ShiftSpace to talk on Software Freedom Day (11/19)

ShiftSpace will be giving a talk at Software Freedom Day in NYC. Sep 19th 6-10pm @148 Lafayette St, 12th Floor.

“In New York City, Software Freedom Day will mark the launch of a series of quarterly Open Source / Open Culture events designed to engage free software hackers, creative commons artists, open government activists, and open science innovators.”

The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

To find out more information check out Software Freedom International.

ShiftSpace to Present at Participation Camp

This weekend, ShiftSpace will be at Participation Camp to discuss  political intervention and strategies for collaborative engagement.

Participation Camp is an un-conference that will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around the question of active democracy and political action.

In recent weeks, several organizations in New York have taken big steps towards making New York City’s public data accessible and useful to software developers.

Participation Camp will host a series of talks and workshops around these efforts, in the hopes of encouraging citizens to take action.

ShiftSpace will present on Sunday, June 28th at 3pm.
View the full event schedule here: http://mudball.net/pcamp09/schedule/

Particiaption Camp is hosted at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at 721 Broadway, 4th Floor.

The event is free and open to the public. Register here: http://mudball.net/pcamp09/

Prop H8 and ShiftSpace Intervention

California recently voted to uphold Proposition 8, banning legal marriage between gay couples. Thousands of people who opposed the bill voiced their frustration in a series of public protests around the country. As reported in the New York Times, opponents of the bill are disturbed to find that for same-sex couples outsider status would be forever “enshrined in our Constitution.”

Alan Van Capelle, executive director of Empire State Pride Agenda, said in a statement to the New York Times:

“Today’s ruling from the California Supreme Court missed an opportunity to do what courts are supposed to do and that is to make sure that all people are treated equally under the law.”

Amidst all the public protests in the streets, a ShiftSpace user took his protest to the web. Erich Blackhound announced on Twitter that he had replaced the banners on the Prop 8 website with his own graphic:

His act of political intervention, sparked a discussion on BoingBoing and illustrated a core aspect of the ShiftSpace design; that in light of the web ShiftSpace can serve as a public platform and function in subversive and meaningful ways; whether for social critique or involvement in political action, or interaction in the shaping of information.

As one of the ShiftSpace founders, Mushon Zer-Aviv says: “Today we live not only in geographical space, but also in information spaces that define our perception of the world and our private and public identity.”

Now, if only we can all “shift” the Constitution to give equal rights to all citizens…

photo from Steve Rhodes, via Flickr

ShiftSpace and privacy

One of the main current problems with ShiftSpace is that when a user is visiting a webpage and checking with us if there is a shift there or not, our server (as any other server would) logs and stores the user’s information. ShiftSpace never sees this information, it is not available to anyone, nor is ShiftSpace interested in tracking their users, but we do recognize that this information exists and is stored. Moving forward we want to remove this log entirely, but that’s not enough. Ideally, we should be able to have access to this information at all.

Thinking about this issue brought to mind the notion of traceability on the net. There seems to be a rift between the rise of open-source, social networks and user-generated content on the net and the increasing sense that privacy is being compromised and there is no longer any anonymity in the web 2.0 world.

I recently read an interesting article on the idea of web anonymity and started looking at the concepts of darknet and lightnet. The article by John Walker “The Digital Imprimatur“  says, among other things, that “signing up for cheap broadband service, with its firewalls and dynamic IP addresses, you’ve already compromised your freedom” let alone by setting up “spam filters, anti-virus software” etc. that are “further nails in the coffin of liberty.”

With ShiftSpace we want to be interactive, interoperable, and interconnected yet we also want to protect the users anonymity and respect their information.

The issues we are dealing with are somewhat similar to what other open-source projects are facing, so we want to hear from our ShiftSpace users too… what do you think about privacy, anonymity and online freedom and what does it mean to you? Moreover, if any of you have suggestions, we would love to hear them.

*expect more tech-speak heavy posts on this subject, as we’re looking into some optional technologies for decentralizing our databases, like couchDB, Browser Couch and Weave.

ShiftSpace IRC channel now open!

