We’re very lucky, in that neither of us are in jobs where we’re trapped into staying in an unaffordable house by the promise of future earnings. It seems all too common now for people caught between crash-related falling wages and pre-crash defined housing costs to end up in ‘speculative debt’ – taking out loans or putting rent on credit cards, in the hope of things picking up and them paying it all off.

One of the latest projects that Amplified are involved in is looking at this very issue – ‘Shirts4Shelter’ sees shirt maker TM Lewin teaming up with housing and homelessness charity Shelter. They are helping raise money, awareness and support for Shelter, as the charity seek to help and advise people from across society who are facing housing difficulties. It will culminate in a ‘shirt amnesty’ in London and Manchester – bring an old, sellable shirt to be donated to Shelter’s charity shops, and get a TM Lewin shirt with a hefty discount, with part of those sales also being donated to Shelter. a massive win all round, methinks.

They’ve also produced a series of videos, telling the stories of people caught in what are sadly increasingly typical stories of modern housing crisis. Here’s the first one. Please feel free to share it around, tell your story, and check out www.shirts4shelter.co.uk to find out just how TM Lewin are helping out.

First, there was the case of Paul Chambers, AKA the #twitterjoketrial, where one guy tweets a jokey, hyperbolic, frustrated tweet ostensibly to his friends that follow him, and has now ended up (after appeal even) with a £1000 fine and a criminal record. And has lost his job.

Then there was the case of Sarah Baskerville – @Baskers on Twitter. She’s a Civil Servant, one that clearly cares a great deal about her job and has a whole load of wonderful ideas for making the processes involved in governing the country more transparent through social technology.

However, when Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail decided – without any warning or reasoning – to write an article about her, instead of praising her well-documented forward thinking approach to the role of emergent technology in the CS, and her commitment to improving CS practices, he instead drew attention to a couple of tweets that mention her having a hangover and suggested that she should be sacked for them.

Wow. What a shitbag he is.

Fortunately, Sarah’s bosses seem to realise that this kind of groundless muck-racking is the work of a putrid mind, a festering, morality-free bullying instinct, fostered by a newspaper that neither likes the Civil Service nor understands Social Media. Indeed, one that appears to be positively threatened by both.

That the Independent followed the story not with a critique, but with an expansion on Letts’ ill-founded bullying, is both a sorry indictment on them as a paper, and a wake-up call to just how few people in our national broadcast media really have the faintest clue about social media, how it works and what it means. Thankfully, the Guardian supplied the voice of sanity.

For me and the work I do with Amplified, the implications of this are potentially huge. We work with a lot of public institutions – including the Civil Service. I have explained how social technologies can increase transparency and public engagement, to people at all levels of the Civil Service, via Amplified’s involvement at the CSLive conference last year. We were invited by the COI – a department jam-packed with people who ‘get’ social media, who are passionate about good, effective governance – to demonstrate and explain social media to attendees at the conference, and to use the conference itself to demonstrate what we were talking about. We used Audioboo, blogs, Twitter, Flickr and other places to take the conversations that would otherwise only have happened over coffee and present the wisdom of the Civil Service to anyone who wanted to hear it. We asked questions, we took questions from outside to people inside. We recorded conversations with everyone from low ranking Civil Servants worried that social media usage was in contravention of their terms of contract, through to Gus O’Donnell, head of the Civil Service, and the head of Scotland Yard’s Serious Organised Crime unit.

Beyond that, we’ve worked with the NCVO, The Arts Council, BITC, IBM, Sungard, Reuters, the Citizens Advice Bureau and others, to open up their thinking, their processes and their planning to input from their users, their employees and conference attendees through social media. There have been loads of overwhelmingly positive stories of what this has enabled for the people we’ve worked with.

So when some tech-phobic journalist with a grudge decides to stalk someone’s Twitter account in order to ‘dish the dirt’ on them completely without context or a shred of honest reflection on the stirling committed work that person does in their role, I – as you might understand – get rather angry. Not least of all because I now need to warn the people we work with that their staff social media usage policy needs to take into account the possibility that some Letts-shaped turd may well be looking for a way to make a couple of hundred quid out of taking ill-informed, unresearched and morally bankrupt pot-shots at their staff for their use of social media. Further more, the #twitterjoketrial case shows that we can’t even rely on the law to understand the conversational nature of social media usage, regardless of any broadcast ‘potential’ that may be latent in the service. Paul Chambers case is an horrific miscarriage of justice and an insane waste of police and court time, presided over by someone with no apparent working knowledge of the internet at all.

These are interesting times we’re in – they are transitional and this new and largely misunderstood technology is highly disruptive and some institutions are proving highly resistant to the kind of adaptation required to take full advantage of their wonderful democratising potential.

But we know – you know, or you wouldn’t be reading this (unless you’re just Quentin Letts doing a vanity search, in which case, you should be ashamed of yourself, but clearly aren’t, or you’d have the decency to refuse to work for the Daily Mail in the first place.) this stuff is changing everything, it’s not going away, however many draconian and ignorant ‘digital economy acts’ are passed, however many dumbass Daily Mail journalists hide behind their pamphlet of hate and fear to peddle lies about hard-working Civil Servants.

