Introduction

This has been a fascinating week for Australian sport. It started with Tiger Woods’ victory at the Australian Masters golf tournament and is ending with visceral debate about play, games, physical education and sport in Australian society. Although I have written two posts about the Independent Sport Panel’s Report I have been mindful of Todd Sieling’s manifesto for slow blogging. He suggests that slow blogging is “an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament”.

Slow blogging is an art at a time when the immediacy of the Internet offers the opportunity for “daily outrages and ecstasies that fill nothing more than single moments in time, switching between banality, crushing heartbreak and end-of-the-world psychotic glee in the mere space between headlines”.

David Crawford’s Review of Australian Sport has offered remarkable opportunities for comments and responses. I have taken some time to read the Report and in this post I would like to explore some of what I consider to be the important issues raised. Before I do so I need to declare some interests.

Personal Interests, Private Troubles

I have had a lifelong interest in sport and physical education. I have played, taught and coached a variety of sports and have been fortunate to have been involved in international sport since 1980. I qualified as a teacher of physical education in 1975. My own pathway in sport has been enriched by a profound sense of the educational value of physical activity and a passionate, personal, intrinsic commitment to sport from a very early age. I completed my PhD (a sociological account of teaching physical education) in the late 1980s in England at a time when teachers were withdrawing from after school activity in state schools. I witnessed at first hand the break of the umbilical connection between teachers and pupils. I believe this had immense implications for the organisation of sport and the loss of an educational ethos in physical activity. From 1978 to the present I have had a profound interest in the social and cultural aspects of sport and for over a decade taught courses in sociology and cultural studies.

My academic life gave me access to the work of Norbert Elias through Eric Dunning’s sociological approaches to sport. Elsewhere in this blog I have explored themes of play and playfulness and these aspects were nourished in me by Ione and Peter Opie’s work as well as by Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois. Some of the early sociologists of sport encouraged me to reflect on play, display and spectacle and I was particularly influenced by Gregory Stone, Allen Gutmann and Fred Inglis. Like any student in the 1970s and 1980s I had access to many of the writings of leading Marxist thinkers. I was fascinated by John Hoberman’s work too and much more recently by Andy Miah.

This passion for sport has infused much of my life. I am a product of sport providing a social inclusion opportunity and I hope I have not forgotten the importance that sport can play in life changing experience. Whilst at the University of York (1973) I completed what I believe to be one of the first undergraduate studies in Apartheid and Sport. This fascination with the power of sport as a form of expression continues today with my enchantment with the possibilities midnight basketball holds.

I came to Australia in 2002 to join the staff at the Australian Institute of Sport and have had remarkable access to elite sporting environments and cultures in Australia. My sport journey started standing behind the goals at Buckley Wanderers trying to save the heavy leather laced balls missed by the goalkeeper, through thirteen years of school physical education to working with the Welsh rugby team to coaching on river banks in Australia. Recently I became a member of the Board of Australian Canoeing.

I am hopeful that these private troubles (as C Wright Mills called them) have some bearing on the public issues raised by David Crawford’s report.

Public Issues

Just before I read David Crawford’s report I came across Nikolai Bohlke and Leigh Robinson’s (2009) paper Benchmarking of elite sport systems. I did not have access to the full paper but noted from the summary that their research “used semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis to investigate the elite sport services offered by two successful Scandinavian sports”. They found that “a number of the services that led to the success of the two investigated systems are strongly context dependent”. they propose that “benchmarking is only appropriate as a tool to further understanding of elite sport systems if it is approached as a way of learning, rather than copying”.

So as the Crawford Report was released I was thinking about within and between sport system comparisons and the kind of evidence (and time) one might need to understand a sporting culture. I liked in particular Nikolai and Leigh’s point about learning. I found Chapter 1.1 (Defining Our National Sports Vision) of Crawford particularly interesting in setting a context for me to read the report. I was drawn to some points made on page 8:

In all, we need to consider what we can afford to invest and how we appropriately balance this investment to support a broader definition of sporting success. This will mean more explicitly defining elite sporting success in the context of prioritising those sports which capture the country’s imagination and represent its spirit and culture. These are the sports where our performance on the national and world stage is important to our sense of success as a nation.

There should be debate about which sports carry the national ethos. Swimming, tennis, cricket, cycling, the football codes, netball, golf, hockey, basketball, surfing and surf lifesaving are among the most popular sports in Australia, a part of the national psyche. Many are team sports and are the sports we are introduced to as part of our earliest education and community involvement.

If more money is to be injected into the system then we must give serious consideration to where that money is spent. If we are truly interested in a preventative health agenda through sport, then much of it may be better spent on lifetime participants than almost all on a small group of elite athletes who will perform at that level for just a few years. (Emphasis is mine.)

These three small paragraphs are the essence of the debate for me and appear to have been a raw nerve for some people’s sense of the world whilst reaffirming others’ core values. I have tried to capture the range of responses to the Report in an earlier post (Engines Started …) This introductory section (1.1) led me to think about:

• 21st century approaches to fitness and health
• How a nation state defines priorities for the allocation of the public purse
• Whether funding is a right or a privilege
• Whether history is destiny
• The imperatives for ethical sponsorship
• The advantages of a common wealth approach to social capital

I have combined these into three themes: insatiability, connectedness and deference.

Insatiability

For some time I have been concerned that it is possible to have an insatiable appetite for funds to support elite sport. In fact my arrival in Australia in 2002 coincided with a major dilemma for the Australian sport system … how do you progress after a successful home Olympics that was the focus of enormous investment? I still wonder if 2000 was a justifiably proud high water mark for Australian Olympic endeavour. Thereafter we had to compete with the energy of new host nations and the growing presence of the United Kingdom with significant financial resources at its disposal. Australia shared its expertise with the United Kingdom post-Sydney Olympics and many other nations warmed to the Australian model of success. It seemed to me that the only way to compete with these nations was to assume all Olympics were home Olympics so that Australia could resource a small demographic with sufficient long-haul training and competition opportunities.

