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Man has always been fascinated with space. In terms of public sentiment NASA has fallen a long way from the heights it enjoyed during the Apollo era. Private projects like the X-Prize Foundation have won media coverage and public following through open competition with the ultimate goal to create a commercial space program. Despite a decrease in public sentiment NASA has had major success stories like the Mars Rover project. The question facing NASA is how to better engage and involve the public in exploration.

I sat down with NASA scientist Scott Maxwell who is the Mars Rover Drive Team Lead to discuss ways NASA can engage the public, a subject he is speaking on at Gnomedex.

How did you get involved with the Mars Exploration Rover project?

I was getting my masters degree in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign when I was recruited to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). I had always wanted to work in space exploration but it seemed to me that type of work was something other people got to do. In my head there was this wall and I was on one side and the people on the other side of the wall were the ones who got to work in space exploration. It wasn’t until I actually had the job at JPL that I realized there wasn’t any wall at all. What separates you and completing that goal you have isn’t an imaginary wall but simply the strength of your desire to go after that goal.

Once I arrived at JPL, I was hired in to work on the software we use to analyze data that comes back from a number of different spacecrafts. I then got involved in a project that was basically a replay of the Mars Pathfinder mission with the Sojourner rover. I was referred by a colleague to be part of the project which ended up ultimately getting canceled but evolved into the Mars Exploration Rover mission. I sort of went along for the ride.

What was the mission goal for the Mars Rover project?

The overarching goal of the mission was to continue the exploration for signs of life on Mars. Specifically the rovers Spirit and Opportunity went to Mars to attempt to find evidence of past liquid water on the Martian surface, the idea coming from the one example we know of, life on Earth, where water is always necessary for life. We are trying to put together a series of planks that hopefully lead up to a story of past life on Mars. Answering the question, yes or no, was there life on Mars. Of course, either way we answer that question has profound implications. If there was life on Mars that is very exciting because the idea of other life out there would have significant implications. If there wasn’t life on Mars that would also be exciting because we could better answer the question of why not, why did form on Earth but not on Mars?

Both rovers have found signs that there was indeed liquid water for extended periods on the Martian surface. Today, 4 1/2 years into their 90 day mission, they are continuing to explore Mars and to add to the scientific treasure trove of information they have been collecting since the day they arrived.

It must be nerve-racking to work on a project that you send into space with the hope that the equipment will still work when the craft gets to its destination despite the numerous things that could go wrong.

That’s certainly true. If you’ve seen any of the news coverage when we get data back from any spacecraft which has landed successfully and is transmitting data; well, people are just jumping in the air and cheering and clapping each other on the back. There’s good reason for that. For instance, someone in my role can invest 4-5 years of their life in rover mission working on it day and night; skipping vacations at times; making all kinds of personal sacrifices in order to complete a project. There comes a point where literally in one minute you will know whether all of those years of work are going to be successful or are going down the tube.

Certainly one characteristic of working in the space program in general is that it does have the same kind of downsides as any other job but the upside is tremendous. We have a saying in this business, “When we have a product launch, we really have a product launch”.

Being there to see the spacecraft you worked on put into a rocket and blasted up into space towards another planet is mind blowing. It’s the kind of stuff I used to fantasize about as a little kid. I never thought it would be my life and now the fact I’m getting paid for it is just unbelievable.

With all of today’s science fiction, how do you deal with people’s sometimes unreasonable expectations when it comes to the type of life they expect you to find?

In some sense finding any sign of life anywhere in the solar system other than on Earth would be tremendously exciting. We don’t have any kind of measure how common life is throughout the universe. The only thing we really know for sure is there is one place, one little planet where there is life and it’s ours.

When you look at the numbers and you kind of have some understanding of how life works it seems certain that it must be elsewhere. But we don’t know when or if we will ever find other life. Even if we found just one example, anywhere. Even if all we found was one tiny little microbe on Mars we would know so much more than we know now. We would learn so much about what kinds of life are possible, where life can be found, what it takes to sustain it. It would completely revolutionize our understanding of the universe that we live in.

