 This is the generative commons call on Wednesday, August 18, 2021. Yeah, and gosh, I'm wondering where Sebastian has singers gone because I was asking him to see if he might join us for these calls. And who is Sebastian. He is an old and dear friend who is with IBM now and his role at IBM is remarkably close to what generative commons is trying to do. I know and I had a catch up call with him a couple weeks ago and we're like, oh my God, you need to show up here. I gave up what I was doing by the way I can't. Oh wait, maybe it's this now that I gave up just so you know. All right, about that. Let's see let me add the link to our zoom to him. Hey Hank. Hey Hank, we haven't started Jerry hello to Stacy. We haven't started generating the generative commons yet we're just troubleshooting. Yes, good. I like your background that's very, that's a lovely print. Yeah, thanks. I like lighthouses. My favorite iconic things in the world. So yesterday, randomly in conversation. Oh, yesterday evening at an event I was at a woman randomly said yes you could get paintings of lighthouses and then there's a painter famous for painting lighthouses. And she mentioned his name and I don't remember that I'll look him up. Yeah, yeah good. I know there there is a pain to do a lot of lighthouses but I can't come up with the name. Yeah. And what's that in your background is that a tall in the south seas. This is the Moana Island from the movie Moana from the Disney movie Moana. Oh no, Thomas Kincaid. No, no, Thomas Kincaid who let's see if I can find a Wikipedia page or some art. Okay, the official website painter of light. Well, ha, painter of light is not this one but but here we go. And let's get images. There we go. A painter of American Americana kind of paintings. And I'm not saying not seeing that many lighthouses in in the first all I did was search for King Kate and then switch to images. Now I get all of course let me just screen share real quick. So I added the word lighthouse and here are a bunch of Thomas Kincaid lighthouse scenes, which are a little bit fantasy romantic, I think. Yeah, yeah, he has a hole. And then if I if I back up to the first one you'll see what his normal sort of image repertory is. He does. He makes he makes rural sort of town scenes look like they're coming out of the movie The Hobbit. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so I don't have a I don't have a plot for our conversation about the gender comments for today. But we've done pretty well just kind of being open to what shows up in the calls and going with it. So I'm wondering if either of you want to take a shine a flashlight into the generative commons topic and whatever direction you'd like. Well I have a language question that I want to ask. I want to know if the word skins that I learned yesterday. Yep. So I want to know if I if that word could be appropriated to describe a theme. Like I mentioned that I was working on something and my theme is sort of everything that you look you know everything you needed to know you learned in kindergarten, here's what you missed. And it's sort of like a Mr Rogers type thing, could that be called the skin. So kind of sort of now theme, you threw that word in here as well, and theme has a specialized meaning here to when it's used to mean something like skin. So, if you install WordPress, you then get to choose through word hundreds and thousands of WordPress themes, which will make your WordPress site look like something or something else. The theme will include what is the arrangement of things on the on the web page. What kind of links do you have it's everything. Sometimes the theme includes usually the theme I think includes fonts. So the theme is kind of a unified package for a look and feel of a site. So, looking at it from that person and a skin is kind of a simpler theme skins I think got popular maybe not. So if you remember the Napster app. But back when we were downloading music like crazy off the website off the web right. So Napster had skins and it probably is earlier than that we could look it up on of course the Wikipedia the holder of all knowledge. But basically for Napster it was just like a different look and feel for what the little music player interface looked like, and it might look retro retro futurist or afro modernist or like you know, you could you could basically pick from a couple of different skins to change the look of it. So given that and given a kindergarten or Mr Rogers theme, you could in fact skin or theme, a website or an app to look a little bit like Mr Rogers set, or the castle or. Yeah, I meant more figuratively so I guess skin is the outside what it looks like. And I'm looking for a word that reflects the inside, which is why it's called a skin by the way and not a skeleton or, you know, or whatever else it's kind of like the bones of something or the inside the structure of something. So it's very much flesh. Yeah, yeah, you want the flesh and the soul. Yeah, so so skin and theme aren't quite exactly what you're looking for I think. Thank you, but they can be helpful because because you could imagine easily. Mr Rogers neighborhood theme for a website. You can imagine what characters would would would linger in there and what some of the background would look like and the theme music because he composed so much music is like have you watched the documentary about him. I think I saw parts of it but here's the funny thing. Yeah, I hated Mr Rogers is really, I really did it was boring. I, but I understand now why I kind of got it. I didn't grow up with me I grew up in South America so I didn't grow up with any children's TV other than some brutal cartoons. That was that was about it. Right, I didn't get Sesame Street Sesame Street as much later Mr Rogers I didn't get none of that. But April had a hard time with her mom and her in her childhood, and for her Mr Rogers was really significant. I feel very, you know, very loved by her and the idea that you're fine just the way you are was really anchoring and we watched the documentary together and it really moved her. She was like wow, and I, and I hadn't realized what our roles had played for her growing up. So that was really interesting for me. What type of documentaries that it's a it's called won't you be my neighbor I think let me look it up. And I did see it. Rogers don't even know who Mr Rogers is but really sounds like I should know you have some fun things coming. So it is called what should be my neighbor I'll put a link to it in the chat and, and I'll put a link to Mr Rogers in my brain in the chat. There's the Wikipedia page and then there's a I've got under Mr Rogers you'll find a bunch of YouTube videos that are different aspects of it including I think a couple clips in the documentary. But one of the one of the really interesting things in the documentary is that Fred Rogers believed in equality and this is the civil rights era when he's doing these things. In the real coin he has a police police care no the mailman, not the policeman right the mailman character is black, and he invites the mailman to it's a hot day on the set they're pretending it's a hot day. He invites the mailman to take off his shoes and put his feet in the same small little, you know inflatable pool that Mr Rogers has his feet in and treats him completely as an equal and it's like this is an era where these things are are very and he does this wonderful gentle sort of friendly thing on set. And that's one of many kinds of things that Mr Rogers is busy sort of quietly doing. As he went about his business and I didn't realize the how profound that was, and then separately from that, I watched a video documentary about Sesame