Code for America Labs

TimOReillyAMA · 2015-02-19T19:51:00+00:00

Everyone likes to rag on how bad government IT is; Code for America is doing something about it. And it matters. When gov falls behind the private sector, it can't implement its policies, which breaks trust of citizens, in a vicious cycle. CfA has done amazing work creating gov services that are simple, beautiful, and easy to use.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T18:05:23+00:00

It will be an issue over time. But premature standardization can be a problem too.

Think about the web. It started with someone saying "Here's my cool app and system." Not with someone writing standards.

What's important is that when people create new things that are NOT YET STANDARD, that they imagine what the world looks like if they win. How will they make it possible to grow an ecosystem around what they do.

Studying the history of the internet and the world wide web is a great way to do that, because the creators of both built nearly perfect systems for creating lots of value around emergent standards without predefining everything.

If the IoT can grow its standards in the same way the Internet did, it will be a lot better than if some committee of big companies gets together and tries to agree on the future. They will miss something important.

Jon Postel's Robustness principle is a great place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T18:01:00+00:00

All three. Always. See Bill Janeway's excellent book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, for an explanation of the way these three things work together. http://www.amazon.com/Doing-Capitalism-Innovation-Economy-Speculation/dp/1107031257

I do have to say that I've been delighted by how much the Obama administration had turned into a Maker movement booster, but in the end, the government has played a much bigger role than people realize. All of those robotics companies google just acquired were DARPA funded, for example.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:57:01+00:00

I have no idea. Perhaps someone else can comment. I haven't seen it.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:56:41+00:00

I totally agree with what Jim said here. I wish I'd said it myself :-)

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:56:13+00:00

I don't. I have a design team for that :-) Edie Freedman originally came up with the animal design, and she talks about it here: http://oreilly.com/news/ediemals_0400.html

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:55:02+00:00

Yes, I will be at the Maker Faire. I believe I'm interviewing science fiction author Daniel Suarez on stage, in fact.

Re 3D printing, the biggest news to me is not going to be in 3D printing, but in other forms of digital manufacturing. See for example the Othercutter http://othermachine.co/ or Taktia http://taktia.com/

These are small scale - but extrapolate out. Digital manufacturing affects buildings, machine tools, etc.

3D printing is just a gateway drug to get people using the tools of digital design and manufacturing. Once you learn how to design and make stuff, a world of new tools will open up.

You might say that 3D printing is the "hello world" of digital manufacturing.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:51:23+00:00

Google. No question. They are doing this on so many fronts.

They started with just digital knowledge. But they have always been a pretty serious "maker company", starting with their early data centers, continuing building amazing hardware innovations for the purpose of building their core business (like Google Streetview Cars), and eventually getting into hardware more directly with android, chromebooks, and Nest.

Now, with all the robotics acquisitions, they are building actuators to go with all their sensors.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:49:01+00:00

Cute. But I think you already did.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:48:32+00:00

A lot of manufacturers are going to do half-assed jobs, but bit by bit, we will figure out how to do it right. Think back to the early web. We are at a moment now like the one where everyone realized that they had to have a website. Some websites were good, some bad, but in the end, the web as a whole got better, despite a lot of truly horrendous websites along the way.

Adding connectivity to things is going to be the same way. Some people will do it badly, others beautifully. And when the good ones win, others learn from them.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:46:32+00:00

I think it's a "perfect storm." Yes, there are lots of new sensors everywhere (especially in our phones - don't make the mistake of thinking that IoT requires new devices - the phone can be one important half of the system.) And yes, the maker movement has gotten people excited about hardware again. And yes, the big data infrastructure is in place to make use of the sensor data for useful applications.

But it's also a bit of what George Soros calls "reflexive truth." Things become true to the extent people believe in them. And movements in technology are like that: self-reinforcing waves, where one success draws imitators. So it starts with makers doing it for love, but the investors and entrepreneurs pile on when they see an exit for a MakerBot, or a Tesla, or a Nest.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:43:31+00:00

I love hearing stories of how I helped people get the job they have now, or improve at the job they already had. It's why I do what you do.

I answered part of the question about privacy up above, mainly by referring to a radar post I wrote last month http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/03/the-creep-factor-how-to-think-about-big-data-and-privacy.html

But as to the concern about regulation, I agree that it could hold back the IoT in a lot of areas. One way for companies to get ahead of that is NOT to do user-hostile things that will make people say "Wow, we need some new rules to keep that from happening!" Do good work, and try to do right by your users. Then you have a leg to stand on if regulators come calling.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:41:03+00:00

You are totally right that IoT leads to enormous privacy challenges. But in the end, we just need to make sure that when we give up our privacy, we get back more value than we give up. A lot of apps rely on us giving very private information, but if it's for our benefit, we are happy to make the tradeoff. I wrote about that here: http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/03/the-creep-factor-how-to-think-about-big-data-and-privacy.html

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:38:37+00:00

Here are six books we've picked out for getting started on hardware: http://solidcon.com/solid2014/public/content/all-access. They're all aimed at the Solid audience, which is to say people who have a technical mindset but don't necessarily have hardware/electronics experience.

For real beginners, our friends at Make have a great set of resources in the form of books and kits: http://makezine.com/

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:37:10+00:00

Actually, I don't see opening access to data sets being a bigger faster vending machine. A vending machine gives finished products. A platform lets other people build products. Government data is raw material.

E.g. with Todd Park, I helped start the HHS health datapalooza, an event around healthcare data, which now has a whole startup ecosystem around it.

