Tag: challenge

In one picture: The internet now and into the future

Breath in and out the internet

I have to give credit to Bill Thompson for his thoughts around the public service internet. In one of our conversations Bill suggested a need for a picture to sum up the internet now and where we are going.

It feels like two pictures, but images can be powerful and stoke up vivid responses in the mind. Its a challenge I have been thinking about quite a bit and put it on the Publicspaces international matrix chat (#PublicSpacesInt:matrix.org).

Challenge for you all… If there was one picture which would sum up the state of the internet now, what would it be? Also what picture would sum up the internet if things go the way you would like what would it be?

Theres been a few entries but my favorite so far has been Erik who posted the one above.

This image would probably sum up my ideal internet as a magical portal to empower yourself with all the knowledge, and a connection to all the people in the world.

Others saw this as a way of breathing new life into the internet. While I started thinking about modifying the picture into something with multiple people breathing life into the internet (closer to this in nature). I like this image but don’t like the fact shes looking at her phone, likewise this image is striking but hands behind her back feels less participatory that where I think we are going. This is better but needs multiple people working together.

Like my colleagues in BBC R&D looking to change the way AI and Machine learning are displayed in the general media. I think I might take it upon myself to craft something using inkscape/glimpse and lots of creative commons media. Just something which speaks closer to what I think I’m going for when I talk about public service internet.

Love to know what others come up with?

My booklist challenge

Every once in a while you get some viral challenge, where you have to tag someone else in. Its a little annoying but I thought this might be interesting. From a friend on Facebook…

I have accepted a challenge to post seven books I love, one book per day, no exceptions, no reviews, just covers. Each day I will ask a friend to take up the challenge. Let’s promote literacy and create a book list!

Tagged in ianforrester

I just seen this and I’m more than a few days late… As I only ever use Facebook for signing up to my volleyball team events and the monthly occasional post of the public service internet notes. I pretty much missed it and very unlikely to post anything daily. I decided to do the challenge on my own blog.

So here is my booklist with books which were pivotal…

SundayRebeccas world

MondayFree culture

TuesdayStrange attrators

WednesdayUncertain vision

ThursdayMindbenders

FridayDesign for community

SaturdayThe dyslexic advanage

 

#ALSIceBucketChallenge not accept…

#ALSIceBucketChallenge

To be clear this isn’t an attack on ALS the charity, and you can choose to do what you personally like. However these are my views and opinions, what you have is a choice…

Shane nominated me and Chris for the ALS Ice-bucket challenge on Twitter and Facebook.

I heard about the challenge but that was about a year ago, so I looked it up on wikipedia. And also looked around the web to find out what people were saying about it.

I personally hate and reject social pressure, it tends to bring out the   rebel in me. The Icebucket challenge on the surface of it seems to be harmless but deep down it seems to have the same tones as a pyramid scheme and a whole dollop of social engineering. Strong words but as I said this brings out the worst in me.

As of Thursday the “Ice Bucket Challenge” had raised over $41 million. And yes, it’s probably true that this kind of cash would not have been raised if a long list of famous people hadn’t videoed themselves dumping ice water on themselves.

But a couple of points. First, wasn’t the original idea that you were challenged to EITHER dump water on your head OR make a charitable donation? Because that’s what President Obama did when he was challenged by Ethel Kennedy. (Which was, admittedly, a pretty big guilt trip. Ethel Kennedy is 86 years old and she’s also, well, a Kennedy, so ignore that challenge at your peril.)

Guilt trip…! Yes and because its public and in the open, it adds social pressure.

At a recent dinner party, I discussed with friends and Shane why I hated the idea and compared it to things I mentioned before. Most seemed to think it wasn’t a big deal, why was I getting so worked up about the whole thing? Just do it or don’t? To which I started to go off on one comparing it to the confidence tricks and the problem with compliance (complete story)!

Well to cut things short, I decided after reading and sleeping on it. I’m not going to take part, not because I’m scared of getting ice cold water over my head (although its been suggested someone like me may pass out?). Not because I don’t want to donate money to charity and not because I don’t care.

Cornering me into a corner and saying pay or/and put ice water over your head is not something I recommend. I can already imagine all the other charities trying to come up with their own versions, although you can suggest the no make-up selfie was similar? Guilt tripping and social engineering the general public into going along with the flow for a quiet life. I wonder how many of them, actually paid the charity? Did Shane? He did. But have we sunk to such a level that charity can only get money by social engineering and compliance techniques ? (I imagine yes but this feels a step further that I’d like to think)

As I said its not about the money, so I have paid an extra sum to the open rights group (the UK  equivalent of the EFF) instead of to a charity which uses social engineering to convince people to donate to them.

I imagine there will be backlash against my decision but I’m sticking with it and leave the question to everybody getting involved in the #ALSIceBucketChallenge, are you doing it because you care, think it will be a laugh or feeling the social pressure? Deep down, if nobody recommended you for it, would you do it?

Think about it and don’t take the easy way out, do what feels right to you! Donate if you want to, take the icebucket if you want, but don’t be a sheep, think about it!

Challenge accepted…

Tim Dobson challenged me to this…

Therefore, I want to post a blog post, everyday, for the month of February. What’s more, I want to challenge my friends, my colleagues … neighbours … pets etc to join me.

