Today  the OpenSpime Developer Network and OpenSpime.org have been launched!

The architecture of the OpenSpime protocols, based on an extension to XMPP, is available for anyone to explore, and improve, but what is even more important is that with very little effort anybody can run his or her own OpenSpime servers, and implement OpenSpime compliant applications using the Pyopenspime libraries which have also been released simultaneously.

OpenSpime is an ambitious project, and it is not only about technical issues of implementation, protocol optimization, server scalability, etc. The healthy development of future technologies which can have a high level of impact on our societies depends on the availability of the right kind of policies concerning privacy, data retention, security, etc. for individuals, corporations, and government bodies alike.

OpenSpime.org has the aim of becoming the meeting place for an open debate about these wide ranging issues, where the discussion can be held alongside the technical development of the infrastructure, so that there won’t be a consumer backlash against poorly thought through policies, or ambiguous terms in privacy protocols.

(Photo by Nasa, uploaded on Flickr by Jurvetson. See a high resolution version too!)

The Phoenix interplanetary exploration vehicle landed on Mars. My name, David Orban, is on it, together with those of the other members* of Planetary Society. This is of course a rather indirect way of being on Mars, but for the moment I can’t do better, and it is still thrilling to feel part of humanities space exploration efforts!

The photo above is really worth seeing at high resolution: it shows the Phoenix lander descending on the surface, as seen by the Mars Orbiter flying around the planet.

*If you want your name flying into space on other vehicles, you can participate in other programs that the Planetary Society is organizing too!

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.

[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

Tomorrow I will be speaking at Extropia Core at 1PM PST, invited by Sophrosyne Stenvaag for her ‘Saturday Salon‘ conversations. The title of my speech is going to be “The New Renaissance“

OpenSpime is the infrastructure company for an open Internet of Things!

OpenSpime creates hardware reference platforms, and software environments for collecting, and managing information about the world around you, where you live, you work, you travel. And through the aggregation of multiple validated data streams online, it enables new ways of visualizing the data collected.

Free hardware, free software, open APIs and communication protocols. OpenSpime’s business model is about the provisioning of the SpimeID identification numbers for the trusted communication of validated data streams between spimes and the OpenSpime servers.

We will be presenting the first OpenSpime prototype hardware sensor for CO2 level detection at ETech next week, and are actively seeking funding for OpenSpime, Inc. which is being incorporated in California.

On Feb 15 the voting for the ‘Grand Challenges For Engineering in the next 100 years‘ is going to start. This is the contribution I wrote for the discussion there:

Atomic scale assembly, and programmable matter… A better understanding of quantum mechanics, and the software capable of exploiting it will give us unparalleled power over the structure and function of the objects we build.

As we move to leverage our increasing understanding of nature’s laws on the atomic scale, and the computational power enabling more and more powerful software programs designing these atomic assemblies, we will be able to construct–actually most of the time enable to self-construct–objects on a level of effectiveness and flexibility orders of magnitude higher than today.

Since humans started manipulating stone, and mud, to shape, and build objects, and tools to build better, more functional objects, the refinement of these activities might have led us to believe that we have gotten fundamentally better, while actually a stone age clay oven and Intel’s latest chip fabrication plants are based on the same principles. This macro-level approach is not sufficient anymore to achieve our goals, and simultaneously share the world’s resources in a more equitable manner among all the peoples needing them.

Rather than assuming quantum behavior as a nuisance to shield from, we have to accept it as an intrinsic and powerful element of reality, and learn to exploit it in our designs. Once we do that, everything in engineering is going to change radically: from design, to construction, to building, to project management.

Since the consequences of this radical approach are going to be vast, and complex to anticipate, it will be crucial to analyze their impact not only from the point of view of engineering itself. We will have to be alert to the possible social consequences, and inform the political decisions that will unavoidably regulate what are permitted or desirable actions through sound scientific analysis.

I have been invited to hold a lesson at the California School of International Management‘s course on Strategic Marketing. The lesson will be delivered online, via Skype, and Second Life on the island of Lipari, on Wednesday, February 6, starting 2PM PST (11PM CET). If you would like to attend just let me know in the comments, or write me an email a tweet, or anything else that you fancy, and I will be very happy to have you with us.

During the seminar I will concentrate on analyzing the role of brands and strategic messaging in the future, drawing a parallel with what these concepts might have meant in prehistoric times, and concluding that today we have to speak with the same immediacy, and spontaneity that has formed the basis of communication then.

Thanks, Marc, for the invitation and the organization of the event!

Nowadays there is no programmer probably who doesn’t feel at home using mice and windows, and who is not glad that high level tools help in the development of rich client or web applications.

Online worlds have been attracting content creators, especially Second Life, which is famous for having started out as an empty desert, and was filled with millions of objects by its inhabitants. This however is a little different than the attitude of hackers. These have a natural tendency for self-reflection, whereas whatever they place their hands on is turned into a further tool for making new tools, to program better. An example could be the passive attitude of many users of Second Life, who lament the low quality of the debugging tools that can be used in-world. This would be never accepted by a true hacker spirit, where the quality of a debugger is especially important for the creation of highly evolved code.

We have to watch, consequently, very alertly, any attempt at luring programmers, developers, hackers, to any online world, as the one which wins their hearts will leapfrog the others.

Today IBM announced their Project Bluegrass, a virtual world in which they will immerse the Rational CASE toolset, and the Jazz collaboration platform. For the moment Bluegrass is not apparently open, so I can’t comment on it further, but the move in itself, if followed by something that people can try out and use, could be a good one.

Not a lot of people remember VPL Research these days, even if many know Jaron Lanier, the inventor of the term ‘virtual reality’. VPL Research produced and marketed at the end of the ’80s and the very beginning of the ’90s the original DataGlove, and other groundbreaking virtual reality tools. Jaron Lanier was convinced that virtual realities were necessary for making sure that the computing metaphor could advance.

And VPL in the name of the company stood for ‘Visual Programming Languages’.

Thanks to Michele for the original article!

I asked him: “How can people find the right balance if their adaptability is stretched to its limits by technological progress evolving the rules of change?”

The Dalai Lama answered: “Technological progress has to serve humanity in its quest for happiness. It must not be the other way around, with humans enslaved to technology and money. The difference between humans and technology is that humans have feelings, and what I always say to my friends, is that our education systems have to teach the inner values of spirituality to the person.”

And at the end, like the crack of a whip he said: “I think that one day, the part of the brain which brings feelings should be removed, then we should be like robots, and ourselves become part machines. That would be good, actually. That would be super!” and he laughed…

Was he then joking? Or is the Dalai Lama a singularitarian transhumanist and he laughed so that those who were not ready could pretend and not take him seriously?