Minimal paths, pneumatics / Frei Otto
Cantenary Bifurcations / Thomas Wong
Artesanal Voronoi / Seven Six Five
Complex City / Lee Jang Sub
Three 3 / Kat Masback
Vector Fields / Biothing
The full transcript of my first academic seminar is now online: Microplexes. It's housed at urbagram.net, which will be the home of my research into urban systems.
Power infrastructure in a favela, by andreasnilsson1976
Charles from Trampoline Systems organized a workshop on emergent democracy last week in Shoreditch. It was kind of interesting. I thought I'd post some quick notes.
First of all here's a rough definition of the phenomenon of emergence: A synergistic property or behaviour of a system that cannot be explained solely by the sum of its component parts; when the organization of a system exhibits dynamic behavioural properties that exist on a macro level in relation to its component parts. Systems that arise out of emergent phenomena are said to be complex.
One example of emergence is the development of the human foetus from the division of a single cell, through further division and specialization, into a complex human body. See Johnson's book Emergence for more examples.
Throughout the discussions it was clear there was a lack of clarity on the difference between strategies for refining democratic participation and a truly emergent system of governance. Emergence resists strategization because by definition it cannot be governed. In an emergent system it is precisely the lack of governance of the whole that allows complexity to arise from the behaviour of individual components reacting to particular constraints (governance at the component level).
This creates an interesting paradox of the expression emergent democracy. The question that the expression raises is this - what changes in participation and organisation will it take for democracy to produce a truly complex system of governance?
Let's take the complex system that arises out of traffic flows in a metropolis as an example of governing complexity. Individual agents (car drivers) are free within a set of constraints (the rules of the road, the placement of traffic lights, one-way streets etc) to make a set of choices about what route to take, how fast to drive, where to stop off and what time to travel. Car drivers really have a lot of freedoms in this system. Traffic flow is a complex system which urban planners try desperately to govern - with differing levels of success, because they don't often have good enough tools to predict the resulting behaviour of 100K+ car drivers. Because the simple rules governing the constraints on drivers mentioned above are increasingly not enough to deal with congestion in cities, governments begin adopting much more holistic governance rules (e.g. a congestion charge).
Admittedly, this is a field seeing a lot of research as a result, but it's an example of how complex systems and governance are often in tension. The rulesets that define cell replication and the instructions encoded in DNA do not attempt to govern the whole that is the human body. If you attempt to govern emergent behaviour with any top-down strategy, you eliminate the free agency of the component parts in the system. The analogy in the traffic flow example would be for urban planners to ban cars and allow people to only use public transport. Like this the level of governance would be such (the governance of routes and schedules so regulated) that the resulting traffic system may not exhibit properties of a complex system at all. What you've done is eliminate the free agents from the system. So it's difficult to imagine how you can successfully 'govern' emergent behaviour (by any accepted notion of governance) without extinguishing complexity; you probably have to re-define political 'governance' in order for it to be plausible.
In a truly emergent democracy, governance would play a role at the component level, in the rulesets that dictate how the individual citizen can participate, but would have to refrain from dictating, regulating or containing the emergent decision making patterns and structures that arise.
Charles highlighted a single change in the nature of voting that may drive emergent democracy: technology will force a shift from fixed place/time voting to continous voting in the near future. He backs this up with various historical reference points as to how technology has affected politics throughout human history. I'm inclined to agree with Charles, and this shift leads to all kinds of questions around representation and participation. Various other people contributed to an interesting discussion on the night:
Mako from Selectricity demonstrated their online polling system which has come out of research into civic technology at MIT; it supports several voting strategies (including preferential, condorcet and borda) and provides a wide variety of feedback on results. You can try out a quickvote for free or contact them for access to more advanced tools.
Sennse from Wikia provided an insight into arbitration and power dynamics at Wikipedia (which she worked at). Interestingly, Wikipedia takes the time to point out it's not an experiment in democracy or any other political system.
Edward from Involve also talked about their collaboration with local government in citizen engagement.
If you want to explore further try Joi Ito's essay on the subject.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that Joichi was an early investor in Last.fm, whom I work for.
