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Arts Council England podcast: social media and UGC

07/16/2012 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Arts Council England are currently funding a potentially exciting series of digital projects that connect arts organisations, researchers and technology providers to form, in its own words, ” collaborative relationships” that will hopefully create knowledge and practical innovation for people and groups in the creative sectors to improve engagement with audiences and/or explore new business models.

Projects are themed around a number of areas, including:

User generated content and social media: harnessing the power of the internet and social media to reach audiences and to give them a platform for discussion, participation and creativity
Distribution and exhibition: using digital technologies to deliver artistic experiences and content in new ways in online and place based environments, including exploring international distribution and exhibition
Mobile, location and games: developing a new generation of mobile and location-based experiences and services, including games
Data and archives: making archives, collections and other data more widely available to other arts organisations and the general public
Resources: using digital technologies to improve the way in which arts organisations are run including business efficiency and income generation and the way in which they collaborate with each other
Education and learning: developing interactive education and learning resources for children, teachers, young people, adult learners and arts sector professionals

In response to the current projects being delivered – and to showcare some of the interim results – the Arts Council are producing a series of podcasts to discuss the key themes listed above. I took part in the inaugural podcast covering social media and UGC along with Charles Beckett from Arts Council England and Spencer Hyman from Artfinder. You can take a listen via Soundcloud…

The next round of funding for potential projects is now open so if you’re interested head over to the Digital R&D website or take a look at the case studies of current projects.

Just Do It! film now free to download

06/29/2012 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

I’ve been catching up on a load of great independent films made recently that are trying to shed light light on some of the current problems and productive responses to them. One of those is Just Do It – a tale of modern-day outlaws. I highly recommend watching it and there’s really no excuse as you can now download it for free from the Just Do It website and even stream it – which I’ve done, below.

Although I’ve been ever so slightly involved with the film, it really is a great British film that has taken time and courage to bring to life the surprising, funny and passionate responses of environmental activists to the frankly depressing and thuggish actions of business, the police and Government. Quoting the official blurb:

“behind the scenes of the secretive world of direct action, Just Do It is a unique look at the planning and plotting behind the mass media headlines.”

Just… er….. it’s too easy…. go and download it!

Managing organisational complexity

03/25/2012 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

My recent post on the #Occupy movement and how it can help organisations become more social prompted me to dig out and (re)read some of the great work written by the late and great anarchist thinker and writer, Colin Ward.

One short essay in particular, Harmony Through Complexity, started me thinking again about non-hierarchical and self-organising systems and how today’s ‘networked enterprises’ – to use McKinsey’s terminology – should embrace Ward’s clear and forward-thinking work to become better at managing the organisational complexity necessary to survive in the contemporary networked reality.

Originally published in 1978, Harmony Through Complexity is well ahead its time, drawing as it does on anthropological studies of tribal societies, linking this with the (then) still emerging field of cybernetics and distilling this complexity into a clear argument for the benefits of leaderless organisation.

Ward’s fundamental argument is that tribal societies, organised around informal and largely leaderless practices are far from simple or primitive as sociological or scientific “experts” in the civilised West believed. They are, rather, held together by vastly complex social arrangements that rely on customs, cooperation and collaboration to evolve and survive.

Such “socially-calibrated” practices are not, Ward suggests, representative of “society’s simplicity and lack of organisation, but of its complexity and multiplicity of social organisations.”

In fact, Ward argues, civil society institutions from Government through to NGOs and businesses can – and should – learn a lot from these social, self-organising arrangements.

Putting these anthropological insights into an organisational framework Ward fascinatingly makes the connection between these complex, tribal organisational forms and cybernetic management theory – still a relatively new idea in 1978 – which offers a novel way of approaching the management of “complex, self-organising systems”.

Without delving too deep into cybernetics or systems theory (See Joanna Beltowska and Amy Rae great presentation below for a handy overview of systems thinking) Ward draws on the work of British cybernetician William Ross Ashby to highlight the ‘Principle of Requisite Variety’.

This organisational theory demands that the variety of practices within a controlling system must be at least as varied as the system it controls. Or to put it another way, while we have traditionally attempted to ‘simplify’ organisational structures by creating discrete, siloed departments managed hierarchically, the reality is that effective organisational co-ordination and management can only come from an approach that is as social and complex as the organisation itself.

The full problem organisations face is brought to life by another British cybernetics pioneer and mathematician, John D. McEwan, who observed:

“First we have the model current among management theorists in industry. This is the model of a rigid pyramidical hierarchy, with lines of ‘communication and command’ running from the top to the bottom. There is fIxed delineation of responsibility, each element has a specified role, and the procedures to be followed at any level are determined within fairly narrow limits, and may only be changed by decisions of elements higher in the hierarchy. The role of the top group of the hierarchy is sometimes supposed to be comparable to the ‘brain’ of the system.

