Seven years ago John Xela and I started a label called Type.

To kick it off with the flat zero budget we had, we built a website more or less in a weekend.

Seven years later, that exact same website, bar a few alterations was still running, and John was understandably narked at my “I’m soooo busy” excuses about an update, so I sought to a appease him and build us a fancy new site.

I got a bit carried away and rebuild the entire thing from scratch in Ruby on Rails, and we now have a (purposefully not very) fancy new site.

Some nice things about it:

• You can listen to all of our albums for free, streaming via Soundcloud from the site.
• We’ve got new mixes and a monthly radio show planned. The first episode is up there now.
• The forum now works like it should, and you can set up your own profile on the site.
• The whole thing just feels a lot more 2009 and not so self-conscious.

Anyway - I’m pleased to finally have updated the site - it’s been a long time coming!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Help Me Investigate is a site that enables you to find out the answers to tough questions and investigate things that you think deserve the attention of many but aren’t things that your local or national newspaper would have the resources to check out.

It works by enabling easy collaboration with other people who also care about the same thing that you do:

I start an investigation on the site, say “Why was the tree outside my house cut down?” (something that really annoys me, but I don’t know how to find out).

Once I’ve started the investigation I get my own investigation area on the site and I can invite other people to be co-investigators. Over time, we each contribute small parts to a shared investigation area on the site, adding links, documents, articles, updates on conversations I’ve had with the council, and so on.

The end result is that someone with particular skills in dealing with the council could join in and say “Well I know Geoff has responsibility for trees, and I just spoke to him. Your best bet is to give Juliet at Active Tree Surgery a call on XYZ”, or someone else could make a Freedom of Information Request and post up the response on the site.

This is the kind of information that is not easy to find on the web but is very valuable, and with many people collaborating around a subject, each contributing in their own way, anyone could potentially get to the bottom of things that frustrate them.

The team

Paul Bradshaw, who’s idea this project was, has more on his blog, and talks about how the site is an example of a potential model for Slow Journalism, as well as providing a potential model for how investigative journalism could look in the future as newspaper revenues fall and fewer local and regional papers are able to do this kind of low-level investigation any more.

The third co-founder of ‘Help Me Investigate Team’ is Nick Booth, whose experience of working with people who are active within their local community means he has the hardest job - getting the site out to people who will find it most valuable and helping them to use it while we adjust it to suit everyone’s needs.

Heather Brooke, who instigated the high court campaign to get MPs second home allowances information into the public domain, joins us as our resident expert and will be on the site offering guidance, advice and suggestions for making investigations successful.

Paul Henderson is on hand to support the site’s small, but growing, community - answering questions, offering support, resolving disputes and whatever else emerges while we test it.

Hopefully we’ll be going into Public Beta in the next few weeks and I can say more, but suffice to say we’re really excited about this project and so are 4IP and Screen West Midlands who’ve funded the project so far.

My role in all of this is to turn a great idea into reality. No pressure then.

Developing the site

I’m a big advocate of Ruby on Rails, but I’m pragmatic and only use it appropriately. The great thing - it’s absolutely perfect for a project prototype of this kind. I emphasise prototype. We only have funds initially to see if we can make something work here - it’s experimental. So the best way to do that is using a rapid development framework and develop in an Agile way. I’d love to say I’ve been doing Test Driven Development, but actually it’s worked better using human testing rather than automated testing - I can’t find much documentation on using early user testing over sitting in an office and writing tests. Anyway…

With Help Me Investigate I seem to have found a beautiful combination of tools for rapid development. Here’s what I’m using:

