Library of the Future:Nerve Cen­ter of the Com­mu­nity — Thomas Frey, Senior Futur­ist at The DaVinci Insti­tute, pre­sented at the Topeka Shawnee County Pub­lic Library

we spend most of our time think­ing about the past
– we know about it and have expe­ri­enced it
but we’re going to spend the rest of our lives in the future
it’s like we’re walk­ing back­wards into the future

epipha­nies are one of the things that sep­a­rate humans from ani­mals
every great new busi­ness is an epiphany

Frey had “a full cat­e­gory 5 epiphany“
“the life of an idea junkie“
Frey described a time he and his wife were sit­ting in a side­walk café when he heard a song and used “Shazam” on his phone to find out the name of a song, which he then imme­di­ately down­loaded
real­ized that his phone has a cam­era, too
the future of retail — when you see some­one wear­ing a jacket you like, just take a pic­ture of it to pur­chase it (just point and click at it)
in the future, all of our body info will be scanned in so that clothes fit the first time
no longer restricted to just what’s in stores
instead of own­ing a store, own­ers could hire mod­els to walk up and down the street (not just cloth­ing, but small appli­ances, too)
any prod­uct, any­where, anytime

showed a slideshow of mod­ern libraries

what form of pay­ment will you put in a vend­ing machine in 2059?
Frey thinks the vend­ing machine of the future will be mobile and will come to you
will know what you want
might even fly

what music that we lis­ten to today, will peo­ple still be lis­ten­ing to 100 years from now in 2109?
more impor­tantly, how will we be lis­ten­ing to music 100 years from now?
will it just appear in our heads? will it still come from speak­ers?
the ulti­mate music player will have the abil­ity to assess our reac­tion to the music and will only serve up music tha we react pos­i­tively to

ulti­mate drink dis­penser will have the abil­ity to assess what kind of liq­uids our body needs and will only serve up a liq­uid that we react pos­i­tively to
knows exactly how much sugar or cream should go in your coffee

the idea of “per­fect water“
we all know pol­luted water is bad for us
if we take every­thing out of it, it’s less than opti­mal
some­where in between is per­fect water for each per­son in the world (6 bil­lion dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions)
some­where in this line of think­ing is the inter­face of the future

sys­tem think­ing
no famous Roman math­emti­cians — they weren’t famous because they used Roman Numer­als, which was a stu­pid num­ber sys­tem
every num­ber was an equa­tion, which pre­vented them from doing any higher math with numer­als
– no place­holder num­bers
–> what sys­tems are we employ­ing today that are the equiv­a­lent of Roman Num­ber­als?
– Dewey Dec­i­mal Sys­tem, income tax code, “quart of oil“
is there a bet­ter sys­tem we could be using? invari­ably there is

Rick Wake­man video, key­board player for the rock band Yes
he writes music with 64th and 128th notes
the piece he played in the video could never have been played on a tra­di­tional piano — needed a mod­ern keyboard

Frey took a class about how to use a slide rule because he was told he had to
end of the slide rule era, begin­ning of the cal­cu­la­tor era
he named the space between the bot­tom inter­sec­tion the “Max­i­mum Freud“
a time of lots of chaos but also of lots of oppor­tu­nity
what tech­nolo­gies are at Max­i­mum Freud any­more?
– fax machines
– checks
– key­boards
– com­puter mon­i­tors and hard­ware
– tra­di­tional tele­vi­sion
– sign lan­guage
– inva­sive surgery
– AM/FM radio
– drill & fill den­tistry
– the end of wires (tele­phone lines, cable TV lines, inter­net lines, and even power lines — within our lifetime)

the evo­lu­tion of books
in what year will the last printed book be pub­lished?
Guten­berg Press — by 1500, there were more than 5,000 books in print across Europe
through the Espresso Book Machine
some­thing like the Kin­dle may be as cheap as $5 in 5 years
at what point, is it too expen­sive for libraries to cir­cu­late print books?
when do ebook read­ers become so ubiq­ui­tous that it no longer makes sense to print ink on paper?
when does pub­lish­ing become down­load­ing titles
small pro­jec­tors built into devices
infor­ma­tion dis­plays built into things
what does a book look like in the future?

every forum now is akin to an online forum, with authors, experts and other read­ers avail­able to dis­cuss and answer ques­tions on almost every impor­tant book ever writ­ten
books are now conversations?

10 Global Trends
—————-
1. more peo­ple live in urban areas than rural areas (200,000 peo­ple a day migrate)
2. 840 mil­lion peo­ple crossed national bor­ders, more mobile soci­ety (as opposed to 50 mil­lion in 1950)
3. num­ber of new prod­uct launches (300 per day)
4. 550,000 new busi­nesses were launched every month in 2007
5. more than 50% of all women reported being sin­gle in 2005
– more than 50% increase in the num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing alone in the last 20 years
– counter trend of par­ents liv­ing with adult chil­dren — grew 67%
6. the num­ber of peo­ple work­ing through retire­ment has dou­bled
7. minori­ties will become the major­ity in 2042 (30% Lati­nos, 15% Blacks, 9% Asian)
– inter­ra­cial fam­i­lies, 1000% increase in the past 30 years
– will stop talk­ing about races in the future because they’ll be so unde­fined
– rises in the per­cent­age of pop­u­la­tions that are foreign-born
8. smaller fam­i­lies, big­ger houses (700 sq. ft. in 1900)
9. com­ing boom in data cen­ters (will con­sume 3% of global elec­tric­ity sup­ply by 2010; some­time before 2020 power con­sump­tion will dou­ble)
10. only 14% of all col­lege grad­u­ates live in the U.S.

