Open Video

I hosted a workshop on Open Video and Popcorn.js together with Henrik Mitsch and Cole Gillespie. I gave a 15min intro to Popcorn, showed some demos, and then we broke into groups to discuss opportunities with open video (learning, tech, and storytelling).

Sam Figueroa kindly took notes from the session and the HTML slides are here.

The following week we organized a meet-up at Oberholz to help folks get started on their video projects and perhaps do a regular “open hack” and skillshare around these tools. The team at Leuphana Moving Image Lab has been central to helping get these efforts off the ground.

The next Berlin Popcorn meet-up is on June 6.

Connected Learning / Hive

Thanks to the generous invitation Jöran in the re:learn track, I shared the work being done at Hive NYC, a city network of “learning sites” where you can learn skills and make things with participating organizations.

It focuses on connected learning, experiences which are hands-on, effective, networked and driven by youth’s interests. Slides.

There’s a lot of potential to build a network like this in Berlin.

We’re hosting a community brainstorm on May 16 at Oberholz to survey what learning initiatives are out there, what we’d like to see in Berlin, and test whether we’d like to try something together.

If you’re an educator, a geek, a lover of learning: stop by!

Iron Blogger

Iron Blogger Berlin cashed in over 200EUR of blogging debt at the re:fill bar. (I sadly added much to that pile.)

It was fun to see fellow bloggers and even recruit a few new ones (hi, Anja and Torsten!). A big thanks to Nicole for stoking the blogging fires and getting us all together.

Thanks, #rp12!

Huge props to the #rp12 team for pulling together an impressive conference. With 4,000 people, a new but fitting venue, and all in all good fun, it was a wonderful experience and definitely the best place to meet up with ze German internets.

“Smart garbage”: objects self-disclose how to fix, disassemble and recycle them.

— Mike Kuniavsky, Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design.

Inspired by a Bruce Sterling lecture in 1999:

Smart garbage doesn’t fester in darkness, ignorance and denial. It becomes a resource.

Motorcycle riding is romantic while motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Sitting in Prinzessinnen Gärten, enjoying the first outdoor lunch of the season, I got to talking with a Berlin transplant about Quality.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig is reconciling two types of personalities:

• the romantic mode: primarily inspirational, imaginative, creative, and intuitive. Feelings rather than facts predominate.
• and the classical mode: straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned. Its purpose is to bring order out of chaos.

We find these modes prevalent in our society, and often within ourselves as well, as we alternate between these two ways of seeing the world.

In the weird way you discover similarities in your day-to-day work and philosophical models, I was struck by parallels in Pirsig to what we’re doing at Mozilla.

On the one hand, we’re building initiatives to inspire the romantics, the “non-technical” personalities who don’t want to be bothered with the inner workings of code…at least not yet.

These initiatives are about imagination and creativity, self-expression, and a sense of wonder. The 14-year old sending a lovebomb to her mom, the filmmaker re-imagining his film for the web, the journalist remixing a rival newspaper’s website and sending it around the office for laughs.

On the other hand, we’re delivering tools that push what’s possible technically. They are about executing good code, improving software offerings, establishing infrastructure standards, and working with people to dig into code and think algorithmically. Popcorn contributors squashing bugs to speed up the tools, a badge issuer complying with specifications, a developer producing a sophisticated hack to display timelines better in news stories.

At moments in the organization, you can feel the tension between these two modes, the romantic and the classical. They have different perspectives, different ways of evaluating the world and our progress within it.

Pirsig’s book was about the interrelation of the two modes, neither one “winning out” in the end, but rather being pushed to the point where the division between them dissolves.

At the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness. You can’t be aware that you’ve seen a tree until after you’ve seen the tree.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Pirsig uses the metaphor of a train, rushing down the tracks. At the front of the train, propelled by romantic knowledge, you push to the edge of time where the division of perception and intellectual awareness dissolve. The train cars, built and maintained by classical knowledge, are essentially all institutional knowledge and empirical findings. And the tracks that the train runs on is Quality, the continuing stimulus inspiring us to create and push forward in the world.

Of course, this model isn’t really immediately helpful to improving how different parts of an organization work together.

If anything, though, it does reinforce that the way to speak to people is through the inspirational “what’s possible” romantic mode, all the while supporting the momentum with a real corpus of code and ensuring that quality continues to be the guiding principle of where we’re going and stimulus to keep doing what we’re doing.

You can read more about Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality in Wikipedia or pick up a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I certainly forgot how much I enjoyed reading it the first time.

Images: Time For a Rest At The Camp Buell State Historical Site., Definition of Quality by Robert Pirsig

No trip to Japan would be complete without a report about their vending machines from the future.

A few years back, when I traveled to Japan for the first time, friends put me on scouting missions:

“Find the robotic vending machine that follows you around Shibuya!”

