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#breakoutbeceite

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I'm at  #breakoutbeceite in my role as "facilitator/catalyst" helping people to experiment with new models of working:

 

“¿Hacia dónde va el turismo 2.0?, ¿Hasta qué punto Internet ha cambiado nuestra forma de viajar?, más viajes sí, pero más cortos, ¿es el city break el turismo del futuro?, elegir un destino u otro, ¿de qué depende?… ¿qué soluciones innovadoras se plantean en épocas de crisis para un turismo de calidad? Para resolver éstas y otras cuestiones, el hotel La Fábrica de Solfa de Beceite (Teruel) ha organizado para los próximos 23 y 24 de marzo, el primer breakout de Turismo 2.0.

 

El objetivo es reunir a un grupo de profesionales vinculados al turismo y la red fuera de su hábitat natural para intercambiar de forma conjunta experiencias, ideas y modelos de trabajo en un entorno diferente al de este tipo de encuentros.

Desde La Fábrica de Solfa queremos ofrecer precisamente un paquete turístico innovador destinado a personas que no necesiten estar vinculadas a una oficina u otro espacio continuamente y que, al mismo tiempo, entiendan que la combinación entre ocio y trabajo puede potenciar tanto la creatividad como la productividad, además de aprovechar la interacción con otras personas en un entorno favorable, como es un pequeño hotel rural. Con la ayuda de los participantes y seguidores del evento queremos ajustar la oferta a las necesidades de las personas interesadas, en lo que sería un diseño 2.0, abierto a la participación de los potenciales clientes. Esta es un borrador de la propuesta que queremos debatir:

“¿Quieres escapar por unas horas o días de la oficina para compartir una experiencia de trabajo colectivo o simplemente para disfrutar de un entorno adecuado donde desarrollar tus proyectos profesionales o personales? ¿En qué consiste Breakout Beceite? Reúne X personas o apúntate con un grupo multidisciplinar de profesionales que necesiten trabajar en un entorno de paz y, al mismo tiempo, conectarse la naturaleza y disfrutarás de nuestros servicios, todo incluido. No tendrás que preocuparte de nada, os cuidaremos mientras trabajáis relajadamente y programaremos actividades des-estresantes a tu medida y en la medida que decidáis: bicicleta, 4×4, masajes, senderismo… Una oferta de lunes a viernes para freelancers, autónomos y, en general cualquier persona o equipo que no necesite estar vinculado continuamente a un lugar concreto…”

Invitados que participarán:

• José Antonio Donaire , geógrafo, profesor de la Universidad de Gerona, director del Instituto Superior de Estudios Turísticos

• Joan Planas , videoblogger, creador especialista en comunicación audiovisual

• Pedro Jareño, responsable de comunicación de la plataforma Minube

• Chris Pinchen (Cataspanglish ), comunicador especialista en medios sociales, dinamizador de los eventos Breakout organizados por el Citilab de Cornellà.

• Óscar Hernandez es periodista y jefe de la sección Distritos de El Periódico de Catalunya desde 2009. Postgrado de Periodismo Digital en la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) y autor del blog Metatecla .

• Cinta Massó, manager en Hotel Consulting

• Cristina Ribas , consultora, profesora de periodismo en Internet, Universidad Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona.

Modera: Sandra Oñate, periodista”

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Kfé Innovación #kfe03 City projects

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KFE-Logo

Kfé Innovación #kfe03 from chris pinchen on Vimeo.

 

Forgot to mention in the video that people who can't be in any of the venues today can still participate via twitter and chat

Kfé Innovación

Kfé Innovación Facebook discussions

#kfe03

NetworkedCity is a new project we're working on but the sites aren't really ready yet – watch this space

NetworkedCity

BCN Networked City

 

Previous posts about Kfé Innovación

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Kfé Innovación interviews: Peter Corbett

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The folks over at Kfé Innovación asked me to do some interviews for them with movers, shakers & innovators, so here's the first one with Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs and founder of Apps For Democracy. The post over on the Kfé Innovación site has a transcript in English and links to a Spanish translation – check it out here.

