mark-elliott.net

Last week was pretty intense, here was my schedule:

Sunday 26 Apr - New York

After a very cramped 24hr flight I arrived at JFK in New York and while I was tired, I was buzzing with excitement…

Monday 27 Apr - New York

The view out of my hotel window when I woke up (Madison Square Gardens on the right side of the street one block up):

That evening I appeared on Doug Rushkoff’s radio show, Media Squat on WFMU in Jersey City. Here’s a link to a podcast of the show - I appeared in the first half hour or so just before Joanna Harcourt-Smith.

It was fantastic to meet Doug, he is an amazing guy with a good deal of achievements to his name, and on top of that, he’s a very friendly, genuine, passionate and intelligent guy. Unfortunately things moved so fast in the studio that I forgot to get a picture, but I did get a shot of this odd if not tragic sculpture in Jersey City near the studio (NYC in the background).

Tuesday 28 Apr - New York

I had the great fortune to be asked to present at the OpenGovNYC meetup in DUMBO, Brooklyn, and to facilitate a workshop exploring the idea of ‘policy sprint’. It was a really great group and notes were taken in the Sunlightlabs wiki here (thanks Matt and Marquina for scribing!).

Me in action (my presentation on left screen, and Twitter backchannel on right):

Enraptured audience I’m sure :-):

Workshop underway:

My wonderful hosts (Matt Cooper-Rider, Marquina Iliev, Britt Blazer and some other strange guy):

Thanks to Noneck for the tech help!:

Wednesday 29 Apr - Washington DC

This day was fairly stressful, that is until I arrived at the Sunlight Foundation. I caught a train from Penn Station in NYC to Princeton NJ where I rented a car and drove to Washington DC, and due to cockups/delays with picking up the car, I arrived in DC just in time for rush hour with my presentation being at 5:30pm. After finally finding a parking place and bolting headlong up to the offices, I was greeted by a beer, pretzels and a very interested and warm bunch of folks - thanks to Conor Kenny (senior editor for OpenCongress.org) for organising!!!

We explored many of the challenging and subtle nuances of Web-based collaborative consultation and policy generation and once again due to the frenetic pace, I didn’t get any pictures :-(…

Thursday 30 Apr - Princeton University

Thursday I hightailed it back up to Princeton for the conference start in my very comfy rental car:

And I arrived at last:

The conference, City Planning, Civic Participation the Internet at Princeton University launched with a dinner, then a screening of Us Now a good primer documentary about how Web 2.0 is opening up opportunities for the public to self organise and engage with government and governance issues in general.

Friday 1 May - Princeton University

My presentation was first up for the day with a panel discussion following. It was great to get it over with so I could focus all my attention on the many fantastic presentations and folks amassed at what turned out to be a fantastic conference.

Here’s a picture of the panel discussion I sat on with John Geracy from DIYcities and Nick Grossman from The Open Planning Project who also gave fantastic presentations.

Here’s a few highlights from the conference - not all of them, just one’s I happen to get pictures of!

Edward Andersson from Involve that provides:

Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock and a lead developer of the Django web framework:

Bill Schrier, Chief Technology Officer, Seattle who gave an inspired presentation and made me hopeful for the future of the adoption of innovative technologies for city infrastructure. Robert Davis, siting in the picture, also gave a focused presentation on Toronto’s experience as leaders in social media adoption:

John Wonderlich, Policy Director for the Sunlight Foundation lead a great discussion on and around their many inspiring projects:

Saturday 2 May - Princeton University

Saturday consisted of a few workshops, the first presented a $200 (if I remember correctly) desktop touch screen solution made by bolting a Wii remote control onto a data projector - very cool!

Then Christian Madera the conference organiser led a session on Web tools for planning (well done for putting together such a successful conference Christian!!!):

And then we wrapped things up with a lunch. Here Wansoo Im from Verticles Interactive Maps is showing off his great community history and mapping projects:

Sunday 3 May - Princeton University

Before heading back to Melbourne I even got a chance to do some sight seeing around Princeton University - a beautiful campus indeed! Here’s a few of my ‘moving stills’ inspired by having high definition video on my camera:

Even the student admin building is grand!

I’ve met a lot of amazing people and learned about an equal amount of amazing projects and programs going on in the US. I think this next year with the Personal Democracy Forum and O’Reily’s Gov2.0 conference coming up, 2009 will have set the pace for the open gov race…

I just saw this this morning (emphasis mine):

THE Federal Government is planning to make internet censorship compulsory for all Australians and could ban controversial websites on euthanasia or anorexia.

Australia’s level of net censorship will put it in the same league as countries including China, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, and the Government will not let users opt out of the proposed national internet filter when it is introduced.

Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy Minister Stephen Conroy admitted the Federal Government’s $44.2 million internet censorship plan would now include two tiers - one level of mandatory filtering for all Australians and an optional level that will provide a “clean feed”, censoring adult material.

