As the summer gets *really* hot, I though I’d let you know that we’ve got some special Tuttle things coming up.

Firstly, our lovely hosts at the ICA have some paying guests on a couple of Fridays this month and so we’re being accommodated just down the road at Inn The Park This goes for tomorrow, 3rd July and the 24th. We did it last week and it was great.

Inevitably, the rumour mongers have started questioning our relationship with the ICA – well, move along, nothing to see here, we’re still all madly in love.

In addition, they are offering a special Tuttle membership of £30 for the year which gets you reductions on tickets, a discount in the bar and advance notice of cool stuff happening there. I think it’s a great way of saying thank you to them (remember too that they’re a charity themselves) for giving us a chunk of Central London real estate for free every week. All you have to do is go to the front desk and ask to join and say you want the Tuttle Club offer.

And.

On Friday 10th July we’re going to do Tuttle over at Channel 4 with a special guest – Manuel Castells author of The Rise of the Network Society – who has been influencing thinking about the social dynamics of the web for as long as we’ve had a web. More details on that soon – I expect we’ll have to be a bit more formal about an attendance list

With all of this to-ing and fro-ing I’d strongly suggest keeping an eye on a twitter search for #tuttle or at least to check before coming down to see exactly where we are.

Which reminds me that I’ve still done nothing about the tuttlebot – gaah!

At Christmas we did a screening at the ICA of Brazil, home of Harry Tuttle, our hero. It was lovely to do a screening especially with such a lovely film, but it occurred to me that it would be equally nice to do something midway through the year.

So I asked on twitter for suggestions and I got the following, which I’m presenting to you today as a poll. It will run for 10 days until Friday 19th and I’d just ask you to think carefully about what you’d like to see in the company of your fellow tuttlers one morning (probably) in July.

THE POLL IS NOW CLOSED

In the event of a tie, the winner will be decided by the respective proposers wrestling in mud.

Just to wrap up, as well as paying for coffee at last week’s Tuttle, the guys from Evernote have given us a group premium account. Thanks again!

The first stuff that’s up there is pictures that were taken on Friday but I’m interested to hear from you other ways that you can think of us using this lovely resource, whether it’s something you want me to do or something you’d like to get a group together to do – as always, the tuttle brain is open for new ideas

I’ve been chatting to Al Robertson at Tuttle for a while now about a consulting model and process that might emerge from the network in addition to but not in competition with the small and hypernimble JFDI crowd.

Al’s a great thinker, writer and strategist, he has the interestingness of the plannerly crowd that introduce me to him and he also knows how to put a good pitch together. So he sent me the following. I was tempted to fiddle with it, but I’ve gained just enough sense to know when I can’t add anything more, so I present here unedited, for your perusal, pontification and the picking of holes. I’m starting to try this out with potential clients – ideas and introductions to more folk who might find it useful are very welcome.

The Crowd – Tribe – Team process

Tuttle consultancy is rooted in the Crowd – Tribe –Team process. Before describing what that is, we should define a Crowd, a Tribe and a Team.

The most open, freeform way of organising a group of people is as a Crowd – that is, a disparate group of people with no clearly defined internal relationships, or external goals. A Crowd is a seed. It’s full of potential, but that potential needs attention and focus to help it grow.

When Crowd members start to engage with each other, they begin to discover others who share their particular interests, or they realise that they all share a common interest set. The Crowd then begins to assemble itself into one or more, more purposeful, Tribes. A Tribe is a loosely organised group of people, united by common passions or ambitions. A football crowd, for example, isn’t really a crowd at all; it’s a football tribe.

As Tribes develop, they become more organised, and their members become more action orientated. They begin to create clearly defined aims that spring from and support their shared passions or ambitions. In order to achieve these goals, Teams are formed. Individual Teams are created with specific goals in mind, and are assembled from Tribe members with the relevant expertise or interests.

The Tuttle Club began as a Crowd, but it has now become a Tribe. Within that Tribe, individual Teams are working to complete clearly defined tasks. One Team, for example, is putting together a book on Twitter, while another has been thinking about how Tuttle can use its tribal expertise to help other groups of people. While working through that process, we’ve realised that the Crowd – Tribe – Team process can be a very useful consultancy tool.

We begin by meeting you as a Crowd of highly experienced, highly creative and highly competent people. As we engage with your business, we work with you to create a series of Tribes – groups formed around your specific business issues, made up of those most engaged by them, and with experience most relevant to them. Finally, each Tribe becomes a Team, committed to delivering clearly defined solutions to specific, carefully considered issues.

That process evolves the traditional solution-orientated consultancy model, by understanding that asking the right questions is as important as developing effective solutions. So, it brings a very broad range of expertise to bear on the process of understanding and framing those questions. This helps our clients look in new directions for highly creative, highly original and highly effective responses to their business issues, and ensures that delivery of those responses is based on an in-depth understanding of those issues.

We’ve been asked to participate in a survey on how the current economic situation affects freelancers such as make up a goodly number of our friends and funsters. As a participant in the survey we will receive free access to the results when published so, I’d love you to contribute – of course, all data will be kept strictly confidential – only aggregate results are reported.

FreeAgentCentral is looking at how freelancers, small businesses and consultants feel about their finances. They aim to find out how freelancers in different industry, country and target-client markets are feeling the pinch, if indeed they are.

I’m just trying to tie down with them when they can sponsor the coffee one Friday soon, but as they have this survey out until 15th, I thought we might be able to help in advance.

