To the frontier! A new project for the blog

As Axl Rose once memorably asked

Where do we go? Where do we go now? Where do we go? 

To the frontier, Brother Rose, to the frontier! 

Photo from אליבאבא made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

In the coming months this blog is going to focus - in between the usual digressions and diversions - on people who are changing the world in ways big and small

People who are

• Changing the nature of community action and activism
• Debating the kind of future we want 
• Putting the word justice between social and media
• Practicing the kind of extrovert geekery we can all learn from

People, in short, who are on the frontier of making life kinder. More exciting. More meaningful. Plain better.

Whether you're working inside or outside the late-capitalist borg, I want to interview you, write about what you do, review your books or other artistic product. 

If this feels a little bit like the mini-me version of Friends of the Earth's The Big Ideas Project, that's because I've taken some of my inspiration from that. But the kind of things I'll be looking at might often fly under the radar of something like TBIP - partly because I don't operate at the same level and partly because my range of interests is slightly different.  

Maybe we should all be keeping a record of what inspires us to move towards a better future. This project is certainly intended to do so.

Social science fiction: how story-telling games can help us dream our green future

Last weekend we played a story-telling game called Shock for the first time (available free for download here). Billing itself as social science-fiction, the idea is a simple one: the players decide on a shock – the big idea that changes the world as we know it. They jointly create a world that reflects that shock, then pick lead characters and collaborate in telling a tale which explores it further.

Science-fiction is a literature of ideas – even if some of it is in the business of recycling old tropes – so gamifying science-fiction story-building makes a lot of sense. You could go high-brow, looking at, say, identity loss in a world of uploaded consciousness. You could use it to give space opera an infusion of purpose. Or you could do what we did after several glasses of wine on Saturday night and decide that what the pulp end of the genre was really missing was a  a Nazi hollow-earth empire hidden beneath the earth's crust. With giant mechs. :-)

We really liked Shock, although the conflict-resolution mechanism needs a bit of practice. But it got me to thinking that the game might have value outside the tabletop hobby. Its rules would work well for group story-telling online, such as via a shared blog or discussion forum. And its ability to imagine possible futures could be a great creative tool for those seeking to achieve them.

Like environmental activists, for instance.

As speculative fiction is to literature, so environmentalism is to politics – even at it's most nostalgic it's a discourse of change and of big ideas. The kind of stuff that Friends of the Earth are calling for - renewable energy, the closed loop of resource use, the localisation of food supply and economy – these are big ideas that would change the world as we know it.

These are as much science-fictional ideas as they are green ones.

What story-telling can give environmental activism is a way of imagining that future and giving us hope that it can be realised. It makes impersonal social forces personal through plot and characterisation. It dramatises both conflict and resolution. It makes the future feel real, however briefly.

Story-telling also matters because we know that when seeking to persuade people that a big idea is worth reaching for, facts are necessary but not enough. We know that positive campaigns fare better when we're inviting someone to share a narrative – The Big Ask and The Bee Cause have both met that need well.

Story-telling as collective ownership

And contributing to the creation of that narrative can be very powerful. I have found that volunteers and activists respond much more positively to a national campaign when we create a space where they can explore and take ownership of it. Then they take it to places which its creators never thought about. 

So, we know story-telling has a great deal to offer campaigning. And I'm suggesting in particular that science-fiction could provide a great framework for making our near-futures of environmental (and thus political, economic, social) change more tangible to ourselves and to those we want to reach.

But there's only one way to test this...

and that's to suggest running a game of Shock online with an environmental theme, perhaps via another blog or on Campaign Hubs, where others can see it and (hopefully) be inspired. Looking at Friends of the Earth's next major campaign, could we perhaps tell a story about what might happen 1, 10, 50 years from now when community-driven renewable energy comes to Anytown, England?

Thoughts? Players, even?

Tweeting in a Trolling Paradise - the problem with Twitter culture and what we can all do about it

One of Twitter's greatest achievements – alongside the Arab Spring, the Inigo Montoya bot and getting the Pope to tweet – is being an incubator of trolls on an grand scale. It has such low barriers to entry and participation (including anonymity and its 140 character input limit) and weak normative cohesion (translation: no-one on Twitter agrees on how Twitter should be used) and limited ground-rules that it's an asshat's paradise.

Sometimes, as high-profile news stories of the past year have demonstrated, it's a misogynist, racist asshat's paradise. No-one should have to fight so hard as Cristina Criado-Perez to ensure that murder and rape threats should result in police charges, for example, but we seem to have gotten there in the end. 

