Last week, my Uncle Roger passed away in a car accident. He was 82.
I will always remember Uncle Roger for go-carts.
He made them himself.
When he was young and just married, he was working in a big metal factory. But he got bored by factory life and rules, and decided to start up his own business. His niche was the production of high precision metal moulds.
He started with one milling machine in his backyard. I believe he ended up with 20 or more machines when he retired 15 years ago.
The workshop and the backyard was also our play territory. I still very well remember the garden and the big sandbox he has made for children. And he could do amazing things with metal waste, such as building go-carts by welding old tubes, adding old bicycle spare parts to it, such as chains, pedals, and wheels. It was as if he could paint with waste. These go-carts were rock-solid, and if it happened that during one of the races a wheel went off, Uncle Roger was there are the technician in the pit stop to fix it immediately.
When I think about Uncle Roger, I also think about one of his daughters, about my age. She was the first girl I fell in love with. She was lovely, a bit boy-ish in her game and really taking care of me as her nephew when we were on family visit. I wanted to marry her, but unfortunately marrying your niece is not something you do. I think I was 8 or so.
We were a bit late for the funeral due to traffic jams around Brussels. The funeral was held in Flanders, about a 1 ½ hour drive from where I live. The morning was a bit grey, a bit misty, already a bit sad, with fog over the fields. It was a bit chilly when my spouse and me entered the church.
It took me some time to be in full presence during the ceremony.
It’s a long time ago I entered a church. Usually only for marriage or funeral ceremonies, and on a very rare occasion, I step in when I need silence. I sometimes do this when traveling for business.
As the ceremony went on, i looked around the church. From an architecture point of view, this church was fairly straightforward, nothing special really. But the stained glass in the main chapel of the church distracted my attention and musings.
They were beautiful paintings with glass, and each of those stained glasses was labeled with the name of the rich family that had offered this to the institution church; probably it would buy them eternal life in heaven one day.
It made me think of the stained glass artwork by Flanders artist Wim Delvoye, using x-rays of human beings as elements of eternal life. He is very intense, and an absolute innovator.
The artist is from the same region as where the funeral was held. This region of Flanders is also where some of the fiercest battles in World War I and II were fought. It’s deep in Flanders’ DNA, and we have a culture of respect for the war veterans, of which there are not many left these days.
What I did not know is that Uncle Roger was the chairman of one of the local war veterans associations. He never fought the war, but he was volunteered for the position, as known for the social work he did in that area of Flanders.
I was therefore surprised that during the funeral there was a delegation of Belgian war veterans, with flags, and a really good trumpet player honoring my Uncle Roger with the last post and the Belgian national hymn.
It was a simple and serene ceremony. With the same serenity as the family exposes: no frills, with a lot of warmth, respect, love and belonging.
In Flanders, it is the habit that after the funeral, the family relatives are invited for a cosy get together, with a bite and a drink. In some families this is a full three-course lunch, in others – like ours – it is a simple sandwich lunch with fresh soup. It is a moment where the family can re-connect.
I sat in front of my nephew Joost, about my age, which is main curator at one of the most famous art museum in Brussels. He is deeply specialized in medieval paint art, with a deep niche expertise on Rubens and Pieter Breughel the Elder.
He is that much expert, that he is asked by very wealthy families and investors worldwide to do assessments on paintings to make sure they don’t buy copies etc.
The painting above is called “The Blind lead the Blind”, and I use it in a brand new upcoming presentation about innovation and the roles of rebels. The painting was made in 1568 and you can read everything about it on Wikipedia.
I asked Joost if he knew some anecdotes about the painting. I think he went on for more than an hour.
I was impressed with Breughel’s as an innovator, as a rebel and an influencer on many next generations of painters. For his technique, but also as for being one of the first who took art out of the religious context.
My Uncle Roger was not a painter. He was not a rebel. But he definitely is one of my influencers. He was a simple metal worker, self-made made. He worked with hard and steel metal, but he was a very soft man. For me he was the innovator and artist of go-carts. I will remember his soft smile and his endless caring for children playing in the backyard. I will remember him forever.
At Innotribe in Toronto, we had a fantastic group of speakers. We call them “igniters”.
It was energizing and inspiring to see how some of them were each other’s fans on-line, some just met for the first time face-to-face at Sibos. Many of the discussions between speakers were definitely as interesting as the public appearances they made during the Tribe. We have to do something with these deep conversations…
During one of the few break moments, i got myself in a quite engaging discussion with Dan Robles from The Ingenesist Project and Social Flights. We shared our passions and our scarves, and i told Dan about my dream. I like to connect with people at their scarves- and passion-level… Finding the real soul, the real person and what is driving his/her dreams.
The dream of evolving this whole Innotribe event thing in something almost architectural.
