I’d like to add that I’ve recently found a highly cogent rationale/alabi for posting this raw, sloppy, first-draft-of-history note-taking in Clay Shirky’s notion of “first publish, then sort”.See? Its not just that I can’t be bothered to edit…it’s the 21st century way!

080623 Personal Democracy Forum

• EE missed her plane so we’ll have to rejigger the schedule
• Huff
• Clay
• Internet Directors

Hill Clinton Comedienne

• Taped and not that funny

Chuck DeFeo - townhall.com

• Bush/Cheney strategist
• Is this new media helping us do anything new, or is it old wine in new bottles
• 1765 john adams made his entrance into political life; a dissertation on the struggle for power: are we shaking off a king? who has the power? those in power regularly try to expand the limits of their power but “none of the means of information are treated with more tenderness than the press—-that it should be easy and cheap and safe for any person to communicate their thoughts to the public “
• that’s a blogger ideal
• power struggles are struggles about ideas and framing
• after that revolution we had a consolidation of media: 3 networks, a few papers, etc.
• but it wasn’t until today that we’re really able to fill that ideal
• “we’re truly seeing the democratization of the 4th estate”
• we know one to many (broadcast), we know one-to-one (phone), but many-to-many is new
• got into politics in 1996, we were interested in TV, but in retrospect we never should have
• over the 48 yrs of televised politics & campaigns, participation has declined
• got out of college, wanted to go to DC because that’s where the debate bat Ideas is. That’s no longer the case.
• in the 1960s we had mass communication for the first time, but we lost interactivity
• We’re pretty engaged in this country right now
• Has the truth been lost in the process?
• the ability for a limited few to control what everyone thinks is over

Arianna Huffington - HuffPo

• We did the 2000 shadow convention to deal with
  • fundraising
  • poverty
  • war on drugs
• still need to deal with them
• [OT rant about multitasking]
• definitely now bottles
• its a mixture of wine
• there’s a lot of old media that’s good: accuracy, fact checking, ferreting out the truth; we can never give that up for any reason, especially partisanship. Truth comes first
• the problem is that the media is doing its best to be “even”, even when the two sides don’t have equal value. We wasted years debating Global Warming in that way.
• the major problem of media is the illusion of neutrality instead of ferreting out the truth
• new media; transparency, accountability, and community are what we bring
• its better to announce yr allegiances than strive for objectivity and then get info from favored “anonymous sources”
• “lou dobbs is supposed to be a journalist?” - laugh line
• “its not enough to tell a good story and tell the truth once; we need to follow it”
• “we need the OCD of the new media to complement the ADD of the old media”
• no accountability: Bill Kristol on the NYT after the war? Come on!
• there’s a lot of energy at HuffPo towards community, behind anonymity is some really vile trolling
• an example of what can go wrong: human nature can go wrong. We may sell our objectivity for an all-access pass. Woodward is a great example: he went from the kind of journalism that brought down a president to the kind of journalism that allowed a president to sell a war
• unprecedented access, completely missed the story
• “dumb blonde” of journalism: awed by access to power
• when the conventional wisdom moved on, Woodward accounted for it by saying “Bush changed.” If we know one thing, its that Bush doesn’t change.
• the pretense that old media is representing facts and there’s no opinion involved
• new media must resolve to never sell independence for access
• transparency, accountability, and community

Panel: Chuck & Arianna

• Micah: what’s an example of new media getting it right? Doing it better?
• CD: people on the ground being distributed widely.
• AH: we have watches on people for the sake of accountability: The Lou Dobbs Watch, Dana Perino Watch, Glenn Beck Watch. We can get over there to put the spotlight on them. In the meantime, the reporting team has been breaking stories, eg Lieberman breaking 527 rules, we broke FL and MI. We are more and more doing the things newspapers do. New tagline is “internet newspaper”: we’re launching new (non-political) verticals. We love talking to people who disagree with us.

