Technology - Jon Lebkowsky

Big Dog

A strange, remarkably agile robot from Boston Dynamics (discovered via Toe Stubber).

Mac Tonnies

An interview with Mac Tonnies, who has the Posthuman Blues, is a good overview of transhumanist thinking.

I would argue that we’re all “inferior” in the sense that we’re ill-adapted to essentially any lifestyle other than the one in which we happened to evolve. (Ask an astronaut.) I don’t think any transhumanist thinkers want to create a “perfect” being; the operative goal is to empower the human species on an individual level. In a foreseeable future scenario, instead of being saddled with the genome one blindly inherits, one can choose to become an active participant — and I find that possibility incredibly liberating and exciting. Transhumanism is not eugenics.

Adam Fisk’s P2P system, Little Shoot, has gone public. I’ve been using the private beta version for a few months. Searches turn up lighting fast downloads of documents and media. Most of the files I’ve accessed have been Youtube videos, but you can also use Little Shoot to turn up images, audio, docs, and apps. You can also publish with Little Shoot – since it’s new, most of the content is coming from sites like YouTube and Flickr, but as more people use it, more files will be contributed by users and a file sharing network will evolve. Mashable ran a piece on Little Shoot, saying that “Fisk and his team think file sharing has evolved in the wrong direction in the Web 2.0 world.”

“People flocked to put their videos and photos on sites like YouTube and Facebook, and those sites now control an astonishing percentage of our digital content. Corporate ads are slapped on personal videos. Privately shared content is taken down due to bogus copyright claims. Sharing has become synonymous with forsaking one’s right to manage one’s own content,” the company says.

(If you’re interested in more detail about the system, note the Q&A at Mashable, where Adam’s made several clariftying posts.)

Gary Chapman at Texas Community Media Unworkshop: Obama’s Open Government Initiatives

At the Texas Community Media Unworkshop last Saturday, I posted several notes to Twitter from a talk by Gary Chapman of the 21st Century Project at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. By popular demand, here’s those notes, with some additional material…

Kevin Martin from FCC was at UT [last] week. He said Democratic members of the FCC had been trying to increase minority ownership of broadcasting, but his philosophy had been instead to expand the space and the opportunities. Gary had previously had concerns about Martin, but found himself agreeing with much he had to say. Martin is considering how to increse the availability of broadband as well as the bandwidth, something the Obama administration also wants. (See my previous post about white spaces.) Gary also heard Martin propose free national public broadband.

The LBJ School is working with Obama transition team. There’ll be a White House CTO. http://change.gov/ has info about transition.

The Federal government has already put spending data online and has created APIs, ways for programmers to access and use for that data, which anyone can also download. Obama drove legislation to do this – transparency in government is a top priority for the new administration.

OMB watch has created a site, FedSpending.org, using that data.

Data about the Federal budget is also online, but not in an accessible way – as pdf documents. The LBJ School has prposed working on a transparent onine budget similar to the spending data, and is working with the Obama transition team on the concept. This should open a new era of transparency and accountability. People will be able to monitor what’s happening at all levels of government. The most compelling applications will tie the spending data to the budget for analysis… connecting the dots for real transparency.

The LBJ School is also seeking funds for a lab to create tools for bloggers, activists, etc. Get programming talent to build new tools. For instance, the want to take a wiki model of collaborative space and flip that into specfic applications for collaboration and for doing processing online. Gary mentioned as a similar tool Wikicalc, Dan Bricklin’s collaborative spreadsheet absorbed by SocialText. Another exampnle: Google is creating APIs for its spreadsheet.

The next phase of public media will blur boundaries between government and citizens using online tools, Gary says. We’ll see a transition from e-government, which is merely transactional (renew your driver’s license online) to i-government, or information based government. Government shouldn’t just build PR web sites, it should be guarantor of data quality for access by tool builders. This is the next phase of democracy, and the ext stage in the fight against corruption. We won’t need to file freedom of information access requests, because the information will already be online and accessible.

This is all high on the Obama transition team’s agenda. They’ve been working on this for months already. Obama is also reestablishing status of science – planning to bringing on a science advisor.

