BigMother.dk

I’ve just been announced professor at Århus University, simply by giving an interview on Bigmother, Careware and cognitive enhancements for Danish Radio. A surprising change of status and occupation. Look at the fact box right.

I did notify DR on the mistake but they seem so convinced of my merits that they have kept the title.

Update: The ethical barometer is only visible when at the ‘mother page’ (not the page of this post).

You probably already noticed the small red counter thingy at right. It’s an Actics plugin. It’s a small widget to integrate into your preferred web-presence, be it your blog, website or community profile page, to get feedback from your proxies on your success in honoring your own ethical ideals. Press it and tell me what you think of my ability to live my values. Think of it as a way to realize (ethical) New Years resolutions with a little help from your friends. Or as a way for companies to turn their ethics into action and – less idealistically - values into value creation together with customers, partners and suppliers.

We’re testing how bloggers, NGO’s and corporate users find the plugin relevant to achieve their respective objectives (personal realization, public perception management etc.). So expect to see it on more progressive sites in the coming months.

Play around with the plugin and tell me what you think. Comments, mail and telex appreciated. What you miss, what you don’t get, persons/companies/NGO’s you know that would be interested, bugs found (yes, you’ll sometimes have to reload it in Safari, and close it with ‘apple’ + ‘w’ in Firefox on mac) and all the other relevant feedback. Meanwhile we’ll continue to work on usability and communication on the plugin workshop (to be actics.com) for you to get your own free plugin soon.

Finally the little start up I’m involved with has a pre-beta ready to show our friends and other very tolerant people before last redesign and public beta launch later this summer. We are dependent on your feedback and input in order to stand any chance of succeeding with this. On the concept, on communication, on (lack of) usability, on functionalities and everything else you think it’ll take to make a general audience start using it. Please press the logo and go check it out. See you in there.

We’re slowly moving towards launch of Actics.com (which is presently in no-show-pre-beta) amidst investor negotiations, staff recruitment, publication deals, research projects and other everyday Actics stuff. We begin by firing up under our community with the Actics blog on everything related to an ethical social software startup with galactic aspirations. Currently the blog is manned by a sweet mixture of entrepreneurial, bright and visionary Actics personas namely Nicolai, Adam and yours truly writing on the new paradigm of users in charge and corporate transparency, the emerging ethical economy, and more mundane issues relating to the creation of useful social software. We will widen the scope, improve our arguments and encrease the number of contributing authors down the line so you might as well subscribe right away and improve your chances of winning one of our ‘dedicated reader’ trophy awarded sometime in the future… As always, comments are appreciated.

Apple presented its new ‘fun products’ yesterday. What a disappointment! Not that the Mac mini is not a great product to upgrade to the Intel era or that a portable sound station for the iPod isn’t useful - but come on. We were waiting for something a little less incremental. But what probably annoys me most is to see Apple doing something that ought to come out of Denmark’s world class sound design that I’m trying to promote. I’ve been arguing for a while now, that we ought to take advantage of the truly innovative Danish digital amplification technology developed by B&O to leverage the digital-portable revolution. Putting in one of B&O’s IcePower amps would boost performance incredibly in a mobile system, reduce weight (and perhaps size) and lower powerconsumption (almost al energy is converted into sound instead of heat in digital amps). And with drivers from Scanspeak and Peerless you would simply get an awesome mobile High End system. Come on Danish Colleagues, what are you waiting for?

I Just did a survey on the future of the web by The Pew Internet & American Life Project. It asks you to motivate why you agree or disagree with different more or less far-fetched statements on the future of the web. One of them is clearly BigMotherian:

“Transparency builds a better world, even at the expense of privacy: As sensing, storage, and communication technologies get cheaper and better, individuals’ public and private lives will become increasingly “transparent” globally. Everything will be more visible to everyone, with good and bad results. Looking at the big picture - at all of the lives affected on the planet in every way possible - this will make the world a better place by the year 2020. The benefits will outweigh the costs.”

To the greatest disgrace of my beautiful mind child one of the other scenarios was the infamous J-curve:

“Autonomous technology is a problem: By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them. We will be on a “J-curve” of continued acceleration of change.”

To this I responded:

“Ha ha, this is simply third grade science fiction. Dangers come much from more subtle (read: less anthropomorphic) issues.”

But now, I need to abandon the BigMother ship. If it belongs to this company, BigMother is surely an absurd idea.

