Description:
Casey, founder and Executive Director of the Designers Accord, works with organizations all over the world to create positive social and environmental impact. She has been named a “Guru you should know” by Fortune magazine, a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and a “Master of Design” by Fast Company.This Keynote will be simulcast in ACC Level 1, Ballroom A / ACC Level 3, Room 9ABC / ACC Level 4, Ballroom D / ACC Level 4, Room 18ABCD

Presenter:

Valerie Casey – Designers Accord

Today we’re going to talk about hoe despite the fact that ht interactive community has been absent from the sustainability conversation, it’s the interactive community that is going to take the led in this.

We’re going to start with narrative. Kurt Vonnegut graduate thesis … there are existing narratives that you can apply around this axis,,,good and ill fortune (vertical) and time (horizontal). In top one someone is leading an ok life, they lose something important, they again it and then are happier. At bottom,, it;s abut a person who become happier about finding something they like a lot, they lose it and then get it back and are happier.

Another one: cockus metamorphasis. An already unhappier man become a cockroach.

The Kaftka narrative is the one we tell about sustainability and it’s why sustainability feels so overwhelming.

Stories are about toxic villages in China and Big Macs being cheaper than salads, burn pits in Iraq.

Started the Designer’s Accord to challenge this idea, with an underlying philosophy that by bringing the creative community together we can look at these issue in a new way … to make change we have to depend on collective. It’s a Kyoto Treaty of design. Guidelines include personal to collective accountability, Idea about sharing not only successes.

Advance the notion that sustainability sits outside of what we do.

Constant total length: if you can imagine a world as having two fixed points and a string sits between. Anytime you pull on that string it reverberates through the system.

7 ways to think about systems

. A system is more than the sum of its parts

Presenter:Clay Shirky
Part I: Sharing
Anyone who is looked at a modern city has seen the same thing, People trying together into and out of a town, total inefficiency. One solution is to make bigger roads. Second solution is about better public transport. Third solution is PickUp Pal, it’s about moving information. Then people can share cars. There’s no longer an infrastructure issue. It’s better for everybody except buses. So bus company hires a private detective and suggested that they were breaking the law because car pools can only be no-to efficient. It goes to court and there is such an uproar that the law gets rewritten. What PickUpPal realized is that they can not operate in the current environment.
The fight between the bus company and PickUpPal was about sharing. How well can people share? We have this idea of “rainbow unicorn sharing.” PUP was doing jackhammer sharing. It has historically happened around media revolutions.
Which brings us to Guttenburg. He is associated with the Bible almost exclusively. But he actually created the press to create indulgences that buys you time off off purgatory. There was a high demand for indulgences. The imbalance was handwritten. You couldn’t write them fast enough! But they got so good that it it created indulgence inflation. Indulgence inflation, ability to read bible, etc. actually doesn’t support Catholic church but weakens it.
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. It is a bigger threat to society.
Scribes: With the spread of printing press the scries started writing slowly. Book written, In Praise of Scribes. He has it printed–and the media destroys the message. That is the kind of change abundance brings about.
Second, literacy. If you could read and write you are set for life. Now it is so critical that we make sure everyone knows it and you can no longer make a living at it.
Part II: Monkeys and Balloons
Napster was the first big time app that was general social change, to geeky. One of the explanations of this behavior was that young people today had become criminally minded, had no morals.
Two things wrong are with this thesis: 1) It’s obviously false (you would expect to see this behavior elsewhere if this was true, and oddly coincided with largest fall in criminal behavior, except theft of digital property) 2) It relies on junk sociology. It’s a huge generalization, it’s like an element of your being. But human motivation doesn’t change that quickly.
Napster simply increased opportunity to share and changes motivations around sharing–not by creating a new one but by unearthing a new one.
Study of sharing on primates (book” Why We Cooperate). Primates don’t have a behavior called “sharing,” there are actually three modes. There are three feelings around sharing: one mode for good, one for services, one for information.
What freaked the music industry out was that we didn’t voluntary withhold things that would make someone else’s life better. We weren’t spiteful And the music industry didn’t get this. The fight from the industry is to reintroduce spiteful behavior. If we allowed to indulge in the positive emotion of sharing, then it will completely transform the way that media works in the 21st century.
DARPA. last year launched red balloon challenge. Launched 10 balloons and asked for lat and long. Thought it would take 30 days, first people solved in in under 10 hours. If you have two lat and long coordinates you can’t tell how far apart they are. You need a calculation. DARPA does not want to talk about this calculation so they point to wikipedia. Why did they not point to Britannica? Because they couldn’t. The required signing up to get full info. And links are 404 … for weeks … because no one cares. It’s a reference work you can’t refer to. Wikipedia has made Britannica less accessible. Wikipedia is not just a new competitor, it has changed the environment.
Part III: Lingerie
The funniness of the reviews of the 3 wolf t-shirts is mainly communal. Enjoyable by participants. You see it everywhere,. But that’s not the potent stuff.
The potent stuff is when people try to create civic value not just communal value. One of the best examples of this right now is a site called patientslikeme.com. It’s trying to get people who share the same symptoms to come together and document those symptoms n obsessive detail.
This flies in the face of the U.S. health care industry. Site has openness philosophy. They tell users that we believe if we share our symptoms doctors will be able to find cures faster. If we hold info private we lose potential for public good. It will fail if they don’t change U.S. health care culture. The argument is for the co-creation of public good.
Last January, Hindu fundamentalist group went out and attacked women drinking in bars. Attacks were photographed and videotaped and the group said they will enforce how we think women should ask. if you’re a woman you can go out and defy or you can stay home … or you can start a Facebook group called the association of outgoing forward and loose women. Thousands joined. They mailed pink panties to the head of this group. The effect on the politics was remarkable because one there was clear there were women acting as a group then the state acted and arrested the members of this group.
We would like the state to do the right thing on behalf of citizens. What the FB group did was demonstrate there was enough of a constituency that the state should care.
2007 Kenya elections. Blogger needing help documenting act of violence. Two developers created Ushahidi.com. It places acts of violence on a map. It was better at getting information and predicting information. The site has gone global. Takes what the whole group knows and taking it into a shared doc.
Pakistan kids, tied of Pakastani government, we’re going to show up in market streets and clean up every Sunday. Started FB page. They kept coming back and others started going in. It’s positive deviance. Deviating from social norms in a positive way.
Today we have tools that promote sharing. Previously it was all about sharing in small groups. Intrinsic motivation seemed to go hand in hand with small projects: little things for love. And now the link between intrinsic motivation and public action were accidental.
Today the number of people who can put something into the social sphere is abundant (where as before it was excluded to a class of jobs such as publishers). Today you can do big things for love. We are creating opportunities for each other that bring motivations into the public sphere that increase
This is the big opportunity: How much value can we get of public sharing?