One positive side-effect of this is we now seem to be having a long-delayed conversation about the kind of Twitter we want. Putting criminal threats and acknowledged hate speech to one side – a clear cut issue, or at least it ought to be - I think the rest of the debate revolves around two questions:

• Where you draw the line between a troll and someone exercising their self-declared right to free speech / be an opinionated jerk on the internet.
• Is there a better solution to trollish abuse than the block/ignore/suck it up advocated by the champions of the status quo.

For what it's worth, I don't believe the block and ignore strategy is sufficient, not least because it places all responsibility squarely on the individual, rather than the community or Twitter themselves. I think there is at least one easy, uncontroversial thing both could do which would make it a safer, less troll-infested space without impinging on freedom of speech.

Start talking about the kind of Twitter we want

One important thing the community could do is start taking collective responsibility for Twitter-space. For me, that means:

• Talking about the kind of minimal social rules for the conversation the majority of users are prepared to accept.
• Promoting positive norms for Twitter – if the user base can embed Follow Fridays for example, why not others?

One example of such a norm could be found in non-violent communication: don't just block; tell users when you feel offended by what they say (e.g. ad hominem attacks, rudeness) and ask them not to do it again. At present, there is an assumption in favour of not appearing to be upset - this needs to be challenged for change to occur and people to reflect on their behaviour.

We all have a role in shaping – even by tacitly condoning through inaction – Twitter's ground-rules, ideas of what is acceptable discourse, exactly as we do in any other social situation. Some of Twitter's defaults facilitate trolling – fine – we need to be taking steps together to redress that balance.

Twitter should support this conversation

I think it's unhelpful for Twitter to keep to the virtual equivalent of laying cable and only intervening when local law would probably require it anyway (e.g. for threats of violence or persistent harassment). I understand they don't want to set themselves up as moderators. This would be a commitment beyond their reach, nor does the infrastructure of Twitter enable this to be devolved to volunteers.

But they could support the kind of conversation among their users we're talking about in this post. Whether that's a forum, releasing their own positive memes into the wild or incentivising good Twitter citizenship, or something else as yet unthought of remains to be seen. 

The point for Twitter is to get past the false choice presented to them of sheriff or bystander and play a positive role in community building.

Kum ba yah, anyone?

I want to be very clear that I don't think embedding community-generated norms in Twitter is an alternative to intervening properly in cases of threat or repeated verbal abuse. That would be extremely naive.

But owning the conversation together is something we can all do to contribute to making Twitter a safer space without impeding free speech.

Searching for Birmingham's science-fiction soul rebels

How can Birmingham - a city so pathologically futurological that its motto is Forwards - feature so little in science-fiction?

I expect London to dominate literary geography - much like other genres - but other towns in this divided kingdom have had their SF-nal stories told. Charles Stross and Ken MacLeod have both set near-future novels in and around Edinburgh, Jeff Noon has given us a post-Singularity pyschedelic Manchester. Heck, Cardiff has Torchwood.

But if anyone's claimed Birmingham for speculative fiction at all it's been Tolkien, reflecting on his early years from the safety of his Oxfordian refuge. And his view of the city is decidely anti-futuristic.

Yet Birmingham - created practically ex nihilo for the industrial revolution - has been chasing the future since its inception. Look around you and see futures past - the Rotunda, the ziggurat of the old Central Library - alongside attempts to grasp the coming moment like the new Bullring and the Spirograph. Feverish attempts at civic rebranding - Eastside, Southside, this quarter, that quarter - are not signs of a city that is content to live in the moment.

However neurotic its official culture might be, Birmingham really is a crucible of change. One of our most diverse cities, still divesting itself of traditional industries, shaking off the old certainties of modernity and asking big questions. And it's dramatic. Whole areas of the city like Digbeth in simultaneous decay and rebirth. A cosy catastrophe and an ideas factory side by side. 

So, again: why has no-one written about this from an SF perspective? To paraphrase one of the city's more famous musical sons, I'm searching for Birmingham's science-fiction soul, and I can't find it anywhere. Where have you hidden it?

Update 9 February

Since writing this post, I've been directed to two spec-fic novels which do feature Birmingham substantially. Thanks to James Brogden and Stephen Theaker who both got in touch to suggest:

• The intriguing sounding Iain R MacLeod's Song of Time, as reviewed by Mr Theaker.
• Tourmaline by James Brodgen himself!

I'll look to see if I can lay my hands on these forthwith. I was hoping to be proven at least a little bit wrong and it'll be good to see the city as represented in these stories.

