fisharepeopletoo

Occupy Bristol and Free All Monsters! @Occupybristoluk @OccupyLSX

Monster Makers from Rossendale in Pennine Lancashire.

 

Press release, apologies for the press release tone.

Calling All Bristol Monster Makers

Saturday 3rd December, 1pm-4pm

Bristol children, and even grown ups, have the chance to create monsters that will travel all around the world as part of a new mobile phone game.

To make a monster, children use the power of their imagination and the pens, paper and art materials provided to conjure it up. The monsters are then uploaded into a mobile phone game called Free All Monsters!

The game has players all around the world who use their mobile phone as a Monstervision Machine to look for invisible monsters visiting their local streets, and monsters created in Bristol will regularly be seen as far away as America and Australia, as well as on the streets of Bristol.

So far more than 300 monsters have been created by children and grown ups, and these monsters have been spotted more than 4000 times in total around the world. Children who take part are awarded a unique Monster Makers badge.

Andrew Wilson, of the Advanced Monstrology Institute said “Making monsters is a great way to practise being creative, and to imagine the world differently.”

Adults as well as children are welcome to come along and make monsters. Dr Paul Coulton, also of the Institute, explained “Grown ups often say that they aren't creative, but we've found that everyone enjoys drawing monsters if they give themselves chance.”

As well as monster making there will also be a monster spotting trail in which players must find monsters living in Bristol city centre and prove their Advanced Monstrology skills to earn a Monster Spotters badge. Families and grown ups who want to take part in the monster spotting trail need to have an iPhone and should download the Free All Monsters app, but there is no need for an iPhone to take part in Monster Making.

The monster making session and monster spotting trail are both free events as part of a range of activities for this week's Community Day at Occupy Bristol.

Families and grown ups should come to College Green between 1pm and 4pm on Saturday 3rd December.

To spot monsters made in Bristol at any time, download the Free All Monsters app.

 

The respected monster Mean Green Giraffe Bee.

 

Vote! Vote! Vote! For Me! Me! Me! (and other people!) Last chance! @nesta_uk @ace_national

The Arts Council (ACE) and NESTA are going to provide funding so that arts organisations can:

"use digital technologies to engage audiences in new ways and create opportunities for new business models."

Which is fine as far as it goes, but whether that money is put to use creating valuable outcomes is all down to the interpretation of those phrases "engage audiences"* and "new business models".

It is important that there is space for rich, creative, non-mainstream and challenging interpretations, because that is where new things come from. And that they can come from non-mainstream organisations.

There is chance to vote for some attempts to open up that space, by me and other people, closing today.

I don't claim that any of these are the final word, but they are about opening up, not closing down, the relationship between the arts and technology.

If we recognise these spaces, we'll recognise others.And that is where the "art" will be hiding.

 

"Creating welcoming, participatory spaces using just enough appropriate technology, analogue and digital."

Vote here

 

"The mixed reality of cities, public space, mobile technology and imagination as an "arts venue" for stories and play."

Vote here

 

"shifting engagement: how digital technologies invite audience co-creation of the art work"

Vote here

 

"Discussion about what "digital" really means in terms of the arts. Goverment and large organisations think "digital" means Youtube video of their publicity. An app to view opera publicity on your smartphone isn't digital art, is it?"

Vote here

 

*I don't think it's valuable to talk about audience engagement. Online ticketing is audience engagement. We should be talking about participation.

Building the lo-fi smart city

How would we do that then?

In Melbourne they have started by measuring smiles per hour.

Backed by evidence from the world health organiation.

Community Micro-coordination

Micro-coordination is the sociologists Richard Ling and Birgitte Yttri's name for the finely grained coordination and efficiencies we are able to find because we are all connected, everywhere.

So, for example, I might send a text saying "Can you get some milk on the way home?"

What happens if we scaled up these efficiencies by one notch, so that as well as being part of the intimacy of our personal and domestic lives they extended to our civic lives, but still at an intimate, local range: to the civic lives that we have no choice but to care about, because it's where we are?

What changes might happen if we made tools to be used for micro-coordination among small neighbourhood groups, activists and local public services?

This is my be-careful-what-you-wish-for wish to the special magic pixies of fate #opendata

I wish for a web site called "What Is My Child Worth?"

I wish to get Danny Dorling to help.

