Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

My eyes are bleeding.

Back in May of 2004 I started working with my current co-worker Frosti, who was then head of the Vestmannaeyjar department of environmental issues and public works. My role was mostly technical, but one of our pet projects was to try and collect data for a promotional CD for Vestmannaeyjar.

At the time I was an administrator of the Icelandic Wikipedia, which at the time was small and unremarkable, but growing at a staggering pace - I was mostly active contributing to the Mathematics articles, but also wrote an assortment of other articles that appealed to me for some reason. Some wiki users are powerful editors, fixing minor errors and checking references - I’m the other kind; I sit down every now and then and hammer out something large and full-fledged.

I approached Frosti with a different proposition one day: Instead of making a CD, let’s make a Wiki. A far more specialized wiki than Wikipedia, explicitly about Vestmannaeyjar. And he bought the concept almost immediately. At first I saw several differences between our wiki and Wikipedia, so I started writing my own piece of software. But then one day I saw the light and decided to just use Mediawiki, slightly altered, and figure it out. It has worked out great.

We got a fairly substantial government grant, a project called OpinMenning, or Open Culture. They granted us 1.5 million kronas to develop the wiki, that we soon dubbed Heimaslóð.

By the end of 2005 we were running just under a thousand articles and some hundred photos, but we also had a small team of people from the islands actively contributing. During the summer of 2005 I ran a small editorial group consisting of five people, partially funded by the aforementioned grant and partially funded by Iceland’s unemployment fund, who decided they had a stake in funding numerous interesting projects like ours.

During the summer of 2006 I did an internship at DeCODE Genetics rather than work in Vestmannaeyjar, so Daníel Steingrímsson, my friend and the star member of the editorial team from the previous year ran the show.

Summer 2007 I was back in Vestmannaeyjar, busy doing other things although working at the same place, so Daníel ran the editorial team again with a fair amount of success. We collaborated that year on converting the entirety of Vestmannaeyjar town plans into Google Earth format and linking some of the datapoints up to the wiki. We also worked with Helga Jónsdóttir on launching a hosted side-project on the Wiki called Byggðin undir Hrauninu, or, The Town under the Lava. It was opened later the same year with several dozen articles and about a thousand photos.

At the time of writing the ownership of Heimaslóð is slightly unclear, as is the management of it. In the coming weeks I am going to suggest to the Mayor of Vestmannaeyjar that the Wiki be opened up and published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike Noncommerical License, and that the owners of photos on the wiki be asked to license the data under the same.

Currently there are 6917 pages in the Wiki, whereof 2774 are active articles in the main namespace. The pages have been visited 2.096.839 times in total and consist of 30.033 edits.

The most-visited pages are:

• Forsíða (97.335)
• Heimaeyjargosið (16.358)
• Tyrkjaránið (11.010)
• Byggðin undir hrauninu (10.543)
• Flokkur:Fólk (8.198)
• Um Vestmannaeyjar (7.965)
• Saga (7.850)
• Flokkur:Hús (7.783)
• Menning (7.621)
• Þjóðhátíðin (7.226)

The largest articles are around 40000 bytes, the smallest some 30 bytes. The Wiki contains several full books republished in their entirety on a per-article basis, with gracious permission from the copyright holders.

As my path has diverged from Heimaslóð slowly with time, I look back on the project with pride. It is a success story of a small Wiki that emerged, but at this time I think many of the institutionally enforced bureaucratic decisions are stifling its further growth tremendously.  It needs to be set free.

http://www.heimaslod.is

George Dyson just did an Edge piece dubbed “Engineers Dream”.

What if analog was not really over? What if the digital matrix had now become the substrate upon which new, analog structures were starting to grow?

Recommended read.

Here’s more on the Law of Requisite Variety from Principia Cybernetica.

The entire idea of representative government is to outsource the governance of your everyday interactions with society to a third party.

Instead of outsourcing it, people have tried to insource it, by pushing for a flat model of direct democracy.

My suggestion is that we crowdsource democracy: let those who want to participate do so with no barrier for entry, and let those who are apathetic or uninterested sit on the sidelines. Let everybody control their own level of participation.

There is frequent talk of computers and cellphones converging and becoming readily available for use in the developing world. Let’s analyze that statement with regard to time, financial incentives of companies such as Nokia, and the economic prospectus for the developing world as it is.

Currently two billion people have access to cellphones, which are providing a severe jump in infrastructure all over the place. It is expected that within the next five to ten years every human on earth will have access to a cell phone. This is based on direct trend analysis without much regard to means, but let’s take it as a given.

