Participation Camp 2009, an unconference held at NYU’s ITP,  is part of a broader vision of the organizers to position open government at the leading edge of an open organizations movement. For more on open organization Matt pointed me to David Johnson’s work and the Virtual Company movement, vermontvirtual.org.

Matt Cooperrider (@mattcoop on Twitter) – the initiator and main organizer, and Suresh Fernando (@sureshf), and Stephan Dohrn (@sdohrn) – who worked with Matt on the virtual aspects of the conference, share an interest in open collaboration, the intersection of collaboration and technology, and “how practices in this space can scale up to a global level.”

Matt and Suresh met as a result of their deep commitment to the social venture space (see Suresh’s paper, “On  the possibility of an open system mobilization platform”).

Stephan worked with Suresh to build the virtual strategy – choosing the tools, and working with the virtual presenters to stream them into the conference and the presenters on site who were streamed out. Stephan and Suresh are part of Radical Inclusion – an international group with 2 people in Germany, one in Seattle, one in London. Suresh is based in Vancouver, and Stephan in Brazil.

Participation Camp was both a global gathering with virtual presenters from India, Netherlands, Canada (Montreal and Vancouver), and the US; and it was an extraordinarily vibrant and focused forum for current issues in New York City and State.

Open Collab

The next step for Participation Camp is an experiment called “Open Collab” – to take the evolving ideas into a persistent space that people can stay engaged in. This is in contrast to traditional conferences that are discrete events. There is already a Participation Camp Wiki. But OpenCollab hopes to explore virtual collaboration processes on a number of levels (Google Wave, perhaps?).

“We see that there is already a healthy movement of self-organized camps and conferences all over the world, but no thread that draws them together.  Presumably many of these camps and their participants share common interests and goals, and a desire to contribute their discoveries to a larger pool of knowledge.

There is of course, no shortage of online discussion groups and wikis.  While useful, these are no replacement for the energy and excitement generated by real-time interaction.  We think that the best way to tie the world’s many camps together is to curate a series of open virtual sessions that anyone can join and be a part of.

Our experiment, with the working title “Open Collab”, begins Wednesday July 15th at 15:00 GMT in our PCamp Skype Chat.  We’ll focus on building out this concept and a community to support it.  Our long-term vision is to build a solid framework for cross-camp collaboration in time for Spring 2010, when most camps gear up.

PCamp was primarily focused on Open Government, in part because better government is necessary for improved collaboration in the face of shared challenges such as climate change, poverty, and war.  Help us take our efforts to the next level.”

This Themes doc gives a a good summary of ideas to take Virtual Participation Camp forward and questions about how to make virtual collaboration more effective.  It is an excellent frame for those interested in getting involved with the continuing virtual experiment, “Open Collab.”

There was a rich integration of virtual sessions into the ITP event with video streams that brought in remote participants from across the globe. The conversations from the Skype group chat are archived here, here, and here.  I asked Stephan why he chose Skype over say, CampFire, or even an immersive environment like OpenSim. I mentioned how useful OpenSim had been in creating Virtual HomeCamp for HomeCamp2. But I wasn’t surprised to get the response that simplicity and users’ levels of comfort with different tools were the key factors.  Although Stephan mentioned that another Radical Inclusion member, Sofia Bustamante (see Turn Up The Courage), is exploring virtual worlds for collaboration.

I recorded the three sessions I attended at ITP on Saturday: Mark Belinsky’s – audio, Gale Brewer’s audio, and Noel Hidalgo’s audio.

Mark Belinsky: OpenMyCity

The pictures opening this post are from Mark Belinsky’s session on the OpenMyCity project (pic of the session notes on the left and Mark Belinsky on the right). Mark is director of Digital Democracy (@mbelinsky Twitter).

“OpenMyCity is backed by a coalition that formed around the Pioneers conference that took place recently in New York and Amsterdam…The goal of OpenMyCity is to find the best ideas about how to make use of municipal open data by asking citizens and organizations to answer a simple fill-in-the-blank question: “If I knew ___, I could do ___.”

Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategy Labs (@corbett3000 Twitter), and the creative force behind Washington D.C.’s hugely successful Apps for Democracy, participated in the session (which followed his). Peter (picture above) brought up an interesting hypthetical framework to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs:

“What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.”

Although I missed Peter’s session, I caught up with him for an interview (full transcript below) in which I asked him more about this repurposing of an open source dating platform idea, and the latest developments in Apps for Democracy.

Gale Brewer: New York City’s Open Data Legislation

NYC Council Member, Gale Brewer (@galeabrewer Twitter)

NYC Council Member Gale Brewer’s session on opening government data – Introduction No. 991-2009, gave an important explanation of the Open Data Legislation and why this effort to get raw data to the public legislatively is important (audio here – the recording is not of the highest quality but OK, and I hope to have a transcription soon).

