read, and I haven't dog-eared many pages. However, that's not because there's nothing useful in the book - just that it works best read as an entire work, rather than as excerpts. If you've any interest in design or products then this is a good manifesto for how they should become more sustainable as well as more futuristic.

Page 22
Everyone can't be a designer - any more than everyone can be a mayor or a senator

Page 23
[...] with enough informational power, the "invisible hand of the market" becomes visible. The hand of the market was called "invisible" because Adam Smith, an eighteenth-century economist, had very few ways to measure it. Adam Smith lacked metrics. Metrics make things visible.

Page 95
Suppose that I'm trying to create a new kind of object, to shape a new kind of thing. I don't want to be burdened with the weighty physicality of the old one. I want a virtual 3-D model of the new one, a weightless, conceptual, interactive model that I can rotate inside a screen, using 3-D design software.

Then I'm not troubled by its stubborn materiality...

The dog-ears don't add much I'm afraid, and this last one I included because I think it shows one of the common mistakes that non-product-designers (and I include myself firmly in this camp) make when getting into making physical objects. The digital it's-all-about-the-new-tools-and-digital-fabrication mentality rarely survives its first encounter with reality. The new tools do unlock new ways of working, but they don't mean you can ignore the physicality of the materials and avoid iterations and prototyping in the real world. That said, Shaping Things is definitely more good than bad.

Tags: shaping things Bruce Sterling IoT product design

Barcamp Liverpool 2011: What is the Point of Liverpool?

At Barcamp Liverpool last Friday I gave a talk entitled "What is the Point of Liverpool?". It was an attempt to look at Liverpool's place in the world and the ways that it might evolve over the coming years. Luckily the guys from PodFactory.org were roaming around with some video cameras and happened to capture the talk. Given that they weren't formally covering the event, I wasn't miked up and so the sound levels aren't as good as they would be normally. Still, if you want to hear what I said, you can watch the video after the jump.

I've included the slides here so you can see them better, and included my notes, which will give you an idea of what I was planning to say - I think it bears some resemblance to what I actually said...

And if you want to find out more about the event in general, there's my write up and more over at the Barcamp Liverpool Lanyrd page. Anyway, on with the slides...

So, what is the point of Liverpool, now that it's no longer the gateway to the new world? Well, it’s a city. And that’s a good start.  A city is a small enough entity that it can change how it does things, yet large enough that if it works, it will influence the rest of the country, and maybe the rest of the world.  Hell, it wouldn't be the first time this city has done that.

And that's how these things always start.  Well, actually, it's not.  It's some smaller group within the city, who listen to some crazy guy suggesting that there's a different way of doing things.  But that's handy, because we haven't got the whole city here right now, and I'm not sure I know what the better way of doing things is.

But it is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, and I've at least made a start on some of the questions...

There are big problems... The economy...

Climate change...

Rising unemployment – and even in places where the economy is showing some growth, like the US, we’re not always seeing the jobs coming back at the same time.

Coupled with a low skill base provides a challenge to the perceived wisdom that we have to focus on education and "knowledge work". But at the same time, means there's a huge resource of people available, if we can find things that they can do.

It feels like, whereas in the past there was the opportunity to leave work without many qualifications and get an apprenticeship and, if you were good, work your way up - these days the career options look more like parallel tracks, where you either work in retail, or call centres, or the much vaunted "knowledge economy", and it's hard to jump the tracks between them.

So, do I have any answers?... Maybe...

More importantly, do you have any answers?

Because the problem is, if we don't come up with any answers, well, there are other people making suggestions and making plans, and we'll have to live with that.

More and more big chains taking over from the local shops and pulling the profits out of the area sooner.

For the past thirty years or so the grand plan has been to focus on attracting "inward investment". Get some big firm to move in and create loads of jobs and we'll all be saved.

It seems that the latest idea is that it hasn't worked because it wasn't big enough, or in a nice enough position, so of course the next step is to do it on an even grander scale...

The comment from a recent Seven Streets article really depressed me. This is the only option we can envisage?

Or maybe working in shops to service the WAGs and footballers... At least they’re supporting local car firms...

We’re still waiting for it to arrive in all sorts of places, and even when it does come it will be in the shape of call centres and regional sales offices, which is why the much vaunted skyscrapers will be cheap knock-offs pretending to be “landmark” developments.

The only real growth is going to come when we stop waiting for The Powers That Be to save us, and get on with saving ourselves.

So I want to present another vision of the future. And like all visions of the future, this one will be wrong.

I don’t have any flashy fly-through videos, so you’ll have to make do with a couple of photos and your imagination as I describe how it will change...

It’s a warm summers morning, in 2015. I’m sat at a little aluminium cafe table, on the pavement just over here, checking my email. As I finish off, one of the waiters from The Rat Coffee Shop comes to clear my espresso cup and take it back across the street to the cafe. I walk round the corner and into the bottom floor of the DoES Liverpool building.

As I swipe my card to gain access the door reminds me that I need to go and talk to the web designers who are refreshing the MCQN Ltd website. They’re on the first floor, so I don’t venture into the ground floor workshop – which is packed with all sorts of interesting bits of machinery – laser cutters, CNC mills, 3D printers, lathes... But instead head up stairs.

The first floor has fewer of the machines, and it’s split into an assortment of open plan areas with desks and a couple of meeting rooms. There are more people working from laptops here, though there’s some soldering going on over in one corner and one of the meeting rooms is awash with bits of blue prototyping foam.

After checking over the latest designs from the web agency, I head further upstairs to my desk. The top floor-and-a-bit is taken up with MCQN Ltd, and it’s from here that we design, prototype and code the devices that are making peoples lives easier and a bit more fun. Bubblino is still sat doing his thing, but has been joined on the “shelves of things” by a wealth of other items.

As I sit down at my desk, one of the project leads gets a call on her mobile. It’s the factory, to let her know that the run of prototype PCBs she sent them yesterday is ready to be picked up. She grabs her keys, and a minute later is heading out onto Duke Street on the office cargo bike.

Ten minutes later, she’s parked up outside the factory. Most of the work is mechanised these days – there are all sorts of CNC machines, pick-and-place machines building PCBs, and reflow ovens doing the soldering, but robots are as cheap to run in the UK as they are in China, and this means we can see what working conditions are like and provide this sort of more responsive work.

There are still staff here, and there’s nothing to stop the talented and more ambitious ones from working their way up from supervising the machines to designing products.

We’ve also given over a bit of the building to DoES Toxteth, because DoES Liverpool is pretty busy these days, and not everyone wants to head into town to do their hacking...

I’m not a betting man, but I am betting my company that my vision of the future will be closer to reality than Peel’s.

The Internet of Things is becoming one of the “next big things” – and Liverpool has a good chance of riding that wave, but only because there are people here who are passionate about it and working at it. And if we’re successful, we’ll be hiring people from both inside and outside the city, and will attract others who want to work in the field to move here because that’s where the interesting stuff is happening.

But it might not be the Internet of Things that brings the city its big wins – I’ll be disappointed if it’s not – but it could just as easily be something around open data – with ScraperWiki based here, and the new open healthcare group that Ross Jones has co-founded; or maybe something around podcasting, given the success that Dan and Don McAllister are already enjoying.

Or it could be something completely different, that you’re passionate about. But that’s the key point – it’s not going to be something that the council has stuck in a strategy document somewhere. Not because we can make better bets than they can about the future, but because there’s someone already in the city who wants to drive it forward. It’s all about the people.

And interesting things can come out of Barcamps. The first Bubblino was built for the last one, and he became MCQN Ltd’s first Internet of Things product.

And now we’re building all sorts of things. This is from an Internet-connected radio that Russell Davies commissioned, and I’m just stupidly proud that there are things going out into the world with “Made in Liverpool by MCQN Ltd” written on them.

It was also at the last Barcamp that I met Andy Goodwin, and without that connection, Ignite Liverpool wouldn’t have happened. It was where ScraperWiki was announced, and it’s where Thom and I hatched plans for Howduino and to start a regular meetup for Arduino tinkerers. That grew into Maker Night, which then grew into DoES.

What’s going to come out of this one?

All of the photos of old buildings in Liverpool that I've used in this presentation have one thing in common - they're all empty. Waiting for you to fill them with your ideas.

Tags: Liverpool future IoT barcampliv

Laptops and Looms: A Modern History Lesson

This is another post sparked by the recent Laptops and Looms event. To see the rest of my thoughts on it, and links to other people's reports, check out my main Laptops and Looms write-up.

One of the themes running through Laptops and Looms was the decline of the British manufacturing industry. Given the old mills that we visited, a lot of it was around the decline of the textile industry, but also the heavy industry of steel, shipbuilding, etc.

The heyday of most of those industries was in the 1800s and the first half of the 20th Century, and most were in steep decline before any of us discussing them were born. As a result, most of our experience of them is second-hand, and there was (quite rightly) a concern that we were romanticising the past.

Thinking about things after the conference, it occurred to me that in my career so far, I have already lived through the rise and fall of an, albeit much smaller, industry here in the UK. This is a very personal, and potted history, and so I'm not presenting it as the definitive story of how things happened. However, hopefully there's some value in relating the tale.

I graduated from uni in 1995, which was around the time when the Internet was starting to gain traction, and mobile phones were just beginning to reach the point were ordinary people might get one. It was a time when the ability to send text messages was a high-end feature that not all phones had, and portable computing was the domain of PDAs - devices like the Psion Series 3a or the Palm Pilot, which were standalone devices that only synchronised with anything else when you plugged them into your PC at your desk.

