Supernova 1006, NASA's Chandra X-ray ObservatoryContinuing my coverage of Supernova 2009 (see Changing Networks, Workplaces and the World), a "forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age", I further dive into my notes/musings from days 2 and 3:Going with the Flow (Real Time Flow Track with track chair Tantek Çelik)(Tim O'Reilly, Dick Costolo, Brett Slatkin, Monica Keller)Real-time information is becoming capillary, but the way in which it's provided is under great debate. The relationship between real-time information flow and technology/business decisions can greatly affect how we consume it. Tim O'Reilly raised questions of how the relationship will converge: "king of the hill or interoperable?".Brett argued that the debate has nothing to do with business needs - standards reduce costs. "I can write something once and change my provider at any time ... [it] has to do with how hard it is to interoperate". As most point out, a lot of the success of email came from its interoperability.Dick Costolo from Twitter discussed how they're spending a lot of time on APIs - making them better and more accessible. He spoke about current debates on if decentralization possible (at this point Blaine Cook, one of the original architects who no longer works at Twitter, spoke up from the audience: "Is it possible!? I built it!").But if you as a provider open everything up, do you then lose your competitive edge? For instance, Tim Berners-Lee compared to Google: Tim created the opportunity (the web) but didn't capture much of it. The panel explained that if you interoperate, the competition can focus on more interesting things and building them better. Tim O'Reilly chimed in, "companies who used to be "content bullies", like IBM and Microsoft, are now saying they like open source stuff because they now have the short end of the stick". Blaine Cook spoke up again and shared what Fred Wilson, an early Twitter investor, told him about being open: "You'll have a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie will be larger".Life in the 21st Century(Esther Dyson, Bernardo Huberman, Linda Stone)How is technology going to change us? Esther Dyson introduced the panel around this topic. Linda Stone discussed her latest endeavors in creating what she calls "zeitgeist mapping". Her work in continuous partial attention inspired her to start looking at 20-year social trends as a way of providing clues to other social shifts. By looking into what products were being created and selling well, she plotted them to look for "shifts in dominant mass consciousness attention paradigm". She argued that her data showed 1985-2005 was all about social networks and as an extreme of being "highly connected" 2005-present is all about security, trust and quality of life due to being overwhelmed and unfulfilled. I personally disagreed with this analysis - while Linda's data may be accurate, the analysis to me seemed to be making huge leaps of assumptions that weren't explained incrementally (though, it should be noted this was a short top-level talk rather than an in-depth walk-through). Another point I disagreed with was how "Twitter started primarily as noise and it is increasingly signal". I believe it would be more accurate to convey that Twitter primarily has remained the same, but the number of people realizing the value (signal) in it has grown exponentially through word of mouth and storytelling.The panel continued on to discuss concepts about how technology is accelerating faster than humans can. Though, again, I'd argue that a lot of these concepts are more about cultural acceptance of technology and connected-behaviors as opposed to needing to "re-wire" our brains.The rest of the presentation talked a lot about attention and attention as a currency. "Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit - attention also defines a culture or a community," said the panelists. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Peter Merholz' tweet from the session: "We've been talking "attention economy" since 2001. let's move the conversation forward here. #sn09"Frontiers of Real Time Collaboration(David Weinberger, Jason Shellen, Paul Lippe, Laura Fitton, Deborah Schultz, Anna-Christina Douglas)This was an interesting session to attend, as there seemed to be a lot of people in the audience who were passionate to hear what these people had to say about real-time collaboration. I believe the panelists wanted to discuss collaboration as well, but oddly the talk veered way off course - spending the majority of the time talking about Twitter. After Twitter was discussed for several minutes, the talk continued to simply discuss tools (like Google Wave) but spent no time discussing collaboration or concrete examples of how real-time tools can produce successful collaboration. At the tail end of the talk, I raised my hand and said that they had focused a lot on the tools but not anything on collaboration and asked how these tools are helping people overcome current challenges they face in trying to collaborate. I didn't receive much of an answer, but after the session, I received apologies from the panelists and thank you's from audience members who felt my same slight frustration. While the panel got off course, it was valuable to me to see how many people cared about discussing the subject. I have a deep personal interest in this area, which is why I organized an upcoming panel for SXSW 2010 called Open Collaboration Between Scientists, Communities and the Unknown. I very much am looking forward to discussing issues/successes around open collaboration more!Attendee Roundtables(Brad Templeton, Crystal Y.)These were quick rapid-fire 10 minute talks on a wide range of subjects from Supernova attendees. I don't have much other than a link and a couple insights to share from it:Brad Templeton from the EFF talked about robo-cars: http://robocars.netCrystal Y. (a high school student) shared some insights on her experiences with online communities. She explained that it's annoying to be private on social networks because then you don't allow people with similar interests to be able to connect with you. She also talked about how kids don't focus on "being careful about what you say online" (a common characterization adults place on today's children) - that actually they focus on "talking about what they stand for online to represent them" (a more positive outlook that aligns with a lot of danah boyd's research). One of the insightful quotes I most enjoyed from Crystal was "Whenever I read articles that say "teens don't use Twitter" it really annoys me".
