[u.k.: new institute for web science]

 "Department for Business, Innovation and Skills   (National)

The Government today announced the creation of the new Institute for Web Science.

It is designed to make the UK the hub of international research into the next generation of web and internet technologies and their commercialisation, and was announced by the Prime Minister alongside plans for a radical opening up of information and data to put more power in people’s hands. The Institute will conduct research, collaborate with businesses, identify opportunities for social and economic benefit, assist in commercialising research and help Government stimulate demand through procurement.

The web was originally a place where people published documents that users could search and pick up. Web 2.0 has enabled users to contribute and create web content more easily. Web 3.0 will take the web to a whole new level by publishing data in a linkable format so that users and developers can see and exploit the relationships between different sets of information.

The development of these technologies will create significant new opportunities for business and the public sector. The impact of these technologies is likely to be as important as the creation of the original web, and could generate large-scale economic benefits for the UK in the global market for web and internet technologies. The role of the Institute will be to undertake research and development, and act as a bridge between research and business, helping commercialise these new technologies. It will also advise Government on how semantic technologies can be used in the public sector, and how public procurement can be used to speed their adoption.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said that £30 million would be set aside to create the Institute for Web Science. It will be headed by Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British inventor of the World Wide Web, and leading Web Science expert Professor Nigel Shadbolt.

Read more here. 

[2010: 10 ways social media will change]

Read more at Read Write Web:




Social Media Will Become a Single, Cohesive Experience Embedded In Our Activities and Technologies


Social Media Innovation Will No Longer Be Limited By Technology


Mobile Will Take Center Stage


Expect an Intense Battle As People and Companies Look To Own Their Own Content


Enterprises Will Shape the Next Generation of What We've Called "Social Media"


ROI Will Be Measured -- and It Will Matter


Finally: Real, Cool and Very Bizarre Online-Offline Integration


Many "Old" Skills Will Be Needed Again


Women Will Rule Social Media


Social Media Will Move Into New Domains

[american army takes on some web 2.0 ideas]

"Join the Army, where you can edit all that you can edit.

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.

“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”

In recent years, collaborative projects like the Firefox Internet browser or Wikipedia pages have flourished with the growth of the Internet, showing the power of thousands of contributors pulling together.

Not surprisingly, top-down, centralized institutions have resisted such tools, fearing the loss of control that comes with empowering anyone along the chain of command to contribute.

Yet the Army seems willing to accept some loss of control. Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued the ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. About 200 other highly practical field manuals that will be renamed Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures, or A.T.T.P., will be candidates for wikification.

As is true with Wikipedia, those changes will appear immediately on the site, though there is a team assigned to each manual to review new edits. Unlike Wikipedia, however, there will be no anonymous contributors.

Many in the Army have been suspicious about the idea, questioning if each soldier — specialist or not — should have an equal right to create doctrine, Colonel Burnett said.

“We’ve gotten the whole gamut of responses from black to white,” he said, “ ‘The best thing since sliced bread’ to ‘the craziest idea I have ever heard.’ ”

The colonel said that he was hopeful that by reaching out to the 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums, he would be tapping the kind of people who would be comfortable collaborating on the Web.

“Our motto is, ‘If you ever thought what would I do if the Army let me write doctrine, now is your chance,’ ” he said."

Read more here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/business/14army.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2

[interdisciplinary papers]

The online conference on the Future of Scientific Publications resumes with an new paper by Roberto Casati "On Publishing", now available on http://www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub. In his paper Roberto Casati discusses the social significance of publication in the life of a scientific knowledge object (SKO). The importance of publication is made evident by the complex issue of unpublication (the strong version of retraction whereby a SKO is completely destroyed). Unpublication is a tempting option in the electronic world. He argues against the viability of unpublication, both on practical and on principled grounds related to the cascading entitlements of published paper.

There is also a paper by Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder of the Oxford Internet Institute on "Sifting through the online web of knowledge" at: http://www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub. Their essay examines how researchers gain access to knowledge at a time when scholarly communication and materials are increasingly moving online. This topic has so far mainly been discussed in terms of journal publication and readership. Here a broader view is taken, including a variety of areas where knowledge production and dissemination is broader than journal publications and includes data and tools. A second reason to take a broader view extends the horizon still further, since scientific communication and collaboration are not just undergoing change within the research community, but also depend on wider changes such as the use of search engines and how they affect what can be found online generally. New search behaviours are particularly evident among a new generation of scholars and potential scholars. Hence we will look at changes in research as well as in the realm of online knowledge more broadly.

Have a look at the papers: www.interdisciplines.org/liquidpub.




Via an e-mail from the interdisciplines.org list.

[twitter & politics]

Is Twitter now a part of U.S. foreign policy? The Washington Post reports that:

The State Department asked social networking site Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance earlier this week in order to avoid disrupting communications among tech-savvy Iranian citizens as they took to the streets to protest Friday’s reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

That sounds like a wow. Only maybe not. A few grafs down the Post also reports that the White House downplayed the request this way:

“This wasn’t a directive from Secretary of State, but rather was a low-level contact from someone who often talks to Twitter staff.”

But a senior State Department official told the Post that the contacts were quite official.

