Brian Kerr

Snippet from a course announcement for a winter 2007 class to be taught by Don Blumenthal at the U-M School of Information:

This course will examine: 1) privacy issues related to the safeguarding of sensitive information against inadvertent disclosure; 2) policy and societal questions concerning the value of security and privacy regulations, the real world effects of data breaches on individuals and businesses, and the balancing of interests among individuals, government, and enterprises; 3) current and proposed laws and regulations that govern data security and privacy; 4) self-help and private sector regulatory efforts; 5) emerging technologies that may affect security and privacy concerns; and 6) issues related to the development of enterprise data security processes and programs that take into account the requirements of all relevant constituencies: e.g., technical, business, and legal.

Here’s the course catalog page for Data Security and Privacy: Legal, Policy and Enterprise Issues. I met Don at a2b3 lunch some time ago. This looks like a great topic and a relevant offering, since — when I was on an outbound trajectory from the department, at least — so much of the dork curriculum actually resulted in half-baked SQL-injectable junk and so forth.

(tags: course networks privacy process security umich umsi)

 _________________________________________ 
/ ArbCamp is coming up soon! It's a       \
| one-day event we're organizing, to be   |
| held on Saturday October 27th at WCC.   |
| The challenge is to try to attract a    |
| diverse or interesting crowd, keep      |
| everybody in the same space for a few   |
| hours, and hopefully make a bunch of    |
| connections and cool ideas, not losing  |
\ (too much) money in the process.        /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ For me the major reference point is     \
| RecentChangesCamp, both the 2006 and    |
| 2007 versions. From 2006, see the       |
| budget; ArbCamp will be smaller, but    |
| this is about the right level of        |
| financial transparency to shoot for.    |
| The 2006 wiki at one point had scanned  |
| receipts for expenses, but I can't find |
| that page tonight. From 2007, see notes |
| from 'What to remember for future       |
| events', which I remember as a          |
| frustrating and productive highlight of |
\ RCC 2007.                               /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The key here is that there's a certain  \
| kind of unstructured structure you need |
| to pull off an event like this, and     |
| it's a larger, more diffuse, amount of  |
| work than you'd expect. And if all else |
| fails, just do everything in public,    |
| and hopefully someone will make         |
\ corrections as things go awry.          /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 _________________________________________ 
/ The other reference point is opening    \
| space, or open space technology         |
| (dorkily abbreviated OST) -- but        |
| whatever you call it, it's just a       |
| pattern of bringing people together in  |
| a certain way. Many people have spilled |
| many words about open space stuff, but  |
| a really good starting point is Michael |
| Herman's very concise 10-page guide to  |
\ organization and invitation.            /
 ----------------------------------------- 
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

Links

• ArbCamp
• RecentChangesCamp
  • 2006 — Budget
  • 2007 — What to remember for future events
• Michael Herman — Inviting guide (PDF)

(tags: annarbor arbcamp invitations process web)

Here are three quick rambly sketches of Facebook applications I want — and yes, I’m working on Facebook stuff, but these are applications I want to use, not make.

(1) A flyer tool for group / event promotion. Ideal workflow: point it to a group, get a full-page lo-fi flyer suitable for printing and posting at the cafe or bulletin board. This flyer wouldn’t need to contain much more than a giant Facebook F, the group’s name and picture, some community_indicators — such as number of members, unattributed snippets from wall postings or discussion boards, etc. — and a cheesy “you’re invited!” message. Lots of interesting groups for cafes, venues, and locations, and a flyer is a cheap way to link Facebook to meatspace.

(2) A pageoftext.com style micro wiki application. Individuals and groups already have a strong set of communication tools: posting walls, discussion boards, messaging, and so forth. But for certain kinds of conversations, a wiki scratchpad would be awesome. The generic use case is a way to dodge the Facebook group officer control tower stuff: only officers can make certain kinds of changes to the group, but it’s a hassle — and a risk(?) — to make everybody an officer.

(3) Hunt the Wumpus. With a tileset like this, and anybody who shows up on your profile gets to take a turn (so that the Wumpus never goes unfed).