Coming up soon in the serie: Codehead, Frank Kresin, Chris Ward and many more…

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A Dance for the Republic (and other uses for blogs)

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637_un-ball-per-la-republica5

So one day way back last summer, my friend Pep tells me about this book he’s recently published, Un ball per la República, which is the story of the Spanish Civil War and the Republic in the village of Alcampell where he grew up. And so we get talking and I ask if he’s going to do an English version, but he says it’s impossible because it’s published by a small Catalan publisher, and I suggest blogging about the book and, you know, making it more than a “book”, with hyperlinks and maps & photos and all the sorts of stuff that a small publisher can’t afford to do, even if they had the vision. Pep loved the idea and A Dance for the Republic was born.

I’m sure “the author” will excuse me for saying that he had a very linear & chronological approach to writing and it took him a few meetings to get his read around the idea of using the blog structure as a platform, the use of categories etc. Check it out if you’re at all interested in the subject matter or how an “online book” can work.

#ict4rd

Ricard Espelt is well known to visitors of this blog for both his role as councillor for new technology in the village of Copons, as well as interviews & posts for TalkingAbout. Right now Ricard is doing a Phd on technology & rural communities and I’ve been helping him a little on his English language blog which he describes as:

“This blog is a platform to communicate with the rural communities and develop a research space for my Phd. My intention is to  use this blog to help my Personal Learning Environment to find more connections and more dialogues with the rural-local researchers.”

So here we have blog repurposed as a publicly available academic research document and communication vehicle. Check it out here

[gfa]

[gfa] is the working title of a blog which we are using to document the investigation into the fascinating and obscure of life of Ana’s grandfather, Gerardo Fernández Agüadero. Read the post about it here or go to the blog itself

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[gfa] A story worth telling

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gfa

When I first met Ana, she didn't tell me that both of her grandfathers had been in prison after the civil war in Spain. That's understandable, but when I first visited her parents place, there was a framed yellowing newspaper article on the wall which was unavoidable. And it spoke of her grandfather, of his time in a dungeon in Venezuela, and then the rest of the story came out. More or less. Because there are an incredible amount of contradictions in the story, but it is a story well worth telling. So after many years, and false starts, we've begun investigating, and now we have the tools to tell thae story as we go along.

Here's the introduction Ana has written on the "project" blog:

Tenemos una tendencia a mejorar nuestros recuerdos, a cambiar los hechos a nuestra conveniencia, no es mal intencionado pero cuando hablamos de un pariente explicamos nuestra versión, y no nos preocupa, demasiado, la veracidad. Si le queremos solo explicamos las cosas buenas y sino ya sabemos que hacemos…

Me gusta escuchar a mis padres explicar historias de nuestra familia, pero como los dos son hijos únicos acaban pronto. Pero hay una historia que siempre ha captado mi interés, la vida de mi abuelo paterno, un hombre que siendo muy joven emigró a América, que estuvo diez años en una mazmorra venezolana, que salió de esta porque le dieron por muerto y le tiraron a los cocodrilos, que le robaron su fortuna, que regresó a España, que lo encarcelaron durante tres años al final de la Guerra Civil , que contrajo matrimonio en artículo mortis, y que como él dijo en una entrevista: "lo que no pude desde entonces es huir de aquel recuerdo…, huir de mí…"

Mi interés por saber qué sucedió, dónde ocurrió y por qué, me ha llevado hasta aquí.

[en]

We have a tendency to improve our memories, to change the facts to our liking, it is not malicious but when we speak of a relative we explain our version, we are not  too concerned about the truth. If we liked the person we just explain the good things and if not, well, you know …

I like listening to my parents tell stories of our family, but as both are only children the stories end soon. But there is a story that has always captured my interest, the life of my grandfather, who as a very young man emigrated to America, spent ten years in a dungeon in Venezuela, who came out of this because he was thought  dead and thrown to crocodiles, who had his fortune stolen, who returned to Spain, was imprisoned for three years at the end of the Civil War, who married in articulo mortis on his deathbed, and as he said in an interview, "what I could not do from then on was escape this memory… run from myself …"

My interest in knowing what happened, where it happened and why has led me here.

