I mentioned ‘Project Phoenix’ in my last previous post, and this was it – getting vfridge up and running again.

Ten years ago I was part of a dot.com company aQtive¹ with Russell Beale, Andy Wood and others.  Just before it folded in the aftermath of the dot.com crash, aQtive spawned a small spin-off vfridge.com.  The virtual fridge was a social networking web site before the term existed, and while vfridge the company went the way of most dot.coms, for some time after I kept the vfridge web site running on Fiona’s servers until it gradually ‘decayed’ partly due to Javascript/DOM changes and partly due to Java’s interactions with mysql becoming unstable (note very, very old Java code!).  But it is now back online

The core idea of vfridge is placing small notes, photos and ‘magnets’ in a shareable web area that can be moved around and arranged like you might with notes held by magnets to a fridge door.

Underlying vfridge was what we called the websharer vision, which looked towards a web of user-generated content.  Now this is passé, but at the time  was directly counter to accepted wisdom and looking back seem prescient – remember this was written in 1999:

Although everyone isn’t a web developer, it is likely that soon everyone will become an Internet communicator — email, PC-voice-comms, bulletin boards, etc. For some this will be via a PC, for others using a web-phone, set-top box or Internet-enabled games console.
…

The web/Internet is not just a medium for publishing, but a potential shared place.

Everyone may be a web sharer — not a publisher of formal public ‘content’, but personal or semi-private sharing of informal ‘bits and pieces’ with family, friends, local community and virtual communities such as fan clubs.

This is not just a future for the cognoscenti, but for anyone who chats in the pub or wants to show granny in Scunthorpe the baby’s first photos.

Just over a year ago I thought it would be good to write a retrospective about vfridge in the light of the social networking revolution.  We did a poster “Designing a virtual fridge” about vfridge years ago at a Computers and Fun workshop, but have never written at length abut its design and development.  In particular it would be good to analyse the reasons, technical, social and commercial, why it did not ‘take off’ the time.  However, it is hard to do write about it without good screen shots, and could I find any? (Although now I have)  So I thought it would be good to revive it and now you can try it out again. I started with a few days effort last year at Christmas and Easter time (leisure activity), but now over the last week have at last used the fact that I have half my time unpaid and so free for my own activities … and it is done

The original vfridge was implemented using Java Servlets, but I have rebuilt it in PHP.  While the original development took over a year (starting down in Coornwall while on holiday watching the solar eclipse), this re-build took about 10 days effort, although of course with no design decisions needed.  The reason it took so much development back then is one of the things I want to consider when I write the retrospective.

As far as possible the actual behaviour and design is exactly as it was back in 2000 … and yes it does feel clunky, with lots of refreshing (remember no AJAX or web2.0 in those days) and of course loads of frames!  In fact there is a little cleverness that allowed some client-end processing pre-AJAX².    Also the new implementation uses the same templates as the original one, although the expansion engine had to be rewritten in PHP.  In fact this template engine was one of our most re-used bits of Java code, although now of course many alternatives.  Maybe I will return to a discussion of that in another post.

I have even resurrected the old mobile interface.  Yes there were WAP phones even in 2000, albeit with tiny green and black screens.  I still recall the excitement I felt the first time I entered a note on the phone and saw it appear on a web page   However, this was one place I had to extensively edit the page templates as nothing seems to process WML anymore, so the WML had to be converted to plain-text-ish HTML, as close as possible to those old phones!  Looks rather odd on the iPhone :-/

So, if you were one of those who had an account back in 2000 (Panos Markopoulos used it to share his baby photos ), then everything is still there just as you left it!

If not, then you can register now and play.

1. The old aQtive website is still viewable at aqtive.org, but don’t try to install onCue, it was developed in the days of Windows NT. [back]
2. One trick used the fact that you can get Javascript to pre-load images.  When the front-end Javascript code wanted to send information back to the server it preloaded an image URL that was really just to activate a back-end script.  The frames  used a change-propagation system, so that only those frames that were dependent on particular user actions were refreshed.  All of this is preserved in the current system, peek at the Javascript on the pages.    Maybe I’ll write about the details of these another time. [back]

I too have worried about the demise of interest not just in computers, but in science and technology in general.  Also, the way Apple exercise almost draconian control over the platform is well documented (even rejecting an eBook application for fear it could be used to read the Karma Sutra!).

