If you're in Austin Monday night for SXSW or otherwise, check out the Plutopia bash at Scholz Garten, 1607 San Jacinto. This most interesting of SXSW evening events is a collaborative gathering of two camps that normally don't pitch tents on the same terrain - green/sustainability advocates and techies.
Plutopia is the name of a collective including futurist, artists, technologists, and green activists that are aligned in their understanding that a sustainability economy is emerging and inevitable, and sustainability will be mediated by technology. If we're to opt out of business-as-usual and rething community organization, building, food production, etc., we'll be experimenting and finding alternatives. The Plutopia event at SXSW (where "Plutopia" was a mashup of "pluralist utopias") is an explosion of art and entertainment that has, as subtext, a creative consideration of possibilities. Bill McKibben will talk about economy, ecology, and community - the subjects of his book, Deep Economy - and The Heather Gold Show is a conversation about "opting out." The live premiere of producer Maggie Duval's Lance Van de Kamp Show is happeniing, too, featuring His Excellency Nikita Chrusov of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. There'll be installations by Austin Green Art and The Robot Group. We'll also have performances by pioneer electronic composer Carl Stone, David Demaris, London's Intimate Stranger. And there's more (check out the site). Not sure how we filled the vessel quite so full...
The Austin Chronicle has published my article about Facebook in its SXSW Interactive issue.
Are we watching a generation "slice in two," or are these sites making visible, and emphasizing, a division that already existed? Before the social Web, most of us didn't know we were part of social networks. We had friends, and we knew that our friends might know people that we don't, but most of us never thought to chart or analyze those relationships. Now we can make our networks visible and explicit and touch base with them every day through sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Are we any better off than we were before? Do we know the people in our networks any better than before? Can we manage more relationships than we did before? Looking at the darker side, will we be exploited by the operators of network platforms? Will everything we say and do actually, no foolin', become part of our "permanent record," tracked by Big Brother and his henchmen? Will the Internet become the next television, an instrument for programming consumers, pretending to be a channel for art and entertainment?Systems change
Yes to everything. Yes, we're better off; there can be tremendous value in network exchanges and far more potential for productive collaboration and resulting innovation. We probably do know most of the people in our networks better; we can connect to them casually every day, like the Internet was a massive water cooler where everybody, and I mean everybody, can hang out. Can we manage more relationships? Sure, but that's deceptive: We have the technology to manage more, but that doesn't mean we can manage all the relationships that we "add" at any qualitative level. All the social-networking platforms caution you to add as friends only people you really know well. Real value depends on quality, not quantity, of relationships.
And yes, some people will be exploited, but network platforms that exploit will lose trust, lose users, wither, and die. Yes, everything we do online is recorded somewhere and probably retrievable somehow by somebody, and the intelligence agencies are probably crunching some of your data somewhere sometime. There's never been any real expectation of complete privacy online. On the other hand, it's impractical to think that Big Brother is watching. His eyeballs and his interests are constrained by an economy of attention, if nothing else. And the Internet's already become the next television, but it has a bazillion channels, many with ads, and many of the ads that do appear are unobtrusive. Austin tech consultant and entrepreneur Venki Iyer told me, "We all just need to get used to surveillance and practice good sousveillance [watching the watchers]."
Nancy White posts about systems change practices, quoting Donella Meadows: "I don't think there are cheap tickets to system change. You have to work at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off paradigms...." [Link]
The image above is one she used at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners, which seems pretty cool in itself. (So many conferences, so little time.)
The Producers
Not Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, but co-producers of the upcoming EFF-Austin-driven Plutopia party at SXSW Interactive. Plutopia is a loose collective of artists, technologists, and futurists, formerly called Futurama. We organized for an installation at Maker Faire; the SXSW party is looking more ambitious. The Plutopian producers are Maggie Duval, Randy Jewart (of Austin Green Art), and Bon Davis. More about the party as the planning evolves. It'll be a Scholz Garten, a bier garten with an opinion of life...
