This blog posting coming to you upside-down
Hamish MacEwan was my host last night at Thursday Night Curry. Very lively group. Matthew Cruickshank has created Docvert, which takes MSN files and coverts them to open standards outputs. Roger De Salis is bravely rolling out fiber (fx.net.nz) across New Zealand. Lots of people want to talk about copyright policy and open source. It was a long thin (loud) table, so I didn't get to hear about everyone's efforts. But I did get the strong sense that this is a cooperative, energetic bunch that is making a lot of headway.
On the way across the Pacific, I read Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Written 45 years ago, it couldn't be more relevant.
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other. .. The intricate order of cities — a manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plan — is in many ways a great wonder. We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is.
Jacobs's point, made in many beautiful and different ways in this book, is that cities aren't art. Attempts to plan cities by, say, completely segregating residential uses on long blocks with narrow sidewalks–so there's nowhere to buy a cup of coffee or a newspaper–or optimizing for cars (so that sidewalks are narrowed and parks are cut off from people) have disastrous deadening results. She exalts the general-purpose sidewalk as a key element of city life. A sidewalk's strength is that it's not optimized for any particular use.
Planning the internet, like planning a city around the needs of cars, may destroy the delicate interdependencies among the zillions of components that create order online. We can't see the internet the way we can see Greenwich Village, but a variety of things are happening online that make for an unbelievably diverse and lively environment.