Open Thinkering

Menu

Tag: John Bevan

My CC Superheroes

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

As part of the Creative Commons certification project that We Are Open have been involved with, a request is going around with the #CCquest hashtag to name your ‘CC superheroes’.

The idea is to tag five people who are ‘defenders of the commons’:

What are the virtues of someone who is an advocate for Creative Commons? How does what they do support the philosophy and spirit of The Commons? Think about what it takes to become this kind of person, and how we might wrap that into the Certification project.

It would feel like cheating to name three of the five as my co-operative co-founders (Bryan Mathers, Laura Hilliger, and John Bevan) so I’ve cast my net wider. Even so, it took me all of about three seconds to think of the people I’d mention! Do bear in mind, however, that these are five people out of perhaps ten times as many who I could have mentioned.

  • Alan Levine — it’s entirely fitting that Alan is a member of the #CCquest team, as in the 10 years I’ve known him, he’s been a living, breathing example of the power of working and sharing openly. An inspiration.
  • Audrey Watters — a tireless advocate of all things open, especially in education/technology, an important critic of the ‘Silicon Valley narrative’, and someone who tolerates bullshit less than anyone I’ve ever known.
  • Cory Doctorow — I’ve only met Cory a couple of times in person, but seen him speak many, many times. He’s one of the most eloquent speakers I’ve ever had the privilege of hearing, and his work actually goes even wider than ‘open’, encompassing the totality of our lives online.
  • Jess Klein — I had the great privilege of working with Jess at Mozilla, and still find it difficult to explain the range of her talents. She’s a designer, but also an educator, a facilitator, and a prototyper. And she does all of this in the open. Check out the Open Design Kit she recently helped put together!
  • Jim Groom — a legend in his own lunchtime, I rely on Jim’s company, Reclaim Hosting for this blog and my other presences on the web. He’s the force behind the monumental ds106, tells it like it is about making a living in the open, and great fun to be around, to boot.

Who are your CC Superheroes?

Image CC BY-NC-ND giuliaduepuntozero

Do only yogurt-knitting vegans start co-operatives?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

weareopen.coop

(image CC BY-ND Bryan Mathers)

Despite the best efforts of the London Underground to crush us into submission before we even started, weareopen.coop had a great first planning session at Ravensbourne in London today. John Bevan and Bryan Mathers were there with me in person, and Laura Hilliger joined us via the magic of appear.in from her home in Germany.

We’d come up with lots of questions in our pre-planning meeting, as well as some aims for things we’d like to get out of the day. You can see our planning Hackpad here.

Principles

Once we’d all arrived and we’d figured out the tech to allow Laura to participate fully (which involved my ever-handy Sony XRS-11 bluetooth speaker) we dived straight into the principles by which we want to work. John, Bryan and I worked on a nearby whiteboard, while Laura took a photo of the piece of paper she worked on:

weareopen.coop - principles (whiteboard)

weareopen.coop - principles (paper)

Riffing off Laura’s three-part structure, we formulated three questions to answer:

  1. What do you do?
  2. How are you different?
  3. What do you create?

The answers to these are on the hackpad, but I’ll share where we ended up after much discussion around the second point:

  • Nimble / Limber / Acrobatic
    • Experimental
    • Bold
    • Curious
    • Improv
    • Disciplined
  • Participatory
    • Collaborative
    • Co-operative
    • Share all the things
  • Co-operative character/spirit
    • Solidarity
    • Surplus, not profit
    • Anti-individualist
  • Knowledgeable
    • Considered
    • Competitive
    • Illuminating
  • Connected
    • Old/new ways of doing stuff
    • Inclusive
    • Eclectic

We particularly liked the notion of being ‘acrobatic’ (although without using the metaphor of a circus). There’s something about it that suggests discipline with flexibility.

Bryan + Laura

Toolsets

We spent some time both ‘silent hackpadding’ and discussing the questions we’d come into the day focused on, but this led quickly to considerations around tools. From that we found that a really nice metaphor emerged around tools in a workshop.

