Kata

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Anthony Colfelt has been at the ForUSE conference in New Hampshire, and has an excellent piece on his reflections/conclusions drawn from the experience:

“Larry Constantine said it best in the final conversation that was held between the remaining delegates on the last day. “Process is like the training wheels for learning a craft. When one has gained enough experience one knows when to throw it away.” Ron Jeffries also had a good way of describing process. “Process is like a Kata, you practice techniques over and over and over to make you learn the art…” Having once studied Karate, the notion of practicing set techniques in different combinations really resonated with me. Through practice, you can draw on your route knowledge of individual techniques and combinations of them, to best solve a problem when faced with it.”

» The Vanity Experiment: ForUSE – Conclusions

The gift

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“The gift of the net” by Richard Barbrook in OpenDemocracy:

“Ever since the beginnings of modernity, free speech has been championed as a fundamental right of all citizens. Yet, for most of the population, this concept has been a piety rather than a reality. Big government and big business have long monopolised the media. But, ever since the advent of the net, freedom of expression for all no longer seems like a utopian dream. We can conceive of a society where making your own media is not just possible, but also a mass phenomenon. Sharing knowledge could become much more important than selling information.”

It’s all about the tail

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was one of our mantras during the early stages of iCan. When we were talking with people from News and other involved divisions in the BBC, we used to use the power-law curve so beloved of the blogosphere to give an analogy of the connection between the 6/7 major national or global stories that feature on the 30-minute evening news programme and the 100s or 1000s of personal, local issues that people could feel empowered to act on.

3 or 4 times a year at least, one of those personal, local issues will propel itself up the power-law curve to become a national or even global story. For instance, the fuel protests in the UK of a few years ago. iCan was about trying to increase that number, by recognising and supporting the continuum that exists between the tail and the top.

Even if not every story, issue or aspiration for change makes it to the top, the community and resources of the tail will provide support, information and inspiration for each new inhabitant of the tail.

The Stephen-Gould-esque aspiration then is reach some kind of self-sustaining equilibrium of activism and achievement there, with plenty of punctuation into the wider public consciousness that the top of the power-law curve represents. Whilst upward-mobility of stories or campaigns until they get onto the ‘broadcast-radar’ is desirable for the BBC as a news-gathering aid, it’s not the primary purpose of the iCan service – which is to create positive outcomes for people in their local civic environment – in the tail.

As Kevin Marks* rightly points out – it’s about low barriers to entry, and as we said, it’s all about the tail.

Phew…

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iCan is live (in beta-be-gentle-with-it-form). It’s been a tough 14 months, but hopefully it will be of real use to people with real problems or plans for their locality.

It’s a little empty right now, as the punters have yet to populate it, but it’s going to grow and get better. We had the design work for perhaps the next couple of revisions already done before I left, and the ethnographic research we did at the top of the project, coupled with user-testing and research that the new design lead Helen Day is going to be doing should see some rapid iterations up-ahead.

It remains to say well done to all who made it possible. Helen, Julie, Priya, Ki, Andy, Thomas, Dharmesh, Stokes, Nico, James, Anno and Tom particularly. Danny has a nice little appraisal.

Preorder-2-Peer-2-Peer

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Half-formed thought [© Philip Tabor]: If I’m anything to go by as an example, then I would think that a lot of people who download episodes of their favourite TV shows using p2p networks then go on to buy DVD or VHS box-sets of those same shows when they are released a year-or-so later.

Often, due to demand from fanbases, these box-sets have place-holder pages on Amazon where it’s possible to pre-order them.

Why not legitimise p2p downloads though this pre-order method? Buy the box-set upfront, a bit of Amazon web-services magic dust, have the bits now, get the atoms later.

Does this seem fair? A good idea? How would this work?

Nano(pop)tech

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Joho reports from PopTech on a talk by Christine Peterson:

“Nanotech, she says, has not been overhyped. It can change our relationship to matter. Nano, she says, is about changing the structure not just of nanos but for objects of any size…

…Christine suggests a possible future: You have one object in your house and it changes into the various objects you need.”

Forget what Nick Hornby did – that’s really going to screw-up Desert Island Discs.

The post also points to the wonderfully-named Utility Fog.