Category: Open

Transforming the Way We Work, Innovate and Learn

The WORK/LEARN track at Lift 11 is subtitled: Transforming the way we work, innovate and learn. From the introduction:

What will the XXIst-century organization look like: A network, a nebula, or a process-based system where everything is standardized and measured? How can these two cultures, these two ways of producing and of innovating, work together? And, since education seems to have changed far less than most of society, how can we prepare for a world where we all learn continuously and ubiquitously?

Geoff Mulgan is Chief Executive at Nesta, a funding body for science, and talks about Openness and collective intelligence, its prospects and its challenges.

According to him people have different perspectives on networks. People predicted networks would lead to big brother states and corporations and fascistic organizations, whereas other said it would flatten hierarchies. The truth is, networks do both. We need to learn how to navigate the balance of openness and closure.

He thinks we will need to develop three different strategies to do the following:

  • Stop the abuses of networked technology
  • Infect and embrace the hierarchies
  • Grow the new

Who shows the example of Who Owns My Neighbourhood and Sutton Bookshare. He is interested in depth rather than breadth in relationships. Another project he is involved with is the Action for Happiness website, giving people science based advice on how to be happy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc6WW1GGjbk]

Next he focuses on some methodological solutions to make progress in solving the problems mentioned above. One is social innovation camps, another is I do ideas where you people can get a grant not by filling in a grant request form, but by posting a video.

He uses some Hegelian thinking to frame the problem. If “Hierarchy” is the “Thesis” and “Open Networks” are the “Antithesis”, then what is the “Synthesis”? There are testing out the model by means of a Global Innovation Academy with pilots in many countries.

He leaves us with his advice on what we need. We need fast and slow, we need always on, but also often off and we need open as well as closed. He doesn’t have the answer on how to do these things and realizes we are in a time of heavy experimentation.

Edial Dekker is the CEO of Gidsy a marketplace for authentic experiences. He is of Hack de Overheid (Hack the government) fame. His talk is titled Trusted networks and the rise of the micro-entrepreneur.

According to Edial we are in trouble: we are in the slowest economic recovery since the 30s, we will run out of natural resources and we are at peak globalization. He sees all kinds of initiatives that are trying to tackle these problems from the bottom up and are getting a lot of traction. Examples are The School of Life or How to Homestead, a community that tries to help you become self-sufficient, or the Betahaus a very successful makers-lab in Berlin. He could give endless examples of empowering technologies allowing people to share resources in a different way.

He aligns his argument with Robin Chase, where these new collaborative platform are very scalable and capable of making use of the excess capacity. He quotes Kevin Kelly who says that “Access is better than ownership”:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grKn_xzu-5M]

Currently he is raising money for his start up. The question that always comes up from investors is: “How big is your market?”. He didn’t really know how to answer that question. So he asked his advisers at Etsy who told him that when they started there was no market for handmade items. They created a market that wasn’t there before. Jyri Engeström invented the concept of “Social objects” to describe this.

He finished by giving some tips:

  • Make your product as human as possible (Rob Kalin of Etsy)
  • It start with chips and end with trust (Kevin Kelly)
  • Unmute the web (Alex & Eric from Soundcloud)
  • Don’t solve problems, pursue opportunities

The final speaker in this track is the Finnish Ville Keränen, a “geek and learning designer” at Monkey Business (check out their site, the tag line is “More action. More chaos. More mistakes. More learning.”). He must be the best branded speaker of the event, taking his sun-glassed banana everywhere and wearing yellow pants. His talk has the title: From Team Academy to the future: Building organizations for humans.

He first asks us to get up and give each other a “tender and dynamic greeting”.

For Ville it is all about people, courage and fun and well-being. He feels we are sometimes a bit too serious in the way we work. He quotes Tom Peters who said “I would have done some real cool stuff, but my boss didn’t allow me”. He then shows a quite incredible youtube video in which a Finnish ice hockey player show exactly the right behaviors you need:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1E3dSCf23A]

Some key concepts from the team academy: you enter the academy and start a company with a team of people on day one (even without a business idea). There are no simulations, only real projects. There are no lectures, but there is lots of dialog. There are no teachers, but team coaches instead. There are no exams, only team companies. There are no grades, but real clients. One of the goals is to make a trip around the world with the money you have made (if you made enough money).

