fisharepeopletoo

The Participatorium

The participatorium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

The participatorium is one space.

The participatorium has no permanent internal walls.

The participatorium must be hackable -  the walls, floor and roof must be cut-openable, and reclosable.

The participatorium must be temporarily but not permanently sub dividable into both open and secret spaces.

The participatorium must be a landmark.

Everyone who lives here is a member of the participatorium.

Guests are welcome in the participatorium.

The participatorium has rule sets.

The participatorium is free.

Let's Close All the Theatres and Art Galleries

And build participatoriums instead.

A particaporium is the place where the people of our towns and cities present themselves.

Tweets Are Pointless - Haven't We Been Here Before?

Tweets are pointless.

Haven't we been here before?

It's not the content of the message it's the act of messaging that contains the meaning.

What's different, or still being worked out, about twitter is where it sits on the private-broadcast scale of social media spaces.

The closer it is to the broadcast end, the less acceptable the "I'm having my tea now." messages will be.

But it may turn out that different twitter users will position themselves at different points on that scale.

If your only followers are your mates, then "I'm having my tea now" is perfectly acceptable and valuable.

Not because they give a sh*t about you having your tea, but because you and they are still being mates.

[Six Spaces of Social Media ]

Birth. School. Work. Death.

"six months of anonymous cell phone records from more than 100,000 people in a European country, obtained from a European cell phone provider. Those cell phone records gave an approximation of each person's location at the time of each call, because cell phone calls are routed through the nearest cell tower.

He and his colleagues found that people tend not to stray far -- almost three quarters of the people stayed mainly within about a 20-mile circle for the entire six months, and nearly half the people rarely strayed outside a six-mile circle. They also tended to go back and forth regularly between only a few locations, such as home and work."

link

What is Civic and Social Innovation?

When I signed up for the 4iP site I ticked the box that said I was interested in "civic and social innovation".

I take it for granted that I am, but then thought I ought to ask myself what I understand by that.

If you were going to step back and ask what we want from civic and social innovation, what would it be:

• open to everyone
• welcoming of everyone
• able to benefit everyone equally
• not leave anyone behind

It can be innovation without being any of those things, but can it be civic or social?

I don't know if that is a good definition or not, if those are worthwhile principles or not, or even if I should be using buzzwords like "civic and social innovation".

But it's a really good description of what I learned from my heroes .

Where Were You Happiest to Arrive and Why?

For about a year, from February 2007, we put up posters at bus stops in Manchester asking "Where were you happiest to arrive and why?" and inviting people to reply by text message, or read what someone else has written, again by text.

About 2000 people read messages, and 400 sent them in, and these are some of the most memorable:

picadilly is my best, because i found the love of my life there. Ten years strong. By jim of salford.

At ashton new road waiting for a bus to take me home from another one night stand!

Im lonely need company

the 8 to bolton every tuesday night for a couple of pints with the lads to break the working week. Can't beat it!

Happiest to arrive back at the hospital the morning after my little girl had been born :-)

arriving at stepping hill hospital after childline stopped my son from killing himself

getting the bus to the hospital in time to see my brother before he died he was only 19

The 375 terminus at Shiloh Road - it has to be Manchester's loneliest bus terminus, with sweeping moorland views

rail replacement from stockport to sheffield the peaks are gorgeous today in the sunshine

[it takes a lot of good humour and some lovely scenery to write that about the rail replacement bus service!]

And finally, this fantastic piece of Zen philosophy for living:

I am always happiest to arrive somewhere when i am late and it turns out that everyone else is late as well, especially on a sunny day!

Muscle Memory of Cities

A really nice remark by Matt Jones during the Urban and Social Media presentations at Futuresonic :

"we get a kind of muscle memory of cities, like where is the best place to cross the road. Can we surface this for each other" using the streams of data we now generate.

Incorporeal

and corporeal.

I usually try and make myself stay away from Latin words, because when writing in English they are much less poetic than ones that come from old english and the vikings, but maybe that's a good one.

Because it's got corpse in it. As in dead body.

I've just used incorporeal when writing about wireless networks and data -- so what I've written would mean "things that don't have a body which will die."

It sticks out a bit, to be honest, as a choice of word, when "intangible" would probably do the job, and words that stick out are usually the ones you should get rid of, but it sounds richly strange, in the context, and it makes me think of alchemists, plagues and  Descarte fighting with the "evil genius" .

Our Space

Urbisunderground is the communal web site set up by/for the alternative* teenagers who hang around outside Urbis in Manchester.

Building and maintaining it seems to be a semi official youth work project, rather than self organised, but the web presence certainly followed from the real world meeting place rather than the other way round.

They talk about being "on Urbis"  - by which they mean being at the real world place, not the web site: "there was a weird atmosphere on Urbis last night" - in the same way they would talk about being on messenger or on My Space.

*"emo" may no longer be the correct terminology.

Identified Flying Blogject

My pal Simon at the BBC’s super geese.