My younger sister Kerryn is a high school teacher in our home town (brains run in the family, you know). As a matter of fact, it’s the high school we went to – Edgewater College in Pakuranga, in the city of Auckland, New Zealand.

She’s doing a project with a bunch of her year 10 students, and she’s asked for my help – and now I’m asking for yours. In short, if you live somewhere other than Pakuranga, Auckland, New Zealand, and you have a digital camera (or a phone that takes photos), I’d really appreciate your involvement.

I’ll let Kerryn describe the project…

Hi

Some Year 10 students at Edgewater College are participating in The Flat Stanley Project. This project is based upon the book Flat Stanley, by Jeff Brown. In the book, Stanley is squashed flat by a falling bulletin board. One of the many advantages is that Flat Stanley can now visit his friends by travelling in an envelope.

The children in this class have made their own Flat Student, and have written a brief description of their Flat Student. Due to the fact that the school year is three weeks away from finishing, their version is electronic.

The students would like you to treat this ‘student’ as a guest and take them on an ‘adventure’ that will enable them to learn a bit about you and your country. To facilitate this, if you could record the visit with perhaps printing out the Flat Student and taking a few digital photos and replying with a brief e-mail about your part of the world, it would be greatly appreciated by the students involved. As we are very short on time, the location of the photos does not have to be too flash, just somewhere local (ie a café as opposed to the Eiffel Tower). Alternatively a short email would also be valued – anything at all would be great.

Once you have had the opportunity to share your world with us, we’d love it if you send the Flat Student to someone you know in another country, who can then in turn share a bit about themselves and their country.

Please e-mail your replies to dnk@edgewater.school.nz

There is also a Twitter account set up if you want to send any messages @EdgewaterStan

The project completion date is December 7th however I will of course ensure the students will get late replies when school starts back next year.

On behalf of all the Year 10 students taking part in the Flat Stanley Project,

Thank you very much

Regards,

Kerryn

If you can help, SEND ME AN EMAIL, and I’ll send you a Word doc with your own ‘student’ to print out.

Nothing fancy – but if you could take the ‘flat student’ with you somewhere of interest, or somewhere that shows a bit of your world, that would be really helpful. I’d consider it a massive personal favour.

And I don’t ask those very often.

For the past week, I’ve been in Amsterdam as part of the Rhythm Changes project. Rhythm Changes is the three-year European jazz research project I’m involved in, and this was the big conference on Jazz and National Identity.

Academics from around the world came together to talk about their own research, share ideas, give presentations, attend jazz gigs and explore the city. Because I’m part of the project that organised the conference, I had more than just a delegate’s role in the proceedings. My job was to put as much of the conference online as possible.

Originally, it was going to be me, two assistants, a few laptops, several Flip cameras, some great stills cameras, full recordings of all the presentations, live conversations online about the various topics, and so on. Unfortunately, budgetary and technological uncertainties got in the way and so we had to scale right back.

Fortunately, Jake was available to come along with me to Amsterdam for the first few days, so I put him to work tidying up the code on the website, taking photos and adding the conference information to the Rhythm Changes site.

We stayed at a friend’s apartment, which was lovely – albeit rudimentary as far as sleeping arrangements were concerned… and we struggled to find wifi from time to time.

It was really great to hang out with Jake of course, and he was really helpful and focused. He worked pretty hard, and the site is massively improved by his work. He left before the conference really got going though, which he’s probably quite thankful for – though I certainly could have used his help.

We also had the chance to visit my cousin Greg, his wife Nadine and their two children in the Hague. I haven’t seen them since their wedding (so I hadn’t met their two kids) so that was a real treat.

Then there was the long Skype/phone chat with my sister, who had a “big birthday” (that’s one of the ones with a zero or a five at the end) that day, and we also ended up talking to my parents for a good stretch too, so that was nice.

As far as the conference is concerned, there’s so much that I could embed here on the blog, but most of it’s probably only of interest if you have a particular curiosity about current work in the field of jazz from a media, sociological and cultural studies perspective.

If that appeals, then by all means, go and check out the website, which has keynote addresses in full, musical performances, lots of interviews and other exciting stuff (your experience of ‘exciting’ may vary).

Suffice to say we had a good time (yes, this is how we enjoy ourselves), learned a lot and had some fascinating discussions. Lots of really great people in this bunch and I’ve made some good friends through this project.

Came back home to lots of work, piles of emails and other pressing matters, which I had about 12 hours to deal with, because after a night at home, I had to turn around, get straight back to the airport and head off to Copenhagen, which is where I am now… and about which, more soon.

