• Masters of Media, New Media MA Amsterdam PICNIC %u201808 - Itay Talgam Interview
  Itay Talgem: Conductors aren't leaders. (That's the first vionlin's job.) Instead, "the conductor has another job. He has to make people connect. So it is about connectivity, about becoming a conductor to enable other people to work together. So that is quite a funny profession. In internet, I guess people are very much interested in the ways people come to collaborate and to create together."
  (tags: ideas music conferences connection xenophilia)

If you’ve been to a tech conference in the past five years, there’s a good chance you’ve also been to an “unconference“. Unconferences work to break down the barrier between speakers and audience, inviting all attendees to participate in shaping the program, offering sessions or contributing to the discussion that’s taking place. Done well - Foo Camp, the various Bar Camps, blog unconferences - they’re a great way to tap the expertise of everyone in the room, to ensure that discussions focus on topics people care about. Done badly, they’re chaotic and frustrating, dominated by the loud and self-confident (I’m both, and I’m well-aware that I need to be moderated.)

So I approached Mastermundo, a day-long conference following on the end of PICNIC with some trepidation. The conference organizers were emphatic in making the point that this was an unconventional conference, designed to break the rules of conferences as we knew them. Instead of having a stage, podium and audience, we’d meet in the modern art museum, on a train, in public spaces, moving from Amsterdam to the Hague during the day, with speakers delivering talks to an audience listening on headphones. Not an unconference as I’ve attended them before, but certainly not a conference like PICNIC, with a stage, an audience, the performative act of making your case with your words and a few sides.

What the hell. As it turned out, I was planning on spending my Saturday in Amsterdam visiting the modern art museum and taking a train to the Hague to meet a friend for dinner. Why not attend a conference while I was at it?

Two surprises about Mastermundo. First, I had a great time… and I wasn’t sure I would. Second, it’s really hard for people to break from their scripts, even if you beg them to.

Mastermundo Conference at Stedlijk Museum

At the (temporary location of) the Stedelijk Museum, we were given headsets and told that we could wander anywhere in the gallery while listening to the speakers. The first speaker, a Dutch designer, immediately broke script, asked people to sit near him, so that we could see the images on his laptop screen. When subsequent speakers encouraged attendees to wander through the galleries - showing a fantastic show of contemporary African photography - they were rapidly defeated by the short range of the headphones and the tendency of people to want to see who’s speaking to them. Try as you’d like to break this rule - when someone tells a story, people will sit and listen to her.

And despite promises of breaking all the rules, we eventually found ourselves in a conference room in the Hague, looking at the speaker in the front of the room and watching a slideshow on a giant screen. You may be creative, rebellious Dutch artists, but you are no match for the power of Powerpoint.

I’d chosen to give my talk on the train from Amsterdam to the Hague, figuring this was the only way I’d be guaranteed the opportunity to read my notes. As it turned out, I probably had the most unusual experience of all the speakers. I sat in the front seat of a train car, wedged in next to the equipment necessary to broadcast my voice via FM, looking at the end of the car or out the window. As I delivered my talk, the only person I could see was the technician, who was trying so hard to keep the transmitter attached to its battery that I couldn’t get any emotional feedback from her at all. It felt more like one of the recording sessions I’ve done for reading for the blind than like giving a lecture.

I found the whole experience so strange that when my friend Rafi took my place as the next speaker, I perched myself within his field of vision so that he’d have a face to look at and the reassurance that someone was hearing what he was saying. I don’t know whether this was helpful or simply made him more self-conscious. I simply hope he doesn’t think I’m stalking him.

A few folks seemed to connect well with the talk so I thought I’d share it here, more or less as I delivered it. Envision yourself sitting on a train looking out the window as I read this to you. Or while you’re wandering through a gallery of contemporary African photography. Or don’t. That will work too.

When I was twenty years old, I’d just finished university, and I’d won a scholarship to study in Ghana, West Africa for a year to study Ghanaian music.

I knew more about Ghana than the average American. For four years, I’d studied Ghanaian drumming in university and had worked with some of the best musicians in that country. I’d read books, magazine articles, newspapers, talked to lots of Ghanaians in the US, people who’d travelled there before.

Which basically meant that I knew nothing. As the plane from London descended, I looked out the window expecting to see the bright lights of the city of Accra, one of the largest and most populated cities in West Africa. It took me a moment or two to notice that there weren’t that many lights and that very, very few of them were on top of one another.

In that single moment, I realized that my vision for how I’d be spending this year was entirely wrong. I’d been planning on finding a part of Accra where young urban professionals lived in apartments. I’d get an apartment, make friends with the neighbors and live basically the same way that I would had I left college and moved to Boston or New York.

This, of course, turns out not to be possible. In 1993, it was pretty uncommon to rent an apartment in Ghana with less than 10 years rent in advance. And besides, people didn’t really rent apartments - they lived with their families until they were able to build their own houses. The young, up and coming Ghanaians I wanted to meet were either making their fortunes in the UK or the US, or living with their parents.