I believe the Crawford Report provides an opportunity to debate these issues in a transparent way. I think the Report makes a strong case for “a nationally agreed plan for sport which encompasses all relevant areas of government and engages all tiers of government” (Summary of Findings 2.1 point 6). What interests me in particular is the timescale is required to agree and operationalise a plan that impacts on our lived (rather than aspirational) experience of sport in Australia. The development of a national policy requires stability of political will. This is exactly the problem facing young scientists in the World Economic Forum … how do you develop an ecologically sound energy policy for 2030 when there will be multiple changes of government in that time scale?

Connectedness

I believe fervently in a sustainable sport system that is funded ethically and that has an educational vision. I believe that the essence of sustainability (as an alternative to insatiability) is the family and the local community. I live in a rural community near to Braidwood in New South Wales and am becoming more and more aware of how a community can include and support its members. Local communities have local heroes and these have enormous influence over behaviour.  Successful communities are connected and grounded.

I take another key message from the Crawford Report to be how Australia wide connections can be made. If we are to have a vision for a healthier Australia then it must start in the family and at school. Any policy must deal with rural and regional Australia as well as urban and metropolitan Australia. These issues were at the fore of the recent SEGRA Conference in Western Australia. I think there are very important messages in the Crawford report about capacity, educational policy, access and inclusiveness that should stimulate our discussions about connectedness.

There is enormous sense in having a national service for elite sport as there is for having a national approach to voluntary effort. I do believe that one of the major (unintended) consequences of resourcing full-time positions in sport has been for volunteers to think that paid staff can deal with all eventualities. This is a time, as Charles Leadbeater suggests, to think of working with one another and thinking of pebbles rather than boulders.

I think a connected system that has a scalable collaborative ethos can achieve remarkable outcomes. In a sustainable sport system it will be the aggregation of effort that makes optimum use of human and financial resources. This necessitates our whole sport system accepting that there is an alternative to zero sum models of sport success. This alternative goes beyond the social traps identified in the tragedy of the commons.

Deference

There are numerous descriptors for the behaviours of voracious individuals and groups. I believe the Crawford Report invites us to reflect on possessive individualism and to contemplate a non zero sum approach to the flourishing of the sport system. Robert Wright has written about non zero as the logic of human destiny. He shares insights into reciprocal altruism that resonate with ideas developed by Peter Singer.

This to me is the ultimate challenge in the Crawford Report and the Prisoner’s Dilemma for our sport system. What if we can transform all the energy we invest in sport to enable all Australians to flourish? What if we take this one step further and have a global approach to sport as an ethical domain in which activity flourishes and that our part in it is to contribute to sport as a form of mutual recognition. What if sport will be about the triumph of the human spirit and its continuation as a life choice possibility throughout the twenty first century when we will face much more important challenges than whether we win gold, silver or bronze. Some years ago, Bill Clinton observed that:

The more complex societies get and the more complex the networks of interdependence within and beyond community and national borders get, the more people are forced in their own interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win-win solutions instead of win-lose solutions…. Because we find as our interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when other people do better as well – so we have to find ways that we can all win, we have to accommodate each other.

Conclusion

I have really enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on David Crawford’s Report. Over the last few days an editorial comment from The Age has kept intruding in my thoughts.

Australians will celebrate any gold medal won in 2012, even if it is in a sport they never think of between Olympics and even if it is won by someone they have not previously heard of and might never hear of again. Nor can anyone begrudge individual athletes their success. But, as the report notes, the present system funds such success at the rate of $15 million per gold medal. The nation’s self-esteem is surely neither so low nor so brittle as to require this level of investment, and it is money that in some instances could be more wisely spent. A shift to funding high-participation sports at grassroots levels might not result in the same surge of collective euphoria every four years, but it would contribute in a more sustained fashion to national wellbeing. (My emphasis)

I am hopeful that the educational possibilities contained in the Report, the suggestions about using existing facilities more effectively, and the valuing of local heroes are celebrated and ultimately accepted by the Government. Late in the evening here in Mongarlowe I am wondering if we have found something in the Crawford Report rather than lost something.

The aggregation of our efforts in Australia is possible and I do believe it is our pathway to sustainability. We can be a non zero sum sport system if we have the collective courage and the political will.

Source

I am attending the National Elite Sports Council (NESC)’s Forum in Canberra next week. In addition to the Forum web site there is a Ning site for the Forum. A link to the conference program can be found here.

I have the opportunity to present on Day Two of the Forum and I have been thinking for a while about what to say. After my first draft I started again and late this week had my thoughts focused by Charles Leadbeater’s work. I have posted the draft and the presentation on SlideShare.

This is the presentation I hope to use as the framework for my talk.

I am using more Creative Commons images from Flickr in my presentations. Just searching for the images is transforming how I think. I have been thinking about presentation style too and am fascinated about how I might mash the Night Air, Garrison Keillor’s Radio Program and the Bush Telegraph for this Forum.

I hope to blog during the Forum. I am mindful of a recent post by Graham Attwell in sharing ideas live. Graham observed:

I am all for openness, open education, open discussions, open knowledge and a culture of sharing. Yet as digital identities become ever more important, it is critical that we have the rights and the tools to manage that identity and that social network providers appreciate and support those rights and make it easy for individuals to understand how they can mange both privacy and openness. This is an issue which will not go away.

This is a news item about the Forum.

