devlog

I came to Thorstein Veblen for his theories of systems economics; but I stayed for his theory of women’s fashion. It’s a kicker, and the short version goes something like this:

In “barbarian” societies, the difference between a “leisured” class and a “working” class whose labour supports it, came down along gender lines. What was classified as “women’s work” was menial, proto-industrial production - ignoble maintenance work. The earliest form of “ownership” was not ownership of goods, but ownership of *people* - specifically “an ownership of the woman by the man”, at first in form of tribal trade or trophy.

From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry. Later, given a superfluity of subsistence goods, it becomes a mark of success to display leisure - non-productive consumption of time. The busywork of housewives is an extension of this display of “vicarious leisure”. Women’s fashion is designed to illustrate and advertise disutility, lack of or impedance from practical function. Thus Veblen:

To apply this generalization to women’s dress, and put the matter in concrete terms: the high heel, the skirt, the
impracticable bonnet, the corset, and the general disregard of the wearer’s comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized women’s apparel, are so many items of evidence to the effect that in the modern civilized scheme of life the woman is still, in theory, the economic dependent of the man — that, perhaps in a highly idealized sense, she still is the man’s chattel.

All this changed, right? Veblen wrote “The Theory of the Leisure Class” in 1899. Since then, there have been two big bursts of gender equality legislation. There are no formal education or economic impedances to women acting in society.

Yet the visible dictates of women’s fashion haven’t changed. The forces of flux that Veblen was scratching his head over 108 years ago, left
“unanswered the question as to the motive for making and accepting a change in the prevailing styles, and it also fails to explain why conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be“.

This sudden interest in fashion is not just abstract. I enjoyed spending half-an-hour browsing the archives of “The Sartorialist“, a photoblogger who stops stylish people on the street and takes pictures of them. Sometimes the pictures are accompanied by notes explaining why the picture was taken, which I enjoy because they illustrate the precision and minute detail of the photographer’s approach towards mens’ fashion.

The pictures of men are mostly about small variations on a set of rules. The arrangement of shapes and tones, the tiny rulebreaking details, allow people to appear stylish but not garish - to seem confident, relaxed, dressed in themselves. The pictures of women mostly look like dolls. The latest weird shapes, layers, very distinctive pieces and composites. They mostly seem self-conscious and nervous in outfits “displaying a general disregard for the wearer’s comfort”.

I wound up reading Veblen because of “The Rebel Sell“, a book whose analysis is influenced by the workings of his theory of “conspicuous consumption”. The book has a chapter covering the “countercultural” perspective on a media debate in Canada at the time, about school uniforms, and how the removal of them from public schools encourages a neurotic hyper-fashion-sensitivity amongst younger people that is heavily exploited by the fashion market.

Perhaps teenagers are the best explainers of “why conformity to a given style at a given time is so imperatively necessary as we know it to be”. An article in the “USA Today” on the plane to Canada offered a fourteen-year-old girl’s commentary on why she had held off shopping for “Back to School” clothes until a few weeks into the school year; to see what everyone else was wearing, because “you don’t want to be wearing the same thing as 12 other girls… but you don’t want to stick out too much.”

When i need a new piece of clothing, i go to that big Swedish chain that has a store on every High Street in Western Europe. It is very economical and i can usually find something to wear in there. This will take half an hour of filtering through plunging necklines, decorative frills, thin fabrics, and colours and cuts that are just too distinctive and “now” - that don’t guarantee more than one “season” of wear, because the clothes will appear so “last season” after that. If i go looking for anything specific, such as a plain-coloured long-sleeved t-shirt, i am guaranteed not to find it.

I recently went to this store with a male friend. In the menswear section there was a rack of exactly the kind of sturdy, long-sleeved t-shirt i was looking for and couldn’t find. The shirt came in a broad palette of colours, and a range of sizes starting at two sizes too large for me. All around, there is the ruleset, with subtle variations. The fabrics are heavier, for more wear; the styles are simpler, more practical.

Is it possible that women can be advertising their own disutility, their own propensity to leisure? Why is women’s fashion so overfocused on display and on differentiation?

A “Rebel Sell” analysis of fashion retail would go a bit like this: the “fashion industry” is very overt in its exploitation of the cultural-countercultural feeding cycle. Designers and buyers actively seek out localised tastes which can be capitalised into bigger trends. The fashion industry comes to suffer from a collective action problem. If one organisation develops a popular innovation that its competitors don’t, it will profit at their expense. In order to maintain its place on the High Street, each outlet must maximise volume *and* keep innovating.

Thus the fashion chains’ own urge “not to be the same, not to be different” means both that there is a terrific amount of homogeneity and plagarism between outlets, and that there is a terrific pace of renewal in order not to be out-competed by those producing “the new”. They get locked into an almost literal Keynesian Beauty Contest. A buyer is not looking for what will “suit” women best, be most adaptable to different peoples styles and shapes, or what generally is the most stylish clothing. A buyer will base decisions on their assumptions about what other buyers think is appealing to the market. Collectively, they are not finding style, but for a kind of “homogenous distinctiveness”.

