Recently, CityCamp was convened in Chicago. It brought people from all over the continent and from as far away as the UK. It also brought a lot of Chicagoans out of the woodwork. There are aspirations for a more locally focused event.

It’s time to advance a synoptic view of our efforts in Chicago …. we need to map our mutual efforts and when describing our separate efforts to each other and to others, to do it in a way that paints a picture of how we are connected.

Towards that end, I implore you to join with me in advancing Civic Discourse and Collaboration in the Chicago Region, utilizing the e-democracy.org platform and model.

There are several things that need to be done:

1. Sign up here at the Chicago Region Civic Forum (CRCF) and post a self introduction http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chicago
   Also, acquaint yourself with the general e-democracy.org model. Feel free to ask questions.
2. Regularly share news, events and ideas pertinent to the issues of our fair City, and respond in a civic spirit to the unfolding conversation. Make this a part of your routine. Put your issues on the table!
3. Actively invite others to participate. We need to take this to the streets.
4. Entreat public office holders, candidates and their staff to join the forum. Our voices will be that much more likely to inform public policy.
5. Help establish community and neighborhood level local issues forums for more locally focused topics. I’ll help any group that commits to this aim. If you are ready to take this one on… join the Chicago Team Coordinating Forum here: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chicago-team and let’s take a hold of our democracy.

Chris views Chicago’s policy on the public selling of art as a matter of free speech. I won’t make his arguments for him — you can read up on his campaign on his blog. I will say that I find his argument compelling, and that our city would be better if these policies were overturned.

Recently Chris was ticketed for his activity of selling art without a vendor license, within the Loop area. On another occasion he was arrested and charged with a felony for taping his encounter with the police. There is a recent article in the Sun Times with a plethora of comments from supporters of the Free Speech campaign and decrying the misapplication of the eavesdropping law. I urge you to add your comments to the article, and to spread the word on this valiant campaign.

Here’s the comment I posted.

Mr. Drew is undertaking a heroic effort to make our city better – not just for Artists, but for all of us. I want my city to be a vibrant cultural center, with artistic endeavor at every scale. The art he offers for sale is of the most humble and accessible form.

Art indeed is speech, and if Mr. Drew’s account of Supreme Court opinion on Commercial Speech is correct, then it is clear that the city’s peddler law is overly broad and therefore unconstitutional.

If the law were really about public convenience (i.e. for pedestrian traffic, etc.) why would seeking donations rather than a sale exchange make a difference? I’m not up to speed on the legal distinctions or constraints against regulating these other activities, so I’d love to be informed. Perhaps the Sun Times could do a bigger story, exploring the irony of the eavesdropping charge, along with the contrasts of civil rights and free speech pertaining to different classes of behavior and different public spaces.

This of course brings to mind the absurdity of specially designated “Free Speech Zones” established during large scale events. That’s something else that needs to be challenged.

I do hope that local media will take up the broader issues, and do us a public service informing us on this important topic. Spread the word, for Free Speech, whether you agree with Chris or not, this deserves public consideration.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In this, a lesson for the Digital Excellence movement, not unlike Daniel Burnham’s call to make no small plans.

I’m interested in more public dialogue, so I only provide my reaction here, and leave the others in that email exchange to speak for themselves and to audiences of their choosing – but as I have something to get off my chest, here I go…

(Wow, well, glad interest has been sparked…) my read is that real (as opposed to who?) people are affected in so many cross-cutting ways by media policies that they can’t even see it (or if and to the extent they do they are seeing so many things at once, and potentially different things from each other, with different languages to interpret or speak about them).

We’re embedded in the results/effects of media policy. Another factor to consider is the manner in which policy obscures itself. To the extent that those shaping policy are often angling for particular perks, obscurity is a strategy and an advantage … to those passing legislation/policy and serving narrow interests. The contrast between narrow interest vs. general interest in any policy (media or other policy) is the big puzzle. We’ve tended to accept the exigency of acceding to the narrow interest to get things done, or to get the uncomfortable questions off the table. We tend to steer away from the real work that would build enduring, generative capacity.

None of this is terribly helpful, I am sure.

Thom Clark makes excellent points in that capacity is policy … i.e. local capacity is both a (variably effective) policy maker and the result of policy. If we are to collectively “grow ours” (in contrast with “get mine”) then we have to invest in meaningful capacity building that seeds the local and builds lateral connections over these localities (not necessarliy spatial/geographic nearness) – in multiple dimensions – capacity in fields of interest, of professions, of other “community” of various stripes.

That is, every sector of life is touched by this.

