August Bank Holiday Weekend IS Greenbel

• soaking up great music
• encountering some life changing thinking
• playing as many gigs as I can possibly find over the weekend.
• hanging out with the most inspiring people I’ve ever met.

The proportion of my Greenbelt time spent on each of those three things has changed over the years – in 1990, I went to 63 different gigs over the weekend (and thanks to the commensurate lack of sleep, dozed off at the wheel of the car before I’d even got off the campsite, leaving my mum to tackle the 300 mile drive home).

Then I gravitated towards the talks - as my view of the world expanded into my 20s, so my appetite for the challenging, inspiring, heady mix of politics, theology and justice issues shook me from whatever complacency the other 361 days of the year tried so hard to force upon me.

Having played at the festival with a range of artists in the 90s, the turn of the millennium brought with it an insane schedule of shows that seemed to increase year on year – Greenbelt was the place where I launched my first album (10 years ago this week), where the Recycle Collective first played a show, where many amazing and fun collaborations have been birthed and found a home. I think my record was 13 performances in a weekend…!

But this year – our first year festivalling with the baby, we have no gigs and have largely ignored the program (despite downloading the iPhone app to see what we’re missing) – so the question was ‘can you go to Greenbelt, do nothing, and still have that Greenbelt experience?’

The answer is – of course - ‘of course’. Greenbelt has always been about people. Whether those people are on a stage, or sat on the grass, in a band, writers, thinkers, politicians, vicars, believers, doubters, old, young… none of it matters. Greenbelt is a place where people mingle and mix, sharing ideas, lives and a constitution-rattling amount of caffeine (and organic beer) in the pursuit of the possible. We collectively breathe a sigh of relief that the Daily Mailification of the world has yet to breech Greenbelt’s fiercely guarded space to be excited and optimistic about the future while taking seriously the challenges that face anyone who chooses not to be complacent in the face of injustice.

So Lobelia, Baby Flapjack and I have wandered around, guided by serendipity into a never-ending series of life-affirming conversations with amazing people. It’s impossible to leave this place feeling like the world is screwed – there’s just way too much here to get excited about. To much, passion, hope and wisdom emanating from a field in Gloucestershire that has the potential to change everything. Again.

Right, time for coffee…

Much has been made of

There’s much in the article that has been attacked - the suggestion that they take money from struggling businesses, the idea that their ‘enforcers’ are referred to as ‘sales people’, and of course, the much bigger problem that very little of what gets played ever gets paid for thanks to the reporting process using ‘sample data’ – from local TV and radio – to decide what’s likely to have been played.

The situation is similar in the UK, with the PRS collecting from venues as well as keeping data on radio plays based on the sample day idea (though I know that with the PRS, at least in some cases, it’s possible to call them, tell them where and when your music was played, and get paid even if it didn’t land on a sample day…)

I ended up on the list of artists that got paid after my tour opening for Level 42 round the UK. I got paid a LOT of money for playing my own music, and then got a series of top-up payments (which were either money that was missed from the tour, or based on the assumption that tours like that rarely happen in isolation so I was probably missing out on money elsewhere… which I was, however uncomfortable I am with the ’success breeds success’ approach to allocating where the extra cash goes)

So, I have two suggestions that it’d be interesting to have batted around on here:

Idea a) There are numerous ways to report exact playlists these days – last.fm being the most obvious. Why aren’t businesses allowed to use such a service (an extra-verified last.fm account, especially for the business, that draws metadata from an approved source, for example) to report exactly what they play, so that the actual writers of those songs get paid.

And b) why not have an opt-out and a ‘free to use in cafes’ Creative Commons-style license that requires the licensee to display a list of the music that is currently being played along with contact details for the artist. The terms could be defined by business size or type (not valid for any establishment charging entry, or using a DJ, for example), so only for places that have background music, but it would mean that those artists who are currently not getting paid even when they do get played can opt out and instead of their non-existent pay-outs, can have some exposure. I know that a number of times in my life I’ve heard background music in cafes and bars that I REALLY wanted to buy, under this license, the music would’ve been displayed, and Sting wouldn’t be getting paid for the privilege. Their playlists could be public via the last.fm option in Idea A too, or they could even pull the music from a specific web-based central pool (would work well if something like Spotify was available in the country where the venue operated, but only if Spotify had a more open submission process for music…)

It would mean that bars that thrive on playing top 40 music could still do so, and play the license that means those people get paid, but bars that play jazz, blues, folk, indie etc. who still have to pay but who are understandably pissed off that the royalties they pay DON’T go to the artists they are playing, they get to do something INSTEAD of paying a meaningless license, something that is pro-music. It would encourage small, struggling businesses by removing a burdensome license fee that may otherwise mean they don’t play *any* music (which clearly none of us want).

