Category Archives: social networking

Sunday Serendipity Reading Links

Every day I save a bunch of links from my explorations over the interwebs. Stuff that passes my radar, may become fodder for my writing at some point, but often gets piled and forgotten.I thought maybe it is good to share some of the unsought links I encounter, and some of the notions why I bookmarked it. Blogging of course used to be linklogging, sharing links to your blog neighbourhood, so let’s say it’s returning to a respected tradition. Here are a fistful of links from this week.

FabLabs

I met Cindy Kohtala (@ckohtala) at the Koppelting unconference yesterday, who just published her dissertation (PDF) at Aalto University in Finland on the sustainability of FabLabs. She included the Dutch network in her research because of the more diverse forms of labs, and the network they form. Will read her dissertation with interest. Reminds me of posting about the failings of FabLabs, and discussing the BeNeLux FabLabs network, because of its unparallelled density and connectedness, I named it the City of FabLabs in my Lift ’10 talk.

Open Data

Foss4Geo is the annual global conference of the open source for geo community. This year Bonn in Germany is the host city and I will be keynoting there next week, on the value of open data and the peculiar role geo data has in it.

Internet of Things

Peter Bihr, of ThingsCon fame, writes about The arena’s of IoT. Please note that the internetconnected fridge is not an IoT arena

Distributed web

IPFS, a distributed way of delivering webpages and files. Pointed out to me in the context of my postings on distributedness and agency. Napsterizing/torrenting everything. Also seems to want to preserve everything on the web better.
Steem is a blockchain based social media platform. Aims to ‘pay’ you for contributing, and do the bookkeeping in a blockchain ledger. Not sure that may work, nor that permanent records of each social media utterance are desirable. Like with IPFS mentioned above, ’not forgetting’ may not be a feature but a very concerning social bug. My friend Boris Mann is trying it out, looking forward to reading more of his reflections. I may not understand, I never understood the purpose of Medium either, which superficially seems to be the same thing but without the bookkeeping.
Anil Dash reflects on the lost infrastructure of social media. This resonates strongly with me in terms of what made blogging so exciting 10-15 years ago, as well as with my recent writings about agency. Part of the picture is weaving a tapestry of functionality across different services and tools that together are a potent mix. It needs plumbing like RSS, trackback and discoverability over the lines of conversations distributed over the individual blogs of the participants. My friend Lilia did her Phd on those distributed conversations. And as Hoder wrote seeing the web again after six years in an Iranian prison: much of our web now, such as Facebook, is just TV, not coffee house interaction.

Governance

Free private cities. Sign up to live in one, so you have an ‘equal’ position based on contracted service provision. Because tinkering with democracy and the fact that others have different needs is bothersome, or such. Apparantly the social contract isn’t good enough. This has high overtones of Snowcrash Burbclaves, and the micro-democracy states (100.000 people each, and with every election there is freedom of movement globally to pick the government (corporate, value or ethnicity based) of your choice in the very entertaining near-future SF book Infomocracy by Malka Ann Older. These private city contracts don’t seem to account for the cost of leaving if you cancel your contract, as it is still territory bound, so finding a new service provider means physically moving. With all the social and monetary cost of doing that. Also seems to me that the Principality of Monaco held up as a good practice example, incorporated US towns, or the City of London for that matter provide ample demonstration of why this may not be the way forward to a more inclusive global society.

Effectiveness

The Ribbon Farm, a blog by Venkatesh Rao, newly added to my feed-reader. His recent newsletter edition on premature synchronization as a cause of problems, chimes with a lot of my experience. Converging too early (because there are just 10 minutes left in the meeting), or forcing convergence in a group doesn’t help much usually. The leading example in the link being military reminds me of an anecdote I once heard about “the world championship of armies” where the US military units were failing because they waited or tried to confirm orders continuously, and the Dutch fared better because they upon receiving others did what seemed worth doing based on context and observation, not seeking further orders and disregarding the literal meaning of orders in the process. Desyncing, as a practice seems valuable advice, and similar to making stuff distributed by design, or probe-based evolution. Seek out new perspectives and let yourself be challenged as part of your routines.

On Agency Pt 3: Technology Needs for Increased Agency

This is the last of three postings about how I see agency in our networked era.
In part 1 I discussed how embracing the distributedness that is the core design feature of the internet needs to be an engine for agency. In part 2 I discussed how agency in the networked era is about both the individual and the immediate group she’s part of in the various contexts those groups exist, and consists of striking power, resilience and agility. In this third part I will discuss what we need to demand from our technology.

