Category Archives: Conferences

10.02.06
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BlogTalk Reloaded: danah boyd

[This is liable to being the only talk I take notes on – just too braindead to do more.]

The word ‘beta’ used to mean something. Before Friendster, it used to mean that something was in testing, but now it probably means ‘not yet profitable’.

Software dev used to be a hideous process with specs being written, and checked, and coding and lawyers. But developers don’t like this sort of process.

MySpace developers decided to hack something together using Cold Fusion. No spec, no qa, no usability, no legal, no marketing. They just deployed it. From idea to deployment was two months. Can say ‘maybe they got lucky’, but that’s not the full story. But when they shipped, they asked the users for feedback, and built out requested features. But still no designed system, it’s just piecemeal hacks.

The beta is still pretty standard way of doing something. But MySpace still doesn’t have QA, instead they launch 2 or 3 new features a day, and hack on the live servers. An extreme idea but it’s a new way of working that’s pretty consistent to the social software world.

– hack it up, get it out there
– learn from your users, evolve the system with them
– make your presence known, invite feedback
– monetisation? Add a few ads here and there

Pros and Cons to this.

Cons – produces terribly horrible code that fails frequently. Held together by voodoo. But if you think about how usability been done, has a mentality, lab-driven context. They show people software, ask them to interact with it, and the result is that they fix a few pixels, change working, change page flow. Great for human-computer interaction but not human-human interaction.

But when you have crowds it is different to when you have individuals. Anything that can be fucked with gets fucked with. No good way of testing it per se, but no way to say ‘how to make certain that this can be used. But this is key to what makes social software valuable – it ends up reflecting the crowds.

Because social software spreads friends to friends, this is great from a marketing perspective. Shapes way people use it, the way they think about it. Early days of flicker, Caterina and Stewart said hello to every new users and talked to them about the site and why they did it. That shaped the Flickr culture, and the community because then friends of Caterina and Stewart did the same.

Lots of social software is tech-centred technology.

But an example that went awry. Orkut. Known now as a Brazilian site. WAs originally deployed as an invite-only to tech people, engineers, people associated to Google. But people joined because they knew those people, but weren’t necessarily interested. Too many YSANs.

But then some Brazilians joined, and the list of countries had a list of flags… like a sports event where you want to rise in the rankings. The Brazilians thought this was fascinating because they could beat the Americans. Messages went out and the Brazilians joined en masse, went from 5% to 90% of the people. At this point, the developers weren’t living in the system anymore.

Orkut has now spread to India, and that was deliberate. No problems launching but has taken on a new form recently. The space duplicates the caste system in some detail, and again Orkut does not know what’s going on or how to deal with it.

Culture’s provide meaningful context that tells us how to act. Spaces set norms, e.g. getting on a bus. As kids we don’t abide by norms, until our parents teach us. We learn from people around us and the space itself. Know that a bus is different to an opera house.

So how do you make meaning of context on a social site? Early Usenet groups all looked the same – so how do you make context? Can’t tell the difference between the others except by interaction.

So look at Friendster:
– Gay men
– Bloggers
– Burning Man attendees

Depending on which group people joined Friendster in, they took on that role. So if you were invited by a Burning Man attendee you thought it was a Burning Man site, so you they did their profile as per their own context, and didn’t realise or assume there would be any other contexts but the ones they knew.

Didn’t take long before your boss got online and you realised this was not a place to be half-naked.

Academics often talk about context and what’s appropriate. But it’s very difficult to cross contexts. People change, for example, the way that they speak depending on who they are talking too, but you can’t speak to multiple groups simultaneously without having to make a choice.

When researchers created ARPANET they were interested in sharing information. Interest driven starting point. Even MUDs and MOOs were activity driven.

But inversion with social software, because they started people-first, because you don’t want to know everyone on the web. You may be blogging to reach an audience, but you don’t have billions of readers, you start off with your friends, and if you’re really popular you’ll get beyond that. But your friends build the context. The people you know, connections of relations you have in the system.

Radically different process, but we don’t know how to deal with it. Problem is scale. These contexts collapse. How can you deal with multiple contexts because you’ve scaled.

Monetisation is forcing a lot of sites to scale too fast.

Facebook, for example. Colleges… then… schools… then businesses… now everyone. Tension with marketing – marketing means scale, and scale means multiple contexts.

Delicious, conversations about how awful it was that non-techies were posting.

How far can things scale? Can it work?

Blogs are the only area where its scaled successfully. Because there is no ‘blogosphere’ because it’s not one thing. People are unaware of each other – foodies and knitting bloggers don’t mingle.

Three questions;

Designers: There are costs to chaotic processes behind the design now, and what are the processes that can support users without burning out designers
Researchers: what implications does all this have for society, design, every day life, globalisation
Business folks: Monetisation and growth are seen as desirable, but they destabilise most social software and kill communities. is it possibly to monetise without doing that?

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10.02.06
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Conference burn out

OK, it’s official. I’m burnt out as regards conferences. My flight was over three hours late last night, and our pilot told us just before we took off that had we been another 20 minutes later, we would not had enough fuel to get to Vienna, so he would have had to cancel the flight. Instead of thinking ‘Wow, that was lucky’, I found myself feeling cross, and wishing that Air Traffic Control had held us just a bit longer, or that the weather had worsened, so that I could just get back on the Piccadilly line and go home.

Instead, Lady Luck saw fit to ensure that I didn’t get to Vienna until 2am, and didn’t get to my friend Horst’s place until nearly 3am. I am, as you can imagine, a bit tired.

I’m also not impressed one little bit with the programme at BlogTalk Reloaded. There are lots of great speakers… in fact, there are too many. With no slot longer than half an hour, and a distinct lack of breaks, I am wondering how I am going to last. In fact, I know I am not going to last at all. I haven’t had a proper meal since lunchtime yesterday, I didn’t get dinner last night, no breakfast this morning because we had to rush to get here in time, we have a 15 minute break at 12:30, and lunch is not until 1.45. My talk is just before lunch. If I can string a sentence together at that point, I will be lucky.

I have to ask, for exactly whose benefit was this programme put together? As a speaker, I feel a bit miffed at only getting half an hour, because it’s not really long enough to get into the interesting detail of what I have to speak about. I will either have to talk fast or cut stuff out, and either way I’ll feel like I’m short-changing everyone. (And no, I’m not going to come over all falsely modest to say that I’m not interesting enough for a full hour. I’m bloody interesting, actually, and I believe that I’m not the only one here who’s bloody interesting.)

Half an hour also doesn’t give time for questions. Half the fun of talking is having a chat with the audience for the last 15 mins… oh, wait. Now I’m really pissed off. I don’t get half an hour, I get 10 minutes. I spent all that money, and went through all that pain for 10 minutes? I work for myself, so I have to pay for my own flights, there’s no nice business slush fund to pay for me. The whole point of coming to these conferences is to raise one’s profile in order to get more work. Networking is a big part of that, but so is having the opportunity to prove one’s experience and express one’s opinions from the stage, thus giving people an understanding of what you do and who you are.

10 mins gives no more than a snapshot, and frankly, had I known I would never have bothered.

Their format is this – two 10 minute presentations and then a 40 minute chat afterwards in small groups. Now, I’m all for chats, but would rather do that with everyone here (there are not many people here so it would be more than doable).

I thought last night that I need to put a moratorium on conferences for the next few months, and this experience just emphasises that I need to not book in any more conferences for a good long time.

UPDATE: I complained to the organisers, and they have changed the format so that myself and the other person talking this hour get half an hour each, with no ‘open space’. I do appreciate this, and I hope it will make for a better experience not just for me but for the audience. All I have to do now is not pass out or fall asleep.

09.29.06
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SHiFT: Martin Röll – Time for a SHIFT

How we need to change our thinking and acting to use information technology sensibly.

At these sorts of conferences, there seems to be quest for identity, to find out who we are, and how we shape the word, and how the world shapes us. Thomas talked about hacking language. Stowe will talk about tools, how we shape them and how they shape us. I’m talking about hacking the human operating system, how we live and how we interact.

Two assumptions in the title: we need to change, and that we aren’t using IT sensibly. Lilia thinks we are using IT sensibly, but what I mean is that we are not using the possibilities we have from the things we’ve invented, there’s a lot more we could do, and there’s a lot of tech that’s not useful at all.

The other assumption is that we need to change, and I’m not going to argue that point. But I do think it’s time for a shift and we do need to change, because I see things that we are doing on this planet that I don’t like, but I’m not going to labour the point about when we need to change.

But these points I am going to make are going to work for you no matter if you think the world is going to change or disintegrate.

Wishes don’t work, no point wishing for change. Need to act ourselves. That’s why he used ‘we’. Also, pointless blaming others for our misfortunes, we have to own that ourselves.

Idea of this talk is that when we look at the tech we’ve invented we can see it helps us get more things done. Can access more information, can find things faster, can communicate with more people, can work more effectively. Question is, what are we going to do with all that now? What work are we going to do? Are we going to use it to fight faster and more dynamically, or are we going to come up with some better ideas?

Two things are important:

– the way we interact with each other when we use IT.
– the way we work, the things we work on, and the type of work we do when working for other companies and the way we earn our money.

There are things we get wrong, specially when we access the web for accessing information. We tend to believe that what is in the browser is the world, don’t take into account that it’s a snapshot of the world, and we don’t think about the state of mind we are in when we access information.

So you’ve just got up and haven’t had coffee and are feeling groggy, then a comment on your blog may read as a stupid comment, but later on when you read it you may realise it’s constructive criticism.

Often we mis-interpret things online because we don’t take into account our own state of mind, we no longer see things the way they are, we see our own emotions in the email we get and the information we process. We react to this information badly when you are in a ‘fight’ mode, or a ‘protect’ mode. But have to think about why you are reacting the way you react.

Our information systems are created in such a way as it’s easy to get drowned in information. When we try to absorb too much information we become ineffective.

Once we’ve found out what we want to do, once we have our thinking clear, we have to go on to the acting part. One of the most important things here is what do we focus on. We tend to multitask, think about email, or what we have to do… when we don’t focus on what we need to do, when we are procrastinating we don’t get anything done. But we are the ones that decide where to put our focus, our attention.

There are lots of tools there to help us find what is interesting… but that’s frequently defined as what’s being linked to a lot. But when we do that we get into mob behaviour. We find something on the net, but we don’t know anything more than what we’ve seen. So we amplify what is happening without really it being important or relevant to us.

We should stop doing that. People will not stop reading a blog because I haven’t linked to popular things. In fact, if I stop for 2 weeks, it doesn’t matter. RSS feeds mean that people will stay, they can see when you start writing again. We should blog less about things that suck. What I get mad about when I see what’s happening in my part of the blogosphere – so many people spend so much time commenting on things that we don’t like, or things that suck.

There is so much stuff that sucks, everyone could easily write a list of 100 things that suck, but a blog entry is not going to change it. We should focus on what’s really important to us, what’s positive, what can make a difference. Don’t waste time on criticising politics or business or user-interfacces on a new gadget. We shouldn’t talk about he things that are irrelevant to our own actions.

Also need to be aware of the consequences of what we do, particularly the economic consequences. At this conference, you’ll meet a lot of people who are inventing new tools or processes. We are innovating. This is important for companies because they are hiring us and paying us. But we need to be aware of the repercussions of what we do. We need to think carefully about where we are going to put our new inventions. In the end it will all be freely available, but we are the ones who decide who gets it first, we shape the first behaviour, we help the first users make use of the tools. And by making this decision of how we use the tools, if we are not giving it to some people we can stop development, and by giving it to others we can speed development, so we need to think about where we apply these tools.

We have a duty too to share what we know and what we are developing. Not enough to just talk amongst ourselves, to show the demo to other geeks, but they can find it themselves anyway. If we really believe in what we do and we think that it’s important we need to go out and show it to people who don’t know yet. Most people don’t care about what we do because they don’t know about what we do.

You won’t find them on Google or Skype or IM, but our duty is to go out there and find people to share with. But we are developing stuff for us, not for people who are not at our conferences. We can work effectively but other people don’t, and some people are getting left behind and we should show what we do to other people and let them participate in this new world that we are creating.

I believe we are not using the tools we have developed effectively today. Much of the time we use our computers we are recreating other tools we already have, or engaging in the same behaviours. We need to think more about why we are doing what we do. We shouldn’t confuse the browser with reality. We should be mindful when we communicate with others through the electronic medium. Too often we misunderstand others because we’re not aware of our own state of mind when we are interfacing with the system. We need to co-exist with everyone.

Also need to be careful who we work for, whose money we take. If we aren’t more careful, we’ll just be the generation that made things faster. But if we do, not only can we get more things done, have better communication, but we can also shape a world in which more people can live together peacefully.

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09.29.06
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SHiFT: Kevin Cheng – Communicating concepts through comics

Communicating new technologies. We’ve got lots of great tech, but when it comes to talking about the ideas, we need to step back. Communicating using comics. Works at Yahoo Local. Used comic strip to communicate the idea for how the local restaurant search might work.

Started off writing a short script about the story and ideas they wanted to convey. Then put together the flow of the story, then drew it, and put it into Flash. Easy to share. Easy communication. But printing things out better than using Flash, even thought Flash is portable.

Why did they decide to use comics? Why are they interesting and powerful.

Comics are universal, so you can tell that a comic of a dog farting is a dog farting even without any language skills.

Comics need imagination. Comics are abstracted version of person, and are more ‘everyman’ than a photograph (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics). Comics give people room to be engaged with the character.

Abstraction can also be used for the user interface. Don’t want to distract people so abstract the UI.

Comics are more expressive. Adding context of images to words changes the meaning of them. Allows you to communicate even body language.

Comics better at telling time and motion. Movie storyboards.

Great for iteration. Quick to draw and redraw.

[Of course, this presentation somewhat depends on images I don’t have here to show you… so ironically you really are only getting half of the story here. How’s that for the point being made for you?]

Who uses comics?
US Postal Service. Comic strip post card about where to buy stamps, but although you throw it out you can absorb it as you glance at it.

Matrix storyboard.

Squid Labs, ‘HowToons’, instructions for kids on how to make projects like air hockey out of a balloon and AOL CD.

Dodgeball. Use comics to explain their service.

Doing comics is not that hard. If you don’t know how to do it, then there are a lot of resources online to help you get started. Look at expressions, changing eyebrows. Wally Wood’s 22 Panels. Trace pictures. Different tools for making comics.

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09.28.06
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SHiFT: Euan Semple – The Quiet Revolution

Here at SHiFT in Lisbon, a two day conference on Social and Human Ideas for Technology. Again, not going to blog every session, just a few here and there. First up, Euan Semple.

Words ‘social’ and ‘media’ and ‘business’ help people make assumptions about what is happening, so they then package and dismiss it. People come up with all sorts of reasons why blogs/wikis/etc won’t work in their business, why it is nothing to do with them.Some people are jumpy about ‘social’ in the workplace.

BBC, implemented social software and had ‘globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations’. Different from the way organisations usually talk. Most businesses try to manage relationships and information, to control communications. The global nature of the net and the uncontrolled nature of the conversation on the net is intimidating to most people. But the thing that scares people the most is the fact that it’s person-to-person. business has sanitised the personal out of business. You try to act as your job title instead of your as a person, and you’re not encouraged to act as a person, to be yourself, and a lot of businesses actively discourage it.

Way BBC implemented social computing was different too. Usually do months of consultancy and user testing and that doesn’t really work. Companies get fleeced by IT people doing that. Decided didn’t want to do that at BBC, so had own ideas, own technology, and wanted to just get on with it.

Created a forum first. No marketing, all word of mouth. Out of 24k staff, 18k had used the forum at some point or another. Most of it’s mundane, people asking questions. Exposed differences within the different parts of the business, which previously they’d pretended didn’t exist. Smart manager engages with the conversation, even when they are negative or critical. E.g. weather graphics were not liked by people in the BBC, and the manager in charge of that came into the conversation and just talked calmly to everyone.

Euan keen not to own the forum, fought off people branding it, or tell people how to behave. When there were problems he’d go and just ask questions about it, to encourage discussion.

Forum talked about big stuff too. Jerry Springer the Opera. Big discussions. First time that they’d had a pan-BBC discussion about something big.

People think it’s just about the technology, but it’s not. Is naturally disruptive. But organisations don’t have a choice – the MySpace generation will demand this if it’s not there – they’ll either not work for you, or they’ll do it on the web which could be really bad for you.

Then put in a social networking tool, Connect.Gateway. Tools helps people get to find people interested in the same things, and empowered people who would otherwise not have had a way of connecting.

Then added blogs. Euan’s still cautious about blogs in business because they work on the basis of having an opinion and expressing it, and that’s not trivial in an organisation. It’s difficult tot say what you think. It’s paradoxical – in business it’s hard to say what you think and there’s no accountability, whereas in the geek world if you don’t say what you think you don’t exist, and there’s a trail behind you that everyone can follow.

Richard Sambrook started to get interested, and wanted to talk directly to a new division of 1500 people and didn’t want to do memos and staff emails and newsletters, so he used a blog instead. Did it well, blogged every day, mix of stuff, allowed comments. Would raise strategic issues and sometimes other senior managers would engage in the conversation in the comments thread. Those conversations would have happened elsewhere, but you wouldn’t have seen them publicly.

His internal blog at one point was being read by 8000 staff, now settled down to 4000 staff. Also humanised him, took him out of the org chart. Has now just started his own public blog. Very challenging for people in an organisation like the BBC. Some of the stuff eh wrote on his internal blog ended up in the press. The edges are getting fuzzier, what can you and can’t you write about.

Then introduced wikis. Adoption curve was steeper, less popular. Firstly, people used it as an easy way to set up a website. Allowed people to publish information that they couldn’t have published any other way, as had no budget for a web designer.

Euan then used the wiki to collaboratively write a policy for employee blogs. Asked 90 BBC bloggers to help work on the policy, using comment son the wiki pages (Confluence). After a couple of weeks it slowed down, as the policy writers reached consensus (with no meetings), and so got given to the management to ratify.

Someone in the forum said that it was frustrating that BBC staff can’t take part in BBC competitions. Set up competition internally, and collaboratively people put together the rules, the criteria, etc, for a photography comp. Now they are using it for organising programmes.

Something about the ownership about it, the self-selection that allows people to really engage with it.

RSS helps. Lots of people talking internally, but need a way to manage all that conversation and RSS does that. Began to see who was interest to who and that showed them who’s interested in what.

Tagging also an important. Tools that replicate delicious inside the organisation.

We have a glimpse of how this works, but when the MySpace generation comes into business, they will expect this, and they will know better how it works, and how to sidestep the red tape that can get in the way of getting things done.

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09.27.06
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Our second podcast pt 1: A conference roundup

We recorded this on Sunday night, but I’ve really struggled with Odeo’s upload tool. In the end, I gave up, uploaded to the Internet Archive and just linked to it via Odeo. (Note: It does take a second or two to load into the Odeo player) The Creative Commons publisher worked a treat, and I’m happy that we’re using CC licencing anyway.

