stef's posterous

Change Nation - the tech behind the scenes

Change Nation is a project that Ashoka Ireland have been developing for the last year.

It, quite ambitiously, is about kicking off a series of interventions, projects, social enterprise ideas that address some of Ireland's problems, particularly as the country goes through a challenging period.

I've been doing some event-based work with Boz Temple-Morris recently - I'm playing the role of a live-coder / data-wrangler / visualiser. As the creative director of the event he brought me in to think about what we could do from a digital point of view to support the idea. After a few open-ended discussions we settled on the idea of addressing the "it's not just a talking shop" issue that many events, summits and conferences suffer from. Too often I go to well-meaning events and there's never any follow-up to the offers of support that are made and conversations that happen.

Here's how Change Nation came together (my role in all this was about one week of work in a year-long project).

50 Proven Solutions

Whenever I start a project, after working out what we're trying to achieve (in this case, addressing social issues in Ireland) it's important to focus on the simple elements that make up the project. What are the "units" that people can hold onto and understand. Luckily much of that thinking had been done before I joined in. The Ashoka team had researched 50 "Proven Solutions" from around the World, and invited the entrepreneurs behind them to come to the summit for four days to see if they could get their ideas off the ground in Ireland. These 50 are the focus of the whole project.

One-on-one Conversations

At many conferences there's a focus on panels and talks, break-out groups and so on. This was different - the focus was on one-on-one conversations. I'm really interested in how powerful this can be. Essentially the organisation acted as a match-maker to really make the most of the entrepreneurs' time in the country, and set up a series of conversations throughout the summit to give crucial access to decision-makers and power-brokers. Think heads of government departments, investors and high-profile business-people.

Change executives

Each of the 50 entrepreneurs was assigned a "change executive". Whilst the name is a little opaque, the concept is quite simple - these are very smart under-30s volunteers who had come through a rigourous recruitment process, and their job was to play a concierge / PA / curator / reporter role throughout their entrepreneur's stay. They ensured everything ran to time, that any blockers were removed and that actions were recorded and could be followed up on after the event.

The "Action" as a unit

We wanted these to be public. So we wrote them out large on pieces of corriboard (sturdy, plasticated cardboard) and physically displayed them during the event. Then we transcribed them into text, recording names and organisations, and they went straight out onto the web on the web-app we built for the event.

Then, to really reinforce this process we brought in Toby Harris (my old VJ crew partner) and he visualised the actions as they came in on a large screen at each of the four venues that we held the events in.

All in all, we managed to collect around 300 actions, and there's huge variety - "I'll introduce you to the minister", "I'll offer mentoring", "I'd like to run this project in my school"... Some are more concrete than others, but the crucial thing is that they are now publicly available online, all with unique URLs that we can refer back to and build upon.

It's quite gutsy doing this in public, but it added such weight to the conversations, and the event actually felt like something significant was happening and that there would be follow-up.

The tech

I was brought in quite late in all of this, and without being too harsh to the people who had volunteered to do their web production, the project had a pretty but very basic, static site as its digital front end. You know the kind of thing - there was an "about" page, a "news" section, and an "events" page. For the fifty solutions it was a single page with a list, and each item took you off to another site. And when Bono tweeted about the project it promptly took the site offline just from a handful of concurrent users.

It really needed something very different to support such a radical idea, so I took over on the Tuesday preceding the event and started rebuilding it. Not the kind of thing I'd normally advocate to be honest! This first four days of work on the tech were about getting the app into a workable state so that I could add the features that I thought it needed - a live element, landing pages for each solution, the ability to get user input from anyone, comments, social integration, and so on. 

The stack I went for is my most familiar, and I seem to be using it on everything at the moment - MongoDB for the database, Ruby as the language of choice, with Padrino as the web / data-model / business logic layer, Mongoid as a simple ORM, S3 for image storage, Heroku (the Cedar beta in this case) for hosting, HAML for layout, Pusher for live interactivity, JQuery for UI and interaction, Compass for style.