• A Macbook - you no longer need a big, fancy computer or a local server for developing something like this.
• Ruby - comes pre-installed with the mac
• TextMate - I’ve never been a big fan of Dreamweaver and all of those development environments. Simple text-editing works best.
• Rails 2.3 - a beautiful MVC web development framework that has a steep learning curve but pays off with about your third project.
• Brightbox - a little bit expensive, but a high quality, lovely way to get Rails applications online relatively painlessly
• Passenger - Quite the revolution in getting rails applications online easily
• Subversion - Yes I know I should be using Git, but it comes pre-installed on Brightbox. This is where I store all of the code for the project as I’m working on it - when others collaborate we can use this code repository collaboratively, and it gets backed up to…
• Amazon S3 - Automated backups running nightly mean that if we suffered a catastrophic server failure it’s recoverable.
• Capistrano - a tool for ‘deploying’ websites that
• Firefox - a great web browser you may have heard of
• Web Developer Toolbar - a handy plugin to Firefox that gives you options for debugging the page’s CSS
• Firebug - a wonderful debugger if you’re doing Javascript
• YSlow - a tool by Yahoo that grades your site on how quick pages will download and tells you what you can do to fix it.
• Prototype - a javascript framework for doing AJAX/page effects (I’m also a fan of JQuery)
• Scriptaculous - easy animation and javascript page effects
• Attachment Fu - automatically scale images and host them on Amazon. Paperclip seems to be an improvement on some functionality but I haven’t used it on this project.
• HAML - This absolutely revolutionised the way that I structure pages. Rather than marking pages up in HTML you use simple tab formatting. Feels like writing haiku instead of code. Lovely.
• SASS - And on top of HAML this is a beautiful way to write page styles. It’s a meta-language that sits on top of CSS. Brilliant.
• Compass - And topping off SASS, Compass is a compiler that runs in the background as you work, writing out the CSS files. A wonderful find and I can see this getting popular very fast for web developers who want to write semantically sensible pages but using popular web frameworks, such as…
• YUI or Blueprint - two great web CSS frameworks that make building pages so much quicker. Compass has its own versions of these and other frameworks meaning you can use more semantic code styles but still benefit from the way they work
• Resources Controller - sketching out controllers in an MVC with common REST methods automatically added for you means some of my controllers consist of three lines!
• Asset Packager - squash your CSS and Javascript into one file each, making your pages load faster
• Community Engine - a great way to get a quick start with a community site. Yes - I have to trash loads of the code whenever I use it, and end up moving over to my own versions of the code but it gives a project a kick-start early on by handling common tasks - users, profiles, login, sessions, security, all the stuff you need on any multi-user site so you can concentrate on the stuff that matters. Ace.

There’s more - but maybe I should do this is as a talk at one of the many Birmingham meetup events. I’d love it if there were more people around using Rails in the area - it feels a bit lonely out here sometimes!

If you’d like to be part of the private beta, please fill out the form on the Help Me Investigate site.

Related posts:

1. Introducing Tweetlet - twitter for pregnancy Wouldn’t it be great if you could use Twitter...
2. What do you wish for in 2009? If you could wish for one thing in 2009,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A very quick but enlightening conversation with Charles Hunter that’s given me some exciting angles to take in my research. Thank you Charles and the guys from Mudlark who contributed to the conversation.

Here are the short idea-form notes from our conversation:

What relationship is there between chaos theory and serendipity?
Chaos theory as applied to the example of a cup of coffee with sugar in it.
 
Openness to serendipity enables serendipity
There is a mindset required to enable serendipity to occur, without it it will not.
 
Bandwidth of the brain
There is only a certain amount of information or opportunity that the human brain can handle without feeling overwhelmed. Could there be some kind of tool to enable us to ‘compress serendipity’? A toolbox for randomness?
 
Opportunity cost
In any situation where serendipity can occur, there will be an associated opportunity cost for following something that may be a dead end in search of something that may or may not occur. This is a dampening factor on serendipity occurring - opportunties are closed down by other factors.
 
Cognitive load
If cognitive load is too high (you are too busy, too much information is coming to you) then this is also a dampening factor on the mindset required for serendipity to occur.
 