What steps does NASA take to ensure that spacecraft we send don’t carry microbes from Earth on it?

Well we would like to find life on Mars but we don’t want it to be life we accidently sent there on our own spacecraft. We don’t want to contaminate another planet.

NASA has very stringent planetary protection requirements about the degree to which spacecraft have to be cleansed of earthly life and contaminants before they can be sent out into space. Both rovers had to be very thoroughly cleansed to get rid of any possible microbes that might be sent there.

One of the philosophical concerns we have is that suppose life on Mars existed and we sent the rovers carrying bacteria that somehow managed to take root on Mars and wipe out that native life. As a scientific matter that would be horrible but even more so as a philosophical matter that would be horrible. We don’t want to inadvertently commit genocide against the only other life we might find in a universe. For all those reasons we have very strict requirements to prevent contaminants from being on anything we send to the surface of another planet.

Obviously one of the appeals of other planets is resources. What about the concept of terraforming Mars?

Terraforming would present enormous engineering challenges for us that we don’t know how to solve. It is certainly a very exciting possibility because having other planets to live on at least increases the chances of humanity surviving in the long-term. There would be a lot of advantages to it but we really don’t know how to do it yet. Our very best bet is to take better care of the planet that we are on.

There is some work going on in direction of putting people on Mars. NASA is undertaking a project called Constellation which will return us to the Moon and may eventually put people on Mars. But even with that project NASA is not thinking about terraforming or colonizing Mars any more than in the 1960s they were thinking about colonizing the Moon. At this point the focus is on simply getting people there.

So now that you’ve gotten the rover to Mars what do you do for an encore?

Right now I’m going to try to see Mars Rover project all the way to the end. I have however been working on other projects including Phoenix and doing work on the Mars Science Laboratory which is the next rover-like mission to Mars.

I’m also working on project called ATHLETE which is a very exciting lunar proposal where we would basically be taking a 12 foot tall, six legged, metal robotic spider on roller skates and putting it on the moon. The purpose is to help astronauts get around and build habitats and complete work that requires mobility. So I am still living my dream by getting work on projects with some amazing people.

How have the explosion of social media and the rapid exchange of ideas impacted what NASA is doing?

Well that is actually what I’m going to Gnomedex to talk about. So far NASA’s communication with the public in terms of space exploration has really all been one-way. NASA has been sending information out to the public but there hasn’t really been any way in which we’ve tried to make it a two-way conversation. Social media could make it possible for a member of the public who wants to communicate with exploration team instance to find some way to do so.

My goal is to find methods for people who have a high level of interest to actually ask questions and participate in the mission. Of course they will need to be able to pass through certain gates and they have certain levels of skill. I think there is a tremendous untapped possibility where we can make space exploration work so much better by bringing the conversation to people who would otherwise never have direct access to it.

Personally I’m very excited about this possibility. I remember myself as a kid watching little black-and-white TV reports about the Voyager mission and what if I had been able been to look at some of the science from the Voyager mission and maybe discover something that no one had ever discovered thereby contributing to the mission in that way.

As a government entity can NASA be agile enough to take advantage of those types of recommendations?

It certainly will be a challenge. I don’t think that NASA institutionally really understands how to do this. But I do think that the rewards from that type of collaboration would be tremendous.

Part of NASA’s responsibility is to engage the public in space exploration, to communicate back to the public what it is we found and what we have been able to do. I think it is a natural extension and generalization of that mandate to bring the public in and enabled them to actually be part of the mission itself. To go along for the ride in a brand new way.

I know that there will be problems: the volume of suggestions we would get, the fact that there would be plenty of kooks, and the challenge being how to keep the noise from drowning out the signal. How do we make it a useful experience and not discourage people who might be interested in participating but are unable to get through. I think there are some definite management problems involved but that’s the kind of thing we hope to get feedback on from conferences like Gnomedex.

How realistic is it that NASA will listen to the information they get with the inherent institutional bureaucracy?

