The launch event for Media Sandbox 2009 included an exercise we called ‘Golden rules‘ which is now providing me with invaluable salient wisdom and advice as I put the Transition Towns web platform together. Here’s one of them:

One of the golden rules for platform development which is now very significant to me

To round off this year’s work, they are holding a showcase, and they’ve published a lovely book about it all too, which is beautiful and inspiring. I’ll be going along for sure.

If you fancy going along, check the events page on the Media Sandbox website.

In the meantime, here’s the blurb:

Media Sandbox Showcase & Publication Launch
Tuesday 20th October 2009 | 16:00hrs | Cinema 1 | Watershed, Bristol

The creative media industries are going through a period of rapid change. The uncertain economic environment has made it harder to find the time and space to dedicate to nurturing new ideas. The Media Sandbox development scheme was set up to give new ideas a safe environment in which to grow. Sandbox made six awards earlier this year, to innovative projects researching emerging possibilities in multiplatform technologies. From HMC, Drake Music and bibic’s multi-sensory environments for children with additional learning needs to Indie Mobile’s new music focused campaign tool, all the projects respond directly to the challenges of modern society.

This event celebrates the achievements of those six commissions and will include a showcase of all six, plus open discussion addressing the challenges posed by multiplatform technologies. The event will also coincide with a launch of a new publication that celebrates two successful years of the Media Sandbox scheme and an exciting announcement about next years’ scheme.

16:00hrs:
Project presentations and panel discussions with Nicole Yershon, Director of Innovative Solutions at Ogilvy; Richard Hull, Researcher in Pervasive Technologies at HP Labs; Mark Leaver, Director of Development at South West Screen; and Clare Reddington, Director of iShed.

18:00hrs:
Evening Reception including informal demos of this years’ projects and the launch of the Media Sandbox Publication. Drinks and light bites will be served.

If you would like to attend, please check the events page on the Media Sandbox website, or call Watershed Box Office directly on +44 (0)117 927 5100.

Steve Bridger gave us a great presentation around and about the subject of Generosity which left us with plenty to think about, personally, publicly and professionally. And Jesus’ social network, but that’s another story…

After a whistle stop tour ranging from big brands to personal sharing, religion to altruism, giving to taking, he left us with six things to think about:

1. Start with people
2. We are what we share
3. Is the social web making weak ties stronger than blood ties?
4. Successful brands are exceptionally generous
5. Create experiences that mirror people’s aspirations
6. Do we need new metrics for generosity?

There was a lot of discussion about society and culture, sharing in general and our expectations of selves and other. Maslow’s hierachy of needs came up along with some clarity about the term ‘survival of the fittest‘ (whereby it could be said that the Capitalist hegemony related the term ‘fittest’ to a blindly competitive theme rather than ‘that which is most suitable to its context’, which gives it a very different feel:

What’s more, although the phrase conjures up an image of a violent struggle for survival, in reality the word “fittest” seldom means the strongest or the most aggressive. On the contrary, it can mean anything from the best camouflaged or the most fecund to the cleverest or the most cooperative. Forget Rambo, think Einstein or Gandhi.
(New Scientist article: Evolution myths)

We thought about why we give to charity, the implications of dis-intermediatory bodies like Kiva, Freecycle, Swop, School of Everything etc., whether big corporations actually can give, why, and what that means.

People explored how ‘brands’ could be generous, what impact that might have on ‘competition’ and ‘control’, and what it was that people were being generous with, and why.

• What are the implications for the world when my ‘generous’ act of sharing a photo means a professional photographer doesn’t get any money for producing a better one?
• Is ‘mega-corp multinational’ really being generous when it shares some of its codebase with a developer community, or simply sensible (and resourcing cheap innovation)?
• If we have a ‘competition commission’, are they the good guys or the bad guys?
• Can our market model exist side by side with a culture of ‘we are what we share’?
• If someone does what could be seen as a generous act for selfish reasons, does that make it less generous in outcome?

It seems we’re not alone in pondering this subject. On a corporate note, an interesting article appeared about this very subject:

Has it ever been important for corporations to ditch the greed and embrace generosity? It’s something that countless individuals have already started doing, of course: giving is the new taking, and sharing is the new giving. And yes, we do realize that this month’s Trend Briefing is massive, but in this business climate, can you really afford not to spend some time figuring out how to get a little closer to your customers?…

GENERATION G | “Captures the growing importance of ‘generosity’ as a leading societal and business mindset. As consumers are disgusted with greed and its current dire consequences for the economy—and while that same upheaval has them longing more than ever for institutions that care—the need for more generosity beautifully coincides with the ongoing (and pre-recession) emergence of an online-fueled culture of individuals who share, give, engage, create and collaborate in large numbers.

