Author: brittblaser

Open Sores

Dave Winer and Tim Bray clearly get on each other’s nerves. Some would say that’s understandable….;-). Yesterday resurrected an old disagreement over RSS (of course). By way of background, Dave mentions today:

I heard, through Britt Blaser that Mitch Kapor says he’s spending a career implementing my designs. How about that. Now we’re going to open source Frontier, to give Mitch a run for his money. He’s got much more money of course, but I’ve got more source.

Actually, the comment was more general, and even more generous. I told Dave that Mitch had said that the software industry has spent the last 10 years following the trends that Dave Winer starts.

It’s not about competition, but leadership.

2:58:07 PM    

The Killer Web App

I’ve been buried since my visit with the Spirit of America people in L.A. 3 weeks ago. I wanted to understand what the most interesting pressing concerns are and whether I might be helpful. I mentioned before that SoA connects the needs of people in Iraq and Afghanistan with willing donors in the US. Jim Hake, SoA’s Founder, Angel Investor and CEO, calls it “entrepreneurial humanitarianism”. The people of America are calling it good sense. Explaining it to a bunch of smart, tech-savvy people last weekend, the best description occurred to me:

Spirit of America: just-in-time peer-to-peer foreign aid

I’m taking on a full time involvement with Spirit of America to see how killer a web app we can put together. By killer, I mean a site that collects and catalogues all requests and exposes the needs and responses to all interested parties.

SoA has two very talented programmers working on contract, Donovan Janus in L.A. and Rhesa Rozendaal in the Netherlands. Donovan is also Dutch, but has lived in the US for four years. Donovan is candid about their respective roles, “I’m a really good programmer, but Rhesa’s a great programmer.” They built and manage Exposure Manager which, it turns out, is a unique set of services to host digital photography, present galleries, and offer prints (yeah. physical product) for sale, through a commercial processor. It’s received raves from Glenn Reynolds, which never hurts business. Instapundit’s gallery is here.

Naturally, I’m encouraging Donovan and Rhesa to develop a blogger program, so that people who’ve archived history or art can make a buck or three without leaving the comfort of their den. Hell, people would pay big money for a print of Jeff Jarvis’ classic golf swing!

Tiger by the Tail

Spirit of America had quite a roller coaster ride in April. After posting a request for a $90,000 project, several newspapers described the project and the web site’s switchboard lit up to the tune of $1,300,000.

Well.

Is this, like, even legal? I mean, isn’t this what government is for? Don’t we have to carefully weigh the various demands and study them in committee? And make sure we don’t move too quickly? It turns out we don’t. Here again, the web is disintermediating something that seemed like it was locked up in an “official” function forever. As a cyberlibertarian, this is how I think the world should work, P2P good works. It took just 21 days from the time of the request to equip TV stations in Iraq’s Al Anbar province to delivery of the equipment.

The great story though, is what happened about 6 weeks later when Spirit of America delivered 50 commercial sewing machines to a new sewing cooperative set up in Ramadi by “The Organization of Creative Women in New Iraq”. Here’s the report from one of the soldiers working with Spirit of America, Major Holden Dunham, USMC:

“Dear Jim,

The local TV station we have been supporting with your donated media gear did a news spot on the new sewing center that opened in Ramadi. The station did a 14 minute segment set to music, with interviews of different people interspersed throughout the segment. The center has actually been expanded into what the Iraqis are calling a “Women’s Center” (the sign reads in English below the Arabic, “The Organization of Creative Women in New Iraq”). The Iraqis will be planning to use profits generated from the sewing to fund women’s education (English, computer skills, etc). This is huge and is exactly the direction we are trying to drive things as it runs counter to the agenda of the extremists who are fighting to keep this part of the world mired in the dark ages. During the segment, they panned to new furniture (purchased by us), school-type desks and new computers (I believe provided by CPA), and of course, the sewing machines set up on tables, each one being its own sewing station. They are saying that 900 families will be supported by the center though I think that may be a little bit of an overstatement as locals here are sometimes apt to do.