There are few learning principles behind the team academy. Learners learn what they want to learn (constructivism). Learning is always situational and contextual. Learning is social and happens in a community. I believe that in my company we are relatively good at the second principle, but have a lot to learn about the first and third principles.

Team Academy is now expanding rapidly. Their challenges are currently how to lead a global network, how to think big and how to expand to domains outside of business? One thing that they are doing well is capturing the excess capacity of their students.

Who needs to become “smart” in tomorrow’s cities?

Transforming abandoned oil platforms into ocean mini cities
Transforming abandoned oil platforms into ocean mini cities

The first true theme of the conference is Urban, who needs to become smart in tomorrow’s cities. From the introduction:

We want cities to become greener, safer, more competitive, more inclusive, more vibrant or easier to move in. To achieve that takes more than great engineering and determined leadership, yet this is what most models of “smart cities” are built around. It requires trust and collaboration, the deliberate sharing of urban (hardware, software, informational) resources, open innovation ecosystems, empowerment policies… How will we achieve smart and open cities that could be livable?

Saskia Sassen is talking about The future of smart cities. Her research question is how much of the new technologies are truly urbanised. The cities is not just the materialities, it also is the people, the practices, etc. This means that the city can “talk back” and there is a notion “cityness”.

What would it mean to do open source urbanism? What would it mean if we start to think of the city as the hacker? Incompleteness is her foundational image for the future of the city because the concepts of the user don’t align with the concepts of the engineer.

I thought it was unfortunate that Sassen did not develop her thoughts further than these large broad philosophical strokes. This was in stark contract with the next speaker: Adam Greenfield runs a shop in New York called Urbanscale. His talk is titled: On public objects: connected things and civic responsibilities in the networked city. He prefers the term “network city” over “smart city”).

He is inspired by Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city. In our current networked city we have become an instrumented population. There is a strong spread of locative and declarative media. Increasingly we live among declarative objects (see Tom Armitage’s project of the talking Tower bridge).

We are surrounded by objects that can process information and “speak” to us leading to new modes of surveillance based on information gathering objects. What might it mean to speak of our right to the networked city. Maybe we need a new theory of public objects to help us think about them?

Greenberg show examples of a couple of technologies that are used in urban settings to get at a “taxonomy of effects” and a first start at thinking about the morality of objects:

  • Välkky traffic sensors are non objectionable: there is local collection with a local effect and a clear public good.
  • The Nikon advertisement that is “paparazzi billboard” is mildly disruptive: there is local collection and local effect, but there is no public good and slight disruption.
  • The Acure touchscreen vending unit is gathering information about you and tries to discern your age and your gender and then present you with the right proposition. This is a prescriptive and normative non-urban technology. This is local collection with global effect and no public good: the data is analysed and used to change the propositions.
  • Quividi (“he who watches”) VidiReports video analytics suite is a technology that records people as they pass by billboards and tracks their attention. Vidireports is leeching value of the cityscape. This technology is predictive and prospectively normative. Greenfield is actively trying to influence government to legislate against this type of technology.

Greenfield then gives a definition of the public objects. They should be designed in such a way that they are open and easily available. This has some problems: we are enormously increasing the “attack surface”. We also don’t have the etiquettes and protocols of precedence and deconfliction. But the aspirations are big though: among other things it could be a physical manifestation of the public sphere.

Next up was Alain Renk talking about Unlimited cities. He talked in French which was simultaneously translated. This setup made it very hard for me to both pay attention to the talk and blog. According to him we are confronted by a trend of standardisation of urban environment and it is very difficult to develop “urbadiversity”.

Robin Chase gave an incredibly inspiring talk about people-(em)powered platforms.

Some examples of people-(em)powered platforms are meetup and Etsy, Waze, Airbnb or Couchsurfing. This stuf is powerful: Intercontinental built 4400 hotels in 60 years, whereas Couchsurfing has 1.2m “couches” in 8 years (twice the volume of Intercontinental).

