Serious Simplicity

Last Sunday I headed down to the Sun Microsystems building for another VRM event in London. This time it was called “VRM Hub Open Space” and the objective of the session was to participate and listen to ‘participant-sourced’ conversations about VRM. Lloyd Davis did a splendid job of explaining the Open Space method to newbies like myself and thus the afternoon was both pleasant, argumentative and informative. To a certain extent this was a follow-up to November’s VRM event (Unlocking the See-Saw) primarily because a large number of the attendees had been present at the earlier event so, in a way, certain conversations picked up where they left off last time.

VRM interests me because it is a grass roots movements that is promoting an alternative to what I call the “traditional entrepreneurship model” and provides an approach that enables entrepreneurs to be more ethical in their ventures. But what made the event really interesting was not that it matched my personal ethos. Rather it was the sheer variety of ideas and approaches that a relatively small group of people brought to the table. Topics discussed ranged from public sector to mobile operators, from social media to privacy, identity and retail! My take-away value:

1. VRM Excites People
   Although mostly everyone present had their own interpretation and personal ‘VRM Utopia’ in mind, the level of enthusiasm and engagement was ubiquitous. Moreover, this was not some geek-centric or startup-centric or other niche-centric group of people. There were developers, bloggers, consultants (ahem), academics, entrepreneurs, writers and designers all agreeing about the fact that this is something worthwhile and worth sharing knowledge and ideas about.
2. VRM is Still Young
   Of course, what all these diverse people weren’t agreeing about was about how to go about implementing, promoting or otherwise advancing VRM. And this is not a bad thing. VRM is still young and in my humble and unschooled opinion, were the energies of the VRM community directed solely towards the realisation of one particular project the likelihood of success (define it how you will) would be drastically reduced.

This is the time to “let a thousand flowers blossom” and let VRM take root in a variety of different fields and soils. Sometimes not even necessarily outwardly shown as “VRM”. But the message will be out there, and, hopefully will take root.

At the very least, I hope to be able to contribute to this in some small way.

(Oh, if you’re new to VRM and have no idea of what I’ve been talking about read this.)

Guy Kawasaki reviews TicketLeap today, a new online service that democratises ticket (to paraphrase Guy). Having an interest in the company, Guy is obviously full of praise for these guys, however it went over to TicketLeap.com to check it out for myself and it’s most definitely an ace service. Here’s a quick run-down of what I found:

1. Sign up is straightforward but they manage to muck it up slightly with the ZIP code section. It only accepts numbers (i.e. US format) but most countries have letters in the ZIP (e.g. UK). So I had to enter a fake one to sign up.
2. Great guidance. Once you sign up successfully you get a simple-to-understand list of next steps and things to do without too much unnecessary jabber and marketing talk.
3. Creating an event is also simple and takes about 4 minutes if you already know the venue, times and so on. A great feature is the possibility of adding a seating chart. Really cool stuff guys… but same problem with the ZIP code.
4. Next you choose ticket options. Not too complicated but provides a good set of features, including limiting number of tickets and defining multiple ticket types (e.g. student, premium, etc). TicketLeap will charge a fee per ticket (that seems to be their business model) and you get to choose who pays it (you, the buyer, or an even split).
5. Finally you get options to invite people (from Gmail, etc) and a bunch of useful stuff like custom website badges for direct purchase links and so on).