An intriguing paper in the nytime “Wikipedia: Exploring Fact City” builds an analogy between Wikipedia and a city. Like a city, Wikipedia is a tale of spontaneous organization and achievement because it mimics the basic civility, trust, acceptance of a city. The author Noam Cohen elaborates in trust with references to Jane Jacobs observations of sidewalks and rules that govern them:

It is this sidewalk-like transparency and collective responsibility that makes Wikipedia as accurate as it is. The greater the foot traffic, the safer the neighborhood.

The concept of acceptance is developed with reference to Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History,”

Even before the city is a place of fixed residence, it begins as a meeting place to which people periodically return: the magnet comes before the container, and this ability to attract nonresidents to it for intercourse and spiritual stimulus no less than trade remains one of the essential criteria of the city, a witness to its essential dynamism, as opposed to the more fixed and indrawn form of the village, hostile to the outsider.”

Why do I blog this?: Working on a project that propose the treatment of a city digital infrastructure with the same approach of its physical infrastructure (i.e. enable rather than structure urban life). Some thoughts in this article can support my argumentation. Digital infrastructure could relay on these approaches of trust and acceptance to enable rather than authoritatively structure/frame/contain the intercourse and spiritual stimulus that make living in a city possible.

The objective to metamorphose the LIFT conference from its grassroot and “groups of friends” origins to become a perfectly ran organizations has been widely achieved. While building a professional profit-generating event, the organizers did not forget about the keys to their previous success: openness (no VIP treatments, nor reserved areas), rely on the community (I only heard positive feedbacks from the workshops and the open stages delivered their pleasant surprises), commercial free, and magic formula of mixing the right amount of entrepreneurs, researchers, designers, artists, journalists and activists.

I attended the conference digitally naked with a pen and pieces of papers as instruments to record notes and thoughts and the archived videos to support my memory:

Bruce Sterling launched the conference in the role of a near-future futurist. Predicting the future is about moral boosting. The main reason people prosper is because they are willing to get out of the bed. Showing up is 90% of the job.

His talk focused on how we can deal (i.e. analyze the driving forces and get on with our own life) with a phenomenon we are certain to be confronted in 2008. He exemplified a foresight method (”you cannot predict the future but you can describe it“) with a recent black swan, the wedding of model Carla Bruni with french president Nicolas Sarkozy . An event that defines the character of our time (especially in Europe). An event that, if we do not have the proper analytical tools, we will be overwhelmed, confused and sicken by it. However, If you we understand the driving forces that guide what is going on we will be able to anticipate the developments. “Like an american who learns the rules of soccer, you probably still won’t like it very much, but you will understand why it matters to people, you’ll be able to put into a useful perceptive and get on with you own life.“
Paul Dourish (video) how we can understand what ethnography can teach us (talk in the following up of his implication for design paper). We miss disciplinary power relationships: ethnographers might regularly be asked what implication for design are, whereas it is not possible to ask a computer scientist the impact of his/her work to social theories. The relevance of classical ethnography in the context of mobility, presence and absence. Symbolism of to define mobility different from the technological perspective (location, coordinates) and the ethnographic perspective (dispora, nomad, asylum). There are different ways to represent space that is not about the cartographic representation (aboriginal vs western, history of the place, identify, different account of space). Particularly relevant to my current project with the senseable city lab (reveal the digital traces) and my taxi driver study (the impact of satnav system on mobility and practices)

Genevieve Bell talked about the armed race of digital deception (quoting James Katz), for every device that aims to tell the truth such as GPS there is a service available to deceive (e.g. alabi service). Technology changes faster than people do (culture, practice). How do we act in social practice with the act of lying or withholding information, the notion of white lies and good lies. Lie is about negating the real, but not about negating the truth (Peter Stiegnitz). Playful act through the rules of the world (how we choose to present ourselves, depending on the knowledge of the lookers). With secrets, we keep safe from what we choose to withhold. With lies, we shape our own realities .”Twitter is making an art out of the form of confabulation“. Particularly relevant to my work on people’s disclosure of location information in Flickr and the granularity they use (attaching a coarse-grained location information can be considered as a good lie). It also touches my taxi driver study as Genevieve points out in the very end of the talk: what do we do if technologies also start to lie such as satnav systems giving a bad direction?

Tom Taylor (video) how to use social network to inflect behaviors in the context of sustainable development. He advocated for the use of positive peer/social pressure. The positive approach goes through the engagement of individuals in groups via social softwares and let people expose their behaviors. In the future we will be able to capturing data from different sources (such as Nike+) and expose them where you do not expect it (Measure, visualize and expose in a social graph). As using a Wattson to monitor the electricity consumption in a house. Tom stated that exposing actions can have a massive effect on the way people behave. In the light of the recent works on persuasive computing, this still needs to be proven (specifically how to make that happen). This work reflects well the intention of WikiCity, its feedback loop, and the use of digital traces for social navigation. An aspect to study would be analyse the spiral of: influencing behaviors that influence the data that influence behaviors the influence the data…
I had a pleasant discussion with Rafi Haladjian on creating innovation and services from the technological constraints. In his career he created success from constraints in the network administration for the Minitel (the importance was not about creating a density of traffic, but by spreading of the day so that line would always be used), the Internet (bet on the physicality of server hosting, the unique link that is not virtual and therefore fragile) and the internet of things (play and take advantage of the positive aspect of immature technologies).

