Friends,
Together we can enumerate and provide links to an array of efforts that are disjointed, though worthy. They may have different levels of activity or may be at a relatively inactive state after prior peaks. Enumerating and evaluating these would be a useful task for us, too.
We’ve got an abundance of toolsets and tool providers as well … and so the special challenge to a sustainable effort and a thriving commons becomes more and more probable (it’s not just probable, it’s the situation we have tended towards, and the situation we’re in).
Consider each of these tools and possible community spaces as an attractor. People like us, are seeking community around the practice of community ICT, and if they don’t find it they rightly constitute it for themselves.
A somewhat active space functions as an attractor in these circumstances and from a certain perspective it makes a lot of sense to go with the tool that is present and functioning at some level versus duplicating efforts and dividing the field further.
The issue, as I see it is that the field has multiple attractors none of which are established quite with the field in mind. Someone who finally finds one of these attractors may be quite relieved and may embed themselves in the community (which may or may not satisfy them, or may have fallen into a trough of activity – and there is something valiant in seeking to fulfill the promise of our potential as a wider community in any of these contexts).
But we here, knowing of the many and disparate efforts are a bit weary at maintaining a presence in any number of such sites and communities. Here, even with this conversation we’re making choices where to post, and we have doubts about which is the most effective channel.
We also recognize that as new tools emerge, new community attractors will be constructed by those who either haven’t found the other attractors, or for whom the degree of community there was lacking.
As we make choices based on our history and preferences we’re going to keep fragmenting this field, and reacting to the fragmentation.
Since there are existing sites of community or potential community, which should serve as assets to our movement, we ought to reflect on the perspective of “Movement as Network” (a paper by Gideon Rosenblatt of ONE/NW) – a thought piece for the environmental movement that I read with our field of Community ICT in mind.
What do we do with these assets, these many sites of aggregation, these attractors? Should we establish higher expectations? Should we push them towards collaboration and coordination? Should we disrupt models that don’t align with our own vision of Community ICT? I’ve got my own answer to these, you may all guess.
I’m inviting you to a new mode of practice where we consciously reshape this network of communities and resources. We can take initial steps to get data and information flowing and where it should
not matter which of these sites you come to, you can get the full swath of information you need.
Think for a moment of the WISEREarth Index – could their organizational directory serve as an equivalent of an OpenSocial for the NGO/NPO sector? (Thinking more broadly here than Community ICT – any non-profit monitoring the online world and maintaining any sort of presence there – soon sees a multiple presence effect and has some very partial representation of themselves in many many places, some of their own initiative, and some a result of scraping and some as a result of friends propagating their presence. None of this is sustainable under the current regime of information flow.)
All of this sounds a bit extreme and ambitious … plenty of big ideas litter our sector and have diverted us from more humble work (and some have inspired us to achieve great things, no doubt).
Yet, we can start humbly in this, and we have. Enumerating these spaces, evaluating them and engaging them… starting this conversation is perhaps our own way of moving towards the movement as network attitude. It is for me.
MM
Michael – great ideas on WiserEarth. Got any thoughts on how we could go about make it easier to improve the ‘current regime of information flow’. We’ve improved the outflow – Share This, Facebook Application, soon to launch API, but haven’t got much in the ‘inflow’ category.
We spoke last fall, or perhaps late last summer… time flies! To begin with, we need a much more public conversation on this topic, a conversation where we actively invite potential collaborators so that we can make this happen.
The first step we need to take, as a practical measure is to document our data models, announce them as public data standards and invite critique of the data model, and invite use or adoption of the model by others. If we can move in the direction of a useful data model that spans any one organization or effort, we have the basis for tremendously relevant data flows.
Too often we’re caught with only the beginning of a good idea. Having an Open API sounds like a great thing, but t isn’t enough and often doesn’t bear the fruit we intended.
If we design our API with concrete partnerships in mind, and make them public and open, with a commitment to the long-term stability or maintenance of that standard that that implies, we’ll foster a better ecology of information flows, and a better culture of information sharing between groups and causes committed to the social benefit sector.
In the WISER Earth context, I’d be clear that the organization index constitutes an open and public data model, with a page documenting the choices that led to the specific fields in that data model, and what those fields are.
I have not been able to follow your progress close enough in recent months, and I would love ot learn what elements of your API have been established and opened.
I’m leading the redevelopment of the Catalytic Communities website (http://www.catcomm.org), and we’d love to rely upon WISER Earth for organizational data. We see no reason why someone contributing a Solution to our site should have to enter all the data on their organization when it’s already in the WE system.
So, we want to be able to check if such and such organization is in WE, and when it is, we’d rely upon that data, and when it isn’t in WE, there would be a mechanism whereby the organizational data would be added to the WE dataset.
I’m speaking at a very general level, but now that we’ve got our basic tools in place, we’re ready to actively move on these fronts, and we invite your partnership in this endeavor. Certainly the WE name has a good deal of respect and recognition, and if WE provides this sort of leadership, we’ll achieve a great deal together.
Regards,
Michael
Michael,
I gotta admit that I don’t fully understand what you’re envisioning here and that much of my ignorance is technical = when you mention the term “community ICT” in your original post and then later in you correspondence with angusparker, you guys mention the terms “API” and “data models” = I had to look up via google these terms just to gain a foothold in this conversation.
Thanks much for mentioning Gideon’s paper “Movement as Network” = that seemed to bring me up to speed with respect to self-organizing metaphors in general and with conscious and compassionate (after all, if we’re gonna actually enrich our public good then we may as well bring our best games) community-response to eco-crises in particular.
BTW, I love your use of “attractors” here! I’m not sure how best to tap into it as a resource and yet I’m convinced that basic human-attraction = that which we the people actually love = is necessary (and perhaps even sufficient) to help us clean-up and get-out-of our current eco-messes and, at least as importantly, also help us redirect our evolutionary courses so that we prevent such mess-making tendencies from getting so out-of-control in the first place.
So, I’m all in favor of our common human capacity to be attracted, to appreciate, to love, to evolve (or whatever we want to call such a commons) becoming much more of an explicit design component and perhaps even an organizing principle for the efforts/results you’re envisioning here.
If I’m catching your drift, you’re aiming to push our collective-envelope in terms of how the designs and uses of our info-tech infrastructure can continue to evolve to best support individual human beings teaming-up to help manage our emergent eco-crises, globally and locally. Am I at least in the ballpark here? Or am I projecting more of my own biases?
If I’m not too far off-base with respect to this here conversation and if the notion of “evolution” can serve as a guiding influence on the designs of our emergent info-tech infrastructures is at all supportive of your aim, your image, your vision then let’s consider entertaining our common notions of evolution as a sort of meta-attractor. What’s really, truly, actually, sustainably, thrivably super-attractive for each and every human life-form? I don’t claim to know the answer and yet I’m pretty sure evolution’s in the mix!
Evolutionary, open-source, self-selecting, self-organizing etc., human activity systems are quite attractive to me and I trust they already are to many if not most of my fellow-species members who share in the whole commons = life on Earth.
I trust my two-cents is coherent enough and relevant enough to this conversation.
Ciao for now,
paul
We certainly need to work with attraction, and not against it! (Sorry for the delayed response.) And in working “with attraction” we should see how best to establish spaces of attraction so they can work well together and not to cross-purposes, dividing vital energies and attention.