JE Meeting 9/25/19

Agenda

• I’m looking to spend ~3 months in heads-down research mode, but it can be more or less. I thought that’d be a good chunk of time to start with and then revisit later. I was thinking that we could plan it around a talk or conference deadline. Or we could make one up and maybe I somehow find a way to hold myself to it? It will also depend on what I decide to work on of course… But Oct 1 to Dec 31 is my current thinking. It might be Oct 6 to Jan 31 but that’s the idea.

• I have a few options for what to work on next, but I have one that I’m kinda attached to. So hear me out, but I have other ideas if you really disapprove…

• I feel the need for a powerful vision statement. Maybe a video, maybe an essay with photos and videos. Putting my steak in the ground for the community and also outside of it – my friends and family outside of research. (Thought it is important to have a specific audience.) In some ways I see it being similar to Bret Victor talks and videos, or like the Augmenting Human Intellect research agenda. I want to convey the problem with how things are, and how much better things could be (if we solved all the problems between here and there). Maybe through experimenting with my dream things and others’.

• No SPLASH this year, ok? Work with someone going to record things?

To decide

• timeline –> now-ish to early Feb
• finish deadline / venue –> Salon, Feb
• content –> BV style thing
• next meeting / checkin schedule –> next Friday
• SPLASH / live recording –> last min decision

Notes

• Bret Victor-y
• I agree
• Time and space and relativity is very hard and very dense hard-ness. Maybe too crowded
• “end-community programming” has nice overtones, and social impact of this work is much less crowded. more room for making a mark. much more topical. culture is so important in programming. very relevant
• “research fiction” –> maybe a BV term, maybe Toby. BV / Engelbart, sci fi thing
• dark matter of software - 90% of all software doesn’t exist because too expensive to make
• good timing because the theme of the next salon will be an illichian convivial computing: bicycles for the mind, so that could be the perfect target / milestone.
  • either a mockup or something: vision
  • key problem stopping it (cultural, technical, research) - lacking in BV’s work. Some sort of roadmap with milestones. Research Programme.
  • A paper doing this would fit right in. Timing is right. Submit in early Feb.
• try to attend comp collective this friday ilich
• mockup the software architecture that could enable this
• TODO write up my research goals, what I’m doing and why, going into that conference. goals, etc.
  • write the abstract to my paper that I want to submit to the Salon now (another way to think of it)
  • deadline to send him this is oct 4
  • he liked when I said “talking to other people” to get some more use cases because that opens up other perspectives. I’m a bad subject for this because I could build these things
• cautionary tale: we all spend some time building our personal information world ideal world. It never produces anything general purpose. In emacs. So arcane and complicated. He used to have an enormous .el file. That’s the risk just doing it for ourselves.
• he agrees with me that people can’t imagine what they want, but I can pull their needs and how they think and I can provide some technical empathy to solve them
• his current update
  • talk at Kent Oct 21
  • semantics working mostly now and read-only UI in progress
    • maybe show me soon