Unfortunately, the Bloomberg administration and the Council are at odds over this now as the Bloomberg administration doesn’t appear to see the immense value of raw data over data packaged in accordance with what an administration thinks people needs (see this post on Gateway to Gov research and Discussion Blog, and John Geraci’s post on O’Reilly Radar, “Open Gov Is a Dialogue Not a Monologue.”)

Samuel Wong (@samjwong Twitter), Legislative Aide on Technology in Government, Office of Council Member Gale A. Brewer, attended Participation Camp (picture above), and is active in the virtual forums. Sam points out that Big Apps is a great idea, but cannot be implemented without open raw data from the government.

In email, I asked Sam what people could do to support the Open Data Legislation and he suggested:

“Right now, we are trying to gather information from other cities that have tried to open up their government – possibly some stats on cost-savings. The administration is worried about this.  If people can submit a brief written statement of other cities’ efforts, that’ll be helpful.

As the Administration considers a demand model for NYC Big Apps, the supply side is missing. A top-to-bottom model will be ineffective, in comparison the people-government collaboration model generates a sense of government accountability and trust.

In order to engage and collaborate with the people, the first step is to tap into the unique intellectual capital in New York City that will revitalize the private sector.  Once the government data is available, developers will competitively build applications from the raw data, which will help daily New Yorkers find the information they need.

Intro 991-2009 fosters competition among developers by supplying raw data that can be used for many purposes, including education and quality of life issues: the legislation complements NYC Big Apps, as greater results will yield from it.  Open data is a public service enhancement.

Thus, in addition to your advice and support, please participate in Apps for Democracy’s NYC Big Apps Ideas Feedback Forum [www.bit.ly/bigideas] to show your enthusiasm for more data for programmers, developers, and the daily New Yorker.”

Links from other blogs on Open Data legislation below:

http://www.politickerny.com/4271/bloomberg-administration-resists-online-mandate-citing-user-friendliness

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/182/new-open-data-standards-legislation

http://nyfi.observer.com/politics/208/pdf-bloomberg-announces-big-apps-contest-says-dine-winner

http://personaldemocracy.com/blog-entry/nyc-council-gives-open-data-hearing

“Several notable individuals” participated in the discussion on Open Data which as Lou Klepner noted,  in his post, included but was certainly not limited to, Andrew Hoppin (CIO, NYS Senate), Noel Hidalgo (Director of Technology, NYS Senate, ), Steven Clift (Founder, e-democracy.org), Silona Bonewald (Founder, Legal of Technical Voters), and Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist.org).”

Craig Newmark (@craignewmark Twitter) brought up some vital questions concerning how we can raise public awareness around the Open Data Legislation.  I had a quick chat with Craig after the session.  I was surprised and happy to see him playing such an active role in a small unconference.

Tish Shute: I noticed Gale Brewer was very enthusiastic just now about some of your recent work -  there was a boot camp I think? What is that?

Craig Newmark: Something that the Craigslist foundation does is to run a boot camp. The idea is to help people who want to help to be more effective at it. Focusing on non-profits. For example, last week one theme was to help people present what they’re doing more effectively. Because if you don’t – if you can’t tell someone what you’re doing in 30 to 60 seconds, they’re going to start tuning out. There’s also grant writing issues if you’re a foundation or a non-profit of some sort. And then there’s the effective use of technology. The idea is that if the bootcamp can help give someone a clue about any of those, that can make life much easier for someone who’s trying to help other people.

There is a nice short video here about Craig Newmark’s commitment to Gov 2.0, also see his blog.

Andrew Hoppin and Noel Hidalgo: nysenate.gov

Andrew Hoppin (@ahoppin Twitter) – pic above, was an active contributor to the discussion on OpenData. His team seems to have survived the upheavals in Albany to continue their innovative work on nysenate.gov that now allows “constituents to give direct feedback to Senators on proposed bills, hearings and issues in “crowdsourcing portals” for property taxes, ethics reform and campaign finance,”(see here for more, and also see my post on the work of Nathan Freitas the great developer for this team).

Director of Technology,  NYS Senate, Noel Hidalgo (@noneck Twitter) – picture below, led the excellent session on nysenate.gov (audio here).

More on Virtual Participation Camp

This week I got a chance, through the PCamp Skype group, to follow up with Suresh, Stephan and Matt (picture above of Matt Cooperrider participating in Gale Brewer’s session).  One of the topics I was interested in hearing more about was the Twitter and Iran Workshop that was part of the ITP program. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend in person.

I was interested in following up on some of the issues raised in my previous post, Twitter and The Web of Flow: Talking with Stowe Boyd & Bruce Sterling about Microsyntax, Squelettes, Favela Chic and the State of Now.

