We're building up a great collection of videos. Here's what you can see to date:
Participants: we're adding videos to the participant bios page. First to be added are Joy Marsden, Ishi Khan-Jackson and Dan Lamoon. More to follow soon! (And pictures too.) We've also added videos to the team page.
And we've established an Amplified Leicester YouTube Channel where you can see talks by JP Rangaswami, Duncan Wilson, and Keith Perch as well as an increasing number of videos from project participants, Advisory Group members, and other Leicester people explaining how they use social media.
To start you off, here are introductions from Rav Kaur, our Project Coordinator, and Ash Brown, our technical assistant. More participant videos as soon as we can record them.
In 2009/10 Amplified Leicester offered a small group of participants from across the city the chance to: • Benefit from Leicester's huge diversity of people and cultures • Generate new ideas quickly • Think like a futurist and see the bigger picture • Organise and collaborate better • Be persuasive in different social situations • Share and develop creative ideas • Manage the stream of information which bombards us every day • Choose the best people to collaborate with • Make the most of different kinds of resources – social, economic, creative
Every fortnight participants attended inspiring
lectures and workshops and in between meetings worked together via
Twitter, Facebook and other social media applications. They filmed
interviews in their communities and shared the videos online.
On Thursday 15 April 2010 we will showcase their work and expand the
conversation to include the city and beyond. This one day event at the
new Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre
will include practical workshops run by the participants themselves,
presentations of their experimental projects, and talks by the project
team. Keynote speaker, Andrea Saveri, an independent foresight and
strategy consultant based in Berkeley, California, will locate the
Amplified Leicester experience within a global context.Find out more at www.amplifiedleicester.com
Andrea Saveri 'Amplified Leicester and the Resilience
Imperative'
Introduced by Prof Andrew
Hugill, Director, IOCT, DMU [A]
17.15 Panel discussion
Chaired by Ross Grant,
Leicester City Councillor [P]
·Thilo Boeck,
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Action, DMU
·Toby Moores, Amplified
& CEO Sleepydog Ltd [A]
·Andrea Saveri,
independent consultant
·Sue Thomas,
Professor of New Media, IOCT & Humanities, DMU
·Vijay Singh
Riyait, CEO iQubed & Sikh Geek [A]
18.00-19.00 Drinks Reception
Keynote Speaker: Andrea Saveri on 'Amplified Leicester and the Resilience Imperative' The forces of globalization, economic crisis, climate change, and
brittle legacy systems have presented communities around the world with
a resilience imperative. Communities that thrive in the future will be
the ones who can create new patterns of learning, relationship, and
value creation. The building blocks of community resilience rest on
strategic use of digital media as a way to: develop network power and
cooperative systems; create a process for building social and design
capital; and nurture a mindset for community transformation and
individual growth. Amplified Leicester offers a rich opportunity to
examine community prototyping and learning in action and to examine how
networked resilience will shape the future of community and regional
life.
Andrea Saveri
is an independent consultant, located in Berkeley, California. She
works at the intersection of foresight and strategy helping
organizations adapt to a world of unexpected change. For more than 20
years Andrea has worked in Silicon Valley and around the world with
businesses, foundations, and public institutions applying insights from
futures research and emerging technologies to develop strategy and
market opportunities. She currently focuses on the convergence of
technologies of cooperation, strategies for collective action and
commons building, platforms for enabling resilience, and amplified
communities. This nexus of disruption and creativity offers
unprecedented opportunity to regenerate community life, flexible
institutions, and our capacity for wellbeing.
Workshops (Book as part of the registration process)
1A INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CREATIVE WRITERS with Farhana Shaikh Learn how to use social media to research stories, create a readership and build up a profile.
1B QR CODES - CREATING, READING, & GUERILLA CAMPAIGNS! with Sarah Eaton & Mike Wilkinson Learn how to set up a QR reader on your phone and create a QR code. Plan your own Guerilla QR code campaign.
