Opening the Crates

Opening the Crates

After over a year locked away in our garage, I’ve finally brought through my 14 odd crates of vinyl. Today was spent opening them up, picking out some gems, then lifting the rest up into the loft. Once we’ve converted the garage into a studio, they’ll all come out again, but until then, I’ve got vinyl in the house again, and all is good.

The first record I picked out is one I forgot I owned – Edu Lobo’s first album in the states, ‘presented by Sergio Mendes’. Mendes did this for a lot of his brasilian compatriots, using his crossover success in the States to bring through more obscure artists. It didn’t really work, and artists like Edu Lobo only recently gained an audience in the US and UK off the back of DJs interest in their work. This album contains the awesome acoustic guitar and drums monster ‘Zanzibar’.

I’m gradually uploading more pics of my favourite, or most bizarre albums, in this Flickr set

2Gether and Yeardot

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.

The Geek Season

Nearly through a rash of conferences, amidst a rash of toddler birthday parties. This has meant that around 50% of my diet in the last 2 months has been either danish pastries or fairy cakes. I’ll leave you to work which is responsible for which.

Working backwards, Mashed08 was at the weekend. Just like last year, it seems there’s something magical about getting a few hundred geeks together to hack over a weekend. And just like last year, Alexandra Palace’s roof opened, although this time it was the (planned) pyrotechnics inside the venue, rather than the (unplanned) lightning outside that was responsible. Or rather, Ewan Spence’s socialflightsim crashing on to the stage.

BTween transplanted itself from Yorkshire across the Pennines to Manchester, and the Museum of Science and Industry. The event expanded to fill the space, and was much better to boot. Highlights for me were Kaiser Kuo puncturing some Western assumptions about China, the Chinese and their Internet use; and Bill Tidy’s live-drawn insights into the lives of the over-60’s. More stand-up cartooning at tech conferences, please!

Bill Tidy’s session would have fitted in nicely at Interesting08, which I missed for the second year running, as I did MediaFutures. What is it about geeks that, as soon as the sun starts to make an appearance, we organise loads of indoor conferences? Can we co-ordinate ourselves to make them *not* clash next year? Or perhaps hold one outdoors?

Before all of these, I was at Thinking Digital in Newcastle, which had an eclectic lineup including Greg Dyke, Ray Kurzweil, Tara Hunt, Aubrey DeGrey and Fake Steve Jobs. Unfortunately, due to another clash with the Big Chip Awards dinner, I had to leave after the first morning, so didn’t get to see much of the conference. But I did get to attend the fantastic Speakers Slow Dinner at Secco in Newcastle, with a very inspiring talk on all things Slow from Carl Honore. Although he broke his own Slow philosophy by herding a group of us into a cab to the Baltic for the second half of the Champions League final before they’d even served dessert.

Next up is the Hide and Seek Festival at the Royal Festival Hall, and then next week the last of this burst of events – 2Gether08 – which will try and round up lots of the other events into one geeky social innovation bundle.

The Geek Season is well and truly established. We just need a bit of co-ordination, and a good drinks sponsor for the whole damn shooting match…

candles

Turns out that I’ve been doing this on and off (more off than on) for 5 years.

Now if I can just get around to converting the whole thing to run on wordpress and embedding Tumblr, it might get a bit more lively…

Sanger Institute

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Sanger Institute data centre, originally uploaded by matlock.

We’re working on a really exciting project (an ARG) involving history, cartography and genome research, and the Wellcome Trust are working with us so that we can base it on the bleeding edge of scientific research. So today, I was lucky enough to get to look around the Sanger Institute, where much of the DNA mapping for the Human Genome Project happened.

It was a fascinating afternoon, with conversations ranging fluidly between robotics, bio-tech, history, culture and ethics. Tom, the writer on the project, was feasting hungrily on such stimulating source material, and hopefully we’ll be able to send him up for a residency so that he can work closely with the Institue on the ARG’s story.

The announcement that they’d mapped the human genome was hailed as the beginning of an era of genome-related cures for many illnesses. But in reality we still know next to nothing for certain about how our genes interact to make proteins. Its very much like exploring a new country – the map is still full of blank spaces. I’m hoping that our project will inspire a new generation of explorers to rise to this challenge…

Make *all* your audience into Heroes

My esteemed work colleague Alice Taylor posts some concerns she has with ARGs, namely that the typical treasure-hunt game dynamic ends up creating an incredible moment of live theatre for a very small group of players (normally tens or hundreds at most) and a more distanced, spectator experience for the masses.

