Author: griffey

Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.

Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.

He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.

Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.

Categories
Blockchain Library Issues Technology

Blockchain & Decentralization for the Information Industries

Announcing the launch of the first Massive Open Online Course on Blockchain & Decentralization specifically focused around libraries, museums, archives, publishers, and the rest of the information ecosystem! Registration is now open and the course itself begins March 11th and runs for 6 weeks. Did I mention that the course is free?

I am the course designer and instructor for this MOOC, which is my first time designing a learning experience like this. Myself along with 4 very talented San Jose State University i.School students who will be acting as TAs for the course, will be monitoring the course and participating in the discussion boards to make sure that everyone progresses through the following outcomes.

  • Describe and explain the early uses of distributed ledger technology and the design of current blockchain systems.
  • Recognize the differences and similarities among various decentralized systems, and determine the most appropriate blockchain applications.
  • Compare and evaluate the advantages/disadvantages of using blockchain or other types of technologies for different applications.
  • Identify the ways blockchain can be applied in the information industries.

This course is the penultimate outcome of an IMLS grant given to San Jose State for the Blockchain National Forum, which was held in 2018. The final outcome will be a book which will be published this year, with chapters written by attendees and experts, summarizing and expanding on the lessons from the Forum (full disclosure: I wrote one of the chapters for the book as well).

The course is designed without any expectation that participants know anything about blockchain or decentralized technologies before beginning the course. It will walk you through details and introductions to the technology, all the way through existing services and systems and finally to what a decentralized future might look like. The full course breakdown looks like this:

  • Week 1 – March 11-17
    • Overview and History of Blockchain
  • Week 2 – March 18-24
    • Issues, Considerations, Problems
  • Week 3 – March 25-31
    • Decentralization
  • Week 4 – April 1-7
    • Systems & Services
  • Week 5 – April 8-14
    • Use Cases – Public Libraries, Academic Libraries, Museums, Archives
  • Week 6 – April 15-21
    • Future Directions & Next Steps

The course is a combination of mini-lectures that set up each week’s content, a selection of content relating to the topic (including readings, video, and audio), and then a discussion board where people can ask questions and talk about each week’s topic. At the end of each week there is a short quiz, and successful complete of the quiz will earn badges for each week, as well as a cumulative course badge and certificate at the end.

Please share this announcement widely! I’d like everyone who is even remotely interested in learning about Blockchain and decentralized tech to sign up and work through the course.

I’ll see you March 11th in the course!

Categories
ALA Personal Technology

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries

Cover image of Library Technology Report

Now available is a publication I’m particularly proud of, “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Libraries” from ALA Techsource. I edited the volume, as well as authoring two of the chapters. The real stars are the three other librarians who contributed: Bohyun Kim, Andromeda Yelton, and Craig Boman. Bohyun wrote up her experience at the University of Rhode Island in setting up the first library-based multidisciplinary Artificial Intelligence lab, Andromeda talked about the development and possible future of AI-based library search as illustrated by her fantastic service HAMLET, and finally Craig talked about his experience in attempting AI-driven subject assignment to materials.

I wrote the Introduction, where I try to give a summary of the current state of AI and Machine Learning systems, and show some examples of how they work and are structured in practice. I also am particularly proud of drawing a line from Mary Shelley to the Google Assistant…you’ll have to read it to get the full effect, but here’s a different section to whet your appetite for more AI talk:

What changes in our world when these nonhuman intelligences are no longer unique, or special, or even particularly rare? …. AI and machine learning are becoming so much a part of modern technological experience that often people don’t realize what they are experiencing is a machine learning system. Everyone who owns a smartphone, which in 2018 is 77 percent of the US population, has an AI system in their pocket, because both Google and Apple use AI and machine learning extensively in their mobile devices. AI is used in everything from giving driving directions to identifying objects and scenery in photographs, not to mention the systems behind each company’s artificial agent systems (Google Assistant and Siri, respectively). While we are admittedly still far from strong AI, the ubiquity of weak AI, machine learning, and other new human-like decision-making systems is both deeply concerning and wonderful.