Q&A

• Q: What will keep the blogs from becoming the next radio & becoming partisan yes-men preaching to the choir?
• CD: My Dad says “why are people so polarized?” Its because no one can tell what the facts are. Arianna and I disagree on things. Newspapers are said to be the 1st draft of history.
• AH: No way. The right used to accuse the Left of being relativists. Now that’s turned. I’m saying we DO know things. Remember the benchmarks before the surge in Iraq. It’s a FACT that they haven’t been met. I was being asked “can new media be credible?” What, the old system is credible? We have an obligation to adopt the best practices of accountability and then let the chips fall where they may. We cannot simply protect those we favor.
• CD: when you say “these are the facts”, its the old-media broadcast model. If you talk about Global Warming its ok to say “more people believe Gore than Inhofe”.
• AH: I’m saying that if you give equal weight to Gore and Inhoffe, yr not doing yr job as a journalist. The major problem of modern journalism is that splitting the diff is accepted as legit
• Q: Do you see the new media as fostering a global public sphere?
• CD: in america “revolution” always seems to have a positive connotation, but we’re not there yet
• AH: what’s happening with FaceBook and bloggers is amazing. I see a longing for america to be part of the world again; whenever Obamas’ on the cover of a mag, circulation goes up.
• I’m greek; watch out for Trojan horses

Clay Shirky

• Here Comes Everybody in 5 words: “Group action just got easier”
• Politics is not governance
• Belarussian flashmob ice-cream-eating example
• the problem of a group eating ice cream isn’t the ice cream, its the group
• the gov’t couldn’t stop the Livejournal “conspiracy”;
• we love these stories: 40k kid walkout in CA, FB protests on HSBC and Fair Copyright for Canada
• here’s the thing though: most of the stories we have of real-world collective action are “stop-action” stories: make an action stop. A protest
• so where’s the construction?
• custom lego mini-figs,
• homeschooling: they made
• tax almanac wiki
• the amount of starting and sustaining energy on the wed is astounding. this is not a medium that’s only good for protest
• so maybe collective action is harder? sure, it is. “Collective Action” means “everyone stands or falls together”, but even then we have examples of people coming together. Barn-raising is the canonical example. And that’s not for commercial gain. So why do it? it cowrs in communities in which everyone owes each other favors. You need density and continuity. They don’t happen in large fast-moving groups (eg, the internet)
• a xerox printer with closed-source proprietary drivers started Stallman on the path to founding the Free Software Foundation
• it inverts the purpose of traditional legal licensing mechanisms (which usually restrict freedom) to instead increase the freedom of the users
• maybe that’s what’s missing from collective action?
• what would licensing look like?
• democracy design workshop: “the virtual company project” is a way to remove the problems with a corporation.
  * - in VT you can do virtual coprs!
• community interest companies: take the bug out of for-profit companies that want to have public-service goals. THis lets you put social goals at the heart of the enterprise
• meetup alliance: take meetup groups and associate them at a regional or national level. Attempt to take individual action and raise the level at which it operates.
• momtown, atheist alliance, etc may be able to effect action rather than merely lobby for it. Imagine Linus LOBBYING M$for a good operating system. Imagine Jimmy Wales protesting outside of Brittanitca until he got a good free encyclopedia. No way. Sometimes you have to build things.
• how do we get that energy?

1550 BRian Lehrer

• moving from the least open media environment in history (broadcast) to the most open environment
• from my privileged position I want to be someone who helps usher in the new era rather than blocking it
• news is more than just infotainment but to play a role in the democracy
• help individuals take action via media
• The CUNY TV show is web video for people who don’t necessarily get the web
• crowd-sourcing:
  • SUV concentration per neighborhood,
  • price of milk per neighborhood,
  • viewers parse through 11k pages of Hill Clinton’s First Lady schedule
  • suggesting weekend street closings

Jay Rosen

• early in the rise of Semi-pro journalism but late in the decline of old press
• the old media (“tribe”) saw the web in 1996 as a place to repurpose content. this did some long-term damage to the old tribe
• the web is shared bw pro and am. this is ok because freedom of the press is shared
• pro and am don’t conflict. they’re complementary
• the hybrid form will be the most powerful
• but to make these hybrids work, we need to find a new way of working
• Off The Bus is a way to make that happen
• what Huffington Post did for editorial, OTB wants to do for the campaign press
• Expand the press:

Mayhill Fowler

• Cox said “Obama supporters gave their email addys to get into events”, and then later they had to go to the local Obama office. THis started from non-connected septuagenarians. Important small tweak to get people much more involved.
• when I report, I audio record NAD take notes AND crack jokes with the locals AND blackberry w the editors
• “I cover the campaign from the POV of the voter”
• as part of the non-traveling press I try to get access
• half of what I do is talk my way past deputies to park in the press lot, trying to access
• OTB will be seen as the Woodstock summer
• then I went to IA and never came back

Amy Holmes (young conservative from Bill Mahrer)

