Author: Jon Lebkowsky

Co-wrangler of Plutopia News Network, cohost Radio Free Plutopia. Podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. Former editor/publisher, FringeWare Review; associate editor at bOING bOING and Factsheet Five; writer at Mondo 2000, 21C, Wired, Whole Earth Review, Austin Chronicle; sub-editor at Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; blogger at Worldchanging. Digital culture maven, podcaster, writer, dharma observer, enzyme. On The WELL, Cohost of VC (virtual communities), Media, and Civil War (.ind) conferences.

Fiber Fete: Smart Grid – The Killer App

Speaker: Ron Holcomb
CTC

“Smart Grid” implies today’s electric grid is dumb, which is pretty much the case. Energy leaves generation plant, goes into the “ether,” knowledge comes back only in the form of a meter reading. Wasteful but reliable system.

Smart Grid is really simpler than it sounds. We have command and control systems. Command and Control Systems | Communications Infrastructure | Two Way Communications Devices. Applicatioins: Automated demand response, distributed generation, distribution automation (load balancing, including better handling of catastrophic events that previously caused outages), price response (give users more control over management of their consumption), electric vehicles, outage management, voltage control.

What’s driving smart grid?

Regulatory: Energy Independence and Security Act has clear vision of SG applications and challenges. Paradigm shift has begun.

Social/environmental. Renewable portfolio standards in 33 states, some aggressive.

Economic: cabon based fuel cost volatility and looming carbon taxes.

Energy interest second to none in impact on American life, and prices and pressures are going in one direction. We have a lot of work to do here, we haven’t really attempted effective management for conservation, cost control. High speed, low latency pipe is key to business success in this context.

Significant economic benefits from wind enrgy, smart grid enabled distribution reduction of carbon emissions, reduced energy consumption, reduced cost of power-related disturbances, society benefits that exceed costs by four to one. (EPRI)

Why isn’t this happening faster, now. Question is how we pay for it?

Review of various benefits to enterprise (utility), ratepayer, and to society. Cost of service interruptions to ratepayer: $80 billion/year.

Not happening faster because so much of the ROI is indirect, hard to qualify, hard for the enterprise, the utility company, to monetize.

What is the utlility’s philosophical view re cost resposnibility? RE. social and environmental responsibility? What level of financial responsibility should utility take for outage costs born my customers? Should utility play a role in economic development and local job creation?

Strategic considerations: Stick to tried and true public power business pratices. Invest in future-proof infrastructure. Electric crews can build and maintain it. Own it, don’t lease it. Avoid risk of cores service failures by handing over command and control communications to a carrier. Avoid risk of price gouging (considering size and value of energy industry).

Fiber Fete: Telemedicine notes

Speaker: Lawrence Keyes, CEO, Microdesign

Continuing from Twitter tweets…

Talking about the DocBox, a set-top box for telemedicine. Currently seeing senior Tai Chi class taught over the DocBox, which is connected via DLS or cable of at least 384Kbs up and down. Sound is transmitted through the television set; DocBox has a built in microphone (controlled for classes centrally – microphones may be switched off for a class, can hold up your hand to speak.) Via split screen, the patients in a class can see each other.

Requires fixed IP address, “illegal” with some providers who use DHCP persistently.

It’s obvious how Fiber to the Home would help: better video and audio. Quality potentially good enough for diagnostic imaging. Electronic Health Record, video conferencing and monitoring expected. Anyone can be a provider: every patient can be a transmitter via symmetrical network, and network can be managed from anywhere.

See http://www.mxdesign.net for more info.

A thought about evolving social environments

I’ve been a member of the seminal online community, the WELL, for around two decades. I’ve been active on Facebook since it opened to non-students. Originally Facebook wasn’t conversational. Other former WELL members and I discussed how Facebook Groups didn’t seem to take off as conversational environments in quite the same way as the WELL’s conferences, many of which are still vibrant after 25 years. Facebook has changed since we had those discussions – now Wall posts and comments on Facebook are like topics and responses on the WELL. (We saw the same pattern in blogs with comments: someone posts a lead item, what we called the “zero post” on the WELL – a conversation starter. In blogs the emphasis was originally on publishing, then some blogs became more conversational, and posts followed by comments on those blogs were very much like topics within conferences on the WELL.)

