Digging into Warm Data, The Warm Data Lab, and Certified Training.

We must build data infrastructures that embody multiple ways of knowing and understanding our world, and that help us advance both ecological and social ends, before corporations conquer this space for themselves.

Tech culture has created a Wild West of real and simulated individuals, and infested its terrain with manias, biases, and irritability. I’m not suggesting that data dignity is a perfect or complete solution, or that it should replace all of the other ideas in play. But no idea is working well enough right now, despite an urgent need, and data digni... See more

the world is changing fundamentally due to several major factors: the shift in geological time from Holocene to Anthropocene, the impact of the internet and smart phones on the infosphere and lifeworld, capitalism running out of viable frontiers and being a complex adaptive system that has lost its ability to adapt, widespread governance failures, ... See more

I think people have always wrestled with the question of how to turn data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. More information (or more structured information) doesn’t automatically mean more knowledge — or wisdom for that matter.

As the world becomes more complex, existing data platforms cannot keep up — and a lot of valuable knowledge remains trapped and not written down anywhere. Not even Google can index what is in our minds (not yet anyway). Some of the most valuable data in the world is the unstructured, tacit insights in our heads.

Data, on one end of the spectrum, is separable, objective, linear, mechanistic, and abundant. Wisdom, on the other end of the spectrum, is holistic, subjective, spiritual, conceptual, creative, and scarce. [...] Today we are drowning in a raging flood of new data and information and the raft of wisdom to which we desperately cling is breaking

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As an answer to this question, I propose this: We are discovering and awakening into an essential, animating, actionable awareness of ourselves as participants in ecosystems.

The question behind it was “how can anyone, whether they’re technical or not, create or cultivate their own database?” When I started doing independent research last year, that was one of the main questions that was swirling. It’s fundamental to a lot of the other explorations that I'm doing now, looking at how alternative forms of technology might... See more