Here are my raw notes from Joi Ito’s presentation. He is a great speaker, and very interesting.

• Social software didn’t save the world
• But the ecosysem and framework (e.g. internet) is the only way we’re going to solve the problems we have
• Our world is fundamentally messed up, the problems we have are messy
• We made technology to make things faster, more efficient.
• More efficient doesn’t necessarily mean better.
• More efficient means things get brittle, they start to amplify
• Things get non-linear and complex (non-linear means drastic changes. not continuous.)
• Before things were so connected, we still had problems but they didn’t amplify each other
• The only way to deal with complexity is a decentralized system
• The way we deal with world hunger or terrorism is still via centralized planned efforts. they don’t work.
• Book about current political failures. (i think the book is The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Ramo.)
• example: kid with cell phone and laptop. In silicon valley, this kid would go work for Google. But he was in Beirut. What are his options for where he will go?
• When you look at Israel and how they have responded to terrorism, it works best when it is decentralized, not nation-to-nation.
• The solution is to turn these kids into entrepeurs, instead of joining the hesbala.
• World Without Oil
• alternate reality game
• about the future when peak oil has passed and oil has run out
• game is over now, but you can read the forums
• in the forums you see stuff like the high school physics teacher, and the hardware store guy, and the mom who are figuring out how to lower the energy. it’s backyard ingenuity.
• Positive Deviance – Jerry Sternin
• In any culture, where you find disfunction, instead of focusing on on trying to stop the disfunction, you look for cases where the disfunction doesn’t exist. Then you try to amplify the good.
• Example: daughters who confronted mothers in Egypt over genital mutation. They found ways to get this daughters to talk to more people, talk to entire villages, and almost overnight they stopped the practice.
• The Internet
• “I believe very strongly in the Internet. It’s my religion”
• free and open source software has created the nuts and bolts of everything we use
• even google could not have done what they have done without open source software.
• it lowers the cost of innovation, the cost to try things around.
• The Stack:
• Creative Commons
• The Web (W3C)
• The Internet (IETF)
• This stack is the core of the internet. it keeps things low cost.
• It used to be that big companies and governments, with big budgets and experts, would work through standards bodies on specifications that would take years and years and years. These specifications would then go to large contractors and R&D labs, who would make products.
• Now, everyone sits around talking on mailing lists. It’s so easy, a couple of people can do it. It’s based on rough consensus. Just about everything important that has happened on the internet, it is a small group of people, trying things out. They love when people use it in ways it wasn’t anticipated. They don’t try to know the whole thing.
• By comparison, in the old way, there is no way to use it other than intended.
• Japanese have started doing header compression. The television guys have taken the header compression and brought them to the ITU. This is a battle over trying to keep the internet open.
• Having the stack allows people to interoperate without having to renegotiate everything over from the start. e.g. it used to be so hard to mac and PCs to talk together.
• The lower friction from the web allowed an explosion of innovation.
• Now that everything is so open, the friction is so low. Now the problem is the legal costs. The legal fees and time costs can exceed the value of collaboration. 
• So Creative Commons eliminates some of that.
• Joi will tie all this back to saving the world
• Creative Commons
• They have a core of six licenses
• Attribution
• Non-commercial (2/3rds of people elect this)
• No-derivatives (don’t want people to mess with the content of the work, e.g. documentaries)
• Share-alike (if people create a derivative work, they have to share it back with the same license)
• It deters some sharing and reach, because for example, ABC won’t use your work because they won’t share back their whole show under those rights.
• Most bloggers and educators want liberal sharing
• Professional musicians want more constrained sharing
• The point is not to dictate what people should do, but enable people to share they want they want to, without having to have a legal discussion.
• Wikipedia was previously using a free software foundation license. Now using Creative Commons licenses. The problem was that if you had a university professor who was using Creative Commons, they couldn’t use wikipedia content, because the licenses would conflict, even though they were essentially the same.
• License proliferation is bad because it prevents sharing
• It’s like having two internets. One internet allows collaboration and sharing. Two internets means you can’t.
• Nine Inch Nails used Creative Commons licensed. They grossed $1.6M in the first week. Top selling album on iTunes, even though it was also available free. 
• The cost of failure is so low, you can try lots of things. e.g. Linus Torvalds saying “I’m going to create an Operating System.”
• A company can spend millions of dollars thinking about whether to do something, and then millions more getting ready to do it. They would never do something like Linux or Amazon or Google.
• Doplr went into a cabin and prototyped it over a weekend.
• There is no idea you shouldn’t be able to prototype in a week.
• It’s cheaper and easier to prototype something than it is to create a presentation and try to explain things. 
• Examples of organizations
• Global Voices: network of bloggers, regional heads aggregate in each region. And then aggregate at higher levels. They do translation. The purpose is to give voice to each region, and enable a global conversation.
• Witness: gives resources to human rights organization to record and share video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations
• Meetup: For profit. Thought of doing it as a non-profit. We think of non-profits as volunteer work, and for-profits as IPO work, but there is a whole range of in between. Meetup has a tremendous amount of social good, and the founder only cares about saving the world, and makes money to keep the company going.
• Architecture for humanity: get designs for building, license them under creative commons license. architecture is quite hard, so sharing it and opening it up is tremendously valuable. designs for hospitals and schools.
• The Girl Effect: the power social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate.
• Lulan Artisans: teaches women and girls how to knit, dye fabric, make money. Founder wanted to stop human trafficking, and the way to do that was to enable the woman to make money. They make more money than the man. So instead of selling the women, they are more valuable in the family. Thing has done more to stopping human trafficking than almost anything else. 
• Keys
• empower people financially
• give voice

