Social software: software that supports group interaction. Emphasizes how radical that is. Prior to the Internet, we had lots of patterns that support one-way outbound. Prior to the Internet, the last invention that affected group conversation was the table. Ridiculously easy group forming is really new. We're just finding out what works, still learning how to make these things. This definition doesn't specify class of technology, which is unsatisfying. Email is not necessarily a supporter of group patterns, but it can. Weblogs can be broadcast if used for one to many, but can also support social patterns.

Definition is right, though, because it acknowledges the nature of the problem. Groups are a runtime effect. We keep seeing patterns, as on the WELL, where the social software was built, and had unexpected results.

Part 1: Best explanation for 'a group is its own worst enemy' in a book by W.R. Byum, who worked in group therapy with neurotics. He found that the groups were trying to defeat therapy. "Are these individuals taking action on their own, or is this a coordinated group?" Couldn't resolve this, but lack of resolution is the answer. Humans are fundamentally both individual and social. Every one of us has a rational, decision-making mind, but are also able to enter into visceral bonds with others that would override rational, individual thinking.

Groups of people who have formal membership in groups clearly have a group cohesion, but Byum says that this cohesion is deeper, and kicks in stronger, than supposed. Illustration: You decide you don't want to be there, but you don't leave. Then one person gets up and gets his coat, and everyone gets up at once and begins to leave. This effect is so steady, it's called the paradox of groups. There are no groups without members, but there are also no members without groups. People decide at some subconscious level to do something that illustrates a group effect.

Byum found that the group has specific patterns in the way they tried to defeat his attempts at therapy. First was sex talk - flirtatious or salacious talk among members. Sex talk is always in scope in human conversation - one basic pattern they can always devolve into. Second: identification and vilification of external enemies. E.g. Open Source community against Microsoft (instead of doing stuff). Nothing causes a group to galvanize like an external enemy... even if someone is not an enemy, identifying one causes group cohesion. Third: religious cohesion, as with the Cult of Clay (funny worshipful moans from the audienece). E.g. go to a Tolkien newsgroup and say The Two Towers is a little dull, and see what happens. In most places you'll be flamed, because you're interfering with a religious text.

Groups sandbagging goals in favor of these patterns. The way around this: group structure (as in Robert's rules) is necessary to defend a group from itself. Defends the group from the action of its own members.

Communitree in the early 70s. Dialup. Throw off structure, and new, beautiful patterns will arise. This does work... at first. As time sets in, new patterns emerge. In this case, a high school got hold of a bunch of modems, and they weren't interested in sophisticated conversation at Communitree. They were overrun by these students. The place that was founded on Open Access had too much open access... free speech but too much freedom. They had no defense. The site shut down.

Was their inability to defend themselves a technical or a social problem? In a way it doesn't matter, because technical and social issues are deeply intertwined, and can't be disconnected.

Attack from within is the pattern that matters here. Communitree was shut down from within, and at the machine level, you couldn't distinguish the good from the bad.

Why people haven't learned within this arena: they're not reading stuff like Rose Stone's description of Communitree.

Lambda Moo: wizards decided to be involved only in technological stuff, but had to come back because they couldn't separate the technical from the social. They had to structure and run the community.

When you're dealing with people as one of your runtime phenomena, that's a very different practice.

In political realm, this is called a constitutional crisis. Constitutions are necessary elements of long term groups. As a group grows, the chance increases that they will look for moderation (a way to defend themselves from themselves).

Why important now? Observes a revolution in social software. The web was into a size thing for several years... loosely coupled and growing. Scale only worked if you werent' responding to users. The dense interconnected pattern that drives groups and coversations wasn't possible... we blew past the interesting midsize scale of groups wehre people could actually have conversational forms that can't happen with tens of thousands or millions of users. Now, all of a sudden, these things are emerging: weblogs, wikis, platforms (rss). Platform allows interesting developments at lower cost, like Stewart's Confab.

Why do we have weblogs now? Why did we have geocities instead? We didn't know what we were doing - it took a while to realize that conversation was better than pictures of cats.

Pepys weblog... Phil was asserting that weblogs would be around for at least ten years.

We've internalized, now people are building, and what they're building is web native. A weblog and a wiki is web all the way in... lightweight, loosely coupled, easy to break down and extend. RSS is a web native way of doing syndication.

We can now start to have a small pieces loosely joined pattern. Joi Ito's Emergent Democracy happening: conference call was lower bandwidth, so added chat, and then wiki... two realtime, one annotated. It's difficult to coordinate a conference call without interrupt logic - here that moved to the chat room, and the call flowed well. Could type urls in the chat or refer to the wiki. This is a broadband conference call, but it's not a giant thing. But this is an incredibly powerful (but light) pattern.

Final thing is ubiquity. The web has been growing for a long time... and in ways 'all' have access to the network. For some groups of people, everyone they work with and know is online. This pattern of ubiquity lets you start taking this for granted. We're starting to see software that assumes that all offline groups will have an offline component - that is lightweight and easy to manage.

As here - you assume people who assemble are both online and offline at the same time. Library of Congress meeting: SocialText set up a wiki to capture large complex bits of stuff. For future memories they take for granted that this will be the case. Shared ubiquitous computing can lead to new patterns.

What should we do re social software, knowing that a group can be its own worst enemy? Clay has been looking at this problem for ten years, and pretty hard for a year in a half. What makes community work online... he can say with confidence, it depends. (laughter)

Natural and supernatural grace... you never knew if you have supernatural grace or not. Social software is like that... something supernatural about a group working... more groups fail than work. It's like a cake recipe: nothing you can do to make it come out right every time. But here's a list of a half dozen things to do:

Accept 3 things: 1) You cannot separate technology from social issues. Separate tracks for technical and social, for instance, don't work. Mentions ymmv list: the conversation could not be forked. You cannot completely program social issues... you can't specify all issues in software. The group is real, it will exhibit emergent effects, and it can't be programmed in the software up front. 2) Members are different from users. Core group that cares more about the success of the group. They garden the environment to keep it growing and healthy. The software doesn't always allow the core group to express itself, so it'll invent new ways to do this. E.g. old hats mailing list outside a newsgroup email list... three tier system ultimately, also a young hats group. 3) The core group has rights that trump individual views in some situations. Voitng is a bad idea where citizenship is associated only with an ability to log in. Example: Tibetan culture newsgroup voted down because of participation by Chinese students... sufficiently contentious groups would be voted away. Tyranny of the majority. Core group needs a way to defend itself as it gets started. Wikipedia has similar system - 'volunteer fire dept'... their leverage has kept it up despite repeated attacks.

These are things you have to accept.

Constitution: formal (code) and informal (custom).

What would you design for in social software? 1) Handles the user can invest in (not identity, which is a hot button issue). Anonymity doesn't work in group settings, but weak pseudonmity doesn't work either... we need to be able to see sustained identities. 2) Reputations are not linear and not portable from one situation to another and is not sufficiently expressed. Ebay's rep system starts with a linear transaction, so it works even tho linear. But you can't extend it. Reputation is stored in your head, but it must be associated with a handle. There should be a penalty for changing handles. E.g.: Casey Nicole story. Changing your identity is really weird, and when the community finds you've been doing it and faking it, they will expend astonishing effort to find you and punish you. Some systems have additional accretion so you can read involvement as an aspect of identity. Describes a sponsorship deal for member in good standing. 3) You need barriers to participation. It has to be hard for some users to do some things, so that core group will have a defense capability. Ease of use is the wrong way to look at this situation. The user is the group, not the indvidual. You have to find some way to protect the group. Soft forking (e.g. LiveJournal) - can be connected to multiple clusters. IRC chats and mailing lists are self-moderating... people drop off as the volume increases. Or Metafilter which occasionally turns off the new user page. Human interaction doesn't blow up like a balloon, it collapses.

