c.Figallo

Archive for the ‘SociALCHEMY’ Category

Both Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle have accumulated a lot of Web cred over the years, and you could say that they’re both pretty confident in their own visions of where things are headed in our increasingly collaborative and wired world. I admit, I tend to sit up and listen to them when they release a document like The Web Squared White Paper.

My concerns about global warming have, for a long time, kept me informed about sensors that report to us about changes and conditions in our environment. I’ve never been all that interested in more domestic applications, but as the White Paper describes, we’re well on our way to having ubiquitous sensing and reporting technologies in our offices, cars, roads, homes, bodies of water…you name it.

O’Reilly and Battelle write about information shadows and how, in the Internet of things every object has them. I find this concept to be fascinating.

What the Web 2.0 sensibility tells us is that we’ll get to the Internet of Things via a hodgepodge of sensor data contributing, bottom-up, to machine-learning applications that gradually make more and more sense of the data that is handed to them. A bottle of wine on your supermarket shelf (or any other object) needn’t have an RFID tag to join the “Internet of Things,” it simply needs you to take a picture of its label. Your mobile phone, image recognition, search, and the sentient web will do the rest. We don’t have to wait until each item in the supermarket has a unique machine-readable ID. Instead, we can make do with bar codes, tags on photos, and other “hacks” that are simply ways of brute-forcing identity out of reality.

Here’s the commentary on Web Squared from social web maven Dion Hinchcliffe.

On a couple of occasions during the late 90s I was the giddy recipient of stock options. All around me, it seemed, peers were becoming instant millionaires. So I figured I was in line for the same fortune. Not so.

By the year 2001 I began to understand just how destructive the headlong rush into IPOs had become, not only to the way we ran our businesses, but to the valuation of all businesses.

There may be shortcuts to wealth for a select minority – and for outright criminals – but for the rest of us, we need to produce products and services that deliver real value.

In an interview with Fast Company, accompanying the release of his new book Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House), Rushkoff lays out some ideas that seem to fit the times.

Definitely don’t go public. Not until you are truly ready to leave your business. Going public means selling your business to disinterested shareholders. All they are going to care about is the short-term asset value of your shares. So if you care about any other aspect of your business–its customers, employees, industry, or even just its longevity and sustainability as a business–then don’t go public. Shareholders will demand growth at the business’s expense.

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The rest of the world is no longer going to respect the monopolies our governments declare. So it’s time to compete again. This means America learning how to do something instead of simply outsourcing and creating debt.

It won’t be easy, but it could actually be fun. Imagine competence as a viable alternative.

I once helped create a community where we agreed to start everything from scratch. In Monopoly, they say “return to Go,” and that’s what we did in terms of both the social and physical manifestations of our living situation. We agreed to invent our own village and our own infrastructure. We borrowed from models that we knew were archetypes – houses, roads, water systems, communications – and we built them, using “pre-owned” materials and equipment, according to our own idea of what local economy and self government should or could be. We were true “amateurs” – lovers of whatever technology and practices we could adopt.

We made plenty of mistakes, of course; none of us had ever done such an audacious and difficult thing in our entire young lives. And, as we discovered our mistakes, we made corrections. It was slow work. We had no formula or method for iterative lifestyle development. We didn’t have the luxury of funding for planning and r&d, so we had to live with our errors, sometimes, for years. Looking back on those years, most of us can see where we went off track, but it’s too late now for do-overs. The community disbanded for the most part in 1983.

In 1986 I began managing an online group discussion system called the WELL. Again, we were a group of people with some basic resources to share and work with. Instead of land, we had disk space. Instead of saws and tractors we had UNIX and a database program that structured our conversations and privileges. And, again, we were starting from scratch, inventing our own community. But in this case, we could make mistakes and fix them almost instantly, at least in some cases. It took us a couple years to be able to afford to replace the original CPU, which was ill-suited to multi-user sessions. But in terms of improving the features of our online social environment, we could make changes pretty quickly. As newcomers to what was then known as Cyberspace, we were amazed at the malleability of our digital village. And that was just the beginning, whcn a relative few were able to work socially in a software universe.

We tend to get jaded when we spend much of our time on the Web, but if you think about it, we have become acclimated to iterative culture. Our way of relating to one another through this collection of media relies on tools and conventions that are constantly under beta test. No platform, no user interface, is a finished product. Either because of competitive business pressure or the hacker imperative, every product – from the most successful to the striving to be successful – is constantly in flux.