I also wrote the Conclusion and suggested some further reading if people are really interested in diving deeper into the world of AI and ML. In the conclusion, I try to talk about some of the likely near-future aspects of AI, and the impact it is likely to have on the information professions, from individualized AI assistants to intelligent search. From the conclusion:

As with much of the modern world, automating the interaction between humans is often the most difficult challenge, while the interactions between humans and systems are less difficult and are the first to be automated away. In areas where human judgment is needed, we will instead be moving into a world where machine learning systems will abstract human judgment from a training set of many such judgments and learn how to apply a generalized rubric across any new decision point. This change will not require new systems short term, but in the longer term a move to entirely new types of search and discovery that have yet to be invented is very likely.

I hope this work is useful for librarians, libraries, library students, and any other information professional who is trying to wrap their heads around the possibilities and potential for Artificial Intelligence and the world of information creation, consumption, organization, and use.

If your organization would like to talk to me about AI or Machine Learning and how it might make a difference to your business or operations, please get in touch. I’d love to work with you.

Categories
Personal

Future Direction

TL;DR – I am on the job market and actively looking for a full time remote position where I can make a broad difference in democratizing information access.

I am officially on the market for a more traditional job. I enjoy the work I have done for the last few years in consulting and elsewhere, and am incredibly appreciative of the learning and growth that have come with it. Over the last year, I have come to realize that teams are a force multiplier for effort, and I think the most effective place for me right now would be as a part of an organization where I can take advantage of that multiplier to make a difference in the world.

I have a rich background in technology and libraries, and could be successful in a number of roles: product management for technology work, managing a technology team, directing a research unit, acting as an evangelist for technology, and writing/reporting in a more journalistic way. I have managed technology teams both in organizations and independently, have international experience in both academic and public library operations, am regularly invited to consult on emerging technology strategy and planning around the world, and am a respected author and researcher. I created two different open source software/hardware projects, both of which have an active international audience and user base.  My CV is available online, and there are examples of my research, thinking, speaking, software projects, and writing available all over the web. If it involves understanding, communicating about, explaining, creating, or forecasting technology and/or libraries, I’m your person.

So what am I looking for? I would love to be library-focused or library-adjacent, mostly because it’s an area where I have extensive existing connections and knowledge, and can have the most impact to the world. I’m also super interested in socially-responsible technology work, where I can work towards providing increased access to information and have a net-positive effect on society.

I am geographically limited, and am looking for remote work that allows me to work primarily from middle Tennessee. I’m happy to travel occasionally (that’s my situation now), and traveling for work would be great.

If you have a position that you think might be a good fit, or if you just want to reach out to see if there’s anything that might work out to get me on your team, drop me an email or fill out the form below. I’d love to talk.

Contact Me

Categories
Library Issues Maker Personal Technology

Joining MetaLAB

I am beyond thrilled to announce I’ll be working with the outstanding group of scholars and artists at Harvard’s MetaLab this upcoming academic year as an affiliate, working mainly on their Library Test Kitchen project. I’m joining a team with some of my favorite makers and doers, people like Matthew Battles, Sarah Newman, and Jessica Yurkofsky, and many more that I am looking forward to meeting. I’ll still be in TN, working with them remotely and joining the team in Cambridge whenever possible.

I’ve been inspired by their work for years now, especially projects like Electric Campfire, which are right in my sweet spot of making with a goal of increased social connectivity. If you’ve not taken a look at the stuff that LTK has done, browse through and see what might inspire you.

Personally, I’m super excited to stretch my own knowledge of design and making through working with MetaLab. I’ve been consciously paying more attention to the design and making side of my brain recently, and while my instincts are not always to the artistic (I tend toward the more functional) I do have some aesthetic opinions that I like to embed in the work I do. I’m looking forward to expanding this bit of my brain.