Question 1 – Any further suggestions? Any modifications needed to make it work?

Question 2 – would you as an artist sign up for such a scheme? What terms would you want added to the license?

Thinking caps *ON*:

So I sent him this list of links (it’s far from complete, but the poor guy’s got a lot on, so 50-odd links weren’t going to help!):

http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/01/quick-thoughts-on-obscurity/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/02/warners-mistakes/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2010/01/dear-rock-stars/ (particularly the bit about Bono claiming Hollywood is screwed on the same day that Avatar became the first movie to gross a billion dollars)
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/12/transformative-vs-incremental-change/
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/04/art-first-why-the-present-of-music-is-the-best-its-ever-been-for-musicians/

and the one I sent last night,
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/09/independent-music-manifesto/

oh, and the point in this one about spending on Entertainment Media being WAY up, is vital…
http://www.stevelawson.net/2009/11/online-music-balancing-the-scales-of-free/

Enjoy – please do share the link around to this page, or to whichever of the individual posts resonates best with you.

As far as I’m aware, my MP Jim Dowd wasn’t there. I don’t know why – he may have  a really good (professional or personal) reason for not attending. But I’ve written to him again asking him to turn up tomorrow to the 3rd reading and oppose it.

Here’s the email -

Hi Jim,

were you in the Digital Economy Bill debate today? I didn’t see you on the live feed (which I watched for about 6 hours), but I wasn’t actually writing down names.

If you weren’t, and didn’t have a water-tight excuse, I’m sorely disappointed that you chose to forgo the chance to be a part of what is a vital piece of legislation, and one that desperately needs more consideration. Your colleagues Tom Watson, Eric Joyce, Fiona McTaggart and Austin Mitchell, as well as John Redwood, put fantastic cases in favour of scrapping the bill in its present form. They demonstrated a remarkable knowledge of both the technical and cultural workings of the internet, as well as a really strong grasp of the relationship between legislation and behaviour online, and also the blatant fabrication of the BPI/DCMS figures on ‘lost revenue’ to ‘illegal file sharing’.

I’m disappointed that you weren’t there to lend your voice, to represent those of us who rely heavily on the internet for our businesses, and for whom large parts of the digital economy bill have very negative consequences.

Please assure me you’re going to show up for the 3rd reading and make sure this ill-thought out piece of lobby-driven nonsense won’t get rushed through before the General Election.

cheers,

Steve Lawson

Hi Jim,

just a quick note ahead of tomorrow’s debate to express again my fear that highly contentious and misunderstood elements of the Digital Economy Bill will get pushed through in the wash-up. I was most grateful to receive your message that you don’t think the majorly contested parts of the bill will get pushed through in the wash-up, but I’m seeing a lot of reports elsewhere that suggest that that is still a possibility.

I honestly can’t stress enough just how much a much wider discussion is needed, for everyone to fully understand the specific and unhelpful vested interests at work in the parts of the bill that were drawn up by the BPI, and the consequences- foreseen and unforeseen – for those of us who work in the digital sector. To not pursue the discussion/consultation to the point where those making the decision were more fully versed in the culture it impacts and the consquences of their decision would be deeply undemocratic, and would certainly impact on my decision about which way to vote at the next election.

As a natural and life-long socialist, I really want to feel at home in the Labour party. Many things have caused me to feel increasingly disenfranchised from the party I grew up rooting for in opposition, the party whose transition to government in ‘97 I saw as a huge victory for ordinary people, poor people, the people who’d been crapped on by the tories for so many years. Since then, the transition of the Labour party from the party of the people, the party of workers, of the masses, to being a party open to the kind of insane lobbying that the BPI are responsible for in this instance has depressed me greatly and – along with my gross objection to the Illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq – has lead to me looking for a political home elsewhere, but finding none.