If this is the case, then most likely what will happen in the short term is that older phones used in the west will trickle down the line to be sold or given away second hand in developing countries - now I’m not talking about places like urban areas in India, where almost everybody already has a cellphone, but rather places like the Indian province of Kerala, or perhaps Burma or rural Thailand, or even Malawi. So second-hands filter down, infrastructure is raised, all the while in the west our cell phones become like 1990’s level supercomputers, with big screens, fast uplinks and high levels of interactivity.

This is not a bad way of doing it, and what’s probably going to happen is that the cell phone emergence in the developing world will cause a massive positive feedback loop of innovation and economic growth. Couple that with appropriate technology and you’ll see numerous other trends:

• Decreased fatalities due to smoke from open fires, malnutrition, simple bacterial or viral infections, and that kind of poverty related death.
• Decreased birth rate, connected to higher quality of life, availability of contraceptives, and lower infant mortality rate.
• Increased global food output
• Increased levels of organic farming on a global scale
• Far higher average GDP globally, and less scedasticity overall

But this is all grounded on the added functionality expected of cellphones during this inevitable convergence, e.g. built-in global positioning, fast internet access, high resolution screens, USB host inputs on devices, all of which could provide for things like:

• Location specific agricultural instrumentation and satellite based fertility analysis provided directly to farmers on the land, so they can get specific recommendations for plantation.
• SmartAID - cell phone based expert system for first aid and disaster response; essentially a simple AI strapped onto a Wiki, channeled through a cellphone.
• Cellphone based microcredit/mutual credit banking systems.
• Identity management, voting registration and direct democracy.
• Public safety announcements, etc.

For some of these any modern cellphone, dating back to 1998, will do. But for many of these services you need to be far further along the convergence pathway.

Which is why rebooting tech is a smart idea.

With $10 in parts today you can build a 20 MHz network-capable computer that’s roughly equivalent to a cheap home computer of the early 1980’s. Connect it to either a TV or a cheap LCD screen, for example a Nokia 3310 screen (pictured), and a keyboard, and you’ve got yourself a really simple teletype terminal.

So, instead of waiting patiently for the convergence to reach developing rural areas, which is 10-20 years from now at current rate, you use what exists to push general computing into 1980’s level tech. Make it available to people, and you’ll have an emergent hacker culture.

Now, for text only teletype terminals to interface with the best resources of the day, we’re going to need a few things:

• BBSWikipedia - a small C application that runs natively on AVR microcontrollers, for example, that can download Wikitext directly from Wikipedia or other Wikis, parse it, and display it on a 80×25 type display (or less!), with links active but images omitted and tables severely simplified. This could be just a port of Links, but then it would have to have significantly improved offline caching support, because
• we really need stable Internet connections; and while this could mean waiting for proper broadband penetration in rural areas, it more likely means backing up a bit and using cellphones as dial up modems for a while. At any rate, we can’t assume the existence of persistent network connectivity for a while, so people must have a way to back their shit up while offline so that they can schedule downloads and stuff.

Essentially, what I’m talking about doing is making a cheap platform for 1980’s style tech and use technological paradigms of the era as a migratory step until there’s something better. Something better will arrive a lot faster than it did the first time round, that’s almost certain, but having something workable really fast is definitely a win.

How insane is this idea?

Is a bit too New age mumbo-jumboish for my taste, but if you run what he’s saying through a low pass filter and stone wash it in a soapy medium rinse cycle for a while, he starts to sound like.. well.. me. How scary is that?

Still recouping from the conference, which was awesome btw. I’m amazingly still on some kind of high from that, but, alarmingly, I’m being productive at work for a change. Lots of really cool stuff going on over here.

Shopbot has arrived in Iceland; it will be here in Vestmannaeyjar by Monday. That means that next week is going to be FUN.

I’d like to take a rabid writing session this weekend. Let’s see if it happens. Mind is managing to piece together everything finally, which means I’m slightly more unstable than usual, but I’m backed up with good thoughts that deserve to be put into a measurable space.

(Am I referring, with this, to a hypothetical calculus of ideas? Oh dear! Oh my!)

Wish you were here.

- S

There has been talk for several months here about raising a “green data haven” in Iceland. I happen to know several people connected with the initiative, and can report that it is in no way a pipe dream.

Arto Bendiken just sent me this link. It’s interesting to me only in that it starts with a Cryptonomicon reference - but it might be informative to those who aren’t aware of what’s going on.

John Barlow said a couple of days ago that Iceland has the ability to become the Switzerland of Bits. I think he’s on to something.

We at FSFÍ went out to Þingvellir yesterday with our foreign speakers at today’s conference, including John Perry Barlow and Eben Moglen. We sat John down and made this profound video:

Here I point out the “freedom stack”. This ties very deeply in with The Shadow Parliament Project. Watch and learn.