Andrew Lippman on “open architecture products,” and viewing customers as partners who will contribute to the evolution and design of the products they buy and use.
The stability that we associated with products is gone. And so if you try to base your business on a product that you think will last a long time, then I suspect you’re likely to be in trouble — because society will change more rapidly….The young are not satisfied with products. They’re satisfied with things they can build into their own products. And so the challenge is to build those as open-architecture products. (From MIT Sloan Review)
I’m part of the Society for Participatory Medicine, and we’ll soon be publishing the Journal of Participatory Medicine. (We already have a very active blog at e-patients.net.) Kevin Kelly posted a nice summary of our intentions at The Quantified Self:
The newest channel in this effort is the launch of a peer-reviewed science journal dedicated to research in the field of “participatory medicine” — as in patient participant. (Sometimes labeled Health 2.0) There is a great overlap with self-tracking and the quantified self (although by no means is all self-tracking health related), so I think this new journal will appeal to self-trackers and self-trackers to the patient-participant field.
This journal, called sensibly enough, the Journal of Participatory Medicine, will use an open source model (no fee to get the articles) which is both very much in the spirit of the paradigm, but also very future-proof (free is where all journals are headed).
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.
My good friend and cyberarts ally Bob Anderson, aka Bazooka, died May 31. I just learned of his death today via the Austin Chronicle. Found another obit in the Austin American-Statesman.
I interviewed Bazooka for an article on Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds site in 1997. Here’s the interview:
JL: Why art?
BA: I figured out I didn’t want to do anything else, I guess. I couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to do anything else besides art.
JL: what was your first experience of artistic creation, that turned you on?
BA: making a drawing and having it turn into something I didn’t know it was gonna be. Rather than me making something and have it turn out exactly the way I wanted it to be. Isn’t that the opposite of what science is?
JL: sorta. In science you have a preconception of what you’re after, in your…
BA: building on the past
JL: theoretical stuff, but also… (cf writing)
BA: Marcel Duchamps: art coefficient, coefficient between what you’re doing and what’s really happening. (Also “I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.”) The difference is what makes it art. I did do a lot of fingerpainting. I remember painting in preschool, and I can’t remember doing much else in preschool. Surely I must have done other things? We had a xylophone made out of different kinds of water, and alphabet, and drawing. Continue reading “Remembering Bazooka”
An argument in favor of preserving the book as a vehicle for knowledge transfer and a platform for hard ideas and serious reading. (This is useful to consider, but I wonder if the book is anywhere near obsolete?)
… university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don’t traffic in hard ideas. They’re too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly. More free-form modes of communication (blogs, wikis, etc.) cannot do justice to hard ideas in their fullness. But we university presses luxuriate in hard ideas. We work the Hegel-Heidegger-Heisenberg circuit. As the Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters notes, even when university presses succeed in publishing so-called trade books (as in Charles Taylor’s recent hit, A Secular Age), we do so because of the intellectual rigor contained in such books, not in spite of it.
Hard ideas define a culture — that of serious reading, an institution vital to democracy itself. In a recent article, Stephen L. Carter, Yale law professor and novelist, underscores “the importance of reading books that are difficult. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle. The hard work of serious reading mirrors the hard work of serious governing — and, in a democracy, governing is a responsibility all citizens share.” The challenge for university presses is to better turn our penchant for hard ideas to greater purpose.
This is the lead-in to a manifesto asking publishers of scholarly books “to be more creative by introducing new subjects into our existing lists,” leading to a “hybrid vigor” that “will put us on a stronger course and renew the place of books in the world of ideas.” This is a great plan, but as I review the piles of books are really want, possibly need, to read but can’t make time for, I wonder if we have to pursue an academic career to do serious reading – to justify the commitment of time, to make it a priority. Maybe we need a complementary project to assert that priority in the lives of ordinary working people. Turn off the television set, bang your head into a challenging book filled with hard ideas.
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.
Jay Rosen made a rich Tumblr post about mindcasting and Twitter. Mindcasting is Jay’s term for his posting style – where his goal is to have a high signal to noise ratio… and he’s a very active conversation engine. This post has notes on the form… e.g.
The act of building an editorial presence in Twitter by filtering, processing and structuring the flow of information that moves through the medium using one’s follow list, journalistic sensibilities and individual right to publish updates.
