I recently watched a presentation done by Martin Seligman, ex-president of the American Psychology Association. He's the main man behind something called 'positive psychology.' It's a fairly new branch of the discipline, and one in which there's alot of positive interest.

Ever since the 50's, psychology has dealt with illness. Medical solutions to psychological problems have been the 'norm' of psychology as a science. As such, psychologists got the reputation of being a little scary. Talking to one meant they'd analyse you to find problems. Your repressed memories and assumptions could be read from a single conversation - therefore psychologist were those to be ignored.

Well, according to Mr Seligman, this is no longer the case (at least with him). Since the mid-90s, there has been an increase in interest in psychology as it has diversified into new fields of practise. One such field is this positive psychology.

The talk I watched was done at something called TED (www.ted.com) - it's a conference organised whereby experts in their field are invited to share their ideas. The best thing though, is that they're then asked to move their ideas into a different field. To throw it out there for all the other brains at the event to understand. Sometimes these sparks can light a fire.. that's the idea anyway.

Well, Mr Seligman's talk was on happiness. It's a fairly new area, and one open to massive interpretation: so here's mine.

Seligman talks of three types of happy lives.

Pleasant Lives - Celebrity, Indulgent, ExperinceGood Lives - Appreciation, Focused, Commited, EngagementMeaningful lives - Pensive, Broad, Faith.

They're not mutually exclusive or inclusive. It's interesting, it's possible to have all three.

His studies have led him to find the opposite of what he'd expected to be true. The most 'happy' life to lead is the Meaningful Life, then the Good Life, followed by the Pleasant Life. His reasoning is that although the pleasant life is something we all aspire to; it's also extremely habituating. If you have air conditioning, then a fan is no replacement. The step up is great - but once you're there you've got to enjoy it and appreciate it, else it becomes the habitual norm and anything less is sub-standard. Ironically the pleasant life is the most depressing, as improvements are finite - and more often than not they happen in big steps, rather than incremental changes.

The interesting thing was is that he applied this 'happiness' to technological development (not necessarily electric). Sure, you can put out a "pleasant" application and people will be happy with it. However, it's got to be constantly improving. If you create an application that people can get engaged with, it moves up a step to the "Good"applications; people are happy just using it. The third stage is the 'meaningful' application; one that gets the user interacting meaningfully with it. A great example is facebook.

Now, the interesting thing to me is that this group of 'three' is very similar to another group of 'three' that I read about at University. There's replacement, enabling and ubitiquous technology. The three categories seem to fit nicely as pairs.

Replacement technology - that which replaces a process we already have, but makes it easier.

Enabling technology - that which enables us to do things that were either not possible, or too time consuming to be worthwhile before the technology.

Ubitiquous technology - technology that becomes so widely used and pervasive that it becomes a part of the fabric of society, and is taken for granted.

Reading Zeth's blog post, Zeth cites commentators that say the time is over for the Open Source World, that development is slowly stalling and the exciting ideas of the 90's that came out of Open Source are being commercialised and exploited. I don't think that for one second. Software has (unnecessarily, one may argue) become far more complex. Sure, improvements in programming have been made and there are better skilled people out there than before - but packages are becoming far more complicated.

I'd ask, is this needed. The 'Pleasant Life' of Seligman talks about how having too many pleasures can be depressing. The constant expectation rather than fulfilment is lost on people who fail to appreciate. The same can be said for software consumers.

The ideas that have made people rich are rarely complicated. It's a simple idea, executed well that succeeds. The problem now, is not in "integrating all these fantastic packages and solutions," but in the realisation that perhaps that's not what is needed. Perhaps we need to look again to the simple things in life. A hammer doesn't come with a screwdriver attachment, in the same way a phone doesn't have to come with 'twitter integration.' Sure, it's a nice feature for thos that want it... but for those than don't it becomes a barrier to using the original 'simple' aspect of that technology.

Clay Shirky provides a fascinating insight into how a collaborative approach utilises more skills, and empowers more people than the old institutional model. Rather than coming from an Open Source background, he uses the example of Flickr to convey his point (and then takes a stab at Ballmer). It's an interesting presentation, and shows how you can make the most of the information/data available in a field.

However, there's an angle to his talk which isn't covered in this short presentation; which I imagine is due to time constraints. That's the opportunity for cross-discipline collaboration, and what that means for us.

