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Digital Britain, The Digital Age, Uncategorized

The Future of Broadband event in Gateshead

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The Future of Broadband in the NE and the world

In a busy, buzzy and engaging event, over 100 of the NE’s leading business people and entrepreneurs discussed the Future of Broadband – looking at the prospects for the NE in the new wave of broadband services, often called “Next Generation Access” or “NGA” some of which are being developed here in the region.

The scale of the opportunity

The event was sponsored by  NorthernNet represented by Mercedes Clark Smith and Sunderland Software City represented by Fred Pernet of Codeworks.

In their opening remarks, Fred and Mercedes mentioned the importance to the NE’s businesses of getting to grips with the coming services as broadband develops; this is especially important given that the region is increasingly looking to create new jobs in the digital and creative sectors; such as games, animation and software.  Mercedes described how NorthenNet offers types of technology and broadband speeds to smaller companies previously only available to the very largest and on a much more flexible basis.  She argued that “It’s not about the technology; it’s about the people” and that the benefits of creative and technical people working together are beginning to be realised.

The move from Copper to Fibre

To provide a basis for the conversation, Adrian Wooster, Chief Technology Officer of the Community Broadband Network, talked about “From Copper to Fibre” and covered the types of new services based on optical fibre technology and their impact on business.  He mentioned that it’s important to remember that it’s not all about download speed.  Increasingly the speed at which you can upload files and other content is becoming more critical to businesses.  He said “New technologies are coming, some of them already being implemented in Gateshead, that offer the potential for new services.  You can get closer and closer to customers.”  He stressed the business relevance and innovation potential of new services.

G-ti – “Getting it done” in Gateshead

Liz Reed from Gateshead Council (pictured above) focused on G-ti (which stands for Gateshead Technology Innovation) a ground-breaking project bringing ultra high speed service to the Baltic Business Quarter.  “Our job is to make sure we get businesses and jobs; jobs for local people.”  That G-ti is an example of collaboration between the private and public sectors, is a very open and competitive network and that it demonstrates what Gateshead needs to be competitive.  That it’s important for local authorities to demonstrate leadership.  She spoke passionately about the “need to unite creative and technical people in using this new stuff”.   Liz said that Gateshead was “About getting things done.”  At the end of LIz’s presentation, Brian Condon a director of CBN and an independent consultant on technology and business, did a ‘straw poll’; asking the audience to vote on whether this project was a good use of public funds – admittedly an unrepresentative audience – but they voted in favour (with not a single hand raised against).

Caring for the “Not Got Anythings”

Other local projects featured highly in the session – Cybermoor Limited whose Operations Director, Kevin Wood, said that in his area of Weardale ‘NGA’ stands for “Not Got Anything”.  Cybermoor are working with local communities to install optical fibre and improve access to services and innovations such as high capacity ‘Telehealth’.  He agreed with Liz that it was about “Getting things done”.  He said he wasn’t afraid of the “Community” word.  He was open about some of the issues of small scale projects; and that a lack of depth of resources could give problems.  He concluded that “It’s about making things happen when no one else cares.”

George’s “Stories from the Coalface” from ITPS and Virgin

George Galloway, MD of ITPS brought what he called “Stories from the coalface” of real business in the region.  ITPS is a successful and growing privately owned IT services business with over £10m of turnover.  George, who was on stage with Chris Walsham from Virgin Media, provided examples of how ITPS operates.  They were the first Service Provider to offer services on the G-ti network (there are now 5 competing providers) and they partner with a range of companies including Virgin Media.  Chris stressed the importance of partnership working and the need to collaborate.  He said that their strategic relationship with ITPS was a good example as it shows that both large (and Virgin Media has a £15bn network) and smaller players can benefit.  George gave the example of a successful project where a move from Copper to Fibre (of one of the types described by Adrian earlier) had delivered operating cost savings of 30% while simultaneously provding a 10-fold performance increase.  Chris added that these new technologies can help companies reduce their carbon footprint; reducing the need to travel and saving time.

