wired uk, (private design practice) dangerous precedent
incentives
lots of cool new stuff (ie, synthetic biology, mmos, city-level interaction, etc)
"the spirit of the age" = matt jones' "get excited and make things" t-shirt
"the community" - people who you don't want to [scoop] you, or people who you want to buy things from you
but "the community" is made of lots of different kinds of people
Do we really want to incentivize other people to join our nice little club?
Maybe we do want to keep the mad people and idiots out.
Maybe we don't want encourage the marketers, and the hacks, and the standards bodies
Self-definition
So what is the group for? Powerful groups have a central tenet
Until there is a self-defined story, it's hard to recruit people
Having a problem, not a theme
"there is no problem in play," so it's hard to get people broadly interested
Having a shared history
physcomp/ubicomp doesn't have a shared history, a knowledge of past
"to the untutored idea, there is no way to tell the difference between 2009 and 2001. that's a bad thing."
the community should create a history of stuff so we know not to create old work
"it wouldn't do in any other field."
{Note from liz: This also part of the definitional problem that affects a lot of computer science -- in which the computation is no longer the object}
" a creation myth is necessary even if it's factually incorrect"
Defining the Win Condition
What does success concretely mean?
We can't move towards it if we don't know what it is
"Right now the physical computing world seems to be more about defining the journey than the destination"
And that should be declared explicitly
Ben's slides
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