Month: March 2004

WTFcon london

i’ll be at WTFcon saturday and spending sunday in london too. WTF will be an open space event:

Open Space Technology is a self-organizing practice that releases the inherent creativity and leadership in people. By inviting people to take responsibility for what they care about, Open Space establishes a marketplace of inquiry, where people offer topics they care about, reflect and learn from one another, to accomplish meaningful work. It is recognized internationally as an innovative approach to creating whole systems change and inspiring the best in human performance.

the principles:

  1. Whoever comes are the right people
  2. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
  3. Whenever it starts is the right time
  4. When it’s over it’s over

New digital divide

Over at thoughtstorms, they are discussing a new digital divide:

In the future we’ll see the world increasingly divided into 2 classes : the information-rich haves, and the information-poor have-nots.
But ironically the exploited, impoverished, have-nots, will be those who are duped into paying increasingly more for decreasingly valuable proprietary information products.
Meanwhile the cash rich, information rich will increasingly rely on superior, free information products : open source software such as Linux, public service programming from the BBC, the online communities of enthusiasts in every field, united through blogging, mailing lists and other discussion forums etc.

why is there no free entertainment when there is an abundance of free knowledge? i think knowledge accrues, while entertainment does not. entertainment atoms do not build upon each other in the same way that knowledge atoms do. maybe this is the return of a protestant work ethic?
only those who produce will prevail

Caught with the pants down

your magnolia server does not send any information about your content, not even a link. it simply calls our website saying that someone had logged in OR magnolia has been started. well, we did this because we wanted to know how many people are using magnolia (90% users never post anything on the list) It helped us to know how much effort to put in future development.

hear, hear. another faux-pas (the first one being to claim JCR compliance) from the boys at obinary.

Telephony to co-presence

I’ve noticed that Skype has changed the way my household communicates with the rest of our family. Even though we still have PSTN access to each other, we very rarely use it. We’ve become reluctant to interrupt each other without some form of presence indicator telling us it’s OK. If someone is online, they’re not depooing babies or watching a movie. We talk for much longer, but in a more relaxed way. The PC in our living/dining area has speakers and a webcam – we don’t use headsets. My wife can chat to both her parents at once, not serially. It doesn’t feel like a phone call when your family are chatting with you while you make dinner. When my parents were over in Kansas City, we were sat around the dinner table chomping away, nattering with my brother in London. The whole anxiety that you need to say something meaningful to justify the payment of money to a phone company evaporates.

most telephone conversations that extend one minute have been asynchronous, we just haven’t admitted it in the past. (doodles anyone?) a shared understanding that attention varies and the elimination of technical limits to voice communication patterns move “telephone” conversations towards ambient virtual co-presence. this is exciting because it brings down the wall between virtual and real another tiny bit.

trade legalism

john robb has an interesting idea: export legal hassle. while his post has a tongue in cheek tone, there is a sound underlying idea: greasing the wheels of commerce by expanding the rule of law. under the assumption that laws are fair and are not merely devices to delay the demise of obsolete industries (hello DMCA, hello RIAA), this levels the playing field and reduces uncertainty. always good things for trade. works best in conjunction with pacification by trade
the interesting question is of course whether this brings countries in closer compliance with the rules or is just another stage for an arms race.

US files a complaint against China for WTO violations. Now this is something that we can export: legal hassles. Unleash the lawyers! We should have 100s of WTO filings against China in the works. 1 way to make this happen: create a method by which private law firms can create a WTO case and share in the fines levied (or a lump sum payment based on a portion of the savings for US companies for successful efforts where no fines are extracted). There are probably lots of methods that can make legalism a top US export.