MixedRealities

This video is not new, in fact I learned on Wikipedia that the Nokia Morph concept was unveiled in February 2008. It’s pretty amazing stuff, but then again, the morphing is meant to show what might be possible. “Some” of the imagined features could become reality by 2015. The video popped up again on Facebook – maybe it’s just Nokia trying to enhance a high tech image while the company suffers from the very real world Apple and Android competition.

Anyway, it was the first time I saw the video and I thought I should share it here, because at least it makes us realize what disruptive changes we should expect in the years to come.

This device concept showcases some revolutionary leaps being explored by Nokia Research Center (NRC) in collaboration with the Cambridge Nanoscience Centre (United Kingdom) nanoscale technologies that will potentially create a world of radically different devices that open up an entirely new spectrum of possibilities.

Roland Legrand

The residents of the virtual world Second Life have been breathlessly following the events around the Emerald viewer. There are some lessons to be learned here for open collaboration projects, for instance for the Liquid Newsroom.

The Emerald Case

For those who don’t follow Second Life or the Emerald issue, here is a brief summary. Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, allows third parties to develop and distribute their own user interfaces for the virtual world, called viewers.

Emerald is a very successful third party viewer, developed by a group of avatars. I say avatars, because they are only known under their avatar identities.

Everything seemed to go very well, yet another example of how beautiful Second Life is, with its staggering user-generated production. Until one of the avatar-developers launched something which for Linden Lab was nothing less than a denial-of-service attack. The attack was served through Emerald.

Linden Lab entered negotiations with the avatar-developers, asking for some of them to leave the development team.  One of them refused so it seems that the project will be terminated. You can find abundant coverage of the Emerald case on the New World Notes.

One interesting quote from Wagner James Au on that blog:

With so many reversals and free-floating avatar names associated with this whole drama, it’s all become irrelevant. Somewhat ironically, the only party I trust at this point is Linden Lab, because, you know, it’s an actual company with actual names. With avatar-to-avatar trust so thoroughly broken in this case, I highly recommend you do the same.

And yes, I know by Internet standards, Keyboard Cat is an old meme. But I still find it funny. In any case, the assumption that anonymous Second Life avatar identities are as trustworthy as real ones is also an old meme (just here, hardly as humorous.)

Which introduces us to one of the more fascinating aspects of this case: the anonymity.

Credibility and collaboration

All this made me think about our collaborative news project “the liquid newsroom” and the issue of credibility. Suppose you’ve an international project, like running a story how a multinational company behaves in various places on the planet. Could one of the collaborators be known only by a (eventually funny but not necessarily authentic) Twitter name? What if that person contributes essential information which is for instance damaging for the company involved, without the editors knowing whether she actually checked the facts? What if the editors really have to rely on the information and have no means to go out and check for themselves?

Social media are a package, and often help us to identify people pretty well (especially if people want to be identified). I think persons in collaborative news projects should be identified, using profile pages on social networks, email and video interviews. They should at least be identified by their colleagues on the team. If they don’t want to be identified they can still contribute, but their information should be double-checked by the editorial team (whose members would have to identify each other).

If we want to be taken seriously with our social media and open collaboration, we have to think about identification and issues of legal responsibility. Suppose your collaborative platform runs a story, produced by various contributors, what would happen if something goes very wrong? Is it only the (hopefully identifiable) contributor who would be legally challenged, or the whole team (for instance for not checking the identity of the contributor or for accepting too easily the challenged coverage)?

It seems some legal advice is required here. All this may seem straightforward, but in fact it is no longer. We don’t talk here about journalists meeting each other physically in a newsroom, but about a geographically very dispersed team, interacting through social media – people who often never met each other face to face. It even is not that obvious which law would be applicable.

Checking the identities of those involved would be a necessary first step, at least for projects where it is quite conceivable that people could harm others, and at least for those who take responsibility for the collaboration.