In the 6 months that we’ve been commissioning online education projects, we’ve both seen a lot of proposals that use these ‘winner takes all’ formats. These are sometimes like TV reality shows, where the interactivity is limited to the audience voting on other participants, and sometimes treasure-hunt-style ARGs.

Whilst its inevitable that not all your users will become immersed in a game, I share with Alice a concern that we are importing broadcast ideas into online entertainment formats. Broadcast has one big problem with mass participation – it has a limited amount of bandwith in which to tell a story, so it makes sense to narrow the field of the story as time passes, until there is one winner who gets all the attention at the end. The X-Factor, for example, would be a complete mess if it tried to follow the stories of 12, 120, or 12,000 of its hopeful participants for more than a few weeks. The prize in a limited bandwidth world is to give more attention to the winners, until there is one person winning the ultimate prize of the undivided attention of millions of viewers. This is because bandwidth (and therefore attention) is the scarce commodity that broadcasting values most highly.

Online, we don’t have to worry about bandwidth scarcity. The scarcity of attention is more acute, but the answer is not necessarily to try to artificially focus attention using winner-takes-all gimmicks. If I’m interested in a player/participant/thread of a story, why can’t I follow it, even if most other people want to follow something else? Do we have to focus on one aspect of the story, and expect everyone to be happy with that?

Anyone who has heard me speak in the last year will have heard me rave about World Without Oil. This is not just because its an educational ARG, and we’re commissioning a few of them next year. The reason I love it is because it points to a future direction for ARGs, in which the story is not a funnel that directs a few people towards a unique experience, but an open, collaborative story in which lots of different threads can exist alongside each other. I’m not sure that WWO altogether solved the problem of how to help people navigate these threads, but it has shown an very productive new direction for ARGs, in which a story arc can be used as a structure for creativity, exploration and collaboration. Of course, MMOs have known this for a long time, and manage to combine overarching narratives with lots of tiny social groups sharing quests together.

For me, ARGs need to understand this dynamic in order to become a mainstream experience. They focus far too much on creating a coup de theatre for a few privileged players, and not enough on making every player’s experience remarkable. Even if this experience is something that they only share with a few friends, such as WWO’s Ped Party mission, it can still be a powerful and moving thing.

We don’t have to think in terms of funnels and winners in online storytelling. We can let stories fracture, multiply, escape and wither, depending on how we want to encourage our users to play with them. We should check the urge to rely on models inherited from the world of TV and experiment with new concepts of open, collaborative play. On the web, we don’t have to only have one winner – we can make all our audience into heroes.

BBC Labs rises again!

I’m very pleased to say that the deeply talented Matt Cashmore and Morag Cartwright have picked up the baton of the BBC Innovation Labs, and is currently winging his way around the country with Frank “Mr Labs” Boyd on the launch days.

Matt, as usual, is making a much better job of this than I did when I was at the BBC, and has introduced a couple of innovations in the process. The briefs are a lot more focused and tangible this year, which I think is partly because this is the second year that some of the commissioners are involved in the Labs, and they’re using their experience to write better briefs. There are also some really nice videos of the commissioners explaining the brief, so even if you can’t attend a launch day, you get a good idea of what they’re looking for. Its such an obviously valuable thing to do, I wish i’d thought of it last year. Still, nice to see Phil Gyford’s elegant MT templates for the Labs site is holding up well for the 3rd year in a row…

But the most significant innovation is the promise that at the end of the 5 day Labs, any team selected for further development will know how much they’re being commissioned for, will have a development meeting within a week, and contract within 2 weeks. This is great news, as the most disappointing thing for me at the Labs was that the enthusiasm and commitment to ideas that would flourish on Labs would quickly dissipate back in the sterile conditions of White City. It often took months to get post-Labs kick off meetings organised with indies and commissioners, and often much longer to actually get projects going. In the first year, some projects ended up abandoned, as commissioners moved on to other roles before they were put into development.

Its really, really good to see the Labs continuing, and I hope this means they’re a permanent fixture from now on. They’re a vital part of the growing network of projects that the BBC is using to have better conversations with the creative digital media community. They’re an incredible amount of fun, as well, so if you’ve not thought of attending a launch day or proposing an idea, then do it. NOW!

As a taster of the kind of thing that happens at Labs, look at Muddy Boots, a prototype developed out of an idea from James Boardwell of Rattle Research. Its a neat hack that looks for contextual content from around the web to support BBC News articles. Here’s some info from Backstage.

