Category: Conferences

I go to conferences as a speaker, and also work with some big conferences in blogger relations or outreach. I think about conferences. Complain about them. Have ideas.

Lift12 Stories: Rufus Pollock, Open Data [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Rufus Pollock’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

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In Sumer, 5K years ago, businessmen had the idea to start mark counts of stuff on the side of boxes. Born of necessity. Writing.

UK census 1801. Desire to count population. US: 1880 it was taking 7 years to process the data from the census. 1890 Hollerith Tabulator.

IBM 1960s. Innovation coming out of government need and the nuclear programme (need for computational power).

Today, in the midst of a revolution. Information complexity (necessity) and info tech (opportunity).

Government is opening up information. 3 years ago, no open data. Today, also companies and communities.

What is Open Data? Anyone (= really anyone!) is free to use, reuse and distribute. At most, requirement to attribute or share alike.

Dream of open data: dropability (?).

In general, open data does not mean personal data. We’re talking about stuff like train times, station locations, spending breakdowns, national laws… transport, geolocation, statistics, electoral-legal.

Why now? Story of medicine gone wrong.

Summer 2002, ex-accountant from Vegas turned Catholic priest. Chest pains. Told he needs immediate heart bypass. Goes home, calls up his best friend (nurse) advising him to get a second opinion. Non-specialist told him there was nothing wrong with his heart. Saw another one. Same thing.

Went to see the CEO of the first place. Something is wrong, what are you going to do about this? Hrm, not very much. Thanks for the feedback.

Contacted the FBI. Hundreds or (of?) thousands of people over a 10-year period had unnecessary serious procedures performed on them (some died, or ended up permanently disabled or in pain).

Don’t get a flat tyre in front of that healthcare place or you’ll end up with a heart bypass!

One of the best post-surgery survival rates (of course if you operate on healthy people!)

Looking at the statistical data, it would have been possible to notice high rates of surgery and very low mortality rate.

To many eyes all anomalies are noticeable. If more people had seen the data maybe the alarm bell would have been sounded.

Apps and services

  • Mapumental (enter criteria to choose where you want to live — price, commute…)
  • Where does my money go? visualise where your tax money goes, with coloured bubbles. Would help us feel better about paying our taxes.

Why open? Goes back to the challenge and the opportunity of the information revolution. Challenge: exploding info complexity.

In 1820s all UK bank clearing was done in a single room once a day. Today, billions of transactions a minute.

Opportunity: computing power. Today, a smartphone has more computing power than the system for the Apollo moon landings.

Open data scales and closed data doesn’t.

Why not open cars and open shoes? Giving a copy of your car is a problem, but a copy of your data isn’t.

Innovation. Best thing to do with your data will be thought by somebody else (vice versa too).

Better engagement, understanding…

Where are we going?

More use of this open data (specially by businesses). Businesses will wake up to the opportunity. They’ll also realise they need to share back. Communities as well.

Quatity changes quality. More data means better data.

Data as platform rather than commodity. You build on it rather than sell it.

Faraday’s baby. Be modest.

Assumption: institutions have this data and it’s well-organized. Is it sometimes a mess? Or not there? Making it public is suddenly making departments/institutions get their data in order.

Lift12 Stories Open Stage: Pierre Spring, Don't Make Me Steal! [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Pierre Spring’s open stage presentation — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What happened after the don’t make me steal workshop?

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Outcome of the workshop was a manifesto that you can sign through a web app. Put it on hacker news and went for drinks. 4500 visitors in the first evening!

Luckily the server didn’t crash. Had nailed a need somewhere. 10’000 people signing within 3-4 days. Translations started coming in.

One story: hadopi. General secretary of hadopi contacted them through Twitter requesting to meet them. “Hrm ok, can we do that in Switzerland please?”

Spent several hours talking. Very positive. Offered to connect them in they started to reach 100’000 signatures. Also contacted by Dach, Pierre spent hours talking to them on Skype.

Nobody from the movie industry. A year later: things haven’t really changed. Movie industry still has people working on stuff like ACTA and SOPA. Sad!

In Switzerland, government decided NOT to change the law, still legal to download as long as you don’t share. Report saying losses are minimal.

MegaUpload got shut down. Pierre thinks it would never have existed if you could download legally.

