Ultimate frisbee, Net Generation and alternative forms of governance

Hokay
So as part of my never ending ultimate frisbee political endeavors I have been part of an ongoing discussion about the future of the sport in Israel (as board member of Flow -Israeli Flying Disc Association). Part of my ongoing struggle is transforming the way the sport here is played and viewed by its own participants. I wont delve into that too much just to say that one emerging theme has been that of how the sport is governed. For those unfamiliar with the sport (shame on you!) one of the main cornerstones around which proponents focus is Spirit Of The Game - which basically means that people take it upon themselves to treat each other fairly and respectfully and thus the rules are built around self refereeing. This has created a sort of "outcast" or "alternative" feel to the community. So when governance is talked about there is always the conflict between the "power to the people" crowd who don't want structure and want to leave the players responsible for everything - and the classic hierarchical structures that most of us (yours truly amongst them) feel are critical for advancing forward.
So...well I have started to think and look around and see what other forms of governance are available apart from classical delegative hierarchical democracy.
Thinking about the current trends in the business arena, especially the internet and new media one starts to think how the principles of coopetition and distributed co creation could impact how we do things here. Most of the material that I have come across deal either with commercial coopetition in which business entities have a vested interest in gaining traction for new technology, breaking some R&D barrier or pushing standards. In these cases they usually create a consortium or NPO or even a JV and usually declare their IPR to others, reveal some of their future plans and so on. Other instances of non classical structures often occur in international relations context (like the UN, EPI and others) some interesting thoughts on this type of interaction can be found here. In these instances national entities (which are hierarchical in and of themselves) interact as peers to try and govern hypernational issues.
Another interesting example is TakingItGlobal - a youth founded and centred NPO that encourages youth participation in political, social and environmental issues. TIG works through education programs created by its members in cooperation with partner organizations and has a heavy emphasis on web based participation.
It would seem that most of these forms of peer cooperation examples put an emphasis on deliberative process as opposed to a bargaining one. That is - instead of a bunch of disparate entities bargaining over the outcome as viewed from their perspectives, deliberation requires that prior to decision making the problems are well understood and articulated and clear metrics for the success of the process are put forth and agreed upon by the parties. This is in line with current thought regarding win/win or integrative negotiations as opposed to distributive negotiations.
What can be learned? Well it seems that no one has come up with a complete alternative to some sort of power delegation. This might have to do with the fact that deliberative processes are by their nature long. They lend themselves to important non urgent issues but fail with urgent matters need to be dealt with (think "in battle" or "in game" situations).

I would argue that the advent of connectivity and IT has not really changed the basic premise of governance - sometimes a decision needs to be made quickly and this means that very few people can be involved. Technology will however narrow the gap of applicable situations for using collaborative processes. Employing technologies like web polls, wiki's, forums and such will allow us to manage the collaboration across a wide audience and with shorter cycle times. Take a look at what the UPA is doing with the Ultimate Revolution - a strategic planning process with a heavy emphasis on member participation based on web enabled forums and data collections, as well as conventional meetings. The process chart lets you see how they have chosen to mix traditional with new.
So can we manage things differently? I believe there is much room for inclusion of new approaches into current thinking and mitigate some of the principal-agent issues that classic governance suffers from.

This needs to be done with caution - not every aspect can be freely translated into these type of processes and some aspects will not stand much to gain. The most probable areas for incorporating collaboration are:

• Strategic planning
• Rule evolution
• Fund raising
• Event planning
• League moderation
• Knowledge base creation
• Community reach out

One caveat that needs to be dealt with is the loss of "experts". Many times in collaborative processes there is equal weight put on each contributor. This means that more often than not popular views get acknowledged rather than views based on hardcore expertise (this problem arises with search engines like Google that rank according to popularity...). The UPA took care of this by manually putting in various expert groups and or decision milestones where management will be involved. This works well for a strategic issue that deserves detailed attention and planning. If we want to move a step further and create many other semi self governed processes we will need to devise an expert ranking system that will moderate the process effectively while still allowing the man on the street to push change ahead.
I will try to followup on this issue with David Barkan - who has been consulting the UPA in their process (as well as being a long time player/coach/prophet and friend of Flow...)
MC

3D I/O as VW enabler

For the past couple of months I have been pondering the issue of VW mainstream penetration as a 3D extension or hull of the WWW.

In the recent VW2007 in NYC, IBM rep was talking extensively about the 3Dnet - what he/they see as the future metaverse like internet.

So beyond the SF connotations what is really the key issue that might drive this development? Personally I feel that I/O devices are THE critical missing link in our 3D experience (of course things like BW, MIPS interop and so on are also not there yet). These devices were basically not even touched upon at VW and in a local gaming conference I attended, and are only lightly touched upon in the blogging community as far as I can see.

The 3D information revolution is mainly based on the premise that our brain processes 3D data faster and more efficiently than 2D as it has honed these skills over many years of evolution(very similar to the way color adds a lot to our image processing abilities such as depth perception, object recognition and so forth). That basically means that the optimal pre-processing of visual information requires that it be rendered in REAL 3D.
The problem is that the current 3D is a mere 2D projection of 3D objects and does not allow our brain to use the information in its fullest (e.g. - two eyes don't really have different perspectives, small head movements do not change the point of view and so on). I argue that when devices allowing REAL3D experience become more wide spread we will be able to harness the power of this revolution. I am talking about devices like haptic gloves and VR goggles and in the future probably brain implants.
The current state of such devices is that they are not there yet as far as price point, performance and usability (some early examples: PureDepth, Icuiti). They will undoubtedly debut in medical/military/research applications or in high end gaming platforms - but as the price/performance mix changes such offerings will become household favorites (just like WiFi, broadband, MP3's and cellphones). A recent article in SciAm featured two extreme high end devices aimed and the radiology field (read $50K a pop!) but it is not far reaching to think that at the rate we are going now we will have such CE devices gaining popular acceptability within the next ten years.

Most skeptics usually point to the fact that text comprehension and searching does not lend itself to 3D....I beg to differ!
Text is not only about reading. Most of what we do with text is search and arrange textual items within various contexts - like lookup something, schedule an appointment, edit a post and so on. To that end it is quite probably that 3D interfaces will drastically change the way we go about these tasks. just look at MSresearch demo to think about what could be next (and there are many others.
The reason that text is such is that it is the only form of information that is formally learned and not hardwired into our brain like say - recognizing faces. Thus text evolved together with the technology that we invented to make it (chisel - feather - fountain pen - ballpen - printing press -writing machine - computer - T9...).One has to wonder what type of text abstraction could be formed when 3D reading and writing is freely available....could we invent a new way to write and read that utilizes 3D?
MC

Overfeaturing

So over featuring has been dubbed one of the big nono's or failure factors of many startups and is a talked about issue with current product evolution in CE and consumer SW. Just a funny article/concept that reminded me of that and how bad things taken to extreme could be funny. Case in point is the Swiss Army Knife $1200 godzilla. Read a funny user report.

MC

DRM - knowledge as an economic good and hierarchies in media PART ONE

So this post started as something about DRM and intellectual property a week ago but became too long...so I decided to break it down into two parts. Here is the first:
Last week there was some uproar at Digg concerning the BluRay crack code (part of the DRM scheme they are using) and the site's moderation and deletion of posts and user accounts of people who posted it. Many of the threads concerned take the F-U approach towards the RIAA and corporate America.
One more interesting and balanced post that touched upon the issue of laws as part of the underpinnings of our society and also called for proactive approaches and for people to try and suggest solutions for the issues.
Obviously this issue revolves around two critical themes - freedom of speech and intellectual property rights. Though most people tend to focus on the first i would like to look a little of the IPR issue (an easy overview of IPR can be found .
So essentially what is the big deal with IPR? Well it turns out that the crux here is the fact that ideas or knowledge are a special case of "good" in the economic sense. Why are they special - well mostly due to the fact that they can be copied without end, and if i give you my IPR i am not left with less, and also that once you expose someone to your IPR you cannot take it back. This creates a situation where (at least according to common schools of thought) if an open economy is left to its own accord there will be very little incentive for people to create any new knowledge since they spend huge resources on creating them but cannot reap the rewards.
so the classical view was to give the creators some sort of limited monopoly for using the idea and keeping other people from using it (hence patents, copy rights and trade marks).
The main problem is that the rate at which the law and big corporations have been able to adapt to the new digital economy and information age is too slow. The result is that some entities receive unreasonable IP rights that grant them say patents over doing square roots, while others (especially so in the media industry) are helpless against piracy and digital redistribution of their material.
So to the point at hand - media. Let's review the issue again. some people seem to feel that no matter what type of media we are talking about - the solution should basically be scrap DRM and let all digicontent be free...hmm. So what would be the incentive to create it in the first place?
Some more advanced ideas talk about empowering the artists by cutting the publishers out of the loop. This is already being done by some sites offering direct PayPal donations to artists. one of the things people are missing here (IMHO) is the fact if we have learned anything form the web2.0 revolution is that quality content is hard to come by and difficult to create. Taking an idea from Wikinomics: the three cornerstones of p2p, non-hierarchical co creation are:

• Object of creation is information or culture - puts low threshold on participation
• Work needs to be divisible into small chunks - so people can contribute with small effort
• Cost of re-assembly and editing needs to be low

So how does this apply here? Well obviously not all media is the same! I shuffled these ideas around a bit and suggest looking at the problem using the following filters (this approach is by no means perfect - but I will see how this pans out):

• ease of creation (what equipment is needed, how deep is the skill set, funds, need of concurrent effort vs. time deferred effort, division of labor and editing)
• criticallity of the human brain in analyzing the media (sensory inputs, cognitive vs. visceral digestion, sensitivity to distortion)
• ease of distribution (bandwidth, QoS, device and system requirements)

[ I borrow here the terminology of visceral from cognitive sciences. Namely from Donald Norman's Emotional Design]

What is the outcome? Well considering that IPR is worth the effort only when the creation is of high quality (read: not MySpace junk, not just funny flicks on YouTube or silly photos on Flicker) here is my take on it:

Text:

• Creation -written media is the easiest kind to create. It requires only thought and research (this can take years of course), but the tools of production are these days basically a simple laptop. And owing to the nature of the effort there is no real need for concurrency (e.g. - no need for 20 people to be in the same room to do this). Granted editorial effort is needed here - but at the end of the day all you need is a wiki SW or some other text editor and time - the general scope of the creation can be agreed upon and every person can be allocated a part of the work.
• Brain -our understating of written language is 100% cognitive (it requires higher brain functions to interpret the symbols and create the meaning) we are very insensitive to distortion. as an example think of the following: I can very easily read text in any font, probably in font sizes 6-50, in two languages (that's all I know), on the laptop, newspaper, small paperback, billboard, piece of paper and so on.
• Distribution -The distribution of such media is very easy - in compresses well and can be sent in small installments and easily recombined. It is mostly device agnostic

The end result is that media in the form of text lends itself to low cost creation and distribution schemes and as such will tolerate considerable distortion and changes along the way. This is evident in the fact that some blogs or community based projects are gaining respectability as a real information source (whether news, literary or analysis).

Photos and graphic art:

• Creation - high quality media of this kind requires usually more sophisticated equipment (say good quality camera, high end computer, knowledge of art, sophisticated SW, maybe lighting equipment etc.) It might also require you use a model, travel places, test out stuff and spend resources. To effectively collaborate on such a project is also quite more difficult - it is hard to create a common understanding of the general scope and look and feel of the output (the equivalent of table of content) and all people involved need to have all their technical tid bits solved (compatible SW, same viewing settings and so on). The editor of such an effort is not just changing wording and cut'n'pasting - he is literally changing your art! Concurrency might be an issue what with models, assistants, props and so forth
• Brain - our brain is much more critical in analyzing photos - we very quickly discern poor technical quality, loss of resolution, digitization artifacts and the limits of our I/O devices in contrast and color saturation and so on. Also images are not processed completely within our cognitive brain. Some of the information goes through a complicated (and yet not fully understood) mechanism that is not completely conscious - we react on this visceral level to various types of stimuli like symbols, colors, faces, general tone and so on. This part of the experience is sensitive to small changes and to the creators ability to master these facets.
• Distribution - such media requires high storage capacities, more robust transmission schemes and are somewhat device dependant (e.g. cellphone vs. TV).

So there are less large scale digital creations in this space than in text based media - thus far.

Music - well this is probably the media that started it all (with Napster). Lets look at the details:

• Creation - high quality music usually requires some special SW and/or HW (music editing SW, musical instruments, microphones, studio and so on). It also necessitates deep fundamental knowledge on how to create music. Again it is not as easy to form a skeletal structure that collaborators can use to understand how the piece should sound - so chopping up the creation is not as easily achieved. Many times concurrency of several people is needed (sound engineer, musicians)
• Brain - we interpret music very much at a subconscious level. This means that subtle differences in the music itself change the way we listen to it drastically. Also production quality (noise, balance, distortions, jitter and other artifacts) can disturb the listener in a big way.
• Distribution - serious disc space is needed, high quality compression schemes (that means R&D effort), good bandwidth and quality of service for streaming applications.

So yeah - co-created free music is possible (mainly electronic/remix), but has limits and will usually suffer form lack of resources

Video/Multimedia/Gaming - well this is no doubt the holy grail! It is basically the Photo/graphic arts/music multiplied by say 200,000 (the number of frames in a feature length film?):

• Creation - high quality requires not only serious SW and HW but also deep knowledge of all aspects of film creation since every frame counts and any problems with directing, continuity, lighting, sound or whatever are difficult to control or edit out in post processing. One usually needs tens of people concurrently to manage such a task. Although division of labor is possible it usually works within closely knit units that have deep understanding of the need and the technicalities. Over all a lengthy and extremely costly endeavor. Just to think of this in real world examples - most high quality feature films that we have learned to expect cost hundreds of millions of dollars - most of which is CGI time! World class games like WoW cost tens of millions of dollars to create!
• Brain - obviously this is the most sensitive form of media since it not only encompasses all the others but the sheer size of the data and the interconnectedness nature make these creations very sensitive to distortion and quality issues (notice how easy it is to realize you are watching a B movie just from seeing a couple of seconds...)
• Distribution - high capacity, high BW, jitter and timing issues - what more could you ask for?

Just to get everyone on the same page here - the first feature length film (I know of) to be produced and marketed virally is FourEyedMonsters which, although is highly credited and interesting is hardly at the level one expects from a tier one blockbuster.

So what is the conclusion i draw from this? Despite the advent of web2.0 and advancements in easy to use and accessible tools for collaboration and creation of media genuine high quality creations become increasingly difficult to produce as the media is more complex. IMHO any way you dice it Mission Impossible III level films cannot be made with low budgets and by sparse teams of loosely coupled individuals, and this will probably remain true for quite some time to come. So why is a large and loud group of people so disrespectful to the need of the creators to recoup their development effort and funds by exercising their legitimate right to protect their IPR (whether through DRM or other means)?

MC

OSINT, Google and the USPTO

So we are familiar with the USPTO...
Traditionally searching it is a nightmare since the interface is so bad and no real effort to facilitate searching has been done.
So along comes Google and creates the mostly wonderful patent search engine. A sigh of relief? Somewhat but not really. For some reason they have decided not to do the most obvious thing: create a really good solution to this mostly not very difficult problem.
Patents are a quite limited and structured form of data. They are limited in numbers, are mostly text, have set internal structure and self reference already built in. This would be a classic case where OSINT with its various application of data mining and classification combined with stronger semantic engine and new forms of graphic representations.
Some examples of what I am talking about can be found in the the ever changing space of specialized search engines that pop up in the web2.0 sphere. Take a look at Mooter and Axioma for a couple of examples.
So what do I propose? Here are some ideas that come to mind (not exhaustive by any means):

• Use tags, labels and color coding for critical information (like author, assignees etc.)
• Create visualizations of datasets (e.g. all patents by author and what fields they are in, what space is a certain company involved in)
• highlight interconnects (who cites this patent? what field are they applying this in?)
• "People reading this patent also read..."

Of course putting in the provisionals is also key...and maybe integrating PCT...

I am admittedly not familiar with professional grade patent search tools but from what I hear they also lack these features and depend on hard work, deep knowledge of the database and material and luck...

Why has this not happened?

MC

Photos!

So I received some critical comments form friends - saying the blog is too serious and no fun to read and I should add photos - so I did.

