How do you balance the intelligence and stupidity of the mobs? Sure, smart things come from everyone but so do dumb things. Kevin Kelly has an interesting article on this thread titled The Bottom is Not Enough.

“It’s taken a while but I think we’ve learned that while top-down is needed, not much of it is needed. Editorship and expertise are like vitamins. You don’t need much of them, just a trace even for a large body, and too much will be toxic, or just pissed away. But the proper dosage of intelligent control will vitalize the dumb hive mind.

Yet if the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all?

Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough.

More importantly, the brute dumbness of the hive mind produces the raw material that smart design can work on. If we ONLY listen to the hive mind, that would be stupid. But if we ignore the hive mind altogether, that is even stupider.”

“The systems we keep will be hybrid creations. They will have a strong rootstock of peer-to-peer generation, grafted below highly refined strains of controlling functions. Sturdy, robust foundations of user-made content and crowd-sourced innovation will feed very small slivers of leadership agility. Pure plays of 100% smart mobs or 100% smart elites will be rare.”

If you haven’t seen Improv Everywhere’s stuff yet, check this one out. Make sure you watch it to the end to see how the crowd reacts, very cool.

Speaking of starbucks and wifi, peep this video.

If this means they’re ditching those push button chicken soup dispensers and getting back to making coffee then I’m all for it.

‘Starbucks, he said, has lost its focus on coffee, noting that the company switched from making espresso by hand to robotic machines that pump out drinks with the push of a button.

“For them, the move to fully automated machines was inevitable, but they lost something,” Mr. Cates said. “If you are a barista, you have to roast your own coffee. It’s a necessity. You cannot compete by selling music or WiFi.”’

As Mark always says, it’s about the experience! In the meantime I’ll stick with Planet Bean.

Man am I’m glad I’m dumb. Seriously, I really need to ask more stupid questions here if these are the returns I’m going to reap.

Check out the comments there. The links eventually lead me to explanations involving ascii art. Seriously, when’s the last time you read a tech article with ascii art? I’m equal parts envious and concerned about the guy who wrote that. In either case his art was very helpful.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my dumb question and point me in the right direction.

I’m planning to attend DemoCampToronto17 this coming Monday and StartupCamp in Waterloo Tuesday night. You should too.

I’m sure this is explained quite clearly somewhere like here or here. Hopefully someday I’ll be pythonic enough to understand. In the meantime, this is confusing to me and a bit scary. I’m hoping someone can explain to me why I’d want this behaviour.

Let’s take a really simple class with one method. All that method does is creates a variable local to that method and then print it out. One catch, first I call a second method, passing in that variable, and change it within the scope of that second method. As expected, that has no impact on the variable in the calling method and the result when you run it is “local…”

class klass(object):
    def settime(self, s):
        s=’remote’

    def dosomething(self):
        astring=’local’
        self.settime(astring)
        print “%s…” % astring

if __name__ == “__main__”:
    c = klass()
    c.dosomething()

Modify the above, adding a class within that same method call, again attempting to modify it in the second method call. Again, do nothing more than print both variables out. My instincts do NOT have me expecting the results I get, which are “local remote…”

class me(object):
    def __init__(self, n):
        self.name=n

class klass(object):
    def settime(self, t, s):
        t.name=’remote’
        s=’remote’

    def dosomething(self):
        astring=’local’
        aclass=me(’local’)

        self.settime(aclass, astring)
        print “%s %s…” % (astring, aclass.name)

if __name__ == “__main__”:
    c = klass()
    c.dosomething()

No, these aren’t my typical naming conventions.

As Edwin Hutchins writes, cognitive anthropology “turned away from society by looking inward to the knowledge an individual had to have to function as a member of the culture. The question became ‘What does a person have to know?’ The locus of knowledge was assumed to be inside the individual….But knowledge expressed or expressible in language tends to be declarative knowledge. It is what people can say about what they know.”

So what am I rambling about? As far as I can tell, cognitive theory itself only recently, early 90’s, turned away from focusing solely on the individual and what a person knows. They’ve since developed the notion of socially distributed cognition. The concept I love is that the cognitive properties of a group is NOT simply the sum of the cognitive properties of the individuals.

Software is facing parallel false assumptions now. Is there any software being built that focuses on socially distributed cognition? I’m not talking about web 2.0, groups, friends, tags, etc because that ain’t it. Ya sure, it’s a leading question and I’m talking out loud about what we’re working towards with brainpark but isn’t that what this medium’s about? Software that supports cognition in the context of an individual is good, but it would pale in comparison to software that tackles socially distributed cognition….maybe…..I think…..but I’m just one person….

Mark recently came out of the closet in mentioning that he is focusing “100% on leading Brainpark, Inc. a new software venture targeting the small to midsize company with a suite of networked collective intelligence solutions. More to be revealed soon…”

While it’s not news to most, I’m coming out as well. I’m spending parts of my current life supporting Mark and Bobby with product design and development. In doing that, I think we’re taking a unique path in product design. Unique in software, not so unique in every other industry.

What’s unique about it? We have yet to use a computer in any form. We use a LOT of paper, pencils, and pens. We are working hard to involve community members continually from day 0. The result is a rapidly iterative design process that’s highly participative from a user perspective. The hope is that we learn a lot as early as we can from real users.