2 weeks in - a google phone review

So I was at a funeral 2 weeks ago, and feeling pretty sad and in need of distraction. Also while at the funeral, my phone broke, so the next day I went down the road and spent a good hour telling all my life and family data to the sales guy, who then signed my life off in blood for the next 18 months on this planet. Midlife crisis?

T-Mobile says it's £30 a month for a famous "Google Phone" or G1, but actually this works out at 45 for most people if you throw in the data plan (which for a G1 makes little sense without), and the 10 pound insurance the phone shop was very very into flogging to me. I declined, saying they should seek alternate revenue than insurance - I see that as a dead market in these times. They should concentrate on providing services like repair or home made application development. Much more money in that, and value to building a community of phone users around a shop etc etc... But I didn't waste too much time telling him that.

Rooting it up

After 2 weeks using this, I've found out that it really makes sense to "root" it. This is UNIX speak for gaining all the administrative privileges to the backbone of the phone - a task usually reserved for ultra geeks, but something you can also do for a fee nowadays in most phone repair shops. T-Mobile have been very nice with this so far, and it looks like rooting doesn't invalidate your warranty, unlike Apple, which has sometimes resorted to "bricking" people's iPhones when they tampered similarly with them. As various forums list - the main benefit is you can "tether" your phone to your PC - and use it's unlimited data plan instead of shelling out on a virgin media plan (yet another contract with the monthly fees devil). Another reason is that after just 4 days of downloading various free apps from the android market, my phone was packed full and complaining about lack of space. So rooting also helps here because you can then install applications on the 2GB SD card that comes with the T-Mobile package.

On the Case

Another mishap on the journey is that as we were arriving in Bristol from the funeral, my daughter had a stomach upset, all over the bus, and somewhere in there was the phone's slender sock that had also come with the t-mobile package. So it's still there somewhere, and as we cleaned the seat and gathered belongings, I somehow lost it. But a plethora of much more usable cases already exist - some simple, plastic and protective, others leather and very business-like, but few that actually fit around the phone and it's opening keyboard, protecting the big touch screen as needed, when in the hands of someone like me, who invariably will drop or mess up a phone if left long enough with it.

Film Programming

Then it was Easter, and one night I realised it was probably my only available night to actually get into some android programming. After about 3 hours faffing and reading, downloading eclipse and looking up existing android code from the various open source app projects on code.google.com, I managed to produce a Maya Deren application. All it does is show a picture, and a bit of text, and it's little more than a hello world app - although I see a vague market for it - a personalised obituary service. But in the spirit of Ms Deren and her early experiments with film, I plan to continue by using the camera preview API - a basic way of showing video and related effects on the phone, before the new version of android comes out - with much improved video recording and display capabilities.

Programming was much like modern web design and programming: the layout was held in XML files, and the programming code separate, and even the code itself, when working with the android API, is incredibly high level, making it easy to, for example, save some data to a database, take a picture from the camera or choose a colour from a colour picker and feed the result back in to a function in just a couple of lines of code. This is probably why the android application landscape today is very similar to pre-1995 java applets - where you could typically wait 15 minutes for someone's homepage to download a gnome picking it's nose.

Zombie Borg Circus

There are some brilliantly geeky applications on the market. Firstly, the ones that let you play games - I wish other people I knew had this phone so we could all go out and play Zombie Run for example - brilliantly simple: it tracks your location and some (hopefully) imaginary zombies on a google map and you have to outrun them around the town... Would be good in connection with the AK-47 App...

The creator of Audacity now works for Google, which can account for the brilliance of the ringdroid application: it can record any sound - from the phone's microphone or anything being played from inside another application. So I can record Last FM streams for example, or voice diaries/comments, and chop them up to size for use as ringtones or to export from the SD onto other media. Sadly though, no improvements have been made to this since October.

My daughter (the one with the stomach upset, much better now thanks) really likes the speaking capabilites of the phone. A linux text-to-voice library was ported to the android platform some time last year, and now there are reams of applications using it. In the one she uses, she can type a word, and it will speak it back to her. A variant does this in other languages too. This keeps her amused for many fruitful 30 minute periods, only slightly alarming when she waves it around with glee from the absurdly robotic pronounciations.


But a more advanced use of this TTL library is certainly the "The vOICe" application - I have no idea where or why this came about, but it is billed as an "augmented reality application for the visually impaired" and it converts input from the phone's camera, into sound, as well as speaking out GPS locations and other robotic data. Now I know what to choose as an eye implant if the world of City of Lost Children ever comes together or the borg have to cut back in the face of the intergalactic credit crunch. It is the single most geeky application I have ever seen in my life.

I also found so many comics. It looks like a big screen touchscreen phone may be the short form media place of choice in future. Some comics incorporate simple animations and sound to replace talk bubbles, others are just a slideshow of images scanned from print based comics, but all of them allow you to read the first issue for free, and charge you for the next one. All but one, a CC licensed remix of a Cory Doctorow story, which could be the future of CC licensed media... If anyone has a comic in mind, I'll be happy to score it with my local improvising orchestra and release it as CC for you! Enquire within: http://orchestra.cubecinema.com

Soundcasting

So where next with android? First step will be rooting it, installing the next version of it's SDK and firmware when it's (imminently) released, and then getting to work on a soundcasting application - this is so that when you are walking around and hear nice sounds you want to share (the birds in the park, your footsteps in the snow), you can stream them out to a slightly annoyed audience as you would a twitter message, but in the form of background or unintended noise only. Much more like the twitter of real birds.