Matt noted that the centralized hijacking was taken as a given and the question was:

1. how do we get more reports out despite that

2. how do we aggregate/filter those reports

But, he also noted, the group at hand was less interested in a specific solution and got philosophical pretty quickly.  What is our goal with these interventions? To support people’s right to democracy?

Matt explained:

“I was pushing a project described here: http://votereport.pbworks.com/Iran-Election but the more experienced folks seemed to think it was too late for a solution like that but everyone pretty much agreed that the main goal was to get something like that ready for the “next one:” someone, Noel I think, suggested an international ICT “Red Cross” style organization.”

One of the virtual presenters at Participation Camp was Gaurav Mishra (@gauravonomics Twitter), the founder of 20:20 Web Tech, Votereport.in, and a leader in India’s Gov2.0 scene.

Stef Van Grieken (@stefvangrieken), New Voting Foundation also presented on the use of electoral compasses to identify key candidates for parliament in the Netherlands.

“The application matches candidates to voters based on the party program’s and individual political views.”

Ed Pastore (@epastore), Metagovernment, delivered a talk entitled, “Making Direct Democracy Practical,” outlining the drawbacks of representative democracy in various contexts; and exploring the historical criticisms of direct democracy and detailing, “several emerging projects which are actively working to overcome the limitations of direct (or otherwise more inclusive) democracy by applying sophisticated web technologies.”

And, Gabriel Flacks, Newsactivist and teacher at Champlain College in Montreal, Quebec, gave a talk entitled “Teaching Participation: the Newsactivist Curriculum.”

Talking With Peter Corbett

Tish Shute: What do I think are the most important apps for democracy to come out so far?

Peter Corbett: Well I won’t say what the most important are, because I think all of the ones created in the first round last year and the ones that are being developed now are important in some way shape or form. I’ll say what the most interesting were, and which were the ones that won medals.

So “ilive.at” won the gold medal in Apps for Democracy last October. What it does is, you put in your address and it basically forms the world around you. And you can see where crimes happened and where the post office is, and where the grocery store is. It’ll also show you an overlay of U.S. census data, to show you sort of the composition of that neighborhood – so what’s the average age, what’s the ethnicity, the composition from a married/single perspective.

The city thought it was really great and that it could help people decide where to move, and what that place looked like if they were in a certain sector of the city. Another really interesting application that was developed was “We the People Wiki,” and if you go to wethepeoplewiki.com you can see it. What it does is it creates all in one place all the information around crime you can imagine for a specific case. So if there was a homicide, you can see who the community prosecuter is, who the defender is.  You can see the ward within which it happened mapped, the specific address where it happened mapped. Also realtime data will stream up showing the last 5 homicides in that area – trying to identify, “Are there some trends around this thing, etc.?” So those are two interesting cool apps that were created.

In this new edition, Apps for Democracy “Community Edition, amongst the applications we’ve seen entered, there’s one that is essentially an iPhone application that lets you walk around the city and geolocate yourself so it’ll show you you’re on this street corner and you can take a picture of a pothole, upload it to the 311 service request system, and then hit “send to facebook,” and it publishes to your social profile, and people see that you’re concerned about this stuff.  And what that does is it creates little social hooks to get your friends to say, “Oh I can do this too and I should do this too.”  So we start to build a better view of what the problems are in the city, so that the city can then take care of them.

I think the promise of something like that is building an additional layer on top of it later, maybe where citizens would be empowered to solve some of these problems themselves. Because some of the things that get entered won’t really be things the city can take care of. Certainly litter is within the perview of the citys’ responsibility, but could there be community organizations who take care of things like that if you start to see trends in certain places of having a lot of requests around that.

There’s a last application I’ll talk about in this community edition, it’s called “PointAbout”. What it does is it builds an interactive map of all the vacant properties in the district which happen to be havens for drug abusers and possibly dangerous areas at night and things like that. Building that is really important. It’s really hard right now to do that in the city because it’s a lot of footwork and paperwork. So citizens themselves can identify addresses when they’re out and about and say this is a vacant property. It’ll make DC a safer place.

Tish: So have you seen the Sprx Mobile app “Layar,” an augmented reality browser?

Peter: I have seen that. It’s very cool. I think augmented reality is A the present and B the future. So it’ll be very cool to see augmented reality applications developed for DC in the future. Or anywhere, I’m very DC centric obviously. I live there and DC’s my client.

Dimitry Kachiev who’s the director of research and development for the city of Washington DC, just released an API actually that will show you in realtime the location of DC’s circulator buses. The circulator buses only go inside DC and are therefore not owned and operated by WAMATA which is metropolitan area transit authority, which won’t release their realtime data. So looking at Google Earth you can literally see the buses moving around the map. I use the circulator. I live 5 blocks from the line, but I never know when to leave my building to go to it. And now I can go, “Oh I see bus number 1150 is 5 blocks down, I might as well start walking now. Because then I’ll intersect it.”

