Andy Gibson « Sociability

New Public Thinkers: My Nominations

10 December, 2010

My good friend and intellectual scratching post Dougald Hine has started a conversation here to identify the next generation of public thinkers, and has invited me to be part of it. Here’s what Dougald says:

“Radio 3 is currently looking for “a new generation of public intellectuals”. You can apply here – except that to be eligible, you must be studying or working inside a university. Now, call me self-interested, but by this criterion, the likes of John Berger or a young Karl Polanyi would fall through their net. I’m not comparing myself to those remarkable men. But as someone whose work gets cited by academics in a range of disciplines and is, I hope, beginning to make some impression in the public sphere, I’m disappointed to be excluded from consideration.

This isn’t just about me, though – there’s a whole network of people I’m aware of in the UK and beyond who are doing substantial new thinking from outside of academia – often in close and constructive dialogue with those operating from inside university departments. The way Radio 3 and the AHRC are approaching this project is going to miss out on a huge amount of the emerging intellectual culture of our generation – many of whose brightest minds saw what was happening to academia and chose to do our thinking elsewhere.

I’ve written to Roger Wright, the controller of Radio 3, telling him this and inviting him to redress the balance. To help him, I’d like you to nominate your own choice of “new public thinkers” from outside of the university walls.”

It’s a compelling argument, and one which I wholeheartedly support. I have nothing against the academic world, having worked with many academics over the years including on Social by Social, but ever since my School of Everything days I have been convinced of the importance of breaking learning out of institutions and embedding it into society, and of the huge intellectual value created outside the academic world. And as one commenter pointed out, it seems odd that Radio 3′s criteria would actually exclude Antonio Gramsci, inventor of the term “public intellectual”.

Dougald has very flatteringly nominated me as one of his choices, prompting a flurry of blogging and tweeting from me as I try to live up to the moniker! So now here are my three initial nominations, although I’m sure I’ll think of more later. Interestingly, they’re all people who do things rather than write or talk about them, which perhaps reflects my growing belief that ideas are worth far more if they’ve been tried out in practice. So here goes…

Dougald himself – obviously I should return the favour, but over many years of collaborating with Dougald he’s been consistently years ahead of public discourse, introducing me to Ivan Illich when we were dreaming up School of Everything, writing about economic collapse long before the mainstream had the courage to do so, and creating new models for living and working which I believe will help shape the future of society for years to come.
Charles Armstrong – an entrepreneur by profession, Charles brings his understanding of ethnography and technology together to create new tools and infrastructure to help us live better, and has som incredibly smart ideas about networks, crowdfunding and the future of business and society. I’m nominating him particularly for his work on emergent democracy and the brilliant One Click Orgs which is introducing democratic structures into the corporate world.
Tessy Britton – another long-term collaborator of mine, I could nominate Tessy for the work she has done on learning and personal development which has shaped our work together on Mindapples. However, I’m particularly nominating her for her incredible work on Social Spaces, including the wonderful book Hand Made, and her bold action-research project of the Travelling Pantry, touring the country to test her ideas out in practice. Many PhDs have been awarded for far less.

So, who are your nominations? Please name your choices on your own blogs or webspaces, link back to Dougald’s post, and invite your friends to do the same. Let’s see what interesting people emerge…

1 Comment | Andy Gibson, blogs, collaboration, invention, learning, mindapples, School of Everything, Sociability, Social design, social projects | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

5 #bigsociety questions

9 December, 2010

Interesting news this month that Steve Moore has taken over as Director of the Big Society Network, and that the Network is poised “to launch a new series of events, projects and partnerships over the coming months which will showcase an array of new innovations in support of our remit.” Having worked a little with the Network already on their NESTA-funded Your Local Budget platform, I think it’s time I posted a few of my thoughts and questions about the Big Society project.

