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.

So who won? (day 158)

If you had lots of money and you were suddenly faced with a vote for or against the redistribution of wealth, which way would you go?  What if the majority of your neighbours were quite poor?  I faced that decision today, with my avatar.  I was a wealthy flagger (had invested some money) and healthy enough though I had been injured in a random shooting by some of my fellow avatars.  I had made good choices along the way and though I had tried all the drugs presented to me, I stayed away from teen pregnancy and marriage with kids, and didn't sink my money into a house.   I considered myself a compassionate avatar for equal opportunity and justice for all.   But when the vote was called, I was surprised to feel a quite palpable twinge of entitlement.  I deserved that money.  The fact that chance had favoured me had been forgotten in a frenzy of selective memory.   Exposed, I sheepishly voted for equalization of wealth.  I consoled myself with the cheers of the many who got richer.  I then secretly hoped that winning was not tied to wealth.

My avatar was a little ball in the game "Best Before", a 200 person video game currently playing at The Cultch.  I say 'playing' because it does involve a measure of theatre from the game's creators.  This theatre game has heart.  It was not what I expected and certainly steers away from the usual tropes of video games.  It was folky and funny and thought-provoking in a surprising way.  It was sometimes socially edgy yet undependable as a social barometer.  Were people making decisions based on what they would really do in real life or were they trying something new because the consequences were temporary?  Starting with the decision to be male or female, that dilemma came up often.

A song for this post.

IDMAa eh? (day 70)

I'm astonished to say that I have no recollection of not blogging on Wednesday night.  I was up until 2 working on Paula's The Wall project again and I guess I just tuned out at some point.  Last night though I was exhausted from a travel odyssey to Muncie Indiana to the IDMAa conference (which Emily Carr is hosting next year).   It was a conscious decision that sleep was better than blog.

The conference started early with a keynote from Tom Kelley of IDEO.   He was...umm...perky.   We came in late so I'm not sure what the red queen is was going on about was, but it seemed to apply to a lot of things.  To be honest I didn't get much out of his talk but that may be because I have a block when it comes to that kind of presentation.  It's a sort of inspirational tone that just says "nothing deep here, move along".   But let me be clear.   I have nothing but respect for IDEO and what they do.   Many people seemed to enjoy his talk a lot.

The next talk I totally missed because of jetlag.  I slept through most of it.   The little bits that I remember were fascinating.  That talk was from John Fillwalk from the Digital Intermedia Arts Institute which is part of Ball State University.   Turns out the Institute was part of the campus tour later so I got to see some of what he talked about in his talk which was great.   The best part was a Second Life instrument that rang the real life bells in a bell tower on campus.  It was amazing to walk down the street and hear the seemingly random bell sounds, like a postmodern concert.

The next panel I attended was about the Future of Interactivity.  I was impressed with the work of Richard Elaver (Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne) who is using generative patterns based on nature to create 3D printed forms.  Some beautiful modular jewelry and other objects.  I can't find a website unfortunately.

The last talk I attended was at the Museum of Art where they also had the conference exhibit.  I toured about half of the exhibit before having to break to go to the panel.  It's an awesome show.  There were two highlights to the panel session.  One was Lindsay Grace (Miami University) talking about Critical Games.  He did one game a week for six weeks, all critiquing particular aspects of game play that are pathologically repeated and not often questioned.  He demoed one game called "Wait'  where the details of the game (and points) only come if you remain in one place in the game space.   As soon as you walk, the environment goes white.  Another is game was 'Black/White' where all characters are visually the same except for colour and behaviour.  There is no way to tell if the characters are enemy or not.  The other talk that caught my eye was from Tammy Brackett (Alfred University) who uses cellular automata to remix video feedback.  She has some great images that were generated from a seed of a musical score derived from chromosome six.  She had work installed in the exhibit but I didn't get to see it because when it was closed after the talks.  I was very disappointed about this.  Particularly because it's doesn't open again until 1:30pm tomorrow at which time I'll be on my way home. 

My biggest regret of the day is not having toured all of the exhibit.  My second biggest regret of the day is not being able to attend all of the afternoon panels.  My possibly third regret of the day is joining twitter.

A song for this post.