I was talking with Kate Raynes-Goldie of the CBC at the end of the first day of ROFLcon yesterday [live-streamed here] and had a small realization about another difference between broadcast fame and Web fame. A little connection that immediately seemed too obvious to blog about. Nevertheless, here goes….

I said in my talk at the conference yesterday that we are making fame our own, rather than an alienating effect of the broadcast regime, because we make people famous on the Web by passing around links, and that — especially when you watch people watching YouTubes together — it’s a lot like how people tell jokes together: one video reminds someone of another, and there can be a type of pleasant one-upmanship as people try to top the current video with one that’s even better.

Not until I was talking with Kate did the further obviousness occur to me: One of the differences between broadcast and Web fame is that in making someone famous on the Web, we are putting a little bit of our social standing at risk. We’ve got a stake in it.

For example, during the wonderful, impromptu videofest blogged by (and, to a large degree, led by) the wonderful and impromptu Ethan Zuckerman, during Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center last week, everyone was pointing to the next great video to play. In the midst of this, I lost the thread and pointed to a video that, when projected to the group, was out of place and not even very interesting. People shuffled uncomfortably, trying to figure out why I would suggest such a clunker. I was embarrassed. (At least the video was short.)

That we have something at stake in what we recommend is, of course, well understood and completely obvious. But for me, only last night did I recognize that that’s one of the reasons the Web famous feel more like ours than the broadcast famous usually do. Not only do we make them famous, but we do so at some risk to ourselves.

It’s a type of sweat equity, or, in my case during video night at the Berkman, it was more like a type of flop sweat equity. [Tags: roflcon2008 fame ]

1 Comment »

I’m talking tomorrow at ROFLcon, a conference about Web fame, celebrity and culture. I’m supposed to be talking in a general way about Web fame. Then I’m leading a panel composed of men (yup) who are Web famous: Kyle Macdonald (One Red Paperclip), Joe Mathelete (Joe Mathelete Explains Marmaduke), Ian Spector (Chuck Norris Facts), Andy Ochiltree (JibJab.com), Andrew Baron (Rocketboom), Alex Tew (The Million Dollar Homepage)

Here’s a sketch of what I’m thinking of saying:

Fame has been a property of the broadcast (= one-to-many) system. Fame is based on the math of many people knowing you, so many that you can’t know them. But it’s not just math, of course. It’s also economics. The broadcast economy has a fiduciary interest in building and maintaining the famous. They’re “bankable.”

Because of this scarcity and the fact that the one-to-manyness of the relationship means the knowing is one-way, the famous become a special class of person: mythic and not fully real. They are not like us, even ontologically. Fame is a type of alienation.

Outside of the broadcast system, fame looks different. This is a type of do-it-yourself fame, not only in that we often want human fingerprints on the shiny surfaces we’re watching, but also because we create fame through passing around links … occasionally for mean and nasty reasons. Kids sitting around watching YouTubes with one another are like kids telling jokes: That reminds me of this one; if you liked that one, you’ll love this one. And the content itself fuels public conversations in multiple media. This is P2P fame.

There’s a long tail of fame, although I suspect the elbow isn’t quite as sharp as in the classic Shirky power law curve for links to blogs. At the top of the head of the curve, fame operates much as it does in the broadcast media, although frequently there’s some postmodern irony involved. In the long tail, though, you can be famous to a few people. Sure, much of it’s crap, but the point about an age of abundance is that we get an abundance of crap and of goodness. We get fame in every variety, including anonymous fame, fame that mimics broadcast fame, fame that mocks, fame that does both, fame for what is stupid, brilliant, nonce, eternal, clever, ignorant, blunt, nuanced, amateur, professional, mean, noble … just like us. It’s more of everything.

But most of all, it’s ours.

* * *

[ROFLcon will be live-streamed here. [Tags: roflcon2008 web_culture fame celebrity ]

12 Comments »

I am coming to grips with the sticker shock of hitting my 40th birthday. Unfortunately, I’m 57.