In the summer of 96 I joined STNC, a fledgling startup based in Cambridge who were writing software to add connectivity to PDAs. We worked closely with OEMs and low-level operating system providers to give them email and web browsing capabilities.

Thanks to a continent-wide standardisation on GSM, Europe was leagues ahead of the US in mobile phone adoption and innovation, but that's not to say we had it all our own way. As it became clearer that a combined mobile-phone and PDA would provide exciting new possibilities, it was US firm Geoworks who seemed to be in the lead. They'd managed to sign up two of the top three mobile phone manufacturers to use their GEOS operating system. However, their coronation as mobile OS kings was short-lived: although Nokia released it in the 9000 Communicator (and later the 9110), Ericsson fell out with them and canned their smartphone project at the eleventh hour - even after getting to the point of having it featured in the latest James Bond film (remember when he steers his BMW 7-series from his phone on the back seat...?)

Alongside software startups like ourselves, there were also people in the UK building hardware. One of those was TTPcom, based just South of Cambridge. They built mobile phone hardware platforms that the OEMs (people like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, etc.) could license and use as the base for their own phones. In 1997, a collaboration between STNC and TTPcom saw us create the first ever web browser on a mobile phone - a fully-featured (for its day) offering with HTML3.2 and GIF and JPEG image support.

Come 1998 and Psion morphed into Symbian, going one better than Geoworks and pulling all three of the top manufacturers as partners/customers - Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola.

As the millennium loomed, the heart of the mobile Internet was firmly centred on the UK, but the sector was becoming big enough that it attracted the attention of Microsoft - who decided to refocus their efforts with Windows CE and build their first smartphone.

As it turned out though, that only bolstered the UK's position. In July 1999 STNC was bought by Microsoft, but unlike other technology or expertise acquisitions, it made sense for them to keep us in Europe.

There were other UK tie-ups with Microsoft too - Orange debuted the smartphone platform (which was completely unrelated to the work we were doing at STNC), in the form of the Orange SPV, and Sendo, based in Birmingham, were an early licensee before a controversial eleventh-hour switch to Symbian.

Integrating into Microsoft turned out not to be all it promised. An eight-hour and three-thousand-odd mile separation naturally means you've not got as much contact with surrounding groups as those based in Redmond, and the fact that funding was no longer a pressing concern meant that we lost our focus on getting customers and getting products out. Coupled with some short-sighted decision-making from the leadership of Mobile Devices Division, and in early 2002 our group was shut down and the scattered across the globe and across the industry.

I spent the next few years working with a number of other mobile-related startups in the UK: Trigenix, who were later acquired by Qualcomm, and the final iteration of Pogo Mobile, who had a rather nice Internet-focused, keyboard-less touchscreen device (ooh, who else has done something like that...) that sadly didn't get beyond prototype stage.

In the same time period Symbian struggled to make good on their initial promise, largely through trying to please all of its partners all of the time, Sendo went into administration and were bought by Motorola, who also acquired TTPcom a year later.

Not long after the acquisition of TTPcom, I spent six months contracting with Motorola. I led a skunkworks team hidden in an neglected corner of the ex-TTPcom-now-Motorola site just outside Cambridge where we prototyped a new (and most importantly, usable and not horrific) UI for a low-end handset.

The UI was developed by the team who'd done a really nice job on the Motorola Z8 (a Symbian-based handset from the Sendo group in Birmingham) and five of us learnt how to code for the TTPcom AJAR OS and built most of the basic apps in less than six months. Unfortunately, we then had to engage with the Motorola bureaucracy which deemed the TTPcom engineers too expensive, and so ruled out a small team in Cambridge/Denmark in favour of a big team in India or China or Russia, possibly project-managed from Italy. Not surprisingly, none of that came to pass, and I don't think it would have produced anything cohesive and usable if it had.

Within two years both the Cambridge and Aalborg sites had been closed, and with it the TTPcom legacy gone.

The ex-Sendo group didn't fare any better. There was a successor to the Z8, the Z10, released in 2008 but even in 2007 it was clear that the Motorola smartphone focus was no longer with Symbian, and the Birmingham site was closed in 2008

Symbian survived a little longer, slowly becoming more and more subsumed into Nokia, who then basically pulled the plug earlier this year with an announcement of their switch to Windows Mobile. With it the last glimmers of the UK's mobile phone industry (rather than third-party app development) died away.

Tags: laptopsandlooms UK mobile phones STNC Microsoft TTPcom Sendo Motorola

People, Canals and Regeneration

Today I visited FabLab in Manchester. It was a lovely day, and the route from Manchester Picadilly station is very picturesque - along the towpath of the canal. However, on the way back it also felt somehow empty and soulless. Lots of nice enough little flats, all next to the water, but it felt as though it was lovely in the warm sunshine, it would be all rather more oppressive and foreboding on a winter's evening.

Maybe that says more about me than the realities of life in Ancoats. However, it still seems like a lost opportunity - somewhere that a few shops, cafes, pubs or just things other than houses and flats would mean it had some life and animation outside of the odd sunny weekend.

Something that starkly apparent as I read through this fantastic article from Jane Jacobs, Downtown is for People. First printed in 1958, but just as relevant today, which is when I got to read it.

Laptops and Looms. Not Your Typical Conference

I spent the latter half of last week in the Peak District, participating in the rather wonderful Laptops and Looms conference. Russell Davies, Dan Hill and Toby Barnes pulled together an amazing selection of people and persuaded them all to congregate in an old mill in the village of Cromford just on the strength of spending three days exploring how to turn making into manufacturing.

For such a loosely defined event, we managed to cram in so many thing that I'm still trying to unpack it all four days after the event drew to a close. I'm going to try to provide some of the background and raw facts of the conference in this blog post, and leave the more thoughtful stuff to emerge in subsequent thinking and blog posts as it filters through my brain.

Background

Checking back through some of the emails sent before the event, it turns out I was wrong to refer to it as a conference. Russell says "This isn't a conference, it's a conversation." And he's right, that's a much better description, even if it's rather cryptic for anyone who didn't attend.

The agenda was deliberately loosely defined - the introduction to the themes was Russell's August column for Wired UK, and the organising principle was to get a bunch of interesting people, stick them into (one of) the world's first factory and see what happened.

How It Worked

It was an event which addressed a lot of the problems that I outlined in my long conference post. The mornings were the nearest to a traditional conference, with a number of presentations acting as scene-setters or almost provocation pieces, but they often veered off into group discussions on the topics raised.

The afternoons had flexible and varied activities which saw us taking a tour of Masson Mill; a kickabout on the nearby park; a train excursion to Derby to visit the Derby Silk Mill (which argues that it is the oldest factory); and rounding off the three days with an afternoon of cricket at Chatsworth House.

The evenings saw us exploring the delights of Matlock Bath, chatting over a communal meal, or just reflecting on the day in the pub.

All of which meant that there was ample opportunity to discuss things and get to know each other. I think I probably had at least a five minute chat with something like 90% of the people there, which was fantastic.

General Themes and Topics

So what did we talk about?

Digital fabrication techniques, how well they do and don't work. Mass personalisation, with Alice Taylor from Makielab giving an open and inspiring talk about how they're aiming to make everything in the country where it's sold. Matt Cottam made everyone (I think, he definitely did me) jealous of how he's got funding to let him run an awesome new project. Toby played devil's advocate about the drive for shedloads of growth, and asked whether there's a way that the oft-derided "lifestyle" businesses could be the answer. Matt Ward took a stab at defining some of the terms we were using and some of the conditions which fed into the debate (hopefully he, along with everyone else, will publish his slides somewhere). We talked about what's stopping more makers from turning interesting hacks into real products, and wondered how we can more easily replicate Newspaper Club's winkling out of printers in other areas of expertise. We noticed that we don't build our tools any more (coincidentally something that came up in a recent item about HP losing its way) and asked if that fed into the decline in manufacturing. Dan did an excellent job of setting things in a wider context, looking at the decline of the British manufacturing industry, and the rise of China, whilst showing that Germany had managed to cope with the changing world without losing its industrial base. At one point he challenged us to define "what is the point of the West?" How do we engage with the "dark matter" of policy and government so that we end up with a society more attuned to our ideals and values, and less towards finance or call centres. The Makielab guys were helped to build a Makerbot. We talked about ways to collaborate and new ways of working, and I talked a bit about DoES Liverpool. And we debated what is stopping the network of makers from becoming a new wave of industrialists?

There are people whose presentations I've missed, and hundreds of other topics that I wasn't aware that were discussed, because I was busy involved in a similarly interesting conversation elsewhere.

What Now?

In his closing comments, Russell asked us what we wanted to do next. He didn't have any grand vision or plan, he'd just had a hunch that interesting things might happen if he got us together.

He was right. I'm hoping that the discussions and connections continue to ripple out in the coming months. It looks like there'll be another event held in the future, which is excellent news, because I can't state how awesome those three days were.

Tom Taylor said that he hoped that it would spark a raft of good blog posts. I want to echo that hope, and this is the first of my contributions to the pool (and hopefully it won't dilute the quality too much).

There's very little that I'd change if it were run again. That said, I expect that the themes will be a little better defined after we've had a year to continue the conversation.

I think it might be useful to replace some of the industrial heritage sections with trips to some of the local "supply chain" sized firms. Rather than a tour of an 18th Century mill, visit a working injection-moulding factory or similar. See if we can unearth some of the remaining industry to give talks about how they work, so we can see how to use them and also look for new possibilities a la Newspaper Club.

What about having a "gallery" area, and encourage attendees to bring something along to show off. There was so much creativity in the room, and there won't be time for everyone to give a talk about what they do, so fill the area where people get coffee with objects or posters showing what the other attendees do. If you could find someone to staff it, you could even open it up to the public in the times when the attendees are out on some other activity...

