After a long and hard week wireframing, coding, arguing (a bit, and mainly over the music) and eating a lot of biscuits, we headed up to London to the event at Engine, not without a degree of nervousness.
The standard of entries was incredible. Teams from Manchester, Norwich and London had, in the space of a week, built the most amazing apps.
Particularly worthy of note was Isabell Long’sGov Spark (an app for monitoring Government Department energy consumption) and WhatBlock (a pupil-powered crowdsourcing app for compiling lists of blocked sites) but there were so many great ideas (which you can see here).
The great news for Harry, Damon and Lawrence, Brighton’s YRS team, was that TubeSmart won a runners-up prize while SocialLibrary won Best in Show, generating a lot of interest from the audience and judges.
This is all no mean feat when the judging panel included Andrew Stott (Director of Digital Engagement), Helen Milner (MD, UK Online Centres) and Mark O’Neil (CIO at the DCMS), amongst others.
Wot I learneded
I feel I learned a lot from the week too, which I won’t bang on about, but in short…
1. It seems IT/ICT teaching schools needs to change. While it’s been 16 years since I experienced it, this is something I heard a lot about at the event on Friday (and since). What I do know is that our team were all self-taught and self-motivated; that at least one of them ditched IT through lack of interest and that events like Rewired State are their only opportunity to do something really creative with technology.
Harnessing their motivation, imagination and lack of baggage (that us embittered, elderly people come with) is extremely powerful and inspiring to be a part of.
2. Rewired State is amazing, as are Emma Mulqueeny and Dan Morris. We need more organisations (and people) like this – and investment in them – if we’re really going to harness technology and imaginations for a better society.
Brighton’s digital community rock
I was also bowled over by the number of offers for support from the Brighton digital community – so many I couldn’t actually accommodate everyone! Big thank yous to those who dropped in to help over the week – Alan and Jesse from Cubeworks, Jon Markwell, Anna Debenham, Joe Holdcroft, Cennydd Bowles and Mike Parris – who gave some added inspiration to the team.
Words from the team
It seems only fitting to end on something from the team, rather than me, so here’s a few words from Harry, Damon and Lawrence.
Lawrence on how the ideas came about:
“The biggest challenge of the week was by far coming up with ideas. We spent the majority of the day in the sunny NixonMcinnes office racking our brains for ideas. Having thought about it recently, I think the secret to our success was not staring at the endless list of incomplete/hacky data, but actually asking ourselves what the government was doing wrong.”
“Tuesday and Wednesday me and Lawrence (@lawrencejob) spent coding TubeSmart (the code was pretty bad – mostly due to some functions I wrote late at night that we hacked around with to do some other stuff and integrated with a DB class from Lawrence and partly due to a lack of time), while Damon (@damonhayhurst) spent most of his time doing wireframes for SociaLibrary.”
We’re currently sitting on the top floor of Engine on Great Portland Street, getting ready for kick-off and the YRS Brighton team’s chance to wow the crowd.
We’ll follow up with news of how we get on but in the meantime, a few quick words and thoughts on the week from Harry, the youngest member of the YRS Brighton team:
“As I write this, me and the rest of the YRS Brighton team (@yrsbrighton) are on the train to London, where we’ll present our weeks work to a crowd and see what the other YRS teams have come up with. This week, we’ve come up with two ideas – TubeSmart and SociaLibrary.
TubeSmart is a web application that overlays SVG circles on top of a tube map. These circles grow bigger as more and more people enter each tube staton, and the information is updated in real time (although because TfL won’t release the neccessary data, we’ve had to make it up).
The user can navigate back in time and see the map how it was then. The user can click on an individual station and view a graph showing the rise and fall of the number of people at the station over time.
SociaLibrary is an idea for a web application that improves upon the current online library system by integrating social media. Currently there is a lot of data available about where libraries are and what books they have. SociaLibrary uses this data to make it easier for people to access libraries.
