Many late night discussions over the last year from FOWA, IT@Cork, eTech, Green:net to Geekyoto, and with the AMEE team have led me to think on topics like

• “digital inheritance”
  (e.g. what if you could inherit your grandfather’s iPod?)
• dematerialisation
  (digital products and products transforming into services)
• desiring what we need
  (as opposed to the consumer movement that drove us from a needs-based culture to a desire-based culture)
• modelling flow rather than inflation
• and change and adaptation in an elastic society
  (to redefine the notion of “growth”)

Far, far too much to try and summarise here, but hopefully good springboards for discussion. A recurring theme is the transformation from products to services  (eg. the instant car rental schemes where you can rent for 30 mins). Digital music has already dematerialised the physical product of music to replace CDs.

Inspired by the powers of ten, I’ve been wondering how in the world might make the 90% reduction in CO2/GHGs that’s required to address climate change. This is an order-of-magnitude change in the way we currently live.

We need to all make “powers of ten” changes to our lives, from the CO2 intensity of our power production, to the way we relate to products and services.

So, to my latest call to action…

“Turn every product into a service for 10 people”

I’ve christened this Δten / Δ10 / Delta Ten, so it can be talked about in those management consulting meetings where 6σ (Six Sigma) is mentioned.

In fact, maybe Delta Ten should be an add-on to Six Sigma?

“Delta Ten seeks to improve the sustainability of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of inefficiencies (errors) and variation in manufacturing and business processes, and extends this to usage patterns (e.g. resource sharing and re-use), consumption and waste, by using strong reductionist techniques to diminish the use of energy and materials by a factor of ten.”

• delta 1 = 10% efficiency increase (10% reduction in materials, increase in energy efficiency, or energy consumption through re-use)
• …
• delta 9 = 90% efficiency increase (90% reduction in materials, increase in energy efficiency, or energy consumption through re-use)
• delta 10 = The process is rendered wholly and demonstrably sustainable through the effective and credible management of resources (e.g. renewable energy, managed forestry, effective waste management, and cradle-to-cradle/biomimetics).

A delta 10 means you have created an environmentally-intelligent service, not a product.

Anyone like to help?

A better voting version of this

Online Surveys & Market Research

Watch it here:

http://www.ageofstupid.net/screening/pp/london_vue_acton

(copy of my post on the O’Reilly Radar)

We’re all aware of the emotive language used to polarize the climate change debate.

There are, however, deeper patterns which are repeated across science as it interfaces with politics and media. These patterns have always bothered me, but they’ve never been as “important” as now.

We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. The sheer complexity of these interweaving systems is staggering.

Much of this change is being driven by “climate science”, and in the communications maelstrom there is a real risk that we further alienate “science” across the board.

We need more scientists with good media training (and presenting capability) to change the way that all sciences are represented and perceived. We need more journalists with deeper science training - and the time and space to actually communicate across all media. We need to present uncertainty clearly, confidently and in a way that doesn’t impede our decision-making.

On the climate issue, there are some impossible levers to contend with;

1. Introducing any doubt into the climate debate stops any action that might combat our human impact.
2. Introducing “certainty” undermines our scientific method and its philosophy.

When represented in political, public and media spaces, these two levers undermine every scientific debate and lead to bad decisions.

Pascal’s Wager is often invoked, and this is entirely reasonable in this case.

It is reasonable because of what’s at stake: the risk of mass extinction events. If there is a probability that anthropogenic climate change will cause the predicted massive interventions in our ecosystem, then we have to act.

The nature of our actions must be commensurate with both the cause and the effect. The causes are many: population, production, consumption - as are the effects: war, poverty, scarcity, etc.

Our interventions will use all our means to address both cause and effect, and those actions will run deep.

Equally, we must allow science to do what it’s designed to do: measure, model, analyse and predict.

From a scientific perspective we must allow more room for theories to evolve, otherwise we’ll only prove what we’re looking for.

However, if we ignore the potential need to act, the consequences are not something anyone will want to see.

