NESTA Connect

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.

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.

Dealing in more than one currency

I remember after a relatively lazy lunch some years ago, asking a friend of mine who worked at the Bank of England what this thing money really was.  After the initial look of alarm in his eyes, normal service resumed and, being a solid economist, a solid economist's answer is what I got.  Somewhat unsatisfied, I then perused the rather fun Bank museum but to no avail for my question remained: what currency truly motivates our actions?

While the term online transaction may conjure up images of frozen Paypal screens and shoes which looked good on screen but give you blisters on the street, let me use it to refer to the motivation behind interacting in online communities, be that the blogosphere, social networks or whatever.  The intention behind this transaction is rarely clearcut but there appears to be two main contributions.  One is the wish to share and connect.  The other is the desire to be seen.

Together these two factors constitute whuffie, the currency introduced in Cory Doctorow's cult hit Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. 

Tara Hart in an excellent recent post on this topic clarifies whuffie when she says that:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

But does working in this kudos or gift economy get you fed?  Tara says oh yes it does, and is confident that as the value of online communities continue to grow and evolve this can only be more and more the case.  In fact, she is so confident that November will see the publication of her new book on this very topic. 

In the next few years, I believe the ability to deal in multiple currencies in a consistent and integral way will become an increasingly key skill for fruitful 21st century living.  Money, time, carbon, whuffie and attention all have their value and their place, but to over-emphasise one to the exclusion of the others can limit our view and therefore our capacity for innovation.

PS Guess how much it costs to visit the Bank of England's museum? 

TBL and events, dear boy, events

It all came and went in a bit of a blur in the end.

Sir Tim Berners Lee came to Nesta yesterday to talk about the Future of the Web, joined by Charlie Leadbeater (Author) and Andy Duncan (Channel 4). The webcast is available here. I think he's the most important person we've had at Nesta in the 18 months. Nobody else has done more for innovation or collaboration in my view. And yet he was so down to earth yet clearly very passionate about his subject even though he must talk about it publically nearly every day.

It also formed the launch of a project which we are supporting called the Web Science Research Initiative. It quite rightly seeks to study the web as a complex system in it's own right. It's at a vague but exciting stage right now and feel excited about the prospect of being part of it.

I didn't particularly enjoy the event in the end, mainly as I was somewhat preoccupied with observing other peoples thoughts via the twitter backchannel. For me, incorporating twitter was a partially successful experiment and one we can build on, but I'd rather be listening in future. I was however rather delighted to be able to ask a question on behalf of a chap in Iceland.

Others have criticised the panel and discussion format, however I think it's always a very tricky balance between the big themes and big name speakers (which draw people in) and the more detailed discussion and intimacy that we also want. In restricting Tim's talk, we aimed to give more time for discussion but in hindsight I think some people, myself included, would prefer to have just basked in the presence of a great innovator and heard more from him without interruption. However it was, as with everything else, an experiment, from which we will learn continue to play around with.

Tim said something about not underestimating the potential of humanity connected, and it is that very un-british, ambitious and optimistic note upon which I'd prefer to focus on.

Our hopes and fears for the future of the web

Come 2gether08 right now

I really enjoyed 2gether08 last week. A festival focussed on exploring the positive social potential of technology. The buzz was palpable and it was great to be involved and participate. Steve Moore has an uncanning knack for collecting interesting people and bringing them together. I don't know how he does it and I suspect he probably doesn't either but we can learn a lot from simply bringing together a smart and passionate group of people, and creating the space for them to collaborate. For those who missed it or want to get a flavour of what it was all about, take a look at some of the various videos/content expertly documented by David Wilcox and others here, http://2gether08.com/. Let's build on this momentum.

NLab Social Networks are no 'Moore'

I really enjoyed the nlabs conference on Thursday and thanks to Sue and the team for convening such an interesting crowd.

I was finally able to get off my chest about how social networks are starting to fulfil some of the fuctions that traditionally made cities great, such as the random interactions on city streets that we use to continually learn and modify our behaviour. Start of a longer conversation there I hope.

I think that online social networks are particularly useful for building relationships, not with people you know well already, but rather with people you don't know well yet, such as people you meet at conferences for example. And it's the 'strength of weak ties' that social networks enable that stimulate more interaction and ultimately innovation.

It was good to talk about some of these themes with a new crowd too. I was amazed that when I did the 'who knows Steve Moore test' that there were only a handful of Moorites in the audience. I kind of take it for granted these days in social media circles that they'll know Steve but there we go.

Anyway, all the videos and presentations will be available here pretty soon and worth skimming through, in particular Ken, who was on fine form I thought, but all contributions were really good.

Battle of the Brands

Noah Brier has recently set up a new site called Brand Tags that does what it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what others felt about Pepsi and a stack of other brands, you can find out by looking at its tag cloud.

More fun, though, is the Battle Mode - the idea that some brands are stronger than others. Thanks to his innovative use of web 2.0 technology, we have a collaborative (and user-generated) brand ranking.

Hyper Island and Dare

A surprisingly recurrent question that I find myself asking about creative innovation at NESTA is "How do they do it in Sweden?". The Swedes seem to have a track record in good innovation practice.

So when Skillset launched their excellent Media Academy programme, which aims to nurture creative people for the new media sector, they drafted in Mattius Hanson from the wonderful Hyper Island.

I'm glad to say that the UK (notably Scotland) can hold its own too with Dare to be Digital having an equally successful record of getting talented people into industry - this time in games.

2 steps to a small and connected world

There was an interesting article here in the FT yesterday about geographic context providing the next generation internet, and there is already a lot of serious cash pouring in that particular direction as described in the article.

However my question is, will that be enough? This query is triggered because I'm also currently reading finally Duncan Watt's now quite old book 6 degrees of separation where he describes something that had been puzzling people interested in networks for  a while, which they describe as the small world paradox.

Let me see if I can describe this as I understand it. By taking one step and then another, can never get you further than taking 2 steps (see the picture of the triangle for a mathematical illustration of this same point). However in network theory this is exactly what can happens. 2 steps through a network (or 2 degrees of separation) can take you very far indeed. The best way to describe this is if you have 2 friends who you know through very different circumstances who you don't think would have anything in common. So 2 people who are potentially very different (and therefor far apart in their own social networks), are actually very close - in fact just 2 steps removed because of their affliation with you!

The logical leap here is that people usually connect with people they are similar to, however they also a) use a couple of different criteria to determine how people are similar such as geography AND occupation and b) people tend to emphasise similarities over differences. And it's these conditions that make the world small, and therefore also searchable. If you use just one criterion, i.e. just geography, the network is very large and unsearchable. It's also worth noting that if you use too many categories to label nodes in a network it becomes overly fragmented and again unsearchable.

Which brings me back to the FT article - geographic search is great and important but not enough in itself, so the wise bucks will go towards creating content and networks that are categorised and searchable by several but not too many different contexts.

Innovation Edge - formal and informal conversations

We've got 3000 people registered to come to our annual conference called innovation edge next Tuesday. There are lots of interesting speakers but as has been mentioned many times before, the traditional speaker/audience format of big conferences doesn't make the most of the knowledge and networks of the attendees.

People have been experimenting with open space formats in recent years which is great but not right for such a big event i don't think. Also, sometimes we simply want to hear what people have to say. I'm looking forward to Tim Berners Lee in particular, even through it's via a video link up.

So facilitating some real dialogue at an event like this is tricky given the scale of the thing. However we are going to try and experiment which I've seen work really well at smaller events. Namely we've set up a Twitter account specifically for the conference and will try to participate in some conversations between the attendees live, and I'm the shmuck who agreed to do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm really happy to try it but I'm not quite sure how it will work and am a little worried about insufficient connectivity at the venue, but nothing ventured nothing gained I guess.

