Open Cities Registration Begins!

super exciting day! open cities registration begins!!

Open Cities came out of observations and conversations about issues that affect many of us, slowly growing into a desire to think about the kinds of questions and possibilities around what ‘open’ means and what it enables. A big kudos to Mark Kuznicki, who first looped me into the conversation. The passionate people/participants/citizens organizing Open Cities hope to facilitate

“a weekend-long web of conversation and celebration that asks: how do we collaboratively add more open to the urban landscape we share? What happens when people working on open source, public space, open content, mash up art, and open business work together? How do we make Toronto a magnet for people playing with the open meme?”

Open Cities is premised around an unconference format – participant driven with sessions unscheduled til the day of. Open Cities aspires to be the first of many, locally and internationally. If you are interested in participating, the only caveat is that both feet must be in the conversation. As well, we expect spaces to fill up rather quickly so please go and sign up asap! And huge thanks to the Centre for Social Innovation and Fort York for their generous sponsorship! And some amazing preliminary press from BoingBoing (thx cory!) and BlogTO

Pass it along. Post it! Ping it! Pay it forward!

• Open Cities
• Registration

• 23 June 9am-6pm: Open Cities unconference, Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina
• 23 June 6pm-9pm: Open Cities BBQ, Fort York
• 24 June 12pm-7pm: PS Kensington/Open Cities Collaboration, Kensington Mkt

ps- i didn’t think i’d make it to Open Cities due to a scheduling conflict, but things have cleared up. :)

kctos and vienna in december!

good news this week!

an abstract proposal i submitted was accepted!! Tacit Knowledge Creation in Knowledge-Based Hybrid Communites will be presented at the biannual INST conference, held in Vienna this December. This year’s them is Knowledge, Creativity and Transformations of Societies, and the section where my paper will be presented is Knowledge Production, Cultural Discourse and Media.

so what’s it all about? i’m looking at the way hybrid communitiesform and develop. a hybrid community is one where the people involved encourage literacy, mobility and intent along a digitally mediated continuum -  from non-digital to digital technologies – to cultivate and create contexts for new forms of knowledge and exchange. tacit knowledge is the subjective stuff of experience and expectation, our implicit lens that to some extent frames the nature of our position, relationships, communities, beliefs and values, intents and narratives. how do new technologies, new behaviours and new tensions/opportunities in the space of digital and non-digital presence create bridges for tacit knowledge?

there’s tie-ins here to benkler’s wealth of networks – where he discusses the values and motivations of digitally enhanced (hybrid) communities, as well as henry jenkins and the idea of transmedia literacy – where content is distributed across various platforms and contextualized according to the constraints and desires of those involved. also drawing upon danah boyd’s recent research on social networking among young americans (thanks to david crow for the heads up regarding danah’s recent work), and a slew of real world examples.

i’ll be posting sections and ideas as they’re written for feedback and comments over the summer! see you soon!

keynotes from SXSWi – tectonic shifts

Now that the dust has settled from the intensity of Austin (complete with nuclear tacos, tornado watches and flash flooding in addition to Will Wright’s keynote and Bruce Sterling’s rant), my inner magpie has sifted through SXSWi’s glitter and taken away a few shiny threads of what are hopefully insightful and inspiring. (as a side note, SXSWi is publishing podcasts of the panels: find them here)

Many of the panels I attended and the majority of the conversations that I had with people indicated a shift towards trying to understand what is being articulated, changed or revealed in us through our relationship with technology. The consensus is that our focus on technology is richer and more reflective when we think about who we are as people and what we want, with critical engagement and inquiry directed towards socio-technical means and motivations.

Empathy – the ability to understand someone else’s condition (emotional, economical, social, mental, etc) – is emerging as the critical factor in not only designing but also living through and with new technologies and technological platforms. Our ability to imagine what people think, feel, want and imagine themselves as is heightened when we redefine what we hope to get out of our relationships and how we may want to use it.

Any goal we define has a set of constraints and metrics applied to it, and data passes through relevance and application filters. Sometimes we permit the information to change the filters, sometimes we do not. What I perceived at SXSWi was a strong motivation to accept and look for the nature of that change in developing ideas. To change the nature of the system which will support and disseminate them, and to imagine new systems.

Along with this comes (among many other things) learning how to listen to what else people are saying and doing when they interact, speak, gesture, etc – through their physiological, emotional and tacit responses to a particular thing. Implicit within this as well is a deeper understanding of context – why does someone feel or want this way, and how much does the design of the thing reflect this want and help them achieve it? A contextual caveat though is understanding that my bias is to look for these kinds of connections and keys, and that there were also discussions that reflected far different ideas and approaches, some of which were, or were not as the case may be, as rich in potential.

