Alchemical Musings

Today I saw Ted Selker present a talk on “Context-Aware Computing: Understanding and Responding to Human Intention” His perspective on inventions resonated strongly with my recent thinking on social interfaces and software as architecture, and in turn, ideology.

Ted is helping to create a world where intelligence is everywhere, transparently. People joke about toaster oven’s with IP addresses, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.

A few of the examples really stuck out though – intelligent doors that give different people different messages about the availability of the inhabitant, tools that help people manage their relationships better (e.g. themail, clustering and color coding emails, rather than putting them in buckets), and a great little anecdote about doctors who don’t wash their hands before examinations.

In this last case, a hospital approached the lab asking for some high tech solution to insure that doctors washed before procedures. They used to have human supervisors (union, I’m sure) standing by the sink, and were envisioning some sort of rfid-cybercop-surveillance solution. Instead, Ted and his team designed an electronic doorstop. The examination room door would not close until the doctors washed their hands for at least 20 seconds.

Ted has a background in cog-sci and is acutely aware (the whole media lab seems to be) of the ways in which technology is becoming a leading art, and ways in which behavior can influence worldview. I wish this understanding was more widespread.

A few other thoughts –

Ted’s characterization of inventing as adventure movie, moving “at the speed of physics” reminded me alot of extreme programming – release early, release often, embrace change, favor improvisation over the paralysis that comes with the heft of over-engineering and over-designing.

Many of his UI strategies seemed to draw heavily from techniques I first learned about reading The Art of Memory (also echoed in research suggesting larger screens improve efficiency).

Also notable is how this approach of transparent, cognitive prosthesis contrasts with the UI the informedia group presented. Their Visual Query Interface presents the user with sliders allowing them to interact with the system to fine tune the strictness of the computer’s judgment. This mixed mode of interaction seems to differ fundamentally from the approach the contextual computing team is taking.

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Last Friday CCNMTL hosted a mini-conference on New Media and Education (pics). Me and my colleague Dan Beeby co-presented a marathon series of workshops on Sakai and Web Services. We repeated each of our two 35 minute talks 3 times over the day (2×3 talks == a very long day), and I can’t wait for the video’s to be published so I can see the rest of the conference 😉

The first talk unfolded into a conversation about Course/Content Mgmt systems, open/community source ecologies, and the purposeful use of tools w/in those environments. The second talk covered rss, blogging, delicious, flickr, odeo, and the balance between push and pull. The participants were attentive and engaged, and I although the pace was brutal, I really enjoyed working on these presentations.

The funny thing about giving 6 talks in one day, is that by the third talk in, I couldn’t remember if I had used a particular phrase two slides back, or two hours back… Luckily, Dan and I knew the material cold, had a good rapport, and were very comfortable swapping lines and improvising. The only glitch was due to flickr not refreshing their feed for over 24 hours… can’t expect much more from an external service (more on that in a future post).

The slides got a little mangled on the html export, but here they are: An Instructors Guide to Sakai & Courseworks Remodeled.

Dan has a great touch in photoshop, so careful what sorts of pictures you leave laying around his desk.

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This weekend I participated in the NYC free culture summit and learned a few refreshing radical activism tricks from the class of ’06.

In stark contrast to the scholarly focus group I attended last week, this group explicitly understands that they need to create social spaces for like-minded activists to congregate, learn, and plot. The tools of the revolution were revealed in the speed geeking session – Once someone in the 21st century finds the truth, all they need is a mailing list, a blog, a wiki, irc, and rss (with a dash of delicious and flickr, to taste). Remarkable how quickly and easily people with real communication needs figure out how to use this suite of tools, understand which is good for what and when.

Highlights included a Riot Folk performance, a talk by Siva (“Space. Hope. Imagination. Potential.”), a talk by the Creative Commons gang, and suprise appearance by Cory Doctorow .

The most fun had to be not-protesting (you need a license to protest) outside of Time Sqaure’s Virgin Megastore, and reverse shoplifting DRM info into the stacks of damaged cds.

The revolution might not be televised, but it could very well end up on flickr.

