While SixDegrees and other simultaneous efforts like Friendster failed to achieve the exponential growth beloved by Silicon Valley venture capital, Facebook immediately began going viral.
Why Facebook succeeded where others failed seems very interesting. Here the explanation seems to be that it was "well seeded" with a dense social graph in a high-prestige institution.
This is a case of what Paul Keller and I have called the Paradox of Open: the existence of power imbalances that leads to, at best, ambivalent outcomes of openness. It is a paradox that the success of open code software, both in terms of the reach of the technology and in economic terms, has happened through underfunded or entirely volunteer work of individual coders. This shows the limits of the open source development model that will affect the future growth of the Fediverse as well.
The Paradox of Open (Source) is as Keller and Tarkowski formulate it, that the clear socio-economic value and tech impact of open source comes from underfunded / volunteer work. Vgl [[Bootstrapping 20201007204011]] and the role of precarity in it. Makes me think about 1937 Ronald Coase's transaction costs which in [[Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky]] is used to derive a Cosean Floor (and Cosean Ceiling). Openness allows you to operate below the Cosean Floor, but it seems that to bootstrap beyond that first stage is harder. Are such projects incapable of finding a spot above the Floor further down the chain, or are they pushed aside (or rather 'harvested') by those already positioned and operating above that Floor? Perhaps your spot above the floor needs to be part of the design of the work done below the floor. What's the link with my [[Openheid en haar grenzen 20130131154227]] in which I position openness as necessity to operate in a networked environment, and as necessarily limited by human group dynamics and keeping those healthy? Balancing both is the sweetspot in the complex domain. Are we any good at doing that in other terms than just social group behaviour in a room? #openvraag what's the online/bootstrapping equiv of it? How did we do that for my company 11 yrs ago (in part by operating something else above the Floor alongside)?
a second bootstrapping / zebra example, in 2yrs to 30k monthly
Plausible open source webstats, reached $1M recurring annual revenue. 4 people, no marketing, only word of mouth, started late 2018, launched beta Jan 2019, so they've built that up in 4 years. Became sustainable at 11k monthly revenue, then 2 people. 3rd added at 29k monthly revenue, June 21. Useful overview.
Paul Graham argued in 2005 (just before starting YCombinator) why venture capital is traditionally unfriendly to founders, and how it sets itself bad incentives.
Conceptual knowledge has a hierarchical structure, with the definition of every concept referring to more fundamental concepts. This leads to the question of where this recursive process ends, i.e. what the most fundamental concepts are. When considering human knowledge as a whole, this is a non-trivial problem in epistemology.
Also there is a question of self-reference and bootstrapping:
#!/bin/sh # -*- tcl -*- # The next line is executed by /bin/sh, but not tcl \ exec tclsh "$0" ${1+"$@"}
Bootstrapping (compilers)
Thus the recursive logo of PyPy is a snake swallowing itself since the RPython is translated by a Python interpreter.
PyPy was conceived to be an implementation of Python written in a programming language that is similar to Python.
speak
Interesting that Cheyer is/was at Samsung. In my work experience, Samsung (at least its semiconductor division) is the company I've seen most in need of Doug's methodology and the one that was least amenable to it. The way I would sum up the environment at SAS is one where folks aren't even aware of how much low-hanging fruit could be had with just plain ol' "B-level" thinking, in Doug's terms, let alone Doug's exhortation to strive for C-level.
does the hypothesis team use hypothesis in any way when they're building hypothesis
This is something I "confronted" TBL and the Solid group about recently: complete lack of dogfooding—they're all using GitHub and Gitter and whatnot, not their own tools. (Natural question arises: "if you aren't even using your own tools in your own work, how/why should we believe you when you say it will be good for us?") It's a phenomenon that I've seen commonly summarized as "X for thee, not for me".
It also reminds me of McCarthy's response to Steve Russell's proposal to actually implemeent eval: "ho, ho, you're confus[ed]".
Remember that Unix’s forte (or not, depending on your point of view) has always been that it’s a self-hosted operating system designed to make it easy to develop itself, and the result is (still) that advanced system administration often ends up being programming in one way or another. In such a context, exposure to better tools and techniques is good for everyone.
explains Jeff Rulifson, the computer scientist who developed much of the software on display at the Mother of All Demos. "The idea was to create tools and then use those tools to improve the tools," Rulifson says. Instead of making the tool once, it would be continually improved, based on the experiences of its users. As the tools improve, they make it possible to make new, more useful tools. Engelbart called the approach "bootstrapping," named for the bootstrap circuit in radar systems.
Agile, but better, before there was agile.