Street. It's called street gang. I'll put a link to speak. I'll put a link to speaking in the chat as well speaking how we got to Sesame Street, which I, which moved me a lot, because it was because a friend of mine. This will be a funny sort of story I think a friend of mine took me out to lunch in 1998 when I went off on my own. And he told me the story of Jim Henson and Lloyd Morissette. So, and I'm going to, I'm going to kind of, I haven't updated the way I tell the story for having watched the documentary so I should do that, but Jim Henson was basically a busker puppeteer busking on the streets of San Francisco. Occasionally he'd get like a local channel TV show or something and then there'd be the odd puppet festival but he was barely making a living, you know doing puppetry and he invented this he had an already invented Kermit and a couple other characters so you can tell there's something there. And then he runs into Lloyd Morissette and Joan Gants who later becomes Joan Gants Cooney, and those two basically say hey you're a really good puppeteer we could build something around you. And the existence of the Muppets Sesame Street Children's Theater Workshop and everything else around it comes out of them having sort of built stuff. And what my friend David was telling me over this lunch was, you need to find your Lloyd Morissette. Because you're good at some of the stuff you're doing but you're not good at selling business and in some weird way I've been looking for my Lloyd Morissette since 98 with a little success. And in some sense OGM is a way of crowdsourcing some of that. Right, like, like hopefully some people will show up would like to build parts of this and what we haven't figured out yet what we really haven't figured out yet is how to actually frame up projects and how to actually get people to go spend a bunch of time on the project. And how even to fund some of these projects which is what I'm trying, what I'm trying to pitch for right now. Yeah. And then just to tie this back to the topic at hand. And how to have all these projects feed the comments. Yeah, right. So that as we build materials, we are sharing them with each other. And we had a really interesting conversation last night with a couple people from a large package goods manufacturer and vendor about the first I was showing them my brain, and they were like, whoa, man. And then I was like, wouldn't it be interesting if we sort of curated one of these collectively in whatever tool made sense for you but if when you improved something about Sesame Street, it was improved from my view and my visit to be information as well. Yeah. And that could change how education is done how voting and governance happen how corporate strategy is made and we'd sort of be talking through this shared memory, and their eyes lit up they were like yeah that sounds really interesting I'm like, alright how do we do that. How do we inspire, you know, partly what that means is that companies as they collect and create information would need to share a lot of it, and they're completely unaccustomed to that they're busy they're busy putting up higher walls to defend the castle. And partly what we're saying here is that you don't really, if you think living in a fortification is going to save you or help you you're wrong, you actually need to live in a village with like, like palisades, and be you know be peers in the contemporary making things fruitful for everybody. I mean, I'm very inspired by the books I read just in the last few years about North and South America and Australia, being managed landscapes, like really inspired by them. And it makes complete sense like in Australia there's a weir, a weir is a trap in a river. Basically you set big stones in a river that stick a little bit out of the water, and you don't have to close the weir like like so there's a weir that's in the Barrow one or something like that river in Australia, that's possibly 20,000 years old. They they can't date it it's really hard to date. But what would happen would be, you put stones in the river and then you put them close enough that a fish cannot escape, you know, a mature fish can't make it make it through the stones, but the water grows to no problem. Then, when you know that the fish are going to run, because the fish run seasonally and there's a timing to it, you take everybody take the family in the tribe basically over and you camp next to the river, you then put the stones off the close the bottom of the weir. And you wait for the fish to run and the fish fill your weir, and you just go there and you reach in and you take the fish out and you dry them salt them smoke them do whatever you're going to do to save a lot of protein, very very inexpensively and easily. And if you understand what happens when, and you just pass that down through stories like songlines, you're on your way. And there's there's a lot of cheap protein and once you figure out salting smoking or and drying, you can carry this stuff around for a while or hide it or do whatever else right. And so, and that's just one of the things another thing is you plan, you find a forest that's got a bunch of game that you like, and then you plant something that those animals like to eat right next to the forest and you just go away, you just so a lot of this stuff near the forest. And then you go away for that for a year and come back, and then the animals are out grazing you like you call the herd you pluck some of them to eat from. And you do other kinds of things with controlled fire, fire stick farming or whatever, whatever you want to call it, but with control burns you actually manage the undergrowth and everything else that's around. And then after a control burn you would plant something that you wanted to see in that area, you would do other kinds of things. So when the first fleet the British first fleet shows up in Australia. And you read their journals, and this is from the book the biggest estate, I think it's called are the greatest estate or the biggest estate I'll look it up. So you read the journals of the first fleet, gentlemen who land, and their comments are Australia is like a gentleman's garden, you ride your horse through the trees it's clear and you reach up there's an apple you look down there's a board. This is a marvel. And they think this is just how nature works in Australia. They attribute none of this to local intelligence or care. They think the locals are lazy and stupid heathens. Even though this is among the oldest civilizations on the planet. Right. And they proceed then to destroy the civilization, and another little light bulb went off, and they bring sheep because they realize oh this is a terrific landscape our sheep will grow fat and happy we can. We can start to finance Australia by selling wool from here, isn't that great. And then they let the sheep raise wild across the countryside and the sheep eat up the sheep eat up this whole manicured landscape. The sheep are like thank you so much. And they go run rampant and destroy all of this. Not all of it but progressively they just sort of eat up the place. And you're like, oh crap. Right because when you're managing the that when you manage animals and plants well. So one of the thoughts in my brain says humans who know what they're doing are really good for the land. You want smart humans on the land everywhere because they make the land better. They increase soil fertility which would make class happy and maybe save our planet. You know a whole bunch of other things humans are good for the land, who own but only those who know what they're doing. And that the idiot humans who are busy building a house in the middle