This dynamic reinforces the “rebel sell” bind that their young female customers are in. If they shop on the High Street, at any time the styles across all the outlets are too much “the same”. Meanwhile the kids’ own pursuit of “the different” quickly becomes adapted into “the same”. Those who are really uncomfortable with “the same” are driven to a high level of artificial distinctiveness in dress. The world treats them differently, the experience of reality becomes a constant critical appraisal of dress.

This *isn’t* so far from many people’s experience of reality. Dress has amazing power and helps define peer relations and it is infectious. Dress presents a barrier in many social situations (less so, than it did presumably when it was a definite marker of class, when multiple sets of clothes were just unaffordable to many). This is why one ought to dress up smart and neutral to catch plane flights; less interpersonal friction, more knee-jerk politeness.

It bugs me that women’s self-presentation so often looks like a program that reads, “Look at all this wasteful creativity. I am decorative and nervous about it.” It reinforces gender-role-based expectations in such a crass way. But I’ve never found any theories about why this happens that i could buy into before. “Competitive display as a man-catching activity” - just a fantasy. “Collective programming on the part of a repressive, male-dominated industrial fashion complex” - requires too much belief in malicious systemic agency, also an anti-fantasy. “Media/PR manipulation through forced emulation of celebrity icon figures” - possibly, but this comes after the fact of fashion creation and not before.

I liked the Veblen theory because it collapses the problem into economics. It de-sexualises the discussion of women’s dress codes in a way that I find helpful; it is too easy to run into concerns about advertising and pornography, which can be very emotive, obscuring analysis and rendering viewpoints easy to caricature.

But can we now explain why, if the economics have changed, the reality hasn’t? Why does fashion still dictate high heels, constricting skirts, piles of trinkets, long hair - the tokens of economic unfreedom? Business clothing for women remains a natty imitation of male styles, or a vestigial version of the crippling skirt-and-heels outfit.

As observed in the world, it seems to be younger women who dress so self-consciously and most closely to “trends”. Women get older, they and their peer group settle into a personal style, crucially acquire more economic power, more cultural know-how and more personal mobility. The competitive consumerism of “young teens” inspires whole books. But young teenaged people are economically unfree. If we follow Veblen, then the teenaged and younger are economic dependants being used as a conduit for “vicarious leisure” in such a way as domestic servants and housewives were once used.

Thus, very young women remain dressed in the costume of the economically unfree. Lacking their own transport or local knowledge, they get stuck on the High Street where it is very difficult to find anything outside of the group vision of buyers, that homogeneous distinctiveness. Exploration of “the same, but different” becomes harder when the prevailing same is so extreme.

Mandatory school uniform would’t fix this, and might even help propel it. A quota on parents limiting positional spending on their offspring would be good, but sadly unenforceable, as the public sphere can’t get into family matters. A more effective solution would be to send children back to work. From the age of 7 or 8 they could create value a couple hours a day, rather than the crafts busywork they currently do. That would help get them, and all of us, out of the costume of economic unfreedom.

Saul suggested that we run a “Open Social Graph” session at next year’s Open Knowledge Foundation conference. Great! I thought. Hang on, what’s an open social graph?

Bread Fitzpatrick sets out some broad assumptions and goals about this open social graph effort. It’s a reaction to user annoyance at having to recreate a “social network” on different trendy online services that rely on a map of contact lists to spread messages about.

I recalled and exhumed a short essay written a couple of years ago and never really aired, about the forces behind the bubble-and-collapse of social network data sharing during the last major effort to do this, using FOAF at the peak of the Great Social Networking Fad of 2003/4.

Why is it happening again now? The userbase of such services must be many thousandfold what it was at that time; there is more momentum to it, more “added value” now. Perhaps the momentum is caused by a lot of people going into these online services from a “mainstream”; they won’t understand the need to have to “link up” in facebook, and linkedin, and dopplr, to get more access to the presence of overlapping sets of people.

But no-one directly *wants* to get this data out into a more “commons” like environment - it’s just the easiest way of bridging around the gaps. A relatively small and vocal group of people want to make this happen, self-interest is flourishing among them as it does in everyone.

Does anyone seriously want “a thousand new social applications to bloom”? I don’t want to be twittered and doppled and jickled to an early death. I already am involved in more email conversations than i really have the cognitive capacity for. I would much rather have less code, than more. And the prospect that an “open” effort raises, of a blooming of “Mom and Pop” social graph based service hosts is, in more than the short term, a pipe dream or a bad joke.

The underlying structural design looks like it tends to agglomeration, and eventual monopoly or oligarchy. There’s only one Wikipedia, one OpenStreetmap, one Flickr, holding an inexorable momentum over any minor adaptation, spinoff or clone. In real-world business, the kind that accompanies these waves of excitement on the internet, we see a cycle of buyout, burnout, merger, consolidation, buyout…

There’s no reason to believe this will stop. Meanwhile, there is space in this debate about the “identity” of shared descriptions and the terms on which they are shared, to rest for a bit, and not go rushing forward.

I’m not saying “sleepwalking into a surveillance society“, as the UK’s Information Commissioner put it a few years ago; but stop and think. What needs is such an effort really trying to address? What place does much of this information have on the Internet, let alone the Web?