There are lots of other effects, but these are primary.

The users are there for one another, so control is limited.

Q&A

Online community is more than message boards and chats.

Clay feels that online community is not a great term, because there is an offline aspect as well. It's online plus real world overlap.

(Find Tom Coates on online community ... reference in the discussion.)

Discussion of the 3D problem - it looks like the real world if you're drunk and in a cave.

Non-immersive software has tended to be more sustained than the immersive because it allows for the small pieces loosely joined effect. Immersion is not as universal a pattern for social behavior as people have thought.

How tune the software for the needs of the groups and users? Past model has tended to be architectural: make a place for people to be together. Now more of a shipbuilding pattern - build something and go there together. Wikis: general bag of capability that can be used flexibly. Optimizing software for particular shapes of tables... because of platform effect it's easy to build software customized for specific use.

Discuss Clay Shirky - A Group is its Own Worst Enemy: Social Structure in Social Softwar

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/24/2003 01:57:10 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

Applications could be created better if people interact with them in new and interesting ways. HTML interface is great for documents but terrible for applications. Why can't we use web applications with a good interface? And why can't we have applications that run on your local machine as well as the Internet. (Notes that people are now starting to roam from one to another hot spot... trick of sustaining the app in transition.)

Applications need their own environment on your machine. They shouldn't be trapped in your browser.

Flash Player is widely distributed, and replacements can be rolled out in less than a year (to the entire population of Flash users).

Demo of software called Central.

Application Finder. Choose and select the application "Central." Applications when downloaded are held in a secure 'sandbox.' Other apps: a news reader, a directory (cf FOAF?)

Includes Technorati in the demo. Set to do background technorati lookup when he launches a person's directory file.

App that launches the office map for Macromedia's building. Can see who occupies office.

Can bring up mini versions of apps, like the directory.

Forecast app - shows sales forecasts for Macromedia, drawing on finance system data. (Flash MX used to create this system.) Price grabber app with notification system. Intel Centrino for mobile computing... created a Hotspot finder.

In Q&A Tim O'Reilly says this has some analogs to Sherlock and Watson in Mac OS X. Then discusses Flash re-visioned as a framework for apps with a web services back end, which is truly an emerging technology (probably not emerging fast enough, I think, after listening to Alan Kay.) Answer: Flash player with Action Script is now handling logic. Packaging processing on the client and infrequent server-side processing. Some of those apps are being created, like hotel reservation forms. E.g. Watergate in Washington DC now has a rich client reservation form. Services that are starting to be revealed are tied together in the framework that Macromedia is developing. Evolving toward user-produced front ends for web services.

Plans to extend to laptop devices? Central will run wherever Flash Player 6 is. Pocket PC after OS X and Windows. Will also be on cellphones etc. Hard to get cross platform compatibility... but porting a virtual machine kind of runtime engine... has same bugs and features on all devices (bug compatible!).

Question of accessibility in Flash, and lack of performance compared to dhtml. And isn't this stuff kind of bolted on top of an animation engine? Yes, it is - that's exactly what Macromedia is doing, Kevin says. Each version adds more capability to handle application functionality. Next generation of Flash will have an order of magnitude performance increase, and Macromedia has been working very hard to address accessibility (I knew this via Austin's Knowbility) and has included accessibility kits with products.

P2P transactions... need state and data reconciliation for interactive stuff. This is application-centric but Macromedia is aware of the issue. Easy model for keeping and synchronizing local objects. Can also keep a local copy of an XML doc that lives online. Client is a local shadow; code lives on server too.

Client server all over again? When or how do we move back to the server? Kevin: we're in this weird in between state where processing is definitely happening on both client and server, and in distributed computing, on both with both cooperating. How do we take advantage of this mesh of stuff to create clients that are a blend of the client and the server? We have a blend now and are in between.

Stewart B.: in Flash development doing a lot of work defining the environment; when will there be a better IDE? Kevin: Macromedia is having the same problems, and they're working to improve IDE, have some improvements out already. Building a new set of components, Halo, for Central.

How is Kevin getting the Technorati link cosmos? Call web services across domains (multiple domains) but all have to provide web services interfaces. Might require a special key like Google. Screen scraping may also be used. In this case, scraped the Technorati page... but expect that sites like Technorati will reveal data with an API.

Discuss Kevin Lynch: Rich Internet Applications

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/24/2003 10:27:52 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Alan Kay at Emerging Technology Conference: "Are We There Yet?"

A little bit of complaining about where we are and what hasn't happened.

40 years ago project mac first funded by J.C. Licklider, who had written that "human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought." That hasn't happened yet, except in science. For the general mass of people with computers this isn't happening because most people use instrumental reasoning - reasoning according to current goal structure of that person. This is a real problem, good first order but terrible second order idea. Adults also have way to much context... a lot of things that work pretty well, but pretty well is the enemy of qualitative improvement (and vice versa).

In 1963 thesis on Sketchpad UI by Ivan Sutherland was presented. The display couldn't draw lines, coul edonly fine points. The first clicking window in history. A nonlinear graphical spreadsheet. Gathered both the direct things that you did and the indirect rules that were part of the drawing. Could actually simulate the details of the drawings, do modeling. With different conditions and the same rules, would get variations in the display. Could create instances that could be manipulated and scaled. Multiple instances of ideas that he called masters. A first object-oriented system, and a kind of a prototyping system. One of the most incredible works in history done by one person in one year. Alan asked Ivan how he did it - "Well, I didn't know it was hard." His thesis is available from MIT Library. Notable for the number of apologies Ivan makes because it wasn't better. [Link]

Also in 1963 - PDP1 Spacwar at MIT, the original video game based on Doc Smith's "Lensman" sci fi series. [Link]

PDP1 Interactive LISP - John McCarthy and peter Deutsch. First time programming language was made the operating system of the machine as well.

Doug Englelbart NLS in San Francisco, 1968. Engelbart is the true father of personal computing. Steward Brand was the cameraman. Kay shows the video of Engelbart demoing a system... subsecond response from a machine very far away because they really wanted it. (Today we're settling for less.) Interactive video and collaboration were part of the demo. Immersive sharing - so popular that they used it for conferencing with monitors and shared cursors... part of the way of life at SRI in 1968. [Link]

Alan Kay ran into Sketchpad and Simula in '66. Also influenced in '68 by a pen-based system at Rand. (Shows video). Why can't we do this on our handheld? Because nobody's thinking about it.

'68 - first flat screen display, Seymour Papert discovering that children could learn geometry - powerful ideas... idea that they could leearn on labpots with wireless. There's been almost no effort by the general industry to try to teach kids with computers, and computers are barely more able than they were 20 years ago. We should put a lot more effort into working with children and computers - children are the only ones that do two handed interfaces like Engelbart did.

30th anniversary of the Alto - proto for today's personal computing. 1975.

Squeak Demo (OS and Apps) ... 2.8MB is the whole system... 230K lines of code... could probably be 20k lines... working on that. 1.8 million objects.

Examples from today of the kind of programming that children do. They want to learn to drive cars, so we say design yourself a little car that you would like to learn how to drive. Both boys and girls like big powerful offroad tires. Children want to prove that they're worthy to exist in the world; they feel unpowerful so they want to show that they are powerful. Children work with views of the car, and create behaviors for the car which manifest when you activate its movement. Then you can create a steering wheel and associate the wheel with the movement of the car.

Why shouldn't all programming be like this? Good question to ponder.