There’s no live application. There’s just a data feed. But it can be visualized on Google Earth. And if you go to api.dc.gov you’ll see the beta API for that feed. So then you just click it, load it into Google Earth, and you’ll see the busses moving around.

Tish: I was fascinated by the idea you mentioned to use an open source dating platform to create resource matching to needs. But I didn’t quite pick up whether you actually built something yet?

Peter: No that is a hypothetical framework that we haven’t really put to the test yet. What we are thinking about is how in any given city or country or even globally on the net, there are people who have specific needs and there are people who can provide solutions to those needs. So it’s really sort of like a dating site analogy that we use when thinking about how to match those two for the most efficient outcome.

So think about males being people who have needs maybe females as being providers or something. So when you login and create your profile, you say I can provide this stuff. I’m a web developer, I’m a designer, I’m a great carpenter, I can transport food to places. and then what the needs are. We need food, we need web design, we need whatever, here’s our location. I’m not currently married, I’m single. So going into the system an algorhythm would say OK based on the need, and based on the provider, Peter Corbitt should provide web design to this non-profit because A it’s 2 blocks away from him, B he’s not on a project right now, C they’re not currently being satisfied with that need. Matched.

Tish: How is that different from what Mechanical Turk’s doing other than the payment thing?

Peter: I think there’s a lot of differences. Mechanical Turk is really just paying for specific actions in a discrete period of time. I want ten thousand people to click this link ten thousand times.
So the dating site analogy is extended when assuming that this need is fullfilled there was a discrete need like we just need 20 loaves of bread, well great done that need is gone. The need is gone out of the system, the matching doesn’t happen again. But if it’s an ongoing need like elderly care or afterschool tutoring, when that marraige is broken, when there’s a divorce, that needer goes back into the matching system to be rematched. Everywhere it happens, someone has a volunteer for a specific thing at a non-profit, they lose that volunteer, they have to go back and get a new one and it’s just an ongoing process. If you automate that it’ll be much more efficient. You’ll get more done.

Tish: How is that different from what the The Extraordinaries does?

Peter: The Extraordinaries concept I think is similar to a certain extent. The concept is very cool. So the it’s probably a little synonymous.

Their concept is a mobile micro volunteering thing, which is terrific. And I look forward to using it. I don’t know yet that they’ve gotten their application developed and approved?

Tish: You work for a very busy marketing company, how do you fit this all in? Where does it all fit? How do you monetize it? How do you keep it together?

Peter: Sure. I’m the CEO of iStrategy Labs, and 95% of our revenue comes from brands like Geico, American Eagle Outfitters, Rockstar folks like that, that pay us to do cool weird things with marketing technology. The D.C. government is our client, and pays us to create cool new things like apps for democracy.

Tish: So the D.C. government pays you to do Apps for Democracy?

Peter: That’s right. So we created the concept, and execute it and run it and champion it. Apps for Democracy is a way to engage citizen technologists in building applications for their city, by incentivising them with a little bit of fame, and a little bit of fortune.

Tish: But it’s basically D.C. based?

Peter: Nope. Yes and no.  It’s focused on applications for the city of Washington D.C. The first round that we had last year, 80% of the applications were developed by D.C. based people, I should say the greater D.C. area so D.C., Maryland, Virginia. The other 20% came from California, Massecussets, North Carolina, from specific hackers that like to work on this kind of stuff. There’s an Apps for Democracy Finland, there’s an Apps for Democracy Belgium. It’s spreading as an idea, as a way to do things differently. And those aren’t paid consulting engagements that we have for iStrategy Labs.

I give that insight away freely because I want people to do it. I think it’s the right way to do things. And it certainly helps our initiative be more well known and give us more impact when we do something.

Tish: And you mentioned you’re very involved with Government 2.0 camps and O’Reilly’s upcoming Government 2.0 Expo, and Government 2.0 Summit?

Peter: I’m on the programming committee for Government 2.0 Expo. Government 2.0 Summit I just sort of help promote a little bit. Government 2.0 Camp I co-created with 3 other individuals, and Government 2.0 club I co-created, and Transparency Camp.

Game Play and Collaboration

A collaborative sculpture (pic above) emerged at Participation Camp, also a game of Nomic

“Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.”

—Peter Suber, the creator of Nomic, The Paradox of Self-Amendment, Appendix 3, p. 362.

Also there was a linkcube unit stationed at ITP throughout the conference, but unfortunately I didn’t have a moment to check it out.  Linkcube is part of the 80+1 project.

“Using real-time data exchange, the users, who are geographically distant, are presented on screen as if they were right next to each other. This closeness lets users get momentarily acquainted with other humans to whom they would not otherwise be exposed. What results is a set of playful interactions and the ultimate photographs serve as a tangible record of this memorable virtual experience.”

