So, it’s been a long time since I’ve written on this blog.

It’s not been because of a shortage of things to say, far from it, there’s been so much that I’ve been wanting to say, but just haven’t been able to bring myself to write, and talk about all of the many different things that interest, and fascinate me.  There’s been such activity both in my personal life, as well as in the London Tech Startup community that I’m a part of, amongst other things.

Then there’s also the heaps of different things that have been happening in the Social Media Community in London, and it makes me realise that actually there’s a whole lot more that I’d like to write about, but don’t do so, because it doesn’t always act in the best interests of my audience.

Over these last few months, I’ve started pondering about this approach to blogging that I’ve been taking, of amalgamating everything into one blog, and making everyone come to one place to find out the latest about me, my thoughts, insights, and experiences.  Perhaps I’ve been wrong.

I know that there’s most definitely a steady stream of interested readers of this blog, that know me from either the Social Media Perspective, or from the London Tech Startup crowd.  But what you guys probably didn’t know was that there is a part of me that is immensely spiritual, and metaphysically inclined.  I can also imagine the Social Media interests I have don’t necessarily directly translate into the extremely geeky and techie interests that also drive my entrepreneurial curiosity, and the craving to contribute to something more meaningful, and personally stimulating, as well as helping raise my profile, and perhaps in time, additional streams of revenue.

So until further notice, I’ve decided to hold back on the blogging here.  And when I say here, I mean just this blog – http://life.magitam.org.uk.. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up blogging completely, or that I’ve decided to stop blogging.  Far from it, I want to step back to figure out where I should  be blogging, and how so..  There’s a lot I want to say, and a lot of different places I want to say it.  But what I don’t want is for one audience to get confused or mixed in with another, or for me to get so de-focussed with my blog, that I lose the desire or focus as to what I’m going to talk about.  Initially I’m going to be setting up my other blogging sites, and then once I’m done, and have them set up, I’ll be sure to share here a list of all the different places where I’ll be blogging from in the future..

For now, this blog has become too much of an unfocussed chaos, and in order to start making some more coherent, focussed directed conversations, and discussions, around some of the many different communities I’m a member of, I’m going to step back, before taking a huge step forward, and start publishing in a more targetted and focussed manner, across mulitple sites across the internet ;)

Now any suggestions you might have as to what subjects you’d like to hear me write about, feel free to fill up the comments below, and I’ll see if what you my audience wants is at all in line with what I imagine my writing to be targetted towards.

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I don’t normally pay much attention to emails, and chains that I get sent..  Often, they’re just a waste of time, and occasionally there’s something in them, that make me stop and think about some of the choices I’ve made in my life.

I don’t know why, and I normally would never do this, but I read this, and felt like sharing it, with the readers of this blog.

Yes, it is a “chain” email that is probably doing the rounds.  And yes, there probably are a very select group of people, who I’m going to finger out, and send this email to, but for once I thought I’ll share it on my blog.  Just because it feels so “right” for me, where I am in my life ;)  Sometimes it’s good to look at things from different perspectives…

Choose Your Attitude

Michael is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say: When someone would ask him how he was doing, He would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”

He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Michael was there telling the employee how they could look on the positive side of the situation. Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Michael and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?”

Michael replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, ‘You have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested. “Yes, it is,” Michael, said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people affect your mood. Your bottom line: “It’s your choice how you live life.” I reflected on what Michael said.

Soon after, I left the company to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that Michael was involved in a serious accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Michael was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back.

I saw Michael about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied. “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?” I declined to see his wounds, but I did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place.

“The first thing that went through my mind was the well being of my soon to be born daughter,” Michael replied. “Then, as I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or I could choose to die. I chose to live.” “Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked.

Michael continued, “…the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘he’s a dead man.’ I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Michael. “She asked if I was allergic to anything. ‘Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled…

“Gravity.”

Over their laughter, I told them, “I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.”

Michael lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. After all, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.”

You have two choices now:

1. Delete this.

2. Forward it to the people you care about.

I hope you will choose #2. I did.

ENJOY LIFE – IT’S THE ONLY ONE YOU GET !!!

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Tuesday evening, 27th of January, 2009, at the London Geek Dinners, in Hummus Bros in Covent Garden, a bunch of techies and geeks gathered, waiting expectantly to hear some inspiring words of wisdom, and learn from Jeff Pulver, headlined as “Technology Anthropologist; Entrepreneur; Early-Stage Seed Investor; speaker, Living in Social Media”..

Arriving at Hummus Bros a little after 7pm, I was glad to find that I had arrived earlier than the guest speaker.  Digging into a warm apple juice with cinnamon, some tabouleh, and some hummus and avocado, gave me a chance to catch up with some familiar faces, and enjoy a satisfying dinner, before Jeff’s arrival.  Apparently, he was coming, straight from the airport, and arrived a short while after I finished ;) Nice timing indeed!

After Jeff got a chance to get settled, and have some dinner, he gave us a short 20 minute speech, sharing some interesting insights, and giving us some of his thoughts around Social Media.

He related some of his childhood stories, of being a Ham radio operator, as a child, and how his persona as a shy child at school was a completely different identity to the person that he could be on the radio.  The two worlds, allowed him to experience being “himself” – without people being able to go on anything more than his voice, and what he talked about.  That liberating freedom, to hide behind the technology, back when Ham Radio’s were mainstream, hasn’t really changed too much, to this day.  That ability to be yourself, with technology dealing with the job of masking the real you, has really become something of an everyday reality.  In fact, so much so, that I remember turning up to an event, where I was sat right behind someone, who I had befriended virtually, but until that moment, didn’t even know who she was ;)  It’s crazy that you can hide yourself, so well, behind the technology, and if you’re just a little afraid, you don’t have to worry about being yourself, until you’re hidden.  Then you magically discover the courage to be yourself.  Scary, yet empowering at the same time :)

Jeff related a story of his high school reunion, which he attended, and went equipped with a video camera, to ask people what they remembered of him, and the first three folks he asked couldn’t even remember who he was, and then the fourth person he asked remembered him, saying something like – ah yes, you’re the one with a cool dad!  Jeff’s take, on that, after reviewing the videotape, after the reunion, was to remember, that it’s not about how you remember yourself to be, but about how others remembered you to be.  An interesting point, I think, we can often forget about.  When creating an impression, it’s not about what you do, or say, it’s about how the other perceives what you’ve said or done..

