Playing the game on the 30th floor

I’ve run workshops in village halls, conference centres, board rooms and cubby holes … but no-where as memorable as our venue yesterday at the Chain Reaction event. Amy Sample Ward and I were assigned a room on the 28th – or was it 30th? – floor of the Clifford Chance building in Canary Wharf for our session of the Social by Social game. High, anyway – providing a vista right across east and south-east London: docks, Dome, barrage, offices, warehouses and homes from 16th to 21st century.

So when we started off with the usual question about inventing a scenario – where are we going to play today? – it was pretty impossible to avoid looking out of the window and imaging the community below … with a some help from a couple of people in the room who knew the area.

It turned out that  Canary Wharf was a very mixed sort of place, with top-rental offices and high-priced riverside flats next to social housing; busy with office workers in the day, dead at weekends; retail malls, but few local shops. While there were some strong community groups, and a 32-acre City Farm, action was needed on several fronts: organising festivals and events, getting better engagement and representation for residents, and connecting different communities.

So after filling out a description of the area we split into three groups and used the Social by Social card set to plan some action. You can see the cards we used in my post from yesterday. The three groups first chose from a set of cards offering engagement activities, then from a set of social media and other tools, and finally looked at ways to pay for their plans.

I shot some video as we went along, as you can see here, starting with an introduction from Amy. Thanks everyone who came, entered into the spirit of the occasion, and resisted the temptation to spend the entire time looking out of the window.

Previous game events here.

Social by Social at Chain Reaction

Tomorrow, Amy Sample Ward and I will be running a version of the Social by Social game at the Chain Reaction event in London … which promises to be a terrific 400-strong gathering of community activists, policy people, business leaders, with a few Cabinet Ministers too.

The game will be similar in form to those you’ll find here: we’ll invent a place, break into groups around some social challenges or themes, then use sets of cards to plan how to engage people, choose social media tools, and work out how to fund the package. However, although the format is pretty standard, I’m sure the ideas will be highly creative. The cards and other props are there to stimulate conversation – and that always works.

We’ve tweaked the cards from the last play, as you can see below. Each card has an image (so they don’t all look the same), a description, and budget points from 1-3. The green budget points are for engagement cards, yellow for tools, red for funding. We’ll set a budget for green and yellow, that has to be matched by red.

I wanted to get this preview up so we can do a little promotion of the workshop, and also have an immediate link for anyone who asks where they can get the cards on the day. We’ll shoot some video and report back later.

The official Twitter stream is cr_event, and you should be able to follow tweets tagged #cr09 through a search here. Follow us @socialbysocial

View this document on Scribd

Saving Slaghampton at Reboot Britain

As Amy reports here, we launched the Social by Social handbook at Reboot Britain on Monday … and then brought the content to life with a run of the Social by Social Game.

Before we started games designer Drew Mackie – aided by handbook co-author Professor Clive Holtham – prepared a challenging scenario: the town of Slaghamptom, suffering from rising unemployment, declining industry, public services under pressure,  some social frictions, and a football team recently relegated. What could social technology offer?

Here Drew explains how enthusiastic players formed project teams (we gave them flags to gather round), developed proposals, and then used sets of cards for engagement, technology tools and funding to create a plan. There’s a more detailed explanation of the game here.

Our teams were incredibly creative and produced three projects:

The Carbon Neutral Project

The Community Cohesion Project

The Tourism Project

Afterwards I asked Jag Gill how useful he had found it. Jag works with local voluntary and charity groups in Sheffield, including through the BashMash collaboration days to promote grassroots digital engagement.

You can see the content of the handbook here. We aim to create a wiki version, and make links between the game and handbook content. That way you will be able to play the game for real – in a local community or organisation – develop and plan, and look to the handbook for advice on how to follow through.

During the game I asked Andy Gibson, our co-author, for a quick explanation of what the book is all about. Here’s Andy’s 30 second pitch.

We’re going to Reboot Britain, are you?