• “macaca” is the first word that comes to mind
• “internet can be a knife in an alley”
• we saw the internet could be a tool and a weapon
• also showed how new media can be part of the herd mentality. Eg: “hillary and the math”
• Obama’s “Fight the Smears”: rumors spread
• hillary-supporter posts unsubstantiated rumor of Michelle Obama’s racial slur
• the internet can be dangerous
• BL: Meg’s two scoops 1. obama’s “bitter” remark. How did you get access?
• MF: I’m an Obama supporter who’d donated $2300. Called up, got put on the list, recorded it (bc I record everything)
• BL: what are the ethics of primary scoops?
• MF: they may have assumed I’d put the campaign before the story, but I put the story first
• JR: i think its a bad idea to respond to people who say “citizen journalists don’ have ethics.” That’s a slur, not a Q. Second: Obama’s people said the fundraiser was “closed to the press, but not off the record”. THey also say that they assume all these things are recorded. They’re adjusting to the fact that the tools that used tho be monopolized by the media are now in the public. The Obama campaign is agile enough to separate “closed to the press” from “off the record”. From my POV the “ethic” on trial is whether people have the right to report their experience as citizens, during this campaign. The reason we have these arguments is that the powers of the press have been given to the people, and damn it, we’re going to use them.
• AH: this is a new reality: what you say WILL be recorded, and sometimes context will be lost. When people are thinking out loud or offhand, they misspeak.
• JR: also, the politico stole MF’s story, fed it to Drudge, and that’s how it got started. Who’s the ethically impoverished one now?
• BL: I finally read the MF article and was sad that the context of the essay had gotten lost. It was a beautiful call for understanding each other and humility.
• Jeff Jarvis: I hear journalists talking about their rules, which are really ways to keep people in the club. We shouldn’t have these rules. We shouldn’t have trades for access. BUt our sources shouldn’t trust us to keep their interests in mind. They shouldn’t us to do anything other than get it accurate. What we want is openness. We should be blowing open the off-the-record bit.
• JR: through history, this is a cycle. A closed world opens up to the prying eyes of a new press. THe people inside fight it at first. Then they learn its hard to fight it, so they shift to “come on in, we’ll show you how it really is”. This is what yr talking about. The bargain is that you get domesticated. The white house press corps was on the street before Teddy Roosevelt, interviewing people as they left. Access DOES give you goods, but it affects yr ability to tell the truth stories. If you can get INTO the event WITHOUT compromise (like MF) she’s EXTENDING the press. The pro press should be cheering this expansion.
• MF: we needed: collaborative journalism and a fresh photographer, right out of school, not taking the same photos over and over. The traveling press got stuck in the narrative of “Obama cant bowl” and that got magnified into the mainstream media and that became the story of the bus tour. But I was there, I was on the ground, and the bowling town LOVED Obama.
• Q: I’m robert Cox from the Media Bloggers Association. We were working to accredit bloggers for the scooter libby trial, and then have it go up through the AP. IN the media room, the reporters said “so where are the bloggers?” and then went on to discuss terms: Any jokes in the media room were to be off the record.
• JR: every professional group has an ethic, and the traveling press especially becomes part of a club. Its not that journalists are inclined to groupthink. Its that in a competitive environment, everyone is terrified. The group mentality prevents outliers. And to stay sane, there needs to be a backstage, and that’s what they do.
• AH: As a public name, I’d be pissed if I couldn’t chitchat in the green room with my debate opponent.
  [Argument over whether the US Court press room is a public space or not]
• RC: some of the folks in the media room were witnesses in the case too
• Matt Sheffield: is part of this conflict that we’re learning that journalism is sausage-making?
• MF: when I joined the circus, I was fascinated by the traveling press, but i wouldn’t blog the green room. The traveling press always gets in last, tired, grumpy, they need some downtime and that’s their downtime. I’m getting to be there too. I was at the Obama victory rally, sitting next to a blogger, and when I looked at his blogging the next day half the story was about Obama and half was about me. We need to have that code of the road
• AH: and let’s not pretend that everything’s true. there’s a lot of garbage out there.
  [JR on open and closed systems]