Sorry, these notes are a bit messy than usual. It was an interesting session format…

• What is a socially responsible geek?
• Non-profit versus No profit
• Transitioning from corp work
• triple bottom line / alternate business models
• 4 empty seats
• Modified Samoan Fishbowl
• Really a desire to learn about different types of business organization. A co-op as opposed to a partnership or a corporation. 
• Annie Bruno: materials geek, have a consulting business that does deep research into materials impact
• Philip Dja? Uja? : drupal shop
• Web of Change conference…
• Why aren’t you doing what you really care about?
• It is a positive experience loving what you do
• Many people come into it with a starving artist perspective… if i do what i want to do, i won’t be able to make money.
• One thing that has helped me get over a fear of profit is having employees. when it was just my partner and i, it felt greedy to take profits. but when we had all these amazing employees, i realized i wanted to be able to hire them and keep them there, and provide for them.
• Sarah, from Australian: curious how many people are from non-profits, looking to technology, how many people from geek world who want to be socially conscious. poll showed room was 90% geeks.
• Max Whitney, NYU, central IT. essentially a non-profit. Recently tried to be recruited to a massive internet company. But her response was that it wasn’t very stable…only been there for 10 years. Her question… They need to hire people, can pay only a third of what a big internet company can pay, how can they get talented people to come do worthwhile things.
• A: if you create a business you want it to be profitable. if you don’t make a profit, it goes away.
• B, latino, worked for presidential campaign. 1 out of 4 babies born in the US is latino, yet when you come to SXSW, there are no latinos. want to leverage and engage technology. civil rights organizations are so far behind environmental organization when it comes to adopting the technology. how can we all work together to share best practices, how can we work together in solidarity, rather than in silos. could build real political power if all worked together. how can a community take the internal power they have, and work with other communities. 
• C, agency in portland. Personally socially conscious, but have to come to work everyday and make ways to sell more cola to kids. Want to do socially conscious stuff, but in the non-profit world, either need 10 years experience grant writing, or would have to make the same salary she made coming out of school.
• response: There are jobs available, you have to find them. Partly it is selling the whole lifecycle: normal work hours, being happy, etc. some non-profits can afford to hire agencies, some cannot do it at the regular rates.
• resources: netsquared.org, puts on net tuesdays, for people to network.
• college students are coming out of school with $100k to $300k in student loan debt. If you work at non-profits, after 10 years, you can get the loans forgiven. This can add up to $30k/year in a benefit to the employee.
• one option is to do volunteer work. maybe you may still be at an agency to make money, but you could use skills to volunteer at organization. e.g. manage a non-profits social media.
• VP marketing from patagonia there.
• socially conscious marketing does work.
• for profit company, but a company that does believe strongly in doing good.
• they give 1% of revenue away (about $35m over many years) to non-profits, primary those that benefit the earth.
• they try to be as sustainable as possible, but avoidable to pollute somewhat.
• grassroots activists schooling: they teach people how to be activists, write grants, give presentations, etc.
• Dawn, from Intuit. They are committed to social responsibility (will: they are?). They do fundraising for non-profits, give 32 hours paid volunteer time per year. Their question, how can they leverage their skills in technology to help non-profits. For people in non-profits, they have skills that they can bring to for-profits, to help them blend their for-profit and do-gooder sides.
• (gap in notes because I went up to speak)
• Suggestion of Four Hour Work Week book, because it can make you more effective and efficient so you can get your day job done in 20 hours a week, and spend more time launching things on the side, or volunteering.
• Idea for Crowdsourcing Non-Profit ideas… have a site where people can propose ideas, and corporations can fund them.

