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>the blog of david n wallace [aka Lifekludger]

Back in 2005 after thinking about “Attention, Recognition & Context” I wrote in 2006 that I was “hung up on the concept of context“  and a bit later “On context and openness”

Which lead to the thinking about how I do what I do at Lifekludger, documented in the “Contexts and Clues” section of the About page as — “To get from one context to another takes a Kludge!“….

So just the other week I get a ping from @fang about the book kluge —–

Then I see a tweet from @kanter asking “what is the sweet spot between personal productivity and connectedness?”

My response (below) gets quoted by her in a blog post “What’s the sweet spot between personal productivity and social productivity?” here ……

Which leads me to read Stowe Boyd’s post about “Information Overload, Schmoverload“, and his thoughts on network productivity here ……

Then I talk about it with Mike on our podcast here …..

And so there I am, reading Stowe again, critiquing more mainstream media articles on the so-called ‘curse of multitasking’ and the over emphasis placed on ‘personal’ productivity - “…the war on Flow” here ….

And what do I read? “In the wonderful book, Kluge, Gary Marcus makes a solid case that the human mind is really bad at memory, and that we have developed all sorts of compensating techniques to counter that weakness. Our memories can be demonstrably changed by simple shifts in context ….”

From Context to Context via a connected kludge.

We need connection to others and to other’s thinking if nothing more than a technique to counter our weaknesses - we need a networked life.

And this holds true in any area of application - personal or professional.

That, my networked friends, is life network productivity.

Dave

Technorati Tags: beth kanter, connection, context, fang, information, overload, network productivty, stowe boyd

http://labs.summize.com/sentiment 

Here’s some interesting grabs from Twitter during the following discussion at Supernova on Openness I caught this morning.

Kick-Off Discussion: The Value of Openness

JP Rangaswami (BT)
Elliot Maxwell (Consultant)

From: @wseltzer on Wednesday, June 18th at 00:17:54 [link]
To: @rafik
Supernova is http://www.supernova2008.com/ — good discussions of openness and innovation

From: @sarahdopp on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:24:14 [link]
We’re all stealing each others’ laptop powercords here in the openness panel. Openness is not hoarding the juice. #supernova2008

From: @carterkr on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:15:18 [link]
Pondering the Zen of Openness.

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 21:02:39 [link]
Is openness something society can effectively legislate or is it cultural and a state of mind?

From: @factoryjoe on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:56:24 [link]
Elliot Maxwell’s (http://emaxwell.net) talk on openness was very good. All openness is not created equal. #supernova2008

From: @LangDavison on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:51:47 [link]
#supernova2008 Elliott Maxwell: openness in health care will lead to evidence-based medicine, because you have information about what works

From: @wseltzer on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:51:27 [link]
JP Rangaswami: airport gate standardization as a model of openness: standard enables competition, transactions, scale. #supernova2008

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:45:28 [link]
How does the innovator, the entrepreneur make money? Who will invest in this business? Who licenses openness?

From: @abbepatterson on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:43:40 [link]
Technology is an openness enabler, true, but what is the business model for enabling openness?

From: @Ross on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:42:26 [link]
“openness isn’t about moving bits, its an attitude about letting people contribute their best”

From: @debs on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:35:17 [link]
openness is a continuum - me like that - death to binary thinking

From: @BJ on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:34:50 [link]
Openness is better because it fosters and creates community - at #supernova2008 from JP at BT - inspirational

From: @sarahdopp on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:34:01 [link]
“Openness means having no place to hide.” -@jobsworth #supernova2008

From: @Casablanca on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:33:36 [link]
To: @jobsworth
“Openness means having no place to hide” #Supernova2008

From: @AjitJaokar on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:33:20 [link]
JP Rangaswami at supernoava 2008 - Openness has value because of the community it generates

From: @gapingvoid on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:32:31 [link]
To: @jobsworth
: “There is no reason to believe in ‘Openness’ if you don’t believe in ‘The War For Talent’.” Totally, totally spot-on.

From: @LangDavison on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:32:08 [link]
To: @supernova2008
JP Rangaswami (BT) “No need for openness [in corporations] if you don’t believe in the war for talent”

From: @ccarfi on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:23:05 [link]
To: @jobsworth
openness “sets an ethics platform” and openness “attracts talent” #supernova2008

From: @davemorin on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:13:56 [link]
At the SuperNova Conference with @jsmarr, @daveman692, @t, @johnmccrea, @jobsworth and many other incredible people. Talking about openness.

