blog de notas de juan freire

… As we move from the realm of “pure” software – that is, programs running on generalised computers producing essentially digital output (even if that is converted into analogue formats like sounds, images or printouts) – to that of “applied” software, there is a new element: the device itself.

For example, in the case of the pacemakers, having the software that drives the computational side of things is only part of the story: just as important is knowing what the software does in the real world, and that depends critically on the design of the hardware. Knowing that a particular sub-routine controls a particular aspect of the pacemaker tells us little unless we also know how the sub-routine’s output is implemented in the device.

What that means is that not only do we need the source code for the programs that run the devices, we also need details about the hardware – its design, its mechanical properties etc. That takes us into the area of open hardware, and here things start to get tricky …

The problem with hardware specifications is that they are only really useful to those with the facilities to implement them – that is, hardware manufacturers. In fact, those best placed to explore the hardware are the original designers and engineers with their prototyping machines. So what is needed is some way for others to get involved in that design process right at the start, not after everything has been decided. Of course, there are technical areas that few have the competence to comment upon – but some do: there are bound to be designers and engineers outside the company who are able to make useful comments. And even non-technical people can comment on other aspects – for example the appearance of devices, or assumptions about how they will be used.

Companies already gather that kind of information through market research, but there’s a key difference here. Instead of the company paying a specialist market research organisation to go out and ask people what they think about a possible new product, this would entail opening up the entire design process to let anyone comment. Where the former depends on finding enough people who may or may not have interesting things to say, the latter is self-selecting: those who have opinions are given a way of expressing them.

This is not a new idea. It was formally dubbed “open innovation” by Henry Chesbrough a decade ago, notably in his book of the same name. It’s based on the simple but powerful idea that there are always more people outside a company than inside it who know about any given subject – it’s never possible to hire all of the world’s experts. And so it makes sense to open up the development process to tap into that pool of expertise that would otherwise be missed …

… The BlackBerry was designed for businesses. Its true customers weren’t its users but the people who run corporate information-technology departments. The BlackBerry gave them what they wanted most: reliability and security. It was a closed system, running on its own network. The phone’s settings couldn’t easily be tinkered with by ordinary users. So businesses loved it, and R.I.M.’s assumption was that, once companies embraced the technology, consumers would, too.

This pattern—of winning over business and government markets and then reaching consumers—is a time-honored one. The telegraph was initially taken up mainly by railroads, financial institutions, and big companies. The telephone, though it became popular with consumers relatively quickly, was first used principally as a business tool. The typewriter’s biggest users were offices. The Internet originated in the military-industrial complex, and first found an audience among academics and scientists. The personal computer, though popular with hobbyists early on, came to market dominance only once I.B.M. introduced models targeted squarely at businesses. Historically, new technologies have been very expensive—when phone service was introduced in New York, it cost the equivalent of two thousand dollars a month—and so early adopters have generally been companies that could make (or save) money by using them …

It didn’t. In fact, even as the BlackBerry was at the height of its popularity, we were entering the age of what’s inelegantly called the consumerization of I.T., or simply Bring Your Own Device. In this new era, technological diffusion started to flow the other way—from consumers to businesses. Social media went from being an annoying fad to an unavoidable part of the way many businesses work. Tablets, which many initially thought were just underpowered laptops, soon became common among salesmen, hospital staffs, and retailers. So, too, with the iPhone and Androids.

…

The consumerization of I.T. has deep economic and social roots and is unlikely to go away. Technological innovation has dramatically lowered the cost of computing, making it possible for large numbers of consumers to own powerful new technologies at reasonably low prices. (Apple’s products seem pricey, but despite the weak economy it has sold more than a hundred million iPhones and more than forty million iPads.) The workplace is changing, too. The barrier between work and home has been eroded, and if people are going to have to be constantly connected they want at least to use their own phones. Companies have quickly come to love consumerization, too: a recent study by the consulting firm Avanade found that executives like the way it keeps workers plugged in all day long. And since workers often end up paying for their own devices, it can also help businesses cut costs. One way or another, consumers are going to have more and more say over what technologies businesses adopt. It’s a brave new world. It’s just not the one that the BlackBerry was built for.