of a forest that is kindling. And then like, you know worried when it burns down, like that was not a that was probably not a good place to build the house. But you could camp there and then people and I had a homestay trip and we had a conference to attend in Beijing. And we were like, oh, okay we've been to Beijing together what else could we do in April booked us a homestay trip in Mongolia. And we went to Ulaanbaatar for a few days which was awesome. And then we took a little micro bus out way out onto the step and stayed with three or four different families and learned that to this to this. The population of Mongolia, which is 3 million strong, half the population lives in Ulaanbaatar the other half is out on the step in the in the thinnest populated place on earth other than Greenland. And they move three times a year. So all these families pick up and move their girls and the girls are they are your so basically round homes that you can break down in a couple hours pack up and move. They move three times a year. So they have winter quarters up in up toward the mountains. And I don't remember what else is happening. But when they move, for example they leave their horses behind. And the horses will take care of themselves. And they can find their way back. They do all these interesting little tricks, there's no fences out on the step, like no fences. In fact, you know the roads are really full of potholes so when you travel out, you're busy dodging potholes. And sometimes parallel roadways that are just kind of like other people just gave up on the road because it was so full of potholes so there's pothole little paths next to the road, and there's every now and then you have to stop because there's a bunch of goats crossing the road. And that's what they're going to do. But it's super interesting how all these things coexist. It was easy to envision Mongol horde. And then the Mongol invasions worked really well as long as they were on step. If they were on open step they could like take you over because they knew how to live on that easily. You start to get into crowded mountainous terrain, you start to get into thick forests, and their logistics start to go haywire. And the last little piece of that, the thing they drink a lot is fermented mare's milk. They have cows, camels, horses, sheep, and goats, all of which produce milk. The milk they drink is fermented mare's milk. They milk their horses. It's fermented because fermentation preserves the nutrients and preserves the milk. So you can have an open, you can have an open tub of erog is what it's called, and it won't spoil, it's fermented, it's good. It's good for you. And when you visit agar, the first thing that happens is the older male of the incoming visitors that they meet gets offered a bowl of erog to drink from. And so you get, and they warn you don't drink too much of it, it's a really good diuretic. It'll give you the shits. Yeah, so I drank some. It's like a kefir or a spicy yogurt or whatever. That's kind of what it's like. But it's really nutritious. And they, you know, they'll drink a half bowl, no problem. It's blue, blue, blue, just come in off hard work on the step and you drink some erog. And then the reason I brought it up is, you can progressively dry it and cook it, but I think as you dry it down, it turns into the world's first cliff bar. And so this little, it looks like fudge or toffee, kind of a cake like a centimeter and a half or an inch thick. And you can break it up, it's hard. It's just like protein. It's just like protein. And you can imagine slipping that into your robe or your pocket or your bag and going a really long distance. So, so this was like portable rations, you know, Napoleon had big, you know, margarine and canned foods were invented for Napoleon's armies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, because he had to feed his armies on the hook. And they, you know, one of the ways that Napoleon beat his enemies was they didn't have a long supply chain with all kinds of kitchen, you know, kitchen trucks and food stuff happening. The, you know, everybody kind of ate where you were and you had to pill for the local villages or fields or whatever for food. But they invented canning for to keep the army moving. So you don't have canning in the days of Mongols, not on the horizon. So you've got, you know, dried erog. Anyway, sorry, follow stories. But how do we, how do we get everybody to start seeing that we're all like sharing space and if we shared space more intelligently we could actually do a lot of really good stuff. Yeah, it's a pretty simple, a pretty simple thing we've managed to the idea of ownership, and which is part of capitalism and all that has managed to eat everything. So let's eat our brains. One of the reasons I really like the book The Great Transformation by Polanyi and have you have either of you heard me mention it before. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, I bring it up a lot. One of the reasons I love it is that it describes how we used to live together before the industrial revolution. And people used to share a bunch of stuff like when when when the neighbors down the street slaughtered the pig, a bunch of people got to eat some pork. And then you salted or smoked some of it and saved some of it, but, but we did a whole bunch of sharing, and then capitalism wants all of that territory it doesn't want anybody living on the land for sheep. And so it pushes them off the land so they no longer have a lot of room for a plot in the backyard, etc, etc. Anyway, and there's a bunch of really interesting cross stories here like the history of the potato intersects there. The potato is not a is not a thing in Europe until after Columbus right the potato is native to the Americas only to Mesoamerica to the Incas. There's no potatoes anywhere there's no hot peppers in China, before they cross the Pacific. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no hot peppers in China. Don't have hot peppers. And now it's like you can't imagine the Sichuan cuisine without hot peppers but no hot peppers. So the potato is actually really nutritious. Yeah, it's very nutritious, because it absorbs a lot of minerals in the earth. And then there's a whole history of trying to convince Europeans to eat potatoes because they wouldn't. They refused. And kings had to resort to trickery in order to get people to like potatoes. And then they became dependent on potatoes and then there was a potato blight that destroyed the potato crop across Europe within three or four months. And the Irish were so dependent on potatoes that they starved. Or immigrated. Starved and many of them had just were forced to leave so you have been a huge Irish immigration into the US where they're treated as horrible people. Like, like in America always the most recent wave of immigrants is treated like shit. You know, whether it was Italians or Irish or whatever, we called them terrible things we thought they were lazy and stupid and you know, it was bad. But that's our pattern. So anyway, so partly I want to figure out what does a medium look like that makes this kind of storytelling easy. And then where we can overlay and contrast and improve our stories, because I had a had a moment. Some years ago I met a guy who loved history, and we started telling some of these stories and I was, I was telling a story about how the Mongols bounced off the Great Wall of China. Well, later they conquered China and you have the whole Yuan Empire in China, but that before that the Chinese build this wall to keep the damn Mongols out. And the Mongols basically bounce and start going over and invading Europe. So the European invasions are partly result of the Chinese of the Great Wall of China. Who knew that. But then this other fellow started saying, Oh yeah, and then this and then this and then this stuff that I don't remember right now, because I was standing instead of sitting sitting in front of my brain in a browser. And stuff that was his worldview about how things evolved. And it was, it was fascinating and great and I sat there thinking, Okay, I wish I could swiftly. Put things together into a view of history that made sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, or a couple of those. But yeah, now have to think of the titles maybe I can dredge up references. History is told by the losers or something like that. Howard Zinn's The People's History of the United States is exactly that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think there are there are one or two more. And there's a very, very nice to get them back into the front of attention of people these days. Yes, exactly, exactly. And partly that's what I'm trying to do so I have this unproduced video, my story of trust my history of trust, which is just my talking head and I meant to, I meant to sort of unpack it turn it into a series of better produced videos etc I haven't done that. I wish everybody, and that's just my own version of history, but I like it a lot if it explains a whole bunch of stuff like how colonialism really fucked up the world, and why decolonization actually might matter. Right. And why all those people we've been treating as heathens might actually deserve respect and equality and, and everything else. And what a hard time they've had, and how systematically the systems have been designed against them, because that's what you do when you win. Yeah, yeah. And so, so, and just to leap over a couple thoughts but how do, how do white supremacists in the United States say that America is for white people like how, how can they say that with a straight face, given any notion of history, like really what's up there. It's just not credible on any, unless you just think hey we invaded we captured the place it's ours now, or whatever. I don't know. Things like that make no sense to me, you know, to make it to make a claim like that and, and rest your heart on it and attack and hate other people for it, just as like not sensible. But then a lot of these things are not about sense. Right. Not. I don't want to sound anywhere close to making excuses for white supremacists but I do want to answer your question, please. I believe that what they're thinking, before it gets to the hate part. It's, we want our own culture. Don't make us mix cultures. Right. That's the short answer. Right, but they also seem to feel like they're being persecuted for their culture. And I can see how that becomes a narrative, because nobody's actually trying to stamp out white European culture as it sort of got transmuted in the US nobody's actually, I don't see anyone actively trying to get rid of it or doing something to it or, and then it's a very syncretic culture so Elvis Presley gets famous for taking black music and making it, you know, a palatable to white people. Interesting. Right, gets really famous for doing that. Interesting. And there's a whole bunch of other weird things that happen in the middle of all that, but, but there's this idea and the census early data was released just I think last week, and shows that there's a big decline in white Americans so that the percentage of America that considers itself Caucasian or white is going away. Some part of that drop may in fact be because a lot of people are just answering with better with more detail that they're not white but they're this other ethnicity. And those same people in the previous census might have checked Caucasian or something like that I don't know. But it's but but there's this whole white replacement argument that says that the plot from the left, which wants free immigration is to just outnumber the white people in America and turn this country into something else entirely. And then like, I hear you, I have little or no sympathy for this. Nobody's really trying to chase you off. And these are just awesome people and why don't you go have some of their food, like go go figure out yeah. And then is that's a great book that's a just taking the perspective of the losers is really interesting. You can download it. You can download this following a link 622 pages. Yeah, let me try to get the link into the great book. It's a great book. I was just going to say something but I've lost it. So what does all this mean for the generative comments and for any agreements to work and Stacy I saw that you put the link to your Google Doc. Is that for the story or writing or. It's, it's for the answer. My best answer to your question, which you didn't finish answering, which is how do we get. How do we get people to want to contribute to that. And when you read that you'll see that one of the things that actually gets created is sort of like a TV station. And that would mean that there might be a group of writers that want to take your trust series and break that apart and create their own show out of it, which would then be scheduled in that. And is that is that is what you're saying harmonious with what I've been saying about weaving the world as a show. Oh, absolutely. But absolutely. There's one slight difference though, because the idea is so. Oh, GM gets this funding to give out. And so if you read, well, you know what you read, you'll read it, and then you'll decide but um, yeah, I'll talk more about it after. I just, I had to request access. Yeah, and you need to give me access. Oh, I requested access I don't know how that works, but I'm thinking I'm going to get an email. I would assume it's an email. Yeah. Yes, Google should alert you that. Yeah, that you are wanted for that. Yeah, good. I got yes I got it. Okay, good. Cool so if you change the settings or just approve us individually you should be able to see it. Yeah I like to prove individually because as I hope Pete. I'll give you a couple of reasons, but also I only want to get somebody's not interested. I don't, you know, I want to know who actually wants to read it. Yeah. Also. Thank you. Thank you. All right, let me pose. I don't know what I'm posing not a question with sort of a question. I'm not sure of the generative comments or generative innovation comments or the way I sometimes translated it before I met OGM distributed living lab global lab for societal innovation. Now I'm starting to call it the mission lab for, for SDGs. I am a part of. Let's see, a federation at club. A league. Are you part of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Not yet. I don't think I'm surprised. I used to characters myself as a noxious. But anyway, I don't think I'm a good man. Well, I'm a, I'm a member of the world of futures studies federation of the new club of Paris, set up by Leif Edmonds and among other things. I'm not a member, but I correspond regularly with the board of directors of the European network of living labs. I'm now part of OGM, which is either a mindset a church or different things that might all put into the, put into the matter most a couple of weeks ago. And each of them has the potential of being a kind of mission lab or distributed global lab. Exactly how let me put this in the chat as well should actually do it in matter most like do that later. Oh, GM, I've mentioned it to you Jerry. How, how to do something like that. It's an ongoing theme of a conversation sometimes for the world federation of future studies. I'm going to do a workshop about this at their global summit in Berlin in October. The new club of Paris. I