What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

A nice 10 minute interview with Cameron Sinclair aired on PBS tonight.  I learn something new every time I hear Cameron speak.

"It's a little known fact," says Cameron "most plastic tents are made in Pakistan ... when the Kashmir earthquake happened, because of the series of natural disasters we faced that year ... they ran out of tents."  Watch the video to find out what was conceived by Pakistanis caught in this desperate situation.

Nancy and I caught up with Cameron two weeks ago at a Pecha Kucha event in SOMA.  He told us that Autodesk is now working with AFH to add Project Freewheel models to the OAN.  Freewheel is the "web ready" export format from Revit and other Autodesk tools.  Revit Architecture is the Building Information Management system that Nancy has been training architects to use recently.  Her experience with a Freewheel 3D model (of my house) seemed to indicate that data rich models are too dense to smoothly manipulate (zoom, rotate).  Given the size and complexity of some of the AFH projects, this could pose a problem when adding DWF files to the OAN.

As Cameron said in the interview, the simple solutions are the important ones.  Maybe 3D orbiting of structural designs in a web page is not so important.

The People Formerly Known As The Audience landed a piece on Wired.com today about the Open Architecture Network (OAN).  

The story was part of a pro-am journalistic experiment orchestrated through Assignment Zero that produced 80 distinct articles dealing with crowdsourcing, of which 12 earned a spot on Wired's home page.  As one of the OAN story contributors, I bagged my first byline on Wired.com, one in which I was decidedly on the am side of pro-am.  While my contribution was relatively small, it was enough to give me a taste of the post-edit blues - most of my copy was either red-lined, or reduced to the point of inaccuracy.   My original reporting expanded on the technology choices and process of developing a collaboration site using the open source CMS Drupal.   The final piece gives a nod to Drupal and Sun Microsystems, but leaves the wrong impression:

"Even the software powering the site -- designed by Sun Microsystems -- is open source: the Drupal content management system chosen by thousands of nonprofits for its ease of use."

Sun did not design Drupal, and while ease of use is one of the virtues of Drupal it's an oversimplified view of why so many nonprofits use it.  Granted, the focus of the story was not so much on technology as the potential for open source design, but one of the points red-lined from my copy was perhaps one of the most relevant given the context of this crowdsourcing experiment:

"Organizations that use Drupal for their online communities include... Assignment Zero."

Drupal is everywhere.   Drupal's integral role in the explosion of collaboratives born of open sharing and grass roots participation is worthy of an entire Wired issue, if not more than just a mention buried deep in one story.  Even among citizen journalism sites, it's a dominant software platform - witness The Witness Project, for example.

Still, good to see the momentum for Architecture for Humanity continuing in the media - in addition to the Wired piece, another story about the OAN appeared this week in Business Week, and AFH's founder, Cameron Sinclair, was added to the distinguished list of "Thinkers of Tech" for Fortune's iMeme conference next week in San Francisco.

We're still the audience, we just have something to say now. 

 

"I feel like we're embarking on a very interesting social experiment ...learning about the social behaviors of architects... How does this strange black turtleneck wearing species interact when they are not at a cocktail party?"
- Kate Stohr, Co-founder of Architecture for Humanity.

This was the reply I received from Kate after sharing a post on tips for fostering a community online. The post couldn't be more relevant to her and the rest of Architecture for Humanity as they approach the launch of the Open Architecture Network (OAN), which will coincide with this year's TED conference. Lessons from the social networking front line are pouring in, and I expect the OAN will begin it's contribution of do's and dont's, how-to's, and testimonies to the power of the network soon.

Anyone who has launched an online social network will tell you that the experience is, indeed, a very interesting social experiment. Some of the most compelling communities have taken shape with minimal intervention and control from it's founders, yet their vision and values manage to persist through its evolution by virtue of their participation. The social networking movement puts Metcalfe's law squarely back in good standing as a reasonable measure of the value of the network, which the law says is proportional to the square of the number of users. In fact, it may be time to revise the formula as we see true benefit reach well beyond the network itself, to those who have never touched a computer. And the Open Architecture Network is poised to be one of the those networks whose beneficiaries may have never before been touched by the network effect.

If you give a damn, listen to the Treehugger interview with Architecture for Humanity's other co-founder, Cameron Sinclair. And watch this space for breaking news about the new Open Architecture Network.