1722 Rashej & E. Edwards

• EE: “I’m on the internet a lot, but I still spell the word “are” A-R-E, not “r”.”
• AR: we had the political internet directors here today […]
• EE: we don’t have internet true-believers for candidates…yet
• AR: how much strife is there between the old guard and the new guard? what about the AManda Markoff episode?
• EE: I’m net everywhere in the campaign, so I don’t know. But we knew that the internet world be a good way to reach the people that John wanted to talk to, but that’s not going to get everyone, so we knew we needed to get into the MSM too. You need to partner w the MSM otherwise yr feeding from the same pond. We wanted our bloggers because they speak their mind, but we didn’t vet well enough and we handed a weapon to the Freeper crowd.
• AR: speaking of arming yr enemies: how do you feel about Obama opting out of public financing?
• EE: Meh [launches into attack on McCain’s flip-flopping]
• AR: Obama also has an unprecedented list. Think’s he’ll use it (for anything other than fundraising)?
• EE: I hope so, but history says most don’t
• AR: what advice would you give the next president for the first 100 days?
• EE: we’re moving to a time where we have transparencies . Every dep’t or agency should have a plan to provide public information, with insiders as well as ombudsmen. Information trickles out of the government, it needs to be a more regularized process.
• AR: The internet is the only organism we know that has a memory older than itself. Could this possible make it optimal for politicians to tell the truth?
• EE: I hope so. Politicians aren’t easy to train; we had Elliot Spitzer after Bill Clinton. Maybe with a generation that’s more used to having every minute of their lives reported.
• AR: I heard Obama publicly stated he wanted you to help w healthcare, which was a surprise to you. Story?
• EE: I’m delighted to have input.
• AR: JRE endorsed Obama, but you haven’t. How do you feel about him? What advice would you give?
• EE: I told HRC that I would stay out, and I kept my word. Now I’ll be working and doing whatever I can to elect BO. He’s ahead, but I lived through 2004 and I know its not over til its over. We can’t take anything for granted.
• AR: from yr lips to BO’s ears. And there’re so many bloggers here, its public.
• EE: oh, all the campaigns say that
• Audience Q&A
• Q: what about yr list?
• A: we’re tied up in the audit now, but in the next months we want to get moving
• Q: JRE started his campaign in NOLA. How can we refocus on NOLA?
• EE: JRE ended the campaign there too.
• AJ: Facebook? Myspace?
• EE: its hard to have a presence if there’s any celebrity at all. My daughter has a public profile for people who found “JRE’s daughter” and a private real one
• Q: people are so stressed, how do we get them involved in governance?
• EE: we need to find new ways to engage people. Video town halls, so even if you can’t see yr Q asked, you can catch it later
• AR: echo chamber?
• EE: […] JRE walks in
• JRE: I just walked in!
• AR: do you think the internet was effectively used in yr campaign & do you think it’ll change 2008?
• JRE: no doubt the internet makes a big diff. Its the only reason BO isn’t taking public funding, which gives him a HUGE advantage over Bush—I mean, McCain. [huge applause]

THE VISUAL ETHICS REQUIRED IN INFORMATION GRAPHICS INCREASE THE DESIGNER’S BURDEN FROM FAITHFUL EXECUTOR TO EDITORIAL ARBITER.

How do design choices affect the integrity of the data being portrayed? Can information graphics and the designers who create them ever claim pure objectivity? John Maeda, newly appointed president of RISD, world-renowned designer and innovator, will engineer a conversation with three designers who specialize in visualizing information. Steve Duenes guides the New York Times graphics group in print and online; Andrew Kuo cleverly quantifies feelings through his meticulous charts and diagrams; Fernanda Viégas explores the social side of visualization at IBM. Together they will examine a range of current and anticipated trends in visual journalism: judicious simplicity over seductive complexity, data- and story-driven visuals, and the increasing demand for dynamic versus static information visualization.

John Maeda, MIT

• Growing up, I was into art and science. This book really turned me on: paul rand - designers art
• went to art school in the 1980s, got away from computers. vacation!
• Yale art student quote from the 1980s: “i came to learn design, not computers”
• Started doing experiments
• “Remember when photoshop switched to layers and got hard?” I had a pixel I couldn’t erase; I went through layer after layer trying to find it. It was piece of dust on the screen.
• JM started making physical objects: iPod fish, etc.
• “Museums are great but the world is even better” started making found stuff.
• Circle triangle, square, right? I didn’t get it until I got older. Circle is smooth. Triangle is the punk rock one. Square is boring and solid.
• Simplicity became appealing; found the letters “MIT” in “siMplIciTy” (also “coMplexITy”)
• Career crisis: no “RISD” in “simplicity”. But: found “RISD” in “RaISon D’être”
• Introduces the speakers, finishes with “Steve, COME ON UP!” (sounding very “Price Is Right”)

Steven Duenes, New York Times

Charts

• What do you do? we’re the dept. that does pie charts.
• also trying to do other stuff: stock market volatility
• sometimes use new forms in familiar guises: a chart tracking court decisions in the Terry Schiavo case looks like a fever chart
• word frequency - tag clouds of words in DEM/GOP convention speeches, Bush SOTUs

Maps

• Maps: ground zero, bush/kerry contributions by address
• distinguishing aggregate data by showing Missouri’s Clinton / Obama results. Like the cardioid map of purple counties.

