(click here to view all photos from the London Tinderbox Workshop)

It is risky to promise that any day of workshops will be "fascinating, erudite, practical, and fun." Happily I think that this is just what we achieved at the London Tinderbox Workshop last Saturday, a gathering which included writers, gradstudents, a journalist, a business coach, a consulting researcher, and a corporate ethicist.

After morning introductions in Starbucks, and a move to the Grand Union Paddington, Alex Strick van Linschoten and I started the day by talking about how we use Tinderbox.

I demonstrated Tinderbox basics:

- while in a group planning session (demo: Business Model Generation Canvas)

- in personal tracking (philosophybites progress)

- for personal notes, while plotting the structure of Euclid's Elements of Geometry

Alex demonstrated his use of Tinderbox within journalism to:

- Store interview information

- Track relationships

- Pick out trends and common themes

- Visually verify with his sources that his picture of a situation is correct

- Connect with DevonThink, Scrivener, and other tools as part of the writing process

After lunch, we broke into groups:

- Alex gave a further demonstration of how he uses Tinderbox for research

- Mark Anderson demonstrated import/export and timeline features

In the last session, everyone worked together to create a shared Tinderbox document about the people, events, and issues of the South Sea Bubble of 1720, one of the early, great financial bubbles.

At the end, our teams gathered together, made a composite Tinderbox file of all our research, and gave presentations on what we achieved.

Alex's team put together a fascinating map of key players and relationships (a) (b) (c). During his presentation, we also created some agents to traverse the graph and find characters who had specific links to a specific house of parliament.

Mark's team assembled a fascinating timeline of key events in the history of the South Sea Company, including share prices (a) (b) (c).

Peter Button and I tried to fill in the historical context. We identified an ongoing theme around news and information technology: Jonathan's coffee house had started listing stock prices just twenty years earlier, and the world's first daily newspaper was only nine years old when the South Sea Company was formed. We also noticed a theme of bold expectations for Britain's maritime success. We learned that Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift supported the South Sea Company, and that Sir Isaac Newton apparently lost £20,000 pounds in options or real investment. Finally, we tracked down the further history of the South Sea Company, which continued to manage the British national debt until the 19th century. How did it pay off the debt? By transporting 34,000 slaves, 4,000 of which did not survive the journey. (context map) (context map zoomed out)

Out of session, the conversation was fascinating. I recall many fascinating conversations, including topics such as business ethics, the future of publishing, Kant v Aristotle, how the news works, and Serbian history. I always find that Tinderbox draws together a group of fascinating thinkers with interesting projects, and Saturday was yet another example of that.

Our main venue was the brand new Grand Union Paddington, a spacious yet intimate restaurant which just opened two weeks ago. We weren't expecting to enter the "Pleasure Level," but the venue was very good for our day of discussion and projects. We had access to a power socket, the WIFI (mostly) worked, and our makeshift projector screen functioned as planned. The seating worked well for what we needed. Three clusters of couches with tables worked well for our breakout groups (except when everyone clustered in the corner around Alex to see his research on Afghanistan). Movable cubes provided enough seating for main presentations. The serving staff were thoughtful, and we stayed in house for lunch. My vegetarian burger was tasty, and I think everyone else seemed satisfied with the food.

Dinner was at The Frontline Club. Most went for the rabbit and morel pie. I chose the potato dumplings with sprouting broccoli and Berkswell cheese. The dumplings were smooth and light, a very good complement to the fresh broccoli. I had not tasted Berkswell (which is a sheep's cheese) before, and I enjoyed how well it paired with the greens, its taste concentrated enough to add a nice edge to the rest of the dish.

Later today or tomorrow, I will post links to some of the files we created. Thanks for coming everyone!