Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.Distributed Intelligence
It is always worthwhile to read Kevin Kelly!
…the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not be bounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that use the web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, the more money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the web is on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link or creates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.
Ushahidi – crowdsourcing Information in times of crisis
Ushahidi is one of those projects that radically transforming social life. Ushahidi, which means ”testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008 (I was there!).
The new Ushahidi Engine is being created to use the lessons learned from Kenya to create a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way to gather reports by mobile phone, email and the web – and map them. It is being built so that it can grow with the changing environment of the web, and to work with other websites and online tools.
Our goal is to create a platform that any person or organization can use to set up their own way to collect and visualize information. The core platform will allow for plug-in and extensions so that it can be customized for different locales and needs. This tool will be tested and made available as an open source application that others can download, implement and use to bring awareness to crises in their own region. Organizations can also use the tool for internal monitoring purposes.
The core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time. It is being developed by a group of volunteer developers and designers, hailing primarily from Africa. So far there are representatives from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the US.
AlJazeera is now using it to cover the War in Gaza. – thanks to Becky Johnson’s twitter for pointing this out.
Books I ordered at Amazon this year
I just went through the books I ordered (unfortunately, I found no way to export the data elegantly). Here they are, without the author (google them) but with comments:
Through A Glass Darkly (Donna Leon, a perfect Christmas read for anyone who just returned from Venice)
Snow Crash (a must-read from 1992, predicting everything from secondlife to google earth)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything (the re-edition is not worth it, even though Joe Trippi is, read the wired article on howard dean to understand the obama campaign)
A Castle in the Forest (Norman Mailer’s last book, a fictional biography of Hitler written from the perspective of a mephistopheles, a surprisingly good book)
Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence (great book, did a course on it that really worked)
Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (best book of the year, if not available in English yet, read his 1979 or Faserland)
Faserland (the 1995 classic, a fossil from a different age)
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (re-reading Porter was important to understand what is new about the world we are living in)
Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization (boring)
The Tortilla Curtain (could not get into it, even though it is set in Topanga Canyon)
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism (not bad, at all)
Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (new edition, worthwhile)
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide (not worth it)
Martin Luther (read up on him to understand the transformation of our times)
Little Brother (great fun, and you can download it – creative commons licensed)
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It (important read and you can download it – creative commons licensed)
For and Against Method: Including Lakatos’s Lectures on Scientific Method and the Lakatos-Feyerabend Correspondence (for the aficionado – else read Feyerabends “Against Method”)
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant (the last gasp of competitive strategy, we are beyond it)
The 10-day MBA (clffnotes for the rest of us)
The Network Society: From Knowledge to Policy (not the amazing followup to Castell’s network society – neither is the book coming out in 2009)
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (best web 2.0 read of the year)
Beyond Citizenship: American Identity After Globalization (well written, but falls short)
Republic.com 2.0 (Cass Sunstein is always readable, this is slightly dated but important).
Free Thinking
Do follow Chris Anderson’s reflections, while he is writing…
Ambient awareness
To understand services like twitter and how they are shaping our social graphs, read today’s NYT Magazine at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?pagewanted=all
cheers from Cancun airport (ambient info)
Colombia 2.0
I just came back from Colombia, teaching Government 2.0 as a compact course. To see pictures, go to: http://picasaweb.google.com/philippmueller/ColombiaJuly2008
My argument in the course was that new modes of collobaration that become possible when technologies and new social practices reduce transaction costs drastically (think wikis, RSS, XML, blogging, open data, etc.) are transforming social life very fast, because they (a) expand the social universe, (b) compete with existing forms of collaboration (c) disrupt the balance of power between existing forms of collaboration, and (d) corrode our existing practices of collaboration. Some impressions on the country that (in part) seem to corroborate my argument:
a. Universidad de los Andes is one of the best universities in Latin America. I met many amazing professors and students. They are just in the process of setting up a graduate school of government. We had a wonderful conversation on case teaching and on internationalization (should they teach in English?), we hope to cooperate throughout the year.
b. The big peace demonstrations in February with more than 5 million participants were organized through facebook. Colombia has always been a fairly passive country, the last bigger demonstrations took place in 2002 with 20.000 participants. The peace demonstrations of the 1990s were very well funded and had a big administrative overhead.
c. The projects of my students ranged from building an online platform for the psychologists that are helping the demobilized guerrillas to find a footing in society, to a vaccination site, where hospitals, doctors, and patients could co-produce, store, and retrieve the vaccination records of little kids, to a the peer production of security through an online community where concerned citizens could upload videos of crime and share experiences.
d. Bogota (an 7 million inhabitant city, at the elevation of 2600 m) developed the TransMilenio bus system, an integrated network of dedicated bus lanes, elevated bus stops, and modern buses. This has solved some of the traffic congestion problems of the city.
e. In the last 10 years public space was re-invented. The big highways in the city, open up to bicyclists every Sunday (they are actually used), bike lanes have been given priority over other traffic, development takes the pedestrian view into consideration, it is actually fun to walk, both downtown and in the party zones at night. There was a time when mimes where shaming people into behaving socially.
f. The last car bomb exploded in Bogota in 2003 (in Club Nogal, killing around 20). Security is assured through a combination of deterrence (bomb-sniffing dogs everywhere) and societal pressure.
g. The rich live in the city. Appartment buildings are deemed more save than houses and living outside of the city is not (yet) and option. Therefore, you might actually meet important policy makers strolling casually through the park.
h. Colombia is a country that has been (and in parts still is) in war. The sophistication of dealing with demobilization and security is very high. The ethical quesitons the country’s prosecutors office are asking, go beyond what we see in other countries such as Afghanistan. A lot can be learned here from Colombia.
There is much more to learn from this country. It is worth a visit.
Cory Doctorow in Cambridge
Do watch Cory’s presentation in Cambridge. it is worth it….
cheers,
Philipp
Living Network Society
political theories once accepted rapidly are backgrounded. Therefore, there was not much ado about McCain using Versionista to argue about Obama’s Iraq War stance. But we should step back and celebrate the complexity of “living network society.”
The latest addition to the Internet campaigning toolbox is Versionista, a web-based diff utility that tracks changes in web sites on an hourly basis and automatically generates full reports with side-by-side comparisons of specified versions. Versionista helps to promote accountability by giving activists the ability to see when politicians have changed the language of their campaign promises and policy statements.
the tattered ruins of the state
Google announced that they were adding “Map-Maker” to Google maps, allowing you to participate in creating/adapting/changing the maps of our worlds. For the analysis go to:
Mashable
John Battelle
Techdirt
Of course, Jorge Borges, On Exactitude in Science” comes to mind, where describes the tragic uselessness of the perfectly accurate, one-to-one map:
In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild drew a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography saw the vast Map to be Useless and permitted it to decay and fray under the Sun and winters.
In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; and in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
The idea of crowd-sourcing map-making chips away at another prerogative of the state, namely, the definition of territory and territorial sovereignty. So maybe we will be confronted with a future, where we can find the tattered ruins of the empire on the crowd-sourced and ad-sensed map of tomorrow 2.0.
Where does your value lie?
As companies that are very serious about profit are open sourcing their platforms, we need really reflect what they mean, when they say “our value lies in the community not the technology.” What sounds like an innocent buzz-word is really a frontal attack on 300 years of liberal epistemology.
Check out today’s article on Reddit in Arstechnica.
