WC Archive

But BOINC is more than the server source code. It's also a client-side program, making it possible for a single user to participate in a variety of distributed computing projects with a single application. It's currently in beta.

This makes me really happy. Not only was SETI@Home the most well-known of the various distributed computing projects, it ran on a wide variety of platforms, including some not normally included in other projects, such as the Mac and SPARC. BOINC continues this tradition, running on Windows 95 and up, Linux/x86 (possibly others to come), Solaris/SPARC, and Mac OS X.

Once BOINC is out of beta, we could see a flowering of interesting distributed computing projects. What can be handled with this method? Anything that requires mathematical analysis of lots and lots of components. Current non-SETI distributed computing projects include protein folding and climate prediction.

All very cool, but if reputable scientists and interesting research teams don't use the journals to publish their results, it might take awhile for PLoS to build up any steam. Fortunately, the second issue of PLoS Biology contains an article that has received abundant attention: monkey mind control (warning: 3MB PDF). Researchers at Duke University implanted computer connections into the brains of monkeys, allowing the team to learn the brain signals corresponding to the monkeys using a joystick to control a remote robotic arm. They then disconnected the joystick; the monkeys continued to control the robotic arm via the brain-computer connection. The monkeys quickly realized that they didn't need to move their arms to control the robots. This has obvious implications for adaptive technology for the disabled, and opens the way for more advanced mind-machine interfaces.

The article has received quite a bit of attention in the mainstream media (I mean, how could you not want to learn more about monkey mind control?!?), in turn giving an important boost to the status of open biology movement, and the Public Library of Science.

Peer-to-peer, distributed systems aren't just the tools of protesters and activists. The American military has been aggressively pursuing emerging collaborative technologies to help soldiers make flexible, well-informed judgments about battlespace conditions and goals. Each soldier is conceived of as part of a system of units, real-time intelligence sources (such as unmanned aerial vehicles and "smart dust"), both relying on and contributing to "operational topsight." It's useful to recognize that, whatever advantage swarming protesters have at the moment, the military and police forces are also beginning to go emergent, too.

To wit: Thomas Goetz's piece in the November issue of Wired, Open Source Everywhere. This is one of the better articulations of just how broadly the idea of open, collaborative, distributed innovation can be used. It begins with a good, solid example of how open source works outside of the software realm, and builds a powerful case for the use of the technique across a wide spectrum of applications. Unlike many relatively mainstream articles about open source, he manages to explain the concept clearly enough for beginners without being patronizing, while still providing sufficient new material for veterans to chew on.

The sidebars to the piece are well worth reading, as well. One of the first, "The Ideals of Open Source," includes this tidbit which, to me, sums up precisely why the open source concept can be revolutionary:

SHARE THE RESULT
Open source etiquette mandates that the code be available for anyone to tweak and that improvements to the code be shared with all. Substitute creation for code and the same goes outside of software. Think of it as the triumph of participation by the many over ownership by the few.

* Note: By using "open source," we're not taking philosophical sides in the battle between the Open Source supporters and the Free Software movement; if anything, we have a leaning towards the Free Software perspective. Unfortunately, the term "Free Software" is a bit too (a) ambiguous (hence the need for "free like beer" vs. "free like speech" distinctions) and (b) narrow ("free software biotech" doesn't really make sense, for example, and "free biotech" runs into the free vs. free ambiguity). The term "open source" packs more of a semiotic punch.

Mischief is often an engine of innovation. Figuring out how to make things do what you want them to do -- not necessarily what the designers want you to do -- is both fun and illuminating. Gibson wrote, "the street finds its own uses for things," and sometimes that use is as a medium for pulling pranks (c.f., "Flash Mobs").

Bluejacking is the latest manifestation of this desire to make mundane tools of communication interesting. In brief, it uses the "bluetooth" short-range wireless protocol built into an increasing number of mobile devices (everything from cell phones to Powerbooks) to send a short message to an unsuspecting recipient. Most of these devices are set to allow the transfer of virtual business cards and the like; "bluejacking" piggy-backs on this, putting pithy comments ("Nice shirt!" "ur cute" etc.) in place of business names and numbers. There's no way for someone to actually take over a remote device in this way -- "bluejacking" sounds more ominous than it really is -- but reactions to having odd little messages popping up on one's cell phone range from amusement to confusion.

The practice is relatively new, as bluetooth has only recently become a commonplace feature on mobiles, and seems to be more common in Europe than in the States. This is not terribly surprising; mobile phones are everywhere in Europe. It also seems to be a habit of the young.

So you want a top-five grade supercomputer, but you don't want to spend a lot of money? Time to call Apple. The 2200-processor cluster of dual-2GHz G5 PowerMacs installed this summer at Virginia Tech is now ranked as the third fastest supercomputer in the world, at 10.3 teraflops, after the 5180-processor Earth Simulator (35.9 teraflops) and the 8160-processor ASCI Q system (13.8 teraflops). Okay, nice, but the real kicker is that the so-called "Big Mac" cluster supercomputer cost just a smidge over $5 million dollars, compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars for #1 and #2.

