Lift09 — Florence Devouard — Update on Wikimedia Foundation [en]

At the start, was difficult for the foundation (not enough money, etc).

During the last couple of years, has stabilized a lot — much better situation.  25 staff members, 350 servers, 8mio dollars budget, audited and located in San Francisco.

Nearly 25 local organizations involved. Got a grant to improve usability. Also a sum of money from the Mozilla Foundation for something around pushing video formats.

Wikipedia

  • 250 languages
  • 11 mio articles
  • 200 000 articles for 12 languages

Gone mainstream, so more vandalism

  • bots who track “deceased” or words like that… annoying when people are announced dead and they aren’t, even if it’s for a few minutes
  • flagged revisions: the visitor knows whether the page has been reviewed or is a “draft”; tested on the German wikipedia (there can be upto 21 days of backlog, bringing it down to 7 days). There is discussion to use the same system for the English wikipedia (roughly 60% in favour).
  • approved wikipedians can “rate” articles

Wikisource: online archives

Idea: put an image of the book on part of a page, and the text opposite, so that the digitized version can be checked.

Wikibooks

You can create your own book. Define title, chapters, using content from wikipedia.

Wikimedia commons and images

media repository created in 2004 => order posters of images in wikimedia commons (WikiPosters) — available initially in France.

Lift09 — Globalism, Mobiles, and The Cloud — Juliana Rotich [en]

Global Voices.

blogs == good (control your vision, branding)

forums == ?? (echo chamber, what’s going on?)

Problems with blogs: too much to read, lunch photos, invisible breaking news, technorati is “just OK” (sorry!)

If you’re Kenyan and looking for Kenyan content, it’s problematic. (Safari photos.)

Network of bloggers from Africa, Asia, Europe… You get to hear stories which do not make it to the mainstream media. For example, Egyptian bloggers sued by chemical company for taking pollution photos. Madagascar cyclone.

*steph-note: this is making me want to dig deeper into Global Voices.*

English is not a global language. Lingua GlobalVoices translation project. Getting more content and context for what is happening around the world.

Africa: lots of text messaging. google Mobile SMS. Call and hang up before the person picks up = “I’ve run out of credit” — understood that if you Flash somebody, they’ll call you back. Then, text messages: “please call me, thank you”. Companies interested in using the space after that message to advertise.

Opera Mini (usage going up). 80% of BBC mobile site’s comes from Africa (the future is already in Africa!)

Mapping and Crowd-sourcing

Mapping election conditions in Zimbabwe. Ushahidi mashup, SMS gateway.

3 billion people with mobiles != 3 billion of citizen journalists.

Lift09 — Ramesh Srinivasan — Cultural Futures [en]

What would a diverse digital world/web look like?

How is the web impacting the world?

Design exposed Ramesh to questions of culture. *(steph-note: I think this is a very good point/thing.)*

Put technology in the hands of *people*: things happen. Used in a different way and in a different context than what they were planned for.

Cultures understand how to take technologies to use them in ways that best benefit them.

Usability tends to push us towards thinking that there are specific uses for the technology, and we design them for those uses. But out there in the wild, other uses appear.

Example: Native American communities in Southern California, spread across reservations, connected through wifi.

Rethinking the museum. Piece of pottery — viewed by Zunis through stories, uses, rather than characteristics. Intersection between what the Zuni say about the piece of pottery, and the museum.

Video camera in villages in Andhra Pradesh. People seeing themselves in different ways.

=> comparative study Ramesh ran. 2 villages, similar demographics. “Create videos” around their everyday lives.

What happens? specially in an environment where 80% of the villagers are illiterate?

Power of choice. Characteristics of illiterate societies (very ritualized). When they start creating videos, some kind of literacy settles in. They’d take videos of things in the communities that were wrong, and send it to the government. Social action. Posted on YouTube, even!

What happened?

Mobility, dissemination, social capital, dialogue outside the focus group, confronting ritualization by interrupting everyday life.

Taking it to Policy. Scale vs. The Local.

How do policy-makers view the world? Example, waterlogging (monsoon). Hundreds of terms in people’s vocabulary for that, but only one for those complaints on a policy level.

Public Grievance & Redressal website

Where to start? tagging to overcome ontology issues, for example.

