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Starting with a meeting six days prior to the start of Bar Camp, the crew managed to find free office space, design a logo, start a wiki, print free T-shirts for all attendees, convince Etheric Networks to donate and install a wireless hookup on a neighboring business's roof, line up enough sponsors to make the event free for everyone, and convince over 100 geeks to give up a summer weekend for hours of indoor geek talk.

I'm here at the Berkman Thursday meeting listening to Urs Gasser speak about what he calls "information quality". He started out talking about a few cases where the implicit meaning of quality with respect to information meant accuracy. While this made sense for some fairly straightforward issues (e.g. fake herbal medicines or lies in the news), I found it a pretty simple and obvious definition.

Then he talked about information as being relational between communicating entities. That makes more sense, because different individuals will have different goals for a piece of information. And now he's pulling in transnational legal issues that arise when stuff published on the internet gets delivered in a place that has different libel or hate speech laws.

At this point, the definition of information quality seems so broad that we couldn't possibly conclude anything about it in general. And Urs pauses for questions; I ask this (bluntly). First answer: yes, there are many aspects. Second answer: there are some internet-specific issues in information quality, like Wikipedia edit wars (I don't quite believe this). Thirdly, these issues are not just theoretical but also relevant in practice.

I am still not convinced, but I am listening.

Urs thinks there are three approaches worth considering:

1. Laissez-faire. We don't want to even think about internet info quality regulation; no one has the power to regulate quality. The problem with this argument, in my opinion, is that information quality is fundamentally dependent on social exchanges and there is a power balance in those which will always serve to regulate it in the context of that social structure. Good and bad fight it out over time and the good lives (J.S. Mill).
   I asked about why this is even possible. Mal asks a similar question: info quality is transactional, so just producing more information without adding more informed transactions implies a vacuous definition of information. As if you want produce information by adding speakers. Bah.
2. Information order model. An authority, like China but also possible a democratic society, making choices about information quality regulation. Also consider the BBC and internet forums with a moderator.
3. A decentralized model. Starts with the assumption "information quality is imporant" but admits it's hard to define and there are fundamental reasons we cannot produce a valuable shared normative definition of information quality.

Now we go off on a tangent and talk about markets for a while. Google seems like a sort of information market in the sense that it values each website. There are different approaches (reputation systems, etc.) and they have different advantages and disadvantages. I think this is what Urs' paper is about, so I'm hoping that means this will get more specific.

I want to ask: what problems are you trying to solve?

I don't really think there is such a thing as information quality. There are such things as trust, lies, information availability, listening, speaking, publishing, believing, regulation, communication, relationships, and censorship. But is there some meaningful common ground?

On blogs, Urs notes, that we don't have laws to establish social contracts for information-related transactions. Some bloggers explicitly state poilicies. On top of this, I think that all bloggers take part in implicit social contracts, unwritten assumptions that underlie communities and cultures and help people communicate.

Urs has to leave… which I think is kinda lame, but quite forgivable. I'm still not sure he's talked about anything specific enough to be meaningful.

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David has a long, thoughtful post on the pathology of this region:

After a decade of living here, I see the reactionary narrow-mindedness that lies under New England's progressive face. This region still votes Democratic and champions liberal causes, certainly. But the landscape, so seeded with history and the evidence of past successes, breeds a poisonous conservatism that never looks beyond its own feet, and never thinks past yesterday.

This is a deep and scary observation. It puts Boston somewhere on the scale between Silicon Valley (where a “conservative” might wish it was 1999) and Paris (where someone is always frowning at you for violating some ancient rule of etiquette). I find it personally threatening because a conservative, hidebound environment is the worst place to write software; it's important to leverage the malleability of program code to try out new ideas and back out of the stupid ones. On the other hand, maybe the growing generation of hackers will carry an attraction to change into the halls of power.

This is all very interesting because it combines questions of industry development and city (vs. suburb) growth with broad cultural analysis. One of America's pivotal characteristics—a lack of history—is self-effacing, and as this plays out, the implications will touch just about everyone.

I recently subscribed to the MIT Technology Review magazine. It promised to be something like Wired but smarter, thanks to its long history and university affiliation.

While it's certainly an improvement over Wired, it doesn't go quite far enough. The April Tech Review is an amorphous stack of short, shallow articles, with only two stories over 4 pages long (there is also a series of one-page articles on technology in various countries, each written by a different author). Most of the content consists of single-page or sub-single-page vignettes, many of which smell like products of the PR machine. I wonder if they'd do better publishing "emerging technology" index cards so VPs can take them into meetings and quote buzzwords until their boss is sufficiently impressed.

Where is the reporting? As close as we get in April's issue is a story by Bryant Urstadt (apparently a freelancer) on oil drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. It summarizes the cases for and against drilling, concluding that while the technology to drill cleanly exists, we shouldn't count on the oil industry to use it. This piece is under three pages long. As a short, topical report, it's fine, but I'd expect to see 5-10 of these short reports amid 4-7 serious stories.