how long will it be before peo­ple can get a Ph.D with­out being lit­er­ate?
the first time Frey lis­tened to an audio­book, he thought he was cheat­ing
read­ing is the process of trans­lat­ing the char­ac­ters (text) on the page
still do it with sound when lis­ten­ing to books
method doesn’t really mat­ter — it still counts
Socrates was not lit­er­ate — never wrote any­thing
wouldn’t know any­thing about him if Plato hadn’t writ­ten about him

is read­ing the ulti­mate infor­ma­tion expe­ri­ence?
are books a tech­nol­ogy equiv­a­lent to roman numerals?

future of edu­ca­tion
——————
did an 18-month study on this topic
organ­i­cally gen­er­ated con­tent (courses) going to a global dis­trib­uted sys­tem
an iTunes-like approach to edu­ca­tion
teach­ing requires experts
we can’t train experts fast enough as infor­ma­tion expands expo­nen­tially
teach­ers become a chokepoint

over­lay a trend line of courses over YouTube, Wikipedia, and Google, it’s flat ver­sus the amount of infor­ma­tion being gen­er­ated — course­ware vac­uum
MIT Open­Course­Ware (1,400 courses) try­ing to fill that gap
– 12 uni­ver­si­ties have joined the Open­Course­Ware Con­sotrium (1,800 courses total available)

what is the most impor­tant thing I should be learn­ing today?
kids today aren’t being taught what they want to learn
what’s the pri­mary inflec­tion point for change?
– spe­cially archi­tected rapid course­ware build­ing, which doesn’t exist yet

12 dimen­sions of the future course­ware archi­tec­ture
————————————————–
60-minute learn­ing units
modal­ity and lan­guage agnos­tic (not just computer-based, get credit for expe­ri­ence); courses from every­where but man­aged online
smart pro­filer & rec­om­men­da­tion engine (what per­son is most inter­ested in and what they should take next)
truth & accu­racy — a high per­cent­age of what’s being taught in class­room today is the­o­ret­i­cal; every aspect of soci­ety has its own ver­sion of the truth
– need a truth author­ity? won’t work
– need a checks & bal­ances sys­tem where any group could put their stamp of approval or dis­ap­proval on these courses
cer­ti­fi­ca­tion inputs — early adopters for this will be pro­fes­sional asso­ci­a­tions (what con­sti­tutes suf­fi­cient learn­ing); home school­ers will also adopt this
offi­cial record-keeping sys­tem
global dis­tri­b­u­tion system

avail­able on demand 24/7, any­time, any­where
less depen­dent on teach­ers and schools, more indi­vid­ual con­trol
gen­eral study courses will be priced at $1/course
many schools will use these courses to plan their cur­ric­ula
teach­ers will go free­lance to cre­ate their own courses
stu­dents who grad­u­ate from the equiv­a­lent of high school in the future will be 10 times smarter than stu­dents today
the idea of tak­ing K-12 edu­ca­tion in one year, which will give rise to celebrity teach­ers
we’ll know when we get the right sys­tem put in place because a mil­lion new courses will be cre­ated
libraries will become the work­ing lab­o­ra­to­ries for the cre­ation of inno­v­a­tive new courses
libraries are cen­tral to his vision

com­mod­ity level — Star­bucks
prod­uct level — a cup of cof­fee
expe­ri­ence level is what they con­cen­trate on, though

how do we cre­ate the ulti­mate infor­ma­tion expe­ri­ence in libraries?
peo­ple are using their own PageR­ank test­ing to fig­ure out how rel­e­vant the library is to them individually

library as place, as opposed to library as ser­vice
———————————————-
build­ing is a gath­er­ing place

8 reccs for libraries of the future
——————————–
to improve rel­e­vance in the minds of the community

1. cre­ate a search com­mand cen­ter in your library; make it easy to peo­ple find infor­ma­tion
– can look like a lot of dif­fer­ent things, but have to help them con­duct searches
– really only doing text search­ing right now, but need to pre­pare for other search attrib­utes beyond just audio and video (taste, smell, tex­ture, reflec­tiv­ity, etc.)
when every­one records what their glasses see, we’re spi­der­ing the phys­i­cal world

2. remote office space
– for every 100 peo­ple who get laid off, 7 will start a new busi­ness (not that they’ll suc­ceed), so will see a new era of entre­pre­neur­ship
– “empire of one“
– cloud com­put­ing trend = consumer-driven inno­va­tion, rise of the power col­lab­o­ra­tor, eco­nom­ics of IT are chang­ing, bar­ri­ers to entry are falling (con­nec­tiv­ity, reli­a­bil­ity, a qual­ity user expe­ri­ence, and secu­rity can now all be assumed)
– busi­ness colonies — group­ings of “project peo­ple” work­ing together as projects form, com­plete, and dis­ap­pear
—> at the heart of every busi­ness colony will be a library
– peo­ple who work from home suf­fer from either iso­la­tion or dis­trac­tions
—> they need another place to go (prover­bial “third place”)
if you were to design a library for these peo­ple, what would it look like? what fea­tures would it include?
remote office space? a telep­res­ence room?

3. pro­duc­tion stu­dios
“when the tools of pro­duc­tion are avail­able to every­one, every­one becomes a pro­ducer” — The Long Tail
tran­si­tion from con­sumers to pro­duc­ers
they want to take own­er­ship of what they cre­ate
– blog­ging sta­tions in the library, pod­cast stu­dios, one-way mir­ror glass so that oth­ers can watch the pro­duc­tion of con­tent
—> pas­sive learn­ing to active pro­duc­ing centers

4. band prac­tice stu­dios
there are 2.2 mil­lion bands on MySpace right now, and every­one needs a space to prac­tice
if you put in sound­proof rooms, they’ll get used non-stop, all the time

5. enter­tain­ment stu­dios
gam­ing now touches 75% of all US house­holds
Sec­ond Life and vir­tual world sta­tions (cre­at­ing dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ca­tion vehi­cles)
mini-theaters, mini-planetariums that peo­ple can use to cre­ate con­tent and post it
art stu­dios to make a cul­tural hub
exer­cise stu­dios that com­bine learn­ing and recreation

