Discourse: rebooting the public sphere

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This is interesting — a serious attempt to re-engineer an online forum system. One of the most depressing things about the last two decades is the way the discussion-group system (the News Groups that were the glory of the pre-Web Internet) decayed and effectively disappeared from view. And yet online discussion is one of the things we need most if the Net is to re-vitalise the public sphere. So this new, open-source project has the potential to restore something really valuable.

Discourse is a from-scratch reboot, an attempt to reimagine what a modern, sustainable, fully open-source Internet discussion platform should be today – both from a technology standpoint and a sociology standpoint.

We tried to build in all the lessons learned from the last ten years of Internet web forums, so that the community has a natural immune system to defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers. There’s also a trust system, so engaged community members can assist in the governance of their community.

The act of participating in a discussion should fundamentally feel good in a way that it currently does not on all existing forums and mailing lists. It should be fun to have discussions with other human beings, not a chore, or something that’s barely tolerable.

Software as pure “thought-stuff”

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In my lectures I often describe software as “pure thought-stuff”, which makes sense to geeks, but not to anyone else. This talk by Bret Victor provides a wonderful visualisation of that idea — though it’s also about a lot of other things. The first ten minutes convey the message about thought-stuff.

Thanks to Quentin for the link.

The hidden ironies of a Firefox OS

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The news that there is going to be a Firefox Operating System has set the cat among the pigeons. GigaOm has an interesting take on it which is refreshingly alert to the irony of the carriers’ response to the development.

The fact that the carriers are lapping this up represents a moment of supreme irony: these are the same companies – largely former monopolies – that were all about walled gardens, the companies that wanted to replicate the portal-first, AOL model in the wireless world. And what happened to stymie that scenario? Apple happened.

It was the iPhone that really loosened the carriers’ grip on their product. Suddenly they were just providers of voice and SMS and data, not suppliers of value-added services. The revenue cut from app sales now went to Apple and Google, not to the operators. The walls to their gardens had been obliterated, and someone had set up much more attractive walled gardens elsewhere.

So back we come to this idea of the open mobile web. This is an area where luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee have been on the warpath, pointing out very real problems with the iOS/Android model. These include the inability to share app-based content in a standardized way, and the inability to search across apps. In short: the loss of the level playing field that web technologies represent.

Firefox OS is designed to solve those problems. Weirdly, we can now witness the former walled garden proprietors genuinely extol the virtues of openness. By promoting Firefox OS, they cannot regain control – however, they hope to prise some control from the hands of Google and Apple.

The vision behind Google Glass

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This morning’s Observer column.

What endears the Google Glass project to me is that it’s the latest instalment in a long and honourable tradition in computer science. It goes all the way back to one of the great luminaries of the business, Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the computer mouse and was a pioneer in networked computing and the design of graphical user interfaces. (In December 1968, in San Francisco, he gave a live demonstration of what networked computing could do that had a profound influence on the people who built the internet and much of the technology we use today.)

What motivated Engelbart from the outset was a passionate belief that computers had the power to augment, rather than replace, human capabilities. Machines, he believed, should do what machines do best, thereby freeing up humans to do what they do best. And this idea of “augmentation” has inspired a good deal of research in the decades since Engelbart embarked on his mission to change the world.

The futility of wanting to be liked

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I’m not a fan of David Cameron, but I had given him the benefit of the doubt on the same-sex marriage Bill. My feeling was that he could only have embarked on such a divisive issue (divisive for his party, that is) because he believed passionately in the cause. But Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in a perceptive piece in today’s Guardian puts it down to political ineptitude: it was part of his campaign to de-toxify the Tory party. “Of all Cameron’s own goals”, Wheatcroft writes,

none is stranger than the same-sex marriage bill. Try to set aside the rights and wrongs and look at this in terms of brute calculation of political advantage (and that’s how politicians do view matters, whatever they may say to the contrary). Bear in mind that Cameron’s critics are correct when they say that same-sex marriage was in neither the Tory manifesto (or any other party’s) or the coalition agreement.

To make this clearer, go back 45 or more years, as some of us can, to the famous liberal reforms passed by parliament under Harold Wilson’s government in the late 1960s, on abortion, homosexuality and divorce. I am old enough not only to remember them but to have collected signatures when I was an undergraduate on a petition for the repeal of the existing law criminalising homosexuality, one of my last political activities and for all I know my only good deed.

But although the bills were passed under the Wilson government, they were not introduced by it. They were all private members’ bills. Abortion reform was sponsored by a recently elected Liberal called David Steel, and homosexual decriminalisation by Leo Abse, an eccentric Labour MP (and by another eccentric who deserves to be remembered with honour, “Boofy” the Earl of Arran, a Wodehousian peer who bravely steered the bill through the Lords).

As a result, although the measures were contentious, there was no animosity between parties – or within them, a contrast indeed with this latest episode. So why did Cameron bring in the bill? The answer given by his somewhat diminished claque of sycophantic admirers in the media is that it was part of his mission to detoxify the Conservatives and show they aren’t the “nasty party” any more. In that case he conspicuously failed in his own terms, since more Tory MPs voted against the bill than for it. He has merely reminded us that he is the weak leader of a bitterly divided party.

Wheatcroft’s point is that the Tories were not brought into this world to be ‘nice’. They’re supposed to be competent, he says, and to protect the world for the wilder enthusiasms of the liberal mind. But Cameron doesn’t match up to that elementary requirement — which is why a new poll ranks him just ahead of John Major and Gordon Brown in the competence stakes.