Project Muckle

5 years ago I had a big idea. So big in fact that I ran up a project called Project Muckle. And as we all know, “Many mickle make a muckle!” This idea was that big. However, it never really made it out of the planning stage, but I’ve given a few presentations on it. I wish I was charismatic enough to get a bit more interest in it, but alas I’m about as charismatic as a door knob. It probably started when I began using words like “alas.” Now the idea came from the frustration that the internet wasn’t giving me what it had promised. It was supposed to bring us all closer and it just seemed in 2015 like we were only using it to build social networks that didn’t really bring us closer together. Where was the connection to new ideas? YouTube was supposed to have petabytes of new videos uploaded daily and I kept getting the same videos recommended to me over and over again. Pizza rat was genius though.

I wanted to be amazed at the world that existed, but it seemed I had to know where things were to find out new things. I didn’t and to be honest still don’t know what it is like to have a Argentinian Quinceañera, or what it is like to turn 90 in Mongolia. How could I fix this? That question shapes most of my days. My wife hates that. So my idea was to build what I was calling a Transient Social Network with Memory. See my comment earlier about not being very charismatic. Regardless, I really wanted the ability to spin up a social network that only existed for a limited time in a limited location. And then the activity of the transient social network can be saved like a bubble that represents an event which can be revisited and re-experienced.

So as an example, do you remember T in the Park, the Scottish weekend music festival? What if on entry you were given the opportunity to sign in to a social network specific to the event. All texts, videos, social media posts, audio recordings, calls and pictures are kept and stored. I hadn’t worked out privacy as of yet so don’t start shouting yet.Then when the event was finished, the bubble is available to be revisited. On revisiting you could just be confronted with a wall of data and that wouldn’t be very useful. We need to curate the event, much like you would get on the telly every night of the festival they would bring you an hour of the highlights. I wanted to use machine learning to break down the event into its parts based on thousands of variables in the data captured at the event. You could see when all the phone migrated from one tent to another married to people posting images and texts saying the event was amazing. Then taking the social media data and coupling it with data from the event itself such as official videos and the event itinerary we can see that the crowd loved Mickey 9s on Saturday night King Tut’s Wah Wah Tent. They Never actually played there that I know of, but you should listen to them anyway they are brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovKYuUMN5dc

...but alas I’m about as charismatic as a door knob.

I wouldn’t need to hide any of the event away, just fold it back and present the highlights based on how many people viewed, talked about or took pictures of an event or with capturing enough data how many actually attended, plus a thousand other variables. You could still explore every corner of the event just like visiting a foreign city.

Here was my pitch in 2015:

This volunteer based network takes all allowed media from a device, while it has permission, during a set time span and within a particular geography. A transient social network. A ready example would be a music festival. So imagine T in the Park, for three days all allowed tweets, Facebook posts, selfies, videos, sounds, images, and what have you are collected in cloud storage. They are already paired with metadata surrounding the event through which the data is being collected. Beyond that we can run the data through machine learning and AI algorithms to determine what were the main focuses of the event creating metadata about the experience had at this event. These editorial choices can then present an archived view of the event (not removing content, just suppressing similar or not as important content) The event then exists in a package that can be revisited and experience again by those that were there (in the case of Grandma’s 75^th birthday party) or if the event is open to the public to anyone in the world.

Allowing the platform to collect information, also allows it to act in much the same way as a traditional social network. If you give permission for the device to see your contacts it can tell you that your roommate from college is at the festival and currently over by the falafel hut. Maybe you’d want to send a message so he can repay that tenner he owes you? These interactions in turn begin to add to the experience of the entire event and are rolled into the packaged re-visitable event.

I saw this whole system in four key layers:

Connection Layer

• App attempts to connect to a central database if successful it registers or joins a local network bubble if not successful it generates a local network bubble and syncs at the earliest convenience
• Once a network bubble is created online options are given including whether or not to be an open bubble or by invite only as well as other options
• Once you join (online connection) you have access to all content that is being generated.
• Ultimate aim would be to enable mesh networking, but this is waiting on Android to be allowed to do this without rooting phone

Experience Layer

• You can search for others within the network bubble
• You can message currently connected  network bubble members
• You can leave messages on a board for network bubble members to be picked up when they connect again
• You can post text, pics, video, and audio
• With each post GS coordinates are submitted (if GPS is turned on, or in case not location data is submitted) as well as time
• If you are connected to the network bubble you can browse uploaded media and leave comments, votes on quality

Archival Layer

• Server side – all uploaded content is archived
• Machine Learning used to curated material, (in the case of multiple photographs it would take image data such as location and aspect and only allow a single image to be show based on comments and quality vote).
• The network bubble is curated in layers so that an experience can be re-lived by peeling back layers to reveal more depth and dimension

Re-Visit Layer

• Allow all past members of the network Bubble to re-visit past experiences
• Archiving continues to adapt according to comments and votes left for media in the archival bubble

I still like the idea. I would like to visit a search engine of experiences from around the world. Perhaps I could find a new way to experience the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona in a way other than reading about it or watching City Slickers. I feel naive thinking that the internet still has the ability to bring us together rather than divide us through bullying or voter fraud, but there you have it.

As always if you are independently wealthy and wanna watch a guy with the drive, means and ideas to shift the world (not necessarily for the better) then I'm always available. Wait till you hear what I'm doing now!