Just a reminder that the OpenTech call closes tomorrow, although we’ll probably leave the form up and working for a few days afterwards while we finalise the programme. So if you want to offer a talk at an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at, go for it.
Amongst friends of a friend, there’s a conversation going on about “the vision thing” and how their (IT) industry has lost it’s way: original post, a reply, roundup.
Paul comments that most of the pitches he hears are derivative – but 95% of everything is crap, and you find a good pitch, generally you don’t have time to listen to any more. More so when you consider that there are so few new ideas, and most of them come from connecting across multiple disciplines, which very few people do.
Useful comes in phases. We need time to figure out how to use tools in new ways once they’re built, and also have a idea to use them for. YouTube has been around for 3 years now, but we’re still using it like “TV on the internet”. Granted, anyone can have a TV channel and you can embed it in web pages, but it’s still pretty much the same thing. YouTube has revolutionised media distribution, but it’s not revolutionised creation, and has probably done less than iMovie. The operative word being yet. All the bits that make the gmail interface be gmail existed for a number of years before gmail itself actually existed – what changed was simply someone putting them together in that way.
That’s not sexy or even necessarily new, And I’m pretty sure that the pitch for gmail would have sounded really dull. Until you actually used it. This site isn’t sexy, and probably wouldn’t have even taken that long to build http://omnisio.com/ – but think about the implications of being able to attach arbitrary points of video together. And you can go from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMyuy7yDdG4 and end up near http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yq0tMYPDJQ
.
When anyone can shoot a video on a £50 camcorder, that’s a good reason for people who are capable of doing more being given the skills and tools to go further and use their talents, rather than be restrained by basic tools now. Over time, it will get opened to more as the barriers to entry are lowered. It’s easy to claim that anyone can do video, but not everyone can do it well (cf some youtube content). And the tools aren’t there yet on how to do that online, but give creative people a copy of final cut pro and magic can happen. They’ll bring the good ideas themselves, and overcome all sorts of hurdles to make it happen. Good ideas have a habit of fighting to get out (and sometimes they keep score).
There’s nowhere that yet integrates video seamlessly, rather than being a flashy site that says “we do video”. The fact that the definitional video site is youtube, rather than say, news.bbc.co.uk (or something that just uses youtube as a platform) says how far there is to go in something that could be considered good (although I’m aware the BBC are doing a redesign soon which might make this wrong overnight).
Think of the course that “DTP” took from the mid-80s to about 2000 when amateurs stopped having to care as the tools were good enough (and the professionals could get on with the interesting stuff rather than laying out a newsletter for cash). This progression takes time, and in the words of Rosabeth Moss Kanter, “everything looks like a failure in the middle”
In a post, Paul (who started this off) wrote:
Children who can’t afford shoes in Africa are given laptops so that they too can learn skills needed to write on a ‘Super FunWall’ and define the solidity of their friendships as nothing more than a button click
Working on a project with some friends, one person gave their reason for spending time on it as “because I want kids with a $100 laptop to find out why we’re bombing their country”.
If you want to see where you time is going (and you’re anything like me who does most stuff by email), look at the breakdown of email in your sent-mail folder. One good definition of who you are is what you spend your time doing. And there’s only one person who controls that (stolen from Tim Ferris, in a reference I can’t currently find).
One thing I’ve been working on recently is a method for doing the TWFY-thing on pretty much any committee of any type that takes minutes of meetings:
http://www.theyserveforyou.com/
It’s still being finished (the useful stuff is there, all the bits that make it pretty aren’t, yet).
To see how it currently works, I’ve loaded the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee http://mpc.theyserveforyou.com in going back to 1997. Either email alerts, rss and everything 
It’s a fair way from being polished, but it is functional, including with full online signup so youc an do your own committees and give them the theyworkforyou treatment without a huge amount of infrastructure work – we’ve done all that for you.
If you know perl and want to help with the backend infrastructure, or if you have design or graphics skills and want to help with the look of the site, please get in touch. Help is always appreciated.
One of the many remaining things on the todo list is to add in the concept of agendas, so that you can see what is coming and comment on it in advance.
Maybe I shouldn’t reply quite so quickly to interview questions.
More tea anyone?
I’ve talked previously about doing something about constructive engagement in my constituency of Manchester, Withington.
In the 2005 election, it was won by the local students getting out to/the vote, and engaging and winning on something close to the merits of an argument and the issues.
