The tents are coming down. People are seeking out the one person they really wanted to talk with but did not run into — Foo has grown to 325 people or so. A comically long stream of pizza boxes are streaming in and being emptied one octal bite at a time.

It was a great Foo. Probably the best, at least for me. It is as an astounding set of people with a wide range of interests (within the tech field, of course) and a wonderful group ethos.

There’s a time for calm discussion of hard issues. Right now is the time for thanks. So, thank you for the gift, Tim, and thank you to the gracious and fun O’Reilly crew for running the event not only so well but running it just enough. [Tags: foocamp06 oreilly]

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Since I first talked publicly about Everything Is Miscellaneous (a book I’ve been writing for the past few years) at Foo Camp, and last year I had a session to kick around my proposed outline, at this Foo I read a chapter from the penultimate draft. (On Monday I get my editor’s comments and write what is presumably the final draft. Well, besides copy editing. And changing my mind. And being obsolesced.) Chapter 8 is on the virtue of messiness and includes a section on the Semantic Web, since I figured it’d be better to be eviscerated in a small room than in full public.

It seemed to go ok. Some excellent suggestions from the listeners, including for subtitles… [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous foocamp06 semweb semantic_web]

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[As always, all of this is me rapidly paraphrasing, paying attention most to what happens to interest me, and putting everything worse than the speakers did.]

Chris Csikszentmihalyi says science doesn’t work the way it thinks it does. For one thing, only 3-5% of experiments are re-proven. Often that’s because they’re so sensitive to instruments and materials. Also, much of the knowledge is tacit. Instead, scientific conflicts are usually settled by looking at the lab it came from, etc.

So, his lab wants to know what types of research isn’t getting done.

Three dualisms: 1. The Prayer Gauge Debate. In the 19th Century there were attempts to measure the efficacy of prayer. Science went up against a popular paradigm. Chris contrasts this with lab press releases getting done if they promise a cure for cancer. I.e., scientists learn to mis-represent their projects in order to get funded.

2. Mertonian Norms. Merton said that scientists work for commonality, universalism, and organized skepticism. Vs. 80% of MIT funding comes from the US government. To the scientists involved, the knowledge they develop is not politicized. But Chris’ Indian friends see it as inevitably and very much politicized.

3. Tool neutrality. But saying it’s neutral is like saying that from far away, everything is small. Vs. Technology is out of control. If it’s out of control, it is an agent, and thus isn’t neutral. [Hmm. This contrast isn’t symmetrical.]

Chris’ conclusion: We know very little about how technology works, and we tend to very sloppy in how we think about it.

He gives a couple of examples of non-neutral tech: A Lebanese grad student is consistently searched multiple times when coming across the US border, so she built a suit that records the pat-downs.

And a student created a personal audio device that integrates ambient sounds, so that someone speaking to you is brought in as someone singing beautifully.

Me: If someone says what they’re building is neutral, you can ask them, “Then why are you building it?”

Chris: Given where the funding for tech is coming from, given how hard it is, how can we build stuff that isn’t just neutral? Bruno Latour’s example: The thingies that automatically pull the door closed behind you. You get one after the sign you put up that says “Please close the door” fails to work. The door now shifts from normally being open to being shut.

Kaliya Hamlin: The interesting thing is to shift where the money is coming from.

Quinn Norton: Socially responsible investing has the reputation of being money-losing, but it’s not.

Tom Coates: I’m reminded of research that showed that initially took sperm as the active principle and eggs as lazy. And looking at only one sexuality scale rather than multiples is silly. Examining these premises is useful. Not everything is right.

Chris: The idea of bedrock is troubling. Diverse interpretations work.

Tom: But some paradigms advance us. E.g., the info model of the brain lets us do more than the old pneumatic one.

Chris tries to steer the discussion from this topic because, he thinks, it can progress without having to resolve the issue. Chris and Tom agree that all are politicized.

Zack Exley: For the past 150 years ago we’ve been stuck in this abstract argument.The solution is to do something. Make something. Run for Congress. More smart people in Congress.

Kaliyah: It’s a structural problem.

Someone: VCs are investing heavily in non-military projects aimed at making the world better.

[Conversation gets too thick to take notes on sensibly. And, as you may have noticed, the above doesn’t capture the conversation up to this point very well. Sorry.]

Chris: Right now, engineers generally look at the efficiency of solutions. My thirty year goal is to expand the considerations. E.g., suppose the democratic quotient or the egalitarian quotient were involved? We don’t have a lot of language for talking about this.

Zack: Why would a corporation do this?

Chris: They can do this in part because of the myth of the neutrality of technology.

Me: But “tech is neutral” is only a rationalization. If you could get the corporate mission to be enhance shareholder value AND make the world better, you wouldn’t have to worry about the rationalization.