What happens when you promote fear and encourage citizens to report "suspicious activity"? [Link]
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. The person he says it to -- a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant -- now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted.Meetings of the minds
This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.
Maggie Duval, another "wizard of connection," and I met yesterday and talked about a number of things, especially our evident alignment of intentions and practices and our interest in forms if economic development that benefit creative people who don't happen to wear suits and haven't learned the various secret handshakes. I'm sometimes too busy to think about the big picture, so it was nice to have a free-ranging high-level conversation with someone who is generous, spiritual, and highly creative in her thinking, especially after several days of putting out fires and focusing on specifics. I had incidentally just come from a triumphant Polycot Associates meeting, where we had finalized a document that captures our core thinking about the web presence management practice that we've been developing for the last two-plus months. Next step is to complete development on a new web site. More about that later.
"I'm Nobody"We need more teachers like Clay Burell... or maybe we need more citizens like Clay... [Link]
But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It's not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I'll continue using). And it's definitely not about "Classroom 2.0," since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.
Putting "what it is about" in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It's about not being "a Nobody doing anything" when my students are looking for "Somebody doing something" about what they care about. It's about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It's about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It's about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It's about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It's about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.
It's about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.
That's the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on "real-world project-based learning" along these lines?
I fought the law... and I won?
Evidently you're not allowed to take photos in Silver Spring, Maryland. I shot the above photo from my Silver Spring hotel room in 2006 - I guess I broke the law, and got away with it?
Story FieldsTom Atlee has published an interesting piece called "Story Fields - the Narrative Shape of Our Lives." Looking at stories, he sees "that there are huge constellations of them that reinforce each other. Each of these groupings paints a particular whole picture of how life is or should be. These story-pictures seem to have a lot of power over people." He goes on to discuss how we weave our perception of reality from stories, myths, and symbols. To reshape reality, we have to reshape the narrative. [Link] Of course, this isn't new thinking, but Tom's articulation is always interesting and compellling:
... we can apply the principle of justice mechanically, as a computer would, weighing out pros and cons. But the approach is cold; we can't bring real justice to life that way. If we want to live a principle, we need to translate it into story form. Our efforts to live by the principle of justice draw us into fables, history, role models and other story phenomena -- the story of Solomon deciding who is the real mother of the baby, the image of Gandhi fasting until the Hindus and Muslims stop fighting, the role model of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat in the front of the bus. Then, in our own lives, we play out our own small versions of these stories. Research into the cognitive processes of moral deliberation shows how heavily we rely on stories and mental scenario-building to put our moral principles into practice. Jesus, Christian missionaries, Jewish prophets, Buddha, and hundreds of zen masters and meditation teachers have spoken in parables to weave their principles into the living story-fabric of their audiences' minds.
At the societal level, a story field can seem almost synonymous with culture. Actually it is the narrative dimension of culture.
Penguin Day
We had a pretty great Penguin Day yesterday, though I was a little concerned because of low turnout. However that actually worked in our favor: we only had twenty people, but they were the right twenty people. I posted photos at Flickr, but they don't do justice - you can't photograph an explosion of creative energy, however hard you might try. Allen Gunn (Gunner) from Aspiration led the discussion, and we were also joined by the briliant Michelle Murrain from the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. Michelle led a great session over lunch, where we discussed the needs of nonprofits (and how NOSI might help meet 'em). I think the techs learned more from the nonprofits than vice versa, which was very productive. There'll be followup a t http://austinpenguinday.org.
Brett Hurt at Bazaarblog has just published an interview with Giff Constable of The Electric Sheep Company, which "offers solutions for virtual world commerce, creativity, and community." [Link] The conversation reminds me that the Second Life is not some new separate thing, but a natural evolution as the Internet and the web begin to have the bandwidth and the cycles to compelling visual/virtual spaces. Second Life really is well named - it affords a sense of place imagined collaboratively by residents and companies within the environment.
