EmergingTech Writeup

Offline and unable to sleep because of a really painful lower back, I spent my laptop battery writing up some notes from my experience at Emerging Tech. The advantage of doing it from that vantage point is probably a bit more reflection than in my previous entries. The disadvantages inclue the failings of my short-term memory, and my knack for ignoring things i don't like :-)

Since I was offline when I wrote this, there are no links in the text (i may add them later) but to compensate it's full of what I would call "monkey-class typos"

United Airlines Flight xx from San Diego to D.C.

The end of a long week at ETech.
Emerging Tech 2004 was a conference of highs and lows. Rooms full of brilliant minds, and sharp pens, with a good bit of hacker thrown in t actually make stuff happen. Starting on Monday with the DigitalDemocracy Teach-in, the conference got off on the wrong foot. While the changes in the US democratic process were certainly interesting, and the Howard Dean campaign and it's impact on the presidential election surely worth studying, there was an element of self-congratulation, and righteousness, that doesn't belong in a conference discussing a democracy that is still, at best, deeply troubled. From former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, extolling his virtues, to the endless talk about the importance of bloggers and social software systems such as deanspace. It was a highly US centric day, and to be frank democracy is neither a US invention or even something that the US seems to do particularly well. I sorely missed some more critical attitudes in a time when, despite the good intentions of bloggers and internet activists, mainstream media is still becoming ever more powerful, and large portions of both the US and world populations still have no access to the internet, let along any ability to contribute in a  meaningful way to this so-called democratic revolution.

I was skeptical in advance, and had it not been for the fact that one of the speakers was my good friend and mentor Ethan Zuckerman, probably would have gone to some of the tutorials instead. And had it not been for the excellent closing session with Ethan and Joi Ito, I would have gone away from the session with little worth telling. As it was I might have preferred participating in one or more of the hands-on tech tutorials, but at the same time, the teach-in was definitely the talk of the conference, and a lot of people I talked to were as skeptical as myself, and the corridor conversations on the perceived power of blogs and social software were interesting.

The conference itself started on the tuesday morning with Tim O'Reilly's welcome and keynote. I think Tim O'Reilly is one of the sharpest observers in the tech space, and one of the few at that level with a real understanding of the power of hackers and hackability to innovate. While his keynote in many ways was similar to the one he gave at Reboot in Copenhagen in June 2003, he again had some very clear observations on the near future of the tech industry. The second tuesday morning keynote, in stark contrast was an embarrassing sales pitch from Helen Greiner of iRobot corporation. I do admit to be slightly biased by a general failing to be really fascinated by robot technology, and by the sale-pitch allergy that my dot-com period inflicted on me. The short of the matter is that I walked out on this keynote within the fist 5-10 minutes, and from the corridor chatter have nothing to regret.

In general I ended up spending far more time in the corridors listening to the gossip, connecting and chatting than at actual sessions. Partly because i was at times less than blown away by the cutting-edgedness of the tech on display.

Rael Dornfest and Tim O'Reilly wrote in the conference program, "Two strong themes emerged as we pt the conference program together: mobility, also known as 'untethered', and social software".
This statement was very true, and also to a degree embody most of my criticism of the program. I would add to that a third and much more riveting (and emerging) theme, namely geolocation and collaborative mapping, which in turn embodied a lot of what I found strongest about the conference.

Untethered: A lot of sessions in the untethered track were focused on cellphone systems, and mobility with sessions on mobile hack talking about different ways to use your cellphone for unintended purposes, sessions on high speed cellular data technologies, social software and presence information system on cellphones. While all of these subjects are certainly interesting, and useful, it is hard for me to justify the term emerging technologies in that respect. Almost exclusively featuring Us based projects (a few notable exceptions) and with a few talks seemingly reinventing things that were tried in scandinavia, japan and korea a few years back, I witnessed what I can best describe as a sort of denial of reality. The US market, and services in the cellphone market are literally years behind, and as Joi Ito eloquently put it in his monday afternoon talk show with Ethan, the rest of the world is past using laptops. They've moved on to the cellphone, and services are popping up continuously.
One session entitled "How I learned to Stop Worrying and love the Cameraphone" (disclosure: I wasn't at this session so this critique is based only on the session description) purportedly talked about "a groundswell of anxiety over privacy issues, and widespread skepticism over the value [of cameraphones]).
I'm sorry, but I'm with Joi Ito on this. Cameraphones are the next big thing. Everyone has them, loves them and uses them all the time. The protests over privacy and skepticism at the value of having a camera in your phone are nothing more than a whisper, mostly spread by those (like myself) who don't have one, and hence don't really 'get it'. Emerging they're not, and neither are presence applications, IM on the cellphone or other such projects.
In defense there were some really neat projects shown, including the wonderful hackish projects presented by Tom Igoe's team at NYU, and the down to earth approach to user centric design presented by the (non-US :-) Priya Prakesh, regarding Project Miljul in India. It is also worth noting that the untethered track included a number of projects that were more about open networks, distributed ownership of architecture and freenetworking. While free wireless LANs are also hardly emerging tech, it is refreshing to remember that other argument for wireless. Not the mobility but the ownership of the network, and the freedom that gives to hack, to innovate and to steer clear of corporate and governmental control and censorship.