My final take, from Jeff Pulver’s talk that evening, was about how he would never want to have, on his public facebook identity, pictures of his children.  He discussed the way in which there were clear segments of groups of people, and the ways he related, and connected to them, meant that to different groups of people he wanted to share different things, or disclose different bits of information.  That challenge alone is enough to realise the shortcomings of our current tools of communication..  This point, was, more saliently touching upon an idea that I’ve been playing with for a few years now, and been refining, and synthesizing, through my own needs.. Having the ability to segment, and selectively email groups of people has been in my list of targets to accomplish for a long time now..

Imagine that you have personal pictures that you want to share with your family, pictures of your work colleagues, you want to share with your work friends, and pictures of you out on the town, with friends, that you want to share with just that group of friends.. Right now – there’s no easy or simple solution to that dilemma.. but rest assured, I’m working on it ;) – If you want to talk more about that challenge, hear about some of the innovative solutions that have been thought of already, or help develop the next generation of information filtering and distribution, then get in touch, or comment below, and let’s get the conversation rolling ;)

Jeff, ended by sharing his take on the future… He saw the future as being even more converged, even more connected, even more interconnectedness across our world… He also talked about how technology is making the world smaller, and mentioned a bit about how the ability to stay connected, to have an ambient awareness of everything your friends have been upto.  He described how his childrens generation stayed connected with their friends, even through the school holidays, and that they each know what the others have been upto, thanks to facebook, myspace, and similar platforms..

Imagine who you might still be friends with, or connected with now, if you’d had these tools at your disposal when you were younger??  Our children are growing up in the world, where it’s normal to have travelled to another country, have friends around the world, and stay connected through technology.

Food for thought eh?? Or Fodder for your dreams!!  Night all!

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This morning, I’ve finally figured out why I so rarely get any real work done.. Because I’m always so busy trying to “fix things”!!

I guess it’s just part of the growing pains of technology, and getting your systems up and running.  Normally, whenever I start with a new computer, there’s some basics that I have to do to any machine, before I can be comfortable using it.  That includes installing some decent open source tools to be able to get my work done.  One of the reasons I prefer to use Open Source software as much as possible, is simply because I can then use it on any platform, and I don’t have to start learning a whole new interface… And with a zero cost to acquisition, the learning I put into installing and configuring the software repays itself, pretty quickly, once you’ve had to install and use the same piece of software on two or three computers… (if you’re reading this, and thinking two or three computers?? Just remember, being a techy, I’ve been using computers for ages, and as I’ve upgraded from an x386 to a 486, to Intel Pentium, to Macs, and Linux, and now am on pretty much everything (except Mac – gotta get myself a Mac again soon!!))

So anyways, Open Source software tends to be able to do the same job as closed source, but has the same interface on pretty much all the platforms, and usually, being open source, if a platform isn’t available, you can usually get the code, and make it work on your platform, if you want to.. I like having that freedom, and knowledge.. Not that I would necessarily do it, just yet – but one of these days, I’m going to get stuck in under the cover, and when I do, I want to make sure that I can contribute and give back to those who gave me so much benefit, and value early on when I started off using the tools to try to stay productive, and useful, with my work, using those tools..

So, for email, I’ve long been a firm advocate of Thunderbird.  Even on a Mac, back when I had the luxury of having one at my disposal, I used the default Mail App, and just had to get out of there, and get my dear lovely Thunderbird working on my desktop as quickly as humanly possible!!!! It’s just painful, when I think of the pain points, but not wanting to bash any software, and not remembering what the points of pain were, suffice it to say, it was something simple and easy enough for me to think, this really should be able to do this, and it couldn’t so I left behind the default Mail client.. (I’m sure Mac’s Mail app is constantly being updated and improved, but you just can’t beat open source for speed of deployment, and just getting the functionality faster, and sooner!!)

Anyways, I’ve used Thunderbird, for as long as I can remember – and the few times that I’ve “had” to use Outlook, or some MS equivalent, I just cringe, and long for the sanity that comes with the open source alternative..

Well, going back a few years, one feature that I thought would be really useful, would be to have a calendar, so enthusiastically I started using Google Calendar, excited that I could export my calendar, and publish it places – (I’m a techie who wants to know I can take my data with me and share it everywhere :)

So I figured, if I can export, and I can publish, I should be able to use it with a desktop client “somehow” – and the bane of being an early adopter is that you really don’t get to choose your apps, with just a point and click style approach – there’s usually some “coding” or integration that needs to happen, to make things work.  No problem – I’m a techie, I don’t have a problem with getting under the hood and making things work, after all that’s what I thrive on, the challenge of making systems do what they’re meant to, so that I can just get on with my life, without having to constantly tell everyone, or repeat stuff that should be easy to replicate, share or just make available.

But alas, the best Google Calendar could do, is let me import my external calendar, into my computer.  (Ok, as I’m writing this, I distinctly remember it being iCal format into iCal on a Mac – so I’m guessing this was quite a few years ago, pre-Lightning and Sunbird – the Mozilla Open Source counterparts for Calendaring).  There was no way that iCal would let me write something into this calendar that I could then sync with my online calendar.. Not that I was using multiple computers at the time (back then it was just a form of online backup in my mind)…

Eventually, with nothing really working quite right, I ended up just leaving it, and never really used calendaring at all, just because life wasn’t too complicated, or busy, and I didn’t need to see every little thing that I was working on, or keep track of, or be on time or as punctual back then…

Fast forward a few years, and a few countries later, and being back in London, and having discovered and now that I’m starting to regularly attend some interesting and cool events, conferences, networks, communities, and groups, I’m often and quite frequently asked about other events that I could suggest and recommend to others.. I guess being someone who’s quite interested in these things, I’m often discovering events through word of mouth, or just happen to know about the places to find things, like meetup.com or upcoming.org…

But I guess that’s not always the case.