SociaLibrary also integrates social media – users can see what their friends are reading and books they have liked.”
We’re half-way through the week and the team’s been making amazing progress on two really great ideas.
The team are getting really stuck in to their projects, and we’ve had some great people dropping by: Alan and Jesse from Cubeworks, Cennydd from Clearleft and Anna and Joe from Message
It’s all looking pretty good for our presentations on Friday, but see for yourself with our first lot of photos on Flickr.
In the meantime, here are a few word on progress from Damon…
“Over the past few days we have continued to progress with TubeSmart. Lawrence are Harry are deep in coding. I’ve started designing wire frames for our second project, books.gov.uk.”
“Progress has been slow with a few bugs including the tube map not appearing and Damon’s work being lost. Other than that we have had a few guests in over the past few days including some of the guys from Cubeworks and ClearLeft.”
Young Rewired State kicked off yesterday and the Brighton team have already come up with two really solid ideas for how to show Government what it could be doing better, with open data.
Harry, Lawrence and Damon spent the morning talking through examples of data sets and previous YRS creations before getting stuck into creating their ideas in the afternoon.
We’ve also set up a Brighton outpost twitter feed, which we’ll all be posting to – follow it for the latest on what we’re up to.
So, meet the team, in their own words…
Lawrence Job
Hi there, I’m @lawrencejob. I freelance under the better known brand GridFusions, and love cloud/web development. I have attended a few Rewired State events before, and always leave wanting more – I enjoy socialising, coding and the feeling of changing the country. Albeit slowly. Last year my team won an award with TfHell, and a few weeks later the impact was felt. And this year we’ll do even better.
Harry Rickards
Hi, I’m Harry. I know a bit of PHP, HTML/CSS and C, and want to learn a lot more (PHP). I signed up for Young Rewired State to get some more experience, and hopefully make something cool that’s useful to someone. I’ve had quite a bit of experience in open source projects, e.g I’m part of the Debian Multimedia Packaging Team and the contact point between that team and upstream (the developer of the program) for LiVES (a piece of video editing software).
Damon Hayhurst
Hi, I’m Damon, I’m 16. My hobbies also include DJing and playing rugby. I came here to learn more about web development and design. Also as a form of work experience to improve my CV. I’m very much interested in social networking and how it affects the media as a whole. I hope what I will get out of the week will benefit my skills in web development.
But what about the ideas…
Idea one: Books.gov.uk
To improve use of local libraries, particularly amongst young people, we want to bring book availability, recommendations and personal borrowing behaviour into people’s social networks.
_ socialising the library experience and personal borrowing data.
_ providing reading recommendations based on online conversations.
_ reducing paper waste by digitalising notifications and warnings.
_ centralising the library system so anyone can borrow anything from anywhere (and therefore the data) – ok so this is a big ask.
TubeSmart
Using real-time ticket barrier data, we want to produce a heat map of train/tube stations to help travellers work out which stations they should avoid using at particular times. Using recorded trends over the year, and local events, we can give advice on planning future journeys.
Stay tuned for updates from the team, and the latest on progress…
The time has come to embark on another search for two more starships to join our intergalactic fleet of rockets, interplanetary shuttles and lightspeed motherships. Ummmm. Yes.
Please stop what you’re doing now, and go and do something more useful. More creative. Whatever that is for you.
Well done if you stopped.
If you are still reading do you ever wonder what makes it so difficult to stop? There seems to be something about the human being that makes us want to consume words – many of us seem to find it hard not to keep on pressing forward, seeking to find out what’s in the next sentence.
Perhaps this is what fuels our addiction to the (streaming) media?
It’s not just words of course. Moving images, and sound too. We watch. We listen. We consume.
In the light of some research on the use of the iPad in the home that our Insight practice is cooking up, I wondered whether we’re getting something wrong.