The economics are sustainable: I put my excess capacity into a common platform. This can grow very fast (low financial risk) because now the common platforms are completely scalable. This is a much more efficient use of resources. It is a dematerialisation: so more service than asset and it is focused and collaborative consumption. Put another way: ownership will not be the higher status consumption.

Chase has now started buzzcar (they have an app), a way for people to share their cars. It uses a collectively built infrastructure that is collaboratively financed where end users gain financially. Doing it like this she doesn’t have to wait for government or private companies, instead she has “auto-preneurs” putting their cars into the system. See here for a video explaining the concept. This way one well-used shared car can be used by 30-50 people. Some of these people will sell their car so one well-used shared car equals about 15-20 cars and can save 40-60 parking spaces.

This type of collaboratively built infrastructure will create the people’s city. Rather than having centralized or decentralized systems you now get distributed robust and resilient systems. We can finally have a future where there is scale without the homogenisation that this would usually bring.

The final talk is by Frédéric Mazzella. He has created a new way of carpooling and talked about how car-pooling can help forecast car traffic. Covoiturage.fr has 1.2 million members. By using people’s intentions of where they want to go when, they can forecast traffic (he showed a nice visualisation of this).

Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2011: I Will Participate

Mining Social Networks (The Economist)
Mining Social Networks (The Economist/Andy J. Miller)

George Siemens has written about the upcoming Learning and Knowledge Analytics 2011 course (#lak11). After reading the very interesting draft syllabus I have decided to actively participate. This means you should be seeing reflections about the course in this very blog soon. The dedicated Moodle site for the course asks participants to introduce themselves and write about their course expectations. I have posted the following:

I am a 34 year old guy from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I work as the “Innovation Manager for Global Learning Technologies” at Shell International (at the headquarters in The Hague). Before this job I was heavily involved with the Moodle project as an e-learning consultant working for the Dutch Moodle Partner (Stoas Learning). Before that I was a teacher at a high school in Amsterdam (I taught PE and project based education).

I love technology and am deeply interested in how it affects society. One of my business cards uses my favourite quote (from Yochai Benkler): “Technology creates feasibility spaces for social practice” (see here for more context). To me, this open course is an example too of a practice enabled by technological possibilities.

My blog can be found at http://blog.hansdezwart.info and you should also find links to my other social networking presences there. I try to blog regularly and what I write on this course is here.

I intend to actively participate in this course. For me this means:

  • Spending time to read and annotate all the course materials during my commute (1.5 hours each way) on my iPad.
  • Writing reflections at least once a week on my blog
  • Doing all the suggested activities and participate actively in the Moodle forums.
  • Try to attend the weekly live Elluminate sessions (if the timezone agrees with my schedule) or at least watch the recordings.

If I manage to the above, then the course will be a success for me. The topic is inherently fascinating to me and I would love to be helped with how learning and knowledge analytics could help my professional practice.

Looking forward to meeting other participants and learning together!

It would be great if some of my readers would also be able to join!

5 Things I Cannot Live Without

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. For this post we agreed to write about things we cannot live without. The restriction is that the things should have a hierarchical relationship where the lowest level of hierarchy is the microprocessor and the highest level is the Internet. Each thing should be described in 100 words. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Please don’t take the title of this post too literally: yes, even I realise that I will be able to live without these things. Instead consider this a tribute to these five things. Also be aware that the title is not “The 5 Things I Cannot Live Without”, there are many other things that I find way more useful and crucial (think bed, dishwasher, etc.).

So here goes, in a loose hierarchy from local to global:

Microprocessor
CC licensed by Flickr user Stéfan

1. The Microprocessor
What do you know about the microprocessor? If it as much as I used to, then it will be very little! Did you know that the first microprocessors appeared in the early seventies and that they were mostly used for calculators? Did you know that their capacity follows Moore’s law? Did you know that microprocessors not only integrated in computers, but also in cars, toasters, TVs, dishwashers (again!) and most other electrical equipment with some advanced functionality? Finally, did you know the Wikipedia article for Microprocessors needs additional citations and references? Why don’t you get to work and fix it?

2. My iPhone
I don’t think I have yet waxed lyrical about my iPhone. First of all I am late to the party: I have only bought one last December. This is because I resisted buying a closed down Apple product for as long as possible. I really really wanted to buy an Android phone, but all the ones that I tried were seriously less capable than the iPhone. So why is it that much better? Because thought has been put into every single element of the software and hardware design. Nothing is accidental, everything is considered. No other company is there yet.