In fact, for many, sharing a passion and receiving recognition have replaced ‘taking’ as the new status symbol. Businesses should follow this societal/behavioral shift, however much it may oppose their decades-old devotion to me, myself and I.”
(Trendwatch article on Generation G)

The resounding note for me was that it is easiest and most rational to share within the boundaries of our ‘communities’ (however they are described), and sharing between them would involve some form of exchange. As ever, the issue of trust came up, and how we define our boundaries (which reflect our intentions, which define what we can and can’t share).

As ever, thanks to The Pervasive Media Studio, for their kind loan of the excellent space, and all attendees who came and had a good think together.

This is a brief personal reflection on igfest, the three day games festival which took place in Central Bristol from 19th to 21st September.

I was a voluntary member on the organising team, mentored some of the games, ran a game on the day, and generally helped out. I was immediately drawn to igfest as it combined festivals, games and things that anyone can do for free, and take home with them and play there too.

We will see a lot of ‘Game’ theory entering into the facilitator’s toolkit as well, so I wanted to get some hands on experience of all this stuff.

Also, I have been very impressed by Simon and Simon (the organisers along with Clare Reddington, Duncan Speakman and Helen Stephens) who have been running iglab since they met at the Media Sandbox launch event; the event was designed for people to meet eachother in a collaborative context so I feel broody when I see them together.

Iglab has been gradually building a community around games in Bristol all this year, so igfest is a fantastic example of what you can achieve if you nurture your community carefully and keenly.

This is not an all round review of all the games as I didn’t see or play many of them as I was working the gig. Like I say, a personal reflection, with a scarey picture at the end of the deranged and hilarious Welshmen who I shared a police station with during ‘Journey to the night’.

(Rainbow rain being played)

My favourite game was Holla Lu Lu. It’s easy, simple, quick, engaging, funny, age-less, and encourages everyone to enjoy their immediate environment while making funny noises. It’s very easy to facilitate and everyone enjoyed it.

I was very sorry to miss Bad Taste Party. This sounded brilliant and made everyone think about how very badly us Brits are dressed. I approached someone and asked if they were playing it, as I thought they might have got lost. They weren’t, I was mortified. Good game.

(Mercury began with an arm wrestle)

I was also a big fan of Mercury. As well as having Tom and Mike staying with me, and mentoring the game, I fully bought into Tom’s logic about how team sports have become focused solely on one movement with one goal (to win), hence breeding a bunch of people who can do only one thing. So when Mercury opened with an arm wrestle, moved through chicken noises, into backward football, past a haiku writing session and out with handball played with a huge silver exercise ball, I was hooked.

It was a shame to miss Harp Beat, I heard great things about it from 4 year olds and 40 year olds alike.

Congestion Zone made everyone very happy – essentially a series of mazes, some simple rules and a bunch of noise-making objects…

(Players piece the clue together in Holla Lu Lu)

I was very sorry to miss Sneaks and Blaggers. I hadn’t realised that it would book out so quickly, and it’s not really a viewing game, so I gave it a miss and had some pizza with the moose instead.

The Moose hunt game was brilliant – some technical issues with the mobile carrier aside, it got people outdoors, blending virtual with physical worlds.

(Simon Katan briefs the Congestion Zone players)

Rainbow rain looked hilarious. A barely concealed paint fight; brilliant spectator sport!

And Binocular football – currently doing the festival rounds at the moment – delayed due to traffic, but played later on Cathedral Green – another superb spectator sport with some brilliant comedy commentary.

I was sorry to miss Journey to the middle of the night. It sounded great. But I was acting in it.

As a delirious policeman in front of the old police station in Bridewell, waving my hoover extension around, ranting at the punters before letting them in to be ferried down to the cells by sergeants sledge and hammer (thanks to Joe and Lucy for gamely volunteering at the last minute) to be greeted by Jo and Simon the deranged prisoners to give them a clue to help them on their journey.

(Joe and Lucy as Sergeants Sledge and Hammer)

Given all the happiness around, and the superb location of a proper police station at nightime with real cells down a scarey corridor, and everyone being over 18 and all, we decided to go *dark* on everyone, and there was much shouting and screaming and banging of doors, honking of the bicycle horn, and so forth…

If anyone felt it was over the top, we’re kind of sorry and kind of not. We thought it was worth pushing the boat out for that special touch!

(Simon and Jo, the deranged prisoners)

All in all, a fantastic weekend, brilliantly organised, excellently and generously executed, great people and lots of games to enjoy and take home and play again.

One of the participants said that she couldn’t see why schools couldn’t run a lot of the games we ran as they needed no paid for equipment, instantly engaged children, encouraged them to imagine, collaborate and share their experiences while framing ‘competition’ in a less aggressive manner than ‘traditional’ sports… Well said!

Well done all!

