Filed under: advertising, art, feedback, information, opensource, proposal | Tags: 2waytv, application, fellowship, guggenheim, housingprojects, information, publichousing, tv, tv2.0, twvee, video
i’m applying for the guggenheim fellowship. it’s due very soon and i’m way behind but the application will be focused around some implementation of the system shown in the tv2.0 doodle above. the doodle currently tells the story in a nicer way than my application but it should change a lot over the next couple days.
about the fellowship:
http://www.gf.org/about-the-foundation/the-fellowship/
The Foundation receives between 3,500 and 4,000 applications each year. Although no one who applies is guaranteed success in the competition, there is no prescreening: all applications are reviewed. Approximately 220 Fellowships are awarded each year.
and from the frequently asked questions:
The average amount of Fellowship grants in the 2008 United States and Canada competition was approximately $43,200. Since the purpose of the Guggenheim Fellowship program is to help provide Fellows with blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible, grants are made freely. No special conditions attach to them…
the application resources:
http://www.gf.org/applicants/application-resources/
So, on to my application.
There are 3 main documents I am working on as google docs.
1. A brief narrative account of your career, describing your previous accomplishments. This account should include mention prizes, honors, and significant grants or fellowships that you have held or now hold, showing the grantor and the inclusive dates of each award.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcpfp46j_145cvg9tcfm I am focusing on my history and accomplishments through 3 directions: artist(music, sculpture, doodles, timelapse), systems engineer(mech eng, robotics, wikipedia/linux analysis), and community organizer(collision collective, radio show, etc). this is something i have thought about a decent amount but never tried to actually write down so it’s slow and needs some work.
2. A list of work:
Publications, if you are a scholar, scientist, or writer.
Give exact titles, names of publishers, and dates and places of publication.
Playwrights should also include a list of productions.
Exhibitions, if you are an artist.
Include a chronological list of shows, citing dates and places, and a list of collections in which your work is represented. Forthcoming shows should also be mentioned.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcpfp46j_1469gwzswcf
3. A statement of plans for the period for which the Fellowship is requested. Applicants in science or scholarship should provide a detailed, but concise, plan of research, not exceeding three pages in length. Applicants in the arts should submit a brief statement of plans in general terms, not exceeding three pages in length.
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcpfp46j_147d62kv727 My proposal for the project is focused on the ideas of the broadcaster project, twvee, tv 2.0, 2 way television, open systems engineering, open information channels, public history files through video, and distributed systems. Specifically, the proposal is to openly develop and implement an easily accessible public video booth for the Gowanus Public Housing project in Brooklyn, across the street from where I just moved, my local environment. Possibly this would be a short video version and a timelapse installation? The exact details should not be solidified, only the process, goals, and small steps. The exact form of the installation will be determined by working for a couple months with the local community.
see also the broadcaster project proposal to the banff/01sj/sundance locative cinema call. that is viewable here.
various doodles on the general idea of tv2.0, broadcaster project, local news 2.0, etc in this flickr set.
and notes on the broadcaster project.
Filed under: art, information, opensource | Tags: activism, information, open, opensource, sharing, tools
It is that time of year again. I am applying for the artist residency program at Eyebeam atelier in New York City (this will be my third try, persistence is important!). It’s a great program so if you’re an artist in the NYC area, I recommend checking it out and applying for it if you are into open source and the like. Here is the info about the residency->
http://eyebeam.org/get-involved-residencies/faq
Currently I am focusing on the idea of freeing up private corporate information streams. I’m expanding on and trying to formalize some of the ideas discussed in this post->
http://plainfront.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/thoughts-on-total-openness-of-information/
My application in process is a google doc. Of course, in the spirit of openness, here it is. Suggestions welcome! It is due this Friday the 15th.
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dcpfp46j_86cxb6r2cp
Questions I am trying to keep in mind while writing:
Are the ideas good? Are the ideas well presented? Am I selling myself appropriately? The character count limits are quite short so keep that in mind when giving comments. Thanks!
Filed under: information, opensource | Tags: business, constraints, economics, evolution, experiments, future, information, ip, market, mutation, present, replication, value
we believe in evolution. evolution is survival. there is no “good”, “bad”, “true” or “false” only replication and mutation. success is simply a matter of what replicates and for one reason or another, mutations happen along the way. some mutations are beneficial, some not. in changing environments, mutations are essential to survival. Although some things can make it a really long time… (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYOf2wIoxgo)
So what does this mean to us, living now, trying to figure it out?
