Canon Cameras at Tuttle

It’s getting harder and harder to pay for your own coffee at Tuttle. Since we moved over there, our new hosts, LEON, in Spitalfields have been very generously giving away free first coffees until 11am for lovely Tuttle folk – and now Canon Cameras are covering the costs for the whole session (within reason!)

Sam at Canon Camera Buzz writes: “At Friday’s event Canon will be showcasing cameras from compacts to high-end Digital SLRs. If you have any questions, whether on the products being demonstrated or any Canon camera, the Canon UK team will be there and more than happy to help.”

As usual, there’ll be room for you to carry on tuttling without having anything to do with the sponsor if you really don’t want to, but I think people who come to tuttle, but who aren’t interested in shiny new camera kit are few and far between.

If you want to know more, follow @canoncamerabuzz and the hashtag #canontuttle

Pastures new again

As I announced to the Tuttle Club on Friday morning, we are in need of a new home. The simple story is that there’s an education event going on every Friday at the ICA which is incompatible with Tuttle being there. They thought we could co-exist but having tried it out last week, they realised how excitable, energetic, noisy and disruptive our presence can be.

It’s been an excellent space for us, and I’ve seen upset in people about losing the space even temporarily, in the last day or so that is as much about affection for the ICA bar as it is affection for Tuttle or just a resistance to change. We care continuing our relationship with the ICA. In the pipe line, for example is a Tuttle Film Club. I’d urge you to consider being a member there – it’s a great place for people like us to support and be part of. And you get discounts (10% off at the bar), access to exclusive events & priority programme info all for £35 a year (or £30 if you ask for the Tuttle Club offer)

Now then. What are we going to do next. Well in the immediate term we need somewhere to meet next week. I had a lovely offer from Henry at LEON of using the space at their Spitalfields branch and that looks like where we’ll be, subject to final confirmation which I expect to have cleared in the next day or so. I will confirm the details here and on twitter – so if you can’t see anything else other than this statement, that means there’s nothing else to see. CONFIRMED – we’ll have a reserved section from 10-12 Keeping an eye on #tuttle on twitter is always a good idea anyway.

I don’t know how repeatable this offer is as we go forward or how sustainable we’d find meeting in a cafe like that every week. As a incorrigible prototyper and continuous improver, my challenge to the group is for us to find a space “even better than the ICA”. That’s a tough challenge but it also helps me remember that we’ve grown and changed in the last year and we should acknowledge that in our choice of future home.

We should in any case think hard about what to do next. There are a few options I’d like to play around with:

1) Stop, forget it, go home. It was fun while it lasted, alright let’s get back to Friday mornings at work. Should we? Have we run our course?

Given that we’ve consistently been attracting between 50 and 70 people every week (except Boxing Day) and still there are people who say to me “Ah Tuttle, yes I hear it’s very good, I’ve been meaning to come, it’s just been a bit tricky” and every week there are still more new people than I can physically meet in one session, I don’t think we’ve exhausted the format.

2) Look for somewhere else. Think of all the open empty spaces in London that we could imagine Tuttle existing in. Well, what are the minimum requirements? Most people say: somewhere to sit, the ability to make or buy coffee, and wifi. I’m interested in pushing that a bit further what are the things about the physical environment of the ICA that you really appreciate?

Royal Festival Hall, National Theatre, Barbican, all have large open public spaces. The School of Everything unplugged event manages nicely at the RFH, for example, but that’s at most 10-15 people. Even if the move halved the number of people we’d dominate the space we occupied, so it would have to be by arrangement with the venue, not just a flashmob. An important Tuttle principle is “Don’t piss the venue off” I also like having a space exclusively, so you don’t have to constantly be asking people whether their there for Tuttle or not when they wander up to the huge crowd.

It should also be free (gratis) – the deal with the ICA was that they didn’t charge us for the space and there was no minimum spend at the bar. I’m not at all keen on going somewhere that means we have to either raise a group collection every week or need to bring in sponsors every single week – if we have someone else’s space it should be on a philanthropic or patronage basis – they have to see (as the ICA did) what the value of having us there is, and it’s not straightforward to articulate and measure.

I’d like to nail a common assumption though. As much as we’d love to think that all venue owners would be grateful to have 50 or 60 people in their space spending some money on a Friday afternoon, when it comes down to it, anybody with a space that we’d be able to use, has an existing plan and model for how to maximise revenue from it and minimise their costs. Free might (or might not!) work in our business, but very few restaurateurs, pub landlords or general managers have gotten their heads around it yet.