Iterative culture is adaptive, though much of that adaptation may be ill-founded. Not every attempt to enhance, replace or invent offers us practical improvement. Not every brilliant idea gets noticed and adopted by a critical mass of users. There is wasted energy and creativity, and not every successful (in terms of mass adoption) product is the best of breed. But the overall trend of frenetic creativity is a good and necessary thing. Humanity needs this rather than any form of complacency. Looming over us are challenges that demand strong social invention muscles.

Iterative culture demands that many of us buy in and be part of it. If, indeed, the entire Web is a beta test, we are all beta testers, so we should be cognizant of our role and contribute at least a bit to the feedback that is necessary to follow paths to improvement. We have not, by any means, reached the promised land. Our economic system needs a radical overhaul, as do our political and environmental systems. These are much bigger challenges than getting hundreds of millions of users onto Facebook.  But participating in iterative culture on the Web is good practice for a time when iterative culture comes to our regions and neighborhoods.

Like learning to fly an airplane on a computerized flight simulator, we can make mistakes with little damage on the Web, while we learn what it’s like to collaborate on the design and function of our social environment. Resilient communities where we actually live may require a lot more collaborative skills than we are currently exercising. We need the practice.

Many in the Twitterverse are transfixed today by the uprising in Iran following the contested presidential election there. Suddenly, an online platform has become a window into national drama with international implications. Twitter – a technology invented in the U.S. – has become the reporting channel from within a dictatorship out to the rest of the world.

A similar information wave rose up in China around the protests that peaked in Tiananmen Square twenty years ago. Then the technology being used was USENET, a pre-Web messaging network that a few academically based computers and modem-connected computers could access to reach the world outside of China.

It’s when leading edge technologies play key roles in world-changing events that we tend to notice the power they have in affecting human life on the planet. This was also the case immediately following the tsunami of 2004 when photos and videos of the event and its aftermath were distributed around the world.

We are amazed and grateful when our digital inventions plug us in to big events and movements. In between those episodes, many of us may find the latest communications technologies to be useful, helpful, handy and entertaining, but we don’t seem to be able to use them to generate change on the scale that we see in crisis-driven usage.

The technology is more difficult to employ impressively in the causative direction than in the effective direction.

We face what could prove to be a global scale crisis from a combination of economic and political trends combined with the impacts of global warming. We could mobilize millions of people to a degree of intensity comparable to that happening in Tehran for the purpose of preventing or at least mitigating these crises. But the social use of technology has not reached that level of sophistication.

Crisis first. Then exemplary use of technology. We need to learn how to reverse this order of things.

With this first post, I begin pulling together my scattered interests and activities into a single, integral Cliff Figallo. Gradually, other outlets of my rambling will wither and biodegrade into the bandwidth.

It’s true, though, that like many, I’m deeply interested in a wide variety of things – climate change, sustainability, helping veterans, helping farmers, wilderness, experimenting with new software and gadgets, taking photos. But those can and will be covered through this single personal blog, which hopefully will prove useful and interesting to others.

There’s probably enough about me on the About page for you to decide if I’m worth reading.

The most important things happening through the web are productive conversations. Everything else is tinsel. I will try hard to avoid hanging any tinsel here.

For most people, there’s plenty of room for improvement in the daily commuting ordeal, and it’s especially stressful when there are surprises – traffic accidents, road construction, mass transit delays and breakdowns…

In several large cities (NY, Boston, D.C., Chicago, LA. London and Portland OR), with large volumes of commuters, there’s a Web/phone platform available for commuters to help one another along their regular routes by messaging into a dynamic digital status report.

Clever Commute and its accompanying blog asks its users to “define your line” by checking your home region, the routes and transit lines you normally take and your origin an destination points. Other commuters who travel the same lines report on conditions each day and those reports are sent to members of each line community via their cellphones and PDAs, warning them of obstacles or steering them to better alternate routes.

It’s a great application of location-based realtime crowdsourcing that has some environmental impact wherever it decreases the amount of time that mobs of people are stuck idling in stop-and-go traffic jams.

John Geraci is founder of DIYcity, which I blogged here. He’s a guest blogger at O’Reilly Radar and just posted an article there titled The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory

I live near a city (San Francisco), but not in one. Yet what Geraci envisions could well apply to many counties and townships, also, where populations depend on common transportation systems and utilities. Where solutions can’t be funded in the forms insisted upon by government agencies, tech-savvy citizens can collaborate on hacking better-than-nothing solutions.

