mark-elliott.net

As part of One Web Day (a global event to celebrate and take stock of the value the web provides humanity) Future Melbourne took part, with Melbourne’s Lord Mayor John So as the 55th One Web Day ambassador, as well as hosting a event to communicate our experiences to those who are in positions to effect change in our local government towards participatory governance. It was my honour to be the keynote speaker for this event, talking about the wiki-base collaborative environment designed and built by my outfit Collabforge, as well as the experience of taking part in one of the world’s first large-scale collaborative endeavours for local governance. Here’s a video of my presentation:

It’s been a busy few months for me and have taken on a few new projects which I hope to talk about soon. Till then, peace out.

Via Future of Humanity Insititute:

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about 30,000 Euro. And it isn’t even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs will be about 400 Euro). … We are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. … We hope to announce self-replication in 2008, though the machine that will do it - RepRap Version 1.0 “Darwin” - can be built now.

Is this the beginning of the Star Trek style replicator? Imagine, open source replicators - coding the capacity to create physical objects - boggles the mind really…

I made a brief stop in Howard Rheingold’s beautiful garden office while passing through San Francisco in early July ‘08. He interviewed me for his vlog on the topic of stigmergy and the recent City of Melbourne wiki my company CollabForge designed and developed. (Too bad I look as exhausted as I was - traveling with 2yr old twins is way harder than I ever imagined!) Afterwards we went on a splendid walk on Mt. Tamalpais - great views (despite smoke from forest fires) of the SF bay.

click to watch on Howard’s site

Alas, the end must come to all good things… I will begin a bit of a reflection upon the Future Melbourne project, framed as an investigation into the future of democracy, because, that’s what I believe it is.

One month later and today is the final day of public consultation for the Future Melbourne wiki. I applaud all who contributed - and note, I do consider simply browsing the site a form of contribution. In fact, it is often helpful to compare the wiki to a town hall meeting to get a better understanding of the forms of engagement that comprise the full spectrum of contribution.

For instance, those who actually turn up to a town hall meeting is a subset of everyone who had heard and possibly discussed the topic up for review. Then, those members of the attendees who ask a question are a yet another smaller subset. Similarly, those who browse the site are kind of like the group that turns up to the meeting, while the folks that take the time to register and edit the ones who ask questions.

Both sets are important and even necessary for each other’s existence. The dynamic where a majority of the input comes from a minority of the participants is referred to as the Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 Rule). I’ve found this rule to apply in almost every f-2-f social setting where the group is larger than those who can manage a single sustained conversation (usually about three people) and where all participants are engaging in a single endeavour.

While some people argue the Pareto Principle as failing of human activity (the majority is always represented by the minority), I don’t think this is the case. In my mind, this would be like arguing that since an engine always requires fuel, engines are a failure since they can never run without it. Engines are very useful to humanity, and while some fuels are better than others, there’s a lot of ways to engineer and engine (however you’ll never escape the need for some form of fuel).

So in collective activity, the fuel is the ‘masses’ who build ignite the sparks of the minority. The rising of such a minority may be due to the dynamics of collective psychology, or, perhaps those individuals would always participate without the support of the majority. Nevertheless, the two seem always to be tied and therefore it makes sense to see the two as interdependent.

UPDATE (thanks Dale ;-):
During the period of consultation between 17 May and 14 June we received approximately 9300 visits to the site from 6500 people. In total, these visitors viewed over 48000 pages on the site.

During this period, approximately 200 individual edits were made to both the plan and its discussion pages. These ranged from new ideas to extensive well-researched contributions on the future of our city. The contributions will now be reviewed by the Future Melbourne team to organise, refine and incorporate the range of ideas into the Future Melbourne plan in the best possible way.

With regard to the Pareto Principle, this means that of the total number of folks who engaged the site (6500), 3.1% made edts (200)…

It’s been some time since i last posted on the boys - now almost 21 months (that’s nearly 2 yrs old for non-baby folks). They are just entering into the ‘telegraphic’ stage in their language acquisition - speech is characterised by two word phrases - often noun adjective/verb combinations or something of the like, e.g. “bye-bye daddy”, “more egg”, etc.

Carving out their own personal space seems to be of primary concern - sharing being the primary challenge these days.

Here’s a few pics:

Cedar used a stool to find the chocolate, Lucas watches to see what will happen…

One of my personal favorites - Lucas Hefner and his ‘mamma’ :-).

Now they just need a hot air balloon!

What can i say?.. just look at that face :-).

Cedar and mom at the park today.

And finally, for the main attraction.. Box Racing!: