Social change and economic impact are not things that can be extrapolated out of a piece of hardware. New technologies are unrealized potentials – building blocks whose eventual impact will depend on what is designed and constructed with them. The shape they ultimately take will be determined by our ability to visualize how they might be applied in new contexts.

From Nathan Rosenberg’s seminal 1995 McKinsey Quarterly article on Innovation’s uncertain terrain.

It’s probably the neatest summary of my attitude to technology and why without re-imagining the society that surrounds them, all the windmills, solar arrays and miracle-engineered crops won’t do the jobs our technologists and policy wonks think they will.

Since I’ve decided to spend the next three years training to be a doctor, it’s time to read the Hippocratic Oath. Here’s the classic version:

I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath and agreement:

To consider dear to me, as my parents, him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and, if necessary, to share my goods with him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art, without charging a fee;

and that by my teaching, I will impart a knowledge of this art to my own sons, and to my teacher’s sons, and to disciples bound by an indenture and oath according to the medical laws, and no others.

I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.

I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion.

But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts.

I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.

In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves.

All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal.

If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot.

Okay, so there are a few oddities in there but after 2,500 years that reads pretty good. A couple of points:

The doctor may be the oldest individualised profession we have. Taking ‘profession’ to mean any  job that requires specialist training and is bounded from the rest of society. This oath is a collections of values doctors profess before they’re allowed hit the big time. And in the act of professing their shared values, the oath forces doctors to consider their relationship with their future patients. In other words, doctors don’t get out of doctor school without at least once having to seriously think about everybody else in society and their relationship to them.

Imagine all ‘professionals’ had to stand up publicly and make this kind of empathy statement at least once in their life. Had to at least consider how their professional conduct over the next 40-50 years would impact everybody else.

Professional oaths for odious professions isn’t a new idea. But previous suggestions have missed the point. The value of the Hippocratic Oath isn’t that it lays out a set of rules (we have shared belief systems, social conventions and legislation for that) but that it forces junior doctors to empathise. And that’s a process we should all go through at least once in our lives.

Pic (cc) Alyssa A Miller

Saul Alinsky’s list of ideal attributes of the organiser/activist

• Curiosity
• Irreverence
• Imagination
• A sense of humour

Pic (cc) Final Gather

Ireland you messed up. You got greedy and now you owe big banks in Germany lots and lots and lots of money.*

Payback is tough, but maybe today’s Irish Times leader points to a solution. A post-Fukishima Germany is rethinking its energy mix. Ireland, you haven’t even fully thought out yours in the first place, but look west and you’ll see an answer both yourselves and Frau Merkel may find to your liking. What’s more, the interconnectors running energy off the island of Ireland and into mainland Europe are close to coming online which means you get to enter a market formally reserved for big boys and girls only.

Supply and demand, debt for wind. Easy no? Oh, and as an upside, you get to turn your desolate western ports into green jobs incubators. Sorta like Dong Energy is doing in Belfast. Double win, all across the Atlantic coast.

And here’s a bit of advice Ireland. Get this done quick. Because if you don’t, the smart German electricity companies are going to buy up your waters and do this anyway. Who do you think electrified Ireland in the first place?

* Let’s ignore for the sake of simplicity the complicit and profit making motives of German banks in lending money to greedy Irish developers in the first place.

-EDIT-

Irish ministers were in London this week discussing renewable energy sales. Very neighbourly of Britain to offer to subsidise (I’m guessing) cap-ex projects. Thanks chaps.

Earlier this month I started working with 38 Degrees, the member driven campaign organisation. Friday was my first day in the field. I travelled to Sheffield to meet some of our members themselves on their way to meet their MP, Nick Clegg. I was blown away. Whatever preconception I brought into job about who a typical 38 Degrees activist was firmly put in its place. I met 30 very different people with bound by a single goal, saving our NHS.  Hopefully I can bring something to the table, the people I met last week certainly did.