My perception of agency more or less provides the design brief for the technology that can support it.

Agency as the design brief for technology
If distributed networks are the leading metaphor for agency, then technology needs to be like that too.

If agency is located in both the individual and the social context of an immediate group the individual is functioning in for a given purpose, then technology needs to be able to support both the individual and group level, and must be trustworthy at that level.

If agency consists of local striking power, resilience, and agility, then technology must be able to take in global knowledge and perspective, but also be independently usable, and locally deployable, as well as socially replicable.

If technology isn’t really distributed, than at least it should be easy to avoid it becoming a single point of failure for your and your groups use case.

Two types of tech to consider
This applies to two forms of technology. The ‘hard’ technology, hardware and software, the stuff we usually call technology. But also the ‘soft’ technology, the way we organize ourselves, the methods we use, the attitudes we adopt.

Technology should be ‘smaller’ than us
My mental shorthand for this is that the technology must be smaller than us, if it is to provide us with agency that isn’t ultimately depending on the benevolence of some central point of authority or circumstances we cannot influence. In 2002 I described the power of social media (blogs, wiki’s etc.), when they emerged and became the backbone for me and my peer network, in exactly those terms: publishing, sharing and connecting between publishers became ‘smaller’ than us, so we could all be publishers. We could run our own outlet, and have distributed conversations over it. Over time our blog or rather our writing was supplanted, by larger blogging platforms, and by the likes of Facebook. This makes social media ‘bigger than us’ again. We don’t decide what FB shows us, breaking out of your own bubble (vital in healthy networks) becomes harder because sharing is based on pre-existing ‘friendships’ and discoverability has been removed. The erosion has been slow, but very visible, not only if you were disconnected from it for 6 years.

Smaller than us means it is easy enough to understand how to use the technology and has the possibility to tinker with it.
Smaller than us means it is cheap (in terms of time, money and effort) to deploy and to replace.
Smaller than us means it is as much within the scope of control/sphere of trust of the user group as possible (either you control your tools, or your node and participation in a much wider distributed whole).
Smaller than us means it can be deployed limited to the user group, while tapping into the global network if/when needed or valuable.

Striking power comes from the ease of understanding how to use technology in your group, the ability to tinker with it, to cheaply deploy it, and to trust or control it.
Resilience comes from being able to deploy it limited to the user group, even if the wider whole falls down temporarily, and easily replace the technology when it fails you, as well as from knowing the exact scope of your trust or control and reducing dependancy based on that.
Agility comes from being able to use the technology to keep in touch with the global network, and easily alter (tinker), replace or upgrade your technology.

Technology needs an upgrade
Most of the technology that could provide us with new agency however falls short of those demands, so currently doesn’t.

It is mostly not distributed but often centralized, or at best ‘hubs and spokes’ in nature, which introduces trust and control issues and single points of failure. Bitcoins ultimate centralization of the needed computing power in Chinese clusters is one, Facebooks full control over what it shows you is another.

It is often not easy to use or deploy, requiring strong skill sets even when it is cheap to buy or even freely available. To use Liquid Feedback decision making software for instance, you need unix admin skills to run it. To use cheap computing and sensing/actuating hardware like Arduino, you need both software and electronics skills. Technology might also still be expensive to many.

Technologies are often currently deployed either as a global thing (Facebook), or as a local thing (your local school’s activity board), where for agency local with the ability to tap into the global is key (this is part of true distributedness), as well as the ability to build the global out of the many local instances (like mesh networks, or The Things Network). Mimicking the local inside the centralized global is not good enough (your local school’s closed page on FB). We also need much more ability to make distinctions between local and global in the social sense, between social contexts.

There are many promising technologies out there, but we have to improve on them. Things need to be truly distributed whenever possible, allowing local independence inside global interdependence. Deploying something for a given individual/group and a given use needs to be plug and play, and packaging it like that will allow new demographics to adopt it.

The types of technology I apply this to
Like I said I apply this to both ‘hard’ tech, and ‘soft’ tech. But all are technologies that are currently not accessible enough and underused, but could provide agency on a much wider scale with some tweaks. Together they can provide the agency that broad swathes of people seem to crave, if only they could see what is possible just beyond their fingertips.

