Panchromatica

World's fastest Broadband

Sigbritt Löthberg's home has been supplied with a blistering 40 Gigabits per second connection, many thousands of times faster than the average residential link and the first time ever that a home user has experienced such a high speed.
...
The secret behind Sigbritt's ultra-fast connection is a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between two routers up to 2,000 kilometres apart, with no intermediary transponders.

According to Karlstad Stadsnät [the local council's network arm,] the distance is, in theory, unlimited - there is no data loss as long as the fibre is in place.
...
"The most difficult part of the whole project was installing Windows on Sigbritt's PC," said Jonsson. [Head of Karlstad Stadsnät]

via Fred First
 

Towards a living art - a digital manifesto

Digital tools can make Art that is accessible; Art that everyday people can afford to take home and live with, and discard when they want to move on to something new. "Archivability" is a scam...a way to exclude...a lame excuse to charge more money. We can't possibly know that any one of us is making artwork that someone will want to pull out of an hermetically sealed drawer in five hundred years. Digital artwork is much more akin to the Japanese print makers of the 1700 and 1800s. No one questioned if those prints were going to last three hundred years. Those colorful, masterful, fast moving commodities served a different purpose all together...a living purpose. A purpose that was inextricably bound to expanded creative and commercial bandwidth brought about by new tools and techniques. The market for those prints roared with the life of mass approval not exclusion based on price or snobbish philosophy. This is where a Manifesto of Digital Art should carry us.

I liked this bit too:

Like all good manifestos our's must call for the death of something or other. Usually, this death is wished upon an oppressor or an oppressive idea. I can think of no greater oppression than the concept of "limited editions". One of the things nailed into your head while attending the finer art schools is that the artist owes it to buyers, agents and your future estate to limit your output of a certain image. The argument usually is that too many copies drives down the prices and scares off your "investors". But, who really profits from this? Not the artist. This is the art agents' way of guaranteeing that after you die everyone else will profit.

and this:

If I were to guess as to how future art critics might describe this period in the development of digital media and the effect it will have on the world of Fine Art, I might venture to say; "The turn of the new century was a heady and revolutionary period in the development of Art that saw, through the introduction of digital tools, a great democratization in art making and began a period of time wherein the cracks in the dam of the traditional Fine Arts world began to show."

Pass the dynamite.

This is a bus?

This is indeed a bus. (Via Cool Town Studios)

Wikis, webs and what people REALLY think

In a recent post I quoted this:

Rather than expect people to visit somebody else’s online space to share their views or debate issues, more and more people will share their own views through a personal space, weblog or wiki with the expectation that these can be cross-posted or syndicated to other places that would like to share them. People should own their own contributions and express them in their own voice - it should be up to the consulting organisation to do the leg-work to aggregate these contributions by going to the people, rather than vice versa.

I've been playing with wikis for a while, using PBwiki, and I used to visit Ecotone when it was active, but I have never used it for any serious purpose. Now in a naked attempt at promotion, which I freely acknowledge, those nice people at PBwiki have offered to double my wikispace it I post about them here. You can tour their site or sign on and play as I did.

There is a serious point to this of course. The availability of extra space gives me a chance to think about slightly more complex possibilities. I also believe that the greater the variety of tools available, whether blogs and wikis or photologs (like flickr), the more likely it is that they will permeate into the wider community and give the standard member of the public the chance to have their say in their own words.

I'm working on something at the moment which could bring some of these ideas together in a public consultation. If it is going to work I have to be able to do it myself because I am in no way a programmer - I stopped doing that when I sold my BBC Micro. Anything that depends on complex tools simply won't work. I'm hoping to adapt an idea from Village Design Statements that I know has been used elsewhere in other ways (here and here for example).

I'm looking for funding for a bundle of disposable cameras (or better still some digital compacts) to give out to 'ordinary people' so that they can then take pictures of what matters to them. The current context for me is our local town centre, but it could be health, being young in this town or anything . The idea is to upload the pictures plus writings by local people to a wiki or perhaps to a photolog and enable a debate around those images and writings. A wiki would be better in many because it can take all forms of comment in formats not predetermined by others, but the downside is that with no structure it can be hard to find your way around. It is important that this doesn't take place in isolation - it has to be tied in with other things to give everyone as many ways in tot he discussion as possible. We could also for example set up an online forum, hold 'cafe conversations', exhibitions of the photographs, invite letters in the local paper, do guided walks, have a market stall. We could look at the history of the place - and therefore at why it looks and operates as it does today. The Urban Tapestries project might be another option

I'm quite excited by the possibilities, but also slightly daunted. Most public consultation activity does one thing - it almost certaintly isn't enough and it may indeed be the wrong thing, but by and large it is easier, especially for time pressed and/or cash strapped local authorities or voluntary groups. The approach I'm thinking about is multi-stemmed and much more complex. I haven't even begun to think about how we might collate what comes in...

Instructables

In a - sort of - way this follows on from the previous post. Looks like it will be a fascinating site to monitor. I discovered it via flickr, where it was described as a 'Flickr for DIY', which seems apposite, although I think it has the potential to be much more.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons licensing is a wonderful idea, allowing an artist to set the terms on which their work can be used. The image below is one of mine from Flickr but based on another photograph, (licensed under these terms) so allowing me to create derivative works and in this case even to make commercial use.

Mysterious beauty, originally uploaded by ibanda.

Having access in this way is really stimulating, letting me work with a host of images I would never have taken myself and allowing me both to practice digiatal manipulation and in some cases to produce works that stand on their own.

This one for example is I think different enough from its source to have a standing of its own. I'm looking at how I might post some of my own images under a Creative Commons license. It seems reasonable that if I make use of these I should also offer some up.

Public sector innovation can work

A much more successful example of public sector innovation than the Dome was pioneered by the Irwell Valley Housing Association in the late 1990s. Traditionally it appears that 80% of staff time in housing is spent on dealing with 20% of the tenants either causing or in trouble. The other 80% of tenants got little attention.

Irwell Valley managed to break this cycle by setting up the Gold Service scheme This gives all tenants a standard level of service but allows for additional benefits if they stay up to date with their rent,

In order to qualify for Gold Service membership, residents must apply and satisfy some basic criteria. These are: 6 weeks clear rent account OR if in arrears, 12 weeks of continued rent payment plus any agreed repayment AND no other breaches of tenancy

If a member falls into arrears or breaches their tenancy in some other way, they will be suspended from Gold Service benefits. Here are just a few of the benefits:
- Up to £52 cash back over 1 year paid in the form of bonusbonds
- - Faster repairs service
- - Discounted home contents/personal possessions insurance
- - Discounted goods and services
- - Education and Training Grants
- - Gold Credit
- - Increased choice in improvement programmes

While the scheme apparently met with some opposition from traditionalists with “equalitarian” views, tenants seem to have loved it and signed up in large numbers. An evaluation of the project was undertaken and subsequently it seems forty to fifty other organisations, with over 1m homes, have adopted similar schemes.

While some may see the introduction of such consumerist approaches as undermining the public sector ethos, I am not one of them. Anyone receiving or using services provided by a public body is in a contractual relationship. This doesn’t have to mean legalistic imposition of contract law – in areas like housing such contracts will almost certainly be more effective if seen as part of a partnership. This is what the Gold Service approach seems to be about.

It would be interesting to see how far this approach can be taken. Could it be used for example to generate greater community involvement in managing our streets and open spaces? In a limited sense the Business Improvement Districts now being trialled in the UK are similar, although I suspect the motivation is more about generating additional revenue than increasing public and community involvement.