Brian Frank » london

Making a Scene, Creating London’s Identity

Brian — Sun, 08 May 2011 17:00:33 +0000

Some of what I said to Randy Richmond for his essay about London’s identity doesn’t quite ring true to me a month after I said it (my fault, not his), but it isn’t wrong either.

[Read this if you're interested in the conversation. It's not at the finished stage of, like, "10 things you need to do for London tomorrow!" But there's a lot of thought behind it (and believe it or not, a fair bit of editing). I might polish parts of it up later. Or I might not. Depends how it goes…For background, here's a list my best older posts about London.]

The first possible mistake I noticed in yesterday’s essay was what I said about youth culture appreciating irony and “celebrating the ordinary.” It’s true that hipsters have embraced some pretty mundane and unexpected things — PBR, fixed-gear bikes — but ordinariness isn’t the most important factor.

It’s more accurate to say that youth culture (I wish I had a better term) has a capacity to embrace anything, regardless of how ordinary or extraordinary it is.

What matters most is that it’s chosen, not imposed or overtly sold by someone we don’t identify with.

Affinity for these things comes down to whether we can reshape, repurpose or reinterpret objects and use them to express (or make us think we’re expressing) who we are as individuals and members of a close-knit group — especially for creative people. It’s about how much autonomy we feel by adopting and incorporating something into the identities we’re creating for ourselves.

Same goes for choosing a city.

Most people don’t seem to mind buying something sold through an overt marketing approach, and that’s fine (I’m not passing judgement; nor do I presume that my argument here applies to everyone). I guess because they more or less would have bought what’s being sold anyway (things designed for mass appeal: Top 40 music, processed food, generic stuff… anything we associate with middle-class suburbia, I guess — including suburbia itself).

But if we’re talking about encouraging creative young people to flourish then the first thing is simply giving them space (literally and figuratively) to create something in. And that includes letting them help create the city’s identity.

Whether it’s entrepreneurship or the arts, support through the creative process is a huge help, but I think (at least in the earliest stages) most support comes more from peers, or at least individuals (teachers, mentors) providing encouragement and guidance outside formal protocols, so all that youthful creative energy doesn’t get stifled by established ideas about what a good idea ought to look like.

Being genuinely creative isn’t just about getting on stage. Setting the stage is where a good chunk of the satisfaction come from.

Think of how punk and grunge musicians repurposed make-shift venues and seedy dives to build their scenes, rave culture came up in warehouses and illegal venues, hip hop came up in self-organized street parties. Here in London a couple of indie collectives — 379 and Open House — have repurposed venues and organized successful events and have played an invaluable role building the city’s arts and music scene (i.e. identity).

We’d be usurping half the value of the city for creative types if we said, “Hey creative people, here’s what London’s identity is, so bring your crayons and you can colour inside the lines we made for you!”

I don’t mean that we should invite everyone to the table to talk about London’s identity. I mean a city’s identity ought to emerge from what people are doing and making.

Of course what a city makes and does should be planned and subsidized to some degree — but I’m just glad I’m not on any committee that might be remembered for making bad plans and subsidizing sub-standard results.

If we look at a city like Waterloo that successfully planned ahead (so people tell me) we have to think of it as making successful bets. Luck had a fair bit to do with it. They couldn’t have really “known” how big tech was going to be. And even in London’s own past I’m sure there are plenty of examples of faulty foresight and bad execution to make us wary of our ability to sit down and collectively make good bets.

I’m a big believer in taking risks and betting on the future but I think it’s best left to people and organizations that can swallow the potential losses without causing too many harmful ripples.

City Hall can and should cultivate an entrepreneurial, artistic and adventurous spirit without taking on the risks and usurping the gratification that goes with actually being an entrepreneur or artist.

That goes for every large institution on-down:

Enable the enablers. Let the process and dialog play out. Observe and listen. See what emerges. Enable the next cohort of enablers to contribute — provide a background to continue from but let fortuitous accidents and discoveries happen — by building on past successes but not necessarily determined by them: let each new cohort give it their own interpretation. Observe and listen again. Keep looking for what emerges. And so on.

At this point it’s important to say that merely telling someone their contribution is important isn’t necessarily enough.

Contribution to a community has to reflect a person’s identity — their competencies and passions — and people need to see their contribution manifested in a concrete way. As in, “hey people are using something I made…there’s where my suggestion was picked up and used,” etc.

“Show, don’t tell,” I wish I’d said in the interview.

And more generally, “underpromise and overdeliver.”

It often it feels (to me) like too many initiatives in London start with a list of brags, and then we decide how to back up our words, instead of doing and making things that are worth doing and then figuring out how to communicate their value to the world.

That’s certainly not an indictment of every initiative. There are a lot of great things happening in London that are genuinely worth bragging about (and more all the time, I think).

And I know that a lot of things do need to be born out of a brag. Maybe it’s unavoidable (I know it happens everywhere, I’ll admit) but if you want to know what I’d most like to improve, this is it — what I feel tends to stifle new ideas as much as anything: the need to package everything into a pitch as soon as possible.

I’d like to see some things germinate a little longer.

(And one final caveat here. If you asked me what my biggest complaint is about myself, I’d say it’s the opposite: I’m incapable of turning my ideas into polished pitches. I never get projects past development. Anyway, we all have something to work on.)

Both in my own experience and as an outside observer I’ve been frustrated to see opportunities to cultivate deeper and broader value trumped by desire to celebrate smaller, immediate, symbolic wins at the expense of longer term strategic vision.

We absolutely need small symbolic wins — but not at the expense of the small symbolic failures that can help us learn and understand and adapt to bigger challenges: i.e. failing early on small projects, when it’s relatively harmless, to root out new opportunities (new ideas, new ways to organize and collaborate) to avoid bigger failures down the road.

There are simply too many questions we can’t possibly answer until we try things and see what happens.

Much of the ongoing visioning process requires an ability to work with uncertainty: comfort moving forward without knowing exactly where the destination is, yet being willing to move forward on hypotheses — “strong ideas, weakly held” — combined with a keen eye for clues and signs along the way, ingenuity to navigate and adapt with an emerging landscape, the ability to perceive and describe general patterns, and finally, decisiveness. so we don’t languish in ambiguity forever.

I’m not entirely sure how to execute it at a group level, but that’s my experience, at least. I know that vision definitely does not mean, “let’s spend 6 months coming up with something overly-comprehensive, which presumes too much [and then 10 years gradually forgetting about it and finally deciding it was entirely wrong -- and eventually using the example to make a false case for futility]“.

The tail wags the dog when try to assume too much about a distant destination we know very little about.

We don’t know what the world will be like 20 years from now. We don’t know what the best opportunities will be in 10 years. We don’t know which industries will grow or decline the most. We can’t foresee disruptive events around the world (whether oil prices, trading boundaries, etc. will be more or less congenial). We don’t know what will happen with Detroit and other cities on our map. We don’t know what future federal and provincial governments will do. And so on.

On one hand we can’t assume too much with any certainty (no decision or investment is guaranteed to pay off). On the other hand, we can’t navigate all that uncertainty without at least some sense of who we are, what we’re good at, where we came from, and where we want or need to go.

Working that balance between holding fast and letting go isn’t something to be afraid of. Even something as simple as picking up your pen requires flexing some muscles while relaxing others.

Vision is an ongoing process. It’s a balancing act, like everything important in life.

Don’t smother it but don’t let go either.

Like love and fishing (two very different things, obviously, but the same in this regard), chasing something that isn’t ready to be caught is often counterproductive. Watch, feel, and adjust accordingly.

Just get on with it, make things, enable others and get far enough out of their way, pitch in when you can without becoming a barrier, ask better questions, pay attention for answers and keep going forward.

My Dundas: Transforming London’s Sentimental Centre

Brian — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 21:03:04 +0000

Revitalizing downtown is an ever-relevant topic in London, as I’m sure it is in most cities.

(There may be cities where downtown isn’t an important part of the story; those are cities I don’t want to live in.)

Last night we had a bit of a thing here as part of Downtown London and the London Downtown Business Association’s annual general meeting. It was billed as an opportunity to start planning “Visions of Dundas” for 2020. Input was solicited on Facebook, and the early risers among London’s emerging leaders kept it going this morning with an ideas salon.

The City’s planning department has also been facilitating discussions for a year or so, starting with some downtown visioning sessions last summer.

One idea that gets a lot of attention is eliminating vehicular traffic on Dundas Street for a few blocks. I’m not sure I know enough to oppose it, but I’m not sure what exactly it’s supposed to accomplish either.

I walk the main stretch of Dundas at least two or three times every week. Not once have I thought my experience would be better without cars. Drivers already avoid it, and it’s one of the easiest streets to walk across (compared to, say, Richmond St., which is far less friendly for pedestrians — and that doesn’t seem to discourage many people).

My other concern is that cars actually add a lot to the feeling of vitality.

Dundas has a buzz and much of it comes from cars. That energy is part of the reason I like being there. There’s a real sense that something’s happening. I don’t know what would replace that with the cars gone — or more precisely, I’m not sure how cars are currently a barrier to any other sustainable activity (in the broadest sense) moving in.

I support the sentiment that says we should change society’s attitudes about cars, but I’m not seeing how closing Dundas Street to traffic is the most effective action to take at this point. I think a lot more narrative, strategy and education has to happen before we see the right shift in public attitude.

The only thing I can really see improved by removing traffic is the livability of second and third floor apartments along the street. I often think it’d be great to live (or work) there but couldn’t stand the constant sound. But it’s the buses that create most of the noise. If we get rid of cars and make it a public transit-only street (like Granville in Vancouver — at least I think it’s Granville, correct me if wrong) then I still won’t want to live there. And if it becomes like Hess Village in Hamilton — a strip of bar & restaurant patios — the noise might be even more disturbing.