6. expert series
so many peo­ple are uncom­fort­able with tech­nol­ogy, so once a month, could put some tech experts at the front of the room and let the audi­ence ask ques­tions; let the con­ver­sa­tion go where it may
social learn­ing
fig­ure out what’s of inter­est to the com­mu­nity while rais­ing the tech IQ of the community

7. time cap­sule room
archiv­ing the his­tory of the com­mu­nity
what did it sound like to drive down Main Street? what did it smell like?
cre­ate the room but let the pub­lic decide what it turns into
many local com­pa­nies will prob­a­bly want their orga­ni­za­tions archived there

8. poetry park
pub­lic plac­ing inscrip­tions on large rocks set out around a park

elec­tronic outposts/branches
—————————-
– mag­a­zines & peri­od­i­cals
– read­ing area
– search com­mand cen­ter
– stu­dios
– no books
– effi­cient oper­a­tion 1–2 peo­ple staffing it

extend­ing influ­ence
——————-
very few library haters out there
very lit­tle out­bound com­mu­ni­ca­tion — need to change that; weekly online newsletter?

how do we cap­i­tal­ize on epipha­nies?
make your library an epiphany cen­ter where peo­ple can have ideas and then have the tools to act on them

Joan Lip­pin­cott started out by speak­ing about net gens — “If we were cre­at­ing aca­d­e­mic libraries today, what would they look like?”

Oxford, San Jose State Uni­ver­sity?
would they only have print col­lec­tions, spe­cial collections?

or would we cre­ate learn­ing com­mons?
would they look like Google Book Search or iTunes Uni­ver­sity where the librar­ian mostly deals with licens­ing, totally online?

can we cre­ate libraries with con­tent, tools, and ser­vices for today’s students?

looked up “what’s in my bag” pool on Flickr to see what today’s stu­dents carry (not books)

net gens — born between 1982–1991 who grew up with com­put­ers and other media at home and in school from ear­li­est ages
Joan has two Net­Gen daugh­ters, although their friends are bet­ter infor­mants
also calls them mil­len­ni­als, dig­i­tal natives, gen y, next gen, Dot­Nets
when asked what comes next, she uses the term “screenagers” :-p
– the gen­er­a­tion that will have had com­put­ers and mobile devices since birth

char­ac­ter­is­tics of Net­Gens (a pop­u­la­tion, not a gen­er­a­tion)
using “Born Dig­i­tal” def­i­n­i­tion, a highly edu­cated sub­group has the fol­low­ing char­ac­ter­is­tics
– always con­nected, multi-tasking
– ori­ented to work­ing in groups (doesn’t mean they love “group­work,” but they like hang­ing out with their friends and social­iz­ing while work­ing; you used to go to the library, do your work, & go back to the dorm to social­ize. now they social­ize at the library with friends who are there and who aren’t there)
– expe­ri­en­tial learn­ers (like the shift to hands-on learn­ing from lec­ture)
– visual (ori­ented towards visual cues, although they do still read; when they’re doing a his­tory paper, they may embed a map or cre­ate a video — they don’t just use text)
– pro­duc­ers as well as con­sumers (they cre­ate some­thing of their own)

even if you have 50% adult learn­ers at your cam­pus, many of these char­ac­ter­is­tics still apply
(kids today call them “cam­eras,” not “dig­i­tal cam­eras”)
any­one work­ing in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is work­ing in groups
adults are active learn­ers — they want hands-on
think of any pro­fes­sion — they are all pro­duc­ing web­sites, word doc­u­ments, or pro­duc­ing some form of dig­i­tal information

so our tools need to be ori­ented towards these char­ac­ter­is­tics because they’ll need the skills using them going forward

char­ac­ter­is­tics of “deeper learn­ing” (edu­cause)
– social
– active
– con­tex­tual
– engag­ing
– student-owned

libraries are per­fectly posi­tioned to take advan­tage of this
it’s the projects they do out­side of class that gives them the skills in class
– gives them con­text, they own their prod­uct, and engages them

it’s not just hype and it has rel­e­vance to learn­ing
have to think about how we do this in our own institutions

are all stu­dents really tech-savvy?
stu­dents are con­nected
98.5% of respon­dents own a com­puter, 82.2% own a lap­top (doesn’t mean they are new com­put­ers or that they bring them to class)
spend 19.6 hours a week doing work online (Joan thinks that’s low)
almost all are using social networks

har­vard med­ical school sur­vey of stu­dents in 2007 found 52% own a PDA
app with most use is ref­er­ence!
have to think about the next gen­er­a­tion of pro­fes­sion­als and how we serve them

they love the inter­net and would give up TV & radio before inter­net (because they’re doing those things on the web)
col­lege kids increas­ingly live in the online and offline worlds at the same time
has impor­tant impli­ca­tions for how we struc­ture services

JISC study found that learn­ers who are effec­tive in online envi­ron­ment also cre­ate con­tent, seek peer sup­port using infor­mal net­works & social tools — an under­ground world of net­work­ing that is invis­i­ble to institutions

they may know how to build a web­site, but “we’re more inter­ested in the art and flow of argu­ment“
have to teach them how to use these tools in their dis­ci­plines, not their per­sonal lives
we want stu­dents to con­nect bet­ter to library col­lec­tions and services

Henry Jenk­ins’ “selected core skills“
– col­lec­tive intel­li­gence
– judg­ment — the abil­ity to eval­u­ate the reli­a­bil­ity and cred­i­bil­ity of dif­fer­ent infor­ma­tion resources
– net­work­ing — the abil­ity to search for, syn­the­size infor­ma­tion
– sim­u­la­tion — abil­ity to inter­pret & *con­stuct& dynamic mod­els of real world processes
– appro­pri­a­tion
– mult­task­ing — a pos­i­tive thing when can shift focus to salient details

MIT Photo Diary study

there will be an increas­ing empha­sis on data for visu­al­iza­tion (how do we rep­re­sent this in our find­ing aids)
con­tent opti­mized for mobile devices

