 That's me! I've recently moved to Sheffield, come up from London and delighted to be back in the north. At the end of the presentation, I'm going to come back to 3 questions I'd like to ask you this morning. Firstly, what do you like having done for you? Secondly, what do you like doing with others? Thirdly, what do you like doing by yourself? Take a moment, take those in and jot them down if you like. I'll be calling out for a bit of audience participation later, and we'll talk about those. So, what I'm going to talk about today, the obligatory, who I am, what I'm interested in, how I think we're going about designing new services or magic, as I'm calling it now, how our tools can limit us in that, and how I think we need to find ways to do less doing to people and more doing with people, which probably explains my relationship with the co-op. So, as you heard, I originally spent the last sort of five or six years very involved with a good friend of mine, Ivo, getting something called Good Gym, up and running all across the UK. The premise of Good Gym is that traditional gyms are totally bonkers. You often will go to some dark basement somewhere, start running nowhere on this treadmill, or we're still lifting things in the corner of a room that really don't seem to need lifting. And so, the idea was that all this latent energy could be put to much, much better use. So, what we did was create ways for people to come together, run and put that energy to use in their communities. That will often take the form of weekly group runs where groups will gather, 20 or so people run to perhaps a local school, paint a classroom, we'd bed at a care home. This is actually down in London, lots of turning manure at city farms, always a popular task. And then also what we'll do is we'll pair up individual runners with isolated older people, the coaches, because it's those people that provide the motivation to get out each week and do a run. So, that was Good Gym. I'm pleased to say it's running now. We're up to about 30 or so areas across the UK and it continues to grow. So, I think it's kind of interesting seeing how people want to arrange themselves in new ways. But most recently I've joined co-op, co-op digital, platinum sponsor, which may explain my being here. What do we do? Well, the co-op has been around a while. 1844, these are the Rochedale pioneers, all came together. And of course being back in 1844, this means that we're six years older than California. I'm proud to say six years older than the valley. And actually what's exciting is I think we've been an innovator for most of that time. These are some of the first retailer to have scales in the stores, the first self-service stores, and various other bits and pieces. And these were all tackling quite serious needs at the time or inequalities. The first retailer to have scales in stores were because people were being ripped off with weights and measures. Business owners would be cutting flour with chalk or sawdust in a bid to raise profits. So, yeah, always a history of tackling the inequalities that we saw people coming together to try and do that. And we're not afraid to be radical, so based on principles of open membership and democratic control. And I think this is a quote by Catarina Fake, and it's a wonderful quote. I think she says you can tell what companies' values are by what they focus on and what they take the time to build. So it's all well and good saying we are this thing, but when you look at what these companies are doing, I think that's really a reflection of what their ambition is and what their values are. So we're starting to ask what do you get if you have membership cooperation on the internet? What are the future digital services where cooperation is a competitive advantage? This is the team I work with, a lovely bunch of folk. And we've been exploring a huge range of areas because I think any modern service now, I think, would probably involve elements of cooperation. So we've been running little experiments to look at where we might move, whether that's in energy, community energy organisations, or the grid, the complete shift that's going to happen there. Obviously high streets changing care, connected devices, some of the stuff in the homes, privacy and data, and a little bit around ensuring things too. So sometimes we use design sprints to explore what these services could be. So I'm curious, people in the room who might identify as designers, perhaps? Okay, a couple. A few people who are sort of design-based, mostly technologists, then it sounds like. So let's see how much of this is familiar. But the way we've been approaching things is we've built prototypes to test our assumptions and put them in front of real people to learn what works and what doesn't and what to do next. So perhaps as hackers, it's a similar thing, right? You sort of make something quickly to get it out there and look at how it responds and judge what to do next. And I think that's the thing now. We can do this with software. We can build things incredibly fast. It can be sort of smoking mirrors to some extent and see the impact it has. That's the kind of approach we take. So to give you an example, we have an electrical supplier called Electrical, and they saw how people were getting ripped off renting washing machines. You might be familiar with people like Brighthouse on the high street. And it turns out to be incredibly expensive. I've got my opinions on this sort of thing, but essentially, you know, if you're struggling financially, you could rent a washing machine. When you start to