Ed Mitchell: Platform neutral

Some time ago, I was walking around The Big Green Gathering Festival at 4am. It was a beautiful night and I was having a great time. The Big Green is one of the darkest festivals in The UK with no spot lighting (because that is simply a waste of energy), but there are some traditional street lights dotted around and about the fields. It is all very Alice in Wonderland.

As you might imagine, there is usually some loitering with good intent around the streetlights. Many of the conversations I happened to have that night are still with me. As well as helping us festival-weary travellers find (or not) our tents, they provided us with some surprising ‘collaboration opportunities’ as we all say these days.

At one streetlight, a guitar player, a double bass man and a wind musician stopped and offered to play any song anyone wanted to the passing crowd. A few ideas trickled out, some songs were keenly played, but it really took of when someone suggested the hokey cokey.

Within moments of the first few chords, as if by some weird fluke of the time space continuum, there were at least 50 people (could have been 100, it was dark) singing and dancing the hokey cokey. We had so much fun, we all demanded it again, and then again. By the time we were spent, our numbers had tripled and everyone was very over-excited.

More suggestions were made, but nothing would ever be as good as the hokey cokey. The energy peetered out and the crowd dispersed, back to its random, Brownian Motion style of movement around the site.

This is why I love festivals in The UK. Not corporate concerts pretending to be festivals, mind, proper festivals.

Asides to the music and real ale tents, the ‘make a bowl’ and ‘run a co-op’ workshops, the spoken word tents and the crazy hippy jiggery pokery, the organisers create an open social platform upon which serendipitous events can and do occur freely.

At any moment, around any attractor, at any time. You never know what is going to happen, who you are going to meet, what you will see, nor what you will talk about to whom. Obviously it’s not just the organisers; the attendees have to put energy in to get excitement out, but that is part of the deal.

The sum of a festival’s parts are far greater than its whole. There are wonderful moments that you can never predict. Meetings of minds, enabled by an open-spiritedness and free to access group of keen participants.

This is how communities can be, online and offline. Un-manageable in a traditional sense, project manager resistant, you have to work with them to offer them the most space to find their own weird corners and generate their own noise.

When I found Facebook, this is what it represented to me. Hopefully, this will be the way of the future of these web apps.