Social Innovation Campsites

It is with some regret that I can't go to Social Innovation Camp this weekend (as any parent knows, on weekends you metamorphose into a Taxi Service) as I find the whole area of how the internet will restructure society fascinating, and events like these are good ways of thinking through some of the issues.

Next best thing is to link to all the stuff that is going on, so here for starters is:

- The Grauniad's Bobby Johnson up and at 'em (this is his last post, scroll down for earlier ones):

(I'll add more as the event progresses)

What was fascinating was the open call for ideas, of which 6 were chosen to go with initially. I'm not sure they would be the final 6 I would have chosen, but it must have been a tough decision - check out these other ideas here.

I have three main areas of interest:

(i) Restructuring public services - how can we use digital media to restructure the way services are delivered (and reduce fraud, crime etc without turning into a CCTV country where TV watches you instead of the other way round)

(ii) Restructuring democracy - how can we get the systems to give us a "wisdom" rather than "madness" of crowds online, and how do we eliminate the "government by activist lobby group" problem - is get the voice of the silent majority heard.

(iii) A Green Machine - I have two issues with the current Green fashions
- a lot of it is a scam to make money out of good intentions, or force all sorts of other agendas.
- a lot of the real benefits don't come from single acts or governmanet edicts from on high, but
from community actions to reduce energy requirements while keeping services, lifestyles etc as
high as possible

The problem I find with a lot of this stuff is taht it cuts across party, ideological, class etc etc divides, so is hard to have "rational" discussions. Try this one for example:

"Our % spend per head on public welfare services is far far higher than our emerging competition on China and India. Is this sustainable in future?"

..and see what happens. I've been accused of being a rampant socialist / communist and a rampant right winger / libertarian for trying to understand the dispassionate, fact based truth about this one.

Now I suspect that the "wisdom of crowds" of the majority would probably get you towards a more correct solution to any of these issues, and an executable one too as a majority would be roughly in agreement. Today though, many of these areas are hijacked by activists of various persuasions, and its hard to see them off if you can't get visibility of the vox populi's views.

There is a high attraction of the "Here comes everybody", We-think" or "Starfish & spider" sorts of ideas, but there are also some major risks:

- if you actually look at how skewed current social media technology is (the link-rich get richer) and how non-nuanced it is in terms of privacy, its probably too early to use for anything mission critical yet - so what adjustments are required to "regulate" its bad effects.
- self organisation clearly works in ad-hoc, single issue ways, but can you actually run long term this way (you can build a software widget or run a revolution, but how about build a Space Shuttle or run a country)

All communications revolutions drive huge changes in our social, economic, political and cultural structure, and it takes a few generations - but its clear we are in the early stages of a 100 year cycle.