Platforms relationship and time in a transmedia experience

Platforms relationship and time in a transmedia experience | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Transmedia storytelling analysis matrix

Transmedia storytelling analysis matrix | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Michel Reilhac notes from TransmediaVic

I've just been to the TransmediaVic Conference (thankyou NT Film Office for the travel assistance) where Michel Reilhac gave a presentation titled Transmedia as a state of mind. I was particularly taken with his 10 commandments:

1 Thou will collaborate :
Loose the old habits. Stop the siloed thinking.Explore new ways even if painful. It will be even more painful when you reach unprepared the end of the current system. Only then can you decide to still do the traditional storytelling

2 On the story, thou shall focus :
Loose the fascination for the new gimmicks and devices that will keep popping up and the fear of not keeping up with the geeks.. We use technological devices to tell our stories, that tend to blend, mesh and interface instead of remaining separate and autonomous. Technology changes but the needs remain the same

3 The game culture thou shall embrace.
It is a vertical approach to story telling as opposed to the traditional horizontal approach. Game is no longer the enemy. It is our partner and friend, for us who come from the storytelling world.

4 Thou shall earn the trust you rightfully deserve
Trust is not managed, it is earned. Trust management/ community management, these notions are odd. Trust is kept, maintained and nurtured. It can be betrayed and what one seeks is the engagement that it triggers. It is very much about how to trigger engagement through being totally sincere and honest

5 The problem is not the story, it is the interface.
Independent cinema and TV, as we know them, are reaching the end of a cycle as dominant forms of storytelling on the market. Relationship to audience needs to be entirely re-invented:

• community building
• a film is no longer the end of a short cyclic process, it is an element in a life long project where the artist becomes the media

6 Thou shall focus on the flux not on the object:
Flux has different depths and speeds. Focus on the relevance of the artwork in the context. It is a vehicle for social interaction beyond its own limits.

7 Thou shall blend flux and events:
Both are today’s components of our lives. We need both. Live arts and festivals have a great future for this reason. We need them more and more as we are more and more online and virtual. Man is a social animal.

8 Thou shall spend great time and energy
Transmedia needs now to dedicate a lot of time, not just a side kick anymore.

9 Thou shall be fair and honest when blending the real and the virtual.
Loss of tangible dimension of reality. AS IF rules. The whole as if approach to ARG’s has to be carefully managed not to leave the audience with a sour betrayed feeling.

10 Thou shall play the game of changing the world
Transmedia expresses our craving for new utopia. “Left to his own devices, the individual must now entirely construct himself on his own, away from the old collective and religious frames “ Gilles Lipovetsky in “The deceptive society”.

In our self oriented societies, the meaning of existence is seldom found in a great collective adventure. It therefore has to be found in the inner resources of each individual. Or in the re-invention of ways to CHANGE THE WORLD:

Building Creative Collaboration

All social networks are different. Some are tightly clustered and everybody seems to know each other. Others have broad reach and you can connect to people far away through just a few contacts. How a network is structured will greatly affect how information flows within it.

Network theorists have learned a lot about what drives social networks and have come up with three basic metrics that give you a pretty good idea how a network will behave.... read more at Digital Tonto

National Parks Infinite Photo

Great website feature: Zoom in on a spectacular national park photo to reveal hundreds more photos making up the original. Then zoom again at each level for an endless array of images, each submitted by users to My Shot. Check it out here.

Transmedia Talk Podcast – Episode 17

Download at Culture Hacker

Rethinking Rights in a Transmedia World

This was a hot topic and TransmediaVic with good reason... read the article at Publishing Perspectives

Arts and creative industries

Australia should seek new and liberating ways to bring together the arts, popular culture and the creative industries, according to Arts and creative industries.The report, funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and prepared by Professor Justin O’Connor of the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology, looks at ways in which the policy relationship between these often polarised sectors of arts and creative industries might be re-thought and approached more productively.

Download the report here.

