Day 2 was spent without our Iraqi counterparts, so we had more technical discussions. Nadav pitched a delay tolerant network that was immediately called “data mule.” Jeff had a good crowd for his balloon and kite demonstrations, and for Cartagen as a vector mapping platform. I was in a conversation about how to incentivize participants in crowd-sourced data collection, and lessons learned from projects around the world. I also met Jacob from Souktel, who I missed connecting with when I was in Ramallah, and had an exciting discussion about ways to track settler violence. With a lot of work ahead of me, the spinning ideas and jetlag kept me up until far too late local time.
Category: Travel Page 38 of 62
Globetrottin’
At the Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in Iraq and the Middle East conference.
We started off by asking questions about when and where mobile or distributed data can make a difference in a rapidly rotating roundtable. Projects I’ve learned about at and through the center were helpful here, but the experience of field workers was much more instructive. Further questions on the conditions that best support gathering this data yielded some good war stories. Central issues include the technical literacy of the field workers, whether the tool is deployed on externally provided phones or “in the wild”, the tradeoff of message syntax vs cost, how to develop incentives for participation, and the privacy of messages sent to shared or village phones. This was just a taste of the experience that user deployment provides, but was enough to make this technologist’s heart sink. The real world is so much messier than the lab…
I didn’t end up giving an Ignite talk due to a mis-scheduling, but gave demos of VirtualGaza and GroundTruth to interested and engaged crowds. There was some interest in setting up similar systems in various places, and much curiosity about how I can do this political work in an academic context. A good question, and one for which I don’t have a good answer.
Members of the government of Iraq are here, and much of the discussion was initially aimed at helping them as best we can. However, they appeared to have decided that they have internal issues to address before talking to developers, so the conference took a turn for the technical. I’m a little disappointed, as part of the appeal of coming to this conference was to learn about the issues that face the people on the ground. However, I understand that the Iraqi delegation may not have other opportunities to meet and talk about their shared goals. In any case, now it’s a meeting of technical and experienced international development people, not an attempt to solve the issues facing one country.
Went out to an amazing Lebanese dinner. Katrin said she ordered the bare minimum course menu, but still the food kept coming until we had to beg them to stop. We first sat down to a table of mezze, which we failed to recognize as only appetizers. After eating more than enough, then the meat course came, followed by another meat course, and finally delectable knaffe. We rolled out stuffed, satisfied, and ready for another day.
On my way to a conference on Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in Iraq and the Middle East. Perfect, right? More on that later.
I booked a flight with a daylong layover in Paris, so Jeff and I spent our jetlagged morning walking around fueled by coffee and pastries. We intended to fly a camera-kite in front of the Eiffel Tower, but the dual lack of wind and sleep prevented it. Instead we strolled the streets, just eating whatever came by. Stopped at the oldest registered bakery in Paris, serving deliciousness since 1802. Then Jeff either translated the hieroglyphics off the column at the Place de la Concorde, or did a good job bluffing. Either way, I was impressed. My French wasn’t as good, but I’ve still got enough to get by.
Then we took the RER back to CDG and napped fitfully in Terminal 2 until we could board the plane and sleep there. Landed in Amman at 11pm, took a mad-dash taxi ride to our ridiculously fancy hotel, where we ordered room service and slept again. Need to be sharp for the discussions tomorrow.
Had a lovely Levinger Family Thanksgiving in New York. Arrived in Katonah to hordes of children, great food, and our heralded gift exchange. Nelson was thankfully not offended by my present of a Manchester United logo emblazoned with the logo of his former employer, AIG. I thought it was funny, and he agreed.
Went to the city on Thursday night and stayed chez Zach. Watched perhaps the worst movie in recent cinema history, Sharks in Venice. Filmed 100% in Bulgaria and using the same stock footage over and over.
Friday we ate pizza at Lombardi’s, had rice pudding a block away, shopped at several crowded stores although purchasing nothing more than a salt shaker. Went to several bars in the East Village: Niagara, Please Don’t Tell, Bourgeois Pig, had a lobster roll at Luke’s, and late night matzo ball soup and corned beef at Katz’s. There was one last bar, which I don’t remember the name of, and Ruth walked us a mile in the wrong direction, failing to realize that the empire state building is north; although she claims this was due to her distraction while playing the Question Game.
Saturday Zach’s roommate’s parents arrived, giving us some much needed extra parenting in the form of breakfast and flu shots. After our inoculation, we walked across the Brooklyn bridge, which was lovely, and Ruth explained all the intricacies of floor area ratios and their contribution to the relative building heights of Lower Manhattan.
After a snack at a farmers market, it was off to the Transit Museum, which is apparently kid-central.
However, since I also became giddy at the sight of old trains, perhaps the strollerati can’t be all wrong. One dad had his kid on a leash, and learned a lesson in the power of passive resistance. Fight on, little man! After enough infrastructure-nerding, we took the subway up to Barney Greengrass, to pay our respects to the sturgeon king. Ruth tried to get a sardine sandwich on a raisin bagel, which both the server and I simultaneously told her was not an acceptable combination. Adventurous as ever, she resolved to try it for lunch later this week.
Strolled back through Rockefeller center, which was jammed with would-be ice skaters, who instead were sitting in line. Saw the new Times Square pedestrian area and the Macy’s window installations, which reminded me of my deep seated loathing of Christmas. Got late drinks at the Flatiron lounge, which had an interesting art deco theme and was less snooty than PDT. I was somehow convinced to buy a jacket at Armani Exchange, which is a step up from the previous target of my suit buying expeditions, the Men’s Warehouse.
Sunday we took the train back to the car at White Plains and got stuck in traffic in Connecticut for most of the afternoon. Stopped at the Black Rock for oysters, crab cakes and calamari to fortify us on the long journey back to Boston.
Listened to speaker after speaker at the O’Reilly Government 2.0 Summit, and got a sense of both where things are going right, and just how much further we have to go. Tim defines gov2.0 as providing a platform, the provider of data and services, but letting “the market” (both commercial and non-commercial) building the innovative apps we’ve come to expect. This is dandy in theory, and data.gov and the Sunlight Foundation are nice examples of it in practice.
However, the fact that data is “open” doesn’t mean it’s really usable. Just putting up a website with a set of PDF files isn’t enough. It’s like the interstellar bypass plans in the Hitchhiker’s Guide that was ” on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘beware of the leopard’.”
Adrian Holovaty reiterated that sites will take what they can get, scraping if they have to, but that we drastically prefer “diffs to dumps”, and that PDF is “the devil’s spawn.” I doubt the Adobe representatives in the audience were pleased at that.
John Markoff of the New York Times asked the pointed question: how do we ensure that these platforms enable liberation not control? Having a common platform isn’t helpful if it’s locked down and doesn’t interoperate.
While many of the presentations were very good, “death by slideshow” still ensued. Vint Cerf, chief architect of the internet, noted that “Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.” Many of the shown projects fell into the “dots on a map” paradigm or “open it and they will come” fallacies. Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, asked for more “apps that matter, not just more bus trackers.” How apropos; I’m working on it, Mitch.