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 Kere’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. Kéré’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 Kéré turns them into practical structures with shapes worthy of Eero Saarinen. To his credit, Kéré 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.

Linda Stone, the queen of all social networks, wants to challenge the idea of “friending”. This, she argues, is the most absurd behavior we engage in online. Confronting her panelists – Jyri Engeström, Matt Jones, Addy Feuerstein and Philip Rosedale – one by one, she asks if they’re her friend. The point – our real social interactions are far more granular and nuanced than online tools currently allow them to be. This is the problem most of her panelists are striving to solve, either by building new, better tools, or by challenging how we think about social media.

Engeström works on social media products for Google, and while he doesn’t preview the Android for us – despite some strong pressure from Linda – but does offer a useful model for what works in social media. People don’t connect randomly in real life – they connect around objects of shared interest. This interest can be anything – he shows a slide of Italians connecting in a farm field around their shared interest in unusual breeds of potatoes. In social networks, we usually connect around bookmarks, photos, status messages, locations or travel. When considering a social network, you should ask the question, “What’s the social object within this service? If you can’t answer that question, the service is in trouble.”

Social networks are leveraging the ability to create new meda. Photo sharing took off when we got good cameraphones. Video, with services like Seesmic, may be the next thing. But we can’t just think about the object – we should think about verbs as well. Go to Ebay, and the verbs you encounter are “buy” and “sell”. What actions does a network want you to engage in? And what are the points where it triggers you to engage? Good networks have thought through these questions carefully and designed tools that have clear objects, verbs and triggers.

One of the tools lots of people are celebrating here is Dopplr, an excellent social network for frequent travelers. (Like me.) Matt Jones, one of the founders, describes the site as a small part of the coral reef of the web, serving a very narrow niche with a small piece of info – information on where you and your friends are in the world on any given day. Jones thinks we should let go of the idea of friendship in many social tools and just focus on the exchange of information. He quotes Merlin Mann, who describes the new feature on FriendFeed which allows you to pretend to follow a friend so you won’t create an awkward social situation, “This is a major breakthrough in the make-believe friendship space.” There are many rich ways we can build social relationships online, but we’d do better to focus on the information we already exchange, the “wear we leave on social objects”, rather than forcing make-believe friendship.

Addi Feuerstein is a true believer in media sharing and social media. His project, AllOfMe, allows you to merge your posting to various web2.0 sites into a single lifestream, then edit contributions down into a timeline. This functions as something of a scrapbook – you can show your children what flickr photos you and your spouse published during your courtship by promoting those to a personal timeline. There are interesting video-based interfaces to present the results. I don’t think I’m in need of an aggregator of my social network presences, but this certainly looks like a good one. Linda suggests that this might be a tool for narcisists, but also for anyone keeping scrapbooks or memories…

Philip Rosedale explains how the Burning Man festival influenced his thinking about the virtual world Second Life. He went to his first Burning Man as he was beginning to design the tool, and decided, “Whatever second life is going to become, it’s going to look like Burning Man.

Rosedale believes that there are three characteristics special to Burning Man, “three unlikely, mysterious ingredients”. It’s “purposeless” – you build things, but there’s no overarching goal to building. You are in symmetric relationships with the other participants – you’re all here to entertain one another. And you’re all aware that there’s an element of risk – if you’re dumb, the desert can kill you.

These functions, he tells us, are replicated in Second Life. There’s adversity – the interface is difficult, there’s a learning curve in building. The system is symmetric – you’re all amusing one another. And it’s purposeless, in terms of an overall goal.

Second Life is one manifestation of technology in a world where the only thing scarce is your attention. Creativity is a scarce resource, and it’s probably evenly distributed around the world. As we get better at producing things, not just bits, we’ll all wear designer jeans designed by different single individuals. We’ll want everything to be creative and custom. And this spread of creativity will spread wealth in a Tom Friedman-esque fashion, flattening the world.

It would be interesting to try to synthesize Rosedale and Engeström theories. What are the objects and verbs in Second Life? Is it possible for creativity and purposelessness to be the object or the verb in a successful social network?

Aaron Koblin is a data visualization geek. He believes that “data systems tell stories about our lives”, and he’s in the business of building beautiful, poetic images that tell those stories.

Some of his earliest works looked at mapping georgraphy in terms of the use of infrastructures. The image above is a map of North America drawn by tracing the paths of planes in flight. As this map moves through time, you can see the East Coast wake up and get on the road, followed by the midwest and into the West. “You’re able to intuit the system without knowledge of any geography.” He’s built similar maps of traffic accidents, of email flow, and a visualization of data coming into and out of New York City called the New York Talk Exchange.

Recently, Koblin is fascinated by Mechanical Turk – both the historical wooden figure that allegedly played chess (it didn’t – a man sat inside the machine and made the moves) – and the contemporary data outsourcing service offered by Amazon. Most of the tasks people are asked to do with Mechanical Turk are extremely boring and repetitive – Koblin offered a much more human task: Draw a sheep, facing left. If you did this, using his online tools, he’d pay you $0.02. Over forty days, more than 7000 people drew 10,000 sheep. They took 105 seconds, on average, to complete the task, which makes this not an especially good way to make money, but a lovely way to make art.

