flighthings-blog

[flighthings-blog]

Silverside Detectors, Finalist #128 at MassChallenge 2013

One Marina Park, 14th floor, MassChallenge Headquarters, and Silverside's new home.

Yesterday, 128 finalists were chosen from the roughly 1200 that applied for the MassChallenge 2013 Accelerator program.  A company we started called Silverside Detectors Inc. was accepted into the program. 

Silverside is trying to solve a hard problem: how do we make our cities much safer from the threat of nuclear terrorism over the next 25 years?  Our governments use their resources as best as possible to stop nuclear material from moving improperly through black markets, or from being brought into a city in a weaponizable form.

One of the biggest challenges is that detection technology is far too expensive to be placed everywhere that it's needed.  

Silverside provides a solution by making a new type of detector that does what others do, but is 10 times less expensive.  With these detectors, a much stronger Global Nuclear Detection Architecture at our borders, ports of entry, highways, and airports is finally possible.

I want Silverside to be the 128th finalist in MassChallenge this year by helping keep our vibrant and beautiful cities' people safe, growing, learning, and getting better all the time.

I've never met a more wonderful, kind, passionate, and alive group of creators, thinkers, and doers than in the start-up community in Boston.  To me, MassChallenge is the epicenter of this passion.  Along with this year's other finalists, Silverside is proud, humbled, and ready to get to work to change the world for the better.

[flighthings-blog]

Late that night Hungry Joe dreamed that Huple's cat was sleeping on his face, suffocating him, and when he woke up, Huple's cat was sleeping on his face.

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

[flighthings-blog]

There are countries in Europe where the native considers himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits. The greatest changes are effected there without his concurrence, and (unless chance may have apprised him of the event ) without his knowledge; nay, more, the condition of his village, the police of his street, the repairs of the church or the parsonage, do not concern him; for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. He has only a life interest in these possessions, without the spirit of ownership or any ideas of improvement. This want of interest in his own affairs goes so far that if his own safety or that of his children is at last endangered, instead of trying to avert the peril, he will fold his arms and wait till the whole nation comes to his aid. This man who has so completely sacrificed his own free will does not, more than any other person, love obedience; he cowers, it is true, before the pettiest officer, but he braves the law with the spirit of a conquered foe as soon as its superior force is withdrawn; he perpetually oscillates between servitude and license. When a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and its laws, or perish; for the source of public virtues is dried up; and though it may contain subjects, it has no citizens. Such communities are a natural prey to foreign conquests; and if they do not wholly disappear from the scene, it is only because they are surrounded by other nations similar or inferior to themselves; it is because they still have an indefinable instinct of patriotism; and an involuntary pride in the name of their country, or a vague reminiscence of its bygone fame, suffices to give them an impulse of self-preservation.

Alexis de Tocqueville

[flighthings-blog]

Signing locations for We the People petitions

Here are 20 randomly selected petitions from We The People: Whitehouse.gov's petition website that are around 25,000 to 40,000 signatures - the threshold of response from the administration.

I used the whitehouse scraper code, heatmap.py, the Free ZIP Code Database, and Google Earth.  Thanks these things.

Apologies if this not the best sample or visualization, just wanted to get something going during the snowstorm.  Also, poor form clipping Alaska and Hawaii.

This type of visualization helps me think about the dynamics of support that nationwide petitions have.  This would be a great thing to visualize right on the whitehouse.gov site.  Im lookin' at you, whitehouse.gov hackathon :)

Allow H1B approved cases to get Visa stamped in US

To award the Medal of Freedom to the 4 Firefighters who were ambushed in West Webster New York on Christmas Eve 2012

Ban and outlaw Breed Specific Legislation (BSL) in the United States of America on a Federal level!

Declare the Monday following the Super Bowl a national holiday.

Eliminate armed guards for the President, Vice-President, and their families, and establish Gun Free Zones around them

End the Military’s Discrimination against Non-Religious Service Members 

End to the War On Coal, end the job killing policies of the EPA and require an economic impact analysis of new policies

Establish Lunar New Year as a National Holiday. Give it the same importance and weight as the other cultural holidays.