…

Groups including the System Administrators Guild of Australia and Electronic Frontiers Australia have slammed the proposal, saying it would unfairly restrict Australians’ access to the web, slow internet speeds and raise the price of internet access.

EFA board member Colin Jacobs said it would have little effect on illegal internet content, including child pornography, as it would not cover peer-to-peer file-sharing networks.

Aside from the obvious issues regarding censorship and freedom of speech (something not constitutionally enshrined in Australia and therefore not ensured) this is a very bad idea. This will at a minimum,

• introduce a ’state approved’ perspective on reality which can then be more readily extended,
• generate network inefficiencies for most of us, and for those who actually want to get to what is blocked, they will work it out (even most primary school kids I talk to these days know how to get around access restrictions imposed upon them).

To draw upon that a classic web quote attributed to John Gilmore: “The net treats censorship as damage and routes around it”.

I thought this kind of logic would depart our federal government with the Howard administration! Apparently I was wrong.

And why isn’t this making bigger news? Perhaps mass media doesn’t care? - after all, the medium is the message - i.e. if you’re interests and life are all bound up in broadcast (push) media, perhaps you aren’t so likely to care about distributed media etc?..

How will touch screens transform the collaboration, the Internet & life in general?..

With the anticipated release of Apple’s iPhone, you can bet that the popularity of touch screens will ramp up. Especially with incredible technologies like these:

How does this relate to stigmergy? Well, just think about it this way – stigmergy is all about encoding some local environmental medium, & what touch screens provide (esp with multi touch types of technology) is considerably more capacity to encode the digital media before you with regard to both content (more points) & complexity (multiplicity & dynamism). (Personally, I can’t wait to be liberated from the keyboard – imagine your laptop as two connected planes of touch screen – mmm isn’t that better! )

How does this relate to collaboration? Almost the exact same principles apply – more content & more complexity means more interaction. How does this relate to the Internet? Gee, I can only think of about a billion ways!..

If you’re hungry for more, try a YouTube search on ‘touch screen’…

Thanks to wellrounded.wordpress.com

Heylighen discusses the role of stigmergy and the open access economy.

Francis Heylighen’s recent work Why is Open Access Development so Successful? Stigmergic organization and the economics of information presents a straight forward and compelling case for stigmergy as an underlying mechanism in the expansion of what he terms, ‘open access development’.
Heylighen provides three characteristics in order to designate information as “open access”. The information must be:

• non-proprietary,
• part of a creative commons free to access, use, and in many cases modify, and
• consisting purely of information that can be duplicated without limit.

Recognising the inherent connections between stigmergy and the workings of the World Wide Web, Heylighen reviews the basic process:

…termites do not communicate about who is to do what how or when. Their only communication is indirect: the partially executed work of the ones provides information to the others about where to make their own contribution. In this way, there is no need for a centrally controlled plan, workflow, or division of labor.

and connects it to Internet-based processes:

…any new or revised document or software component uploaded to the site of a community is immediately scrutinized by the members of the community that are interested to use it. When one of them discovers a shortcoming, such as a bug, error or lacking functionality, that member will be inclined to either solve the problem him/herself, or at least point it out to the rest of the community, where it may again entice someone else to take up the problem.

Heylighen draws on the autocatalyitc nature of stigmergy to explain the success of various projects in the open access domain (Wikipedia, Open Source Software etc) by recognising that

…the more high quality material is already available on the community site, the more people will be drawn to check it out, and thus the more people are available to improve it further. Thus, open access can profit from a positive feedback cycle that boosts successful projects.

However he also notes that

A possible disadvantage of such “rich get richer” dynamics is that equally valuable, competing projects, because of random fluctuations or sequence effects, may fail to get the critical mass necessary to “take off”.

Finally, Heylighen recommends:

To be able to fully compete with the established market-based system, moreover, the still very young open access movement will need to further learn from its experiences, addressing its remaining weaknesses and building further on its strengths. This will in particular require developing better standards and rules, and more powerful software solutions for harnessing stigmergy and allocating recognition and feedback—the main drivers behind the success of open access according to the present analysis.

In all, Heylighen provides a sound introduction to stigmergy and its relationship to the recent development of peer production / open access, which I hope will serve to generate interest and research into the role of stigmergic coordination of human affairs.

–Oh, and he cites my work Stigmergic Collaboration: The Evolution of Group Work… which is cool ;-).

More media, more interactive, more collaborative, more stigmergic.

Stigmergic collaboration seems set to really take off with the advent of AJAX programming methods – Thinkature.com is a great example of this.

I was able to draw, create stickies-like notes, connect them mindmappishly, do an image search either online or on my computer within the workspace window and just drag and drop it in. And of course the best thing (although i haven’t tested it yet so I can’t vouch for its capacities) is that the workspaces are synchronous collaboration environments supporting chat and even voice chat.

I’d really like to see support for embedding sound, video, and well, why stop there, let’s have video chat as well!

ConceptShare.com looks nifty too but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet…