Favorite bad joke: “(Beyonce) put a NuvaRing in it”

EMERGING PLATFORMS

• Facebook said to be a consumption stream (other panelists disagreed) with many rehashed memes that come from email
• 4chan and Reddit, however, are said to be a reactionary stream
• memetic culture causes a transfer of perceived ownership; at some point, the readers/consumers consider themselves to own a meme or piece of content, instead of the original creators
• emerging topics (Bronies) will overwhelm any existing spaces and might need a new, dedicated space to “corral” this rising meme/trend
• Star Wars kid rejected fame, but Scumbag Steve accepted it; both made a guilty character from an innocent person
• memes go through a normalization process as more platforms join in on the consumption and creation processes
• a meme might not always spread, but its structure and mechanisms still can—memegenerator and the advice animals
• increasing population sizes for audience or demographic results in greater fragmentation
• “it’s not who you share *with*, but who you share *as*” —Chris Poole
• there are many people who the internet has found “guilty” that probably should be forgiven
• “what if zero ad dollars were on the internet?” (no mention of webrings and link exchanges)
• “what if there was only one *perfect* platform?” (no mention of Berners-Lee’s visions of a semantic web as the original platform)

INTERNET CULTURE AND GEOPOLITICS

• Biella Coleman: too awesome to summarize in notes
• rumors can build intimacy amongst a group, despite contributing to an increase in tension
• activity of the web, attacks, memes, and trends all wax and wane; expect it

DEFENDING THE INTERNETS

• heavy-handedness by government toward new technology mirrors their meatspace mechanisms, but they’ve failed to bring the rules of due process; technical workarounds and a lack of scarcity (thermodynamics) make the heavy-handed actions more harmful than good
• find the right voices, perspectives, and backgrounds to lend rhetorical/ego support to your arguments so you come from a relatable position that the mainstream can respect—don’t be the silly internet at all times
• “come back with a warrant”
• internet’s requirements of open, interconnected third party agreements create many vulnerabilities for corporate and government power structures to exploit the rights and freedoms of people

COLLECTING AND PRESERVING THE WEB

• best of the web is already gone from the live web (average lifespan of a page is 100 days before change or removal)
• the web is locked in a perpetual present; Orwell would acknowledge the people who control the present control the past and can also control the future
• redundant geographical storage provides the most effective and reliable hedge against disaster
• artificial intelligence or new systems/methods can come from a wealth of historical (linguistic) data (example Google Translate)
• “we’re not doing a good job” (Brewster Kahle, about archiving old software source code and ongoing, new developments in open/free software)
• web moving to a new, contextual (JS, client side tech, paywalls, or login required) framework of platforms and away from pages
• separation of search engines from content (institutionally and functionally) has been a good thing for the open, accessible web; trends to merge these two have been generally bad for all

WARD CUNNINGHAM

• the linguistic-focused software and tools behind wikis belies the old paradigm of math-heavy computer science
• the end-user facing linguistic focus of wikis (and interlinked content) has shown the value of navigating and reading in non-linear manners
• What is the schema of collaboration?
  bad: adding content or writing comments in a single thread with chronological structure; Ward skipped this and allowed adding content ANYWHERE
  good: consensus and voting mechanisms, but they need MORE progress
  TODO: greater understanding of the mechanisms of decisionmaking
  programming should be complete and good when it looks like it didn’t take a lot of effort
• visualizations are useful and good, but make fewer of them static and start opening the datasets, source files, or just simply make them editable and expandable

INTERNET UNDERGROUND

• the underground exists to pay homage to a bygone era
  users don’t just care about being sold to (advertisements), but who they’re being sold to
• Sherrod DeGrippo wants fuckedcompany to make a comeback and encourages people to do it
• Sherrod DeGrippo is a bad person
• Rob Beschizza is really into Minecraft

I’ve heard the same issues about Wikipedia that everybody seems familiar with (“not a valid source,” etc.), but, in 2007, I conducted a project very similar to the current program and proved the skeptics wrong.

Background

I attended Oregon State University from 2003 to 2008 and wrote my undergraduate thesis under guidance of Associate Professor Andrea Marks. It was an amazing adventure. My written thesis demonstrated three key points…

1. The common American public education model had grown from several cultural and technological revolutions^[6][7]
2. The effectiveness and equality of American public education has suffered during the cultural and technological progress of the 1980s and 1990s^{[figure 1][18][19]}
3. The shift in cultural norms that have come with the Millennial Generation and the advancement of technology that has related to the Web 2.0 movement should be embraced and integrated into instructional models to improve education (but be bold and do it correctly)^{[28][32][34][37]}

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture arguments are well summarized by his 2006 lecture, “The Withering Of The Net” < http://www.archive.org/details/igovernance_rawfootage_l2a >

My favorite part of the thesis was an adventure in which I expressed my frustrations and then showed the legitimacy of our new techno-cultural frontier. I cited Wikipedia (using the proper URLs), YouTube^[40], television news^[35] and dramas^[14], a public email list^[34] and various lectures from distinguished academics^[27][39][41]. It felt good to supplant the cultural symbols of my contemporaries into the academic rigor of an accredited, four-year professional degree program; it felt good to write out my thoughts; and it felt great to get full credit for my thesis and graduate with cum laude honors.

Proof of concept

After writing the thesis, I was required to perform three projects that proved or explored its findings and arguments. For one of the projects, I contributed to the Wikimedia Foundation’s various projects and explored their collaborative merits and cultural functions. In total, I have logged 3189 edits since April 14, 2007.

I told my classmates how to use wikis, how to evaluate Wikipedia’s articles for accuracy and completeness (follow through on those references!), and how to take important terms from articles and references and find scholarly books and articles in the amazing databases of our university.

I participated in mild edit wars on contentious articles and silly nitpicks over the appropriateness of “slaughter” versus “kill,” when used to describe humans.

The Secret Service watches your Wikimedia contributions

I combed through my previous years of illustrations, photographs, scans and saved photos and released a lot of my work into the public domain. I worked for the library at the time and went rogue (like Carl Malamud) to “free” many high-resolution public domain images from the university’s archives. I even caught the ire (OTRS #2007110910016335) of the US Secret Service by uploading 24 megapixel scans of the US Dollar in denominations of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 bills (they’re public domain!).

Since my thesis, I have fully reorganized the categories relating to printing technologies, written a few articles about new construction in Portland, Oregon, corrected various typos, and contributed many sources and statements to articles that interest me.

Reflection

I interacted with two people holding doctorates, a notoriously mysterious contributor, several users who ended up banned (one directly by Jimmy Wales, himself!), and various unknown-to-me usernames and IP addresses. The work was at the hours and pace that fit my schedule (although, there was a lot of pressure to meet course deadlines), and from the comfort of my own office in the urban apartment I shared with three other students.

Throughout my interactions with the Wikimedia Foundation, I have learned that Wikipedia and the cultural commons are only as good as we make them—and they are generally pretty darn amazing. My goal was to push the boundaries of my university, the roles of Wikipedia and the legitimacy of my generation’s norms. I found that my writing skills greatly improved as I synthesized texts together to form sophisticated articles. My reading comprehension skills grew by leaps and bounds after pouring through several hundred books, thousands of journal articles and dozens of web projects.

Lastly, I found the courage to stand up to the Old Garde and let them know that the internet and its collaborative technologies are transforming the world—whether or not they join us in this new frontier.

I provided CSS adjustments, W3C validation, JavaScript enhancements, SEO improvements, and image optimization and cropping.

http://brigadoonwineco.com/

Design by Megan B, site build by Lincoln Furrow.

Previous design
Original design

I built a custom WordPress 3 theme for Vigillo, an innovator in trucking industry risk-management technologies.

This rebuild and design update of StoneRidge Wealth Management’s website uses Ruby on Rails to quickly and flexibly integrate content, Yahoo! Finance APIs, email forms and more.

A WordPress-based site that powers the national and local efforts of the non-profit Breast Friends organization. Design by imageINK marketing.

With proper indexes, data types and foreign key relationships, the system can handle hundreds of thousands of records without a loss in performance. Many millions of records can be served with adequate memory, disk space, and database configuration.

Its custom MVC framework quickly and securely validates data, maintains application security and evaluates user permissions with a flexible system of user accounts and settings.

This is a project I do not associate my name with, but I have happily built and supported it to improve my skills and assist the free, open source software movement.

LAUNCH is a global initiative to identify and support the innovative work poised to contribute to a sustainable future and accelerate solutions to meet urgent challenges facing our society.

My responsibility was the front end implementation. The site is built with the Geologie Insta-CMS in Ruby on Rails.