So anyways, I was getting a touch annoyed, at just always finding events, or seeing events I wanted to add to my Google Calendar, and tired of Google Calendars lack of integration with Firefox, to be able to just clip an event, and tag it for my calendar, the way I can do for my bookmarks with Delicious, I thought I might be able to save some pain and hassle, by having at least a desktop based client that I can then later sync up with Google Calendar… And as I’m writing this I’m also getting an idea for something, which I’ll share in a second…

So anyways, I set up a bunch of calendars on my google account, which I’ve set up as public calendars…
If you happen to be interested in seeing them, before I’ve properly integrated them into this blog, you can check them out here for now:

For all events even vaguely Spiritual that might be of interest to me:
XML, iCal, HTML

For all Talks and Workshops in London, that might inspire, or engage people working in New Media, Technology, Social Change, Innovation, Culture, or just generally anything else that I think might be interesting to attend:
XML, iCal, HTML

For all Networking Events, Unconference Events, MiniBars, MiniCamps, basically any “unstructured” event, where there’s an opportunity to meet people, connect and network, that I’m generally interested in knowing about. These can be related to Technology, Social Media, Web 2.0, New Media, Startups, Entrepreneur Stuff, Innovative Stuff, pretty much anything that I think is cool, and suited to the general ConsciousComms Community (more about ConsciousComms in the near future):
XML, iCal, HTML

And I’ve only have set these up, because I have found a simpler way of capturing the “events” to add to the calendar, because the pain of trying to add events to Google Calendar was just too great a burden to make me even start taking the first step towards getting the events onto public calendars in the first place..

It’s at this point, that I want to say a huge, huge, thank you to Jonny Reeves, a contributor to a blog called simply bfish.xaedalus.net for taking the time to write his excellent article on Integrating Google Calendar into Thunderbird using Lightning!!  Admittedly, I figured, that I should be able to just add Google Calendar to one of the Mozilla Calendar tools myself, and found the plugin for Gcal from the Mozilla extensions repository.  But if it weren’t for his article, I might have had to experiment with Thunderbird and Lightning, to make sure things worked, and then to figure out how to make it work.. If it weren’t for this well written and properly documented entry, I wouldn’t have been able to just make these tools just work, and get on with my work, so thank you Jonny!! I love that you’ve gone and done what I would have done, had I known it so long ago, and had the time to go through and document so clearly and simply what needs to be done… (It does make me wonder though how comes I didn’t use Google Cal integration with a desktop until now?!?)

I’m pretty sure that article alone will bring down the barrier to entry for so many competent technical users who might not have adopted the hybrid solution to get their systems working otherwise..  It’s nice when you see such clearly documented stuff, and having benefitted so greatly from it, I’ll be sure to remember to share things in as clear a manner as possible, in the near future around some of the things that I’m a bit of an expert on, and feel like there might be people who could be interested in having more help with..

For now, I just had to write this, to express my gratitude, and thanks to scribefire, I just had it pop up, and it let me start writing.. now I just need to catch up with all the other articles that I’ve been working on..

And as an afterthought… I’ll just share an idea that’s occurred to me.. based on the way delicious works – how about a product that lets you “clip” events, to a calendar??  Does anyone thing such an idea has legs?? If you could be at a web page, and just want to record the event, in a calendar format that you could easily share with others.. would you want to use something like that?? Obviously modelling the style of delicious, i.e. having plenty of tagging, networks, etc.. but having a uniquely “Farhan” spin to it.. if you’re interested drop me a note in the comments, or just let me know what you think of the idea through the blog’s comments… (and don’t worry, if you happen to post me your email address in your comment, I’ll make sure I don’t publish it..)

thunderbird, lightning, google calendar, desktop, london events

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ChainReaction08 – Gordon Brown just
arrived on stage, and is honoured to be here at the start of Global
Entrepreneurship Week

Gordon Brown – grew up in a school,
where there was no contact between business and the school – meant
that he never considered being an entrepreneur

Returning to the school, he was
impressed to find a program teaching entrepreneurial values

wants to reward people who generate
value, and take healthy risk, and don’t want to support people who
are taking unhealthy risks

Mayor of Dagenham, had Henry Ford
opening a plant in Dagenham. Mayor asked Ford if he would
contribute to opening of an old people’s home, and with no response,
ended up announcing it.. interesting story…

Mandela shared with gordon brown, he
climbed the mountain, the led to the ending of apartheid in south
africa

he said there is now a new mountain to
climb, finding solutions to the global challenges of poverty, and
there are ways of

Jane Tewson, Peter Jones, and Gordon
Brown on Panel discussion

This is the first financial crisis of
the global age, the first time there’s been a resources crisis and
it’s time to stop thinking of this as a country economy – but as a
global one..

Oil Crisis, people dying because of
lack of food

Oil Crisis – long term greater demand
of energy rising..

Food crisis – africa large land mass,
and is a net importer of food.

Reform of financial system – at a
global level

Global program to address food, and
invest in agriculture

Energy – growing demand, fuel costs,
being unaffordable, security challenge, and need for renewable
resources.

Need co-operation

unemployment, new deal based on
consultation based on young people

solutions to these chaallenges for our
global economy will generate more growth in the coming years, and
together we can work towards creating a better society..

Peter Jones

scarcity drives innovation – we are
able, and have to do a lot more with less. – Don’t lose sight of the
fact that scarcity drives innovation, it makes you want to do more,
with less..

About the inter-connectivity, and about
small businessess out there, not getting stuck on having a hard time,
and need to get out there more, contributing, more, csr programs, to
contribute to society…

Prime Minister Gordon Brown –

There’s many social enterprises in
prime ministers home consistuency, many innovative solutions for
government services are coming out from social enterprises like
nurses, or schools being taken over..

Trying to create a social enterprises
bank, to fund entrepreneurs. Social Enterprises show, to great
effect, that there’s a big contribution to be made

Enterprise based on hard work, effort,
and having the talent to use, and everyone should be encouraged, and
challenged to tap into their talent.