Hypercities

Built on the idea that every past is a place, Hypercities is a digital research and educational platform for exploring, learning about, and interacting with the layered histories of city and global spaces. Developed though collaboration between UCLA, USC, CUNY, and numerous community-based organizations, the fundamental idea behind HyperCities is that all histories "take place" somewhere and sometime, and that they become more meaningful when they interact and intersect with other histories. HyperCities essentially allows users to go back in time to create, narrate, and explore the historical layers of city spaces and tell stories in an interactive, hypermedia environment.

Read more here.

i3DG Palm Top Theatre

Wow! Don't you just love it when you see something amazing? Add this groovy gadget to your iPod, format your media accordingly and away you go... 3D in the palm of your hand. Awesome! I can see a huge market producing video clips for this format and, when connected to the device's gyroscope, gaming.



Palm Top Theater Exhibition — V2_ Institute for the Unstable Media

EpiCollect.net

EpiCollect.net provides a web application for the generation of forms and freely hosted project websites for many kinds of mobile data collection projects.

Data can be collected using multiple mobile phones running and all data can be synchronised from the phones and viewed centrally via the Project website or directly on the phones.

Best Practices in Incorporating ICT into Funding Proposals

Overall, organizations that want to integrate ICTs in their work need to plan ahead, strengthen their staff capacity on the ground, and have a clear understanding of the steps to follow when integrating ICTs into proposals. And rather than detailing an exact tech solution into a proposal, the proposal writer could offer a few options, say that "a solution could be" or "might look something like this", or be clear when negotiating with the donor that an idea will be tested but may change along the way when participatory work is conducted with end users, and as it is tested and adapted to the local context.

Read more here.

Kansas City Art Museum Adopts the iPod touch for Tours

When the lease expired on the museum's 150 traditional Acoustigides, the museum's Education Department reevaluated their audio guide strategy. One of their goals was to increase the pick-up rate of the guides, which was relatively low with the Acoustigides. They decided that any new device had to be able to display pictures and eventually videos. Dedicated players with such capability were much more expensive than the audio-only guides. They decided that a Web-based solution would take advantage of mobile devices that visitors were already familiar with.


Read more here.

Scoop.it

Be the curator of your favorite topic! Create your topic-centric media by collecting gems among relevant social media streams. Publish it to people sharing the same interest with Scoop.it



Be sure to check out Transmedia on Scoop.it

From Social Media to Social Strategy

Organizations don't need "social media" strategies. They need social strategies: strategies that turn antisocial behavior on its head to maximize meaning. The right end of social tools is to help organizations stop being antisocial. In fact, it's the key to advantage in the 2010s and beyond.

This article - of relevance to the form and function of BOMAGS and Digital Playrooms - explores seven social strategies that are turning yesterday's zombieconomy upside down...

Digital Salon: Digital Playroom in disguise?

Digital Salon is a new-technology interpretation of an idea that has been around for centuries, since the first visual arts Salons were held at the Louvre in Paris in the 1600s to present collections of the latest artworks by many artists, and the Salons became highly influential on artistic styles and artists reputations. This idea has been transformed into the Digital Salon, a touring event that aims to showcase the work of Digital Media makers and artists working in a variety of media.

During 2010 and 2011 the Digital Salon will tour to ten different regional centres in South Australia, showcasing the work of people making digital media and art in regional areas. There is little known about the extent of digital media practise outside of large urban centres, so Digital Salon will help highlight what’s happening in these areas and help digital media makers connect with people from other places and industries.

In addition the touring events will showcase the work of local media makers at a fun, audiovisual multimedia event that hooks up media makers to other centres, before taking the work on tour to other Salon events. The Barossa and Riverland makers who will be the first stop on the touring route, will have the opportunity to have their work presented in eight other sites and to “hook up” with media makers at other events on the touring route.

Do you have media or ideas to contribute to a Digital Salon event… make contact and tell us about it.

Read more here. ABC Online story here.

