6 April, 2009
I’ve been off exploring lately. Those of you who follow me on Twitter etc. will have spotted that I was at ‘#sxsw‘ – also known as “South by Southwest“. The South by Southwest Festival is held every year in Austin, Texas, and it’s a huge international (mainly US of course) festival of Film, Music and Interactive content.
The #kebab unpanel at SXSW09 - photo by Benjamin Ellis
School of Everything were out in force promoting ourselves internationally, meeting other start-ups and soaking up new ideas. The flavour was very much Silicon Valley though and I was surprised at the lack of cutting edge thinking in the panel discussions. I’ve come back feeling that the quality of discussion in London is extremely high: hearing apparently cutting-edge panellists repeating ideas which I’d heard two years ago in London made me feel we’re really at the heart of something interesting over here.
I enjoyed Steven Johnson’s talk about the eco-system of news, not least because I enjoy analogies to ecology to describe business developments. I also enjoyed hearing Bruce Sterling rant about the recession, the human impact of web 2.0 and the importance of bringing your own beer to speaking gigs. And I managed to get myself into an argument with Chris Anderson of Wired about the economics of ‘free’ culture and the future of publishing, which actually included him shouting “screw the printers!” at me. All rather good fun, and he was nice enough to Twitter me afterwards and continue the discussion over here.
The highlight though was undoubtedly the British invasion of the conference with the now-infamous #kebab session. In the pub with Richard Pope on the Saturday night, we decided that the conference needed stirring up and hence that we should run a Brit-focussed panel about using the web to achieve social aims rather than just “how to monetise Twitter”. The next morning, Richard found us an empty room to steal, nagged me into facilitating it, and we somehow persuaded Mike Butcher and others to announce it – until by 2 o’clock we had a room full of people waiting for us to do something interesting.
We ended up running “Not another social media panel” – an improvised ‘panel-slam’ event where anyone on the panel could instantly replaced by a member of the audience. Be interesting, be knowledgeable, or be replaced by someone who has something better to say. The result was a pleasing array of organised chaos, including user-generated name labels and a live Twitter-stream for the event following (for some reason) the hashtag #kebab. By the end of the session (via some references to monetising waterboarding and assorted US vs. UK banter) the entire panel had been replaced including me, the room was packed and ‘kebab’ had trended as the fifth most mentioned word on Twitter. There’s some video footage kicking around in the Twitter stream, and we also ended up on Techcrunch, the Guardian and even in Wikipedia. Not bad for a little idea we had in the pub.
We’re now wondering how we can start a SXSW-style event (with added kebab) here in London and rally some of the cutting edge discussions around the UK start-up scene. Anyone interested in helping out with that, let me know.
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Andy Gibson, School of Everything, events, invention | Tagged: free, future, kebab, start-ups, sxsw, texas, twitter, web 2.0 | 
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Posted by Andy Gibson
27 November, 2008
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Andy Gibson, School of Everything, Sociability, business, technology, visualisation | Tagged: andygibson, assets, knowledge management, network theory, organisations, presentation, slideshare | 
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Posted by Andy Gibson
8 October, 2008
Mindapples is coming along nicely (hence my silence here – sorry, too many blogs…), and whilst explaining the project to people I keep finding myself pushing the concept of ‘behavioural publishing’. So I thought I’d better think out loud and try to explain what I mean.
Mindapples asks a question that people want to know the answer to, and gives them a platform to share their answers in public. The idea is to encourage everyone to take more care of their minds, simply by publishing what people are already doing. The site doesn’t help you ‘do’ anything in a practical sense. All it does (or at least will do once we’ve built a better website) is publish the behaviours that we want to see more of. And I think that, simply by publishing these behaviours, we can create more of them.
As well as helping us practically to perform tasks, the web can also give us the inspiration to do things that we didn’t previously feel were possible. For example, School of Everything provides a set of tools to help people organise their learning and find new students near them. But as my friend Stowe says, “the presence of the tool implies a permission to behave in a certain way.” By building a website that helps everyone become a teacher, we want to show everyone that they have something to teach. Or to use another example, Flickr doesn’t help you take photos, but by publishing the photos of millions of photographers it gives us all permission to be a photographer too.
So if there is a behaviour you want to encourage – be that social care, photography, knitting or democracy -
rather than leaping straight into building complex tools to help people do it, why not find where it’s happening already and share it with the world? If you can rally the people together who want it to happen and tell their stories, maybe they’ll build the tools for you.