I wish to use databases to tell a radical, not a conservative, story.

I wish for all sorts of data from all sorts of places.

I wish for the analogue data as well.

I wish for help from someone who knows about databases.

If you are reading this, and you understand what I'm on about, we were destined to meet. Email me: andrew at blinkmedia dot org

If not, it wasn't meant to be.

How To Split the Lib Con Coalition and Have Fun Doing It. #ge2010 #ge2015

We've woken up with a whole new political rule set, and everything from now on is going to be lots of fun.

The rules of politics in the age of coalitions are about listening, negotiating, collaborating and coming up with unexpected solutions.

But most of all the new rules are about shifting alliances.

Everything is always to play for.

And in our day and age, "everything to play for" is the best and most beautiful state to be in.

Everything is fluid, uncertain, changeable, unexpected, chaotic and complex. Any state we are in from now on is always just another state waiting to be born.

From this morning onwards all sorts of wonderfulness from science and economics and even maths have come into play. Ideas about self organising systems, game theory, evolutionary biology, autopoiesis, complexity science and systems thinking, all of which I can't even pretend to properly understand, are suddenly our guiding principles.

And one of the things these ideas reveal is that small actions can have big effects, which is great if we don't want to wait around for the over-networked posh idiots to sort the world out for us. Things that we can all do in structures outside of party politics matter. In complex non-linear systems the small things have unexpected consequences, it's a mathematical fact!

There are lots of big challenges of course, but that is great because you can't have a decent story or a decent game without risk of failure.

And best of all is that this new rule set is perfect for, and demands, creativity. Political systems become a subject for creativity.

I read a smshing definition of creativity in neuroscience the other day: "creativity as the ability to restructure one’s understanding of a situation in a nonobvious way. "

And if nothing else, what was sadly sadly missing over the last 13 years was anyone ever doing anything "non obvious". They made an obsession of finding out the obvious and doing it. No one ever, ever, took a step back and looked at the system as a whole and said "ok what is really going on and how can we really change it?"

For all the battered nobility of his last few days, all Brown ever wanted to do was sit in the centre and command the world to change based on the force of his will and his absolute understanding, and his chosen mechanism for doing so was to throw tax revenues at it skimmed from the City.

But the world just doens't obey that command any more, if it ever did.

So here is a policy to test out in breaking up the current coalition:

Local income tax.

It's a Lib Dem policy I think anyway. The Cameron wing of the Conservatives would have to pretend to be in favour given how much they have gone on about localism, but the devolutionary implications would be too much for the right. If it passes then the control of revenues and the autonomy that goes with it will allow Labour to build up the independence of its English regional strongholds and push for greater freedom from London regardless of which coalition is in power there. And a hundred city states all experimenting with the rule sets of government is million times more creative.

God knows whether that would work or not in any way.

But that's not the point. The point is the process. Release early release often. Prototype. Beta test. Declare a republic in Sunderland and see what happens.

That is the world we are in now, and it is miles better than the old one, regardless of who it is that thinks they are in power.



A great essay about creativity and experimentation in political rule sets here.

A useful primer about systems thinking here.

A bonkers and almost mystical introduction to autopoiesis here.

Hand woven from finest Huddersfield 1s and 0s: Thumbprint gets a mention in IDEA's Local by Social report

Thumbprint gets a mention in IDEA's Local by Social report.

I've only glanced through the report so far, but I wonder if Thumbprint is the only UK-made tool mentioned. Not the only UK activity, of course, but the only one where the tool, the space-for-participation, the 1s and 0s, is made in the UK.

If it is, I'd say that reflects the fact that The-Rest-of-the-World has been using SMS a lot longer than the US, Twitter not withstanding.

Thumbprint is probably the only one other than Wordpress that's made by a cooperative community interest company as well.

Thank yous again to Mandeep from the Young Foundation for the tip.

1a) Calculate a Social Equation (show your workings out in the margin). You may turn over and begin. #HSEv2 #huddsms

I've been involved in starting the Huddersfield Social group, which we define as "a group of local volunteers who are committed to using all forms of media technology to connect people so that they can get things done for themselves in their neighbourhoods."

We ran our first social media surgery on Monday evening (based on an excellent idea originally from Birmingham), and I had the honour of talking to the first person who came in looking for advice, who was Yakub, who worked for a mental health patients advocacy group.

