It’s been around for a while, but it feels like the time for Diaspora is now.

It started with a Kickstarter project that aimed to raise $10K but actually made $200K, and the basic idea is that it will eventually be a fully self-hostable social network – instead of everything being a on centrally owned/controlled server, you’ll be able to use it just like any other social network to talk to people all over the world (on any of the ‘hubs’) but you’ll be able to own all your own data.

Here’s Why That Matters:

The Social Web as we know it is, for the most part, a corporately owned commercial space. We aren’t the customers, we’re the bait to bring in the customers – the advertisers. Any attempt to make sharing of our thoughts, ideas, location, photos, info easier is so that there’ll be more data to sell, both for ever more sharply targeted adverts (increased value of each ad and – the theory goes – more ‘useful’ to us.) The data that is scraped is also, on occasion, made available to pollsters, the police, governments… whoever is either willing to pay for it or demand it (and I’m sure legislate more favourably in the interest of the multi-billion dollar companies that run the networks).

All in, the ‘business’ of social networking runs entirely counter to what we users actually want from it, and the only thing we’re constantly told is that the advertising is the price of it being ‘free’. Sadly, we’re never given the option of buying our way out of the surveillance side of things – I’d pay seriously good money for Twitter to leave my network the hell alone and let me get on with talking to the people I care about without being bothered by ‘trends’ and ‘promoted tweets’. There’s pretty much nothing about the way Facebook conducts itself that I find admirable or positive. Twitter seem slightly more reticent to break the service that everyone has fallen in love with, but the gradual creep of trying to glean and sell aggregate data, rather than just let us pay to not be a part of it is deeply troubling.

But they’re not in the business of “social networking”. They’re in the business of selling MASSIVE amounts of data. Allowing the smart ones to opt out, even at a price, damages the data set.

Pretty messed up, eh?

So, What Do We Do?

We take the power back. We move to services where we own and manage our own data. Where privacy is as important as data portability, where there’s no advertising, just the chance to talk to and share with the people we actually want to listen to. Of course, those are still fantastic spaces for discovering things we may end up spending money on – if I need a recommendation for anything I’m shopping for, my twitter friends are the first people I ask. But invariably, I get some spamming dickhead try and sell me their version of whatever it is I’m talking about, regardless of the fact that I have a bunch of trusted friends whose opinion I care about.

Diaspora is in its infancy. BUT they’ve got (in my opinion) the most important bit right – the interface is clean, well designed and usable. Most ‘open source’ solutions suffer from a crisis of ugliness (the open equivalent to Twitter, at the moment, is Identi.ca but is so unbelievably ugly that I find it really difficult to use). Diaspora have fixed that.

What to do? Go to diasp.org and sign up. Then put ‘solobasssteve@joindiaspora.com‘ into the search box. You’ll find me. Add me. Tell your friends what your ID on there is (it’s always in the form of an email address like that – the first bit won’t necessarily find them…) And post it in the comments here.

Start sharing. It’ll take time to start to build a community. But it’s worth the effort. We need a place that’s ours, not owned by advertisers and spyware-peddling losers.

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Amplified is about online conversational integrity

We help enable conversations online around events. We are amplifiers of ideas, opinions, perspectives, and we bring with us our own curiosity and interests in order to facilitate honest, meaningful discussion.

Through years of incorporating social media into our daily work and lives, we have a deep understanding of what works best for particular situations. The environment is changing constantly – partly why I describe Amplified as a ‘perpetual beta project’. Anyone who thinks they have social media “mastered” is in for a shock when the next sea-change happens in usage, perception and tools in a week’s time…

So what do we offer the client? We help facilitate a much bigger conversation, we help distill big ideas into social-media-sized conversational elements and we do so from a position of trust with our extended networks. Everyone who works with Amplified is there because they are trusted and are experienced in the use and application of social media to web-scale conversations.

The elements that come to play are:

• Documentary – through live blogging, tweeting, photographing and audio-recording, we make the substance of the event readable, audible and visible online, both during and after the event.
• Conversation – by being part of (and often central to) the Twitter conversation around the event’s hashtag, we are able to feed questions from the room to those outside, and vice versa, as well as talk about our own experience of being at the event and of the event’s area of focus. We also often use Audioboo to publish conversations with attendees, speakers and organisers of events, asking questions and sharing insights in a way that helps distill thoughts and ideas into sharable media online.
• Aggregation – the Amplified page liveblog is often central to what we bring to an event – using CoverItLive to both transcribe in real time the happenings at the event, but also aggregate tweets and photos into that blog as part of the timeline. The combination of the two gives greater context.

At events where our personal Twitter accounts are the focus of a lot of people’s attention, we use selective retweeting to reflect the thoughts and ideas that are happening elsewhere on Twitter, for those that aren’t just following the hashtag, thus exposing them to a potentially much larger audience.