From: @olivermarks on Tuesday, June 17th at 20:12:50 [link]
#supernova2008 @jobsworth and Elliot Maxwell kick off ‘the value of openness’ open flow track

[Flickr photos by meteo - 1 | 2]

Father Bob on Forgiveness:

One was a woman from Rwanda where millions were killed a few years ago. She was from tribe A, Tutsi, massacred by tribe B, Hutu. She’d lost husband and children. She was at a “truth and reconciliation” session arranged by South African Bishop Tutu, (Church and State have a different relationship depending on where you are in the world).

She identified her family’s executioners in “court” that day. Then she asked to be lead across the room to the man. I forgive him, she said, and want to take him home to be my son.

Too much, isn’t it! You or I couldn’t do that. We’d want revenge (we call it justice) because we’ve been brought up on retributive justice. We’ve rarely heard of “restorative justice” where all aggrieved parties and the offender(s) are in the same room together to seek truth and reconciliation

The only point I want to make here is that it seems possible to forgive, even if not forget

Powerful stuff from Bob [as usual].

Got me thinking about openness as a restorative agent, or moreso, environment. How much real justice exists in our world, in court or out, depends on how much openness exists in or hearts.

As Bruce Cockburn [another who writes powerfully as usual] wrote :

“Everybody
loves to see
justice done
on somebody else”.

“Justice, Inner City Front, 1981″

Think about it. I did.

Dave

Technorati Tags: father bob, openness, justice

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!

My friend Biff from Naked Yak wrote something ages ago I’ve wanted to reiterate here as it’s very important:

Naked Yak 27/01/08 8:04 AM NakedBiff

Nurturing

The more we share the more we know each other, the more we have in common. In this sense, how we use the technology that is available to us is key - we should use it to share. And we are!

From Boston Now:
“People may make fun of blog or Twitter posts about what someone had for breakfast or how they like a certain video game, but it is all part of how humans build a cooperating society that works. It can’t be rushed, and it can be nurtured, even with simple text messages.”

In the long run, sharing technologies may just help bring about World Peace, by making us more aware of each other.

Not us and them, but we. (kudos to Father Bob)

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

In light of the article in Wired and its’ call to action for a “Open Social Net” and the long discussion on this topic that Laurel, Mike and I had on our latest podcast, this quote by Doc Searls over on the Project VRM blog is very timely.

Earth to walled-garden builders: You can’t own customers for the same reason you can’t own slaves: they’re human beings, and they want to be free.

Prediction: in Web 3.0, the best wall-less gardens will win.

Dave

Image from Flickr by tarotastic

Technorati Tags: doc searls, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, web 3.0, walled gardens, social net, vrm, wired, openness

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

Technorati Tags: jp rangiswami, linda stone, bob dylan, gen y, closedvopen, mike seyfang

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

I’ve never read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Tipping Point” but something inside me feels on the edge. Some kind of epidemic at that intersection of technology advance and human desire seems to be going down.

Facebook is all at once touted as saviour and villan. Dave Slusher points out what others are thinking. Cam’s talking about Telstra and being pinged by Techcrunch.

Mike’s trying (very well) to explain what it is we’re feeling as Stephen Downes echos similar sentiments and Laurel explains definitions and points us to where in Facebook the RSS is hidden.

It appears everywhere there’s a (natural) tendency to want to put things in neat boxes and try and grab some stability (sit down in the boat folks!)

JP is writing the Facebook Enterprise Epistles in parts 1, 2 and 3, with 4 soon to come (which will be my favourite as he is going to tie it into Four Pillars). Doc’s staying away (wise man is Doc, well, busy man too). There’s two very interesting juxtapositions right there from two people I admire immensely.

Certainly, to the Enterprises which see Facebook as a villan, it’s a villan that represents OPEN - even though to the people in the masses formerly know as the audience, Facebook and Web 2.0 still doesn’t seem to be as open as it ought. Showing open means different things to different folk in different spheres.

Of course, I think it’s all very interesting, even if I do feel a bit twitchy. The one thing it is, no matter where you sit or view it from, is OPEN. The discussions need to be had and aired. And we need to be patient and listen and not shoot ourselves in the foot, or anyone else in the midst of it.

Facebook or no Facebook, my friend Roy still seems to me one of the most open people I know.

Change is all around. Even this morning in Second Life, my favourite Elf had turned into a Nun. Seemed stangely odd hugging a Nun with the name Silkcharm.

However in the midst of it all, I’ve had one main thought for the last few days - Where’s my friend Kent?

I guess that thought echoes on what community really means.

Don’t worry about the technology people - the walls on that will come down with the walls around our hearts.

Peace.

Dave

Image ArtistsHeartMechanicsBrain by dkart.

Technorati Tags: doc searls, malcolm gladwell, tipping point, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, dave slusher, roy blumenthal, facebook, open, openness, closedvopen, stephen downes, jp rangaswami, kent newsome