Please go and do the survey here to balance the idiocy that might result from this survey if prudent and knowing people doesn’t voice their perspective. Afterwards, please get back here and share your thoughts.

PS. Sad they don’t conduct this as a Prediction Markets survey. That would have been quite interesting (unless people are already brainwashed by half-wit futurists).

Recently I posted an idea how to inform hungry homeless people on free lunch from leftovers from receptions and similar events. GarbageScout is a congenial ‘let’s recycle and distribute goods to those who need them’ service that allow people to post, search and find usable items thrown away by others. The service probably only work in places such as New York where people actually dump their old stuff on the streets. But it’s a nice way to promote more sustainability. (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004071.html well I do read other blogs

Update Witness have launched a forum on how to establish a successful footage sharing web portal after the discussion featuring af WorldChanging. Go and contribute if you have any good ideas, experience or technical knowledge.

Explorations always happens in jumps. Today I stumbled upon a whole bunch of surveillance niceties (again due to WorldChanging) which I will try to present briefly.

First, in an ‘old’ and quite extensive article at WorldChanging, Jamais Cascio proposes Participatory Panopticon as the more likely non-big Brother future of surveillance:

“… in the world of the participatory panopticon, this constant surveillance is done by the citizens themselves, and is done by choice. It’s not imposed on us by a malevolent bureaucracy or faceless corporations. The participatory panopticon will be the emergent result of myriad independent rational decisions, a bottom-up version of the constantly watched society… if the question is “who watches the watchmen?” the answer is “all of us.”

This view is pretty close to the whole point of BigMother (and what I sometimes refer to as counter surveillance). The article contains numerous valuable links and references, although it sometimes slips into more geekish gadget-futurism.

Second, there’s the term ’sousveillance’ (watching over from beneath) which beautifully captures some of my personal discont with the Big Brother monopoly. The term is semi-academic and seemingly quite developed. According the site devoted sousveillance:

“There are 2 main definitions, which are approximately equivalent, but each capture slightly different aspects of sousveillance:

1. Inverse surveillance: to watch from below;
2. Personal experience capture: recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. There is already a certain legal precedent for audio sousveillance, e.g. “one-party” recording of telephone conversations enjoys greater legal protection than recording by a person who is not a party to the conversation. In most states, audio surveillance is illegal, but audio sousveillance is legal.”

Also this page is a rich source of references and ideas. I’m not done with it.

Lastly, Peter Gabriel’s (yes, the musician) Witness Media Archive program, dedicated promotion of human right by helping the violated to document the offenses with pictures. Witness have created a web site with filmed or photographed abuses and train people in using this medium. The next step is to allow easy upload and distribution of for instance camera phone footage, which will bring even more leverage to the abused. Even if not CareWare in it’s strict sense, this service truly photo sharing with a sense. Read an interview with Gabriel in Business Week

I just stumbled upon a service in the US for homeless people called Community Voice Mail. It offers free voicemail for people without an address or phone. The service thus provides homeless people with the possibility of for instance applying for a job (to end a negative spiral). And according to the testimonies at the site, the service does have a positive impact. I myself have been playing around - mostly for fun I have to admit - with the idea of creating a service that helps homeless finding food. Although rather subversive (and a bit to conceptual), the service would simply track receptions and formal cocktail parties in the area by means of web crawlers and some contextual information and broadcast where the free food and beverage was available in the neighborhood. Too much food is thrown away anyway, so we might as well distribute some of the waste from our excesses. The service unfortunately depends on technology and even if we could equip homeless with the proper wireless devices or internet kiosks through donations and sponsorships, most devices or kiosks probably wouldn’t survive the rugged and wet life of a homeless or public placement. If you got good ideas let me know, and we’ll start developing proper careware together.

Lovely example of how we could deploy existing ubiquitous technologies as careware

At the University of California at Berkeley, professors and students are researching how to put the worldwide proliferation of mobile phones into (additionally) good use. Instead of immense technological and not least economical troubles in distributing stand-alone technology to track pollution and potential harming airborne chemicals, the group is testing sensing systems build into ordinary mobile phones. Such thinking is a beautiful example of how existing ubiquitous technology could get a lot of beneficial monitoring qualities and become careware. However, we will still need clear proof that all the radio waves we are filling our world with IS harmless, also when scaled. Check out the article in Wired News: http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,68485,00.html?tw=rss.TOP