Selective awareness
If you are looking for something you will see it everywhere - is serendipity just an effect of this? Pattern recognition based on what you already have on your mind? The ‘isn’t that weird’ factor. My thoughts on this is that there is a blurred line between serendipity and coincidentality that needs to be sharpened to make the distinction between the results of random events and the occurence of those events.
 
Missing jigsaw-pieces
It is incredibly rare that something comes along fully-formed, anything usually must fit into something else to come to fruition.

Tags: serendipity, interview, charles, charleshunter, hunter, cognitive load, opportunit cost, openness, chaos theory

Related posts:

1. Getting a fix on Serendipity As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed...
2. Daedelus on Serendipity An interview with the musician Daedelus on the subject...
3. On Serendipity Thank you to everyone who helped me decide my...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

An interview with the musician Daedelus on the subject of ‘accelerated serendipity’, the occasion of which in itself had serendipitous qualities - someone else Tweeted, I was nearby, we hadn’t seen eachother since he stayed at my house for a show a few years ago, I had my notebook, conversation ensued.

Summarised in short idea-form.

Flâneur
A French movement, who sought the epitomy of a pure moment in the idea of being lost within a city through ’strolling’. Wikipedia: Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”.

Psychogeography, Situationism
We talked a little about how serendipitous walking could tie into psychogeography. Did it matter if they found anything through walking the city, or was it merely the act of walking and achieving the true experience of a city through its randomness?
 
Dandyism
Getting lost within cities is the most interesting way to experience them, and they would often find themselves in unexpected places and at the edges of cities.
 
Wabi-sabi
Their appreciation of the imperfection of being lost is like the Japanese term Wabi-Sabi.
 
Spazzatura
An Italian fashion/trend based on being immaculately dressed but with one slight imperfection making an outfit ‘perfect’. Without this flaw, the outfit being imperfect. For example, wearing a watch over one’s cuff, or a beauty spot. An example of a person would be Beau Brummell.
 
Jazz
Members of The School for Jazz often described how they played music as the act of pulling something from nothing - pulling notes from the air.
 
Ephemeral State
To pluck these notes from the air they would get into a different state of mind, Daedelus called it ‘ephemeral’.
 
Improvised Moments
Points in time where improvisation and experimentation are encouraged.
 
Leadership through Jazz
It reminded me of a talk I saw a few years ago that mentioned how an organisation is like a jazz band and someone had written several ‘leadership’ books on leading like a jazz leader.
 
Happenstance
A better word for serendipity without the more mystical or new-age associations?

Tags: serendipity, interview, daedelus, wabisabi, dandyism, spazzatura, jazz, leadership, flaneur, psychogeography, situationism

Related posts:

1. On Serendipity Thank you to everyone who helped me decide my...
2. Charles on Serendipity A very quick but enlightening conversation with Charles Hunter...
3. Getting a fix on Serendipity As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Thank you to everyone who helped me decide my Clore Leadership Programme research topic. I’ve settled on looking at the idea of ‘accelerated serendipity’, which I think actually encompasses the other topic I was considering: ‘conversational leadership’.

So, things have been progressing and I now have an academic supervisor (does this make him by boss?) in Russell Beale, a man I have a lot of time for and who shares many similar (and many more dissimilar) ideas to me around digital culture.

It’s taken a while to get going, mainly because of the disruption associated with the arrival of my son. Never start anything ambitious and new when you’ve just had a baby arrive is the advice I would give but unfortunately could never follow myself.

So, to kick this thing off I’ve spent the last few months on Google, setting up feeds on the subject and generally getting my bearings. What I’ve learnt already is that it’s a hugely interesting, devisive, diverse and (I’m hoping) relevant topic to research.

But I wanted to get some initial open ideas and discussions going on, so I’ve had a series of conversations with people, initially at Futuresonic 09 on the subject, and I’m going to post notes from each of the conversations here, as I’ll be doing with everything to do with my research - in the spirit of open innovation.