This inconvenient truth is born home by Doc Searls‘ recent “incident.” [More from Doc here, here, here, and here.) I am one of the absurd number of people who count Doc as a close friend. I happened to be in the conference room when the pain in his chest got too strong to ignore. He called the Harvard health folks who said it might be a good time to stagger on over. So, I walked him there. It's the least the second oldest person in the room could do. Not to mention, that way I found out as soon as possible what was going on with him, which turned out to be a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot that had traveled to his lungs), which was treated quickly and well.

Boston is a good city to get sick in.

Doc's doing well, thank heavens. He blogged a couple of days after the incident that he's resolved to start taking better care of himself. Good. We want Doc around for many decades, purely for selfish reasons.

Doc is in the midst of what I guess we should called a Two-Thirds Life Crisis because it comes some time after the Midlife Crisis. I've been through my own, having eaten my way into Type 2 diabetes a couple of years ago. I resolved to start taking better care of myself, and, fortunately, you can no longer use my blood to top off your pancakes in the morning. I'm actually in better shape than before. (Irony alert: I'll probably drop dead this afternoon, just to give y'all something to blog about.)

Anyway, here, is a handy comparison chart:

[Tags: midlife doc_searls aging old_farts ]

7 Comments »

This is a Google-automated translation of the Baidu page on Obama. (Baidu is the Chinese search engine.)

* * *

Ethan Zuckerman says his favorite way to browse GlobalVoices is through the digests page. [Tags: china global_voices obama baidu ]

Be the first to comment »

Birte Fallet, Kjersti Haukaas and Asbjørn Risan present a topic map of Donald Duck’s world. It cameou t of a master course at Oslo University, with Steve Pepper as tutor.

They show the surprisingly full Duck family tree and the topic map of the relationships. Quackmore is the father of Donald and Della. [See? We learn stuff every day! They made special relationships for cousin, uncle, etc. [Why not infer this from the tree? Possibly because they decided to exclude known members who do not participate in stories.] Some relationships are symmetric, and some are asymmetric. They have a special association type for “unrequited love.” And some characters switch occupations. In fact, Donald seems to have a different job in juist about every episode: museum guard, factory worker, dog catcher… They attached the occuptations to the stories. They’ve captured a lot of detail. [But not a taxonomy of Entertainers Without Pants]

They found topic maps to provide “associative richness,” flexible, easy to learn and “Quite fun actually.” The map is here

[Tags: topic_maps donald_duck ]

2 Comments »

Three musicians from the Royal Academcy of Music — Antony Pitts, Hannah Riddell, and John Drinkwater — talk about using topic maps to organize music. They begin with a snippet of Bach’s “A Musical Offering,” which always strikes me as extraordinarily modern, as well as of course exquisitely beautiful. [Caution: I'm live-blogging and thus only capturing a little of what's being said, plus making mistakes, writing poorly, etc.]

Anthony talks about one day in the life of the Academy. He zooms in on more and more detail, eventually showing a messy sketch of a small stretch of time, including the works and musicians being discussed and performed, with “A Musical Offering” at the center. It’s a mess. Now he shows a cleaner version that sorts by scores, sounds, ideas and opinions. But the musical work doesn’t exist in any one of those boxes, he says. The music moves from inspiration to notation to interpretation to reception. There are distinct boundaries between them. Anthony treats those as rows and adds columns for creating, capturing, connecting and communicating.

Ultimately, they show a timeline — RAMline — divided into seven rows: idea, composer, score, performer, sound, audience and history. It is fed from a topic map, allowing multiple visualizations.

Anthony shows the ontology. [Pardon me if I don't try to capture it :)]

Hannah teaches a course on assessing the way music is documented. Students create their own RAMlines, like a CV. “The logic of the topic map has transcended language barriers,” and led them to unexpected conclusions. One student (Laurie) did a map of Bach’s cello suites, tracking versions, arrangements, and publications. Another student has a RAMline of Chopin Scherzo #4, tracking the recordings, etc.

The project is at the end of Phs 1: an internal working model. In phase 3, it goes open access. [Yay!] They hope it will be largest online music knowledge base.