Another model of rejuvenation was presented last night by Ron Soskolne, a development consultant who specializes in large mixed-use projects like the Yonge-Dundas Square in Toronto: a “bright lights, big city” destination and public space.

There are certainly lessons to take from Yonge-Dundas but I think we should be careful not to fixate on the most prominent features.

For example, I look at it and the first thing I notice is dazzling visual displays. That’s appropriate for Yonge St. with its history of ostentatious facades, but sticking a jumbotron up at Richmond St. would be a bit like bringing in circus elephants to mix with the squirrel population in Victoria Park. It might overwhelm the natural environment.

The other prominent feature at Yonge-Dundas is the large open space.

The key to making that work is that it wasn’t simply conceived as a “build it and they will come” idea; it’s purposefully situated and “programmed” to keep activity flowing through it.

Where would a proportional flow come from in London?

(Consideration of flow is essential, whether we’re thinking of large spaces or small.)

The big lesson I think we should take from Soskolne’s example is that public investment led private investment.

It wasn’t just about tenants moving in and using what the City built; property owners and developers became more ambitious to initiate their own improvements after the City led by example and signaled long-term commitment.

And the funny thing is, we don’t even have to look elsewhere for that lesson.

Look at how the “Market District” has developed since Covent Garden Market’s renewal and the construction of the John Labatt Centre. Look at how Galleria (now Citi Plaza) was rejuvenated as a mixed-use facility since the Central Library moved in.

This line of thought leads me to wonder about a Performing Arts Centre… It isn’t something I’ve felt the need to settle an opinion on yet, so I’ll leave it at the mere mention for now.

Shifting mindsets, something more immediately feasible I have in mind is some kind of location-sensitive digital portal.

Think about how fast mobile and location-based technologies are progressing. I’m not overly optimistic about usefulness or adoption right now, but it’ll quickly become far more powerful and affordable. It has to be on our radar. We have to start to envision the role it’s going to play — and it will play a role — in the way people live, work and play in coming years.

(This is another area where public investment might be needed to lead before private investment catches on.)

Now’s the time to think and talk about possible uses so we know what we want when we see it — so we know which questions to ask and we’re not seduced by something inferior. Let’s not be caught playing copy-cat or catch-up on this one.

Ironically, a lot of the appeal of location-based technology for Dundas is its potential to highlight the City’s history.

Heritage and historical character differentiates London from other cities. We can use as a point of civic pride as well as a selling feature.

A lot of our heritage runs along Dundas Street, or adjacent to it — going all the way back to the day John Graves Simcoe set up camp at the forks of the Askunessippi River (the “antlered river”; we now call it the Thames), where he hoped to establish the capital of Upper Canada.

Et cetera…

I mean, there’s probably at least one good story every 20 feet. Why can’t we use today’s technology to engage with this history on-the-spot, in the present, instead of having to go digging into the archives? (It doesn’t have to cost a lot. Hypothetically a prototype could be done with a free blog and a bunch of QR codes printed off at home).

When our city’s stories are made digital they’re more likely to spread. We have to think of stories as infinite resources or gifts that people are naturally inclined to share; what can we do to ensure they get shared an extra degree or two into people’s social networks?

Stories proliferating outwards means attention, interest and flow coming back in…

But ultimately a digital solution won’t be enough — only part of how we should think of the overall concept.

My vision of Dundas is not a bunch of people staring at Blackberries and blundering into each other. Our focus has to come back to the physical spaces where we meet, work and play.

We also have to think holistically.

There are poverty and substance abuse challenges to address — and not simply brush aside to some other place. There’s also the question of cars and buses, which leads to questions about transportation in general. We have to keep thinking and talking about these issues on a large scale.

What we do on Dundas Street won’t solve those problems, but at the very least we can’t let it become the symbolic centre of something getting worse.

It’s enticing to activists of one cause or another to see Dundas as an opportunity to win a victory. But as the sentimental heart of London we have to be mindful of everyone’s cause. A commercial plaza that wipes out heritage and marginalizes the underprivileged is a net failure. A shelter or clinic that scares away tenants is a net failure.

We should work to improve commerce, social justice, heritage, culture and healthy living as one connected set of initiatives — just as the city ultimately functions as one big system.

What we do on Dundas Street sets a standard for the rest of the city. It has to be part of the narrative, if not the symbolic start or heart of our narrative. Most people don’t visit it every day, but it’s the area most people will visit eventually. Nowhere else has the same symbolic value.

As long as Dundas thrives, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is thriving. If Dundas dies, people will point to it to argue the city as a whole is dying.

And finally, it should represent the city’s vitality — and not just our ability to do big public projects. The heart of the city needs genuine dynamism and energy in constant circulation. It’s ok to experiment, make mistakes and even let things happen in messy, unplanned ways.

From what I can tell it looks like the City and Downtown London are doing it right. It won’t be right all at once, but as long as we’re moving forward, we’re doing exactly what cities are supposed to do.

If you liked this post, contact me about writing and developing original, persuasive and enduring ideas with you. Get a copy of my book and visit openconceptual.com for more about my work.

Dundas Street Party photo by Scott Webb at nuwomb.com. Heritage photos via the London Public Library Image Gallery.

Follow the ongoing #mydundas discussion on Twitter.

How to Lose Elections and Alienate People

Brian — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 08:14:16 +0000

It took me most of my young life to figure this out.

After growing up as a precocious political junkie I got jaded pretty early. I grew up in a rural conservative family but somehow, deep-down I’m an urban technophile who often hopes there’s no problem that walkable neighbourhoods and Twitter hashtags can’t solve.

In high school I went through a phase of believing that communism would work if only the greedy capitalists would stop sabotaging it. Thank god nobody hooked me on Noam Chomsky. By the time I finished university I was in a phase of believing that a pure form of libertarianism would work if only the naive socialists would stop meddling in the free markets. Thank god nobody hooked me on Ayn Rand.

In the course of not committing to anything I’ve learned what it’s like to believe just about everything. The political philosophy I have now is very close to the philosophy of pragmatism. I’ve taken it seriously enough to write a book about it, but most of it’s on an inaccessible theory-level. Thankfully there are more and more real-world cases I can use to explain what I’ve come up with. Yesterday’s municipal elections in Ontario are perfect.

Rob Ford is not someone I’d vote for, and I think Toronto will be worse in many ways with him as mayor. But I know this: there are people who chose to support him and I have to respect that.

Ford’s an especially vivid example but I’ll say the same for everyone here in London and anywhere, at all levels. Think about this as we refocus our attention towards other challenges and debates.

If an issue is controversial enough that people strongly disagree, then assume that your opponents are just as self-assured, just as honest, and just as well-intentioned as you are. They’re not rubbing their hands together, deliberately scheming to screw people over (well, there may be exceptions — but there are always exceptions and almost certainly a few bastards on your side too).

The people who disagree with you probably aren’t evil or stupid, just different. Even if they are stupid and evil, you won’t win them over for long by dictating right and wrong. Stuff like high speed rail and ubiquitous bike lanes might be the best ideas ever — back your proposals up with all the research you want — but what matters most to people isn’t the idea itself, it’s whether they feel like they had freedom to disagree and an opportunity to change the outcome.

Take that sense of relevance away from people and you’ll lose their support — it doesn’t matter what for.

This is the key to everything. Not just in politics but at work, at home, everywhere. People look for ways to feel competent and autonomous; they’ll thrash against whatever or whoever makes them start to feel like robots or puppets. People don’t want to merely follow instructions, no matter how good the instructions are.

Of course believers in ideas often seem to behave like puppets, but how they got that way is important (and remember to think about how you came to believe in your ideas, and that your behaviour probably looks pretty puppet-like to others).

The way beliefs work is that once people identify with them, those ideas and sentiments generate a sense of relevance on one’s behalf, so we don’t mind trading-in autonomy on behalf of your beliefs because it pays off when we see our beliefs winning, or simply when we’re able to live and work within those structures (like soldiers, gratified by the sense of duty, discipline and honour that comes not just despite sacrifice but because of it).

It’s not the physical city we’re wrestling over so much as its soul. That’s probably not news to fighters for justice and change, but keep in mind a lot of your opponents believe they’re just as righteous. It’s not the visible structures we’re trying to build or protect so much as our vision and values, or sense of purpose — all the reassuring little reminders that what we do and what we believe actually means something and makes a difference.

When I was trying to figure this stuff out I was heavily inspired by Jonathan Haidt, the influential moral psychologist. Conveniently, last week Haidt published an excellent article on what motivates the tea-partiers in the US. It can be adapted to understand conservatism more generally and Rob Ford’s victory in Toronto specifically, as well as Joe Fontana’s surprise upset here in London.

Haidt argues that to understand the Tea Party we have to appreciate the protestant work ethic — deeply rooted in North America’s up-by-our-own-bootstraps immigrant lineage (I point out) — by which it’s important that a person be rewarded for hard work and discipline, while people who are irresponsible ought to suffer (and learn from) the consequences of their mistakes.

Here’s how Haidt put it, brilliantly I think:

To understand the anger of the tea-party movement, just imagine how you would feel if you learned that government physicists were building a particle accelerator that might, as a side effect of its experiments, nullify the law of gravity. Everything around us would float away, and the Earth itself would break apart. Now, instead of that scenario, suppose you learned that politicians were devising policies that might, as a side effect of their enactment, nullify the law of karma. Bad deeds would no longer lead to bad outcomes, and the fragile moral order of our nation would break apart. For tea partiers, this scenario is not science fiction. It is the last 80 years of American history.

