On the other hand, I’ve never been much of a protester.

I went to a Peace Protest while I was in Wellington last year, the first I can remember going to since university days. The turnout wasn’t huge. New Zealand is the most peaceful nation on Earth (according to a recent global audit), and in that context one might think a peace protest makes no sense here anyway, but it was the start of a year long “global peace march”, and in that context, starting in NZ makes perfect sense. They’d also chosen to start on Ghandi’s birthday – which means it was my birthday as well, albeit many years later. The other reason I was going along was because I’d heard Richard Stallman was going to be there, and I wanted to ask if he remembered me from a certain 48 hour party we were at in Christchurch about a decade earlier (random factoid: the dude can dance). Anyway, as I said, there wasn’t a huge turnout at this protest. Maybe a couple hundred people. It was a workday, and they hadn’t done much advertising (it even took me some time to google the details of the march once I’d figured out it was happening)

Yesterday I went to a much larger protest – over 3 thousand, according to National Radio (vs “hundreds” as reported  elsewhere, a good example of how the media coverage of a protest impacts its impact!), in our local Cathedral Square, to protest the recent disbanding of Ecan (our regional government) by the national (National) government. I turned up late (this isn’t exactly unusual) but somehow ended up being the representative “protester” quoted in the press (The Press) this morning.

“Protester Seth Wagoner, of Christchurch, said he was shocked at how quickly democracy was taken away and he was showing solidarity with the environment.” (link)

Which I figured would sound better than “Well, my friend was going, it was only a couple blocks away, and I wanted to see how many people turned up“, when the reporter asked me “Why are you here?”

But thinking about it in retrospect, I’m glad I was there, and I shouldn’t have been so ambivalent it. People should protest more often, even those of us who arguably have “more important things to do”.

I could ramble on about this for quite a while, but the truth is I do have quite a lot of important things to do, so I might come back to this later. After all, I’m not trying to get into All Souls College here. But if I was, here are a few threads I might try to weave into my narrative:

1) The reasons people choose names like “National” for their political party, or “The Press” for their newspaper, and whether we should let them do that.

2) The nature of ECan, a “regional council” that many people barely knew, and how the rights of hundreds of thousands can be appropriated by a few people who actually care, and understand what they need to do.

3) How the power change at Ecan – swapping out an elected “council” for an appointed “commission” may or may not effect the civil servants who actually do the real work – with a somewhat dubious analogy to the recent power changeover in Britain, particularly with respect to:

3.1) transitions of power in a democracy, and how the week long decision making process from the LibDems caused the media to condemn them for leaving Britain without leadership, even suggesting that the Queen should step in and do something about it, how the reporters from Europe laughed at this notion given the occasional 6 month coalition forming process they have to put up with, potentially diverging into a discussion of

3.1.1) the role of the Monarch in (a) Britain and/or (b) New Zealand, past, present, and or future.

3.1.2) advantages and disadvantages of different types of “representation”, with respect to:

(a)  in the case of ECan, replacing a “democratic” council elected mostly by local landowners, with a technocratic “commission” appointed by a government that was chosen nationally by everyone – both in general and in this specific case.

(b) in the case of Britain, the upcoming referendum on the AV “Additional Vote” , how the various stakeholders appear to feel about it, how the question of (more) proportional representation affected the coalition forming process, and why the referendum will (probably) be a historic moment in the world’s oldest surviving democracy.

(c)  in the case New Zealand, our upcoming referendum on the retention of the MMP electoral system

4) How Local Government ‘parties’ have formed in some cities that have only a loose affiliation with parties at the national level. In the legislatures of the USA, it is republican vs democrat all the way down, so far as I know. In NZ it is much more diverse. How affiliations between National, Regional, and Local government parties, and the movement of personal between the ranks may or may not affect how the votes go and the policies we end up with as a result.

5) “Headlines”, with respect to:

5.1) how this post started out with the title “Protest”, switched to “Democracy. Use it or lose it”, and then “Democracy. It’s complicated.”

5.2) the rarely mentioned role of newspaper sub-editors (who write the headlines, among other things) in the democratic process.

6) The media and their role in reporting on protests, other ways they affect public opinion, and their resulting power over both elections and sitting governments.

6.1) How the ownership of newspapers and other mass media affects the editorial positions taken, delving into the relationships between the owner(s), the owner(s) other media and non-media companies, the editor(s), sub-editors and reporters, giving examples such as:

6.1.1) Fox News, and their supposed disconnect between “News” content, which is supposedly fair and balanced, and “Talkshow” content, which clearly isn’t.