Whatever time and space mean, place and occasion mean more
- Aldo Van Eyck (dismayed with modernism)
Van Eyck designed and built about 700 playgrounds throughout Amsterdam from the 1950's onwards. Social network designers could learn from Van Eyck's thoughts on and approach to public space - he petitioned for these areas of play and dotted them throughout the city as spots where the 'seeds of community were sewn'. A whole generation of children found themselves playing in the very heart of their city, in all sorts of unlikely locations. The playgrounds were rarely cordoned off from the city around them - they were open, exposed areas that forced kids to come up with rules for play and security. They brought unlikely elements together, valued ambiguity and looseness in function and blurred borderlines. You can find more information on his playgrounds and another article here.
How others compared you recently: "Who is hotter", you won 0 and lost 1 time.
- 'Compare People', Facebook App Email Notification
Thank you Facebook application platform, for all that you have done for me in 2007.
Small medieval towns and villages would likely have been populated by one or more high-density networks, and closed networks still exist in working-class and ethnic communities in modern cities. On the other hand, those towns in the Middle Ages where a middle class was forming and social mobility increasing were characterized by low-density (or 'open') networks... For our purposes here, what matters is that high-density networks act as efficient mechanisms for enforcing social obligations. An individual belonging to such a communication net depends on other members not only for symbolic exchanges but also for the exchange of goods and services. The only way to preserve one's position in a network, and hence to enjoy these rights, it to honor one's obligations, and the fact that everyone knows each other means that any violation of a group norm quickly becomes common knowledge. In short, density itself allows a network to impose normative consensus on its members.
Hackney Road, London. Do winners really replace words with numbers?
Cristian Vogel, of super_collider fame, has just put his entire new record on Last.fm, straight from the mixing desk - unmastered. So go check out the Night of the Brain previews. Great to see established artists utilising the network in a way that shortcuts the traditional publishing process and gets music direct to the listeners. Nice one Cristian.
MySpaceaphobia: the agoraphobic feeling of being a tiny individual roaming around in an enormous social context, being chatted up and chased by shills, sock puppets, and unsavory characters.
- Stowe Boyd, Human Scale, Neighbourhoods, and Myspaceophobia.
This harks back to my comments on Flickr and the mass ID suicide.
Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.
- Bruce Sterling's southern drawl re-enforces the notion of a spime in his Internet of Things eTech keynote. It's an insightful, articulate rant on the language of emerging technology, how RFID will replace barcoding and the state of physical objects in the near future. If you didn't catch this talk a while back it's well worth the podcast.
If you'd like to help me build a Dymaxion house in second life - click the 'find' button down the bottom, click on the 'people' tab in the window that pops up and type in 'bucky'.
Well i've used the term mashupware a bunch of times, but Zimbra's online demo coins the phrase 'enterprise mashups'. The business model could mean a new age of SLA's between inter-dependent services, meaning folks like QOOP could ask for legal agreement from folks like Flickr, replete with uptime guarantees and service availability/quality guidelines.
A side note: In my years of analytics and data mining, a recurring theme is that better algorithms are nice but better data is nicer.
- Steve Krause, in Last.fm Vs Pandora.
In a network, simple & open standards always win. This is true at all levels of the stack - from protocols to data architectures to data formats. This is the lesson. We are learning it.
Four conditions to be met for collective intelligence to flourish:
- Diversity of opinion: Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
- Independence: People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
- Decentralization: People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
- Aggregation: Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.
See the wikipedia page for more.
Gigr.net is a community driven gigs portal built on Ruby on Rails. It already talks to audioscrobbler & itunes (to pick up your listening habits) and exports iCal calendars / RSS feeds with shows involving the bands you're currently listening to. It's heading in the right direction by learning to talk early on. What i mean is that this kind of service gains value by playing well with others and that's precisely what Gigr has set out to do. Solid import/export options already.
Anyone can upload information about shows/artists/venues. Username/email is all that's required to sign up for free. Do it. It's just getting off the ground but there's already a ton of shows in there.
Note: If you're a Rails developer then get talking to Ernest about access to the SVN repository. This is just the kind of service that could wind up embedded in something like the last.fm service.