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I recently read that Guglielmo Marconi envisioned the radio being used primarily for 2-way communications, and Alexandar Graham Bell imagined the telephone being used to broadcast concerts to large audiences. Whether or not this is true, it’s interesting to wonder if the inventors of technology are really the best at predicting its eventual usage.

Today I attended a focus group organized by the Marconi Society and EPIC which focused on the next generation of scholarly tools, and the future of research and the journal. Most people in the room were completely overwhelmed by the amount of information they were supposed to track, and many thought that better filtering tools would help. People also talked about the real problem of knowledge quality and credibility, and some sort of map for navigating the various layers of information in the world.

What I kept hearing in people’s remarks was that people really need spaces, not maps. Researchers need virtual watering holes to gather around. The quest for knowledge is not a search for data, it is arrived at through dialectic. Communities of like minded researches will naturally perform the task of filtering, highlighting, and vetting important information. It will take AI a long long time to accomplish the comparable task with advanced search and filtering portals….

Seems to me like the Marconi Society should consider funding the development of a specialized distribution of a well established CMS, perhaps modeled on drupal’s CivicSpace, or Shuttleworth’s SchoolTool. CivicSpace is basically a drupal bundled and configured with some modules that are geared towards operating an NGO. SchoolTool a Zope3 app designed for operating a small-mid size k12 school. The work might also benefit from considering the social software design patterns we worked on in Ulises’ course this past fall.

I also met some really cool people, doing really interesting and socially important work with technology.

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Ulises recently asked us to summarize our thoughts for the semester in our blogs. Considering that this blog was started for this class, I was surprised by my own initial resentment at being asked to post something so specific here. During the course of the semester, this forum has become a place for me to speak, not to answer. Even when I was posting assignments for class, they were items and issues which I selected and chose. This initial emotional reaction indicates how engaging these tools can become, and helped me answer some of the questions on Uilses’ list.

Its been great fun! Best of luck to everyone, and see you on Tuesday.

>> What is ‘social’ about social software?
to paraphrase: Social Software is made of people

>> How is the notion of community being redefined by social software?
>> What aspects of our humanity stand to gain or suffer as a result of our use of and reliance on social software?

Radical redefinitions of memory, identity, personal space, intimacy, and physical interaction.

>> How is social agency shared between humans and (computer) code in social software?

>> What are the social repercussions of unequal access to social software? >> What are the pedagogical implications of social software for education?

stay tuned.

>> Can social software be an effective tool for individual and social change?

See above. I think the pedagogical value of a tool follows from its potential for individual and social change.

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The semester is almost over, and that means its time for me to compose some thoughts. As usual, this opens more questions than it answers, but I’m pretty happy about how it turned out.

Collecting Knowledge: Narrative Tapestries and Database Substrates

“An examination of Web 2.0 using Manovich’s Language of New Media, and an interpretation of folksonomies within the context of the narrative-database dichotomy. This inquiry looks at tagging as a mechanism for constructing narratives from databases, and relates narratives to knowledge construction and representation. Educational curricular activities involving tagging will also be considered.”

Special thanks to Prof. John Broughton, John Frankfurt, Michael Preston, and Alexander Sherman for helping me develop these ideas.

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On Tuesday November 29th I attended a presentation of The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffery Sachs in Africa (watch it here). Angelina couldn’t make it, but Sachs (author of The End of Poverty) is a rock star in his own right, and it was the first time I have ever seen him talk.

He is an energetic and inspirational leader, who still believes we have the power to make the world a better place, and is actively working on operationalizing this vision. Some may be skeptical about MTV’s pro-social initiative, think.mtv.com, but whatever their corporate parent’s intentions, it has the potential to do some real good.

Notable moments included Dr. Sachs using the phrases “Open-Source politics” and the “wikipedia of foreign policy” to refer to an emerging form of democratic self-determination. It was also great when an audience member questioned an mtv vp on sending a pimp team over to kenya to help them fix the village’s only ambulance.

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Originally published on theploneblog.org

How hybrid economies help keep software honest.

Last week’s Plone Conference was truly phenomenal – provocative, intense, and fun (big thanks Jon and ONE/Northwest!).

One of the most amazing things I experienced last week was alluded to in Eben Moglen’s keynote (to be posted soon)- the manner in which this community has managed to bring together people who don’t ordinarily interact.