One difference is that the WELL had a taxonomy: it was called a conferencing system, and was organized as conferences on subjects like Health, Media, Grateful Dead, Virtual Communities, Art, History, Design, etc. Topics were pretty free-ranging within the major subjects, but you knew where you would go to discuss a particular subject. On Facebook, there’s no organizing my subject. All kinds of conversations appear in Facebook’s news feed or activity stream – right now I see conversations about climate change and volcanoes, events, Texas politics, design, business, etc. – not organized in any particular way. A stream of comments some of which become conversations, many casual, some more active and compelling. This really seems to work, and the converations lately are not dissimilar from those I see on the WELL, despite structural differences between the WELL and Facebook.

I find myself drifting more and more into Facebook because there are real, sustained conversations there, unlike Twitter’s more drive-by posting – and because I don’t have to fiddle with a 140 character limit. Twitter feels very broadcast, compared to Facebook (or Wave, or other conversational systems). Not to diminish its importance – Twitter is a great place to share short bursts of information and links. But it’s less “social.”

This is me thinking aloud. Is there a business conclusion from all this?

I’ll close with this thought: I spoke to a group of Realtors last week, and told them not to expect miracles from social media. You’re not using social media because it’s somehow going to bring you more business than traditional media. You’re using it because it’s taking mindshare from traditional media. The audience is there – on the plus side, you can target more specifically the people who might be your customers or clients; on the minus side, they’re scattered over multiple platforms, you have to connect more directly than before, and they don’t often answer the door when salesmen come.

Keep it simple

Just learned via Twitter from someone who reads my blog that text instances of the Sociable social bookmarking links were piled up at the end of each of my posts as displayed in Google Reader. That’s nust not very poetic. Does anybody ever actually click through one of those bookmarking icons or links? I’m not convinced.

I turned all of that stuff off, as well as the Zemanta tracking pixel added to my posts via Scribefire. The web’s complicated enough; I’m making my presence as simple as possible and focusing on producing great content.

(If you’re reading this on Google Reader or some other news aggregator, and you still see something wonky, just let me know.)

A couple of insights

The sort of things you just have to write down somewhere, like on your blog…

Got these via K. Marcus Hartsfield on Facebook…

“Directly it is said that not a single thing exists, and yet we see in the entire universe nothing has ever been hidden.” (Dharma Hall Discourse #53 from the Eihei Koroku (Dogen’s Extensive Record)   

He reports finding this one written on a bathroom wall at The Omega Institute in upstate New York:

“Satori. Don’t think it will be glorious; that momentary burst of radiance illumining all. Nonsense. It is more like losing your mother in a large department store. Forever.”

Times are changing: foraging, simplicity, Shirky-smart, etc.

Two of the best ideas I heard this week were curated or catalyzed by Clay Shirky.

One is the mathematical concept of the Lévy flight, which I already wrote about in my last post.

The other is in a link e-Patient Dave sent me. I ran across it again in a discussion of models for connectivity (“freedom to connect”). In a post called “The Collapse of Complex Business Models,” Clay discusses Joseph Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies, applying Tainter’s thinking to the web and digital media. Tainter says that societies that become increasingly sophisticated will tend to collapse, not despite their sophistication, but because of it.

Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.

Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.

The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

He then goes on to explain the evolution of complex and entrenched procedures within sophisticated, high quality media production, and how these are now trumped by the popularity of (commitment of mindshare to) simple, “good enough” media. Clay’s closing paragraph:

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Interesting to note that there are no comments on this post, only pingbacks (links to it by others). It’s an important, already influential piece.