SocialMinder Alpha: threat, or menace?

SocialMinder logo I received an email from a trusted friend offering a free invitation to the “closed” alpha test of a application called SocialMinder that’s supposed to map emails to my Linkedin network and provide some analysis and intelligence. I signed up,then let my friend know I’d done so. He immediately responded that SocialMinder had spammed his address book without authorization, so if you got a request from me to sign up for the service, ignore it. It appears to be either a scam or a severely broken alpha. I received an “action report” after signing up, and all the links in the email were broken (“502 Bad Gateway”). I tried to log in at the site, same error message. It appears to be working for some people, but until I see it, I can’t recommend it – and I haven’t authorized the site to contact anyone in my behalf.

Obama on Technology and Innovation

The Obama presidency hopefully starts today, not January 20 – and it’s time for all of us to start real work on a future that’s not just survivable, but thrivable. My particular interests are social technology and sustainability, and on the tech side, I’m particularly interested in the ambitious plan set forth in Obama’s white paper, “Connecting and Empowering All Americans through Technology and Innovation” (linked as pdf). The doc incorporates some of the best thinking about where we should focus…

Ensure the Full and Free Exchange of Information through an Open Internet and Diverse Media Outlets – including a clueful paragraph on protecting the openness of the Internet and another on encouraging diversity in media ownership.

Create a Transparent and Connected Democracy. Tals about online tools for open government, and “bringing government into the 21st Century,” using tech “to reform government and improve the exchange of information between the federal government and citizens while ensuring the security of our networks.” To that end, he wants to appoint a Chief Technology Officer. (D’oh – you mean we didn’t already have one?)

Deploy a Modern Communications Infrastructure – great news for the “Freedom to Connect” crowd, including yours truly. “Barack Obama believes that America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access,” so he’s going to push for a redefinition of what constitutes broadband in the U.S., i.e. fatter pipes. He also wants to open spectrum for more and better wireless deployment.

Employ Technology and Innovation to Solve Our Nation’s Most Pressing Problems, such as lowering health care costs by doing more to integrate records and facilitate digital claims processing. Healthcare systems are a patchwork mess, so this will be a huge challenge – it’s definitely time to take it on.

Invest in Climate-Friendly Energy Development and Deployment. Those of us who are interested in clean energy development know that it’s all about technology – we replace resource extraction with knowledge development and engineering to support greater efficiencies as well as the development of new forms of energy. Obama has several items for supporting the development of the clean energy sector, and for upgrading education so that our schools will produce more science and engineering graduates, and “[tap] the diversity of America to meet the increasing demand for a skilled workforce…so that we can retain and
grow jobs requiring 21st century skills rather than forcing employers to find skilled workers abroad.” He’ll also modernize public safety networks.

Improve America’s Competitiveness. “Barack Obama supports doubling federal funding for basic research, changing the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology.” Obama proposes making the R&D tax credit permanent, reforming immigration, doing more to promote American business abroad, ensuring competitive markets, protecting American intellectual property abroad and at home, and (big one) reforming the patent system. “By improving predictability and clarity in our patent system, we will help foster an environment that encourages innovation. Giving the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) the resources to improve patent quality and opening up the patent process to citizen review will reduce the uncertainty and wasteful litigation that is currently a significant drag on innovation.”

This is a lot to accomplish, but vision, attitude, and powerful intention will go a long way in getting us where we need to be after eight years of backward thinking and indifference. Personally, I’m putting my nose to the grindstone and plowing ahead with the the two areas of focus I’ve had for years – on the social web and on sustainability, both well-addressed by Obama’s plan – and I’m feeling invigorated knowing that the new administration will be supporting, not obstructing, progress in both areas.

White spaces

David Isenberg blogs about white space, a telecom term for unused frequencies in the radio waves portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, here specifically referring to using available digital television spectrum. Google and the New America Foundation had a meeting on white spaces or pervasive connectivity, “open airwaves, open networks.” David says this “seems an over-reach without a systems approach that includes pervasive fiber and already-deployed wireless protocols, such as Wi-Fi and LTE.”