am proposing it to the events commission which I've now become part of in a conversation next week. And for the email, I've done two presentations about it at the two most recent digital living lab days. People are interested in it, but they don't know how to go somewhere with it. And I've also drafted an article with three pleasantly disturbed French people in the last in the last month and we're going to look for some sort of publishing for that. So it's starting to come together. I would love to do an experiment where two or ideally three of these groups try to do it and just afterwards reflected on what they learned what worked but didn't work, put it together and then we'd know a lot more. I like that. Yeah. And how to do this how to reflect. And I'm sitting here thinking about. I'm going to over generalize here. So my apologies ahead of time, but a lot of a lot of convenings of senior people are sort of technologically limited in the sense of they totally know what books are. Books are of extremely high value and sometimes they publish books or big light papers or whatever done. They also know how to make policy and what what sort of how politics works and how global policy and all of that might might be made and manufactured and they have influence in some cases and those things, but they're mostly completely unaware of the new commons and the generative commons that we're talking about, because books, if you buy the bookstore, books are not in the commons. No, right books are kind of carved out of the commons by book rights and book software and whatever else which which takes the ideas and says no no still got to protect these, which frustrates me. And so finding some new kinds of literacy that allow these folks to express things and put them in the generative commons might be a great thing and it can be as simple as recording a two minute video and putting it on YouTube with a you know the default creative commons kind of attribution or license that that's easy But but and another piece of that gets done by mixing the older groups with younger groups. Yeah, who are native in their in their grasp of how to communicate in these ways, who may or may not be able to articulate about new commons and what you know generative commons might I certainly know that they can find a lot of stuff and link to it and play with it and make their own and they feel and they feel a lot of sense of agency and power in making media. That's that's just comes with the territory of growing up with it with Instagram and YouTube and whatnot right. Yeah, and so I feel like really brilliant groups and all they do is produce a book or a report. I just get angry. Because, because they're not digestible enough, they're not, they're not useful enough, they're not usable enough. Even, you know, even a good report should should openly publish all of its underlying data in some database so that other people can go run analyses and do whatever. It's a standard. But it's not often. Right. Yeah. So how do we make these entities more productive, more accessible, more usable, more visible by changing some of these aspects of how they work. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I met online and spoke several times just before just before actually meeting you Jerry with Ward Cunningham. And he showed me the rudiments of how to use federated wiki. And I tried with two colleagues here in the Netherlands, a couple of times to develop some skills. And I don't know if it's the best thing out there. It seems a bit clumsy for what I know Stacy likes to call the models among us like me. So I don't know. I mean a federated wiki and I yesterday when, when David Bowville was was in the chat I went to his federated wiki pages and I saw oh yeah that's right this gardens of knowledge that was really inspiring and such. I'm wondering just I mean I think it's a way to use the intelligence of the and skills of the people in open global minds to to make some prototypes that might work easier than federated wiki or whatever else is out there. Yeah. And so here's a link to David Bowville's Democracy Garden using federated wiki. It's really inspiring. Yeah, Stacy so you can look around. And David, David has done a whole bunch of work around this so a lot of the liquid democracy stuff that was happening in Germany. He was deeply involved in. He's been thinking really hard about all this stuff and I think is is sort of peacefully frustrated. And trying to fund, you know, he's busy applying for grants to get some funding to move forward his batch of ideas. And I find, and word cutting him as a neighbor here in Portland. I've had lunch with him a couple times. I don't really like fed wiki, because I don't really understand how to live in fed wiki. I, it keeps opening, opening these vertical windows. And I don't understand how I'm moving around it same thing happened to me for Tiddly wiki I was using Tiddly for a while. Stacy Tiddly wiki is a local on your computer wiki. So, so basically, you can run Tiddly wiki without having an internet connection and you can basically build a little wiki for yourself, but Tiddly is like a single page wiki in some sense. But it's one of many different wiki variants that exist. And the fed wiki is interesting because of its very highly decentralized model for copying pages. And I wanted to edit Stacy, if you had created a page on on on your fed wiki about David Bowell, and I wanted to edit or comment on it, it would make a copy of that of your page in my fed wiki, and then leave a link on yours over to me. But I don't actually know how the changes would be synchronized or moved I have no useful mental model of how that actually functions. It's highly decentralized because there's lots of copies being made on the fly of every page fed wiki that's the smallest federated wiki or fed wiki. And so those things don't really work for me and, and one of the things that's fun about Pete Kaminsky's efforts on massive wiki is that he's had lots of wiki experience he's friends with Ward as well. He was the co founder of social texts which was was selling wiki services to corporations back in the day. It eventually got bought and went away. I was on the advisory board for for social texts alongside Ward cutting him. So we had advisory calls, you know, for to help them try to sell this thing because his corporations were just having a hard time understanding how to think wickily and how to work wickily. Right, which means kind of working in the open. And again, there's a piece of when I said earlier wouldn't it be great if people just understood that we're like interdependent on this little, you know, fragile rock together that would change things around a lot. Yeah, one of the things that that lets you turn on that light bulb is working wickily, when you when your ideas are open and other people can go and prove them connect to them do other kinds of things. I just I had a, I had a conversation with Pete yesterday where I said, so Pete. Technically speaking, wiki is a wiki because you people can edit it right there on the face and social and with massive wiki you can't do that yet there's no, there's no pretty front end where I can just click on something and start editing page and save it again. So if you have to run over to a tool like obsidian or hack and learn how to use GitHub properly, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, swing a dead cat overhead three times while I'm saying the Harry Potter chant. The Harry Potter spell that actually saves pages on GitHub. And he was like, he was laughing. It's like, yeah, I know. And so part of what I'm trying to figure out is how can we fund as a project, a useful front end for massive that is open that does kind of what you're saying, Hank, that makes it easy and accessible for other people because, you know, the wiki is using the wiki media platform, which is a wiki as well is probably the most used wiki in on the planet. And it's not that simple to use. And it's now gotten kind of complicated. It's, it's good but it's not great. If it were great it would have replaced Google Docs for example. Yeah. Hey Michael, thanks for joining us. Sure. I'm sorry for being so late. I figured I'd drop in for what it's worth. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. We've had a wandering conversation through a bunch of different things from how indigenous people took care of the landscape around the world to, to how wikis work and what what that that's where we are now and how to think together basically using these tools and a bunch of other stops in between. So just a reaction to, to what was just being said. I was, I was going to type into the chat where thank you typed just your note how to fund a useful front end for massive. You know, how to find a useful front end for massive and anything else that can interoperate with that that should interoperate with that, so that if you learn to use one of the tools. It shouldn't take much learning. But, you know, if you can use one of the tools, then you can use massive and you can use, you know, trove and factor and, and you name it. Yep. But they're all, they don't have different front ends. I mean, they have different front ends but they don't have different input modes. And they're, and they're sharing data, given access privileges. Totally want to use. Go ahead, Michael. I was just asking what Hank just said. Oh, is it easy to use. That that interface that we're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it. You know, there's lots of things that I would dream about are being able to share views on the same data that everybody has, like, access to their own data and then the ability to look at it. How does it, how does it look in massive wiki has looking trove, how does it look on Facebook, how does it look, you know, in Dropbox as a just a file structure in the brain. That would be great but I wasn't even thinking about that, that, you know, back end dream, I was just thinking about, like, you know, if, if we're using markup, or if we're using the ability to select and make something bold. With a keystroke, whatever it is that that very, very simple input mechanism is as as friendly and same as, you know, I mean, basically, if you think about Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and and all those things, they, they share input simplicity, and they virtually share the same capabilities. And it just seems like, you know, an interoperable, you know, information sharing network should be as easy as that to, you know, have that that shallow a learning curve. And, and, you know, be, if there's anything more difficult about it than that, it should be common to the platforms that use it, and everyone should be invited. Yep. Yep. Easy to say. Yeah. So, and not hard to do, but just hard to disseminate and agree on. Yeah, the light bulb that went off in my head, had some years ago was that if we see that tools like email and web builders and whatever, if we see that they're all starting to use variants of HTML, and we think of HTML kind of at the lingua franca of documents, then the only thing that's going to mean a website and an email is that one of them says, where do I put this is given a URL, and it's stores it on the files that respond to that URL. And the other one is like, who do I send this to, and it's given an email address and there's another system called SMTP and pop and all that sort of stuff that knows how to deliver this package to HTML to some other person but the body of the message doesn't need to be different in pretty much any other way. Like, and then I was like, Oh, crap. Okay, so, so all these things are actually much more similar than we think they are. What we need to do is create an environment where it's easy to promote and demote things so that, so that we can then just write to whatever thing we want. It's a much simpler way of thinking about how documents live. I would go a little further and just say that if you think about email as, you know, something that you own your own end of every email you've ever sent or received and if you save it and archive it and organize it. You don't even need to be connected to the web to experience it. And if you were willing to share access to some of those things and not other those other those things and make some of those things public. You would still live on your, you know, hard drive server, whatever they don't have to be in the cloud. If there were a way, an interoperable way to say, here's the stuff I have, here's the stuff I'm willing to make public here's the stuff I'm willing to make public to these four of us, because it relates to what we're talking about, and that kind of, you know, simple standard of, of interoperability access is is it's similar to what we have for texts, and not incredibly dissimilar to what we have for email and, you know, I am not technical, but but I know that would not be that hard. And, and so an architecture for email that might have existed but didn't because it's really kind of cumbersome but now we can kind of maybe waste cycles on it. But imagine if email was just a bunch of files on my directory. And I would give what I when I sent you an email I would be giving you permission to read the document that's in my directory. And as you made your way down through your stack of emails in your inbox, each of them would be taking you to somebody else's directory where you're reading a web page basically, that's my message to you. And that's not not at all how email works we're busy, like sending these little puppies all around the world. Yes, Stacy. Then what would happen if for whatever reason, you decided to take it down. If you decided to remove your emails from the world, you could then do that because you would have kind of acts, they would be like files only on your system and you would have access rights to remove them. And thinking about the other person that was counting on having your location for that bit of information. So there's a couple layers to this one of them is the world I'm describing is not a world I would like, because I don't. I don't want people to be able to like remove all their emails and have them be gone. And then there's lots of ways in which you could replicate or make redundant or just in its chair in a distributed way those files. So, I say the radical piece of it is all those files are on my hard drive on this little computer that I'm using right now and that's the only place those files exist. Another way is my emails live on IPFS the interplanetary file system, which basically takes any file splits it up into pieces, sends out those pieces to everybody who's cooperatively storing these things, so that nobody holding the pieces knows what the message says, and only I can reconstruct the message, but the message is redundantly saved across the full network because it's been split up into lots of pieces, and many people have many other pieces, right. But the key to access it and reassemble it and open it is just my or and whoever's I give permission to. So in that world. I still have some kind of virtual control over the file but the file is no longer just on my device but rather, you know, spread across lots of people's devices on this distributed file system now. And one of the things we're trying to figure out is where IPFS interplanetary file system and is that is that your pointage or. There