Just scanning through my laptop and I find a folder called projects with lots of notes, proposals and ideas. So since they have been there for ages and I have not done anything with them and their time has probably past I am going to spring clean, well, actually dump a few here and lets see what we have.
▼ ❑ Data Collection
▼ ❑ Car
▼ ❑ Data
• ❑ Date Mileometer Petrol (Date, cost, location of Petrol Station, Company)
▼ ❑ Car computer
• ❑ Mini-ITX
▼ ❑ Research
• ❑ Connecting to car computer to extract engine data
• ❑ See Gavin's idea on car data website
• ❑ Grants work
▼ ❑ Other transport
• ❑ Bike
• ❑ Alternative transport ideas
▼ ❑ House
▼ ❑ Readings
• ❑ Gas Meter Reading: Date/Time Meter reading
• ❑ Water Meter: Date/Time Meter reading
• ❑ Electricity Meter: Date/Time Meter reading
▼ ❑ Sensors
• ❑ Wattson - DIYKyoto - do some more research / maybe buy one
• ❑ Wind sensor - measure the wind speed over time around the house, to be able to evaluate the possibility of using wind power
• ❑ Temperature sensors - around house
▼ ❑ Stuff
▼ ❑ Data on stuff
• ❑ Barcodes
• ❑ Free range eggs have a code on it that says what farm it came from, can we get that data for example
• ❑ Japan - using barcodes to get data on products
• ❑ Art project - scan barcodes to get corporate data on companies
▶ ❑ Talk Idea
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I decided that this was something I wanted to do shortly after helping with the first Big Brother Awards. I spoke to some friends and toyed with some data models but being easily distracted never fully pushed the idea through. Still it was on the web and I still got the occasional email, mostly calling me evil and CCTV is evil and ...
But the project has not gone away and the need for it just grows and grows.
iSee/Applied Autonomy have worked in NYC on mapping the cameras around Manhatten, the idea was floated again on the first MySociety.org call for ideas, Urban Eye, a research project being carried out by Clive Norris and ***** is building local data of areas for academic study.
Meanwhile the use of CCTV proliferates. The number of cameras in the UK alone is huge and this is just set to increase, especially due to the current climate of fear that pervades many countries.
The UK is CCTV101, a test lab for the use of video surveillance within a democratic society.
So how do we map this. The answer has to be, after years of toying and trying things out, boldly.
When we first conceived this project, CCTV was highly unregulated. Police would not even be aware where many cameras were situated. Now we are sure that the Police are doing more to make sure that they know where cameras are, this information is still not made available to the public.
So to start with, the first approach is to go out outside and look for the cameras. Look where they are situated, how are they mounted, where they are pointing. Understand how they appear in the urban infrastructure.
The sheer scale of such an undertaking on a national or international scale can be daunting and has in fact made us pause on a number of occasions, as we make up data and system models to handle the size of the data, but realise that we do not have the resources to actually build the data centre required.
To approach this you have to take a collaborative approach and not just for the collecting of the data but also for the storage and availability.
Simon Davies, Director of Privacy International, had at one point suggested that as a project we map the areas not under video surveillance. Whilst this would be more feasible in defining an approachable dataset, what you would have would be a rapidly decreasing dataset.
Whilst this may make for a striking image and may still be a useful project to undertake (instead of gauging pricavy and freedom in terms of number of cameras, how about using percentage of country not under surveillance). It is not what I wanted to undertake.
which brings us to the issue of recording a camera. How do we record information on a piece of street furniture like a surveillance camera?
Do we consider, say, a poll with 2 or 3 cameras on it a single entity or isi t correct to record each camera?
In fact what are we trying to record, the cameras or the spaces under visual surveillance? (bringing us back around to the idea of mapping those spaces not under visual surveillance).
What we want to do is define a schema, something simple that will allow people to hold files, say, for their street or maybe their route to work. Then much like FOAF, we could spider these files to build up a map of cameras. This way the maintenance of the data is up to an individual but the amount of data that they would have to maintain would be of a size that they feel is acceptable to them.