One of the more interesting points made by Clay, is that he poses the current '$1 million question' - Are Bloggers Journalists? - and then turns it on its head.

Journalists, and journalism came about to fulfil a societal need. How to communicate with the majority of the population. Gutenburgs's printing press was a percursor to European journalism, and for the last 400 years or so, journalism has been an integral part of mass communication.

However, we now have a little something called the internet - which, as Gutenburg's printing press did all those years ago, revolutionise access to information. The infrastructure required to become a 'messenger to the people' is in place for people to with it as they wish - create facebook pages, youtube videos, or wordpress blogs. Once the infrastructure becomes freely accessible, the applications of it become massively varied.

In Clay's talk, he mentions a ratio. 80% of people do 20% of the work, and vice versa, using a lovely graph of the long tail:

Though a graph illustrating a different set of data, the concept can be re-applied to Open Source Project contribution. The Green area applies to the 'core' developers, who may even be employed by the project. The Orange applied to the people directly involved with the project, and perhaps some power users, and the Red section applied to everyone else.

The wonderful thing about the Red section, is that you get lots and lots of people contributing very little. However, it's these people who can really add value to a project.  With so many projects now existing across different distributions, each system becomes pretty unique.  Where bugfixes and irrationailities can be spotted and reported on by end-users running their unique system - the value added is huge.

There's also a question of expertise.  The guys in the Red Section are the programming experts, who are commiting code.  Those in the Orange Section are the users/implementers of the code - so will typically have a clear understanding of the direction of the project and the needs that the project needs to fulfil. Whereas in the Red Section are people who use the package, but often alongside other packages of greater interest/relevance to their line of work.  It's this cross-discipline collaboration that is unprecedencted.

Getting average non-geeky end users to use Open Projects is a massive challenge, but one that is going to bring massive benefits to Open Source Software.  Some people talk of the digital tipping point from a technical standpoint - "Woo, when we get this critical mass we'll overtake Microsoft within the next 5 years."  To be honest that doesn't bother me. Judge MS as you wish, but that's not why I'm here.  I'm here because the potential contribution that end users can make to Global Knowledge, through Open Projects.

It's going to be possible for a biological scientist and and engineer to be reviewing the same problem for different purposes.  It's unlikely that these two disciplines would ever communicate were it not be for this open project, and it's also possible that only with the combined knowledge and expertise of these two disciplines, the problem can be solved.

This is what excites me most about free software, and to think we're only just at the beginning.

It's quite nice how people can see that all my different email addresses can be linked via a gpg key.  If you deal with me through this blog, you can see the companies I work for, and vice versa.

I like that.

It's a massively important area of discussion, with huge social implications.  However, because it comes under the "geek umbrella" - most people choose to ignore it or 'switch off' from the conversation.

"Digital Rights, and what "feature creep" can achieve in terms of illegal/immoral operation."

It's something that I think needs to be put in the forefront of the public psyche - in so far as legal issues are regarded by the majority.

Leaving social issues to a group of people often stereotyped as having negligible social skills doesn't seem to be a sensible idea.

I've just read an article on The Register which detailed a system that Shopping Centres are now using to track people's movements around a shopping centre using their Mobile Phone.  When a phone registers with a network, it gets a TMSI address (a bit like a dynamic IP address) - and this PATH software is able to locate a handset to within a couple of metres - good enough to track which shop punters are going into.

Even though the makers say that each individual TMSI is refreshed at each phone reset - with more and more people leaving their phones on for sustained periods - it's not particularly outrageous to say that if I worked out my own TMSI, then the data is no longer anonymous.

Anyway - that's a little beside the point.  When I walk into a shopping centre, there are plenty of CCTV cameras.  I believe the mandate for putting them there is for my protection, rather than tracking my consumer habits.  Imagine some 'hoody' walking into a shopping centre, stealing something - then getting his phone confiscated by Police to work out the TMSI to see where the 'hoody' has been for the last few hours.  It's technically possible with this new system.

With the advance of technology, there are loads of completely un-sexy but massively important questions that need to be answered.  At the moment the government and authorities are simply seeing £'s.  There's technology being put together and used that infringes far more on our civil liberties than someone owning a copy of a terrorism handbook.

So, let's get un-sexy and start discussing what we want from technology.  Just because we can doesn't mean we should.