d o w n s t r e a m

I Smell the Future

SixthSense is the much heralded Augmented Reality technology developed at MIT's Media Lab by Pranav Mistry. No, it doesn't actual bring the sense of smell to the digital world, but it does give us a new way to blend the digital world and real world in a much more seamless and natural way.

In his November 2009 TEDIndia talk, Pranav shares his belief that this technology has the potential to reclaim our humanity. SixthSense will steer us from becoming Computers interacting with Computers to humans interacting with the digital world as we would the real world.

SixthSense was first brought to the global stage in March at TED in March 2009 by Pranav's professor, Pattie Maes. Comparing that talk with Pranav's November talk, you see that this is not another grad student project destined to sit on the shelf after the inventor graduates - the catalog of use cases has clearly expanded in past seven months. One use case that Pattie alludes to, but is missing from Pranav's more recent talk, is the potential to evaluate the environmental impact of retail goods while you're shopping. This use case is at the heart of what we want to enable at downstream.org. Today by the use of barcode, and tomorrow, thanks to SixthSense, visual object detection/recognition.

The future for SixthSense is made more exciting by Pranav's plans to opensource the technology. He cites his desire to bring it to the masses, rather than keep it cloistered in the research domain, as motivation to open this up. Let's hope he is successful in those plans. Choice of license may be one of the most important decisions he makes in the evolution of SixthSense. With so many obvious and wide ranging improvements it would be a shame to see the potential get locked up in a commercial fork that dominates the device options and turns it into nothing more than an ad platform.

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More background on SixthSense and Pranav Mistry:

• IBN video story on SuperStars of Science
• MIT Research Highlight on SixthSense
• Whitepaper: Wear Ur World - A Wearable Gestural Interface (PDF)
• Other projects from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT

The Promise of Crowdsourcing

Today I came across the work of Mike Krieger and Yan Yan Wang at Stanford's HCI Lab in which they studied the efficacy of certain online brainstorming techniques.  Their research focused on comparison of idea generation tools to see if, through tool adaptations, it was possible to increase participation in expanding and improving ideas while overcoming the problems of too many ideas, not enough idea collaboration that are typical of brainstorming on discussion forums.  Part of their research revealed some great lessons from crowd sourcing endeavors on the Internet which Mike has shared in these slides posted on Slideshare.

Crowds and Creativity

View SlideShare presentation

The most valuable, and I think uniquely insightful advice he gives are the 9 guidelines for successful crowd sourcing online:

1. When diversity matters
2. Small chunks/ delegate-able actions
3. Easy verification
4. Fun activity, or hidden ambition
5. Better than computers at performing a task
6. Learn from hacks, mods, re-use from crowd
7. Enable novel knowledge discovery 
8. Maintain vision & design consistency
9. Not just about lower costs

I see these tips as not only useful to the aspiring wiki-ist, but also to users of Mechanical Turk, which happens to be a tool that was instrumental in their Ideas2Ideas study.  I'm looking forward to applying these guidelines and the design principles behind Ideas2Ideas to future crowd sourcing endeavors.

Our New Open Source President

CNN ran a post election panel featuring Republican consultant Alex Costellano on Thursday who hinted we may be blessed with an open source presidency come January. Citing Obama's deference to the American public by admitting "I need your help," Costellano extrapolated that this is an unprecedent gesture to involve the people on making policy, opensource-stylie. Costellano rationalized his interpretation of the president elect's statement by effectively contrasting Microsoft's "worship in our church, or else," approach to software with Obama's apparent participation age bias. Nice! Bravo! Bring it!

CommunityNext - It's A Widget World

The second CommunityNext conference, held at the Plug And Play tech center in Sunnyvale today, is focused on viral marketing. The take away from the event: widgets=viral. And Facebook is the api to write them for.

Pictured here is Noah Kagan, CommunityNext organizer.

More on the event when I have a keyboard bigger than my Treo in front of me.

OAN Makes Top 10 List at Planetizen

Planetizen, the online commmunity for urban planners and designers, ranked the Open Architecture Network as one of the Top Ten websites for 2007.  Like the OAN, Planetizen is built on the Drupal CMS. 

While browsing through Planetizen I came across a link to AssignmentZero a crowdsourcing journalistic experiment.  The site is also built on Drupal, and they've got an assignment posted to write about Architecture for Humanity, who they describe as "one of numerous organizations practicing open design".   Along with three other writers, I took the assignment, natch.