Photo (cc) chotda

A book per week for a year. Yeah maybe I’ll give that a go some time, when I have some time maybe. I had a whole bundle of excuses at the start of 2010, most of them still valid, but none of them any longer convincing. So four months into the year I’m still just about on track. Here’s the listing.

1. News from Nowehere, William Morris (1890). What if instead of turning right during the first half of the 20th century, the UK turned left. Rid itself of the monarchy and all forms of government and ascended into a communitarian utopia. Morris puts down the scissors and safety glue and answers just that question.
2. The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien (1940). Alice in Wonderland with whiskey, porter and bicycles. Genius.
3. The European Union as a Leader in International Climate Change Politics, R. K. W. Wurzel and James Connelly (2011). Okay, back to reality with a bang. If the EU can be described as reality. This is a book I have wanted for the past year, the ultimate primer on what the governance institutions of the EU are doing about climate change, along with chapters on major nation state players such as Germany, the UK and France.
4. Mao II, Don De Lillo (1991). If you’ve read nothing by De Lillo read Underworld. If you’ve read Underworld go get Mao II. Typically “Great American” in its vantage point, De Lillo takes two of that continent’s most enigmatic artists, J.D. Salinger and Andy Warhol, and uses them as inspiration for a contemplation on individualisation and the crowd at the end of the 20th century.
5. The Story of a Hedgeschool Master. Eugene Watters (1971). Educating catholic children was illegal in 17th century Ireland. This didn’t stop the emergence an estimated 8,000 hedgeschools, which are exactly what they sound like. This is the story of such a school and its European trained teacher.
6. How to Win Campaigns, 2nd ed, Chris Rose (2010). Chris did a lot of work with us at 10:10. You can take or leave his approach to value based campaigning, but there’s lots here of value to campaigners or indeed anyone working with public opinion.
7. Chasing the Flame, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Samantha Power (2008). Speaking of change, Sergio was a guy who made a difference in a big way. Total hero who one suspects was not your typical UN aid worker.
8. Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. David McKay (2009). Solid numbers on where the UK’s energy demand is and where that demand could be met if we were to go all renewable.
9. State of Fear, Michael Crichton (2004). A slightly less believable thriller than Jurassic Park.
10. White Shroud. Poems 1980 – 1985. Allen Ginsberg (1986).
11. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (1913) James Joyce. “If only we knew”, the refrain repeated across Ireland as Catholic abuses were uncovered throughout the Eighties and Nineties. Seems like Joyce was well aware of the huge amount of power
12. Poke the Box. Seth Godin (2011). Godin sold this e-book for $1 if you bought before the release date. Great model, great value and one important lesson; your idea is nothing until it ships.
13. The Net Delusion. How not to Liberate the World. Evgeny Morozov (2010). Morozov urges his readers away from a reductionist viewpoint that would give Twitter and Facebook credit for Arab revolutions this Spring. But in doing so he’s guilty of employing plenty of technocratic reductionist arguments himself. Which is a shame, because this is one of those books that could truly be labeled “important”.
14. Communication Power. Castells (2009). A great follow-up to Morozov and one which illustrates just how important a role our communications systems play in shaping and aggregating power in society. To change society we need to understand it, this book’s going to help.
15. Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure. Des Wilson (2011). Three reasons to read: 1) Wilson was one of the originators of the single issue campaign in the mid-sixties. 2) Wilson created and saw success on a huge number of campaigns over four decades. 3) Oh, and he was also a key protagonist in the SDP, Liberal Party merger. He doesn’t often admit fault but provides interesting background nevertheless.
16. The Golden Notebook. Doris Lessing (1962) currently reading…

I’ll update this as I go through the year. And I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on the books themselves. So if you have an opinion, or a suggested book, let me know.

That was fun. A few months of hard work, lots of new friends made all over the world and a tonne of cash raised for non-profits doing some good work. Thanks Twestival Local. But before consigning the project to the filing cabinet, let me quickly consider some of Twestival’s more interesting attributes.

