So the big news today on Twitter was Chris Hughes’ talk at TED. He got just under 2 minutes on stage and showed off some augmented reality stuff using Papervision 3D and the FLARtoolkit. Unfortunately he said some stuff along the lines of “I wrote” and “we converted” and didn’t mention the actual projects themselves by name. Understandably, some of the Flash community, who have contributed or use these projects, were pretty upset about this. A lot of people have put a lot of time in on these projects and then to see them on stage at a big name conference like TED, without being mentioned by name, and in a way that implies that another person did it all… yeah, not fun.
Now, I happened to meet Chris out at 360iDev earlier this year in San Jose. We didn’t become good friends or anything, but we had several conversations and hung out a bit. I liked him. Interestingly enough, the one thing we talked about, pretty much exclusively, was open source. Now, I’m all for open source, but Chris actually struck me as an open source fanatic. He’s created open source projects and actively contributes to others. He’s very serious about it. In fact, we wound up talking to the 360 organizers and set up an impromptu lunch discussion panel one day to talk about open source and how it fit in with the iPhone platform.
So my initial reaction was that it didn’t make sense that he’d be up there maliciously trying to claim other people’s work as his own. It just seemed incongruous to me. However, he said what he said, and it definitely comes off sounding like he created this whole thing. I could go into saying how he only had 2 minutes, and little preparation, and whatever. My point is not to stand up for him or defend him or apologize for him. He can do that for himself. And for the record, he did post on his blog the fact that he used Papervision and FLARtoolkit – before all the uproar – and has since blogged explaining himself.
My real reason for writing this is that it really depressed me how ugly things got in the community. I must have gotten 100 or more tweets about the situation. There were blog posts, jokes. People were posting photoshopped photos of Chris. Someone even started printing tshirts!!! For god’s sake! And before that, nobody even talked to the guy, asked him what was up.
Now, again, I want to re-iterate: I’m not here to defend him. And I totally understand why certain people would be upset. But this whole thing got way more ugly and disturbing than it really should have. I compared it to a lynch mob, and to me, that’s really how it felt.
How can I not compare this to last week’s Hoss/Flashbelt turmoil. The sad thing was that many of the same people who were decrying the whole “bandwagon jumping” to defame Hoss were now jumping on that same bandwagon to defame Chris. I know, I know, “it’s different.” Well the facts are, but the reaction is not.
My one question was, why not just talk to him first? Several people answered that simply talking to people does not always work. Frankly, that scares the crap out of me. “I don’t like what Joe is doing. I’m not going to talk to him because that might not work, so I’m going to start a massive PR campaign against him.” I’m not naming names, because most of the people who were going on about this are actually very good friends. People who I have massive respect for.
I’m not sure what to make of it all. It gets me down though. 🙁
The way the flash community has responded to these last two events has been such a shame. I feel like I am part of a club that prides themselves on juvenile behavior. I think it’s time we start putting away childish things.
I met chris at 360 iDev too and got the same impression.
I completely disagree. PaperVision3D has served me very well, and if the papervision team say they’re not happy with what happened, then it does matter, and I support them. And if that means blogging about it, then why not. You see really it seems from this post on Hughes’ blog ( http://spazout.com/ted_2009_and_why_it_was_the_best_thing_ever ) that he just bamboozled the TED organisers who were unfamiliar with the Flash scene. He might as well have shown the general electric site for the amount of his own work that went into it.
It’s completely different from the Hoss thing – he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
the flash community is fast becoming a bunch of sissies.
Iain, you disagree with what? Talking to people?
Thanks for posting this. Sometimes reasonable discussion can’t fit into 140 characters.
Understood, on that “rush to judgment” syndrome. Anil Dash wrote about a similar thing last week:
“The Law of Fail: Once a web community has decided to dislike a person, topic, or idea, the conversation will shift from criticizing the idea to become a competition about who can be most scathing in their condemnation.”
http://dashes.com/anil/2009/06/the-end-of-fail.html
It takes awhile to get a cycle of followup information, but it’s very quick to reinforce a social network. I suspect it’s less about external events than internal needs…?
jd/adobe
I get your points Keith and I agree that it was kinda like lynching a mob, on the other side if you don’t know this guy (for example – myself) and are familiar with pv3d and FLAR this presentation give you really a feeling like this guy is a douche.
