Coming Amplified events include Amplified Leicester, Amplified Midlands, PuntCon, and Reboot Britain. We’re also hoping to participate in the UnSheffield event as livebloggers. We had an Amplified assisted event, PICamp, in Belfast on 25th May and we expect to have events in Glasgow, Newcastle and the South East in August, and a themed Amplifed education event in September. If you are having an event you want Amplified, let us know – we’re happy to see how we can turn the spotlight on the digital creativity and problem solving happening all over the UK!

It’s actually a fair call.  Shirky has probably been in social media longer than most of the people on the Digital Britain Steering Committee and he’s certainly done a lot more to convince businesses and government officials alike of the value of new media.  But Shirky himself is an academic, and he’s not as connected to the British technology business scene as he’d need to be to really deliver on a costed, and tactical Digital Britain report.

But the Amplified collective are connected to British business and the social media, technology and creative scene.  We are the kind of people who should be participating in this kind of decision making because we collectively have experience across a wide range of sectors and we can cost projects, connect with providers or services and think creatively about how to solve access and participation problems.  We make decisions about the values and problems associated with interfaces, protocols and infrastrcture every day.  We mediate connectivity and we filter for meaning.

In short, the Amplified community are probably the best qualified group of industry professionals to advise on digital policy in Britain today.

But we weren’t asked to contribute prior to the publishing of the Interim Report at all.  And where we have been asked to respond – as all British residents and citizens have been given the option to respond – it is in writing to the Digital Britain team, or by participating in TED-style Digital Britain summit events across the UK in April and May.

If Amplified’s ambition is to make the UK into the most connected (and perhaps connective) place on the planet, then we need to be involved in the decision making process here because we actually know what is going on.  We’re not a bunch of disconnected researchers and policy wonks, but creators, entrepreneurs and networkers who can best advise on how to pull off a strategy that will actually result in a genuinely Digital Britain.

I’m suggesting that Amplified set up some topics in the regional events in February and May (and in between) that can actually help solve universal access to broadband services affordably and efficiently, and that focus investment on social media technologies and services that will assist the British economy.  Let’s show them how it’s done.

On the 21st we’re at the ICA for a morning of conversation around the future of online video. We’ve kept the title as broad as possible and we’ve got around 60 or so attendees, which isn’t too shabby for such an early start. With just a little over 24 hours to go I’ve added a bunch of possible conversation starters over on the wiki to kick things off. These were just off the top of my head and there’s plenty of crossover and probably one or two things that no one but I would be interested in. Do please feel free to add more.

As well as being fascinated by what a room full of social media practitioners can come up with after a few hours chewing this over, we’re also using the event to consider how a sit-down-cafe-style suits Amplified09. We’ve secured a range of venues for the events in the first quarter of this year and we’re aiming to have lots of small groups within them (as some of the smaller gatherings at Amp08 worked better than the really large ones). The point is to be conversational and avoid simply broadcasting as much as possible – so we’ll be using the opportunity to try out a few different scenarios over the course of this year. We’re still learning as we put this together and of course the input we get from all the attendees is something else we need to factor in.

If one particular topic is over subscribed then we’d rather have two sessions run than a single one where not everyone gets to participate. The power of Amplified events is that we’re already getting some very smart people together and the real value is in how they interact – not how good they are at sitting and listening (there’s a calendar full of regular events for that).

We’ll also be trying new ways to capture the event. We’re not sure how the ICA will handle a lot of live streaming, but we will be using video where possible along with the ‘one tweet initiative’ that worked so well at Amp08. I dare say we’ll have whiteboards and index cards to scribble on too.

Once this event is over we should be able to announce a date and venue for the first large Amplified 09 event (aiming for the end of February) and then the regional events should begin to fall into place.

We’ll keep you posted…

Thumbnail images from the awesome Horror Express now available on The Internet Archive

January 5th seems like the first real day back at work for most people so we’re firing up the blog engine and catching up with your wiki activity. In the meantime, Happy New Year everyone.

