McFilter

How to Be More Like Berlin?

Dan Hill has posted an excellent report on a wander round some of Berlin.

Lots of food for thought there, not that I've drawn any conclusions yet.

The pavement gardening is yet another example of the sort of stuff bubbling under the surface here in Liverpool, with projects like Cairns Street in Toxteth, and the almost-but-not-quite-yet groundswell of urban farming from projects like The Mediated Garden.

And the civic engagement and "YIMBY" (rather than NIMBY) attitudes and projects provoke "how do we replicate that here?" pondering, but the report on acceptance and diversity at the end is, as Dan says, brow furrowing. One of the concerns I have with both the slow gentrification (or is it re-gentrification, given the original occupants of these houses?) of the Georgian Quarter (that I'm as much a part of as anyone else), and moves to clear out the cheap-lager-fighting-rings of Concert Square is where all the people currently inhabiting and using the spaces are supposed to go? Out of sight, or into some area away from the city centre, so we can easily avoid them aren't good enough answers.

The Liverpool Docks in 1941

A really interesting film from 1941 which shows how bustling the river and the docks were back then. Given how chatty the @MerseyShipping account it, I suppose it's possible that there still a similar level of activity these days, but it's nowhere near as visible, as it's mostly restricted to the container port at the mouth of the river.

I wonder what new activity we could bring to the docks and the river to reinvigorate it? I'm not sure about the docks themselves, but it would be good to get back to manufacturing enough things that this comment was true again...

"Britain must deliver the goods overseas. And into Liverpool pours a steady stream of home produced articles to meet the constant demand of buyers abroad"

(via Feeling Listless)

Thoughts on Craft and Manufacturing

This video is a nice bit of manufacturing pr0n, which shows mostly how some cufflinks are made in a pretty industrial manner with a nice automated CNC machine. However, it also shows that there's a human scale attention to detail with the quality checking of the finished items.

AliceMadeThis: Promotional Film from Brickwall Films on Vimeo.

If you head over to the website for the company that's responsible for them, you get a more craft-based feel from the copy:

So, they're using the latest (well, actually that CNC machine doesn't look all that new...) industrial processes but using them to make something where the scarcity and quality provide the value.

A thousand of something on a global, or even just a Western economies, scale still means you're unlikely to encounter someone else with the same item; yet it's more than an individual artist or craftsperson would want to make by hand.

This is the first example I've seen of this sort of hybrid approach, but maybe that's just because it's not very visible. If I'd only seen the website I'd have assumed that the manufacturing process was much more traditional and hands-on - my initial reaction to the text was that it was almost disingenuous... hiding the industrial process so as not to alienate the customer.

That might just be me, but if it is true, then surely there's scope for opening things up and showing how there's a continuum of processes from handmade, local craft all the way through to the mass-produced in sweatshops in China. Maybe then we'll see more people moving into the middle ground, like Alice Made This have, providing both increased prosperity for craftspeople and more employment in local manufacturing?

Tags: laptopsandlooms manufacturing craft makersguild

Open Source Entrepreneurship

Last week the Global Entrepreneurship Congress came to Liverpool - a massive conference about all things business. Alongside the main conference there was a massive programme of fringe events, and obviously DoES Liverpool was no exception. We had at least one event (and often more) each day - some run on our own, and others that we ran in conjunction with other like-minded groups in the city.

One of those collaborations was a panel discussion entitled Open Source Entrepreneurship, and Max Zadow who came up with the idea asked me to be one of the panellists.

It was all very free-form, but I think it worked well - I enjoyed what was basically a long discussion loosely centred on open source and encouraging more, and better, businesses. The other panellists were Francis Irving, Julian Tait and Jon Bains, but there was plenty of engagement and contribution from the "audience" too.

Luckily Defnetmedia had slung a camera in the corner of the room to provide a basic record of the event, and so you can watch it now:

Open Source Entrepreneurship from Defnet Media on Vimeo.

Running the Arduino + Ethernet - Building the Internet of Things course again

It's been a while since I last ran one of the courses to show people how to get their Arduino hooked up to the Internet and interfacing with services like Pachube and Twitter.

So, once again over at Madlab as part of their Omniversity series I'll be spending the day taking people through the basics of the Internet of Things.

Head over to course booking page to find out more and sign up.

What Would Liverpool's 9 Businesses Be?

This is a lovely video about 9 businesses in Detroit, which I found via Johannes Kleske...

9 Businesses from 4exit4 on Vimeo.

Naturally, I started wondering what Liverpool's 9 businesses would be. DoES Liverpool, Bold St Coffee, Leaf... who else?

I love the strapline at the end of the film too, we should ditch all this "It's Liverpool" stuff, and steal that:

Move to Liverpool, work hard and have fun

Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Small Giants, Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham

Not sure how long this has sat on my Amazon wishlist (which is doing a great job of saving huge slabs of trees from sitting around my flat unread...) but I finally got a copy as a Christmas present. It's a good treatise on what's important about running a business.

Page XVII
What's in the interest of the shareholders depends on who the shareholders are.

The shareholders who own the businesses in this book have other nonfinancial priorities in addition to their financial objectives. Not that they don't want to earn a good return on their investment, but it's not their only goal, or even necessarily their paramount goal.

Page 37, talking about spin-off companies
[The] new ventures had the effect of giving good people an avenue to grow and take on new challenges without having to find employment elsewhere

Page 52
Explaining her decision to stick with her own company rather than sign with a major label, [Ani] DiFranco told the New York Times in 1998, "I have to know for myself that there is an alternative to big corporations. I want to live in a world where one can and does choose to go to the local drugstore on the corner - that old chemist who's been there with his wife behind the counter for thirty years - instead of going to the Rite Aid or the Kmart."

Page 79
[The book The Discipline of Market Leaders] argued that, to be really successful, a company had to focus on providing one of three types of value to its customers: the best price, the best product, or the best overall solution.

Page 88
[Brian Grunert said] "The idea was to make something worth buying and then put it out there so that people could be attracted - or not."

Page 156
As Elizabeth Conlin put it in her Inc. article, UNBT had been founded on "the heretical notion that a company's has organic, almost preordained, limitations," and that if you exceeded those limitations and grew too fast, you would undermine your ability to provide excellent customer service, create a great workplace for your employees, and maximize shareholder returns. "We could grow faster, but it would cost us everything," [Carl Schmitt] told her. "In the bureaucracy of growth, you lose your distinctiveness."

Page 165
[Gary] Erickson [of Clif Bar] said "[...] The long-term [aim] for me is to be the chair of the company and contribute where I can - not in operations. I play with ideas and throw them into the pot."

Page 195
To me, the owners and leaders of these companies stand out for being remarkably in touch with, and focused on, what most of us would probably agree are the good things in life. By that, I mean that they are very clear in their own minds about what life has to offer at its best - in terms of exciting challenges, camaraderie, compassion, hope, intimacy, community, a sense of purpose, feelings of accomplishment and so on - and they have organised their businesses so that they and the people they work with can get it. When outsiders come into contact with such a business, they can't help but feel the attraction.

Page 199, Norm Brodsky talking about how he feels about business
"I think you need to feel in your gut that whatever you do is the most interesting, exciting, worthwhile thing you could be doing at that moment. Otherwise, how do you convince anyone else?"

Page 217
In business, after all, it's easy to confuse size with greatness, and getting bigger with getting better. When you stop and think about it, the connections between the two are tenuous at best, but - with all the attention paid to getting big and growing fast - it's easy to understand why most of us tend to equate them. By deciding to go for greatness rather than bigness, the small giants remind us that the two are not the same [...]

A Nice Way to Set Donation Levels

One of the perennial problems that places like DoES Liverpool and hackspaces have is how to spread the cost of running the space among the community that uses it.

