The other day whilst reading a feed somewhere in my hundreds, I came across a link to a video .. this video in fact :

I instantly felt a recognition and affinity and especially wth the subtleties in the kaos (yes, oh yes, there’s subtleties), so much so it sent me hunting for more. I found it’s a creation by John Callahan who has a wikipedia entry here.

If anybody really knows me they’ll see why I like this so much. Some, like the person who complained about the ‘insensitivity’ of the cartoon shown above, won’t see anything, as they really don’t wish to see the reality of humanity in all its raw openness anyway.

You see I realise the affinity I felt was with John’s humanness, not specifically his disability.

I’m not gonna say much more except this guy has insights only other quads could recognise and does a bloody fine job pointing out some of the idiocy anyone with a disability lives around and through. A true artist.

Here’s links to some of his other stuff worth a watch:

Interview snippett

Part 1 of a tv documentary shown on Dutch TV:

and his other ‘Quads’ animated cartoon series

and his songs on youtube

For many years I’ve had an image in my head of an absurd cartoon that I’ve just been waiting for opportunity to be drawn. It’s the kind of image I think someone like John would appreciate and could really do justice – If there ever was such a thing in this world.

FWIW

Dave

“The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else.” — Doc Searls

I think it’s a Giant Zero kinda experience on the Live Web when this happens :

• Oct 16 : Mike and I record our Extraordinary Everyday Lives Podcast, #055 – guest, Michael Specht.
• Oct 17 : Michael posts about his Cluetrain rides again slide deck.
• Oct 23 : I update my Oct 12 post on my blog about Roy’s Because Effect.
• Oct 24 : Doc writes about Michael’s slide deck post AND writes quoting my Because Effect post.

“The Net is a giant zero. It puts everybody zero distance from everybody and everything else.” — Doc Searls

My mate Roy Blumenthal from South Africa, who is the man behind my portrait on my lifekludger blog, has scored himself a gig as a weekly co-anchor of CNBC AFRICA’s business magazine show, ‘Kaleidoscope‘ where he employs his visual facilitation skills to draw the info under discussion live on screen on his tablet pc.

While Roy’s talent is undisputed, I rekon this is a great example of the “Because Effect” (as termed by Doc Searls) as an indirect outcome of Roy’s digital networked life of openness.In the connected network world,  the Because Effect feeds on openness. And it’s more than an API.

Kudos Roy.

Dave

“social tools are specifically different from other tools we use to interact in that they shape culture”

Stowe Boyd

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 

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]

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

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!

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

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

[tags]doc searls, mike seyfang, laurel papworth, web 3.0, walled gardens, social net, vrm, wired, openness[/tags]

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

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

One was JP talking about his ’self-editing’ actions when posting a list of songs he has been listening to and his feelings about revealing to us all he listens to Boney M!

On our “social media” culture and the implied transparency he writes:

When I scanned the list I was very tempted to take out the Boney M song, but I didn’t. It felt like cheating. It felt like the equivalent of quietly kicking your golf ball out of the rough when no one’s watching. You don’t do that. It felt all wrong even though nobody was watching. So anyway I didn’t do it. And it made me ponder about the cultural and social implications of the renaissance of transparency that we’re all experiencing.

(emphasis mine)

Beyond the traditional idea of transparency, as a means of holding some external entity like public officials accountable and fighting corruption, the way we are all becoming more interconnected in different ways means that we are being called upon as individuals to hold ourselves accountable.

The focus has been turned inwards. More inversion.

If you think about the concept of Doc Searl’s ‘giant zero‘, we’d be standing on the inside of it pointing inwards with no wall between us. Or at least that’s where we seem to need to be.

Transparency assumes something in the way, a wall, a fence that, if not completely blocking the view, is somehow nonetheless a barrier. Openness means the way is clear – not just ’see through’, but ‘go through’.

But while we might be experiencing something of a renaissance that starts with transparency, and I suggest is moving beyond it, social change never comes easy and we will need to find ways to adapt. This thought was bought home to me by something on the Naked yak blog.

Social Networks In The Limelight
Wherever there is change there is conflict. Maybe we are seeing the consequences of becoming more open.

Openness has consequences…and conflict, even if it’s within ourselves where we experience it. Certainly there’s signs on the interweb of this wrestling in regards to privacy, business ideas and personal experiences.

But opportunity is also a consequence of openness – a because effect. Opportunity for all kinds of things – connection, business, trust, markets, meaning…life.

I think it’s worth the risk.

