Bumph Box

I wanted a tool which could help me record my moods at any given time. I’m wondering by being conscious of my moods or emotions and recording them, I could effectively control them or at least think about how they affect me and whether I can do anything differently etc. By recording all the data I can maybe get an idea of how grumpy I really am – maybe it should be called the Grumpometer.

Anyway, having a look at available apps (ideally I want to record stuff on the go) nothing really stood out and I thought I could probably knock something together using free existing tools. So, using a combination of Twitter, WordPress and Your Flowing Data. I have a basic mood tracker which can provide me extremely dull information about myself, as long as I remember to input my feelings.

When I want to record a mood, I go to the mood tracker page which I set up on this blog. That basically gives me a list of emotions to choose from. Choosing one of them fires a tweet direct to Your Flowing Data which records the details. You can add extra bits in at this point too. This gets added to the other data and makes it all available in a number of snazzy ways. So I could see how often I’ve been happy on a Monday, for instance.

I’m not really confident it will work due to my cockeyed approach to using tech stuff but we’ll see. It’s usually about having a bash at things. I guess it’s set up so anyone can give it a go if you set up a Your Flowing Data account and you’re on Twitter.

Add this link to your phone to record stuff on the go: http://bit.ly/grumpo. It just about works ok on my 3G I Phone.

Here’s my latest recorded emotion

In many respects it’s one of the defining moments of any tournament your team plays in. Their first goal. It takes a weight off a nation’s shoulders, settles them down and offers hope for the rest of the tournament. And those who had invested in HD for these very moments, missed it thanks to the shambolic ITV sports team. I don’t care what or who was to blame. If it was a technical fault, how come they don’t have back up plans? this isn’t fucking beta. And I may be paranoid, but the news that Paddy Power offered odds of 8/1 on any game getting interrupted by ads on ITV just seemed too…. Maybe the person in control of the buttons was Scottish or something.

I built a memory vessel out of love – much more than a crate for growing salad, time will see to that.

I read a tweet from Labour MP, Tom Watson, about an article in the Guardian saying a fifth of young people have never received a letter. This was one of those small coincidences where I’ve had similar fears about writing letters, probably more so just putting ink to paper (or anything to paper for that matter). I’ve been receiving some mentoring for the business and during that process, it was suggested that I should get some of my old skool creativity back on track. Maybe get a band together, do some art or photography. I wanted to try something so stupidly simple first off though, just to see how I felt, and that was stop using the laptop for everything, including taking notes and start jotting stuff down in a notepad again. Amazing how something so simple could have such an effect. Not that it’s sent me down any mega mind blowingly creative path, just unblocked some weird little mental blockage which had started to make me uncomfortable. Call it creative constipation.

Anyways, following on from this, my Dad handed over a load of old family photographs a few months ago and I thought i’d have a bash at some online archive thing (which i’m still procrastinating over) but in amongst the photos were a few letters written to my Mom by my late sister, Jane who died at the age of 23 from leukaemia, back in 1986. Reading these obviously brought on a right old mix of emotions which eventually settled down to an overriding sense of joy. I thought then, it’s only letters that really have this power, they’re physical objects, personal, they age – really wonderful things. So I promised myself that I would write a letter to my boy at least once a month so that maybe he might feel that same sense of joy or something similar, however many years down the line. Also, he likes it when the postman delivers the letters at the moment so it’s nice that he gets something from time to time.

As ever, looking at trying stuff that fits the old digital inclusion / engagement / participation mould, i’ve kicked off a hyperlocal blog (on the tumblr platform)  for where I live. It’s called ‘Roughly Roughley‘ and so far I’ve put a few links up to the MySociety stuff, bus timetables, weather and a SnapGroup.

I’m keen to watch how it takes off and develop, if I manage to get a number of contributors, to see what kind of stuff they want to put up there. I have a few people in mind initially to contribute but i’m currently thinking about building some recognition.

One of my concerns with the whole hyper local thing, is longevity. I wonder whether a year or two down the line, will we have a load of ‘ghost’ blogs where no one continues to contribute. It will be interesting to see how the sites are curated and if plans are put into place to ensure they continue to be used.