Something artistic. Something that combines in a deep way high quality content, super facilitation, and performance. Emotional engagement. Deep conversations. Making an impact. Way beyond our little Inno-“tribe”. Societal impact. Awesomeness. With a richness of values of what it means to be human.
It all boils down to this old idea of mine of setting up a think tank on long term future, to prepare the next Values kit for our children.
I am worried and concerned. For our children. For my girl of six years old.
And apparently, i am not alone. Had a wonderful chat this week with Sam. Went all directions… until we talked about my princess.
In my Prezi “How to Make Babies” (based on my blog post with the same title), i show what happens when she grabs an iPAD and starts drawing.
And the most intriguing is what she said:
“My fingers don’t get dirty”
It was immediately clear to me she was born in digital. And I was thinking that in a couple of years from now, our children will say “my fingers do get dirty” when they make a real painting, on a canvas with wet paint…
It did not take years. Here we are, one year later, and here is a viral video of a two year old baby, who expects a paper magazine to behave like an iPAD.
I am worried and concerned. For our children. For my girl of six years old.
Just one quote, as i know Mark hates to be overquoted and expects people to add their own content:
As we move further into a hypereconomy, we need to assemble value chains from the resources available to us. We need to be able to bring this material together with that design expertise, married to a fabrication capability, delivered via the appropriate transportation logistics. When we can do that, every individual will have the same capabilities to fashion an assembly line that Henry Ford once commanded
Read the post. It’s scary and challenging at the same time.
We need to prepare our children and our pre GEN-Y’s for taking up leadership during the next 10-20 years. When the blurring between man-machine will have materialized. Maybe not the singularity, at least Paul Allen does not think so. But for sure when the frictionless economy will be there. And when it will be important to know what makes us more human humans.
The story of the Turing test, of the speculation and enthusiasm and unease over artificial intelligence in general, is, then, the story of our speculation and enthusiasm and unease over ourselves. What are our abilities? What are we good at? What makes us special?
“Think Tank” is probably the wrong word. Too much talk-club. I was more thinking along the lines of a “movement”. A New Value Movement?
This desire to be part of such movement, that realization was indeed the main trigger to start this blog in the first place. Check out for example some older posts about “Singing my own song” and here about the Think Tank idea and here about “Great to Good: a new value kit”
The concept for a New Value Movement must have sticked on Dan’s ribs, and i was pleasantly surprised to receive a quite extensive thank-you letter from Dan referring to our conversation. I reproduce the letter below in its entirety (my highlights):
Hello Peter;
I don’t believe that I properly thanked you for your confidence in me to present to your truly important attendees at Innotribe.
I tried to go a bit further over the edge of provocation and I hope that I did not go too far. No sooner had we finished those amazing Innotribe sessions did the Occupy Wall Street movement largely validate much of your theme about a New Value movement. It is almost scary to see our prediction that people will re-organize around new value and directly challenge financial currency with social current (currency).
In addition, I learned tremendously at innotribe and my eyes were opened to many new ways of interpreting our goals. I have since updated much of my ongoing positions to reflect what I learned at Innotribe. The Big Data sessions, DAG, and Craig Burton’s API work were especially moving for me.
I believe that the time and technology are right for shifting factors of production away from Land, Labor, and Capital and toward Social, Creative, and Intellectual Assets. We are developing a simple web app which I believe can catalyze this shift at a remarkable rate. Please let me know if you would be willing to offer some comments or suggestions to this project.
Thanks again and please extend my gratitude to Kostas for his wonderful hospitality.
Dan Robles
I am humbled and energized by encouragements like this and it goes without saying that i enthusiastically accept Dan’s invitation to comment on his project.
I also got several calls and reach-outs post-Sibos. From people who i spoke to some months ago about this Think Tank idea. And suddenly, all at the same time they want to talk about it again. It must have to so something with synchronicity. With emergence.
Somehow i feel like i have to take a big jump. Beyond the “classic” Innotribe events. Something bigger, with more impact on society. More depth and meaning.
Is it fear to jump ? Is it not being able to articulate it? And then – recently – somebody close to my heart wrote me:
i caught on to that from you, but you haven’t shared too much with me. it’s paradoxical that you talk about wanting depth and meaning, because you have come across as very closed to me when i see you in person… but maybe you are just distracted and focused? or maybe you are afraid to act as your true self in the swift/innotribe setting?
Am i just distracted and focused? I feel i am both.
Very distracted, as trying to keep-up with this information stream in my RSS feeds, the twitter stream, etc.
Very distracted, as i have probably 20 drafts of blog posts sitting ready to publish.
Very distracted, as i feel my creative energy becoming un-stoppable and ready to burst out something new, big, exciting, energizing, inspiring.