Suw has been on the conference circuit lately. I so glad that she got a new MacBook so we can do video iChat. Otherwise, I’d rarely see her. She’s been to FooCamp, EuroFoo, and EuroOSCON. It’s got her excited about Second Life among other things. And we talk about the devloper-as-journalist Adrian Holovaty.

She just left this morning to go to Shift in Lisbon.. We’ll have to talk about that later.

powered by ODEO

You can always simply download the podcast here. (20:28 9.8 MB)

We started off thinking that we really didn’t have much to talk about, but in the end, we talked so much that we decided to break up the podcast into two parts. I’ll add the show notes in a bit and post the second part in a bit.

UPDATE: Show notes:

00:30 EuroFoo recap Suw talks about FooCamp and EuroFoo, including talking about the Google Flyover, making a crashed Cylon raider out of beanbags
03:25 Suw talks about a presentation on chocolate. Remember, only losers chew. Real people suck.
07:00 Other topics at EuroFoo, future of spying, Ryan Carson talks about working a four-day week, and ‘Could we build a tricorder?’
08:56 EuroOSCON. Suw discusses Tom Steinberg of MySociety presentation about democratising government. I talk about distributed journalism. I space on the details, but Glyn reminds me in the comments.
11:52 Adrian Holovaty talks about adding structure to the data that journalists gather. Adrian talks about the developer as journalists.
16:40 It’s like Tom Coates who talks about a ‘web of data’. Journalism now is a web of news, Suw says.

The first half ends a bit abruptly, but I’ll post the second half now.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Mark Shuttleworth – The challenges facing Ubuntu

Has two talks he could give – collaboration, one of the great challenges facing free software community. Have some dam good tools, and produce world class software, but if we’re going to step up to the next level that our grannies can use, and be confident and comfortable using, we’ll have to amp up the collaboration.

Or… can look at some of the mountains that we have to climb. If we want to establish the norm, there are some key challenges.

Crowd voted for challenges.

Free Software Rules
The web rules – Apache is the no 1 web server; free software CMS; applications.

Reverse auction, start with no 13 and work to 1.

13 – Pretty is a feature.
Absolutely true. When I was able to show someone Firefox and it looked so sweet, less interested in the magical underpinnings, or free software, or extensions… than in the fact that it looked reallly good. Need to look at the real pioneers of classy sofware and see how they use their stuff. So Gnome focused very much on distilling the essence of software and making it good. See same meme in KDE environment, who make things look pretty.

To be de facto, needs to look and feel super-polished. Means we need to accept some contraints, and think about human-computer interaction.

12 – Consistent packaging.
When an industry’s in transition it’s a difficult time. People tell me the difficult thing about Linux is that they don’t know how to install software. No installer like InstallShield. Compounded by numbers of distros and packages.

Installing external software is an old way of thinking, happens in the old world.

Eg. Oracle used to take days to install, but OracleExpress takes minutes. Should basically wish for it and it’s there. We can do that in the free software world far better than in paid, because we can create the alliances between software.

But the packaging is the elephant in the room. Used to be an area of real innovation, but now we need convergance. Debian did well early on, so need to think about commonalities. Ideal: common packaging format that’s easy to work with so that developers have something build into their project. It should be trivial.

Indicator of success is when you see propriorty software guys adopting free software packaging, as Oracle has done.

11 – Simplified licencing.
Whatever you think, they started out with a framework for people to decide how they want to their licence. CC have said there’s a specturm, like it or not, and some people are happy with things others won’t like. This is what the universe of people out there looks like. Consistent licences.

In software, we have 150 – 200 licences. So running into some annoying incompatibilities. Need to understand what the CC guys have done well, and then adopt it.

Essence of success is not OS, but free software. Some people want to be somewhere else on the spectrum than me, but better to have a framework for that .

10 – Pervasive presence
Linux desktop can start to be a genuine thought leader, a genuine innovator, and presence is going to be there. So need a universal addressbook, knowing the channels through which you communicate, give an idea to the user an idea of who’s out there.

meshnet. bunch of laptops in this room, so how hard would it be to figure out who is around? There is work going on, but if we could treat this as a common infrastructure, so that we enable collaboration platforms.

9 – Pervasive support
Or the perception of. People say that ‘Its’ lovely but it’s not supported’, but there are numbers that you can call, but people don’t think it’s supported. So transform support into perception of pervasive support. Cafe guy has a guy who has a phone no. for people to ring. The knowledge is there, so hard to find grads with no Linux experience. Need to get people to tell others.

8 – Govaritye Ra Russki
Translation. If you look at how well software is translated, it’s easy to think we’re doing well. 347 languages who have more than 1 million speakers. So we have to invest in the translation effort. Build the platforms to support the needs of translators. Need to be translated upstream, so it’s easiest to distribute. A lot of effort in building bridges. Need to help the documentation guys, but the infrastructure is written for the Linux people, not the developers.