“One of the areas where people are able to get out the word is through Twitter,” said a senior State Department official in a conversation with reporters, on condition of anonymity. “They announced they were going to shut down their system for maintenance and we asked them not to.”

On the other hand, is this all being blown out of proportion by the Twitter-loving press?

“Twitter’s impact inside Iran is zero,” said Mehdi Yahyanejad, manager of a Farsi-language news site based in Los Angeles. “Here, there is lots of buzz, but once you look . . . you see most of it are Americans tweeting among themselves.”

Re: Twitter's impact inside Iran is zero? Not sure about that. If people are doing something outside of Iran, wouldn't that have an impact within?

See these stories too:

• Iranian Youth Protests Could Outlast Ahmadinejad Rule
  "Since the election, reformist Web sites, as well as Twitter and Facebook, have been cut off in Iran, although Iranians are evading the controls via proxy"
• Iran's Twitter Revolution "Ahmadinejad will twitter to his supporters he will save Iran from the rule of the twitter mobs and the Ayatollahs and mullahs will twitter"
• Dissecting Twitter's Role In Tech, Society, Politics"The Iran situation, where Twitter continued to provide communication resources to Iran residents after the government had shut down other communication"
• Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement "The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time." (this link via @SteveCadwell)

Article from Richard Koman at ZDNet.

[digital media & learning]

Re-reading a report on the "digital youth" and how they use/interact with digital media. (Note this is US-based but over 800 "youths and young adults"). Some interesting take-aways:

• Most youth use online networks to extend the friendships that they navigate in the familiar contexts of school, religious organizations, sports, and other local activities
• The majority of youth use new media to “hang out” and extend existing friendships
• Contrary to popular images, geeking out is highly social and engaged, although usually not driven primarily by local friendships
• Geeking out in many respects erases the traditional markers of status and authority
• New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in a classroom setting
• Rather than assuming that education is primarily about preparing for jobs and careers, they question what it would mean to think of it as a process guiding youths’ participation in public life more generally.

[web 2.0 tools and education]

I've been reading the JISC report on Web 2.0 for Content for Learning and Teaching in
Higher Education and on page 8 the authors have this useful list of ideas on how to use certain web 2.0 tools to facilitate learning. None of them are new to me but still good ideas. I'd be interested to hear what innovative uses other educators are coming up with.

Podcasts can be used to provide introductory material before lectures, or, more commonly, to record lectures and allow students to listen to the lectures again, either because they were unable to attend, or to reinforce their learning. Podcasts can be used to make lectures redundant while still supplying (possibly didactic) presentations of learning material by lecturers.
· Vidcasts can be used to supply to supply videos of experimental procedures in advance of lab sessions
· Podcasts can be used to supply audio tutorial material and/or exemplar recordings of native speakers to foreign language learners.
· Distribution and sharing of educational media and resources. For example, an art history class could have access to a set of art works via a photo sharing system.
· The ability to comment on and critique each others work; including by people on other courses or at other institutions.
· Flickr allows for annotations to be associated with different areas of an image and for comments to be made on the image as a whole, thereby facilitating teacher explanations, class discussion, and collaborative comment. It could be used for the example above.
· For Flickr, FlickrCC18 is a particularly useful ancillary service that allows users to find Creative Commons licensed images that are freely reusable as educational resources.
· Instructional videos and seminar records can be hosted on video sharing systems. Google Video allows for longer higher quality videos than YouTube, and contains a specific genre of educational video

"Education in every country and in every epoch has always been social in nature. Indeed, by its very essence it could hardly exist as anti-social in anyway. Both in the seminary and in the old high school, in the military schools and in the schools for the daughters of the nobility [...] it was never the teacher or the tutor who did the teaching, but the particular social environment in the school which was created for each individual instance" ~~Vygotsky

[social media & marketing]

When writing (righting?) the title for this post I was struck by how the conjunction changes the proximity of social media to marketing...they aren't really situated at opposite poles of a spectrum; they can in fact embody similar values.

Speaking with an advertising company today about incorporating aspects of social media into their "marketing strategy" (erm, online identity) I found myself being asked (repeatedly) what exactly *is* social media. Well, that is a big question, with answers of varying depth and complexity. Perhaps the simplest and clearest explanation of social media is, well: having conversations online. Because it is *social* media, i.e. media that's social. Its use stimulates discussion and, surprise, there is a feedback loop here, there is plenty of opportunity to respond. However, using Facebook and tweeting about the latest, coolest, über product is not really *social;* it's marketing. We're told how savvy social media users are now (Pew) so really, there is no excuse for being (as a company/advertiser/etc...) anti-social...(geddit?). Just look at these stats (via online gaming news):

• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000)
• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)

Findings: community is key.

So, companies (or whomever) need to build community, not just a facebook profile. They need to be seen as experts in there (no matter how focused) field, not novices. Easy words to say, time-consuming to develop. And that's key too, "develop," rarely does community or expert knowledge happen in an instant, that takes time too.

Engage, build conversation, listen and connect.

Oh yeah, and as I noted at a meeting in Paris last week, "google is truth." At least in terms of online visibility and that certainly counts for something.

And, for those of you already decreeing the death of social media...take a look at Mitch Joel's post "Social Media is Just Getting Started."