Video of real science with 11 year olds. Kids dealing with the physical world. Dropping a ball and measuring/manipulating movement via video of the ball dropping. (At this point I'm really wishing you could all see these videos.) Understanding how gravity works is something 70% of college students don' t get, but the kids do using this software (extension of Papert's thinking). Once you 'get' gravity, you can apply it to models, like spaceships in a version of spacewar.

Describes David Reed as the slash in TCP/IP. David is included in a slide called "What is scalable group collaboration." There are 2^n possible subgroups in a network of n people - how do you do 2^n problem successfully?

Broadband conference call with avatars in a 3D graphical environment. Reflections in psychological real time. Step into a window into a different space - like a link into another page, except it's live. Alan's avatar jumps onto a martian landscape. Each has a pov that can be represented. (This is all written in SmallTalk.)

Ongoing demo of virtual world - now in ocean. A collaborative environment, a broadband conference call in this collaborative space. Includes telephony, though it wasn't demo'd.

Squeak is a vehicle, not a goal. Unlike Java, Squeak runs exactly the same on every machine.

What to do until software engineering is invented... do late binding, which means being able to make the changes easily.

"We just don't know how to do software yet." We make the change after we have the disaster.

Discuss Alan Kay at Emerging Technology Conference: "Are We There Yet?"

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/24/2003 09:39:01 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Thoughts and Pheromones

I joined Pete Kaminski and Ross Mayfield in a discussion with Eric Bonabeau of Icosystem yesterday - one of those productive hallway discussions, in this case leading to an epiphany that wouldn't necessarily have followed from Bonabeau's presentation on swarm intelligence, which was more about the relevance of insect studies to the construction of algorithms. In our informal discussion, Bonabeau noted that we need to transform the way that we think, that human thinking tends to follow a path set by a first thought or image and discard other alternatives, similar to the ants that follow the strongest overlay of pheromones even if the path is destructive (as in the blind ants that fall into a destructive circle when separated from their colony). This made me think of the Buddhist practice of non-attachment to thoughts - if you avoid making the attachment to a thought or idea, you can be open to others that might be more useful. This may be relevant to the structure of social software.

Discuss Thoughts and Pheromones

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/24/2003 07:35:06 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Wednesday, April 23, 2003
Wireless Routed Networks

Christian Dubiel, FHP Wireless

A wireless routed network is an architecture where the individaul wireless nodes can switch and route traffic to enable interconnection with distant nodes. Can extend effective range of low power radio systems (e.g. 802.11). Similar to a wired network. Wireless equivalent of the Internet, but wireless does make things quite different:

• Highly dynamic environment
• Interference
• Multi-path fading
• Limited bandwidth (802.11b - 4-6 Mbits effectived use0

Scaling challenges due to control traffic overhead. Potential throughput degradation across mltiple hops. RF characteristics not friendly to traditional TCP/IP. Wireless packet loss - if the link is flaky, it's not an intermittent, but a sustained problem, so TCP/IP doesn't "route around it."

Mesh varieties: Mobile ad hoc mesh is designed for peer to peer device interconnection... self-organizing, self-contained, and flexible. Issues...scalability - number of nodes, multi-hop throughput. Networks can't get too large. Reliability depends on where people are located. Will problem go away with real CDMA? Not sure why it would.

Multipoint to Multipoint Fixed Wireless. Deseinged for last mile wireless alternative to fixed-line broadband connections, e.g. copper and coax. Fixed wireless system where CPE becomes an integral part of tthe backbone. Individual links, often pint t point, especially at higher frequencies. Scalability can be an issue if you're trying to replace the equivalent of a metro area wired network.

Routed Radio Access Network

Designed for broad wireless coverage, not just interconnection. Truly wireless network that is not dependent upon underlying wired infrastructure.

Implications for 802.11... deployed all over the place. People envision having coverage area outside your office or home. Principal limitations:

• reliance on wired infrastructure for backhaul.
• unlicensed bands, therefore limited range and coverage.
• scalability and reliability issues.

Trying to create a large 802.11 coverage area - "big stick" approach.

Ad hoc network doesn't necessarily need backhaul. It could be a self-contained unlinked network.

Discuss Wireless Routed Networks

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 05:49:21 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the WWW

Jo Walsh is a coder and artist. See zooleika.

RDF graph, bot, and data on the web. Has some aspects of presence. These aren't new ideas (projects a quote from Hofstandter)... about nodes and links and isomorphic drawings. A metaphor for how he sees a certain kind of connections working in the brain.

Geopositionaing on the semantic web.

Friend of a friend... travel itineraries, FOAF people world map.

Collaborative ontolgoiese. When mudlondon is told about new types of space, sends them to an ontobot over Jabber. Exploring ontology, vote on new things embedded in the ontology.

SVG map of the RDF tube model. Routefinding traversal. OWL rules allow us to encapsulate psychological factors in logical inference. Define psychogeographic territory. Cartography... scalable vector graphics format in formal GIS. Animage collaborative and historical maps.

Mounting the model on the wireless layer. Presence in jabber, space: location... etc.

Sorry, I didn't do a good job blogging this one. Walked in a little late, and I was off balance for the duration. The Emerging Tech cult has driven me mad, no doubt...

Discuss Gonzo Collaborative Mapping

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 04:47:54 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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GNU Radio

I didn't really announce it, but I'm blogging from the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in Santa Clara, California... through Friday.

While blogging the GNU radio demo, I crashed, but the key point from my perspective is that this is a start on the technology required for the move toward Open Spectrum. I'm looking at an HDTV demo that looks solid. Ultimately the broadcast media - radio and television - could be transmitted as digital signals without regard to frequency, according to the Open Spectrum proponents.

Politics:

• MPAA/CPTWG/BPDG "Broadcast Flag." In exchange for free use of spectrum, they're not allowed to encrypt the signal. HDTV signals are mpeg4 process streams, so there's already digital broadcast. Content people proposed to set a cleartext flag set in the MPG transport stream, a content redistribution msg that says whether you can get at the bits or not. They're trying to get electronics companies to honor this, and now they're proposing legislation. They want to impose robustness requirements for anyone to be able to receive the signal. They want to increase security by jeapordizing the security of the system by including a chunk of code. The issue is quiet now. There's also ARDG - analog reconversion discussion group. They want to stop the analog hole so that no one can convert the content (watermark detection).
• FCC: Software radio in general. FCC has been very forthcoming, not wedded to old technology. They do want some kind of migration path to open spectrum.
• FCC: Free software radio. FCC hasn't freaked out yet, but they're concerned about malicious paper broadcasting in wrong frequency and overriding or interfering with emergency signal.

What is interference? Drop two sets of pebbles in water and concentric ripples pass through each other... same concept with radio signals, with the right technology. Mesh networks... as you add users, the net capacity of the network scales. It's sublinear but not horrible.... with more modern tech like spread spectrum, these can coexist.

Discuss GNU Radio

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 03:00:14 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Mapping Wireless Networks

Maps 'tell stories, and our maps should tell our stories accurately.

GIS: the keynote is layers. Comes from acetate sheets you put over maps to overlay: water systems in a layer, roads in another, etc.

Open Data Sources: TIGER: Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referncing Systgem." Includes a huge about of data, often inaccurate, but free.

GNIS: USGS's official repository of domestic geographic names information. Contains almost two million physcial and cultgural geographic features.

Other sources include Digital Line Graph, Digital Raster Graph, Ortho photo Quads,...

Other sources: Digital Elevation Models (DEM). Available from USGS.

GPS, Netstumbler/kismet. etc.

TIGER Mapserver.... instant attractiv e mpas... but they don't tell our story, the servewr is slow, and it's not OS. They can't provide the code.

GRASS

PostGIS - uses PostgreSQL.

