After the more formal session earlier this month, handing over the daily tasks for the Board, last weekend saw a more regular get-together.

The theme was Show and Tell, and we each got to talk about what we have been doing in the past 12 months, and use that as a conversation starter or inspiration. Also we invited a few people who have been working with some of us, to bring in fresh perspectives and create more possible connections between our work. All in all a very pleasant day in Nes, in the windy and empty polders south of Amsterdam, on the Amstel river bank.

Photography by Jonathan Marks

Diverse themes, such as systematic innovation, cross cultural understanding, dance and techno, video interviewing children, West African medialabs, urban innovation clusters in Barcelona, public discourse through social software, and self defense courses were discussed. We are looking forward to inviting more people to our coming meetings, and are planning a bigger group meeting in March.

LTR top: Colby, Gil, Ton, Elmine, Michael, bottom: Barry, Jonathan, James, Rob

With the new year, the IFCCC also saw some changes in the daily board. Each year three of the nine board members take up the tasks concerned with the daily management of the IFCCC. These roles are the chair, the secretary and the treasurer. For more than the past year Colby Stuart (Chair), Elmine Wijnia (Secretary) and Michael Graham (Treasurer) have guided the IFCCC through its first year of our formal existence. (Thanks guys!) With the new year it was time to hand over those roles.

As of January 1st, Rob van Andel is our Treasurer, Jonathan Marks is our secretary, and I have taken over as Chair. Colby, Elmine and Michael will of course continue their work as board members of the IFCCC.
Last Sunday saw the formal hand over, with signing the paperwork, handing over the chair, and a group picture.

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We hope the new year will bring renewed energy and inspiration to you and us all. We intend to focus our attention more outward again, after looking inward for a while building our internal structures. Our next Board meeting will be on January 28th, for which we have invited a number of people with whom we have collaborated in the past year.

Have a great 2007!

(photos by Colby Stuart)

Henry Jenkins from M.I.T. has released a white paper - Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century - that makes very clear the challenges and gaps created in a very short time by the Internet paradigm. He also opens our eyes to a new set of competencies required to be able to create value for ourselves in this new media-contextual world.

He opens the door for educational systems to see why it is important that they evolve from a conventional way of teaching and move into a new learning methodology. People that have grown up in a world that has had the Internet as its communication and commerce backbone are “digital natives”. They have a completely different way of engaging than “digital immigrants” or “digital dodgers”.

Each of these profiles has a different set of skills and abilities - some complementary and some that leave wide gaps in the ability to create, build and sustain value. Seing the world through these lenses also reveals huge differences in what people value.

As you read through this paper, you begin to see life through these different lenses. I recommend a serious read through this paper. And if you’re interested in moving deeper, check out Henry’s blog.

This week two proposals were (near) unanimously passed by parliament, instructing the government to create two laws:

To strictly seperate cable networks and services
To open up networks to all service providers

Essentially this is the net neutrality that is so hotly debated in the US at this point. Network owners there are aiming to start charging users for content, based on the ‘premium’ quality of that content, like multimedia etc. It is also about giving ‘paid for’ data more priority in transport. This would result in a poor mans internet connection that is slower and less information rich as the access of people that pay more. With cable companies deciding who’s connection is going to be throttled or not.

By proposing legislation that seperates activities providing networks and those providing services this gets prevented. The network owner then cannot influence the type of content it transports, it merely knows it is transporting data.

Important proposals in my eyes, and also important is the amount of support it got from both government and opposition parties. Minister Wijn of Economic Affairs indicated that there might be some trouble in getting these proposals passed unchallenged by the EU. But he also said that he was behind this ‘with whole his heart’.

Kudos to MPs Van Dam (PvdA) and Hessels (CDA) for proposing it and building the near unanimous parliamentary support.

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At the BlogTalk Reloaded conference in Vienna, we just shared our reflection on the co-evolution between the IFCCC as a community and the set of tools we use to support our work.

The presentation will be is available on Google Video, and we will upload uploaded the sheets of our presentation, once the internet connection here at the conference is stable enough to do so.

Elmine and I enjoyed sharing our story, and are curious to hear the feedback in the Q&A session later on.

