d o w n s t r e a m

Former IT architect, inspired by the Internet's potential. Based in California. Working to raise awareness of what happens downstream from our actions. Hopeful that, in the long run, I = PA/T

[dwnstrm]

Is Beekeeping Wrong?

Parasites and pesticides have brought chaos to bee colonies throughout the world. Natural beekeepers want to transform our relationship to t

Truth! I’m of the same school as this guy in Oxfordshire. The commercialization of bees in very bad, a microcosm of all that’s wrong with the agro economy

[culturenlifestyle]

Street Artist Brings Awareness To The Declining Bee Colonies Due To Urbanization On Stunning Street Murals

Louis Masai Michel is a global street artist who has conquered the streets of London, where the intriguing subject of his art has contagiously been picked up in Bristol, Devon, Glastonbury, Croatia, New York, Miami, and New Orleans as well as get many other art endorsers on board throughout the world. The humble and busy bee is making it’s way around the street, in swarms of beautiful large murals that bring focus to its plight. In a bid to save the species from colony collapse and the series implications that arise, Michel started on the project straight after a trip from South Africa, where he learned about them and was inspired to turn to his art to solve this environmental issue.

Keep reading

[webuiltthiscity]

The wonderful Paul Madonna’s last post on “All Over Coffee.” Read the whole thing here. More about his decision to retire the strip here. “All Over Coffee” has been a gift to the city of San Francisco, and he deserves a standing ovation for his wonderful body of work. 

[dwnstrm]

Financial Services author and pundit had a lot of nice things to say about Dreamforce 14

[webuiltthiscity]

One of my favorite mosaics in the whole city: Owl Tree, at the corner of Taylor and Post

[dwnstrm]

I love the Owl Tree even more with this new mosaic. The tile setter is AndreI Lishchishyn, who I'm proud to say did the tile in my bathroom and kitchen.

[thereconstructionists]

When she penned her 1962 book Silent Spring, marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) loudly, if perhaps unwittingly at the time, announced what’s been termed ” The Age of Ecology” and became a key figure in pioneering the modern environmental movement.

Today, when sustainability is on every corporate and cultural agenda and the deluge of news of environmental collapse is never-ending, it’s hard to appreciate just how radical Carson’s tireless advocacy was at the time — and yet, more than half a century ago, she presaged one of today’s most pervasive, inescapable concerns:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

With Silent Spring, which not only was the Inconvenient Truth of its day but also paved the way for the very existence of such contemporary efforts, Carson made more people take environmental concerns to heart than anyone ever had before. Particularly opposed to the use of pesticides, she withstood unrelenting attacks by chemical companies and effected a landmark change in pesticide policy, resulting in a nationwide ban on chemical pesticides like DDT and spurring the grassroots environmental movement that eventually produced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental historian Linda Lear captures Carson’s legacy in all its tragedy and beauty in Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, where she writes:

Rachel Carson was an unlikely person to start any sort of popular movement. She treasured her solitude, defended her privacy, rarely joined any organization; but she meant to bear witness. She wrote a revolutionary book in terms that were acceptable to a middle class emerging from the lethargy of postwar affluence and woke them to their neglected responsibilities. It was a book in which she shared her vision of life one last time. In the sea and the bird’s song she had discovered the wonder and mystery of life. Her witness for these, and the integrity of all life, would make a difference.

Sixteen years after Carson succumbed to breast cancer, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honor, also bestowed upon reconstructionsts Margaret Mead and Georgia O’Keeffe — by Jimmy Carter. So enormous was Carson’s cultural impact and so far-reaching her legacy that her story was even adapted in a children’s book.

Learn more: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature | Wikipedia

[beekahuna]

We need another Rachael Carson today.

[www-tech-bull]

[dwnstrm]

I'm thinking about taking a little detour with binoculars the next time I cross the Bay Bridge.

An enormous floating barge has emerged in the San Francisco Bay, which tech-savvy sleuths suspect is a massive data center being constructed by Google, the CNET blog reported.

The huge floating structure “stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers....

[dwnstrm]

The internet is at risk of transforming from an open platform to controlled national networks.  This balkanization of the net is bad news for companies who net presence is at the center of their business, and for netizens who want unimpeded access to information and services from these providers around the globe.

If that’s not enough to convince you that leaks about the NSA’s PRISM program are damaging to the Internet industry, consider this piece, also from FT.com: US cloud computing industry could lose up to $35bn - a survey by Cloud Security Alliance found that among the non-US respondents, 10 per cent said they had cancelled a project with a US-based cloud computing provider while 56 per cent said that they would be less likely to use a US-based cloud computing service.