Substitute the specifics and reflect on the broader notion of “social engineering” and how government programs are perceived by many people — the “silent majority” — as dangerous and naive, even evil.

Rightly or wrongly there’s a common perception that taxes basically transfer justly-earned rewards to people who are cheating or otherwise getting off easy. It’s about fairness — same word but different meaning than the “fairness” used by people on the left.

The belief is that if you earned the reward, it’s only fair that you get to choose how it’s spent. If people want to build houses and businesses in growing suburbs, it’s their money and it’s socially just to give them that freedom. If people want to drive their own car, it’s socially just… etc. If people start perceiving that taxes are too high, then things like streetcars and public art become symbols of injustice and distraction — choices earned by good, hard-working folks being taken away and given to a people who didn’t earn them and therefore aren’t qualified to make them.

I’m as guilty of progressive idealism as anyone, sometimes. It’s easy to get in these bubbles where we talk about hope in great ideas and building a better society, but we still need to engage in dialog, listen to people’s fears (whether warranted or not) and genuinely address their concerns.

Perception is reality in politics. It doesn’t matter if there’s a surplus of downtown parking, for example; if someone has trouble finding the perfect spot one day and perceives there’s not enough parking, if you don’t take them seriously they’re going to think you’re messing with the city’s karma…

Sometimes it feels like you absolutely know we’re right — we don’t just have the best opinion but the only opinion — and if we believe in our hearts that our ideas are valid and our cause is just, we’ll get the outcome you hope for. They have to change their mind because we’re right.

And as elections prove again and again, eventually we get just what we deserve.

Note: this is certainly not the only way to lose elections and alienate people. I haven’t even started to figure out exactly what happened here in London…

The Solar Power Tree and My Civic Dilemma

Brian — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 18:11:27 +0000

Woke up the other day and read this story about a hideous metal tree (it’s actually London’s logo — maybe one of those things that doesn’t look right on a different scale) with awkwardly-attached solar panels to symbolize London as a “clean and progressive community.”

There were already some complaints on Twitter. When I saw it for myself my first response was to make a wisecrack — in all sincerity I thought it looked like something one might have seen at Expo ’67: an exhibit to make people think “the future” which is already our past.

But then I said “no, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I worried about the effect it would have on my non-London followers’ impressions of this city. It’s not like I’m immensely influential, but what I say does have the potential to reach people and I don’t want them all chuckling about London as one of those stereotypical backwaters that brags about convoluted “world’s biggest” attractions.

And then I realized, gosh aren’t we supposed to be spreading the word about this tree? Isn’t that the whole reason it exists? (It’s featured prominently on the lawn of Tourism London and will be seen, I assume, by most out-of-town visitors coming in off the 401.)

So here I am trying to keep it a secret for London’s sake and London wants the world to see it.

Maybe my crowd isn’t who it’s supposed to appeal to. Fair enough. I do have a cynical bent, like a lot of the people I tend to connect with. I’m sure there are many others who think it’s great. I’m not trying to dictate good and bad taste — though I’m not really interested in keeping my taste a secret either, so here we are. Watch the video at LFPress.com and come to your own conclusion.

But this is just one case in what feels like a higher level problem I’m facing.

On one hand I know it’s not nice to criticize, and in most cases I prefer to see people actually doing things and making mistakes, rather than over-thinking plans and talking about hypotheticals and going nowhere. Criticism like mine can stifle action which is not something I want to do.

On the other hand I think a lot of us have ideas and suggestions that are worth considering and the last thing I want is everyone going along with mediocre projects to get along.

I’ve been trying to figure this out since over a year ago when went through my open government phase, arguing that social media is a natural way to promote London’s culture and conduct ongoing conversations about what’s great and how we can improve.

I also know that we need to maintain real, face-to-face social integrity and that requires a lot of private conversations. But, to me at least, the results of things that don’t emerge through conflict and tension are mostly contrived, ugly, boring and unadventurous. I don’t want to perpetuate the habit of assuming that nothing will happen if we don’t speak up.

This “solar tree” isn’t really that bad. It just happens to be an especially salient and straightforward example. Since its main purpose is symbolic anyway, I might as well use it to represent the more general dilemma I’m trying to deal with:

How should we navigate the narrow space between complacency vs. unhelpful complaints?

I think the answer is something like this: instead of taking the initiative on these types of things so they just seam to appear as if out of the blue one day, government ought to focus on enabling initiative to emerge from the ground up. An empowered base of citizens and private enterprises can produce more ideas (and more constructive criticism early in the process) which results in better ideas eventually being advanced.

For that to really work we need accountability and dynamism built-in. We don’t get great results when we’re all being optimistic and nice to each other; we get great results when we challenge each other to do better. And the process should be documented — i.e. what naturally occurs when we hold (or at least share) these discussions in digital spaces.

I know other people might not share this sentiment, but before I’ll buy into something I want to know the story behind it. I want to be able to follow the breadcrumbs back to the originator and get a sense of their motives, why supporters preferred that idea over its alternatives, what exactly they’re trying to accomplish and how we’re supposed to assess whether the thing actually follows through on its intended promise. I might not agree but at least I’ll get a sense of who they are and how to start reconciling our disagreements.

As things are now, the sense of powerlessness that comes from seeing things land fully-formed down from the sky makes me anxious and cynical — trees are supposed to grow from the ground, up — and I suspect it makes us even more likely to complain, even when things aren’t so bad.

Of course, I could be wrong. But it’s by articulating these thoughts and subjecting them to your scrutiny that they get better.

Btw, if you like this post, consider hiring me to help express your ideas.

The Social Network Movie as a Social Application

Brian — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 12:07:10 +0000

I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin:

I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling.

I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort of a wannabe screenwriter myself — just enough to have wrestled a lot with attempts to balance accuracy and meaning. I look at this as just being the Internet’s turn to be misrepresented by Hollywood. I mean, does Hollywood even get itself right?

Sadly, truth isn’t as important as we like to believe. If truth was important, Hollywood wouldn’t exist. What matters most in the long run is a compelling story.

Apply a kind of Darwinian principle to it: there’s no iron law dictating that the stories that survive have to be true; they just have to be coherent, attractive, adaptable, resilient, and reproductive (of course truth helps most of those, but it isn’t necessary and is sometimes counterproductive when based on complex facts that the audience isn’t familiar with).

“Fidelity to storytelling” essentially means giving the audience something they can take home with them and use in their own social interactions. That’s what makes stories and movies successful: people can “remix” them into their own personal, social stories and conversations (think of how much meaning can be communicated with a single quote from The Simpsons, Seinfeld, or Shakespeare).

Here’s the irony: this is pretty close to the principle on which the social web works. It’s the insight that Zuckerberg understood early on: content is merely a means for people to connect; create a platform where people can exchange social objects and “likes” and the network generates its own value.

If The Social Network was absolutely true to reality, far fewer people would see it and even fewer would have much to say about it. It would lose its social function. It would only serve a small elite that simply wants to preserve their authority and control, afraid that the ignorant masses might make things impure and imperfect…

Sound familiar?

There’s a bit of “what goes around comes around” here. Some of the most outspoken proponents of blogs, wikis, and creative commons — e.g. Jeff Jarvis and Lawrence Lessig — are also the most outspoken critics of The Social Network’s creative liberties.

As far as I’m concerned, creative liberty is creative liberty.

Either we let ignorant, bitter trolls comment on news articles and write Hollywood pictures or we don’t. Either someone has to be an expert to participate or they don’t.

We could say, “fine, they have a right — but then we have a right to challenge them with criticism,” which I 100% approve of.

But there’s another irony here. Read this post by John Hagel — with lots of interesting points and a conclusion with which I sentimentally agree — and see if you pick up the dissonance:

… the distortions in the movie are not simply there to create a more engaging story; they are there to help construct a narrative of the revolution that helps to reassure the ancien regime that they were on the side of humanity. It is no wonder that the mainstream movie reviewers are jumping out of their seats and offering standing ovations.

But the new media’s caricatures of the filmmaker’s motives seem every bit as distorted as the caricatures described in the film’s reviews, and both sides are advocating on behalf of a revolution or regime. It isn’t one constructed old media narrative vs. the righteous Internet; it’s two narratives clashing with each other — both resorting to simplistic cause-effect explanations and two dimensional characterizations.

Jeff Jarvis accounted for the filmmakers’ motives with statements like ”old media resists change” and “these guys want to deny the internet credit for it.” Scott Rosenberg quotes Mark Harris’s description of the movie as “a well-aimed spitball thrown at new media by old media,” and added he thought “it’s more than that — it’s a big lunging swat of the old-media dinosaur tail.”

I think those are fairly valid, but far from the whole picture. I can’t imagine Sorkin single-mindedly rubbing his hands together in anticipation of sticking it to the Internet any more than I can imagine Zuckerberg creating Facebook simply out of spite.

They’re handy caricatures for telling more compelling stories. We couldn’t do much without them.

Of course a Hollywood movie isn’t the most generative platform — but then again, neither is Facebook.

If we keep working at it, eventually we’ll stumble on the right story.

Journalists, Politicians & Citizens: Who’s Responsible for What?

Brian — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:26:38 +0000

We had an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day, about the lack of attention given by the media to lesser-known election candidates.

Partially aside, it was the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see for a while — a lively backchannel discussion about how local politics news is covered — and I hope this is the start of more meaningful conversation that generates momentum, character, continuity… and actually goes somewhere.

Here’s how this one started. Joe Ruscitti, newly confirmed editor-in-chief at the London Free Press, fired up the old Editor’s Blog to poll readers about perceptions of bias in their mayoral campaign coverage, generating the following reaction from commenter Noah:

This has been a large source of frustration for Eric Southern’s mayoral campaign, as I’m sure it has been for others. You need to look no further than the August 18th article written by Patrick Maloney. The article starts by introducing Eric as a the latest candidate and then proceeds to dismiss his campaign entirely, along with the other 9 people running at the time it was written. This was entirely without cause or justification, unsupported by logical argument, without any examination of his platform. Eric was first to post his platform online, first to propose a serious vision for the city, but was shot down before he even had a chance to introduce himself to the people of London.

I know Noah and I met Eric once and I think they’re both good guys. Southern has ideas that are worth serious consideration and I like some of the creativity in his campaign (e.g. encouraging anyone to photoshop his picture; I’m not sure how that will turn out but I like the initiative).

But…

A sensible platform in itself isn’t leadership. Ideas aren’t leadership. Ideas are everywhere; everybody has them. Platforms and ideas don’t qualify anyone to be mayor. It’s what someone does with ideas — whether their own or others’ — that really matters.

If a candidate can’t make an impression on the local City Hall reporter, best of luck balancing all of the egos in council meetings, standing up to unions and developers (or anyone else), unifying citizens around a coherent vision, persuading the provincial and federal governments to fund programs in London, selling the city abroad as a place to do business, or any of the things that mayors do every day.

I don’t mean to pick on Noah’s comment. It might have had some effect. Whether or not it did, Patrick Maloney wrote up a piece on London’s lesser-known mayoral candidates. Between the lines it reads like a clever exhibit of reasons why every candidate does not deserve equal space (which is exactly how I would have tried to write it too).

(I was going to list their shortcomings here but it got to be too long and depressing.)

If you’re a somewhat competent and organized wild-card candidate, enough diligence and persistence can eventually build a reputation and more frequent mentions in the media, and maybe even being the focus of some articles.

That’s how someone like Toronto’s Sarah Thomson can go from being effectively dismissed behind the phrase, “other candidates include,” to being the subject of influential endorsements and first tier billing on high profile television debates.

Or think of Barack Obama. He was relatively unknown in 2004. He became president four years later not with ideas and complaints about “fair coverage” but by doing what leaders do: he commanded people’s attention and earned a reputation, he created a story that journalists and citizens wanted to tell, he recruited a stellar team and delegated tasks to build a strong organization, he solicited advice from a wide range of prominent citizens and turned those strangers into supporters — not just supporters at the polls but people who opened doors and generated support along the way.

Like it or not, the best politicians tend to emerge through positions of prominence. That’s where people learn the soft skills needed to do the job. It isn’t for everyone. Also consider, as recent research shows, power changes people. A lot of swell folks turn into assholes once they’re given authority. It isn’t hard to imagine some of the fringe candidates becoming downright dictatorial if they were ever elected. Good intentions and a few decent ideas aren’t enough.

In many ways, the person with the best ideas might be the least suited for politics. Charm consistently beats intellect — if not at first, at least eventually. Even Plato’s thinking (the foundation of Western political philosophy) was painfully ineffective in the practical realm of politics.

Now if ideas don’t come from politicians, where do they come from?

They come from anywhere, at any time. Ideas come from all of us. Ideas come from “the community” — from experts and people with first-hand experience, as well as from novices (who haven’t learned enough to be biased by outdated assumptions), people who are passionate, people who couldn’t care less but see things differently, people who’re already invested in a challenge (financially, emotionally, professionally), and people who have nothing to lose — in the process of conversation, not as an abstract moral good, but as a practical means of filtering out mistakes, recognizing biases, turning ideas into actions, and (this is important) following up to identify emerging opportunities for correction and improvement.

This is where social media comes back into the picture.

People come up with brilliant ideas every day — in coffee shops, in the shower, around the water cooler, wherever — but they evaporate. Nobody’s around to hear them, or the people who are there don’t have the right knowledge or contacts to push the ideas forward. But when something is shared online, it’s “capital” that people can continue to build on later.

When we had the Twitter conversation about media coverage on Wednesday, people came and went and came back and everything we said was still there for everyone else to see. The next day I heard one of my arguments used on the radio (close enough to my wording to know it was cribbed from my tweet). Nothing groundbreaking but it’s a concrete example of an idea spreading. Maybe someone who heard it on the radio is in a position to make something more out of it, or maybe someone hears it and thinks “what a stupid thing to say; what he should have said is…” and it becomes something better, which gets passed along and so on.

The biggest problem with that [informal side of the] process right now is that most of it is still offline and unaccounted for. It isn’t concrete. People don’t really “get it” because they can’t visualize it and can’t see how — for example — Bob Smith’s tweet about introducing more rigourous nomination criteria turned into a conversation that got people thinking and researching what other provinces require.

Still a very modest example, but there are tools being developed (like ThinkUp and Storify) to document these conversations more coherently, and we’re still just finding our legs on these platforms.

Another challenge is traditional media constraints. There are too many stops in the conversation. When a print or radio person repeats an idea without pointing back to the source, they’re not just preventing others from finding and participating in the conversation, they’re subtly encouraging their audience to do the same. It perpetuates an atmosphere in which people hold onto their ideas rather than exchanging them.

On that I’d recommend the speech Felix Salmon gave at a recent CJR breakfast, on “teaching journalists to read“:

We need much more critical reading, and we also, desperately, need much more linking from Old Media to outside sources. Links aren’t something cute to relegate to a blog ghetto — they’re an intrinsic part of what journalism has to be in the 21st Century. And most journalists are very, very, bad at linking.

Another benefit is that it might encourage citizens to exercise more discipline in what they say online, aspiring to have it taken seriously by credible journalists and prominent politicians in conversations that really matter.

And maybe then people like Eric Southern won’t think they have to run for mayor to have their ideas heard and treated seriously.

It would be great if politicians were better at linking too, but it doesn’t fall in their area of responsibility. They’re responsible for turning the ideas into action and results. It’s journalists who are responsible for how ideas and stories are accounted for and shared; journalists have to lead by example here.

As for the rest of us, I think our responsibility is to think of ourselves as politicians or journalists (or both) in the making. Even if we don’t intend to become politicians or journalists ourselves, if we care about the civic sphere we should think of our ideas and opinions directly and explicitly contributing to the same production line that the professionals are on.

Above all we need to reinforce the notion that it’s worth putting a little extra effort into these conversations, because the next idea you have might be one that gets passed up the line — might improve both the common good and your personal stature.

Voting is Contagious

Brian — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 07:26:48 +0000

The gist of Connected, the excellent book about the power of social networks, is that the most important factor in whether a person will do something — e.g. donate to charity, gain weight, steal a car, or simply smile — is whether the people around them are doing it too.

It isn’t true of everything, but yes it certainly is true of voting, according to the book:

It is well known that when you decide to vote it also increases the chance that our friends, family, and coworkers will vote. This happens in part because they imitate you… and in part because you make direct appeals to them. And we know that direct appeals work… This simple, old-fashioned, person-to-person technique is still the primary tool used by the sprawling political machines in modern-day elections.

Interestingly, authors Nicholas Christakis & James Fowler manage to address the “rational” notion that one person’s vote doesn’t really count (in a purely rational sense, it doesn’t) by showing that one vote counts because of the network effects it can cause: when you vote, your friends are more likely to vote too, so “instead of each of us having only one vote, we effectively have several.”

They took the probabilities found in existing research (i.e. if one person you have regular discussions about politics with votes — people have about 5 such “partners,” on average — then you are 15% more likely to vote too) and plugged them into computer models to see how one person’s vote might “cascade” through social networks. On average, one vote would generate about three more votes. And in some cases, cascades reached as high as one hundred additional votes!

(They found that the more polarized a network is — which is to say, the more connected we are to like-minded people while being less connected to people with different views — then cascades will have a greater effect. Results would also depend on how “central” the first voter is, i.e. if their friends each have a lot of friends, then their vote will affect influence more people at two and three degrees of separation.)

Perhaps the most interesting study was done by researchers who went to the doors of two-person households encouraging people to vote. As a control group they encouraged other households to recycle. They found after the election that people who answered the door and were encouraged to vote were 10% more likely to do so than those encouraged to recycle. Most interesting was that their partners and housemates — though the researchers didn’t speak to them directly — were also more likely to vote (about 6% more).

It’s important that voter mobilization initiatives take note of this research. Otherwise efforts that aim to have a mass effect may be counterproductive: i.e. the time spent pulling people together to plan and manage big initiatives might be better spent spreading out across neighbourhoods and engaging people where they’re already congregating.

I suspect that programs like Rock the Vote work insofar as they serve as venues or points of reference for communications between individuals, or for people to spread the message to more of their friends. For example, an event can bring people together, but if the people at the event aren’t saying, “I’m voting and so should you” — not just to others at the event but to other people in their network — then it’s just theatre. Likewise, if everybody participating in the event was already going to vote anyway, it’s an exercise in mutual self-affirmation.

In other words, the message needs to be contagious: the question isn’t how to mobilize people, it’s what do people need in order to mobilize their friends…

One way of thinking about voter mobilization is something like a “two-step flow” approach, based on findings (note: from the 1940′s) that political messages in mass media didn’t affect everybody directly, but rather affected “opinion leaders” who then spread the message through their social networks. (People who have read The Tipping Point may be reminded here of connecters, mavens & salesmen).

I don’t necessarily subscribe to that theory exactly as it is, but it certainly has heuristic value: instead of thinking in terms of what the message is, think in terms of what people will do with it to ensure the message will be contagious and spread through the second and third degrees of participants’ networks.

