NESTA Connect

Collaborative Models in the Film Industry

I love film festivals, and the London Film Festival is one of my favourites.

This year, NESTA is sponsoring a London Film Festival Fringe event, called Power to the Pixel. Director Liz Rosenthal describes the event as looking “ahead to where the power of the internet and digital platforms can offer new opportunities for those creators and companies that can no longer effectively function within the old film business model”.

Of course, there are plenty of traditional film businesses trying to understand these opportunities also.

Showcased at Power to the Pixel were some of the most innovative creative and business tools from around the world. Here are some of them:

PlaceVine – brings content creators and brand owners together to create sponsored content. Check out Shane Meadows Somers Town for an example. Would you guess that his short film was fully funded by Eurostar?

M dot Strange – talked about how to make a $70 million (style) feature film in your bedroom, and then show the world how to do it for yourself via YouTube. He uses his social network of admirers as zombie extras who then virally market the movie. And then they subtitled it into 17 languages. For free.

Wreck a Movie – gives film-makers a platform to crowd-source their own production using social networks. Timo Vuorensola explained how he and some friends went from space cadets in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning to selling war bonds to fund animated feature that satirises Moon-based Nazis in Iron Sky.

All of the talks will be up on the Power to the Pixel website soon.

Embracing Chaos & Connectivity

I recently watched an excellent documentary on BBC4 called 'high anxieties: the mathematics of chaos' (still available on iplayer) which essentially tells 3 interwoven histories over the last 100 years or so, namely:

1. Chaos theories in mathematics
2. Economic theories and models
3. Climate change theories and models

To cut a long story short, the main message is that  we have repeatedly make the mistake of believing that the world behaves like a big pinball machine with predictable causes and effects. However in reality, mathematics and science include inbuilt chaotic behaviour which we generally choose to ignore as it's too unsettling.

More specifically, what the 3 histories show us is the following:

• The is potential for chaotic behaviour almost everywhere
• the more connected a system is, The more likely that chaotic behaviour occurs that system (be it mathematical, economic, climate etc)
• The more you drive/push/grow a system, the more likely chaotic behaviour will occur.

Now I can't see our global connectivity decreasing any time soon; in fact I think it can only increase. Therefore assuming chaos is generally something we strive to avoid/manage in economics or our climate, this suggests to me that we need to rethink our attitude to relentless growth.

Ever the optimist I believe we need to embrace this ambiguity and chaos, not ignore it, and be more wary of certainty. Perhaps we should learn to live with ambiguity from unexpected sources such as artists, the slow movement and mathmeticians. But then again i'm not certain.

Extreme collaboration take 2: Resistance

What do you get when you bring together a film maker and actor (Gael Garcia Bernal, Motorcycle Diaries & Babel etc), a human rights campaign director (Colm Ó Cuanacháin, Amnesty International) and a supposed expert on web technology (err...that would be me then apparently), all ably facilitated by Wai Mun Yoon, a digital strategist and all round renaissance man?

The answer is a great little event yesterday called Resist which sought to understand how communications networks shift the way we understand poverty and our power to resist its causes?

The outcome was a great discussion which also involved a fair few people chipping in questions from the web, all feeding in to the development of a film with Gael and filmmaker Marc Silver are producing and due to come out in 2010.

It was an unusual gig for me, and different to what I usually get involved in, but one I enjoyed all the more so because of the different perspectives that fed into the discussion, and not the usual suspects to talk about these topics. The webcast is available here if you want to take a look. I hope to be involved going forward and urge you to take a look too and get involved too.

By the way, this post builds upon a previous post on this blog here, which seeks to illustrate what we mean by extreme collaboration which underpins all of our work here at Nesta.

What is the right size to thrive in a recession?

One of my favourite observations of the last couple of days comes from James Cherkoff who runs his own small business who asks:

"What do I say the next time my commercial bank asks for a solid business plan?"

Pot calling kettle, and all that. Anyway, the current crisis really demonstrates how everything and everybody is linked to everything else. And in particular that trust (between large financial institutions) is the bedrock upon which the 21st century networked economy is all about.

So our economic fate is increasingly intertwined with others and we are experiencing our first real networked global recession as Charlie Leadbeater says. This obviously means we have to find £400bn pounds when our banks get too creative, but it also creates plentiful opportunities if we know how to embrace them. So, ever the optimist, I am wondering whether, can we turn this to our advantage given the diversity and connectedness of the UK.

Desperation is the father of necessity (with necessity being the mother of invention) and it may well be the smaller agile businesses who can find the bigger opportunities in the next 12 months, though obviously the corporates ought to find it easier to whether the storm i.e. Small is Beautiful but Big is Powerful.

The crisis is a fascinating reminder for large swathes of the population (and estate agents) in how markets can go down as well as up, but more importantly is possibly a once in a generation opportunity to really radically redesign and rethink our politics, economics, and society for the better.

Over-Specialisation Nation!

Is it is possible to become too specialised?

The dramatic events of last week on the financial markets are one example how, I believe, specialisation can cause major problems. The ever increasing (so called) 'sophistication' of financial instruments have become so complicated that they can't be understood by enough people, certainly not the financial regulators, and therefore the products that end up having no bearing on genuine economic reality, leading to the recent bubble and subsequent credit crunch.

Similarly, I have long felt frustrated at specialists in academia or industry who are so narrowly focused on their narrow niches that it is practically impossible to understand what they say and what they are working on, and only a handful of other people can even question them let alone understand them.