Also “It’s true that mindcasting is a pretentious term. People have always told me that certain things I do are pretentious. Every occupation has its hazards, right? What saves mindcasting from being totally so is that it’s an alternative to an even more pretentious notion: lifecasting.” He ends with a great Julian Dibbel quote:
It may begin as just a seed of an idea — a thought about the future of online media, say — tossed out into the germinating medium of the twitterverse, passed along from one Twitter feed to another, critiqued or praised, reshaped and edited, then handed back for fleshing out on a blog, first, and then, perhaps, in a book. It’s not that tweet-size sparks of insight haven’t always been part of the media ecosystem, in other words. It’s just that Twitter now has given them a vastly more exciting social life.
Read Jay’s whole post, my excerpts here don’t do it justice. Just registering my affinity. I really like the idea of diving into the information flow and working it to accelerate its quality. (Wondering if I should add Tumblr as yet another venue for writing/blogging/conversation.)
On the WELL, Richie Unterberger is talking about his new book about the Velvet Underground, called White Light/White Heat after the VU album. An interesting note from the interview: Richie says he thinks the song “White Light/White Heat” was inspired by Alice Bailey’s occult book, A Treatise on White Magic. From the interview:
It advises control of the astral body by a “direct method of relaxation, concentration, stillness and flushing the entire personality with pure White Light, with instructions on how to ‘call down a stream of pure White Light.'” And it’s known for certain that Reed was familiar with the volume, as he calls it “an incredible book” in a November 1969 radio interview in Portland, Oregon. A Velvets fan I interviewed who
would talk to Reed at the Boston Tea Party confirmed that Lou “was very interested in a form of healing just using light, projecting light.”
Not the way we usually think of Lou Reed or the VU.
EFF founder Mitch Kapor is the new board chair for OneWebDay, the global event founded in 2006 by Susan Crawford. As an Austin organizer for OneWebDay, and having worked in the past with Mitch via EFF-Austin, I’m psyched to hear this news, and the news that OneWebDay’s been awarded a Ford Foundation Grant. Susan, who did such a great job making OWD happen, is advising President Obama on science, technology, and innovation policy at the National Economic Council.
I went with Dave Evans to Woolridge Park in downtown Austin today, where Mobile Loaves and Fishes and Stubbs Bar-B-Q joined forces to feed fine Texas BBQ to 200 people. Alan Graham of MLF introduced me to Andrew Shapter, director of the documentary “Happiness Is” (trailer below). I can safely say happiness was Stubb’s BBQ for a couple hundred people this afternoon.
“Happy Memorial Day” is a trending topic on Twitter, and I’ve seen several tweets this morning remembering or acknowledging war veterans as individuals or as a whole. I’m not sure that “happy” is the right adjective for a day acknowledging the tragic deaths of so many.
I spent my early years assuming I would join the military, but it didn’t happen, and I often felt a void where that expectation had been – partly relief, but partly a sense that I had lost something important, having been exposed for years to stories of World War II and my father’s memories and memorabilia. (He was on his way to war when World War II ended, and was in the Army of Occupation in Japan.) We played war all the time and saw military service as an inherent part of life. We were raised to be patriots, and were disillusioned at our perception of the politics of the Vietnam war. I think we were the first generation to have enough information, through emerging mass media, to question whether the military was being misused and whether we should serve. I was in college and had a way to opt out, and later there was the draft lottery and I had a high number. I never enlisted so I never went there.
Our sense that the Vietnam war was wrong complicated our thinking and created an internal conflict between our postwar patriotic conditioning and our sense that, in perpetuation the war in Vietnam, our leaders were wrong and the tragic human costs were wasted. One terrible cost of this cultural shift: soldiers who fought in Vietnam returned to a cultural malaise and confusion, no parades, no sense of victory, no sense of moral validation. I had a roommate who had been caught in a Vietnamese booby-trap, and while he survived, he returned with profound disillusionment.
We now know that wars and global politics are complex. Should we be in Iraq? What is the nature of a “war on terror,” who are we really fighting? What is the nature of patriotism in a 21st century era of globalism? Much to think about.
But on Memorial Day, we honor those who served and who died as real patriots. This makes me think of Audie Murphy. I first saw Murphy as an actor in Western films; only later did I learn that he was one of the most decorated war heroes in U.S. history. Audie Murphy represents a whole spectrum of thinking about military service. He was a great patriot who fought hard and received 33 medials, and he was also a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who was very frank about his own problems and pushed the government to acknowledge the condition and extend health care benefits to cover it. I’m thinking about Audie Murphy today, and I’m thinking about my Dad’s years in occupied Japan, and my brother’s years flying transports into Vietnam. I’m thinking especially about my older cousin Charles, who was at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked and told us rousing stories of that chaotic day. They were all among the fortunate who survived.
I realize that I’m fortunate, in that no one close to me died at war. Thinking on Memorial Day about all those who died, and all those who lost someone, in wars of the past and present. Every death is a cascading tragedy. I’m ready for world peace.