We’re hoping to see more action on Amplified09 get togethers up and down the country and a couple of mini events to get us back in the swing of things.

Should be a fun year ahead – thanks for being part of it!

Thanks to Nik we now have a schedule page on the wiki. Conversations will run BarCamp style, but to best utilise the various pods and rooms that Nesta have put at our disposal we figured that giving people a chance to book space early was a good idea. So if you’re aiming for a cosy round table chat on your topic then grab one of the smaller pods. The main room will have multiple groups filling it so has a separate schedule on the same page. Hope that makes sense…

And of course we’ll be expecting lots of chop and change during the event itself. Still not quite sure what I want to sit in on myself at this late stage. The schedule will be up on a whiteboard tomorrow for you to play with and we’ll have more whiteboards and paper for anyone who feels the urge to scribble. We’ll be projecting anything hash tagged with #amp08 up on the wall somewhere so remember to Tweet and we’re aiming to have wifi, streaming ability and some Second Life presence too.

Anything we forget, mess up or stumble across last minute we’ll add/amend to the February setup for Amp09. At least that’s the plan…

And if you need a reminder of the layout for tomorrow don’t forget the video here.

by @joannejacobs
Welcome to the third newsletter for Amplified08, with our event only two weeks away!  The finer details of sessions and resources at the venue are now becoming clearer.  We have a very active team of people all doing different things to help make this event something to remember, and with an ever-growing waiting list of participants, there’s a responsibility to ensure that every opportunity to participate is realised.

This edition of the Amplified08 newsletter focuses on what we need for the day, and on the kinds of things that YOU can do help make Amplified08 a success.  We have a couple of sessions for the day given a bit more detail, as well as a list of groups represented at Amplifed08.

What’s happening and what’s needed
by @loudmouthman

We’re in the process of collating resources so we can stream as many sessions as possible online during the event.  Phil Campbell has agreed to provide us with his ‘Ammo Boxes‘ which he assembled for use at PodcampUK, and we’re now trying to work out how to courier these across.  But we could always do with a few more microphones and webcams, so if anyone else is willing to provide these at the event, we may be able to hook these up to the backbone at NESTA, leaving the wireless bandwidth free for much tweeting, blogging and idea sharing at the event.  Please let @loudmouthman know if you have any tech you can provide for us at the event.

The public wifi access available at NESTA can support Flash sites and Second life, so we’re planning to have the event accessible through SL.  However, we are aware that the bandwidth may fill up fairly quickly so we’re talking to some possible providers of additional public bandwidth at the event.  Again, if you or your business contexts are prepared to support Amplified08 in providing more bandwidth, please let us know.

Finally, we are keen to reward people for their fast action in registering and participating in this event.  If you have technology products or services, gizmos, gadgets and other marketing goodies that you’re prepared to donate to Amplified08 either as part of the ’showbag’ participants get on arrival, or as a door prize at the event, please could you get in touch?  We promise to be very grateful indeed!

The important stuff: Food and drinks
by @joannejacobs and @rohan_london

Rohan from NESTA has confirmed that NESTA will be providing tea and coffee and bickies on arrival at NESTA at 3:30pm, and that there will indeed be beer, wine, juice and nibblies from 6-8pm.  After the event concludes, there’s also been a general suggestion of retiring to a pub somewhere for further drinks and perhaps even the odd spot of dinner.  We haven’t settled on a venue for the after-party yet, but stay tuned for more on that…

Session Focus: Cockroach Economics – Credit-crunch strategy, open chat suggestion
by James Cherkoff

Paul Graham, super-hacker and founder of the Silicon Valley VC Y-Combinator recently wrote about recession. “Fortunately the way to make a startup recession-proof is to do exactly what you should do anyway: run it as cheaply as possible.  For years I’ve been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world.  The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. The cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.”

Is the cockroach-approach the right way ahead?

James’s blog on this issue.

