Next session has James Surowiecki speaking on The Wisdom of Crowds.

BTW, I caught the 2pm keynote which covered “building big things with small groups”. Their wisdom: KISS.

Title compliments of SteveR

Tapping the collective wisdom of a large group of people – “under proper conditions we can leverage the intelligence of the large group”.

Hey, I ran on the idea that we could tap the collective wisdom of Chapel Hill to solve some seemingly rather intractable problems.

JS: Google is an excellent example of the power of the collective. “Google is tapping into the intelligence of the ‘net” via page ranking to sort the most relevant links to the top.

Over the long haul, the bettors at the racetrack function, collectively, as a perfect forecaster of the future. Rather remarkable considering that the pool of bettors include “old-hands” quite knowledgable on horse-racing, folks betting their Mom’s first name, those using lucky numbers or “systems” – in general, a normalized mix of people, the common factor of which they’re interested in a positive outcome.

Of course, JS’s basic hypothesis is not too different than that posited by the Delphi Method, described further in this 1975 work The Delphi Method: Techniques and Applications

Continue reading SxSW Day 1.0 – Mob Rules? →

Local Austin developer David Humphreys opens the panel by introducing Jesse James Garrett, who coined the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) – which describes a mix of web technologies used to provide a much more fluid web experience to the end users.

Humphreys kids that by coining the phrase, Garrett has gauranteed himself many years worth of invites to panel discussions ;-)!

Continue reading SxSW Day 1.0 – Telamonian or Locrian Ajax? →

Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places is supposed to cover all the vagaries of XML usage in the Web-world.

Finding well-formed XML on the ‘net can be quite a chore 😉

As I walk in they’re discussing XML micro-formats. The discussion shifts to namespaces and namespacing your documents.

Oops! The classic namespace boner cropped up – “namespaces are the like tm:”. For XML wonks, the confusion between a tag’s namespace prefix (the “tm:” in “tm:title”, for instance) and the namespace itself is neverending. Essentially, the prefix is malleable and can be arbitrarilly assigned while the namespace is invariant.

I jumped in to point out the difference and asked the panel if they thought the namespace should be well-defined – like with a schema. Panel split on this.

Best reccommedation on namespaces, etc. – use RDF to help tease out the structures for micro-formats, extending formats (like RSS) using namespaces.

[UPDATE: Podcast of this session.]

First up, Podcasting 2.0, a panel discussion crying out for the unconferencing talents of our local Audioactivism’s BrianR:

Chris Pirollo on podcasting “It’s not a lack of tools, it’s a lack of talent.”

One person asks – “Is there anyway you can do to make a podcast sound professional?” Pirollo – “garbage in, garbage out – without talent, without decent equipment it’ll sound like garbage”.

On video and monetizing content (how come making money drives so many of these discussions?) Eric Rice “we’ll never video something unless it’s a taste test – don’t give it for free.

Audience member – “you seem to be saying that most podcast are produced by technical people – that’s why you’re saying podcasters “need talent”.

Pirillo – NPR has raised the quality of podcasts overall. Before NPR, the poor quality of podcast was generally acceptable – NPR set the standard.

Pirillo – “Because the tools are so simple, everyone and their grandmother can podcast, and now everyone and their grandmother is…”

Rice – “That’s good” Pirillo – “No it isn’t – if you want to do a podcast for 5 people, leave a voicemail”

Laura Swisher – “let people do a podcast for 5 people” – if they’re good they’ll rise up

Once again, how do we monetize our content?

Rice talks about using product placement on his video ‘blog – I wonder if he told his consumers that he was touting a product?

So I ask Rice – What’s the ethics of product placement? He quickly ducked that question.
Back to branding,monetizing and money, money, money.

On to Looking for XML in All the Wrong Places

I’m attending SxSW Interactive in Austin this week. Interactive is a growing adjunct (attendance up %270) of SxSW (South by Southwest). Panels cover a range of topics, technical to political to social.

I thought I’d post a few comments on the sessions I’m attending/monitoring/ease-dropping on throughout the week.

Note: This is the full-text of an editorial published in today’s Daily Tar Heel. Ryan Tuck did an excellent job editting for brevity – I’m including the full-text here for completeness.

An election does not a leader make, but rather a temperament and a set of skills.

Leaders with vision will make sure their decisions are accretive, adding
one brick on another, until their visionary “cathedral” is set on sound
foundations. The more pedestrian of elected officials will forge ahead
without vision – making decisions as expediency demands. These folk may be
trusted to guide a ship along well traversed paths but they will never
bound forward to undiscovered shores.

Our Council has recently discussed two paths to social and economic
sustainability.

