This is a draft presentation for the NESC 2009 Forum to be held at the Australian Institute of Sport, November.

1. Spotting

3. Isolated fires started ahead of the main
fire by sparks, embers or other ignited
material...

4. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken

7. Sustainability

8. Communities

9. Technologies

10. Performance

14. Tragedy of the Commons
... a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting
independently and solely and rationally consulting their own
self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited
resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's
long term interest for this to happen.

17. Benefaction
Altruism

19. Prediction
Projection

21. Forecaster
Futurist

24. Altruism ... our moral
obligation to serve others
and place their interests
above our own.

27. First Thesis
We know a great deal. And we know not only
many details of doubtful intellectual interest, but
also things which are of considerable practical
significance and, what is even more important,
which provide us with deep theoretical insight, and
with a surprising understanding of the world.

29. Second Thesis
Our ignorance is sobering and boundless. . . With each
step forward, with each problem which we solve, we
not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we
also discover that where we believed that we were
standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in
truth, insecure and in a state of flux.

31. So, we have data in clumps—in collections that
are curated and hosted by libraries, publishers,
and others; what we need are the runners
that connect those clumps, and what we'll
discover when we have them is that data
doesn't move between clumps very
successfully. That's a problem that nobody is
really dealing with

33. Microcontent
Social Format

35. Users possess a new degree of agency in constructing their
engagement with resources and other users so that it is easy
to form and interact with social and technological networks.

37. Produser

39. Wikipedia (31 October 2009) has
3,080,049 articles, and 18,420,169 pages in total.
There have been 343,586,517 edits.
There are 866,624 uploaded files.
There are 10,872,490 registered users,
including 1,691 administrators.

41. Intercultural dialogue, as a governmental project, must always
struggle against the likelihood of failure because most people do
not tend spontaneously to communicate across lines of difference.

43. The normal case of social software is
still failure; most of these experiments
don’t pan out.

44. You need to be really pigheaded.
Iterate. Change things. Experiment.
Try again. After all, it’s only failure if
you give up.

46. My love of music was seriously impaired by this trap that I'd built
for myself, which was that for compositional purposes I'd invent
tunings. I'd tune to the numbers in a date, I'd tune to a piece of
music that I liked on the radio, I'd tune to birdsongs and the
landscape I was sitting in... all of which is great for composition,
but terrible for performance. I'd work out these wonderful fresh
harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and
I felt like I was always out of tune. You kill the neck on a guitar in
no time at all from changing the tension all the time.

48. Prisoner’s Dilemma
Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police
have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having
separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the
same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the
other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the
other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice
receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent,
both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for
a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives
a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to
betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is
assured that the other would not know about the
betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should
the prisoners act?

49. Two players may each cooperate with
or betray the other player.

51. The only concern of each individual
player is maximizing his or her own
payoff, without any concern for the
other player's payoff.

52. Rational choice leads the two
players to both play defect, even
though each player's individual
reward would be greater if they
both played cooperatively.

54. In the classic form of this game, cooperating is strictly
dominated by defecting, so that the only possible equilibrium for
the game is for all players to defect. No matter what the other
player does, one player will always gain a greater payoff by
playing defect. Since in any situation playing defect is more
beneficial than cooperating, all rational players will play defect,
all things being equal.

55. In the iterated prisoner's dilemma, the game
is played repeatedly. Thus each player has
an opportunity to punish the other player
for previous non-cooperative play.

57. Zero Sum

58. Non Zero Sum

60. Social Traps

61. The more complex societies get and the more complex the
networks of interdependence within and beyond community and
national borders get, the more people are forced in their own
interests to find non-zero-sum solutions. That is, win–win
solutions instead of win–lose solutions.... Because we find as our
interdependence increases that, on the whole, we do better when
other people do better as well — so we have to find ways that we
can all win, we have to accommodate each other....
(Bill Clinton, 2000)

66. email is based on open standards, and it's the
lowest common denominator for Internet
communication. Any communication system that
wishes to supplant email will need to offer both
openness and ubiquity, and nothing available today
comes even close.

71. Sources
Flickr
Monga Tree http://www.flickr.com/photos/ozjulian/3307584961/sizes/o/
Perth Skyline http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/39456503/
Melbourne http://www.flickr.com/photos/robinhutton/39456503/sizes/l/
Sydney http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevgibbo/323501973/sizes/l/
Spiral Staircase http://www.flickr.com/photos/procsilas/71222778/sizes/l/
Scaffolding http://www.flickr.com/photos/pagedooley/2201791390/
Synchronised Jumping http://www.flickr.com/photos/elvire-r/2451784799/sizes/o/
Leaf http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgraths/3597037843/sizes/l/
Dandelion http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcgraths/2664830874/sizes/l/in/set-72157600641178544/
Vault http://www.flickr.com/photos/goetter/960831783/sizes/o/
Balance Beam http://www.flickr.com/photos/goetter/2083820550/sizes/o/in/set-72157594181227561/
Car in the Hand http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/3858368342/
Underwater swim http://www.flickr.com/photos/jayhem/3601351382/sizes/l/
Russian Padlocks http://www.flickr.com/photos/akras/2382415876/sizes/l/

72. Flickr
Port Arthur 01 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3186347007/in/set-72157612423328758/
Port Arthur 02 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3187173540/in/set-72157612423328758/
Port Arthur 03 http://www.flickr.com/photos/clydestreet/3186340169/in/set-72157612423328758/
Football Player http://www.flickr.com/photos/vramak/3499502280/sizes/o/
Bird’s Nest Reflections http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmaccubbin/2846650238/sizes/l/
Inside the Bird’s Nest http://www.flickr.com/photos/cmaccubbin/2812880376/sizes/l/in/set-72157606953902842/
Balancing on Water http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimmyharris/3858405124/sizes/l/
Shoes on the Wire http://www.flickr.com/photos/lachlanhardy/83702051/sizes/o/
Sydney Cricket Ground http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3063964989/sizes/o/
First Female Olympians http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3446629550/
Dawn Fraser and Ilsa Konrads http://www.flickr.com/photos/statelibraryofnsw/3383583260/in/set-72157615860623268/
Clovelly Lantern Walkers http://www.flickr.com/photos/350org/4038873501/

73. Web Links
Russian Sky Jumping http://englishrussia.com/?p=1522
Street Parkour http://www.streetparkour.com/
GRB 090423 http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/314167main_GRONDafterglow_annotated_HI.jpg
Tragedy of the Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Journey http://keithlyons.wordpress.com/2008/11/19/cck08-what-a-journey/
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
Microsoft Founders’ Photograph http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/2809/1096/1600/microsoft_founders.jpg
Joni Mitchell http://jonimitchell.com/Library/view.cfm?id=238
Prisoner’s Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
Zero Sum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-sum
Social Traps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Traps
Peggy Hora http://www.thinkers.sa.gov.au/home.html

74. References
Between Promise and Practice: Web 2.0, Intercultural Dialogue and Digital
Ang, I. and Pothen, N. (2009).
Scholarship. Fibreculture, Issue 14. Link.
Charman-Anderson, S. (2008). The importance of pig-headedness. Strange Attractor.
Why Email Remains the King of Internet Communications. TidBits, 29 October.
Engst, A. (2009).
Link.
Popper, K. (1976). The Logic of the Social Sciences.
Unsworth, J. (2009). Clumps and Runners. Third Bamboo Workshop, Tucson, Arizona, January.
Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The Importance of Failure. The Journal of
Unsworth, J. (1997).
Electronic Publishing, 3, 2, December.