But is it no longer more important to be right than it is to win?
The current crop of young, local LibDem activists seems to have mostly studied at the Rovian School of Racing to the Bottom. That may not be that much of a surprise given average 2nd year undergrad today (ie the engaged undergraduates locally) will have only been 12 during the 2000 US election, and only 9 in 1997. Some of the stuff Gordon Brown is doing nationally has potentials. That kind of debate is likely to be all they will have ever seen. What the effects of that are within the next 5 or so years, will be interesting. As with many things, while the high level impacts matter to most people, the longer view results will be based on the impact that type of attack-ad politics has on the children.
Previously, it’s been a matter of pride amongst my (generally older) LibDem friends that they “just don’t do that sort of thing” (the kind of comment where the phrase “old chap” wouldn’t be out of place); it would appear that the future may not be quite so bright.
What impact will that have on Manchester Withington, where the activists in a year or two are even more likely to have been brought up on this tactic, and whether that will suit the kind of constructive engagement which makes for a good debate, but not an easy win.
Or will they learn the right lesson, that the politics of hope, exemplified by Obama in the US at the moment, can come over here, and pull the debate to something where substance wins over style?
Anyone got any ideas for some fun we could have with this on www.directionlesgov.com
He’s missed as much today as he was a year ago.
“He wandered into differing disciplines, made a mark, and wandered on again like a giant that had no idea he’d just trodden on a village.”
If you’ve not already read it, see Tom Longley’s first post about this before not having a clue what’s below. Although I’d strongly recommend that you don’t read the linked report unless you’re very interested in specifics – it’s really not pleasant reading.
Tom asked some people to take a look at the documents, and see what we could think of doing to fix it up into more useful ways.
The structure of each document is relatively simple, and the formatting mostly fine (three different structures, which can be identified easily with regular expressions). In fact, the whole script handling most of the 5 years (a couple of reports are very different for various reasons) is only 122 lines of code (roughly half parsing and half spreadsheet generation).
The reason for using a spreadsheet is down to simplicity – it can be done fast, and the fact that the data is only semi-structured. Plus, since it’s in Excel, it can be edited in almost anything, on any platform, without a requirement for anything above windows 95. Future stuff can be based either in VB/macros or in a more intelligent spreadsheet, or in something else. But in order to operate in a country with some security concerns which are far from abstract, simplicity is useful.
TomL touched on the issue of geography. Detailed geography is useful – lat/long/date being ideal as the basic item as that is constant over time, and can be rolled into the geography as needed (no, it’s not that easy, but the other options are far harder). The main problem for the existing data, at the moment, is tying together the list of names which exist over time, and putting them together in some way which we can look at from a higher level (e.g. region).
This stuff is fundamentally a qualitative time series dataset on which we then build a (somewhat depressing) quantitative time series dataset. Discontinuities in geography is not a rare or unknown problem for such conversions. But we need to know the names of places before we can start doing things with them. Town names don’t change much and often it doesn’t matter when they do – even if there’s a formal edict changing the name to Leningrad, people will still call it St. Petersberg.
While for some purposes (constituency stuff), knowing you live in Manchester or Harare is nowhere near enough in the abstract; at the current level, we don’t have better data for the past stuff (or, at the moment, any decent data), so we’ll have to live without it. But it does mean that as things move forwards, we can retrofit future (hopefully good) data onto the historic data: want 2008-2010 data? then you can get your own decent geography; want 2003-2010, you can get what we can give you. It’s a very common problem, and there is no single solution. But something is better than nothing, and, in this case, perfect could be the enemy of good. For legal or audit purposes, being on the right street matters; for other things, it’s arguably less so.
At a mySociety meeting before Christmas, Tom Steinberg spoke with his usual eloquence about how those in the room (the leading e-democracy activists from the UK and USA) were extremely fortunate to operate in countries where we can do what we do without concern for ourselves or that of friends and family. Unfortunately, this is all to rare in the world. Democracy is a great gift from the past, and we don’t own it. We’re only custodians for the future; and we should believe in doing the right thing for the right reasons, and in so doing, leave things slightly better than we found them.
It’s easy for someone to claim that they’re doing something in the name of democracy; that should not be confused with actually doing so, especially when they’re running for something.
I’ve put the text of Rowan William’s “Islam in English Law” lecture into commentOnThis.
Disruptive Proactivity