“Find the SMART car vending machine!”

“Find the umbrella / necktie / lobster / underwear vending machine!”

To varying degrees of success, those were hunted down pretty easily (although I regret never seeing the robotic Coke machine).

This time around, we had our quest to find the facial-recognition vending machines.

The machines, developed by a subsidy of the train company JR East Co., analyze your facial features to determine your age and gender and recommend a drink accordingly. They also change recommendations to match time of day and temperature. It uses algorithms such as men prefer canned coffee and women like slightly sweeter drinks.

Sales from these machines have tripled in comparison to regular machines.

The photo is of Peter, disapproving of the machine’s recommended energy drinks, since he in fact wanted an orange juice.

A near-perfect future. ^^

Image: Japan Vending Machine Free Drinks / CC BY-SA 2.0

The theme is lattes and lasers. Their signature drink is a marshmallow man peeking out of the coffee to accompany the humming laser cutter in middle of the room.

What strikes me about this place is it’s welcoming atmosphere and casual introduction to fabbing. It’s in the heart of one of the busiest neighborhoods in Tokyo, and Chiaki says they get a lot of walk-ins who discover a nice-looking cafe, have a coffee, and then get curious about the laser cutter.

She says the visitor ratio lands around 50:50 men and women, and people from all sorts of backgrounds (designers, school children, small business owners) stop by.

The cafe benefits from an active design community via Loftwork and an impressive Fablab about an hour outside the city in Kamakura. They’re also starting a series of workshops with the Tokyo Hackerspace, including a DIY coffee roasting session.

The idea for the space sprang out of a workshop a few months back, where teams of designers, developers, and fabbers sprinted together on design projects. Chiaki explained that the workshop tapped a community’s interest in opening a dedicated fabbing space in the city.

In many ways, this parallels Berlin’s Open Design City’s origin story.

Comparing Tokyo and Berlin, perhaps the connection between the betahaus cafe and the annexed maker space could be more explicit. Perhaps some example products or signage in the cafe could signal that you can stop by and make something yourself. Or even put fabbing on the cafe menu.

Some Mt. Fuji coasters we cut while visiting:

Images by thewavingcat: Fab Café / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Marshmallow Man at Fab Café / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Fab Café in Shibuya / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Coasters at Fab Café / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We had a lot of fun doing some betatesting for the Mozilla Summer Code Party.

The idea is to gather a few friends around your kitchen table, have some drinks and snacks, and play around on the web together.

It’s through the informal, friendly setting of your kitchen table that we hope people will find inspiration to make things together on the web. The format is simple and also highly customizable, so you can host the event on your own terms.

Mimosas and Making

As part of the organizing team for the Summer Code Party, I felt it was really important to test the kitchen table format myself. (A huge shoutout to the other Mozilla betatesters! I’ll be writing a summary of your input and experiences tomorrow.)

On a Sunday afternoon I called up three friends to come over and play with Hackasaurus. Two of them already knew about the tool but hadn’t played with it too much, while the other was new to it. They all have experience with making things on the web: the group was comprised of a journalist, an illustrator, and a web strategist.

The invitation was very casual, which I think helped set up a relaxed, fun atmosphere. I just asked them to bring their laptop and to swing by my house for an hour.

We poured ourselves some mimosas, and I showed them two tools to get started.

Hacking the News

I first showed them lovebomb.me, which lets you remix cards and send messages to your friends. Their reaction was lukewarm. So I moved right into demoing the Hackasaurus X-Ray Goggles.

After remixing the example on hackasaurus.org, they installed the goggles and surfed the web for other sites to hack. The most obvious thing to remix was images, so they swapped photos on sites they knew.

One friend, interested in politics, hacked Wikipedia by replacing a politician’s profile with a brown envelope, a symbol of corruption:

After a few image hacks, we took to changing text as well. Another friend remixed a headline story so that it raved about his brother’s favorite sports team. He emailed the hack to his brother and immediately followed up with a call to explain how he made it and how funny it was.

There was also a Guardian remix about a politician outing himself as a muppet. “Labour leader calls for equal rights for muppets after he is revealed to be one,” reads the subtitle.

Storything

Since one of my friends is a journalist keen to learn more code, I showed her the Storything prototype. It’s designed to walk journalists and others through basic HTML tags, using a two-pane editor and a little video tutorial to mark up an article they’ve written.

She did the first chapter and said it was helpful and would likely try out the rest of the tutorials.

Doing your own thing

Several other betatesters pointed out, and I agree, that a successful kitchen table event balances curated activities with a hackable agenda that encourages participants to do what they want.

So while two participants were using Hackasaurus, the other was writing in his blog and clicking around on the web. I think that’s great and definitely the way to run these things: create a fun, communicative space where friends can learn and make stuff on the web, either in a guided or free-form way.