The other model is from the cybernetics of evolving self-organising systems. Here we have a system of large variety, sufficient to cope with a complex, unpredictable environment. Its characteristics are changing structure, modifying itself under continual feedback from the environment, exhibiting ‘redundancy of potential command’, and involving complex interlocking control structures. Learning and decision-making are distributed throughout the system, denser perhaps in some areas than in others.”

So far, so good. But what can we learn from this? The top-down model is widely adopted and ingrained in current industrial and social practice. It’s the dominant model for government, schools, businesses, NGOs and most other institutions conceived and established in the industrial era. It’s how we used to operating so why should we change?

One reason we need to think about helping organisations to embrace complexity and become more social is that failing to do so impacts signficantly on their viability and sustainability.

Research by the Deloitte consultant and ‘edge’ guru, John Hagel, shows that the efficacy and performance of US firms has fallen significantly with return-on-assets down 75% from 1965. Not only that, but the current life-expectancy of businesses in Standard & Poor’s 500 has fallen from 75 years in 1937 to just 15 years today.

Significantly Hagel traces the cause of these downward trends to the mid-20th century when companies began to consolidate their structure and operations, rather than seek continual institutional innovation and adapt to the growing complexity of the social environment.

The significance of this institutional innovation is highlighted by Dave Grey from XPlane who, drawing on the work of Shell’s Head of Strategic Planning, Arie de Geus, argues that sustainable and successful organisations all feature three common traits:

Ecosystems: Long-lived companies were decentralized. They tolerated “eccentric activities at the margins.” They were very active in partnerships and joint ventures. The boundaries of the company were less clearly delineated, and local groups had more autonomy over their decisions, than you would expect in the typical global corporation.

Strong identity: Although the organization was loosely controlled, long-lived companies were connected by a strong, shared culture. Everyone in the company understood the company’s values. These companies tended to promote from within in order to keep that culture strong.

Active listening: Long-lived companies had their eyes and ears focused on the world around them and were constantly seeking opportunities. Because of their decentralized nature and strong shared culture, it was easier for them to spot opportunities in the changing world and act, proactively and decisively, to capitalize on them.

It’s interesting to see how a lot of this thinking is being converted to action in the more cerebral social agencies out there.

For example, you can quite nicely boil down de Geus’ active listening to ongoing research conducted across an organisation’s internal culture and its external social landscape; followed by a strategy stage where research insights identify organisational identity in shared-values or define the social capital that binds internal and external networks together; next this strategic vision is is used to shape an organisational‘ecosystem that enables networked communication – both internally and externally. Finally, all agencies should be creating evaluation frameworks for their clients to ensure they are continually measuring and improving the performance of their strategies in a complex organisational environment.

Assemblages of Resistance: Network Politics paper (finally)

02/17/2012 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Dan McQuillan and I presented a paper at Anglia Ruskin’s Network Politics’ conference in Cambridge last May.

I’ve been meaning to sort out getting this paper up for a while but never really found the time to edit/tweak/revise it so just figured I’d post it anyway!

Assemblages of Resistance: new media, old technology and the Egyptian Uprising

It’s very image-led so I heartily recommend consulting the slide notes or this blog post while you review.

In summary, we were interested in the notion of assemblages that draw together material objects/forces as well as communicative components in a fluid network. Our argument addressed the conference’s question of whether the emergence of distinct, proprietary platforms (e.g. Facebook; apps; etc) are undermining the web’s political potential.

We believed that assemblages provide a conceptual framework for accounting for radical ways to circumvent and route around attempts to lock down the web as a networked space. Perhaps more radically, we asserted that the web isn’t just an immaterial networked space but that it’s also imbued with physical effects – from technological infrastructure, hardware to human capacity and material resources.

Articulating this hypothesis we used some good empirical data and insights that Dan had gathered from the Egyptian #jan25 uprising and internet shutdown. We tried to highlight how multiple components – people, technology (crucially, both ‘new media’ such as twitter as well as old media such as ham radio, faxes, etc) and material objects (rocks; lamposts; space; etc) – were assembled to act as a radical, revolutionary assemblage – or more accurately, a network of assemblages.

Importantly, such assemblages contain within them – and exude – a radical potential. This radical potential is firstly that assemblages resist attempts to curtail them (e.g. the Internet shut-down didn’t stop the revolution, merely prompted different arrangements of components within the assemblage(s)) and secondly, that as the effects of fluid (re)assembling of multiple material and immaterial components are based on their capacity to become something when combined with other elements in the assemblage the outcome can never be known beforehand, thus making attempts to predict and put a stop to the revolution near impossible. Still with me?

