Mad 2012 : 7 billion people : (The worlds most inspiring photo)

Speaking to young innovators and social entrepeneurs in Hong Kong at MaD 2012 conference. A fantastic experience to meet young people with ideas and projects to change the world for the better – one step at a time! PS. Carl Sagan is awesome.

What can we learn from Murray’s Friendship Graph?

• Murray: Now, we’ve known each other for quite some time in the professional realm. I’d like to push things forward in the Friendship realm.

• Conchords: What’s the Friendship realm?
• Murray: Well, you’ve heard of a realm – yeah?
• Conchords: Er, yes.
• Murray: Well, this is like a friendship one; a group of people basically getting together, calling each other friends…Look at this.
• Conchords: What’s this?
• Murray: A friendship graph; look along here on the x axis – that represents time passing, on the y axis here, that represents the different levels of friends. Okay? We’re starting up here with friends, down to workmates, colleagues, strangers (which is pretty  much everyone I’ve noticed) …and then enemies.

 We’re pretty comfortable navigating our social relationships by classifying them more or less in the same way as Murray rather bluntly describes. Up until 5 or so years ago   it has been very easy for people to segment their ‘realms’ and to vary their behaviour according to whether we’re in the company of ‘friends, workmates, colleagues, strangers or … enemies’.

However, now social media usage has become so widespread, with 26million Facebook users in the UK , many of us are increasingly faced with the quesiton of how best to communicate consistently and with integrity across ‘the friendship graph’ and how best to draw together a fragmented online and offline identity across a wide variety of social networking platforms, including the office, the pub and your living room sofa. 

 The thing is that many people seem to be a bit confused about how to get the most out of the new networks available without compromising traditional ones.  The key to making social media work for you lies entirely in your own hands, through taking pro-active control of the online networks that you use and the way you use them:

• In the first instance, that is about deciding which platforms to use, and which to disregard.
• Then, there’s the question of what content/conversation you want to share with the rest of the world
• Finally you can use your privacy settings and groupings to help people engage with that content

 If you get it right, then people will be able to engage with you online in one persona that pretty much reflects the real, offline you in all your rounded and lustrous glory. If you get it wrong, as many of us do, then it could well be a case of coming over as someone with a split personality, or maybe just giving us all TMI. People don’t want to be dragged up the friendship graph by force of your ‘fab nites oot!!!’ Facebook album! As you can see from the Conchords’ efforts, you might end up jettisoning your ‘workmates’ into the ‘strangers’ realm before you know it.

 

Goodgym: A smarter social service

You might remember me mentioning the marvellous Goodgym a while back when the project won the Social Innovation Camp weekend ideas pitching session. Yes, this is the project I almost fell into a canal for.

The concept is very simple -  it matches two differing needs in order to provide a different kind of social service.

The idea of GoodGym is to provide isolated or immobile older people with regular human contact and to provide motivation for younger, mobile people to run and get fit.   The Good Gym aims to make it easy for people to channel the energy used up as part of their exercise routine  toward a wider social good. 

I was very pleased to see that Ivo and the team were featured on BBC London News spreading the word about the project. Check out Goodgym on the telly! Excellent to see things going from strength thanks to lots of wonderful project leaders and volunteers’ time.

The project is currently piloting live throughout Tower Hamlets right now and looking for people to get involved there, as well as inviting expressions of interest from further afield.

Fun and Funding – Youth Funding Network

I spent a great evening yesterday with the Youth Funding Network who have a very simple idea for raising funds and gathering volunteers for a variety of different charities. I was invited along by Liz from Otesha (A v.cool youth led sustainability charity involving bicycles, theatre and educational projects!) who is one of the organisers.

A subterranean den of philanthropy - Fairy lights provided by YTFN!

We turned up at a mysteriously quiet location in a bar in Hackney to find a basement packed with people looking for drinks, conversation, cupcakes and an opportunity to donate and/or volunteer for charities.

The whole event is run very simply and effectively. It involves paying £10 on the door in exchange for a voucher and simple info-pack outlining the three charities who will pitch for funds from the crowd that evening. Drinks and cupcakes are first on the menu, followed by pitching from the three featured charities. Then, the pitching itself begins – with everyone having a £10 minimum donation (the door entry fee) to put forward to the charity of their choice.

