Validation from thoughts by Peter A. Gloor on Collaborative Online Innovation Networks (COINs)

On page 16-17 of Swarm Creativity, Peter A. Gloor says:

"Over the past two decades, businesses have largely focused on streamlining structured business processes. Today, the challenge is to optimize the flow of knowledge, streamlining unstructured, knowledge-intensive innovation processes, and turning organizations into COINs. By visualizing the flow of knowledge, making it transparent, and optimizing its course, organizations and individuals become more creative, innovative, and responsive to change. This is one of the keys to success in the new century. But while the importance of continuously optimizing and fine-tuning businesses processes is universally recognized, the importance of redesigning and optimizing knowledge flows is still widely underrecognized.
Organizations can successfully promote COINS by giving up central control in favor of self-organization in swarm creativity, developing an ethical code, and setting up a social network connected by hubs of trust (which you'll also learn about in subsequent chapters)."

If this is true, this validates an idea I've had for awhile. That is, it makes a lot of sense to develop a global network of Hackerspaces. Perhaps, each Hackerspace could have its own node of a distributed social network. Hackerspaces seem to be places that prefer to give up central authority in favor near chaos. I know this is the case with Ohm Space. Ohm Space also supports the Hacker and Maker Communities.

See Wikipedia's Hacker Ethic for exposure to the Hacker Community:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

Or perhaps Chris Anderson's Ten Rules of Maker Businesses for Exposure to the Maker Commununity:
http://blog.ponoko.com/2010/11/16/ten-rules-for-maker-businesses-by-wireds-chris-anderson-%E2%80%94-rule-1/

Fuseki

I downloaded Apache Fuseki today. It is an improvement on Joseki. Time to learn about the SPARQL query language for the Semantic Web. http://jena.apache.org/documentation/serving_data/index.html

Conceptual Overview

I figured it was time to provide a bit more clarity. Hopefully this achieves it:

One part of this distributed economy is distributed manufacturing, where things are made where they are needed. In addition, there is an internet side to act as an enabler. There is an emerging form of web, the semantic web (or data web), that promises to make web search much easier and organize our information. There is also visual analytics that promises to allow us to see patterns in the data.

For the semantic web, look no further than Google's Knowledge Graph for an example of a Semantic Web application, or even Facebook's Open Graph. Both of these use ontologies, which are a key component of the semantic web.

For visual analytics, Tuft's universities' Visual Understanding Environment is a good example. Ontologies and RDF export are supported (two semantic web technologies). There also are cool things it interfaces with such as zotero (a bookmarking system) and Fedora (an architecture for storing digital content) that make it a bit more powerful.

What I described in the overview post of my blog (http://adistributedeconomy.blogspot.com/2012/03/overview.html) is a big picture view of a platform and system that agglomerates all of these emerging technologies in addition to a few others. They seem to work well together.

Here are a few links:

Google's Knowledge Graph: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

Facebook's Open graph: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph/

Visual Understanding Environment (VUE Project) on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/vueproject?feature=results_main

Visual Understanding Environment Home Page: http://vue.tufts.edu/

Semantic Web at the W3C: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/

Fedora Commons Repository Software: http://fedora-commons.org/

Examination of VUE (Visual Understanding Environment)

VUE, or Visual Understanding Environment, led by Tufts University provides and excellent way to explore new information. It would correspond to the network visualization portion of this distributed economy. Unlike Gephi, VUE has the ability to interact with various digital repositories such as those built upon Fedora, interact with the bookmarking and bibliographic service Zotero, merge concept maps and interact with instant messaging to promote collaboration,export RDF, and many other things. In addition, VUE also mildly supports ontologies, which are used in the Semantic Web as frameworks to express a particular domain of knowledge.

Diego Uribe has also demonstrated an extension of VUE through his Digital Creative Problem Solving environment. In his extension, he developed an interactive work space that used infrared tracking technology present in the Wii Remote. He also proposed extensions such as a VUE I-Phone app, the ability for multiple users interacting in real time within the same workspace using Wii Remote technology, the ability to import spreadsheets into the map, importation of VUE into Second Life. He composed a two part Youtube video of his proposals which may be found at the following URLs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvH2JQsey-c for part 1 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzVB8KvlqNg for part 2.

A few videos that I found useful include:

VUE 2 overview by VUE Project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrb7bAtmPE8

Other VUE Videos produced by the VUE Project
https://www.youtube.com/user/VUEProject

Undergrads Should Love Zotero by Rebecca0321
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDoO_JxQAko

Why use the Semantic Web for Distributed Innovation?

Follow the quotes:

"Four organizational principles needed for distributed innovation: "Empower people to experiment." "Enable bits of information to find each other." "Structure information so it can recombine with other pieces of information." "Create a governance system that sustains this process." --- (Summary of: The Success of Open Source) http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/411

"The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing." ----(W3C SEMANTIC WEB ACTIVITY) http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

Quote from the book Wikinomics

"Without effective access to data, materials, and publications, the scientific enterprise becomes impossible", pg 180 of Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Solutions? "effective access to data" ---> semantic web "materials" ----> crowdfunding or donation of materials "publications" ----> open access journals

Potential for Change

The distributed economy appears to offer enormous potential for change. Technologies such as the semantic web, additive manufacturing, crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing and social-micropayments, distributed computing, and network visualization all appear to have great potential. The potential of one component, the semantic web, is described briefly by Tim Berner's-Lee and Mark Fischetti in the book Weaving the Web,

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

Further information from Tim Berner's-Lee may be found in the Youtube video: The Semantic Web of Data. Additionally, Tim-Berner's Lee appears to offer a broader view of the Semantic Web and the Web in general in his interview with Tim O'Reilly titled, "A Conversation with Tim-Berner's Lee".

