Whilst I was at Supernova, I acted as a sort of official backchannel mole, monitoring IRC for amusing or insightful quotes to project on the screens during breaks.

These were my slides. Warning: They may not make sense if you weren’t there. Although, frankly, they may not make sense even if you were there.

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Hiring people to write your blog is like hiring someone to write your email.

TomCoates:The panel is awesome

TomCoates:Ev versus Mena versus Cat versus Lili versus er…

Buzzmodo:When was the last panel with 4/5 women?

TomCoates:This is interesting – you probably don’t want people to get into a state of total comfort with their representation because things will clearly go worng. You want people to be a bit self-controlling. I mean – even at home, people don’t tend to sit around naked scratching themselves. People have an internalised sense of what’s appropriate for them.

hodder:the problem with teenagers is that they have no experience and they nothing to lose

direwolff:or you’re gonna hate that you have your past stuck to you for life

debs_:i don’t agree there is more out there and there will be more so more is forgotten and forgiven

TomCoates:can I ask people in this channel, do you use your mobile phone for phonecalls

direwolff:yes

TomCoates:do you like it? I mean – basically – I’m interested in this because I have no problem with the idea of talking about stuff on my weblog, but I find people ringing me up incredibly invasive and intrusive. I never used to.

Suw:tom: that’s what skype is for, I hardly ever phone people anymore because i don’t like to interrupt them

TomCoates:so what I’m interested in is why people don’t look at things like phonecalls and ask about the horrors and invasions of that and don’t look at how these new technologies are LESS invasive, MORE easy to control, LESS privacy releasing

anildash:if a person searches for the band “chicago”, yahoo should say “before phil collins made it suck?”

Suw:TomCoates, what was interesting about the Yahoo thing? what caught your eye?

TomCoates:Well basically it was that when you added something to your search repository, it wasn’t that you searched your metadata about it, you seemed to be still searching the page. that’s interesting to me, anyway – that you can bracket off things that you find interesting and search them as a subset rather than as a layer about it.

avantgaming:”we’re not really sure what the revenue model is yet”– but we’re playing with it. That’s cool.


jjgnet:it’s actually a good fit: baseball fans have always been multi-channel and participatory. people have been going to games with radios to hear play-by-play for generations, and keeping their own boxscores for generations before that.


njt_:”so mark, has SBC considered supporting people who bring their unregulated ducks to the ballpark?”

TomCoates:loose-coupling versus long term relationships

TomCoates:a typically san franciscan dilemma

Dick Hardt: Digital Itentity is just authentication to prove you are a directory entry.

TomCoate1:The balance between what technology is good for and what people are good for is important. Often people think that improving the technology means firing people. Which I guess it could do, but the core of the enterprise is letting the computers do what they’re good at, and the people what they’re good at that may result in fewer employees (if you’re late in making the change and can’t repurpose your staff), but the ones you have left will be happier and more creative.

TomCoates:that fucking rocked. Interesting questions about the kind of organisational structures in working environments that make that kind of sensation good. that make us feel supported, and safe and comfortable and able to focus and be creative.

Dave Sifry: People would rather be strangled than be forced to put something into a taxonomy or explain why they did something.

wseltzer: we’ve gone without data privacy so long we barely notice.

KevinMarks:Odlyzko’s point is that communications services between individuals and organisations are way mroe important than media, but much harder to count as they are so small

TomCoates:so I went to an event a while back and in the event the guy queried the distinction between marketing and content saying that he put ‘content’ in scare quotes because really – all content was was good marketing, which completely freaked me out

KevinMarks:If you’re calling it ‘content’ you are halfway there

rossm:whenever i hear the word ‘content’ I reach for my gun

njt_:hey dinosaurs, go back to your tar pit and die already!

TomCoates:yeah – fuck you dinosaurs!

KragenSitaker:there’s a knitter ethic?

hodder:don’t stab your seat mate with your needle

njt_:children treat parents as damage and route around them

Supernova2005

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Dan Gillmor (Grassroots Media, Inc.)

Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove)

Suranga Chandratillake (Blinkx)

Lawrence Gelburd (Wharton)

Dan Gillmor

The protection of markets is always one of the great disincentives to innovators.

