<p class="line867"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">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 - <b>I'd like to highly encourage everyone who's doing a piece to do the same by the end of the weekend</b>. 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.</span></strong></p>
<p class="line867"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></strong></p><p class="line867"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">Eric<br></span></strong></p><p class="line867"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;"></span></strong></p>
<p class="line867"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">-------------------------------------------</span><br></strong></p><p class="line867"><strong>March 4: Planning Discussion</strong>: 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: <span class="anchor" id="line-30"></span></p><ul><li>Text-based messaging <span class="anchor" id="line-31"></span></li><li>Audible/tonal messaging <span class="anchor" id="line-32"></span></li>
<li>A mix of low-level communication, e.g. touch, electric signals, etc. <span class="anchor" id="line-33"></span><span class="anchor" id="line-34"></span></li></ul><p class="line874">Some decisions were made: <span class="anchor" id="line-35"></span></p>
<ul><li>Have
a server/backbone oriented around text, with a pluggable architecture
that'll be easy to write "bridging" modules to connect pieced in. <span class="anchor" id="line-36"></span></li><li>Bridges will be written to connect pieces into the backbone, as needed based on the protocol used by the piece(s). <span class="anchor" id="line-37"></span></li>
<li>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. <span class="anchor" id="line-38"></span></li><li>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. <span class="anchor" id="line-39"></span></li><li><p class="line862">Proposals do <strong>not</strong>
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. <span class="anchor" id="line-40"></span><span class="anchor" id="line-41"></span></p></li></ul><p class="line874">Next Steps: <span class="anchor" id="line-42"></span></p><ul><li>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. <span class="anchor" id="line-43"></span></li><li>Michelle will sketch out an architecture for the backbone server piece. </li></ul><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Wim Lewis <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wiml@hhhh.org">wiml@hhhh.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style="">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.)<div>
<br></div><div>Susie Lee and Yoko Ott presented a class+artwork they did with the <a href="http://fryemuseum.org/exhibition/3049/" target="_blank">Frye</a>, in which students were encouraged to go on a <a href="http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm" target="_blank">dérive</a> 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div><div>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 "<a href="http://www.candyfab.org/article.php/complexshapes" target="_blank">candy fab</a>" is hard to beat. Or the chocolate-based fused-deposition machines.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>After the break we talked about the emergent communication protocols for <a href="http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication" target="_blank">PDSTWE4</a>. 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 <a href="http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication/ChronosProtocol" target="_blank">Chronos</a>) 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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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 <a href="http://projects.dorkbot.org/dorkbot-wiki/EmergentCommunication?action=fullsearch&value=emergent&fullsearch=Text" target="_blank">full-text search for "emergent"</a> also gets you a nice list of pages.</div>
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.........dorkbot: people doing strange things with electricity..........<br>
..........................<a href="http://dorkbot.org." target="_blank">http://dorkbot.org.</a>...........................<br>
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