Steve Pepper adds that topic maps started out as a way to capture musical information

3 Comments »

The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”

Be the first to comment »

TechCrunch has a good explanation of Footnote’s digitizing of the Vietnam Memorial, which is handy because the Footnote site is getting hammered with traffic right now, so the app is running slowly. The site lets you browse the Wall by multiple categories, and links together bunches of information. Sounds very cool.

The Vietnam Memorial wall is an argument for stone over information. But information is good, too.

[Tags: vietnam memorials ]

4 Comments »

Ashish Jha at the Harvard School of Public Health is giving a Berkman lunch talk on “U.S. Healthcare: Can Information Drive Better Care?” [Note: I am typing quickly, getting things wrong, missing stuff...]

He says the first few minutes should leave us depressed about the state of health care in this country. A major problem underlying all this, he says, is a lack of transparency.

We spend $2.1 trillion dollars on health care in the U.S. in 2006. That’s about a sixth of the economy, about $7,000 per person (minimum wage is $11K/yr). It’ll be a fifth in the next decade. We spent a much bigger percentage of our GDP than other countries.

What do we get for this, Ashish asks. He cites a Rand study that came up with 439 “indicators of healthcare quality.” These are core, non-controversial treatments and practices. Rand found they get done about 54% of the time, suggesting “the care we get is pretty inadequate.” Even for privileged groups — e.g., white, wealthy, educated men — it doesn’t go much above 58%. “There’s a disconnect between what doctors think they do and what they actually do.” One of the listeners says that recent studies show that this is because there are typically 7 health care people involved with any one medicare patient, and they don’t get this done because they don’t know what others in the group are doing. “It’s completely about the system,” says Ashish.

He continues depressing us: About 10% of people admitted to hospitals suffer an injury there. One in four doctor visits lead to medication injury. (Ashish says he’s not confident in that study.) 44k-98k deaths come from medical errors.

His conclusion: The quality of care is unacceptable.

Why? 1. Because we pay for the quantity, not quality, of health care. 2. Care has gotten complex, but the health care systems haven’t kept up. 3. Little transparency. E.g., usually we don’t usually know how much our medical care actually costs (as opposed to what our co-pay is). We know how much health care for our pets costs, but not for our children. 4. No adequate feedback loop: Medical malpractice has been a failure and regulation sets the bar too low.

Ashish talks about one part of the response: The Ny State Cardiac Surgery reporting program. In the early 1990s, NY found huge disparities in cardiac surgery mortality across 31 hospitals: 1 in 200 dying vs. 1 in 14. So the state started publishing mortality info about every hospital and surgeon. As of about 2000, it’s all on the Internet. Over the course of 12 years, the rates dropped dramatically. Why? The market share of the hospitals didn’t change; the bad hospitals didn’t lose business. But the hospitals now had data that reinforced good practices. There’s anecdotal data that physicians began to learn from one another. Most dramatically, the rate of surgeons leaving their practices among the bottom fourth was way higher. Ashish’s project tracked them: Some quit, some moved. Even after adjusting for age, etc., people in the bottom quarter were 3x likely to quit.

People don’t check the ratings. Ashish thinks this is a place where the Internet could help.

90% of hospitals are still paper-based. Even those that are electronic can’t share info. The law says patients always have a right to get their records, but the doctor or the hospital owns the record. Patients can view it but it’s not in exportable, shareable form. (There’s a discussion about the state of electronic health records and why it’s a more complex problem than it seems.)

Ashish says that the HQA initiative has hospitals reporting on 23 quality indicators, and performance has improved steadily. HCAHPS makes patient experience data available.

Gene Koo: Health care decisions aren’t made by purely rational agents. All sorts of quirks come into it. So, how does the transparency of info help us?
A: Maybe consumer involvement in health care won’t work out. I’m looking for empirical data.

Q: What’s the role of the consumer in this? Are there data now that consumers are taking on more of the responsibility for their health care?,br>
A: People on the right say that consumers aren’t behaving like consumers because they don’t have any skin in the game. You don’t know how much things cost. So, we need transparency (they say), linked to having skin in the game (i.e., you pay for visits out of your pocket). But, few have high deductible health plans. My personal feeling (says Ashish) is that this isn’t going to be big. People are generally in them not because they want to be involved but because the plans are cheap.