This model also sits well with another, early intention of the CCTv database, as originally conceived. This being that all we are doing is collecting, storing and serving data on cameras and their location.
What people do with this information is up to them. We came up with a few brief examples.
* Police interface - allowing the Police to monitor this information. We expect that they already have their own initiative and process here and I am sure there are a myriad of reasons why they would not want to use such a datasource (not necessarily justifiable reasons, but reasons all the same). This idea was floated to demonstrate the the project was politically agnostic about the cameras. They are there and need to be counted, whether you are police or activist, when it comes to using the data was not, for us, as the database creators, important.
* CCTV Density for UpMyStreet
* Activist route planner. Similar to the iSee project, what would be the route of least surveillance?
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• ❑ Create an open source presentation stack
• ❑ Create a plan for an City based Centre for Alternative Technology (UrbanCAT)
▶ ❑ Visualisation tools
▼ ❑ Energy Boutiques
▶ ❑ They find you the greenest power
• ❑ They micro manage your energy use and purchase
• ❑ flag up warnings about high energy use / carbon emissions
• ❑
▼ ❑ Visual Billing
▼ ❑ mobile phone
▼ ❑ show calls graphically
• ❑ to who
• ❑ duration
• ❑ (where you were)
• ❑ Can download recordings of all calls.
Just some ideas, the state of my head at various times. Veers, towards surveillance a lot. Lets see if I can actualise any of the current batch :).
I recently finished reading the book 'Standard Operating Procedure' by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. It is based on the interviews that were made for the Errol Morris film of the same name.
It is about, if you do not already know, what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Why did US military personnel abuse prisoners there and why did they record there actions in photographs.
The story is truly terrifying in what was allowed to happen.
I don't though want to write specifically about those events or even this specific book here. Instead I am just starting to collate some notes and thoughts on an idea about the reporting on this.
In fact, I first read about this outside the daily press in Seymour Hersh's book 'Chain of Command'.
Within this book this episode is a much smaller part of the whole, an exposure of the then current state of Iraq and America's 'adventure' there.
What I want to record here now is some notes and thoughts on the words around this story, where they are, what can be built and can they lead us into further insights into what happened, why it happened and what we now do to stop it ever happening again.
The heart of stories is words. Even though pictures play a key part in this tale the pictures themsleves carry a baggage that makes the viewer complicit in some way. Many of the pictures taken by the soldiers were published in newspapers across the world but in these two works of reportage they are not reproduced. One of the images is hinted at in the cover of the SOP book, but otherwise their content is described in words.
Does this rob them of their power to involve reader, investigating the story through these texts? By relying on words do the authors in fact, properly, remove the artefacts, the pictures from the story and in fact present us with the terrible actions that took place to physicalise what was going on in the minds of these soldiers?
Can we generate meta texts around the documentary evidence and reporting around this stroy that will tell us more? Could it be used to bring in people who would otherwise not engage with the story and therefore not encounter the possibility to learn from it.
In the Seymour Hersh book reference is made to the report by General Antonio Taguba, the Taguba Report. This report, though marked as Secret / No Foreign Dissemination has in fact been available to the public worldwide since at least May 2, 2004. (You can read it here).
This is just the first step of an experiment. I call it 'This is our algorithm' wanting to look at truth and stories when as work online.
update:
Here is the wordle visualisation for this, 'Testimony of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld'
and here is the visualisation for the Wikipedia page on the events at Abu Ghraib
More soon hopefully.
Gavin Bell has posted the slides from his recent talk at TOC08. Some good stuff here on nurturing the online community around content that can equally apply to broadcasters such as the BBC as much as publishing houses. (Gaving used to work at the BBC, he is now at Nature).
I am obviously very interested in the perception of the BBC and its content, what it does, what it could do and what it should do (as well as all the negatives to those questions). So out of curiosity, I have a few questions below, if you would not mind answering them on your blogs (put a link back to here so we can find it) we can see if we can learn anything.
The BBC does run surveys on bbc.co.uk on occassion, and it has a whole department whose job it is is to understand the audience. I just want to see what the picture might be if we took a more grass roots approach.
If you do not want to blog the answers then you can email them to me, let me know if you mind me blogging your answers, anonymously of course.