Exposing cleanly another layer of information, rendering it that much easier to hook into other information resources… the pressure in the structural design doesn’t go away. We can “democratise” this layer of “social graph” services all we like, but they will go the way of independent ISPs and free web hosting and email providers, unless we find a way of building them that hasn’t involved papering over the cracks exposed in all the underlying layers. In the meantime I, for one, welcome our Google Social Graph.

For the last year, I had an almost permanent migraine, triggered by light sensitivity. I pushed myself through on ibuprofen and Chinese herbal remedies; recently even those stopped working. I had to stop looking at the laptop screen for a few days; the migraine went away, and I was able to go out in brightly-lit places again.

When I start looking at the screen again, the edge of the migraine kicks in after about 5 minutes. So I’m trying to drastically reduce my online commitments - unsubscribing or switching to digest mode on about 100 mailing lists - reduce the load of volunteer work i’ve been doing for OSGeo and OKFN - prioritise all my actions and communications according to time-sensitive requirements for other people.

I’m somehow enjoying being forced to filter information more. With less input, i have a lot more thinking time. Obliged to work with pen and paper, I’m having fun ideas about paper-based backup systems. Obliged to meet people over VOIP rather than IRC, my voice (quiet, hesitant) is strengthening, and I pick up more of what people need, from their tone. I’ve been having fun talking with Der T about voice-based systems.
But I need to change my work practises completely, and find paper-and-voice based ways of doing what I’m good at. I make a living out of coding, systems analysis, and writing. I can’t do any of this at the screen without causing myself the physical pain which says “now back away from the keyboard”.

I’m finding that it’s both possible and fun to do software systems analysis on paper. The last couple of days I’ve been walking through, on paper, the blabla codebase with T. I have the latest subversion branch printed out, read it through and sorted it into four piles. I call the four piles “Please Make It Stop”, “Laugh or Cry First?”, “So This Is Documentation?” and “I Thought These Things Might Be An Application”. Then we sat down and reinvented CRC cards, where Roles, Goals and Interfaces happen. If it’s not on a postcard, it’s not in the system; if it can’t fit on a postcard, it’s trying to do too much.’

Next comes some literate testing; right before i burned my eyes, i was going through a process like this for the Plex, the software aspect of the 24 days project and the ongoing ESP initiative. I wrote a set of pseudotests to be fleshed out by application developers. These expressed the models in and interfaces of the system.

I’m enjoying casual involvement with the blabla project particularly, because it is a voice collaboration and archiving environment. A lot of the current implementation is crust, but the core design is simple and beautiful. It’s in that semi-stalled state that a lot of software projects get to where they work well enough for the core developers to base work on, but are hard to get into for a newcomer and also suffering from the “second system effect”. The accretion of new features and utilities over an original rapid prototype. Now is a good time to step back, clean up, take some pride and focus on opening up contribution paths to new people. The problem is that the core developers are busy doing commercial work to keep themselves alive. Some kind of sponsorship for release candidature is needed.

What else can i do with myself? I find that writing isn’t as bad for my eyes as reading, so increasingly the internet is becoming for me a write-only medium. I’m interested in finding projects where i can print out a lot of material, do paper analysis notes and perhaps compose summaries and critiques by voice and pay if necessary to get these things transcribed. Late last year I started reading the OGC specifications for the godawful CSW/ebRIM set of standards for expressing metadata about geodata and carrying it around, and making a set of implementation notes. I did this in a fit of pique after being accused of not having a right to slag it off if i wasn’t familiar with all the OGC material, which is actually quite reasonable.

This is the sort of thing i would like to find a syndicated way to work on. A friend expressed interest in contributing support to a research study on geospatial metadata standards and appropriate software, and next-generation / distributed ways of passing data around and re-using it. One would run such a project on a completely open source basis and be able to do it as “sponsorware”, somewhat like copycan works.

This is written partly as an explanation of my status - those people who see a lot of me online will have been aware of my popping up and wailing about screentime aversion for several weeks. If i’m not writing back to your email, it’s because i need to focus my time online as much as i can, and i generally have way too much communication to deal with and mutual promises to others that i am trying to restructure and cut down on. This is also a kind of plea for interesting offers - my situation is a bit unusual, and self-support feels like a whole new game for me now.

The Oyster card is the RFID based payment system for the Tube (subway) network in London. Up until January 2007, i would not allow myself to get an Oyster card. These were my reasons why:

• Price-based access enforcement to collective transport networks is a mistake; public transport should tend to be free. Free-riding behaviour isn’t a negative effect; it forms part of a social safety net. In most European cities, ticketing is basically an ‘honesty system’, in-transit ticket checking is rare, and most people *do* pay. Distrust-by-default is not the behaviour of a system in which i want to live.
• RFID based access systems are a misinvestment - what use are sophisticated demand models for traffic analysis, when the money that should be used to upgrade the network has been spent on access systems? TfL faces many, many millions in hardware and software licensing costs per year, because their tender process was not transparent. Decryption power increases more than exponentially, replication hardware becomes cheaper, and RFID is likely to time out as a ’solution’ within a few years.
• Plain old gut-feeling-ugliness about the fact that all one’s movements are tracked, combined with the same ugliness about the fact that access price is being used punitively to force people either onto the Oyster system, or off it.