Finalize Standards for GLUTEN-FREE Labeling

Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann.

Grant Temporary Protected Status to Guatemalans 

Include Licensed Naturopathic Physicians as primary care providers in the Federal Healthcare Law (Obamacare).

Invite Neal Boortz, the author of The FairTax Book, to spend one hour talking with the President about tax reform.

Legalize Marijuana at the Federal level.

Light the White House gold for the month of September to honor pediatric cancer fighters and bring light to the cause.

Make all involved in the rape of the Steubenville scandal be pushed out of Juvenile court so there can be real justice.

Not INFRINGE upon 2nd Amendment rights by instituting any new form of firearms ban, legislation, or regulation.

Officially recognize American Sign Language as a community language and a language of instruction in schools.

Prevent the FDA from regulating or banning the sale and use of electronic cigarettes, accessories and associated liquids

Recognize Acupuncturist as Healthcare providers

Recognize pharmacists as health care providers!

Save the Johnson Valley OHV Area. Be fiscally responsible. Stop 29 Palms Marine base expansion. Keep public lands open.

Uphold the Constitution and the 2nd amendment. The 2nd amendment was put in place for the people.

[flighthings-blog]

Drunk-SAPN

A real-time streaming transcript of C-SPAN mixed with a drinking game.  The more drinks, the more trashed everyone gets on C-SPAN.  Check it out!

Dan Schultz (@slifty) at the Boston Globe Innovation Lab asked me 3 hours before the debate to get a stylesheet and logo together for the site.  Thanks so much to him for teaching me how to code and deploy like a boss.

[flighthings-blog]

Reason #347 that the Boston Globe rocks: robots.

[flighthings-blog]

why Wirite?

here are some examples...

- Bill Clinton, 2012 DNC Speech

- Dave Matthews, Radio City, 2007

- Lawrence Lessig, On Point with Tom Ashbrook Jan. 2nd 2012

And so on.

It's funny how aligned we can be about certain challenges we face in our country, but how little we can actually talk about and do anything about them.

Here is an example: A recent U.S. Gallup Poll found that reducing corruption in the federal government ranked at the top of Americans recommended priorities for the next president:

Sounds like an issue that would get a lot of air time for discussion.. from the media and the presidential candidates.  But it doesn't.  Why?

One reason may be that it ranks much lower in importance within either group of Obama and Romney supporters:

Such issues can get slammed for multiple reasons.  First, since politicians run campaigns focusing on their base, they may only take the top tier of issues with their group.  Second, even if they are trying to create positive vibes on the other side of supporters, they may focus on that side's top tier issues.  Third, another issue that is also high priority across the board can be the large frontrunner for a bi-partisan issue, especially if it is easier to understand and more seemingly pressing - such as job creation.  Lastly, when the issue is about a problem with the decision making body itself, it is an issue that representatives are less keen on talking about.

Another problem is that our media is not taking the lead to address such middle of the road issues.  Even though there are many voices that could take the charge:

Such voices become siloed in a similar way as our representative systems, possibly for some of the very same reasons.  Issues that try to be raised in the middle that do not fit in this system (ie: No Labels, Rootstrikers, and United Republic) are drowned out.

So...

Such a system wouldn't have just a small group of representatives - such as our congressmen, or people in the media, or leaders starting petitions, or foundations like Rootstrikers - deciding what topics to address and how to address them... it would be the entire community:

There is a growing amount of research that is hinting that we need everyone to create good collective decisions, not just leaders and representatives.

Existing tools, although amazing and getting better every day (see loom.io, meldd, and a list of others), are not yet ready to create documents from a large collaboration of differently minded people.  Out of the major tools that we have that could potentially help:

How do we make a tool that can get there?

What if we take a Wiki style editor, and meld it with a user voting system, like Reddit?

and make a new tool:

The goal of the tool is for edits to be made by anyone who wants (the Wiki part of the tool):

... at the same time, all of the edits are being voted up and down by the community (the Reddit part of the tool):

then the top non-conflicting edits are placed into a new version of the document:

The document would be discussed and honed from version to version until a large enough group of authors were supporting it.

