Tech4Society and social media

Apologies for the lack of updates recently. I've been alternatively buried in work and snow as DC has experienced another record-breaking snowfall and the marketing team at Ashoka has been intensely focused on the Tech4Society conference hosted by Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation in Hyderabad, India, last week.

As we were planning Tech4Society, the fourth and largest in a series of events as part of the Ashoka-Lemelson partnership to find and support social change inventors and innovators, I was determined that unlike the first three this conference would be fully social media enabled. I wanted it to be an example of "distributed eventing", where the event is more than just what goes on within the convention center and is instead a platform for interaction and dissemination on a much wider scale. In this I think we succeeded beyond anything Ashoka has done before.

In the lead-up to the conference we held a "Blog Your Way to Hyderabad" competition to select the official blogger of the conference. The winner would get an all-expenses trip and all-access pass to the conference and be given the reins of the AshokaTECH blog and Twitter account during the event, to keep the world informed of the conversations, examples and insights being shared. This was a gutsy move on Ashoka's part, giving an unknown person the responsibility of being the main conduit of information to the world about one of our most important gatherings. In every respect, however, the bloggers competition was a huge success. We received a number of excellent entries (all fo which served to spread the word about the event in the lead-up) and with the help of an outside judging panel of experts chose Elliot Harmon, a full-time blogger with TechSoup, as the winner. This was a fantastic win-win: we secured the services of a professional and experienced blogger and TechSoup was essentially able to send a correspondent to the event, something they never otherwise would have been able to do, doubling the audience and impact of his updates. You can read through all of Elliot's blog posts from Hyderabad (and the other coverage) here.

Not everything went to plan however (it almost never does): I spent much of my week organizing a conference call exclusively for bloggers featuring two Ashoka Fellows live from the event, only to be defeated by technical difficulties on the day. Still, I think this is a promising model of blogger engagement (and will, in fact, be trying again tomorrow on the occasion of the launch of Ashoka's new Globalizer initiative). We also sent a videography team to Hyderabad but were unable to upload their videos in real-time due to the bandwidth limitations on-site (it apparently took five hours to upload this one video).

The final stage of the Tech4Society social media strategy is to share the learnings gained from the event. We will be doing this by hosting a forum on SocialEdge and holding the next of our monthly #SocEntChat Twitter chats on March 3 on the topic of "Technology, invention and social change."

Overall this was another huge step forward for Ashoka in how we utilize social media to increase the impact of our work. Social media helped make Tech4Society a more global event which extended well beyond it's geographic location and those able to attend in-person. People from all of the world joined the conversation on Twitter and read in near real-time about the work being presented on the blog. Over the next week we'll be uploading a series of videos to further share this work. And this is the most important thing social media is allowing us to do: shine a better spotlight on the incredible and important work of Ashoka Fellows. As one of my colleagues said in reflecting back on our work in this area, "the world can’t adopt and help what it doesn’t know about."

Musical discovery this week: Save the Robot

My favourite new act discovered this week: Save the Robot. Really fun and creative full-on and progressive psy Save the Robot is a collaboration between heavyweights Alien Project and Quadra. I only found them this week but they've got two albums out already on the TIP World record label - 2005's Battle of the Mind and last year's Love Machine. Follow those album links to have a listen, here are a few stand-out tracks:

Love is always free (Open Air Remix):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcXNyTfH4No]

Battle of the Mind:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpX7l1_aok4]

Communicate (epic remix of Coldplay's Talk):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gv6Y3B_ZTE]

America the Ungovernable

My Dad always used to say to me, "Tom", he'd say, "America is ungovernable." Dad's talking nonsense again I would think to myself, of course America is governable. I mean, it's being governed isn't it?

Now that I'm living here I can say: only barely. Dad was right, America is an incredibly difficult country to govern. Their three "separate but equal" branches of government, one of them split into two houses, and dominated by a two-party system at once rigid and chaotic, makes meaningful progress on difficult issues the exception rather than the rule, a product of circumstances which occur infrequently.