However, is the problem the closedness of the platform?  On the iPhone and other smartphones, it is the apps that catch imagination and these are ‘open’ in the sense that it is possible to programme your own.  Sure Apple charge for the privilege (why – the income surely can’t be major!), but it is free in education.  So what matters, app development, is open … but boy is it hard to get started on the iPhone and many platforms.

It is not the coding itself, but the hoops you need to go through to get anything running, with multiple levels of ritual incantations.  First you need to create a Certificate signing request to get Development certificate and a Provisioning profile based on your Device ID … sorry did I lose you, surely not you haven’t even written a line of code yet, for that you really need to understand the nib file … ooops I’ve lost the web page where I read how to do that, wait while I search the Apple Developer site …

Whatever happened to:

10 print "hello world"

This is not just the iPhone, try building your first Facebook app, … or if you are into open standards X Windows!

Nigel Davies said his 7 year old is just starting to code using Scratch. I recall Harold Thimbleby‘s son, now an award winning Mac developer similarly starting  using Hypercard.

If we would like a generation of children enthused by Facebook and the iPhone, to become the next generation of computer scientists, then we need to give them tools to get started as painless and fun as these.

The central premise of Tomasello’s book is that:

(1) only cultural development can explain the remarkable development of the human race in the past 200 thousand years, as the changes we have seen are simply not explainable in terms of genetic evolution during that timescale

(2) the crucial genetic step that has fuelled this cultural explosion and the essential difference between humans and other animals is our ability to attribute intentionality to each other, to interpret others’ actions as being for some purpose.

Early on Tomasello describes this as:

“the ability of individual organisms to understand conspecifics as beings like themselves who have intentional and mental lives like their own” (p. 5, Tomasello’s emphasis)

While I agree with the broad argument, this specific statement is almost the opposite of the hypothesis, which I often talk about, concerning the origins of self-consciousness. In particular I suggest that the very concept of self may be an accident of sociality; we are aware of ourselves as intentional beings because we are aware of the intentionality of others.

By self-consciousness here I mean not feeling awkward in company, but the explicit awareness of oneself. This is not the same as consciousness, or simply being aware (one of the deepest mysteries), but more the declarative knowledge that one has intentions, actions, and thoughts.

My own argument runs like this.

In order to survive and prosper we need to be able to predict the actions of other creatures and our fellow humans. When chasing a rabbit it is useful to know that the rabbit will run away when it sees you approach, and that it will try to reach a nearby rabbit hole. Similarly, it is useful to know that one’s fellow hunters will attempt to cut off its escape route. These reactions during hunting could be purely instinctive, and probably are for many creatures such as pack animals, but with higher reasoning we can be more creative in terms of the strategies we use whether as hunter or prey; and this higher-order thinking is most effective when we can predict the actions of other creatures.

When the creature we are predicting is behaving largely instinctively, then our predictions can be similarly relatively simple. However, if the creature we wish to predict, a fellow human, is also able to employ these higher-order strategies, then we need to understand these in order to understand the other’s behaviour. In order to predict the behaviour of our fellow hunter, we need to take into account her understanding of the rabbit; and moreover, her understanding of ourself¹.

That is, to understand others one has to think about oneself as if from the outside — self consciousness!

Returning to Tomasello, his argument is about mutual understanding as a means to learn through creatively emulating others, whereas my argument above is more about the instrumental understanding of others. Being able to understand motivation helps both. The instrumental case, I’ve already described – by understanding what motivations drove your behaviour I can more accurately predict under what circumstances you will behave similarly.

Tomasello’s developmental case is similar. If I am able to imitate others then I have additional behaviours that I can employ, but I still have to learn pretty much for myself when they are appropriate. However, if I know why someone else is behaving in the way that they do then I can instantly know when those behaviours are appropriate for me. When the reasons for behaviour are readily visible in the environment, for example, a sound in the bushes and everyone running, then no model of mind is necessary to learn the association between stimulus and imitated behaviour, but where the behaviour is the result of inner thoughts and drives then we need correspondingly more complex responses.

Tomasello (p. 99) argues that this is also essential for language development as we have to understand the perspective of others as we interpret or frame utterances.

