Do you want to experiment with spimes, have a first look at the preliminary OpenSpime architecture? Are you a hardware hacker, a maker, a mashup-wizard? Want to play with spimified Arduinos, SunSpots, iPhones, and more?

Than come to Bastard.it for the OpenSpime Drink-Link!

In a relaxed and friendly environment in design-crazed, fashion-full Milan, we will pass an evening together mashing up our ideas to see what comes out a few brains knocked together.

The event is open to all, but registration is required.

Your retina is burned with the afterimage of the comment which says all kinds of witty, and now lost things, and has links to interesting stuff which you won’t be able to look up. As you scramble to select the text, to at least copy it, wondering fleetingly if it would be honest to repost it after the fact, since a bit is a bit is a bit anyway, your computer (hey, this is a Mac crashing and they were not supposed to do this EVAR) decides that this is the best moment to barf and crash badly enough that it needs a cold restart. (Yes, I know, music software, video encoding, a virtual machine, a couple of dozen tabs on a beta browser, a voip client or two, two dozens of IM windows, might, just might justify it. But still, oh stochastic forces, why now, why me?!) The comment gone, the clipboard gone. More panicky checks, with somewhat laconic answers: “no, when you *delete* a record, instead of junking it, it is gone”, “no the database is not a file system, and you can download a ‘RecoverMySQL’ utility to make you happy’, and ‘no, this is a virtual machine, with an automatically compacting virtual disk, so there is no magnetic trace that a military grade data recovery shop could discover there”…

And than, a miracle. It appears that your machine is backed up twice a day. And the comment in question has been posted six minutes (!) before the next backup. And your sysadmin recovers it, and puts it back to its place.

Cathartic!

I don’t recommend it to anybody with a heart condition.

Well! As I am used to say, “what is the question that I should be asking?“:

• How can I thank Marco properly? (I already kneeled in front of him…)
• What are the impacts of progressive dematerialization of our IT infrastructure?
• What guarantees that I work with Steve Jurvetson before I die?

Joi Ito wrote on his blog that Creative Commons was looking forward to receive some examples of how the CC licenses helped reusing photos from Flickr. I already had in mind exactly a story like this, so it took me just a few minutes to put together an email to Melissa at Creative Commons…

I publish all my photos on Flickr with a CC-A (Creative Commons Attribution) license. As long as people credit me as the original author of my work, I am glad for them to take the photos for any possible purpose, and if they have a way to make money through it in the meantime, so much the better!

Photo of Birka island close to Stockholm

I took this photo at a boat trip a couple of hours from Stockholm in Sweden where I went for a few days with my family. These excursions are a lot of fun now in Europe, for just three-four days maybe with low cost airlines bringing you anywhere. Ryanair leaves just a few minutes of bus drive from where I live. It is so cool to be able and hop on a normal urban bus, take the plane, and an hour or two later be in a different climate, country, and culture. The fact that the tickets cost just 10 euro or so, if you plan ahead, help a lot as well!

A few months after I posted the photo, I received an email from a company compiling a travel guide of Sweden, alerting me about the fact that they wanted to include the photo in their new guide, if I agreed. I told them that I was happy, and that given the license they wouldn’t have even had to ask… Now it is funny, as I am writing this, I do not remember the name of the guide: but since they gave me credit for the photo, I know that it is enough to type in Google “david orban sweden guide birka” and yes, it comes back as the first result: Schmap Art and Entertainment, correctly credited, linked back to the Flickr photo page, and to the appropriate CC license!

An other example is the inclusion of my photos of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and physicist Eric Drexler on their respective wikipedia pages.

From my photo

to his wikipedia article:

I like to take photos of people, with or without me standing on their side and these two are among my heroes. The photos were taken and put on Wikipedia without people asking my permission, which they didn’t need, and properly crediting me on the page of the photo. The fact that the photos were both appropriately cropped, to focus on the
subject on the article, and taking me out of the picture of course is also an important positive element of the freedoms that the CC licenses automatically grant to the people reusing the pictures.