Further Thoughts

I'll be revisiting some of the themes thrown up by the conference in the coming days (/weeks..?) and will add them here. I'm also going to try to collect any other writing spawned by the conference from others, and will include links to them too (and I've not read any of them yet - I wanted to get my thoughts down first before diving into the thoughts of others...).

• Laptops and Looms from Paul Miller
• The Dissolution of the Factories, or Lines Composed a Few Days After Laptops and Looms from Matt Edgar
• Laptops and Looms: Decompressing from Rachel Coldicutt
• Boutiquiers from Matthew Sheret
• Photos from Mayo Nissen
• Photos from Toby Barnes [added 25/8/2011]
• Laptops and Looms: some thoughts from Mayo Nissen [added 25/8/2011]
• Photos from Matt Ward [added 25/8/2011]
• Making Things, and the Labour Theory of Value, some pre-event thinking from John Willshire [added 25/8/2011]
• Won't somebody think of the children?, James Bridle's thoughts [added 30/8/2011]
• Laptops and Looms: A Modern History Lesson, some further thinking from me [added 1/10/2011]

Tags: laptopsandlooms making manufacturing iot

Food for Thought

One of the outcomes of the public disorder from the past few days has been a huge supply of analysis and thinking around society and related issues.

I've not been reading very much of it (I've got a rather fractured relationship with things like Twitter, and 24-hour news, at the moment - hopefully I'll find the time and the way to unpack some of that into a blog post soon) but these are some of the things that I have read which have seemed the most interesting, or the most thought-provoking.

I don't agree with everything that they all say, but they seem to provide some use in giving me different ways to explore my take on events...

• "America": Consumerism and the End of Citizenship
• Most of the kids are alright
• The UK riots: the psychology of looting
• The Liverpool Riots Do Not Indicate That Our Society Is Broken
• Dave Haslam's Manchester perspective but equally applicable elsewhere.

Tags: ukriots liverpoolriots society citizens

Thinking Out Loud

Far too busy with this, working on this, and getting this up and running, but wanted to share a couple of things in the hope that writing a paragraph about each of them would help get my brain processing them.

Wicked Problems. A really interesting post, and given a similarly interesting discussion I had last night (which I'm afraid I'm not going to write up here, sorry), wonderfully timely. The universe as serendipity engine in full flow.

Google+. Have been on it for a week or so, and I'm not really seeing how it's different/better than Facebook or Twitter. And I'm getting a little disillusioned with both of those two (though I was never really illusioned with Facebook...). Pete Ashton covers lots of the problems over here. Lots of good stuff in that blog post - owning where important stuff of mine is stored is important; advertising-funded models aren't good; blogging as a useful tool for the writer, rather than the reader... That last point is what I get most out of my blog, and something that's been lost as an explanation in the professionalising of blogging.

I think Google have taken the wrong direction with their more recent approaches to helping people cope with the amount of information out there. They're sticking the filter at the wrong end - it's happening with search, where we'll end up in little echo chambers based on our social network, and Google+ has it built in. Filtering at the source is good for privacy, but a bad solution to information overload.

It feels like we're experiencing an enclosing of the Internet. Facebook turning off RSS feeds; Twitter restricting client apps... Maybe it's Apple's fault, they've shown how nice closed systems can be, and closed systems are definitely easier to build. But it stifles innovation, and locks people into one platform. Good for the companies who "win", bad for society.

I think Schroeder is right (at the end of the Wicked Problems post), that open source hasn't lived up to its potential. It could be building the tools that we need to cope with the modern world, and instead it seems to be driven by people who want to build a free version of whatever the latest cool commercial app is.

Finally, there are murmurings of another Barcamp Liverpool, and so I'm starting to ponder what a follow-up talk to this one would be. I wonder if I could persuade Dan to do some bigger-picture thinking and give a talk challenging the open source movement to look to a higher purpose. That'd be a superb talk.

Four Things I'm Thinking About

Ben Hammersley is on fine form at the moment. Go read his latest blog post about society and thinking about what government should be doing. And then watch the video of his talk in Derry for the British Council:

British Council Annual Lecture 2011: The Internet of People from British Council on Vimeo.

This is all feeding into the maelstrom that is my thoughts on society and cities and the future. It's proving hard to pin down into any sort of narrative, so I figured I'd stick some of it in my blog as a work-in-progress, helping think things through sort of thing. Showing my working as it were, and hopefully at some point in the future I'll blog about it more coherently.

Society

What should society look like? What would a good society feel like, sound like, look like, taste like? Pulling in bits of Julian Dobson's recent post about separating ourselves from poverty, and wondering how we persuade people (myself included) that it's a good thing to encounter some dodgy characters in your neighbourhood; that the alternative is creating no-go ghettoes and then having to live with policing and trying to help people escape from them.

Cities

Mostly using Liverpool as a lens through which to view and try to shape what the city should be. Lots of this from the discussions I had while walking round the Baltic Triangle, waterfront and Liverpool One with Owen Hatherley.

Whole sets of contradictions: we should encourage a more mixed occupancy of the city centre - families and old people as well as "young professionals", but the 1980s suburban housing estates of bungalows with their backs turned to the surrounding streets don't feel like the right solution; the problems with the private land and big-chain commercialism that is Liverpool One - summed up perfectly by Hatherley as "a bad idea done well", compared to the revitalisation of that part of the city and a better linkage to the Albert Dock; the need to get around the city easily contrasted with the damage done to the walkability of the city with the six lanes of traffic that cut the Pier Head and Albert Dock, and the northern docks and Everton off from the city centre...

"Smart" Cities

This is my professional interest, given that I run a company which, in part, builds some of this stuff. So thinking about what is useful, bella, life-affirming about the possibilites... from a citizen's perspective rather than that of the state or big business. None of which is to say that it can't, or shouldn't, be of value and benefit to business or the council, but that there needs to be more than just that narrow group who benefit.

And thoughts of who benefits from a city that's easier and more enjoyable to inhabit reach into thoughts about how to implement systems so that everyone benefits - not just the iPhone-wielding "city is my battlesuit" types.

Adam Greenfield is the go-to man for this sort of topic. There's very little I disagree with in his take on the issues, and I particularly agree with his opening sentences in this video about "smart cities" being an abhorrent term for the subject...

The Future of Work

So once we've worked out how society should function, what the city should look like, and what technology will be in it, we'll need to build that...

I'm (half) kidding - I don't think the big top-down vision works, it's more a case of choosing a general direction and heading off that way, correcting as we go. However, I think we need more making things and less selling services and fancy financial confections; and we need to tip the balance back towards the North some more to stop the South East from becoming a paved-over, gridlocked hell of offices.

And while we do so, we'll hopefully get beyond the tired arguments of us versus them and realise that we are the ragged trousered philanthropists, particularly with the capital required with the latest digital manufacturing possibilities.

The Sum of the Parts

This is already too long and too dis-jointed, but I'd be interested in other people's take on the subject, or further input for me to mull over. It feels like there's some sort of commonality to all of this, and it remains to be seen if I can tease it out.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

The Observer today has a collection of articles about "public intellectuals", and whether we have enough of them, or think enough of them here in the UK. That reminded me of this long-neglected draft blog post containing my notes, and some extended thoughts on the topic, from reading Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?.

Given that I haven't gotten round to finishing it off in the past eighteen months, it's unlikely that I'll get any closer to finishing it than I am now, so with some minor tidying I'll publish it now...

"The growth of specialization is fuelled by a culture where intellectuals are discouraged from looking at the big picture, and encouraged to find meaning in their specialty. Discussions are increasingly self-referential and not designed to communicate and engage people outside a specific field of speciality. [...] Instead of Knowledge we have developed the tendency to develop micro-knowledge."
Page 70

"Apathy and disengagement breed both anti-political and apolitical reactions. The political class is aware of this: but instead of attempting to address the underlying malaise and disillusionment through developing challenging political ideals that could inspire the electorate to vote, its response has been to acquiesce in dumbing down."
Page 80

"Politics has gone into early retirement. The big issues of our time - the impending environmental catastrophe, threats to our health, killer bugs, weapons of mass destruction - are presented as perils that stand above politics. It is widely believed that the world is out of control and that there is little that human beings can do to master these developments or influence their destiny. Deprived of choice and options, humanity is forced to acquiesce in a world-view that Margaret Thatcher aptly described as TINA - There Is No alternative.

If indeed there is no alternative, politics can have little meaning. Without alternatives, debate becomes empty posturing about trivial matters. Politicians are forced to inflate relatively banal proposals to the level of a major policy innovation."
Page 83

"The more the act of voting has lost its purpose and meaning, the more deperate attempts are launched to give people yet another opportunity to 'have their say'.

UK commentators have noted, with more than a hiint of envy, that more young people vote for their favourite personality on the reality TV programme Big Brother than they do in elections."
Page 88

"As [French political theorist Bertrand] de Jouvenal states: 'the businessman offers to the public "goods" defined as anything the public will buy; the intellectual seeks to teach what is "good", and to him some of the goods offered are things of no value which the public should be discouraged from wanting'."
Page 108

On the problems of a policy of maximum inclusion:
"In June 2001, a statement on widening participation issued by Universities UK observed that 'the key issue for the sector now is attracting people with no background of (or current aspirations to) study in HE to courses and universities'. In other words, widening participation has little to do with meeting a real demand for a place in a university. It means getting people to come to university regardless of whether or not they have such aspirations."
Page 120

"Norman Fairclough's study of the language of New Labour suggests that social exclusion is conceptualized as a 'condition people are in, not something that is done to them. Social exclusion is rarely presented as a process but rather something like illness that people suffer from.' It is not so much about poverty or economic disadvantage, but the feeling of not being a part of the important institutions of society. The premise upon which this version of the problem is based is that people become excluded because they lack the sense of self-worth to participate in the institutions of society."
Page 126

"The exhortation [from the American Conference for College Composition and Communication (amongst others)] to remove the barriers posed by spelling, punctuation and usage illustrates the kind of education that the access agenda offers to the ordinary student. It is a form of education that is more interested in giving students a sense of achievement than in educating them."
Page 144

Maybe a lot of what is wrong with our country is the triumph of marketing and consumerism in persuading us that there's always an easy option and that hard work is to be avoided at all costs. The way to be successful isn't to work hard and persevere, it's to get lucky by catching the public's interest on some "talent" show or reality spectacle and become famous for being famous.