Our experience and the benefits:

Our experience has been that meaningful engagement around people’s negative responses is better for everyone, and the honest feedback allows you to tailor your events to your audience, and leaves them feeling like they’ve been listened to rather than just talked at. We’re not a marketing or PR agency; we do something different so we won’t spin your mistakes, we won’t hide the opinions of those who aren’t into your event. We don’t feed trolls or give voice to angry malcontents, but we also don’t attempt to bury legitimate criticism.

We’re also not journalists (though a number of our team have a background in the BBC or writing for national papers and magazines) – the role of our own opinions within events is just that of an observer, a participant. We often have better access to the speakers and organisers than the majority of attendees, just because we’re working for them, but we’re more ‘super-delegates’ than journos. Where we do write reportage-style pieces, we do so from an informed position but not an exalted one. We don’t have ‘an angle’.

In almost 4 years of organising and amplifying events, we’ve never had one ‘go bad’. Our policy of transparency and trust has time and again led to far better outcomes than a more guarded, controlled and lower risk approach might. The conversations are wider ranging, and the input of outsiders more genuine, as well as the archive being of far greater use to the event organisers due to the richness of the thought and opinion shared by those who are included in the process and the conversations.

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Here are a couple of examples of the content that arises from the Amplified process:

This page is from a 4 day symposium on Cultural Rights, held by the British Council in Paris.

And this one is from an event with Tipping Point, who promote and explore creative responses to climate change.

It was an amazing day (see the liveblog at amplified11.com/ArtWorksPHF ) and certain themes emerged, particularly as they relate to support structures for artists. The themes of sustainability and cross-disciplinary learning/practice came up a few times, which inspired me to think about how they relate to pop/rock musicians.

It seems that a lot of the infrastructural role that (often centrally funded) arts organisations play in the (broadly) non-commercial arts (dance/theatre/fine art) worlds are deferred in music to record labels – at least in the perception of the artists. When I asked on Twitter about where musicians get their support/encouragement/teaching/motivation from (all things that an arts organisation structure would supply in most other art environments), and whether it was ever distinct from the commercialisation of the end product, I got some really interesting responses from Mike Scott of the Waterboys, (@mickpuck on twitter), archived over on ExquisiteTweets. Click here to read that.

The conversation brings into focus some of the role of the Auteur in popular music – it’s great to read Mike’s response, he has clearly had a self-fed drive to produce music that is ‘great’ from an early age, taking the emotional inspiration of the great rock records of his youth and channeling the desire to connect in the same way into making his own music. (this article by Richard Curtis suggests he’s succeeded) – and the degree of success that Mike has had over the last 25 years shows that in his case, that innate drive was more than enough to produce great work.

But popular musicians in general have no culture – or indeed language – for ‘incubator’ spaces. Supported, mentored environments in which to make their art and think about what it means in the context of their own lives and their culture. We rarely consider what it would mean to do that, to do anything other than respond to that which we are most instinctively, viscerally drawn to in the music of our youth… Our incubator is the bedroom, the band practice room, and those who manage to introduce genuine innovation into their own practice are those who can self-motivate, whose innate artistic vision is already iconoclastic enough to push them to those ends.

What about the rest? What about the potential for such experimentation, for exploring what being human means through our music, that gets ignored because it’s never presented as a possible path, because the environment to do it in doesn’t exist? Because the words to describe it aren’t part of our music-learning experience. We’re either playing our instrument as a reaction to an unsatisfactory classical education, or via a handful of guitar/bass/drum lessons with a teacher that shows us how to play rock classics which most often stays in the realm of playing other people’s music, without much interpretation or recontexualisation, and certainly with little focus on creating something new and meaningful…

And of course, the converse is also, to some extent, true – there are entire fields of artistic endeavour where the creative iconoclast is seen as a maverick, a ‘threat’ to whatever establishment may exist. Rather than being resourced to share their experiences in self-motivation, in self-exploration, they are gently sidelined, often subservient to an easier-to-accredit educational path. Instead of becoming leaders, they are the exception that proves the institutional rule.

In his talk at the ArtWorks Launch, Sean Gregory, the director of creative learning at the Barbican and Guildhall School, highlighted a couple of things that feed into this. The need for cross-disciplinary work – both artistic practice and a project to find a shared language for what we do as artists, and it’s importance to our humanity, and our culture. The other was the importance of funding projects like ArtWorks. He highlighted the rarity of these opportunities particularly as they relate to cross-disciplinary work.

Fortunately, ArtWorks is – as we’ve seen from so many of the arts sector projects that Amplified has been involved with over the last couple of years – an expression of a shift in the perception of many arts organisations and funding bodies, towards a greater realisation that the combination of reduced government support for the arts and a vastly accelerated pace of change in art and technology points to an ever stronger need for spaces where artists can develop and explore their own practice, to learn from each other and to make sense of the world that we’re in. It’s not for nothing that the French government pledged an extra €100M of funding for the arts in response to the economic downturn, Sarkozy vowing to “make culture our response to the global economic crisis”.