(Brett asks) eMarketer predicts that advertising on social networking sites will grow from $280 million this year to $1.8 billion by 2010. What do you think about their prediction, and how do you think it applies to marketing in Second Life?
(Giff answers) I think that number is almost meaningless because social networking is starting to touch everything we do online, so the definition becomes increasingly blurred. On e-commerce sites, social networking will become an important component of establishing reputation/trust around a product, especially once you can overlay collaborative filtering and reviewing technologies with social network information. I think that the web and a Second Life-like technology will become increasingly interconnected and complementary. We will use both, depending on whether we want a 2D or 3D experience for a particular purpose (they have different strengths and weaknesses), and depending on whether we want a live social interaction. There is no question that people feel more “together” in a 3D immersive environment.
He goes on to articulate a set of rules for companies in Second Life that are not too different from the guidelines social Internet consultants have been espousing for years:
- stay honest with yourself about your brand and how it is perceived
- stay authentic and honest with consumers [I tned to shy away from the c-word – they're active participants, not passive consumers - jon]
- decide whether your product really translates into a virtual world or whether you need to focus on brand don’t think you can control everything about your brand in a virtual world (or put another way: do not be afraid of your consumer)
- create an opt-in experience and let people take your brand with them somehow
- keep your standards high – you are representing your brand and company
- like a blog, keep things fresh, new and interesting if you want people to come back again and again
- be prepared for technology bumps, because this space is new and evolving extremely rapidly, and rapid evolution in software means bugs
Buy WorldChanging
Alex Steffen asks WorldChanging supports to "Help Us Hack the Publishing System" by buying the WorldChanging book on November 1st. As one of the authors, I second that request - and you'll be glad you did, because the book is attractive, informative, and a great read (all 600 pages!) It would also make a great Christmas gift!
WorldChanging is a small nonprofit with a somewhat larger voice. We're asking you to help us turn up the volume even more!
WorldChanging
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging's Fearless Leader
WorldChanging and Polycot have been working hard this week to launch a redesign of the WorldChanging site to accompany the release of the User's Guide for the 21st Century
The redesign makes for a more professional wrapper for the same compelling content, and it includes a section on the book including a calendar for the book tour that's under way beginning this month. (I'll be at the Austin signing, along with Alex, Sarah, and Tessa, on November 28, 7pm at Book People. We'll have a reception afterward at the new REI, just next door.)
My own role at WorldChanging has been to create a network of local blogs, beginning with the cities on the book tour. We launched the first three of many localized blogs this week, for New York, Austin, and Portland. The goal at WorldChanging has always been to extend our positive, solutions-oriented conversation and give visibility to WorldChanging projects across the globe. The network we're building will be the platform for ongoing conversation, action and design leading, through many developments in many locales, to a better, more sustainable world.
WorldChanging GuideAs I work away on WorldChanging projects, the WorldChanging Guide to the 21st Century is #92 with a bullet on Amazon, based on presales (the book doesn't ship 'til Novemer 1). We're getting great reviews, such as Cory's at bOING bOING... Buy a copy!
David Isenberg's held two conferences called "Freedom to Connect"; the idea first emerged from a private meeting in 2004 which I attended. Several of us were gathering thoughts on a private wiki, where Martin Geddes posted this:
Freedom to Connect is a thinking tool to enable you to think about the role of networks in the future.
It will give you the questions and the words you will need to participate in the discussions and decision-making about how and where networks are built, who has access to them and under what conditions and how we should be able to use them.
Freecon will lay out the reasoning behind enabling universal public access to these broadband communication networks and the benefits that can flow from that kind of access. It will also provide the case against restricting access, limiting publication or broadcast rights and controlling or prioritising the kinds of traffic that flow through those networks.
Armed with these tools you will be able to argue for the best possible communications future, against the constraints that vested interests will want to place on your ability to communicate. ...
We never got real clarify about the "freedom to connect" concept, often addressed since then by the more limited term "net neutrality."
