Four short links: 17 August 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. How Twitter Works in Theory (Kevin Marks) -- very nice summary about the conceptual properties of Twitter that let it work. Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you're looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you're declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don't care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.
2. Army To Test Wiki-Style Changes to The 7 Manuals -- In early July the Army will conduct a 90-day online test using seven existing manuals that every soldier, from private to general officer, will have the opportunity to read and modify in a “wiki”-style environment. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. MobWrite -- converts forms and web applications into collaborative environments. Create a simple single-user system, add one line of JavaScript, and instantly get a collaborative system. (via Simon Willison)
4. Open Data Standards Don't Apply To The Military -- It’s that last particular point that should be the most disturbing to the administration. Apparently all geospatial data being developed and utilized by the USAFA would be unusable without a sole software vendor. This causes concern over broader interoperability with other agencies and organizations, access to important national information, and archivability and retrievability. Expose of the single-source "standard" vendor lockin in US military geosoftware and geodata. (via johnmscott on Twitter)

Four short links: 3 August 2009

Mathematics Collaboration, Risk, Visualisation, and SemWeb

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration -- Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collaboration.
2. 2845 Ways to Spin The Risk -- introduction to the ways in which our perception of risk (and numbers in general) can be distorted by how it is presented. (via titine on Twitter)
3. Logstalgia -- OpenGL app to visualize Apache log files.
4. 4Store -- "scalable RDF storage". 4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people. (via joshua on Delicious)

Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals

by Mark Drapeau | @cheeky_geeky | comments: 16

Guest blogger Mark Drapeau is the Co-Chair of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Sept 2009 and the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010, both in Washington, DC. He holds the title of Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, a professional military educational school run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mark is also co-founder of Government 2.0 Club, an international platform for sharing knowledge about the intersection between technology and governance.

When one thinks about important problems facing the United States, and indeed people all over the world, it is difficult to not come up with the laundry list that every talking head seemingly has on the tip of their tongue: jobs, education, health care, national security, poverty. There are so many problems to solve, with so many constraints on spending money, and such a short supply of manhours to get the job done. Many government employees spend a lot of time working on the issue or crisis of the day (or the hour) rather than thinking about long range planning and strategy.

This might be Alexander Hamilton's fault. One of the first things I was indoctrinated with after moving to Washington, D.C. was that the U.S. system of federal government was not designed to make good decisions; rather, it was designed to not make horrible ones. This is counterintuitive, perhaps, but mainly true. And this flies in the face of ideas about using technology to make government more efficient, mainly because the purpose and organization of government is quite different from that of business.

Nevertheless, more and more people from the private sector are interested in playing a role in government, thanks in no small part to the excitement surrounding the Obama election and inauguration, in which social media technologies and information sharing were showcased at their best - massive fundraising from many small donors, empowering people to self-organize locally, and direct public relations that circumvented a mainstream media lens. Now, people enamoured with emergent social technologies want to know how they themselves can revolutionize not only politics, but also governance.

For those who don't follow fashion trends in Washington, D.C., allow me to present the new and increasingly popular species of talking head - The Geek. (The Geek is distinguished from The Wonk, studious, preppy, bespectacled types that run Washington policy, know exactly what intersection Brooks Brothers is on, and enjoy cocktail parties for "networking," and The Nerd, the type of scientist or other fastidious pointy-head rarely seen outside a laboratory or professorial tower, with nary an interest outside their own peculiar and narrow slice of life.)

The prototypical Geek is a different breed of talking head, one that usually lacks media training, one that often hails from Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Austin, Boston, St. Paul, or Boulder, one who likely knows more about the inside of a computer than the average person does about the inside of their fridge, a well-read introvert shy in real life but outgoing on Twitter and in the blogosphere, who is erudite enough to have always felt there was a better way to run the government but feeling entirely disconnected from the apparatus.

No longer. When I speak about Government 2.0 to audiences around D.C. I am fond of telling them about the very smart and motivated outsiders (i.e., The Geeks) who think that they can run the government better than the government can. I enjoying dropping the line, "The government can no longer afford to work at the pace of government," because people never really know what to say in response as they mull it over. That statement is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not entirely fair to hundreds of thousands of hard-working government employees; but of course, my role as a speaker is usually to provoke thought and get a point across, not to be fair. And gradually, through my efforts and those of many other Government 2.0 enthusiasts, people inside the Beltway are understanding that new ideas and new technologies can bridge gaps between government and the citizens (and that outsiders are starting to utilize such technologies whether the government gives permission or not).

