WHAT IS AMPLIFIED LEICESTER?

Thanks to John Ager, for allowing me to copy and paste this from his blog. It's actually a guest post on John's blog, by Sue Thomas (photo above), Professor of New Media at De Montfort University in Leicester. I'm a big supporter of Amplified Leicester, as you'll have seen, faithful reader, but I particularly wanted to circulate this post because it promotes the panel I'm convening for the next session later this month.

In today’s networked world, many skills which we may already have but not recognise as special are coming to the fore. The Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, have identified a skill set which they call ‘amplified’. It features qualities such as "Cooperation Radar" – the ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task, and "High Ping Quotient" – responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; propensity to reach out to others in a network. You can read all ten of them here. The language may be very Californian, but the skills are ones we would all recognise. And social media is helping us to do them even better.

In 2009 I ran a project called "Amplified Leicester" which brought together 30 very different Leicester people and helped them develop their ‘amplified skills’. That project is now over but this year we’ve been hosting a series of talks and panels at Phoenix Sqaure where we look at ‘amplified’ approaches and discuss how they can be used in specific contexts. So far we’ve looked at politics, police, and crafts, and this month we’re considering faith (or not) in a panel discussion convened by George Ballentyne of the Council of Faiths and called Amplified Communities of Faith or Belief.

George’s guests are a very varied group – Sughra Ahmed of the Islamic Foundation, Richard Hopper of Leicester Secular Society, and Matthew Hughes of Samworth Enterprise Academy, a Church of England school. It takes place at 7.00 pm Wednesday 23 March 2011 at Phoenix Square. Do come along to hear what they have to say and join us in the Screen Lounge afterwards to continue the discussion. It’s free and open to all. Book online here and join the Amplified Leicester community here. We look forward to seeing you! The Twitter hashtag is #ampleic for all Amplified Leicester related tweets.