Notes from my talk at the Open IoT Assembly, June 16-17 2012
- why are we here at the Open Internet of Things Assembly, what are we all trying to do?
- one view, the Cosm firehose: data data data
- problem comes when people think that this equates to ‘knowledge’ (Wisdom/Knowledge/Info/Data paradigm)
- enlightenment project, rationality — if we know the universe we can control it
- assumes that the universe is knowable; so let’s attempt to know every last quadrant of our world
- there’s the belief that if you can just tame the deluge certainty will ensue…
- This fetish of the firehose has shaky foundations:
- belief that there are a finite set of knowable parameters
- control, dominion & certainty (aaron straup cope refers to ‘a thinly veiled god fantasy’)
- impartiality, freedom from ethical decisions (‘it’s not me it’s in the data’)
- the spectacularisation of data, revelling in complexity only so that ‘experts’ can rescue us from the cacophony: scientists, urban planners, yes, even artists
- the concerning thing about this neo-postivism is when it’s applied to the design and manipulation of our cities because these processes have their own ‘god fantasies’:
- efficiency (those big biz initiatives that use “Smart” throughout their PR material)
- predictability
- homogeneity
- all the things that go counter to the sustainability of what makes a city a city
- social goals that rarely have anything to do with technology and sound suspiciously like the sorts of things urban planners were saying in the 50s and 60s when they gave us highways and highrises/tower blocks
- The alternative is to look not at the data, but at the people that are deciding to create the data and the processes they’re using — not “making data public” but the public making data.
- think of a learning/teaching paradigm (rather than knowledge); activity rather that state
- crafting data (or crofting as Andrew Back understood it), impingeing, prodding the universe/acting upon your world
- infinite parameters, the questions you ask, creative act
- things that can’t be ‘measured’
- things you don’t know about
- different ways to measure, techniques, technologies, contexts
- people conducting experiments & making hypotheses about the world and, because they themselves have been measuring, being able to evaluate the changes that ensue from their actions (energy, air quality egg)
- crafting data means going through those same processes that so-called ‘scientists’ go through
- identifying patterns & outliers
- understanding dynamic range
- accuracy, reliability
- importance of context
- standards of evidence, particularly important in climate change
- discovering and sharing:
- dealing with heterogeneity
- oversight
- formats
- meta-data
- licenses
- take a step beyond, people as sensors (engines for computing complexity), not quantified self but quantified and qualified selves, instrumenting the world to give it a voice.
- embrace the complexity
- i don’t believe we can deal with the world’s challenges through reductivist solutions extracted from an oracle-like data-pool (it was probably reductivism that created the problems in the first place).
- the issues and challenges of our world, which have indefinite parameters, demand creative propositions that are probably so complex that they require:
- cooperation between people who don’t agree with one another, who have no consensus — but collaboration doesn’t need consensus
- people who have understandings they cannot explain to each other,
- insights that are necessarily so intricate that they will take more than one person to tell the stories