One path, of traditional “bricks-and-mortar”, has the overwhelming,
enthusiastic and at times giddy endorsement of our elected leadership.
The other path, which promises a much lower risk and a much higher reward
than the first, has languished in a backwater of indecisive malaise.
Continue reading Castles in the Clouds →

The DTH has just announced the UNC’s picks for the new Carolina North leadership advisory board: Continue reading And then there were fourteen…UNC appoints Carolina North Board →

Following on the steps of my previous post, Mayor Foy issued a formal response to UNC’s Ken Broun’s presentation about the new leadership advisory board on Carolina North.

Observing that the town has already formed a committee to discuss Carolina North, the Mayor and Council has referred UNC’s response to the 2004 HWCC report to the HWCC for further comment (my 1st meeting as a new member of the HWCC is Feb. 16th). Quick aside: I was the 1st person in Chapel Hill to volunteer for this new UNC committee.

Following up on the Broun presentation itself, Council made several notable comments and requests for information:

• What tasks do you wish the committee to perform?
• What outcomes do you expect?
• How would the work produced be different than that of the HWCC?
• Timeline: When would the committee be appointed? Start work? End work? [Mr. Broun’s a busy guy, where will he get the time?]
• Is the proposed committee composition the final structure? Who’s already been appointed?
• Is UNC committed to supporting a long-range transit plan?
• Will UNC address the fiscal equity problem? When?
• Will UNC consider the Town’s proposals for preserving open space and the environment?
• Is there a definite plan for the Horace-Williams airport’s closure?

One question I would’ve added: How deep is the UNC Board of Trustee’s commitment to this new process?

Two other notable comments from the letter.

One, pointing out that “Mr. Broun had been assured, and strongly believed, that the University recognized the Town’s regulatory power”, did this mean that UNC “recognizes the legitimacy of the Town’s zoning power over Carolina North and does not intend to seek relief” from that authority?

Wow! The Council wants firm confirmation and so do I.

Two, the observation that the “speedy” 1 year negotiations over OI-4 were necessary to accommodate the influx of development on Main Campus spurred by the just passed Education Bond. No such pressure to rapidly move forward, on the Town’s part, exists now. Given that, the Town will still, as a sign of good faith address these requests in a timely fashion.

UNC announced a new committee whose functions the new leader Ken Broun describe in this Jan. 11th column and current UNC Chancellor Moeser described in this subsequent Jan 22nd column.

Two years in the making and as a sign of good faith UNC released their response to the 2004 Horace-Williams Citizen Committee’s Report.

I applaud this first step though I’m a bit disappointed that, given two years and substantial debate over those ensuing years, the response to the HWCC report wasn’t more thorough.

The Daily Tar Heel published my response and suggestions on how to move the process forward in their Feb. 1st edition:

There are many questions surrounding the proposed Carolina North project.

Will it be as vital to North Carolina’s economic development as Chancellor James Moeser has claimed? Are the financial assumptions for its capitalization sound? What are the true environmental and neighborhood impacts of this $1.5 billion, 50-year project?

And, chiefly, how do we move the planning and design process forward?

My interest in Carolina North is not academic.

I’m a 14-year neighbor of the Horace Williams Citizens Airport, and a vocal watchdog of UNC’s development plans.

I’ve joined the town’s Horace Williams citizens committee. As a 2005 council candidate, I called for a drastic rethinking of UNC’s predicate parameters for the project.

And I volunteered to join UNC’s new community leadership advisory committee for Carolina North.

Echoing the rhetoric from my campaign, professor Ken Broun, former Chapel Hill mayor and new leader of UNC’s advisory committee, said, “Let’s start from the beginning and have a full discussion, as if we had a blank map.”

If we’re entering new territory our citizenry will have to put some old hurts and hard-earned lessons, for now, off the table.

The disappointment of UNC’s failed 1997 community outreach on “Outlying Parcels Land Use Plans,” the outrages along Mason Farm Road, the high-handed behavior during the 2003 chiller plant negotiations, the recent muddled planning process and the other bumps and bruises throughout recent years should not be forgotten but, instead, be put aside in good faith as we attempt to craft a new process.
Continue reading Last chance? →

The winds of change are blowing….

I’m working on a new version of my ‘blog, retitled Concerned Citizen, to better suit the new year. Within short order I’ll be posting some articles on last year’s election – including an analysis of campaign finances, my ideas on what to do to bootstrap Chapel Hill’s municipal networking initiative, comments on my new appointment to the Town’s Horace-William’s Citizen’s committee and other issues I’m concerned about…

Since the election

• the Town Council, the DPC and the Tech Board has inched forward with muni-networking
• the Town Council is discussing a town-wide economic development office (one of my platform planks)
• UNC has co-opted my campaign rhetoric on Carolina North, set aside current plans and called for a community-oriented rethink
• the Town Council agreed to let the Tech Board “experiment” with Internet-based reporting of our deliberations

Hey, it’s only been two months, more to come….

Holiday tree trimming comes a little early at Horace-Williams Airport.

Orangish will be trimmed, bluish are nuked.