Let’s do this in an open way - I think it’s only appropriate.

Related posts:

1. Getting a fix on Serendipity As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed...
2. Help me choose my leadership research topic I have two ideas that I’ve been working up for...
3. Daedelus on Serendipity An interview with the musician Daedelus on the subject...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Update - don’t copy paste my letter because MPs will ignore it. But you can use mine as inspiration…

You might want to do the same, so here is the letter that I wrote, which might provide inspiration for your own letter. I had originally recommended copying and pasting this, but apparently identical letters received by MPs don’t have as much impact as those in your own words.

Go to WriteToThem to write and send your letter in a really easy way.

Dear [MP'S NAME],

I am sure by now you will have seen the shocking video of a police officer attacking an innocent bystander - Ian Tomlinson - who happened to be walking past one of the many G20 demonstrations.

He suffered a baton attack from behind by a police officer and after striking his head on the floor he later died.

The police are unapologetic about his death, describing their actions as ‘maintaining order’ on Radio 4 today.

After seeing the video this seems hard to swallow. It makes it reasonably clear that he was not presenting a threat to anyone, nor was he causing trouble.

If this were a member of the public holding a baton, striking a man to the floor, who later died as a direct result, that person would promptly be put in jail.

However, because the perpetrator is a police officer this apparently does not hold true.

The police officers involved and the way the matter has been handled so far have shown a disregard for the law and for common decency, which erodes the public’s confidence in the Police as a whole.

Please - I urge you to raise this matter in the House of Commons and put pressure on the Police to ensure that justice prevails.

Yours sincerely,

[YOUR NAME]

UPDATE - The Guardian have picked up my letter on their News Blog

UPDATE - Lynne Jones MP has replied to my letter (at 3pm on the day I sent it):

I share your concerns about events leading to the death of Ian Tomlinson.  I am also concerned about the issue of “kettling” and the general attitude of some police to demonstrators.  Peaceful demonstrators have the right not only to demonstrate but to be treated with respect. You are not the only constituent who has been in touch and I agree that such events do erode public confidence in the police. In the first instance, I will be passing on the communications I receive from constituents to the Met Police Commissioner as I am already in correspondence with him on the police attitude to people planning demonstrations.  I am sure that the response I will get will be that the matter is being investigated by the IPCC but at least it will be a way of demonstrating the strength of public feeling on this issue.

I will also look to see how the matter can be raised in parliament - it may well be that there will be a statement on our return after the recess.

Regards

LYNNE JONES MP

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’d like your help helping me to decide what I should be looking at, so here are the two ideas with a 350 word explanation of each.

I will be producing a 20,000 word paper (or equivalent - blogs, wikis, video interviews count).

Idea 1: “Conversational Leadership”

Over the last decade the term ‘thought leadership’ has become commonly used to label a particular style of leadership that involves distilling influential ideas into easily understandable and sharable concepts and then disseminating them through a variety of means to bring about some kind of change in those outside of one’s immediate organisational leadership structure.

With the sudden growth of social media technologies over recent years, is there something new emerging from this style of leadership? A new style where individuals are applying social media technologies to reach and influence a large number of people, but engaging in two-way conversations with many people in a highly public way, and in so doing acting as ‘conversational leaders’?

This model of how one can potentially influence another’s thinking given appropriate tools and access has caused widespread debate. Is the term ‘thought leadership’ jargon or is it a useful term to use when discussing how highly influential individuals are able to instigate change outside of what would historically have been considered their control? Are there any fundamental differences that are emerging in leadership styles of those who use social media platforms to communicate? Do MPs on Twitter have a different way of leading than those who are not?

I intend to find out what the truth is about these ‘conversational leaders’, and try to get an understanding, first hand, of what it means to be one. What issues does this mode of leadership bring up? What tools and techniques play a part? What are the aims of the people following this method of leading others? Do they even perceive their activities as ‘leadership’? Is there a perception that this is not a leadership role in the classic sense? Are we seeing something new emerging in terms of how leaders are expected to behave? Is this purely a technological trend or is this pointing to something longer-term and a fundamental shift in how leaders will lead in the 21st century?