I ended up renting an apartment from a guy named Patrick Fiachie. He’d left Ghana for the Soviet Union as a youth, studied at Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow, and eventually sought political asylum in the US, in Minnesota. For twenty years, he worked as a counselor to undergraduate students at a small college in Minnesota… which meant kids like me were very familiar to him, and he was very familiar to me.

Patrick Fiachie, Osu, Accra, Ghana. 1993

Patrick had come home to Accra, and found himself in the business of translating between the realities of Americans who’d come to study in Ghana and Ghanaian realities. He was a bridge figure - he was able to explain to the owner of the building he lived in why it made sense to make foreign visitors pay rent one month at a time… and as a result, the building she’d built as an investment filled up with international scholars who were paying far more rent than Ghanaians would have… despite the fact that I was paying $100 a month for two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bathroom, which had power most of the time, though no running water.

Patrick acted as a bridge in different directions. I mentioned to him one night, as we were playing chess together, that I felt like a stranger in the neighborhood. The kids kept calling me “brofunyo” - white man - even though I stopped in the streets and introduced myself in Ga. A couple days later, I noticed that everything had changed - people were greeting me by name and being much friendlier. I overheard a conversation at a local market stall - a woman said to another market woman, “Oh that white man - he’s uncle Pat’s nephew.”

I didn’t make any sense in the neighborhood until someone had claimed a relationship with me. It was pretty obvious that I wasn’t Patrick’s nephew - I’m white, he’s black, we don’t look very much alike. But in introducing me to the neighborhood as his nephew, I became his respobnsibility. If I did something wrong, they could contact Uncle Pat about my behavior. And once I was connected like this, it made sense to treat me differently.

The view from my apartment window, Accra, 1994

It would have been pretty hard to figure all this out without getting on an airplane. I can tell you what it’s like to go from being a stranger, an outsider, to being part of the neighborhood. I can even tell you what it smells like when you get off the airplane, wet earth and burning plastic, but I can’t explain why it’s one of the most wonderful smells in the world, why it brings tears to my eye when I catch a whiff of it.

A few years later, I had the chance to go back to Ghana in some very different circumstances. I’d gotten very lucky in the dotcom boom in the US, and I had some money in the bank. And I wanted to do something to help this nation, which I’d fallen in love with. My bright idea was that Ghana might be able to participate in the same sort of Internet revolution that the US and Europe had been living through. I realized that one of the gaps Ghanaian businesses were dealing with was a skills gap - there were very few people who knew how to design a webpage, set up a database or manage an internet service provider. So I started raising money to bring American and European volunteers to come live and work in Ghana for a few months at a time. We called it Geekcorps because it was a little like the American Peace Corps, except it was staffed with geeks.

This worked out pretty well, actually. There are lots and lots of burnt-out geeks in the world who are excited about the chance to work in Africa. And African businesses are often pretty receptive to the idea of low-cost consulting on technical issues. It worked well enough that we ended up running projects in more than a dozen nations, mostly in Africa. Some succeeded, some failed, but I noticed something in the long run: whether or not a project was successful, it almost always had some sort of transformative effect on the volunteer’s life.

Several of the people we worked with decided to stay in Africa for good. A handful got married to people they met while they were volunteering. A large number changed the direction of their careers and a few are now leading people involved with the world of technology transfer in the developing world. Having the chance not just to visit as a tourist, but to work in countries like Ghana, Rwanda or Mongolia gave them a chance to make connections that ended up changing their lives.

Me. Dzolo-Gbogame, Volta Region, Ghana, 1994.

I don’t run that nonprofit anymore for a very simple reason - it’s really, really expensive to buy airline tickets. Not just the tickets - it’s expensive to get visas, to house people, to make sure they’ve got health insurance and enough money so they eat. But if I could find a way to do it that wouldn’t bankrupt me and destroy the environment, I’d be looking for as many opportunities as possible to take people out of their everyday context and bring them into different parts of the world where they can be helpful. This doesn’t need to cross international borders, by the way - the US is big enough and diverse enough that I’ve seen people get a full dose of cross-cultural contact by going urban to rural or vice versa. But it needs to be for a long time, and it needs to be in the course of doing a project, otherwise you’re a tourist, and it’s hard to connect in that circumstance.

What I’m looking for are the sorts of experiences that forces someone to confront the reality that the way they, personally live, isn’t the only way to live… and that it may not be the best way to live. That’s something easy to understand consciously, but it’s harder to feel. Personally, that feeling wears off for me fairly often - I need to spend a lot of time with people I admire, people who are living very different lives from my own to be reminded that my way of seeing things isn’t the only way.

Basically, what was so great about Geekcorps was that it put me in a position where I could help create xenophiles. Xenophiles are people who are fascinated by the whole world, by things other than their ordinary experience. They’re people who want to connect with people who see the world very differently. Some of these people are born this way, lots more are made - a good recipe for xenophilia is to raise a child in a culture deeply different from that of her parents - people call these kids “third culture kids”. Third culture kids have one foot in each of two cultures - the culture of the country they grew up and the culture of their parents, and as a result they don’t really live in either, but a little bit in both. Some kids hate this - many love it, and they end up bridge figures, natural xenophiles who can help translate cultures for other people. Barack Obama’s one of them.