How is the net becoming a platform not just for text and pictures but for everything. It’s bigger than journalism.

Jeremy Allaire, BrightCove

Founded BrightCove, online service for distribution of TV on the internet. Open model in terms of who can publish. Core premise isn’t anchored in open source media, but more general accross programming. Monetisation of media, and free media.

Traditional distribution platforms for video on a mass scale are scarcity constrained and closed access. Economic/contractual system in place, rights issues, but internet confronting that head on. Opportunities for two audiences:

– existing commercial p rogrammers, line up of tv/sat providers, not necessarily movie studios, but producers of massive amounts of content. but little control over distribution

– secondly, net new growth in who can credibly create video products. Tens of thousands of video producing organisations and have a new distribution path. The net growth of people who have cameras and lightweight production tools will grow exponentially so a publishing model for them is important.

In beta trials, launch later this year. This is a plaform evolution so TV as an internet platfor ms new, it’s not IPTV or TelcoTV, but it embraces the internet models of discovery and communication. Best practices from the net merging with TV.

Surange Chandratillake, blinx.tv

Blinx.tv is an audio/video search engine, using speech recog. tech to make the audio and video itself searchable. Jeremy’s points aply. Blinx is content agnostic, and have done deals to get trad content into the system, but also open to opensource content.

In many ways this is not a reinvention, just a new chapter in an old story, which has themese like the Gutenberg printing press. It’s about tech being used as an amplifier for the ideas of an individual. Then it’s all about power and influence. The net can be used to broadcast beyond what you could normally do. that becomes interesting.

When first launched product was a download tool, had a traditional marketing plan with ads etc. that people do. Briefed Om Malik, and told him that it could be blogged, that the embargo only applied to ‘real’ media, but three days later had a massive problem with download demand – Om’s blog totally wiped out their servers with demand. That’s the power of amplification.

Blinx allows any submissions, and automatically indexes any content. One issue was a submission form from the BNP, fascit nationalist political party in UK. Irony that they were benefiting from the work of a second generation immigrant.

Lawrence Gelburd

Love biz, tech, entrepreneurship. Building services. Interested in loosely coupled servers etc. Realised that big companies didn’t like it.

Started open systems, open protocols so that anyone with a computer could get all the information needed to control a building. Good for users, not so good for competition. Created national standard -> international standards. Well worth it.

Dan Gillmor

Harder to do good audio than good text, but good video is even harder. Everything is crap, or a lot of it is crap. so how are we going to find the good stuff?

Jeremy: Production values, costs, etc. This is largely tech driven at one level, but as scarcity has been addresed, so moving from terrestial to digital, to satellite to digital TV, as it’s easier for smaller markets to be served with focused content, it’s easier for people to find stuff.

Advent of workstations and hardware/software, the timing of internet TV distribution is not totally coincidental. Micromarkets can be supported, and understanding production values becomes easier.

The methods of discovery for this are no different to what the web already presents. I don’t believe in a programme guide, but in self-programming. People who create content will programme.

The base of discovery which is search, they won’t be searching for video, but they may happen to come across video.

Surange: easier for an endu users to become a producer, and in six months wherein blinx has been live, the content was traditional media, but now it’s swinging widely the other way, 50% self-generated content and that will grow faster than the traditional media. So how do you organise it? How do you find the bit you care about. Predictably it’s following what happened with the internet. So there are directories, that works for a while but breaks down becuase it’s a lot of effort, there are attempts at using folksonomy, which has more chance of succeeding. Because you have more people doing it and they are passionate about their particular areas. One of the most powerful source of discovery is search, the fact that you can go to one place and describe what you want then jump to that info is phenomenal.

Only a few short years ago you had to use a library. Now you can just use Google. Just need to understand the raw data in order to be able to search, but that’s just the first platform. Once you get to that stage then you have to build everything else on top which is where it is interesting.

Lawrence

Save people time and energy from doing search, some businesses woujdl rather pay to have someone else to do it. There will be hybrids of human and machine filtering. Some of this stuff is going to have to be done by machine, too much data. And you don’t want to spend so much time watching to find what you want.

