A few thoughts on the much-social-media-covered Reboot Britain conference hosted by NESTA, July 6th, London. Overall an interesting event bringing together leaders in policy, politics, social enterprise the media and digital technologies – mainly the high-brow high-impact types, and it was a bit more talking ‘at yer’ than the talking ‘with ya’ I hoped it may be. Thankfully the Twitter Stream and AudioBoo capture from those social chaps at Amplified helped the conversation to flow.
NESTA CEO Jonathan Kestenbaum talked about a ‘perfect storm’ as social technologies move from the margins to the mainstream and can enrich us – either rejuvinating our bankrupted economy or yielding social capital.
Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Culture Secretary proved more clued up than the left with his view of ‘wikinomics’ shaping government action and knowledge institutes – as Wikipedia contains less errors than Encylopaedia Britannia and Hurricane Katrina’s online response was a rapid, user-designed mash-up of emergency services. Conversely, Steph Gray from whatever-the-DTI-is-called-today talked about how it can be difficult to get meaningful influence on policy through digital tools – but commentable wikis of policy drafts, video responses and blogs of those developing policies are a start. He warns the number of active users is very small and not always representative of the policy’s end users.
Educational technologies legend Derek Robertson talked about his projects in Scotland to create immersive learning using Nintendo consoles with 5 to 14 year olds, dispelling the ‘folk devil’ view of games as draining energy and intelligence, actually showing that the pilot Nintendo students had better and fasters responses to mental arithmetic.
I enjoyed a session by my long-time cohort Antonio Gould and Matt Mesh focusing on user-centred design, though to me this was as much about functions and content as purely design, thinking about the needs of the audience not creating online services and apps that are worthy but un-engaging, or creating a glut of ‘me too’ services for white, educated 30-somethings (largely us – the digital service commissioners). We need to develop public services that are useful for all. Don’t just involves users at the end in an artificial focus group, involve them all along the way in attraction, entry, services and exit stages.
Jeff Saperstein, founder of the Travelling Geeks (who were on tour at Reboot) and author of Creating Wealth in the Innovation Economy believes in centuries past we defined ourselves by religion, then by nationality, now regions are important in defining identity – and regions may have more in common inter-continentally than across national borders. Success is dependent on the enterprise’s flexibility to adapt and capacity to work with those from other cultures.
Too many sessions to get more than a snap shot of it all really. Other assorted interesting ideas and stuff:
Lee Bryant (Headshift) on e-democracy – there’s a fear of mob rule, but this is just the evolution of democracy, a ‘coalition of the willing’.
I passed through the launch of Social By Social – launch of the new book helping people to use digital and social tools for social impact and played the game – scenario planning of a major urban regeneration project using an allocation of resources cards, looking at what resources we could be using online and what the impact and cost would be which was useful in getting people thinking about what, how and why.
A big zen-like thanks to Digital Health Service with a free session on productivity which got me thinking about whether I really need (or could stomach) a ‘media fast’ switching off, and how I should be thinking about asking users what they already think or know rather than being too prescriptive in short-format consultancy.
Overall an interesting and packed day, but really left feeling politicians et al are somewhat leaping on social media as the latest bandwagon, as I’ve blogged before digital technologies and tools including social media just help shorten the gaps between people and opportunities – but the gaps – digital divides, call them what you will – are still there.