Hard work in the pursuit of something in which you really believe, or in a field that interests and excites you, is fulfilling and rewarding. It could be the pursuit of greater knowledge to understand and cure disease, but it need not be; academic difficulty is just one of the peaks available to be climbed - it could be the physical challenge of athletes; the problem-solving required to run a business; or the satisfaction of having fed and enriched the lives of the customers at your cafe.

"One of the distinctive features of the contemporary so-called postmodern era is the loss of convition in the idea that the public is capable of being enlightened. But scepticism about the project of public enlightenment is rarely expressed in a coherent and explicit form. In an era of inclusion and participation, doubts about the capacity of people cannot be raised in a clear and open manner. We live in an era where clear statements about people's ability are obfuscated by a vocabulary that relies on terms like 'special needs students', 'differently abled people', 'non-traditional students', and 'the intellectually challenged'. This confusing language coexists with the rhetoric of flattery that declares that everyone is special and creative. But at a time when normal university students are routinely described as vulnerable, it is evident that the mental capacity of the public is not held in high esteem."
Page 151

Part of the problem, Furedi claims, is down to the development of a docile public who don't have the opportunity to argue and debate the issues at hand.
"Communications are organized in such a manner that it is difficult for people to 'answer back or with effect'. Most important of all, 'the mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions interpenetrate this mass [the public], reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion'."
Page 153

Here is something I feel is beginning to change. The Internet, and in particular things like blogs or Twitter, is providing a much more level playing field when it comes to discussion and communications. There are still issues with reaching less computer-savvy groups of society - see Julian Dobson's excellent piece about Reboot Britain - but I'm optimistic that, for the most part, these barriers can be overcome and we will all benefit as a result. The rise in the number of unconferences (and the way that they bleed out from the real world onto the online, through live video streaming, twitter hashtags, blog posts and recorded video) shows a reconnection to groups of people coming together to discuss and solve their common issues. It's nothing new, but maybe the digital tools give us the ability to scale it beyond the town hall to a national or global scale.

"Deference to traditional authority is being replaced by reverence for new ones. [...] Increasingly victims are endowed with a moral claim to authority. Victims of crimes are assigned authority to make pronouncements on the issue of law and order. Parents of casualties in the Iraq War are frequently treated as is they were experts in military affairs. Victims of an illness are transformed into expert cancer sufferers. Patient groups insist that their representation of their malady is the final word on the subject and that decent people have a moral duty not to offend them by refusing to affirm their claims."
Page 174

"Contemporary culture continually incites us to defer to a bewildering variety of relationship experts. Parenting coaches, life coaches, makeover gurus, supernannies apparently possess the authority to tell us how to live our lives."
Page 175

Maybe these seemingly contradictory paragraphs, from successive pages of the book, show the heart of the problem: we live in an age of contradictions, and it's difficult to navigate a path through them. Maybe that's always been the case, but I haven't lived in other times and so can't tell. Or maybe it's a flaw in the drive for specialisation. Fields of study have had to become so focussed in order to continue to make progress, but with that focus can come a lack of perspective of how that fits into the rest of the world. It's time us generalists stopped deferring too much to the specialists' greater knowledge of a particular topic, and started to assert the importance of our ability to weave the specialists recommendations into a wider context.

Can the Working Class Save the Middle Class?

There's an excellent interview with Umair Haque on the GOOD blog. In it he wonders why so many people are protesting against cuts rather than attacking the institutions that caused the problem in the first place, the banks? He argues that a better response than marches and protests would be grassroots organised economic action. I think he's right

The UK Uncut movement et al have shown that they can mobilise lots of people and generate lots of action. What if instead of occupying shops and going on marches, they persuaded people to move their bank accounts elsewhere? Would that succeed where Government is failing, at curbing bank bonuses and making credit more available for businesses that need it?

What if people banked with a local credit union or building society?

What if, indeed.

Why aren't the local credit unions (e.g. Partners Credit Union who are for anyone in Merseyside) working out how to persuade me to move my account across? Surely having lots more people using a local, non-profit savings/loan institution would be a good thing, and widening the customer-base to include conscientious objecting middle-classes would improve the image of credit unions from the reputable lender of last resort?

And what if we mixed in the technical chops of groups like One Click Orgs and the open-source movement? Just think how awesome and secure a way of banking that would be...

Tags: banking credit_union oneclickorgs

Rainy, Grey-sky Thinking

When it comes to designing better ways for our cities and us to interact, it occurred to me just now that what we definitely don't need is "blue sky thinking". That sort of "start afresh", "everything can be re-imagined" approach is what gave us Corbusier's aesthetically-pleasing yet soul-less and aggressive in practice grand modernist projects - most evident in the slum clearances and war-damage reconstruction in the UK cities of the 60s.

What we need more of is almost the opposite - "rainy, grey sky thinking" perhaps. Thinking that embraces the constraints of the city-as-is and works out clever ways to reuse and refactor what already exists, and which replaces as little as possible.

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: The Craftsman

Reading Richard Sennett's The Craftsman has been rather a slog. After breezing through most of the books I got last Christmas in a matter of days, it's taken almost a year to finish this one. It's not that it's a boring book either - there is plenty of interesting information about tools and how we use them, and how work was organised in the past. For the first half of the book though, it was really slow going.

I got through the second half much more quickly, but there were still plenty of occasions where I'd find my reading interrupted; however, that was mostly because a certain passage had triggered a bout of thinking and contemplation. I wasn't expecting to find treatises on city planning or IQ levels for example, but was happy that I did.

I'm not sure they make a lot of sense and, particularly with the earlier parts of the book, it's too long since I made the notes to remember exactly why each quote was worth marking. But here are the dog-eared selections that I made...

Page 2:
Oppenheimer reassured himself by asserting, "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."

Page 6:
The good teacher imparts a satisfying explanation; the great teacher [...] unsettles, bequeaths disquiet, invites argument.

Page 11:
The Enlightenment believed that everyone possesses the ability to do good work of some kind, that there is an intelligent craftsman in most of us

Page 73:
This is why we should not give up on the workshop as a social space. Workshops present and past have glued people together through work rituals, whether these be a shared cup of tea or the urban parade; through mentoring, whether the formal surrogate parenting of medieval times or informal advising on the worksite; through face-to-face sharing of information.

Page 108:
Failure [by the craftsmen to develop and create machines themselves] has magnified the symbolic threat of the machine. Skilled operatives live with and through machines but rarely create them in modern industry. Technological advance comes in this was to seem inseparable from domination by others.

Page 199:
Put simple, it is by fixing things that we often get to understand how they work.

Page 202:
In response to [the Great Fire of London in 1666] Wren sought to apply the principle of dynamic repair [i.e. understanding something by dismantling it and reassembly] he had learned scientifically to the healing of a wounded city.

Page 226:
The natural world appeared to these faulty disciples of Charles Darwin as a place of strife only; society, they argued, was ruled by self-interest, absent any altruistic cooperation. To [philosopher John] Dewey this seemed a macho fantasy that missed the real issue: working with resistance is the key to survival.

Page 229:
A city needs constantly to absorb new elements. In healthy cities, economic energy pushes outward from the centre to the periphery. The problem is that we are better at building boundaries than borders, and this for a deep reason.

From its origins, the centre of the European city has been more important than its periphery; courts, political assemblies, markets, and the most important religious shrines have been located in the city centre. That geographical stress translated into a social value: the centre as a place where people are most likely to share. In modern planning this has meant that efforts to strengthen community life seek to intensify life at the centre. But is the centre, as a space and as a social value, a good place in which to mix the cocktail of cultural diversity?

Page 232:
In the years immediately after the Second World War, the architect Aldo van Eyck began filling up Amsterdam's empty spaces with playgrounds - in trash-filled backyards, at traffic circles, on forlorn corners and the edges of streets. Van Eyck cleaned out the trash and graded the ground; his team sometimes painted the walls of adjoining buildings; the architect himself designed playground equipment, sandpits, and wading pools. Unlike school playgrounds, these street pocket-parks invited adults in as well. Many had comfortable benches or were located next to cafes and bars, allowing adult child-minders to nip inside for a quick drink to steady their nerves. [...]

The designer's aim for these small parks was to teach children how to anticipate and manage ambiguous transitions in urban space. Infants taken to the Hendrikplantsoen playground, in its 1948 form, could for instance wallow in sandpits that had no neat separation from grassy areas. [...] The lack of clear physical definition again provided a challenge; there were edges, but not sharp separations; probing that condition was meant to stimulate inquiry.

Page 249:
[...] transparency can counter [the danger of organisations being infiltrated by corrupt staff], but transparency of a certain sort: the standards of good work must be clear to people who are not themselves experts.

[...] Standards comprehensible to nonexperts raise quality in the organisation as a whole.