The Democratic and Republican parties dominate American politics to an even greater extent than any two parties in Australian, England, France, Germany or Canada. But they are generally, despite impressive Republican unity in opposing everything lately, a unruly bunch, and only periodically vote along party lines.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I appreciate very much the greater diversity of opinion this allows. The health care debate has been a nightmare to watch up close but on the Democratic side at least there has been a robust debate about which model to pursue in what why. One the other  hand, they couldn't get the bloody thing done.

It's been an amazing and dispiriting experience to observe (initially from afar, then up close) a seemingly-endless election campaign fought on a variety of issues, one of which was healthcare reform, and a landslide victory for the progressive in that election, only for the country to tear itself apart for a year following that election over the same issue they had been debating for the previous two years.

Despite my intense frustrations with the political dynamic in Australia when one party wins in a landslide campaigning on a set of policy reforms most of those reforms generally happen. Mandates are real. And if we hate these changes once implemented (or resent the delay in implementing them) we vote them out next time around. The cycle of (political) life. But here winning an election is no guarantee of anything. The president has only limited control over domestic policy - legislation must be introduced and passed in houses of Congress, and now, absurdly, both parties seem to accept the notion that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to get anything meaningful done.

Which is why America is generally ungovernable. Legislators put themselves above the parties. The process is unwieldy and prone to delay and obfuscation. The American political system seems designed to make it exceedingly hard to get difficult things done. It requires a rare combination of factors to allow changes on any scale to be affected, and it is beginning to look like the present moment, as hopeful as it seemed a year ago, might lack one or more of these factors.

Thinking back over the past 100 years of American history I can think of only two presidents who passed significant progressive domestic reforms: FDR with the establishment of the welfare state and LBJ with civil rights. (Clearly the fact BHO doesn't roll off the tongue is part of what is holding Obama back). In both cases there was a society under stress, from the Great Depression and the ructions  of the 60's and assassination of Kennedy. In both cases America had significant external challengers, being at war or on the brink of war. In both cases there was passionate opposition from the right, who warned of ruin and socialism. So far so familiar. But also in both cases there was an equally-passionate and organized mass movement pushing from the left, advocating and demanding needed reforms. It's this last factor that is missing from Barack Obama's America.

This might be, in part, a product of the success of the Obama campaign itself. To an unprecedented degree it dominated the debate, monopolizing donations, volunteers and attention. This helped create a historic campaign but it also left the left wing groups outside government weaker than they would otherwise have been. Without an effective-enough or large-enough left flank to push him and perhaps more importantly the Congressional Democrats the perceived "center" of the health care debate has moved relentless rightwards, to the point where what eventually became a center-right reform is still being discussed as being "too far left."

Ironically success at campaigning has created a weakness for Obama in governing. Not that it was easy to begin with. It's not designed to be.

The Obama Adminstration one year in

This is an exerpt from an interview I did with Alex Steed for the Millennials Changing America blog. He has been collecting perspectives from  youth organizers about the successes failures and dynamics of year one of the Obama administration and was interested in my "outsiders perspective". I'm now officially a token Aussie. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dKiAN5l4QE]

Learning in Community

This most recent weekend was one filled with learning and community, leaving me feeling both smarter and more connected to Washington DC than I was before. It made me realize, or remember, that learning from one-another is one of the most vital components of community; where we are connected by our common ideas, ideals and aspirations; where we realize that all of us know so much more than any of us. On Friday night I attended the opening night of the Social Justice Camp, an unconference bringing together the grassroots social justice community in DC and emphasizing the importance of arts in bringing about social change. Friday was an Ignite-style event, with a dozen speakers giving short presentations on their work. It was great to hear more about the work of homeless advocates, food security organizers and social change muralists. It had a nice feel to the event, as unconferences always do, of everyone being on the same level, there to share and learn, without a divide between presenters and audience.

This feeling continued on Saturday night at the first Columbia Heights Arts Salon. This was an event for local artists in the Columbia Heights area of DC, hosted in four local homes. A series of house parties combined with showcases for local talents - with houses dedicated to performance, visual art, photography and digital installations. K performed to open the evening, the first time she's performed solo in two years. The fact that she felt encouraged and inspired to create and present a work in five days is testiment to the platform this sort of event creates. The event was put on my the newly-formed Columbia Heights Arts Foundation (CHARTS), which you can find out more about here. K and I are going to try and get involved and see how we can help them as we're really inspired by their vision of building community through the arts.