actually is a thing called IPFS it's been around for a long time, there's also something called IP LD or IP linked data, which is really interesting which I know nothing about I am totally an amateur here, but these, but these are actually interesting architectural components for our future work. Yeah. I'm sorry, just out of curiosity, it's interplanetary or intraplanetary or interplanetary. It's just it's a cute thing. Okay, all right. Presupposing, presupposing that there are others in on standard. Yeah, on other worlds, and it's in a lot of use like it's this is a popular platform that actually works as opposed to other things out there. One thing that strikes me in, you know, getting back to what Stacy was asking, when you think about like somebody who creates a website, and other people put comments on it or interact with it, and then that person takes the website right down. It's, you know, it's gone like that, and that's their, their right to do and you sort of know you're taking that risk when you post stuff that lives on their website. But if we were talking about individual, you know, files that you commented on, they might put up as going back to the email example. The email is a sharing of a file, and then the responses to that sharing of that file by whoever has access to it. You know, this is the way of dealing with it with without going to IPFS and the kind of fractionalizing which sounds a little a little blockchain ish on us. I'm not watching it all, because it doesn't have all the it doesn't have the proof of work it doesn't have all that other stuff. Right. Yeah, but I mean it's it's a standard that involves cooperation among many devices cooperation among any devices and a sort of useless shard being the makes cooperation necessary, like it's one person only has a piece of it. But in the case of this kind of email like file sharing that I'm imagining and would think of as an answer to Stacy's point. If I create a file and share it with you, you for three and and you all comment on it and but the all four of us have a copy of that complete file, I can delete it. I still have it. And by originally choosing to share it with you or give you access I mean it would be good if the access could somehow be made a permanent state so you one of you couldn't decide oh I'm going to make this public to everybody. But you know there's a there's a consensual act there with some some boundaries around it and and keeps us each safe from the other blowing it up. What I'm just describing right now is the fed wiki architecture. I think that's the intention of that wiki is that there's, that's why it's always making copies of each page, and putting them on your own fed wiki is that is that hey. That's how that's how it preserves kind of larger system level integrity or something or access or something and I'm not sure I just have no useful mental model for how that works and how to use it properly and what it means. I mean it can be as simple as structurally as. And this was honestly, you know, factors as aspiration but if you think about, say Dropbox. If you put, if you were to choose to put everything you ever see every bit of information that you gather, you know, in your Dropbox, and then make certain folders shared and certain folders private and certain folders public. So that, that keeps your access to everything. And gives you the power to share what you want to share and let people edit what you want to let them edit. Yeah. Interesting. Stacy you want to jump in. Yeah, I had like another question and sort of like an imaginary question regarding what you were what you were saying Jerry about this idea that you'd send something out everybody would have a piece of it you would only have the key. And how that works, theoretically, if all the other people all the other locations work together, would they be able to guess the cake. In principle they shouldn't be able to because the key is a cryptologically secure unique thing which is as good as the key cracking technology of the time. So, given enough compute power, most passwords are crackable, like if you can sort of brute force your way through, but, but some of these passwords are permutationally crazy, like, you'd have to be pretty smart to sort of figure out how so probably, if it was technically well built, then technically no. You could have all this you can have all the shards but not the key to decrypt it and reassemble it properly and, and you still wouldn't be able to make sense out of it. So, in principle, I'm definitely I was I was thinking about 100,000 people getting together cracking code. Well, there's certainly a lot of people trying to do that and there's there's new technology, like quantum computing that suddenly releases a tremendous amounts of new compute power, which are very useful for things like password cracking. Yeah. So, so, so these. So things we think of as, as secure today because we use X kind of difficult password that threshold keeps getting further and further out as we get better and better technology. Which also means that older files that we think are protected may in fact become unprotected pretty quickly. I was just visualizing it like a piece of a puzzle and I was thinking the more pieces you have the easier it is to find the missing one. Yes, unless the missing one is just different from all the other pieces because it's the key and it's not a piece of window or wall or flooring. Got it. I guess. Yeah. We're sort of at our time anything else anybody wants to put into the conversation or to think about. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. I'll go back to my earlier comment I think just before Michael joined about the four groups that I've involved with, and putting something to each of those groups and one of the groups would be OGM. The group World Federation of Future Studies. Third one is the new color Paris fourth ones European network of living labs. They all are representing distributed collective intelligence, which could be leveraged for doing something to benefit larger society like cracking a really difficult puzzle with one of the UN's sustainable development goals just just as an example. I would like somehow to convince three of those groups to do something next year. There's something you said, when I mentioned that Jerry which was because of the tech capacities of OGM. You could perhaps create the technology for it. And that's how we got to this discussion of massive and and Google docs and dropbox and number of the things that weren't mentioned but the things I really liked, which was what Michael said, creating an input simplicity and a shallow learning curve like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. How to propose how to work that up into a type of proposal and where to propose it to OGM. All those other organizations or groups have their own way of doing it. Part of what I'd like to propose is that if three of them do it, they pool their knowledge and what they learned and such so that everyone benefits. Great. So a couple things that come to mind. One, I think we would be easy to convince, because we have special magic access to our organization. And if we could describe it so this is very OGM project like, you know, doing this would would serve really well, our kind of purpose on earth. And if we frame this properly it could also be a project that I'm trying to find funding for myself. So, so, you know, I would love to be able to put this on a dashboard and say hey we'd like to write something that does this. And here's the use case and there's four organizations in the world that would use it if we built it. Michael, oh you weren't on the chat yet let me just