In amplifying our intelligence, we are applying the principle of synergistic structuring that was followed by natural evolution in developing the basic human capabilities. What we have done in the development of our augmentation means is to construct a superstructure that is a synthetic extension of the natural structure upon which it is built. In a very real sense, as represented by the steady evolution of our augmentation means, the development of "artificial intelligence" has been going on for centuries.
Engelbart explicitly noted that what he was trying to do was not just hack culture, which is what significant innovations accomplish, but to hack the process by which biological and cultural co-evolution has bootstrapped itself to this point. Culture used the capabilities provided by biological evolution -- language, thumbs, etc. -- to improve human ways of living much faster than biological evolution can do, by not just inventing, but passing along to each other and future generations the knowledge of what was invented and how to invent. Engelbart proposes an audio-visual-tactile interface to computing as a tool for consciously accelerating the scope and power of individual and collective intelligence.
For instance, an aborigine who possesses all of our basic sensory-mental-motor capabilities, but does not possess our background of indirect knowledge and procedure, cannot organize the proper direct actions necessary to drive a car through traffic, request a book from the library, call a committee meeting to discuss a tentative plan, call someone on the telephone, or compose a letter on the typewriter.
In other words: culture. I'm pretty sure that Engelbart would agree with the statement that someone who could order a book from a library would likely not know the best way to find a nearby water source, as the right kind of aborigine would know. Collective intelligence is a monotonically increasing store of knowledge that is maintained through social learning -- not just social learning, but teaching. Many species engage in social learning, but humans are the only primates with visible sclera -- the whites of our eyeballs -- which enables even infants to track where their teacher/parent is looking. I think this function of culture is what Engelbart would call "C work"
A Activity: 'Business as Usual'. The organization's day to day core business activity, such as customer engagement and support, product development, R&D, marketing, sales, accounting, legal, manufacturing (if any), etc. Examples: Aerospace - all the activities involved in producing a plane; Congress - passing legislation; Medicine - researching a cure for disease; Education - teaching and mentoring students; Professional Societies - advancing a field or discipline; Initiatives or Nonprofits - advancing a cause. B Activity: Improving how we do that. Improving how A work is done, asking 'How can we do this better?' Examples: adopting a new tool(s) or technique(s) for how we go about working together, pursuing leads, conducting research, designing, planning, understanding the customer, coordinating efforts, tracking issues, managing budgets, delivering internal services. Could be an individual introducing a new technique gleaned from reading, conferences, or networking with peers, or an internal initiative tasked with improving core capability within or across various A Activities. C Activity: Improving how we improve. Improving how B work is done, asking 'How can we improve the way we improve?' Examples: improving effectiveness of B Activity teams in how they foster relations with their A Activity customers, collaborate to identify needs and opportunities, research, innovate, and implement available solutions, incorporate input, feedback, and lessons learned, run pilot projects, etc. Could be a B Activity individual learning about new techniques for innovation teams (reading, conferences, networking), or an initiative, innovation team or improvement community engaging with B Activity and other key stakeholders to implement new/improved capability for one or more B activities.In other words, human culture, using language, artifacts, methodology, and training, bootstrapped collective intelligence; what Engelbart proposed, then was to apply C work to culture's bootstrapping capabilities.
La generación de condiciones favorables para proyectos de vida colectivos exige la creación de entornos favorables mediante la “infraestructuración” apropiada. Las infraestructuras habilitantes —el resultado del co-diseño— tienen la intención de contrarrestar las infraestructuras desfuturizantes que están en la base de la mayoría de las actividades modernas —su subversión desde el interior (e.g., a través del reequipamiento, entendido en sentido amplio) o desde el exterior (nuevos diseños)—. Hacer el co-diseño posible y probable requiere que se establezca una multiplicidad de elementos, desde la investigación, la experimentación y la creación de prototipos hasta plataformas, redes locales y herramientas orientadas
a la comunidad. Un aspecto interesante del marco es la idea de que las capacidades del diseño difuso también pueden ser acrecentadas a través de estas herramientas y prácticas y que esto podría ser un paso importante para hacer que el co-diseño sea eficaz. Las soluciones habilitantes surgirán de acuerdo con la fuerza de las herramientas y las metodologías de co-diseño. «Las soluciones habilitantes son sistemas de producto-servicio que proporcionan los instrumentos cognitivos, técnicos y organizativos que aumentan las capacidades de las personas para lograr un resultado que valoran» (Manzini 2015: 167-168). Se originan en una pregunta aparentemente sencilla: ¿cómo podemos alcanzar la vida que queremos vivir?
La idea de infraestructuras habilitantes está vinculada fuertemente con la indagación de mi investigación. La primera personas de esta pregunta y de la mía indica la intensión de que estas infraestructuras habiliten a sus creadores/usuarios en lugar de a quiénes las disponen para ser usadas, pero que apropian su plusvalía.