Diagrams

• mostly 2D vector drawings, no fancy 3D stuff ground zero: adobe dimensions & illustrator
• not inventing, not going beyond what we know
• 3D often means guessing and inventing. Pen and ink can be more honest
• with no warning or change in pace, a (final) slide comes up saying “THANK YOU.” in helvetica. Classy.

Andrew Kuo

• I went to RISD but I was a bad designer. Too sloppy.
• started blogging at earlboykins.blogspot.com - wanted to disassociate from art identity
• he’s the guy that does infographics of indie rock shows. (McCarren Park Pool)
• “i’ve been doing this x-axis stuff lately”
• “i was inspired by my friend brian chippendale, he goes diagonal, you read it like a snake” (jb: like cantor’s diagonal argument!)
• “as soon as you extrude something, it confuses people. i like that”
• “basically this is like a bar graph, done in a really bad way”
• “enthusiasm is a really big part of what i do” - “7 nights of bright eyes. being a fan is important. it may sound like hell to you, but it was heaven for me.”
• w x-axis you can say two things at the same time that contradict each other and I really like that
• meta-reviews: redact by color
• reviews of txt msgs
• reducing everything is really liberating
• animal collective video: really low res, fit for the form. based on a traveling wilbury’s
• band: hex messages
• inspired by an artist that I love (sophie call)
• chart of me getting drunk: happy, blind, grumpy, happy
• ends with LOLCAT: “‘sup”

Feranda Viegas - IBM

Info Visualization in the 1990s

• gaudy colors, scientists (by experts, for experts), all men
• www.many-eyes.com: can we make a space where people can share their infovisualization work?
• 14k visualizations & “a bunch of users”
• word tree: built a txt analysis tool because so much txt was being analyzed
• “Most people think of data as numbers, but txt is data too. Text is ripe, its a huge opportunity for types and graphs.”

How are people using the site?

• user “crossway” made pairs of co-occurrence biblical characters, made a social network
• made it across the blogosphere, boingboing, etc
• analysis of results made it back to many-eyes
• institutions are coming to Many Eyes: sunlight foundation, Lessig’s corruption lecture

Personal Data

• ME is completely public, but they get personal data all the time
• 1st example looks just like Andrew Kuo’s work. What’s the difference? Its the difference between fine arts and design (expression and toolmaking?)

Panel Discussion

• JM: FM, are you gonna put steve out of business?
• FV: no way, we love steve. the NYT does the craft. its being done by experts. on ME, the idea is “if you bring these tools to everyone, what will they do with it?” I think its a very different thing.
• JM: Pete, is she right?
• PD: Its like the difference between Wikipedia and the NYT. We’re telling stories, going out and communicating stories. THey’re a marketplace.
• JM: FV, will you put AK out of business?
• AK: yes and no. the more you make these things, the more writing comes into it. if you can be clever, or you can tell a story, that’s where it is
• JM: SD, what do you mean by “sometimes you have to lobby for that graphic”
• SD: bribe’em w alcohol. we were talking about a series of maps that we were playing with to describe the result of the 2004 presidential election editors are conservative w charts, not too comfy w something new. If you show a map that displays county by color, its skewed towards large counties and you get the wrong idea.
• JM: AK, you get away w murder. lobbying?
• AK: no, its shocking what I get away with. They (don’t?) know what I’m doing, I give it to them, and they all they do is correct my spelling.
• JM: SD, are there fashion trends? What’s in this year?
• SD: hard to say
• JM: FV, are you a scientist?
• FV: I don’t think of myself as a scientist
• JM: i saw all the vegetation (trees; plants as metaphors for info vis techniques), but are there other planets up there?
  
