The Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho (Hindi: खजुराहो), a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District, about 620 kilometres southeast of New Delhi, is one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Luckily not so many have been there. Khajuraho has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for their erotic sculptures.

This village (20.000 inhabitants) is a very relaxed and peaceful place.
If you stay longer than 2 days – this is the time the average tourist spends there – the locals know you and don’t bother you any longer to buy things, take a ride on th etuctuc and what so ever.

I stayed there for almost a week and I am planning to come there more often since I’ve got involved in a project to build a schoolfor the poor there. More on this soon …

Nothing to add.
Pure beauty.

Unbox India

The unbox conference was outstanding – regarding content, formats and quality of speakers. Great job, thanks for that to all those who were involved in organizing the entire thing. It was worth coming.

Let me start with a few things which I found remarkable …

• why brought they so many Dutch designers in – especially when they are all somehow cover the same scope ?
• I was wondering why only so little people attended – was it a question of the price (200 USD)?
• no wifi, no life stream – actually a shame when you really want to “unbox” to a broader audience outside the walls of British Council
• hopefully they are NOT heading towards a TED-like event with a very closed circle
• great name
• Handmade India – a wonderfully designed book,  a tribute to the Indian craftsperson. It’s organized by the geographical distribution of the crafts across all states and regions of the country. Edited by Aditi Ranjan (PDF download link is here)
• Indrajit Hazra – Indian novelist and journalist. Sharp, disruptive mind – liked him a lot
• 3D printing: print your own mobile house. A little house, but a house.

These are the three things struck me the most:

Royal Enfield …
… the legendary motorcycle manufacturing company from England, now based entirely out of Chennai, southern India. It’s the oldest one in the world. Founded 1905. But this is very much more on a personal level though – I bought one of these wonderful motorbikes – a bright red one. Hopefully delivered soon to downtown;-)

I did an interview with their CEO Venki Padmanabhan where he talks about the story behind Royal Enfield, its culture and its way of community building. They are aiming to become the VESPA in the motorbike world.

They caught me. I used to have an old red Vespa …

The other two things were Wash United, an NGO which suceessfully generates political will and promotes safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene for all, and Indy Johar, member of 00:/, a London based strategy & design practice company. Their foundation is delivering outstanding architecture and commissioned research into the built environment.

More on these two soon …

Since 10 days I am travelling in India now – it’s been mindblowing in many ways. I started out in Delhi at the unbox festival (more to come on this), went to the Taj Mahal (I’ve never seen anything more beautiful) and since a few days I am in Khajuraho, a small town about 620 kilometres southeast of Delhi. Rural India.

Today I was sitting with these 3 guys in the fields, explaining them my phone, flipping through all the pictures. And then they saw my book. Somehow we figured out that that they wanted me to read out of it. It couldn’t have been more bizarre: me reading Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space” to people whom I don’t understand, in a language they don’t understand. I was reading passages from the chapter “The Holy Theatre” – the setting here could have been easily been one of Brook’s experiments …

Finally the entire conversation between Peter Kruse and David Weinberger on “data”. It was last year, late September at Petersberg. A very warm and sunny day. Actually 4 month before David’s book Too Big to Know was published.

All in all 7 videos:

part 1: Warm-up;-)
part 2:Peter and David are “warming up” and trying to find out what the other one is meaning when he talks about data, knowledge and understanding.
part 3: The impact of technology on culture and the question if the internet is capable of “building” a new culture.
part 4: The responsibly of the ME and the WE within the network and how narratives can help to create a better understanding between different cultures.
Is it possible to tell a story if it includes a hyperlink?
part 5: On politics
part 6: What can WE do?
part 7: 140 characters on DATA

Tomorrow morning when I wake up and step out of the plane it will be warm and sunny.
Nice temperature.
Delhi, India. My first time in India.
Directly from the aiport I will go to the unbox festival, a festival which builds momentum around design thinking and interdisciplinary collaborations to drive sustainable innovation for businesses, society & culture in India.

Thanks to Britsh Council and Goethe Institute to get me in;-)

The Unbox Festival 2011 from qs vimeo1 on Vimeo.

On Sunday I will attend TEDxDelhi and then I am off for a week – wondering if I find my landway all the way to Mumbai or it might as well be that I’ll be heading north to the foothills of the Himalaya … snow and cold again.

Let’s see.

It was last year in September. I spent 10 days in Shanghai doing some research on global governance, social media and the open source movement. I wrote about here and here – and I did a couple of interviews – with David Li, Marc Chijs, Carsten Ullrich … This one here happened more or less by coinincidence in a bar named Ying Yang. Ying Yang is a lesser known venue in the French Concession district in Shanghai. Full of atmosphere. Posters of Chairman Mao adorning every available wall space, the musical background floats seamlessly from bossa nova to jazz, progressive psychedelic, and everything in between – as you can hear in the interview;-) – a favorite spot for both bohemian locals and expats in-the-know.

