Dave Witzel

The defendants, including Google, Amazon, and Yahoo, are hoping that Berners-Lee’s testimony—combined with that of other web pioneers like Netscape co-founder Eric Bina, Viola browser inventor Pei-Yuan Wei, and Dave Raggett (who invented the HTML “embed” tag) — will convince the jury that the inventions of Eolas and its founder, Michael Doyle, aren’t worth much. The stakes couldn’t be higher — if Berners-Lee and the defendants don’t succeed, Eolas and Doyle could insist on a payout from almost every modern website. - Dave Witzel

HealthCamp Foundation is a non-profit. Our mission is to Empower Health Care Engagement. We do this by helping local organizers setup and run HealthCamp events - Dave Witzel

David C. Kibbe: It’s clear to me that health data exchange is now seen generally as inevitable, and that this is in part due to the potential for many small provider organizations and low-volume exchangers to avail themselves of low cost, low complexity, point-to-point, and yet very secure solutions via Direct exchange. (ONC should be thanked for stickting to their guns on this one.) As one large vendor put it to me last week, “Direct exchange is simply a cost of doing business for us now.” - Dave Witzel

We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk from TEDxBloomington, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. - Dave Witzel

In this chapter we discuss the extent to which such programmes could and should be modelled on active, enquiring and experiential pedagogies which are associated with best practice in education for sustainable development. We also examine the potential role for communities of practice to support professional development for ESD within institutions. In particular, we evaluate a professional development exercise at the University of Gloucestershire which experimented with such approaches and discuss its potential transferability. - Dave Witzel

The government needs to move to a "presume to publish" mentality to keep its much touted open data strategy alive, according to one of its key information advisors, Nigel Shadbolt. Shadbolt, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was appointed as information advisor in 2009 by the previous prime minister Gordon Brown to help transform public access to government information. - Dave Witzel

There is a proliferation of economics blogs, with increasing numbers of famous and not-so-famous economists devoting a significant amount of time to writing blog entries, and in some cases, attracting large numbers of readers. Yet little is known about the impact of this new medium. Together we are writing a paper to try and measure various impacts of economics blogs and thought we’d share the results over a few blog posts – and hopefully get useful comments to improve the paper at the same time. - Dave Witzel

This architectural insight may actually be more central to the success of open source than the more frequently cited appeal to volunteerism. The architecture of Linux, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are such that users pursuing their own "selfish" interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct. In other words, these technologies demonstrate some of the same network effect as eBay and Napster, simply through the way that they have been designed. - Dave Witzel

Collaboration Curves were first identified by John Hagel, who heads consulting firm Deloitte’s Center for the Edge in Silicon Valley. “We’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of learning curve as we scale connectivity and learning, rather than scaling efficiency,” says Hagel in his Harvard Business Review blog (coauthored with John Seely Brown and Lang Davison). “Collaboration curves hold the potential to mobilize larger and more diverse groups of participants to innovate and create new value.” - Dave Witzel

Spectacular video series illustrating how the notion of remixing is deeply embedded in our culture and in our creative process. It appears that episode four, which is due out this month, will focus directly on the challenges this poses as we regulate around intellectual property. - Dave Witzel

Beginning with Charles Darwin's first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines. - Dave Witzel

Lack of sustainability is, to a significant degree, the product of governance – our decision-making processes and structures favor non-sustainable outcomes. What does “sustainability governance” look like? The book Dynamic Sustainabilities (DS) has expanded my thinking about this. The authors characterize traditional governance as “closing down” questions to conform to “planned equilibrium” thinking and an artificial world. What they propose is governance that “opens up” questions and actions to embrace more fully the challenges of a dynamic world. Well functioning Global Action Networks are governance arrangements that do this. - Dave Witzel

Did you send the first network email? As far as I know, yes. However, there are a few qualifications. Network should be included because there were many earlier instances of email within a single machine. - Dave Witzel

A description of the Taj in Jalalabad, Afghanistan and the "Beer for Data" program. Vinay Gupta interviews Smari McCarthy. Part of a much longer interview that can be found at http://blip.tv/file/1701435 - Dave Witzel