Then on Sunday it was K's birthday which we celebrated at a tea party for about 16 at which everyone presented/taught something. The variety of things I learnt that afternoon was amazing: drama games, canvas stretching, the scale of the universe, productivity techinques, how to draw a superhero, speak Russian and wear a corset. Everyone had something to share, a passion or a skill, a professional competance or a hobby. We all have things to share, but rarely are we invited to share them. Everyone came away from the experience inspired and uplifted - having maintained our attention for almost six hours and enjoyed every moment of it. This is a really different way of learning from what we get in our institutions - peer-to-peer, relaxed, and human.

This is what community looks like. It is open, vulnerable and participatory, based on common values and able to support its members to share and grow. Experiencing community like this, inside a room, with our shared energy strong and perceptible, is like a jolt of electricity - it animates and inspires. But elements of this community are also found online, and social media has given us a platform to replicate many of these features.

The people I feel most connected to online are those I actively share with and learn from. Twitter, in particular, has given me access to a set of peers who share my values and are looking to collaboratively learn how best to use these tools to affect social change. It is only through trial and error that this learning will take place, and the more we share the faster we can learn. This is why I was part of launching the monthly #4Change twitter chats. This is what inspired the estalishment of sQuareOne (now called the Vibewire Enterprise Hub) in Sydney. The creation of spaces where peer-learning happens.

As my friend Morgan puts it, We Operate Best Together. And we learn, build and grow best together too.

NYE Mix

I'm kinda proud of this mix, the first I've properly put together, which I played on NYE. It was planned for two hours, which is the length of the mix posted here, but ended up being almost three hours on the night, with me extending it with additional tracks, mostly by Protoculture, given the lack of anyone to play after me and the presence of people still dancing. I hope you enjoy it, there's some seriously rocking material here. It's starts and ends a bit silly but in-between it travels from deep electro to tech house and into a solid hour of psytrance via an obligatory "New Years Day" remix. BPM goes from 125ish to 146ish. My advice: put on some good headphones and listen to it the whole way through. NYE 09-10 Mix

Track list:

1. French Emotions - Peter Godwin

2. Really awesome track from a mix my friend Morgan put together that I don't know the name of UPDATE:  Mr. Dry - Tim Green

3. Poor Leno (Silicon Soul remix) + There is a light that never goes out (acapella) - Royksopp + Erlend Oye

4. Good sluts factory (let it CIA mix) - Kiko and Ginos

5. Strip Joint Mathematics (Jet Project remix) - Deepchild

6. Love is going to save us - Benny Benassi

7. New Year's Day (Paul Oakenfold remix) - U2

8. Born on Mars - Mr Peculiar

9. Ain't Talkin Bout - G-Light

10. Inside the Sound - Ananda Shake

11. Hear the Noise (Quadra remix) - Alien vs The Cat

12. Slayer - Toast3d

13. Dismental - Raz

14. Radio Trance - BBP

15. The Frequency (feat Nomad) - Talamasca and XSi

16. Analog - Planet B.E.N. vs Didrapest

17. Illusion - Exordium

18. I Wish (SKAZI remix) - Infected Mushroom

19. Becoming Insane - Infected Mushroom

20. Take Me Home (Benza's Philthy mix) - Phil Collins

Year-end lists

It's always a bit of fun to put together "best of" lists at the end of the year and despite this being a bit late I thought I'd note a few things that moved or impressed me in 2009, for my own record as much as anything else. Best books: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer, Outliers: The Story of Success - Malcolm Gladwell, Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World - Samantha Power

Best live music: Infected Mushroom at Burning Man, Hallucinogen at Orb Festival, Haltya at Gaian Mind Festival, Deadmau5 at the 9:30 Club. Honourable mention: Mum at the Black Cat.

Best new artists discovered: Azax Syndrome, Deadmau5, Beireut, Beats Antique.

Best new album: Ineffible Mysteries From Shpongeland - Shpongle.