Roland Legrand

The adventure of what I like to call the virtual newsroom or virtual media company continues: today Steffen Konrath published a Manifesto, prior to finding a business model (please follow the link for the complete Manifesto). Konrath:

The Liquid Newsroom Project explores the virtualization of corporate structure as an answer to today’s problems: “cooperation” in context of today’s challenges expects people to cross (territorial) boundaries of language, national and corporate interests. Boundaries create inefficiencies of how we can make use of our talents and gifts.  (contextual adaptiveness).

It’s a very radical approach, applying process thinking on newsrooms and journalism: “the content is triggered by events and interest of the people and not by purpose of keeping a company alive.”

In my opinion, this means that it is quite possible that the news team changes its composition in function of the events and missions. It’s more like making a movie: people finding each other in a creative process working on a certain project, and then going their way and applying for another project or starting a project of their own. This is very different from a traditional newsroom, where people stick together for years (which also has it’s advantages of course).

While the Manifesto says that  the free flow of news is essential (at least one route of news distribution should be free of charge), it is also made clear that we’ll need a commercial model to operate the platform.

So there are several important things to be done now, like suggesting business models and technical platforms. The discussion happens now on the News3.0 blog and on the #liquidnews Twitter feed. Things we’ll need are

- a content management system

- a chat room

- a forum

- a work list and project tracker

- a wiki

- social bookmarks

- a content aggregator to keep track of the distributed discussions

- of course I think it would be useful to have regular meetings in Second Life (which would add a very important informal discussion and meeting element).

So, just follow the #liquidnews to see how things develop, and don’t hesitate joining in!

Roland Legrand

In my previous post I mentioned briefly how in a “virtual company” the marketplace actually enters the company instead of staying exterior to it. Ideally, this means the end of bureaucracy.

Thinking this over as a financial journalist I do realize that the world is dominated by corporations and state institutions (or even non-profit organizations) which are still dominated by bureaucracy and even seem to need it in order to avoid total chaos. So is this “virtual company” just a techno-libertarian fantasy?

Alan Murray in The Wall Street Journal seems to give these strange ideas a lot of credit in his article The End of Management. Well, not exactly the end maybe, as he also says “Corporate bureaucracy is becoming obsolete. Why managers should act like venture capitalists”…

The big corporation is a product of the age of Henry Ford, the mass-production and consumer society. Murray says that famous managers had to fight management-as-bureaucracy in order to innovate. Murray:

Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.

This, of course, is what we see on a daily basis: small start-ups challenging the incumbent players, and succeeding. Industries like the media which are baffled by changes such as the internet. It’s not that those corporations did not see it coming, the often saw it among the very first – but they were unable to change. One of the management experts quoted in the article explains that managers tend to overinvest in what is, as opposed to what might be.

Start-ups have no “what is” to invest in, they focus on what might be. Smart corporations try to combine the stability of bureaucracy and the drive of start ups, like Google allowing employees to spend 20 percent of their time on their own ventures.

It is not just a matter of adapting and innovating, but also of engagement. How are companies supposed to keep the Millennial Generation interested and motivated? Playing around with 3D game-like tools won’t be enough. Murray:

Traditional bureaucratic structures will have to be replaced with something more like ad-hoc teams of peers, who come together to tackle individual projects, and then disband.

All of which seems to be very close to the LiquidNews and the LoveMachine projects mentioned in the previous post.

Roland Legrand

Suppose you want to start up a newsroom of your own, but you don’t have the money to hire employees and to pay the rent for some fancy office space. Suppose you want to experiment with new, immersive story-telling techniques, but you lack employees, offices etc. Or suppose you are a company running a virtual world and having to cut back costs.

What would you do? Chances are that you would look for collaboration. You’ll have to negotiate as you go. Maybe you’d feel a bit unhappy about this, once you’re no longer part of the known world of corporate entities and traditional labor relationships. But then again you could be among the pioneers exploring what eventually will become the new normal.