I agree on the Talking point, but yeah if I would be Ralph, Carlos or Saqoosha, and all of sudden I see this video on TED I would go on Twitter a say WTF. Problem is that after a while Twitter can get really ugly…
I don’t wanna go in details here, in case (riping off pv3d/FLAR as well as lynching) this was a really sad for Flash community as a whole.
hi,
thank you for this (rather courageous) post.
I can’t belieive one can be stupid enough to willingly take on the whole flash community’s anger.
in the video, Chris seems extremely nervous and unprepared, so is the speech.
in such a state of excitement, giving credit is not a priority, even though it should have.
@marcus +1
Hi Keith,
I like your pacifist and calculated approach to things. I would, though, in this situation side with the guys from PV3D and FLARToolkit.
Chris is a smart fellow that knew what a huge opportunity it is to speak at TED. The PR and the connections can definitely put his software shop on a good footing. He also knew that if he admits to PV3D and FLARToolkit then he would have to explain it was left for him to do. This is exactly the question he was asked: “What is the code he actually developed for the demo?”. So far, I haven’t seen any answers.
The guy has a complex, something having to do with showing dad how good he is and showing the world that he can do more than the iPhone thing. Which is ironic somewhat, a guy that brags about breaking the law is once again involved in a edgy situation.
I disagree. I do think that yesterday’s reaction was exactly what was needed to counterbalance the unjustified amount of positive attention and exposure Chris got from his TED appearance.
Regarding the “talk to people first” argument: this event took place in February, so Chris had several months of opportunity to talk with the people that made his 3 minutes of fame possible, maybe say thank you or even apologize in advance that he forgot to give credits on stage. But there was nothing. Not even now there is an apology – only justifications.
Part of being in a community is social control, especially if there are resources that are free for grabs. Whilst the majority of people have enough responsibility and moral values that they would not take more than their share even if nobody is looking, some individuals need to be made aware that they would not get away with it. So even though it is ugly, the occasional lynch mob makes sure that people will continue to share their labour and knowledge for free.
And I think we have been a pretty civilized mob anyway.
Ok he did a mistake. Everyone does mistakes and hopefully he learnt form that. But that should be enough now! End of story!
the mob mentality is driving me nuts. I totally understand why people who put so much hard work, love and time into something that someone else doesn’t even acknowledge- don’t get me wrong, but the retweet stuff is really frustrating. We need to add to the conversation, not repeat it.
I could say I’m guilty of retweeting about this “hughesgate” issue but I can understand where Ralph was coming from – Hughes should have given credit to the frameworks. With that said – I do feel sorry for Hughes, what can we do in the future if such problems arise? Perhaps this is one of the downfalls of twitter? Highly effective but too much noise?
I can’t think of a solution for this…
I had to dig to find the video and script to form my own opinion, and in the process learned that TED organizers are already removing the original. It it definitely shines a bright light on this Chris Hughes character. A two minute first impression, left me nauseated. Dude is arrogant and obviously stealing credit for his own benefit. A lot of people really fall for this sort of personality.
I also learned his “claim to fame” is hacking the iPhone and he claims that this is why Apple released a SDK. After the impression he left from the video, I found myself wondering how much credit he deserves for his self proclaimed “claim to fame”.
OK, I’ve read the link to his blog, read the comments here and seen all of the fuss. I also think it’s a shame.
Sure, he was unprepared and the importance he had placed on being able to speak, or even BE AT TED, clearly stressed him out so much that he effectively flunked and failed to give credit where due. He was far too EXCITED, damn it!
Lesson: get speaking engagements based on your own abilities and it won’t happen.
Lesson for conference organisers: Think carefully before squeezing somebody into the schedule based upon a quick demo in a bar.
However:
Before Twitter this would have been something that a few people, a few “community insiders” whispered about to themselves and would have prompted an amount of “tsk tsk” reactions, not to mention a slap on the hand from a few others.