• FV: we wanna get there, if people wanna contribute more visualization techniques, but most of the hurdles are legal
• JM: you should offer a bounty
• JM: AK, what’s up w design vs art?
• AK: artists are embarrassed to admit they went to design school. Design is more worthwhile because you help people. With art you just help yourself.
• JM: in the AK world, what color is art and what color is design?
  (laughter)
• JM: SD, what makes a good pie chart
• SD: you never want too many wedges. you never want only one wedge
• JM: FV, is Many Eyes a science project?
• FV: no, I think of it as a design project
• JM: yeah, scientists aren’t allowed to be happy. You were pointing to the humor at Many-Eyes
• FV: yeah, its really important. people have created diagrams of what color relates to what emotions
• JM: “a picture’s worth 1000 words, but it takes words to say that” reaction?
• SD: i’ll show you a pie chart
• JM: SD, you mentioned adobe dimensions. What’s the deal?
• SD: we keep an old mac. its like a 3D rendering program for people who’re very slow
• JM: what’s a digitally manipulated digital diagram?
• SD: one that suggests more than you do
• JM: andrew’s work is like visual op-ed. when will there be a whole newspaper of visual op ed?
• JM: how many people to make ME?
• FV: 4. No RISD grads though.
• JM: you all use rollovers. my friend could never stand interactive graphics because he said “its like a dog sniffing for a bone on the screen”
• SD & AK: what’s wrong w dogs?
• JM: why scatterplots?
• FV: matt erickson gave a keynote and said “no more scatterplots” because the readers couldn’t understand them. But wait! its the easiest way to show correlation between two variables. but its not true. people are good at maps, they’re good at time-series. But if yr a pro, you think that scatterplots are easy, but they’re not.
• JM: AK, what’s yr favorite kind of plot?
• AK: god, the bag of tricks is really small. i like the circular thing. its really important to be happy about what you make.
• JM: SD made the pt about the “honest diagram”. talk more about that. are computers dishonest?
• SD: if the operator is dishonest. there’re a million ways to represent, that you can distort the data. zero base, make the change look more than it is, etc. So we work through iterations until we feel like its honest
• JM: there was that moment when I left the computer and was working w ink and reached for the undo key. Is ink honest?
• AK: no, but getting away is key
• JM: what’s “honest” for ME?
• FV: everything is very template-based. we’re starting to let people choose their colors.
• JM: let’s talk computer programs? will there be advancements?
• AK: they have it, they’re just not giving it to us?
• JM: do you feel limitations? Besides using Adobe Dimensions?
• SD: we don’t feel so limited
• FV: we’re using java and flash, not illustrator. most of ME is done in java. as soon as we launched, people are like “why java?” “its fast and beautiful, but i hate you. why java?” So we’re moving to flash, but math-intensive stuff like social networks need java.
• JM: what do people need do be successful like you? who do you hire?
• SD: we have cartographers, statisticians, illustrators, but they all have a journalistic outlook: they want to have to learn facts and tell a story
• VF: it would be awesome to find people who’re very good at some craft, but are also willing to cross boundaries and do some inter interdisciplinary work. it makes you think of things in a different way.

Audience Q&A

• Q: does Many Eyes take dynamic data? or let you share data?
• FV: not yet
• Q: SD, to what extent is yr department given investigative leeway and to what degree are you told what to do?
• SD: we get 80% of what we’re dealing with. people in the department are journalists and should be trying to find stories.
• Q: Are people on Many Eyes using the wrong schematic?
• FV: we see that a little. but when people choose the wrong technique, other people will come along and try another technique. But a few times people use a technique in the “wrong way” to great effect. Eg, someone used the time series w categorical data at the bottom and we were like “huh, we didn’t think of that”
• Q: SD, how do you know if yr designs are working? Do you do testing? And if so, do you see a progression; is the public learning?
• SD: “we’re totally blind, we have no idea if people understand what we’re doing” We get some feedback from the peer review workflow in the office. In the past few years we’ve been doing more web work, and so we’re doing a little more user testing.
• Q: How does Information Design lead to other disciplines?
• AK: Don’t worry about it. See things as pure objects.
• SD: if yr a bad journalist, you wont get data, so to me that’s the source
• FV: I can’t think about these as separate disciplines. We don’t yet know what “good” is, we’re just scratching the surface. What does it mean to think about these moving things as something that you can really inhabit. We’re still in the beginning of that.
• JM: yr either talking about line — i did this first — or yr sharing
• Q: Do you take notes at rock shows?
• AK: i have to. its like steve said: the data is real
• Q: SD, what do you think about the donut versus the pie?
• SD: if you look at european newspapers they use the donut more, but we’re patriotic, so we use the pie.
• Q: FV, have you thought about privatizing ME?
• FV: that’s the #1 request we get from companies that want to visualize private data. we’re just a small research group and we don’t have the bandwidth for a project
• Q: Are there copyright issues w redesigning data?
• FV: as long as you don’t use it for commercial ends, you can use it any way. The only thing we ask is to credit.
• Q: do reporters in other departments turn to you for help understanding data?
• SD: a little, there’re resources out there and we develop resources. its pretty common to get sent spreadsheets and ask for a visualization. usually they come when looking for a lede, “here’s the data, where’s the lede?”
• Q: SD, what’s the average profile in yr dept? AK, have you collaborated?
• SD: backgrounds are all over the place
• Q: 3 elements: accuracy, precision, and keeping interest? which is the most important? [QUESTIONER wanks on about the difference between accuracy & precision]
• AK: i’m concerned with not-accuracy. I want to get back to the last question: I don’t collaborate. its important for me to be the producer. When people ask me to do a chart of their ex-boyfriends, it doesn’t work.
• FV: back to accuracy & precision: we want to spark conversation, that’s the first thing we’re here for. But accuracy is important when you have a public site that anyone can use . Its sort of like Wikipedia. So having mechanisms to let other people check is really important.
• SD: Accuracy is the most important. But i’m contractually required to say that for the NYT.
• JM: to close: artists & creatives are good at dealing w ambiguity. People with this skill are important more than ever as the world gets more and more complex. Go out and show.

