The Israeli Sphere: Connection Theory

1948, The water level in the sea of Galilee, Bublil, Shema Yisrael, what’s the connection?
Through a design-research workshop we will place information bits lost inside the web of the “Israeli sphere” in an attempt to find out, where is this Israel sphere anyway? How to design inside it? Towards it? From it? Students will work in small groups and will conduct a networked research following cultural, logical and visual connections. The work methodology will be divided into three steps: Content, Structure & Presentation, inspired by new approaches of indexing, linking and delivering information online. In spite of the networked inspiration and practice, the output of the workshop is not limited to this medium or the other and the workshop is open to students from different disciplines as long as they are ready to work hard, sleep little and experiment with this new and challenging process.

תיאור הסדנה

1948, מפלס הכנרת, בובליל, שמע ישראל… מה הקשר?
במהלך סדנת עיצוב-חוקר נמקם פיסות מידע אובדות בתוך רשת ה”מרחב הישראלי” במטרה לגלות איפה זה בכלל המרחב הישראלי הזה? כיצד מעצבים בתוכו? לתוכו? מתוכו? סטודנטים יעבדו בקבוצות קטנות וינהלו מחקר מרושת בעקבות הקשרים תרבותיים, לוגיים וחזותיים. מתודולוגיית העבודה תחולק לשלושה שלבים: תוכן, מבנה ותצוגה בהשראה מגישות חדשות לתיוג, חיווט והגשה של מידע ברשת. על אף ההשראה והפרקטיקה המרושתת, תוצרי הסדנה אינם מוגבלים למדיום זה או אחר והסדנה פתוחה לסטודנטים מדיסיפלינות שונות כל עוד הם מוכנים לעבוד קשה, לישון מעט ולהתנסות בצורת עבודה חדשה ומאתגרת.

יום ב’, בריף #1: ממצאים מהרשת

זמן הגשה: 15:00

בתחילת הסדנה התבקשתם לבחור מתוך מבחר פתקיות פוסט-איט כשעליהן מצויין מעין קוד הבנוי מספרות ואותיות. אל תרגישו מוזר אם זה לא אומר לכם כלום. פתחו דפדפן איטרנט והקלידו את הכתובת http://bit.ly/ ואחריה / ואת הספרות והאותיות שקיבלתם. לדוגמא, אם קבלתם את הקוד b4yTXe הקלידו http://bit.ly/b4yTXe הלינק המקוצר הזה יוביל אתכם אל הממצאים הראשונים שיעזרו לנו למקם את עצמנו בדבר הזה שאולי נוכל לקרוא לו “המרחב הציבורי הישראלי”.

פיסות המידע שקיבלתם חלקן תוצרי המרחב הישראלי, חלקן מיצרות את המרחב הישראלי, חלקן חיות בשלווה במרכז התודעה וחלקן נלחמות על מקומן. הבחירה בהן נעשתה על בסיס שרירותי לחלוטין, היא קרוב לודאי מיצגת פנים מצומצמים למדי של המרחב הזה אך בשאיפה יש בכל אחת מנקודות ההתייחסות הללו ערכים שידרבנו אתכם לחפש הלאה.

מה אתם צריכים לעשות?

• הכינו פתקיות צהובות וטושים שחורים עבים
• פתחו דפדפן אינטרנט וגלו את הקישור שמאחורי הקוד הראשון שקבלתם
• מיד לכשהקישור נפתח כיתבו לפחות שתי פתקיות עם הרשמים הראשונים שלכם מפיסת המידע
• חקרו עמוק יותר אל תוך הממצא שלכם וכתבו לפחות 10 פתקיות נוספות (הרגישו חופשיים לכתוב כמה פתקיות שעולות במוחיכם). אם אתם צריכים לחקור עוד כדי ללמוד יותר על המידע שקיבלתם, הרגישו חופשיים לעשות את זה.
• הדביקו את הקוד שלכם (הפתקית האדומה) על הקיר בכיתה
• הדביקו את האסוצייציות וההקשרים שלכם (הפתקיות הצהובות) מסביב לפתקית האדומה – ייצרו מעין רשת של הקשרים מסביב לקוד שקיבלתם
• חזרו על אותו התהליך עם הקוד השני
• כשאתם מוכנים או לחילופין כשהדדליין מגיע, נפגש בכיתה ונמשיך לשלב הבא

יום ב’ בריף #2 : להסתדר בשלשות

דדליין ומעבר לשלב הבא: יום ב’ 18:00

את המשך העבודה משלב זה נעשה בקבוצות. אתם לא מחוייבים לקבוצה זו או אחרת, אבל אתם מתבקשים לבחור את שותפיכם גם מתוך התחשבות בדרך בה רשתות המידע שבנו סביב הקודים שלהם יהיו מעניינות לפתח בהקשר למידע שאספתם אתם סביב הקודים שקיבלתם. בשלב הבא נעמיק את המחקר סביב רשתות המידע שבחרתם כך שזכרו שבשלב זה אתם בוחרים לא רק שותפים לעבודה, אלא גם פיסות מידע חדשות להתעסק בהן.