The permanent photo on the main page is of Zoe eating a Popsicle!

The one above is of myself and my co-captain Yoav during a tourney in April (ultimate frisbee!) we are so serious!!! (visit our website) Photo taken by Hannah.

I will make an effort to be more lively in the future!

MC

Mortality - is there hope...?

A colleague's father just past away a while ago. I believe he was 55 or so... it brought back some of my own thoughts in the past couple of years on the issue of mortality.
I guess a few things came together for me in a loud wakeup call:

I began to notice that my dad was not able to function his usual...getting tired quickly and needing my help with some physical stuff

My own health, although still great is not what it used to be... feeling my younger self slip away.

My 47 year old brother had some health issues - they were all benign..but still

Reading Eli Weisel's Night - especially the part where he talks about his father's dying moments and the emotional torment that he felt was the darkest part of his Holocaust abyss

But most of all I think it was the birth of my first daughter - Zoe. It was really a revelation and an incredible experience in many ways (I am sure every parent knows what I'm talking about) but it also brought a new sense to time - children are wonderful yet frightening metrics for our own demise and to the passing of time. Since they change so noticeably you begin to feel time flowing by. It also made me realize that no matter how good I feel now, how cool I might think I am Zoe will never really know me as I perceive myself to be at this point. For her I will be a 50 something old man most of his life behind him!

Of course everyone thinks of mortality, and this is not the first time by any means for me (my mother still recalls how at the age of eight I screamed from the shower saying something like "we are all gonna die - you, dad and me") but i think that having children changes everything including your view of life and death. For me it sort of symbolizes the beginning of the end.

Obviously this issue has occupied many minds ever since the dawn of man...and I wonder where exactly are we going with this. Reading some of the recent issues of Scientific American and other papers on robotics and AI it seems there are some converging trends in Nanotech Biotech and computing that will eventually change the way we live and the way we die.

Some of these advancements have to do with health issues like fighting cancer, anti aging, nerve repair or organ regeneration - but the interesting part for me is reading about augmented brain technology and the fact that we are not very far away from being able to engage not only in turbo charging our memory but maybe in actual mind uploading so what will the outcome be? The consequences of robbing man kind of mortality are of course not clear. Probably, at least for non religious crowd, the real issue lies with the continuity of consciousness (a la immortality test) and assume linear causality (unlike quantum immortality). Obviously the mere physical reincarnation is, by most accounts meaningless (popularized by motion pictures like Island and AeonFlux ). One wonders what would unending existence type of scenario do to the structure of so called humanity. Some accounts talk about stagnation and lack of any motivation others tend to look at the outcome as engineered heaven while yet others argue that existence that cannot be terminated will inevitably lead to misery as the conscious entity will not be able to commit willful suicide in cases where it no longer desires to continue an unwanted existence.

ultimately it seems that humans' philosophy that consciousness is what separates man from animals will be our demise. With that kind of definition it seems more than plausible that artificial entities with sufficient memory space, computing power and probably parallel processing and self referencing will very soon be able to be effectively self aware and will thus be effectively human under these terms (see Hans Moravec and The Singularity Institute for some data). Beyond that point we will need to face the very difficult questions of what constitutes life and death and re-examine our consciousness based theories. It might turn out that multiple consciousness and mind connectedness scenarios where an abstract conscious entity of super human intelligence and infinite existence come to "life". In fact proponents of this school of thought believe that web2.0 with its massive collaboration and co creation abilities is the beginning of such an occurrence. No doubt we are at an Archimedian point. Will we all be part of one big virtual entity (like Gaia ), will we be able to live multiple co-existence lives in virtual domains.

Whatever the future of mortality is I just want to end with a little story that my thesis advisor told me about Lev Landau (who was his doctoral advisor back in the good old days):

So Lev is sitting some really cold afternoon with Ginsburg in the Moscow Academy debating some issue in statistical mechanics. Ginsburg says something like "....but this is an extremely improbable outcome. It is like saying that this fireplace will spontaneously transform itself on the quantum level to a beautiful girl!" So Landau pauses for a second, then smiles and says: "that is true - but if that does happen the chances that she will have cloths on are REALLY zero!!"

So whatever it is, I hope the girls don't have cloths on!

MC