Dave

[tags]openness, transparency, doc searls, giantzero, jprangaswami, change, shift, inversion[/tags]

Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Couldn’t sleep last night and so read this essay by Danah Boyd

This sentence stood out to me:

“The division around MySpace and Facebook is just another way in which technology is mirroring societal values.” – Danah Boyd

There exists in society too much division already – based on things like age, gender, ability, income, race, looks.

We don’t need to be building things technologically that serve as platforms to strengthen divisions – or create new ones.

I’ve said it before – openness is more than an API.

Dave

{Photo from Flickr by mondoagogo}

Technorati Tags: signal, danah boyd, openness, Generous+Web, class

It’s reflected in the comment I jotted down here while liveblogging. During his keynote, Daniel Ben-Horin from Compumentor made reference to the emergence of a fourth platform. Mike Twittered it at the time as this : “May 14, 2007 Mike Seyfang: Now it gets interesting – Daniel Ben-Horin: the fourth platform (the terrain has shifted)”

This whole “Social Sector”, as Laurel terms it, encompasses all the elements of ‘Free as in Freedom’ and is an economy of sharing that builds with relationship and thrives on openness and connection. All the things that amplify an individual’s life ’signal’.

Here’s a snippet from Laurel’s post “dotSub and the fourth Social Sector”

Social Sector is destroying companies and doesn’t even notice. Government – watch out, Social Sector is only about activism, without even realising it.

Get over there and read it all. Go on…you know you want to.

Dave

(Photo by 4MAX, via flickr)

[tags]cu07, social sector, activism, fourth platform, openness, freedom, signal[/tags]

Bruce Sterling @ IDEA 2006

* architectures of participation
* mass dis-intermediated production
* participative information architecture
* If you cut up the present, the future bleeds through. (William Burroughs)
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000698.php

Bruce Sterling @ SXSW 2007

socially motivated commons based peer production
* granular
* modular
* integratable

* self-selectable
* in/out mechanism – membrane of differentiation
* communication
* trust construction
http://audio.sxsw.com/podcast/interactive/panel/2007/SXSW.INT.20070313.BruceSterling.mp3

Right on!

But it takes time to share. And right now I don’t have time to share. So I’m making time to share a little bit, show the overlap and the connections from that.

Mike, my mate, brother in munge and podcast co-host is in Sydney at the Unlimited Potential conference where Hugo is who is also a mate and was the first guest on said podcast. Hugo leant me a Tablet to review after hooking up with him on a podcast on TPN, a hookup which Mike is going to play the audio of upconf2007. I see Mike is thinking of a UMPC which reminds me. Hugo, isn’t it time a UMPC got a Lifekludger going-over? Meanwhile Beth Worrall, a friend of Mikes, appeared on her first podcast and gives the shoutout to Mike and I.

Remember…connections happen when stories overlap!
Stories need to be shared for the overlap to occur.
Share or die!

Dave

Google, Amazon.com, AOL and Yahoo are helping defend online peer Craigslist against a lawsuit that would hold the Web site liable for discriminatory housing ads that appeared on its site.

The lawsuit against Craigslist was filed by Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

The committee argues that Craigslist has violated the Fair Housing Act by letting its users post ads in which they discriminate in seeking tenants, asking, for instance, for a “gay Latino” or a “clean, godly Christian male.” The lawsuit cites about 120 ads from July to October 2005.

Now I live in Australia and so don’t know about this “Fair Housing Act” spoken about, but it made me ask myself how I would feel if an ad appeared asking for a tenant that had a disability. Which, if you’ve just tuned in, I do.

I think the answer is, I’d feel bloody good.

Face it, no matter how much they protest they don’t, people discriminate. While I’m no aficionado on equal opportunity – far from it, I’m just your normal guy with a disability – here in Australia it seems the question is whether the discrimination is ‘fair’ in the circumstance (whatever that really means – ‘fair’ discrimination).

I mean, how do newspaper classifieds get on? They have personal columns; Guy seeks Guy for … Girl seeks Guy for … etc. I guess it’s to do with the ‘Act’ they operate under. Anyway, I digress.

Given my previous musings about the new spirit of openness that seems to be appearing on the net around all things web 2,0, I wonder if what’s happening on Craigslist with this lawsuit isn’t just one of those old rocks getting beaten against by a new wave in a growing ocean.

I mean isn’t openness better in that at least we know where we stand?

Rather than a negative, I see what’s happening on Craigslist as a positive indicator of society. It is an indication of acceptance of and an expressed desire for people to be included by other people. It’s saying to the people being offered tenancy ‘you’re wanted‘ in society.