You can now join the ShiftSpace IRC channel at IRC.freenode.net – the channel is #shiftspace. You can download an IRC from the following free sources:

http://www.mirc.com/ for Windows

http://www.xchat.org/for Linux or Windows

http://colloquy.info/ for MAC

Someone will be available throughout the week but the whole ShiftSpace team will be on the IRC during our regular meetings every week on Wednesday from 1-7 and Saturday from 1-7. Thank you and we look forward to seeing you there!

Subversive Technology and Democracy

Yesterday I went to a really interesting discussion on how technology played a role in the Saffron Uprising in Burma (Myanmar) and helped bring international attention to the oppressive control of the military-led SPDC.  The talk was organized by Digital Democracy and Not An Alternative and was held at The Change You Want to See gallery in Brooklyn as part of a series of talks curated by Upgrade NYC and Eyebeam. The featured guest of the talk was Stanley Aung, founder of ABITSU and Burma Bloggers, who teaches students to use technology to organize, communicate and to understand the change it can effect on society. You can watch some of the presentation here. 

Getty Images

During the uprising in Burma, photos and videos spread to news agencies around the world and brought to light the nature of the situation. In response, the government cut phone lines and blocked internet servers. On Friday May 2, 2008 the deadly cyclone Nagris devastated the country and killed over 200,000 people. In the aftermath of the cyclone foreign aid workers dedicated to delivering emergency telecoms in disaster areas were prevented from going into Burma. Organizations such as Telecoms Sans Frontieres were denied visas into the country, see here.  

Still, as reported in the Guardian “the internet has been a powerful force for opposition groups outside Burma. They maintain websites to provide uncensored news and organize opponents of the military regime all over the world. Though most people in Burma can’t access them, the sites raise awareness worldwide”.

As written in Politics Online: ” Globalization’s effect on the way information is transferred has become problematic for governments violating human rights or anyone wishing to prevent the spread of information. Many contemporary examples from U.S. satellite images of Serbian atrocities in the 1990’s, to disturbing cell phone images at Abu Ghraib, smuggled tapes containing anti-government rhetoric in Iran or the use of emails or blogs to organize revolutionary movements in China, show how challenging it has become for governments to suppress the distribution of unwanted information. Undoubtedly the internet can be seen as a democratizing force and those wishing to impede this facilitator must conceive new ways to fight an invisible enemy.”  

But if it is to bring about change technology must work in two ways, it must not only bring access and empower people who are victims of their county’s regime or suffering under oppression, but it must also educate the people who are privileged to live in the free world, in a democracy – and were it not for the work of Amnesty International and smaller non-profits like Digital Democracy and Global Voices political prisoners would have no hope of survival and many people would be unaware of humanitarian issues throughout the world. This subject touches me because I was just 7 years old when my family fled Bucharest as political refugees in 1989, just weeks before the Romanian revolution. Both my grandfather and my father had spent time in jail and our family was heavily monitored by the government as my father sought correspondence with diplomats and senators and humanitarian organizations abroad. My family waited 7 years to leave the country, since I was conceived, until we were finally fortunate enough to be supported by a refugee organization in California. 

As the talk yesterday broached on ways to circumnavigate the firewall in Burma, I wondered if ShiftSpace could be of help by providing a back-room channel for communication online…still ShiftSpace is not encrypted and as the government tracks keywords it might be able to trace keywords amongst ShiftSpace users as well…but I think this is a subject worth thinking about. There will be conference in May at UC Berkeley that will talk about how “recent innovations in science and technology have provided human rights advocates, journalists, and scientists with new tools to expose war crimes and other serious violations of human rights and to disseminate this information in real time throughout the world”, see here:  http://hrc.berkeley.edu/events/newmachineconference/

Also, for more information on Burma see here and also this site about the experiences of Burmese refugees in NYC and the work of the Soros Foundation

 

image from this New Yorker article on the situation in Burma

 

 

 

Creative Destruction and Convergence

I just finished reading a funny and somewhat comforting book called “Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction” which talks about how the combination of globalization and technological innovation has created an ever-widening income gap encouraging average Americans to live beyond their means. How this has affected cultural trends and lifestyle choices, ie. what kind of work we choose to do, when we choose to marry and have children and what our attitudes are on friendship, happiness and personal fulfillment. Slackonomics makes the case that a generation of “slackers” surviving back to back dot-com and housing bubbles and facing economic instability are reshaping and challenging the driving forces.