One of the key aspects he identifies is precisely that language requires us to see ourselves “from the outside”, which is entirely consonant with my own argument that the notion of self is an accident of social intercourse. The issue is about which comes first phylogenetically, self or other. Tomasello (p. 70) notes that social theorists “from Vico and Dilthey to Cooley and Mead” stress that our understanding of others rests on parallels to our understanding of ourselves; I would simply add that the reason we have access to knowledge about ourselves may be precisely in order to understand others.

When discussing how children acquire a sense of self, he notes that research has shown that infants do not conceptualise or explicitly talk about themselves before they do about others. So, while it is not true that ontogeny inevitably recapitulates phylogeny, this is certainly suggestive evidence that self is at least no more primitive than other.

While my own and Tomasello’s position both rely on the understanding of the motives and intentions of others, there is also that much deeper sharing of feeling and emotion when we empathise with others. It maybe that empathy is more primitive than the awareness of our own or others intentions as we do not need to explicitly know what someone else is feeling, nor be able to articulate one’s own, in order to simply feel with them.

It is easy to see why it is useful to understand others emotions – if someone bigger than me is feeling upset and angry it may be better to steer clear. But the roots of empathy are less clear and obviously rooted in social cohesion and bonding; it is a feeling not just with others, but intrinsically for them.

This getting alongside others is exactly what Christmas is about “the word became human” (John 1:14, New Living Tr.) and Immanuel means precisely “God with us”; the ineffable becoming an infant.

Another term in the original Tomasello quote is “conspecifics”. We have a special understanding other creatures of the same species as ourselves. This is clearly important for imitation and learning, there is no sense in imitating the behaviour of creatures very different from ourselves, such as birds, as we may be physically not able to do the same things (can’t fly!) and anyway may not share the same kinds of motivations (e.g. making a place to lay eggs).

This works also within species, we need to learn the things that we are able to and need to perform and so it is those closest to us in terms of aspirations and abilities who are the most obvious to imitate. Yet it maybe those who are more different and more experienced who have most to offer. Diligent students understand this and step beyond the obvious peer group, but also the best teachers are able to see the world from the point of view of their students.

I read with fascination as Tomasello described many experiments of his own and others that look at small infants acquiring language. However, I also noted that the focus of them all was on the way in which the infant had to make sense of the parent or other adults words and gestures. In fact, it is also the parents who try to make sense of the inarticulate sounds and embryonic gestures of their child.

look down		bend down		stoop down

People differ in the way they interact with small children: some stand fully up and look down, some bend over the child from the waist, and some squat down or sit on a low chair so that they are the child’s level. It is the latter I always know are going to be the ‘naturals’ with children².

To be a good teacher you sometimes need to become like a little child – Christmas.

1. This is effectively a second order model of mind, First order model of mind is when we understanding that others have beliefs, motivations etc.; that is that they have mind. Second order is when we reason about their understanding of our minds, third order when we think about how they think about us thinking about them! One of Piaget’s critical development steps is when a child moves away form ego centrality to be able to understand other people’s different knowledge and physical point of view – first order model of mind. In autism this does not develop normally with corresponding social and other developmental impact. While most of us manage first order and second order model of mind without difficulty, but third order is more difficult and fourth and higher orders get hard to deal with except more analytically. This was wonderfully demonstrated by the Kursaal Flyers‘ 1976 one hit wonder which as the opening line: “Little does she know that I know that she knows that I know she’s two timing me.” (music at lastfm, lyrics at justsomelyrics) – fourth order model of mind! There was a video at the time that acted out the scene described in the song lyrics. [back]
2. Of course, while people tend to interact naturally in one way or another, you can explicitly choose how to address a child. [back]

But there is another side, where global networks could help local communities to grow and reconnect with one another. Some things are happening grass roots up, some need changes in public policy or intervention, and some may never happen.

The electronic village shop is a dream I’ve had for now well over 15 years, and may happen, or may not … and maybe definitely will not if I don’t do something myself! However, there are other signs of local connections growing.

I have talked about these issues and the electronic village shop at different times over the years¹, but have never previouslly written about them, so eventually …

the electronic village shop … the first dream

Around 17 years ago we moved to a small village, Skirwith, nestled under the shadow of Cross Fell and the North Pennines. The house we moved into had once, many many years before, been a village shop, but there had been another shop and Post Office that had closed only a few years previously. Even the village pub, a traditional place for locals, not a modern evening-out-from-the-city place, also closed.