3. Xs4all
My Internet provider is XS4ALL. There are a couple of reasons why this will be the case for the foreseeable future (even though their price/speed ratio is not competitive):

4. Google Services
Over the last couple of years I have come to rely more and more on Google’s services. So much so that it has become increasingly hard to even list all the Google services that I have an account for or use regularly otherwise. As an excercise I have used this Wikipedia page to list all the products I use regularly (on Ubuntu or iPhone): Chrome, Sketchup, Gears, Calendar, Gmail, Product Search, Reader, Apps, Feedburner, Youtube, OpenSocial, Maps, Aardvark, Alerts, Translate, Groups, Image Search, Scholar, Web search, Analytics, Gapminder, Trends and Zeitgeist. Couldn’t be bothered to link them all: Google them!

5. The Internet
It is a cliché to call the Internet a “game changer”. However, it cannot be denied that it is the most disruptive technology out there. It creates feasibility spaces for social practice (thank you Benkler) and it forces you to rethink traditional ways of doing things. In the field of educational technology for example it has led to, among other things, new course paradigms, an Edupunk movement and deep critiques of the learning function. We cannot fathom what the near future of the Internet will look like as the pace of change is continually accelerating. I cannot wait for it!

P.S. This post was inspired by Techcruch’s Products I Can’t Live Without.

Mozilla and the Open Internet

The Mozilla Foundation
The Mozilla Foundation

For some reason I have recently equated the Mozilla foundation to Firefox. Sitting in the Mozilla room at Fosdem for a couple of hours has cured me of that.

Mitchell Baker, chairperson of the Mozilla foundation, talked about the right for self-determination on the Internet. She explained that having a completely open (meaning free as in freedom)  stack to access the Internet does not necessarily mean that you have ownership over your digital self. There is a tendency for web services on the net to be free as in free beer (think Facebook), without giving users true ownership of their data. Mozilla has started a couple of projects to try and move the open spectrum away from the internet accessing device to the net. Trying to make sure that at least one slice of the net is open. Mozilla Weave is an example project that aligns with this goal. I really like the fact that Weave does client side encryption of all data and that it is offered as a service by Mozilla but can also be installed locally.

Tristan Nitot then talked about “hackability”. He actually doesn’t like to use that word because it has negative connotations for the media. What he means with it is “generativity” (see The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It), but that word is even harder to understand. His argument was relatively simple though: vendors aren’t always creative imagining what their products can be used for. The telephone, for example, was thought to be used mainly for listening to opera music. It is important that people are allowed to play with technology, because that is where innovation comes from. Tristan finished his talk with a slide with the following text: “Hackability is getting the future we want, not the one they are selling us.”

Paul Rouget then demoed a couple of very interesting hacks using Firefox with Stylish, Greasemonkey and some HTML5 functionality. A lot of his work can be found at on the Mozilla Hacks site. An example is this HTML5 image uploader:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/wbSoSCStodA]

Finally we had Robert Nyman introduce HTML5 to us. I thought it was interesting to see that it was Mozilla, Apple and Opera that started the WHATWG and got the work on creating the HTML spec started. Their work will be very important (for example, it might mean the end for Flash) and should make a lot of web designer’s lives less miserable. Robert’s presentation is on Slideshare:

[slideshare id=3089690&doc=an-introduction-to-html5-fosdem-100206103609-phpapp02]

Some things will be much easier in HTML5: what caught my eye were some new elements (allowing more semantic richness, e.g. elements like <header> or <aside>), the new input types which can include client-side validation and the new <video> and <canvas> elements.

Finally I would like to point you towards the Mozilla Manifesto. This is the introduction to the document which is available in many languages:

The Mozilla project is a global community of people who believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet. We have worked together since 1998 to ensure that the Internet is developed in a way that benefits everyone. As a result of the community’s efforts, we have distilled a set of principles that we believe are critical for the Internet to continue to benefit the public good. These principles are contained in the Mozilla Manifesto.

Mozilla has endeared me again. Cool people, great projects, an important cause.