Where am I speaking?

Tuesday night, actually not part of SXSW but a good lead-in, EFF-Austin and Plutopia Productions are sponsoring an event – a panel on the twentieth anniversary of the Secret Service raid at Steve Jackson Games, part of the “hacker crackdown.” I’ll be moderating a panel featuring Steve, Bruce Sterling, and attorney Pete Kennedy (who argued the case). The event, at Independence Brewing, is sold out, but we’ll hopefully be streaming, or at least have video online after the fact.

The day before SXSW starts, March 11, I’ll be giving a talk at “Sharing, Exchanging, Social Health,” an event that takes advantage of the presence in town of many participatory medicine/social health advocates, and gives them a place to hang out. It’s an unconference seeded with a few programmed talks.

With my Plutopia Productions colleagues, I’ll be introducing Plutopia 2010 on Monday the 15th. Gates open at 7pm at the Mexican American Cultural Center. Plutopia is a defining SXSW Interactive event, this year focusing on “The Science of Music,” and featuring Bruce Sterling, DJ Spooky, DJ Strangevibe, Black Pig Liberation Front, Xiao He. The schedule is here. We’ll also have the Edible Austin Food Fest featuring local food and distillers.

Tuesday, David Armistead has asked me to join his core conversation at SXSW Interactive, “Can Social Media Save Business So Business Can Save the Planet?” Here’s a description:

In the era of GM-like businesses, now just past, opaque layers of hierarchy were used to control the flow of information to create an effective coordination of action. But new communications and information technology, including the new social media, now drop the costs of coordination so low business has to adopt them to stay competitive. Except – these technologies drastically flatten the organization and flood everything with radical new transparency, and many firms resist these kinds of changes.

John Motloch from Ball State University will also join us. Should be a lively and worldchanging discussion.

Finally, at the end of the day Tuesday, I’m introducing Bruce Sterling’s talk. I don’t think either one of us has any idea what we’re going to say at this point, but Bruce’s talk is always a highlight of the event.

Basically we’ve got an emergent, market-driven global financial system that was all about a faith-based market fundamentalism. It was deprived of oversight for three good reasons (a) it rapidly brought prosperity to billions (b) under globalization, money is inherently global while governance is inherently local (c) complete regulatory capture of the system — nobody but bankers understands how to bank. There’s no caste of regulators left anywhere who have the clout or even the knowledge to do anything usefully stabilizing. No, not even if you give them guns, lawyers, money and back issues of DAS KAPITAL.

Too big to fail. So, what can you do? Cross your fingers, basically. Make some reassuring noises. Cheerlead instead of reforming the infrastructure. And pawn what’s left of the credibility of government.

Twenty years ago, it seemed like this situation might lead to shareholder power, a kind of pension-fund ownership society. It kind of did, for a while. But over a longer term, the poor engineering told on the rickety, fungus-like structure of finance. The wealth and the executive capacity drifted into the hands of moguls. Not governments, big institutions, megacorporations, multinationals, but moguls, weird eccentrics, like Russian moguls. Madoff figures, Enron. Nobody was left to look. Even if they did look, all they could possibly see in Madoff and Enron was a genius, highly charitable head of the NASDAQ and the world’s most nimble and innovative energy company. It’s like looking at your SUV and seeing drowning polar bears. Just a minority viewpoint.

Particulars: The event is November 13th at 7:30pm or 9:30pm, featuring Ivan Neville’s Dumpstaphunk, John Pointer, and the Sangra del Sol Dance Troupe. Tickets are $100 apiece, $50 of which is tax-deductible. There’s also a silent auction, and a cash bar.

To by tickets, click on desired show time link below and enter the promotional code “ADOPTIONROCKS” (all caps)
7:30 pm link = http://budurl.com/adopt1
9:30 pm link = http://budurl.com/adopt2

If you want to sponsor or need more information, contact Mike Chapman – mikechapman2.0@gmail.com

Had an unintentional overnight stay in Providence RI September 11, following a talk with some friends about the future of the Internet, and because the Internet has become essential infrastructure for the ecology of business, the future of enterprise and economy as well. I woke at 3am to catch an early flight back to Austin, and while I was preparing to leave saw on MSNBC a replay of the 9/11/2001 news – the attack on the World Trade Center.

On the shuttle to the airport my attention opened and I noticed a lighted bus stop signboard, an ad for footwear, and something about that very traditional piece of advertising felt safe. Much of the conversation of the last few days had been about how crazy, chaotic, and unpredictable the world has become. I think most of us are feeling more anxiety than ever before – we don’t feel safe. Our perception is too often that the world is coming unhinged.

Seeing that ad, I thought how we all just need to feel safe.

Recently I was talking to a friend who does marketing, and I was saying that marketing is practically undone in the new world of fragmented, complex communications, where mindshare is focused more on media for connection and relationship than on the kind of one-way mass media that traditional media’s built on. Marketing professionals can and do work hard to understand the new media environment and adapt their skills, but do we really need marketing, or are we disintermediating the space between operations/production and the customer? Doc Searls has described a concept called “vendor relationship management” (VRM) that connects the customer more directly with product, a disintermediation of need and provisioning. In that context marketing may be replaced by customer ratings and reviews, and successful sales determined (as it should be) by product quality, driven by operations. In that context, more of the customer’s dollar is allocated to the producer; some part of it is possibly allocated to systems that manage connections, and the social interactions that provide product feedback (hence the great success of Bazaarvoice). Given all this, I wouldn’t feel especially safe if my skills were all about marketing, because marketing could become irrelevant.