6.1.1.1) The phrase “Fair and Balanced”, how Fox tried to trademark it, what that would have meant, and how the EFF  stopped them.

6.1.1.1.1) A potentially lengthy diversion into the relationship between intellectual property law and representative democracy, by which time the essay markers would I’m sure have already decided to give me an “A” or an “F” depending on how they felt about indented intellectual diversions, but given that they’re expecting one to write an essay length response to a one word question, intellectual diversions are clearly something they are looking for.

6.1.1.1.1.1) Yet *another* potential diversion onto the subject of how one can clearly have “too much of a good thing”, for instance:

(a) “Freedom” in Market Economies, as demonstrated by the recent global financial maelstrom (with at least a footnote relating to the nature of the words “Free” and “Freedom” and how they are leveraged into new roles, eg by the “Free Software” movement started by Richard Stallman (mentioned in Paragraph 2 above) and also in respect to our new “Free (as in Speech) Beer” brand, which of course started out just as an opportunity to take the piss (hur, hur) but evolved into something approaching an actual business model, with it’s own domain name(s) and the beginnings of a new “open” licence  (but then I got distracted, which as you can see in my case, isn’t very hard) or;

(b) intellectual diversions, potentially enlightening but ultimately leading one further and further away from the original topic under discussion.

6.1.2) The venerable Wall Street Journal, recently purchased by the same media conglomerate that owns Fox News, has, as with most papers, different standards for the “News” parts of the paper, which tend to stick, roughly speaking, to reporting the known facts, versus the editorial pages, on which, particularly in the case of the Journal, the most absurd nonsense has often been printed, quite regardless of and often in direct opposition with the known facts.

6.1.2.1) This separation of policy as regards fact checking, at the world’s largest newspaper, is well known to sophisticated consumers of news content. However, to unsophisticated or inexperienced news readers, comprising perhaps 95%+ of registered voters, the imprimatur of the Journal, with it’s long history and imposing credentials, gives an undeserved advantage to said editorial content, no doubt fooling many readers into accepting as fact what is merely opinion…

6.1.2.1) Furthermore, when one considers the (relatively recent) co-ownership of Fox News and the WSJ…

6.2) A more general diversion into how consolidation of media companies, their ownership by other companies, or ownership by people who own other companies, may have an effect on their editorial policies, their news sourcing, etc, and by extension, have an effect on the “constituency” they share with the politicians.

6.3) Perhaps something about the fact that most printed news is sourced from only 3 big networks – the AP…(nuts, I’ve temporarily forgotten the other two…one is french…)  and suggest that editors should take a look at Allaboutthestory.com [disclaimer: owned by some Kiwifoo friends] and www.project-syndicate.org to freshen things up a bit.

6.4) And perhaps even attempt to drag in Chomsky & Herman, “Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media” which is really compulsory reading for anyone who’s serious about this sort of thing. I read it over a decade ago and was highly impressed. One key takeaway for me was that you really didn’t need some grand conspiracy to control the media and/or popular opinion, the economics of the situation pretty much ensured the ‘elites’ would stay in charge (these days I’m a bit more sanguine about that, and not in any hurry to try Chomsky’s desired experiments in Anarcho-syndicalism thank you very much). I haven’t seen the more recent documentary, which I expect was a bit less detailed. How relevant is it to the modern day media situation or countries other than the US? Not sure, but it’s worth reading anyway.

7) A personal connection. My friend’s dad lost his job when ECan was disbanded. He’s an interesting chap, as is my friend.

7.1) For instance, my friend put a footnote in his doctoral dissertation (on the geopolitics of the Patagonian toothfish, for what it’s worth), promising a bottle of scotch (I can’t recall if it was a malt or a blend) to any of his three examiners who actually read that footnote, for his feeling was that in general examiners rarely bother to read the footnotes, meaning they were likely to miss potentially vital details, such as the reason my friend had brought three bottles of scotch to his oral defence – none of which were claimed. Given the growing length of this outline of potential threads in a hypothetical answer to a demonstrative example of the question no longer being asked in a fellowship exam at a college I never plan to attend, I will attempt a similar wager. A pint of most excellent ale awaits the first three people who read this sentence and let me know they have done so.

8) Realising the end of the exam time period was drawing near, I would then valiantly attempt to draw several of the preceding (sub-)points into something approaching a conclusion.  Perhaps something along the lines of “In conclusion, protests perform a vital role in a representative democracy, a mechanism for the populace to display their displeasure with the actions of their leaders. Active suppression of street protests by police, or at worst, the military, is a sure sign of unhealthy democracy. However, the impact of a protest, its ability to spark ongoing debate, further protest action or to actually bring about the changes sought by the protesters relies crucially on the role of the media…

8.x) Democracy. It’s complicated.

————–

[1 week passes...]

Hmmm. Well in light of the fact that I haven’t managed to get back and actually finish this off, I think I’ll post it unfinished for your amusement. At least, I hope some of you will be amused. If there’s anything in there you’d like me to follow up on, let me know in the comments. I may come back and re-work this later, and add more links. I had at least a dozen more random threads to weave into the outline; here are the ones I’d actually started to write down:

The ongoing transition of power from Newspaper owners to aggregators, search engines, and now social media, why this matters

How I hadn’t seen so many people in the square since the funeral of Rod Donald, co-leader of the NZ Green party, a great man taken well before his time.  Of course, had he still been alive, Rod would have been a speaker at this event, and he ties into the themes of this blog post all the more greatly for his involvement with electoral reform and the nationwide MMP campaign, and also the transition to STV for our local government!

How a brilliant part of this particular protest was the cairn of rocks. What a great symbol. Top marks to whoever came up with that one.

The friend I came along with, who felt more strongly about the protest than I did, felt that she had let herself down by not wanting to go on the record (which is why I ended up on the record) out of (I think) concern for her current work in the public sector. Frankly I think she was doing more than her share  just by showing up, but there’s certainly a potential diversion there on the potentially chilling effects of a large public sector, and one might also be tempted to talk about the power of the public sector unions that are apparently now in negotiations around the entitlements that states in the USA can no longer afford…

Somewhere in the middle of writing this post I got a call from The Press’s tech reporter, clarifying a few details for an article mentioning my company’s products due to be published next week. So I was tempted to try and fit something in around chilling effects wrt work within the private sector as well – ie if a company director or CEO posts something that might be interpreted as critical a media organization (fortunately, in this case, The Press is a non-Murdoch owned newspaper!) , or any institution with the potential to affect the health of the company, are they in jeopardy of breaching legal or moral obligations to company stakeholders?

Social aspects of protest, why they’re important for reasons other than just the policy changes they seek to bring about…

Some other interesting protest examples:

* During the Bush years, whenever Bush spoke anywhere they set up “First Amendment Zones” - corrals where the police kept the protesters separated from the govt supporters and the media.

* Contrasted with: the people who showed up with guns to anti-Obama protests and were allowed to keep them because that’s the sort of state they were in.

* The protest Flotilla delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza suffered the tragic loss of 9 lives, but it caused a media storm world wide that might actually lead to the human rights being partially returned to 1.5m people living in poverty in the Gaza Strip

* The protests around the time of the Coalition negotiations where they were attempting to force Clegg to stay true to his word, how this may or may not have helped the LibDems get such a great deal in the negotiations, whether Sky News reporters berating the protestors in their interviews was appropriate….

* The photos of the Christian “million man march” that ended up being re-purposed by right wing blogs and media as supposed pictures of tea party protesters.

A rationale for protest:  Use it or lose it.

Representative Democracy has a lot of problems – the main one being that the public really only gets to hold their politicians accountable every 3 to 5 years.  In between elections, one of the few ways you can exercise your democratic rights is getting out on the street in a mass protest. Plenty of people will tell you that this is largely a waste of time – the media will downplay the incident and the government will ignore it. Millions of people out on the streets didn’t stop the Iraq War.

How important is being on the streets vs more modern forms of protest, eg, tweeting and blogging? You can of course, do both at the same time…just so long as they’re not jamming outgoing signals from the area as they tried to do with the #flotilla.

How the flotilla protest was an interesting case as it was international in nature and the resolution came in international waters, and without trying to get into the details of that particular case (which could be time consuming and potentially hazardous!), attempt to put in some points about how democracy is constrained or enhanced by international treaties, the role of the UN, and yada yada, and perhaps also mentioning Sir Geoffery Palmer, the rumour that he might be asked to head an international inquiry into the flotilla affair, and why he would be well qualified.

Here’s the (much) longer version of my three tweets from yesterday.

I have been watching the UK election with some fascination since the results indicated a “hung” parliament. My knowledge of British Politics is scant – it simply hasn’t been all that interesting up till now for those of us with no British heritage (unlike the majority of my countrymen, my closest non-Kiwi relatives are Americans). But things have become very interesting indeed now that there is chance for massive political reform in the oldest democracy in the world.

I speak, of course, of the potential for the Britain to switch to Proportional Representation, which is, to quote Joe Biden, a big f’king deal.

The difference between “First Past the Post” and true Proportional Representation is like Dawn and Day. The Tories are right to fear PR – it’s a massive step towards ending generations of electoral injustice that have traditionally worked in their favour, and will do so even more if they get a chance to re-gerrymander the electoral map (Note, the British gerrymandering in recent elections has been far less egregious than it used to be long ago, it’s not a super-partisan process as they have in  the USA). To do so is actually one of their election promises, although their phrasing of that particular promise is something along the lines of “cut the cost of Westminster on the ordinary citizen by reducing the number of MPs”.

Even if it is done 100% fairly, redrawing the electoral boundaries won’t end the structural unfairness for long, and neither will it end members of the Duopoly suppressing 3rd party chances in the more obvious way: by warning the voters that a vote for a 3rd party is effectively a vote in favor of the other half of the Duopoly – thus compelling voters to vote tactically for the lesser evil, rather than strategically for the party they actually want to support.

The LibDem leadership surely knows this. They are not stupid. In fact, although I’d never even heard of him before, five minutes of listening to Lord Menzies on the BBC website this morning was enough to convince me that he is probably one of the smartest guys in the house.

Meanwhile, their deputy leader, Vince Cable, appears to be an economics wizard – he probably has folks like Stiglitz, Roubini, Summers, Geithner and Volcker on his speed-dial already, just waiting for his chance to get stuck in and help save our global macro-economic petard from the misdeeds of the last decade (or arguably, the last century).

And of course, Clegg himself appears to be pretty sharp. I am going to go out on a limb here, and extrapolate that the rest of the LibDem front bench are also highly competent.

So, as I said, these guys are not dumb. They know that a Lab-Lib coalition is going to be best for their party and best for Britain, and hence their A-team is likely in the midst of negotiating as good a coalition deal they can get from Labour and the rest of a required “rainbow” / “traffic light” alliance/coalition, while their B-team also negotiates in good faith, for a Lib-Con deal they believe Cameron can never follow through on – because his party would rather hang *him* than accept it.

Cameron himself would probably give the LibDems almost anything they want in exchange for the keys to Number 10, and presumably his front-bench would too. Their problem is that if they give the LibDems too much they risk of being given the boot by their own caucus in very short order – perhaps before they even get to the Queens Speech bit (this is one of those areas where a days worth of surfing the UK intarwebs, interspersed with updating my about page, and believe it or not, some actual work, is quite inadequate, I have no idea how fast the Tories could stage a backbench revolt).

Anyway, and this is a guess, the Achilles heel that will keep Cameron from number 10 is this: the common or garden unreconstructed Tory backbencher has ideological blinders so big he can barely see his chauffeur if he sits on the wrong side of the Jag.

Furthermore, his core constituency is likely similarly impaired (minus the Jag…) – or they wouldn’t have elected him.

I could be wrong on both counts. Maybe Cameron can overcome his own party and come up with an acceptable deal. But I wouldn’t bet on it, because any deal is going to have to get past not just Clegg but *his* backbenchers, due to the triple lock clause.

This is the sort of situation you end up with in an FPP electoral system where the electoral lines are redrawn only rarely – or worse are redrawn by the legislatures, as in the US Congress (and State congress) redistricting, in which incumbents always seek to feather their nest with a few more acres that match their demographic niche, while trading away the acres that have switched sides to neighboring incumbents of the opposing party, who are usually only too happy to receive them.

In a properly designed PR system, this sort of thing just doesn’t happen – the parties can gerrymander all they want and it won’t change who gets into power the next time around, so they don’t even bother trying, and the electoral needles gravitate back towards the center, eventually resulting in honest, centrist MPs who really care for their electorate – partly because their electorate really has a shot at turfing them out the next time around.

Perpetuating FPP, along with slow or biased redistricting, and backroom deals done with the usual suspects, is how a two-party duopoly maintains its power – for decades or even centuries. Chances to overthrow such a Duopoly and introduce Proportional Representation (AKA: Actual Democracy) come along less than once in a generation – and this is Britain’s big opportunity.

The LibDems have waited 90 years for this moment, and I refuse to believe that Clegg’s team are going to risk waiting another decade or three before it comes along again – regardless of what Cameron offers them in “other” inducements. They also know that to accept a Tory offer will require overcoming the “triple lock” voting formula that gives their backbench, and members, even more power than the Tory equivalents.

They will negotiate in good faith regardless, it puts more pressure on the A-team and their counterparts to come to a deal quickly, and regardless, it’s keeping an election promise from Clegg, and it’s important to start building up trust with the electorate. But eventually they will almost certainly follow the logical path from here into….