[social media in education - cfp]

CALL FOR PAPERS

Electronic Journal of Communication (EJC)

Special Issue:

Communication Pedagogy in the Age of Social Media

Over the course of the last few years, social media technologies such as blogs, microblogs, digital videos, podcasts, wikis, and social networks, have seen a dramatic increase in adoption rates. To date, Internet users have uploaded roughly 80 million videos to YouTube and launched approximately 133 million blogs worldwide. Because of their ability to connect people and to facilitate the exchange of information and web content, social media technologies not only provide a powerful new way to interact with one another, but they also present exciting new pedagogical opportunities.

Earlier this year, the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative released the 2008 Horizon Report, which seeks to identify new technologies capable of affecting the way we teach and learn. Among the critical challenges outlined by this year’s report is the need for universities to equip students with new media literacy skills and to develop curricula that “address not only traditional capabilities like developing an argument over the course of a long paper”, but also “how to create meaningful content with today’s tools.” (The New Media Consortium, 2008, p. 6).

Considering that these tools center around the ideas of collaboration, participation, and conversation, they should hold special interest to communication researchers and educators alike. As a result, this special issue seeks to examine the pedagogical applications of social media technologies, especially with regard to the communication classroom. Examples of best practices in social media adoption in all areas of communication education are welcome, as are case studies or empirical research analyzing the effectiveness and/or effects of incorporating social media technologies into the communication classroom. Research examining the role these technologies play in the social construction of a collective knowledge pool would also fit within the scope of this special issue.

The special issue is scheduled for publication in the first half of 2010. Deadline for completed manuscripts is April 1, 2009. Submissions should be electronic (.doc or .rtf format) and must conform to the specifications of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th ed. Place author’s contact information in an email to the editor only, not on the title page of the submission.

Issue Editors:
Corinne Weisgerber, Ph.D. and Shannan H. Butler, Ph.D.
St. Edward’s University

Send inquiries and submissions to: corinnew AT stedwards DOT edu


via: Social Media for PR Class.

[digital literacy, learning and kids]

Youth "can be 'always on,' in constant contact with their friends through private communications like instant messaging or mobile phones, as well as in public ways through social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook."

"Kids' Informal Learning with Digital Media: An Ethnographic Investigation of Innovative Knowledge Cultures" is a three-year collaborative project funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Carried out by researchers at the University of Southern California and University of California, Berkeley, the digital youth project explores how kids use digital media in their everyday lives."

Project Objectives
The first objective is to describe kids as active innovators using digital media rather than as passive consumers of popular culture or academic knowledge. The second objective is to think about the implications of kids' innovative cultures for schools and higher education and to engage in a dialogue with educational planners. The third objective is to advise software designers about how to use kids' innovative approaches to knowledge and learning in building better software.

Research Summary
Over three years, University of California, Irvine researcher Mizuko Ito and her team interviewed over 800 youth and young adults and conducted over 5000 hours of online observations as part of the most extensive U.S. study of youth media use.

They found that social network and video-sharing sites, online games, and gadgets such as iPods and mobile phones are now fixtures of youth culture. The research shows that today’s youth may be coming of age and struggling for autonomy and identity amid new worlds for communication, friendship, play, and self-expression.

Many adults worry that children are wasting time online, texting, or playing video games. The researchers explain why youth find these activities compelling and important. The digital world is creating new opportunities for youth to grapple with social norms, explore interests, develop technical skills, and experiment with new forms of self-expression. These activities have captured teens’ attention because they provide avenues for extending social worlds, self-directed learning, and independence."

Go here to download a two-page summary of the report.

Go here to download the summary white paper.

Go here to access the full report.

Go here for the press release and video being hosted by the MacArthur Foundation.

Photo from Old Shoe Woman on Flickr.

[future of creative technologies conference]

14 days until The Future of Creative Technologies Conference - 20th of November at the IOCT, De Montfort University in Leicester.

The conference has an excellent line-up with three of the IOCT's visiting professors sharing their views in the afternoon (Dr Jim Hendler, Professor Howard Rheingold, Dr Lev Manovich) while the morning session lets delegates choose which of three workshops they'd like to participate in.

Places are almost fully booked .

If you'd like to come (it's free!) register online.

[transdisciplinarity and knowledge cartographies]

As I discuss research projects, aims and future developments with IOCT researchers and affiliates, I'm realising more and more that we're often talking about the same (or at least similar) things though we're using a different language to describe our systems and processes. A recent paper by Josianne Basque, Gilbert Paquette, Beatrice Pudelko and Michel Leonard on "Collaborative Knowledge" suggests the use of a mapping tool as a way of tracing where knowledges crossover and supports the "externalising" of knowledge. Although this tool (MOT) is primarly discussed in terms of sharing knowledge between experts and novices, something like this visual mapping would be useful in the sharing of knowledges between disicplines too.



There are loads more interesting papers in the edited collection Knowledge Cartography: Software Tools and Mapping Techniques including ones that focus on knowledge mapping and curriculum development.

[howard rheingold's social media classroom is live]

Thanks to funding from the MacArthur Foundation, Howard Rheingold has been developing: "an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media. This digital learning space will both feature and analyze the use of blogs, wikis, chat, instant messaging, microblogging, forums, social bookmarking and instructional screencasts for teachers and students."

