I took my medium format camera to OpenTech this year, as part of my on-going project to take photos of cutting edge geeks with trailing edge technology (see also ETCON 2003, Evolution 2003 and New Media Art at the Tate).

The light wasn’t great at the venue – there wasn’t much natural light, so I used a spot in the main lecture theatre where there was a slightly angled soft spot overhead. This, and a high contrast film, has given the pictures a more dramatic contrast, but it meant that some of the pictures look a bit too shady for my liking, especially in the eyes. It also gives a great level of modelling on the skin, which I like a lot, but i’m not sure my subjects all will… I might have to invest in a softbox or go really pro and get a ringflash.

Here’s some of my favourites. You can see more over at my Flickr site.

Matt Webb

Ted Nelson

Paul Hammond

Tom Coates

Lee Maguire

Gavin Bell

Ben Metcalfe

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The BBC has launched the first product from the Creative Archive. In a collaboration with Radio 1, around 100 clips are available as part of a project to encourage creativity amongst ‘vjs‘. the clips are a heady mix of wildlife, urban environmental and fantastic ‘futures’ footage from old Tomorrow’s World programmes.

It’s good to finally see an output from the Creative Archive, and I know there’s a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind this relatively modest start. But I’m sure this launch will open the floodgates for lots of similar projects in the coming months.

The Creative Archive has carried a huge burden of expectations since Greg Dyke’s slightly premature announcement in Edinburgh almost exactly 2 years ago. Many people expected the BBC to just dump tons of stuff online, but I think that the decision to place archive material in the context of other BBC brands (like Radio 1) is the right one. Our audience already has a relationship with the BBC through these brands, and it makes sense to use these to encourage people to experiment with the archive, rather than creating a stand-alone brand just for the archive.

It also gives production teams in broadcast divisions the opportunity to see how creative our audiences can be, and the incredibly exciting possibilities for mixing user-generated content and BBC output. Radio & Music interactive are doing fantastic stuff at the moment, from podcasting to SMS takeovers, so it makes sense that they should be the first partner for the Creative Archive.

Huge congratulations to Paula Le Dieu, Paul Gerhardt and Jennifer Rigby, the people most responsible for making this happen.

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Surprisingly, I actually did it. London to Brighton, 54 miles, on the hottest day of the year. It was a bit better than I thought – I got cramp quite badly at about 35 miles, but managed to cycle through it, and even the slightest hill after the halfway point made my thighs ache – but I didn’t really get to a point where I thought ‘I can’t do this’. It was a fantastic day, and the support of the people along the route offering home-made cakes, drenchings with water pistols, or just encouragement, made it even better. Best of all, the British Heart Foundation have raised over £3M from the 27,000 (yes, 27 thousand) people who did the ride on Sunday.

If I haven’t cajoled you into donating already, there’s still time…

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James Purnell, the creative indsutries minister, gave the keynote at an IPPR event this morning on the theme of ‘Creative Britannia’. The speech announced the successor to Chris Smith’s ‘creative industries task force’ – a new policy initiative to support the creative industries in the UK. Most of the speech was quite routine, but he did announce a new project to deliver the Government’s manifesto pledge to review the copyright/IP laws for a digital world.

There was a report a week or so ago that he was in favour of extending some copyright limitations to 100yrs. He didn’t actually announce that in the speech, but instead was quite careful to emphasise the need to both renew IP laws in light of the digital age, but also to preserve ‘the easy exchange of ideas’. A few people (including Will) tried to get him to be a bit more explicit on this, but he artfully avoided saying anything.

Adam Singer gave a response from the stage that was full of fantastic rhetoric, describing the emerging market for 3D printers as a harbinger of a world in which all creative IP is under threat from piracy: “It doesn’t matter if the button says ‘print’ [in reference to 3D printers] or ‘burn’ – all design will become simply a file to be shared”. He saw strong IP as the “intellectual hygiene of a networked world”, suggesting that IP law should be taught as the “new domestic science” in schools, as it was the most important future skill for creative entrepreneurs. His rhetoric, although very entertaining, was from the dystopian end of the telescope – “each time bandwith increases, another industry will fall [because of IP theft]”. You could try to unpick all the false assumptions in that last sentence, but frankly, its not worth it. Just sit back and bask in the warm glow of his fire and brimstone. In fairness, Adam Singer is far more measured and informed than the above quotes suggest (despite describing Lawrence Lessig as the “Martin Luther of copyright” that the music industry had failed to burn…), but he’s a great public speaker, and it’s his job to provoke.