And as the Backlash over US snooping intensifies, former Microsoft Security officer Casper Bowden weighed in to say “We’ve reached a decision point about European sovereignty. Either we rely on the US for our data capacity forever or we bite the bullet and say we need our own cloud software industry.”

[dwnstrm]

Green Grid - Data Center Pulse Collaboration: A Model for Industry

The Green Grid Technical Committee heard a compelling proposal from Data Center Pulse Founder and Chairman Dean Nelson today. His recommendation addresses a weakness in the otherwise formidable Green Grid value to the IT industry, which today is dominated by vendor interests.

Data Center Pulse is driving an agenda built around addressing data center operators' primary pain points and opportunities for improved efficiency. Dean's proposal to The Green Grid (TGG) was to establish formal collaboration between the Data Center Pulse membership - individuals who run data centers - and TGG's consortium of companies. Their list of Top 10 Challenges provides the roadmap for collaboration.

The collaborative approach between these two influential groups is a pragmatic one. Data center operators and IT vendors are both confronting the possibility of regulators stepping in to dictate metrics and compliance criteria. In the highly complex business of data centers, it will be very hard for bureaucrats to get it right. Standards and metrics forged directly by not only the companies producing data center products, but also by the people using them, will result in more appropriate and achievable compliance goals. Regulator, vendor, end user, and public interests are highly aligned around the top level goal of improved efficiency, so this collaborative model presented by Data Center Pulse should bolster the IT industry's defense of self regulation.

Taxpayers and industry interests alike should welcome this kind of opportunity to avoid greater bureaucracy. I'd go even further to say this model should be the preferred approach in all industry regulation scenarios. Bureaucrats can contribute by examining the balance and effectiveness of collaboration between end users and vendors, between the producers and consumers, rather than forming expensive, often misguided, and inevitably insufficient regulatory bodies to inspect individual operations. Of course, the TGG - Data Center Pulse collaborative model is the exception much more that the rule when you look across industries. Little is being done to connect end users of USDA beef, with feedlot operators and meat packers, for example. A lot of work and cultural shift will need to occur before consumers of car wax will have any say in the design and production of Turtle Wax. Still, I think this is a worthy goal, and one I believe can be achieved by following the many lessons of the IT industry's ability to regulate itself, like this collaboration between TGG and Data Center Pulse. Thank you Dean for a successful proposal.

[dwnstrm]

I Smell the Future

SixthSense is the much heralded Augmented Reality technology developed at MIT’s Media Lab by Pranav Mistry. No, it doesn’t actual bring the sense of smell to the digital world, but it does give us a new way to blend the digital world and real world in a much more seamless and natural way.

In his November 2009 TEDIndia talk, Pranav shares his belief that this technology has the potential to reclaim our humanity. SixthSense will steer us from becoming Computers interacting with Computers to humans interacting with the digital world as we would the real world.

SixthSense was first brought to the global stage in March at TED in March 2009 by Pranav’s professor, Pattie Maes. Comparing that talk with Pranav’s November talk, you see that this is not another grad student project destined to sit on the shelf after the inventor graduates - the catalog of use cases has clearly expanded in past seven months. One use case that Pattie alludes to, but is missing from Pranav’s more recent talk, is the potential to evaluate the environmental impact of retail goods while you’re shopping. This use case is at the heart of what we want to enable at downstream.org. Today by the use of barcode, and tomorrow, thanks to SixthSense, visual object detection/recognition.

The future for SixthSense is made more exciting by Pranav’s plans to opensource the technology. He cites his desire to bring it to the masses, rather than keep it cloistered in the research domain, as motivation to open this up. Let’s hope he is successful in those plans. Choice of license may be one of the most important decisions he makes in the evolution of SixthSense. With so many obvious and wide ranging improvements it would be a shame to see the potential get locked up in a commercial fork that dominates the device options and turns it into nothing more than an ad platform.

More background on SixthSense and Pranav Mistry:

IBN video story on SuperStars of Science

MIT Research Highlight on SixthSense

Whitepaper: Wear Ur World - A Wearable Gestural Interface (PDF)

Other projects from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT

[dwnstrm]

Building Change

As blame for the 2005 Katrina disaster continues to be doled out, residents of the devastated region are taking steps to protect themselves against future storms and to not fall victim to “gross negligence” on the part of federal agencies.