In our work on Digital Excellence this was perhaps our central point. (We blend the concepts of Digital Literacy and Media Literacy at this point, at a very deep level, so they maybe synonymous or united at a higher level.)

Every sector, every aspect of our individual and collective lives is touched by media/technology processes. It’s important to pair these terms – individual and collective – it’s not just individual lives here, it’s how we live together that is affected, and our own awareness of our role and freedom to shape this. So it’s groups and communities and families, and organizations that have to be part of the story, too. Each of these flavor and shape the quality of my individual life and I have to take time to care for these aspects of my/our selves.

My gut is to flip the question on it’s head… show me any story or any aspect of life not affected by media policy. I recognize that that’s probably not compelling for the audience.

FWIW, (and to state the banal) I’m an individual… I engage in media activism, and media policy, and I buy into the importance of “being the media”. I endeavored to get others to some state of awareness on several interrelated topics (and to build my own awareness and understanding thereby), not to mention awareness of their interrelatedness, and I employ multiple strategies to do so. I have perhaps a very different notion of “policy work” than what may be commonly understood, but there’s the rub — all sorts of work are being re-imagined and restructured. (That’s nothin’ new, but perhaps only more so now..)

“Be the media” as sentiment and strategy is an expression of this transformation of work and life, and a recognition that practice and policy are one. Policy may otherwise be regarded as something that happens above, or elsewhere, or happens to you … but in this model, policy is what we contest and what we make and how we practice. If you’ve the motivation and I haven’t worn out my welcome take a look at the entry for Grassroots Public Policy Development in the Public Sphere Pattern Language project spearheaded by Doug Schuler.

Getting to this practice of “being the media” and being with (and for) each other in community, talking about and reforming our practice and our communities at the same time gives us something fairly exciting to talk about. Trying to be clear: talking about or sharing any of the strategies we’ve employed feels like a success story to me in that we’ve been building community and community capacity.

I’m tempted to enumerate tools, devices, strategies – ranging from the pattern language process itself to open space and other civic focused gatherings to new models of philanthropic or educational/research engagement to positive media to open data commons models – but any list would be partial, and would not honor the plethora of ongoing efforts and approaches to living together in a new way. So many things tied together … we’re enmeshed in good and bad ways. And as the story goes – each interpretation of the moment is subject to revision. Perhaps.

Any of you are welcome to tell your story here – or anywhere. How does media policy affect you, personally, or the things you care about?

Much work is ahead of us, and it feels good to feel again a pride in our institutions, our values, the progress of our history, and in this our public and collective recommitting to hope and virtue.

The values and principles our 44th President has eloquently pronounced are ideals I have long espoused – and yet felt at times like a voice crying out in the wilderness.

How many of us have felt alone in our ideals and now are strengthened by this higher kinship, a fellowship of spirit common to the species?

The highlight of this ceremony is that we can laugh with joy together through the wit and wisdom of Rev. Lowery’s benediction.

I’ve cleaned up the rough notes of my 3 minutes and I share them here as an “open note” to the transition team led by Susan Crawford and Kevin Werbach. Much thanks to Nathaniel James for coordinating the call!

When Chicago was exploring options for vendor driven citywide wifi networks there was a prolonged public debate and discussion (some through hearings coordinated by Aldermen, others through hearings specific to the digital divide committee, and more still in public meetings convened by the Chicago Digital Access Alliance).

Grassroots groups looked closely at what had become a contemporary re-framing of the digital divide – namely, Digital Inclusion.

In Chicago, grassroots and civic leaders determined that Digital Inclusion did not offer a big enough vision and was potentially constraining and divisive. At the most benign level we saw the Digital Inclusion language as a means of obtaining the endorsement of disparate groups by favors rather than involving community in true holistic planning processes or giving community a mechanism for effective oversight of communication infrastructure initiatives. The FCC (and really, all institutions of Govt.) should support a policy agenda that encourages inclusive local planning processes and oversight.

In Chicago, we evolved a conceptual framework around Digital Excellence as a new model for transcending the digital divide.

I will not go into great depth on this, given time, and given the current limited scope of the FCC (and the purpose of this call) but I do wish to underscore our view that Media Literacy and Digital Literacy are deeply connected, and that the FCC should be connected to (and support interagency) efforts addressing this.

In a new model of participatory governance there should be outreach efforts of governance bodies such as the FCC to educate the public on it’s powers and the channels for citizens and communities to avail themselves of the resources and protections of the particular agency. This would go beyond public hearings convened in recent years by the FCC and would be a mandate for public education on the science and policy guiding the FCC. This would institute a sunshine palliative to past practices and reduce the perception of privileged access to decision makers.