Twestival may be many things, but primarily Twestival is a network, a Latourian actor network even. It is made up of people and concepts and held together astonishingly by a large number of narrow but elastic paths/relationships on Twitter. Maybe on some other lesser social networks too. Twestival displays the classic characteristics of a network; it’s distributed (simultaneously globally, locally), it is robust (knock out one city, the rest continue unaware) and it is scalable (expansion and contraction do require relatively little resource overhead).

Look, I knew all of this before working on Twestival but actually experiencing it work was pretty special. I can’t overstate the value those Twitter paths played in management and information dissemination. Of course email and Google Docs and Skype were part of the toolkit, but day-to-day when something had to be done fast, and when exciting a volunteer as well as spreading a message was crucial, then Twitter was the medium of choice. Twestival didn’t happen without it.

Where does Twestival go next? I don’t know, ask @amanda. That’s not so important as where some of these network management techniques go. I’m going to let Manuel Castells bring the party:

Networks are complex structures of communication constructed around a set of goals that simultaneously ensure unity of purpose and flexibility of execution by their adaptability to the operating environment.

Sounds just like Twestival and indeed lots of other campaigns. Maybe it’s time we conceived some of our campaigns using a paradigm of networks rather than in the classic Euclidian manner encompassing, as it does, a start point (campaign launch) and end point (win/loss), typically in two dimensions with one axis denoting the all too quick passing of time.

What do we gain from a network approach? I’ll give one benefit right now; people. For many campaigns, finding, organising and activating volunteers is a tough job. We have to spend valuable time seeking out those who are engaged, receptive to action, capable of action, willing to spread our message and so much more. Aspects of network theory as proscribed by Castells and Yochai Benkler, may help us out here. Certainly Castells would have it that in the networks, where innovation is a valuable commodity, the innovators become apparent quickly. That for me was the beauty of Twestival. Innovators coming to the fore, engaging, taking the project framework and iterating.

So two jobs now for campaign (network) organisers. 1) Be aware, you are creating networks, not a-to-b routes. 2) Figure out how to find the innovators. Both of these warrant follow up posts.

Photo (c) TwestivalTunis on Flickr

When were you last inspired by something? I mean real inspiration, not just the hazy feeling of empathy towards some distant cause or impressive endevour. The way soundtracks are “inspired by” movies and shampoo scents “inspired by” forest fragrances .

I’m writing about  the type of inspiration that makes the hairs stand up on the back of our neck. No really, I mean actually stand up. That makes us not just sit up and think, but  that changes the outcome of those yes/no decisions that slowly add up to our lifetimes.

Doesn’t happen very often does it? So we should pay attention when it comes our way. Because inspiration that is not followed by action doesn’t inspire anyone, and perhaps real inspiration is the ultimate viral message.

So when was the last time you were inspired by something, really inspired? Got it in the front of your mind, good, now, go do something amazing about it.

Looks like the first battle in the war to control the unfolding nuclear narrative has been won by the incumbents, the nuclear lobby. If CJR is to be believed they’ve set the table from which the media is now working, in the US at least.

The term “nuclear renaissance” has been used to characterize the current state of the industry in a number of stories this week concerning U.S. policy in the wake of Japan despite this lack of construction. The suggestion of a renaissance, though, stems from the idea that loan guarantees for nuclear in the Clean Energy Act, combined with a new preference for “greener” nuclear options over greenhouse-damaging coal energy, have put a number of new nuclear reactor projects in the pipeline. Thus, the “renaissance” of this sixties/seventies favorite technology. The press is now asking if events in Japan might have changed the course of that rebirth. But they’re not necessarily questioning the nature of the rebirth itself.

What does this mean?

via Japan’s Quake and Political Fallout : CJR.

Clay Shirky on the Middle East. He admits over-egging the social media influence omelette but more credit to him for it. Then he gets into it. Here’s the pay-off:

“Governments have systematically overestimated access to information,” Shirky said.

“They’ve also systematically underestimated access to each other. Access to conversations among amateurs is more politically inspiring than access to information. Governments are afraid of synhronised groups, not synchronised individuals.

via SXSW 2011: Clay Shirky on social media and revolution | Technology | guardian.co.uk.