Thank you to the gang for inviting me onboard. I’m excited to see what we can do together!

And lastly: MetaLab and Library Test Kitchen will be making an appearance at the 2018 LITA Forum in Minneapolis in November, so watch for more information about that very soon!

Categories
Personal

Libraries as the Last Private Public Space

TL;DR: With the rise of surveillance technologies, and the ever-growing Internet of Things, there is a distinct possibility that in the near future, the library may be the only private public place left in modern society.

The modern world is largely driven by what has been termed “surveillance capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff. Surveillance capitalism is, defined roughly, the monetization of data that is gathered through the observation of individual or group behavior. This data can be gathered voluntarily (by asking users for it), involuntarily (one company gathering information about an individual by taking it from another data source), or via some combination of the two (data that was given freely by the individual, but is later leaked or stolen from the recipient). Almost the entirety of the modern web is predicated on surveillance capitalism, with targeted advertising being the driving force behind many of the largest companies in the world. Nearly every social network (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and the like) are in this category, as are the largest web retailers like Amazon. Google is, famously, not really a search company, nor is it driven by a desire to organize the worlds information. It is an advertising company, with 90% of its revenue coming from some form of advertising that is based on the things it knows about you.

Consider, just as an exercise, how much Google can know about you. If you use the Google search engine, it knows everything you’ve searched for, every result, and every link you’ve clicked to get information. If you use the Chrome browser, then Google has the capacity to know nearly everything. In theory, they can know everything you’ve typed into the address bar, everything you’ve typed into a non-secure form, and more. If you use Gmail, Google scans your email (sent and received) to better target you. Use Google Drive or Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, and those are scanned as well.

The last few months have brought to light the cost to society of surveillance capitalism, in the form of Facebook and the potential influencing of the US elections through automated targeted advertising. There is beginning to be a backlash against this type of data collection, and it’s possible that the near-future may see the rise of regulation and policy to prevent this sort of data from being used in advertising. This isn’t out of the realm of possibility, as the US has a history of federally regulating types of advertising allowed, from type (subliminal advertising) to content (cigarette ads, alcohol ads).

This is likely to be necessary as future hardware developments allow for near-zero-cost low power data collection systems to be implemented ubiquitously throughout our world. Consider the development of a camera module that powers itself, because the sensor is also a solar cell that produces the power necessary to run itself. Due to Moore’s Law and Koomey’s Law, we will soon have the capacity to spread cameras and microphones with cellular and wifi radios attached to them across our environment at incredibly low costs. It is very easy to imagine a future where companies like Google give away packages of these “ubiquity sensors” and use them to harvest data about movement and behavior in the same kind of way that they “give away” Google Maps by harvesting movement information from Android phones.

Once we head further down this road, it is highly possible that we are approaching the end of public spaces being anonymous or private spaces where one can be reasonably certain they aren’t being surveilled. Right now, this is already more or less the case in many cities like London, and we have seen omnipresent surveillance spread across entire counties in the case of somewhere like China.

I say all of this because I believe that not only is privacy and security fundamental to the operation of libraries in the United States, but because I can envision this near-future where libraries may be the last public space that doesn’t surveil you for the purposes of increasing the bottom line of a corporation. This is a space and effort that libraries should embrace, advertise, and focus on…privacy and freedom from surveillance is necessary for a functional democracy, in the same way that the ALA’s Democracy Statement says:

“Democracies need libraries. An informed public constitutes the very foundation of a democracy; after all, democracies are about discourse—discourse among the people. If a free society is to survive, it must ensure the preservation of its records and provide free and open access to this information to all its citizens.”

