Archive for the 'Chaos' Category

Idealistic Content Warning:this post contains considerations based on personal ideals and tenets.

This morning a couple of titles in Boing Boing caught my eye:
. London’s panopticon of CCTVs aren’t solving crimes
. DRM violates Canadian privacy law

Mixed feelings. On one side I’m happy to see an evidence that intrusion in people’s privacy is not helping to fight crime, and is thus useless from that perspective (meaning the Eye will need to come up with a different excuse), on the other hand I’m not impressed at all by seeing reported as “news” a sideways attack to DRM.
DRM (well, not only digital, let’s say RM) is wrong. Fullstop. No need to hide behind the rotten corpse of privacy.

Besides, let’s admit it: the whole concept of privacy just jumped the shark. It’s the fruit of a dystopian culture based on secrets, harass, blame and deceit; we should aim at composting it, and ultimately It should be seen, at the very best, as a necessary evil, not as a coveted holy grail.

That said, I was very happy to read the headlines above: and many many kudos go to the University of Ottawa. Well done guys!!!

Oops… just found this draft that has been hanging in my wordpress limbo for a week or so. Time to shoot it out even if still a bit gross.

Last night (that is, last week) had a little chat with Feba, who kindly updated me on the RomagnaCamp, the latest Italian BarCamp.
She meticolously collected links to the presentations happened during the event, and also pointed me at other threads of conversation all over the spaghetti blogosphere… a natural born technorati, she is.

Following the event from the outside, and without paying too much attention on it, what I perceived on saturday was a general atmosphere of joyful relax, facilitated by the beach setting. I’m sure I missed a really enjoyable event (and a chance to challenge Amanda in a Wii-boxing match :P ).

Some of the participants though… palmasco, samuele silva, mantellini are introducing an interesting topic: Are BarCamps, in Italy at least, dying?
Orientalia, on the other hand, wonders if that was a barcamp at all, with the easy going atmosphere and the slow pace and people engaging in all sort of recreational activities (from long walks on the seashore to playing with and entertaining the “next generation” - barcampers’ children ).

Imho it doesn’t make sense to talk about the death of BarCamp. BC is a format, and one that proved to be successful and very flexible. Quite the contrary, it seems to me that the use of the format is simply evolving, being conditioned and interacting with the local environment and culture: as I often pointed in the last few years, Italy tends to be a self contained system in the global blogosphere. We see what’s happening outside, sometime we bring in conversations, memes and trends but seldom the other way around: hence the dynamics are unique to the Italian ecosystem, (almost) completely detached from the rest.
The way it evolved in Italy then is less about sharing achievements, intuitions and propositions, and more about creating a social circle, through which jointly explore topics of common interest.

So the bottom line is that, yes, the BarCamp experience is dead in Italy, but just because the original concept was composted through the interaction of the local culture and transformed in a new one.

Speaking of the BarCamp format instead, well, my (and Folletto’s) presentation for the ZenaCamp was supposed to be quite on topic, as the title (Dead is the BarCamp, Long Live the BarCamp) suggest.
My point there was (and still is) that this format’s strength is that, by the means of enforced participation and lack of structure, it creates a game space where the participants experience a suspension of formal social rules: everybody is peer, and all are (supposed to be) making an effort to contribute to the experience and share their knowledge.

So, in the end, a BarCamp is just as good as the people who make it.

Going through a few months worth of feeds, noticed Anu’s post about him leaving Headshift. Of course I’ve been knowing the fact for a while, but still, seeing his feed there in the same page where the voices of other friends and now-ex-colleagues are collected and aggregated, makes me think of this whole crazy spinning merry-go-around that is the social media “world”. People join for a round or two, then leave, others stay for some more time, new faces jump in the wagon, and so it goes, on and on… Still, everybody is somehow changed by the experience and share something with those who, even if for a little time, were part of the same “spin”. It’s not just a matter of memories, it’s like resonance.

Let’s face it: it’s one hell of a good time to be out in the open, offering skills to the best (or most remunerative, depending on your ethics) cause, and the thrill of self employment, or of thorough changes (oh, sweet memories of the early dot-com era) is surely tempting.
Nevertheless,  I came to believe a while ago that the days of pure free lancing are gone for me, at least in this chapter of my life: if a change is going to happen, I’d probably rather go back to enterpreneurship… oh my, forgive me, this is another story, one for which too many elements are still missing (a good setting and a decent raison d’être above all else).

So coming back to the here and now, I found that Headshift has the most peculiar characteristic of being a constantly challenging (not always because of exciting projects, but that’s what life’s like) environment, and that’s - after all- what I always asked for; furthermore, I foresee some very interesting developments on the horizon, and I’m just too curious to find out what’s the shape of things to come…

but I’m letting thoughts run free once again, I guess it’s time to go to bed.

I think the whole point in this post (if one has to be) is that I’m glad and proud to have met and worked with all the headshift team members (past and present), clever human beings, and I’d like to get this chance to say thanks to all of you. And good luck with your current and future adventures!

Yesterday, browsing through TUAW I stumbled upon moodswings, a plugin for QuickSilver that allows for simultaneous update of your status message through different chat system and web services (as of this version: Adium, iChat, Skype, Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook). It also incorporates some parsing magic to embed extra infos as your latest played track in iTunes or local weather. Sweet, we all love semantic sugar.

So I eagerly downloaded the thing and tried it… just to found out that the solution is not there, yet… or not so easy anyway: even with all the overlapping of communities that we are subject to, even with all the fuss and stress and tension toward DRY, still the affordance expressed by each and every of these tools is fairly different. The way I use twitter is far from the way I update my status on facebook (where also the implicit syntax is different), and then also on Skype it seem to me more natural to state my location and general availability rather than the microserendipities that I twitter about (oh, and speaking of Skype… have a look at the latest beta for Mac, AddressBook integration is -starting to be- sweet). Even Jaiku, that at first sight could seem just a perfect overlap on Twitter’s behaviour, moves in subtly different ways by the mean of commentability and the availability of channels.

In the end I think moodswing is an excellent starting point, but the next step must be the ability to differentiate the output on each channel, giving each one the right emphasys: in my case that would be location on Skype, mid-term focus on facebook, solipsistic haikus on twitter and so on.

Oh, and please, let’s add Plazes support :)