Once the site was rebuilt (the day before the event!) I started coding up the actual features we needed to support the event. We drew out a "social" map to make it clear what we were doing and where the conversation would happen. Essentially - the #changenation hashtag was by far our most active way of interacting with people who weren't at the event, but also Facebook latterly seems to have become a place for conversation. In fact, we gained about 700 likes during this short period.

Because it was a custom-build I could code up and deploy features as they were required - essentially I live-coded the site/app during the event as things became necessary. This was really interesting, if a little pressured, but that kind of time-pressure does focus the mind.

One nice example is the "Live" (now "As it happened") page. We wanted to be able to grab things from the web as we found them and present them in a feed - videos, photos, tweets, links. I found that embed.ly had an API where you can give it a URL and it will give you back a full embed of the content at that URL (assuming it is in their provider list). So quite quickly (in about 2hrs) I made a simple admin area, we grabbed things from twitter, copied and pasted URLs into it, and then using Pusher the Live page would automatically update with a new embed appearing at the top of the page. Just that is something that could be useful for any event.

Mobile support was a big deal too. 20% of our users were on mobile, and most of the work that the change executives did was mobile-based. Grabbing content, stuffing it into a shared Posterous group (by gosh these guys need to fix their user-on-boarding process. Horrible! But it worked a bit in the end). The original site had no mobile support at all, so I went responsive right from the beginning. I'm a little tired of the bootstrap thing, even though it's great, so I used my favourite Skeleton for CSS. It's not perfect, because you're forced into using some old school non-semantic classes for layout, but because the design of the site was so unusual (45 degree angles on everything means lots of hidden divs) it seemed fair, especially given the time constraint. 

Admittedly the page load is a bit much for mobile, but the site did function, and I managed to drop the bounce rate for mobile devices from 65% to about 40% - not perfect, but an improvement for people who wanted to read about the event.

One nasty gotcha we had was that the entire ident for the project was based around the Akzidenz Grotesk typeface. But there's not @font-face license available for it. If you're doing an event, make sure that the ident has this kind of licence (try things on Fontkit), otherwise you'll end up in a world of font-pain. I probably lost about two days in all of this to font tweaking at the expense of other, more impactful features.

I also spent some time getting Facebook graph in on every page - I've not seen whether this has been useful yet.

Toby's visual app was a custom piece of software he'd made, using Quartz Comoposer and XCode, and we used a simple atom feed / xml feed to pull live data into it using a polling strategy. Very very loosely coupled, and it meant the visuals would work even if there wasn't any internet because of local caching.

Photo / Video

We had a small team of videographers and photographers. These guys did a stunning job of documenting the event and at the end of each day Toby edited together and performed (!) a short 3-minute piece that really showed the progression of the ideas. Sadly, because getting good internet was a problem throughout the four days (on the last day we were on a shared iphone 3G personal hotspot!) we couldn't get the content up fast enough. In the end, we found that photos taken on an iphone and put on Twitpic were a much neater way of getting that "live" feel out. I think there's a role here for asking the photographer to do "proper" shots with their 5D/1D and then pull out an iphone just to get some shots online during the day. 

Data-wrangling

We quite quickly hit the issue of just having too much data flowing around - tweets, facebook comments, comments on the site, posterous contributions, new actions on cardboard, RTE live content bein broadcast, and one of the most crucial jobs was handled by Carolyn. She was our "data-wrangler" and just made sure that the right bits of information ended up in the right place in time. Quite a task! We were all frazzled by the end - it was like DJing with ten record decks.

Narrative

One element I wish we'd had more of would have been a reporter, someone to write it up as it happened in a text-based live-blog. One for next time(!).

What next?

I've written this up just as a way of explaining some of the components that came together for this ambitious event. We played a small but crucial part in the process - documenting, making transparent, communicating, archiving and supporting the future success of these "solutions" and making sure the "actions" actually occur.

We're operating in some unknown territory here, so I'm chatting to the guys at Ashoka about where this could go next. I've got an idea for an "Activism CRM" that helps people collaborate and keep track of these actions, and support them digitally and transparently. Whether or not that sees the light of day, the crucial thing is that the event happened, it was well received, people "got it", and we've started a few ripples that could result in some ambitious social projects in Ireland.