Sarah Perez at Read Write Web explains the impact of a Social Media Classroom:

"Social media and the participatory web have had a greater impact on our world beyond just how we connect and socialize with our friends online. The base concepts surrounding how these interactions take place has influenced a whole new generation of web users who now expect to participate in discussions and not be dictated to...whether online or offline. We've seen this influence occur in the workplace, where millennial employees demand to know "why" they're being asked to do something instead of just doing it. We've also seen it effect the business of marketing as social media users now feel strongly that brands (companies) should be listening and conversing with them in an open, transparent matter. So why not bring the social media revolution to the classroom, too? It only makes sense.

Those involved with this project believe that today's students need more than a class where a professor lectures for an hour - that has no hope of engaging their interest. Students need a classroom where learning is a more participatory experience and where the tools they use in their everyday lives - social networking, videos, chat, aren't checked at the door. The Social Media Classroom is an important project to make those types of tools available to educators who might not be as up to speed with the latest technology, while also simplifying the use of those tools through the introduction of a single platform that integrates the best of the Web 2.0 world."

Read more here and here.

Join the community of practise here.

[transdisciplinarity and communication]

A little while ago I tweeted that I was working on a transdisciplinarity check list (things to read, watch and listen to) as a way of mapping the field and setting the scene for a conference I'm going to run and a journal I'm going to start (no prob!). Christy Dena, transmodiologist extraordinaire, saw my tweet for help, tweeted back and wrote a blog entry with loads of links and information on transdisciplinarity. Interestingly:

"there are (at least) two very different implementations of transdisciplinarity in the methodological realm: one that argues it should be about collaboration between academia & non-academia to address world-scale problems, and another that argues it is a conceptual approach that can be applied to anything, by an individual or group."

I prefer the idea that connections can be made between any kind of group rather than making an initial separation between "academic" and "non-academic." I'll be following the Nicolescu and Dena school of thought.

Have a look at Christy's post here.

[transliteracy & transdisciplinarity in new highcross, leicester]

Today marks the opening of the new Highcross area in Leicester. It boasts some great new shops (including a flagship and absolutely enormous John Lewis) and loads of fabulous eateries (business meetings right Sue?!) Sue and I headed down today for the opening and ended up beginning and finishing our first collaborative research project of the new academic year. We used clay (how transdisciplinary) to create a transliteracy/ioct island complete with people (well, one person), a tree and two flowers. Though this is difficult to tell in the photo below as it's a bit blurry.... After that hard work we enjoyed a very tasty hot chocolate (I had a white one) at a All Things Chocolate and then saw the silk parade complete with clowns on stilts and marching band. A bit from the Highcross site:

"The river of Silk will, flow through the city to the hub of Highcross Leicester. Made up of a flowing river of 24 silk banners, which signify Leicester’s rich textile heritage, community groups from across the county will start the procession at the Clock Tower with participants making their way down High Street, along Shires Lane and through the lower level of the new mall."

[twitter overload]

[job opportunity - creative industries research fellow]

Creative Industries Research Fellow

Policy & Research

Contract:
Three days a week (or equivalent), Six month initial contract with possibility to extend for further six months

Salary:
£40,000-£50,000 (pro-rata), plus benefits

Closing date:
5pm, 13 August 2008

Location:
London

Core Purpose of Role:
This role will involve researching and writing analytical pieces on the creative industries and helping Hasan Bakhshi, who leads NESTA's policy development and research on the creative industries, to manage NESTA's ambitious programme of research on the Arts & Innovation.

The position will suit an analyst who wants to combine a NESTA research fellowship with their academic research or freelance work on the creative industries, or someone who is seeking a secondment, as we can be flexible on the exact pattern of working hours in the week.

To apply:
To apply, please email or post your CV and covering letter to recruitment@nesta.org.uk, or Tanya Holland, NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London EC4A 1DE.

For further information and to review the Candidate Brief and Role Profile please visit our website at
http://www.nesta.org.uk/creative-industries-research-fellow/.

NB. Interviews will take place on Wednesday 20 August.

[conference: science in the 21st century]

Sounds like a conference that anyone interested in transdisciplinarity and web 2.0 (for lack of a better term) should go to. Just take a look at some of the talks like Katy Börner's talk on "domain maps of abstract semantic spaces" ( scimaps.org) or Jacques Distler on how blogs, wikis etc... are reshaping communication in the sciences or Barry Wellman and Rainie Lee on "Networked Individualism and the Triple Revolution: Networks, Internet and Mobility."

"Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online. We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet. Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in. Information exchange and management, the scientific community, and the society as a whole can be thought of as a triangle of relationships, the mutual interactions in which are becoming increasingly important."

Sep. 8th-12th 2008, Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario

[transdisciplinarity and academia]

With my new job starting on the 1st of August I'm getting ready by reading (and reading and reading!) about transdisciplinarity. Although my post is going to be more focused on a kind of academic transdisciplinarity and creating a context/facilitiating conversations between various disciplines, I'm interested to read/learn/hear/see how other knowledge institutes are grappling with the demand to share information while having to cross (sometimes) radically different research cultures (enter: knowledge translation theory "exchange, synthesis and ethically sound application of knowledge—within a complex system of interactions among researchers and users"). I've just come across a set of interview questions that were posed to Mark Linder (Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University) in January this year. On the blog: Critical Practice for the Next Generation, most of the questions seem to broach issues of transdisciplinarity...how is architecture transdisciplinary, should it be *more* academic or more *businessey.*

In his book, Nothing Less than Literal, Linder has this definition of transdisciplinarity:

"the exchange of concepts and techniques between established disciplines through translation and transference" and one of the interview questions asks: "What would this 'exchange of techniques between the established disciplines' look like, in a practical sense? Are you proposing that the architect take on the roles of the painter, builder, or other professional in order to widen the scope of what is currently considered the 'architects job?'"