It’s my theory that xenophiles are going to be very powerful in the future. We’re living in a world that the pro-globalization folks refer to as “flat”. That’s bullshit, obviously. The world is flat as far as stuff is concerned. In my hometown of 3000 people, I can get water from Fiji and fish from Chile, but I’m not going to encounter any Fijians or Chileans. I’m not even likely to encounter information from those countries, news, opinion or cultural influences like films or TV… not unless I very actively go looking for it. So the world’s flat in terms of stuff, but not in terms of human interaction. It’s flat, but in the least important ways - in the ways that matter, in the ways that would allow us to connect with people from other cultures, allow us to share ideas and solve problems together, the world is disconnected. It’s lumpy.

Xenophiles are good at making connections in this lumpy world. It’s a good idea to have them if you’re trying to do business in another country - some of the people who are making lots of money in this economy are people from developing nations who study in Europe or America and then return home. They can bridge between cultures in a way that helps them make smart economic decisions. They’re even more important if you’re concerned with security or with diplomacy, because their ability to cross cultures makes it far more likely that they can collaborate and create solutions with people from other cultures.

So here’s the question I’m interested now: how do we build real, productive connections with people across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries… without putting people on airplanes? Or trains? How do we efficiently manufacture xenophiles?

And since you guys can’t answer, I’ll go ahead and offer one solution that works really well - intermarriage. If you fall in love with someone from a very different culture, you’ve got a strong incentive to connect with that person’s family, learn their culture, change your perspectives. And while I’ve thought about this, it’s even harder to figure out a scheme to make intermarriage mandatory on a massive scale than it is to figure out how to put a substantial fraction of the world’s population on airplanes.

I’d been hoping the internet could be a solution to these problems. After all, it’s now possible to read the newspapers in another country, to read the blogs of people who live in these countries and hear what they’re thinking about. We can go to flickr and see the photos that people take, we can surf youtube and watch the videos that are making people laugh in other countries. Shouldn’t this help us connect with people around the world?

That’s what I thought a few years ago. I helped start a website called Global Voices, which is basically a site designed to help you find citizen media from other countries, especially the developing world. Want to know what people in China are talking about online? We filter through thousands of Chinese blogs, try to find the conversations that are interesting, translate them into English… and then into over a dozen other languages. If you read the site, you’ll end up getting a much better sense for what the hot topics are in other parts of the world… and you may find yourself emotionaly invested in someone else’s blog, and by extension in their life and ideas.

But you probably won’t. That’s one of the biggest things we’ve discovered with the project - it’s hard to care, even if you want to. I can point you to a lively conversation taking place in another corner of the blogosphere and even if you can read the language, you’re probably not going to connect with the conversation. You don’t have the context. And beyond that, you don’t have any connection to the people or events involved.

It’s not your fault. Human beings are tribal by nature. There’s a sociological phenomenon called “homophily” - it’s the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together. Let people organize themselves and people will form into groups, usually by race, nationality, religion, level of education. In the US, there’s a lot of mobility - people move all the time - and we’re starting to see this happen politically - Bill Bishop calls it “The Big Sort”. It ends up meaning that left-leaning people live with other leftists, conservatives with other conservatives and we’ll each understand less about each other. We do this with information as well. If information affects people like us, we pay attention to it - if not, we’re almost hard-wired not to care.

It turns out that there’s an art to getting people to care. It’s about telling stories, stories that introduce us to people we care about, whose pasts we speculate about, whose future we worry about. Most of the world’s problems can’t be summed up by a single story about a single person… but unless you can attach a story to a problem, it’s likely that you won’t get anyone to pay attention to the larger problem. The problem with this art is that it can turn into a trick. The trick works by oversimplifying, turning stories into good versus evil, black and white. If we tell the story and lose the subtlety, at a certain point we’re lying.

We’ve got the infrastructure that makes it possible to connect to one another, to tell stories to one another, to share films and family photos and things that make us laugh or cry with people anywhere in the world. And so far, we’re pretty bad at using it. At the worst, we use it to hurt each other - think of the guy in Lagos who wants to rip you off while promising you millions of dollars… or the guy in London who makes sport out of humiliating and punishing him.

So here’s where I’m asking for help - we need bridge figures, people who can help build connections between cultures. We need xenophiles, people who are interested in the whole world and in building conversations that break out of the homophily trap. We need tools that let us use this infrastructure to connect. Help me figure out how to bridge people and how to build these tools.

Say what you will about the decor in the Lloyd Hotel - and I have - the food’s pretty damned good. And the menu’s pretty charming, offering options like “boiled vegetables”, “posh boiled vegetables” or “superposh boiled vegetables”.

I did get hung up in the “deep fried” section, however. There, below the cheese croquettes and the bitterballs (fried gravy, more or less): “balls of chef thor, three”.