It took me years to give up watching TV. I still find it hard to pass a newspaper stand. And the constant chitter-chatter of the radio presenter still has an attraction even on a slow news day.
And what have I done? I’ve replaced those streams with others: Twitter, Facebook, email.
Of course, I celebrate the idea that we’ve at least loosened Big Media’s unique hold on our attention.
For a couple of years I worked in a company trying to change the way source information was delivered to consumers.
And, lo and behold, fifteen years later, a really popular app for the iPad is Flipboard – which allows the user to build their own newspaper out of their own Twitter and Facebook feeds – the totally personalised and customised newspaper dreamt of by media futurists for more than 30 years. And with content that may – or may not – be produced by a media professional; content direct from the source.
But what monster have we created? With the iPad, and the commodity-priced tablets that will follow, a way for anyone, including corporations of course, to reach directly into our homes. A way for anyone’s voice – even mine – to reach you.
And there’s the rub. What are we giving up by allowing our valuable time, our valuable headspace to be used up by the sound and fury of others voices?
Isn’t there value too in a bit of peace, a bit of quiet reflection. In staring into space. Listening to our own voices? Why the rush? What are we running away from? What are we scared of?
I know that in this new world we can create and produce too – I’m writing this post aren’t I?
But that is my problem; yours is that you are reading it.
So stop entertaining yourself to death. Why not go and sit quietly? Eat a peach? Ride a bike? And enjoy.
A bunch of links? Not the best name I know but in essence that’s what this is, a bunch of interesting links from across the web that I have perused this week. I’m planning on making this a weekly thing so if you see anything on the world wide webs that you think I might like then ping me on Twitter.
First up, http://what.time.zone.is.stev.ie/in/? just in case you need to know where abouts our developer Steve is. At the time of writing he is in Tennessee (as far as we know).
I’m not entirely sure the next link is 100% true, it seems a little bit mad to me (and almost like some comedy sketch from the videos), but hey, its the internets right? Training mice to deal in ForEx trades.
The net seems to be all a buzz with posts on Gizmodo and a bunch of other blogs about a new physics engine by Lagoa Technologies, its pretty darn impressive! Makes me think about the Euphoria engine made by Natural Motion which is used in games like Grand Theft Auto, it blew my mind the first time I saw the demo.
A few weeks ago the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera blog posted up some great pictures of the Apollo 16 landing site. The post is a pretty interesting read… if you like that sort of thing!
The beginning of this week saw a flurry of social media madness from Gillian McKeith (the poo woman off Channel4) who was involved in a bit of a slinging match with Ben Goldacre of badscience.net, check out a (fairly biased) round up of the story over at Bad Science or a (slightly less biased) analysis by David Naylor.
The framework has been designed to help advertisers and agencies apply clarity, structure and standardization to social media measurement.
Broadly speaking the framework suggests that you should first establish Intent (I) . This element demands that a set of objectives be established, which can then determine the key performance indicators (KPIs) that are most relevant to success.
Thanks to Ricardo Semler and a wonderful group of people that make up the team, we run our company differently to most.
We try to ever-develop an open culture, where for example people share their rewards – see illustration!
We try to harness the innate potential of our people through democratic practices – see video!
We try to do all of this in a way that translates into happiness benefits AND financial benefits – read blog post!
But – alas – it’s not all candy floss and kittens in our world.
The more we practice what we do, the more aware I become of the challenges in doing what we do.
Here’s a few we wrestle with:
Stress from openness and reality
Honesty & conflict
Non-participation
Dealing with other people’s perceptions
Managing messiness
UK employment law
Perceived slowness
De-programming new people
The need for personal change
Forgetting how different it is
1. Stress from openness and reality
I think we all feel we’d like to know what’s really going on at work. But actually, it’s pretty stressful sometimes. Reality bites, and there’s probably a reality biting in every workplace but in ours it’s a special kind of ‘this is really real’ reality – be that new business data, financial information, having to share in big crunchy decisions, having to bear the load of big responsibilities and solving tough problems. I guess people that have or do work in start ups can absolutely identify with this, and probably freelancers and independent consultants too. But often when you live in a bigger organisation, this kinda thing is hidden away.