Cor­nell has put images from their dig­i­tal col­lec­tions on their com­put­ers as screen­savers so that when stu­dents ask where the images came from, the librar­i­ans can tell them

Seat­tle PL visu­al­iza­tion of books being checked out

need to think about embed­ded con­tent and trans­form­ing text data into more visual formats

- adopt and adapt
– assess
– hir­ing new types of staff
– train exist­ing staff
– let go of things you don’t need to do

these stu­dents are our future and it’s our role to recre­ate aca­d­e­mic libraries

Set­ting Up a Tool for Knowl­edge Shar­ing in a Pub­lic Library
Decem­ber 2, 2008

works on knowl­edge man­age­ment at the Pub­lic Library of Vlissin­gen in the Nether­lands
the Library also pro­vide ser­vice for the local hos­pi­tal and have opened ser­vices in ele­men­tary schools
they want to be a two-way library where their users are, adapted to the needs and wishes of their users
dig­i­tal library is becom­ing more impor­tant because fewer peo­ple are com­ing in for books

have to share knowl­edge effi­ciently, mak­ing use of hid­den staff tal­ent
did a “knowl­edge scan“
found that the intranet wasn’t meet­ing staff needs
their wiki is inter­nal only because they want to excel inter­nally before they might open it up for users

six steps to imple­ment­ing a wiki
1 — plan­ning the wiki
actu­ally the most impor­tant phase of all
many impor­tant ques­tions need to be answered, includ­ing is your inter­nal cul­ture ready for some­thing like this
are peo­ple stim­u­lated to share their knowl­edge or are they pre­vented from shar­ing it?
what do you want to get out of it?
which users do you want to con­tribute to it? what will the scope be?
they decided to involve all of their users because shar­ing knowl­edge is impor­tant to every­one
early involve­ment of future users is impor­tant — involve them as soon as pos­si­ble
also gets you feed­back
use wikitmatrix.org to find appro­pri­ate soft­ware for your project
decide hosted vs on your own server
they started out on their own server but went to a hosted ser­vice when they real­ized they didn’t have the in-house tech­ni­cal knowl­edge they needed

2 — design­ing the wiki
used an exter­nal visual designer to make the wiki use their cur­rent brand (he hap­pened to be the son of a staff mem­ber)
cre­ated the ini­tial struc­ture of the wiki but let it grow organ­i­cally
seeded it with ini­tial con­tent (no “empty box”)
cre­ated doc­u­men­ta­tion and pol­icy rules for the wiki (“wik­i­quette”) but don’t focus on the rules
cre­ated a sand­box area where peo­ple could exper­i­ment and play with­out feel­ing like they could mess things up

3 — Test­ing the wiki
used early adopters who were already famil­iar with wikis
test basic func­tions, proof­read­ing ini­tial con­tent, test links and wiki usabil­ity
let future users test the wiki

4 — Launch­ing the wiki and train­ing users
found it impor­tant to do this offi­cially so need to com­mu­ni­cate it to every­one in an offi­cial way
have lots of “com­mu­ni­ca­tion moments“
tell peo­ple what the wiki can do for them and inte­grate it into daily work prac­tices
pay more atten­tion to “slow adopters“
cre­ate a good handbook

5 — Man­ag­ing & main­tain­ing the wiki
appointed a “wiki gar­dener” to be respon­si­ble for mod­er­at­ing dis­cus­sions, review­ing con­tent, review­ing wiki struc­ture to makke con­tent eas­ily acces­si­ble by every­one
impor­tant dis­tinc­tion that she has no effect on actual con­tent — she isn’t a “wiki dic­ta­tor“
tech­ni­cal sup­port is main­tained by the host­ing com­pany in their case

6 — Wiki eval­u­a­tion
they’re in this stage now
using sta­tis­tics and user surveys

showed a screen­shot — it’s sim­ple because it’s focused on the con­tent
“teams & clus­ters“
“information”

they are now devel­op­ing new soft­ware that will com­ple­ment the wiki by han­dling ref­er­ence inquiries from the pub­lic
answer­ing ques­tions will become based on team exper­tise, not indi­vid­u­als
this is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new way of work­ing in a Dutch pub­lic library
they will see the first demo of the sys­tem next week, so just in the ini­tial phase

wiki lessons learned (prac­ti­cal tips)
– the suc­cess of a wiki depends on user con­tri­bu­tion and enthu­si­asm
– involve your end-users from the begin­ning
– reward peo­ple for con­tribut­ing to the wiki, acknowl­edge experts who share
– a wiki com­ple­ments, but does not replace, face-to-face shar­ing; it’s not about the tech­nol­ogy or the tool, but the peo­ple
– seed the wiki
– inte­grate the wiki in daily work­ing practices

q: which soft­ware did you use?
a: moin moin was their first choice, but installing and con­fig­ur­ing it required more tech­ni­cal skills than they had, so they moved to Plone; users don’t need any tech­ni­cal knowledge

q: was the goal to replace or com­ple­ment the intranet? and can you give exam­ples of mak­ing the wiki prac­ti­cal for staff when explain­ing it?
a: the Library has dif­fer­ent geo­graph­i­cal loca­tions, so it can be dif­fi­cult for teams to meet phys­i­cally, so they are also imple­ment­ing a chat func­tion within the wiki