Hacking with GLA environmental data

Rewired State kindly invited me along to a two-day hack with unreleased environmental data from around London, held at City Hall or the GLA.

I discovered that there are a lot of interesting environmental data sets on the London Data Store, as well as some new APIs that the GLA are working on with Kings College.

What grabbed me was that scouring through the data available was that there is an hourly feed available of 99 air quality sensors across London that I can't seem to see has been hacked on before. I think it went live actually during the hack, and I must be one of the first external people to play with it.

So I did a couple of air quality hacks. One with the live data and one without (the API went live on the second day and I didn't get a chance to pull it in).

Smoggle

This is a cute little game idea (with a monster of course) that could be used as a way of explaining which parts of London have good/bad air quality. Kind of silly, but playing around with the idea of ambiently getting information across to people in an unexpected way.

Is it smoggy in London?

One issue with much of the way that air quality data is displayed currently is that it appears very academic and unfriendly. I wanted to concentrate on answering just one question well, and this is it - 99 live sensors picking up air quality. The map changes colour to be more grey on a bad day, and I've got a "human" way of describing the air conditions:

And clicking on one of those points gives you an ultra-simple meter reading for that location. The idea being that you can add this to your mobile phone home screen and check it before you leave for work of a day.

I had some trouble with the JSON formatting, so I also suggested putting these feeds on Pachube. And wouldn't it be amazing to do some live data visualisation in that beautiful public space on entering City Hall? I feel a proposal coming on...

How to block behavioural adverts that follow you around while you browse

You've probably noticed recently that you keep seeing the same ad repeated time and time again on lots of different websites you've been going to. Over the last year or so it's been irritating me more and more - while I understand websites need ad revenues to survive, I also think that for me this is one step too far - particularly when the ad isn't relevant to me and yet I get presented with it every single day of my life!

A couple of companies I know and respect started using it, which has really affected how I view them. In fact Chargify (who we use at Aframe for some of our payment processing) were using it and I kept seeing their ads everywhere, despite being a customer!

I wanted a button next to these ads saying something like :"Yeah OKAY! Dude. I'm a customer of yours. Please make it stop", but apparently that doesn't exist.

So as of today I'm blocking all behavioural advertising and as far as possible, anything that tracks me while I use the web.

Wake up monsters!

It should work well in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, iPad and iPhone. It might also work on other things too, but I'm not browser testing on Christmas Eve!

Enjoy and all the best for the new year...

Screened - a map visualisation of UK film screening data

Introducing Screened

I've spent the weekend and a few evenings making a spare time app using the BFI's data on UK film screenings. They're in the process of opening up a data-set of some 5.4 million film screenings that happen each year, geolocated and with data about the films - genres, venue, and so on.

It's an interesting data set, so for a first hit I have made a simple app that visualises where and when films were screened during 2010.

I've written a longer blog post about the thinking and process behind the app over at Aframe.

Mix: Gaining Spacial Awareness

A collection of songs that have formed the soundtrack to my exploration of London over the last few weeks.

Some thoughts about Birmingham Creative City

I've just been to the "Birmingham Creative City" launch and I thought I'd put a few thoughts down in response. I'll start at the beginning...

I lived in Birmingham for over ten years and over that time became pretty well networked as a kind of go-between for the types of people who had been influential in the city - lawyers, bankers, accountants; and the new 'creative' types who were doing interesting things - designers, music people, arts organisation folk and so on.

I guess you could say that I quite heavily bought into the idea of the Creative Class and the importance of nurturing creativity in cities. At the time I was working on my first startup there was a lot of talk about the value of the 'creative industries' - a new term that had been coined, I think by government. 

"The Creative Industries": The result of a 'god of the gaps' approach to economics that collected thirteen rag-tag 'industries' (and that's a loaded term itself) into one big 'there be magic here' term: "Look. Stuff to do with creating or exploiting intellectual property is going to be really important". It was the hot new thing, and lots of people started pushing this agenda. I was a young, impressionable designer who'd had a modicum of success with a couple of small projects and won a couple of awards (this does bad stuff to you, but that's another story). 

