“Let me tell you a bit about my holiday…”

Those were the words I used to start my description of Four Walks to the crowd at NFPTweetup the other day. It was the first time I’d talked to strangers about my holiday/lifestreaming thing (apart from to some of the lovely people from Child’s I who were in the audience). It was really the only truthful way to start the story though, as it was how the story began.

I was really in need of a break and a recharge and fresh air. So my lovely wife and co-founder suggested I took a long weekend off on my own to go and do whatever would make me relax totally. I did what I often do and think immediately of walking and Austria and small valleys and smaller trains.

Then I was part of the team behind Activate Summit that The Guardian organised. It totally blew bits of my mind I hadn’t expected it to. The day after Activate I totally rewrote my Design Talk at The Workshop because of its profound effect on me. The dystopian themes within some of the talks and the inspirational ways that people were overcoming some of them made me feel I had to do more. Do something at least. Matt Webb also talked about simple solutions, starting small and with friends and family. It made me think about my holiday and I felt guilty but feeling that I could give something from it, I just didn’t know what.

I remember watching Charlie Leadbeater’s talk and almost feeling physically sick with guilt. I wrote this on Twitter.

Feel so utterly ill at ease seeing images of slums and poverty while sitting in luxury pecking at a piece of glass and plastic #activate09:

There were people in the world who would never have a holiday, and parts of the world where the word would never have a meaning if it existed. A holiday is a privilege. One I mustn’t squander by trying to work through any bits of it, or thinking about work, but one I should also try and do something good with that served more than just me.

So I started thinking what I could do. I’d planned to do some gentle walks. I could do more and longer walks (it would help me get fit too and help me to connect again with a simpler more primal world). I could do those walks for charity and raise sponsorship for a cause I cared about. A plan came together to walk every day I was away and to do some really good long walks, some of at least 15km+ to really test myself. I knew of one which would work and was about 22km. The plan became set the target of 50km, a decent round number and find walks to fit.

I’ve been doing some consulting work with the lovely people at Just Giving and what comes next is in no way a criticism of them. It struck me that something is missing from current day sponsored walks and that is a conversation.

In the older way that you’d do a sponsored walk you’d personally ask people if they’d sponsor you (now with improved activity stream and publishing tools), they’d see the sponsor form and probably weigh up who else was sponsoring (social proof), you’d then do the event and ask them for money. They’d probably ask you how it went when they next saw you, and unlike being part of a public stream conversation you may well share something more personal about the event as you reminded them of their promise.

What we seem to have come to in charitable giving is the following; an announcement, then a black box of “time before event + time of event” and then a quick round of photos (optional) and a few status messages. What is missing for me is what happens in the event and as Sam Thomas pointed out today what we have now is a transaction not a conversation. And it could be so great if we moved it more to a conversation. We have the most amazing tools and sensors now. We can map time and space and sentiment.

This was the part I really wanted to explore. It was a given that I’d take loads of gadgets with me and that I’d occasionally want to attach myself to them and the interwebs just so I wouldn’t get withdrawal symptoms, but I also wanted to explore with them and to detach them from my normal work/life activities. I’d hopefully play a bit and definitely just “be”.

So I thought about what this space would be like where you told people you were doing a sponsored event and they could join you, or at least pop in and out. Where they could see your location, see pictures, be party to the thoughts you chose to share, be partly with you in some respects. You could think of them at specific times as you knew they’d sponsored you and the thoughts of them would get you through difficult times and you’d maybe dedicate specific miles to them, and maybe their comments would spur you on.

The London Marathon alone has more people wearing a tag which reports your position/time in the race (over 24,000) than there are criminals in the UK wearing GPS tags (about 17,000) yet the data is barely used. What would be fascinating is to turn this into an automated feedback loop between the sponsored person and their sponsors, where everyone could really be involved and there could be a sense of presence and bidirectional communications.

This is what I built. It didn’t take too long as the internet provided all the relevant bits of lego.

• A simple website which had a Google Map for each day’s walk with the route plotted on it and a distance for the day’s walk.
• An Android app which sent my current GPS location to a very crude API allowing the site to be able to plot my current position.
• A homepage which showed you the current day, where I was currently and all of the twitter messages from my fourwalks alias and from people replying to fourwalks.

I chose to tweet under a different alias for a few reasons. Firstly because it would allow me to not get into “worky” conversations and follow links and think about work (and also was part of my letting go of the stream therapy). Secondly because it would compartmentalize what I was doing both for my existing friends and followers, but also in order to serve the charity I was walking for better. Thirdly it also allowed me to take on another voice.

This seemed pretty important to me. Sometimes, especially in conversational media, we seem to have lost the art of story telling. This encompasses so much, suspense, more suspense, everyday mundane details, interior monologue, comedy, scene setting and stage whispers. Having a different guise allowed me to explore these themes and voices more naturally than if I was speaking as me. I was inspired in some of my thinking in approaching this in my old friend and former colleague Tim Wright’s work and especially his Kidmapper project. In fact my inspiration came from him, from Mike Butcher’s blogging in pyjamas for Comic Relief, from Six to Start’s wonderful map based storytelling and from discussions with Toby Barnes about playable data and hiding data in games. And of course Amanda’s brilliance with the inclusivity of Twestival.

What came out of this all for me was a deeply emotional experience; of friends joining me virtually on walks and encouraging others to. An intense and quite tearful high as I finished the first and hardest walk and heard how much money was being raised, not a huge amount, but it seemed huge to me. Of being encouraged by people I know and also telling them of how I was feeling and what I was seeing.

Before the walks someone very close to me asked me if I wanted company, and was most gracious and understanding when I said actually what I really wanted was solitude. What I got through this thing I made was solitude++ or possibly “augmented solitude”. I also have a deep desire to do it again and to do something fun with all of those marathon runner’s sensors and some maps, data and social APIs.

p.s. Hello Nike 10k, London Marathon, anyone who’ll have me. Can I play.