Entries Tagged 'Changesurfing' ↓

Note that I didn’t say “The Great Redeemer”. The reality is that Obama hasn’t redeemed America – it largely redeemed itself by electing him in the first place, which is not to say that his ability and willingness to lead the country along the right path is not worthy of the highest praise – but he didn’t get there alone, and he knows it: “This election isn’t about me.” – how many times did you hear that during the campaign? I don’t think it was false modesty, he knew the American people were desperate for Change, and he was willing to offer it in no uncertain terms.

Still, after re-electing Bush, America has a lot to make up for. I cried that day back in 2004, and I suspect so did half the politically aware people on the planet (and we all cried again 4 years later, but for a different reason).

Realistically speaking, a huge leap has been made, but solid incremental improvements towards a return to international norms and good faith multilateral agreements, as well as strong leadership in progressive, non-military areas, followed by a public affirmation in the form of a re-election in 2012, are going to be required before the real skeptics, of whom I know plenty, will accept that America has truly redeemed herself and may deservedly claim some sort of leadership in the “free world” again.

Personally, I’m sold. The tenor being set by the first few days, along with the quality of the people going into key positions (more on some of them later perhaps) is going to make a significant difference to America’s standing in the next 4 years (heck, in the next 4 months), and I even believe they can sort out the economic crisis without the huge inflationary crash being predicted by some (probably some more on that later as well).

NB: This post grew from a comment I made on Jimmy Wales’ blog (which is currently in moderation but that may have changed by the time you read this).

The ‘08 US election has re-drawn the American Political Map, put tears in the eyes of many (myself included), and surely changed the world. My father was pretty sure it couldn’t happen, and I think most Americans his age would probably have agreed, right up until the first results started coming in. Dissatisfaction with American politics was the major reason my parents ended up here in the early 70s, a year or so before I was born. History was made on the 4th of November, there’s no doubt about it. But enough has been written about Obama’s victory to stretch from hear to Mars if you printed it in 8 point Helvetica, so I’ll refrain from going on about that in this post.

In contrast, New Zealand goes to the polls tomorrow in what has to be described as a bit of an anti-climatic mood. Few seem to see a lot of difference between our two major parties – largely because John Key decided to adopt most of Labour’s policies, on the grounds that (a) they seem to be working and (b) the public seems to like them. The NZ public appear to have simply gotten bored of Labour, and frankly, I think they’re a bit daft because “boring and predictable” is about a thousand times better than what we saw from all the other NZ governments in my lifetime. But after 9 years everyone has managed to find at least one or two things they don’t like about Labour people or policies (Recent copyright legislation is a biggie for me and anyone else who cares about freedom and the internet), and since minor quibbles become more important when the other side isn’t promising to do anything much different, well, I can see how Labour is unlikely to get through this time. I’ll still vote for them, because they earned it, and I think, as Russel says, in years to come we’ll probably look back at the 4th Labour Government as one of the best we ever had.

However, one other notable point of difference lacking between our two possibilities for Prime Minister is their religion – or rather, their lack of one. In the last leader debate “Both said they did not believe in God or in an afterlife” – I quote from a report of the debate I read, because I missed the debate myself. Recently I’ve been regretting the lack of a TV at the office! So perhaps what they actually said was a bit more nuanced.

But if not, my assertion that this too is an historic election. I haven’t had time to research it, but it seems to me that Helen Clark vs Jenny Shipley was probably the first time two woman had fought for leadership of a western democracy, and this might be the first time that the fight is between a pair of atheists.

The reason this is possible is that the role of religion in NZ culture has been depleted to the point where no one really seems to have thought about the significance of such an election. Our separation between church and state is very much a “done deal”, and any talk of bringing the two back together is electoral poison. The fact that the last leader of a significant Christian party in this country is currently doing time for sexual abuse of multiple girls under the age of 12 probably may have something to do with that.

In America, on the other hand, it is almost impossible to win office, even at the state or local level, where they elect almost everyone from the local judge to the local tax collector, if you openly declare that you do not believe in God. It is a tragic, broken state of affairs and explains much of the pain that the country has gone through in the last few decades – through deliberate manipulation of their “flock” and of their favored politicians, the leaders of the religious right have prevented anyone from getting into power who was (a) smart enough to have decided there probably isn’t a God, and (b) honest enough not to have hidden their decision. And when you can’t elect a huge number of smart, honest people into even lowly positions of power, and it’s impossible for them to get into those particular positions of power through merit alone, well, what would you expect to happen?

BarCampChristchurch was very cool. Already looking forward to the next one! I’ve had this post under construction for a while now, just been completely flat out for the past couple weeks.