Anyway the feed will appear on this blog so you can keep an eye on what's being talked about. We will also be live blogging here. Else, sign up to Twitter, if you haven't already done so, follow @innovationedge, and join the conversation if you fancy trying it.

Lights...camera...social action!

For those of you interested and who haven't seen it already, have a look at the social innovation camp film available here. It's less than 10 minutes and gives a much better taste of what it was all about than any words can convery. As I've said previously it was a great experiment and one that appears to have been talked about a great deal already (e.g. here and here  and here) and I really hope it grows and goes from strength to strength.   

Are online social networks the new cities?

You may have seen that Nesta is planning it's forthcoming Innovation Edge conference which is shaping up to be a really interesting day.  In preparing for the event I casually mentioned to the organisers that it might be interesting to have a session on the topic of social networks as the new cities. This casual comment has now morphed into a great line up of speakers including Michael Birch (Bebo), Richard Leese (Manchester City Council), Jon Gisby (Ch4), Inkie (Street Artist and SEGA) and Charlie Leadbeater (We-think Author).

The session is getting very popular so I'm getting a little nervous about how the themes we should and could debate and discuss. So I thought I'd ask readers of this blog if there were particular points of view of questions you might have for any of the panelists that we can feed in to the preparation for this session?

My take, for what it's worth, is that cities have traditionally been the financial, social and creative of the world. However technology now enables new centres of gravity to form online and we now carry our 'communities' on the devices in our pockets? I think this is profoundly impacting on the way we connect, interact and collaborate and will fundamentally change our cities and traditional social hubs. Obviously the death of cities is far from being realised with most cities growing rather than contracting, so we still crave the interaction and benefits that close proximity affords. And yet many people complain that we don't know our neighbours and our communities are increasingly isolated. With our expanding and increasingly global social networks, what do you think this will mean socially, politically and geographically in 5, 10 or even 20 years time?

These are all huge themes and I'm not expecting complete answers, but I'd really welcome any thoughts and ideas you might have that we could pose to the panel to discuss and debate at the event. BTW, the event will be webcast so if you can't make it you will still be able to see what happens.

Organising without organisations

I attended an RSA lunchtime lecture last week with Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and co-hosted by Matthew Taylor of the RSA and Nico McDonald of Spy Media. The delegates were a who's who of the London internet scene who had rushed out of the lunch breaks to attend and unfortunately there wasn't a proper opportunity afterwards to catch up properly. He started out with a great statement as follows:

"web technology is becoming boring enough to be socially interesting."

i.e. the technology (blogs, wikis, social networks, email etc) is now useable enough to be adopted by lots of people to use it in new and interesting ways. He cited numerous examples of groups forming outside traditional public or private institutions to instigate change whether it is holding HSBC to account on it's promise of no bank charges to students, or to a flashmob in Minsk, Belarus, arranging to all meet in the central square and eat ice cream, which was sufficiently threatening to the authorities that the police broke up this subversive activity!

His basic premise in the book is that informational and coordination tools are so cheap and easy that groups and organisations can thrive without traditional institutions. The book covers familiar territory in a readable and interesting way, but isn’t really new per se, however in person Clay is very smart enthusiast for the new networked economy and good value.

I was interested in where he felt change would be greatest: in corporations or governments (in public or private sectors)? He was diplomatic in his response and obviously said that both are changing profoundly however he implied that the public sector is less used to people voting with their feet/wallets like the private sector is and therefore would find changing more difficult.

He finished by saying that the pace of change is so rapid that there is a social imperative to try different approaches to organising without organisations. For me this vindicated the approach we have taken with NESTA Connect which is testing open and networked organisational models in both the public and private sectors. I'd welcome further good examples of interesting open and networked institutions/organisations, or approaches or models that we could and should be testing to stimulate innovation through collaboration.

And the audience takes over....

Building on what happened at the We-think event last week you may have seen that the audience took over when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was interviewed last Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive festival – see here for what happened. An interesting follow up post here by Steven Berlin on the best way to gauge the tone in a room without technology is to crack a few jokes. 