The power and strength of the library to protect and enable democracy and equity goes farther than the preservation and access to information. Libraries have a duty to the privacy of their patrons, but moreover they have a duty to defend the foundations of democracy itself. In this future world of ubiquitous surveillance, the library has a duty to say no….to provide access to spaces that are not collecting information about what patrons are doing. Libraries are spaces where people should be safe, as safety is a prerequisite for information seeking and understanding. Ubiquitous surveillance is fundamentally unsafe for vulnerable populations of patrons, and libraries have a duty to those patrons to resist the collection and retention of data about individuals.

As a result, the next 5-10 years are going to be incredibly dangerous. Libraries can step up at every level to protect the privacy and security of their community. In order to protect and support the fundamental tenets of our democratic society, libraries must double-down on privacy now by protecting their patron’s data and information seeking, but also be ready to protect their communities by resisting the rise of ubiquitous surveillance in the world.

Categories
Blockchain

Blockchain & Libraries from Carnegie Mellon – Qatar

This past month I traveled to a place I wasn’t sure I’d ever visit…Doha, Qatar. I was brought to Doha for an awesome reason, to deliver the Gloriana St. Clair Distinguished Lecture in 21st Century Librarianship. The topic that I was asked to prepare remarks on was Blockchain (which I chose to broadly construe as decentralized technologies) and how it (they) might matter to the information professions in the near future. The actual title of my talk was Decentralization & Blockchain: Possibilities & Problematizations for Libraries, and the goal was to explain the technology, but also to bring to light potentials and risks that surround blockchain and decentralization technologies as they relate to libraries and information systems. There is a huge amount of potential in this technology, beyond the fintech hype and insanity of the moment. There is also risk, especially for organizations that are centered around the very notion of centralization of resources.

Here’s my lecture, along with the accompanying slides below it. If your consortium or company is interested in possibilities for blockchain in the information space and are looking for a consultant to help you understand it, I’m available.

Video

Slides

Categories
Personal

Vote Griffey!

After well over a decade of being a part of ALA and LITA, and working at (almost) every level of the division, I was asked and accepted the nomination to run for the position of Vice President/President-Elect for the Library & Information Technology Association. I’ve served as an organizer of an Interest Group, been the chair of multiple committees, served as a Director-as-Large, and spent two years as Parliamentarian for the Division. I’m excited that I have the opportunity to stand for election, and I hope that members find it worthwhile to vote for me. If you’re reading this, I hope I can count on your vote, and ask you to let your friends in LITA know that I would appreciate their vote as well.

What does this mean? If elected, it means I would spend the next three years following an arch of leadership in LITA (as Vice President, then President, and then finally Past President) at a time of what could be great change. The recently released Working Document – Exploration of Integration and Realignment Opportunities for ALCTS, LITA, and LLAMA is the beginning of a long discussion among members of the respective divisions. The TL;DR of the document is that all three divisions recognize that their individual challenges may be mitigated in part by joining forces…not an easy nor straightforward goal, but one that has the potential to strengthen the opportunities for and service to all members.

I’m excited by the opportunities a change like this represents. My time with LITA has been punctuated by efforts to make systems better for members, first as an IG chair with BIGWIG where we moved the needle on how presentations might work at the Annual conference through the Social Software Showcase, then as chair of the Programming Planning Committee where I led the team that completely revised how programming was done by moving from an entirely analog process (7 copies of your proposal plus in-person meetings at Midwinter…) to a digital one. Even now, when I’ve been tasked with re-thinking how LITA Forum works, my focus is always on what we can do to empower and reduce the friction necessary for members to be involved.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world of technology will keep marching, and I will work to maintain focus on issues that are at the heart of the future of the profession. I’ve tried to outline some of those on my Election Website, but I would LOVE to hear from members (and potential members!) about where you would like LITA to focus. If I’m elected, I’m going to need a ton of help…but I’m excited to have the opportunity to serve in this role, to work to make LITA better for members, and to hopefully chart a better course for the future of library technology.

If you have any questions for me, or just want to drop me a note about anything, I’d love to hear from you. You can @ or DM me on Twitter @griffey, or feel free to send me an email at griffey at gmail.