Every Piece of Infor­ma­tion Is a Latent Com­mu­nity
Decem­ber 2, 2008

Clay Shirky’s keynote talk to open the 2008 Online Infor­ma­tion Conference

“group action just got eas­ier” = 5-word sum­mary of his book Here Comes Everybody

the ways the media envi­ron­ment is being trans­formed now that con­sumers are first-class par­tic­i­pants
the over­lap of all of the pat­terns in one envi­ron­ment is the big tran­si­tion we’re all liv­ing through and try­ing to fig­ure out

showed a pic­ture of a truck in a park­ing lot at sun­set on Flickr — HDR pho­tog­ra­phy (tech­nique, not just soft­ware)
don’t need to see what’s going on in the com­ments to under­stand what’s going on there
peo­ple start insert­ing pho­tographs into the com­ments, which turn to a tech­ni­cal dis­cus­sion
a user group is assem­bled on the fly
used to be gather then share — used to have to iden­tify the peo­ple who would be inter­ested first and then organize/share
Flickr reversed the pat­tern — share and then gather
they didn’t iden­tify them­selves before they saw this page
Flickr had the infra­struc­ture to let these peo­ple cre­ate a com­mu­nity on the fly
once the users cre­ated this, it wasn’t evanes­cent any­more — it was per­ma­nent now

shows that every URL is a latent com­mu­nity — poten­tial value that peo­ple look­ing at it might find value in it
not all will see com­mu­nity grow, but the poten­tial is there
can have many more com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice at much lower cost because the old dis­tinc­tion between con­ver­sa­tion and pub­li­ca­tion is no longer true
why pick? Flickr gets more value out of not hav­ing to decide in advance what a piece of infor­ma­tion might be used for
even on the Flickr pic­ture, other con­ver­sa­tions can take place in parallel

Flickr gives users the tools to add value

there are large pat­terns we see (not every ser­vice on the inter­net has these, but some large ones do)
– share
– col­lab­o­ra­tion
– col­lec­tive action
in this order, because how much does the indi­vid­ual have to give up to get value?
takes more effort the higher you go on the ladder

showed Bronze Beta — the Buffy the Vam­pire Slayer fan club site
back when WB sold the rights to Buffy to UPN, UPN didn’t want the com­mu­nity group online, so they shut down the server (UPN: we don’t want it because we’re in the tele­vi­sion busi­ness)
the users, how­ever, wanted the com­mu­nity to con­tinue, so they raised money and com­mis­sioned a new ser­vice to move to
they explic­itly decided they didn’t want any “fea­tures” — no rat­ings, rank­ings, etc.
they just wanted to type in text, and now it’s just a giant scroll of con­ver­sa­tion
the com­mu­nity is still going

these new social tech­nolo­gies are the first time where later gen­er­a­tions of tech­nol­ogy have fewer fea­tures than older ver­sions
the sim­plic­ity in the tools has to do with a mind­shift of the com­puter as a box to a door
for individually-oriented soft­ware, a long list of fea­tures is good (Pho­to­shop, Word, etc.)
but when we want to col­lab­o­rate, fewer fea­tures is bet­ter; we need the same men­tal model of what’s going on
the com­plex­ity is in the user, not the soft­ware
in Bronze Beta, the com­plex­ity is in the very long list of rules cre­ated by the users (“no col­ored fonts”)

showed the Wikipedia entry for Doc­tor Who — it’s been edited almost 9,000 times by more than 3,000 peo­ple
the breadth and depth of par­tic­i­pa­tion is quite extraordinary

“hive mind” — peo­ple that use this term almost always don’t under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing
these folks aren’t part of a com­mu­nity in any sense because most have only edited it once or twice
some­one, though, has edited it thou­sands of times; every arti­cle he’s touched on Wikipedia is about Doc­tor Who
there is no coher­ent aver­age behav­ior, although the com­mon­est behav­ior is one edit, one user
we’re used to count­ing noses — how many peo­ple watched my TV show, read my book, etc.
but here, there is no one com­mon user behav­ior; instead, there’s this tiny group of fan­tas­ti­cally engaged users
imag­ine going to your boss and try­ing to con­vince them to plan this
it’s not every­body pitch­ing in like a barn-raising; it’s not col­lab­o­ra­tion
it’s like a small, self-appointed edi­to­r­ial board

col­lab­o­ra­tion involves real syn­chro­niza­tion
it’s not just you share and I share
col­lec­tive action is the most dif­fi­cult pat­tern to get going because the whole group has to com­mit to it and either stand or fall together

two exam­ples — HSBC

they recruited col­lege stu­dents with penalty-free check­ing accounts
proved to be pop­u­lar, but then they changed their minds and added a penalty
gave users 30 days to get their money out
thought they had the infor­ma­tion and coör­di­na­tion advan­tage
in the sum­mer, the stu­dents should have been out­classed by HSBC’s tools
but they didn’t count on Face­book
a user starts a page, which goes viral
for the first time, col­lege stu­dents are dis­persed but active
they started shar­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion — good banks to move to and how
once one per­son solved the prob­lem, the infor­ma­tion was avail­able to every­one
good­bye to HSBC’s infor­ma­tion advan­tage
then they orga­nized a real-world protest, but it never hap­pened because by then HSBC had caved in
HSBC backed down because the stu­dents were upset AND coördinated

“think­ing is for doing“
there is an analagous trans­for­ma­tion that pub­lish­ing for act­ing
the news­pa­per could only report HSBC had changed the deal, while Face­book could actu­ally encour­age users to do some­thing
pub­lish­ing and action is no longer a choice — can do both
now have a response with­out man­age­r­ial control

exam­ple two — flash mobs
they were pro­moted in “emails by bill“
wanted to prove that hip­sters would do any­thing you told them to
hits belarus — eat­ing ice cream in Minsk Square
the police showed up — the group became a prob­lem (not the group eat­ing ice cream)
it had been made ille­gal to act in con­cert — to be a group
when they entered the square, they weren’t a group
the live­jour­nal page led to action — it’s a full cycle; they didn’t just bring their ice cream — they also brought their cam­eras because they wanted to doc­u­ment the state’s response

in less than 3 years, flash mobs went from being some­thing to mock a cer­tain class to polit­i­cal protest
we tend to under­es­ti­mate the poten­tial of these tools because they tend to look friv­o­lous
we don’t under­stand their poten­tial
any­thing that allows group for­ma­tion is polit­i­cal
so much of the mean­ing of the tool is in what the user does with it once it becomes social

what is all of this doing to the media land­scape as a whole?
we’re liv­ing in the mid­dle of the largest increase in the social expres­sion of the human race