That said, the Iraqis had a true ribbon cutting ceremony. There was a darling little girl who was holding one end of the ribbon while a man cut the ribbon. One of the Iraqis interviewed (I believe he is the director of the center) thanked the Governor for the assistance that made the center possible. Because we are approaching the transfer to sovereignty there was no Coalition involvement in the opening of the center. Thus, though the Coalition was not mentioned; we still see this as a win. Any time the interim government gets credit for something that benefits local people, it increases support for the interim government. Support for the interim government means greater stability, which is what we need to get Iraq through the transition period.

There is still a fight here, but we are making progress.

Thanks again for the help.

Holden

This works on so many levels. It’s a women’s organization. The women are gaining economic clout. Individual American citizens, their empathy and abundance leveraged and focused by the Internet, have reached out to touch individual Iraqi citizens with new jobs, new opportunities and a newfound enthusiasm for economic freedom. Yep, Spirit of America is a collection of disruptive technologies.

It’s especially gratifying that the local TV station that covered the story used equipment donated by the same SoA Iraqi fans who sent over the sewing machines. In fact, the TV stations exist only because of the equipment sent by Spirit of America.

Re-purposing the funds

What, you ask, happened to the $1.1 million that SoA didn’t need for the Al Anbar TV stations? We sent out a mailing to ask what we should do with the excess. The options are to 1) use the money for any Soa purpose, 2) limit it to any support of populist media (or refund the excess), 3) use it only to support the Al Anbar TV stations (or refund the excess); 4) refund the excess.

Here are the responses as of Sunday noon, EDT:

1) Use the money for any Soa purpose
2511
2) Limit it to any support of populist media
374
3) Use it only to support the Al Anbar TV stations
4
4) Refund the excess
9

Party opportunity lost: This response, which came in the Thursday before July 4th, was typical. Atypically, we didn’t follow this donor’s directions. There are limits to our responsiveness:

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to make my donation unrestricted.
It was only $100, but I’m very please to advise you that you could spend
it for whatever you deem necess
ary.

In fact, give yourself a party on Friday, if you want. It would be OK
with me; you’ve all done an enormous amount of good, and I expect
you’ll continue to do so.

DICE

Guy Kawasaki, the magnetic personality who rose from jewelry salesman to Apple’s Mac evangelist to venture capitalist, once said that there are four criteria of great software. It must be:

    • Deep
    • Indulgent
    • Complete
    • Elegant

As remarkable as it is that I would assume a full time commitment, what may be more remarkable is that we at SoA have a real opportunity to develop a DICE-y suite of tools for organizations that want to engage, seduce and bond with its stakeholders. Here’s how.

Every time a person hears about an organization, they usually check out its web site. As we have all learned, the site can be seductive or sucky. Interestingly, that’s a choice that the organization makes. The principles are fairly obvious, but the will to stick to obvious principles is not common. Do we care enough to draw out the new visitor and engage her in the promise and thrill of our work? Or do we simply mimic our competition?

Every organization wants its visitors to register at the site and to share as much information as possible. Then the organization instinctively seeks to keep asking for more from the new member of the site: more sales, more attention, to put up with more annoyance.

At the Dean campaign, we discovered quickly that an email that’s welcome on Monday is spam by Thursday. How can an organization optimize the sales or support it gets from its members without pissing them off doing it?

Excitement First there must be a reason to share more than a modest bit of registration data. That requires an exciting product or cause, a Howard Dean, Spirit of America or, some would argue, a Mini Cooper or a Macintosh. (Wendy’s, much though they might yearn for an unofficial spokesman, just look silly when they show actors doing it.) So the first step after getting some snippet of registration info is to establish a meaningful connection with your new member.

Connection to the Cause is the precursor to “stickiness.” There must be a two-way connection between the member and the site. The member is there because the product is, as Alan Kay used to say of the Macintosh, good enough to be worth criticizing. Criticism is a blessing: customers willing to invest time helping design the next rev of your product. The way to connect to your members is to know they have important wisdom to add to the community surrounding your worthwhile effort. Armed with that internal conviction you need to exhort your members to not hold back their suggestions. Here’s where you list what you already do and the next obvious things you haven’t done yet and seek real ideas from the huge brain trust surrounding the meager set of ideas at the home office. Pop-up lists of unrealized possibilities and probing questions seeking fresh ideas, if you’re skilled and lucky, can convince people to spend time telling you what to do. As the member invests this time, you can often get more personal information from him.