[Tech aside: a teraflops translates as trillion floating-point operations per second, which is why it's grammatically correct to say "a teraflops," so don't send me email about it, okay?]

Now, not many of us have $5 million to toss around, even for the world's third-fastest supercomputer cluster. Fortunately, the notion of "grid computing" -- using distributed systems to emulate a higher-performance system -- is taking off, and Apple is apparently getting ready to jump that direction, too. The easier that distributed computing gets, the cheaper it gets, the more powerful it gets, the more ways there will be to take advantage of it to figure things out -- climate change, protein folding, etc. -- that can really make a difference.

The idea of linking myriad computers across the net for distributed power is really starting to grab people. The enormous capacity of modern personal computers is wasted on mundane tasks such as web surfing and composing email, yet can be taxed when trying to do something sophisticated like system modeling or data analysis. Distributed computing -- sometimes called "grid computing" or "hive computing" -- lets machines contribute cycles or take advantage of other machines' spare power, as needed.

Robert X. Cringely at PBS has a nice, clear essay about how this all could work, and why it's important.

[...] let's think of what we could do with a hive.  For one thing, we could put a node on every desk, but instead of being limited to the power of your PC, we could have demand ebb and flow such that you could do computational fluid dynamic modeling on your desktop as easily as you could surf the web.  Hives could be cheap adjuncts to Big Iron, or they could replace mainframes completely.  A hive is a network, so why not replace all those Cisco routers with hive nodes that happened to route as needed?  Same for wireless links.  A wireless mesh hive is very interesting.  And there is no reason why we couldn't link hives together until the whole net was just an ocean of computing-on-demand.  Then every school could effectively have a supercomputer, even the high schools.

802.11 -- "WiFi" -- is cool. We love WiFi. W1r3l3ss r0xx0rs. Etc. But it suffers from an occasionally significant limitation: you have to be near a WiFi router to take advantage of it. If there isn't an open WiFi network nearby, tough luck. But... what if your wireless device could discover other wireless devices in the vicinity, which in turn know about other devices, and so forth, until you get to one within range of a WiFi router? You could then pass packets along, using this ad hoc network without actually being in range of a "real" network.

Such a day may soon be upon us. The Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, is building out an experimental system for combining a variety of wireless protocols into a city-wide voice and data communications grid -- the Dublin Ad-hoc Wireless Network, or DAWN. With this network, mobile devices from phones to PDAs to laptops could pass packets along a constantly-reconfigured route from user to user, including moving from the DAWN system to the fixed voice and data networks. It's all very experimental and tentative at the moment, but it certainly has some potential.

The notion of ad hoc networks isn't just a laboratory hack. The Cybiko, a $99 handheld game/MP3/PDA/chat system aimed at the teen mallrat market, uses the ad hoc network method to let up to 100 devices trade messages, music, and games at any given time, as long as the various members are within 300' of another network member. The current model doesn't connect to WiFi, requiring a serial connection to a PC to send anything to the Internet at large, but I wouldn't be surprised it that was in the next iteration of the device.

We here at WorldChanging make plenty of references to Open Source Software and the wonderful crunchy goodness therein, but I suspect that most of the people reading this site have never tried out Linux on their own machines, feeling -- perhaps rightly -- that most Linux distributions are not made for mere mortals. While the most popular Linux versions have made great strides in ease-of-use and ease-of-installation, they still have the unpleasant requirement that you reformat at least part of your hard drive to give them a shot.

But open source is more than Linux. Open Source applications actually exist for Windows. Enter the OpenCD.

The OpenCD is a CD (surprise!) containing a wide assortment of useful open source applications, from professional software such as OpenOffice to internet apps such as Mozilla to various utilities for privacy and file management. Not only are they free, they're open source -- the CD contains links to the source code for every program. The latest version of the CD was just released today.

The goal of the OpenCD is to show non-technical users that a software world exists beyond Microsoft and Adobe, without requiring that they give up familiar programs and environments. Best of all, it's freely available, downloadable as an 'ISO' file for burning to CD; the makers encourage users to copy it as often as they like.

If you're curious about this whole open source thing, and want to check out some examples -- or you know someone who is -- this is a good place to start.

Diversity is good, particularly when it comes to networked computers. This was the conclusion of a report released in September at the Computer and Communication Industry Association meeting in Washington D.C., and is the subject of a new study funded by the National Science Foundation (and to be carried out jointly by Carnegie Mellon and the University of New Mexico), looking into ways to protect against viruses, intrusions, and other digital menaces.

If we apply the lessons of biology to computer networks -- a sensible approach, given that both have characteristics of complex adaptive systems -- the notion that diverse environments are more survivable than monocultural one makes a great deal of sense. A given bit of hostile code can't spread to every member of a network if the network contains a variety of different operating systems, just as a given tree disease can't spread to every tree in a stand if the forest contains a variety of different species. (Disclaimer/hype: I wrote about this very subject four and a half years ago, in Salon magazine.)

