our dear friend Antoinette Hoes pichted in with her skills. An application with the Dutch foundation “The Digitale Pioniers” was made with her help.

thnx to our dear friend and immortal Adeo Ressi, we are able to scout and hopefully attract a finance Immortal for the 1ive0n1ine project.

I’ve been spotting the video material we shot at SIME (or almost done so, it’s an extensive archive). The editing is going to take some thought, because it’s an interesting puzzle. And that’s how we see it: people in dialogue with each other, people agreeing, disagreeing, arguing a point. I feel that we’ve touched upon some salient points in pointing out finality and dying and the afterlife (or something like it) as a quality the internet might possess. For me this is a journey, a voyage of discovery. It struck me, especially as we drove back to the airport with Dan Dubno, that there are no answers, only questions we can ask ourselves and each other. Baffling experiences, moments of insight, glimpses the otherlife. These reveal themselves to us in the guise of the most ordinary occurrences.

[CSHWDPT] converged on Stockholm to present our Otherlife project @ SIME’s first day. Here’s the video piece we showed.

When we started out, in 2004, we talked about the internet, tipping point, life, death and immortality, in no particular order. And now the goatshed goes live on stage at this year’s SIME.

peopleweavers can be found here. Basically it’s a community organizers’ community. Most valuable and most needed!

David Wilcox looks back on the failed bid for a massive Uk Government’s social innovation contract, after a beauty contest where the Open Innovation Exchange submitted its bid transparently, using a loosely jointed array of blogs, facebook, youtube and wikis. Eventually, the UK government chose to award the contract to “the Innovation Unit, a government-funded body set up by the Department for Education and Skills.”

OIE’s approach was a first and a notable innovation, but it didn’t get them the contract. Simon Berry, who led the bid, comments:

“John Craig [Head of Innovation at the Cabinet Office] has indicated to me that they were looking for a partner that already knew what needed to be done and had specific actions to make it happen. It could be argued that this reflects more traditional thinking ie “we know how innovation works, this is what needs to be done and this is how we are going to do it.”

I also think that they had problems with our approach to the web presence for the Innovation Exchange and would have preferred more complete designs to be presented. This was exactly what Ben Whitnall of Delib thought would happen. In the video after the interview he said: “We weren’t about trying to build a proprietary, monolithic new system to bring everyone to us, we just wanted to leverage what was out there already. Unfortunately, I don’t think that makes for a very sexy pitch . . .”

We prefer to make use of existing web services to build presence, especially because increasingly, “internet presence” is now “social presence”. Engaging people is a matter of personal contact, authentic voice and intensive collaboration. This is true in the public sector, which is the space where OIE operate and it is as true in the world of marketing, where corporate façades are crumbling, and collaboration is becoming the only way in which companies can hope to reach their customers. We’ve received flak for not focussing on “web presences” (i.e. sites) and instead advising clients to use what s there, but -more importantly - to engage with the people they want to sell their products to.

It’s that time of the year when I grab my tattered copy of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, and start reading, nodding approvingly at every other page. In artsy internet circles D&G are best know for their theories on rhyzomatic organisation of networks, which, as it turns out, is exactly how the internet is structured: not as a hierarchical structure but as a lateral network of interconnections. One element of D&G’s theory is often overlooked and that is their theory of the nomadic warmachine. I believe the rise of social networks is not the rise of rhyzomatic networks, but spells the advent of the nomadic warmachine. One early theorist of such a warmachine was Lawrence of Arabia, who writes, in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:

In character our operations of development for the final stroke should be like naval war, in mobility, ubiquity, independence of bases and communications, ignoring of ground features, of strategic areas, of fixed directions, of fixed points. ‘He who commands the sea is at great liberty, and may take as much or as little of the was as he will.’ (…) Discrimination of what point of the enemy organism to disarrange would come to us with war practice. Our tactics should be to tip and run: not pushes, but strokes. We should never try to improve an advantage. We should use the smallest force in the quickest time at the farthest place. (SPoW, pp 337/338)

Off late, there has been much talk of “disruptive business models” on the internet. I’d argue that today’s online social networks, far from being the cosy hangout for the socially inclined, are in fact nomadic warmachines waiting to become manifest. It is in the nature of such machines to topple empires, to destroy the incumbents…Citizen journalism is one of the first arenas where the kind of oppositonal organization such as Lawrence describes is flourishing. And there are other, potentially disruptive business models that are flying under the radar - just. Mobile telephony is a case in point. There is a reason why Apple, once the nomadic warmachine of computers, has allowed AT&T to disable VOIP on the iPhone. If VOIP on mobiles becomes a viable thing, then there is nothing that can stop consumers of mobile services to by-pass their operators. And if these consumers were to band together, then that would certainly topple empires.