A recent example of this self reliance is the Biloxi, MS Model Home “Porchdog”. This residence, recently completed and now occupied, is the product of a design process that took the local conditions and occupants needs into consideration and was facilitated by Architecture for Humanity.

[dwnstrm]

The Sustainability Challenge: Can the Internet Help?

Today’s Green:Net event in San Francisco’s Presidio District brought together some of the most informed and influential people working at the intersection of sustainable business and high tech. It was good to see this cross section so enthusiastically pursuing opportunities for improving the environment and their bottom lines while most of the rest of the economy is struggling to stay afloat. I was proud to represent Sun, which was one of the three event sponsors.

No Consensus Here

Kudos to the Green:Net organizers for hosting a wide spectrum of perspectives in the keynotes and panels of this one day conference. The poles of the spectrum were aptly represented by Saul Griffith and Bob Metcalfe. Both of these engaging speakers are big heros of mine.

Both have expansive knowledge relevant to dealing with society’s energy dependence. But they differ on the approach to meeting the challenge. I think Griffith would agree with Metcalfe when he said, “Our goal is not to darken the Earth,” but he would differ with the Internet tycoon on priorities. Metcalfe, true to his venture capitalist roots, believes the real challenge is to feed the every increasing demand for energy, and he cites the evolution of the Internet as a great reference case for meeting that challenge. Griffith’s perspective, on the other hand, places the priority squarely on conservation. I have to side with Griffith, with all due deference to the man behind the Law of network effects, if for no other reason that it represents a bigger shift for society and implicitly acknowledges that there is much that is broken in our current consumption orientation. In an era where some mainstream scientists are projecting the decimation of human populations, knocking our species down from six billion to one billion by the end of the century due the effects of climate change, it’s time to consider an emergency exit strategy.

Griffith gave his emergency exit strategy in a condensed version of the one hour talk he gave to the Long Now in January, and still managed, in 20 minutes, to convince many of the 200+ attendees that the situation is dire and, crucially, that we (that’s the royal We,) have a shot (about a 1 in 3 shot,) of keeping CO2 below the 450ppm threshold where scientist agree we might still avoid irreversible feedback effects. Griffith and Metcalfe effectively sanctioned the rules for the Green:Net conversation: consensus is not required to participate; differing opinions are valued.

Open_Source is a Verb

One of the highlights of the event was the Sun Workshop titled, Open Sourcing The Sustainability Challenge: Technology for Social Good. The panel discussion was Moderated by Josie Garthwaite with Sun’s own Lori Duval, Natural Logic’s Gil Friend, EQ2’s Steve Burt, and AMEE’s Gavin Starks providing the subject matter expertise. Data was the focal point of this discussion with lots of emphasis on accuracy and integrity being critical success factors for measuring GHG inventories and environmental effects. It was clear that these leaders appreciate the magnitude of the challenge, yet they do not shrink from it. It was also clear from this workshop that the companies and NGO’s and governments building these data collection and analysis systems are going to need a lot of computing infrastructure and specialized information systems knowledge to manage the Big Data sets required for accurate and meaningful analysis. Openeco.org was cited in the discussion as a good example of an open model for collecting, protecting and comparing data. However, Openeco.org, and the range of the carbon calculators and GHG inventory tools on the web do not fill the need for a comprehensive analytics system needed by decision makers who deal with GHG emissions policy and standards. Bigger, more sophisticated and integrated systems are needed here.

Can the Internet Help?

Another highlight for me was the Panel titled The Green Web Effect, which dealt with the use of web technologies to create a successful call to action in the green business movement. Much of the highly evolved thinking about the network effects of the Internet that is typified by Clay Shirky's work was abundant in this panel consisting of Moderator Alexis Madrigal, Erin Carlson, Director of Yahoo! for Good, Ron Dembo, Founder and CEO of Zerofootprint, Jason Karas, Founder and President of Carbonrally.com, Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google, and Dara O’Rourke, CEO of GoodGuide. Alexis opened the discussion by saying, “We didn’t necessarily start the fire, but we’re trying to help put it out.” Framed in that context, he then asked the panelists, “What do you want to have happen out in the world?” I liked O’Rourke’s answer the best, because it aligns with a vision I’ve had for many years. He said, “We want to help people to make better decisions by providing the right information at the right moment.” He was speaking of the GoodGuide service, which helps consumers understand the environmental, social, and health impacts of their purchases at the decision point in a retail environment. I’ve just started using their new iPhone app and am pretty impressed with what they’ve accomplished in less than a year as a business. I am very excited about the potential for this service when they add barcode scanning capability. I’d also really like to see them add some reputation enabled crowdsourcing capabilities. I’d also really like to help them build that.