Partnership working to ‘bridge the gap’

Simon Roberson who is the NE Regional Manager for BT Group gave a different perspective from a very big player in the market.  He  talked about BT’s plans to deploy “Superfast Broadband” to 66% of the UK population by 2015.  He said it was a very big project and that it would be difficult to reach those people described as being in the “Final Third”.  He said “We have to remember that the ‘Final Third’ is one third of the population; not 1/3 of the country.” and that there are still very big distances to cover outside the dense urban areas.

Simon gave an example of partnership working in Northern Ireland as a way for the public and private sectors to work together.  He argued that, despite what some other speakers had said, what will pay for the investments will be premium services such as HD and 3D TV which need more bandwidth than existing services.  He said to businesses in the meeting “For you guys it’s a tremendous opportunity.”

Stand by me . .

In a charismatic multimedia keynote presentation, Houston Spencer (above, left)  Vice President of Alcatel Europe (the private sector partner in G-ti) used the Ben E. King song “Stand by me” coupled with images from the 50s and 60s to show how much the world has changed and how much more change there is to go still.  He showed a video called “Stand by me; playing for change” which was made in multiple locations by multiple players and brought together to form a single performance.  He told us that the original record had been played over 7 million times on the radio since its original release 50 years ago but that this video, released only 2 years ago had already been watched over 12 million times on YouTube.

Houston talked about the changes that are coming; and that big organisations came about because of the ‘need to aggregate capital’ because everything was expensive.  The IP/Broadband world changes all that – and that it’s now much easier to create and distribute new forms of content and products using the internet.  Houston asserted that many people mistake the intent of new forms of social media such as Facebook and Twitter; they are not about “broadcast mode”; “It’s not about self promotion, it’s about making connections with people, building relationships and forming an ‘ecosystem’ of people connected together”.  Houston concluded that there was a risk that the big players might destroy the ecosystems they are creating by too many rules or changing the conditions that brought them about.  He finished with an optimistic picture of how relationships sustained by the internet can result in an explosion of global collaboration and connectivity.

Photo credit: Simon Williams, Crest Photography

Uncategorized

Thoughts on realtime and near-realtime media

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It may look as though my blogging has stopped, based on this poor old neglected site – but actually, the reverse is true. I’ve been blogging more but in different places and guises. I’ve been working hard on the new Centre for Creative Collaboration of the University of London and doing events with Amplified. And the flow of Audioboo content continues.

I’ve been looking back through the material I’ve generated and seeing what I’ve learned that might be useful; looking for the links between things and trying to see where I’ve got to. It’s actually quite interesting that this post and the previous one are so far apart in time. Since the previous post, lots of stuff has happened – so I’m going to pick out some things I think may be useful for you to have a look at.

Developing the Liveblogging Process

I’m really interested in realtime and near-realtime media and together with others from the Amplified team – Amanda Gore, Laura Kidd, Lucy Windmill and Steve Lawson, we amplified the NIACE/Ofcom DigiFutures meeting in November. At the peak of activity, we were liveblogging three ‘conversation circles’ simultaneously using Scribblelive, making photos and videos, and using Twitter to interact with ‘remote participants’ outside the room. Steve Lawson was not present at the event but was still part of the team; generating conversations with other people while he monitored (and commented on) the output we were generating. I made a short video to capture some of the work:

We used similar techniques at the myPublicServices event (#mps09) event; there were lots of other people using social media to cover the event and we had a loose social media cooperation where, at the event, we had an initial conversation with others to understand how we could all maximise the benefit to the event and to people outside it. We also began to see how to measure the impact of what we do.

What’s also interesting is to look at the impressions created by those tweeting. And to reflect that in the list of top 20, both @solobasssteve and the indefatigable @cyberdoyle were not actually present at the event. It was clear from both these events that there is an audience and interest from remote participants in events; and that we can measure that interest and also that it is possible to create ‘bridging’ conversations between those inside and outside the meeting.

The Digital Age, Uncategorized

b.tween09 global collaboration – how it felt

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A real collaborative project.
We started something yesterday.