• Igfest website
• igfest flickr group
• iglab website
• PM Studio website
• Moose hunt website
• Simon games

This is a brief event report from the Media Sandbox final event on Tuesday 6 May, in Watershed, Bristol.

While we were designing the launch event for the Media Sandbox project (November 2007) we had the end event in mind (seeing the project as a Community of Practice with a clear lifecycle), so there was a clear logic to the event design from the beginning. This took into account group work done at the launch event, during the project itself, and all the potential future outcomes from the project.

In the bigger picture, I would call this blended facilitation: seeing the project as a whole as a group knowledge transformation opportunity, using different tools and techniques to suit the purpose and context, and using both on and offline worlds to get things done. Thus the final event was complimentary to the launch event, and all related activity in between.

Our main goal was to provide as many learning and sharing opportunities between the projects and community members in as many different ways as possible. In this way, the different nuances could emerge, and people’s communication preferences could be afforded.

Thus, as well as asking the projects to do short presentations to a panel, we offered them exhibition space for one to one conversations, introduced a knowledge cafe to afford group exploration of the challenges encountered during the projects, and encouraged event attendees to actually play one of the games invented, and try out the applications wherever possible.

A key part of the day was a group of external judges onsite to award one of the projects further funding. In this vein, we also invited anyone else to pitch for some separate micro-investment in a Pecha Kucha style; although this time the judges were the projects themselves.

It was a fascinatingly different event to the launch event, and a lot less noisy; in its reflective nature, it offered the group some form of closure, a sense of knowledge transformation, a network maturing and reflecting on its work and shared experience, and asking itself questions for the future.

The Agenda:

1. Welcome, introduction, background and refresh
2. Judges panel: projects showcase
3. Nuts and bolts knowledge cafe
4. Tea, exhibition, game play
5. Open pitching
6. Drinks and final announcements
7. Exhibition

Welcome, introduction, background and refresh

We had a lot to do, so the temptation was to dive straight into action, but this had to be resisted! It was vital to allow attendees a bit of time to catch up with previous work, set the context, and provide a grounding for the ensuing conversations.

After a project introduction and welcome from Clare Reddington, I ran everyone through the agenda, and then asked Dan Dixon and Peter Ferne to talk about the Pervasive Media domain mindmap (.pdf) we had co-created with their help at the launch event. Following this, I ran everyone through the selection criteria we had also co-created at the launch event. Hopefully, this whirlwind update brought everyone’s attention back to the domain in question, and the community at large.

Judges panel: projects showcase

This was the traditional, formal method for communicating (broadcasting) the work done by the projects along with potential benefits for the future. Although the projects have been collaborating admirably during the last six months, only one gets further funding, so the showcase (to a panel of external judges) added a fringe of competitive-ness to the whole affair. The balance of collaboration/competition is very interesting, and an invaluable asset for motivating action, but that’s another blog post.

Each project presented for six minutes and had three minutes question time from the judges (Simon Ingleby, Dan Sutch, Paul Appleby). All the presentations were unique and stimulating, and the judges produced some sticky questions to keep them on their toes. After the presentations, the judges stepped out to talk among themselves while we took a short break and introduced the knowledge cafe

Nuts and Bolts Knowledge Cafe

The term and technique ‘Knowledge cafe‘ was coined by Knowledge networker and all round good guy David Gurteen, who was fed up of ‘chalk and talk’ gatherings where one person stood and told all the others how things were. David’s intention with the knowledge cafe model was to help all participants reach a deeper understanding of a subject through intimate conversation rather than other forms of learning. In this model, all participants are equal and can reach a shared understanding of a subject very effectively.

We chose this technique to compliment the previous presentation model with a conversational approach in order to offer the participants a chance to get upfront and personal with the projects and really explore the issues they confronted. The projects spread themselves around all the tables in order for all the participants to have projects at their tables, and we discussed the following question for 30 minutes:

“What challenges did the projects’ encounter during their R&D, and how did they go about resolving them?”

(knowledge cafe-ing in action)

In true peer to peer style (ie no managers around to get in the way of honest discusions) there were no judges at the tables, but we didn’t think it would have hurt to have th judges on the tables, as this would have offered them another lens through which to observe the projects.

After a surprised silence (I think everyone was expecting me to boss them around more (I mean direct them)), people just got on with it, and had thirty minutes of good honest conversation. Following that, we opened the conversation up to the whole floor and found that there were a number of shared themes at different tables, and issues that surfaced.

Tea, exhibition, gameplay

(I just put this slide here as I like the photo but do have a clearly viewable agenda at all times)

The exhibition was a chance for the projects to have one to one conversations with attendees, and explore their questions directly. All of the projects manned their stalls effectively and politely. One of the projects, Swarm, was a game, which is quite hard to explain, so they ran a short version of it outside during the break. Likewise, the Happy Packages crew felt that people needed to actually try their product rather than discuss it, so they ran their products for people to try out.