Six Spaces of social media

TechCrunch has an illuminating report on the Bear Stearns suggestions for Yahoo, and includes their definition of four kinds of social network:

Leisure-Orientated Sites: entertainment sites, open to all users – eg Myspace, Facebook, Friendster, Bebo, Orkut, Windows Live Space, Hi5

Professional Networking Sites: Sites focusing on business networking – Linkedin, itLinkz

Media Sharing Sites: sites focusing on the distribution and consumption of user-generated multi-media content, such as videos and photos – Youtube, Flickr

Virtual Meeting Place Sites: sites that are essentially a 3-D virtual world, built and owned by its residents (the users) – Second Life

These definitions feel a bit haphazard and thrown together – a mixture of user behaviours (networking, leisure) and media objects (video, photos). I’m not sure these distinctions are that valuable as an tool for analysing social networking – they don’t speak enough about user’s motivations for using services, nor the kind of relationships and behaviours that the services engender amongst their users.

As part of my current job, I’ve been trying to find a way of describing social media spaces in a way that can be shared by both traditional media indies and digital media agencies. The former understand genres and formats, whilst the latter understand platforms and networks. After a few weeks of gradually finding out what doesn’t work, I’ve ended up adopting a more user-centred model, based on the assumptions users have about what they can *do* in certain kinds of space, who they’ll be doing it with, and what kinds of behaviours are expected. I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while, so here they are – six different types of social spaces, based on behaviours and expectations, not platforms, genres or formats. Caveat – this a crude analysis, and the examples are not exclusive – there are lots of overlaps between these spaces; and they exist both online and offline:

Secret Spaces
Behaviours: Private, intimate communication, normally with only one or two others, often using private references, slang or code
Expectations: Absolute privacy and control over the communication between users, and no unauthorised communication from third parties (eg spam)
Examples: SMS, IM

Group Spaces
Behaviours: Reinforcing the identity of a self-defined group, and your position within the group, eg ‘stroking‘ behaviour to let the group share a sense of belonging, or mild competitiveness to signal hierarchies within the group (eg who has the most friends, posts, tags, etc)
Expectations: A shared reference point for the group – eg a band, football club, school, workplace, region, etc. Rules about approving membership of the group, and icons for the group to signal their membership (badges, profiles, etc)
Examples: Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, etc

Publishing Spaces
Behaviours: Creating your own content or showcasing your talents to an audience outside of your usual social group
Expectations: The ability to control the context and presentation of your creative content. Ways to receive feedback, comments and advice from other users.
Examples: Flickr, Youtube, Revver, etc

Performing Spaces
Behaviours: Playing a defined role within a game structure. Experimenting through simulation, rehearsal and teamwork to achieve a goal. Iterative exploration or repetition of activities in order to perfect their performance
Expectations: A clear set of rules that is understood by all players. Clear rewards for success or failure. The ability to test the boundaries of the game structure, or to perform extravagantly to show off your talents
Examples: MMORPGs, Sports, Drama

Participation Spaces
Behaviours: Co-ordination of lots of small individual acts to achieve a common goal. Shared belief in the goal, and advocacy to encourage participation by others.
Expectations: Rules or structures that help co-ordinate activity towards the goal. The ability to create micro-communities within larger participation groups – eg a group of friends going on a political march together, or a workplace group created to train for a marathon
Examples: Meetup, Threadless, CambrianHouse.com, MySociety

Watching Spaces
Behaviours: Passive viewing of a linear event as part of a large group. Organising a group to attend an event, and sharing experiences afterwards
Expectations: Spectacle, entertainment, a feeling of thrill or joy. A shared sense of occasion, or of being taking out of your everyday existence for the duration of the event. Mementos or relics of the event (eg programmes, tickets, recordings, photos, etc)
Examples: Television, Cinema, Sports, Theatre, etc

So – I’ve been using these six spaces to try and get people to think outside of platforms, technology, genres or formats, and to think instead of what users might be *doing* in these spaces, and what they might be doing it *for*. Using these spaces as the inspiration for designing interactions should help us to think about how users’ *feel* about the services they use, and what kinds of implicit expectations they have of the service and other users. It asks questions for people designing services, or projects that are based on these services. Who is in control of what elements of the service? What kind of conversations are users having, and with whom? What kind of behaviours are accepted, and how are they rewarded? What kind of behaviours are rejected, and what are the punishments?

I’m sure there are many, many variants of this kind of analysis around the web, but I’ve found it really useful as a way of helping people think of the ‘register’ the project is operating within, to design from the point of view of the user, and to make sure we don’t cross implicit boundaries that will offend them or discourage participation.