It is interesting that exactly because I was so positively moved by the pictures being taken, and that I was preparing to write up something like this, I actually managed to take a before, and after picture of the Drexler article:

before the photo

after the photo

So what is especially cool about these other screenshots? That they are a reuse squared! Because they are not the plain screenshot of the Wikipedia article, but that of the Apple Macintosh Dictionary application, which feeds itself on Wikipedia. So these are a fairly long chain of culture propagating richly, from author, to source, to application, all smoothly, given the automation afforded by the CC license!

And a final example…

All my slideshows on Slideshare are based on CC licensed Flickr photos, and themselves are also CC-A licensed. For example:

| View | Upload your own

I have a fairly personal slide style, where I have typically 10-20 slides, each with three-four words in a sentence, and one photo. I invariably choose the photos through a search on Flickr, always using advanced search and picking CC licensed photos that I can also change, and use commercially. Even if today I release my material without
asking for any payment, or even without placing Google ads on my site, I want to be sure that if I want to publish a book for sale in the future, I do not have to go back and change my images. (Hey, it is annoying that Steve Jurvetson’s photos pop up so prominently in my searches, but hey, it is not his fault, is it? You can also see that I credit the photos on the last page of my slide deck…) Without Flickr I would not be able to create these slideshows, and I would definitely be a less effective speaker (or would resort to Larry Lessig’s style of presentations, which are anything but ineffective!)

So I hope these three examples help you understand why I love Creative Commons, and why you should also always label what you create under the license of your choice.

[13:04] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Hey everybody, welcome – we’ll be starting in a few minutes – still lots of people coming in – If this is your first time here, please feel free to grab a gift bag and some treats from the back tables – and welcome to to Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon

[13:06] Sophrosyne Stenvaag:
Our Salon Spotlight Guest this week is Davidorban Agnon. David is the Founder of OpenSpime, Inc., Vulcano, a community in SL, Lunarez, and numerous other companies and nonprofits, is a blogger, inventor and creative thinker – and David’s going to be talking about his activities, and about The New Renaissance – welcome, David!

[13:08] Davidorban:
Thanks Soph, for the kind intro. Hello everybody! Thanks for having me in front of such an interesting and stimulating audience.

I will speek for about 20-30 minutes and then it will be great to open the floor for discussion and questions and all the fun we can have. But first, I would like to ask some of you some questions.

When I speak in front of a physical audience I always try and establish their ‘breaking point’ in terms of what tools online they do use or even have heard of so let me ask each of you, and just answer with a yes or no.

First question: have you ever contributed to Wikipedia?

[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: no
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Nope
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: yes
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Yes
[13:12] Chimera Cosmos: read only
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: yes
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yeds
[13:12] Extropia DaSilva: No.
[13:12] Galatea Gynoid: minor edits
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: and went to wikimania
[13:12] Tara Yeats: -d
[13:12] Malburns Writer: once or twice
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: I try to aviod acting like I know things…
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes once or twice
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes

[13:12] Davidorban: Second question: do you use Twitter?
[13:12] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:12] Zentinal Ziskey: no
[13:12] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: gods yes
[13:12] Shava Suntzu: addictively
[13:12] Velicia Llewellyn: Yepyep!
[13:12] Yel Oh: hi Alanagh
[13:12] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:12] Ciaran Laval: Yes
[13:12] Alesia Markstein: No
[13:12] Tara Yeats: yes
[13:12] Dani Revnik: no
[13:12] Kanomi Pikajuna: not any more
[13:12] Crap Mariner: Twitter uses me
[13:12] Yel Oh: no
[13:13] Galatea Gynoid: reluctantly :p
[13:13] Chimera Cosmos: yes, a litle