I think it is precisely this anxiety that to be transdisciplinary one must be able to wear many hats and wear them well. I suppose this is what the students on the Creative Writing and New Media Master's course at DMU must grapple with. As authors of new media works, must they also be well versed in Flash, html, java, image design etc...? I think this mirrors the development in science from Mode 1 knowledge production and the move to Mode 2:

Mode 1 refers to the more traditional practice of science,

created within a disciplinary, primarily cognitive context” (p. 1), situated within universities, and characterized by a polarization of discovery and application. In contrast, Mode 2, also referred to as “postacademic” and “steady state” (Ziman 1994, 1996) “is created in broader transdisciplinary social and economic contexts” (p. 1), and is based on the principles of convergence and synthesis.

Of course raising the idea of Mode 1 and Mode 2 is not value-free nor does it lack an "imperializing" stance as Mode 2 seems to be the preferred system in the hierarchy (at least according to Gibbons et al. and not that I disagree either...but how to avoid hierarchies in transdisciplinary practises and is it even necessary?)

I wonder how disciplines other than architecture and science are managing issues of transdisciplinarity...

[take a stand against Mugabe]

Visit avaaz.org - the world in action website. Fill in your name and country and a message will be sent to the leader of your country (in the UK that's Gordon Brown). The aim is to get 100,000 messages protesting Mugabe as leader. Right now there have been 49,609 messages sent.

[nlab social networks conference - panel discussion]

Panel Discussion Rounding up the issues of the day with Steve Clayton, Roland Harwood, Chris Meade, Vijay Riyait, Andrea Saveri.

"All our relationships are built on favours...ultimately that's how you make money." (RH)

Distinguishing between the social media platform and the activities, sometimes these issues are conflated (AS)

Emergence of new infrastructure for businesses and on top of that the ways we support client development etc...(AS)

Questions:
How to bridge the gap between all the technical skills and the person/client/community. How do you bring the benefits of social netowkring to more people more of the time?

It is clear that these tools have benefits. It is time to get a little more political (CM) - it's about sharing information and succeeding globally.

Vijay notes that there aren't really many of these kinds of conferences engaging small businesses particularly out of London. We need to get out there and connect with business groups etc... Creative Coffee Club then fits in really well with this idea.

Question:
Caroline from PCM Creative - If you could only keep two social media platforms what would they be and why?

Twitter because it's fascinating and Facebook. Niche social networking is important but the grander interactions with people you don't know are it (RH)

Chris thinks it's a good idea to have only one that can do all sorts of things. That could be more exciting rather than another thing appearing and another thing we need to learn.

For Andrea it's delicious and news aggregator that tracks all the blogs so that she can stay in touch with a whole community of people.

Facebook allows Vijay to connect with colleagues and clients which as a small business helps develop a social relationship which helps build trust.

Question from Karl Craig West: He explains that his clients should use social networking but they come back saying "so." Why should small businesses get into social networking, where's the business incentive.

Vijay: How many people run a small business (half the delegates). How do you get your business (networking). Vijay says social networking can only help. The value in getting to people.

Chris reminds us what Jim said, that online social networking lets you do more for less. What about the tailor who went from "zero to hero" (RH) and Jim Benson solving a problem within 25 minutes after asking the twitterverse. That's got to be important to a business.

There are ways to expand markets, to get that kind of reach with social networking. Also where you need expert knowledge. Using social media to participate in channels where you can get that kind of information (AS).

David Terrar: it doesn't matter what the business is, there are always tangible benefits. Dell using the platform to talk to customers etc... There isn't a killer feature other than collaboration.

Michael: consensus that social networking is worth investing in but isn't it a bit oversaturated and actually aren't consumers way more savvy? Consumers know there's an agenda behind it.

Chris Meade says this is why it's important to pick one kind of platform and stick with it. It's better that people have a focus and know what they are after. Vijay reminds us that there are companies who began a blog under the pretense that it was written but a real, unaffiliated person. We need rules on transparency.

Toby Moores: One question we haven't yet addressed is the dramatic shift in landscape, the fact that India and China are producing more grads than we are producing children. So doing the innovative bit of business is going to shift so the value of social media is amplifying that process. How much do you believe that social media will be adpoted and support this shift in landscape?

Andrea thinks it will. It is a collaborative, open, social platform. It supports emergent swarm activity. But right now China has the greatest number of bloggers around so she wouldn't underestimate their involvement in the creative side of business.

Could we live without the web? RH says we assume it'll be there forever in the shape it is now.

Vijay says the whole thing about social networking is allowing people to be creative, letting go of some of that control. We know big businesses will adopt it but will smaller businesses?