NASA justifiably thinks of itself as engineering elite. While that is true, there are still people outside of NASA who might be able to contribute and see possibilities that we haven’t seen. Maybe they can help solve problems that can only be solved by throwing a lot of time and manpower at the problem but NASA doesn’t have the time and manpower to take on. Why not create some kind of forum where we can post that type of problem and receive feedback. Maybe some random kid in Virginia with spare time on his hands will put his head down take a few weeks and solve it for us. Why can’t we do stuff like that? There is no particular reason why we can’t do it, it is simply that we aren’t thinking in those terms yet because the possibilities that social media brings to the table are so new. But if there is any organization in the world that should be taking advantage of such new technologies to fulfill its mission, it is NASA.

Is there pressure to better reach out to the public because of the success of XPrize?

It’s not because of pressure that we are looking to do this. NASA as an institution is just waking up to the possibilities of social media. The way XPrize will help is that they create ways to engage new parties to contribute towards exploration. Xprize is about building up a commercial space exploration capability that doesn’t exist yet.

While it’s very valuable and could contribute to the NASA mission it’s still not the kind of thing that the normal person can get involved. For instance Jane Smith who lives in Alabama, who is an extremely bright person and is brilliant in math still doesn’t have a way to fulfill her passion and participate in space exploration. The amateur astronomer in the backyard who has the time and interest to contribute still can’t contribute to something like Xprize even, because there is a financial and resource barrier. The kind of thing I have in mind is to truly allow the public to be part of space exploration.

What would your ideal feedback system look like?

In the case of the Mars Rover operation we have two kinds of timelines that go on.

We have the tactical timeline where every day we are putting together the next day’s worth of planning for the rover. That’s very intense, focused and time driven. I don’t think that there is a real way to engage the public in that portion of the operation.

We also have this other timeline going which is the strategic timeline. It is planning for events weeks and months down the road while looking back at data we have gathered to better understand the challenges we are facing. For example, let’s say a rover is heading over to a crater and when we get there we need to decide whether to try exploring in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction taking into account the slope. It’s answering that kind of question that is part of the strategic timeline.

Sometimes it’s answering questions like: let’s look back over the lifetime of the mission and see how the rover has handled traveling over soil as opposed to on rock because we know we will be going over this mixture of soil and rock coming up and we don’t really have a good prediction for its performance but we’re going to need to know that in a few weeks. So let’s take some time to mine data we have so we can make the right decisions.

One way this vision of mine might work is something like Yahoo Answers. NASA could post questions explaining that we have this item here and we would like to be able to do this with it over there, how do we do it? And users could pick up this problem and help us find answers. It allows us to find people to work on tasks they happen to be good at or have the time and knowledge to tackle. Tasks that would benefit from having more people working on them.

What about international contribution?

What is important is that the analysis is done and done well. If it happens to be done by somebody Australia who wants to contribute it makes little difference.

Exploring space isn’t something just America does anymore. It is something that the world does. The rovers themselves have scientific instruments on them they were contributed by other countries. There are very few space exploration projects anymore that are purely American. We had to seek out a level of international cooperation.

Why not reach out to a country that doesn’t have a space program but whose people still have the enthusiasm for exploration and allow them to participate?

With NASA’s budgetary issues why not corporate sponsorship of NASA’s programs?

As an institution NASA is allergic to that.

My personal feeling is that we should be more open to it but I do understand where the concerns come from and I don’t see a good solution to concerns around corporate sponsorship. Obviously the question is one of ethics and of tainting scientific results.

I remember a story in the Onion where the title was something like “Coke sponsored Rover finds evidence of Dasani on Mars”. Although funny that’s exactly the kind of thing we would like to avoid.

The nature of science is to tackle uncertainty. How do you deal with questions where people do not have content scientific hypotheses and are seeking absolutes?

I have people in my family, for example, that ask me whether or not there is life on other planets. I tell them that nobody knows. We haven’t found any yet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t any. It’d be very exciting if we found some and it’d be disappointing but still very interesting if we didn’t find any. Sometimes the best answer is that I don’t know and in fact nobody knows. That’s what’s exciting about exploration.

With a foray into social media maybe we can go a step further and say here is how you can help answer that question. Today nobody knows but maybe tomorrow we will know. Thanks in part to you.