The events team laid on some fantastic grub for us too; in true English style, we had a selection of teas, finger sandwiches and cake. Best event food I’ve had for ages.

Open pitching

As part of the Media Sandbox project was to open as much opportunity to as wide a range of people as possible, the Media Sandbox team openly invited anyone to pitch for some micro-investment and network support. Three pitches were selected for the ‘final’ showcase at the event: Adam Nieman, Vicky Brophy, Ben Gannaway.

In order to mix up the community roles and make the most of the practical learning the Media Sandbox projects had experienced, we asked them to the be the judges, and sat them at different tables with the other participants so that they could discuss the pitches with the participants in order to influence their decisions.

In Pecha Kucha style, the pitches were given 6 minutes 40 seconds to present their ideas. Following their presentations, we encouraged discussions at the tables before some questions from the floor. It was poignant to note that the judges (Media Sandbox projects) had some really sticky questions (from experience), so I think we now have a ready made set of judges for next year.

The open pitches judges retreated to heatedly debate the winner, and the rest of us headed to the bar as all that was left was announcing the competition winners and doing the thank-yous.

Final announcements

To be honest, it was all a bit emotional actually. I know that, as a facilitator, one goes through some wild ups and downs with the ‘facilitatees’, and feels a strong emotional overdraft after a gig because of the energy one has to put into it (never trust a facilitator who says it’s no big deal; every word and gesture from all participants counts), but as the final announcements were made I felt all a bit choked up because it meant that the gig was coming to an end – the whole thing. Anyway.

Happy Packages won the projects competition, giving them a further £8,000 and office space and stuff.

SSTV (website to come soon I’m sure) won the open pitches competition with a proposal to build street sport communities around Bristol using CCTV and locative media.

Following this, Clare Reddington and Mark Lever from SouthwestScreen said their dues, flowers for Clare appeared in true arty style, and the projects manned their exhibition stands over wine and beer until 8pm when we moved on to Start the bus, where it became more casual…

Introduction

This is high level case study about the blended facilitation work ongoing with the Media Sandbox commissioning scheme managed by iShed. Here is the descriptive blurb:

Bringing together leading technology, artistic and media talent, Media Sandbox is a new commissioning scheme to support South West companies/organisations to research emerging possibilities in digital media.

The theme for 2007/2008 is pervasive media. By supporting a community of research around this cutting-edge theme, Media Sandbox will encourage business growth, share knowledge with the wider sector and reinforce the reputation of Bristol and the South West as a centre for cutting-edge R&D.

Traditionally, this type of commissioning involves a call for bids, distribution of cash to successful bidders, some relatively private research and development, and a ’showcase’ event at the end where the bidders tell us a few things and say thanks for the cash.

We felt that this commissioning construct could do with some spring cleaning by introducing community-type thinking and free open source software. This case study is a stab at reporting that…

This is an outline of the case study which I have worked on and co-presented with Clare Reddington and Emma Scott from iShed at an Arts Council England conference, and a Unicom conference. You can view and download the presentation from slideshare:

See the presentation on Slideshare

We wanted to open up and share the projects’ findings with a wider audience, involving more people in the actual process and research, spreading the knowledge that the projects generate, and thus hopefully broadening the learning opportunities made possible to sponsoring a small bunch of people to do R&D. So we decided to consider it from a ‘community’ perspective.

We also wanted to explore how to use free software to support wider learning in distributed communities.

There is a lot of hype, waffle and evangelism about ’social software’ but precious few case studies showing how you actually use it; how you put it together, what frameworks you need to make sense of it, what worked and what didn’t, and stuff like that. It is now possible for anyone to walk into a community centre or library, access the internet for free, and use all the tools we used to do your own thing – start a campaign for example – so how can we help with that?

All the software we are using is freely available on the web; this is a much mooted benefit of the ‘web2.0′ movement but how do you use it and what resources does that require?

The cost is in the knowledge required to stitch it together and understand how to facilitate the system – so we wanted to explore and publish that too.

In a nutshell, Media Sandbox aims to invest in local people to do cool stuff in a new area called ‘Pervasive Media’. By investing in these people, they get some time to explore the topic and thus generate and share knowledge about it, develop new products, meet others interested in it, build a base of knowledge in the region, and thus attract more people to do cool stuff the region. (For the official line, have a look at the website).

The community construct

We modelled the whole thing around a community construct in order to set everyone’s expectations of who owns the knowledge generated (everyone apart from the more secret stuff around the core IP).