Like many others in the social innovation world, I’ve been tentatively exploring what the “Big Society” actually means and whether I want to be part of it. I think I have a general understanding of what the Big Society is (unlike most of my friends, who have never heard of it at all!), that it is about clearing the way and providing support for individuals and communities to solve their own problems, rather than waiting for the government to save us. Part of this I assume is about removing the regulation and bureaucracy that gets in the way of citizen action and involvement, and part of it is about creating the conditions for individuals and community groups to contribute more to the running and improvement of the society we live in.

This is all good stuff, and certainly my conversations with the individuals involved has confirmed my general sense that there is good work being done here by good people. However, I still have a few significant questions about how it will work in practice, and these are questions to which I need to know the answers before I would be happy to say the Big Society will be a good thing for this country. By posting them I do not intend criticism (and I’ll also post some positive Big Society ideas shortly), but to trigger a debate and get some answers, so that we can all be clearer about what we are supporting here. So here goes…

Does anyone ever get paid? If good work is now to be done on a voluntary basis, then what is the future for those of us who currently earn money improving society? I believe that if we can make improving society something that financially sustains and rewards those who do it, we will get a lot more good done. For many years now, I have been proud to be part of the social enterprise movement, working to create new ways to use business principles and revenue generation to achieve greater social impact. Yet now almost every week I seem to be approached by another public sector organisation asking me to give my time for free to help them transform their business, because “it’s a good thing to do”. So is money now only to be used to reward people who are not delivering social benefit? Must we all become lawyers and bankers to fund our expensive habit of improving the world? Or should we look instead, as Windsor and Maidenhead have proposed, to alternative currencies to support ourselves? And do we really know what the socio-economic impact of all this will be, particularly on the voluntary sector and the social enterpreneurs that the Big Society claims to support?
Who’s in charge? One of my consistent surprises about this Government is the top-down nature of many of their announcements, which seem to be the continuation of New Labour’s behaviour change programmes rather than the traditional free-market Conservative approach I was expecting. If the Big Society is to flourish, it cannot be led by the Government, or the credit claimed by the politicians. The role of the State should be to support the activities of communities and create the conditions for the activities they want to encourage, and make things easier – through funding, infrastructure, resources, support. Yet it often feels as though by launching this initiative (and particularly in a time of radical cuts) the Government is calling on citizens to work for the State, to help out with public sector projects, deliver public services. So do we, the Big Society, work for the Government to help them achieve their aims, or will public servants become what their name suggests, and support us to do what we think needs doing? And if it’s the latter, how do we decide what the State should support?
Who is accountable? Schools, hospitals, policing and the like are the responsibility of the state: we pay our taxes on the expectation that critical services will be provided to all of us on a fair, equitable and democratically-accountable basis, presumably because we grasp that the wellbeing and prosperity of the people around us is important for our own health, wealth and happiness. Ensuring greater involvement from service users and community groups in public services is fantastic, but it takes time and money to get right, and proper democratic accountability to ensure vulnerable people remain protected. Volunteers also have their own agendas and problems to worry about, particularly in a recession, and the Government still remains ultimately accountable if things go wrong, so are they just creating more problems for themselves later by not taking responsibility now?
Who pays for volunteer management? Volunteer management is a complicated task and requires a considerable amount of work to get it right: not voluntary work, but full-time work by reliable staff who aren’t making their money elsewhere – and this work must be paid for. My experience of running voluntary projects (and I’ve run a large one, unpaid, for two years now, in Mindapples) is that getting people to volunteer is the easy bit, especially in the internet age; the hard part is finding time to tell them what to do and make their efforts join up properly. I don’t need more volunteers, I need money to pay for staff to organise them and scale up our efforts. The Big Society Bank is excellent, but the sums being proposed are tiny compared to previous state funding for the voluntary sector, so what is the plan for sustaining and strengthening our existing voluntary infrastructure in a time of social change and fiscal constraints? Unless we have a plan for how this is going to be paid for, I will be relying on the only people who have any spare cash (or Nectar points) these days: wealthy philanthropists and large corporations. And that isn’t the Big Society, that’s Victorian England.
What happened to democracy? The Big Society aims to “take power away from politicians and give it to people”. But the State is us. The public sector exists to represent the views of the whole population, serve the interests of the many whilst protecting the interests of the few, and answer to the people for its actions. How have we become so alienated from our State institutions that private, independent organisations seem now to offer more possibilities for putting ‘the People’ in charge? Democracy and equanimity are difficult and expensive to achieve, and by cutting away these layers we may achieve greater efficiency, but do we leave ourselves vulnerable to increased social injustice, and subservience to the needs of the wealthy and the confident? There are tools for ensuring this of course, democratic organisational structures and community governance models, but when I hear talk of creating “the U.K’s biggest mutual: to which all citizens will be able to belong”, it feels like we are trying to rebuild the State in parallel, not because it will be any better, but because we have lost faith in the current system. And replacing it… well, that sounds very expensive indeed.