I asked a question to the panel about the kind of industry trends that the DCMS were looking into when developing new IP models for the creative industries. Writers like Henry Chesbrough and Eric Von Hippel have documented trends in ‘old’ industries like Pharma and Engineering towards ‘open innovation’ models. Emerging best practise is to maximise your return from IP through a range of licensing models outside your own company, moving from old models of patent enforcement to open licensing models with peer companies and even Von Hippel’s ‘Free Revealing’, where IP is given up in order to drive other competitive advantages.

It would be a shame if the DCMS assumed that a monolithic protectionist approach was the best model for the creative industries, whilst ‘older’ industries were moving towards models that maximised the return on IP through more flexible approaches. Creative Commons, Backstage and the BBC’s Creative Archive License are breaking new ground in this area, and the DCMS should be encouraging more experiments like this, not discouraging them.

UPDATE – good article by David Rowan on the same event in the Times today. He makes a similar comparison to other industry models, pointing out that patents are restricted to 20 years to encourage innovation, so why do the creative industries need up to 5 times as much protection?

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Grennan & Sperandio, the artists known as Kartoon Kings, have a new comic book out, created in participation with young people from the South Coast. As a Brighton/Hove resident, I’ll be rushing along to the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (one of the co-commissioners) to get a copy.

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I used to have a personal trainer a year or so ago, and for the 18 months of our twice-weekly sessions, I was the fittest i’ve been since my early twenties. Since then, I’ve only managed the (very) occassional bike ride or jog along brighton beach, and i’m starting to notice the effects.

So, with foolhardy recklessness and in the hope of re-igniting my desire to keep fit, I’m doing the London to Brighton bike ride in a few weeks. It should be ok, but i’m already fearing that i’ll be the least fit of our group, dragging behind and pushing my bike up the hills. The only consolation is that I’ll be able to go straight home afterwards for alcohol and a warm bath, instead of having to schlep back up to london with my bike.

I’m doing it in aid of the British Heart Foundation, so go on – sponsor me. At least that way the suffering will be worthwhile…

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There’s lots of fun projects using tags on Flickr, but most of them I find interesting for their cool use of tech, rather than their aesthetics. But the ’50 people see’ project is just beautiful. It takes 50 pictures that share a tag (ie ‘eye’, ‘mountain’ or ‘shadow’) and maps them onto each other. The resulting images have a beautiful, scratchy surface, a bit like an abstract version of a Dave McKean illustration. I’d love to see these printed up large in a gallery.

[thanks to Kim for the link!]

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Ben Hammersley has the best commentary, but let me be probably the last person to welcome Backstage into the world. Backstage was a project that was passed around a couple of times before finally sneaking under the wire and into the world. I think Tom and Matt were the original parents, before handing it to me. I did very little except come up with the name ‘backstage’ before handing to James, who did a fantastic job of actually getting it somewhere, before Tom returned to bring in the fantastic skills of Ben, helping James and Ben get it over the finishing line. So essentially, it was vapourware until the A-team of Tom, Ben & James actually knuckled down and built something. They deserve all the plaudits and free pints that the blogosphere can throw at them.

Which in a way is the message of backstage, and what they should probably put as its tagline (paraphrasing the cult kids TV show) – Why Don’t You Just Switch Off Your Television Set And Go [Online] And Do Something Less Boring Instead?

Ah! – Backstage – the kids TV programme! Its only a matter of time! (For our US viewers, imagine a cross between Sesame St and O’Reilly’s Make magazine…)

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Clay, picking his way through the exchange of posts about the significance of wikipedia, suggests there are two perspectives on technological innovation. One group of commentators use ‘Radial’ maps when describing innovation, valuing vectoral shifts out from a central point; whilst others use ‘Cartesian’ maps that value the final destination. Put in other terms, radial people get excited about iterative progress, and cartesian people look for the endgame. He suggests that writers like himself and Cory Doctorow are ‘radial’, whilst Danah Boyd and myself are ‘cartesian’, and that explains our different takes on the potential and limits of folksonomies.