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NASA Invites You Along for the Ride

Photos have power. They can entertain, document, convey emotion, and form opinion. Without context the person looking at the photo may come away with emotions unintended by the photographer. Thus the beauty of art. Given context, photos can put a face to a tragedy that might otherwise simply be a distant statistic. That’s the power of the medium. Seattle photographer Amanda Koster believes in the transformative ability of photos. It is that belief that fuels the business of her company with a quirky name: Salaam Garage.

Amanda represents the kind of grass roots type content that Gnomedex likes to showcase. I sat down with her to learn more about Salaam Garage.

How did you get started in photography?

I ended up in photography while studying anthropology. I thought that developing strong photo essays would enhance my anthropology research projects. As I took the courses I found myself falling completely and madly in love with photography. I did finish my anthropology degree but I had decided that photography was where I really wanted to get involved because I wanted to have hands-on direct interaction with people.

I remember when I was little I saw a commercial of a photojournalist on TV. What’s funny is that it was a Tide commercial where the actor was purposefully crouching on the side of the street taking pictures when a car drove by and drenched her in mud. Of course Tide got all the mud out. But I thought to myself, wow that looks like a really cool job.

What helped shape the tone of your photography?

Immediately after I graduated I took a trip to eastern Africa, heading to Tanzania, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. I took a bunch of pictures while I was there. It was really early in my photo career and I wasn’t very good since I was still learning the craft. When I returned home I showed people my photos. There was one specifically I keep thinking about, of an Ethiopian kid on the side of the road selling bananas. People kept looking at the picture and asking me if I was sure I was really in Ethiopia. Because the kid wasn’t starving to death and in the background there wasn’t a desert.

And I thought to myself, wow, how powerful photography can be and how powerful telling a story along with photography can be. What would’ve happened if I didn’t have those pictures when I tell a person about my trip? Maybe the only pictures they’ve seen to that point were those made famous by Sebastião Salgad of starving kids being weighed on grain scales in the desert during the famine in Ethiopia in the 80s. Are those the kids they would imagine I had seen on my trip? It was then I realized this is what I’m going to do, take pictures of what the world is really like versus all the pictures you see in various magazines.

Caxton Odhiambo. Photo by Amanda Koster.

How did dealing with cultural stereotypes impact your work?

I had a friend who is Ethiopian and I worked at her family’s Ethiopian restaurant as a waitress. The dumb joke I heard over and over again was, “Oh, Ethiopian restaurant? Better go there full.”

Those attitudes frustrated me. In my photography I want to show what the real place is like. I’ve never had much of an interest in bringing back pictures solely of horror stories, the kind people have seen over and over again. Because I feel that no one sees that anymore. We’ve grown immune to it. Numb to it. I mean with those stereotypes what good would it do to bring back photos of starving kids in Ethiopia? Let me bring back something that people haven’t seen before.

Why did you start Salaam Garage?

The reason I started Salaam Garage is because I had been doing photography work with NGOs for about a decade on different kinds of human rights and women’s rights projects. People kept asking me when they heard about my international projects, “Can I come with you?” Eventually I decided to put together a tour as a total experiment.

I identified an NGO called Vatsalya, who was doing work getting kids off the streets in India. These efforts involve child prostitutes or those at high risk for HIV infection. Vatsalya helps by placing them into an orphanage where they can learn various vocational skills in a safe environment. Vatsalya is Indian run and Indian founded, which was very important to me because I wanted to support a local group that understood the culture. I contacted the founder, Jaimala, who thought it was a great idea and helped organize things.

What I didn’t want was to be the tour guide with the visor and the whistle and the white sneakers. Instead we just quietly worked around Rajasthan India, a small group of people traveling the neighborhoods and back alleys. That’s what I want to see and that’s the way I work as a photographer. I don’t want to just see the market. I want to see the farm where they grow food; I want to see the alleys where they make stuff. I want to see where the people live.

What do you hope to accomplish with the content generated by Salaam Garage?

People are creating content all the time, literally vomiting content everywhere online in the form of blogs, podcasts, and viral video. What would happen if all that content creation was harnessed? What would happen if some of that content is actually out there to help make a positive impact in this world?

What if instead of some viral video of someone dancing in their underwear, people were posting interviews from the streets in India. Show a kid who is making it; an orphan who is now learning spelling and has a new outlook on life. There are people out there surviving homelessness, HIV-AIDS, child prostitution. Why not let some of those positive survival stories slide into all the content creation you see in places like Myspace.

What about people who want to create content but are concerned they are not professionals?

I see it as a mystic, but I don’t think being a professional makes any difference. Lots of people read magazines like National Geographic that are so over produced that people don’t find any kind of personal connection to the stories. The highly over produced content traditional media creates is so many layers removed from reality that it makes people feel they are unable to do anything about the subjects covered. And it’s simply not true.

Much like that first picture of the Ethiopian boy I mentioned earlier, anybody can go take a picture, show it and have it have a huge impact on the audience. When I took that picture I was not a good photographer. At that point like 80% of my pictures did not come out. Yet that photo still made an impact on my family and community.

Are viewers interested in news or socially conscious pieces in a setting like MySpace?

I think people are interested in personal connections. People are really hungry for an unedited personal connection and raw content. There might be a lot of problems with the grammar, and spelling may be wrong, but if it’s real and it’s raw it’s what people are hungry for.

How does the kind of content you want to create differ from mainstream media?

If you search mainstream media and try to find out information on India, aside from tourism you will find two main topics: articles about the booming economy focusing on the IT and a growing middle-class; or articles about the poverty, disease, and the homeless children. Rarely will you find stories about people overcoming these challenges facing them.

For example I went to Kenya and I did a project called AIDS is Knocking. It was conceived as a documentary about AIDS orphans and widows. I worked with a NGO in a community with a 38% infection rate, one highest infection rates of AIDS in the world. The problem with statistics is that they don’t have a face. During my work on AIDS is Knocking I kept hearing the statistic that 11 million children were orphaned due to the AIDS epidemic. What do 11 million orphans look like? Statistics don’t help people wrap their heads around the reality of a problem. I thought to myself let me find just one of those 11 million orphans, get to know them and tell their story.

In my case I found Caxton (pictured above) who was the oldest person in his family at 15 years old. Every day he worked on the farm growing his maze and his millet and he went to school. The next day he goes out and does it again. And you know, he is making it. For me the goal is to get to know one person, one story, hear the real story of their life, where they live, what they dream about, what they look like. These orphans do normal things in their daily life. They play, go to school and do their freakin’ homework. A life profile has far more of an impact on the audience than just saying the statistics of 11 million orphans over and over again.

Once I was asked to speak at Harborview Medical Center for this big conference on infectious disease. When I was first asked to present AIDS is Knocking, my first thought was I don’t know anything about infectious disease, I am a photographer. The conference featured PowerPoint after PowerPoint with lines going up and lines going down, numbers everywhere. When at last it was my turn everybody in the room was totally exhausted, hungry, and eager to go to the bar. I played the video to audience of Caxton and everybody was really quiet. Then I showed some photo slides when suddenly the conference organizer interrupted me, stood up and said to everybody, “Do you realize this is the first picture of a person we’ve seen all weekend?” There was dead silence. I mean, this is an infectious disease conference and all they were looking at were numbers and pictures of the disease but not of the people. They were that far removed. I thought that was a powerful lesson.

Do you ever have the desire to follow up with people you’ve profiled to see how they’re doing?

Oh yeah. I personally do want to go back and see Caxton. And there’s others, like some of the kids I worked with in Brazil when I worked with Doctors without Borders. So absolutely I have that desire.

What is the future Salaam Garage?

I’m taking my time setting up more trips. I want to do it right. I’m not in any hurry for rapid growth. What I would like to see happen is for us to coordinate with schools in order to provide scholarships for people to go on these trips who otherwise couldn’t afford to participate. I would like to get some kind of corporate responsibility sponsorship as well.

I am also releasing a new book about my experiences called Can I Come with You? It will be released on September 18 of this year.