We live in a connected world, however we tend to only talk to people closest to us in our networks.  Take for example this map representing the behavior of Facebook links within the United States:

This image shows that although we are very connected in the online world (how awesome are all of those links pouring over the oceans?), we still have a tendency to connect with like-located people.  And even though it can't be seen, there ends up being a huge tendency to connect with like-minded people as well.  Another study that looked at just this was done during the 2004 presidential election:

This shows conservatively minded blogs (red), liberally minded blogs (blue), and the connections when they link to each others ideas (yellow and pink).  You can see it doesn't happen that often.

So how can we stop this from happening with Wirite?  Two things...

Any person at any time can see exactly what the sentiment of the document is.  In other words, what groups of people are supporting it, which are not, and why they feel this way:

Furthermore, one can look at the history of the document, and see how the support has changed from version to version, and what changes to the document have brought people on board, or off board the document:

With the benefit of this information, here is the second thing:

If you help make a change to the document by either editing or voting up an edit that brings more people on board that are near you demographically, you will get some diversity karma:

but by making changes that bring people on board that are less like you, you can get much more:

By expressing and discussing edits, votes, and diversity karma on Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites, we will be able to see how our collective efforts bring a larger, more diverse group of people together to solve and reach solidarity on challenging issues:

If this seems a little like a game, you are right! There has been lots of research showing that people can figure out and do the most incredible things with one another, just by making tools that enable it, and just by asking them to help. 

We are using some of the best practices from this research as spelled out in Jane McGonigal's recent book Reality is Broken (cool quotes):

So how are we going to use all of this to make a tool at the Boston Globe?  Well, one way that we are thinking about is to write an article with the Boston Globe community that probably couldn't be written in any other way. 

One interesting place to start is for the presidential election.  We already know that sometime soon there will be opinion articles that look something like this in our national newspapers:

But what if we could write something like this?:

...and not have it written by just a small group of people, but rather the group of people influenced: the American public.  We could imagine a document that increases in size and diversity by giving people the right tools to be able to do it, by challenging them to use it, and by asking for their help:

We could have a competition, so that if the document reaches a certain level of support AND diversity, it could be republished in the Boston Globe:

Such a document would be an important new way to find and express the pulse of a city, a town, or a country in a way that we have never seen before.

This is what we'll be trying to make at the Boston Globe!  If you are interested in helping, please shoot use an email at andrew@wirite.org.

Thanks!

[flighthings-blog]

Theory vs. Experiment

Reality is too easy.  Reality is depressing.  It's unproductive, and hopeless.  It's disconnected, and trivial.  It's hard to get into.  It's pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating.  It's hard to swallow.  It's unsustainable.  It's unambitious.  It's disorganized and divided.  It's stuck in the present. Reality is all of these things.  But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny.

                                                                - Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken

Recently the two main experiments - Atlas and CMS - at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN published results showing that there is strong evidence that a Higgs-like particle exists.  The result was the first in a potentially long list of things that will be observed at the LHC.  

The Higgs observation is going to change how the Physics community does what it does within the upcoming years.  Mainly, it will make us revisit the relationship between experimentation - observing our universe with our senses - and theory - explaining how our universe works using mental models and mathematics.  These two divisions of labor have an amazingly complex and beautiful interplay, both motivating one another to explore truth in the world and the universe. 

Exploring new and better ways for our government and democracy to work is kind of like this as well.  There is a similarly amazingly complex and beautiful interplay between observations of how we get along and make decisions with one another, theoretical analysis of why things are happening the way that they are, and experiments that are creatively implemented to see what we are all capable of.  These experiments in governance and democracy not only have the potential to change the theory about what we are capable of together, but also have the potential to change the the very world we are exploring.

Just as in physics, learning the history of experiments that have come before and what theories have been developed to explain past experiments is a good first step to decide what to do in new experiments.  Seeing which past events, and which past theories are the building blocks of the things we do is helpful to guide and understand the new task at hand.

For these reasons I am laying out the major histories, theories, and ideas that we are mixing together to motivate Wirite during it's stay at the Boston Globe.  The main themes of these writings are that:

we have always struggled in the United States to find the right balance of friendship vs. adversarial decision making,

we need lots of people working together to create good decisions on complex issues, and

there are new ways to think about empowering people to do good and challenging work together.

on to the texts...

