fisharepeopletoo

The Reboot Britain Che Scale Challenge Results Are In!

The Che Scale is a handy ready reckoner for working out if policies are radical or just talking the talk.

Whatever the policy is, just ask yourself "If I were a rich and/or powerful person, how worried would I be by this?"

The Che Scale goes from 0 to 5, with 0 being "Ten more years of New Labour? Yes please!" and 5 being "Stuffing a suitcase full of used tenners and clawing their way onto the last Learjet to Monaco."

Anything over 0 has at least something worth listening to.

So, these are the sessions I went to at Reboot Britain, scored on the Che Scale.

Introduction and Welcome from Chairman Nesta 0/5

I wasn't happy with any of this, so much so that it gave me pause to wonder about how, why and in whose interests Nesta are spending a "national endowment".

I might come back to Chairman Nesta and his Vanguard of Innovation another time so I'll leave it there.

Except to say that this would have got minus Che Points except that Che never gets negative. When Che faces a negative situation in his life, such as girlfriend trouble or running out of milk, he gathers a band of armed men around him and sets off into the forest to start a revolution.

Jeremy Hunt MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport 0.5/5

Only 0.5 Che Points but a very enjoyable talk.

It was interesting to hear a working politician talking about what he thought the internet meant for the centre left and centre right in the same way it's always interesting to hear people talk about jobs that mean something to them.

I'm not sure if the phrase "collaborative individualism" can make any sense, but if it does it'll depend on who says it and who hears it.

Fools Gold, Gillian Tait, Assistant Editor, Finacial Times 3.5/5

This was the most radical session of the whole day, presented by a financial journalist who used to be an anthropologist, and had analysed the credit crunch by studying the culture within banks.

The reason the world went bust was because:

- nobody responsible for financial innovation really had a clue what they were messing with
- they were all making too much pretend money for anyone to care
- regulators didn't regulate
- banks were structured like tribes with everyone in the tribe looking upwards not across,
- but, the tribes had no one at the top who knew what all the bits were doing let alone how it all worked
- whichever part of a bank was earning the most ("Who's got the most goats?") did what they wanted.

If I was a rich and powerful banker I'd be threatened by this, because it left nowhere to hide.

To stop it happening again we need to challenge this financial "innovation", and challenge the tiny priesthood doing it.

Then she wished us "good luck" and marched out, which at first I took as fond best wishes but afterwards I thought was actually "fat chance".

Mining the Archives, Tony Ageh 1.5/5

Archives are the raw material of a new industrial revolution, but they have to be opened up.

Let's hope so because I'm not sure the UK has got many other untapped sources of new wealth.

1.5 for the openness and the challenge to existing media.

How Co-design Can Help Reboot Britain, Deborah Szebeko 1.5/5

We should listen to the people who use public services when we try to make the services better.

This will make better and more efficient public services at a time when there is no money left to spend on better public services.

Can't argue with that.

I wasn't so keen on the idea that we should look at national questions through an X Factor style "Britain's Got Problems" type event, but 1.5/5 anyway, because that bit was probably a joke.

Consumer Democracy or a Politics of Citizenship Matthew Taylor 2.75/5

This was quite useful because he said that consumerism is ok in our relationship with services as we use them - we should all expect to get decent treatment - but it's not a good way of thinking about government.

In our other role as the owners of public services we have to recognise that governing is about working out compromises between groups of people who maybe can't all have what they want.

If our opinions are surveyed as consumers of government we are quite grumpy, but when people do take a role in "government" structures, e.g. citizen juries, they prove themselves to be good at listening and compromising.

I've read a lot of evidence of the same kind in a report called "Empowering communities to influence local decision making: a systematic review of the evidence" and I think it's all very hopeful, so long as it's done on scales that people can get their heads round - very local - and it means something, so there has to be a risk of failure.

Hyperlocality and Active Citizenship 3/5

"Hyper local is bringing geographical scale down." - Kevin Harris, who really does know about this stuff.

The smaller the units are the more chance there is of self-organising, self-sustaining, bottom up problem solving and self government in which people do listen and compromise.

I hope.

But there has to be a risk.

Nothing meaningful ever happens if there can't be a failure.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre is full of the risk of failure: if not enough people in your neighbourhood can be bothered to take part, you get less money to spend. Tough.

Straight Line Thinking Stops Here, Alan Moore 0.25/5

This was about as much use as crystal aura cleansing. Lot's of natural metaphors and folksy stuff about communities and sharing.

0.25 just for not being Chairman Nesta.

How we learn to stop worrying and love local government 3/5

Local government as a convenor ( I quite like that word just because it reminds me of 1970s trade union shop stewards on the 6 O'clock News).

If you think of local government as the convenor of a process of citizenship at a very local scale (I can't quite bring myself to say "hyperlocal"), that is again quite powerful and hopeful I think.

The more sense people have of themselves as part of a local citizenry, the more of a challenge it is to the centralised state.

How People Power Can Reboot Britain, Lee Bryant 3/5

Three points for saying that government contracts should be parcelled up into small seed funding awards for small businesses, social enterprises and so on. These businesses would try and work out solutions, with the best ones making themselves obvious, and the same money would be working twice, with even the cost of the failed ideas being repayed as support for businesses that were trying to be innovative, some of which might well use the knowledge gained from their failed innovations to come up with successful, and unexpected, new ones.