Right, questions (and my answers). Oh yes, you always reserve the right to change your mind :), these are just a snapshot of perception today.
1. What BBC content do you watch / listen to / interact with which you feel strongly about. In fact what content do you just enjoy, passively 'consume' etc.
I watch a fair bit of TV and listen to the Radio, though mostly Radio 4 and XFM. BBC4 is my favourite idea of a channel, though how much do I get around to watching? What is interesting I guess is that of an evening I will watch stuff as it is on, its usually nothing that I am passionate about though.
Last thursday we sat down to watch 'Ashes to Ashes' as we had enjoyed 'Life On Mars' so much. Of course these things rarely live up to their expectations.
2. How much of this do you get from traditional routes (i.e. broadcast to your television, radio or recorded off air via a video / pvr) vesus other routes (BBC Listen Again, iPlayer, DVD or download via the likes of Bittorrent)? How much of this material is BBC and how much from other sources?
Well I do watch a fair bit as it is broadcast but that is more of an evening 'what is on'. BBC content wise, well I do download from an internal experimental service which means I do not use iPlayer. I use Macs at home anyway so to play back full screen I would have to run windows, streaming to a window is not really that good an experience. Even with a large pipe internet connection from Be* the streams still stop. This was a problem with Joost as well.
We have made use of Listen Again a bit, but not that much. I am more passive about radio content. If it is on then I can listen in and get into it but if I miss it then it rarely matters. On the odd occasion I have bought the CD from the BBC Shop, for say the recent Dirk Gently dramatisation.
I do by a few DVDs as well, though these have mostly been for documentary content. Coast and Planet Earth. I also bought the Planets and Space when I was doing an Open University short course on Planets.
Bittorrent I do, ahem, use but that is mostly for those shows that premiere in the States, I had watched all of Heroes before BBC2 started showing it (and therefor knew how slow the show got).
iTunes, well it has supplied me with the odd episode of South Park and I may get some Babylon 5 from it but again these are not BBC shows and here it is a trade off between waiting for the DVD's to be in a sale at the likes of HMV (in the case of Babylon 5) or not be that bothered (in the case of South Park).
As to the website, I look at the news and check schedules. I rarely go to a site to find out more about the show becuase I feel that I can get a better discussion elsewhere, which leads us onto ...
3. Where do you talk about BBC content? Online, on your blog, forums, amongst your online friends? or do you just chat about it at work, at the pub. Do you have 'water cooler moments' or do you in fact not really talk about it much?
My blog a bit a guess, with friends and at work. The old 'did you see' (we spoke a bit about 'Life On Mars'). In fact I have not had the urge to really talk about much television at all recently. Which is a pity as there is a lot out there that is worthy of discussion.
I think back to what excited me about television. I enjoyed Dr. Who, Blakes 7, in fact a whole load of TV scifi. Now I enjoy Dr. Who (the new ones) but it is not brilliant (a few episodes have been worthy of the alieness that the doctor should embody). Torchwood is just shouting and swearing and rather predictable polymorphous perversity. (Now Cronenberg on TV...). In fact Battlestar Galactica is the best scifi on TV right now.
Edge of Darkness is still a level to be attained by much TV drama. It worked on so many levels but again maybe I was just at that impressionable age at school, just reading Crisis comic, listening to The The's Infected albumn.
Adam Curtis is the most interesting person on television at the moment, and all you do is hear his voice. It is a visual radio programme.The playful nature of the mash-ups of archive footage, the thesis being conveyed all make for compelling television and something that I would want to talk about. The BBC's support for discussion on 'The Power of Nightmares' was awful though.
Oh, and my favourite TV series of all time, damn, well it is between Edge of Darkness and The Prisoner. I guess you can tell a lot about me from that.
4. If you wanted to get in touch with the people who made the content how would you go about it?
Slight unfair advantage, I could try the internal email system. Otherwise though I would try the BBC website, the contact us links do work eventually. Would I leave a comment on a page though? Depends on what I want to say I guess.
Ok my answers are fairly weak actually, humm, but what do you think?