Cognitive Democracy, by Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi

Premise:  We need everyone to create good collective decisions, not just leaders and representatives.

Quotes from the paper:

Democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly diverse perspectives to come together in order collectively to solve problems.  Democracy can do better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism or markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy.

What are broad macro-institutions such as politics, markets, and hierarchies good for?... We start with a pragmatist question whether these institutions are useful in helping us to solve difficult problems... Most vexing problems are usually ones without any very obvious solutions... How do we regulate financial markets so as to minimize the risk of new crises emerging, and limit the harm of those that happen?  How do we best encourage the spread of human rights internationally?... These are social problems.  That is, they are problems witch involve the interaction of large numbers of human beings, with different interests, desires, needs and perspectives.  Second, as a result, they are complex problems... We argue that macro-institutions will best be able to tackle these problems if they have two features.  First, they should foster a high degree of direct communication between individuals with diverse viewpoints.  Second, they should provide relative equality among affected actors in decision-making processes, so as to prevent socially or politically powerful groups from blocking socially beneficial changes to the detriment of their own particular interests.

Research on problem solving typically does not talk about differences in actors' interests, or in actors' ability successfully to pursue their interests.  While different individuals initially perceive different aspects of the landscape, researchers assume that once they are able to communicate with each other, they will agree on how to rank visible solutions from best to worst.  But actors may have diverse interests as well as diverse understandings of the world...They may even be working in such different landscapes, in terms of personal advantage, that one actor's peak is another's valley, and vice versa.  Moreover, actors may differ in their ability to ensure that their interest are prosecuted... Here, relative equality of power can have important consequences.  Individuals in settings with relatively equal power relations are more likely to converge on solutions with broad social benefits, and less likely to converge on solutions that benefit smaller groups of individuals at the expense of the majority.

We have no reason to think that actually-existing democratic structures are as good as they could be, or even close.  If nothing else, designing institutions is, itself, a highly complex problem, where even the most able decision-makers have little ability to foresee the consequences of their actions.  Even when an institution works well at one time, the array of other institutions, social and physical conditions in which it must function is constantly changing.  Institutional design and reform, then, is unavoidably a matter of more or less ambitious "piecemeal social experiments"... The rise of the internet makes this an especially propitious time for experimenting with democratic structures themselves.  The means available for communication and information-processing are obviously going to change the possibilities for collective decision-making.  (Bureaucracy was not an option in the Old Stone Age, nor representative democracy without something like cheap printing.)  We do not yet know the possibilities of Internet-mediated communication for gathering dispersed knowledge, for generating new knowledge, for complex problem-solving, or for collective decision-making, but we really ought to find out.

Democracy, we have argued, has a capacity unmatched among other macro-structures to actually experiment, and to make use of cognitive diversity in solving complex problems.  To make the best use of these potentials, democratic structures must themselves be shaped so that social interaction and cognitive function reinforce each other.  But the cleverest institutional design in the world will not help unless the resources - material, social, cultural - needed for participation are actually broadly shared.  This is not, or not just, about being nice or equitable; cognitive diversity is itself a resource, a source of power, and not something we can afford to waste.

Beyond Adversarial Democracy, by Jane J. Mansbridge

Premise:  Having the best interests in mind of people we aren't close to or even know is a theme in our history.

Quotes from the book:

Every step in this adversary process violates another, older understanding of democracy.  In that older understanding, people who disagree do not vote; they reason together until they agree on the best answer.  Nor do they elect representatives to reason for them.  They come together with their friends to find agreement.  This democracy is consensual, based on common interest and equal respect.  It is the democracy of face-to-face relations.  Because it assumes that citizens have a single common interest, I have called it "unitary" democracy. These two conceptions of democracy persist, side by side, in every modern democracy.  The adversary ideal and the procedures derived from it have dominated Western democratic thinking since the seventeenth century.  But unitary ideals and procedures continue to influence the way legislative committees, elected representatives, major institutions like the Supreme Court, and local democracies actually act.  In crises of legitimacy, citizens often revery to the unitary ideal, as young people did in the small participatory democracies that flourished in America in the 1960s and early 1970s. These two conceptions of democracy are not only different, but contradictory.  Yet those who talk and write about our democratic ideals never distinguish them.  They assume either that adversary democracy is the only legitimate form of democracy or that unitary democracy is the ideal form and adversary democracy a compromise between the unitary ideal and the exigencies of practical politics.  The main argument of this book is that both the unitary and the adversary forms of democracy embody worthy democratic ideals, although each is appropriate in a different context.