MapServere - knows layers. Capable fo reading data from a variety of sources, including GRASS and PostGIS.

Nocat Mapping. Add info about distance, bearing, clearance. Then you can plot it with GDPlot...shows hill in the way...doesn't account for curvature of the earth, Fresnel zones, ground clutter.

Bright future; Visualization tools that allow us to play "what if " easily. We need web services that expose public databases and facilitate the development of map-based applications.

Discuss Mapping Wireless Networks

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 02:03:19 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Eric Bonabeau: Biological Computing

Ants, wasps, termites.

Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smar resultss. - Kevin Kelly

Great, but how do yhou make those connections? Nature does this well... produced brain, bacteria, trees, ants. The idea of bio-inspired computer is to look at nature, how nature has done it, and create solutions based on nature's way.

Social insects do this very well... they do amazing things collectively that no individual insect can do. Ants, wasps, bees, etc. We look at how insects do it, and create algorithms inspired by their practices, which are based on millions of years of evolution. They are successful, resilient...

• Flexible: a colony can respond to internal perturbations and external challenges.
• Robust: tasks are completed even if some individuals fail
• Decentralized
• Self-organized

What is important is the mind-set, looking from bottom up rather than top down. Decentralized bottom-up mindset is whaty swarm intelligence movement is about.

How edo we shape emergence? How do we define individual behavior and interactions to produce desired emergent patterns?

Lessons from the swarm.

1: In emergence, the whole can be more than the sum of its parts. Must design carefully for that.

Double-bridge experiment... bridge with two branches between ants and food source. Exploit the environment to look for food. Colonies use one bridge but not the other. Ants follow pheromone trails... first ant chooses one branch over another randomly. If 1st ant made successful trip to food and back, will lay a pheromone trail that other ants will follow. If a renegade ant takes branch b, there's still more pheromone at branch b because it has more pheromone (more ants have dropped pheromone there)... so cooperation is amplified.

Change experiment: one branch longer than the other. Colony collectively chooses the short path. Mechanism is the same. The first ant that returns to the next shows the shortest path twice, to and from... short path marked first because it takes less time to make trip to and from. Ergo more ants choose the short path.

Issue: mechanism is very simple, but not very robust. If you establish long path first, then add short path, they will continue to use longer path because it's well marked.

Nature solves this problem with evaporation... the pheromone evaporates over time.

At some point we don't care anymore whether what we're considering is biologically possible, when we're conceptualizing to inspire sfotware design. I.e. you could increase evaporation rate in creating a computer model.

Traveling sales-ants

Assume that each ant, after building a tour reinforces the edges it hsas used by an amount proportional to 1/L. Build a tour by hopping based on pheromone concentration divided by the distance of the length between cities.

After iterations, agent builds a solution to the problem. This works well for optimization (heuristics).

Reoptimize quickly using memory of the solution... can use that memory to find a solution quickly.

This technique has been used to schedule toothpaste factories by Unilever. Algorithm incorporates consideration of glitches.

Routing in communications networks... simple agents are launched, goe from source to destination, updates routing tables on way to destination, viewing its source as a destination.

Compared to other routing algorithms - up to 95% improvement.

A short list of commercial apps...

#2 Simple rules rule.

Bucket brigages in harvester ants... ants retrieve seeds in a bucket brigade of up to six workers... organized in terms of ant size. Most efficient ants are the larger ants... brigades organize by size.

This is the optimal way of organizing labor. Bucket brigades at Taco Bell... Take order, cash, monitor, steam, wrap...

The slower guys hand off to the fastest along the chain of taco assembly.

Agent based solution or bottom-up simulation - a good way to simulate aggressors - defenders behavior. Add protector and behavior changes. "Smart Mobs."

Southwest Airlines: simple rules and bottom up modeing. Optimize cargo routing using simple rules.

UAV (unmanned air vehicles) - will have more about this Friday PM.

Cautionary tale abouty "blindly" following simple rules. Usually efficient army ants that are practically blind sometime get bad results... as a colony separated by rain from the main column (no pheromones found). The more pheromone, the faster they go, the more they lay. They get into a 'circular mill' where they run faster and faster until they die of exhaustion... so simple rules can be problematic in certain pathological situations.

#3: no one has to be in control. As where ants push and pull in different directions until they all push in the same direction, and go on with that direction. You can do this with simple robots and robot swarms that do simple tasks with no one in charge and little connection.

Couldn't understand nest-building in wasps, came up with a different model. Engineered emergent patterns - grown using little bricks with no intelligence, all they ask is whether it makes sense to stick or not. They are the emergent results of coordination via the construction itself. #4: Size matters. Size of wasp colonies and bee colonies. Polyvalence: smaller colony, all do everything. Specialization in larger colonies. Completely emergent.

When you look at colony efficiency in honeybees, efficiency increases with size of colony to a point - at large size you have saturation where they tend to interfere with each other... at some point you have swarming as efficiency flattens... nature's way of doing de-mergers. In nature you never find mergers, only de-mergers.

#5: Prey... Swarm intelligence. Michael Crichton's Prey.

The science of Crichton's book is becoming possible. You have all kinds of natural and artificial collective systems...

Coming soon:
More distributed optimization and control
Self healing self organizing comm networks
Swamr robotics will move beyond mappingv Self-aggregating devices
Self-organized satellite deployemnt and maintenance
Contrllling swarms of UAVs, UGVs, UUVs
Swarm based sensor networks, smar t dust
Social engineering of collective phenomena

info@icosystem.com

Discuss Eric Bonabeau: Biological Computing

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 12:00:20 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Digital Rights Management

Panel at Emerging Technology

Dan Gillmor: DRM should be Digital Restrictions Management.

Wish Jack Valenti was here... he's a gentleman and a persuasive, charming guy, even though he doesn't answer direct questions when yhou ask him. He has a big industry behind him.

Joe Kraus: DigitalConsumer.org. In DC with full time lobbying staff. Silicon Valley stays out of politics... "if you don't agree with my position, I should tell you my facts again." Legislators don't respond to this. Also in Silicon Valley assume that new technologies will overcome policy problems, but this is not necessarily the case. We have to acknowledge that there is an attack on innovation. Joe got involved and learned that you can have an effect... it makes a difference for them to know that we eill cheer them on if they upset Hollywood.

Wendy Seltzer of EFF (legal context): This is definitely digital restrictions management - not talking just about the rights of the copyright holder. Also talking about what you can do as someone who wants to design a new system for digital media... restrictions placed in various places... on the media, in the devices that play the media, and on the networks that we use to view/hear the media.

Traditional copyright law prior to DMCA gives copyright holders certain exclusive rights - but they are limited. Still give the right to privately perform and make fair use. Thereare holes in copyright holders rights that are an important part of the balance, that the copyright holder does not have a right to control. Copyright holders using certain technologies to restrict rights - to restrict what you can do with the media. You could debate in the tech realm how effective those restrictions in technology layer were.

DMCA adds another layer - now if there is circumvention of the tech measure or offer tools for the circumvention, it's a crime. It's no longer a question whether you're clever enough to get around the technology - now circumvention is a crime. Goes beyond right to control public performance... e.g. when you buy a DVD you no longer have the right to access it by whatever means, but by the means dictated (licensed) by the copyright holder. Also technologists no longer have the right to tinker with the technology, to study it, to create workarounds even for fair use. Fair use becomes unlawful under DMCA, according to the studio (will hear arguments on that in a specific case Friday morning...)

Film studios use the words theft or piracy, and we're not allowed to discuss the impact on the Internet. ISPs are being told to turn over the names of customers and colleges told to turn off access to certain users to prevetn this 'theft.' Will the restrictions break the technologies?