Caught up with Corante head, social network expert and organiser of the Symposium on Social Architecture, Stowe Boyd last weekend on Skype to discuss Clippr following his great post detailing a frustration with current RSS readers.
More interest like this might even convince me to deploy and open up clippr to the public in a more scalable manner.
Must. Find. The. Time.
Doing good stuff on the social software front - Last.fm. I popped by their office last week and liked what i saw (and i don't mean their fusball table, piles of CD's or digestive biscuits). Their set up is quickly becoming a data mining playground. In the form of the Audioscrobbler iTunes plug-in, this lot has wisely set up a data harvesting ethic that could hold big value for the music industry in the near future. It could also deal me tailored gig listings i'll actually use. Now that's something.
If you're looking for a flatshare in London in the near future make sure to bookmark Move Flat, which really just gets it. Julian, creator of Moveflat.com, understands the process. He's been there.
Here's what he says on his site:
This site is about not making journeys across London to look at something that turns out to be a complete waste of time.That is what the site is for.
I'm not interested in running a property site where anyone can post anything.
That's because it really isn't very interesting for me to do it.
What's interesting for me is to use the internet to change things.
So I'm interested in ads that are interesting for people that are looking on the site.
That means the ads have to contain useful information for people that are looking for somewhere to live.
That means I am refusing between 20 and 30 ads a day on this site, every day.
... what has become important about all internet sites is trust.
Couldn't have said it better myself.
The only other internet service for Londoners that comes close to Move Flat is CraigsList UK. CraigsList is number 1 in NYC but still relatively unknown in London, so spread the word - it's like an internet Loot that works 10 times better and is run by nice people.
I'm posting this entry from within the all new hyped up OSCON'ed to hell and back Flock browser. It's got integrated blogging, bookmarking (del.icio.us) and flickr services. But the best innovation in Flock (most of it is just web services) is the 'shelf', a container for dragging and dropping images and text during browsing. It acts like a halfway house for all these services. It's duh obvious, but good ideas always are.
Flock is built on the mozilla code base. So get XUL'ing kids.
Flickr is not a service, it's a social network. When people join a network, they seek community. Up until its Yahoo! acquisition, the services that Flickr offered for photo management also happened to be top quality; utilizing the latest technologies, offering a generous API, good cross-browser compatibility and a continuous enhancement of features through Beta. Just as importantly, the environment was cosy, with Flickr staff both good humoured and responsive to user feedback and groups of users forming genuine visual links between their lives. The small group of people who built Flickr obviously loved what they were doing. The broad but niche community of users obviously loved what they were communally accomplishing.
What happens when this gets assimilated into a service for a larger company like Yahoo!? Well, you get softly spoken demands to open a Yahoo! account in order to benefit from continued (paid for) Flickr services, followed by a lot of user paranoia, some clarifications, a Flick Off anti-Yahoo! user group and a lingering (perfectly valid) question,
I don't use any Yahoo! services. Why should i sign up to their network?
This is the question coming up again and again. It shows the psychological influence a popular network like Flickr has on its members. The attitude towards Yahoo! can be summed up as,
I don't belong there. I belong on Flickr. The two are miles apart.
In a tight network such as Flickr, membership to the network has real meaning to it's participants. It is a place with ethical co-ordinates and aesthetic values. It is virtual and yet it is not - Flickr had to pack bags from Canada and move to Silicon Valley. All acquisitions are symbolic, as well as physical/business transitions.
The Flickr team say the Yahoo! acquisition will allow them to integrate a lot of services including payment, but i must admit i'm all for successful startups resisting the temptation of acquisition, seeing a product through version 1.0 and pulling in resources independently. I'm also all for social networks not hankering after boundless growth - it can impede the social quality of the network for a lot of users.
Assimilation is certainly not the only option, since well crafted API's and strategic partnerships can deal with integrated services without a loss of corporate identity (if there's one thing Flickr had and is slowly losing, it's a strong identity around which a meaningful community can evolve). I'm suggesting resisting the lure of scaling up and putting the focus on increased features, finely graded account types and integrated services as a means of avoiding acquisition.
Perhaps the results of the David VS Goliath 'tag-fight' sum up the user-base's stance on the acquisition better than anything else.
More on Wired.