… Design Thinking originally offered the world of big business—which is defined by a culture of process efficiency—a whole new process that promised to deliver creativity. By packaging creativity within a process format, designers were able to expand their engagement, impact, and sales inside the corporate world. Companies were comfortable and welcoming to Design Thinking because it was packaged as a process.

There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation.

CEOs in particular, took to the process side of Design Thinking, implementing it like Six Sigma and other efficiency-based processes …

By formalizing the tacit values and behaviors of design, Design Thinking was able to move designers and the power of design from a focus on artifact and aesthetics within a narrow consumerist marketplace to the much wider social space of systems and society …

So what is Creative Intelligence, or CQ? Let me start by saying it is a concept in formation and I hope our conversation over the next months will give it a true, deep meaning. Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen’s Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space—our lives today.

At this point, I am defining Creative Intelligence as the ability to frame problems in new ways and to make original solutions. You can have a low or high ability to frame and solve problems, but these two capacities are key and they can be learned. I place CQ within the intellectual space of gaming, scenario planning, systems thinking and, of course, design thinking. It is a sociological approach in which creativity emerges from group activity, not a psychological approach of development stages and individual genius …

The Mongoliad is a community-driven, enhanced, serial novel that you read with your Web browser, smart phone, or tablet.

The story, which unfolds week by week, is set in the year 1241 CE when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world and only a small band of warriors and mystics stood in the way of utter defeat and subjugation by the great Khan.

It has already been lauded as a swashbuckling swordplay novel with the sweep, charm and verve of the major Stephenson epics.

[Introduction]

After the Baroque Cycle was published, Neal said to me, “I’ve written all of these swordfights, but I’m pretty sure that I got at least some of them wrong, so I figure I need to learn how to really fight with a sword so that that doesn’t happen again.”

…

We are presenting The Mongoliad first as an online serial novel for a few reasons. One is that it lets us share an intimacy with readers that isn’t possible when the books come out every three or so years, all at once, in doorstop format. When something gets you excited or bores you, we want to know. Another reason is that we are energized by the possibilities for creating parts of this novel not only as words, but as illustrations, graphic novels, maps, and eventually games and movies. We’d really like to engineer this thing so that we can make good use of all of the possibilities inherent in this kind of distribution. After all, up until now novels have been defined by the technology of the printing press, and we don’t have to use that definition anymore unless it suits us. So to that end, some of the things that show up here will be chapters of the novel, some will be character portraits, some will be background articles about topics raised by the progress of the narrative, some will be maps… we don’t really know the full extent of what it will be, but we do know we want it to be awesome. And part of it is our website, http://mongoliad.com, where everyone can join the conversation, and have fun discussing, arguing, bloviating, and maybe even influencing the progress of the story in some way …

Uma revolução social e de costumes ganha território nos rincões do Nordeste do Brasil. O movimento saiu das lan houses das áreas pobres do interior e da capital, expandiu-se pelas zonas rurais, entrou nas casas e em comunidades. Promoveu grandes transformações coletivas, sociais e culturais. O cotidiano de famílias, associações e escolas foi alterado. Percorremos 11 mil quilômetros, nos nove estados da região, e constatamos que o Nordeste está atravessando uma nova fronteira - a fronteira digital.

O acesso a computadores, celulares e à web formou redes de comunicação no mundo real. São redes que têm a internet como ferramenta de apoio e que ligam cidadãos em torno de interesses comuns. É um fenômeno novo, estágio avançado da inclusão digital. Investigamos as mudanças provocadas em um lugar que teve quase o dobro do crescimento do número de internautas nos últimos cinco anos. O Nordeste aumentou 213%; o Brasil, 112%, diz o IBGE - embora muitos continuem excluídos. É o mesmo que desponta no topo do ranking de acessos a sites de relacionamentos virtuais (75%). Este especial multimídia mostra a inclusão para além da lan house e do Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube e outras redes sociais - algo que também já foi popularizado neste território. Gráficos e quadros ilustram o Brasil do qual estamos falando; entrevistas com especialistas e links para estudos fornecem informações extras para os interessados. Textos, vídeos e o mapa das cidades visitadas desvendam nomes e sobrenomes dos que desenham esta nova geografia sociodigital, a nova fronteira das expressivas mudanças que vêm ocorrendo no Nordeste.