Connection with Other Believers is the blessed event where one member reaches out to another in an authentic, unexpected and welcome way. In the case of a cause like a political campaign or Spirit of America, the members are enthusiastic until your web site bores them, or worse, drives them away. Having discovered where the new member lives and what parts of your cause she likes, you can encourage other members to initiate that connection. (Obviously, you cannot give a new member’s email address to another member. You must forward the message much as UserLand does when you click on that little envelope on the left of this page:


UserLand example of a message handler

Pull is the reason to return to the site after the first flush of enthusiasm. If the product or cause is exciting, it’s probable that it’s touching people’s lives. In that case, the stories need to be collected and posted often enough that there’s a reason to return. Obviously, the centerpiece of any web site is the official blog. This is where you post the news that’s actually news. If there is no actual news, then you don’t have a cause – game over.

Hyper-Connectivity is what happens when the members start connecting and doing real things together in the real world. User groups, clubs, support groups, volunteers – however they express their collective enthusiasms, this is the tipping point for any organization. It’s what happened spontaneously with the Dean campaign and Spirit of America, but it needs support and encouragement from the web site. At Spirit of America, we’ll provide a collaboration module, called Teams, where any member can invite others to join up for anything ranging from a cuppa Joe tomorrow morning to a 3-year campaign for reliable drinking water in Iraq.

Friends don’t let friends not register As I’ve suggested before, each member needs a convenient way to upload a list of their contacts to the site and to invite them, in a secure and respectful way, to perform a one-click registration. (Heh. Mebbe I oughtta patent OneClick registration…;-).

Acts II and III

Registration is where most web sites stop, and rely on spam and the magic of their “content” to increase membership and skyrocket their company into the stratosphere of fame and fortune. Well. We’ve seen the future, and it isn’t that. Stopping at registration is like inviting friends over, only to leave them in their dripping raincoats in the foyer, holding their hats and umbrellas, wondering what’s next. Where’s the love?

In this ideal registration sequence, this cause needs as much direction and wisdom it can get from newbies, who look at the organization with beginner’s mind and can teach us so much more than we can teach them. By asking which of our activities are most exciting, we’ll hope to get more information about the newby, not to spam her and impose broadcast techniques, but to discover who else in our community shares her interests, and to connect her with like-minded people. But the communication is among them, with just a bit from us.

Insert Picture, Cut 1,000 Words

This is what I’d hoped to inspire at the Dean campaign. It’s not clear that it would have made a difference, but it’s a chance for the world to tell this dilettante to go back to the bat cave. Although I was happy to put my money where my mouth was up in Burlington, this is even more of a commitment to testing these ideas in the public laboratory.

12:20:15 PM    comment [commentCounter (304)]

Can Door

At Jerry Michalski‘s retreat this weekend, I received a book from Jerry’s lovely wife, Jennifer. It’s called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott and it’s supposed to be about writing, but I think it’s about life.
The inspiration for the title is a lesson on writing from Anne Lamott’s father, a professional writer, like Anne:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead of him. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around his shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

She tells a story about her own son.

My son, Sam, at three and a half, had these keys to a set of plastic handcuffs, and one morning he intentionally locked himself out of the house. I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper when I heard him stick his plastic keys into the doorknob and try to open the door. Then I heard him say, “Oh, shit.” My whole face widened, like the guy in Edward Munch’s Scream. After a moment I got up and opened the front door.

“Honey,” I said, “what’d you just say?”

“I said, ‘Oh, shit,'” he said.

“But, honey, that’s a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?”

He hung his head for a minute, nodded, and said, confidentially, “But I’ll tell you why I said ‘shit.'” I said Okay, and he said, “Because of the fucking keys!”

Hard Landing

The worst moment in my life was a hard landing at Danang, Vietnam in early 1968. On a normal day, the only bad result would have been my obligation to pick up the bar tab at the Tuy Hoa Officers Club that night. But this was a special trip. We were carrying wounded GI’s from Dong Ha to Danang.

