Looking WAY Forward

There are a lot of people out there who are pretty clever. Not the majority, but quite a few. People who can look at a situation and easily identify how things could be better. These people see how things should be in five months.

Then there are people, far fewer, who can look at the big picture and identify how things could be better and how to fix them – people who see how things should look in five years. They’re on the cover of magazines like Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, etc.

Then there are people, maybe a few on the planet, who can see how things should and sometimes will be in 50 years. They are much easier to recognize 50 years afterwards, but they are always around. They’re not usually on too many covers, because they’re too far ahead of their time. Even if people don’t dismiss them as crazy, very few people are willing to work on such long-term goals.

R. Buckminster Fuller was definitely in the last. So I’m pretty excited that there’s an exhibition of his work coming up at the MCA. Nikola Tesla is another good example.

But the point of this post is to share with all of you TED. This is a great site where you can watch videos presenting some of the great ideas that we’ll see in the next five to 50 years. Some of them are really interesting and some of them are totally mind-blowing.

I highly suggest watching as many as you can. They’re definitely worth your time.

Crowdsourcing vs. Open Source

So, last night, I got bit on the foot by a mosquito, which itches like crazy, and was keeping me up.

I got started thinking about Wikipedia, like one does in the wee hours of the night, and I came to this conclusion (my thesis): Wikipedia suffers from credibility problems because contributors have vested interest and no vetting.

In distributing a pile of work among a great number of voluntary participants, there are basically two schools – crowdsourcing and open sourcing.

Crowdsourcing, abbreviated, is breaking a big task among a fluid group of anonymous, voluntary participants. One excellent example of crowdsourcing is reCAPTCHA, which utilizes humans’ ability to read distorted text to do character recognition on scanned text that computers have a hard time discerning.

Open Source, abbreviated, is providing information or skills you’ve learned to the collective body. It’s rarely anonymous. Linux, an operating system written collectively by thousands of people over the years, and provided for free to everyone else, is the most common example. Google “linux” and be amazed.

Wikipedia lies somewhere between the two. Wikipedia’s content comes from people who contribute what they’ve learned (or what they believe), with the idea that enough people validating (or correcting) eachothers’ statements will end up with something resembling the truth.

Here’s where the difficulty lies. With crowdsourcing, to use reCAPTCHA as the example, no one cares enough about whether the single word is read incorrectly to try to sabotage the system. There is no bias and nothing to be gained by coercing a group of people into convincing the system that a single word is wrong. With open source, the person doing the work has put in the time to learn the language, the time to learn the distro, and the time to learn whatever piece they’re working on. Essentially, the participants are self-filtering. It would take more than the casual user to become an active participant in the development cycle, write code, and get that code into the final build to cause any kind of harm.

Wikipedia, however, until recently, could be edited by anyone with little to no expectation that their statements would be traced back to them. This led to, obviously, all kinds of abuse, with people who have conflicts of interest making edits to suit their beliefs, employers, etc. The casual user, or a conspiracy of several users, can making their version of the truth the most popular belief.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but I think that edit moderation would take us a long way towards it.

Whatever happens, I think that documenting the collective intelligence is a phenomenal idea that needs to be pursued vigorously. As long as we’re documenting the collective intelligence, and not the collective ignorance and mis-information.

That’s what Faux News is for.

IT Everywhere

This is way too cool (read: nerdy) not to share.

IT Everywhere

Coffee! COFFEE ALWAYS!

When I first started at this job I thought “Awesome! Free Coffee! All day!”. Then I tasted it. It tasted like they were using cigarette butts in place of coffee filters.

At my last place of business, they used Folgers. Which always reminds me of camping and never tastes good. The first scoop out of a freshly opened can tastes exactly like the last scoop out of a six-month old can. Congrats to Folgers on consistency, but when every scoop tastes like it’s six months old, something’s gotta change.

So I started springing for office coffee out of my own pocket. Peet’s. It was glorious. Fresh, delicious coffee. Only I was paying for all of it for everyone in the office. While it was uncool, it was better than drinking Folgers.

At my current employer, everyone drinks coffee all day. That’s too much coffee for me to spring for it myself. So after I had my first taste, I started trying to make things better. I replaced the airpots (which smelled terrible and that must affect the taste), and got bids from four different coffee service places to figure out how to move away from the Costco putrescence we were currently plagued with. Replacing the equipment was out of the question for now.

Almost a year later, finally, we have a coffee service. I’m not going to go into the details of what it took to make this minor miracle happen (it wasn’t me), but I will keep you updated on how well this goes.

The Common Tragedy

The tragedy of the commons is alive and well.

You know it as well as I do, but you might not think of all the ways in which it is affecting your daily life. I don’t either, I guess, just when it stands in my way.

This time it’s bandwidth at work. There are 40 of us. Using two load-balanced T1s. And it’s not enough. Not by a lot. Nearly every day I get this email:

Any reason our internet is so slow???

Yes. There is a reason. It’s ignorance of the tragedy of the commons. Or, more likely, ignorance (and a little apathy) about everyone’s role in it. So go, read about it. I promise it’ll be rewarding.

Obviously, it’s about far more than your limited bandwidth, cold showers, and expensive gasoline.

So, next time you’re thinking “We need more…“, spend a moment thinking about how you affect it before you complain about how it affects you.