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20040320
20040319
Posted
3/19/2004 04:57:38 PM
20x2 is a thoughtful, frenzied, mind-numbing event of rapid-fire creative thinking on big, open questions. It has taken place four times in the last three years. It usually runs within the weeks of SXSW events in Austin. Twenty thought leaders, artists and interesting people at large are invited to speak for two minutes each on a particular topic. This year was, "What's the big idea." In under an hour you have heard from 20 top cultural creatives and you walk away with scores of fresh ideas that their concise, insightful words have sparked in your own thinking.
 I am planning a trip to Nashville in May to attend EC'04 (site not Mozilla friendly). I had an email exchange with Mark Oestreicher, President of YS today about trying to arrange a Book Club morning get together with Jack Caputo sometime during the conference. I also suggested that we try to arrange a 20x2-like event. Getting 20 thoughtful bloggers, artists, authors, theologians and pastors would not be difficult at an event like this. Mark suggested that we hold off a year and do it in both California and Nashville next year. That is probably the wise thing to do... but, then again, perhaps there are enough people interested to pull off an unofficial 20x2... (?)
Posted
3/19/2004 02:06:11 PM
an update from a good friend in Kosova regarding the recent ethnic violence:
..We face a crisis here in Kosova. For three days now the country has been
consumed with marches, demonstrations, looting and burning. So far over twenty
people have been killed and many hundreds injured.
We live and work in Prizren. The air in the city center reeks with smoke
from burning buildings. Tear gas blinds the eyes. Tanks and soldiers surround
the local UN building, many of its windows already broken. Elsewhere the local
police can do little as large mobs vent their anger. Serbian Orthodox houses
and religious structures lay in smoldering ruins.
The commercial airport has been closed. America, Britain and other
countries are flying in extra troops to help. But the situation remains
volatile.
Various factors contributed to the sudden outburst of hostility. Ethnic
tension between Serbs and Albanians is one. Sporadic violence between the two
sides came to a head when three small Albanian boys drowned in a river as they
fled from a Serb mob near the northern city of Mitrovica.
Another factor is that the United Nations continues to control Kosova,
restricting the formation of a truly democratic government. Most people feel
that the UN has bungled its mandate to bring stability and progress to the
region.
A third factor is that the unemployment rate remains above sixty
percent--this is the greatest problem. Most young adults cannot find work or
plan for the future, and so they lash out in frustration.
An ultra-nationalist group, rather shadowy and small in numbers, has been
planting bombs and creating disturbances for some time, hoping to destabilize
the social structures. Perhaps they provided the recent spark in various
cities, but the explosion of violence was a spontaneous response from frustrated
young adults....
Posted
3/19/2004 11:36:02 AM
{personal comment capture for later use}
jason clark : emergent-uk: what happens when the talking is all over?
jason,
you are unlikely to see them as the majority do not have any of the signs of organizational life that we have come to associate with institutionalized common cause. many exist in a shadow culture; a loosely joined patchwork of people in local geographies. answering your question would mean giving you names of families and friends and colleagues with unique configurations of overlapping connection to their neighborhoods, friends and cities.
i too tire of the banter re: the need to change. i think that many people and communities already have and are no longer contributing to "the conversation" (whatever that is), because the conversation is simply repeating the same questions year in and year out. i agree with you regarding the GenX/Emergent-thing being programmed and promoted to death as if they were some kind of demographically sensitive advertising campaign. i think that your final question, though, may still be asking for something that is lived out along organizational vectors. there many not be many great examples of this within such parameters.
Cheers,
dan
http://theyblinked.com/articles/amagnacarta.html
20040318
Posted
3/18/2004 06:08:59 PM
Ambient Devices
via EV
why not process your standard daily data by color as you walk through your living room?
i like this. it would be cool to have a custom version that could take data from the position of a cell phone and traffic data to indicate how long a housemate's commute home will be or any number of other pervasive computing data that could be fed into this color-mediated data instrumentation.