Session Focus: Bretton Woods 2.0 – how social media and open source collaboration can assist the governance and regulation of financial markets and society
by Paul Massey

This weekend, the G20, World Bank, UN and IMF are meeting to discuss ways out of the current financial crisis.   The meeting is billed as the start of a process of institutional reform; a Bretton Woods .   Amongst the possible roadmaps, Robert Zoellick, the World Bank President, has suggested “a Facebook for multilateral economic diplomacy“.   The statement demonstrates how fundamental social media has become to our lives.   However, is Robert Zoellick right and is the world ready for Bretton Woods 2.0?  This session will discuss the potential of converging technologies, collaborative social media and open source to tackle the converging social, economic and environmental challenges of C21.

Could Facebook be a useful model or is the Holy Grail an open source kernel, lying hidden in Cyberspace, waiting to render multilateral reform?   Hopefully after the session we can connect with Mr. Zoellick and provide perspectives from social media practitioners in the UK.

Bretton Woods – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
Zoellick: Break Up the Group of Seven – Business Week article

* Editor’s note: I’m still looking for more sessions to be elaborated in these newsletters.  3 more chances, folks, so get your descriptions in now!


Some of the groups participating in Amplified08
by @joannejacobs
Some people have been asking who is participating in Amplified08 and what groups they come from.  You can now view the names of the people who will be attending at the EventBrite page.  As for the gorups, this is by no means a full list but it’s a start.  We’re happy to profile more groups in these newsletters if you’re prepared to submit your details!

Creative Coffee Club: http://creativecoffeeclub.com/
Tuttle Club (Social Media Cafe): http://tuttleclub.wordpress.com/
Social Media Camp: http://www.socialmediacamp.co.uk/
Social Media Mafia: http://socialmediamafia.com/
Minibar: http://www.meetup.com/minibar/calendar/8229093/?eventId=8229093&action=detail
Facebook developer Garage: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5282952746
2Gether08: http://2gether08.com/
Mobile Geeks of London: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2821560179
London Wiki Wednesday: http://www.socialtext.net/wikiwed/index.cgi?london
chinwag: http://www.chinwag.com/
One Media: http://www.one-media.org/
Fresh Networks: http://www.freshnetworks.com/
Social Innovation Camp: http://www.sicamp.org/
Likemind: http://likemind.us

And that concludes Newsletter 3. Please keep submitting your session focus details to us, and we’ll be happy to add these to the content for the next edition.

Well it’s been a blindingly fast start for Amplified08 with all tickets for the event going in about 5 days. If you have registered and now think you won’t be able to go please let us know as there is now a waiting list for people who want to attend.  If you didn’t get a place or if you can’t be part of proceedings though, please be comforted: we plan to live stream as many sessions from the event that we can, and you will be able to follow the back-channel through twitter.  And on that note, we can now say that the official twitter hashtag for the event is #amp08.  You probably guessed that anyway, but we thought it’d be better if at least one formal space made that clear.

Thanks to all those who provided feedback on the first newsletter, and to all those who have offered to add content in to the next editions.  I’m hoping to get two of these out every week.  Today’s edition focuses on the session that @anniemole has registered as a topic for further explanation, as well as some commentary from David Tebbut on the focus of sessions.  Plus there’s some guidelines for participation on the day as well as a basic structure of sessions and the venue.  So let’s get to it….

Venue and Schedule

First of all, you can find details of our venue at NESTA on our wiki.

We have essentially 5 separate rooms and one larger conference room which for break-out sessions we can also use for at least 4 if not 5 separate conversations.  There’s also corridors and reception areas that can be used for sessions where necessary.  And we plan on having 3 sets of breakout sessions, so we have room for about 25-30 sessions throughout the event.  It’s up to you to plan ahead for what you would like to discuss and what you would like to prepare for sessions.  We’re allocating 40 minutes to each breakout session, and we don’t want these to be presentations, but rather, conversations. By all means register your interest in hosting a session, and hosts should be prepared to provoke conversation, but it’s not about one person presenting.  See below for participation guidelines, but the objective is for all participants to have a chance to contribute to discussion.