1C LAFF YOURSELF CREATIVE with Ishi Khan Jackson Laugh your way into thinking creatively for the future with laughter therapy, comedy improvisation, games, and thinking outside the box.
Morning Workshops 2 11.00 - 12.00
2A I HAVE A STORY TO SHARE with Nduka Onwuegbute Learn how to create, develop and publish stories using generated prompts, and share the generated stories using social media.
2B OPENING THE BUSINESS FLOODGATES with Mel Gordon Learn how to use Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and blogs to market a business.
2C VIRTUAL WORLDS FOR BEGINNERS with Mike Wilkinson Find out what virtual worlds such as Second Life and Forterra are all about.
For the second half of the workshop Duncan Wilson from Arup talked about future solutions. He focused on the role of design through engineering, sustainability, and a belief for a better future which he summed up by citing SF novelist William Gibson “the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed”. Duncan introduced Foresight; a multidisciplinary team of researchers, academics, scientists, strategists, engineers, and consultants whose job is to develop plausible design. He discussed important drivers of change: water, waste, urbanisation, climate change, energy, and demographics and distributed packs consisting of information cards on the different Drivers of Change categories.
The categories were examined across societal, technological, economic, environmental, and political domains to identify potential impacts of change and possible solutions. The group spent some time reading and discussing the cards, then Duncan asked participants to write down their own views and collected the cards to be scanned and shared. Overall the session inspired the participants to expand their vision of the kinds of projects that might be possible in Leicester.
Click here to read Duncan's blog post on the event and here for the scanned notes.
Sue introduced the third workshop and began the session with an insight into Longbroading: thinking in terms of higher-level systems, massively multiple cycles, and the very big picture. This was followed by a quick exercise where the group was asked to collect ideas for projects which use collaborative technologies to create an impact which will still be felt in Leicester in 50 years’ time. To achieve this, they chose from one of three imaginary budgets - £50,000, £2,000 or £0.
Participants were given 15 minutes to brainstorm possible ideas for their chosen budget.
Surprisingly, the majority opted to work a budget of of £0 - their ideas included an online time capsule, recipe swap, online sign language, and a Twitter for transport project which, interestingly, was also an idea shared by the highest budget group.The £2,000 budget attracted ideas focusing on legacy and a student alumni social network. This particular idea was challenged because Ian believed the members were promoting “classism” and excluding users without a university education. As the group discussed the matter Rav pointed out that Facebook began as a selective network in its infancy before taking a global audience. Other members felt it was fine to target a niche market as most networks do have various purposes and that to exclude types of users was not always a negative choice. The final group shared their ideas of mini projects funded by a £50,000 budget and outlined a number of proposals including a digital family tree, aroma-mail, anti bullying scheme, and a charity communications service.
All ideas sparked much conversation between the participants. The exercise also showed that many participants believed that through networking and networks collaborating together small projects could be realised without a massive budget.
To round off the discussion, Sue announced that the group will be given a real budget of £14,000 to support the development of a series of mini-projects providing practical examples of how collaborative technologies can be exploited in a city context. More on this in future posts.
To view photos from the group exercise please follow the link.
This presentation discusses the emerging era of human enhancement as an interface between cultures of computing and biology. It argues how the future of humanity will depend largely on its ability to accumulate biocultural capital, while faced with the environmental imperative to ensure sustainable adaptation.
Professor Andy Miah, BA, MPhil, PhD, is Chair of Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the Faculty of Business & Creative Industries at the University of the West of Scotland, Fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, USA and Fellow at FACT, the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, UK. http://www.andymiah.net
One of a series of private events for Amplified Leicester participants.