This entire “meeting” was set up via twitter and facebook. A friend of mine, Kate Ettinger, connected me with a bunch of “gangsters” – all of them members of we.makesense.org – a worldwide network of social entrepreneurs (I would highly recommend to check them out!). Habib Belaribi, Larry Vetea Tchiou, Clément Renaud and his girl friend Qu Hongyuan (most people call her Yuan – that’s also the way she introduces herself). Over some French red wine we were chatting about Shanghai, China, makesense and global governance.

A wonderful evening.
I’ve learnt a lot.

Thank you guys! Thank you Yuan!

The first part of the conversation between Peter Kruse and David Weinberger started out with a more general discussion on data and how data is related to networks, especially the internet.

In this second part they are talking about the impacts of technology on culture and the question if the internet is capable of “building” a new culture.

Last week I was part of a web 2.0 workshop at NATO. Together with the communication department of NATO I am working on the launch of the website we_NATO.org which doesn’t aim to replace the traditional NATO.int website but much more to become a valuable add-on.

The concept is easy and simply. Technical wise it will be a blog and a wiki.
Contentwise it will offer a more diverse perspective on NATO’s topics. We shall move away from the current practice sending out PR messages to a more conversational style. This will include formats such as

• live video chats between NATO senior staff and people from outside NATO’s world such as Joi Ito, Peter Kruse, hopefully Don Tapscott and David Weinberger
• (video) interviews with peers from outside NATO who can discuss more openly topics such as smart defence, missile defence
• blogposts from activists from the Arab world discussing new partnerships with NATO
• narratives from Afghan women who have been working with NATO to improve a better cultural understanding between the locals and the allies
• online discussions brought up by people like you and me
• connecting peers which usually don’t speak to each other
• …

And these is a huge challenge. For the people working on it and for NATO the institution itsself. We are experiencing this in every step we make.

For the people itsself – especially NATO staff – the new platform is challenging because they have

• to step out of their comfort zone
• to question what they’ve been taking for granted for many years
• to learn that “crisis” might be helpful to drive change
• to learn that being disruptive can be inspring
• to deal with a huge amount of scepticism among their colleagues
• to learn that failing is an option
• to become more open to what is new
• to learn that sharing means loosing the gatekeeper authority
• to realize that there are much better things than email to communicate
• to adjust to the different speed in communication and operation on the web
• to learn that small steps smartly made are much more efficient than running a master plan
• to allow that agenda setting is (at least partially) coming from the outside world and that this can be a good thing

On the institutional level  the challenges are even bigger – I think. Even though the team members are committed to the project – the institutional reality might not. NATO is a very very hierarchical system. They are only “special” people who are allowed to speak in public about NATO. Only a few can give NATO a voice. PR-polished voices, in many cases compromises, always with the goal to please everybody, to demonstrate agreement and not to hurt or contradict any allies’ position – always feeding their “masters”. Indeed our project is backed up by top management. But the big question is: is the system ready to adjust? Is the institution NATO able to shift between the hierarchy-modus to the network-modus – as presentetd in this video –  if needed?

So to a huge degree the goal of the workshop was to give the team members a better understanding in which ways the project is challenging the current system NATO and then in a next step to gain greater support for the new formats and the way to move forward.

For the first part we invited Peter Kruse. His presentation (see below) clearly aimed for this better understanding. He pointed out 3 major challenges:

• Power shift enforced by network architecture
• Expectations provoked by network experience
• Cultural change necessary for network success

This one hour presentation really set ground for a much better understanding of what we are planning to do with we_NATO and it was an easy next step to gain support for the new formats and our step-by-step approach to proceed.

So why did I title this post: I am a “frustrated” optimist?
I am very optimistic that these new forms of communication and collaboration will succeed – but I am over and over again frustrated by the hurdles, restrictions and ignorance companies and institutions come up with – and I am not only talking about NATO – to resist change and NOT to adapt to the outside world.

I have to admit it’s been a while since we videotaped this conversation between Peter Kruse and David Weinberger on “data”. It was last year, late September at Petersberg. A very warm and sunny day. Actually 4 month before David’s book Too Big to Know was published.

For me, as an observer more or less, it was very interesting to see the different approaches both of them took when they were talking about data. Peter, who spent great parts of his life in the field of brain research, always in search for a higher order (pattern recognition, understanding) within all these networks; David, embracing the messiness of the web and open data, was arguing from the side that knowledge (data) itself is becoming the network.

So let me start with the very end. After a two hour converstaion we asked both of them to “squeeze” the most essential about data in a tweet – here is what they came up with:

In this first part of the conversation Peter and David are “warming up” and trying to find out what the other one is meaning when he talks about data, knowledge and understanding:

Please stay tuned, more to come!