(tumbled, tweeted and flickred already, reposting here since this is in fact my main URL)

Contributed a chapter to State of the eUnion: Government 2.0 and Onwards

Available at: www.amazon.com/State-eUnion-Government-2-0-Onwards/dp/144… or electronic version and more in stock at: www.authorhouse.com/Bookstore/ItemDetail.aspx?bookid=65460

Other contributors include Lawrence Lessig, Tim O’Reilly, etc: 21gov.net/about/press-release-18-november/

Continuing my coverage of Supernova 2009 (see Changing Networks, Workplaces and the World), a “forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age”, I further dive into my notes/musings from days 2 and 3:

Going with the Flow (Real Time Flow Track with track chair Tantek Çelik)
(Tim O’Reilly, Dick Costolo, Brett Slatkin, Monica Keller)

Real-time information is becoming capillary, but the way in which it’s provided is under great debate. The relationship between real-time information flow and  technology/business decisions can greatly affect how we consume it. Tim O’Reilly raised questions of how the relationship will converge: “king of the hill or interoperable?”.

Brett argued that the debate has nothing to do with business needs – standards reduce costs. “I can write something once and change my provider at any time … [it] has to do with how hard it is to interoperate”. As most point out, a lot of the success of email came from its interoperability.

Dick Costolo from Twitter discussed how they’re spending a lot of time on APIs – making them better and more accessible. He spoke about current debates on if decentralization possible (at this point Blaine Cook, one of the original architects who no longer works at Twitter, spoke up from the audience: “Is it possible!? I built it!”).

But if you as a provider open everything up, do you then lose your competitive edge? For instance, Tim Berners-Lee compared to Google: Tim created the opportunity (the web) but didn’t capture much of it. The panel explained that if you interoperate, the competition can focus on more interesting things and building them better. Tim O’Reilly chimed in, “companies who used to be “content bullies”, like IBM and Microsoft, are now saying they like open source stuff because they now have the short end of the stick”. Blaine Cook spoke up again and shared what Fred Wilson, an early Twitter investor, told him about being open: “You’ll have a smaller piece of the pie, but the pie will be larger”.

Life in the 21st Century
(Esther Dyson, Bernardo Huberman, Linda Stone)

How is technology going to change us? Esther Dyson introduced the panel around this topic. Linda Stone discussed her latest endeavors in creating what she calls “zeitgeist mapping”. Her work in continuous partial attention inspired her to start looking at 20-year social trends as a way of providing clues to other social shifts. By looking into what products were being created and selling well, she plotted them to look for “shifts in dominant mass consciousness attention paradigm”. She argued that her data showed 1985-2005 was all about social networks and as an extreme of being “highly connected” 2005-present is all about security, trust and quality of life due to being overwhelmed and unfulfilled. I personally disagreed with this analysis  – while Linda’s data may be accurate, the analysis to me seemed to be making huge leaps of assumptions that weren’t explained incrementally (though, it should be noted this was a short top-level talk rather than an in-depth walk-through). Another point I disagreed with was how “Twitter started primarily as noise and it is increasingly signal”. I believe it would be more accurate to convey that Twitter primarily has remained the same, but the number of people realizing the value (signal) in it has grown exponentially through word of mouth and storytelling.

The panel continued on to discuss concepts about how technology is accelerating faster than humans can. Though, again, I’d argue that a lot of these concepts are more about cultural acceptance of technology and connected-behaviors as opposed to needing to “re-wire” our brains.