The first point, about foraging, is that people don’t necessarily sustain adoption of something, even if they really really like it. In the early days of blogging, I made this point in talking about links and hits from blogrolls and RSS feeds. Someone finds your blog, they really like it, so they add the link to their news aggregator. Everytime the news aggregator updates, the link to your blog produces hits, but those hits are questionable, because a common behavior is to add an RSS feed, read it for a while if at all, then move on to something else. People don’t get the web delivered every morning as a newspaper, or monthly as a magazine. It’s not push, it’s pull, and they’re surfing based on criteria other than loyalty. We have to adjust our thinking accordingly.

The second point is that complexity reaches a point of diminishing return, costs escalate beyond what we’re willing to pay, and whole systems break as a result. With media, it’s not just that it’s simpler to make something that is compelling and gets mindshare. It’s that simpler access to “good enough” media (via the web) trumps more complex (or costly) access via movies or television. Consider the traffic in torrents of lower def but “good enough” copies of movies, television shows, record albums, etc. Or think of simpler paid access to slightly more lossy music/video via iTunes, or Hulu.

There’s more to talk about, like the social thing – we’re committing mindshare to online conversations that, before, we might have commmitted to passive consumption of television programming. But you get the drift – behaviors are changing online. And low-cost/free/good-enough is as entrenched in online culture as expensive/complex/high quality is entrenched in old media culture.

Times are changing. And I’m out of time, for the moment.

Foraging and surfing

I’ve often said that we don’t know enough about how peope behave online – e.g. how they read blogs or other web sites. Do we visit the same sites over and over again? Or do we surf, following links we stumble across as we wander, and now with pervasive social media, those that are posted on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.? More likely both – we have some sites we visit regularly, but we also bounce around a lot.

Behaviors are probably more complex than we think. Seth Godin writes that he learned, from Clay Shirky, of something called a Lévy flight: Example: “an animal that forages will hang out in a small area, looking for nuts or berries, then will realize it has used up all the likely sources in this spot. It will then head off in a random direction, walk many paces, and start foraging again.” The online version:

Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there’s no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.

Godin calls this “a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.” But I’m enough of a nimrod to want to substitute the word human for consumer.

Monster Scroll

At Pink Tentacle, view all the weirdly fascinating images on the Kaikidan Ekotoba monster scroll, “a mysterious handscroll that profiles 33 legendary monsters and human oddities, mostly from the Kyushu region of Japan (with several from overseas).” Example below: a Russian hitodama, or fiery apparition composed of spirits of the recently departed.

Happy Birthday to the WELL

The seminal online community, Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, better known as the WELL, is celebrating its 25th birthday. Here’s the birthday message I posted there:

Happy Birthday, WELL.

I can’t imagine what my life would have been had I not found my way here. The WELL connected me as a writer, thinker, and doer, brought be to the Internet as a far earlier adopter than I might have been, broadened my horizons toward infinity.

I often use the WELL as the example of virtual community – everything I learned about meeting, coordinating, and collaborating online I learned here, and principles I learned here still hold true. People who think the social Internet started with Facebook and Twitter are astonished when they hear what we were doing here from the late eighties onward. And that we’re still here, still jamming, after two decades.

TEDxUT Notes

Today at TEDxUT, I was live tweeting all day until I maxed out my update quota. This was my second TED-inspired event, really like the format, though I’d also like to do something a little more … experiential. The venue (UT’s AT&T Center) was great, and the talks were diverse and compelling. Since tweeting was allowed, I did that instead of taking conventional notes, so I’m posting that link instead of a summary.

Selected tweets:

Jim Walker: Sustainability has basic equity component, impacts everyone globally. Challenge: how to pursue sustainability, keep qulaity of life. How do we improve the lives of millions of people living on brink AND improve environment at same time, become sustainable. Gulf between academy and athletics at UT. Nobody’s fault, matter of evolution. Both leaderships focused on relationships.

Melissa Lott (on Energy): In 10-15 years, we’ll have translational tools to put data into useful formats for feedback and management. Powerful to be able to see electric flows per appliance/device in home. We need to make people passionate about the science of sustainability. Space program analogy. We need that kind of excitement. Astronaut Barbie becomes Energy Wonk Barbie.

