innovation in the wild, wild web

INNOVATION IN THE WILD, WILD WEB

GEEKS, ENTHUSIASTS, AMATEURS, PIONEERS, SCOUTS, SAVANTS, SEERS, PROPHETS,

FORECASTERS, HOBBIESTS, EXPLORERS, SCAVENGERS, COLLECTORS, MAKERS, EVEN

ARTISTS.

Who Are These Innovatorsin the Wild?

A WILD-EYED ENTHUSIASTTIM BERNERS-LEE

User Manuals

“Users of products and servicesare increasingly able to innovate for themselves.”

“Users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit frominnovations developed and freely shared by others.”

“Users benefit directly from their innovations.”

Things Change By The Way They Are Used

Things Change By The Way They Are Used

Systems and devices should be designed so that users can change them.

Tools for Users

When the Multics system is shutdown, this group of researchers at BellLabs, against management’s wishes, begin writing their own operating system for their own use. The work began after they’d written the game “Space Travel.”

SHARING TOOLS, SHARING WORK

“What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication”

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/hist.html

HYPERCARD

Pei Wei

OPEN INNOVATION

LARRY WALLFATHER OF PERL, ENTHUSIAST

PERL CONFERENCE 1997

Andrew Schulman gave a talk “The Web as an API”

Every UPS package has its own homepage on the Web.

He talked about “how complex URLs can be used to cause programs to run on another machine and produce large ranges of data.”

“Distributed Computation in the Guise of Hypertext!”

http://www.sonic.net/~undoc/perl/talk/webapi1.html

OPEN SOURCE

Tim O’Reilly organized a summit around Open Source in April,1998, bringing together leaders of many open source projects.

The infrastructure of the Internet was built on open source and continues to be developed as open source software.

WEB AS AN OS PLATFORM

The Web as an Open Source Platform

Blogs, Flickr, and RSS

Small teams were creating cool applications

WEB 2.0A new generation of applications built on the Web

A new group of enthusiasts

EVAN WILLIAMS

TWITTER

Twitter is an open API

A Messaging platform for all kinds of devices

THE WEB MEETS THE WORLD OF THINGS

HACKS

Hacks are clever solutions to interesting problems.

Peter Samson of MIT and the Tech Model Railroad Club in 1960’s

“[He] had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. And how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them?”

The First Hacker

from Steven Levy’s Hackers

HACKERS SHOULD BE J U D G E D B Y T H E I R HACKING, NOT BOGUS C R I T E R I A S U C H A S DEGREES, AGE, RACE, OR POSITION.

from Steven Levy’s Hackers

The Hacker Ethic

“I just loved going down to the Homebrew Computer Club, showing off my ideas and designing neat computers. I was willing to do that for free for the rest of my life.”

Steve Wozniak

“I’m not exactly sure why so many people are here. A lot of them are just curious about what’s going on.”

A DIY Tradition

MAKE IS WHERE

HACKING MEETS

TINKERING.

Makers are wild-eyedenthusiasts.

Send a Camcorder Up in a Model Rocket

ARDUINO

OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE PLATFORM

Phil Torrone, Enthusiast

Look for the Wild-Eyed Enthusiasts

Dale Doughertydale@oreilly.com