The BBC is developing a unique four part documentary series for broadcast in 2010 on BBC Two. It has a working title of ‘Digital Revolution‘, and there are a number of ways we can all get involved, including helping Stephen Fry to come up with a better name for the series, and shaping the content of the series.

Here’s some blurb from the Digital Revolution website about the project:

‘Digital Revolution’ is an experiment in collaboration. We want to hear the opinions, thoughts and experiences from the populace of the web – you. Add your comments to our blog posts. Tell us the stories you think we should be covering. Your input will help shape our documentary.

One of the things I personally find exciting about the project is that as many as possible of the video rushes† are being made available by the site for us to watch, share, download and, significantly, edit ourselves (adhering to the licensing terms, which are similar to Creative Commons but have to differ because of the way the BBC is funded and run). This ties in with a previous post about Remix. Some of the people interviewed and available in these rushes include:

• Tim Berners-Lee
• Clay Shirky
• Charles Leadbeater
• Howard Rheingold
• Stephen Fry
• Jimmy Wales

many of whom I’ve written about, used quotes or photographs of in presentations or writings, or communicated with directly.

When I have time, possibly next week, I’ll certainly be remixing this video content.

You can follow Digital Revolution on Twitter @BBCDigRev

† Rushes (or dailies) are the unedited, raw film (video) footage from a days shooting.

Innovation expert, Charles Leadbeater was in Australian recently sharing his ideas on why we need better models of schooling to improve social cohesion.

In moving towards greater efficiency, Leadbeater believes that our societies have focussed not on people but on processes, systems, structures and yes, technology.

The work of public institutions like schools is not simply to provide a service but to build and nourish relationships in which people feel valued; are motivated to do well, have opportunities to work collaboratively and in doing so feel they are making a positive contribution to their community.

History shows that throwing more money at education doesn’t solve the problem of student disengagement. We know that at risk children and their families need greater support before starting school and during the early years of schooling.

Leadbeater suggests two new approaches: finding ways of schooling that is motivational and bridging the gap between school, family and community.

Both Leadbeater and Stephen Heppell see the dismantling of large secondary schools as the first step in creating smaller, personalised learning environments in which students are recognised and feel comfortable within their space.

This is what the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Development has aspired to with their massive redevelopment of the Broadmeadows site.

Under the old model, Broadmeadows was facing a dim future: high youth unemployment, schools seen as 9-3pm institutions, parents not involved in the learning.

After a significant period of planning and redevelopment, the Broadmeadows site has become a contemporary educational village. Students learn in smaller hubs connected by communal resource areas. Parents are invited to use the facilities.

Sometimes those of us in education are at risk of forgetting that improved learning outcomes are a result of our investment in people not our systems.

The great American pedagogue, John Dewey is as relevant today as he was one hundred years ago:

When the school introduces and trains each child of society into membership within such a little community, saturating him with the spirit of service, and providing him with the instruments of effective self-direction, we shall have the deepest and best guaranty of a larger society which is worthy, lovely and harmonious.

Poche letture mi hanno colpito come We Think di Charles Leadbeater. Un misto di inattaccabile idealismo e scientifico illuminismo. Guardatevi questo video che in 4 minuti con immaginifiche illustrazioni dice tutto e di più. A prescindere da tutto la mia riflessione è che le immagini e la musica agiscano su centri più nervosi più efficaci di quelli che toccano le parole. E, dico una banalità, è proprio grazie alla diffusione dei contenuti multimediali (ovviamente correlata alla diffusione della banda larga) che il web è davvero cambiato.

I’ve recently written a couple of blog post that are receive a bit of attention, the first was about the changing role of education and the second about Nurphy a new online service for conversations. I’ve decided to see if I can combine then by asking question about one on the other and seeing what happens. It’s a bit of an experiment really.

So, here goes. I’ve posted the following up as a conversation that anyone can join, once registered with Nurphy. Will people be willing to sign up for an untested service at this early stage? I’ll find out. The conversation starts here.

Whatever, I’d still like people’s opinions about the following.

Is the rise of the Professional Amateur Pro-Am, the increase in open educational resources (OER), personal learning environments (PLE), and greater significance of informal learning and research going to lead to a move away from an emphasis on institutional, formal learning?

As people are able to continually express their skills, abilities and achievements via social media, will formalized accreditation, with potentially out-dated assessment systems, be less relevant?

Or are formal learning and research institutions able to adapt quickly enough to the new requirements of society?

I recently wrote a post that touched upon openness of and elitism in education. I just wanted to express a few more quick thoughts on this, though it is something I intend to return to with a more in-depth look at open education and resources.

I feel the elitism of universities doesn’t lie with who is allowed to become a students, it is more related to the fact that resources are securely tied up within universities making those resources inaccessible to the majority. Resources in this context could be books or journals (hard copies or online with paid for institutional subscriptions), the academic discourse, the talents of faculty, the research equipment and facilities, past Ph.D. theses, etc. In addition, it relates to the subjects and specific topics that are deemed to be worthy of teaching or researching, or what the funders deem so.

Universities deal in the currency of degrees, a passport in society. Why in times of recession, such as at present, should it be that otherwise capable individuals are denied their chance of a degree passport because the government puts a squeeze on the number of places available in order to balance the books? A further point is the question of assessment, and is it really a useful measure, or is the ongoing presentation of someone’s work, either within a university or indeed outside it (informal learning), a better reflection of their capabilities and abilities? Indeed, evidence is beginning to accumulate indicating that those who present their work using social media place themselves in a more advantageous position for employment. And shouldn’t publicly funded research be in the public domain anyway? I’ve previously written about Open Notebook Science.

I can envisage how much of this could be opened up to greater access, but I was having a problem with scientific equipment and facilities and how that might be liberated.