The ‘hard’ technologies where barriers need to come further down I am thinking about are:

Low cost open source hardware
Digital making
Low cost computing (devices or hosted)
(open) data and data-analysis
IoT (sensors and actuators)
Mesh networking
Algorithms
Machine learning
Blockchain
Energy production
Agrotech
Biotech

The ‘soft’ technologies where barriers need to come further down I am thinking about are:

Peer organizing, organisational structures
Peer sourcing
Open knowledge
Iterative processes and probing design
Social media / media production
Community building practices
Networked (mental) models
Workflow and decision making tools
Community currencies / exchanges
Hacking ethics
Ethics by design / Individual rights

Putting it all together gives us the design challenge
Putting the list of social contexts (Agency pt 2) alongside the lists of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ techs, and the areas of impact these techs create agency towards, and taking distributedness (Agency pt 1) and reduced barriers as prerequisites, gives us a menu from which we can select combinations to work on.
If we take a specific combination of individuals in a social context, and we combine one or more ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ technologies while bringing barriers down, what specific impact can the group in that context create for themselves? This is the design challenge we can now give ourselves.

In the coming months, as an experiment, with a provincial library and a local FabLab, we will explore putting this into practice. With groups of neighbours in a selected city we will collect specific issues they want to address but don’t currently see the means to (using a bare bones form of participatory narrative inquiry). Together we will work to lower the barriers to technology that allows the group to act on an issue they select from that collection. A separate experiment doing the same with a primary school class is planned as well.

Agency map, click to enlarge

On Agency pt. 2: The Elements of Networked Agency

Earlier this year I wrote a 1st posting of 3 about Agency, and I started with describing how a key affordance is the distributedness that internet and digitisation brings. A key affordance we don’t really fully use or realize yet.
I am convinced that embracing distributed technology and distributed methods and processes allows for an enormous increase in agency. A slightly different agency though: networked agency.

Lack of agency as poverty and powerlesness
Many people currently feel deprived of agency or even powerless in the face of the fall-out of issues originating in systems or institutions over which they have no influence. Things like the financial system and pensions, climate change impact, affordable urban housing, technology pushing the less skilled out of jobs etc. Many vaguely feel there are many things wrong or close to failing, but without an apparant personal path of action in the face of it.

In response to this feeling of being powerless or without any options to act, there is fertile ground for reactionary and populist movements, that promise a lot but are as always incapable of delivering at best and a downright con or powerplay at worst. Lashing out that way at least brings a temporary emotional relief, but beyond that is only making things worse.

In that sense creating agency is the primary radical political standpoint one can take.
Lack of agency I view as a form of poverty. It has never been easier to create contacts outside of your regular environment, it has never been easier to tap into knowledge from elsewhere. There are all kinds of technologies, initiatives and emerging groups that can provide new agency, based on those new connections and knowledge resources. But they’re often invisible, have a barrier to entry, or don’t know how to scale. It means that many suffering from agency poverty actually have a variety of options at their fingertips, but without realizing it, or without the resources (albeit time, tools, or money) to embrace it. That makes us poor, and poor people make poor choices, because other pathways are unattainable. We’re thirsty for agency, and luckily that agency is within our grasp.

Agency in the networked age is different in two ways
The agency within our grasp is however slightly different in two ways from what I think agency looked like before.

Different in what the relevant unit of agency is
The first way in which it is different is what the relevant unit of agency is.
Agency in our networked age, enabling us to confront the complexity of the issues we face, isn’t just individual agency, nor does it mean mass political mobilisation to change our institutions. Agency in a distributed and networked complex world comes from the combination of individuals and the social contexts and groupings they are part of, their meaningful relations in a context.

It sees both groups and small scale networks as well as each individual that is a node in them as the relevant units to look at. Individuals can’t address complexity, mass movements can’t address it either. But you and I within the context of our meaningful relationships around us can. Not: how can I improve my quality of life? Not: how can I change city government to improve my neighborhood? But: what can I do with my neighbours to improve my neighborhood, and through that my own quality of life?
There are many contexts imaginable where this notion of me & my relevant group simultaneously as the appropiate unit of scale to look at agency exists:

Me and my colleagues, me and my team
Me and my remote colleagues
Me on my street, on my block
Me in my part of town
Me and the association I am a member of
Me and the local exchange trading group
Me and my production coop
Me and my trading or buying coop
Me and my peer network(s)
Me and my coworking space
Me in an event space
Me and my home
Me in my car on the road
Me traveling multi-modal
Me and my communities of interest
Me and my nuclear family
Me and my extended (geographically distributed) family
Me and my dearest
Me and my closest friends

agency comes from both the individual and immediate group level (photo JD Hancock, CC-BY)

For each of these social contexts you can think about which impact on which issues is of value, what can be done to create that impact in a way that is ‘local’ to you and the specific social context concerned.

