Blob
>the personal blog of david n wallace
[aka Dave the Lifekludger]

Saw via twitter a friend of mine, who happens to sing beautifully, had found karaoke on My Space. So I went to listen.

Dave

Technorati Tags: ksolo, myspace

Cross posted from Lifekludger blog

I read with interest my good mate, Hugo Ortega’s UberTablet blog. Hugo was the very first guest on our Extraordinary Everyday Lives podcast and, outside of my regular colleagues, has been the single biggest supporter of my Lifekludger endeavours, and indeed myself, in a substantial way – providing equipment to try with my mouthstick especially.
So as I read in his latest blog post about how he’s been snowed under with the things he’s been doing to promote all things Tablet in Australia I’m reminded of what Mike keeps telling me and what we’ve been trying to avoid with Lifekludger.

People Don’t Scale – Networks Do.

But it pays to remember I’m talking about people here when I refer to Networks. Maybe it’s better stated:

People Don’t Scale – People Networks Do.

Hugo has found that he’s become a bottle neck – we each only have 24 hours in our day. It’s a lesson we need to heed in this age of exponential growth in available information and rapidly advancing technological growth, if we are to somehow turn it into knowledge and practical outcomes that can benefit and grow us as people enriched by the age we live in rather than enslaved by it.

Just how we grow a network that can scale and how we can do that while keeping the true to the spirit of why the network exists is another matter. It’s an issue that seems to be evolving at the same time as the rest of the technical issues are that are underpinning it. Maybe why we are seeing such attention paid to social networks.

The answer though cannot lie back in the centralised past as centralisation creates bottlenecks. It can’t rest on one point of contact, a single node. The end goal might be node focused but that doesn’t have to mean node centred.
Maybe, like so many other things, the answer lays buried somewhere in the natural world, the small pieces [people] loosely joined [network], the strength of the geo-desic dome, in the triangle of abundant, heterogeneous, creative people – the ecosystem of humanity.

Connection and Openness.

An human ecosystem based on connection and openness [sharing], focused on a node. That’s the Lifekludger vision.

Dave

Reference (from Mike coming out of discussion with JP) :

ABUNDANCE: speaks to the post scarcity world of the internet – where the cost of storage and distribution approach zero, some very different rules kick in. Kinda crucial to the longtail and the jewels therein.

CREATIVITY: coming up with new ways of doing stuff – sometimes just for the pure fun of it. Whether solving a problem or scratching an itch. Either way, leave your past solutions and old habits at the door. You are not a mindless, replaceable unit of production here!

I was awake at 3.30am to take part in the Second Life talk that’s part of this forum: (why do I do these things…)

Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities

This two-part, interactive event will take place in two locations online:

First, the live discussion in the virtual world of Second Life at 9am PST
The follow-up discussion will take place for the rest of the day, 10AM PST- 6PM PST, in TechSoup’s Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum at: <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>
Event Schedule:

9 AM PST in the Nonprofit Commons Amphitheater in Second Life.

Simon Stevens (aka Simon Walsh in Second Life) <http://www.simonstevens.com> will be speaking about his work in Second Life. Simon Walsh is chief executive of Enable Enterprises which manages the Wheelies nightclub for people with disabilities in Second Life and the Second Ability Second Life simulator. In real life, Simon has cerebral palsy and lives in Coventry, UK. He is a disability consultant and trainer working with many organizations large and small.

Simon will give a virtual talk via text chat in the Nonprofit Commons amphitheater, in the virtual world of Second Life

10AM PST- 6PM PST –the follow-on discussion will continue in an all-day, asynchronous (not-live) forum on TechSoup. This event will occur in a question and answer format in the TechSoup Accessible Technology & Public Computing forum <http://www.techsoup.org/go/accessibletechnology>

Online Event: Using Virtual Worlds and Emerging Technologies for People with Disabilities in this forum, Feb. 29th, all-day, asynchronous (not-live). No registration is needed; just show up here and post your questions!

Accessible Technology and Public Computing message board, TechSoup

Dave

Today I got in my delicious “for” bookmarks a link with a note that a site has appeared called Photodropper (purposely not linked to here) had appeared on the scene and is pushing a WordPress plugin that aside from a few changed variable names appears is the exact code ripped off from a plugin called Flickr Manager which my colleague and programmer at the place I work wrote and released back in November 2007.

The Flickr Manager was released prior under a GNU General Public License. The Photodropper plugi has been released as Copyrighted. Even to my basic level of understandig this appears to contravene the GPL.