Peolpe talk on different levels
People talk on different levels

Feeling about it – a very odd feeling seeing how the work came back where somebody, I don’t know who or where, has worked on it adding ideas and their own thinking.  If the work  had changed dramatically, then we might have had a problem.  As it was, it had changed a fair bit from our original idea but it hadn’t gone a long way; not much time.  If there had been a bifurcation and they’d gone off in a totally different direction.  If we’d got it  back and thought “That’s absolutely not what we were thinking.”  then there might have been the potential for conflict.  They couldn’t know our pattern of thinking and we had no communication with them; all they got from us were a few slides.

We’ve actually come up with quite a good idea.  But the issue emerges – how do we continue it?  What mechanisms do we have for sustaining that type of collaborative work.  I’m hoping that other people around the world will be thinking about how we implement.

Here is one version of our reworked material (others here):

Love Your Neighbour

View more documents from btween09.
Digital Britain, Social Media, The Digital Age, Uncategorized

Can the Internet win the next election?

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Bloggers think ‘No, but it can probably lose it’

Last week’s elections and the political fallout have placed in context, for me, the event I went to at the Frontline Club on 28 May about how the Internet might play a part in the next election.  The participants were:

  • Iain Dale, Conservative blogger at Iain Dale’s Diary
  • Alex Smith, recently appointed Editor of the LabourList.org
  • Adam Boulton, Political Editor, Sky News (Chair)
  • Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes)
  • Matthew Macgregor of Blue State Digital (the company that worked for the Obama campaign
(l-r) Iain Dale, Alex Smith, Adam Boulton, Paul Staines, Matthew Macgregor
(l-r) Iain Dale, Alex Smith, Adam Boulton, Paul Staines, Matthew Macgregor

I made contemporaneous notes and also some Audioboo content which is available here.  A bit of background to the event here:

Everyone in ‘Broadcast Mode’ needs to ‘get with the program’

iain-dale
Iain Dale - political blogger

Iain Dale  (pictured left) believes that the internet will impact individual MPs (mostly through revealing things they don’t want revealed I suspect) but that the overall ‘systemic’ effect of the internet will be small.

He agrees that the next General Election will be the first where mobile phones and social media will really begin to play a part and where bloggers will cause changes in the news cycle:

“We get more hits every day than all the 3 main parties put together”

He said referring to the traffic generated by his blog and by Guido Fawkes’.

The problem is the main parties are in ‘Broadcast Mode’ and that given British politics is driven by ‘controlling the message’ the level of interactivity of social media is a challenge.  As Matthew Macgregor said “The internet is a tactic not a strategy” and that it lowers the barriers to communication (especially inbound to the Party) but how real is the commitment to ‘openness and transparency’.  The reaction of the media to policy discussions driven by social media will, Matthew believes, be instructive; will the shutters come down once the media starts talking about ‘splits’.

“There’s nothing to click on other than ‘Unsubscribe'” – Matthew Macgregor

Alex Smith believes that “The Internet will play a crucial role in the next election” – he mentions viral video and the possibility of debate being shaped by the internet.  He argues that the internet has “already effectively removed one of the Prime Minister’s closest political aides” and that the next election will to some extent be driven by stories that will “break on the web”.  Alex believes that Paul and Iain have a huge impact on the media cycle and thinks that this will be an important factor.  All the panelists agreed that the Internet strategies of the main parties were poor at best.

Boulton’s shock hashtag confession

At one point when talking about social media and the internet Adam Boulton said he didn’t know what a hashtag was (and I don’t think he was joking!) and references to the internet seemed to feel like references to some kind of monolithic bloc.  Alex picked up the point that realtime interaction driven by things like Twitter might be important.  Adam seemed to think that a Sky news team would always be faster on the ground.

The next Boo starts with the voices of Alex Smith (interesting references to Alan Johnson) and then Iain Dale.  I round off with a few thoughts.

The next Boo has ‘reportage’ – skip it if you feel you have enough of a flavour from the text above.

Reflections and implications

The format worked well with a fairly formal panel session followed by various panelists joining tables and moving between courses.  The informal part of the event was really good – we had Iain Dale and Alex Smith and the comments and discussion were very engaging.

