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The Fuel Which Drives Community | The Company You Keep

Exist as an act of love.

Watching a Shirky talk always means leaving with a huge amount of pearls, but check out the above plus the quote below and tell me it doesn’t resonate with any creative endeavours you have been involved with:

“…they don’t care that they saw it in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.”

If you work with a client or in a corporation / organisation which doesn’t get what you’re trying to do even though you have showed them the solution, forget changing minds, time to change the company you keep!

Then surround yourself with people who take care plus improve each others output.

Video link if not embedding above.

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Curation As An Emerging Skillset | A 5 Step Guide

5 step curation skillset plan

How to become a curation king / queen.

Traditionally, a curator researches and puts together a collection which speaks to a narrative and / or serves a larger idea in art galleries and / or museums.

In the current digital habitat, all can participate in this activity, so the challenge is honing the skills and leveraging the tools. Why?

Because for you and the organisation / company you serve, curation will be at the forefront of:

  • developing new ideas;
  • broadening discussions;
  • navigating and sifting through information to concentrate it into action;
  • celebrating those in specific industries; plus
  • uncovering / creating / deepening relationships to those that matter.

How?

Here we go:

1. Find : Track other digital curators to emulate / learn from.

Follow / learn from Tina or Jason or Maria or Shaun or the Open Culture peeps etc—rather just serving individual tastes, these guys are also aiming to inspire, educate, challenge, explode wonder, intrigue, curiosity, in their audience.

2. Find : Deliberately forage content from many sources.

Online is a noisy place and it’s not simple to find the signal. For many of us with the tools such as advanced search techniques plus RSS it’s a simple case of making the web work for you. RSS allows for a filtering on a delicious scale which when mashed up with things like IFTTT and Yahoo Pipes can become the perfect recipe for making yourself look double awesome.

3. Follow : Click those inspirational digital breadcrumbs.

Be careful not to get stuck in the filter bubble—sites like Tumblr and Pinterest exemplify curating platforms plus once you start clicking you will discover how deep the rabbit hole goes. Don’t worry too much and just click away, flow around areas of interest, follow those links and see where those web-roads take you. You’ll be astonished with the gems you’ll find.

4. Focus : Sharpen the sights and cull the chaff to find the good stuff.

Now you’ve been using the above tools / techniques for a while it’s time to sort and strain. It might be you’ll decide to stop following certain feeds and replace them with ones who serve more specific content. It should always be a trial and error process in pursuit of revelatory inspiration.

5. Frame : Context is king so reposition & tell stories with the new found ideas.

The best curators (some listed above) contextualise the treasures found by weaving a narrative around. This adds the much needed context for the audience and yourself when you return years later plus demonstrates your ability to join ideas into salient points. It’s time to shape the reason and link the work to creative action (whether that be an infographic, white space in an established industry, applying divergent technologies into traditional approaches, learning from obscure voices from other sectors to influence innovative strategies etc). Wrap those finds up in beautiful potential.


So examples of where this can be applied:

  • students can be taught the above as a research methodology for their studies;
  • product designers can utilise these steps to gain a deeper picture of the problem / industry their serving;
  • teachers can employ these techniques as a way to collate content related to their subject focus;
  • start-ups can use these tools to aggregate ideas around the market they are entering;
  • leaders can illustrate brand stories in which they would like to emulate.

…you get the idea!

Follow the plan and basically suck the juicy wisdom out of the web then humanise it for good.

How relevant is curation in your role / organisation? And who else is talking about this as a skillset (am keen to learn / connect)? Riff in the comments!

Related / inspired / remixed from original post 2013 | Create / Curate plus all images from Graphics Fuel
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2013 | Create / Curate

Creating / curation is the new black.

And my 2013 theme:

rilke create quote

Creating is action.

Doing.

“Where I create, there I am true”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Public speaking for me is a hugely innovative exercise. Many folks don’t understand the work and expressive energy that goes into a presentation and its delivery (especially if you don’t use a script or practice like me then the execution itself is very much an inventive act).

I. Want. To. Do. More. And. Get. Better.

But, also, taking the time to craft the opening video here or the images which compliments the text, is part of what I mean.

It’s the realisation of discovering what you’re good at plus what you’re passionate about then using that to spark creation.

Deconstructing. Starting. Expanding. Mashing up ideas. Disrupting. Smiling. Thinking.

Look out 2013 for lines in the sand and new ventures.

clay shirky curation quote

There are two areas of curation which hold my interest: developmental and experiential.

“Curation solves the problem of filter failure.”
Clay Shirky

Developmental

How do you / your organisation / company view curation? What role does it play in broadening discussions and skill development internally? How are you using it to celebrate those in your industry or even as a way of extending yourself?

The rise of the individual digital curator (thanks to sites like Tumblr / Pinterest) allows for a wider interpretation of the more traditional role. Although, the leaders in the field (Tina or Jason or Maria or Shaun etc) demonstrate a higher purpose rather just serving individual tastes, but that of aiming to inspire, educate, challenge, explode wonder, intrigue, curiosity, in their audience.

The idea of curation as a(n online) skill is hardly ever discussed in articles / conversations around social media. My argument is that it will become increasingly crucial to individual and organisational development—as the signal vs noise ratio of companies / organisations, let alone a sector or industry, continues to increase, so to is the need to understand how to navigate and sift through the information and concentrate it into action.

This is sucking the juicy wisdom out of the web and humanising it for good.

Experiential

TEDxTeAro (I’m the license holder) is an example of experiences as curative event.

There are two things to be announced in the New Year around stretching the idea of traditional events: one for Wellington-based creatives (to be made public next week) and the other for social media mavens like myself who want to explore the next set of questions (who understand the difference between strategy and culture and who want to get away from ‘how to use Twitter / Facebook’ to advertise in a slightly different way and sell stuff).

More to follow but thinking it’s time play around with event formats and offer attendees more than a seat and people talking at them.


What’s your 2013 theme? What do you think of mine? Leave a comment below you lovely tribe of readers you.

Clay Shirky image attribution
Video music via Oddworld
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