Quite quickly I found myself in an odd position. On one hand I seemed to be able to talk to those 'suits' of Birmingham in a language they could understand, and I also kind of understood what these 'creatives' (ugh. There it is - I'm almost allergic to the word now) were about. 

For many years you'd find me at random meetings and events with either side, talking about the economic arguments for creativity and culture, about what we could do for the fair city of Birmingham, if only XYZ were to happen. I sat on boards, I helped set up things that fit into the grand agenda of, umm, getting 'creativity' onto the agenda. There were a handful of us at any one time doing this. The faces changed, the exact same group of people would never be found at the same events but I realised that I'd found a group of 'usual suspects'. Sometimes we formalised our ideas, sometimes we didn't, everyone worked on their own stuff and did it for free. Or at least I did. I'd work on this agenda during working hours and then catch up at weekends and at night. It was a project.

I did it mainly because I really cared about it. I had this idea that through creativity, culture, art, architecture, education, inspiration and just _being smart_ about what the future is going to be about that we could collectively make Birmingham into a better place. I mean - we've all looked around. There's poverty, unfairness, lack of opportunity, untapped talent, total geniuses keeping their light under a bushel... I guess my idea boiled down to - "Maybe if we can get the suits to understand what we could do with Birmingham using creativity as a theme we could do something beautiful for this place".

There was a bunch of us up to this, for a variety of personal and business reasons. Some wanted a bigger arts scene so they'd get more visitors to their venues, some wanted more TV programmes to be made so their production companies could get more work, some wanted a 'critical mass' of talent so we could have a sustainable freelance talent pool, some people wanted inward investment so they could shift more property, some wanted a better nightlife so they could enjoy the place more - tons of reasons. I don't think I found anyone who would disagree with 'It would be great if Birmingham did more to support creativity'.

Along the way this idea seemed to get a little bit of traction. Not very visibly, but if you were at the right meetings you'd start seeing this stuff being dropped in here and there. If there's one thing I learnt in this process it's that when things change there's absolutely no way of attributing these subtle interventions back to any one person's actions. There were a bunch of us doing this over time - I won't name names. You'll probably know one or two. And I don't in any way know everyone who was doing this.

I had a notion of "the powers that be" in some way perhaps making a few decisions in a subtly different way than they would have and not really caring if it was exactly what we'd have wanted, just as long as it were in the right general direction.

Some years in, I distinctly remember meeting Martin Mullaney, my local councillor when he'd just been given the responsibility for culture/creative in the council. And I really tried hard to stifle a grin when he started pitching back at me almost an identical list of the arguments we'd been putting forward for several years. He had no idea who I was, obviously, why would he? But at that point I realised - job done. Influence applied. I don't know who'd been briefing him, but our collective message of 'wouldn't it be great if...' seemed to have pervaded. 

At that time I'd put various things on pause while I was on the Clore programme (it looks weird online, but it's great. Yes it was tax-payer's money. It was well spent - read on) and I realised that over this time I had become increasingly tired and jaded by the various attempts to actually do things around this idea, really dodgy festivals, publicly funded events that were plain embarassing, funding decisions that seemed mental, fed up about things that I cared about closing or mysteriously burning down, getting really shit advice from the various unqualified expert advisers I was introduced to, loads of talented folk reaching a certain level and then leaving, people just about managing to get cool stuff off the ground but being hampered rather than helped, weird planning decisions, scheme after scheme aimed at this 'sector' as if a theatre and a software company have things in common. Of course there was all of the good stuff, but these things got pretty tiring and I realised that I just wanted to go and do a proper startup and stop messing around.

So I killed my darlings and went and did just that. There's probably another post just here about stopping undirected activity and just doing one thing well. I'll write that one day.