If you are a LITA member: I ask for your vote, and appreciate your faith in me if you do. Voting opens Monday, March 12, closes Wednesday, April 4, and you should receive details on voting in your email.

Thank you!

Categories
Digital Culture Library Issues

Beware Library Cobras…

This post is a short excerpt from my upcoming Library Technology Report on Smart Buildings. I’m just returning from attending LITA Forum 2017, and had a fantastic experience. My one disappointment was in the lack of problematization of data collection, retention, and analysis…especially as it relates to the “Internet of Things” and the coming flood of data from IoT.

This excerpt contains no solutions, only questions, concerns, and possible directions. If anyone has thoughts or would like to start a dialogue about these issues, I’d love to talk. The full Library Technology Report on Smart Libraries will be published by ALA TechSource in the next few months.

The end-game of the Internet of Things is that computing power and connectivity is so cheap that it is literally in every object manufactured. Literally everything will have the ability to be “smart”; Every chair, every table, every book, every pencil, every piece of clothing, every disposable coffee cup. Eventually the expectation will be that objects in the world know where they are and are trackable and/or addressable in some way. The way we interact with objects will likely change as a result, and our understanding of things in our spaces will become far more nuanced and details than now.

For example, once the marginal cost of sensors drops below the average cost for human-powered shelf-reading, it becomes an easy decision to sprinkle magic connectivity sensors over our books, making each of them a sensor and an agent of data collecting. Imagine, at any time, being able to query your entire collection for mis-shelved objects. Each book will be able to communicate with each book around it, with the wifi basestations in the building, with the shelves, and be able to know when they are out of place. Even more radical, maybe the entire concept of place falls away, because the book (or other object) will be able to tell the patron where it is, no matter where it happens to be shelved in the building. Ask for a book, and it will be able to not only tell you where it is, it can mesh with all the other books to lead you to it. No more “lost books” for patrons, since they will be able to look on a map and see where the book is in their house, and have it reveal itself via an augmented reality overlay for their phone.

The world of data that will be available to us in 10-20 years will be as large as we wish it to be. In fact, it may be too large for us to directly make sense of it all. My guess is that we will need to use machine learning systems to sort through the enormous mounds of data and help us understand the patterns and links between different points of data. The advantage is that if we can sort and analyze it appropriately, the data will be able to answer many, many questions about our spaces that we’ve not even dreamed of yet, hopefully allowing the designing of better, more effective and useful spaces for our patrons.

At the same time, we need to be wary of falling into measurements becoming targets. I opened the larger Report with Goodhart’s Law, credited to economist Charles Goodhart and phrased by Mary Strathern, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” We can see this over and over, not just in libraries, but in any organization. An organization will optimize around the measures that it is rewarded by, often to negative effects in other areas. This is captured in the idea of perverse incentives, where an organization rewards the achievement of an assessment, only to realize that the achievement undermines the original goal. The classic example of this is known colloquially as the “Cobra effect”, named after the probably-apocryphal story of the British colonizers in India rewarding citizens for bringing in dead cobras in an attempt to control their deadly numbers in cities. Of course, the clever people of India were then incentivized to breed cobras in secret, in order to maximize their profits….

Libraries should be wary of the data they gather, especially as we move into the next decade or two of technological development. The combination of data being toxic to the privacy of our patrons and the risks of perverse incentives affecting decisions because of measure’s becoming targets is actively dangerous to libraries. Libraries that wish to implement a data-heavy decision making or planning process need to be extraordinarily aware of these risks, both acute and chronic. I believe strongly in the power of data analysis to build a better future for libraries and our patrons. But used poorly or unthoughtfully, and the data we choose to collect could be secretly breeding own set of cobras.