I think there’s more mileage in expressing our need loudly and letting interested parties come to us, rather than go around trying to persuade people.

If we reject the first option and choose to continue then at least at first we have to explore this route.

3) Go Large. This is to continue with the original vision of having a space of our own, even if it’s contained within something else. It means grasping the nettle now and maing a business out of it, a business that engages in providing consulting services, running other events in a full-time space all of which subsidise the freeness of open Tuttling on a Friday morning (and doubtless afternoon too). Perhaps I’ve been waiting for a crisis like this in order to push me into really going much bigger.

hmmm….

Actions for you

I think there are a few things to do to help us all find our way.

1) Make a list of all the possible venues, their facilities, location, cost where known etc. This is something that’ll be valuable to the community as a whole anyway – I’m often being asked to suggest venues for stuff. So please contribute to the List of Cool Places (in London) to do Cool Stuff

2) Add to the list of selection criteria - let’s pull together what it is that we’ve liked about where we’ve been and would like to maintain or improve on in the new place.

3) Talk about it with whoever you can, open up conversations about who’s got spare space, who’d like to have us play alongside them, which cats are hep to our jive etc. Talk to me about how can we make Tuttle an even more exciting adventure. Bring me your evil plans.

And remember that this isn’t going to get sorted out for you, we all need everyone to help. Although I talk about a Re-Location Committee, that’s partly just an attempt to reclaim language – this isn’t the sort of Committee your parents served on – it’s self-selecting, if you want in, join in. And if you think I’m a complete nana and am missing the point or need a good talking to or whatever, let’s talk about it in the comments.

Social Media Cafes and other Tuttle-inspired events

As you probably know, I encourage people all over to start their own social media cafe rather than trekking to the nearest big city and then moaning about how long it’s taken to get there.

I want to be absolutely clear, I own nothing here. I have no control over or responsibility for anything that these groups or their members do or say. Neither do they owe me or the Tuttle Club any allegiance – any affiliation is purely informal and may be as tenuous as the fact that one of the founders may have once said something to me about being interested in what we’d done. I have a feeling though that if I’d tried to franchise the idea with contracts and fees and branding and such, they wouldn’t be springing up quite so perkily.

We’re all in it together, kid.

Outside the Central London group (that’s us) I am aware of the following social media cafes, tuttles and tuttle-inspired events. I’m sorry if I’ve missed anyone out. If I’ve left something in that died long ago, let me know.

In the UK, working roughly upwards from the southernmost (though my geography isn’t *that* good) …
Cornwall
Devon
Brighton
Hove
Lewes
Tunbridge Wells
Rochester
Twickenham has kukutana
Thames Valley
Oxford
Bath had a meeting and there’s a facebook group but not sure if there’s any more.
Cardiff has Trydan
Cheltenham
Cambridge has Twig
Coventry & Warks
Solihull
Birmingham
Lichfield
Black Country
Derby
Manchester
Edinburgh

In mainland Europe, I’m only aware of:
Barcelona

In the Land of the Free:
Boston, MA
Long Beach, CA
@langley started something in Denver, CO but it appears to have closed…
Chris Heuer has run a social media cafe at Citizen Space in San Francisco, CA
New York City, NY

So who’s going to get going on Asia, South America, Australasia, or Antarctica…?

Photo by woodleywonderworks on Flickr cc-by

Sponsored by NCVO

This week’s meeting is supported by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations who are launching a new campaiging site Their aim is to create a tool resource for anyone campaigning for change:

“Through Louder you will be able to create a microsite for your campaign with the most used ‘change-tools’ the web has to offer. You will be able to connect to and manage profiles on other social media sites helping you coordinate supporter action.”

There’ll be a small group attending so do go and say hello and thanks for the coffee.

In the meantime you can also follow LouderDevelop on twitter.

Voicebot – it’s a letter writing robot

UPDATE: This has been postponed due to some damage to the robot’s workings during transit. Check in with Charlotte about when the event might happen – in the meantime, I’m sure flowers, grapes and lucozade would be gratefully received by the poorly robot c/o the Sidekick Studios gang.

On Friday 21st August from 9am Charlotte and Alex atSidekick Studios are inviting the Tuttle crowd (old and new) to breakfast with a robot before they head off to the ICA.

The Voicebot is “a robot installation which gives young people a playful and powerful way to have a direct voice in the House of Parliament. Produced for vinspired, the national youth volunteering service, young people will be invited online to tell MPs what they care about. The Voicebot – a letter writing robotic arm which is connected to the internet – will then write out the messages in the real world, in Westminster, creating an open and direct channel of communication between Britain’s youth and politicians.

