I’ll be speaking on two panels at the 3rd annual conference on Privacy, Identity and Innovation in Seattle, Washington on May 14th and 15th, 2012.

Produced by SageScape, Privacy Identity Innovation is the only tech conference focused on exploring how to protect sensitive information while enabling new technologies and business models. Join the 3rd annual conference, pii2012, May 14-16 in downtown Seattle.

Monday, May 14, 2012 – Edgewater Hotel

pii Labs workshop* – Mobile Apps: Designing for Privacy & Trust. Sponsored by ACT, this hands-on workshop is designed to offer mobile apps developers practical guidance and best practices on designing with privacy in mind.

2:45pm: Lessons Learned: Designing for Privacy

Moderator: Mark Blafkin, Executive Director, Innovators Network

• Amber Case, Co-founder and CEO, Geoloqi
• Tarik Kurspahic, Co-founder and CTO, Personal
• Damien Patton, Founder and CEO, Banjo
• Mike Sax, Co-founder, Asigo

Tuesday, May 15, 2012 – Bell Harbor International Conference Center

4:25pm: Location & Discovery: The Why and When of ‘Where’

• Moderator: Christina Gagnier, Partner, Gagnier Margossian LLP
• Amber Case, Co-founder and CEO, Geoloqi
• Nick Bicanic, CEO, echoecho
• Damien Patton, Founder and CEO, Banjo

Venue Information

Address:
May 14, 2012 sessions:
Edgewater Hotel
2411 Alaskan Way, Pier 67

May 15-16, 2012 sessions:
Bell Harbor Int’l Conference Center
2211 Alaskan Way, Pier 66
Seattle, WA 98121

To check out the rest of the conference, see the Privacy Identity Innovation conference schedule or Register on Eventbrite.

Consider the prospect of Facebook, Google, Amazon, LinkedIn and other data silos bidding against each other for what data you might provide. What kinds of data might be the most interesting? How could that value be enhanced? How could you collect it with minimal effort? How would your privacy be protected? What could you get in return?

At this event you’ll pick a particular type of personal data and build an app to show how its value as a personal asset can be enhanced. The app can be mobile, desktop, web or something else.

Where?

Thetus Corporation
34 NW 1st Ave
Portland, Oregon, United States (map)

When?

Saturday, June 2, 2012 from 8:30am–8pm.
Calagator Link.

Register (Free!)

Let us know you’re coming on Eventbrite! http://vdatpdx.eventbrite.com/

About Vibrant Data

Inspired by the Arab Spring popular uprisings’ use of Facebook and Twitter, The Vibrant Data Project is trying to understand the development landscape that is giving rise to the Gutenburg press of our era: disruptive communication and commerce vehicles that have the potential to overthrow corrupt regimes, spread new ideas, broaden economic opportunity, improve health and well being and aid in the fight for social justice and human rights.

I’m excited to announce that I was offered a keynote speech at this year’s SXSW conference in Austin, Texas! I’ll be doing an extended version of a talk on cyborg anthropology and the future of the interface, and will then go into what we’ve been doing at Geoloqi, and some major partnership announcements.

If you’re interested in the future of humans and technology, and the future of location, it should be an interesting speech! Lots of new things to talk about. Hope to see you there!

When and Where?

Keynote on Location and the Future of Humans and Technology
March 11th, 2012 from 2:00pm–3:00pm CST
Exhibit Hall 5, Austin Convention Center

Speech Abstract

We are now entering into an era of liquid interfaces, where buttons can be downloaded at will, and software flies through the air. Phones have been untethered from their cords and are free to colonize our pockets. They cry, and we must pick them up. They get hungry, and we must plug them in. We increasingly live on interfaces, and it is their quality and design which increases our happiness and our frustration.

The best interfaces compress the time and space it takes to absorb relevant information, and the worst cause us car accidents, lost revenue, and communication failures. We are tool using creatures. Prosthetics touch almost every part of our lives. Until recently, humans have used their hands and bodies to interface with objects. Early interfaces were solid and tactile. Now, the interface can be anywhere.

This speech will discuss how the field of anthropology can be applied to interface design, and how future interfaces, such as the ones employed by augmented reality, will change the way we act, feel and communicate with one another. Topics will include non-places, time and space compression, privacy, user flow, supermodernity, wearable computing, work and play, gaming, history and prosthetic culture.

Want to meet up during SXSW?

I’ll be on Twitter @caseorganic. Feel free to @ or DM me anytime!

If you are press attending SXSW Interactive and would like to schedule an interview, contact
Jennifer Lankford
theMIX agency for Geoloqi
415-412-2856
geoloqi@themixagency.com.

What is Random Hacks of Kindness?

Random Hacks of Kindness is a simultaneous global hackathon which addresses issues of disaster and humanitarian response. Local subject matter experts are brought in to guide the developers in relevant issues and to further the use of developed tools after the event.

