What a Saturday.  I had the chance to sit in on some interesting sessions at the inaugral Trampoline Melbourne, an unconference organised by Pat Allen, Melina Chan, and Steve Hopkins.  It was held at Donkeywheel, Melbourne’s newest social change projects venue.  100 people from various disciplines came together to speak about their biggest ideas.  I heard some interesting talks on complexity theory, persuasion psychology, trust systems as alternative economies, biomimicry, advertising and mass-collaboration, and missed out on hearing some apparently interesting talks on Zen IT and permaculture, personal prototyping, amongst others.  The format of an unconference is simple.  People turn up and the session agenda evolves as people put their hand up to speak.

I had a chance to present on future health, and explored the way technolology and open, accessible, data will have significant impacts on health outcomes when applied to the social determinants of health, namely, education, information equity, income, empowerment, and looked briefly at the potential of rapid learning systems to improve clinical processes and aid in clinical decision support.

Slides from my talk are below (it probably doesn’t make much sense as slides were only visual cues, but links to interesting sites are on slide 99), and video of the presentation here.

There will be another Trampoline in the future, so keep your ears out.

Humour detour.  @provoost just pointed me towards a peek at a future of less labour intensive aged care.

“…..as the cleansing bubbling action kicked in, Toshiko Shibahara, 89, settled back to enjoy the wash and soak cycle of her nursing home’s new human washing machine.”

I think it’s pretty self explanatory.  I think the manufacturers may have taken inspiration from Barbarella

1. Medical conditions. You mention a medical condition you forget to tell your health insurance company about, and the day you come to make a claim, any accidently withheld conditions might void it. Is the answer to never mention them? No, but make sure that anything you do mention, you have notified your insurance company about in advance of the claim. This includes depression. What you type now will be easily found my insurance companies in 30 years time.

2. Reputation. The aggregate of your public dialogue is your personal brand. For many people who make their living from social media, contoversy is nothing but an opportunity for expanding your brand awareness. As twitter turns the corner into the mainstream though, people relying on their professional careers, might find themselves hamstrung by things they have said. I’m not suggesting people live in fear, but it will take a while before the honest, open dialogue in social media is appreciated by every potential employer.

3. Legal implications. If content can be linked to you, consider any legal implications of your dialogue. Its early days yet, and legislation is yet to catch up with new forms of social media. Hopefully we will bear witness to a new frontier of free speech, but defamation laws may adapt in one form or another. Courts are already making a foray into the world of social networks (see Subpoena served by Facebook), recognising the relationship between an individual and their online presence.

As much as I hate to say it, if you’re new to social media, take it slow at the beginning. Consider the consequences of everything you type. I’m not meaning to throw a wet blanket over something we all know is phenomenally valuable, but its in your own best interest to take your time getting used to it. These are things you can never take back.

Does that mean the dialogue is less honest than it would otherwise would be? Yes, of course. We’re moving through an early phase of a single stream of open dialogue, to the next phase of permission-based online dialogue where information you share is only available to groups you nominate. Existing social networks don’t currently do this beyond classifying people as “friend” or “not friend”, but they will soon.

There will always be a thriving open dialogue, and hopefully, with this, a greater sense of openness about our personal thoughts and feelings. Information about you is valuable, and I’d encourage you to share with the world, in a thoughtful way. Its the many-to-many exchange of information that has made the web what it is, and it is yet to take us places we can’t imagine.

Whilst my body is long gone, I’m happy to still have the opportunity to talk to you like this, in a way my great great grandparents unfortunately didn’t have to speak to me. Little did they envision the opportunities we now possess to have a permanent record of our every online conversation built into a relatively accurate personality construct that can speak to you in the way that I’m speaking to you now.

You might be accustomed to this transgenerational conversation, but let me tell you, we aren’t. Our parents are just getting comfortable with the idea of email, and our generation is just getting accustomed to the idea of public conversation on platforms such as blogs, microblogs, and open social networks. You will know more about our tastes in music, our interests, our passions, our foibles, and our lessons learnt than we ever knew about our ancestors.

I’m sitting here listening to a radio station based on a friend’s excellent taste in music. This is a small step, so I can’t even begin to imagine what will be possible in eighty years time. Eighty years is a long time, and if you’re reading this, its clear the human race has somehow figured out how to convince the machines not to eliminate us from this beautiful planet. Congratulations on a fine achievement, god knows how you did it.

If you’ve chosen to download my construct into your family pet robot, then thats alright by me. The only condition I’d place on this is that I get to go camping with you. I won’t mess up your car/hover vehicle/magic carpet or whatever it is you move around in. If I’m speaking to you in a virtual space, ask me to take you to the Abbotsford convent for a beer and some live Cuban music on a warm Friday evening in December 2008. You’ll love it, really.

If you’re a construct talking to me having already eliminated all the humans,
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Our team managed to get a bitofpluck.com up and running by the deadline.  Creating colorful, engaging connections between strangers with similar interests based on location data.  The frenzy of rapid development over the weekend makes for some frenzied learning.

Story cards
The 1. I am (user)….2. I want to (action)….3. So that (outcome) story cards really helped us frame the fundamental value proposition of the site, from both the business and the development side.  It helped us keep the feature set as simple as possible so that the developers had a realistic target to meet and had everyone moving in the same direction.  We were talking pretty big at the start and this really helped us pull our heads in.

Ideas abound
I can’t believe I ever thought there were not enough new ideas.  The process of getting together with people in that environment just seems to bring the creativity out.

There are some great people in Melbourne
Genuine, intelligent people just seem to be congregating and this is just one example.  Not just people who want to start a business, but people who seem to believe that a business has more to offer than just a revenue stream.

Its not the last we’re going to see of this kind of get together.  Thanks to Maxim Shklyar from Kisla Interactive for letting us use his fantastic studio, and Bart Jellema of Tjoos.com for bringing his Startup Camp expertise from Sydney, and Michael Specht from inspecht.com.au for food sponsorship and organisation.

Image courtesy http://www.w3.org/2006/Talks/1106-sb-OneWeb-Mobile2/

Here’s a link to a short article by Jeffrey Sachs on the digital war on poverty.

Its interesting to see market forces accomplishing a feat NGOs would be unable to (assuming they had wanted to).  As of 2007 over 50% of the world’s population now use mobile phones.  It took 20 years to reach 1 billion, another 3 years to reach 2 billion, and the 3rd billion took just 2 years.   Mobile phones and their future capacity for information distribution are making their way into the hands of the world’s least resourced.  Assuming there is bandwidth left over after everyone’s finished downloading Myley Cyrus ringtones, there will be an opportunity to connect people and distribute something useful.

Mobile phones will initially help enable banking and access to microcredit loans, and as the technology develops, we’ll see a gradual improvement in access to the world’s increasingly organised information.