Still to come… the foresight session with Scott Smith, Bill Cockayne and Francesco Cara.

We collected very valuable content from picking up the brains of the 70+ participants of our workshop Ubiquitous computing: visions, failures and new interaction rituals. The feedbacks were rather positive: Mark Meagher, Hannes Gassert, Michele Perras, Vincenzo Pallotta, and Tom Hume.

Group activity at the workshop

So Nicolas opened a pandora box by mentioning in Chronotopic visualizations: representing traces of people in spatial environments that the collection and representation of traces left by people in space through technologies is gaining momentum in location-based computing. In the past, this type of research aimed at understanding mobility and travel behaviors or predicting them (e.g. John Krumm’s work on “Predestination”). However, the collection of mobility data is time consuming and requests non-negligible efforts in setting-up and deploying surveys infrastructures. The costs and privacy issues prevented such studies to move beyond the scope of transportation research (see Jean Wolf’s Applications of New Technologies in Travel Surveys for a survey). Now, the accessibility to affordable wireless sensors and the emergence of the geospatial web are generating new types of “digital footprints” left by people in space though technologies. My Tracing the Visitor’s Eye project is one example among many. For instance, Danyel Fisher developed Hotmap to visualize where in the world people look at when they use Windows Live Maps (see Imaging the City workshop and Fisher’s Hotmap looking at Geographic Attention.

Density of people “querying” Boston through Windows Live Maps. Courtesy of Danyel Fisher. Made with Hotmap

Now, as Nicolas questions, What types of affordances these new types of data/visualization create? First, they might be directed at professionals such as urban planners to build or refine their models, but also to any kind of industry that deploy services or infrastructures supporting mobility throughout a city. For instance, it might inform on the installation of Municipal Wi-Fi. A second line of investigation aims at feedback information back to the people in order to creating a control or feedback loop (i.e. a “mirror to ourselves”). This approach makes use of social navigation (”navigation towards a cluster of people or navigation because other people have looked at something“) to help individuals make more informed decisions about their environment. A few weeks ago in Rome, the MIT SENSEable City Lab closed the feedback loop as a first example of their Wikicity project. They aggregated various types data and visually mapped the density and movement of people, buses, taxis in real time throughout the whole of the Eternal City. “By revealing the pulse of the city, the project aimed to show how technology can provide the inhabitants with a better idea of their own city and can help adjust their behavior accordingly. In the context of the web, Mor Naaman translates the feedback loop into a “social media cycle” (see the slides of his presentation this week at Yahoo! Research Barcelona: How Flickr Helps us Make Sense of the World).

Crowds gathered outside Rome’s Museum of the High Middle Ages on September 8, 2007, to view a real-time display of population movement during the city’s Notte Bianca festival. (Courtesy of MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory). In the media: ‘Wiki City Rome’ to draw a map like no other, City life on the screen, Wikis, the Semantic Web head to the streets, Les cartographes du téléphone mobile

Last week at Picnic, Adam Greenfield gave a presentation “The City is Here for You to Use: Urban Form and Experience in the Age of Ambient Informatics” in which he discussed how everyware is already affecting cities. More specifically, he mentioned this new types of real-time information about cities and their pattern of use, visualized in new ways and that information can be made available locally on demand in a way that people can act upon.

Adam Greenfield at Picnic07 on visualizing the patterns of use of the city: Stamen Design’s cabspotting, crime and real estate mapping, map of cities with WiFi hotspot.

Current scenarios for the application of these real-time visualizations mainly aim at facilitating a quick search or decision making such as determining a jogging path that corresponds to a combined query, or pedestrians that may eventually turn to interactive maps to avoid the masses or catch a bus. Other scenarios that take advantage of the temporal and social aspects of the traces could emerge. Such as providing an interactive tourist map of Switzerland based on Flickr traces revealing Zermatt, Interlakend and Davos and obscuring the non-relevant geographical location. But then, what are the scenarios beyond that?

A map of Switzerland by tourists for tourists?

Scenarios based on digital footprints lefts by people in urban environments seem to rely on the structure (urban environment), the past/current usage (social, navigation, wayfinding) and the content (POI). An application should intersect these layers in a meaningful way. However, delivering a pure mirror of the reality might be hard to reach. In some cases a meaning emerges from incomplete data patched by data mining, filtering and visualization algorithms. Their choice impact the perception of the data, potentially bringing an objective angle of the content provider and modifying the behavior. This is when read/write urbanism flirts with captology (aka persuasive computing). In other words, do the traces or the algorithms used to treat them that influence the individuals/citizens? Moreover, as discussed this week with Infovis.net’s Juan Dünsteler, information visualization struggles between educating people in reading visualization and providing relevant metaphores. Therefore, the data presented and misunderstood can impact the decision making (Visualizing Geospatial Information Uncertainty: What We Know and What We Need to Know).

