|
|
|
|
Minutes of Meeting at Stanford Can We Help Google Create a Better World? (announcement) May 26, 2004 Reuters
Digital Visions Program Lounge 1-3PM Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google attended, explaining that his job was to make sure that you get what you wanted when you type in the text to the Google search bar. His "passion" listed on Orkut.com is "making the world a better place," and he has an eclectic background as one of the world's leading computer scientists, including a look at what it would have been like if Abraham Lincoln had used PowerPoint at Gettysberg. His software responsibility is to search a "haystack" of 30 terabytes (3 million megabytes) of data to find the the "needle" being searched. Peter has done research on artificial intelligence, pattern languages, and George Lakoff and "Metaphors we live by." Other attendees were Jan Hauser, Dave Davidson, Ed Dunphy, and Tom Munnecke. (over dinner that night, we continued the discussion with GivingSpace oldtimers Duncan Work and Jack Park) Googler and Reuters Digital Visions Fellow Megan Smith helped set up the meeting, but was unable to make it personally. David Brin also contributed some ideas before the meeting (David has been patiently brainstorming ideas for making the world a better place with me for several years, called these ideas "surprisingly understandable and practical.") Roberta Baskin, former correspondent for Now with Bill Moyers, producer of 20/20, and Nieman Fellow at Harvard also brainstormed some of the media-related issues of these ideas before the meeting. Of particular interest was Google's ability to associate "interesting" links culled from massive amounts of data. Is there some way to associate information for making the world a better place? Mass media tends to focus on the most visually stimulating pathological extreme - an aircraft accident, for example. Reporting the list of successful airplane landings would not be newsworthy to the mass media. To a much smaller set of people (on or waiting for a particular plane, for example) this information is of great interest. Being able to associate specific topics to specific interests can break out of the "if it bleeds, it leads" media effect and open the door for more interesting, positive news. I spoke of the role of framing discourse around the positive. While the news was largely about what is wrong with the world and the problems we face, there is little systematic information and ways of linking to that which is positive and life-affirming. After considerable discussion of what could be done, I asked the question, "What is the simplest thing we could do to get started?" Two ideas emerged as candidates: 1. Add a "Better World" section to the Google news aggregator at the same level as sections for Sci/Tech, Business, World, etc. People would come to this section to discover and read about people, communities, and ideas about making the world a better place. This, of course, introduces the question of how to figure out if something belongs in this section. This is very much the right question to be asking; opening up this space in the news aggregator thus forces the question. [Peter asked where they might scan for such news. I asked a few newsgroups for suggestions and came up with these as a sample starter set.] 2. Add a positive social network model to Orkut, a social networking site associated with Google. Questions profiling Orkut members currently tend to be driven by the interests of 20 somethings. With only some minor changes, this could be modified to allow people to relate to each other according to their interests and activities in making the world a better place. This would allow people to discover others with similar or complementary interests by topic, location, relationship, reputation, etc. Either or both of these ideas could serve as starting points for more sophisticated behind the scenes processing... to be continued. Tom Munnecke Palo Alto, May 27, 2004 |