Bunny Wong: role of DRM in the future. Some solutions require DRM of sorts... e.g. video games you play online. Will TCPA or Palladium be effective means of enforcement? We want a second opinion! Palladium is a sweeping change... encrypt video io, keyboard, controller... do we get an extra sense of security and safety from this chipset? Could we have done this with the technologies we have already - existing technologies without overriding our rights. Microsoft believes that hardware attacks on secure computerss are not a threat - "most users won't."

Cory: Microsoft is trying to lock people out of the kind of innovation that made the company. Good news: Napster built a huge library, and the copyright law was used to burn that library to the ground... but it sprung up again! But the bad news is not that there are folks engaged in ongoing attempts to burn down the library, i.e. MPAA, RIAA, etc. The blame is not with them.... we have to blame ourselves. There were 57 million Napster users when Napster went dark. This is more than voted in the presidential election (50 million). The problem here isn't that we built a library or the recording industry is losing money. The problem is that copyright's objective is to build libraries, and its tactic is to compensate artists... Napster had no provision for that. Incentives are important, so we should compensate those who create.

Entertainment industry has traditionally tried to change copyright. We did it with piano roll... radio... vcr. We need to resolve by figuring out how to compensate artists... and the questions around this are not answered by DRM. The question DRM answers is how do we burn the library down for good. Instead of trying to keep the libraries viable, how do we accommodate the property rights of the entertainment companies, is the question they're asking in DC, and it's the wrong question.

So instead of the broadcast flag, where broadcast industry gets a veto right over the design of pcs - and watermark technology, where pcs shut down when watermark is detected, we should be building libraries.

The answer is to not run like roaches when they turn the lights on. When we hear about this piracy, ask why should we burn the libaries down. The thing is to open the debate about how to compensate artists.

Q&A Cory: buying a PC doesn't make you opposed to file sharing, but supporting DRM makes you supportive of burning down the library. Evidence that people who do file sharing buy cds. How will debate change when next version of office comes out and it actually empowers users to enforce their own digital rights. Cory: don't think it'll shift geek sensibilities. Dan: question is more about mainstream than geeks. Joe: people will at first be excited about it, then they will realize that the less they make themselves connected, the less valuable their stuff becomes. People may learn that the value is there, in the connections, and not so much in their work. But in short term people will hoard more.

Wendy: problems with this technology. First, when it fails (can't print a file for a presentation you need)... then when it works (can't share a file with colleagues).

Cory: the three whistle blowers on the cover of Time Magazine this year would not have been able to forward the files as they did.

Bunny: Recording industry is part of an overhead the Internet can make extinct. We need micropayments. You can't pay ten cents to an artist... overhead of server farm, secure encryptions, etc.

Cory: go to people in organization - MPAA Technical Working Group - tell them that the broadcast flag is wrong. Ask them to stop.

At the end of the day, copyright law is broken for this. Contractual negotiations are complex. Hollywood is capable of having the law changed in its favor. To the extent that entertainment industry can lobby to get DMCA enacted...

Greg Elin: a lazy web idea: a payment system done with your individual blogroll.

Discuss Digital Rights Management

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 10:32:37 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Howard Rheingold at Emerging Technology Conference

Howard, following up on Smart Mobs, discusses some of the things he's seen that are relevant to collective action:

You can create tools that amplify collective action.

It's not given that we will still have the same freedom to innovate going forward, but there are people in this room who can innovate around legislative and other constratins.

Defines collective action as people volunatirly working togetgher to create, communicate, deliberate, coordinate, agree, exchange, link: Democracy, Science, Stock Markets. We'd still be throwing rocks at rabbits and picking berries if we had not taken collective action (banded together) to hunt big game.

We can use technology to increase our trust and enable social agreements where there were none before. Unix is an example: collective work for common good. Architecture of unix and fundamental protocols of the internet (end to end) supported collective work. The web if nothing else is an example of collective action: if you had asked corporations and govt to create the web, they would still be workin gon it in our grandchildren's lifetime.

Early signs of collective action: computational: p2p, folding@home, wikipedia, wifi, social software. The @home groups have people sharing cycles on their PCs (seti@home has 30-40 teraflops of distributed computing power).

In the future with increased bandwidth and wireless, what will people be empowered to do collectively?

Wikipedia is an astounding example: a bunch of people building a body of knowledge and doing well at it.

Social software: any kind of wiki, forum, email list, instant messaging - tools for people to act together, without which the software is not that powerful.

We are beginning to see people use Internet to affect political process, as in South Korea where they tipped the election using wireless messaging etc. to get out the vote. Same in recent elections in Kenya, and antiwar demonstrations worldwide that were spontaneous, ad hoc organizations using the Internet, texting, mobile phones. Howard Dean uses meetup to bring constituents together.

(Great shot of Howard staring at teevee set): are we going to be consumers or users. Consumers: how we were treated before the PC empowered us. Old model of broadcast, one to many, radio tv movies recorded music. Consumers passively receive those media, and the creators of thos media would love to return to the day where we have such passive consumption... and trying to use legislation to get us there.

User actively shape media, create as well as consume, link together for collective action: PC, Internet, Web. Not just inventors coming up with something, but groups forming and creating, shaping extremely rapidly. Doesn't think we can assume we will maintain this freedom to innovate without a fight to remain users rather than consumers. Control of innovatgion is under attack... broadcast flag, trusted computing (i.e. don't trust users), compromise of end-to-end principle, control of spectgrum by incumbents. Routers being built to censor packets, broadband carriers requesting and being granted the right to withdraw from peering relationships, balkanization of networks resulting from that. Howard is afraid this is a successful attack so far. Now WiFi is threatening to the government and to corporations that pumped a lot of money into 3G systems. They're not going to take this lying down... spectrum probably won't expand without some kind of political pressure.

Important to be politically involved, but this group should consider that their daily work matters -can't invent your way out of this unless you understand the political constraints - you can build astonishing technologies; the way these things are designed will reallly matter. You're going to have to be actively involved... defend your freedom to invent, prefvent incumbengts from exclusing newcomers. It's not over yet; next year or the year after we'll know more about these political efforts... meanwhile we have to fight for a preserve... make networks of devices, human communication media, a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum available for experimentation.

We're at a plateau where we might be locked into a particular technology that may not serve us well - re spectrum regulation - but there are new radio technologies that could take us to another understanding of spectrum use.

File sharing makes stuff available that are otherwise hard to find: Napster users voted with their participation: that's how they want music distributed. Nobody has figured out yet how to do that and aloow payment (micropayments). Given an easy way to pay a fair price, people would do that - why don't we put the recording industry out of the business of mediating popular music and allow artists to sell more directly to their audiences?

I.e. we can invent our way around the bottleneck. Current recording industry should give way to creative destruction so that new distribution models could emerge. If recording industry and movie industry went away, quality of media would go up immediately. (applause!)

Emergence: encoujrage self-organizing networks - a future in which people will have devices that are mobile, networked, and pervasive. E.g. palmtops that have connectivity are being used by people who otherwise would not have used the Internet... fishermen, for instance, to keep track of conditions for fishing.

What can we do to keep open systems that enable self-organized groupo to create things that we don' t know about yest?

Trust mechanisms are pivotal. Will reputation evolve? E.g. emergence of the banking system and money enabled capitalism as we have it today... those have to do with trust mechanisms. We all know that if you just had a baby, bought a new car, network has gone down, etc, you can get online, connect with someone who will give you some information, and might become your friend though you've never seen 'em. As you walk down a street, through an airport, you're surrounded by strangers, some of whom have common cause with you... we lack a mechanism for identifying th ose people and assessing how well to trust them. System such as ebay uses should evolve so that people can find each other with an acceptable degree of trust. All kinds of economic arrangements might emerge if reputations can evolve to trusted systems and become widely used.