So the emphasis on openness is actually pretty tough to live with. As one team member put it when he first joined, “it’s like having the honesty volume turned up”. Good, but not easy.
2. Honesty & conflict
Being in an honest environment leads to more conflict. Hopefully more positive, and open conflict (as opposed to concealed, disguised, poisonous conflict) but conflict all the same. In reality, we don’t have enough positive conflict at NixonMcInnes in my opinion, and we’re taking responsibility for that and trying to work on it. But it’s hard. (A good book on this is Crucial Confrontations).
But as British people, as nice people, sensitive people, I think most of us find conflict very very scary. Especially in a professional environment. It’s hard!
3. Non-participation
You think the issue matters or that the opportunity to contribute is wonderful – you open up the floor – and then nothing. No participation, no contribution, no care. One of the thing that new starters find hardest is that simply asking for input doesn’t always work. People here are busy, capable and empowered – so they behave more like volunteers. You need to enlist them, excite one another with the mission, call and engage. An email won’t get it. Sometimes our guest board seats go unfilled, much to our chagrin. Just because you say it’s participatory, doesn’t mean it is!
4. Dealing with other people’s perceptions
One I find very hard. When I describe our working practices, culture and values to people, they usually don’t get it. Maybe it’s how I communicate it? But senior agency people and clients look at me like I’m a bit mad, a bit goofy and actually totally insane. They say things like ‘well, if that works for you….’ and ‘do they know how much YOU earn’…. and ‘but isn’t just like management by committee’ and perhaps worst ‘wow…ummm…that sounds really nice’.
It’s especially different with other agency professionals: to them it just feels alien and a total lack of respect for authority. But it can also be an overhead for family and friends and normal people – it’s hard because it’s different. But it can make for a lonely experience.
5. Managing messiness
Difficult to explain without sounding like a new-age-business-writer-twerp, but it goes something like this: we believe in participation, we believe in being networked rather than command-and-control, and in empowerment rather than over-hierarchy.
The result of this combination is that when someone says ‘who do I need to talk to about this’ the answer can often be ‘try Lasy and see what Tom says, and then speak to Max’. When someone phones up and says ‘who is the person that manages XYZ functional responsibility?’ the answer may not always be simple.
So some of the good stuff does result in a kind of functioning and effective messiness, which we’ve learnt some people just can’t tolerate. Some people – good people – have been attracted to the promise of our culture, but in the end repelled by the lack of simple answers to sometimes simple questions :)
6. UK employment law
UK employment law is a tricky thing for any company. I understand what it is attempting to do, and protecting people is a very important thing to do. Our issue at NM is that we feel we often put people before the company finances (which of course has a long-term benefit of translating into positive financial results) but that the law is an absolute blocker, minefield and inflexible mallet of an instrument.
Put simply, democratic principles and UK employment law are definitely not peas in a happy pod. A challenge.
7. Perceived slowness
When you have to involve people, it can feel slow. The pressure is on, you just need to get something done, the thought of canvassing opinions and experiences and inviting feedback is basically a very unpleasant idea. It FEELS slow.
So maybe you short cut it.
You don’t involve the people, you save the time, make the decision and go go go. BLAM!! Then, bit by bit, people ask the same questions, want to know the whys and wherefores, or perhaps just waste time while they wonder what’s really going on and why.
Involving people can feel slow – lots of contributions, lots of feedback, lots of input. But we feel the results are actually faster – once committed, people commit more fully. HR professionals say that employee engagement is the magic key – engagement = results = profits = win. We believe participation is the magic key to engagement. It can feel slower in the early stages, but the benefits come next and keep coming.