Tools in a workshop

We used the improv approach of ‘Yes, and…’ to build out the metaphor. For example, tools both old and new sit alongside one another in a workshop; there’s times when you need to ‘sharpen your saw’; and there’s times when you know you haven’t got the right tool for the job, so you have to borrow one from a neighbour.

Thinking of our own tools, we had a back-and-forth about what we should use to collaborate. The tension was between wanting to use Open Source technologies wherever possible, and recognising that clients will not always have the skills or motivation to sign up to a new platform. In the end, we decided to abstract away from specific tools to think about the type of technologies we need:

Those with an asterisk* come with a one-click install process via Sandstorm.io.

Telling the story

Bryan had to head out at lunchtime, so Laura, John, and I dug into setting up Loomio and helping tell our story through a basic pitch deck. We used The Writer’s Journey, which is a modified version of The Hero’s Journey:

After about 45 minutes of hacking and a spectacular brain dump from Laura, we ended up with this. We need to get really clear on our single product for new clients: the Thinkathon. This is a one-day facilitated thinking session that helps clients untangle problems, provides them with a ‘shopping list’, provides clear next steps.

Doug + Bryan

Next steps

A combination of factors meant that we ended up about 4½ hours of time together today. Still, that was enough to get a significant amount of work done towards building weareopen.coop. Things we need to do next include:

  1. Updating the website
  2. Creating a compelling description of the Thinkathon
  3. Setting up the tools we’ll use amongst ourselves and with clients

We’re open for business right now. Part of any new venture involves building the plane while you fly it; the difference is that we’re sharing that building openly. Get in touch if you think we can help you: [email protected]

Three of the best people I’ve ever worked with…

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

…were colleagues at Mozilla. Like me, they’re all doing their own thing now. It would be remiss of me not to point you in their direction, on the off-chance you’re not already aware of their work.

Laura Hilliger (@epilepticrabbit)

Laura Hilliger

I’ve known Laura for a while as she wrote her Masters thesis on web literacy. She left her position as Education & Training Lead at Mozilla last week to pursue the next chapter of her career, explaining her move in this post.

Laura is an American living in Dresden, Germany. You should hire her to do anything learning related as she’s has the creativity and capacity to get anything done that anyone throws at her! She’s super-talented.

Laura’s LinkedIn profile

John Bevan (@bevangelist)

John Bevan

John seems to know everyone. It was kind of his job to do so when he was on the Engagement team at Mozilla, getting the word out and raising money. Since then, he’s been at Nesta, and he’s also worked for the BBC, The Guardian, Rewired State, you name it.

His current focus of attention is dotcomrades doing something about trade unions in the networked era. I went to the alpha launch event in London last week and he’s definitely onto something. Find out more and get involved via his blog post.

John’s LinkedIn profile

Kat Braybrooke (@codekat)

Kat Braybrooke

Kat is one of those people – like many I worked with at Mozilla – who defies categorisation. She’s talented technically, but driven by cultural endeavours and her sharp designer’s eye.

Leaving Mozilla in February, Kat upped-sticks from Vancouver and moved to London. She’s “taking on small contracts with value-based projects that aim to make the world a better place” and particularly interested in “web development, curriculum design, participatory research or community curation.” More about that in this blog post.

Kat’s LinkedIn profile

There’s so many talented people who have left Mozilla over the last year that this could have been a fairly long list. I wanted to point you towards Laura, John, and Kat as I think there’ll be some of you who could benefit from knowing them better.

As for me, I couldn’t be happier at the moment. I’m working primarily with City & Guilds around digital strategy and Open Badges, as well as the occasional workshop and keynote for other organisations. I’m designing a little bit more capacity into my schedule from September onwards, so if you’re interested drop me a line: [email protected] or let’s connect via my LinkedIn profile!

css.php