2013-06-19T06:32:16-04:00 Geoff Mulgan http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/author/index.php?author=geoff-mulgan Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Geoff Mulgan Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2906265 2013-03-19T19:00:38-04:00 2013-05-19T05:12:01-04:00

Geoff Mulgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoff-mulgan/
But on this occasion the cynics and sceptics would be wrong. If you stand back, the remarkable significance of this day becomes clearer. For most of human history the main goal of states has been to conquer land, and to achieve glory for their rulers, usually at others expense. Then in recent decades it was all about GDP. It's only in very recent history that rulers have been willing to commit themselves to helping their citizens live happier lives.

That they are doing so is in part the result of the spread of democracy, and of the idea, implicit in the UN's Charter for Human Rights, that states should be servants not masters. This shift, so remarkable when seen in the long view, is the result of the slow, but steady awakening of the world's peoples to the idea that they can be sovereign - in charge of their fate and not just subject to the whims of others.

Living in old democracies, our newspapers full of the latest political scandals, it's easy to be jaded and miss the big picture. But for the rest of our lives my guess is that we will see governments and politicians increasingly taking it for granted that at least one of the ways they should be judged is their success in fostering the conditions for people to live happier lives. As they will learn, any commitment to happiness can be risky. David Cameron pledged his government to putting happiness at the heart of its work, and commissioned the Office of National Statistics to do big surveys of just how happy the British people are. In the week of a budget which is unlikely to bring many smiles to people's faces, it's not hard to see how this commitment could backfire. Austerity is grim, and any recovery may be notably joyless.

But one of the virtues of talking about happiness is it quickly brings you back to the everyday details of life. Today is as much about citizens - about us - as it is about the governments that make up the UN. It forces attention to the question of what we can do to improve the wellbeing of the people around us. How can we use simple devices like paying attention to thanking the people around us, taking care to notice nature, or looking after our own health and fitness. Some of these can have surprisingly powerful effects, particularly for people who spend too much of their lives glued to screens, or walking the streets hunched over their smartphones. Again and again in recent years cynical journalists have tried out the simple techniques that scientific research has shown to work in improving happiness, and, despite themselves, have ended up being won over.

Not all of these methods are easy, because it's habits that make the difference, and habits are hard to change. Deeper fulfilment is rather different from the happiness of seeing a good film or watching your team win at football, and it doesn't come at the push of a button. But there are so many things that we, and governments, can do that it's sad so few of them are acted on. Governments may not be well placed to get their people dancing (which in some evidence is just about the best thing you can do to enhance happiness). But they can help children grow up better prepared for happy lives and strong relationships; they can help schools train for resilience; and they can encourage health services to do as much for mental health as physical health. Economic policy can also play a big role. For example, there is lots of evidence that being out of a job has a disproportionately bad effect on happiness.

Seen from afar this period will look like a midway point - stumbling through a very fundamental change in how we see the world we live in. That shift is to a mentality in which we recognise that success isn't just about physical stuff, or just about money. Instead it's as much about the quality of the relationships we have with those around us. Their happiness and ours are intertwined.

In my book I suggest that this will form one of the important threads in the emergence of a different kind of capitalism - less wasteful, cruel and blind than the one we have, which is now going through another of its periodic crises. As I argue these crises are rarely only economic - they have always been crises of meaning as well - crises of economic systems that just haven't made enough sense even to the people doing best out of them.

Today will hopefully prompt a cascade of small actions - dayofhappiness.net. It almost certainly won't be the stuff of summits, or of news bulletins which still tend to be about what important people do rather than the things which people do which are important. But it matters - and it matters mainly because it is about the things that ultimately really matter.

Geoff Mulgan's The Locust and the Bee: Predators and Creators in Capitalism's Future is published this month by Princeton University Press]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2550912 2013-01-25T11:11:24-05:00 2013-03-27T05:12:01-04:00

Geoff Mulgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoff-mulgan/
This issue - present in the minds of every parent who sees their children growing up immersed in social networks - has just been addressed by the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir John Beddington, in a report this week, Changing Identities in the UK - the Next Ten Years .

I'm an enthusiast for what networks can do for learning, understanding and motivation to engage. But I also sense a problem. If you define yourself by your networks and what they feedback about you, what happens to your sense of self? How does the online soldier "killr1" or enthusiastic Tweeter "@topbeiberfan" relate to the off-line, face-to-face reality of student or worker, brother or mother?

One possibility is that we are seeing a generation grow up with fragmented identities, composed of a multitude of uneven mirrors, but hollowing out what's at the core. With a fractured sense of self we come to depend on what people feed back to us - often mediated through social networks - not what we are. We have complex identities but may become less able to act as a subject - confident in what we really are. When there's a setback, as there always is, there's less to fall back on.

There are many consequences of this. At a personal level, one is the temptation is to act in ways that are bright and visible rather than ones that achieve real or lasting traction. A stunt that gets onto the TV news, or attracts a million YouTube hits, appears to be a great success but experience shows that it may be illusory and, after generating a few minutes in the limelight, may have no effect at all. As the Internet of things advances the very notion of a clear dividing line between reality and virtual reality becomes blurred, sometimes in creative ways. Every object and even every body part may soon have an identity - a URL or successor. But some of that blurring is dangerous, if you can be a hero in virtual reality more easily than in reality why not take that shortcut?