Idea 2: “Leading by Accelerating Serendipty”

We live in exponential times. The instant availability to large amounts of information on an individual level is now at arguably the highest level we have ever seen.

Breaking news has migrated to online social networks as the place to ‘hear it first’ to the point where social technologies like Twitter are now more swift at reporting world events than any other network.

But that availability of information leads to a number of problems. We suffer from increasing ‘choice paralysis’ and information overload. Finding valuable nuggets of information in this sea of data can be hard.

Conversely, it is increasingly difficult for leaders to be able to know how to structure their organisations to enable them to react quickly to changes in the marketplace.

It is common for leaders to look to research and development departments to investigate new technologies, and to marketing and PR departments to investigate how to use these new channels for communication in effective ways.

But with such rapid changes occuring as a background, how should leaders structure their organisations? How should staff be enabled to be ‘listeners’ and to engage in using social media tools to bring about measurable benefits? If it is unclear what benefits come about through using these tools, how do organisations justify their use? How should organisations be physically structured and laid out in terms of location, architecture and interior design? What factors enable rapid collaboration and innovation?

I propose that at the heart of many of these issues lies the concept of ‘accelerating serendipity’. The idea that it is possible to lead an organisation in such a way that whilst not being aware of the intended ‘destination’ for where that organisation might be headed, it is possible to put in place management structures, policies, physical layouts, working methods, business practices and communications strategies that enable for a higher incidence of the ‘happy accident’. These ‘happy accidents’ could be potential business opportunities emerging from enouraging more collaborations with partners, enabling staff to mingle and discuss ideas in open plan environments, or encouraging staff to use ‘open innovation’ models for research.

I intend to research this theme and to discover if what I understand as ‘accelerated serendipity’ is a real factor that leaders think about, or if some of their behavioural trends could be labelled and made more meaningful when brought under such an umbrella.

What do you think?

These are drafts - hence blogging it before approaching people about it, but both of these areas are close to my heart and I could see myself spending the next year researching them. But which one? Which is most realistic given my already insane workload? Which would be most useful to you? Let me know!

Related posts:

1. On Serendipity Thank you to everyone who helped me decide my...
2. “Thank you” to the Cultural Leadership Programme The Cultural Leadership Programme are generous sponsoring my Clore Fellowship,...
3. Getting a fix on Serendipity As part of my Clore fellowship I have agreed...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I had an unexpected trip to hospital this week which wasn’t much fun, but I’m fine and just have ‘take it easy’ as medicinal advice to take away.

Here’s a little film I made to pass the time.

Related posts:

1. Dad’s Okay We all had a bit of a scare last...
2. Making a music video in 5 hours for Film Dash Xela - Ut Nos Vivicaret (edit) from aeioux on Vimeo....
3. Minority Report interfaces will soon be real g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo. Pretty amazing...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. The original document (top 10,000 words) [Wordle] [PDF]

2. The comments so far on Big City Talk (top 10,000 words) [Wordle] [PDF]

Both of these are best viewed either on their respective Wordle pages or PDFs (both linked above).

Interesting to see some of the differences between what people seem to want to discuss in their comments and the corresponding incidence of those words in the original document.

Eg. “Street, Quarter, Buildings, Development” vs “People, Think, Need, Cycle”.

Wordle images are under Creative Commons attribution licence (so please link back to them if you use these images).

Related posts:

1. Big City Plan public consultation - who’s in? By Striatic on Flickr It’s all been a bit...
2. The Culture Question: What does Birmingham need? The Big City Plan is out for consultation, and it...
3. Recession busting business models Nesta asked some of their contacts what they thought...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

…and a big and strong one at that!

Welcome to the family Oren.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.