1 — print­ing press/movable type
2 — point-to-point com­mu­ni­ca­tions (tele­graph, tele­phone)
3 — cap­tur­ing sound and video
4 — broad­cast­ing spec­trum (radio, television)

curi­ous asym­me­try to them — the ones that are good at cre­at­ing con­ver­sa­tions are not good at cre­at­ing groups and vice versa
there was no medium for cre­at­ing two-way con­ver­sa­tion among groups (many-to-many) until now
there is no longer a dis­tinc­tion between con­sumer and pro­ducer
giv­ing some­one the abil­ity to receive email means they can send email
the audi­ence grows and becomes var­ied
the 5GB gen­er­ated this year will be at the edges

the inter­net is also the mode of car­riage for all pre­vi­ous media as it’s dig­i­tized
it’s also adding social dimen­sions to all exist­ing media

to pro­duce some­thing for a lot of peo­ple to watch, read, etc., I have to take on a big bur­den for pro­duc­tion costs
if I’m wrong, I lose a lot of money
in an era of guten­berg eco­nom­ics, I decide which books are good and I pub­lish them
all fol­low­ing media have had the same eco­nom­ics prob­lem
fil­ter and then pub­lish becomes the model — see what’s good and then pub­lish it

now, any­one can pub­lish to any­one with a mar­ginal cost of zero
it’s the first medium we’ve had that works with post-gutenberg eco­nom­ics
any­one can say any­thing to any­body and they fre­quently do
it’s too much con­tent to fil­ter in advance, and there’s no eco­nomic rea­son to do so

the ques­tion for a 15-year old today is not “why pub­lish” but “why not pub­lish?“
many of the huge busi­nesses built on the back of the inter­net have at the core of their busi­ness model a post-publication fil­ter
get to the good stuff after the fact, not before

the users are now well and truly engaged in the pub­lish­ing environment

the user as pub­lisher model:
1– Gnarly Kitty
a fashion-obsessed Thai stu­dent who posted about a fish­ing game
why would any­one pub­lish that?
because she’s not talk­ing to us — she’s talk­ing to her friends
we’re not used to see­ing things that are pub­lic but not in the pub­lic
then a coup hap­pens in Thai­land, and the gov­ern­ment tells the media not to report about it
but Gnarly Kitty pub­lishes the first pic­ture of tanks in front of the par­lia­ment house and she is now the go-to source
peo­ple are now flood­ing in and she becomes a global resource
then she posts about a phone she’d like to own
the users get upset and want more about the coup
she responds with a post that it’s *her* blog and it’s about her life

zuck­er­man: jour­nal­ism has gone from being a pro­fes­sion to being an activ­ity
she com­mit­ted acts of jour­nal­ism; she just did it while she was a con­cerned cit­i­zen
not con­nected to self-definition
this model is new
she doesn’t need the money to be a global pub­lisher
she gets thou­sands of new read­ers and she tells them if you don’t like her con­tent, then leave

2 — Howard Forums
early blog about cell phones
can”t answer people’s ques­tions about their phones, so he says hey, you all talk to each other and he puts up a forum
is up to a bil­lion pages this year because the expert users are solv­ing prob­lems for the new users
tech sup­port reps from phone com­pa­nies will refer callers to the Forums
they have access to “real­ity,” which the engi­neers don’t
the kinds of ques­tions that can only be answered when A has part of the answer and B has the other part and they col­lab­o­rate
users cre­at­ing detailed tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion
it’s not all tech all the time, because users have got­ten to know one another and they hang out here together (they post pic­tures of their pets)
as a pub­lisher, it’s easy to see that you’d get rid of the pic­tures of cats
but that mis­un­der­stands what is going on here
that both of these things are com­ing from the same web
they’re not doing one in spite of the other, but rather because of it
it’s the fact that the users care about each other is what gets them to do all of this
com­mu­ni­ties have to be for the mem­bers
the sat­is­fac­tion comes from mem­ber­ship and recog­ni­tion from the com­munnity
host­ing that isn’t amenable to crowd­sourc­ing solu­tions
com­mu­ni­ties need to get to know each other and share all kinds of things in order to do the tech­ni­cal documentation

3– showed a still shot from Joss Whedon’s new show, Doll­house
fan expe­ri­ence is that his shows get can­celed, so they’ve already cre­ated a site to save it from can­cel­la­tion before it even airs
in the past, they’ve orga­nized protests
they don’t trust the mar­ket­ing depart­ment to explain to peo­ple why they should watch it, so they do this them­selves
there is no aspect of the infor­ma­tion indus­try that users aren’t crawl­ing into, includ­ing the mar­ket­ing depart­ment
users don’t always do this well
the pat­tern is usu­ally extract the sig­nal after the fact
they do always do it dif­fer­ently, though
grap­pling with that dif­fer­ence is the big ques­tion we have to deal with now

one of the big changes is that any­body in any part of the infor­ma­tion busi­ness is now part of the entire infor­ma­tion busi­ness
no longer i work in tele­vi­sion and you work movies — it doesn’t mat­ter any­more
no longer that we pro­duce the con­tent and then the users go off and talk about it some­where else
cre­at­ing com­mu­nity and arrang­ing action are now part of pro­duc­tion
not every orga­ni­za­tion should get into every part of the busi­ness, but pub­lish­ers can now be con­ven­ers of com­mu­nity
can allow ama­teurs in to extract value — that’s what we’re grap­pling with
it’s not a move from A to B but from one to many
the land­scape itself is expanding

when the print­ing press came out, it wasn’t that peo­ple looked at it and said, oh now we need a print­ing indus­try and this is what it will look like
lit­tle things turn out to be big deals
mak­ing books smaller meant more peo­ple could carry them (cre­ation of octavo size)
if it’s hard for a thief to get a book out the door, that’s a fea­ture
that lit­tle intu­ition sparked a revolution

