Thinking of Buiness

So I was reading away, as I do, and I came across an interesting little piece of modern web which acts as a business objectives and management solution. It seems decent and looks like it would be a great back end for a more populated version of this project.

The project is called PlanHQ and it has a pretty decent tour.

Internet Startups and Failures

I came across a silly little game called Sim Web 2.0 representing some of the dynamics of internet startups.

Today I have decided that at least some of the core aspects of my project have failed. Namely the active part that never really got clear of the ground. I believe this to be the case because although I have a collection of "interested" users there is not a sufficient throughput of information and activity on the project site. This is of course quite sad but it is also could be quite informative.

In reaction to this failure I think there are a few potential developments. Firstly, I am considering trying a number of much smaller projects on various other network driven systems, perhaps based around packages like facebook or some of the ready made collaborative systems. I think another potential development would be to send out some review content asking people engaged in this system to give me more context. The hardest part of this of course is that I need to find a way to help people overcome the fact that they are sorry that they could not be involved because they were too busy. One last thin is the prospect of making the design stages or process secondary to the act of collaboration. Perhaps the "network of friends" structure that I always talk about should be valued more and the friends aspect of it should be made more realistic...

Any suggestions?

Carve Out and Passion for Participaton

As some people know I like Chinese things and recently I came to know a small group of Chinese students working on something they call a "carve out", which is basically a small project that is fairly specialized and that is based on participating with friends and colleagues a like. This really interests me of course because some of the driving things behind my interpretation of good collaboration are that it is based on the "network of friends" system that I have previously discussed and that passion driven participation is rampant, which I think should govern the world. So this is great and I think this might just fall into the category that Malte had suggested I create. One in which I am participating in someone external's project. In this case it is not so much that I am actively part of their project more that I am helping them with decision making on some aspects, however I think the general thing is there. I am working with them and being governed by them. So far it is not very developed, we are just talking about ideas at the moment but I think it could become something engaging.

Mid Semester Further Review

A week after my Mid Semester presentation I was given formal feedback from my lecturer Malte. This went quite well and we talked through some of the issues of it all. Here are some of the things that were brought up.

1. Clarify what is going on more at the beginning of the presentation next time.
2. For whom and why and what - Basically he was wondering if I could demonstrate the answers to questions like these in my presentation. I think he though I was a little bit confused about whom and why.
   
3. Become part of another team. Join another project that i can be part of. I think this is a great suggestion and I hope to be able to do it. Currently I am trying to get people in my community to host a project, even if it is just between the two of us but most people are pretty soft core in this regard.
   
4. My lecturer things that I should have 3 components
1. Set-up getting collaborators - Design 2.0
   
2. Real collaboration - The competition work I am doing with Soumitri et al.
   
3. Part of someone else's project - Non as of yet but hopefully one soon.
   
5. He would like me to find ways to succinctly suggest my background and the project as it is.
   
6. He also found my presentation too conversational. He suggests bring in some fundamental images at the start to allow people to fit in better. Perhaps a map of the project approach or something along these lines.
7. He then suggested that a map like this is in some ways what could also be the final design outcome for the overall project
   
8. He asks, Counter project and major project work together but how? Outline direct pros and cons and related materials. I think this also extends to the 3 types of collaboration outlined above.
   

Copyright Ideas

As a development from the talk given by Elliott Bledsoe the week before last at that workshop I have written um a few thought on the matter of open copyright.

1. The person that puts something online should be responsible for its rights. This can take care of a lot of issues of allowance of information.
   
2. New media should NOT have local copyright laws. The internet is global. New Media is global.
   
3. Human readability in licensing is essential. Without this the problem will not actually change
   
4. Licenses Stacking is pretty good. This means that people creating licenses can customize them quite a lot.
   
5. Creative Commons being too structured and requiring too much Attribution. This is a major issue. CC is for dorks. There is no system to work around your own needs. This ether needs to be made more easy or absolutely impossible, like a blanket clause.
6. Attribution is needed but it is ambiguous how this can happen well. In a lot of cases it is impossible to enforce and on some media it is to hard to do at all. This is a major problem, perhaps situations where attribution is not occurring could by default become commercial uses.
   