2011 Synapse Residencies now open

The Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) is calling for applications from creative practitioners and science and research organisations for the 2011 Synapse Residency program. Now in its sixth round, the program is a core element of the Synapse initiative of the Australia Council for the Arts and ANAT, which supports collaboration between artists and scientists. The residencies are open to Australian artists with a demonstrated interest in science working in any discipline and/or medium. Domestic residencies of 16 weeks’ duration and/or international residencies of 12 weeks’ duration that take place during the 2011 calendar year will be supported.

To ensure a good fit between the artist and host organisation, a joint application must be submitted. It is the responsibility of the project partners to establish contact and to identify the nature of the proposed collaboration prior to application. Those with existing relationships are strongly encouraged to apply. The Synapse residencies have a creative research focus and it is not expected that they will result in the production of new work. The residencies may also be approached as a platform for testing and informing a more comprehensive, longer‐term research project suitable for submission to the ARC Synapse Linkage program.

Deadline for applications is 5pm, Friday 25 February 2011.

View previous projects here

Gallery Pedestal for iPad

BeYOND - Kiosks. Digital Signs. Design. Programming.

See also: Kiosk Pro - the perfect app for turning the iPad into a kiosk

Why You Need Better Tours

Why You Need Better Tours

View more presentations from audioconexus.

The Serval Project

Communicate anywhere, any time … without infrastructure, without mobile towers, without satellites, without wifi hotspots, and without carriers.

The Serval Project consists of two systems.

The first is a temporary, self-organising, self-powered mobile network for disaster areas, formed with small phone towers dropped in by air.

The second is a permanent system for remote areas that requires no infrastructure and creates a mesh-based phone network between Wi-Fi enabled mobile phones, and eventually specially designed mobile phones that can operate on other unlicensed frequencies, called Batphone. The two systems can also be combined.

Read more here.

Check out Dr Paul Gardner-Stephen

Check out ABC Adelaide report

Changing The Way You See With Augmented Reality

Since AR has the possibility to create such a unique visual experience, it naturally has attracted adopters from the creative community. Here are just a few cool projects taking advantage of AR...

Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Your Life Is A Transmedia Experience

View more presentations from socialcreature.

The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!)

By our lights, the notion of “creativity” can’t be separated from the skills required for creative execution. So our analysis of the characteristics crucial to creativity focuses particularly on the skills that facilitate putting ideas into action.

Below, we outline five key qualities of particularly productive creatives, followed by some recommendations for how to uncover them in potential hires, co-workers, and collaborators.

Read more at The 99 Percent

The Growth of Mobile

Recently related article: Mac iOS = 72.5% of Australian mobile web traffic

Starbucks Launches Smartphone Payments Nationwide

Making payments with your smartphone at Starbucks is simple enough. Simply download the app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or Blackberry device and when you make a purchase, hold it out for the cashier to scan. The app deducts the purchase from your Starbucks account, which can be reloaded with credit cards or PayPal.

Starbucks Launches Smartphone Payments Nationwide

Add live video chat to your website with TokBox

WOW!! The OpenTokTM API allows developers to integrate video chat directly into their own websites and web pages, while providing the developer with complete control over the selection, layout and interaction of the individual audio/video streams.

TokBox

Evolutionary Tension

Evolutionary tension is a heightened intensity that awakens your soul, and compels you to sit up straight, focus, and pay attention. It is an upward pull, a profound sense of urgency to bring into manifestation that which has not yet occurred. It is the relentless demand to become more, to reach for new and ever-higher levels of moral, philosophical, and spiritual maturity. This positive tension creates a potent and spiritually charged context for human relationship because it is infused with the living presence of the possible.

~ Andrew Cohen via @technoshaman

Andrew Cohen's Quote of the Week

Digital Media and Technology in After School Programs Libraries and Museums

This report synthesizes research and examples of the diverse ways in which organizations approach and integrate digital media and technology
into their youth programs, practices,and philosophies. We aim to clarify a framework for under-standing organizational efforts related to digital media and technology and to establish a foundation for future research in this area.

Our guiding questions for this report are:

• How have digital media and technology been incorporated into youth programs within educational, civic, and cultural organizations, including after school programs, libraries, and museums?
• What types of participation and learning do digital media and technology support and/or complicate within these organizations?
• How can research in the area of digital media and learning contribute to better integration of technology within individual organizations and better coordination via technology among organizations?