Tell a story people will tell their friends…

Note: To readers in the London Ontario area, some voter mobilization ideas were discussed at ChangeCamp and a group is gathering to try developing some of those projects on Tuesday, July 6 at Gig’s Grillhouse, 6:00 pm.

Here’s Nicholas Christakis’s TED talk about some of the ideas in Connected — notice that headline writers loved the obesity angle: newspapers are good at writing stories people will want to tell their friends…

Learning to Be Open By Default

Brian — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 20:20:30 +0000

This is my first post following ChangeCamp London (there will likely be one or two more) in which I’m suggesting points for probable improvement: mostly things I actively promoted through the planning process, and which I hope to see emphasized more in the future.

This post argues for the need to be open throughout the process. There are some specific benefits I’d like to highlight:

Efficiency: the more eyes on a project, the faster you’ll find mistakes (per “Linus’s Law“) and opportunities (per Zittrain).
Simplicity: assume everything is already public and you stop having to worry about it; by comparison, managing who’s allowed to know what and trying to protect everything costs a lot of time, attention, and lawyers’ fees — and in a digital age is often futile — that could otherwise be used to create value.
Accountability: a preemptive strike against critics and mudslingers (though without context and narrative, people might lock onto one or two pieces of info that look bad on their own).
Sustainability: individuals who select their own role in a project to suit their strengths and recognize their personal contribution are more motivated, and the group as a whole is more adaptive and resilient.

Obviously not everything can be done openly, but it’s a lot easier to manage balanced approaches when we have experience at both extremes (i.e. we need to make the mistakes and appreciate the benefits of both in order to fully understand the nuances in play when we combine them into new projects and enterprises).

ChangeCamp ought to be the vanguard of openness & engagement in the city. Wherever we think politicians and City Hall should be on a scale of openness, we need to set an aggressive example several degrees further along. If, for whatever reason, ChangeCamp can’t be the vanguard (i.e. maybe I’ve grossly misinterpreted the example set by ChangeCamp Toronto) then we ought be using the momentum from ChangeCamp to develop something else to serve that purpose.

We need to create examples that are open-by-default from start to finish: assume that everybody can listen, actively provide opportunities for people to do so, actually adapt to new information as it comes in, learn continuously in dynamic social contexts, iterate the general aspects of the initiative to embody new contributions coming in at each phase, and when some exceptionally sensitive or mundane work needs to be done we can always choose to be strategically closed for those specific tasks and decisions.

The experience with ChangeCamp London was, after an initial burst of self-organization (nudged by Mark Kuznicki, ChangeCamp’s founder), the process in London reverted back to a closed-by-default mindset: we became mired for almost two months as we spun hypothetical scenarios around in isolation. Things improved immensely, but there’s still a lot to learn before we really master the open approach.

My understanding is that in those early stages there were worries that openness would make decisions too difficult — though nobody actually advocated seeking community consensus on every single decision (I’d already called attention to the hazards of trying to do that, not just on this blog but later in print as well). There was a misunderstanding of the difference between the providing information about the process (good) vs. explicitly framing requests for feedback on everything (ineffective).

When you say, “hey, here’s what we’re doing” and indicate that people are welcome to respond and participate, then you’ve provided an opportunity for people to self-select (i.e. conversely for organizers it’s an opportunity to start identifying people who are most committed, or have special attributes to contribute, to start nudging people into complementary roles), to start developing a deeper sense of responsibility for the outcome, and maybe point out potential problems and opportunities.

Maybe you get a few bad suggestions but addressing those is a part of doing things now: at least the interactions will be out where everyone can judge for themselves.

(Charlene Li’s Open Leadership has a lot of practical guidance on maintaining confidence while relinquishing control. As in Groundswell, she advises establishing the objectives before choosing strategies and tools…)

It also means the process is accountable — so for instance, if someone now wants to claim that ChangeCamp was designed to promote a particular group’s agenda (not inconceivable, given the political atmosphere and the fact that “perception is reality” in politics), we can refer back to show how the process developed over time, instead seeming to emerge fully-formed out of the ether one day, casting long shadows of doubt and providing the impetus for potential opponents to speculate about our aims and motives.

(We witnessed the kind of commotion and conflict this approach can cause when ActionLondon launched.)

As long as key organizers make accountably sound decisions and are willing to listen to people who have the best knowledge that applies, when appropriate, then there won’t be many complaints about the few closed discussions and unilateral decisions that have to happen sometimes.

What everyone wants is a way to contribute according to their unique interests and abilities; people will happily defer as long as they’re occupied in a role that’s personally gratifying. But if people feel thwarted or ineffective, then they tend to become more generally agitated, critical, uncooperative, and apathetic.

As a local example of a good, fairly open approach, I’ll point to Kevin Van Lierop’s PARK(ing) Day initiative (Kevin or anyone can correct me if I’ve misrepresented this slightly):

after hearing about the worldwide movement and being inspired to try it in London, he started mentioning it on Twitter and in conversations;
based on the feedback he got from that, he decided to present about it at PodCamp;
based on the validation & momentum generated there, he organized an orientation & brainstorming session that was open to anyone to attend;
people who attended that session felt a greater sense of responsibility to help make it work by investing their time, knowledge, and interpersonal capital to grow the network…

Kevin doesn’t seek everyone’s endorsement for every decision. But the fact that it’s open enough for anyone interested to stumble upon it, then self-select and participate in a way that’s appropriate to them, then nobody resents Kevin’s authority. It’s also working because Kevin has been listening to feedback rather than arguing that people’s suggestions are wrong.

It’s also essential to be aware of the unique knowledge, interests, and style of the people you’re asking for suggestions (if and when you do ask explicitly).

If you make an open-ended request to me (for example) for feedback or advice, you’re almost certainly going to get advice about the big picture, your project’s vision, concept, and strategy — because that’s what my background and competence is — rather than what kind of sandwiches to serve or what font to use on the website. My advice on tactical and cosmetic things like that will have a negative value to both of us: the information will be bad and I’ll feel uncomfortable giving it. Other people might be delighted to offer advice about food or web design. It all depends on asking the right person — which in a lot of cases means asking nobody in particular, but rather just getting it out and responding appropriately to whatever signals come back from people.

More positively, by being open-by-default, Kevin is feeding off of the energy that’s freely circulating about PARK(ing) Day as word gets around and cycles back to him in the form of inquiries, encouragement, and offers to help. Like a financial investment, it’s working for him while he’s busy with other things.

People are more willing to share it with others because they aren’t afraid they might be over-sharing, stepping on Kevin’s toes, undermining his leadership, or violating his confidence (notwithstanding what might be said in private conversations): virtually everything’s already out there.

Note that being closed has important functions too. There are often good reasons not to be open.

Other than the obvious need to respect confidentiality and not affect negotiations in progress (e.g. not talking about a specific venue until arrangements are finalized), withholding info before formal announcements is an effective way to generate a spike in attention and enthusiasm. But for something like ChangeCamp I’m not sure that’s necessarily beneficial. I’d prefer to have a relatively small number of participants who’ve seen the process develop, understand the aims, and feel personally responsible for the outcome, rather than draw a larger but perhaps less committed crowd.

No doubt we can (and should) have both kinds of events — workshops and spectacles — just as we ultimately need to combine closed with open approaches. And we should continue to discuss the relative merits and applications of each.

Nobody expected ChangeCamp London to be a perfect event: everybody expected it to lead to ongoing conversations and projects.

As we proceed, I hope we’ll be more explicit about our objectives, so we can have grounded conversations about best practices as we expand the network and build momentum — as efficiently, simply, accountably, and sustainably as possible.

Preserving Our Problems vs Changing to Learn

Brian — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:15:01 +0000

A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate:

Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But over time as capital increased in complexity, unions complexified as well, until unions needed management. The two became one system — union/management. So now the problem with unions is that they are locked into the old framework, the old system. They inadvertently perpetuate the continuation of the problem (management) they are the solution to because as long as unions exists, companies feel they need management to offset them, and so the two became co-dependent

But I think it goes even deeper than institutions and bureaucracies. It isn’t just organizational, it’s conceptual: it’s personal

Consider Shirky’s claim that in bureaucracies, “it’s easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one”; now consider that our minds are organized in complex ways, and it tends to be easier to make our ideas more complicated than it is to make them simpler — because making them more complicated only requires attaching new imperatives and exceptions, whereas simplification requires reorganizing everything in relation to everything else: unlearning a lot of what we’ve learned, killing a lot of our “darlings” (ideas and projects we’ve become personally attached to), and in some cases re-aligning our social and professional affiliations.

Then there are the burdens, which can actually make us feel more important — especially if they’re the conceptual kind. When we have to constantly work to keep our complicated schemes in order, that feeling that “this would all collapse if I wasn’t here to keep it together” is a source of meaning and personal pride.

To put it in terms of the model I developed in Truth, Will & Relevance, we come to rely on the sense of efficacy and relevance that’s generated by being an integral part of a sophisticated system.

It requires a lot of discipline to be wary of these hazards while we learn to use new tools and develop solutions to emerging problems. I’ve noticed this in conversations about open government and citizen engagement. I’m seeing people focus too much on the old problems, or adopting new tools without adopting new mindsets and goals.

Look at a lot of politicians who’ve adopted social media but keep broadcasting the same old messages. For those people, Twitter and Facebook accounts merely add complications and burdens. Instead of using social media adoption as an opportunity to reset their whole approach, to learn to communicate more openly (which is ultimately simpler than trying to be controlling and clever), by merely glomming a new set of practices onto existing systems they’re making it even more difficult to change when it finally becomes do-or-die.