Chris: But 18 year old engineers-to-be are taught that they don’t need to consider the effect of their tech on the world because they’ve been taught that tech is neutral.

Kaliya: You should read Engineering by Design…

[It continues...]

[Tags: foocamp06 technology politics]

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Julian Bleeker is interested in how first life and second life (with SecondLife.com as a good example) overlap.

E.g., he designed a game in which players got a word square (jumbled letters that contain words) that they had to track physically in a field, wired with GPS. Some decided instead to “draw” by walking in a path that created a picture.

Nikolaj Nyholm talks about how Imity.com uses Second Life to prototype user interactions.

Matt Bidulph has been doing Second Life mashups. You can use http, he says, to pipe out info from SecondLife, including what people are saying. Cory Ondrejka, Second Life CTO, says that there’s been an explosion of interest and development since they put in http requests. (Someday, he says, they’ll make every object a Web server.) He says that there are 100 classes a week inside Second Life in how to use the API and scripting language.He looks forward to the day when there is a Second Life renderer inside a Web browser.

Phillip Rosedale, Second Life founder, says that they’re a small development house. They’re focused on opening Second Life up and getting it to run fast.

Nikolaj says that it’ll be at least five years before we can programmatically and ubiquitously locate someone in terms of latitude.longitude based on their phone positions, but we can already (see Imity) see who is around a particular phone number. GPS will take that long to get put into cellphones because of battery life…

[Tags: foocampe06 second_life ]

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Mike Davidson of Newsvine.com opens by saying this is a time to talk about how to improve the editorial process. How to decide which stories are important and interesting without human intervention? E.g., Techmeme.com looks at what A-Listers and B-Listers are linking to, while Digg lets everyone vote.Newsvine measures how long you spend looking at a story.

Jay Adelson of Digg.com says he’d like to see the mainstream media reflect more of what people actually are interested in. Steven Levy of Newsweek worries that this would result in even more coverage of runaway brides, etc. Digg says that people tend not to digg porn, etc., because it’s associated with their profile. Dan Gillmor wonders how you add reputation to popularity.

Someone asks about journalism on demand. Dan says that some projects are going on now, including Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net. Fundable.org also does something like this.

Me: I want to get recommendations based on what my friends are reading and, as Dan points out, what friends of my friends are reading. Jay points to some people’s desire to be anonymous. Dan touts pseudonymity. Karl Fogel says that that permits covert corporate and government sponsorship. Dan asks how we out bad actors. Suggestions: eBay-like recommendation system. Newsvine has a probationary period. Slashdot karma.

Newsvine tried eBay-like ratings — report bad articles — but found that the best writers were about 80% because some people didn’t like what they said. The bland writers had 100%.

Me: The simple way to start is to let me build a list of people I actually know and whose judgment I want to influence what’s recommended to me. Then I don’t have to worry that the person is in fact the CIA or Wal-Mart.

Gabe Riviera of Techmeme is using the implicit social network based on who refers to whom.

Does Diig track how many people diig a page before they’e clicked on the article.Jay doesn’t quite answer.

If we only listen to people we trust, how do we get challenged?

Dan recommends newstrust.net, an effort to measure MSM.

Adrian Holovaty from the WashingtonPost.com is interested in optimizing information collection. How do we get journalists to collect information in ways that machines can reuse it. Newspapers are a collection of information desperate for a framework, while Wikipedia is a framework desperate for information, he says.

Graeme Merrall augments reporters’ stories with metadata.

Dan says there’s a difference between stories and data. Steven Levy says that without training journalists in how to write a story, the data won’t ever become a story.

Already, he says, journalism is becoming a matter of filling in forms and then letting computers build the story. E.g., at one small paper, there’s a visiting band form that the journalists fill in.

Dan points out that Adrian did an app that plotted police/crime info. [I missed the url.]

John Gruber points out that columnists are not so easily replaceable.

Dan rises to defend reporters. Reporting is hard than we’re making out.

Mike Davidson wonders if 5-10 years we’ll be able to say that we want to read a story about the new Apple, written in the style of John Gruber of Steven Levy, etc. He’s skeptical.

Lily Chen says that it depends a lot on what people care about. She cares about what happens on her street but no one is writing about. An automated system might be able to be of value there.

Karl Fogel says that people in the US feel isolated from worldwide news sources in part because there’s no translation. In the open source world, documentation has been translated within days, he says.

Jay wonders if info will continue to go behind the pay wall after a few days. General opinion in the room (actually, in the tent): Nope.

Rabble says that more journalists work as PR people than journalists. Dan says that we need more transparency. Mike of Newsvine says companies have offered to pay them to put their legitimate sources on their site. BestBuy has paid someone to write an article about, say, hot products, that contains a single quote from BestBuy. Newspapers run the article knowing that it’s in effect a paid placement. It’s labeled “ARA” but that’s the only sign.