I spent last week in a 12th century chateau in the south of France.

I travel a lot, as you may have noticed if you follow this blog – but I hardly ever get an actual holiday (to which my sisters always say “from what?!”). In fact, I was so ready for this break that my brain actually started to shut down a few days before we left, and it came to a complete stand-still for the first day we were in Avejan.

To say that I was ready for a break was an understatement. It was more like when your computer just runs out of processing power. I was experiencing the human equivalent of the spinning beach ball. So just shutting down and rebooting – with the help of a book, a few of my favourite people in the world and some very good wine was just what the IT helpdesk ordered.

There’s not much to report from the week in fact (other than the fact that it was wonderful), except that I rediscovered something I’d written a few years earlier, and used that to reassess where I’m at with life, where I’m going and how I’d like to get there. The sort of pause and reflect thing that holidays are quite good at.

I may actually write a blog post about that particular piece of writing soon, because it was surprisingly helpful…

It was beautiful weather – high thirties (that’s like 95F for US readers) – and we spent a bit of time swimming in the nearby river, but mostly we sat in the shade of a walnut tree, ate, drank, talked and read books. But like I say, other than some good conversation with great people (four kiwis in France) and a bit of introspection – nothing much really happened.

And, as I mentioned, it was wonderful.

Through the northern hemisphere summer, our friend Mary runs the Chateau d’Avejan (just outside the village of Barjac) as a bed and breakfast for just a handful of guests at a time.

It’s all word of mouth. Friends of friends of friends, sort of thing – and we had the place to ourselves.

But when the weather turns cooler, she heads back to New Zealand and works at a university teaching English. She hasn’t seen winter in over twenty years, which sounds like a pretty good way to live.

Perhaps the best thing for me was the fact that there was simply no internet. I was completely offline for a whole week. It caused some anxiety at first – though not nearly as much as I had anticipated – but I can thoroughly recommend some away time – especially if, like me, you pretty much spend your whole life on the internet.

I have a pretty big year coming up – and so these few days sitting and doing next to nothing was, I suppose, my deep breath in before the onslaught of writing, teaching – and pursuing a whole bunch of really quite exciting, but potentially exhausting projects – really kicks in.

I returned to a book contract, which I’ve now signed and sent off; I have a new regular writing gig that I’ll be able to tell you about very soon – and some very interesting opportunities and activities coming up in Copenhagen, Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Rio – and that’s just in the next couple of months.

So the chance to pretty much just switch off was a real blessing.

Naturally, I brought some rather nice bouteilles de vin back with me (as well as some unrealistic expectations about local fresh produce and coffee), and I look forward to sampling a few Bordeaux over the coming weeks.

If you’re interested, there are more photos (a LOT more photos) of the holiday, the region and the journey here on Flickr.

I’ve been in Belfast for the past weekend, doing what we came to describe as a ‘knowledge sprint‘. My friend Rich Dale (pictured above, uploading his brain to the internet) is co-founder of a startup called Planzai. I’m on their board of advisors.*

Planzai is a web application that helps people do things, with easy-to-follow expert guidance. It’s like having a project management plan for whatever you want to get done – growing potatoes, training for a marathon, creating a personal budget, organising a wedding… but with someone who knows what they’re doing there to guide you along the way.

Planzai provides the platform, and experts create ‘blueprints’ – step-by-step plans that do the guidance, make sure you don’t forget anything, that you do them in the right order, allow enough time for each thing and perform the tasks in a timely fashion.

You tick off the steps as you go along, and the steps are explained and demystified as you encounter them.

Example Planzai blueprint for making a music video for your band

But they need more of these blueprints – and they need them soon, and so originally, I was asked to help run a workshop that would allow us to quickly generate more of these plans. A “knowledge sprint” to create as many useful blueprints as possible over a weekend.

Instead, I suggested that we do a workshop to generate the perfect ‘How to make a Planzai blueprint’ blueprint. The “meta-blueprint”, if you like… so that we can always quickly and dependably source more blueprints using a system that had its own quality control and step-by-step guidance built in.

This, for these guys, made perfect sense. It would mean that anyone with a bit of specialist or expert knowledge in any field could follow the instructions and generate a Planzai-quality blueprint for others to use.

The workshop – day 1

For six hours on Saturday and again on Sunday, I worked with a team of Planzai staff and friends to develop this meta-blueprint: the blueprint for generating more blueprints.

Essentially, I was the ‘facilitator’ – and so of course did very little of the actual work. Instead, I guided the proceedings, gave the days their structure, talked through the process, took the feedback and ‘coached’ the sessions.

The aim was that on the first day, we would develop what we thought of as a workable prototype.