Rob Faris: There’s a huge role for intermediaries. Intermediation is not working well right now. We need intermediaries who looks at outcomes and figures out what works and what doesn’t. And I’d like to see how quality considerations can be inserted into this.
A: We’re at the beginning of a very interesting journey. If someone like you can’t navigate the health care system…

Q: What do you think of the candidates’ positions?
A: They all talk about the uninsured, which is just one part of a complicated set of issues. We have 47M uninsured because health care is expensive. Most of the health experts I talk with think Clinton’s health plan is a little more realistic. But all of this falls apart if we can’t get a grip on healthcare costs. They’re rising at twice the rate of inflation, and neither Obama nor Clinton have gotten serious about healthcare costs.

Q: (me) How do you contain costs?
A: Electronic records would help. Payers should pay more for outcomes not for particular tests, etc. And there;s a whole “comparative effectiveness” movement. E.g., what do you do for someone with low back pain? You get different treatments based on locality. Payers should start taking more of an active role. But payers have not wanted to take up that responsibility.

A (person in the audience): Part of the answer is that the amt of money spent in the last 6 months of life is shockingly high. We should spend more earlier on preventative measures.

Ashish: You don’t always know when the 6 months are. And there’s a huge issue around managing expectations at the end of life. Plus, when someone else is paying…From a policy point of view, it’s very hard to fix this stuff. Even though health reform comes up every five years, it doesn’t get done because the status quo is everyone’s second choice. [Tags: berkman healthcare health ashish_jha ]

1 Comment »

Solana Larsen has a fabulous idea. For those of us vegetarians who love faux meat, why doesn’t a restaurant serve up something besides the usual mock chicken, beef, pork, etc.? Why not faux endangered species? Solana suggests a menu… [Tags: vegetarian solana_larsen food ]

4 Comments »

I am so disappointed that I had to miss Lisa Stone’s Berkman talk. She’s blogged a transcript here, and pretty soon the video will be up here. Sounds like a great talk…

[Tags: lisa_stone ]

Be the first to comment »

Jeff Jacoby, a conservative columnist for the Boston Globe, is angry at Obama and at those who cheered his speech. We (I not only cheered, I wept) are guilty of accepting a double standard because, says Jacoby, if our clergyman had said the hateful things that Wright did, we would not have sat quietly in our pews for twenty years. Yet, we are willing to give Obama a pass. Obama not only should have objected to Wright’s words all along the way, he should have left the church or worked to get Wright fired, just as Jacoby would have done if his rabbi had said equally awful things.

I know Jacoby’s synagogue. It’s in my neighborhood. I’ve been there. It’s lovely. Airy. Light. It’s in Brookline, a terrific part of greater Boston. Jacoby’s synagogue’s got comfortable seats, pretty ornamental touches, and a well-dressed, affluent, overwhelmingly white congregation.

The notion of a double standard assumes, in an odd way, a single standard. The criticism only makes sense within contexts uniform enough that our moral judgments should be the same. If I condemn a Democratic governor for paying for sex but excuse a Republican congressman for the same offense, then I’m guilty of applying a double standard.

But Jacoby apparently didn’t hear what Obama said in his fearless, epochal speech. Who is this “we” who applied a double standard? Our glorious union is nevertheless imperfect because it is riven by divisions deeper than we are comfortable acknowledging. The racial division is so deep that politicians never talk about it except in platitudes so empty that they function as lies. Now Obama has.

If we apply a single standard, we are denying the fact that synagogues in Brookline are very different from African-American churches in Illinois. We can, and should, express our strong disagreement with the particularities of Wright’s sermons, but if we stop there — and every political advisor in the land would have urged Obama exactly to stop right there — we will continue in our fantasy that there is a single culture, a single set of values, a single set of assumptions, a single view of history, a single vision of the future, a single set of constraints, a single set of opportunities for all in our imperfect union.

Obama is asking us to do what is perhaps hardest. What it takes adults to do. Obama’is speech asks us to embrace difference and simultaneously to transcend it. That’s why Obama presented contexts that not only helped us white Jews in Brookline understand why a Black pastor might say such things, but also acknowledged how African-Americans can seem to white folks who don’t see why they should be disadvantaged for crimes they did not commit.