every­body is every­where and all the walls have fallen
every­body can see each part of the busi­ness; it’s all horizen and no bar­ri­ers
what’s the next good thing to do?
the answer is most cer­tainly to explore
exper­i­ment­ing our way into the future is what will show us what works
there is no roadmap for the period we are entering

q: what is the role of the pro­fes­sional librar­ian
a: liz law­ley says libraries are “hap­pi­ness engines;” the whole of the world that deals with tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing is now deal­ing with the split between lovers of the page and lovers of the book; it’s easy to see the role of librar­i­ans as hosts of books, but if you see socia­ble libraries as hap­pi­ness engines, then the ques­tion becomes what set of things done in libraries now would increase the hap­pi­ness; one of the obvi­ous answers is “col­lab­o­ra­tive fil­ter­ing” — help­ing the user find the next thing to read, watch, etc.; libraries have typ­i­cally ser­viced users one-to-one, but there are groups of peo­ple com­ing together and talk­ing with each other in the library; ideas make peo­ple happy, so what resources do we have to extend that; one of the big resources we have is that we have “con­ven­ing power” — it’s unmatched in civil soci­ety; the cross-section that goes into a library is quite extra­or­di­nary; it doesn’t have to be one-to-one, and there is a great deal of poten­tial in exper­i­ment­ing with many-to-many; even in the cor­po­rate world, libraries can join up peo­ple who should be talk­ing with each other; IBM exam­ple — “DogEar” plus a one-way mir­ror; allowed researchers to tag URLs, although they’re not shar­ing the tags back to the world; two geographically-dispersed research groups there dis­cov­ered each other because they were tag­ging the same resources, clearly with the same ideas; they actu­ally called each other and then pooled their efforts; this would never have hap­pened from the top-down; “research is a famously upside-down prob­lem” so there’s no way one per­son at the top could have said these two groups in two dif­fer­ent coun­tries will work together; when the users can see what each other think (don’t apply the ontol­ogy in advance), peo­ple with sim­i­lar world-views can be con­nected; con­nect­ing users because they’re look­ing at the same information

q: if we spent our lives orga­niz­ing infor­ma­tion as a com­mu­nity, how do we tackle all of the new infor­ma­tion being cre­ated?
a: you can’t; you only have 2 chances to actively orga­nize things — moment of cre­ation and moment of use; at cre­ation, can try to add meta­data, but at use stage, you can involve the user and have them mod­ify or ver­ify the meta­data; the prob­lem becomes a lit­tle bit of effort gives you a high degree of lever­age, so have to find the right point where this hap­pens; there’s no way to apply the metaphor of the shelf to cyber­space; they have to do with auto­matic extrac­tion, invit­ing users to upgrade meta­data at the point of use

q: what does this tell us about human nature that we might apply to things we do?
a: that is THE ques­tion, in part because it’s the one we need to answer but can’t; used to think that the world was chang­ing because tech­nol­ogy was chang­ing, but now thinks we’re just not used to explain­ing human behav­ior with­out being paid or other extrin­sic moti­va­tion; we used to think the mar­ket was the pub­lic sphere and the house­hold was the pri­vate one, but that’s chang­ing; Wikipedia makes no sense at all; what crit­ics have missed is that human nature con­tains an enor­mous amount of Gnarly Kitty motivation;public and pri­vate sphere are exist­ing side by side, can’t be explained purely by the market

q: the idea of exper­tise as opposed to pop­u­lar­ity
a: if your skull is going to be cut open, you want it to be done by a trained pro­fes­sional; the reverse is that you don’t need to buy music only in the pres­ence of a record store pro­fes­sional;
the closer things to come to life and death and one-off deci­sions with no reversabil­ity, the more we want exper­tise; the places where there is an obvi­ous right answer that is inde­pen­dent from the social view; changes here are com­ing about in the end of the spec­trum where what peo­ple believe changes what is true; are SUVs a truck or a car? that deci­sion was social­ized, which got us to a bet­ter answer than let­ting Wash­ing­ton decide; there’s no gen­eral “get ouf jail free” card for experts; very often, the really inter­est­ing hybrids are where pro­fes­sion­als and ama­teurs come together; in most but not all cases in the infor­ma­tion indus­try, it’s headed to hybridiza­tion because it’s not the crit­i­cal one-off deci­sion; how many dif­fer­ent strate­gies can we apply to see where the cost ver­sus value curve is

q: should we be wor­ried about effi­ciency? should we be wor­ried about experts? one of the prob­lems of com­mu­nity is that there are matu­rity issues that affect new­bies (keep learn­ing or does every­one become an “expert”)
a: the social ori­gin of good ideas; putting experts and ama­teurs together improves both groups because when the expert has to teach, he learns; it’s the con­ver­sa­tion between the two turns out to be more pow­er­ful than pure ama­teur aggre­ga­tion or pure expert knowl­edge; these sys­tems work not because they’re effi­cient because they’re effec­tive after many fruit­less tries at low cost; resources don’t get tied up in the fail­ures because it’s eas­ier to iden­tify them; we’ve all been in that meet­ing where we real­ize we’ve expended more energy talk­ing about the idea than we would have if we’d just imple­mented it; most Flickr pic­tures don’t have com­ments but it doesn’t cost Flickr any­thing; that’s why these new sys­tems look so strange to us

Notes from John Palfrey’s talk for the MacArthur Foun­da­tion at Google Chicago

point of the book Born Dig­i­tal was to bust some of the myths and look at dif­fer­ences in behav­ior between dig­i­tal natives and peo­ple like their grandparents

shouldn’t treat every­body the same way just because they have the same tech­nol­ogy — may not use it the same way
how they define this spe­cific group of kids (not all mil­len­ni­als) — born after 1980, access to the tech­nol­ogy (only 1 bil­lion peo­ple), skills to use it