There have been some interesting examples where institution based science projects have reached out to the public for assistance. There was SETI were you signed up and your computer were utilized while it was on (and you weren’t using it) to process data to search for extra-terrestrial life. Then I recall a project were public volunteers were called for to look for new astronomical bodies in tens of thousands of photographs of space; these were provided online and after doing a test to see how accurately you could assess the images you could process the live data. It was discovered that humans were much better at seeing differences in the data than if the processing was done electronically with image recognition.

Therefore, in a rather detached way people were participating in scientific research.

However, I then heard the repeat of the Friday 25 September Science in Action programme^* on BBC World Service at 4:32GMT on Sunday morning. (Sometimes I’m awake in the night or wake up early.) Listen to the programme. The significant part where this blog post is concerned is the DIYbio article. The article talked about people who are undertaking scientific research, bio-engineering in this case, in their own homes using inexpensive equipment, some bought secondhand on Ebay(R) for a fraction of its cost new to a research lab. They are able to design and create new biological parts, devices and systems. Integral to this approach is the support from online communities, DIYbio.org for example, sometimes with professionals voluntarily assisting these communities.

Clay Shirky has talked about the increase in mass amateurization, without being amateurish. This is the breaking down of the dichotomy between ‘experts’ and amateurs, with the creation of a new category – the Professional Amateurs or Pro-Ams. Charles Leadbeater in his book We-Think talks about how mass creativity has seen sites including Wikipedia and Youtube, and the Linux operating system rise in prominence and signal a shift in the way we and society can organise ourselves; participation becoming the key element.

All of this, for me raises the question, “Are universities, education systems and society more generally getting ready for the future of learning and research?”

^* This particular programme doesn’t seem to be archived, though you can usually listen to the previous two recent episodes, so I guess you’ve probably got a couple of week to hear it before the link is broken.

I was in a meeting today where we were talking about how we could develop our community engagement and participation approaches using online resources (social networks/ social media etc). We also started talking about the need to present to particular “communities” (what ever we mean by community)  information about how we are doing, what we are spending etc, giving them the opportunity to be better informed to contribute to the decision making process.

The reason i write this post is because a colleague introduced me to “Time Geography” a concept where by you understand different elements such as time, mode or travel, access etc and use this to understand and analyse how people might make choices around getting from A to B.

I can see huge value in learning more about Time Geography as i can see that this is a really useful tool by which we can understand and determine the role for social tools in enabling access to services or supportive communities, and also helping to understand some of the wider social exclusion issues people face.

To help explain the concept more i have included a diagram and a quote from “A Time Geography Approach to the Visualisation of Sport“

Lifelines represent the path taken by an individual in time-space. An individual will trace a path between stations (e.g. school, work, home – can vary according to size), where they congregate with other individuals to create bundles. Movement in spacetime can be constrained by the boundaries of some domain, a physical manifestation of authority constraints. Finally, a prism represents the total area of space reachable by an individual in the time available (can be projected backwards in time as well as forwards). The shallower the slopes of the prism, the faster the individual is capable of travelling. The prism is symmetric if the station of origin is the same as that of the destination (as in figure 1), asymmetric if otherwise. Together, these time geography elements form a powerful analytical tool

The aspect of this which i find most fascinating is the way in which you can start to model and analyse individuals in terms of their access to communities or in this case “bundles”.

In the context of engagement and participation, the “lifeline” that someone takes may well have been drastically altered or reduced due to the increase in social media tools and socially supportive devices such as internet enabled phones. This will in turn and we know that it has created numerous more “bundles” online where people congregate and converse with one another. This could in turn contribute to understanding customer preferences for channel usage if particular channels were easier to access based on their lifeline. So a local library with Internet access becomes a hub for active citizens, digital TV might provide a role in information provision and service delivery to specific types of communities, this would also be true for mobile or wifi networks.

In a social exclusion context this might help us understand whether or not people who are excluded do so because of their “prism” being to wide and effectively restricting them from accessing services or communities (regardless of whether the community is online of offline). If we could start to surface this in a more visual context like this we might be able to determine as councils whether or not alternative channels of service delivery were likely to be effective or even if other providers (community, voluntary sector etc) might be better suited to delivering the service themselves. This was eluded to in a recent Charles Leadbeater piece in the Guardian on the State of Loneliness.

This is only my early thinking on the subject but i see real value in using this method to help understand how social media and social networking might be able to reduce the slopes of individual “prisms” to allow greater opportunity to participate in “bundles” or communities.

I have started to realise much more now (better late than never i always say) is that one of the greatest challenges to the public sector engaging in social spaces is “does society as a whole really want us there?” i suspect on face value the answer is No. But if you look at this from the viewpoint of Public Sector Reform and considering the future budget position Local Government needs to consider this as a matter of priority in my eyes.

The recent post by Paul Clarke over at HonestlyReal talks about changing focus and understanding the real purpose of local government.

There is the opportunity if we allow it to happen for the public sector to consider a completely new model of business. One which enables local people to determine how best public, private, voluntary and community resources should be defined to deliver local services.

Now one of the challenges presented here is the concept of “local” (offline and online) becomes slightly more complex and requires us as service providers to think about and acknowledge the complex lives people lead and the way in which they live them.

What we are really talking about is challenging the way society itself works and how it can be supported to provide leadership to its own communities alongside Public Sector organisations. We are in effect challenging society to develop more fruitful and more meaningful relationships to enable them to support themselves. Social Media has started to enable people to reconnect in more convenient and timely ways.

An interesting article in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago Charles Leadbeater which argues that relationships and mutual self-help rather than the reforms, such as those in Government’s “Building Britain’s Future”, are the key to more effective public expenditure.

There is a project called Southwark Circle that does this kind of thing, a quote about this project on the Particle Website states

This is a social reform challenge, not just a public service reform challenge.  The question is not just “What can public services do to improve quality of life and well-being for older people?” but rather “How can a locality mobilise public, private, voluntary and community resources to help all older people define and create quality of life and well-being for themselves?”