The rest of the presentation talked a lot about attention and attention as a currency. “Attention is the most powerful tool of the human spirit – attention also defines a culture or a community,” said the panelists. Unfortunately, I have to agree with Peter Merholz’ tweet from the session: “We’ve been talking “attention economy” since 2001. let’s move the conversation forward here. #sn09″

Frontiers of Real Time Collaboration
(David Weinberger, Jason Shellen, Paul Lippe, Laura Fitton, Deborah Schultz, Anna-Christina Douglas)

This was an interesting session to attend, as there seemed to be a lot of people in the audience who were passionate to hear what these people had to say about real-time collaboration. I believe the panelists wanted to discuss collaboration as well, but oddly the talk veered way off course – spending the majority of the time talking about Twitter. After Twitter was discussed for several minutes, the talk continued to simply discuss tools (like Google Wave) but spent no time discussing collaboration or concrete examples of how real-time tools can produce successful collaboration. At the tail end of the talk, I raised my hand and said that they had focused a lot on the tools but not anything on collaboration and asked how these tools are helping people overcome current challenges they face in trying to collaborate. I didn’t receive much of an answer, but after the session, I received apologies from the panelists and thank you’s from audience members who felt my same slight frustration. While the panel got off course, it was valuable to me to see how many people cared about discussing the subject. I have a deep personal interest in this area, which is why I organized an upcoming panel for SXSW 2010 called Open Collaboration Between Scientists, Communities and the Unknown. I very much am looking forward to discussing issues/successes around open collaboration more!

Attendee Roundtables
(Brad Templeton, Crystal Y.)

These were quick rapid-fire 10 minute talks on a wide range of subjects from Supernova attendees. I don’t have much other than a link and a couple insights to share from it:

Brad Templeton from the EFF talked about robo-cars: http://robocars.net

Crystal Y. (a high school student) shared some insights on her experiences with online communities. She explained that it’s annoying to be private on social networks because then you don’t allow people with similar interests to be able to connect with you. She also talked about how kids don’t focus on “being careful about what you say online” (a common characterization adults place on today’s children) – that actually they focus on “talking about what they stand for online to represent them” (a more positive outlook that aligns with a lot of danah boyd’s research). One of the insightful quotes I most enjoyed from Crystal was “Whenever I read articles that say “teens don’t use Twitter” it really annoys me”.

I had the pleasure of being invited back to attend Supernova this year. Supernova is “the only forum to examine all of the opportunities and challenges created in the Network Age”. The conference is a solid event to attend for a few reasons: quality networking with well accomplished people, hearing reflections on the state of everything from people who have been in the computing/web industry since the 80’s and 90’s, oh, and, power cords and wifi that works from every seat.

Diving into my notes/musings from day 1 of the conference:

The Changing World
(danah boyd, Adam Greenfield)

Looking into how the world around us (both offline and online) is changing as a result of social technology, danah boyd and Adam Greenfield shared incredibly fascinating research and concrete examples of the relationship between people, things, data and connectivity.

danah’s presentation focused intensely around the topic of visibility – that digitally “only when we choose to look, do we see”. You only get a sense of what certain spaces are online based on what you choose to consume. On Twitter, you set your norms based off who you follow, not who follows you. As a result, danah states that there are divergent understandings of what digital norms are based on where you are in the network. Not surprisingly, there are huge differences in how people use the same services. A big example is Twitter’s trending topics, which has forced a lot of users to see spaces they didn’t choose to see (e.g. domination of different ethnicities than the ones they follow, obsession with pop culture, using Twitter for different purposes, etc.).

She then discussed real world challenges and opportunities that exist from choosing to look. While kids may post things online that make adults uncomfortable, the posts can also be used as an opportunity to have an open discussion about how to decide what to put online, etc. There are also a lot of kids who are expressing their need for help to their social networks. Often times their peers aren’t equipped with resources to help and the parents and counselors aren’t choosing to participate or look in these social networks, so they’re missing chances to help those who are emotionally troubled and don’t know what to do/where to go.

Changing from people to public objects, Adam took the stage and kicked off with the fact that 50% of the world’s population now live in urban environments. In the near future, sensors will be embedded all around us, conditioning the possibilities of urban space. With IPv6, everything in our world can become addressable. This would create an entirely new way of reading cities and spaces. Adam explained that the data for these objects has always been here, but we haven’t had access to it before: “entire existences are retrievable in ways they never were before … the public has the right to benefit from this open data”. Adam also was sure to make the point that it’s not just about consuming data, but also contributing to it. As Usman Haque once said (and I find this quote to be very relevant to my efforts in Spacehack.org), “I don’t care so much about making the data public. I care about the public making the data.”