Readers may well feel skeptical about the unitary ideal.  Clearly, no two individuals can have completely common interest.  The claim that people have common interest can, moreover, be a way of misleading the less powerful into collaborating with the more powerful in schemes that mainly benefit the latter... Westerners have increasingly accepted conflicting interests as an inalterable fact.  This development in political thinking paved the way for creating democratic institutions on a national scale.  But the increasing legitimation of conflicting interests should not blind us to the fact that most human relationships are still built on common interests.

Over the generations, the idea gradually gained acceptance that a democracy should weigh and come to terms with conflicting selfish interests rather than trying to reconcile them or to make them subordinate to a larger common good...At the bottom, this theory of adversary democracy is remarkable similar to modern laissez-faire economics.  Following a modified version of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, laissez-faire economists not only accept the "marketplace" vision of a society based on self-interest but make it an ideal.  They believe either that the invisible hand of supply and demand will aggregate millions of selfish desires into the common good, or that, because no one can know the common good, the aggregation of selfish desires is the best substitute.

To the extent that we feel we share experience with another, we feel alike, and hence in some sense equal.  We think of this underlying experience when we say that, although human beings may be unequal in outward qualities, they are equal underneath.  Our common experience allows us to view others as somehow independent of their social roles and titles, which are clearly unequal.  Blood brothers and sisters, unequal in skills, often feel these sentiments of identity and equality of respect. Workers, blacks, Jews, women, nationalists - all groups with a common past - can, in stressing that past, evoke feelings of identity and equality.  "Fraternity" does not contradict the ideal of quality, but rests on a perception of underlying likeness.

...in practice face-to-face contact increases the perception of likeness, encourages decision making by consensus, and perhaps even enhances equality of status... it seems to increase the actual congruence of interests by encouraging the empathy by which individual members make one another's interests their own.  It also encourages the recognition of common interest by allowing subtleties of direct communication.  On the negative side, it increases the possibility of conformity through intimidation, resulting in a false or managed consensus...When citizens have a common interest, face-to-face contact - which allows debate, empathy, listening, learning, changing opinions, and a burst of solidarity when a decision is reached - can bring real joy.  But in the face of conflict, emotions turn sour. Even in representative systems, an aversion to conflict leads citizens to avoid discussing politics; in face-to-face assemblies, similar aversions have more profound effects.  Some people do not attend meetings because they know in advance that they will get upset.  If they do attend, they may still need the support of a faction before they can find courage enough to enter the fray.  They may hold back what they have to say until they lose control and become too angry to listen.  Fear of conflict leads those with influence in a meeting to suppress unimportant issues rather than letting them surface and cause disruption.  It leads them also to avoid the appearance of conflict by pressing for unanimity.  If these techniques are successful, the consensual decision that results does not reflect a common interest.  For these reasons, in both the town meeting and the democratic workplace, face-to-face decision making worked better in times of common interest than it did in times of irreconcilable conflict.  When a polity has to handle many questions of conflicting interest, most people prefer a secret ballot and a method of combining preferences, like referenda or electoral representation, that puts some distance between them and their opponents...Face-to-face meetings of all citizens are in any case impossible on a nationwide level...

Reality is Broken, by Jane McGonigal

Premise:  Lots of people can do really good and challenging work with each other more than you would imagine.