I believe in the aspirations of the Big Society. I believe that the people of the UK are the state, and the Government serves us and should help us achieve our goals. I believe people are basically good and can be trusted, and that current public service culture disempowers vulnerable people and makes it hard for individuals to contribute to their own lives and communities. I believe that passionate individuals and grassroots organisations outside the Government should step in to solve problems which cannot be tackled by top-down authoritarian solutions, such as community and social care, public health promotion, invigorating communities, guiding the cultural and social development of our children, monitoring the activities and efficacy of the state infrastructures. However, I do not think that this work should be free, nor that paid civil servants can hand over their jobs to volunteers and remain in their lofty positions. And I continue to believe that the running of our state infrastructure is ultimately the job of a democratically-elected body of paid agents acting in the service of the people.

These are just my current questions: I have heard many others, and doubtless others will emerge as we go. The message for some time has been that we are in charge and we must find the answers to these questions. As Steve says, “it is a work in progress”. However, if the Prime Minister and other prominent figures are prepared to say the Big Society is a “Good Thing” for Britain, I’m presuming they must have thought these issues through first? If the leaders know the answers, please let them share them with us – after all, they’re part of this Big Society thing too. If they don’t, then I would question why they are telling us how great this will be when so much remains uncertain. Either way, I believe these questions need to be answered, and that means we need to get on with it together.

The devil, as they say, is in the detail.

to launch a new series of events, projects and partnerships over the coming months which will showcase an array of new innovations in support of our remit.

1 Comment | Andy Gibson, communities, mindapples, Social by Social, Social design, social projects | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Some thoughts on facilitation

5 September, 2010

Gosh, what a long time it’s been since my last post. I’ve been busy over here developing Mindapples(check out our lovely new website, as funded by UnLtd and Nominet Trust), and also doing various writing pieces which will hopefully see the light of day soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been doing more facilitation and speaking work lately, and it’s been a while since I posted anything about that side of my and Sociability’s work. I’ve done a fair bit of work with the amazing The People Speak over the years, and I recently spoke to my good friend Saul Albert there about facilitation as part of their research project into the subject. Here’s what I said in response to his questions:

Saul: What is the first issue on your mind when you have to facilitate a highly diverse group?

Andy: People are often very suspicious of the facilitation process. They have their own agendas, and want to know immediately that the process will accommodate them. People come into the room with clear ideas about what they want to achieve, they want to see whether the day will give them that opportunity. So I’m mainly trying to read the room, get a sense of where people are at emotionally and intellectually, how happy they look about being there, and how vocal they will be if they feel the event isn’t meeting their needs. Figuring out why everybody is there is the first job of any facilitator, and speaker for that matter, and it’s an easy one to miss.

Saul: How did you deal with this?

I usually begin by stating my agenda very clearly, what I’m there to do and what I want to get out it myself, personally. Making it personal to me is very important: I am just one person and what I want is just one of many voices, so if I claim to be an authority or representative of the establishment, I deny people the space to claim the event for themselves.