We-think: you are what you share

  Last night Nesta hosted the launch of Charlie Leadbeater's latest and long awaited book 'We-think' . The evening also featured the self proclaimed 'antichrist of silicon valley', Andrew Keen, author of last years 'Cult of the Amateur'. The two speakers were set up to occupy opposing ends of the debate around the impact of the web on society, economy and politics. However the discussion was remarkably agreeable, but that’s not to say they both agreed; far from it.

I won’t go over their arguments in detail rather will pick out a couple of the points which I found most interesting in the context of many of the things we are grappling with as part of NESTA Connect.

Charlie’s perspective is that we are moving from a world where ‘you are what you own’ to ‘we are what we share’. His thesis is nicely summarised in this little youtube video for a quick summary we-think and reminds me of a little of the excellent The Machine is Us/ing Us. He goes on to argue that the impact of the web will spread much further than media and entertainment and will have significant impact around 70% of the economy, and interestingly the biggest impact will be on the developing world where technology will allow millions of people to become participators. In terms of the pace of change, it could be remarkably slow, as much as 50 years for the culture to shift in many organisations. There are many issues yet to be resolved but on balance the impact on freedom, equality and democracy will be beneficial.

Andrew paints Charlie as a utopian (in the best possible taste). He stated that the web encourages anonymity and allows people not to take responsibility for their actions. He also had few kind words for people such as Chris Anderson, who he says have embraced the internet as an excuse for doing away with the state, absolute free market, doing away with State. He also controversially, states that academics are perfectly placed to be the risk takers of the future. The tenure system lends itself towards inward thinking but challenge is to lend itself to more speculative thinking. He argues that Universities might be the front line of the new battle and is the perfect institution to be turned upside down.

The most interesting part of the discussion for me was that the web, a platform that lends itself to sharing and arguably the 1960s greatest legacy, is now the platform for modern commerce which is based on individual ownership and competition. So the key challenge will be how will big organisations, whether private or public, will adapt to this collaborative world? Interestingly the debate around the impact of the web in the US tends to be mostly focussed upon the economics, but the debate last night focussed as much on the social and political implications. The consensus from both speakers was that organisations are critical and require a core engine that makes the rules and combines both top down and bottom up solutions.

So in conclusion, it was an interesting and thought provoking evening with lots of meaty issues to chew over. My own views are obviously more closely aligned with we-think than cult but Andrew made some interesting and perhaps deliberately controvertial statements, only some of which I disagreed with. For me, this reinforces the sentiment that concencus creates echo not bandwidth and that diverse or extreme perspectives are a good thing. With that in mind we should actively encourage and set up more debates and discussions  along these lines. What unlikely pairing could and should we get next time?

Emergence and 21st century cities

I've just finished reading 'Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software' by Steven Johnson which was published in 2001 and most of the technology related stuff is obviously outdated, but the whole concept of order or patterns emerging from complexity is fascinating and resonates strongly with the concept of collaboration that we are pursuing through NESTA Connect.

There is a chapter on what we can learn from ants - this goes over territory we are have been influenced by and exploring already with swarmteams (see here) but the most interesting section for me was on cities. This takes me back to a statement I heard a while back staying that social networks are the new cities, which we'll be debating at our Nesta conference and the NLabs conference in the summer.

Berlin argues that cities, like ants, allow the exchange and storage of masses of information through the interaction of it's inhabitants. The development of cities are analogous to phase transitions in nature where an input of energy leads to a remarkable change in state of matter (e.g. liquid to gas, through heating for example). He describes the analogous injection of energy leading to phase transition in cities, first the heavy wheeled plow, then crop rotation, which both enabled more efficient agriculture and subsequently much larger connurbations.

