Design for Living

At the Netsquared conference yesterday, I had an interesting conversation with Tom Munnecke about his attempts to model processes with positive effects. It brought together several threads I have been following recently - Tim O'Reilly's trademark brouhaha, the process of trying to effect positive change through the Open Rights Group, Jeremy Zawodny's disappointment with nofollow, Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks and Jaron Lanier's Digital Maoism.
What all these disparate essays share is a view of the world as a positive sum game, and varying perspectives on how the rules, practices, laws and technologies interact to adjust people's behaviour. I'm not sure if there is an overarching theory here, but there are general tendencies that can be applied when designing laws, or choosing which rules to apply to your work.
The key one is the notion of a positive sum game - that what you are making needs to be designed to add value for all parties who use it, not to try to sequester the value for yourself. That way it can grow in a natural way, because all who use it amplify the value in the world.
I've been working on something that I think follows this precept, and I'll hopefully be able to release it soon.

Technorati Tags: culture, digital rights, economics, emergence, meme, netsquared, Open Rights Group, ORG, Tim O'Reilly, web 2.0, Web 2.0℠, wikipedia

UK Isochrones

A great set of maps of journey times from MySociety , but what I'd really like to see is an animation of this over time, showing different services come and go, and the train time intervals pulse through. Part of the problem of public transport is the sawtooth shape of the isochrones because of what happens when you miss a train by a minute and have to wait half an hour.

Gates agrees, Live TV is dead

Scott Rosenberg is at the D Conference:

Gates talked in very broad terms about TV/Internet convergence and Microsoft's "IPTV" initiative. What, Kara Swisher asked, does that do to the broadcast model? Gates "It's gone. It was a hack. People want to watch what they want to watch."

However, Gates' Windows Media DRM is also a hack, and one designed to stop people watching what they want. Still, interesting to see him say it.

Technorati Tags: Live TV is Dead, television