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Mind playing tricks I guess

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Bloody hell – not a thing posted on here since last August! Why do I always have the impression that everything is being documented…well I guess it is on the myriad blogs we have for individual stuff and twitter of course. Ok – so we've been doing LOADS of stuff and there's a whole BUNCH of things we're working on, so I'll try and get them down in the next few days…

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Kapow! It’s the Cataspanglish Summer Special! Pt.2/In the City

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One of the most interesting things we've been involved in this year was the Do 1002 Systems/Layers Walkshop Barcelona with Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim. As usual, I've haven't had time to post about it but I've been ruminating on it ever since. The walkshop was pretty well documented – the videos above are by one of the walkers, Marc Pous and there's a lot of stuff on the quick & dirty blog put together by Enric and myself. I've got to finish uploading photos and adding details to the map of the route and you can find my pre-gig post here.

For some time now we at Cataspanglish have been discussing the usefulness (or otherwise) of event formats. Whereas more & more things online are getting geolocated & locally contextualised, so-called knowledge sharing events continue to operate in a void, as if there were some kind of universal truths which operate everywhere. A typical example of this is the references to FixMyStreet made by many speakers over the last year without (usually) exploring the local conditions, history and culture of the UK or (in this case) Spain/Catalonia and why the public are more likely to participate in this sort of project in one place than another.

Another issue is the amount of time & effort which finding & negotiating the use of a suitable venue and infrastructure, such as wifi and power supply, requires. Again, to us this is beginning to seem redundant when public spaces are increasingly connected. Back when I was a dirty squatter,  the lack of physical space/housing & constant moving meant serious organisational problems for the squatting movement, as nearly all the time was spent in just getting a roof over your head. While the housing crisis remains, what has changed is the ability to organise things in public spaces – as has been demonstrated in a rather overkill way by the Breakout events, but exists in an everyday, workaday way in coworking in cafes etc. Also lessons have been learned (by us at least) from the concentration on the building as a space of Citilab instead of Citilab as a collection of concepts & ideas.

Kapow!

Yeah, yeah – but what does it all mean?

It means that through participating in the walkshop and all of the above, we are going to start doing events in public spaces using available infrastructure. Will we do more "Camps"? Well, we've got one up our sleeves, but we want to explore this new idea, so the the next cataspanglish "event" is going to be somewhere in downtown Barcelona and it's going to be a kind of mashup inspired by the walkshop, subtlemob and Hannah Nicklin's "The Smell of Rain Remind Me of You". The theme? The City of course…Watch this space

Here's a video about subtlemob's "As If it Were The Last Time"

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Kapow! It’s the Cataspanglish Summer Special!

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bno67tv2166

Back in the prehistoric period that was my childhood I used to spend my summer pocket money on these "summer special" comics (images taken from this great post on the subject by Lew Stringer). And this summer feels just like one of them, so much stuff crammed in within the covers – so I just wanted to recap a little what's happening in the world of cataspanglish…

Right now we're up to our eyeballs in PodCamp Barcelona 2010 which takes place in El Masnou, September 13-18. Instead of following the format of the last two years and making it easy on ourselves, clever cataspanglish decided to change the format, adding some workshops to give back, through our knowledge, something to the good folks of El Masnou who bankroll the event. We also decided to limit the number of "presentations" and, at the suggestion of @Moof who is working on PodCamp with us this year along with @pdavenne, make the afternoon part of the "main" day of PodCamp Barcelona an after-lunch discussion forum based on the "sobremesa" – the long, leisurely after-lunch, over coffee and liqueurs chats around the table typical of Spain.