[13:13] Davidorban:
Third question: would you go as far in lifestreaming as to put (assuming you have any) biological signals online in realtime (for example heartbeats)?
[13:13] Centrasian Wise: yes
[13:13] Zentinal Ziskey: nope
[13:13] Velicia Llewellyn: No
[13:14] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: n/a
[13:14] Nikitten Ninetails: no
[13:14] Grace McDunnough has no heartbeat
[13:14] Stan Aichi: sure
[13:14] Yel Oh: if I could think of a good reason to . . yes
[13:14] Extropia DaSilva: Me? No. My primary might but not me.
[13:14] Tara Yeats: unlkiekly
[13:14] Crap Mariner pleads the Fifth
[13:14] Galatea Gynoid: Not sure there’d be a point…
[13:14] Shava Suntzu: unlikely
[13:14] Chimera Cosmos: sure

[13:15] Davidorban:
Fourth question: assuming you could (with an implant or upgrade) merge thoughts, and PURPOSE, with more entities, would you do it?
[13:15] Malburns Writer: Mal hopes to put memories online before heartbeat fades, but …
[13:15] Grace McDunnough: Yes
[13:15] Centrasian Wise: yep
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Yes
[13:15] Sophrosyne Stenvaag: yes
[13:15] Crap Mariner: No
[13:15] Velicia Llewellyn: …..come again Dave?
[13:15] Yel Oh: yes
[13:15] Stan Aichi: yes
[13:15] Galatea Gynoid: Crap: Resistance is futile. :p
[13:15] Shava Suntzu: I want to know more about it before I’d say yes or no
[13:16] Grace McDunnough: Join the merge, Vel . you know you want to
[13:16] Zentinal Ziskey: yes, selectively and voluntarily
[13:16] Velicia Llewellyn: Gotcha

[13:16] Davidorban: So.. thanks for this. It is interesting how when speaking to different audiences you can always lose them after a while with the answers becoming prevalently no, or huh, but not here!
[13:16] Grace McDunnough winks
[13:17] Davidorban: So, let’s start!

And then come back to see what the questions could/should mean, if anything… Let me start with a little dash into history. The ages of humanity have been determined by the evolution of ideas, and their implementations in technology, and societal organization. We have had several epochs, that have been characterized by the interplay between structures and aggregations of various levels: the individual, the family, the clan, the village, the city, the kingdom, the nation state.

Today’s dominant organization, the nation state, is creaking under the forces of globalization. Not only global commerce of products, but also services, and in general the flow of ideas. The metaverse is one of the most important harbingers of the forthcoming changes. And we, in Second Life are experiencing the approaching shockwaves: all the various crackdowns on innovative and controversial practices in SL are a sign of how disquieting, and at the same time how important these experiments are for the physical world.

They are just afraid and rightly so: change is too hard for lazy mammals.

And we are the ones who have to reassure the physical world that change can be beneficial, and while hard, not drammatic, or tragic.

One of my main interests in memetics, and universal Darwinism in general… Dynamic evolution in the metaverse in omnipresent. The evolutionary aspects of Second Life itself are undeniable:
- an environment with constraints hosts
- activities that are observed and copied
- with variation through reinvention
…this is the basic recipe for any universal Darwinian evolution.

I created Vulcano in SL, which you are all welcome not only to visit, but also to be part of, as an evolving social structure. Vulcano on Second Life has been born as an experiment in applying these rules within a social structure. What happens if you let everybody do what they most want to do and learn in SL, to build whatever they want?

The only ‘seed’ as the starting point of the evolution being “apply common sense”!

Since everybody’s definition of common sense is different, there will be a lot of variation, as the news of Vulcano is passed around and people here “Hey you can do anything on Vulcano, as long as it makes sense”. And given the maximum number of prims on a land, there is an environmental constraint that is applied, eliminating what are the stupid ideas, and keeping the ones that in this context make most sense.

After more than a year of evolution on Vulcano we are ready to start and abstract some of the things we learned!