Resources:

• http://www.netsquared.org/
• Four Hour Work Week http://bit.ly/bADd4A

• Social media ethnographer
• Looks at how people use social media in their lives
• been blogging about this for 13 years
• Wonders how does social media transform society
• Is an activist: wants to make the future we want.
• Everyone is involved in social media at some extent. Everyone is seeing the transformation.
• One of the puzzles is how privacy and publicity intertwine.
• Privacy is not dead. People care about it. But what privacy means is not necessarily what people think. Privacy is control over having what information is shared. When people feel that they don’t have control over their environment and their setting, then they feel like their privacy has been violated.
• Recent fail: Google buzz. Google has taken a trust hit, because of people’s experience. 
• People were given option to be part of buzz. As part of opt-in experience, they were given a default list of people that they would probably want to follow. That list of people was publicly listed in their profile.
• Nothing they did was technically wrong, and they gave users plenty of chances to opt-out, turn things off, etc.
• Google Mistakes
• Google integrated a public facing system inside one of the most private systems possible. Many users thought Google was exposing their private email to the entire world. Not true, but it caused a panic.
• Google assumed people would opt-out if they didn’t want to participate. More and more technology companies seem to think it is OK to thrust things onto user, and then back up later if people freak out.
• People wanted to check it out, so they accepted the defaults to opt-in. But it was hard to opt-out. People got confused. Were afraid they would cancel their gmail account.
• You want your application to go viral, but throwing everyone into the water and accepting a few drownings is not an acceptable way to do that.
• “Hello, how are you?” is not an optimal way to start a conversation, but it is an essential social convention. Technologies frequently overlook essential social conventions in favor of optimal experiences. e.g. it’s one thing to start a conversation by volunteering your age, sex, location, but it is weird if someone else looks that up in your profile and uses that to start a conversation with you.
• Social network types:
• articulated (linkedin)
• behaviorial (e.g. AT&T knows we’re all in the same room as SXSW) 
• personal 
• Google made the mistake of merging articulated and behaviorial social networks. We just don’t understand those kinds of networks as well as we do personal networks.
• Just because something is publicly available doesn’t mean people want it publicized. 
• Learning to trust
• a conversation with a friend… you think the conversation is private, but there is nothing to stop your friend from telling others. you develop trust over time. but it can easily be broken. 
• “walls have ears”
• we want an architecture that protects privacy
• but there can be eavesdroppers
• when sitting in public…
• you have certain expectations of who you might encounter, and the maximize number of people who could show up
• if your mother, who lived 3,000 miles showed up, or if your entire high school class showed up, you’d freak out.
• Online environments are harder to figure out than offline environments. we’re still trying to structure the environment and learn the norms
• Security through obscurity
• Technorati found that the average blog is read by six people
• Ears and mouths
• Early adopters are consistently surprised how communities change when adopted by the mainstream
• Privacy Fail #2: Facebook changes in december 2009
• Facebook asked users to change the settings for how to share information
• 35% set their settings to be private
• 65% unconsciously made their settings public by accepting the defaults
• Among non-technies, Danah asked people what they thought their settings were, and what they actually work. And not a single person had settings that matched what they thought
• People who could be at risk by sharing information publicly (e.g. teen girl with abusive father, who moved thousands of miles away to get away from him, unknowly accepted the new Facebook defaults, with the result that her information was available to her abusive father
• PII versus PEI: personally identifiable information vs. personally embarrassing information
• People want to share PII, they want to control PEI
• People want to share a limited amount of information because sharing private information establishes a bond
• Conversations in social media are public by default, private thru effort. Conversations previously are private, public thru effort.
• People think about what they have to gain or lose by being in public
• Teens tend to think about what they have to gain
• Adults tend to think about what they have to lose
• Not the adults at SXSW mostly…
• Teens want to be seen by their peers, but they don’t want to be seen by people who have power over them.
• People want to have things in public, but not publicized.
• Taking something that is in public and making it more public (e.g. facebook, google mistakes) is violating the established norm
• Teenagers want to become celebrities, but they are unaware of the actual stress and pressures of being a celebrities. Teens today were not alive when paparazzi drove Princess Di to her death.
• Publicity
• Many people assume that because twitter and facebook are visually similar, people use them in the same way
• Facebook is about communicating with people you know
• Twitter started out this way, but it has become the place for people who want to develop an audience.
• In some cases, it can be a way to develop a level of intimacy in public: example of celebrity who couldn’t go out in public without guards, but could interact with fans via twitter
• Teens and tweens are highly involved in twitter compared to people’s expectations
• Justin , a teen star, was a trending topic for 18 of 20 days. 
• Black users highly visible.
• Many white users responded poorly
• As a privileged person, I believe I have certain rights: to be online, to be in public, (lots more good stuff.)
• But many people don’t have these options… people who are illegal immigrants, people who have abusive ex-partners, LGBT folks have lost jobs, been kicked out of the military.
• Can your child’s teacher have an online profile? Can they express their religious views? Post photos from a party?
• Offline, people can switch their context. They can put on their teacher persona when they meet a parent or student on the street. Online, people can’t change personas. 
• Chatroulette: get randomly connected to a stranger with a video chat. You can talk to a stranger. If you don’t like it, you click next. 
• A source of concern among adults… who worry about things like their kids getting exposed to someone’s genitalia.
• But the site was developed by a 17 year old russian teen
• But the stories of people using it are heartwarming. One wanted to play rockband with an audience, some want to talk to others about college, etc.
• Odd combination of privacy and publicity. Private space (happens in bedroom, livingroom), but talking to strangers.
• People can be geo-located based on IP address. 
• No magical formula for privacy and publicity.
• They are processes, evolving, being transformed.
• No easy answer.
• What you want today will change tomorrow.
• How you do it in one place is very different from another place.
• When you moved from Web 1.0 to 2.0, you deploy living code. You learn to embrace the complexity of your users. 
• You have to figure out what people want. If you expose people, you lose trust, and may put others at risk. 
• Parenting…
• Forget about “back in my day”. It doesn’t exist.
• The key is to ask questions. What are trying to achieve? How would you feel if other people were looking? 
• You, as an adult, are not expert, so it will be something you need to figure out with your child.
• Marketing…
• Just because you can see someone doesn’t mean they want to be seen by you.
• Just because you see what they are saying doesn’t mean you understand them.
• Pew found 85% of adults want control over their information.
• People want privacy, and they want a sense of control.
• It’s not about having something to hide. It’s about having a sense of control. It’s about having a place to open up.
• Angelina Jolie say she puts out so much information in public because then she could maintain some information in private. Bloggers find this too. The more they share, the more that others assume that is the whole picture. So what is left can stay more private.