A colleague recently told me:
Peter, i think you need to re-connect with yourself.
Same thing. Fear to act as my true self in the swift/innotribe setting? Or in any setting ?
From time to time i use this blog to re-connect with myself. And to share some of these musings with you all out there.
In the hope that somebody reaches out. Shows me an open door.
Or like last week, reminds me that i am the “heavy artillery” when i think i have become persona-non-grata, because too deep, because too demanding and probably even more so because i don’t always live the values that i preach. Even rarely live them. And it is probably that what undermines trust. I expect trust and am surprised i don’t get it when i don’t live the values that i preach.
What suddenly stopped me in staying alive? Where have you see me changing?
My starting point for this blog in April 2009 was the realization that my mission was to “inspire others to dream”. Now i want to add emotion. In Dutch there is a word for this: “ontroering”. I tried to translate, and the closest i got was “thrill”.
Who wants to help me seeing clearly? Who wants to engage with me in this adventure? Who wants to help articulating what this New Values Movement is?
I am hungry for your feedback. Send me something in the comments of this blog post. Send me an email or DM me. And i need time to think.
This post is a fifth in a series on personal digital identity. Part-1 “The unpolished diamond was published here in August 2010 and Part-2 ‘The Digital Identity Tuner” was published here in September 2010. Part-3 “Personal Data Something” was published here in December 2010. And part-4 “Austin-Munich-Toronto” was published in February 2011 here.
Drawing by Hugh MacLeod (@gapingvoid) during the Innotribe Deep Dive on Digital Identity, Sibos Toronto, September 2011.
That was February 2011. Since then a lot happened. I had so many rich discussions, met so many new fascinating people, and have been aroused by a deluge of new ideas on digital identity. And my employer SWIFT gave the go-ahead for an incubation project on Digital Identity that is now called the “Digital Asset Grid”.
We are moving from money bank to digital (asset) bank
The DAG is an infrastructure play for SWIFT to offer a certified pointer system pointing at the location of digital assets and the associated usage rights
It’s and economic imperative for SWIFT to expose its core competence via API’s
The DAG is a huge opportunity for SWIFT to be a key infrastructure player in offering an end to end hardened infrastructure and end-point to enable the seamless exchange of any sort of digital asset between any number of entities
This is also a huge opportunity for financial institutions to plug-in to this infrastructure for offering a new set of services in the data leverage space in un-regulated data market places
For me Digital Identity is so much more than your log-in, or our account-number that is backed by a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process, or another userid/password or a security token.
I look at it a spectrum. Like you have a spectrum analysis for a star that uniquely identifies it, you can imagine a spectrum for the digital identity of persons:
Digital Identity Spectrum is everything from PKI, account#, Log-In to address, attributes, history, preferences, biometrics, reputation, risk profile, intentions, signals, etc and all this in transaction and time context.
It’s no co-incidence that Facebook recently announced “TimeLine”. Identity in time-context leads to your identity spectrum that is unique at one given time. And yes, you will be able to play it backwards like a movie, but also forward to do trend analysis and forecasting.
VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) is about sharing specific parts of my spectrum with specific vendor(s) in specific transaction context(s). In the Digital Asset Grid project we asked ourselves:
“What if we could apply the VRM principles not only to personal data but to any content, to any piece of information, to ANY digital asset?”
You could then start thinking about sharing specific parts of any digital assets with specific vendor(s) in specific transaction context(s).
In essence, what we are doing, is “weaving” digital contents with associated digital rights and who has the rights to that content.
It’s a map of digital weavings
of digital fabrics
This is how the Digital Asset Grid was born.
Is this not too consumer oriented for an organization like SWIFT? I believe this is the wrong question. The discussion “consumer vs. enterprise” has kept us blind. Same by all sorts of other customer segmentations like “small-medium-large”. In the identity ubiquity game, all this is segmentation is irrelevant.
We have to start thinking in terms of different sorts of entities that participate to the identity-dance. Those entities can be:
Person (humans)
Loose group of persons (for ex Google Circles), that have no legal construct
Commercial companies
Non-Profit companies
Governments
Educational institutions
Programs (code)
The last one – programs – is quite fundamental. We are witnessing the blurring between humans and computers. It smells like early singularity. And in this debate we should not only be concerned on how programs augment humans, but also how humans augment programs. But that is another more philosophical discussion, and some good reading on this can be found in the book “The Most Human Human” by Brian Christian. (Amazon Affiliate link)
Back to our Digital Asset Grid…
The vision of the Digital Asset Grid
is to move the SWIFT network and SWIFT services
from a closed, single-purpose, and messaging-based system
to an open, general-purpose, API-based system
It’s a natural evolution. That’s it. No disruption. No—“the next big thing.”