Unless we accept double, triple, multiple standards, we are invisible to one another, and thus to ourselves. The thoughtless insistence on a single standard is unseemly and unhelpful, especially when it comes from those who live in privilege for whatever reason.

Jeff, you and I live in what is pretty much a white part of Boston. As far as I can tell, Brookline has made little progress in integrating itself in the twenty years I’ve lived there. We’re stalled. Stuck. Now, who did I hear talking about this just yesterday?

What a tragedy it would be to throw away the hope Sen. Obama presented us yesterday. It, at long last, gives us a way forward. [Tags: obama jeff+jacoby politics race ]

8 Comments »

I just watched Obama’s speech on race. Before the commentariat bashes the speech into a shape they can sell for the next few cycles (Wolf Blitzer: “It was a preemptive strike” - feh!), I want to say that I thought this was a fearless speech that shows the way forward on the issue we Americans fear more than death, taxes, and terrorism.

I listened thinking about what Obama chose not to say. He could have condemned racism and tried to put the whole race issue behind him, as Mitt tried to remove religion as an issue. Instead he seized the moment and put a push-pin into the timeline: Here’s where we started to confront in public the racial divides the majority culture has refused to acknowledge.

He could have given simple platitudes. Instead he trusted us with the complex truth. Think how any other major politician would have handled this.

And we saw a bit of how the audacity of hope can not only move us, but move us forward. [Tags: obama race politics ]

5 Comments »

I can’t say much makes me happier than this photo of the One Laptop Per Child laptop I donated in the hands of its owner. (I had done the “buy two, get one” program, and then donated the laptop they’d sent me. That’s the one you see here.)

Thank you, Waveplace, for doing this, and for letting me see what you do.

(I am on the road and have not yet seen either of the two videos available (1 2)). [Tags: xo olpc waveplace haiti]

4 Comments »

Here’s the society for all you Puerto Rican Danes and Danish Puerto Ricans. Heck, it’s even got its own refrigerator magnets. [Tags: puerto_rico denmark everything_is_miscellaneous]

Be the first to comment »

Clay Shirky is giving his book talk. Here Comes Everybody was released today. It’s immediately necome #1 at two Amazon lists. [Note: I'm typing quickly, getting things wrong, paraphrasing, etc. For an accurate report of what Clay's book is about, please read Clay's book.]

The Internet isn’t a decoration on society. It is a challenge. It is important on the order of print and broadcast. Previous media either were two way or they didn’t create groups. Now we have a network that is natively good at group forming. And this medium contains the contents of the others. In a single bullet point his book says: “Group action just got easier.”

Humans are great at forming groups. But they get complicated faster as they get large. A workgroup of 10 has four times more connections than a group of five. There are native disabilities once a group passes a certain size. The typical answer has been to install a hierarchy. Now we’re seeing a set of tools that make it easier to create large groups: Ridiculously easy group forming. E.g., email unexpectedly became the dominant service used on the original Internet. That was because of the “reply all” button, a social feature.

But there’s been an enormous social lag. This tech has not transformed society as rapidly as it might. That’s because groups are innately conservative. No one wants a protocol that shuts out group members. It needed to become ubiquitous and boring. That’s when the social effects become interesting. Clay tells the story of his parents’ first date, a story that is not about internal combustion engines but that depends on the presence of them. We needed the Net to be always present and invisible for it to have its social effect.

Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action are rungs on a ladder: How much does an individual have to work to coordinate with the group?

Sharing. E.g., Delicious.com has urls, users and tags. It lowers the difficulty of sharing, so the social effects are practically unintended. It’s “me-first” collaboration (cf. Stowe Boyd).

Tagging systems let you share and then aggregate, reversing the traditional order. E.g., the mermaid parade in Coney Island. Since Flickr added tagging in 2005, you can click mermaidparade and get all the photos. The photographers weren’t coordinated ahead of time. Sharing has become a platform for coordination, rather than vice versa.

