On the road with the Circuit Riders

Yesterday and today I'm out and about with at the UK Circuit Riders conference in sunny Birmingham. We had a great day yesterday and I helped out with a session run by David Wilcox, Nick Booth and Laura Whitehead who I've finally met!). highlight of the session was the chance to Skype with Beth Kanter (who has already blogged about it here).

In the first session we also got to run a brief version of the Social Media Game (we ran out of time on the second session) and have a good discussion on being 'Naked in the Goldfish Bowl'. As a representative of the semi-professional naturists ruralnet|uk I was able to give some examples doing stuff in the open and how it works for real - including this process and the Innovation Exchange bid (successful failure) on doing stuff out in the open. I've been a bit hamstring by no freely available wireless and the 4 cyber cafe computers not working yesterday but there are now some pictures up - Laura has more too and everything tagged ukriders is here .

Speaking of doing stuff in the open we've submitted an idea to the Social Innovation Camp. It's for what we call Active Brokerage - a system where community groups can seek mentors in a trusted space, and interested/available mentors offer their services. Offers and mentor profiles are sent to the group for consideration.Groups choose a mentor, and the choice is posted in the ‘mentor forum’. The chosen mentor then helps the group through the project/problem. Groups report on project outcomes to the marketplace so results are shared with the community. Mentors post project/problem reports for peer review in mentor forum. We've been doing this for a while on our old platform, but we're sure that the Social Innovation Campers can come up with a much better 'Web 2.0' way of doing it - we'll let you know how it goes.