#bigbrotherinyourbrain
#sxswi

• Neuroscience – Dr. Danielle Stolzenberg
• emotion is necessary for cognition
• story about road trip, got drowsy, and pulled over at road stop. got a feeling to lock the doors, and she says to her friend to lock the door. later, a truck driver tried to get into the car.
• this was actually a subconcious emotional reponse: some piece of sensory input was processed by the brain, to create an emotion, which inspired the decision to lock the door
• descartes’ error, by antonio damasio
• story of experiment with decks of cards, some more positive than others
• subjects would subconsciously respond to the deck, would sweat more when pulling from a negative deck.
• but they had no conscious strategy.
• mesolimbic dopamine system… controls how the brain processes sensory input and how much the sensory input is paid attention to
• Kogelschatz – background is marketing
• the science of google
• “the database of intentions, a living artifact of immense power” – john battelle, federated media publishing
• google will eventually pass the turing test
• google uses eye tracking to see how customers 
• Gary Koepke — marketing
• how does the creative process use neuroscience?
• Pradeep Pho – showed cool video of neuroscience rap song.
• talk about networks processing sensory input. activation levels of networks is the basic architecture
• Dooley – Marketing
• study of marketing campaigns
• 20% had very positive impact -> 100% increase
• 20% had moderate positive impact -> 50% increase
• 20% had small positive impact (20% increase), 20% had no impact, 20% had small negative impact (20% decrease)
• no “super ads” likely that would turn people into a bunch of zombies
• Does sex sell, how about humor?
• Some people react positively, and some react negatively.
• Did an ad for cadillac, put a woman in a sexy situation. 39% sales increase. not overt, not objectifying.
• humor can work.
• some of it can be able creating discomfort. old spice ad…. sexy, humor, discomfort. making fun of marketing. irreverence. 
• an easy laugh isn’t always the best way to go, nor is overt sexuality.
• Big brother in your brain?
• Roger Dooley
• What is the extent to which people can influence our decision process?
• Choice Architecture. 
• People were asked to choose from among tents on Amazon.com. Experimenters changed the order for each test. the one in the first position sold at 2.5x the rate of any others, regardless of qualities of the product.
• Decoy Marketing
• If you have an existing expensive product, you can make a second product which is inferior, but almost as expensive as the expensive product, and this will cause the expensive product to sell more.
• Putting a pretty girl on a flyer caused home mortgage customers to choose a significantly higher interest rate mortgage.
• AK Pradeep
• The brain hates straight lines and jagged lines. Apple products have almost none of either. The brain likes 3-5 things. A web page with more than 3-5 image groups confuses the reader.
• We pay the most attention to faces that are hard to decipher. Faces reveal emotion, emotion reveals intent. The primative creative inside me wonders if the person next to me is going to attack me. If a person is smiling, I can ignore them. If the person has an undecipherable expression, it is computationally too difficult to figure it out. The brain spends more time dwelling on it. Supermodels walking down the runway always look a little pissed. An expression that is hard to decipher makes them memorable. Great artists figured this out. The Mona Lisa would not be the Mona Lisa if she was smiling.
• Questions
• What are the 3 big things we can learn from neurscience, that we couldn’t just learn from behavior studies?
• If you ask people what part of a 30 second commercial they liked, it is very hard to do.
• If you asked people which part of a piece of music, which part is emotionally provocative. We don’t have the language to express it. But with neuroscience, we can figure it out, so we can recreate it.
• neuroscience does not necessarily discover new principles, but it allows you to narrow in and focus on what is the most provocative.
• the moment between moments is most provocative for the brain. the brain goes nuts.