The next rung up the ladder is conversation, i.e., people actually synchronizing with one another. Clay shows a “communty of practice” at Flickr: High Dynamic Range photography at Flickr. Pre-Web, it would have taken 5-7 yrs from a pro photographer figuring it out to people in the street doing it. At Flickr, it took 3 months because when a photo went up, people could talk and ask how it was done. People post photos, etc. The medium becomes the platform for a community practice where people help one another get better. No commercial incentive.

That’s an example of “every url is a link to a community.” The discussion can turn into a group sharing resources. Clay points to bronzebeta.com, a Buffy site. It came after the Bronze bulletin board shut down. The fans raised money for new software to create their own bronze. They told the designers not to give it any features: no ratings, no identity mgt. They just wanted the system they used to have, a very basic discussion board.

He also points to Aegisub, a project that required a division of labor. It was a huge collaborative effort without a commercial motivation, or an anti-commercial motivation. Their success resulted in making themselves unnecessary.

The fourth rung is collective action. That’s coming. Three stories:

In Jan, 1999, a Northwest flight was stuck on the tarmac fo 7.5 hours. NW signs a toothless bill of passenger rights. Same thing happened last year and it resulted in legislation. What happened? Kate Hanni was on the second plane. She googled for articles about the flight. She comments on all of them, in detail. At the end of each comment, she asked others on the flight to contact her. She’s coopted the media and turned them into sites for coordination. She goes around to legislators’ offices. William James, the philosopher, once said “Thinking is for doing.” We have brains because we’re deciding between courses of action. Now publishing is for acting.

Second, flash mobs started as a critique of hipster culture. The guy who started them said he could get people to do anything at all if you tell them that it’s a protest against the bourgeoisie. It spread to Belarus: They’d go to a square in Minsk eating ice cream in January. Cops arrested them. It was illegal to form groups in October Sq. The kids turned the joke on hippies into a genuine form of dissident action. They provoked the government into reacting, and documented it. Media led to collective action, and the action led to more media. They thought publicity would make a difference, but the West turned out not to care much about Eastern European dictatorships. The tools are very different when deployed in high or low freedom environments. (They’d also done a flash mob where people walked around October Sq smiling.)

Third, a group ran around Palermo putting up stickers protesting the prominence of the Mafia. It was a big story. Now they’re reversing it. They put up a Web site at which businesses can agree to refuse to pay the protection money. If an individual business were to do this, the Mafia would act. They also let citizens search the site for businesses who’d signed.

So, ridiculously easy group forming improves sharing, convesation, collaboration and collective action. Clay is watching now and in the future to see how collective action evolves, for that is the hardest but could be the most important.

Q: Privacy?
A: Privacy cuts across all of this. The higher up the ladder you go, the more important it matters. For sharing, privacy doesn’t matter much, but if we’re going to converse, I at least need a handle. To collaborate, I need to know more. But if we’re going to bind ourselves in collective action, then identity becomes really important. [Hmm. That last point seems wrong. In some collective action, we don't need to know much about others. E.g., a flash mob of kids eating ice cream.] Privacy isn’t all or nothing. Under what circumstances do we want people in a collective action to know one another, but not be known by others. The big change in privacy is not in opt-in or opt-out; it’s that we’ve lost “don’t ask.”

Q: Yochai Benkler is working on whether you can explain this other than by enlightened self-interest?
A: There’s a growing literature on explaining behavior via social motivations. Behavioral economics is unambiguous about the ultimatum game: People will refuse deals that seem unfair, even if they’re in their interest.
Q: But social cohesion is to my benefit …
A: What you’d really like to be in a group that produces public goods but not have to contribute. But the willingness of people to spend resources to keep social cohesion going cannot be rolled up just to individual enlightened self-interest. [Missed some of that. Sorry.]

Q: What are the downsides you see?
A: I used to be a cyber-utopian. That view broke for me. I was teaching a class at NYU on social software. One of my students was a community manager for a magazine for teenage girls. They were shutting down the health and beauty boards because we can’t get the pro-anorexia girls to shut up with tips about how to avoid eating. I was thinking this isn’t a side effect of the Net. It was an effect. Ridiculously easy group forming for anorexics. Now, we have to move to a publish-then-filter world. That pattern suggests we’re moving the media world from decision to reaction. We can’t stop the pro-anorexia groups from forming. All we can do is watch and act.