Best play: Rock’n’Roll by Tom Stoppard, directed by Joy Zinoman, at the Studio Theatre.

Best website discovery: GrooveShark

Best moments: January 20 - the inauguration of Barack Obama, September 3 - an amazing day at Burning Man, featuring chinese restaurants in the desert, giant prawns and prawn trawlers, the billion bunny march and carrot counter-protest, September 13 - our return to Sydney picnic/party with so many wonderful friends we  hadn't seen in too long.

Biggest disappointments: Copenhagon, the American health care debate.

News and Notes from the New Year

So obviously I've been really really slack about keeping up the blog since Christmas, my apologies for the long pause between posts. It's been a busy time, with one of our best mates from Australia visiting and several days of relentless partying over NYE, followed by the inevitable recovery period. Good times, but poor commitment to this blog. Anyway, I'm back. As mentioned above NYE was a ball. In the days before and after NYE I was surprised by how many people mentioned to me that they didn't have any special plans for NYE, and that NYE was always "over-hyped" and they never had a terribly good time anyway. How could this be? As with any party you mostly have the time you choose to have, and NYE is the ultimate excuse to have a really, really, good time - it's the one day when the whole world (seemingly) is letting loose and having fun. It's when people usually give themselves a few days to do something nice, whether that is getting away to a cabin in the woods with close friends or rocking out at a big commercial party or something in between. I have had fantastically fun NYE's every year of my adult life, and this one was no exception.

What did make this NYE a little different was that I attended a house party for the first time in, I think, 8 years. Last year I was at a warehouse party in Montreal, the year before that on a houseboat in a river north of Sydney (with 30 friends spread over five boats, with two sound systems - perhaps the best NYE ever) and then for five years before that I attended outdoor festivals and parties. I really feel being outdoors is the way to celebrate NYE, but that clearly doesn't work in the northern hemisphere winter. So, a house party it was, and a lot of fun was had. The house had a lovely basement dance floor area and I DJed from 3-6am. I'll get the set online later this week if I can work out how.

NYE is also a wonderful time to reflect on the year that was and goals and aspirations for the year ahead. I have a card in my wallet which I created to remind myself of my goals for the second half of 2009. Here's how I did:

• Exercise more, improve fitness - 7/10 - I bought a bike and started riding to work (although I haven't since injuring my back in September followed by it becoming horribly cold and icy), joined a gym and usually go 2 or 3 times/week.
• Go to bed earlier, get to work earlier - 1/10 - Abject failure. Something I want to focus on this year.
• Write more, experiment with video - 8/10 - A decent success I think. I started to blog to help with the writing goal and despite somewhat fluctuating commitment I write much more than I was previously. I also created three little films this year, a completely new medium for me.
• Be proactive looking for additional opportunities - 4/10 - I got involved in a few things and was part of setting up the monthly #4Change chats on Twitter. This didn't go as far as I'd like though, and is something I'd like to focus on in 2010.

So, overall a passing grade, although with clear areas to work on. All these aspirations remain relevant to me.

My resolution this year is to be better at time. I want to sleep more and get to work earlier. I want to be more punctual in general and get things done on-time.  I've never been very good at time, it's always been a bit mysterious and difficult to manage, but I know that getting better at this will help me achieve everything else I want to do.

Goals for 2010:

• Learn more. I want to seek out some professional development and skill-building opportunities this year, I feel I let that slip last year. To kick things off I've signed up for a speed reading class.
• Explore more. Last year Kate and I visited several cities on the East Coast, as well as the week we spend in Nevada for Burning Man, but beyond that we didn't really explore the United States at all. This year I want to see much more of America, visit cities like New Orleans and Miami, and also get to nearby destinations like the Carribean and Europe. We won't be here forever and we should use it as a base of operations to explore this part of the world, keeping a travellers mindset even as we focus on our day-to-day jobs.
• Create more. Stay aspirational at Ashoka; look for other professional opportunities (I'd love to do more speaking, facilitation and consulting); be creative and have fun (do more video, continue to write, collaborate with others). Build an amazing camp at Burning Man, and bring some of my favourite people from Australia over to share it. Support K in her creative pursuits.

