Trust, sharing and caffeine: Steven Johnson on Priestley, coffee houses and innovation

Steven Johnson was in London last week, mostly for a talk with Brian Eno at the ICA; but he also fitted in a conversation at NESTA, which I was able to get to.

Johnson was talking about his new book about Joseph Priestley, the Enlightment scientist and theologician and, as I learned on Tuesday, freind and influencer of the Amercian founding fathers.

What interested me most was Steven’s description of the Enlightenment mileu: an ecosystem of interested individuals and environments – largely coffee shops – which promoted the free circulation and sharing of new ideas. With open discussion and scepticism testing their ideas, these environments promoted a new synthesis; the whole was greater than the sum. Johnson reckoned that the discovery of photosynthesis and its roll in releasing oxygen into the atmosphere was down to the sharing of ideas between Priestley, Benjamin Franklin and others.

This seemed to resonate with those in the audience interested in open source technology and working, free-flowing ideas and co-operation being central to their working methods. (This also reminded me of Mike Masnick’s talk in Edinburgh learlier in the year, where he said that it was the sharing of ideas around Silicon Valley that made the area so innovative.)

Johnson also believed that dissent and scepticism were important qualities which facilititated innovation. This requires a tolerant society, able to accept dissent – not something that was guaranteed in the Enlightenment: Johnson described how Priestley had been chased from his Birmingham home by rioters who took exception to his dissentng religious views; they burnt down his home and he took exile in the young USA.

Johnson reckoned that the equivalent to the coffee house is now to be found online – natch. Modern media open up access to anyone with an internet connection, and we can all contribute, borrow ideas (copyright or not…) and play around with them, creating new syntheses in exchange.

His description of the coffee shop sounded to me very much like Tuttle: I think the face-to-face, social aspects of meeting together add a lot to the online fora the internet facilitates. I think it helps the serendipity and the fluidity of conversations. One never knows who is going to be there, and it is easier to explore and disagree face-to-face than it is online. The offline gathering engenders trust – and that is important if you are sharing ideas, debating and arguing.

Learning to Skip: distant memories

What with the all the fuss about BNP’s Nick Griffin being on BBC’s Question Time a couple of week’s ago, reading Al’s posts about the British Council’s film archive¹ and being prompted to think about politics generally, I have been remembering an experience I had over forty years ago.

I was in a film about race relations in London – set in Notting Hill Gate. This was the time of the Notting Hill race riots; Notting Hill was a run down area, not home to politicians and film stars as it is now. In 1965 – when my story is set – the Second World War was still memory rather than history; people were still arriving on ships from the Carribean like the Windrush; tension was high.

But really, it was just a story about a little boy and a little girl: Jemima and Johnny. I played Johnny (and originally it was called Johnny and Jemima, which is how I still think of it…); a little girl played Jemima (obviously enough). In the film Johnny’s father was a rabble-rouser for the National Front (the precursor to today’s voter-friendly, unracist BNP); Jemima’s family recently arrived from the Caribbean. The film was set among the rubble in bombed streets of Notting Hill and Westbourne Park (no Trellick Tower; no Westway); the two warring families on different sides of the race divide had to work together to rescue us.

I don’t actually remember much about making the film: early November mornings, dark and cold; walking through Portobello market to buy chips; playing with a white rat; having to be taught how to skip down the street.

Me. And “Jemima”. Not quite skipping.

It was only by chance that I was in the film. The director, Lionel Ngakane, a South African emigre, was a friend of my parents; he saw me at a party and exclaimed “that boy must be in my film!” So I was. My brother was too, part of a gang of kids running through the streets.

It was a low, low budget film. Lionel couldn’t afford to record sound, so it was overdubbed afterwards. For reasons I never understood, he used an actress to speak my lines, and the voice never really sounded right. They spelt my name wrong in the credits and couldn’t afford to correct it: my one shot at fame and IMDB have my name wrong!

Lionel was an interesting character. I saw a lot of him over the years; he often talked of making a sequel to Jemima and Johnny, but nothing came of it. The film was shown at various film festivals and won a prize at the Venice.

I was never certain why Lionel was exiled from South Africa. He was an active supporter of the ANC, and there was a story that he had been gun-running, smuggling guns into the country. It is possible a much younger me made that story up, though. For whatever reason, he had to leave South Africa, unable to return; he believed that he was being watched by South African agents in London.