Nathan Freitas holding a Peek with Oliver+Coady partner David Oliver talking to fans at New York Tech Meetup – Mobile Meets Social

Volunteerism and participation in public life seem to come naturally to Nathan Freitas. Nathan is one of the leading innovators/developers in NYC in mobile strategy/design (for more on his Android development read on). And he is much in demand as speaker who shows others how to realize their mobile experience and design dreams (for upcoming speaking engagements see Nathan’s blog). But also Nathan has spent much of the last ten years working on new ways for causes and non profits to benefit from technology.

Most recently Nathan has started working part time for the NY Senate under, “Albany’s King Geek,” the new CIO Andrew Hoppin:

“The CIO team is organizing training sessions for senators and their staff on social networking platforms and how to pay attention to online feedback. Last week, they hired mobile specialist Nathan Freitas to create new phone applications that will allow citizens to get government news on the go.”

Also, Nathan is currently supporting engineer on, The Extraordinaries, a smart phone application that explores territory “beyond the flattening tendency of online relationships” (see this list from Andy Oram of the Questions on Government participation).  The Extraordinaries is Ben Rigby and Jacob Colker’s prize winning project  – “a smartphone application that delivers volunteer opportunities on-demand.”

Ben’s post, Information Age Volunteerism – Open Sourced! Crowdsourced! and the extensive comments give a detailed analysis and critique of this brilliant and creative new approach to volunteersim in the information age.

Nathan, in my view, is a great example of how to “do well by doing good.” And, I am particularly excited by the work Nathan and his partner in Oliver+Coady, David Oliver, are doing on Android, e.g., Nathan’s new gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client (you can download the source here).

I first met Nathan when I interviewed him about Cruxy in 2007 (see my post, The Mixed Reality Metarati and “Destroy TV:”  Merging Art, Technology, Politics and Play).  Nathan recently announced that “the fat lady has just uploaded her last song.” Cruxy was an innovative distributed music venture Nathan started with Jon Oakes.  Although, as Nathan explains, Cruxy “never really broke through in the way we hoped.” Nevertheless Cruxy seems to have been a fertile garden for ideas that are coming of age in Oliver-Coady’s current mobile experience endeavors.  As Nathan explains, “the world, including Apple and iTunes, has shifted to embrace some of the ideals we have always had – open formats, more ways to distribute and promote online, more avenues for niche content to be discovered and heard.” Cruxy’s technology platform, built by the incomparable Will Meyer:

“was a great success in my mind, being one of the first to fully embrace Amazon’s cloud and provide a widget-based commerce system that actually worked!”

Nathan has a new company, Oliver+Coady. But Nathan told me that he feels he is over his “start up phase.”

Nathan Freitas: I am just tired of the term “startup.” I’m more interested in being defined as person than a member of a corporation. Also I am more interested in the ideas of cooperatives, and have been working on this idea (see here for more on the New York Creative Cooperative ).

Tish Shute: You do a high percentage of non profit work. Are you still managing to keep the home fires burning in the economic downturn?

Nathan Freitas: There is definitely profit to be made in non-profits because even if you only get paid half of what you get for corporate work, it is worth it in terms of fulfillment, ego, respect, and general contribution back to the planet. However, I’ve also been investing time & energy w/o pay into thinking about how causes can benefit from technology for over ten years. So its not just something you decide to do one day, and suddenly are successful.

Tish Shute: What are some of the highlights of your non profit work recently?

Nathan: Well, The Extraordinaries project is definitely a highlight. It is focused on a whole new approach to volunteering and winning the first prize at the WeMedia Conference for the non-profit tech category was a great validation of the work. I am just a supporting engineer on the effort, which was founded by my good friend Ben Rigby (a longtime non-profit tech guy as well) and Jacob Colker.

Ben wrote this excellent book on mobile tech and organizing, Mobilizing Generation 2.0 He’s done a ton of mobile work with youth voters via his non-profit, Mobile Voter.

The Extraordinaries is really taking all of our joint experience and putting it into a whole new system that is meant to go beyond generic email blasts that just ask you to “send a fax” or “send a link”. it gives people specific tasks they can accomplish on their phone or in their local area using their phone.

Tish: Did you do Twitter Vote Report with Ben too?

Nathan: Oh, no, Twitter Vote Report was with a different group of folks…mostly east coast-based, organized by the TechPresident.com blog. But Ben and I worked on SMS efforts for the 2004 election. We sent 40,000 messages out to SEIU labor members and MoveOn members… really the first time SMS was used in a wide-scale manner to help get out the vote on election day.

Tish: Do you have a new mobilization project planned?

Nathan: Its all about The Extraordinaries right now. We’ve got a big launch coming in June, and are working actively to add more causes that can benefit from volunteers and organizations that have volunteers but don’t know what to do with them.

