Wow, the idea’s come a long way since we first thought we needed to do ‘something cool about the impact of social media’ and mix it with the things we’ve seen working at previous Amplified events!

We threw out the idea of a free (or nearly free – £1.40 to be precise) Amp-style event, and got a huge response. Including a response from Reuters, who also saw that there was room for such a conference and offered to host it at their building in Canary Wharf.

Wow.

With the added infrastructural possibilities that the Reuters facilities offered (we’d seriously considered holding £1.40 in a park!) – as well as the expertise of the wonderful people who work there – we set about making the most of the space, the team and most of all the amazing minds of the people who’d said they wanted to come along.

We came up with the framework of a ‘Curated Unconference’, where before each of the first two sessions, we’ll offer two 5-10 minute ‘question framing’ talks, inviting us to consider the ways social technologies have completely changed the environment for news makers and consumers, and also the changing landscape for politics, democracy and governance, followed by small group conversation, taking that start point wherever it goes. There’s no hard and fast injunction to stay on-topic, and I’m sure all kinds of conversations will spring out from it.

The ‘Amplified’ bit will be to document those conversations - feel free to record, video, audioboo, tweet, blog, take notes – we’ll be on hand to help, to collate, and to generally encourage all of us to document all the great ideas, and hopefully provide materials and mechanisms for all the discussions to be taken beyond the walls of the venue.

For the last of the 3 sessions, we’re going to take the best of the ideas that have already been posted on the wiki, and throw those open for group discussion. There are SO many great ideas there, it’ll be hard to decide (and of course, I’m sure a few other topics will come up as we go along). And alongside that, there’ll be a web-cast panel conversation pulling together themes and ideas from the day, and inviting as much participation, widsom and comment from those outside of the event.

We’re REALLY excited about this. The format works, the people who say they’re coming along are far too brilliant to try and force them to listen to talks all day. We’re trying to curate a space for all those minds to explore the past, present and future of what all this social technology means, and help carve out a path for our thinking and planning in those areas.

See you on Nov 11th.

The day will run from 2pm til 8pm, so there’s time for those of you who work in London to come along for the last session, or watch the stream and join the conversation online.

Please sign up here: http://1pound40.eventbrite.com/ (I know, you already registered an interest on the wiki, but spaces will be limited to some degree, so we need a fair way of managing that, which Eventbrite gives us).

The minimum fee is £1.40 for this event. All proceeds will go to charity (www.dec.org.uk) to the Indonesian disaster appeal. We suggest donations of £14.00 or more if you can. Many thanks.

Please keep the conversation about the day and its possibilities going – here in the comments, over on the wiki, or in your own bit of the internets.

I finally started reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but am already underlining parts that jump out at me. For example:

Collective action… is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members. All group structures create dilemmas, but these dilemmas are hardest when it comes to collective action, because the cohesion of the group becomes critical to its success.

So I guess we need some cohesion. Time to reach out to the initial networks I mentioned and see if we can find some common ground. We’re planning to run a Network of Networks event later in the year, unconference style, so it’s time to get this particular ball rolling. There was a quick discussion around this at CCC London last week and it seemed a good idea as a first step to get some of the names behind the networks together for some coffee and a conversation around where we can take this.

For some reason I was reminded of the brilliant opening to Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet:

On an April day in 1746 at the grand convent of the Carthusians in Paris, about 200 monks arranged themselves in a long, snaking line. Each monk held one end of a 25-foot iron wire in each hand, connecting him to his neighbour on either side. Together the monks and their connecting wires formed a line over a mile long.

Once the line was complete the Abbe John-Antoine Nollet, noted French scientist, took a primitive electrical battery and, without warning, connected it to the line of monks – giving all of a powerful electric shock.

Nollet did not go around zapping monks with static electricity for fun; his experiment had a serious scientific objective. Like many scientists of the time, he was measuring the properties of electricity to find out how far it could be transmitted along wires, and how fast it travelled. The simultaneous exclamations and contortions of a mile-long line of monks reveled that electricity could be transmitted over great distance; and as far as Nollet could tell, it covered that distance instantly.

That was a big deal.

We’ll be looking for our own big deal, but our first step will be a little less painful and revolve around tea and coffee rather then electrocuting the clergy.

If you’d like to get involved at this early age please drop me an email (mikesizemore @ gmail dot com) or leave a comment.

Photo credit: Tesla Coil by Kent, J (CC license)