A question was asked by omgtbh on twitter on why anyone would give €50 to Outvesting with no sense of return.

The questions specifcally were
"I don't understand #outvesting nonsense. Why would you give money to a business and expect nothing back? "

Brief background to what Outvesting is

Outvesting was largely inspired by the IQ Prize and the conversation around two blog posts, by Pat Phelan and Joe Drumgoole. While lots of figures were bandied about throughout the discussions the sum of €5,000 kept coming up as a baseline figure that a bootstrapping startup could do something useful with. It’s also the amount of funding received by Level 1 awardees at Social Entrepreneurs Ireland.

So why?  I tweeted twice on this

"We can either moan about the darkness or light some candles. This is lighting a small candle"
&
"with a smart person like @eirepreneur giving a lot more than €50 in terms of time it didn't seem too much"

Is that it? Well yes and no. There is an element of social responsibility, mixed with curiousity mixed with experimentation going on here as well.

I'm serious about the lighting a candle v's cursing the Darkness piece. My Dad was a founder of the Carrick-on-Suir Credit Union many decades ago. Their motto was (and is) "for people not for profit or for charity". It was about bootstrapping a community through small savings and loans. Did it fix all the problems? No. Did it make a significance difference to the community, absolutely.

I'm also curious. I saw some of the twitter chat that started it so when James started the whole thing my thought was. "That is a great idea. And the cost isn't too much. Yeah lets give it a go"

I'm also interested to see if this will work. Its an experiment and it could be amazing or it could be an abject failure.  Who knows. We'll learn from the experiment though. Ideally it'll lead to something else. What else might that be? I don't know. There is only one way to find out.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” - Charles Darwin

As I complete work for an elective lots of things are happening to illustrate the importance of this course. It's why I think this area is both Urgent & Important. This isn't about technology, it's about shifting power structures and an altering working landscape that will continue to take shape for decades to come.

I think the smartest thoughts I've read on this are Ze Frank who commented on

 "the inevitability of an uneven distribution of resources. I look at the events of recent years not as a flattening, but as a shuffling of places on the curve. certain things transition from luxuries to commodities, but new luxuries take their place"

The question for most people is where will they be in that shuffling. The course I'm running is about giving student an edge. That few inches that makes the difference.

A brief glance shows some of what's going on. Mark Little  is crowdsourcing ideas for his new Enterprise on Twitter, as Rupert Murdoch is talking about shutting Google out of his sites. 1.1Million Irish people are on Facebook and 200,000 are joining a Fanpage complaining about the "Hand of Henri".  Salesforce is validating Enterprise use of Social Software with new Chatter tools. At the same time Andrew McAfee published his excellent new book that has defined the idea.

So we'll combine ideas & frameworks. We'll work out how to be more innovative and how to save time, money and resources in this brave new world.  We'll have guest lecturers, new ideas and new ways of working.  My definition of success - this should be the highest impact course you take and should resonante with you for decades to come.

As a background it helps to have read this post first.

Why I spent some time plaing around with Niall Harbisons diagram

There is a real danger of this turning into a mutual backscratching society Niall says nice things about me, I say nice things about Niall and so on ad infinitum. Behind that is something more important.

To understand why I'd spend time redrawing someones diagram I need to tell a few stories. I have been online in one form or another for quite a while (does undergrad years in UCD when I was using Vax terminals to browse Usenet groups and getting help on my final year project on Neural Networks from some of the luminaries in the field date me - yeah thought so). The air now feels similar to the air then, or maybe its how I'm more active now than I've been in quite a while. It doesn't matter something is resonating.

When I started in my first job (ESB or "the board" as its also known) I felt like someone has chopped off one of my senses without Internet access. So I set off to persuade the powers to be to get Internet access (I need it ergo the company should need it). Along my way I discovered a few important things.  I started by getting some time in the office of the head of Planning & Technology section of the IT Dept. This gentleman was tasked with envisioning the future use of technology within  "the board".

I described for him what the Internet was and how it worked. He was incredelous - people online answer questions for each other FOR FREE and don't even expect to be paid for it. He could not comprehend it.  Not so much a gap in understanding but a yawning chasm. He said he'd have a think about it if I costed it and gave a demonstration to him. I set off to do that. It was in the process of costing it that I found out we already had a connection to the internet. It wasn't widely advertised and I found out who looked after it and persuaded them to grant me access. So my missing sense was restored. In the course of a couple of days I learned about generation gaps, culture differences and that clever people will sometimes just go ahead and do things and figure out the consequeces later. I also learned a lot about large organisations and how they work.