…a Rainbow “alliance” comprising: (1) a Lab-Lib coalition, (2) “anyone but Brown” in Number 10, and (3) as many minor parties as possible providing confidence and supply (for which they will rightly demand concessions, but coalition partners in theory get to pick and choose between a few competing offers, and given the urgency of the moment, sane voters from minor parties are likely to understand that a bird in the hand as big as Proportional Representation is worth a dozen in the bush, and thus they should not risk overplaying their hands.

Ideally, the coalition should bring as many of them as possible into the “big tent” in order to ensure continuity in the event of by-elections and greater legitimacy in the eyes of the voters (and as they say, better that they’re in the tent, pissing out of it…)

That’s how it gets done in New Zealand, and so far, it’s actually worked out pretty well – even with the oddest of parliamentary bedfellows. Of course, there are extremists on all sides who will swear blind that it’s been a complete betrayal – which is how you know that they’ve done the right thing.

There were many excellent talks of both a technical and general nature – leaning heavily towards the technical, but that more or less suited the participants (I won’t say ‘audience’ because at an unconference there is no real seperation between organizers, presenters and audience!)

At some point we all gathered ourselves together to show solidarity with the 120 people in Wellington hashing out the PublicACTA declaration that day, via twitter. It was unfortunate that we’d already announced the date for the barcamp by the time PublicACTA was announced, as there were certainly several people who would have liked to have gone to both events (including moi!).

#bcchch showing their support for #PublicACTA

As one of the nominal unorganizers of this particular unconference, I’d particularly like to thank CII for hosting the event, my co-unorganizer Pete for doing much of the publicity, getting the ball rolling, and buying the beer, Stephen for organizing the Pizza and doing much of the MC work once things got going, and everyone who showed up, got into the spirit of things, and shared a great day of talks with us, despite it being nice and sunny outside!

A few highlights of the barcamp for me included:

Rus Werner from CrowdFusion gave us a quick demo of how to put together a website using the CrowdFusion framework, which looks to be a highly advanced content management system targeted at large group blogs, but capable of supporting all sorts of content management scenarios. Rus is the only NZ based developer, the rest of the team were in LA that day to put their latest client live – TMZ – which is one heck of a big site.

We were very pleased to have CJ down from Wellington and she joined her fellow Hitlab member Rob Ramsay to talk about a really fascinating idea they’ve had for combining augmented reality and the DigitalNZ APIs into a new kind of mobile-web game. Actually it appears to have got a long way past just being an ‘idea’ and we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing this come to life later this year.

Later on in the day Pete wowed us with his demonstration of what’s possible with HTML5 and Webkit, culminating with a live demo of the Quake engine running at 30fps *in the browser* – I had already heard about this awesome demo (done by some Google guys to show off what’s possible with HTML5 these days), but it’s another thing to actually see it running.

It was great to hear that we have a Camino developer in Christchurch, and Chris gave us an update on the Camino project, entitled ‘Not dead yet!’ or something along those lines. I asked about what it might take to get extensions into Camino, and he seemed open to the concept. My feeling is that it will be best be done using the new Mozilla Jetpack framework, as that does not use any XUL, which Camino avoids in favour of native Mac ‘Cocoa‘ componentry.

My old friend Neil from Screaming Duck software talked about his new lightweight browser plugin (plugin as in something like Flash, rather than an extension like Interclue) ‘thefbi‘ that allows for a subset of native x86 code to run inside a sandbox in the browser. I think there may well be a niche there despite the fact that HTML5 may make most plugins irrelevant in the long run (and many of us would be very happy about that).

Andrew from Morningstar Security gave an overview of the huge scan of NZ based ‘websites’ he originally presented at the last Kiwicon. Apparently lots of really crazy stuff has public facing content on Port 80 these days – Printers, Voip-phones, drilling equipment, you name it. Much of this stuff should only be available behind a firewall or at least a login, but as you would expect, this is not always the case.

Personally I did a presentation about “Personal Idea Management” and although it was ok, I put it together in a bit of a rush and didn’t really get in all the “ideas about ideas” that I wanted to. I got some good feedback afterwards and I look forward to reworking the presentation and giving it another go sometime in the future. Maybe as a Pecha Kucha talk, or at another unconference. At the very least I’ll make a blog post on the subject at some stage! For this talk I was mainly talking about the special class of ideas that could form the core of new tech projects (or even new startups), which is a type I am particularly prone to. This is a pretty tiny subset of the general field of “ideas”, and although in an ideal world one might have software custom designed to help out with it, it’s probably going to be handled mainly within the standard note-taking / brainstorming apps such as Mindmappers, Hierarchical Outliners, and Personal Wikis. I have tried a bunch of these and have never quite settled on one I’m totally happy with, or a system that was in any way ideal, but working on this presentation and the feedback I got afterwards has definitely given me some ideas and I look forward to trying them out. Since the presentation I’ve had two new ideas for iPad apps, and they will join the backlog of 50+ things we could be building if we had any spare capacity right now. Certainly I look forward to the day when some of that backlog hits the front burner!

