Tech, culture, democracy. Scope, scale, speed. Loyal but disobedient.
DPLA is moving forward (announcing technical team, http://dp.la/2012/01/04/announcing-our-interim-technical-development-team/)
MIT Open Courseware is moving forward (OCWx, a free online education)
National Archives is moving forward (Citizen Archivist Dashboard)
Yale is moving forward (public domain policy)
“It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very best thing to do with the treasures of the world is to give them to the world.”
The comment continues,
It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very best thing to do with the treasures of the world is to give them to the world. So many of them [museums and other collecting institutions] are so fixated on ‘ownership’ that they just can’t let go. Hopefully, they’ll all die off soon and the generation now growing up will take a more mature approach — that is, they’ll realize that everything from academic papers to great art belongs to everyone, and that anyone attempting to claim them for themselves is a hoarder — to be despised, shunned, and overruled.
“You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof for it (this happens especially often in geometry). The main reason is that you have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true.”
“Understanding something abstract or proving that something is true becomes a task a lot like building something. You think: ‘First I will lay this foundation, then I will build this framework using these familiar pieces, but leave the walls to fill in later, then I will test the beams…’ All these steps have mathematical analogues, and structuring things in a modular way allows you to spend several days thinking about something you do not understand without feeling lost or frustrated.”
“You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.”
“‘So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?’ a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: ‘Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.’”
Full paragraph,
In a deposition in the case that was recently published as part of an unlikely art book by the writer and director Greg Allen, lawyers for Mr. Cariou follow Mr. Prince deep into the strange and often trackless territory of artistic intention. About as close as they get to pinning him down is that he wanted to use the borrowed pictures to explore his fascination with the painting of Willem de Kooning and also thought of his collages and paintings as part of an idea for a movie about a post-apocalyptic world in which Rastafarians, famous literary lesbians and others commandeer hotels on St. Bart’s. “So what are four lesbians from the early 20th century doing on St. Bart’s in, now, when there’s a nuclear war, like why are they there?” a lawyer asked Mr. Prince, who responded: “Your guess is as good as mine. That’s what I do, I make things up.”
“Tragic mutual incomprehension”
“E pur si muove, as Galileo is reputed to have said in the face of Cardinal Bellarmine’s certainties, ‘And yet it moves.’”
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
“All of this seems to offer the grandmotherly option between Starkman and the FON [Future Of News] crew — ‘You’re both right, dear. We need institutions and we need experiments.’ Even given this hybridization, though, our views diverge: Plan A assumes that experiments should be spokes to the newspapers’ hub, their continued role as the clear center of public interest journalism assured, and on the terms previously negotiated.
Plan B follows Jonathan Stray’s observations about the digital public sphere: in a world where Wikipedia is a more popular source of information than any newspaper, maybe we won’t have a clear center anymore. Maybe we’ll just have lots of overlapping, partial, competitive, cooperative attempts to arm the public to deal with the world we live in.
Some of the experiments going on today, small and tentative as they are, will eventually harden into institutional form, and that development will be as surprising as the penny press subsidizing journalism for seven generations. The old landscape had institutions and so will the new one, but this doesn’t imply continuity.”
“If you believe, as I do, that many of those [newspaper publishing] institutions are so mismatched to the task at hand that most of them face a choice, at best, between radical restructure and outright collapse, well, in that case, you’d probably find the smartest 25 year olds you know, and try to convince them that now would be a pretty good time to start working on Plan B… No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25 year olds.”
“Twentieth-century beliefs about who could produce and consume public messages, about who could coordinate group action and how, and about the inherent and fundamental link between intrinsic motivations and privation actions, all turned out to be nothing more than long-term accidents. Those accidents are now being undone by new opportunities, created by us, for one another, using abilities afforded to us by new tools. The driving force…is the ability of loosely coordinated groups with a shared culture to perform tasks more effectively than individuals, more effectively than markets using price signals, and more effectively than governments using managerial direction.”
A frieze of horses and rhinos near the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery, where artists may have gathered to make charcoal for drawing. Chauvet contains the earliest known paintings, from at least thirty-two thousand years ago.
What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.
From First Impressions: What does the world’s oldest art say about us?
By Judith Thurman, June 23, 2008, New Yorker
Contrast the mind-blowing concept of 1,000 generations of cultural continuity with Sir Ken Robinson’s statement at TED in 2007,
If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that’s been on parade over the last 4 days, what the world will look like in 5 years time…
Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity? [At around 2:20]
http://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY
Reading through some conference tweets and an argument about "free" resources vs. charging fees for access.
To me, a conversation about effort, mission, and value is much more interesting than the false dichotomy of “free” vs “charge for access."
“To get an idea off the ground…over this last decade the barrier to entry has been lowered quite a bit, to where if you have something new you want to explore it really is a couple thousand dollars to get something off the ground and launch it.”
Host Leo Laporte and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble" title="wikipedia">Robert Scoble</a> talk with Rose about how much easier it is to get stuff done now.
Kevin Rose: If you wanted to start a company back in 2000 it was a lot more difficult than it is today. You’d actually have to go out and buy dedicated servers, and there was no Amazon S3. There was no EC2. To get an idea off the ground today (or even just a few years ago) over this last decade the barrier to entry has been lowered quite a bit, to where if you have something new you want to explore it really is a couple thousand dollars to get something off the ground and launch it.
Leo Laporte: That’s a really good point, that’s completely changed everything hasn’t it?
Kevin Rose: Absolutely, especially the way that we scale websites. It was really difficult back in the day. And the fact that you can go and just launch new server instances in milliseconds depending on what the load is of your current site, based on EC2 — it’s just so much easier than it was even just a few years ago.