One of my earliest political memories involves Lionel. When I was about ten, Lionel’s father died, and Lionel applied for a temporary visa to return to South Africa for the funeral. He surprised that he was given permission to visit. On arriving in South Africa, however, he was arrested, questionned and put on the first plane back to London. Young though I was, I thought this was unbelievably cruel and mean-spirited; I could half imagine the South African authorities not allowing him back, but to say he could return for the funeral and then to stop him on the brink seemed incredibly mean.

I remember speaking to Lionel in April 1994. He had just cast his vote in the first democratic elections for South Africa at South Africa House in London. He was ecstatic – he couldn’t believe it. Not only was he able to vote in a South African election for the first time, but he had been actively welcomed into South Africa House – a building he had picketed many times and which he had never been allowed in before. Now they were happy to have him enter! He wept down the phone.

He returned to South Africa permanently in the late 1990s and died a few years later.

Jemima and Johnny is still being shown – it can be found in the BFI. My then-partner saw a screening in the Edinburgh Filmhouse when it was shown as part of a series about Black Britain a few years ago – I couldn’t go. It has recently been discussed on Radio 4 in a programme about black British cinema. I have a copy on video tape somewhere, which I really should get transferred to DVD, I guess.

¹I must declare an interest – I am involved in the Counterpoint projects, but not in an editorial or content-creation role – it is just that my involvement has pricked these thoughts!

Is it possible to monetise social capital?

Last Friday at Tuttle, I was talking with Emile Embiabata about ideas he has to monetise social capital generated through social media. This is something we have discussed before, and whilst it interests me, I also don’t quite get it: I am sceptical about the ability to monetise social capital, because in doing so the capital one has built up will, I think, become devalued.

Social capital is something that people at Tuttle seem to have in spades: indeed, it seems to be the underlying principle behind Tuttle, and what differentiates Tuttle from other, more income-focussed, networking events. As someone pointed out to me last week, Tuttle isn’t about sharing business cards, it is about sharing ideas.

Emile’s idea – and I have no concept of the technology behind it, so I hope he doesn’t mind me discussing his idea – is that the capital that one builds up through posting thought, links and – particularly – likes and dislikes on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and so on are actually worth something. If people respect one’s views – if you have a high social capital – those views are likely to have a value. Every time someone clicks on a link to, say, my favourite restaurant because I have tweeted about it, I could get rewarded. The more people respect my views, the more valuable my tweets about my favourite restaurant are likely to be.

The main difficulty I have is that at the moment my views are completely independent. If I tweet about a restaurant (which I don’t think I have ever done!), it is because I like it, and want to share it with people. But if people who read my blog, my tweets, or my Facebook updates know that I am rewarded for posting those views, will they be worth the same? Will they not ignore them – because my independence has been corrupted – sponsored by my restaurant. (By the way, if any restaurants wish to corrupt me, I’m sure we can come to an arrangement…)

Emile countered this by pointing out that if my opinions were defiled, my social capital would be reduced, and people would click on my links; I would lose Twitter followers, and I would get less well rewarded by his system.

It would therefore be self-correcting: if I were honest and true, my stock would rise; if I were spammy and corrupt, people would ignore me, and my views would be worthless.

He may have a point; we agreed to keep talking about it, with me retaining my sceptical, independent and transparent outlook.

I’ll let you know what happens!

“Are Bankers Good or Bad for Society?”

Last week, Chris Skinner spoke at Gresham College, asking “Are Bankers Good or Bad for Society?”. (He was talking on the eve of the eightieth anniversary of the Wall Street crash…) Then today there is the news that the Government are considering splitting up RBS, Lloyds Banking Group and Northern Rock by selling off some old high street banking brands – Williams & Glyn from RBS, and TSB and Cheltenham & Gloucester from Lloyds. If not more bankers – it would seem this is more a sale-and-rebranding exercise – at least more banks. So we’d better get used to it.

Chris’ talk was interesting, though he seemed to conflate bankers, banks and money. His answer to his rhetorical question was generally “yes”, but within a moral, societal context. Regulation and competition have a role here, introducing a moral dimension – though Chris was sceptical of the effect of regulation (he thought regulators would always be trying to catch up with bankers, rather than leading the way).