Dong Ha was a postage stamp strip just 5 miles from the North Vietnamese border. That area of Vietnam is oddly like an English moor, rolling grass plains and few trees. At night, they lit the 2,600 foot strip with those little round kerosene lamps they used around construction sites through the early 50’s. Dong Ha was a place where a wounded soldier, minutes from the field, would be transferred from a helicopter to a C-130 rigged to carry 72 litters, plus medical staff. We could get them to Danang in 15 minutes and the worst cases would be put on another chopper for a three minute trip to the hospital ship in Danang harbor. That afternoon, I was told as they loaded on the litters at Dong Ha, we carried a kid with a sucking chest wound.

I normally had no trouble landing the C-130 – John Robb will confirm that it’s a tractable, responsive and forgiving aircraft. But every pilot just gets it wrong once in a while, and we typically made a dozen landings a day, so the law of averages caught up with all of us every month or so. But at Danang? Jeezus, the runway’s 2 miles long and 300 feet wide and it was broad daylight. It was just a bonehead mistake. The landing was really hard. Not a bounce, there was no airspeed left to afford that, just a crunch that would make you wonder if the gear was OK, if you didn’t know how tough these planes are. Normally, the crew would have burst out laughing, having a good-hearted guffaw at my expense – just one more of the many delights of hauling stuff around Vietnam, since most of our cargo was things, not people.

But today no one said a word. No doctor running to the flight deck to yell at the miserable clod who just jarred the teeth of all the people in back who still had a face. No conjecture on how was the kid with the sucking chest wound. I’ve done a lot of things to regret, but nothing as irredeemable as that hard landing at the wrong time.

The Kids Matter

I was reminded of that moment when I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 this weekend. Michael Moore’s purpose is to shock us with the images of our guys and their people maimed and killed by the carnage of war. He’s been criticized by those who think he went too far. Those of us who’ve witnessed the combat know that Moore understates its effects. If he aired more extreme footage for three hours, he’d still understate the horror of those scared, confused and suddenly mortal 19-year-olds, whose lives will never be the same.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

– Dwight Eisenhower

That is why combat veterans don’t talk much about their experiences. Only distant observers like me, witnessing the action from on high or the results lying in the cargo bay, can even broach the horror. We’re silent not because we’re strong but because we cannot comprehend how stupidly the inexperienced bulk of society speaks of war as a rational option that we’re entitled to use on people the way a company might launch a hostile takeover: Boys with tin soldiers, attempting to seem grown up.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

– Dwight Eisenhower

Ah, some say. You’ve been scarred by an unfortunate personal experience that blinds you to the necessity of expressing America’s rights in the global arena. We honor your experience but not your conclusions. Like history’s great leaders, we must wage foreign policy with the objectivity demanded of real adults like us. Why else would we be in power, if we were not a better judge of international realities?

You do not lead by hitting people over the head-that’s assault, not leadership.

– Dwight Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

– Dwight Eisenhower

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.

– Dwight Eisenhower

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

– Dwight Eisenhower

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they never existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

– Dwight Eisenhower

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

– Dwight Eisenhower

I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.

– Dwight Eisenhower

Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and co-operation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.

– Dwight Eisenhower

No easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them.

– Dwight Eisenhower

12:51:35 PM   ]

 

I Have a Theme…

Memorable conversation is the foundation of civilization.

There’s a lot of tripe written and believed about blogs, but the plain truth is that they contain a huge body of thoughtful conversations, all of them memorized by the Googleplex and some memorable by any standard.

Any conversation conducted long enough leads to consensus; any consensus shared long enough, to action. (The IETF‘s early rallying cry: “We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.”)

Warlords and monarchies and the Industrial Age adopted more focused conversational modes to foment action: commands, demands, exaggerated urgency and authority. These modes are so compelling that they supplant conversation and consensus as the required stimuli for action, substituting a superficial ritual of listening and acquiescence for the miracle of minds meeting.

(One of 3M’s many experts on meetings has seen the perfect business meeting: the Sioux council in Dances With Wolves: open discussion, deep thought, no conclusions jumped to before the data’s in).