At the end of the day, I think it was pretty clear to everyone at the event that open networked systems for dealing with global warming, and energy efficiency are not only possible, but imperative if we are going to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic consequences of climate change. The event was another reminder of why I’m proud to work at Sun.

[dwnstrm]

Mega Data Center: Seeing is Believing

Over the past few months I had heard exclamations of amazement regarding a storied new data center in the Nevada desert called SuperNAP. I was a bit skeptical of the superlatives about scale and efficiency that embellished these stories. My skepticism turned to exuberance last week when I joined a group of architects from Sun for a tour.  The goal of our tour of this Mega Data Center was to see first hand the state of the art as implemented by Switch Communications, where Sun operates it’s cloud computing business.

Switch, and it’s customers, which include several operating units within Sun, are beneficiaries of the collapse of Enron. The former utility giant had designs on trading network bandwidth using models similar to their energy trading systems. When Enron’s flimsy financial structure gave way, their financial backers and the U.S. government stepped in to auction these assets. Switch CEO Rob Roy was the only one that showed up at the auction block.  In an uncanny twist of fate, he managed to side step what could have been a formidable bidding war to control this hub of communication that is unparalleled in North America.

Here are the vital stats that only begin to describe the phenomenal facility that Switch has managed to assemble:

407K square feet of data center floor space

100 Mw of power provisioned from two separate power grids

Fully redundant power to every rack, backed by N+2 power distribution across the facility

Enough cooling and power density to run at 1,500 watts per square foot (that’s 10x the industry average 150 watts).

27 National network carries

This describes the capacity of the SuperNAP, which is just one of the eight facilities operated by Switch within a 6-7 mile radius in a no-fly zone south of Las Vegas.

Sun to Reveal Cloud Plans Tomorrow

Some details of Sun’s Cloud Computing business will be revealed tomorrow (March 18) in New York at the CommunityOne East event.

 Additional Resources

The Register article on Sun’s cloud in the SuperNAP

Another article in The Reg with pictures of the SuperNAP

CommunityOne site

Cloud Computing at sun.com

[dwnstrm]

Rural Rwanda's Budding Healthcare System

Ordinarily, my Inbox is full of anything but heartwarming emails, but last week I was gratified to receive a photo of four Sun Rays atop health worker desks in Butaro, Rwanda. The photo, sent by Erik Josephson of the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/AIDS & Malaria initiative, shows the pilot setup for rural health clinics that former president Bill Clinton envisioned when he made his TED 2007 wish to …

“… build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country."

- Bill Clinton, March 2007

Sun provided these Sun Ray 2’s and the supporting servers as part of its commitment to support the TED Prize that year. To actually see the Sun gear in situ makes all the planning and logistics and weekly conference calls over the past 18 months suddenly all worthwhile. The site in the photo is one of two pilot locations in which the infrastructure will be tested in live clinical situations over the next month. Pending the results of the pilot, this model infrastructure will be rolled out to an additional 70+ clinics and hospitals across rural Rwanda.

The pilot phase of the project, currently being administered by Partners in Health and The Clinton Foundation is set to begin in the villages of Butaro and Kinoni on Monday.

The systems infrastructure, comprised of the Sun Ray 2, Sun Fire X2100 server, and Solaris OS, were selected by the project steering committee to serve up the healthcare worker desktop environment. The selection criteria reflected the goals of the project as well as the relatively austere conditions where the healthcare facilities are located:

Electricity is scarce and not terribly stable in rural Rwanda, so the Sun Ray 2, which consumes about 4 watts and is an entirely stateless device, is a good fit for the workstation. Attached to each Sun Ray is a low power 15” display which brings the total power consumed by each workstation to less than 25 watts. On the server end, the X2100 is the lowest power server available from Sun. The total electricity demand for the primary IT infrastructure in a typical clinic - 7 workstations (Sun Ray and display), 1 server, 1 network switch - is less than 500 watts.