Dan Gillmor

Broadcast flag – the bill to insert the broadcast flag has failed. Yay!

Questions from the floor

Greg Allen: Starting to imagine what technology might look like in the next 5 to 10 years. We’ve reached escape velocity. So waht do you dream about at night?

Surange: Distribution used to be a big problem, and that doesn’t exist for broadband-enabled people. The problem becomes then how you get to waht yhou want – finding stuff is difficult. I believe that it is partly abouthte individual, but also about implicit tech.

Tom: what about machine-readable licenses?

?: XRRL describes this

Supernova2005

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Mike Homer, Open Media Network

Reinvent public broadcasting

Landscape for rich media delivery:

– Consumer broadband take-up

– mass market video creation stools

– bitTorrent adoption

– Weblogs

– RSS feeds

– RSS feeds move to porcasting and video blogs

The Open Media Network

– a free public service for the mass publishing and viewing of legal content on the internet – a true public broadcasting system for the internet – basied on kontiki’s grid delivery technology

– components of the strategy – grow as fast as possible -s tart with free content – provide only legal content – authorise dby copyright owner – accelrate content collection – mass publishing innovations – accelerate audience growth – mass viewing innovations – harmess the community for organising, ratings and rankings.

Benefits of open media network:

For consumers – broad selection of content, easy to find, tv style program guide, secure virus free background, kontiki grid, better than bittorrent and secure, personalisation, season tickets, tags, synch ipod, windows media, tivo

For producers – free directory listing, automated publishing with RSS feedreader, free delivery, unlimited volume, broad audience – PC, TV – ipod, prominent branding, links back, secure nanopublisher with payments

Tivo implementation of the open media network.

KQED has an affiliate programme

http://www.omn.org

Firefox and Mac version in beta in a couple of months.

A handful of key features that are important for professional publishers and display on a tivo in the course of the next three months.

Marc Canter, Ourmedia.org

partners:

internet archives

creative comments

broadband mechanics

bryght

wikipedia

commitments to join registry:

– open media network

– odeo

– buzznet

– brightcove

Supernova2005

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Classic notion of authority is to have the big leader, top down, etc.

Next generation web – small groups can organise and be as effective as large groups. Notion of authority is residue of middle ages. Seven levels of authority. Serf to King.

Adam Smith – two sides. Unless you have sense of empathy or sympathy and moral responsibility you can’t have the self-interest side either.

“These good acts give pleasure, but how it happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct. In short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and succor their distresses.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1814

Humans are wired for trust:

Human brain evolved in part to read an dmanage complex social relationships. Behaviorual and neuro-economiosts found that people are not rational, maximising economic actors but risk trust to protect reputation and social norms. Economic “chioices” are not conscious – but a mid-brain function.

What is trust?

– evolutionary stable strategy tested through a variety of social species over millions of years of evolution.

– a pattern of neural pathways and dopamine circuits – embodied in the social emotions – mirror neurons.

– socially constructed and enforced ‘protocols’ that depend upon ‘honest signallying’, credible and equitable reputation accounting and outcomes, cheater-detection and enforcement.

Trust is more emotional than rational – you can’t make a distinction between rational thinking and emotional thinking.

Reputation and trust:

– Control through ‘reputation’ rather than ‘force’

– How someone is seen and rate by their social peers determines their standing and access

– Reputation scales faster and is less costly than force

– Emergent network roles and dynamic specialistaion

– Social identity an ‘social exchange value’ social currency is tired to context and reputation.

Network leadership roles – eight different people work in a network – exemplar, gatekeeper, visionary, truth-teller, fixed, connector, enforcer, facilitator.

Effective networks work well if these people are placed and operate effective.

{diagram of ‘netwoork role-based sense-making inter-networks}

SocialPhysics Platform – multiple identities and contexts – ‘you have many selves / different ways in which you perform in different networks’.