The reverse also applies and is also seen, in the negative light, in access to the built environment – when I can’t get in a shop to spend my money, when transport isn’t accessible to everybody, society is saying ‘you’re not wanted‘.

Regardless of an ‘Act’ or any real or perceived discrimination, or an argument over a written law, we should be looking what it says about the spirit of the society we live in. Inclusion should be celebrated.

Notions of what society says about inclusion really stood out to me in Second Life (SL). You’ve got all sorts of weird looking people in there, but everyone I’ve met seems to get along and be accepting. I wonder if it’s because, much like Star Trek, most avatars are based around a walking human form.

When I first entered SL I went looking for a place to buy a wheelchair. In fact, the only efforts I’ve made to build anything in SL are to attempt to build a wheelchair that I can sit in. So far all I’ve managed is rubber looking hollow wheels.

Alright, so you can fly in SL, but my point is when I see in ‘First Life’, classifieds everywhere advertising a tenancy for a person with a disability I’ll really believe we are beginning to live anti-discrimination rather than just talk and make laws about it.

In the mean time, I’m backing openness.

[tags]openness, web 2.0, craigslist, google, discrimination, disability, inclusion, accecptance, society, yahoo, aol, amazon.com, second life[/tags]

About having, not using blogs. Like I wrote last week in No-one likes to be used….

Blogs are RELATIONAL not merely TRANSACTIONAL. And nobody in a relationship likes to be USED.

Robert’s well summarised description got me asking the question I posed at the end of Openness is more than an API -

“Is openness a cultures’ adaptive behaviour to enable what in essence we crave” relationship?

Here’s some choice bits of what Robert said came out of the conference :

Natural human relationships, based on honor and reputation, mediated in the context of community will replace transactional relationships mediated by institutions.

Community and personal reputation will increasingly be amplified by social software and will creates “Places” in which commerce will take place, just as markets themselves were once social spaces. Participation is not a feature of this emerging paradigm but its centrality.

Blogs are documented ‘natural human relationships’ and the same rules of relationships apply in virtual space as in physical space. If we think they don’t we’re thinking in the past not the now and certainly not of the future. Trust, reputation, honour matter. Things naturally occur or grow out of participating.

Robert reports that at the end of the conference that everyone was asked us to speak out what they would do now. For my part, it’s Lifekludger.

Dave
[tags]reboot8, openness, trust, culture[/tags]

Steve asks “Do English Blog?” He seems to be asking about ‘English’ people (nationality) rather than English speaking. Which is strange as he lives in Australia. I’d much rather ask ‘Do Australians blog?’ To which I’d answer yes, but not mearly enough. But it’s still early days really.

Dave Sifry, Founder and CEO of Technorati, has some interesting comment about blogging languages (as opposed to the actual nationality of the blogger) over in part 2 of his latest State of the Blogosphere post.

Steve also ponders:

“Why do people – yes everyday normal people – decide to expose themselves by creating a blog and going public. ”

From where I sit, I think it has something to do with how we are made up. Some of which I talked about in my previous poast ‘Openness is more than an API‘.

The short form is people crave relationship and connection/communication is at the heart of relationship – Connection and communication on a large scale is what blogs are good at.

The blogosphere is in essence just one big love-fest!

Context is something that bugs me from time to time, and features in Lifekludger. Openness is a more recent ‘fog’ to me.

A couple more recent posts from around the place that have got me back thinking about context again, and openness still.

In a post “Blink, War and Platonic Goals“, themaninthedoorway says “knowledge, context and experience are the environment essential to unconscious decision making.”

Confused of Calcutta writes in an excellent post titled “Four Pillars: Thinking more about blogging and enterprise architecture“, “blogging is the opensourcing of ideas”

And the very ‘Lifekludger-ish’ “Because problems are not constant. So we have to solve for problem-solving, not solve specific problems.”

On context he adds “Command is leadership and can happen even in emergent environments, does happen even in emergent environments. Command is not permanent but contextual. Control, on the other hand, is hierarchical, permanent-and-therefore-temporary, rarely domain or context sensitive.”

Well, it all meant something to me….in the ‘fog’ somewhere.

Via Beth Kanter I found myself at Christine.net at a post titled “Ramifications of Web 2.0 for Nonprofits with Participatory Applications” covering part of the NTEN 2006 Conference. This bit grabbed my attention :

The first intriguing question that came up: Do people’s social needs drive the emergence of new technology, or does the emergence of these new technologies drive what people want to do?