Quotes from the book:

It is games that give us something to do when there is nothing to do.  We thus call games "pastimes" and regard them as trifling fillers of the interstices of our lives.  But they are much more important than that.  They are clues to the future.  And their serious cultivation now is perhaps our only salvation

                                                                     -Bernard Suits, philosopher

Game developers know better than anyone else how to inspire extreme effort and reward hard work.  They know how to facilitate cooperation and collaboration at preciousness unimaginable scales.  And they are continuously innovating new ways to motivate players to stick with harder challenges, for longer, and in much bigger groups.  These crucial twenty-first-century skills can help all of us find new ways to make a deep and lasting impact on the world around us.  Game design isn't just a technological craft.  It's a twenty-first-century way of thinking and leading.  And gameplay isn't just a pastime.  It's a twenty-first-century way of working together to accomplish real change. Antoine de Saint Exupery once wrote:                      As for the future, your task is not to see it, but enable it. Games, in the twenty-first century, will be a primary platform for enabling the future.

In a good computer or video game you're always playing on the very edge of your skill level, always on the brink of falling off.  When you do fall off, you feel the urge to climb back on.  That's because there is virtually nothing as engaging as this state of working at the very limits of your ability- or what both game designers and psychologists call "flow." When your are in a state of flow, you want to stay there: both quitting and winning are equally unsatisfying outcomes... Competition and winning are not defining traits of games - nor are they defining interests of people who love to play them... In high-feedback games, the state of being intensely engaged may ultimately be more pleasurable than even the satisfaction of winning.

Players begin each game by tackling the obstacle of not knowing what to do and not knowing how to play...it's a truism in the game industry that a well-designed game should be playable immediately, with no instruction whatsoever.

When we don't choose hard work for ourselves, it's usually not the right work, at the right time, for the right person.  It's not perfectly customized for our strengths, we're not in control of the work flow, we don't have a clear picture of what we're contributing to, and we never see how it all pays off in the end.  Hard work that someone else requires us to do just doesn't activate our happiness systems in the same way.  It all too often doesn't absorb us, doesn't make us optimistic, and doesn't invigorate us.

What a boost to global net happiness it would be if we could positively activate the minds and bodies of hundreds of millions of people by offering them better hard work.  We could offer them challenging, customizable missions and tasks, to do alone or with friends and family, whenever and wherever.  We could provide them with vivid, real-time reports of the progress they're making and a clear view of the impact they're having on the world around them.

Satisfying work always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal.  Having a clear goal motivates us to act: we know what we're supposed to do.  And actionable next steps ensure that we can make progress toward the goal immediately. What if we have a clear goal, but we aren't sure how to go about achieving it?  Then it's not work - it's a problem...In the absence of actionable steps, our motivation to solve a problem might not be enough to make real progress.  Well-designed work, on the other hand, leaves no doubt that progress will be made.  There is a guarantee of productivity built in, and that's what makes it so appealing.

When we fail in real life, we are typically disappointed, not energized.  We experience diminished interest and motivation.  And if we fail again and again, we get more stressed, not less...[but] the right kind of failure feedback is a reward.  It makes us more engaged and more optimistic about our odds of success...If failure feels random or passive, we lose our sense of agency - and optimism goes down the drain.  As technology journalist Clive Thompson reminds us, "It's only fun to fail if the game is fair - and you had every chance of success"

Meaning is the feeling that we're a part of something bigger than ourselves.  It's the belief that our actions matter beyond our own individual lives.  When something is meaningful, it has significance and worth not just to ourselves, or even to our closest friends and family, but to a much larger group: to a community, an organization, or even the entire human species.  Meaning is something we are all looking for more of: more ways to make a difference in the bigger picture, more chances to leave a lasting mark on the world, more moments of awe and wonder at the scale of the projects and communities we're a part of. How do we get more meaning?... connect our daily actions to something bigger than ourselves - and the bigger, the better.

An epic environment is a space that, by virtue of its extreme scale, provokes a profound sense of awe and wonder.... A good working definition for "epic" is something that far surpasses the ordinary, especially in size, scale, and intensity.  Something epic is of heroic proportions.