A reportagem percorreu os nove estados do Nordeste. Ao todo foram 11 mil quilômetros. Entrevistamos mais de 50 pessoas …

Censorship and deletion practices in Chinese social media, by David Bamman, Brendan O’Connor, and Noah A. Smith. First Monday, Volume 17, Number 3 - 5 March 2012

Abstract: With Twitter and Facebook blocked in China, the stream of information from Chinese domestic social media provides a case study of social media behavior under the influence of active censorship. While much work has looked at efforts to prevent access to information in China (including IP blocking of foreign Web sites or search engine filtering), we present here the first large–scale analysis of political content censorship in social media, i.e., the active deletion of messages published by individuals.

In a statistical analysis of 56 million messages (212,583 of which have been deleted out of 1.3 million checked, more than 16 percent) from the domestic Chinese microblog site Sina Weibo, and 11 million Chinese–language messages from Twitter, we uncover a set a politically sensitive terms whose presence in a message leads to anomalously higher rates of deletion. We also note that the rate of message deletion is not uniform throughout the country, with messages originating in the outlying provinces of Tibet and Qinghai exhibiting much higher deletion rates than those from eastern areas like Beijing.

… Según sostienen teóricos neoliberales, el sujeto se comporta como lo haría una empresa y se enfrenta a sus pares de la misma manera: de forma estratégica, calcula los posibles beneficios y pérdidas que se desprenden de la interacción y busca ante todo defender sus intereses. De esta manera, surge lo que denominamos el sujeto-empresa, el empresario de sí mismo, el emprendedor que compite en el mercado por mantener su nicho y hacer viable su existencia. Obviamente este proceso no ha acontecido de espaldas a marcos institucionales y sin el auspicio de políticas de promoción, que han sido determinantes a la hora de crear la figura del emprendedor/a tal y cómo la conocemos hoy en día. En un trabajo anterior he estudiado cómo se ha ido construyendo el discurso en torno al emprendizaje en cultura en el Estado español y qué tipo de dispositivos e instituciones se han creado para propiciar este fenómeno (Rowan, 2010). A lo largo de los últimos años se ha edificado una densa arquitectura institucional compuesta de incubadoras, planes de promoción, oficinas de información, eventos, charlas y talleres, líneas de financiación o espacios de co-trabajo, que complementada con programas de televisión, eventos públicos, películas libros y revistas, han impuesto un modelo empresarial muy específico en el campo cultural: la figura del emprendedor/a cultural. Este proceso ha venido acompañado por importantes cambios en las políticas públicas y los discursos que las sustentan …

la aparición de sujetos-marca, es decir, personas que son empresa hasta sus últimas consecuencias. El sujeto-empresa es aquel que aprende paulatinamente a implementar y a hacer suyas diferentes estrategias de mercado, y a moverse en un entorno poblado por otras empresas, la producción de una marca fuerte que le representa es tan sólo una consecuencia de este proceso. Así, el emprendedor explota todos sus activos, es decir, sus saberes, sus contactos, sus redes, sus intuiciones y sus afectos y se convierte prácticamente en una máquina cuyo objetivo es aumentar la productividad  y competir en el mercado con otras formas empresariales. Debe poner su cuerpo a trabajar y depende de su capacidad para autogestionarse lo que le hace viable o no como modelo empresarial. Como cualquier empresa debe aprender a producir una constelación de signos, elementos visuales, discursos propios y rasgos identitarios que le diferencien de sus competidores y ayuden a su identificación. Es entonces cuando se empieza a producir el sujeto-marca, es decir, se genera un interfaz capaz de mantener de forma sostenida al sujeto-empresa en la esfera pública. La marca es la condensación del valor del sujeto-empresa, es el punto en el que sus activos se exponen al escrutinio de sus posibles clientes y potenciales competidores …