After that, I’m really open about asking each person/group what their agendas are. I don’t necessarily expect answers, but by creating a space where people feel able to say that the process isn’t meeting their needs, people feel that they can articulate their critique immediately, that there’s a space where they can be critical if they need to be. This means they don’t sit there waiting for things to come up that they can bend into a critique. They say their piece, then they kind of forget about it and get on with the discussion. As long as people know they can influence the agenda if they need to, and they trust me to be true to that commitment, then they can relax and engage.

This might sounds strange, but there’s also an important element of amateurishness involved. If I’m too slick then people feel they can’t shape the structure, they become afraid of “getting it wrong”. By stepping out front and being human, even making a few little, light-hearted mistakes, I give people the confidence to step forward and contribute. It’s very important to step into the role of leader, and hold uncertainty.

Saul: Who do you know who does this that you admire? And what other techniques / technologies do you know of?

Johnny Moore does a lot of work in this field and I like his style. He’s very explicit about what the process will be, what will happen and how it will work, so people can understand whether it will meet their needs, get over that question and then get on with it. He’s quite rigorous about getting clarity on structure, which is an important thing for me to remember to do too.

Theres also the unconference approach where there’s no plan, and if you’re not getting much out of it, it’s your fault! But you don’t really learn very much in this situation, and I think people often end up having the same conversations they’d be having anyway – it’s nobody’s job to bring any fresh content to the party.

Saul: At your events, is facilitation all your responsibility? Who else shares that responsibility?

In one particular example where I felt this worked well, I had an ‘assistant’. She was actually my client for the event, a part of the development team of the organisation, so like me, she was interested in everything working well. I gave her the task of taking notes to make sure that everything was recorded, which she did brilliantly. She sat with a laptop and wrote up notes on a projector for everyone to see. The audience could see whether their points were making it into the notes, and I would also keep an eye on them and when I saw something important that hadn’t been noted, I’d bring people’s attention to it and make sure it was included.

The interaction between what’s happening and how it’s documented is really important, because it’s how people become part of the official chronicle: they need to feel that history is including them.

Saul and the team at The People Speak are evolving the art of facilitation all the time, and I really enjoy working with them because for my money they’re the only people who really know how to let a crowd run an event for itself. If you’d like them, or Sociability, to run one of your events, drop me a line at andy[at]sociability.org.uk.

Q: What is the first issue on your mind when you have to facilitate a highly diverse group?

- People are often very suspicious of the facilitation process.
- They have their own agendas, and want to know immediately that the process will accommodate them. People come into the room with clear ideas about what they would achieve, they want to see whether the day will give them that opportunity.

Q :How did you deal with this?

I start off by naming my agenda very clearly, then I'm really open about asking each person/group what their agendas are.

By not expecting answers, by just creating a space where people feel able to
say that the process isn't meeting their needs people feel that they can
articulate their critique immediately, they feel there's a space where they can
be critical. This means they don't sit there waiting for things to come up that
they can bend into a critique. They say their piece, then they kind of forget
about it and get on with the discussion.

There's also an important element of amatuerishness. Not being too slick means
people feel they can shape the structure. It's very important to step into the
role of leader, and hold uncertainty.

Q: Who do you know who does this that you admire? And what other techniques / technologies do you know of?

Johnny Moore who does a lot of work with the RSA.

He's very explicit about what the process will be, what will happen and how it
will work, so people can understand whether it will meet their needs, get over
that question and then get on with it.

Theres also the unconference approach where there's no plan, and if you're not
getting much out of it, it's your fault! But you don't really learn very much
in this situation, and tend to have the same conversations you'd be having
anyway - nobody brings content to the party.

Q: At your events, is facilitation all your responsibility? Who else shares that responsibility?

In the example I was thinking of, I had an assistant, who was also my client
(internal to the commissioning organisation). She sat with a laptop and wrote
up notes on a projector for everyone to see.

Like me, she was interested in everything working well. I gave her the task of
taking notes to make sure that everything was recorded, which she did really
well. I would also keep an eye on the notes and when I saw something that
hadn't been noted, I'd bring people's attention to it and make sure it was noted.