The March of Read-Write: Was Sousa Wrong?

TED's roots and core values are no better represented than in the person of Lawrence Lessig.  It was he who really Gestalt² the content of the conference.  ("If you love a word, use it."  Erin McKean told the TED crowd today.  As a criteria for choosing the right word, she says, being in the dictionary is an unnecessary and artificial constraint.  What are the odds a word with exponentiation in it will make it into the publication she looks after?  As a word and feeling, I love Gestalt².  It's entertainment's Metcalfe's Law on steroids.)

In Lessig's TED talk he recounted John Philip Sousa's passionate opposition to the advance of phonographs and the recording industry. "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country," Sousa warned, and went on to say, "The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

So, in an abstract sense, goes the tired argument for the prevailing commercial model of copyright protection.  But that wasn't Lessig's point.  His point was that the Read Only culture that is ardently protected by institutions like the RIAA, the big five recording companies, and portions of the publishing industry, is a culture "where the vocal chords of the millions have been lost."

The stark irony presented was that, indeed the same voice Sousa sought to protect by preventing  technology's indiscriminate trampling over humanity's means of expression is again the voice that, several technological generations hence, is opening up for all humanity to hear.   Without our common sense recognition of Fair Use, artists like Javier Prato, and Johan Soderberg would not be able to reach most us.  Of course, fair use alone does not get such artistic works to the people.  You also need a network.

Implicit in all this was more validation that the redshift market projection that Sun is betting on is a very good bet.

For me, Lessig answered an important question that was not asked.  Which is more precious to our freedom of expression, fair use or network neutrality?  In the RW culture, these convictions to freedom are inextricably connected and equally important.

Network Like You Give a Damn

"I feel like we're embarking on a very interesting social experiment ...learning about the social behaviors of architects... How does this strange black turtleneck wearing species interact when they are not at a cocktail party?"
- Kate Stohr, Co-founder of Architecture for Humanity.

This was the reply I received from Kate after sharing a post on tips for fostering a community online. The post couldn't be more relevant to her and the rest of Architecture for Humanity as they approach the launch of the Open Architecture Network (OAN), which will coincide with this year's TED conference. Lessons from the social networking front line are pouring in, and I expect the OAN will begin it's contribution of do's and dont's, how-to's, and testimonies to the power of the network soon.

Anyone who has launched an online social network will tell you that the experience is, indeed, a very interesting social experiment. Some of the most compelling communities have taken shape with minimal intervention and control from it's founders, yet their vision and values manage to persist through its evolution by virtue of their participation. The social networking movement puts Metcalfe's law squarely back in good standing as a reasonable measure of the value of the network, which the law says is proportional to the square of the number of users. In fact, it may be time to revise the formula as we see true benefit reach well beyond the network itself, to those who have never touched a computer. And the Open Architecture Network is poised to be one of the those networks whose beneficiaries may have never before been touched by the network effect.

If you give a damn, listen to the Treehugger interview with Architecture for Humanity's other co-founder, Cameron Sinclair. And watch this space for breaking news about the new Open Architecture Network.

Participation Age Phenomena

On Saturday February 10 I attended a great event on the Web 2.0 phenomena known as social networking (or should I say the social networking phenom known as Web 2.0?): CommunityNext at Stanford. Great speakers, good schwag, and a large dose of optimism about the potential for networks of people to affect enormous positive change in the world. See my notes from the event posted over on downstream.org.

Two orgs represented at the event I found especially compelling:
Kiva.org and Cambrian House.

Kiva.org has enabled the infusion of capital into the 80% of the world's population that is not banked through an innovative microfinance model that has gained much praise and attention from the media, philanthropists and financiers. My friend Tracey Pettengill, Founder of MicroPlace has partnered with Kiva's founder, Premal Shah, to bolster microfinance in Silicon Valley hosting a periodic event with the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network. Their next event features guest speaker Bob Annibale, Citigroup's Global Director of Microfinance. Should be an interesting discussion.

Cambrian House has an innovative model for incubating and propelling new business. Leveraging Crowdsourcing, the model facilitates those with a great idea for a product or service to connect with funders, technical expertise, legal support, guidance and moral support to get the idea off the ground. I'll let you know how my idea for the next big thing flourishes on Cambrian House.