Question from Andrew (?): what is really different with social networking? Moved from relationship marketing to meeting needs of the customer but today, social networking enhances that relationship, makes that conversation much better. Forces traditional thinking businesses into rexaming the way they do business if they have come from a "command and control position." But the younger businesses will do things very very differently. Suggestion from Andrew to FSB and BusinessLink to do some case studies to move this into the real world and out of academia (note: this isn't an academic conference!). Note from Sue: Shani has been working with Creative Coffee Club to do exactly that.

just found social cash - a way to magically monetize?

[nlab social networks conference - jim benson]

Social Networking Beyond The Dogma: Let's Make Some Money

The application of social networking and social media technologies ultimately should help your business work better. How do you set goals, create campaigns, and execute cost effectively?

NOTE: if you join a social network - twitter, facebook etc...you must give back to the community, answer other questions, participate otherwise you're just a leech.

Which social media networks should we be on? Well, can't say but Jim does tell us what we shouldn't be on...Facebook! At least if we're thinking about time vs content...it takes too much time whereas twitter etc...can offer benefit/value much quicker.

Social networking reduces costs of: lead acquisition, product improvement, individual sales, expert information and opportunities

Social networks are like cities by fostering growth, coordination, affinity, voice, realisation

[nlab social networks conference - ken thompson]

Bioteams: what can we learn from nature's social networks?

Ken's current job grew out of his investigation of "nature's best teams." Have a look at www.bioteams.com.

Nature’s teams, such as bees, geese, ants and dolphins, are based on a small number of fundamentally different principles than human teams. Interestingly these “bioteams” seem to bear a much closer resemblance to today’s virtual/ mobile social networks than the traditional organisation teams we all know and love. Ken will explore whether an awareness of these principles can help us get much more value out of both social software and social networks.

Ken Thompson: "Bioteams - What Can We Learn from Nature's Social Networks"

Prizes?! Ken says we're going to be interacting and we get prizes!

Most networks are networks of convenience.

Check out Ken's most recent book The Networked Enterprise.

Three principles of swarms: ask the network, all nodes, network invention

www.swarm-pro.com/private/messageboard.aspx - the name of the swarm is NL owned by ken.thompson. to join, text "JOIN NL username to 07786203958

After we've registered Ken asks us a variety of questions to which we respond via sms to this swarm team. We can all see the (often quite funny!) responses to the questions by browsing to the url. Ken is going to add this to his site later.

Apparently we're a collective brain. If there was one question we wanted to ask the room, what would it be?

How any of those constantly twittering get any work done? Ken rephrases: "Does Twitter distract from work?"

Are current group structures natural?
Bioteams share 4 common behaviours:
any group leader can take the lead - nature's groups are never led exclusively by one member. Collective leadership is...the right leader for the right task at the right time. Single leader teams are no longer appropriate.

Pheromone-style Short messaging. Nature's groups use short instant message. Instantly broadcast and received in situ. Short and simple...all species have a message instinct.

Small is Beautiful and Big is powerful

Crowds - everyone does the same thing at the same time...Scale or the Wisdom of Crowds.
Sall groups...everyone can do different things at different times

Read the many through the few. Nature's networks are clustered. Some group members have many more connections than the average. These members have extreme connectivity.

Humberto Maturana on Autopoieses: "a living system is one whose only products are itself." (more on Maturana here: http://www.oikos.org/maten.htm)

Boundary, processes, nervous system, external communications = living network

Check out swarm tribes: http://www.swarmtribes.com/Public/getswarming.aspx?sname=jd4

*The most successful teams on the planet are not human teams.*

[nlab social networks conference - andrea saveri]

Andrea Saveri on The Future of Work: Amplified Individuals, Jobs & Organizations

Institute for the Future - founded in 1968

How to forecast the future, applied to business, government and non-profits

Think about the future though aware of the present

Amplified individual uses twitter to get information out. Thinking of global events and tweets becoming quick and powerful ways to sort, filter and disseminate information.

Amplified individuals are also highly collaborate - work with others to collectively solve problems, tap into an contribute to the intelligence of crowds. Re: businesses this might expand staff without necessarily hiring new staff. Through social media can actually attract people to you to provide people to you without hiring somebody.

Wikis - a great example with wikis on just about everything. Imagine being a small business, putting up a wiki page about a new process, technique or technology you're inviting other people to contribute to that knowledge base. Identify your own need (HR: you get other people to scratch your itch).

Prediction Markets - imagine what it would take for small businesses to do their own market forcasting, accessing intelligence from a broad community about a focused question. See: http://us.newsfutures.com/home/home.html

Another way to use sociology and collective action might be to bring in ludic concepts. Gaming allows different kinds of associations and people get interested in solving puzzles etc...

Amplified Individuals are highly improvisational. Andrea tells us about a group of work-from-home people who band together to work in a real space and share infrastructure and resources.

Amplified Individuals are also highly augmented. They employ systems, tools, and hacks to enhacne cognitive abilities and coordination skills. This is particuarly important for small businesses as they are likely to fill many hats, the kinds of techniques and practises to enhance memory, attention etc...is important.

See chumby - way to control information. Have a look at the chumby website. Totally into social media, they have a section where the audience (are they really called customers?) can upload (via flickr) their own photos or videos (via youtube)
of a chumby: http://www.chumby.com/pages/showoff.

