Two years ago, some amazing things happened. It snowed for one, and we all stood out in the snow, queuing to go into an East End warehousey type building. We did it because one of us had organised something amazing, partly without organising (although there was a lot of that going on behind the scenes). Amanda Rose, she’s the one on the right of this picture which is one of my favourite images ever, decided that everyone on Twitter should get together if they could and should raise money for charity. Apart from picking a day and a charity she didn’t put too many other stipulations on it. For me it was this concept of a peer-to-peer festival combined with an amazingly social distribution network you may have heard of called Twitter, that made Twestival quite an extraordinary concept and just the most lovely thing. There was no asking for permission, granting permission, it was all about a network doing something for a network and through that doing something for people less fortunate than ourselves.
So two years on and it’s a bright sunny day and there’s little chance of snow and it’s Twestival again. The greater scale of Twitter has in some ways made it more and less interconnected. It’s less of a club and more of a mass media now, but a mass media made up of networks of friends and communities of interests. It’s an interest graph full of promise for peer-to-peer fundraising and festival making to happen. Amanda has created something wonderful by having an idea and letting it just fly where it will. Let’s celebrate her and that today, by giving to good causes.
