Conferences
 Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 09:53 (Check me out!)
Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.
There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.
The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.
Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.
Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/23/2008 - 15:28 (Check me out!)
Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.
No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.
Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.
Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.
Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.
So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.
There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.
The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?
Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?
All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)
Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.
Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/12/2008 - 10:38 (Check me out!)
One of the bigger disappointments of the Technology Management Conference was Don Tapscott’s keynote speech Wednesday morning. Tapscott is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I really looked forward to hearing some profound reflections on how Wikinomics relates to the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the session was scheduled to start at 8 AM, and because of a collection of transportation issues, I just could not make it into New York from New Haven in time to hear what Mr. Tapscott had to say. I hope he did say something profound and enlightening and that others will write about it.
The most exciting high point of the show was talking with Michael Warner, CEO and Founder of Quantum 4D. Quantum 4D provides a data visualization tool using 3D models, that shift as a time series is played through it, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. It is still in an early stage and there were lots of things that I wish it had. For example, you load data into Quantum 4D in batches, instead of Quantum 4D connecting up to real time data feeds. Their presentation layer looks good, and they talk about the ability of users to collaborate in the three dimensional space that the data creates. We talked about taking the presentation object and incorporating it into other systems. Being the Second Life fan that I am, I suggested finding ways of presenting their model in Second Life so people could collaborate in a virtual world to work with the data. There was some resistance to this idea due to some of the bad press that Second Life has received.
We talked about using QWAQ as a collaboration tools and about looking at integration with other collaboration tools. We talked about pricing models and about different companies creating their own data spaces that they could share on a free or subscription basis. This was definitely the hottest software I saw there. My sense is that it is something that only innovators and visionaries are likely to get right now, and the challenge will be to see how it develops, scales, gets documented, builds its community, and on and on, before it becomes the tool of choice by early adopters and the early majority.
After seeing such an interesting and compelling presentation, I was wondering what the Open Source Update panel had to say. The panel was made up of luminaries, Roger Burkhardt, CEO and President of Ingres, Randy Hergett, director of engineering for Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, Roger Levy, SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell, Marcus Rex, CTO of The Linux Foundation, and Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. Unfortunately, it was too much like so many other panels, where the moderator asked lots of questions and didn’t really provide an opportunity to let these people shine. I left the panel without having heard anything new or interesting.
The final highpoint was the marketing effort of FTEN. They describe themselves as “an independent non-broker dealer application service provider (ASP) that offers these sophisticated solutions to Clearing Firms, Broker Dealers, Prime Brokers, Hedge Funds and Proprietary Traders.” They boast about their access, speed and control. Their swag was little stuffed pig toys with wings. They had women dressed as pigs with wings at their booth and they even gave away helium balloons to members of the press to try and get reporters to their booth. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or innovative about their platform, but I do have to compliment them as having what seemed to be the most sought after and talked about swag.
Today is the final day of the Technology Management Conference. I’m working up in Connecticut today and won’t make it in. However, I was glad about what I did get to see, as well as the chance to connect with many old friends at the show and look forward to next year’s SIFMA Technology and Management Conference and Exhibition.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 19:40 (Check me out!)
Just about every year, I find a key theme from the Technology Management Conference (TMC), and this year’s theme seems to be unstructured data. Other years, compliance seems to be an issue, such as the year after Sarbanes Oxley took effect. Another year seemed to be about phone turrets, but that might have been because I was in the market for phone turrets that year.
So, I’m not sure if it is because I am attending TMC this year, in part as a blogger, or if it is just that much more prominent, but unstructured data turned out to be a key part of my discussions.
When I picked up my press credentials, there was a press release from Firstrain announcing the FirstRain Blog Monitor. The press release talked about the proprietary FirstRain MarketScore Algorithm “to conintually analyze and identify the most impactful blogs from the hundreds of thousands across the broad web”.
Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain was quoted as saying, “Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light”. The press release ended with a pointer to Penny’s blog.
NewsEdge was also on the first floor of the show. They are a news searching tool that has been around for several years. They do not current crawl blogs as part of their real time news, but they do have the ability search blogs and they hope to add blog crawling by the end of the year.