Just apply out-of-band our core competency to the modern age of connectivity. Instead of destabilizing the market by disruptive innovations, provide the basic infrastructure missing for a global transaction-based platform on the Internet.
Of course, its vision is grand, with plenty of innovative elements and thinking. Here are some examples how we move from the traditional identity “space” to the new “Digital Identity Grid”
I would like to zoom-in on one of the bullet points above: from one way request-response to full duplex dance.
The web – a collection of pages – is based on some simple request-response mechanisms. I request a page and the server responds and gives me the page. End of that transaction.
With the dataweb – a collection of Digital Assets with associated usage rights – we will need something where exchanging entities can perform a dance around and with the Digital Assets. And we want to be sure that they are who they say they are, and that they have the right usage rights to the digital assets. So we move from a two dimensional view of the world (in computer terms a “table”) to a multi-dimensional view (in computer terms a “graph”)
The Digital Asset Data Web is the next phase in the evolution of important internet stuff. It’s probably what comes next in the following series:
To continue the dance metaphor, the SWIFT infrastructure is the Dance Hall where entities meet to perform certain specific dances.
One of the many use cases for the Digital Asset Grid would be to solve compliance, In stead of moving messages from A to B, we keep the data where they are and “point” to them with SWIFT certified pointers to where the data are located and the associated usage rights.
The dance protocol (full duplex) for this use case, from opening of the dance with (a “webhook” in technical terms), to the actual picking-up of the content, and closing the dance and everything in-between, could look like something like this:
PartyA: “hey, I am sending a signal that I wanna dance the tango (slang for payment instructions) with any party in the Swift dance hall at 9pm”
PartyB: “yep, I wanna dance with you, let’s meet in the SWIFT dance hall at the bar”
PartyA: “ok, here we are, cool place ;-)”
PartyA: “Let’s get to business”
PartyA: “I just gave you following rights my payment instructions at this XRI: you have XDI pick-up rights”
PartyB: “ok, gotja. Will pick it up right away”
PartyB: “knock knock, I am coming to fetch those payment instructions”
PartyA: “let’s check if you have the usage rights….”
PartyA: “everything looks fine, go ahead”
PartyB: “loading, loading, loading…”
PartyB: “Ok I am done”
PartyA: “So am I”
PartyB: “tomorrow, same place same time to dance ?”
PartyA: “would love to 😉 9pm again ?”
PartyB: “sure, bye bye”
PartyA: “bye bye”
And, what’s really cool about it, it’s fully auditable, end-to-end.
When telling this story to one of my colleagues, I got the following reaction: “Hey, but you are changing the basic messaging paradigm of SWIFT… I am not sure that I want to support an innovation like this… one that is cutting off the branch from the tree I am sitting on…”
Here is something essential for innovation. Any innovation team in any company should not only look at some nitty-gritty small incremental innovations, but
daring to be great and to re-think
the cash cows of our companies
Like Guy Kawasaki used to say: “the best way to innovate is to set-up a company that is trying to kill your cash-cow”
All the above is about the infrastructure story that SWIFT could play in and in that sense is a bit navel staring. But the biggest opportunity however in all this is probably for banks, financial institutions, and new upcoming innovative financial service providers.
This is a HUGE opportunity to offer new digital services in non-regulated markets
Many examples and use-cases here :
Personal Data Lockers, Digital Asset Lockers, Digital Asset Services aka Digital Bank, « Who-touched-my-data » services, Personal Data Trading Platforms, Digital Asset Trading Platforms, Corporate and Bank Klout Services, Audit services, Tracking services, Big Data and Analytics services, EBAM, Corporate Actions, etc.
Also e-Wallets of all kinds. Not only « wallets » for money but wallets for all sorts of Digital Assets. An e-Wallet is nothing else than a browser on a personal money store. What if we start thinking a browser for a personal data (asset) store?
And I spoke recently to one of our managers in Securities Business : also there plenty of examples, even in looking at trading assets.
So far, the Digital Asset Grid was just the result of a research project at SWIFT. Today, I am very pleased to announce that the SWIFT Incubation Team just gave the green light to move this project in prototype stage.
It means that during Q1 2012, we’ll have a working prototype targeted at a specific use case, but we will expose the API’s of the infrastructure and give them in the hands of developers and challenge them to come up with some cools apps that can be built on top of this infrastructure.
A lot of the thinking in this blog is the condensation of a lot of teamwork of many many people who participated to this Digital Asset Grid project. With the risk of missing out somebody, I’d like to send out a digital invitation signal to those people for a thank-you dance in the SWIFT Dance Hall: Mary Hodder, Kaliya Hamlin, Doc Searls, Drummond Reed, Craig Burton, Andreas Weigend, Gary Thompson, Tony Fish, and also lurking-in Don Thibeau, Scott David, and Peter Hinssen.
