Heerlijk gegeten bij Bird Thais aan de Zeedijk. We moesten een kwartier wachten op een tafel. Op maandagavond! We kregen uiteindelijk de mooiste tafel: een ronde aan het raam aan de grachtkant. Heerlijk gegeten. Dank voor je gidswerk James!

Goede gesprekken gehad over van alles en nog wat. Over dromen. Over p2p. Over Pareltaal. Over holacratie. Over levenskunst en geluk. Over geld. Over open source. Over netwerken. Over een volgende keer. Over objectief journalisme. Kortom, een uitermate zinnige en plezierige avond. Dat vonden mijn vrouw Anja en mijn dochters Esther en Tamar ook, want die waren mee. Amsterdam is namelijk altijd een leuke stad. En het gezelschap ook.

Eén van de onderwerpen was objectief journalisme en het collectieve intellect. Laat Deepak Chopra nu toevallig een serie artikelen geplaatst hebben over A CAT-Scan of the Global Brain dat m.i. precies over deze onderwerpen gaat. Ik spoor je aan het te lezen.

Kasper Souren kon niet van de partij zijn, want hij zit Trento, Noord Italië. Hij is wel van plan volgend jaar in Amsterdam te gaan wonen. Welkom terug. Kasper verwijst in zijn e-mail naar Het dotCommunistisch Manifest. Interessante stuff.

Neem voor mijn droom de Aarde Wiki Bus Tour. Da’s meer een lange termijn perspectief. Het liefst wil ik op zo kort mogelijke termijn (lees: 2008) delen ervan op kleine schaal in Nederland implementeren. Zeg maar het starten van een reusachtig klein collectief dat leidt tot een florerende onderneming geschoeid op de principes van peer-to-peer.

Om half elf zo’n beetje de zaak verlaten en op de Nieuwmarkt nog even nagepraat. We kunnen wat vaker bij elkaar komen, wat meer bloggen. Michel Bauwens is begin december in België. Mogelijk kunnen we dan weer een bijeenkomst organiseren. In Amsterdam. Of België. Idee: we kunnen ook een (bescheiden) seminar organiseren in Nederland en/of België. Ik ga daar in ieder geval mee aan de slag.

Graag tot de volgende keer.

Succes en plezier,

Martien.

Stumbled across a wonderful website yesterday with a lot of awseome and open source Flash applications that produce wonderful graphics, many of them fractal, complex. Check out Levitated.net—a friendly company.

Some key points:

• Storm is designed like an ant colony
• Rather than having all hosts communicate to a central server or set of servers, Storm uses a peer-to-peer network for C2.
• And even if a C2 node is taken down, the system doesn’t suffer. Like a hydra with many heads, Storm’s C2 structure is distributed.

Reminds me of an experiment I did we did with Jini and RIO. Once started up on several computers, we just couldn’t get the system down. Kill one, and somewhere else a new one pops up. Thought of desigining in a “suicide pill” that would trigger on some special message spread across the net.

We think that the best way for you to manage your network is to stop thinking about all of the little pieces and to start focusing on the big picture: you and the people who matter to you. We think relationships mean more than email addresses or which service you’re signed on to at the moment. So we’ve created an experimental demo based upon open technologies OpenID, the Microformats hCard and XFN, and FOAF that allow you to see your entire network of relationships in one place – across services, across platforms, across the entire Web.

How wonderful! I’ve been wanting this for ages! Even started the Campfire experiment a couple of years ago to address exactly this issue. I fully endorse opening the social graph.

(Via Semantic Wave.)

The robots are able to work together as a group not by communicating with all members of the group at once, but by talking only to their neighbors, and model other similar behaviors performed by bees and ants. ‘Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Via Slashdot.)

Refreshed my link with Gerald “tensegrity” de Jong, triggered by a blog entry from TED titled Creatures on the beach from the Dutch sculptor Theo Jansen which instantly reminded me of Gerald’s Fluidiom and Darwin at Home projects.

Gerald’s email signature also mentioned Groovy Actors:

In a nutshell it’s a natural next step, building further on object-oriented programming (OOP), where objects become active talkative peers.

Imagine running thousands of concurrent programs on one computer where each program instance represents something or someone in the real world. Some things are passive and only react to events but lots of real world things also take initiative.

That’s why parts of this kind of system can better be represented in software by “autonomous agents” or “actors” which frequently interact with each other.

And built using the Groovy language.

Just wondering why Groovy Actors are limited to a single computer rather than autonomous peers distributed across thousands of computers. Love to have concepts from Erlang and JavaSpaces built in.

Love to see the Groovy Actors’ Hello Storage example implement the story of The Wizard, The Rabbit, and The Treasurer.

Erlang is a programming language designed at the Ericsson Computer Science Laboratory. Open-source Erlang is being released to help encourage the spread of Erlang outside Ericsson.

The language syntax reminds me a bit of Prolog. And I wonder what the power would be if something like Erlang is combined with the elegant concepts of JavaSpaces.

