Collective Decision Making at Los Alamos Lab
November 29, 2006
My collaborators at Los Alamos National Lab, Marko Rodriguez and Jennifer Watkins, just launched a web presence for the Collective Decision Making Systems project, an umbrella for their research on prediction markets, voting systems, and related topics (some of which I’ve helped out on). Keep an eye on these two — they mix technical brilliance with imagination, and that’s a potent combination.
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From Counterculture to Cyberculture
November 10, 2006
Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.
Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.
Kevin Kelly: founding executive editor of Wired magazine and CoEvolution Quarterly, journalist and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World — which told a better tale about emergence and complexity science than the Santa Fe Institute ever could.
Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.
Fred Turner: Stanford professor of Communications and Digital Media, one of my mentors, and now celebrated author of the superb work of scholarship and story-telling that brought all these free-thinking intellectuals together tonight: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.
I have much to share with you about what these folks shared with me tonight, but it’s 4:42am and will have to wait.
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