El valor simbólico, que siempre ha sido crucial en el campo de producción cultural -como bien argumentó Bourdieu- , adquiere ahora unos mecanismos optimizados para su construcción y diseminación, y por lo tanto resulta imprescindible analizar el auge del sujeto-marca para entender las recientes transformaciones en el campo cultural. Para ello se puede servir de diferentes herramientas y tecnologías de la comunicación como los blogs, cuentas de Twitter y de  Facebook y otras redes sociales que sirven para construir la identidad digital de la marca, y al mismo tiempo sirven para promocionarse dentro de los espacios de validación social de la cultura: inauguraciones, saraos, presentaciones, conferencias, etc. De esta manera su cuerpo deviene la barrera última que distancia a la empresa de sus clientes, el cuerpo es el propio interface de la marca. Es por esta razón por la que en ocasiones se hace muy complicado separar lo público de lo privado, lo íntimo de lo social, la realidad de lo que se busca proyectar. La necesidad de regular lo que la marca comunica implica un proceso de regulación, es decir, es necesario hacer un trabajo constante de evaluación en torno a qué emociones se exteriorizan y cuáles no, qué ideas se pueden formular en público y cuáles no, qué comportamientos son deseables y cuáles no. En este sentido la marca puede terminar siendo un marco de contención y un límite al desarrollo de la subjetividad, el autocontrol se transforma en paranoia. Un tweet demasiado mordaz, un comentario desafortunado, una emoción mal calculada pueden hacer que la marca se resienta …

… The value of community and serendipity is what’s driving the wild-fire emergence of hybrid workspaces in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville. In places like Artisan’s Asylum, experimentation and entrepreneurship intersect, engineers work next to artists and their collaborations fuel creativity …

Entrepreneurs who aren’t lucky enough to catch the eye of a venture capital firm on their own can compete for MassChallenge’s annual one-million-dollar prize. The money is just a nominal motivator; the real rewards are the networking opportunities and office resources allocated to some 125 startups selected to share a 27,000-square-foot floor, donated by developer Joe Fallon, in a Fan Pier high-rise. Started in 2010 by business school graduates John Harthorne and Akhil Nigam, MassChallenge’s hodgepodge of startups gets mentors from partner organizations and rare access to top investors. The office is a beehive of activity, where finalists work alongside peers with projects in a range of high-growth industries. They have use of legal advice, office cubes and a whiteboard so massive it’s being certified by Guinness World Records. Collaborations range from a biotech developing treatments for blindness to a company that delivers artisanal wines to customers’ homes. And for motivation, the entrepreneurs just need to look out their floor-to-ceiling windows on the waterfront to imagine themselves as masters of the universe.

Academia, too, is seeing a new generation of workspaces, like the Harvard i-lab (Hi for short) in the Allston building that was formerly home to WGBH. Director Gordon Jones describes the i-lab, which opened last November, as a startup, an experiment in bringing together students and resources from schools across the university. Harvard students have access to the center’s classes and its experts, but retain rights to their own intellectual property. The center also hosts workshops like “Startup Secrets: Company Formation,” taught by venture capitalist Michael Skok, with some of the seats reserved for the public. A circular open-floor plan, exposed ceiling and IdeaPainted surfaces sprinkled with inspirational quotes evoke the dorm rooms and hacker spaces that might lure the next Mark Zuckerberg, and maybe even keep him from dropping out this time. 

“Part of what this is about,” Jones says, “even in the building design, is high modularity. It’s intentionally unfinished. This is about all of us building this place together.” Instead of an office, Jones sits in an approachable, small cubicle. The intermixing of people who wouldn’t have met in a traditional classroom pays off. For example, a biology graduate’s thoughts on natural selection influenced a business school student’s theories on company performance …

Whereas Cambridge’s coworking spaces, both academic and industry, tend to be tech-oriented, Somerville’s workspaces are more community-driven. “It’s not about making millions of dollars,” Graney says. She started the Design Annex, a 1,400-foot center housed in Union Square’s former police station, so that designers of all stripes, who would normally work out of their home, would have 24/7 access to a place free from domestic interruptions. Since the Annex is part of a global network, members, for the price of a monthly gym membership, can use workspaces or conference rooms to conduct meetings anywhere in the world.