Two main issues:

a) how do we develop web systems that actually show controversy (wikipedia doesn’t really show that, for example *steph-note: except in talk pages*)

b) search: information has moved from “in your mind” to “what you can find = Google”. Google’s algorithm is based on a certain idea of how things should be found. eg search for Africa — head over to page 3 at least to find the first page *produced* by/in Africa… that says something! How do we show different ways of solving a problem?

Lift09 — Change — Yeong Roh [en]

Arts: helps her think about herself. Shift of mode from previous speakers. More reflective.

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Change what, and how? and what should we change?

Start with changing our outlook or perspective of ourselves.

I Ching. Book of change. 2800 BC.

Author accused of being a North Korean spy.

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Word for “open up and make connections” = “connect all the way from the earth to the heavens”

Who do we think we are?

4 Dimensions of existence according to Ken Wilber:

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Levels of Consciousness: Senses — Cognition, science — Understanding, culture, values — Spirituality.

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Lift09 – David Rose – How Fiction Shapes the Future [en]

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Persistant needs/wishes fantasies:

  • to know
  • to communicate
  • to heal
  • to protect
  • to create
  • for mobility

Inspirations for where to advance.

Know

To know the truth. Invention and fiction.

  • Marsden (?): here were no cultural icons representing strong women => WonderWoman, with lasso of truth. In its snare, you have to tell the truth.
  • Snow White: mirror mirror on the wall…
  • Conlin: Alexander Crystal seer.
  • Wizard of Oz.

Single pixel browser. Orb. Ambient objects: between push and pull. Skiing conditions, gardening, weather forecast…

Watches are a pretty mature object, but angular perception is not very ambient. (steph-note: I think I may have got that wrong, lots of examples of angular displacement devices.)

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Fridges are a great place to diplay stuff. They’re already expensive, so easy to add an extra screen or something.

Exposing customers to energy prices flattens the demand curve.

Showing us a device with proximity sensor: from far away you see the cross-room view of the weather forecast, and as you get closer, you see more detailed views. (steph-note: wow!)

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Communicate

Photo frame with presence sensor, and squeeze sensor.

Internet-connected pillcap. Ordering refills. Escalating alerts to take the pills. Share on facebook (I’m on something and I’m doing well). Rewards! Medical records!

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Protection

Phasers on stun on Star Trek. Exploring brave new worlds without harming anyone.

Ambient umbrella!!

Create

Robots would give you time to be creative. Roomba!

Painting with a digital brush that picks up color from your environment! (great video)

Guitar Hero.

Mobility

Flying carpet. Drive in the smart lane, GPS. Marauder’s Map = GPS combined with Google Latitude. Tracking busses in SF.

Lift09 — Change — Nicolas Nova — The Recurring Failure of Holy Grails [en]

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Videophone 1969 — so expensive that nobody could use it.

The Intelligent Fridge 1996

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Location-based services 1993 — a success in terms of communication, but not in terms of where people are *(steph-note: not sure I got that right)* — Google Latitude, but problems for privacy reasons. Not that simple.

Common characteristics:

– overoptimism
– reinvention of the wheel
– ignoring similar attempts

Issues:

– Trapped in the zeitgeist (designers, researches, engineers).
– Time is not stable. Innovations happen slowly.
– Short term, long term
– bad understanding of “users”
– the “average human” myth

Automating rituals (Where are you? Smart fridge that does the shopping.)

Virtual assistants in MS Office. Idea: technology should be more “natural”. Making things “natural” is difficult: what is natural, and how can technology really replicate it?

What is “natural” shifts over time. Eg. swiping travel cards that are in bags in the subway: natural for the people who are used to do it, but not for those who have never been in the subway. It’s difficult to define.

So, why is it important to explore failures?

Many failures are actually good ideas before their time. Failures can indicate possible futures to explore. More detailed critique. Source for design (Apple certainly learned a lot for the iPhone from their Newton failure).

It’s important to spot failures, there is a need to document them and turn them into a design strategy.

Lift09 — Change — Patrick J. Gyger — Science Fiction and the Future [en]

Lift09 021 - Patrick Gyger Amazing stories (pulp magazines). Looking into the future. Thirties. This is when SF started becoming a genre.