The event would have been improved by a more discursive (and less ‘Question Time’) approach by the chair.  Also, having a chair who seemed quite cheerful to admit that he didn’t ‘get’ the internet seems odd – but then presumably Adam ‘Hashtag’ Boulton was a draw for the ‘punters’ (especially the non-geeks)!  All in all though a minor criticism.

There were two main things I took away to think about:

  • The importance of internet aggregation in realtime and increasing symmetry of communication,
  • The potential for independent candidates to harness the power of the internet to disintermediate the major parties.

More thoughts in the next Audioboo:

Digital Britain, Social Media, The Digital Age, Uncategorized

Sometimes it needs stating . . .

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There was a bit of noise on Twitter both during media140 and after it on the extent of ‘obvious stating’ going on at the event.  Much of this comment was of a critical nature – ‘they don’t get it’; referring to the somewhat Twitter-sceptical journalists in the room.  The bigger players there (Sky and the BBC) indulged in a bit of un-necessary and rather tedious sparring.  Both of them, I suppose, feeling secure in their knowledge that their respective ‘market’ power and ‘broadcast’ mode will leave them largely unchanged by the openess and pervasiveness of social media generally and Twitter in particular. Hmmm.

Following media140, I’ve been reading blogs and the press coverage – reportage mostly; who said what and with little commentary or analysis about what it all means.  Perhaps it’s too scary for the Potential Legacy Media (currently known as MSM) to think about?  And sometimes that means the obvious needs a bit of stating.

Wordle based on media140 liveblog

As part of the ‘post match’ coverage there was an interesting if largely self-referential segment on pods and blogs on R5Live with journalists and a thoughtful comment from Mark Jones of Reuters who also provided some excellent comment and analysis on his Reuters blog.

Realtime coverage

I used Audioboo and Scribblelive at the event.  I also generated the wordle above based on my liveblog.  You can find the liveblog here and ‘hat tips’ to contributors here.

Those of you who liveblog events will know the level of concentration it needs.  Using Scribblelive actually increases the level of complexity as you try to bring in other people’s tweets, try to avoid too much duplication (most sole tweeters at events do so in realtime and there’s often duplication in the aggregated stream).  Trying to join in, provide some realtime feedback and combine inputs is ‘not for the faint-hearted’ as the Scribblelive people say!

In the next sections, I provide some thoughts on media140 after reflecting on the issues, the coverage and my own liveblog and Audioboos made at the time; I name the presenters in the Audioboos and you can also refer to the Agenda.

The 140 Character story

This panel kept bouncing off the argument – they had a silly discussion about whether Twitter was journalism or not.  And we kind of forgot the ‘realtime news’ tagline of the entire event.  What was missing for me was:

  • What the aggregation of information carried across Twitter enables (the analogy from Bill Thompson of the Twitter  ‘seismograph’ is insightful);
  • The speed at which news can propagate through memes and hashtags and the level of self-organisation enabled by this form of cooperative production (Retweets, comments, links to blog posts, realtime and near realtime video streams and websites); and,
  • The need to filter true signals from the sheer noise and volume of the information available.

Sources, editorial control and workflow

The panel did discuss the risks of ‘opening up’ the news process and the potential impacts on the way news is made and perceived.  I wonder what happens to the ‘news cycle’ in a General Election when many of us have access to realtime video production on our mobile phones or can report events directly as they happen over Twitter?  We’ll find out soon!

The panel focused on the risks.   An example of the risks seems to have been happening while the event was on, but I’m not sure anyone realised it.

twitterspam Skynews.com used Coveritlive to add a Tweetstream to their site.  There seems to have been no filtering so there was lots of spam.  And seemingly little editorial control over the Tweets.  Just what risks Sky may have been running can be imagined; the links to ‘goldencasinoflash’ could have been links to anything.  Anything at all….

untibpc-spamtMy Tweets were being carried live by Skynews also – even though I was effectively doing competing realtime coverage using a rival platform to Sky.  I don’t know to what extent there was active editorial control of the Tweetstream – the amount of spam they let through might suggest very little?

Frontline Journalism

One of the few times in the event when the room went really quiet and people listened really hard was when Guy Degen, freelance journalist and a member of the Frontline Club, played some audio and video footage from Tblisi.  He was sent there on his own for Deutsche Welle; he had no gear and no time to get any, no crew and used a mobile phone to cover a riot. Frontline indeed.