While Annexers tend to be designers already established in their careers, another building houses a panoply of fledgling businesses. Located in a 4,400-square-foot warehouse set back from the street, Fringe comprises 20 people and 16 companies—ranging from cult brewery Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project to a roof-garden business, Recover Green Roofs. There are coworking days when Fringe opens its brightly colored conference room to people looking for a place to work, and even provides them with free coffee. Businesses pay for space per square foot, and they can partition and decorate their offices to any taste. Custom-bike builders have a utilitarian shop next to a space shared by a video producer and studio photographer, which is overseen by a salvaged piece of Shepard Fairey street art depicting Andre the Giant. Every business is deliberately different, as meticulously curated as if it were part of an art exhibition …

Entre julio y noviembre de 2009, los estadounidenses Joshua Glenn y Rob Walker llevaron a cabo el proyecto Significant objects. El objetivo: probar que un objeto con una historia vale más que un objeto sin ella. Para el experimento invitaron a cien reconocidos escritores, Whitehead, Jonathan Lethem o Bruce Sterling entre ellos. Cada uno debía inventar una historia para un objeto viejo comprado en el portal eBay. El resultado fue contundente: las baratijas compradas en eBay por un total de 128,74 dólares fueron vendidas por un 3.612,51 dólares. El valor añadido de las historias fue donado posteriormente a causas sociales. ¿Cuánto cuestan unas mini botas de metal? 3 dólares. ¿Cuánto valen las botas si pertenecieron a unos soldados aventureros de Sicilia que se embarcaron en la Guerra Civil de Estados Unidos (historia inventada por Bruce Sterling)? 86 dólares. La narración de la epopeya, la emoción generada, cuestan 83 dólares …

Calles = objetos compartidos. Y ahora llega la vuelta de tuerca Objetos-Ciudades. ¿Por qué no consideramos una calle, una plaza o una avenida como un objeto, como un spime de historias compartidas y escondidas? En un momento en el que algunas instituciones o marcas apenas hablan de una Internet de las cosas de objetos conectados con sensores, de datos controlados verticalmente, las Historias de las cosas cocinadas conjuntamente pueden jugar un papel vital. De nuevo, la tecnología necesaria es asustadoramente básica. Podemos abrir una entrada en la Wikipedia para un rincón / calle / parque de una ciudad. Después, creamos un código QR para dicha entrada con la herramienta gratuita QR Pedia. Una vez colocado en el espacio físico serán los ciudadanos los que creen una narración colectiva (suma de narraciones individuales) sobre dicho lugar. Parece inevitable: las instituciones o marcas tendrán cada vez más difícil imponer narrativas sobre lugares concretos. La voz ciudadana se va a elevar. Y la ciudades, bosques o islas se irán transformando colectivamente gracias a un procomún de historias…

Y aquí llegamos a otro detalle crucial: las narraciones están adoptando formatos híbridos, mutantes, imprevisibles. Un mapa elaborado colaborativamente con la herramienta WhatIf de Ecosistema Urbano es una narración colectiva. Una serie de tweets alrededor de un hashtag es un relato colectivo. El sonido de una plaza (voces, gritos, música), grabado y subido a la red, puede ser un tipo de relato. El proyecto HistoryPin, que yuxtapone en google maps fotos antiguas y recientes vinculando personas del presente gracias al pasado, es una narración colectiva. Y basta colocar un código escaneable —muy pronto ni si quiera hará falta código— en el espacio físico que nos traslade a un sitio de Internet para completar el círculo de los relatos del procomún …

Y las narraciones serán las articulaciones básicas para esa ciudad relacional de “lugares y redes” de la que habla el antropólogo Michel Agier. Las historias compartidas, en la ciudad fragmentada, deterritorializada, pueden ser una argamasa tan sólida como las relaciones de parentesco. Pueden acabar incluso sustituyéndolas. Las historias son aquellos hilos que los habitantes de Ersilia, una ciudad invisible inventada por Italo Calvino, colocaban entre las casas de la urbe. Los hilos eran blancos o negros o grises o blanquinegros dependiendo de las relaciones de parentesco, intercambio, autoridad o representación. Cuando los hilos eran tantos que ya no se podía pasar por en medio, contaba Calvino, los habitantes se marchaban: las casas se desmontaban. Apenas quedaban los hilos. Y luego construían en otro lugar una nueva ciudad imitando la telaraña de relaciones.