I'm excited about 2010, and not just for the futuristic quality of the date (but seriously, 2010! Who would have thought we'd come this far?). Our visa's expire in August and we have some big decisions to make - do we stay in America? (Probably yes). If so do we stay in DC? (Probably no). If not where do we go next? (San Francisco?). And what do we do there? A year for pushing ourselves personally and professionally, looking for new opportunities to learn and grow and contribute. For new friends and the deepening of existing friendships. For adventures large and small, little steps on a big planet.

The journey itself is the thing, and we will see where it leads us, and be grateful for all that we experience along the way.

Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dream.

-Paula Coehlo

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

-Goethe

DC Snow Weekend

As you might have heard (or lived through) DC got a bit of snow on the weekend. A record-setting amount of snow actually, an amazing 20 inches in 24 hours, near shutting the city down. Lots of funny and strange things seem to happen at times like this, and perhaps the strangest story to come out of what was dubbed snowpocalypse09 was a huge public snowball fight on the corner of 14th and Ust NW, in the heard of the U St shopping and dining district, at 2pm on Saturday. At some point during the ruckus, which had about 200 participants, some snowball enthusiasts decided to target passing cars, and in particular a massive Hummer. I can understand their desire, there's no car that more makes me want to participate in acts of civil disobedience than the Hummer, a converted troop carrier for god's sake. Anyway this particular Hummer contained an undercover police office, who got out of his vehicle brandishing his gun. At people bearing snowballs. Madness. It was all captured on camera thankfully and the detective is now “confined to desk duties” while the incident is being investigated.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAgQKJuriIo]

This was all odd enough, but what's really revealing is what happened next. Here's how the local news reported it:

A lively snowball fight on D.C. streets took a dark turn Saturday when anti-war protesters dressed in anarchist garb showed up, and a D.C. police officer pulled his weapon out of his holster.

But things started to turn for the worse when the crowd -- some carrying anti-war signs and dressed all in black with masks -- began to pelt passing cars. A plain clothes D.C. police detective emerged from a Hummer -- it's unclear whether it was his personal vehicle or an unmarked police vehicle -- after it was struck. The detective began yelling at the gathered crowd. At one point, he pulled back his jacket, exposing his service weapon -- it's unclear if he did this intentionally. That's when things took a darker turn.

So they blamed a group “dressed like anarchists” for causing the problems, and indicated that the undercover detective only showed his weapon rather than brandished it, and that the only gun drawn was by a policeman who arrived later. Okay, a couple of things here. Firstly, the “dressed like anarchists” bit. By this we can only assume they're referring to people wearing balaclava's and scarfs around their faces. But aside from the seemingly omni-present anarchists (and bank robbers) who wears this sort of get-up? You got it – people in cold places! Like places where it's snowing like crazy. Like DC on Saturday.

Secondly, re the gun, see the video above. There's enough evidence online that there's no excuse for a professional news operation, reporting hours after the event, to get this wrong.

So besides being an example of a police officer completely overstepping the bounds of their authority it's also an example of the media completely overstepping their bounds of reporting, adding their own spin while blatantly mis-representing the facts, and doing so on the side of authority. This happens all the time of course, and this particular incident may not be the most important example in the world, but it is illustrating nonetheless. Protests in particular always get this treatment by a new media which is part of the status quo being protested. Not that this was even a protest, but the media were all too keen to fit it into their knee-jerk protest narrative of rowdy kids and put-upon police.

On a more personal note I had a productive snow weekend. Firstly K and I made a film with our flatmate D entitled Kiev: City of Love. It's a beauty I think you'll agree, we're very proud of it (My second film ever!).

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/8287052]

What do you think, time to get a pilot to the networks?

Then our visiting mate Scott and I made this snow Loch Ness Monster which is honestly the best snow sculpture I've seen since the dump. A weekend well-spent!

Social Media for Social Change

I put this up on Slideshare about a month ago but forgot to post it here, so here it is: the deck from the presentation I gave at the Powershift Virginia conference on using social media to affect social change. Hope you like it! [slideshare id=2406263&doc=powershiftvirginiapresentation-socmed4change-edited-091102150135-phpapp01]