Edgeryders London Re-Gathering

[emkay]

LOTE4: The Stewardship Gathering

We found ourselves entwined in conversations during The Case Study Adventures in August. With familiar faces, new arrivals, and the recognition of a desire to come together more often.

“A new world is being built by people working far outside the mainstream. Around the world there are people exploring the edge of our current society. Who are they? What are they working on?”

London has long been a part of that edge, as a hub of experimentation, social innovation, radical diversity and home to many of you. Although sometimes it can seem like our little island is a bit distant from the movements happening across the mainland. There’s plenty going on in this city, and around it, and it’s about time that our community became more than a loose connection of scenes and industries.

This is your city, your gathering. Your opportunity to find collaborators. Your time to build.

One month before LOTE4: The Stewardship, let’s find each other again, amid the multitude of networks and projects that pervade life at the edge.

Let’s see what conversations are urgent and important, and how we can help boost your efforts. What resources can our collective knowledge uncover and how can our joined insight connect initiatives?

Let’s move outside of our existing bubbles.

Whoever you are, however you’re working - You’re making the future, so make it with friends.

Find us at Royal Festival Hall at 12:00 on Saturday 20th September.

You’ll find us on Level 5 gathered around the tables facing the north facing balcony. to help shape a tradition and open a new chapter.

Please feel welcome to leave questions/suggestions about this gathering, or future ones below.

Date: 2014-09-20 11:00:00 - 2014-09-20 11:00:00, Europe/London Time.

[linda]

Trying to find my place

I am a theoretical physicist. That means that I basically understand how the universe is put together, as far as is known to by the physics community today. But that I lack all the technical skills to do anything useful with my knowledge. Knowing a Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, is essential when trying to understand the origin of the universe, but rather useless for anything you would want to do on Earth.

At the moment, I am a Ph.D. student in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity, which I will finish some time during the summer 2015. After that, I do not know what I will do. I do enjoy research most of the time, but lately I felt more and more that I want to do something useful, something that actually make a difference in the world. Quantum gravity is fascinating, but it is not useful.

So what can I do?

Programing

I am learning programing, Python to be more exact, and I learned som C long ago. If you have a project that need some coding, you are wellcome to send me those easy but boring parts of the project that you do not feel like doing yourself. You will be doing me a favour by doing so. You get some code and I get some experiece.

Math

Theoretical physics is mostly applied math, and I am good at it.

I do not have any ideas for project my self. But I want to help make the world better. So I hope someone who reads this whill help me find the project where I fit in.

At the moment, I am livig in Grenoble, France. I have to start writing my thesis soon, but over all I am in good time with my Ph.D. project, so I can afford spending time on other stuff too. After all, I am a student, I am paid to lern stuf, so I should be allowed to make time for anything that involvs learning.

[noemi]

Helloo

Linda, welcome to Edgeryders, hopefully you will find your place somewhere, on the internet or not.

I do not have any ideas for project my self. But I want to help make the world better. 

This is very candid, and it sums up much of the attitude around here. Also, you are probably the first theoretical physicist on Edgeryders, at least a declared one!

There are some tech tasks available although not sure they’re a good fit based on what you write. Have you tried going through the projects, see if there’s something you would like to get involved in? Some are more active than others, some have a more hands on approach, others are more like dedicated spaces for sharing things on specific topics.

[alberto]

Network science?

Hello Linda, welcome. Wow, that was a killer presentation! My name is Alberto, and I hope to prove you wrong on the “theoretical physics is useless in practice” line. It also looks like you might be wasted doing boring work with code: plus, Edgeryders is Drupal, which is PHP, not Python.

Many physicists know some network science. Those that don’t, being good at math, can easily learn it. Would you be interested in participating in a hackathon that uses network science to figure out how online communities evolve? That’s going to use plenty of Python. I plan it for March, in Italy.

Background: we at Edgeryders are really interested in a network approach at studying how our own online community behaves – at least,  I am and the others at least humour me! The thinking behind this is that, if we can teach ourselves how to “steer” emergent social dynamics of online conversations, we can use networked humans as a very large and powerful engine for problem solving. I tried to outline the dream in a TEDx talk a few years ago. A near-real time interactive network representation of Edgeryders is here, and you are welcome to play with it.

Designing Collective Intelligence: Alberto Cottica at TEDxBologna

[linda]

I invite you to prove me wrong about the “theoretical physics is useless”. However, I only said that theoretical physics i useless, theoretical physicists are not, because we know math, and math is defiantly useful.

I never really worked with graphs, but I know the basic definitions and such. And social interaction is interesting.

Hackathon sounds like an event where you stay up writing code as long as you can before falling asleep. Never been to one of them, sounds fun however, and Italy is not very far. Tell me when you decided when and where.

[alberto]

Rome, 8-9 March 2015

I will soon go public with it, maybe save the date in the mean time.

[matthias]

More ideas for applying math and Python skills

Welcome to the edge, Linda Glad to see that our slightly chaotic online space did not deter you … hope you’ll find an interesting and meaningful activity for you around here!

Your account of wanting to make a difference reminds me of Marcin Jakubowski, also a physicist. He was working on nuclear fusion, missed making a real-world difference with that, and came to the conclusion that “nuclear fusion is useful … 150 million kilometers from earth” Then went on to build Open Source Ecology.

Math plus programming is super useful of course Here are two immediate use cases from an Edgeryders project that I’m involved in. It’s called the Makerfox project, and it is a web platform. Started last year as a somehow Edgeryders-affiliated project that a small team including me is working on. In short, we’re developing a better working economic exchange mechanism than money (more precisely, money in austerity-plagued Europe).

1. For Makerfox, we invented this thing we call "network bartering", which is very flexible bartering in graph shapes (see an example below: every participant gets as much as they give). To calculate the next valid barter deal, we use mixed integer linear programming as a mathematical optimization technique. For now this works ok (using a standard MILP solver library), but with more users, our algorithm has to be more efficient. I keep hearing that application specific MILP algorithms are often two orders of magnitude faster … so, you get the idea. Might be a bit much to fit in before a thesis though.
2. Also, we so far have only very basic ideas about the economic performance of a network barter market … we could use some agent based simulation and statistical evaluation. A teammate who will work on this is a Python programmer as well, so this would be a good opportunity for Python skills.

Anyway, these are just inspirations. Have a look around, there are many more projects, and I’m curious what will be your favorite in the end.

And Alberto, sorry for these “competing” proposals, but I could not resist. Math-savvy folks are just too few around!

[linda]

Markerfox seems super cool. I will have a look around

[alberto]

No worries

The Makerfox is a great project. And then, I only had in mind a humble two-day hackathon, just to dip a foot in the water; then, if @Linda wants to play ball… there is going to be plenty of ball to play.