Many of the folks at the barcamp said we should have another one soon – which hopefully means “within the next year”! I may or may not still be living in Christchurch at the time, but I will try to be there regardless! Remember there’s nothing stopping anyone from getting another barcamp ball rolling at any time, anywhere. Come up with the nugget of a plan, make a post to barcamp.org about it, tell your friends, and you’re on your way! I may make another “lessons learned” post with a few hints about what went right for us and what went wrong this time around, but really all the info you need is at barcamp.org, and if I do make that post I’ll try to find a place for those thoughts there as well.

Anyone who missed Barcamp but would like to present a tech talk in an informal setting, I encourage you to come along to a Spacecraft gathering, and let people know in advance what you’ll be talking about. There are also the monthly TVIC tech dinners – the last one was very good with possibly as many as 20 geeks in attendance.

I’m actually quite proud to be mentioned in the credits for Endeavor as one of the playtesters. Also mentioned (at the top, in fact) is Emma Hart, life partner of Karl, the lead developer here at Interclue. Emma proofread the Endeavor rulebook, but is more well known for her column at Public Address, and just recently she had her first book “Not safe for work” published – awesome!

Another friend full of awesome is Grant Ryan, who I mainly know from the turn-of-the-century Christchurch entrepreneurial “Tech-BBQ” days. His company of the time, GlobalBrain, was one of the big success stories out of NZ during the dot-com Boom (and a few of my friends were briefly paper-millionaires as a result). After that he went on to co-found Realcontacts and Eurekster. In what will hopefully be his most significant project yet, Grant has recently released his latest invention on the world – the Yike Bike Mini-Farthing. Helping him out is Realcontacts/Eurekster co-founder Gary Franklin, who is on the nascent Interclue advisory board, and is yet another friend full of awesome.

Another friend from the same era, Mark Rocket, is behind the company that recently launched NZ back into the Space Age, with the Atea-1 sub-orbital rocket. Awesome!

Meanwhile, my friend Ana Rakonjac, who is currently living in Dunedin, has posted photos of the Magneto-Optical-Trap (MOT) based experiment that she’s been building for her PhD. She (and another PhD student) are working on creating Bose Einstein Condensate (BEC), which is probably the coolest (in both senses of the word) state of matter in the entire universe. Ana recently got her taekwondo blackbelt, so she kicks ass in more ways than one. In fact, like Brooke Magnanti, you could say she’s a character straight out of XKCD.

And although Dunedin gets pretty chilly, it’s not the coolest work location on the planet – that has to be where my buddy Ethan Dicks has spent the better part of the last decade – The A.M.A.N.D.A / IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Ethan hasn’t been in XKCD but he was in a User Friendly plotline back in 2004.

Oh and I shouldn’t forget my mate Daniel Webster who’s new band Permanence has been rocking the local venues lately with the best Joy Division sets, since, well, Joy Division. Nor my friend Tria Manley, who has joined the potential XKCD pinup brigade by mixing telco knowledge base management by day with burlesque dancing by night.

Nor, for that matter, Joel Pitt, who’s the only guy I know with a half decent shot at accidentally destroying the human race, should one of his experiments (in open source artificial intelligence) go horribly wrong. I’m actually hoping to grab him for Interclue if his crazy friends in Silicon Valley don’t start paying him to bring us closer to the Singularity again.

I have many other friends who are full of awesome, particularly those I met at Kiwi Foocamp – where being at least somewhat awesome is more or less the price of admission – but it’s good to have older and closer friends doing just as well in their own fields of endeavour. I’ve mostly kept this list to the people I know who’ve done something awesome *recently* – if I was to keep listing all my awesome friends I’d be here forever. ;-)

Many of these people deserve their own complete blog post and I hope to get around to it, but given I have a heap of other stuff to write about and my posting rate has not been great of late, it may take me a while – by which time they will have increased in awesomeness so it’s all good.