The second session began with a quick group exercise where the participants were asked for their thoughts on the project so far and how it might impact on the way they used social media personally or professionally, or on the city of Leicester as a whole. Everyone shared their thoughts with the group in a one sentence summary and some key themes soon became evident. Social exclusion was mentioned several times, with some people very concerned about those who remain 'unnetworked'. This was followed by an interesting series of questions from Ian: "How do groups socialise? Who is following who? Do certain groups of people stay connected only between themselves?” leading to the issue of identity raised by Laura: "With no profile how would people be judged?” Another area of concern was the relationships between networks, local resources, and community cohesion, especially in relation to the positive and negative effects of social media on various communities. Then there was some anxiety about maintaining a balance between online and offline media - would social networking affect our ability to maintain face-to-face contact and other traditional methods of communication? This led to the issue of time management and feeling overwhelmed: managing various networks and using a variety of tools can be time-consuming and again forces the individual to think about how to maintain a balance. There was a great deal of interest in the impact of social media on business, especially the extent to which it will enhance local business networks and enable international commercial relationships. A few participants noted the rise of new vocabularies and the ways in which new media tools are changing the modern language.
Overall the main focus was on empowerment - of individuals, of businesses and of agencies - and on the negative implications for those who remain ‘unnetworked’. We agreed that social media is a vitally important element of today’s world, but that face-to-face communications remain essential to fulfilling personal and business relationships. The trick lies in managing both effectively.
Sue then explained the amplified qualities of Influency (knowing how to be persuasive in multiple social contexts and media spaces, and demonstrating awareness that each context and space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique) and Signal to Noise Management (filtering meaningful information, patterns, and commonalities from the massively multiple streams of data and advice) and proposed that we use the medium of storytelling to draw narratives out of massive streams of information. In small groups, participants applied the model of a three-act story structure to create ministories about local issues. Some even managed to reduce them down to 140 character dramatic Tweets such as RossIGrant’s The Musical Princess: Princess C threatened! Evil Lord to sell C. No KISA. Villagers rise up to save C. Rescue C from Danger. HEA #ampleic (probably only intelligible to locals!)
We continued the storytelling theme with our visiting speaker Keith Perch, Editor of the Leicester Mercury newspaper, who spoke about writing for news-based social media. He made clear early on that "I'm not going to tell you how to write". He urged the group to use social media as a voice, to be honest, and not worry about how they write. To illustrate this point he asked the group to retell, in brief, the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Once they had summarised the tale in a few paragraphs he invited people to share their version with everyone, an exercise which quickly revealed that some members told the story from the point of view of Goldilocks whilst others viewed it from the position of the aggrieved bears.
Keith encouraged the group to "recognise your bias" and provoked an interesting debate about truth, fairness, balance and transparency when writing as individuals. All members took the opportunity to raise questions on boundaries and share personal opinions. They also shared their personal stories on how writing for social media impacted Leicester, discussing The Bowstring Bridge debate as a timely example. Keith concluded the session by reiterating that an honest approach is best, even if people don't like the opinion you’re expressing.
Stories we tell about our world: the image above was chosen to illustrate Scott Page's comment “When looking at a fish tank, people from Eastern countries tend to notice patterns in swimming fish, and people from Western countries more often notice individual fish.” (from 'The Difference: How the power of diversity creates better groups, firms, schools and societies' Scott E Page, 2007) Do you think this observation is accurate?
We live in an age of information overload, and we have to find ways of simplifying our access to information, of assessing the quality of the information and of passing the information on. There are many constraints and assumptions - physical, economic and social - that tend to prevent information from flowing freely; and many battles to be fought and won to keep our information pathways free from pollution and accessible to everyone.
JP Rangaswami is the Chief Scientist for BT, reporting to Al-Noor Ramji the CEO of BT Innovate & Design. He has extensive international experience in IT and financial services companies and is passionate about innovation, information and how it is used, and education. He is a fervent blogger www.confusedofcalcutta.com, tweeter www.twitter.com/jobsworth and a regular speaker at industry events, particularly on innovation and opensource.
One of a series of private events for Amplified Leicester participants.
We gave every Amplified Leicester participant a special notebook and pen to record their thoughts and observations. It's a real pleasure to see them scribbling away as we work, debate and share ideas together.
Very curious to know what they are actually writing and drawing in there.... I wonder what they're thinking about?