• בקשו מחבריכם להציג לכם את רשת ההקשרים שבנו, נסו לדמיין את החיבור בין פיסות המידע שאספתם אתם לבין אלה של חבריכם. (קחו בחשבון שנתן לכם האפשרות לוותר על כמה מהנושאים שלא יתאימו לרשת המשותפת שלכם או לשחק עם דגשים שונים על היבטים שונים ברשתות שלכם)
• התחלקו לשלשות ורכזו את הרשתות שלכם בפינה אחת בכיתה.
• חזרו על בריף #1 עם שתיים מהרשתות סביב הקודים של שותפיכם והוסיפו להם לפחות עוד 6 פתקיות (לפחות)

יום ב’ בריף #3 : נראטיב ומבנה

דדליין ומעבר לשלב הבא: יום ג’ 16:00

בשלב הבא נייצר מסלולים ונשרטט נראטיבים בין הרשתות שתוויתם. המטרה שלנו הוא למפות את הנושאים שהעלתם ולקשור הקשרים חדשים מתוך הרשתות שיצרתם.

• ראשית, כדי לעגן את ההקשרים המקוריים, מתחו חוטים אפורים בין הקוד לבין ההקשרים שמתחתם ממנו. אל תהססו למתוח חוטים אפורים בין הקישורים השונים ברשת שבניתם סביב הקוד המקורי.
• ההקשרים עצמם אם הם אינם נובעים ישירות מתוך הקוד המקורי. החוטים האפורים יאפשרו לנו להפריד בין הרשתות הראשוניות שתוויתם בשלב התוכן לבין ההקשרים החדשים שתייצרו בשלב המבנה.
• עכשיו כשכל רשת מסומנת ע”י חוטים אפורים נתחיל לשרטט נרטיב שיעבור בין רשתות ההקשרים. בחרו חוטים צבעוניים והחלו למתוח רשתות חדשות בין הקשרים שונים שהעלתם בשלב התוכן. אגב, הרשת לא חייבת להיות לינארית, הקשר אחד יכול להתחבר ליותר משני הקשרים אחרים.
• אני רוצה לראות לפחות 3 נרטיבים אופציונליים בין ההקשרים שהצעתם.
• כל נרטיב אפשרי שתציעו יכלול לפחות ארבעה מתוך ששת הרשתות הראשוניות שאיתן אתם עובדים.

יום ג’ בריף #4 : תצוגה ובריף עצמאי

דדליין ומעבר לשלב הבא: יום ג’ 19:00

בשלב זה נבחר נראטיב מוביל מתוך ה-3 שזיהינו ונייצר לעצמנו בריף עצמאי:

• בחרו את אחד מהנראטיבים שמושך אתכם במיוחד להתעסק בו
• יצרו רשת פתקיות חדשה שמתארת את הנראטיב שזיהיתם
  (בשלב זה אין עוד צורך מיוחד להתייחס אל כל ההיבטים ולכלול את כל ההקשרים הראשוניים שזיהיתם בשלבים הראשוניים ואתם חופשיים להמשיך את המחקר שלכם אל תוך הסוגייה שזיהיתם במרחב הישראלי.)
• כעת נסו ליצר לעצמכם את הבריף:
  1. מה הוא המידע שברצונכם להעביר?
     בנקודות: מה אמור הצופה/משתמש/קהל/נמען העבודה לקבל?
     מה הן השאלות שאתם רוצים לשאול? שאתם רוצים שהנמענים שלכם ישאלו את עצמם?
  2. בנו אסטרטגיה של מדיום: איזה נתיב מידע יוכל להעביר את המסר שלכם בצורה הטובה והבהירה ביותר?
     (התחשבו גם המגבלות הזמן והטכנולוגיה)
  3. חלקו את התפקידים בקבוצה, בין מחקר תוכני, גרפי, טכני…
  4. יצרו סקיצות, כמה שיותר וכמה שיותר מהר
  5. הציגו את הסקיצות לפניכם ובקרו אותם ביחס למטרות שהגדרתם, האם הן משרתות את המסר? כיצד ניתן להדק אותן? כיצד ניתן להמשיך הלאה?
  6. יצרו לעצמכם דד-ליינים, אם תרצו להתייעץ איתי בכל אחד מהשלבים הללו, ידעו אותי בזמן (את המייל שלי יש לכם)
• מכאן הלאה נגדיר לכל קבוצה את הבריף שלה

בהצלחה!

Radars and Fences progam, with Laila & me

On Friday March 12th 2010 I will be participating at NYU’s Media Culture & Communications’ Radars & Fences III: Borders, Affect, Space (please RSVP and come). My friend Laila El-Haddad and I will present You Are Not Here – A Tour of Gaza Through the Streets of Tel Aviv, and we’ll discuss the way geography and the concept of the border is shaping the mediated experience of the conflict. We will also discuss some of our recent initiatives to disrupt the theater of conflict resolution.

I am posting an essay Laila and I wrote for the catalog of the Unrecorded exhibition in Istanbul, March 2008, curated by Basak Senova. At the end of the essay I embedded the videos of Laila & Saeed’s Al Jazeera documentary Tunnel Trade that have inspired this text.

The Gaza Tunnel Trade: Interpretations of Occupied Space

by Laila El-Haddad and Mushon Zer-Aviv

When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, the city of Rafah was suddenly split between Egypt and Gaza by an Israeli wall. Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart. Before long, influential families who once controlled trade through Rafah moved their business underground through dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the border, connecting family houses on either side.

