Stef Lewandowski
Create something every day

A couple of people have said to me that I’ve been off the radar for a while. Basically - I’m head down on my new startup Odadeo. But other than that there’s still been loads going on.

Here’s an update for anyone interested - a very very sketchy and quickly written list of a few things I’ve been doing this month. Could this be the real-world equivalent of those “My del.icio.us links for today” posts?

Emily, Imogen and I are expecting an addition to the Family. As everyone has said “Well you must enjoy it if you’re having another one so quickly!” Yes, I do and oddly enough I know of about six other people who broke their ‘we’re having a second child’ news this month. A predict a glut of double buggy purchases on ebay.

I am appearing in a kids’ TV programme to be broadcast next year and spent a few days this month in front of the camera. Can’t tell you much about it but it’s been a huge amount of fun. And I’ve actually learnt about the difficulty of how to speak on camera on an extended basis - maybe I should get some media training?

I’m a singer. Bill Drummond (of ex-KLF / burn £1m fame) is doing a mass music project with 100 groups of 17 people, called The 17. I’m one, and spent an interesting afternoon listening to him talk and then with a group of others we sang the same note for 5 minutes in a dark room somewhere in Derby. As you do.

Birmingham Future’s BYPY awards seem to be picking up steam and there are now plans afoot to do something ambitious in it’s tenth year. As an ex-winner my suggestion was to get all of us together to do something that could have lasting impact for the future of Birmingham.

Birmingham University’s alumni scheme launched their own social network your.bham.ac.uk to tie into their internal network my.bham.ac.uk. I’m not usually a proponent of organisations trying to do this kind of thing (”Don’t host the conversation - link to it”), but with the large numbers of people involved I think this could prove to be valuable, especially given the huge involvement that I think that alumni should and could have with the university and consequently the city.

Advantage Web Midlands? David Furmage at AWM asked me to produce a document on what the digital media industry would like to see them doing in terms of a web strategy to promote our types of businesses, as well as what impact that could have on generally improving AWM’s presence. After lots of off-the-record conversations and a few ‘throw the ideas away and start again’ moments I think we’ve come up with something quite radical, ambitious but ultimately simple and scalable.

WordcampUK happened. I only made the drinks thing after all and met some good people - I’d like to see more of us Birmingham new media types pulling together for things like this in future.

I got an iPhone 3G and now wish I hadn’t - it’s slow and glitchy, and I have to replace all of my charging devices including my bedside clock radio because they have subtly changed the interface it uses. “Free”? Sure.

I went to 2Gether08, which was basically full of evangelist London social (in multiple senses) media types. Aside from being made to feel like I was totally out on a limb with my internal definition of social entrepreneurship and listening to a philosopher talk social media for the first time, I think I was suffering from conferencitis. Too much input. Mid-way through, the isowish.com site had a viral spike so I sat and coded that in a corner instead. Silly I know. Interestingly, I was so busy this month that I bailed on two other conferences at the last minute: FUEL and bTWEEN.

I’m seriously considering starting a coworking space?! It seems pretty obvious and I have the perfect location. I’m looking for people to share the risk/opportunity. Get in touch if you’re interested in having a city-centre Birmingham based space to work, connect, collaborate, share ideas, get inspiration and generally accelerate serendipity (there’s that term again) for about £25 per week. Did I mention that it would be beautiful too?

The Big Picture got 110,000 photos and is now doing a World Record Attempt. We hit our target, but not without lots of web problems along the way. If someone ever suggests (like me) that it would be a great idea to do a mass photography project through a third party API using Wordpress as a platform, just say “No - build an entirely new system from scratch. It will save you money and time after just one month”.  You live and learn, but I am never, ever, going to use the Flickr API for anything again without some kind of assurance from Flickr to guarantee uptime and connectivity. Lovely, lovely project - a fantastic thing for the West Midlands to have achieved. But pretty much solidly for six months I’ve been worrying about this site in the back of my mind and staying up past midnight on more nights than I can remember addressing problems with Flickr integration.

The marketing plan for our school is working. With the help of Substrakt the school of which I am a governor is now the proud owner of a fancy new site. And it doesn’t stop there - we’ve got ambitious plans coming out of our ears, and what’s great is that the marketing plan being the first is already having a positive effect - I’m looking forward to being part of some great work there. Ever thought about being a school governor? It’s a challenge but very very eye-opening.

I’ve started making interesting things happen with Andrew Dubber. What happens is that we meet up in a cafe, talk over a handful of ideas and then we just make one of them as quickly as possible. Or two. Or more. So far it’s isowish.com and 5alist.com and since then Christian Ward from Last.FM dropped me a line and gave me a great idea, as did Sam from Automattic. The rules - it has to be dumb, it has to be quick, it has to be fun, and the whole thing has to be very very lighthearted.

