I don't disagree... yet I do have a couple of points that intersect at some oblique angle:
1) I've often felt that many social geo apps cannot even be written at home in an office. There's a quality of being outside, in a place, or in a new situation, that makes the idea vital - and when one returns home the idea loses its luster. It's not because the idea sucked but because ones own needs and embodiment make one a different person in different situations. 2) Also, there seems to be this emerging idea of "social practice development". A term I steal (and abuse) from the art community. It seems like a new practice that is basically changing the way developers (in Portland at least) work. We're tending to swarm together to work on projects socially; even without personal dollar gain. I believe this is because working with other people has a value for its own sake. Working with others at least makes work a sustainable process because you're feeding other parts of you... not just that hunger to make things. Speaking to your comment about how everything sucks and we should do more useful stuff - I don't really even disagree there - but this stuff is incredibly incredibly hard... it is entire lives of peoples effort... But there is a trajectory - I hope it goes like this: 1) To be able to "see". Super rich socially filtered static spatial data about any area of interest. To know where your friends are, where stuff is, the history of things. I call this "the old white mans internet". It is an internet of dry dead things; Wikipedia entries and Encyclopedia Of Life and WiserEarth and all the other fact repositories... 2) To be able to "say". To be able to issue verbs on the environment; to say "I want Pizza" and to have people who want to sell me pizza compete for the privilege - filtered against my trust network... Inverting google so that the sellers do the work would really be satisfying. And it will be satisfying to finally have an industrial voice for our industrial landscape. I see FireEagle as an example here. Folks will hook up bartering and bidding systems to this kind of thing and we'll be able to wander around in our little lives taking gigs, helping out, getting stuff that we need - without the hassle it is now. 3) To be able to "predict". Really we all have to start focusing on the environment - which is not just the artificial idea we call 'nature', but the sum of nature, and humans, and human activity and human structures. Lifemapper is just starting to play around the edges here and that is so so exciting for me at least; http://www.lifemapper.org/ ... 4) To be able to "change". Where I'd like to optimistically see this all go is that we're able to kind of rewrite ourselves and our landscape on large scale. There are a lot of practices we hear about around the world that seem more sane; from sharing childcare to shared gardens to local doctoring to protecting salmon runs. But we don't seem to have the power to affect our landscape. It becomes the life quest to make any one change and that is un-affordable. It's bizarre how much cities and places we live in seem set in stone... maybe this will change? Anyway... see y'all at WhereCamp tomorrow! - anselm > Sure, but it was a springboard into an mostly unrelated rant. :) > > So what's to be done about the real problems? I'm a bit tired of crap like > Twitter being big things, and would like to see actual significant stuff > being done. > > Sorry, but GIS is not it. Second Life is not it. Google Earth is not it. > Maps are not it. Representations of anything are not it. It has to be real > data to be as flexible as real things. > > How do we move to the point of understanding, as a group, the challenge to > be tackled? If you're writing something that goes into a web browser, that's > not it either. > > Steve. :) > >
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