This January, TfL put the cash price of a single ticket up to 4 pounds - 6 euros - 8 dollars. I couldn’t sustain the hit any more. I bought an Oyster card for cash. My mother has registered hers, and uses the ATM machine to ‘top up’, just as she uses the ATM to ‘top up’ her phone, because that’s the simplest interface to the system.

These are some things i have noticed.

• Oyster hasn’t fixed one of the core problems it was meant to solve - the queueing problem. In the abstract, queueing problems fascinate me. Instead of a long queue moving quickly, a queue 1/3 the length moves 3 times more slowly per transaction, because the contents of the transaction are more complicated. Most of the ticket machines only accept coins, and now go almost 100% unused; the one machine that will accept debit/credit cards has a queue just as long as it did pre-Oyster. When that machine breaks down, humiliating chaos ensues.
• Oyster is startlingly de-humanising for the people who work inside the systems. Bus drivers in particular are now hidden behind plastic screens. Instead of looking at the passengers, they are looking at the internal CCTV to make sure no-one is getting in the back door. I can’t remember the last time a bus driver met my eyes. There’s no more conversation to have - ‘top me up’ doesn’t lead anywhere, in the way a destination does.
• The technological flaws in the Oyster system have exposed a command-and-control response in the vocabulary that describes the system. There’s no time or room to say ‘please’. One standard message is “Customers Must Touch In And Touch Out, Or They Will Pay The Maximum Cash Fare”. On a typical journey one hears and sees this message at least 6 times. One only needs to get off the DLR, forget to touch out, and get stung for four quid, once, to remember not to do it again. Flaws in the system punish its users, but then they’re being threatened over and over in a way that’s not necessary, because some new users always appear, and there’s no way to filter the messages.
  
  This bugs me in the way that collective live/work spaces covered in little sticky notes telling you what to do or not do, bug me. If a system is covered in little labels telling you how to use and not use it, then there is something wrong with the design. I want to see less words in the world, and better ideas.

I have other reasons to avoid the Tube system. One is that i am very sensitive to the flicker in overhead fluorescent light, and this seems to get worse as i age. I can *feel* my brain fuzz and my mood dip as i walk into a neon lit space. All the lighting on the tube trains is cheap, and the Central line, always the most useful for me, feels especially nasty.

I also feel semantically overloaded by the constant barrage of advertising on the Tube. London has the cleverest and sneakiest advertising industry in the world, and its subjects are advertising’s test subjects. This is nothing new - you can look at pictures of tube stations from the 1930s and there is as much large size advertising then as now. Some advertisers are starting to learn that if you shout at people, they switch off; I see less large vivid text, less oversize pictures of peoples faces and body angles suggesting sex. I find my eyes are drawn to mixed palettes of light natural colours, green/blue, and see many more ads using this scheme now. But then the message fades away; i remember the imagery, but not the product. Display advertising is provably a waste of money, but people do it because it’s easy, and because everyone else does.

So i catch buses to the edge of Zone 1, and i walk, usually for several hours a day. I see weird things being carried out in the open that i never saw before - specifically women being used by men to trap and exploit other men. I see well dressed pretty girls begging at cashpoints, and men coming up to them and issuing them with instructions. The streets around Brick Lane and Kings Cross where a lot of “sex workers” used to hang out, have been “cleaned up”; now i see girls in vests in the freezing cold, standing in groups of four in the traffic island right in the middle of Bishopsgate outside Liverpool Street station, in full view of CCTV, with a man watching from a car on the other side of the road.

At these times I do not know what to do. I stop and take a long hard look, and then i walk on, aching inside and helpless to help. I design systems, model networks and make map-making tools; I am not a street crusader. A lot of public agencies claim to ask for my comments and suggestions, but feedback is a two way street, that’s only being driven down one way. I want to help fix London, but i don’t know where to start, and i think i’m just going to run away.

Wrote this a few months ago and forgot about it. Is scrappy, but a decent preface to the next post on the stack…

I seem unable to see a copy of Aramis without walking off with it. Frumin’s i returned the next day, Shekhar’s copy i half-advertently whisked 3000 miles away from where it needed to be, and now he wants it back; so one last-re-reading, a quick diversion via Berlin, and pronto in the post back to MIT it goes.

I feel strongly that anyone with an interest in public and collective transportation or civic infrastructure planning should read Aramis at least twice. First time round it made me cry, (though now I can’t remember why). The book is a tragical murder mystery; the investigators a grizzly and brown-raincoated academic sociologist and his intern, an optimistic graduate engineer. The victim is Aramis; Aramis is a “Personal Rapid Transit” system conceived in the white heat of the late 60s, and died an ignominious and apparently sudden death in 1987. Of all PRTs that were specified and almost existed, Aramis got the furthest.

It’s a moralising story about how a large scale and visionary infrastructure project failed; a Wodehousian comic story about self-protection and lapses in communication; and a love story about the most misunderstood kind of love, the love of technology. I’m interested in the dynamics of failure, having managed to extrapolate quite a lot from the history of community wireless networking projects in London - but that’s quite a different story.