Categories
Apple Digital Culture Technology

About FaceID

I’ve seen the hottest of terrible hot-takes over the last couple of days about Apple’s announcement this past Tuesday (although leaked a few days before) that their new flagship iPhone, the iPhone X, will use a biometric system involving facial identification as the secure authentication mechanism for the phone. No more TouchID, which uses your fingerprint as your “key” to unlock the phone, we are now in the world of FaceID.

Let’s get this out of the way early in this essay: biometrics are for convenience, passcodes are for security. This doesn’t mean that biometrics aren’t secure, but they are secure in a different way, against different threats, for different reasons. The swap of FaceID for TouchID does nothing to lessen the security of your device, nor does it somehow given law enforcement or government actors increased magical access to the information on your phone.

You’d have thought, from the crazed reactions I’ve seen on Twitter and in the media, that Apple had somehow neglected to think of all of the most obvious ways this can be cheated.

 

and my personal favorite

The Wired article above, by Jake Laperuque, includes the breathless passage:

And this could in theory make Apple an irresistible target for a new type of mass surveillance order. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match.

If we’re throwing out possibilities…any smartphone could do that right now based on photo libraries. If there was a legal order to do so. And IF the technology company in question (either Google or Apple, if we’re sticking to mobile phones as the vector) did indeed build that functionality (which would take a long, long time) and then did employ it on their millions and millions of phones (also: long time), it would involve an enormous amount of engineering resources. Coordination of the “real” target vs family members who just happened to have photos on their phones of Target X should be fairly easy to do via behavioral profiling and secondary image analysis.

But that, like the FaceID supposition above, is bonkers to believe. If anything, FaceID is more secure in every way than the equivalent attack via standard photo libraries. If a nation-state with the power to compel Apple or Google into doing something this complicated and strange really wanted to know where you were…they wouldn’t need Apple or Google’s help to do so.

The truth of the matter is that FaceID is no less secure than the systems we have now on Apple devices (here I am not including Android devices as there are simply too many hardware makers to be certain of the security). TouchID, the fingerprint authentication process that is available for use on every current iPhone (and the new iPhone 8 and 8 plus), every current iPad, and multiple models of MacBook, uses your fingerprint as the “key” to a hash that is stored on a hardware chip known as the Secure Enclave on the phone. When you place your finger on the TouchID sensor, it isn’t taking a picture of your print, or storing your print in any way. The information that is stored in the Secure Enclave isn’t retrievable by anything except your phone. Your fingerprints aren’t being stored at Apple Headquarters on some server. There is no “master database” of the fingerprints of all iPhone users. The authentication is entirely local, as witnessed by the fact that you have to enroll your print on every iOs device separately.

FaceID appears to be exactly the same setup, with exactly the same security oversight as TouchID. It’s entirely local to the phone, and all of the information (a “hash” of information about your face…it’s really not fair to call it a “picture”) is stored on the Secure Enclave within the iPhone. We haven’t seen the full security report on FaceID and iOS 11 yet, but I am certain it will be available soon (iOS 10 and TouchID is available here). Given the other well-considered aspects of security on iOS 11 that we have seen, such as requiring a passcode before trusting an untrusted computer, I am confident that iOS 11 and FaceID will be at least as secure as their previous iterations.

Is it possible that Apple, the most valuable technology company in the world in large part due to their ability to develop hardware and software in concert with each other, completely missed something in making FaceID? Of course it’s possible. But all of the ways that technology of this sort has failed from other companies (racial bias, poor security models, data leakage) have not yet been true for TouchID. I do not believe they will be true for FaceID either.

Even setting aside the purely technical aspects, legally there is no difference in the risks of using FaceID over using TouchID. In the tweet above about police holding your phone up to your face to unlock it, it would be important to note that they can compel a fingerprint now. It is entirely legal (with a lot of “if”s and “but”s) for a police officer to force your finger onto your phone to unlock it. No warrant is necessary for that to happen. FaceID is exactly the same, as far as legal allowances and burden of proof and such, as TouchID is now. In the case of preventing law enforcement access to your phone, the only answer is a strong password and your refusal to give it to someone.

