The flickr code blog has an article on how Flickr is integrating Last.fm gig names into its photo pages using machine tags. We've been including their photos on our event pages for a while now. I head up public API dev at Last.fm, so it's nice to see both systems playing well with each other as a result of our recent API upgrades. It's how the web should work.

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.

Manuel De Landa, 'A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History'

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.

On Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man

The single most important piece of writing I read in 2006; Sennett's 1976 study of the public and private sphere through the ages (in particular through the last four centuries) is erudite, expansive, thought-provoking and profound. Defining the city as "the place where strangers meet", Sennett goes on to demonstrate the breakdown of the public sphere by the emergence of personality, the cult of the individual and the erosion of the boundary separating public from private. Sennett is a sociologist with the ability to study the bigger picture without getting lost in a statistical labyrinth. Here he takes a selection of detailed observations scattered through the centuries, probing deeply into the social relations of one particular era or location at a time (he dubs the technique "postholing"), and brings them into a wider ideological frame. It makes for highly interesting reading.

Sennett believes the public sphere has been in deep crisis for quite some time, that the public and private need be clearly distinguished for healthy social relations to exist, that personality is a narcissistic construct that threatens public discourse, that public space in our cities should be rich with interaction as it once was, that we endlessly seek the intimate in public interactions. The book includes an analysis on the social relations that brought about cosmopolitanism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, clothing and its evolving role in identity, myriad observations on the impact of urban planning on social interactions and a lot more.

I'm curious to know how Sennett views the hyperlinked 'social network' environment of the present day. He's talking in kensington next week at an RCA debate, so perhaps i'll have a chance to ask him myself at some point.

Anyway, essential reading for anyone with a commitment to social software (beyond the 2.0 hype machine).

Sony research group demo an 'augmented surface'

Spurred by Miranda's reference to Malcolm Gladwell's article, The Social Life of Paper and other articles on the subject ( MIT Press' The Myth of the Paperless Office, Passion for Paper and Bill Gates' paperless working methodology), i thought i'd throw in my $.02.

I really can't see a case for paper in the workplace outside of enhancing co-located group sessions/workshops (i've described some below - Gladwell points one out as well). I'm trying, but i don't see it. At least for software development, though i believe this view is defensible for a range of industries.

One of paper's great advantages lies in its physicality. As a result of its portability it can potentially radiate information to multiple people in different locations without any technology requirements other than a pen/pencil. It's spatially flexible and provides a low barrier to authorship.

When you access paper-based information, subtle authorship traits are clear (handwriting and drawing styles communicate myriad things to us which digital typography and rigid outlines do not). Paper media retains these traits so well because the paper/pen combination provides one of the greatest interfaces mankind has ever come up with. It allows for much self-expression. From an accessibility perspective, the printed press gives you high resolution fonts you can take to bed with you. No eye-strain included.

So it's not all bad for paper. But the paper-less office isn't a myth. I don't use any paper at work. The only pieces of paper i have touched involve HR processes such as holiday forms (arcane admin rituals).

I use OmniGraffle or a whiteboard for quick visualization of ideas. Whiteboards beat paper hands down for radiating information to groups in the workplace (see Cockburn). Textual collaborative, dynamic information resides in the web browser - accessible by all, manipulable at all times. Wikis, chat-rooms and project management tools sit there. The browser is our core communication medium.

For notes, I have OmniOutliner which i also use to deconstruct large problems into identifiable tasks. Technical designs can be drawn in applications pretty quickly. These designs can then be uploaded for others to comment, in their own time. I can re-organise and re-prioritise my tasks at a keystroke. I can take notes on a meeting with others, during a presentation (backchannel). Put all this together and paper is starting to look a little ragged.

In the processes of archiving and organising (search/sort), paper also makes a weak case for itself. Digital alternatives exist for tracking ideas, dialogues, designs, tasks and most other everyday information. The notion that paper is a more secure information storage mechanism is also often mistaken and i can only assume comes from a misunderstaning of modern technology (stories of giant electromagnetic guns and hackers making people nervous).

In contrast examine the issues that arise from using paper instead of digital tools, and accumulate these over time (no versioned history of events, unsearchable, restricted ability to re-organise, closed access). It's a cludge. Moreover, it's potentially harmful; paper is, after all, the medium of bureaucracy. Solutions to everyday design problems require agile, accessible information. You need to be able to mix and match approaches, sculpt them in a group environment and change them on the fly. Your chosen media should reflect this.

The only place i see for paper in software dev is in CRC cards and planning sessions (blitz planning, sprint planning or xp planning games) - specialized techniques peculiar to the field (though kaizen-blitz sessions are widespread in the manufacturing industry). Broadly speaking, these are group processes taking place in one location, in which members pursue a single goal of identifying and organising many discreet chunks of information in real-time. Paper's spatial properties come to the fore here. Note that the paper is often thrown away after the session is complete and results captured.

All of these group operations could be carried out on a screen, but screens are interfaces to personal computers, which are designed with the individual in mind. Personal Computers are not for groups (as the name suggests), and a network of such computers does not constitute a true group interface. Turkle has alluded to the solipsistic design of the modern computer in the past. I think as better groupware interfaces are commoditized, such as augmented surfaces (sony research video), the use of paper even in these group processes will become optional and ultimately deprecated.

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'.