We're connected... NESTA have had some interesting events lately. They're clearly into what Steve Moore calls "the convening power of the brand" as they assemble groups of people and interesting speakers, usually relying on word-of-mouth through social networks to get the right...

Chaos? Josh Porter has a good post on recent events at Digg. This is the bit that most interested me:One is as described by Mike Arrington of Techcrunch: Digg Surrenders to Mob. Simply using the word “Mob” makes for great press....

Fairness and monkey business The Frontal Cortex: Inequality and the Perception of Fairness. I love the experiments psychologists come up with.One of the more powerful examples of this behavior comes from Franz Waals and Sarah Brosnan, who trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them...

Palaeolithic wisdom Ken Thompson enthuses about a Harvard report, Virtual Teams: Palaeolithic Insights About the Art of Cyber-Managing. Ken summarises:Three instincts in particular have to be excavated from our caveman days and brought back into our organizational teams... 1. Purpose shapes function...

Costwolds or Milton Keynes? Euan Semple's talking about how he developed social software at the BBC. It's nicely put. And I think the metaphor carries way beyond software.When we started building this stuff at the BBC we were consciously trying to build the online...

Fingering the Ninjas... I met Euan Semple for tea yesterday at the slightly bizarre Brunswick Centre in London. Euan talked about the fun he's having coaxing organisations into social media and it all made sense to me. We kept returning to the idea...

Beyond the black box Some months back, Ross Dawson sent me a free copy of his book, Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: Leadership in Professional Services. I am not a prolific reader and the book sat on my desk for a long time, leaving me...

Co-creation Rules James and I are getting to work on a new manifesto for Change This. It's called Co-creation Rules, a deliberately ambiguous title. Our aim is put together some of our insights from working with brands and organisations. These are the...

Polychronic (instead of just chronic) Euan Semple blogged Teemu Arina's lucid presentation on the social web in support of informal learning. Teemu cites Lev Vygotsky's notion that "all higher understanding is dialogic by nature". I love it when he talks about a customised interface for...

Talkin' co-creation Neville Hobson and Shel Holz did an interview with John Windsor and me as part of Corante's Innovative Marketing Conference here in New York. The theme was co-creation. You can download it here. I've podcast with Nev and Shel before...

Open Source Research Via Richard Gayle and Glyn Moody I found The Synaptic Leap:Biomedical science is indivisible.  The physical and psychological barriers that divide scientific communities are ultimately artificial and counterproductive.  We see online collaboration as a natural way to bridge these gaps...

The Fetish of Change - chewing it over My post responding to Christopher Grey's polemic The Fetish of Change has provoked some great reflections by other bloggers. I really appreciate the way blogging allows us to chew over essays this way. Mike Dewitt really enjoys Grey's thinking, though...

It'll never work Inspired by a post by Earl Mardle, I've added a new category to this blog, It'll Never Work. I'll use it to flag stories about experiments carried out in the face of scepticism. Well that's the plan... though of course...

Microphone or talking stick Look, blogs are a great place for half-finished ideas. It's probably one reason why I like to blog but find it an increasing ordeal to write essays, proposals etc. In this spirit, I was thinking about talking sticks. I've been...

Waiting and presence - experiment A few days ago I blogged Chris Corrigan's post about waiting. He was talking about experiences of waiting that is not about anticipating the future but about being fully present. Jeff Risley left a comment saying he'd be reading Chris'...