Zeitgeist

Quoting from GiroDiVite:

Pantegane e sangue : romanzo breve / Wu Ming

Pantegane e sangue : romanzo breve / Wu Ming. - primavera 2000
di Redazione Antenati, Data 15 maggio 2005 - 251 letture

Today I came across CodeTree.

Can digital artists learn new techniques, be exposed to new coding structures, and better express themselves by working in tandem or in a group?

CodeTree is an attempt to create a worthwhile dialogue between new media artists of different skill levels and backgrounds. The project's objective is to offer a social network that facilitates learning and artistic expression—a place where coders can dissect, share, and expand upon one another's code.

The site is nice, but what really hits me is the possibility of creating some kind of 'live' repository for code.
Ok, I know we have sourceforge, rubyforge and all those other forges and they do have forums and tools to comment on dovelopers, but I'm thinking about something different.  Smaller piecies of code for a start.  Nuggets of code that can be understood at a glance and modified with a quick brush on the keyboard. Think Java Almanac.

I would like these piecies of code to be tracked during their evolution, and to be able to follow the personal history of their contributors too.  I would like to comment on them via a wiki-like interaction.  I would love to use them via intellisense in my code. 

I want to be able to sketch my intent and as soon as my 'Intentisense' picks up interesting keywords, somethink looking a bit like Google Suggest.  If I do my own modifications I would then like to upload them directly to my Noosaurus, my shared executable knowledge thesaurus.. for other people to see and modify and rate and rank and tag.

Coding like tagging like blogging... I feel this can have huge potential.

Temporary Action Groups or Transversal Agile Groups, as you like.
It occoured to me that while there are many open source project, I haven't seen many projects that span across several disciplines.

I find inspiring to think that a group of similar minded people from different walks of life can come together to produce something beautiful across several media and from different ascpects, each one contributing with his own special skills.

This happens in companies and in some activist groups, but I don't see it happening spontaneously without the push of money or political ideology.

I would like to see <TAG>s emerge.  I would like to see a system that allows people from different disciplines but similar attitudes to find each other and to assemble into small hit-and-run teams that can collaborate on small significant projects, disband and coalesce again in different forms.

I envision a <TAG> having the following characteristics:

• small, so that it can be agile
• leadership is task ans skill based and it can be shifting
  
• it acts mainly through the internet, since the internet is pushing more and more into our lives and it allows you to have the right mix of impact per expended effort within a reasonable amount of time
• temporary, based around a single well defined task rather than around a campaign or an ideal
• transversal since it brings together expertise from several fields
• it's action based.  The creation of a final product is the goal of its existence
• it's extremely focused on obtaining a certain goal within a limited amount of time
• it's agile since it is willing to keep changing its tactics and it reasons on how to refine the process
  

It may be too early too say something about it, but I feel that something may be changing in Italian politics.
I'm not talking about factual changes yet, but there is something that is changing in the way italians perceive themselves and their institutions.

I think that belonging to a larger european community is a big part of this emergent shift of perception.

Italian political dialectics have been for a long time mostly self referential.  Suddenly there is Europe, there are external observers that give the Italian ruling class someone towards whom they can feel ashamed for their actions and attitude.  Just think about Fazio.  His continued presence at Banca d'Italia is causing daily embrassment to the country.

I think that a few years ago, without this external 'screen' on which this shame could be projected, the situation would have gone back to normal in a few months.  It will be interesting to see how it develops.  In the meantime stay tuned on Beppe Grilo's Blog.

Amazing video!

You must have heard the saying: if you have an idea, there is already a site about it on the web.  If you have an original idea, then there must be at least ten sites about it.

I googled for 'legal engine' and I found MetaLex.  This seems to be an XML legal ontology that could be a first step towards Executable Law.  This paper details some of the concepts.

Free movies on the web.

Democracy 2.0 is a project that plans to rewrite laws from scratch via a wiki medium.  I'm not entirely sure of the validity of this experiment as I believe that a system as complex as a body of laws needs to evolve and adapt rather than being designed.

However this project gave me an idea.  Law is knowledge and some knowledge can be encoded in an executable format. What if laws could be translated to code?

You would have systems of laws that can be checked for consistency and loopholes.  The laws that apply to a given situation could be searched and legal simulations could be run as well.

Laws of course need interpretation, but I still wonder if there is a useful subset that could be mapped to code.

What happens when Grand Theft Auto meets Legoland ?

Even more videos and audiobooks at learnoutloud.  I will soon start listening to the Biotech section.