The lesson here for developers of networked, collaborative systems is to be open to diversity. A distributed network which allows varieties of devices (or operating systems) to participate can be more resilient when it is, inevitably, attacked. You may well be able to shrug off an attack entirely. Your members will thank you for your foresight.

Nice Bruce Sterling article in the current issue of Wired about the ongoing transformation of open source software (Linux, in particular) from techie darling to catalyst for regional technological opportunity. He focuses on Extremadura, in Spain:

The features may be mundane, but they add up to something quite new: a patriotic regional operating system. The emailer's logo is a stork, Extremadura's most beloved bird. The word processor is named after a famous local poet. The desktop is crammed with hallowed symbols of the homeland. Extremaduran schoolkids could stand up and pledge allegiance to this thing.

Free software has always been free for the sake of technologists, providing open range for code wranglers and server farmers. Now Extremadura is claiming it for the campesinos. Here, open source isn't about the process of collaborative development or objections to intellectual property. It's about power to the people. The LinEx stork is a direct connection to the global economy.

Unsurprisingly, the proliferation of Linux in the poorer parts of Spain bears a connection (at least in spirit) to the rise of Lula...

BoingBoing notes a new program called BadBlue, which lets you view on your work PC material proxy-loaded on your home PC, thereby evading any content restrictions and monitoring one's office may have -- it treats workplace restrictions as damage and routes around it. The main use for this is, unsurprisingly, for adult surfing. While this is of admittedly marginal WorldChanging utility (unless you work in an office which has blocked access to Slashdot), it does remind us of Peekabooty, a similar concept aimed at a very different audience.

Politically repressive regimes fear the free flow of information over the Internet, and censor it with firewalls. Peekabooty is a distributed, peer-to-peer application explicitly intended to bypass national firewalls. In short, it treats political censorship as damage, and routes around it.

Peekabooty is software run by "global-thinking, local-acting" people in countries that do not censor the Internet. A user in a country that censors the Internet connects to the ad hoc network of computers running Peekabooty. A small number of randomly selected computers in the network retrieves the Web pages and relays them back to the user. As far the censoring firewall is concerned, the user is simply accessing some computer not on its "banned" list. The retrieved Web pages are encrypted using the de facto standard for secure transactions in order to prevent the firewall from examining the Web pages' contents. Since the encryption used is a secure transaction standard, it will look like an ordinary e-business transaction to the firewall.

Users in countries where the Internet is censored do not necessarily need to install any software. They merely need to make a simple change to their Internet settings so that their access to the World Wide Web is mediated by the Peekabooty network. Installing the software makes the process of connecting to the Internet simpler and allows users to take fuller advantage of the Peekabooty network.

"Global-thinking, local-acting" people in countries that do not censor the Internet install Peekabooty, which can run "in the background" while they use their computer for their day-to-day work. It doubles as a screen saver that displays its status as well as information about human rights and censortship.

So you're all ready to go and grab a copy of Peekabooty for yourselves, right? Unfortunately, the Peekabooty Project is in a transition from version 1 to version 2 of the software, and no downloads are yet available of the new application. You can be sure that we here at WorldChanging will let you know the minute that changes...

WorldChanging readers are well-acquainted with open source software, such as Linux. We've also mentioned other realms in which the open source model is starting to be applied. But today's Slashdot brought a nice reminder that open source can even be brought into the world of material objects.

OpenCores is a project intended to develop a set of hardware designs which would allow a chip manufacturer to build a highly-functional system without having to license expensive proprietary core designs. Finally, after three years of work, OpenCores has come up with a silicon implementation. The OpenRISC 1000 chip is a System-On-Chip microcontroller, meaning that it includes everything from CPU functions to memory interface, data I/O, and networking on a single bit of hardware. SOC chips aren't new, but a design which is completely open is.

Okay, so the OpenRISC 1000 chip isn't all that world-changing, but it is a good example of how people are pushing the open source concept into every realm where information matters. And, as more of the material world takes on characteristics of the digital world, such realms are becoming increasingly common. And that is pretty world-changing.

The city of Cerritos, in Southern California, will be one big wireless hotspot come January 1st. This means that, wherever you go in the 8.6 square miles of the city, you can be connected to the net. Cerritos is too remote to have full DSL coverage, and too ill-served by its cable provider for cable broadband. The city worked out an arrangement with Aiirnet to provide "802.11 mesh" networking, allowing a given user to remain seamlessly connected to a single network regardless of which particular wireless hub she or he is actually connected to at the moment.

While this will be the first city-wide 802.11 implementation in the United States, the idea is taking off internationally.

(AP reports that the service will be free, but a more detailed report from the Federal Communications Workers journal notes that it will cost $40/month for a 500Kb connection.)

I suspect that the good people of Cerritos are in for quite a surprise. As those of you with Wi-Fi connections at home or work already know, a high-speed wireless connection is a viscerally different experience than a hard-wired link. Rather than thinking of the Internet as something that comes in through a little plug in the wall, wireless users start to think of it as something in the air all around them. Rather than information being something you go to get, it becomes something that comes to you.

