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Cosas de Andrius
The State of the Lab
Thank you to all for your letters, large and small, but especially for "caring about thinking" in your personal projects and daily life.
Our lab exists as a catalyst to support all of our efforts. Easier said than done! What have we achieved so far? We have brought together a group of about 30 active and 300 passive participants. We have managed to set up our laboratory to attract constructive people, the kind who "openly, independently work for free", and keep out destructive people.
We are quite varied in outlook and circumstance, with sparks of activity in Lithuania, California, Chicago, London, India, and in Spanish and Tamil. We have pursued delightful investigations and published two outstanding papers. We have a few business contacts and some experience working together and for each other. We have a strong Internet presence that feels "real" and makes our values increasingly tangible.
I want our lab to serve our members, not just myself. How can we be useful and effective? How can we generate business for our entrepreneurs? How can we realize the dreams of our idealists, and work across the digital divide in India, the South Side of Chicago, the Lithuanian countryside, and the Hispanic world? How can we serve as a workspace that lets us express our choice to investigate, develop, pursue, organize, promote, harness and share?
I think that, as independent thinkers, we offer persistence. Our laboratory supports all manner of endeavors that advance "caring about thinking". We are not alone. In fact, we are typically not the "hot spot" for any of our endeavors. Our strength (and weakness) is that we are set up to look beyond any particular endeavor. This means that, as Minciu Sodas, we may not be the group to surge ahead. Our members participate in many groups, freely forming, flaring up and dying down. Our laboratory's goal is to integrate the widest variety of people into this churning of activity. We seek to fuel the synergy so that projects advance each other, and give shape to "caring about thinking" as a reference point for all activity.
I share with you my priorities, and hope that you might respond with your own. It's a great exercise! and lets us find ways to work together. I will start with the activities that have universal value, and finish with commercial opportunities that exploit our flexibility.
- Personally, as an independent thinker, I want to know everything and apply that usefully. My thoughts have come together, and I see that they present everything in terms of definitions. So I have started a database for "Definition of Everything", and I look forward to letters that would express our intuition about life, so that I might indeed capture everything. I want to make this multilingual, so that's a technical challenge. The content should be great material for our many tools for thinking.
- Meanwhile, I expect there to be other ways of presenting Everything, and I want to find them. (I think there are six in all). For example, we can present knowledge through practical applications: building an airplane may be simpler than proving in theory that one can fly. My quest will help me become aware of different ways of applying knowledge through our lab. Thank you to David Kankiewicz for your outlook at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/consideringGod/
- Our synergy comes from us integrating all manner of endeavor. I wish to survey the many kinds of organizations that foster "caring about thinking", and classify the kinds of endeavors that they support. This will help us structure our lab, and flesh out the angles we are missing. We can find partners and support.
- I am very glad to have signed up many innovators from India. Thank you Gautam Rao, Umesh Rashmi Rohatgi, Prem Chandavarkar, Sandeep Jain, Maturu Surya Rao, Jasmine Patheja, Angel Mary, Neeraj Koul for your letters. What can we accomplish? I also want to support our activity in Spanish (notably Anthony Diaz' work to bridge the digital divide
America en Español, and thank you to Fabio Caballero for translating our questionnaire "¿Usted piensa en vos alta?") Thank you to George Christian Jeyaraj for
our website in Tamil Let us each clarify, what are we already working on, and what might we achieve together? This activity shows us what actually helps people, and the value of our work, and all that supports it.
- Please visit
our home page and let us know what you think. I have redesigned it to highlight our members (our blogs, projects, sites, etc.) and also our ideafeeds. Jeff Archambeault of the
Open Idea Project is working with Zope on our membership database, which I want to connect with pages for our participants at our
interactive website (Thank you to Stephen Danic of Lucid Fried Eggs!) I want our website to make explicit our interests, projects, investigations, how we want to work together, and how we've all contributed to the public wealth. What would you like to see about yourself and others? My gut feeling is that the best way to support a genuine community is a tangle of different kinds of venues that can show off all manner of programming languages, and also let us participate in many different human networks, such as
ryze and
ecademy
- We should connect openly, where we can, with all manner of related spaces. Our members Peter Kaminski and Edward Vielmetti are two leaders of [Social Text http://www.socialtext.com}], where they have set up a Wiki space that has already played an integral role in "Emergent Democracy", a study/illustration/movement of how direct democracy is emerging from blogs (online diaries). Multiple channels (blogs, conference calls, trackbacks, Wiki spaces) is what makes it work. Another space to watch is
BlueOxen, a descendant of Doug Englebart's
BootStrap, which has a core of great people, but may center too much on a single kind of venue, the "collaboratory".