Posted
3/18/2004 02:31:20 PM
NPR : Festival Promotes Peace Through Sacred Music
Ten years ago, after the Gulf War, two Islamic scholars decided to start an interfaith music festival in Morocco to promote peace. The Fes Festival of World Sacred Music is now a celebrated institution in world music circles, and for the first time, it's going on a 17-city tour of the United States....
Posted
3/18/2004 06:44:50 AM
Here is an interesting piece of social networking software. Basically, it just scans the contact lists of two PDAs and shows the owners any people that they know in common. If one of the PDAs does not have Meeple installed a trial version is installed automatically when the search begins.
Meeple is little more than a novelty at this point, but would make for a cool feature of a larger offering if the function was intelligent enough to do its queries automatically, say over Bluetooth, creating an audit trail of the common contacts you have with people you meet with throughout the day. Being able to preset certain contacts to set off an indicator would be cool as well.
Posted
3/18/2004 12:09:32 AM
Mel Gibson hits out at war in Iraq and Talks of another Movie
...Gibson said in the interview that he planned another religious film.
He wants to tell the story of a Jewish rebellion nearly 200 years before the birth of Christ, which led to the festival of Chanukah.
"The story that’s always fired my imagination … is the Book of Maccabees,” Gibson said in the radio interview.
"It’s about Antiochus, the king who set up his religion in the Temple, and forced them all to deny the true God and worship at his feet and worship false gods.
"The Maccabees family stood up, and they made war, they stuck by their guns, and they came out winning," he said.
"It’s like a Western."
20040317
Posted
3/17/2004 10:44:14 AM
Mirror.co.uk - MY HELL IN CAMP X-RAY
...Jamal's most shocking disclosure centred on the use of vice girls to torment the most religiously devout detainees.
Prisoners who had never seen an "unveiled" woman before would be forced to watch as the hookers touched their own naked bodies.
The men would return distraught. One said an American girl had smeared menstrual blood across his face in an act of humiliation.
Jamal said: "I knew of this happening about 10 times. It always seemed to be those who were very young or known to be particularly religious who would be taken away.
...Jamal said they were told they had no rights. "They actually said that - 'You have no rights here'. After a while, we stopped asking for human rights - we wanted animal rights. In Camp X-Ray my cage was right next to a kennel housing an Alsatian dog.
"He had a wooden house with air conditioning and green grass to exercise on. I said to the guards, 'I want his rights' and they replied, 'That dog is member of the US army'.
Posted
3/17/2004 09:33:13 AM
So it seems that T had dinner with the Archbishop of Nigeria last night. His response:
... (He) came to the house for dinner before speaking at a local church to a bunch of geriatric Germans about Islam. He was one of those people you want to know more of, and spend time with, it had nothing to do with anything he said, it was all about disposition and personality. It was a classic case of Christians in the developing world coming as missionaries to the westÂ…. The concept is only going to grow...
20040315
Posted
3/15/2004 04:02:20 PM
March 14, 2004
Pud, fuckedcompany
Jeff Dachis - Razorfish Founder
Richard Yoo - Rackspace / ServerBeach
Jim Young - hotornot.com
Evan Williams - Blogger/Google
Web Entrepreneur 2004
How did you decide to become an entrepreneur?
- EV decided when he was 9 or 10 that he would have his own business. It was a bad idea. I could have had more experience. Was freelancing at the time Pyra was started.
- Young has never had a real job. A couple internships where he played mine-sweeper. Retreated to grad school for 10 years. HotorNot came up while he was working on his dissertation.
- Yoo just made the jump.
- Jeff learned at a young age that he was distinctly unemployable. A family of serial-entrepreneurs. Degree in Fine Arts and MA in Non-profit Art something.
- Pud had a lot of jobs, but thought he was going to be a rock star. Saved two month of salary and quit his last job to find freelance work which funded his time to create his portfolio of sites.
How do you evaluate ideas?
- Jeff will only do homeruns.
- Jim - ideas are a dime a dozen. Can you execute on them? The idea is worthless in itself. It is rare to have good ideas that can be acted on. Jim is unprotective of his ideas.
