intentional, open <3 design

Back in the day, this mathematically-inclined fellow named Erdös used to go around, the story goes, visiting academic friends all over the world. Erdös didn't own his own pad, and let someone else (Ronald Graham) manage his papers and finances.

Erdös would show up at someone's door and say "My brain is open."

I don't plan on pulling that off exactly, but I figure I might be able to learn from his spirit, and say instead, "My heart is open."

With that in mind, and with some hestitation, I am going to try an experiment called "open <3 design". It is vaguely inspired by Erdös and ESR, who have both had indirect influences on my life, and anti-patterned after the way modern two-comma scale dot coms manage their brains and hearts.

Although googlers have published a number of papers, these papers have an academic flair, and may not be immediately useful to a larger population. For example, if a skilled undergraduate from Rice or Wellesley double majors in women's studies and mathematics, even if she has an idea on how to improve some part of hypothetical dotcoms Googoo or Yoohoo, she may not know where to start, or may be intimidated by the public hella smart face of Google's women engineers.

In my case, I wanted to make triple-u sampling available to everyone, as such ideas should spread as quickly as possible if they can be proven correct in (some) theory and useful in (some) practice. However, I believe that many non-Googoo or Yoohoo affiliated researchers have difficulty working at scale. They may be working in Central America, a second-tier American University, or may be majoring in social justice at SF state, and thus not know how to "talk" googooese.

As an academic, I could raise questions such as these which ask, how does a hypothetical Googoo-like empire contribute or not contribute to the stability of the web? In what ways are Googooers elitist, non-representative, or anti-social?

I don't know if a class titled "Computer Science as a Second Language" could ever be taught, but perhaps Stnaford (intentional transposition) could be a place to do it. "Feminist technology" as a class is another idea, but one step at a time :)

In order to work at scale, I believe we first need to support a language and design culture for VLSD (Very Large-Scale Datacenters), in a way that is both libre and gratis, to borrow from DeIcaza's lexicon.

How might I do this? This is where intentional design comes in. By being intentional and reflective, I believe we as humans can better understand how we create the space around us (is it safe space? productive? happy?) and have some grasp of how easy it is to let fear run our lives for us.

For me, I'd like to capture this notion with the term "open <3 design". Not only will the immediate byproducts of this design process be available, through English text (for the moment) and source code, but I will experiment with making the process of design visible, by blogging about it along the way.

I hesitate to do this, as it has not been done exactly before, but I believe it can be done. The meebo peeps expose core details of their dotcom design on their blog, and the open source community has a new history of sometimes-blogging, but what does it mean for a zeroth year graduate student to start documenting her maybe-this-is-a-thesis along the way?

I think we've learned to be afraid of being scooped like a twentieth century reporter, when publishing cycles were slow and distribution much more limited. But what do reporters think today, when there is a blog reader for every five people who still read newsprint?

There are a number of (female) bloggers or journalers who write about how their personal lives intersect with their academic lives (unlike those who act as if it doesn't), and bloggers who write about what they already know, but is it possible to be open about your thesis, expose it and its implementation freely along the way, and still get published / respect / funded? Could be :)

For me, I really like writing, and as I might be able to tell, I can go on and on and on. When I add up all the (mostly private) web entries I've ever written, I believe I've reached at least two thousand (eep).

Plus, perhaps I can work out a system where I publish my latest results by RSS, and my adviser can keep tabs on me if he wants to by pointing his bloglines feed at it ;).

(My adviser, being wise, wanted me to get involved in a group project earlier, and I think this might be because it's good to be part of a community... it's good to have someone depend on your work and to depend on someone else's work... good to be
interdependent even though I'm so very used to being super independent. While I will still be part of the Stnaford community, I think this medium can help me mesh with a larger community, and try to give back at least as much as I have already taken.)

I admit there's fear in me. I could end up pulling a Brookers and grow an audience, which has its charm and its annoyances. Companies or non-mensch-y academics could pull a one-way function on my work and not give any thing back. And of course, I might be a little less rich financially if I take this route. (Some money would be nice -- I think I want to help my mom buy a house in the Bay so that we can hang out...)

But, when I think about it, I should think instead of making the world richer, more <3 open, and meditate on this axiom, that what we give out comes back at us in the most manifold ways.