To answer these questions, we examine the ways in which three different organizations—after school programs, libraries, and museums—have integrated (or not integrated) technological infrastructure and digital practices into their youth programs. We embark on this investigation with an eye toward under-standing not just how institutions implement digital media and technology but also why and to what ends they do so.

Read & download the document here.

Story Labs: Digital Playroom model?

A group of multi-platform/transmedia creators – including Australia’s Gary Hayes – have joined forces to create StoryLabs, an organisation for the education and mentoring of storytellers.

“Technology has created both new tools and new ways to reach connected audiences. Mastering these new storytelling tools in the changing media landscape is the mission of StoryLabs,” said Hayes.

StoryLab’s development programs include Ad Lab (focused on cross media advertising), Mobile Media Lab, Community Lab (focused on Social Media Story), Games Lab, Innovation Lab (focused on story around new services and product) and Transmedia Lab (focused on the development of new forms of storytelling).

Mentors will provide “a hands-on opportunity for brands and media properties to advance new story formats and to shape a fully integrated story based transmedia solution”, according to an official statement.

StoryLabs is hosting a mentor and participant online network that will allow people to to engage in the creation of new form storytelling; there are 24 global story and experience creators already listed on the site – four from Canada, nine from Australia and seven from the US and UK.

StoryLabs is also planning incubator labs for the first quarter of 2011, with Screen Australia onboard as a sponsor.

For more information, click here.

SocialSamba.com

Upgrade your friends!

SocialSamba is scripted social networking - the scalable way for brands, storytellers and celebrities to "friend" their fans and tell them an entertaining story through posts, images and videos. It's the experience of Facebook, with the friends fans love!

Let's take an example:

Imagine being able to join a social network with the international super-spy from your favorite movies, along with an intriguing cast of agents and double-agents stationed around the world. Over the course of two weeks, these characters send you posts and comments, with images and videos, making you part of their team as they track down the terrorist, save the world, and of course, get the girl. All of the action plays out in real time through the SocialSamba Facebook app, branded for that spy network. And at the end of the two week experience, when the world is safe again, you can move on to experience another adventure with the same characters, or maybe join the cast of your favorite high school glee club show as they get ready for the big competition.

SocialSamba.com

Wake Up Geek Culture: Time to Live

The future is bright, and geek culture is poised to become more interesting than ever before @ Transmythology

Conducttr: transmedia storytelling platform

Single-media entertainment is dead. Entertainment is now multi-platform, social and interactive.

There has been no off-the-shelf tool to manage the complexity and measure the effectiveness of multi-platform, social and interactive entertainment… until now.

Conducttr is a subscription-based service that allows anyone from international interactive agencies to independent filmmakers to write, manage, deliver and measure engaging interactive, social entertainment that spans online, offline and mobile platforms.

Conducttr acts like an unseen conductor orchestrating the performance of media across platforms and responding to audience feedback. The audience never knows it exists.

Our experience design tool allows the service to be told about the experience, the characters, the audience and the media. It’s then told what media to play to which audiences and when. It’s a secret command center; a hub for controlling cross-platform experiences.

Conducttr manages the experience to a calendar schedule or in response to events. And there’s no programming language to learn, no absurd metadata abstraction of the story and it’s intuitive.

Conducttr is for anyone who wants to deliver transmedia entertainment but doesn’t have the resources to develop their own technology – which is almost everyone. Even those with the resources will find that it’s quicker and cheaper to deploy a cross-platform experience on our platform than develop their own.

Check it out here.

Related article:  A First Look At Conducttr

Transmedia Resources

Bookmark these:

1. Transmedia Practice 
2. Transmedia Resources
3. The Developers Logbook 
4. Transmedia Blog 

Virtual Mentoring for Growth Towns?

Between the socially disorienting echo of apartheid, high crime rates and HIV/AIDS, South Africa is struggling under a lot of extra weight. The group that too often bears the brunt of it is kids. South Africa has a much higher number of orphans than it should. Adult guidance of kids is sometimes in short supply. To make up in part for that, Infinite Family has stepped up.