Sure, the winning projects were sponsored, but the deal is that they share what they are learning with anyone. So you can consider it as a Community of Practice (where the projects are working full tilt to produce new products) within a wider Community of Interest (where anyone with an interest in this area can join in discussions etc.), all facilitated in the centre by iShed.

(Community model for Media Sandbox)

The Long term: the Community of Practice in a three year view

This phase is the first in the three years that iShed is running. So, once a year, the Media Sandbox projects are a structured short vigorous phase of doing stuff, with goals and targets and agreements to share their work. You could see them as ‘generating knowledge objects’ for wider consumption but I’m trying to avoid buzzwords, honest.

The longer term view is that these phases are ‘early seeding’ for the regional network and ultimately, people will come together to do their own ‘innovation’ projects without sponsorship. But ‘innovation’ is a risky business – most of us are busy getting our lives and businesses and services together to afford an R&D team; so we really want to extract and publish as many lessons learnt as possible to bring that risk down…

(Media Sandbox in a three year cycle)

The Community lifecycle

David Snowden said that Communities of Practice without a clear end date will become flaccid and wiffling (not his words, obviously) and thus must have their death built into their life. Totally agree; keep focused. Understand your lifecycles.

Here is how we modelled the CoPs’ lifecycle, and what would happen at different points. Now I’m a believer in serendipity and the risks of over-engineering, but if you are planning something focused, it is very useful for everyone involved to know where they exist within a framework, and what is going on. The context, and their roles, if you like:

(Community of Practice lifecycle with related phases and activities)

Knowledge ‘assets’ at different points of the lifecycle

Another way to plan with this lifecycle in mind is to consider what knowledge could be created where and when. Again, I’m aware of the risks of over-engineering, so consider this as a framework. The current fashion is to ‘tut’ at planning in favour of ‘affording emergence’. I’m a fan of this theory but suggest it’s not entirely suitable in many contexts.

We did not prescribe this to people by way of beating them with sticks and measuring their output on a clipboard – we used this as a communication and planning tool for ourselves to assess what might come out of the process and how to handle it, nurture it across the two worlds and generally ‘afford it’:

(Sandbox knowledge assets mapped to the community lifecycle)

Blended facilitation

‘Knowledge’ lives in people’s heads but it is also a social construct. It evolves, or transforms, through moments when people come together to share what they know. These gatherings can be in the ‘physical’ world (meetings, offices, community centres, pubs, parks etc.) or ‘virtual’ world (blogs, forums, telephones, wikis, letters etc.). increasingly, we are using both worlds to help groups discover what they know and what they are going to do about stuff.

Physical meetings are expensive, but highly productive in terms of helping people meet eachother, generate new ‘knowledge’, agree high level stuff etc.. Virtual tools aren’t so great at that, but they are cheap (free in our case) and effective ways to build on what can be done physically, and prepare and follow up on physically generated stuff. The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world.

The trick is to work out what activity to do in which world. It’s called ‘blended facilitation’.

All of the launch event’s design had this built into its theory from the start. You can read the event report here. Here is our plan of how we approached the process. At the moment, we are in the ‘open innovation’ phase, largely using the virtual tools to share findings from the projects.

(Blended facilitation planning for Media Sandbox)

An example of ‘facilitating a bit of knowledge in both worlds

One of the first hurdles we encountered in the project was that there isn’t much publicly available knowledge about what ‘pervasive media’ is; no-one really has a clue. We had heard that the big corporations have been exploring this and building their understanding of it, but obviously that’s their private business. So we had to generate our own understanding of it as a group.

At the physical event, we built our own mindmap of what we thought, as a group, ‘pervasive media’ is. Everyone in the room was invited to grab some post-it notes, write words on them and stick them on a board. Two volunteers ‘grouped’ these keywords to make sense of the group’s words, producing a public model for us all to see and relate to (a representation of the knowledge in the room).During the day, everyone could come and move the words around, add new ones etc. You can see Dan and Pete doing the grouping on the left picture below.

At the end of the day, we transcribed this mindmap using a free mindmap tool on the internet, and published it online. Anyone could see it, and edit it as they wished. There it is on the right hand side of the picture.

So, we used the opportunities of a physical event to do something that is very tricky to do virtually, and then published it online to share our findings with a wider audience (anyone on the internet).

(Producing a mindmap at a group meeting, then sharing it online)

Things we are doing

We are now in the open innovation phase, using the free internet tools to share the projects findings around the world (to the Community of Interest, you could say). Naturally, all sorts of stuff is going on; here is a list of it:

(List of things we are doing)

Who is doing what?

It’s all very well having blogs and wikis and twitters and telephones and instant messengers and mailing lists and emails and carrier pigeons, but what on earth are we meant to do with them to achieve our goals? We are not all early adopting highly adaptable engineers with a passion to explore new technologies.

