curiosity {app}

Perhaps the best way to unleash the genius in each person, that art that gets us out of bed everyday, to put in the 10,000 hours of expertise (or whatever), is to set us free, in spaces of permission, where we have nothing to prove. And where there’s plenty of crowdsourcing for gatherings that matter. [ie: finding our people everyday is a breeze.]

Perhaps the best way to unleash the genius in each person, is to facilitate and crowdsource curiosities. [ie: hastening the time between intention and action.]

Imagine a c\app. Imagine google glass/siri/everest, et al, via a necklace (or wherever/however you want to wear it – chip) as accessible to everyone, under the guise/default/commons of public education.

ie: tech as it could be.. as a means to non hierarchical listening.. so we can org around legit needs

let’s just facil daily curiosity ie: cure ios city; 2 conversations ..as infra

app/chip update (2014) ideas:

• app flow (zoom out)
• app flow (input)
• app flow (output)

thinking wearable – frees us up to us – even more

You’ve got to make the systems so that they help people pay attention to the world in front of them.

– Clive Thompson

In order for this to happen, we are suggesting the removal of compulsion from our current definition of public education.

No doubt, no delusion, chaos is sure to abound. We’re wanting to create and prototype an app to ground that chaos as well as provide an echo chamber of sorts.

An app that would encourage/create/support:

1\ People talking to themselves daily, asking themselves if they are doing what matters. Self-assessment vs standardized assessment.

2\ People connecting to people in their city/community, a strategic serendipity. Finding others that are noticing, dreaming about, wanting to connect and/or do, the same things.

3\ People’s mesh network, their footprint or trail. The future intention economy, where credentialing comes from a networked individualism expanded/grown over time.

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chip/app functionality: 1. listen w/o judgment/agenda 2. connect to others (local) via word recognition 3. create/leave a trail/mapping

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A couple of scenarios:

#1 Julia & Vicki & Tom

[graphic above links to page/graphics of just this scenario]

Julia, age 12, uses a donated/recycled laptop and the donated wifi from the wifi bank, to voice record the following before she goes to bed:

I noticed a lot of my friends’ parents have cancer. They keep talking about early detection. I asked my mom and she said if you find out early on, the cancer can usually be cured, but that not enough people find out early. I also watched a video of a 17-year-old that wrote a recipe to cure cancer and is now working at Stanford. I’m dreaming about finding ways to improve early detection. I want to connect to people who are experts at this and see what I can learn from them.

Vicki, age 25, uses her iphone and texts while waiting at the doctor’s office:

I just found out my mom has cancer. They told her they didn’t find it soon enough and that it’s spreading too fast. I’ve got to research myself, find out some other answers for her.

Tom, age 7, uses his mom’s ipad and his family’s wifi access, to record the following:

My mom has been doing this healing stuff my whole life. I’ve never believed in it before. But she started doing it with me, because I have/had asthma, and now I don’t have it anymore. I’m really interested in seeing if it can help people with cancer.

The app connects them.

A mesh network created for each of these could have one small node representing their intense curiosity and that’s it. Or, it could be the start of an offshoot node, as they advance into the study of health and medicine. Either way, this cancer node could be detected by the app in a couple weeks by someone else talking to themselves about the same things and then they all receive notification of another potential connection.

#2 Joe & Miguel

Joe, age 15, uses the free wifi from the wifi bank and his free recycled cell, and he texts on morning:

I notice we waste water every time it rains. The public sprinklers keep running. I would love to fix that.

Miguel, age 72, a retired teacher, uses his laptop and types that afternoon:

I noticed the sprinklers in the city run when it’s raining, I’m imagining saving tons of taxpayers money & water by fixing that, I want to connect to city people or whoever to figure out what can be done.

That evening, Joe and Miguel receive each other’s text #, with the topic that connected them, other numbers if others mentioned the same/similar, and possibly a suggested location for meeting up.

Joe, would already have a mentor/facilitator (be known by someone), but it may have initially been by appointment (ie: if everyone in our district was freed right now, 1:8 ratio, so we’d connect 8 kids to one adult just to get rolling). Joe & Miguel could hit it off and Miguel could become Joe’s person, or they could just fix the sprinkler problem and that would be it.

Depending on how things turn out…one of the nodes on Joe’s future mesh network could be the company he started for sprinkler systems, or that he got into programming from this initial venture.

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The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

—Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society

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You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.   ― Buckminster Fuller

perhaps the c (pronounced see) in c\app will help us see more..

ongoing thinking:

app/chip update ideas

• how to ensure the focus doesn’t go toward the sync, and like agriculture, we lose site of the why, and focus only on some pre-determined efficiency. perhaps we keep the focus on curiosity – the natural whimsy of a person. becoming more and more natural (eudaimonious), the more free the person truly feels. ie: the more they feel they have nothing to prove.
• how to create a device (some small chip you can create/add to your necklace, bracelet, bobby pin, glasses, headband, shoe, cell phone, laptop, earring, ..?) that you determine when to take it off, put it on. and how cool if now people know enough code, (or this gives them desire to learn code) that everyone codes their own device, creates their own device. we’ve been prototyping a non-functional device (Alex’s suggestion) which really opens up open. your not handed a device with set functions, you create functions.. as you wish.. flexible/perpetually in beta even. siri/neurocam/arduino/personal fabrication/wit(dot)ai– ness.
• how to be the least intrusive to people – worldwide – who are doing/being – wearable?
• how to create/sustain an accessible/abundant data base – via redefinition of public ed – the only ask is that you put it on for minimum of 3 minutes a day… to talk to yourself. so then we have a ginormous data base.. from every person, for at least 10 seconds a day, to draw on.. to see what we have been missing in regard to the interconnectedness in our own city.

[imagine the data from 3 minutes a day in a community of 70,000.  imagine the serendipitous interconnectedness – hastening the time between intention and action.]

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cure ios city