With Israel’s military withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the number of tunnels mushroomed. The Israeli military used the tunnels as a pretext for stepping up demolitions of houses to make way for a buffer zone along the border. Israel’s main concern is the smuggling of weapons to armed Palestinian groups. But for the smugglers themselves there is far more to the tunnel trade than politics and arms smuggling. Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and drugs to cash and people. It is a vast enterprise, and pays five times an average annual Gaza salary in one month. It is a family business, passed on from father to son and always – for reasons of security as well as economics – kept in the family.

Lucrative trade

The tunnel trade is not merely a black market, it is a multi-million dollar, top-secret industry run with military-style efficiency, and one of the most lucrative businesses in Palestine. Even Israel’s Foreign Affairs website acknowledges “This industry comprises a primary source of income for entire families, and is the main source of income in the area.” What was once opportunism quickly became an established industry with market fluctuations, share holders and dividends like any other business. Out of necessity, a handful of prominent Rafah clans used their strong cross-border familial ties to achieve illicitly what politics otherwise makes impossible.

Independent tunnelers exist, but creating and completing a tunnel requires not only experience, stamina, and the mental strength to stay underground for extended periods, but also financial capital. As a result, tunnels are usually financed by large clans or other groups with vested interests (even businessmen or government officials). The actual digging is often sub-contracted out to young diggers. Younger tunnelers hope one day to be able to “own” their own tunnel.

The tunnel trade is a lucrative one, but with great risks involved. Houses are routinely demolished and shelled if Israel’s military suspects they harbor tunnels-even though their existence is often used as a pretext for Israeli military activity in the area. Then there is the danger that the tunnel, some of them 1.5 meters wide and up to a kilometer long, might collapse during construction or smuggling. Or being caught and detained on the Egyptian side of the border.

In October of 2006, the Israeli military was even authorized to use air force against tunnels or houses suspected of hiding them, and yet Rafah families go on building and smuggling. With Gaza’s economy in ruins and the strip almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, there are few alternatives.

Re-interpreting occupied space

The tunnels also serve as a way for Palestinians to bypass and challenge the traditional boundaries of occupation, siege, and the Israeli “Matrix of Control”.  They have even been able to transport Palestinian spouses separated from one another and unable to otherwise enter Gaza because they lack the proper Israeli-issued ID cards and permits.  Such permits have traditionally been the tools used to control movement and residency and restrict access to and from the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

But the Israeli occupation has also utilized far more overt and deadly tactics.

In The Art of War (published by Frieze Magazine, May 2006) Israeli architect Eyal Weizman describes how Israeli military think tanks have been using urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-structuralist theory to develop new strategies and tactics of urban warfare against the resistance in the occupied west bank city of Nablus. Weizman is quoting Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! […] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”

While Kokhavi arrogantly presents the Israeli Army’s strategy of tearing through urban fabric of Palestinian life, it seems like the tunnel traders in Rafah, have themselves long departed from this traditional interpretation of space. While the critical discussion of urbanism in the West re-examines the city and attempts to expose the repressive invisible boundaries, in the occupied city it becomes an agent of repression. The city is not immune to the corruption of the occupation which is digging through walls and through the ground to posses and control any transfer of goods and ‘bads’. It seems the rules of urban theory breaks under occupation, when the ruler exerts both the visible and the invisible control mechanisms.

Challenged urbanism

The occupied city drives both sides of the conflict to challenge urbanism, but this non-traditional interpretation of urban space is not new to the Gaza strip. It runs back into history much further than contemporary cultural theory or the Israeli occupation. Tunnel digging has been a historic strategic tool in the region where ancient escape tunnels leading from forts and Churches led (sometimes for more than a kilometer) all the way to the sea. The tunnel proficiency has been used in the attack on an Israeli base outside the Gaza Strip. In summer 2006 several Palestinian gunmen popped out of the ground, attacked and killed several Israeli soldiers, and captured one of them, Gilad Shalit, through the tunnel and into Gaza. This sophisticated attack, reinterpreting the border, has left the Israeli society terrified. It has also played a major part in the lead up to the war in Lebanon the week after, when Israeli territorial sovereignty was breached again, this time on the Northern border.

Our interpretation of space is to a large extent dominated by the fundamental human experience of gravity – walking freely on the earth. Yet, today, interpreting space in this ‘traditional manner’ is a luxury deprived of people under occupation. In Gaza, the ground is literally torn under your feet, and this fundamental point of spatial reference is lost.

In January 2008 the Israeli siege on the Gaza strip have resulted in thousands of Palestinians, mainly women, tearing down the Rafah wall and removing the overground barrier between the Palestinian and Egyptian sides of the city. At the time of publication, parts of the wall are still down and the underground monopoly has been temporarily broken by civilian society, unbound, overground.

The Tunnel Trade Part I:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Tunnel Trade Part II:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Please RT! (click the image)

On February 9th Google have unvailed Google Buzz, a service that involuntarily transforms every Gmail user’s private contact list into a public social network. While Google has suffered from privacy concerns in the past, Buzz is considered by many angry users to be crossing a line. Many loyal Google users including myself have hence chosen to disable the service. I present a list of reasons why you and your contact list should do that too.