An economy deep in recession, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low. We face an unprecedented set of challenges: how can we punch through the gloom?

Instead of more pessimism, at this one-day event on 6 July, we ask you to work together with fresh ideas to Reboot Britain.

How can we take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

Confirmed speakers include Martha Lane-Fox, Gillian Tett (author of Fools Gold), Howard Rheingold,Charles Leadbeater, Craig Newmark (craigslist), Sir Michael Bichard (Design Council and Institute for Government), Jon Gisby/Daniel Heaf (Channel 4), Paul Miller (School of Everything), Alan Moore (SMLXL), Lee Bryant (Headshift), Julie Meyer (Ariadne Capital), Andy Hobsbawn (Do the Green Thing), Jon Watts (MTM London), Jeff Saperstein (Creating Regional Wealth), Jim Schuyler (CTO to the Dalai Lama), MT Rainey (Horsesmouth)

New speakers are being added daily. Check out http://www.rebootbritain.com for more.

Over 350 people have registered for Reboot Britain so far.  If you haven’t already registered you can do so here http://rebootbritain.eventbrite.com/ (Tickets are been priced according to your ability to pay.)

As well as the formal sessions we have a Reboot Camp taking place simultaneously across the venue which include the following:

• Demos present their Progressive Conservatism thinking for public services.
• How are we going to manage doing more for less?
• Learning Without Frontiers: How technology is changing cognitive development, and redesigning our schools for the new age
• WeBank host a peer-to-peer session on new models for lending and borrowing, using Zopa as a case study showing how quickly you can lend or borrow without the middleman

Other sessions include:

• Innovation Live – Stan Stalnaker, Hub Culture
• Social Innovation Camp Express
• Tim Davies – 50 small hurdles that prevent public bodies from unlocking their knowledge
• Elevator Pitches – online democracy, transparency and participation tools
• Conversing with local government at grassroots level- Hyperlocality and active citizenship
• The Stalemate – where next for the media and politics?
• The future of public service media
• Social x Social
• Busting the Silos – opening organizations for growth
• Practical examples of new financial instruments

Can’t wait for this event! We will be there, blogging and Tweeting; and will also be facilitating the Social by Social game session!  If you are in London on July 6th, definitely check this out.  If you aren’t, well, be sure to follow the blog for updates!

Playing the Social by Social Game: London Net Tuesday

Full size image here

The Social by Social Game really took off at Net Tuesday this week when some 20 participants invented a south London borough, created a set of project ideas for better health, happiness and the environment, and then went on to plan how social technology could yield these social benefits. All within 90 minutes.

We did have the benefit of a set of props – more on that later – and lessons from the session that we ran at the SHINE09 conference a couple of weeks ago.

The core team was the same: David Wilcox, Andy Gibson and Amy Sample Ward – all co-authors, with Cass Business School of the forthcoming Social by Social handbook. More on that here.

Thoughts on the Social Collaboration Game from SHINE09

This past Saturday at the SHINE09 unconferance, David Wilcox, Andy Gibson, Drew Mackie and I facilitated a version of what was called the Social Collaboration Game.  We also had some great role playing contributions from Jess Tyrrell of Germination (playing the “Council Leader”) and Cliff Prior of Untld (playing the “Civil Society Minister in a new Tory Government of 2010″). The game combines elements of the Social Media Game, local real-world issues (at SHINE we used local regeneration topics), and the idea development and pitching of the Social Innovation Camp model.

David has written up an incredible rundown of the game, including the cards, the planning documents and more.  Visit the SHINE socialreporter blog to read David’s post.

I wanted to add a bit to our process by adding in some feedback about how I think we can improve the game (we’ll be running it again at the June event for London Net Tuesday!).  If you were there, I would love to hear your thoughts as well; and if you weren’t, well, read David’s post about how it all works and join the conversation!