There was a huge amount of energy and interest in the room, and everyone who attended got a buzz from connecting with and supporting charities in a very personal way. Additionally, a match funding round backed by particular audience members helped to really push up the value of the donations made on the night, so all the charities benefitted still further from the event…Imagine what the results of 10,000 such events would mean to local communities…

Of course this isn’t the answer to the cashflow issues and sustainable income stream building that small startup charities are currently being faced with. However, there was something very encouraging to see so many people pitching in their donation in person, making a direct connection with the charities  themselves. These participants were more than happy to take a chance on providing some seed funding which will enable great new ideas to get off the ground at speed, with little bureaucracy.

I spent my ££s on the Hackney Pirates – check out their site here!

UK General Election Turnout 2010: Waiting for a spike in democracy?

UK voter turnout for the past 50 years or so has been in a steady but relatively gentle decline…. well, that was up until the 1997 General Election, where it proceeded to tumble rather more rapidly with turnout eventually falling to around the 60% mark by 2001/2005 elections.

So, what’s in store for us this time around?

Stats from House of Commons Research Papers 01/54 & 05/33 
Courtesy of ukpoliticalinfo

This year’s televised leaders’ debates have gone some way to pique public interest in the 2010 UK Election, with the Electoral Commission reporting a spike in voter registration form downloads as the registration deadline approached.  This may well have been related to interest sparked by the debates; yet it remains difficult to know whether that indication of intent will be transformed into a corresponding spike in votes at the polling stations later today.

Yet even if turnout does increase this time around, would a spike in the chart above really indicate that the public have re-engaged in democratic politics in a meaningful way and that we are back on track to a healthy democracy?

I’m not convinced. There are a number of trends that may well continue to influence political engagement beyond the 2010 turnout stats; spike or no spike.

Patrick Dunleavy, Chris Gilson and David Sanders over at LSE have commented on a  couple of key long term trends which we ought to be paying more attention to, albeit perhaps after the 6th May when everything has calmed down a bit… These include the following points:

1. Over the longer term, people simply do not identify with parties the way they used to.

Stats from LSE election experts blog R.Sanders

2. A significant proportion of younger people consistently aren’t voting, or feeling a duty to vote.

I’d also add two further points to those;

3. There appears to be some indication of a hardening of the cynicism and distrust with which people view politicians (post-expenses scandal), as evidenced in the latest edition of the  Hansard Society’s excellent ongoing Audit of political engagement* .

4.  In relation to all of the points above, there seems to be what you might term a lack of relevance of Parliament to people’s every day lives. As Hansard Society Chair, Peter Riddell points out;

‘the main challenge for Parliament may be to show its relevance’… yet… ‘ there is little public interest in the various political reform proposals debated by MPs, think tanks and the media.’

I know I can certainly think of a few things I’d rather do on my day off than get involved in political reform initiatives, and I actually like that sort of thing.

If citizens and Parliament are to re-engage beyond May 6th then there is a need for more meaningful, longer term relationships to be built from both sides.

The kind of trust required to acheive this kind of attitudinal shift takes time and effort to build, and I’m not sure how much time and energy any members of parliament will have left over for the democratic deficit after dealing with the deficit.

However, that said, there’s one thing I’m hoping for on May 6th, and that’s a statistically significant spike… so to speak.

*Point of information, I'm featured in one of the Audits - but which year was it? Answers on a postcard to me please... first prize.... £10 book voucher (with which to buy your own hard copy of said audit)

Return of the Mack?

Yes, in the time honoured tradition of  Mark Morisson, and Slim Shady; I have returned. Indeed, I am back.

Where have I been these last 8 months or so?

Could I possibly have been over at NESTA, managing the final stages of the Big Green Challenge and helping set up Jailbrake with the team at sicamp, as well as taking on the role of Chair at OteshaUK whilst simultaneously storing up ideas for allsorts of exciting blogposts that I haven’t had time to write up as yet…?

That sounds about right to me.

Watch this space for some new news and some old news, but definitely no Huey Lewis and the news. There are limits.

Iran Election : London Protest : Social Media

I just met this group of young Iranians and supporters on Waterloo Bridge. They’re campaigning on the recent Iranian voting scandal and will be protesting in London outside the Iranian embassy this Saturday as part of the http://www.whereismyvote.org/ global day of action on July 25th from 1-4pm.

“The Global Day of Action is not affiliated with any partisan political agenda and is aimed at securing the internationally recognized rights of the Iranian people”

Interesting to see local groups getting active and handing out flyers in such a positive and friendly way, I think it really works well. I’d say that I’m far more likely to go along to something if asked in person rather than tweeted at, emailed or facebook-messaged. Social media is great, but sometimes having a chat is what’s really the motivator.