Genevieve: He’s got three of them?
Me: Had. Who knows how many are left.
Genevieve: Please tell me we’re ordering that.
…
Me, to the waiter: The balls of Chef Thor, please.
Waiter: Of course. (pauses). That doesn’t sound very good does it?
Me: How do you say it in Dutch?
Waiter: Chef Thors Ballen
Genevieve: I don’t think that’s really any better.

Some impressions of the daylong Surprising Africa event at PICNIC08:

- Binyavanga Wainaina, an extraordinary Kenyan writer, talked about the problem of naming, figuring out what language we can use to describe the Africa we encounter today. He’s recently travelled to Lagos, a city that he used to think of as scary, which is now a place he’s come to love and be fascinated by. Driving from Lagos to Ibadan, he finds himself passing huge churches by the side of the road. He stops in and begins talking with people at one compound, called “Redeemer’s Camp”.

It quickly becomes clear that it’s more like a small city than a camp. There’s a huge suburb of tidy houses, and warehouse-sized churches - put together, the churches can seat hundreds of thousands. The community was built by an applied mathematician, who had apocalyptic visions and began buying property outside of Lagos in the 1980s. Members of the church - bused in from Lagos in old American schoolbuses - decided that it would make sense to live closer to the church. They came up with a novel arrangement - you could get land, power and water for free if you’d build a house with a spare room that could be used by visiting church members. Now many of the people who live here aren’t active in the church - they just wanted a quiet and safe place to live.

Lagos is huge and unfamiliar, but Binyawanga finds it filled with people looking for ways to make good, to solve problems. “to thrive in this city, people have to search for good. There’s an unbelievable quest for good.” How do we describe a place that’s so unfamiliar, is portrayed as so threatening, and is so hopeful and filled with good?

It’s always great to see Erik Hersman on stage, talking about the work he’s doing on the brilliant Afrigadget. In the best “point, don’t speak” fashion, he never talks about his hard work documenting African ingenuity - he just gets out of the way and lets the projects tell their stories.

His talk today hits some of the highlights of Afrigadget over the past couple of years: the spread of mobile phones, the amazing variety of applications developed to take advantage of them, the complex work done to localize technology into African languages, the creative solutions to the power and infrastructure problems of the continent. But, frankly, his documentation of his talk is so much better than anything I could come up with, you should just read what he has to say.

The punchline - Africa’s an amazing lab for innovation, because if it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Montskilelelo Veleko is a South African photographer fascinated by the ways in with South Africans are making their own fashion. She meets people in the streets of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town who’ve made their own clothing, setting themselves apart from local styles and fashions. In some cases, their clothing serves as a walking advertisement for their services as fashion designers. The heart of her presentation is a series of photos showing at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, set to the music of BLK JKS. The track in question was so hot, I’d bought the album off iTunes before her talk was through. But that’s only because I’m not brave enough to dress like the folks she’s portraying, or talented enough to get the shots she gets.

Filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa addresses the theme of the day - how do we look at Africa in a different way - in a very direct fashion. Her film, “This Is My Africa“, is a close look at the continent through the eyes of a dozen or so Africans, who talk about their favorites colors, flavors, smells, sounds and sights on the continent. While this sounds like a recipe for sentimentality, it’s actually an exploration of the creative energy of the continent - she shows us a fifteen-minute excerpt, where her subjects show energetic paintings coming from the continent and look at the wide range of astounding music to be found between E.T. Mensah and Fela.

Saro-Wiwa plans on making the film expansible, allowing viewers to record and add their own contributions, so that no sound, sight or smell goes undocumented. You’ll be able to add the pieces you care about on her website in the near future. Can’t wait to see the film, which is screening in locations around the world.

I sat next to Francis Kéré for two hours at the PICNIC Surprising Africa conference before I learned that I was sitting next to one of my heroes. He’s one of the winners of the Aga Khan award for architecture for his inspirational Gando primary school, designed when he was an architecture student in Berlin.

Interior of Keke’s award-winning school building in Gando, Burkina Faso

Exterior of the Gando primary school. The metal roof, made from sheeting and welded rebar, protects an earth ceiling.

The building is pretty much the best example of African solutions to African problems that I can think of. Realizing that his fellow villagers in Gando were brilliantly skilled at building with clay, he looked for ways to use local techniques and materials to build practical, long-lasting structures that can be locally built and maintained. The school is cool, light and vastly superior to the structure it’s replacing.

I desperately want to show you all the images from Kéré’s talk - he shows amazing photos of Burkina, including a stunning shot of a dividing line in Ouagadougou, where the formal, rectilinear grid of the city turns into informal, unplanned and organic sprawl. He’s a critic of African tendencies to ape western building styles, showing us houses that have arbitrarily picked up Chinese or European touches, which mostly look out of place and cheap.

His designs leverage skills that have developed over generations, like the intricate process of laying and polishing a clay floor. He documents the process, which involves laying chunks of clay, pounding them into small pieces with heavy wooden hammers, breaking them more finely with hands and feet, and finally polishing with large stones. The resulting structure is cool, beautiful and affordable for his friends and neighbors.