For me this just reminds me of what my Nan and other older people i talk to used to say to me about when they were young:

“Communities helped themselves back in the day, neighbours would support each other and would help each other out, we didn’t have or need the same kind of support you lot have today”

Are we seeing social media facilitating a return to traditional and “old skool” values around community and neighbourhood support.  I see the main difference being the “community” and the “neighbourhood” that people relate to is more complex and far reaching (offline and online) than ever before.

If this is the case, then the Pubic Sector truly has a huge task ahead, not only support itself to transform the way we engage with people and our own staff, but to acknowledge those communities who are already engaged but also nurture communities (offline and online) to become part of the wider public service delivery model.

Said my friend. She’s clever like that, even if she is quoting Ray Kinsella in ‘Field of Dreams’. I’ve gone back to the notes I made during Leadbeaters lecture and amongst the scribbles are some wonderful anecdotal references such I Love Bees, the deeply fascinating 2004 campaign by 42 Entertainment. Or Funtwo in his teenage bedroom playing Pachelbel’s Canon in D from under his overexposed baseball cap, views to date on YouTube 59,916,716, almost 60 million times.

And lots of pithy snippets too. Fashion buttons from them for New Media Zealots (sic) like myself.

Design for this world in an intelligent way. Design for participation and organisation. Capacity for contribution and collaboration. Mobilise a community.

‘Here come’s everybody’ says Clay Shirky borrowing from James Joyce. He evaluates the effect of the internet on modern group dynamics and “what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures” And to quote CL

“..something new and potentially far reaching emerges: people can become organised in new ways, at low cost, without many of the paraphernalia of traditional, hierarchical organisations…capacity for collective self-expression and self-organisation creates new options for us to become organised, to get things done together in new ways”

La gente de TED no deja de sorprendernos con su fantástico entusiasmo para compartir ideas, haciendo real su slogan de “Ideas Worth Spreading”. Este mes han lanzado un fantástico proyecto que consiste en reclutar voluntarios para subtitular las charlas que ellos agrupan en su sitio web. Así, lo que antes era exclusividad de gente que hablaba inglés (y que no tenía problemas de audición), ahora está al alcance de prácticamente todo el mundo. En los casos en los que no están disponibles subtítulos en español, suele estar disponible la opción de subtítulos en inglés, lo que sin duda es una ayuda, pues a veces es mejor leer el inglés que escucharlo. A eso se suma, además, un interesantísimo atributo, denominado por ellos “transcripción interactiva”, que consiste en – valga la redundancia – la transcripción de la charla en el idioma seleccionado con hipervínculos a la parte del video en la que se menciona cada una de las oraciones y frases subtituladas. Algo realmente fantástico.

Aprovecho para invitar, una vez más, a que vean las charlas que en mi opinión son fundamentales para entender el impacto que tienen las nuevas tecnologías de comunicación en el mundo hoy. Las primeras dos que menciono tienen subtítulos en español y las últimas dos sólo están disponibles que subtítulos en inglés. Espero sean de su agrado.

1. Larry Lessig: “La Ley Está Ahogando La Creatividad”. He hablado tanto de Lessig que creo que no hace falta comentar nada más. Solo basta mencionar que esta fue la primera charla que oí de él y fue suficiente para hacerme un fiel seguidor de sus ideas.
2. Howard Rheingold: “Sobre Colaboración”. Una de las más interesantes charlas sobre la evolución de las tecnologías y el impacto que tienen sobre el desarrollo de nuevos modelos económicos.
3. Yochai Benkler: “Open Source Economics” Su reflexiones sobre lo que él llama el “networked information economy” y cómo estamos viviendo tiempos de profundos cambios en lo económico y lo social.
4. Charles Leadbeater: “Sobre Innovación”. Sus comentarios sobre el surgimiento de los “profesionales amateurs” es excepcional, enfocándose en el impacto que estos tienen en el desarrollo de nuevas ideas y, por supuesto, de nuevo valor económico.

A significant part of my Masters project is to adopt an intelligent, mindful, distant view of myself as a practitioner and a commentator. To help me with this I have made my world tangible by simply dividing it into parts that resemble boulders and pebbles.  This method of visualising my landscape was inspired by an metaphor described by Charles Leadbeater in his paper “Coming Crisis of the Creative Class”.

This model is composed of boulders, pebbles and micro pebbles. These individually weighted and labeled parts have enabled me to ask meta level questions about the value that I add through my work and to view my everyday work holistically and see where the gaps are.

When I look at this landscape I am asking these questions:

• Who visits my beach?
• What boulders work with pebbles?
• What pebbles are growing to become boulders?
• How do the boulders make money?
• Are there any pebbles growing taller than the boulders?
• Who should I invite to visit?
• How is it being sustained?
• What can I see in the distance?
• How do I find the pebble I am looking for?
• How do visitors navigate their way around?
• Are there any dangers on the beach?
• Do I like working on the beach?
• What is missing?
• What is driving me to maintain and enhance this beach?
• What will the beach look like in five years time?

It has made me realise I need to be more conscious of how often I roll a new boulder onto the beach. This takes time, dedication and focus. I am only one person and I can only sustain a certain amount.

There is rising tide of pebbles on my beach. Every minute millions of people throw a pebble onto my beach: a blog post, a YouTube video, a picture of Flickr or an update of Twitter. A puzzling collection of pebbles in different sizes, shapes and colours , in no particular order, as people feel like it. How is this managed?

This very simplified version of my world into boulders and pebbles has focused my thinking on hybrids and collaborations. I hadn’t realised until now the vast amount of opportunities I have to create new collaborations and organise my pebbles to new heights.