He then describes in some detail the next major injection of 'energy' into cities by the industrial revolution, typified best by Manchester's the world's first industrialised city. It's population exploded 10 fold from just 25,000 in 1773 to over 250,000 in just 75 years, without being formally consitituted as a city. It was finally recognised as a city in 1853 after the massive population explosion had happened. However, whilst this short period was clearly explosive and chaotic, the city grew with a tremendous amount of order or self-organising clusters without top down leadership.

And of course, bringing us up to date, we are now in the next major injection of 'energy' into our cities, namely through the web and digital world which he argues is having a similarly huge impact on our cities which we are only just beginning to understand the social, policital and economic ramifications. Industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate towards physical centres of ideas generation (i.e. cities) but now we also exchange a vast amount of information and ideas using technology, leading to virtual and distributed clusters which are changing the way interact and share knowledge.

Greater Manchester has of course undergone an exciting and remarkable transformation in the last couple of decades building upon a range of strong influencing factors from an amazing music scence from the late 1970's onwards, to the IRA bomb in 1996, to the Commonwealth Games in 2002, to the creation of the largest campus university in the UK formed in 2004, to the relocation of large parts of the BBC to Salford in a couple of years. It will be fascinating to watch this next 'phase transition' in Manchester, and all other regions and regions, in response to these new online social networks and we are currently focussing our attention here (more on that soon).

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee, the godfather of the internet, is setting up the Web Science Research Foundation (which we also hope to work with) to research and understand and influence the social, policital and economic ramifications of this new transition. Exciting times.

Social Innovation Campers

I'm really pleased to showcase a new programme called Social Innovation Camp , taking place on April 4th-6th, that Nesta are supporting in partnership with the Young Foundation. The idea came to us from Paul Miller (School of Everything), Dan McQuillan (Make Your Mark) and Christian Ahlert (Open Business) inspired in part by Netsquared in the US. The event blurb is as follows:

What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out. In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

This feeds into a wider group of Connect projects we are developing and supporting around innovation clusters that harness the participatory culture of the web focusing upon the social or creative economies, and I'll post more on this again as this evolves.

"Entrepreneurs are artists armed with technology..."

"...and social networks are the new cities." Or at least so says Julie Meyer, founder of the First Tuesday network and now MD at Adriane Capital, at yesterday's grandly titled World Entrepreneurship Summit.

Sometimes the best conferences are the least well organised and the summit was certainly chaotic in both good and bad ways. Most on the discussion in the plenary talked about the challenge of combining social and commecial outcomes which musn't be seen as an either or decision. However the highlight was definitely Kevin Spacey who lit up the room and talked about his work at the old vic. He argued sincerely that arts are a necessity not a luxury in our society. He also talked about his own debt to his mentors and reminded the room not to "forget to send the elevator down no matter what level you are on."

A poorly attended yet fascinating breakout session asked whether the internet represents a new economy or not? The most interesting element of this discusion for me was of the art of unlearning (or re-learning).

Firstly JP Rangaswami of BT and the excellent blog confused of calcutta talked about an emerging we verses i culture, and that we have to unlearn 1000 years of history of becoming more individualistic and are now being forced to become more collaborative in order to survive and thrive. Also he talked about the need for creating business models around abundance rather than scarcity which was interesting.

Pat Kane, musician and author, followed and talked about how the music industry is unlearning too. It has gone full circle from it's live origins to making most money from selling recordings, and back to live business models again. Prince and Radiohead were both cited as major artists who have recently given music away for free and the bulk of their earnings coming from their concerts.

Madhuban Kumar discussed the implications for education were discussed given that the time you graduated from a 4 year computer science degree, arguably the first 3 years are obsolete! (My physics degree starting in 1992 presented modern physics as beginning in 1900!)

I guess if there is a common thread of all of the above, it is that adaptability is the key as always and needs to be instiled early through education, arts, business and policy. If we can instill that into our culture and society we will be onto something.

Cooperation Commons

“More people pooling more resources in new ways is the history of civilisation” – or so says Howard Rheingold who spoke at ‘Mass Collaboration’ last night at NESTA together with Mark Earls, author of Herd.