Page 285:
If no one could deny that abilities vary at the extremes, the shape of the IQ bell curve raises a question about the middle. Why the blind spot to its potential? The person with an IQ score of 100 is not much different in ability than the person with a score of 115, but the 115 is much more likely to attract notice. There's a devil's answer to this question: inflating small differences in degree into large differences in kind legitimates the system of privilege. Correspondingly, equating the median with the mediocre legitimates neglect - one reason why Britain directs proportionately more resources into elite education than into technical colleges

Tags: work tools craft book urban planning IQ

Thoughts on Conferences

I'm back from an excellent day yesterday at Interesting North yet I'm feeling strangely disappointed.

Interesting North

It's not a reflection on the event itself - that's what's so strange about it. IntNorth was one of the most enjoyable conferences I've attended:

A gorgeous setting. The bar set high with the polish and smooth-running that Tim and his team achieved. The typically "Interesting" variety of topics, all lovingly presented by people obviously passionate about their subject. A lovely lunch - popping over to the cathedral for soup and bread in support of a local charity was a great idea and meant we could meet more people rather than scatter across the city. I haven't seen that done at a tech/geek conference before and frankly it's something that should be done more frequently.

Conference Format

So. If it was such a fabulous conference, which it was, why was I left wanting more?

I think the problem is with the conference format. My discontent has been building over the past few events that I've attended. The whole broadcast dynamic of one person imparting knowledge or ideas to the audience feels at odds with the more egalitarian, discursive world of blogs and twitter.

Barcamps are a step in the right direction, but they just open up the speaker slots - they don't change the basic structure.

In theory there's nothing to stop me proposing a discussion or a debate or something similar for a barcamp session, but the trouble with that is that I (and I suspect many others) need to let ideas and arguments gestate for a while before I'm comfortable sharing them.

I had a flavour of this at the Arduino DevCamp earlier in the year. Rather than present, I held a session discussing favourite libraries. Some useful info came out of it, but I think a lack of preparation all round (me in thinking about how to kick the session off, and other participants because the idea was new to them) made it a bit of damp squib.

"Networking"

Another problem with the conference format is the lack of time available to talk to other attendees. Not networking in the "how to get ahead sense", hence the quotation-marks round it in the heading, but meeting new people, chatting to old friends, talking about what you're all experiencing... that sort of thing.

There were a raft of people at IntNorth with whom I wanted to catch up, but just got to say a passing "hello" to. I don't, personally, want longer breaks - I'd prefer more of them. I find it really hard to end a conversation - as often because they're so interesting as because they're boring - so externally enforced breaks in the breaks would be good too.

There's also the inverse problem of starting conversations if I don't know anybody. Short breaks would help there too as there's less time to stand on your own like a lemon. Maybe there are more ways - which aren't the enforced fun of networking games - to help break the ice?

Conclusions?

Lots of questions. Any answers?

Not yet. Not really. In the best blogging tradition, this is me writing stuff down to help my brain process it, and to see if it resonates with anyone else. However, I wonder if blogging itself could be part of the solution.

So, to recap: broadcast dynamic... bad; meeting lots of people... good; new ideas... good; no time to prepare... bad; mixing people up... good.

The Long Conference

Blogging, in one of its forms, can be a debate held across space and time. I write something on my blog; you link to it from yours and either expand upon it or argue against it; I can respond, others can join in.

What if we did some of that and then met up in person to continue the discussions? That would provide for the engagement and preparation of everyone beforehand, and because the discussions are stretched either side of the meeting event it would be a bit of a long conference.

In addition to getting your ticket, you'd have to have published a blog post on one of the conference themes beforehand. There'd be no judging of the quality of your writing or of your ideas - it's just to prove that you've spent some time thinking about it. No blog post, no admittance to the conference.

Some of the conference topics would be announced at the same time as the conference dates, and people would be able to suggest additional topics and themes. A conference committee would decide which additional ideas were accepted and add them to the proceedings.

The blog posts around the conference would be aggregated onto the conference website, so people could engage with the topics beforehand, and the committee would select a list of speakers from all of the blog posts. At the conference itself, there'd be short talks from the chosen speakers to act as starting points for an ensuing discussion. After each talk/discussion session there'd be a break to either let people continue debating, or drift off to other things.

There'd only be room for two or three sessions in each track in a day, but there'd be space for people to commandeer a room for a longer session if need be. The idea is to focus on connections between people and quality rather than quantity.

Right. There are holes in this that I could drive a bus through, but it's getting long enough already, and more importantly, I've finished my pot of tea. So I'll leave it there for now.

What do you think? Is there a germ of something interesting here? Would you want to come along if I organised it? Please leave comments, blog about it, or tweet your thoughts. I'll be watching the Internet for items tagged with #longconf.

Tags: conferences barcamp IntNorth longconf

Unmaking Urban Mistakes

John Tolva has written an excellent essay (it's a bit long to be a blog post really) entitled Lessons from unmaking urban mistakes. In it he looks at how the inner-city highways have improved traffic throughput in the city, but at the expense of the human-scale interactions, and also looks at how the highways affect the surrounding architecture.

It's a difficult problem to solve. When I travel around the city by car then it feels like it's quicker on the trunk roads, although given the number of sets of traffic lights, maybe it isn't. Here in Liverpool the docks and the Pier Head feel cut off from the rest of the city centre by the six lanes of traffic on the Strand. The problem is even more pronounced when you get to the north edge of the city centre and the inner-city motorway that is Islington. I think the resurgence of city-centre living would have bled out to the north much more if there wasn't this huge gulf of inhospitable tarmac in the way.

Is the answer better public transport, maybe an underground system to provide capacity without taking up surface space? Or to separate the cars and pedestrians? If the latter then we'd need a better solution than the desolate pedestrian subways and underpasses that resulted when we tried that with the new towns in the 1960s and 1970s.

Maybe block-level one-way systems help - basically separating the carriageways of the highway to adjacent streets so that there are fewer lanes of traffic for pedestrians to navigate at any one time. That seems to work reasonably well with Dale Street and Chapel Street in Liverpool (although these days Chapel Street has reverted to two-way traffic).

As you can see, I don't have any answers to these questions yet. It's just something I ponder about in some of my thinking on how to improve Liverpool. And the question is made all the trickier because the solution needs to work with the existing fabric of the city - demolishing and rebuilding swathes of the city are only likely to generate a different set of unintended consequences.

Tags: Liverpool urbanism transport regeneration

What's With the Obsession About Big?

Pete Ashton has posted a great entry recently to his blog, wondering whether Birmingham City Council has an obsession with big, grand, look-at-how-great-we-are events that seem more about showing off to the rest of the country (and world, if the world happens to care) and engaging in woolly activities like "improving the brand" than it is about putting on enjoyable and great events for the population. He asks why it has to be about the big, major initiatives and why it can't celebrate more smaller events - something that might, paradoxically, differentiate the city more than another me-too big lighting switch on.

Reading Pete's article, it seemed to me that you could switch some of the names and some of the projects (although thankfully I don't think we've had a similar failure with people getting injured) and it could easily be about Liverpool. There's a similar desire for big projects that swallow up millions of pounds of funding and promise grand regeneration, prosperity and job targets in the middle distance. It all makes for great headlines in the Echo, but does it really achieve much more than that?

I suppose it depends on whether you think that the way to improve the city is through a top-down or bottom-up approach.

From my (admittedly somewhere near the bottom) perspective, the top-down style seems to provide good media soundbites and short-term bragging rights, but at the expense of much of the money trickling down the lowest level and a high risk of failure. Liverpool One isn't perfect but is about as well executed as a big shopping mall project could be, but the Innovation Park seems to be a grand project casting around for a purpose still.

Maybe the problem is with a focus on trying to attract prosperity from outside the city, rather than nurturing the potential of the people within it? Do we have to create these grand schemes in order to successfully bid for regeneration funding? Are we building big science parks and office complexes with a view to attracting big companies to relocate to Liverpool and bring their jobs with them? I don't know; it would explain things better if that's true.

Is that how successful cities operate? "Move here and we'll give you loads of handouts". I'm not sure I'd want to live in a city populated by people who are only around because they were paid to be here. I think it's better to take a longer-term approach and help the people already in the city, who want to be in the city, to create interesting and new businesses. Some of them will fail, but some of them won't, and I don't think it's immediately obvious beforehand which are which. We should be encouraging all of them, and helping people dust themselves down if things do go wrong. That way we'll end up with a much more resilient mix of businesses and who knows, maybe the next Meccano or White Star Lines or Littlewoods...

Tags: Liverpool regeneration

Britain's POST?

The Reboot Britain event took place a couple of weeks ago, and some of the information from it seems to be filtering through into my "digital neighbourhood" (for want of a better way of explaining it).

I think Julian still has the best analysis of the problem, with his blog post on the danger of it being a digital-savvy love-in, but there are some good nuggets lurking within what was presented.

It's disappointing to see that event the digital-savvy don't properly get the new way of doing things. They've fallen into the all-too-common trap of thinking that they're embracing social media just because they've worked out how to use it as a source of extra content for their website. But if I want to talk about part of the event over here on my blog, the best I can do is direct you to this page with the video for all of the presentations and ask you to scroll through the list to the right of the video until you find Lee Bryant almost at the bottom. Then if you click on his face (because of course, making his name or the description a link too would be too tricky...) you'll finally be able to watch an excellent talk about how government should approach IT projects.

It seems there's also a Reboot Britain conference wiki, but as that also fails spectacularly to embrace the new open, transparent ethos of the web by requiring you to register before you can even read it, I don't know if there's anything useful in there or not. If anyone else can be bothered, feel free to let us know in the comments whether it's worth our while.

