Chaos’n'Coffee

It’s just the usual bloody deadline.
This one is due tomorrow, the soft part of it. So I expect to be slightly more available since tomorrow night. But I’ll still be hacking like hell till next week.

Meanwhile, lot of stuff is going on here, and it’s a shame I can’t spend enough time to go into details… but let’s try on a postcard:

Half-a-Hackday
Yes on saturday I was in Ally Pally for the Hackday. Half-a-day because I had to leave in the evening to have some hope to meet the aforementioned deadline. But I had a chance to catch up with Ludo, Antonio and Enrica and speak some Italian with them.
Also other “old” friends like good Pedro and Colin who are becoming usual conference buddies, James who was planning to tinker with Arduino, Ian who’s by now probably the most prolific event host in the geek-o-sphere and many others. I also managed to miss some, especially some new twitter-buddies (Uldis and Pixeldiva, among others), those that in the past weeks became the constant “voices” of my days (once I had radio for that, but it was far less interactive).
Since the plan was to stay until 6pm, I didn’t start a hack of my own, but was planning to join Jeremy since he introduced his idea at Reboot and I found it quite teasing.
The team was huge, the ideas stormed for a few hours while the hackfight took shape. It’s been fun. A lot. And the project, I must say, has been a very interesting example of how much can and can’t be done between the physical limits of 24 hours, with a mistery team, made of humans (who need to sleep or rest, even if Nat and Colin didn’t sleep at all, but they’re super-humans).
I’m very proud of having been part of this team, and of contributing some ideas to the game mechanics side of it.
So much so that instead of living at 6 I was still hanging around Ally Pally past 9.30 :)
Anyway, for a detailed chronicle of the hack and the project flow, have a look at Jeremy’s article

Beside hackday, life is going on fast and there will be news soon.
For the time being, it seems that a few more Italian friends joined the London bandwagon, so I spent some time in the past few days listening to their stories and trying to give some advice. I also thought the blog could be a good place where to put these… but that’s the kind of post I feel quite uncomfortable with. Oh well, we’ll see.
Oh and another thing: I was reading Jeremy’s post, and noticed he linked me on codewitch.org which is odd because that’s been on hiatus for five monthes or so now. But I guess that means something, or that not only in a lifetime we are asked to play a thousand roles, but that we are supposed to play them thoroughly. Or just that google doesn’t forget easily. Go figure :)
So maybe I’ll bring back codewitch soon.

Much like during last year Reboot, when the idea of “sustainability” has been the main carrier for the event, the fact that objects represent key socio-emotional artifacts has permeated the event’s fabric this year.
In fact, one of the main themes that inevitably spread through the Reboot9 conference has been the computer as a social agent.
Starting from Jeremy Keith and his speech on “Soul” (the very first presentation I attended on Thursday morning) to Tom Armitage and Dan Dixon who quoted the Nass research on human reactions toward an artificial agent (a computer), all the way to Matt Webb who’s been my last presentation on Friday and was titled Products are People Too.

Lee scored a very good hit sharing with us the story of the city of Kozarac: destroyed during the war and its population scattered to the four winds, for a certain period of time it existed only as a forum on the world wide web.
Then people started to come back and are now in the process of rebuilding it and reclaiming their heritage, and still using and leveraging the web to help in decision making, organizing the rebuilding activities and coordinating initiatives like international fund rising.
This presentation blessed me with what I think has been the most tangible example of how much “human” can emerge from a piece of technology.
It was of those moments when you really think that all this ado about social media is about something good after all.

Stephanie approached a very similar theme from a very different perspective and framing: her presentation - Waiting for the BabelFish - has been about multi vs. mono linguistic web.
Now, I really enjoyed that speech and I think it perfectly address a serious limit that I’m constantly facing too: the fact of acting (or at least trying to act) as a bridge between two (or more) different linguistic groups and the dilemma of how to keep contact with all of them.
Her main point is that most people on the web are (to a degree) multilingual.
The problem is, I think that vast majority of them never even considered acting as bridges and therefore need to communicate to more than one linguistic group at a time.
Nevertheless, she subtly introduced two other (imho) key concepts:
. first is that, with the wider and wider adoption of the Web (and its space-crunching effect) and its related technologies (in this case mobile networks act as support technology) the concept of border (and thus of state) is getting obsolete, as nation shifts more and more to match with linguistic group and system of beliefs and values.
. second is how do we create these bridges and how to keep them in good health.
We tried doing that algorithmically (i.e. automatic translators and the like), but it clearly is not sufficient.
And why is that?
Because culture and communication are so much more than just content.
You can’t just take a bunch of sentences and translate them in another language and hope that people from that culture will get all the information that were carried in the original message.
However, as Steph pointed out, automatic translations can help at least in getting the geist of an article, but to properly achieve this goal the content should be respectful of standards and declare its languages (otherwise the automatic translators will make a mess), which is something that current tools don’t support very well…

On a sidenote, this also makes me think of the general trend of simplifying tools’ features and delegate the complexity to the human user, who’s so much better at that than any algorithm (at least for now).
Dopplr is the perfect example: it “just” tells you if any of your friends is in the same city, then you decide what to do with that information (call him, ignore him, poke him on Facebook or whatever).

Stowe Boyd reminds us that the buddylist is the real killer app while exploring the concept of Flow.
Stowe’s presentation was simply awesome, even if I don’t agree with all his conclusions… but I’ll have to get back to this on a later post.
All I want to highlight here is a remarkable intuition that for me was the most precious revelation of his presentation: flow combined with continuous partial attention assume a tangible value when you realize (o implicitly admit) you’re part of a network and the network’s achievements are more valuable than the individual’s.

photo by Paolo, it is too awesome not to post it :)

P.S.: if you’re looking for more comprehensive notes about the conference, Stephanie has a lot of good stuff, also have a look at Lars mindmaps (this and following ones…), and of course the Reboot website itself!