- EV - "How many business end up doing the thing they set out to in the first place?" I start companies because I wanted to build product and didn't want people to tell me how. Tim O'Reilly has an interesting adage: "Business is the context for doing interesting things." Do what excites you.
- Pud, "I went into business because I don't like to wake up early. If I can support myself and not wake up early I am a zillionaire." When the idea becomes obsessive the idea is good. When you don't have a clear path to money, but you can't sleep. "All of my business are user generated."
If a customer contacts us with a question that requires a manual data search it is a rule to create a tool to answer the question and if appropriate to release it to the public site.
A lot of people come up with an idea and they don't do it because it is already being done out there. Where there already people doing one of the major businesses you have started? What about competitors?
- Jim - Yes there were others... they were all executing poorly. There interface didn't work.
- Jeff - Product vs. Company is an important question. You have to create the engine, but once you do it is open source in terms of the idea. Taking the leap from product to company is a huge leap.
- Jim - What matters is were people are--not wether it is perfect.
- Richard - we are a commodity business (hosting) and this is different. we needed to add invisible technology value. the branding and community are the differentiating value in our clients offerings. they shouldn't have to focus on the servers, security patches, firewalls, et al. You have to build a brand and reputation.
How do you get users?
- Pub - went to www.ac.org and launched fuckedcompany by announcing it to 7000 web designers.
- Yoo - people who know people. at the peak of the dot com boom we dropped a million a month on advertising... we are back to word of mouth and getting to know our current customers.
- EV - users. Names are a crucial aspect of the company. All of the names up here are great names.
How long does it take to be break-even?
- Pud - if you can't do it in 6 months you shouldn't do it as a bootstrapper not bringing in VC.
- Young - it was 8 days from us thinking about the idea to launching and 8 days from launching to being profitable with a million users a day. we renamed ourselves 8 Days, Inc.
- Jeff - from customer one we were profitable.
- EV is saying that Google, as it has come to us, could not have been built cash flow positive from day one. Which is very true. Size, ambition and profit margin on revenue per customer varies across models.
Fear is the number one thing that holds back the potential entrepreneur. Tell us about your failures:
- EV - Pyra was my third or fourth company. The early failures are crucial. The old adage is fail fast. You don't know what is a failure or a success at the time. Just do stuff.
- Richard - once your money is in it fear is called commitment. bring in outside advise. there are a lot of small decisions that contribute to the outcome. none of them seem very significant in themselves, but combined are the success or failure of your project.
- EV - i grew up in Nebraska. my dad was a farmer and it didn't occur to me that i would work for anyone else.
Posted
3/15/2004 02:08:46 PM
March 15, 2004
Howard Rheingold
Mobile Communication, Pervasive Computing, and Collective Action
my notes and interpolations:
- Howard Rheingold is being introduced at the moment.
- Howard wants the house lights up. He has no PowerPoint. He is not providing a picture of the future, but a lens to bring things into focus.
- Howard is starting with a call to action: We are living in and benefiting from a common wealth in which individuals are able to contribute to and borrow from things given for the benefit of all. That commonwealth is under attack: enclosed, privatized, censored, metered and sold back to us. Extension of copyright into where it does not belong... digital rights management -- trusted computing... compromising end-to-end principal of the Internet... the innate right to innovate... the regulation of spectrum according to the laws and practices of the 1920s (applause).
- There are two ways to resist: one of them is to fight back. EFF is doing this legally and culturally. They need two to three orders of magnitude more lawyers out fighting for us.
- There is another away as well: we can create new commonwealth. We can create it faster than it is being ripped off.
- Characteristics of the new commonwealth: open, self-organizing, enable groups to form within, self-documenting, foundational--enabling others to build on it.
- Finnish call mobile phones: little hand.
- Collective action is the important message coming from the technology.
- clue: PCs became a wide phenomenon when the cost came down to the monthly salary in the lower end of the middle class in the US. The computational "phones" will be at this level globally (~$50/month) in the next seven years.