Question – 20% of participants are
under 21 – what would you say?

PJ – Self belief – opportunities
not just waiting to be found, but

you are the new way, the new crest of
what’s waiting to happen.. Go and make your dreams reality

Jane – seconds that – anything’s
possible. Don’t be afraid to ask, don’t be afraid to show you’re
vulnerabilities, just ask.

PM – discover your talent and use it
to the best effect – school motto – everybody does better
together – I will strive my utmost

Rise to the light

Anything is possible

Recognise that – aspire high, aim
high, you can prove anyone can make a difference

Edison, made the lightbulb, after 100
failures .. he said they were 100 steps to success..

Never be discouraged – use your
talent to the best effect – the global entrepreneurship week is
about that.. the global economy and social entrepreneurship week at
chain reaction is all about that..

I will strive my hardest…

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Given that’s it’s a packed and intense two days during Chain Reaction 08, and that the WiFi connection is sporadic, and non-responsive at times, it means that the social reporting, and real time updates from the event are a little more challenging to get out.

For now – I’m going to just share my unabridged notes, from the sessions that I attended, to give you a “flavour” – and I use the term very very loosely, of what’s been happening at the event..

I’ll be sure to revise this posting to a more detailed write up, after the event, once I get a bit more time, but for now – I just want to share what’s come out of the sessions so far..

So to start off, after some excellent ice-breakers, and welcomes to the room, and after an inspiring keynote from Jeremy Gilley, we broke off into different rooms.

I really wanted to sit in on the Collaboration for Social Change session, which was chaired by Stephen Howard from Business In The Community.

Here’s my notes, taken,in realtime, as the session took place – and I hope they give you a glimpse into some of the conversations that were happening, please ask any questions, or share your insights in the comments below.. For now, I can only apologise for the roughness of these next few blogposts..

Collaborating for Social Change

Steve Howard chaired session.

IBM

Microfinance infrastructure

kuda India – 100,000 microfinancing clients

collaborating internally – created opensource software for managing micro-financing organisations, working with grameen bank

royalmail

coming years, business might step backwards

– key theme, asking staff what they want to do, having staff express what they wanted to do

– people love engaging with community, unlocks talent, people have more contact with customers

– in offices where people are engaged, and doing more volunteer work, other metrics and scores are better

– royal mail support barnardos – aligns with values of staff, and what matters to them

– questions from audience – hiten shah – partnership working is difficult and mostly fails, would like to know key elements for success and pitfalls for failure

– partnerships take longer than expected – require a few years to properly be able to work together

– IBM – moved from “big things” to helping staff take small local action -

– RoyalMail did the same, focus on what people want to do locally, not national large corporate led strategies

– remove barriers, to make it easier for people to engage and participate in the programs

– homeless project, involved providing work for homeless – over 16hrs work, meant homeless lost their free housing

being open, with frank dialogue, with staff, not trying to control process, but empowering staff

– boss from Big Issue, sharing social entrepreneur model – challenging corporates to invest CSR budget in Big Issue Invest

– outsourcing CSR spend – to organisations that are more effective, prove return on investment, and show profit

chainreactiion08 – commercial organisation with a social purpose – the Royal Mail

– do we have shared interests? Having different positions? Should work together, where there are common aims

people with money want to give their money in a way that provides visible returns, leads to direct results

– leadership development in the “Third Sector”, what do we need to prepare the next generation to work across the sectors

– IBM-programs exist where leadership can be developed, and second staff to government

– RoyalMail – most organisations have secondment programs, had staff leave to join organisations and programs

-companies starting to bring in an external person into corporate trainings, so they can benefit

– royalmail – business learns from the experience too. Hugely benefits staff to be exposed to the environment

– question – salesforce gives 1% of time, what do corporates do?

– ideas and hours are logged internally, and IBM supports financially accordingly

– how do we take this idea to the other employers, to smaller businesses? Value of community contribution

– video message from allan gillespie, from goldman sachs – video stopped working

– allan gillespie – talks about social action – microsoft, building foundation years ago, burdened on africa poverty issues

– power of immunity, and immunisation – most poor communities only 25-35% get vaccines – people dying from preventable diseases

– prevent children suffering from diseases, kids can be educated, mothers can support family

– millenium development goals, monterey, california, creation by UN – 2000

chainreacction08 – goal 5 – reduction in preventable child deaths

– MS, gates, invested 1.5 billion – uk, and other european govts stepped up and also added to funds

france spain, italy, south africa, sweden, norway – funding secured over many years

– promise of funding used to secure loans to be paid off, across the program

– problems like refrigeration of vaccines with solar refrigerators, motorbikes, resources to make vaccines available

– 10 years – estimated 500 million children will be vaccinated, at least 10, 20 million children saved from death

– gates, un, gleneagles, uk, bank of england, city of london – chain of ripple to make change

– join leadership, government, politics, for sustainable success

– prof david grayson – chair of csr @ Cranfield Business School

– proposal asking businesses to see if a sustainable model for a new immunisation program might work

– fortuitious accident, that proposal landed on desk of banker at goldman sachs, who was looking for csr programs to engage with

– council for social action – need new ways of making change, collaborating

-key characteristics in paper which highlight what works in collaboration-pdf on council of social action website

these will not always be the right approach, takes great deal of time and energy to make programs work

requires significant investment from govt, business, and third sector

must have shared purpose, build deep relationships over time, for commitment to succeed

need for a common vocabulary, between business, govt and 3^rd sector

need capacity to engage with whats on offer, and to properly commit to the cause

extend collaboration common to business to partner with other organisations, new forms off collaboration

capacity for organisations to work with different types of

launch of a consulation – what are the determining critical factors?

-can you share what you’ve seen work? Different scales, different size?

– have the critical success factors been correctly identified?

– have key requirements that will lead to this success been identified?

– looking forward to getting more feedback on these ideas.

invitation to connect with BASAC that’s developing program for supporting community co-operation and participation

suggestion to connect the dots, connecting people together who are already doing amazing things

– unlocking talent, business response, how do we create a web based talent map of what’s already there??

