TEST

We’ve recently launched some rather lovely widgets for our Battlefront project. You can embed a widget for any campaign you want to support, such as the marvellous Alexander Rose above. We’re also experimenting with widgets on another project, where we’re experimenting with using them on Myspace and Bebo. Alter Ego gives you tools tocreate badges about different aspects of your personality, whilst Dictum asks you questions about your opinions and morality.

I’m interested how these will propogate, or not. The Battlefront widget has already generated over 17,000 views, despite just a handful of installations (its only been up a week or so).

Sometimes, a random web session throws up a series of coincidences, like three cherries on a fruit machine. Today, three interesting takes on futures pinged the radar. First was Matt Jones’ giddy notes on attending a Ken Adam talk at the V&A, projecting a line from Adam’s high-modernist volcanic dens for Bond Villains, via Dan Hill’s visualisations of wifi architectures to Google’s plans for floating data centres cooled by the ocean. Then, I caught up with Jane McGonical’s Superstructs, a collaborative scenario-writing game led by The Institute For The Future. Finally, Russell Davies proposes taking a middle-england model village and hacking it to create a collaborative vision of the future.

These ideas describe a range of scenario styles, from the lone creative vision of Ken Adams to the crowdsourced noise of Superstructs. Of the three, I find Davies’ vernacular model-village future the most intriguing. The vernacular is something that is often missed in futures work – we find it easier to believe the extremes of the modernist utopia or chaotic dystopia. Future studies deal in the grand statements of imaginary architectures, or the disruptive wake of Big Historical Moments like an earthquake or oil shock. You rarely see ideas about how something as mundane and unexciting as a suburban house or village shop will look in 100 years time.

Yet, the vernacular is both the wake of detritus that is tidied up to make history, and the tiny atoms of our potential futures. Vernacular architectures are local solutions to local problems; evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Vernacular photographs are the opposite of photo-journalism – statements of identity rather than history, created to be passed down through future generations, rather than looked up in libraries.

What would a vernacular future look like? I think it would be a link in a chain, rather than a break. The shop in Russell Davies’ model village would have leaflets offering deals on future comms networks alongside tinted colour postcards of the local area. Our Post Office sells scraperboard craft sets similar to the ones I played with in the 70s alongside inkjet cartridges and MP3 keychains. The local shopping st includes an (excellent) tradtional family butcher and a grocery-cum-wifi-cafe-cum-money-transfer shop. The wall edging our kids’ nursery playground has the faint ghost of a pre-war shop sign painted directly on bricks next to an Adshel board rotating mobile phone adverts.

It might take a lone genius like Ken Adam to imagine the future, but, as I hope Russell Davies finds out, it take a village to build it.

Jemima Kiss has broken the news that Matthew Postgate has taken up the new Controller of Research & Innovation role at BBC Future Media and Technology. This is fantastic news – Matt really understands the role that Research and Innovation plays at the BBC, has had lots of experience with the politics of the organisation and its stakeholders, and is a genuinely lovely bloke as well. He has the vision, intelligence, charisma and leadership skills that the R&I team need to truly influence the future of the BBC.

The last few years have been difficult for research & innovation at the BBC, as the traditional long-term standards and engineering work of the R&D team in Kingswood Warren has had to adapt to a world in which it is often outstripped by short-term web-based innovation. Meanwhile, it has had to react to calls for it to open up its platforms and research to support a wider UK innovation community. There has been a lot of work in the last 5 years to address these issues – some successful, some not – but its an unfinished process, and Matt will have to create a new innovation culture in the organisation.

I’m sure he’ll have a lot of people giving him advice, but as someone who worked in Innovation at the BBC for 5 years, I thought it was worthwhile writing down some thoughts. I appreciate that advice from ex-colleagues can often seem tainted by unfinished politics and unsettled debts, so I’ve focused on what’s possible in the future, rather than raking over old memories. Here’s five things that would be inspiring, intriguing, or even controversial for BBC R&I to do:

1 – Put BBC R&I in a national and global context
Just as the BBC internet strategy has changed from being about bbc.co.uk to being about the BBC on the internet (eg Youtube, Facebook, Myspace, et al) the R&I team need to see themselves not as a BBC team, but as part of a network of innovation in the UK and the world. This happens a lot at the level of individual people and projects, but all the targets and evaluation of the R&I team’s work at an organisational level focuses far too much on short-term value within the BBC. This might seem a reasonable way to justify investment in a time of budget cuts, but the best companies and talented individuals in the world right now evaluate themselves and their work against their peers, regardless of whether they work for the same company, a competitor, or somebody in a completely different market. The BBC should have the ambition to see its R&I talent as part of this peer group, and measure its success acoordingly.