The various photography geeks who read Revenews would never forgive me if I didn’t ask about the equipment. What equipment do you use?

For my digital work I have a Canon GL-1 video camera, a Canon 1-d Mark III digital camera that’s my hi-end, and a Cannon Powershot G9 which is my point and shoot. I always struggle over what gear to take, especially now with all the baggage restraints on airlines. And of course, with digital work, I always take backups for the cameras including backup hard drives.

What advice would you give travelers who are thinking about doing this on their own?

I would say do as much preproduction as you can. In essence that is a big component of what Salaam Garage takes care of. Connect with people in the country you are visiting and try to let them know your intentions.

That’s the most important thing to me is to be absolutely transparent with your intentions. Do not go in there with ulterior motives. Do exactly what you said you were going to do. Be honest and realistic with yourself. Don’t think you’ll have an exhibit that’s going to travel the world the next day after you return. Expect when you show up things not to happen way you thought they were going to go. Be patient. In this country we’re used to having an Internet connection 24/7 and used to being in constant communication. There may be places where it might take a week to get information you really need. So well be prepared.

If you’re really there to make a difference, listen to what the people tell you, to what they need and to what will make a difference in their lives. Don’t make the trip about yourself; just be the medium for their story.

See the original post here:
Altered Vision: Salaam Garage gives voice to positive content on developing nations

To a bookworm a bookmark is simply a method of not losing your place. For social entrepreneurs like Larry Halff they are the building blocks of online communities. Coming from a cultural anthropology and sociology background Larry was always interested in how people communicate, get together, form groups, and interact. It was partially this interest that led him to launch Ma.gnolia, a human-organized bookmark collective. Recently I sat down with Larry to learn more about how Ma.gnolia changes the way people connect.

Why start a business based around bookmarks?

When we started Ma.gnolia, about three years ago, it was with the intention to create a more community oriented and sharing-enabled take on social bookmarking. Just saving bookmarks on your own desktop is an implicit reference of your interests are and the things you care about. Then Delicious came along: it exposed that bookmark collection publicly and sort of created an emergent community. However there really weren’t tools for people to actually build topically focused communities and share with each other. So at Ma.gnolia we wanted to sort of extend that model and look at ways you can reference something that you may want to not just save for yourself but to share it with friends or with a group of people interested in the same topic. You may want to contribute that information source to a pool where people of similar interests are all sharing the stuff they find on that topic.

For instance if you are interested in the Coen brothers and you want to start finding other people who are also interested in the Coen brothers you could add some bookmarks related to them into Ma.gnolia. You could start a group; put the sites that you discovered about the Coen’s in that group and start to look at who else has bookmarked the same sites you found interesting then invite them to join the group. You would all be able to share all the information you find about the Cohen brothers collectively.

I think what we were trying to do was explicitly acknowledge and encourage the people interacting with each other in building communities rather than just sort of passively letting people see each other’s lists. We want to build applications that encourage positive interactions and people coming together around common interests.

Why the funky spelling of Ma.gnolia?

We were inspired by the movie Magnolia, the one with Tom Cruise, which is about how people’s lives are interrelated and in exposing the common threads that may not be apparent. As you know it is difficult to get good names online these days. Magnolia.com is owned by Exxon which bought it when they bought Magnolia Gas and Electric Company. I doubt we will be purchasing that form them anytime soon.

How do you keep the references organic and keep out the threat of marketing spam?

Ma.gnolia is actually community white listed. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the way Flickr designates people to monitor public search areas. Well, we kind of have the reverse. The community on Ma.gnolia has to say that you are a member in good standing before your bookmarks appear in public search areas. So that basically keeps out the spammers. We have what we call the “Gardeners Program”, where trusted community members can review and flag new members as either being a spambot or a real person.

When it comes to how things are labeled how does the fallibility of the humans who are categorizing the bookmarks impact things? Or is that part of the joy of browsing?

Humans are fallible and Ma.gnolia is not trying to be an authoritative reference on any subject. Rather we are providing content organization tools that allow people who trust each other or people who are in communities with a marked commonality to federate and say, “These are our trusted sources.” It allows people to designate sources they trust whether it is their circle of friends or business associates and gives them the flexibility to decide how they want to organize around those things. It is less about dealing with the fire hose of information from the entire Internet and more about developing specific trusted resources and cultivating communities around those sources.