Hmmm... it seems to me that an enterprising person could set up little hand-held wireless PocketPC rentals outside of, say, a supermarket, with the devices pre-set with links to various nutrition and consumer information websites. Would immediate access to such data change buying patterns? Researchers, here's a good place to start looking...

The traditional approach to immunization policy (an appropriate concern in the U.S. right now, given the current panic over flu shots) typically involves trying to immunize as many people as possible in order to cut down a bug's chances of spreading throughout the population. This doesn't work all that well -- it turns out that, on average, you need to immunize 95% of the population if you're just getting a random sample. While it may be theoretically possible to immunize 95% of a population, the financial and logistical challenges are fairly daunting.

But human societies are not random. We have networks of interaction, easily demonstrated by checking out the various social software websites out there (Friendster and Tribe.net being two of the better-known ones). And when you start thinking about human behavior not as random individuals but as networks, you can come up with new ideas about immunization.

Human networks of acquaintances, computer networks like the Internet, and interacting protein networks in the body, all share a characteristic layout: most of the elements have only a few links to others, while a few individuals have a very large number of links. If one of these highly connected individuals in a human network becomes infected, she can become a "super-spreader," infecting all of her contacts and efficiently distributing the disease. This structure suggests a deceptively simple solution to the vaccination question: immunizing all the super-spreaders in a network slows or stops the spread of a disease as effectively as destroying a country's highway interchanges would stop traffic.

Reuven Cohen and colleagues at Israel's Bar-Ilan University have found that, rather than trying to immunize everyone in hopes of hitting the "super-spreaders," randomly selecting 20% of a population and asking each to name a single acquaintance, the immunizing that acquaintance, is an effective means of focusing in on those most at risk of spreading an infection to a large number of people. With a large enough population, you can even take a smaller sampling and only go after acquaintances mentioned by two or more people and still get great results.

This is a wonderful example of how thinking in terms of social networks can lead to world-changing developments.

WiFi-enabled bicycles? Worth a try. Students at New York's Parsons School of Design came up with a novel method of spreading wireless networking to otherwise unconnected locations (such underground subway stations) by rigging up regular bikes with 802.11b access points set to route bits to adjacent bikes until one has a clear Internet signal. The system is still very rough -- it doesn't seem to work when the bikes are moving, and the battery life is pretty lousy -- but I was struck at the willingness of the design students to merge seemingly disparate technologies in order to achieve what they see as a social good (that is, free wireless for everyone).

This also suggests to me that a likely element of the already-arrived (but not yet well-distributed) future is the spread of peer-to-peer systems (technologies and behaviors) into our social and physical infrastructure -- into the very bones and marrow of our societies. "Make the invisible visible" is a good Viridian motto; maybe a good WorldChanging one is "make the networks ubiquitous."

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, one of the authors of the Institute for the Future's Future Now blog, has a well-written and thoughtful essay in this last weekend's Los Angeles Times Book Review, examining Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs and Andy Clark's Natural-Born Cyborgs. (Free registration is required to get into the LAT site.)

Pang clearly understands the importance of Rheingold's argument, seeing it as more than simply a paean to cellphones and thumb tribes. Smart Mobs describes a vision of how technology changes humans as social beings. Linking it to Clark's less-well-known exploration of how human beings co-evolve with our tools it smart. Clark sees cyborgism not involving the implantation of computer chips into our bodies, but in the ever-closer interaction between human minds and information tools. Pang draws out the contrasts between Rheingold's emphasis on groups and Clark's focus on individuals, letting us see the underlying connections.

Imagine our children carrying — or just as likely, wearing — more computing power than sits on your desk today. Imagine them living with a constant background sense of being connected to family and friends; working and playing in smart mobs; pooling experiences and knowledge with trusted humans and virtual agents; and experiencing the Internet as a deep, abiding presence, sometimes on the edge of their awareness, sometimes in the center, but always there. After a time, their abilities to organize and act collectively will recede into the backgrounds of their consciousness. At this point, smart mobs become another of Clark's technologies — another tool that quietly extends the abilities of humans, shaping our thought but rarely thought about.

I read Smart Mobs earlier this year, and it's an important book. It sounds like I now have another book to get as a companion.

Ants are fascinating creatures (except when they're invading one's kitchen, in which case they are simply pests to be dealt with harshly). Individually pretty non-intelligent, the nests nonetheless display behavioral sophistication, usually associated with pheromone patterns. Complex behavior resulting from individually simple actions... could there be a lesson for software programmers?

But of course.

MUTE is a new open source file sharing application, running on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. It combines heavy encryption with ant-derived packet handling to allow file-swapping which cannot be tracked via conventional means. It's still rough around the edges (to be generous), but is an interesting reaction to the RIAA crackdown on music sharing.

(This is not an endorsement of music file sharing, although Tim O'Reilly's argument that Piracy is Progressive Taxation is pretty compelling...)

While the anonymized and encrypted file sharing aspects are interesting, what really caught my attention was the use of ant food search patterns as a model for packet handling. Ant searches are perfect examples of complexity theory: simple rules can lead to complex behavior (though watch out for circular mills and emergent failures). MUTE relies on this to build file sharing networks in which no given member can know both who else is on the network and what they have to share. The more participants -- even if you never share or download a file -- the better it works.