I’m eager to see what kind of thinking and practice the ArtWorks project brings into being, but also anxious to see popular music pedagogy ‘grow up’ and start to absorb something of the spirit of open-ended research from projects like this, and see where that takes us…

One strand of it is people blogging about women who have influenced them and their tech/science/engineering/maths-life. So that’s what I’ll do.

This year, I want to write a little about Nancy Baym – Nancy is Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas, with a special personal emphasis on “personal connections in a digital age” (the title of her excellent book) and in the changing relationship between musicians and their fans.

I’ve been reading Nancy’s ‘online fandom’ blog for years, and was drawn in immediately by her scholarly approach to looking at the subject. Almost all the people who write about the changes that the internet has brought about for musicians and music fans do so from a purely anecdotal perspective – me included (albeit somewhat aggregated anecdotes that point to a sea-change in those relationships). Nancy is doing brilliant research and presents that work all over the world at conferences in both the academic and music sectors. Her book is one of -if not THE – key text(s) on connections online.

I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from Nancy and swap ideas with her over the last couple of years. I finally met up with her at a conference in Berlin last year, and have been interviewed by her twice for different books or papers she’s writing. It’s not often that an interview teaches me more than I’m able to impart but not only does talking to Nancy make me up my game just through her not letting me get away with any folksy fluffy BS about the internet being nice for musicians – at least not without backing it up – but her questions are the best questions and her responses reveal her to have the most astute grasp of the whole area of online communication as it relates to musicians of anyone I’ve ever come across.

She’s a brilliant academic, digital ninja, ardent music fan and brilliant analyst of what happens beyond the fluffy shiny stuff of our lives onine. She also wins at Twitter – follow her at @nancybaym – she manages to be funny, sarcastic, erudite and fiercely intelligent in 140 characters. Another rare trait.

There are still a few hours of Ada Lovelace Day to go - who are your digital heroines?

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.

want to be a part of something fun that may make life a little easier for all of us? 

I’ve been working with the genius digi-gnomes at the Imperial College Dept Of Social Computing for over a year on a music sharing app/platform. It’s been through a few revisions, and we want to give it a trial now.

If you’re up for being involved, all that would happen is you’d get to download the app, and could then upload your music. There won’t be any financial transactions in the trial version of the app (though it will be a really interesting proof of concept to see if anyone who hears you chooses to go outside of the app in order to pay you for your music!) – so there’s no money in it, but there is some potential audience, and the chance to play with something very cool before anyone else. You need to have the rights to all your music – if you’re legally allowed to put it on bandcamp, you can put it here as well.

So, if you’ve got at least one album you’re happy to upload into the system (you’ll have the option to remove it again before any properly live version of the app goes out to the general publique.) let me know and I’ll send you an invite as soon as the app’s available (in the next couple of days)

 Sound good? of course it sounds good. Call me, m’kay? 

A 7-year-old of my acquaintance is soon to receive the exciting present of an MP3 player, and I have been co-opted to the organisation of this great event.

I feel sure it would be a much more satisfactory present if it arrived with some music already on.

He loves rock music, so I’m looking for some. I’m thinking say 3 to 10 tracks, depending on what I find.

Here’s my spec:

• Legitimate free versions available… or, at a pinch, very cheap. I don’t want to spend a small fortune on something he may not take to. (But if ever there were a situation fitting the profile of “win future fans by letting them hear the music”, this surely must be one )
• Lyrics encompassing a healthy world view. So none of ye olde “My woman done me wrong”, and preferably (though I know this is a tall order) none of the “You made me feel/do X”.
• Rock music of some description. Can’t be much more descriptive here as I don’t know exactly where his tastes lie, but hey, why not expand them while we’re at it, anyway
• Or orchestral music! as he likes that as well.

I tried looking on Bandcamp, but ran out of time/energy before finding anything within my parameters. There are some tags relating to ideology – like “feminist” or “queercore” – but can you search on “all of several tags/criteria” on their site, like you can on say a shopping site? I couldn’t figure out how. I wanted to ask it for the intersection of ideologically sound and free/cheap and rock. And the ones I did find with promising tags, most didn’t have the lyrics written down for me to quickly scope out… and I ended up quailing at the amount of music I’d apparently have to listen through to (if I could even make out all the words) to check out whether something really met my standards on the “acceptable messages for a 7 year old” front!

So I thought this was a case for consulting some actual humans (probably ones who listen to more new music than I do). Hence posting here

Any recommendations?

(of course feel free too to riff on the general nature of using words to search for music, etc…)

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?