Brian Frank, two first names.

Convergence of Social and Indie Media

03-11-2010

If you’re in London Ontario this Saturday afternoon come to the Central Library for the Indie Media Fair. I’ll be doing a workshop at 3 pm on the convergence of social and independent media.

I didn’t come up with the theme but it certainly resonates with me. I went to the fair last year and was sort of surprised by how analog-centric it was. Open House Arts Collective and From My Bottom Step were the only exceptions I know of.

It led me to write a rant about how we ought to be using the web to document the city’s culture and ultimately recognize the best of it:

There’s a false assumption that blogs [and any use of social media more generally] are these fleeting, in-the-moment things. That’s certainly how they are made, but in the process they also leave behind concise threads of enduring information…

Social media bridges between us better than anything else (hence calling it “media” — what mediates our experiences). It’s no replacement for meeting face-to-face, but before even getting to that there’s no better way to identify shared interests with people we may have assumed were completely different. It happens to me every week. It’s amazing to learn how much we have in common with so many different people.

Thomas Cermak at LondonFuse is one example of someone I stumbled upon through the web — and he’s the one who approached me about participating on Saturday. We’re of the same mind when it comes to the need to bring a broader mix of people together.

This is where I understand the idea for a workshop on “the convergence of social and independent media” came from. Just as I was surprised by how analog the Indie Media Fair was last year, the indie media milieu seems to be equally unsure of what to make of the Geek Dinner crowd. It seems odd to have this split — after all, both groups tend to be both social and independent.

I’m looking forward to the discussion. I’m not quite as preachy as I was when I ranted about it last year. I’m hoping to kickstart an actual dialog — and hopefully cultivate a little more convergence. It isn’t a big city; there are a lot of fascinating opportunities to complement each other’s efforts…

Are there any related ideas or issues you’d like us to address there?

The other scheduled workshops are:

• 1 pm » Kane X. Faucher — “scholartist” — how academic and artistic work can be made to contaminate and resonate to produce new media forms.

• 2 pm » Iconoclast on “intellectual self-defense”: combating propaganda in our society.

Tables to showcase your creative, independent work are only $5. Contact indie.media@lpl.london.on.ca or 519-661-5100 Ext. 4986.

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Minds for Sale

03-04-2010

This talk is causing me to reconsider many assumptions and ideals.

For the most part I still believe in cultivating more creative and educational autonomy for ourselves in order to overcome the digital sharecropping and sweatshop-type mind labour that critics are warning us about.

Ultimately I keep coming back to my belief (for now it is based largely on faith) that there must be enough people like me out there (somewhere) who are apathetic about games and incentives — and passionate enough about being responsible and doing genuinely valuable things — to maintain a balance.

The web can and should be used to reveal consequences and open things up for scrutiny, not hide them.

At this point things might go either way, so if we like openness, responsibility, and genuine value so much (as I do), then let’s not waste any time developing good platforms and communities to keep people’s attention preoccupied from the potentially bad ones.

Our challenge is to create and provide experiences (rather than impose them) that will shape social norms to favour moral accountability before too many people get comfortable not having any.

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Creating a Platform for Collaboration

02-22-2010

Yesterday I read a really interesting story about a project to develop a new tool for researchers at the massive CERN laboratory (the folks who made that gigantic particle accelerator in Switzerland) to collaborate and share expertise more effectively.

It’s a great complement to what John Seely Brown and John Hagel recently wrote about growing from a do-it-yourself culture to a do-it-together culture:

… the second and third level of pull begin to move us beyond “free-agent nation” stories into a new domain of scalable peer learning that can lead to the emergence and rapid evolution of very large and highly innovative global institutions. Scalable DIT offers the potential to turn the experience curve on its side, generating increasing returns to learning and performance improvement.

CERN might qualify as such an institution. It’s composed of thousands of researchers, representing hundreds of universities and dozens of nationalities. Many of the scientists and engineers are based in different countries and spend very little time together on-site…

Then along comes this young hotshot who knows his way around computers, thinking about setting up new systems to connect and keep track of all the experts and their expertise — especially as things are constantly changing and new researchers are always coming and going.

At one point he was thinking that each researcher would have their own page and it would link to other researchers’ pages — sort of like a Facebook for scientists, I suppose.

This is what he was thinking when they started pushing to build the Large Hadron Collider:

In addition to keeping track of relationships between all the people, experiments, and machines, I wanted to access different kinds of information, such as researchers’ technical papers, the manuals for different software modules, minutes of meetings, hastily scribbled notes, and so on. Furthermore, I found myself answering the same questions asked frequently of me by different people…

In a way it doesn’t sound all that original. In the past couple of years we’ve heard a lot about organizations using social media-type tools to facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration through the web.

There are also a growing number of more academic initiatives, including OpenWetWare (for biology), and more commercial communities like InnoCentive.

But in another way, what this guy is doing — or perhaps I should say, what he already did — was original. The guy I’m talking about is Tim Berners-Lee, the platform he developed at CERN in the 90’s is called the World Wide Web.

The More Things Change…

With all the recent buzz about the social web, it’s been too easy to forget that the web is simply continuing to get better at what it was always intended to do: make people more knowledgeable and make knowledge more sociable.