Photography. I’ve noticed I’ve pretty much stopped taking photos recently, other than ones of my family. Perhaps I’m entering a new phase..

Clore is taking up much of my thinking time. In about six weeks time I go on a two-week residential course as my introduction (initiation?) into the Clore Leadership Programme. I still haven’t quite got my head around the fact that for the next 12-18 months I am more or less working solidly on my own personal development. I know a lot of people who go on the programme stop what they are doing for the period and just focus on Clore. It’s really serious. But I’m so embroiled in so many ideas and projects, responsibilities and opportunities that my biggest challenge is just trying to make sense of how on earth I am going to be able to simplify what I am doing to ensure I make the most of the opportunity.

Here’s my thinking:

• Hire some more people. I’m looking at each company I’m involved in turn and looking at whether the make-up is correct, and what would happen if I took some time out. Type runs itself without needing me day to day, but do we need more resources? 3form has some very exciting things going on (I can’t list everything here as always) - do I need some new blood? Odadeo obviously needs people too… and so on.

• Hand over some projects to other people. I basically can’t continue with my current workload and be able to deliver everything to the level I want. I’ve already had some pretty bad instances this month where I’ve let some people down, and I don’t want to see that happen again. So I think I need to simplify my workload and reduce some responsibilities.
• Partnerships. I’m keen to move towards a situation where projects that I am involved in aren’t necessarily based on a ‘client/provider’ relationship. I’m finding I am much more productive and effective if I am a partner on something, so I’m looking at setting up more of these kinds of relationships. In that situation there’s more leeway on what is expected in terms of commitment too.
  

Odadeo. This deserves a post all of its own. But since March I have basically gone back to being a coder, and I have learnt Ruby on Rails, along with a whole lot more about how to build and deploy a rapidly developed web application. It’s been fun and I really really want to write up some of what I have learned. As far as I can tell there must be only a handful of Rails people in Birmingham. There should be more.

Creative Republic. Wow. Things seem to be gaining some momentum! Helga, Lorraine and the board are pulling lots of exciting stuff together, and it certainly feels that with all of the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff (post in itself) we’ve been doing for the last couple of years that we’re suddenly getting serious weight behind the idea that creative industries need to be taken note of in this city. Especially with the Big City Plan stuff happening. We have two events coming up about that for instance, and the Young Directors Forum and Birmingham Future have both taken Creative Industries on as their themes for the year. My thinking - if we can get the ’suits’ saying the ‘jeans’ are important we’ve won the argument. Now it’s up to us to work out what we actually want to make happen, so Creative Republic will be asking those of us who have signed up to the charter.

Big City Plan. I’ve been pitching some nice web ideas into the mix, now that the plan has some dedicated resources for web and communications. Thinking games, that WIKI idea we’ve been talking about for ages, and my Local Ideas mashup idea, amongst others. I probably shouldn’t be mentioning it but I do want some exciting web projects to come out of this process. The Highbury initiative was all about communicating with the people of the city. I can’t help thinking that the appropriate media of our time for asking what people want out of our city are web and mobile.

I wasn’t in the Power 50. Ahhh… but John Bounds was! And Sandra Hall, and Mark Ball, and lots of other good people. I was a bit miffed but not really that surprised. Rather bizarrely though, a judge said to me that evening that my name was under consideration again but that I was “too London and International focussed”, which pretty much amazed me. Ah well “perceptions” and all that, but that it did seem a bit weird to me and actually made me quite annoyed for a few days - not the list thing - the fact that to be seen as someone who does something in the city you can’t have ambitions beyond the place. I think that could explain a lot about the image problem this place has. I just think we still have an image and attitude problem - it’s the “No swagger”, “No pride” thing again. Yeah - I know, this sounds like sour grapes, but I’m just talking about the comment, not being kicked from the list. Oh all right - yes, it’s sour grapes

Life-hacking. The inbox was just the start. I’m fully life-hacking myself at the moment so that when I am on Clore and kicking Odadeo off into public beta that we have a fully functioning Stef around, rather than having all those piles of paper around! With the help of Dubber, Jason, Emily and Estelle I am sure I will be fine…

I realise I’ve been quiet about the whole Odadeo thing. Keeping it secret for so long wasn’t much fun and I’m know a few people have been saying “What’s Stef up to?”.

Phew. Lots going on as always and I am sure I have forgotten lots. The idea here is that I just need to get a load of stuff out so I can get back into the rhythm of blogging again without feeling that ‘blogger’s guilt’ where you always feel that there is just one more thing you should have published…