This initial version of MUTE is intended as a music file-swapping system, but the underlying logic works in any setting where obscuring both content and path of messages is important. Might be worth downloading while you still can.

BOINC, which we linked to and talked about a couple of months ago, was just written up in New Scientist, generating a fresh round of links. (BOINC is an application developed by the SETI@Home crowd as a generic distributed computing platform. It's open source, and set to be released next month.)

For those of you new to the world of distributed computing, it's a method of treating many (hundreds, thousands, even millions) of networked personal computers as a single pseudo-supercomputer. In this way, massive problems involving huge amounts of data can be inexpensively analyzed. It was initially made famous by SETI@Home, which chews on radio telescope data looking for possible signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI@Home functions as a screen saver, only processing its data when your machine is idle. (Because the site lists just how many units of data any individual person has processed (across any number of computers), some folks have written viruses/worms to forcibly install SETI@Home on unsecured machines over the net!)

But BOINC and SETI@Home are not the only distributed computing projects out there. Rather than list them all, I'll just point you to AspenLeaf.com's Internet-based Distributed Computing Projects website, which is the best listing I've found for what's going on, what's coming up, and what you can do to help. There's even a link to a distributed computing chess program, if your computer would rather have fun in its spare time than fold proteins or look for alien life...

If we're certain about anything around here, it's that the future will be wireless. These days, "information wants to be free" has little to do with cost, and everything to do with getting off the leash of an ethernet (or phone) line. Swimming untethered in the infosphere is revolutionary.

If you live in Portland, Oregon or Seattle, Washington, you're lucky: both cities have rapidly-growing open-access distributed community wireless "metropolitan area networks." Portland's is the Personal Telco Project; Seattle's is Seattle Wireless. Both have express goals to cover as much of their respective cities as possible with free (as in cost) 802.11 Internet access. Seattle Wireless describes itself as a "NYASPTWYOMB - not yet another service provider to whom you owe monthly bills."

And it's not just happening in the United States: NZWireless is setting up free community metronets all over New Zealand.

As world-changing as these efforts are, they are adding a layer of roaming information to societies which already have well-established information and communication technology institutions. But what about the developing world?

Onno Purbo, an Indonesian IT specialist, believes that wireless technologies should be part of a developing world strategy to build out both information and communication systems. In Indonesia, he has helped construct a system combining both WiFi and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies. Relying in part on Free Software-based servers, his system allows a rapidly-growing number of people to make cheap (or free) phone calls and access the Internet. What's more, he's made tutorial files on building a bottom-up ICT infrastructure freely available on his website (alternative link) (sadly, they're mostly in Word and Powerpoint formats).

Does the Internet need saving? The proliferation of viruses, spam, and music-industry lawyers suggests that it does. But many suggested solutions to these (and other) online problems tend towards the top-down. Wired has come up with an only-partially tongue-in-cheek list of ways of making life better for the still-growing numbers of people getting online. They're not all winning ideas, but enough of them are sufficient compelling that somebody is going to make a fortune/be seen as a hero/both implementing them...

Some tasty examples:

4 Appoint Larry Lessig to the Supreme Court Is he a Democrat or a Republican? Who cares! Laws governing information flow are the new affirmative action, abortion, and gun control rolled into one.

17 Let a thousand Wi-Fis bloom Open spectrum is the new open source.

19 Make privacy a personal asset Canada has it already: a law that prevents firms from consolidating all customer information after a merger.

32 Build friend-of-a-friend filters Think of it as Friendster for your inbox. Everyone on our list can email everyone on yours, but outsiders have to fill out those annoying SpamCop forms.

33 Create a P2P email program We directly trade MP3 files, instant messages, and now phone calls without the bother of backend servers. So why not email messages?

42 Replace servers with P2P Too many network services - domain names, Web servers, email - rely on the old client-server model, which is vulnerable to attack.

97 Celebrate diversity With nearly every computer on the planet running Windows, Outlook, and Explorer, it's too easy for a single virus to spread everywhere.

One of the odder little bits of a typical Google results page has to be the "Similar pages" link for every hit. Clicking on it generates a list of other sites which usually (but not always) have thematic connections to the original. The Similar pages link for WorldChanging.com, for example, quite reasonably points to Viridian Design and Weblogsky (our own Jon Lebkowksy's personal blog), but also to the Amazon link for Nick Hornsby's book High Fidelity. Huh?

Still, exploring the corridors of iterated similarity you get on Google is a good way to spend an afternoon. That's what makes the TouchGraph Google Browser so much fun. Entering a URL lets you see a graphical map of its various "Similar pages" links, as well as the pages similar to those pages, and so forth. It's Java-based, so it presumably runs on anything able to run JRE 1.3+, with typical Java alacrity.

Once you have your initial map, you can then start building out the maps of similar sites, even adding seemingly-disparate links until you find connections. Surprises are common. TGGB is an amusing way to spend the day, yes, but also a useful tool for seeing links that you may otherwise miss.