Registration Deadline:

Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Register Here to Attend! (Free)

Dates:

Friday, December 2, 2011 – Sunday, December 4, 2011

Hackathon Location:

Collective Agency
322 NW Sixth Ave, Suite 200, Portland

What’s a hackathon?

A hackathon is a gathering of technically skilled individuals focusing on collaborative efforts to address a challenge, issue, or goal. They usually run from several hours to weeks, and can include rigid structure or organic emergence.

What makes RHoK special?

Geeks Without Bounds brings a year’s worth of experience in facilitating unconferences and hackathons to these events, as well as heavy involvement in the Volunteer Technology Community (VTC). We set expectations and limitations in regards to what responders will be able to learn on short notice under stress and what networks and power situations are like.

The hackathon will take place in the Collective Agency on NW Sixth Ave. in Old Town Portland. There’s TONS of stuff to do in the area. Maps, travel, and hotel info to come soon.

Can’t make it to RHOK?

Try the Geoloqi Open Data Hackathon on Nov 17-19th! Or, even better, come to both!

Questions? Comments?

Contact @willowbl00 on Twitter, and don’t forget to register!

We’ll have food and drinks, and plenty of interesting things to discuss and work on. The new office has two war rooms for planning and plenty of space for hacking and discussion.

Thanks to our wonderful local sponsors who will be providing food and drink! That’s CivicApps for lunch, and Thetus Group for breakfast! Geoloqi will be providing beer and refreshments, and Stumptown will be providing coffee!

When?

Friday, Nov. 18, 2011 from 6:30Pm-9:00Pm – Setup and Planning (including beer and snacks)

Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011 from 9:30Am-6:00Pm – Hacking and Presentations (including breakfast, lunch and snacks).

Sunday, Nov. 20, 2011 (optional day for additional hacking!).

Where?

Upstart Labs / Geoloqi HQ
500 NW 9th Ave, Portland, OR 97209

View Larger Map

Full Schedule

Friday:
6:30Pm-9:00Pm – Hacking, planning and drinks begin!

Saturday:
9:30-10:00Am – Registration, breakfast and coffee.
10:00Am-10:15Am – Attendee short presentations. Groups and individuals set up to hack. Ideas are tossed around.
10:15Am – Hacking Begins!
12:00Pm – Lunch and snacks arrive!
01:00Pm – Hacking continues
05:00Pm – Presentations, and dinner on your own!
06:00Pm – Hack late into the night if you wish.

Sunday:
10Am – Optional day if you want to continue building your layer or app! We’ll be at the office until 6:00Pm to help you out.

RSVP

While the event is free, we’ll want to make sure we have food and drinks for everyone. RSVP on Plancast!, or check out the event on Calagator! We look forward to seeing you there!

I like Twitter, but not all of it. I like what people post on Twitter, but not all of it.

I’d like to be able to filter out parts of what people talk about. I don’t want to read posts about politics, for instance, or sports, babies and what people ate for lunch.

Other people might love these parts of a person’s life, but don’t want to hear about Apple or technology.

Subscribing to Parts of a Person’s Life

For instance, I often follow UX Designers for their design tweets, and when I do I’m interested only the tweets relevant to UX design. With topics, you would be able to subscribe to different flavors content from a person, or topic.

You can search a specific geography but you can’t publish to it.

You can follow a hashtag but you can’t subscribe to one.

What about using a colon to tag a post by a topic, and allow people to subscribe to that topic in your life?

Geographical Subscriptions

When I first explored the Portland tech community, I only followed people in Portland. It was easy to see news from a specific geography. Now, tweets about Portland are lost in the noise and I can not longer separate them out without having a specific search in Tweetdeck that is dedicated to them.

Relevant Tweets, Eliminating the Noise

In the 2007 when Twitter was prone to fail whaling, software developer Aaron Parecki made a Twitter clone to allow people to communicate when Twitter wasn’t working.

Built into the system were channels where one could subscribe to various parts of a person’s life instead of the entire person.

For him, these channels were like hashtags, but in reverse, because hashtags publish to everyone, but channels publish to a topic segment that someone had expressed an interest in.

Additional Thoughts

This post is an exploration of ideas that Aaron Parecki and I have had for the last four years.
I know that this system has been integrated into some sites, and many networks are trying to implement aspects of this, but I don’t think it’s been done well yet.

What are your thoughts on how this would work? Would you use Twitter more or derive more value from the site if you could filter through tweets and parts of people’s lives in this way?

About

Interested in working with Ward Cunningham on his new wiki project? You can on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at the Portland Incubator Experiment.

Wiki-founder Ward Cunningham shared his idea of a Smallest Federated Wiki SFW during IndieWebCamp this June. In a few short weeks, he brought his idea to life and is inviting others to work with him on it. This is the second worksession for people interested in contributing to the project.

What is SFW?

The Smallest Federated Wiki project wants to be small in the “easy to learn powerful ideas” version of small. It wants to be a wiki so that strangers can meet and create works of value together. And it wants to be federated so that the burden of maintaining long-lasting content is shared among those who care.

