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.

Unusual instruments of inspiration (day 199)

Another long day keeping up with three lives: social network, sxsw, work.  I'm pretty sure I couldn't do this full time.  I'm not sure how other people are doing it and partying too.  Again, I'm wondering about my gene pool.

Today I woke up too late for the first panels which sucked.  Seriously my only excuse is a 2am bedtime and a totally blackened hotel room which let no daylight in for me to cue to.  I thought the birds would wake me as they had done the morning before but the miracle of selective hearing had happened in the intervening 24 hours.  You see there are these birds here called Grackles and they deserve their name.  They can make sweet sounds but in a group they make a range of grackly sounds that are very distinctive.  And when I say there are these birds, I mean there are LOTS of these birds.  They line the telephone lines for long distances, perched side by side so the line looks like a thick black marker.

Too me so long to recap yesterday that I'm thinking I'm just going to do very quick highlights for today.  I tried to go to a 'battery life in Africa' panel but ended up being at a 'twitter and Tolstoy' panel which had usurped the canceled Africa timeslot.  The amazing thing is about this twist is that before deciding to go to the Africa panel I had made my way to another panel and at the very last moment changed my mind.  Unfortunately the venues were almost as far away from each other as possible so I rushed over to the Africa panel, probably just in time to miss the person saying it had been canceled.  But I wasn't the only one that was late and when we collectively realized that we were not in the right panel we left and talked in the hallway.  I talked with this guy called Peter Vesterbacka who had two gadgets to show me.  One was a solar-powered battery charger and the other was a golfball sized bluetooth interaction device called Blobo which has both orientation, force, and pressure sensors.  Very cool.  You can even drop and bounce this thing.  And it's only $49.  I was hooked.  I tried to find them at the Trade show to see a demo but a dyslexic brain turned 402 into 204.  I'll see them tomorrow.  Anyway, as I was walking away I marvelled at the sequence of events that would have me meet this guy.  Sometimes these types of coincidences are more visible and I become amazed for an instant.

Then I went to a conversation on democracy in the workplace and found out about WorldBlu from Traci Fenton.  She was very impressive and I left the session thinking, "yes we can".   Turns out there are many organizations (some large!) that are switching to a democratic way of operating.  There are core principles they outlined on their web site to get started.  Every year they have WorldBlu awards they give out, and they publish a WorldBlu list.

Then I went to the keynote which was an interview with Twitter CEO Evan Wiliams.  I knew it was really boring and I was desperately trying to connect to the twitter feed but my iphone wifi receiver was just too weak to pick up an overloaded signal.   I would have been a witness to a live backchannel lynching.  Oh well.  I also missed the leaving the room in a coordinated swarm.  I just watched a bunch of people leave and just thought they had to be somewhere (wasn't a huge swarm).  Slowly, the room emptied to about half full.  It had been standing room only.  I honestly don't remember much of what he said except he announced a new API feature (@anywhere).

Then I went to a talk by James Fowler on how networks influence our habits and emotions.  I think I may have blogged about this before.  The idea is that you are influenced by people up to thrice removed from you.  So a friend of a friend of a friend being happy will increase your chances of being happy.  Same thing for obesity.  It's not news that we influence each other.  It's surprising that it's more spread out than I assumed.  The talk was good but I am triggered by evangelism and this had some of that.  They wrote a book.

Then I went to see Jaron Lanier.  That was a definite highlight.  I arrived early to get a good seat thinking he would pack the house.  He didn't.  I'd say the (large) venue was about a quarter full.  Fools, I thought.  And miss out they did.  He started and ended his talk playing unusual wooden wind instruments, one he claimed is a precursor to the computer.   He asked us all to turn stop using our gadgets during his talk.  He then proceeded on a meandering discussion of the state of social media and asset exchange.   If the social network guy was an evangelist, Jaron was a prophet.  There is something about the way he is that reminds me of Richard Stallman.  A kind of slightly off genius quality.  Anyway, while he was talking my mind was the most stimulated it has been in a very long time.  I even got lots of unrelated ideas pop into my mind and it occurred to me that being in the presence of someone who has such a grasp of a wide-ranging set of ideas is enough to make anyone creative.  Next time I'm feeling in the grey zone, I'm switching on a Jaron Lanier talk.  Hopefully they'll put it online.  Maybe I should say a few things about the content of his talk.  There was so much there I'll just scratch the surface.  He was riffing on his current thinking that he summarized in a book "You are not a gadget".  (He was signing copies later on but there were no more left when I got there.  Bummer.)   Some highlights:

• The current thinking of make information free and sell merchandise is flawed.  It assumes that there is a special 'creative' class and a much larger 'lump' class that does nothing but lazily consume.
• Ted Nelson had it right with his Xanadu design.  Unfortunately he was a terrible manager ("Imagine the worst possible manager, Ted is worse") and the idea never got anywhere.  His model assumed everyone is a first class citizen and can be producer and consumer of information.  They can make information available for free if they want to but there are no gatekeepers to keep them from publishing for a particular device.  There is only one logical copy of every file.
• The 'walled garden' approach does not work.  Why should we accept to have multiple devices each with their own formats and marketplace?
• Facebook is preventing young people from re-inventing themselves.  They are so busy maintaining a representation of themselves that they don't have time and have too much at stake to change.  
• To much 'meanness' and 'me-ness'.  We need to design systems that are not so ego-driven.

There's so much I'm probably forgetting but I didn't have my usual Evernote application open because of his opening request.  Besides he was talking so fast there's no way I could have kept up.  And he sped up as time went on.

Okay that's it for today.  So much for just highlights.  One more half day tomorrow.  I head back mid-afternoon.

A song for this post.

More for less (day 198)

A full day today.  I was more familiar with the lay of the sxsw land so things were a bit more relaxed.  One of the things I realized yesterday was that I couldn't really tweet and listen at the same time.  I might be lacking that gene (or decade).  So I decided to listen and take notes in Evernote of the moment that were more, well, notable.  I retweeted a few things that agreed with my own observations -- a kind of second-hand or amplified tweet.

First a few comments I forgot about yesterday.

• A few more Ze Frank projects that were interesting: angrigami, re-enactment of baby pictures (can't find a link to this!), his suggestion that we all re-enact habitual childhood walks on Google Street View or Bing Street Level. 
• Danah Boyd mentioned sharing more to gain privacy, in the context of celebrities.  If they don't share enough they get more scrutiny.
• Robert Fabricant posits that people respond better to badges than graphs when it comes to personal information presentation.  Someone in the audience asked how far the game metaphor is going to go.  Will we wake up early and get 5 points, exercise and get 10 points, etc?  It's starting to feel a bit like a Brave New World.  I've been using FourSquare during the conference and I've unlocked one badge.  It seemed kind of random and even though I am checking in to places it still feels a bit forced.  Perhaps if I was competing within a group, I would be more motivated.

A attended five sessions today.  The first was a session on storytelling by Dr. Sanjay Gupta & Suneel Gupta who spoke about the Kahani movement which collects stories of (mostly) South Asian people.  A the beginning of their talk I was expecting something so completely different that I didn't fully grasp the impact of community-based collection of stories.  I liked the way they presented the material and the heartfelt responses they got from the audience.  As they talked I remembered a sunny afternoon in Montreal when my dad told me stories I had never heard before.  It felt like an unlikely moment and I wondered why I'd never even thought to ask.  We spend so much time with our parents we think we know them.  I liked how the Gupta brothers were asking us to look again.

The next session was by Michele Bowman, on cartography.  She presented a series of maps combined with data collection.   The ones that stood out for me were:

• emotion maps
• subway smell map
• cultural values

Then I went to a conversation with Michel Gondry who is always a pleasure to hear.  I'm not sure if he was kidding (probably) but he seemed to have a particular sensitivity to people leaving the room while he was talking.  They showed a clip of his music video fully made from yarn, incredible (can't find the link but will post it when/if I do).  The thing that stood out for me was his very relaxed manner and the way that he seems to fully inhabit a creative world.  When asked by someone in the audience to answer the question "what would you do to someone who wouldn't stop talking during one of your films" he mumbled a few words about not doing anything to them but then quickly jumped in to an anecdote about having shushed a crowd during a performance where he was playing music with his girlfriend.  He then expanded on this and said it might be nice to create 'shush' units that could be installed on the theatre seats and remote-controlled by the filmmaker.

Then I went to see Valerie Casey's keynote.  It was a call for interactive people to be responsible to sustainable practices.  She said many things that were interesting including "when will be stop thinking that less bad is good enough?" Implored people to employ systems thinking.  Said that we are all operating at the pleasure of the systems we are part of. 

I also saw a panel on crowdsourcing and emotional gaming, neither of which made a big impression.  Plus it's getting late here.  If I feel more generous tomorrow I'll add some comments.

A song for this post.