Remembering my "social media advisor" training I asked Yakub to tell me a little bit about the organisation, about anything they already did on the web, about what they wanted to do (the effects and benefits they were looking for, rather than the names of sites), who in the organisation was going to be looking after it, and whether he used the web at all himself.

He was already pretty comfortable doing practical jobs such as online banking and ebay (and so was at least as technically savvy as me), so our discussion was much more about what the organisation hoped to achieve by having a self -published presence, which was to record and archive the things that they did, and how the organisation could carefully, manageably and sustainably get into the rhythm of having that presence and creating a meaningful archive.

Which in plain terms means if you start a blog, somebody has to write something, so who in the organisation feels comfortable doing that and what will they write about?

We looked at some random blogs suggested by Blogger as examples, and I ended up doing the same thing when talking to an artist later on. Despite blogging being a bit old-fashioned these days, it felt to me a better way for small groups to get started than the other obvious contender of the moment, Twitter. Only having to write 140 characters sounds like it might be easier, but being on the "real time web" means you've got to be there all the time, the momentum of it leaves less time for consideration, and it's a much shorter time before it's obvious when you are not there.

Yakub decided to have a go at blogging, see how it went, and come back to the next session to talk about exchanging information and experiences within the patients advocacy group and have a look at Ning. Being able to tell people there would be another session in the future was very helpful I thought, because it didn't feel like people were being pushed out of the door into the cold Huddersfield night with a cheery "right you are on your own now." Most of this stuff is about confidence and organisational resources (the off-the-shelf tools like Blogger lower the technical resources needed, if not the time and confidence resources), and oddly, I think it might turn out that the more widely used the phrase "social media" is, the less helpful it will be, because it makes people worry that there is more to it than there is.

Having gone first, I felt that gave me licence to skive, and I spent most of the rest of the evening ambling around avoiding work while everyone else got on with it. Altogether 14 different organisations came down for a chat, including a credit union, a tenants federation, campaigners, an arts group, a local event, a local councillor, and a writer.

There were two reasons why people came along and why the evening had such a warm feel I think. The first was that it was organised by people who had experience of how much work, and what, needs to be done to get the word out about real world events to the organisations we wanted to benefit. If we had left it to "social media marketing" I don't think there would have been anyone there!

The second was that we talked before and after about why we were doing it and this was reflected in the feel of the event. None of us are much interested in social media literacy as an end in itself, for us the things that fall under the term social media are just neighbourhood empowerment tools like a whole range of others from printed paper to internet radio (I wanted to call our activities civic media rather than social media, but was roundly outvoted by the collective!). Even someone with as shallow and noob a knowledge of internet history as me recognises that this sort of thing has been around a lot longer than web 2.0, and in fact has a parallel history that has nothing to do with the internet.

What is interesting about the moment we are at now is less the social media than it is the activity. It's a common sense conclusion based on the last 18 months and the next 100 years that what is important is going to be localism, resilience, self-reliance, anti-centreism, anti-elitism, participation, fun and sustainability. There is a kind of commitment coming together that, while it isn't born of the internet, and isn't evangelical about it, is informed by it. This commitment is a mutualist, communitarian (I may have made one of those two words up and be misusing the other) opposition to self-serving shrink-the-state, “welfare for the rich, taxes for the poor”, anti-public service policies. In a nutshell, dismantle the state by all means, but not before you dismantle big business.

When we met to discuss Huddersfield Social for the first time, I asked everyone why we were doing it. Not because it's my place to vet anyone's motives - anyone who is prepared to put in the time to help counts as far as I'm concerned, no matter why they are doing it - but because I was interested to know what our reasons were, mine included. Everyone round the table thought about it for a bit and then came up with a really positive answer in a sentence, which made me think we'd do OK.

And I forgot to write any of them down.

All I wrote was "neighbourhoods/connections/ relationships/people + power/technology".

After the event on Monday we decided to make the best of a bad job and turn that into an equation.

This is the Huddersfield Social Equation v2, a mathematical formula for working out why you would do a social media surgery.

It is version 2 because it is best devised and understood after 2 pints (Black Goose mild in my case) or 2 gin and tonics:

people+connections+relationships+(all sorts of technology) = neighbourhood empowerment

[Big thank yous to The Media Centre, and especially Clare Danek, for giving us the room, tea, coffee and biscuits and wifi]

Playmakers and Rule Sets #playmakers

I watched the documentary Playmakers last week.