As Ward says,

Our new wiki innovates three ways:

• It shares through federation,
• composes by refactoring and
• wraps data with visualization.

Resources

If you’re not yet familiar with Ward’s new wiki, check out the following resources

• http://wardcunningham.github.com/ — Video Demos (very popular)
• http://videos.mozilla.org/serv/air_mozilla/10052011_brownbag.ogg — Ward explaining SFW to Mozilla
• https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki — Source Code
• https://github.com/WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki/wiki — Project Roadmap

When

Thursday, October 13, 2011 from 6–8:30pm

Where

PIE: Portland Incubator Experiment
1227 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Calagator
Plancast

Defining a Singularity

A singularity could be defined as everyone experiencing a certain moment or thought at once. Like having all time zones converge on one time, or the entire planet experiencing the same weather for a moment, these moments of singularity are fascinating to experience.

It’s not that we are always connected to the same thoughts, but that if something globally relevant happens, those who are connected have the capability to experience it at the same time. It does not matter if anyone has the same opinion on the subject, it matters that they are all suddenly aware of the change.

During a singularity, all media reach a saturation point. During an earthquake or the death of a celebrity, social networks generally collapse into a single topic and tweet about it for a period of time after the event.

Mental and Technosocial Convergence

In the case of Steve Jobs, real-time media channels were saturated mere seconds after the announcement. The Twitter channel I had open in Tweetdeck began zooming by with every tweet being the same. Some form of communication mentioning the passing of Steve Jobs.

Software developer Aaron Parecki noticed not just the Twitter and news channels filling up, but all of the subchannels he was in on IRC as well. Within about 20 seconds, two IRC channels, Twitter, and the entire Portland Incubator Experiment office simultaneously were talking about his death.

Time and Space Compression

As the time and space it takes to send and receive information decreases, these kinds of micro-singularities will become increasingly common. If you’re connected to the web, it is likely that you have just experienced another singularity.

Although in this case, the micro-singularity was brought on, as @jenkhughes stated, “it was a micro-singularity made possible by Steve’s own inventions”. The analog world announced the death to the digital world, and the digital spread at the speed of light to all nodes on the network. Jobs played a massive role in making those nodes on which we all connect. RIP Jobs.

She discussed a number of interesting things, which I recorded. The interview is posted below in audio form. The audio was recorded from Skype, so I apologize for the quality of the connection and recording, but I hope you will enjoy her interesting thoughts.

Synopsis

Have you ever faked a restroom trip to check your email? Slept with your laptop? Or become so overwhelmed that you just unplugged from it all? In this funny, eye-opening, and inspiring film, directed Tiffany Shlain takes audiences on an exhilarating rollercoaster ride to discover what it means to be connected in the 21st century. From founding The Webby Awards to being a passionate advocate for The National Day of Unplugging, Shlain’s love/hate relationship with technology serves as the springboard for a thrilling exploration of modern life…and our interconnected future. Equal parts documentary and memoir, the film unfolds during a year in which technology and science literally become a matter of life and death for the director. As Shlain’s father battles brain cancer and she confronts a high-risk pregnancy, her very understanding of connection is challenged. Using a brilliant mix of animation, archival footage, and home movies, Shlain reveals the surprising ties that link us not only to the people we love but also to the world at large. A personal film with universal relevance, Connected explores how, after centuries of declaring our independence, it may be time for us to declare our interdependence instead.

Website

http://www.connectedthefilm.com

Facebook Page

https://www.facebook.com/connectedthefilm

About Tiffany Shlain

Tiffany Shlain is a filmmaker, artist, founder of The Webby Awards, co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences and a Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute. Tiffany’s work with film, technology and activism has received 44 awards and distinctions and her last four films have premiered at Sundance. Her films include “Life, Liberty & The Pursuit of Happiness,” about reproductive rights in America and “The Tribe,” an exploration of American Jewish identity through the history of the Barbie doll, “Yelp: With Apologies to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl,” about our addiction to technology and the importance of “unplugging”, and her new award-winning feature documentary, “Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.” A celebrated thinker and speaker, she delivered a keynote at Cannes MIPdoc in France, has advised Secretary of State Clinton, is on the advisory board of M.I.T.’s Geospatial Lab and presented the 2010 campus-wide Commencement Address at UCBerkeley.

Let me know if you like the posts and I hope you enjoy tuning in! Several have already been posted. Their titles are below:

Wired Magazine Posts

Monday: Why Do Makeshift Solutions Persist?

Tuesday: Does Your Tech Make You Feel Superhuman?

Wednesday: How Social Networking Is Extending Our Nervous System

Thursday: Your Brain is Full of Junk: Here’s Why

Friday: Calm Computing

Full Archive of Wired Magazine Guest Posts

Looking for more?

More about each of these subjects will be released in the release of A Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology! It’s slated to be released in October, though probably around the end of the month.