get out of debt, perhaps you then start to get sold other things. I can only pay for it in store. I'm not quite sure. Yeah, I sort of take issue with these sorts of organisations, and I think there might be interesting new ways to tackle that. So we started to wonder whether people would sign up for a subscription service for washing and quickly put together a website called Washify. So for £4 a week, you'd get a washing machine. Should it break, repairs within two days, and we could tie in with a regular delivery of laundry liquid or something. Subscription services are pervasive in music or film, and I think we'll start seeing more of this sort of thing. So it was a way to test this. And we thought there might be three potential markets, landlords, people who don't have the cash to buy machines up front and people who are constantly moving around a lot. So we started trying to research with landlords and put an ad out in Landlord Zone, a riveting reed, but it does reach 120,000 landlords. So there, it's just a case of fairly nondescript average just offering some time to speak to them. And we invited them to have a look at a website that we'd made about this proposition. Watch them sign up. Ask them how they manage their flats, and they're more about that dynamic, as people never rented a flat out, so I don't really know a lot about that. Next door, we'd be observing them and taking notes on what we're learning. So there it is at the end of the prototype. We're all very excited. Will people sign up for a subscription service for their washing? Does that landlord hate the idea? As it happens, a broken washing machine is a fantastic excuse to go and snoop around your property and check, you know, is it being kept as you thought? Or you've probably got a network of tradespeople in the area that you use to manage these things. So, yeah, our first idea completely bombed. But we were still sort of exploring this further, so we were putting ads out on both Facebook and Google and started printing flyers and hit the streets with the flyers to talk to people. That was out and around Salford, I think. And the Facebook ads and flyers didn't attract anyone. A complete waste of time, incredibly depressing. It was speaking to people, trying to collar them. It's a hard job. But the Google ads, in fact, really, really worked, worked really well. And I realised it was quite simply, you're reaching someone at the point when they're searching for something. So we wanted to find out a little bit more about that. I added a chat box to the web page and you've probably seen these sorts of things in the bottom corner of web pages that pop up when people start to check you're okay. But for us, it was a really good opportunity to speak to people immediately at that point and learn a lot more about them. And what we realised is that we were starting to reach people at precisely the time where, like, their washing machine's broken, they've got a pile of dirty washing on the floor, it's starting to smell a bit. It opens up all sorts of other ideas. So if you wanted to build a service around this, you probably the first thing you might do is provide a voucher to get it quickly to a local dry cleaners or something. But, yeah, I guess it's just trying to show how we can quickly build this sort of magic these days. It was interesting listening a bit more to the sort of connected devices I taught that Caroline gave last. And I think I come at it from a slightly different angle because I'm familiar with, like, want to cry and all of the botnet attacks that are happening at the moment. And it doesn't seem to be a month that we can go without seeing all of these insecure devices being turned to malicious use. And people just aren't familiar with what's going on, I think, in their homes. It is just magic. And I was curious, could the co-op help people to understand and take control of these devices? So to do that, another experiment we ran, we launched, well, we came up with the concept of this idea called co-op scout. And I'll show you a complicated technical diagram of how that works. So scout connects to your broadband router and effectively connect all your devices to scout. And in turn, it would be able to monitor the network for both sort of, I guess it would be checking exploits and posts out there and being able to update you should you be updating your software on these things because often most people plug things in and just leave it. So, again, we recruited six participants that we knew had different devices in the home, so we screened for them up front and asked quite extensive lists of all their software. And then they came into the lab setting and we were able to present them with a kind of mock-up of their home on a phone. So you can see this is how a dashboard might look in the Samsung TV, something that's going on. And you can see it can send the audio data to a third party called Nuance. So anything in the home is being recorded and transmitted insecurely. And you can sort of say, well, I'm not quite comfortable with this and we could show them how to disable it, actually take the TV offline and worry I'm kind of interested in maybe with co-op. You know, join a few thousand other people lobbying to change this. Remarkably, everyone's like, holy, there's no idea. Oh, I'm okay with it. And I was just like, well, no one wanted to take their tellies offline. But there was something in this idea, this is something rumbling away that we're not comfortable with it. And maybe if there's another kind of action we might be able to take on that. So that was