Tish: I was just looking at your post on Peek too.

Nathan: Yeah… fortunately that is a completely  “for profit” gig.  But I like the company a lot, and think their spirit of providing access to email at a very low cost plays well with the non-profit world.

Tish: So it isn’t just iphone apps that are paying the bills?

Nathan: Nope. iPhone is just an aspect. Everyone is so obsessed with it and how to strike it rich quick, but in the greater scheme of things, there is a huge ecosystem of mobility out there for you to find a niche in, if you are looking.

Tish: Are you able to monetize your work on Android yet?

Nathan: here and there… releasing some for pay apps soon, also including “free” Android ports in some high-profile iPhone apps we hope to have out soon. Some successful iPhone app developers are looking for people to port their apps to Android, as well.

gReporter – opensource, geotagging, media capture report client

Tish: So what are your hopes for Android development in general and your gReporter app in particular?

Nathan: I think Android represents right now what Linux on desktops did in 99 or 00  Though as we all know, cycles of technology seem to speed up. There is huge interest in it at the academic level and there is also a genuine interest in its use by non-profit/development agencies working around the globe.

You have to jump through hoops to get an unlocked, open iPhone w/o contract. Android provides an alternative solution to this, that acts more like a true platform, and not just a consumer product.

Tish: At the moment the Android market place is only for free apps right?

Nathan: No, it now supports paid apps. I just bought one today for $2.99

Tish: What did you buy?

Nathan: An app that allows me to turn my G1 phone into a WiFi hotspot sharing my 3G connection to anyone who connects.

Tish: So what are the most important aspects of Android in your view?

Nathan: There are  two sites to help demonstrate what is really going on with Android that makes it significant

1) Open Intents – this is the ecosystem of developers, all creating services and apps that interoperate, share data, and generally build a very rich Microsoft style platform:
except all these are open-source and built by lots of small developers and not one big corporation.

2) Android on HTC – this is the home for all the efforts to port Android to pre-existing HTC/XDA mobile phone hardware. You can see the status of ports here: http://wiki.xda-developers.com/index.php?pagename=Android_devices  Imagine… taking an old Windows Mobile HTC phone, and then popping in an SD card that reformats it over to Android brand new phone!  For much of Asia, India and Africa, there is huge interest in this.

Tish: Nice! You mentioned earlier that you are thinking of doing SDK for the android sensor API’s?

Nathan: That would be part of the geo report app… expanding it to capture all sensing data and report that when you submit your text, photo or audio report.  Right now it just detects your lat and lon, but no reason it couldn’t also check your compass, altitude and whatever other data the device might offer.

Tish: So what will your geo report do now?

Nathan: It allows you to submit a text, photo or audio report, tagged with geo coordinates, timestamp, and basic user info (name, email, home location, etc) to whatever server it is configured to us. it is the latest release of code used for the TwitterVoteReport and InaugurationReport efforts.

There is also just a lot to learn or use from the code itself, which is available at: http://github.com/natdefreitas/georeport-android

Lots of little lessons learned packaged up into a functioning application

Tish: How many sensor APIs does android have?

Nathan: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/hardware/SensorManager.html

int SENSOR_ACCELEROMETER A constant describing an accelerometer.
int SENSOR_ALL A constant that includes all sensors
int SENSOR_DELAY_FASTEST get sensor data as fast as possible
int SENSOR_DELAY_GAME rate suitable for games
int SENSOR_DELAY_NORMAL rate (default) suitable for screen orientation changes
int SENSOR_DELAY_UI rate suitable for the user interface
int SENSOR_LIGHT A constant describing an ambient light sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient light measure in lux.
int SENSOR_MAGNETIC_FIELD A constant describing a magnetic sensor See SensorListener for more details.
int SENSOR_MAX Largest sensor ID
int SENSOR_MIN Smallest sensor ID
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_ORIENTATION_RAW A constant describing an orientation sensor.
int SENSOR_PROXIMITY A constant describing a proximity sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the distance between the sensor and the object in meters (m)
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_HIGH This sensor is reporting data with maximum accuracy
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_LOW This sensor is reporting data with low accuracy, calibration with the environment is needed
int SENSOR_STATUS_ACCURACY_MEDIUM This sensor is reporting data with an average level of accuracy, calibration with the environment may improve the readings
int SENSOR_STATUS_UNRELIABLE The values returned by this sensor cannot be trusted, calibration is needed or the environment doesn’t allow readings
int SENSOR_TEMPERATURE A constant describing a temperature sensor Only the first value is defined for this sensor and it contains the ambient temperature in degree centigrade.
int SENSOR_TRICORDER A constant describing a Tricorder When this sensor is available and enabled, the device can be used as a fully functional Tricorder.
float STANDARD_GRAVITY
with a few easter eggs as well
GRAVITY_DEATH_STAR_I
SENSOR_TRICORDER

Nathan: They are all in the API however, there isn’t hardware to support all of them yet… for instance TEMPERATURE is not yet supported
nor is LIGHT.