Las historias colectivas son los nuevos hilos. Las lianas compartidas que quiebran muros, fronteras invisibles, segregaciones étnicas. Da igual el color que tengan estas viejas-nuevas historias, porque son narraciones colectivas, compartidas. Pero en lugar de molestar los tránsitos, las narraciones-hilos conforman el esqueleto, la columna vertebral, las extremidades y el corazón de las ciudades del procomún. Por eso es importante construir relatos —como sugiere el colectivo de escritores italiano Wu Ming— como si fueran espacios para ser habitados. Por eso hay que construir calles o plazas como si fueran narraciones colectivas, como si fueran párrafos insustituibles de un imaginario superior que da sentido a la nada.

… la asociación Geomun2.0, dedicada a la cartografía colaborativa, organizó en enero un taller con el fin de que quienes montan en bicicleta diseñen una red de carriles funcional. Los participantes llegan al local del MediaLab-Prado donde son las sesiones y se sientan en sillas blancas. En las que quedan libres dejan sus cascos de bicicleta.

Olga Terroba, la coordinadora del taller, plantea sus objetivos: además del obvio de diseñar el carril, quiere fomentar que los ciudadanos mejoren el espacio público y popularizar el software libre con que trazarán los mapas. Añadir desde casa información a las plantillas de OpenstreetMapno es más difícil que buscar una dirección en Google. Un administrador que trabaja con los criterios definidos en el taller se encargará de revisar los datos que los usuarios suban desde casa. También pueden adjuntar fotos o vídeos de Youtube con más información.

“En vez de protestar, queremos promover soluciones más prácticas que las que ofrecen políticos que desconocen la realidad”, explica Olga. “La gente propone y nosotros, los técnicos, ponemos medios”. El taller comprende cuatro sesiones en las que se discute, se organiza una salida para tomar datos de la calle y se suben estos a los mapas. Cuatro días que pretenden convertirse en la semilla de un trabajo prolongado que presentar a la Administración.

Al taller están inscritos 60 participantes, pero a la primera sesión asiste solo una treintena. En la última serán diez, el núcleo duro del proyecto. La mayoría trae sus propios ordenadores, y los dirige el espíritu asambleario del 15-M: no hay líderes en los debates, lo que hace que se combinen discusiones útiles con peroratas que mueren entre incómodos silencios. Entre todos, poco a poco van añadiendo ramales al carril …

Think the annual arts fest in the Nevada desert is nothing more than a week-long bacchanal? Think again. It’s a a master class in how to create awesomeness.

It’s easy to dismiss Burning Man as nothing more than a bizarre hippie love-fest that takes place deep in the Nevada desert every year the week before Labor Day. But doing so misses the fact that it’s an amazingly successful enterprise—and, as such, has a thing or two to teach about how to inspire creative people and create a great product.

Since it first began 25 years ago, Burning Man has grown larger every year (if you ignore the slight dip in recession-scarred 2009). It’s grown so much that this year, for the first time ever, the organization had to cut off ticket sales early, for fear of finally hitting the 50,000-person limit authorized by its federal land-use permit. And those tickets aren’t cheap either—they now cost an average of $300 a pop.

Granted, Burning Man’s overall intention is not to create a “product,” per se. (Not one for trite labels, it calls itself an “experiment in community.”) But its growth numbers—in terms of customers and revenue—are ones any business could envy. So how does Burning Man do it?

…

…

1. Obtain a basic understanding of network technology.

2. Craft your network identity.

3. Understand network intelligence. 

4. Understand network capabilities.

…

So are there limits to the network approach? The famous “Dunbar’s number” suggests that people have the cognitive capacity to keep about 150 relationships in their heads. Hoffman thinks that concept is outdated. “One hundred and fifty relationships might be the limit for our short-term memory — our RAM, if you will — but under that lies a hard drive that has much more capacity.”