I just got back from attending a two-day meeting on Open Government Data, organized by Carl Malamud of public.resource.org and hosted by Tim O’Reilly. The focus of the meeting was on making government — all governments, at all levels — as open and transparent as possible, with the use of the Internet. It was an exciting discussion to take part in. There was a feeling at the meeting, shared by most I would guess, that we were giving shape to something that could ultimately help to modernize the notion of democratic, representative government.

The reasoning behind Open Government Data is that society has been transformed by the openness of data afforded by the Internet. Open, equal access to information is good for the general public, is good for competition, and is good for the field in question. The political process, however, has been left out of this equation. While access to information of every sort has exploded in recent years, access to government data — non-sensitive, non-priviledged data — is still generally very hard to come by.

That needs to change. By opening up government data, making it freely accessible and allowing it to be downloaded, forwarded, mashed and so forth, the political process could experience the same sorts of benefits that other sectors now experience with increased dataflow.

What would opening up access to government data do? Several things:

For starters, the political process would become immediately more transparent. You could easily see who was taking money from whom and so forth. Everyone should agree that would be a good thing, right?

Next, a big chunk of government data would become part of the public record, available for indexing by search engines and such. Imagine if you could Google “how did my town council vote on that housing development last week?” and see the actual minutes of the meeting.

Finally, and most interestingly, a whole layer of added value would emerge on top of government data as public entities mixed, mashed and mapped that data however they chose. In the same way that Google Maps mashups added value to the web, allowing people to see things they hadn’t before, opening up government data would result in new and valuable ways of seeing that information. Groups and individuals would be able to use government data to find patterns in it, detecting trends, linkages, surprise success stories, or stark failures in their government and reporting on them. And that value would feed directly back into the political process itself.

Open Government Data has never been tried before because it wasn’t economically realistic — the cost of reproducing information was too high. Times have changed, and the cost of reproducing data is now virtually nothing. Government ought to keep step with that change, and reap the benefits. The great thing about the idea is that it ought to have 100% bipartisan appeal. Open data is good for everyone, not just liberals, not just conservatives. It opens the playing field up for all.

Here is a draft of the Open Government Data Principles that was produced at the meeting over the weekend. It still has a few can of worms to be dealt with, as Ethan Zuckerman was keen to point out. Overall though it’s an exciting proposal.

Neighbornode was a project I created for a class at ITP in early 2004. I spent just twelve weeks coming up with the idea, building it and launching it in New York’s East Village. When I put up the first router at my friend Mo’s apartment, I figured it would go up, I’d turn in my final, and it would come down a few weeks later. It was just a class project.

But nearly four years later the project is still going, entirely under its own steam. I get emails at least once a week asking for the firmware (even though it’s available on the site). The latest email is from a sergeant stationed in Iraq. They have wifi in the main tent on their base, but it’s too hot to spend much time in there, so they set up their own router outdoors and figured they should add Neighbornode on top of it.

It’s really satisfying to turn something loose into the world and see people take it up on their own and use without any prompting. Even more so when that happens by accident - when you expected the thing in question to have a life span of a few weeks.

The funny thing is that because I figured Neighbornode wouldn’t last long, it isn’t built very well. The UI is terrible, the functionality is clunky, certain aspects of it dead-end without amounting to anything. The project was more of an idea than an actual, complete website. Still, people bother to set it up. Even with all of its defects it has an intrinsic appeal.

Neighbornode could be really useful to people if it were open source, and anyone could add whatever they wanted to it. That would allow the idea of Neighbornode to spread and grow, without being hobbled by the clunky code and design I threw on it in the last week of class. I’d love to see the idea morph into new things.

Of course I don’t have the time to open source it. If you do, drop me a line, I’ll send you the code.

A few weeks ago I got a random email from greek journalist Matthaios Tsimitakis, wanting to interview me for the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini. He said he was passing through Brooklyn, and could I meet that afternoon. After work, we went to a bar and talked. I had no idea what it was he wanted to ask about, and was surprised when it turned out he wanted to talk mainly about Grafedia. He, in turn, was very surprised at who I was - or so I suspected. He was expecting, based on Grafedia, to meet a tech artist, a subversive, definitely not someone talking about his current startup and the business world. I’m pretty sure I was disappointing him at first. But as we talked and had a few beers, we hit on some really interesting topics that touched on all of my work over the past four years, and where it may be heading. I was genuinely surprised with the outcome of the conversation, and felt like it gave me a new sense of direction.

The article is titled The Internet as a Model of Modern Cities. I can’t find the translated page, but here are some occasionally bizarre, sometimes indecipherable excerpts from a translation by Babelfish that get the general point of the conversation across:

The Tz. Gkera’tsj believes that the season of Web 2.0 finishes, but to us bequeaths interesting new ideas that were acquired without cost. “The Jnternet existed a enormous field of research for how we can organise the things. The cost of this research but also her failure was very low. In the Jnternet we learned to make very effective systems of management of all types of information and now I believe that it should we transport this experience in the real world.”

“Our cities contrary to the network, collapse. With the network of transport you want mja’mjsi hour in order to you go down from your house in the centre. If this were website, simply him we would close because it would not be enough good. I believe that odey’oyme to the season that we will take models from the Internet and him we will apply in our cities “.

In the question an it belongs in tehno-optimistic that see the technology as means of social development, his answer is unambiguous: “Yes. It is heard somehow idealistic but him I believe. I worked in many pro’tzekt that me helped I remove end with the jigsaw, city, Jnternet, social interaction coke. Now I try to put in the equation (city-technology) the parameter of balanced growth and the protection of environment. And believe that the Jnternet can play decisive role “.