Tish: and errr what is gravity_deathstar

Nathan: It is a value representing the fictional gravity on the Death Star from Star Wars – geek humour

Tish: That makes me think of this great essay by Julian Bleeker, Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design Science, Fact and Fiction:

“When you trace the knots that link science, fact and fiction you see the fascinating crosstalk between and amongst ideas and their materialization. In the tracing you see the simultaneous knowledge-making activities, speculating and pondering and realizing that things are made only by force of the imagination. In the midst of the tangle, one begins to see that fact and fiction are productively indistinguishable.“

Picture below is Nathan playing his dream ukulele – designed using the free, open-source Inkscape vector drawing tool (see his open-source Ukulele plans here)
See Nathan’s blog for the whole story of how the Flying V Rockin’ Ukulele Design he posted to Thingiverse a few weeks ago, after being inspired by Bre Pettis’ talk at ROFLThang materialized at the  NYC Resistor “amazing workshop laboratory in Brooklyn where they let anyone come over and hang out at, to learn how to make, build and fabricate pretty much anything. They also have a laser (aka “LAAAZZZOOOR”) which you can think of as an automagic thing cutter-outer!”

so this….

became this …

Nathan and David presented Coovents at NYTM – Mobile Meets Social. They had a large group of questioners surrounding them (see picture below).   I talked to David after the presentation.

David Oliver was a software architect, user experience designer and product manager in the areas of mobile/wireless and electronic payment at IBM for over a decade.  Most recently, he lead the effort to productize a mobile client for IBM’s Lotus Connections enterprise social networking suite.  As a software architect, David was often technical lead for IBM’s business partner relationships with mobile device manufacturers.  Prior to IBM, David was co-founder of the Internet’s first “micropayments” company, Clickshare.

Talking with David Oliver

Tish Shute: How are smart phones are causing us to rethink what networked online relationships are all about.

David Oliver: You know these [mobile] devices are .. there’s a long time we tried to pitch that we’re going to treat them like they’re PC’s, or they’re just like anything else. But they’re really not. It may be the same coding style but the way you think about using them is entirely different. And the way you think about your program. so if you use html, java and that kind of stuff, yes it’s same code type but the way you think about it is entirely different. And to me these little devices make what you said [relationships inherently about who YOU are, WHERE you are, WHAT you are doing, WHAT is around you, etc.] a lot more possible than a PC. because in a PC you almost have to sit in front of it and like it controls you. But the device is so little and there’s almost no user interface by comparison. You got to be very smart how you build something so that it’s almost invisible. And of course that’s the beauty of the iphone, Apple will tell you. The idea of ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous what? Am I really computing? I don’t feel like I’m computing. I feel like I’m interacting or something.

I think twitter is very cool. The real way it’s cool is that there’s no required client. You can access Twitter any way you want.  You can imagine other ways to use it. Tweet Deck happens to be a nice for now. What I like about Twitter is, if you give it a tiny bit of thought, the Twitter network’s complete white noise, just like the internet itself. If you put a probe on the internet it’s all white noise, it’s all unordered packets. It makes no sense. So it’s cool that Twitter is at the level of little bitty conversations, but collectively all white noise. Totally meaningless white noise.  There’s some neat things going on, but I think we haven’t seen barely the first of what you can do with Twitter.

The way I see it is it’s like instant messaging where you don’t instant message to someone you instant message to the network and there are listeners. So normally in the old world of IM like AOL IM I would say Tish let’s talk and I kind of like grab you. Then it’s a narrow pipe you to me. You can add a few people in and make a little group, and that makes a bit of a closed network. But with twitter you just like talk into the air as if I were standing over there and you had a twitter client here, we could have the same interview. Because I would be watching you OH I see Tish’s question. I’d be over there talking  and you’d be picking me up over here. I’ts like you’re talking into white noise, like at this bar. You choose to hear me, this guy is not choosing to hear me right now.

Tish Shute: So what does Android bring to the party?

David Oliver: They have the notion that you have a telephone platform that’s open, and that everybody can use. And it’s got a variety of sensor data – not just location but also accelerometer and compass and more.  So in theory you can almost broadcast that data. It’s connected to a network. It’s easy, open API’s to get at that data. But the question is who are you going to broadcast it to or who are you sending it to. What are they going to do with it? How are you going to control it, and make sure people don’t misuse it? As you heard with the services tonight, there’s a central kind of service necessary to filter and rebroadcast that stuff back out to places that need it, or can use it, or you want to have use it. I think the mobile device is only one piece of this. Nat and I always talk about well we do mobile applications but a portion of it is on the server. And coordinating with the people or the group or the central resource that brings all this data together.