Who’s going to build devices in such scale that they’ll out price-performance Wi-Fi? Who’s going to offer service that’ll out-pervade the cellular network? And what about that one critical factor that every wireless network must consider, backhaul

He sees this as another in a series of experiments, but he’s lookng for “a big, synoptic plan that rises above specific technologies and specific policy agendas, that uses all of the expertise available, to craft a comprehensive vision worthy of the moniker ‘Pervasive Connectivity.'”

Suppose in the next few months we get the opportunity to propose a real plan for Pervasive Connectivity for our nation, could we rise to the occasion? Or would we remain conditioned to the mindset of the last eight years, when small increments counted as great victories. Naomi Klein cites Milton Friedman’s idea that in a nodal moment, the ideas implemented are the ideas lying around. Rick Perlstein, in an essay called, A Liberal Shock Doctrine, points out that even progressive progress occurs in spurts, at opportune times. We shouldn’t limit our vision to one specific technology or one tactically available sliver of spectrum. Now is the time to have a comprehensive plan “lying around” for the network we really want.

Insomnia

Kevin Koym can’t sleep. Is wifi keeping him awake? [Link]

Research that has been sponsored and published in Europe has shown that adults that use their cell phones close to bedtime might get to sleep fast, but sometimes don’t enter into the most restful phases of sleep for an extra hour. I posited in my own case that my insomnia was possibly caused by working too late- yet it was not untill I started limiting my wireless internet usage that I started noticing that wifi might have something to do with this as well.

How’s your sleep?

The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software

“The Future of Affinity: Living Networks with Social Software” was a presentation delivered by Jon Lebkowsky to the CenTex Chapter of the World Future Society in November 2004.

Thanks for inviting me. This is a huge subject, and I’ve tried to prepare an overview with some history, a sense of what’s happening now, and thoughts about trends.

There are thousands of people thinking about and working on social software and they’re all very smart, so every day brings new thoughts and new developments. This talk should give you at least a sense of what’s happening.

The Internet is a social phenomenon. It’s a communications environment that flows in many directions at once. The character of tools and applications built for use online is that they are interactive. Those of you who have computers that have persistent, always-on connection to the Internet: think how your experience and use of your computer differs from the experience and use of a standalone computer in the past, one that was not connected to others. Think how your relationships have changed since you got that persistent connection.

The killer apps for the Internet have all been about talking and sharing. We share artifacts that are formed from data, and those artifacts are exactly replicable and can be fixed in various media – a new reality that has rendered our concept of intellectual property obsolete. It’s also changed the way we think about social relationships.

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs, p. 15: “The Internet was deliberately designed by hackers to be an innovation commons , a laboratory for collaboratively creating better technologies. They knew that some community of hackers in the future would know more about networks than the original creators, so the designers of the Internet took care to avoid technical obstacles to future innovation. The creation of the Internet was a community enterprise, and the media that the original hackers created were meant to support communities of creators. To this end, several of the most essential software programs that make the Internet possible are not owned by any commercial enterprise – a hybrid of intellectual property and public good, invented by hackers.”

Rheingold emphasizes the collaborative and community aspects of the early development of the Internet because that had a lot to do with decisions about its structure. It was built for collaboration, for community. Since then, more than anything, the Internet has been a tool for community and for social engagement.

A few key technologies have evolved to make today’s Internet what it is:

The Internet itself, which we call a network, but that’s wrong: it’s a network of networks, where they can form new kinds of relationships to each other, and as Michael Schrage has said, New kinds of relationships between networks create new kinds of relationships between people.

Email – the first killer app, it was a defining technology, especially when email distribution lists found common usage.

File Transfer Protocol – the original file sharing, though how would you know where the files were located?

WAIS (Wide Area Information System) – an early way to find documents on the Internet.

Archie – search system for files available via FTP

Gopher – menu-driven system for document retrieval.

Veronica – search system for gopher

Usenet – distributed newsgroups that became public conversations

Online forums – asynchronous interactive discussions similar to bbs systems

Chat – realtime interactive discussions

Instant messaging – applications that support one-to-one realtime messaging; some IM software supports chat sessions for a limited number of users. IM was originally just social, but is finding more an more business use.