1. Choice: We never asked for it

First and foremost we have never asked for Buzz, we have never signed an agreement to enable it and we don’t necessarily want it. Even without all of the many other reasons, this should be enough. Many of us are already oversaturated with social media and Buzz just creates more noise. The fact it is coupled with Gmail makes it harder to resist the temptation to waste even more time on depressing filtering of meaningless contextless chatter.

2. Privacy: Our private and public contacts are not the same

An abused women workplace and new partner exposed to her abusive ex; doctors’ confidential client list shared with the world; journalists’ sources automatically revealed; Iranian and Chinese activists networks mapped for their governments to easily track; your own private contacts, private no more. When asked by CNBC if users should trust Google as a friend the company’s CEO Eric Schmidt answered:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

I don’t know if this is the excuse he was also making internally at Google in their privacy debates over Buzz which they most certainly have had before giving the green light for this bold move. Schmidt and Google are not vindicated by the fact Facebook has been compromising its own users’ privacy and that its founder Mark Zuckerberg have been making similarly miserable statements. In response to Zuckerberg social media researcher and lead thinker on the issues around the online public/private danah boyd says:

“Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation.It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways.”

The same applies to Google. This time, it was even more “unexpected” as it simply happened.

3. Context: Who you interact with on different services is different for a reason

“By offering social communications, which have primarily been used for entertainment purposes, Buzz would bridge the gap between work and leisure.”
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Google Buzz, quoted by the New York Times

Why would we want to do that? There are very good reasons for us to keep different contacts on different service. In fact, one of the most often complains people have about Facebook is that its popularity has ruined it. Once both my clients, my students, my colleagues, my kindergarten friends, my boss, my grandma and some hundred other people who claim they know me all “friend” me on Facebook the platform immidiately loses its social context. Would you invite all of your facebook friends to one party? Would you want to tell all of them the same thing in the same way? Yeah… me neither. Now ask yourself the same question about anyone you’ve ever emailed with on Gmail, including all the people you email with and you just can’t stand. E-mail gives us control over the contexts and tones of our different relationships and that’s its key feature. That’s something Buzz is ignoring by turning our email contact list to a social network.

We switch between different social networks all the time, we manage different social graphs (social structures) and manage different aspects of their identities in different ways on any of them. That’s exactly why we develop work relationship around our LinkdIn contacts and leisure relationships around our YouTube contacts. No Sergey, we don’t want you to bridge this for us and I wish I could add “…thanks for asking”, but you didn’t!

4. Techno-Social Simplification: Stupid algorithms make for stupid social relationships

Why does Sergey and other engineers at Google and beyond want to bridge the different facets of our social life? Because they can monetize on mapping our social media activity. They can generate a lot of income by understanding how we interact with each other and using that in a commercial context. I am not trying to criticize that, if they would’ve done a very good job of that, that would be a different issue, but they don’t.

Google (and many of those it attempts to compete with) fail to understand our social life because our social networks don’t work like computer networks. Groups of 3 don’t easily scale to 30, to 300, to 3000. “Friending” your friend is not like “friending” your grandma, your boss, your favorite celebrity. This inherit syncing problem between technological networks and social networks is an old problem that will not go away so soon. We won’t go and describe each relationship we have and assign it its own settings. Especially since unlike the way Facebook defines it, we do not experience our relationships in the same way, I might “friend” a person I admire, they might accept, but we are not equally “friends”.

Twitter has dealt with this problem by simplifying the networking and the interaction, doing away with consent based “friending” and introducing the aspect of “following”. This has also been the source of its success. But Google, being behind on the social media game was impatient to allow users to define their own networks and have decided for you to follow and be followed by your email contacts and to share any public content by simply channeling it to your central broadcast and discussion hub – your Google profile page.

Engineers love simple elegant solutions, but there’s nothing elegant in this simplification of our public life. This is a crude cop-out from finding adequate technological solutions to the fullness and richness of our social life. In the meanwhile we censor ourselves and restrict our online interactions because the platforms we have prefer simplicity and scale (clean code – easy) over intimacy, complexity and depth (messy code – yet unsolved task). In the meanwhile Schmidt prefers that if the engineers in his company cannot deal with the intricacy of our social life we should not be having it in the first place. I beg to differ.

5. Culture: Vote for an Opt-In and against an Opt-Out culture

Many social web services allow you to import your contacts. It’s a great way for them to spread the word and make sure you tell your friends and by that make the service more meaningful to your and their social life. The process is not obvious though: you are asked to enter your Gmail (or other service) username and password in an interface on the third party’s site. This makes most people think twice to make sure they actually trust that service with possiblly the most valuable access key to their online identity (which is why many users, including me never do that). Even if you chose to do that you are still invited to chose who of these friends would you actually want to invite to that service. This assuming that not all relationships are made equal. Google, to gain an advantage over its social media competitors decided to completely ignore this steps and decide it for you, in their own way – algorithmically.

This move by Google was encouraged by Facebook’s recent move to flip its users’ culture on its head automatically set content as public by default. They defend themselves by saying we simply have to “opt-out” of the public option if we so prefer. But they know there is nothing more persistent than the “temporary default”. Most users didn’t respond to Facebook’s change of service just as much as most uninterested users didn’t turn Buzz off. Many of those who were excited about Buzz also installed the Google Buzz mobile application, there they encounter yet another privacy decision made for them – their GPS location is attached to their messages by default. But hey, don’t like it? Opt out. Right? Wrong! Very very wrong!