And the same three points again for talking about failure at all, and pointing out that even if 60% of the ideas failed that wouldn't be any worse than the big contracts the government gives out now to consultancies.

And again for suggesting getting rid of "process based" improvement based on setting targets from the centre and enforcing them.

Howard Rheingold 2/5

Media literacy as an ongoing personal state of mind that questions sources of authority, and that convenes collective action (my use of "convenes" to paraphrase I think, rather than him saying it in so many words.)

And that was it. Home in time for tea.

I went to Reboot Britain with very mixed expectations, and all-in-all got plenty out of it, though I might have been even happier in a plain old conference about technology and local government.

Do we still do the dance?

You know, the dance that everyone used to do when they were talking on their mobile phone in a public place - outside a bar or a shop or a library.

The dance that was giving a physical expression to being in a mixed reality.

I've been trying to see if we still do the dance.

But either we've stopped doing it, or it's become so commonplace I can't make myself remember to notice it.

The 9 Things You'll Need for Civic Engagement Using Mobile Phones

I started writing a discussion of "What Makes a Good Tool for 'Mobile Civic and Social Innovation' " but it just kept getting longer and longer to the point that even I'd had enough, let alone anyone else reading it.

So here is the short version (which has turned out to be useful and surprising to put down like this):

1: works on any mobile phone, straight away
2: no registration
3: post but not pre moderation (you mostly won't need either)
4: partnerships (a way to get your call to action out to people)
5: a well worded call to action
6: examples for participants to follow
7: an awareness of the context: who is here? what do they want?
8: an archive that values the responses and keeps them in context
9: access to the archive from any mobile phone, straight away

The problem with putting these 9 points down like this though, is that they are based on nearly 10 years of experimenting, succeeding and failing to create civic engagement through mobile phones, and so even if (when) I've got them wrong, I know inside-out what all my reasons for, and discussions about, each of the points would be.

But it might not be so clear to anyone else what they mean or why?

So, questions, comments and doubts are very welcome.

The Mk 2 Machine in Action

The Mk 2 Magical Monstervision Machine in action capturing monsters in Lancaster.

Big thank yous to Paul Coulton and the cell of inventors in Lancaster.

Magical Monstervision Machine

I've been in communication with a cell of eccentric inventors based in a ramshackle unmarked building deep in the grounds of Lancaster University.

These inventors have built a Magical Monstervision Machine, which can be used to reveal the presence of the ancient monsters that lurk on our city streets, invisible to human eyes.

Trials are still at their earliest stages, but last week I successfully used a Magical Monstervision Machine Mark 1 to discover for the first time several monsters in their lairs.

Here are the secret blueprints of the Mark 2 Machine.

Your computer will now self-destruct in 10, 9, 8...

Obama's Cairo Speech by SMS

Highlights of Obama's Cairo speech tomorrow (June 4th) are being "broadcast" by SMS, and comments can be sent back by SMS.

The only snag I can see with this is that you still need web access to sign up, which might cut down the number of people who can and do sign up from the developing world - I wonder if they have also used regional radio stations to broadcast a way of signing up by SMS?

That would be easily done, so if not, maybe their SMS gateway (Clickatell) are worried about it being so popular it actually costs them a bit of money - which it bloody well should do considering they have got their logo right underneath Obama's picture in connection with what might be a historic moment.

Here is where you go to submit your phone number, but no registration process.

Three words that can get you damned

I've been a bit unsure about using the phrase "call to action" as a quick way of describing things like a poster at a bus stop asking "Where were you happiest to arrive and why?"

Partly because it feels like one of those phrases it's easy to repeat so often it becomes meaningless, and partly because it makes me think of marketing.

But then I had look on wikipedia and found that Call to Action is also a left wing Catholic group in the US, which if you join you automatically get excommunicated by the Bishop of Nebraska - no trial, no right of appeal, straight to Hell.

Three words that can get you damned can't be all bad.

a lot more

Holly's reply is a lot more insightful than my lazy bit of self publicising, and a lot better than it deserved.

But I can't quite get rid of the feeling (or the hope), dumb as I am.

That if everything isn't as much in play now as it can ever be, then when will it ever be?

That this can't be the only time that people have thought, or hoped, so.

And that we are trying to keep everything in play for as long as we possibly can, because it will end.

Is local government the Cinderella of politics?

We don't care about politics because we understand, quite rightly, that no one in positions of power over nation states and beyond (elected or otherwise) gives a flying f**k about us or anything we might ever need, care about or wish for.

Maybe local government is, or could be, different?

"we are at the stage of the invention of the television camera"

"In the development of the internet and connected, two-way media, we are at the stage of the invention of the television camera...

We have not yet created media or entertainment native to the internet. We will not for a while, it’s going to take us time."

From the blog of one of the blokes who runs the internet story company Six to Start.

I'm not sure about it being the invention of the TV camera - "birth of cinema moment" sounds cooler.

But otherwise I'd pretty much agree with that.

Which is why I've been trying to figure out  what are stories for mixed realities?

Here are some of the states of the art  so far.