Adrian says that the categorization onus should be on the reporter. All the info in it ought to be categorized so, if it’s a report on a mayor’s speech, we can see all the speeches by the mayor, all speeches about the same topic, etc.

Graeme points to Visionbytes.com for media search. AOL says that their Drambuie project does something similar. [Tags: journalism digg dan_gilmore newsvine techmeme washingtonpost citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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“Mechanical Turk” [Tags: foocamp06]

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FOO (Friends of O’Reilly) Camp is perhaps my favorite conference because it is more like a camp than a conference. Tim O’Reilly invites a couple of hundred people (it’s getting bigger as it gets older) for an unstructured 2.25 days. If you want to lead a session, you write it onto the paper-based wiki. The sessions are almost universally highly informal, and the structured ones tend to be well worth the structure. Plus, perhaps because there are something like a dozen simultaneous sessions, skipping one to hang out and talk with the incredible people here doesn’t seem like a lost opportunity because you were never going to see everything you should anyway.

Last night we began with the traditional introductions: One by one, everyone in a large room — a tent this year — stands up, says her name, affiliation, and three words. The intros ranged from the listing of technical areas to three-word world overviews. Although my perception is inevitably skewed, it seemed to me that this year there were more social activist technologists and more women.

So, here’s why I love FOO: Last night, after a looong drive up from Oakland, which the presence of Ron Hornbaker (Bookcrossing, Propsmart) as a passenger made seem short, I immediately went to the back lot to pitch my tent. By the time I made it onto the main backyard, I had had conversations with amazing people about digital rights in the UK, why evaluating to a curve suppresses productivity, open source politics, and the state of PR’s adapting to networked markets. All of these are for me listening topics, especially given the caliber of the people I got to listen to and ask questions of.

And there’s the rub. FOO is by invitation only. I feel privileged in both senses to be here. More than just feelings are at stake. Social networking inevitably happens at FOO. If FOO doesn’t make an effort to be diverse, the old boys will just naturally become better friends because they spent 2.25 days camping, eating and peeing together. O’Reilly has been making an effort to be more diverse. Enough? Nah. But what would be enough? As with any institution, they are stuck with a starting point that doesn’t fairly reflect the population’s talents. It’s not an easy problem. Taking it seriously, making steady progress, and always feeling that there’s more to do seems to me to be the requirement. Also, this year, campers were asked to list people they would like to be invited to next year’s FOO. Good idea.

There’s value to an invitation-only party, but it’s not the only sort of party we need. That’s why I’m so happy that the original FOO Camp spurred the invention of unbarred BAR camps that are structured like FOO but are open to anyone. There’s a place for both.

But I don’t trust my judgment because I so love being at FOO. Getting to hang out with this community — makers — is deeply satisfying to me. Deeply.

So, I’m feeling very happy to be here, and only a little guilty. [Tags: foocamp06 foo oreilly conferenza]

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Betsy Devine talks about “vandal waves,” usually precipitated by mainstream media attention on an article. She looks at how many of the edits are made by registered users and by anonymous users.

She talks about pgkbot, software that blocks inflammatory user names on IRC chats. How can that type of tech be used to block vandal waves, she asks? Not one person who edited Swiftboating on Nov. 29, 2005, not one went on to become a serious contributor (ten or more entries). Typical of a vandal wave: The time between edits by different users shrinks, and there’s a surge in the ratio of IPs to registered users.

She distinguishes vandal waves from spin waves. Spin waves are created by people trying to influence the media. These are harder to identify programmatically because they are paid, professional writers trying to disguise their work. (See paidToComment.com.)

She’d like to see Wikipedia’s anti-vandal tools made more user friendly. [Tags: wikimania2006 wikipediabetsy_devine]

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Florence Nibart Devouard is on the Wikimedia Foundation board. She talks about building in diversity.

She begins by giving a history of the foundation. Wikipedia started in January 2001. The Wikimedia Foundation began in the middle of 2003. She gives a detailed and interesting history.

Resolutions, she explains, need at least two members to approve the draft before it get svoted on. All is done in public.

The Foundation’s original mission statement says it’s about encouraging “the growth and development of open content, wiki-based, and multilingual projects.” It is not Wikipedia-specific. She points to other ways of putting it. E.g., “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” (She accompanies this with a photo of Jimmy Wales as a Jedi Knight.)

The board needs to see the big picture, in addition to specific expertise.

Issues: The organization is US-based but the community is international. The projects are run by voluneers. The organization does not own the content. Solutions: Balance appointed vs. elected board members to make sure that there are enough people who get the big picture. Set up an advisory board. And organize meetings all over the world.

There are also educational issues: The number of contacts to the outside world, other than Jimmy. Limited reporting overall. Only one board meeting in 2006. Solutions: Organize real life meetings, seek help from professionals or academics, study other orgs, require an annual survey by each board member, and require reports from committees.