This is a dangerous culture developed by services who take their market dominance and us their users for granted. This culture in itself might become the norm unless we express loud and clear that we want to opt-out from the opt-out culture. This is the cloud service incarnation of what we’ve seen before in the browser wars: Google Buzz on Gmail is just like Internet Explorer on Windows – a buggy, insecure and aggressive attempt to monopolize an existing market by shoving software down the throats of captive users. Therefore it should be resisted.

Don’t chose for us. We’re not stupid, we’ll chose which services to opt into and which ones to just not bother with.

6. It’s half-baked: Google admitted to a flawed testing process

This admittance of flaws is not the first time Google releases an unfinished product. They usually label new products as “beta”, though they di not do it this time. That’s ok, it is true you can’t really know a product until it reaches its full user scale and even then some surprises would happen. This calls for plugging my absolutely favorite quote by architect Stuart Brand from the book titled How Buildings Learn: “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.”

But some predictions are actually fair, and some wrongly made predictions can be taken into account before they are made, mainly through testing. Google has a process for that which they have used many many times before. For some reason they didn’t use it this time, they didn’t even use a hype inducing mechanism like they did with the closed beta of Google Wave. They just slapped it on everybody, privacy compromising and socially broken as it is.

Google employees tested Buzz internally, but the company’s engineer culture that thrive on simple technological systems did not alert the product developers to the social implications. Basically, they didn’t suffer from lack of social context, they were all Google employees using this service, they had social context.

There’s a saying that “Google don’t get ’social’”. They failed to get it many times before, “Open Social” failed, no one that is not a crazy hacker gets what Wave is all about, and even Dodgeball, a company Google bought died from lack of adequate support within Google only to be revived by its founder outside of Google as the very FourSquare. Google needs professional help. Much like Microsoft pays danah boyd a nice salary to research the social implication of their actions, Google should employ more sociologists and cultural critiques to challenge the techno hemophily that dominates the labs in the Mountain View Googleplex and from there the world.

7. Security: Potential security holes have been found

Some security holes have already been reported. This again from a product that has access to the highly secure personal data of all Google users. We know some cyber-attacks from China have already compromised user data, at this sensitive point why make it easier by opening more channels for exploit.

8. Usability: The interface sucks

The main thing you hear from many Google users that are less critical of their privacy and rights is that the interface itself is unusable. Much due to the lack of social context, the first thing users are trying to do is collapse conversations that they just don’t care about. They can’t do that due to a lacking interface, and the response and changes from Google are too scattered, too broken, too late.

This will probably be the main reason why people actually chose to turn it off.

9. To show we can: It is hard to turn it off, but we’re determined enough to do it

A possible usability hurdle that is not unintended is the fact it is really hard to turn the damn thing off. When the welcome screen first appear, saying you don’t want it was not an option, saying you don’t want to hear about it right now still kept the service on. Then Google revealed a small link at the bottom of the page saying “turn off Buzz” and guess what? It’s still on! You actually have to go manually and remove your contacts from the “followed” list to actually disable this. Cnet wrote a good tutorial for that.

Update: The Buzz team have responded to some of the frustration. Opting out of buzz should be easier now. The option is not yet available on all accounts though. (again, great! but it should not be there in the first place)

10. Support: That’s the only way to make Google Buzz better

Google is a great company. I don’t think they are “evil” since “evil” doesn’t exist in the world, whenever somebody say someone is “evil” they just expect us to uncritically disprove of them. In that sense for Google to “not do evil” it needs to make sure to maintain its image and PR efforts and not have people uncritically disprove of them.

I applaud Google’s way of doing its business in many fields, and most prominently its support of open source software and free culture. I believe Google has a lot to give the social web too. They might even call it Buzz, but by accepting this flawed and dangerous service and by simplifying our relationships to make sense within it we are not helping make it better. If Buzz becomes the social platform it hopes to become it would either be if us the users cripple our social relations to fit the engineers schema or by us the users sending these engineers back to their drawing boards. The former will be an undesired result for us and in the long run for Google too. For the later read on…

What Should We Do?

There are several things we should do:

1. Before you turn it off, find who are your friends who actually use it, inform them of the reasons not to. If it helps, use this article.
2. Turn it off – Cnet wrote a great detailed article on how to do it. Update: It should be easier to do through the Gmail settings options under the new Google Buzz tab (see image below)
3. Help your friends, family, loved ones and hated ones turn it off
4. Spread the word on using the social tools that make sense to you (#buzzoff is not a bad hashtag)
5. Write about it in other places and contexts. If you want to use, mix, translate parts or the entirety of this article, please do
6. Follow the FTC complaint filed by EPIC a privacy advocacy group
7. Talk to friends at Google, explain your concerns, they are good people, they will probably listen

Disable Buzz (at time of publish still not available on all accounts)

What Should Google Do? (pun intended)

Much like Totyota had to withdraw its cars and manage the crisis, and based on past lessons there are four steps for dealing with these type of mistakes:

1. Identify what the problem is,
2. apologize.
3. Then very quickly describe what is you’re going to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again,
4. and then do it. Follow through on your promise.

