Yesterday I attended a pre-event for today’s Likeminds seminar in Helsinki. It was a part of Dicole’s OZ-events, indeed a very nice way to organize people to meet up and socialize on some nice theme, which in this time was social media. Scott Gould gave us a presentation which I enjoyed. I got couple ideas to take home.

1. Think about the purpose of being in the different Social Media.
2. Broadcasting vs. Social Participation
3. For the Likeminds the hashtag is the platform.

This event and ideas came in a right time because I was just about to help our superhero friend Claudia with their Social Media tools and systems. I was about to do that by writing and explaining our tools and methods in this blog and now I got a whole new perspective – not only tools and methods, but also the purpose. Why Twitter? Why Qik/Youtube? Why Facebook? Why Blog? Am I just using the social technologies to broadly cast my own ideas? Do I really want to engage participation? What’s all this noise I am creating? Or maybe just like Henna asked at some point of our summer days: “What are you saying and is it connected to anything?” I will dig into these questions later on in another blog post.

The third point on my list is about the way this movement called Likeminds is being organized. If I have understood correctly anybody can organize anything for so called likeminded people. Who are these likeminded people? I think you are because you are reading this, and I am because I am writing it. I had heard about likeminds breakfasts through hellohelsinki.fi and from our Green Monkey Liher. How to do it? You just add the hashtag #likeminds into your event, youtube video, Flickr images and so on. So then, likeminded people, can go and see what’s going on near you or participate virtually. I think simple is beautiful. Hashtag as a platform for organizing probably truely approaches the minimum structure needed to enable self-organizing. I am starting to believe more and more in self-organizing, and starting to doubt more hierarchy and control. Let’s trust people.

Ville Monkey

Ps. Thank you Teemu, Mikko, Petra and everyone at Dicole for hosting this inspiring event. We will follow your example here in Jyväskylä. Thanks also for all of you whom I met and shared interesting conversations. In this event with many start-ups and related people, I am happy I also saw futurist and philosopher Sam Inkinen, who made remember that Monkey Business is a lifestyle company. Thanks a lot Sam!