Over my few years in the ESB access to the Internet, along with cobbled together CompuServe access and access to some Irish bulletin boards was a great source of advice, programming tips and technical support as we build some cutting edge software. It was great fun.  The unwritten rule was you give and you get. Give and take. Apparantly a lot of this is build into us in the nature of reciprocity around how our species works. The proper way the species works.

So how does this lead to changing Nialls diagram. Well I've been following Niall on Twitter for about a year now. I watched the development of Look & Taste, wondered where the hell he got the time to run with so many different initiatives (be honest Niall its like "The Prestige" there are two of you running around sharing the same name).  In observing I've learned lots. From his blog posts, free content, attending one of the events his business partner Lauren ran for free etc. (Not to mention the flowers for Valentines that I won for posting a comment on Look & Taste. )

So I've gained a lot from Niall. When I saw the diagram I was intrigued. Yet something about it grated like a pebble in a shoe, something I couldn't put my finger on grated. So I talked to Niall and asked if he'd be OK with me having a go improving it. He sent me the link to Google docs. I messed around with it, then printed it out to play around with. I even took the approach of my kids in school and cut out all the pieces and moved them around on the page. It gave me a slightly different perspective on how these tools relate together. To be honest I only thought it a slight improvement on Nialls original document. Rather than waste time on a nice neat diagram I roughed it up with Sharpie and paper before emailing it to Niall. I didn't expect it to end up on the front page of the Simply Zesty blog.

Niall summed it up as "He just wanted to make something better for others to gain knowledge from." which is true. I have a ferocious need and desire to learn I enjoy learning & teaching. It was also about saying thank you and contributing to the pool. I also clearly have too much free time with 1.5 jobs, a PhD underway and 3 small kids. Its still important to contribute, to help others. That was the key lesson of my fathers life.

Over the past year as the country has walked off a financial cliff one shining beacon of hope is the online community in Ireland. I came across the following list that Rowan Manahan blogged about from the first TEDx in Dublin that goes to the heart of this (and I've probably been annoying lots of people with the list). It reads

* Follow your passion
* Find playmates smarter than you
* Solve the important problems
* Share your toys
* Build tools
* Make Magic


This is whats going on withing Twitter and other places in Ireland. Here people, often people who don't have or shouldn't have the time are there to talk to and give advice to and support those who are trying to do things and to build a better country. Over the past few months examples such as Outvesting, BizCamp, and many other shine a very positive light on what we can do when we want to. There are so many smart and helpful people around. It worth reaching out and contributing. You give and you get. Give and take. 

Sergi Brin concludes his Google  founders letter with the words

When I was a child, researching anything involved a long trip to the local library and good deal of luck that one of the books there would be about the subject of interest. I could not have imagined that today anyone would be able to research any topic in seconds. The dark clouds currently looming over the world economy are a hardship for us all, but by the time today's children grow up, this recession will be a footnote in history. Yet the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life.

Think deeply on that last line - "the technologies that we create between now and then will define their way of life."

There is a lot of rubbish spouted about technology, that Facebook is making us less social, that Twitter is dangerous because its impluse based way of signalling interfers with our empathic brain which takes longer to process signals than social media allows. These are worse than nonsence, reporters picking information from scientific press releases and weaving a pretty tale out of air. Either way these stories are for the most part rubbish.

The very clever Lauren Fisher of Simply Zesty has written a post warning that "Social media is not your marketing strategy".

So what says you? Thats obvious. Course it is. Everything smart is obvious when pointed out. Trouble is people often don't stop to think about the obvious. And what's obvious to one isn't necessarily obvious to all.  The comment that at a social media conference "...and there were quite a few who had never heard of Google analytics, alerts or adwords" reinforces this. A bit like a fish not recognising that its swimming in water, sometimes the obvious isn't and needs pointing out.

The most important bit of the whole post is close to the end

To successfully become a consumer-centric agency you need to move away from ‘campaign’ thinking. This is a hard step to take, it is essentially what marketing has always been built on. But there is no point thinking in terms of campaign timings, when what you’re hopefully creating is a loyal community online. That community is not there to receive your your campaign messages when you’re ready to throw them. You have to keep the conversation going and, most importantly, be responsive to what’s happening.

The money quote bears repeating

That community is not there to receive your your campaign messages when you’re ready to throw them.

Kinda a summary of the Cluetrain  now 10 years old and the nature of conversations.  Bears repeating. And will need repeating.