interesting. These design experiments are all done in just a few weeks. So I suppose it's also about just trying to learn quite quickly in these ways. But I think the tools and the approaches we take do limit us in this. So I think it's all well and good there for products or services that are predominantly transactions in some sense. But I think where I get particularly interested in is how we might use software and magic to help people form new forms of relationships with one another. So what if we were going to try and design ways that people may trust one another? We worked with the insurance part of the business. And they came to us basically saying insurance is totally broken, both fingers in the ears and that no one trusts anyone anymore, which is bizarre given the whole industry seems to be built upon something like that. So insurance companies don't trust claimants. They put in fake claims. In turn it drives up prices. We all bonify claims can't do it. And then all the other parts of the regulators don't trust the insurance company. So it's a real pickle. And I think in part it's because it doesn't really look like this anymore, which is Lloyd's coffee shop of London and it's people of a mutual interest of trading, shipbuilders and the like looking out and trying to forecast what's going to happen. So we were curious whether the co-op could help people come together to ensure the things that matter to them in a, I suppose, a more local sense, a community insuring itself and built another prototype. This one again will somehow get the links out so people can have a look around at this stuff. But protect together was a way that perhaps a group of people might sort of say we'll ride bikes for a monthly subscription. We're ensuring one another's bikes and should something happen we'll draw on that. Whoops, sorry. Again, so this time we brought people who lived in a particular block together and spent a day looking in a lab at what they thought about this sort of proposition. And of course everyone says yeah, I'll put the money in and trust my neighbours and all these sorts of things. But really I think what I completely started to see was we were going about testing this in all the wrong way because I think we're still in this transaction form where we might present scenarios and things but we'd slipped into this state where we were asking people what they would do and not really able to observe what they'd actually do. And we needed to find a way to test those new kinds of relationships. And I think we sort of see hints of this. This is Monazoi, one of the... It's not really a start-up anymore but one of the banks, online banks. And they're investing heavily in the UI and the experience of the banking app because they recognise trust is incredibly important there and what it's doing is it's meaning but I think what it's doing is it's sort of meaning that yes, I trust Monazoi, I trust them as the bank. And it made me think well, we sort of have it happening a bit. This is Airbnb. The way to rent holiday accommodation. And here you can see we've got... on the listings, we'll often have profiles or feedback ratings. This is Mo's flat. And he's had 14 ratings. And it's kind of interesting but on the other hand, it's a bit like I was looking for a spanner last night on that, Amazon. And I found it stark that we're sort of reducing these potential relationships almost to transactions now. This will go and stay in someone's house and then I'm assessing it in the same way I might a particular spanner in a list of things. And you could contrast that with something like couch surfing which was a sort of predecessor to all of this where on a profile page here it drills into a lot more detail about a particular individual whether it's their education or ethnicity or beliefs or religion or maybe it's where they've been or the ambitions of where they want to go but we can kind of forge different types of relationships there. And it's important here. I'm not talking about sort of nostalgia but I think so there are certain things that these new digital services that we're seeing that are doing incredibly well but I think it's recognising that in doing that the sort of professionalisation or the transaction is these things, we're losing things the ability to create these new forms of relationship. And so to bring it back to the co-op we print members' opinions on wine and beer rather than those five star ratings which I thought was quite interesting and we have a group of... we can call out to members to participate in different ways and so there was a sort of taste-taste testing experiment and in turn in the local store then the reviews went onto the bottles and it was incredibly successful and incredibly engaging and I think this is interesting but let's be honest it's just labels and sort of in some respects it's the surface I think of where we might be able to get to. So ultimately I'm still grappling with how we do less of these things to people and more try and find ways of using technology to work with people. And it was really stark, it struck me it's not just about the things we build but how we might interact with one another. So back in March a colleague and I went to the Internet Freedom Festival which is an incredibly interesting week. There we were able to meet with human rights workers, lawyers, technologists, activists from all over the world fighting for human rights in countries where democracy was under threat. Some of them are travelling under pseudonyms so it's where really their themselves would be in a lot of trouble should it be known