Lesson one: stakes must not always be raised!
We have had thermonuclear attacks, which we survived, and decided not to ban the attacker. The biological necessity of always trumping the enemy so that you won’t be exterminated doesn’t apply!

Lesson two: you can encourage mistakes!
The wonderful sensation of being free to experiment (the childlike wonder, as FSJ would say) is here to stay even as adults when you realize that other people are making the same at the same time as you are or that they went through the same experiences as you are.

Lesson three: metarules are fundamentally important!
In order not to burden the growing community with more and more rules, we have metarules that establish the survival value of the social structures, and the rules that sustain them.

Our next excersise running right now is going to be the design of a dynamic constitution that will have an XML formulation in order to be machine readable, and allow the evaluation of DIFFERENCES between different forumlations. Why is this very important in our opinion? When different online worlds in the metaverse interoperate the frontier crossing them will beeven more important than those between countries today as the changes will impact the laws not only of the social structure, but ownership, DRM, control, identity. When you are crossing in an Open Source world, you shall leave all your nice DRM protected dresses behind!

(BTW: as a consequence, since this filter is not symmetrical, Open Source creation is bound to overcome greatly close sourced creation in the metaverse as well)

So, to start the final part of my speech…
When ideas flow freely, since they are not a scarce resource, what you must keep is adding value through further elements of invention, and creativity.

What happens to humanity as we merge with machines?
What will become of natural humans in a world of automation, where white collar jobs are as regularly mechanised, as blue collar ones in the ’70s or the ’80s?

Too many people are living in a state of fear. Because they confuse evolution with extermination. Still today the most numerous life forms on the planet are bacteria.

Humans are the foundation of the technological evolution, which is going to acquire a large degree of autonomous life. When humans decoupled themselves from the grind of the natural environment 10000 years ago with the invention of agriculture, they took on the new grind of organizing their new life as mechanizers. After 10000 years of trying we are now on the verge of actually being able and go back to what we are good at: chatting, grooming, telling stories, etc.

Without the heartbreaking realities of a 20 year long average lifespan and without the incredible loss of ideas being born just to be extinguished becaue of lack of connectedness.

This is what I call the New Renaissance!

Going back, by going forward: embracing technological tools, to achieve fulfilling and stimulating lives where creativity is unbounded by commercial rules and flows openly adding to humanity’s happiness in an inclusive society that is not afraid of the future that it is building

[13:41] Davidorban: THE END

Please read the full Q/A session on Scribd

| View | Upload your own

David Orban
“Strategic Marketing Evolves – The changing role of brands in the network age”
Disintermediation is immediacy. After a hiatus of ten thousand years, during which more and more sophisticated tools were needed to overcome the lack of contact between the producers and consumers, today, with the new opportunities that the network gives us, we can go back to rely on reputation as the surest guide on which to base our transactions.

You can also download the slides, and the audio of the lecture separately if you prefer.

[Update: I also uploaded the audio of the QA session following the lecture]

The Internet is the public space of the modern world, and through it governments now have the opportunity to better understand the needs of their citizens and citizens may participate more fully in their government. Information becomes more valuable as it is shared, less valuable as it is hoarded. Open data promotes increased civil discourse, improved public welfare, and a more efficient use of public resources.

The group is offering a set of fundamental principles for open government data. By embracing the eight principles, governments of the world can become more effective, transparent, and relevant to our lives.

There are also some videos that I shot, photos

Your comments are welcome here, or on the discussion group we created!

09.35 Right on time Scott Hirsch of the Management Information Group is starting in the Strategy and Business Models track his presentation “Be Like the Ineternet: Collaborative, Disruptive, Networked”. The hall is not full yet, but people are streaming in constantly.