(Note: if I come across a link to the deck Adam presented, I’ll put it here, as it contained a lot of concrete project examples that clarified some of his main points)

Changing Networks
(Jonathan Zittrain)

As always, Zittrain’s presentations (rants?) are filled with energy. His words to Amazon and Apple about their control-freak-ways were to the point (and tangentially reminded me of Tim O’Reilly’s War For the Web.

“You can’t code to your Kindle – you can’t open it and spread [your stuff] to other Kindles,” exclaimed Zittrain. A statement that reminds me of a quote that often pops up in Matt Biddulph’s talks from the Maker’s Bill of Rights: “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it”.

Zittrain went on to talk about how Steve Jobs doesn’t want to give you the freedom to screw up the iPhone experience like you can screw up a Windows box. Apple then saw everyone jail-breaking their phones, so they created a software development kit, but even then everything has to be funneled through the app store – which is known for denying things as silly as an Android-eye app from its store. This is incredibly frustrating as a developer – you have a piece of software that you wrote and you want to give it to your friends, but you can’t unless Apple identifies and approves you.

The presentation then pulled up a quote from Steve Jobs saying “what’s the point?” in reply to why he denied a funny political app from the store. Zittrain argued that most technological advancements come from someone who would originally say “what’s the point” – like people did with Twitter and Wikipedia – and that the app store stops ‘whats’ the point’ creations from happening/spreading.

Social Networks in the Workplace
(Denise Howell, Alex Macgillivray, Kerry Krzynowek, Gabe Ramsey)

I started the morning off with this session (part of the legal track for the conference). The panel discussed how obviously social networks in the workplace has still not reached a comfortable point. The informality and immediacy of communications makes people uncomfortable. As a result, companies often react off of fear and create policies and expected social norms that are short-sighted and misguided. This topic is obviously near and dear to me after I was banned from using social networks at my job at NASA last year.

“If we could duct tape everyone’s mouth there would be no risks, but you take these risks all the time – this is nothing new,” stated one of the legal panelists.

Alex Macgillivray, the General Counsel of Twitter, explained that he really appreciated Google’s policy approach to the subject by just telling the employees “don’t be dumb”. Throughout the panel, this was brought up as a good solution. I have to agree. While the panel was lacking the viewpoint of an employee’s perspective on all of this (most just focusing on the employer’s point-of-view), the “don’t be dumb” policy is groundbreaking in this time of fear culture in that it respectfully treats employees like adults rather than untrustworthy liabilities.

Notes/personal observations from my year of science conferences (covering SciBarCamp, SciFoo, Science Commons and Citizen Science Alliance).

In July I attended SciBarCamp and SciFoo. These were both amazing events, each with their own approach and attendee diversity. While SciBarCamp had diversity in the types of science each attendee worked in, in general the people who chose to be there were fairly tech-savvy and more on the communications/outreach side of science than the scientist side. At SciFoo it was about the opposite, people coming from very diverse areas of science with varying roles/experiences in it, but a lot less tech-savvy.

BarCamps and FooCamps revolve around the user-generated goal of having everyone who attends actively contribute to the conference. I had a rough idea for a topic I wanted to converse with people about in hopes of gaining more first-person insight around it. After brainstorming with my counterpart Natalie (pictured above with me in our lab coats at Institute For The Future), we ended up on the title, “Open Collaboration Between Scientists, Communities, and the Unknown“. I gave the talk at both conferences, treating it as a conversation in progress. The two sessions went very differently. At SciBarCamp, I gave the talk with Natalie and by the end of it, people in the room were eager with voicing their thoughts on how to solve open collaboration problems and offering advice to other people who voiced concerns. At SciFoo, I led the talk and had a few other attendees demonstrate their endeavors in open collaboration. Though the talk is inherently conversational (having each attendee speak up at least once), it was mostly crickets. I have an inkling as to why this was.