While this might be looking at a higher level than what I’m pointing to in my ‘openness‘ post, and there’s likely to be a cyclical nature to these issues, there’s certainly some overlap.

Often after something is developed a serendipitous use can be discovered in a unrelated arena – unforseen ‘custom’ uses of general purpose ’stuff’. Whether it’s “emerging new technology” or whatever you’d call the already emerged kind, sometimes the society needs to ‘open’ its eyes to ‘other’ possibilities. The term tunnel-vision springs to mind.

Sometimes, like I’m trying to demonstrate with Lifekludger, there’s a ’social need’ already existing for technology already existing.

As they say on Distributing the Future podcast, “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”.

This time it’s over an email he sent to Nathan Torkington of O’reilly, documented in a post titled “Business as Morality”.

Doc Searls: Business as Morality

In it, Doc outlines three moralities, however it’s the last one that caught my attention.

Morality of generosity. We give. We are open. We love without expectation of reward, or even accounting. (In fact, when you bring in accounting, you compromise it.) Think about how we give to our spouses, our children, without strings. It pays off, too.

(emphasis mine)
This morality of generosity is characterised by giving. We see it in technology in the ’sharing’ of open APIs in the web environment today. But Doc is right when he points to the family relationship as a model of this morality. There is no other place that requires such intense, ongoing, openness. Here we see the meaning having its impetus from something much deeper than technology. As Linda Stone’s address at last years Supernova conference hinted, the shape of technology is more fashioned by and for culture than it is an incidental happening of experimentation.

Linda Stone: Supernova 2005: Attention

In short, we create and form what we crave. The tools we use are what’s at hand and what we can make with what’s at hand. But the driver is people, not the technology in and of itself.

So, what do we crave now? Linda outlines some of it in her address:

So now we’re overwhelmed, under fulfilled, seeking meaningful connections.

Now we long for a quality of life that comes in meaningful connections to friends, colleagues, family that we experience with full-focus attention on relationships, etc.

The next aphrodisiac is committed full-attention focus. In this new area, experiencing this engaged attention is to feel alive.

I happen to believe that full-attention focus has always been an aphrodisiac. Just look at kids and what they do for attention. It might just be that at this point in time we’re beginning to realise it. And the technologies of the Net are forming to make it possible.

Too much openness at once?

I wonder are virtual worlds becoming more popular because the internet world is becoming more like the real world – or at least how we sense the real world should be – and for many people it leaves them feeling too vulnerable and seeking for a place to be anonymous again. Forming virtual, virtual realities, where relationships can be ‘managed’ and ’safer’.

Doc maps his three moralities to a market model with relationships as the foundation.

But relationship is what actually makes markets. I’m talking about real markets here: places where we do business and make culture.

You have to be generous in relationships.
I learned this from a Nigerian theologian named Sayo Ajiboye, by the way. Way back here.

Way back there, Doc quotes Sayo speaking about markets, life and meaning.

“Aiye Loja…” meaning “All of life is a market…”

Speaking about life as a market makes relationship the currency and a person’s life the bank. Bank isn’t such a good metaphor in this instance though as Banks aren’t exactly known for their giving, let alone giving generously. Maybe source is a better term, or essence.

Relationship is the essence of existence.

I’ve held that to be true for many years. Relationship is what our lives are about. If relationships work, life works. That’s why markets are miracles. They’re made up of the very substance that makes life work.

Ever since becoming aware of this phenomenon known as blogging and its related out workings in people’s lives, I’ve had a quote at the forefront of my thinking. Amazingly, it stems from a song written back at the time Doc was crossing paths with Sayo Ajiboye, 2001, but wasn’t credited as quoted until a couple years later.

“What I see happening in the face of all this darkness is something new in human spirituality, openness, some sense of our common destiny. We’ve got to keep nudging ourselves in the direction of good and respect for each other.” (Bruce Cockburn – Open)

As I touched on in my previous posts titled You can’t stop the signal and Audio of Linda Stone’s Supernova Address

Question left to discover is what will be the “adaptive behaviour” that will emerge to fulfil our desire of “being connected”? Will it be, as I touched on in my previous post, this concept of “openness”?

Is openness more than the outworking of a technological concept we are seeing in the form of web apps that “share”?

Is openness a cultures’ adaptive behaviour to enable what in essence we crave? relationship?

[tags]Nathan+Torkington, doc+searls, markets, signal, linda+stone, openness, Generous+Web[/tags]