I had a couple ideas of my own that I thought might fit the bill, and I managed to get one of them out of my head in sufficient detail to submit*. Amazingly, my idea seems to have ended up in the 16 Idea Themes that over 3000 Googlers distilled from over 150,000 submissions!

My submission was one of the two bundled into this theme (other themes had as many as 6 relevant submissions)

As you might imagine, I’m pretty stoked. Of course, “Enable people to submit bug reports about problems in the real world” is just the first line of a longer submission – not too long – Google wisely required everyone to refine their submission to answering 6 short questions and supplying an optional short video. Good thing, given they got 150,000+ ideas to read through!

Three things you might be wondering at this point:

Surely this isn’t a new idea?

It’s certainly not a new idea in 2009. There a lot of similar projects underway right now. One of my friends was telling me about his at the Digital NZ hackfest just the other day. A recent silicon valley demo contest even featured a SaaS version of the idea, Citysourced, targeted at American Cities, and it was noted as one of the few potentially world-changing products among the 50 launches. It probably wasn’t a new idea when I submitted it for this 10^100 contest a year ago, although I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it back then, and I also doubt it was a new idea when I submitted it for an informal blog post based competition 6 months before that (ironically, I was trying to win a ticket to Google I/O, and missed out!). Way back when I first thought of it, circa 2005, it may have been vaguely original, but there was little point in implementing such a project back then because cellphones with GPS didn’t actually exist at that stage, so it ended up on the backburner with the other 5-10 “big ideas” I usually have fighting to get out of my pile-o-notes and into some sort of coherent project plan.

Should I vote for Seth’s idea?

Well, the idea behind the competition is to help as many people as possible. So pick the idea theme you think will do that. However, here’s why it might be worth picking my one: Cellphones with cameras** will likely be more or less ubiquitous in 5-15 years, we all share an environment that has it’s occasional problems, and people who want to know about those problems (and pretty soon, autonomous systems will want to know too), and the usual ways in which information about these problems is transmitted, routed, stored, organised and displayed is really inefficient and fragmented compared to what could be enabled with todays technology, so a good implementation of this idea would eventually help everyone on the planet. So the real question is, could a project sponsored by Google in the next year or so create a significantly better outcome than would be achieved by leaving it to other players in this space***? And how does the importance of getting this done right, sooner rather than later, stack up against the other 15 big ideas? I may post a follow up considering one or both of these questions, but this post is getting long enough already.

Why isn’t Seth’s (or anyone else’s) name mentioned in this list?

I was initially a bit disappointed about that, but I think they quite rightly want people to focus on the ideas rather than the people who submitted them. I was also initially disappointed that they didn’t link the submission titles to copies of the complete submissions, but I guess the point is to get as many people as possible to read all 16 ideas and then vote, and linking to a bunch of extra information would not have helped! On the other hand, after the voting process is over and the “final five” are found, I hope Google will provide more information about the individual submissions and submitters.

In conclusion, go vote!

PS: I made my final submission in a bit of a hurry, typing it direct into Google’s webform, and wouldn’t you know it, when I went to recover the text I’d entered using Lazarus I discovered I didn’t have it installed in the browser I was using! Hopefully Google will send me a copy of my submission even if it doesn’t make it into the final 5 – I’d like to blog it for posterity.

PPS: If you actually managed to read this far, why not sign up for my RSS feed?

* I’m working on a blog post that explains the other idea, which I still think is well worth doing.
** GPS helps, but isn’t essential, phones can do a reasonable job of nailing down location using signal triangulation.
*** Of course, some of them would probably be invited to answer Google’s RFP, and an ideal solution would probably allow for open and distributed interop between both new and existing players in this space.

Following up on my previous post about the Christchurch Digital NZ hackfest, I did find the bug in my search plugin script, it was just one of those minor typos that takes ages to find because the error message you got when you tried to use it was completely uninformative. Sigh. However, since I spent most of my time on this during “Mozilla Service Week” I chalked up a few hours there to add to their total. Kudos to Mozilla for organising that and I’ll be sure to take part in a more serious way should they do it again.

Digital NZ has created a Custom Search Builder, and it seems to me that they could add Search Plugin generation to this reasonably easily. All they need to do is take a copy of my sample and use it to create a template the swaps out the content of the ShortName and Description tag, and also the template attribute in the <url> tag – everything else can stay the same. Then they need to add a javascript install link to the search result pages similar to the one here.

Heres what my sample search plugin file looks like (NB: First bit of code I can recall posting in this blog. I promise not to make it a habit.)


<OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/"
xmlns:moz="http://www.mozilla.org/2006/browser/search/">
<ShortName>Digital NZ</ShortName>
<Description>Digital NZ Archive Search</Description>
<InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
<Image width="16" height="16" type="image/x-icon">data:image/x-icon;base64,[data string goes here]</Image>
<Url type="text/html" method="get" template="http://search.digitalnz.org/en/search">
<Param name="search_text" value="{searchTerms}"/>
</Url>
</OpenSearchDescription>


The Webserver has to serve up that XML file with a MIME type of application/opensearchdescription+xml

eg using apache, in a directory where .xml isn’t reserved for anything else, one could put this in a .htaccess file:

AddType application/opensearchdescription+xml .xml

It’s also relatively trivial to add something to the headers of a webpage to enable autodiscovery of one or more search plugins. I’ve done that on my example page. Once you’ve done so it’ll appear in the search plugin manager for the browser, like this:

For more details, and how to do other cool things like enabling search completion, see:

OpenSearch Specification
Mozilla article on creating OpenSearch Plugins for Firefox

Among the various hacks there was an iPhone app and a Drupal module, and I got most of the way through building a Search Plugin for Firefox and IE, which is a relatively trivial hack in theory but I’d never built one before so it was a useful learning experience.

Unlike fully blown browser extensions such as Interclue or Lazarus, search plugins are just an xml file that when loaded using a special javascript method (only available in certain browsers, such as Firefox 2+ and IE7+) will cause your browser to create another search provider for the search box, which by default in Firefox only has a few general purpose search engines such as Google and Yahoo available, and a few site specific ones such as Wikipedia. But anyone can create a new search plugin for the search on their website, and getting users to install it can mean that they come back to your website more often.

I found a few little niggles, such as that the xml file had to be served up with the right MIME type by the webserver, and that the best way to provide the icon was using a “Data URI” – essentially a way of encoding an image using text. Fortunately Hixie has a kitchen for that.

My attempt is here, and in theory it should install fine in IE7+ and Firefox2+ by clicking the link on this page, but so far, it doesn’t, and I’m not quite sure why. I’ll update this post once I’ve fixed it! [update: fixed]

DigitalNZ has a “roll your own search engine” system set up for their growing collection of Digital Kiwiana, and it should be simple enough to extend that system to build a search plugin for each derived engine, since they will share the same pattern apart from the target URLs. There are also standards for search completion (guessing what you want to search for) and autodiscovery. I’ll make another post in a couple of days once I’ve had a chance to figure it out properly.

[updated because I forgot their mission was only to index the metadata, the digitizing and putting online bit is up to the contributors and partner organizations]

Provisionally, I am inclined to blame this tweet, which eventuated shortly after this post. Cheers Fred. :-)

I expected the download rate to tail off after that. However, it’s actually steadily increasing, thanks to a spate of retweets and blog posts from people like Rick Broida, who is syndicated all over the place. We might clock over 100,000 installs for the week at this rate. That would put Lazarus in the the top 20 Firefox addons, maybe even top 10. Unfortunately I can’t tell right now because the AMO stats are broken – the last 5 days of traffic haven’t been processed for some reason. So everyone’s weekly numbers are currently way off. That may be fixed by the time you read this post, of course.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my advisors about whether we should be focused on Lazarus or Interclue. I argued that Interclue had better long term monetization prospects, and showed them my marvelous J-curves. Nat pointed out that Lazarus had the more obvious value proposition and some incredible user feedback. I threw a few ideas into the ring on how we could extend and monetize Lazarus, and it was mooted that it would be best to get at least one of those ideas into action before we started to actively promote it. However, it appears that active promotion wasn’t exactly required in this case. We appear to have entered a cycle where every time someone complains in a tweet, on a forum, or in their blog that they just lost a pile of text they typed in, someone else chimes in and says “Got Firefox? Get Lazarus.” or words to that effect. Hence we have some pretty impressive word of mouse going on right now.

[UPDATE: It appears there was a bit of a stats glitch! We were never getting more than ~5k installs / day for Lazarus. However, ~5k/day is still very impressive and a considerable boost over what we were getting before that]

She’s everybody’s sister… she’s symbolic of our failure… she’s the one in fifteen million who can help us to be free.

“Watching TV”, from Roger Water’s amazing album “Amused to Death“, contains surely one of the more poignant statements of the value of mass media in evolving peaceful democracy that you’re ever going to hear. Given the events of the day, I suggest giving it a listen. (And if you haven’t already, you might want to buy the album, and listen to it on a good sound system, it really is awesome. )

Roger’s Yellow Rose was a student of philosophy. So was Neda Agha-Soltan. So was I.

And I grieve for my sisters.