For all the talk of somehow making Birmingham more creative in some way, there's an inherent lie that we'd sold ourselves. We'd sold the future to ourselves rather than the reality of the present. And I'd started believing the hype. So when it came to attempting to get a startup idea of the ground it was just a lot harder to find investment than everyone had been saying it was. That's debillitating - having a bunch of ideas and just not being able to take any of them anywhere isn't good for your sanity. Far better to plug away at something that does work on some small level than to reach for something impossible if there's just no funding around, right? But that's not me. So I made myself open to the idea of leaving the city to do my next startup. Which is what happened. Surprisingly suddenly I met up with David, co-founded Aframe and left for London with some actual cold hard cash behind it from private investors who knew a good business idea when they saw one.

I've not been back. I've kept my flat and I still pay council tax in Brum, so I can still claim citizenship. But I've not stepped back into this scene anyway - I put it behind me, got my head down and I've been working hard on 'doing one thing'. Forget the politics, or talking about doing something, forget the whining about public money, I took everything I'd learnt on Clore and applied it to getting Aframe off the ground. You can read more about how we're doing elsewhere - in essence, we have some investment, we have a great team, we have a fantastic product and it's bloody hard work. 

I thought I'd be back more often, but I just didn't need to go. I'd said all that needed to be said. I started organising a 'post leaving leaving do' but never got around to it because I was coding solidly. It was exhilerating and liberating. It still is in fact, although we now have scaling challenges rather than 'prove the idea works' challenges (cue jibes from my team-mates).

But at the back of my mind I've been continuing to think about these things. Did I just abandon "project Birmingham"? Was all that work a waste of time? All those crap networking events and attending dull events about tax accounting just to spread the idea a little? I hoped not, but I'd just packed all that up with all the possessions in the move.

So, to bring this up to date, I was surprised last week to get an invitation to the launch of Birmingham Creative City - I guessed I must still be on some list somewhere. And after some thought I took a few hours out of my 'staycation' to pop up to Birmingham to see what it was, and perhaps be on hand with an occasional comment, idea or question.

I now feel beaten up and generally depressed. Where do I begin? I mentioned the Martin Mullaney instance earlier for a reason. It was fascinating being in a room with a bunch of folk effectively giving a more involved version of that conversation. Here we were, a bunch of folk who've been trying to get the creative/cultural idea written into the strategy for the city (region? city-region?) for a good few years. And here they were, a government minister, various powerful local folks, the head of the new big "power that be", someone from the Arts Council deciding not to give us in the audience the same arguments we've been giving for years because the "argument has been made".

We win. Apparently.

We've got what we wanted - the 'suits' have taken on what we've all been saying and are serious. A bit too serious. And that's the problem. Gone was our creativity, our soul, our delivery, our ownership of this concept. In its place we have powerpoint. We have people giving speeches in which they "welcome the Minister's comments".

I guess we got what we always wanted here, and there's no use being upset at the lack of style or inspiration in the delivery. Or rather - that was one of my first thoughts.

In actual fact my other was "Fuck you". To give that context, go and have a read of what Pete Ashton said. It's a good rant. 

When I say "fuck you", what I'm getting at is that a lot of the interesting stuff in Birmingham tends to happen in spite of those with a remit to support it. A Birmingham "fuck you" in this context is more like "Fuck you - I'm doing it anyway". I call it in-spite-of-ness and the city has it in bucketloads. It's had to. The minister for culture being flown in to help launch the idea of a creative city as if its a new thing should expect such a reaction. As should all of the team behind their powerpoint launch.

Powerpoint. Seriously. You're going to launch a grand vision about making this city a creative powerhouse (or whatever term you want to use) with a powerpoint presentation and a dry delivery of some stats to a room full of suits (was I the only one there in a pair of trainers? It certainly felt like it).

No. You should be doing something utterly unforgettable, something that gets people talking, something probably based around an idea that may or may not be possible but that nevertheless inspires a "Wow - seriously, are you nuts? Okay, well if you think that's possible, I'm in" reaction. Instead I have left this event with absolutely no idea what the idea is. Something to do with economics or something, maybe it's about getting some of these university leavers who've been promised media jobs at the end of their course some employment in the area that they dreamed of working. I don't know.