Don't get me wrong. Without question we desperately need well trained and educated specialists who understand complex issues in great detail, be it financial or philosophical. The world is a complicated place, and I'm not for one moment advocating a retreat to creating renaissance men and women, however appealing a romantic notion that may be. It's simply not possible for individuals to be sufficiently knowledge about a breadth of issues or disciplines as it once was.

However I think when swathes of business and academia get so specialised and riddled with jargon that they become practically incomprehensible, then I think we've gone too far and need to take a step back. I think businesses, academia and governments need to create more space for specialists to interact with larger groups of people across traditional boundaries. This is what we try to do with our NESTA Connect programme. As I've said previously this space might be provided by talented people who span multiple disciplines themselves, or organisations that act as intermediaries.

This excessive specialisation is a global phenomenon, and yet the UK is interesting in that a) it has one of the most specialised education systems in the world, and yet b) the opportunities open to graduates of a particular discipline tend to be wider here compared with Germany, and possibly the rest of Europe, for example.

So in conclusion, I believe we should no longer tolerate the uber-specialist who talks to no-one but their immediate micro peer groups. Else we run the risk of losing the ability to discuss, debate and question other people, leading to the ludicrous situation that precipitated the recent crash in financial markets.

Video and final stab at social networks and cities

Readers of this blog or attendees at Nesta's recent events will have heard me, or others talk about the theme of 'social networks as the new cities'.

I don't intend restart this discussion again in detail but for anybody who is interested, find here a video of a talk I gave earlier in the summer at the NLab conference in Leicester, on this topic.

It's something of a stream of consciousness exploration of the subject but hopefully gives a flavour of my point of view. Namely that cities arn't just simply analogous to social networks, but rather some of the functions that cities provide (proximity, economies of scale, random interaction etc) are now increasingly being provided by social networks.

And most importantly, we are only just beginning to see the impact on our cities and places which will be profoundly impacted by the web, just as they have been historically by other disruptive technologies.

Anyway, enough on that, but as always I'd be interested in any thoughts and feedback as ever.

PS. Thanks again to Sue Thomas for curating the event and inviting me to attend.

Convergence of Media Production

Broadcasters have for years now been talking about developing content across different platforms.

When it works well - BBC's coverage of the Olympics, Channel 4's Big Art Project - it is wonderful.

But TV producers and digital production companies have traditionally faced a key barrier to innovation. Their differing business models, ways or working and the issue of intellectual property ownership have meant that collaboration to produce convergent content is more difficult than it ought to be.

NESTA teamed up with PACT to sort it out, and they have produced some useful legal templates and a guide to allow firms to contract more easily to work together.

What we'd like to know is whether they can be used outside of these media sectors. If relevant to your business, please feel free to try them and let us know?

Guide to collobaorating

Jon

Artificial dualities, digital yoga and the embodied web

I call it artificial.  Clay Shirky calls it "an accident of history".  We're talking about the distinction made between online & offline.  The other common terms for this pair is virtual & real or (dare I even say it) cyberspace & meatspace.  Whatever the language used however, the problem I have is not with the words per se but with the split itself.

Differentiate then integrate.  For any innovation in whatever field to really become pervasive, it pretty much has to follow this simple three word formula.  If you're reading this blog, more likely than not, you've lived through the period where the internet and web technologies have differentiated and now we are in the first real phase of integration.  If you're not sure what differentiate means, the simple test is to remember life before Facebook.  If you're not sure what integrate means, the test for that is to remember life without email. See!

This is why Clay talks of making a distinction between online and offline as an accident of history.  No ten year old uses this language because their digital life is conditioned so early.  Show me the person today who considers a phone call a virtual experience.  But back in the day, holding and speaking into a piece of metal resulting in the voice of your grandmother who lives in Idaho must have been a pretty ethereal experience.

The reality of our lives contain all experience, be that spent reading this post, slaying a demon on World of Warcraft or having a coffee with a new friend.  By using stark binary dualities as virtual and real, we are distinguishing one as having more substance than the other.  This is separation and perhaps a disservice - our world probably has enough of that.  Let us consign this particular accident of view to history and instead move to a far more interesting problem.

A relationship that I am finding much more useful to explore is that between the non-binary pair of web and place.  Or to use an equivalent spiritual pairing, mind and body.  As a culture which has become ever more dependent on the intellectual faculties of mind since the Renaissance (thank you M. Descartes), our disconnection between mind and body has become increasingly acute.  In fact, the information economy in which most of us live pretty much does not require our bodies at all, much of the time we may as well be brains in vats.

The Sanskrit word yoga means union, for through its practices body and mind, though never ever really apart, are invited back into intimate relationship.  This can take effort, it certainly takes patience and commitment but the results are well worth it since they are harmony, peace, learning and a strength that can move mountains.

(Please excuse any contradiction but) There is danger in the web remaining a web-only phenomenon.  So what we need now is a digital yoga - the reconnection between web and place.  I call this the Embodied Web. Enough brains in vats.  Let's get integrating.

Thankfully of course this is inevitable. Thankfully of course this is already happening.  Alternate reality games, geo-social networking tools like Brightkite and everyone born in affluent circumstances since 1992 are all early examples of this artificial boundary becoming more and more blurred.  You'll probably be alive to see it dissolve completely.  Be excited.