It has been organised by the Let’s Change The Game initiative and Law 37, the developers of Operation: Sleepercell. It is an afternoon of speakers there to talk about the use of ARGs and playful content in contexts other than pure entertainment or advertising.

It will be held at Channel 4′s headquarters in central London.

These groupings can also take on characteristics, good natured audeinces through to angry mobs. In this mix is what I have been calling the ‘friendly crowd’, a grouping where part of the spectacle is to do good, the crowd allowing for small acts of altruism by each individual in the crowd, amounting to some action that is possibly greater than the whole.

Whilst people grouping together to achieve good aims is nothing new, what has happened with the Internet is that these groups can be at once large, anonymous and yet accountable. 

Simple tools allow for a small core group to generate the spectacle around which the crowd will gather and the individual acts of each member of the crowd can be small. Something easy to achieve but by doing the act (signing their name, making a small donation, tagging a photograph, etc) they can give weight and ligitimacy to the larger overall actions.  The crowd is drawn into the spectacle but also contributes to it.

This is not something new but a new name for something many of us are doing already. Clay Shirky has written about it in ‘Here Comes Everybody‘ and Charles Leadbetter in ‘We Think‘. It can be seen in the work of MySociety and in the new ideas being developed by the Institute for The Future (Superstruct, X2). Closer to home Lets Change The Game, a project initiated by Adrian Hon from Six To Start have created the first ARG for a charity, Operation: Sleeper Cell for Cancer Research UK.

There are already many more examples. In the US they have the IFTF to lead the way in producing these mass participation spectacle events that can lead to developing new ideas on how we should live. In the UK we do not yet have such a group, a forum to talk about ideas that can bring people together in a way that allows for good to be done and for people to also have fun, be creative, participate.

Can we form such a group to talk about these ideas, share ideas and create partnerships in this space? I would like to invite you all to join me in this and see where it takes us.