5 char­ac­ter­is­tics

1. “I blog there­fore I am“
express their iden­tity online and offline — they don’t dis­tin­guish between the two
avatars as another ver­sion of iden­tity
one dif­fer­ence is “sub­scribe to *me*”

2. mul­ti­taskers
a lot of debate over mul­ti­task­ing and what it is, but they’re doing mul­ti­ple things at once
exam­ple of game in which boys tried to main­tain as many IM con­ver­sa­tions with as many girls as they could at once

3. con­sumers to cre­ators
inter­act with dig­i­tal for­mat — seems self-evident, but pre­sump­tion is imme­di­ate access because dig­i­tal (eg, dig­i­tal cam­era vs a dis­pos­able one); movie the­ater vs YouTube, print vs search­able text
pre­sump­tion of media in dig­i­tal form and that it’s social and shared

held a con­test to design the logo for “Dig­i­tal Natives” project at Har­vard Law School — got 136 entries (32 from the kid who won), just for the glory (no prize)

4. mash up dif­fer­ent media, putting dif­fer­ent forms of media together

comes down to a series of tech­nolo­gies — RSS, Google Docs, light­weight col­lab­o­ra­tive tools

5. an inter­na­tional per­spec­tive
“couch­surf­ing” Google Maps mashup — 89,000 friend­ships created

(I think these were the five char­ac­ter­is­tics, but I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion to num­ber­ing until later)

Issues: Secu­rity

secu­rity — Inter­net Safety Tech­ni­cal Task Force (Texas is the only state not par­tic­i­pat­ing in this!)
“stranger dan­ger” is num­ber one fear
data shows kids are not any less safe than they were 10 years ago (fewer inci­dents), although some kids do meet their attack­ers online (it’s become a pub­lic park in some ways)

bul­ly­ing is borne out by the data, though — clearly an increase in this, although maybe it’s more that adults can see it now, as opposed to in the past (it’s asyn­chro­nous and per­sis­tent now)

social net­works:
– unin­tended audi­ence
– replic­a­bil­ity
– per­sis­tence
– search­a­bil­ity
– unin­ten­tional contributions

adults on dat­ing sites are just at bad as post­ing too much per­sonal infor­ma­tion as kids are on myspace, etc.

his big fear now is “dig­i­tal dossiers,” which start as early as sonograms

side­bar: what is a book? why take dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion about dig­i­tal behav­ior and put it in print?
didn’t write the book for kids, because they won’t read it
the book started as research posted in Base­camp
put chap­ters on a wiki

Issues: Pri­vacy

kids like 3–5 minute videos, so this sum­mer they gave some money to a few interns and had them remake each chap­ter into a video that they then put on YouTube
showed the video on “dig­i­tal dossiers”

Issues: Intel­lec­tual Property

copy­right piracy — notion of “stick­ing it to the man” still an excuse
kids that did get music from iTunes used gift cer­tifi­cates (often from par­ents), so they were actu­ally kind of down­load­ing it the same way — for free

remix issues — enor­mous con­fu­sion on this score
once a kid sees the artist, or once they become a cre­ator, they start to think dif­fer­ently about piracy
but there’s an enor­mous range of under­stand­ing about this
played the video of the piracy chapter

Issues: Cred­i­bil­ity

mis­in­for­ma­tion, cheat­ing, hid­den influ­encers, blogs, wikipedia
gen­er­ally, kids don’t go to the library unless forced to go there
“I went to the library on a field trip once“
Har­vard libraries are packed but with kids using lap­tops, not books

infor­ma­tion over­load — is it real? can you get addicted to this stuff?
thinks we have to take seri­ously the idea that you need fil­ter­ing tools for all of this

Oppor­tu­ni­ties

there are cor­re­spond­ing ben­e­fits and oppor­tu­ni­ties in each of these prob­lem areas
cre­ativ­ity, media lit­er­acy, social pro­duc­tion, semi­otic democracy

a world where peo­ple can remix cul­ture and his­tory — it’s much more pow­er­ful out­side the US but still impor­tant for democ­racy here

knowl­edge cre­ation, equity/democratic, participatory

empow­er­ing indi­vid­u­als, access to infor­ma­tion, infor­ma­tion creation

digitalnative.org
join the Face­book group

ended book on the chap­ter on activism — some young peo­ple are very involved with using these skills and tools to change the world and par­tic­i­pate
Obama cam­paign as an example

have to choose how we embrace these things while fight­ing the worst of them

Ques­tions

- what was the cut­off point for the upper age of kids since those born in 1980 would be in grad­u­ate school now
– older kids were actu­ally more sophis­ti­cated and thought­ful about issues like pri­vacy, show­ing that kids do learn; big­ger con­cern might be the gap in the under­stand­ing of par­ents and teachers

- par­ents who didn’t go to col­lege have less expe­ri­ence in this area for edu­cat­ing kids about this stuff or show­ing them how to be cre­ative with these tools
if this is a cru­cial life skill, then we need to rethink this

- atti­tudes from the data about news?
– they asked a lot of ques­tions, and kids don’t read the NYT cover to cover or watch the evening news (this is a big gen­er­a­tional dif­fer­ence — every­body doesn’t get the same truth any­more); they graze for head­lines (which might be through RSS, a Face­book feed, on a mobile device, etc.) — get­ting lots and lots of facts; a smaller num­ber of them would “deep dive” and click on the link; fewer still engaged in a feed­back cycle (post it, cri­tique it, etc.); if the net effect is that we have every­body get­ting a shal­low ver­sion of the news & the most sophis­ti­cated ones are doing the most with it (tri­an­gu­lat­ing data, etc.), then that’s prob­lem­atic; asked if any­one has ever edited a Wikipedia page — only a few had ever done edits, and they were usu­ally to fix typos — didn’t find this recre­ation of the knowl­edge store

- did your research show what might hap­pen when dig­i­tal natives become old enough to change our IP law, fair use for exam­ple?
– copy­right law used to mat­ter only to map mak­ers, etc., but now it mat­ters to every­one; long way from being changed