Simon Booth-Lucking

I'm running a social media workshop at Face to Face, a dance conference held at The Point in Eastleigh on November 9. The workshop includes a variation of the social media game. For the participants future reference here are all the social technologies, categorised as they are in the game.

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Yesterday I had the privilege of a personal tour of the awesome new Ravensbourne building on Greenwich Peninsula. "Welcome to the future of higher education" promised our guide, Head of Enterprise and Innovation Chris Thompson, and he did not disappoint. It's a radical building, housing a radical approach to learning that gives me hope for Britain's chances in the digital industries of the 21st century.

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The building itself is stunning. The patterned facade and angular aesthetic is the perfect counterpoint to the adjacent Millennium Dome. And, quite conciously, nothing about it says "higher education institution". There's not even any signage on the outside. It makes you curious, a trait no doubt encouraged in the students.

Positioned a few minutes walk from North Greenwich tube station, the building is ideally placed for the Olympics-inspired Thames Gateway developments, but still has quick links to the old hubs of the City and West End. This location is a great metaphor for Ravensbourne as a key node in a network of learning and enterprise; an organisation geared for collaboration.

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Once inside this sense of collaboration and openness gets stronger. Sat in the public atrium foyer was like viewing a cross-section of a fantastic ant colony of learning. Students hurried up and down open stairways, seminars could be spotted in open spaces on the second floor, and a half-drawn panel of sliding doors revealed a main lecture space that opened out into the atrium where we sat. All of this was presented with a striking clean interior design that compels students towards industriousness. It seemed to say, "this is where you build the future: now get started."

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To build the future, you need the right kit. Ravensbourne's state-of-the-art equipment had the gadget-boy in me salivating. There were the big things like the TV studio and facilities (the most advanced in Europe) and the recording studio (available to bands playing at The O2 Arena should the urge come over them). The small things were just as impressive. Students could do an impromptu show-and-tell by plugging into a hallway TV screen's HDMI port; printing to your printer of choice is done with a swipe of the student ID card; a hand-held 3D scanner could model both form and texture, which could then be printed to a 3D printer.

Amongst all this gadgetry there is a library, but it's ran on a kind-of honesty system with no librarians. Saving money in this way makes a lot of sense when the previous library only had one book taken out every three weeks. As Chris put it, the students want knowledge not books. In the digital world knowledge often comes iteratively, so Ravensbourne has large prototyping labs with the tools of different crafts placed together to encourage cross-pollination and experimentation.

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The learning style complements the hardware and software of the building. Seminars and lectures take place in open areas and music plays in the background of a fashion workshop. There are courses on enterprise and the students own collaborative work spaces are cleverly placed next to desks rented to start-up businesses.

These things are the Ravensbourne way, and seeing this innovative learning style in its new home one can start to make sense of what's happening here in its recent historical context. The building's neighbour, the Dome, was a structure filled to celebrate the young, confident Britain of New Labour, yet now it hosts the global corporate music circus that is the O2 Arena (I'm pretty sure Jedward are not the future we all hoped for back then). Encircling the Arena are the identikit cafés and restaurants that have sucked the life out of Britain's public spaces. And beyond rises that mega-symbol of the industry that did most to bring us to our current nadir, Canary Wharf.

Ravensbourne's new building suggests a new direction; aware of it's historical neighbours, but more human, collaborative, creative and enterprising. Everyone should wish it luck.

This week I attended a panel session on open data and mobile government. In simple terms, open data is about governments making public data available in a way that lets clever people do useful things with it, such as an iPhone app that tells you when your bus will arrive.

A good panel had been pulled together. Chaired by Daniel Appelquist of Vodafone R&D and Mobile Monday London, it comprised David Mann from the DirectGov innovation team, Phil Archer of Talis, and Kenton Price of Little Fluffy Toys (makers of a Boris Bikes app). Broadly speaking they represented the owners, providers and developers of open data respectively.

Now, open data is á la mode in government circles, so much so that it is explicitly supported in the Coalition programme for government. Having started under the Brown administration, the agenda has survived a general election and the Comprehensive Spending Review.

And it's easy to see why. Open data is a potential panacea to government problems: it addresses lack of trust, the austerity era need to do more with less, and the need for growth in creative and high tech industries. Ideally open data enables a closed loop to occur, where countless small interactions between public services and citizens can be aggregated and fed back for improvement.

For this to work the sub-loop between government and developers needs to be working. But the panel revealed some serious gaps in this loop:

No service guarantees

Kenton Price had clearly been frustrated by the unreliability and unresponsive of TfL, who provide the data his app relies on. And he's not alone in this as app developer Malcolm Barclay discovered recently. Until government can provide some basic service level agreements (SLAs) for its data services the app market will not grow as the investment will carry this risk. If there are no SLAs how will we know when it's failing?

No-one responsible at a low enough level

Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude is ultimately responsible for government open data, but I don't imagine he's taking many calls from irate app developers. Below that it all seems pretty opaque within individual organisations. If no-one's responsible who will hear the small screeches of failure?

Compared to the developer outreach work of companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter the UK government has a lot of catching up to do (the current marketing freeze perhaps not helping here). From the look of surprise on Kenton Price's face it was clear that the outreach work being done (such as Rewired State) was not yet known of widely enough.