Finally, we seek to learn from the Egyptian Uprising case study and articulate a way of using assemblages not only as a conceptual framework, but as a pedagogical one too. We do this by turning to the pedagogy of Paulo Freire who argued for a praxis-based learning rooted in experimentalism – the sought we identified being assembled in Tahrir Square. Dan brings this point to life using other examples he has been involved in, such as Social Innovation Camp and The Good Gym, and demonstrates how such approaches not only offer a radical resistance to authoritarian ways of thinking and doing, but also provide a productive route out of the totalising and seemingly inescapable spaces and practices – both in Egypt and the UK.

At least, that’s how I remember the paper coming together. It might have been nothing like that. Why not take a look at the Slideshare above and find out! You can find the original abstract here to make sure I’m fibbing 🙂

Free spirits, fairy dust & free-markets: some notes on the post-political

01/31/2012 by simoncollister Leave a Comment

Ive been doing some reading recently around the post-political – largely contexualised as post-cold war political philosophy.

I’m trying to apply some of the insights offered by the likes of Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj Zizek to the contemporary situation we find ourselves in in early twenty-first century Britain, and how/whether we can find a way out of the current throes of capitalism.

Then an interesting thing happened, a handful of really prescient stories and ideas converged on me. Here’s a summary…

I was stirred to recap on the post-political by the excellent blog post by Dan McQuillan who examines the seventeenth-century English radical Antinomians in light of the contemporary Anonymous and – to an extent – #Occupy movements.

Fascinatingly both groups seem to reject any attempt at formal, strategic opposition to dominant structures and forces. Instead, such groups adopt a tactic of detachment in which they go about their aims without giving credence to authority’s anticipated or expected responses. far from entering into power structures, both the Antinomians and Anonymous envision and produce another world. And this in turn is their strategy. It’s a de-strategy.

Highlighting this tactically productive approach, Dan’s post draws a lineage from the heresy of the medieval proto-antinomians, the Free Brethren of the Free Spirit, through to the radical seventeenth-century Antinomians and on to contemporary hackers. A timely reminder that struggles against authority and oppression are nothing new and that revisiting previous excursions into sites of radical action may bring new ideas and new ways of acting.

Then, just as I’m getting into the post-politics at a more contemporary level I come across the excellent chapter, On Fairy Dust and Rupture, in the even more excellent book, Occupy Everything: Reflections on Why its Kicking Off Everywhere.

Penned by the The Free Association the chapter seeks to account for the intrinsic faith people have in capitalism as viable system – a faith that, on the face of it, could be considered a ‘magic’ quality – and how this internalised logic can be tackled and shown for what it is: a sorcery created and maintained by a range of forces operating explicitly and implicitly; at a structural level and at an individual level.

For the authors, the fairy dust refers (via The Troggs!) to an unknown quality that can transform something mundane or everyday into something that exceeds the sum of its parts. “Fairy dust,” they argue “invokes the need for a gamble, a roll of the dice, an experiment.” [p.29].

The authors go on to map out ways this fairy dust can be sprinkled on actions and events and how these one-off ‘ruptures’ can be built upon to spread greater and deeper social and economic change. The spark of nature’s fire that could trigger new antinomian movements, so to speak.

And finally, coming hot on the heels of reading this a friend shared Adam Curtis’ latest blog post on the Soviet stagnation of the 1970s/80s and the responses undertaken by a disaffected youth.

Curtis’ prescience and the dimensions through which he explores seemingly mainstream topics generally unnerves me, and this post is no exception. In it, Curtis plots similar themes tot he ones I’ve been tracing – but from a different angle: the post-political Soviet end of history as The Plan began to fail.

Curtis’ piece is amazingly timely as it looks at how soviet art and cultural movements of post-political Russia sought to reject soviet communism and, realising if offered an equally – if more subtle – totalitarian system, liberal democracy.

Curtis presents a critical appraisal of the economic and social (i.e. human) failures of the soviet system in ways that cannot fail to generate resonance with the reality of our Western society today.

This is especially powerful as Curtis succeeds where others (save for the radical left) have failed. Offering a genuine critique of Britain in the here and now is difficult as The Free Association’s ‘sorcery’ of capitalism maintains its hold creating either a denial or an awe of the system.

Yet Curtis’ analogy is hugely powerful as it shows how the great Soviet Plan entered into increasingly illogical and absurd spasms as it attempted to predict and manage the complex demands of the population.

It would be easy to laugh at the examples given by the scientists and economists as they explain their predicament were it no for the increasingly absurd lengths we see capitalism going to in its attempt to shore up the yawning gap between the economic, material reality and the glossy, consumer driven fiction all around us.

Curtis concludes with the somewhat bleak transition of Soviet Russia to a pseudo-Liberal Democratic Russia where the radicals of the post-political 1970s have either committed suicide (quite a few seemed to go that way, interestingly) or embraced the far-right or liberal democracy or, in the case of Vladislav Surkov, both.

That is is why Dan’s post and The Free Association are so important. They point us towards practical tactics and ideas for conjuring a way to another world.

Back to the post-political and searching for ways out.