Jesse Hirsh blogs

Last Mile Mobile Solutions: Tracking Crisis Response

jesse — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:22:23 +0000

I do a lot of work with World Vision Canada and have this week met with some great people working on an innovative project that could have significant impact above and beyond their initiative. It's called "Last Mile Mobile Solutions" and it's a partnership with FieldWorker Mobile Technology Solutions to produce mobile units that speed up, and digitize, the process of food distribution in poverty and crisis relief programs. Here's a video that illustrates the technology and its potential:

This quote from the website contextualizes the potential for innovation with this device/concept:

LMMS replaces an intensive manual, paper-based process. Crucial information is captured using handheld computing units that wirelessly transmit that information to permanent database storage, analysis and reporting. The mobile features enable staff to roam and send and retrieve data that they need. Bar-coded identity cards link beneficiaries to a wireless data management system, which enables faster and more efficient field operations. Preliminary results indicate a 75% reduction in beneficiary processing and verification times at food distributions. LMMS eliminates the reliance on paper-based systems, automates calculations and delivers faster web-based reports to donors and stakeholders. The project is an example of how the humanitarian and private sector have combined their respective strengthens to achieve substantial impact in improving efficiency and accountability in humanitarian action.

Is Privacy Dead?

jesse — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:08:48 +0000

Privacy is dead, and social media holds the smoking gun, at least that was the sentiment expressed on CNN.com by one of silicon valley's hottest pundits, Pete Cashmore. It's a sensationalist statement, but one that speaks to many people's feelings, both positive and negative, about how personal information gets caught up in the world wide web.

Is privacy really dead? No, not yet. However, there's a growing chorus of people empowered by social media who are eager to declare that it is. This is partly because of the power of networks, and their ability to leverage your private information for personal gain and/or amusement.

Social media is also regarded as a popularity tool that allows people to emulate the celebrity culture we are immersed in. We can all become micro-celebrities who capture attention and influence, albeit on a much smaller scale.

The fear is that as this starts to become more and more prevalent, discarding privacy will become compulsory, expected behaviour necessary for graduating from school, getting that job, buying the home, and succeeding in life.

Resisting Internet Orthodoxy

jesse — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:37:50 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren't in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of "group think." In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn't an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn't allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin's definition of technology as being "how we do things around here". The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being "here" at some point in time.

William Gibson notes this changing relationship between space and time by declaring that "the future has already arrived, it's just not evenly distributed yet". The problem is that the pioneers who are eager to get wherever first are eager to assert their control over new space, and in this case it's quite simply a definition of how things should be done (i.e. carried out over time).

Ironically, another source of internet orthodoxy is the rigid culture of mainstream media, and the efforts to frame our world for easy consumption in between increasingly boring and irrelevant commercials. Television, radio and publishing, while becoming less dominant everyday, still set the tone for how we should be sharing stories and analyzing the world. The orthodoxy that governs the operation of these industries not only stifles society, but also threatens their survival.

For example, this past week CBC News has gone through a rebranding, redesign and renewal process, that has been a total travesty as far as critical Canadians are concerned. It's not that something new wasn't called for, but rather that what they've done is stay entirely within the orthodoxy of sensationalist cable news, a position which is neither appropriate for a public broadcaster nor desired by their audience.

What they should have done is try something new. Something that reflected both the opportunities the internet has to offer, and its potential to bring real substance and investigative journalism back to televised news. A number of newspapers, like the Toronto Star, have returned to a heavy diet of investigative reports as a means of differentiating themselves from aggregation services. This kind of unorthodox approach in an age of journalist cutbacks is exactly the type of contrast that courageous old-school organizations need to embrace in order to renew their relevance.

The business world plays a role in perpetuating a hypocritical approach to orthodoxy. They demand that everyone conform, except for a successful few who have the privilege to rebel. This ignores the fact that rebelliousness is the source of much of their success.

Had the CBC done anything other than pimp their personalities and superficial redesign, the corporate world would have been in an uproar: How dare the CBC do anything different? You can bet that my ideas about what they could have done would be condemned as anarchistic and "just not how things are done around here."

That's something you hear a lot in politics, where orthodoxy is perhaps the strongest force against reform and genuine change. The big news out of Ottawa this week has been the change in office of the leader of the opposition. Peter Donolo was brought in to save the floundering leadership of Michael Ignatieff.

From day one Iggy has been a joke, and rather than admit they made a mistake, the Liberal Party turned to orthodoxy as their means of salvation. Unfortunately, short of dumping their leader, they may be right that politics respects tradition, especially when it comes to back-room power deals.

I think one of the reasons my clients and audiences enjoy the work I do and the perspective I bring is that I help them see problems and our society in a way that opens doors and opportunities rather than locking them.

As space continues to collapse, and time continues to accelerate, people will increasingly wonder why the promises of the internet are not being delivered. The reason is simple: internet orthodoxy prevents us from realizing the true potential of open and distributed networks. Now is the time for us to build our own vision of what the internet should be, and to do so we must reject just about everything that anyone is saying about it.

The Internet as Religion

jesse — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:14:39 +0000

Google Makes Us Stupid

jesse — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 05:20:52 +0000

Can you see my tongue in cheek?