Kevin Anderson was insightful on the impact of social media on reporting on a roadtrip style assignment in the USA.

Local and human

Local news = newspapers? #fail

Joanne Jacobs ably chaired the final panel session and brought the whole event back pretty much on time so kudos to her.  It was an interesting and stimulating panel – and you can pick up some of the flavour of the discussion from pp 6-8 of the liveblog.

Given what’s happening in local and regional news, the discussion after the short presentations seemed to spiral into being about newspapers.  But surely local news is going to be much more than papers – but I can see there’s a painful transition to go through for a lot of people.  Some of the more ‘gung ho’ social mediarati might like to think about that.

No-one mentioned the ‘backchannel’

The backchannel (what happens in the social media space during an event or presentation) didn’t get a mention.

Here’s an example from media140:

Use the backchannel!
Use the backchannel!

I first came across the backchannel in tech conferences in the USA about 5 years ago – using chat room software over local wireless networks and, in some instances allowing external participants ‘listening-in’ to audio streams to interact with the chat.  All these messages were projected on a screen behind the speaker so it was generally impossible both to present to the audience and watch the backchannel at the same time.  The backchannel often had more stimulating and interesting stuff on it than was happening on the panel.  And dangerous sometimes for both speaker and audience.  I remember taking my PowerBook onto the stage and using it in a panel session both to contribute to the backchannel and comment on what other panelists were saying.  Apparently, this was unusual at the time.  The audience reaction was interesting!

So it seems to me that the Potential Legacy Media faces the same risks as a pompous or tedious speaker in perpetual broadcast mode with an active backchannel.  Like a politician giving the answer to a question the interviewer didn’t ask, the risks of audience alienation are high.  And when the real backchannel turns against you, as it has for our MPs recently, life can get very unpleasant.

Being Human and Connecting

Jeff Pulver over a quite good Skype video link finished off on an optimistic note.  We can move from a position where the one-way broadcast mode can become much more interactive.  It has to be more than ‘promotion’; it must be much more about connection.  Above all, it’s about being human and taking that humanity with us into social media spaces and connecting.

Digital Britain, Uncategorized

Adopting digital behaviours in real life . . .

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How do currents develop?  How do we not lose stuff?
Where does everything go?

img_0813Artist Lanfranco Asceti gave a charming presentation on how, when we are creating a record in the flow of information through digital behaviour, we create the potential for conflicts with ‘real life’.

Lanfranco uses a transmedia artistic approach to investigate the intersections (or not) between the digital world and the real world.

His presentation began with a video made as part of his artistic process in seeing how messages are transmitted.  “How can we understand the flows of messages?”.  He has thrown a message in a bottle  to his friend Henry Jenkins, a Professor at MIT, into the sea in Istanbul.

The question is?

Will Henry Jenkins hear about it?

The most compelling image for me is of the bottle being thrown into the harbour and then ‘bouncing’ back out and into the thrower’s hand.  Made me think of e-mail bouncing or of servers being repeatedly ‘pinged’.

We are throwing bottles in the sea with a message to Henry Jenkins as well as throwing a message in the sea of the information of social networks on Facebook to see if Henry Jenkins will stumble upon the event online first or will receive the message in a bottle. The object of the game is to see if and how he will find out about the project.

I’ve also been thinking for a while now about ‘where do all the tweets go?’ and what ephemera now means in the Digital Age.  And as the ‘digital noise’ in our social media environment increases how do we deal with what is likely to become a decreasing ‘signal to noise’ ratio.  I see the development of new kinds of social media tools – ‘inference engines’ that help us to locate what they think we might be interested in.   Prioritising our attention will become a key skill in digital engagement.  Lanfranco suggests that the issue of voice and the need for a very varied network is important in ensuring that no one voice can speak with unquestioned authority.  This will be an interesting and innovative driver of behaviours across the world.

Digital squatting the Googleplex –
artists occupying  digital space

googleplex

Lanfranco is also a ‘Digital Squatter’, running exhibitions on ‘Google’s territory’ in virtual space.  Who owns the virtual space?  Layering information over Googleplex.  He also squatted at Tate Modern and a few others.  Just to see what happened.  You can find out about it here.

