Network of advisors

I haven't blogged much, because I've been spending most of my time coding. But other things are happening, too. Among them, I've recruited some great people to be advisors to the 2People project. I'm really grateful to have these people involved:

John Fitzgerald: Former senior counsel at Defenders of Wildlife, John is a public interest lawyer with extensive experience working with the US Government, multilateral development institutions, and NGOs. John and I met at last spring's CERES conference and finished each other's sentences.

Billy Parish: Founder and Executive Director of the Climate Campaign , and Coordinator for Energy Action. Billy has focused on coalition-building within the youth movement and developing new climate leaders by organizing conferences, trainings and tours. Billy is a dynamo of youth activism. We met at the DC fast.

Linda Plano: Associate Director at the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center. A veteran of high tech industry, Linda helped found the Energy Special Interest Group at the MIT Enterprise Forum and was a Visiting Scholar at the Laboratory for Energy and the Environment, among other things. I am awed at Linda's willingness to talk about 2People everywhere she goes.

Ron Sandler: Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Northeastern University, Ron is a scholar of environmental ethics and technology. He is a senior investigator at Northeastern's Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing, where he does research on the ethical implications of nanotechnology. Ron is the one who told me about the amazing MetroQuest simulation tool.

Leith Sharp: Director of Harvard University's official sustainability program, the Harvard Green Campus Initiative . After only four years, HGCI has achieved over $1 million per year of savings, and annual reductions of over 20 million pounds of CO2 equivalent. Leith is a role model for getting things done.

O'Reilly ETech Conference

I just applied to give a talk at O'Reilly's ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference. Won't know until October; the conference itself is next March. Here's what I proposed:

Realities such as climate disruption and the current extinction crisis suggest that humans are having a wee bit of trouble grokking the tragedy of the commons (TOC). A big part of every TOC, though, is an information problem: TOCs arise when we don't know (or can easily ignore) the consequences of our actions, when there's no collective oversight of the commons, when we're unaware of better alternatives to existing behaviors, and when we have the illusion that our actions don't matter -- because we can't see our aggregate impact.

Framed this way, it's not hard to believe that software -- especially social software -- could be a key in helping us make the societal transition to sustainability. This talk will give an overview of new efforts in this area, ranging from data infrastructure (eg., NICK) to future simulation (MetroQuest), and focusing on Reef: community software that provides a citizen's dashboard for the 21st century.

Reef takes the three great ideas of social software -- wiki, social networks, and syndication -- and integrates them into a framework to support ecological footprint reduction. It is a GIS-based, action-centered ecosystem for content.

Tags for searching and tags for browsing

I gave a tech talk about Reef last night at Boston Perlmongers, a local group of perl aficionados based at MIT. (Reef is the software that 2People will be based on.) It's the first time I've gotten that kind of input and scrutiny from a big tech crowd, and it was great. Very lively conversation and lots of thoughtful comments. I was very gratified that my basic architectural decisions went over quite well, and I think people were pretty intrigued by the project.

One of the best moments of the night was a colloquy on tags. Someone suggested that Reef could "help" the community converge on a common tag set, by making suggestions based on what tags have already been used (what del.icio.us does, only it gets more interesting when you try to do it for things that haven't yet been tagged). Someone else suggested that if you're building a taxonomy -- which we are -- then you converge on a tag set by the simple act of putting your content into the hierarchy itself. In other words, you either add a brand new node in the set of categories, or you choose an existing tag.

These two views on tagging are both valid and important to understand. One represents a "search" purpose, the other a "browse" purpose. We hope that Reef can support both of them. When Google/gmail says "Search don't sort," they're really mixing apples and oranges. Sorting isn't an end in itself (like searching), we do it because we want to be able (later) to browse. Searching and browsing are two fundamentally different and important modes of information seeking. Reef will integrate them both.

Free the Supply Chain!

Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder) is announcing his "problem list" for the new century at the Wikipedia conference (by analogy with Hilbert's problems -- a list of very influential math problems that opened the 20th century). It's his view of the key content areas that demand a "wiki" approach -- the collective creation of a knowledge base under an open use license. Ross Mayfield (of SocialText) gives a preview of this list.

Wikipedia has always been an important model for 2People, and I added a comment to Jimmy's blog, under the banner:

Free the Supply Chain!

Transparency and community sharing of knowledge must be brought to bear on the hidden consequences of our daily economic transactions. Exactly what are you supporting when you buy a shirt sewn in Malaysia or conventionally-grown bananas from Honduras? This is arguably the most important freedom of all, since without it we will not succeed in making the transition to sustainability.

But since I never quite put it that way before, I wanted to elaborate a little on that here. The wiki model applies to 2People in an obvious way: community content making is a way to create and maintain a vast, up-to-date, localized encyclopedia of sustainability info.

But the wiki model also applies in a less obvious but more important sense: wiki is about freeing knowledge and empowering the commons. The knowledge embodied in a sustainability encyclopedia is not just any knowledge -- it is the information we need in order to make life-or-death choices for our future. 2People is not just a handy guide to lower energy bills; it's about creating transparency all the way through the supply chain, so that we as a community can really understand the consequences of our actions.

Or, in open source terms, the first model is free-as-in-beer, the second is free-as-in-liberty. It's that second kind of freedom that will transform our economy.