This discussion will die down. We love movies. Just let us buy them, don’t make us steal them.

Lift12 Stories: Tricia Wang (Han's Shoe) [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Tricia Wang‘s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Han grew up in rural China. Model citizen (Mao-abiding). Civil servant? Something changed. Fang Bin Xin (FBX) — “Father of China’s Great Firewall”. Gets lots of public talks on dangers of internet and need to control it.

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One of these talks. Han threw a shoe on FBX.

What happened to Han?

Nothing.

How does the son of a farmer end up on international news and live to tell the tale?

Spent the last few years studying trust. Can pop up and erode at a moment’s notice.

When Han went to college, everything was put in question. Hardest working people in society were sometimes made the most poor.

Han discovers Twitter. Learns stuff. Blocked in China. VPN is needed. Pay for it! 2%.

On Twitter found people with shared interests => shared identity => shared responsibility. Tweet good information!

May 19 2011, Han checks Twitter, and sees people inciting others to give FBX a hard time. Han goes to see. Bumps into students with eggs that they planned to throw. But they got nervous. Shoved the eggs in Han’s hands. Han shows them at FBX, misses, and in a final act of desperation, takes off his shoe, throws it and misses.

Bolts out of the security hall. Chased. Thinks he escaped. Shares tweets of his escape and blistered tweets. Back to his dorm, he’s major news on Twitter. Hashtags. Offers: sexy girls, apple products, one night stand, vacation to Thailand, VPNs, American pistachio nuts, shoes…

He was never working alone. Information -> ideas -> behaviors. Became international symbol for internet freedom.

How is trust constructed in China? (We need to understand that to understand Han’s story.)

How do we build up the trust to acquire share information with sources we don’t really know. Tricia does deeply immersive investigative stuff as an anthropologist. Gaming and sleeping in internet cafés, etc.

Why wasn’t Han arrested? Police visited him. Also took him to dinner and got him drunk. First, put a lot of pressure on all the institutions he was part of. We are all embedded in institutions. Institutions, in China, are also responsible for the acts of the individuals that belong to them. Personal records, lots of them. Sealed brown envelopes that follow you in life from institution to institution.

Police first went to his university. Institutions trust other institutions to get things done. Assumption: his university would correct (?) him.

Police couldn’t find central command (Twitter, etc — police didn’t get it, there was no central command for them to go after). Emergent structures…

When people lose trust in institutions, top-down measures don’t work so well.

steph-note: missed a few links here

Self-healing mesh network — the loose community Han was part of through Twitter. When the other students got cold feet (weak node) Han acted, though he hadn’t planned to. Self-organized collective.

Institutions can have weird consequences. Firewalls can sometimes protect people from the law.

Information can only be free when people aren’t in danger for accessing it.

  • Social circles: people you already know. Reinforce our relationships. Build on existing relations of trust.
  • Social network: entities we don’t have a personal relationship with. Expand our relationships. New relations of trust. Reveal common interests, etc.

Problematic implication: social graph = web of trust. Sharing can mean that we’re trying to figure out trust, rather that it’s established. Difficult to represent the strength of institutional affiliation algorithmically.

Information acts.

steph-note: skipped a bit there; fascinating but going a bit fast

Trustworthiness + out circle + in network = participation.

Example: pedestrians creating desire paths (outside of designed paths). Equivalents in social networks. Desire paths decrease social distance. They’re hard to predict.

With visibility comes traceability. Information doesn’t pick sides.

Lift12 Stories: James Bridle (Ship Adrift Project) [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of James Bridle’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

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Gibson: artistic creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

Network realism: like when Gibson inserts silver flying penguins in his story, but they actually already exist in a video on YouTube, some company makes them, and in his story they’re flying about in the same building as in the video.

Code/Space. Check-in hall: if the code fails, the whole thing collapses into a big hall full of angry people.

Most of our cultural lives and literatures are spent in code/space. We outsource our memories and experiences to the network. Good, but intense consequences.

Caveat: space is a bad metaphor for the network/internet. There is no such thing as public space on the internet. steph-note: need to think about this, I always use the space metaphor.

Financial algorithms.

Two-thirds of wikipedia’s top editors (EN) are bots. SmackBot which locks down pages when there is too much frantic editing. Etc.