In my observations, the more tech-savvy crowds were more vocal, but less diverse. At SciFoo, while it was incredibly inspiring to be around people you might otherwise never in your life get a chance to meet, the diversity seemed to create conversational barriers, which made BarCamp-style interactive talks more difficult some of the time. It felt as if the extreme differences between people made them less eager to offer advice/solutions to one another. Some of this could also be accounted for by the majority of the attendees not being familiar with the user-generated conference format and thus more used to just sitting back and listening to a talk.

The coolest thing off the top of my head that I learned about at SciFoo was a guy talking about his geo-engineering solution for climate change. Essentially using microbubble generators attached to boats that cause water to temporarily appear white in the ocean. He had worked out all the logistics for it and calculated that enough sunlight would be reflected off the otherwise dark-blue-light-absorbing ocean to make a big change. I think he is working out making this a reality (or at least I hope he is!). I’m frustrated each time I see an article on geo-engineering being unrealistic (always citing the “mirrors in space” idea to generate “yeah, right” reactions from readers).

Either way, I had a great time at SciBarCamp and I was completely honored to be one of the few invited to SciFoo (seriously, an event with world renowned scientists from every subject around the world, science couldn’t measure my excitement!). Socially, it all felt like the first day of school and the last day of summer camp in one weekend.

Thankfully, I had another event to attend later in the month to satiate my science cravings. Science Commons was a panel, moderated by Tim O’Reilly, dedicated to discussing how to make the web work for science. The discussion was cut off way too short for such an important subject. Nevertheless, issues discussed in the short time centered around web and identification standards for various types of scientific data, the perceived lack of incentives to collaborate and be online, and how citizen science makes a huge impact.

Lastly, I had the pleasure of being in London for the Citizen Science Alliance conference at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. The event mostly featured the team behind Galaxy Zoo discussing the challenges they faced and the exciting new endeavors they have coming up. Their new endeavor, Zooniverse, is indeed something to get excited about. In summary, they’re offering a hand-holding process and platform to help scientists get massively large data sets online and ready to be analyzed by citizen scientists. This is incredibly important as it is a common problem I hear about and this solution not only provides the technology, but also the much needed community support when starting the process. Overall, I was very happy to be able to attend this and meet people working in the citizen science world from different countries. I personally love to see citizen science projects and involvement coming out of countries outside of the States and can only hope there will be a lot more of it in the coming years.

(photo via adactio)

I’ve been meaning to write about a lot of the conferences I’ve been to this year (hopefully will get to it in a follow-up blog post). One of the upcoming conferences I’ve been offered to attend again is Supernova, a conference about “understanding how decentralization and pervasive connectivity are changing our world”. From web privacy to web standards, Supernova is great about booking speakers who not only live and breathe the issues they’re discussing, but actively fight for the progress of them in their daily life. Here’s a few people and talks I’m looking forward to from the current line-up:

Speakers:

• Marko Ahtisaari (Dopplr)
• Kevin Bankston (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
• Danah Boyd (Microsoft Research)

Talks:

• Social Networks in the Workplace (definitely a talk that’s of personal interest due to my experiences at NASA)
• Updating Copyright Law: A Fair (Use) Fight? (Jason Schultz gave a *great* panel discussion on this topic at SXSW titled Fair Use on Trial)
• The Changing World (Pervasive connectivity is altering everything from our social interactions to our cities.)
• Privacy and the Social Web
• Fun with Fun (What are the emergent properties of games and virtual worlds that will impact the broader technology space?)

Olson:
“How do we communicate how beneficial NASA has been to our society from a technological, from a national security perspective, and from an inspirational perspective?

And y’all talked about what Congress and the government can do, but one thing I find when I meet with constituent groups, we just had a group up here yesterday from all the NASA centers, some employees. And they all asked what can I do? What can I do to help you or to help make sure that the American public understands how important this is for our future?

Ms. Myers and Mr. O’Brien, I’d like to give you the first crack at that. What can we tell our constituents? What can they do to make a difference?”