Wikipedia states:

“The GPL is the most popular and well-known example of the type of strong copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft. Under this philosophy, the GPL is said to grant the recipients of a computer program the rights of the free software definition and uses copyleft to ensure the freedoms are preserved, even when the work is changed or added to.” (emphasis mine)

But as wrong as that might seem, this get’s me angry for reasons that transcend pure legality. Let me try to elaborate why.

My colleague Trent is a talented programmer, he’s also a fast learner and a mate. When I hired him last year to work for the place I work and be a part of the small IT team he was just finishing Uni. He’s now starting his Honours. He hadn’t heard of WordPress much less participated in any wide open source endeavors or dipped his foot into the Web 2.0, read/write online world. His first task was when we had to rework a project that had been put together hurriedly prior to his starting that documents the History of Disability in SA. I had conceived and built that site using as many Web 2.0 and collaborative techniques I had absorbed in the prior year and the time and our budget could afford and done so with the emerging nature of online interaction in mind. I rapidly threw everything I had learnt about the emerging Web 2.0 technologies and the culture of cooperation, sharing, collaboration and openness I’d been immersed in. And Trent picked it up quick, very quick, soaking it in like a sponge then mixing in his own thoughts and ideas. Right there he embraced the re-mix culture of ideas.

In no time we quickly were exploring all kinds of ideas and rapidly developing tools and techniques focused around building a kick-ass back-end infrastructure on WordPress that we could implement for our redevelopment of the History project and ensuring the things we built were suited to our longer term vision of redeveloping the centre’s information systems framework, which we had decided was, and is, to be based on wpmu.

One of the key tools Trent made was a plugin for WordPress that could better handle the images we used on the History project site. You see, the project uses images on Flickr that we put there. It was planned that way – use tools already existing that do the job we need and build a site using data that is actually distributed. So we used Flickr as the centre’s and projects photo manager. To better allow staff to easily control the integration between the images and the other associated text (stored locally) Trent developed what became Flickr Manager plugin for WordPress.

Encouraged by me he released it into the WordPress community under a GPL license. And started a blog. Our desire to be part of the culture that we exist in – the Web 2.0 space online – and to support the WordPress community was blossoming. The Flickr Manager plugin, released onto the WordPress Extend plugin site got fast take up and rapidly Trent developed more features and made heaps of bug fixes. A lot of time went into getting it just right, aided by a lot of messages from users of the plugin and helping them when they had problems with it. The community was working. It turns oput that his Flickr Manager was the first WordPress plugin to actually allow uploading to Flickr from the WordPress dashboard, not just retrieval of images from Flickr..

I managed to convince the Director that getting Trent and myself to WordCamp in Melbourne was a good investment in the future – no mean feat in the climate of funding cutbacks and total upheaval we were in, are still in, trying to regroup the way we operate and fight for survival.

All this effort and passion that goes on behind what the end user, the world sees, is where the real heart of Web 2.0 anmd the collaborative, participative, sharing and caring nature of open source culture exists. It’s openness of people at their most human, fundamental level. People connecting with other people.

So to have some un-appreciative, un-creative leach come and claim something they ‘badge engineered’ as theirs is like introducing a vacuum back into culture. And it makes me sick. And if you love anything thats good about humans, culture and this online place we share – it should make you sick too.

It’s anathema to everything we are trying to achieve as a connected people.

Dave

I see JP pointed to Lifekludger here on a recent post of his about my testing Pointui in a post he titled ”
Freewheeling about visualisation and manipulation tools and support for diversity“.

He picked up on a Tweet I left ;

“dnwallace : tryin out Pointui on WM5 and liking it. Finally, ‘touch’ features without a finger – http://pointui.com/“

There’s too much to say than I have time right now, this is just to point you onto the lifekludger blog rather than here.

More to say on the subject later…over on Lifekludger.

Dave

Over on a post on Naked yak about what a FRIEND really means, Chris offers a comment that got me thinking:

It gets even weirder, because of the friends blurring with business colleagues.

Maybe the nature and title of the relationship needs to reside in the hands of the one making the connection, not an outside imposed technological ‘cubicle’ definition.

Relationship specification and definition should perhaps be inverted and opened up – individual centred relationship context – self configurable extendable fluid relationship matrixes.  Just like cones of silence need to be. Supported by technology not defined by it.

It’s kinda like the personal social side of Docs VRM stuff.