At the risk of sounding even more ‘cartesian’, this is a ridiculous over-simplification, and artificially polarises the debate we were having about the impact of folksonomies as an innovation. I’m surprised that Clay – who I’ve long admired for the elegance and sophistication of his writing – has proposed such a binary opposition. It misinterprets some of the questions Danah and I were asking, dismissing them as symptoms of our cartesian worldview and us as being out of step with ‘an era of radial triumphs’. He then extends the cartesian analogy to explain why only companies who have a monopoly – or think they do – engage in pure research, as cartesian approaches to innovation require more resources over longer periods of time.

As someone who is currently engaged in an review of the entire R&D function where I work, this presses a number of my buttons at the same time. The lapsed academic in me wants to dig into Clay’s binary opposition and tease out a more complex model of innovation, whilst my work brain wants to demonstrate that current innovation best practise is to invest in a broad range of innovation and R&D strategies, some ‘cartesian’ and some ‘radial’. The second part will have to wait until after I can talk more publicly about the strategies we’re devising, so first of all, lets look at some alternative theoretical models for technological innovation.

Until quite recently, histories of science and technology have been polarised along similar lines to Clay’s radial/cartesian analogy – science discovers and technology applies. But in the last 20-30 years, researchers have been looking at the sociology of science and technology, mapping the dynamics between the two communities and the effects these dynamics have on innovation. Any period of innovation you care to choose has scientists who ‘do’ technology, and technologists who ‘do’ science – but the missing chapters in our technological histories describe the social networks that acted as crucibles for these communities and their products.

Bijker, Hughes and Pinch’s excellent ‘The Social Construction of Technological Systems’ proposes a new model for appraising technological innovation based on mapping the different professional and amateur communities that shared innovation problems, and tracing how the interaction of these communities led to the solution we now recognise as the ‘innovation’. Using the invention of the bicycle as an example, they demonstrate how innovation develops in a series of saccadic moves, nudged this way and that by the specific needs of each community. In the early development phase of the bicycle, many opposing solutions were available, but our traditional quasi-linear history describes a line between the boneshaker, penny farthing and the bicyclette, with other ‘failed’ options described as dead ends off this path. [click here to see this illustrated in a pop-up window]

Bijker et al propose a model that asks ‘why did some variants die whilst others survived?’. Their model explores the different social groups who shared the ‘problem’ driving the innovation. In the case of the bicycle, this includes the male audience targetted by bicycle manufacturers at the time (“Bicycling is a healthy and manly pursuit with much to recommend it, and, unlike other foolish crazes, it has not died out”), but also women (“From the number of [Safety Bicycles] adapted for the use of ladies, it seems as if bicycling was becoming popular with the weaker sex, and we are not suprised at it”) and even anti-cycling protest groups (“…stones are thrown, sticks thrust into the wheels, or caps hurled into the machinery. All the above in certain districts are a common occurrence, and have happened to me, especially when passing through a village just after school is closed”) [all quotes from contemporary sources quoted in Bijker et al].

The ‘Social Construction of Technology’ approach describes each group’s specific problem and aligns them to variant innovations that existed at the time. This approach introduces other factors other than the purely technological into our understanding of innovation:

“This way of describing the developmental process brings out clearly all kinds of conflicts: conflicting technical requirements by different social groups; conflicting solutions to the same problem (for example, the safety low-wheelers and the safety ordinaires); and moral conflicts (for example, women wearing skirts or trousers on high-wheelers). Within this scheme, various solutions to these conflicts and problems are possible – not only technological ones but also judicial or even moral ones (for example, changing attitudes toward women wearing trousers).”
[Bijker et al; “Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts”]

This is a far more sophisticated approach to understanding the drivers for technological innovation – closer to the PEST/PESTLE analysis used in scenario planning than the technological deterministic rhetoric that tends to dominate contemporary debate. Instead of innovation being depicted as a single line, it is a complex network of innovations and communities [click here to see this illustrated in a pop-up window].