It’s worth restating the basic point made by many: A big vision for dealing with the digital divide under a a new banner of digital excellence would require interagency collaboration and strong integration with citizen led efforts.

Programs like DOC-NTIA TOP (Technology Opportunities Program) – quietly killed several years back – must be revived, along with funding for a new generation of hybrid Community Technology Center/Community Media Center/Community Network (given the new era of convergence on Internet Protocol as media/communications platform). TOP’s successor should be redesigned to leverage the knowledge and experience gained in these social/technology experiments and there should be parallel institutional support for the replication of any powerful community innovations that emerge as opposed to the unfortunate past model of funding limited efforts at innovation then leaving that experience in a database or shelved in reports.

Digital media infuse all aspects of life but historically most investments in digital literacy and access have had very limited goals (and moreover limited success) and tended to segment digital from other dimensions of social and public life. Efforts to redress the digital divide should not be limited to remedial kindergarten concepts of the divide, they should start with a big vision … our vision is a world where the majority of the public are confident in the use of collaborative tools, are able to express themselves in media formats of their choice and that communities are creating new tools that suit their purposes.

That’s close to what I said … there were other points I would have liked to address, but my watch was focused on digital-divide/access sector. I tend to take a very broad view on the scope of “digital” as touching many aspects of our experience as members of the community. It’s something that penetrates every sphere of life and any public program or service needs to consider the digital dimension and social divides that intersect. The digital transformation of our culture and economy is still in process – businesses have more capacity to adapt, as they can pass costs on to their customers, but government and community groups have less freedom in that regard.

Though the US has been cited as being close to 20th in global broadband penetration, I don’t want to see a narrowly conceived national broadband policy emerge without a deeper community oriented, community driven commitment to the higher aspirations of Digital Excellence encapsulated above.

The public at large, communities and municipalities need space for experimentation with new models of dealing with the connectivity issues and the tools that will ride upon the new media infrastructure. We need means of getting to the Internet through channels not owned by major corporations. We need to eliminate the stranglehold on the last mile (better described as the first mile – since they’re our communities). We need to open up the spectrum – we should have seen an equivalent to Moore’s Law in efficient (and expanding) use of Spectrum were it not for a regulatory status quo based on narrow interests and outdated or junk science where spectrum is regarded and held as property rather than as an arbitrarily divisible medium (subject to technical advance). The Internet and the Airwaves should always belong to the public. They must be administered with a long term view informed by science and the public interest. To restate: we need room for experiment in civic technologies and processes – at all layers of the stack.

Information Infrastructure resources for communities, the public and government bodies at all levels of jurisdiction should be supported in a Civic Garden model where anyone anywhere may freely access and interact with resources in the .GOV, .EDU and .ORG top level domains.

The Internet is the new medium for local, national and global civic discourse and such interactions should be privileged under the same principles of civic necessity that justified support of print journalism and the postal service.

Community capacity in the deployment of networks, services, tools is essential to a free and democratic society. I join with Lauren Glenn-Davitian in a call for a rewrite of the 1934 Act that established what is now the FCC in light of the ongoing evolution of technology and our society, and in light of the vision we have for ourselves.

Theresa breezed through Chicago in 2005, and graciously took 15 minutes to give me a tour of CatComm’s website. I was hooked in less than two minutes!

Conceptual depth, authenticity, and devotion are three things that inspire me. Finding a special alignment of these things in CatComm and Theresa made me an instant advocate. And my own commitment to the digital divide sector and community networking arena gave me a great appreciation for the approach Theresa had undertaken. CatComm is an exemplar of Digital Excellence by virtue of its holistic ethos: people in community solving what they need to solve and sharing their experiences with each other. This is an exercise in positive media—the sharing of stories and know-how.

In learning about CatComm, the first big ‘a-ha’ moment for me was the recognition that we need exactly the kind of tool that CatComm provides in order to share knowledge. We must foster this practice and I was keen on sparking replication of the Casa here in Chicago and elsewhere.

What one community solves inspires others to take action and go further. At the same time, organizations and web sites crop up to tackle the challenges we face. They operate with much the same mindset and similar aspirations—but are all too often unaware of each other until a good deal of work has already been done. Realizing this has been central to CatComm’s recent evolution. We are following a network perspective and we have now adopted the stance of a network steward among many. That means working in cooperation with an increasing network of like-minded organizations.

Leadership in networks is different from brand or organizational leadership. There’s an ecology of the network and we’re redeveloping the CatComm site and organization to consciously function as part of a network. We’re joining hands with other clusters working on the same meta-question: How can we more effectively share the experiences of people in community solving challenges? We have made a major investment in the technology of our website. In some respects, we’re turning the site inside out so we can get out the way and also get the technology out of the way. These are the insights we’ve gleaned from the practice of open space—making room for self-organizing—and has given us kinship with those on the wiki path.

