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  • Historical Pre-Enactment Society

    A two-week prototype of living in the future, live and in person.
  • Founder: nemorathwald

    community, surveillance, experimental, protovation, experiment, prototype, reality tv, simulation, real life,

  • Who We Need

    Television executives. (optional)

    Experiment-design enthusiasts.

    Social psychologists.

    Specialists in CCTV, RFID, and other spying technologies.

    Owners of parcels of land or a large house.

    Event coordinators (such as myself, so we’ve got at least one).

    Web application programmers.

    Web usability designers.

    Attendees of the “Burning Man” event.

    Sponsors or other funding.

  • How to join

    Define one of the following terms:

    1. the modern English idiomatic usage of "cargo cult".

    2. "triple-blind experiment".

    3. "control-group".

  • Mission
    You've heard of the TV show "1900 House". HPES is “2100 House.” You've heard of Civil War re-enactors and the Society for Creative Anachronism that re-enacts the middle ages. HPES is pre-enactment.The Historical Pre-Enactment Society gets together in person for a few weeks to pre-enact a world-changing solution to test it and locate ways to improve it. HPES rapidly attempts many prototype solutions, measures them, throws them out, and evolves improved versions. If not for the copyright on EPCOT by Disney, it could genuinely be called an Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow.
  • What we can accomplish

    • HPES helps distinguish between solutions that work, and solutions that will not work or are actively counter-productive. We hope to apply mechanisms to hold them accountable to provide some kind of outcome. The simulations would differ significantly from reality, but could still provide insights about where we need to apply patches to our ideas.

      Pre-enactors are permitted to exploit vulnerabilities in the proposed solution and still earn points, so long as they live by the proposed solution, because finding those social, technological, and systematic weaknesses will improve our understanding for future sessions of HPES. Ideally, the players will win, but the proposed solutions will fail. There is more to be learned from negative experimental results than positive ones. Solutions must fail rapidly in order to improve rapidly.

      If you feel your Superstructure could use a test in microcosm, please join.

  • How this superstruct works

    • The only online component would be the HPES website, at http://preenactment.org. We would develop a web application for users to propose and define world-changing solutions, detail what tasks pre-enactors would fulfill to earn points, what behaviors would deduct points from pre-enactors, and what measurements would determine the success or failure of the proposed solution.

      When an online solution design team has declared their design to be rigorously experimentally defined under peer review, applications open up for Pre-Enactors. They sign a pledge that if a certain number of pledge signatories is reached, they will all travel to meet in person and live for a few weeks under the behavioral conditions of the proposed solution.

      They also agree to be spied upon during that time as if in a reality TV show. Hidden cameras, RFID tags in the products they use, keystroke loggers, and other surveillance technologies detect whether they are pre-enacting and scoring points, and also whether the proposed solution is succeeding or failing. At the end of the session, the winner is the pre-enactor who most accurately pre-enacted the proposed solution.

      An actual television show seems unlikely, but a web-based show distributed similarly to "The Guild" or "Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog" might be practical.

  • Other information

    • Additional reading:

      The 1900 House: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_1900_House

      Society for Creative Anachronism: http://www.sca.org/

      Experimental design on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_experiments

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