"In the middle of the Facebook App frenzy (was that a whole 4 months ago?!) I wrote “Delusions of Facebook” to try to dissuade as many startups as possible from going down that path. I hate to say it, but man — I was right." read more | digg story

See Michele's fantastic notes from William Cockayne's excellent talk at LIFT about foresight, it's connection to innovation and the roles that people tend to take within a product innovation cycle. Great stuff. I'm embedding the video here: ;)

It's a great talk which gave me lots of food for thought. Michele took the time to recreate some of Cockayne's images from his slides, the most important of which is the following which describes the four common roles of expert, breadth + depth, breakout and innovator:

Michele builds upon Cockayne's foresight to innovation role/actor model to offer an alternative view of an innovation process that more closely reflects the subjective impressions of being part of a open, creative and chaordic system, which I think is genius! She describes it as a model to deliver "timely awesomeness". (Michele is herself timely awesomeness!)

Check it out:

not flowing along a regulated path, each eddy is an iteration, receptive to changes in external and internal environs, and accept the nature of ambiguity as something to work with. larger eddies flow towards foresight and visioning, smaller eddies flow towards prototyping and design. research does not stop. the process ebbs and flows between the two.

And now you know why I want to work with Michele Perras, Super-Genius. I've always found linear innovation pipeline models to be not terribly useful to reflect the ambiguity observed actual creative work. While some industry innovation cycles do look like your standard pipeline or funnel model, the remixability, permanent ambiguity and limitlessness of digital materials mean that old models don't offer much insight for a new world of digital objects and subjective human experiences of those objects. Michele is onto something here.

This appears entirely reasonable to me:

"We don't think it's a radical proposal. We're interested in Canadian eyeballs for Canadian programs," Lind told the commission. However, he added, "It's confusing when everybody has their hand in the pie. To maximize Canadian audiences in primetime, social policy objectives need to be elsewhere."

[From Playback :: Rogers calls for market-driven fund]

I'm no fan of Rogers anti-competitive behaviour in the mobile and broadband arena, but I have to agree with the tenor of their approach to the much-maligned CTF. I want to see top-quality Canadian content succeed on Canadian screens as well as around the world. I don't think mixing economic and cultural policy agendas has been very successful to date and will become increasingly irrelevant unless some drastic changes are made. The CBC should focus on its mandate of telling Canadian stories to Canadians and be well-funded to do so.

But....

If the cablecos get their wish on CTF reform towards a more market-centric approach, then I think it is fair that those funds also be made available for indie producers for broadband distribution without discrimination or the requirement for broadcast network distribution deals.

Dear CTF: Open up the process, let viewers decide on what gets funded. Maybe the CTF (or some successor institution) could learn something from A Swarm of Angels or FilmRiot and actually innovate instead of foot-dragging on change.

This is the single biggest policy change that could support the emergence of a new generation of Canadian innovators in content and business models, who can develop quirky and compelling niche content on small budgets with potential global audience appeal. This is my dream - am I alone?

Upcoming event worthy of note:

March 19, 2008 08:30–4pm – Experience Tech 2008– at MaRS

Experience Tech 2008 brings you the plenary sessions and keynote via live broadcast from IDC's annual Directions Conference in Boston combined with MaRS Master Classes in Toronto.

Tom (of WirelessNorth fame) ran a great workshop at LIFT08 on the future of wireless (sorry I missed it - so many choices!). The slides are on Slideshare:

I love digital ethnographers and anthropologists! LIFT08 had a strong program of anthropological and ethnographic research and practice. Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist at Intel (which sounds like a great gig!). She gave an insightful presentation about digital deception based upon a solid understanding of human behaviour around secrets and lies. She argues that understanding secrets and lies provides better insight into issues of privacy and security.

Fascinating stuff - watch the video:

Presentation notes after the jump...

Presentation Notes:

Facts:

• UK survey 2006, nearly half of mobile users actively lie about where they are; Hi honey, "I'm on my way home" - yeah, right!
• 100% of people on online dating sites lie about themselves; men about height, woemen about we
• we are entering an arms race of deception; for every bit of transparency, there is a service to lie about it;
• people lie about where they are in mobile; people lie about height/weight in online dating; entering an era of accelerating deception;

What do anthropology theory and tools reveal about digital deception?

Perspective: technology transforms far more rapidly than social/cultural changes; difficult for us as technologists to understand this limitation, and is rather confounding to Intel (hence they have 30 anthropologists!)

Secrets and Lies; lies - untruths, secrets - knowledge that is withheld;

Cultural Ideals about Secrets & Lies: legal systems and religious doctrine always against lying and deception; there are certain exceptions in certain situations; bringing peace to households, between households and among nations; lies are ok if the end is good;

Cultural Practices about Secrets & Lies: we're telling lies all the time; we tell 6-200 lies a day - from greasing the social skids to much more complicated and intense; motivations: conceiling misbehaviour, not many about increasing popularity; men tell more lies, women are better at it; secrets are kept and broken irrespective of status at law or socially

Other Perspectives: Social theorists that argue lying is a necessary part of daily life; Steignitz - the lie is not about negating truth, but about negating a particular kind of reality; Sommer - self-deception is part of survival; a core behaviour as part of learning about identity; playful act of working out the rules;

Notion that all info should be avail to everyone is very recent; you see various cultures resist this and place gates around their traditions - Australian aboriginals; the secret and the sacred - not all knowledge should be in the public domain; the public domain is actually coded and you need to have knowledge to understand what you are seeing;

Similar playfulness and practice is happening in the digital sphere; avatars, playfulness, codes can be read in a number of different ways; withholding info is a way keeping it safe; what we withhold and why is about keeping ourselves safe;

New ICTs arrive in the land of secrets and lies; lying about where, who, what you are doing are all dissembled online; some of this is required

Dana Boyd looking at age on MySpace is lied about, stunning number of people over 100, which begs credibility; the price of participation is a lie - your must be over 14 to join because of law;

Online dating sites - unlike lies in physical world that result in guilty or shame, lies online results in something approaching glee; lies are flourishing;

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard. e.g. "My prom date was gay...I pretended not to know."

Cell phones have tracking services attending them by the parent of children; surveillance can be culturally reconfigured; children with tracking said their parents love them more; alibi services - creative a backstory to support your lie;

Insights/Conclusions:

Tensions between cultural ideas and cultural practices are important and significant; a lot of what we see going on in tech and behaviour are us sorting these tensions out

Secrets & lies is a useful way of reworking notions around privacy and security; systems and networks infrastructure are concerned about privacy and security; people are concerned about they things they don't want to have told, their secrets and their strategy for getting around this is telling lies

What are the implications about how we build social networking sites, building web 3.0 on a bedrock of confabulation?

How does it fit into larger conversations about national security, safety and danger?