Infinite Family connects mentors anywhere in the world with South African teens in need of adult guidance, advice and support. These "net buddies" connect via weekly video conferences. Read more here.

2011 – Year of the Content Provider

Can you be profitable in the transmedia space?

As in the film industry, there are four keys to transmedia profitability:

1. Pick the right projects;
2. Choose the right elements/medium for exploiting each project;
3. Maintain right and tight budgetary discipline; and
4. Have a solid distribution strategy uniquely designed for each project.
   

Read more at Digital Book World

5 New Paradigms for a Socially Engaged Company

Companies are realizing that it is not enough to get people to show up to work; the real challenge is creating cultures that enhance creativity and innovation. Here you'll find what leaders in the field had to say about this new age of innovation and engagement.

Related article: Tribal Leadership audiobook download

LearnLabs: 21st Century Classroom

 “There’s a new demand for students to be critical thinkers, have great communication skills and collaborate.” Pedagogies have changed, but classrooms haven’t. Until now... read more about How Steelcase Redesigned the 21st Century College Classroom | Co.Design

Inverted Learning Model for Digital Playrooms?

Inverted learning involves students accessing and listening to teachers’ lectures outside of the classroom, think homework, and using the time in the classroom to apply those lessons. Teachers quoted in the eSchool News article entitled “Teachers Turn Learning Upside Down,” believe this new style of instruction allows students to focus on the class, not the teacher, while in the classroom. Says one forward thinking educator, “Students can absorb the material as homework and then practice what they’ve learned with guided help from the teacher if they need it. This new learning style not only makes class time more productive for both teachers and students, but also increases student engagement, increases achievement, and caters to all forms of personalized learning.”

Read more at The Future of Education is Here » Blog Archive » Nothing is Off the Table

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Every medium has a niche. A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers.

As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. 

 But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other. That question is... here

120 iPhone apps from museums & cultural institutions

Fantastic list and reviews of 120 iPhone apps from museums and cultural institutions at Museums2Go

Forecasting the Next Educational Era

We’re undertaking this journey because museums are, first and foremost, educational institutions. Read more at the Center for the Future of Museums

EU Report Warns of "Digital Dark Age" if Digitization of Cultural Heritage Left to Private Sector

The report by the "Comité des Sages" was delivered to the European Commission earlier this week and calls for continued development of Europeana, the portal to Europe's digital libraries, as well as for efforts to expand access to public domain material. EU member states must ensure that all material that's digitized with public funding is available online and that all public domain masterpieces are available via Europeana by 2016. Works that are still covered by copyright but are no longer distributed commercially need to be brought online as well, and if the rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have the opportunity to digitize the material and make it available to the public. Read more at RWW

Era of Openness

• Wherever possible, companies, countries and individuals should embrace open standards as a way of encouraging innovation.
• Notions of intellectual property are changing and will change even more. Clever companies will manage their intellectual property like mutual funds — with some IP highly protected and other IP shared with the world free of charge.
  

Wikinomics and the Era of Openness: European Innovation at the Crossroads | Anthony D. Williams

Participatory Audience Engagement

A logical turn in the everyone-is-special movement was to include museum goers as participants in artworks. Read more here.

2010: The year the future arrived

In case there is any doubt that the future is on our doorstep and ringing the bell, Future News has compiled a list of 250 headlines related to the future of computing, the environment, medicine, robotics, and other topics that have been hot in 2010. Although by no means a complete record of the year's future-related headlines, this list demonstrates what an incredible year 2010 has been. Even if you don't click through to any of the articles, just reading the headlines will give you a good idea of the technology tsunami that was 2010.

Donations on Facebook

The Boston Museum of Science has launched a campaign to raise $ 2,500 needed for the reopening of the planetarium by asking it’s Facebook fans to donate to attend a fundraiser through the application Fundrazr. Read more at MuseumNext

Related article @ Mashable: Are We Too Obsessed with Facebook?