One driver for my refascination with Aramis is, being back in London, the inevitably increasing angst being experienced here over the state of the Olympic Sacrifice Zone and the lack of open planning process or visible planning progress. 2012 looks every day more likely to be a civic eschaton that affects every London in a way they really notice - in their tax bills and the state of the transport network. Visionary transportation systems comprise a large part of the “Olympic Legacy” rhetoric; everyone, we are told, from spectators to athletes to IOC members, will be taking public transport into and out of the OSZ. There will be bullet trains; all will be multimodal and greenly fueled; this is a glorious future or a tragically collapsing one - the two visions can’t be unentwined.

2012 is a long or short 6 years away, and we’re already starting to see the pre-emptive PR brickthrowing expressed in this children’s rhyme excerpted in Aramis:

Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' la politique,               The political weasel;
Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' la technique.               The technological weasel.
Il est passe par ici                    He came this way,
Il repassera par la                     He'll go back that way.
Il court, il court le furet             The weasel is running,
Le furet d' l'economie,                 The economic weasel.

My experience of Shekhar’s scene at MIT, Columbia and beyond - researchers and theorists in the sociology of technology and planning - is as a retrospective scene (necessarily as it defines itself?) and can be very inward-looking - yet does not inevitably have to be. Has Jack Lemley, Alasdair Darling or Bob Kiley read Aramis? Are planners and engineers exposed to the profound and powerful conclusions arrived at by the sociologists of technology, the Latours, the Harveys and Castells? Or do our planners and our planalysts live in intellectual silos, missing so much learning from each others’ capacities and conclusions?

I want to be able to keep track of others’ tracks. The London Free Map project that got folded into OpenStreetmap originated in our collective GPS walks through the Olympic Sacrifice Zone.

I want the dynamics to be able to be understood; to construct the murder mystery and solve it before it happens - by an open planning process to be able to avert cultural atrocity. Now London is committed, the best we can hope and plan for the Lea Valley and all the networks that its development will effect, is a site that truly works for London.

(These are excerpts from the Catherine Porter translation of Aramis))

That is why the Context is such a bad predictor of the project’s fate, and why the tedious argument over “indivudual freedom” and “the weight of structures” does not allow us to understand Aramis… Where is the freedom of the individual actors? Everywhere, in all the branchings of the context. Where is the structure? Everywhere, traced by all the branchings and relationships of the context. - p155

Anyway, do you really know what the word “metaphor” means? Transportation. Moving. The word metaphoros, my friend, is written on all the moving vans in Greece. -p59

Over the last year I have been intermittently writing poetry. Most of it was produced compulsively while under some influence or other. I recently found that i had assembled enough poems to fill a slim volume. Horrors! But they form a sequence which wraps around and seems ‘complete’. So i put them all into a PDF of terrible poetry written in 2006. I suppose, i would be interested to see if they provoke reactions in anyone.

I’m living in a software-oriented version of that Monty Python sketch that begins, “I’ve come for an argument.” Wilfried always accused me of being a software critic, a term I have resisted in that a critic is not usually understood to also be a practiser. But perhaps it’s an appropriate term for rattling around digging around peoples’ codebases and helping them work out how to refactor and repackag - and most crucially (or critically) to document intent - to expose more of the ongoing working of the design, decision and planning process involved in software development to people who aren’t participating in it (yet).

I am lucky to have the friends i have here in England, this is what keeps me returning here for long spells. I’ve missed out on a long cycle of the KnowledgeForge development process, having spent the last happy year in Cambridge (Mass) writing almost no software. I want to get more involved now; in helping to build the CKAN application. The Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network can be viewed as a data-generic version of the OSGeo metadata repository project, and I think the two will eventually become the same thing for me.

In the meantime, knowledgeforge’s domain model got hived out as a separate project - a meta-model mapping layer that supports SQLObject now, and in future theory a raft of different ORM or OODB backends. It’s a nice project and just needs a dummy application to run tests against, and doc coverage fixing up, to make it really distributable.

I moved my own simple geodata metadata management engine to KnowledgeForge, and my hope for converging it with CKAN is to be able to:

• remove from geometa its direct SQLObject dependency and have it use domainmodel underneath
• remove domainmodel’s django dependency and replace it with the tiny dispatcher / CRUD interface from geometa
• eventually replicate the basic geometry support added to SQLObject in geometa now, in the metamodel part of domainmodel
• slap on OAI-PMH, WFS-Simple, etc, metadata exchange interfaces onto everything in sight.

But this all may have to stay on the back burner for now, because i’ve been approached by Tav to help him make more of ESP now. I’ve been following from a distance the adventures of “The Plex” for years, listening to Tav give presentations at dorkbot or explain to friends some elements of his vision, which taken completely is to replace everything with something better. The Plex is a kind of - a meta-framework, or a meta-architecture. In the way one becomes sick of solving a slightly different looking version of the same problem over and over, Tav’s work is an attempt to solve the meta-problem. (There’s a ring of this in the meta-ness of domainmodel too; and both remind me of my and Schuyler’s old work on the ontomatic and the epistomat. But nobody i know has an epistomat yet, not even me.)