At the other end of the spectrum was NewsWare. They do not track blogs because “blogs don’t factcheck” a spokesperson for the company said.
Not far away from NewsEdge and NewsWare was Dow Jones Newsfeeds. They were touting their Solutions for Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading. In essence Dow Jones is taking key reports and providing elementized newsfeeds that are especially interesting to algorithm traders. I keep hearing good stuff about their feeds and it was my first chance to get details. They do not include information from blogs in their elementized news feeds, however they make extensive use of it in other products, such as Factiva.
In addition, the Dow Jones representative spoke about “Generate”, a Boston based firm that Dow Jones recently acquired which dynamically tracks information on around 4.7 million executives, ties it together with other news data to provide a solution something like what you would expect from a businessman’s mashup of Google and LinkedIn.
All of this led to a particularly interesting company, JackBe. JackBe provides an ‘Enterprise Mashup Platform’, that gathers information from many platforms on the web and within the enterprise so that it can be presented as a widget that a company can use internally or externally. They have done work in other businesses and are starting to explore providing their technology to the financial services sector. They were the most interesting tool I found on the first day of TMC for structuring unstructured data. It will be interesting to see what day two brings.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/09/2008 - 15:08 (Check me out!)
As many of my friend microblog from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m preparing to head to the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008. SIFMA is the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association. It was formed by the merger of the Security Industry Association and the Bond Market Association. I’ve gone to the Technology Management Conference for many years as part of my work with Wall Street firms.
However, this year, I’m wearing a slightly different hat. I’m going as a member of the press, a credentialed blogger. I’ll be looking for things similar to those that I looked for when I went as a Wall Street technology executive, what is the interesting hot new technology. Other years, I’ve simply explored the exhibit hall, which is typically more than a full days work in and of itself. This year, I’ll try to attend some of talks as well.
At first glance, the talks don’t sound especially interesting. Perhaps the most interesting will be discussions about computing capacity or open source software. Yet there are bound to be surprises, and by being on the press list, I’m getting little hints here and there. So far, the most interesting press release has come from Tick Data which is announcing the availability of “trade and quote data for equities traded on Japan’s six major stock exchanges back to January 2003”. I was always fascinated by this sort of data and have been trying to gather it for the stock exchanges in Second Life. Tick Data’s press release says that “the firm expects to expand its coverage further into this region in the near future.” This sort of data illustrates just one of the reason why Wall Street technologists are always looking for more compute power.
Will there be other interesting innovations reported out of the Technology Management Conference? We’ll have to wait and see. It probably won’t bring as much excitement as talk about the next version of the iPhone, but it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/24/2008 - 08:06 (Check me out!)
The recent issues around Twitter have led me to ponder how companies can cross the chasm as their product appeal grows from the innovators and early adopters to bring in the early majority without jumping the shark.
There are many different issues to explore here, but given that it is Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and I should really be getting on the road for a camping trip, I’ll try to have a brief exploration of the issues here, and then, perhaps, explore them in more detail later on.
To me, the interesting topic to explore is how the growth affects the dynamics of the company, both with the management of the company, and the larger group of stakeholders.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/23/2008 - 07:44 (Check me out!)
If I were to summarize the ‘Activism and Education Using Social Networks’ track at Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, I would boil it down to putting a human face on advocacy organizations and seeking due process online. What was most interesting was that during the discussions, I watched these processes happen online.
Eric spoke about the new ACLU Blog, “because freedom can’t blog itself”. He spoke about the difficulties in working out the policies of what could get written by whom for the blog. He noted the contrast between traditional advertising, expensive, glossy, and not reaching the younger generation, and online content. He noted that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are not all that fancy in their graphical design, yet it is the user generated content and the first person perspective that is so compelling. As he spoke about this, he brought up the ACLU’s Flickr page, which to my surprise, included a picture of a good friend of mine. I quickly posted a link to the Flickr photo on my friend’s wall in Facebook. Ah yes, the power of the personal.