A: My nightmare is that the advertising budget for print shrinks and we lose newspapers in mid-size American cities. We lose investigative journalism. Every city under a million goes back to endemic civic corruption. The newspaper industry is not ready now to talk about how to save investigative journalism as we lost print.

Q: [couldn't hear it]
A: The social media being used in the presidential campaign is less social than before. Obama excels at fund raising, and public-created media. But no one has proposed a policy wiki. No one has proposed the lateral conversation among supporters. (I’m an Obama supporter.) There may be an opportunity in the first 100 days to do social production of shared ideas, which the campaign has not done so far. But I don’t think it can get there without creating a profound cognitive dissonance among the voters.

Have you looked at the mechanics of collective action?
A: The things that are working now are hard to fake, non-professional surprises. Someone has done something you couldn’t do with a fake grassroots campaign. Most email campaigns to the Senate are of zero value because they’re too easy to fake. [Hmm. It's not that they're hard to fake. It's that they had a cost.] The thing that worries most is the need to be surprising, because surprise is a wasting asset, because you can’t be surprising three times in a row.

Q: [me] Why did you choose the axis of groups that take actions? I can feel I’m a member of the Group That Likes Obama without actually doing anything…
A: I’m interested in the trade-off between individuals and groups. At what point can you not explain behaviors through individual psychology. I was irked by businesses that think they have communities instead of cusomters. The dividing line is between people who change their behavior because they’re in a group and those who don’t.

Q: Mobile streaming and virtual worlds. How do they fit into collective action?
A: The change in things we can do via mobiles will be far broader. And I don’t think there is such a category as virtual worlds. All successful virtual worlds are games. [Tags: berkman clay_shirky here_comes_everybody groups social_software sociology books ]

9 Comments »

Linda Katehi (U of Illinois) asks how we can design an infrastructure that enables and sustain collaborative work. [Standard live-blogging disclaimer holds: hasty, error-free, subjective, unworthy.]

John Wilbanks of Science Commons talks about the cultural infrastructure that enables content to move so rapidly and easily around the Net. He’s posted his comments on his blog. [Thank you!] “We are swimming in cultural infrastructure for content, but not for knowledge.” He is going to argue against having an end goal for the Network. “The end goal is to create a world we cannot imagine.” We shouldn’t even be talking about “papers,” etc. on the Net. We should be talking about namespaces, not just ontologies. “If we can’t use the same names for things, we can’t have knowledge.” Intermediate goals: End to End. We should make it easy to get answers to difficult questions. And we need to build human capacity. We should focus on getting greater throughput so data turns into knowledge and innovation. [Read his remarks on his blog.]

Mackenzie Smith from MIT Libraries asks what a knowledge infrastructure is. Now that John has given us the why, she’s going to talk about the “what.” There are seven layers, she suggests:

1: Repositories.

2 : Data management.

3. Linking (interoperable semantics). We need namespaces and identifiers, and encoding standards (e.g., RDF), and ontologies like Object Reuse and Exchange.

4. Discovery. Finding data on the Web.

5. Delivery.

6. Social.

7. Business models. Policies.

The IT view, Mackenzie says, is what you can plug into the layers. She talks about some of the various tools available.

The organizational view: Different areas of the U are responsible for the various layers. The one layer generally no one is addressing is the business layer.

Chris Mackie (Mellon Foundation) wonders how many infrastructure “successes” are really just “steaming piles of integration.” What’s the right way to do design? Bottom up? Top down? Knowledge needs to emerge and for that it has to be bottom up and open. But that won’t get us where we need to be. We also need it to be top down; we need global optimization. How do we pull these things together?

We cannot allow our cyberinfrastructure to be so top-heavy that it flattens all other organizations, including community colleges, etc. We need the diversity of the educational ecology, Chris says.