We are now beginning to see technical possibility of arriving in a new town and pulling out your phone to get a map to a specific place, find places to eat, etc... all possible (whether an industry will emerge is in question)... Importance of open systems to maintain our freedom to self-organize. Freedom of information in places.

The Era of Sentient Things. Mark Smith created software to enable his camera to read bar codes. Why? Scanned the bar code, picked up info from UPC database and automatically googled info about the products... Howard tried and found his way to information about Sun Diamond, maker of a package of prunes, that showed some of their down side (via legal cases).

Tried with cereal, discovered recall notice.

Will this system (UPC) remain open? We're on the verge of having bar codes replaced by RFID tags. All kinds of things are possible if we can write to and read these tags. When everything has a story, who will be allowed to read and write them?

Design principles:
• End-to-end principle (TCP/IP) - the people who designed the Internet thought about us... what we would need for innovation.
• Link to others... or design for links/integration
• Is there a default privacy switch? Is it on or off by default? Design of defaults is important to our protection - how we can opt out from pervasive cloud of information (this came from the Q&A).

Q&A

Surveillance problem is that it's asymmetric - people watch us but we don't know who they are and can't watch them. Software for identifying your face not there yet, but will be... will surveillance cameras be linked to databases? Could be.

Technologies can give us power and freedom, and can take it away. The way we use technologies changes the world we're in. In order to trust someone, you need to know if they're an identity that you can trust persistently. Some form of digital identity will be necessary.

In democracy, you need people who are well informed, you need fair elections, and you need protection for free speech. All under attack. A chaotic rough and tumble discussion is important out there...

Q: Disconnect? Howard talks about individual solutions - geek tech idea... I'll take my toys and go somewhere else. Doesn't seem to work very well. Is this a disconnect from call for collective action? Bridge gap? What are the solutions?

You shouldn't ignore necessity to support EFF, CDT, Public Knowledge etc. It takes money and expertise to fight the political battle. Decisions so far are being made by lobbyists and experts who go to DC in behalf of corporations - they're not hearing from citizens. Recording industry has managed to frame their battle in their terms, and I think we need to take that back. Howard is talking about innovating to this audience, because that's what we do. It's not coming up with a magic box to solve all problems... the thing is to be aware of the political issues and build in affordance for collective action.

Cory: strong pseudonymous identity: is that a feature or a bug?

Howard: if I can trust 'em, I don't care if they're a man, woman, bot, or group. Operational decisions you need to make based on other peoples' experiences with the identity, whatever entities it might represent. The utility of reputation is operational. <\p> Discuss Howard Rheingold at Emerging Technology Conference

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/23/2003 09:35:30 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Sunday, April 20, 2003
Mark Lombardi's global networks


The late Mark Lombardi created hand-drawn network maps (he calls them "narrative structures") which show political relationships associated with "busted banks, hot money, financial fraud..." Lombardi's works will be on the road through October 2004. (Thanks, Valdis!) [Link]

"At some point in my development," says the artist, "I began to reject reductivist approaches in favor of one capable of evoking the complexity, venality and occasional brutality of the times. What emerged was a study of 'irregular' financial transactions, with special emphasis on those undertaken in secret by select groups of influential yet silent partners."

Discuss Mark Lombardi's global networks

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/20/2003 07:12:44 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Jon Udell on Blogs, scopes, and human routers

I never got around to blogging this when Udell blogged it a couple of weeks ago, but I think it's important and extremely relevant to productive aspects of blogging (i.e. k-logs - blogs for knowledge sharing and management - and social networking). [Link]

If I am seeking or sharing information, why do I need to be able to address a group of 3 (my team), or 300 (my company), or 300,000 (my company's customers), or 300 million (the Usenet)? At each level I encounter a group that is larger and more diffuse. Moving up the ladder I trade off tight affinity with the concerns of my department, or my company, for access to larger hive-minds. But there doesn't really have to be a tradeoff, because these realms aren't mutually exclusive. You can, and often should, operate at many levels. (Quote from Udell's book Practical Internet Groupware)

Discuss Jon Udell on Blogs, scopes, and human routers

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/20/2003 05:30:42 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Saturday, April 19, 2003
Happenings vs Webex

I went to a breakfast with a panel on wireless Friday, hosted by Austin's Technical Business Network, and ran into my friend Emily Sopensky, who said she's been looking into virtual meetings. I told her about the Happenings that Socialtext has been coordinating for emergent democracy and the new Social Software Alliance (which held its first meeting via a happening yesterday). Emily asked why this was any better than Webex. I mentioned this to Adina of Socialtext, and she figured the difference is that Webex is more about presentation than conversation. I'm still mulling it over – since I haven't done a Webex event in ages, I'm not sure I know the product's current capabilities.

I just registered for a live demo of Webex. Meanwhile I've looked at their standards and platform pages, and their news page which has a number of press releases suggesting that Webex is a happening company.

They have a pricing model that begins at 45 cents per participant per minute, and teleconferencing adds at least 10 cents per minute. I think we had about 20 people in yesterday's happening for about an hour, and if I've done my calculations correctly, that would be $660. However our cost was whatever toll fees each of us paid to call the number specified by freeconference.com. I think I pay 5 cents per minute for long distance service, so if you extend that per person, the cost was around $60 for a pro bono happening. That's one advantage over Webex (though vendors like Socialtext will charge for components and consulting for commercial versions of the 'happening' model).

Discuss Happenings vs Webex

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/19/2003 06:38:16 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Thursday, April 17, 2003
Social Software Alliance

A group of social software developers and practitioners have formed the Social Software Alliance to develop standards and best practices for weblog, wiki, forum, and realtime messaging (chat and IM) platforms and related software (e.g. Friend of a Friend (FOAF), RSS). [Link]

From the call for discussion:

We propose a trade group of social software developers and other interested parties who work together to create and promote open standards for the social software community. Social software blends tools and modes for richer online social environments and experiences. Some examples of social software are weblogs, wikis, forums, chat environments, or instant messaging, and related tools and data structures for identity, integration, interchange and analysis.

Social software is a dynamic and constantly evolving environment, rich with possibilities to create better connections between people. With a growing number of active developers, we need a central nexus to help drive the process of coordination and interoperability between different developers' products.

The alliance will:

• aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards
• assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards
• help promote each standard to gain wider adoption

The fast-paced nature of the social software space now argues for developing light-weight, easy-to-implement standards, following the Internet tradition of rough consensus and running code, but perhaps moving faster than the larger standards bodies. It is expected that those standards promulgated by the alliance which become widely adopted will be proposed to the appropriate general standards body or bodies: W3C, IETF, ISO, etc.

Discuss Social Software Alliance

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/17/2003 07:08:01 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Tuesday, April 15, 2003
Where's Ed Murrow when we need him?

Ed Gernon, producer of an upcoming CBS drama about Adolph Hitler, was fired for expressing his opinion that the mood in the U.S. today is simlar to the mood in Nazi Germany. I think his view is a stretch, but a comparison to the McCarthy era in the USA seems perfectly apt, and still pretty disturbing. [Link]

Let CBS know how you feel by giving feedback at the their web site (Thanks for thinking of this, Bobby!).

Here is what Gernon, interviewed before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, told reporter Mark Lasswell about Germany and Hitler's route to infamy as shown in the CBS story:

"It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war. I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

Here is what Gernon said about Americans accepting President Bush's decision to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq aimed at toppling Hussein and stripping him of weapons of mass destruction:

"They will stand by and let it happen because of the fear of what will happen if they don't."