But what does it mean when pebbles grow taller then the boulders? My network is rapidly become the tallest attraction on the beach. The nature of social networking allows me to connect with pebbles who are friends, and twitter allows me to create lots of really tiny little pebbles.

I am really keen to hear your thoughts and opinions on this model. It is up to you if you throw a pebble towards me in the form of a comment or a little micro pebble reflection in the form of tweet.

Οι σκέψεις σαν εικόνες. Το σπουδαίο στο βίντεο δεν είναι μόνο το θέμα. Βρίσκω εξαιρετική την φρεσκάδα του, την αμεσότητα και την απλότητα του. Δε χρειάζονται πολλά.. Σπάνια βρίσκει κανείς κάτι τόσο ευθύβολο. Το μέτρο όσον αφορά στις εικονες επιτρέπει στις φράσεις να λειτουργούν σαν στοιχεία πλαστικά και το παιχνίδι με τον χώρο αντί να κουράζει ανανεώνει διαρκώς την προσοχή.

Οι ιδέες που παρουσιάζει είναι, νομίζω, γνώριμες.. Η Αισιοδοξία του υπό συζήτηση. Ο Leadbeater ήταν μεταξύ άλλων σύμβουλος του.. Tony Blair!
Εντούτοις εκτιμώ πως πρόκειται για ένα από τα πιο ωραία και εύστοχα ‘δοκίμια” που κυκλοφορούν στο δίκτυο!

Ας θεωρήσουμε κι αυτό το βίντεο σαν ένα ακόμα παράδειγμα των δυνατοτήτων που δίνει το δίκτυο για Λόγο (πολιτικό και άλλο).
Καλές οι αφίσες και τα συνθήματα αλλά..

το site του Charles Leadbeater εδώ

το σχετικό μ’ αυτόν άρθρο στην Βικιπαίδια εδώ

Finished Leadbeater, still mulling…

So. Dipping toes in tricky territory and popping heads above parlous parapets now. What with all this twittering bleeting and blog-trotting, foisting opinions on Fastfude…..most chuffed to be ‘Desked‘ – but why? Leadbeater does a leadbetter job than I could on analysing this instinct to just spew observation and dilutions thereof into cybersphere. It’s a heady cocktail, the urge to scribble, the need to connect, stir in a soupçon of information junkie, need-to-know nosey-beak and gadget geek, factor in the desire for feedback and peer-applause, and you’ve got your serial blogger right there. Perhaps it taps into the diarist, the documentarian, the habitual observationalist in a certain profile. You know the type, 200 years ago we’d have been cataloguing butterflies in big culottes. Hey whats the bets ‘culottes’ is a hot tag?

I tweet therefore I am, I blog therefore I’m heard. Albeit by the two people a day who bizarrely google ‘mens pointy shoes’. I’m not kidding, if you want to direct traffic to anywhere, I recommend liberally peppering the text with ‘free porn’ and ‘mens pointy shoes’. (Note to self: Crash out quick bloggette tagged ‘free porn’)

There is a perversity in the Norn Iron psyche that delights in knocking the block off any bap foolish enough to poke itself above the parapet…notwithstanding I attempted a considered and (I thought) informative piece on Fastfude on the merits of Twitter. The indie-kids seemed a little vague on it’s potential, and I was possibly a little piqued at being categorised by a common noun like ‘twats’ (© my-angel-rocks) However, for my efforts, I earned myself this from Shane In Craigavon:

“I can tell you that you are some slut character from some 20s buke who was hangin round with a jock, but got mowed down by the metaphorical ‘American Dream’, or somethin bulshitty like that…”

Have to be impressed he identified the obscure character from the ‘Gatsby whose moniker I blether under, but still. Decided not to encourage him and let it slide. Poor lad clearly has his own problems, he lives in Craigavon for starters, and is probably stressed out by his mocks. But what I really should have posted was “now now charmer, this is not the forum to be schmoozing the ladies. Theres dedicated sites for that sort of thing you know”

or “Listen Pal, if you knew me you’d get the symmetry ok?”

I really have been giving this all a lot of thought. It started with the business networking, then there was Leadbeater, then the blog and then along came twitter. -Next thing I’m at Open Coffee Lisburn and in danders alaninbelfast. It was most fascinating, to meet in the flesh what I suspect I had largely regarded as an abstract electronic concept. As I said at the time, I felt like I had stepped through the wardrobe and was gazing at Narnia (I know I know, me and five blokes having a coffee in Lisburn, I know. But it was early and I had a bit of a hangover so things had a hyper-real aspect that morning)

Anyway, here’s what I posted on Fastfude. Not sure who I convinced, Shane In Craigavon hasnt been too vocal it has to be said.

Usually reluctant to stick my head over the parapet, particularly on a forum like ‘fude as there is something slightly perverse in the local psyche which delights in knocking it off. But regardless, here’s a considered shot across the bow of the Twitter-maligners. It may well be this years facebook which was last years friends reunited. And chances are we wont be twittering in ten years time, but if we’re not, we’ll be doing something else. The collective We-Think, (© Charles Leadbeater) the cumulative power of the What I Know Is, is here to stay and it’s the way of the future. Be it the pithy distilled sound bites of Twitters 140 characters, or something else entirely, this form of localised and global real time communication has taken networking, marketing, and the immediate dissemination of information to unprecedented levels. Dip into Charles Leadbeater and see what he has to say on the subject. Check out his anecdote about the Asian kid doing Pachelbels Canon in D on his electric guitar in his bedroom. 58 million hits. THAT’S the power of the übernet. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a band, a fan, geek, marketeer, or promoter, Twitter is one of the most powerful tools on the internet right now to either a] get a message out there to a highly targeted audience, or b] efficiently monitor real time events, articles, releases, news and pertinent commentary.