Net neutrality isn't a great label because it doesn't mean anything to most who hear it and to many who say it. It's supposed to suggest a lack of bias in prioritizing data transmission... a small-d democratic Internet, where every packet has the same opportunity to reach its targeted location, so you can expect content you send to get where it's going expeditiously, and you can expect your requests for content to be honored in the same way.
The Internet is build around the end to end principle, which says that the network is relatively "dumb" with "intelligence" - e.g. communications protocols or rules - running at the end points. This "dumb network with smart terminals" that doesn't act on data in transmission any more than is necessary to manage the flow of data and acceptable performance along the routes from end to end. The dumb network is "neutral," it doesn't care what's in the data it's transmitting. It doesn't give priority to, say, streaming video (which is one reason your streaming videos occasionally stop for a few seconds while streaming).
From the perspective of those who operate broadcast or voice networks, the dumb network is a dumb idea. Because they focus on delivery of content that needs sustained flow, they advocate a network that gives priority to some packets over others... for better "quality of service." If you followed their lead to make the Internet more multimedia-friendly, you would change the character of the Internet - and it might be harder to ensure access to, say, Weblogsky with all that video streaming everywhwere. Bad for me, but okay for companies that deliver digital media and voice over IP - especially the former telcos that already dominate the network.
If we had much fatter pipes, more bandwidth, that would also mitigate their delivery problem. Why don't we have more bandwidth? Why is last mile service (to your door) constrained and asymmetrical? In part it's because they don't want a world where anyone and everyone can deliver content and services. A fully two-way symmetrical system threatens distribution systems that are already difficult to control.
I don't pretend to be an expert on networks, but I've learned a lot since I started paying attention. You can learn a lot, too, by joining the discussions at the Freedom to Connect BarCamp tomorrow evening. We've invited experts and hope to hear many sides of the 'neutrality' question. The future of the Internet is clearly a significant public issue, poorly understood by legislators and policy wonks, as well as the general public. There are many calls to action from interest groups coming from different perspectives, and ne telecom legislation that shouldn't be considered or passed until all of us, and especially lawmakers, have a clear understanding of the issues. (At the moment, legislators have a one-sided perspective, because what they hear on the subject comes from telco and cable industry lobbyists).
Notes on "open source disaster recovery"The peer-reviewed web journal First Monday has a paper on "Open source disaster recovery" that discusses the Katrina Peoplefinder project. As one of the participants in that project, I noted some differences in the article and my perception of the project. I sent a few notes to one of the authors... repreated here for the record. Italic items are quotes from the paper.
"Ethan Zuckerman led the technical effort of assigning chunks of unstructured data to volunteers and on Saturday, 3 September, a wiki was set up for this purpose at katrinahelp.info."
The actual sequence of events:
- Geilhufe posted a call to action.
- Ethan and I were the first two volunteers. We agreed to work on data scraping and data entry. Ethan worked with others on scripts to scrape data for data entry.
- I worked with data entry volunteers and became the tech support guy for the effort.
- katrinahelp.info already existed, so we asked if we could use it as our base of operations.
- Ethan worked through the weekend, then had to leave. Zack Rosen took over for him.
Project leaders were hesitant to form a relationship with the Red Cross, whose database was built with assistance from Microsoft. Jon Lebkowsky writes in the Smart Mobs blog, “Marty Kearns of Network Centric Advocacy encouraged the PeopleFinder project to throw its data to Red Cross and to push for the Red Cross site to be the single authoritative search for evacuees and other Katrina victims, and family and friends searching for them. Marty’s suggestion implied a difficult question: should the PeopleFinder project end?” (Lebkowsky, 2005).
- We weren't really hesitant to work with Red Cross, in fact, I was actively pushing for it, and we all understood the importance of that relationship. The real question was how to get their attention, and whether they would take over. That was resolved by simply making the PFIF data availble to them (and to Yahoo and Google),
One key figure — David Geilhufe — oversaw the PeopleFinder project and negotiated relationships with other organizations.