“Higgins Open Source Trust framework”

1. Create a framework / API – an abstraction layer for identity and social networking services

2. Create a set of exemplary context ‘provider’ implementations (plug-ins)

3. Create an exemplary appl that demonstrates how to use the extensible network

4. Enable developers to leverage higgins in their applications…

[Higgins Project: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/etf/main.html and http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/ ]

Policy conversations: identity metasystem initiative…

http://cis-berkman.editme.com

Provocative Takeaways:

– trust is biological encoded and supported by social emotions

– can have principled strategies for achieving high levels of trusted exchange

– identitiy is multiple, distributed, contextual, role-based and reputatioonal

– markets are a kind of social networks and depend upon the social emotions -trust – empathy – reciprocity – to function

– long tailed markets are aggregates of social contexts

– trust feeds on transparency

[from backchannel: http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2004/12/09/thelaws.html]

[http://www.google.com/search?q=trust+serotonin+oxytocin ]

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[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

“The cake has to bake” – I don’t buy the whole-new-web story, this is a maturation process. We’re only in the beginning, yes, but it’s not Web2.0 either.

We do use open source extensively, been coding since March ’99. Our killer apps on this stack are out (salesforce, supportforce), but now we’re selling our toolset, customforce (v2 shipped yesterday) to develop apps, competing with Access and IDEs. And, of course, there’s customforce, “database on demand”. Multiforce will be our OS, lets ISVs manage entire apps hosted on our network.

Our sw is free for universities and nonprofits.

Q: I used to describe you as Seibel, but now you sound more like Oracle.

A: When I started out was the era of 3270 terminals, an 80’s stack that only recently got replaced by MSFT in the ’90s. [“Oh, and Seibel — they’re still around” 🙂 ]

Merrill Lynch signed 5K users this week.

We have to show entrepreneurs in this industry what’s possible. We have other ideas in our labs that highlight that this is a platform — so you can sell software to manage “conference events”: payments, rsvps, etc. There’s a ‘long tail of enterprise apps…’

[He’s using long-tail as the label-du-jour for what used to be called “mission-critical custom apps”]

Part of customization is localization: Japan and China shouldn’t remain stepchild markets that wait for patches, etc. Much less customized to local cultures…

Q: Where’s your blog? A: crmsuccess.com

[but http://crmsuccess.com/ doesn’t obviously link to anything of Marc’s — but it’s apparently only for customers. IRC backchannel found http://crmsuccess.blogs.com/ which is public]

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[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

[Note that his basic pitch is that “there are other apps for buying things covered by POs — but we handle all that stuff on your expense-reports”. Non-PO spending is a significant part of the bottom line, and it’s almost all services…]

[Wins points by literally taking off his tie. Then by referring to how conference speakers go on ad nauseaum about the long-tail!]

Opens with a reference to Newton and General Magic. Even reaches back to HP e-Speak (claims $400M on that alone?!). Nice history lesson, but seems to be drifting — and then he brings it home:

Market opportunity? The end of EAs — fewer and fewer executives have assistants!

“Imagine a world in which your flight is delayed, and your hotel and car service are notified, your dinner guests and reservation are updated” — that was, I agree, the universal scenario for all the e-business services pitches.

Larry Ellison is wrong — Silicon Valley is not Detroit, and software innovation hasn’t even begun. [He’s doing a good job of ref’fing to earlier speakers in the morning, but I’m not even sure that the conf attendees rememeber as much!]

Less than 10% of e-Commerce is in services. [His slides are waay too small-font]

We are happy Salesforce customers, but true on-demand is coming in more personalized, presence-oriented, embedded ways. Cuts to a race-car slide of hundreds of service providers you might deal with as a knowledge worker (or consumer).

Some of their customers’ employees spend 2hrs a DAY scheduling services. Their platform (for suppliers) is a global reservation system; coupled with a personal assistant for buyers.

His scenario is an opportunistic sale of Yankees tickets while he’s on a business trip to NY. Rearden’s EBS (Employee Business Services) scenario is a little scary — shows clear r/t class customization of employees (who gets coach, who gets the jet). Calls it a nearly $1/2 T category, ripe for at least a 1% savings. People want to lump us together with Salesforce; we have many more subscribers at admittedly less fees, nearly 1M by end of year. It’s mundane, but it drives a network effect.