Aside. Why this tendency towards a “framework”? Most of my friends have written one, despite the proliferation that exist. I am programming because I want to solve a meta-problem for any given problem I am working on. I stop programming because I’m bored with solving the same problem over and over. Observably, the framework is a level-of-things that We naturally wind up at. Then Rails induced a lot of people to believe the idea was commercialisable, and there was no holding back.

What constitutes a framework? John refuses to call his work a framework, though it has all the behaviours. Tav proudly calls the PlexNet a framework, though it’s envisaged to do a lot more than that. clkao would refuse to hear the word said in his presence, and insist on referring to a “frame-sausage” throughout conversation./Aside

I didn’t come here to talk about making my own meta-framework - i came here to talk about inventing my own development meta-methodology. Remember Journalling and how simple that was? So that’s one piece in a bricolage of programming practises - writing down as much as possible about why you are doing what you are doing. Another is Test First, rather crashingly so; my mind goes back to the literate programming crowd at eurofoo ‘04 and the talk of Literate Testing that I heard there. Another practise is Death By Diagram- everything gets drawn, if you can’t draw it it doesn’t exist, all this goes in the documentation trail, plus you are generating graphs from the code the whole time and the drawings are keeping you honest about the designs. Another is Be Polite, You Fucker and stresses the importance of not succumbing to unnecessary rages about things because what is the point, life is short and arguing about software should be fun.

In terms of the design process I am trying out thinking of it as “Goals, Roles and Interfaces“. (I think there is a bit of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory in this and reference to the flashcard- and userstory- based social methods of software design from the earlier days of OO theory.) What makes it a bit less like that is it takes into account the goals and roles of everyone involved with the system - the people collaborating on designing and implementing it - prospective contributors known or unknown - the “users” of the system and their responsbilities within it and what they are trying to achieve by participating in it. Interfaces of course is where Exchange happens or Abstraction happens - something is translated or processed - something combines a set of translations, or processes, and presents a different interface to them.

This all sounds enticingly abstract, doesn’t it, and we’ll see how trying to emphasise these bits of practise works alongside strong architecture opinions which deal with the specifics. I don’t want to talk about the specifics because i can’t dictate them - situation can be so different - and often i can’t change them. So I am offering what seems to be on the periphery of a specific core. Like a framework for not having a framework, it can be a kind of methodology for not having a methodology.

Sadly enough the word “metadata” still acts on me like catnip on cats, then the words “data licensing” put a seal on it, I feel impelled to go and poke my nose in other people’s business. The business in question was that of Re:Transmission, a gathering of independent video producers held in London, and their quest to adopt a common metadata standard for video distribution.

What they’re looking at is straightforward, and as long as they can agree on something which contains a sensible least useless thing model of properties of video data, it’s hard to see that it matters which format they prefer to use as a carrier. Again, it’s the underlying metadata model that matters, not the specific exchange protocol or carrier format, which can easily be translated if wanted.

The Transmission group have a good opportunity to establish clear rules about open data licensing, and I hope they take it for a project which is all about re-use and the encouragement of public redistribution and distributed public archives.

A recent post to the Transmission list by Minna Tarkka points up where I start to feel a little edgy about this discussion:

… we have been immersed in the …onerous, stringent… world of semantic web and listened carefully to the (partly academic) discussions of its possible merits visavis soft ontologies (self-organising maps) and folksonomic camps. we think that there are ways to combine the best of these approaches in creating flexible description schemas for audiovisual content

The overview document has some token discussion of “folksonomies”. The theoretic advocates of “folksonomies” have held them up against a straw-man version of the semantic web, the “wrong trousers” version which imposes rigorous taxonomical hierarchies onto data structures, which insists on classification of media according to a domain specific vocabulary. Metadata is metacrap, they cry, but as far as i’m concerned, folksonomy is folksonocrap as well.

The emphasis on classification and categorisation is seriously overstressed when it comes to data discovery. We know this from web pages - indexes rely on inference and locality much more than they rely on any, necessarily unreliable intentional descriptions of web pages; so much metacrap. But what the semantic web (in a broad sense which can start to include constructs like Atom and GeoRSS) is good at is transmitting recordings of things which are definite, observable and relatively inarguable. What time a piece of media was recorded; the area in which it takes place in space; which people feature in it; meta properties of the media such as bitrate and duration.

For a network like Transmission - specifically directed towards “citizen journalism” and the recording of local events - timing, location and any details of protagonists should provide a lot more value in terms of “discoverability” - not just as an abstraction but also a local, immediate discoverability of events nearby in the world or elsewhere in similar circumstances that might matter to me.

I start to view category-based, keyword-based annotation as a big red herring. What about transcriptions and subtitles, or scene descriptions? If there’s an emphasis on making these available - and there seemed to be in the plans being drawn up by the network - how much more benefit to index them than to worry about classification schemes, whether “controlled” or freeform, at all?

Today I had a fun surprise digging out an old notebook of mine from a box that had been in my mother’s keeping. It dates through the summer of 2003, after my introductory whirl on the conference circuit with Gonzo Collaborative Mapping on the Semantic Web. At the end it overlaps with the “Crystalpunk Notebook” that I made for Wilfried Hou Je Bek.