How did the explosion of social media impact Ma.gnolia?

I think it is been two-sided; we’ve received a lot more interest in general. Overall there has been a lot of interest in the way people can express themselves online. I think that focus is sort of the biggest impact. We have become more than just social bookmarking or simply the sharing of bookmarks in that people see us as another publishing platform, like a blog. Ma.gnolia has become a way for people to represent themselves in a content specific micro-publishing platform. That change in perception has been the biggest impact.

What about the possibility of lash back against the glut of different social platforms?

There is backlash but I think it’s part of an evolution process. One of the reasons we are speaking at Gnomedex is we want to talk about the direction of Ma.gnolia. The trend we see has social media and social networking going in a direction where people have more control of the ways they represent themselves online and on what places they are represented. Building out tools and services in ways that are useful to allow people to maintain control of their content and representation is key.

What about Ma.gnolia’s evolution?

What we are working towards is giving people more tools to provide them better control over who and how they interact with others in their communities. I think that’s sort of the big push. We are looking at the work that Chris Messina is doing with the DiSo project and seeing how we can learn from it.

I think the social media space is going to start seeing technology developed around ways people and groups can be represented across various social sites. Rather than all of these various individual groups being spread out, like having one on the Facebook, one on MySpace and one on Ma.gnolia; people will be able to say this is their group across all the different social spaces. These are the topics I am interested in regardless of what site it is on. I don’t think we are close to that now, but I think it is something we are working toward.

Does OpenID play into that?

I think that OpenID is a key part of it. It is the method in which you can identify who you are across the different sites. One of the ways that you can link yourself to your various group memberships is of course through your open ID.

How do you see this impacting privacy policy and privacy policy concerns?

I’m not a legal expert but I believe that many sites will still have to do their part to enforce current privacy standards. In terms of contact information, I think people will be given more say and new standards will be formed around how and when people want to be contacted. This can be built around people’s OpenIDs allowing them to state “this is how you can contact me and this is when you can contact me”.

How does Magnolia monetize currently?

We sell ads. We are still essentially an R&D type outfit.

Are there ideal partnerships that Magnolia is looking for?

Yeah. We are based in San Francisco and we are in constant contact with people in the same space and are definitely interested in participating in standards development processes. As these messaging, group and content syndication standards are pushed out we are looking to work with others taking on those challenges.

The biggest standard development that we are involved in is in developing OAuth. The sort of tagline is that OAuth is, “Your valet key for the Web”. When you want to give a site or application access to do things with different account of yours OAuth can provide the authentication protocol. For example, let’s say you are on Flickr and want to grab photos to bring into Facebook; you don’t have to give Facebook your username and password. Through OAuth you just undergo this process where you give them permission without having to give them your login credentials. It is a security protocol that is literally like a valet key giving you the ability to control how other sites access your account.

When you give a site your username and password to a different site you trust them to securely store that information. Essentially the problem is that they can now do anything with the account once they have that information. With something like OAuth, you can just give them temporary access. You are in control of how they access your account and you don’t have to undergo this big security risk.

From a culture anthropology perspective how has the internet changed us?

I think the way we’ve organized information has changed a lot. Our brains are more focused around holding and remembering references to things rather than holding and remembering things themselves. I think our communication and capacity to communicate is a lot broader. Without the geographical constraints or the temporal limits we can keep a lot more connections open on a much larger scale. Whereas before to keep the connection open you would need to sit down and write a long letter or be in the same place at the same time.

What about the old idea of everybody being raised by the village? Can online communities fulfill the role of the village?

Yeah I think that they already do. People do form more distributed communities and probably more ad hoc ones around actual interests rather than geographic proximity. I think it’s a different kind of relationship than you have with the people who live around you but I think that people are definitely forming those communities and they are no less valuable.

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Distributed Communities and the Social Village: How Ma.gnolia creates foundations from Bookmarks