Oh, one gripe with the phone. It's quite hard to actually figure out how to make calls!! A couple of times in the first week I had the phone, I couldn't get apps to close in time to make important calls, but now I'm getting the hang of the idea that you can't ever actually close applications - they just go to the background and maybe die later if the phone things they aren't doing anything useful. Also the touch screen system, whereby a different function is called if you press for a bit longer, rather than a single tap, was hard to get used to, a bit like learning to click the blue underlined words if it's your first time on the web. Battery usage varies wildly depending on what apps are running or services you are using (GPS is a good way to drain it all in an hour).

And the whole UI sometimes feels like a messily put together collection of bits and pieces - for example it should be easy for it to pick up phone numbers in any application and have a standard list of things to do with them - save to contacts, call, sms etc - but actually this kind of thing is not yet there. So let's say, for an IT person like me, it's great, and a really addictive gadget to have, but it's really not grandma-ready yet.

Sustainable Communities Bill

Here is my submission to the sustainable communities bill call for suggestions. I hope that others feel motivated to publish their SCB suggestions. I think there's a huge lack of dialogue in the current process, and the more we share what we know the more we can counter this

-- 0 --

Walking through Bristol in mid recession, there are many many more empty properties as businesses close, homes are repossessed and places become derelict. This reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression in the US: Thousands of properties lying empty while people are homeless or crammed in social housing, or having to endure various hardships due to living arrangements. This conundrum led to considerable social unrest both then and in the recession of the 70s.

To solve this problem some turn to squatting, or artists sometimes ask administrators of empty properties for their temporary use for exhibitions, and many positive results have come from this. The arts/community group Artspace/Lifespace has made many steps forward with this in Bristol, with it's use of the Pro Cathedral and now the various "Bridewell" police stations as temporary arts venues before their redevelopment as housing projects. Apart from giving these places free publicity, they also cleaned out the properties and maintained them while occupying them.

I believe a part of this success has been the empty buildings tax which the owners of these buildings would have been charged had their buildings sat empty.

I'm not aware of what legislation stops there being a general purpose way of facilitating temporary use agreements with a property's administrator. I am sure however that there is much legislation that gets in the way of this.

Uses need not purely be artistic. Any positive community uses such as short term housing, shops, and businesses can help a positive future for the community around it. I believe any social, cultural, business or environmental purpose could be included within this scheme, thus leading also to many low cost business models - such as food preparation "cafes" in busy central streets, voluntary organisations or workers cooperatives producing what we no longer afford to import, and a homeless population not driven to rioting or crime due to lack of community or opportunities around them. Agreements could vary depending on the nature of the project (such as increasing rent as business picks up), some part of building's insurance could be covered as part of the agreement, and much of this could be paid for by a higher tax on these empty premises, and by the opportunity cost of leaving those buildings empty. I would ask that this agreement be done as an open process, consulting with local residents as is usually done for a planning permission application, not only to grant the use, but to ask for suggestions, contributions and involvement (for example, in time or money) towards the scheme.

I am aware that the SCA as it stands does not have space for dialogue once this suggestion is sent, but I am happy to do so informally or to travel wherever possible and present further documents or clarification further along the line. I have written this without contacting the groups mentioned in 10., but will endeavour to do so and that they can submit similar proposals.

Point 9: I don't know if these come under "local service providers":

ArtSpace/LifeSpace: http://artspacelifespace.purplecloud.net/index.php/developers
Community groups such as the PRSC in Stokes Croft - which has done lots of work with the homeless population of that area.
Workers cooperatives in Bristol - the CDA will know who to contact.

--0--

Next suggestion:
Volunteer waiver of unpicked food prices. Under this agreement, farmers unable to raise money for distribution, and where sale price doesn't meet production costs, allow city people to come and take produce. Perhaps in exchange for city items or training. Groups transporting large amounts of produce could then be allowed to distribute it.

"The farmers are being pauperized by the poverty of the industrial population and the industrial population is being pauperized by the poverty of the farmers. Neither has the money to buy the product of the other."

http://sharonastyk.com/2008/10/05/the-great-depression-the-credit-crisis-and-the-future-of-your-food/

Big Cafe on Transport Sustainability

About a month ago, I went to the "Big Cafe for Transport" event that was happening just around the corner from my house at the brilliant new "Co-Exist" sustainability business centre. Coexist run as a CIC and are just about to launch with a plan to open up green community and event spaces, funded in turn by work and business spaces. I really hope that means a market in stokes croft!

After I attended, I'd promised everyone I'd write up about it, and promptly left it as a nagging thing in the background as life took over. But now the official write up of the event has been published so I thought I should finish the abortive blog post I made that same night. A disclaimer: I'm allowed to make mistakes here, so if I've written anything wrong or stupid, please correct me!