The project explores how the physical internet can be used to re-connect the public with those who govern us, creating new ways for people to be heard, and tackling problems like democratic deficit. “

There’ll be a live demo of the robot in action at Sidekick Studios, who would love people to come down, check it out, and spread the word that a new robot is in town, and it takes no prisoners.

If anyone has any questions, please email: charlotte@sidekickstudios.net

Our first consulting gig

I want to take this opportunity in mid-engagement to let you know how the consulting work we’ve been doing has gone. I hope you’ve heard by now that it’s gone well, but I’d like to fill in some of the gaps and catch up on my own understanding of how it has worked.

So the introduction was made by Rohan G (then at NESTA) with whom I’d already talked about who we as a loose network could construct a consulting offer. Rohan suggested that we talk to Catherine Fieschi at Counterpoint about what they wanted to do to build some form of platform for discussing and engaging with people about what cultural relations mean in the twenty-first century. I’m glad to say that after I’d explained what we would do in some detail, Catherine agreed with me that our Crowds, Tribes and Teams methodology would be an interesting way to unpick the brief and get to something practical.

We initially agreed to carry out two half-day sessions at the Crowd and Tribe levels. For those who haven’t been paying attention, that means:

Crowd
10-15 of our members meet with a similar number of your people in a relaxed space for free conversation. People are briefed beforehand on the issues facing the client, but the conversation is allowed to wander in the same way that it does at the Tuttle Club itself. It’s an opportunity for blue-sky thinking.

Tribe
7-10 more specialist contributors are identified to drill down further into issues raised in the Crowd session. These people meet again with a similar number of representatives from the client in a series of short facilitated conversations. The main output is a document detailing what we’ve learned so far, a strategic approach to untangling some of the problems and a few immediately realisable benefits and projects.

We agreed that if team work were required and there was something we could do for them we would discuss that after these two, but that either side could walk away after this first bit of work if things didn’t work out.

Now, the process for bringing a crowd together had already begun a few weeks previously. I had been through my address book and chosen the people that fell into the following categories: had been to tuttle a few times; in my address book; freelance/flexible; I would trust them to take in with me to a client. I e-mailed them and asked for some basic information that I could use in marketing materials: a profile pic; a 140-char biography; a summary of skills and interests; and the tribes to which they feel they belongg. I e-mailed 99 people – if you’re reading this and think you should have been included let me know. Exclusion is a bazillion times more likely to be about my poorly managed gmail address book than to be about my discomfort with taking you into a client.

Anyhow, about 45 people came back to me and a few more trickled in since then. At least when I went to pitch the idea to Counterpoint, I had a pretty good idea of the high callibre of person I might have at my disposal. And then having secured the engagement, I e-mailed the 45-ish to say “this is what the gig is and when, the first 14 people to e-mail me back get to come and play” or words to that effect. I then went out for an afternoon walk. And when I got back I had 22 messages in my mailbox from eager tuttle beavers. You are lovely.

So the quick-draw 14 were, in order of alacrity: Steve Lawson,
Al Robertson, John Dodds, Ben Mason, Brian Condon, Suw Charman-Anderson, David Jennings, Patrick Hadfield, Andy Roberts, Caroline Bottomley, Alison Wheeler, David Wilcox, Richard Stacy and Ben Walker. I knew that I could take any one of them into the client for a half-day and create something very good, but to have 15 of us had mind-blowing potential. I’m glad to say that we fulfilled that potential, and minds were blown (including mine).

Round 1

I’d suggested that we meet in a neutral space. Both sessions were held at Wallacespace in Covent Garden. Lovely, lovely space, thank you. And we started with one of their excellent lunches. Then we went and sat in the “living room” for the afternoon. I facilitated. Catherine gave a brief intro to the brief and we did introductions – it turned out that we had a surprising number of musicians in the group both tuttlers and BC people, though as Steve Lawson was among the first to say hello, perhaps he just set the tone!

We went into conversation. As with Tuttle on Fridays there was no more format than this. From time to time, I would ask them to pause and take the temperature to see if everyone was OK or if people needed a chance to move and talk to new people, but I resisted the temptation to “do” more. After 3 hours of these chats I started the process of convergence to create some placeholders so that we could recall the conversation later. I stressed throughout the afternoon that it was about having the conversation rather than creating a document. And I tried to keep this documentation process true to that. Firstly, I asked people to write (preferably longhand) a paragraph or two describing what they’d learned or found out in the afternoon. We had a wander round the room and had a look at what each other had written.