I’d love to see the Labour party move away from its recent big business bed-hopping, and become once again the democratic voice of the people it claims to represent.

The Digital Britain report contained a whole load of wonderful suggestions re: digital inclusion, digital education and the use if internet-based communication technologies to re-enfranchise parts of the population that have been increasingly distanced from much of mainstream civic life. Most if not all of the digital inclusion aims will be damaged and perhaps rendered impossible by the various effects of the Digital Economy Bill, all in order to protect an industry that was never a support to Britain’s artists and musicians, and has utterly failed to capitalise on the massive benefits and advantages brought about by the very technologies this bill seeks to strangulate.

…Not to mention the parts of it that will cost millions to implement before the Government and ISPs discover that hackers and clever internet people will be able to work around it anyway, losing all the vital and useful currently available metadata that we have via the public search sites that track metadata relating to music shared and played online.

Thanks for reading,

Steve Lawson

The tendency for people to shift their computing life into ‘the cloud’ is rolling on at great pace.

• their email to Gmail,
• their photos to Flickr,
• their back-up to Amazon or Dropbox,
• their documents to Google Docs

and are using collaborative platforms for sharing data, from Soundcloud for music files to Google Docs for spreadsheets and text.

This has been matched by a corresponding conversation about the impact of ‘Cloud’ ideas, technolgy and infrastructure on our ideas of culture and creativity. There are wonderful conversations happening about notions of ownership, what happens when a cultural entity can be made freely available to all, when people can actually build on the work of artists in every field, remix and mash-up other people’s work…

It’s heady and fascinating stuff, and much of it is explored in some detail in Charlie Leadbeater’s book ‘Cloud Culture’ as commissioned by the British Council.

The bit that seems like a massive stumbling block for me (aside from the obviously and gargantuan obstruction of the Digital Economy Bill, in all it’s neanderthal, regressive, stagnant, authoritarian lunacy) is the issue of mobile access to the cloud.

You see, at the moment, access to the internet is shifting from being perceived as a privilege to a right. This belief is impacting on education policy, and well as international development considerations, with regards to building infrastructure in those countries euphemistically labeled emerging economies.

But at the moment, the ‘right’ seems to be to ‘internet access’ rather than ‘permanent/constant/consistent internet access’, and one of the big issues with Cloud concepts is ‘what do I do when I can’t get to my stuff?’

Clearly, mobile access is the key to this, but the mobile industry is SO far behind in making itself cost effective, consumer friendly and up-to-date tech-wise, that it’s hard to imagine a greater technological discrepency than that between the potential of ‘cloud computing’ and the cost, openness, inter-operability, capacity and bandwidth of mobile comms, particularly in the US and UK.

You only need be at an event where people are tweeting a lot from mobiles and a couple of people are streaming video via 3G to experience the crunching stand-still that happens when the system is overloaded. And try accessing a Vodafone signal from an Orange-registered phone when that’s all that’s available? Forget it. What about accessing mobile data overseas? Better visit your mortgage provider first…

While mobile hardware has come on in leaps and bounds in recent times (and looks set to expand even further, under the influence of the Apple iPad, if not including the device itself), the mobile networks are making no noticeable steps at all towards ‘access’ becoming anything that resembles a ‘right’.

Just to underscore this point, having been out of contract for a while now, I called Orange, and told them that as I didn’t need a new handset, I’d like to switch to a sim-only contract, and I’d like to have whatever was the cheapest monthly option that had unlimited data (which, I think, is actually 500meg on Orange, under their ‘fair use’ policy… WTF?) – I was promptly told that the cheapest one they had was £30 a month – almost the same as I was paying already. Which seems a little odd. I asked what would happen if I said I was leaving to another network, at which point, I got the baffling response of ‘well, if you get a new phone, you can have it for £15 a month’ – way more minutes/texts than I need, unlimited data and a Nokia 5800 for £15 a month. Could I get it without the phone? Nope.

It’s nuts, it’s a totally stupid business model, is environmentally unsustainable, and the total lack of interoperability between the networks makes it all too common for people to not be able to access their data in the cloud.