Lasswell writes that Gernon went on to say that a similar climate "absolutely" nourished Germany's endorsement of Hitler's extremism. "When an entire country becomes afraid for their sovereignty, for their safety," Gernon added, "they will embrace ideas and strategies and positions that they might not embrace otherwise.

Discuss Where's Ed Murrow when we need him?

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/15/2003 08:46:14 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Saturday, April 12, 2003
Community Informatics

Logging in from Colorado Springs, from a meeting with academics and practitioners discussing the potential need for a discipline or sector for community technology. Our meeting was a brainstorming session with diverse viewpoints represented. The issues are economic, practical, technical, social, and political, and part of the challenge is looking from all of these perspectives at the role and relevance of community information systems which are still evolving and somewhat fragmented. What's clear to me is that we have a lot of work to do, and I'm thinking a lot about Lee Felsenstein's How to Make a Revolution. Get a project and go with it.

Discuss Community Informatics

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/12/2003 05:44:52 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Thursday, April 10, 2003
Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?

This is a very good overview of the spectrum policy debate as it stands today, for those of you who are interested in the future of wireless telecom and its implications. [Link]

Commons proponents such as Lessig say skepticism about a "spectrum commons" is due to the way we've been trained to think about "spectrum." People believe spectrum is a thing. People believe radio "interference" is because radio waves collide. Both thoughts are wrong, according to Lessig.

"Spectrum is not a thing," and "interference" is not an issue of radio waves; it's an issue with the equipment used. When people think of spectrum as a thing, Lessig said, they assume that the benefits of property rights outweigh costs and benefits of an open commons. The current FCC allocation process made sense in the mid-twentieth century, Lessig said. "It's the wrong answer today."

Discuss Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/10/2003 07:41:15 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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How to Make a Revolution...

... in three easy steps, according to Lee Felsenstein, via David Reed. (Thanks, David!) [Link]

FIRST, everybody gets a project.

Join one or start one, but the project has to be directed toward making things better. That's what's called a "positive vector".

SECOND, everybody talks with everybody else about their projects.

That's "talks with", not just "talks to" or "talks at". This sets up a "field of communication", with information flowing in all directions. It's very important to the process, and we now have the tools (the Internet and the phone system) to make communication available without much hierarchy.

THIRD, be prepared to change your project based upon what you learn by communicating about it.

This is also very important. It "closes the feedback loop" by making the communication consequential, and, with everyone's good sense, sets up a "converging system" in the general direction of the vector.

That's it. Act, especially in concert with others, communicate and re-evaluate. Repeat as often as possible. Oh, yes - keep records of what you try and what happened , both good and bad. The system needs an element of memory to function.

Discuss How to Make a Revolution...

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/10/2003 07:17:55 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Remembering VisiCalc

Scott Rosenberg blogs the Computer History Museum's event, "The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc," which includes a panel discussion featuring VisiCalc creators Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, along with Mitch Kapor, who carried the VisiCalc concept into Lotus 1-2-3. Hard to imagine the personal computer revolution without VisiCalc. The spreadsheet was the kind of killer app that gave people a reason to buy those cranky little boxes. [Link]

Bricklin and the other panelists agreed that VisiCalc succeeded because it was different from the kind of financial forecasting software that already existed -- it was a free-form, general purpose tool, an electronic "back of the envelope." It allowed non-programmers to do things at a level of complexity that, previously, you had to learn programming to accomplish.

Discuss Remembering VisiCalc

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/10/2003 05:50:53 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Webby Nominees for Community

Interesting Webby Award nominess for best community site:

• BBC Video Nation
• Geocaching
• LiveJournal.com
• Meetup
• Nervous Industries

For most of these sites, online and offline blend in interesting ways. Meetup is a site for coordinating physpace affinity groups, nervousness.org coordinates mail artists, geocaching.com has people hiding caches and planting clues for others to find them, and the Video Nation site is a collection of video statements by ordinary people in a number of categories, with a place for comments by viewers.

Innovative stuff, for sure, an acknowledgment that a "virtual community" can be particularly effective when it extends into the physical world.

Discuss Webby Nominees for Community

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/10/2003 05:33:22 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Tuesday, April 08, 2003
Quicktopic Lag

I'm making a subtle change, omitting the counters on Quicktopic discussion links. I think they're a source of lag when the blog loads. Too many little javascript widgets to deal with.

Another potential change: I keep saying that I'll migrate Weblogsky to Movable Type, but I've been too busy to do the detail work of template design. What I could really use is more time to blog all the stuff that's on my mind...

Discuss Quicktopic Lag

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/8/2003 04:19:19 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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HowJapanese

We set up a wiki at the Viridian Design web site, and somebody slipped in with comments on the Viridian principles from a Japanese perspective. Wiki is so Wabi Sabi. [Link]

Discuss HowJapanese

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/8/2003 04:14:31 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Monday, April 07, 2003
Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead! (?)

Discuss Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead!

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/7/2003 09:06:41 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Fix-Net

My colleagues at Austin Free-Net have launched a successful technical support service for other nonprofits, called Fix-Net. The pilot program was an unqualified success. [Link to Fix-Net article in Community Technology Review]

Discuss Fix-Net

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/7/2003 07:49:23 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Internet, Swarms, and Social Software

D.C. Denison in the Boston Globe discusses various interactive applications of Internet technology based on emergent "swarms" that self-organize for various tasks, including military:

According to authors John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, swarms are much more than an unorganized mass of individuals -- like a swarm of soccer fans. Instead, swarming is a structured and organized way of striking from all directions.

Rand's 98-page briefing for the National Defense Research Institute is ''an elaboration of our ideas about how the information revolution is affecting the whole spectrum of conflict.'' The new unit, in Rand's model, is ''the small, dispersed, networked maneuver unit,'' which the authors call a ''pod'' and which is organized in ''clusters.'' The authors credit Internet technology with empowering the connectivity of these small units. In fact, the study asserts that the technological tools for this shift already exist, so that ''moving towards swarming is going to be more a function of cultivating an appropriate turn of mind and a supple, networked military form of organization.''

I got to this article via Ross Mayfield, who in turn found the link via Mike Helfrich of Groove Networks. The article mentions Groove, whose software I've avoided because the beta I tried a couple years ago was bloated. Microsoft made a significant investment in Groove, which wasn't exactly a good sign for those of us who promote simple tools that are configurable to meet complex demands - but that's another conversation. Helfrich refers to "the military/technology trend taking hold right now in the form of social software that uses the internet as it was intended. Decentralized groups of people swarming with a common purpose, using the net as a platform for connectivity, leveraging the net's inherent pervasiveness and high availability." That's a clueful perception, well aligned with other social software conversations such as the one about emergent democracy.

Ross was on a panel with the Groovers, and he also mentions "how Groove allows ad-hoc application infrastructure creation.  Sensor networks based on smart radio network physical infrastructure are realizing Saffo's vision of a shift to Interaction." Saffo's diagram:

The Shift From Processing and Access to Interaction



Source: IFTF

Discuss Internet, Swarms, and Social Software

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/7/2003 05:25:06 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Friday, April 04, 2003
Metanewspeak

David Weinberger took the time to clarify just how many ways Andrew Orlowski's googlewash rant is wrong. Orlowski's redefinition of Orwellian newspeak is, er, newspeak. [Link]

Worse, Orlowski's comparisons to 1984's NewSpeak are dangerously wrong. NewSpeak is a totalitarian government's intentional subversion of language by changing the meaning of the culture's most important, elemental words: Peace becomes war, freedom becomes slavery, etc. James Moore and the bloggers who linked to him aren't a totalitarian power, and Moore only shaded the meaning, not cynically reversed it. Further, the phrase isn't an elemental term; according to Orlowski, it was coined just this February. Orlowski seems to have confused folk music with a totalitarian state's national anthem.