It should only take a minute, and there’s a chance for you to win one of 3 prizes (Nintendo Wii, iPod Touch & iPod Shuffle). So go tell ‘em what you think.

Thank you, dear tuttlers, as ever, for your time and participation!

This Friday, 17th April, we’ll be sponsored by Imagini both for general coffee drinking (Thanks Imagini!) but also with an opportunity for 6 people to get involved more directly with what they’re doing.

To explain:

“The basis on the session on Friday will be focused on the alpha launch of the VisualDNA Shop. These are widget-based ‘shops’ that sit on a blog and take visitors through a short quiz with picture-based answers. The answers build a VisualDNA profile, which is used to create personalised suggestions for items to be purchased. It’s a revenue generator for the blogger, and can be tailored to suit the focus of the site.

The objective would be to invite blog owners from various verticals (aligning with our travel, photography, entertainment and mobile VDNA Shops) to build a VDNA Shop and start using during the session. Each blog owner will be guided by someone at Imagini who will have a laptop to work from.”

If you want to take part (there will be a small reward to say thank you) then sign up on the special list on the wiki page this week.

As well as this little bolt-on, which will be happening downstairs, I’m sure there’ll be someone from Imagini up in the bar to give people a briefer look at the new features if they’re interested.

Thanks to Sonia Pignorel from Imagini and Vikki Chowney from Six Degrees for helping set this up.

This is the beginning of a call for developers, but I probably need some help fleshing out the spec first.

It started with the sign-up page on the wiki falling into disuse – maybe it will recover, but I think it’s served it’s purpose – most people just turn up, or they don’t.

However there’s still a need for information about who’s going. Some people want reassurance that there’s going to be *someone* else there. Others may want to know which people that they know are going. It’s also useful to know after the event who was there so that you can follow up conversations or connect in a non-spammy way with people you didn’t get to see.

The non-spammy bit is very important, I want the information to be available, but I want to maintain the trust of people who come to twitter that their data won’t be harvested by unscrupulous folk. Of course it’s been possible to snaffle data from the start using the wiki, but it doesn’t seem that anyone’s bothered yet.

So I want you to treat this post as a draft specification for a new tool, a bot for which the principal user interface is twitter. I imagine it working like an irc-bot. I send messages in a pre-specified form with certain parameters and I receive a message back which either confirms an action I’ve taken or gives me some information (where that information won’t fit into a tweet it will need to be stored somewhere readable and linked to).

The core functions I have imagined so far are:

Going – defaults to adding you to the list of people coming to the next tuttle but with optional date parameter, returns a confirmation that your message has been recieved.

WhoIsGoing – returns a list of people already signed up, records (somewhere – where?) the fact that you asked.

IsTuttleOn – returns “yes” except when it doesn’t

WhatTime – returns 10am except when it doesn’t

WhatIsTuttle – returns standard description. Can take username as a parameter so you can let someone know (for the scenarios where a n00b asks “dude, wtf is a tuttle?”

WhoWent – takes date parameter, returns list of people who signed up.

You get the idea.

As a user, can you think of other functions you’d like to use? Can you think through the implications of such functions and let me know if there’s something stupid in there? Let’s throw this around for a little while – I’m particularly interested in understanding ways in which it could be simplified or abstracted from for use by other meetups or else extended for us to perform other functions than Friday meetups.

As a developer, what are the holes? What else do you need to know to be able to start building a prototype? I’m language or environment agnostic at the moment and would like outputs to be available in multiple forms, not just the existing wiki. Beyond the twitter API you might consider getting this bot to talk to the pbwiki API (perhaps “Going” writes some details from your twitter profile to a wiki page) or you might look at it talking to the Eventbrite API or whatever.

I hope it goes without saying that all parts of the development process should be Open Source – you should be prepared to share your code with others for the benefit of the Tuttle community and anyone else who wishes to use it.

(also, apologies, I’m forgetting to say thankyou to @yellowpark, @evangineer and @robocallaghan for helping me get my thinking this far)

Here’s the Annual Report I’ve been promising you for so long. I expect you’ll enjoy reading it about 38.94% as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thanks to everyone who contributed.

E&OE, subject to contract, without prejudice etc.

Pass it on.

I took an impromptu trip to Oxford today to do a lightning inspection of the newly formed social media cafe there Luckily everyone at the Jam Factory (also confusingly labelled The Old Marmalade Factory) had their 27B/6’s ready, in triplicate and duly signed and stamped. Also the main entrance on Park End Street was a cunning diversion from the real entrance round the corner – that will have put off any clueless opportunists who insist on reading maps and addresses literally. 10/10

But seriously, it was great to see another little outcropping of tuttle spirit with people who’d never been to another tuttle getting it straight away and seeing the benefits.

Big thanks to Colin, Donna & Robbie at 1000heads for getting it started and keeping going.

Yeeeee-haw! I’m very grateful to Sam Michel of Chinwag for letting us have a Tuttle on the UKTI stand in the Expo Hall of SXSWi this year – we’ll be there from midday on Sunday 15th March. I’m afraid that it will only therefore be open to those with a SXSW badge, but if you’re desperate to join in and don’t have one, then let me know via twitter and there may be ways to find a temporary way round (no guarantees, though I’m afraid).

If any Tuttle regulars could bring some regular builders tea with them, I’m sure that would go down well – the caterers only seem to understand coffee and I forgot to bring a stash of PG Tips