After googling the name of the track Slideshare brought quickly up a stack of slides, so without knowing whether they are identical, I am putting them here (I guess they will be 90% similar anyway!):

| View | Upload your own

09.45 After presenting what MIG does, talks about the “Abandoning the waterfall for the washing machine” slide. Interacting with the audience fairly often. However there isn’t a clear direction to the presentation, really, feels a little rambling… aha, this was just the introduction for twenty minutes. Now he shows the agenda for the morning: Bottom Up Innovation, Group Interaction, Web2.0 Business Models…

10:05 Hmm also said he hates networking, and then asked us to come up to the mike and say what is on our mind in terms of Web2.0 business ideas and challenges, and a couple of us did. Mister Wong asked to help with getting the buzz about the service around, and I spoke about www.metasocial.eu (don’t go there, it is empty now!) asking technical help on how to set it up…

11:00 Finishing the presentation for Ignite (taking a pause in live blogging). Posted my slides for the Ignite presentation on Slideshare: Metasocial Web

11:30 What are business models, and how they compare. Nothing remarkable, I’d say

12:00 Uploaded photos to Flickr from Web2.0 Expo Berlin

12.30 Recorded a new video response to Marc ‘What is Second Life for? – 2‘ this time about ‘Do you really have to pay for everything in Second Life?’

13.00 Panel discussion with startups from SeedCamp. Nothing earthshaking!

14.00 Looked around the halls, at the other sessions, and recorded snippets of the presentations.

14.30 Panel discussion with Venture Capitalists, and Angel Investors about their activities.

There are interesting contradictions in the VC business, which as usual in the technology area, first reach the US, and later Europe. On one hand there is a lot of money that needs to be invested, with funds becoming larger and larger, and on the other hand startups in the web space especially now need less and less money, or they are even able to go from start to profitability with just a small Angel round. Also, when VCs actually manage, and put too much money in a company, that money tends to be spent badly, instead of smartly.

Asked a question to the panel about the changing nature of business plans, that not only show exponentially increasing revenues in three or five years’ time, as they have always, but also are more and more taking into account the exponentially decreasing contstraints. So if the money provided by VCs is going to be maybe one of these constraints, what is the value that VCs are going to provide in the future? The answers were the traditional networking, distribution, completing the team, etc. I find it appallingly weak as a value proposition for giving up 30% minimum of your company!

An other question was from Spain regarding distributed teams, when people, as in many parts of Europe are difficult to move, but can be accessed for working remotely. The answers were rather negative. I see this as a great opportunity! The Venture Capital community is not understanding the changes that are coming! Before asking my question I made a remark, being a Second Life specialist, that just as blogs were not common or people with notebooks during conferences five years ago, and now are almost universal, in the same way virtual teams will be common in five years’ time, and especially in online worlds like Second Life they will be universal, and almost the only acceptable way of organizing your startup’s workforce.

16:00 Going to the keynote session room for coordination with the Ignite people.

17:00 Tim O’Reilly’s keynote quotes Ray Kurzweill on his last slide!

18:10 The Ignite sessions are starting.

Well, that was fast. I thought of the Metasocial Web a few days ago, and looks like I will be delivering a speech about it at Web2.0 Ignite in Berlin tomorrow.

A lot of what the Metasocial Web should be is in flux, naturally, so it will be good to get the feedback from the audience, and compare notes on how to quickly progress towards it. The core of the argument is that we are ready to pull together information from public data repositories, and use crowdsourced effort to manage the data to get a better dynamic understanding on how our political, social, and economic systems interact. The goal is to be able and build as much second order knowledge about these systems as possible, in order to operate them at a higher level of efficiency then possible before.

I am calling this the Metasocial Web, or Societal Software, as social networks concern themselves with individuals, and their groupings, while the Metasocial Web is concerned about societies, and their possible competitive comparisons. My idea is that countries that adopt a Metasocial Web are going to be much more effective in allocating their tax resources, and that given this competitive advantage, all countries are going to be pushed towards it quickly.