I’m still longing for an elegant platform neutral programming language that has mechanisms for “effortless” peer-to-peer built in. In fact, our new social and wisdom fabric cries out for a new “programming” language (and perhaps OS) that catalyses p2p development on all layers, from information to human to social to wisdom and that fuels the noosphere.

One of the first things I’d do with it is create an evolutionary prototype of Armillaria with The Wizard, The Rabbit and The Treasurer as an example. Stigmergence.

Wow. About time. Since long I cherish the desire for a scale-free distributed social network. Both Campfire and Cheetah work in that direction, the latter for diabetics.

When will we have opened up our databases so you can update your personal information in a single action and everyone you want to are up to date too?

Talk about trust. Armillaria can help to grow a fully distributed social reputation system to do just that. The Wizard Rabbit Treasurer tells a small story of how this might work for the underlying data.

Love to work on a project like this. I’ll keep an eye on

(Via [http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml">Wired News].)

The Future of Bridges: Self-Replicating, Irregular Designs: “Self-replicating bridges might be more robust, but also weirder looking, than the nearly magical pieces of civil engineering that human beings come up with.

(Via Wired News.)

Like any other startup, we’ve adding new feature nearly every day on BookTour. But my favorite is one that we added last week. You know the music services, such as Sonic Living, that’can scan your iTunes or LastFM’libraries and then automatically tell you (via emails or RSS feeds) when’your favorite’bands are coming to your town? We wanted to do the same for books and authors.

So now if you go to your Profile page on BookTour.com, you can enter your Amazon login info and we’ll automatically look up all the books you’ve ever bought and add those authors to the list you’re tracking. If any of them are coming to your area to give talks or other appearances, we’ll send you an email or include it in your RSS feed. And you can always use the service to ping those authors and ask them to come speak to your company, organization or just book club while they’re in town.

How cool is that?!

(BTW, we don’t keep your Amazon info. The site just opens a secure connection to Amazon, fetches the books from your order history, and then closes the connection and discards the login info. That means you have to enter’the login’again when you want to refresh your favorites list in a few months, but it also ensures that your login information can never be compromised.)

(Via The Long Tail.

Als we dat nou eens naadloos kunnen samenvoegen met grote bedrijven op dit gebied. Een organisatievorm vinden waarbij beiden elkaar versterken. De groten zijn zeldzaam, veerkrachtig, geworteld en enorm. De eenpitters, tweepitters en gasstellen zijn met velen, klein, wendbaar en innovatief. Hoe kunnen ze elkaar versterken?!

Hey Sanne, Daan, Ik wil meedoen! Gaan we in augsutus om de tafel om dit verder vorm te geven?

Mijn gedicht “Wanneer Dan” vat het geheel samen.

Brad Neuberg on Inventing with Values:

A few months ago, my friend, BradNeuberg, gave the keynote at Yahoo’s internal Front-End Engineering Summit. The video is now online, and it’s worth watching. Brad’s not only a great guy and a great hacker, he’s an excellent speaker. He speaks from the heart with intensity and good humor. ” (ME6)

I want to highlight four things Brad said: ” (ME7)

• A good way to approach invention is, ‘I Against I.’ (The name comes from a classic punk song from the mid-80s.) Don’t worry about what others will do. Instead of trying to protect your ideas by putting up walls, compete against yourself. If you’re going to be put to pasture by somebody, it might as well be by you. And as Brad points out, no ideas are safe. In this day and age, you will be put to pasture. ” (ME8)
• Brad’s section on values was tremendous. He cited two techniques for clarifying values. The first was ‘Mob Rule.’ If you were the only thing between an angry mob and some other thing, what thing would cause you to stand your ground? This reminds me of something AlanDershowitz said in the best class I ever took in college. Dershowitz said that he was willing to die for freedom of speech. I was astounded by that statement, and it made me think about the values that I was willing to die for. ” (ME9)
• The second technique was, ‘The Last Speech.’ Imagine you were about to leave your company and that you were asked to deliver a final speech. What would you say? This actually happened. A decade ago, JamesGosling was fed up with Sun and decided to leave. ScottMcNealy asked Gosling to write a letter before he left, explaining what he would do differently if he were in charge. Gosling outlined a vision which ultimately led to him staying at Sun and creating Java. ” (MEA)
• Brad ended his section on values with a story about ArchieRand, the famous expressionist painter who was one of Brad’s professors at Columbia. Rand used to walk around the room as his students worked, look at them with his eyes blazing, and say, ‘This shit matters.’ ” (MEB)

Each of these things are worth thinking about and trying. ” (MEC)

(Via EEK Speaks.)

Here’s what I did:

1. Include ScriptCloud’s tagline.css into style.css of weblog theme.
2. Save all text into a plain and simple text file.
3. Upload it to ScriptCloud.
4. View generated tag cloud, and open HTML source.
5. Copy just the tag cloud HTML and strip it from all the color settings.
6. Paste result into body of blog entry.

Check out the ppt file at the bottom of

One of the slides mentions the term evolvability. To me, the most important qualitative aspect of software, or any system if you like.