Via: Online Schools

The Future of Social Shopping

Going beyond the Facebook fan page

Retailers are exploring a new frontier in social commerce as they go beyond simply offering Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for their customers to follow.

Fueling this trend is web retailers’ quick adoption of social sign-on, which allows consumers to log in to their Facebook account instead of registering on an ecommerce site. Social sign-on gives retailers access to rich profile information for targeting customers.

“Bringing Facebook profile data into retail sites makes sense because it influences consumers when they are close to conversion,” said Jeffrey Grau, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report “Social Commerce: Personalized and Collaborative Shopping Experiences.” “In contrast, many consumers on Facebook are mainly socializing with friends and further removed from making purchase decisions.”

Read more at eMarketer

Library Hack

PDF download > http://bit.ly/eD9y5n
Remix Au/NZ library collections & data

Libraryhack is an initiative of the National, State and Territory libraries of Australia and New Zealand where developers, artists, and digital content creators will be invited to re-mix and repurpose library collections and data.

It is built on the model of the Government 2.0 Taskforce competition Mashup Australia [http://mashupaustralia.org]. Libraryhack will make unique library collections and datasets freely available for re-mixing and re-purposing by anyone – a library ‘hackfest’. A competition with a range of categories will encourage participation.

Each of the participating libraries will make content available and host ‘hack’ events to encourage and support creation of new content. Events will include opportunities to ‘create content, mashups and apps’ the support of experts, at a later date showcase the results of the Libraryhack. Forums encouraging public discussions about open data and digital content creation will form part of the Libraryhack activities.

A national marketing campaign will be coordinated to support Libraryhack.

10 Rules for Collaboration

Based on a combination of experience, discovery and observation, Creativity_Unbound present 10 tactics you might want to consider putting into practice inside your organisation.

British Library Smartphone App

YouTube - Treasures Smartphone App from the British Library

Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. Create your own here.

Smartphone / App stats for 2010

The $1 to $2 price point was the most popular choice for developers looking to sell their applications. The number of applications at that price point grew to 27 percent of all applications, up from 22 percent in January. The number of applications costing more than $5 fell to 15 percent of all applications across app stores, compared to 21 percent of all applications in January.

More applications on Apple’s App Store switched to a freemium model, which lets users download applications for free and then makes money by selling premium services through the application. About 34 percent of all revenue generated by App Store applications came from in-app purchases on free applications. Half of the revenue generated from the App Store came from paid application sales.

Read more at VentureBeat

Sociology Perspective of Facebook's Marketing Power

This post is the sequel to a previous post The Social Dynamics of Facebook Fan Pages, which investigates an often overlooked weakness of FB. Previously, we explored the social dynamics that govern how people behave on the Facebook (FB) platform and particularly on FB fan pages. Due to the attention economy and the conflicting social spheres on FB, we actually arrived at a rather counterintuitive result. That being – the reason that a FB fan page (which is a community) is not engaging for a business is precisely because the FB platform (which is a social network) is too good at facilitating engagement among the strong ties. I must emphasize that this is not a technology problem. It is an inherent problem in how humans behave, because people naturally focus their attention on stronger ties and tends to ignore weaker one during any active engagement....

Read more at the Lithosphere Community

How to Develop Your Social Media Policy

10 Questions To Answer When Developing a Social Media Policy

1. Can employees use social media at work?
2. Can they use it for work?
3. Can they represent the organization?
4. Do they need separate profiles for work / personal?
5. Can personal info sent via social channels impact an employees job status?
6. What social networks can be used for official communication?
7. Who is responsible for official communication?
8. What is the escalation process for negative or legal issues directed at the organization via social media?
9. What happens if an employee departs the organization?
10. What is the disaster response plan for social media?

More at Travel 2.0

Mobile Digital TV Coming to an iPhone, iPad Near You

While the big focus has been on providing TV, video-on-demand and other content via your WiFi or 3G connections, this device brings local broadcast television directly to your iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Read all about it here.