Could you get Barchester buzzing? Second test form goes volunteer-registation-tastic!

And here's form number two - the one for registering interest in local volunteering with your community group. As you may recall, I think this works best (only?) when a campaign has a number of structured entry activities, and I've used Friends of the Earth's The Bee Cause as an example on this form as to how it might work.

This took about about half an hour's thought on the train to Newcastle last week and then another half an hour to set-up using JotForms, although clearly those timings reduce the more familiar you get with the approach as well as with the software.

So, I have the same questions for you, more or less as for the e-newsletter form, namely: 

• Are the questions right? Too many? Too few?
• Is the language right?
• Does it work ok for you on a mobile or tablet? 
• What could we do to improve the presentation? It's probably best to look at this on the actual survey rather than the embedded version in my blog for this one 
• Does the whole thing feel simple enough that your group would feel confident replicating it?

Getcha local campaign group news here! The first test form

Right, so here's the first test form for comment: sign-up for monthly e-news from Barchester Friends of the Earth here. It took me about 5 minutes to get the hang of JotForms and another 5 to create the form. So, not a time-consuming process.




I've successfully embedded it in this blog, but you could just hyperlink it too, which might be more practical for some set-ups. 

For example, I don't know if you could embed it in a Friends of the Earth local group site as this is still me playing in my private sandbox at the moment. If Facebook is your primary means of organisation, again, an embed code isn't going to help you very much.

You could also take your hyperlink and turn it into a short-code using bit.ly or similar - e.g. bit.ly/barchesterfoe for posters and other print publications.

Feedback please:

• If you were to use this, would you need more information than just an e-mail address at this point? Bear in mind there's a trade-off between the amount of detail required / time it takes to complete a form and the likelihood of someone signing up.
• Is the language right?
• Does it work ok for you on a mobile or tablet? 
• Could you see yourself taking online sign-ups on a stall or at an event using something like this?
• What could we do to improve the presentation? It's probably best to look at this on the actual survey rather than the embedded version in my blog for this one.
• Does the whole thing feel simple enough that your group would feel confident replicating it?

Oh, and please do give the survey a go with some made-up e-mail addresses if you like, so I can check the reporting facility too. :-)

Thanks again!

Grassroots campaign groups - the electronic sign-up form you need

OK – so if you were designing an electronic sign-up form for your local campaign group, what would you do?

I was listening to a talk by Rachel Collinson the other day at our staff away days about forms for fundraising and mass online action when it hit me – why don't many local volunteer groups do this?

Why electronic forms now?

Electronic forms have always been efficient at the administrative end of larger NGO operations, but the opportunity costs of doing so for small groups have now sunk through the floor.

We're now at a point where decreasing complexity coincides with increased opportunity. With Google Forms, for example, someone with no programming knowledge like me can design a simple form in 5 minutes which will send the answers straight to a spreadsheet on Google Drive.

And with computing increasingly mobile through smartphones, tablets and laptops, the potential to bring the quick and easy e-form to the people at events and through advertising is much greater than a decade ago.

I don't imagine a time any time soon when electronic sign-up forms will replace the paper version – we live in an age of incomplete wi-fi and varying degrees of comfort with technology. But we're now in a better position than before to employ 21st century recruitment and engagement tactics for 21st century grassroots activism.

The form you need and the form you want

Now, here's the part where I'd really welcome your thoughts. What do you make of this?

I think that the form that would be most helpful at the grassroots – the one you need - is a very simple one signing people up for local e-news like a regular e-mail newsletter. They could give you a name and an e-mail address and that would be it.

You've got the opportunity to turn these people into members, activists, financial supporters later through the news, but the key thing is that it's so simple you can complete it in 10 seconds. On a computer. On a phone. At a desk. On the go. Wherever, however.

The form you want (which you might be tempted to reach for before the first) is one where people can register their interest in volunteering with you. The classic version of this is the first Obama campaign election portal where people could go to the site and clearly express their interests – could they fundraise, could they deliver election material, would they canvass, would they phone bank? Bingo!

But …. to do that well your group needs to be running a campaign which has structured volunteering opportunities.

It's easier for election campaigns than others, but a good example from our own scene is The Bee Cause, where potential volunteers can do anything from simple actions like scattering wildflower seeds in their back garden to complex ones such as lobbying their MP.

This has the potential to be incredibly helpful to groups, I feel, but only under those conditions. Hence, my sense is that this is something to build to – don't implement it when you want it – implement it when you need it for a campaign that demands it.

In the meantime, get your sign-ups up and send them your news. You have something important to tell them, after all.

Thoughts?