I would propose this model is closer to the ‘map’ that Danah and I are using to discuss wikipedia and folksonomies than Clay’s reduction of us to a ‘cartesian’ perspective. Bringing other potential actors or drivers to the debate is not symptomatic of a worldview that fetishises ‘end-goals’ at the expense of iterative progress, but instead looks to make the fascinatingly complex network of existing actors even richer and more diverse. If anything, this approach is anti-cartesian, as it seeks to create a plurality of possible end-states, without fetishising one at the cost of the others. It values the iterative achievements of innovation communities, but puts them in the context of other actors and communities that might currently be invisble to them.

Ironically, this approach is a better conceptual fit to the radical commons-based production models we’re debating than the techno-centric ‘radial’ models Clay describes. As massively social forms of production become more and more significant, we should by all means celebrate the technological glue that enables them, but we should also start to examine the social communities that are simultaneously their users, creators, adapters and abusers.

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Clay makes some very valid points on my recent post about the limits of folksonomies, not least to point out the difference between personal taxonomies – as in tags that are only meant for one user – and vernacular taxonomies (Clay uses the example of theives’ slang from the 18th Century) that are shared between a group of people. Delicious, Flickr and other tagging services allow people to share personal taxonomies, and therefore to benefit from the amplified signals that emerge out of the unstructured noise.

But – and this is the important bit that I missed – those amplified signals have no infrastructure to support them. They exist without the community having to agree them, even in adhoc forms. They are simply amplified feedback. There are no politics in folksonomies, as there is no meta-level within the system that allows tagging communities to discuss the appropriateness or not of their emergent taxonomies. There is only the act of tagging, and the cumulative, amplified product of those tags. As Will Davies would probably put it – there are public goods, but no public realm.

This is truly radical, but brings me to the second point that Clay makes. He asks why Danah Boyd and I worry about ‘exclusion’ in these kind of systems. My first response would be to blame my art school/lit crit background, and say that years of exposure to critical theory creates a knee-jerk reaction to ask questions about access and inclusion. But its not really about political correctness, but rather a curiosity about how things like folksonomies play out as their scale increases.

In my post I suggest that folksonomies are valuable only whilst nothing is at stake. I might rephrase that, and say – what happens when folksonomies develop a political realm? At what scale, or in what contexts, will this occur? Can these structures retain their radical visibility and accessibility within political contexts? How might that help overcome some of the barriers to participation in exisiting political realms?

Wikipedia is a useful example of a ‘folk’ project that is having to grapple with politics. It has a very active meta-level debate about the value and authority of its texts, but by applying the same conditions to this meta-level as the content itself (everyone can participate, everything is visible), it seems to be able to cope with the demands of its emerging politics. Clay has raised this issue a lot , asking how we might signify these meta-narratives at the level of wikipedia content. But he’s also aware that the solutions that work now might not work at the next level:

“One of the mysteries of scale is that there’s no such thing as scaling well. You can make something 100 times bigger, and if it works, you think you’ve got it licked. But the next power of 10 can kill it. So I don’t know whether or not openness and co-creation are incompatible at Wikipedia scale.”

Personally i’m neither optimistic nor pessimistic about whether folksonomies can scale succesfully. I’m just curious. Wikipedia feels to me like the last toll booth on the ‘information superhighway’ – that vision of the internet as a network of monolithic libraries & information repositories that large organisations (like Time Warner and [*cough*] the BBC) got excited about in the 90’s. After wikipedia, its not highways any more, but dirt paths as far as the eye can see. Wikipedia straddles this border – its an off-ramp from the serene knowledge fantasies of the internet superhighway to the noisy, playful web of folksonomies.

But, as more and more people take the off-ramp, the dirt paths have a habit of becoming roads, and border towns turn into cities, and suddenly we’re having to think about governance, authority, access, and representation again. This hasn’t happened yet with many folksonomy projects, but it will. What kind of solutions will we come up with to solve these problems of scale? What kind of public realms will we create to discuss the politics of the playful web?

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