It’s a good idea not to stray too far from that. It seems to keep recurring… But we also need to stay busy making and doing things to take advantage of both the social and the knowledge aspects of the still-growing web.

It took about twenty years for the web to become genuinely embedded in our society. It is important now — i.e. we can more or less take it for granted — in a more profound way than we could only a few years ago.

But the momentum has not slowed. The web is far from maturing. Let’s assume it has only begun to affect society, and we’ll need to prepare for more drastic changes.

While we can’t predict what new things will come, we can anticipate the general shape of change will continue to emphasize making people more knowledgeable and making knowledge more sociable. Work on projects that go towards those ends; it’s hard to imagine going wrong like that.

The above quote is from Weaving the Web, written by Berners-Lee and published in 1999. You can start with his original proposal.

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ChangeCamp: Toronto to London

02-18-2010

A few of us travelled from London to a ChangeCamp event in Toronto Tuesday night to help design a civic engagement toolkit:

We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations across the City of Toronto and beyond through community-based leadership.

The London contingent was there representing a bit of the “and beyond” category (the only category I’m ever comfortable in). We’ll be helping bring ChangeCamp to London… more on that later.

What I love most about ChangeCamp is how the model continues to evolve. At the heart of it are are continuous & fundamental questions, What should we do next? What should ChangeCamp become? … In fact, these types of questions are asked quite explicitly.

My photo doesn't do it justice.

A comment I keep seeing around ChangeCamp is “dialog is action” (or something like that).

Initially I wasn’t prepared to accept that, but as I thought and read about it more I realized how true it is.

Dialog subtly affects the vocabulary and perspective we use, which changes the narratives and working theories we employ, which influences the way we interpret events and how we conceive the need for action, and so on.

There’s a very basic change in mindset that needs to occur. It takes time to condition new habits, and it’s through communication that those core changes are made — at least, certainly, in an area like civics, which is deeply nested in language.

As for exactly what kinds of change we should be aiming for, I love the way Peter Block explained it in this civic engagement workbook (our homework): we need to invert our mindset, from thinking of ourselves as effects to thinking of ourselves as causes:

The shift in thinking is to take the stance that we are the creator of our world as well as the product of it.

It immediately reminded me of William James (the great psychologist and philosopher, not the fictional bomb tech).

As a young man James was stricken with a deeply corrosive skepticism, especially when it came to the question of free will. He wanted to believe in it, but logically he couldn’t prove that life wasn’t merely a series of events that had already been determined beyond his control. Finally, after an especially desperate episode, he decided his first act of free will would be to believe in free will.

It starts very close to home. We have to make a leap of faith to believe we’re a cause, and only then do we do the sorts of things that demonstrate it to ourselves.

I remember watching via Twitter as ChangeCamp took shape last year, and it has been especially interesting to see Mark Kuznicki et al continue to push the concept forward, building on the ideas that emerge in these conversations, and incorporating others from people like Peter Block who only became known to organizers more recently.

This phase is especially interesting to me.

The point of Tuesday night’s session was to design a kit that will empower others to pick up the ball and run with it via their own initiative, turning ChangeCamp into a more self-sustaining enterprise. I’m looking forward to learning as new insights emerge through interactions among a wider range of perspectives.

(You can see the ideas that came out of the discussions, which were documented in real time via ScribbleLive. Check out the photos on Flickr. It was a lot of fun — though not necessarily easy to record all of the surprising ideas bouncing around in the group I was in.)

When we talk about bringing ChangeCamp to London, we’re talking about bringing this whole conversation and spirit with it.

Don’t just ask what effect something like ChangeCamp is going to have on your community. You have to come out and articulate possibilities, and more importantly, you have to imagine yourself as one of the causal agents who will make those possibilities into realities.

There are a lot of great things already happening in London, but the world is changing, new democratic tools are emerging and groups are learning to use them to improve their communities. They’re designing their own futures. We can do it too, when we decide to make ourselves accountable for that.

The conversation can start here or anywhere. You’re free to join — and you’re free to own part of these emerging processes… Now are you willing?

Saying “yes” in the comments or on Twitter is one way to start the conversation about where, when, and how to go forward »

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Generativity & Prosperity

15.02.2010

Generativity: maybe the most important word we’ll use in the next 10 years. It applies to all aspects of the challenges we face: social, technological, cultural, intellectual, economic.
There’s a big article in the newest Atlantic that got me thinking about it: How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America:
If it persists much longer, this era of [...]

The Practice of Theory, Revisited

11.02.2010

Of everything I’ve written, I think The New Pragmatist has retained the most value.
I told someone two years ago I was going to clean it up and publish a PDF, but I got pulled away from it by too many new ideas to have any patience for futzing around with something old… until now:

There’s another [...]

Why Would a Twenty-Something Stay in London?

31.01.2010

Today I was trying to answer this question in a group discussion at AgendaCamp. Most of the time we talked about reasons to not stay in London.
Personally, I moved back to London in 2000 after finishing school to regroup before figuring out what to do with my life… And I stayed in London because I’m [...]

iPad: Setting the Table for Tablets

28.01.2010

Did anyone really think Apple wants us replace our iPhones or MacBooks?
I actually think it hits my sweet spot better than either its bigger or smaller cousins. It won’t replace my other stuff, but I definitely picture this as my primary device.
Apart from a couple of hours I spend writing every day, most of my [...]

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