At a more political level, control over identity is bound to become more fraught. Up to now we've been fairly relaxed about sharing vast amounts of personal data with big Internet companies and retailers, mainly because of the extent to which we benefit from this arrangement. But it looks unlikely that this will last. The public are becoming smarter both about what's done with their data, and about its value, and in movements like the Pirate Party we can see the beginnings of much more aggressive attempts to assert control. Young people who were relaxed about posting every detail of their life on Facebook become a lot less relaxed when they realise just how transparent their life has become to future employers.

The Internet is a technology founded on decentralisation. But it has ended up concentrating power in the hands of a few organisations whose business models make them unlikely guardians of personal privacy and identity. A positive response is to turn identity into a field of innovation, as people try to get the greatest benefits of digital networks without the costs. Projects like Mydex are attempts to maximise the flexibility of the Internet with much greater citizen control over data and identities. But we need much more experiment to discover better solutions.

One of the challenges will be to strike the right balance in relation to authentication. On the one hand free Internet advocates continue to argue for anonymity as a vital protection for civil liberty in countries like China. On the other hand pervasive anonymity brings with it a lot of social ills - and a culture in which trolling thrives. and aggressive, offensive and antisocial behaviour appears to have no costs.

Every powerful new technology brings with it great opportunities but also new risks and harms. Societies have typically taken decades to work out how to get the best of the opportunities and how to effectively contain the harms. Electricity and the car are good examples - both with more fatal risks than the Internet. Both innovations ended up highly regulated but also greatly expanded everyday freedom.

With the speed of digital development we don't have decades to work out the best way to proceed. The Internet is a space for freedom and that should be protected at all costs. But we shouldn't be shy of intelligent debate about the choices that need to be made to reap rewards without unintended harms, and we urgently need smarter solutions that aren't controlled by the new powers dominating the Internet, but rather put people and citizens' interests first.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.2099831 2012-11-11T19:00:00-05:00 2013-01-11T05:12:01-05:00

Geoff Mulgan http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoff-mulgan/
But my tendency to jealousy is soon tempered by the realisation that for all the wonders of technology we, the generation whose children are now immersed in a virtual cornucopia, haven't really done that well. The smug complacency of technology adverts disguises a pretty mixed picture, with too many people not connected, too many passive users of technologies designed for interactive, and far too much talk about empowerment but far too little action to make it happen.

16m people lack basic online skills in the UK - a cost of £63bn to the economy - according to the Go ON UK report issued this week, and not all of them are older. Our games and computing industries repeatedly complain about the lack of skilled school-leavers, as do businesses making ever more use of data. Even many of the teenagers who feel confident on navigating the web, simply don't have the skills needed to 'write and create' digital tools, not simply consume them. Yet that is where we now need to go - cultivating a need generation of digital makers; young people for who creating digital content is as second nature as consuming it.

The good news is that there is a keen enthusiasm from children: three quarters want to get to grips with coding and program writing. But, with only 3% currently 'doing', this enthusiasm isn't being translated, which could be down to limited opportunities. After all, teenagers find it hard to tear themselves away from games and social media. Left to their own devices children and teenagers have no difficulty creating new characters, stories and home movies. Making their own projects online, like creating their own online game, website or phone app is simple the next step.

So what's going wrong? The sad truth is that digital education is often deadly dull. At the moment, schools are preoccupied with the finer points of Excel and PowerPoint - not how to write websites, code apps and create.

Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring. Courses can, and should, incorporate the excitement of programming games, apps, or making digital devices. Tools like Arduino, which allows you to build your own interactive objects, like a storytelling doll, or a dancing robot, are a good example of how this can be achieved.

Many excellent groups and organisations are showing the way, letting children and teenagers fiddle and play with bits of code and programming. Code Club matches schools and programmers while MadLab's Manchester space mixes hackers and geeks with creators. And there are some exemplary schools and teachers who don't just teach with technology but also teach how to make technology. Alan O'Donohoe, principal teacher of ICT at Our Lady's High School, Preston, for example, is persuading others to join him in his mission to "TEACH COMPUTING, not secretarial skills".

Nesta and partners Nominet Trust and Mozilla want to help more of these inspiring projects get off the ground. We want all children - inside and outside of school - to have the opportunity to code, programme, make digital media and discover the fun of developing their own apps, websites and more.

But to create a generation - and not just a handful - of digital makers, we need to get quite a few things right in tandem: a foundation of deep understanding of computing; the practical experience of making things; and a feel for how you work with others.

Playing our part to make this happen we've launched Digital Makers - a £225,000 fund and a network for organisations to come together to stimulate and promote digital skills across the UK.

The Digital Makers fund, which is now open for expressions of interest, will support projects which equip young people (ages four-18) with the skills they need to become confident digital contributors and makers and new 'places' for learning - online, at home, during out of school clubs, play camps and beyond.

This shouldn't be so hard for the nation that was home to the creator of the world's first mechanical computer - Charles Babbage, the man who first imagined how an electronic computer would work - Alan Turing, and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the worldwide web. But what links all of them was they had the skill and confidence to be makers not just users. That's the spirit we now need to spread.]]>