Avoiding installing hell 2.0 in a Paradise built in hell 1.0.

Jon Crowcroft

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jac22Jon.crowcroft@cl.cam.ac.uk

Disasters happen• Read this book: A Paradise Built in Hell, R.Solnit:• http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paradise-Built-Hell-Extraordinary-Communities/dp/0143118072/

• Lots of nice examples, but subtitle matters:

The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

• Before first responders get there (>72hrs) self-organise!• Then the emergency “services arrive, and mess things up

badly• Can we help?

Yes we can• Lots of useful tech

• Twimight, firechat, haggle, thingbox etc• Not only improve community creation/organisation

• Create situational awareness• E.g. maps of dry land, clean water, food/drink etc• Do pub/sub/cloud (distr)

• Then have first reponders start with a clue• Note – this has been done manually

• (see Haiti Earthquake/google maps/twitter of safe buildings/ triage data on who to rescue etc)

• So what are the challenges?

Challenges• transition from small group to large where social ties stretch…• …and break

• (when society invented money and policemen)• So can we mitigate this?• Digitial societies are being tried• Old2new – usenet, wiki, liquid, occupy

How to build/experiment• New social media tools• Self-forming social groups• Evidence based collective decision making• You name it…

Two other topics came up• Principle of Least Astonishment• Not Neutrality• Reading

1. Smart Data Pricing (Here…see later)2. You’re Capped (Chetty et cal, CHI ‘12)

• What’s the problem?• Most traffic isn’t “caused” by user (directly)

• “Mysterious” Processes• Adverts (Times of India 2 orders magnitude more than page)• Anxiety/inability to make rational/informed choice• Not rational, anyway!• How to fix?

Social Value of Non Neutral• Discuss…. back in the 80s, we had telnet, ftp, smtp and a few other

clunky things. At the turn of the decade, we• then had wais, gopher archie and a host of clunky things; at the turn of the

next decade we had mosaic,• ie, safari, and a host of cgi clunki things. shortly after that we had altavista,

yahoo search, inktomi,• and a host of clunky search things. each of these was terminated by the

next wave. fb seems like the• terminator for myspace, orkut, weibo, and a bunch of other clunky things.

Hence my• prediction.....similar to when fb look at your "wave" of comments on a

parntner's timeline, and see it• crest, and then predict you are about to leave (and presumably can look at

updates on some other• gender-preferred timeline and even say who you are switching too:)

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http://nymote.org/

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Cheers! Thank You! And Questions?