Social Work

One of the great things about the work at the moment, is that the value and the mission is all in non-commercial engagements around goals which are fundamentally about public good.

I'm really excited about a project with the former Schumacher (he of small planet) Development charity, now renamed ">Practical Action So far it is just a dialogue with their team of experts in how knowledge transforms lives. I bring what I know about how digital networks enable knowledge to move around. There might be a conversation later about jointly proposing work in this area to DFID, about how their ideas could be scaled up. It's a special pleasure to be working in Polish with their knowledge guru Zbigniew Mikolajuk, who is a tall energetic polymath. I like his favourite observation, "technology doesn't frighten me. People do". Polish vocabulary and mindset has a great genius for precision - and I see it more in men of Zbiszek's generation (he's a Solidarnosc exile) than in the younger Poles I mostly know. I mostly get to use sloppy domestic and emotive Polish at home - I'm seldom exposed to this treasuretrove of exacting and structured reasoning.

A contact who blogs on headshift writes about a possible social regeneration project we have been discussing. If he runs an 'un-conference' on this digital/social media initiative, essentially an open brainstorm, such as is necessary to get public sector engagement, might this go against the commercial imperative I ought to have as a consultant who's working mainly for a commercial company. The interesting thing is that actually it's the contrary. In any case my terms leave me pretty free to contribute my time and energy wherever I think's best, and I'm chosing to give energy this year not to areas laden with money, but rather to fringe ones that might expose me to problems and areas which are way outside the main moneypots.

The stuff with ESOL on facebook has been all about reaching disenfranchised asylum seekers. And I've had more insights from that into how you get complex content into web 2.0 than I've had from any number of whizzo commercial contracts. Because it's a genuinely new area, where no one has sought for solutions before. It happens that I also talk a lot about ESOL with the top commercial publisher in the field, and we have won several big online production contracts from them. No names given ! But the work was not nearly so innovative as what we did for zero money on the fringes of society. The ESOL client wrote to me today, is puzzled by the small worlds application I built, so I have asked them to meet me there. Check it out in small worlds by searching from Tinopolis ESOL location when you have got your avatar. It's a great AR environment, beats Second Life any day.