7. Two Problems with people in this market.
   
1. People do not implement copyright and do not care about it. These are most people who like doing something and care less about money. Passionate individuals who do not have a reliance on money.
   
2. Those who do, do not do it nicely. This group are people who are involved in some industry and do not think enough about the users. People like Metallica and Prince for example but also many other media sources such as the New York Times.
   
8. Look at for some notes on things of interest http://wiki.lessig.org/index.php/Main_Page
9. Humanise Copyright (this might be the big issue) A huge problem with copyright now is not that it is that bad but just that it is not understood. There is nobody who really understands all the rulings in the Copyright act in the united states and this is quite problematic. This issue needs to be simplified more than anything else. So it is predictable and understandable, well known and respected.
   
   
   

Trickle

So the whole design 2.0 community is moving pretty slowly. I am going to shift things back another week. Which is still fine because I have some extra time but it is a little annoying.

Today I have started posting more items in the design requirements section for project one. I think I will get to do more of that tonight and perhaps add some stuff to the similar section in project two. For the time being things are close to at a stand still but I think as the design aspects come in people might become a little more engaged.

Lastly, my time is being spent mostly on external things now. For instance looking into the success and failures of other systems. More on that later.

Avanoo

Recently there have been major updates to the strange new online question tool, Avanoo. The updates include a rethinking of the whole model of the product and now it seems a bit more like a glorified Pownce with some extra stuff. In any case and whatever it is like, one of the biggest changes is that Avanoo now supports things a bit like collaborative projects. Not quite in the same way that I would like to but interestingly open none the less. It seems like the network topology would allow this sort of collaborative project doing to be very large scale very quickly and perhaps would play well with the concept of the design 2.0 system. For the next few weeks I am going to look at being part of this community and perhaps post a few projects that I am interested in to see what happens. 

Does anyone else participate in this network?

Still/Open - Copyright

As I wrote yesterday, the workshop I attended last week included a number of areas of interest, including a talk on Creative Commons and alternative copyright initiatives by Elliott Bledsoe. This issue is obviously quite closely related to the work that is taking place within the second project of Design 2.0 however it is relevant to note that as of yet there have not been any serious mentions of Creative Commons on the project forum. I will summarize the goings on here and then post it on the forum.

Elliott is a young lawyer form some part of Australia that is not Melbourne and he is part of a research project which is aimed at representing the Creative Commons (CC) rights system in Australia and making a development of policy to represent the CC in a court of law. This is quite nice because it means that now CC can be used by Australians on Australian things and they can sue people who breach the rights within Australia. There are a few other advantages but I do not really care about those. Being Australian, the organisation Elliott represents chose to also implement ethically natured aspects of the policy when they composed it. Subsequently other countries did the same, but he suggests Australia was the first. This is of course not a surprise as that is how people here do things. 

In any case, Creative Commons as many people are well aware is a system that allows average people to have slightly more say in how their work is death with from a copyright perspective. The initiatives of CC institutions include creating "human readable" versions of the policy which can then be used to help people select the appropriate license for their content but also can be used to help potential breaches understand where the line is drawn, something which is obviously a problem with many other aspects of copyright today. 

Despite the great work done on CC I am still quite dubious of it as it completely does not deal well with commercial licensing and it does not offer any kind of rights management if you intend to achieve commercial compensation for your work. This is a bad thing because though artists are passionate about their work, they still need to eat. The CC solution to this problem is, in my opinion quite undeveloped. However, when I posed this issue to Elliott and mentioned that I was running a project in this regard he quoted a project called No Ank which is said to be the answer. At the moment it is just a budding project but they are thinking about it on some level.  Having partially reviewed their methods I feel they are not offering a solution per se but they are offering a method to handle the issue.

I do not support the localisation of new media copyright schemes however I appreciate the work that Elliott and his colleagues are doing. 

Still/Open - Open Source Magazine

On Thursday and Friday last week I took part in an interesting workshop called Still/Open conducted by Anat. The underlying topic of the workshop was open source thinking however each of the four presenters covered vastly different materials. To my luck a few of the aspects of the event tie very closely into my work on this project. In particular, the first presentation, on open source magazines and zines, the third presentation, on creative commons and alternative copyright systems. 

