Conference call and online chat today in the Joi Ito instigated group on Emergent Democracy. It is a multi-track thing where we're both talking on the phone and writing in a chat room, and organizing around some wiki pages. And in-between those events are mailing list discussions. Which I haven't gotten around to participating in much. On the table today was the potential of a Journal of Emergent Democracy for peer reviewed papers on the subject. The definition of 'Emergent Democracy' - a subgroup was put on that task. Kevin Marks' suggestion of 'vote links', web links that include a tag describing whether one recommends what one is linking at, or one recommends against it, or there is no judgement about it. Suggestions for a Social Software Alliance, to discuss possible new standards, from Pete Kaminski. And a few other subjects.
[ Diary | 2003-04-11 23:59 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]
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At this evenings meeting of the L.A. futurists group the speaker was Dr. Carlo Montemagno who runs the Department of Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering at UCLA. He is a pioneer in hybrid biotech. Nanoscale Biological Engineering. Very impressive. Instead of trying to build little machines one atom at a time, which are very unstable, the idea is to do it more like nature's way. Get the right kind of proteins together under conditions where they'll follow simple rules consistently and do useful things. The 'hybrid' approach is doing nanotech with biological components. They're making good progress with something sort of like remote controlled slime molds. See this site.