Which is why most people and organizations don’t manage to change fundamentally: instead, they become irrelevant.

As I’ve become more involved in these things I started to notice myself getting caught up in ideas and affiliations that would lead down that road. We get seduced by awesomeness and novelty and before we know it we’re becoming the old guard, incomprehensibly defending institutions that aren’t sustainable in a world of new challenges. Because along the way, rules develop, roles and relationships become structurally defined, and then you can’t change in a fundamental way without affecting the networks of trust and relevance we rely on. In other words, it would piss people off and turn them against you — and then you become powerless and virtually nothing positive is accomplished.

Instead of being seduced by any particular concepts or schemes, I’m attracted to what might be behind them. If something isn’t generative — if it doesn’t afford opportunities to learn, change, discover, or create something new; if we aren’t actively exploring those opportunities — it isn’t merely uninteresting to me, it’s dangerous.

Update: deleted part of first sentence, June 18.

Testing Wave Embeds: With Thoughts On Collaboration

Brian — Thu, 27 May 2010 18:03:49 +0000

Some Things Happening

Brian — Fri, 07 May 2010 17:06:21 +0000

Truth, Will & Relevance

Regular blogging has taken a back seat for the past while as I finish book. I know I suggested I’d be self-publishing something months ago, but every time I get it into the shape I want it, the impression I get from ‘the whole’ inspires vast improvements — not just being picky about things, but substantial improvements in coherence, credibility, etc.

What began as basically a blog-to-book collection of posts has morphed into something that reads like a somewhat carefully plotted argument, or proposal — though it didn’t come together arbitrarily; I have a lot of old outlines in my head. It’s the book I tried writing a few years ago (before I started a blog) but kept getting hung. The intervening practice and real-world points of reference have been just what the doctor ordered. It was also a matter of being right too soon, I think. Most people (myself included, most of the time) only want to hear what we’re already starting to think but haven’t quite managed to articulate.

Anyway, it’s called Truth, Will & Relevance. It’s about how we think about the profound challenges and opportunities in our world, which continue to surprise, energize, and inspire me with awe every single day. From crazy stock market crashes to crazy elections, riots against hard economic realities, to massive oil spills and tension between industrialism versus whatever-we-call-what-comes-next, there’s a lot to think about — a lot I’ve already thought about — and a lot of opportunity to radically reshape the way we think and talk about these things.

That’s what I love. That’s what I’ve done… In the mean time I don’t have a lot of spare words to blog with. For now here are a few more things I’m getting out to do:

PodCamp London 2010

Is tomorrow! (Saturday, May 8)

I’m on the organizing team — though my contribution is embarrassingly meagre compared to what Bill Deys, Titus Ferguson, Kevin Van Lierop, and John Leschinski have done. (They’re probably working on it right now while I’m sitting here writing about it.) Regardless, I’m tremendously proud and looking forward to a great day. The schedule is almost full of diverse, interesting sessions, and the Convergence Centre at UWO’s Research Park looks like an awesome venue (and I look forward to more cool things happening there).

That’s all I really need to say for now. If you don’t know, now you know. The plan is to stream the sessions, so if you’re curious check PodCampLondon.com for the link on Saturday. You can follow on Twitter via #pclo10 (there will be a lot of volume on that).

GenNext Timeraiser

Is Thursday, May 13.

The folks at the United Way are doing a lot of creative things to get younger demographics involved in philanthropy. Timeraiser is an especially interesting one. The idea is that instead of pledging money, people pledge time — perhaps an even more valuable form of capital. The good thing (I think) about framing it like this is that when we donate time as volunteers, we aren’t just giving, we’re getting something back as well — not just as reciprocity, but largely by way of the social capital we create in our communities.

To pull it off, GenNext has partnered with Pillar Non-Profit Network, London Community Foundation, and the London Arts Council, in order to coordinate an art auction that will be the focal point and driving force of Thursday’s event.

I’m usually too reticent about volunteering — as I am about nearly everything — so things like this are a great nudge to get more engaged. More details here.

ChangeCamp London

Is coming together — though I’m not sure how much I can say at this point. We have a date and a few possible venues. If you have suggestions or want to contribute in any way, contact me and I’ll let the other organizers know. Some background is available via london.changecamp.ca and my post about it is here in case you missed it.

The idea is to “re-imagine government and citizenship in the age of participation.” That includes citizen engagement, open data, encouraging government to use open standards and open source software — and just having a more open mindset in general — while we as citizens need to assume more responsibility and initiative.

Note that ChangeCamp London is just one aspect of a lot of great, related projects that are gathering steam in the city. Open data is on the radar, thanks largely to the guys at rTraction and their EatSure project.

We’ll hear about other things happening in the near future as well… For now I have to say it really feels great to be a part of all of this with people who are actually making things happen.

London As a Platform: Stolen Bikes Edition

Brian — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 06:26:07 +0000

How It Happened

Last night a group of us got together to discuss ChangeCamp London and different opportunities for fostering a more collaborative & open culture in London. It was a great meeting and we’ll see some good things coming together in the near future.

With that still fresh in my mind, I noticed a tweet from Jody Bailey:

My bike was stolen today from outside the downtown library http://bit.ly/a8OjBg http://bit.ly/chSPvo contact me if you see her #ldnont

[Update: more at FMBS.]

I felt pretty bad — he spent the last month biking and tweeting about #30daysofbiking — so I retweeted it without hesitation, thinking, “you never know… as it ripples out through people’s social circles maybe it’ll be seen by someone who knows something.”

He thanked me, adding,

After talking with security and police, apparently bike parking downtown is a real problem. Time for some action.

So naturally, my response was,

Let’s start a website!

Of course, that’s my response to every problem, but I think in this case it’s a pretty good fit for pulling something together: challenging but doable, with room for imagination and opportunities for people with different skills and knowledge to contribute.

We won’t “solve” the bike theft problem any time soon, but at the very least we can build some awareness about this issue and stretch our underused collaborative muscles, giving us valuable practice and experience for other initiatives in the future.

Where To Begin

I did a very shallow search for existing initiatives and found one: the Boston Stolen Bikes Community Alert. It is (or maybe was) run through the City of Boston’s website, using Twitter and Facebook to take in reports of stolen bikes and then distribute alerts out to police, bike shops, hospital & school security, and anyone following those feeds.

But Twitter and Facebook don’t strike me as the best approach.

The first thing I thought of was that maybe we could track locations & times, and then turn the data into visualizations — maybe patterns will emerge, leading to arrests or more effective strategies for prevention.

Maybe a visualization can increase awareness enough to motivate more people to put a little extra thought and effort into the problem — to be on the lookout for thieves, etc. You never know who might see it and generate a serendipitous lead or insight.

And considering what’s possible with real-time mobile apps, it’s hypothetically conceivable that someone could report a theft-in-progress, sending out an alert to people within a certain distance to see where the thief might have gone.

And why does it have to stop with bike thefts?

Even if no bikes are recovered, there’s a kind of therapeutic value for overcoming that helpless feeling — to feel like they did something — and to actually see the information is out for people to notice, where it might do some good.

What Do We Need?

Obviously we need people with technical know-how. I have next to none. Maybe we can start with something as simple as a Google map [which I just spent 1 minute setting up] that people can push pins into.

Ideally the police would be involved. Note that in Boston’s case the police where already tweeting when the bike program launched. If anyone has any insight into, or relationships with anyone the police department, maybe we can explore something there.

And of course, first and last, we need an active community — i.e. people in the cycling community to champion this — who want to see it work and are willing to experiment a little and keep up the momentum » Spread the word!

Also, a catchy name never hurts…

What do you think?

And if you see Jody’s bike, contact him @3oh6.

Update: add your bike or improve on this (which wouldn’t be hard).

Lesson for London in Civic Engagement

Brian — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 20:55:53 +0000

Yesterday a new website launched, Action London 2010, providing Londoners what promises to be a textbook perfect case study on dos and don’ts of civic engagement in the digital age. They say (and have demonstrated they are) working to improve the site quickly, to their credit. I wasn’t going to post this but I eventually decided to lay out my thoughts coherently while still fairly fresh — hopefully just once — because this is applicable to every civic engagement initiative (e.g. one I’ll be discussing with others on Thursday). We’re all learning the same lessons.

In an article about the site in the Free Press, the group’s spokesman stated there’s “no hidden agenda.” Since then we’ve learned (through pressure) it’s backed by a group of associations and coalitions mainly representing development, construction, and manufacturing, plus Nash Jewellers. Formally, the online interactions I’ve seen were handled by a PR company.

Maybe there isn’t a hidden agenda, but they seemed to begin by doing all the right things to make it look like there was. When a website with opaque backing calls itself “grass roots,” I think the chances are pretty high that it’s astroturf:

Astroturfing denotes political, advertising, or public relations campaigns that are formally planned by an organization, but are disguised as spontaneous, popular “grassroots” behavior.

Come to think of it, I’m skeptical every time I hear the word “grass roots.” It’s like the rule-of-thumb I’ve heard about people who brag about running with biker gangs: if they feel like they have to say it, they’re probably lying (or just confused about the meaning of what they’re saying).

Don’t get me wrong. Everyone’s entitled to promote their interests in a democracy. And don’t automatically count me as opposed to the interests this group represents — in fact, I’m eager to learn more about them; I’ve never really been able to figure out what I think about how and where development should occur [for example]. I’m personally more of an urbanite by nature, but I’m hard-pressed to impose my sentiments on my friends and family who like large lots around the outskirts, at least not without really knowing what I’m talking about — which I don’t (as far as that issue is concerned… but on the issue of openness, on the other hand…).