LoveMachine

In a previous post I wrote about how Linden Lab becomes a bit more like LoveMachine, which applies extremely open procedures and for instance enables developers to bid for very specific jobs. Visiting the worklist, the connected Twitter feed and the live workroom of the LoveMachine is an eye-opener.

The principles of the LoveMachine which guide the product – a kind of human resources evaluation system – and the making of the product are called the Tao of  LoveMachine. On a more theoretical level I’d like to add that the whole principle is integrating a market thinking in the project itself. While traditional management turns companies into islands which have to survive on a market – while having a bureaucracy inside the firm – the new thinking tends to install the market also inside the project.

I do realize there are quite some people rejecting this whole LoveMachine thinking. They blame the original version of it to have crippled Linden Lab. Or they attack it on more ideological grounds, considering it a kind of techno-communist monster which is even worse than the traditional management methods. The more down to earth critique could be that the new LoveMachine is just a way to organize cheap labor.

Liquid News

Yet it seems a realistic and innovative way to organize new projects which otherwise simply would not be possible. Have a look at this project, which is still very early stage, of the Liquid Newsroom: for a paper.li version of the #liquidnews feed go to http://paper.li/tag/liquidnews, for blogposts by Steffen Konrath about his project go to News3.0.

Konrath about his liquid newsroom:

A liquid newsroom would challenge the constant of space (the site) and organizational form (the editors involved, the publication etc.). Instead of a given organisational type (a publication, newspaper, blog, etc.) the news site (not page!) will come into existence the time someone decides to open a topic. “Liquid” like liquid design means that the topic will determine place, team and time and not vice versa.

So I would open a liquid newsroom topic by simply activating a (to be build) liquid platform. The system will create a new bubble in the visual topic landscape (“new topic”), so that it can be discovered by readers. In the meantime after the topic site was created other journalists decided to join the team in order to fill it with content. This liquid team will be the “editorial board” of the topic site. It may change over time, but it is not limited to any specifically dedicated teams (=traditional newsrooms). It is flexible enough so that people can cooperate spontaneously.

So far my basic outline. Now back to the starting point: it is a call to participate.

I would like to start an experiment with my readers & Twitter followers to start an open innovation project on a global level to develop such a concept using social media tools and simply our connectedness.

The Liquid Newsroom will not only be a virtual concept I would like to develop with a global connected community, it shall also become a reality. Via the same mechanisms I would like to seek the geeks to code it and the financial funding to make it happen.

You can participate in the discussion, simply by using the #liquidnews on Twitter. While writing this post, I mentioned the LoveMachine in the Liquid News feed and Konrath sent a tweet to @lovemachineinc. So while people may hesitate to announce and discuss business projects publicly, they miss out on going that much faster and finding partners.

Maybe Liquid News will fail. Or maybe it’ll take a very different form. The same applies for the LoveMachine – but then again, the cost of failing is much smaller compared to what it was just before the dotcom crash, and the more projects we have, the more we’ll learn.

Roland Legrand

John ‘Pathfinder’ Lester recommended in his keynote for the Second Life Community Convention reading Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End and that’s what I’m doing now. Tweeting about this book I got a reaction by Raph Koster, telling me to also read Halting State by Charles Stross.

I will try to read both books as a pair. They deal with issues which fascinate everyone who is interested in massively multiplayer online role-playing games, virtual environments and augmented reality, but they are also creepy (as Prokofy Neva said in another tweet) because they point to the dangers of totalitarianism,terrorism, mankind creating so much ubiquitous technological power that some crazy individuals can commit horrible acts of mass destruction.

That’s what interests me about this literature: it’s not about some highly imaginative situation thousand years from now, but about possible near futures. While offering compelling narratives, the authors audaciously extrapolate what is already going on, helping us to step back and see the bigger context of what we’re doing.

I’m considering starting up a reading group in Second Life and on other social platforms about Rainbows End and Halting State. If you’re interested, just let me know.