Lisa Chamberlin, a contributor for the NYT,  gives the example of the Splasher as a perfect metaphor for creative destruction, a theory coined by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. The Splasher is an unidentified street artist that splashes graffiti and distributes manifestos that say things like: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion. We are all capable of manifesting our desires directly, free of representation and commodification. We will continue manifesting ours by euthanizing your bourgeois fad.” The author argues that the repeating cycle of graffiti that becomes respected street art that’s then destroyed by more graffiti illustrates the economic model of creative destruction in the sense that “recurring ‘Innovation’ propels the economy which exists in a state of constant tumult. ‘New Men’ or ‘Entrepreneurs’ operating within ‘New Firms’ drive innovation…Meanwhile, powerful elements of society resist major innovations, because they tend to wreak havoc on existing arrangements. As a result, ‘the history of capitalism is studded with violent bursts and catastrophes.’ It is no gentle process of adjustment but something ‘more like a series of explosions.’” (Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction)

As far as creative destruction ShiftSpace can be a great example because it seeks to challenge the commodified space online. If you look at the web, instead of becoming the Utopian public square first envisioned by its pioneers the result has become more of a mall, with ads and click-ons and search pathways dictated by companies who create their own order of the space of the web.

Initially, one of the inspirations for ShiftSpace was the work of net artist Cristophe Bruno who made a poetry advertising campaign on Google’s AdWord. In his own description:

“I opened an account for $5 and began to buy some keywords. For each keyword you can write a little ad and, instead of the usual ad, I decided to write little “poems”, non-sensical or funny or a bit provocative. I began with the keyword “symptom”. The first ad I wrote was :

Words aren’t free anymore bicornuate-bicervical uterus one-eyed hemi-vagina www.unbehagen.com

As soon as the campaign was launched, I was able to see the results. Every time somebody was looking for the word “symptom” in Google, they could see my ad in the top right corner of the page. My first satisfaction occured when somebody who had typed “hemorroid symptom” on Google arrived on my website, after having clicked on my ad. I decided to explore this new world and to launch several campaigns. Each of them was to be a targeted poetic happening of a new kind.”

After doing this for some time Christophe Bruno was eventually discovered by Google and stopped. But his web art and in a sense public protest really inspired ShiftSpace in the creation of their alternative space for the web.

Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it?

In one of our ShiftSpace meetings I was recommended to read the book La Vie: Mode D’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) by Georges Perec. The book centers on a Parisian apartment block seen as if the entire facade were removed, exposing every room. Perec exhaustively describes each detail  of the objects and characters inhabiting the spaces, frozen in a period of time. “While the book can be read linearly, from start to finish, it can be just as enjoyable to dip in and out of: for this purpose, an appendix section contains a chronology of events starting at 1833, a 70-page index, a list of the 100 or so main stories, and a plan of the elevation of the block as the 10×10 grid.” (see here)

Perec’s novel as it is frozen in time and weighty in details flattens the apartment building, like looking into a dollhouse -  the world he describes becomes a 2D rendering where the 3rd dimension is added by the viewers gaze into that missing 4th wall, the reader’s interaction with the text.

It is a tremendous exercise in imagination and as an extension to ergodic litrature, I started to look at cybertext, game theory, the narratives of MUDs and MOOs and of course hypertext itself.  All in a sense playing with the idea that the interaction itself changes the outcome and that the user shapes the narrative.

Which brought me to look at liquid information and this old WIRED article about Frode Hengland: ” ‘I love the web, but it’s a shitty toy,’ ” he says, ” ‘(It’s) a first movie of a train coming into a station.’ Hegland’s idea is simple — he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a “hyperword.” Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole. (…) Liquid Information takes Berners-Lee’s ideas and runs with them. Hegland’s experimental system is geared toward allowing users — not just writers and editors — to make connections. Instead of just viewing websites, readers can change the way information is presented, or relate it to other information elsewhere on the web.” ( Such as a web reflection of Perec’s book where each object and each scene encapsulates a story unto itself.)