Some data held by private companies

Not all public data is produced by public organisations, and with more private companies and social enterprises coming into public service provision this trend is only going to increase. David Mann said that this was already a problem in some cases. Phil Archer suggested open data provisions be written into outsourcing contracts; a good idea but wishful thinking I expect. How can private companies be compelled to use the same loop as everyone else?

Culture still not right

David Mann was at pains to point out that he couldn't speak for all of government, and to be fair his innovation team within DirectGov "get it". He was honest enough to say that in much of government the culture to support open data entrepreneurs with the right service just doesn't exist yet. So, who cares if the loop isn't closed when it isn't their loop to worry about?

Related to this was some brief but interesting discussion about the economics of app development and what, if any, pricing model might be the right one to properly support the mobile government market.

David Mann and Phil Archer both alluded to forthcoming projects that would improve the situation, although they both said they "can't really talk about it just yet", which kind of proves the point about the cultural problems.

In summary

For me this area is a really interesting microcosm of the problems government faces today. Some of the principles are good (open data, Big Society, lower welfare bills), but can government be small and responsive enough for the rapid, Internet-speed 21st century, without shrinking so far that it effectively removes itself from a loop that then quickly becomes chaotic?

The title of this great piece of research by the Brand Science Institute of Hamburg was irresistible to the sober judge in me. I recommend taking its 24 pages with a glass of water if you've done a heavy night on the social media Kool-Aid.

Hat tip for the find to We Are Social.

Micro-bots attacking surveillance cameras are seen as a growing threat. Photo by Matt Biddulph.

Yesterday I listed privacy as one of three problems that will define the next five years of social media. In his post, A Privacy 9-11 Could Derail Social, Steve Rubel describes the threat to social media's (commercial) success.

Anyone in security will tell you that a good defense is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. Yet, no matter how hardened our technological defenses are, it's my bet that somewhere someone will suffer a major privacy leak that impacts millions, sends shock waves through our system and makes us feel less secure than we did before. Such an event could slow interest in social networking and derail its marketing potential.

He points to design decisions by the big platforms (Amazon, Facebook etc.) that are aimed at improving things, and calls on marketers, government and the media to pull their weight.

How might marketers contribute? An immediate thought is inspired by the way that it has become accepted that opt-in rather than opt-out is the right way to do email marketing: must marketers now develop and adopt social permission models? For example, I need to explicitly opt-in to let you tell that hot new Facebook game to invite me to a game. Of course marketers might see that as stopping them creating a viral hit but, as with email marketing, accepted practices do change.

A seemingly small step, but given the growing popularity of social gaming one that potentially changes behavioural norms.

Where will social media be in five years? Mashable, the hyperactive yet still damn useful social media guide, has celebrated its fifth birthday with an article asking just that question. Predictably it is now trending through the TweetBook-o-Sphere quicker than Usain Bolt on skates.

Never one to miss the chance to sober up a passing bandwagon, here's my alternative next five years in social media.

Privacy problems

In January Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg caused a fuss when he was interpreted as effectively saying privacy is dead. Around the same time Google CEO Eric Schmidt was saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Creepy.

I find these attitudes uncomfortable, and the skeletons in my cupboard aren't even that exotic!

A backlash is growing. Advocacy groups like Consumer Watchdog and Electronic Frontier Foundation run critical ads on giant screens in Times Square and help internet users keep up with the privacy settings of new services like Facebook Places. Even Schmidt himself is aware of the risks to vulnerable members of society.

Users need safeguards and control. Companies need the advertising revenues that keep their services largely free at the point of use. This is a big issue to resolve in the next five years of social media.

Identity crisis

Related to privacy problems is identity. In real life we present different selves to different people; clients, colleagues, friends, family. And within those groups we have different circles based on past experiences and future hopes. In the last five years social media has largely put that element of human nature in the ignore pile, leaving users with the choice of self-censorship, potential oversharing or just plain old giving up.

Plenty of research has been done into this problem, with the best I've seen coming from Google researcher Paul Adams, leading to speculation that Google will swoop in and solve it. Whoever solves it in the next five years will have to pay much more attention to:

• How we really think about "friends"
• How we influence and are influenced by other people's opinions
• How we control what others can put in our profile and vice versa
• How we don't understand how big our audience is (for example, here are people slagging off their boss in public)

Power to the people?

In these disengaged and cynical times there's a lot of excitement about social media's impact on democracy. David Cameron and friends are busy talking with Mark Zuckerberg and just about everybody. The best exploration of the potential I've seen is the documentary Us Now - well worth taking the time to watch fully.

But when Clay Shirky, an intellectual cheerleader for online democracy, says that actually it's a bit broken you know there's a problem. So far social media has increased noise but not impact, with politicians disliking or plain ignoring the bulk e-petitions we've all signed. And well-organised but non-representative groups, whether they be lobbyists, football fans or pranksters, have been able to hijack attempts at online consultation.

Despite predictions, the 2010 general election was the TV debate election not the internet election. Social media has got five years to change that next time.

Some more well-known Mad Men

"Are you mad?" This is the most common response I get when I tell people that I've started working for myself. Okay, what they actually say is "That's brave", but I think what they really mean is, "Are you mad? In this double-dipping economy where people are clinging onto their jobs and praying that interest rates stay low? Rather you than me!"