The rest of the world would also eventually see, from other reference sources, that
Post Twitter we find that the “news” of this mistake and the subsequent updates related to it can be escalated to such proportions that they hardly bear any relation to the actual scale of the issue itself. I’m not saying the situation isn’t bad. What I am saying is that he’s probably realised that himself by now and it may just be time to calm the mob down. In fact, I read between the lines on his blog that he realised it immediately afterwards – going back on the stage and making amends probably wasn’t an option however!
The weight of “the community” is something that should not be underestimated. It shouldn’t be abused though and behind most (robots excluded) Twitter accounts are real people who have real feelings.
Before jumping to type those 140 acidic characters, think about whether you’ve EVER made a mistake that you’ve regretted afterwards?
Sorry for taking over your blog with my thoughts Keith 🙂
Twitter sucks. It is so full of crap and totally annoying.
I have deleted my account from there.
P.S. Chris Hughes is cool!
Why can’t we all code along?
I for myself took part – not in the retweeting but I analysed for myself: what actually happened. I tried to think about what I wrote and took as much care as was possible in the statements I gave.
Persons are always different in extreme situations. I wouldn’t say that Hughes is a bad guy now because he did that: but he acted wrong at a bad time. He was given time to excuse and act – and his reaction was not closely covering the damage. If he is that much into open source he should be aware of open source licenses (which he seems not to be). From your description (without meeting Hughes) it sounds like he is as much of a fan boy of open source, as he is fanboy of himself who(reading the source code) doesn’t seem to really care what he publishes(and how) open source.
Now that the flash mob is such a fast/unforgivable one lies in the guruism – imho. People follow others and believe they are gods and don’t fail or are not humans. I invested 25 minutes to verify what I got from his presentation – I don’t think many other did: They show immediate solidarity to opinions. I agree that its a scary thing but on the other hand – If those things were really injustified then the people forget about it very fast … perhaps it would even turn out against the person inflaming them.
Btw.: I think he could have avoided a lot of the bashing by a comment box at his blog or by answering tweets properly or by a open letter.
Keith, I’m sorry but I have to disagree with you on several points. First of all, I think it’s fairly biased to say “I’ve met him, he seems to be … “. Since all the evidence and facts around this talk point in a different direction, I can’t see how this is relevant to the discussion.
For justice we need to be factual.
Chris Hughes went quite a length to get himself on stage at TED, as he describes in his blogpost about TED. Let’s ignore the tone which he uses in that specific post for his sake and say he had something genuinely novel to show. Unfortunately he didn’t.
What he showed on stage was a modification of a tutorial made by someone else. A tutorial which is showing off how to use FLARToolkit and Papervision3D. He modified this demo to show a ted video and a 3D model (which he apparently took from somewhere else).
I liked the comparison I saw somewhere else : It’s like replacing the google logo on the google search page with a Ted logo and then showing of the super sorting algorithm this incredible thing you programmed off.
A better comparison would be that he would demo the Quake 3D engine for the first time, where his contribution would be opening up the texture pack and modifying it to show TED logo’s.
That, on itself isn’t bad, as long as you give proper credit. Now, let’s say he actually ommitted it by accident. Why does he then say things like “I programmed”, “We managed to introduce”, etc. It’s all over in his talk. This is not just an ommision, it’s an attempt to take credit for work he just hasn’t done.
Furthermore in the subsequent TED interview, in very clear wording, he takes credit for porting ARToolkit to Flash. His self supplied sourcefiles and by his own (way later) addmitance, this is using FLARToolkit, which he had no hand in what so ever.
Let’s see it’s all a slip up, and in all fairness he was trying to show a demo of these two opensource projects….why would he until this point in time still say that his work was “Based upon FLARToolkit and Papervision3D”. Why would he not say; I modified an example I found online. His work is not based on anything, it’s a demo of the work other people did. He did not do any actual work, but in every possible way he seems to want to obfuscate that fact.
I find the likeness you are striking between hossgate and hughgate unfair. Actually, I’m quite happy with the result the twitter uproar caused right now. Would TED actually have had removed his video and talk based on his input alone ? Would they have done it if 3 developers would have whispered about it? No, the rectification was placed based upon this uproar. Can we question the uproar about the Iran Elections in the same way ? Even is the cause is right, we cannot leverage the power of new media to rectify a standing issue.
