Only Dead Fish

Hands From Above

This is genius. From artist Chris O'Shea. Fun, interactive, doing stuff with people rather than at them. Wonder how long before an advertiser uses this idea...

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

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Britain's Got Talent

 

Image courtesy

“In the knowledge economy all staff are volunteers, but our managers are trained to manage conscripts” Peter Drucker

I've been thinking about this quote ever since I read it over at Johnnie's place. I did a webinar the other day about social technologies, and there were a number of HR professionals on the call. The discussion turned to how employers might best attract and retain talent in the connected world. The point was made about the need for companies to resist the temptation to impose too many controls on employees in their use of such tools, and how many bright young things have a level of expectation about the use of such technologies in everything they do (including their work).

But it felt like there was a big point that was in danger of being missed - that corporates have already become far more transparent to everyone, prospective employees included, whether they like it or not. A networked world creates choice and leverage for individuals. It's easier than ever to find inspiration, start something interesting. The barriers to entry have never been so low. My sense is that talented young people coming onto the job market for the first time have a very real sense of their connectedness and the possibilities that that enables.

So the question should not be about which organisations 'allow' the use of such technologies, but rather which are the ones where the employees are visibly empowered by them. The awful state of the current job market allows organisations the luxury of choice, but for how long? As Hugh MacLeod rightly said the market for something to believe in is infinite. And this, to quote Seth, is "where the real truth lies, where growth occurs regardless of the state of the economy". My hunch is that when we come out the other side the future will belong to those companies that are visibly driven not only by a strong sense of purpose and a culture of transparency, but empowered and connected employees.

Project 10tothe100

I'm quite fascinated to see how this turns out. Late last year Google launched Project 10tothe100, a "call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible". More than 150,000 ideas from over 170 countries were submitted. Google have grouped them into sixteen broad ideas, each inspired by numerous individual ideas, which are open for public vote:

Promote health monitoring and data analysis

Enhance science and engineering education

Create real-world issue reporting system

Create Genocide monitoring and alert system

Work towards socially conscious tax policies

Build better banking tools for everyone

Collect and organise the world's urban data

Encourage positive media depictions of engineers and scientists

Help social entrepreneurs drive change

Make government more transparent

Provide quality education to African students

Create real-time natural crisis tracking system

Build real-time user reported news service

Drive innovation in public transport

Make educational content available online for free

Create more efficient landmine removal programmes

Clicking through to show the 'suggestions that inspired this idea' is the really intriguing bit ("Create a single world bank or supra-national currency, uniform rules and transparent public accounting", anyone?). Voting ends on October 8th. Like I say, I'm fascinated to see how it turns out. So go vote, and let's find out...

Birds On The Wires

"Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating."
Jarbas Agnelli

Lovely.

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

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Data As Art

These data visualisations from Chris Harrison are so beautiful they are an art-form in themselves:

Digg Rings
Using data from the digg API, the top ten most-dugg stories of the day over one year rendered in a series of tree-ring-like visualisations (moving outwards in time). The colour of the rings relate to digg's eight top-level categorizations, the thickness of each ring is linearly proportional to the number of diggs the story received.

The Colour Flower
Using a data set of colour names collected on the internet featuring more than sixteen thousand colors labeled by people online.

The Internet - City To City Connections
Using data from the Dimes Project, showing how the Internet's routers are connected geographically. Almost 90,000 connections between cities all over the globe are shown.

Amazing. More here.

The Wrong Summit

This short 3 minute TED talk by Arthur Benjamin makes a simple but very perceptive point, that the teaching of mathematics is now out of step with the modern world. Moving beyond the foundations created by arithmetic and algebra, Benjamin suggests that as the world moves from analogue to digital the curriculum should move with it and embrace the more modern, discrete mathematics of randomness, uncertainty and data, and that the 'summit' of the subject should change from calculus, to statistics and probablility.

If the subject was more aligned with the changing world, Benjamin argues, maybe more people would find it relevant and interesting and maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be in the economic mess we are in today. It's such a compelling point it makes me wonder how many other 'wrong summits' we're still aiming for.

Jer Thorp

Two amazing visualisations from Jer Thorp:

First up - 'Just Landed' - originated from a thought about the data that is hidden in various social network information streams, this visualisation finds tweets that contain the phrase 'just landed in', parses out the location they’d just landed in along with the home location they list on their Twitter profile, and maps out global travel in the twittersphere...

Just Landed - Test Render (4 hrs) from blprnt on Vimeo.

Next up, a visualisation of the UK National DNA database, the largest DNA database in the world holding profiles of 4.5 million individuals. The central graphic is a DNA strand with one dot for each of the profiles in the database, and the visual is further broken down into racial groups, age groups, and those who have been charged versus those who are ‘innocent’.



Amazing work.

Doing By Not Doing

Unfortunately I didn't get to go to this years Google Zeitgeist event a few weeks back, but I know a man that did and he came back raving about the final session of the first day - a talk by reknowned Isreali conductor Itay Talgam. Having now seen it, I can see why. Itay uses the metaphor of conducting to talk about leadership and collaboration: the importance of opening space for interpretation within organisations; the price of over-control; what he calls "doing by not doing". It's fascinating. And well worth half an hour of your time.

Credit Crunch

Young Harry S Truman

Designer Stefan Sagmeister tells a story as part of his strangely wonderful 'Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far' about a commission he was once given by a magazine editor. Given no brief and a long deadline, the unlimited freedom becomes something of a curse, until he rereads his diary and picks out a sentence that becomes the basis for his work. Once published, it sets off a chain of events that leads to the publication of 'Things I Have Learned...'.

That sentence was: 'Everything I do always comes back to me'. In Stefan's case, it ended up proving its own content. In my case, it is one of those maxims that you come back to again and again. A bit like this Harry S Truman quote I came across (via a comment on this post from Rory Sutherland):

“Everything is possible, just so long as you don’t care who gets the credit.”

Indeed.

Tweeting From The Top Of The World

I still can't quite believe this. Late last week I blogged about Gavin Bate, mountaineer and founder of the charity Moving Mountains, that helps street children in Kenya and Nepal. Gavin is currently in Everest base camp, about to mount a summit attempt in aid of his charity, and he's tweeting via a satellite phone from the roof of the world. He laid down a challenge (with some help from Cybercom) for the digital community to tweet him ideas on how he could raise some additional publicity and sponsorship, so I tweeted a suggestion to him that he auction a tweet from the summit of Everest. And he's doing it.

Just think - the first ever tweet from the summit of the highest mountain on earth. The highest ever tweet (from 29,028ft!). And an amazing PR opportunity. There'll never be another opportunity like it. So come on all you brand planners, media and PR types - surely that's an idea really worth getting behind? And all for a brilliant cause. Spread the word, tweet the link, and go bid for a piece of history.