If you can think of any other questions that should be here, that might make for useful learning on perception and thinking about what the BBC should / could do then please feel free to add them, I'll update the questions list.
Just so that I don't loose it, Philip Trippenbach hads been blogging about games and Journalism for a while now. Lots of interesting posts here.
I am the Technical Project Manager for the Languages site on bbc.co.uk. This is a great resource if you are interested in languages and especially if you want to start learning a new one. If you want to learn French, German, Spanish or Italian we have interactive courses to get you started. If you want you can also pick up some basic Chinese and Portuguese you can also find some starters here.
bbclanguages
My request is, if you are interested in learning a language and using the BBC languages website or already do and you are blogging it then could you:
- Let me know, either an email or a comment here would be great.
- Tag your posts with bbclanguages when you blog about your experiences learning a language, it does not have to relate directly to the website, maybe a story of you using some of your new language skills in the real world.
- If you are not already, get your weblog registered on technorati.
Apparently WarHammer, the tabletop fantasy battles game is 25 years old this year. The game is published by Games Workshop which has over those years changed itself quite considerably.
As a kid my friend and I would often get the bus from Kingston to Richmond and then the District line to Hammersmith with a short walk to what was then, as far as I know the only Games Workshop shop in the country. It was always busy on a saturday. At that time they sold all manner of games, as the amount of stuff that they published was much smaller.
In fact I had one of the first sets of rules for the game, though I never really got to play it. I think I was a sucker for collecting rules and never following through enough in actually playing. Still it always looked great fun when you saw a game with all those figures. (In fact, my real desktop battle game of choice was Car Wars).
Sadly these rules did not survive the many moves and growing up that happens, unlike a number of other games which I recovered from a loft earlier this year.
Still the other day I picked up a copy of White Dwarf, GW's magazine to see how things have changed. I know the stores are all over the place now and only sell GW published material. They also host games and hobby events which I think is excellent. White Dwarf is of course just focused on material for these games, but the I suppose Imagine, which was the magazine published by TSR Uk really only focused on Dungeons & Dragons (and a bit of Star Frontiers in later life). White Dwarf at the time I was getting it was the indy mag.
Why was I interested, still not really sure. One I am interested in games again and play, two I have a six year old son, playing games like this made me what I am (not sure yet if that is a good or bad thing) so maybe he would enjoy it too. Thirdly is there new stuff we could do with such games? Could you take a game as well documented as WarHammer and subvert it? Make it a tool to play Buckminster Fuller type 'World Games', would they be worth playing and would you gain anything from them?
I have no idea on that count, but it might be fun to try (plus it involves playing with miniture figures and dice).
If anyone who reads this is playing War Hammer or similar and has any comments on this then please let me know.
The Games That Came Back:
Continuing from the post on the Social Bar, I thought I would put down some details on where it comes from.
Initially I was given some time to do a bit of R&D, as a part of one of the technical teams here. I was interested in another way of dealing with comments. I wrote my initial proposal and started putting together some GreaseMonkey and Ruby prototypes as well as lots of sketches. I did eventually realise that there was not a big tech project here but a set of ideas that may or may not work. I had proposed this for Etech, but withdrew the proposal when I realised that all I was producing was in fact these ideas on how to think about comments and not anything that you could really measure.
I have been thinking about comments for a while, I built a site a while back that converted the UK Governments ID Card Consultation White Paper into a weblog, each post was a paragraph from the document and of course you could comment against each comment.
Most of the comments were not that useful and could not really inform a consultation.
More recently I am taking part in a project with the Design Against Crime initiative at Central St. Martins school of Art and Design, Bike Off is all about bike parking. The lasest research project (AHRC/EPSRC funded) is about developing standards for bike parking facilities. Part of the project is to have a public consultation on the proposed standards and we are going to evaluate a number of online and offline ways of doing this.
One of the ideas to address the comments problem was to switch off the comments. In other words we would produce a resource where it was easy to link into the document, to be able to link into the heart of the document when you wanted to write your response to the consultation. It is a model that I expect that we will still try. The point here was that you would (or at least should) get better 'comments' if in fact you did not want to host the comments but just make sure you had a good number of linkable too elements that needed commenting upon.