Banks – and hence bankers – do perform some very useful roles for society, such as:

• facilitating financial planning and management
• enabling individuals and organisations to borrow and lend
• spread the risk of lendinging
• allocating capital within the economy
• thereby enabling trade and projects that would otherwise not be undertaken
• thereby promoting innovation

They do others things too, of course; at the moment they seem to provide society at large – and media and politicians in particular – with hate figures to mock and pillory. Of course, bankers are just a reflection of society: there are a few selfish, greedy bankers out there just as there as selfish, greedy people in all professions. It is just that the riches available to those working in banks can seem so wildly excessive and the people receiving can seem remote from the society they serve.

Over the past decade or so, they have also completely misjudged the risk of the business they were in. Chris quoted David Vinar of Goldman Sachs from 2007:

We are seeing things that were 25-standard deviation events, several days in a row

As Chris explained, a 25-standard deviation event should be expected once every 100,000 years – that is, they are pretty rare! – not several times in a week. That is a pretty big error to make, and resulted in severely flawed, highly complex business models based around derivatives – and the economic crisis we find ourselves in.

Chris then went on to talk about the future of banking and the role of competition to make bankers behave well. He could have been talking about the suggested split up of RBS, Lloyds and Northern Rock. I doubt this will introduce any more bank branches – we won’t have greater access to banks – rather, existing branches of these institutions will be relabelled with the revived banks’ brands. This probably won’t be too hard – I remember meeting an RBS bank manager in a branch in north west England that proudly proclaimed that it was a former “Willy Glyns” branch rather than RBS. It might be harder for customers – will customers be given a choice which bank they will go with? Customers are famously more likely to get divorced than change their banks, so will they really benefit from being moved wholescale from one bank to another, new one?

On the other hand, increasing the choice of high street (retail) banks for customers should provide them with more choice, and competition could lead to innovation of products and reduced costs.

Then again, it will lead to the loss of the economies of scale that lead to the banking mergers in the first place – so some costs may increase instead.

I guess we’ll just have to wait to find out!

Edit: John’s comment reminded me that Chris was concerned by the increase in moral hazard resulting from the nationalisation of banks. Mervyn King recently identified this as a critical issue. If banks believe that the Government will step in if things go wrong, they essentially become a one way bet: heads they win, tails the taxpayers lose.

Changing the World (part n…)

A couple of weeks ago, Francesca’s post on “how do we change the world?” prompted me to write about something I thought we needed to change – our approach to climate change.

This in turn prompted others to respond (and challenge…) [I particularly liked a blog someone linked to about changing the world by dancing - I can't find the link now!].

Then we saw the Trafigura/Carter-Ruck gagging order farce, and the way the twitterverse and blogosphere reacted. (Joanne Jacobs has pulled together lots of different reports and responses to Trafigura here.)

Days later, Jan Moir’s careless comments following Stephen Gately’s untimely death prompted another flood of tweets and postings, resulting in the largest ever number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission.

These may be small events in the greater scheme of things: the planet hasn’t been saved; no war has been stopped; no lives have been saved¹. But people and organisations have been shown that they have to be accountable.

People of all political flavours have new tools available to make their voices heard, and we are finding out how to use them most effectively.

This is important. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. It was hard to have an impact, but people tried – including me. For me, politics is always personal. In the 60s and 70s, people went on marches – I went on many to make my voice felt (Rock Against Racism I remember best). The food we bought sent messages – neither South African wine nor apples, citrus from neither Franco’s Spain nor Israel. There were lots of boycotts (Barclays Bank sticks in my mind, which was easy – I didn’t have a Barclays account!).

These are all small things, but buying food became a political act. I think it still is – I believe that buying organic food sends a message (though it worries me that the message might be that I am middle class and can afford to buy organic food…). Buying Fairtrade products is saying that “this is important” – and many supermarkets have reacted by increasing the range of Fairtrade products they stock.

Lots of small things add up. These things do matter. Hundreds of thousands – perhaps evens millions – of people marching in protest of the Iraqi war may not have been able to change Government policy, but they certainly influenced a lot of other people, and made MPs accountable for their votes in Parliament.