Rules:

  • Your blog must be public
  • Virals/Images/Videos posts are allowed, but only if you comment somehow on the content.
  • 1 post per day, for 28 days of February, by the same person

Questions:

Q: Why?

A: Why not? Being able to write coherently, repeatedly is a valuable skill. Doing it on your own can be boring/lonely. Knowing other people are also having to rush for the 23:59 deadline is somewhat warming.

Well I guess this is your challenge accepted…. Although I might double post once in a while…

It still amazes me that I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years… Although I do need to alter my archived posts as they all point to blojsom/blog still…

Banging the drum for Media Freedom and the Web

I was very excited to invited to the Mozilla Festival which this year was in London. Not only that, it was in South East London.

The Mozilla Festival use to be the Drumbeat Festival but got a rename. The event is something between a un-conference and a hackday. A whole series of challenges which people can duck in and out of. Challenges ranged from Data Journalism to Disc Jockey hacking (ironically both DJ).

Dj Challenge

I headed up the DJ (disc jockey) challenge which was first formulated quite some time ago on behalf of BBC R&D and FutureEverything.

The challenge was to reinvent or at least evolve dj’ing. We started the challenge on Saturday afternoon and it kicked off with a little stimulus from myself and others in the form of a modified presentation. On top of that, we pointed to the Google Doc, which was an aggregation of thoughts from not just myself but many others including BBC staff.

That list is still available if your interested in getting involved in the challenges.

Andy

But what came out of the challenge were 2 very strong ideas…

  1. Can we create a format which supports tracks or layers in songs, then build Dj software which takes advantage of them.
  2. Can we build a club environment which makes use of sensors to feedback to the Dj and Vj in real-time through meaningful visualisations
More were talked about but these were the strongest ones, and these are the ones which will be taken forward hopefully into the Future Everything festival next year.
The theme for the conference/hackday was around media & web freedom and there was a question how does the Dj challenge fit into this? Well I gave the example of my pacemaker…

Dj Challenege

A few of us were looking at the problem of what you do with mixes once there finished? Actually one of them was from Mixcloud.com and we were exploring the idea of licensing, etc but we started to think what other ways can you experience mixes? One idea was to map locations to places in a mix.
On my pacemaker, I’ve done mixes walking through locations such as the wrong end of irlam mix. Imagine if it had GPS, so you could map sections to a location. When the mix is uploaded, it could lead people through an artificial version of my journey. So you could experience that moment when the bus streamed past and almost knocked someone over 🙂 How exactly this works, we don’t know, but that’s the challenge…

Hugh

This for me is the effect of the web on Djing, perfecting fitting into the media and web freedom ethos.
The challenge asked a lot of the people who did attend and frankly if I was to do it again I would size down the challenge down to a few core areas and work on things which can be done in the 90mins we had. Mozilla did allow us to run over 2 days and we have some ideas did run through-out them.
Moving away from the Dj challenge for now, I didn’t get much of a chance to attend the other challenges, but they sounded great. There was a real feel of excitement in the air and the location of Ravensbourne added another layer to it all.

Mozilla Festival

Here’s some of the other stuff which looked very interesting to me…

This Javascript library is looking very impressive and the documentary combining Popcorn with WebGL was impressive. I can only imagine what Adam Curtis could do with this… I’ve made a note to check it out in detail soon. I also think it could be useful in the area of Perceptive Media.
Its another one of those Javascript library’s (seems to be a trend). This one is a nice gaming framework, its still in alpha but it slightly crosses over with the BBC R&D universal control spec from what I saw in the demo.
Hyperaudio links written text with the spoken word. This means you can edit a audio file like how you edit text. Its quite magical when you see it, and would make a great tool for remixing
Teaching young people through standard web technologies how to change the web and make it there own. I think of it like One Laptop Per Child’s Sugar but less programmatic…
Although this wasn’t in the event, I found them from one persons suggestion and then when I went to look up the Eatery I found it again. Its like Creative Commons for privacy, interesting…

Mozilla Festival

Unlike Hackdays where everyone gets a chance to demo there hacks to everyone else, the Mozilla festival had the challenge leaders stand up on stage and give a brief overview of the best ideas and prototypes. On the Saturday night there was keynotes from a whole bunch of people including Tim Hunkin. Everything was good till a guy from the Tech City commission or something started going on and on… Wrong place and wrong time to do a pitch for how great silicon roundabout and techcity are… Frankly I would have liked to have thrown a popcorn.js rubber toy at him because it was so out of tune with the rest of the event. Of course I didn’t do that… but it was bad. Honestly if I caught his name, I would be naming and shaming…

Luckily all the rest of the keynotes and presentations were actually good to excellent.

The event finished with the Dj challenge taking control, because we didn’t have anything built I Dj’ed on my pacemaker along with the Alphasphere guys putting on a performance on stage. If we had thought about it a bit more, we could have Jammed together but alas maybe another time? Maybe at the Future Everything festival…

Congrats to the Mozilla crew, it was great and certainly a highlight. Mozilla’s mission is a good one and something we can all get behind. I was surprised how many people I know from Yahoo, Ebay, etc who are now working at Mozilla. Although it was very adhoc it kind of worked…

I look forward to next year…. Excellent work Michelle, Dees, Alex and a whole host of other cool Mozilla people. It was a honour…