But local ways aren’t without their flaws. The reason Burkinabe are moving away from clay and towards concrete is because clay buildings melt in the spring rains. Kéké’s solution is to build second roofs, soaring structures made from welded rebar and corrugated sheets. These materials are common in any African context, but Kéké turns them into practical structures with shapes worthy of Eero Saarinen. To his credit, Kéké is clear that it’s his team - 25 guys from Burkina Faso, some from his village, with a variety of metalwork and clayworking skills - that do the hard work.

Talking with Francis afterwards, he told a small group of us that, even though he was honored with the Aga Khan Prize, it’s hard to convince the authorities in Burkina Faso to give him commissions. Because he’s a local boy, they have a hard time believing that he’s an internationally known architect. The fact that he sleeps outside with his crew while working on a project just confuses them even more.

I told Francis that he’s someone who has long inspired me. My experience has taught me that most solutions imported into Africa fail… badly. The most revolutionary solutions to African problems come from the people who are living with those problems. Francis’s architecture is a beautiful manifestation of this design principle.

My dream is that the vocabulary he’s developed for Gando - already expressed in two school buildings, a health clinic and housing for teachers - will be replicated and spread throughout the region. Already his primary school in Gando has received the ultimate compliment. He designed the school for 120 pupils, and it now has over 500. He doesn’t claim credit for the school’s growth, but I don’t think the building’s success and the school’s expansion are coincidental. Who wouldn’t want to go to school in a building that looks like that?

I’d forgotten the difficulty of speaking at and covering a conference at the same time. It’s too easy to assume that speaking just means getting on stage, giving your presentation and then returning to civilian life. The fine folks at PICNIC have kept me busy with a long line of journalists, photographers and smart young Dutch students who want to discuss business ideas.

So, no blogging from the stage by me today. Instead, I’ll point you towards Kathlyn Clore’s coverage of my talk at the European Journalism Center “Bloggers Lab”, Erik Hershman’s photos of my talk on the main stage, Lucy Hooberman’s coverage of the same and Hubert Guillaud’s notes in French. Thanks, everyone, for helping me try to share these ideas and messages.

And now, a well-meaning photographer has me sitting in wood chips on the floor next to a stuffed sheep. I think the sheep is supposed to be reading my laptop over my shoulder. Or something like that. It’s confusing here in Holland.

Talk one of four at PICNIC was a small seminar for the European Journalism Center. Their part of the PICNIC experience was hosted in a geodesic dome tent within the “club” - the noisy public space where attendees are eating, drinking and having fun. So it felt a bit like giving a seminar in the anteroom of a dance club… not the easiest experience.

The talk after mine came from the founder of Zemanta, Jure Cuhalev, an interesting plugin for bloggers. You install Zemanta on your browser, it watches what you’re writing as you author a blogpost, and it sends your text to a server, which does natural language processing analysis, and suggests videos, photos, hyperlinks and tags for your content. The media suggestions appear in a window, and you can drag and drop them into your post - they’ll appear with appropriate attribution, ensuring that you follow the “rules of the road” of the internet. Related articles can optionally show up in a section at the end of a post, and the page will be tagged for optimum findability from search engines.

I love the idea - and especially some of the features, like entity extraction. When I type a name - Jure Cuhalev - I’m usually going to look up that name on the web and link to that person’s webpage or blog - Zemanta promises to this automatically. Looking forward to trying it out on my blog soon. And here’s a good video from G4’s attack of the show which introduces the tool.

Chatting with a journalist after my talk, I ended up showing up late for Adam Greenfield’s talk, coming in for one of his more gruesome examples. Adam’s speciality is ubiquitous computing, and he’s done great work thinking about what happens when computation makes it into every aspect of our lived environment. This ubiquitization happens a little bit at a time. In European cities, it’s become common to fence off spaces with retractable bollards - metal posts that rise out of the ground to block spaces to unauthorized traffic. When an RFID-enabled vehicle with the right permissions passes by, the bollard retracts and gives one access to a street.

When a system like this crashes, things go badly wrong. Adam shows an example of a car - properly authorized - which was assaulted by a misfiring bollard, killing a passenger. “Who do you call for tech support when a system like this fails?”

As we transform our urban spaces, we’re starting to see spaces that are “stealthy, slippery, crusty, prickly and jittery“. Here Adam is borrowing terminology from Steven Flusty at USC. Stealthy spaces can’t be found; slippery ones can’t be reached. Prickly spaces can’t be occupied comfortably; crusty ones are armored and can’t be entered. Jittery may be the most interesting to Adam - they can’t be used without being under surveillance.

map from cabspotting.org

He adds “foggy” to this list of spaces - spaces that can’t be mapped - they don’t exist on your GPS, you can’t plot routes to them. This may become increasingly important as we start visualizing urban spaces in terms of data, offering a network overlay to help us understand our places better. These overlays might look like the map of San Francisco drawn by GPS in taxi cabs. Or a map using Zillo’s information of real estate value. Increasingly, we’ve got information about a place in that place, made local and actionable. We might choose how we move through a city based on the air quality of the areas we plan through, or the traffic we might encounter. “Networked overlay closes the loop, changing how we interact with urban space.”