copy and paste it because before you got in Hank pasted posted this which has acronyms for a lot of them. So World Future Society Federation. World Future Studies Federation right more than 200 people around the world. Yeah, new club of Paris has 100 some odd people on all continents, which we have special access to as well because it was started by Leif Edmondson who I'm on the events commission as of a month ago, and the European network of living and I'm also editor of contributing editor of the online WFSF human futures magazine, but that's that's different conversation. The European network of living labs. I've done two presentations at their digital living lab days, which used to be a face to face living lab days but it's digital for the last couple of years about this topic so the board of directors is enthusiastic but there's 400 member organizations where it's hard to they're underfunded and overworked. But anyway, I mean, all of these organizations know about this to some extent. The directors are interested board of directors are interested, but their members organizations, just like the OGM is a kind of community and there's no board of directors or anything. So if it could be expert prototype. I think at least these groups would like to use it and I think there's probably a lot more in the world. I was just curious to ask, if you think are familiar with futures space, which is another European futures group that has has a large presence on factors so that's why I know about them they use it for horizon scanning and discussion and I'm very curious about the whole realm of of futurism, future ology. A lot of them call it futurism, which and call themselves futurist, which drives me nuts and that's an art movement and it gets sort of confusing. But, but yeah, I'm not familiar with them but I just opened their website looks really interesting. Is this then Michael. Yeah, yeah. And, and time. Tanya is somebody we told about about OGM, hoping she would come and join us for like, I mean for her, for her lack of middle age and maleness. Nothing else. I'm sorry, but you know, God these being kind by saying middle age, you know, I know I have to tell you this is one of the better groups is as far as that goes. Well because we're, we're one fourth female. But I mean as a whole, I mean as a whole GM as a whole, I've been to other places where. Okay, yes, there are. You have. Yeah. You know that the source of most world problems is TMR. It's a testosterone induced mental retardation. It's an ancient, ancient bad joke. I don't think we talk use those terms anymore, but I like TMR. Yeah. So that's Tonya Schindler. I've got it up now Tonya Schindler and Graciella, what a lot of way. Yeah, they're a good bunch. Oh yeah. I mean it would be fun to involve them in our attempts to build some infrastructure for sharing what we know. Yeah, and then it would be really interesting for futureologists to start sharing out what you know they're forecasting whatever else on a common platform in some ways. I mean, there's a whole bunch of it is I hadn't really thought about the I collect futurists so there's a whole bunch of them. But to involve some of them in using open scaffolding for sharing their data out would be super interesting and then if you think about Phillip Tetlock and super forecasting. He's really interesting in that he's talking about what is a good forecast, like you know, hey, this is going to happen is not a good forecast but hey, by this date this number is going to be this number is a forecast you can actually check. And so he's trying to figure out who among us are the super forecasters, which is a good and interesting question. Although once someone has been identified a brilliant super forecaster whether that destroys their ability to do that I don't know, but that's a question we would probably like to be facing, it would mean we would have found a few of these right now, because I remember just, I'm always looking for when large events happen like 911 or the global financial crisis or the insurrection. I'm always looking for who who beforehand saw this coming. Yeah, and had and had a really good explanation. And what I'm describing actually is Michael Lewis is modus operandi. He just wrote a book, premonition, which is about who saw the pandemic coming and he wrote the big short, which was about who saw the global financial crisis coming and so his MO now is like hey major event I'm going to go figure out. I'm going to go do a lot of research and hunt down the six people who the six eccentrics who saw this coming and nobody was listening to them and that makes for for good plots. Yeah, but but if we could. Some of those people are actually super forecasters and trying to understand how how they thought or what they thought is really interesting. And I love the big short the movie and the book were both super interesting because one of those teams just went and started visiting homes, they started visiting neighborhoods, and seeing that these homes were shut down and stripped, and that people that there was a balloon payment coming that nobody nobody was going to be able to afford. And there, then they sat down with the loan originators who were like, make and mint. They were just taking lots of money home, and we're perfectly happy to get people who had no collateral, no ability to pay to take out and get another mortgage and they were like, Oh, okay, this is completely broken. And the question then is, when is it going to fail and how is it going to fail and what is the proper hedge strategy so that you make money from the failure which is a good cynical thing to be doing. And in the big short, none of the people who win this game would ever want to replicate it afterward because all of their communities hated them. All of their clients were like you are insane you are risking our futures and our company. This is nuts you shouldn't be doing this until the day when they were the only ones who had a good bet on what was actually happening. Anyone. Long story, anything else for where we are or shall we wrap the call. I'll go back to my island. Hank can go back to his lighthouse. Yeah, good idea. Now this this was a great call. I love the fact that we can talk here. If it's only two people, three people, four people, five, six, and I get so much energy, even though well in Europe it's the end of the afternoon, but I come in tired and I go away energized. I love that. I love that. And whoever shows up as whoever was meant to be in that conversation. It's like, it's a one of the ground rules of open space is like, you know, whoever is here is whoever was meant to be here and turn it works out. Yeah, that's exactly. Because somebody needed to, you know, ask, ask Hank to put the link for the WFSF in the chat, or maybe he already had. Yeah, I did. Okay. Yep. And it's federation. Yeah. So that that's with web web links and, and, oh, let me just, if I may just share one thing with you, please, which I got from one of my LinkedIn feeds yesterday. Let's see just this work. I've got a photo on my screen. You should be able to screen share. Yes, yes, yes, yes. If you've opened it in preview or anything you should be able to just hit screen here and show us what's on your screen. Yeah. So there we go. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah, yeah. It's not apropos of the conversation but I shared it with a lot of people yesterday when someone shared it with me so I thought you guys would enjoy it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Made its way on Facebook. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'm sure. Yeah. Okay, thanks so much. Thank you everybody. Thank you guys. Thank you.