When the village shop closes a part of the community dies. But for the old or less well off … typically the real locals farmworkers and those who have lived and retired there … it is even harder. many of our neighbours had no car and the bus service ran once a week! Collecting your pension or buying food meant a 3 mile walk to the closest Post Office and bus stop, and hoping for a hitched lift on the way. The only saving grace was the mobile shop, library and butchers vans that came round each week.

The economics of a village shop are tenuous; small customer base, small premises and restricted stock make it hard to make a profit. Could information technology make a difference to this?

At the time it was pre-Web, for those outside Universities or big companies, pre-Internet and certainly pre-Tesco-online. However, in big businesses just-in-time manufacturing was still a hot topic, with short inventories enabled by better processes and better IT.

So was born the dream of the electronic village shop.

One of the problems a small shop faces is that in order to have half a dozen cans of beans on the shelf, there needs to be a box of beans in the store room. I imagined small shops with bar code reader and computer (OK heavy investment at the time!) with inventory software that once or twice daily dialled in (remember no permanent networks … and this is the countryside!) and connected with some sort of central or regional computer. Many shops are franchises of a chain such as Spar, Mace or Coop, so this would be the point of contact and at a regional distribution centre a picking line would create individual daily deliveries, not of boxes or crates, but 3 tins of beans, 2 packets of soup, simply keeping the shelves stocked. Store rooms become extra shop space, product range expands, less wastage so lower prices.

Once the village shop had a computer, it could become the information hub of the local community (recall still the days of few home computers), small scale printing, email services etc. The local community revitalised by a global (or at least regional!) connection.

While the dream was born in a village, this all holds equally for small corner shops in cities, especially large estates: again often so important for the marginalised – the old and the poor, who cannot get to the out-of-town superstore.

the dream continued … Mrs Goggins as information scientist

If anything things have got worse over the years. Often village shops were also sub-post offices adding an extra strand to their income and, perhaps as important, meaning that those collecting pensions and benefits at the Post Office counter then spent it in the shop. But Government has moved benefit payments away from the counter and the Post Office has been closing smaller sub-Post Offices across the country.

However, the opportunities have also grown. Instead of slow and expensive dial up connections, the web and ubiquitous broadband. Furthermore online shopping shows that small scale deliveries are not only possible, but that the infrastructure is there.

For food, instead of daily dial ups for staple sticks, it is possible to think of more personalised services. Imagine walking into the shop on your way to work in the morning and saying “I’d like to do lasagne for dinner tonight”. In the evening when you return, at the shop they have fresh pasta and ragu, ricotta, mozzarella, parmesan, in just the right quantities.

Instead of boxes left soggy on your doorstep, the shop is of course also the ‘drop off centre’ and in the process reducing the number of delivery points and fuel use… indeed in an environmentally aware future we should see integrated delivery mechanisms across different wholesalers so that there is just ONE delivery for everything.

Some of us are net savvy, knowing where to go to shop on the net, what is safe and what is not, but for the rest … welcome Mrs Goggins, the friendly postmistress from Postman Pat, now becomes the information scientist helping you find things in the web.

While the financial benefits of offering any general computing services (printing etc.) have disappeared in the UK, the social needs are more pressing. Those who are transport-poor and cannot get out of the local community to shop are often also information poor and do not have internet access or IT skills. Imagine … Mr Dickens has an email address at the village shop. When his grandchildren sends him emails, Mrs Goggins prints them and then when he wants to reply she scans his letters and they are emailed back to his grandchildren. If eGovernment is to reach beyond the city, this is an obvious locus.

where we are now

In the village of Wray, the village shop does have its own electronic display, supported by various projects at Lancaster University (ISS NRSP Unit and CASIDE project). This is not integrated into the business side of the shop in the way I have envisaged; in this case the village is large enough and prosperous enough to support the shop anyway. However, the photo display does act as a locus for community activity, with pictures of the old village, the annual scarecrow festival … and even the maggot race.

It is common now to also find village shops acting as cybercafes especially in far-flung areas and tourist destinations and also in some cases as hubs from which local products are sold worldwide. However, eCommerce if anything is bypassing not just village shops, but the high street too.