As spaces become addressable, scriptable and queryable, we can start doing very weird things. What happens when billboards in Times Square start warning individual pedestrians that they need to catch a cab right now if they want to make their flight to Jamaica. Or letting you know that the NYPD knows that that guy is carrying a gun, and that they’re watching him. “I don’t expect these spaces to be pleasant,” he tells us, but they’re coming.

The more hopeful version is a world in which we move from browse urbanism to search urbanism, where we find ways to reach out to the different experiences waiting out there in the city.

I’m not really doing Adam’s work justice here - I’d recommend reading his blog for lots more of this stuff.

My friend Bruno Giussani leads a session introducing nominees to win the Picnic Green Challenge. This is a big prize, funded by the NL Postcode Lottery, and awards 500,000€ to the winning project. Out of 235 nominees, we see four finalists:

routeRANK - a website that looks for the best travel route, both in terms of time and environmental impact.

Greensulate - an insulation that works like extruded foam, but is grown on locally available byproducts, like rice and cottonseed hulls. The result is like styrofoam but produced with a far lower carbon footprint.

Smart Screen - a window glass that reflects solar energy away from warm spaces and opens to absorb solar energy in warm spaces.

Veranda Solar - Easy to install solar panels that sit on your windowsill and plug into existing electric outlets.

We’ll know in a few hours who wins the big prize - I’m pulling for Veranda, because I want to buy some of those as soon as they’re available.

Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital converses with - grill, perhaps - Mike Fries of Liberty Global, the world’s second largest cable operator. The focus is on the future of television, and Fries feels very, very strongly that the future is professional, random-access content.

Swisher observes that the US is the “third world of broadband” and wonders if in countries like the Netherlands, where bandwidth is more pervasive and cheaper, we might see the rise of IP television. Fries doesn’t buy it. He believes that IP doesn’t have the quality or service or bandwidth… and he points out that IPTV is very easy to steal. That’s why only 0.5% of revenue in the content industry is generated online. Swisher wonders if that’s because content industries treat all users as thieves.

Fries isn’t worried about making us feel bad as content thieves. He’s more worried that we’ll destroy television in the same way that we’ve stopped the music. “If video goes the way of the music industry, we’re all going to be watching cats on skateboards.” He argues that we spend hundreds of hours a week in front of the TV (which seems like an exaggeration) and only 7 minutes watching online video. That’s because “consumers want 50 inch TVs with HD quality.” His family is “falling in love with the television again” - it’s “big, clear and you can put your butt on the couch.”

Liberty Global is one of the partners on the o3b initiative - a new constellation of satellites designed to bring broadband connectivity to rural areas in the developing world. He references the global cable map, pointing out that there’s a single cable connecting West Africa to the internet, and no cables connecting East Africa. I’ve always assumed that the constellation would be mostly oriented towards phones - Fries suggests that the real goal is random access broadband television delivered to African communities… and towards broadband internet connectivity as well by selling wholesale bandwidth to internet and cable companies.

Had I not shared a boat ride with Michael Tchao to the PICNIC venue today, I would have assumed that he’d run in this morning. From, say, Brussels. Or Munich. He’s the general manager of Nike Techlab, the group responsible for Nike+, the project which links Nike shoes and the iPod, allowing runners to track their running experiences online.

The motivation behind the project is an old one. In 1987, Tchao tells us, Nike launched a product about the size of a videocassette, which you strapped to your waist and chest, and it measured your distance and speed via sonar. It didn’t sell. By 1999, they had a slightly smaller device - it strapped to your shoe, and it was so big and heavy that the Nike CEO referred to it as “the tumor”. If your CEO calls your product a tumor, that’s not good.

But the product’s pretty cool now. It’s a small sensor which sits in a running shoe… and almost all Nike shoes now have a pocket for it. The sensor talks to a transmitter attached to your ipod… probably a nano, which is what devoted runners tend to carry. (I’d always wondered who bought nanos. Runners. That’s why I never guessed there was a market.)

Traditionally, systems that track running data combine “the emotional appeal of an EKG plus the excitement of Excel.” The Nike+ system is a lot simpler. At the top level, you get a calendar with an orange box on days you ran. That turns out to be pretty good motivation. So’s the fact that after a run, you’ll get a voice message from Lance Armstrong congratulating you on your longest run ever. Or the fact that the iPod will shuffle to play your “power song” at the point in your workout when your energy is flagging.

But the really fun stuff happens when you share this data. There’s a global leaderboard which lets runners and walkers around the world challenge each other. You can challenge friends, setting up contests via emails (last one to 100 miles run buys lunch) or leaving unlockable messages (run 14 miles and see the message I left for you).

