Essays - Page 2
Align The Misaligned
The internet has fragmented into distinct ecosystems across the globe. This article explores how ecosystem architecture can embrace this fragmentation as an opportunity for innovation rather than a problem to solve.
Practice Innovation
Ecosystem architecture blends decentralization with regenerative design to address complex challenges. This article explores how innovation as a practice, rather than artifact, can transform communities through sustainable and equitable solutions.
Across Space And Time
Contemporary ecosystems transcend biological boundaries, dispersing across space and time through digital networks. This article explores how modern organizations require new frameworks of ecosystem architecture to design and cultivate thriving, non-hierarchical structures.
The Low End Theory
Everyone seems to be working on moonshots nowadays, because Google does it. Google's approach is to take an unsolvable problem and pump resources into it. Most others only copy the unsolvable problem bit. We leave shooting at moons to Google and pick low-hanging fruit instead.
Data Drive
Another trip down memory lane. I rediscovered this short text somewhere in a far corner of the internet today. It's the manifesto for the Data Drive research group that Sander van Maas, Robin Boast, and I started together in 2013 at the University of Amsterdam. Forgot all about it, but boy, is it relevant today.
Agency Trumps Humanness
Last year, I was asked to develop a vision for online collaboration for the Planet B project. The challenge: building a community of people that may never be in the same place at the same time. The solution: a mob of bots with an attitude.
Value Driven Development
Behaviour Driven Development is a practice that helps engineers and their users to align their expectations. In this post, I explain how Public Badges build on this practice by rendering the implicit values behind these expectations explicit.
Learning Apart Together
In 2013, way before social distancing made it cool, Marijn Koolen and I proposed that the University of Amsterdam should take a large part of their teaching online. We saw an opportunity to increase the quality of education. In 2020, I'm surprised that most people still treat online learning as second best.
Intelligence Unleashed
Supervised and unsupervised learning are two branches of machine learning. But these terms designate much more than a mere technical distinction. This post explains that unsupervised learning promises a new way to think about intelligence in general: Human and otherwise.
False Media
Fake news is often treated as a property of information. However on a content level facts and lies are now mostly impossible to distinguish. In this post, I argue that we should bypass this problem by focusing on the agent rather than on the news.