These facilities do not have extensive protection from the heat and dust that are common in Rwanda’s rural villages, so reliable systems that will hold up to extremes is important. The Sun Fire X2100 is a reliable workhorse with good serviceability. Combine that with the Sun Ray’s zero moving parts (except keyboard and mouse) and you have about the most reliable setup possible. Every clinic and hospital will inventory one spare Sun Ray, so if one does fail it’s a simple replacement to put that workstation back into service - no installation or configuration required. Just attach it to the network and you’re back to treating patients. Spare X2100 servers will be inventoried in Kigale, so a server failure will require that the replacement be dispatched to the facility for replacement.

Rwanda is a fledgling economy. The ICT infrastructure upon which the healthcare system and other critical social services are built must be sustainable and low cost. Any dependence on proprietary commercial products would effectively impose a tax on growth and leave Rwanda’s infrastructure at the mercy of foreign commercial enterprises. So, wherever possible, free and open source products were chosen. The Solaris operating system, the Gnome desktop environment, and the Open Office productivity tools fit the bill, and nicely complement the medical records software to be used in these clinics, OpenMRS.

OpenMRS and Africa’s Health Workforce

OpenMRS is an open source application, written in Java, that was conceived by Paul Biondich at the Regenstrief Institute. It is designed expressly to address the need for electronic medical record keeping in the developing world, but also to serve as a framework for building generalized medical informatics systems. The Rwandan government selected OpenMRS as a key component of their healthcare scale up effort.

A few countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Rwanda among them, have set a long range vision for national economic and social advancement. Vision 2020 is Rwanda’s development strategy to achieve or even surpass developed world standards for national government, rule of law, education and human resources, infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and agriculture. OpenMRS and the supporting open source and energy efficient technologies from Sun contribute toward the infrastructure as well as the human resource goals of the plan. These tools will help to expand the pool of workers capable of delivering critical forms of healthcare by providing a standard protocol and reference resources to community members and paraprofessionals employed in health worker roles, thereby alleviating dependence on highly trained medical practitioners for routine diagnosis and procedures. Estimates from the development community and the UN indicate it would take more that 20 years for sub-Saharan countries to reach the 2.5 health workers per 1,000 people ratio to be consistent with UN targets, assuming they even had sufficient training capacity to matriculate that many doctors and nurses. Instead, OpenMRS helps to change the equation and make it possible to expand health care services much faster than would be possible in a traditional public health model.

In essence, the four workstations in the photo represent a new model health system, not only for Rwanda, but potentially for many other countries in the developing world.

Related Reading:

Can Rwanda’s Vision 2020 Succeed? post on WorldChanging.org

OpenMRS FAQ

Sun Ray in Health Care (and other Sun Ray success stories)

[dwnstrm]

Heros Act Sociocentrically, and Other TED Highlights

Here are just a few of the highlights I’ve had the privilege to experience at TED in Monterey:

Phil Zimbardo prepared Tedsters to become everyday heros by informing us just how closely we dance with evil.  Evoking Solzhenitsyn, who said “The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every individual,” Zimbardo’s research reveals how susceptible we all are to falling in with Bad Apples.  But we’re able to resist it best when we’re not in a Bad Barrel, i.e., the situations and institutions we inhabit must foster cooperation not separatism, empathy not blame.  I.e., the opposite of the conditions in Abu Graib pre-scandal.

Irwin Redlener prepared us for survival in the wake of a nuclear attack by elucidating a few relatively unknown tips:  (1) post blast radioactivity within a mile or so of the blast is lethal on the ground, so get shelter below ground or on the 10th floor or above, (2) know the prevailing wind direction (and ideally the actual wind direction at time of blast) and head perpendicular or away from it,  (3) don’t rely on the government or other government preparedness programs to protect yourself.  They’re not ready to deal with it, and (4) keep your mouth open so your sinuses don’t burst in the aftershock of the blast.

Samantha Power prepared us to recognize heros who embody the knowledge so precious to dealing with today’s most difficult challenges by giving tribute to champions like Sérgio Vieira de Mello, and reminding us to seek them when working to avert social atrocities and humanitarian crises.  She put American pride on notice with a reminder that our “Never again” ethos was nowhere to be found during the Rwandan genocide.

A brief "trailer(?)" for Pangea Day debuted to the delight of Tedsters.

And then there were the Prize Winners:

Neil Turok, whose dream is that the next Einstein will be African.  He’s building a model for higher science education in Africa with the AIMS school, delivering RICH (Relevant, Innovative, Cost Effective, High quality) education in major African countries.

