Public Services Lab Blog

Liquid Networks

Carla Ross - 13.10.2010

London coffee houses of the 17th century were fertile ground for innovation.

They gave people from different backgrounds, and with different expertise, a space to gather and share ideas - in short these liquid networks allowed ideas to flourish.

City Camp

I’m just back from a three day stint at City Camp London #ccldn, a coffee shop of its time.

Organised by FutureGov, City Camp started out in Chicago earlier this year with Kevin Curry to bring together influencers , including citizens, to create communities of practice that act on transformative ideas for the city with a particular focus on the web.

FutureGov brought it to London with the aim of bringing together leaders and citizens from across the city for three days of stimulation, participation and collaboration to re-imagine how web 2.0 could shape the future of the city. With the weekend culminating in project pitching to a panel including NESTA.

Where do ideas come from?

Steven Johnson's brilliant TED talk has looked into the idea of communities of interest, touching on old London coffee houses and ending up at the current models like City Camp London.

Diversity, incubation and chaos

Johnson outlined the common patterns for successful ideas which were: diversity, incubation and chaotic environments.

I wouldn’t have described it as chaotic but it was open. I was impressed by the diversity of disciplines there - from  private companies to public bodies, big corporates to small independents, an ebay lawyer, a mapper at google, architects, planners, gamers, designers, developers, ground air controllers, researchers, funders and a medieval historian. As Scott Page says, the key to optimising efficiency in a group is diversity of thought.

Ideas are slow burners

Johnson’s other theory is that brilliant ideas don’t happen in a flash as often reported but are often the result of incubation – a slow hunch – one participant noted that the pitched ideas selected had been brought along to the event in one form or another. One of the benefits of the weekend seemed to be that the ideas that resonated had been slowly incubating in form or another with individuals for a while and CCLDN gave the right conditions for them to come together.

The weekend was an improvement on the Camp model in that it did have a fairly decent blend of government, developers, and funders in the room – which I think will make for more sustainable ideas. There could have been greater representation from central and local government departments, but I think this will come.

Future Gov managed to pull together the right blend to ensure communities successfully formed to tackle challenges. It remains to be seen now whether this has resulted in teams that can take the ideas forward and create sustainable projects and models.

The idea has taken seed with a further 8 City Camps planned across the globe by the new year and now as a result of the weekend a CC Brighton and CC Manchester in the pipeline.

For NESTA’s part, together with Unlimited, we’ve committed to further conversations with five of the eight pitches to see how we can help develop and support the initiatives.

More to follow on these soon - in the meanwhile you can check out the work we've done in this space so far with Reboot Britain.

Helping others find the way

I’m left with one last thought, that the first ones in the coffee house need to be careful not to berate the others who are still finding their way.

A panel discussion on the relative merits between mail and written letters left some of the crowd a little frustrated at the retro feel to the discussion, but at least the government are on that innovation curve, even if at times it’s at the other end.

After all, they are dealing with many citizens who still are also just coming around to thinking about how they can use web 2.0 to organise their life differently.

If we want to bring them along we need to keep the doors open.