The Internet is a Surveillance System

jesse — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 21:28:31 +0000

I've been super busy with work and not able to find room to write, although part of the problem is what I want to write tends to be complex, requiring time I don't have, to really play with the ideas. In the meantime I'll post some Flying Solo vids Wodek Szemberg put together based on a session we filmed last summer.

Censorship in Canada's Copyright Debate?

jesse — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:16:55 +0000

Last week I received a take down notice from YouTube regarding a video I posted three years ago from an appearance on RoBTV which has since been rebranded as BNN.

Turns out I was not the only one. Jason Crocker from the Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights also had some RoBTV/BNN videos pulled from YouTube.

Jason also did some digging to find that there were dozens of videos from BNN on YouTube and it was just the ones around the copyright issue that had been forcibly removed.

The easy conclusion to reach based on this limited data is that BNN is getting pressure to remove these particular videos. Perhaps in response to attempts to book guests who disagree with the arguments made in the videos? Those guests perhaps decline to appear on the channel out of a perception of bias against them due to the examples uploaded to YouTube?

The story has been picked up by ZeroPaid.com in the states, and its possible there were other people who's clips have been removed and we just haven't heard from them (yet).

Unfortunately this type of censorship does tend to be effective in part because it employs the very copyright laws we seek to reform. In this instance my appearance on a cable news channel was not something I was allowed to share because they claim ownership. While fun, I don't presently have the time to fight it, so instead I'll just cease doing business with BNN, and encourage others to do the same.

The video had been modestly popular, featuring a panel with myself and a CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) representative. Now that discussion is gone, and you can bet the people at CRIA would never have the courage to debate me in public again.

Update: Rose Noonan from BNN promptly got in touch with me to clarify that in fact they are removing *all* BNN videos from YouTube. So this is not an example of censorship in Canada's copyright debate, and that they are not discriminating against a particular topic, but rather are removing the items regardless of the topic.

While I still disagree with their actions I acknowledge that they are not targeting copyright in particular nor do they wish to curtail the debate on this subject.

Hypercube: Start Your Engines

jesse — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 18:31:13 +0000

Last night the Hypercube audition process came to a close, and 50 Canadians received a free Cube from Nissan Canada. I wasn't able to make it to the Toronto event, but watched via Twitter as winners were announced across the country.

Congratulations to the 50 people who won, and I hope those who did not are still feeling good about their participation. If not, I'm curious to hear about it.

Certainly we are hearing from those who's auditions were successful, and they could not be happier.

My friend Kevin Grandia won, in spite of the fact he lives in the suburbs, and wore a suit to the party last night (going straight from his corporate job). Yet Kevin was successful because he demonstrated a number of key qualities, such as creative videos, a sharp website, and effective mobilization of his supporters.

Talking to Kevin this morning it was great to hear his plans for the car. This is where the next phase becomes interesting. Following along with the 50 to see what they're going to do with their new Cubes.

Brave News World Summit

jesse — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:32:36 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in the Brave News World Summit hosted and organized by The Centre for Creative Communications at Centennial College in Toronto's east end.

It was a great day spent with interesting people who work in the local and regional media industry. The keynote was Jeff Jarvis, who was unable to attend, so he presented his "What Would Google Do" rap via skype.

I participated in an afternoon workshop around the concept of a journalist toolbox, or what any aspiring hack needs to know to make it in this cut throat business. The picture above is from that session, which was organized by Ellin Bessner who wrote her own blog post about the event.

There was also a blog compiled by Centennial students during the day, as well as a blog post from Melissa Feeney.

Flesh Eating Bugs at the ROM

jesse — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:24:40 +0000

The Royal Ontario Museum has setup a new web cam that allows you to watch flesh eating bugs ravage a dead carcass! Granted it's in a controlled environment, so you shouldn't feel weirded out or anything, but some people do freak out at the sight of bugs gnawing on flesh.

This web cam is an interesting way to give people a behind-the-scenes look at how they clean up the skeletons that end up on display. Here's a couple of paragraphs from their press release:

For those who might wonder just how the skeletal remains of birds, squirrels and other vertebrate skeletons on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) acquire their gleam, a live webcam will for the first time allow a special glimpse into the Museum’s bug room. Not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach, and only open to curatorial staff, the bug room is the area in which animal specimens are placed and where a colony of beetles eat their way through animal flesh, revealing clean bones and performing a vital task in the preparation of artifacts for display or storage. ROM website visitors are invited to watch nature in action via live webcam footage of the bug room at www.rom.on.ca/insects.php from Thursday, May 14, 2009.

The bug room is a sealed, metal-lined, climate controlled room where a series of bug species make light work of cleaning skeleton bones. This month the live webcam will show Skin Beetles (Family Dermestidae) making their way through the flesh of a Golden Eagle discovered in Ontario’s Nipissing District and donated to the ROM by the Ministry of Natural Resources. As the room must remain in total darkness to mimic the natural habitat and behavioural patterns of the bugs, the webcam that is being used to capture the bugs in action has infrared capability, resulting in a black and white image.