– how do we take this challenge and make it simpler and easier for businesses to connect and collaborate

– ibm evangelists will offer advice, suggestions, find and ask for advice

royal mail – move away from evangelising, and making local connection

– learn across sectors, ripe environment of people who know how to use social networks

– simple actions, why so complicated?

– worldeka, more information, more networks

– suggestion of many ideas, diversity in nature, thriving on diversity

– royal mail – overarching aim is to make it easier and more accessible for businesses to participate, and engage

– not targetted at single solutions, or one solution, but many different solutions, and many different responses

– suggestion that firms make visible a choice to work because of csr, and make that visible

– talk about issues, not necessarily business

– choosing partners based on common values

– building brand and reputation, recruiting the best staff

– IBM actions were based on the values expressed through their staff jams

– tangible evidence from Legal and general research showing companies that implemented these values to outperform

– procurement from ethical suppliers, royal mail, constantly asked about what they’re doing on sustainability and social action

– companies genuinely interested in working with like minded organisations

– grad recruitment – if you’re not talking about work life, environment, you dont’ stand a chance

requires big change in mindset from organisations in civil society, and preparedness to work across sectors in new challenging ways

jeffery sachs – us against a common problem – not us and them anymore

how do we prevent stifling of ideas, increase cross-fertilisation of ideas

subject is more important than ever – need is greater than ever – feels too big to deal with alone

– individually we can help, collaboratively we can help even more

– stephen howard – ceo – business in the community – what can we take away? What difference can I make?

– the urgency has never been greater..

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Today (Monday 17th November 2008) marked the inauguration of Chain Reaction 08, a two day conference in London which “will bring together social leaders, community activists, policy makers, business leaders, young people and people like you from around the globe to share learning and to generate new ideas for social change, locally, nationally and globally.”

Today also marches the launch of Global Entrepreneurship Week “the first worldwide celebration of enterprise, which aims to unleash young people’s enterprising ideas and address some of society’s biggest issues, from poverty reduction through to climate change.”

As the day ends in London, and all the delegates wind down, and finish up for the day, later, half way across the other side of the world, in San Francisco, there is another conversation about to begin, at The Global Summit where the question will be asked – “What will it take to build a sustainable future?”.  The Global Summit(TM) a world-wide partnership for a sustainable future, is laying the foundation for annual Summits across the globe. The Global Summit(TM) begins with a two-day symposium and culturally rich welcome reception. Outcomes include guiding principals for a sustainable world across six key social and economic sectors, a blue print for the world’s first global citizen voter platform and an online collaboration system that maximizes our collective impact. Learn more about this event by either reading this press release, or by visiting the website of the Empowerment works – the organisation responsible for putting on the event.

It seems like this week could truly mark the beginning of a significant changing tide in the world we live in today.. I’ll be personally attending Chain Reaction 08, where I’ll be socially reporting on the event, via twitter, and blogging, as best I can.  At the same time two dear friends, fellow facilitators of the Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, and former colleagues from The Pachamama Alliance where I volunteered for 9 months will be attending The Global Summit in San Francisco.  We’re planning to organise a conference call, after both events, to find out about each others experiences of what was shared, and to find out threads between the two events, that we might be able to start weaving together, between the two gatherings, half a world away from each other..

I don’t know about how much virtual engagement will occur at The Global Summit, but we’ll have plenty of resources to engage people online, coming out of the conference, so please do connect into the conversations in whatever way you feel would work best!!

Whilst clarifiying a few details for The Global Summit, I’ve discovered a few more relevant happenings this week..

This week the following related events are also happening, or did already happen:

Governor’s Global Climate Summit, Nov 18th and 19th, 2008, in Beverly Hills, California,
convened by Governor Schwarzenegger

The G-20 Global Economic Summit, on Nov 15th and 16th, 2008, in DC, organised by President Bush.
You can also read the Full G-20 Declaration.

The first pan-European Town Meeting on Climate Change, 15th Nov, 2008, simultaneously in Florence, (Italy), Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain) and Poitiers (France), in the context of the IDEAL-EU project, one of the ongoing Preparatory Actions on eParticipation funded by the European Commission.

So it’ll be interesting to see with all this flurry of activity, what long term sustainable social change could come out of these programs? and what actually ends up coming out of all these meetings…

If you’d like to engage with Chain Reaction 08 – we’re deliberately including an online social element to the community interactions, and so would like to extend the invitation to everyone to join in, participate, and collaborate.

You can start by tagging everything you generate with the official tag of chainreaction08 – so everytime you blog, tweet, post a photo on flickr, or just generally include anything that you would like to include in the conversation, be sure to include that tag (except if you’re replying to something that’s been said in twitter, in which case the fact you’re replying will mean that the earlier part of the conversation, as well as your response will appear in the results :)  This applies to all people who are at the event, and watching from their homes too :)

On twitter, to search for a keyword, you can use http://search.twitter.com and put in the keyword terms for Chain Reaction 08.

A comprehensive query, that includes all related variations can be found by visiting http://tinyurl.com/5pu375 – this will provide you with a complete list of all posts on twitter relating to the London Chain Reaction 08 event. (The RSS Feed for this query can be found here).

For photos, everyone’s been asked to post them on flickr, and to use the keyword tag of chainreaction08 to make sure that they are visible to everyone who is looking for images from the event.  If you’d like to see the latest photos that have been uploaded, just visit here.  If you happen to attend the Chain Reaction 08 event, and have pictures that you’d like to share with the other participants, then I’d like to invite you to create your very own free flickr account, and post the photos you’ve taken during the course of the two days onto flickr, making sure that you tag all your photos with “chainreaction08” (without the quotes, of course!)

You can also find relevant blog posts, that will help weave a connection between the participants of Chain Reaction 08.  Again, if you want to have your blog appear to other people, make sure that when you post your blog, you include the tag chainreaction08, so that other people can find it, when they are looking for related content..

Fortunately, Google has integrated it’s video search into a single interface, that comes from multiple sources, so you can also find all videos from the event, that are shared on youtube and google video using the chainreaction08 tag.