At DoES we went for a more traditional fixed set of levels of use and prices, but some of the hackspaces go with a "donate what you feel is fair" approach (and then often end up with a recommended amount to guide people).

Just now I was reading about the Arduino commune that John Willshire has been attending, and they've got a lovely way of defining an "amount that's reasonable, but will vary based roughly on people's individual ability to pay":

"[...] if you’re coming along regularly, you might like to make a donation to the space (of, say, the amount of money you last withdrew from a cash machine or something like that)."

I like that.

The Future of Liverpool?

For a long time now I've been bouncing round ideas about "visions of the future". Not because I've any grand aims to become a futurologist but because I think it's important to ruminate on how things might, or could, turn out.

Initially I thought it would be good to hold a one-day conference on the future - call it "20:20 on 2020" and invite people to present short, Pecha Kucha- or (slightly longer than) Ignite-style presentations where they'd give a 20 slide, 20 seconds-per-slide glimpse of a possible future life in (roughly) the year 2020.

However, compelling presentations of the future require a visual artistic ability that I, and I suspect many others, are sorely lacking - and what's more important is the narrative about how the future would work rather than a few pictures. Plus a conference would take an awful lot of organising and fund-raising that I don't have the time for at the moment.

So, a couple of months back, I found myself revisiting the idea, but this time as a writing exercise. That seems more universally accessible, and allows it to run over a longer period of time - hopefully garnering more interaction and involvement from people, whilst also using the existing infrastructure of blogs, twitter, etc. to minimise the overhead of running the project.

I still didn't have the time to take it further, but a recent conversation on twitter with Maria Barrett and Esther Dix has at least tipped me over the edge into making the idea public. I haven't got the bandwidth to drive it forwards, but if I can find four or five volunteers who want to help make it happen then I think it could be game on. If that sounds like you, then drop me line...

Anyway, onto the idea...

The It's Liverpool campaign, particularly for a council marketing project, is a really good idea - let the people lead the marketing and show why the city is great. It's a great way to promote the city to outsiders. What it doesn't do though, is help the people in the city to work out how they want the city to evolve.

That's where It's Liverpool 2020 comes in :-)

2020 might not be the right date, and it won't be a hard requirement to target it, but basically it's a blog post exercise to encourage people to write an article on their blog about a possible vision of Liverpool in 2020. The guidelines would be deliberately vague - it could be a short story as easily as it could be a list of projects and initiatives. Though it was set in 2015, the second-half of my Barcamp talk will give you an example.

There'll be a website, but it'll just point to posts on other people's blogs, and maybe show tweets tagged with #il2020.

Then there'll be a handful of volunteer curators who'll pick out their favourite pieces, which will be featured on the il2020 website, or in an ideal world we'll pique the interest of the Echo or Seven Streets and they'll be reprinted in a series there.

The idea is to keep the tech minimal and out of the way, as it's the writing that's important. The volunteer organisers will basically be doing bits of promotion; checking submissions and adding them to the website; and curating the submissions (and obviously, not everyone will have to do all of those roles).

I think that would be a really useful project to run, but there's plenty of scope to scale things up if it seems worth our time/effort... It would be nice at the end to compile a Newspaper Club newspaper containing the posts and distribute it round the city... We could find out who's in charge of the Council's ten year plan and present the ideas to them... It could spark some Social Media Surgeries to show people how to start a blog, so they can participate... maybe we could even hold some outside the city centre (at Toxteth TV or KVFM or wherever) to find some new voices...

Worst-case scenario: a few people write some blog posts about the future of the city.
Best-case scenario: some of the actual inhabitants influence some of the direction of the city; the group of volunteers go on to run more stuff, including more regular Social Media Surgeries; we introduce a load of new voices into the online debate about life, society and whatever in Liverpool.

What do you think?

Tags: liverpool future itsliverpool il2020

Jonathan Meades on Regeneration

Uncomfortable watching for anyone in Liverpool or Manchester in places, but an excellent dissection of the regeneration industry. Hat tip to Mike Chitty for sharing it.