Let’s dance put on your red shoes and dance the blues Let’s dance to the song they’re playin’ on the radio
Let’s sway while colour lights up your face Let’s sway sway through the crowd to an empty space
If you say run, I’ll run with you If you say hide, we’ll hide Because my love for you Would break my heart in two If you should fall Into my arms And tremble like a flower
I just opened my on-line newspaper, and there was Steve’s picture page wide.
Immediately felt something happened. Tears fill my eyes. I am moved by Steve’s passing away. That may sound strange from an ex-Microsoft employee, but it isn’t.
First of all, i am not religious.
Secondly, in my previous life, I had the privilege to spend some hours face to face with Bill Gates. I remember how much respect Bill showed for Steve. And i believe it was both ways. There is no doubt that both are great business men, as both have created a garage business into a two digit multi billion dollar business. Bill was unbelievable tense and sharp, and reading the press and publications, Steve was no different.
Both are great leaders. Both are great persons. Both are authentic. Both care about the world at large. But Steve had the charisma, and could time after time touch me emotionally with a every new product launch, quote, humor, “there is one more thing”, thinking differently, and celebrating the corporate rebels and the crazy ones:
We will have to miss all that. I am hungry for the next leader who can inspire me spiritually and emotionally, beyond the mere bottom-line.
Innotribe at Sibos is over. We had a lot of fun: as you can see from the Feel Good video below, all laughing faces.
From now on you can also re-enjoy those moments via Virtual Sibos, where ALL of the Innotribe session are now posted. Or check out some of the sessions you may have missed. You will need your MySibos account and password to access the Virtual Sibos site.
Once you are in, check the tab “conference”:
The sessions that took place in the Innotribe Space, can be found under “Innotribe Space”
We also had two “main conference sessions”: The Future of Money and the Innotribe Opening session. Those you can find under “conference sessions”
There is also some cool Innotribe material from Sibos TV that you can easily find via the Sibos.com home page:
As content curator for Innotribe at Sibos, I am already on my quest for speakers/ignitors and main themes for next year’s Sibos in Osaka.
I am indeed again in my painting and brainstorming mode, and the next couple of weeks I will attend a couple of smaller targeted conferences, where I hope I will find the inspiration for next year’s event. Of course, if you have ideas, don’t hesitate to drop them in the comments section of this blog post, or contact me directly. I am sure you will find me 😉
It was an honor to be your painter this year, and hope to see many of you back next year in Osaka.
I suggest you already reserve the dates: 29 October – 2 November 2012
As an ex-DJ, i had quite some fun in selecting the music for the stings (speaker walk-ins) and movers (in between interactive sessions). Our audience at Sibos liked it so much that they asked to publish the list. Here it is:
Praga Khan – Breakfast in Vegas
Goose – Words
The Black Box Revelation – Do i know you ?
Buscemi – Seaside
D-Shake – Yaaaaaah
Deee-Lite – Pussycat Meow
Moby – Find my Baby
Timbuk3 – The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades
I believe that today we collectively as a team set a new standard for conference events. We have received so many compliments about the content and the interactive format of today, that we start blushing 😉 Heartwarming as well. Thank you to all those out there for the encouragements.
Digital Identity
First half of the day was spent on digital identity, but not in the sense that we usually talk about it at SWIFT. This went way beyond PKI.
All the speakers delivered as expected, but i would like to single-out Doc Searls, with a talk so good, that it made me emotional. And the interactive session was mindblowing with special structures created to represent the infrastructure, a weaver that was made out of 10 mushroom chairs, and a brainstorm about a next-generation browser, not to browse pages, but to browse data. You must start wondering what we have smoked 😉
I also would like to say a couple of words on the Digital Asset Grid project, that was also the subject of the deep-dive later that day.
We are moving from money bank to digital (assett) bank
It’s an infrastructure play for SWIFT to offer a certified pointer system pointing at the location of digital assets and the associated usage rights
It’s imperative for SWIFT to expose its core competence via API’s
This is a huge opportunity for SWIFT to be a key infrastructure player in offering an end to end hardened infrastructure and end-point to enable the seamless exchange of any sort of digital assett between any number of entities
This is also a huge opportunity for financial institutions to plug-in to this infrastructure for offering a new set of services in the data leverage space in un-regulated data market places
We got quite some interest, but is it clear that we’ll have to do quite some internal selling and convincing to make all the benefits of such solution clear. Somebody very senior from a bank suggested that the best thing to do now is probably to build a prototype to make this game-changer more tangible and understandable.