Alone in a crowd with content (day 197)

Crowds and crowds and lineups and free food and free drinks and loud music and people moving in streams.  It reminded me of the dot com days but this time the crowd was much more mixed.  Some from those days and some younger, and a mix of men and women.   A big emphasis on social media.  Almost too much.  It's somewhat suspicious in its pervasiveness.  Like we're praising at the altar.  This too reminded me of the bubble ten years ago.  A constant consumerism vibe with products being offered as we travel from venue to venue.  Even the 'we can end this' campaign had to adopt a similar tactic to get attention.  Because in a place where distraction is the mode of being, attention is currency.  Very little eye contact.  Most people had their eyeballs on their screens.

For me the most exhausting thing was being alone in a crowd.  I didn't see anyone I knew but I laughed and was frustrated with them, and read their tweets.  I felt strange about going to parties alone and this made the lineups that much more daunting.  So I came home to my new hotel which is a far cry from the Hilton where I spent the first night.   I asked Yelp to tell me where to eat and ended up at this Lebanese cubicle in a strip mall.  Context is everything.  Yes it's a 4 star in this neighbourhood, no doubt.

So what about content in this chaos?  I'm happy to say there is some content.  I attended a talk on design for awareness that had some interesting points about how to created a state of augmented mindfulness.  It's too bad the talk was not well attended.  From the tweets, I know that people were in the iPad panel.  Robert Fabricant of Frog Design gave a great talk on how data collection and presentation can motivate people into making changes.  He exemplified the challenge by showing someone craving fried chicken at time t, and not wanting diabetes at time t+x -- we are not temporally consistent in our desires.  It is possible both want fried chicken and not want diabetes because they are not immediately and not completely correlated.  That, and the fact that habits are physically compelling, make changing things really really hard.   Fabricant talked of the design challenges in convincing people to collect data (if it's not automatic), convince them to spend time with the reporting, and then make sure they know what to do, and then help them make the change.  Enough to keep designers busy for a while.

Also attended a talk by Danah Boyd, on privacy and publicity.  She had lots to say on the equivalence of privacy and control.  That people may be more public but it does not mean they want to be publicized.  She also talked about the privilege of being able to share and the crowd's rejection of some, and the fear of some.  Hiding is sometimes a necessity and in a pinch this is hard to do if you're all over the web.  She didn't take any questions.

The last talk of the day was a conversation with Ze Frank which was entertaining, heart-warming, and bemusing.  Ze is a funny man.  I'd say he's joyful and human but sometimes his entertaining side gets the better of him.  When he was in balance he was amazing.  I'd say this talk/interview/performance was the best I saw today.  I laughed and cried.  I loved his 'children songs for adults series' -- one about being scared and another for when you're overwhelmed.  I thought it was interesting that he made these in response to request from his followers and with the help of his followers in the case of the second one.  There was a kind of vulnerability that I thought was really sweet...perhaps the best of social media.  Someone in the audience asked him if there was a limit to the world going faster and faster.  Were we going to reach a breaking point.  He was very dismissive of her question which I found surprising.  He switched into making fun at her expense.  It's too bad.  I think it's an interesting question because it begs all kinds of questions -- how are things faster?  Are we doing more things? Thinking more things?  Being asked more things?  Are any of these things controllable?  Is everyone's life faster? Faster than what? What happens if we refuse to go faster?  There are so many directions to take this question.  Perhaps it's worth a panel on its own.  I think she asked the question to the wrong crowd.

A song for this post.

Going Sou' (day 195)

SXSW.  I've heard of it.  Now it's time to see what the fuss is about.  I've shared my nervousness about it with some people.  I've been to enough conferences to know that the big media ones are confusing and made for people who love the special kind of freedom that comes from chaos, drink, and unfamiliar surroundings.  I can be that person.  Or I can feel so lost that the only thing I can think about is getting back to my hotel room to read a good reference book.  It seems to depend solely on the company I keep or don't keep.

I admit I have not done enough homework to even know where to go when I wake up on Saturday.  Hopefully before then I'll have cozied up to the schedule and intuited the best coolest things to take in.  The tools are there: fill up your my.schedule, gather info by pointing your iphone at coded designs, etc, etc.  Being social is the what of this conference it seems.  I'll be looking to my friend Alex for some tips, right after I load up my phone with the proper apps and have double-booked all the slots in my.schedule.  Always better to start from a baseline before hitting up the experts.

And whatever happens, at least I get the sun for a sweet few days.

A song for this post.