The era of ubiquitous always-on wireless networks accessible through mobile personal devices (less buzzwordy version: being able to communicate and get on the web everywhere and at any time via something you carry or wear) is just beginning, and we're now starting to see glimpses of what this world will look like. One of the more intriguing emerging technologies is collaborative mapping. The notion is that people don't just want to know where something is (and how to get to it), they also want to know what other people think about it (and how reliable those opinions are).

MUDLondon is one approach to this model. It's an odd mix of very old-school text adventure ("You are in a 10x10 room. There is a door to the North. It is closed. There is a passageway to the east. You see a goblin in the room." "Go North." "The door is locked. The goblin attacks you. You have died."), WIKI, and an underground city guide. Eschewing any fancy GPS location finding, it relies on contributors to identify and update which roads lead from which parts of the city as well as what you may find in various locations. As you may expect, it's done with more than a little attitude:

the user is encouraged to connect new places to the model, augmenting it with his or her own mental map, annotating with descriptions, known postcodes (which are automatically converted and cross-referenced with other grid location data). ref erences to external URLs, reviews etc can be added and annotated in the RDF model.

MUDLondon is accessible over instant-messaging clients Jabber and AIM -- the latter meaning that a number of wireless handheld devices can talk to it.

The MUDLondon website includes links to a variety of collaborative-mapping efforts as well as to some of the underlying technology proposals. Right now, this technology is primarily text-based, but one can easily imagine how graphical maps and photo-cameras can add visual appeal in the months and years to come. Moreover, the implications of this sort of tool are pretty huge. Annotated maps and guides, layers of data about locations around you, the ability to leave messages for other visitors... and adding in cheap GPS systems gets around the more tedious aspects of entering in which roads lead where and would allow users to focus on the fun parts -- telling other people what they know.

Over at Many2Many, Clay Shirky points us to 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism, from the Democracy Online Newswire. The essay, written by Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford, details a variety of programs for collaboration and communication available to people trying to make a difference in the world. They range from tools for online publishing, newsletter and mailing list management, discussion forums, even tools for quickly distributing posters. (Warning: as of the time of this posting, the links in the essay to the various tools seem to have a garbage character at the end of the URL; if you try to hit the links on the page and get an error, try deleting the "%20" at the end of the address.)

All of the programs listed are free (cost), and most are licensed under the GPL (GNU General Public License), making them philosophically "free" as well.

Free collaborative/creative tools and the activist community have a natural connection. Such applications are mechanisms for spreading news and ideas which, by their nature, also spread the ability to disseminate news and ideas to an ever-larger audience. To mangle an ancient metaphor, they are the software equivalent of giving a person a fish that, when eaten, teaches that person how to fish and where to find a fishing pole.

UPDATE: Jon Stahl's Journal links to this post, and adds some useful comments based on Jon's own experiences with some of the software mentioned in the article. He also suggests a few other useful tools, in particular a couple of non-Free but still useful membership and relationship management applications. Go read what he has to say.

I was trolling ThinkCycle this morning, and came upon an old link for Dan Luke's Radiocar proposal. It's a concept based on car-sharing, and it doesn't yet exist -- but could. The writeup of Radiocar is heavy on scenario and short on business plan, but it's still a pretty cool idea:

“Radiocars are located throughout the city, so when I need to go somewhere, I can see the location of nearby Radiocars on my GPS equipped PDA. I can reserve any available car at which point I walk over to it, use the Bluetooth on my PDA to gain access, get in, and drive away. It’s like having your own private fleet of taxis except you’re the taxi driver. But it’s more than just this. Radiocar has partnered with transit services. They’ve been able to put all surface transportation under one digital umbrella so that whenever you need to get from point A to point B, you can see the locations of not only Radiocars, but also, busses, trains, and boats. You can input two coordinates and get back data showing the most efficient way to reach your destination according to where various modes of transportation are located relative to your location when you query the system."

The scenario addresses many of the more obvious concerns about Radiocar, including privacy issues and how to make sure the used cars don't get scattered all over the place. There are elements of the scenario that seem a bit off -- the pricing is way low, for example -- but it's a nice example of how ubiquitous wireless networks could be used to promote new models of social interaction.

If you've been on the Internet for more than just this last year, you'll remember the ubiquitous and annoying pop-up ads for wireless video cameras. Advertised as a method for seeing who's at your door or providing a bit of quick & dirty security, the pop-ups often implied that what you'd really use them for is spying on the neighbors. Well, it turns out that lots of people have purchased wireless video cameras, and the dirty little secret is... they really do use them for quick & dirty security.

This, at least, is the discovery of the "warviewers," techies with the appropriate pieces of hardware to pick up wireless video signals on the run and the time and interest to actually seek out such devices. Warviewing (or, more commonly, Warspying) involves seeking out the unencrypted, unshielded broadcasts the cameras transmit, usually by walking around with an antenna, receiver, and display. So far, what the warviewers are finding in their (completely legal, if a bit odd) excursions are a lot of cameras pointing at doors, lobbies, and freeways.