However, I'd rather not end on such a depressing it-looks-like-Britain-has-failed-its-Power-On-Self-Test note, you should have a look through the photos of Reboot Britain in Lego and see some of the inspiring and interesting ideas that the delegates at the event had about what should be done. I think getting them to build little lego models to illustrate their postcard notes is a superb idea; it makes the notes prime presentation fodder, which surely will help them to spread.

Tags: rebootbritain

Liverpool Architecture Society's Integrated City Project

A few days ago I found out about a project that the Liverpool Architecture Society is in the process of launching. The Integrated City Project is a challenge to look at ways of reconnecting the various districts and areas of Liverpool and working out a cohesive set of suggestions and plans for how best to develop the city.

There isn't anything as yet on the LAS website, but the LAS President elect, Robert MacDonald, has kindly agreed to let me publish the details in a web-friendly format here.

I'm not exactly sure how I can help with the project, but it seems that it could be a great opportunity (and possibly that final push that I need) to try out some of the really interesting "civic software" initiatives that are springing up.

Could the findings feed into a set of requirements for some DIYCity.org projects?

Would something like the Sutton Green Map help inform people about amenities, planning and infrastructure issues?

Can we experiment with the recently released source code for EveryBlock?

It also feeds nicely into the sorts of technology and ways of working explored by the Be2Camp group, and that initiatives like Talk About Local are starting to address.

Of course, it's quite possible that this is the sort of technology-focused response that fails miserably because it's targeted at the iPhone-wielding web native. But I think there are ways round that, and that's maybe where the geeks of Liverpool can help - rather than just installing all these whizzy Web2.0 services, we can extend them and look for ways to integrate them into peoples lives. Maybe text-messaging can provide enough interaction and richness to bootstrap the service; or we could integrate with The Newspaper Club to provide hyper-local, customised paper versions of the content; or work with local shopkeepers to install simple information kiosks... We'll need to work out what the problems really are first, but if services like this are useful then the technical challenges can be overcome.

I don't want to publish Robert's email address online, so if you want to find out more or get involved with the project then let me know and I'll happily pass your details on. My email address is over on the left.

Liverpool Architecture Society's Integrated City Project

Just imagine a ‘do it yourself’ city. Crises in government organisation and financial development are leading towards the self organisation of people in urban situations. Liverpool Citizens need encouragement to take creative and cultural urban control of architecture and inner city developments.

As an upbeat creative response to the economic recession, The Liverpool Architectural Society (established 1848) and others are planning a positive city wide project as part of the forthcoming cultural years of the Environment and Innovation. The society aims to address architectural, cultural, planning and social issues in the Inner and Outer City of Liverpool. The LAS aims to be inspired by local communities and situations. Multi-professional teams of architects, landscape architects, artists, students and communities will set out to create a series of practical and theoretical urban propositions for the inner city. A locally designed and constructed integrated light rail tram system is also being considered as a way of re-connecting different parts of the fragmented Inner City.

Currently, the Inner City is very much a hollow vessel without people. It needs new urban activity and density. In 1931 the overall population was 857, 247 and in 2002 the population was 441,500. In Merseyside, 83,000 jobs were lost between 1981 and 1986, representing 1 in 3 jobs. The average annual income in Liverpool was £7,363 in 2001, which was £4,127 under the national average. Unemployment is well above the national average. The biggest single knowledge gap is that we do not know whether the vacant land and empty building problem is getting worst, or better, or staying the same. The population increase in the 12,000 of new build apartments, in recent years, has been in the City Centre. Why has the inner city and outer areas been excluded and disconnected from these new developments ? The LAS ambition is to include the Inner City in future speculative visions for the city.

The best way to appreciate the shrinking Inner City and polarisation of Outer City of Liverpool is to just take a short walk out from the City Centre or take a bus ride to The Dingle, Toxteth, Kensington, Edge Hill or Walton or Seaforth. Any number of empty buildings, houses and vacant sites immediately become apparent. These neighbourhoods, districts and locations will be the focus of The Integrated City Project (see adjacent map, copyright James Mellor) This map highlights 33 urban districts including Speke and Garston. There are also numerous zones of vacancy ‘inbetween’ the perceived urban neighbourhoods.

URBAN DESIGN & CITIZEN PARTICIPATION

The urban design methodology will be to invite 33 independent and autonomous teams of designers to adopt one the Urban Districts or neighbourhoods. Each group will then be invited, over a twelve month period, to develop local contacts and participate with their communities to create new Urban Models for the neighbourhoods. The community connections might include Liverpool City Council, Merseyside Network for Change, Tenants Spin, City Planners, industrialists,developers, schools, businesses, creative industries, social groups, libraries, hospitals, health centres, GP’s, public houses, cultural, sports and entertainment. This process of design participation will be recorded by public progress presentations.

PUBLIC EXHIBITION 2010

The objective will be to hold an exhibition in a Major Public Venue in 2010 attracting National profile and publicity. The 33 individual projects will be presented as 1.500 models, photographs of the inner city communities, illustrations of the new projects, interactive multi-media, film and moving image. The Liverpool City Council will be invited to take a lead and participate by displaying the updated Shankland City Centre Model. There will be opportunities for public participation, sponsorship, either financial or in kind with the involvement of various city wide agencies.

Tags: Liverpool Architecture Society civic

BarCamp Liverpool: Don't Just Change the World... Improve It!

In the run up to Barcamp Liverpool I set myself a challenge, and was even stupid enough to spell out the rather ambitious idea here on my blog. I decided to prepare two talks: the beginners guide to Arduino I've already posted; and a second which would be about inspiring people to start a business, or work out what's "wrong" with Liverpool and fix it, or use technology to counter climate change.

I didn't want to steal two slots in the schedule if that would stop someone else from presenting anything, so I held off adding the second talk until late morning on Sunday. There was a slot free for the end of the day, which fitted nicely with my ideas of rounding off the weekend with something of a call to arms.

I tried to pull the possible threads together under the umbrella term of improving the world, but I think my current business-focus skewed things a little. Still, I hope the dozen-or-so people present take the general idea and twist it to their own experiences and passions, and that me rambling about doing great things does have some small effect.

I've done what I can, whether this is "the spark that started things happening" will be up to others.

As ever, the slides are on Slideshare. After the talk, Alex asked about the assorted business networking events I'd mentioned, so I've thrown a list of places that I find out about business events and networking onto the GeekUp wiki. Feel free to add to that if you know of any similar links in the NW. The other way to find out about more of the events I attend is to keep an eye on my Upcoming page.

Tags: bcliverpool barcamp liverpool entrepreneurship

The Most Important Topics to Discuss or Disseminate?

In a couple of weeks it's the first Barcamp Liverpool. One of the "rules" of Barcamps is that everyone who turns up should have a talk ready that they offer to present. I've been pondering over what I should prepare for my talk.

So far I've generally hinted at doing something Arduino-related, and have been assuming I'd either talk about monitoring your home (show the Mazzini prototype, talk about that and some of the similar projects from others, or some of the things I learn about at Homecamp); or running a more general "Getting started with Arduino" session where I plug some LEDs and a switch into a breadboard and write a bit of Arduino code. And I expect I'll still have something along those lines as one of my proposals.

However, I've just realised that I should be turning my thinking on its head. Rather than coming up with ideas based on the knowledge that I've got that others might find interesting, I should instead be answering the question:

You've got the attention of a couple-of-dozen motivated and intelligent geeks; how do you want to change their lives?

Now you could improve their knowledge, which is what my initial ideas cover; but maybe it would be better to inspire them to go out and improve the world, or challenge their thinking and affect their future behaviour.

I'm setting myself the challenge to go to Barcamp Liverpool with two proposals: one along the lines of the Arduino tutorial, and another that falls into the second category. I'm just not sure what it will be about. Maybe I'll talk about starting and building businesses that make a difference; or lead a brainstorming session to work out what's going wrong in Liverpool and how to fix it; or implore people to find ways to improve the reuse and recycling of technology to improve the environment; or...

I'd love to hear anyone's ideas, comments or thoughts on what this second proposal should aim to achieve. I'd love it even more if you came along to Barcamp Liverpool and presented something along these lines to inspire me. How cool would it be if we could point to Barcamp Liverpool as the spark that started things happening?

Tags: Barcamp Liverpool Homecamp Arduino

Do Computer Networks Hinder, Rather Than Help, World Changing Movements?

Whilst reading this entry on Socialreporter I began to wonder if computers and the whole social media shebang are part of the problem rather than a solution. I found this paragraph particularly apt:

"There are lessons here to be drawn from the greatest social innovations of the past. While Facebook may be a jolly efficient way of setting up a campaign against HSBC’s overdraft policy, the Paris Commune of 1871 managed to raise mass resistance to Thiers and autocratic government without as much as single laptop, and while blogs may help us to feel we are cooperating in some ethereal way I don’t think the cooperative and international development of quantum physics before the 1950s used a single byte of stored computerised information or a single email. The point is that, if computer-mediated networks are all that stand between Britain and an effective community of social innovators, how do you account for the Salvation Army, extension education, or much else of our civic heritage?"

The Internet makes it much easier to find a group of like-minded individuals, which gives you that initial buzz of something happening, but does that insulate you from the reality of convincing the masses? In earlier times you'd have to convince a fair number of non-(or not quite-) believers in order to gain enough bodies to do anything. So you were better placed to move onto the next phase of convincing even more people. Nowadays, whatever niche you represent, you can easily find everyone else who has the same viewpoint and set about doing things based on that belief system without ever having to hone the skills necessary to propagate the message outside of your clan.