Different in how agency is constituted based on type of impact
Impact can come in different shades and varieties, and that is the second way in which my working definition of agency is different. Impact can be the result of striking power, where you and your social context create something constructively. Impact can take the form of resilience, where you and your social context find ways to mitigate the fall-out of events or emergencies propagating from beyond that social context. Impact can be agility, where you and your social context are able to detect, assess and anticipate emerging change and respond to it.

So agency becomes the aggregate of striking power, resilience and agility that you and your social context individually and collectively can deliver to yourself, by making use of the potential that distributedness and being networked creates.
Whether that is to strengthen local community, acting locally on global concerns, increasing resilience, leverage and share group assets, cooperatively create infrastructure, create mutual support structures, scaffold new systems, shield against broken or failing systems, in short build your own distributed and networked living.

Designing for agency
For each of those contexts and desired impacts you can think about and design the (virtual and real) spaces you need to create, the value you seek, the levels of engagement you can/should accommodate, the balancing of safety and excitement you desire, the balance you need between local network density and long distance connections for exposure to other knowledge and perspectives, the ways you want to increase the likelihood of serendipity or make space for multiple parallel experimenting, the way you deal with evolution in the social context concerned, and the rhythms you keep and facilitate.

The tools that enable agency
To be able to organize and mobilise for this, we need to tap into two types of enabling technology, that help us embrace the distributedness and connectedness I described in part 1. The ‘techie’ technology, which is comprised of hard- and software tools, and the ‘soft’ technology which consists of social processes, methods and attitudes.
What types of technologies fit that description, and what those technologies need to be like to have low enough adoption thresholds to be conducive to increased agency, is the topic of part 3.

What would you like me to write more about?

Something to aspire to

A few years ago Elmine and I wrote a short e-book on how to organize an unconference as a birthday party (PDF linked on the right). Since then I’ve regularly entertained the idea of writing another e-book, but that never really happened. While I do have some topics I’d like to write about, I find my knowledge of those topics still too limited to be able to come up with a narrative to share anything worthwile. There are also doubts (fears?) about what type of things would have a potential readership

So this week I decided to ask:

What would you like to see me write more or more extensively about?

Already I got a range of responses, and it is an intriguing list. Some suggestions are about aspects of my own journey, others are about topics that I don’t know much (or anything) about, but where apparantly there’s interest in my take on it. Some come close to topics I already want to write more about, but feel I haven’t found an angle yet.

Here’s the list until now. More suggestions and thoughts are welcome.

Optimal unfamiliarity (a phrase I coined in 2004 initially to describe what mix of people make a great event audience to be part of, but has become a design principle in how I try to collect information and learn.), suggested by Piers Young
An epistolary travel log novella (something that could arise from my 14 years of blogging about my travels and work), suggested by Georges Labreche
Open currencies (which Google tells me they have no meaningful results for, but which connects to my experience with LETS, and chimes with free currencies in p2p networks), suggested by Pedro Custodio
Moderating sessions with a mix of analog and digital tools (closely connected to my thoughts about fruitful information strategies in social contexts), suggested by Oliver Gassner
Fatherhood (as I became one 9 weeks ago, but I don’t think 9 weeks counts as experience), suggested by Dries Krens
Motivating others to act on open data (a large chunk of my work), suggested by Gerrit Eicker
Being a European in the digital age (which I strongly claim to be), suggest by Alipasha Foroughi
Convincing profit oriented organisations of the value of open access and responsible research (comes close to Gerrit’s point), suggested by Johnny Søraker
How and why I left my job (being employed by Dries mentioned above), suggested by Rob Paterson
The journey from my involvement in knowledge management and early blogging, to where I am now, and how it impacted the way Elmine and I arrange our lives (lots to unpack here!), suggested by Jon Husband (who, like Rob Paterson, has been part and witness of that journey over many years)
The proliferation of means of communication versus the quality of communication (for me this points to information strategies on focus, filtering etc.), suggested by Jos Eikhout
Personal information strategies and processes using open source tools (something I blogged often about in various shapes and forms), suggested by Terry Frazier, a fellow blogger on knowledge management back when I started blogging in 2002

Looking at who responded is already in a way a manifestation of some of the suggested topics (the journey, the information strategies, the optimal unfamiliarity, facilitating communities).

