dan mcquillan's List: social computing IS52026B - lecture 15

• 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems  and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer  to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet  Users' Glossary, usefully amplifies this as: A person who  delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a  system, computers and computer networks in particular.
• 7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively  overcoming or circumventing limitations.

• One detail about the camp really bothered me – the campfire and the pile of firewood nearby. At the center of the camp is a pictureque wood fire with a cooking pot. You’re encouraged to sit on the huge fallen tree trunk and contempl ate the posters and images that surround you. I kept getting distracted by the big tree stump holding a lantern and the pile of logs as thick as my avatar’s legs.

   

  Firewood is a major problem in Darfur’s refugee camps. There’s not much firewood in Darfur to start with. There’s little or no firewood left near refugee camps – refugees routinely walk five to ten kilometers from the camps to collect fuel. If men leave the camps to forage for firewood, they run a very real risk of being killed by militants or soldiers. If women forage, they run the very real risk of being raped. So families engage in a terrible calculus – sending young girls out in the hopes that they’ll neither be raped nor killed. Yoo-Mi Lee and Mark Jacobs are giving workshops in Darfur to help women cook with less fuel so they can reduce their trips outside the camps, exposing themselves to danger. In Mark and Yoo-Mi’s pictures, you’ll see small, thin sticks, not huge piles of firewood…
• Au reports that a group of Second Lifers who enjoy portraying comic-book characters – the Green Lantern Core – decided to patrol “Camp Darfur” and prevent future griefer damage. Their intervention wasn’t opposed by the Sudanese government, didn’t require the UN to organize a blue-helmeted security force and didn’t require US troops… if only it were so easy to solve problems in this life.

• The opportunity is the construction of a civic space in where citizens talk to each other, rather than to the state.
• If you are stuck in a computer game, what do you do? Gamers today – and remember around three in ten people play computer games – will go to a gaming community online, and ask others for advice. They will almost always find someone willing to help them overcome the challenge. Other gamers will help for a variety of reasons: they may get respect for their knowledge; their standing in the community will improve; or they may simply be in a good mood that day. But mostly they do it on the principle of reciprocity.
• Common in social capital ^↑ literature, reciprocity means nothing less than you scratch my back, I will scratch yours.
• What you definitely do not do when stuck in a computer game (or how to load it, or how to make it work better) is e-mail the software designer and ask them to make the game easier or better. Yet this is precisely the current British government’s strategy for e-democracy. Got a problem? Go take part in an impenetrable consultation exercise that might, in some distant way, improve the system. Not exactly a hot selling proposition.

• Napster, the music file sharing system, was an application that allowed you to download music. It was developed by a 19-year-old called Shawn Fanning.  

   Fanning’s story ^↑ is internet folklore. A young techy gets an idea. After a considerable amount of time spent in his bedroom, he developed an application that would allow others like him, albeit illegally, to swap compressed music files. It took off, and the music industry will never be the same again.
• The website Meetup ^↑ is a good example of civic hacking. It is not an application as such, but it is based on much the same idea. The site allows people with common interests to meet up with each other.

• The question is simple: what is the ethic of e-democracy? What is the underlying principle that should guide us in this process of development? The current consensus is that money and time should be spent developing new ways of allowing citizens to interact with parliament and the state. It claims that representation is the ethic of e-democracy. I disagree.  

   Marshal McLuhan’s dictum was: “The medium is the message”. At base, this means that certain media, or mediums, are good at doing different things. The internet is peculiarly effective at connecting groups of people together. In fact, this is what it does best.  

   So, a sensible strategy would start on this principle. But the people it should be connecting are not citizens and parliamentarians, or voters and civil servants. It should be connecting ordinary people with other ordinary people. And there should be applications that help these people to help each other. A programme supporting civic hacking can do this.
• This should become the ethic of e-democracy: mutual-aid and self-help among citizens, helping to overcome civic problems. It would encourage a market in application development. It would encourage self-reliance, or community-reliance, rather than reliance on the state.

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• the common question might be: yes but what did they make and what happened next?