So, what do we do? Cos crap mobile + Mandelson and his big internet scissors cutting off coffee shops based on what their patrons download is going to make public access to wifi a commodity in short supply – the extra strain the mobile networks have to take up if the Digital Economy Bill kills free public wifi will almost certainly be too much for the network as it stands…

Solutions anyone?

Dear Lord Clement-Jones,

Along with everyone I know who works in IT/the internet and the music industry (yes, ‘everyone’), I am entirely opposed to the digital economy bill – the assumptions it makes about the relationship between people making a living online and the rights of media conglomorates to continue peddling an outmoded understanding of how digital assets are best exploited in a world where distribution and even marketing can be done for free and revenue gathered at many different stages of the process.

As a musician, writer, teacher, university lecturer and owner of an independent record label, I have found the free flow of information online to be utterly vital in freeing me from the inethical, counter-creative and monopolistic practices of the big media entities (such as major record labels) and allowing me to build a SME, to partner with other SMEs in broadening the base of the UK online economy.

The web is enabling a switch in the recording industry away from a state where a tiny percentage of ‘lottery winners’ sell millions of records and everyone else remains hopelessly in debt to a label who lend them money, spend it on themselves and hold onto copyright beyond the point where the loans have been paid back. It’s unsustainable and the wonder of the digital economy is that artists are able to manage that themselves – that we’ve moved from hundreds of people selling millions of records to thousands upon thousands of individuals selling hundreds or thousands of recordings, but more importantly, doing so in a creatively and economically sustainable way without giving away their rights.

For those people, the distribution networks on the web that the Digitial Economy Bill with either explicitly or inadvertently shut down are a vital resource for connecting with an audience at a time when the cost of conventional marketing channels (often owned by those same media giants that were acting in such an anti-creative way under the old model) are prohibitively high, enough so to guarantee that all projects beyond those with outside leverage (read: big media backing) will lose money.

In the new economy that doesn’t need to happen. I and my peers can make the music we love, find and audience and allow a range of entry points for them to contribute financially to the ongoing production and performance of that music, and it works. It works time and time again.

At a time when major label entities who are fighting the internet are falling apart (look at EMI’s current crisis), independent musicians are thriving. No-one is making millions, but no-one needs to. The right to become insanely rich by exploiting the intellectual property of others is not something that should be enshrined in law to the detriment of the sustainability of the tens of thousands of people making a healthy, legal, creative and culturally significant living through the internet.

The Digital Economy Bill threatens tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods, while protecting the interests of a handful of very rich people at the top of the big media food-chain, while peddling a series of falsehoods and misused statistics about the state of play for Britain’s creative industries. Please, withdraw the nonsensical amendment with regard to ‘web blocking’ – it’s counter to the good of Britain’s digital economy,

Yours sincerely,

Steve Lawson
http://www.stevelawson.net

I’ve started mentally drafting this a few times, but almost all of them just ended up with me reiterating everything I said in my ‘

However, this evening, someone linked on Twitter to This blog post claiming that it was a campaign masterminded by Sony. And now the process of saying ‘is it?’ and ‘if it is, how dare they!‘ has started. I’ve been asked my opinion on it, both the veracity and the meaning of it, so I thought I’d scribble down some thoughts.

I don’t, truth be told, think the blog post sets out a particularly convincing case for it being a fix. It’s all good conspiracy stuff, but a bit thrown together. Not particularly good journalism, for sure, and at worst is just a piece of willfully opportunistic nonsense drummed up as link-bait for the blogger concerned.

But, the weird thing is how many people seem to be really bothered by the implication that it’s a fix.

If this is a set up, a Sony campaign, it changes nothing. Whether it is or it isn’t, a bunch of internet nerds hyped back into the charts an 18 year old massive rock hit (it’s on Rock Band) – the biggest hit by one of the world’s biggest rock bands, a band known to millions as rock’s voice of discontent – as a ‘protest’ at X-Factor songs getting to the Christmas number 1 position in the UK singles chart. Both songs were released on record labels that were part of the Sony group, so either way Sony win, no one in the whole world chose between the two when deciding what to buy, so all it did was add more sales to the charts, not actively dissuade anyone from buying music deemed ‘unacceptable’.