I ended being MC by default, which is a pretty unfamiliar sort of role for me, but Ben was busy liveblogging and Stephen was running the laptop finding interesting content to go along with the talks, so I ended up being the one doing the talking between talks. The job was to watch the clock and figure out when and how to call time on each speaker, and since we had a lot of interesting people there and lots of good questions being asked, it was tricky. Didn’t completely fluff it. Everyone seemed to have a good time anyway.

A few notes on some of the presentations:

Ben didn’t quite manage the Steve Jobs effect since we couldn’t make the air-pointer driver work with Powerpoint 2007, but it was an excellent presentation on SaaS nonetheless, probably the best of the day from my perspective. And he thought he wouldn’t be geeky enough!

The lads from SLI definitely had the best schwag. Actually I think they had the only schwag. They also brought their projector which came in handy. It’s good to know there are some well financed web companies in Christchurch – hopefully Interclue will join them in that regard sometime soon. They’re hiring, by the way.

Marek showed off his new OpenID provider. OpenID was very much on the menu at BarCampWellington as well. There was some good debate about the pros and cons at both. I think it’s definitely an important standard, but it may take a while to catch on with the users. I hear that they have taken it off the menu for Firefox 3 which is a shame.

We chatting about hardware gadgets in an open session, with Phil telling us about Arduino and Eric Woods mentioning his recent investigations into the world of smartphones, and his conclusion that the best value to be had right now was importing a new Treo 650 from the states, for about NZ$300. I have a Treo 650 and I can confidently say it’s excellent value at that price, but the two things that really irritate me are the lack of 3G data – GPRS ping times are awful – and the camera being a poxy 640×480 that doesn’t work well indoors. The photo I’ve used here is an example of that. The sound recording for video is also pretty poor. Also if you want to use it as an alarm clock you’ll need to install an app, and most of the cost money. Google Maps works moderately well on it tho, and doesn’t cost money.

Near the end we remembered we hadn’t done the 3 word intro’s! A week later, the same thing happened at BarCampWellington! You’d think if anyone would have remembered to point it out at the time it would have been me, but my memory is reasonably atrocious at times. At Barcamp Christchurch we mixed 3 word intro’s with short talks by the people not wanting a half hour slot. Eg
Isaac from Wowza gave us a bit of a chat about user-centric data modelling that he expanded on here.

As a Finale, Roger Bays gave us a demonstration of his phenomenal augmented reality artwork, Semaphore. He was able to demonstrate using a monitor rather than using a headset like he did when he one the People’s Choice award at a recent exhibtion featuring 50+ artists (I think). I’m really looking forward to the day when they get this sort of thing working with descrete, affordable, non-bulky, wifi enabled dataglasses.

All in all, although I think in retrospect we should have given ourselves a few more weeks to prepare, and done it over a weekend, it was a really good day for the Chch tech scene and I hope it inspires more gatherings of it’s like as soon as we can organise them. Don’t forget to sign up to the TVIC mailing list to find out more about geek gatherings in Christchurch.

Fortunately more organized minds than mine are pushing things forwards on BarCampChristchurch after I kicked the ball into motion.

Ben Kepes has signed up as co-planner, so I’m only half as stressed about it now :-)

The chaps from OnlineGroups.net set us up a free discussion group using their wizzo ad-free groupmail system. They’re making the same offer to anyone running a barcamp anywhere in the world, very much fitting in with the “gift economy” that Barcamp encourages. The discussion there is taking over from the TVIC mailing list, which you should also be on if you’re in Christchurch. There will be a BarCampChristchurch2 at some point, so you might as well join the list even if you’re not sure if you’re coming to the first one!

Lots of people have added their names to the wiki. Despite the fact that it seems to barf every time you try to edit it (just hit refresh…)

I’m particularly looking forward to Joel talking about the Singularity (trivia: I met Joel after looking for something to link from the word “Singularity” on my Technoprogress page), Ben talking about SaaS, and Marek on OpenID. I’m sure there will be many more topics of interest, so anyone who can make it, should do so!

Anyone is also welcome to come to a meeting at CII, 200 Armagh St, 11am Friday 31st where we’ll confirm as many details as we can, then go have lunch somewhere.

If you’re thinking you’ll be coming, make sure you add yourself as a participant on the Wikipage! It seems to me that every time I try to edit the page it throws a 500 error and I have to hit reload, but it works on the reload. Weird…I will have to ping Chris about that…[update: I found the issue thread about this on the PBWiki Bugs forum and posted there]

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 – just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.