Wikipedia is a new paradigm in how we understand and coconstruct human knowledge. Big deal.

Artificial systems here have agency, motive, intention. We’re sharing the world and knowledge with them.

Comments where you don’t know if it’s a spambot or a human. steph-note: happens more and more to me, and it is unsettling.

Spambot comment, if you read it, something seems to be calling out to us in it. Feel like things that are desperately trying to speak to us! But they don’t know how, and we’re not trying to listen.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room. Ship in the middle of town. You can stay there. Lovely thing but a failed ship, it doesn’t go anywhere. James was asked to provide internetty stuff for the ship. Weather station on the roof. What would the ship do if it could fly, if it were adrift? Has been plotting it for a month — went straight to Poland.

The ship knows where it is virtually, and looks for stuff online related to where it is. Tweets, Foursquare, wikipedia entries. Creates a log of things it learns and tries to speak them up.

Strasseblickfernweh. Made-up view. Emotional response to seeing stuff through machines.

Polari, specific type of argot. Somebody on Twitter asking if @shipadrift is Nordic Polari. Ship started responding to personals. Was blocked! Ship can’t access anymore! sad.

James loves spambots, follows mostly spambots on Twitter. Likes the way they speak. If we keep killing spambots they’re never going to achieve sentience! It’s a shame, we live with these things.

steph-note: am going to look at spambots differently from now on

There are stories already in the world. Co-created. Need to be put in words. We need to be sympathetic to these things that share our world, speak to them, invite them into the world. They’re looking for consciousness.

Lift12 Open Stage, Gaming: Niklaus Moor, José Luis de Vicente [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of the open stage talks — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

Niklaus Moor: Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation in gamification.

Call of Duty 3. Massively successful launch.

What changed besides the graphics, since version 1?

From level as chapter to level as progress of the character. More motivating!

Gamified the game. Measure my usage of the game. I get medals.

The core is a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. The key is in the right balance between the two.

Danger! you can kill intrinsic motivation by having the wrong extrinsic motivation.

steph-note: I wrote about that recently!

Stopped kids from stealing by rewarding them for it. Also, kids in school.

José Luis de Vicente: On the Mythologies of Play

Not about how videogames are going to change the world, but in how they have already changed it. 3 stories.

Fold it. Solve puzzles for science. Figure out enzyme structure.

Gold farmers in China. Exploit the game to accumulate in-game currency or virtual goods which they sell to western gamers.

Aram Bartoll‘s model of Dust made of concrete (2011).

 

 

Lift12, Gaming: Sebastian Deterding [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Sebastian Deterding’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What happens when our everyday life becomes more and more structured like a game?

Russian bureaucrats: need a job to get a flat, need a work permit to get a job, need a flat to get a work permit.

Mobile boarding pass. Transfer at Schipol, but image broken, can’t read QR code! Machine won’t provide paper boarding pass because pass has already been downloaded. Thankfully service agents are not robots… yet.

Gamification. Mindbloom.

Scary: what if we let computers run our systems and put humans inside? What happens?

1. The first thing we encounter is exceptions. The rule system might not foresee certain situations. But exceptions are the rule! We always need a manual override. Handling the exceptions.

The more we replace humans with computers, the more we remove these manual overrides.

2. Rules are also never explicit. Spirit and letter of the law. Work-to-rule: follow rules so strictly that nothing gets done.

Foursquare. In London, holding a session of foursquare users to determine what kind of behaviour is “in the spirit” of foursquare use.

Journalist who tried to gamify all aspects of his life during a week. Including “better fiancé”. You look lovely tonight! Pfff, you’re just doing it for the points.

The reason we’re doing something is really important for us.

Scratch: programming videogames visually, with resharing etc. Automatic credit line, but in the community social norms require a manual note with credit.

4. How rules beget gamers.

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System => intention.

The more you use quantitative measures to influence decision making, the more the actions leading to those measure are subject to various forms of corruption.

Munchkin: tries to amass as many points as possible even if it’s at the expense of others. Maximise their outcome within a given system. Forget they are also social actors.

Everyday life is full of this kind of munchkin.

“Fixing the game” by Roger L. Martin — this is what happened to our economic systems. Too myopic on the results.