Firstly, the look at magazines of the open source variety was a great way to interact with the group and experience what collaborative systems could be like. For the first hour or two the specialist, Alessandro Ludovico, lectured on the intricacies of this matter. After that he broke us into teams and set us each a task. My group had the task of creating a strategic pitch for a open source culture magazine which we took on with a lot of vigour. At this point I also use Compendium to Discourse Map the entire conversation. Our output is shown above.  For a number of obvious reasons this was a great task ad we had a really good time. We also gave a compelling presentation which it seemed everyone appreciated. Our pitch ended up being essentially a Mothers Group inspired index of localised open source minded services and establishments. Our intention was for the magazine to represent the scales of localisation up to global, for the time being, that would be relevant to a specific reader. We were also interested in rendering it as a map or collection there of, that exist as pages with localities specified for the readers convenience. This and a number of other traits of the product make us think of it as a any web or post web solution. In any case we managed an interesting bout of collaborative though, specifically some that could not happen in a distributed team as easily because of the lace of connection. That said there are identifiable notions that could and did not exist in this instance of the workshop. One in particular is full understanding and explanation of posed ideas. Of course some barnstormers would suggest this is a bad thing anyway but I think regardless it is something that adds certain powers to a distributed team, even if the understating is only minor it may be enough to warrant more justification in the typing of a post or submission of a suggestion.

Other aspects of the workshop were also of course interesting and I am really grateful for Boo Chapel for giving me the opportunity to take part in the whole thing. 

Mid Semester Presentation

On Tuesday this week I gave my mid-semester presentation. We had 10 minutes for presenting and 10 minutes discussion. 

I had started my presentation about 2 days before hand but most of the final content was done the evening before. It ended up being relatively clean and, I think, information rich. In any case, I used Keynote 4.0 from iWork 2008, which is really lovely, and I made seemingly good use of a few of the tools within the package. I think the efficiency gained was largely due to a pipeline for incorporating work into a presentation that I have been working on recently. This process includes subdividing a project into key issues of approach and then building an informational needs plot to drive what is included in the final presentation.

The presentation started with a quick introduction of the project in general and its sub projects. Then I talked about the tools used for the current website and some areas to grow this and deal with issues. There was then a section on Crowd Spirit, the Beta software similar to mine. For a few moments I discussed the counter project, which currently is to engage in some different kinds of collaboration. Lastly I talked about academic developments needed to continue this project and finished with a review of the projects future. 

There were not too many questions apart from needing further explanation of aspects of the work in general. Feedback did, however, provide the suggestion that I not spend too much time on psychological explanations for the projects developments and instead simple try understanding what is happening. This I found vaguely helpful as it allows me to concentrate on the design issues of my work more. 

Here is a PDF of the presentations. Sub page animation is not represented. 

The Free World and the Open World

I think, in the world of things and the world of work and play, there are a number of grate players, participants of the systems and providers of service. With all of these members, however, there is economy. Fundamentally speaking this is not a problem, economy is a great example of complex system design with flexibility to cater for emergent trends and the ability to deal on a global scale with mission critical issues. This is our world. 

There are a multitude of economies and perhaps my interest in this area shows through in my work on the Copyright Project, however, that aside, the greater reasoning and perhaps the driving notion which lead this endeavour to exist is that of social systems and the shift in economy our little earth has recently noticed. A few years back now, a then budding Internet company, Google, released AdSense, that day, the world experienced perhaps the most successful implementation of the attention economy. 

Open source, and closed source are two of the players I referred to previously. They are often seen as characteristic mindsets that separate humanity into two distinct groups. I do not believe in this however, instead, I think there is a part of humanity that lies in between and provides things out of love and passion for the society of beings it takes part in. This is what drove Google, firstly to exist and secondly to revolutionise advertising, it is also the thing that drives the open market economics to need to trend away from monopolise. This is where my project sprouted from and where I suspect the future of humanity lies. My dreams aside, Open Source is NOT a solution, passion is.

This may seem like a convoluted argument, especially when it is actually pitched to demonstrate why I chose the tools I do and why this project will use what people need to use to contribute. We will not use open source. We will use free to us, because that is what we can afford. It may include cases of open source but will be built on and grounded with add supported tools. These are the tools built with incentive and used with passion, this is in my opinion the greatest model of all. 

Real users never pay!