The interaction between what's happening and how it's documented is important
so people see how they become part of the official chronicle: they need to feel
that history is including them.

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Posted by Andy Gibson

Poor social entrepreneurs

28 April, 2010

Tonight it’s the launch of the RSA Social Entrepreneurs Network, and I’m actually rather looking forward to it. There’s been a very interesting discussion on the group forum already about how social enterprise can reward the entrepreneurs behind it.

Social enterprise is one of the fastest-growing sectors in our society, and I think it has a lot to teach the policy world, traditional charities and the commercial sector. The problem, as I see it, is this though: social enterprise is good at generating revenue through doing good, by selling products and services, delivering contracts for the public sector and so on. What it isn’t so good at though, is looking after the people who make it happen. The sector suffers a lot of burn-outs, and many people who are starting successful social enterprises can only do so because they have made money in the commercial world, or because they are able to live cheaply without overheads like children or sick relatives. The sector is thriving, but at the expense of the people at the heart of it – and without the money from the lucrative public and private sectors, much of it wouldn’t exist at all.

I think what’s needed is greater liquidity in the social enterprise sector, which starts with making it easier for successful entrepreneurs to set up their next venture. Social capital is great, but it doesn’t pay the bills while we work for free for a year raising funds and building brands. We need to make sure the people who have set up organisations with strong social impact get a return on their “sweat equity”, or the sector will always be parasitic on the commercial world and dogged by burn-outs and drop-outs.

I think there are two obstacles to allowing this “liquidity” to happen. The first is the psychology around “non-profit”: how can I as a social entrepreneur claim my financial reward when my project is based on goodwill and channelling profits back into the community? The second is structural: how can non-profits pay dividends on in-kind investment, in the way they pay a return on cash investments? Time invested for free in building an organisation should always be regarded as a loan, to be recouped with a reasonable return when the venture is successful. I don’t want to be a millionnaire, I just don’t want all my hard work to go unrewarded. And I think we need new corporate vehicles, and a new culture around money for good causes, to make this possible.

With Mindapples, my second social venture after School of Everything, I’m looking at ways to write in profit-shares and bonuses for founders and volunteers if we build a successful revenue model for our non-profit community organisation. Does anyone know any good examples out there of when this is done well that I could base our model on?

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Local by Social published

16 March, 2010

I’m pleased to announce that Local by Social, my new policy pamphlet about government and social media, was published today by the Improvement and Development Agency and NESTA.

Social media is changing the world in which we work, socialise and govern. From Twitter to eBay, Facebook to YouTube, new tools are emerging every year that place the connecting power of the internet in the hands of every one of us.

In this context, the expectations on councils to engage, work openly, be accountable and move more quickly on issues are growing. Meanwhile, councils are facing the biggest cuts in spending in the post-war period and are being asked to do more with less just as demands from local people are rising. Higher expectations combined with drastically fewer resources make the imperative to innovate critical. A new set of tools is needed to meet this challenge.

The pamphlet outlines how local authorities can use social media to achieve more for less. It also highlights the risk to councils if they ignore the technological advances of social media and the people using them, and the importance of government working sensitively with the community groups and social enterprises who are developing great new projects in this space, which is rather timely given the current MyPolice saga. It’s designed to be read alongside our 2009 book Social by Social which can also be downloaded from the Social by Social website.

You can download the pamphlet from IDeA’s site now, and also discuss the content on the Social by Social network too. There are some more links and examples on the IDeA website too, and printed copies will be available from NESTA and IDeA shortly.

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, communities, Sociability, social projects, web 2.0 | Tagged: Andy Gibson, local by social, local government, policy, Social by Social, social media, sxs | Permalink
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Activity round-up for October

26 October, 2009

Consistency has never been one of my strongest points, and consistency of blog posting especially. I’ve had quite a lot of things going on lately which merit a post though, so here are a few of the headlines.