Todas las infraestructuras habilitan. La pregunta es a quién. Acá también hay un vínculo de pasar de las acciones a las infraestructuras, como diría Antonio LaFuente y como venimos haciendo permanentemente desde comunidades hacker.
Los escenarios adquieren un doble carácter: se basan en la innovación social y también tienen la intención de crear las condiciones para la innovación social. El resultado es «una ecología de encuentros colaborativos» (Manzini 2015: 118); en este contexto la sociedad se convierte en «un laboratorio de nuevas formas de ser y de hacer»
se pueden diseñar dispositivos para transformar, gradualmente, nuestras maneras principales de entender y de ser
el cuidado se puede estructurar en el diseño de herramientas y equipos a través de lo que denomina «presenciación” (presencing), un concepto relacionado con la noción del diseño transparente de las interfaces tecnológicas que es clave para la incorporación en las herramientas de hábitos ecológicos a través del diseño para transformar nuestras acciones rutinarias en formas de comportamiento ecológico; esto ha de lograrse mediante la incorporación de ‘guiones’ en el diseño de productos. De esta manera los diseñadores tendrían que ir mucho más allá del objetivo de satisfacer las necesidades de los usuarios para articular, de formas novedosas, las preocupaciones y deseos de una colectividad. Las nuevas rutinas encarnadas se volverían lentamente colectivas y transformarían, eventualmente, la conciencia social y las estructuras institucionales. [...] El enfoque, sin embargo, sigue siendo básicamente teórico y no aborda, explícitamente, la dimensión política.
Esto pasa en alguna medida con Grafoscopio, pues debido a su caracter de metasistema y su condición de objeto activista, embebe prácticas referidas a la disponibilidad permanente del código fuente, tanto de la herramienta, como de los escritos creados en ella y ejemplifica otras ecologías del conocimiento, asociadas al conocimiento como bien común.
La comunidad de práctica alrededor de Grafoscopio comparte, deconstruye e incorpora dichas formas de entender y ser, de modos progresivos, configurando una identidad propia, que es distinta al grueso del hackerspace. Una ventaja de nuestro enfoque es que lo político es explícito y la teoría y la práctica dialogan en él a través de dispositivos digitales hacktivistas..
. First, as has been underlined above, one needs to take into account both actors’ inward oriented and outward oriented communicative practices. In addition, it is understood that media representation today goes far beyond coverage by mainstream media as it relies on actors’ multi-layered media ensemble. Second, instead of arguing for a straightforward causal correlation between ‘media attention’ and social standing, this research reveals a more eclectic process: a spiral of legitimation that is based on the relation between the organization’s internal communicative figuration and the communicative figuration related to the public discourse around the political qualities of contemporary media technologies and infrastructures
En el caso de HackBo, la comunicación "hacia adentro" ocurre principalmente en la forma de mensajería instantánea (Telegram) y la lista de correo comunitaria. Sin embargo la comunicación es ocasional y referida principalmente a asuntos operativos (pagar los servicios a arriendos) con uno que otro logro por parte de los miembros del espacio en sus logros individuales o dentro de pequeños grupos y no como todo un equipo. Se ha combinado un poco esas dos formas de comunicación, mencionando actividades del mes y recordando el pago de servicio.
Otras iniciativas (DataSur, GIG) han intentando un boletín mensual de actividades, que sin embargo ha fallado y el uso de Discurse por parte de OKFN empezó con mucha actividad pero ha decaído. El foro de Manjaro (también basado en Discurse) logra una comunicación más fluida y ritmos comunitarios más visibles.
Una labor de bootstrapping más adecuada podría ocurrir desde indicadores del pulso comunitario, basados en visualizaciones de datos sobre repositorios de código y bots que medien comunicaciones comunitarias. Tal vez unas gráficas que resuman y detonen ciertas actividades. Esto podría pasar en varias comunidades. Acá los chatbots serían importantes y ocurrirían en paralelo, pero debería iniciarse por estadísticas de las actividades que ya ocurren en la comunidad. Para el caso del Data Week podrían ser cosas como:
Rather,andthisisDerrida’sintervention,theactbringsthepeople,itspoliticalsubject,intobeingthroughtheact.Thepeopleadeclarationnamesdonotexist.Derridawrites,‘[People]donotexistasanentity,itdoesnotexist,beforethisdeclaration,notassuch.Ifitgivesbirthtoitself,asfreeandindependentsubject,aspossiblesigner,thiscanholdonlyintheactofthesignature.Thesignatureinventsthesigner.’
[...] By bringing into play a chain of events, delegation, representation, naming, signature, and citations, a declaration enacts a signature that restores, by right, to political subjects their subjectivity.
En este sentido, son Grafoscopio y el Data Week, quienes convocan a la comunidad alrededor de ellos mismos.
