Might social tech hold a clue to waste management?

In discussions online (particularly in Google+), there is a very interesting strand that relates to how what I'm going to call "social tech" is creating a new way.

But first, a matter of definitions.

Social tech, to me, is that entire system of technologies that makes social interaction with peers far simpler. Sharing ideas, information, knowledge. Building friendships with people that you would most likely never have met, being exposed to new ways of seeing as a matter of course. The value of networks.

Search, and especially semantic search, to make the retention of knowledge less valuable than how it is dealt with. All ever so slightly related, and all building a web that becomes "social tech".

The value of networks. Source: The Upcoming

As is my wont, I tend to see how social tech flows directly into waste management, or more importantly, resource recovery.

2013 - The Year of Garbologie

My first post for the year (how did that happen?), and I've returned from the few weeks off with some renewed focus and ideas around this blog. Well, perhaps two key ideas.

But before we turn to the ideas, the title. 2013 will be the Year of Garbologie. Why? Because I finish up my day job in May and launch Garbologie. The past year of gently growing Garbologie one day per week will lead to the denouement of Garbologie going live. This is all becoming real - my safe(ish) job is winding up and something new is taking its place. Hopefully something new and beautiful and truly marvellous.

But to the ideas.

A social media epiphany

A couple of days ago, enjoying a beautiful winters day on the edge of a quiet oval, I had a bit of an epiphany.

I had been receiving tweets on my new twitter account for something like a month, and blogging for a little longer. This great tide of information had been washing over me, but had kind of felt like somebody else's conversation.

Until Wednesday, with the sun warming my back. It was then that I finally realised the true value of social media. And this is that there is an almost bottomless wisdom and intelligence in social media - be it twitter, facebook, blogging, whatever.

Of course, there is also limitless inanity, but that's the easy bit. Just ignore that. The fear is not tapping in to some vapid stream of consciousness, but rather missing pearls of wisdom.

My realisation was that social media gives you access to a million minds, each turning over similar questions in wholly unexpected ways. Many writing blogs of immense value, the sort of blog that you would truly cherish in a book, challenging your thinking. indeed forcing you to think.

Then there's the more instrumental observation. There are a whole heap of people who blog, tweet AND run businesses in waste all around the world. And they are invariably doing something that is really interesting and deserves adaption for local markets. There is a lot to learn, digest, turn around.

Social media, in short, makes you realise that the world is quite a bit larger than Perth, Western Australia. That the ideas are not limited to that which circulates around this goldfish bowl. That you can learn without cease. I had not felt this for many years.

I also realised that social media goes further than being a kind of uber-library. It holds the possibility of fundamentally changing the way we are.

Critics will write of how these changes are for the worse. A lack of attention, inability to express complex thoughts, confinement to an echo chamber of peers and so on. Of course this is possible.

But equally possible is a remarkable deepening of humanity. I see this with the personal branding described by Trevor Young in his book "The Micro Maven Manifesto". I see it in the annual report prepared by Jonathan Fields. I see it in the flowering of individual expression, each working toward the more perfect fulfillment of their self. A person can finally be all the different people he/she really is. People no longer need to give simple answers to "What are you?"

I realise that is naff, but I find it immense. To be able to be authentic and find people prepared to listen is humbling. To be able to work hard, knowing that the work you are creating is forming a part of the world EXACTLY as you want it, not mediated through the lens of an employer, is empowering. And for this opportunity to be available to so many is truly incredible, creating a rich ecosystem in which many can find their own niche.

This was my epiphany. A realisation that there is a vast library of work just waiting to be found, and a whole host of people helping me to find it. A realisation that I am in the perfect place at the perfect time. A realisation that all of the hopes and dreams which have been (poorly) bottled up inside my brain can be free.

There is no need to pretend any more. Garbologie is just the beginning.

Social media, entrepreneurship and waste

Sometimes it's fun to grab three apparently dissonant ideas and rub them together. So here we go: social media, entrepreneurship and waste.

If we take social media and entrepreneurship as orbiting waste, then the two almost contradict what we currently do.

A common thing in rubbish is to have an education campaign. This goes something like this: an educator prepares a waste minimisation or recycling message, delivers it, and then perhaps measures the effectiveness of that delivery a while later. It is a megaphone. It is not a social media.

Instead, social media would require the educator to be educated as much as he/she educates. Social media in waste management would involve creating the space where a community can speak with itself, and the educator becomes facilitator. This space is, so far, unmapped. It has remained so for fear of "blow back", where the failings of the host organisation are reverberated and amplified through the community until the host reputation is shattered. The Western Earth Carers is feeling its way through the space through a series of facebook pages: Western Earth Carers and Plastic Free July. Together with twitter feeds, this is not for the faint hearted. However, it has been quite amazing thus far.

Throw entrepreneurship into the mix, and it gets even more interesting. For me, this is where social media starts to move outside the realm of communication, education and facilitating community action, and begins to move into the realm of building up new businesses. Nimble business, with social media at their core, in the field of waste management.

I'm not sure what this looks like exactly, but suspect it is the space between people taking personal action for the environment, and business doing things environmental things for people. I think it is people enabling businesses who enable people. It might manifest in viral campaigns to drive a particular business model around the environment, perhaps "gamification" of some environmental activity, maybe a deeply personalised waste service.

To get to this point, I suspect there is a fair amount of design work to enable network effects to be unleashed for a business. A lot of thinking is needed to understand what might actually resonate, and how. It must be driven by ethics rather than morality (a future blog surely rests on ethics and morality in waste management).

There needs an immense amount of authenticity - the bullshit detector runs red-hot when people can see everything you do. But it is only by seeing what you do that people trust to engage their own passions around "your" cause. And only then can this precious space at the intersection of three dissonant concepts form and thrive.

You don't know quite how this space will turn out, or even if it will form at all. It is a bit like the "scenius" described by The Technium in "Scenius, or communal genius". A bit different too, but the idea is that it erupts when the conditions are right, and also easily dissipates where it is forced into formality.

So they are my thoughts. I'd like to develop them further over the coming months, and would love any comments or suggestions for further reading, case studies, ideas.