Our Man Inside

This five part mini series of Audioboo’s were compiled, edited and enhanced with music by Mark Cotton aka @MCFontaine You can find out more about Mark here: http://about.me/mcfontaine

I blogged about the Do Lectures in detail after I attended in September 2011. You can get more detail here: ourmaninside/do-lectures

For a glimpse into some of the moments and conversations please take a few moments to listen below.

..and here are a few images from my Flickr stream

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Thinking Digital does the conference model really well. It’s a humane accessible version of TED. Small enough to be friendly, big enough to attract the innovators looking for and sharing new ideas.

The Do Lectures do something amazing between a campfire chat and an intimate mini festival. It’s still the most amazing ticketed event I’ve been to and I feel would be extremely difficult to emulate if you were ‘in it for the money’.

SXSW Interactive calls itself a festival but feels to me like the bloated physical manifestation of Facebook. I love the festival model but when it grows for the sole intention to create more profit it becomes monstrously corporate at the expense of heart and soul. If it’s participants can’t see the added value because nothing stands out as amazing on a menu of mediocre. Then it’s just a shanty town of billboards, populated by the bewildered.

If I was going to create something right now, I’d do something similar to the Elevate festival. Set in Graz, Austria, events were ran in all kinds of places from community spaces to the caverns of a hollowed out mountain.

It would start after a lazy breakfast, late enough for conversations and epicurean enjoyment of a shared meal. With more panels than stand up speakers, the audience could see who could talk around their field and not just about their field. A hefty chunk of panel time was given to the floor with statements encouraged as much as questions. The audience switching effortlessly from voyeur to participant.

After the political, environmental & musical discourse came the DJ’s and bands filling laser lit carved rock walls inside the mountain. The music, conversations and partying continued till dawn.

Once again the spaces either side of the timetabled events held immense value. The panels and talks merely catalysing the social side.

We naturally connect with those around us. It doesn’t need to be timetabled in. In fact some people loath the pressured expectation that in between sips of coffee you will be reciting your LinkedIn profile to whomever you can corner or collar in those precious 15 minutes.

I’m not saying the conference model is dead, I just think there is room for more of the intimate festival feel. Less herding from room to room, more of a flow around the attractions.

If you’re looking at assembling a quick and easy gathering of people in order to impart information in a day, then maybe the standard conference model is still for you. Although longevity in the conversations and connections is where I feel value lies.

If you want the ideas planted in the panels and talks to germinate within in your participants minds, let them socialise organically. Take the time to make the space.

Why have a flash of inspiration when it can strobe.

This post originally appears on the Open University’s website ‘Platform’ linked here

I didn’t just go to SXSW for the free cocktails, late night parties, and spontaneous meet ups.
 
No, I had work to do and a part of that was my own research. Simply put, I was really interested to know if anyone had any idea as to what ‘the next big thing’ might be.

The conference centre was where most people would gravitate towards, yet personally I found it repulsive. Not initially. I got to the conference centre before everybody other than security and it was a space full of potential. The corridors were wide and inviting. The barriers set up for registration zigzagged the great hall and everything seemed geared up for conversation.

As soon as the circus kicked off though the punters (of which I was very much one) were penned in and sold to: whether it be the constant bombarding with brands hanging in the air, brands in your food, brands asking you to scan a QR code so they could infiltrate your phone or brands on napkins you could wipe your disgust on. There was no escape.

Mainstream
For a large chunk of the festival I played the same game. After all, I owe much to my own accidental brand and the very fact I was walking the Austin streets was down to sponsorship from forward-thinking British brands.
 
I soon realised I was not alone in my discontent. Not just for the massively monetized conference but for the scene itself.

Perhaps now social media appeared mainstream (this was after all the first year SXSWinteractive had outsold the music festival).. perhaps now everyone was doing it.. those that really cared had lost their niche. The early adopters surfing on the edge of a wave were not prepared for it to crash on the beach.
I am not a regular but I still had 2008 to compare with and this year certainly seemed to be some kind of tipping point. Where were the breakthroughs? Where were the new memes that will carry us into and through the next innovation horizon?

All the panels I wanted to attend seemed to be on simultaneously. Then when there was 10 minutes between events there was 20 minutes of travel to get to a distant hotel conference room.  As a result I struggled to cover half of what I wanted to see. I took little comfort in the fact that in order to find out more, chasing people up who’d been to these panels returned the common response “meh”.

Soggy
With all the tech saturation everything felt… well, wet and soggy. I was proud to be asked to talk about location based app LoveFre.sh  as it’s based on discovering local produce and the people around it. Just using the app dropped me into peoples lives that were passionately going about their business because they cared.

It was this same theme of local that took me into the streets meeting  the local community and those living locally during the festival.

There was also great insight to be had from the SXSW old timers: they knew where to go to find the pockets of reality amongst the cash-encrusted carnival.  One of the high points of the week was being introduced to the Frey Cafe tucked away in the back of the Red Eye Fly bar. Ewan Spence led the way and the night was filled with magic. In it’s 11th year Frey cafe was unbranded & untouched since it’s origins. It was real life storytelling at it’s finest. But for how long? Just the presence of the festival in the city pushes the rents up on all spaces no matter how small and hidden away. These gems are being driven underground.

Also my conversation with Adriana Lukas on Self Hacking went a long way to restoring my faith in humanity…

At least the humanity that was in attendance. We need more disruption, more disrupters and do-ers.  If the masses are now going to be shovelling data into the web like everyone else.. Where are the artists,  the chefs who will make sense of it all and present us up beautiful bite-sized chunks that we can not only share with those around us… but that we can get excited about as we dwell upon relevance?