Okay, so wandering around hoping to see something more interesting than the UPS delivery guy on camera isn't exactly world-changing, but it's interesting to think about the parallels between open-access wireless networks and open-access wireless cameras, especially as WiFi-based cameras begin to replace the older "X-10" type. Could it be that allowing anyone to see what the camera sees is socially beneficial? Does having wireless (and accessible) cameras mounted in semi-private/semi-public locations reduce privacy or increase our safety by letting us watch each other's backs? It may be that open-access wireless video cameras are less a tool for voyeurism and more a tool for participatory transparency. It may even become something of an update on the group Witness, which provides video cameras to people fighting for human rights.

A couple of years ago, I got to spend a few months owning/operating an AIBO, one of those Sony robotic dogs. It was a surreal experience -- it behaved just enough like a real dog to make me feel odd whenever I treated it like an electronic toy. As a substitute companion it wasn't all that compelling (at least for me), but as a demonstration of how sophisticated independent robotics has become, it was fascinating.

If only I had been more of a hardware hacker, I could have done something more exciting with the AIBO than let it chase a pink ball. For example, Yale engineering students use toy-robot dogs as platforms on which to build pack-based mobile environmental sensors:

The feral dogs have a simple communication system added in their adaptation, that allows the coordinate behavior of a pack. The dogs will cover different portions of a terrain (maintaining a radius) for effective space filling, but will converge if one dog gets a particularly strong signal. This functionality is intended to provide information that is displayed in a form that is legible to diverse participants i.e. the movement of the dogs. The dogs paths provide immediate imagery to sustain discussion and interpretation of an otherwise imperceptible environmental condition of interest (e.g. radioactivity; air quality issues and the re-opening of English powerstation; class-based environmental discrimination). Because the dog’s space-filling logic emulates a familiar behavior, i.e. they appear to be “sniffing something out”, participants can watch and try to make sense of this data without the technical or scientific training required to be comfortable interpreting a EPA document on the same material.

The animal-like behavior, then, becomes a mode of communication -- we interpret the actions of the pack of mobile sensors the way we would a pack of dogs.

The Feral Robotic Dog project is an ongoing series of classes, but the instructional material is all available online. If you have one of the various models of toy-robot dogs, and were wondering just how you could make it do something more than sit up and bark, here's your answer.

Nice brief posting over at the Future Salon blog about RFID tags, the little radio-responsive chips increasingly used by companies such as WalMart to keep track of inventory. It's not a full-blown proposal, more of an insightful observation, but it does push me to think about what kind of relationship I'd like to have with my immediate surroundings:

Suppose my coffee cup had a sensor in the bottom, a battery in the handle, and the knowledge that if it starts out full of hot liquid and winds up, 4 hours later, full of cold liquid, it should be deeply unhappy and attempt to complain loudly and vociferously.

We could have an RFID-based system running in the house that looks for all the unhappy objects.

More generally, if my objects had a notion of home (or if the system had a notion of home), wouldn't life be wonderful. Suppose I could tell my house: the date/calendar book should be near the suitcase. And the suitcase should be in the bookcase near the front door.

Such a system would be quite useful for those of us who seem to have a genetic propensity towards clutter.

FlashMobComputing -- two great memes that taste great together. Flash mobs, as world-changers out there should know, are wireless/web-driven insta-gatherings-cum-performance art. Grid computing -- aka swarm computing or, by extension, mob computing -- combines the computational power of dozens or hundreds or thousands of small, personal computing devices into a single supercomputer. FlashMobComputing is, therefore, a random, web-driven gathering of people bringing computing devices to be used to create an ad-hoc supercomputer.

Seriously.

You are invited to join us in Koret Gym at USF in San Francisco from 10pm - 4pm. Bring as many computers as you can and we'll give you everything you need to jack-in and add your computers' firepower to FlashMob I, and hopefully make history. The more people that come the bigger a supercomputer we can create. Everyone who participates will receive a T-Shirt, immortality on this site, a certificate and a badge to put on your computer in recognition of having created one of the fastest supercomputers on earth. Plus they'll be prizes, contests, special guests, and lots of fun throughout the day.

PCs only, though, so my Aluminum Powerbook can't help it along...

Justin wrote to tell us about a conversation at Dervala.net about what individuals can do in response to problems -- often very big problems -- in developing and war-torn nations. Few people have the resources or opportunities to devote their lives to helping others; Justin asks, in the comments, "is there a way to help human rights without full-scale immersion — that is, without going over there, cutting off links with your family and friends, and dedicating your life to it?"

This question turned into its own discussion at Dervala.net, a discussion which includes some very WorldChanging-style links to organizations dedicated to making things better one volunteer at a time. Thinkcycle -- a group we posted about early on -- is mentioned, as is a South African program for building an Open Source school administration infrastructure, SchoolTool. One of the most intriguing links in the discussion, however, is to a site called Design that Matters, a Massachusetts nonprofit which links NGOs, underserved communities around the world, and university engineering and business students.

Started at MIT in 2000, some of the projects DtM has undertaken include Cholera treatment devices, an incubator for premature infants that works without electricity, and a "Cree Talking Toy" -- a device designed to help Cree and other Native American children learn their native languages. Design That Matters is definitely a WorldChanging organization to watch -- and help out, if you can.