Also, I have sent Chris Hughes a very clear email about how I feel on this. He has yet to respond. The blogpost addition he has made is just further obfuscation of the actual truth, and I do feel the interview should be rectified (as well as that Chris should apologize), for the clearcut statement that Chris was involved or responsible for the porting of ARToolkit to Flash. It’s just not true.
In fact, I think you can THANK Hughes for making the effort to demo this technology to the TED elite (yeah, they are and I’m probably just saying that because I’m not). I he intended to take credit for the foundation technology then he’s a fake and very misguided. But, I’m not sure whether that was his intent or not. And, sure, he could have disclosed more in the presentation. But step back and realize this was the first exposure to AR in Flash to many folks present.
Here’s a crazy analogy: Sex Pistols made punk rock big. Sure, they totally stole it from The Ramones ,but I dare say that if the Sex Pistols’s manufactured version of punk rock hadn’t been presented as they presented it (which I don’t recall them ever going out of their way to credit The Ramones)… then punk rock wouldn’t have become the movement it had. Analogies aren’t always great for arguments–and, really, I’m not so much arguing here rather pointing out that we should actually give some props to Chris for promoting the technology–even if his vicious intent was to take all the credit for it (which I really doubt).
On Keith’s point: is a twitter-mob a good or bad thing… well, that’s very interesting. I think like other new vehicles for “news” it will get sifted out one day. However, I don’t have a lot of faith this happening any day soon.
Since none of the work he showed was fully his, I do not think that analogy of punk rock is really valid. Imagine the Sex Pistols just covering every Ramones song. Would it then be just to say that what they did was contribute to Punk rock ? No, in that scene it would have been plagiarism.
If Chris actually added something new to either toolkits or the example he modified, this would be valid. Instead he showed something entirely un-original, which essentially comes bundled with the FLARToolkit and an example and claimes he actually wrote software. Obfuscating the reality; this was a demo of FLARToolkit with Papervision3D as a visualizer, which he merely modified to add the TED Video and a different 3D model then the original example.
In your analogy, the Sex Pistols would have changed some of the drum-riffs in the Ramones song, this being enough to make it “their own”.
No matter if they helped with the exposure of Punk music, it would have been called plagiarism in that scene, or at least highly unoriginal and unjust to claim your own. (Even if they printed in small print that it where covers on the back of the album).
Let’s agree to disagree. 😉
Just had a nice IM conversation with Ralph. Talking to him helped me to clarified some of the thoughts in my own head. Basically, I asked Ralph if it were me, who Ralph knows well, instead of Chris, who he doesn’t know, what would he do: A. Contact me and say, “Keith, what the fuck were you thinking???” or B. Blog and twitter about it. Obviously, he would have done A.
So all I’m saying is that Chris is a person, with available contact info, and the same could have been done for him. Now if he had not responded, or refused to acknowledge what was said, or didn’t handle it, then the situation could have been escalated.
I think it’s too easy to start a campaign against someone when it’s someone you don’t know. And the real point I realized when talking to Ralph was the amazing power we have at this time. I can start an international movement right now, without even leaving my chair. I have something like 1,700 twitter followers. If I blog, 20,000 people will read my words over the next week. I’m not bragging. Those are just numbers. I’m sure many of you have similar or better numbers. And once a hot subject hits the retweet circuit, I’m sure it can easily reach millions. Within an hour or two! That’s incredible power. More than most individual people have ever had in history. Hell, even more than most governments or press agencies have had in terms of speed and instant reach. We need to be careful how we use it.
And people actually watch soap operas? You can’t much better than the Flash community these days …
And that’s why I don’t do any of this “social web” crapola.
I second Mario, however you watch this, from at least the moment when Chris went on stage until now (public apologies are yet to be done), he did all wrong. Even twittering the link to the TED video came back as a boomerang since now it redirects to the clarifying post.
It’s good to make mistake if you can learn from them, it’s a shame it seems Chris didn’t get it yet though.