Roland Legrand

I love my iPad – I used it all the time at the Second Life convention, for tweeting, looking up stuff and blogging. One of the reasons I love it is that it’s a great device for watching video. Some mainstream media integrate video very nicely into their iPad applications. However, it seems that all this slickness comes at a price: The conversation with the people formerly known as the audience is often non-existent. It seems that the potentially-messy-but-genuine conversation with the community is being shifted to Facebook and Twitter.

The iPad (and similar products) is potentially a disruptive device, empowering people to publish not just blog posts or status updates but also their own books and magazines, as the example of Flipboard demonstrates. There is a danger, however, that traditional media won’t understand this and will revert to its old ways by producing slick end products that broadcast without actually engaging in a conversation.

You can see this tendency at work online in the videos produced by newspapers. Yes, you can (often) embed their videos, share them on Twitter and Facebook and via email. But often you can’t participate in a discussion about the video. Sometimes you can’t even leave a comment. Too little effort is being made to evaluate and integrate interactive and community aspects into video.

For example, have a look at the impressive video production on WSJ.com. The videos are well done, but the integration of community interactivity is underwhelming. We’re struggling with this at my own newspaper as well, but we’re in the process of applying some solutions.

I listed ten solutions on my MediaShift blog, going from the seemingly self-evident (using blogs or wikis to get community input) to the more adventurous (using Second Life, or other techniques mentioned in a previous post- and in the comments on that post – about immersive journalism).

I must admit that for now, I hesitate using Second Life for my own newspaper. Many community members work from behind corporate firewalls and are not likely to ask their IT-departments for an exception. However, we could stream the session in Second Life on the web, and allow for chat on the web (and of course, in-world). But then again, I run a daily chat show now in CoverItLive, with about 700 participants – and it works perfectly well in that text based environment.

Would it really be a good idea to have maybe 5 people attending and interacting in Second Life, while having 690 other people on the web? You should know that the daily chat show is not for people who are primarily interested in technology but for those interested in financial markets. My guess is that they are not interested in experimenting with Second Life – they want to exchange ideas about finance, avoiding all technical hassle and focusing exclusively on market topics of the day.

Using social media I often feel that there is a huge gap between those interested in finance and those interested in technology – for those who want to discuss financial markets, the tools which work are traditional blog posts, text chat, and eventually embedded and curated Twitter feeds.

I look forward to any suggestions or comments, preferably on my MediaShift blog so as to keep an easy overview of the discussion.

Roland Legrand

The Linden Second Life viewer goes open source and it seems that Linden Lab is adopting some of the radical methodologies used by CEO Philip Rosedale in his LoveMachine venture. At the Second Life Community Convention in Boston Linden Lab announced sweeping changes in their development policies.

CEO Philip Rosedale had already announced that the iterations of crucial software would go faster. A Linden panel with Scott Lawrence, Sarah Hutchinson and Kent Quirk on Sunday underlined that the development of new versions of the Second Life viewer will happen in the open, with public documentation and lots of preparatory consultation.The developers will use the  Scrum framework and maintain a public list of things to be done and of things external  edevelopers are invited to do.

The mainline viewer changes it’s license to LGPL. This makes the code to be used with less licensing issues by others.

The Linden team said to be very dedicated on accessibility, and these features are in the backlog. The backlog will be available this week. More in general Oz Linden asked the Second Life residents to consider themselves stakeholders, to show up at office hours provided avatars have something intelligent to say and refrain from flaming. Community members insisted that residents should be included in the Scrum teams.

The new approach would make it possible to take back features of third party viewers in the main viewer, until now the cycles were too long to do this effectively. The presentation by the Linden team was very dynamic and engaged – Q Linden participating from a rehabilitation unit, recovering from a stroke.

The approach reminds me of the recent LoveMachine project of CEO Rosedale which applies extremely open procedures and for instance enables developers to bid for very specific jobs. It seems Rosedale is radically changing the inner workings of the Lab, pushing it in the direction of very open and public development procedures and making intensive use of social media such as blogs, wikis and virtual meetings. The participants at the convention reacted in general very positively.