Key Characteristics:

moddable, influency, ping quotient (measure of your responsiveness to other people's requests for engagment, your propensity and ability to participate), protovation (fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles), open authorship (creating content for public consumption and modification), multi-capitalism (fluency in working with different capitals, eg. natural, intellectual, social and financial), longbroading (thinking in terms of higher level systems, cycles, the bigger picture, can you rise above and look at the higher-level system), signal/noise management, cooperation radar (ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task)

Why Important for Small Biz?

This really does amplify scope for info. Individuals have the motivation and know-how to create new strucutres and processes that bypass traditional constraints

Key Ways:

Economies of sociality

Asymmetric power

Responsive resilience

New market niches

***Questions

How to monetize the individual? Go to that multi-capitalisation skill. Understanding of the relationship between building social captial and reputation might be a way to convert that into monetising. What do you give away and what do you charge for? This is a real area of fluidity right now. We shouldn't think about monetisation alone...we should think about other kinds of capital.

If you're talking about micro-businesses and the amount of time that should be spent on this kind of social networking/web. Andrea: it's not just a chunk of time...what is it that they're doing on the web. Are they participating in a discussion related to their job...that would be related to their work. The question is why are you going out there? You need a good reason for using that kind of technology, a way to enhance the staff that actually makes them more productive.

[nlab social networks conference - roland harwood]

Roland Harwood: "Are Online Social Networks the New Cities?"

social networks are starting to fulfill some of the interactions upon which cities are traditionally based

two books that have inspired Roland:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs and Emergence by Steven Johnson

Manchester - first formed as a settlement in 76 and 1301 there was a town charter and in 1700-1850 because of industrial revolution it grew ten-fold though not formally recognised as a city until 1853.

People who study urban growth talk about the role of technology (field rotation etc...) on the development of cities. "I think the internet is going to have as profound effect on cities but we're only at the beginning."

See Richard Florida Flight of the Creative Class.

Jane Jacobs talks about the essence of cities, especially cites in which you can walk. In a car you are isolated but on foot you overhead conversations, have encounters and even change your behaviour based on those encounters. The characteristics of good cities:

random encounters, information storage and exchange, communities, space to play, economies of scale, trade/sharing, organised complexity, anonymity.

Diversity drives innovation. We need to create more space to cross-fertilise our ideas (this can feed into my IOCT research on transdisciplinarity).

Roland's just mentioned a really interesting idea of "bothies": random shelters that people can use for free?! See here for more info: http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

[nlab social networks conference - steve clayton]

Today is the day for the Social Networking conference hosted by NLab.
First speaker of the day is Steve Clayton: "Social Networking for Small Businesses - Lessons from Microsoft?"

How to establish trust between big business and local consumers?

How do consumers find info? Show of hands - who uses the yellow pages? no one. People use google (and microsoft live search) and blogs. There's a really big difference between a blog and a website for businesses.

Microsoft put a video out for a game Gears of War and instantly it turned into a hugely viral marketing tool. The audience mashed it up and turned the video into a social device, a tool for communication (see here and video mashups here)

Hilarious microsoft ipod video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4313772690011721857

The best bit about the web, finding something unique to say and start conversations with people on the long tail.

To get high on google: either pay to appear high on the right hand side or have lots of people linking to you to appear high on the left-hand side.

Stats:
*70% of small businesses have a website
*2 out of 10 small businesse websites do not have company contact details or product/service info
*info isn't updated

Think of small businesses that blog and then do well - English Cut, Savile Row - 4 years ago there wasn't much demand for a £3000 suit but bumped into Hugh MaCloud who suggested he set up a blog. Rather than try to sell suits the plan was to talk about tailoring, how to buy cloth, how to cut cloth etc... now sells suits to royalty and has more business than he can manage...all because of a blog which engages conversation.

Microsoft now has 4500 bloggers.

Through constant engagement, linking to others, facilitating conversation Steve moved up in the google listing.

The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman
Small is the New Big by Seth Godin - means you have something unique, you can be agile. The web and blogs in particular give you the platform to do that in an incredibly powerful way.

Twitter - the new pub, a place where all your friends are.

Need to build up the trust quotient.

If the buzzword bingo is a bit tricky, a jungle of new-fangled terms and ideas, Steve suggests common craft for ideas explained in "plain English."

[nature and textile art]

A little while ago I participated in a round-table discussion at the ICA where 2 of the 3 artists were textile artists...or at least they created art with textiles. I'm thinking here specifically of Rachel Beth Egenhoefer and Nicola Naismith. Both artists create some really interesting objects and installations with wool etc... That must be why I'm going to be checking out the THE HYPERBOLIC CROCHET CORAL REEF at the Hayward Gallery in London curated by Margaret and Christine Wertheim from the Institute for Figuring.