With P2P global conversations re-emerging alongside broadcast and top-down dictates, we are reclaiming rough consensus as a stimulus for action. Open source is the most obvious expression of the consensus-action dynamic, but they really are showing up in all sorts of places: communities forming around web sites that organize conversations so they are memorable and leave them in place while consensus forms out of the threads that gain the most traction.

SoA P2P

Individual and small group actions spring from these consensus epicenters, but they don’t exhibit the focus and persistence that paycheck-based activities enjoy. How might consensus-based action rise to that level? I believe we’re getting closer, and I’d like to help Spirit of America take it to the next level. The reason SoA might lead the way to more effective consensus-based action is its natural appeal to every stakeholder in the problem-shrouded Iraqi opportunity. When people touch Spirit of America, they usually find something they’d like to get involved in. Many of us feel we have to get involved.

Jim Hake, Marc Danziger and I agree that each SoA member should have the tools to engage at any level, involve their friends and social organizations and, depending on their political persuasion, reinforce or compensate for U.S. Iraqi policy.

I’d also like to involve the small-pieces-loosely-joined consensus that is the blogosphere. If our shared values overwhelm our disparate politics we might even be susceptible to a call to action – even though our style is to rag on imperfections and disappointments. What’s wrong with that? Design is simply the flip side of disregard. Michelangelo reputedly said that sculpture is a matter of removing the parts of the marble that don’t look like a horse.

The blogosphere’s values are transparency and openness; individual, authentic voices amplified by spontaneous feeds, supporting links and persistent reiteration. Imagine with me that we keep an eye on the bully Spirit of America laboratory where people overseas act as Requestors to bring to Donors’ attention the needs that seem worthy supplying. We can think of such suggestions as blog posts and our collective response to it as the means by which we support the request with links and buzz and dollars and volunteer logistics.

Like any catchy idea any blogger puts out there, a school kit or a sewing machine or an irrigation pump is a candidate meme. We blog it into reality with the sincerity of our expression and the energy of our reinforcement.

It’s all the same to me and, I hope, to you. Here’s a depiction of the SoA process to host the requests, comments, support and cash flow. Now all we have to do is implement it in web services and maybe we’ll find that what matters most in foreign aid is the web, not the spiders.

Just like blogs.

11:19:18 PM    

Bill, Bill, Bill…

It’s an interesting moment in politics. On Wednesday, Fox News’ movie critic praised Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis waxed enthusiastically on Bill Clinton’s talk at the premier of The Hunting of the President, and last night Micah Sifry exposed the dark underbelly of the Clintons’ rise to power, the Whitewater scandal the Republicans never exposed because it was, well, so businesslike. (Thanks, Doc, for the pointer. Sorry we’ll miss each other.)

Micah quotes Roger Morris’ Partners in Power:

More than half those who bought Whitewater lots from the future president, his wife, and their extravagant partners would lose their land and all their equity payments. Partial records showed at least sixteen different buyers paying in more than $50,000 and never receiving property deeds. Meanwhile Whitewater carried on a flourishing traffic in repossessions and resales, selling some lots over and over when aged buyers faltered….Typically, Clyde Soapes’s planned fishing retreat was resold to a couple from Nevada for $16,500, then taken back again after only a few payments, and resold to yet other buyers–all for the same middling but pitiless profit wrung from the struggling and the old….’They screwed people left and right,’ said a local businessman who watched the sales. ‘Taking advantage of a bunch of poor old folks on a land deal….The future President and First Lady. That ought to be the real Whitewater scandal.’

Interesting. The right wing spent $80 million looking for something tawdry about the Clintons, and wouldn’t expose the real scandal because there’s nothing wrong with stealing money as long as you do it with a corporate charter and a lawyer. The well-documented conspiracy didn’t hound Bill Clinton for doing the hurtful things that they would have done, and probably had.

Instead, they hounded him for doing the things they dreamed of doing.

1:13:05 PM    

DUI Without Losing your License

It’s been a busy week here at the East 43rd Street Design Center. Ian Bogost was in town to teach at a conference called Serious Issues, Serious Games, and stayed to work on an evolving notion I like to call DUI[^]Dynamic User Interface. Ian is the designer of the Dean Iowa Game, which allowed people to understand the mechanics of canvassing in Iowa.

