stef's posterous

London C-all-in-g

Some changes are afoot, and it's high time I blogged about it. In short - I'm going to be in London doing something exciting. As part of the Clore programme each of us must undertake a three to four month 'placement' with an organisation of our choice. For instance my friend Ariane is working at CERN for a few months setting up an artist-in-residence scheme (after running the fantastically named Pestival), others step out of their roles in small cultural organisations to work at much larger ones (on the Olympics, large theatres, performance spaces, etc), and vice-versa. I've been struggling to find the right placement for me, mainly because it's hard to imagine myself stepping right out of the agile development / open innovation / rapid prototyping / mashup / culture / web / startup world that I've been in for the last few years. A month is a year in Internet time, and all that. So, rather than stepping _back_ from that world I'm going in deeper - it's what I'm passionate about and given that the experience of Clore could be summed up in just the one word "authenticity", this can only be the right thing to do. So my 'placement' is a little different from ones that have gone before - I'm co-founding a startup. It's the first company to come out of the All In Group, a private venture that was formed earlier this year specifically to set up, finance and grow creative technology businesses. What I'm working on is very exciting and in a few months I'll be able to talk about it, but until then we have to keep what it is under wraps, suffice to say it's a new venture focussed squarely on the creative industries. I'm really excited - I'll be working with some amazing people to build something utterly cutting edge, with finance in place to do it. Along the way I'll be documenting some of the issues generally faced by a creative/tech startup, some of which I'll be publishing here, others will go into a paper for Clore. I'm also putting together a wish list of people I'd like to meet and learn from, and I'll be doing the occasional day shadowing one or two, or meeting over coffee to get a better understanding of creative/cultural/digital leadership issues. This also means, obviously, I'll be away from Birmingham, but I'm not cutting any ties! Over the last couple of years I've been cementing a strong relationship with Made Media, who are in my opinion one of the best teams to go to for cultural web production in the UK, and they're taking on my web production projects, as well as any opportunities that I can see are great ideas but can't work on myself. As always - I'm happy to bounce web ideas around on Twitter or over a coffee with Made on hand to turn them into reality for you! Both Odadeo and Help Me Investigate continue to go from strength to strength and you can expect to see interesting developments on both fronts in the coming months. I also remain a strong advocate for Birmingham, and I hope that having me in the capital could be useful for arguing the case for regional creative enterprise and strengthen ties with the big cultural organisations. In my time here I hope I've sown seeds that now have a life of their own, and are each continuing to grow in their own right - things like Type, Created in Birmingham, Creative Republic, the SXSWi yearly missions, BCCDIY...  Looking further back there was Default at the Medicine Bar, VJing at Prosession at the Que Club (remember that?)... There's too much to summarise here but I hope that in some way all of these things have had a positive impact on Birmingham. It's been an amazing decade where I've been lucky enough to experience some great successes (as well as my fair share of failures!). But all in it's great to be leaving on a high note - new opportunities beckon. I'm sad to be leaving the city I've called home for a decade, yet very excited by the new opportunities that this move will bring, occasionally bewildered by the scale of what I find myself working on, but more often confident that the impossible is just something that hasn't been done yet. Over the next month or so I'll be in Birmingham at the weekends until we've found a place for the family to live, and once we do I'm sure we'll be organising a little party to say 'adieu'. Wish me luck!