There is also content being video’d and streamed directly online, throughout the event courtesy of David Wilcox, and Qik…

Then, most importantly, we also have an active online community at http://chain-reaction.crowdvine.com/ so if you don’t happen to have been able to join the event, live, or want to join in from a distance, the online community will undoubtedly be a rich resource, that connects people together long after chain reaction 08 is over, and perhaps by chain reaction 09, there’ll be an international dimension occurring simultaneously at the same time.

If I happen to have missed any resources, please add them into the comments section below, and I’ll be sure to update this page, to properly reflect all the resources, and references relating to ChainReaction08, so that everyone can benefit from knowing where to find everything related and relevant to a matter dear to our hearts.

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In the UK there’s a thriving group of non-profit techies, (also known as Circuit Riders) who stay connected through a mailing list, that regularly keeps everyone engaged with helping each other, and supporting each other, through those trying times when you need someone to call upon, as well as those not so trying times, when you just want to let people know what’s happening, or sound out ideas.  That’s great for the virtual contact, but I’d always felt that there was something lacking in the face to face meetings and events that could also occur, and that I’d experienced during my time as a Non Profit Volunteer Techie in San Francisco during 2006 and 2007.

Working with a model that seems to work well, of meeting on the first tuesday of each month, Amy began the first of London’s Net Tuesdays this week, and by all accounts it was a roaring success!!  You can read a nice detailed account of the event at Amy’s Blog. I don’t think it would be fair to even begin to try and give a better summary than Amy’s already done.  Clearly a seasoned blogger, with a great writing style, she’s done an excellent job of reporting the output from our Bloggers Discussion Panel, which involved Type Pad, Moveable Type, Wordpress and Community Server being represented. One of the members of the Panel, Miko who wore the slightly more technical hat for TypePad, as well as representing Community Server, has written up an excellent summary of the key blogging platforms, and a great summary of some of the differences between them.  I thoroughly recommend if you’re starting out to read her summary, and use those to help inform your decisions about which blogging platform to use.

We then ended the panel, having answered some great questions about the features and functionality of the tools, and then started to come up with a list of considerations to take into account, before getting started.  The blogging “strategies and approaches” part of the conversation was designed to verse people a little in the thinking that goes into making a successful blog, and after brainstorming from the room, we crowdsourced the following 5 key points, of :

1. Setting Goals
2. Write with Passion and Knowledge
3. Practice writing blog posts for a few months
4. Use your community to come and comment
5. Integrate your blog with everything you do

The premise behind this conversation was that in order to be successful with your blogging, there’s some key pre-requisites that are needed.  Especially if you want your blog to be engaging and participative.  With that in mind, Miko shared her own take on starting blogging, and what you should do, to prepare to succeed.

Some Of My Own Thoughts on Blogging

I’m certainly in agreement that blogging doesn’t just happen, on it’s own, in isolation from the world.  I think often people look at a blog, and think “I can do that”. They might even assume that just by installing or getting a blog set up, that they too can start to reap the engagement and conversation that occurs in the blogosphere.  Unfortunately, it really isn’t all as simple as that.

Speaking, from my own experiences, and I wrote my first blog post in 2004, I can say with all certainty, that blogging for me has been something that evolves over time. I’ve undoubtedly been learning a lot about the medium of blogging along the way too, and that journey educates and inspires me to continue to always try out new things, and then some.I first started my blog, as an experiment, using Blogger.com, and started out thinking of it as a place to capture my thoughts and interesting things that I would come across on the internet.  You can even see at Blogger.com my original blogs, as they were until I left them, and integrated them all into my current Blog, which is now a self-hosted installation of WordPress, and where you might be reading this from.

Back when I first started blogging, I decided on some key areas of interest for me in my life, and thought I would use a blog to collect interesting websites that I found and bits of information that I thought were useful.  I considered my blog to be a place to store my thoughts, and as a record of my travels through the internet. I even started a few different blogs, because I thought that other people might be interested if I started collecting enough interesting websites, relating to a specific theme, or idea, or topic, and that in time, people would start finding my blog and commenting on it, and leaving their thoughts and ideas, if I were to capture the “best of” along the way.

You must remember that this is back in those days when del.icio.us and other social bookmarking websites hadn’t yet come out, and I was itching for a way to start collecting my bookmarks online, so I wouldn’t always have to use the same computer, but would always have access to the cool links that I found along my travels.  I also wanted to be able to share with friends, and family some of the cool stuff I would find online, and thought that naturally in time, a blog would be the perfect solution.

And to an extent, it did work, for a few months, and it certainly warmed me to the idea of blogging, but it didn’t really take off, in a big way. I still didn’t quite understand, back then of what I might be able to use the blogging for, and I definitely didn’t maintain the discipline of keeping my blog updated with all the interesting and wonderful things I discovered along the way.

I think back then, part of the challenge for me was that everytime I wanted to post something I would have to log into the blogging platform, and then create the entry, and couldn’t just use a plugin, or bookmarklet script or external blogging client to write to my blog.  Now after experimenting with a number of great tools, I’ve decided that I’m in love with ScribeFire, a plugin for Firefox, and since using it I’ve also started blogging a whole lot more too.  But I digress..So after a considerably non-productive use of blogging, with little real interest in keeping it alive for the sake of keeping it alive, and with this terrible feeling that no-one in the world was interested in what I was writing about, or posting about, I laid my blogging to rest.  Not consciously, but I just didn’t feel the need, or a desire to write about stuff as much.  I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired, or excited, and I guess I was going through my own challenges in life, understanding what I wanted to do, and how I wanted to engage with the world.

Then in the summer of 2005, I ended up travelling to Peru, in South America, and all of a sudden, I had something that I wanted to share with all my friends and family back home.  After a few attempts at writing out long emails, with details of what was happening, in response to people’s emails, I realised that most of the time I was writing pretty much the same set of details in response to people, and spending quite a bit of time repeating the same stories over and over to people, on a one to one basis.  Spurred on with the knowledge and experience of using Blogger.com, quite successfully in the past, I decided I would use that wonderful medium of “blogging”, to write about my travels.  Suffice it to say, it didn’t take long before I took great pleasure in sitting in internet cafes, writing up my notes of the day.  I even became really diligent in writing in my pocket diary, a summary of the days events, so that my time in the internet cafe would be spent just writing up what I’d already thought about and reflected upon, at the end of each day.  I thought that sharing my travels, and experience in that intimate manner would be a great way to keep everyone updated on what I was upto, and how my travels were going, and it meant that I wouldn’t have to write the same email to everyone that kept asking me how things are going, and what I had been upto.