Sara Kiesler (CMU) has been studying collaborative research projects. About a third are successful, but about a third are failures, and a third struggle. What surprised her was that the problems in collaborating were not due to differences in how different disciplines approach their work. The biggest problems were inter-institutional. The two institutions have different bureaucratic procedures, regulations and cultures. No one in the institutions watches out for the welfare of inter-institution collaborations. And they don’t like it if the budget goes to the other institution.

John: We need both top down and bottom up. The key is to make sure they use the same standards. Standardize around names and transactions. You want to make it easy to stitch them all together.

Q: This is the first time the full range of institutions has been brought up, probably because the attendees come from major research institutions. So, good to have acknowledged there are other types of educational institutions.

Q: Physicists are used to collaborating. And the funding agencies drove the senior scientists to collaborate. Don’t underestimate the role of the funding agencies.

In the context of U’s, are there any warnings the panel has for us?
Chris: The challenges to collaboration are getting more real all the time. E.g., IP issues prevent some collaborations.
A: There’s the centralize-everything clique, the decentralize clique. Any preferences?
Linda: The totally centralized one doesn’t work in the US.
John: You can’t order people to innovate. You have to build systems that enable explosive innovation, based on standards. Making control the default doesn’t work. Harvard’s Open Access policy switches the default to sharing, with an opt-out. I think that’s the right way, but we don’t have the evidence yet.
Mackenzie: The decentralized model is a little more maintainable.

Sara: The collaborations that succeed tend to be the ones that have some practice doing it.

Q: Collaborative technology is still bad. And IP gets in the way. Also, U-industry collaboration seems to work best when the academic wants to have an effect in the real world.
John: The standard contracts for the life sciences depends on your tax status. Every collaboration with a commercial entity, even at a very early stage, gets complex very quickly. A simple design decision has made this hard.

Q: How do you align interests for collaboration?
Sara: Interdependence.

Q: The right question isn’t decentralized or centralized. It’s what you’re going to do that’s between those two, because neither of those will work.
Mackenzie: Dropping a governance onto a project at the beginning can kill it. There are many approaches.

[I've begun to fade — didn't get much sleep last night, and live-blogging is really tiring... [Tags: cyberinf education standards universities ]

1 Comment »

I just caught up wth Harold Feld’s Super Tuesday endorsement of Obama. In the course of explaining why Obama’s life story resonated with Harold, who comes from quite a different background, Harold posted the following quotation:

“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone of the foundation. It is from the Lord, and it is wonderful in our sight!” (Psalms 118:22-23)

Wow, that Guy could write!

[Tags: harold_feld psalms ]

Be the first to comment »

Howard Rheingold has posted the front and back covers of his 1974 book, War of the Gurus. If you don’t look closely, you’ll think it’s written by the reporter-columnist, Jack Anderson. Google Books has nothing on it except that it also gives a credit to Kelly Freas, the great sf and MAD illustrator.

I’m guessing that Howard is the Kevin Bacon for the rest of us.

[Tags: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Anderson ]

1 Comment »

There’s a terrific article in the NYT about Lessig’s Fair Use Project’s involvement in defending a small publisher who brought out a Harry Potter encyclopedia. When the publisher went from Web to print, and from free to for-money, the Potter folks sued, saying it’s unfair. The author, Joe Nocera, says:

For, as Mr. Lessig points out, anybody who owns a computer can now create content that is based on someone else’s creation. Indeed, we do all the time, by posting content on Facebook, on YouTube, everywhere on the Internet. If the creation of that content is deemed to be a violation of copyright, “then we have a whole generation of criminals,” said Mr. Lessig — which is terribly corrosive to society. But if it is fair use, as it ought to be, then it becomes something quite healthy — new forms of free expression and creativity.

He concludes on quite an optimistic note. [Tags: copyright harry_potter lessig fair_use ]

13 Comments »

Yesterday, in a major party’s primary election for the presidency of the United States, about half the people voted for a woman, and the other half voted for an African-American.

We won!

[Tags: politics obama hillary ]

19 Comments »

Richard Sambrook of the BBC World Service has a fascinating post (from Dec 17, so I’m a little slow) about the meaning and effect of Facebook groups in different countries, focusing on the Middle East.

[Tags: facebook middle_east richard_sambrook ]

2 Comments »