Intelligent Infrastructure needs people? Web 3.0?

September 11, 2006

The core competencies of web 2.0 companies according to O’Reilly are:

  • Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
  • Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
  • Trusting users as co-developers
  • Harnessing collective intelligence
  • Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
  • Software above the level of a single device
  • Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
Web 2.0 is also characterizes “a second-generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in new ways” (Wikipedia 2006) and “creating network effects through an architecture of participation” (Oreilly 2005).

We have social content sharing (flick.ca, collectnik.ca, odio and youtube), media convergence gadgets such as cell phones that do everything but make toast, all sorts of wireless gadgets and practices, open source, creative commons licensing, data sharing portals, wikis, interoperability, huge computing capacity, and all the cultures, collaborations, and participatory nature of it all.  And…

Then all the same sort of thing is happening in the geomatics world and well users are creating tools that geomatics specialists could or would not or missed, namely widgets and services to integrate all that web 2.0 content in a map.  So now you can take a picture with your camera, load it to flickr, geotag it and map it on a google map and this can also be done with text, audio, video and so on.  Hyepertext narrative is being geo enabled, content is being syndicated to a location and into location portals and communities are democratizing their infrastructures via community wireless networks.  You can even chose tv content!

The stuff is being integrated and converged!

Are their underlying infrastructures converging? What are the predessor infrastructures?  Will an intelligent infrastructure emerge organically through all of this or will a few major corporations take charge and come up with their own solutions?

What about data? Scientific data in particular, when will it become a part of this movement?  What about big science projects - when will they become public?  When will mapmaking framework data and all that satellite imagery be free?  Demographic data?  When will citizens be in charge of satellites and other global scale sensor technology? When will public institutions change and seamlessly share the decisions they make, from the budget to the votes in the chambers?  When will the technology and the institutions change  to include citizens in the decision making processes on topics such as the environment?  When will specialists  & technocrats  value  community and indigenous knowledge?  Does this mean a return to particularism or a more integrated and ingenous participatory universalism?

The intelligent infrastructure is

the intersection of the Internet, telecommunications and information technology

But that definition misses the people!  I think an intelligent infrastructure will be the intersection of the Internet, telecommunications and information technology and people -  participatory, collaborative, inegrative, across cultures and hierarchies and professions - Web 3.0?

anyway! i had to get this out! even if not quite worked out! 

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