Our schedule is as follows:
3.30 – Arrive and registration
4.00 – Whole group meets to introduce the event and general announcements
4.30 – 1st Breakout Sessions
5.10 – BREAK
5.20 – 2nd Breakout Sessions
6.00 – BREAK
6.10 – Whole group session to feedback on sessions and to plan for Amplified09
6.40 – BREAK
6.50 – 3rd Breakout Sessions
7.30 – BREAK
7.40 – Whole group session to feedback on sessions and to close
8.00 – CLOSE

For those who want to hang about or go to the pub after the event (or join us there if you didn’t score a ticket or can’t make the timing) we’ll be publishing details of where to meet in coming weeks.

Participation guidelines

Once again, Amplified08 is designed to be an opportunity to amplify ideas by bringing together people from different social networks and with differing skill-sets.  This way we can share our projects, theories and products across networks and plan ahead for collaborative projects at Amplified09 and Amplified2010.  But in order to achieve that information sharing and collaboration, we felt it was important to come up with some guidelines for participation. This is by no means an exhaustive list, nor is it going to be policed.  It’s also open to your own suggestions for amendment, clarification and expansion.  But it’s a start.

• Two Ears, One Mouth: we ask that your listening to contributing ratio be to listen at least twice as much as you contribute.  Unless there’s only two people in a session this is always possible
• Good, Bad, Interesting, Next: We would love you to think about what’s good, what’s bad and what’s interesting about your session and see if you can articulate that either collectively or individually.  Then if you can have a plan for what comes next that will give us the building blocks for further action.
• #amp08: If you’re tweeting, can you please tag all posts with #amp08.  This makes it easier for us to track conversations during and after the event.
• 1 tweet: If everyone who attends sessions – digitally or physically – can sum up their understandings or response to each session with 1 tweet, this will capture a live zeitgeist of the event.  There’s a bit of controversy over how we hashtag this (see the Amplified08 blog), so feel free to add your commentary.  We may even have to put it to a vote!
• Step Outside your Comfort Zone: Please don’t just join sessions because they are run by people you know.  Try and break out of your current networks and exchange ideas with new people, and join sessions because you find the topics interesting and feel you would like to contribute.  That doesn’t mean you need expertise in a field; anyone who wants to contribute ideas should feel welcome to do so.

Session Focus: The Future of the Book

Annie Mole comes from the old skool “I love reading – Physical books are wonderful – Kill all e-books” Luddite approach & Billy Abbott is more of a “e-readers look really interesting I want to see how they can enhance my reading” school of thought.  And Chris Meades as Director of if: book London has the practical experience of talking to & working with publishers and authors on the Future of the Book.

We will lead a session looking at some real examples of what’s been going on in this field from an EU and global perspective which should help to open discussions and we’ll be collecting others examples of these technologies & “future of reading and writing” initiatives.

Some ideas for topics to talk about:

• What is the future for the traditional paper book? How will ebooks effect them? What new technologies are there that can push the old skool book & make it even more valuable or make it obsolete?
• What is the future of the ebook? How will they develop over the coming years? What are the pros and cons of their adoption over paper books?
• What is the future of reading? How will the increase in the usage of mobile devices affect the use of  books (both paper and ‘e’)?
• What can we as consumers and creators of books, stories, expreriences & content do to stay current with the trends in books? What should publishers be doing with their IPs? How can authors leverage new technologies to expandtheir readerships?

At the end of the session we’d like to have a record of a bunch of ideas of how we think things are going, what we could and should be doing to stay on top of the changes in books, and how these ideas could lead to publishing projects & challenges for us all.

Annie Mole – http://london-underground.blogspot.com
Billy Abbott -  http://cowfish.org.uk/blog/
Chris Meade – http://www.futureofthebook.org.uk/ http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/

Context is everything!