Our world is fundamentally messed up. The Internet and technology is going to be the only way we can change some of the problems that we have. We’ve spent our lives focusing on technology that makes us more efficient but that doesn’t necessarily make things better. It just makes things brittle. It makes things complex.
The only way to deal with complexity is with a decentralized system like the Internet. “Non-linear complexity.”
Book, The Age of the Unthinkable, Joshua Ramo: fixing requires non-linear change.
There’s a lot of ingenuity in the people who have the ideas, these are the things that give me hope. People are willing to make sacrifices and lifestyle changes that people don;t expect. We need to own the problems.
There is an interesting field called positive deviance which is to find those few people who for some reason aren’t disfunctional. You focus on those people and try to amplify that. It’s like hacking. Rather than top down centrally planned approach.
IN order for us to create bottom up solutions is to empower people financially. It means not giving aid and making people dependent. Second, you have to give people voice. These two things are the nuts and bolts of social change.
The Internet is my religion. Free and open source software has really lowered the cost of doing things which lowers the cost of failure which increases innovation.
The stack: Creative Commons, W3C, the Internet. It allows people to participate without asking permission. Keeps everything low cost and available. They create interoperability. Not until TCIP until you can connect stuff for free.
Right now we use governments and such to come up with standards. But really it’s “small pieces loosely joined.”
We also have meta-data to be aware of copyright license.
The White House uses Creative Commons. Wikipedia converted last year to CC. Aljazeera uses it, NIN.
Success of West Coast is because they are far away from government and they were left to do what they wanted on their own.
Almost all open source projects are failure but because it is so low you can try all of these things. But if you’re IBM the cost is high.
There isn’t an idea you shouldn’t be able to prototype on a week. It takes the power away from the investor. You can get lift off before you take anybody’s money.
Example:
-Global Voices: network of bloggers, provides voice of people in those regionsWitness-Ushahidi: allow sms on web, can report incidents and aggregate-Meetup-Architecture of Humanity: in any field if you figure out a way to share it and open up-The Girl Effect (Nike)-Lulan: for-profit social venture, fighting human trafficking, used weaving and dying and then sells stuff; woman is making more money than the man and is not sold off for money-Mozilla drumbeat: How do you teach open source?

Today is a short day. I am presenting at an off-SXSW event in the morning and then leaving early since my son has been sick. Here are the two panels I will be attending today:
11: Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing Human Nature and Digital Data, Clay Shirky
2: Systems Design and Inspiration, Sunday Keynote with Valerie Casey
Btw, I would love to attend this, I think it will be good:
Web of Things, Connecting People and Objects on the Web (9:30)

Description:
We’ve entered The Last Days of Media. Traditional publishers’ economics can’t stand up against the overwhelming volume of new content and ad inventory being manufactured by the likes of blogs, Facebook, Myspace, Craigslist et al. What will New York City and the nation look like without the New York Times?
Search for comments on twitter at #mediaarmaggedon

Presenters:
Greg Beato – Reason Magazine
Markos Moulitsas – Daily Kos
Amy Langfield – NewYorkology LLC
David Carr – NY Times
Henry Copeland – Blogads.com

If the Times ceased to exist how would you feel about it?

Markos: There is a lot of criticism that is misconstrued that they go away. People want the Times to do their jobs. We want traditional media outlets to do their jobs but the decline is because we have lost faith.

If the Times were to disappear would the bloggers be able to step in?
Amy: No. It’s not as thought there are only bloggers. NY has a lot of other newspapers and newsmakers. Can’t just crowdsource. Who is out there with all of the resources?

Do you see Gawker filling your role?
Dave: I see Gawker moving toward us. But parts of the ecosystem are growing new muscles and competing with us. But we need deeper information and across interests. Also online is not necessarily as accountable.

Mark: In the Palin story crowdsourcing worked, people debunked the story. It goes beyond politics, people live and breath the topic.

Dave: Problem is we can’t wave and balance agendas. When you assemble bits from everywhere you don’t know what it’s attached to.

Mark: We have to build a case because we have to prove ourselves.

Amy:Dirt bomb at Grand Central on Twitter example; no attribution.

Greg: The condition is not that we are running out of news but that we need to make sense of it. The NYT is making sense of it.

Mark: Most impeccable sources can be wrong, people have to become more savvy consumers.
Dave: I don’t believe that journalism should be kept away from people or that they can’t do what I do. If you wipe out the Times there’s going to be a long gap between certain types of reporting are going to grow up. I think it’s good that everybody has something to shoot at.