- people unable to derive economic benefits from previous revolutions will be able to this time. more people will also be able to make mischief with such tools.
- we carry the new devices. this is a break through. our tech is untethered and colonizing our social spaces in ways we have not yet known.
- the users created the applications that made the PC a revolution. the early PC luminaries where drop out kids who took geek toys and made them ubiquitous platforms (Gates, Jobs, et al).
- collectivism is central control... collective action is distributed commons-empowered authority... the most Federal governments are collectivism... stock markets are often collective actions...
- collective action dilemma... we are self-interested by default (we want to live and we want to have our children live....) - how to give up some protection to have a common trust to do things together.
- a maxim from some hunter-gathering people (?): "the best place to store the extra meat from today's hunt is in my neighbor's belly."
- Alphabetic writing grew out of a need to create records for the empire. With literacy came new means of existence. Forms of collective action became more widely possible with this literacy. Methodologies come with ways of eating, knowing, writing... social arrangements, enterprises and agreements are needed for new social forms. (random, semi-related comment: there is no progress--there is perspective and difference.)
- we can do some things with our rationalism, but it is not inherently better than being a hunter-gatherer.
- Napster: 70 million people, more people than voted for the President of the US, collectively acted to bring a sharing system into existence... Napster model: provisioning the very resource that you are pillaging while you are doing so.
- Seti@Home - 20 teraflops of distributed computation... more than any government can afford to put into a budget... cf: Folding @ standford.edu
- we do not really know what we can do with billions of devices linked to broadband speeds. we will find out about it, but we do not know yet.
- ebay is a market that should not exist... it is the classic prisoner dilemma... Works because of a very simple, somewhat gameable, reputation system... an existent proof of the functional use of mediated reputation
- what could we do walking around with a reputation system? the people we walk around with... some of them have common cause with us, but we do not know.
- the problem with rep systems is that only geeks change defaults... we need implicit information that we can make judgments from
- the ability to coordinate and to find common cause with people goes far beyond selling your bike or finding a date.
- manipulation and disinformation is a reality as well: the Nigerian riots re: Miss World were SMS-message encouraged....
- End-to-End was once guaranteed technologically by the routers... now bits are filtered by some Cable companies... if this continues and plays out the Internet will become Balkanized.
- The vested interests have gotten very smart about trying to legislate privilege for their proprietary monetization schemes. yes, give money and support the groups like EFF fighting this, but also invent new systems.
- 8086 processor can now be purchased for under $10 on a platform that is 1/5 of an inch. They are getting smaller and diving below one cent in cost. throw out enough of these with sensors and you have pervasive computing. small enough and they can be ingested. for better or for worse and probably for the worse as it is very difficult to undo something that have trillions of components that you cannot see.
- a world in which nothing works and nobody knows why. a world in which control is hidden, felt, but not directly recognized.
- there are people dieing in Africa over the parts that go into our mobile phones... there is a responsibility issue here.
- "The role of the state is to enable the market to destroy itself."
- "Marketing is important."
- emotions have to do with regulating cooperation... anger enables us to regulate free riding... etc etc. there is knowledge out there is that is silos in particular disciplines that needs to come together... Howard is doing this in the realm of collective action. He wants to see a wikipedia of collective action/cooperation. He is looking for some funding for his research. He wants to see open source science. The privatization of science is a danger.
- he wants to create a discipline of cooperation. you cannot create a discipline without peer-review and publishing, but he wants to have voices not be limited to the established academy. genetics languished for 50 years because Mendel was outside of academic circles.
- the more indisciplinary you are the more you have at risk...
___________________
Thoughts:
--> we need to go in the direction of mesh networking... trying to eliminate, as much as possible, centralized infrastructures in all fields. a world in which the bits of my call go to the devices closest to me and if not for them are passed on into the network until hitting the recipient. mesh networking also has social ramifications for how people pattern their existence ideologically.
