TEDxTuttle Event - A first report from the trenches

Yesterday saw the TEDxTuttle event held. It went by without any major glitches, and those that did occur were marvellously covered by the presenters and our superb Front Of House team, Tuttle members Joanne Jacobs, Janet Parkinson and Julia Shalet.

A bit of behind-the-scenes for you all: in organising this we chatted to a few people at Tuttle about the sort of things they might like as a conference theme, and one of those that came up was a view of trends into the future. There were others, but when Tomorrow's World* presenter (and Tuttle member) Maggie Philbin agreed to kick it off, the die was cast. Again, we had asked around about themes people were interested in - Digital Technology and Social Media are Tuttle's raison d'etre, but there is also a strong interest in Sustainability so we decided to run with those 3 broad themes and look at what was happening in them in the near to medium term future

In the sign up process, we asked people to list areas they were interested in within these themes. What we found was that there a number of "clusters", quite inter-related in many ways, and we used those to select topics for videos and speakers.

So the program resolved itself to:

- Maggie Philbin leading us into a history of the worlds of tomorrow, via some fascinating clips from the 60's, 70's and 80's of what people thought the hot hot things of those past futures would be.

- Technology stream - we covered Robotics with P W scary Military Robots video , Mobile Multimedia with the amazing 6th Sense and - on the advice of Tuttle member Sarah Blow - we asked Rachel Armstrong to come and talk about the fascinating area of living architecture.

- Sustainability stream - Jared Diamond's Collapse to keep the Collapsonomics crew happy, set against Willie Smits amazing talk on how to rebuild a wrecked ecosystem, and Tuttle founder Llloyd Davis on curating a sustainable online/offline social network

- Social media stream - first, Ben Walker looked at the dynamics of Twitter via words and music, Clay Shirky's video looked at Social Media's potential, Mat Morrison gave a talk on how Social influence is measured, and we rounde off with Dan Pink's video on how open problems cannot be solved by carrot and stick incentives

Maggie then closed with some hilarious videos of daft inventions from times of yore (see youtube video above)

The TED videos you can watch for yourself, here is a precis of the talks (Adam Tinworth wrote a great liveblog yesterday over here on One Man and His Blog, I've borrowed some of that and added what I recall):

Maggie Philbin

Maggie showed a timeline of when inventions were first aired on Tomorrow's World. What really hits you is:

- How long a lot of the stuff that we think of as "modern" actually first emerged onto the market
- How many of the "sure fire" predictable successes of the day turned out not to be
- How many of teh things we take for granted today were ridiculed, lampooned or ignored when they first came out. (CDs, Mobile phones, Personal Computers) by the consumer "experts" of the day

Maggie also ended off a very good Q&A piece with teh observation that people were far more interested in science and technologies then, today a lot of kids see "media fame" as their future path

Rachel Armstrong

Rachel is working on what I would consider one of the most imporatnt (and probably valuable0 emerging areas of technology - Living Architecture. In other words, building materials with living organisms (simpel microbes) in them. The two key benefits are:

- Buildings that can modify their environment via the live microbes contained in teh materials (eg give out oxygen, take in CO2 - imagine if every wall and roof on the planet could do this)

- Buildings that can grow themselves, repair themselves and evolve organically according to need

You've read about it in the Science Fiction, Rachel showed the state of the art in today's science

Lloyd Davis

Lloyd looked at his experience of curating teh Tuttle club over the last 3 years. Its main claim to fame is it is still growing in size and capability after this time and has yet to be perverted from its (lack of) specific purpose As he points out, its major claim to fame is that it is an open club (its fervently open to anybody, but its not for everybody) . Some key points were:

- Its like running a Kid's Birthday party - "nudge" aberrant behaviours early rather than be draconian later
- Someone has to shoulder the risk - I'm here, I'm doing this - and give others the confidence its happening
- Tuttle spends nothing on promotion, etc - the best way to do this is to do cool stuff and then talk about it.
- Tuttle uses Twitter heavily, its ideally architected for the Tuittle dynamic - but its mainly a way for people to talk face to face. However, the online/offline conversation means that you interact with the real person
- "I know more about people, but not in a creepy way, because I see them every week." That leads to more opportunity for serendipitous meeting and connection, as we get to know and trust people

My own view is that Tuttle is functionally the modern equivalent of London's famous coffee clubs of the Age of Reason, and in my opinion could possibly also become like the Groucho Club for the digital media tribe.

Ben Walker

Ben is famous for his funny song "You're nothing if you're not on Twitter" (penned in a lazy hour at Tuttle, by the way) but gave us a hilarious, thought provoking and musically adept guide to twitter as he set various people's tweets to different types of music. Some takeaways were:

- You can never look at a tweet again after hearing it set to music - from then on you look at every one from the point of view of "what sort of soundtrack is this tweet"
- Twitter may be 40% Babble, but Babble + Context = Conversation

One cannot do Ben's talk justice in words and I was too busy laughing to remember most of it - you will just have to wait for the video (we will do this one first, I promise) but here to remind you is the song on YouTube

Mat Morrison

Mat has spent a lot of the last few years on the mathematics behind social networks (The first time I met him we spent a very enjoyable 2 hours in a late night nightclub talking system dynamics and network maths) and gave a talk on some of his analysis work. Some highlights:

- Companies are increasingly trying to use social media to make people do what they want them to do, people are increasingly using social media as a filter. thsi means that the obvious influencers (eg thsoe with the most Twitter followers) are not, except for the most banal, low risk things
- Viral isn't - the curve is more like a series of hiccoughs, declining in size. This is because very seldom does one person tell more than one other person (on average) about something. Also, most beople's social networks are clumpy so soon they are "going viral" to each other.
- Also, most people are "homophilous" - is the cleave to people and memes like themselves, and when the meme crosses the boundary to a new and different "homophilous" set of people it often dies
- There are people who span a number of networks - the "Between-ness ratio" Mat calls it - but due to the above effect their influence is limited
- You can be judged - literally - by the friends you keep. It is far moer reliable to make predictions about you from looking at your friends than by the confusing data you put out yourself.

Anyway, the feedback so far seems to be very positive, and most everybody had a good time (a relief for us Broadsight Boyz, as we did all the back end website, audio visuals etc).

I will put up the key feedback learnings for any next time in a separate post.

*Tomorrow's World was a BBC TV show that ran from the 60's to the 80's and on which she was a presenter. It was to look at new technology, and with people like Maggie on, it was the start of the meme that geeks can actually be cool.

(Cross posted on the Broadstuff blog)