2 – Make the 2012 Olympics a focus for innovation
Innovation thrives when it has a big, meaty challenge to aim at. The 2012 Olympics will be a landmark event for the BBC and digital media, as its the first Olympics where the host nation will have an entirely digital broadcast network (or at least, as near as dammit). I saw Ben Gallop, head of BBC Sport Interactive, present at a Westminster eForum conference on New Media opportunities for the Olympics, and he promised that, for the first time,, at any Olympics, the BBC will cover all 4,000 hours of sporting activity across the whole event. This is the kind of challenge that motivates, inspires and draws together teams of talented people. There should be at least half-a-dozen big, meaty Olypmic-based challenges that can raise the profile of BBC R&I within the organisation and the UK

3 – Give away one amazing thing every month
The BBC has dipped its toe in the water of open source, open collaboration and open licensing of content over the last few years, but these have been fringe projects that haven’t really had the impact that they intended. Bitter experience tells me that trying to change things in a systemic, strategic way is just too damned hard in an organisation as politically complex as the BBC. Better to try and do one amazing thing every month, rather than spending 3 years pushing one rock up a hill. Pick one BBC asset, research project, technology – whatever – and give it away for people to play with. And do this every month, without fail.

4 – Make money, or even better, make money for other people
This might be controversial, especially in the middle of a global financial crisis, but some of the work that BBC R&I does has commercial potential. There needs to be ways for this work to be licensed, spun out, experimented with and commercialised where this make sense, even if this is by other people than the BBC. This was always a massively political issue within BBC R&I, as many felt that having a commercial focus would drive research away from the BBC’s core goals. This is nonsense – letting researchers explore commercial partnerships, start-ups or other exploitation routes can help innovation get out the door more quickly than the BBC can manage itself. This will benefit the organisation by putting its own innovation products in the same commercial context as external suppliers, giving them the challenges and opportunities that the rest of the market deals with every day.

5 – Make R&I a virtual network of talent inside and outside the BBC
This is similar to the first point, but is more about individuals than organisations. The BBC has, over the years, attracted an incredible amout of talent to its new media and R&I teams. Many of them have gone on to be thought leaders in their fields, and have created some of the most innovative products on the web, sometimes even for the BBC itself. R&I should encourage conversations and collaboration with any talent, not just the people working for the BBC itself. There should be a revolving door of talent working for, with, alongside and sometimes against BBC teams. People tend to leave the BBC with a sense of rejection or resentment – this is partly because of the uncanny cultural influence that such an august institution has on you, and the feeling that you are either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of its circle. Far better to see the BBC as somewhere like Pixar -  a once-in-a-lifetime creative community that you’ll feel part of for the rest of your life.

I left the BBC to join Channel 4, and have relished the opportunity to do some of the things i’ve mentioned above. It might seem counter-intuitive, as Channel 4 launches its own digital innovation project (led by another BBC New Media alumni), to be offering the BBC advice, but I’d love to see the UK’s two PSB organisations competing for the best ideas, talent and projects in the UK. Between the BBC and C4 there is a wealth of experience, talent and most importantly, resources. I’m sure that Matt will turn R&I into an incredibly exciting and fun place to be, and that we’ll all be keeping an eye on what the ‘competition’ is doing, and using this to drive our own ambitions for 4IP.

Mike Butcher reports on TechCrunch UK that Playfish has rasied $17m in a second round of funding. In any climate, that would be a phenomenal 2nd round, but in the current financial situation, its absolutely extraordinary. It demonstrates how important gaming is to the next wave of innovation on the web. Forget the semantic web – its gaming that will lead the innovation of new interaction models, engagement and monetisation. Especially with stats like these:

“Playfish now has over 10 million monthly active users on Facebook (around 1.5 million daily) and two billion monthly minutes of play time in under a year.”

That last stat is astonishing. If I interpret it correctly (2bn minutes of play by users per month) then that is one *heck* of a lot of attention – comparable to the attention garnered by a broadcast TV channel. If that is still growing, and they can turn that attention into cash, then $17m will quickly look like a very cheap investment.

