Monthly Archives: July 2009

Links for 2009 07 29

Links for 2009 07 26

Google and Virgin to conquer Mars … opensourceing it!

virgle
UPDATE: thanks to the comment by Vincenzo, I now know this was a April 1st fool! Thanks Vincenzo! The application form with its strange questions could have me realize that! Example:
# I am a world-class expert in
physics
medicine and first aid
engineering
Guitar Hero II

Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars, by Google and Virgin.
The vision is heavily based on Open Source and Crowdsourcing. Clever move, both from PR perspective and from practical perspective!

It comprises three equal partners: Google, Virgin and a diffuse network of talented individuals who want to participate in our mission.

Who do I see as the perfect leader for this project? Yochai Benkler, fabolous author of the book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” and of “Sharing Nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production”, most inspiring paper I ever read.

More from http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html:

A post-post-industrial economy
What does “open source” mean in the context of a distant, planet-wide, century-long enterprise? Today’s industrialized (and post-industrialized) (and, one imagines, post-post- industrialized) economies are sustained not so much by physical wealth as by advanced systems of shared knowledge whose marginal productivity grows as more is accumulated. “Shared,” however, doesn’t mean valueless; we see Virgle as a decidedly for-profit venture that will develop most efficiently via decentralized models of effort, authority and reward. If the first economic revolution was agricultural, the second industrial and the third digital, the fourth will be Open Source — the birthing of a planetary civilization whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination.

We want to engage, one might say, the Long Tail of human creativity. Instead of 5,000 people working 12 hours a day six days a week in exchange for a full salary and benefits, imagine 5 million people working a few hours a week in exchange for contribution-based equity in the form of shares in Virgle Inc and ownership of the land of which the colony will ultimately take some form of possession.

You weren’t thinking real estate? Start. Virgle’s costs will be considerable — we’re planning on up-front investments of $10-15 billion in the first two decades –- but so too will the colony’s long-term earnings. Whatever one’s interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty, for instance, it seems clear that the initial explorers and developers will be able to claim ownership of some significant portion of 143 million square kilometers of Martian real estate, which, sold (or traded as open-source sweat equity) at an average value of $10 per acre, would be worth a cool $358 billion. Multiply that by 100x for its post-terraforming value and you get a figure of $36 trillion. Clearly, whatever model of real estate distribution our emerging society adopts, its worth will exceed the investments likely to be required to unlock that value.

Our civilization’s most valuable export, meanwhile, will be intellectual property. The problems our Pioneers solve in the course of their world-building enterprise will represent an engine of invention in dozens of lucrative areas, from biotechnology to geology, physics to agriculture. We see the community’s system of intellectual property development evolving from a community open source model to commercial open source (or perhaps we mean that the other way around?). We can imagine that commons-based peer production model — in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or direct financial compensation — extending to almost every imaginable aspect of Martian life.

Links for 2009 07 22

  • Trust No/Every One | The AppsLab
    "When we inject trust into the equation. It’s altogether different. I have an implied social network I live and breath within at Oracle. They are not only important to me, but I to them. It’s an inseparable part of getting things done, and the power of social networks is that the relationships become explicit and the content is relevant."

Links for 2009 07 20

  • Obama’s data and Clarke’s first law » Contrordine compagni
    Vivek Kundra, the first-ever White House Chief Information Officer, time ago switched the District’s 38,000 employees from Microsoft Office to Google Apps.
    Now on Wired he shares his vision on all federal data release in a machine-readable, user-rateable and taggable form. Fascinating!

    Towards the end of the interview, almost as a side to the main topic, the interviewer asks this question:

    As CTO of Washington, you moved tens of thousands of employees from Microsoft Office to Google Apps to save money. Part of your new agenda is shifting the government to cloud computing and using free software. How will that happen?

  • The future of scholarship? Harvard goes digital with Scribd – Ars Technica
    "Today, with the announcement that Harvard University Press will publish 1,000 digitized books on Scribd, the academic world took one more step in its glacially slow march into the digital age." I liked the word "Glacially"! ;)

Links for 2009 07 12

  • Facebook | Social Data Revolution
    Andreas Weigend, Former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, teaches a course on Social Data Revolution at Stanford and at Berkeley and put the two classes in competition on "How to acquire and retain an active online community using metric-based decisions on Facebook Pages"!
    http://socialdatarevolution.jimdo.com/facebook-competition/
    My oh my! How much I would like to attend this class!?!
    Mission:
    Mankind is transformed by the data created by individuals. Information overload has become more serious than ever. Social discovery is the new search. What applications can we build to create relevant meaning in our lives?

  • The Trunk Club For Men: get help with clothes shopping
    A real woman helps you figure out which clothes to buy via Skype video call, you receive the clothes at home, you pay only what you like to keep, send back for free the rest! Men only!

  • Hawala – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Hawala (also known as hundi) is an informal value transfer system based on the performance and honor of a huge network of money brokers, which are primarily located in the Near East, North and Northeast Africa, and South Asia. I give money to an hawaladar A asking to give it to target Z, hawaladar B gives it to hawaladar C, (…), hawaladar T gives it to target Z. No record of anything, just based on trust (honor system). Amazing! And working! Similar to what Ripple.sf.net was to make possible electronically and decentralized! Amazing!

Links for 2009 07 10

Pretending not to. Social networks as covers (both for love and work)

Great paper by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Harvard Business School) “Networks as Covers: Evidence from business and social On-line Networks” . Amazing which patterns everybody can unveil when (almost) all out social interactions leave electronic trails everybody can collect and analyze! Amazing and of course scary!

This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. Most generally, a cover is any action which allows ego to signal to alter that he is of type A when in reality they are of type B.

Evidence from Linkedin: “LinkedIn allows people who are currently employed to go on the job market without looking like they are on the job market. Recruiters are attracted to LinkedIn because they can obtain access to people who are ordinarily very hard to find in the labor market. Interviews with employers reveal that they are aware of this function of LinkedIn, and lose their employees this way.

Evidence from another network (the paper does not explicit which one but says “the network has been designed largely for people to keep in touch with their friends, and not for business purposes. Results indicate that almost 70 per cent of all activity on this on-line network is related to viewing profiles and pictures of others.”, so I might guess the network is Facebook, wondering why Mikolaj didn’t write which is the network… ): Men in particular look at pictures of women they do not know. Furthermore, regression analysis shows that men who publicly declared themselves to be in a relationship are more likely to examine profiles and pictures of women they do not know. Consistent with the view of networks as covers, (…) men in relationships and with large on-line networks are more like to look at women they do not know. In contrast, single men with large networks are more likely to look at women they do know. Implications for network theories as they pertain to organizations are explored.

Credits for picture: pagedooley from Flickr Creative Commons released