In fact, many of us are baffled by all this stuff; in fact, many of us are so baffled by it that it makes us worry that we don’t know enough, and if we are responsible for introducing these to our organisations/campaigns/clubs etc., we feel stressed and stupid, and I think that sucks. As well as this, people are now inundated in a tsunami of information generated from wide variety of sources, and we don’t want to add huge amounts of unnecessary noise in people’s lives, further stressing them out and distracting them from their work.

So we planned who would do what, and how that could be best afforded by the free technology we had to hand. We don’t know if this is all successful; this is part research and our intention is to produce a report later about what worked and what didn’t so others don’t have to re-invent every wheel.

Here is a rough socio-technical diagram of who is doing what:

(Diagram outlining the various activities around the projects)

How are we doing it?

It seems obvious in retrospect, but how did we work out how to facilitate it? Below is a highly simplified but robust basic model:

1. The projects write fortnightly research journals (blogs in the Community of Practice). We remind them of this regularly and they do it. If they don’t, we have ways of making them talk (semi-serious threats that I will come to their offices and bug them for example, but I haven’t had to do this yet so it must be a sincere enough worry for them)

2. Once a month we write a newsletter which we send to the mailing list, reporting on the activities and drawing out the common themes which are appearing (using a free email tool sent to the free-to-join mailing list).

(Communications and facilitation plan)

That’s basically it. Anyone is welcome to post their own comments to the research journals and the projects will respond. Likewise, anyone is welcome to post mail to the mailing list.

We could ‘facilitate’ more conversation between the Community of Interest members on the mailing list, or push the projects to write more regularly, or do active reporting from other groups exploring this area, or other pro-active facilitation and editorial work, but we agreed at the beginning to take as non-intrusive an approach as possible in order to see what gets used. We are keeping a log of the number of journal entries, and website visitors etc. and will reflect on this at the end.

If we were commercial publishers, we would be much more active in order to drive up our site visits in order to sell advertising. If we were flogging a social networking platform, we would gear the whole thing towards vigorously encouraging people to ‘expand their networks’ in order to build our platform’s popularity (and thus sell advertising or premium services). If we were in an organisation, we might be actively seeking participation in order to meet organisational targets focused on success criteria.

There are other ways for the projects to work together, and to meet others who are interested (the pub for example).

A quick note about IT people

We have used free open source software. That does not mean it is all web-based; some of it we have put on the Watershed servers. You can go entirely web-based, but in this instance we are working within an organisation. This means we work with the ICT department, who get the software working. If we were entirely web-based, we would do it ourselves (a whole other blog post), but we’re not.

This is for the people in organisations who think that people in ‘IT’ are basically a painful obstruction (and for those in IT who think the same about their users): talk to eachother!

I have noted in the past few years that there has been a trend for the software vendors, agencies and consultants to cast a bad light on IT departments, and suggest that all this new social software can bypass them. I think that this is irresponsible.

It encourages expensive outsourcing. This not only costs an unpredictably large amount of cash (don’t start me on UK public sector IT outsourcing), but also generates bad vibes in the organisation, while effectively guaranteeing that no knowledge about how to use software is kept in the organisation. As well as this obvious knowledge gap and increasing dependency on external service providers, it means that those in the IT department don’t get a chance to learn about how to service their users’ needs properly. All of the applications we used are free open source ones, and anyone with some technical knowledge can sort them out.

This self-fulfilling prophecy can be avoided. Go to see the IT teams. I know they can be odd, but they are enthusiastic, and don’t forget – they actually like technology, which has to be a good thing if you are looking for someone to advise you on technical solutions. Some of their work is about protecting stuff and security, and they may say no to stuff, but this does not mean that the next step is to dash outside and get an external outfit to build a new whizzy trendy expensive solution. The next step could be to talk more and work on the problem together (you are working for the same organisation).

In light of this last paragraph rant, this is dedicated to Oliver (photographed above) and his team in the Watershed who is a great example of how things can be with IT. He does the IT stuff, and, after sometimes a bit of initial resistance (usually for very good reason) is calm and helpful. He is part of the whole gig; He does not see it as an ‘IT’ job; their department (ICT) sits in ‘Comms’ so their view is about supporting communications; he even named the beer they sell in the bar (seen behind him in the photo).

He is strategically understanding, tactically responsive, and operationally patient and pragmatic. He knows his stuff and relishes it, and when we did things that broke the technology, he sorted us out without making us feel small and dumb (although he tells me there is the occasional slip but he’s working on it). Maybe there is someone like this in your organisation?

Watershed is a great outfit who encourage their staff to think ‘out of the box’ (Oliver even has his own consultancy in his spare time: Entuplet); and as such, is not the standard. But it is vital to forge these intra-departmental connections and bridge any personality or political gaps you may see therein; avoid the silos! Break those walls down!