ITConversations has posted the audio from a talk I gave at this year’s Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead earlier this year. The talk expands on the themes in my ‘Six Spaces of Social Media‘ post, and starts to open this up into an argument about how the public realm doesn’t exist as a single space anymore, and we need to rethink our political and social language about private and public space, particularly when we are designing policy or projects for these spaces.

I’ve given variants of this talk a few times this year, and feel that there’s something missing in the argument that I can’t quite put my finger on yet. I think the end of the 20th century concept of the public realm is something that we need to address more directly at the level of policy – at the moment, its mainly being discussed in terms of technology or secondary social effects. I’m more interested in interrogating how we use the word ‘public’ in political and social contexts, and suggesting that it no longer means what it did to many people who are the subjects of policy.

As we live in a world currently having to re-engineer its core economic and political philosophies after boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’ were catastrophically obscured, I think we need a more nuanced vocabulary to replace the traditional private/public binary opposition, as this has elided into series of nuanced, dynamic spaces along a line from personal to social. I’m not politically well-read enough to articulate this in terms of hard politics, but I’m trying to take the issues that broadcasters are facing in redefining ‘public value’ media in a digital world as an analogy for broader issues we will have around redefining the ‘public’

Also, listening to this again, the joke I make about being ‘unfortunately’ a Spurs fan has, sadly, only got funnier…

I’m at Seedcamp this wednesday, helping out as a mentor for the 22 very interesting start-ups that Saul Klein and his team have assembled for the week-long workshop. I couldn’t attend Seedcamp last year, but I’m really excited about the event, and getting to meet the companies involved.

There’s something about events like this, and social innovation camp, and the Innovation Labs at the BBC, that gets me buzzing with ideas again. Its the creative energy given off by teams of focused, driven people who are offered a small window in which to forget everything else and just worry away at an idea until it works. Or doesn’t. In which case, better to spend a week finding that out than months or years.

Despite the latent competition in these events, the sense of collaboration is always stronger, as the the focus of the camp/lab format makes everyone feel like they’re sharing the experience together. As a commissioner, they’re incredible opportunities to have a long dialogue with potential suppliers about ideas, rather than just an hour-long pressured pitch meeting in a stuffy office room. Whether you’re a commissioner at a broadcaster, or a VC looking to invest, the intimacy of an extended camp/lab helps you build a relationship with a potential project team, and tells you more than any slide deck or investors pack could. Not least whether the team actually gets on – we had a couple of teams at the BBC Labs fall-out spectacularly during the week, which is very handy to know *before* you give them the money.

I worked out that in 2007, with the Innovation Labs and getting the slate together for the C4 Education projects, I must have seen over 1,200 ideas or pitches. Without Labs, Hackday, Social Innovation Camp and Seedcamp, it would be a lot harder to get to see the best ideas across the many different pools of digital talent in the UK. If it wasn’t for last year’s Seedcamp (and a fortuitous meeting with Paul Miller at No 10) i wouldn’t have seen, and invested in, School Of Everything, for example. Hopefully, 4IP can support and extend this informal network of events, and come up with some new events to fill the gaps.

Very excited about 2 things this week. First up is the 2Gether08 event, organised by Steve Moore and funded by C4. The event is aiming to linkup many of the social and digital innovation community in the UK, including AMEE, Interesting; and Social Innovation Camp.

There’s a fantastic line-up of speakers over the 2 days, including Umair Haque, Julian Baggini, Martha Lane-Fox, Matthew Taylor, Jane Jacobs, Euan Semple, and my favourite – Russell Davies, talking about ‘Interesting for Change’. Should be a really fun and mind-expanding 2 days. See you there?

Also this week, our YearDot project has properly launched. This is an ambitious online and TV project where we’ll be following 15 teens as they live ‘the first year of the rest of their lives’. Its aiming to see how living on the web is changing the way that teens make choices in their lives, and how networking, collaboration and search are affecting the difficult transitions that most teens as they leave home, school or college and have to make their own way in the big, wide world. Its been a fascinating process working with So Television and Holler as we’ve discussed how to get the approach and tone of this project right for the different spaces it will exist in. I think we’ve got it right for the launch, but one of the good things about the project is that we can be flexible throughout the year. I’d be very surprised if the project didn’t look vastly different by the end of the year. To find out and participate, here’s the main hub site, and our Myspace page.