mtl3p

Memory has always been an issue for me. I have never had a good memory and in many of my relationships, the other person plays the role of holding the memory of our time together, whether it’s hockey games in grade 6 or second kisses (I can usually remember first kisses).

Then when I was in Burkina I had a flood of memories. I would go to bed early, lie naked sweating under the mosquito net and ceiling fan, and passively listen as stories bubbled up from different meaningful and meaningless points in my life. After that I realized that I had some control over my memory - not whether I remembered something or not, but that I could decide to stop thinking about whatever was in my head and spend 30 minutes remembering - just lying placidly casting over different periods and places in my life and watching what came up.

Then, suprisingly, during the last 6 months forgetting has become important to me. Not because of any memory I want to excise - actually I have no idea why this became important. I realized that forgetting isn’t a lack of an ability to remember, but that it is an ability in it’s own right. And I guess I’m disturbed that we’re not building our new communications systems with this ability.

Oh - I remember why I started thinking about forgetting. My hotmail account was erased because I hadn’t logged in during the last x months.. I had had that account for 4 years and there was a lot of emails that I thought were very important in there. At first I had the normal reaction of being suprised and pissed off. But anger dissapated quickly and I realized that I felt lighter having lost that data.

Enter present point:
Wifidog doesn’t currently have an archiving system. We can’t clear our portal pages because there is no way to keep content associated with a page without having it show up. This is a problem because the pages are getting really full and messy.

We just got a (small) bit of cash to build that archiving system. I’m going to try and convince the group and the developpers that we should add in the ability to forget to this archiving system.

I think we need to keep everything in the database because some data we need to keep (like content that we get grants to showcase), but from the users perspective I want the system to have a leaky memory. I was thinking about a process that would erase (or make invisible to the common users) 10% of the last year’s content and 2% of the the global content.

I know it sounds kinda flacky and whimsical, but in that we are building software for public spaces, for communities, I think we need to engage with these kinds of soft, un-obvious design ideas. Also, I like that I don’t want this feature because I want to make a point about the human condition as opposed to machines, or anything else. I just think it will _work_better_ this way. I’ll have to see what the rest of the group thinks.

ADDED: Ideally, the system would mostly (but not exclusively) the items that had been clicked on less. I would also love to see something like this added to Flickr. Having 10% of my photos that had been viewed the least culled every year. But this isn’t an optimization system, so the algorithm should be more like 8% of the total selected from the 20% least viewed pictures and 2% of the total selected from the entire account.

I went to Stallman’s presentation on Sunday. Hugh and Francois wrote about it. Omar sent an report about it to the Controverse list. I was really interested to watch how people socialized, seeing who knew who and speculating how they knew of each other.

Someone I had knew from the 2001 Quebec protest was there recording it(video not online yet but here’s their article) for CMAQ. He was also interviewing certain people/orgs to get their response to Bill C-60. I got the feeling like people from the open-source community were getting comfortable with the fact that their opinions mattered. There was very little of the awkward “what are we doing here” or “why is that guy doing interviews” feeling. And the socializing felt more - uh - natural. Less like Trekkies all fired up about being together for a yearly conference. It just felt normal that the room was full of media activists, LUGers -sorry GNU/LUGers, developpers, and community organizers. It wasn’t suprising to see the conference written up in the paper the next day. The whole thing felt very mainstream and un-deviant.

Then YulBlog yesterday night. It was Nicolas’s first time, so I saw it through his eyes a bit. I haven’t talked to him since, but I think he really enjoyed himself - after initially not knowing what to expect. 20 people very few of whom I would have ever met otherwise (different social groups / interests / etc).

It’s all feeling very normal - which is weird. Maybe these are completely personal feelings that have to do only with my relation to the scene. It’s hard to tell if I can generalize from my impressions. I guess I should ask people who’ve been involved in this scene longer and get their impression on how things are changing socially - or if they are.

I wanted to mention two, no, four things about banff.