I can’t promise I’ll write about all of the things suggested, but I appreciate the breadth and scope of this list and the feedback I can unpack from it. More suggestions are very welcome.

Original social media needs still unmet

My friend Peter Rukavina blogged how he will no longer push his blogpostings to Facebook and Twitter. The key reason is that he no longer wants to feed the commercial data-addicts that they are, and really wants to be in control of his own online representation: his website is where we can find him in the various facets he likes to share with us.

Attempting to scale the walls of the gardens like FB that we lock ourselves into

This is something I often think about, without coming to a real conclusion or course of action. Yes, I share Peters sentiments concerning Facebook and Twitter, and how everything we do there just feeds their marketing engines. And yes, in the past two years I purposefully have taken various steps to increase my own control over my data, as well as build new and stronger privacy safeguards. Yet, my FB usage has not yet been impacted by that, in fact, I know I use it more intensively than a few years ago.

Peter uses his blog different from me, in that he posts much more about all the various facets of himself in the same spot. In fact that is what makes his blog so worthwile to follow, the mixture of technology how-to’s, and philosphical musings very much integrated with the daily routines of getting coffee, or helping out a local retailer, or buying a window ventilator. It makes the technology applicable, and turns his daily routines into a testing ground for them. I love that, and the authentic and real impact that creates where he lives. I find that with my blog I’ve always more or less only published things of profession related interests, which because I don’t talk about clients or my own personal life per se, always remain abstract thinking-out-loud pieces, that likely provide little direct applicability. I use Twitter to broadcast what I write. In contrast I use FB to also post the smaller things, more personal things etc. If you follow me on Facebook you get a more complete picture of my everyday activities, and random samplings of what I read, like and care about beyond my work.

To me FB, while certainly exploiting my data, is a ‘safer’ space for that (or at least succeeds in pretending to be), to the extent it allows me to limit the visibility of my postings. The ability to determine who can see my FB postings (friends, friends of friends, public) is something I intensively use (although I don’t have my FB contacts grouped into different layers, as I could do). Now I could post tumblerlike on my own blog, but would not be able to limit visibility of that material (other than by the virtue of no-one bothering to visit my site). That my own blog content is often abstract is partly because it is all publicly available. To share other things I do, I would want to be able to determine its initial social distribution.

That is I think the thing I like to solve: can I shape my publications / sharings in much the same way I shape my feedreading habits: in circles of increasing social distance. This is the original need I have for social media, and which I have had for a very long time, basically since when social media were still just blogs and wikis. Already in 2006 (building on postings about my information strategies in 2005) I did a session on putting the social in social media front and center, together with Boris Mann at Brussels Barcamp on this topic, where I listed the following needs, all centered around the need to let social distance and quality of relationships play a role in publishing and sharing material:

tools that put people at the center (make social software even more social)

tools that let me do social network analysis and navigate based on that (as I already called for at GOR 2006)

tools that use the principles of community building as principles of tool design (an idea I had writing my contribution to BlogTalk Reloaded)

tools that look at relationships in terms of social distance (far, close, layers in between) and not in terms of communication channels (broadcasting, 1 to 1, and many to many)

tools that allow me to shield or disclose information based on the depth of a relationship, relative to the current content

tools that let me flow easily from one to another, because the tools are the channels of communication. Human relationships don’t stick to channels, they flow through multiple ones simultaneously and they change channels over time.

All of these are as yet unsolved in a distributed way, with the only option currently being getting myself locked into some walled garden and running up the cost of moving outside those walls with every single thing I post there. Despite the promise of the distributed net, we still end up in centralized silo’s, until the day that our social needs are finally met in distributed ways in our social media tools.

On the need for distributedness and self-reliance

I came across this Guardian article describing how an American author and artist found his Google account deleted, including his 14 year old blog hosted with Google’s Blogger platform.

To me this incident is notable in a few ways.

The author concerned had his blog up for 14 years, and even used it to write and keep manuscripts, so clearly it was of key importance to him as an online asset.
For such a key asset, using a free service is a risk, as that doesn’t provide any certainty concerning uptime.
Blogger, as a free service, comes with a TOS, allowing Google to withdraw service at any moment. You don’t have a ‘right’ to this service.
After the account was closed, it was impossible to actually contact Google to ask about the why and how, or if it can be reinstated
The author concerned feels he’s being censored (which in a literal sense is impossible, as only governments can censor), although it is likely the account was closed because of a breach of the terms of service (which are notoriously unevenly enforced in every platform)
The author didn’t keep back-ups.