Robert Scoble: what I was putting up on screen right here was a Twitter room, or Twitter list, of a bunch of people who are covering the Iranian protests. This was pretty difficult to do even a year ago. And now we can see 346 people, all who are covering the Iranian protests, most of whom are actually in Iran. It’s pretty amazing that we can connect to each other this way.
“Teams with healthy idea life cycles are easy to spot: ideas flow
between people easily and in large volumes. Conversations are
vibrant with questions and suggestions; prototypes and demos
happen regularly; and people commit to finding and fighting for
good ideas. Often, this is fun—people are happy to learn from
failures, debates, and bizarre ideas. Teams that innovate are great
places for ideas to live; like happy pets, they’re treated well, get
lots of attention, and are shared among people who care deeply
about them.
The life of ideas is the responsibility of whoever is in charge.”
“This is the 21st century data challenge:
Not transactions.
Not data warehouses and business intelligence.
Not database backed web sites
Not even MySQL backed web services…
[The challenge is] real time cloud-based intelligence delivered to mobile applications with algorithmic intelligence”
I was just asked a question about how we should be thinking about “mobile”. The question came with some assertions that made me think the person was thinking about mobile mostly as a content consumption device. This was my very very very quick answer.
[I’ll need to flesh these out later to get the quotes right.]
Notes to self:
The Value of Failure (?)
I’m never quite satisfied when I participate in discussions about the value of failure. I’m not sure why, but I think we’re missing something here. Not sure what it is. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fail quickly. You’ve got to fail to learn.” What does that really mean in practical terms?
Failure and quick release cycles
I think these people (in the video, above) are approaching quick/early failure in a very (literally) constructive way. They walk out onto a field with an airplane made out of foam core, toothpicks, and packing tape; they fly it and crash it and adjust it five or six times; and they leave the field with a much better plane than what they started with.
Notice:
a) Their plane is built to be hackable. It’s made out of foam core. At 4:00 the pilot says "maybe we should try getting rid of this forward sweep" of the wings and he gets out his knife and he cuts off the front of the wings and tapes them to the back. Earlier in the video he decides he needs a bigger vertical stabilizer on the back so he cuts a rough square of foam core, tapes it to the side of the old stabilizer, and pinches the leading edge to make it more aerodynamic. Then he launches it to see how it worked.
Says the pilot/engineer/hacker (at about 5:45):
“So, we came out and it was too tail heavy. so two crashes later we figured that out. Then we put a bigger battery on it. And then we figured out there wasn’t enough vertical stabilizer, and we fixed that. Then there was too much ‘magic carpet’ going on–too much flex–so we put some tape on it and fixed that. Then cut the front of the wing off and put it on the back of the wing, which got rid of the wing rock. Now, with model #1, we got probably five airplanes worth of test flights. ”
b) This brings to mind Stuart Brand’s book “How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built” which (among other things) describes the benefits of building things in a way that makes them easier to improve and modify over time.
c) Another thought: the people in the model airplane video are able to fail/improve quickly because their platform supports rapid releases and quick fixes. (Does my web publishing platform, writ large, allow/support this? Not really.) If their plane were “better” - - if it were made out of fancier materials and looked more polished - - i’m guessing it would be a lot harder to modify and hack.
d) Years ago I saw an article somewhere about designing high performance sailboats. The author said that phenomenal things could be done in the design phase with computer modeling, but that the models were never perfect. For $100k you could design a cutting edge boat with advanced hydrodynamic modeling, or for about the same amount of money you could skip all the hydrodynamic predictions and just build the actual boat and see how it sailed (which, after all, is the ultimate point of the exercise) - - if it wasn’t particularly fast (usually the case) you could sell the boat for cost and try again.
Faster, NASA, Faster, a 2009 NY Times Op-Ed by former astronaut and Google program manager Edward Lu, encourages NASA to adopt a space vehicle strategy that emphasizes smaller but more frequent launches- - as many as one a week, for reasons similar to those used by the model airplane enthusiasts in the video.
The Russian Soyuz rocket demonstrates the value of frequent launching. Variants of this rocket have flown more than 1,700 times, averaging more than 30 launchings a year. As a result, the Soyuz is among the most reliable of all existing rockets. In fact, I flew into space aboard a Soyuz rocket in 2003 when NASA space shuttles had been grounded after the Columbia disaster.
To meet its new goals for human spaceflight, NASA must be able to be creative and take risks, or else it will be unable to adapt to new technology and changing political realities. Grand plans stretching over decades will become irrelevant and eventually collapse.
(Lu’s NY Times op-ed is also useful for .gov employees trying to understand how to operate with greater agility in a highly bureaucratic environment.)
I’m also remembering a conversation I had with the CEO of a New Media/Technology design agency: he said that the big trick isn’t failing, that’s all too easy to do. The trick is building the skills you need to learn from those mistakes, and to recognize breakthroughs and progress when and where they do occur (which is usually when and where you’re not looking).
Another good reference on the “failure” question is We Tried To Warn You, Part 2: Failure is a matter of timing by Peter Jones in Boxes and Arrows, 2008.
There’s also a Harvard Business Review article I’m looking for about how top performing businesses are better at exposing, discussing, and sharing lessons-learned from past failures than the also ran’s are.
My paper Good Projects Gone Bad, an Introduction to Process Maturity from the American Association of Museums conference in 2008 might be helpful too.
And a search on Nina Simon’s Museum 2.0 blog for articles relating to “failure” yields some gems.