"During Summer 2008 - in this International Year of the Reef - the Crochet Coral Reef will be showing in London at the Hayward Gallery. The exhibition will include an expanded version of the Bleached Reef, a new configuration of the Ladies Silurian Reef, the beautifully archaic Branched Anemone Garden, and the ever-growing Toxic Reef. On show for the first time will be the wondrously surreal Chicago Cambrian Reef (curated by IFF contributor Aviva Alter), plus a new formation of the Beaded Reef by master beaders Rebecca Peapples and Sue Von Ohlsen. The exhibition will also debut several new plastic installations: The Exploding Plastic Inevitable Reef (with hot-pink sand by Kathleen Greco), and the Bottle Tree Grove (featuring works by Christine
Wertheim, Evelyn Hardin and Nadia Severns). Hanging elements in the show will include the all-plastic-bag Rubbish Vortex by Australian contributor Helle Jorgensen, a flotilla of jellyfish by Irish crafter Inga Hamilton, and Dr Axt's psychedelic coral-cloud "Reefer Madness."

In addition to the IFF reefs, the exhibition will also debut the amazing new UK Reef, currently being constructed by crafters across the UK (with contributions from Ireland, and even Australia - hey its a former colony)."

On the 13th of June there's going to be an all-day symposium with the crochet reef creators Margaret and Christine Wertheim; mathematician Dr Daina Taimina, inventor of hyperbolic crochet; radical UK crafters, environmentalists, and coral reef biologists. How neat is that?

Now I just need to learn how to knit or crochet...right Edith?!

Thanks to Sue for the head's up.

[wikivision...now twittervision]

xposted at PART:

In January I wrote about how strangely addictive WikipediaVision was (and still is) but now I've come across something that inspires even more obsessive behaviour...at least for me.

I realise TwitterVision (by David Troy) has been around for a while; Nat Torkington blogged about its hynosis-inducing effects back in last March. Although I checked it out then (albeit briefly), it seems much more interesting to me now...perhaps because I'm also hooked on Twitter itself. Its seems this mashup would make a geography lesson or social studies lesson quite fun too...





Follow David Troy on Twitter here.

Other interesting Twitter mashups:

twistori
twitterfeed
twhirl
twitterrific

For more, check out the extensive list (100 examples) at MoMB Labs.

[lord judd & creative technologies]

(image from Sue Thomas)


Yesterday a few of the researchers involved with the IOCT were invited to a meeting with Lord Judd. Our brief: to give him an overview of our research and our findings.


Sascha Westendorf and Keno Buss kicked things off with an overview of their DMU Creativity Assistant:

"a tool designed to help develop creative ideas in a transdisciplinary multimedia context, based upon the thesis that "creativity is an emergent property". The intention is to first understand the stages that creative people move through in their journeys of exploration, discovery, innovation, and composition. The well-established path from preparation to incubation to illumination and verification is a good starting point, but more elaborate models are needed to guide software design for individual and social creativity support, and to deal with the controversial question of how such creativity support tools can be evaluated."

Next came Heather Conboy, E-Learning Co-ordinator for Faculty of Humanties at DMU she's also researching her phd on the impact of online environments on creative writers (a bit about a previous talk here). Heather showed us some interesting statistics including this one: 95% of UK higher education institutions have VLEs (Virtual Learning Environments). I wondered what that meant for the other 5%? Are they ahead of the game and using non-institution based systems like open source platforms or do they have class blogs and teach in Second Life? Heather did explain that these stats are from 2006...I wonder what the deal is now?

Also along the lines of creative writers, Anietie Isong shared with us his research on African Writers. Anietie is specifically looking at:

• How the internet is influencing writing from Africa
• The writers' attitudes towards their writing
• Burgeoning styles employed in their writing

Lord Judd asked if all the African fiction was...well, fiction...Anietie says that though it is mainly fictional there are deep political and relgious themes.

I was really interested in Anietie's research and wonder how concepts like "postcolonial" literature will appear (or not?) in African new media writing? What is the play between the marginalised and the privledged - especially when thinking about access to computers, internet, IT learning? I also wonder how the role of "native" might change as Anietie explained that some African writers are writing from the West (UK and USA were some examples).

See some of Anietie's own poetry here and a short story here.


I concluded the presentation segment with an overview of my ph.d research:

After my presentation we opened up into a more general discussion. Lord Judd (I just cannot say "Frank"!) raised some anxieties and concerns with which we agreed. I think this surprised him. In general I'd say that we all agreed that balance is the key to using new media. Though how MPs are to negotiate all the communication they receive and then have to respond to...I don't know. When I suggested just checking e-mail/letters etc...in the morning I was told that is near impossible; something really important might require feedback and can't just be left until the next morning. Sue suggested we have filters like already junk messages go into spam folders...but maybe we need intelligent agents (like PAs!) to sift through messages first? I didn't realise that MPs received so much communication? That's when the discussion turned to literacies...the literacy of navigating all the information available but also the literacy on the side of the people who write to MPs...do they realise (are they literate?) that they need not write for every small thing and are they sure they are writing to the right person?


Quotes of the Day:
When I introduced myself to him as Jess, he responded with: "I'm Frank." (not "Lord Judd")
When told of my recent phd award he said: "So you're a *real* doctor" (!!!)
When beginning the discussion he exclaimed: "I am not a Luddite. I am NOT a Luddite."

********************************************

Thanks to Sue Thomas for organising the interesting tête - à - tête and thanks to Lord Judd for sharing his time.

NB If you'd like to keep up with Lord Judd's speaking arrangements, you can sign up to an e-mail alert here or subscribe to the rss feed here (who said MPs aren't digitally literate?!)

Sue has blogged about the day over at PART.