St Patrick’s Day

I'm just reading this brilliant book by Lewis Hyde about the idea of the gift, & it occurs to me that Zuckerberg's crime is to take social data we give one another, and reduce it by monetizing/commoditizing it....this is, I suppose what Jaron Lanier says in "you are not a gadget", too...

See also here and here.

Meanwhile, I was at the EPSRC's "wrapup" workshop for the WINES programme of research - this was trying to see if there are lessons in how this large managed programme of research on wireless and intelligent sensor network systems worked so well - it started with a Grand Challenge, and isn't ending with the funding, but lives on in quite a few other projects - specifically in Cambridge, we have the Intelligent Energy Aware Networks project, plus a giant IKC in smart infrastructures...for example....the main thing seemed to be that the community was a real one with common interests and the challenge was very well timed in terms of feasibility and technology maturity.

Anyhow, we may try and create a new (but different) programme by trying to repeat the circumstances somehow - one area this might look at is the design of networked systems for supporting human behaviours rather than just supporting information exchange.