007 – Great gadgets
Interested in Troll Tech. The gadget world is going to be one fo the next major frontiers for free software adoption. Linux has gone from 0 – 20% market share in 2 years. Palm, Symbian, Windows, but Linux has grown massively in the last two years. But it’s fragmented, large numbers of small manufacturers, who need an OS at low/no cost. So not the sort of momentum.

As a community we could change that. Lot of value in having the same OS for your desktop, phone and other devices. Need a Gadgubuntu.

6 – Sensory immersion
In the audience there was one person who plays World of Warcraft (which was Jim Purbrick… from Second Life). Ten people in Second Life.

Joi Ito has a room in his house for playing WoW, with screens up and he can have as full an immersion as possible.

Need to extend sensory interaction with web and the real world. Make this a goal of free software, and be pioneering ahead of the proprietory world. Need to feed people information, and sensory immersion is going to be an aread where free software can pull ahead.

5 – Getting it together
Collaboration. Think of the things we do as free software developers. We track bugs, exchange translation, project management but it’s ad hoc and organic. If we want to stand up and compete with Redmond we need to elevate that to a higher level. When we do a release it’s backward looking, because we look at what’s lready been done. We can’t get data fro the future… so there’s lag, there’s innefficiency. So we don’t know that Firefox is going to release something at a future date.

I belive that it’s possible to release software predictively, and collaborate across software. Lots of layers in a stack, but don’t have good tools for coordinating work across layers. Would like to see a sort of Basecamp HQ. Build infrastructure to help plan and manage projects. So if OpenOffice release is going to slip, then we can work more efficiently.

Need to think about knock-on consequences when one product’s release date slips.

(4 – Seems to have got a bit intermingled with 5.)

3 – Extra Dimension
Vista. Everyone’s trying to learn how to invent new interface metaphors. Things haven’t changed for 15-20 years. We’re going to see a radical innovation soon. Office 12 is really interesting work, and we need to be equally brave and bold. Because of the shift to a world where windows are transparent and really part of a 3D infrastructure, we can have all sort of new opportunities.

iTunes 7 – that kind of innovation. Were not moving to a true 3D world. bue we do have 2.5D. Right kind of place to have large ammounts of innovation.

Look at FireFox’s extensions. LIke to see same thing in Free Software. Need to expose that extra 0.5D.

2. Granny’s new Camera
Impossible to predict what sort of things people want to connect to, and can’t priedict what is going to be invented. Kernal community really need to hear this message. Got the world’s fastest USB stack, but there are many didfferent stacks, so it’s hard to think of a consistent platform that the next generation USB drivers will work on.

The ability to ship software today and connect it to software in 3 years time is essential.

Start to create interfaces that are stable. Maleability, flexibility, etc. But also standard interfaces for device mfrs.

Can’t expect to have perfect interoperability, but can improve a lot.

1- Keeping it free
Microsoft is experimenting with shared-source, but that’s not enough to see the source. It’s about harnessing the source the way you want to. But as free software gets more pervasive and more powerful there’ll be more temptation to subvert it and send it in different diretions. GPLv3 is important, the discussions are are important; anti-patent groups are important, DRM also and tricky interpretations of licencing are the most dangerous things facing us.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Jim Purbrick – Second Life (again)

Jim actually gave two presentations, and this was the first one, which I probably should have blogged before I blogged the second one, but meh, it’s all too late now.

130 million gmae players in the US alone
20 million MMO players
Age of gamer increasing by one year per year, i.e. people start playing games as children and don’t stop.

Tremendous value is being generated online.

Worldwide digital good strade of US$1-2 billion per year – this is paying for items or characters in MMOs, i.e. to take shortcuts.

Typical game is a subscription per month. That means the games tend to be designed so you have to put a lot of time in to playing in order to progress. Can take months to progress and do everything. Money-rich and time-poor people are willing to pay in order to save time. Trade across the boundary.

In-world trade 10 or 20 x the real-world exchange.

$30 billion USD traded internally and across the boundaries, which is twice the size of the games industry itself.

Second Life, is a 3D virtual world.
It is persistant – what you create stays created.
It is massively multi-user – it’s one world, rather than WoW which is a virtual theme park, and after 3000 people the world is full, so they copy the themepark multiple times. SL is a seamless world, so rather than make a copy, just add bits round the edges.
Resident built – compare to other games that are created by the maker. People build, texture, script, animate and *own* what they build. If you sell swords in most games it is illegal. In SL, you can build and sell stuff legally. Can sell for Linden Dollars, and exchange currency. Can records stuff in Second Life, and can sell machinima as video.
Linden Sells land and services, rather than subscriptions. so if you want to make something, you need to buy land so that it persists. If you then want to advertise it, you can stick it in the classifieds.

So this is “not a game”
– no game fiction
– no artificial conflict
– no winning condition

User creation is the big thing. Create objects on the floor out of nothing, like boxes or cones or spheres, etc. Then you colour and texture them and add them together to make things.