[Myers answers]

O’Brien:
“You know I think the irony is that 40 years after the launch of Apollo 11 NASA suffers from a bit of timidity when it comes to unleashing the message. Now they have a natural legion of foot soldiers, evangelizers. Everyone I meet who is involved in space is deeply passionate about what they do; love what they do. They are committed to their jobs in ways most people are not. And unfortunately if they attempt to blog about it or tweet about it they get shut down. This happens all the time because the concern is that they’ll be off message.

It’s important to empower the agency and thus its foot soldiers to know that they can — they can be a part of this. If — if a flight controller wants to tweet and let her social network in on what’s going on inside mission control, assuming we’re not you know in some sort of mission critical situation that would cause danger to somebody, why not empower her to do that? But instead the message is you can’t.

So I think what Congress can do is to the extent they can streamline the rules for NASA and make it easier for them to do marketing, but also to the extent that they can avoid the tendency to get on the phone every time something comes across the bow that might — might offend somebody in somebody’s constituency. Because what that does is it cows the agency. And they need to be empowered too because if you unleashed the power of that workforce and allowed them to spread the word we could just stand by and watch them win the country over.”

Relearn the phrase “don’t burn bridges”
The quote above comes at a time where I still to this day receive emails from people inside NASA who tell me about how they were forced to shut down their personal blog for fear of being fired. Even worse, I still receive stories about people being forced by their managers to unblock people who are harassing them from their *personal* social networking accounts. The social web is a bridge between personal and professional lives and should be respected as such. Learning how to navigate this isn’t easy. Scrambling to put together a “digital policy” for employees might sound like the right solution, however, digital policies are equally dangerous due to their inability to evolve as the digital environment does. Starting off with general guidelines like “play nice” that encourage the use of social networks and respect privacy is a better first step.

Eliminate “the public”
The mindset of people in government is deeply rooted in using the term “the public” when referring to anyone who doesn’t also work in government. Not only does this term massively inhibit their ability to communicate effectively and connect with anyone, but it also frames their view for using the social web – something that “the public” uses and thus they should use as an extension of their job (instead of having a personal AND professional interest in it). This is a hard term to tackle, as I started saying it shortly after joining NASA as well. I recommend stepping down from using the term by saying things like “people will be able to better access this” or “this program allows people to get involved with XYZ”.

We need a “Freedom of Information, Except for Jerks” Act
The title of this section was joked about while conversing about this issue over dinner. The government has no standards or process in place for blocking abusive, harassing and/or all-around trolling people (see Tantek’s Troll Taxonomy). In fact, the government is so terrified of being called out for denying conversational access to someone, that they often pander to the poisonous person over protecting their own employees. As a result, “super villains” are created to feed off of the fear culture – a term Heather Champ, the community manager at Flickr, uses to describe someone who keeps coming back to haunt you forever. As Heather stated in a talk about Shepherding Passionate Users, “Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions and take actions that won’t be appreciated”.
Recommended listening for everyone: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People.

Users drop off at an accelerated rate from accessing/signing up for a new site to actually using it. Even if the sign-up process is super slick and the site is easy to use and helpful with telling users how to get started, more often than not companies forget one significant thing:

If the first impression is a ghost town until the user interacts with the service more (e.g. adds friends, follows feeds, etc.) – that will be their impression of your service and most likely their last login to it.

For Pownce, a social network I was a community manager for, this was a known weakness. I don’t have the data to show the drop-off rate from users who signed up for Pownce, but as with any social network, there’s always a large divide between active users and total users – and keeping the divide as small as possible plays a large role in the longevity of a site.

(original screenshot via Chris Messina)

Comparatively, when users sign up for Flickr, they’re shown the activity that is being created by other users on the site immediately:

(original screenshot via Chris Messina)

Additionally, Flickr always shows content other users are contributing on their service on your personal dashboard, regardless if you’ve added friends or uploaded photos of your own. In this way, Flickr is communicating that they have a live and constantly active ecosystem to participate in – making the user feel less uncertain about adding to that activity and interacting with the site.

