Likeminds

Dave and Mary at Likeminds
Learning Pool's Mary McKenna and me at Likeminds - photo by Paul Clarke

I had an enjoyable time at the Likeminds conference in Exeter yesterday (Friday 26th Feb). Before I start going on about the content of the event, I really ought to praise the organisers for the amazingly smooth way the event ran – it really was superbly run. One great innovation was the lunchtime sessions – focused conversations on a topic facilitated by an expert. I attended Lloyd Davis‘ lunch on cloud culture, which a lot of fun and on which I blogged earlier.

It was a little more marketing focused than the events I usually attend, which provided a different perspective on things – albeit not a perspective I was always terribly comfortable with.

I’ve never worked in communications, or PR, or marketing, or anything like that. I’ve certainly never used the word ‘brand’ in a sensible conversation, as far as I am aware. I’m sure all of this activity and discussion is vital, though, it’s just not one I feel I can really contribute to in a meaningful way.

What was interesting for me was the impression I got that, in some ways, the debate around the use of the internet to increase engagement, and the effect it has on organisations’ working culture, within the public sector might be slightly more mature than in the private sector. I could be wrong, and it could just have been because I was at an event focused on marketing and PR, but an awful lot of the conversation in government about this stuff is focused on issues other than how it affects external comms issues.

Public-i‘s Catherine Howe – who I was delighted to meet in real life for the first time –  really summed this up well in her post about the event:

Here it is – I do not want us to miss the enormous opportunity that the social web affords us to make social change by losing it in a miasma of attempts to sell stuff to each other.  I do not want to talk about marketing and how brands can influence people – I want to talk about people having more power over the world around them.  I don’t want to talk about social communications – I want to talk about fundamental culture change and how we can influence it.

This is a much more articulate way of describing something I mentioned recently:

…while the internet is undoubtedly important for communications, it’s a mistake to put all of this stuff in a box marked comms and assume it doesn’t affect or benefit other parts of the organisation and the way they work.

Organisations of any description have an awful lot more to learn from the culture of the internet than just how to either sell stuff or get people to like the stuff they do. The lessons that the internet teaches us are around the way being more transparent and cooperative in the way we do things is a more effective way of working. I’m repeating myself, I know.

Back to Likeminds. Jonathan Akwue from Digital Public gave one of the best talks, and it was the first one on the day, too. I grabbed it on my trusty Zi8:

Clouds and culture

CloudsLloyd Davis is a lovely man, and a very clever one at that. He founded the Tuttle Club, a weekly networkingy sort of meetup for people who like the internet and other people, which is at the same time very simple but also rather ingenious.

He also sports an even more ludicrous job title than mine, for at least a part of his time – he is Social Artist in Residence at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration. What does that mean? Mary has a go at explaining here. I’ve written a bit about social artists, as has David Wilcox.

Lloyd ran a couple of sessions at last week’s Likeminds conference – he facilitated a panel session; and hosted a lunchtime discussion, which I attended, on ‘cloud culture’. This is a topic he has written about on his blog, and which has been the focus of quite a bit of attention from such luminaries as Charles Leadbeater.

I found it a really interesting topic for discussion, and I’m grateful to Lloyd – and the organisers of the conference – for creating a space where I was made to think about it properly. There are, of course, many aspects of our culture that are affected by the internet, and use of the cloud in particular.

There is the issue of cultural ‘stuff’ or products, like stories, music, films, art etc. Traditionally hosted by museums or galleries, or publishers; what effect will be had by this hosting now being performed by Amazon, or Apple, or Google?

The case of the music industry is particularly interesting, of course. People have been making music for thousands of years. Record labels have existed for a handful of decades. You don’t need the latter to make the former possible. Artists don’t need bigorgs to distribute their work any more – get over it.

There are other types of culture too. What about national culture, in the age of the internet and globilisation? If all our culture is online, in the cloud, what effect does that have on who we think we are?

One of my main interests is organisational culture, classically defined as ‘the way we do things around here’. This is an area where the effect of the internet is probably most measurable. It’s also true of course that the internet itself has a culture. What lessons can organisations learn from this internet culture?

This goes back to my constantly repeated point that the interesting thing about the use of online technology is not the technology but the implications of using it. Internet culture is open, it’s cooperative, it’s funny, it’s transparent. These are the things we should be pushing our government to be.

What I like are examples of offline activity that wouldn’t be possible without the internet. Tuttle is one of those. On the face of it, it’s an old school networking meetup. The truth is, though, is that it’s an old school networking meetup that’s been filtered through the internet and its culture. Most of those who attend know each other virtually, introductions tend to go along the lines of “oh, so you’re [insert twitter username]”.

GovCamp is another example. So we met in real life, and the agenda was put together with post its on a big blank bit of paper. But how was it that so many people were convinced to give up their Saturday’s to come and talk about government? It’s because of the internet culture of openness, transparency, collaboration and the democratisation of publishing. Just as anyone can publish online, whether with a blog or whatever, anyone can speak at an unconference.

As I mentioned earlier today, I’m hoping to run a session at this week’s London LocalGovCamp about what lessons internet culture can teach local authorities, and other public sector organisations. Anyone who is coming to the event, please do come along and join in. Those that aren’t, I’d appreciate any comments.

Here’s a video where Lloyd talks about his stuff:

Yet more gadding about

Boarding at last

Another busy week, this one.

On Wednesday, Learning Pool are hosting another local government breakfast meeting, at Coventry City Council’s offices. We’ll have a range of contributors from local authorities, as well as me. Details here – do come if you can.

Thursday is LocalGovCamp day, this time in London. Well done to Anke Holst for organising it all – it promises to be a great day. Mary and I will be there from Learning Pool, and I’m hopefully going to be organising a session around whether councils can feasibly engage with citizens when people within those councils aren’t talking to each other on a regular basis. It’ll be fun, I promise!

Then on Friday, we’ll be hot-footing it back to Learning Pool towers in Derry for the LP Christmas party! Bit belated, but then that should mean we’ll all be well up for it.

Bookmarks for February 24th through February 28th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Yammer gets a facelift

We’re big fans of Yammer at Learning Pool – it’s provided that virtual water-cooler that a distributed workforce really needs. That mixture of work related updates, general chit-chat and abuse that any office needs to function effectively.

If you aren’t aware of Yammer, it’s like Twitter but it is private to the employees of your organisation. It means you can discuss issues that you might not want aired in a public forum like Twitter, but in the similar short, informal way that status applications work.

Yammer has just had a bit of a facelift, and a new bit of functionality that looks really cool.

Yammer

The cool feature is called Communities. Yammer now allows you to create a stream for people who aren’t necessarily part of your organisation to join. This is separate from your organisation’s stream, so you don’t need to worry about outsiders seeing your private conversations.

It appears that you can create as many of these communities as you like, and you can choose whether everyone from your organisation gets added automatically, or you can pick and choose people to join. Then it’s a case of inviting by email those people from other organisations that you want to be in on the action.

This will be a great tool for informally managing project communications between supplier and client, for example, especially when there are multiple partner organisations involved, and where there are several people from each organisation who needs to be kept up to date. I’ll be interested to see how Huddle reacts to this, and whether they will consider adding status update like features to their offering.

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