The "potential idea" for a modern art gallery (we've all been talking about this for years) has now moved onto a "sketch" for a modern art gallery, with an address. This is flipping great and I can't wait to see it happen. The photography archive looks like it has a sketched home at Curzon Street which is also great news (we've also been talking about this for years, right?). There's a bunch of cash set aside for philanthropy, but on the rough evidence so far, many of the major donations that have happened in the West Midlands have been to the RSC so you can't really generalise.

I'm still confused about the stats too. Is this about cultural organisations that need donations/public money to operate, or is it about software companies and architects who need access to finance. If it's about jobs, shouldn't it be about education? What about scrapping rubbish ICT lessons (learn Powerpoint!) and teaching coding instead?

The thing is, the people all seemed very capable. And it _is_ what we always wanted - a recognition by "the powers that be" that creativity needs to be supported in Birmingham, that it's going to be an important factor in its future success. It's just such a shame that, as with so many things in Birmingham, it's apparently impossible for one person to say "this is my idea and I'm going to own it". A good idea needs an owner not a committee, and that person should be able to express the magnitude of their idea so that others buy into it. Whilst the people speaking all seemed to be in some way 'partners', there's nobody emotionally attached to this concept, and I'm afraid that it's going to be a damp squib. And I'm tired of that.

What's good about my living in London now is that I really don't have to care about this stuff any more. And yet I just do. It's quite freeing not being part of the scene anymore - I can look in from the outside to a degree. Birmingham is a great city but I fear, as others have pointed out, that the Birmingham 'project' is at an end. We should either find a way to do do this 'Creative City' amazingly with passion and surprise, or step away from the grand plans and just focus on the things that we do as creative people on an individual level. I suspect that the latter will be the reaction. Perhaps in these fragmented, atomized times, the city's continuing attachment to the notion of 'Big Projects Are Best' needs to be scrapped. Certainly my advice to people following my experience is "Don't believe your own hype. Just focus on doing good work." and perhaps I'd extend it to this project. Whatever it is.

There's always a point in a launch where you want to ask a question but realise it's probably plain rude. Here's mine: "Given your various statistics and assumptions about how creativity is a Good Thing for Birmingham, why have you come to the conclusion that this is the correct response?" But I didn't ask it. Mainly because there was a danger that I might inadvertently say "Oh, and fuck you" to a government minister.

Perhaps this was just a step along the way. Perhaps "a leader shall emerge". Perhaps we just need these things written into some strategy document somewhere so that everyone can point to it when they need a decision to be made. Perhaps I'm being unfair and I've misunderstood the project. And perhaps it doesn't really matter what I think because I've already voted with my feet, so to speak. 

In the end, I suspect in-spite-of-ness will continue in Birmingham. The artists will struggle and succeed in equal measure, the talented designer/programmer/architect will continue to have a reputation outside the city yet be unknown within, strategy documents will circulate, ministers for creativity and culture will come and go, and the city's powerful creative heart won't even skip a beat.

Mix: Printing buildings where once there were newspapers

A collection of vocal electronica to usher in the Autumn.

Aframe is a Smarta 100 winner

Smarta run an annual "Top 100" list of new businesses doing interesting things in a variety of industries, and Aframe is one of the winners.

As is often the case with awards there's a "vote for your favourite" approach to further filter the winners into some kind of order, and we need your help.

It takes just a few seconds to vote, and to say thanks to the folks who vote for us, we're giving away a free Aframe account - just follow @aframehq on Twitter, let us know you've voted, and we'll send you a special code.

Vote for Aframe in the Smarta 100. Thanks in advance!

Aframe shortlisted for a White Bull "Bully" award

We've only been talking publicly about how we hope Aframe will redefine how people make TV since around Christmas, and we've already been shortlisted for our second award. I think that's not bad going!

This time we're in the running for a prestigious "Bully" award (yes we've had a few jokes at our expense) which are given out at the White Bull summit event series. As a plucky startup and all that we're rather pleased to get some notice about what we're trying to achieve. Better start getting a presentation together...