Lauren made a fantastic video of our adventure:

UrbanHonking took a major step today with the maiden voyage of the first ship in the UrbanHonking Navy.

The launch was captained by Steve Schroeder, piloted by Josh Berezin, with additional support from crew-members Lauren and Mike Merrill. The still unnamed zodiac has a long association with the Merrill family, dating back to the late eighties with service on the interior rivers and coastline of Alaska as well as service in the northeastern United States.

Being the first ship in the UH Navy is of great significance and allows UH further capability to respond to a wide range of challenges in the years ahead.

One of the characters in the upcoming game Mercenaries 2 looks a lot like Jeff Jahn to me.

I was on a panel last night at OFFICE called Meet The Design Press and it struck me that there was a very interesting difference between UrbanHonking and the other media on the panel.

Leading up to the event I thought about what UrbanHonking writes about, and aside from the SuperCal (coming back, I promise), we don't really "cover" many things. I've written about things as if we're press, and even occasionally sent someone to an event to cover it, but generally UrbanHonking is more about creating something.

During the panel I mentioned this to the audience. UrbanHonking doesn't want to write about what you are doing, UrbanHonking wants to get involved in what you are doing. We want to document it, participate in it, and generally blog the shit out of it. (As I was explaining this I was thinking to myself about how UrbanHonking is this loose group of creative people who can do just about anything.)

We're not the "press". Which maybe seems pretty obvious to most people, but I found it a little bit profound.

160 days ago, according to the page it is published on, Anselm Hook wrote, "We need digital models of our communities." I just read this today, but it's something I have been thinking about for a while. After staying in the dome in LA I started reading a book by Buckminster Fuller who mentioned he had a policy of always telling the truth. A reason for his honesty policy was that the computer models we create are only as good as the data we put in, so if you base your models on lies, the results won't mean anything. (A digital honesty policy.)

Anselm makes the point that the world we live in is more complex than we can understand, and it is that lack of understanding that leads to many bad decisions (some of which we can see in retrospect). With a better understanding of how things work we will naturally change our behaviors to reach the best outcome. The problem of digital honesty comes into play in a game like SimCity.

Many of us learned about how cities work by playing SimCity, but in making the simulation more "playable" the game reduces the usefulness of the model:

For example, if crime rate is high in the created city, the user simply places more police stations and jails around the geographical space and crime rate decreases. Clearly this is not how we can or should handle this problem. -SimCities and @Culture

Of course if the game is overly complicated and works to create a more realistic model then even the model we create is more complicated than we can understand. It's not realistic to expect every individual to be able to use complex models of their communities. The models need to be created and run by people who know how to create and run complex models, and then the results need to be explained to the people in charge (either politicians, or if they are unwilling to listen, the press) who can create a strategy.

With a strategy in place you change from reactions to actions. (Or, another way to look at it, actions are the past reactions to the future.) Digital models help create the strategy, and then you create a tactical implementation of the strategy that breaks down into specific actions.

I wish my comments were working.

If you want to harness the power of the masses you also have to do a little work. Sites which create a fertile environment for user participation via reviews (Amazon, iTunes, etc) also have the responsibility to do some weeding. Look at this example from Citysearch:

Clearly user bubbafred is affiliated with the "real" independent taxi. Two entries, each on cab companies of the same name, each with very different and very vague experiences. Citysearch's lack of weeding out commercial spam accounts like this means the while site is suspect and the recommendations are worthless. As is also the case if you have ever read iTunes reviews. Both seem to be under the false impression that the user generated content has a positive effect on the experience of using the site to get the address of a restaurant or to purchase music, and both are wrong.