No, it was an act of lazy cultural snobbery targeted at an institution (the UK singles chart) that ceased to mean anything years ago. As an act of musical defiance it was lazy – ‘yeah, let’s pick a massive selling rock classic that everyone knows that has swearing in it!’ As an attempt to prove that the internet is a force for good in changing the world of music it did exactly the opposite and proved that even on the internet, people resort to the same tired old bullshit of thinking that meaning comes from volume, and the vehicle for mass action is stuff-that’s-already-massively-successful-via-the-old-model.

It was still one song picked as the lottery winner, it was one act – already rich beyond our imagining – who got the golden ticket, the wave of support of indignant web-users, angry that kids and old people could possibly watch XFactor and then want to buy the single that the entire story had led up to over the last few weeks. No-one thinks it’s great – the people who bought it are the same ones who made Pure And Simple by Hear’Say the fastest selling single of all time, but now can’t even remember the name of the band, just that one of them looked like Shrek and that other one debased herself in the jungle… It’s not about music. It’s not about culture, or convincing people that shouty sweary rock music is somehow intrisically better than manufactured pop.

500,000 sales of one song says that the people on the internet are still more interested in being involved in something big than they are in something good.

• Thank your mum for dinner,
• smile at a Big Issue vendor as you buy a copy,
• volunteer for Crisis,
• buy fairtrade,
• recycle,
• and yes, buy indie music from artists whose lives are impacted by every single sale, then thank them and tell your friends.

But do it cos you love it, because it’s good, not because you need to be in mass-opposition to something for it to have meaning.

If Sony fixed this or if it really was grass-roots, the outcome is the same and nothing has changed. Joe will be number one next week, the charts will still never be a reflection of music that I – or anyone else for that matter – really loves. They’ll still be the 40 least offensive, most expensively marketed, best hyped tracks that are around today, and they’ll have nothing to do with what any of us actually listen to.

And I’ll keep telling everyone about the great music I come across on the web – not because I want to start a movement, but because it’s good. Because it soundtracks my life, it’s my music, my story, and I don’t need to hate some X-Factor kid whose surname I don’t even know and whose music I’ve never knowingly listened to for it to be important. It’s important because it’s good, because it’s a sustainable practice that helps the music I love to keep existing, and it’s an act of gratitude to the people who keep making music that makes me feel like the world is a good place to be.

Fix or no fix, nothing has changed.

So for now, have a listen to Miriam Jones – she’s great, relatively unknown, lovely, and waiting to hear from you about how much you love what she does:

Image by Melvinheng on Flickr, shared via a creative commons license.

This is not a post about the things that are wrong with our world. This is a post about how we make them right. Of course it is not exhaustive, and by no means is it intended to be a detailed and flawless solution, in fact it openly admits that fact, because that (you will see) it is the point.

This post is in reaction to many things, but particularly in reaction to the recent #3strikes debate, the actions of Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, and a recently circulated confirmed rumour that suggests the same minister may have his sights set on the leadership of the Labour party. This is not a party political post, and I do not intend to argue why one man’s leadership would be bad for Labour, instead I intend to suggest that what this man represents is an outdated vision of politics, a vision that is bad for our country, and bad for our democracy.

Our society (and although I will talk more generally, ‘our’ here refers to UK society) is governed. We have democratically elected governments who, on the whole, make decisions and enforce laws with the intention of bettering society. I do not believe that anyone gets involved in politics for any other reason but improving the society they live in. This is the desire of the BNP, just as much as it is the desire of mainstream parties, their vision of a ‘better’ society might be opposed to the majority, but that is why they are not in power. Largely speaking, the party in power is supposed to represent the majority vision of what a better society is, and then strive towards it.

I do not believe that is currently so. Leaving aside first past the post reform and candidate selection, we wholly and entirely do not currently live in a democracy. The power is very much not ‘with the people’.

The Story

When Labour came into power in 1997, it was to the tune of a wholly broken opposition. 18 years of Conservative government had systematically deconstructed all that was of society and replaced it with the ethics of individualism. This was very good for a few, and catastrophic for a many. The many had finally realised. Labour won with more than just promises to renew, however, they won with what was for the first time, politics as marketing. It wasn’t just slogans, it was shiny adverts, they weren’t just promoting the values of the party, they were selling the story of New Labour.