Derek Woodgate: How can we augment the learning process? Convergence, ambience, collaboration, remix. Delivering context and relevance… context-based, media-rich, collectively generated, diy and access culture. Mulltiuser immersive enviironments, recombine knowledge into different perspectives. Continuum of learning throughout life. Concept of the sense event. Intesnse, interactive, with augmented ambience. Deliver a sensation, built into an experience. Teachers and students co-create and design educational experiences, real sense of being there.

Ramon Alberto Garza: What’s happening with information? People not consuming broadcast as much. Information a commodity. What will people pay for? Understanding and entertainment. [I would add context.] Global Alliance for Information Tech Development formed to expand global connectivity.Propose and information society bill of rights. In broadcast world, editorial funnels decide what information we get. In the web world, information is firehosed into our brains. Cellphones bringing dark ages villages to the 21st Century quickly.

David Cameron: If you give people more control over their lives, you can build a stronger and better society. Politics will succeed only if you go with the grain of human nature: treat people as they are, not as you’d like them to be. Evolution from local power to central power to people power. Pre to post bureaucratic. ehavioral economics: give people comparison data showing what others are doing, as in energy efficiency. JFK: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Now you actually have the knowledge to do (for your country). RFK on what GNP doesn’t capture (longer speech) http://bit.ly/bdtUkT

John Daly: Teaching influence: create need, have a plan, show benefits,what happens if we don’t adopt. Simple persuasion model. Creating a need: unless there is pain, there’ll be no change. Creating a need: unless there is pain, there’ll be no change. Correlation of healthcare to donor class is practically perfect right now. No pain. Significance of affected parties: rich matter more. Poor and uninsured don’t have power to make the case for healthcare. Campaigns not a battle of facts, but a battle of stories. Republicans sucked people into discussion of plan before need had been established. Pretended there was one plan, cherry picked. People fear regret more than they’re excited by opportunities.

Peter Stone: Stone is into robots, fully autonomous agents in the real world. Could be robots, could be software agents. Robots doing sensing and decisionmaking in the real world in early Robocup, but not well articulated. Have to alter rules of soccer for human vs robot game. Thinking how to do that. Cars with autonomous agents who have a reservation path can make traffic lights and stop signs obsolete. A goal of AI to achieve robust, fully autonomous agents in the world. Result: Jetsons or dystopia?

Meg Withgott: Tree in Amazon jungle with aerial roots that seemed to lift it from the soil – “its a tree that walks,” says the guide. Changed the way she saw culture, life, creation. First tree she new was a huge spreading apple tree. Neighbor said the tree was planted by Johnny Appleseed. Meg thought this was a tall tale or myth. Story of a tree that thinks, the Dream of the Rood. Tree linked old native story to a new story. Tree thinks and speaks. Tree tells the story of the crucifixion. Rebirth is important for this tree. Talking tree promises healing for those who believe. Later Anglo Saxons look to trees for healing – is this a myth? Do trees think? We’ve learned that plants respond to touch and have memories, signal, communicate, plan, do cost-benefit analyses. Back to Amazon, trees really can walk. Socratea exorrhiza. Trees use aerial roots as legs. The Walking Tree can step a meter a year. She had blinders that obscured her outlook when the guide originally spoke… thought plants were more machinelike.

Bruce Sterling: Nonprofit idea that is worth spreading: Design Fiction. Becoming chic in the design world. Has a lot to do with lower coordination costs. Has dropped people across disciplines into each other’s laps. Design Fiction = Has dropped people across disciplines into each other’s laps. Most products of human genius are never real objects, anyway. Designers and fiction writers are up to date with storyboards, user observation studies, scientific experiments, brainstorming. Everybody who’s involved has a different idea about what design fiction is. Recommendations who to follow. FIrst, @bruces. Then Branco Lukic. Dunn and Ravey, critical design, Royal College of Art. BERG, and experience design company in London. Have an onboard sci fi writer, Warren Ellis. Julian Bleecker, guru of Neat Future Laboratory.Make diegetic prototypes,actual objects, commonly electronic, to make political point. Jake Dunagan, Institute of the Future. Into immersive futurist experiences: future shock therapy.Design fiction has to be scripted, thought up. Not standard futurism. Social intervention or activism.