Francesca’s point was that

I’m not doing a lot, and a big part of that is because… it’s not clear how to go about it. I sign petitions, but I don’t go out looking for them – I sign the ones that are tweeted or posted on my friends’ lists. I write Amnesty letters, because Amnesty makes it very easy for me to do it, but nowhere near as many as I ought to. And I also have work and family and friends and I never have a clue when to stop with anything, so quite often I don’t start.

But there is a lot we can do. We can make our voices heard – whatever our views or politics. We can bear witness. We can write, we can hold people and companies to account, we can influence our MPs. Indeed, I can’t think of a time when it was easier to do this.

We have the technology.

In a couple weeks, Amplified’s £1.40 “unconference” aims to

consider the ways social technologies have completely changed the environment for news makers and consumers, and also the changing landscape for politics, democracy and governance

That seems pretty much like what I – and others – have been whining about, so I’ve signed up for it.

Because these things are important – and we can make a difference.

¹I can’t help but hope that some people’s lives might be improved by making others aware of homophobia through the scandal created in the wake of Moir’s lazy, nasty comments.

The Missing Link! Why Twitter Won’t Work In Learning…

(This was a footnote in my previous post, but for clarity I’ve moved it here…)

I recently posted about how Twitter creates a searchable archive which could be used in learning and knowledge management. I was clearly mistaken. The Twitter hashtag for the whisky tasting I recently went to was “#SMWStaste”. There were a couple of hundred tweets with the tag. But searching Twitter, Twitzap or DABR returns no results; googling #SMWStaste produces a few results, but no one page that shows all the conversations.

In essence, the conversations have been lost. I can get to my Tweets by scrolling back through everything I have tweeted until I get to 30 September on DABR, but the page numbers a relative, so I can’t show them to you – more tweets will push back the page number. This is bloody useless. I am disappointed. I thought the point of hashtags was enable effective searching. Clearly not.

What I’ve learned from Whisky. And #Trafigura…

In the past couple of weeks, I have been involved in a couple of events mediated by Twitter that have made me think about the use of social media and what they are good at.

The first was a planned, structured event: a whisky tasting¹. I wasn’t sure how effective this would be: people gathered in three different locations, together with some at home, too; tens of different people tweeting about what they thought of a selection of four different whiskies. I was sceptical: I didn’t think this would work at all; a whisky tasting is all about the shared experience, and I couldn’t see how Twitter would provide this. So I decided to find out by joining in – indeed, after I asked one of the organisers how it would work, I was invited onto the panel sitting in London.

And it worked very, very well: mixing the social with the medium, lubricated with fine whisky, made for lots of interesting conversations both online and off. Reading what other people thought of the whiskies increased the experience, and people built on others’ tweets. I was surprised how quickly I took to it.

The second event happened last week, when I took part in the tweetfest which was #Trafigura. In case you missed this, the Guardian newspaper was subject to a “super injunction” preventing it reporting on a parliamentary question. (The Guardian has been subject to twelve such injunctions in the last year.) Since reporting on parliament was considered a fundamental press freedom in the UK, when word of this leaked, many people dug deeper, and when the nature and subject of the injunction was identified, lots – and lots – of people made a concerted effort to spread the word on Twitter, using the hashtag #Trafigura. After much publicity – a lot of it focussing on the role played by Twitter – Trafigura didn’t pursue its injunction.

I followed the story through Wednesday afternoon: I came to it late and ignorant, followed some of the links, got angry at the assault of British freedoms by big business, and started retweeting. I felt part of a movement, and I felt we played (perhaps a small) part in actually changing something.

The blogosphere has of course been buzzing with the story. Alix Mortimer provides a timeline, and plays down the role of Twitter; Evgeny Morozov says

So, was it a victory for digital activists, who have challenged powerful corporate interests? Well, this is not a lesson that I have drawn from this saga. What we have learnt from the Trafigura story is that digital activism campaigns have much greater chances of success in well-established democracies with a vibrant public life. … If Twitter wasn’t around, the British yellow press would surely pick up this fight, because it simply looks too tempting not to have a quick jab at the corporate interests here

And so on – a Google blog search finds over 38,000 posts about Trafigura. (Make that 38,001, after this… And now, minutes later, over 41,500 and growing!)