As it is, I’m off on holiday from tomorrow so can’t be there, so went to the website to find out more about what I could do online instead. Joining a Facebook group is not as good as turning up by any means, but its a way of showing support and keeping in touch with the cause, and other opportunities to act in real life. 

Aha! So that might be what social media is for….?

—- Newsflash! —-In ‘Other Inspiring Iranians I’ve met on Waterloo Bridge’, see my Ahmad Foroughi post from the time of the Obama Election – an awesome photo, and a sweet piece of social history!

CauseWired : A Web 2.0 Book Review

Review In Brief: Causewired is a new book by Tom Watson which chronicles next generation social activism, or the ’causewired’ phenomenon – people connecting directly on social issues using the web to make a difference in real life. Its pretty interesting, has some good real life examples of the power of web 2.0 so you should probably go & check it out!

Review in Full: Its true that I don’t habitually get my news through the broadsheets anymore – and that when I do get the chance to spread out the newspapers and browse through them it feels like a luxury. Maybe its something to do with the amount of time and concentration it takes to rifle through and unfold the various supplements, find what I’m looking for without a search engine, and then read something with a wordcount longer than 500 in its entirety without any links to source material or comments from other readers to distract me…. ;)

Despite my lack of dexterity and slight attention dysfunction – I do still persevere with getting information in this way, albeit less often than I used to. Of course, this move away from the printed press doesn’t mean that I read any less information, or that I’m accessing it less often. In fact my information sources are far greater in number, infinitely more diverse and (too) frequently accessed by me than ever thanks to RSS, e-newsletters, blogs, Twitter, online journals, and regular Amazon deliveries of the latest books to take my fancy.

So… I’ve increased my digestion of online, interactive, peer to peer, user generated news and info alongside a scaled down consumption of the of printed stuff; but whatever printed articles and books I do choose to take the time out to read from this deluge of information - I’m reading them quite differently now.

The way I access and absorb information has become far more interactive. As I read, I am more actively re-evaluating the text than before, wondering what other people I know think of the material and (much to the irritation of certain print fanatics!) am constantly writing notes in the margin of printed articles/books and intermittently googling references as I go…wondering more than ever before ‘what does this actually mean in practice for me, for my work, friends family?’ etc.

So, bearing in mind all of the above, I hope you’ll better understand what I did when I received a copy of Tom Watson’s new book CauseWired last week and why it matters.

What I did when I received Tom Watson’s CauseWired last week … and was it worth it?

Unsurprisingly perhaps, I started reading from the beginning, marking the interesting sections in the margin (of which there were many) and then googling my favourite references and quotes in what proved to be a fascinating chronicle of the way in which social media and connectedness is changing the face of philanthropy and activism.

Tom W writes clear and interesting accounts of how regular people have used social media tools to highlight the ongoing issues they face in their community or that they care about across the globe. He disscusses the citizen-led coverage of New Orleans post Katrina, of how Darfur and cancer research centres came to be so well supported on Facebook, of how the face of political campaigning is being changed forever, and many other fascinating practical examples of social web tools in action. I googled all of this stuff, and proceeded to skip around a few chapters back and forth and skimmed some bits, went on to discuss the references with colleagues and IM’d a couple of friends about what I’d read. Then I joined the Facebook group and contacted the author on Twitter to let him know I’d be writing something up about his book on my blog.

Then I lent the book to someone else interested in online stuff – and I hope to get it back to read the bits where I left off to go googling… :) Then I watched some Obama videos on YouTube, joined a Darfur campaign group on Facebook and sent an awareness raising video to a few friends, and finally, I clicked online to donate some money to a small charity in Africa that I only heard of and keep in touch with through email/blogposts.

The book is a great resource for anybody who wants to better understand what all this web 2.0 stuff actually does, and what it means for ordinary people right across the globe when it comes to social change.

So, yes, it was worth reading; and what is more, it was worth passing on, so I wrote it up here on my blog.

Web 2.0 is changing everything we do in a whole variety of ways both online and crucially in our everyday lives -some of these shifts are more subtle than others and they even apply to a bog standard book review like this one.

So below, please find the rest of my web 2.0 book review, or in other words – check out these links for more info. What you choose to do with that info will be the interesting part… :)

Max Gladwell

Steve MacLaughlin

The Mongoose

David Bailey