This year I helped out the splendid folk at Favela Fabric with an event they were running for KLM at the
mega-social-tech bash PICNIC '07 in Amsterdam. It was the first step in the airline putting a toe in co-creative waters as part of an innovation programme called Flight of the Future. There's a write-up (in German) about it in Handelsblatt here. The format was to invite together all sorts of people who have an active stake in the airline including KLM employees from every area of the business, journalists, analysts and customers to talk about the future. My job was to bring alive the power of open web platforms which I did by talking about why I hate RyanAir so much and to moderate the open conversation. In our planning sessions we had discussed the topics that might be raised but it was fascinating to see how greatly our forecasts differed from the reality of the mini-Bazaar created by Favela. Although the environment was a natural concern, my impression was that customers presumed this was something KLM were already working on (which they are). On the day, the most passionate area of discussion was how to make flights less boring - which hadn't really come up in our planning at all! And the ideas to brighten up flights were incredibly diverse. One person suggested the very practical notion of letting people flag their interests at booking...
...and putting them next to like-minded individuals so the journey could be improved with an interesting chat about sport, politics, restaurants or whatever the shared passion might be. But the moment for me was when one participant said he found the only event that broke the boredom for him was turbulence and that he would like to take flights that could offer more of it! My expectation was this man would be at the very end of a very long-tail - probably because I am a nervous flyer myself. But when it was suggested many hands went up in support and furthermore people said they would pay extra for flights that routed into rough air! We then went onto have a discussion with KLM experts about the possibilities of making this happen. Now, in reality, I don't think we are about to see turbulence-scheduled flights coming from KLM anytime soon. However, that discussion was the one everyone kept returning to as a way of showing how refreshing genuinely open discussion can be. Oh and the one about what environmentalism can learn from organic chicken…
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