It’s not something we can fix later (for me, “geo-engineering” is not a fix, it’s a pre-infected band-aid).

Given the massive complexity of the issues, and that - really - anthropogenic climate change is only one of many “peak consumption” issues that we face, there is no way we can accurately communicate all the arguments that would lead to mass understanding.

However, the complexity issues are no different from those we face in politics. They are not solvable, but they are addressable.

We can communicate the potential outcomes, and the decisions that individuals need to make in order to impact the causes.

Ultimately it’s your personal choice.

My choice is based on my personal exposure to the science, business, data, policy, media, and broader issues around sustainability. That choice is to do my best to catalyse change as fast as I possibly can.

We all need to actively engage in improving communication, so that everyone - potentially everyone on Earth - can make informed choices about the future of the planet we inhabit.

–
Recommended reading:

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a great resource.

Today, the UK Government launched a campaign “to create a more science literate society, highlighting the science and technology based industries of the future”

Below are some highlights from a great summary on the 2degrees site (which requires registration and I’d recommend if you want to get involved).

I’m just back from IT@Cork  where amongst many things I learned that Ireland has one of the most advanced electricity grids in the world - they’re very close to being able to execute Demand Response which, if implemented at scale (internationally), would have a massive impact on energy management, efficiency and reduction. The UK Act will help move this agenda (and others) forward not just in the UK, but internationally.

Credit: Allen Shaw

“The Climate Change Act 2008 is a historic piece of legislation. It is the first of its kind anywhere in the world and, if successful, a model likely to be replicated in other jurisdictions.

A key element of the legislation is the provision for the carbon reduction commitment which this network is all about understanding - and includes the statutory powers to, for instance, develop UK centred carbon trading to fulfil the obligations within the CRC

… the scale up in the deployment of renewables is extremely aggressive and presents significant investment opportunities.

One of the most valuable features of the new Act is the greater certainty on strategy provided by the requirement to specify three five year carbon budgets that will be legally binding and scrutinized by a powerful Climate Change Committee. As the Minister of State for the Environment, Phil Woolas stated:

“The Bill establishes legally binding long-term targets and medium-term budgets to provide greater clarity for UK industry, and that will enable businesses to plan effectively and invest in the technology that is required to move towards a low-carbon economy and to reap the potential economic benefits that are on offer. It will ensure that we adapt to unavoidable climate change as well.”

The Act in more detail:

The Climate Change Act focuses on a number of policy areas:

• Energy efficiency with the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) as flagship policy
• Renewables expansion (increased ten fold by 2020)
• Transport policy
• Low carbon technology
• Zero carbon buildings
• Public awareness and mobilization
• Adaptation

The calendar of activities is:

• 1 December, 2008 the new Climate Change Committee (CCC) delivers advice for the first three carbon budgets.
• 2009 budget first three carbon budgets delivered.
• Mid 2009 detailed proposals presented on carbon budgets.
• September 2009 Climate Change Committee annual report.
• January 2010 government publishes first response to CCC report.

Key features include:

• 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 (26% reduction by 2020).
• All primary greenhouse gases to be included (check)
• A carbon reduction commitment on businesses with half hourly metered consumption > 6,000MWh / year with support for emissions trading
• Provision for inclusion of aviation and international shipping in climate policy.
• Restrictions (amounts still to be determined) on the amount of carbon reductions that can be met by credits earned overseas.
• A Climate Change Committee convened and empowered to advise, scrutinize and report - and hold the government to account.
• Five year carbon budgets to be published three periods at a time - these are legally binding on government.
• Government to report at least five yearly on the degree to which the UK is at risk from climate change.
• Statutory powers to require public bodies and utilities to take action on adaptation.

Other powers bundled with the legislation:

• Provision to enforce charging for single use carrier bags
• Provision for variable charging of domestic waste
• Amendments to the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation

I’ve been a SoundCloud member since Feb 2008. My most recent login threw up a “we have new T+Cs” message with no option to continue unless you said yes. Here’s the standard stuff

1.  USER hereby grants SOUNDCLOUD and its successors and assigns a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download and/or otherwise make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services.
2. USER also grants each and every other registered user of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid up, license to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, publicly perform, digitally perform, publicly display, distribute, stream, download USER’s content and/or otherwise to make USER’s Content available to other users of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website and Services as set forth herein.