It also started to fuel my desire to write, since I knew I had a captive audience.  I’d received so much support and encouragement from people as I’d left London, that I figured most of those people would probably enjoy reading about my travels, and my adventures.  I later discovered that my cousin had also been sharing my blog out to his fellow co-workers at work, and even though I never received much email, or saw any visibility of how many people visited my blog, and hardly anyone ever commented on it, I felt like it was being read, and I kept it updated, just so if nothing else, at least my family and friends would know how I was doing, and that I was ok.

Of course, once I left Peru, and returned to London, the blogging on that trip to Peru didn’t seem like a natural thing to continue, since I was back home, and things in London just didn’t seem as noteworthy, or as interesting and different as they did out there.  My only regret with my blogging back then, was that I didn’t take a digital camera with me, and take photos… Some of my travels were just so scenic and beautiful, and some of the people I met such loving souls, that I wish I had captured them all on camera.. But instead I got the joys of having fond memories that I shall keep with me instead :)

Again, the blogging had seemed like a great idea, it had become really useful, and productive for me, when I needed it to communicate, and now that I was done with that trip, it didn’t seem like I had anything left to write, and so I just let it fizzle away.  Back then, I didn’t really have any comments on my posts, and I didn’t really understand, if I had emailed all these people that knew me, why didn’t anyone comment on anything I wrote??  And so, by not having much engagement from the audience, I ended up leaving it as a record of my travels, and nothing more.

Uncovering Your Voice

I guess all along, the biggest challenge I had, when writing for my blog, was to get clear in my mind who I was writing for, and what it was that I wanted to communicate.  I would have moments of sharp clarity, and specific things that I thought were noteworthy, and then the enthusiasm would wear off, reality would set in, and I would come to the conclusion that actually I didn’t have anything significant or noteworthy to share with the world. (At least nothing that seemed to get the whole world clamouring at my doorstep, and wanting to comment on).

I’d finally understood, that blogging is a very personal choice, and that if I chose to publicly share myself, I would always be able to do it on my terms, and didn’t have anyone to answer to but myself.  I think partly because back then I didn’t have a clear audience in mind, I used the blogging as a way of tracking my own thoughts, and adventures out into the world of the internet, but never leaving that comfort zone of writing into an empty vaccum where no-one seemed to be listening.

Now, almost four years on, a lot has changed.  My understanding of the internet, and it’s role in my life for one.  My ability to engage and connect with people for another.  And also how I’m using the internet, and what I’m seeing myself using it for are all changing too.  I think part of the online social networking phenomenon of seeing your network online, in platforms like facebook and linked in means that you slowly start to see your “community”.  Wheras in the past, the most visibility you would get is the emails you got and sent, and the IM chats.  The online social networks that have come into existence now, are slowly starting to make us all acutely aware of the fact that we now have “captive audiences”.  Be it we might use those captive audiences to chase, as werewolves, or to write on each others walls, but innately , we have people we are engaging with, and who are engaging back with us.

This is where blogging comes into play, and starts to become useful.

Whilst you can certainly send an email out to everyone you know, using bulk emailing platforms, once that email is sent, it’s gone.  There’s no permanency to that message or conversation.  It disappears into the ether, and you can only track the results, and await the response from people to know what people felt or experienced.  Whilst it makes it possible to communicate intimately, and personally, it detracts from the public presence that could be enriched by sharing the contents of those emails in public.  Especially if it’s non-sensitive information that goes towards establishing your brand, your credibility, your cause, your needs, or your experiences with others.  What people can’t see about you, people can’t know about you, and whilst email newsletters are great in principle, in practice, there needs to be something being added or updated to the blog, or the news section of your own website too, so that those people who don’t currently subscribe to the newsletter could also have the choice, based on the content.

Nowadays, I’ve come to understand a little more clearly my audiences, and my different voices when blogging.  I can’t say I understand or know them all clearly, but I do know that I have a number of different threads or streams of ideas flowing through this one blog.  I have very distinct and different communities of people that I’m communicating with through this blog.  (Albeit, those communities may only exist in my mind for now, but they are very real nonetheless).

I can see, as I re-read my own blog, and see the train of thought, and threads of conversation that I’m weaving together, that I have some very distinct and seperate groups of people that I’m talking to, or in conversation with.  And I think more importantly, I’m starting to understand how powerfully, I can start to engage in the conversation on the internet, through the blogosphere.

It never truly dawned on me, until the Net Tuesday event we had in London, but commenting on other people’s blogs has really started to make me realise and appreciate how important it is to give before you receive.  If I want people to comment on my blog posts, I have to go out there and comment on other people’s blog posts first.

If I want my blog to become successful, I have to make it more focussed, and targetted.  This is something I’ll write about properly another time, but for now, suffice it to say, that the internet is a big place, and the more targetted and focussed your writing is, the easier it will be for you to become an authority in a particular niche.  What that translates to, is that everytime someone googles something vaguely related to your topic or area of expertise, you’ll come up at the very top.  As long as you know what it is you’re passionate about, and what you genuinely know about, then chances are that you’ll eventually be able to become an established authority in that niche.  Until you get that focussed, your own thinking and writing will suffer, as well as the community engagement, and participation to your blog, your website, and your cause, or field of expertise.

Conversely, the more focussed, and targetted you are in everything that you do, the more you start to add real value for others.  You become capable of voicing the unvoiced, on clarifying assmumptions, on becoming an authoritative voice, and opinion.  You also become capable of synthesising and expanding upon the ideas and thoughts of other people, and actually further the conversation in the blogosphere.

But first, you must know who it is that you will be writing for?

Then what is it that you’re going to write that this audience is going to want to know about?