It is probably not-seen at any conference to run one big session of 3 hours like this. It was a great combination of stellar talks about:
Data in context
Data finds data
Examples of big data in action
For each topic we had 2-3 ignitor speeched followed by deep dive exploration labs applying the principles of immersive learning.
in one of them the participants had to make a puzzle
in another they had their own computer to do simulate the concept of the SWIFT Index
All speakers surpassed our wildest expectations. Sean Park opened in a phenomenal way, Michael Chui was rock-solid. Larry, Dave and Amir succeeded in very entertaining sessions without falling in the trap of product pitching or commercials, and they made their content very relevant to the financial industry. Michael Driscoll surprised us all with the enormous sheer volume of data they analyse every day, outbeating a lot of big financial institions with probably more traditional technology. and Michael Ouliel blew everybody away when showing how intelligence services dealt with data in real-time, and applying those technologies on voice, video and other media.
But the absolute star of this session was Jeff Jonas, who had co-designed this session with Mela. The best way to describe Jonas is: ROCK + HEALTH + GAMES = GOD. Jeff is the god of Big Data.
We ran way over time, and even after 3 1/2 hours session, the audience was still hungry for more. Awesome !
Coverage:
We had again a staggering day of twitter activity. Today myself i had a lit bit less time to tweet, as i was content owner for all sessions today. But the audience really compensated for this: thanks to all you peeps out there. Somebody called me “tweetmaster”: i liked that very much, and it encourages me to continue on this path.
Tomorrow is a completely different day. It’s our non-technology-topics day with New Economies, Corporate Culture, Banks for a Better World. And last but not least, we will have our Start-up competion grand finale.
What a day ! So full of energy, emotion and inspiration. Don’t know where to start.
Why not start withe the Innotribe Opening session ?
Opening Session:
As mentioned yesterday, we significantly re-engineered this opening session, based on our experience during the dry-run on Sunday evening.
While the audience was walking-in, we has some nice “spacy” music, with female electronic vocals which gave some sort of mystic ambiance, holding the participants in a deep tension for what was going to come.
Then the lights went down, and from the dark a drummer started playing a tribe-rythm. Slowly African music was faded in, and the Innotribe team – hidden in dark 4 corners of the room – started proclaiming the words of our Power of the Tribe manifesto. A strong emotional start of the session.
Kosta came on, and briefly introduced Lazaro, who gave a 5 min speech about innovation. We were completely taken by surprise when he said “Innotribe is the strongest brand that SWIFT launched in the last 30 years”. Wow! This sentence still shivers down my spine. He repeated same during the Welcome Plenary, and even added: “Innotribe is our secret weapon”. I’d wish that next year we let go the secrecy, and go fully visible mainstream. We can be proud: and there is no reason for false modesty. Let the communication and delivery machine roar at 150% next year !
The next section was scripted as a theatre play. James Gardner, managing director of Spigit was our narrator. This section was a wonderful back and forward conversation between James and our other 3 keynote speakers: Dan Robles from Social Flights, Brett King – this time introduced as Author and Founder of Movenbank, and Heather Schlegel, CEO of Purple Tornado. For those who don’t know, Heather recently joined the Innotribe Team.
There were great interactions with Chris Skinner, the Stanford Students and the Corporate Rebels from Alcatel Lucent.
In this section we could enjoy two worldwide announcements:
Brett announced exclusively the launch of his 100% online bank Movenbank, and the opening of the alpha site on 1 Oct 2011 and the use of the CRED – a sort of virtual credibility currency to facilitate on-boarding and lending for candidate customers with strong social media influence or credibility. This is big stuff.
Dan announced a worldwide partnership with Expedia
The session was wrapped up with a gorgeous video production by Mela about what to expect for the rest of the week at Sibos.
When people walked out of the room, the Innotribe Team held Innotribe flags, escorting the guests up to the Innotribe Space where most of this week’s sessions will be held.
From 12:30 – 14:00 we had the social data session, annimated by our master MC Matteo Rizzi. All talks were excellent and delivered by professional speakers.
What really worked very well was the technique of instigators, sound-boarders, and professional challengers. Chris Skinner and the Stanford Students did not spare the speakers, and almost naturally session participants jumped in with additional questions and observations. In my opinion, a new standard set for audience participation.
Social Data and Collaboration – Deep Dive
The social data lab was very well attended, close to 100 people or so. The group was first split over 3 workshops: reputation and influence, compliance and regulation, and data (for recruitment as an example). They first got inspired by 3×3 matter experts/igniters. In the following part, teams were re-mixed into 6 subteams and received working assignments. A great technique to mix and match the audience, and to create serendipity in the group. At the end the teams had to present their outcome to the group at large.
I agree with Chris when he asked for the relevance of all this for bankers, the “normal” audience for Sibos. It is clearly a point of attention for next sessions at Innotribe. However, off-the-record, one notable speaker told me in confidence that the bankers just don’t get it, and risk to be hopelessly be by-passed by the events. A sign of the times is the fact that today Google formally launched Google Wallet and that no single banker tweeted about this or mentioned it in the conversations.