The Greenhouse Gamble™ wheels were developed by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change to better convey uncertainty in climate change prediction. The roulette-style spinning wheels depict the estimated probability, or likelihood, of potential temperature change (global average surface temperature) over the next 100 years. The face of each wheel is divided into colored slices, with the size of each slice representing the estimated probability of the temperature change in the year 2100 falling within that range. - Dave Witzel

The fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip can be taken to be allegorical of not only chance discovery (serendipity) but of other aspects of scientific discovery as well. Just as Horace Walpole coined serendipity, so can the term bahramdipity be derived from the tale and defined as the cruel suppression of a serendipitous discovery. Suppressed, unpublished discoveries are designated nulltiples. - Dave Witzel

The Department for Defense (DOD) is calling for a better system for collecting and analyzing data related to climate change in order to make more accurate forecasts about the world's changing weather patterns. A report by the DOD's Defense Science Board task force calls for the creation of a "climate information system" that will gather intelligence from multiple agencies and experts both inside and outside the federal government, and allow that information to be used to forecast and mitigate the negative effects of climate change. - Dave Witzel

We define social business as the creation of shared value for everybody in a business value chain, including the customer and the communities they live in, online or offline. Social business has evolved from multiple sources and is taking business in a new direction. From the development of micro-finance to today’s customer ecosystems, shared value and social business is all about empowering people and creating a more collaborative human-centred business environment. - Dave Witzel

You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969? Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage. When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!). - Dave Witzel

For Ramji — who would spend more than three and a half years as the company’s chief open source strategist — the moment Bill Gates stood up was the moment Microsoft turned the corner on its approach to free software. “He was given little to no credit by the open source community — or anyone in the tech industry — for really understanding open source and why it can be important, how it can be a competitive advantage, and why when your competitors start to use it, you have to too. He really got it, and in that moment, he taught us all. - Dave Witzel

The sequence with Tyler, Dave, and John suggests how blogs might change economic discourse. Blogs are a more open way to organize competition in the market for ideas. Blogs also allow more people to see economists thinking out loud, something that used to require a seat in the seminar room. - Dave Witzel

What do customers want? What's the real value of products? How can companies deliver more of what their customers want while using fewer resources? This animated video reveals the direction of innovation and explains what it means for businesses and sustainable design. It offers a simple method for companies to align business and environmental goals and a new way to think about products. - Dave Witzel

Building a genuine relationship with another person depends on at least two abilities. The first is seeing the world from another person's perspective. No one knows that better than the skilled entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs succeed when they make stuff people will pay money for -- and that means understanding what's going on in the heads of customers. Likewise, in relationships it's only when you put yourself in the other person's shoes that you begin to develop an honest connection. - Dave Witzel

I’ll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders. - Dave Witzel

But at this conference, everyone spoke. And everyone listened. The level of respect and caring was, really, like nothing I’ve ever seen, much less among a group of 450 people, many of whom were experiencing one another’s physical presence for the first time. It seems like an overstatement, but just as an example, in a session I moderated, I think that every single person attending spoke, offered an opinion, engaged in the discussion with passion and candor but also with respect. And in any session, even if not all voices could fit in, Twitter offered an oft-used outlet for voicing blunt opinions. For whatever reason, we were all comfortable enough among ourselves to say what we really thought, freely…and is there any greater relief for a writer? - Dave Witzel

Public goods are the building blocks of civilisation. Economic stability is itself a public good. So are security, science, a clean environment, trust, honest administration and free speech. The list could be far longer. This matters, because it is hard to secure adequate supply. The more global the public goods the more difficult it is. Ironically, the better we have become at supplying private goods and so the richer we are, the more complex the public goods we need. Humanity’s efforts to meet that challenge could prove to be the defining story of the century. - Dave Witzel

The Green Button is an initiative promoted by Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States. In a speech last fall, he challenged the utility industry to come up with a simple way to allow consumers to access their utility data. Last week, three big California utilities announced they had made the Green Button available on their websites. - Dave Witzel

YouTube is now streaming more than four billion online videos each day, representing a 25% increase in the past eight months, reports Reuters. - Dave Witzel

The use of crowdsourcing in policy making may be a relatively new phenomenon. However, the principles that should guide its use are not. - Dave Witzel

While the notion of the wisdom of the crowd has popular resonance, government should take care to think about what it wants to achieve when engaging the crowd. - Dave Witzel