Supernova 2009: Changing Neworks, Workplaces and the World
Supernova E0102, NASA's Chandra X-ray ObservatoryI had the pleasure of being invited back to attend Supernova this year. Supernova is "the only forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age". The conference is a solid event to attend for a few reasons: quality networking with well accomplished people, hearing reflections on the state of everything from people who have been in the computing/web industry since the 80's and 90's, oh, and, power cords and wifi that works from every seat.Diving into my notes/musings from day 1 of the conference:The Changing World(danah boyd, Adam Greenfield)Looking into how the world around us (both offline and online) is changing as a result of social technology, danah boyd and Adam Greenfield shared incredibly fascinating research and concrete examples of the relationship between people, things, data and connectivity.danah's presentation focused intensely around the topic of visibility - that digitally "only when we choose to look, do we see". You only get a sense of what certain spaces are online based on what you choose to consume. On Twitter, you set your norms based off who you follow, not who follows you. As a result, danah states that there are divergent understandings of what digital norms are based on where you are in the network. Not surprisingly, there are huge differences in how people use the same services. A big example is Twitter's trending topics, which has forced a lot of users to see spaces they didn't choose to see (e.g. domination of different ethnicities than the ones they follow, obsession with pop culture, using Twitter for different purposes, etc.).She then discussed real world challenges and opportunities that exist from choosing to look. While kids may post things online that make adults uncomfortable, the posts can also be used as an opportunity to have an open discussion about how to decide what to put online, etc. There are also a lot of kids who are expressing their need for help to their social networks. Often times their peers aren't equipped with resources to help and the parents and counselors aren't choosing to participate or look in these social networks, so they're missing chances to help those who are emotionally troubled and don't know what to do/where to go.Changing from people to public objects, Adam took the stage and kicked off with the fact that 50% of the world's population now live in urban environments. In the near future, sensors will be embedded all around us, conditioning the possibilities of urban space. With IPv6, everything in our world can become addressable. This would create an entirely new way of reading cities and spaces. Adam explained that the data for these objects has always been here, but we haven't had access to it before: "entire existences are retrievable in ways they never were before ... the public has the right to benefit from this open data". Adam also was sure to make the point that it's not just about consuming data, but also contributing to it. As Usman Haque once said (and I find this quote to be very relevant to my efforts in Spacehack.org), "I don't care so much about making the data public. I care about the public making the data."(Note: if I come across a link to the deck Adam presented, I'll put it here, as it contained a lot of concrete project examples that clarified some of his main points)Changing Networks(Jonathan Zittrain)As always, Zittrain's presentations (rants?) are filled with energy. His words to Amazon and Apple about their control-freak-ways were to the point (and tangentially reminded me of Tim O'Reilly's War For the Web."You can't code to your Kindle - you can't open it and spread [your stuff] to other Kindles," exclaimed Zittrain. A statement that reminds me of a quote that often pops up in Matt Biddulph's talks from the Maker's Bill of Rights: "if you can't open it, you don't own it".Zittrain went on to talk about how Steve Jobs doesn't want to give you the freedom to screw up the iPhone experience like you can screw up a Windows box. Apple then saw everyone jail-breaking their phones, so they created a software development kit, but even then everything has to be funneled through the app store - which is known for denying things as silly as an Android-eye app from its store. This is incredibly frustrating as a developer - you have a piece of software that you wrote and you want to give it to your friends, but you can't unless Apple identifies and approves you.The presentation then pulled up a quote from Steve Jobs saying "what's the point?" in reply to why he denied a funny political app from the store. Zittrain argued that most technological advancements come from someone who would originally say "what's the point" - like people did with Twitter and Wikipedia - and that the app store stops 'whats' the point' creations from happening/spreading.Social Networks in the Workplace(Denise Howell, Alex Macgillivray, Kerry Krzynowek, Gabe Ramsey)I started the morning off with this session (part of the legal track for the conference). The panel discussed how obviously social networks in the workplace has still not reached a comfortable point. The informality and immediacy of communications makes people uncomfortable. As a result, companies often react off of fear and create policies and expected social norms that are short-sighted and misguided. This topic is obviously near and dear to me after I was banned from using social networks at my job at NASA last year."If we could duct tape everyone's mouth there would be no risks, but you take these risks all the time - this is nothing new," stated one of the legal panelists.Alex Macgillivray, the General Counsel of Twitter, explained that he really appreciated Google's policy approach to the subject by just telling the employees "don't be dumb". Throughout the panel, this was brought up as a good solution. I have to agree. While the panel was lacking the viewpoint of an employee's perspective on all of this (most just focusing on the employer's point-of-view), the "don't be dumb" policy is groundbreaking in this time of fear culture in that it respectfully treats employees like adults rather than untrustworthy liabilities.