Don't worry, I'm not about to stop blogging and stop answering emails (despite how it looks to those of you who've sent me one recently...). I'm just taking this as a reminder that the real world still isn't the same as the one online; I should try to find sources that challenge my thinking and ideas; and that actions trump talking.

Money As Debt

I thought I'd linked to this back when Euan first posted it, but it seems that I haven't. It's very interesting and maybe explains some of the reasons we've gotten into such a financial mess.

(via Euan)

Tags: money debt video

More Thinking By Doing Needed

A friend one commented that some people think by doing, whilst others do by thinking. By that he meant that some people work through their problems in their head, thinking through all the options and possibilities before acting, whereas other people have to start playing with things in order to map out the problem-space and help them to understand what they think about the problem.

Both approaches have their merits, and I definitely fall into the "doing by thinking" camp. The problem with that method is that sometimes you don't have enough information to be able to reach any conclusions.

Of late, all the projects I'm involved with seem to be suffering from that problem, but I hadn't quite put my finger on it until I read Gordon's post about practising more of what he preaches.

I don't have any problem practising what I preach, my difficulty is practising things that I'm not confident to preach, and similarly talking about things when I don't have all the answers (or at least, a lot of the answers). Some of that is because I don't know enough about the subject (like marketing, or the hardware I'm hoping to finish before geeKyoto 2008), and some of it is because there aren't any hard and fast answers (marketing again, and the "best" business models for these projects).

So I need to let myself, and encourage myself to, think more by doing. This blog post is a start.

Tags: introspection thinking doing

A Taste of TED on DVD

Recently my mate Kieran has been helping me get my head round marketing as I try to get word out about tedium. I was trying to work out something I could do to say thanks, and as he's been reading The Paradox of Choice it occurred to me that I could share some of the TED talks with him (including the one by Barry Schwartz, the author of The Paradox of Choice).

Kieran isn't a geek by any stretch of the imagination, so I burned the talks onto a DVD so that he could watch them from the comfort of his sofa rather than having to sit in front of his computer. I think that's about the only problem with the presentations from TED.com - it's hard to watch something for twenty minutes if you've got all the distractions of the Internet.

The talks themselves are superb - interesting and insightful topics being talked about by passionate, clever, famous people. If you haven't seen any of the talks before then I heartily recommend having a poke round the TED website or downloading this TED Taster DVD.

That's right, now that I've put the DVD together, I might as well share it with the rest of the world. All the TED presentations are covered by a Creative Commons licence, which means that it's completely legal to copy them and give them to your friends and colleagues... even to random strangers on the Internet ;-)

There are six talks on the DVD. I picked ones that I enjoyed watching and that seem to be well thought of on the web:

1. Dan Gilbert asks "Why are we happy?"
2. Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
3. Sir Ken Robinson say schools kill creativity
4. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you've ever seen
5. Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice
6. Gever Tulley on five dangerous things for kids

Obviously I can't share physical DVDs over the Internet, so you'll need a DVD burner if you want to make your own TED Taster DVD. And because the files are pretty big I can't just set things up so you click on a link and download it - you'll need to use BitTorrent, but (as well as saving some of my bandwidth costs) that will mean that it will download more quickly.

Despite the scare stories you might've heard, BitTorrent isn't hard to use. Lifehacker have a good beginner's guide to BitTorrent and Gordon McLean wrote an excellent starter guide for anyone using Windows.

Enough! Give Me The Files!

Okay, here are the torrent files you'll need to download the DVD. Choose the right one depending on where you live (well, really depending on whether your DVD player is NTSC or PAL). Each download is about 3.4 GB in size, so please be patient - it'll take a while to download, particularly at first when there aren't many copies around. And after it's finished downloading, please leave your BitTorrent client running for as long as you can to help share it with others.

• TED Taster DVD - PAL version. Use this one if you live in Europe or have a PAL DVD player
• TED Taster DVD - NTSC version. Use this one if you live in North America or have an NTSC DVD player

And if you just want to watch them on your computer, I've collected all the original files from TED.com and gathered them into the TED Taster mp4 torrent (704 MB).

Spread the Word

I know they aren't as easy to watch as your standard YouTube clip, but I think that the more people who get to see the TED talks the better. So, feel free to burn some extra DVDs and give them to your friends, or blog about the TED talks that you love the most, or point people here so they can download the DVD for themselves. Feel free to use the image above, and either link to this blog post or use http://www.mcqn.net/tedtaster (that's just a snappier URL that also points here).

Finally, thanks to Gordon McLean, Andrew Dixon, Adrian Sevitz and a collection of MeFites for their help in launching this crazy idea.

Tags: TED video DVD torrent

Which Vision Thing?

Once again I'm late to the party with my blogging. A week or two back, Paul Robinson posted an entry to his blog lamenting the state of the computer industry. I agree with a most of what he said: services like Facebook could be a really good way to keep in touch and engage with our friends, but have devolved into an endless parade of me-too, frothy, time-wasting games.

By the time I'm getting round to writing about it, things have already moved on. There have been a few responses to Paul's initial post; he's posted a summary of them; and thrown up an area of his website to discuss "The Vision Thing". On there they've even started to draft a manifesto.

All of which is highly commendable, but having read through it I'm left feeling a bit like a goth who's arrived late to a rave. Paul talks about wanting some meaning, and a vision that goes beyond building something "a bit like eBay but with a social graph". I don't see anything like that in the draft manifesto. "Down with IE6" is just froth in geek flavour. "Look after yourself" is just good advice, not something to fight for.

It's a very British manifesto: full of good intentions, but lacking ambition. Microsoft didn't set out to "make businesses lives a bit easier", they wanted "a computer on every desktop and in every home". We should be aiming for "renewable power generation on every home and every office" or "computer and Internet access for every single person in the UK" or...

I know that I'm doing no better than Paul in just writing this blog post. I don't have a solution. Yet. tedium is hardly going to revolutionize the world, but similarly it isn't just froth. It's also just the first step towards building something bigger. I don't have a full handle on my mission to change the world, but I'm beginning to grasp the strands that will weave together to produce it.

Tags: thevisionthing mission business tech

The North / South Divide?

Ian Forrester was at BarCamp Manchester the other week, and in his write-up wonders why he encountered some hostility to Southerners. I can't claim to speak for my fellow Northerners, but thought I'd offer my thoughts on the subject.

First off, I'm not sure that it's a North/South divide, but more of a The Provinces/London divide, and we're just being lazy ourselves by equating London with the South.

Serendipitously, Nick Robinson's latest blog post highlights the issue quite neatly. It's an article about celebrating Britishness, and the photo chosen depicts a Routemaster bus, black cab and the Houses of Parliament. I don't know what image I'd choose instead, but it shows the default London-centric view that's used as shorthand for English or British. We have black cabs in the North, but not Routemasters, and I was ten before I first saw the Houses of Parliament in person. And in the ten years after that I think I saw them again once.

Some of the tension is jealousy, as there's lots of interesting stuff going on in London, most of which is completely inaccessible. From Cambridge it's quite possible to head into London for Mobile Monday, or the London Geek Dinners, but any further away and it becomes a major mission.

London also seems to be the de facto location for any bigger event or conference. The argument being that there are a lot of people already there and the transport links are much better. Which they are, because the roads and railways are all skewed towards the capital. The North-West is at least lucky enough to have a couple of motorways that run across the country rather than towards London.

People in London don't want to travel to events, but expect the rest of the country to come to them. Obviously this is a broad generalisation (and can't be levelled at Ian because he travelled up to Manchester), but when Geoff organised the OurSocialWorld conference in Cambridge it was a struggle to get enough people to attend, and that's day trippable from London. What chance do events further afield have?

For people of my generation and older there's also the hangover from the 80s. This is my least rational reason, but watching huge chunks of the employment and prosperity of the region disappear with the death of heavy industry was painful. Whilst I don't think the government should have propped up industries that were no longer viable, the Thatcher government's "get on your bike" and move down South attitude, coupled with the in-your-face materialism of yuppies in the city didn't help.

Again, these are just my perceptions and thoughts, and I'm interested in hearing what other people - Northern, Southern, Scottish... whatever - think about the issue. I'm not sure I can articulate what I want people to do differently, if anything. Maybe just consider how easy it is (or isn't) for people to get to your event if you're aspiring for national reach. Or just to continue to support events that are being held outside London. I understand that if you live in London you aren't necessarily going to want to organise something miles away from home.

I'm trying to help make a difference by moving back to the North West this summer. So if anyone is looking to arrange something in the area and wants some help, please get in touch and I'll do what I can to assist.

Tags: Liverpool Manchester North South London events

Changing the World is Not Enough

It's strange sometimes how the world conspires to present a wealth of thought strands which I then fail miserably to weave into anything beautiful. At least this time I've got as far as writing something down about them, rather than just flail about in my mind before giving up.

A Sense of Purpose

Number 25 of Mike's 25 things to do before I die is "[c]reate something which people can remember me by". Tom Coates has been bemoaning the degeneration of commenting systems and writing a well thought-out piece about advertising. Jeremy Paxman has urged his fellow broadcasters to rise above the obsession with the bottom-line.

On a national, or even multi-national level, it feels as though capitalism and consumerism have won, and all that matters is how much money you can make with almost no regard for how you make it.

Yet individuals everywhere seem torn between an underlying need to feel a sense of purpose, a sense of meaning; but which is at odds with their day-to-day pressures to fit in and work with the world around them.

Facebook has an app called "My questions", which lets you pose questions for your friends to answer. I'd had to install it so I could answer the questions my friends were asking, but resisted its attempts to get me to ask a question. As a result it has defaulted to some random poser - "What is the one thing you always take with you?"