A tale of two pianos.

Ultima Online, you could build houses and could fill it full of stuff. But the stuff you could fill it with was the stuff that the games company had build. So you can play with it but they build it. So someone realised that if you took a box and put a chess board on it, then a box, and some t-shirts and then some bear skins, you could create something that looked like a piano… it wasn’t a piano but it looked like a piano. In SL you make a piano out of boxes, but then you create a script so that you make it play like a piano.

140,000 hours of use per day
25% of time is spent creating
140,000 hours * 2000 hours/year = 17.5 user-years a day

To create that sort of development, they’d need 6500 people costing $650 m per year.

That’s what Blizzard and EAA can do, because they have that kind of budget. But Linden Labs could not afford this, which is why it’s all user created.

Can also write code. It’s like C code – well, ‘sub-C code’ – but in a 7 day period, 5000 residents have written origanal scripts – 15% of people. and these people are not programmers.

12,000 distinct scripts written in 7 days, which is
3 million lines of script code

So people get others to help them, or copy other scripts.

Unanticipated consequences
So early on, people decided to be aliens, created a spaceship, abudcted people, probed them, and then gave them a t-shirt saying ‘I got abducted by aliens’. The aliens did this about monthly… and people found it kind of fun.

In WoW or UO that would be scary, but LL love it.

Traditionally ‘hard’ problems:
– making 3D objects – 100 million
– making humans – 10 million
– programming – 30 million

Compare to other user created content

Over 60% of people contribute to the platform. Which is a big deal compared to most others that produce less than 10%… or 0%.

Lots of the stuff people make is just experimenting, making something simple and then deleting it. There are huge sandboxes, but every 3 or 6 hours they get wiped.

Because land is valuable, that reduces the amount of crap that’s lying around. Land is a column – you buy a footprint and it goes up as high as you like (well until your avatar melts).

You also get a ration of prims (i.e. you can only create so many primitive objects such as cubes or spheres), so if you want to make a castle then you need to buy a lot of land so that you can get enough prims together.

People make games. Golf, for example, or Tringo – combination of bingo and Tetris, and instead of numbers, shapes get pulled out, so try to line up the shapes on the grid to make continuous blocks of colour. Social game, lots of fun, but it’s licenced in the real world games company, and to TV.

Beyond games, simulations, so for example FEMA simulating distribution of aid.

Massive experimentation, e.g. AI virtual fish. Serena (??) was an amateur, experimented, and now has started working with professors on the same issues.

Good for mixing up amateurs and professional.

Lots of charitable giving in SL. Sponsored walk in SL, people sold items in SL. Made US$40,000 on last walk.

Spaceport Alpha, every single rocket that’s ever been designed and launched, including ones taht exploded. They did it for a laugh, but it’s a great educational resource now.

Education, real world universities do real world learning in SL, loads of stuff.

Virtual Book signing, Cory Doctorow. Virtual book that could get signed.

Beyond Broadcast, someone in the real conference and the SL version of the conference with a dalek. Everything’s Better With Daleks.

People also make money, someone made US$150,000 from land terraforms and zones real estate.

Who’s in SL.

650,000 residents, 10% increase monthly

Demographics
older and more gender balance, 50/50
32
women and older residents demonstrate better skills conversion into second life.

256×256 areas run on Debian servers
3000 CPUs
Area is three times size of Manhattan.
Add 300 servers a month.

Yet more stats… shitloads of stuff is happening, basically.

Why now?

People have been trying to do this for a while.
Broadband, the whole things comes down the wires all the time.
Routing capacity/low pings
Consumer 3d acceleration

But also…

Open Source
Lots of different OS libraries, cross-platform, so clients on Win, Mac, Linux

OS infrastructure. Almost al of it is OS, all the servers, are debian, mySQL, Apache…

Only PayPal, credit card processing and MySQL hot backup and Jira are closed source.

Made contributions to OS projects too.

Integrating Mozilla, any web place on a prim which will mean that you’ll be able to do any web page which can interact with Second Life. Hard to stick Mozilla on a 3D object. Interim result ubrowser.com.

OS projects in SL.

Such as OS Lightsaber construction kits.
Animation overrider, can upload animation for a golf swing, but some animations that avatars use by default, and they’re a bit rubbish, so some have done the overrider so people could bundle it with shoes, so the shoes actually change the way you walk.
Last Sound System, can stream radio stations into land in SL.
Lots of Creative Commons too, audio, graphics etc. Even a CC machine – touch the object which generates a licensing tag for objects.

libsecondlife
Reimplemenation in SL, reverse engineering, people want to modify platform as well as world. www.libsecondlife.org
– joystick control
– SL teledilconics

Moving towards OS SL platform.
Still some closed source libraries getting in the way.
Duty to residences – it’s not just an app, it has people working in it, so need to make sure it’s not possibly to destroy it.

