schmoozy space Mark Szpakowski's szpace blog

Hi all! I'm moving to my new memer blog. Ciao!

In his commentary on his Chöying Dzö, Treasury of the Space of Dharma ("dharma" meaning things as they are, therefore Richard Barron's translation of the title as The Precious Treasury of the Basic Space of Phenomena), Longchenpa (early 14th century), the pre-eminent Tibetan Buddhist master of the Nyingma lineage, explains the meaning of the title:

The metaphor is "The Precious Treasury", while its underlying meaning is "the Basic Space of Phenomena". The basic space of phenomena -- naturally occurring timeless awareness, totally pure by nature -- is mind itself, ultimate truth. The metaphor and underlying meaning are thus connected, because all phenomena of nirvana and samsara without exception occur due to awareness or a lack of recognition of that awareness. This is analogous to all that is desired coming from a treasury of jewels that grant whatever one imagines.

This brings to mind the esse of Thomas Aquinas (mid 13th century, the Angelic Doctor of the Catholic Church), usually translated as "existence" - but note that esse is the Latin verb to be. Esse, says Jacques Maritain, can be directly experienced through the "intuition of Being". William Carlo, metaphysician extraordinaire, with whom I had the fortune to study, characterized esse as the "thesaurus of the possibilities of existence."

Which is why in my mind Longchenpa and Aquinas are always having tea.

I've just been looking at Otto Scharmer's Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (The Social Technology of Presencing) (excerpt). The U Process is a powerful practice and theory for self-transformation of communities and organizations. In talking of enabling conditions to inspire shift on a global scale, Scharmer includes:

A new social art form I call Social Presencing Theater that stages media events and productions to connect different communities and their transformational stories by blending action research, theater, contemplative practices, intentional silence, generative dialogue, and open space.

This resonates with Buckminster Fuller's proposed World Game, where thousands of citizens would gather to watch large-scale simulations and scenarios of planetary actions and their results, something clearly necessary in our time. Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth tour is a great indication in that direction.

Social Presencing Theater takes this a step further. As he describes in a short section on The Theater Stage and the Collective Field, presenting and performing with a live audience is a different experience. The audience, caring and attentive, with minds and hearts wide open, creates a collective holding space, within which intention and presence co-emerge.

The practice of such a collective holding space would be a great direction for the technical/social-technology community to go in, both for conferences and for social collaboration tools. Bar Camps and Unconferences already bring together Open Space Technology and community-building web tools such as Wikis. Theory U and Social Presencing Theater could help give rise to the further necessary quantum moments pregnant with the reflection, dialogue, and self-organization that are being called for.

I'm attending RoCoCo Bar Camp in Montreal, which is about Wikis and "Meetings on Collaboration, Creativity and Self Management". This UnConference is run Open Space style and, being in Montreal, bilingually.

The OpenSpace way of generating agenda topics, small discussions, and return to a circle of all resonates well with the community-driven nature of how wikis grow and are cultivated. As one participant said, "we're building how we work together."

Okay, so others don't have to go through the hours I just spent trying to get a 15-minute install happen: I needed to get WordPress going on a Windows 2000 machine running Apache. I installed the latest stable PHP5 and MySQL, checked out that I could see my php.ini information in a web page, and then command-line queried MySQL to create a database and user for WordPress. But, after unzipping the WordPress files and customizing wp-config.php, and running wp-admin/install.php, I get the dreaded Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress message.

Well, I'll skip to the end. The key things:

• PHP5 doesn't come with automatic support for MySQL
• Edit your php.ini file, uncommenting so that you get
  extension=php_mysql.dll
extension=php_mysqli.dll
• Also add or edit to get
  ;Directory in which the loadable extensions (modules) reside.
extension_dir = "c:/program files/PHP/"
• That last line is pointing to the top level of my PHP install directory, where I chose to put php_mysql.dll. I could also have created an ext directory there to put such things in.
• Put libmysql.dll in NT\System32 (probably anywhere in the Path will do)
• If you don't have php_mysql.dll and libmysql.dll, you can get them from snaps.php.net.

I've been enjoying being on Facebook lately. It does a clean, elegant, exciting job of putting together intersecting circles of people networks, on various scales. The key seems to be people-orientation, in whatever ways people form relationships. I pay attention to my identity, which is almost entirely made up of little communcations with other people channeled through my face and through the groups we form. It's like grooming behavior: we spend time looking through each other's fur, picking out interesting stuff... :-)

Facebook has a Status Updates feature, where I can post short msgs, all starting with, in my case, "Mark is...", as in "Mark is in short sleeves 1st time this year", and also see others' status updates. The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) was a pioneer in this. A perpetually recreated topic in the Grateful Dead forum was a Status Report topic, where all messages were one liners starting with the user's first name or nickname. It created an ongoing sense of touch, as does Facebook and its siblings.

The page layout of Facebook, with its rectangles of RSS feeds and polyarchically owned editable content frames, gives a sense of living mosaic that I haven't felt since the days of NCSA Mosaic.