RFID and the museum

One option for building visitor interaction into an exhibition space is to use an RFID system. RFID stands for radio frequency identification, which perhaps sounds complex, but it is a simple, relatively inexpensive and reliable method of making connections between visitors and installations or exhibits. Read more at MuseumNext

A Difficult Conversation

Excellent blog post (and numerous replies) discussing the value proposition of museums. In the absence of a comprehensive survey of public attitudes towards NT museums, this is highly recommended reading for the BOMAGS consultancy.

Related article: Nina Simon's response to Huffington post article

On the lighter side, I took this snap of the BOMAG roller crushing pirate DVDs while visiting ACMI's Screen Worlds: The Story of Film, Television and Digital Culture.

Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization

Recommended download for any organisation willing to have a realistic look at itself. Tribal Leadership

Mac iOS = 72.5% of Australian mobile web traffic

Where do you think Apple’s iPhone is the most popular? Where does Nokia’s Symbian phones dominate? How is it going for Android in different parts of the world? What about Blackberry? This article will answer all of those questions and will closely examine mobile OS usage across the world.

Digital Playroom trains seniors to use mobile phones

In an effort to narrow the digital gap between generations, a telecoms company and a non-government organisation in Korea has teamed up to train older citizens on how to use mobile phones.

This program not only teaches the elderly how to use mobile devices but also helps narrow the digital gap between the elderly and other groups in society. It also contributes to increase communication among different generations as the elderly and the college students who volunteer in this program get a chance to understand each other. 

The training comes with different levels of expertise. The program’s basic course teaches the elderly how to send text/photo messages and use a mobile phone camera. The intensive course includes more complicated procedures such as transferring data to computers by connecting the mobile phone to a PC and how to take mobile videos and use other value-added services.
They are also taught how to protect themselves from mobile phone-related crimes like voice phishing and spam messaging.
Read more at FutureGov - Transforming Government

A Manifesto for Social Business

The nature of business is inexorably changing. The changes are being driven by a number of factors: ranging from the need to compete differently after the recession, through the availability of huge volumes of new information, to the rapidly growing influence of social customers.

Many different themes are coming together and new business models are emerging from where they meet and mutually reinforce each other. Together, they have the potential to change many aspects of what we call business today. They have the potential to create a new kind of Social Business, driven not so much for social purposes as by social relationships.

Here are the fifteen themes (the Manifesto) driving Social Business:

Related Article: review of Umair Haque's 'Capitalist Manifesto'

Commons Knowledge Alliance

The earth cries out for a new story — a story of a world that works for everyone.

Such a story invites us to consider there is more that unites us than divides us. Not only do we have a common genetic inheritance, we have a common cultural inheritance founded on a deep set of shared aspirations—for security, for the wellbeing of our loved ones, and for full participation in the possibilities of life.

These aspirations lead us to understand that effective stewardship of the biosphere is essential, that societal responsibilities must balance short-term and long-term requirements, and that informed citizens can effectively self-organize to manage their affairs.

The actualization of these aspirations is best served by a vibrant appreciation of the global commons — the rich reservoir of natural and cultural resources upon which we depend for life. The Commons Knowledge Alliance is dedicated to enabling people to deepen their understanding of and participation in the global commons.

The next eLearning course begins January 29th. Click here for details.

Scenius (Communal Genius)

The geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation -- Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques -- As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success -- When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties -- The local "outside" does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Scenius can erupt almost anywhere, and at different scales: in a corner of a company, in a neighborhood, or in an entire region.

Read more at The Technium

Related post: Humanity’s Next God: You? and The Next Buddha Will Be A Collective

The Bossless Organization

Replace the fundamental control relationship in the organization from ‘boss-subordinate’ to ‘mentor investor-intrapreneur team’, where mentor investors are modeled on the angel investors of Silicon Valley and elsewhere: they sponsor, advise, and tap social networks to help teams succeed, but don’t directly control. Read more at Management Innovation eXchange

The Life Story Interview

The life story model of adult identity is one of a number of new approaches in psychology and the social sciences that emphasize narrative and the storied nature of human conduct. Read more about it and download the resource kit here.