--> Theologies of Cooperation and Collective Action
Posted
3/15/2004 01:59:09 PM
Origin of Species
Nandan Nilekani, C.E.O. of the Indian software giant Infosys, gave me a tour the other day of his company's wood-paneled global conference room in Bangalore. It looks a lot like a beautiful tiered classroom, with a massive wall-size screen at one end and cameras in the ceiling so that Infosys can hold a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S. innovators, its Indian software designers and its Asian manufacturers. "We can have our whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time," holding a virtual meeting, explained Mr. Nilekani. The room's eight clocks tell the story: U.S. West, U.S. East, G.M.T., India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia.
As I looked at this, a thought popped into my head: Who else has such a global supply chain today? Of course: Al Qaeda. Indeed, these are the two basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda....
Posted
3/15/2004 12:03:28 PM
March 15, 2004
11:30am, 16B
Boyd, Hall, Dash
Blog Next
- moblogging is not blogging. there are no links. (Hall)
- links are not blogging... it is story telling (Danah)
- photos in a shoe box allow you to craft the story as you want to. the album is literal, linear. (Danah)
- audience member sharing about location based blogging in Japan - kokochi.com
- Anil is talking about Saudi Arabia.... distribute gold phones in Saudi Arabia that have texting and picture capabilities as a way of empowering women. the male disdain for gold would create a majority women cell network...
- Molly - Girlwonder.com "Get away from web paradign… internet desktop… internet laptop… rest of the world will not ever have a computer or see a computer as a relevant device."
- Tyranny of the permalink... on blogs what matters is the recent -- "The inevitable march of the update burries the meaningful moment... " We need non-chronological ways of posting. (Hall)
- "The time for librarians is neigh!" (Hall)
- Muniwireless.com
-"...prioritize on vectors other than time." (Anil)
-"I love ephemerality…" (Boyd)
Posted
3/15/2004 11:42:00 AM
March 15, 2004
10AM - 16B, Rufus Wainwright playing in the background
Ethan Waters
Urban Tribes
- anxieties of this generation of young adults: community, marriage, apathy, etc. 70% polled believe their generation to be out for themselves, half describe themselves as slackers or apathetic
- a generation who has delayed marriage longer than any generation of in American history -- just two generations after the modern generation that had the youngest marrying age.
- just the beginning of the anxiety surrounding the changes in this generation -- we live outside of families -- we live far away from kinship networks,... Not joining the groups and leagues of our parents and grandparents did
- Absence of restraints as the definition of freedom
+ Free from commitments as parents longer with deferral of marriage ( is this a description of a "generational people" or of only a particular social class... what of young, illigimate birth rates in certain communities and geographies?)
+ free from parental control by 25 no life advice
+ advice givers have stepped away from the plate?mentors, priests, boss, etc. encouragement and direction, but no real strong advice
+ freer from the consequences of our actions... room for trying again... Forgiveness... not accountable for the advice we never got
+ free to change: re-creation through geographic change
+ free to be in relationship: serial dating, monogamy, etc. switch through roles
+ free of homogenous narrative: no expected order for living our lives: the clearly linear path of maturation has become ambiguous
+ free of major, society-wide identity campaigns: no lock step national movements, shared sense of being chosen for a higher purpose... peace love and understanding or save from tyranny
+ lives less defined by class, religion, clan, vocation, gender
-60-70s not a individual revolution
- test of freedom is action not ideaology
- he critiques, "Bowling Alone?" - dissinigrating social bonds... "how I felt did not jive with putnam's assessment".... lacked language to describe why I was happy... how I was connected to my city... parents calling with concern and having to try to explain to them my network of friends and connections
- what connected me to my city? "I saw this group of friends that I called my urban tribe..."
- simply, naturally, organicly this thing was created in my life that took the place of these other things (social clubs, church groups...)
- individuals are judged on the sum of smaller deeds: small acts are those of one living a praiseworthy life... we for some reason lack the language for this in friendship...