Geraci cites a potential example for New York City:

Take for example the case of the New York City MTA, which currently operates at a budget deficit of $1.2 billion, and has been trying and failing for almost 20 years to implement a realtime tracking system for the city’s buses, at a cost of millions. As the MTA sees it, their two options are 1. pay for a gigantic, centralized, monolithic tracking system or 2. don’t have bus tracking. (And with their current budget shortfall, it seems like option 2 is the only real choice for them). What if, instead, they entertained the idea of implementing an open bus tracking system, one that relied to some extent on aggregated individual input from bus riders? What if they then crowdsourced ideas on how best to do this? And finally, what if they cooperated with the people who came forward with ideas, to make it easy for them to implement them?

Where I live in Marin County, it was citizen action that instigated the preservation of hundreds of thousands of acres as open space and parkland; it was not government taking the initiative. That mostly happened in the pre-Internet days. Now that we’ve got the Net and there’s more talent, creativity and freedom in the civic sector than in government, it’s time that citizens once again take the lead in building tools and solving problems for their localities.

Bob Buch, the VP of biz dev at Digg spoke at Web2.0Expo and provided some good ideas that were blogged at ReadWriteWeb.

There’s more, of course, in the article, including a finding that if you unbundle the social bookmarking sites from the Share This widget, you get a lot more click-throughs on those sites, in this case Digg, Yahoo, Buzz and StumbleUpon. Hmm, interesting. And that you should hire social media experts for your company if you wnat to make the most of social media. Well, duh, but then again it must need to be said. And automatic syndication of content, as in Facebook Connect. Thanks for sharing, Bob! And RWW, too.

5 Ingredients for Social Media Success

1. Sharing: If you love something, set it free
2. Integration: Don’t try to do everything yourself
3. People: People who know: ROFLCopter, LMAO, PWND, Noob
4. Platform: One to one is now one to many
5. Authenticity: Stay true to your core competency

Got a massive campaign on your agenda? Lord knows, we’ve got some massive problems, so I’ll be some massive campaigns are in the offing. And with such large scale collaborative challenges, we must consider how to scale the use of wiki’s to accommodate them and engage a passel of users.

Atlassian, one of the two or three leading proponents, developers and implementers of wiki usage, shares what it learned helping to coordinate the latest Earth Hour where cities around the world doused their lights for an hour on the same day. Here are their four lessons as posted on NetSquared:

1. Show users how to jump into a wiki

• Users should have clear starting points on the dashboard for (1) information on starting a local campaign, (2) getting resources for an existing campaign, or (3) how to use a wiki.
• Dedicate a column to news and how to get involved with the wiki.

2. Create intuitive page structures

• Simplify the navigation by subject or department for easy browsing. By contrast, Earth Hour’s wiki had become jumbled over time. Information was scattered and it was quite difficult to easily drill down into information. For Earth Hour, the information architecture was reorganized under new headings. Some information was pulled to the top to make it easier to drill down into.

3. Create user guides and faq’s for non-technical users

• With a very broad base of volunteers around the world, the wiki needed information to help out new users. Atlassian created a one-page quick start guide with child pages for specific functions in the Earth Hour wiki (e.g. ‘How do I find my Country page?’). It was written specifically for their non-technical audience and linked to the Confluence User Guide for advanced users.

4. Create a support system

• Create a page with the most commonly asked questions and responses and allow people to add to it.

Inspired by Tim O’Reilly’s story of government beginning to adopt solutions initiated on the consumer Internet, I am trying to apply the same sort of logic to one of the more stubborn institutions in America – our beleagured, ineffective health care system.

On KevinMD’s blog he wrote recently about the inability and/or refusal of hospitals to convert to electronic health records systems.

As reported by MedPage Today, the study from the NEJM found that only 1.5 percent of hospitals surveyed had comprehensive electronic medical record systems. That’s a piss-poor adoption rate, and far lower than the dismal numbers in small office practices.

The reasons cited are no surprise to regular readers of the blog, and according to the survey, “some 30% said the return on investment was unclear, 45% pointed to maintenance costs, about 30% did not have adequate information-technology staff, and about 35% worried about physician resistance.”

Kevin says the problem is not about lack of money; that money won’t solve the problem.

The larger issue is that the current generation of digital record systems, to put it bluntly, suck.

He points to this article in the NY Times where, in turn, two recent papers are cited describing the doubts doctors express about digital health record keeping. The technology and the routines it’s based on are antiquated, “pre-Internet” in their approach. The Internet is over 30 years old. That’s beyond ridiculous.

Quoting from the NY Times article:

Instead of stimulating use of such software, they say, the government should be a rule-setting referee to encourage the development of an open software platform on which innovators could write electronic health record applications. As analogies, they point to other such software platforms — whether the Web or Apple’s iPhone software, which the company has opened to outside developers.

In the Mandl-Kohane model, a software developer with a new idea for health record features like drug allergy alerts or care guidelines could write an application, and those could be added or substituted for a similar feature.