Twitter is an extraordinary information aggregator, and its real power lies in that you choose what to be fed. Single publications, newspapers, music rags, even bespoke sites such as this, physically cannot transmit enough information of enough range. Invariably they have to pitch to the common denominator of the masses to maintain traffic. I use Twitter to cherry-pick the days news and commentary. And from feeds as diverse as The Guardian, The Onion, Belfast Telegraph, New Humanist, local wags like Slugger O’Toole. I slake my thirst for band news with NME, Kerrang, Rock Sound and other more obscure commentators. More and more bands are signing up, I’m hearing first about release dates, local gigs and tours. These are all click-throughs, if I fancy the tag-line I’ll follow the link. I could have fifty RSS feeds in my mail box, but I’d never get around to checking them daily. Instead I browse my Twitter homepage and choose what to pursue. I’ve bought 3 albums this weekend from excellent bands I’ve never heard of, been to two extraordinary lectures recently that I otherwise would not have been alerted to, and just caught a local gig that I’d have cried if i’d missed . I spend a not inconsiderable sum on formalised business networking in Northern Ireland, yet suddenly, through Twitter I find myself at Open Coffee Lisburn building very interesting relationships with much more like minded people with much more relevant interests. Nobody gives a flying Veda what I just had for breakfast, but I’m not telling them. Nor am I interested in what Stephen Fry is up to, so I’m not following him. But what I do put out there and who I elect to follow flags up my interests, crawlers pick this up and alert me to their presence and if I’m interested, I follow them. [i]Highly effective, highly targeted free marketing that puts the marketee in control.[/i] For the record, there’s a few of you muso types out there who’d do well to Twitter up-coming gigs, I’d have you on feed and it would save me trawling dozens of sites weekly to see what you’re up to.. My Twitter ID is MyrtleWilson, but it’s not about what I’m telling you, it’s about what You can tell Me.

Suck it n see…

Organization without the Organization.  Charles Leadbeater discusses how collaboration works in the Web 2.0 world.  Click on the image to watch the still very relevant 2005 TED.com video.

I see what Charles says as a harbinger of what is to come.  Closed source is not the answer.  Open source cannot feed us.  The middle ground: My Inc., personal corporation, is the key.

Link:

• Charles Leadbeater

In his latest book, We-Think, Charles Leadbetter argues that if the 20th Century was one of mass production and mass consumption, the 21st Century will be one of mass innovation and collaboration, the sharing of ideas being the currency on which our future prosperity depends:-

“In the economy of things you are identified by what you own – your land, house, car. In the economy of ideas that the web is creating, you are what you share – who you are linked to, who you network with and which ideas, pictures, videos, links or comments you share. The biggest change the web will bring about is in allowing us to share with one another in new ways and particularly to share ideas.”

At least two questions immediately come to mind. If the new economy is about sharing, what is it that is going to encourage people to share and to give away, rather than trying to cash in on their ideas and maximise their profit, according to the natural laws of self-preservation, natural human tendencies to self-interest etc etc. And in a world where it is rapidly becoming easier to organise on a global scale, what is going to prevent individuals and organisations from using the power of the internet for destructive rather than constructive purposes?

On the first issue Leadbetter is optimistic. It’s not that he believes we-think will entirely replace the market-driven economy but rather that there will be a balance between  market and non-market ways of organising the networked economy. In other words, individuals and organisations will survive according to their ability to sell and to share freely their ideas in the right proportions, a mix of collaboration and commerce, community and corporation. He believes that what motivates people above all else is not wealth but the quality of the relationships they are able to develop, alongside a sense of worth and a recognition of their talents, especially by their peers. This is threatening to traditional corporations with hierarchical structures, which operate on the basis of status and authority within the organisation rather than the creativity of individuals, and in the next few years we will see an increasing struggle between this dysfunctional world where decisions are made for us rather than with us and an alternative world in which we are, in the words of Pat Kane, “players”, where we are engaged and participating fully in the process of our own lives.

The challenge, according to the author, is to create a sense of order and security without undermining our capacity for sharing, for sharing can also spread diseases, infections and viruses, ideas and identities can be stolen. Furthermore, those who have top-down control, whether private corporations or governments, will fight to retain it. However, he believes that within organisations managers and professionals will struggle to retain power based on privileged access to information as those they govern  become less deferential, acquiring their own voices and finding their own information.  Secondly, more forms of peer-to-peer control, including surveillance, will provide the transparency needed to provide the security we all seek. We will get used to rating one another and being rated by our peers – something which is currently an accepted form of self-regulation in the scientific community but which will spread to many other walks of life. Finally, Leadbetter argues, we will have to encourage and develop in people more self-control so that they use their increasing technological power more responsibly. Enter the role of education and educators. He puts it succinctly like this:-

“That means, at the very least, children learning the skills and norms of media literacy and responsibility; learning to question and challenge information as well as copy and paste it.”  Reassuringly, this has echoes of the following statement from the new Literacy and English framework in Curriculum for Excellence:-

To help me develop an informed view, I am exploring the techniques used to influence my opinion. I can recognise persuasion and assess the reliability of information and credibility and value of my sources.

Never has the role of the teacher been more important in guiding and supporting young people as they develop that “informed view” for themselves as independent learners and thinkers.

Comparto la visión que Charles Leadbeater tiene sobre cómo la red está cambiando nuestro mundo. La ha plasmado en su libro “We-think”, del que puedes descargarte los tres primeros capítulos y el primer borrador completo en su página web. Como resumen, en este vídeo puedes ver sus principales ideas de una forma gráfica y divertida:

Today I went to a workshop on ‘Innovative Media for the Digital Economy’, part of the Digital Economy programme run by the UK Research Councils, in which various social media academics presented the first fruits of research which had received seed funding through this scheme.