There are two ways to look at the Deaniacs’ enthusiasm for the Dean Iowa Game.

  1. The simulation showed volunteers that retail politics is about carrying signs, knocking on doors and handing out flyers[^]a practical antidote to the zealots’ illusion that politics is about wonky discussions on the trade-offs between single payer health insurance vs. capped-premium HMOs.
    [^][^][^][^][^][^]alternate view[^][^][^][^][^][^][^]
  2. The Dean for Iowa game demonstrated that the Dean dilettantes would rather play Dean games and iChat with their fellow believers than plug into the Iowa Democratic Party establishment and do something that might actually make a difference.

Whatever your view, the The Dean for Iowa game was a seminal event among those who know that people respond at a gut level to such games, and learn far more than they do from static information. The project received a lot of attention in the press, including these 10 mentions linked to from the Persuasive Games web site (NYTimes, Slate, Ad Age, CNN, Good Morning America, etc.).

Back Story

Last November, Joi Ito told Ian that if he wanted to build a policy-oriented simulation for the Dean Campaign, he should contact me, since I was embedded with the campaign, spending a week each month in Burlington. The timing and the zeitgeist were propitious, and it took Ian and Nicco Mele and me about a week to spec, budget and commit to the project. By then it was Thanksgiving week, and we wanted the game by late December. Ian and his company produced the finished product in 3 week, over the holidays, no less. Ian tells a little of the history today, and a terrific treatise on Visualization as the new eBusiness.

Ian created the first Presidential candidacy game, and now he’s creating the second, this time a policy game for a major political party group. He’s still in the stealth (coy) phase of development

Doin’ the DUI

Serious work needs engaging graphics

A Dynamic User Interface is Flash-driven user environment that borrows its design concepts from computer games. I learned about the importance of dynamic presentation from the cockpit of the KC-135 Aerial Tanker. When I returned from Viet Nam in 1968, I was surprised to learn how archaic was my new airplane, a Boeing 707 equipped to “pass gas” to other aircraft. The tankers still had the old “round dial” flight instruments installed when they’d been built in the 50’s, a technology little changed since the 1930’s.

+ 30 years =

These instruments showed where the aircraft was but, aside from the slow rotation of the compass, none of the displays presented the aircraft’s position dynamically as it moved toward or away from our courses or destination. It was commonly accepted that the plane was a bitch to control, especially in the traffic pattern on hot days.

About a year later, the Air Force installed the Collins FD-109 Flight Director system in the fleet. Overnight, the aircraft was remarkably more tractable and could almost be flown with precision. It was striking that what had seemed to be the aircraft’s inadequacies were really a matter of presentation.

The round dial system was a graphic, but static, presentation of the plane’s data and progress, and it was demanding to integrate all that information. The FD-109 became our trusted Dynamic User Interface, and its descendants present meaningful colors and moving icons to the pilots in your airliner’s cockpit. We are all the safer for it.

SoA DUI

Ian and I also worked actively on DUI concepts for Spirit of America. Spirit of America “Full Throttle” will be a membership campaign that employs strawberry roots activism, by which supporters can directly recruit other supporters and build their own activities to support requests from people we want to demonstrate the awesome power of Americans’ generosity toward previously oppressed peoples.

That’s where the DUI comes in. Ian will present a proposal to the SoA folks to depict each members’ activities dynamically, through various metaphors: a forest with trees, or a flower garden, that sprout branches and leaves and blossoms as a member’s recruits (and their activities) grow; or a bungalow that expands into a mansion as the member’s recruits and activities grow. Of course, we can still use the Solar System DUI that Ian mocked up for the mydeanpeople project, described previously:


click to view the animated depiction

This will be the first organized use of metadata about how members recruit others and empower them with the tools to act, essentially, as their own franchise of the Spirit of America enterprise. This is the “polymer” structure that I harp on until my friends’ eyes glaze over.

We couldn’t get it done for the Dean campaign, but maybe the SoA experience will indicate if it would have worked as I envisioned it last October.