Note that this isn’t just a matter of principle. Looking at it strategically from their own self-interest I think it’s the wrong play because it gives their opponents something really substantial to discredit them with — coincidentally happening at about the same time that genuinely open government initiatives are growing more prominent on the radar in Canada, and front page news from the U.S. brings lessons on the futility of opacity.

People are getting wise. People deserve a lot more credit. You can’t protect this kind of information anymore. It’s going to get out — and then some: there’s also a lot of extra information laying around that people can use to speculate erroneously about even more nefarious intentions. Don’t even give people the opportunity to imagine. Better to invest in generative strategies that increase accountability, reputation, and genuine trust. Better to educate people.

And if for some reason you expect an openly informed public to be a losing scenario for you, then maybe the best strategy is to start unwinding and cutting losses or radically reconceiving your assumptions now before the real changes come.

Ultimately I can’t oppose any initiative that at least moves us further ahead on the learning curve, and I welcome the opportunity to learn and participate in the conversation — if people are willing to meet on common ground, with few conditions and full disclosure.

Convergence of Social and Indie Media

Brian — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:23:43 +0000

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 remember [correction needed?].

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.

ChangeCamp: Toronto to London

Brian — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:14:19 +0000

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 »

Why Would a Twenty-Something Stay in London?

Brian — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:21:44 +0000

Chantelle Diachina, Gina Farrugia, and Grant Hopcroft discuss the opportunities and challenges for retaining young people in London. Photo: Kevin Van Lierop

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 still figuring out what to do with my life.

To be honest I don’t think there is an answer to that question (I mean, the question about retaining young people — though I’m increasingly inclined to think the other question doesn’t have an answer either).

There is no reason for a 20-something to stay in London.

But at the same time, there are lots of reasons.

While there’s no magnetic attraction to draw masses of young people, there are also an infinite number of possible niches and opportunities to retain a few of the right individuals who are naturally suited for London’s character and pace.

The answer our group came up with (notes are here and earlier ones here) can be summarized roughly as

London offers opportunities to have an impact than a young person would have in a larger city. Social networks can be more intimate and diverse at the same time, with more access to the kind of dialogs we had today.

[Update: To be clear, credit for that goes to the group but it was Kevin Van Lierop who nailed the "opportunities to have an impact" phrase, building on James Wilkinson's comments and with elaboration mostly my Jodi Simpson. I contributed very little.]

It sort of contradicted a lot of our criticism in that session and others that the older generations’ established power networks are too comfortable (that was expressed by both young and old alike) with the notion that young people, regardless of talent, need to “wait their turn.”

Of course, the most talented tend to chose to go wait in a city that’s a lot more fun in the mean time.

Either way, I think we can best resolve the situation by coming back to the idea articulated by Kevin in the session that it’s about personal impact through genuine human connections, embracing people who are the right fit, sending the right signals to students so they know exactly what kind of city London is, and demonstrating we’re willing to invest in their future — our future.

Any attempt at setting up top-down programs will be inherently difficult — if not completely counterproductive — especially if they are explicitly targeting young people.

Young people don’t want to be targeted. They don’t want to be young people. They want to be whoever they decide they’re going to be, on their own terms.

I remember reading a case study — can’t find it now — explaining that Teen Spirit deodorant failed because teens, in a sense, didn’t think of themselves as teens. Young people aspire to be older. Marketing needs to aim a few years higher if it’s going to be explicit about demographics.

Or we could just keep demographics out of the message and simply start doing more things right. If we want to appeal to young people the first thing we need to do is give them the impression the city is moving forward.

If they see London moving forward more of them will want to be a part of that.

Most of these steps are things that London — and any city — should constantly try to improve anyways: continuing to vitalize the core, becoming more eco-conscious, making sure there’s decent and affordable places to live available in vibrant neighbourhoods, enabling diversity to continue thriving, facilitating healthy lifestyles, and becoming a more digitally connected city (not just in terms of hard wires and wifi but in terms of becoming a lot more digitally active, sophisticated and savvy).

By comparison, if younger generations see the city simply preserving existing structures and mindsets (whether or not that’s the case; what’s important is what people perceive), it will always be an uphill battle trying to attract & retain them.

If London promotes a positive identity (genuinely, not just in the form of platitudes) and people choose to live here for positive and appropriate reasons (not apathetic ones like mine) and they’re are allowed to invest their skills and interests in suitable challenges — to experience a sense of personal growth and belonging — then the rest starts taking care of itself and the strategic outlook becomes more clear.

Growing London’s appeal to young people is going to be won by margins, constantly building individual success upon individual success. To put it simply, we need to retain just enough graduates from this year’s classes so they can send the message to next year’s graduates… and so on.

Progress is going to occur largely on a personal level. It’s going to have to go through the channels young people are already hooked into and where they’ve already invested their trust.

This is just the kind of hyper-connected, hyper-personal world we live in now.

It’s the lesson every marketer has had to learn with the advent of social media. Every decent book on the subject — from Cluetrain to Trust Agents — makes essentially the same case.

Looking at the bigger picture, these principles are good in themselves. Making our civic life more open & engaging has all kinds of benefits in terms of quality, sustainability, and effectiveness of governance going beyond talent retention.

It’s something we need to be working on, like, today.

Oh right — we are…

Tune in to tomorrow night’s episode of the TVO’s The Agenda, live from UWO. Today was a great experience and I can’t wait to see what fruit it might bear — not just tomorrow but through the course of the year and beyond, keeping the momentum up with similar events.

P.S. Jobs certainly don’t hurt either.

Update: Photo by Kevin Van Lierop via Flickr.

Hashtag Debate in London

Brian — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:33:18 +0000

• Don’t take it too seriously. There will never be consensus. Ultimately everything is decided by what people use. Debate about what we should use will just go on and on forever.

• Sometimes the stupidest ideas (sometimes starting as jokes and accidents) turn out to be the most popular and effective. Think of LOLcats (and Twitter itself). Do some research on how the most popular bands got their names.

• Everything is experimental and will eventually become obsolete anyways. Being able to adapt and grow matters a lot more than any particular standard or practice.

• It takes a lot of bad ideas to come up with one good one. What London needs more than anything is to promote a heterogeneous culture that creates and tries new things. Don’t be afraid to run with it and see what happens.

• #ldn is the most intuitive but people in the UK have been calling their city LDN since long before we were. Use it if you like. I’ve used it a few times — not so much for aggregation but to indicate to people that the tweet was my contribution to a conversation about London (in the same way that people use ironic hashtags like “#fail”).

• #ldnont is logically the best but it will never become standard. If there’s a core group committing acts of citizen journalism then maybe they/we can get together and agree on some standards. Personally I think there should be more co-operation in this space — but that challenge goes way beyond the topic of hashtags.

• #yxu is obviously not the most natural or intuitive (or memorable, I’m finding) but it has potential to lead to other, better ideas. It definitely sparked ideas in my mind and I’d encourage anyone to see their thoughts through. Brainstorm, prototype, and see what happens.

• I don’t and will never follow any London hashtag for an extended period because I already follow people from London who are having the conversations I’m interested in, and through those people I find new people (via retweets, mentions, etc) and whichever hashtags people are using for specific events and topics in the city.

• I’d rather invest this energy into making event- or issue-centric hashtags more effective. How can we improve the conversations that naturally occur and elapse around conferences and topics like the LTC strike, etc?

• If people from different social/interest groups use different tags, that’s fine; they’re using Twitter for building their community and that’s what it’s ultimately about. See the academic conversation on the notion that “there is not one ‘public’ but a network of ‘publics’…”

• There is value in #ldn and #ldnont (or whatever) for people who are new to London or Twitter, but that value quickly diminishes as they start building relationships. Our energy would be better spent making a more prominent “home base” (or several) for people to gravitate to and from… and/or ways to dynamically keep track of what specific temporary hashtags mean.

• On second thought, if you want to promote a specific hashtag, go ahead and collaborate with people to start a hub to promote it — just a site or page devoted to aggregating content — and if people keep coming back and want their stuff to show up on your site they’ll use the tag. If people don’t care then the issue is settled [oops, I meant settled "for now"].

• This isn’t a total criticism of the CanTags initiative. That in itself is a welcome experiment which might prove to become a kind of stepping stone to something else — something we wouldn’t have been able to conceive unless CanTags was tried first. It certainly helped move things along in London and got a lot of us on the same page.

• I have to wonder if the CanTags argument for geographic taxonomy will be made redundant by the rapidly proliferating use of location technologies — not to mention the effectiveness of real-time search.

• What’s important is that we’re having open dialogs that anyone can find and add value to. Keep that spirit alive and the rest starts taking care of itself.

This Blog in 2009

Brian — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 10:33:26 +0000

2009 was my first full year of regular and earnest blogging.

I’m usually surprised by which posts do poorly and which ones are successful. Sometimes I’m not really happy with something but I hit “Publish” anyways and people love it. Sometimes I put hours of extra work trying to popularize something and it vanishes.

Here are my top 20 posts of 2009, according by pageviews (a soon-to-be-outdated metric, maybe) in Google Analytics. Some of them might be surprising:

I went with top 20 rather than top 10 because there are a lot of anomalies in the top half. My biggest hit of the year is also the most uncharacteristic post I’ve ever written.

The Tori Stafford post was an attempt to stretch my boundaries a little by writing something more visceral, less abstract. Almost all of the traffic came from search (1,395 out of 1,606 pageviews via Google alone), mostly through variations on “what happened to Tori Stafford.” My keywords seemed to have hit a conspiracy-theorist nerve. It generated daily traffic for 3 months and over 6 months later it still generates weekly hits. Unfortunately it has nothing at all to do with the rest of my content.