- we create pilgrgimages and such with friends to mark the passage of our lives: burning man, road trips, concerts... pilgrimage, singing, communal gathering
- ~ "if we were able to speak in a new language we would not see ourselves as such apathetic, etc."
- urban tribes create a social landspace across a city
- urban tribes strengthen weak ties... FOAFs... the people one step away from our group of friends... and one step from theat... shadow ties... those on the outside of the periphery that will come into our lives at some point. Give us information and connection that will change our lives... somewhat random dan aside: (if friendster and orkut are visual address books for urban tribes they have some point otherwise they are little on their own because they try to make explicit what is only real implicitly.)
- these are very hard to see. hard to see in one's own life. social science equivalent of dark matter. A force difficult to see, but that holds stuff together... looking for movement so large bodies and work backwards
- weak ties between networks of friends -- this is what connects the nodes, connects the mesh
- rave scene always has been a critical mass, burnming man, flash mobs, social capital not in membership but in network; in chosen communities uniquely connected to other communities.
- Last link, last synapse requires a message to come from a trusted party
- Through one or two degrees of separation I could tap into a network that would connect me to people to do something protest. Pickup Frisbee... I could find the network and drop myself into it.
- Social capital is not contingent on membership. can form between tight friends and at the same time not be a self endeavor.
- This form of community building is pervasive. it is fluid across all of my being. I do not have Thursday nights set out for this? the network is me. I am the network.
- We are sharing our lives and giving our lives with and to others. this is not about saving, making or spending social capital this is the more natural pattersn of barter, seduction, pilgrimage, challenge.
- Massive experience in the meaning of friendship
- Is friendship enough? Yes, it is.
- Shadow tie: shadow ties bring new things into your life. we do not know them yet, they are not weak ties, acquatinences. more weak ties are necessary for copmplex tasks. shadow ties are not the same. people who will appear to us in the next year and change our lives.
- Flashmobs and ememes are a flexing of a muscle. what is next? there is a bit difference between a muscle twitching and a muscle going toward work.
- Social currency, not capital social?
- Social dissipation after marriage... there is a real transition... us is not just us the tribe, but us the couple
- Ironic joke? mac o/s warning on the screen up front. David yells, "get a mac!"
- Marriage not about giving me away.. it was about my friends giving me away author
- We recognize this as the new central social unit in your life and we accespt Rebecca into the group... step away, invest and step back in...
- Relationships as currency work in a technologically media toolset.
--> Trans-cultural heterogenity, displacement, et al perhaps some of the sources of this... Create habits of commitment, habits of action? membership through connection not branding
--> Two important freedoms of your generation (older audience member)
Freedom of health: floride in water, etc.
Freedom from fear: hunger, governemtn, bomb, etc., psychosis of nuclear war
-> urban tribes are very much the case in my life... growing up a third culture kid in Asia I have never known anything other than life within the social tribe. I have found these connections to transcend the generational language in which this topic is usually cast in the United States. Displacement and difference in proximity i think are more indicative of the sources for the marginalization of the standard narratives that keep people in the traditional structures of their particular physical or ideological geography that is an opposite of the urban tribe experience... perhaps a growing number of us who identify with the urban tribe are experiencing what ex-patriots have been experiencing for some time. perhaps, in some sense, we are all expatriots now... coming to terms with what expats have been dealing with for years.
? challenges of individual freedom being described as lack of restraint?
? challenges of social multiple personality disorder ?
? test of freedom is action? but a profound informationalism induced apathy through convenient distraction... ?
Posted
3/15/2004 09:51:41 AM
alt.muslim : Muslim Passion For Christ
via andrew
"In a broad sense, 'The Passion,' as well as the controversy that stalks it, is an extension of the very long struggle for narrative control over the life and mission of Jesus."
20040314
Posted
3/14/2004 04:31:09 PM
some idiot left his gum on the floor under my chair.
it is the small decisions like that to put one's used chewing gum on the floor of a Convention Center that peeks my interest in behavioral psychology.