We broke into hands on sessions and I spoke with many different people. A neighbor, who is active in town politics and works for Yale was there and I spent some time talking with her. A friend of one of the conference organizers from Tribe was there and we talked a little bit. I showed a few people Second Life and talked about the role of Second Life in disability rights advocacy.
This led me to a fascinating discussion with Dr. Linda D. Misek-Falkoff from the United Nations and the Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding. She spoke about RatifyNow.Org, a website to support the global grassroots efforts to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has a wonderful set of videos of people in the U.N. talking about the convention. She also understood the importance of putting a human face on large organizations. She took a quick video of me saying hello to ambassadors and activists fighting for the rights of persons with disabilities.
The afternoon led to a brainstorming session where the topic of social network service providers failing to provide adequate due process was discussed. In particular, Facebooks tendency to ban people automatically because they try to send too many messages, add too many friends, or similar activities. A friend of mine was recently banned this way, and has gotten nothing but automated responses to his requests. A few of us are talking about setting up a group to address this issue.
As this discussion was going on, I received a Twitter from Andy Carvin about Ariel Waldman’s blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Specifically, the post centered around Twitter failing to deal with harassment issues.
At a previous session at CFP there were some great discussions around the issue of cyber-harassment and it will be a topic of one of this morning’s sessions. Around an hour later, a bug report was reported on GetSatisfaction and the blog post got Dugg. The next hour saw the article make the front page of Digg and an hour later Jason Goldman of Twitter responded,
Twitter does not get involved in these disputes between users over issues of content except in limited circumstances. Twitter is a provider of information, not a mediator. Specific physical threats, certain legal obligations, privacy breaches of specific types of information (e.g. SSN, credit cards), and misleading impersonation are some cases where we may become involved and potentially terminate an account.
This only added fuel to the fire. Evan Williams of Twitter twittered.
Note: Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they're saying/assuming is true.
This too, fueled anger at Twitter, already under lots of criticism for its spate of recent outages. It is worth noting that 12 other people noted on GetSatisfaction that they have the same problem, almost as many people as work for Twitter.
About three hours after this, Biz Stone, stepped in and said
The fact that so many of us can have differing opinions without having even reviewed the content we're discussing highlights the difficulty of this issue. In fact, Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.
All of this returns back to the issue of due process. The fact that so many people are so concerned about this highlights the importance of the issue. Biz states, “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” This harkens back to the issues of Section 230 and communications utilities not being liable for content.
Yet it misses a very important point. Twitter, like Facebook and Second Life, which have also have similar issues, is not just a communication utility. All of them are communities. They are communities dependent on privately run communication utilities. These communities lack recourse to any sort of due process.
Biz’s comment about determining the line between update an insult not being something that either Twitter nor a crowd could do well seems ill advised to me. Someone needs to make that determination. Twitter can try to do it. Twitter can encourage the crowd, the community, to join in the effort to determine the line. If that doesn’t happen, the line is likely to be repeatedly brought to the courts and to legislatures to be decided. Either that, or the community will simply move to some other communications utility which provides better recourse to due process. None of those options seem particularly good for Twitter.
The activism panel at Computers, Freedom and Privacy spent time struggling with putting a human face on organizations and in seeking due process in online communities. The ACLU seems to understand these issues very well. Let us hope that corporations like Twitter, Facebook, and Linden Lab makes some progress on this topic as well.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/22/2008 - 09:10 (Check me out!)
"There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" This famous quote of Robert Kennedy paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw sets the tone for this mornings sessions at Computers, Freedom and Privacy.
The plenary panel will be discussing "an inter-networked communication infrastructure that could facilitate the creation of a modern surveillance society". It sounds like a fascinating panel, and looking at things, I am sure people are bound to ask the question, Why? There are plenty of explanations, which I hope will get explored.
A parallel track is Activism and Education Using Social Networks. It looks like a small turnout of people, many of whom I already know and are already very active online. Yet this is the dreaming of things that never were and asking why not.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/21/2008 - 07:44 (Check me out!)
One of the important aspects of any great conference is the networking that goes on. However, this rarely gets listed in articles about conferences. For the journalistic types, it isn’t especially newsworthy. Yet it actually fits quite nicely with blogging. So, with that, let me highlight some of the people that I ran into at the conference yesterday.