Our questions to the audience:

What can we do to make the reflective process on the co-evolution of community and toolset part of our daily community routines?
What signals can we pick up on that point to moving away from the community design principles (valid for the tools as well), or that we are reaching the peek or lowpoint of a new hype cycle iteration in our technology use?
How to build this into a routine for reflection and action?

So that the IFCCC can make the next step on the co-evolutionary path between community and toolset.

(photo by Paolo Valdemarin under CC-license)

(courtesy of volkskrant)

I wanted to pass on this interesting series of articles in the dutch newspaper, Volkskrant, discussing power and transparency within the Netherlands(Dutch only). It is great to see a newspaper diving into discuss such a relevant subject given the rise of social media (blogs) enabling people to say what is on their mind and have their stories picked up by others. There are so many interesting facts from social network analysis of power to determine who is the most powerful(most connected/linked = relevant) person in nederland. Read the blog post here too.

“Nederland heet een transparant land. Buitenlanders weten beter. Wij vinden onszelf tolerant, democratisch en egalitair. Maar we moeten niets hebben van onruststokers als Ayaan Hirsi Ali, mogen ons staatshoofd, de premier noch de regeringscoalitie kiezen én houden er achter de schermen wel degelijk een elite op na.

Dat het Nederland bijna veertig jaar na de ‘tweehonderd van Mertens’ nog altijd zo’n kleine bovenlaag kent, komt naar voren uit zeven afleveringen Macht & Invloed in Nederland en uit de Top 200 van invloedrijkste Nederlanders. Het is een elite, of liever een stelsel van verknoopte deelelites, van hooguit duizend mensen. Zij zijn vooral achter de schermen zonder veel democratische legitimatie actief in talloze raden, besturen en adviescommissies en hebben zo (de mogelijkheid tot) invloed. ‘Holland’, zeggen buitenlanders, ‘is a club, not a country’. ”

This also links into a movement that I have been supporting, which has emerged after the writing and following a conference entitled, BeroepsEer (translates roughly to workers honour). The separation in Nederland between an elite management class and professionals has been causing a lot of pain specifically in education and health sectors. This is not limited though.

There is a great set of links to papers about tagging, knowledge management and knowledge sharing in the outline from the Tagging Workshop in Edinburgh this past week. Definitely worth a read through some of them.

Richard Florida is somewhat of a celebrity here in the Netherlands. He has inspired and affected many corporate and civil decision makers to push the idea of Creative Cities further into government decision making circles . Which is why i found this new initiative by Demos relevant in digging deeper into the implications of how this creative city buzz will manifest in reality.

“This City Salon will explore how cities can break creativity out of the creative cluster and mainstream it across the urban fabric- from public services such as education and transport, to neighbourhood management and budgeting. The session would look explicitly at the skills cities require for the creative age and how cities can bridge the current skills gap.

Cities are back. But for their resurgence to more than a flicker of fashion, cities can’t afford to rely on top-down master plans and the planning department at city hall. Instead cities need to tap into where their real intelligence lies- the creativity of the people who live and work there.

Bristol has earned itself a reputation for bottom-up creativity, from self-build developments like Ashley Vale to its bloom of self-organised music and street festivals. The challenge now for Bristol as a creative city is to find ways for this kind of DIY energy to scale up across the whole city, rather than getting stuck in isolated pockets.

This session will explore the kinds of resources, infrastructure and design principles that Bristol needs to develop as a DIY city, and how such an approach could revitalise and reinvent areas such as Bristol’s housing, transport and night-time economy. ”

via Neighborhoods

We knew it was coming, but now we can watch a series like Grey’s Anatomy before it even hits The Netherlands broadcast TV channels. PeekVid has aggregated a long list of links to all the shows. All the episodes are hosted by Guba.

As IP TV creeps on to our computer screens, what do you think the impact will be on advertising? This was a topic of discussion in the Media Stream at the Summit for the Future 2006 this past week. Opinion seems to lean toward embedded and ambient advertising through product placement.

I also wonder just how long it will take for someone to add a social aspect to this listing aggregator. Then we’ll see people begin to rate each episode and share feedback. This could really help shape the kind of programming that users want to watch.