One of Solly’s Christmas presents last year was a JCB toy called Rex the Roller. Once I figured out what it was I got quite excited by the idea that JCB had done a range of toys based on their magical yellow monsters. However, that excitement soon waned as the toy itself was a letdown. No genuine feeling of character with ‘Rex’, shoddy graphics and overall unpleasant plasticness. Add to that an irritating click with each roll and poor geordie dialogue, I think JCB took the cheap route to bringing their agricultural, construction and material handling equipment into our family living rooms. Possibly one of the biggest missed opportunities I can think of. The real equipment had already won us over but now I feel somewhat cheated. Probably not fair to say as I haven’t seen the full range, but this experience has left me feeling that we may look elsewhere for such construction related fun in the future.

Click to hear Rex

Another short break. We did Aberystwyth and I got sick.

Since starting up We Share Stuff and doing a few other odds and sods, I didn’t really have any vision of where my ‘office’ type of work would take place. I guess at home but as things have evolved and the nature of the work develops, I’m currently like this.

No apologies for the marker on pad sketch. I didn’t want to get all designer tat on this.

So my ‘Triangle of Work’ Currently consists of three locations where I do my ‘office’ type stuff.

Home
The obvious place, but as family life tends to get in the way of work type stuff no matter how you try to switch off, it’s not the ideal place to get anything done. However, during the evenings when things are a tad calmer, I can settle down and crack on with any photography stuff. Also, I’ll get snippets of stuff done when i’m on my own but I tend to not attempt too much from home other than a few emails and getting stuff into the calender.

Harvest Fields Centre
A great venue only 10 minutes away from where I live. (Harken, North Birmingham co-working types) A conference centre, community centre, churchy type place and co-working space all rolled into one. Free wi-fi, decent coffee and friendly staff make it a great space for getting stuff done. It’s a great place for meeting folks too. I guess I do most of my admin and funding type stuff from here. I hope the venue gets the usage it deserves before too long.

Coffee Lounge, Birmingham
Home to much of Birmingham’s online gubbins, including the Birmingham Social Media Cafe. The venue for me is more of a meeting venue. It allows me to catch up with colleagues from around the borough being such a central city centre location (5 minutes from New Street) and having free wi-fi (albeit a tad flaky at times)

So that’s my triangle. I’m keen to persue the co-working space thing and find other solutions to premesis and offices. The nature of my work with the Internet certainly helps that. Always searching for that free wi-fi logo!

Well that’s a bit vague and presumptuous really. But i’m working on a simple four step process of getting to grips with the ‘net. Based on something along the lines that I follow myself. Really nothing more than a few meanderings and thoughts cobbled together. Not sure if it’s something I should work on.

Understand – by following others online. Watch how they use the web and what they use it for.
Start with some similar setups as yours, successful stuff, the sort of stuff that you’d like to see your org doing online. Search for these. Follow the links and see what they’re up to and what they’re saying and how they’re getting involved. A website leads to blog, which leads to twitter which gives you regular updates. etc (need to try this out)

Realise – see the potential of using the technology to support aims and objectives. Jot down those ideas.
Start brainstorming, all the possibilities, doesn’t matter if it seems far fetched, or silly – it’s about getting the ideas down. you can sift through them later. A big part of online culture is not being afraid to fail. There are so many things to try. Failure is seen as good – something to learn from and evidence. Could your org have a blog? would twitter cause problems or increase our voice? could we have everything all in one place online?

Develop – map out the plans, frameworks and policies to achieve the objectives. Put them into action.
So now you’ve got a list of things you’d like to do. How do you do it? start thinking about who is going to do the work, how do they get trained and how many people need to know how it works and how many people should contribute. Start some timeframes to get things done. Think about the barriers and potential hazards and how this could be potentially overcome or at leaset warned about though policy and guidelines. How is this getting paid for? how much does it cost? who do we pay for it?

Sustain – harness a self sufficient system that nurtures & rewards local skills and initiative.
Give the roles to people within to create a cascading effect of skills. Make sure local enthusiastic people get the chances, try and avoid going outside. Learn as much as possible about potential funding streams and even look at new ideas of generating revenue. make the most of peer mentoring, encourage less confident people to come onboard