A big cafe costs 20 pounds to attend. It started really early on a Saturday morning (thus excluding the entire population of Stokes Croft), but it included a lunch (from Kukuva Cafe across the road, locally sourced or at least in aid of justice, according to their vision). It didn't have to be so expensive though: 10 pounds for students, or 15 or 5(?) if you didn't want the lunch. You get to talk to all kinds of people invited from all over the place. So, for whatever misgivings I might have with the makeup of the people in the room and with how representative we were of the people affected by transport in Bristol, it was quite cool and very well intentioned.

Yes, misgivings, because there were too many green minded people there:

• 
  How come no-one brought up road tax (as mentioned that week in the venue mag as a pressing point for car drivers - in their view it should apply to cyclists as well), or even the issue itself of road maintenance?
  
• 
  How come when the idea was formed to "ban front door paving", it got a huge ovation across the room and was included in the summary poster? I just thought that kind of thing just creates opposition and disagreement, but there was no voice there to say that.
  

Oh well, I guess it was supposed to be a very green gathering. I hope there's more effort to bring in different kinds of people in future though - if the outcome can affect real movings of money around Bristol, then it's consultative in nature, and should try and reach out to as many groups and individuals as possible. Web postings are not really an inclusive way for people to express their opinions if they're not comfortable with technology in the first place, and city centre "sustainable" events will not attract all kinds of people in this diverse city.

Fortunately, Transition Bristol is offering free training in "involving hard to reach groups in environmental projects".

I was interested to find lots of opposition on the other hand, from some people, some of whom had been active in politics for a while, even one from the green party, to the idea that transport plans should involve a shift to a locally oriented society. This is the kind of set-up where travel is assumed to be slow, so everything fun or fresh has to be made and used where you live, although this hopefully includes local specialisation and exchanges between localities and globally as well. It's hard to step beyond cycle lanes and think about the whole picture, but I'd have thought a green vision no matter what the party should involve re-localisation, and should be considered holistically with respect to the various threats that we face and the many solutions we can apply to them (fuel, population, water, food, nuclear, climate and counting!).

There have been a few big cafe events so far, starting I think at the beginning of the year. There's been a bit of chatter about this already, but the chair, Vala - who has the controversial title of Professor of Sustainability came across very well. The format of the big cafe events is as follows: You debate some big questions - suitably vague so as to further the gathering of ideas, and then these get written up a summaries. Here are the summaries from this session:

(sorry about that first one, I played with it to try and get it brighter, but now it looks like it's been through nuclear fallout)

When I arrived there, late of course, David Bishop, transport geezer for the city council was talking:

He said we can't invest in train stations because of the infrastructure costs. The same reason seemed to rule out trams, which were community architect Keith Hallet's favoured investment of our money. He says they can be the golden ticket that makes Bristol a wonderful city - they certainly used to be.. (shit link alert - turn popups off!).

The bus routes on the other hand, needed to be like an overground subway network- like the London one. A distant flag waves for First if so, although they have redeemed themselves a bit train-wise with their expansion and publicity of the Severn Beach line - a line whose other name may as well be Easton-Clifton line. Still, I decided to stop taking buses so much, since the day a driver gave me a 2p change ticket that could only be redeemed in one little office in the city centre. Since then my bike has gotten more and more creaky, and my bus rides a lot more peaceful.

On the other hand, David conceded, the bus service is currently unacceptably bad and expensive. It was good to hear a few mentions of peak oil too, although he seemed to think we're not there yet. He spoke about a proposed Rapid transit network whose posters I think were on the wall behind us - I'm sure they'll be easy to find...

We are Smart wireless urban people, he went on. We need real time info, linked, integrated.
The vision for the next 30 years is to get to this integrated transport network.

I was very sad to hear him mention this same old growth agenda - proposed by some now disgraced politician from Blair's old cabinet, of 30,000 homes to be built in the next however many years. Why does this have to be the basis for the transport strategy? It's completely unsustainable. We've proven already not to have the water in the UK for such a development, and empty houses sit unmended, empty shops unused opposite our fancy cafe chats, and both awareness of climate change and of the credit crunch has seriously changed the situation since then. Already I think groups like artspace/lifespace, with their very elegant post-squatting, are a very attractive proposition of short term living and working possibilities. Also their stay deals with that painful issue of the recent empty buildings tax by creating temporary spaces like the Pro Cathedral, whilst attracting people to that building as an arts venue.

Anyway, back to Mr Bishop: He concluded by saying the council is not good at changing it's plans based on new opinions or information, but this is changing. It is starting to listen more and it is learning to communicate better.

Next up, Vala with some examples of good and climate helping transport systems from cities around the world. These have been shown quite clearly in the official write-up.

Then she introduced world cafe format, which I spoke about above, and she introduced the big 4 questions that were to form the rest of our day:

1. 
   if you had a bottomless pit of money to spend on Bristol's transport system, how would we travel around the city in 10 years time?


2. What examples of better transport systems can we draw from the rest of the world or history?


3. 
   What would you enable you personally to make greener choices in bristol for transport.
   


4. How do we encourage better use of and attitudes towards sustainable transport?
   

I'll stop now as this is getting long, but one last thing always gets me: I had the fortune that day to sit next to councilors, council staff and other people involved in local politics, and for all their hard work and merits, what gets me is always the institutionalised, bitchy, childish infighting between political parties. I call it infighting although it crosses parties, because together they, as a group, suggest, plan and carry out changes that affect us. We pay them to do this, so I really hate seeing time and time again how we pay for them to do tit for tat politics, complaining when someone else embraces their ideas if they are from another party or destroying good initiatives for the same reasons, insulting each other, and the whole competitive side of politics. A bit of competition is good, but fairly balanced with co-operation.

If the sustainable communities bill means we're going to see what the balance books are and be shown how they work, my first question will be how much of that money is spent in this kind of faffing, and how can we change it so local government can have a neutral forum to express their views and work together too.

Maybe they need a weekend cafe as well...

Local Economy Management System

Today I did lots of healthy, useful things*, while the news around us is that we are in a recession, a very quick and serious one, and not just as a country but as a globalised western world. What this has led to is exemplified really nicely by the great Big Issue headline that came out a while back "The answer to the food crisis - Grow your own!" - and in general people are rushing to get more and more into planting and cycling and generally into more sustainable lives as they see this is probably the best time to do it - even if this is just a mini bust due to speculation.

And when I read an article in the weekend paper about a poor freelance journalist wishing he had studied engineering as a backup trade - and now impoverished by the credit crunch, I was inspired to expand freecycle and other stuff like that into an online community task/project/exchange coordination system, that could fall back into wireless if there was no main internet.

That's what I've been thinking about since: how to create an open source management system for localised urban economies to exchange, buy, give resources and skills, and organise those exchanges into tasks. But of course it's only about 30% a web application - the rest of it is hard work and face to face trading, discussion and agreements between the people involved, and ways to ensure people without computers don't get excluded and in fact are encouraged to use it.

But this didn't just come out of nowhere: I've recently become one of the webmasters for Transition Bristol. I was chatting about this last week with a friend who is stuck in his house with ME and lots of family heirlooms and clutter, which really get him down. One bit of this clutter is a very nice collection of ecologically oriented books. So we thought - let's start a distributed library for Transition Easton - so just in that part of town, for local people to be able to share say, a lawnmower or a book. So I suggested it to Zoe who is one of the people running Transition Easton - and in doing that I researched all the other exchange systems that have come and gone in Bristol already:

Existing local and UK DIY stuff:

1. freeconomy - marc boyle of BBC walk-to-india fame implementing his free economy idea - a completely gift based system.
   
2. 
   feral trade, an even fairer than fair international trade system where transport happens via DIY trade routes, organisation by SMS and emails, and selling home made Cube Cola, coffee, and now even grappa and antidepressants.
   
3. Diss Free eXchange. Part of the Norfolk based Diss community system. Gary Alexander, the author of this plone based system, is currently working on a new version, so it's something I'm going to propose to my colleagues at work, since they all work on plone as well.
   
4. Bigger things: ebay, freecycle, gumtree. (I know that freecycle is getting a second version written quite soon - to have a web interface replacing the yahoo groups).
   
5. Older/less IT based things: BEETS, LETS and the farmer's market!
   

Larger versions: many existing open source systems have very similar requirements to what I feel a local economy manager would need: The typical version control software used for programming with open source, issue trackers for reporting software bugs, project planning software and team/groupware have basically all the functionality needed. Also they're written in convenient languages allowing a new project to have a peek or even lift functions to get the same things done - some (like the version control software Bazaar) are distributed systems. This is good because they'll not need a central server, but will be made up of all the individual little computers running it. Moodle also has similar capabilities.

Most importantly - It would aspire to the lofty goal of being a "Moodle for communities". A free, open source, world wide project which could then be used by lots of different groups on a local basis. From speaking to Gary Alexander (who wrote the Norfolk based Diss exchange system) , I know there's a systems philosophy called VSM that can be used to inform the development of this, as well as of course the participative and self organising aspects of Web 2.0, permaculture as a design science rather than strictly for gardens, and finally Participatory Economics(or Parecon) - an underused field that I don't believe has an implementation but which I find a good basis. The wikipedia article on population mentions this as possibly the only system that could allow economies to continue functioning at the scale we are at now, without involving a huge die-off (or a war) first.

The first simple thing that Parecon gives is that for example on a web page about a particular transaction, anyone would be able to have their say on it - like "you can't buy those eggs, we need them here at the cafe" or "Oh and can I have the egg shells? I use the powder for my bone disease" etc - which would be a very web 2.0 way to buy and sell, and would make the experience of trade into more of an ecosystem.

The first great thing about VSM on the other hand, is that I was actually born into it! It was only ever implemented on a national scale in Chile during Allende's rule. So there's something wonderful about all this!

---

Here are some of my notes on this(written on the laptop while gardening, out of range of any internet):

Database-wise it would need tables for people, items, projects/interest groups and actions, a plug-in system for extensions and integrations (like with feral trade for international commerce), a strong wifi-mesh enabled back end allowing stronger traffic with wifi networks running same software. And lots of ways of exchanging resources as a community.

All the systems need no more than a way to profile an item - this could be an idea or an instruction, a bit like an issue in a request tracking system or in a project management system.

The system needed is a stripped down, simple to use and expandible(plugin based) way to

buy/sell

Exchange: offer/"take"/advertise/ask for

Exchange indirectly using internal system (timebank extension plugin fits here, as do many others).

So allowing for exchanges - it becomes like a marketplace of skills and resources, products and deliveries.

A funded programme might pay for bikes, lessons and legal system for teenage kids to be able to deliver items in return for meals, food, items, services, training etc, but also money. 2 quid for a delivery is not much to ask, and economy of scale means lots of little things can be delivered (eg flyers).

Also it should allow for the complex elements involved in organising a more extended project requiring stages of production - it would also have inputs and outputs, and tasks allowing for their organisation in a decentralised way - a tasks wiki.

It shouldn't tell you what to do with it, but allow lots of generic options. So this system is like a programmer's CVS of the 90s. It's a first stage towards a programmed economic/exchange system for a community.

So for example a chicken coop: You

1. post an idea,
   
2. people subscribe to it,
   
3. you get meetings together and depending on what's agreed, for
   example:
   
4. you organise flyering,
   
5. you put out ads for coop materials or existing coops,
   for incubators (or raise cash for this and other care items /tools).
   
6. You ask for space for grazing.
   
7. Eggs, compost, weed and parasite pecking given in return.
   
8. Needs transport system as well.
   
9. Needs at least 2 hosting people with working enclosures to get started.
   
   

Could this run via a wireless protocol? querying wifi networks findable via the computer, as well as geolocated network via p2p to connect and offer a node of info each, each page looking like a facebook of tasks and ideas, and such that if the main internet is lost, it can still function via wifi/bluetooth/sms

* Healthy things I did that sunday (from above): I planted lots of recycled potatoes in the garden, hoping they'll come up in a clump (but I think I should have put some mushroom and fungus poison on them first), and I bought an SWC. It will have basil, cucumber, tomato and an assortment of other things like green beans for nitrogen. I learnt a bit about companion plants and germinating seeds rather than planting direct. I might look in ebay for other seeds of nice herbs... Also I cycled off to see a friend, did some exercises, figured out a compost-food recycling system for my house which now needs black magic marker penned instructions as to what goes where. I invented, on a proverbial napkin, the concepts of

1. a water or smoke powered musical box, set into a victorian fireplace wall and using the rising smoke to turn it, or with little paddles, linked to a flow of water.
   
2. a bike powered seed planter with pneumatic seed laying spokes and solar panels to play music as you pedal.
   

And I called an electricity company for a quote to do my house up with solar panels. Nice lazy sunday.

The State of Fluxus day 2

No time just now! Lots of commentary on fluxus today, flux sports, how to put on a fluxus event, and random natter, but later. For now, just the pics - as they are so in demand!

A really nice score, performed on the Monday, when I wasn't around I think... Or was it for the piano recital?

All the budding fluxus stars, awaiting our first concert, day 1

Tools of the trade

Group photo, before the salad

The string quartet performs while the audience throw a big ball up in the air, and chopping sounds begin...

Bowls and rakes, still life

And finally, our name in lights, in the corner of the big poster... Lots more of these on faecebook, slowly appearing here and there...

The state of Fluxus, Day 1

This weekend I went back to what I did a few months back, and went down to the Tate Modern all the way from Bristol, to play (very little) crazy music and perform in front of loads of people in London.

Last time we were on Millennium Bridge, which (to explain for the non-londoner) is a very narrow bridge which gets swamped around 4pm on a Friday afternoon, by commuters going both ways. We were there lined up with loads of loud and eccentric instruments, in t-shirts and responding to a conductor, and to an orchestra by the Tate, and a boat with lots of improvising musicians (Evan Parker included, who is now coming to the Cube Cinema in June) playing samples of maritime, Thames noises - boats, seagulls, and some of the most complicated classical as well as improvised and participatory music that was a beautiful tribute to that space.

This time for us performers it was a 4 day experience - 2 days rehearsal, and 2 of performance, with some of the surviving masters of the Fluxus time, still around performing and writing material, as of course more famous people like Yoko Ono do. We performed from Alison Knowles' fantastic repertoire - including the really colourful and beautifully simple "Make a Salad" piece, and the really funny and proto-improv Newspaper Music. There was also loads of other work by other Flux performers, including a first realisation of the FluxOlympiad - an incredibly accessible way to get kids into experimental arts - "A gateway drug to Rembrandt" as baptised by our great deliverer of the most wonderful lecture in Fluxus, Simon (whose surname I forget, but he's a university professor specialising in this movement's history in the US).

Through this lecture and then through many memories and explanations given by Simon, Sara Seagull and Alison Knowles through this intensely arty weekend, I got to see a lot more of the history of Fluxus than is possible through a quick read of Wikipedia the night before the first rehearsal. Firstly the controversy of Fluxus's life-span, which for some starts with John Cage's Experimental Composition class, and ends with George Maciunas' death in 78, but for all the fluxus people present, was still very much alive and well, as we saw with the performances. What you can say though is that the network of artists who performed Fluxus was described in the past tense, in the exhibition that accompanied our performances at the Tate. Some of the later newspapers had a very Creative Commons-like copyright - anyone is authorised to perform any fluxus Event Score whenever they want, provided they use the names they stated, and if it's most of the event, it has to have the name they provide - in this case the FluxOlympiad, or a FluxFest or many other FluxEverythings from audience participation pieces, to distorted musical performances, or even video, hospitals and toilets in Fluxus style. This is a beautiful spirit, and the participatory element combined with the multimedia element, synaesthesia and the beginnings of improvised or loosely structured experimental artistic practices, as well as the DIY element, which have filtered through from the Fluxus hayday that mesmerised a young John Lennon, but seem to have gotten to today having forgotten their lovely playful origins.

It was very interesting to see the rejection our Fluxus initiators had for the internet - it's always easier for our younger generation to think technology has to be involved in artistic practice but as one performer said, shunning technology becomes a choice, now that it's so ubiquitous. No digital divide to straddle, more imagination needed to get to the same destination. And that aspect was refreshing, although a Fluxus facebook group is now hopefully to be created, and maybe it will only be through this technology that we will now assist in a re-birth of practice in the UK - at least if I can have my way and do a performance at the Cube Cinema...

The pieces were so accessible because they were tiny, some carried out in seconds, like the famous squeaky-toy-into-cymbals piece "C/T Trace", while others needed more time, like the Yoko Ono piece "Sky piece for Jesus", but were incredibly fun to perform and somehow symbolic and spiritual to carry out -we had to wrap up a string quartet in gauze and lead them away with care, like critically injured patients. In another piece we had to scratch our fingers down a small black board, or in another, bang our heads against the wall. So the beginnings of the "pain" aspect so famously put forward by people like Franco B - which Sara summed up wonderfully - "if there's so much pain in the world, what's the value as a privileged western artist in hurting yourself?" - are also to be found in Fluxus. That's terribly misquoted though, a flash of a memory in the middle of a very excited evening lounging in the Tate Modern's staff cafe after the first performance and talking about what went wrong and right. Also the pieces are accessible because they are available to all to perform, although I'd agree they wouldn't make much sense if you didn't get it, or get to share some of the original spirit.

The salad was a wonderful part of it all. It really used our senses, without resorting to video or high art concepts - Alison (and a team of cooks) just cut vegetables and made a lovely (if a bit gritty) salad for all the audience to consume. She made it on top of the turbine hall, in a long 10 minutes with all of them hidden up there cutting them up, but with the knives miked up so we could hear interminable chopping. And then our sight was first to see the spectacle of food, now so scarce in the world - flying greens, reds, purples, liquids and solids, some falling light as feathers, others heavy and squirting bits all over us poor performers - who in this piece had to hold the tarpaulin and toss the salad, and for this had our name written on the wall of the Tate. And then finally it was stirred with rakes and spades, and served on paper plates, and it tasted great! Also because I was a bit skint, it was even better to be fused with art in a culinary way...

Eduserv Symposium 2008

I came to attend this symposium out of the blue, having seen an email late one Wednesday afternoon, saying our assistant director was too ill to go, and after a quick look at the programme, I realised it was a follow-up to an event I'd seen on video a while back where an entire conference on Second Life had been trashed by a talk which had argued it was all pretty much useless hype. So if this year's presentations were going to be in that vein, it sounded like like a fun time.

This being a web 2 conference, lots of it was used, including a live chat backchannel ( http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat powered by cover it live streaming software:http://www.coveritlive.com/ ), a ning based conference centred social networking site (which as expected didn't achieve critical mass but was a nice feature all the same), and of course lots lots more.

Eduserv's Andy Powell started the day talking about these "Disruptive technologies" we know so well. Looking across the room, it seemed a-bleep with mobile phones, laptops and all kinds of hybrid gadgets twittering and SL-ing and all kinds of SN/Web 2.0-ing as he spoke.

"Please turn your phones off as it interferes with the equipment in the room, unless you're twittering or blogging from it"

This was the digerati of UK HE in the room (from which a colleague had minutes before noted the conspicuous absence of any HEA top brass), and it was a bit negative to hear all these references to the "disruption" caused by the uptake of web 2.0 in HE and all this focus on how to "control" it. But later on it surfaced that I wasn't the only one who thought a more positive terminology (like "Emerging Technologies") would be more conducive to positive adoption on campus or even just to an understanding of the real strengths and limitations of these tools. Another good reason to have a chat back channel - all these slightly controversial thoughts tend to get put forward there easily, while I guess people are a bit more shy of doing it live in Q&A.

Larry Johnson:

Larry presented using Second Life as an embellished Power Point, with his avatar walking through a virtual exhibition of photos of his grandparents and of various turn-of-century discoveries, followed by lists of all the technological revolutions that that generation had to deal with. He compared that with the current IT situation, from the beginning of the personal computer and Internet, to now, and noted that in comparative terms we haven't even got from the Gutenberg press to Martin Luther - any real revolution to come from this has still to come. Another difference between that generation and this one is that the focus has shifted from using technology to free up time - we have no such illusions today. My lack of a pen at that point limits my recollection now, but there were some areas that the Horizon report had identified as the main areas of growth and change for the education community:

• the arrival of grassroots video as a teaching tool and increased pressure in HE institutions to deliver video storage/distribution/collaboration.
  
• Collaboration Webs - using tools like google docs or other simple online tools requiring just a modern computer and web browser.
  
• Mash-ups - old news but now getting more mainstream with the increasing availability of data.
  
• Social OS - the next step in social networking is a focus on the individual rather than on content in all aspects of software.
  

In my opinion these blue sky previsions don't tend to take into account the more global state of the world today, the economic downturn and it's effects on the world for example, so Dr Johnson's talk seemed a bit limited in that respect, and when cornered (by me) later over coffee, he seemed dismissive of the effects of global warming and possible legislation changes on data centre energy usage as well as changes due to price increases and how the digital divide would affect the future he envisaged. The horizon report can be found at http://www.nmc.org/horizon

Bobbie Johnson: The guardian and Web 2.0
http://www.slideshare.net/tag/efsym2008

This was the most useless talk of the symposium. I think the inclusion of two large media agencies was a mistake, and we could have done with half that presence replaced by someone from another business sector, from a student or from some other piece of the picture. Here are my notes anyway:

The Guardian was founded as the Manchester Guardian in 1821. The paper's format and structure didn't change until the early 50s with the addition of photography. At all times the core values of social justice, freedom of thought and religion and social reform have been at the forefront of the decisions they have made as an organisation. Johnson spoke at length on the history of this newspaper on that basis, and the various owners and trusts that formed through the years.

The website appeared in 1996. Very embarrassing. By 2007 the director told his staff at the All Hands meeting - "We are now a digital operation which makes printed stuff on the side". So radical change is very recent.

He then showed us a front page scan from a couple of years ago. Very few things came from web 2.0 specifically (although you could say that all the user generated content was in some way reflective of the new notion of the web as a 2 way consumption/production medium).

Then he showed a very nice blog aggregate page (in his words a "Superblog"): http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/index.html - probably one to emulate when doing a university-wide blogging service, although I suspect it's very well edited, so there's an extra bit of effort than just getting people to write good blogs.

The Guardian site has gone from Closed/Subscription based to free access, and as a company they have gone from content provider to content platform.

I closed my notes with a poem:

Did photography create surrealism in art?

The digerati thumb their phones

a blue glare reflects on their faces

Information hiding ignorance

Geoffrey Bilder: Sausages, coffee, chickens and the web: Establishing new trust metrics for scholarly communication

A very interesting and clued-up talk on trust issues and the web. Personally I would have defined these as filtering issues, but it still makes sense either way: the web is awash with information and it's not rated, so you can waste huge amounts of time surfing it, and never can be sure of the quality of what you read, whereas traditional media has inbuilt filtering - due to the physical and commercial limits of just publishing everything like the web does.

Bilder's talk examined amongst other things the reason why the tilde (~) is non-trustworthy - (Spoiler alert!) - because it denotes a URL for a home directory - i.e. not official information but contained in a personal home page. But to a regular non-techy this isn't obvious, and the same is true for the various web 2 enabled sites. It's hard to assess trust. The path followed by any new technology depends on all these issues, and trust is crucial to it's adoption. It usually goes like this:

1. 
   A techno-information power base invents a new technology (eg, the blogging community circa 1996)
   
2. 
   Publicity/Hype follows
   
3. The masses take up this technology
   
4. Breakdown: the hype doesn't live up to it. (eg: people discover most blogs are abandoned in a few weeks).
   
5. Filtering systems are created. (eg: technorati)
   

In this way Bilder made a clear connection between the trust exuded by traditional publishing media via it's implicit filtering system ("wow - they're going to publish my book" = "it passed the filter").

He then talked about the first filtering systems put together on early web logs: the slashdot.org karma points system put together to reduce the incredibly high volume of comments they were dealing with daily, and which was reducing the overall value of the site - high points (awarded via good behaviour on the site) made you a temporary comment moderator, and in turn your moderations would be moderated by other high karma scorers, thus drastically improving the quality of post comments if you opted to raise your filter level.

Other early systems of peer-based filtering were Ebay's focus on user trust and ratings and Google's siterank system. These trust metrics were key to the success of these sites.

Chatting later to Debra, she agreed that self filtering systems are probably the way forward. The slightly depressing outcome of Bilder's talk was the idea that in the same way that traditional media has been supplanted in a way by the web, and as medieval scribes were made redundant Gutenberg press, so quality controlled on-line resource collections like Intute are endangered by this, because they apply a "centralised" filtering/trust system, which an automated web 2 enabled peer review system might do just as well.

The questions and on-line comments were very interesting, and it was a shame there was no time to answer or discuss at length. One insight from here was the way people's perception of their personal profile (as used on SN sites) as increasingly personal - something that should be owned and held by the individual and released/sold only to trusted parties of interest to the individual. Bilder agreed that this is probably the way things will be in future.