Thank you for the suggestion, Justin!

The Tech Bloom needs to be accessible to all users. It's not, at least not yet; Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are an ongoing challenge for blind computer users. I worked at UC Berkeley's Disabled Students' Program for several years, providing computer support for many disabled members of the UCB community (students, faculty, and staff), and I saw first hand how the shift from DOS to Windows made life difficult for blind users, as the screen reading programs which worked very well in the text-oriented DOS world were worse than useless in the multiple-window, multiple-task Windows world. Few blind users tried Macs, as Apple's efforts to make the interface accessible to people who couldn't see were half-hearted, at best.

Although the technologies for visual-impairment-accessibility for Windows have improved in the subsequent years, the solutions are largely bolted-on, and few Windows developers have the resources (or even awareness of the issue) to purchase an expensive add-on to test software compatibility. On the Mac side, however, Apple is now (finally) working on a Spoken User Interface for Mac OS X, built into the operating system itself. It's not yet available, but is intended to be part of the next major version of OS X (which would be 10.4, likely due out early next year).

Chances are you're not blind, and you probably don't even know someone who is. Why should this be important to you? Because accessibility improvements nearly always make life better for all users, not just those with specific impairments. Just like entry ramps and curb-cuts, designed for people in wheelchairs, are great for anyone pushing a stroller or cart (or have difficulty with stairs), computer interface improvements intended for those with disabilities can be of enormous value to anyone who could make use of a different mode of computer interaction. You could have the computer read important email aloud when you're not nearby, for example, or verbally identify windows you've clicked on as a way of cutting through on-screen clutter.

For aging populations, with the corresponding degradation of visual capabilities, having a Spoken UI as an alternative will shift from a convenience to a necessity. And let's not forget the illiterate. While the Spoken UI in OS X is undoubtedly English-only for now, there's no reason why a verbal interface couldn't work in any language. I am hopeful that Microsoft will once again take a cue from Apple and begin work to build good screen reading technology into the heart of Windows.

People shouldn't have to change to accomodate computers; computers should be improved to accomodate people. And as the Tech Bloom spreads, it should be able to embrace everyone. That wouldn't just be fair, it would be positively worldchanging.

Jesse Black adds, in the comments:

I work in this field (www.bookshare.org) and could probably go on for pages, but I'll just touch on one point and offer some links. As obliquely noted in this blog, the blindness market is a small one, so that innovation in the private sector almost inevitably comes with a high price tag. It will be interesting to see how comprehensive the integrated Mac screen reader will be, because the leading resources for the PC environment (Window-Eyes and JAWS) are still very expensive ($500-$1000 I believe). There is a great company called Choice in the U.K. trying to meet the challenge of low-cost adaptive tech. Check out www.screenreader.co.uk. As with anyone trying to provide low-cost alternatives in a difficult-to-reach market, the challenge for Choice is distribution. So spread the word!

Another cool company to check out: www.phoneticom.com. They're thinking about access to materials online in very interesting ways including a read-it-aloud tool that works on either whole pages or just highlighted tools, a speedy convert-to-text-only tool for websites, and, coolest of all, a tool that makes your website accessible by telephone by interpreting the HTML into menus and dynamically generating them over the phone using high-quality text to speech. I never thought I'd say that an automated telephone answering service was cool!

Thanks, Jesse!

Environmental sustainability. Energy independence. Information and communication technology. Development. These issues are inextricably linked. By ignoring the centralized models of the past and moving directly to the decentralized, networked models now emerging, developing nations can leapfrog -- build infrastructures which are more powerful, more efficient, and more sustainable than many of their more "advanced" neighbors. This isn't just the argument we make here at WorldChanging, it's the conclusion of a UN task force working under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Programme.

A United Nations Environment Programme Task Force on Information & Communication Technology and Renewable Energy for Sustainable Rural Development conducted its third meeting at the Neko Tech Center in Ada, Ghana.

Building upon its work in Paris, Delhi, and on-going field work from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the Task Force found that:

* Renewable energy enables rapid deployment of reliable affordable electricity in rural areas, a prerequisite for accelerated national development;

* Information and communications technologies are essential to enhancing rural health, education, government, entertainment and enterprise, and to participating actively in the global economy; and

* Deployed in harmony, renewable energy and information/communication technology mutually reinforce the cost effective deployment of basic infrastructure and enable new livelihoods, social empowerment, and environmental security (emphasis added).

UNEP is an interesting group. Although it clearly has its share of bureaucratic afflictions, it appears to be a startlingly useful information resource for those of us trying to integrate environmental concerns with the drive to improve conditions in the developing world. The Division of Technology, Industry, and Economics has numerous guides for businesses in the developing world (and in the developed world, too) looking to become more environmentally sustainable. The Environment and Sustainable Technologies database resource -- listing 86 different databases covering everything from an EU knowledge base on renewable energy to low-cost appropriate technologies (and that's just in the "A" section) -- looks to be weeks worth of WorldChanging postings alone!