Discuss Metanewspeak

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/4/2003 07:17:14 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Thursday, April 03, 2003
Googlewashing?

Since I've been talking a lot about weblogs and "emergent democracy," I should note this mean-spirited piece of critical thrash from Andrew Orlowski, who accuses the emergent democracy crowd of googlewashing, compared to greenwashing, "where a spot of judicious marketing paint is applied to something decidedly rotten, transforming it into something that looks as if it's wholesome and radical new, but which is essentially unchanged." Somehow he's decided that blogcentric discussions of peace and democracy are part of a totalitarian conspiracy, an attempt to censor web reality. (I wonder how Joi feels about being a "colossus of authority"?) [Link]

Moore's subversion of the meaning of "Secondary Superpower" - his high PageRank™ from derives from followers of 'A-list' tech bloggers linking from an eerily similar "Emergent Democracy" discussion list, which in turn takes its name from a similarly essay posted by Joi Ito [Lunch - Lunch - Lunch - Segway - Lunch - Lunch - Fawning Parody] who is a colossus of authority in these circles, hence lots of PageRank™-boosting hyperlinks, and who like Moore, appeared from nowhere as a figure of authority.

Lunchin' Ito's essay is uncannily similar to Moore's - both are vague and elusive and fail to describe how the "emergent" democracy might form a legal framework, a currency, a definition of property or - most important this, when you're being hit with a stick by a bastard - an armed resistance (which in polite circles today, we call a "military").

Discuss Googlewashing?

Added 4/4/2003: Kevin Marks posts here about the Orlowski piece.

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/3/2003 01:22:04 PM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Tuesday, April 01, 2003
The Second Superpower

As mentioned before, I haven't quite known what to think and what to blog about the war in Iraq. Latest news suggests that Saddam et al (or "et al qaeda") lured U.S. hawks into a war far more destructive than they suspected, probably with forms of disinformation fed to U.S. intelligence operatives. We have growing numbers of U.S. casualties, and we've pretty much blown our social capital &ndash not to mention the very real expense of the war in U.S. dollars. The war appears to be a significant wrong turn by an unsophisticated, blindly ideological administration. It's not clear how we can fix the problem at this point. but James Moore suggests that the emerging, partly virtual peace movement is a second superpower that can have a significant impact on world events. [Link]

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation. Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement. The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights. This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one. These are people who are attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of all 6.3 billion people in the world—and not just the members of one or another nation. Consider the members of Amnesty International who write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and the millions of Americans who are participating in email actions against the war in Iraq. Or the physicians who contribute their time to Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While some of the leaders have become highly visible, what is perhaps most interesting about this global movement is that it is not really directed by visible leaders, but, as we will see, by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants. Surveys suggest that at least 30 million people in the United States identify themselves this way—approximately 10% of the US population. The percentage in Europe is undoubtedly higher. The global membership in Asia, South America, Africa and India, while much lower in percentage of the total population, is growing quickly with the spread of the Internet. What makes these numbers important is the new cyberspace-enabled interconnection among the members. This body has a beautiful mind. Web connections enable a kind of near-instantaneous, mass improvisation of activist initiatives. For example, the political activist group Moveon.org, which specializes in rapid response campaigns, has an email list of more than two million members. During the 2002 elections, Moveon.org raised more than $700,000 in a few days for a candidate’s campaign for the US senate. It has raised thousands of dollars for media ads for peace—and it is now amassing a worldwide network of media activists dedicated to keeping the mass media honest by identifying bias and confronting local broadcasters.

Discuss The Second Superpower

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/1/2003 05:59:49 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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Ross Mayfield on Social Network Types: Some Comments

Ross Mayfield blogged about Social Network Models, and asked for feedback. My thoughts came together in a conversation with Adina Levin earlier today. Here are some comments:

Ross says “Another wave of online communities is underway. The first wave, beginning with the Well, took advantage of the social adoption of email to build community upon Usenet, bulletin boards and forums.”

The Internet itself was built by and for communities. The whole concept of internetworking is about sharing and collaboration, and all the community/social network efforts that have been built into the Internet are there specifically because they fit the concept. The wave metaphor doesn't exactly work for me in this context, because I don't think one wave receded and another followed, at least not socially. We're building new tools which are refinements of the old tools, and the social practices are clearly an extension of stuff we've done all along – we're just getting better at it.

Ross: This wave takes advantage of the social adoption of the web to build community upon web-native tools.  Because the web is more diverse environment so too are the tools.  The physical and logical infrastructure of the web has reached a maturity while usage has surpassed a tipping point where it is ingrained in most people's lives.  As people have become participants on the web, they are building a new social infrastructure, connection by connection.

The web has matured in that it has stabilized somewhat after a period of rapid innovation fueled by VC money. We see more stability at the moment partly because the gold rush is over, in fact we're in a post-boom slump, and those of us who are dedicated to the web are more into refining tools and practices than building expensive new technologies. We're getting perspective, a better understanding of the Internet as an environment for all sorts of things – and we're sorting out the fundamentals. Not sure we're building a new social infrastructure. I think we're extending an existing infrastructure.

Those who are just now adopting the social network meme do seem to think they're onto something new, but there are a number of social network practitioners who have been doing this stuff (including exploring, and fostering the development of, new tools) over the last decade or so. A partial list: Howard Rheingold, Cliff Figallo, Nancy Rhine, Nancy White, Stacy Horn, Rob Malda, Amy Jo Kim, Gail Williams, Bruce Fancher, Denham Grey... the list goes on. I don't want to get into a “been there, done that” rant, because the new thinking and innovation around blogs is great, but the point is that there's already a body of experience and documentation around social networks, and these are worth studying.

What's really new is that, instead of talking inside a community, we're talking across communities. Weblogs (and the feedback that go with 'em) face outward, they're public discussion. You can search them and do aggregation, so there's many ways to pull conversations together. There are tools for high level analysis, so you can see what people are talking about, what subjects are catching fire.

Ross talks about four types of social networks, and weblogs are a subset of one of these types, the conversational. The others are explicit (Ryze), Physical (Meetup), and Private (Friendster).

Ryze's conceptual precursor was a site called SixDegrees where you would identify your connection to people, and you see their connections, so you get a sense of relationship to friends, friends of friends, and their friends... a map of your social network emerged as you connect the dots. Ryze seems pretty successful, and I attribute at least part of that success to the frequent physical gatherings of Ryze members and networks.

Meetup is also about physical meetings, and has no precursors, at least none I can think of. Meetup creates monthly meetings for various affinity groups. The meetups are held in cities across the U.S. Meetup members sign up according to their affinities, and they vote each month on a meeting place from among 3-4 options.

Ryze is a virtual network with physical extensions, and Meetup is a virtual support for creating and sustaining physical networks. This blending of virtual and physical brings to mind the importance of face-to-face contact for online social networks to grow and mature. This has been subject to debate, and I'm not offering statistics, but my personal observation over the years suggests that members of compelling virtual communities will look for ways to meet physically, and will gain weight and dimension from physical meetings. This is just as true for the explicit, conversational, and private categories, in my opinion, and the physical aspect of Meetup.com is working as a plugin for those other types of social networks – examples being the weblogger and slashdot meetups.

This reinforces's Ross' contention that The differences of these Social Network Models will trend to blur....

Ross responds.

Discuss Ross Mayfield on Social Network Types: Some Comments

posted by jon lebkowsky on 4/1/2003 05:45:01 AM | ~permalink~ | ~post a comment~

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