Results tagged “events” from confectious

nerds [!]
everyday creativity is not just "there"
nerdom: "being deeply invested in something"

a celebration of nerds
- like the knitting nerd who got a tattoo of a knitting ball
- knitting nerds as the symbol of nerdom
- like knitting nerds who make sweaters from the hair of their pets
- or topology knitting nerds

what about metal nerds?
food nerds

a network of nerds, a web of nerds, a fractal of nerds, a jungle of nerds!
but people are probably not on the extremes of all possible nerd paths
but the decisions seem logical, and even moral

nerd war!
- details are an important thing, sometimes
- but you do need to start somewhere, sometime

coercion
- for many years mixed up with ideas of dirty hippies
- so how do we find ways to negotiate out of the nerd war?

examples of nerd wars, good and bad

[this is essentially an argument about essentialism and the varying importance of extreme positions]

so how do we find platforms for sharing what we care about that do not bring about nerd war?

nerdiversity!
- ex: ArtBots
- ex: dorkbot

Interactivos: a platform for collective production and learning

initiative of Media Lab Prado, cultural initiative of Madrid City Council
art, science, technology

two week production workshop, conference, exhibition of workshop products - about 60 attendees
1) international call for tutors (free travel and accommodation)
2) call for collaborators (free travel)

importance of in-person contact and communication

3) sharing documentation on and offline

4) welcoming visitors to the lab with "cultural mediators" who lead tours of the lab

5) improvised activities

6) replicated

Creating Imagined Communities of Belonging
(or How One Institutions Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Social Innovation)

- large institutions and technology
-- especially from a major British NGO
-- addressing massive collective action problems
-- trying to let go of a need for physical presence, and the beloved patterns that require it
-- dealing with issues of digital divide (though that's a myth: people have mobile phones all over)
-- in changing others, changing oneself
- some projects
-- "skype grannies" in the UK who are recruited to coach youngsters in slums in India
-- Tierra del Fuego: keeping the city council accountable by blogging council meetings

Richard Sennett: three values that are being undermined -- narrative, usefulness, craftsmanship
- so where is the role of the British Council in all that? Supporting it with simple interventions

"social media and crowdsourcing"
"idea management software"

trying to get IT departments to try new things - "come to grips with the change"
vs "the guys who try to sell you data management, enterprise management, and, God help us, knowledge management"
European section of NYK (the Japanese shipping company)
- using small projects to show the benefit of new projects so it can be sold to an IT dept.
IT departments fear what's going on - sneering is symptomatic of pomposity
how much does pomposity cost organizations? how many clever ideas are stifled? how many meetings run on? how many projects get extended too long?
yet that cost is trivial compared to the cost of installing some social tools and accepting some "nattering"
not command and control but still management of the system
[Mike says: "It's the end of modernism and central planning!]

Designing for an Internet of Things

citing Marc Smith - physical and digital interaction: digital interaction takes place in a different place; we go "into" screens and "to" the Internet
trying to look at how we can participate in digital without being in front of screen
RFID
examples of playful projects from Timo's lab
three levels
- tangible and embodied

[my computer died]

Bemused by idea of "Internet of Things" -- it unites two things he's not interested in: the internet and things
He is more interested in spaces, and environments, and people
talking about Pachube
[he's using the new zoomy presentation tool to give his talk! Will it work? Will it give us motion sickness? Who knows?]
idea of being connected
- we are connected all over, but we still have neighbors -- they're just non-geographical
- DON'T PANIC!
idea of interdependence
- "their environment is that which they construct in their relationship to each other"
idea of participation
- "spime wrangling": actively engaging in production of our environments
"rubbish is the root of virtuosity"
- to make something beautiful with a tool, you must also be able to make crap as well
so, patchube
- "a genearlized realtime broker for networked environments"
- trying to work with small scale projects: enable a simple system for smaller entities to more casually share data
- they do not specify what gets shared; it's
not an internet of things but an ecosystem of environments
- not about rooms that change color when I walk in, not corporate sensor nets, about sharing "the context of my environment" with "the context of your environment"
[I think this is where the terminology gets dodgy. For Haque, the "environment" is co-constructed at the interface between a self and the felt-world.