In teams, the participants described the qualities of the perfect Planzai blueprint, what sort of language it should use, what tools and resources it required to create and the structure it should have.

I organised them into four teams made up of a mix of different types of people – technology experts, management, educators and so on… and they raced to come up with four different, competing versions of the ‘meta-blueprint’.

The teams then presented their blueprints, and they were ranked on a series of different criteria at the end of that first day’s sprint.

The best version was combined with the best elements of all the other versions to make the prototype of the Planzai blueprint for making Planzai blueprints.

It was a document that we were, I think, rightly proud of.

But we only had one night to enjoy that success – because the purpose of the next day was to try and rip that document to shreds… so we made the absolute most of it.

Saturday night was a very big night out in Belfast for the Planzai knowledge sprinters.

The workshop – day 2

On the second day, the aim was to take that prototype blueprint and stress-test it. We gathered a larger group of volunteers and friends together, and – again working in groups – asked them to use the blueprint to make a new blueprint.

The groups were assigned different ‘fun’ categories as idea starters (‘The Pub’, ‘Self-Indulgence’, ‘Animals’ and ‘Happiness’ were randomly selected from a pile of about a dozen topics) and asked to come up with something that they could make a blueprint for.

But the point of the exercise was to find out where the system we had created the day before needed improvement, or failed outright.

From this process, we were able to get a whole stack of feedback about where things weren’t clear, how the plan could be improved and what could be done to make the system more ‘bulletproof’.

Then, while the crew ate pizza and discussed their plans, Rich and I locked ourselves in a room to integrate all of the suggestions into the new and improved plan.

The penultimate iteration

The final section of the sprint was an attempt to use this new and improved version to come up with the beginnings of a series of real, Planzai-ready blueprints. This time, some more serious topics were suggested, and the categories were Personal Finance, Family and Parenting, Health and Fitness, and Events Management.

The new version added a lot more clarity and simplicity about the process, and the blueprints that were created this way were more consistent, reliable and well-structured. There were still some minor improvements to be made and some areas where further clarification would help, and this took us to the point where we could make the final version.

But even better – because the process was now so clear and simple, people were also freed up to let their minds explore other ideas, and some really useful brainstorming about different features, strategies and developments for Planzai happened as well.

There’s some really exciting and radical stuff in the works as a result of this…

Continuing the discussion…

Even after the event was over, and everyone had grabbed a beer at six o’clock on Sunday evening, the energy in the room kept the conversation buzzing for another couple of hours. All the ‘what if we did this?’ and ‘How would it work if…?’ questions that really take an idea like this to the next level.

We hadn’t planned on that stuff – but it was a real bonus, and the knowledge sprint was declared a resounding success.

Best of all, it looks like Planzai’s ambition to not only help people do things easily and reliably, but also to help experts of any kind create and sell their own blueprints through the site is looking really good now…

Thanks to the people who turned up and gave their weekend to this – from friendly, neighbourhood tech startups to non-profit organisations, from educators and experts to friends and family – Planzai not only got the bulletproof ‘meta blueprint’ they were after, but also got the company, its thinking and its ambition a lot further and a lot faster than we could have imagined possible.

I guess that’s what happens when you sprint.

___________________________________

*Currently, I am Planzai’s board of advisors

Earlier this week, I went to visit my friend Clutch at his home in the seaside village of Burntisland in Fife, Scotland.

We have a whisky blog together (called, unsurprisingly, Dubber and Clutch), we’re co-writing a book about whisky (along with a bunch of other authors), and we’d arranged to visit a couple of distilleries and whisky makers.

Our first stop was a light lunch with legendary master blender Richard ‘The Nose’ Paterson at the headquarters of Whyte & Mackay in Glasgow. After a mini spring roll or two and a few stories, he took us into his tasting room, which was not only a museum of scotch whisky, trophies and accolades through the ages, with a bewildering array of bottles of unimaginable value – it was also the source of a non-stop torrent of stories, places, dates and names. The man is a walking encyclopedia.

Clutch, Colin (our photographer friend) and I were then treated to a tasting of a very special and very rare whisky. I was halfway through my glass before I’d done the calculation that I’d already swallowed about a month’s salary.

We then popped to the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, where Colin and Clutch are members, and had a proper lunch and a dram or two with Whyte & Mackay PR guy Rob. This was, as you can see, a more substantial feed. Not a good idea to go tasting whisky on an empty stomach…

Back to Colin’s in Edinburgh for a couple more samples for the book. We sat out in his back garden, overlooking Holyrood House, toasted the Queen (who was in at the time: the flag was up) and watched the sun set over Edinburgh Castle.

