It was fun. We worked hard and focused and produced some interesting stuff. David Wilcox did some fantastic social reporting, the attendees captured their work on video which is gradually appearing, and there are lots of photos on the flickr group. Expect much knowledge sharing; we work to an open innovation model.

A full event report will follow with the high level design rationale and details on the interventions and how you can do it yourself; in the meantime, one of the workshops was to identify the ‘five golden rules’ for anyone thinking of launching a new multi-platform project.

Here are the top five golden rules to consider when thinking about an ‘innovative multi-platform content’ project, as identified by the event attendees:

(the five golden rules as voted by attendees of the event)

Here are the those that didn’t make it into the top five:

(the next golden rules that didn’t make it to the top five)

Here is the full list of all the rules (the top 16 are in order of voting):

• What’s the point?
• Know your target audience
• Know your platforms and their features and constraints
• Identify a desire/need that this product is filling
• A single/simple idea
• Innovate or improve
• Consider potentials, adaptability, flexibility, extendabiity of your concept
• Go Gonzo: create a culture of use; go out there and create the story
• Ask if it makes financial sense
• There are no rules
• Release early and often
• Innovation must involve risk
• Give it a title
• Keep communication simple
• Content must be find-able
• Is it feasible?
• Develop/have a strong idea and stick to it
• New or existing technology used in a compelling and powerful way
• Agree upon a plan
• Don’t spend more than 1/3 of the budget on technology
• Start from what the user wants, not what you want
• Keep it simple
• Ask why it is multi-platform
• Ask yourself if you have the right skills to make it
• Understand the lifecycle and stages of development
• Ensure seamless content interaction across all platforms
• Do you or we have the expertise?
• Know how to measure success
• Can it grow?
• Are you using the right platform?
• Don’t forget your audience
• Platform must be driven by idea not technology
• Platforms must have relevance and value ‘use strenghts’
• Content must appeal to audience
• Interdependence of platform, content, audience
• A clear and adaptable business model
• A clear target audience

Now, we all know that having favourites is wrong, so these aren’t my favourites, but a couple of them really touched my favourite spots:

This one made me think of Nancy White, John Smith and Etienne Wenger and their work on the emerging role of Technology Steward:

(golden rule from event)

This one just simply IS:

Good work all! Full report to follow.

It was a great pleasure to meet them and see their presentations which were all very interesting indeed – there are few enough opportunities to meet one’s peers so they are greatly appreciated.

More importantly, all of the attendees got top marks for attitude as well. They had come prepared to talk openly to eachother, and bring questions and examples which made for good conversations, topical problem-solving and hopefully all-round learning.

Given the other speakers’ amazing communities, I chose to pick out some examples of smaller works I have seen in the last year which have impressed me for their bottom-up and life-supportive nature. Here is the presentation. It’s all a bit visual, but you can download it from slideshare; all the relevant links discussed during the day are in the notes sections.

As well as the presentation I did a mini-mindmap session, asking people to write 5 words that meant ‘community’ to them and stick them on the wall. This is a quick and easy technique to help people get a map of what eachother is thinking about and I highly recommend it.

Nick Booth kindly grouped them for us so we could see any similarities in our thoughts. We found that we all roughly thought similar things:

• People
• Conversations
• Social space
• Relationships

A few others emerged including mobilisation, trust, minority views, power, meritocracy, disruption. Interestingly, no-one brought up technology or money although we talked about them quite a lot as the day progressed.

(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

I think my favourite post-it of the day was ‘Confidence-building’:
(post-it notes from mini-mindmap, 4talent inspiration session, 26/10/08)

It was a cracking day. I learnt a lot, had thorough conversations, met some good people and heard more real stories from the frontlines of all this online community stuff… Love it!

Many thanks to Mars, Dan and Antonio from Maverick for being our hosts.

Sharing is caring, all, keep it up.

The next Gurteen Bristol Knowledge Cafe is going to be held in the multi-disciplinary Pervasive Media Studio, Bristol, on Thursday 27 November, from 18:30. The cafe proper will begin at 19:00 prompt.

Tim Sheppard, local storytelling group member, will be introducing the subject before we get down to the serious k-cafe business as usual.

If you have any specific interests, please let us know. Tim got some feedback in the pub after our last gathering, but if you feel the urge to share some more with him, please add your thoughts to the wiki page.

As usual, please come along and enjoy while meeting and deepening your understanding of this topic, and book yourself in using the event booking page below:

Event booking and venue information link

Tim Sheppard website link

Storytelling wiki page for you to add any requests

Bristol Gurteen Knowledge Cafe mailing list link

Event page on Gurteen website

It’s free and I recommend you read it. Here’s the blurb:

This article outlines how unconferencing contributes to the vision of a performative social science that aims at stimulating social change. The authors argue that conference participation is an integral part of research and has the potential to support social change by enabling learning processes. They then develop an unconferencing model from the theoretical reflection of different theories from social science which reveals that unconferences support individual and social learning processes through enabling knowledge transformation as well as through creating structural links between societal sub systems.

Link to the paper here

This is a subject close to all of our hearts and one we continue to drive very keenly. All of our events have this theory their core, but we try not to go on too much about it in case we bore people who just want a gig that works.

We did a fair amount of doing and learning around conference theory with the ‘Contactivity‘ events during our KnowledgeBoard days:

As a research body, KnowledgeBoard had a strong desire to create an event environment which we could study in order to generate knowledge about this new meeting format. It was a natural evolution of our thoughts during 2005; to host a gathering which would provide us with the data for our research. It was loaded with risk, but it’s not research if you know the outcome, is it?
(From the Contactivity event report)

Since then, we have used many of our separate event design jobs to explore the themes we found back in 2004/5/6 – the European doctors with their devilishly exploratory Unbla model, and well, me (with great support from my friends and colleagues) with ongoing event design and facilitation work (PM Studio, Connecting Bristol, DC10 plus, 2gether08, BBC Learning etc.).

A thoroughly exciting thing is that I am currently co-designing an epic event with the unbla team in Zurich in the autumn to generate do-able answers to carbon reduction problems, but more on that another day; suffice to say it feels like coming home (albeit a bit of a weird Euro-warm and loving but infinitely challenging home).

Well done all! I knew you could make sense of it!

This time I am going to co-present the case study of work with Clare Reddington from iShed, on the new commissioning scheme, Media Sandbox, which I have been working on as a ‘blended facilitator’ (ie working both on and offline). Here is the blurb:

Case Study: Facilitating Open Innovation in a Distributed Community Using Free Social Software Tools: The Media Sandbox experience.
Clare Reddington, iShed, and Ed Mitchell

• Community modelling for sustainable group knowledge transformation in R&D
• Blended facilitation: inclusive community development using both physical and virtual techniques
• Harnessing free social software to share innovation experiences with a wider audience
• Evaluating the reach, range and quality of knowledge uncovered during the process

The project kicked off last week so we will be presenting about a live project, which should be interesting. I will be writing more on these themes about The Media Sandbox in posts to come, and we’re both really looking forward to presenting the story to date.

Conference website