The Social Software track, I'm afraid I just don't understand. I fail completely to see the value of friendster, tribe, linkedin, orkut and all the other incarnations of these systems. I fail to see that adding groups is going to make orkut uniquely different than the overhyped and largely defunct dating service that is tribe.net. I have argued before that the need for these social linking applications seems to be uniquely american, and perhaps am willing to add to that the alpha-geek culture. I remain unconvinced of their value, and in fact am highly skeptical of their application. Partially because organizing your connections on-line seems yet another step towards isolating those that live and breathe on irc, from those that either don't have access, or insist to hold on to th quaint idea that personal relations are just that, personal, and shouldn't be tailored to and given away to a third party system. I have yet to see the social software service that actual is social, and not just a cool tool for alpha-geeks, and americans to manage their list of friends, and share the occasional file. The day i actually use one of these services to broker a second-degree connection and something valuable come of it, i might reconsider (though i doubt it). in brief social relations are far to complex to be categorized with the crude tools presented by thee services, and far too personal to be trusted to companies with terms of service anything like Orkut.
Again, i need to make some exception to the rule, namely for narrow much more specific ideas, that do not attempt to manage or organize personal relations, but instead use readily available meta-data and the on-line behavior of individuals to make recommendations, or improve the way we work with existing tools.
2 topics under the Social Software heading seem to illustrate the opposite point.
FOAF (Friend-of-a-Fiend), is an idea in it's early stages, and deals with two of the problems of on-line social software services, namely that the value of my relationship data is far too high, and the energy needed to encode it in a machine-readable format far to high, for me to give it away to an arbitrary on-line service, and at the same time the lack of interoperability between services means that this effort needs to be duplicated across services. FOAF is an rdf data model that allows you to describe you relationships and information about yourself in a machine-readable format that can be kept locally and shared at your own leisure.
While i remain unconvinced of the need to encode this type of information about yourself and your relationships at all, I am convinced that if anything revolutionary is ever going to emerge in this area, FOAF or something like it will play a definite role.
The other application that seem to have real value is a much more narrow approach and hence does one thing really well, is del.irio.us, a collaborative bookmark exchange system. Because it is simple to use, and aims at doing only one hing, which i to gather information based on peoples bookmarking habits, and use that as the basis of recommendations, it seems to be a much sounder approach. It is not as such Social Software, anymore than amazon is, but is a useful tool for gathering useful information from activities you do anyway. This i dig.

The third and by far the most interesting topic of Emerging Tech revolved around geo-location, mapping and collaborative efforts to tie contextual information to geographic location. From the program description of Schuyler Erle's Tutorial on OpenGIS (which I missed): "Human Beings are born storytellers. Within every story we tell, about ourselves or about the world, is some idea of location - for when things happen, they always happen somewhere." Location is important, and collaborative mapping and geo-location seems to me to be the most emerging technology of all. Because, even though GIS as a technology has been around for years, and interesting uses of it have existed for a long time, a change is ripe to occur. Most geographic data is proprietary. Most detailed maps are owned wither by private companies or public offices. Counties, governments and armed forces around the world, have access to extremely detailed information that, released to the public, would most definitely result in incredible innovation in community as ell as business. Geographic visualizations have the power to tell stories and visualize data like few other things.
In fact, coming back from Emerging Tech and after fascinating discussions, especially with people from locative.net, I realize that geographic data has a lot in common with software. Public offices and Governments spend millions of the tax payers money to hire private consulting companies to produce detailed geographic information, which is since licensed at prohibitive prices, further enriching the private businesses that have been fed once already for their work. Like Open Source software and to a lesser degree Open Spectrum, accurate and open Geographic information would be a powerful innovation-generator, and have strong potential results, especially in the non-profit sector, the developing world, and places and projects where access to existing information is prohibitively expensive.
Even more importantly I see this area as the most Emerging of them all. Ripe for change, and with a growing community finding increasingly clever ways to create and leverage open data, this is a space I ill be watching closely. Much like we have seen with Open Source software, I could envision a combination of proprietary geo-information being freed for public usage, and collaborative approaches mapping areas where this is not the case. Much like Open Spectrum, basic geo-information and maps, which are after all, just representations of the real world, should be an open substrate, a utility available to us all, with useful applications, further layers of information et. being added under open or proprietary licenses.

Highlights of ETech 2004:
As with most conferences, the real value is in the corridor conversations. The small discussion with bright minds, that inspire, and the introductions to the next big thing. 12 months ago I would probably have been much more taken aback with the a-list of participants.The bloggers who are self-proclaimed emperors of the blogosphere, the bussines leaders who have made real stuff happen. At this point, with the self-confidence that comes from breaking through into the much tougher world of IT in development, and with the exposure to the energy and bright ideas of community hackers and geeks, I am a little less taken aback. It's not that I have less to learn from these people, or less respect for what they do and are, just that my world is a little different now. I work with communities, hackers and geeks, and want to make a difference from the bottom up.

here's a few of the talks that I considered highlights at this year ETech, some of them I have blogged previously, and others I've just provided links to other peoples notes, and perhaps a few brief comments.

• Tim O'Reilly: O'Reilly Radar
• Ethan Zuckerman and Joi Ito: Emergent Democracy Worldwide
• Priya Prakash: Project Miljul
• locative.net: Collaborative Mapping Workshop and related sessions
• Edd Dumbill: Continuous Search of personal Information Space with Dashboard

Things I missed that I wish i hadn't:

• Dan Brickley: FOAF Lightning talks
• Scott Draves: Electric Sheep
• Dave Sifry: Technorati Hacks
• Danny O'Brien, Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overpolific Alpha Geeks
• Microsoft: Wallup?

Themes that were conspicuously missing?

• VoIP on the client: Skype