Relation to my thesis: A follow-up to Inferring Spatio-Temporal Activities in Urban Spaces, seeking inspiration for an upcoming infovis.net article and in preparation of a position paper for the Urban Mixed Realities: Technologies, Theories and Frontiers workshop.

Quotes in last week’s Mobile Monday Barcelona on Mobile Social Networks.

Alex Kummerman – Clicmobile

• Studies show that young people are looking for new places “mobile and web” to create their digital identity, share with peers, communicate with messages, pictures, videos…

Alberto Benbunan Garzón - Moviligo

• A “mobile Community” is developed only if all the individual components are combined in the same application (i.e. Unique Product – with multiple applications)
• Ubiquity and mobile payments are the key of the mobile communities

Felix Petersen – Plazes

• Location is part of our identity
• Wap/softwares are “nice”, but SMS is the key for communication
• Geek community care about privacy, but in practice they don’t
• Future is supporting coordination, and context-aware advertising

Flickr set by Rudy

A Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things, thoughtfully written by Julian Bleecker, is an output from the workshop on Blogjects/Networked Things I participated to last month.

This manifesto engages us to think about the opportunities for enrolling Things into a thick and messy imbroglios of social interactions between humans and objects. With his blogjects, Julian brings humanist values (first-class citizenship, aiming at world 2.0, a more habitable world) to the RFID-enabled-refrigerator Internet of Things.

My perception of blogjects is that they are an application of the Internet of Things that I would preferably name a Web of Things. There are about generating content, meaning, and agency within the social web. Something that came out of the workshop (at least for Nikolaus Correll and I) was that blogjects hardly create an ecosystem. The exchanging and circulating (therefore I/O) information is not clear. I find the examples of very sophisticated robots (aibo) and animals (blogging pigeon) rather misleading. Primarily because I do not think that blogjects should necessarily have any “intelligence” (limited to a specific agency and actions). The “food for thoughts/meanings” emerge from flocks (interaction of simple individuals - swarm intelligence) rather than from animal/human-like behavioral individuals. It is the flock of pigeons that can interact with the Bay Area’s cars and drivers to make them aware of their own polution. Besides, would you like a pigeon to reach Robert Scoble’s social status? Well, me neither…

A future Robert Scoble? (left). My vision of the Internet of Things while writing this…(right)

Relations to my thesis: In a pervasive world, objects interconnect and our perceptions and relations with them will change. I am interested in how this chaos can be managed. Features and scenarios around blogjects bring relevant clues to enter the post-refrigirator era of the Internet of Things.

Toucan Navigate is a collaborative Geographic Information System (GIS) for users of Groove. Toucan provide:

• The ability to have entire teams seeing the same map concurrently regardless of their physical location.
• Co-editing: Team members can add, update and delete map features. The changes are shared with the rest of the team automatically.
• Team Location Awareness knowing where team members are is a requirement of almost any emergency response. The team members can broadcast their location to every other team member, securely.

The image above shows satellite imagery combined with map data. The Locations for Gabriel and John are being gathered from GPS receivers and securely disseminated with other team members in real time.

A flash animation of Toucan is also available.

The 8th edition of the Internet Global Congress (IGC), a congress of about the Internet and Information Society, which is held each year in Barcelona, will take place May 29th until June 2nd 2006. An opportunity to grow a local network. It seems to have a very wide variety of themes mainly aimed at companies that use new technologies. There is a call for paper on topics close to my research, including “Mobility: Geo-positioning services”, “Digital city” (I might submit something on the ICING project I am part of), “social applications derived from the use of ICT”.

In his course on Web Characteristics and his project on the Characteristics of the Web of Spain, Vicente Lopez talked about the properties of scale-free/power law networks that are common in social networks. These networks also exhibit the Small world phenomenon, in which two average nodes are separated by a very small number of connections (The Six Degrees of Duncan Watts, Properties of the Kevin Bacon Absorbing Set, Small World Project at Columbia University).

Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall by Rob Pike, Sean Dorward, Robert Griesemer, Sean Quinlan (Google Labs) refers to a gif animation that displays the geographical distribution of search queries throughout a day.

via Cartography

Swisscom is the first european operator to launch a mobile device (named Ogo) that offers instant messanging (via MSN) and email capabilities. Ogo costs 49CHF for the device, then 19CHF/month for the services. Swisscom targets teens and “enfults/adulescents” (teens in theirs 20s and ealry 30s). Carsten Schloter, the ever-opptimisitc Swisscom CEO, envisions Ogo as an SMS killer. I might go down into history for that statement.

You mean I have one device to phone, sms, take pictures, listen to mp3s and FM radio and another one to handle my IM contact and mails? Plus chatting and writing mails need advanced keyboard capabilities that people will need to adapt (ever written a mail on a Blackberry and done IM on a PocketPC?). Adults like integration or at least smooth interoperability (geeks are ok with interoperability). Let’s see how teens accept multiple devices for multiple purposes… It might just work since it is not rare to see (pre-)teenagers moving around with their phone, digital camera, iPod and the occasional Nintendog.