Then I suggested that people get into Tuttler/BC pairs and come up with three bullet point ideas that needed to be captured. We then played the “same or different” sorting game on a big table to create some concept groupings. And that was all.

It feels uncomfortable to go into the details of the feedback we got without specific permissions, but they loved it. Everyone went away smiley and energized. I’ve asked for some feedback that we can use publicly.

Round 2

So then a week later, six of us went back for more. The second session was still conversational but with more structure to help us boil down to a set of projects for consideration. Into the pot I threw a couple of exercises stolen from my improvisation idol, Johnnie Moore – for those who know Johnnie’s repertoire these were the collaborative face drawing and the fast-draw product pitching exercise. I threw these in when it felt like time to encourage people to keep thinking together and get away from judging ideas too quickly. We did a coupld of rounds of conversation focusing on getting ideas down and then trying to grow them organically (next time I’ll also use Johnnie’s “Yes… and…” exercise)

And then we split. I put the BC people on one side of the room and brought the Tuttle team to huddle around a table together. The BC people were tasked with bringing together all of the (potentially duplicated or overlapping) projects into a simple list. We, on the other hand started looking together for a way forward, a way to add further value. After some meandering and group contemplation, Brian Condon gave us the lead by suggesting a frame for categorising the projects: a y-axis of difficulty or perceived difficulty and an x-axis continuum of novelty between “Yawn! I thought they’d do that” and “Wow! I never thought they’d do that”. We plotted projects on this frame and by doing so developed the ideas a little to see how they could be made easier and have more wow!ness.

Right now, we’re in a process of choosing, defining and costing the Team projects that will kick off very soon in time to create a social platform for engagement by November.

And so…

I really enjoyed doing this and am looking forward to the project work – we’re now looking for more, appropriately open-minded clients to engage in more Crowd and Tribe activities.

And it feels like a time to say something of what I’ve learned or remembered during the process so far. Here are some snippets:

Patience is a virtue, both at the micro level of allowing people time to settle, talk, think and reflect before expecting them to “produce” something, and at the macro level – this is the style of work I’ve wanted to do for at least seven years, but in 2002 I had no idea where on earth I might find 15 likeminded collaborators or be able to convince a client that we could do something useful.

I’m most at home serving the group, allowing them to flower. It’s a beautiful process to observe.

Everyone is creative, capable of creation in one way or another. Categorising people as creatives or managers is fake and doesn’t serve us well, especially in a space where we require innovation and change. People are amazing.

It is possible to bring thirty people together and have a productive conversation without constantly telling them what to do.

My years as a jazz kid have paid off – sitting in smoky cellars in the 70s with a bottle of coca-cola and a packet of crisps, watching and listening to men come together in scratch bands and make beautiful music together is a great preparation for this sort of work.

We could have done this at any time – it’s an obvious move to make to create a consulting offer out of a network of smart people. What I’m pleased about is that we let it emerge, we didn’t rush and we’ve ended up with something far more congruent with the general vibe of the network.

[UPDATE 01/10/09: We've started blogging about the projects that were commissioned as a result of this process]

TEDLive in London

[UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, this offer was almost instantly oversubscribed. Sorry to anyone who's only just heard. Yay! for those who got their places]

So this is what I squealed with excitement about yesterday on twitter (not what I swore about today – that’s something else that I’ll write about soon)

I’m going to assume that most people who’ve been to Tuttle or read this blog have heard of the TED conference. If not, I don’t mean to shame you, but really! Go here and check it out, then come back.

So normally you’d expect to have to go to California *and* pay a large amount of money to be part of this experience. OK so the one coming up is in Oxford, so you’d still have to go all the way to *Oxford* (!) but perhaps more challengingly, pay a large amount of money to be part of this experience.

Yesterday, I got a call from Alex at Wieden & Kennedy to say that they were helping Nokia put together an event in a couple of weeks, live-streaming from the TED conference in Oxford at the w+k offices in E1 for FREE and did I know any people in the kind of creative & digital space who might be interested in going along.

That’s when I squealed.

So here is the sign up page for us on Wednesday 22nd – we’ve divided the day up into four slots to maximise the number of people who can take part. You might like to take a look at the schedule to see which slot you’d like most to book. Please don’t be greedy, I know tuttlers aren’t greedy.

There are also sessions on Tuesday afternoon, which is reserved for “Women in Tech” (yes *Women* only – no “Laydees”) and Thursday which is reserved for “Youth” ie people aged 16-25 Please don’t book slots on more than one day. Again, that will help make sure that as many people can come as possible.