It's a very entertaining and funny film that brings together lots of good reference points for "pervasive games" or "playful social experiences in public space".

(The subject is still so happily undecided that there is no name to cover even Barg/iglab/Sandpit and all the things that could be at home there.)

One of the questions the film asked was "Why now for this stuff?" and answering "why now?" was a part where I might have added more than is in Playmakers.

The reason being that I think the answer to "why now" is portable gadgets, going right back to the Sony Walkman and ghetto blasters (and for fun why not include skateboards?), because they've made people sharply aware of the unsaid, invisible, unconscious rules of acting in public spaces.

Everyone has these experience daily - the rules are being negotiated, or not, on the fly.

I was in a cafe the other day where there were lots of people working on laptops, me included, with phones on the tables, so this was a place where the agreed rules clearly are "this place has been colonised by people who come here to work, which means they'll need to talk on phones sometimes", but when one bloke's work-related conversation went on past what seemed to me, without having any idea how long it had been, like a reasonable length of time I started to get pissed off, thinking "why don't you go outside? There are people trying to work in here!".

But how on earth were we going to find out exactly what the rules were in order to stick by them, or not?

The rules aren't new, they were always there, and we don't need them written down, we never have, but portable gadgets make us conscious of them, everywhere, all the time.

A mobile phone is an X ray machine for the rules of public spaces.

Quiet coaches on trains are an example of what happens when these negotiations on the fly come up against rules to make the rules non negotiable.

I hate sitting in quiet coaches because you always know that someone is going to break the "no mobiles" rule, which means everyone else is going to feel like they ought to say something to them, not because they are bothered by mobiles, but because of an instinctive sense of fairness - if I have to stick to the rules, so do you.

That makes it sound like mobile phones challenge the "rules" in a trivial way, and that not using your phone in the quiet coach is just bowing down to The Man.

But in fact it's the other way round.

This emotion of wanting to punish rule breakers connects with game theory as it's understood in biology, economics and politics - that we've evolved to cooperate, and are very good at it, and don't need anyone except ourselves to police cooperation, but one of the conditions of cooperation is to punish "defectors", people who try to get the benefit of cooperation without paying the costs (for example if you want to conserve and share irrigation water amongst small farmers, what you need is either lots of policemen with guns and a legal and prison system, or a long standing traditional rule set for making clear, agreed quotas and for publicly shaming people who break them - this year's nobel prize for economics was for the study of rule sets for collective action).

One of the things that I like about Charter Cities is that it brings an awareness of the power of rule sets, and the way they operate - that the outcomes are always emergent, and you can never write enough rules to proscribe all the possible outcomes - into politics, saying (this is my sneaky paraphrase) that you can't dictate good ends, just put good rule sets (good means) in place and wait to see what happens.

And if you looked at contemporary Britain, what you'd probably say, if you were honest, was "it's not fair." The rule set has got messed up somehow. Or ignored. Or it's too easy to defect and get away with it.

In fact, once you start looking at the world through a lens of looking for rule sets, it's quite hard to stop seeing them all over the place, everywhere from nature to how we act in cafes. What is so coherent and timely about Barg/iglab/Sandpit is that they let us rehearse, and have fun with, our observation and negotiation of rule sets.

I know that is quite a lot to claim for a mobile phone to have revealed. But I guess if it's an iphone?

The Space Hoppers Weren't Meant to Happen

I've seen one or two nice things done with BBC Big Screens recently.

Tom Betts, as part of Expo Leeds.

The space hoppers weren't planned, by either them or Tom, they just happened to turn up as some studenty flash mob effort. Though they looked great at first, they swamped what was quite delicate on the screen, and messed up the loop between action on the square and feedback on the screen. Better images here.

And then a happy combination of Andy Sykes's very welcoming public drawing and animation events with Friispray, which does exactly what it sounds like and uses a wii remote and projector as a spray can to draw on screens. And is open source.

Here they are together, as part of Light Night, again in Leeds.

Welcoming, open source participation.

Making a nice reflection on what the BBC Big Screens are for the rest of the time, which is a sinister-feeling "NEWS. FROM. LONDON." blasting out into public space, with no remote control to change channels.