In order to turn a group of strangers into a community, you have to follow two basic steps: first, cultivate a shared interest among strangers, and, second, give them the opportunity and means to interact with each other around that interest...That is exactly what a good multiplayer game does best.  It focuses the attention of a group of people on a common goal, even if they thing the have nothing in common withe each other.  And it dives them the means and motivation to pursue that goal, even if they had no intention of interacting with each other previously. Does a game community among strangers last?  Not always.  Sometimes it lasts only as long as the game itself.  The players might never see or talk to each other again.  And that's perfectly okay....But communities can also confer real benefits even when they last for mere days, hours, or even minutes.  Even a small taste of [community] can be enough to bring us back to the social world if we feel isolated from it, or to renew our commitment to participating actively and positively in the lives of people around us.

...if we could convince every Internet user to volunteer just one single hour a week, we could accomplish a great deal.  Collectively, we would be able to complete nearly twenty Wikipedia-size projects every single week. Which really makes you wonder: with so much potential, why aren't there even more Wikipecia-scale projects out there? The truth is, the Internet is littered with underperforming, barely populated, or completely abandoned collaboration spaces: wikis that have no contributors, discussion forums with no comments, open-source projects with no active users, social networks with barely a few members, and Facebook groups with plenty of members but few who ever do anything after joining.  According to Shirky, more than have of all collaborative projects online fail to achieve the minimum number of participants necessary to even begin working on their goal, let alone achieve it...This problem is likely going to get worse before it gets better.  As it becomes easier and cheaper to launch a participation network, it will likely become equally difficult to sustain it.  There are only so many potential participants on the Internet.  And as long as participation is designed as an active process requiring some mental effort, there are only so many units of engagement, or mental hours, each participant can reasonably expend in a given hour, day, week, or month...We have to face the facts.  It's very difficult to motivate large numbers of people to come together at the same time and to contribute any significant amount of energy - let alone their very best effort - to a collaborative project.  Most big crowd projects today fail: they fail to attract a crowd, or they fail to give the crowd the right kind of work, or they fail to reward the crowd well enough to keep it participating over the long haul. But it's not hopeless.  As both Wikipedia and Investigate Your MP's Expenses show, there are significant crowdsourcing projects succeeding.  And they all have one important thing in common: they're structured like a good multiplayer game.

With good mission design - a focused task, a clearly defined context for action, a real window of opportunity - something previously impossible to achieve, like saving a life, becomes possible.  That's the power of making volunteer work more like a game: players can be empowered to do amazing things, if their volunteer work is designed like a good quest.

By the age of twenty-one, the average young American has spent somewhere between two and three thousand hours reading books - and more than ten thousand hours playing computer and video games...To put that number in perspective, ten thousand hours is almost exactly the same amount of time an average American student spends in the classroom from the moment they start fifth grade all the way through high school graduation - if they have perfect attendance.  In other words, as much time as they spend learning reading, writing, math, science, history, government, geography, foreign languages, art, physical education, and so on over the course of their middle school and high school careers they spend teaching themselves (and each other) to play computer and video games. Which brings us to the million-dollar question for the future: What, exactly, are gamers getting good at?...gamers...are exceptionally skilled at one important thing: collaboration. It seems counterintuitive: how can you collaborate with someone when you're actively opposing them?  Or even harder to imagine: how on earth can you collaborate all by yourself?  But in fact, online gamers are increasingly doing both, thanks to two factors: the fundamentally collaborative aspects of playing any good game, and new game technologies and design patterns that support entirely new ways of working together.

When enough people play a game, it becomes a massively collaborative study of a problem, an extreme-scale test of potential action in a specific possibility.

What's a superstructure? A superstructure is a highly collaborative network that's built on top of existing groups and organizations.

A superstructure brings together two or more different communities that don't already work together.

A superstructure is designed to help solve a big, complex problem that no single existing organization can solve alone.

A superstructure harnesses the unique resources, skills, and activities of each of its subgroups.  Everyone contributes something different and together they create a solution.

A superstructure is fundamentally new.  It should sound like an idea that no one's tried before.

World changing games must be custom designed specifically for the most impoverished regions of the world, where future-making skills are most urgently needed - for example, developing areas in much of Africa.

Very big games represent the future of collaboration.  They are, quite simply, the best hope we have for solving the most complex problems of our time.  They are giving more people than ever before in human history the opportunity to do work that really matters, and to participate directly in changing the whole world.