1) I had a good chat with someone back and forth by re-writing our iTunes names. We evaluated each others music collection. I was inspired by Julian Bleeker - who talked about getting into an altercation with a neighboor through communicating via their respective wireless networks’ SSID’s.

2) I have felt the future. I was only outside wifi coverage during a short hike on one day. Everywhere I went had wifi and I brought my laptop almost everywhere. It was an incredibly different feeling than montreal. Montreal feels like “where can I get online”. My day revolves around (in some part) places where I can get my fix. In Banff it was simply “When should I go online?”. Actually, it felt like I wasn’t really offline. More like just looking away from the screen for a bit.

3) I went to a Sarah Diamond party. One of the last. It had a pretty big buildup, but I was definitely not dissapointed.

4) I realized (again) that I have no connection to the 70% of blogging that occurs. The livejournal stuff. I was reading someone’s old blog on one of those sites, and it was hard to recognize it as blogging. It seemed more like some kind of forum. Even visually it had no similarities.

5) Not about Banff. I’m really sorry I missed this conference (in quebec), and I’m really excited to follow this (open source quebec gov website) and this(Steph’s new travel blog).

“Collaborative cartography potentially causes a crisis for those places which had been defined by single dominant narratives. With the anticipated accessibility of locative media authoring systems will come a flood of amateur content producers, eager to contribute to the collaborative map.”

I’ve been hanging out with a bunch of mappers recently. I just liked that phrase. The other big thing I’ve been thinking about steadily for the last 2 years (along with everyone else, probably) is the amateurization of most things. I’ve been living it with ISF as well.

that quote is from here by marc tuters

that’s what I’m being. snoopy and sneaky.

I’m at the banff conference and people are talking about language visualization. Interesting, but it’s so far from my current interests that I’m just paying 50% attention. The other attention is going towards checking out what people are surfing via Etherpeg, and I’m using iTunes Rendezvous/Bonjour with GetTunes both to find out about other people that are sharing their music and to “borrow and evaluate for future purchases” some new musicians.

That stuff isn’t even that sneaky compared this - I google people’s rendezvous names. (gasp!). I know that it doesn’t seem so weird, but when you google people around you it’s kind weird. Actually when I think about it, everyone presented themselves, and I could just google their names - but this feels more illicit some how.

People’s names via iTunes around me: kelly a’s music, linling hsu shares, and vidkidlinds’s hot hot tunes (s/he’s got some cool stuff)

I share as mtl3p.ilesansfil.org - just to drive the point home that I want to be “discovered” - until we get profiles working in Wifidog and then that will tie in to my rendezvous name.

Yes, I’m thinking of this article by Neal Stephenson (it’s one of my favorites - Daniel knows what I’m talking about).

I’ve been hanging out with Winnipeg geeks. It has been a really interesting experiment, and one that I definitly will include any upcoming trips.

Like I said, on thursday before I left montreal I sent an email to the local Linux User Group. I introduced myself, gave a quick description of what I’m involved in (ISF), and asked if anybody wanted to meet up for a beer. I added that i was interested in learning about the local scene - OSS and also the general geek scene. I also left a message on the local wifi forum saying the same thing.

There were a few responses, and a few people asked about the WSIS conference and if they could register and I had to tell them that it was invite-only.

The next day in passing I saw someone at the conference with the word “P.L.U.G.” on his conference name tag. When I met up with a few open-sourcers that night at the hotel bar, I found out that his name was Jason, and that he had just dressed up and presented himself at the registration desk that morning and said that he was a representative from PLUG. The woman at the desk replied, “I don’t seem to have a package for you”. An uncomfortable silence . . . and then “Let me go print one up”. (!)
So Jason social-engineered his way into a fairly exclusive conference, and then proceeded to network with all of the OSS and creative commons guys.

I ended up talking with Jason a few times. He is one of the main organizers behind OpenCity 2005 (they’re obviously updating their website) which also took place last year. He’s trying to bring together the left, the OSS movement, and the arts community. We talked a lot about the potential between these three groups. Through him I ended up hanging out with some of the organizers of the Winnipeg Social Forum.