We’ve been rebuilding our platform so that information can be more readily disseminated across networks. Information is valuable, to be sure, but even more valuable is the time and attention of the person, whether they are documenting their project or searching for a solution. We’re working with others to establish public data models and mechanisms to effectively exchange data between sites. We are seeking accelerated flows of information so that attention and effort is maximized.

The data will be stored on our website in a way that allows other sites, applications, and widgets to rely on us as a repository of solutions. We’ll get more eyes looking at our content at more points on the Web then we could hope for from a solitary website, and with support of issue and geographic portals to get more solutions documented in the database. It’s a virtuous cycle that comes from attending to the field we’re all working in rather than competing against one another.

But today, we’re just at the beginning of this road.

We’re about to switch over to a new platform that will allow expansion of the languages we serve and the formats in which solutions are documented. Our content will be available for search, query, and export, and the data models will be published as a standard in our work with the Open Sustainability Network. We’ll be supporting the flow of information with significant attention to the construction of tools that allow others to display subsets of our content on their own sites, so a group focused on a particular issue or particular geography can focus on their concern and not on the technology.

Shortly down the road we’ll be working with others to foster communities of problem solvers (or Solutioneers, as Ellison Horne says!) and supporters. These communities will emerge on the basis of productive interactions made possible by many hands attending to the field.

Is there anything new here? The ring of “public-private” partnership or cooperation is flat…

Chicago should have started wiring (and unwiring) itself 10 years ago. What happened to the promise of CivicNet? Promises, promises, and more platitudes?

This is not to impugn Mr. Bhatt – it’s just that we’ve been singing this song for a long time and we still don’t have the communications infrastructure we need in Chicago (or nationally). I’ve written extensively on how this language obscures the process of addressing civic needs, I won’t belabor the point here.

As far as not expecting a bailout for infrastructure – true – we ought not be holding our breath – but the need for general infrastructure investment is pressing, and lack of action disadvantages our economic well being and quality of life as we compete in global markets. This applies not just to communications infrastructure but to transport and especially public transport. If we want to jump start the economy, this is where we need to make investments – where we’ll create jobs doing the work we need. The “markets” will take care of themselves. Isn’t that what we’d been told all along? I don’t believe the markets take care of everything nor that they take care of things according to our national (or local) values.

What would you do with $700 Billion?

We need bold civic leadership. Bailing out the financiers won’t help any of us in the short run nor over the long haul.

Green investments in energy, transit, and communications infrastructure coupled with decisions that are grounded in meeting the needs of the community with mechanisms for community planning, oversight and accountability are the best way out of our current mess. Indeed, they are the best way forward in any weather.

I’ve just posted on the Catalytic Communities blog a little bit about OWD from the CatComm perspective.

As part of the Chicago NetSquared/NetTuesday meetup group I’ve posted several interviews of participants as a small contribution to this global collaboration. Here they are:

And a story told by Melvin at the September 9 Net2Chi meetup:

You can find OWD video interviews of Chicagoans from prior years if you dig back a little.

Happy One Web Day Chicago! Happy One Web Day everyone!

Here’s more info:

Today’s music landscape is filled with both excitement and foreboding. With so many new technologies and ways to promote and distribute music, how do performers, composers, songwriters and independent labels know how to participate, who to trust, and what is most effective?

Future of Music Coalition — a national non-profit that seeks a bright future for musicians and fans — is organizing a musician education workshop at the Old Town School of Folk Music on September 22, from noon to 7PM. The “What’s the Future for Musicians?” seminar will provide musicians, songwriters, independent label owners and music fans with practical advice about a range of internet-based promotion and distribution options, how to navigate the health insurance landscape, the importance of open internet structures and how copyright law and business models affect musician compensation. Breakout sessions will give attendees a chance to interact with the experts on the latest developments in music, technology and policy. The forum is a great opportunity to network with other musicians while getting informed on topical issues.

Admission is $25, though a limited number of musician scholarships are also available.

Event page:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/events/chicago08/index.cfm

Registration:
https://www.futureofmusic.org/events/chicago08/regform.cfm

Musician Scholarships:
http://www.futureofmusic.org/events/chicago08/scholarshipinfo.cfm

What else is happening for One Web Day?

As part of Chicago’s NetTuesdays Meetups we’ve been recording interviews with people from the Chicago NPO & Tech Sector – hope to have some of those up by Monday!