Reality is too easy.  Reality is depressing.  It's unproductive, and hopeless.  It's disconnected, and trivial.  It's hard to get into.  It's pointless, unrewarding, lonely, and isolating.  It's hard to swallow.  It's unsustainable.  It's unambitious.  It's disorganized and divided.  It's stuck in the present. Reality is all of these things.  But in at least one crucially important way, reality is also better: reality is our destiny.

[flighthings-blog]

a new home...

Starting August 01, Wirite has a home!!

The Boston Globe Innovation lab is a space at the Boston Globe dedicated to "understanding, imagining, and demonstrating the (near) future of news".  Wirite has had an amazing summer leading up to this.  By moonlighting the MassChallenge program, and learning from our awesome mentors and advisors, we have a plan to make Wirite the tool that people love to become empowered with.  Now we are ready to make it happen.  

We believe that by pooling resources in an easy, Facebook-able, Tweet-able manner, we have the potential to make large changes in our world that can only be made if 1) we have a lot of us, 2) we are diverse, and 3) we do it together.  From newspaper opinion articles written by thousands of liberals and conservatives, to peace treaties written by the people in different countries, Wirite strives to give very large groups tools to find what they have in common, so that they can be stronger together.

For the next few months Wirite's founding team will work with the Boston Globe on its first test case: a new way for opinion articles to be drafted... by Bostonians just like you!

We're going to need a lot of help, so thanks in advance as we pester you, our friends and family, and anyone else we can find, to help build this important tool with us.  We couldn't do it without you.

Stay tuned...

[flighthings-blog]

Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.

Josh Ritter

[flighthings-blog]

Finally needed business cards for Wirite.  Here is the first batch.

[flighthings-blog]

a new type of website that will allow you to connect with people you already know

...coming soon...

[flighthings-blog]

A picture of a detector we've been developing for the past year.  It's made of glass, steel, copper, and lithium-6.  Interesting Fact: lithium-6 was originally created to make hydrogen bombs.  Now we are using it to help stop nuclear proliferation.

More of a blurb: 

One of the challenges for national security is to provide for radiation monitoring at a very large number of portals where there is risk of illegal entry of radioactive material. Any technology to be used for such a purpose preferably employs widely available and relatively inexpensive materials and construction, to make wide-scale deployment economically feasible.  The goal of our research is to develop detectors whose low cost, large surface areas, ease of construction, and available materials, allow them to surpass the benefits of more expensive detectors.  We report on the development of a neutron detector that employs large, thin sheets of enriched lithium in a gas-filled multi-wire proportional chamber (MWPC).  The detector has a thermal neutron detection efficiency of 20%.

The amount of already enriched lithium at Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant is important to the efficacy of this method. The United States produced a total of 442.4 metric tons of enriched lithium from 1954 to 1963 for thermonuclear weapons, tritium production, and other purposes. If only 25 tons of the material is used for such detectors, 400000 m^2 detectors can be made. Since two, 1 m^2 detectors surpass the capabilities of a He-3 tube radiation monitor, then 200000 He-3 equivalent detectors can be deployed, greatly increasing the neutron detection capability of nuclear non-proliferation activities.

[flighthings-blog]

Couldn't not watch the end of the Norway NASA broadcast of the Venus Solar Transit alongside the Baraka ending finale.

About a minute into the video, the live feed of the Sun switches from Hawaii to Tromso, Norway.  From the perspective of Hawaii, Venus is not in front of the sun anymore.  But from Tromso, it is just finishing up crossing over.  It is neat because it allows a feeling of the largeness of the Solar System, and the Earth and Sun's relative size.  It reminds me of the feeling I have when driving across the United States, how big the Earth is just by taking hours and hours driving over a small patch of it... beautiful.

[flighthings-blog]

Here is a shortened rendition of the slides we presented at MassChallenge in the semi-finals of the competition.  Just replace the captions at the bottom of the slides with a crazy excited Inglis voice and you should be able to recreate the atmosphere well. 

[flighthings-blog]

reason #143,311 of the millions that make me love everyone.

[flighthings-blog]

MassChallenge accepted!  We'll find out in early May whether we are a highly potential team. Go to http://masschallenge.org/profile/wirite to vote!