See you on Twitter…

Which in turn inspired in me a comment so long it kinda deserves its own post. So here it is, but read her post first

-o0o-

Excellent Rantage.

I feel afronted by the web-phobic ramblings for two reasons – one, just about ever good idea I’ve come across in the last 12 years has been because of the internet. There have been email discussion lists that have changed the course of my life, forums that have connected me to communities that have challenged and supported my various endeavours, found music, videos, books, thinkers, friends… all through recommendations on blogs, sites and social networks. I’ve talked people I’ve never met through potentially life-threatening stress situations, have found an audience for a load of music that has made me a living but which no record label would have a clue what to do with…

Even moreso, every paltry morsel of insight I’ve gleaned from the mainstream media has been tested, corroborated, expanded on, clarified or debunked by the internet. It’s a gloriously disintermediated world where people are actively encouraged to be remarkable because people you care about are watching. Not in a voyeuristic way at all, but as part of a deeper connection that was possible when all relationships were prisoners to geography.

Big media, and the people who glean status, work, meaning and an artificially elevated platform from it are bound to feel threatened, slighted, challenged and disabused of their power by the web. I talk on a daily basis to smarter feminists than Paglia, to better scientists than those who describe twitter as something that only those with a broken sense of self would do, to funnier comics than the TV provides, to more supportive and helpful people that I could possibly find by retreating from the web and…

…and what? What did we do before the web? We were hostages to other people’s community initiatives – be they council, church, school, sport or charitably-led. We were stuck with whatever they offered us. More interested in Kabaddi than football? tough shit, footie’s the only thing available at your local sports ground. Rather talk about contemporary fiction than classics? No dice, your library only runs a dickens appreciation society… Choice is scary, it’s also a very grown up thing, because it requires us to actively seek challenge to our entrenched worldview. But there’s the rub – social networks are far from homogenous. I consciously disagree with almost everyone I’m friends with on a social network, but my own thinking is nuanced, challenged and bettered on an hourly basis by the stream of smart, funny, empassioned information, conversation and community. Sure, there are dickheads. Just as TV has its Clarkson and Newspapers have their Littlejohn, the internet has its fair share of tedious, lying, cretinous bores. But hey, that’s life, shitheads, deal with it.

We’re here, we love it and our lives are better for it. Now, if you want some help understanding it, give us a shout, we’re happy to help.

For the last three days I’ve been at the

There have been some amazing speakers, particularly James Jones the Bishop of Liverpool, Ellen McArthur, Larry Hirst, Stephen Howard… all offering an inspiring challenge to think big, get creative, redefine the rules of the game, challenge business orthodoxy… These have been contrasted with a few more circumspect views, starting from the point that businesses just need to get smarter and less wasteful at what they do in order the fix things, that the bigger questions about the foundations of the western economic project are not really up for discussion.

But one area of convergence has been around the topic of collaboration – pretty much everyone has talked about

• the need for greater cross-sector collaboration
• for a greater emphasis on open tools
• on the sharing of information related to best practices in sustainable business
• as well as online collaborative sharing spaces for businesses to share innovation and ideas.

All remarkable stuff, and it’s noteworthy that such suggestions are being made in this kind of event, but one has to wonder what the popularity of such ideas will be when so many people in business now see their IP as their most valued asset. If you make stuff, then the discussions around less wasteful ways of making that stuff are fairly safe, as the stuff you’re making is still yours to make. But if your main trading entities are ideas, then sharing those ideas to further the degree of understanding with your competitors may be a harder proposition to sell.

The key concept here to cut through that, it seems, is that of urgency - Toby Moores, CEO of Sleepydog, a company whose business is ideas, puts it succinctly ‘the future is too complex to go it alone.’ He recognises that an attempt to hang on to game-changing ideas stops them from being game-changing before you’re out of the starting blocks. Innovations at every level of business and industry are going to be needed for us to meet the immense challenges we face thanks to centuries of ever-increasing consumption and the catastrophic impact that has had on the planet and on the lives of its inhabitants, human or otherwise.

One vital part of the discussion that has begun here is the reframing of the language around future-business practice and human behaviours. The current terminology is rooted in a very particular industrial methodology, that specifically excludes a more holistic view of ‘sustainability’, beyond those things that show up on a share-holder report.

One such example was in the hugely inspiring talk given by James Jones, Bishop Of Liverpool, who said “In 100 years time, social historians will look back on now with incredulity at how we could so comfortably called ourselves “the consumer society”. The devouring society. They’ll say ‘didn’t they have the science? the knowledge? didn’t they know the damage done? Why weren’t they calling themselves with the knowledge they had, ‘Conservers’? why were they describing themselves with a suicide note, ‘Consumers’??”

That’s the kind of radical reappraisal needed for us to even start to think of the role of business as a pro-sustainability one, rather than as business as usual with a greener logo.

So, question: what kind of new terminology would be helpful in rescuing us from an unsustainable future as over-consumers?

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?