• the most provocative moment when eating chips and salsa, it turns out to be  the moment of lifting the salsa covered chip to your mouth with the expectation that it will momentarily be in your mouth. the chip needs to have a curve to hold the salsa, the salsa had to have a certain thickness and chunkiness. this can be discovered with neuroscience. and this attention to detail is what steve jobs does with every aspect of apple products.
• what is the right number of products to offer to achieve highest conversion?
• what is more important than number or order is context and primacy.
• primacy can be the connection to what has been before. 
• 1, 2, 3 is important.
• in the old days, if you were in the jungle, if there was a herd of animals, you had to evaluate if you had found dinner or you were going to be dinner. so we can quickly evaluate 3 to 5 or less, or “a lot”. 
• computer analogy: the computation/analysis happens in hardware for 3 to 5, and in software for more than that.
• Is there a way to innoculate ourselves or children against marketing messages?
• AK Pradeep: father of five kids. very much against marketing to kids.
• common thing for parent to tell children to do their homework, have dinner, watch tv, go to sleep.
• should flip the order: watch tv, then dinner, then homework.
• because during the REM cycle, the brain processes input, and it processes what it did last… so if they watch TV before bed, they process the TV. if they do homework before bed, they process homework.
• would like to see us marketing science to kids
• (will: it seems to me that this could be true of adults as well. do something educational right before bed…)
• AK Pradeep has book coming out: The Buying Brain: http://bit.ly/c4uNtb

I’ve attended SXSW Interactive both as a presenter and ordinary attendee several times, and I thought I would share a few tips for making the most of your experience.

1. Be in the moment: Don’t go to a session and then check out and read email, surf the web, or do work. SXSW is precious. Make the most of your time by being totally immersed in what is going on. 
2. Power is scarce: It’s hard to find outlets to plugin and recharge all your gadgets. You can usually find outlets around the perimeter of the room. It helps to bring a travel outlet strip, so that if all outlets are taken, you can plug in your power strip, and make more outlets. It’s also good to recharge over lunch, so when you head for a restaurant, don’t forget to look for outlets there.
3. Conserve power: If you are taking notes on your computer or blogging the sessions, you may want to turn off wifi on your laptop to save power (and to keep your focus on the session, so you don’t start random web surfing.) I usually use my smartphone to follow twitter and email so I’m still connected.
4. Follow the #SXSWi tag on twitter: You want to follow #SXSWi so that if another session is excellent and your session kind of sucks, then you can make the switch quickly. (or conversely find out if a room is already packed and can’t fit any more.)
5. Follow the twitter tag for whatever session you are in: There will be a back channel of conversation about the session you are in that is almost as valuable as the primary speakers. SXSW is full of experts, both presenting and in the crowd, and you want to tap into all of that wisdom. This doesn’t violate tip #1, because you are not being distracted by something different, but rather tapping into more of what you are already there for.
6. Better talks are usually in bigger rooms: If you are trying to decide between two talks, and one is in a bigger room, go with the one in the bigger. Higher quality and well known presenters get bigger rooms, and usually deliver better talks. If there is a highly focused niche topic in a small room, by all means go to it, if you value that particular topic. But if it is choice between several general topics, go with the bigger room.
7. Talk to the people around you: SXSWi is a social place. The people around you are likely to be very experienced, smart, interesting people. Start up conversations, and make dinner plans with strangers, and keep going until 2am. The wisdom of the crowd is not just an abstract thing at SXSW – it is manifest in the people all around you. Talk to them.