If ever there was a group of entrepreneurs who are invested in the neutrality of the net's telecom infrastructure, it's the participants at this event. Perhaps better than any other business demographic, they demonstrate just how precious net neutrality is. No word on the next CommunityNext event, but I'll track it and post here.

How precious is net-neutrality?

What are the most pressing issues facing the world?

The answer to that question depends on how far you peel the onion. If you accept that the most pressing issues all stem from human behavior, then you might say that the existence of humans is issue number one. That answer doesn't leave much of an onion to peel though. The sheer number of humans is not a very interesting answer either because it doesn't get at the root of the problem; absent excessive affluence, there's no obvious reason that Earth cannot sustain 9 billion people. No, the most interesting pressing issues are the ones that get to the heart of things.

Here's one: the absence of a collective understanding among industrialized society that our consumer behavior is destroying our habitat.

... (pause while Ayn Rand rolls over in her grave)...

Anyone who ever consciously made a sustainable choice - riding a bike instead of driving, choosing the tilapia instead of the swordfish, holding coffee in a ceramic rather than disposable paper cup - only to have the proverbial Hummer drive by and toss a styrofoam container of processed food on the pavement in front of you, has felt the futility of acting sustainably in a world where most people don't know what sustainable behavior is, let alone act that way. That's a stark demonstration of the absence of a collective understanding.

Sustainably minded people leading by example will not win the race with extinction. And phylogeny doesn't move fast enough for us to wait while our brains develop an inter-neural synapse across which we can mind-meld our understanding of this pressing issue. A tail-spin calls for immediate action. We need to accellerate large scale influence through existing paradigms in order to build an understanding of the issue and our individual roles in it.

History proves that, given a catalyst, we have the capacity to transform society in profound ways. Perceptible degradation of global living conditions is proving ample catalyst for change.  And we have a powerful tool to connect us in ways we have only just begun to understand.

The Internet has emerged as the single most powerful medium for social participation across the globe. It's influence and reach expands every day. With serious efforts underway to bridge the digitial divide, we can hope to have over half the world's population connected and participating in the global conversation within our lifetime. The Internet is the medium across which we are building this collective understanding.

The potential positive influence of global participation is not assured in a network that favors one community over another.  The Internet today is essentially destination neutral. But some network service providers have proposed charging content providers for higher quality of service to deliver their content, which would result in diminished choice for consumers of content.   Throttling choice of content will reduce the net to the equivalent of television where virtually all content is delivered with the express intent of driving consumer demand for products and services.  The Internet has been a safe harbor for universal access to content, but would rapidly deteriorate into another platform for big business to dominate society's mindshare, if service providers were allowed to practice "non-neutrality".  We must preserve the network's neutrality in order for the global conversation to reach everyone who has a stake in the design of our future.

At this critical juncture in humanity's social evolution, can we afford to have corporations throttling some voices and amplifying others?

Sustainability Stuck in Ambiguity?,

This week's assignment in my Principle of Sustainable Management course at the Presidio School of Management was to submit a personal definition of Sustainability.  This is what I came up with:

Sustainability is the process of continuously nourishing the systems that provide for abundant life in the super-system that is Earth.

But that's not the working definition.  I'm not sure there is a working definition.  Sustainability is ambiguous. It is destined, I am afraid, to remain in a steady state or an ever expanding state of ambiguity. The current popular discourse exploits sustainability's ambiguity, its actors conveniently adopting the form most suited to their position or view. The word (which is not a word by many dictionaries' account,) telescopes into and out of focus as we try to bring the future into our field of view. It seems to be receding from us in all directions. Sustainability is simultaneously at the outer edge of our perception, and at the core of our social fabric.

Implicit in the goals of sustainability is the notion of common cause. The threat of global warming has galvanized the awareness that we all depend upon, and are at the mercy of, one another in the super-system that is Earth. If we are truly at the dawn of the age of participation, then it is sustainability, in all its shapes and forms, that weens us away from individualistic naivete toward an inclusive era of global awareness.

For our species, sustainability represents childhood's end.

But is sustainability actionable? The architect needs clear priorities, stable requirements, and measurable criteria. The project manager needs scope, budget, and schedule. The builder needs a site, tools and raw material. Sustainability is too slippery. It's so ambiguous that it's nigh impossible to decompose into discrete components. Sustainability is not a composite of anything, so can never be broken down further. There is no blueprint for sustainability.

In order to get on with it, we need a better word.  What is the right word (term or phrase)?