All of this once again highlights the importance of embracing the distributedness of the internet. You have to make sure that you are not just a passive and consuming part of it, but that for things that are important to you, you are also willing to make sure those things are under as much of your own control as possible. Your blog is only yours if you have control over the infrastructure it runs on. The same is true for e-mail, which in the case mentioned above was also lost: you have to make sure you have full control over at least one domain name, at which you can also receive and send e-mail (you@yourdomain.tld).

This in short means you need to make sure you have a claim to the service you actually need. Blogger offers free hosting but can take it away. If you want your blog to exist, make sure you pay for hosting, and make sure you run it on a domain you control. I used Blogger when I started blogging in November 2002 (around the same time in short, as the artist’s blog that was deleted), but once I realized I was likely to continue writing, after a few months, I moved it to a paid hosting package I could more fully control, and on a URL I acquired separately from the hosting, also under my full control. It doesn’t mean nothing can happen (my blog was hacked once), but it does mean I can recover from it.

The web was built in distributed fashion. If you use it in a centralized way, by making use of large centralized services, you expose yourself to vulnerabilities. That is true for centralized free blogging platforms, like Blogger.com or WordPress.com, and all those other services such as Facebook, Flickr and whatnot. Don’t make yourself dependant, don’t put yourself in a position that has a single point of failure.

Midsummer A Year Ago: Make Stuff That Matters Unconference and BBQ

Today is midsummer. The heating system came on this morning, and it has been raining since then. Quite a contrast with last year, when over 40 of you came to brighten our home for the Make Stuff That Matters unconference birthday party, and double that for the BBQ the day after it.

#MSTM14 crowd during my opening remarks, by Paolo

To me it is still a great source of energy to think back to the atmosphere and spirit of MSTM14, and the joy of seeing so many of our colleagues, peers, friends, family and clients interact, having travelled from all over the country, from all over Europe, and even from Canada and spanning 6 decades of age differences. As a bit of sunlight on this day that feels like autumn, some impressions from last year.

We used an introduction game and process, designed with Peter Troxler, to get everyone involved in making something.

Designing together

We had the Frysklab mobile FabLab parked in front of our home for two days, staffed by Jeroen, Aan, Marleen and Jappie of the incredible Frysklab team. Next to their equipment (multiple 3d-printers, a laser cutter, a CNC mill), we had our own 3D printer and four more on loan through the kind collaboration of Ultimaker. This allowed everyone to get their hands on the machines, guided by the Frysklab team and Elmine.

Frysklab, and the line-up in our living room

Klaas ‘borrowing’ our printer 😉 & at work in the Frysklab truck

People started out creating objects with Doodle3d, and then after encountering its limitations, by themselves moved on to more capable but also more complicated software tools. Guiding each other, searching for tips & tricks online, and through trial and error. The 3D-printers kept going for over 2 days, until the last guests left for the airport! Seeing how well everything went, and how our process delivered above our own expectations, made Elmine’s “Maker Moment“. I remember standing in the Frysklab truck towards the end of the first day, with everyone around me excitedly talking, working and making, and I just felt happy seeing the energy all round me. We set out to show ‘making’ as a communal process, and seeing it succeed is joyous.

Peter and Oliver explaining 3d printing from Minecraft, Tjores proudly writing his name in 3D

Amarens printed a 3d-hug, after a scan of herself. A castle made in Minecraft printed by Floris

The second day was all about the bbq, bringing about double the number of people together compared to the unconference day. And people kept on making, neighbourhood kids got busy in the Frysklab truck, and unconference participants showed newcomers how the machines worked. Fine food, fine wines, and many helping hands, such as Ray’s, in the kitchen, kept everyone around for conversations, making and fun.

Ray and Harold making food, Martin and Paolo making music

And even after the event, the ripples kept spreading outward. New connections were made, with friends opening their own home for other participants to stay in during the summer for instance. Elmine and I used a visit to Copenhagen to bring the MSTM experience to our friends Henriette and Thomas, and their sparkling daughter Penny, where we shared what we ourselves had learned from Peter and his son Oliver. My colleague Frank took that same lesson from Peter and Oliver to a whole new level, involving dozens of neighbourhood kids in a 3D-printing event where he lives.

Now a year later, the energy is still palpable to me. On this rainy day a year later I am grateful for the inspiration and friendship of last year. And although it will be hard to top, I am slowly starting to think about what we could do in 2016 for a new edition.
If you are entertaining the thought of doing something similar yourself, do read the e-book we wrote after a previous edition (download the PDF), where we describe the basic steps of hosting your very own birthday unconference and bbq. If you do and we’re invited, I promise Elmine and I will try our best to make it possible for us to attend.