The notes are a fun mixture of annotations from conference sessions, rambling prophetic-style narratives, sketches of designs and implementation plans, anonymous phone numbers, a translation of Jabberwocky into Spanish (why?). There are a lovely couple of pages from what I think was a talk given by Ben Russell at the Locative Media Workshop in Karosta in the summer of 2003, and which I ought to transcribe soon.

There’s a gap of about a year in the notebook; it picks up late in summer 2004 and contains what look like a lot of notes from the literate programming session that I started at EuroFoo in Enschede. This page has copious re-annotations from some unknown later date, and these interested me enough to be bothered to copy them out on their own, scan them and dump them here. This amounts to a poem about code metadata and the understanding of system - well, that is its title.

In the notes i find narratives about finding notes left for my future self. I find a lot of plans sketched out that have since taken form - i see little more than seeds there sometimes. I see a pretty accurate picture of now. I see gestures towards not-now-yet, there in Ben’s thoughts particularly.

All the travel I’ve been going through recently has offered the chance to canvass a lot of different people on their views of - the kinds of thing i have made and could perhaps work with other people to make. I did a rambling but reasonable job of articulating in Hamburg the motivators and the goals behind a lot of the work I’ve done over the last few years, particularly the wirelesslondon-centred projects in collaboration with Saul. Believe it or not, I’m still chewing over the question of finding the simplest, least useless way to apply locative technology to collective media distribution over free wireless networks. The more I hear what about others are working on, the more heartened about that I become; a few video metadata production and consumption tools are in progress; the wifidog crew are working on local media streaming and programming through their captive portal software; this could all lead to a fun and easy win for a small amount of glue.

When i feel it’s quite clear to me what i need; yet i spend half an hour attempting to articulate it to someone who knows me very well; I drop back to trying to articulate it here. Since i Stopped Coding, i’m doing a lot less, and talking a lot more. I want to make the conversations i am in, more pragmatic; to avoid talking in circles, avoid repetition; have better knowledge of history; send more useful messages to the future.

I’m not much of an emailer, really. IRC is my seriously preferred communicative medium; group chat, working equally well both realtime and asynchronous; a semi formal flow of things. IRC is always there. Since getting involved with OSGeo, i’ve entered a world of email which is complementary to an IRC reality. It doesn’t flow as well, and the deluge of interesting things is sometimes a little more than i can bear; more than i can respond to as well as i’d like, leaving me prey to that most self-completing of sensations - communicative guilt. I don’t prioritise email well, and ‘personal’ communications - those not connected to a web of out of band chatter, common tasks, a common operating reality - fall particularly behind in a way that i feel terrible about.

My core problem is that i have no email management process whatsoever. I use ‘mutt’ as a client, right on my mailserver. My mail spool has 4000 messages in it. I have read all of them. When i hit my quota, i move them to a mailbox which has 15000 messages in it. I never look at them again. I have a ‘postponed’ mailbox. It has 1500 messages in it, stretching back to 2003. My postponed file is combination addressbook, archive, todolist, and Enormous Pile Of Guilt.

Believe it or not, this “system” used to work for me pretty well. But now it’s collapsing; much more stuff goes into the postponed pile than i know i’ll ever respond to - because unless i create a response and postpone it, it’s much less likely that i’ll find an interesting conversation again. But now it’s no longer useful for actually reminding me to send responses; it grows at a much greater rate than i can pick it off. Responses often get superseded by others’ later discussions, but they don’t disappear from my pile. In the main incoming stream, I have so much more potentially-interesting email coming in, it becomes less likely i’ll remember to follow up on the *really* interesting or important things.

I like to respond to “the flow of what’s there”, be conversationally reactive in a reasonably rapid way. If i don’t respond to something right away, it falls onto the stack and gets pushed down. Cue guilt. I don’t want to use person- or topic-based filtering to pre-categorise email for me into different folders - i know i’ll forget to look at them, and they’ll build up to become overwhelming. I don’t want to have to tuck things away into a neat series of category or time-sensitiveness based folders - I’m not a sorting machine; this won’t save me effort. And the email volume i’m talking about is almost 100% collective - from mailing lists, or conversations with goodly sized cc lists. I know that other people - mostly people i love and choose to work with - experience the same class of problem, and i want them to be able to benefit from my own expenditure of semantic energy.

I’m looking at a mash of problems; I’m convinced that *the same solution would fix most of them*; i can’t quite explain why.

* Conversations get lost on mailing lists. They burst up when a lot of people care about the same topic.
* Conversations get held in front of a lot of people who don’t care, but one can’t predict who’s going to care.
* There’s no easy way of ‘forking’ a conversation once a lot of people have decided they care, apart from starting yet another mailing list, which either subsequently dies, or turns into a free for all shouting match, or stays alive but grows into something off-topic.
* Conversations that happen on cc lists don’t get publically archived
* I can’t predict whether i’m going to care or not about a conversation until it happens.
* If one doesn’t respond right away, the “thread has died”, whether or not the activity goes on.
* Looking at email as a sequential temporal stream means that once a “thread has died”, it’s hard to continuously be aware that it’s still there.
* A lot of “I should reply to X”/”I should talk to Z” information fills up my mind, in very much the way that GTD identifies as a practical barrier to getting things done; constant inventory taking, when it’s only repetitive and not iterative, corrupts consciousness.
* Email begets email - the more i excrete, the more i get to eat.
* Time spent classifying things is time spent not making things.
* Classification changes over time, as knowledge deepens and connections broaden.

