strategies part one

Its a mystery to me how to create my own generator, however the Kaywa QR-generator works fine for simple urls. It would be possible using this generator to create a scavenger hunt game simply using urls to specific flikr account images that contain visual clues and pointers to a next step.

The next step for real is another story.

The next step is a scavenger hunt linking water and information, or at least determining where the links need to be made.

After the IFTF Ten Year Forecast retreat we went from mock pandemonium right into the real thing, chronicled with attachments by Jamais Cascio at his Open The Future blog. At the same time that I feel that the experience last fall was a sort of inoculation against real despair or denial in these sorts of circumstances it is a bit shocking the rapid pace at which we have been tumbled back into a difficult emotional state. Looking at how the system needs to be superstructed for reals means being also painfully aware of how currently fragmented and unstructed much of our infrastructures soft and hard are compared with my own internal vision of a beautifully connected and working in reflexive concert together system. When I say working together I internally think of geese flying in formation, the response of a school of fish or the beautiful amoebic flight patterns of the orchard birds that seems to know how to all together fly in big wheeling masses.

In the game last September we went through several phases. Initially we had to get to know each other, which means that we had to be somewhat revealing of ourselves. The initial participatory piece of writing was an evenings meal ten years in the future, a starting point for a bit of exposition and a useful piece of writing for everyone involved to produce. These days I am curious what you are all eating now.

In the next phase we felt out the available tools, and the other players. I say player because many of the people involved in Superstruct were more interested in the gaming aspect than they were in the future forecasting mobsourcing aspect. For some of us there was a surprising and elegant cross-over: a deep interest in sustainability and potential applications mixed with a serious interest in play and gaming. The overlap again and again seemed to be also an interest in Open Source philosophy and the application of Open Source ideas to other disciplines and areas of thinking beyond software.

In the game we prepared real world strategies to offset the difficulties presented to us by our gamemasters. There was an effort to create more connectedness among like minded SEHi using the various tools that became the center stage for most of the games action; primarily the Superstruct site, the ning reconstruct effort, the Superstruct game wiki, and youtubes and blogs like avantgames blog.

Some really interesting strategies emerged. One was to create a game that would connect people to meaningful work or activity through online massive collaborative multiplayer playing. Kind of like grinding in MMORPG games like WOW where you become engrossed in an online activity. Like WOW these potentially boring activities can be worked into gameplay potentially with reward to society similar to the protein folding game. The games we had in mind bring rewardand to the participant on some more concrete level than the amorphous social cache that accompanies current MMORPG games. These games are limited because they are locked in a fictional landscape and in turn in an important way locked into a fictional purpose.

Part of the problem is letting people get better when they are sick. How do we break through the "NyQuil society' which has become so pervasive...a society where you are expected to play hurt, play sick and just sort of slyly self medicate to get through it all? Some industries already have developed a sensitivity to creating a work philosophy that doesn't crush the personal lives and physical health of its employees. This is a sensible approach because you need functional employees rather than shattered ones, and in an era of increasing transparency you also need them to be able to be sort of extra functional in their own lives rather than being handicapped by the job. You want the coming transparency to reveal a state of integrity.

Suddenly its not as simple as finding an employer who can create the right responsive work systems; its a matter of life and death. It always has been its just become potentially more dire and it affects all of us in tangible ways suddenly. The CDC site has basic information we can draw from: the H1N1 virus has a latency period of 7 days before symptoms typically show themselves. This sort of pattern emerging already looks like the start of a sharp exponential curve which is familiar to scientists.

It seems very grim, especially in an atmosphere where news is offered side by side with snake oil and the pull and tug of a war for public attention which in turn creates an atmosphere that favors the people who scoff and deny our basic understanding of factual data. The idea that the news will continue to habitually shift from one extreme to another is what I am concerned about.

What can we actually do and how can we actually prepare?

First off we can use our many eyes to compare data streams. If we compare enough notes together using our #H1N1 hashtag we can get a clearer picture.

Here is my picture so far: water.

For me the largest superstruct on the planet is water. Water is the substrate or medium for the organization of information in a very practical sense. We are mostly water and information, proteins are informational systems, life is an informational system.

If we extrapolate this in a larger sense we need to understand how elegantly and efficiently the water systems around us are carrying the information we need them to have embedded within their functionality.

Its the same truth we keep coming round to: everyone needs water, they need drinking water, bathing water, water for their food to be grown and prepared in, and water to deal with the waste stream which results from their food fiber and housing being constructed and used.

This water stream is largely unobserved and unremediated. We think of water in terms of resource, rather than as basic substrate for soft insfrastructure services.

This report from the AP suggests that the h1n1 flu may have resulted from improper waste treatment of swine population outside of La Gloria Mexico. There may be more information to gather at that site, some earlier deaths of infants from pneumonia seem to need follow up. Obviously we cant all just sit back and assume that some other agency, some other government has everything under control. At the same time its important to recognize the sovereignty and dignity of all of the populations and countries involved as we move and make a concerted effort to contain the crisis.

Our interconnectedness, interdependence and rapid movement makes the situation more complicated. These same challenges are also some of the same tools which we have in hand to meet the crisis. Perhaps we can swiftly move to try and determine how many people in the world are at risk due to inadequate water resources and how many people are at risk from inadequate waste stream surveillance, and then just as swiftly move to remediate the unsafe water systems
conditions that endanger us all.

Some places there is water and a lack of information services, other places the reverse is true with adequate access to information often coming at the cost of proper adequate access to water and the ability to maintain hygienic integrity.

We must struggle and manufacture a greater balance of conditions in order to have more resilience and flexibility in our own human systems.