In the morning there was time for a stroll around to see the sights of Burntisland, before heading out to visit the Glengoyne distillery. We had been offered a tour of the distillery and warehouse, as well as the chance to make our own blended whisky (about which, more on our whisky blog).

Also on the tour were a couple from Sao Paulo and their (astonishingly patient) young son. The father, Diego, is a business coach and he’s given me his card so when I go back to Brazil (quite soon, as it happens) we can perhaps meet up for a whisky over there.

Clutch and I spent rather longer than we had anticipated at the distillery, and so missed our bus back into Glasgow. As a result, we had to take a much later one, so the man who ran the distillery shop offered to drive us to the pub down the road where we could have a meal while we waited.

It turned out that we had a mutual acquaintance. One of the radio scholars I come into fairly regular contact with – and with whom I spent a good deal of time in New Zealand at the radio conference – was a friend of his. Small world.

Anyway – long story short, we made it back to Clutch’s quite late, and we were due to have an early start the next morning for another three-hour journey to another distillery. Only this time, it didn’t happen. Train delays, weather and weariness all got the better of us, and so we spent day three of our whisky adventure sitting around the kitchen table trying to write about all of the things we’d sampled and experienced.

The trick, I think, is more writing and less sampling. As the day went on, the productivity levels declined and before too long, it was time to catch the train back to Birmingham.

Clutch gives Donnie a ride through the streets of Burntisland

A lovely few days, we actually managed to get quite a bit of writing done, and although we walked away more or less empty-handed (neither of us actually bought a bottle of whisky), we did get to try quite a few very good drams.

And in particular, it was just nice to catch up with Clutch and his family – and spend a bit of time together for the first time since they moved from just around the corner to that rainy country up north.

I’m in Madrid today at a conference about the independent music industry in the digital age. I’m doing the keynote speech tomorrow, and I’m here with my colleague Jez Collins (left, above) who’s going to be talking about music, identity and cities.

The first thing we’ve noticed is the heat. It’s around 40 degrees here. Lots of people in Birmingham are complaining on Twitter about the ‘heatwave’. It’s 27 degrees there.

The conference has been organised, in large part, by Ignacio (“Nacho” – also above) who works here at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, but who came and spent a few months working with us in Birmingham last year.

We’ve met some really great and interesting people, eaten some amazing food, seen some incredible art in some of the world’s greatest museums and art galleries, and heard some excellent music.

My brain is slowly frying and I may not be able to make sentences tomorrow – but having a lovely time.

I spent the past week in Buenos Aires, speaking at the 19th Un-Convention event. I was part of a whole bunch of different panels – about live music, copyright, building local music scenes and the relationship between visual aesthetics and music.

Un-Convention formed the music part of a larger trade fair conference about the creative industries, including gaming, publishing, fashion, theatre, product design, television and so on.

An amazing experience – lots of new friends, great music, amazing food and wine, interesting sights… all the stuff you might expect from a visit to Argentina. The video captures the event really well (even if you don’t speak Spanish) – and it was put together while the event was taking place, edited and presented at the closing event on the last day. You can actually watch the video being produced in the video itself, which is a bit meta…

I took a fair few photos too.

It was great to hang out with the international Un-Convention crew as well: Martín from Colombia, Fabricio from Brazil, Fer from Argentina, Vijay from India, Ruth from the UK – all really good friends of mine… as well as some people I hadn’t worked with before, but who fitted right in.

Jon McClure from the band Reverend and the Makers joined us on our travels, and I got to meet Federico Novick who I’d been in contact with since 2007 when I interviewed him for New Music Strategies, but who I only really knew via email.

The event was a success by every conceivable measure. The above album was made over the three days of the conference – with artists performing in between the seminars. More people turned up to it than we probably expected, and people really seemed to love it. The CDs, t-shirts and posters that were made during the ‘factory’ part of the event were snapped up within minutes of their delivery.

We’ve also been asked back to do more already, which is a good sign… There are 23 regions in Argentina, and the man from the Ministry of Culture was keen to get something happening in every single one of them. We’re going to start with one in about six months time in Mar del Plata. That would be nice. And a good reminder that I really need to learn some Spanish…

Long trip though – and we only just made it out of Argentina before the Chilean ash cloud shut down all the airports.

And now I’ve come back to a massive pile of marking. As you do.

Jake, me , John Mostyn and the blimp

Sometimes it’s good to put your hand up for stuff just in case. I was doing some writing on Friday, but keeping an eye on Twitter – and one of the people I follow mentioned that if any journalists wanted to go up in the Goodyear Blimp, the company was offering rides for a bit of coverage.