While not a physical shop, NetNeighbours does hit some of the same vision of Mrs Goggins the information scientist. In this scheme volunteers, themselves mostly retired, act as mediators. Housebound elderly clients ring their NetNeighbour with their weekly shopping list. the NetNeighbour then accesses one of the online supermarkets and orders the food.

NetNeighbours had to overcome problems with payments as Internet shopping depends on credit cards and assumes that the person entering details is the customer. Email systems are equally bad at supporting proxies, agents … or even secretaries. The model of the middle-class professional user at their home or office computer is deeply embedded in much of current software infrastructure and financial services.

local connections

Moving away from the physical village shop there are many opportunities for global IT systems to help local communities or establish local connections. In the Blacksburg Electronic Village (supported by Virginia Tech), the Neighborhoods page says:

The Neighborhoods Project is a joint effort between the Town of Blacksburg and the Blacksburg Electronic Village. The goal of the project is to foster better communication among neighborhood residents and between residents, Town staff, and elected officials.

In my own thinking and writing in 2000/2001 on the changing digital economy and in particular density diversity, I pondered how economies will or could change as money loses its traditional role as mediator of information about supply and demand. Increasingly this informational role of money is being supplanted by digital information such as online orders and loyalty cards. Centralised distribution was necessary when cash was the main means of information transfer, but now we can imagine more local-local commerce enabled by digital communications. I can now find the farmer who has potatoes on my doorstep.

This local-local connectivity that I looked forward to is happening with schemes such as freecycle and Craig’s list. Also in my PhD student Haliyana‘s studies of photolog sites, she found that they were not just used for remotely viewing photos of friends and family, but were also a catalyst for local social interactions².

across the world

The problems of the UK village are clearly not the same as rural Mexico, India or Ethiopia; however issues of information poverty, not least access to government and health, is if anything far more pressing. There maybe common cause, common policy implications and common technical issues between rural Britain and rural Berundi.

Some while ago I was told about a project that linked electronically villages in the UK, India and eastern Africa. In India someone posted that their hen was ill and in Africa someone recognised the illness and suggested a treatment. Later one of the African villagers was himself ill and needed a blood transfusion, but was of an unusual blood group. There was noone locally with compatible blood, and the problem was reported on the electronic system. There was another village in the project, just 20 miles away, but far enough not to have any regular communications. Seeing the post a man in the second village, who had the required blood type, cycled the 20 miles and donated blood. Local connectivity through global communications.

This was a pilot project, but more substantial interventions are happening; I found the following in a recent UK Government report:

Drishtee – the Hindi for vision – is the name of a business that was set up in 2000 by a group of young people to bid for a government contract to deliver government services electronically to villages – handling land registration, dealing with taxes and so on. It is a sort of equivalent of the village shop or post office in a world where few people have personal computers.

Drishtee identifies a local entrepreneur and provides him or her with a ‘kiosk’ – a simple stall with a computer – which allows villagers to transact business with the government. There are now 1,000 kiosks, the business is making a profit and Drishtee has plans for 10,000 kiosks in 2008.

They have gradually been taking on new roles and providing new services – selling village handicrafts to the cities, offering distance learning lessons in English – and are now experimenting with offering health consultations through a form of telemedicine.

In a development backed by Microsoft, the first few kiosks are offering a consultation for just over $1. The patient has their temperature, blood pressure, ECG and pulse checked mechanically in the kiosk – with the owner assisting with language and technique as necessary – and is then put directly through to a clinician. Drishtee claim that the cost is much less than it would be for individuals to travel elsewhere.

This programme is only just starting – mistakes will no doubt be made – but lessons will be learned that will be valuable elsewhere.

“The electronic village shop – a possible future”, page 150 from Lord Crisp, Global health partnerships: the UK contribution to health in developing countries (The Crisp Report), Department of Health, London, 13 February 2007.

The future is coming, and good things are happening, but maybe we occasionally need to give it a little help in the right directions.

1. Talks mentioning the electronic village shop: Understanding the e-Market and Designing Products to Fit, London, Jan. 2000, Cyber-economies and the Real World, Pretoria, Sept. 2001. and Toys for the Boys or Jobs for the Girls, Cheltenham, Nov. 2001 [back]
2. See H. Khalid and A. Dix (2006). From selective indulgence to engagement: exploratory studies on photolurking. [back]