What can I say? Speaking twice, on two different topics, in a week where I had major deadlines on three other projects is an unfounded faith in my time and project management skills bordering on wreckless! :^)
Somehow I survived, delivering a talk on the Monday session at Manchester’s Madlab, on the madness of Fractional Reserve Banking (though not having time to more than mention the alternatives), and on the Thursday, in Liverpool, on City of Abundance: Hacking the urban landscape for food.
Although not all of the talk videos seem to have uploaded correctly. As always with these events, there were a number of great talks - so I’m not singling out any!
It’s Good to Talk
Chief outcome? To be reminded what a great format the 20:20 or pecha kucha is. Distill a subject about which you’re passionate about to 20 slides, and talk for just 15 or 20 seconds on each. Not just a vehicle suited to the attention-deficient, but a challenge to the audience.
After all, it’s easy to switch off in a 40 minute talk and remember nothing afterwards, but five minutes done just right will push key points into your brain and leave you thinking about the subject days afterwards.
Could be a great marketing tool - sponsor a conference, and only demand five minutes’ attention in return. Just make sure that you follow up with a page of links and info somewhere memorable online, or take-away printed materials, for those hooked by your passion.
I’ll write up Ignite week more fully after the Liverpool event on Thursday night, but as Ian Forrester has put up a video of my talk on Re-Inventing Money at Monday’s Manchester event I’m embedding it below:
At recent events, when I meet new people, we naturally ask each other “What do you do?”. I’m failing quite badly at summarising my activities, so thought I’d briefly list current projects here, for reference:
Gaia University - IT strategy, project management, & SysAdmin, in a programme to gradually upgrade every online aspect of this international sustainability university over the next few years.
Social Media & the Accessible Web - the Profitable Conversations courses highlighted on the courses page. Got off to a good start last year, now lining up a number of courses around the North West for the Spring.
Hackspace North West - 10 months ago I started bringing people together whom I thought would be interested in getting spaces off the ground. I have done very little on this as fortunately it turned out there were plenty of people also wanting local hackspaces, and they’ve gone on to work towards getting them going. Latest steps in Shropshire & Staffordshire.
Credit Unions - Free Software solutions
Should have been going a long time ago, but a key personnel hiccough has delayed things. Now we’re on the move again, and I’ll be posting announcements on the project here very soon.
Other financial software & local currencies…
Next step is looking for partners to take the core of the Credit Union software, and adapt it for 3rd Sector book-keeping needs. This is something VCOs have been crying out for.
We’re also talking to those involved with Complementary Currencies in a number of countries - something just beginning to gain ground in the UK after a brief flurry of LETS in the 80s.
Cloud Computing for the 3rd Sector.
Voluntary Groups can’t host sensitive data in the USA, and don’t want to be advertised at by Google. Hoping to work with Fossbox on this, and looking for a sponsor to host the 1U server I have that was donated to the project by Blue Fountain.
Permaculture
I studied for my Permaculture Designers’ Certificate in 1993-94, while also studying for the Royal Botanic Gardens’ diploma at Kew. It was the wrong time, and once back home in Montgomeryshire there was little or no work. Now I find a resurgent interest in sustainable design, and am following recent speaking engagements with more practical work.
IT Recycling
M6-IT cic had a great success here, with Richard Rothwell’s Supported Family Computing project reaching dozens of families with recycled hardware, Free Software, family training, and local support, as well as broadband for people previously blacklisted by the ‘phone companies.
Search for partners to replicate this has been unsuccessful, but it’s been a privilege to lead workshops on community recycling with ArcSpace in Hulme, Manchester, with an interesting and enthusiastic crowd of local activists.
Web
Preparing new sites for local sustainability groups, campaigns, and VCOs: some Wordpress, blog-based, mostly Drupal CMS. I miss Plone, but it’s unsuitable for the quick and low-resourced sites I’m doing now.
When a few more get finished I’ll put up some portfolio pages.
Blogging?
I’m developing a horicultural/ethnobotany blog I started designing some time ago, and a *nix introductory blog for NetBook users. Once I can get a 30 hour day I’ll push these through to publication. :^)
In Transition - the two towns nearest to our village are both in possession of new groups moving towards Transition Town Status. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some very interesting people, and get a chance to begin to investigate local food and power solutions.
It’s certainly easier to work totally locally, than try to bring people together at a distance as I did at FACT’s Small Steps to Sustainability workshops. More soon here, and on Twitter.
Hope that helps fill a gap until I renew my calls-for-collaboration posts, too. As to Networking events, maybe I should print this list on a postcard?
I’m travelling back from the Connecting 2.0 Communities event held this afternoon and evening at Madlab, in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. An MDDA-sponsored event to give technical and social media advice to community groups. I was arm-twisted into giving a short talk, so rapidly prepared an item on Social Media tactics and strategy culled from our 3hour course.
Firefighting IT problems? Get some IT strategy in your Org!