He argues that the ownership of digital space needs thinking about – and talked about how there are dangers in the alerting and reporting of activity in digital sapace, he says

“reporting” over the internet is the moral equivalent of the Stasi

And that we will all be turned into ‘digital informers’ as we monitor our digital ‘neighbours’ through our Net curtains.  One to think about that.

Digital Britain, The Digital Age, Uncategorized

Liveblogging the Digital Summit

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Why events like this are needed (if frustrating)

I live blogged the Digital Summit at the British Library – using twitter and a blogging tool called ScribbleLive.  Independently, unofficially; because I wanted to.  You can see the results here.  Also, If you look at the #digitalbritain hashtag on twitter you will see a mass of tweets many insightful and thoughful; a few negative and destructive.  I was watching Tweetdeck, trying to take my own notes and include tweets I thought were useful.

There’s been a bit of activity on blogs.  Not much.  Some of the ranting appears to be about the surprising fact that most of the people running our incumbent Big Media and Telco businesses are white, male and wear ties.  Some of the people in the audience were like that too.

Communities can build Digital Britain
Communities can build Digital Britain

Yes, it was frustrating and yes it was quite a lot of the ‘same old same old’ – but saying ‘you don’t get it’ to people who don’t get it isn’t going to advance the debate.  Shouting “You horrible green scaly monster” at one of the many Media Dinosaurs still roaming the planet may be true but it doesn’t help at all.  In fact it polarises the debate and makes it less likely that we, who passionately believe that we need serious bandwidth, everywhere, for everyone will carry the argument.

Of course, the agenda for the meeting deliberately tried to polarise the audience.  The idea that you can separate the Poetry from the Pipes for example – you need both and they have to work together to create Digital Britain.  The idea that you need a ‘one size fits all’ solution or all else is chaos plays only into the hands of a small number of players with market power.

We need events like this one, where at least there was some cross-sector presence.  Notable that many of the questions and points from the floor were raised by people from community-related organisations.

We need more events and dialogue – preferably designed to work out ‘how it can be done’ rather than finding all the reasons ‘why it can never happen’.  We need the sorts of Unconference activity proposed by @dbuc09 and we need to do them on our territory and make the invitations as open as we all want the networks and services to be.

Ultimately, I think we will need a ‘Patchwork Quilt’ of solutions that meet local needs – not some top down model.  Enterprise networks are patchworks, the internet itself is a patchwork where the pipes and poetry can coexist.  Our job is to get out there and build the Patchwork.

innovation, Uncategorized

e-static shadows at the Dana Centre

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An exploration of electrostatics and their role in sensors, technology and art

static shadows installation
static shadows installation

A beautiful installation by Zane Berzina latterly of Goldsmiths called Static Shadows

Wide bands of specially made fabrics with >1,000 LEDs each controlled by a single transistor. Conducting wires embedded in the fabric pick up changes in the electrostatic fields near the fabric. As the fields change, so the LEDs change in brightness. Big changes (such as a charged rod) produce quick rapid changes. Small charges (from your hand say) produce slow shimmering changes. You don’t need to touch the fabric – it works because the fabric is sensitive to the electrostatic fields in the environment. Lovely analogue technology and completely captivating.

LEDs react as fields change
LEDs react as fields change

Zane describes the blend of technology and craft fabrication as ‘High Craft’ as opposed to ‘High Tech’. The audience asked loads of questions about how and why it came about and the practical and esthetic applications of the approach.

The Digital Age, Uncategorized, Web 2.0

Next Generation Web: tracking,storage and search

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An exploration of how tracking technologies are enabling new ways of organising, accessing and displaying information on the web.

Spiral browser
Spiral browser

Presentations here: CLICK

Graham Kidde of Kodak (right) demonstrates a location- and time-aware spiral browser.  Newer images are presented at the front of the screen; older ones further back.  Spirals can be ‘rotated’ and examined from different angles.  Photos can be ‘tagged’ or grouped or organised according to the people or places they depict.  Cool!  Very cool!