Friday’s “Open Government on the Internet” conference at the LBJ Library opened with Bill Bradley, who discussed his (and President Obama’s) profound interest inmaking government more accessible. The conference explored various aspects of government openness and transparency, but at the core of the conversation is an intention – affirmed by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra – to put all data online and to open up government databases, making as much data as possible accessible via clear and usable application programming interfaces. Bradly talked about data and information as raw material for sculpting democratic outcomes. For example, he supports a searchable Federal budget with links from each budget item to the appropriations bill, the authorization bill, information about the committee that passed the bill, who testified and who they represented. This would be a series of connections that would let you see who did what to affect spending at a granular level.
Bradley said we have the opportunity to leverage the ideas of enormously talented people throughout the U.S. via crowdsourcing or “ideastorming.” Truly open government ios not just about providing information from government sources to the people, but also about flowing ideas back from people to the government.
Most people, he said, are not extremely ideological. Their political views may be more complex, not well summarized by categories like “right” or “left,” “Republican” or “Democrat.” He imagined individuals having personal political pages that include more detail about their views, and from the contents of these pages, you could build constituencies around specific issues (the kinds of “adhocracies” that I envisioned in 1997, when I wrote “Nodal Politics” as one chapter of a never-published book about the Internet’s potential as a platform for democracy and political activism).
Following Bradley, there was a keynote by Vivek Kundra, the new Federal CIO he directs Federal technology policy and strategy. The Federal Government has a wealth of information, he says, that taxpayers paid for and have a right to access and use. Obama issued memoranda on transparency and open government as a first move after he took office – it was his highest priority. We have the Freedom of Information Act that LBJ signed when he was president, and we should assume that transparency and accessibility of information is the default, and not an exception that requires a special request.
Note the Human Genome Project, which put the genome data in the public domain. This resulted in a global explosion of innovation in treatment development, over 500 new drugs. Also consider the democratization of satellite information and its impact on navigation and mapping.
By opening up and making data available across disciplines, we can tap into the ingenuity of the people. The true value of technology and data lies at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Crowdsourcing is powerful – the crowd might see patterns the public section lacks the resources or attention to spot. Looking at innovation at a grassroots level, and lower cost of technologies.
Kundra is looking at agencies that have led the way, and new ways to leverage networks. It’s not enough to merely “webify” exiswting institutions. We should fundamentally change processes. There are 24,000 web sites within Federal government, but we need to think about moving government and services where the people are, systems like Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, Ebay, etc. where there’s high adoption. How do we move our applications where the people are, and fit them to context? We need to provide services in contextgs people are most comfortable with.
Wayne Caswell asked about broadband objectives. Kundra says the intention is to aggressively ensure that we extend broadband access into rural and underserved communities. Services should exist across the entire spectrum, and solutions should work everywhere.
Dennis Mick asked about the possibility of intrusive surveillance. There are robust privacy committees within the CIO council and within the White House. The idea is to bake privacy protection into technologies as they’re developed. They’re working closely with the General Services Administration to negotiate model agreements and ensure privacy protection.
Sharron Rush asked about accessibility. The Feds have rules about accessibility of web sites, yet not all the Fed sites meet accessibility standards (e.g. recovery.org). Kundra says part of the problem is in failing to address accessibility up front and bake it into the procurement process and the architecture of solutions. This will be corrected to make sure no one is disenfranchised.
Gary Chapman, Director of the LBJ School’s 21st Century Project and an organizer of the event, spoke next, saying that the discourse and vocabulary of enterprise computing is being challenged by a new discourse and thinking about consumer technology. What is the bridge between enterprise computing and the new consumer model that is encroaching on institutions?
…it seems our human nature leads us to insist on turning towards increasingly discrete, expert-dependent disciplines to save us from ourselves. Which is why this could be a good time, as [Malcolm] Gladwell smartly hinted, to question our pretense of control. After all, every day, beneath our conscious awareness, the Earth spins around its axis and revolves around the Sun, while the biosphere in its every realm demonstrates that the whole is greater than the sum of its constituent parts. It may seem glib to say so, but given that we’re simply a small part of that infinite complexity, it might serve us well to ask, hat in hand: What is it we believe we can control, exactly?
A Guatemalan Twitter user has been arrested for “inciting a panic” with his tweets. Great reporting from Xeni at boingboing: “Twitter user “Jeanfer” was
arrested for suggesting in a tweet that people who had money deposited
in Banrural should remove those funds, and by doing so, break the
control that corrupt entities have over the state-controlled financial
institution.” [Link]
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