I’ve just presented a scenario – it’s not real at this moment, only a conceptual projection based on trends in the world I know something about. If you’re a social media maven, you may nod your head as you read the paragraph above. If you’re a marketing profession, you’re probably shaking your head, thinking of all the ways this scenario could be wrong. But you don’t necessarily feel safe.

My point here is not to talk about marketing, but to talk about very real concerns about safety. A scenario like this that seems to marginalize the marketing profession can create instability as a whole sector of the economy is described as endangered species. Even if the scenario is completely correct, how brutal do we want to be about this? After blathering about the End of Marketing to my friend whose life is built around that industry, I was thinking we have a responsibility to help people feel safe, not endangered. That’s increasingly hard to do.

Someone said recently how we should consider the possibility of a 90% unemployment scenario, because we could be headed there, at least in the U.S. What does that world look like? It’s more like 90% no longer having what we traditionally think of as jobs; though they still find ways to put bread on the table. Will people work less, earn less?

We’ve discussed how we’re no longer in a world that can produce billionaires. We may no longer be in a world where we can guarantee even a simple majority a secure job with benefits.

But my point is not what changes and difficulties the future may bring. I’m concerned with the psychological and sociological impact of those changes, specifically how we can mitigate the potential profound insecurities, the sense that we are no longer safe.

At the same time, I’m reading a Scientific American Mind article that suggests a relationship of sociability to health. “Research shows that being part of social networks enhances our resilience, enabling us to cope more effectively with difficult life changes such as the death of a loved one, job loss or a move….Not only to our group memberships help us mentally, they also are associated with increased physical well-being.”

I suppose the message here is that connected, we feel safer. And I find that I really do want people to feel safe, to BE safe. Hence the urge to build communities, shared relationships, intimate connections.

Mobile Loves and Fishes is featured in the film, a documentary that asks how we can create more happiness (however defined) in our lives. Here’s a clip…

Several local web thinkers met recently with the IT staff from the City of Austin to discuss a best approach for redeveloping the city’s web site. The Austin Chronicle has a good article about the project focusing especially on my pal whurley and his efforts to help crowdsource a more innovative approach.

To kick-start the redesign process, Hurley initiated OpenAustin, a website where users can vote ideas for the city website up or down and submit their own. They range from the pedestrian (the currently top-rated suggestion is to pay Austin Energy bills online, followed by a system to list road closures across the city) to transparency-related (being able to track applications for city contracts, putting City Council meetings and video online faster) to the more arcane techy (”machine-readable data feeds” for all city info: crime, restaurant health inspections, etc.; and similarly, publishing every piece of city data as RSS feeds).

Hurley acknowledges OpenAustin is currently in the idea-generation stage. The final form of OpenAustin’s assistance in the redesign is still very nebulous – and of course, entirely dependent on the city’s response. Still, Hurley foresees several ways it could take place. “Maybe we don’t take all the RFPs [requests for proposals] when we do it, and maybe we don’t take everything and outsource it to the community,” he says. But he thinks OpenAustin could “help coordinate the community effort” by conceiving the redesign so volunteers could create mash-ups of applications: for example, overlaying a map of all the city’s bike routes with a map of free Wi-Fi hot spots or early voting locations.

My suggestion to the city was to scale the project to manageable chunks. Have an initial RFP for a framework so that technology and presentation are relatively coherent, but build the framework with the flexibility to allow City departments to RFP and manage their own subprojects.

Everyone in the conversation seems to agree that the city should make its data as accessible as possible, so that in addition to the city’s own site, innovative external applications could be developed that find useful ways to aggregate and analyze… this is what the Obama administration’s shooting for at the Federal level.

One other note: got this from Matt Esquibel at the City of Austin:

We also wanted to invite you to a public forum on Wednesday June 17, 2009 at the Carver Museum from 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. to discuss the AustinGO project moving forward. We hope to provide insight into the direction of the project and listen to the the thoughts and ideas of the community in attendance. We plan to have more public forums in the coming months and will provide more information as dates, times and formats are determined.

Kevin Kelly talks about “social media” and social-ism, saying “the frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of [the s-word].” This is a new brand of socialism that “operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.”

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

He uses the word socialism, he says, “because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions.”

Heralds of the transition:

How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with people you don’t know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political socialism seem like the logical next step.

I don’t know that I would make that prediction, and while I’m swimming in all this, I’m feeling a bit circumspect about the future (which, incidentally, isn’t here yet and never will be, despite what you’ve heard.) We’re increasingly dependent on computers, for instance, and global energy shortages or outages could be problematic (better crank out a lot more thin-film photovoltaics). But it’s cool to feel a bit of utopian optimism, if only briefly, between newscasts.