Third issues: Being a team. Don’t allow a single personality to dominate the board, as happens now. Not all members participate equally. Solution: Expand the board with active members. Term limits. Hire a CEO. Set up committees. Have a conflict-of-interest policy. Share the workload.

fourth: Avoid win-lose situations. The chapters now are not branches but part of a federated oragnization. They don’t have the right to use the logos.

Where to go? Partnering? Does the Foundation lead, create, push, and/or support initiatives?

She ends by pointing to three editors who died recently because we should remain who makes Wikipedia.

[How many organizations are this forthright and transparent?] [Tags: wikimania2006 florence_nibart_devouard wikimedia]

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Wikipedia challenges the assumption that to create good information, someone has to be in charge and it needs certified experts, Mitch says. “The view people have of how the world has to work is just wrong.” People think Wikipedia can’t work because they assume it’s as hard to remove grafitti there as it is in the real world. But, he says, all this is what the attendees here already know. [As always, I am paraphrasing and paying attention to what happens to strike me.]

Now he talks about blogs vs. wikis. “I find blogs, especially political blogs, on the whole to be quite disappointing. To me, they’re the talk radio of the Internet.” The problem is that they’re a series of atomic utterances, one after another. Rather than building on one another, they’re like billiard balls. Blogs are about individual expression. They increase partisanship rather than increase thoughtful reflection. [Mitch’s got to find himself some new blogs to read.] But, with wikis, people work on the same entry and improve it.

“As a technologist, I had some unlearning to do when I entered the Wikipedia community” because the tools weren’t all that good. But, Jimmy Wales taught him that the “secret sauce” isn’t technology. It’s community. It’s the shared values: NPOV, being prepared to be edited, learning to make your opponent’s case. To become a Wikipedian is to internalize those values.

In the early years, he says, there were more articles in Wikipedia about Middle Earth than about Africa because the contributors were writing about what they knew about. This is no longer true. He talks about the importance of inclusiveness. But, he says, things could be better. E.g., the UI that shows you what’s changed in an article is obscure unless you’re pretty deep into it. Wikipedia needs to be easier to edit if it is to be inclusive. It looks ok to those who are already in the tent, but that’s a self-selected group. “If we want Wikipedia to succeed in its mission, we must find ways to lower the barriers to participation.” He applauds the efforts underway to do this. “I’d make it a major strategic priority for the community.”

Mitch recommends An Inconvenient Truth. [Me, too.] Politics as usual is broken. See campaigns.wikia.com to see what Jimmy Wales talked about in his keynote. Democracy as the experiment in enabling people to determine what’s best is at risk. “Wikipedia is an existence proof of the power of a decentralized and respectful self-governing community to make an impact.” It is an “inspiration for a political movement.” The key attributes should include:

Participatory.

Product and process intertwined. The product is a wiki and it uses the wiki to produce itself.

Aspiration to high standard of respectful dialog.

Citizens of equal stature with experts.

To most audiences, this idea would be absurd. Politics generally shuns facts and collaboration. “We need a political movement that does not practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia does not practice Britannica as usual.” It’s been done before: Gandhi. MLK. Mandela.

But, to succeed, we need an existence proof. We need new tools, especially ones that help us argue better. Argue fairly. That’s what the Wikipedia culture is good at. [Good point.]

There are no panaceas. In the real world, sometimes difficult decisions have to be made. Facts aren’t enough. The Iraq article in Wikipedia can’t conclude that we should or should not withdraw our troops. This political movement has to have core values. Mitch says he does not have an answer.

Q: If Wikipedia is the metaphor for a political movement, consider that Wikipedia doesn’t yet address the needs of the visually impaired. We don’t have volunteers to do this. How would we get the equivalent problems addressed in the political realm?
A: There are discussions going on about evolving wikis for the visually impaired. “I’m willing to put my oar in the water on that.” For the political movement, it’s like Wikipedia in 2001. We just need a few crazy people.

Q: How might Second Life support these movements? [Mitch is on the board.]
A: It’ll become a fabulous place for collaboration.

Q: Your key attributes are new for the production of knowledge, but they’re old hat in politics. At Wikipedia, there are relatively few active participants…
A: If there were lower barriers to editing, there would be more participants.

[Mitch’s intuition about a tool for fair argument leading to a movement works better, I think, if we assume there are only a handful of parties. But suppose we’re more fragmented than that? A fair argument forum might end as diverse as the blogosphere. They key would be, I think, providing a fair argument platform — an idea I like — that also enables us to come together in movements that accept a range of diversity. Fair arguments don’t always resolve, but we need an ethos that also does not see splintering as the alternative.]

[Tags: wikimania2006 wikipedia politics mitch_kapor]

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