There are lessons here. Twitter added to the offline experience of the whisky tasting, and catalysed my action: I was sceptical and curious, and wanted to see how a Twitter whisky tasting would work. It mobilised me to get involved.

The #Trafigura tweetstream clearly mobilised many hundreds – even thousands I haven’t found a way to count the number of tagged tweets, nor the number of twitterers posting them) – of people. It is likely that newspapers’ lawyers and MPs such as Evan Harris and Paul Farrelly (who asked the original parliamentary question) would have succeeded in lifting the injuction without Twitter, but having the weight of that outcry must have helped – Trafigura were on a hiding to nothing. Twitter enabled people to get involved and spread the knowledge of the injunction, and the information Trafigura were trying to suppress, much more quickly and more widely than would otherwise have been possible.

Ultimately, I think, I have learned the value of Twitter as a communication tool: both the whisky tasting and the #Trafigura flood were about communicating; and they clearly worked for me.

¹I wanted to show you the tweetstream for the evening, but I can’t. [Edit: The footnote was made a post of its own for clarity...]

The View from the Thirty Second Floor

Today is Blog Action Day, and the topic is climate change. This is something I think is very important. Every time I hear someone lecture on the subject, the more important I think it is.

Yesterday, I was stuck in a lift for nearly an hour in a tall tower in Canary Wharf with thirteen other people. It got very hot. Once I was trapped there, I wished I had walked down the thirty two floors, but obviously that wasn’t really a viable option – and I’d never have walked thirty two floors up.

Once more, I was reminded how fragile life is.

From the thirty second floor, there was a superb view of London Docklands and the Thames: there is lots of dense building there, residential and commercial. Much would be flooded if the level of the Thames rose much – a metre or so, and these stately skyscrapers and lowly dwellings would be unuseable.

The building – and its lifts – depend on electricity: it couldn’t function without an easy (and possibly cheap) source of power. Without it, there’d be no lifts to carry people up and down; no air-conditioning to keep the people (and their lifts) comfortable; no computers for them to use and to control the building (and those blasted lifts – when it stopped, and remained stopped, I wanted to tell the engineer to switched it off, and switch it back on…); no electric lights; no tube trains or DLR to bring people in and out.

There would be no Canary Wharf.

Not just Canary Wharf: without electricity, I can imagine much of London would become uninhabitable.

This may sound catastrophic, but at least much of Britain would remain habitable – unlike many of the low lying island states which would be at risk [PDF] if the sea level rose by a appreciably. (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest a rise of a metre or so is likely.)

Perhaps we should be planning for such catastrophes, like the people at the Institute for Collapsonomics is trying to do.

It sometimes feels like we in the west are living in a curious age, a narrow Panglossian time squeezed between pre-industrial hardship and post-industrial chaos.

It might be a strange, strange future.

Just In Time: using Twitter as a tool for learning

I have been meaning to write about the value of Twitter as a learning aid for weeks.

First off, Tim Difford and I were discussing its possiibilities, and second, I read this blog post on Twitter as a learning tool.

Years ago when I was working in the Learning & Development team of a large corporate (you’d probably call it the Training Department), we looked at a new learning management system being developed; it had lots bells and whistles, but one smart bit was the use of something approaching an instant messaging system that would allow people to broadcast questions, requests for help and answers. It seemed like a pretty powerful tool to use as the basis of communities of interest and expertise, and it could be incorporated into a knoweldge management system (five years ago, these were all the rage).

Nowadays, though, I’d think that something approaching a corporate implementation of Twitter would make much more sense (I have no idea if such things exist, though I can’t believe they don’t!). One hundred and forty characters is sufficient for most questions, and you can get pretty near immediate response. As Tim pointed out, the learning tweets – oh how I want to christen them leets! – remain on the server, where they are searcheable, so you can find out who else has the problem or might know the answer. Stats from the system could tell L&D managers what topics were most sought after, and so where to place their other, more formal training interventions. And the whole would build up into – well, a knowledge base.

I was discussing this with someone else recently: a librarian. She recoiled at the thought: she wanted all that knowledge classified within a strict taxonomy. I like taxonomies – I had a really fun project building a future-proof taxonomy for all the learning in the large corporate – but frankly, taxonomies are for the learning professionals: the real users just want to get to their problem – they would search for it, or ask for it in a tweet, rather than browse for it. Of course, the professionals could build a taxonomy if they wanted – but the metadata for a 140-character tweet would far exceed the data in the tweet itself. The information in the tweet is all that one needs – given adequate seach systems.