At least since Doug Engelbart’s “mother of all demos” the introduction of new products has been accompanied by showmanship. Demonstrations are theater where possible uses for technology are presented (Smith, 2009). Hackathons have been argued to be the “front stage” for data and can be contrasted with the murky “back stage” of data production, munging, and interpretation (Gregg, 2014b). The difference with Balsamo might be that she does not put performance in scare quotes.
Esto conecta las ideas de boostrapping vía infraestructura, de Engelbart, con la idea de demo como performance (espectáculo, obra viva) y la inversión infraestructural de Star, al traer al frente aquello que está al fondo (la producción de datos y su uso).
First, the range of possibilities explored depends on the latitude for experimentation afforded by the technology. Second, the intensity with which innovations are explored reflects the
range and depth of innovative practices of users. Third, the extent to which this creativity is harnessed depends on how the resulting innovation is built within next technology generations or suppressed
También está relacionado con la facilidad para experimentar. En el caso de Grafoscopio, comparado con Scratch, por ejemplo, el incorporar tempranamente un lenguaje simbólico permite la amplia experimentación, pero implica un costo inicial alto para realizar dichos experimentos que con otros lenguajes más visuales. Acá hay un problema de bootstrapping: Crear esas metáforas visuales amplias, para públicos adultos, implica tener un grupo de personas que esté dispuesta a experimentar con los lenguajes simbólicas que permite escribir dichas interfaces más amigables.
En general, las nuevas características son implementadas en la infraestructura, pero esto no incrementa los ciclos de adopción, aunque futuras ediciones del Data Week pueden hacer que nuevos públicos sean beneficiarios de la misma.
if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.
So, how, this time, in reimagining the future 40 years ahead, the gap between that future and our current present will be not filled by current dystopia?
If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.
That future is not given, but depends on the medium the group is imagining. It thus depends on the properties of the medium that the group is exploring, selecting, and practicing. On the one hand, technology enables a new medium, which is imagined as shaping the future, on the other hand the future is imagined as shaping the new medium, which then should drive technology.
This relationship between imagined futures and how they mold the medium, leave out the bridged with the present. If history with Kay's group repeats, what fills the gap between the prototypes of the present and the imagined future, is a form of dystopia.
Esta relación entre los futuros imaginados y cómo moldean el medio deja por fuera los puentes con el presente. Si la historia con el grupo de Kay se repite, lo que llena la brecha entre el presente de los prototipos y el futuro imaginado es una forma de distopia.
The lab as a whole—its walls, desks, whiteboards, roofs, machines, and the people inhabiting it—functions as a first demo for an alternative medium.
Esto es porque el laboratorio está habilitado por medios diversos embebidos en el espacio, lo cual nosotros aún no tenemos.
Desde el "Sur Global", el hackerspace también funciona como un prototipo en sí mismo, de espacios comunitarios y convivenciales alternativos, así como de dinámicas de bootstrapping.
As such, bootstrapping can assume different scopes and directions. While Engelbart’s and English’s project might sound ambitious, they still believed, at least in the 1960s, that bootstrapping inside a research group would achieve the desired results. Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group extended this setting in the 1970s through pedagogy and McLuhanite media theory. By bringing children in, they aimed to achieve recursive effects beyond the lab, with the long-term goal of involving the whole world in a process akin to bootstrapping. Bret Victor and his research group’s form of bootstrapping resembles a multi-layered onion. The kind of people who should be part of it, and at what moments, can lead to intense internal discussion.
En mi caso, se trata de traer hacktivistas, periodistas, profesores y hacerlo desde espacios comunitarios y cívicos en lugar de, desde laboratorios.
in a continuous process of “augmenting human intellect.” According to Engelbart, the latter can be achieved through the process of “bootstrapping.” This is a term that can mean many things in the Silicon Valley, from initiating systems to kicking off startups, but in the context of Engelbart’s work, bootstrapping is the “…interesting (recursive) assignment of developing tools and techniques to make it more effective at carrying out its assignment. Its tangible product is a developing augmentation system to provide increased capability for developing and studying augmentation systems” (Engelbart and English 2003:234). Just as Moore’s so-called law, this is a dream of exponential progress emerging out of nonlinear, self-enforcing feedback. How much more Californian can you be?
Bootstrapping es el proceso que hemos usado en HackBo con Grafoscopio: Un contexto provee la necesidad para desarrollar una herramienta en solitario, que modifica las prácticas en ese contexto, y aumentaría la capacidad colectiva para modificar dicha herramienta y otras relacionadas.
El ejercicio, como con la mayoría de proyectos de software libre, sigue ocurriendo en solitario, por ahora, pero hay más intereses colectivos aunándose.
Excellent article and case example of NICs in Education - adapting Doug Engelbart's concept of networked improvement communities for improving how we improve...