Opening up to engage (day 200)

For the first time I'm opening up my laptop during a flight.  Usually I'm quite content listening to a podcast or an audiobook or reading/reviewing papers.  But I wanted to describe the last day at the conference before it lost its freshness.  It wasn't likely that I would write after the flight came in at 1am.

I started the day in a panel about the city as a platform.  The ideas centred around the management of information available and generated from a city.  One statistic quoted by the moderator estimates that by 2012 20% of all data traffic will be passive sensor data (e.g. traffic, weather, seismic, energy, etc.)  One of the applications they talked about is SeeClickFix where citizens are encouraged to submit information about things needing fixing in the city, such as potholes, graffiti, water quality.  Ideas are voted on and automatically sent on to the city councilors that would be responsible for the issue.  There are also mechanisms by which people can volunteer to help with the issues identified.  They've seen an improvement in the speed of resolution and the engagement of the councilors with their constituents.  A similar system was developed in Manor, a small city of 65,000 people just outside of Austin.  They developed a game-like interaction to the submission of ideas for the city.  When you submit an idea you get 1,000 InnoBucks, when you comment on an idea you get 100 InnoBucks.  You can invest your InnoBucks in someone else's idea and if the idea gets realized, your stock pays out.  Investing in someone's idea helps it get promoted up a hierarchy which eventually leads to city review and possibly implementation.  This system has been quite successful and they are making it available to other cities. 

It occurred to me that perhaps all citizens could be given the option to have a portion of their taxes be used for a program like this.  So say 5% of your taxes get put into this application and you get to collectively decide where the money should be spent.  For this to work it would need to also be matched with open government records and good estimates of costs involved.  It's pie in the sky but it would probably give a much needed push to citizen engagement and a better understanding of the issues politicians face.  It could even involve younger people that don't normally get a voice.  Someone at the panel session pointed out that not everyone has access to the internet and for this to truly work equal access would be important.  I agree but if we wait to develop these tools, we won't be ready when access is more universal.  In the interim, there could also be other ways to contribute to the system that don't require internet access.

I attended two other sessions that were not as thought-provoking: one on designing effective mobile applications, and the other on Canvas vs. Flash, two competing technologies for motion graphics in the browser.

In the first session I twigged on the idea of the peer-managed address book.  I seriously had never thought how ridiculous it is to manage all your contacts, when they could be managing themselves.  I update my contact info and it gets propagated to all the address books that contain me.  How trivial an idea and how useful.  Facebook is implementing something like that to interface with the iPhone address book.  I'm not sure I want Facebook to be the platform for this but I like the concept very much.
The Canvas vs. Flash panel was interesting and full of information but the consensus is that there is no perfect solution.  Canvas is open which is great but it's not supported in Internet Explorer and does not have development tools.  The Flash plugin is ubiquitous and has great tools but does not work on the iPhone and is not open and is not easy to debug.  No one won this debate.  It's a sad state of affairs that we can't all agree on open standards.  I personally love the idea of Canvas and I'll try it out soon. The Adobe reps on the panel was quite comfortable (almost arrogant) with their lead in this market.  I also learned that Internet Explorer 9 will not support Canvas but has good support for SVG, a vector graphics standard that's been on the verge of succeeding for a long time.  I made a bet with someone from Adobe in 2002 that 5 years hence SVG would be the major vector graphics standard on the web.  I believed.  I wonder if he ever thinks about that bet.

It will be nice to get back to a more normal pace of life but I'm really going to miss the intellectual stimulation of this conference.  I hope to come back next year.

A song for this post.