The Setup

Our friend Peter Rukavina recently posted his ‘setup’, in which he describes his work place, tools and routines. As did Chris Corrigan, a long time blogging connection, with whom we once spent a great afternoon talking and walking through the northern rain forest on the awesome Bowen Island he calls home. I am always interested in how others shape their work days, and what they use, so I thought I’d share my setup as well.

Infrastructure
At home: A simple desk in the very light attic space of our home. It’s about 25m2, white, with one apple green wall plus windows along both lengths, and it has both Elmine’s and my desk, a bookcase and fold-out couch. It looks out over our neighbourhood, so you still see the daily rhythm and can watch out for the mailman or delivery guy bringing a package.
One floor down we have a room with an electrically adjustable standing desk, that Elmine and I both use.

Our home is connected to a fiber optic network, currently delivering 100Mbit symmetrical connection, that we are in the process of upgrading to a 1Gbit symmetrical connection, at the same cost (60 euro/month including tv and fixed line phone).

We live on the eastern border of the Netherlands, within viewing distance from Germany, and my clients are usually in the western part, a 2 hour train ride away, or outside the country. So I spent a large amount (somewhere between 4 and 24 hours per week) of my time in trains, where I travel first class as that comes with power outlets and a bit more room to work.

The Green Land, a company I started with 3 partners is located at Zpot, in Utrecht right in the center of the country. Zpot is a co-working space started by my The Green Land partner Frank, which provides me/us both with landing desks, and more importantly meeting rooms. Membership is 100 euro/month for the company. I hope to be there once a week, but my schedule gets in the way of that easily. We decided last week to all aim to be there on Fridays at least, to increase the amount of time we get to work together.

Hardware
I use a 2014 MacBook Pro, with 1TB ssd and a few other upgrades, bells and whistles. I regard 21st century knowledge work as artisanal, and my laptop is this artisan’s primary tool. I decided a long time ago that trying to save money on the most important tool I work with is nonsensical and something I’ll pay for in frustration.

That laptop when used at the attic desk is connected to a medium Wacom Bamboo pen and touch, a usb keyboard with numerical pad (for the bookkeeping I do myself), and 2 additional screens, resulting in the picture below (although the pen and pad have been replaced since then). Until last year the second extra screen was connected through an Terratec Connect A1 on USB, but with the new laptop I now use a Thunderbolt port and the HDMI port to connect two screens. At the standing desk the laptop is connected to a wireless keyboard.

For some travel I leave my laptop behind and use an Asus Android tablet with detachable keyboard.

The local network connects to a 2TB NAS that we both use as TimeMachine, and another 2TB NAS we both use as archive disk. It also contains a Sonos bridge that delivers music to speakers in all the rooms in the house.
I run a VPS in a Swiss data center with 30TB storage that serves as off-site back-up and cloud-sync (with versioning).

Next to a HP printer/flatbed scanner, I more often use a Fujitsu Scansnap scanner. That last one is certainly one of the best investments I made. It easily scans everything, double sided, in color and at high speed due to the sheet feeder, and saves to both the file system and Evernote.

An Ultimaker 3D printer is in our ‘standing desk room’. There is also a desk-top laser cutter and CNC milling machine, both of which currently aren’t operational (a lingering item on my todo list).

In the living room a Raspberry Pi serves as (under used) media center and we also have a Nintendo Wii that hasn’t seen much use lately.

I use a Samsung Galaxy S5 phone, and have a 1st gen iPad that has been unused since iOS evolved away from it, as well as a Samsung Galaxy Tab3 that is still in its box and untouched.

While traveling I use a noise canceling headset both on trains and planes, and a Lumix TZ60 camera (although the camera on my phone is quite good and sometimes a speedy alternative). For internet on the road I use a Huawei Mifi, with a monthly 3GB data package that also includes data roaming across the EU (next to the 2GB data bundle and EU roaming on my phone).

Desktop software
My main and daily software tools are Tinderbox (for outlining, mapping, and getting to the point of writing), Evernote (the content part of my outboard brain) and Things (the task part of my outboard brain). LibreOffice for the usual, and Scrivener for longer writes (which talks to Tinderbox).
OwnCloud is what keeps my files synced to the VPS. Smultron for coding / text file editing, and Applescript plus Automator for some routine tasks (such as opening a new project, or populate a checklist for a new speaking gig.) Tweetdeck for a range of Twitter accounts. My VPS runs a script I call ‘Radar’ which is harvesting tweets about specific topics I’m interested in, and presenting me with an overview of URLs mentioned around those topics.