Anyway, it seemed to me that ShiftSpace incorporates all of these ideas and more and I am curious to see more innovative uses of ShiftSpace as a narrative platform, or as it may be, a non-traditional narrative platform.

semantic web pt.2

As a follow up to the semantic web post, how does ShiftSpace fit into the discussion… ShiftSpace counters the whole discussion because ShiftSpace itself questions the status quo of categorizations online.

ShiftSpace challenges the organization of the web – it is an alternate space in response to the lack of uncommodified public space online – for example ShiftSpace tools like cut-ups and image-swap re-contextualize information and distort meanings as a challenge to traditional organizational systems. Other tools like notes and comments allow users to express their ideas regardless of whether the site they are browsing has designated a space for viewer’s input . While ShiftSpace would benefit from some aspects of linking data (for example, the search for a specific word could pull up all the shifts associated with it) as a rule, ShiftSpace does not assume that you already know what you want before you find it and ShiftSpace exists as a result of an already imposed organization of online data, it exists to question imposed orders.

As Clay Shirky writes: “Many networked projects, including things like business-to-business markets and Web Services, have started with the unobjectionable hypothesis that communication would be easier if everyone described things the same way. From there, it is a short but fatal leap to conclude that a particular brand of unifying description will therefore be broadly and swiftly adopted. (…) There is a list of technologies that are actually political philosophy masquerading as code, a list that includes Xanadu, Freenet, and now the Semantic Web. The Semantic Web’s philosophical argument — the world should make more sense than it does — is hard to argue with. The Semantic Web, with its neat ontologies and its syllogistic logic, is a nice vision. However, like many visions that project future benefits but ignore present costs, it requires too much coordination and too much energy to effect in the real world, where deductive logic is less effective and shared worldview is harder to create than we often want to admit.”

In short, as long as people continue to impose their order on the world, there will continue to be people to question it.

semantic web

Working with the ShiftSpace team and thinking about open-source platforms and challenging the private control of space online, has made me very interested in reading about web theory and predictions for the web. So lately I have been reading about the semantic web and looking at the idea of linking data. What is the semantic web? In brief, from an article in the Scientific American, the semantic web is a possible future for the web in which computers express meaning and not just programmed relationships between objects: “Most of the Web’s content today is designed for humans to read, not for computer programs to manipulate meaningfully. Computers can adeptly parse webpages for layout and routine processing, ex: here a header, there a link to another page, but in general, computers have no reliable way to process the semantics, ex: this is the home page of the Hartman and Strauss Physio Clinic, this link goes to Dr. Hartman’s curriculum vitae.”

Here are some interesting TED talks I found on this subject, the first is from Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the www and the talk is his description of the semantic web. Tim Berners-Lee says: “I have a dream for the web (in which computers) become capable of analyzing all the data on the web – the content, links and transactions between people and computers. A “semantic web” which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day to day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The “intelligent agents” people have touted for ages will finally materialize.”

The second talk is from Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired magazine, and he talks about how there is only one machine and the web is its OS, that all of our screens are just portals into the one machine, the web, and that in the future the web will extend to the material world of things and that no bits will live outside the web, that every item will be supported by linked ideas and information. As a tangent to this idea I found this example of mobile tagging, where simply pointing at an object with an embedded code can bring up a url, an example perhaps where the web and the material world can join.

Lastly, here is another interesting discussions related to this subject from Clay Shirky where he talks about how we calssify information and attempt to assert organization online. If we look at how a library is organized, a book must have a specific place on a shelf – its subject heading delineates where it lives in the library despite the fact that a single book can be about many different subjects – online, this categorization is negated as there is no shelf and a book (or a piece of information) can live in many different places simultaneously – shattered in links to many locations. Clay Shirky disccuses how attempts to organize the web are also fundamentaly connected to our particular worldviews and how we process relationships in the real world, see also here. Additionally, David Nolan told me about this book that I think beautifully describes how we understand and display information. As far as the semantic web, one example of it in practice now is DBpedia.