Same thing in organisations with KPIs and targets. Forget that they are there for the long-term survival of the company and not short-term personal benefit.

Also: the exploiter.

Guy who tried to raise his children using economic systems. Potty-training rewarded with sweets. Multiplication and fragmentation of potty-breaks.

Refunding a product when people write an amazon review.

The hacker: tries to reconnect the system to its intention. Often found in healthcare. Gaming the system to be able to heal patients.

Technologies of power. Systems, procedures, technologies set up by governments and institutions to get us to do what they want us to do. Foucault: technology used to rule people can also be used by people to rule themselves.

Book (do not read, bad novel): The Dice Man. Guy who decides for each decision to come up with six options and roll a dice.

If you set up a system to be competitive, that’s what you’ll see, but if you set it up differently, humans are actually pretty cooperative.

Lift12: Tom Armitage. Games: Systemic Media for a Digital Age [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Tom Armitage’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

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What is the toy I give a child to teach it about algorithmic trading?

Video games.

What are games?

Greg Costikyan: games change with the players actions, have interactions, have goals, are non-linear, demand participation…

Eric Zimmerman: games = “systemic media”

The building block of systems is rules. Rules cluster in mechanics. Friction between mechanics — this is where the player intervenes.

Systems: bedrock of games design.

How do you read a game? The first thing you do with a game is play with it. Figure out what space there is inside it. (// “play” in the wheels of a car).

Between us and the game: we exert an action (play), there is an outcome, and somewhere in the middle is meaning. “Understanding” the game. Play also exists inside the feedback loop.

Games only work with a player. So a game must be designed with space for player agency.

Being literate in systems = being able to read them.

But what do we mean by literacy? The ability to read and write a medium (Alan Kay). You need both.

We make games through play, just as we understand them through play.

Make sure the game reveals how it needs to be played, hints at how its systems work. Game design is interaction design. Making games is a step into the unknown.

Games are everywhere. The systems we encounter the earliest in our lives.

Games give us tools to understand other things. Take the models we’ve learned by playing and apply them outside.

Go back to the first definition of “games”: isn’t that what society is like now?

Systems literacy may be the literacy for the 21st century. Doesn’t mean everything is a game! But games are the training ground for the literacies we need.

Lift12, the New Face of Gaming: Kars Alfrink [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève ces prochains jours. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Kars Alfrink’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

What future games can do for networked publics.

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Networked publics.

Four things constrain what we can do in public: law, architecture, market norms, social norms.

Online, architecture is code. The internet is not a separate place, there is nothing virtual about it.

We have a tendency to willfully self-separate — “people like us”. Choose schools they send their kids to.

Lack of appreciation, influence, access to networks. New lower-class.

What do you do to stay sane in the office? You play pranks. Reclaim agency. The same thing happens in the world at large.

“You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?” (rioter to journalist)

There must be more productive ways/rituals to prank our way into a sense of agency.

Ritual. Games can function as ritual in the 21st century.

Games are systemic. Made of rules. Constrain behaviour. Also autonomous. Space set apart from everyday life. Experiment with behaviours which are otherwise impossible or undesirable.

Not all games are like the event they model. More like mirrors.

False idea that we can reliably simulate reality (ref. The Black Swan).

Simulation fever. Gap between simulated reality in the game and reality.

Performative. How speech changes the state of the world. “I declare you husband and wife” is speech that changes the world. Example: Cruel 2 B Kind. Acts of kindness.

Playingwithpigs.nl — both simulation fever and performative. Change the way the two species relate to each other. Give the pigs an active role. And pigs entertained by humans. Real-life issue: EU regulation, farmers must provide pigs with play material.

Games can transform the world in a way that doesn’t instrumentalise games.

Instead, we can make games that empower people, player-centered.

Trust.

This is what Kars thinks games can do for our networked publics.

Massive games providing social good.

 

Lift12: Adrienne Jeffries, Story of Bitcoin [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of Adrienne Jeffries’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

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People buying drugs online with an anonymous currency called Bitcoin.

The technology is the regulator. It’s in the code. A P2P electronic cash system.

Creator: Satoshi — fake name. Disappeared at some point.