Excuse my pidgin english there. And I’m not sure what that reference is to Coke - maybe Babelfish gets paid for product placement in its results?

Anyway, it was a stimulating discussion for me, and it has been generating a lot of ideas for me since then. If you can read Greek, you can read the full article here.

Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.

…After decades of tracking world resources, innovations in science and technology, and human needs, Fuller asserted that options exist to successfully surmount the crises of unprecedented scope and complexity facing humanity – he issued an urgent call for a design science revolution to make the world work for all.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change.

Check out the Buckminster Fuller Challenge.

I was just re-reading a terrific article about the hundred dollar laptop, or XO as it is now called. It was written by a Kenyan named Binyavanga Wainaina and it views the XO from an African perspective, taken in context with all of the other transformative technology invented by Americans and Europeans for Africans over the years. It’s a great read, full of insights and criticism that are not the kind you normally read about new technologies.

One of the points Wainaina makes is about what he calls “pure products” like the XO, and how they often fail in their noble aims:

These pure products are meant to solve everything.

They almost always fail, but they satisfy the giver. To the recipients, the things have no context, no relationship to their ideas of themselves or their possibilities. A great salesman can spark a dialogue with you; in a matter of minutes, you come to make your own sense of his product, fitting it into your imagination, your life. You lead, the salesman follows. Whereas a pure product presents itself as a complete solution; a product built to serve the needs of the needy assumes the needy have measured themselves exactly as the product has measured them.

Later, he says:

For all of the products that have successfully entered our national imagination, the items themselves were probably less important than the process. Success was less a function of satisfying a need than of creating new needs, new demands; it was the way they made you feel about yourself, for good or ill, that made them work.

I think about this a lot in the context of coming up with new ideas for outside.in, as well as other projects I work on. It’s very easy to approach creation/development in a ‘pure product’ frame of mind - develop the thing that is going to perfectly solve your audience’s needs, as you’ve imagined them to be. It’s tougher to hold off from doing this, and instead create something that lets people fit your product into their imagination of themselves.

The full text of the article is on the right-hand side of this page.

I’m back in Brooklyn after working remotely from Montreal for the month of August. Glad to be back in NYC and am loving Brooklyn now that it’s September, but I really enjoyed being in Canada for an extended period of time. It was refreshing to get out of the U.S. for a bit and immerse myself in the Canadian thing, which is very different from the American thing in certain ways. Going up to Montreal for a month was like taking a bath and getting all of the mud off of myself. Now of course I’m back in the mud and reveling in it once again.

The best way to get old companies to really invest in new technologies is to disrupt their marketplace. NBC is never going to invent YouTube. But once YouTube exists, NBC is going to work like mad to compete against it. Nothing gets the creative juices flowing in big corporations like competition from upstarts with disruptive technology.

So if you want ExxonMobil to begin to invest in new energy technologies, present a real threat to the order of their market in the form of disruptive competitors.

The problem is that even then, the innovation from the big, old company will focus on shoring up their current product’s dominance, not on developing entirely new products. They have so much invested in their current product that their innovation has to focus on new ways of using that same product. Anything else would be a waste of their investment.

In other words, any innovation to the energy market from ExxonMobil will revolve around finding ways to continue using oil but doing so more cleanly, and not around replacing oil altogether with other, cleaner technologies.

Big, old companies will never reinvent the world - they’re too preoccupied trying to maintain their dominance over the current one.

Last night I read the piece in the NYTimes Magazine about Sister Daly’s fight as an ExxonMobil shareholder to get the company to take more interest in clean energy technologies. It’s an inspiring piece, and Daly is doing important work. But asking ExxonMobil to develop new energy technologies is like expecting NBC to invent YouTube - it isn’t going to happen. ExxonMobil lacks the innovation, vision and most importantly the incentive to develop new technologies. A corporation is a social machine that exists to make money. Old, successful corporations are machines that are built to take maximum advantage of the current marketplace. To mess with that marketplace would be to tinker with the formula of their corporate success, and jeopardize their profitability.

Which is why you can petition ExxonMobil to get behind new energy initiatives, and they may make some concessions, but any real changes in the energy marketplace are going to come from outsiders looking to disrupt what ExxonMobil has created.

I haven’t been posting much to this blog lately, and it’s been feeling like an under-watered houseplant for the past few weeks. It’s not that I’m not writing — it’s that I’m writing lots, but not for the blog. I’ve decided I should be writing articles for actual publication, so all of my writing energy has been going into that. Instead of spending a few minutes each evening writing to the blog, I’m spending an hour a night writing and re-writing essays about technology and sustainability. At the end of that, it’s hard to then whip off a blog entry, no matter how short.

I haven’t submitted anything for publication yet. Just working out my article muscles, trying to get in shape. Right now I feel very flabby, but I can already feel myself starting to tone up. I always love this process.

In the meantime, my daily traffic numbers have somehow doubled despite my inattention. So I must be doing something right without knowing it. Whatever that may be, I promise I’ll try my best to continue doing it so that my new readers get what they came for.

Here’s a good post on outside.in, passed to me by a friend this afternoon. The author, Matt McAllister (Director at Yahoo Developer Network) has a great feel for what’s on our minds as we move the site forward. Nice to hear this coming from someone else’s mouth.

Warning: very long!