How to Build in the 21st Century turned out to be a great surprise last week. It was written in one of those serendipitous episodes, and given the bad timing for readership (Friday night) I just kind of tossed it into the blogosphere without expecting much attention (the whole week had been a bust and I was at the point of apathy). It still managed to fall way short of my modest expectations… until Umair Haque tweeted it a few days later and people started sharing it in Delicious. But then even after I tried promoting it via Twitter again Monday it still seems to be one of my most unpopular posts among regular readers. Funny way to end the year; gives me a lot to think about.

So I’m at the Laundry Cafe was the result of another serendipitous episode — except it happened in the real world. Unfortunately, like the Stafford post, it’s fairly uncharacteristic, and other than some social media relevance it has almost nothing to do with the rest of my content.

The Silicon Valley Model, like “How to Build in the 21st Century,” was a post that is right in my sweet spot and is very representative of the kind of thinking I’m trying to promote, but was almost completely unnoticed until Jeff Jarvis found it and posted a few excerpts on his blog.

Uncovering London Ontario’s Economy was one of my social engagement successes — of which there are far too few in London. There don’t seem to be enough active linkers to have an effective ecosystem in the city (unless you’re in web design/development). So this is one of the posts I’m proudest of. I was expecting it to be one of those rants that get sucked into the abyss. Instead I woke up to a handful of reactions, which was a completely new experience.

The Social Media Mafia post was another uncharacteristic one, but unlike some of the others I was actually very happy that people liked this. And I love the thought of doing things that people enjoy.

More on Hipsters was a disposable aside that was destined to disappear until Richard Florida responded to it — not that it was worth responding to, except he was part of a group of guest bloggers filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic and I’m guessing it was not easy filling that quota.

Who Twitters? still comes up in search results — which always surprises me for something as common as Twitter. It goes to show what a game of luck SEO can be (why I never bother much). If I titled it with SEO in mind it probably would never have had any juice.

The Raw Feed of History is my personal favourite. It’s probably the most representative of all of my posts, covering the social and political implications of tech-driven developments within a broad and deep historical context. I would have liked to see it do better. Much of the traffic was international via followers who shared it with their contacts, which made me very happy, but unfortunately I didn’t have the same success trying to share it with my own acquaintances — a typical result that gives me no end of frustration.

Creative Culture and Web 3.0 via Google Wave has been another search engine hit that didn’t seem to resonate with people I actually know at all, despite a lot of work I put into trying to customize it to my audience.

Ontario in the Creative Age: First Thoughts. I’m including this as the 11th post in what would have been a top 10 list because it is one of the posts I’m proudest of; it’s one of my most characteristic posts in terms of subject matter, and it perfectly represents the problems we face here in London Ontario. This is a post about London but it generated more pageviews from Toronto. The local region brought just about 18% of the total traffic. The only external link came from a Kitchener site.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Interestingly (at least to me), there’s almost no overlap between pageview popularity and feed item popularity, according to Feedburner’s stats, these are the top posts via RSS:

That last one could be my blog’s permanent subtitle…

What’s my focus?

It isn’t for lack of trying that I haven’t narrowed myself into a specific niche. Every year I get a little closer to finding it.

A lot of this stuff I feel like I have to write because nobody else is. I’d be happy to just read and comment about local issues, for example, but there aren’t enough opportunities.

This is why I also spend so much time in “digital media advocacy.” I’m hoping to educate and bring a potential audience online. I know there are people out there who would love reading the stuff I love writing (I can’t be the only one), but they aren’t showing up and casting their votes. My guess is they have the same doubts that I had a couple of years ago before a few twists of fate turned me into a blogger.

Also, by reaching out I get a better sense of what people are looking for so I can adapt a little further towards them — towards you.

I have some thoughts about where all this is going in 2010, but I’ll get into all that later.

What Innovation Gets You

Brian — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:23:57 +0000

What happens when innovation is done well?

Well… a lot of things happen. One of them is you get a lot more attention — which is harder and harder to come by these days:

What is it that makes the economy hum, but is not growing? What’s the limiting factor behind all those web pages, business plans, strategies, books and articles, marketing initiatives, partnerships and alliances, and expansion initiatives? An attentive human mind. Attention is the missing link between the “bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion” (to use the phrase of William James, an early fan of attention) of the world around us and the decisions and actions necessary to make the world better.

Today, attention is the real currency of businesses and individuals.

That’s how Tom Davenport and John Beck opened their 2001 book, The Attention Economy.

It’s something I’ve been thinking more about lately; it happened to come up in the course of writing the “Cargo Cult to Cluster Culture” post, and completely by chance, a few hours ago in a comment I linked to James’s classic chapter on the subject).

It’s culminating now, thanks to a couple of developments.

On the weekend I noticed a tweet from David Ciccarelli that Voices.com (the London Ontario-based company he and his wife Stephanie founded) was mentioned in the New York Times.

“That’s pretty good,” I thought to myself, as I continued reading other tweets…

Then the next day I noticed a tweet from Stephanie’s VoicesDotCom account with a link and the title, “The Do-It-Yourself-Economy.” I clicked. It turned out to be not just a New York Times mention, but two long paragraphs in a mo-effing Thomas Friedman column! This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestseller list-owning, Charlie Rose-bantering, Mr. “World is Flat” himself.

He’s one of the few people who gives Malcolm Gladwell a run for his money, popularity-wise. People listen to people like that, i.e. other influential people — “mavens,” to use the term Gladwell made famous in The Tipping Point.

So what did Voices.com do to get in the column? Well they do a lot of promotion, but the very first thing they did that’s beyond doubt was build a great service that has enough value to get used and enough novelty to be interesting…

After that the product or service certainly won’t just promote itself, but you’ll get more attention back for less spent over time.

Whereas if you go straight to promoting something that isn’t inherently valuable and interesting then you’ll quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. In other words, it’ll cost more to acquire your 10,001st user than it cost to acquire your 10,000th, and then it’ll be even more for the 10,002nd and so on (because you’ll have to keep stretching farther and farther to reach out to new people).

But if you nail something both useful and new in the development stage, then you get into a situation of increasing returns, because the people using the service will effectively be promoting it for free, so the more people using it, the more attention comes your way, and the cheaper it gets to convert new users.

A slightly different example is the success the London Free Press has had using Twitter.

Yesterday I saw three tweets about Kate Dubinski’s J-Source post that got picked up by PBS MediaShift, “Lessons Learned from Tweeting a Biker Gang Trial.”

As of now, in less than a day Bit.ly has registered 56 tweets and 377 clicks — a substantial number of whom would be a bit of a who’s who of North America’s new media leaders. I first saw it via Mathew Ingram and later Jay Rosen tweeted it too (amusingly, the line he quoted was part of an earlier argument that comes very close to the kind he normally calls-out [my bad, maybe: the column is here, it's good; the point about consistency is exactly right; my recollection was that the denunciation of bloggers was stronger]).

That’s the power of increasing returns. In both cases most of the work was already done earlier in the process: trying new things, and having the discipline to do them well for their own sake.

(As a partial aside, it’s fascinating how Twitter allows us to really to watch these networks and waves of influence be articulated and measured and visualized before our eyes, as we’ve been discussing here the last few days.)

When The Free Press started livestreaming gimmicky events last winter (and making mistakes along the way) I’m pretty sure a lot of people scoffed, but it was through that process that they could’ve done such a great job on the Stafford story (for example) as it broke and played out.

And I noticed yesterday on her blog that Dubinski is still taking advantage of new opportunities to try doing things a little differently. It’s very encouraging to see. Judging by the comments people aren’t universally impressed… but everything new starts exactly that way and people are paying attention, and that’s what pays off in the long run.

LdnFavs09: London’s Favourites of 2009

Brian — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 06:19:15 +0000

Few people can resist talking about end-of-year favourites — bloggers especially.

Since a lot of us are already going to be posting our picks we might as well try to aggregate them into one stream for everyone to admire together. It’s the holiday season, after all.

It’ll be pretty easy — as long as people remember to use the same tag: “LdnFavs09,” or if you’re tweeting it use the hashtag “#LdnFavs09.”

I don’t think you need to worry too much about it technically being a “tag.” Do it if possible, but as long as “LdnFavs09″ is part of the post somewhere I think Google blog search should hopefully pick it up (or worse-comes-to-worst we’ll catch it some other way, inevitably).

Some people have head starts already.

Dan Brown has done a few and got some discussion going at LFPress.com, Ruby has a very good selection of music at LondonFuse (those are the only ones I’ve seen so far).

Other than including the tag, there are no rules.

Be creative!

Pick best of the past year, best of the past decade, mix it up, whatever you want.

If you need ideas check out some of the suggested categories at Dan Brown’s blog.

(My favourite list of the year so far (not from London) is the Best Protest Signs of 2009 at Buzzfeed (via GOOD). Looks like it was a strong year for Conan O’Brien-inspired ironic infiltrators.)

If you’re looking for inspiration I just stumbled on this impressive meta-list of book lists for 2009, and if you’re even more adventurous, take a dip in the meta-list of music lists (warning: maybe wait until the homework is out of the way first).

If you want to follow along the FriendFeed stream will have the most info, here’s the specified Google Blogs search, there’ll be an RSS feed to subscribe if you want, and here’s the Twitter stream.

I’m sure there will be more creative things we can do with it too. We can play with it. If you come up with anything, go ahead and make it or shout-it-out using the tag.

Brian Frank » london

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