Everyone owns the IP of what they make.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Adrian Holovaty – Journalism via computer programming

Journalism right now is broken. Several ways – celebrity focus, political bias, circulation declining consistently, stock prices dropping, craisglist taking away classifieds market.

But that’s not the issue. The issues is that newspapers throw away data.

So if there was a burglary, you have the address, the person, the stuff nicked, roughly the time. has key value pairs. But all the journalist does is write an article and throw away most of the data.

News orgs have huge infrastructure, with reporters on the street, specialised. Infrastructure to collect and edit information, verify it. Not every media organisation does that, that they’re not taking advantage of. Have infrastructure to get info out to people, i.e. a printing press originally. Also have the attention of people.

But can’t take advantage of data because they are just creating big blobs – stories.

So contrast to
Google Base, (which is just infrastructure with no data).
Wikipedia
Craigslist

All great frameworks desperate for data. Journalists have great data desperate for a framework.

Why is structured data important – because if it’s structured a computer can do cool stuff with it.

Journalism via computer programming.

News people write an article, or create a video. A programmer makes a web app that makes it easy to look at the data.

WaPo, Iraq war, huge issue. Most recent deaths page, total fatalities, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation Enduring Freedom. Collect data on everyone who’s died, but can’t do a story on everyone, but can make that data available.

Faces of the Fallen – get own page, bio, map of home town. Depressing but important. Breakdown of age of deaths, most are 21, look by age, photos, breakdown of state, see all the people from the state and their town. Googlemaps. RSS Feed for every state. Sounds depressing and gory, but people are interested and they are then making their own sites, using for political activism.

Another example:
ChicagoCrime.org

Type of crime, street, by block, brows by day, by hour, and latest crime RSS feed

Votes Database, representatives in congress, their votes, breakdowns of late night votes, votes missed, get RSS out there. So people can get more interested in government: did you know your representative voted this way today?

Telling a story via an application not words. Being smart about data, dealing with raw data. Badger journalists to get the raw data so we can do cool stuff. End game is not creating an article, but getting data in one place to do cool stuff.

Cultural similarities to this and open source code.

Open source:
– making code available.
– understanding through transparency: can download stuff and look at it.
– encourages derivative work, although depends on licence.

Journalism via code:
– make the data available.
– encourages understanding through transparency: better to look at the data than someone’s opinion.
– encourages derivative work, can take the data from the RSS feed and do stuff with it yourself.

Call to action
Done talks at journalism conferences, and people grumble that this ‘isn’t journalism’, but that’s kinda depressing that the industry thinks that way. It’s not full of passionate people who want to do cool things with technology but full more of people more interested in the ends than the means. So if people are interested, then go out there and do it.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Jim Purbrick – Second Life

User Creation. Very big thing. User creation tends to be quite low: Less than 10% of people that read the web create content for it. As difficulty of user creation goes up, so participation goes down.

More people in Second Life contribute than any other platform, but small numbers in absolute terms. Users growing 10% per month, and level of 60% participation is constant.

But just geeks? Community is older, ave age 32. Gender neutral by hours of use. Women and older residents demonstrate greater skills conversion than 18 yr old boys.

Just doing it for money? No, a lot of people do it just because they can.

Nearly all trivial? Yes, but you have to start somewhere.

Nearly all bad? Sturgeon’s Law Applies – 90% of stuff is crap. But ok, stuff isn’t always good, but it might be useful to that person. Creation is an end in itself. People just like to make stuff.

Why participate?
Instant Gratification? If you want to get people to participate they want to get results quickly, see the results, get rid of furstration. SL is not completely free of frustration, but you can make stuff pretty quickly. To make complex or pretty stuff takes time, but easy to hack simple stuff.

Always On Creation. There’s no ‘edit mode’, it’s always on. You can make stuff all the time. People are at parties they are still tinkering at the same time.

Collaborative creation. Can use sandboxes to make stuff, 24/7/365 Maker Fair. You can go and see what people are doing, ask them about it.

Culture of teaching. Ivory Tower of Primatives – how to make stuff. Easy to share and distribute. Unlike with some systems you have to build and then make a conscious effort to distribute it, but there’s little friction because if you mark something freely copiable, then people can just take a copy of it.

Creation engine. Used to think it’s like a bulldozer, but it’s more about the people – being able to communicate, hang out, and be able to participate. That’s what’s important, not the tools.

Another interesting thing – we are potentially coming to a turning point. People have created this vibrant world, so real world companies and organisations are coming into Second Life, e.g. American Apparel. Can buy t-shirts for your avatar and for your real life person. Also Creative Commons are in there.

So what will happen? Will the commercial companies come in and ruin it? Or will it maintain an open scouce feel? Probably will be a mixture. But everything in SL can be open sourced in the way that real things can’t, e.g. you can’t copy a real chair, but you can do that with a SL chair.