Microsoft Office Labs vision 2019

Microsoft has an interesting video envisioning our interactions with Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in 10 years.  A short version as well as the five minute version can be found online at http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/.  I found the five minute version well worth the time.

Youth crossing cultures

The tag at the very end of the video stated “productivity”. But what impressed me so much more was relationships. Technology is presented as ubiquitous, but in a way that compliments our interactions with other people and things as opposed to disrupting it.  Our ability to interact with those immediately around us is enhanced as we can quickly share information and even be assisted with translations. Our ability to interact with those at a distance is enhanced; what a great example with the two youth drawing from two different sides of a board, learning about each others culture and language.

Our ability to interact with the environment is enhanced, allowing us to not only work outdoors but gain new abilities to rapidly identify, and hopefully gain new appreciations of the plants and species around us.

What a fantastic example of the most important productivity of all: building relationships!

Big Broadband and Citizen Professionals

I’ve followed with passing interest the development of fiber to the home (FTTH) that is occuring in a few areas around our country and much more extensively overseas.  Along with others, I have wondered just how valuable that much speed really is for most people.  Still, it seems somewhat disconcerting to think that we’ve gone from being a leader in national Internet access to 15th in the world for broadband access.  Further, our definition of broadband is slower than in many of those countries that are ahead of us.  Other countries find it important to bring very high speed Internet access to the home.  The question is what are we missing?

At a presentation Tuesday regarding support for broadband infrastructure development found in the recently signed stimulus package, a consultant utilized an interesting tool developed in the Netherlands that demonstrates the value of Big Broadband (Internet access speeds that are 10-100 times faster than current DSL/Cable speeds in the United States for downloads AND as importantly offer the same very high speeds for uploads as for downloads).  The tool is a simple Windows program, called fiberspeed, that can be accessed at: http://www.mxi.nl/projecten/index1.asp?ph_id=38&pr_id=9

What really caught my attention was just how handicapped people in the United States are compared to other parts of the world when it comes to uploading multimedia files.  For personal use, examples used in the fiberspeed application include personal photos or family videos.  For societal use, examples include instructional videos or even x-ray photos.  For those with high speed DSL or cable, downloads can occur in minutes for large files, but uploads can take hours.

One person attending the meeting asked why the rush to implement Big Broadband since the killer application to demand such high speeds did not yet exist.  I believe this question was well intentioned and reflects the thoughts of many in our consumer-oriented society.  But I also believe the lesson from the fiberspeed example is that the killer application does indeed exist.  It comes in the form of citizen production of multimedia presentations.  Most rural areas, and many low-income urban areas simply do not have access to affordable high speed bandwidth to tell their stories online as citizen journalists using digital images let alone digital video.  And the ability to quickly upload high definition video is only available in very limited places anywhere in the Unitied States.  Nor is access to high grade video conferencing available to most homes in the United States, a valuable tool to allow citizen professionals to work from their homes at a range of collaborative tasks.

But let’s say for a moment that these examples still do not represent the true killer application that demands such high speed Internet be brought to the home.  I would argue that the question also represents a very top-down conceptualization of application development.  It is framed in the idea that Big Broadband isn’t needed until a University or Big Business researcher develops the application that justifies such bandwidth.

What if we started with a bottom-up conceptualization of application development.  What if we conceived of a Big Broadband infrastructure that was open, where people could shop for the best services available from around the world to meet their needs.  And what if we conceived of a development model in which these services used open standards that allowed for anyone to enhance, build upon, and uniquely combine those services to create new ways of doing things.  What if citizen scientists were encouraged to become an active part of the development process, and micro-businesses were encouraged to form to market and support such new services. What if the whole process were opened up to everyone and anyone, bringing together the best and brightest regardless of location, economic status, culture, precisely because they have insights into community needs and goals that only those intimate with their community could bring?

This is not a far fetched dream.  All the pieces are being put in place in Europe and Asia.  It is clear the driving forces for change will come more and more from citizens and not from big business and big universities.  The one thing that is not clear is whether the citizens of the United States will get to play an active role along with their European and Asian counterparts.

References:

Local groups to pursue stimulus money for broadband network (http://www.news-gazette.com/news/technology/2009/02/17/local_groups_to_pursue_stimulus_money_for_broadband_network)

Fiberspeed Application (http://www.mxi.nl/projecten/index1.asp?ph_id=38&pr_id=9)

U.S. Lags Behind in Broadband Infrastructure (http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20080423/)

Technology is NOT the focus

I attended an interesting talk today by Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist working at Intel.  She presented on a mixed methods study that explored notebook and ultra-mobile PC use.  As part of the research, she and her colleagues observed that rather than facilitating work to minimize busyness, technology was actually used more often to intentionally add to our activities, filling gaps, expanding and shrinking until interupted.  Users prized the small form factor because the technology more readily defered to external contingencies — it was easier to look over the screen to see what was occuring on TV and to also attend to the activity of family members.

I found two findings particularly interesting.  First, activities using technology often did not tightly integrate with other activities occuring at the same time.  Thus, while various TV programs might pop up onto the screen URL’s to gather additional information, people weren’t surfing to those sites.  They were instead doing unrelated research to fill the voids when the TV broadcast was of minimal interest.

Second, 50% of activity on notebooks and Ultra-mobile PCs were 2-3 minutes in length, with the time on ultra-mobile PCs shorter than on notebooks.  The shortness wasn’t because the screens were smaller and harder to read, but because they were easier to ignore.  The suspicion is that computing is becoming ubiquitous, but in so doing, it was becoming less the point of activities, and more a support to the rest of our lives.  I find that highly comforting in an odd sort of way!

But more than just being a comfort, I think it provides an intriguing suggestion that we need to be developing community technology centers (CTC) differently.  Right now, they are developed with the idea that people are coming to the CTC for the technology.  As such, traditional desktop or tower cases and larger LCD monitors dominate.  Maybe the CTC of the future instead needs to be a place with lots of tables and chairs that can easily be rearranged, and laptops for checkout.  Stop making the technology the point and instead turn the places back to COMMUNITY centers with access to technology to facilitate community work.