BLOG EVERYTHING

Last night School of Everything won a New Statesman New Media Award, in the Inform and Educate category.

Here's the Every Thing, posing with our shiny new trophy.

Needless to say, we're delighted. Thanks to the judges, the New Statesman and everyone who nominated us, cheered us on and generally spread the love. And of course, comiserations to other finalists Dad Info and Futurelab's Powerleague too.

Here are a few of Team Everything being dignified and restrained in their celebrations last night.

We want to help people learn what they really really want - when, where and how they want. But up to now, we've been more focussed on supporting teachers than learners. In fact, if you didn't want to teach something, no-one could even find you on the site.

Well, fear not. After much technical huffing and puffing, today we're launching personal profiles for everyone. And we want to know what you really want to learn.

Here's how it works:

1. Log in or sign up for a free account and join the community of learners.
2. Add subjects to your profile to tell the world what you really want to learn.
3. Other teachers and learners on the site can see what you're interested in and offer to teach it, or to learn it with you.

We want to create an education system that's truly focussed on the needs of learners. If you tell us what you want to learn, we'll tell the world, and help you find teachers and learners near you who can make it happen. If you want, we'll even notify you by e-mail when new teachers register for your subjects.

So, what do you really want to learn? I want to learn lots of things. Start building your profile and share what you want to learn too. And why not start your own subject and invite your friends to learn it with you?

We've been nominated for the UK Catalyst Awards, in the Self-Help category. Hurray!

And as if that weren't enough, we're also finalists for the New Statesman New Media Awards, in the Inform and Educate category.

More news as soon as we have it...

We're very pleased to welcome Sangeet to Team Everything. He'll be working on design and usability, and has already kicked off with some great ideas.

He tried to hide when we pointed a camera at him, so here's a picture of the very, very large Mac he'll be working at instead.

We've been looking around for inspiration about how to make School of Everything an amazing place to work. One fantastic story is that of Semco in Brazil. When Ricardo Semler inherited the company in the early 1980s he began to wonder why democracy was something that was talked about in relation to government but never to companies.

Early on, he tried things like letting the employees choose the colour of paint in the factories. But as the workers starting taking control of more and more, Semco began to experiment in startling ways. The company started to let employees choose their own salaries. They said there should only be managers where employees deemed they needed them. They did away with secretaries and as many 'menial' jobs as they could. And perhaps most importantly, they did away with the traditional hierarchical pyramid of decision making. Almost no decisions were taken by the company board - they were taken by the employees themselves.

Of course there are some big differences between Semco and School of Everything so it doesn't all apply to us. When Semler took over Semco it was a large, established company with very simple metrics of success. School of Everything is a very small, start-up company. In many ways that gives us an advantage because we don't have to convince anybody that the old ways of doing things need to change. But it also means that at this stage we're really just setting the conditions for future growth. So what are we doing?

Well first of all, we have a policy of having open books. All the company finances are available for anybody in the team to look at. Then anybody can come to our Monday meeting with an idea for spending money. If they can convince the team it's worth a try, we go for it. All our salaries are also open. Everybody knows what everybody else is getting paid. And finally, later in the year when we do a salary review, salaries will be set and agreed by the whole team, not by the management.

There are a few other things we do that help - mainly to improve communication. Perhaps the most successful is that we have lunch together every day. It's amazing how much information you can share just by spending some time together away from the screens.

It's just a start, and we know we will sometimes struggle to blend decisiveness and democracy. But we think it's important to make School of Everything a place where everybody shares responsibility for decision making.

What else do you think we should we be doing? Or are we mad to be trying to put Semler into practice in a start-up?

• Ricardo Semler's book Maverick is available here
• You can download a Demos pamphlet I wrote called Disorganisation for free here
• Read about Pat Kane's Play Ethic (which was a massive influence on Disorganisation) here.
• And you can find out more about workplace democracy in this article by WorldBlu's Traci Fenton.

Everything HQ had a surprise visit this afternoon - all the way from Lithuania.

Darius Damalakas, a programmer and School of Everything teacher, flew over for a tech conference - or so he thought.

"I turned up at the venue," he explained, "but when I sat down in what I thought was the first session I suddenly realised I'd gatecrashed an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting".

It turned out that the conference date had changed - but they hadn't bothered to tell him. So having come all the way from Lithuania, and finding himself at a loose end, he decided to come and say hello to Team Everything.

We've put him up on Dougald's sofa, and he'll be joining us at Minibar tonight. If you're heading to Minibar, come and help us redeem the London tech meetup world by buying him a beer.

The Science Department will be at Minibar tomorrow night.

Andy and Russ during the infamous Recorder Incident at Interesting 2008

They're being very cagey about what they're presenting. I can't promise recorders or lab coats. But it's more likely to include barbershop harmony than Powerpoint slides, which can only be a good thing.

If you're there, come and say hello!

Team Everything is much looking forward to next week's 2gether08 conference. Two days of talks, workshops, experiments and great people, plus the New Statesman New Media Awards" (which we've been nominated for), and a launch event for 4IP, Channel 4's new social technology fund - it's going to be busy, exciting and fun.

Look out for Paul on the Who Needs Government Anyway? panel, where he'll be discussing the way social enterprise is beginning to take the government on at its own game. And Team Everything will also be in the Common Room area at various points during the two days, hosting The Five-Minute Teach - supercharged mini-sessions where you can learn something in five minutes.

Come and say hello! Even better, come and teach something. We've also still got a few slots free - if you've got an idea for something you could teach in five minutes, then email mary [at] school of everything dot com.

Last Saturday a lot of interesting people descended on Conway Hall for the day of joy that was Interesting 2008.

We were invited by Interesting organiser Russell Davies to do something interesting in the lobby. So, using materials close to hand (such as lab coats and ancient modems) we made an Interesting Machine.

We made some antique-looking punchcard type things:

And a very high-tech box with a slot that you could feed them into:

Then we put on our Lab Coats Of Everything, and invited people to write things they were interested in onto punchcards:

Then we ran the Interesting Machine.

By the end of the day we'd done several batch processes, and matched people up into groups according to what they were interested in.

Elsewhere during the day, Andy and Russ joined lots of other people in a nursery rhyme variation in the minimal style, scored for very amateur recorder orchestra (video here, at your own risk).

We had lots of fun. So many thanks to Russell for inviting us, and to all the people who shared what they were interested in with the Machine!

We're heading to Interesting 2008 tomorrow. We're taking some vintage tech.

That's all I can tell you right now. But if you're there, come and say hello!