No more smart/stupid value judgments. No more judging of pop culture, the american dream, gm, big banks, neocons, religious leaders or anything else? We are here to observe the replicators. We are here to work on mutations that might displace the current crop at the top. There is no good or bad. There is no ownership of ideas to impede either replication or mutation. We don’t know the answers. We are experimenting. We are mutating. We must work to reward the systems with the proper incentives. We just need to keep repeating ourselves in the business of making repeaters. We need to keep repeating each other.*
No limits on either replication or mutation? No intellectual property? No haggling over information of any sort? No scalable rewards? Everyone is a service employee?
is this our generation’s religion? the religion of letting go? the zen of informational openness? the power of true unconstrained parallel processing? worship of the process and the cloud of culture and information that hangs above and all around us? the democratization of publishing so individuals can broadcast as loud as corporations? easy, fast, and massive collaboration? loose networks of local and small? the disappearance of the term “theft” in regards to information? no more making money off of copies of things that are copied for free? informational commons? everything seen by many eyes and viewpoints to keep ourselves in check? all of us as teachers. all of us as students. learning models replace knowing models. sustainable business. true value added services. less debt. less leverage. less dependance on jackpots and lottery winnings. acceptance of randomness.
this is a kool-aid(tm) that we are drinking. are we fools?
information, formation, fabrications, for vacations, evacuation, e-vocation, evolution
(*) with slight modification of course.
Filed under: information, randomness | Tags: chaos, experts, information, noise, randomness
But do experts actually get it right themselves?
The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.
“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.
Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones. That had to do with a fault in the media. Talent bookers for television shows and reporters tended to call up experts who provided strong, coherent points of view, who saw things in blacks and whites. People who shouted — like, yes, Jim Cramer!
via Op-Ed Columnist – Learning How to Think – NYTimes.com.
More here.
and here.
And a great quote from Samuel Goldwyn (MGM). “If I had said ‘yes’ to all the projects I said ‘no’ to, and ‘No’ to all the projects I said ‘yes’ to, it would have probably come out the same.” via The Drunkard’s Walk.
Filed under: advertising, art, feedback, information, opensource | Tags: cc, change, evolution, future, gpl, information, lawyer, legal, license, mutation, opensource, publicdomain, replication
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery.
We have copyright. We have patents. We have trademarks.
We have GPL, Creative Commons, and many others that keep lawyers in business.
We have Public Domain.
Why not choose Public Domain?
We believe in evolution. Evolution is replication and mutation. Public Domain maximizes potential for replication and mutation. Is this the best way for us to move forward? If you love something can you set it free?
More concrete measures from me on this within the next couple months. Make fun of me if I don’t.
Filed under: advertising, feedback, information, opensource | Tags: animal, art, commons, design, information, mirror, pointofview, rewards, systems, training
sean says “unless you’re the boss, you’re playing by somebody else’s rules.” but we and many people we know have no interest in being the boss ourselves. so how do you, me, him, her, we, them, etc, change the rules?
How do we design flat and self-rewarding ecosystems?
Wikipedia is a self rewarding system. If you come to a page and the page has been vandalized, you can help the system and activate the revert function on the post. When you do this, you are rewarded with the information you came for. Clay Shirky, HCE book has a nice section on wikipedia.
So where to now?
Let’s go back to nytimes article on animal training and husbands. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=husband+animal+training
A great article. A snippet that summarizes pretty well.
I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don’t. After all, you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
…
I was using what trainers call “approximations,” rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
Give it a read and try to convince yourself we are above animals. We like to give our civilization a little more credit than it may deserve. How do you give yourself a treat for riding the bicycle?
Filed under: information, opensource | Tags: free, freemarket, information, law, lawyers, market, open, privacy, regulations, republican, sharing
Total information openness. No private information.
Can you imagine living life without having any private information? No private bank statements, no private files on your computer, etc. So I understand this is a pretty large leap from the world we are currently living in. Fair enough. So why would you even ask such questions?
Ok. Let’s take a slightly different path. Do you trust the government? Do you trust the large banks? Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust Google? All these entities currently hold some of your private information. These entities have all proven to be fallible. So, given that these entities are fallible, are there other options? Don’t pay taxes and keep your money under the bed is one.
What if all your private information was public? Just the information, not the control. This means your bank statements are public but not the bank password for transfering funds. Is it possible that your information is better off in the hands of the general public than it is in the hands of these large fallible institutions? If everyone has your information, does that make it less prone to theft? Do enough people care to make it repair itself, the way wikipedia repairs itself? Does society function better if we actually know the truth about each other?
How could you do this? What are the small steps one could take to build up to total openness? What would be the name for such an experiment? I think one minute per day is a small step in this direction.
So, any of your data that you consider to be “yours” and not shared with another person. This is the information you attempt to place into the public domain. You don’t do this by picking and choosing, you do it by including all the boring details.
So who can use your information to do wrong? If all the bad people have your info, will you have your identity stolen? But if everyone already knows your info, how can it be “stolen”?
The Big Assumption: Enough people are interesting in seeing your experiment succeed that the positive effects outweigh the negative effects.
Of course you need a catchy name if you’re going to do this thing. What is that catchy name? Some sort of acronym?
TOI – total open information (toi toi toi is something like ‘good luck/break a leg’ in dutch)
NPI – no private information
API – all public information
PIT – Public Information Trust.