On Friday, given that a few people had taken the trouble to answer it, I decided that if people were going to the trouble of answering "my" question, it should at least be something worthwhile. I changed it to "How do you change the world?"

Today I've decided that that isn't a good enough question. Although it has a noble aim, and easily converts to a great slogan (as shown by Hugh in the Blue Monster "Change the world or go home" campaign) there is scope for misunderstanding.

Changing the world isn't enough we need to strive to improve it.

Improve the World, or Go Home

What a great idea. No-one's thought of that before... And that's the problem isn't it - How?

Tags: worldchanging purpose society

How Low Can You Go?

Jon Udell points to this mp3 of a thought-provoking speech given by Brian Schweitzer. Schweitzer is the charismatic, common-sense talking governor of Montana and in this talk he lays out his ideas on how to solve the problem of climate change.

Cleverly, he doesn't label it as such, and instead talks about removing America's dependence on foreign oil and about creating jobs and new businesses. His take is that in the short-term we can save 20% of our energy use through efficiency and conservation; 20% with renewables (interestingly, he points out that a new wind power plant in Montana is providing electicity at $38/megawatt, but a new coal power plant they've also built can only manage $41/megawatt); and a further 20% with bio-fuels.

That leaves a gap of 40%, which he argues could come from new, cleaner coal technologies. These aren't perfect, but his argument is that until the hydrogen economy arrives (or whatever the yet-to-be-invented solution is) we're going to be using some fossil fuels and the newer technologies already exist to strip the toxins from coal before it's burnt (so no mercury and such is released into the atmosphere) and they can capture the carbon-dioxide and sequester it in old oil-fields (it's ideal for helping extraction of oil, and the oil companies will gladly pay for it).

It sounds like a better short-term solution than the expansion of the nuclear program that's being promoted in this country.

The only change which has an immediate pay-off is reducing energy consumption. We need to make saving energy cool, and Brian Schweitzer's rallying cry is "How low can you go?"

The National Grid of The Future?

Jon Udell has posted up the mp3 from a conversation he had with Mike Frost about intelligent energy management. It's an interesting discussion about how Mike's company, Site Control, are building telemetry and control networks in businesses to let them monitor and control their electricity usage.

The main drive in take-up seems to be cost-savings through increased efficiency and control of the businesses energy usage, but as Jon notes, as you get finer-grained control over your electricity it opens up opportunities for the grid to manage usage. Rather than cut power to entire companies, or entire streets of houses, when there is a shortage the power companies can ask (possibly just through dynamic prices) users to scale back their usage. Which would you prefer - brownouts and power-cuts, or a heating system that ran a couple of degrees cooler every now and then?

Jon has written more about the energy web in the past and hit's one of the big problems head on when he says:

"It's crazy, when you think about it, that your phone bill is exquisitely itemized but your electicity bill is a single number"

I think if we had better ways of visualizing our energy usage, maybe even some of these more imaginative, almost ambient displays as detailed on Open Loop's Energy Projects links page or Open Loop's own Buried Light project, then it would reduce the amount of energy wasted needlessly and increase pressure on appliance manufacturers to improve their products.

The Rise of Awareness

I considered including this in my earlier post but couldn't find the right link between the two, so this gets its own entry.

Karen has posted an excellent post exhorting people to do what they can and providing some links to let you find out how (btw, I'm not the Adrian in the comments, that's Mr. Sevitz).

She'll hopefully be pleased to read that thanks to the Attenborough documentaries, we're upping our environmentally-friendliness beyond the home composting; cycling virtually all journeys under five or six miles; using panniers to reduce the number of plastic bags used; and growing some of our own vegetables. I'll post more about the extra things we're doing after they've kicked in properly.

Climate Chaos

Did anyone else watch the David Attenborough documentaries Are we changing planet earth? and Can we save planet earth? I wasn't expecting to learn too much from them, as I think I've got a pretty good awareness of the issues and some of the solutions, so I was shocked at the impact watching them had on me. They really brought home just how big an issue global warming is, and how important it is that we start to act now.

With the entire BBC Climate Chaos season and Al Gore's film, it feels like we're reaching a tipping-point of public opinion - but I suspect that I'm noticing these things because of my "green tendencies", and in fact most of the country (and the world) are largely unaware of the size of the problem facing us.

I think the BBC should make the documentaries freely available for download on its website. Surely it would be a masterpiece of public service "broadcasting", and a perfect way to promote the Creative Archive? Does anyone have David Attenborough's email address...?

Defending Against The Clones

Now I don't know enough about Sheffield to say whether these ideas and claims are realistic, but I think it's a superbly written manifesto and call-to-arms in the defence against the homogonisation of British towns and cities and the rise of "clone town Britain".

"Have the balls to run with a big idea."

Give Me A Future I Can Believe In

Over at the London Review of Books there's a rather interesting essay - The Destruction of the Public Sphere - about the political landscape of the UK.

I think Ross McKibbin, the author, is particularly insightful in his comments about the NHS and education - "Few ask why the educational and health systems seem now so subject to (failed) permanent revolution, given how stable their regimes were before the late 1970s. One answer is that ideological utopias can never be achieved precisely because they are utopian. The other is that the competitive market simply does not work in such systems."

It's rather depressing reading though, for there's no clear solution to re-connect the electorate with the politicians, and none of the major parties look they might be capable of sorting out the NHS or the education system, and make it somewhere where the actual people staffing the services don't have their enthusiasm and drive ground out of them with bureaucracy, league tables, and performance targets.

Maybe now it's time for some leaders who actually acknowledge that the world isn't perfect, and that it won't be possible to make it so. Then we can stop this futile pursuit of a world where nobody dies, no mistakes are made, and every child is a genius mathematician who can write better prose than Shakespear...

I Want To Praise You Like I Should

Good, evil and technology an essay by Scott Berkun.com

"In essence, he didn’t want to annoy me with praise. Annoy me with praise! Is there a more absurd phrase in the English language?

It made me think how many times I’d seen or read things that mattered to me and how rare it was I’d offered any praise in return."

Offer more praise. Now that might be a good resolution for the new year.

(Thanks go to Tom Smith for pointing out this essay.)

Open Rights Group Inaugural Event

As I said the other day, on Tuesday evening I headed down to London for the Open Rights Group (ORG) digital rights event.

It was an interesting evening. As the group is very new, it is still finding its direction, and choosing its battles; so as a result the meeting was a collection of concurrent group brainstorming sessions. I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of the event on peoples blogs, but maybe that will come when ORG wiki is in place and the notes from the meeting are collated there.

Rather than summarize and provide all the links to the speakers, some of the attendees, etc., I'll just point you at this write-up over on Preoccupations.

I still haven't worked out what I'll take from the meeting. These non-technical - political? moral? ethical? - computing issues are important. If nothing else, there'll probably be greater coverage of them in this blog.

Give Peace A Chance

Despite all the doom-and-gloom in the media, there are signs that the world isn't too bad a place after all: the number of armed conflicts has declined by more than 40% since 1992. The deadliest conflicts (those with 1000 or more battle-deaths) dropped by 80%.

TEDBlog: Huge story... largely ignored puts it well:

"The global media also, of course, largely ignored the report. Chances are this is the first you've heard of it. I'm getting more and more angry about this... the strange, unspoken, self-reinforcing alliance between media and public, which results in such a distorted world image being created. Drama, celebrity and parochialism inevitably trump insight, reason, and the global view."

Maybe if we could acknowledge the progress that's we're making, we could be more optimistic about what can be achieved; which would free us to attack the really big problems facing us.

Now This Could Be Handy

Learn About Procrastination and then get help overcoming it. I've definitely been using the "not in the right frame of mind" excuse recently.

The Paradox Of Progress

The Paradox of Progress by James Willis.

This book should be a set text for the induction course of new civil servants. It's also a rather good read for the rest of us. It drew me in and I had it finished in a few hours of non-stop reading, but if were widely read by those implementing our public services then maybe James Willis' Ministry of Leaving Well Alone would come to pass, and the UK would be a better place.

Starting with an analysis of some of the problems facing the powers that be, and the trouble with media-scale hype and an excess of specialism, the author moves on to present the case for generalism and to suggest some solutions; all presented in a very readable style, peppered with anecdotes from his life and his time as a GP.

You can read it all online for free, or buy it in book form for a tenner, signed by the author himself. Maybe we could set-up some sort of adopt-a-public-servant scheme, where we read it online and then our ten pounds is spent sending a copy to a chosen official...

Kill Your Inner Demon

"If you don't like the story your life has become � tell yourself a better one."

Bloodletters - Hack Yourself, well worth a read.

Can The Natural Enterprise Save The World?

I haven't read all these links yet, this post is partly so I don't lose what looks like some very interesting reading.

Richard MacManus links to this interesting article by Dave Pollard exhorting the creative types in knowledge management and IT to embrace entrepreneurship as a way to solve the world's problems. A rather bold claim, but it appeals to me as that's one of the long-term aims of my entrepreneurial venture.

From there, I found links to another of Dave's essays, A Prescription For Business Innovation: Creating Technologies That Solve Basic Human Needs, and also Natural Enterprise, the majority of his upcoming book in online form. I have a feeling this will make an interesting companion read to the next book on my reading pile, The Ecology of Commerce.

The Death Of The Best

In days of not so old, when most people didn't stray far from where they were born, everybody could be the best. At something. You are the best baker; I am the best mechanic; she is a farmer, as is he - he is the best farmer, but she is the best singer; your brother is the fastest runner; my cousin is the best climber.

Everyone could find their niche, and make it theirs.

Then we all moved to the global village. Now there are far more people than there are things to be best at. Now there's always someone better than you. At everything.