Archiving the future

I’ve begun a process of putting together the archive of where I came from and where I am and maybe I hope it will give an indication of where I’m going. It probably won’t.

I’m doing that here, in my work life and I’m doing it elsewhere. In my other life. The split between the two, is really only to do with that word, professionalism. But it’s probably time to redefine what that means. Certainly for myself.

Interestingly, as I began that process an email from the number 27.org project I’m signed up too landed in my inbox with the video above. I’ve had this idea for a while that the fragments of our online lives if we so choose, will be threaded together and become the hand-me-downs for generations to come.

I went through my old Tumblr today. A beginning. There are a few bits inbetween also. But this is a good start.

The Dysconnected Tumblr 

And below is the moment when I took the basic understanding I had of emergent idea of combining the mental health and wellbeing field with the field that ‘techie types’ were in. I wasn’t sure why I was speaking, I really wanted to learn from them. I didn’t really feel like I knew enough to share at that point. But I’ve since learnt that its unlikely I’ll ever really know enough and I’ll never be a fan of public speaking. Not unless it involves absurdist poetry.

12 – Recovery 2.0 (Kate Brown) from LSx on Vimeo.

Making Things Happen

How do you make things happen? The more I think about this the more it sounds like an existential riddle.

If you make things happen in the woods at night and there’s nobody there who’s see’s you do it, does it mean that the doing it didn’t happen?

Or, what’s the sound of one hand happening?

That sort of thing.  But then I think – cogito ergo sum and carry on as before.

Making things happen from within healthcare is Not Easy. Attempting to make an online infrastructure as a platform to drive innovative and collaborative online projects and applications within the world of Wellbeing and Mental Health is impossible. Well, almost.

To do it – you have too:

1. get everyone (and by this I mean strategic individuals from) on board and embedded citywide as a concept  – in this case: The voluntary sector, Adult Social Care, The Mental Health Trust, Service Users, Carer’s, Organisations and Other People (just regular people who don’t use or work in healthcare services)
2. stop everyone on board from deciding that they are individually in charge and get them used to service design principles – pretty much by stealth
3. reveal things slowly – explain how an infrastructure like an iPhone for example is great, but the app’s – that can be designed by anyone is what makes the infrastructure the really exciting bit.
4. stop everyone from running off with a million idea’s that they want to start making immediately despite the money, funding and actual infrastructure not yet being in place
5. make a really (really) rough kind of infrastructure (which really is a ning or a shared blog) in place and get people used to the collaborative way in which it works and continuously develops technically.
6. stop some people panicking about how the world will implode at the risk of such a thing.
7. write a lot of documents. A lot –  Ownership agreements. A year ahead sustainable project plan with business planning forecast. Detailed service user engagement. Setting up innovating on Local Policy and Practice Advisory. Planning National Collaborative Policy Sharing. Technical Development plans. Pilot findings and recommendations. erm. Even your own Job Description. Possibly.
8. go back to the (still)enthused (miraculously) people who were ready to start setting up interesting projects to make content to go on the first early prototype infrastructure. Tell them – all systems are go.
9. stop justifying your existence
10. then, start doing the real work of making it all work, together.
11. (because this goes up to 11) start engaging everybody you can. Everyone in fact.

I am currently somewhere between 7, 8 and 9. I’m glad to be done with 6. Not that there aren’t still panickers. But its no longer my job to do the stopping of the panicking, alone.

Give it three months and my current piece of Making Things Happen will have happened. And if I do it right it will all seem so simple no one will even imagine the impossibility of how Making it all Happen actually was (is).

Except for me. And the bear. In the woods.

* as an addendum to anyone in the independent sector reading this and saying – ‘but this is an insane way of doing a startup – what madness!’  Yes. Exactly.

** as an addendum to my use of the words insane and madness. Using them here, to describe the way in which processes within health and social care directly oppose wanted innovation and entrepreneurial developments seems a very apt application. Much more so than to describe people having meaningful responses to distress.

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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