Once you can answer the above two questions, clearly, and you have people regularly asking you for, or your regularly telling people the same bits of information, then, and only then, will you be able to uncover your blogging voice, and start to contribute in a meaningful manner through your blog.  Until then, you’ll be finding your feet, through the possibilities of what you might be able to voice, and who you might be able to express your thoughts to.  That’s not a bad thing either, because until you start trying, you’ll never figure out your space, and most definitely not find the flow of your blogging voice.

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Would love to hear your thoughts, on why you prefer WordPress over other blogging platforms, and also, a link to your WP blog, would be appreciated.

If you happen to also think WP isn’t so hot, or doesn’t meet your needs I’d love to hear why??

My rough notes so far (mainly from wordpress.org and wordpress.com):

wordpress founded in 2003
largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world
Open Source
Requirements:
* PHP version 4.3 or greater
* MySQL version 4.0 or greater
(The mod_rewrite Apache module)

http://wordpress.com/stats/
4,581,919 blogs on wordpress.com

9.8 million WordPress publishers:
4.2 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus
5.6 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

3,249 plugins – 14,532,117 downloads
601 themes – 1,232,704 downloads
1,906 ideas, 51,228 votes

In September 2008, an impressive 236 million people visited one or more WordPress.com blogs, and they viewed close to a billion pages on those blogs:

Almost everything on WordPress.com is free, and things that are currently free will remain free in the future, but we do offer paid a la carte upgrades for things like CSS editing and custom domains. How do we pay for everything? WordPress.com is run by Automattic which currently makes money from the aforementioned upgrades, blog services, Akismet anti-spam technology, and hosting partnerships.

WordPress Links
WordPress Pages

Full standards compliance — We have gone to great lengths to make sure every bit of WordPress generated code is in full compliance with the standards of the W3C. This is important not only for interoperability with today’s browser but also for forward compatibility with the tools of the next generation. Your web site is a beautiful thing, and you should demand nothing less.

No rebuilding — when changing templates
Changes you make to your templates or entries are reflected immediately on your site, with no need for regenerating static pages.

Easy Importing — We currently have importers for Movable Type, Textpattern, Greymatter, Blogger, and b2. Work on importers for Nucleus and pMachine are under way.

XML-RPC interface — WordPress currently supports an extended version of the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, and finally the MovableType API. You can even use clients designed for other platforms like Zempt.

Multiple authors

Spam protection

Comments

Cross-blog communication tools— WordPress fully supports both the Trackback and Pingback standards,

Bookmarklets — Cross-browser bookmarklets make it easy to publish to your blog or add links to your blogroll with a minimum of effort.

Ping away — WordPress supports pinging Ping-O-Matic, which means maximum exposure for your blog to search engines.

Workflow — You can have types of users that can only post drafts, not publish to the front page.

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Well, there’s not long to go, and as the debates and campaigns are coming to a close, with people already pre-voting in parts of the US, and voting queues taking hours at a time, you can tell that this clearly is an election like no other.. With the webosphere, blogosphere, and twittersphere alive with people actively watching and reporting on this election, the chances of there being a “fix” like there was in Bush vs. Clinton, is getting slimmer and slimmer.. let’s hope these elections represent people’s voting properly, and accurately.  Not that I believe in the democratic process leading to much, but heck, it’s got my interest, and so I’m going to blog about it, and share some of the “emergent” results, I’ve seen from the web 2.0 world of the internet so far.. It’ll be interesting to see how these metrics weigh up once the actual results come out.

Most of the inspiration to uncover these stats below came from reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, a book that talks about how diverse groups, which represent some key criterion, of individual self interest and diversity, amongst other things, are capable of accurately predicting outcomes.

So with that in mind, lets see what the Web and the Internet have to say about the current US elections, and let’s see after the elections how the figures and ratios match up..

This all started when for some strange reason, I googled Obama, noticed the total number of entries listed, and thought, I wonder how many pages on the internet exist for McCain?

Well the results were interesting to say the least [just to contextualise, these facts were collected on the 1st of November, 2008, from 16:40 GMT]

Entries on Google.com (I initially used Google.co.uk, but found the US numbers to be a little higher, so possibly more accurate?):

Obama = about 202,000,000 results
McCain = about 144,000,000 results

From Google News:

Obama = 472,359 results
McCain = 425,271 results

From Google Blogs:

Obama = 13,610,226 results
McCain = 7,984,667 results

From Yahoo.com:

Obama = about 1,430,000,000
McCain = about 1,130,000,000

From Live.com:

Obama = 528,000 results
Barack = 894,000 results
McCain = 3,750,000 results
Mc Cain = 6,690,000 results

From Alexa.com, when comparing the traffic Ranking of barackobama.com and johnmccain.com (the official websites of each candidate), note that the smaller the number, the better:

barackobama.com = 753
johnmccain.com = 2,580

Then on TwitVote, a mock opinion poll for Election2008.

Obama = 4247 votes
McCain = 908 votes

(note, that since twitvote is available to the entire twitter community, this may not represent the views of the american people as accurately, this is also being updated in real time, by people in twitter, so the figures will have no doubt have changed dramatically by the time this is published).

Also, on 7-election.com, where voters can vote, based on their choice of cup, when ordering coffee, in 7-eleven’s across the US, we can see:

Obama = 60%
McCain = 40%

From the CNN Election Tracker Poll of Polls:

Obama = 50%
McCain = 43%

and also the CNN Electoral Map Calculator, where the crowd gets to predict the results:

Obama = 291
McCain = 160

Finally, Technorati.com, a blog aggregator predicts:

Obama = 675,621 results
McCain = 494,815 results

If you can find any other examples of crowdsourcing the election results before they happen, do add them to the comments below, and I’ll edit and update the page accordingly.  For now, it looks like Obama is clearly in the lead, across all the media, except, oddly enough, Live.com.. Perhaps that’s a reflection of either the information Live.com relies upon as being inaccurate, or the users there, being of a different demographic.  I’d hate to think there was any intentional fixing going on..

Please do share your thoughts, and insights, in the comments below.. Thanks!

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