Nike is marketing the project by embracing the idea that runners like communities. This has meant organizing huge events, like the “Human Race”, a simultaneous 10k race in 26 cities. People who weren’t in these cities could run on the same day and participate by running and posting their results to the site, allowing it to become a massive, global event… one group ran around a cruise ship, proving that you really can participate anywhere.

Tchao’s presentation made me want to take up running, which is a pretty impressive achievement. That’s not an easy feat of motivation to accomplish.

Rafi Haladjian is the sort of innovator who challenges your ideas of what constitutes a product. His obsession is connecting things to networks. An early Minitel developer, he founded the first Internet company in France. Lately, with his company Violet, he’s finding ways to connect rabbits to the internet.

Not real rabbits, the kind that are eating my blueberry bushes. Animatronic plastic rabbits. He calls them Nabaztag, which is the Armenian word for rabbit. He likes the word because it’s hard for anyone who’s not Armenian to pronounce or remember.

Why do you need an internet-connected rabbit? You don’t, he explains. They are very nice, though - they move their ears, play music, blink their eyes. They’re an example of a new form of interface, one he pioneered with the DAL lamp - a device that provides new types of expression of internet data, designed not for retriveing information but for enabling awareness. (The DAL lamp changed color to reflect traffic, the weather or the speed of the internet. It cost 800 euros. He sold 170. That’s more than I would have expected.)

Why a rabbit? He’s offered thirty explanations, but the most basic one is that he wanted to connect something to the internet and there happened to be a rabbit on his desk. But this has turned into one of the more intriguing internet business plans I’ve ever seen:

Step 1 - Connect rabbits to the internet
Step 2 - Connect everything else

Rabbits are the first step in creating “the inescapable internet of things”. One something is possible, he argues, it becomes pervasive. A clock used to be a building - now it’s a minor function of a device like a microwave oven. Electricity became common for lighting buildings - other products build on that infrastructure to iron clothes or power ovens.

Networks were made for telephones. Computers helped demonstrate that we could bring other objects onto networks - cobjects, or connected objects. Now the challenge is connecting nobjects, non-connected objects. He reminds us that there are 1 billion PCs, 3.3 billion mobiles… but probably 9 billion pairs of shoes and billions of other things. How do we get them online?

mir:ror

That’s Violet’s latest project - a consumer RFID reader. You can cause your existing RFID objects - like your subway pass - to trigger behaviors when they encounter your reader, like loading up information on delays on the local Metro. Or you can put RFID “stamps” onto nobjects and associate them with triggering behaviors. The goal is to connect everything:

- Put a tag on your box of pills and remember that you took your meds or be reminded to order new drugs
- Stamp children’s books and let your nabastag read the book to your child
- Tag your umbrella and when you wave it in front of the sensor, the computer will show the weather forecast, and begin reading the Guardian to you.

Why? I’m not sure. But Haladjian is and those rabbits are really cute.

Genevieve Bell is probably lying to us.

That’s okay. We lie all the time.

And, as Genevieve says, she’s trying to provoke us.

Lies are everywhere, in everything, and they’re incredibly complicated. Lies are central to movies and advertising, and there’s a complicated construction of truth and lies in all the world’s religions. Catholicism distinguishes between sins of ommission and commission in lying. In Judaism, there’s the idea of a permissable lie - a lie that might end a war or save a life. In Islam, the Prophet allows that telling your wife that you love her to preserve your happy marriage is a permissable one. “For two thousand years, women have been asking, ‘Do I look good in these jeans?’ and men have been lying in response, with religious permission.” In some countries, like the US, it’s legal to lie to avoid prosecution, or at least to refuse not to tell the truth.

The average human lies 6 to 8 times a day, but in outside circumstances, one might lie 200 times a day. We probably need to loosen our value judgements about this. Certain social conventions basically demand a lie - “How are you?” As an Australian living in the US, it took Genevieve some time to learn that there are only two permissable answers to these questions and both are likely lies. There are lies of social convention - “It’s great to see you again”.

Men and women lie differently. Men lie more, and we’re not as good at it. Men lie about their jobs and cars. Women lie about their weight, age and what they’ve purchased.

Why does this happen? We probably need to understand that lies aren’t always opposed to truth. They are often a form of self deception, a way of coping with the world. “Lies are not always opposed to truth - they are opposed to reality.” Children lie to test boundaries, to discover what is and isn’t an appropriate response in conversation. Is it okay to say that you’re seven when you’re actually three?

Secrets are different than lies. Genevieve grew up in indigenous communities in Australia, and there secrets are a big part of life. Not everyone gets to know everything - there’s knowledge held only by women, only by men, only by the old or the initiated. She tells a story about indigenous women wondering at white women’s honesty with their husbands. “The white men asks, ‘What did you do today, dear?’ And the women answer! And the women I spent time with were howling with laughter over this.”

There’s this democratizing notion on the Internet that everyone gets to know everthing - this is a very different idea than is traditional in many culutres. We have a cultural tendency to lie, and we’re now taking this lying online. We need to think about secrets and lies as a strategy for engaging the world and each other, not as a moral failing. “We have this cultural ideal - lying is bad. But we’ve got this cultural practice - we lie constantly. How do we resolve this?”