080315 BarcampNYC3 Day 1

How to Fund Yr Startup 1230

• David S. Rose
• Justin Smithline
• Jason Schwartz

Funding options

• Free Money: SBIR grants fed gov’t (has to be useful) $50k Small Bness Innovation Research
• Loans: renting money. safe & dependable, risk averse, not good for risky startups
• Equity investing: investors take the risk
• Angels - starting to band into groups.
  • NYAngels 70+ members. 300-400 plans/yr
  • $25k/investor typical for total of $250-750k
  • Expect to give up 20-40% equity
• Advice for 1st time entrepreneurs
  • Serial entrepreneurs are heavily favored
  • 1. Have a story to tell
  • 1. Traction: Proof that you’ve done something w limited resources. Show that you can get something done w no money.
  • Use metrics to back up that story
  • 1. Tell the story well. Understand what the angels need to hear.
  • Check out Presentation Zen (book) by carl reynolds
  • check out pitchcoach (.com?)
  • tell it to as many people as possible and create scarcity for yr deal. leverage that for better terms. “No one’s interested until someone’s interested and then everyone’s interested.”
  • Term Sheet: not legally binding. as soon as you get it, start talking to other people.
  • How to apportion equity within the team? Take a long view
  • angelsoft.net
• Bness Plan
  • some people read them, most don’t. Need exec summary. 20 pages.
  • How long should a round take? 3 mos or so. Maybe 6mos. If yr looking for 6mos and not getting bites, yr doing something wrong.

Video Cloud Computing, Calrissian-Style - Nathan

• We’re Lando Calrissian, we need a Lobot to run our stuff
• MUX is 4 things:
  1. STORAGE (S3): big giant video in the sky.
  2. PROCESSING (EC2): processing. Its not like a web server that you need all the time. Occasionally you need tons of power, then nothing.
  3. Datebase SimpleDB
     4: Work Queue SimpleQueueService
• http://mux.am

Fixing Social ID - Peter Ludaddi from M$

• rebuilt machine 3 wks ago
• found himself in a ton of different networks w a ton of clients. that sucks.
• technical options are out there, but the issue is really social
• OpenID
• Cardspace
• Dataportability.orgHank: linked.id the problem is that it’s a semanitc wed data std, which means “fail”
  Permissions vs personas?
  OpenID has personas

Graph Databases - Hank Williams

• store and represent data
• HW has been using a relational DB forever
• relational DBs don’t address the way we store data
• relational DBs are great, but not well-suited for storing knowlefdge
• not easy to add structure after storing data
• accounting has the same data year after yr. Relational DBs are fine. Web 2.0? Not so much.
• PROBLEM: every time you want to change the relationship bw two objects, you need to add something to one of the objects you want to relate. This is bad. On day 1, you have to decide what yr doing. After that, changing it sucks.
• SOLUTION: Graph database. “graph” as in “social graph”
• don’t need to modify things to connect new objects
• Semantic web: good idea, but mapping the graph to a relational db SUUUUCKS.
• kloudshare

Blog to Community - Max from M$

• Channel 9 @ M$: people called M$ “The Death Star”. Channel 9 was created to give some insight into the M$ thought process
• Channel 8 is the student version that’s being dvlped

Get what you want - Bre

• room131.com
• imakethings.com
• start doing things that you can’t do
• ccc: chaos computer club

Startup Failures - freshbooks

• trust yr users. make design decisions that remove barriers.