Hugh MacLeod (twitter @gapingvoid) – who is our celebrity artist from Miami – summarized it quite well: the bankers are in search for a language, a lexicon to express themselved about social media and data.
Reputone
All participants in Innotribe sessions received 5 Reputones, our virtual conference currency. People can express their gratitude and appreciation for somebody else by giving reputones for the quality of networking, opinion, and knowledge. I got several for knowledge and networking and i found receiving very gratifying and motivating. Also giving appreciation is an intrinsic motivator. It’s a deeply human feeling and warm emotion. It really creates a special bond with the person you give to. Maybe we should discuss this wednesday during our session on New Economies, where we will also talk about the Gift Economy.
We had a HUGE response on twitter. At the certain moment the twitter current was so strong that i just could not follow in retweeting. Also the social analytics tool showed an overwhelming presence of Innotribe tweets in the Sibos twitter community. I was told that #innotribe even started trending in cyberspace.
I was particularly charmed by the tweets coming from the Opening Plenary with Peter Sondergaard from Gardner Research, which was apparently so-and-so: one tweeter was publicly showing his/her frustration by saying how he/she was longing for the #innotribe space and atmosphere.
A special place called “home”
Our space is really special. It is so welcoming, that folks like to hang around, make some introductions, relax in the beanbags, grab a bite and a drink. It’s welcoming like a home. That’s exactly how we intended it. Happy to see that it works
Again a special word of thanks to our design and facilitation crew. And to the folks of Jack Morton who delivered today a flawless performance. Yes, also in innovation FNAO is part of our events execution culture
Tomorrow is a very rich day again, with sessions and deep dives on Digital Identity and on Big Data. Like for all Innotribe sessions, we have built in some unique ingredients and performance elements. It’s really hard for me not to reveal the secrets of these sessions, but i really can’t. I signed an NDA with the rest of the Innotribe Team 😉
Looking forward to another exciting Innotribe day!
It is almost 5am on Monday morning now, and I still need to do my daily blog from Innotribe Space. It’s because it was a long day yesterday and it was about 11pm last night when we called it a day 😉 So, I decided to get a good (short) sleep first, and do this with a fresh mind in the silence of the Toronto morning.
Start of the day
The day started yesterday with the daily brief at 7:30am. All activities and to-do’s of the day are kept on a big central whiteboard, tasks are distributed amongst the crew, and status is updated as tasks get completed. And we have 3-4 check-points with the full team throughout the day. It’s super efficient and all crew members are committed like pigs in an (breakfast) omelette.
Room set-up
One of the first big tasks on the list was to go through the room set-up per session. As we make our lives easy (sic), we decided upfront that the room set-up should be different for every session. As everything is video taped, we had to physically set-up every environment so that the video crew can test the lightning and camera focus for specific things that will happen during the sessions.
We also did a dry-run of all the “stings”, walk-ins, and walk-outs: these are music jingles. As mentioned yesterday, different for every session. Quite an undertaking, but the folks from Jack Morton have the right professionals and equipment to program all this. Louise, Alex and team: a BIG thank you: you guys are so good!
Dry-Run Deep Dives
After/during that we looked in detail at the different designs of the interactive deep dive sessions, the by now famous “Innotribe Labs”. As these sessions and the associated assignments for the conference participants need to be perfectly aligned with the messages of our keynotes and projects we want to present, this took some time (understatement).
Students
Today was also the day that our first speakers popped-in into the Innotribe Space. I had the impression that most of them wow-ed with what we had set up, but of course I am biased, so I let you experience and judge yourself the coming 4 days.
This was also the day when we were joined by the students from the Social Data Lab of Andreas Weigend at Stanford University. They became part of the crew, and helped us preparing the activities we planned for our virtual conference currency, the “Reputone”.
Sibos TV
Sibos TV is a full-blown TV Studio infrastructure for the overall Sibos conference. Sibos TV is just in front of the Innotribe Space: they could not have chosen a better spot 😉 It goes without saying that we reserved some broadcast slots throughout the week. You can expect us live today Monday 19 Sep 2011 at 9am (yep, today), with Martine and Hugh MacLeod. And on Thursday around 12:30pm with Kosta and some special appearance. Of course all this needs a dry-run as well. Martine under the studio spotlights. Hollywood is not far away now.
Debrief
As we have daily briefs, we also have daily de-briefs at the end of the day. It’s really cosy and super informal.
It’s fun, full of inside jokes. We pump each other up. We give each other taps on the shoulder It’s also sort of a Tribe feeling to be part of this team. It’s great to feel the Power of the Tribe
Dry-Run Opening
Hey what a coincidence! “The Power of the Tribe” is also the title of our big Innotribe Opening session of today Monday 19 Sep 2011 at 9:30am in Conference Room #1. You can’t miss it.