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Andy Gibson, School of Everything, Sociability, Social design, communities | Tagged: Andy Gibson, behavioural publishing, School of Everything, Sociability, social media | 
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Posted by Andy Gibson
14 August, 2008
School of Everything won a UK Catalyst Award (from the Prime Minister no less) last month, which was particularly nice following so hot on the heels of our New Statesman New Media Award a few weeks ago.
Aside from obviously being very flattered, what struck me about this one though was the curious focus on individuals compared to other social innovation awards. They seemed very keen to attribute each winning idea to one person and praise these special individuals for their unique creativity. There seemed to be little understanding of the teamwork that actually underpins genuine innovation and social enterprise. We even had to ask them to put the names of all five co-founders on their awards website.
The Times Business section just featured a nice interview with me about the idea behind School of Everything, and re-telling the story to them reminded me of just what a collaborative process it has been to get this idea off the ground. If we’d been driven by one person’s vision, I don’t think we could have done it, at least not in the way we have. School of Everything is the product of all our experiences of education, the writings and experiments of various pioneers in the sixties and seventies, the advice of our friends and colleagues, the activities and desires of our users.
Ideas don’t just pop out of thin air, they emerge from conversations, collaboration, stimulation. It’s wonderful that the Government are starting to recognise the contribution of social innovation and web 2.0 to our communities and social services. But maybe they need to adjust their perceptions about how change actually happens, or else they risk undermining the very thing they seek to celebrate.
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Posted by Andy Gibson
3 July, 2008
Look! School of Everything just won an award!
Team Everything celebrate with characteristic restraint and good taste.
We won a New Statesman New Media Award, in the Inform and Educate category, which is very nice indeed thankyouverymuch. Big thanks to the judges, the New Statesman and everyone who nominated us, cheered us on and generally spread the love.
Next stop, the world! Bwahahahahahahaha! Ahem. Yes.
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Posted by Andy Gibson
22 June, 2008
I spent a wonderful day yesterday at Interesting 2008, exploring interesting things with interesting people. It wasn’t like any conference I’ve ever been to before: much more informal, more fun, more varied. It made traditional conferences look like what they are: sterile, mannered, orchestrated sales events. Thank God for people who are happy to sit in a big room and talk to each other about things they’re passionate about. Why doesn’t that happen more often?
In some ways this was to conferences what blogs are to mainstream media. It’s personal instead of abstracted, defined by the personality of the marvellous Russell Davies and his friends rather than ‘brand values’, and inviting lasting relationships. Lovely.
A few quick thoughts on why Interesting was so much better than most events (and I’m still trying to work this out so please do add your own thoughts if you want):
- Short talks about simple things. No essays, no complexity – just 5 or 10 minutes for each speaker to get you interested in their thing.
- Passion. Everyone was talking about something they loved and did in their spare time, rather than something they were selling. You can pay people to do things, but you can’t pay them to be interested in them. And as Russell himself said, in order to be interesting you have to be interested.
- Nice surprises. No-one knew what each speaker was talking about before they started, so no-one wanted to miss a word.
- Bring your own. No lunches provided, and though sponsors brought cake and biscuits we came for the content, not the freebies.
- Singing. And recorders. And electric guitars. And a ukelele. And other things that conferences aren’t supposed to have.
- Jokes. Conferences are so bloody serious – and being serious is not the same as being interesting.
There are more of course, and in some ways it’s like a magic trick: I don’t want to know how it works, because if there’s a repeatable pattern then Glaxo and Nike could do it too. But there’s definitely a lot I’ve learnt about how to run more “interesting” events. Big thanks to the ever-lovely Tessy for giving me her spare tickets, and to Russell for letting School of Everything do Interesting Things in the foyer.
So here’s to fewer conferences, more Interesting, and huge respect to this guy, and this guy.
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Posted by Andy Gibson
13 May, 2008
It’s dangerous who you get talking to these days: in this age of consumer media and mobile technology, everyone’s a TV journalist.
I went for a drink in the sunshine with Stowe Boyd yesterday after the School of Everything Tech Advisory Board, and the next thing I know I’m being interviewed on his N82 and streamed live to his blog:
www.flixwagon.com/watch/26183
The technology was so quick, I didn’t even have time to do my hair…
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Posted by Andy Gibson
2 April, 2008
School of Everything is now officially solvent. We announced the deal yesterday, and it’s been picked up quite a bit already:
I’ll add more links here as they come in, but see www.schoolofeverything.com/about/media for the best of the coverage.
Now we’ve just got to build it and make it work…
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Posted by Andy Gibson
This is what they say: “The Official Honoree distinction is awarded to the top 15% of all work entered that exhibits remarkable achievement. With nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 states and over 60 countries, this is an outstanding accomplishment.”