Why sheep? They were, perhaps, the first industrialized animal, an animal we used to produce industrial materials.Sheep symbolize following. They were the first animal humans learned to clone. And it’s a reference to Le Petit Prince, where the character asks the narrator “draw me a sheep”.

But the real purpose of Mechanical Turk is making money. So he launched a project called Ten Thousand Cents. It invited Turkers to draw a very small part – a ten-thousandth – of a hundred dollar bill. Everyone who participated got a cent… and producing a hundred dollar bill cost one hundred dollars… and the sales of prints supported One Laptop per Child, the former Hundred Dollar Laptop project. It’s interesting to see how many people rebelled, drawing something other than the section they were assigned. When you put ten thousand small images together, that rebellion basically disappears and becomes invisible.

More recent works have included a music video for Radiohead and a visualization of Amsterdam in terms of SMS messages sent. Whether it’s visualizing Thom Yorke or the human structure of a city, Koblin brings an artist’s eye to a data-rich world.

Charles Leadbeater leads off the PICNIC ‘08 conference in Amsterdam with a talk on mass creativity and mass collaboration. Leadbeater’s book, “We Think”, looks at the revolution around participatory culture. He offers a metaphor – media as we know it has been about moving, aggregating and defending boulders – big, immobile, static standalone entities. Our new culture is being built differently – by participating and creating content, we’re all creating pebbles and assembling them together.

Beyond distributed creativity is collaboration – finding ways to coordinate our creative actions so we can participate in new and more complex ways. Leadbeater (oddly, I think) chooses the online game I Love Bees as an example of this collaboration. I Love Bees was an alternative reality game built by 42 Entertainment to promote Halo 2… sort of. The url appeared in a trailer for the Halo 2 game. When visitors loaded the site, they found what appeared to be a personal blog of someone who loved bees and published recipes to use honey. The recipes had been replaced with GPS coordinates. As 4,000 core players – who called themselves The Beekeepers – explored the game, they discovered that the coordinates corresponded to phone boxes around the world. On a specific day, the game engineers started calling these phoneboxes and reading off lines in a drama. The participants, scattered around the world, had to reassemble the drama from the individual lines.

If you can get people to participate in “this mindless game to promote a Microsoft game”, what could you actualy accomplish if you attached this newfound capacity for collaboration to social goals? Leadbeater believes that this capacity for collaboration is what lets us build open source software or collective works like Wikipedia.

He acknowledges that collaboration can lead either towards conformity, or towards chaos. To avoid conformity, you need diversity, people who can see problems from different vantage points. You need to enable collaboration, building systems that let people participate, using modular design, and letting people collaborate as easily as they would add Lego bricks to a structure. You need a shared sense of purpose, but individual payoffs so everyone feels rewarded. And communities must be able to make decisions – it’s a mistake to concude that these new collaborative spaces are structureless. They’re not egalitarian, but open and democratic.

One of the most exciting places for collaboration is in the world of science. Leadbeater points out that scientists, especially those in emerging fields, are some of the most creative authors of tools. He refereces a social scientist who argues that the scientific method is experiencing fundamental change, that the old models of hypothesis and testing with experiment, is shifting towards a collaborative method that involves massive simulation, like those hosted at Nanohub. He references Public Library of Science, an open source scientific database where contributions include not only academic papers, but videos, datasets and the raw materials to replicate experiments.

How do we know if a system is properly collaborative? Leadbeater suggests we should look for systems that are designed to work with you, or allow creation by you, rather than doing things for you or to you. Learning, Leadbeater feels, mostly was done to him, not with him… and when politicians say they want to do something for you, they mostly want to do something to you. (Health, perhaps, is worse.)

Will an internet world allow for different ways to interact? Will we find ways to work together, rather than doing things to one another? He references Gerrard Winstanley, and his movement – the Levellers – who took over public lands in 17th century Britain and planted communal farms. That movement was part of an upheaval in English politics, and it didn’t last very long – about three years – and then the forces who’d had power previously regained their power and influence. Is the Internet going to be this brief moment of collaboration, a weird, wacky moment where people want to share? Or is this a permanent change?

He closes by referencing Sir Tim Berners Lee, who was recently asked whether our social ambitions were too grand for the web. He offers the advice, the danger is not that we ask too much of the internet, but that we ask too little.

Clay Shirky, who’ll be speaking tomorrow, joins Leadbeater for a dialog on these issues. He asks the difficult question, “When doesn’t this work?” Leadbeater concedes that he probably doesn’t want to receive a hernia operation from someone who’s only read about it on Wikipedia. There’s a need for expertise even in a collaborative world.

Clay worries that these new collaborative systems are highly gameable – “I could write an article titled ‘The seven hottest babes of science fiction movies’ and it’s guaranteed to make the front page of Digg, because it works precisely within Digg’s system.” In discussing the issue, the two seem to argue that this is a more exceptional case – more generally, it’s very hard to know which of these systems will and won’t work, and our understanding of these systems is more like that of the weather, not of a neat, mechanized system.

A discussion of the implications of the collaborative revolution for businesses leads to a discussion on timescale. The rise of pro/am culture, the collaboration between professionals and amateurs, is a long rise, and this rise might take many decades. This comes as a relief to large organizations, Leadbeater says, because they’re only really able to make serious changes in the very long scale.