Charles Leadbeater shares some thoughts

The day kicked off with a keynote speech by Charles Leadbeater, author of We Think, the very good book which I had previously referenced in my inaugural lecture and elsewhere.

In a slightly longwinded question to him, I was pleased to be able to thank him for reminding me of the power of Ivan Illich (mentioned in We Think as one of the precursors to the spirit of Web 2.0), who had fired my sociological imagination back in the day. You don’t necessarily expect to be reading about Illich’s radical and brilliant Tools for Conviviality in a book by a ‘leading business thinker’.

He said many interesting things, which I won’t try to type out here (see his website for a range of useful resources), but here’s just one. When asked about Wikipedia, he noted that it’s a useful starting point when looking into a topic, and added: “If you’re a teacher and the answer to your question can be copied from Wikipedia, you’re asking the wrong questions”. What a brilliant point. I will be using that next time one of my colleagues wants to ban Wikipedia, as someone usually wants to, soon.

After this, the academics made a string of presentations about their research studies. These were mostly interesting projects focused on particular online products or services and the ways that people did, or could potentially, use them.

There were, for instance, excellent presentations from Jen Southern (and colleagues), and Andy Miah, on finding new ways that artists can collaborate and rethink their social role; interesting stuff on how mobile technology could help us make much better use of public transport by identifying spare capacity in the system, on the spot; and some thoughtful comments on Facebook and identity from Udi Butler.

As my contribution to the panel discussion at the end of the day, I suggested to the roomful of academics — somewhat bravely, I thought — that it was interesting that it was the ‘corporate’ speaker, Charles Leadbeater, who is an ‘industry’ person, a business consultant and journalist, not an academic, who had been prepared to discuss big broad social issues in his book and his speech — doing the job of an Emile Durkheim or Max Weber in looking at these new technological social phenomena and their role in public life – whereas the academics were mostly presenting narrower stuff, evaluating products and services, or particular case studies, and not really dealing with ‘big’ questions. I noted politely that as academics we all have to work on particular projects, of course, and that probably they aspired to deal with big questions too. I added that maybe the fault lies with the way academics have to align themselves with funding councils.

Nevertheless you’d think that the role of academics would be mostly raising big questions. I have no problem, of course, with Charles Leadbeater’s intelligent and well-referenced mass-market paperback, and don’t really care whether it’s officially an ‘academic’ book or not. But it’s a bit odd if academics are not really covering those big issues on the grand scale, isn’t it?

Is this what happens when funding councils emphasise academic links with ‘industry’ all the time — academia just gets a bit smaller-minded, whilst ‘industry’ responds by producing the superior grand thinkers?!

Creative Collaboration, mixing users with producers and consumers with creators – the concept of the pro-am (professional/amateur or indeed passionate amateur) is one that has lifted the lid on true innovation. Though dealing with varying levels of cynicism towards the practice, that fact remains true that much of societies revolutionary products or services begin with the ordinary user, and that this innovation exists only through discontent. Large companies do not facilitate change- they promote what is already available, what is already successful and it is not until competition or critiques arise that a change is discussed.

Attending a work related, ‘People in Progress’ seminar on Tuesday night – a retail perspective on current consumer trends and ways to take revenue-raising advantage of this – my thoughts drifted back to the concept of the professional amateur and the cross over this has with large companies. The rather enthusiastic speaker, who observes the habits of shoppers for a living, discussed her findings on the modern day consumer.

Savvy, was the title she awarded them. And this could not be closer to the truth.

Consumers are increasingly aware of products, of the market and of the ways in which they are able to get exactly what they want and when they want it. This owing greatly to the many communication channels available to them and largely due to the phenomenon of Web 2.0 – they have information available to them at a click of a button, a rating just a scroll away and dialogue to participate in with just one subscription. Arun Raj Manager at Capgemini, comments on Knowledge@whartons new media blog supporting this stating that;

Today blogs and sites, like YouTube and MySpace, have enabled people to have opinions of their own and use multiple sources to gain the power to make their decisions. Here the limits are defined only by the number of people online and the breadth and depth of knowledge they individually have. Effectively, the individual is the media baron, be it amateur or professional.

This demonstrates that the power is no longer situated soley with the advertisers or sales assistance saying what is good, what is bad. But rather power is now with the people. As a result, these consumers will ask a company the hard-hitting questions and are willing to fight for what they want.

The speaker, expressed to us that this is not something to fear or to ignore, but rather something to embrace – through the users, the majority consumers – growth is possible. That only through their criticisms is a company aware of the faults. 

This then turned thoughts to ideas of produsage where there is a breakdown between consumer and producer. That because the consumers are the main users of a product, innovation of course will start with them – and this is where future is and where the PROAM will show their strengths.

As leading authority on creativity and innovation, Charles Leadbeater in his podcast entitled ‘The Rise of the Amateur Professional’ explains, users unlike corporations have the need, the opportunity and the incentive to innovate. He also explains that users are the greatest competitions against the large monopoly. If it were not for users challenging current systems, or creating new products industry would stagnate.

ProAms make growth possible and in today’s highly connected society collaboration between the two is essential. That traditional corporate model no longer works as a lone force, it much be infused with the bottoms up approach to encourage innovation.

For further reading:

http://www.thecoolhunter.net/

http://longtail.typepad.com/

References:

Knowledge@wharton, 2008. “The Experts Vs. The Amatuers: A Tug of War over the Future of Media”, Wharton. Available from: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1921

Leadbeater. C, 2008. “The Rise of the Amateur Professional”, VODPOD. Available from: http://vodpod.com/watch/814642-charles-leadbeater-the-rise-of-the-amateur-professional