Analyzing the social graph API

• Google social graph API
• nodes are URL of pages
• kudorank.com - algorithm for smart search
• hotshots fb app
• baysean, clickthrough are the competitors to social graph
• xobni.com: non-graph analysis of reputation via inbox
• zoominfo.com people search
• demographic clustering: “ppl who like what you like”

080229 Clay Shirky Book Release for Here Comes Everybody @ ITP

The book

After talking about this kind of thing for years, the book started when Clay realized the social forces he was interested in were no longer limited to geeks.

What’s the book about? In a sentence: “group action just got easier”.

There’s ladder of group action:

• Sharing
• Conversation
• Collaboration
• Collective Action

Where We Are Now

• del.icio.us
  Schacter’s innovation was “sharing first, then groupings follow”. Previously, the assumption was that groups had to be assembled first and only then could they share. The only real primitives in del are the user, the link, and the tags.
• flickr
  Every URL is the potential for a community. A technique like HDR would have taken years to percolate through the old photo ecosystem of trade magazines and hobbyists, but by turning ever posted picture into a potential community (or tutorial), conversation moves much faster.
• Buffy Bronze
  When one TV network sold the rights to Buffy and discontinued the fan board, fans pooled resources and hired a programmer to build a new one. They didn’t want user accounts. They didn’t want tagging. They didn’t want threaded conversation. Nothing fancy; just the same stacked list of comments that they’d been using for years.

“like unitarians’ they’ve survived the death of their object of veneration”

• AEGISUB Anime Fan Software
  Anime fans develop a software/system to subtitle japanese anime that hasn’t been commercially released in English.

“As anyone who’s developed software for multiple platforms knows, if you’ve got a BSD version, yr serious.”
commercially agnostic: not for commercial gain, but not stealing IP. By the rationale of a market economy, this should not exist

Future

Collective Action

• 1999 An NWA plane was stuck on the runway for 8 or 9 hours without being allowed to deplane. Toilets overflowed, supplies ran low, babies cried. Lawyers ran up and down the aisles taking names and plotting class-action lawsuit, but in the end little changed: the airline settled out of court, and a toothless “Code of Passenger Rights” was implemented.
• 2006 Same situation different airline. More poop, different babies, same crying. But this time, the results were totally different: within 8 months of the passengers organized complaint, congress passes a law to establish a Passengers Bill of Rights which kick in after 3 hours on the tarmac. What changed? The technology for communicting and organizing existed in 1999, but internet penetration was not yet deep enough for groups like this to achieve critical mass. The instigator in this case began by commenting on a news article which then turned into an impromptu meeting place for passengers/victims.
• The American Philosopher Henry James said “thinking is for doing”. Clay updates with “publishing is for acting”.
• Flash Mobs: Bill Wassic from Harpers Magazine started emailing groups of people so as to spontaneously gather, perform a coordinated odd task (eg 400 people in the Times Square Toys’R’Us bowing down to the giant animatronic Tyrannasaurus Rex) for a short period of time, and disperse. He conceived of it as a critique of hipsters: tell them its in the service of irony and calling out the establishment, and they’ll do anything you tell them, no matter how inane.
• In Belerus, one of the most repressive of the former Soviet satellites, there is no freedom of assembly. Pro-democracy protesters started Flash Mobs where sympathizers would all meander to the main town square and, at the appointed time, begin to eat popsicles. The repressive state was caught on the horns of a dilemma: allow the protesters to freely congregate and organize, or have the Secret Service arresting people for eating ice cream in public, documented for all the world to see.

The Lesson? In high freedom environments, new technology is used for entertainment.
In low-freedom environments, any opportunity for group action turns political.

• In Polermo, Italy: businesses organize against mafia (“Pizzo”) extortion by group action.

These notes should be regarded as primary sources. They’re quick, rough, often verbatim accounts of whatever held my interest about a given speech, panel, or lecture. I occasionally go back and neaten them up a bit, but that’s the exception rather than the rule. The structure, quality& fidelity of these notes vary widely. Enjoy.

Posting notes that were taken years ago poses an information architecture question: should the notes be cataloged by the date recorded, or the date posted? I’ve consulted with a few library-science-friends, who made the point that the date posted is really only of interest to someone studying my laziness. Therefore I will post the notes under the date recorded, with a notice of the date posted and a link to this explanatory note.