It isn’t clear to me if FaceID is going to be a good user experience…without devices in user’s hands, we have no idea. But the knee-jerk response that somehow Apple is building a massive catalog of faces is neither true, nor possible given the architectures of their hardware and software.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some real danger somewhere:

I think Zeynep has this (as most things) exactly right. This technical implementation is really quite good. The normalization of the technology in our culture may well not be…but this is why I am so vehement about defending this positive implementation as positive. Let Apple’s method of doing this be the baseline, the absolute minimum amount of care and thought that we will accept for a system that watches us. They are doing it well and thoughtfully, so let’s understand that and not let anyone else do it poorly. And for goodness sake don’t cry wolf when technologies understand their risks and are built securely. Because just like the story, when the real wolves show up, it will be that much harder for those of us paying attention to raise the alarm.

EDIT: After writing this entire thing, I found Troy Hunt’s excellent analysis, which says many of these same things in a much better way than I. Go read that if you want further explication of my take on this, as I agree with his essay entirely.

Categories
Personal

Monoprice Mini Delta 3D Printer

The world of low-price 3D printing has been upended by Monoprice over the last several months. They’ve launched a handful of very inexpensive but well-reviewed printers at price points that basically no other manufacturer can touch.

Their latest printer, the Monoprice Mini Delta was launched earlier this year on Indiegogo, and I just received one of them. It’s a very small delta style 3D printer that’s rated to handle ABS and PLA. It has a heated bed, and more importantly, an auto-leveling feature, even if the build volume is only 120mm x 120mm (Delta printers have circular beds, which makes the bed size a diameter rather than an X/Y plane measurement). It even has wifi built in, so that prints can be sent wirelessly.

Did I mention that the printer is rumored to cost only $149? Fully assembled, ready to go out of the box.  They haven’t publicly announced retail pricing yet, but it looks like they are aiming at a $149 as the price, which will make this an amazing deal.

Even $149 is still a fair amount of money for many people, but relative to other 3D printers it is an amazing entry-level price.  For that price, you don’t get the long-term reliability of something like a Lulzbot Mini…the Monoprice Mini Delta is all metal, but is clearly not as well-built as more expensive printers. The tech support alone is going to be far, far less competent that companies that specialize in 3D printing. It’s louder, it rattles a bit, the fit and finish isn’t perfect. But in my testing, the quality of the prints it is putting out for me is much higher than one might expect given the price point.

I’ve printed a couple of Benchys at different orientations, and they have all been well within my expectations for accuracy.

All in all, this is a heck of a printer for the price. The reports online are that Monoprice is having a few issues with first-round production errors…bad control boards mostly. Those are being fixed with new machines immediately, though, so it looks like they are handling the launch and initial support problems fairly well.

I’m not yet certain if I’d recommend the Monoprice Delta Mini to libraries, as I haven’t had time to put hours and hour of printing on the thing to test its reliability. Given the overall build quality, I’m betting that this printer will need a bit of attention to keep running smoothly, which is something that libraries often can’t take the time to do. For libraries, I still recommend going with proven workhorses like the Lulzbot Mini as an entry level printer, or the Taz 6 as a high-end production machine. Even though the Delta Mini is almost 1/10th of the price of the Lulzbot Mini, I’m not convinced it’ll last 10 times as long, or print reliably 10 times as often.

What I would do is recommend the Delta Mini to librarians who are interested in playing around with the technology without a huge investment. For $150, you can have your own 3D printer to play with sitting on your desk at home….one that takes up about as much space as a large houseplant. This is the perfect sort of printer for individuals that just want to play around with printing things for the house, or their kids.

It has definitely made me set up and take notice of what Monoprice is doing in this space. I expect we’ll keep hearing from them over the next year or so with bargain-basement prices on interesting hardware. I’ll keep my eyes out.