Online, we lie about where we are, who we are, wo we’re with. We lie about our height, weight, age and predispositions. No one knows you’re a dog, and in virtual spaces, our identity is almost certainly a lie of some sort.

Genevieve owns up to getting locked out of Flickr because she lied about her age to Yahoo… not out of embarrasment but out of the idea that Yahoo didn’t need to know. If you’re not consistent in your lies, it comes back and bites you. And some communities seem to default towards lying - danah boyd has documented the large number of people on MySpace who say they’re over 100. It turns out to be as easy to lie on MySpace as to tell the truth.

Everyone on dating sites lies. Men add 3-5 inches to their height, while women shave pounds. (One is easier to detect than the other, which suggests that men aren’t quite as smart about lying as women.) 50% of brits cop to lying in text messages, which suggests we all do it. She cites James Katz, who refers to this as “the arms race of digital deception.”

Cellphones allow us to tell anyone what we are anywhere. And we susect them. There’s a service in South Korea that allows you to track people across celltowers and determine their location. She’s interviewed students about how they feel about being surveilled this way - students say they feel sorry for students whose parents don’t love them enough to track them. Some Korean men know that their wives track their phones, and that’s the phone that gets left at work when they go out.

There’s guilt and shame about lying offline, but we seem to have a certain amount of joy and glee about lying online. There are whole sites - like PostSecret - dedicated to the celebration of the secret. Twitter is likely one of the world’s greatest distributed confabulation systems - she observes that there’s very little content about either masturbation or menstruation, suggesting that we’re either lying or filtering, when we talk about what we’re doing right now.

Our devices don’t know how to lie - they want to announce the truth. If you’ve got a GPS system in your car and you’re arrested while picking up marijuana from the fields where you’ve grown it, the device doesn’t know to lie and protect you. Your cellphone can tell us whether it was oriented east or west, what it was near, what other devices it encountered - if you don’t tell it not to share this information.

We’re increasingly interested in this idea of online reputation, which involves announcing our social preferences. We lie here too - we tell people that we read the right kinds of books and blogs, and protect the information about what we’re really up to. We may be building these incredibly complex spaces built on lies.

When we talk about privacy and security, Genevieve concludes, maybe we should talk about secrets and lies - it’s a more natural language for us, the world in which we’re actually grounded.

I missed Clay Shirky’s talk this morning, and am looking forward to reading Lucy Hooberman’s account of what he had to say. Too many commitments, too little time. I’m speaking on “Surprising Africa” later today, so probably won’t be online much as I prepare. But I was enjoying Xeni Jardin’s recent video on sustainable agriculture in Benin - very much the sort of innovation I hope to feature in today’s talk.

If you were a conductor of an orchestra, what sort of conductor would you be?

That’s the central question of Itay Talgam’s talk, closing the first day of the PICNIC conference. Talgam is the music director of the Tel Aviv Symphony, and the founder of the Maestro program, a project that brings music and conducting into business settings as a way of understanding leadership.

To explain why organizations need leadership, Talgam asks an audience of a thousand people to clap their hands together. We fail. Eventually someone shouts out “1, 2, 3″ and we do much beter. But we’re even better when he conducts us from the stage.

But perhaps conductors get too much credit, he wonders. A contemporary classical music poster is likely to feature the orchestra in small type, the conductor in huge type, and almost as a footnote, the contribution of Mozart or Beethoven to the experience. We’re looking for the interpretation of the conductor, not just his ability to make people start and stop on time.

We watch a video of Riccardo Muti. His gestures have clarity and strength. It’s clear what he wants and where he’s going. But there’s such force - why do you need a hand punch to stop a trained orchestra, when (as Talgam demonstrates) you can stop a bunch of amateurs by raising a finger. His theory - “it’s so you know what to do and the sanction if you don’t.” Another conductor leads with his eyes closed - Talgam wonders, “Have you ever led an expedition with your eyes closed?”

Richard Strauss looks like he’d be miserable to play for. No emotion, small, controlled gestures, and he’s turning the pages of the score… of a piece of music he, himself, wrote. The message, Talgam tells us - your job is to just play the damned piece, not to add any interpretation.

There’s a limit to what you can do as a conductor, explains Talgam. “You throw little balls of energy to the players and hope they catch them.” This doesn’t neccesarily mean waving your arms, though. He closes by showing us a number of videos of Leonard Bernstein. He explains that Bernstein’s conducting starts from his feeling of the music. If the passage is happy, Bernstein looks like he’s melting with pleasure. If it’s a tense passage, it looks like he’s suffering. “Not suffering. Enjoying himself in the jewish way.”

He closes with a video in which Bernstein conducts a long, exciting passage without moving his arms at all. It’s clear that every player in the orchestra is watching the maestro closely, and that his control comes entirely from his expression, an occasional nod, a slight movement of the eyes or the mouth. It’s extraordinary… and Talgam has done an extraordinary job of showing us a beautiful and subtle lesson in leadership.