This not what they’ve been doing. They have responded to some feedback and rolled out some changes but they still have to:

1. Identify that opt in was not the way to go – they have not done that yet
2. Apologize for taking the Gmail users for granted - they have not done that
3. Don’t promise “not to be evil”. Promise not to ever opt us into anything we didn’t ask for ever again – they have not done that
4. Then retract Buzz from Gmail, allowing those who want to easily opt in – they have not done that

Finally

This is beyond one service or another, this is a battle on the future of web services. Google is a leader and a trend setter. Where Google goes others follow, for better or worse. We have to win this battle!

I leave you with this:

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

NewsShift turns the news page into a node in a networked collaborative journalistic effort, it needs your help

NewsShift is the title of the grant application coming from some of us at the ShiftSpace team in collaboration with LittleSis.org. NewsShift basically turns a news page into a node in a networked collaborative journalistic effort. It has made it through the first round of proposals and is constantly trending as one of the highest rated applications in the 2nd round in the Knight News Challenge site.

We would really appreciate your help in voting for it, commenting on it, tweeting and Facebooking about it & making sure to get the word out there (you need to register to do that, it’s a headache, but it would help save journalism, so it’s worth it…)

Here are 5  slides that would help explain the idea:

A bit more about NewsShift:

NewsShift is a web platform that adds a collaborative research layer to online news stories. This layer, accessible from the news page itself, offers readers powerful tools to communicate and develop the story with additional information and insight — facilitating collaborative watchdog journalism. As news budgets get cut, local journalists have limited time and resources for investigative reporting. At the same time, readers are responding to news stories with valuable research and analysis using blogs, comments, and other social tools. NewsShift allows readers to share their findings and work constructively with journalists to add new depth to local news reporting. NewsShift tools let readers augment a news story in simple ways: index important names and topics; link place names to maps; footnote quotes with informative URLs. NewsShift can also query web services for data related to the story, letting readers curate what’s important.

A reader can use NewsShift to expose a local conflict of interest. For example: a story on a waterfront development project mentions the mayor’s role in picking the real estate developer. Using NewsShift, a reader discovers that the developer is a top campaign donor to the mayor, and inserts a link to this information. The story’s writer notices this link, and the substantial investigative work that followed it, and writes a follow-up piece airing concerns about the mayor’s ties to the developer.

Similar networked researches happens frequently, but are often lost in the comments or spread thin over the web. NewsShift connects local reporters and readers more closely in the journalistic process, and harnesses their combined research power to connect the news to a broader network of information.

It took 5 days, no pre-coordination, we didn’t know each other in advance, we don’t necessarily agree on a lot of things, but we wrote a book together – more than 30,000 words written, edited, redited. On Monday it will be sent to the printer and that’s it. Kind of…Well the book is open ended, the first release will be printed next week but anyone can go and add to the book or edit the current version.

The book (PDF & ePub versions to follow soon) turned out way way way more successful than I expected, but maybe it’s only because I didn’t get enough sleep. We covered a lot of ground, many of our chapters are skeptical others are very hopeful. Some of the collaborations mentioned in the book refer to examples as new as last week (Haiti), some are very personal, some are just hilarious.

CF team - Temporary image, until I get a better one with everyone inside

Disclaimer

7 things this book is not:

1. It is not an exhaustive survey of any type or any aspect of collaboration
2. It is not consistent in its tone and writing style
3. It is not devoid of repetitions or conceptual holes
4. It is not really an art book
5. It is not really a cultural theory book
6. It is not really a technology book
7. It is not bad at all

The 6 of us have all came to this collaboration with a pretty explicit Free Culture / Free and Open Source Software bias and it shows. As I tweeted earlier:

Subtext: The future is all about Free Software, now that we’ve established that, let’s discuss it some more… #tm10 #booksprint

We talk a lot about Free Software, it is probably our #1 example of the future of collaboration. There are many new inspiring collaboration examples we ignored, or were not really equipped to talk about. This bias is built in to the choice of authors, but it was productive in its own right. The perspective of writing though is not really techi it is much more social, so don’t feel like you need to run Linux to get it.

What we didn’t get to write about (this list is actually a chapter in the book):

• Crowdsourcing & Mechanical Turk
• Internal collaboration in for-profit businesses
• Piracy
• Relative maintenance efforts of collaborative and free culture projects
• Interns
• FLOSS zealotry and License facism and Free Culture as an atheistic faith
• Free Culture posturing, and not walking the talk
• Open Source and design
• Scaling collaborations
• Failure (it was not an option)
• The cost of failure
• Tolerance of errors
• The pain of confronting ideologies
• How to collaborate with people you don’t agree with

And more… but that’s what makes this book an open invitation to collaborate. I intend to write the Open Source Design chapter. If you are following my blog, or have ever taken one of my classes, you know I have it all in my head, just not in writing. Would love to get it out there.