8. De-programming new people
It seems to take about 6 months for people to really get how things work culturally in NixonMcInnes. For people to work out how they can behave, how they can dress, how they can participate and voice their feelings and ideas. You can actually ’see’ it happening, I feel. It’s like deprogramming from a different way. I’m probably underestimating how much this happens whichever new work environment people go into. But it feels big when I observe it, so I’m listing it as a challenge.
The way we deal with the challenge is simple, fortunately: just patience. It happens.
9. The need for personal change
Lots of these other challenges end up resulting in the need for some kind of personal change: changing to cope with extra doses of openness, with more responsibility than normal, with a messier, more networked working structure, with the need to be honest to others, even though you (we / I) really, really would rather swerve it or take the edge off of it or grit and smile through it.
Perhaps this is the hardest of all the challenges? Changing is damn hard. I can’t think of an NM team member who hasn’t really changed since they’ve been here. Being a rose-tinted fanboy, of course I see it as positive change, as evolving, but I really believe it.
And perhaps I can talk with most strength about me. Because I’ve changed massively, thanks to the way things are here. I’ve become more confident and a bit less brash, learnt new communication skills which I occasionally remember to apply, learnt how to change and cope with change, how to help other people do the same. It’s been good. But not easy.
10. Forgetting how different this is
Finally, another big challenge with all this different culture gubbins is starting to take it for granted, forgetting that it’s different and special and ours, and just assuming that’s how life is out there in the working world. And that I believe is a little bit dangerous and a lot of a shame. As a professional service organisation, we achieve our results for and through our clients. To do that, we have to be cognisant of their environment, their pressures and needs and meet them halfway. We do that. But we don’t always remember how different this thing here is.
Lots to do, lots to learn, and at least 10 nice challenges to keep us on our toes.
When clearing through some of my old books recently I stumbled across this little charity shop find I’d got a few years ago. At the time I was just fascinated with old books, but stumbling across it now this book has a new resonance for me. Having worked with Channel 4 for the last couple of years and more recently the BBC, television and the development of technology are subjects that are at the forefront of my mind everyday. The most fascinating section of this book is a double-page spread at the end, which gives us a vision of the future as it was at 1978:
Lets take a closer look and see how accurate we were back then…
1. Videos & DVDs… and today, Sky+
‘Videotapes and cassettes’ reared their tangly-ribboned heads as VHS and ‘Videodiscs’ revealed themselves as DVDs. So this little prediction was pretty spot on. But they hadn’t yet seen a future where we wouldn’t necessarily need physical media containers to hold and record onto, now we can simply record TV onto our Sky+ boxes and there’s no need for physical video libraries.
2. Video games and flatscreen TVs
A large flatscreen? Spot on. Although perhaps not quite so large in the average household. And ‘telegames’? Again, pretty accurate, but without the whizzy futuristic name of telegames.
3. Pay-per-view and VoD
“Thousands of programmes are stored at a central video library. To select one, a viewer drops a coin in a slot and dials a code”
Nice. And pretty accurate, but without the physical coin slot. Think pay-per-view on your digital TV service, micropayments for shows on itunes and even free VoD services we have now such as 4oD and iPlayer. I particularly like this lady’s outfit too.
4. Multi-platform content
“…a viewer presses a button on the TV and it prints out a recipe for a dish which has just been shown on screen.”
The functionality here makes me think of cross platform content – we don’t need to print out recipes for Jamie Oliver’s programme, we can just go to 4food on the Channel 4 website for recipes that accompany the series. Or even pressing the red dot on digital TV to get more content surrounding what you’re watching.
5. iPhone
Look at matey lugging around all that equipment to take to a carnival. Nowadays, he can do all of that with an iPhone. As for the girl leaving a message on a TV screen when everyone is out, not really sure where we’d see this nowadays. Perhaps at a footballers Cheshire mansion?
Beth tells me she has another book from this series somewhere at home, so expect a similar blogpost from her sometime soon…