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

I designed and facilitated it, working closely with Clare Reddington and Emma Scott of iShed from the beginning, and Jack Martin Leith mentored me through the process; thanks to them all for being excellent partners.

The attendees were fantastic; from a wide range of public and private sector enterprises, services and community groups; from technical gurus to totally non-technical artists, all of them came willing to work and learn together – thanks all!

Event agenda: anchor links to descriptions

1. Welcome and introduction
2. Knowledge Networking
3. Pervasive domain definition
4. Ideas marketplace
5. Criteria definition
6. Idea development
7. The P Factor panel
8. References/further reading
9. Some feedback

The event was to inform potential ‘idea proposers’ about the proposal process, assist them with their proposal development, involve them with the process itself, and do some purposeful networking.

Naturally we couldn’t focus on all the ideas individually (approximately 30 potential ideas came on the day), so we had to do some pretty tough market-style selection to choose which ideas to work on as a group in order to really explore the concepts, criteria etc. However, our goal was to work in as open a manner as possible in order to share as many of the findings as possible – based on the theory that learning (and group knowledge transformation) is a social process. Thus the ideas we worked on were illustrations for everyone and meant to help them hone their own proposals afterwards.

The event was also firmly rooted in a bigger picture involving the later stages of the commissioning process, when we will be using ‘blended’ facilitation techniques in a distributed community model around the pilot projects to share their experiences with those who didn’t get the money.

This is because we are very keen for as many people as possible to learn as much about all this stuff as they can; the internet offers us some brilliant and free social tools which we can stitch together in order to enable as much sharing and involvement as possible from as wide a range of people as possible (continuing in the theme of learning as a social process, not something that should be kept in the dark, all alone). And we will only use free tools that anyone else can use, and publish our findings at the end. But more on that later.

The event:

We kicked off with clear blue skies and sunlight pouring through the windows. It couldn’t have been better. After an introduction from Clare and myself, Tom from HP Labs Bristol gave us an inspiring insight into what ‘Pervasive Media’ is to set the scene.

Introductions and agenda

Knowledge Networking

Following the introductions, we pressed on with some ‘knowledge networking’. This is informed by work done around the research events we ran for KnowledgeBoard in 2006; briefly, networking is best done when it has a clear purpose and you put people together who really want to meet. You can read a chapter about how to do Knowledge Networking in the second KnowledgeBoard community book (login required).

Everyone who came to the event filled in a pre-event survey asking them to choose from a list the 5 ‘things’ they could do and 5 ‘things’ they would be looking for. We printed out everyone’s result sheets with this data and put them on the wall (as well as giving them a copy on arrival). Then we asked them to find a person they hadn’t met before, swap their result sheets, and find this person at least two people for them to meet. Then they had to swap back and try to find the recommended people (name badges are a must for this session).

This results in a variety of good conversations based on people’s needs, and everyone has looked at all the sheets on the wall so they have an idea of who is in the room. We also left some space on the sheets to add comments or email addresses for contact after the event.

English people aren’t really known for their networking skills, or for willingly talking to strangers, but the attendees took to it like a duck to water and there were some brilliant and useful conversations going on. Some people had made 5 or 6 recommendations for their partner, and people continued to look for them as the day progressed.

Knowledge networking in action

Group mind map

With 85 people in the room, reaching consensus on what an emergent domain (Pervasive Media) looks like and consists of is tricky but it had to be done. After all – how can we know if our ideas are suitable if we all have a different concept of the domain?

The attendees were asked to think up some keywords that represented the domain, and stick them on the boards at the front, where they would be grouped to give us all an idea of ‘Pervasive Media’. There were a lot of words.

Dan Dixon (Senior Lecturer, UWE) and Peter Ferne (CTO of a new start-up, Jiva) did an excellent job of grouping the words into some shape in a very tight timeline with lots of people adding words continuously. Here they are in action:

Dan and Peter hard at work

Following this brisk exercise, they re-presented the mindmap back to the group for discussion. The mindmap is available for download as a .pdf file: download it here.

The group then had a break, but not for those people wanting to share their ideas with the group…

The idea marketplace

As written above, the event was really about the ideas people had, and how to help them write proposals for the commissioning scheme. In order to do this, we needed a manageable number of ideas to use as illustrations for the group during the day to get a clearer understanding of how to work the idea over. But we wanted to give everyone an equal chance.

We couldn’t focus on all the ideas, so hosted a marketplace where the idea people could propose their idea to the group for later work in a dedicated sessions in the afternoon and appearance at ‘The P Factor’ panel at the end of the day.

The group hear the ideas pitches
(photo from Media Sandbox flickr account)

The idea people prepared an A1 sheet each and then had one minute to stand up in front of the group and ‘pitch’ the idea. There was much hard work as the idea people gathered their thoughts and prepared their sheets. We had 16 ideas (it wasn’t compulsory) and they were all different and stimulating (it’s great fun working with interested people).