(tags: collective facebook interaction media networks process web)

More from The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century (”the one book from 1906 you should read today”) — which, warning warning forever, if you do read it, will continue operate after a month’s time:

Both in its best and worst features the characteristic, inevitable thing that looms up in modern life over us and around us, for better or worse, is the machine. We may whine poetry at it, or not. It makes little difference to the machine. We may not see what it is for. It has come to stay. It is going to stay until we do see what it is for. We cannot move it. We cannot go around it. We cannot destroy it. We are born in the machine. A man cannot move the place he is born in. We breathe the machine. A man cannot go around what he breathes, any more than he can go around himself. He cannot destroy what he breathes, even by destroying himself. If there cannot be poetry in machinery — that is if there is no beautiful and glorious interpretation of machinery for our modern life — there cannot be poetry in anything in modern life. Either the machine is the door of the future, or it stands and mocks at us where the door ought to be. If we who have made machines cannot make our machines mean something, we ourselves are meaningless, the great blue-and-gold machine above our lives is meaningless, the winds that blow down upon us from it are empty winds, and the lights that lure us in it are pictures of darkness. There is one question that confronts and undergirds our whole modern civilization. All other questions are a part of it. Can a Machine Age have a soul?

If we can find a great hope and a great meaning for the machine-idea in its simplest form, for machinery itself — that is, the machines of steel and flame that minister to us — it will be possible to find a great hope for our other machines. If we cannot use the machines we have already mastered to hope with, the less we hope from our other machines — our spirit-machines, the machines we have not mastered — the better. In taking the stand that there is poetry in machinery, that inspiring ideas and emotions can be and will be connected with machinery, we are taking a stand for the continued existence of modern religion — (in all reverence) the God-machine; for modern education — the man-machine; for modern government — the crowd-machine; for modern art — the machine in which the crowd lives.

(tags: books media narratives process representation)

Here’s the game. Make a list, powers of two. For each number, find something in the world that takes up space in your brain, and reduce the count of instances of that something to an appropriate power of two. Yesterday and today, I played the game in my spare time, with limited success. For each something, find the original count in parentheses:

  2 e-mail accounts (3)
  4 web browsers installed (7)
  8 ssh bookmarks (11)
 16 iTunes playlists (23)
 32 twitter friends (36)
 64 del.icio.us network (77)
128 RSS feeds (!) (only got to 183, from 300+)

In almost every case, the reductions hurt a little — I had to get rid of something that wasn’t entirely dead weight, or school stuff I can pay far less attention to now. The last two (del.icio.us network and RSS feeds) were the worst. But I’m really happy with the outcome: fewer, better.

(tags: metacrap process)

A new micro practice: every night as the plates spin down, I write myself a Mac OS sticky note. When I wake up in the morning, this sticky note is waiting for me.

The rule is that I write down everything I need to do that day into a sticky note, and it has to fit without scrolling. Since 70-75 words fit into my note, that’s about 3½ twitters, or 2 del.icio.us descriptions.

That actually turns out to be a lot of space for describing what needs to happen. More than enough. Today my note only has one thing to do on it! But it’s a hard thing, one that I’ve been putting off for some time, and one that’ll soak up all the time I dump on it.

⁂

Hiveminder is overwhelming before noon. I keep individual project logs, but I don’t want to filter through all that stuff in the morning.

But, in the morning, I can read a few sentences and maybe an encouraging slogan.

And maybe the few sentences, or the encouraging slogan, will energize me enough to open up Hiveminder and the project logs and start typing.

There is a quiet desperation to this practice. Hopefully it’s just something I’m using to claw my way through the graduate degree — hopefully in a month, I’ll be able to open up my laptop and confront the work I need to do without this layer of indirection.

(tags: process self)

Same adapted (hands-free) work process as Have geek looking for artists. The theme was transportation/mapping of space:

(A full-size version of this image.)

The SmartNav is still super tiring to use, especially for finicky rectangular selection and trying to more or less line things up along whichever axis. I probably don’t use it enough, or long enough, to get truly acclimated.

(tags: design mac media process self umsi)