- My own ability to participate, and hold our lab together, depends on my generating income by finding contracts or work. Currently, I have ,000 in debt. I believe that my best prospects are to leverage our laboratory. My current focus is the enormous business problem presented by the integration of Eastern Europe into the European Union. In 2004-2006, Lithuania is due to receive about 1 billion euros per year, more than 3% of its GDP, to build its infrastructure. Our
"economy for working openly" would be of enormous help that these funds reach individual innovators throughout the country. More broadly, the bureaucracy of the European Union is vulnerable to the "open conspiracy" that we can organize to help progressive investors like George Soros or Esther Dyson so that the enterprises they invest in can benefit from European Union projects. I need to draw up something rather big, about 200,000 euros a year for two or three years.
- I have been developing political and economic connections here in Lithuania so that our "economy for working openly" might be well understood, and we might win structural funds (up to 100,000 euros in matching funds) this summer for setting this up. Ziniu ekonomikos forumas (Knowledge economy forum) has been very helpful.
- I have submitted two proposals for experimental markets for working openly. One for the
Chaordic Commons, for ,000 to encourage its members to build relationships by sharing and circulating content in the public domain. Mitch Ratcliffe and Owen Davis have been supportive. In response to their encouragement, I have set up a
discussion group which all may join by sending a blank message to ChaordicIP-subscribe@yahoogroups.com especially if you are interested in Intellectual Property issues affect human interaction, and what we can do about that, starting with finding a way to talk about it that doesn't focus on "property". I would like us to pull together a group of Chaordic Commons members and non-members.
- Last week, here in Lithuania, we turned in a proposal for another such market to the Open Society Fund of Lithuania for 14,000 euros. Algirdas Cibulskis, Saulius Sakalas and Rytis Umbrasas would administer this market for our laboratory members which would pay "responders" 5 each for openly serving those "wishers" whose wishes generate the greatest response. The focus would be on supporting ecotourism, as at
here. Raimundas Vaitkevicius and I would investigate how to measure the performance of this market. These experimental markets are very important for us to demonstrate how they might work for more ambitious projects.
- Our member Matt Mower
novissio really got me thinking when he wondered, why is it so hard for individual innovators to make contacts within big corporations. This is a big problem, but also I think the other way around. There are "independent thinkers" in corporations who I believe would really benefit from having a mentor from the outside who would keep them fresh. We have great entrepreneurs including Shannon Clark
jigzaw, Cass McNutt
vantagegroup, Alex Shapiro
touchgraph, and I've already mentioned Matt and Peter and Ed. I feel that many of us would be happy to offer such a coaching service for a nominal fee just to have these contacts. A good deal for all. So I want to develop this with your help.
- As part of that corporate service, I want to include our
"idea feeds", which are meant as a way for discussion groups to contribute their best activity to a shared news feed on a particular endeavor. This is a way for innovators to promote their activity, but we could also charge businesses to present their news for them. That way they would all stimulate each other and also get the ear of independent thinkers inside corporations.
- So I'm looking for all manner of work that is nearer or farther our goal of serving independent thinkers. A big thing to watch out for is "corporate perestroika", where corporations are going to give their workers the freedom to speak in their own voice. Enterprise blogging is an important entry point. Last fall I was in the thick of this as one of seven principals of Percola Technologies, which was established to pursue corporate sales for Blogger. This all fell apart for me when
Google purchased Blogger. But it was actually great news for Peter and Ed and Adina, who rose from these ashes as a fresh bird,
social text that I know will unleash a lot of deep intuitions on "social software". Myself, I am keen to write a short paper for
blogtalk conference this May in Vienna. My topic: the relationship between intellectual property laws and norms and the flow of information.
I would love to get any kind of work - this is simply where I am casting my lines. I look forward to responding to all manner of projects that we bring up. Please do so! and do so, again and again. Try out our lab as a way to work on your projects, and think out loud about it!
A great way to get a feel for our laboratory is to join our open discussion at
Minciu Sodas' YahooGroup by sending a blank message to minciu_sodas_en-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Official members get to participate in our working groups. If you're not a member of our lab yet, a nice way to join is for your thoughtful answers in the public domain to [{"Do you think out loud?"
http://www.ms.lt/openwork/doyouthinkoutloud.html}]
Thank you for "caring about thinking!" Peace.
Andrius
Andrius Kulikauskas
Direktorius
Minciu Sodas
http://www.ms.lt
ms@ms.lt
+370 (5) 2645950
Vilnius, Lithuania
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2003-02-21 | 2 Comentarios
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Comentarios
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| De: lgs |
Fecha: 2003-02-21 18:13 |
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¿Qué pasa si trabajamos "en abierto" en español / castellano? Estoy suscrito al Minciu Sodas Laboratory desde hace tiempo, pero me debo haber perdido alguna de las varias listas de correo y el caso es que no había teneido noticias del trabajo hecho en español.
Puede que haya que hacer algo parecido con el tráfico en una pequeña isla del atl´ñantico, como experimento.
O con la Democracia Emergente - en español.
¿Nos montamos una bitácora cooperativa, o no tan cooperativa, o cooperativa de otra forma, y una lista de correo asociada?
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| De: Andrius Kulikauskas |
Fecha: 2003-02-23 02:28 |
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Lucas, muchas gracias por eso! Andrius Kulikauskas
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