Web software
Owncloud running on my VPS (which has fully replaced Dropbox), including my company’s shared files is always in the background. Flickr for photo online back-up and sharing, with too much of history to move it all to something else. Podio for working with my The Green Land partners, and Slack for emergent work interaction with a team in open hardware. Diigo (with Delicious in the background) for bookmarking. And one that I would very much like to change: Gmail for all mail. I use it webbased for seamless experience with my other devices. This is the one element in my setup I’d like to change, getting out of gmail’s servers. And blogs of course: WordPress and some Drupal sites.

Phone software
Most of the phone apps are there to have access to the same stuff as on my laptop. With some additions for travel: railroad apps for Netherlands and Germany (that also covers most of the rest of Europe), KLM and Amsterdam Airport apps. UberSocial Pro for Twitter, to maintain multiple accounts.
One app I am particularly fond off: LinkBubble. It opens links in the background from any of the other apps (like FB or Twitter), so you don’t break your flow in going through a social media stream. From LinkBubble I can easily share to Evernote, mail, or any other app.

Social routines
I don’t have a lot of regular routines, as my calendar is very different from week to week. I do have a rhythm to my day though, getting up 6:30 and approaching things in various blocks (90min the largest), with focus work in the morning, less demanding stuff in the afternoon. I try to take walks a few times per week when I work from home.

I feel the need to travel a few times each year, to expose myself to different scenes, perspectives and views, so I try to make sure I always have some international work going on. I like to regularly immerse myself in different busy cities, but need the quiet to digest and think things through, and I hate it when I can only just jump from one thing to another without that digestion time. When that happens it makes me ‘forget’ things: last week I was in Kyrgyzstan and the day before I left we organized a conference with 125 people as end point to a year long project. Because of the work in Kyrgyzstan I mostly forgot about that conference the day before and what it signified. I went through the photos of the event this week to remember and relive and take note of what happened.

Every now and then I smoke a cigar, eat a raw herring, or eat a Hema smoked sausage with mustard when I land at Amsterdam airport.

Elmine and I enjoy traveling together, and enjoy good food. I do the cooking at home. We regularly take time to visit friends in various places, but still I think I see most of them not nearly enough by far. Doing a birthday unconference and bbq as we did last June with ‘Make Stuff that Matters’ to bring a wide diversity of people to our home is how we try to give something to our social network and which is a tremendous source of inspiration to ourselves.

That’s my setup. Yours?

My Radar, Finding New Sources of Interest

People often ask me how I stay informed, and always seem to know even about smaller initiatives around the topics I work on. Part of that is what I call ‘Radar’. With Radar I automatically collect all the Twitter messages that mention keywords I am interested in, and detect the web addresses they mention. Those web addresses are evaluated on their type (is it a blog, a video, a general site, a presentation, a photo?) and counted as to how often they are mentioned.

Running totals for Radar: found 350k people, mentioning over 1 million URLs

Radar then presents me with overviews of all URLs mentioned on Twitter in the past day, or week, on the key words I follow. This way I find not just the ‘big’ websites, but also the smaller events, initiatives and discussions, that are mentioned by smaller communities. Next to URLs Radar also tracks who is mentioning certain topics, which basically gives me a list of suggestions of who to maybe follow on Twitter, or who’s profile I may want to look at to see if they also blog about the topics I am interested in.

Most mentioned URLs in 4566 tweets on Open Data in past 24 hours

The 47 people tweeting about FabLabs today, new people highlighted

What comes out of my Radar then may get added to my feedreader, or to my bookmark collection, or to my notes collection in Evernote. Radar is the serendipity antenna that scoops up a wide variety of things. To me, whatever is being mentioned on Twitter is like the froth on the waves: it is not all that meaningful by itself, but shows me where there is movement and energy of interaction. That points me to the places and people that make up the wave below the froth. Which is where the significant info is.

Radar at first was a bunch of php scripts I wrote myself that ran on my laptop and which I started manually in sequence. My coding skills aren’t all that great though, so ultimately I asked Flemming Funch to clean things up for me. That meant he coded the scripts from scratch, with only my original outline of what I wanted remaining. Now it runs permanently on my VPS with a basic web front-end for me to explore the output (see screenshots).

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