Dave Eggers, founder of 826 Valencia and merchant to buccaneers.  His model for neighborhood driven afterschool tutoring in the back of a kids emporium is being imitated all over America, and has even sprung up in Dublin.

Karen Armstrong, author and scholar of comparative religions.  Her wish is perhaps the most audacious TED wish to date, which is has something to do with getting Jews, Muslims, and Christians together on matters of universal justice and respect, but I’m a little vague on the details.  I thinks she wants some help with that part. 

Anyway, Karen and the rest made a believer out of me.

[dwnstrm]

The Open Architecture Network Odyssey: Chapter 2

Sitting in the Is Beauty Truth? session at TED2008 today, I am reminded of a phone conference with TED Curator Chris Anderson last fall to bring him up to date on the status of one of the previous year’s TED wishes.

When Sun wrapped up its formal role in developing the Open Architecture Network (OAN) it handed over a sustaining challenge to the site’s owner and community leader, Architecture for Humanity (AFH).   When TED Curator Chris Anderson asked Sun why the TED Prize winner was left in a lurch I gave a short answer, “It was primarily due to reasons of expediency”.  In actual fact, Sun never walked away from AFH.  Sun was, and continues to be, committed to their success and continues to be involved.  As of today, we now we see a clear path to a sustaining model that leverages the Drupal community and frees AFH from the dependence cycle it was caught in with Sun.  I look forward to bringing that good news to Chris before the conference wraps up on Saturday.

The first step on this path is to refactor the site such that it runs on an unadulterated Drupal core.  To do that AFH and Sun have contracted with CivicActions to migrate the OAN from a hacked Drupal 4.7 to a clean Drupal 5.X.  (It was the hacking aspect that I explained away to Chris Anderson as “expediency”.  Corners were cut, compromises were made, but AFH’s and TED’s primary goal, to launch the site at TED2007, was achieved.  Incidentally, of the three TED2006 prize winner, only AFH’s wish was realized by TED2007.)  CivicActions won the bid to perform the migration by doing a professional and efficient assessment of the OAN’s current state and the effort required to bring it up to the high standards of a showcase Drupal site.

My next few posts will describe the process of setting up this development environment as we open Chapter 2 in the OAN’s odyssey.  I’ll describe how we use OpenSolaris to enable efficient development, testing, and deployment for multiple contributors working on multiple tasks and timelines.

For more on why OpenSolaris was chosen as the development and deployment platform for the OAN, see this article on the Sun Developer Network, and this brief interview.

[dwnstrm]

If we started today...

I had the pleasure to chat with Robin Chase last evening.  Earlier in the day I snuck past security at the Connected Urban Development conference to meet her following her panel discussion on Connected and Sustainable Mobility.  I felt like a KT Tunstall groupie slipping back stage after the show.  Overtly, I wanted to understand her experience as a Facebook Platform developer, and see whether and how Sun could help her company, GoLoco, prosper. 

Covertly, I wanted to find out what she’d been up to with mesh networks since her TED Talk last March.  We agreed to meet at the end of the day.

One of the first things I learned about Robin when we sat down at at Cafe de la Presse in San Francisco is that she is a connector within the mesh networks community.  Despite her successes and notoriety with Zipcar and GoLoco, she has bigger fish to fry with Mesh Networks, and is working hard to build the (social) network to change personal transportation and the way we access the net.   

She is making the case that mesh networks can help solve three major socioeconomic challenges.  The first is encapsulated in one sentence from her TED Talk, “If we started today [replacing every car with a fuel efficient one,] ten years from now, at the end of this window of opportunity, those fuel efficient cars will reduce our fossil fuel needs by 4%.”  Basically, she is saying that no amount of efficiency built on top of a combustion engine will reduce our carbon emissions quickly enough to avert disaster.  The second is the deterioration of our transportation infrastructure at the hands of tax cuts and neglect at the federal level.  The third is the lack of free and ubiquitous access to the Internet.

Her vision is an open source model for building decentralized, ad hoc, peer to peer networks by distributing simple  mesh network transceivers in every car.  Once these devices are sufficiently deployed they work as sensor networks to enable congestion pricing and road use pricing models, plus they will provide ubiquitous and free wireless Internet access.

Obviously, some engineering will need to be done in order for her vision to be realized, but she claims it’s already well underway.  Maybe Sun can help her in a more fundamental way than just scaling up her Facebook app efficiently.  Afterall, Sun knows a little bit about Open Source models and has already delivered devices that can form sensor networks.  I hope I can help bring another degree of connection to her network.