Ways to improve the Social Collaboration Game:

1. Appropriate context & naming: The name “social collaboration game” doesn’t tell you that you are going to be developing innovative ideas that leverage technology and tackle social change issues while in the format of pitching your idea/proposal/startup to a “funder.”  The name and the brief description need to convey those elements immediately so we don’t spend a great deal of time explaining it in the first place when starting the game and so people aren’t confused when we give them technology cards, or ask them to prepare an overview of their project to present.  What should we call it?
2. Keep the timeline realistic: you never know how long it will take for groups or individuals to get through certain parts of activities until you try it, so we tried it, and now we know that initial group formation is pretty quick (at least as quick as we expected if not quicker), but creating/agreeing on an initial idea takes more time exponentially with more people (it isn’t a simple ratio of 5 people w/ 2 minutes to share each and 7 people with 2 minutes to share each = 4 more minutes; instead, it’s 5 people with 2 minutes each and 1 minute of feedback per other group member and 7 people with 2 minutes each and one minute of feedback per other group member, etc.).  Part of keeping the timeline realistic is to build in buffer zones to the agenda so that you have give and take you can use without actually running into other time slots on the agenda.
3. Narrow the goals:  In this round of the game, we had planned that groups would form around possible ideas/topics, create a plan, pitch the plan for “funding” and also create a 3-year  timeline of how an idea like that could unfold.  That is a lot to do in a whole day, let alone an hour or two.  We need to pick what’s doable and focus on that.  Probably leave off the 3-year plan as I imagine that people are less interested in that kind of project development work when it is a fictional projects that they are not actually working on.
4. Streamline the “pitches”: Similar to #3; we confused the participants by letting the “Council Leader” and the “Minister” circulate throughout the groups offering insights into the fictional Borough used in the game and offering different kinds of seed funding or advising.  Then, we asked that the groups pitch to the same two people for ultimate funding (”winning”).  If we limit the funding conversations to the end, I think groups will have more time to talk about their ideas and will worry less about understanding a fictional Borough.  It would also be great, as a side note here, to allow groups to create their own contexts/Boroughs.
5. More public sharing: The point of breaking people up into groups is that there can be many more engaged groups instead of one large group with minimal participation.  This means we have 5 or 6 great ideas instead of one.  But without a public sharing/pitching of the idea then the other groups never learn from each other.  I’d like to see the end of the game include the pitches with the full group listening or even voting instead of letting the energy drop as groups pitch to the “funders” individually.

Obviously lots to talk about and we are really excited to facilitate the game in more contexts and with other groups!  So many terrific conversations come out of a facilitated experiement like this and what’s most exciting are how promising and realistic the proposals are that are generated by participants!

Next, we need to create a wiki for the game so that we can capture these actual social innovations, keep participants connected, and continue the conversations!

Social by Social Game at SHINE09

On Saturday at SHINE09 about 40 people spent a couple of hours playing the Social Collaboration Game … mixing regeneration challenges, social media tools and a splash of Social Innovation Camp. The session generated a lot of buzz as groups pitched entrepreneurial ideas for tackling social, environmental and economic problems in a fictitious borough not unlike east London.

We started with Jess Tyrrell of Germination playing council leader, and explaining how they hoped social entrepreneurs would come up with some innovative project ideas. Cliff Prior of Unltd was a very convincing Civil Society Minister in a new Tory Government of 2010 promoting localism and a shift from big central funds to social enterprise. William Perrin gave an spirited account of how the KingsCrossEnvironment blog has successfully acted as a campaigning focus for the area – and how the 4ip-funded Talk About Local project will spread the model country-wide.

Everyone then milled about to form groups and come up with project ideas, which they took to Jess and Cliff for initial approval. If they got the nod, they were give a set of cards representing technology tools and other methods for project development, and offered mentoring from Amy Sample Ward and Andy Gibson.

The cards each had an image, description and budget points of 1,2 or 3 representing cost or difficulty. Groups had to choose cards totalling 10 points and pitch back to Jess and Cliff ideas that would fit into their earlier briefing. Download the cards here or view below on Scribd.

Cards for Social Collaboration Game at Shine09