SF starts creating a new 20th century. SF zeitgeist, science programme. SF moves over to other media: films, radio.

Commercials start using SF backdrops for all sorts of commercial goods. Up to the 60s, the future is used to promote goods.

What will the future be like? (based on SF, predictions)

Home of the future. Revolutionary transportation. We’ll all have flying cars! But actually, flying cars did exist, in the twenties (René Tampier). <–photo–>

Despite the real flying cars, they remain in the realm of imagination, they are still an object of the future.

SF plants the seeds of dreams and desire. It has to stay in the realm of imagination. There is no place for the flying car in the present, because it is an object of the future, by definition.

Some objects have made their way from SF into our world.

– wrist pager / wrist phone
– cybernetics, artificial limbs (cf. Kevin Warwick last year at Lift08)
– robotics
– communications, videophone (Skype)
– jetpacks (want to see your neighbour soaring above your head in the morning, off to work?)

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Failures — or not there yet:

– invisibility doesn’t really work
– cryogenics (not too good)
– teleportation for transportation — we’re not there yet
– time travel

The future did not take the shape of our SF dreams of the past. *steph-note: not altogether surprising imho, as SF is really talking about the present*

Right now, we live in Utopia in the Western world — we don’t feel the urgency to dream up our Utopia. Some technology utopias have been realised, but have not brought what we hoped from them.

We also live in Dystopia — aware of the dark sides of technology.

“We live in the dreams and nightmares of our grandparents, at the same time.”

Belief of the grandiose views of flying cars: machines, not politics, will produce beneficial social change. We don’t believe that anymore.

Lift09 Workshop: Where will you work tomorrow? (Pierre Belcari) [en]

Workshop information. Watch the video.

Developing environments. Different solutions available at the moment in Europe. Evolution of the workplace.

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Where do we come from?

Office: individual offices, cubicles, open spaces

Hoteling: book work spaces when you need them, inside the company.

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Companies might try to encourage people to telecommute: save money on space, and improve work-life balance.

Evolution of technology has made evolution of the workspace possible.

Working from home? social interaction is lacking.

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Coworking: Gathering of people working independantly but sharing values and costs. Synergy.

*steph-note: I talked about eclau and Coworking Léman here.*

Xavier: FRIUP incubator. Very different from a coworking space. Very startup-minded. Need to leave after one year. Have to present a project to a committee who will decide if they can benefit from the incubator.

Nicolas: on the road.

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Stuck [en]

All set to try importing old posts into a test database. Php.ini edited to allow big file size, long script execution times, etc.

But I get this:

Import WordPress

Sorry, there has been an error.

Failed to write file to disk.

I’m not the only one (google) but I’m stuck. Suggestions? I’m going to bed.

Here's the plan [en]

I have a wordpress export of my blog dated 24th october 2008. That’s good. I means everything published before that date will come back as it was.

The exception to that is the non-blog content of CTTS: the “pages” like the writing section, RSI page, About, etc. But I’ve got all those out of the Google cache (hoping I didn’t forget any).

Feedly, which I loved already, are saving my day by providing me with an export of my 1000 or so latest posts — more than enough to cover the bit that’s missing since October.

Backtype, as for them, have promised to get back to me with whatever comments they have for my blog, as they’ve been crawling it regularly for quite some time now.

So, I’ll have to reconfigure blog, theme, plugins, which is not the end of the world.

I have a copy of the last post I wrote and the ones before in case they hadn’t made it to feedly when I pulled the plug (haha). I also learned that you can access the cached version of a page directly if you know the url by typing cache:https://climbtothestars.org/writing/ in Google, for example.

Where’s the catch?

Integrating the exports I’ll get from feedly and backtype. Off the feedly export, I’ll have to:

  • remove delicious links posts
  • remove “similar posts” div
  • remove post language and “other language excerpt” from the top of almost each post
  • move the language and other language excerpt into the correct custom meta fields
  • find a way to integrate the comments gathered from backtype into the right place in the export file.

Thanks so much for everybody’s help. CTTS is going to be bonky for quite a few days, and not least during the Lift09 conference, which I’ll be live-blogging.

Oh well. Conferences seem to attract server disasters — in my case anyway.