Sitting in the Is Beauty Truth? session at TED2008 today, I am reminded of a phone conference with TED Curator Chris Anderson last fall to bring him up to date on the status of one of the previous year's TED wishes.
When Sun wrapped up its formal role in developing the Open Architecture Network (OAN) it handed over a sustaining challenge to the site's owner and community leader, Architecture for Humanity (AFH). When TED Curator Chris Anderson asked Sun why the TED Prize winner was left in a lurch I gave a short answer, "It was primarily due to reasons of expediency". In actual fact, Sun never walked away from AFH. Sun was, and continues to be, committed to their success and continues to be involved. As of today, we now we see a clear path to a sustaining model that leverages the Drupal community and frees AFH from the dependence cycle it was caught in with Sun. I look forward to bringing that good news to Chris before the conference wraps up on Saturday.
The first step on this path is to refactor the site such that it runs on an unadulterated Drupal core. To do that AFH and Sun have contracted with CivicActions to migrate the OAN from a hacked Drupal 4.7 to a clean Drupal 5.X. (It was the hacking aspect that I explained away to Chris Anderson as "expediency". Corners were cut, compromises were made, but AFH's and TED's primary goal, to launch the site at TED2007, was achieved. Incidentally, of the three TED2006 prize winner, only AFH's wish was realized by TED2007.) CivicActions won the bid to perform the migration by doing a professional and efficient assessment of the OAN's current state and the effort required to bring it up to the high standards of a showcase Drupal site.
My next few posts will describe the process of setting up this development environment as we open Chapter 2 in the OAN's odyssey. I'll describe how we use OpenSolaris to enable efficient development, testing, and deployment for multiple contributors working on multiple tasks and timelines.
TED's roots and core values are no better represented than in the person of Lawrence Lessig. It was he who really Gestalt2 the content of the conference. ("If you love a word, use it." Erin McKean told the TED crowd today. As a criteria for choosing the right word, she says, being in the dictionary is an unnecessary and artificial constraint. What are the odds a word with exponentiation in it will make it into the publication she looks after? As a word and feeling, I love Gestalt2. It's entertainment's Metcalfe's Law on steroids.)
In Lessig's TED talk he recounted John Philip Sousa's passionate opposition to the advance of phonographs and the recording industry. "These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country," Sousa warned, and went on to say, "The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."
So, in an abstract sense, goes the tired argument for the prevailing commercial model of copyright protection. But that wasn't Lessig's point. His point was that the Read Only culture that is ardently protected by institutions like the RIAA, the big five recording companies, and portions of the publishing industry, is a culture "where the vocal chords of the millions have been lost."
The stark irony presented was that, indeed the same voice Sousa sought to protect by preventing technology's indiscriminate trampling over humanity's means of expression is again the voice that, several technological generations hence, is opening up for all humanity to hear. Without our common sense recognition of Fair Use, artists like Javier Prato, and Johan Soderberg would not be able to reach most us. Of course, fair use alone does not get such artistic works to the people. You also need a network.
Implicit in all this was more validation that the redshift market projection that Sun is betting on is a very good bet.
For me, Lessig answered an important question that was not asked. Which is more precious to our freedom of expression, fair use or network neutrality? In the RW culture, these convictions to freedom are inextricably connected and equally important.
Opening the Thursday morning session at the TED conference, the TED House Band riffed on Herbie Hancock's most recognized theme. Appropriate choice, as the Jazz master's melodies are among some of the most frequently mashed-up, sampled and otherwise adapted in variation. So much of the spirit and content at TED 2007 is a mashup of hit themes in the use of technology to solve the world's problems.
"I'm scared. I don't think we're going to make it."
John Doer opened his keynote with these attention getting words, inspired by his daughter who said to him, "I'm scared and I'm angry. Dad, your generation created this problem and you better fix it." The topic of this dinner table conversation was, of course, global warming.
John made a very compelling and emotional appeal to the crowd to use the power of business and commerce to address his daughter's mandate. He cited plenty of examples of where this is already happening. E.g., WalMart has made going green a top priority. Their campaign to sell more compact fluorescent light bulbs alone will reduce carbon emissions by 20M tons.
"Consumers don't know what the real costs are," he testified.
If I get the chance, I want to ask him, "John, if consumers did know the real costs, would they behave differently?" It's a question I ask a lot of people. In December I asked a panel of top executives, including Bob Fischer, Chariman of The Gap, and Elliot Hoffman, founder of Just Desserts and the New Voice of Business. Their unanimous answer, like everyone else I ask, was "Absolutely".
This is a subtext of so many conversations at TED. How do we connect consumers to knowledge of the impact of their decisions. And the adjunct I like to insert in the dialog, what if we could do it real-time, at the point of purchase, and avert the behaviors that are driving the problem that scares John Doerr and angers his daughter?
John closed the keynote with a call to action. "Going green is the largest economic opportunity of the 21st Century. Make Going Green your Next Big Thing. Go carbon neutral by going to climatecrisis.org to offset your carbon. Do it like WalMart - go big. Think outside of the box." The TEDster's, I know, are already there. Let's hope we can tap the amazing portfolio of innovations, many of them circulating in the aisles here, like the Open Architecture Network, and mash them up and assemble the economic widgets and transaction models and networking and knowledge to empower consumers to be the world they want for their children.
Curator Chris Anderson asked Sun why the TED Prize winner was left in a lurch I gave a short answer, "It was primarily due to reasons of expediency". In actual fact, Sun never walked away from AFH. Sun was, and continues to be, committed to their success and continues to be involved. As of today, we now we see a clear path to a sustaining model that leverages the Drupal community and frees AFH from the dependence cycle it was caught in with Sun. I look forward to bringing that good news to Chris before the conference wraps up on Saturday.
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would love to catch up with you and synch up ...
@Ivan - def. The Star-Tides ( Post a comment