It would also help in moderation, as the amount of spam was huge. This though will be a problem everywhere for a long time.
The problem then becomes finding the conversation, which is not that hard now. You can google a URL, and use Technorati to find weblogs that link or use tags. So in fact building up a view of a conversation is not that hard, maybe navigating it in a meaningful way might take some practice but is definitely do-able.
So now we move onto the BBC. I worked on a project where we built some software that was probably overcomplicated for the task in hand and the comments that came in were not 'that' interesting. Or rather they probably were not worth the cost per comment (if you analyse it that way), when using a standard contact us type form on the site would have sufficed.
So how much value do most comments add to the original content? If you look across the web it just varies from site to site. Being able to comment on a friends weblog seems appropriate. The places I think it is not working is when you have comments across a site generically. The Guardians Comment Is Free is not as much of a success as I think the Guardian would have liked. Many of the BBC's weblogs though do get valuable comments.
So in fact a generalisation such as 'switch off comments' is not valid it does though push forward a number of smaller ideas.
- Who owns the comments?
- Where does the conversation take place?
- How do we find the conversation?
The quickest thing that the BBC (and similar sites that produce large amounts of content that is ripe for comment) to do would in fact be to publicise tags along with the page/programme, well that and commit to a permanent URL for an asset (and that is something the BBC is working towards quickly, every programme will have a unique URL for it).
I did these two graphics a while back, they are linked too back in the posts here on nodalpoints but I will include them here again.
It makes it easier to find the posts that discuss the content.
Beyond this there could be spaces for other services that manage your comments in a stream so that you can retain more control over them, even if they are not posted on your weblog. Maybe this is some kind of Public Service Publisher service, maybe it is something that the BBC builds.
As long as organisations get involved with initiatives like Data Portability, APML etc (and they are) then all things are possible.
There will always be projects where it is totally appropriate for comments to be right there on the site, on the page but not always and I think, the BBC at least, has a duty to start encouraging people to interact with the web away from bbc.co.uk.
This is happening in many pockets at the BBC and the Social Bar is not some initiative to be taken up by the BBC or not, this is just a floating of ideas about comments and how we interact with content online. I am using the BBC as a bit of a space to try out these ideas at the moment, but my thinking (for all its flaws) is based on experience beyond this type of site.
I gave a presentation on this project at the recent BarCampLondon3. More thoughts and further thinking is below.
- A lot of comments on many sites are trivial. They do not add any real value to the content that is there (be it a weblog post, a news article or some other piece of editorial content on the BBC's website).
- For all the BBC's will to be creating a space where people can say what they like it in fact can not do this. Policy gets in the way, even marketing can get in the way. What appears under the URL www.bbc.co.uk has to fit in with certain guidelines and perceptive needs.
- The BBC is supposed to be your (the licence fee payers) trusted guide and gateway to the internet. What service can achieve that whilst trapping your thoughts on its own site?
Now if you look at some parts of the BBC you will also be able to bookmark the page using services such as del.icio.us, reddit and digg. Via these tools you can also apply some tags to the content.
- They are being asked to create a space, an identity online. Attached to this identity will be their comments on the BBC comment.
- Link to what they want to comment about. Something that we are loosing with all these facilities to comment right there on the page is the fact that the web was built to link. We should be linking to pages. It is how the web is supposed to work, it is how search engines work.
As I mentioned before, this started as a technical project and has changed to one of wanting to change how we work on the web at the moment. There are technical things that can be built, most of them not too complex, aggregators and more tools to help point people to where the conversation is happening. It may be that the money we save in moderation costs in fact goes into more editorial work guiding people and participating in the conversation but that I do not think is a bad thing.
I think this is a fairly rich topic and is not an idea that is going to change things overnight. There are probably holes in the thinking above (should we be making things harder for people to comment, can we make sure that the producers of content do get involved in the conversations, etc.).
If you can think of reasons not to do this, or to go right ahead then please do let me know. I will post more thoughts on this shortly, including some information on the technical ideas that I thought I was originally going to build, something that might be better suited to being an independant public service publisher.
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