Run a bitcoin miner on your computer. As the total number of bitcoins increased, it now takes several days to make a bitcoin. This is one of the ways it regulates itself. Total number is fixed. Every purchase goes through the system. Can’t use the same bitcoin twice. steph-note: this is going fast, have trouble following the story

At some point the bitcoin became really expensive, peaking at 33$ to the bitcoin.

At some point Adrienne decided she wanted some bitcoins. Bought some at the shop around the corner and stored them at mybitcoin.com. 4 days later the website was gone. People were angry!

“We got hacked, sorry we’re shutting down, refunding half of everyone’s deposits.”

First of a series of bad things that happened to bitcoin. Hacks, exchange flash crash…

Lots of “bitcoin dead” articles. Is it fools’ gold?

Anonymity vs. security, decentralization vs. usability, independence vs. legality.

It’s in beta! Might have problems reaching a massive scale. Trough of disillusionment.

Lead developer: we need to make bitcoin boring (all the drama and coverage was making the price jumping all around).

Now: price is lower, more stable, volume of trade is higher.

Other challenges, competition: bitcoin forks, dwolla, facebook credits.

Adrienne thinks bitcoin remains too hard to use to be popular in the mainstream.

Lift12: David Birch, The Future of Money [en]

[fr] Je suis à la conférence Lift12 à Genève. Voici mes notes de sessions.

Live-blogging from Lift12 conference in Geneva. These are my notes and interpretations of David Birch’s session — best effort, but might be imprecise or even wrong!

lift12 1100312.jpg

Backdrop: the future is already here, just unevenly distributed. To figure out what the future of something is, you need to look around. Technology is already here.

Let’s make a 2×2 matrix that’ll make for an interesting conversation:

Long finance: Scenarios for 2050.

  • axis 1: is geography still important?
  • axis 2: will the Washington Consensus hold? Democracy, Human Rights, the IMF — or are they replaced by consensuses coming from different communities?

We’re going to look at each of these scenarios.

Long hand. The virtual world dominates, community consensus. Virtual currencies dominate. Balkanisation. A lot like London today. Virtual currencies centered on those communities.

Visible Hand. We don’t change anything but continue current trends towards collapse. National currencies collapse and are replaced by barter, private currency, gold and cigarettes. It’s possible to be too homogenous to survive.

Second Hand. Washington consensus prevails, and the mundane. Sooner or later someone will pass stupid laws restricting what we can do on the internet, and geography counts in ways which are quite hard to explain. Institutional banking is a dematerialized business and yet still a very clustered business, even though it could be digital. There are other things going on.

Many Hands. Mundane and community consensus. Lots of different economies based on different consensuses and communities. The G20 is replaced by the C50 — the 50 richest cities. City-state replaces nation-state. This is what David sees as the most plausible scenario. Competition between different moneys plays a very important role.

People will fight for

  • personal identity
  • credit rating
  • parking spaces

A world in which cities dominate. They are the key economic unit, and their hinterlands become the economies they manage.

Euro: there isn’t a “national” economy. Economy of Greece is not the same as that of Germany. The economy of London is not the same as the economy as Scotland. It’s not the same economy. So, regionalisation of economies.

So, lots of different currencies. A world currency (or even a european one) is a ridiculous idea. It doesn’t work for Germany and Greece, won’t work for Mercury and Pluto. There is no future of one world money.

Regional moneys. We’re all in multiple communities. Now, the cost of creating new moneys has collapsed! M-PESA, Google Wallet…

France is a historical accident. Maybe Burgundy makes more sense as an economic unit than France. (“How long is this England experiment going to last?”)

Regions, cities. Some historical regions make more sense as economic regions than modern countries. Aragon makes more sense than France. And these regions would be responsible for these new currencies.

In England, in 1688, the dawn of an industrial economy, held back by pre-industrial money (silver coins: clipped, mint coins below their value in silver). Nobody would have predicted the Bank of England in 1694 in 1688. Out of the blue, central bank and paper money. By the time Newton died, 1727, there was a completely different money.

We are at the dawn of a post-industrial revolution, and its efficiency is being undermined because we’re still trying to use industrial money.

  • 1971 End of the gold standard
  • 2012 Collapse of the euro

Payments will not be a banking service anymore, they’ll be a utility service. Banks still needed to agree on an exchange rate.