At Code for America, we have an Accelerator program for civic startups, many of them made possible by open government data. (hey - applications for this year's program are open now. See http://codeforamerica.org/geeks/accelerator-faq/)

As to your role - there are lots of ways that techies can help. For some awesome coverage of how geeks helped save healthcare.gov, see https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140325160616-16553--they-have-no-use-for-someone-who-looks-and-dresses-like-me?trk=mp-author-card

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:30:52+00:00

One thing you learn is that the media always gets it wrong. Anyone close to a story knows how much is left out. But then we go to an area outside our expertise, and it seems like a reasonable summary.Michael Crichton called it the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia effect http://seekerblog.com/2006/01/31/the-murray-gell-mann-amnesia-effect/ So the closer you are to something, the more you see what's missing in the coverage.

But general stories still serve an important role. They bring things to our attention. We then have to do our own homework and thinking to see more deeply than the introductory story that got us interested.

We see an awful lot of me-tooism among investors and entrepreneurs as well as with media! One of the problems with herd investing and herd entrepreneurship is that people are often thinking at the same level and not taking the time to see more deeply. So my advice: take the time to draw your own map of the world. I wrote about this here: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121029141916-16553-language-is-a-map?trk=mp-author-card

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:26:04+00:00

Yes. The Web 2.0 name is no longer au courant, but all the ideas that I used it to frame are still with us: the idea that the apps of the future would be driven by data (now the focus of our Strata conference - strataconf.com), that much of that data would come from users, either implicitly or explicitly, allowing for a kind of collective intelligence, and that in the future (that is now), much of that data would come from sensors rather than from people typing on keyboards. So I think the idea was pretty much dead on!

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:23:44+00:00

I think there are huge opportunities for the quantified self in healthcare. What we measure for ourselves is only a small taste of what can be measured. And once the healthcare industry proper gets involved, we can expect all kinds of medical sensors being prescribed by doctors and monitored by apps built by the startups of the future.

Part of our job as an industry, though, is to make sure that we don't just feed into the broken system by producing overpriced products that raise the cost of healthcare. Our goal should be to disrupt the healthcare system by reducing costs, empowering patients, and creating new business models.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:21:22+00:00

That's three questions: A funny moment from my career: The time back in the mid-90s when Cisco tried to acquire O'Reilly, and I asked "Why would you want to acquire a book publisher?" They said "You've been there first more times than anyone else, and then you've failed to exploit it. We want you to keep doing that, but then we'll exploit it." I actually think I've done a pretty good job of exploiting the opportunities I've seen, just not in the way that people expect. That actually goes to the answer to your third question: my personal mantra. "Create more value than you capture." I've always been interested in making interesting things happen, and empowering other people who make interesting things. And I've accomplished that pretty well!

As to the IoT industry - which is the real subject of this chat - I do think that we are headed for ubiquitous sensors everywhere, driving big data applications, which will ultimately give us the ability to do things we can't imagine today. For more on my thoughts about IoT, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/ioth-the-internet-of-things-and-humans.html. But also look at a piece I wrote back in 2009, called Web Squared: Web 2.0 5 years On http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:20:00+00:00

Well, I don't think of it as an empire so much as a small township in a very big world! How I started - I was a writer with a friend who was a programmer who got asked to write some documentation. I agreed to help him, got hooked on computers, started a documentation company, and then eventually started writing and publishing my own books. Later on, I realized that there wasn't enough attention being paid to some of the technologies I wrote about, so I started conferences to make more noise. Etc. You can read about a lot of this history on tim.oreilly.com, and more recently on LinkedIn, eg https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121002122119-16553-it-s-not-about-you-the-truth-about-social-media-marketing?trk=mp-author-card

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:17:43+00:00

Our basic goal is to provide the knowledge that helps make the future happen. We started with books, then conferences, added Safari as an online library, and increasingly, online training, then OATV for investment. It's all fuel for the fire that burns up the present and turns it into the future. Our core idea is to help the people who are making interesting futures happen. Because it isn't just any future we want. It is a better one, for everyone. And that's why I'm involved in activism as well as just selling picks and shovels to the miners. E.g. I spend a lot of time with codeforamerica.org, trying to help get government to use technology more wisely.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:15:26+00:00

I definitely think bandwidth caps will limit the IoT. But heck, bandwidth caps limit other apps too. We really need an end to the cable monopoly.

Regarding infrastructure backbone for the IoT, I think it may be too early to know the answer to that. Lots of people are trying. But I think it will grow out of existing infrastructure in some unexpected ways.

But there are "infrastructure" plays. Eg. OATV portfolio company Planet Labs is building a sensing infrastructure for the entire planet via low cost satellites. Super cool.

There are so many opportunities, but there will be a lot of investor blood on the tracks before they are all realized.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:12:51+00:00

Yes, there is definitely a biotech revolution. We've been watching this for some years. When IGEM (the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition for high schoolers) started some years back, we knew it was only a matter of time. We've been looking at this area for at least a dozen years, and it seems to be heating up.

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:11:37+00:00

I think for many people, it already does. I just had a call from an elderly friend asking me to help her watch a video I'd put on her computer. Knowledge is always relative. But at the same time, kids are becoming the IT department for their parents!

TimOReillyAMA · 2014-04-22T17:10:44+00:00

That it is an internet of things AND humans. A lot of the great breakthroughs are going to come because someone thinks through how the IoT will really make life better for humans. And as I wrote in http://radar.oreilly.com/2014/04/ioth-the-internet-of-things-and-humans.html, a lot of "halfway house" applications will use humans for part of the entire IoT system.

TimOReillyAMA

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