The first session I went to was Mike Godwin doing his spectacular introduction to constitutional law for geeks. I took copious notes and may write up a more detailed post about that session later on. For those acquainted with Godwin’s law, the session was small enough to avoid any direct reference to Nazi’s.
Via Twitter, Jon Lebkowsky joined in. Jon has been to many CFPs in the past, but couldn’t make it this year. I first got to know Jon through Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid and have remained friends ever since. Also at Mike’s session were Nancy Scola and David Isenberg. Both of whom I’ve know for quite a while through blogging and it was great to catch up with them. Nancy introduced me to Jennifer Mercurio, Government Affairs Director of Entertainment Consumers Association. We had a good brief talk about Second Life, the Video Gamers Voter Network, and related issues, and I hope to follow up on these discussions going forward.
In the evening, there was a reception which included Jack Balkin. Jack, of course, was in constant demand, and I didn’t speak with him as much as I would have liked. However, I did have a great discussion with Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office. He will be the keynote speaker on Thursday and I look forward to hearing him then. I mentioned Epic and my experiences at UBS which seems to fit nicely with his talk. We talked a little bit about the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”, and pondered whether the actions of the RIAA or MPAA were really promoting the progress of science and useful arts.
I also picked up ‘Scenarios for the Future” published by the European Patent Office and look forward to reading it.
As the evening wore down, I also spoke with Gavin Baker, Ben Masel, and several other people.
I’m sure there will be plenty of additional interesting networking today. As a quick comment to anyone from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, Wordless Wednesday, BlogExplosion, or other sites that bring people to my site for very quick visits, if you’ve made it this far thank you. I would also encourage you to follow the links to some of the folks I met yesterday. You might not get an EntreCard credit, but you might find some very interesting write.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/20/2008 - 20:46 (Check me out!)
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, volunteers self organized a project on the Internet to help people find missing loved ones. Hurricane Katrina disproportionately affected poor people and African-Americans. This afternoon at Computers, Freedom and Privacy there was a workshop on deceptive campaign practices. Many ideas were presented and it struck me that perhaps a project similar to PeopleFinder, let’s call in VoteProtector, should be created.
The groundwork was laid by discussing ways that people have presented deceptive information in an effort to suppress votes, particularly of the poor, minorities, and increasingly, of the youth. Tova Wang of Common Cause and Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center led a discussion including Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of Aristotle, Jon Pincus of Tales from the Net, and Ruchi Bhorwmik who works as legislative counsel to Senator Barack Obama.
Many stories were told about spreading false information in efforts to discourage voters from voting or telling them to vote at wrong locations or on wrong days.
A lively discussion followed about different ways of addressing this. One part of the solution is to get more people aware of 1 866 Our Vote, a phone number, and a website that can be used to get people to report voting irregularities and seek help. The problem is getting more people to know about this, to know about their voting rights and to work together to fight deceptive practices.
It struck me that a project like PeopleFinder focusing on these issues could be a powerful way to do this. People could create tools to mashup reports of voting suppression efforts. These efforts could quickly be brought to the attention of the press in the area of the attempted voting suppression. Voting rights, on a state by state basis could be explained. What are the rules about registering to vote? What sort of identification do you need do you need to bring with you to the polls? What are your options for early voting, absentee voting, and provisional ballots?
What are the rules about voting if you’ve been convicted of a felony? I believe some states allow felons to vote. Others do not. Many have rules about felons being able to vote after they have served their time, and perhaps done a few other tasks to get their voting rights back.
Techniques to make encourage voting and discourage voting suppression could be discussed, such as the great idea of getting a group of people to go to the polls together. If you go as part of a group, you are less likely to be turned away, and you are more likely to stand up for your rights if challenged.
This could then be promoted across all the social networks, not only Facebook, which serves a demographic which is perhaps less likely to run into voter suppression activities, but also MySpace, Hi5, and many other sites that have a tendency of getting overlooked.
So, anyone want to pick up the Project VoteProtector ball and run with it?
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