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Looking forward to LIFT 13

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Three months from now, my favourite conference will take place: LIFT.

What do I like about LIFT conference? I have been given the opportunity to explain this in a recent mini-interview for their website:

Why do you come to Lift?
Lift treats technology and innovation the only sensible way: from a people’s perspective. It goes beyond specific “fields” (tech, marketing, etc.) and easy dichotomies (good/bad, real/virtual), always with a clear focus on our future as individuals and society. It is all about interaction and the intersection of different kinds of knowledge. Same goes for the participants: I love engaging with designers, programmers, artists, entrepreneurs, journalists, students… and sociologists, of course. At Lift, I feel both understood and challenged, which is unique, because Lift is about the big picture as much as it is about the details.

This will be my 5th edition and this time, I promise, I will talk about it here. I blogged about TEDxZurich and the Crisis Mapping Conference in 2011, but I have not found the right approach for LIFT yet.

However, there is one articles directly inspired by a LIFT talk (about algorithms), and two other articles that I know would not exist without everything I got from the conferences (about the porn TLD .xxx and about general web issues).

The parts of their 2013 program which are announced already are very promising… Will I see you there?

Those who don’t understand algorithms…

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Don’t be scared if you don’t know what an algorithm is. This article is for you, so please read on.

If you know what an algorithm is but mainly from a mathematical viewpoint, you may skip the following paragraph, but please read on below, too.

About algorithms… and human action

Picture ‘Lamp Flowchart’ by Wapcaplet, via Wikimedia Commons

In a nutshell, an algorithms is the standardized function by which an action is executed – the important word being “standardized“. Because: the action to be executed is defined very clearly, and the function must state unambiguously in what circumstances and under what conditions this action has to be executed (or not).

This may sound very theoretical, but we all have already been confronted with a multitude of algorithmic processes.

Retrieving money from a cash machine is a typical, rather simple example: the machine has a certain number of predefined “actions” it can do (ask for your PIN code, hand out a certain amount of money, show account balance, swallow your card etc.) and its actions depend on your input, which are “conditions” for the machine.

Of course every action that is computer-based is algorithmic, i.e. implemented within different “layers” of programming, all boiled down to the basic electronic signals 0 and 1.

But no need for computers: actually, every procedure guided by a flowchart is algorithmic, too. Everything that is standardized. Everything that is automated.

“Algorithm” means no room for interpretation. And no choice. Continue reading →