Moof and myself had discussed this kind of event idea after attending the 1pound40 conference held by Amplified in London late last year. Much of the thinking about PodCamp Barcelona 2010 has been inspired by the concepts of Sue Thomas and Toby Moores about participation, involvement & creativity which they experiment on through Amplified projects, and conversations with Steve Lawson and Lucy Windmill who came over to PodCamp Barcelona last year. I'd say that what we bring to that (and which complicates everything intensely), is our intent to create the conditions for real time, genuine but informal communication to take place but amongst people expressing themselves in different languages simultaneously. We have the speaker on the podium simultaneous translation thing down, but how can we extend the peer sharing of knowledge and ideas in a real time multilingual context? Maybe through transliteracy?  We'll keep you posted on the results of our experiment and if you've got any thoughts, please share them in the comments.

The other big issue, and one we haven't had the resources to deal with this year, is that of inclusion of disabled and deaf people. We have added a plugin on the Spanish website which reads the posts (need to find one those for Catalan and English too), but the budget didn't stretch to having sign language and attempts to get volunteers has (so-far) failed…

Whew! this getting too damn long for a single comic strip so I'm going to have to use that great expression "to be continued…"

Blam! (update)
Can't believe I forgot to include the Tweetlation real-time tweet translation that Moof set up at PodCamp Barcelona 2009 and which he and Patrick are going to be running this year. Check out Can you tweetlate?

Barcelona Social Media Surgery, Cataspanglish, past stuff

Barcelona Social Media Surgery

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social-media-surgery

[en]

One of the workshops at PodCamp Barcelona will be a social media surgery. This is a format we have wanted to bring to Spain for a long time, but until now we haven’t had critical mass. After PodCamp we’ll continue doing the surgery on a monthly basis.

[es]

Uno de los talleres de PodCamp Barcelona será un quirófano de social media. Este es un formato que ya hace tiempo queríamos hacer en España, pero hasta ahora no había masa crítica sifuciente. Después de PodCamp seguiremos “operando” una vez al mes.

[ca]

Un dels tallers de PodCamp Barcelona serà un quiròfan de social media. Aquest és un format que ja fa temps que volíem fer a Espanya, però fins ara no hi havia massa crítica suficient. Després de PodCamp seguirem “operant” un cop al mes

 

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PodCamp Barcelona 2010

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els vienesos

Well it's hot and sticky in Barcelona & while the country is closed, we're busy preparing PodCamp Barcelona 2010 – the post below is cross-posted from the PodCamp Barcelona site:

PodCamp Barcelona 2010 will take place in El Masnou from September 13 to September 18th. Yes, that's right, five days of PodCamp Barcelona  — because this year we have a new venue, a new format and a theme: community. PodCamp Barcelona has always been about community — in fact, the original idea of the event was to create a community out of the various people and projects using what could loosely be termed "web 2.0". But this year, the theme is going to be more explicit and for this reason we have decided to change the format.

So what's going to happen in El Masnou from September 13 to September 18?

From Monday, September 13 to Thursday, September 16 there will be workshops every evening. The idea of these workshops is to give back to the people of Masnou through our knowledge. If you want to run a workshop at PodCamp Barcelona, please contact us.

Friday and Saturday will be different however. Friday evening will see two sessions and a wine tasting. Saturday will have four sessions in the morning and after lunch, a sobremesa where each table will be able to discuss, provide ideas and conclusions about each of the six community sessions. The idea is to get everybody to participate whether they are presenting or not, and to crowd source ideas to further develop the six communities presented. Of course, there will be another winetasting after the sobremesa session, and possibly a concert by musicians who use social media in their work. If you wish to lead a community session please contact us.

The conclusions from the community sessions will be filmed and put on the TalkingAbout platform where the debate can continue.

There will also be a Speaker's Corner where anybody will be able to present any project they want. The presentations at Speaker's Corner will also be filmed and posted online. If you want to present in Speaker's Corner please contact us.

All of this will take place as in a brand new building in El Masnou, Els Vienesos, gracias once again to the fantastic participation of El Masnou council in PodCamp Barcelona. We hope that PodCamp Barcelona 2010 will enable more people to participate in the debate and lead to practical conclusions for ongoing community activity.

Oh yes, and one more thing: this year there are two new members in the PodCamp Barcelona team – welcome aboard @pdavenne and @moof Bring it on!