Let’s break at this last point. Time is the most useful axis i have for finding things: “I remember Rufus sent me his phone number again right after we corresponded in early January.” “I remember Saul braindumped at me about dynamic email archiving right after i started trying to get locative media people to use ghug, which must have been around April 2004.” “I remember Markus talked about FOSS4G planning right before the board meeting right before OSCON which was in July 2006.” “I remember the last burst of conversation about lightweight web geodata cataloguing was right after that group of people were at that dreary OWS-4 meeting right after Chris wrote that piece about next-gen torrent-like geodata distribution.”

This is one of my core problems with tagspace - classification changes over time, and flat tagspace doesn’t reflect that. The simplest example is, i get interested in something new; it has a very broad classification; i learn more and start thinking in terms of topics within it. I used to classify a lot of things i sent to del.icio.us with “geo” - now i never do that - i use a finer grain. “Clusters” are probably inferrable from transition - there was a time when i would use both the broad grain and the finer grain at once. But this doesn’t help me find things out; and time spent re-classifying things is time spent not making new things.

This tangent connects back to a reason why my last attempt at making a kind of collaborative archive / topic-based ad-hoc mail bot never took off; it was largely dependent on using ‘tags’ in the To: line; and as Schuyler points out, most people never type in email addresses by hand; they use, modern, intelligent, helpful email clients like Outlook instead. And i don’t think ‘tags’ in any way help me solve the long list of problems i have above. Even if they’re temporally-sensitive inside an application; that temporality is not reflected on the outside; it’s not re-useful.

Try this out as a description of my problem: “I want to be advised what to care about, who to talk to about it, and how important it is to keep talking to them! … based on what i’ve cared about in the past, who else has got some way to doing something about it, and what kind of conversation, if any, we had at the time.” (And this starts to look like one of those terribly circular “first, re-engineer the structure of civil society…” type problems which one meets so frequently.)
I want to start somewhere. I have 1500 postponed emails that i’m never going to send. Life, as Erasmus explained upon deciding not to learn Hebrew, is short. Signal and noise are collective. It seems we can only help reduce noise by talking more. I would like to be able to talk less; i would like to be able to hear a lot less noise. If i’m talking into a blog, i might as well be talking to myself. (Blogs, somehow, acting as engines for echo of noise.)

I like the idea of resuscitating the bot aspect of ghug, but with a reminder-tickler-inference-engine thing which subscribes to an awful lot of mailing lists. Some people run email subscription bots to make web archives. That’s great, it’s good to have a way of viewing a message at a predictable URL (including the message ID, which is persistent and unique across mail systems). Then i want the bot to talk to me about what i’m interested in.

What i’m interested in can be to an extent extrapolated from interconnected collections of mailing list archives:
* Who i’ve responded to in the past and who’s been responding to me
* What urls i’ve mentioned or have replied to emails in which they’ve been mentioned
* What acronyms or keywords or noun phrases, etc are mentioned in email i have responded to / that has been directly addressed to me.

Any message can also be provided a context based on the above consideration - given this email, what other conversations are likely to be related to it? This could be a simple webservice that returns lists of message IDs.

What i then want is some way of expressing the potential urgency of a reply. This is something i’d like to have predicted for me. When a message arrives that fits the criteria above, or that mentions me, turns up on a mailing list, i get a message from a bot: “You might want to follow up on this, below; reply-to this message to create a reply” (it would come with a reply-to header addressed the original list or sender and rewrite the message). “do you want me to forget this or is it okay to remind you of it in N days”, where a decent value of N can be extrapolated from the communication patterns suggested by the network (handwave). You could adjust a collection of factors, prioritise urgency based on topic/channel or person/people involved or presence of certain topics, that are extrapolated from the conversation.

You can write back to the bot at the point - perhaps say ‘0′ to tell it to go away - otherwise it will listen out on the mailing lists for your response to the message id - if it doesn’t hear you reply, in a few days it will start tickling you again - look here is the message you should be sending, with the headers set and everything, just write it. If you ignore it then maybe a week later it will send you a followup reminder, just the same. At some point with neglect it will tail off into nothingness - though perhaps you could say to it ‘1′ to get it to nag you a bit more persistently.

The point of this activity would be a shared store, and sets of reminders trigger to quite a few people at once. Not only are you potentially acting better on “signal”, but so are others. This is a noise abatement approach that works not by attempting to mask noise but by making the signal clearer. Part of the problem is that a lot of people have to listen to a lot of conversations. There’s a lot of redundancy involved. This can be systemically good, as in an open source fashion, but there’s a point at which too much redundancy becomes as undesirable as a monopoly. There’s way too much talking going on relative to what is being made! Perhaps there would be a lot more we could get done together if the signals were a lot clearer.