Compare this with the New York Times Magazine. NYTM publishes a lot of junk too, but it is also a place for long, deep stories. Every once in a while they'll have a multi-part series that gives you remarkable perspective into e.g. what it's like to be an illegal immigrant or African refugee orphan. Couldn't we do something like this for technology? Rather than publish half-page overviews that amount to saying "Will Wright is working on an even bigger Sim" or "Mena Trott says blogging isn't just for would-be large-audience editorialists", why not do a longer interview? Sit down with Will Wright and have him comment on the state of the games industry. On developing and selling his company. On having the rare power to "propose crazy ideas" and pursue them. I've heard Will Wright speak, and he has plenty to say on all of these topics. It wouldn't even require much editing.

Or, taking the concept of embedded reporting closer to home, why not plant a journalist inside a university lab or corporate research division? Sure, there would be some confidentiality issues to negotiate, but I think many companies would welcome the opportunity to have their most interesting projects profiled in such a prestigious publication. Of course, the reporters would have to be insightfully critical as well, so that it doesn't just turn into an advertisement. Over time, reporters could develop their understanding of an industry segment, and use that to provide real insight about emerging trends.

If I had to boil it down to one request, it would be for longer stories. I'm not expecting a Believer Magazine for geeks, but some progress toward that end would be much appreciated.

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Larry Lessig was on WBUR Radio's The Connection this morning.

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John Dvorak: "The concept of disruptive technology goes to the top of my list as the biggest crock of the new millennium."

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… there is the misconception that new ideas come simply from detail[ed] knowledge of your field. In fact, most creativity comes from around the boundaries of a discipline where fields of expertise overlap, it comes from the edges of the known not the comfortable centre. These days that overlap seems to be achieved mainly by the coming together of specialists at those boundaries - a sort of collective polymathy. But however you do it, innovation requires polymathy.

Over the past century, humankind has seen dramatic increases in specialization—at home, at work, in geography, in scholarship, in the layout of cities and towns. There is, of course, a compelling cause—knowledge in so many realms has been so much expanded that effectively applying knowledge to healthcare, law, or scientific experimentation requires extensive training. In these fields, there may be a cost in lost progress or innovation because of excessive division of understanding.

But there is also a much scarier trend. Not everyone needs to make scientific discoveries, but everyone needs to have a healthy life that includes caring for friends and family, pursuing satisfying work, making love, eating, learning, and teaching. Increasingly we have psychiatrists to care for us, consumerism as the surrogate objective of work we do not otherwise value, sexual desires shaped by mass media, food made by machines, and a school/college monopoly on learning.

Any of these effects is probably an impediment to happiness on its own. But what about the second-order effects? If, from a young age, you never believe you have a chance to become a most trusted friend, or an effective teacher, how will you approach other problems? Will you just assume you can't achieve goal because you're not a goal-ist?

This is the danger expressed in Brave New World and similar dystopic visions—that humans will tend further toward believing they can do nothing. Is that prophecy fulfilling itself right now?

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Some are diamonds in the rough, their signal often mistaken for noise; others are so unassuming that people hardly notice them. Others yet are just beginning to gather momentum on issues whose importance will probably have become blindingly obvious a few years from now. All of them envision big changes, and the glimpses I've had into their unusual minds have convinced me that they are onto something important, so I keep an eye out.

I spent a little time reading about the first person on Seb's list, Lion Kimbro. Based on that and the two names I recognized, this will be an inspiring list.

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Jessica has posted responses from her friend Kevin, a public librarian, to my post that started a discussion about the services libraries provide. (There is also a comment here.) Most of his responses focus on how difficult it would be to implement these services because of the budgetary and time constraints libraries and their staff face. Naturally, I completely neglected this point in my original post except to say that perhaps my suggestions would work better in a for-profit business than a library. I was writing about how to better serve patrons.

And I'm not sure what he means by being "overly focused on books" or why that's a problem.

Here's what I mean. Books, though wonderful in many ways, do not have anywhere close to the monopoly on information that they used to have. People talk more, they watch TV, they read and write and play on the internet. There are now many more ways of doing what you could only do with books 50 or 100 years ago. So then, what are libraries about: frail printed bound volumes, or uniting people with information, art, and entertainment? If libraries are mostly for books, then you should expect them to continue declining in importance relative to other information sources.

Perhaps what I am trying to do here is describe a different idea of the market where libraries participate: one where people learn and exchange information. This description is certainly broader than the usual idea that a public library is some kind of sacred institution essential to the functioning of a literate democratic society. While the library may be essential, in terms of democratizing knowledge the glory days of libraries are over. And one key advantage of the internet is that it doesn't depend on the reluctant patronage of a cash-strapped government.

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