The main thing to announce is that Social by Social is now in print and also available to download in PDF at socialbysocial.com. It’s a detailed practical guide to using social technology for social impact, and it’s intended to be especially useful for civil servants, social entrepreneurs and campaigners. It lists the best software to use, explains how to use digital tools to engage communities, and tells some stories of the what happens if you do. Thanks to contributors like Euan Semple, Steve Bridger, Dominic Campbell and many more.

My co-authors Amy Sample Ward, David Wilcox and I have also decided to put our ideas into practice by building an online community of people who are using social technology for social good. If you’re involved in trying these tools out, sign up to the SxS Network at socialbysocial.net and connect with others in this field, share best practice – and get personal advice from us too.

Mindapples is progressing well. Tom, Ana, Sangeet and I have been working on a new brand and a new website and we’ll have something ready for alpha testing next month ready for a beefed up PR campaign in December. The team is growing and we’ve been analysing the results to produce some interesting stories for public consumption. The next step is to secure some seed funding to accelerate the project, so please do introduce us to anyone who wants to fund public mental health education programmes. Read more on mindapples.org.

There’s lots going on at School of Everything too. This month we’ve launched School of Everything Gifts, which means you can buy your loved ones some lessons with hand-picked teachers in anything from breadmaking to Twitter lessons (with personal tutoring from yours truly).

And finally, I’m very pleased to be working with Futuregov on a consultancy project for the DCLG on ePetitions. We’re writing some data standards for all local government petitions systems to ensure our collective efforts to call the Government to account are processed and shared smoothly. More on how to get involved with that on the Futuregov blog.

So, lots happening, especially in my favourite areas of education, democracy and mental health. There’s more, including fun (and occasionally cheesy) things going on with the Courvoisier Future 500, plus interesting plotting with Luke Nicholson at Kept, and some new writing projects in the pipeline. Watch this space for more, when I have time to post.

In the meantime, a little plug for my friends at Castle Galeazza, where I will be spending a few days this weekend to unwind. Reading retreats in rural Italy – the perfect antidote to all this high-tech sociable London living.

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, mindapples, School of Everything, Sociability, Social by Social, social projects | Tagged: dclg, eptitions, futuregov, gifts, learning, mental health, mindapples, socialbysocial, soe, sxs, twitter | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Social media and social conventions

20 July, 2009

On Friday I spoke at Sadlers Wells at the Arts Council’s Art of Digital event, Do the arts speak digital? The topic of the talk and the subsequent Guardian PDA panel discussion was “does the phenomenon and the tools of social media change expectations and relationships with audiences?” A few people asked me to blog it, so here’s (roughly) what I said.

Having recently published Social by Social, I didn’t want to focus on the details of the tools and how to use them – anyone looking for information on technology tools and how to deploy them should check out the book. Instead I focussed my thoughts on the new ‘social conventions’ being created by these tools, and the implications on our culture and power structures as a result of all these technologies. How does it affect my relationship with my audience if the audience can talk back, and talk to each other?

I began with a story my friend Charlie once told me about a speaking job he did in Finland. He arrived to find he was speaking to an audience of one man. He gave his talk anyway, as best he could, and was rewarded with a large and pleasing round of applause from this audience member. Moderately satisfied, he gathered his possessions to leave but was stopped by a cry from the man: “But you can’t go yet: I’m the next speaker!” Because that’s the thing about audiences: you never know who’s in them or what they might have to say.

I was speaking here to a silent audience in a darkened theatre: a common format for these events but actually a relatively recent convention. Richard Sennett in The Fall of Public Man (thanks to Dougald for putting me onto this) narrates the shift in the 19th Century from performances where the audience talked and participated, to a new social convention of a silent audience. But in this talk, I had a Twitter feed behind me showing the things the audience were saying to each other about what I was saying. So what are the conventions for interacting with that? Is it rude of them to interrupt me, or is it rude of me to ignore their comments?