I've had a recent interesting UI experience with providing an iNames login for a site: many, many error messages showing that people are typing search terms into it. Ie, they are using it as a search box!

One reason this may be so is that an OpenID (which includes URL-based IDs and iNames) login just asks you for your OpenID: there is no password field. When you authenticate, you enter your OpenID, and are taken to your Identity Provider (IP) (unless iName Single-Sign-On is taking place), where you provide your password. In OpenID, your IP is the only site to which you provide your password! So the site you're accessing (technically the Relying Party) asks only for your id, and not your password, and so displays a single text field in which to enter that ID.

However, I think people are used to a single field, especially at top of a window, being a search field, in which you enter search terms.

One proposed solution: intially display a Login button, and no text field. When that is clicked, a text field for entering your id slides open, you type your iName there, and click the Login button to get authenticated. If nothing has been entered in the text field it slides shut when the Login button is clicked. I'll see how well that works.

There's been a related discussion (cf Joannes Ernst's blog) on best practices for an OpenID enabled login design that also supports the username/password option. I wonder if the same issue will hit that design if the OpenID version of a login box is shown by default. No, people do not read the fine print!

On Monday I attended a Tidal Power Feasibility Study presentation at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography, in Halifax, NS. The study was conducted by the Electric Power Research Institute on behalf of states and provinces in North America, including Alaska, Washington, California, Massachusetts, Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. This is about second generation technology, TISEC, Tidal In-Stream Energy Conversion, which bypasses dams in favor of multiple bottom-anchored turbines. Interestingly, these have benefited much from advances in wind-power generating technology, reducing their learning curve and entry cost.

The huge advantage of TISEC is its power density; since it makes use of moving water, this is much higher than that of wind or solar. Nova Scotia's Minas Basin, with the highest tides in the world, is the number 1 spot in North America, and perhaps world-wide, for TISEC. Second is right under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Large scale commercialization still seems a decade away. A 150 megawatt plant in Minas Basin would be immediately price competitive, with zero carbon emissions. The fact that you can use discrete TISEC units (with EPRI having identified 3 top candidates) suggests small-scale tidal power generation may also be feasible, assuming rights are granted to public waterways.

I just returned from the Internet Identity Workshop (love the logo!) held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. About 140 people attended, including most of the Open Source players in this field: a bunch of really bright people with heart. The conference was done in Open Space Technology style, with Identity Woman (Kaliya Hamlin) doing a great job of holding the space. We broke up into small groups for presentations and discussions, most of which were high quality, and then re-forming into the whole: systole/diastole.

This may turn out to have been a landmark event in internet history. Why? Because it signals the need for, and ways to achieve, user-centric identity, which can both help solve a number of problems (I've got to manage dozens of userIDs and passwords; my blog comments get spammed; I've got to fill yet another form on this web site) and enable new capabilities (I can put together my personal mosaic (dare I use the mashup word?) of the web people and sites I care about, stitched together through my secure active identity).

Up to now it is the sites that I deal with that give me identities, and extract information about me. We are regarded as eyeballs to be information-mined (remember the Cluetrain Manifesto, Doc Searls noted). It's long past overdue to flip this around (with attempts to do this starting with Novell's DigitalME in the late nineties, but see the Identity Space Map for more), so that the user, the person, is in control of their own identity and the profiles exposed to others, whether they be persons, person-proxies such as weblogs, or web sites offering services. Flipping this around is a bit like moving an ocean, but perhaps we've set the moon in motion to produce a sea change.

The procedure for importing a MacOS X Mail mailbox into Mail is not as obvious as you might expect. I'm posting this entry to spare others the frustration I went through.

I have what must be a common scenario: I normally use an iMac, but was on the road for a week, so took my old iBook so I could use Mail. Now, having collected the messages I want to save to a mail folder/mailbox, I want to move that mailbox (NewMsgs.mbox) over to the iMac. Surprisingly, just copying the ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/NewMsgs.mbox folder from iBook to iMac, and restarting Mail, doesn't work: I get an empty NewMsgs mailbox there.

Next I try the File:Import Mailboxes:Import data from:Mail for Mac OS X menu selection, which provides the following dialog: .

Here's the rub: selecting a mailbox folder results in a No valid Mail for Mac OS X files were found error message. You must select a folder (any folder, located anywhere) containing the desired mailbox folder (yes, the dialog does say this). The error message is beside the point, even misleading: there are valid Mail for Mac OS X files in the mailbox folder, but Mail won't find them unless it starts looking from a parent folder.

Awesome - listening to Neil Young's Living With War, streaming over the internet. Intense impassioned singing, lyrics, guitar - the ghost of 'lectricity howls through the bones of his face (thnx, BD). This is goosebumps stuff! The server's dropping out at times, but hey, what a blast of true feeling. So overdue, such appropriate emotion - this will turn GWB to jello.