Something else very important happened in 1997. The death of Diana. Others have pointed out before me how this marked an important turning point, not in politics, but in the media. This was the media as story, news not as reporting events, but as representing emotions. The papers spoke as though they spoke for us as they ordered the Queen from Balmoral.

Labour was in power without a credible opposition, and suddenly the press felt powerful. They could move the Queen to action. And someone needed opposing. If it was ‘The Sun Wot Won It’, The Sun could also oppose it.

Story is a very hard thing to fight. It is much older than democracy, much older than society.

That was the beginning of the era of Spin. Labour had ridden into power on a narrative, and the mainstream media had assumed the role of opposition using the same. One proposed a story of a better society, the other claimed to represent the stories (wishes) of the people who lived in it.

You notice how neither of these groups are made up of ‘us’?

This is the politics that politicians such as Peter Mandelson, David Cameron and (yes, even) Boris Johnson represent. (Can you think of a better story than the bumbling fool made good?)

An Information Economy.

Spin is all about distribution. Spin is about controlling the narrative of politics; it is about packaging and marketing your version of events. Spin requires complete control of information.

Spin is not working. Our society has grown out of it. Our country has been made undemocratic because of it. Our politicians do not fear the people, they fear the press. The people do not trust their politicians because the press exposes the antiquated attitudes and secrecy within their ranks. However the Press only constructs an oppositional story, it does not deconstruct it. The press is also not run for anything but the benefit of sales. No matter how well standing the broadsheet, how ubiquitous the tabloid. The mainstream media choose their story, and then they spin their readers and politicians into it.

The internet opposes and undermines that.

We live in an information age. For better or worse that is something that must be accepted. There is a rival economy, and it consists of information, it is a world (democratically, one might say) built of a thousand individual narratives. No one claims to speak for others, if someone is championed, it is because one person had the words that echo with others’. In this context the politics of Peter Mandelson et al will not work. He is a clever man, and I hope clever enough to see that one voice, big business, Spin, the politics of ‘push’, are gone. This is the century of pull, this is the century that politics has to become mutual.

Wikipolitics.

Well, everything needs a title doesn’t it? (/a hashtag).

I have blogged before about how I don’t believe in apathy, but I do believe in disengagement. I believe that British politics is due a reformation. I believe that we can demand that. Are you bored of the tone of the Labour government? Do you really believe that a Tory one will be different? Are you looking for a protest vote? A voice? You will not currently find it at the ballots.

What is Wikipolitics?

It is a starting point. It takes the open-source ethic and applies it to government. I don’t propose that we edit policy documents. I do believe that parliament should be opened up, demystified, and the power taken back. How do we do this? We’ve already started, look at projects such as Louder, 38 degrees, look at the Trafigura backlash, the Iran election, the G20 protests.

We now live in a world where we construct our own media consumption, where we pull together, build our own stories. Politics and the mainstream media are clinging on to old methods of distribution and delivery.

Whilst still acknowledging that at least 2/3 of the world does not have access to the internet (the UK figure is something like 30%, with a further 7-8% only having narrowband access – source) and those who do are likely to be from more affluent, developed backgrounds, we also need to be aware that instant publishing and access to our own media channels is incredibly empowering.

We also need to pull ourselves out of the luxury of political disempowerment. It is our responsibility to be involved in politics. If it is not one with which we wish to be involved, then we need to change it.

Reformation, Reclamation.

We need to tell our parties: “Arm your backbenchers with Flips, with Audioboo, with simple wordpress websites. Open up. Work in real-time. And don’t be afraid. We know you are, we know you are worried that you will be criticised, pulled apart, but please remember that although it has not been so before, that is what we mean by democracy. That is the open-source ethic. Let us participate”.

This worked for Obama, he brought the US the highest election turnout in a century. But then he stopped. And that where it’s gone wrong. That’s when Murdoch took back over.