Social computing, and its reflection throughout our face-to-face interactions and mobilizations, is increasingly revealing how we are using new tools and lenses through which to granulate and disperse our behaviours. The benefits of social computing are enormous, and as the drawbacks begin to emerge so too does a desire to understand to what affect our social practices, exchanges, and systems will be transformed. In addition to our cognition, physiology, economics, industries, cultures, etc, etc. Insightful and deep approaches to design are being rethought to reflect more of our behavioural, cognitive and physiological responses – as discussed by Kathy Sierra, Alex Steffen, Bruce Sterling, Henry Jenkins, Phil Torrone, Will Wright, etc, etc.

way more after the jump

kathy sierra keynote – the nuggets of *joy*

sxsw, saturday’s keynote by kathy sierra – check the podcast here

these are some of the highlights from her keynote on humanity in design – what resonated with me…

Question for the audience: There’s a drowning man – would you save him or photograph him and think how you would tag him in Flickr?

As designers and creators, we’re responsible for the products and services that we make. With sxsw, we don’t actually need to be here, there are livebloggers, podcasts, vlogs, flickr,twitter and everything else… yet here we are. Why? Because we are human, and we need to connect. So if we want to make better applications and technologies we better compensate and prioritize our humanity in our interactions.

Face-to-face interactions matter -whenever you reverse engineer passion, you find that ppl need to get together in person to fuel that passion, to allow it to grow.

The user expressing emotions towards computers negates the intent of the interaction. The software doesn’t respond to gesture, to tone or nuance – the things that we continually use in our interactions with each other. Yet our ability to be understood when making a confused or upset gesture is crucial in the clarity of our interactions.

We have designed all of our applications to have Asperger’s Syndrome – they don’t respond to social interactions, and there is no way for it to know or intuit that someone is confused or frustrated. And nobody’s passionate when they suck. People need to pass the Suck Threshold – the point at which they no longer suck and feel abit better about how there’s using a technology, they understand it and can do some things with it. Then they need to pass the Passion Threshold -where you begin to get really good and you start to develop a passion for what you are doing. The point at which the interaction has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with supporting the passion. We are not passionate about the tools we use, we are passionate about what they enable us to do.

But our technologies do not support the learning process – we study gesture and voice recognition, but have no way at this point to integrate that into our apps. And FAQs and Help don’t work if you’re frustrated or confused or lost. They don’t think like a human. So… what do we do?

How about a WTF? button.

If you someone you know is confused, the first thing you do (if you care) is ask “what’s wrong?” You build a context around the problem. To mediate and resolve the emotional reaction, a set of understandable and empathetic questions are necessary -an interactive dialogue.

Critically the most important aspect is understanding the impact of our actions and the impact of the things we put out into the world – both positive and negative. We need to generate an empathetic understanding of the implications of our actions in order to act better.

writing, better…

sxsw -saturday

Moderator: Greg Storey Principal/Creative Dir, Airbag Industries LLC
Greg Storey Principal/Creative Dir, Airbag Industries LLC
Bronwyn Jones Mktg Comms, Apple Computer
Erin Kissane Editor, Happy Cog
Ethan Marcotte Vertua Studios

discussions around how and why we need to examine different styles and cadences of writing – what makes it good or not and how to differentiate and pay attention the media that will represent your writing. premised around why and how podcasts, vlogs, etc may affect and/or raise the bar for good quality writing – but this didn’t really get addressed at all, it was mostly on the differences between print and web).

key points: building the relationships that will support your context. when milton or virgil wrote, they contextualized the expectations of their audience with the the development and emergence of their own voice, rocking it out and finding balance that remains potent and timeless after centuries.

i think that the most successful writers are able to articulate the things that reveal their passion for communication, for storytelling and relationships – turns of phrase and metaphor that stir the spirit not only because of their hopeful inspiration but also because of their attachments to reality.

quote from the panel: if i find a passage that i love i’ll retype it. i don’t know. i guess i like knowing what greatness feels like.

things to remember…
who inspires you and why do they inspire you – find your rock stars – explore their style to hone yours. voice is writer specific, while style is medium specific – writing should be interactive and conversational.
i think that we know this intuitively, and that we can easily speak to each other with informal language and yet when we go to write about something we feel passionately for a tendency emerges to overwork it, to enter a mode of working that’s blocked and locked – more like writing only to the expectations of what we think the context is about rather than what the writing is about.

we develop communication skills that will enable us to be heard more often than not, and in particular situations we feel the need to speak in particular languages to create understanding with human purpose and human context. it is about you and me and the things we want to do while we’re alive. we should be clear about what that is, and know how to tell each other. life is too short to not be amazing.