I’m on my way to Amplified 08, a new UK event that brings together people who want to actively contribute to the conference/event that they’re going to – Think BarCamp/ unconferenced events.
Essential to the event is the lack of hierarchy to the organisation of the event – you don’t have a self-appointed panel of ‘experts’ that decide what is going to be the important things to tell the great unwashed about when they come along – as many ‘official’ conferences are structured.
With the open model that Amplified employs, if you think a subject is important, you can stick it on the list of sessions and see if there are others interested in coming along and contributing.
_Rules of engagement
The potential with such an open event is that the events can become hijacked, or sidelined from the will of the many, so to counter this there are a published Rules of Engagement.
It contains great ideas like Two Ears, One Mouth – If people feel an urge to speak, they should spend twice as long listening as they do speaking.
_Wiki-ness
Again this isn’t diktat, but held in a Wiki, so those who are attending can add or alter the information.
_Sessions that look particularly interesting
Here’s a run down of the sessions that I’ll be trying to spend my time at ..
The future of online video #01:
Open-source regulation #05 – how might we use new technology/social media to move to a more transparent, open and inclusive system of business and government regulation that is both technically and politically viable?
Bretton Woods 2.0 #06 – how social media and open source collaboration can assist the governance and regulation of financial markets and society
The Future of the Book #07: Like to discuss how e-readers & books can coincide, how & if reading will change as more kids spend time online, can reading/ writing be improved with online technologies?
Integration and Aggregation of Social Media (aka the Social Graph Problem) #16: With increasingly more and more places where you can find information, connect with people, raise awareness of the topics,
and generally interact with others online, there’s going to be the added challenge of navigating from one environment to another. From Facebook to Twitter.. From Gmail to LinkedIn. Unfortunately, it’s not
possible to just find everything in one place, just yet, that allows you to interact with everyone from one space. For some, this is the “Social Graph” problem.. of having different people, in different
networks, and places, with no unifying view across them all.. I’d like to propose a discussion around this challenge, to help identify what us as users might “need” to be able to maintain our sanity as increasingly interesting and engaging platforms emerge, that dissect our attention space even further.
MSM and Social Media #21 – As mainstream media becomes more porous and enters social media networks in different ways – what are the expectations? How strong is citizen journalism? How should it be valued and how can it work alongside/within/without traditional media outlets?
Also interesting
From conscripts to followers – new forms of leadership and organization #22 – The default structure for organizations, even start ups, is the “natural hierarchy” that evolves in to the organization chart and eventually corporate command and control, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Making Dave Eggers’s TED Prize Talk ‘dream’ come true #24 – where we can ALL make a difference to the education of disadvantaged youngsters through the use of Social Media (Drew Buddie – digitalmaverick).
Best title
Streams, rivers, torrents and clouds: nature and cyberspace:
co-creation workshop #19 – The web is already greener than you think.
_Possibles –
Cross-Platform Narratives #04:
Creating a multi-authored book #12:
Social media as a medium for storytelling #13:
Social media for audio and visual artists #14: Discussions on essentially cost-free replication / piracy and how best to handle them – p2p, torrents, mp3 blogs, etc. are all forms of social media too… Investigating the rapidly changing landscape of the industry and the many nascent business models that are emerging (iTunes, ‘Radiohead’, Subscription, Free, etc).
Creating spikes in music digital distribution through digital comms and social media #17: Google, MySpace and other platforms have helped to ‘flatten’ the landscape for musicians to directly reach their
audiences – thus the music industry is in rapid freefall, record deals are becoming an increasingly scarce and meaningless resource for music talent.
If you’re there, drop me a Tweet @simonperry
Amplified 08
Address: 1 Plough Place, London EC4A 1DE