The mainstream media has characterised us as a pack of baying wolves. The politicians have been characterised as lying snakes and fat cats. 2/3 people believe they cannot affect decision making. Trafigura, Jan Moir, proves we can. How about we take that to the rest of politics? How about we build our own wiki-guide to how we want to be engaged with, how we want to ask questions of the policy makers, of the parties? How about we offer a route that bypasses the mainstream media – taking honest debate and mobile video on the campaign trail, introducing them to the modern realities outside the political bubble, having a conversation, rather than being delivered a speech. You may argue that there’s no point in participating in a broken system, but how else are people to know how to fix it?

Because this is important. As it currently stands it would take as many years to get women equal representation, as it would a snail to crawl the length of the Great Wall of China. As it currently stands we are bickering and buying our way to climate disaster. As it currently stands we live lifestyles of excess and complete unsustainability. And for all our excess, are we happy? Or are we to some degree living the lives and values that are sold to us – other peoples’ stories?

We are facing a hyper-connected, global village era, politics cannot continue to be its own island.

This is not a manifesto, it is a call to arms. And this is where I stop, because this is a story, too. It’s a story about us, but it’s still my version. We need to write an ending together. How can we open up the political process? What do we want to know? Do we think there should be more experts involved in policy making? Do we want to see cabinet meetings taking questions from Twitter? What tools can we offer? Comment. Engage. This is up to all of us. What can we build? (We have the technology). Go.

– Hannah Nicklin is a brightly coloured and basically nocturnal playwright, blogger, academic and geek. She normally lives over at hannahnicklin.com, and is @hannahnicklin on Twitter.

For charities and campaigners, the opportunities afforded by ‘the social web’ are so massively game-changing that it’s hard to even consider the possibilities without throwing all the cards up in the air and starting again.

Previously, campaign information was distributed via either broadcast OR conversation – conversations were constrained by location, and broadcast brings with it the same problems it does anywhere else – it’s

• expensive
• wasteful
• impossible to track
• difficult to nuance
• time-limited
• platform specific

and all in all a MASSIVE gamble.

But now we have an entire way of thinking about the internet that’s built around ‘shared sociability’ – this ‘Web 2.0’ thing everyone’s been banging on about for the last few years.

So campaigners and charity organisers have the chance to

• re-engage those amazing minds they were previously shouting at via a newletter
• let the subject of the campaign speak for itself via video, photos and audio
• update interested parties hourly rather than monthly or quarterly
• let your supporters BE the campaign rather than just fund it
• track ACTUAL engagement statistics, and follow the progress of any element of the campaign.
• share information, strategy, materials and supporters amongst a network of connected campaigns.

How does that sound? Awesome, that’s how it sounds.

The cost of paper mail-outs is astronomical, adverts in magazines and on TV are an horrific waste of charity money in an age when there are alternatives, and being able to document every face-to-face event you hold and share it FOR FREE with those outside the charity increases the impact of those events by a factor of 10.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is just how huge a shift this is for most organisations – if your entire infrastructure and methodology is about justifying then implementing a marketing strategy that will hopefully fund whatever your campaign is, inform people and motivate them, but which is very expensive and has no guarantees, then suddenly discovering that there’s a world of interested, connected, motivated and resourced people out there happy to talk about what you do and share your information freely with their friends, as well as DO the stuff of the campaign requires a pretty cataclysmic volte face.

Which is where Louder.org.uk comes in.

The social web is such a massive area now, that coming to it late can seem hugely daunting. So the NCVO have put together a site that’s designed to make co-ordinating the web-side of a campaign easier.

It will:

• help aggregate all the content
• keep supporters and activists up to date
• pull other people’s campaign ideas and content into one central place,
• and – crucially – provide instruction, tips, help and support in how all this works, both from the NCVO themselves and fellow travelers on the journey to a better world.

The site is currently in Beta testing stage – it’s launched this Friday, but will still be developing for a long time yet – but it’s there, it’s growing, and it’s available to you to use and play with from Friday.

Possibly the single biggest global impact of the social web is what it’s done to charitable and political engagement. We can stay informed, we can be heard, we can be a part of something bigger. Because, as the site strap-line says, ‘Together We’re Louder.’

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What’s my involvement, you ask? I was invited to the pre-launch event some months ago, at which the idea was put out there for the site. I asked a lot of questions, made a lot of comments and was then hired for a few days to help plan the site and define the range of tools. If 50% of what we’re hoping for ends up being possible, it’s going to be a truly awesome resource.