   

  My response to that is that you are jumping the gun.
• one veteran of the Rewired State hack days was at this weekends’ hactivate event. He spent the weekend coding a composting app, it’s cool, you can see it and many more here. But the big thing for him was spending 1.5 hours playing with a web server, in peace, legitimately, on a Sunday (and learning).
• Another group (and this is usual for a hack weekend) were hack day virgins, and have adopted the amaze-balls face of pride at what they can actually build when challenged by time (hack days are ruthless) as well as taking home the contact details of the colleagues who are as talented as themselves, at other stuff.
• One developer gave himself this hack weekend as a Father’s day present. To have a weekend to spend with his peers, although coding was his day job, to work on his own projects, surrounded by like-minded awesomes, fed, watered – that’s the point.
• Most developers will leave a hack day with new knowledge or at least new contacts, that can lead to extending their ability to deliver the awesomeness.
• It’s probably fair to say that most would not admit to being so excited by the non-coder audience blinking at what they have managed to create in a two-day period, nor the prizes showered upon them.
• Gifting your idea/API/bit of kit and enabling some free time for developers to engage with and over said idea/API/bit of kit. Yes of course you will get any number of good prototypes and even working applications – but better you will get to meet a number of developers, showing off their skills and often their newly acquired ones – this is really as rare as hen’s teeth (usually because they are fully employed fulfilling other peoples’ ambitions) engaging over a dedicated period, with peers they may not have yet met, over your technology or challenge
• The thing I have noted today after Hactivate is that the sponsors are actually dedicated to seeing the apps go beyond the hack day. The winning app was one built to try to address human trafficking, and it was created to make the interface so simple that anyone could take it up without needing access to anything too technical; then we could crowdsource peoples’ safety.
• However the geeks who thought it needed to happen and were so passionate about beating human trafficking that they spent their weekend building an application to make people a little bit more safe, found it hard to adjust to the jump of someone actually taking it on and helping make it happen (within 24 hours). Possibly because they had been coding non-stop for 24 hours, presenting to Press, sponsors and co-hackers – more probably because they were not used to their ideas being taken up so strongly and immediately by the kind of brands that can really make it a reality.

• And so…

   

  The point of a hack day for a developer is to be with like-minded people, work on your own stuff, learn and be celebrated; for the rest of us, it is to create the environment for magic to happen.
• Maybe in the next few years they may become simply about the prototype, but I hope that day is a long way off. The point is developers, living and learning from each other in an environment that is created by you: the challenger.

• Finally…

   

  As ever, my cry is: please, do not take the piss, developers are for life not just for your *next million* or *save the world* idea. They are an asset to be cherished and nurtured and they do not necessarily always value the same things you do. It is rarely money or jobs – most developers are awash with job offers, and extra-curricular *cash* offers.

• please don’t ask me what my favourite app is that was ever built at a hack day! I can’t tell you, I have no idea. I do however now know 200+ developers whom I would be able to call in a heartbeat, and know their skills, passions and talents – but I would never sell them to anyone.

   

  Developers are a talent to be nurtured in our open data and open society world. Hack days respect this and act as breathing spaces for devs.

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• Tim O'Reilly recently opened the Web 2.0 conference by asking entrepreneurs to solve bigger problems.
• I'm vastly disappointed in the moral and strategic bankruptcy of today's crop of venture investors and so-called revolutionaries.

• There are huge shocks rolling across the global economic landscape. Here are just a few. Food prices are skyrocketing. The financial system is melting down. Energy, of course, is more and more toxic, and costly. We are all, make no mistake, dancing on the precipice of economic cataclysm.

    

  It is the obligation of radical innovators to create new value by solving these problems - or cede capital and resources to those who can.

    

  But today's revolutionaries are sheep in wolves' clothing. They're lost in the economically meaningless, in the utterly trivial, in the strategically banal: mostly, they're cutting deals with one another to...try and sell more ads.

• It's a betrayal as deep, perhaps, as that of Wall Street. Not just of those across the globe who are suffering - but also, in the sterile language of yesterday's economics, of their own limited partners and shareholders.

    

  Why? Simple: given their magnitude, it's by solving exactly these problems that the most explosive amounts of new value can be created.
• Today's crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today's deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.
• And that's why the failure to address these problems is a strategic bankruptcy as well. The self-indulgence of today's so-called revolutionaries in a darkening economic twilight is a recipe for strategic suicide.
• So here's my challenge. If you're a revolutionary, then be one: put your money where your mouth is, and fix a big problem that changes the world for the better - if you really have the courage, the purpose, and the vision, that is.

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