This is the final list of chapters we did get in there:

• Introduction
  • Anonymous
  • Introduction
  • How this book is written
• Background Concepts
  • A Brief History of Collaboration
  • Motivations for Collaboration
  • Open Relationships
• What is collaboration anyway?
  • Sharing is the First Step
  • Coordinating Mechanisms
  • Does Aggregation Constitute Collaboration?
  • Collaborationism
  • Criteria and Continuum sets for Collaboration
  • Degrees of Participation and Demands on Process
• Edge Cases
  • Boundaries of Collaboration
  • Anonymous Collaboration
  • Problematizing Attribution
  • Asymmetrical Attribution
  • Multiplicity and Social Coding
• Futures
  • Crowdfunding
  • Setting the Future Free: Ownership, Control and Conflict
  • The Freedom to Merge, The Freedom to Fork
  • Solidarity
  • Other People’s Computers
  • Science 2.0
  • Translation
  • Beyond Education
  • Death is not the end
• Epilogue
  • One programmer and six writers in a room
  • Knock Knock
  • Are we interested?
  • Sample Chat
  • Looking in from the outside
• Appendices
  • Things we ended up not including
  • Credits

Hope you enjoy reading it, editing it, sending it to your print on demand service of choice.

This was one of the most inspiring weeks of my life. Thank you Adam, Mike, Alan, Marta, Michael, Aco, the other writers who contributed in person or by proxy. A very special big thank you to Steve Kovatz the director of Transmediale who made sure this things happens and invested so much trust in us. Judging by the bottles of wine he kept sending it seems he was pretty happy with how things were going.

Now after 5 days of snow and mist the sun came out over Berlin. Now we can rest.

Networking with new collaborators

Marta and I comparing quotes and cats - pic by Mandiberg / Flickr

Today we have finally got better about receiving external help. When I started to write about GIT vs. SVN as references for collaboration systems I checked out Jonah Bossewitch’s Versioning Dissonance paper which he sent me after finding my first post in this series and reading that I might be interested in these ideas. I was initially planning to find a nice quote from him, but ended up realizing he basically wrote what I had in mind, only better. Since he licensed it under a CC-BY-SA license I could just copy paste the Multiplicity and Social Coding part of the essay directly into the book. Jonah will probably go into Booki edit it a bit tomorrow, but it is already a very good contribution to the book as is. By the way Jonah is involved in the pretty astonishing work done by NY based geeks hacking for Haiti, read about it on his blog.

We also got a piece about Anonymus from Patrick Davison. Jon Cohrs, whom I originally know from Eyebeam and who now lives in Berlin joined us too and worked with Michael on some of the pieces. Sophie the copy editor joined in person too and helped me edit some of the definition chapters.

My good friend Ela Kagel from Upgrade Berlin who’s one of the curators of this year’s Transmediale was today’s guest of honor. She quite elegantly blended in. It was largely due to the fact that by this morning we knew we are in pretty good standing and that we can allow ourselves to better brief her about what’s going on. Ela decided to write a chapter for the Futures section of the book titled Collaborative Economies and by the end of the day the chapter was pretty much done.. As a teaser for it I’ll quote one of the quotes she used:

“Cities without gays and rockbands are loosing the economic development race.”

Richard Florida from The Rise of the Creative Class

It seems like finding sexy quotes has assumed some game mechanics in our process with Marta constantly trying to one-up me with great quotes. Quotes are great, you get both a sound byte, an amusing pause and some social capital by having smart people passively validate your thoughts. At some point Marta and I stopped competing on quotes and started comparing our beautiful cat pictures from Flickr (M vs. M).

So it’s bullshit, but in what way

From day one Adam and Martha were into having a piece that pretty much says Web 2.0 is bullshit. Adam took a pass at it and started with a few essential bulletpoints:

• Incentivize data-driven network effects!
• Integrate data-driven weblogs!
• Syndicate A-list network effects!
• Beta-test user-contributed web services!

A direct output from the Web 2.0 bullshit generator. We all took our turns giving feedback and context. Mike helped integrate it into the history section and I ended up working on it a bit myself. It seemed like we all agreed it’s bullshit, but each of us had our own reasons. I was glad to see we have finally came to a disagreement that while Web 2.0 is bullshit, Web 3.0 is bullshit too. (it might sound like a rant, but it ended up being a pretty well articulated point)

One more day to go, we are going to make it. For real!

Attribution

The people in the room have quite strong feelings about concepts of attribution. What is pretty obvious by now is that both those who elevate the importance of proper crediting to the success of collaboration and those who dismiss it all together are both quite equally obsessed about it. The attribution license we chose for the book is CC-BY-SA oh and maybe GPL too… Not sure… Actually, I guess I am not the most attribution obsessed guy in the room.

Scale

We had a parallel sushi sprint going on. I should work on my rolling skills...

Another somewhat illuminating anecdote is that we have some parallel scale issues. We were joined by Michelle Thorne (Creative Commons Germany, Open Everything, Atoms and Bits) and by Mirko Lindner (OpenMoko, more…) who were invited to help us with writing. These are super interesting and talented people who I would love to spend time with. But today there was just no way it was going to happen. Apparently two days were enough for us to construct such a tight process that we could not allow ourselves any distractions.

It seems that the tight time constraints serves as a reverse factor for participation scale. We are so invested in the process that we are reluctant to spend time in coordination and assimilation of new contributions into the overall process. This time constraint is pretty rare for these open collaborations and it definitely affects the actual openness to new participation.