So I wrote an email to the contact person there and said “I’m not a journalist, but I do have a blog. Is that close enough?” Apparently it was. They’d been looking for a bit of blog and social media coverage – so… er… this is it here. I’ll try and keep up my end of the bargain.

I went back to them and said – well, I’m going to need to invite someone to come with me. I don’t have a car, and there’s no public transport anywhere nearby. So – can I have a plus one?

“Sure – no problem. Happy to oblige.”

Then I remembered that Jake starts his Easter break today.

“Um… plus two?”

“Yep – in fact, that’s perfect as it seats three passengers. You can all go together.”

Brilliant.

The flight

I put the call out to my friends on Twitter and Facebook asking if anyone was interested in joining us, and taking the flight – and John Mostyn, local music business dignitary and manager of the lovely local analogue recording studio, Highbury, was keen for a daytrip.

It really was quite something. The airship itself is amazing, and the views were pretty spectacular over the Thames. We took off from Upminster in Essex and spent close to half an hour in the air, by my reckoning.

If you ever get a chance to go up, definitely grab it. An incredible experience, and we were looked after very well – with a cooked lunch beforehand, an afternoon tea afterwards, and all sorts of souvenir trinkets. We even have certificates and a fancy little lapel pin to go with our blimp keyring, blimp badge and blimp air freshener.

It was a lovely daytrip too. Nice day for a drive. John, Jake and I talked about all sorts of stuff (music, mostly – as you’d expect) and had a lot of laughs.

I tell you what though – if I ever own a car, I’m (almost certainly) putting Goodyear Tyres on it – and so should you. And that, I think, takes care of my end of the bargain…

Through a series of unusual and interesting connections today, I’ve been offered a ride on the Goodyear Blimp on Monday. This Monday coming. I’m really incredibly excited about that. Can’t wait.

There’s just one hitch though – it’s taking off from a field in Essex, and it’s nowhere near anything remotely resembling public transportation. In other words, I can’t get there. Don’t have a car.

The good news is – there is a spare seat on that flight and I can offer it. If you’re free to go on a bit of a roadtrip and have a car that will make the journey down from Birmingham to Essex and back – and you’d like to go up in the Goodyear Blimp just to have an adventure, a great experience and a story to tell – let’s do it.

I’d really appreciate the lift. It’d be three of us, actually. You, me and Jake. We promise to be good company and keep our feet off the seats.

Serious offer. Once in a lifetime opportunity. Massive favour. Please let me know if you’re up for it.

I flew Royal Brunei Airlines to New Zealand for Christmas. Managed to get out of Heathrow just fine, though there was plenty of evidence of the chaos it had been subject to for the preceding few days. We went via a short refuelling stop in Dubai, and then I had a 12-hour lay-over in Brunei itself.

If you didn’t know (and my grasp of geography didn’t include this), Brunei is on the north coast of Borneo – the third largest island in the world.

I thought I’d leave the airport and go and do a bit of an explore. I turned down the organised tour, and the $25 taxi that was on offer – and opted instead for a $1 bus into town, and a $2 chicken and rice meal from a takeaway place the locals seemed to like.

Following my nose got me (by $1 boat ride) to a village on stilts, and then the offer of a ride up the river to look at the palace, the mosque, and maybe some proboscis monkeys. Naturally, I agreed and after some brief haggling, off we went… much further than I anticipated.

After about an hour of travelling up the river with my driver Yusup, we slowed down to scour the jungle branches in search of the monkeys. And we went pretty deep into the jungle. Almost worryingly deep into the jungle – or at least that’s how it seemed to my city-accustomed brain.

It did briefly cross my mind that perhaps I’d been kidnapped, and that around the next corner there would be men with guns waiting – but Yusup was so interested in finding me the monkeys, I figured out pretty quickly that this was fairly unlikely. We also encountered some other tourists on boats doing much the same thing, so I guess this is just what happens. Who knew?

Unfortunately, the proboscis monkeys were all in hiding that day, but I did see crocodiles, massive snakes, and monitor lizards. So that’s a win. I mean – I was in the jungles of Borneo, for goodness sake.

And, of course, you know what song was stuck in my head the whole way… and I don’t even like Guns ‘n’ Roses.

I have a similar duration stopover in Brunei on the way back. I’m determined to find those proboscis monkeys this time.

And I’m going to be quicker on the draw with the video camera too. There are actually crocodiles in the above video, but only moments after submerging, so you can’t really see them.

Check the Flickr page for more adventuresome photographs. And have a merry Christmas.