Presenting to Simon Levene from Accel in the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam (special thnx to Reinout te Brake)

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.

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.