The point is, it’s not the tools that matter: it’s the impact they have on our social structures and conventions. The media has changed: we already have a completely new ecosystem of news. It’s changed marketing too, with sites like Dell’s Ideastorm and Skittles turning their website into a Twitter feed for conversations about their product acting as living proof of the Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations”. Organisations and work have changed too: my various friends and followers on Twitter act as a distributed consultancy and community of practice for me.

I see this as a time to play with social conventions and find new ways to interact, with and without technology. A conference is a set of social conventions of audience silence, expert performance and public conversations – and these can be played with, as we do at the People Speak with things like the Twitter stream visualisation, or the talkaoke table. A blog is another social convention, in which we agree to listen patiently to what the author has to say before making our comments on their ideas. Discussion forums are flatter, with no hierarchy except a custodian keeping the space active and safe. Twitter is more complex again, a vast multiplicity of asymmetric relationships, public and private conversations and even old-fashioned broadcast. With each of these new tools comes a set of new conventions, each of which – as Rohan Gunatillake rightly observes – eventually leaks back into the rest of our society.

So if it’s a time to play with convention, it’s also a time to challenge some of the 19th Century assumptions about how things “should” be done. At the same time as the silent audience emerges, so too does the culture of street silence, the shift from the noisy, sociable marketplace to the silent, impersonal shop as the context for commerce, and the shift from consumer-commissioning to mass production of products. Amidst technological revolution, economic recession and climate change, all of these conventions are now open to challenge.

School of Everything is a social marketplace for face-to-face learning. We’re moving from a 19th Century broadcast model of teaching to a social media approach where everyone can be a teacher. Similarly, Mindapples is about respecting everyone’s “expertise” about what works for their minds. As I say in the introduction to Social by Social, it’s about helping people do things, not doing things to people.

So for cultural organisations, what is cultural production when it’s not mass production? What are the conventions and power structures for facilitating social production of and around the arts? And what are the implications for expert practictioners when they are not stood in front a silent audience? Someone asked a question in the following panel about quality control on School of Everything, and also about quality in arts production, and my answer in both cases is that just because an organisation isn’t taking responsibility for quality control, doesn’t mean individuals aren’t doing it themselves. We can all take responsibility for assessing expertise, curating content and making our own judgements; and the price we pay for moving up the power chain is that we must sit through more poor quality material. Thanks to these new tools, the choice is ours.

I believe that social tools make the invisible networks of our culture visible, and therefore possible to engage with. A good arts organisation can rally a community around a cultural event, but all the ripples in the pond become visible too and arts organisations can engage with them. At what point does it become rude for them, and me, to ignore what the audience is saying? Cultural production can create meaningful culture, but it is social tools that embeds it and makes it diverse and relevant to a wider audience.

I think the biggest issue for arts organisations within these shifting social conventions concerns the role of performance. Social media is most certainly performative: when I Twitter I speak to a larger audience than were present at Friday’s event, so don’t for a minute think I’m not performing when I tweet. In fact, if you want to understand Twitter you could do a lot worse than read Keith Johnstone’s Impro. But there are times when it is appropriate to improvise together, and others when it is better to be silent and listen. I don’t want to send text messages during a play, I want to really watch the play (unless it’s a really bad play…).

Arts organisations, like the rest of us, now need to consider the role of silence and performance in all their work, and deploy appropriate tools to assist the performance and embed the culture it creates. But that doesn’t mean the moonlight sonata is improved by twittering through it.

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, events, School of Everything, Social by Social, web 2.0 | Tagged: Andy Gibson, art of digital, arts council, noexpert, silence, Sociability | Permalink
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Announcing Social by Social

7 July, 2009

Yesterday I was at the Reboot Britain conference to launch Social by Social – my first book, co-authored with David Wilcox, Amy Sample Ward and Nigel Courtney and Clive Holtham of Cass Business School.

The book, which was commissioned by Nesta and published by Openmute, is a practical guide to how to make use of the amazing opportunities of social and digital technologies for social impact. We’ve collected the most useful resources around and woven them together with some inspiring stories, practical advice and thoughts on the future.

