[dorkbotsea-blabber] Dorknotes

[Eric McNeill]

*Thanks for the write-up, Wim. I also put some notes on the Wiki (snippet
below) with our findings and next steps. I went ahead and put a short
description of my piece up there - I'd like to highly encourage everyone
who's doing a piece to do the same by the end of the weekend. This will help
us determine where the commonalities are and getting people in two's and
three's talking to finalize designs. Thanks to everyone for being flexible
with this - we've got a ways to go still but it's starting to take shape.*

**

*Eric
*

**

*-------------------------------------------
*

*March 4: Planning Discussion*: We spent about an hour at the end of this
month's dorkbot taking stock of where we're at and figuring out where to go
from here, as the 3/14 proposal deadline is looming. A number of ideas have
been proposed in the past month but none have gelled into clearly defined
tribes. With 10 people in attendance definitely planning on doing a piece
for the show (plus at least 2-3 others that I know of that weren't there) we
don't have enough participation to support a lot of tribes. However there
were several commonalities that people gravitated towards:

   - Text-based messaging
   - Audible/tonal messaging
   - A mix of low-level communication, e.g. touch, electric signals, etc.

Some decisions were made:

   - Have a server/backbone oriented around text, with a pluggable
   architecture that'll be easy to write "bridging" modules to connect pieced
   in.
   - Bridges will be written to connect pieces into the backbone, as needed
   based on the protocol used by the piece(s).
   - Bridges could also allow communication with the outside world -
   subscribing to Twitter feeds, getting feedback from users on our web site,
   crawling for data, etc.
   - Not all pieces must connect into the backbone. We may end up with some
   smaller isolated tribes, or perhaps a tribe where one member is bridged in.
   -

   Proposals do *not* have to include detailed specs of how you'll be
   bridged into the backbone. We'll need a general idea of what you're planning
   and assurance that you can get it done or team up with someone who can help.


Next Steps:

   - Everyone planning on submitting a piece is encouraged to wiki a brief
   description of their idea, the protocol(s) being used, and how you're
   planning on bridging into the backbone. If you've got a great idea but don't
   know where to start with this bridging stuff please make a note of that
   also, and email blabber for help. We'll use this information to hook up
   people common protocols so we can reuse as much as possible.
   - Michelle will sketch out an architecture for the backbone server piece.




On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Wim Lewis <wiml at hhhh.org> wrote:

> I mentioned the idea last month of posting meeting notes to the list after
> the meeting. I didn't think to actually *take* notes, but here's a mental
> mishmash of what was at the meeting and my thoughts on it. (So don't take
> this as a reliable, impartial record or anything: it's very much my
> subjective record of the meeting.)
> Susie Lee and Yoko Ott presented a class+artwork they did with the Frye<http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3049/>,
> in which students were encouraged to go on a dérive<http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm> which
> was recorded in photos, audio, video, and a (mapless) GPS track. Thinking
> about it later, I found myself wishing to know more about how the students
> thought about the activity: what they were expressing in each case, even if
> not in the language of the professional artist.
>
> Stephanie Andrews presented her work in which a whole motion-captured human
> movement (a few seconds of dance) is translated into a (virtual or physical)
> solid object by collapsing the time dimension. Some very pretty
> abstract-looking sculptures resulted, in which you could still see the human
> movement and form. (My friend described them as the advanced version of snow
> angels.) This put me in mind of the SFnal notion of a human life as a long
> four-dimensional worm (stretching from birth to death). Also, starch-based
> sintered-powder-style rapid prototyping— neat! (Though EMSL's sugar "candy
> fab <http://www.candyfab.org/article.php/complexshapes>" is hard to beat.
> Or the chocolate-based fused-deposition machines.)
>
> After the break we talked about the emergent communication protocols for
> PDSTWE4 <http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication>.
> There was concern we might have a problem getting critical mass for
> interesting interactions for any given mode of communication, since there
> are so many possibilities. The most popular modes seemed to be audio (eg
> Chronos<http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication/ChronosProtocol>)
> and some sort of IP-based text protocol (XML, Twitter, etc.), but some
> people were very interested in Zigbee or haptic communication. There seemed
> to be consensus that there should be some sort of hub/server object which
> speaks many protocols in order to tie things together, and possibly allows
> interaction from outside (eg, a publicly visible web page, responses to
> twitter hashtags, an email gateway). There wasn't much consensus on how best
> to prune the set of protocols in order to get more than one entry using
> each. Some people were specifically interested in a particular sort of
> protocol; some people sounded willing to adopt whatever other people were
> using.
>
> The wiki pages for these were hard to find. I renamed some of them so
> they're obviously related to the EmergentCommunication page, and made sure
> the links were working— hope this helps people find them. A full-text
> search for "emergent"<http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication?action=fullsearch&value=emergent&fullsearch=Text> also
> gets you a nice list of pages.
>
>
>
> ........................................................................
> .........dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity..........
> ..........................http://dorkbot.org............................
> ........................................................................
>
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