Here are some notes from the first day at F2C: Freedom to Connect. I was unable to blog live as the network in the conference facility was having problems providing HTTP access.
First up was Tom Evslin introducing Vermont Governor Jim Douglas. Since I read Tom’s blog, I was aware of the e-State initiative they are discussing in VT, so there wasn’t a lot new to me. But one comment struck me about investing government money (long term bonds) in infrastructure that had long term value (towers, conduits, fiber) while leaving electronics to private investment. I don’t expect to see politicians who get that level of detail.
Yochai Benkler gave an excellent talk on the Wealth of Networks but it was almost exactly the talk I heard at Harvard last April, so no new insights. I still enjoyed it!
This was followed by a panel with Benkler, kc claffy, Mark Cooper and Elliot Maxwell. I was particularly struck by kc claffy’s comments on the fact that we have little (she would say no) measurement data on what’s really happening within the Internet (in terms of traffic, routing protocol behavior, etc.). This is a subject I’m interested in as I’ve read a lot of Tom Vest’s publications. I’m not sure what she was advocating as a solution and I didn’t find out more in the brief discussion we had after her talk.
Just after lunch, there were demos and talks by David Smith on Qwaq, about their virtual world has evolved from Croquet. It links a series of personal spaces between machines using peer-to-peer technology. This talk and demo was followed by Cory Ondrejka of Second Life who had tons of interesting information. I don’t have good note, but if you get an opportunity to hear him speak, try to attend.
The next panel was on Enabling Technologies and included James Salter of Atlantic Engineering. One interesting comment he made was reference to a 100% FTTH build in a southeastern US city which cost $1250 per home. Who says this stuff has to be expensive. I have a friend who’s town put in sewers and charged individual homeowners $13,000 each to connect. Salter was followed by John Waclawsky of Motorola. John’s presentation has a certain professional glitz but his sub-text was that the edge will win and core can be relevant to the extent it supports letting people at the edge do what they want.
The final enabling technology panelist was Sanjit Biswas of Meraki.net, a spin-out of MIT’s Roofnet project. They have a $50 wireless mesh router that’s been on the market for nine months. It’s now in use around the world. A typical mesh has one to N Internet feeds. They are experimenting with organic, community evolved networks by giving communities a few free DSL connections and a bunch of routers and watching what happens. There are case studies here.
The panel on Network Enabled Government had several interesting points, especially the comment from Fred Hassani.
Rep. Steve Urquhart (Politicopia) Utah congressman (from Zion National Park area). Politics is not neutral – puts up wiki pages (per issue) with a very short “neutral” statement of the issue followed by Pro and Con sections. People seem to respect these different parts of the pages.
Fred Hassani (Intellipedia) Read disclaimer, then talked about intelligence communities use of Wikis, JWICS (Top Secret), SIPRNet (Secret), Intelink-U (Intranet) all launched with no management or plan. 9000 users on top secret and 300 edits per day – when small plane crashed in Manhattan there were 9 agencies that made 80 edits to a newly created page within 2 hrs. National Intelligence estimate on infectious and chronic disease mercyhurst project as a college class. Good understanding that you draw people in by providing something that is useful to them (perhaps to organize their data).
Micah Sifry (Sunlight Foundation) putting up pages on things like congresspedia with public info but in a fashion that encourages individuals to add information or do research or do manual work to
This panel was moderated by Allison Fine who is the author of Momentum. I got an autographed copy afterwards, but haven’t read it yet.
The final two speakers of the day each got a bit of a hard time from the audience. First up was Sean Moss-Pultz of OpenMoko. His points: We shouldn’t be trying to recreate the PC on the phone. OpenMoko has an open source mobile handset (a GSM phone). Unfortunately, he spent his first ten minutes setting the stage saying things that everyone already knew and getting some of the specifics wrong! E.G, his phones timeline was wrong (GSM in 1980). He was railing against the US practice of operators controlling handset sales, but he didn’t seem to have done the research on what is possible. Internet timeline also full of bogus dates (Skype in 1999); never mentioned an end-user benefit. I felt sorry for him. He should have attended in the morning to understand the crowd he was addressing.
Sean was followed by Jeff Chester on Digital Destiny — It was a strong anti-advertising pitch, but there was extensive questioning of his position on the back channel. I even dropped in a comment myself based on something I’d read from Douglas Galbi but which I paraphrased as I didn’t have web access to be sure of the actual quote and attribution. It was this from Wikipedia
Advertising spending relative to GDP has changed little across large changes in media. For example, in the U.S. in 1925, the main advertising media were newspapers, magazines, signs on streetcars, and outdoor posters. Advertising spending as a share of GDP was about 2.6%. By 1998, television and radio had become major advertising media. Nonetheless, advertising spending as a share of GDP was slightly lower -- about 2.4%.
summarizing Galbi’s points here.
The day ended with some book pitches by Allison Fine, Jochai Benkler and Reed Hunt (whose book In China’s Shadow is very concerned about China’s impact on the US economy. At first is sounded like he was advocating some kind of protectionism, but then it became clear he was advocating a broadband economy and a resurgence of entrepreneurship.
Nice reception (and book signing) at a nearby restaurant. Plenty of interesting people to talk to! Well worth the trip.
http://kentsimperative.blogspot.com/2007/04/he-who-owns-platform-redux.html
many of the non-inclusive small wikis and other similar “sharing” platforms being generated both inside government and by its academic partners, attempting to copy the concepts of Intellipedia and other like tools.....
Posted by: Kent's Imperative | April 10, 2007 at 01:56 PM