However the first speaker, Matt Haworth, did such a great job on exactly the same subject, with the wonderful local example of Manchester’s Lesbian & Gay Foundation’s viral response to US hate adverts, that I mentally ripped up my improvised speech, and settled on the least interesting topic under the sun: IT Strategy. IT Happens, I told the unfortunate audience, it drops from the sky as meteorites of randomly-funded PCs, and volunteer-coded websites, and leaves organisations busy fighting fires as IT fails to do what it should, instead of concentrating on delivering the front-line services for which they have so much enthusiasm.
So, what’s to be done? Organisations with chronic IT problems tend to be those which don’t just lack an IT strategy, but often don’t really realise how essential it is to any modern organisation. These groups usually lack IT expertise not just in staff and volunteers, which is understandable, but in their boards of governance, too. In an age when hardware and software is effectively free, IT funding should first go into bringing in outside help to assess an organisation, and help to draught its strategy; something that would pay for itself in a very short time.
Back in my M6-IT days (and before that at BVSC’s MOST project) we ran courses on IT strategy for decision makers in Voluntary Sector groups. In both cases we relied on carrot and stick from partner organisations to bring in attendees who most needed the courses. What can be done? I’d love to hear ideas for reaching groups (other than springing them on an unsuspecting audience like today ;), otherwise third sector groups will continue to fight fires, instead of using IT to grow and support their organisations.
Just back from Feeding Manchester #3, an attempt to co-ordinate everyone in the business of sustainable food production in the city, and keep the city council and its ambitious plans for local food on track. Although I do a bit of sustainable and community IT in Hulme, and social media training in the Northern Quarter and elsewhere, I was really there on behalf of Congleton Sustainability Group and of Sandbach Re-Imagined, to see what could be learnt.
And while yes, there was a lot to be learnt (which you’re probably best finding - as it appears over the next few days - on the Kindling Trust website), and I was able to offer some points (despite my rural perspective ;) - the best thing I heard today has to be comments from Lydia of Sustainable Levenshulme Underground Gardeners, that many of these local efforts to tidy up one’s patch and grow food there for the community are oppositional, and “kind of naughty”, and the fun can go when the authorities are involved, as it’s no longer “fun and a bit deviant”.
If you’re based in Manchester, and concerned with local food, you might like to join in before Feeding Manchester #4 in the summer but, wherever you are, stay naughty, and happy St Valentine’s Day ;-)
Thanks to Michael Sparks, on the GeekUp list, I was recently reminded of this wonderful XKCD cartoon.
Not only did it make me smile, but it reminded me that “now” is always a good time to stop in an argument on an e-mail list, thus freeing up no end of useful time :-)
Last week, I found myself writing (to a very tight deadline) an article on the Arduino board - and how it has led to a new sort of participation in Open Source, bringing more people from a range of backgrounds to playful & creative fun with technology.
The article will appear next month in Linux User magazine #84 [to be published 18 Feb 2010]. In the meanwhile here are links to some of the really cool projects that I found in the course of knocking out the article.
Asa Calow, Cyberspice, James Devine, Hwa Young Jung, Lady Ada, John McKerrell, Nick O’Leary, Pindec, Ben Tappin, Aisha Yusuf, everyone on the various UK hackspace mailing lists who helped, & special thanks to Adrian McEwen.
There’s been a lot of great buzz about hyperlocal sites as the new local press, with added community cohesion. Indeed I posted a couple of months ago about #tal09, the Talk-about-Local unconference for hyperlocal bloggers. Action within and for the local community is essential if we are to fix what the Tories somewhat pessimistically call the Broken Society. Nevertheless there are important issues in the wider world which can also be well addressed locally, so on Day 1 of Copenhagen let’s take a look at “Think Global, Act Local”.
Town in Transition
Last week my eldest two children played with the Lions Youth Brass Band at the Congleton Christmas Lights switch-on. What was different about this switch on was a street full of local stalls, mostly from community groups. One of them was the recently-formed Congleton Sustainability Group (CSG), selling locally-grown apple juice[1] to raise both awareness and funds.
Following this, I spent this morning at CSG’s monthly meeting, and was pleased to see representatives of local businesses and groups, together with a few individuals, getting together to plan practical changes to make their community more sustainable. Hydro power, energy advice, seed swaps, and, closest to my heart, beginning to look at Community Supported Agriculture and local food production.
The aim of the CSG is to prepare for Transition Town status. A refreshing contrast to places that just declare they are transition towns without actually having community buy-in or any practical results - CSG hopes to bring in more local people and organisations, and get real change in motion before declaring Transition Town Congleton.
[1] 450lbs (210kg) of unwanted apples were collected from local trees and
juiced and bottles at Eddisbury Fruit Farm, producing 106 bottles.
Next year the group aims to at least quadruple the amount of apples
it collects.
Somewhere between Liverpool. Manchester, and Birmingham, pottering around in a convertible Morris Minor, is a man with a re-cycled laptop, and an endless supply of enthusiasm for Free Software, Sustainable IT, and the good things that can happen in the 3rd Sector when IT Strategy and social media hit an organisation.
