Tim's Blog

I found myself on a commuter train on the way to 2gether08 on Thursday morning.

Literally hundreds of, most probably very bright, people around me were heads down, buried away in Sudoku puzzles or reading the Metro - occaisionally checking their phones or Blackberry's.

What if we could find some way of harnessing that cognitive surplus - and providing volunteering/pro-social crowd-sourcing opportunities that commuters could dip into at five-minutes-to-nine, just before they got stuck into their nine-till-five?

Just a thought...

Photo credit: Rule of thirds by pfig

As if annually taking on a stage of the Tour de France hasn't been enough, this year, in celebration of his 50th Birthday, Bill Badham is taking on 'Le Triple Ventoux' challenge to raise money for the Maypole Centre. This from his Just Giving page:

There is a challenge organized by a French bicycle club (actually, a brotherhood) next to Mount Ventoux, a massive 2000 metre mountain in Provence in France. They say, “It is normal for a bike rider to try to climb Mont Ventoux at least once in a lifetime, but you are crazy if you do it again.”

There are 3 different routes you can use to go to the top of Mont Ventoux.

If you can climb all the routes in one day thats what Bill is going to do on July 6 2008 (starting from Bedoin, Malaucene and Sault), between sunrise and sunset, you are declared “Nut of Mont Ventoux.” Putting all that in perspective, to accomplish this feat Bill will climb 4500 metres. That's over half the height of Everest - the descending is another story.

[Summary: Extract from a draft literature review on Youth Work and Social Networking - looking at different responses to risk - and the role of Positive Youth Development responses in particular]

I'm in the middle of putting together a literature review on young people's Online Social Networking, and the possible roles and responses for Youth Workers to take to this emergent phenomena. In the literature review I'm seeking to tread a balanced path between talk of opportunities of Online Social Networking, and talk of risks - so this afternoon I've been looking to construct for a good model to use in pursuing a balanced exploration of responses to online risk.

I'm sharing the draft of that model here for two reasons:

[Summary: Could the Innovation Exchange be about a festival of small ideas that scale...]

One of the bits of blogging I struggle with most is getting the opening paragraph right. So let me instead quote David Wilcox (and borrow his photo of the event in question):

Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work.... The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".

games make things more interesting

response rates are always lower than expected

we should build in incentives

Ok. I promise this is the last one page guide I'll post this week (possibly this year...) - and this one isn't strictly about a social media tool.

I don't own a car and I don't drive, hence I rely heavily on the UK rail network. And to make that as straightforward as possible, I rely heaving on the fantastic traintimes.org.uk created by Mathew Sommerville (ok, I realise I've raved about this before... which to non-uk-train-travelling readers is possibly slightly odd... but I'm not going to let that stop me). And so that others can benefit from the sheer brilliance of traintimes.org.uk and its bookmarkable URLs (and so they can use if to find cheaper rail fares), I've put together this one page guide to using Traintimes.org.uk.

I've just returned from a weekend catching up with friends, and have been struck again by how important the movement of One No, Many Yeses* is.

Social change requires co-ordination that takes place not (just?) through the market, but through individuals taking action because it is the right action to take. That means deeper conversations to creatively work out how we each play our part. That means understanding the real nature of our relationships with others and not leaving the £ sign to mediate in all our interactions.

It needs communities. And I've just been reminded by the loose community of bloggers whose work I read and on occaision interact with, that today is 'Blog Action Day'. A chance for a community to come together around On No (killing the planet) and Many Yeses (ways to live more environmentally friendly lives) and to reflect on environmentalism in their individual areas.