View a sampling of V.I. work online.

At the beginning of a meeting there might be a long horizontal paper unrolled across the wall. Eileen would, from start of meeting, begin sketchhng out words, clouds, little people, relationships, all the way thru the end of the meeting. These murals served as conceptual records of the meetings — embedding not only ideas, but interrelationships. Particularly relevant to NextNow was her Engelbart mural, viewable on VisualInsight.net

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This is what I’d call a state of inquiry, in which one discards any pretense of sophistication and critism, and simply observes — takes in all aspects of what is happening, and reserves judgment and critique.

It’s actually akin to the state of mind that works best when you’re first viewing a film. You observe a lot, but initially there’s limited information, so an approach in which you let it all flow in and hold your judgments ’til later can be the best strategy.

I think Bill’s approach is often similar. At least at the beginning, before sparking a conversation, he often puts people together with no detailed plan for outcomes, and basically makes or “holds the space” for something to happen. He makes the introduction — and lets it go from there. You can be sure he doesn’t do it randomly — there’s always some hint — but it leaves plenty of space for exploration.

Wish I could give you concrete examples. In my case there some fuzzy cases. My professional life has been in Computer Science. But it has been often at the fuzzy edge of what used to be called “man-machine” interfaces or communication. It meant working in 3D visualization, data visualisation, “art” to some degree, and ultimately with Digital Audio Workstations and the composition of music. Along the way various NextNow events included people with interesting ideas and projects that influenced my work — and for sure influenced it visually.

PS: For the 2015 events, I just now found the third page link, so March,  April and May are now all accounted for.

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Tonight I sit and share with you my thoughts about our friend who we sometimes call “Mr Human Glue” who has played a creative and interesting role in our lives. At least in mine.

How I Came to It

Way back in the 1970s I created a technology project at Northwestern University where we sought to introduce and experiment with online communication and education. As a young professor I was into the tech and because we were so far “ahead of the curve” part of my role was to discover and meet other experimenters in related work. At some point a fellow called me up (or wrote on paper!) to say that he had a grant to “call people up and introduce them.” I believe it was an NSF grant. My friend who team-taught a seminar with me — Bob Johansen — and I had some number of such calls, introduced and moderated by this facilitator, and relationships were sparked that went on for decades.

I say that by way of introducing here the concept of “professional introducer.”

Not an entirely new concept, of course, because we know that centuries ago artists had studios where they worked together and often novel ideas arose, musicians and intellectuals had salons, and the univeersity concept certainly served to cross-polinate (ccompared to guilds and trades).

Bob and I had done a collaboration at Northwestern — teaming up to create a Seminar on College Teaching (so-named by our Dean Claude Mathis) in which we intentionally brought together graduate students and faculty from many departments, using this mix to spark new ways of viewing and supporting and conducting education (and expanding our use of “distance learning” technologies). (I’ve writen some about this Computers And Teaching project.)

NextNow

So it must have been 2003 — Bill Daul came along (but no recollection of how we met) with his idea to formally bring people together, which he named NextNow, and it was familiar and very natural. I “signed up” immediately. I don’t recall whether NextNow had coalesced around Doug Engelbart already, or not, but early NextNow meetings such as the one at Fort Mason (using World Cafe as its structure – this may have been only the second NextNow meeting) included a wonderfully broad participation from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. I can’t overestimate how many people I met thru those events – they were miraculous. (Also see Engelbart on Wikipedia)

NextNow meetings were held at many venues, though Doug’s house may hold the record, and events held at or with the collaboration of MediaX at Stanford I think were some of the most fruitful.

For a long period – perhaps most of the life of NextNow – operations, events and meetings at The NextNow Collaboratory in Berkley played an underlying structural role and provided more of an ongoing physical presence than the more “itinerant” meetings.

When I decided on a career redirect in 2015 I celebrated by putting together a paroxism of several NextNow meetings in downtown San Francisco (in March then April and May) we used a model we’d been improving over the years – presentations; small groups; re-convene and synthesize. One of many models the group had tried.

In conclusion (of this one note) I want to recognize publicly that Bill’s work as founder and listener-in-chief allowed me, and certainly a number of others, to meet new people and new-yet-connectable ideas, over a period of maybe a couple of decades, that otherwise just might not have happened. And there was often a special synergy when people “collided” from disparate disciplines.

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I’ve already remarked on some predictions I made in 1973, including working from home, email, co-working spaces and online community access to information and learning. There were a lot of people working on these concepts in the 1970s. Many people had these and similar ideas, and much of the work presaged today’s online educational and social media. My personal focus was on communication in education, and my work involved using a supercomputer (and later a minicomputer) as a hub for education and distance-independent group communication.

Notable among those I interacted with

Community computing—People’s Computing Company (Bob Albrecht) in Menlo Park. Resource One (Lee Felsenstein) on Howard in San Francisco. Whole Earth Store (Rich Green) in Evanston (and Berkeley).

