Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosts hundreds of students each year and the Sensorpedia program plans to sponsor one or more internships this summer. We are looking for students that will bring a fresh perspective and new ideas of how Web 2.0 best practices and social networking concepts from popular websites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Maps, Facebook, and Twitter can be applied to the problems of information sharing and interoperability.

Opportunities are available for students in several fields of study, including Computer Science, Engineering, Emergency and Incident Management, Communications, and Human Factors. ORNL offers internship programs for high school, undergraduate, and graduate students.

Sound interesting? We’ve posted more details on Sensorpedia Internship Opportunities and links to online applications.

I want to share a few of my thoughts as part of the “generation under 30” (barely) that Bryan refers to in his previous post.

I’ve worked in the area of information sharing (sensor data in particular) here at ORNL for several years now. It’s still very frustrating to a technology guy like me to see organizations struggling to effectively share data. I know that we have the tools available today to be more effective.

Millions of users a day share personal information quickly and easily on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Millions of Twitter messages (tweets) are sent every day, connecting users with similar interests. Tools like wikis and blogs have made it easy for anyone to contribute to the global conversation.

We’ve even seen these technologies used within my domains of interest for national security and emergency management. KPBS, San Diego’s local NPR affiliate, effectively used Twitter and Google Maps to track wildfires, plot locations of evacuation points, and post status updates for local shelters and hospitals. Similarly, you might not understand the use of YouTube as a tool until you’ve been evacuated and a video posted by firefighters on the ground is your only window into what’s going on in your neighborhood back home. Those who went through the pain of the Virginia Tech massacre appreciate the up-to-the-minute details that were available via Wikipedia, before they were available on CNN or FOX News, as students updated the wiki with first hand accounts of what was happening on campus.

Image by Noel Sarah Dietrich via Flickr

But Local Success ≠ National Success

While these ad-hoc solutions are making a real difference, we need to formalize how these technologies can be applied at a national level. That’s what we’re helping to do here at ORNL with programs like Sensorpedia. We want to “pave the cow paths” by looking at the paths others have taken to solve similar information sharing problems and formalize the process so we can leverage their success to provide the same benefits nationally.

Do you know of other local success stories that would be beneficial to consider as we continue to build and grow Sensorpedia? We’d love to hear them! Please join in the conversation here on the blog, by following us on Twitter (@Sensorpedia), or joining one of the other social networking groups.

Here’s something Al Gore may not have invented, although he certainly helped to push it along. (DISCAIMER: Actually, I am one of the gullible few who think the former Vice President, Nobel Prize Laureate, Oscar winner [it's that third accolade that really pulls him away from the pack!] has been too harshly maligned for his infamous, if not preposterous, assertion of a paternal “first cause” contribution to the creation of the Internet. After all, it was then Senator Gore who, back in 1991, sponsored the High Performance Computing and Communications Program legislation, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush. That bill poured millions into Internet research in the early 90’s, decades after its creation but significant and timely for its continued support and development of the World Wide Web.)

At any rate, while browsing through Wikipedia in search of just where the “digital divide” is drawn nowadays, not expecting to find an actual physical location, I was surprised to find that in 1996, Vice President Gore was one of the early adopters of the phrase, cited having used it in a speech he delivered just down the road from here in Knoxville, Tennessee. To him, and to many others who have followed, the digital divide was and remains the line that divides the world between those who have access to digital information networks and those who do not; the haves and have nots; the third world residents and the Second Life residents; those who have cell phones and computers, and those who do not.

Today, it occurs to me that there is another digital divide, one that more closely mirrors a divide from a generation ago, back in the 60’s when it was the Generation Gap.

This morning, I was speaking to a group of folks who, like me, were mostly over 50. These were all very notable people, men and women alike, from different countries but drawn together by their successes–board members, senior level executives, captains of industry. My speech topic was Web 2.0 technologies. I was talking about the basic underlying principles of web sites like Wikipedia, FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. At some point, when I mentioned how some of our young innovators were using these sites to share information, pointing to recent examples from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it became apparent to me that there was probably not a single member of the audience, numbering close to thirty, who had a Facebook account or a Twitter account; not one who had posted a YouTube video or a camera-phone upload to Flickr; not one who had edited Wikipedia or had linked a song to his or her MySpace account. For an audience under 30, I would be hard-pressed to arrive at comparable statistics. Today, the digital divide profoundly separates the generations. I have a saying when I see a friend trying to figure out how to do something on his new cell phone. “If you have a 12-year old daughter at home, forget the manual; just give the phone to her and let her figure it out. She already knows how to do it–even if she hasn’t done it before.”

It gives me great hope that the generation under 30 knows how to leverage its social networks, how to create video mashups and link them to Google Maps, how to create a group on Flickr and “tweet” updates to Twitter followers. Yes, there are significant challenges that the members of the next generation will face on the Web–the protection of their privacy, their identity, their security. There will be difficult challenges and difficult lessons ahead–even failures and missteps. However, I am more hopeful than doubtful that the next generation will have an unprecedented ability to “connect the dots” and see patterns and trends that are occurring on a global scale, far more profoundly (and accurately) than anything we have been able to do up until this moment in history.

As we launch Sensorpedia, we hope that our site–your site, really–will be another catalyst to push us along the way to democratizing access to information for everyone. What Wikipedia is for information, we hope that Sensorpedia becomes for sensor information. Check in occasionally to see what new gadgets and new sites become available on Sensorpedia.