Throughout the breakout sessions, I continued to question dividing us up according to our respective vertical sectors – Corporate, Non-Profit, Educational, and Government. As I have begun to write about elsewhere, systems like Plone can help balance the flow of communication and power between people in a variety of situations and settings. Content, collaboration, and community are contexts which exist across sectors, and the tools we all need cross over as well (sometimes with slightly different tunings).

In many ways lumping together all the folks involved with education is odd. Universities are microcosms of cities, and their IT needs are as diverse as the the rest of the world. However, there are still structural and social similarities that form the basis for common language and culture. After engaging with my fellow educators a the educational panel session and the BOF session I understood the value of us sharing and strategizing, beyond just commiseration.

But through it all, there was one thing that united all of the different attendees – a piece of general purpose software called ‘Plone’.

It is worth dwelling on this mixture of participants and the varying forces they apply to the software. Lessig and Benkler have both been writing a great deal about hybrid economies lately, trying to understand their rhythms, and how we might be able to design them to succeed. They have been writing generally about the “commercial economy” and the “second economy” (sharing, social production, etc), but the lessons may cross over directly to our community.

I realized in Seattle how beneficial diversity can be for software production.
Most of the consultants using Plone are there strictly for traditional market considerations – to make a profit. They are helping to keep the software honest. Unlike some other open source projects which exclusively service the educational world, Plone is not sheltered from the raw, harsh forces of the commercial market. This means that some of the people using Plone use it because it helps them get their jobs done efficiently. Others have called this “productivity arbitrage“, and it is a concept that may hold the key to designing successful open source projects.

It is challenging to imagine working backwards and trying to design a software ecology which captures the hearts and minds of such a diverse following. No small task.

As Rheingold said “There’s been an
assumption that since communism failed, capitalism is triumphant,
therefore humans have stopped evolving new systems for economic
production.” – Is Plone’s ecology an example of one of these new systems, and if so, what are our distinguishing characteristics?

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Originally posted at theploneblog.org

The theory underlying Plone’s personal-ad campaign.

At the marketing workshop in Vienna, one of the exercises we conducted was an informal poll of the personality traits and cultural values that people associate with the plone community.

Motivating this exercise was an exploration of the recent Plone personal ad, which came out of the New Orleans Symposium.

This anthropomorphizing of Plone was meant to embody the idea that software has a personality, and that since writing code is form of creative expression, the values of the author will inevitably be expressed in its features. So, for example, I will be suprised the day that Adobe easily allows for the assignment of Creative Commons licenses to content created using their tools, but no one is surprised by the fact that the Mediawiki wiki-engine deafualts to this license.

If you accept this position, then selecting the right CMS is more than a matter checking off features on a matix. It becomes essential that the vendor’s values are consistent with the client’s mission. In the case of an open source project, the “vendor” is really an entire ecology, comprised of of the community, the software, and the processes and structures which bind them together.

Here are some of the values that members of the Plone community currently associate with this project:

• freedom
• good society
• democracy
• egalitarian
• independent
• networking
• meritocracy
• honesty
• elegant
• open
• flexibility
• fun
• quick
• friendship
• collaboration

To be sure, many of these qualities are characteristic of Open Source, and beyond.  But this dimension of analysis is missing from most RFPs.

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Pull over Kitt – you’ve just been lapped.

On Monday November 14th I attended a presentation by Sebastian Thrun, an AI researcher at Stanford U. whose team recently won the Darpa Grand Challenge.

The idea behind the Grand Challenge is to accomplish something that seems impossible, along the lines of crossing the Atlantic, the X-prize, etc. Darpa had previously funded cars that drive themselves, but after numerous failures decided to turn the task into a contest and see how far teams would get in a competitive setting. Last year none of the entrants managed to finish the course, but this year 5 finished, 4 within the alloted time.

The difference between last year and this year was primarily improvements in software, not hardware. In fact, once the software has been developed, outfitting a car with the necessary equipment to drive itself (the perceptual apparatus – laser, radar, and video guidance, the gps, the inertial motion systems, the general purpose computing servers, and the fly-by-wire control systems), were estimated by Sebastian to cost the robots are already here (some of them killer)!

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