Michelle and Mirko actually wrote about it in for the self-referential epilogue section: Outsiders: thoughts on external collaboration (scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page)

Schizophrenia

Yesterday I first ran into this issue of subjectivity. I was about to write “I actually more am interested in…”, but since we are writing collectively I asked the group how should I write this? Am I interested? Are WE interested?

Today this conflict got even more complex when I wanted to refer to a personal anecdote. Both Michael and Mike have already done it in their own writing but they were able to quote themselves as they were indeed quoting previous written sentences. In my case, this was a grim memory from my army days. Not something I have ever put on paper.

Do I say I? Who is I? We’re writing in plural, as “we”. Do I say “one of the authors”? That’s pretty lame and quite superficial, and come on… how many of “the authors” served in the Israeli army? Do I quote myself? It doesn’t really make sense, it is not like I am reappropriating a quote from a different context. Should I declare explicitly that I am switching to first person for the anecdote’s sake? It is a fucking anecdote, any writer will just write it as: “I remember…”. Is English just not equipped for this collective thing?

This was getting quite schizophrenic. As for now we left is as is – unstated. It is still bound to change as we have 2 days left. But all these conflicts more than frustrating they are simply fascinating.

On the second day of our “Collaborative Futures” book sprint (read the posts about it and about day 1) I was still very skeptical about our process and our chances of success. But as the day progressed the project started taking shape and I’m actually even more excited about it now (and the same goes for the rest of us).

Most of our work today was actually heads on writing and from time to time some more lower level structure stuff. I focused mainly on definition issues and wrote drafted three chapters under this section tentatively titled: Sharing is the First Step Towards Collaboration, Coordination Mechanisms, Does Aggregation Constitute Collaboration?

My co-conspirators have wrote about assumptions, history, web 2.0 is bullshit, motivation, open relationships, and other people’s computers (revolving mainly around cloud issues). Pretty interesting writing, as this is definitely a group of pretty informed and passionate people.

We have also drafted a more detailed outlines to the whole book which would be the basis for our call for remote (ahm…) collaboration tomorrow, so definitely stay tuned for that.

Knock, knock…

One of the sections we’ve drafted was an unexpected yet somewhat obvious epilogue which will refer to some of the anecdotes that we are experiencing through this collaboration. I want to share one of them with you now. Around noon today we hear a knock on the door. Now let me just explain the set up, we’re working from a hotel room in a complex called IMA Design Village, on the 5th floor of an old (nicely) reappropriated industrial building with a jerky elevator and nothing to really point you at where we are. All of us were in the room at the time and we were not expecting any company. We opened the door and there stood a guy around our age who said he has heard about the project and he wants to contribute.

We were both amazed and mainly unprepared. He didn’t even say his name, he just said he had some ideas about collaboration and he really wanted to contribute. That was just completely great! But while we announced that the collaboration will be later opened to remote collaboration, at that moment, in that place we were completely unready for more people in the room. Adam (which the mysterious contributor said he met in some obscure music event in the city) have went with user-X downstairs to the cafe to discuss the contribution and he (still don’t know his name) will join us tomorrow writing a chapter for the book.

This was a unique experience of (finally) meeting the epic “anonymous user” in person. That faceless person that does not even have a username but is highly motivated and just wants to start contributing was standing there in-person at our doorstep. We didn’t know his name, we only knew his IP address–where he physically is: he was right there! Practically browsing our “collaborative site”.

And we? We were so Alpha, we were what early web people two decades ago used to call “under construction”. We didn’t even have an interface for him yet. It’s like he found a public yet unannounced URL for a future collaborative platform that was just not ready yet. We thought we were private, but apparently we were live. We were caught off-guarded with our first anonymous visitor, very online and just eager to log in.

If this will continue to be the spirit through the next 3 days I do expect to be continuously surprised. More updates on proxy collaboration definitely coming tomorrow. This is really great!

The stickies on the wall after an intense day of presentations and discussions

Berlin is beautiful in the snow, though we get to experience it mainly through the window. Day 1 of the “Collaborative Futures” book sprint (more about what it is in my previous post) was fascinating and intense. I feel very privileged to have met this  group of talented people, all coming with strong experience and insights about collaboration, all with a pretty explicit free culture & free software bent. (I was weirded out by being the only one to nut be running Linux on my laptop)

As I suspected, this is not an easy task. After a day of intense work we came up with the (tentative) guidelines for the book. You can think of it as a table of contents but it will serve mainly as a general guideline for our writing this week. Finally, this will not be an exhaustive survey of the term collaboration (which would be a boring outcome), but rather a set of articles and insights (and possibly some predictions) about the past present and future of collaboration as informed by our experiences and interests.

Here’s the TOC for the first day:

• Assumptions
• History
• Definitions
• Process
  • Models
  • “Other people’s computers”
• Problems
• Futures
• Epilogue

Other clusters of themes we have brought up and that will or won’t find themselves in the book are: motivations, politics (as in national group identity), money, autonomy, power, free culture, free software, trust, licenses, law, identity, reputation, attribution, scale, leadership, goals, org culture, structures, learning from mistakes, value and bullshit.

Check out the sites and relevant posts from my fellow sprinters: Mark Linksvayer (0+1), Michael Mandiberg (0), Aleksandar Erkalovic, Marta Peirano, Alan Toner, Adam Hyde.

our workshop room (my bed is behind that Ikea thing) and snowy Berlin from the window