Posted
3/14/2004 03:38:52 PM
March 14, 2004
Eli Pariser and Zach Exley
MoveOn.org
Meeting room 18A/B is packed. Every seat filled. The back is full and spilling out into the hall. Dual keynote… one lectern, two mics, one Windows laptop, one convention supplied Mac.
quotes and notes:
- "There's our introducer. We were worried that she was abducted by Karl Rove. Here’s Molly Ivins people."
- "These people cannot govern worth shit!" –Political reporter Molly Ivins on the current administration
-"someone has to figure out how to get the bad information off of the internet." - Molly
(uh, no, we need to create a more exacting culture of attribution and fact checking)
-Molly commenting on the potential endictment of the Texas... "We are rooting for an indictment. 5 out of our last 6 were indicted for one thing or another. one guy who was not indicted was shot by his wife. She was not indicted because in Texas we recognize public service when we see it."
- Eli says that he got a call last night about 12:30am. It was the White House exchange calling. Karl Rove wanted to speak with him. They spent a long time talking. Eli is now stepping down from MoveOn and endorsing the Bush.
- The above was a joke to emphasize that MoveOn is not identified with one personality. Nodes are developing that are not dependent on the whole to function.
- Joe Trippi in audience. Got a brief ovation when people noticed.
- Zach's totally unscientific impromptu poll of SXSW Interactive attendees:
47% Democrats
40% business people
40% MoveOn members
34% Left
34% Consultants
28% Ind.
26% Artists
16% Film makers
14% Annoying Left
12% Musicians
11% Libertarians
7% Don’t care
- Eli, 23 currently, was 20 and just out of college when this blew up.
- Zach created gwbush.com parody site from a couple years ago. He was also an in the trenched union organizer
- Eli explains the impetus for his petition website in the days after 9/11, "I did my shopping. I got home. I still felt empty inside. (Zach interjects sarcastically, "You didn't do enough shopping.") Got home and started a little website. ... A friend sent a petition. I put it on the website… thought that was it..." 3000 messages in his inbox the next Monday. 40,000 signatories to the petition. "I was 20 years old, with a $35 website, standing in my living room… and the BCC calls."
- Scary part was when people kept emailing saying, "what’s next?"
- "There is a physical change that is taking place to this thing we call, 'We the people.'" – Zach
- 2.1 million people on the MoveOn list.
- We are using these tools as a means of rebuilding some of the community that has been lost over the last hundred years.
- Pre-war candlelight vigils came together in 5 days… half million people in 6500 different global locations. In NY every 20 blocks there was a vigil.
- House parties… people opened up their homes… http://action.moveon.org/undercoverusa
- "we don’t know how to use macs" -Zach
- "People assume a lot of things about moveon. They assume for one thing that I am a woman named Ellie…." -Eli
- Basically, everyone sees the org as populated with people like them. Most people have never been politically active before.
- The new habits of micro-targeting political messages is destructive. MoveOn tries to know as little about their membership as is practical so as not to contribute to this destructive habit. As a national movement they want to address people as people not as suburban white women or rich urban men or poor southern …
- Rebuilding something that used to exist… political social clubs, citizen activists, etc…
- Stop dividing things up as inside/outside. Let the insider culture evaporate. This requires normal people communicating, donating and activating for causes. This is the huge opportunity we have.
- "We are accidently here. We all have stories of setting up websites and nobody came." -Eli
- The problem with casting people as genius's for the work they do in bringing people together, like MoveOn, is that it is very disempowering to everbody else. This is why Eli and Zach emphasize how accidental MoveOn's success is.
- "The message is: you just gotta do it." –Eli
- One minute keynote: "Search and hunt for voter virgins… because everybody's doing it in '04. It’s a little Switzerland for voter registration."
Votervirgin.com – spread the love
- Zach on Voter Virgins: "The great thing is that this strategy will help inhibit turnout on the Christian right."
- Zach came up with an idea during some interation in the QA. Do what was done with video with print and allow people to vote with dollars. When an add gets enough money it will go.