The book is aimed at anyone working in the public or third sectors, plus campaigners, community groups and even concerned citizens. It’s 250 pages of practical advice and reference materials, and it’s available to buy here for just £7.99.

We’ve also released all the content free online under a Creative Commons license. Read and download it, add your comments and remix it for your own purposes now at www.socialbysocial.com. We want you all to make use of these resources in your projects and consultancy work, so as many people find out about these technologies and what they can do as possible.

After the launch itself, David Wilcox and Drew Mackie ran another version of the Social by Social Game, which introduces people to new technologies and helps them develop their own social by social projects. If you’d like us to run a similar event in your organisation, or if you’d like more tailored advice, please drop me a line.

2 Comments | Andy Gibson, Sociability, Social by Social, social projects | Tagged: book, education, nesta, reboot britain, Social by Social, social media, sxs | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Real world marketing

11 June, 2009

I’m at b.tween in Liverpool today speaking on a panel with Adam Gee at Channel 4, Andy Bell from Landshare and Lucy Willis from Battlefront. We’ve been talking about using online and broadcast media to create action in the real world, in relation to School of Everything and other “social by social” projects.

My main point was about the intersection of social tools and media content. Battlefront helps young people campaign and then tells their stories on TV and online, and so creates action in the world. Meanwhile, School of Everything is creating action by building tools to enable and inspire people to teach and learn from each other: the existence of the tool is the trigger for creating the stories. Landshare is the model I can see emerging between the two: an integrated commission of TV content and social platform, with TV content to inspire people to grow things on spare land, and a social tool to help them find and use land near them. In other words, the TV content is creating a culture in which the tool will thrive, and providing marketing for the site.

Web 2.0 can also feed back into traditional media by creating and locating stories for cultural programming. Whatever the model of commissioning, if you are fortunate enough to be creating real activity in the world, you can use that activity to create a feedback loop which rallies more and more people to your movement. Here’s how it can work:

Create a tool which helps people do something in the world – share land, teach each other, campaign for change, or whatever. Write the stories you want your tool to create, and build it so it supports those things to happen, smoothly and simply.
Collect stories of the activity that results by engaging with your community, and share these stories back with the community through newsletters, blogs, Twitter etc. – and also with the public through any media channels available. Tell these stories in a way which makes audiences feel they could do it too.
Give users a way to share and promote their activities too, to amplify the effect of the activity and let your users help you market the tool. Help the people who have figured out how to do it share that with their peers.
The stories and media activity then become valuable resources in recruiting more users to the platform, which creates more activity to use in promoting the movement, and so on. By creating activity in the world, you create news; and by telling the stories through the media, you create a culture in which that activity is commonplace.

That’s what we’ve been doing at School of Everything: we talk to our users (or rather Claire does), find out what they’re up to, and tell those stories to encourage more people to join in. The media, social or otherwise, helps us turn the isolated interactions into a social movement.

As for media commissioning, I think there’s a rich seam here for media companies to invest in start-ups, and also in media content to tell the stories they support. The question of legacy is problematic – Landshare and Battlefront are commissions that need to generate stories, so what happens to their community when they have to stop “broadcasting”? So I think you also need a business model to sustain the existence of the web platform (School of Everything relies on real-world transactions for its business model), and finance it as an autonomous start-up that isn’t dependent on the continuation of the commission. We need more integrated partnerships between broadcasters and start-ups. And with the mutual benefit a well-designed broadcast and social campaign can bring, a TV-financed web start-up with broadcast tie-ins looks like an increasingly smart business proposition.

So all we need then is to come up with ideas for really compelling things we want to happen in the real world, that are interesting enough to make good telly. Anyone?

Leave a Comment » | Andy Gibson, communities, events, Social by Social, Social design, social projects, web 2.0 | Tagged: battlefront, btween09, landshare, marketing, School of Everything | Permalink
Posted by Andy Gibson

Sociability

Some thoughts on facilitation

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