Links:

neilyoung.com Neil Young web site
www.hyfntrak.com/neilyoung2/AFF23130/ The album, streamed
livingwithwar.blogspot.com/ The album's weblog
myspace.com/neilyoung

Nancy White posts about needing an easy to use blog community. I think hers is a classic use case, with some key details including:

• inexpensive or free
• easy to use for non-techies
• individual blog for each user
• group blog aggregating individual blogs

Surprisingly enough, there's nothing out there that really fits the bill. Here at coachingplatform I'm working toward that, integrating the Blojsom weblog server with coachingplatform's user-centric, multi-topic workspaces. However, there's a ways to go, especially regarding usability, about which I learned a lot from a recent experience offering a multi-user private blog inside a coachingplatform topic for a group of teenagers.

What we'll be offering:

• a public blog for each user, to which you can post from inside coachingplatform or using your favorite blogging client (e.g., Netnewswire, the Performancing Firefox plugin, ...). This is pretty much ready to go.
• for each coachingplatform topic, a private multi-user topic blog, visible only to the participants of that topic. Any of them can post to it, and only they can see it. The use case for this is teams working or playing together, where they want to share with each other but not with the whole world
• for each topic, a public multi-user topic blog, so the team or group can publish to the world. An outstanding example of such a blog is WorldChanging. We would offer much more: all the collaboration tools (libraries, discussions, web pages, courses) that come with each coachingplatform topic.

That leaves aggregating individual blogs (there's been some debate about how well this works - Drupal/CivicSpace, which do this, tend to quickly become messy and confusing), and - did I mention this :-) - ease of use!

I got an e-mail notice about Money and Intentional Economics: Developing an Integral Vision, A Symposium with Bernard Lietaer, at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, July 7-9. This led me to an interview with him, which was a real eye-opener. Lietaer was co-designer of the Euro and of the process whereby it got implemented, and has worked with currency trading and electronic payment systems on a major scale.

One key insight: money is not value neutral. Introduction of  competitive programmed currencies has destroyed societies.  Making use of complementary currencies, such as time dollars, which can act in addition to the existing currency, can transform the planet:

I believe that by a small change in the money system, we can unleash huge improvements in our social system. It's the highest leverage point for change in our society, and surprisingly few people are looking at it. If you start a new complementary currency system, it can become self-perpetuating and facilitate additional transactions forever.

Private currencies are coming back - think air miles, and how credit cards and virtual currencies are starting to blend. The Balinese already participate in a dual-currency system, and benefit from how complementary currencies strengthen social bonds. Some key quotes:

Complementary currencies simply enable additional matches between unmet needs and unused resources.

The point is: if money is an agreement within the community to use something as a medium of exchange, we can create new agreements, can't we?

For more, check out the Access Foundation, an "Alliance of Complementary Currencies Enabling Sustainable Societies".

A recent wired.com article talked about glanceable information: "you can keep abreast of it with so little mental effort you're not even aware you're paying attention".

This is implemented in many video games, as well as in combat environments, through HUDs - Heads Up Displays, - which project information on your visual field or in the periphery of your center of attention. Such information can provide a sense of context, for example giving a high-altitude map view. It can also track the status of your provisions, fuel, life force, nearby friends and enemies, and other vital info. This is technology that is useful to apply to a situation room or command center, whether that be institutional or personal. In the latter case it could be part of a mosaic view of what is currently important to me, as well as who the key people are in that context. It somewhat parallels how the visual field works, with central focus bordered by sensitive periphery.

The flip side of this is that you also want an environment, with background active agencies, that follows your subtle gestures, nudges, acks, and nacks. This is especially important in situations where you are living with software agents which follow and anticipate your intentions: you'd want these to be highly responsive to your spare gestures, ultimately tied in to your mirror neurons, and acting as your mirror neurons, much like a close pet or companion. For example, such an interface seems necessary to make active subject maps, which contextually organize information relative to you and to others' subject maps, a realistic possibility.

Jamais Cascio writes in worldchanging.com:

The intent isn't to cut people off from their immediate physical experience, but to allow people to maintain non-physical contact with distant experiences -- the health of a sick relative, or weather forecasts, or traffic levels on one's blog.

This is one of the best summaries I've seen of what is opening up in regard to being able to stay in touch with ourselves and our world, as we are and as we could be, by overlaying our experiences of these  through the now much more available and useful technologies of augmented reality (annotating physical space), virtual worlds (living in shared spaces which intersect the real), and simulations (playing with complex interacting systems and what they produce). The comprehensive anticipatory design science envisaged by Buckminster Fuller now seems doable, so we can know the details of our environment, be able to share those and use them for driving shared simulations, and collectively engage in the politics of decision-making.

Such tools can exist in the context of an individual's web browser, but also in multi-screen immersive theaters, with the live presence of people interacting with themselves and manipulating the instruments of the reality-studios enacting their story. The latter could recall the long now of the all-night Javanese shadow puppet play, which mixes the current, the topical, the humorous, with the mythic and timeless.


Technorati Tags: worldchanging, augmented reality, simulation, virtual worlds, buckminster fuller, long now, shadow puppet