Infinite Broadband and Zero Latency ~ and beyond..

I was invited by Steve Walker to a workshop back last year as part of a collaboration by the Open University and Manchester Digital. It came under the guise of IBZL. An opportunity to radicalise around the notion that with the advent of fibre deployment in the UK the speeds at which the internet delivers will enable possibilities that we currently don’t design for – them not being possible at current speeds and all.

In my own mind, for a while I’ve been dealing with the difficulties that arise culturally within organisations and City decision making that dis-enable innovation – specifically (although not limited to)  in relation to idea’s and concepts that have driven social media emergence.  I had a basic model in my head (and here) of a 3D process map that I’d been developing in various projects that I have been using as a visual reference to this and the continuing struggles I’ve had with it.

So this is what I brought to the IBZL project.  What it brought to me, was an opportunity to meet with other thinkers and doers working within architecture of the internet (for want of a better way to describe all the people involved and their varying skillsets) and to begin thrashing out some future planning ideas.

Since that first workshop we’ve met again, three times in total. And we’ve taken the original concept of re-modeling cultural and societal change into process and made it concrete. Well, more a geodesic dome.

We’re forming a group of core individuals to act as a Body to inform, address and implement change Nationally on digital, tech & social media and where it meets all areas of the UK’s infra-structure – economics, education, health etc. For the moment we’re calling it a Digital Thinktank as shorthand (basically because thinking is our favourite thing and we’re being a bit self-referential) But the aims are beyond believing that we alone are the key to the solutions – more around this in future #IBZL posts.

Currently I’m doing a bit of asking and scoping on why something similar isn’t already in place and if there is, why isn’t it meeting the needs of people working at Service Design and Delivery level.

I’ll keep you posted.

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