Next up, Damien Austin-Walker with the his nascent thoughts on how to use what is essentially a global technology in a local way – in this case, Apple Scrumping, although as a metaphor for community involvement in any project. Mere minutes in to the presentation the questions, ideas and suggestions come flooding – this sounding board seemed to strike a chord with most.

The primary questions were what to faciliate, how to facilitate it and also, importantly, why. On the one hand, people could be incentivised to do community work of all kinds by turning it in to some kind of actual-reality game with rewards; but as it was pointed out, people already want to do things and facilitating that would bring immediate benefits.

Discussed topics skimmed upon everything from social reputation systems to QR codes, RFID and GPS. In many ways discussion overlapped the previous presentation I was in.

Clearly this is an area full of questions without any tried and tested answers. Many good ideas flowed around the room but nobody is really doing any of this stuff yet – at least not to a degree that could be considered household – and nobody can really say what works and what won’t, although everyone is very interested. The major hurdles seem to be the dual barriers of technology uptake and public understanding and acceptance; right now it seems like this sort of facilitated community work would require a lot of geeks in a small space – a bit like this conference. But I have faith in time.

Conclusion: much to explore, many ways to do it, and a lot of enthusiasm from the very people who will make it work.

Tags: actual reality, irl, qr codes, scrumping, social responsibility, XFN

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 11:33 am and is filed under Sessions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.