Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Note to Readers this message has generated quite a stream of comments. While I want to encourage communication, please keep your comments civil, and use language which would be suitable for a newspaper.
Thanks, Tom.

I used to be a Cingular customer, wanting to have a triband GSM phone for when I traveled abroad. Over the past year, their service has deteriorated so badly that I could hardly use the service, dropping calls from three different cities in one day. When I go into their store, they usually had at least one irate customer complaining about their contract. My wife has Verizon, and her coverage was great. So, 18 months into a 24 month contract, I called Cingular to see what to do. They acted as if I was their only disgruntled customer. They said that I was obviously using the phone, so it was working (refusing to discuss the calls that didn’t go through). They said that a contract was a contract, to which I replied that they had an obligation to provide a reasonable cell phone service.
All in all, just about the most arrogant, incompetent company I have ever dealt with. I have many other stories to tell about their terrible customer service. I found out that I was not alone, Cingular Sucks advertises itself as “A Website Devoted to Saving Cellular Customers From the Clutches of Cingular Wireless”

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More very interesting comments from Imagine Nepal:

“With the introduction of so-called modern development, there have been some changes in the inherent Nepali values. As the modern development is problem focused people?s attention has gone to fulfilling wants, needs and solving problems. The more problem were solved and wants and needs fulfilled, the more and more new problems, wants and needs have been created. Second, the development focused on inputs that are not easily found at local level. This in fact, developed a culture of respecting culture, values, fashion, styles, materials, methods, knowledge and technology of the far ignoring what is available at local level. Efforts to fulfill people?s heightened ambition with non-local knowledge, methods, materials and technology has turned to be an unrealistic dream. Not to talk of those who have meager sources, the imported materials, methods and technology were not adequate even to the people who could afford for them. This widened the already existing gap between haves and haves not. The people who have not been benefited from the use of modern technology blame the state for ignoring them and now are waging a war against the establishment.”

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Open Croquet is an interesting operating system from the always-interesting Alan Kay:

“The existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would get to declare himself as King. This was great for the King. And not to bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end – technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides of the castles. The castles were abandoned. Technology does this.”

Lots of vision here (pun on the visual interface), but it still seems to me to be a lot of navigational overhead… of course I thought that about Windows when it first came out… I suspect that windows metaphor will be with us for a long, long, time… look at the QWERTY keyboard…

Nothing to download, but there is an introductory manual with some examples.

Jack Park, as is frequently the case, picked up this tidbit.

Semantic World’s Semantic Business Model (SBM) is the international > open effort to provide authoritative high quality models of common > aspects of business and specific vertical industries. The models are > provided in industry standard OWL (Web Ontology Language) format for > use in introducing Semantic Information Architectures to corporate IT > and in anticipation of introducing the Semantic Web into industry. > We are currently looking for industry experts, whether experienced > modelers or not, who are interested in contributing to the project. > Contributors receive free training, immediate access to new models, > access to industry experts, and, of course, credit for the models they > create. > > The modeling is beginning from the bottom up, with fundamental > concepts such as money and location. > > The project home is at http://www.SemanticWorld.org/model/index.html.

I just got off the phone with Sergio Lub, Thomas Greco, and Chris Cook regarding the use of complementary currencies and innovative monetary mechanisms for uplift. Thomas suggested the notion of a “pay it forward” notion of giving, in which the donor stipulates that the receiver make a similar future donation to others, with similar stipulations. This comes from the movie, “Pay it Forward.”

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Sky and Telescope has an interesting story of the attribution for the discovery of Neptune.

What if we had a mechanism for Doug Engelbart’s Evolutionary Attribution ideas allowing scientists (and normal people) to get their ideas out into the public early? As thoughts, ideas, experiments, and proofs emerged, the entire chain of discussants would have bragging rights for the success. People would be rewarded for their collaboration. The flip of this pattern could be called CowboyAttribution, where scientists ride off, do their thing, and then return with the perfect results before anyone else.

If our attribution system rewarded collaboration, we might find scientists collaborating more…

The journals would not like this, of course… it is amazing how many times I have followed a link to an interesting article only to be stopped to be told I need to subscribe to the journal to read the article… putting up barriers like this is not a way to advance our knowledge…

Imagine a mother bringing her newborn baby into a room. People cluster around, and expressions of joy, love, happiness, jubilation, peace, wonder, and hopeabound. This scene could happen in any country, with people from any political, religious, or cultural background. The feelings aroused by a baby in a room reflect the positive core values of humanity which exist in all of us.

Gary Gunderson has pointed out to me that over the past few centuries, the positive side of human nature has somehow become usurped by religious dogma. Our language for the positive has been inhibited by this, while the language for the cynical and negative has thrived. Trying to reclaim the language of the positive without becoming enmeshed in the language of a specific church is quite a challenge.

Naming a pattern BabyInRoom is one way of evoking and discussing these positive feelings. Those of any particular faith can still interpret this pattern in their language, but at the same time, those of other faiths, or none at all, can still communicate with each other and have some shared meaning across the various barriers keeping people apart.

Another pattern might be JubilationOfTheCommons. This is a flip on the Tragedy of the Commons, the typically depressing economist’s view of what happen when the selfish, greedy “homo economicus” approaches a common free resource. A little reflection, however, will discover that most of the most humanity’s progress has come from our ability to band together and work together as a group. The commons should be something to be celebrated, rather than viewed as a looter’s paradise.

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From the April 17, 2003 issue of Chronicle of Philanthropy:

“United Way Suffers Worst Fundraising Decline in Three Decades” donations dropped by 3-4%.

“Giving Drops at Charities That Bank on Direct Mail” compared to an increase of 6% last year.

“Upstart Advocacy Organization Owes Much Success to Online Activists” Moveon.org asked for $27,000 to support an announcement and received nearly $400,000.

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I had a very interesting call with Bliss Browne, the founder of Imagine Chicago and many other activities in and around Chicago as well as the rest of the world. Mac Odell had primed her, and she put up the Imagine Iraq effort on her wiki. She seems to have become quite the computer techie, involved with Wikis, no less.

She wrote an excellent introduction to her ideas about Imagination as a Movement. I was impressed with her skills and insights into community development, particularly in the use of questions to direct dialog.

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I had a wonderful dinner with Mac Odell, Jane LePointe, and Jean LeVaux in Amherst, Ma. last Sunday nite. I wanted to tap Mac’s ideas about how to move forward with the Uplift Academy idea. We spoke of the lessons learned from the Imagine Nepal program, an offshoot of many of the ideas explored in the Imagine Chicago project by Bliss Browne. Jane was also working on an Imagine Boston project, and there were other groups forming around the world, focusing on the use of appreciative inquiry to connect people and communities around the positive.

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