That self-direction helps the host get away from a disciplinarian role, and instead allows for everyone to make something that interests them. As a facilitator, I found my role to be more about introducing ideas, keeping a good flow and troubleshooting, rather than being a task manager.

Ways to improve

We ended up hacking for an hour, and I can imagine we’d play for longer if there had been more time. As we wrapped up, I asked my friends what they liked and what could be improved.

In general, they said they really enjoyed it — it was much more fun than they thought it would be.

However, they suggested adding more tutorials within the X-Ray Goggles, since sometimes it was hard to know why their hacks weren’t working. Perhaps in the manner of Storything with a guided tutorial, or just a hover-over “What’s this code?” or simple debugger might be helpful in showing people how the code is made and how they can hack it.

From my end, I also really enjoyed hanging out and showing my friends something interesting. I think we need smoother integration to publish hacks into a shared, global gallery. For this betatest, my friends emailed me their hacks and I took screenshots.

Perhaps we can build in some gallery functions directly into the Publish button in the X-Ray Goggles, since I imagine this will be a popular tool during the summer code party.

As a facilitator, it certainly helped to be familiar with the tools and to have played with them myself already.

I think encouraging future hosts to test a range of tools and have a ready repertoire is a good idea. As I’ve heard from other betatesters, you might need to adjust the agenda on the fly, introducing new tools to fit the interests and skill-levels of your participants.

Lastly, although I wrote up the host guide for the kitchen table event, I ventured far from it. That’s totally the intention, but I found it striking how little I followed my own instructions. I’m not sure I’d re-write the guide to match what I did in practice, but I’ll have to compare notes with the other betatesters to determine what parts of the guide are really valuable and which are just noise.

A huge thanks to my friends for joining me on a Sunday afternoon for some webmaking!

From armrests on public benches to Hamsterdam, the arsenal is a fascinating list.

In the podcast, the team travels through a “museum of exclusion”, a stretch of street in Baltimore called Greenmount Avenue. Affluent houses are separated from their poorer neighbors with roadblocks, one-way streets, residential parking permits, and impossible left-hand turns.

Daniel D’Oca, the urban planner leading the tour and co-author of the arsenal, points out that while these barriers are a nuisance, removing them obviously won’t directly bring about equality. They are more of a symbol of exclusion and one of the many ways cities can silently segregate its citizens.

That got me thinking about where I live in Berlin, and whether any items from the arsenal, either inclusive or exclusive, are nearby.

Right on my corner, for example, there’s a headache of an intersection. With fences and a weaving set of crosswalks, it can take up to an extra 3 minutes to reach the station. If you bee-lined it with a new crosswalk, it’d be much faster. We’ve thought about sneaking out at night to paint a pedestrian crossing.

On the other hand, immediately to the right of that crossing is a little public square. With an ancient tree, a mosque, several restaurants and now a bus/kiosk, there’s always a crowd gathered. The space invites people to linger and meet one another. The streetview image doesn’t do it justice, but the scene on a summery Friday night can be jammed packed.

Do you see the arsenal of exclusion/inclusion at work in your neighborhood?

1. Señor Amarillo.
2. Surto Tower. On an ambitious and sunny day, ⁋ and I climbed to the top, discovering the even better lookout at Tank Hill along the way.
3. Stattbad Wedding. Swimming pool turned skating rink turned art space in Berlin Wedding.
4. Karaoke in my hotel room! An amenity you don’t get every day. Shout out to Mari, who reserved the room at the Gladstone in Toronto.
5. Puking balloon man at betahaus.
6. Iron Blogger Berlin 1st drink-up. Blogging our way to beer.
7. Team Mullet at the Event Kit Sprint in SF.
8. A badge for Gunner, Bad Ass Facilitator #1.
9. Scurried up this fire escape with Henrik in Aalborg. Around the corner from Nordkraft, an infamous power plant and backdrop of the drug film with the same name.
10. Low-Fi Communications. Pneumatic tubes at Bunker Wünsdorf Zepplin.

1. Visitors Welcome. Sign at my grandfather’s house. “Take nothing but pictures and sea grass. Leave nothing but footprints. Enjoy.”
2. Fuji-San.
3. Designing the Mozfest 2012 website. All post-it brainstorms look the same from afar.
4. Inside Platform4, a maker hub and coworking space in Aalborg, Denmark.
5. Sylt Sunset.
6. Bunker Wünsdorf Zepplin. Site of one of the largest underground bunkers in Germany during World War II. Housed critical communications infrastructure. Short ride from Berlin.
7. Stop Obesity.
8. 20 Years of Quatsch Comedy Club.
9. View from near our party location for Mozfest 2012 in London.
10. Ukiyoe Small Museum. “Open when I wake up / and close when I must go / to sleep / when I’ve had enough / the store is closed”