More noise, more heat

Will Davies’ article The cold, cold heart of Web 2.0 compares the efficient online tools that are increasingly structuring our social and cultural lives with the work of Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker. Becker pushed economic analysis into sociological and behavioural studies, and Will likens this to web 2.0 extending the efficiency gains that web 1.0 made for the retail sector into more personal networks:

Where Becker took the utilitarian assumptions of economics and pushed them into areas of society seemingly untouched by rational self-interest, Web 2.0 takes the efficiency-enhancing capabilities of digital technology and pushes them into areas of society previously untouched by efficiency criteria.

But in both cases there is a crucial aspect of human relations that is missed out and threatened as a result. This is that the means by which people discover, choose or access something can very often contribute its value. People are not only outcome-oriented.

Will worries that the increased speed of selection and consumption erases the inefficiences that create texture to our experiences:

[…]when we vote, chat to neighbours, browse through a record shop we are not seeking some outcome in the most efficient manner available. We are engaging in an activity that we find valuable

I normally find myself in complete agreement with Will – he is one of the most informed crtics of web culture, in that he applies rigorous, well researched thought to otherwise hyped debate, rather than being a knee-jerk nay-sayer. But in this piece he risks coming across a reactionary luddite, another Carr or Keen.

His mistake is best illustrated in the last quote above, where he gives three very different examples of human behaviour – voting, chatting to neighbours and browsing through a record shop – and suggests that Web 2.0 strategies seek to find the same efficiences in each type of transaction.

This is too crude a comparison – each of those relationships is fundamentally different, with different power relationships, cultural and financial contexts. To say that Web 2.0 strategies seek to collapse each of these different contexts into a ruthless drive for efficiency simply isn’t true.

His argument is strongest in the first scenario. He has previously pointed out the dangerous illusion that lowering the barriers to political participation is always desirable. He has called for an ‘ethics of inconvenience’ that seeks to preserve the friction in certain experiences as a way of ensuring their value is not degraded.

But what value is *really* lost through making it more efficient to chat with friends or by replacing record shops with online marketplaces? And, by the way, can we all stop talking using vinyl records as the arbiter of some kind of high-water mark for physical culture? Nick Carr’s recent Long Player post is another eulogy to the LP, which Clay Shirky has unpicked as cultural nostalgia for the LP as the “natural unit of music”, rather than an accident of the production technology available at the time.

There is an important question being overlooked in all these debates. It is not about whether ‘inefficient’ cultural and social value is lost in new technological networks (ie whether buying an LP or chatting over a fence is a more valuable cultural experience than browsing iTunes or reading Twitter). Instead, we should be looking at whether users can readily re-inscribe these values onto the new networks in their own ways. In other words – can we make these new spaces our own? Can we add noise to the signal, and does it matter if this drowns out the new, efficient, transaction itself?

In all Will’s examples, the question is not whether efficiency is a valid goal, but whether the drive for efficiency reduces ownership and transparency – whether we’re being locked into new transaction models that we can’t twist and annotate, or whether efficiency in fact creates more adaptable and mutable systems that can start to accrue new forms of ‘noise’.

A voting system that seeks to make participation more efficient whilst reducing the ability to contextualise this participation within free and open debate would indeed be a disaster, so we should strive for systems that create as much ‘noise’ around the moment of participation as possible. Sharing cultural objects has arguably – through MP3 blogs, bluetooth exchanges, etc – become more deeply ingrained in social contexts than in the ‘golden years’ of the LP. As someone who has spent more time than is strictly healthy thumbing through racks in record stores and fairs, I can admit that what we’ve lost through the ongoing digital revolution are actually feelings of privilege, snobbery and exclusivity, not some shared cultural experience.

Geoffrey Batchen has written movingly about how photography created new opportunities for cultural and social expressions. Cheap portrait photography was a far more efficient, democratic form of representation, and this openness led to vernacular annotations that re-inscribed older social currencies onto the new forms – lockets combining photos with locks of lovers hair; silver frames that included casts of baby’s boots alongside their photo. The incredibly diverse forms of social exchange on social networking services like Facebook, Flickr, etc are merely the most recent forms of this vernacular expression.

Will Davies might think that Web 2.0 has a ‘cold, cold heart’, but this is only true if you assume that ‘efficiency’ is the primary goal. Rather than arguing whether efficiency is good or bad on its own terms, we must instead place these efficiencies in context, and ask whether they increase or decrease the ability for users to re-inscribe their own cultural values in new forms. Is there more noise, more heat? or a cold, cold heart?