TIP – Trust information public
to be continued…
update:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122852285532784401.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/08/AR2008090802681.html
Filed under: art, information, opensource | Tags: copyfight, copyright, free, information, law, lawyers, open, opensource, publicdomain, sharing
The world question center is an annual event where edge.org asks most of its authors and affiliate scientists and artists to answer a “big” question. This year’s question is “What will change everything?” and specifically, “What scientific discovery will change everything?”
http://www.edge.org/q2009/q09_index.html
All the answers are short (1000 word cap) and free of hyperlinks. I decided to take the question and the format to heart. Here is my personal take on the matter. (Thanks to eva, jeff and eric for feedback.)
Is Intellectual Property a Market Inefficiency?
Someday we’ll prove it. Intellectual property is a market inefficiency and it slows us down. We continue to treat information like a physical resource that has limits. It’s not. So can we get over information ownership? No patents. No copyrights. No non-compete contracts. No licensing. No infringement. No legal wrangling over information of any sort. The cost for anyone to replicate and distribute information is essentially zero. No value is lost. It’s not land. It’s not gold. You can’t eat it. Squatting over information is rude. Squatting protected by our governments is even worse. Wikipedia, Linux and plenty of other online projects are flourishing without hoarding of information. Can the rest of businesses in the service, media, and physical product world follow suit? Absolutely.
What would happen if the music and software industries took all their IP protection energy, money, and creativity and used it to better serve customers? Could they give away all their intellectual property and stay profitable?
Many are well on their way already. Small businesses, hackers, artists, makers, scientists, and innovative teachers have been sharing for a long time. When all follow, the benefits to education, the economy, the environment, food, and healthcare will all be significant. Elimination of IP creates a long term and local mindset. Ideas will cease to be king and we’ll openly admit what we already know, “the current best thing is going to be replaced by something better.”
No intellectual property means a better database of our successes and failures, a better feedback loop for learning. Every customer adds input, every company makes refinements. All the information is public. The current focus on ideas, patents, copyrights and “final” products distorts the true goals of problem solving. Companies spend their time “selling” objects and ideas to customers rather than collaborating with them. We will reward companies on their ability to process information rather than their ability to horde it.
In theory, a flatter world is better and we appreciate the steps the web has taken us in that direction. But so many of our long cherished views about ownership run counter to this goal. Old models are flawed. Currently customers and businesses worship the product but we want both to take part in the process of improvement.
Let’s think about what might happen if we get there. Physical resources will always cost money and making great products will always take time. Those who deliver value through goods and services will still be compensated. We already do so in long standing industries where patents and copyrights aren’t as important: guitars, bikes, cars, and restaurants for example. In these and other fields, good products bubble to the top without IP protection. For the more IP heavy research or culture based industries, we would likely see a division between research and production. Large research efforts would be taken on by a collaboration between local independent and academic labs, like the current science and arts establishment. Local and international fabrication companies will use this research and the demands of their markets to create products. The process of improvement will become as important as the products. The focus of the economy will shift from product to process.
With no IP, there will be less reason to have a big company to hold all the secrets. Local production and service companies are likely to become more important than the global multinationals. Small businesses will tap into the wealth of knowledge from others around the globe engaged in similar activities. A loose network will replace the massive monoliths that so frequently fail us in spectacular fashion (after their many years of dominance.)
Is this crazy? If you can’t control your branding and you can’t prevent copies, will the truly good products bubble to the top? Will no-name ripoffs take the place of our cherished brands? If there is no chance of a patent, copyright, or a get rich quick market hit, will the innovators continue to innovate? Where will the research money for drug discovery come from? Can the removal of intellectual property lead to a sane market that is less prone to abusive behavior or will it make it worse?
Let’s step back for a moment. In parallel to the development of the free information distribution miracle that is the web, we’ve also come to better understand the inherent randomness and preferential attachment that is a fundamental part of our highly complex and networked society. We know that success in both scientific discoveries and cultural phenomena is largely random. Once you achieve a certain level of proficiency, being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference. Those who rise to the top are certainly talented and hard working but they also have luck. And once they get to the top, the system usually allows them to stay there for no cost until the crash comes and wipes them away. So everyone is working like crazy to get the hit, and then they can have the good life. We glorify the ones who make it and forget about the many many more who don’t. But when it is as random as we now know, couldn’t there be a better way to structure the rewards? Could we think more about the general process of improvement rather than products? Could alternate incentives lead to less consolidation of wealth and more overall innovation and human satisfaction? Talented and hard working individuals will still rise above, but not as far and it won’t be so capricious. Great products will still reach the market but they will be more flexible and sustainable.
Information is now free and it’s not going back. The sooner we quantify the advantages, the better off we will be. With no intellectual property we can stop focusing on the output (the product) and start directing our attention to the feedback loop (the process). We can remake the economy into a flexible, evolving, collaborative entity.
