“Taking place in the shadow of the closed-down shipbuilding yards, “Sweet Sixteen” rages against the callousness of a capitalist system which abandons its workers”

Excerpt from a BBC review of Ken Loach’s film Sweet Sixteen

I was brought up in one of the grey council houses that feature in that film.

We used to build ships in my home town of Port Glasgow. We have not built ships for many years. I remember the day the QE2 was launched and came down the Clyde to be fitted out in Greenock, the town just next door to Port Glasgow. The ship made a final visit to Greenock in October 2008. The crowds that turned out to say good-bye, and the emotional comments on YouTube videos of the occasion, are indicative of the huge pride that people still have in our largely lost engineering heritage.

I wish the confidence expressed in this clip had been correct. The narrator says that the innovative construction techniques would make the future of the river’s oldest industry secure, “sweeping forward purposefully into the 21st century”. It limped towards the 1980s when the industry finally died.

Regeneration

As you might imagine, the social consequences were catastrophic. It was not just shipbuilding. It was all the ancillary engineering. A whole regional eco-system disappeared. Twenty years on and the effects of this massive industrial decline are still being felt.

It is not all doom and gloom; there has been regeneration. Scotland’s biotechnology industry is thriving (or was before the financial crisis), with Glasgow and the West of Scotland representing 40% of the Scottish life-sciences community in 2006.

Scotland is also ‘punching above its weight’ in video-gaming, particularly focused around clusters in Dundee. The industry is based on the creativity that already existed in comics produced by Dundee companies like D.C. Thomson.

G20 Reflections

I heard someone say that the assembled great and good will be unlikely to agree on what biscuits they want. It is unreasonable to expect much from this summit.

I say this on the basis of a) undisputed evidence of the world’s financial systems being in tatters and their having been in post – except for Obama – under the failed regulatory regimes that allowed the mess to happen and b) what Einstein is supposed to have said  about not being able to solve the significant problems we face at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

The best we can hope for is that the G20 Summit will be just one step in a process of emergent reform. And so, no matter how idealist and perhaps futile it might be to dream and propose how things could be, we all have the chance to contribute to a better future.

Lloyd Davis wrote this on his latest blogpost:

“We’re just realising that we can do an awful lot for ourselves – both as individuals and members of corporations and organisations.”

I have found this a difficult post to write. I am not a fool. Despite my whole adult life being driven by my attempts to understand (my first degree was in Economics), I know there are no easy answers. Economic and technological dynamics will always create winners and losers. The new industries require different sorts of skill and knowledge to the knowledge and skills needed to build ships. And the opportunities belong to a new generation.

Raging Against Callousness

Self-organisation and self-help has always been my hope for social computing and have until now been disappointed. I was awake in the night recently thinking that social networking might be the new opium of the masses. Let them throw sheep! Let them entertain themselves into a stupour. The we20 movement is proving me wrong.

There are two practical ways I believe social computing could help rage against the callousness of abandonment:

1. by creating supportive online communities for those who have lost their jobs, or who are suffering as a result of their jobs
2. by providing access to online learning – a sort of business school of the internet.

Thinking back to my home town, which I left when young because there was no work, the best thing about it is the tight-knit community. Everybody knows everybody else. The artist Stanley Spencer was sent to Port Glasgow as an official war artist in WW2. He was so taken by the sense of community that he returned to do a series of paintings, mainly about the yards. The Resurrection At Port Glasgow has women rubbing mud off children’s faces as they all clamber out of their graves – just like my mother used to do with spit on a hankie! Contemporary artist Mark Neville returned to do a photographic project in 2002. He says:

“The most remarkable thing I experienced during the concentrated time spent in Port Glasgow was the extremely strong sense of community. The painter Stanley Spencer … remarked on this characteristic. I felt this strong sense of community is still very much present.”

Such strong bonds come from living together for generations and from shared cultures. They also developed through adversity. How feasible could it be to create strong supportive online communities?

The second way in which previously abandoned people might be supported is through shared learning. I would love to know more about who is using social tools to bring people together for conversations and self-help, especially for first-line managers who have not been told how to manage and therefore make mistakes, and who get kicked from the top down and the bottom up. The unions? Are they doing it?

I would love to see a grass roots, self-organised ‘business school of the internet’, where people can access existing knowledge and where they collaborate and share experience as they grapple to make sense of it in practice.

I shall continue to focus on working with senior executives responsible for articulating business policies and vision. My capacity is limited for kicking off any other solo project at the moment. I would be delighted to find partners with whom I could realise my vision of a ‘business school of the internet’. An opportunity for we20?