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Stimuluswatch.org; The Falling Cost and Accelerated Speed of Group Action

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 33

Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Conference and posted this request:

"Let’s help President-Elect Obama do what he is promising. Let’s help him “prioritize” so the projects so that we “get the most bang for the buck” and identify those that are old school “pork coming out of Congress”. We can do this through good clean fun crowdsourcing. Who can help me take the database on the Conference of Mayors site and turn each project into a wiki-page or other mechanism where local citizens can comment on whether the project is actually needed or whether it’s a boondoggle? How can we create an app that will let citizens separate the wheat from the pork and then sort for Congress and the new administration the project in descending order or relevancy?

Several developers read the post and got to work.  Stimuluswatch went live on February 2nd with all the features Brito had requested. Last Friday alone there were 20,000 unique hits to the site. Total time to complete, seven weeks including holidays. Total cost - about $40 in monthly hosting fees.

I caught up with two of the developers behind the effort, Peter Snyder (via phone) and Kevin Dwyer (via email). The story they told me exemplifies how the web enables some remarkably fast group action. Here is how Kevin tells it - and pay attention to how many references there are to some form of open source, web service, or plug-and-play functionality that the team used to get this done.

“After reading Jerry's original blog post about the US Conference of Mayors report, I quickly wrote some python code to grab (screen scrape) all of the projects from their web site and put them into a sqlite database. The lxml module was awesome for this. Brian Mount took it and remastered the database into a MySQL database. Peter Snyder then popped up and offered to build the web site using a PHP based system called CodeIgniter. It lives up to its name (and Pete is awesome) because he had a fairly complex site up in no time. Now that we had a great base for the site, Jerry wrote copy and worked up some CSS/HTML which gives the site a great look and feel. Jerry also helped us integrate disqus and tumblr, which definitely helped reduce the number of wheels we had to reinvent. I experimented with several wiki backends and settled on MediaWiki. Using a perl module, I created wiki stubs for each of the projects to give users a bit of a framework for recording any facts they researched about each project, as well as listing points in favor and against. The whole thing now runs on an Amazon EC2 image.

Peter also pointed out that in the short time since launch, users themselves have helped cleanse errors in the data that was pulled from the mayor’s database and already begun filling out details on these local projects; including showering great disdain on the “doorbells” project.

None of these people knew each other previously. They were brought together by blog post into a common effort. They used open source tools in rapid development. They plugged in off the shelf online social technologies (disqus, tumblr and mediawiki) to create a forum to discuss these local projects. They achieved this in seven weeks. In fact, according to Peter, “the real effort here was more like two weeks”.

It will be interesting to see how stimuluswatch.org performs as a place to allow transparency and citizen involvement in civic projects.  As we the public wait for www.recovery.gov to launch, perhaps we should just be asking them to give us the data. We can do the rest.

Wikitecture - Radical Collaboration in Architecture

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 6

Many of the precepts that began with Open Source (collaboration, shared IP, crowdsourcing etc.) are migrating from software development into a series of ever more surprising disciplines. Today old-school institutions like Proctor and Gamble go outside of their own R&D teams to innovate new products while Best Buy opens APIs to allow outside developers to build on their catalog data.

Now here comes “Wikitecture” applying these precepts to the very complex process of designing buildings. I want to dig into some of the details of Wikitecture and summarize what I think it has to teach us about collaboration.

My friend Jon Brouchoud is the co-founder of Studio Wikitecture, a group dedicated to bringing collaboration into the architectural process. He and Ryan Schultz have been pioneering "Wikitecture" for the past two years using Second Life as a proving ground.

Recently Studio Wikitecture won Architecture for Humanity’s Founders Award for their submission; a health facility in Nepal. There were over 500 entrants to the contest. Many of Studio Wikitecture’s contributors (roughly 40) were not architects but each brought specific, local knowledge that benefitted the project. A few examples:

• Adobe and gabion wall construction was suggested as among the most viable design material given the exact (and remote) location and the ability to utilize local labor. Other materials would not only cost more but could even be prohibitive in terms of shipping into the area.
• In Nepal an odd number of steps is considered inauspicious so all stair plans were designed for even numbers.

Jon told me that Wikitecture achieved a level of depth and detail in research that would be extraordinarily difficult and time consuming for one firm to manage alone. This gets to the first benefit of Wikitecture; it brings local knowledge into the design process. This video shows the building process:

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