David Tebbutt contacted me this week, and he made an important point about Amplified08.  Here’s some of what he said:

“The discussion is strongly flavoured with advocacy and what works and what doesn’t, but I think that much depends on context. Perhaps that will fall out naturally from the groups represented. But I have a sneaky feeling it won’t, unless it’s encouraged”.

I couldn’t agree more.  Context in terms of the technology/method of communication, the business or service oriented environment in which communication technologies are being used, and the socio-political and economic environments in whcih communication is taking place, can all impact on any methodologies, products or practices which emerge from Amplified08 sessions.  We need to be wary of coming up with too many hard-and-fast rules for technologies or communities, without clearly articulating the contexts where any rules apply.

David has said he is still evolving his thinking on this and he’s said he would like to put something together for us after the event on this, so I’m hopeful that may happen!

Amplified 08 is slowly coming together.

In a nice example of amplification we mentioned our new wiki via Twitter a few evenings ago around 11pm and by 10am the next morning already had quite a pile of interesting people signed up. Since then we passed the 100 mark rapidly and at the time of writing have 170+ waving their virtual hands in the air. Add to that the Facebook and Upcoming events pages and we think we’ve got all the bases covered in allowing people to express their interest in the event. Next step is to integrate all that stuff into our WordPress template (or even design a nice new fresh one for Amplified?)

Crucially none of this is the actual sign up list, just a first step in letting us know we’ll have no problem in taking up NESTA on their kind offer and filling every nook and cranny they have. We know some of those 170+ can’t make the actual event because of geography (hello New York!) or just want to express their interest in this and the subsequent events in 2009 and 2010. We’ll continue to add stuff to the wiki and hope some of those signed up do so too.

We are almost ready to release the tickets via Eventbrite so keep tuned to the wiki, this blog or follow @amplied08 on Twitter. Right now we envisage the tickets will go pretty fast.

We’re also beginning to pick up topic ideas. Check out the wiki page here to add to the ideas already beginning to form. Remember we have a large space made up of some very unique smaller spaces and we’ll be encouraging small clusters of activity throughout the late afternoon and early evening. If you can only attend the early sessions or or unable to get to us until after 6pm, don’t panic. There’ll be plenty going on for you to get your teeth into.

Also because we’re still working out how Amplified 08 will lead into Amplifed 09 in February, there will be a lot of post event discussion here, on Twitter and within the individual networks. This is a long game, a marathon more than a sprint and the exciting thing is that we’re learning how to pull it all together… erm… together!

There’s a newsletter on the way that will go over a lot of this stuff and a couple more blog posts to come on the topic suggestions and why we’re doing this. One thing to note is that I’m to San Francisco on Saturday so this blog will go very quiet for two weeks unless some of you reading this take me up on the offer of doing a little amplified blogging… perhaps you already have a post simmering on your own blog that you want to cross post here or have someone in mind to point an N95 or microphone at. Just let me know and we’ll get you signed up here.

Amplified 08: Your Space @ NESTA from Mike Atherton on Vimeo.

So my ideas as to how we best utilise this space are rubbish. What do you see yourselves doing there on the 27th? What conversations would you like to have? Do you have an interesting use for one of the pods?

Let us know what you’d like Amplified 08 to kick start…

Remember: the conversations we have here will be built upon on a larger scale in February at Amplified 09.

Today I’ll be adding a wiki to the blog so we can throw some ideas around and over the next few weeks we’ll be grabbing some interviews with some of the individuals that make this whole thing worth doing. So there’s video and audio content on the way too. As soon as we can we’ll have an Eventbrite page set up for tickets so bookmark this blog for further updates.

I know we’ve had some people express an interest in taking part in the blogging too which is a great relief to me. So if you want to get involved in the event in any shape or form then please get in touch with me via mikesizemore@gmail.com or drop me a line on Twitter or simply leave a comment below.

There’s a little more info about the scope of Amplified in the previous post. How we build upon that from here is up to you.