Which is all very predictable and quite hard to avoid if you do anything online - the usual definition of “Service” as “anything we want” is normal, if questionable. Now here’s the interesting bit;

3. This license does not grant SOUNDCLOUD the right to sell USER’s Content or otherwise distribute it outside of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website or Services, provided however, that streaming of Content on third party Websites via embedded widgets or the SOUNCLOUD Application Programming Interface (API) or similar tools shall not be deemed a distribution outside of SOUNDCLOUD’s Website or Service.

which on the surface looks necessesary for them to offer an API, however the way it’s worded means that they are explicitly carving out the ability to distribute USER’s Content via the API… and who’s to say they can’t charge for ads on such streaming (and you’d expect the sites embedding the streams to sell ads). Another good example of the deal-flow from £ to content-producer still not being realised.

I presented at <head> at the London Hub (in person) on Friday, and today online (from home). I wanted to capture some of my thoughts immediately before I forget:

This is the first time I believe I’ve seen what I’d call true p2p broadcasting.  Perhaps a coming of age.

Having spent (too) many years webcasting everything from Glastonbury to conferences to Parliament, I have to say that this went very well. I started doing “webcast chats” at Virgin Net in 1996, which worked - and helped me learn how to mash up broadcasting with chat rooms - but the video was still “one-way”. The distributed-source nature of HEAD really changed this context.

As a presenter, I found the experience relatively seamless*. The great benefits of presenting from home included;

- not having to travel the venue, hang around, and travel back.

This is a vast benefit. It’s very low stress, even travelling across London is stressful. No (/minimal) missing out on family time at weekends.

- No CO2 footprint.

- No £cost.

The negative bits? Missing out on serendipity.  This was mitigated, in part, by the Hubs - which is a great idea - and the chat room. It actually felt a bit more human than standing on a stage.

I enjoyed this more than most conferences I’ve spoken at, and had more (and better) questions via the chat room. I also felt much more comfortable stopping “presenting” and actually listening to the questions. Maybe physical conferences should present the back-channel to the presenter on their tele-prompt?

The distributed nature of the presenters coming into the video stream really helped to create a feel of community. Being able to jump between rooms was also very handy.

Things that would make it better;

1) As a presenter, being able to see and/or hear the viewers; somehow. I’m not sure how. More emoticons, a “sucks more/less” slider? This would really help with gauging feedback. Put pressure on your presenters to be better - this can only be a good thing.

2) As both audience and presenter - a cross-room chat back-channel. I’d love to see the chatter from other presentations to see if there were points of serendipity I could pull out (while presenting). As an audience member I’d like to see all the chats.

3) Better software* integration to manage my view vs everyone else’s view and how it can be customised.

4) Presenter’s need to be retrained - this will take time. Aral made a training video, which was great, but we need to extend this to a whole new “stage” (e.g. getting good lighting, decent cams, etc.). I hooked up 2 webcams so I could jump-cut but manage it well while speaking - but I have a motorised cam, so could have given position control to the audience.

In summary, this was a great experience (especially for a first conference) and one I’d definitely repeat.

I also estimate that this approach saved between 1,000 and 5,000 tonnes of CO2.

Well done to Aral and the whole HEAD team.

*Adobe still have a huge amount of work to do to get it right (there were some pretty basic features missing from the online app).

Cape Farewell sets off today with a slightly different crew to norml; including Jarvis Cocker, KT Tunstall, Laurie Anderson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and many other remarkable individuals.

Hopefully I’ll have something more to write about soon, but in the mean time, good luck Chris and no I’m not jealous at all…

(source: http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/)

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the second-lowest extent recorded since the dawn of the satellite era. While slightly above the record-low minimum set in 2007, this season further reinforces the strong negative trend in summertime sea ice extent observed over the past thirty years.