The recommendation being – don’t use emptiness as a motivation for users to interact more with your site, even if you have super friendly instructions. Displaying example content not only shows that your site isn’t dead inside, it shows users what’s interesting without saying it.

I arrived home from SXSW at 10am, after staying up with friends until 5am, when I needed to leave for the airport. Still in the day’s clothes and make-up, I promptly collapsed for a 6 hour nap.

People:
SXSW was fabulous as always, but different for me from the first time I went a couple years ago. As many people re-tweeted from me, I always explain SXSW to people new to it that it is like having the entire internet in person, and it’s just as weird and overwhelming as you would imagine. While that factor hasn’t changed, the “meeting new people” aspect of it has.

When I first went to SXSW in 2007, I knew absolutely no one there, and was being asked how I seemed to know everyone there by the end of it. A lot of SXSW veterans say to not hang out with people you already know, that you’re “doing it wrong” by not meeting new people. On my 3rd year here, I don’t know if I agree entirely. It comes off wrong, but in talking with a friend, we agreed that we feel like the people we’ve come to know are the best of the best (with new people coming in through trusted connections). Hallway conversations this year seemed to be littered with the “what do you do” questions. I got rather tired of even entertaining these questions and took after Cal Henderson’s approach of just answering with “I write email”. I will admit one negative to staying with a group of friends while out and about is that I realize it makes me difficult to approach.

SXSW, for me, has transitioned from meeting new people, to spending quality time with people I already know and I would argue that it’s just as valuable. I did make two new friends that I absolutely adore this year: Amber Case (a cyborg anthropologist – SO much cooler sounding than digital anthropologist!) and Matt Biddulph (Dopplr’s CTO and camera geek). The geekery I shared with both of them was delightful – alas, neither live in San Francisco. On a brief side note, it was fun sharing a suite with Miss Violet Blue, with occasional drop-ins from Natalie and Karen.

Panels:
• “Back Off Man, I’m A Scientist: User Generated Discovery” was wonderful as one of the only science-related panels offered this year. The discussion circled around how unprofessional science is the best way to protect its objectivity and how Spacehack projects like Galaxy Zoo are leading the way in exploration and discovery for both the public and the professional science industry.
• “Make it So (Sexy): Lustful Design in Mainstream Science Fiction” was the type of panel I love – the kind that does not have enough time to zip past every single cool thing you should be aware of, whether or not you can keep up. The panel featured a ton of science fiction movies that displayed different types of sex/technology hybrids. This was great mind candy to consume for my Engadget column: Movie Gadget Friday.
• “New Threats to New Media: Fair Use On Trial” was the best participatory format for a panel I had encountered. In summary, the moderator would show a video to the audience and ask if they thought it should be fair use of a series of songs or movie clips, etc. based on how they felt. The moderator would then turn over to two panelists who had opposing views on if the video should be considered fair use or not. The moderator would then turn back to the audience and ask if anyone had changed their mind based on hearing the arguments – then pick someone from the crowd who had changed their mind and gave them 30 seconds to explain why. This not only had everyone paying attention, but also served as critical thinking, as I became curious about why I felt some examples were fair use and others weren’t.

Cupcakes:
I can’t begin to thank Sugar Mama’s Bakeshop (a local Austin cupcakery you should check out when in the area!) enough for sponsoring my SXSW “flashcake” experiment. I was inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s random wine parties last year and wanted to try it with cupcakes by tweeting out random locations to get free cupcakes (first come, first serve). Needless to say, it was a huge success, everyone *loved* Sugar Mama’s cupcakes, and my friends Natalie, Karen and Micah helped with optimizing the cupcake strategy (we even partnered with Mighty Leaf tea at one point, which was a great combo!).

• A video of one of the “flashcake” mobs was captured by Clintus.
• Reuters mentioned the phenomenon
• CNET says I was making all the out-of-work geeks smiling
• Wired dropped in a brief mention

353 days, 11 hours, 7 minutes and 10 seconds until SXSW 2010!