Supernova2005

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[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

Introduction – two communities at the front-lines of having to deal with the issues going on in this conference are homeland securty and the military.

Tara Lemmey – What does homeland securty look like in the information age and how do we do it in way that holds privacy and civil liberties together. Strong recommendations on how we change the national security infrastructure. We were very successful in getting executive orders and legislation passed to get this stuff done. “What we’re showing you has been mandated into law”.

The FBI agent in chicago calls in information fron chicago. want to get information into the system as quickly as possible. Speech to text, we then edit it. The technology is simple, but the concepts underlying it are very different. When we first did this project the documents had to go up the chain, wildly redacted before they got anywhere. We recommended a ‘right to share’ document. How do you write a document that handles levels of secrecy as well as on various audit-trails to help people go about what information is trustworthy. Looked to Ebay to check reputation kind of stuff.

We had to explain the publish and subscribe model. Documents go out in a distributed way to subscribers to it. if something really vital was happening it would be quick to escalate it.

Four months later a CIA agent in Kabul gets information about a microbiologist. Right now, those two bits of paper (the one from FBI and this one) might not meet together. Likely that they won’t.

In our fictional world the Joint Terrorism task force gets the information and can read it because he’s subscribed to it – probably about Chicago but might be about bio. Gets related documents pushed to him. he wants to connect the documents. Computers can do fuzzy linking, but you really need humans to make judgments.

The DHS are doing federated network search – watching what people are looking for. When she submits them she can see what’s going on in the activity space – chatter of the network normally at the external stuff. (Presented like Flickr tagspace – very cool). She sees a spike in usage in one particular type of conversation, see’s who the experts are, makes an ad hoc team.

What are the critical points of action, do you have enough information to do something, what do you need to get it.

People send out information to people, asking questions around this kind of stuff. And then sending out information out to the USDA or to state local law enforcement. Trying to increase the signal ta the edge

Producing a case report.

That gets sent upstairs – that’s the end of this part of the representation. 5/10/15,000 instances of this kind of activity happen every day. The FBI is leading in a lot of ways, because their old system was failing and they had to reconceive it.

The big issues are looking at the cultural issues. having a positive effect on policy, but culture is the hardest bit. what do distributed organisations look like culturally and how do you encourage positive behaviour. Also who are you recruiting and what does this look for going on in the future.

Also greater privacy challenges arising out of this stuff.

= Meeting the challenges of a new competitive landscape =

= Navy Commander Greg Glaros, Pentagon’s Office of Force Transformation =

Find a direct way of getting to the defence department. ‘because our business model wasn’t working’

new concepts of operations.

This is the world through the lens in which we see it – globalisation II – containment strategies. New rules – globalisation III — are about connectedness. Security = Defense + All Else. From industrial age to information age.

(http://www.google.com/search?q=globalization-ii+globalization-iii )

Finding ourselves – the people today in Iraq will be the statesmen of the next generation, because they’re seeing how things work now.

Old way: shouting at each other on battlefields against known opponents. (low liklihood, low vulnerability – preserve advantags in force

prefers Iraq to washignton as you knwo who’s shooting at you

low vulnerability high iklihood – insurgents in Iraq – intelligence needed – how do you out-adapt enemy

High vulnerability and liklihood – catstrophic – 9/11 – deflect ultra terrorism

high likelihood low vuln: disruptive – cyber attacks avoid trategic surprise.

3 blocks war – complex, distributed, adaptive

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[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, me et al. EAOE.]

Connecting Worlds – a collaborative approach to innovation in self-managing technology. Autonomic computing is about tackling complexity in the IT environment. Everything we do relies on a manageable flexible infrastructure. Without it, nothing works. Fundamental.

The word autonomic comes from the autonomic nervous system – like your pupils dilating when it gets dark.

Have to develop technologies but also an ecosystem to support this stuff. What’s needed is an ecosystem of participating vendors and technologists that can fit together in a modular way.

(GLIAC has a strong committment to research – over 3000 patents. Over 500 patents are on autonomic patents. From having intellectual property, you can then open it up to the public sphere – they’ve contributed 120+ collaborative projects into the Open Source community. Embraced Linux. Also put together a venture capital team that goes out and puts together partnerships – 750 relationships with venture capital backed companies. reaching out to find a community to collaborate with. Also collaborating with 1000s of innovative companies.)