NSIDC will issue a formal press release at the beginning of October with full analysis of the possible causes behind this year’s low ice conditions, particularly interesting aspects of the melt season, the set up going into the winter growth season ahead, and graphics comparing this year to the long-term record.

At least once a year I refer someone I meet to Danny’s superb piece on Wired UK.

I wanted to write about this now, partly because I’m embarking on a new venture, partly because there is a another bubble emerging, but mostly because I’m reminded of the “global coincidence of desires” that Danny spotted in 1994.

An amazing part of what Danny captured was what it felt like at that time: the genuine, emotive belief by an army of people that they could change the world (and many did), and how at a time when the nature of a website was something we were all trying to work out - that individual decisions fundamentally affected the architecture and building blocks that shape what we do now. Aside from the gold-rush, the underlying story of world-changing actions.

I was fortunate enough to work with Tony, Danny and Rik at Virgin Net.

I was in my mid-20s. I was an Astrophysicist and knew a bit about software. I had my own naive views of how the web might bring about the democratisation of information - both through bottom-up action and by redirecting mass-media - I had more than a little to learn.

I certainly wasn’t Wired. My move to London was enough of a culture shock - I remember my first meeting about “online community” - listening to Marketing define it as “everyone inside the M25″, me trying to describe the 800 person village on a small Scottish Island I grew up in, Tony describing Colours Magazine and Danny talking about the real things people were doing. I don’t think any of us actually understood each other.

I spent most of my 4 years at Virgin listening, watching, experimenting and learning how a coincidence of desires is impossible to execute - even within relatively small, exceptionally talented and committed team inside an international brand. Over the last 9 years I’ve learned a bit more about multi-dimensional communication; and the many impossible balances between corporate, social and personal objectives.

This global coincidence of desires is fueling collisions across all our spaces (”convergence” is never anything but a collision). The catalyst is our looming potential self-destruction - our “Resource Crisis” now encapsulates Climate Change and Peak Oil, Energy, Water and Landfill shortages, the depletion of raw materials, globalisation, the list goes on…

Each year I re-read Danny’s “What nearly happened” to remind myself how that time felt, and to re-contextualise one of the most important statements in it, a point that Tony made: “can’t everyone define the future?”.

Apart from great insights backed by luck, I’m not sure anyone understood how the web would really manifest itself today, and how long it would take. I spent at least 5 years attempting to get a YouTube-like idea off the ground, but the serendipity wasn’t fully aligned until 2 years after I stopped trying.

At ETech this year, Tom Loosemore summarised MySociety’s 5 step process for changing civil society, which includes “Leave for X years”.

Now we’re in a space where we are starting to seriously address the combination of cloud, grid and edge, open APIs, open data, openID and oAuth - watching the unfurling of everybody, unpacking system that “dump excess energy in the form of structure” [Burke] and scratching the surfaces of digital identity management.

All these are arriving, coincidentally, at exactly the time we need them - not just in a technological sense, but driven by a global consciousness that we all know: that, really, we need to do this to address sustainable living.

Friends who’ve been pushing the environmental agenda for decades have a tough time right now, having everyone else come in an “own” their parade, but mass-adoption rarely recognises the small army of dedicated individuals who created the movement. It’s a painful transition but we need them all to help us work out what’s next even if it is “move all the towns“.

The fascinating thing for me is watching the whole sustainability space not only collide with itself, but with a broader, globally connected consciousness, driven by a Resource Crisis that will affect every living thing.

The personal desire to catalyse change has been evident in every single person I’ve met over the last 3 years, from politicians to scientists, from bands to hedge funds, from engineers to activists: “everybody”.

Our challenge lies in creative execution: to create many granular, networked spaces that can flourish. How can we let these networks flourish and not only create value for them, but redefine what value means in the process? The words are coming: “Creative Capitalism“, “Philalthrocapitalism” but you have to assume that these are the sticking-plasters of change, similar to the early old-media references to the Net, rather than the radical re-engineering that’s needed. That re-engineering will, most likely, come from unexpected places.