Sidney Burrus: Open Educational Resources. Burrus is involved with Connexions at Rice – similar to MIT Open Courseware. Connexions is a respository of modules of informaiton online, plus tools for athoring and maintaining content. Book is mature technology being replaced by net-based content delivery, which is more immediate and current. A book created by a stay at home rural Illinois mom (Catherine Schmidt-Jones, Music Theory) via Connexions is globally one of the most read books in its field (music). Within 3 days Minh Do created Fundamentals of Signal Processing for his class – with chapters by global experts. Software to enable virtual laboratories. Powerful learning tool. Creative Commons important for broader distribution of learning.

Reworking meetings?

I downloaded a sample of the new Jason Fried/David Heinemeier Hansson book, Rework, which will doubtless find its way onto my reading pile – seems like good pithy bits of advice we can all use. However I zeroed in on the “meetings are toxic” section, and tweeted something about how that view suggests someone who doesn’t know how to have meetings. But it really suggests the frustration of someone who’s been victimized by others who don’t know how to have meetings. And even people who know how will sometimes screw up – I’ve subverted a few of my own meetings, for instance.

It’s useless to rail against meetings as toxic, just try to have better meetings. In fact, the authors acknowledge that point, but only after venting. Examples:

“They’re usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things.” But life is like that, no? When we’re not doing zazen, we stumble into conceptual states of mind, samsara, and everybody’s weaving a bit of that web, and you don’t cut through it by pretending it isn’t there. The meeting should be the knife that slices through the fog and finds reality and clarity. If you don’t know how to do that, your meetings might be unproductive, if not toxic, but that’s a problem of organization, not a problem with meetings per se.

“They usually convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute.” Yes indeed – this frustrates me, too… meetings where the people in the room are saying the same thing over and over. Department of Redundancy Department. But I had a flash of insight while sitting in one of these – there were people in the room who needed that redundancy for knowledge they were acquiring to sink in. Meetings can be slow because some participants need them to be slow. Quick thinkers may be frustrated, but there’s where a commitment to group process takes priority.

“They drift off- subject easier than a Chicago cab in a snowstorm.” That’s true, if the meeting doesn’t have an effective leader to keep things on track. The solution for this problem is implicit.

“They require thorough preparation that most people don’t have time for.” So you shouldn’t have meetings because they require preparation? That seems out of kilter to me. If nobody needs the meeting, then the preparation is a waste of time. But if people need the meeting in order to synchronize their efforts or get clarity about something, do you really want to blow if off because preparation’s a hassle?

“They frequently have agendas so vague that nobody is really sure of the goal.” So write a clear agenda, no?

There’s a couple more, but you get the point. It’s easy to complain about meetings, because they do have failings, but the better move is to say how to make them effective and productive.

In fact, Fried and Hansson do have some recommendations – set a timer and end meetings whether everyone’s done or not is one. So if the people in the room haven’t quite worked it out, and the timer goes off, they’re SOL.

Invite as few people as possible is another, and I totally agree. Why invite anybody who doesn’t need to be there? Have a clear agenda, start with a specific problem, both good. Meeting at the site of the problem is a recommendation that might not be practical. End with a solution and assigned responsibility, also good. Action items.

One that’s surprisingly missing, that I learned many years ago: don’t call the meeting unless there’s a reason. (Standing meetings for checkins can be an exception, and monthly organizational meetings where there’s always something to address).

My bottom line is that meetings are not inherently toxic. And you gotta have ’em. I think I would’ve reworked that section of Rework. (Bet the rest of the book is great!)