- Initially, yes, but leadership became fractal pretty quickly. David couldn't be expected to stay on top of it all. Ultimately multiple leaders emerged, and were more or less effective. I recall one conference call where a whole new set of people were trying to assume leadership with no sense of the history and direction of the project. (Those who had been working on the project evidently didn't have time to make the call.)
Also note that ShelterFinder, a significant project and arguably more successful in meeting its goals than PeopleFinder, emerged from within the PeopleFinder volunteer base with a different set of leaders and processes.
Each of the organizers highlights his or her role within the project, sometimes to the exclusion of other key figures.
The issue of receiving credit for work carried out also applies to PeopleFinder's tense alliance with the Red Cross, when volunteers worried that the project would come to an end as a result. Yet the alliance was made despite these worries because working with a better known organization would increase the project’s effectiveness, giving victims access to a central, well–known place to go for information and assistance.
Again, I think this conclusion is based on an overstatement of the tension that I myself reported. And it was less that the project would end than that the work would stop before finished, and that some of the work wouldn't be used.
A final word: I haven't seen any evidence that our data helped anyone find someone who was missing, and design decisions early in the process made the data less useful, in my opinion. For instance, those entering data couldn't make changes, so if they made an error, they had to re-enter the data (so we had many duplications). The assumption was that it was better to work fast and have duplications than to slow down to correct errors.
My biggest concern was that there was no way to reconcile 'missing' reports with 'found' reports. You couldn't update records, period.
pighed's second life
pighed writes an account of his experiences in Second Life, with plenty of screen grabs to show you where he's been. People write stuff about Second LIfe all the time, but pighed, bless him, has illuminated the experience like nobody else I've read. Read this and see if you don't wanna go there.
having been on the road so much in Real Life, and having had an emotionally exhausting fekkin wreckage of a year, it was nice to have a place where i could build something for myself. it was a sort of spiral thing i made, learning how the system works (whenever you are born you have to learn The System) and so i called it Tenaya Spirals. when i got it completed, or in a stage where i wasnt thinking about it as much, Sparrowhawk would come over and we would sit down and talk with each other for hours on end about love, or history, or books, or what it means to enjoy a virtual glass of virtual wine, and if the brain, that is stuck inside of a dark, dank lockbox we call a skull can differentiate between the real and the virtual. we talked about her lover, the one she had to bow down to, who was really having an impact on her life, and how love does not need to be a thing that is in the real world (who hasnt spoken to their lover on the phone and felt satisfaction?) and we would watch the sun set.Resistance is futile
Thomas Holmes of the University of Minnesota has charted WalMart's growth. You can also see an animated version of the progression as a .wmv video.
The business of Second Life
Business Week this week features a set of articles on Second Life, the avatar-based virtual community operated by Linden Lab. I started to say created by, but online communities are co-created by their members, the folks who make the platform are like any city's infrastructure – they serve the community, but it's inherently beyond their control. What's great about Linden Labs is that they totally understand that, and they're all about creativity in building an infrastructure that brings out the best in the community – perhaps I should say the various communities – that they serve. Business week notes that "it's not all fun and games," there are business applications for Second Life (and potentially for other graphically-realized virtual worlds that might follow).
I'm sad to report the death last Friday of my friend and mentor, Tom Ferguson, MD. Tom had dedicated his life to expanding the patient's role in medical care. He edited a magazine and book called Medical Self-Care, and later the online Ferguson Report, as well as an aggregation of content at DocTom.com, where he was blogging. His last post was March 31.
Tom and I first connected in the early 1990s, at one of the first EFF-Austin meetings. He saw early on the role the Internet could play in medicine, especially how it could empower patients and create new ways for patients to interact with those responsible for their treatment. Most recently, Tom had been working on the concept of the e-patient, where e stands for empowered. Tom had been ill for quite a while, and this increased his empathy for the patient's role. Others will carry on his work, hopefully leading to more of a partnership of patient with physician in the future of medicine.