I can’t say too much about this session, as we want to keep the surprise. But we have designed it as a very a-typical Sibos session, with music, performance, great speakers, lots of interaction, and two very interesting worldwide announcements.
The dry-run for this session started at 5:30pm and it went – what would I say? – “quite” ok. But as we have experienced so many times in the past, the thing only starts living once you are in the real physical environment of the room, with the speakers all there “in flesh”, and with the full technical crew there.
So, guess what? We decided on the spot to re-engineer the session, to get a much better interaction between the speakers, the audience and our 3 “challenger” groups: Chris Skinner, the Stanford students, and the Corporate Rebels from Alcatel Lucent.
I guess it must have been quite late for the speakers last night as well, as they had to re-shuffle their decks, video’s etc overnight.
We all meet again this morning at Sibos at 07:30am for a second complete new dry-run. We are sure this opening will get you thinking and inspired, and launch you all into a fantastic Innotribe roller-coaster for the rest of the week.
We are so happy to take responsibility for what we love, and looking forward to share it with your and be at your service.
This blog post is the first in a daily series of reporting from the Innotribe Space in Toronto. A daily brief and some personal reflections by your blogger of service.
Today was quite some day. All about preparing for the Innotribe show/performance that will start next week Monday 19 September 2011.
This morning we started quite early. All there by 8am !
The Innotribe Space
Our space is gorgeous. It is a 25 x 15m standard conference room that has been transformed in a multi-functional area. All the technical stuff is kept along the walls, so that we can use the space to it’s full capacity. Not capacity in sense of number of participants we can get in, but capacity in the sense how we can most optimally create an environment for immersive learning, deep conversations, participation, and… fun !
We have 2 fantastic 103″ plasma screens, and 3 additional smaller ones that we can hoover over the place as needed.
And we have a great technical infrastructure to deal with all the visuals, audio, video, light effects, etc, etc. All this equipment is operated by a fantastic crew from Jack Morton Worldwide. These guys are super professional !
The room will look different for each of the 12 sessions we’ll run throughout the week. Sometimes in arena format, sometimes in World Café format, etc… but NEVER in a traditional conference theatre style format.
And to relax, we have beanbags “FatBoys”, big and small format 😉
The other rooms
We also went to check-out the 2 other rooms where Innotribe activities are planned. Conference Room 1 is sometimes referred to as “the boxring”, because the stage is in the middle and the audience sits around like in a stadion. Again, plenty of audio/visual support there. That room will be used for the Innotribe Opening session on Monday morning at 9:30am. Not to be missed, and some very special worldwide annoucements to be expected !
Conference Room 3 will be used for the Future of Money session on Thursday at 9am. It looks a bit like a lounge area. And also here we have also a quite spectacular world announcement upcoming.
The debrief
Mela is the boss this week. Every morning we have a brief of all the tasks to be done. With several intermediary checkpoints throughout the day. My tasks included today finding the appropriate jingles for session transitions, helping move chairs, preparing the assignments for the interactive workshop bit of the New Economies session. And like in school, we get good points when we deliver our stuff in time: we are so easy to motivate 😉
Dry run all sessions
The majority of my time was spent on a deep minute by minute rehearsal with the technical and video crews of all the keynote sessions we have this week. Tomorrow, Mela will do the same for all the deep-dives. We look for example at slide decks, speaker announcements, audio and video effects, room format checking, who comes up when, who needs a lapel microphone, where will we put the handheld microphones for our professional challengers, etc, etc
Music selection
I spent some time today on selecting music for the “stings”: these are short soundbits that are played when a speaker comes up. And we wanted of course different stings for every session. Yep, we do it to ourselves 😉 Some of the other music are labeled “movers”: these soundbits are used when we ask the audience to move from one side of the room to the other. Just to make you curious, here are some song titles: breakfast in vegas, Mr. Scruff, Open Sesame, Humanoid,…
The design crew
I was most impressed by the design crew: those are the (SWIFT) people who think deeply on the props and assignments for the interactive sessions, and are also responsible for the execution. Man, this is a lot of prep work ! Some models have to carved in foamboard, magnetic tiles will hold the assignments, sessions will be live scribed, 3D models are being build,… and all this of course in line with the great content we are going to bring this week.
There are still many many things to be done tonight and tomorrow. But we are ready. Ready to give you a performance and experience like you have never seen before at Sibos. Yes, we set high expectations. We think it will be worth it every minute.
Come and joing us at Sibos in the Innotribe Space ! You well never again say “workshop” to an Innotribe Lab! And follow us on Twitter via the hashtag #innotribe
Petervan Studios 