And then we went for lunch. Many a picture was flickrd of the curiously purple tray of summer desserts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmje/2475205817/ (more photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/efsym2008/ - and the efsym2008 tag worked quite well as a way to tag across slideshare, flickr, delicious etc)

Also during lunch I bumped into Torsten Reimer of the now semi-defunct AHRC Methods Network. He sadly told me of the serious lack of funds that this kind of initiative suffers from. They have a little money for small projects, but not enough for anything bigger as a result of these, or for any radical strategic changes, so the MN is not viable at the moment.

BBC:
This was similar to the guardian talk in it's irrelevance for me, but of the two I'd have kept this one, more witty and a lot more insight into the future: the speaker showed us the evolution of BBC content up to it's inclusion today on other websites: on the Sun, the Guardian's sites, and the communities formed around programs that the BBC had produced, but that were taking place outside of the BBC's websites.

So does it matter to the Beeb that their competitors are taking the content that 25% of their income is spent on (the online side) and making community out of them? This is the "globalisation" problem of web 2.0, and a hard decision for the Beeb, but they currently allow it. Possibly because their core principle is that they are a brand: Their charted doesn't specify they have to make programmes on TV: they just have to entertain, educate, inform.

Chris Adie:

First of all, the document circulated prior to the Symposium ( http://www.vp.is.ed.ac.uk/content/1/c4/12/45/GuidelinesForUsingExternalWeb2.0Services-20070823.pdf
) is a great first step towards regulations/guidelines/policies that help an academic institution deal with the issues that come up with the increasing adoption of Web 2 technologies.

In ID's case, the problem (for me) is the possibility of us hosting a university wide blogging service. A service like this would need us to first revise guidelines in many ways, even if the decision is to allow people to just use external services (we are still liable and there are still risks even if this is the case).

Another problem with external services is the credit crunch: what happens when your service goes bust, closes, shifts in focus, loses critical mass, starts charging or switches to paid registration?

From the chat: here are the BBC's guidelines on SN/Web 2 use: http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/index.shtml

Also in the chat, the point was made that some of the social networking sites might be more resilient than public services - for example the ill fated AHDS - what will upcoming UK elections mean for any online services we may be using now?

Some of what he said I found to be a bit unbalanced along the lines of that chat comment: he said for example that information might be more at risk of unauthorised use, unscheduled maintenance etc - but these are also risks within an institution if their internal policies or technical systems aren't up to scratch - and if the government can lose huge amounts of public data, I am sure Higher Ed can catch up.

Also I'm a bit concerned with the paper's implicit position on Intellectual Property rights. It is true that not all info should be given away immediately, and that a lot of grant money depends on ideas being kept safely under wraps, even in academia, but a university legal dept should be up to speed on the GPL and CC licenses, and be able to advise what is personal and what is owned by the institution depending on who you are, the nature of the work/data and in what capacity you work for it. Any other sharing should be facilitated by universities by their embracing of web 2.0 related speedy transfer of knowledge (such as twitter/facebook).

Apart from these doubts though - this is the first clear and broad paper trying to put together the first academic guidelines on risks and implications of using SN and Web 2 technologies, and he is aware it's just a draft and needs input from others.

Afterwards I asked Chris how we can feed back to him about his paper. He said he's in the process of making it into a wiki, but that at present comments are open, and we can feed back that way.

David Harrison: A Modern Work Environment at Cardiff U: http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/insrv/futures/mwe/index.html

http://diharrison.wordpress.com/2008/05/10/reflections-upon-efsym2008/

Dr Harrison startled us all with a very advanced web manager's view on how to run all the IT services within Cardiff University whilst still leaving space for SN/Web 2 technologies to be adopted strongly and used by their staff.

The presentation had lots of diagrams which I can't really explain well in written form, but here goes: The core (read "boring") services like calendars, request trackers, sick forms, finance software are at the centre of the picture, around which sit the managed research and learning environments, and around these, are the VLE/VRE. Anything else around this circle includes twitter and friends. Somehow this made much more sense with his slides though so I should stop there..

My main notes were that he had Cardiff's VC supporting all the way through, attending all the meetings and pushing things forward. We can't count on the same support at Bristol Uni, with Eric Thomas being much less available and not known to be particularly tech-friendly.

He also said that innovation, real discovery isn't particularly widespread in universities. The kind of innovation they see more and need is where existing innovation is brought into the university or across faculties and departments. This is a brilliant potential benefit of Web 2.0 - facilitating communication between people who wouldn't normally talk to each other, and giving them ways to disseminate that and value it.

More discussion of this at
http://blog.newport.ac.uk/blogs/michael/archive/2008/05/09/32921.aspx - another staff member involved in their MWE blog that mentions this presentation (I'm afraid I only scanned through this first time I looked... It's mostly on the media presentations).

Grainne's Presentation was the only one that really went into how web 2.0 actually affects pedagogy within academia. It was also interesting because I joined ILRT after she had left, and this was my first chance to see her after hearing so much about her. Fortunately she's already put it online: http://e4innovation.com/?p=198 - so I can skip talking about it since this post has gone on far too long now!