No, not a reference to my female cycle as I’m sure the rumormongers had hoped! I’m 3.5 months late on figuring out my new year’s resolution.

In my previous personal post, I stated that I wasn’t sure what 2009 was going to be for me yet. I think it has taken a few months to crystalize around the concept of vulnerability.

It started with the realization that I am a lot less shy than I used to be just a couple of years ago, and how silly I was for being shy over small stuff. I began to embrace being vulnerable within my dating life, from telling someone I used to have a crush on them to Twittering about someone I met that I thought was cute to asking a guy why he went on a date with someone else and not me. All things I used to be absolutely terrified of doing. While I anticipated feeling incredibly embarassed, the process of pushing past my threshold became surprisingly addictive and gave me a huge wave of relief. I suppose it goes in step with all the rainbows and unicorns that are supposed to appear when consultants tell brands about the benefits of being “open”.

In the exploration of vulnerability, however, I’ve discovered that it’s much more difficult to be vulnerable when it comes to work – this is an observation in other people as much as it is myself. As said at SXSW by Ben Brown, the difference between self-employed and unemployed is in your head – but that doesn’t make it any less difficult to announce to people your paycheck status when you’re trying to say, “no, really, I need more things on my plate”. And with me, I know I have trolls and stalkers who are just licking their fangs at the delight of this vulnerability (but of course, they’re also the ones who are the first to attack me every time I experience any recognition/success).

And while a low-to-no paycheck status might be great for creativity, “unemployment” can be like being sick: you have all the time in the world to do whatever you want to do, but like being sick, it’s difficult to focus past the cloud of needing to take care of yourself. This isn’t really a complaint, so much as my personal description of what it’s been like to be on the low-to-no status for a few months. I suppose this makes my other resolution to be to keep producing lots of stuff and putting it out there in the face of this financial “fog”. Good thing I have a shit ton of awesome ideas and people around me

With many creator-types unemployed or between clients, trendhunters expect a new sprouting of startups, echoing the creation of web 2.0 companies from the post-dot-com unemployed. I don’t believe that will happen in the same way. Peoples’ piggy banks are squealing and while web 2.0 companies got started with minimal money, most individuals now don’t even have enough to take the startup step forward.

Rather, I am witnessing a high tide of what I’m dubbing “pico projects” (terminology partially influenced by the recent launch of Picocool). Small projects developed by an individual with input from nearby friends as a makeshift advisory council, with little to no concern for monetization (at least at launch), just the desire to see an idea through to fruition.

Within my immediate circle, the launches of pico projects such as Huffduffer, Baconfile, Picocool and (my own) Spacehack are examples of this new wave. Projects that are more than single-serving sites, but less than a pitched business plan or even what Jason Calacanis has dubbed the $5-10k “microstartup“.

My friend and sometimes advisor to Spacehack, Ben Ward, points out that the shift from startup to pico project is not only due to a downturn (as some of these pico projects are more mini moonlighting outside of day jobs), but to the pervasiveness of tools readily available today as compared to just a few years ago. As a non-developer, this rings clear – my project in its current state uses about the limits of what I can “hack” together on my own without dependency on a developer. But this is also true for developers, as frameworks like Django have more easily allowed for the development of endeavors like Baconfile.

In mentioning this slight shift, Jeremy Keith pointed me to £5 App, a meetup for individual or two creators to showcase simple software that they decided to just go ahead and execute. I particularly enjoy this line from the meetup description:

“The discussion will range from technical (what tools/languages were used during development) to business (building communities, spreading the word, costs and rewards).”

…calling attention to the fact that these projects care more about building communities than how to talk to angel investors.

What are some pico projects you’ve come across or built in the last few months? I’ll link any I find to be interesting from the comments at the bottom of this post.

Other interesting pico projects:
• Not in the comments, but Jeremy Keith pointed me to Readernaut
• Josh McKenty, a colleague from NASA, reminded me of the TinyApps project
• Emily Chang introduced me to 4am Project
• Blaine Cook recently created TinyArchive