Empathy
All this relentless shovelling is just leaving a hole where meaning used to be. Show us how these technologies make life better. That is all. Because it can you know.

The free alcohol-induced hedonistic nights left a bitter taste in my mouth when I woke to hear the news in Japan. It was mobile tech and social platforms that were getting the news to me.

In talking to those around me on the streets of SXSW I found an empathy I felt was lacking in the halls and auditoriums. It wasn’t easy to reach out across the world to a nation in need other than to chuck money in their direction in the hope that would make their problems go away.
 
Offline
This is just the beginning. We have the users: let us hone the use. Buzzwords of Game Layers and the Gamification of education are just words without the social interaction these mechanisms seem to rely on. My offline interactions were way more rewarding than my online ones. The social tools I used enabled me to find the people I wanted to share physical space with.
 
I came away from SXSW 2011 with realisations very different to what I’d expected.
Our fate seems to be in the hands of the digital shepherds, the designer/developers who in my opinion need to display our time-based data intertwined with our geographic data. I think it’s been given a fancy name like Geotemporal Visualization.

Easily accessible time/space data sets done well are necessary if innovative collaborations are to create some kind of empathic strands that span out to link our online relationships.

The SXSW interactive festival made me want to unplug and turn everything off. Only for a moment though. I found that turning on just a few channels, a back channel, a transmission frequency and a slight turn of the ‘squelch’ dial to allow just enough background conversation in …and I was re-engaged.

I am still looking for the balance of on vs. off. I am still looking for the niche.

Let’s make The Geeknbury Festival 2008 happen!!

On the 24th to the 27th of July I will be in a field near Hambledon in Surrey whether you guys want to join in or not.
I will most likely have a T-shirt on saying ‘Geeknbury 2008′ and although I don’t know exactly how many people are required to make a festival, I will be proudly stating that this is the first ever Geeknbury.. and history will note it so.

The idea for a Geeknbury is a few years old in my mind but up until a few weeks ago I had no idea how to make it happen. It was already the summer when I had decided to actually do something and bumping into Rachel Clarke and then being introduced to Rebecca Caroe turned the idea into a possibility.

Rebecca already has a private party/festival (Vann) she puts on every year and was happy to have Geeknbury as a bolt on to her event. All we need to make this happen is find bands, activities, events, inspiration and most importantly of all Geeks!

The existing festival runs from Saturday till Sunday but the Geeknbury Geeks can arrive on Thursday night and have a little extra time to strum guitars, tweet around the camp fire and burn marshmallows.

So I guess this is a rallying cry for all those people who are really interested in being a part of Geeknbury 2008 to put their hands up and minds together so we can make this happen.

It is a family (and geek) friendly festival with limited 2 meg wifi but openings for all imaginations to run riot and get creative.

Tickets are £50 for adults and £20 for all kids over 4 years old.

For this you get entry for the festival, camping, access to all the music amenities and activities and a certain amount of food and beer (Saturday night dinner, beer/cider/soft drinks and Sunday morning bacon butties plus tea and coffee.) Not to mention the good times, connections made and great memories to take away.

(There are four staff/helper positions available that will pay £50 and all the above for free.)

If you look at the Wiki at http://geeknbury.pbwiki.com/ you will see a more up to date progress list..

But In A nut.. what we have sorted so far:

Large field – 6 acres
Loos – 5 portable
Tents – 2 – one large 40 foot by 20 foot and one 20×20 foot
Food & Beer – provided for Saturday night dinner, beer/cider/soft drinks and Sunday morning bacon butties, Coffee and tea (all covered by paid for ticket holders)
Electricity – a wired spur from the main house
Hot tubs – 2 x 8 person (one for kids, one for adults) Bring your swimmers!
Wifi – is available but currently low, probably about 2 mb
Fire pit

Entertainment
Making water rockets from empty plastic bottles (they fire 60 foot into the air!)
Team games – non-stop cricket, rounders, football
Garden tours – Gertrude Jeykll water garden
Band(s) for Saturday night. Main evening act (jazz/blues/soul review with singer Gwyn Allen fronting), and I think main afternoon act, Isadore & Clay (folk rock) & a classical octet.
Yoga
Tai Chi
Casper the Rocket Man (with two helicopters.)
a Monster truck that runs on rocket fuel.
Childrens activities eg play, mask making.

..and here are some ideas for things we may need:

Films, a projector and screen
More music/bands and an open mic stage perhaps?
More accessible power to charge laptops and mobiles (Solar power?)
Better wifi and a mobile booster aerial
A Silent Disco
Massage
Meditation
..and so on..

So can you help? If you have any ideas for features, shows, acts or classes leave a comment below or DM me on Twitter

Colin Rogal is the Music Coordinator but is abroad filming a documentary till the 7th of July so please bat all ideas and suggestions in my direction. (leave a comment below)

Tickets can be purchased by sending your request with an address via paypal to.. rebecca@caroe.com

..You can also guarantee yourself tickets by making a cheque out for the full amount payable to ‘Vann Summer Fest‘ and sending it to:

Rebecca Caroe
7 Vicarage Close
Waterbeach
Camebridge
CB25 9QG

So if you can help out in any way, be it with the organising, funding, sponsorship, performing, teaching or supplying of anything that can be put to good festival use.. please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

(p.s Big thanks to Derek Mantle for making a logo for the festival at super short notice.)

Check out the GEEKNBURY PHREADZ CHANNEL to see some of the action.