It was thoroughly enjoyable and informative evening – we covered a lot of ground from cooperation between hunter gathers to the global shift towards collaboration due to the increasing influence of non-western economies. And yet the whole evening felt light-hearted and fun, with a diverse and engaged crowd. It was my favourite event I’ve been involved with in my 10 months at NESTA and hopefully the start of an interesting new dimension to our work in developing NESTA Connect.

We could have filled the room several times over despite only minimal word of mouth promotion which is a tribute to the reputation of our speakers. Several people said to me beforehand that in meeting Howard, they were meeting a ‘hero’, and the same goes for me. Cooperation Commons is an amazing resource and has been a big influence on us in developing our work. There are lot’s of blog posts appearing today on the subject which is gratifying. Webcasts of the whole event (including a Mexican wave involving the entire audience) are on the NESTA website here.  Audio of both Mark and Howard's presentations are also available from here.

Mass Collaboration?

Mass communications, mass transportation, mass markets - how does the increasing participatory culture of the web affect human behaviour and human interactions? I have commented elsewhere that technology and globalisation have shrunk the planet to only 3 degrees of separation which sounds disarmingly small. But with a practically infinite number of combinations, the question is which path to take through the highly connected but labyrinthine networks? In an article about cyber crime this morning, the BBC's Today programme on Radio 4 referred to the internet rather predictably as the 'wild west'. Borrowing that analogy for a moment, who are the new cartographers of this new frontier?

To start to discuss some of these issues and to begin to lay out the tools, techniques and foundations, we are hosting an event ‘Mass Collaboration?’ on September 11th 2007 in London. I'm delighted to say that we will hear from Howard Rheingold and Mark Earls, two writers who examine and challenge traditional perceptions of mass behaviour change and cooperation. This fits closely with our objective to stimulate innovation through extreme collaborations. This event is intended as the start of a conversation on how to optimise the potential social impact of technology, and its impact on how we should think about mass collaboration for innovation in the UK and beyond. If you are interested and able to attend please register here. Please also let others know who may be interested and able to attending.

Networking not working

With our growing social networks, the concept of 6 degrees of separation is now hopelessly out of date. The web has increased the ease with which we can now stay in touch with more people than ever meaning that the real figure was calculated in 2002 to be more like 3.5 degrees of separation, and now the figure is almost certainly much less. The fact remains that it really is certainly a small world and it is getting smaller all the time.

In his book Linked, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi argues that scale-free networks pervade our world from the internet, to the metabolic network of protein-protein interactions inside cells, to the social ties that link networks of directors of Fortune 500 companies, to the transmition of Aids, to the network of Hollywood Actors. These networks have a number of peculiar traits from the importance of hubs or connectors, to being very robust and resistant to random errors but susceptible to targeted or malicious attack. Interestingly Barabasi argues that the 20th Century was about reducing the world into its constituent parts, whereas the 21st century is about putting them back together again. With our focus on new unexpected of extreme collaborations, I am hoping this is one area where NESTA Connect can make a difference.

There is only one letter that differentiates 'networking' from 'not working' and the boozy networking lunch is often mocked as a jolly. And yet it is often said that it is not know-how but know-who that really makes the difference. Ron Burt, the Chicago based sociologist shows that interacting with the usual suspects leads to recycling of old ideas whereas having just a few weak ties to a number of different clusters or areas of expertise can have a marked impact on the number and quality of ideas, leading to new innovations.

I would estimate that I have 7 or 8 key clusters of friends/contacts with whom I stay in touch without too much effort but I have no idea how these networks interlink or how big a network that could potentially plug me into. The challenge is, of course, finding the right path through these networks to achieve your objective and as with any new terrain, it would really help to have some kind of map. This is the one thing that puts most people off networking as it can appear random and pointless.

How about as a first step, we ask nicely that the clever and cash rich people at Google and facebook or linkedin mashup their databases to show how our personal and professional networks actually connect. Now that would be worth a few pence on the share price I'm sure.