Why 2004 Won’t be Like 1984 [^] CLI to GUI to DUI

“Why 1984 won’t be like 1984” was the headline
for Apple’s introduction of the Mac. In 1984, it was clear to only a few people that computers needed to enrich their means of depicting data. Most of the experts were convinced that the CLI [^] Command Line Interface [^] was plenty good enough. Their confidence echoed that of IBM’s Thomas Watson 2 generations earlier, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Ian is suggesting another interface revolution, where dynamic graphics depict a user’s motion through her flight plan of commitments, deadlines and opportunities. Perhaps, as the FD-109 did for the KC-135, it will also make our lives more manageable and enjoyable.

5:36:15 PM    

Americans Doing Something

Spirit of America is serving a communal need we’ve felt since 9/11/01. Do you remember that dark September when you wanted to do something–anything–to make a difference? Remember the tone-deaf response? Take a trip to Orlando; live your life as if nothing has happened. If We the People had been empowered to work through our rage and grief proactively, perhaps our foreign policy would not bankrupt our grandchildren.

SoA is helping We the People do something significant to make the world a better and safer place. Except for the crazies, re-purposed cold warriors and pacifist Birkenstockers yearn similarly for pacification of the mid east–and the world.

Steven Johnson sees something important in Spirit of America:

My buddy Jeff Jarvis alerted me to the laudable Spirit of America site, which has already been widely linked to through the blogworld, but every link counts, so here’s mine. It’s a fascinating model for combining long-distance philanthropy with targeted interventions. I won’t bother going through the details since they’re nicely summarized here. But the site makes me wonder whether this isn’t the beginning of a fascinating new chapter in the web’s gift economy…

…What Spirit Of America suggests is a version of that swarming directed towards Good Causes: someone halfway across the globe (or halfway across the country, or the county) puts out a call for help setting up a wi-fi network in an under-funded school, or repairing a sewage treatment facility, and within five days they’re flooded with funds, spare parts, technical expertise, and good will. And when the network goes online, or the sewage starts getting processed again, we all get to see the results. (Maybe not so fun for sewage, but you get the idea.) And then we get to move on to the next cause.

Bingo! That’s what I’m talkin’ about! And so is Jeff when he describes SoA as open-source nation-building. Is it possible that the Internet disintermediates foreign aid as it does so many other communication-dependent economic structures? Natch!

This resonates with John Robb’s link to Phillip Bobbit’s important work describing the ascendancy of the market-state:

Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles, on the rise of the market-state:

The “market-state” is the latest constitutional order, one that is just emerging in a struggle for primacy with the dominant constitutional order of the 20th century, the nation-state. Whereas the nation-state based its legitimacy on a promise to better the material well-being of the nation, the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen.

The current conflict is one of several possible wars of the market-states as they seek to open up societies to trade in commerce, ideas, and immigration which excite hostility in those groups that want to use law to enforce religious or ethnic orthodoxy.

States make war, not brigands; and the Al Qaeda network is a sort of virtual state, with a consistent source of finance, a recognized hierarchy of officials, foreign alliances, an army, published laws, even a rudimentary welfare system. It has declared war on the U.S. for much the same reason that Japan did in 1941: because we appear to frustrate its ambitions to regional hegemony.

“…the market-state promises to maximize the opportunity of each individual citizen.” How’s that for a consumer-oriented manifesto?

It’s a classic market opportunity, and the virtual Al-Qaeda market-state is responding to it with innovation and energy. The entrepreneurs at Spirit of America see the success enjoyed by this new class of entrepreneur, and realizes that an American response, fueled by real abundance, can overwhelm the competition with a better product, one that actually improves lives rather than one that promises to improve the afterlife. It’s a functioning product vs. vaporware, and it’s really no contest.

The Spirit of America proposes to deliver real results to the customers to whom Al Qaeda is shipping empty cartons. In that sense, SoA is as much a market-state as Al Quaeda, but still a baby one. How big does SoA have to grow to match Al Qaeda in GDP? In about a week and a half, last month, SoA raised $1,500,000, giving SoA an imputed annual GDP of $52 million. That’s about 25% as big as the US economy in 1789, according to these experts.

It’s a start.

9:25:31 PM