- Collaborative decision making software – action forum – people put up ideas and comment and the ones that get the most votes float to the top – no product out there… just homegrown… should be a product out there…. Works when you send a lot of people to it… clarity comes from an announcement to a large group, a time delimited response…
- We are not a website… we are an email list… the website is just a transaction mechanism
-"I think what you’re asking is what do we have to do to win? We have to do more." –Zach
- Best question: "Creating platforms for change" meme.
- in the context of this question about what is to come:
"If you could know how horribly we execute things… its shocking… but it still works." –Zach
- quoting someone-
"Howard Dean was like the tape in Mission Impossible. He gave the Democratic Party their instructions and then self-desctructed." -Eli
- learned-helplessness behavior
at the end... short, but felt standing ovation…
Posted
3/14/2004 01:56:03 PM
Who chose the music being piped into the Austin Convention Center?
"Screw you, we're from Texas," is droning out of the speakers throughout the Center in the distinct drawl of Ray Wylie Hubbard.
Such a welcoming choice.
Posted
3/14/2004 01:40:10 PM
i blogged in a paper journal when my batteries died yesterday. if all goes well, i will transcribe and post it soon. Eli Pariser just walked in.
Posted
3/14/2004 11:51:51 AM
'Special skills draft' on drawing board
Washington -- The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages.
The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request.
Posted
3/14/2004 11:50:16 AM
Marissa Mayer (blog?), Director of Consumer Web Projects, is speaking now on:
"Google, Innovation and the Web".
Google's Mission:
"Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"
– do things that matter
– relentless focus on the user
– brilliant people have good ideas – use them
– today is Einstein’s birthday
– put smart people in a creative environment
– the Googleplex is an attempt at blended, balanced workspace… children, meals, laundry…
– "20% Time" - One day a week Google employees spend their time on anything they are passionate about
– ideas come from everywhere -- not top down, not bottom up
– mechanisms to capture and sort ideas: active email lists -- an all company misc list
– all of Google, more than 1000 people, still everyone have access to these lists
– design for users
– original Google design not a critique of portal complexity--the founders didn't know HTML
– compile, discuss, prioritize
– Large Project Ideas lists (Sparrow – name of tool
– small teams, fast and agile: staff more projects, ownership, self organize, turn-around quickly, transition quickly
– communication is key
– 100+ different engineering teams at Google
– tools to organize
-Sparrow – ideas, launch dates, sign offs in simple Ok, No toggles
-Snippets – every person emails a couple lines (5-10) at the end of each week that are aggregated and published for everyone to cross pollenate, etc.
-Blogs – team, personal, projects
– test, experiment, iterate
– release early and often
– labs.google.com – a step out of alpha new features are released for feedback – Deskbar, search by location,...
– Googlette’s – startups within a startup… function as little companies… control of UI, monetization, launch, prioritization of feature set, etc. -- i.e. Orkut a project that came out of the "20% Time" of Orkut--a Google engineer Orkut. (Aside: Orkut developed student and alumni social systems at Stanford. When Orkut finished the Google social system he sent out an email to the company-wide misc list. Within hours 1000+ employees signed up… 100's of page views an hour inside Google… this is what pushed it to a public release. Orkut has had exponential growth… in one month moved from 0 public users (Google employees only) to 150,000+ global users. Orkut is a testimony to how quickly Google can innovate and release…)
– Orkut moved from Idea to a 150,000 user pulic product in less than 6 months…
– stay true to your mission
– a copyright notice is only at the bottom of the Google homepage to visually communicate to the user that the page is done loading… early usability tests showed that people were waiting for up to a minute expecting Google to be loading… one comment during focus group, “is this some guys homepage?”
– Google Top 100 -- top two: Don’t be evil, Buy Iceland
– Cf: Gocal!
– employees from all over: Google Chef worked for the Greatful Dead, Google Lawyers often do coding, the World puzzle champion works at Google, a former brain surgeon is in operations
– Google as a verb is a problem per their legal team.
– No answer when asked "What will your strike price be?"
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