Students from the University of Ottowa have also provided an excellent overview of the potential of the semantic web in their video, "Semantic Web vs. Web 2.0". For those that need to see more of the technical side of the semantic web, a video titled "A Semantic Web Overview" may be useful. A site such as revelytix.com with its Distributed Information Management System makes a lot of use of the semantic web, and provides a means for inspiration. The company, Metatomix, is also very interesting. Please also note Metatomix's cross-agency systems for justice, which seem to parallel this distributed economies functionality. In addition, an ideal semantic web application should work without extensive knowledge of RDF or other semantic web technologies.

Additive Manufacturing, another component of this distributed economy, also appears to offer great potential. One emanation is the 3D printing craze. Perhaps as this technology, and others under the additive manufacturing umbrella, become more widely available, and perhaps open-sourced, a great change may happen. Manufacturing could become much more distributed. An article by the Atlantic Council titled, "Could 3D Printing Change the World? - Technologies, Potential, and Implications of Additive Manufacturing" provides an excellent discussion on this very topic.

A number of pieces of hardware have come out that have been open source. One such example is the Rep-Rap printer which has a website at: http://www.reprap.org/wiki/Main_Page. Another example is the Lasersaur laser cutter, which may be found on the web at: http://labs.nortd.com/lasersaur/. Yet another example is arduino, which may be found on the web at: http://www.arduino.cc/.

Crowdfunding, which is the virtual equivalent of pitching an idea and offering rewards while keeping a bucket in front of you, is growing rapidly. In fact, President Obama recently signed the JOBS act which includes crowdfunding. This is described in an article on shareable.net titled, "Crowdfunding goes prime time -- what next?". Crowdfunding may be found at sites such as Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Vodo. As described in the shareable.net article, it is different than the traditional model for starting a business, which involves appealing to rich venture capitalists who may want large returns. As the article suggests, this could allow for more flexibility and creativity.

Flattr, is one example of a social-micropayment platform. Like crowdfunding, it can involve transferring small sums of money. However, it is more like the "like" button on Facebook than the sales pitch for crowdfunding. This distributed economy could have both. Basically, each URI could function like a "like" button, and URIs could be connected to other URIs that give further detail by means such as text or multimedia.

The distributed economy also uses crowd-sourcing. which is defined by crowdsourcing.com, is "..the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call". Basically, it enables open source projects and taps into such ideas as Open Research, Open Science, Collaborative Innovation Networks, Open design, Open Innovation, and perhaps others.

Distributed computing, or grid computing, has been around for some time. It was used for the famous SETI project. While this was university-based, private individuals may also set up their own grid computing networks. Some of the projects on BOINC team USA are such examples: http://usa.lanex.com/. The university-based Constellation project which may be found at: http://aerospaceresearch.net/constellation/ is also very interesting. The virtual supercomputer that results from a grid computing network could be used for improving and testing models that were funded by social micro-payments and/or crowdfunding and built with additive manufacturing. Supercomputing seems instinctively vital for larger projects, such as those described by aerospaceresearch.net.

Network visualization software is used to visualize data. Network Visualization has been used for things such as social networks in applications such as Thomas Fletcher's Friend Wheel, random constructs in a collaborative fashion at Perl Trees at perltrees.org, in multiple ways with Touch Graph's applications (with a Facebook plugin nearly identical to the network visualization within Diaspora idea presented earlier), Visual Thesaurus from Thinkmap.com, for academic searching with Action Science Explorer which was cited by the National Science Foundation, for academic searching with Microsoft Academic Search (possibly built on the same technology?), for Security Network Visualization at UCDavis, in Gephi which describes itself as "like Photoshop(TM) for graphs", Large-scale RDF Graph Visualization Tools which are described at mkbergman.com in addition to theory, Ontology mappers such as Snoggle, RDF visualization tools such as RDF Gravity, Revelytix's Knoodl 3.0, and likely many other things. Network Visualization is transformative because it allows people to see patterns in data that they would not see otherwise. It speeds up research as in Action Science Explorer. TouchGraph's Facebook plugin and especially Revelytix's SPARQL query visualization appear very close to the use for this particular distributed economy.

All of the components of this distributed economy would work together, and are and will likely continue to cause radical change. Of course, such transformation has not occured without resistance, and it seems Hackers have tried to set up a Peer to Peer Bank to fund open source hardware, but they faced a lot of resistance from the conservative banking industry as described in Wired. Presumably, intellectual property will also be a huge issue. In addition, at least some work may involve Professional Engineers in some way. Fortunately, the semantic web holds the promise to make data much easier to find which could smooth legal issues (or it could go the other way?). Hopefully this distributed economy would encourage people to be more open. After all, if you have more in the semantic web, more people can find you and contribute their ideas which could make things better for everyone.