Tish Shute: There seems to be a lot of new location based services – platforms to aggregate location based data being developed (e.g. xtify and viaplace). What do you think about the direction this development is going in?

David Oliver: It’s not conventional wisdom but it’s one of these things where when a crowd of people does something, and that means people themselves are the service providers,  when they all get together the net effect is greater that the individual effect would be. Pooling together makes more sense than doing it individually. Its a little bit like an advanced version of you have to have a password for every single site and you manage your passwords. Location is the same way. If you had to give every single website that you enjoyed your location data or tell them how to get it, what a huge pain. So they’re offering a way to do that in a more general sense. There are humongous privacy issues though. Just like passwords. Would you really trust a place that held all your passwords centrally?

Even with the most basic level of calling. Now that you can call from anywhere. Largely people are getting into a mode where their mobile phone is them. It’s always with them. That’s how you reach me. Forget the home phone, the work phone it’s just a mobile phone. You have an address attached to you, an address I can reach you at that’s location independent. So there some beauty in that and it’s very freeing. It makes your location unimportant, you can call me anywhere. You can text me anywhere, message me anywhere. You can be anonymous. My son told me something recently. “I love going to New York City because I can just walk around and nobody knows me. I’m completely anonymous. That’s the coolest thing”, he says. At one level that is a good thing and a lot of good things can happen that way. But this new thing is sort of the flip side where everybody knows your location. And we haven’t figured out if that’s a good thing yet. But we’re in the throes of that whole changeover happening. And we’ll see. There’ll be some misuse. I’m not an advertising guy, so the fact that everything’s got to be ad supported makes it potentially very creepy and very dangerous. So we’ll see how that evolves.

Is there any model where you can go “Oh this is just like ‘S’”? I don’t see where that’s possible. It’s a new world. Where you’re exposed all the time, potentially. And how do you figure out either as an individual or a larger group, society or whatever, when that works and when that doesn’t. And you know there’s going to be some mis-steps probably. But the tangibility creates some of these interesting opportunities, there are just some amazing things that could happen, really, really good things. But we’re not going to get there in one step.

One of the things that was really a killer for privacy and a killer for in some ways the internet, was during the dot com bust. Prior to the bust, there were web sites that you’d given your name and email, and they said “we promise to preserve this privacy.” But as soon as those companies went bankrupt, their email list was gold. It was value. And a bankruptcy judge, in a court in Delaware, created a legal basis to sell that data. Those things that were formerly private were no longer private – “no no no that’s got value. I’m going to sell it so the shareholders get their money.” So all these web sites who had lists of user names that they promised were private, became public information. That was one of the biggest blows to privacy in the history of the internet. That’s going to happen again and again. Like if MeetMoi goes out of business the likelihood is all your shit’s going to get sold. I’m sorry it’s all going to be sold. It’s all a big joke. And that’s why central services are horrid, and I don’t like anything about a central service.

There are some pragmatic things about the way routing on networks actually works and the fact that the internet has gotten very centralized itself. The core ideas of the early internet which were essentially a survivable telecommunications network, remember it was the defense department that did the original internet? So the original idea of the original internet was survivability. The Russians could bomb the daylights out of the United States, territorial U.S. and we would still have a survivable network. That was the idea. And therefore all the nodes were dispersed and did not count on each other, and could reroute. Well now one company UUNET or whatever they are they own the whole thing. And you can look up all their locations on some internet database. 18 well placed bombs and the whole internet goes down. That’s what happens over time.

Well the whole cloud thing is also kind of a myth. It’s a very neat sounding term, and some aspects of it are different and new. Nate and I do a lot of cloud computing, it’s all on Amazon.

But we’ve always had that. That’s called time sharing. Strictly speaking it’s a thin contractual accompanied by a much much much easier application programming interface. That’s what cloud computing is. It’s a very skinny contract. Timeshare was a  huge contract. Literally it’s legal and a little bit of API ease. It’s just timesharing. But at Amazon and the other ones too, you’re not responsible for your node going down. If it goes down, they push it somewhere else automatically. Your disk goes down. You’re not responsible for backing up your disk, it’s already on 14 copies on 8 continents. They do that. So it’s a higher level of service. Nate and I have this thing called slice host. And we’ll probably build some services on it, and if they get popular, it’s like a vending machine. You just drop in a dime, they give you another slice. No contract at all. It is growth and learning about old ideas. Like this whole idea of software as a service. The company called ADP Automatic Data Processing, who basically in short do payroll for everybody. It’s software as a service. It’s been going on since 1952 or something. It’s more like a reconception using modern tools. It’s like virtual worlds are a different thing. That’s a whole different beast.