An idea being pitched

The group then voted with sticky dots (marked with 4,3,2,1) upon which 9 ideas they wanted to focus on in the afternoon. This was tough love for the idea people – who took it all in good spirit. Then we had lunch.

Setting the criteria for the decision making panel

A key part of our work was to de-mystify the decision-making process that the commissioning panel would use to select the pilot projects, and the criteria upon which they make their decisions is an important element of this. So we defined them as a group on the day.

That way, everyone knows that they have had some say in this; not only does this democratise the process as a whole, but helps everyone understand the criteria, hence improving their proposals unilaterally.

The commissioning panel (with one exception) were in the room, involved in these conversations as they took place. This was important; we didn’t want this panel to seem high and mighty (because they aren’t), and they are making their decision for the good of the group and the wider commissioning remit to support a range of R&D projects which will benefit as many people as possible.

The room was split into four groups (approx 20 each) who were given 15 minutes to produce 5 key criteria each. The 20 criteria were added to a board and I grouped them into relevant groupings, to see if we could identify 5 criteria for the panel.

This is no laughing matter – it’s a really tight timeline, 20 people working together for the first time, new domain to pilot things in, and then how to get 85 people to agree on such nebulous but important matters?

Criteria being discussed at one of the tables
(Photo from Media Sandbox flickr account)

It worked a treat. The groups approached the breakout sessions differently (some voted, some had leaders, some did it unstructuredly), produced their 5 criteria, and then discussed the whole lot together (as 85 people) how it all fitted together. Everyone was reasonable without being over-compensating (if you know what I mean); one of the risks of ‘collaboration’ is that people will seek consensus without robust discussion, but we avoided that and produced the criteria for the panel.

The Criteria we produced are online on the Media Sandbox site.

Idea Development

Having counted the votes during lunch, we identified the ideas to be worked on in the afternoon.

After the criteria session, the idea people sat at one of the 9 tables and hosted a one hour conversation around their idea. They were advised to use the criteria we had just created to guide their sessions. They were briefed clearly to remember that this was illustrative only – and that as well as helping them clarify their own ideas, the session was to help everyone.

Idea development at the tables
(Photo from Media Sandbox flickr account)

I expected that some of these tables would reach a natural end before one hour had passed, but they were all in full conversation when I had to break them up for a break before the final session.

If I haven’t said this before, the attendees were thoroughly excellent.

The P Factor

This session was to give the attendees a glimpse into the decision-making panel and some way of helping them understand how to hone their proposals for the real commissioning process (e.g. what sort of questions will they ask?). So we decided to set up a situation which was similar, but not quite so serious.

Four volunteers (Tom Price, Vicky Brophy, Tom Burton, Will Wellesley-Davies) sat on a pretend panel in a gameshow-styled format, and the 9 idea people had 3 minutes to pitch their ideas to the panel before 3 minutes of brisk questions revolving around the criteria. It had dashes of Improv in it to say the least. The group watched. There was quite a lot of note-taking in the group as issues came up which is a good sign.

The P Factor was the trickiest session as the room’s acoustics made it hard for those at the back to hear, and having 9 mini-dragons’ den re-enactments in a row is tough on the concentration. I was rather critical of it myself, but heard that it was entertaining, informative and useful. So there you go; I still think we can improve on it next time.

And that was the end.

Which is only the beginning…

of:

• a wider free to access Community of Interest in Pervasive Media
• longer discussions and idea development with more people around the subject
• six pilot schemes sharing their experiences with the wider world using free software
• anyone being encouraged to engage with the pilots through the CoI forum or comments on the blog

Some references/further reading

• Media Sandbox website
• Group mindmap: produced on the day
• Proposal criteria: produced on the day
• Open discussion mail list: for wider discussion around Pervasive Media
• Flickr Group: for photo-sharing
• KnowledgeBoard Community book 2: facilitation techniques book for free

Some feedback

“… I enjoyed myself last Thursday and found it really useful.”

“Many thanks for a very useful day last Thursday – I found it really good, and met a load of very useful contacts.”

“I thought it was a very stimulating and successful day, and well organised.”

“Many thanks… Excellent event I thought.”

“…thanks for putting on a really great day with Ed last Thursday. I felt like it was well organised and fully geared to getting the most out of your audience/delegates/professionals. It clearly wasn’t your first one that you’ve hosted.”

“thanks for a good event last week, very well organised, good spread of people.”

“Just wanted to say thanks for a great day last week. It really felt like a big children’s party for grown ups. I got very excited and ended up having tonsilitis all week afterwards but feeling better today. Thanks again for the event, very useful.”