“We now face a problem sprinigng from the very core of our success in th IT industry… More than any other IT problem, this one – if it remains unsolved – will actually prevent us from moving to the next era of computing… The obstacle is complexity. Dealing with it is the single most important challenge facing the IT industry”

80% of money in organistaions around IT is spent on maintenance. Therefore on 20% can be spend on new stuff.

Most orgs have lots of systems inteconnecting. Also that means a whole range of different job roles. The way that people approiach technology today is orthogonal to the way it needs to be delivered – the user sees a simple process completely distinct from the job roles / sections and componentised tech structures.

Many people think that Autonomic Computing will allow machine sto take over all management tasks (ROBOCOP PICTURE / JOKE ABOUT ARNIE). Isn’t about getting rid of people, but producing a blanace between what people do and what technology does – technology not living up to its side fo the bargain – people forced to do things in time-consuming, tedious and error prone ways.

Characteristics of the solution:

– end to end modular reference architectural concept

– self-managing autonomic technology in all components

– common componentry

– virtualised resources

– federated configuration management data

– unifying standards

– process automation (workflow / portal technologies)

Supernova2005

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[Collaborative notes taken by Nat, Tom, Kevin, and me. EAOE.]

How many comparative literature majors were in the audience? Five – she wins the bet.

Other quick questions, to ensure we are all on the same page.

Does technology free you? Or enslave you?

In 1997 I coined the phrase continuous partial attention. With continuous patial attention we keep the top item at the top and then monitor everything else.

cpa is motivated by the desire not to miss opportunities

We feel alive when connected to others. To be busy and to be connected is to feel important

In close to two decades it’s been important to maximise connections, to network, to maximise technology. Speed, agility and connectivity are very important. Need to nework and always-on lifestyle means we are overstimulated and underfulfilled?

do you cherish technology-free moments now and then?

Email free fridays has emerged. We are email junkies – 1 billion sent a day. Great new way to do business but also a headache. Nestle-Rowntree has introduced the idea of email-free Fridays. It’s been banned in the co. to see if employees are more creative with face-to-face meetings.

Email can defer decisions.

CEO requires everyone to disarm in meetings – leave tech at the door.

Three kinds of meetings at MS

– free for all

– you must pay attention if at the table, unless at back of room

– meetings where total attention is demanding.

Larger pattern at work. Shifting into a new cycle -an evolving set

Attention is dynamic – socio-cultural influences. use of attention and how it evolves is a thread. 20 year social cycles – but they are generalisations.

We take a set of beliefs to an extreme; the extreme fails; we seek what we repressed.

1945 the org was central – Authority

Culture was that employer/marriage community was key

Was a belief that by serving employers, marriage we would be happy. Service to the institution would bring us happiness, so focused on that which served the institution, and stursted experts and authority to filter out what was not important.

In the 60s, it was more about self-expression, a 20 year period all about ‘me’.

Trusted ourselves; entrepreneurial – co’s like Apple

Paid attention to that which created personal opportunities. Gave full attention to software like Word or Excel because we saw it as providing opportunities.

Fragment attention if it enhanced opprtunity

Multi-tasking was a super-functional adaptivity.

one employer to many, marriage to a rising divorce rate

20 years of all-about-me increased narcissim and lonlieness.

1985-2005 – networks has been the centre of opportunity. Getting things done usedto mmake us feel alive, now it’s connectivity.

Connection was the aphrodisiac.

CPA is a post-multitasking adaptive behaviour.

ADD is a disfunctional variant of CPA Myspace/friendster which count false connections – the lack of meaning underscores the emptiness of promiscuous connection.

The iPod is as much about a way to make a protected space as a personal playlist.

Not “what do I have to gain?” but “what do I have to lose?” – Fear.

Look to Institutions for trust rather than excitement.

New aphrodisiac in the new era is comitted attention, intention, focus, experiencing engaged attention

Our opportunity is to develop the tools and technologies to take our power back so that it really does enhance our quality of life.

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