World Wide Web – a system for publishing online including support for text and graphics as well as page description

Content management systems – sophisticated systems for publishing web pages

Search engines – increasingly sophisticated systems for finding data on the web.

Weblogs – simple content management systems for personal (and sometimes professional) online publishing.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) – machine-readable format for syndicating weblog and other content for aggregation by web sites and “news reader” applications

Wikis – text-based collaborative workspaces

P2p systems – decentralized systems for sharing files

BitTorrent – a system that supports the efficient sharing of very large files, e.g. music and video files.

If you look at the prevailing trends in the evolution of Internet technology, they’re not ecommerce or publishing, though both are important if not necessarily as profitable as we expected during the madness er, the 90s.

The prevailing trends are what I mentioned earlier: more talking and more sharing. Ultimately it’s about relationships, and those relationships can be represented conceptually as networks: social networks, where people are nodes in the networks and their relationships are the connecting links.

Earlier today I ran across quotes from Michael Schrage, in “The Relationship Revolution” (for Merrill Lynch), where he makes an excellent point about the social uses of technology:

“To say that the Internet is about ‘information’ is a bit like saying that ‘cooking’ is about oven temperatures; it’s technically accurate but fundamentally untrue.”

“A dispassionate assessment of the impact of digital technologies on popular culture, financial markets, health care, telecommunications, transportation and organizational management yields a simple observation: The biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations.”

The traditional economics and established markets for human relationships are yielding to new cost/benefit equations enabled by new media. The coin to this new realm isn’t data and information; it’s the value and priority that people place on the quantity and quality of their relationships.”

What are the latest trends relevant to social software?

The growing presence and impact of weblogs (blogs), and the evolution of the weblog from a tool for publishing to a platform for conversation and knowledge-sharing. (Trackback)

The appearance of sites like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn that give visibility into social networks, your own and others’. These sites can support ad hoc group-forming and collaboration. Expect to see this kind of technology integrated with other technologies for targeted niches. That’s where they really belong. (Brazilians on Orkut)

Sites for sharing home-grown multimedia: sounds, images, and video. E.g. flickr.

More and better technologies for conveying and evaluating reputation (called reputation management). Examples: Slashdot, Ebay. When you’re building tools to support affinity relationships, trust is key. Reputation management helps establish trust before you know much about the other person.

Standards for conveying personal information, like FOAF, a protocol that allows you to store and selectively share your personal data. Ideally you should own and control data that’s about you.

Combinations of modular tools like weblogs, Wikis, chats, conference calls or voice over IP to get sophisticated environments for meetings as well as for sustained communication. These will have a relatively light footprint, as opposed to heavier ‘one size fits all’ tools.

There’s also the impact of wireless, which brings the possibility of increasing mobility into the mix. Wireless Future project for IC2: If we consider that the web puts the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, then wireless devices that access the web put all that knowledge in the palm of our hand, and we can take it wherever we go. More relevant: It puts the visibility and management of our relationships in the palm of our hand, and supports our ability to sustain computer-mediated collaboration wherever we go.

There is a trend away from proprietary applications, toward Open Source solutions. It’s important to understand the meaning of this trend: it’s about transparency. Proprietary solutions are “black boxes,” and you have no choice but to run them as they were built. There is an increasing demand by knowledgeable users to know how software is built, and to have access to modify the code that controls what the software does. And Open Source is generally supported by communities of programmers in collaborative relationships, like the early developers of the Internet Rheingold mentions in that quote from Smart Mobs. To that extent open source is always social software, because it is a product of social process.

We hear a lot about “knowledge management,” where the idea is to manage, retrieve, and make sense of knowledge stored in documents. Is that really knowledge? I think knowledge is not just information, but information plus process – and if knowledge is dynamic, its management has to address more than its static form. I think some of the tools we’ve discussed tonight will point toward ways to share an manage knowledge in dynamic computer-mediated environments. Challenging, but promising.

So I’ve given you an overview of social software, and how it supports various forms of affinity relationships. I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, for instance we could spend another whole evening talking about political applications of social technology. Thanks again for having me, and I’d be glad to take questions now.