As this post points out, Twitter is a great – though not perfect – tool for informal learning. Out in the Twitterverse, the ability to be able to communicate ideas and through, links to blog posts, deep thought and knowledge is powerful. Within a corporate system, the ease of communication, the stats it could provide, and the precise delivery of just-in-time knowledge could make it a very useful tool in the arsenal of learning.

How Can We Change The World? Two Months to Copenhagen

Back in January, I saw – and wrote about – climate change campaigner and free-market proponent James Cameron talking about life after the Kyoto protocol and December 2009’s up and coming Copenhagen conference.

One of the things Cameron said was

“why are young people not angry with those who got us into this situation?”

It was a powerful message: here is the most important issue facing the whole of the world, and, frankly, not a whole lot is being done about it. Why isn’t everyone getting angry about governments throughout the world failing to get to grips with this issue?

Two things have got me thinking about this again. Firstly, Francesca raised the question how do we change the world? A pretty good question to ask, and when we really need to change the world – whilst we still have a world to change – why are governments so far failing to do it?

Secondly, and probably more directly related to Cameron’s talk, Graciela Chichilnisky gave a talk to the RSA on the topic “Saving Kyoto” (also the name of her new book…).

So: another talk on climate change. Another really scary talk: when the meeting’s chair Mark Lynas described the best case scenario of current models and what such an average increase of 4°C would mean, there was disbelieving laughter, as if one had to laugh because the likely outcome was too hard to contemplate.

There was also a lot of hope in Chichilnisky’s talk: but it was only hope that we might stabilise atmospheric emissions at this best case scenario, so we’d better get used to planning for this – and not a lot seems to be going on there.

Chichilnisky was one of the brains behind the market in carbon, and she reckoned that the short term solutions to climate change were different from the long term – short term solutions include “negative carbon” power generation incorporating carbon capture and storage whilst long term include utilisation of renewable resources such as solar, wind, bio- and nuclear power – so we need both short and long term solutions, but the short remains a fossil fuel economy at odds with the long term renewables agenda.

She foresaw that one of the big barriers to addressing climate change is the standoff between the US and China – what she called “a new cold war”.

Despite the new US President’s clear participation in the climate change debate, the Energy Bill 2009 has yet to be passed by the Senate and be signed into law: the USA signed up to the Kyoto protocol, but has not ratified its involvement.

Chichilnisky even put a price on solving climate change – that is, using short and long term solutions to stabilise the damage caused to climate at an average rise of 4°C: $200bn per year. That sounds a lot – but what was spent in stabilising the world economy from the ravages of the credit crunch? The US economic stimulus cost $787bn; the US Federal Reserve bought $1,200bn worth of debt to support the economy; the UK government spent $88bn rescuing banks and injected a further $350bn into the financial system to support short term debt; Germany spent $68bn on one of the countries banks; and so on. (All the figures cames from this BBC report on the credit crunch). From just these five interventions that I noticed, that’s nearly $2,500bn – over twelve years’ of spending needed to stabilise climate change.

And yet it seems like nothing is happening.

Why aren’t people more angry?

Why aren’t there marches through the streets in support of the 43 small island nations whose very existence Chichilnisky expects to be threatened by rising sea levels caused by climate change?

What can ordinary people do – and do quickly – to stabilise climate change? (I keep writing “stabilise” because remember, the best case scenario is that we might manage to stabilise global emissions at a level that causes an average of 4°C temperature rise – leading to melting ice caps, rising sea levels and changing weather patterns.

Well, we can sign up to 10:10 – though I greatly reduced my emissions years ago (I got rid of my car; reduced my air flights; buy carbon-offset; use low energy light bulbs; switch my PC off when I’m not using it…) [see – I believe in this stuff – and yet I am quibbling about what action I might take: you can see how governments will squirm to be able to keep their carbon footprint up there!]. We can write letters to our governments – though I wouldn’t expect to be able to influence the negotiating stance at Copenhagen.

I’m doing these things.

So how can I change the world? Before the world changes so much through our neglect that it is too late to do anything about it?