that they're participating in these sorts of things. And at the same time then I logged on to check work email and was mandated to go and perform my information security basics. And it was the Solarius Flash Game like who still makes flash games where the information theft dragged the boat of information security and go fishing for secure parcels. This is totally bonkers. And the stark contrast of being with people whose threat levels were significantly greater than what the kind of information I have on my work device. I turned to my colleague and I was like, this is absurd. We have to react to this in some way. And of course we could have done a monzo on it and made it flashy and slick and this could be delivered in a different way but instead we came back and we decided to throw a crypto party. And I don't know if anyone's been to a crypto party before but essentially it's a way to celebrate and play with the kinds of cryptographic technologies that are out there. So we made passwords using dice so picking up half a dozen dice, rolling them and then you use them to look up words on these big long sheets of dictionary paper and of course it's more secure because you've not used a computer to generate that password by bringing it into the physical. And it gets people talking about what is a secure password. So it's a way of phishing for random letters. We played with Signal which is an open source piece of software by Wisponet, what's that used but essentially with it being open source in theory is more, well it's less likely to have been tampered with. It's less likely to be backdoors into these sorts of things. And then used Tor and showed how you could visit Google and it might spit it out in Chinese or in Russian or something because you're kind of bouncing through proxies. And so I think personally I think encryption and anonymity is for everyone and that our privacy is incredibly important and that's why we party with crypto. So I suppose the point with this is it was much more about trying to find ways to work with the organisation rather than feel like I was having something done to me. So I think we can sort of explore those concepts a bit more. But it gets complicated. So this is the design sprint that Google will present. There's a five day process to get something in front of users really, really quickly and this is what we tend to follow a lot. But when you're moving away from products and services with a very clear transaction and you're thinking about relationships which are built on trust or social constructs it gets quite confusing and quite messy. So I'm starting to ask the question what happens when this agile way of building software isn't about websites anymore and I think it can feel really overwhelming. And how do you use agile to build new types of relationships? And I think what I'm starting to see is it becomes about how you design the invite or the follow up or like the merchandise, the badges and things. These things all become incredibly important to creating the community that understands the vision the activities and the language that we use. So one little example at Good Gym as I say we call the older people the coaches and it seems quite insignificant I suppose but bearing in mind this is Sheila and for most of the other interactions she had in her life she was the care receiver whether it was a district nurse coming in or a social services worker so for a moment to be the coach where she's responsible for Kevin and his well-being and his fitness I think it can really transform how we think of ourselves so the language we use in this services and the magic we're building I think it's really important that digital is still very much there but it's there to enable new types of relationships and not just transactions So that's a little bit of a summary a whistle stop tour of this concept of why cooperation I think is even more important today some of what we're trying to do with carp digital look at what happens when you bring what is the role of the carp in the 21st century amongst the Amazons and the Googles and the Facebooks So back to those three questions I asked you at the start to have a think about what you like having done for you what you like doing with others and what you like doing by yourself but rather now than ask for individuals I think what we'll do is we'll just turn to someone next to us and spend a minute or two just sharing reflections on a couple of those things so you can get to know each other a little bit differently Excellent, thank you So Sorry, I'm not going to call for responses back now but hopefully I mean look as soon as people are able to work with one another it's so much richer if I'd have put the call out to you and I think we'd have had this weird silence and a couple of people would have tentatively volunteered something I'll look forward to hearing some of that in the break and so just to pull it back together I guess I'm worried that the world is becoming dominated by these sorts of transactional consumer services maybe they're getting dressed up in these fancy new technologies but essentially it's market share capital and sort of VT return and I think that often in the name of trying to do things for people we inadvertently end up doing things to them and all of their ethics and the values that are getting built into these pieces of software are often coming from a very very slim narrow view of the world so our next challenge I think is to design new ways for people to work with one another both in building and scaling this stuff but participating within it thank you