Saturday night I met up with two people from the wifi group. It’s probably inaccurate to call them a group, since they seem to be mostly just participating on the local forum and doing seperate projects. Bart (can’t find website) is going to set up a central point on a water tower near downtown and invite other geeks to connect. The two people I met were *very* knowledgeable about wifi - esp. hardware - they could have given any one of our guys a run for his money. They were completely non-interested in wifidog, not because they were only interested in the technology, but because they weren’t interested in “mom and pop” users. They wanted to set up a social network, but only for themselves - as a way to bring together geeks in the region - so that they had their own exclusive communications infrastructure (that’s what I took away from it, although I might have misunderstood them, and they weren’t necessarily representative of the rest of the group).

In both cases, it took a bit of time before it felt comfortable talking to these strangers, but after 20-30 minutes it was really natural because of the common values and points of reference. I find it really exciting to make this assumption that these people and I are part of some larger community. I’m not sure if it’s true, but in practice it seems to work quite well. I’ve meet up with wifi people so far in BC, Seattle, and NYC, but in each of those times I had a real reason. This was the first time I was doing it just to learn about the local scene and for some company in a foreign city. I feel a bit like a mini-joi ito (each time he travels he lets people know that he’s going to be in a city, and, when time permits, he sets up a wiki page to coordinate hanging out with the local people that are interested in similar stuff).

All of this stuff fits in my head with the idea that people like us (open source people, internet people) are still very low down on a curve which will bring us up as a group over the next couple of decades. I hangout with people because I like them and because it’s really comforting to be around people you can both get energy from and give energy to. However, on a less emotional level, networking at this time is especially necessary (and potentially rewarding) because we don’t have very many resources (money, social pull, political power, etc). The people that you work together now and get to know and trust will be the people that help each other later on when we all have more access to resources (power). That’s true for networking with any young group, but I think it’s especially powerful for opensource/internet people, because we are in the process of a revolution, and we (as a group) are going to rise very high, very quickly. That’s the hypothesis. It’s part of what’s been going through my head in the last couple of months.

Hey Pat - I thought you would like this email I just got from Robin.

“le collectif Réalité sans télé vous invite à une soirée bénéfice dont une partie des profits servira à financer la promotion des éclipses télévisuelles ayant eu lieu tout au long de la semaine. En fermant la télé toute la semaine durant, le canadien moyen aura eu environ 24 heures de temps supplémentaire à consacrer à d’autres activités, et il se sera échappé au visionnement d’une moyenne de 8 heures de pubs! Le collectif Réalité sans télé est heureux d’avoir pu contribuer à ce mouvement, par son intervention directe auprès du public et ses obstructions des projecteurs du métro par moyen de ballounes √† l’hélium.”

RealiteSansTele.org

also, BTW - I saw one of their employees controling them with a TV controller (IR). So they’re not only controlled centrally.

I’m soo impressed. I expect this at international conferences, but not by a relatively small community group.

La Journee de reflexion sur la democratie en ligne
28 avril 2005 de 9h00 à 16h30

and

Une journee de travail sur le Sommet mondial sur la societe de l’information
(this is a lead up to the conference in Winnipeg that I’m going to - which itself is a lead up to the Summit
29 avril 2005 de 9h00 à 16h30

posted from Laika

I am at a loss to comment on this. The alternative title for this entry involves some swear words along with a lot of question marks.

“What is Kuma\War?
Playable accurate re-creations of real war events released weeks after they occur. Missions developed using advanced game technology and distributed online.”

And check out this press release- they work with the US military to make training simulations.

Disturbing. I thought that America’s Army was weird, but this takes the cake.

FTR - I still think that open source MMORPG’s is the future. For everything - including/especially education. I was reminded of that when I got Hugo to show Nicolas an MMORPG in Vancouver. He had never seen one before and it freaked him right out ;-) I get freaked out by them too. It makes me think of WG’s quote “The future is here, its just not evenly distributed”.