The WELL: inkwell.vue.228: Christian Crumlish, THE POWER OF MANY

#78: Christian Crumlish (xian) Thu 18 Nov 04 10:07

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:07:00 PST

What interests me most in that area is the ways people can now collaborate on creative projects in time-shifted or geography-shifted ways. We are getting close to the point where you can "jam" live over the Internet. (Right now, there's generally still a lag - although I was jamming with my brother despite the delay over our iSight/iChat videophone link the other day.)

I love the idea of people preparing part of a work, such as laying down basic tracks or doing an initial visual draft, and then sending their work-in-progress across the net to allow a collaborator to layer changes on top of the base.

Another way that people are using networks around creative arts, music, and performance is in organizing and publicizing events. Burning Man has used its mailing lists and online presence for years as an organizational tool. Most bands post their tour information and sometimes ticket info online and if they're smart they provide a place for their fans to interact as well.

Sites like Upcoming.org and Dodgeball.com also enable people to make calendar / event plans in public, and see what their online friends are also planning to do or where they're planning to be. [Read entire topic]

#77: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Wed 17 Nov 04 16:22

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 16:22:00 PST

Some comments:

"The grassroots part of the Dean campaign tried to get ideas moving from the fringes into the center, but with little success, imho."

It was actually more a matter of grassroots Dean supporters trying to get the campaign to accept policy input from a well-organized, well-staffed and moderated issues forum. We found that the Dean campaign, as open as it seemed to be, didn't want input on policy... and they were focusing more on the campaign than policy definition.

"perhaps there are analogies in the world of politics in which hub-managed command-and-control pyramids may prove vulnerable to the many eyes of an open movement. We'll see."

Krista Bradford, Aldon Hynes et al. are forming a group around a concept they originally referred to as 'investigative blogging.' Not sure at this point what the group will be called or how it will be structured, but the intent is to bring bloggers and investigative journalists together in a symbiotic relationship.

"We may have to get used to the idea of being suspicious of all information that we can't check directly ourselves."

Which is probably a good way to be, regardless.

Moving away from politics, finally... you talk a bit about how artists, designers, and other creative people use networks. Can you talk about that a bit? [Read entire topic]

#76: Brian Slesinsky (bslesins) Tue 16 Nov 04 19:23

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:23:00 PST

re: Wikipedia, have you seen this article?

The Faith-Based Encyclopedia http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html

I think he has a point - one can assume that eventually wikipedia articles will reach an equilibrium, but it's open question whether the quality at that equilibrium will be as high as we hope. [Read entire topic]

#75: Christian Crumlish (xian) Tue 16 Nov 04 19:18

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:18:00 PST

Re Jon's last question before my "hiatus":

"Christian, Convio makes an interesting case study for technology to support campaigns and nonprofits using a customer relationship management approach. Could you discuss what you learned when you talked to Convio's CEO and looked at their approach?"

Mostly what I noticed was that it was part of the .org diaspora that took place after the dotcom bubble crashed. Specifically that Convio founder Vinay Baghat was volunteering at his local public tv station and was appalled at the slips-of-paper approach they were using to track pledges. He realized that the nonprofits often have very low "repeat business" rates and generally don't keep good enough track of their existing supporters, so he imported his knowledge of customer-relationship management software and processes to develop the equivalnet for nonprofits and activist organizations.

Instead of tracking customers and trying to upsell them, this software is geared toward involving supporters: yes, getting them to donate (fundraising) but also getting them to pass along alerts and ideally climb the involvement ladder to the point that they are taking actions in the real world to support the mission of the organization.

In my book I call this kind of application ARM (for "activist relationship management") software.

Going back to the open-source question from before, Convio is proprietary and may eventually be subject to open-source competition. One of the articles I'm working on for Personal Democracy Forum is a straight-up price comparison among many of the major political-consulting / technology service providers. [Read entire topic]

#74: Christian Crumlish (xian) Tue 16 Nov 04 19:13

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:13:00 PST

Thanks for the birthday wishes. They tell me life begins at 40, but a few days after my birthday while I was sick with the pseudo-pneumonia my celebration was cut short by the disheartening election results. In a way I was better off in a codeine 'n' antibiotics medicated state as everything seemed so unreal, including the repeat of false hopes earlier in the election day.