Just a thought.

Dave

The latest EELS podcast is up. In it we welcome Kent as a new co-host.

EELS 32 – 24th August 2007 – Introducing kent

Interestingly, Chris Carfi, who we had on show #30, has posed a timely post on one of the topics we talk about on the latest show.

From his full post here :

quote from Debra Aho Williamson: “[Display advertising] is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ and the real potential of social networks has yet to be tapped.”

Dave

[tags]chris carfi, eels032, podcast, advertising[/tags]

Would an app that allows people to post a status message to Facebook while mobile possibly be the next killer app?

Was catching up on my rss feeds on my mobile phone while travelling in the van on the way home, as I tend to do. Scanning through my friends Facebook status’ feed to see what they’d been up to, I saw Laurel had been cyber-streaking (is that again) and Mike was enjoying what was happening on the wall at the virtual danah boyd conference (yes, I know it’s not called that but it might as well be) while Beth made her fundraising goal and was buying gear for Cambodia.

I had the thought. Why couldn’t I change my status without having to go onto Facebook? (which is hard in the back of a van travelling in peak hour traffic with a pen in your mouth, pda perched, balancing on your hand, and on a 4inch screen that’s half taken up by a on screen keyboard).

It then struck me. That’d be just like a Twitter clone. You follow your friend’s status feed and post your own.

So, who’s gonna be the first to make that little bit of connectivity work? Unless of course there already is and I don’t know about it. In which case the question is, whose going to be te first to tell me where it is?

Dave

[tags]facebook, twitter, danah boyd, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, beth kanter[/tags]

JP picks up on my “Walled Hearts” post and points to the Generation factor. He writes :

The median age for Too Open is probably Generation X. The median age for Too Closed is probably Generation Y.

Ay, there’s the rub.

It occurred to me that from the Enterprise standpoint Facebook looks very open yet really there’s a further level than that, one which predominately the Gen Y’ers live in and are after. That must scare the pants off them Enterprises if they were to see that level without having a sense of vision for the future.

Certainly, in these rapidly changing times many long held positions are challenged and it can be like peering into a long, dark tunnel. Just yesterday at work, where we are going through massive change anyway – not specifically due to changes in the Webspace – I was challenged inwardly over decisions about service provision and business models. And we are talking tiny scale. Still, my mind went straight to the tension of closed v open and sustainable business development.

JP has had a lot of talk in comments about the generation thing being a furphy. However what I think JP is hinting at, regardless of the labels you put on it, is attitude. As Mike hits on – the stance has been a CLOSED default, the switch is being flipped to OPEN default and Gen Y, M onwards are flipping it. What are you as a participator in technology (and in Enterprise) going to do about it?

Just like the 60′s again…the individual is the new centre of gravity. Linda Stone‘s spot on. So was Bob Dylan.

Read this as a cry to people and Enterprise (of all size) today :

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Might be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside
And it is ragin’.
It’ll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

Dave

[tags]jp rangiswami, linda stone, bob dylan, gen y, closedvopen, mike seyfang[/tags]

*Dylan Lyrics, “The Times They Are A-Changin” : Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

I try not to talk too much about work but I’m laid up here in Horizontal HQ (bed) and a certain pixie has been on my back (figuratively speaking) to blog yet my mind’s a bit of a haze from a cold. So I thought I’d show you what we been working on as it went live today.

History of Disability in South Australia.

You can go there to find out what it’s all about. I wanted to relay a few details about it. I kind of wanted to put a (beta) sign on it as there’s much more in plan for it. We want to enable a way to comment on the articles and stories, to allow conversations about and around the content while it adds to the richness at the same time. You know, “I went to that school too, I found…” type discussion.

My major focus when building out the infrastructure was to allow it to scale over time and be easy for the staff who adds stuff to do so. Also not having access to bunches of resources (including our funding which was recently cut in half) I wanted to use tools and services available where possible and not re-invent the wheel.

It’s based on a wordpress backend that’s been modded for easy content management, Flickr for images and lots of custom kludges to bring it together. The whole thing is tag based so offers extreme flexibility for future. We plan to also build fulfilment services in and make use of classification of resources ongoing by incorporating the ability for people to add to the collective by submitting tags. Search also is anticipated.

All these things should be relatively easy to implement given time due the nature of wordpress.

There’s been lots of behind the scenes things that conspired to never let it come to pass, but at least now we have the first building blocks down.

Technorati Tags: history, disability, dirc