I am going to the Web2.0 Expo in Berlin. It is the first time that I participate in person in an O’Reilly conference, after having been an observer and commenter of the Web2.0 conferences, and am very much looking forward to it. The energy is apparent already!

Web2.0 eats its own dog food, luckily, so there is a very good social network that lets attendees connect, organizing the links by interest, and facilitating the communication after the conference as well. Made be CrowdVine, this network belongs to the new breed of web2.0 applications which understand the importance of open data, allowing you to export all you input, and the network you created. I will sound hard to satisfy, but now it’s the time to move further on, and allow people to export not just a list of contacts, but the second order knowledge that the interconnections between them, and the conversations, comments create.

• The Times: “At Least The Chicken Kebab Was Real”: gotta love that title! Worthy of the best classics from The Onion (like the immortal “God Answers Prayers Of Paralyzed LIttle Boy – ‘No,’ Says God“). “David Orban, chief executive of Questar, a software firm, thought they could: “I disagree with the idea that it’s not possible to regulate supply. [The goods have] an artificial scarcity, but there can still be a rarity factor,” he said.” That doesn’t sound like me, but I will look at the recording! I recall of having actually quoted Cory, and said that bits won’t become less easy to copy in the future then today. Yes, ‘limited editions’ will be of great emotional value, but their limitedness will have to come someplace else then lack of copiability or unforgeable timestamps… (They originally misspelled my name, and only a friend’s pointing the article out to me let me know abou it. I wrote them for a correction, which they did within
• Tech Digest: Live Blog: “David Orban, from Questar, loads up his Powerpoint presentation (well, the Mac version…he’s been sitting next to me the whole day typing away on his Mac). He talks a lot about 3D printers, and the possibility of owning a good in a virtual world, and being able to print it out and own it in real life, too. Somehow I think this is several years off still!” Well, yes, Katherine, and some of us are actually thinking farther ahead than the end of the current quarter!
• Ugotrade: “Cory Doctorow – A Reverse Surveillance Society” In this fantastic almost-book-length post, Tish, the publisher of Ugotrade, covers many, many areas of the Forum. It is the third time she quotes me in a month, and hope her readers are not fed up with it. There’s more to come, so they’d better not! “In the picture above David Orban shows a delighted Ginsu Yoon his new Second Life viewer an: “Immersive stereoscopic projection of a life size screen covering 180 degrees of vision, connected to the live grid, tracking the avatar with ultrawideband emitters, created by the University of Milan and Eximia, in Italy.” David has posted a video gives a full explanation of “Real 2nd Life” on his blog, so check it out!“. I suggested Tish to list an index to the post, and put anchors in the text, so that people can actually point to parts of it, it is so long…
• Inside the Metaverse: “We managed to get some in depth interviews with the following people: Aleks Krotoski (The Guardian), David Orban (Questar), Corey Bridges (Multiverse), Betsy Book (There), Ginsu Yoon (Linden Lab), Richard Bartle (University of Essex), Robert Lai (CRD China) and Frank Campbell (Mindark). Many different opinions and many diverse views on the future, but always with great nuance and never black and white.” I am very much looking forward to see what comes out of this. At least a teaser-trailer asap, please!
• The Guardian: Talking points from the Virtual Worlds Forum. They don’t quote me actually, but used and credited a photo I shot of the special CSI-themed Onrez SL viewer created by Electric Sheep. All the photos I took, and ever take, are Creative Commons Attribution licensed, so anybody can use them, for commercial purposes as well, as long as they credit me as the source of the photo (if somebody wants to do away with that requirement, that is possible too, under separate special arrangements).

The organizers of the Virtual Worlds Forum also graciously agreed to allow me to post the video of the panel I recorded (Thanks, Sasha!), and I am busy editing that as well. As it is longer then ten minutes, and I am not Google which is evidently not bound by the rules it sets for others posting on YouTube with hour long videos of its own there, I will upload it on Google Video.