I don't think tnf is waaay older than me. Although I'm willing to believe 40 is young for the time being. [Read entire topic]

#73: Christian Crumlish (xian) Tue 16 Nov 04 19:07

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:07:00 PST

In (54), Ari said,

I don't think I accept the idea that "Blogs are vetted and balanced by other blogs". That may be a good way to find blogs with which you might agree, or that might be interesting reading, but the fact that lots of people believe something or prefer something doesn't make it true or preferable to me. It does worry me that "all of my friends value this" replaces "I have some objective, or reasonably-objective way to evaluate this."

I'd question whether external metrics of authority have ever been objective or even reasonably objective, but I grant that "emergent authority" is an alien and worrisome concept for those of us who grew up with experts and encyclopedias and intellectuals and kings and such. I think the idea that blogs are cross-checked by other blogs does not just mean that groups of likeminded people clump together to endorse their own realities but that contrarian and adversarial blogs challenge the assumptions and errors in the blogs they disagree with and in so doing create a tension or a sort of dialectic that can potentially strengthen or make more robust the ideas and information shared online.

However, it's always contingent. Even if wikipedia continues to get more and more accurate and correct in some areas, you won't necessarily know if the part you're reading is flawed or was recently vandalized or is an unchecked hoax or something. We may have to get used to the idea of being suspicious of all information that we can't check directly ourselves.

In (56) David Kline pointed out

If you want to see a real "echo chamber" in action, take a look at how often major media outlets run a story just because other major media outlets have run the same story and deemed it thereby "a story." Look also at how often rumor, unsupported allegation, and outright misinformation is replicated ad nauseum by major media until it becomes conventional wisdom.

I have to agree with this. I don't think that traditional professional publishing is in any way immune to groupthink and the promulgation of unexamined assumptions. [Read entire topic]

#72: Christian Crumlish (xian) Tue 16 Nov 04 19:02

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 19:02:00 PST

well, it's taken me longer to get back on the stick than i thought. still a little low energy, but i would very much like to continue this past the realm of pure politics and activism.

here's some catching up:

Jonl asked: Christian, you quote Kos on "open source politics," something Adam Greenfield has also been writing about (http://extremedemocracy.com/chapters/Chapter12-Greenfield.pdf). How does a software licensing concept relate to poltics, and to your thoughts about "the power of many"?

Note also that Micah Sifry wrote about this exact same topic in the current Nation ("The Rise of Open-Source Politics - <http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041122&s=sifry>).

I think people are talking about two different (but related) things when they talk about open-source politics. One is literally the introduction of open-source software into the world of political and electoral technology. Applications we mentioned earlier, such as Civicspace and Advokit exemplify this approach.

Most people, however, I think are using the open-source concept as a metaphor to really mean more "open" processes in general. More transparency, more accountability, less secrecy and self-dealing.

Others, such as the Well's own <bluefire> point out that we're even further from having a kind of open-source *policy* process in which the masses are able to influence the positions and decisions of politicians and public servants. The grassroots part of the Dean campaign tried to get ideas moving from the fringes into the center, but with little success, imho.

I relating it to the power of many by pointing out that something like Firefox could only conceivably threaten Internet Explorer by emerging from the open source Mozilla community that nurtured and improved and bug-tested it. If Microsoft feels threatened by Linux or even by the way that web-application-service-platform sites like Amazon and Google run largely on open-source and open-standards technologies, perhaps there are analogies in the world of politics in which hub-managed command-and-control pyramids may prove vulnerable to the many eyes of an open movement. We'll see. Metaphors are powerful but they have a way of leaving out the tricky bits. [Read entire topic]

#71: Cynthia Dyer-Bennet (cdb) Fri 12 Nov 04 15:41

Fri, 12 Nov 2004 15:41:00 PST

Christian, so glad to hear you're finally feeling better! [Read entire topic]

#70: David Gans (tnf) Thu 11 Nov 04 09:57

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:57:00 PST

Stay as long as you like! [Read entire topic]

#69: David Kline (dkline) Thu 11 Nov 04 09:56

Thu, 11 Nov 2004 09:56:00 PST

Great. We'd love to keep going here. [Read entire topic]