My take: on Saturday I had a bit the feeling Linden Lab was regressing in time. The road map makes sense, but where were the visionary aspects? Mesh imports are interesting and necessary, but what about the new mobile platforms, what about the iPad? Philip Rosedale was very cautious, speaking about “experiments” but not much more. Today, Sunday, it seemed the visionary Lab was back again, reaching out to the community, opening up proceedings, asking for active participation. Maybe they should go even further and integrate residents in the development teams, but there are many teams and the Lab promises they will reach out to the residents for the specific stuff they work on.

Maybe I’m too optimistic here, but I got the feeling Rosedale is doing something far more radical then I realized until a few hours ago.

Roland Legrand

Some first impressions after the first day of the Second Life Community Convention:

• CEO Philip Rosedale said that Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, is profitable and on solid footing. My take on it: Linden Lab is a privately held company, so we don’t have the data public companies publish. “Profit” can have various meanings. My guess is that current revenues minus current expenses yields a positive result, but that issues such as the restructuring costs (a third of the employees had to leave the company) and possibly the impact of writing off investments are not taken into account here.
• The Teen Grid will be closed. 16 and 17 year olds will be invited to migrate to the main grid, for the younger groups there is a dialogue with educators in order to find solutions.
• Rosedale embraces mesh, and this will be launched before the end of 2010. This would result in better virtual content and in better performance.
• The roadmap for 2010 includes improved group chat,  smooth region crossings, faster startup, lowest crash rate, more avatars per region, controls on avatar complexitiy, more possibilities for the display of names, the viewer AutoUploader, open source development. More in general Second Life must become “fast, easy and fun”. Rosedale said he does not mean by this that Second Life should become like World of Warcraft, but more like the iPhone – delivering a more delightful experience.
• Rosedale is interested in having Second Life on a device such as the iPad, but it’s too soon to include this in the roadmap.
• Doug Thompson delivered the other keynote of the day. Instead of talking about fast, easy and fun like Philip does, he prefers “faster, easier and more fun” while saying that worlds such as Second Life are also challenging, transformative, identity-shaking, frustrating, spiritual and erotic. He confronts Second Life with the average web experience. My take on this: I can only agree, see my previous post.

Both keynotes were very rich in content and I’ll come back on the topics Philip and Doug discussed.

What about the future of Second Life? It seems that the road map is about delivering a better experience for those who already are believers in Second Life – I don’t think that it will result in a dramatic growth of active new users. Fundamentally Second Life is about exploration and adventure, and that takes time. It’s not about finding practical information or news in a fast and easy way, it’s not about keeping contact with people you already know or about accumulating impressive numbers of followers. It’s about taking your time and deep engagement, and that is not what the mainstream public looks for on the internet. This being said, I’d be happy if Second Life would succeed in expanding its active user base, even if that growth would be slow.

You can find my tweets on mixed_realities.

Roland Legrand

A new Draxtor Despres machinima about the Second Life movie Life2.0 (I’m sure we’ll talk about it during the Second Life Convention, this weekend):

The interviews with members of the audience are interesting, especially the comments why they’re not in Second Life. It seems it’s too difficult to navigate and that it takes too long to get registered and up and running.

Those arguments are not new of course, but they continue to puzzle me – personally I find it harder to understand the complexities of Facebook and iTunes. In my humble opinion it’s also a matter of motivation: you try to master iTunes and Facebook because it’s pretty obvious why you want to go there, while entering Second Life is more like an open-ended adventure.

The problem of Second Life goes beyond that particular virtual world. It’s about how people use the internet. The internet experience is still very much a web-experience in which everything is supposed to go very fast. Spending a few minutes on the same site is considered a huge success for that site.

Gaining access to a service should be instantaneous etc. While the fact that the web provides very fast information and connections is very good, the challenge is how to use the web for more in-depth, immersive experiences.

Roland Legrand