Computer conferencing—Murray Turoff (New Jersey Institute of Technology and formerly the Office of Emergency Preparedness). NSF project managers.

Networks—Doug Engelbart and team (Stanford Research Institute, SRI). I was at Doug’s lab he day they connected to the “Arpanet.”

(There’s a whole additional thread of people who worked in computer-based-education, which I’ll write up later.)

Resource One

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A “backdoor” is a mechanism that allows a service provider or government to access the contents of a system without knowing users’ passwords and without their knowledge. It is essentially a universal key that opens everything.

We hear government officials crying out that this is the only way they can protect the nation against attack. In other words, the government wants to have universal access to every electronic communication, or we will all die in flaming terrorist attacks.

So just why is this the stupidest idea in the world?Well it’s so incredibly stupid because it is impossible to guarantee that a “universal key” that decrypts everything can be kept secret. The government’s argument make it sounds like there’s a little physical key (like a little golden metallic key, let’s say) that could be kept safe in a place like Fort Knox and only brought out when needed. And yes, would be separate keys or processes for each provider or company (one for Apple, one for Dell, one for AT&T, one for Facebook) But encryption does NOT rely upon physical keys—that’s a dangerous argument.

There would be additional processes and safeguards on these keys, but essentially once a key is figure out, an entire company, entire industry, entire set of encryption processes, could be compromised.

With encryption, the  key is a sequence of numbers. You don’t have to break into a vault and “steal” the key to have universal access — you just have to figure out what the key is, even independent of the guys who created it in the first place, and once you figure it out, you’re in and you have access to everything—past, present, future.

Here are some common-sense reasons why this just can’t possibly work:

1. If someone were to find a way to independently generate or figure out the key(s), they’d be able to read every encrypted message ever created. (It’s a bit more complex than this, but it’s close.)
2. The key(s) would immediately become the target of every foreign government’s security services. If one of them discovered the key (stole it, recreated it, hacked an easier way of duplicating it), you’d probably not know. Just suddenly everything would become transparent to them.
3. Crooks will immediately attempt to discover the secret key(s). Don’t underestimate these guys. They are superb hackers and they have many millions of dollars to spend working on this. They might succeed.
4. It’s even easier, however. The key(s) would be stored somewhere on computers. If crooks could hack into that computer, they could probably extract the key.
5. A disgruntled government employee might release the key(s). Think about Edward Snowden if you want to argue that any government anywhere is really capable of keeping everything secret all the time, and forever.
6. Once the key is “out” it’s out forever. There’s no calling it back. (There could be mitigating circumstances on this one, but it would still be a terrible meltdown.)
7. The key(s) doesn’t affect just crooks and terrorists. It would also affect commercial transactions, banking, credit cards, stock markets … in short everything that depends upon encryption could be compromised if the key(s) were hacked.
8. Oh, and public key encryption has existed for years. If the government were to require that in the future there be backdoors for universal decryption, any of the existing encryption systems (which would not have backdoors) could continue to be used. (As far we we know there is no universal key for today’s systems.)
9. You know the phrase “If guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns.” Well if commercial operators are required to provide the government with backdoors into their systems, you can be sure that outlaws will not, and from then on, only the outlaws will have secure communications.

Convinced yet?

Is that enough? Do you trust any government to do this, let alone to understand the magnitude of this Pandora’s Box?

[1] Interesting Infoworld article about this.

[2] Problems with backdoors Infoworld article

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You know, in programming (which I do a lot of), there are often little gotchas that require hours or days to figure out. And once you’ve figured them out, it’s easy to forget them if you immediately move on to the next challenge. Working at the level I do, which often requires typing command-line stuff, I’d never remember this stuff character by character unless I used it every day.

For instance, I was exporting a French blog database today (from MySQL), which has lots of é and ï and ç and ô characters in it. These have always given me trouble, because when you’re migrating a MySQL database from one server to another, and you don’t export and import them properly, they just don’t come through as the proper accented characters.

To do it right I’d have to remember this line:

mysqldump  –user=mylogin -p –opt mydbname -r myfile.sql

Now, given the hundreds of different things I do every day, week after week, how would I remember that one?

Jerry’s Brain

Jerry Michalski uses a notable tool —theBrain— to hold links to info and organize it for exploration. He may have the most extensive theBrain in the world, having used the software for more than 15 years. He has a quick introduction to his brain on his Rexpedition site. You can also watch Jerry talk about his brain (30-minute video … breaks all attention span rules).

An (External Memory) Podcast

One of my favorite podcasts is Big Picture Science from Team SETI. On January 20th, 2014, they did a nice cast on how human and computer memory is progressing. The Forget to Remember episode is worth listening to.  And this is a podcast you might like to subscribe to!

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