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.

Here’s something fun I invite you all to explore and join in with if you are so moved: http://ow.ly/11y6A

These short URLs tell you next to nothing so I’ll offer a little context.

There’s a group of people I know convened together in open space in the cause of the “metacurrency project (MCP)” … their cause is heavily shaped by the question of play. There are technical dimensions to their work, but their work is aimed at making new things possible for humanity. If I could, I’d be with them now. I’m with them in spirit.

One quick point of entry to their world view (and my own) is in the contrast between Scarcity and Abundance as dominant meme. This is about the attitude in which we engage each other more than about how many resources their are in the world at any given moment. (It’s also a question of not being dominated by this contrast of scarcity and abundance.)

Even accepting some finitude, or relative finitude: as human’s in the application of intelligence we are meant to conduct ourselves in a stewardly manner towards life… that is to say, our behavior should be generative.

So, even though this group is in part engaged in a technical question – building software and protocol under the MCP effort – the larger challenges are social and ideational: how we might live together… opening the space not to offer a final answer, but to situate us in generative spaces of inquiry and infinite play… where the burdensome quality of tasks slip away and joy comes to the fore and where we collectively and selectively form responses and rules with a freedom to mutually adapt ourselves and the rules.

On the voicethreads platform you can add your own voice and your own vision.

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’ve got a new adage, based on reading Sascha’s brief note on what the Australians are investing in their broadband infrastructure, by comparison with our meager and near meaningless investment.

The new adage: Bad Government is a Tax on a People (Who are Bad at Math)

The adage may seem out of place given that our friends in the Southern Hemisphere are investing close to $1,400 per person, whereas in the USA it would be closer to $25 per person, but my point is that we just don’t understand the math, first of relative speeds provided by our infrastructure compared with those being deployed elsewhere, and second by the relative costs per bit/transit of any data we are passing over our networks (compared with relative cost/speeds elsewhere) and third, the real costs necessary for a meaningful investment as opposed to either lip-service investments or sweetheart deals for selected entrenched interests.

The heart of the adage is this: we really need to understand relative scale, scope and value when we make any collective judgment or investment. (And likewise when we foreclose any option.)

Personally, I’m a bit more cautious when it comes to the notion of national broadband strategy. I want more freedom for diverse range of actors ranging from community to local government to private sector.

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?

Here’s the description of the session, join us if you can!

Networks of Collaboration and Service: Redesigning Work and Partnership

Tools and Networks abound. Our challenge is in working together effectively. What is missing from the tools and practices of the social benefit sector? What are the opportunities for coordination among and across networks afforded by a shift in perspective towards building for the commons? Catalytic Communities, a pioneer in the solutions ecology will be the starting point for a collaborative design session — building the tools and culture we need to grow a plurality of commons.

That’s the idea. This could be the theme of a conference all it’s own. We’ll see how it goes. We’ve only got one hour, but this is one of the questions that drives me in my work., Even if we just foster a little seriousness on the opportunities this frame evokes, we’ll be taking a step.

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

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.

While thinking about poverty two points come immediately to mind. First, we live in a world of great abundance. Second, and not unrelated to the first – the impoverishment of our repertoire of ideas and options is something we must take seriously – our symbolic or cultural impoverishment.

We live in a world of great abundance. In the context of recent global financial news we’re prone to forget this. In the context of the many effects of poverty we are drawn in to the immensity of the gap we must surmount. I return again and again to the work of Amartya Sen – in questioning the distribution of resources. Hunger and want more often than not is about a breakdown in the distribution and exchange of needed resources and rarely a result of insufficient resources for populations. Greed gets in the way. People are unwilling to let their wealth flow. We have the wrong idea of what wealth is.

Material Impoverishment persists largely through a nefarious “Symbolic Impoverishment”. This does not mean that social justice (or injustice) is not an active factor. So much more is possible for us as individuals and collectively as a species than we generally recognize. We accept limited options in the face of difficult circumstances. We reinforce the imagery of limited options for others. We find ourselves goaded by urgency and compelled on tight time-frames. Sometimes we accept external limiting definitions of ourselves, our station, what we deserve. We are distracted from our connectedness and what we ow to each other. (Georg Simmel’s notion of the relative decline Subjective vs. Objective Culture is relevant to this question – and reframes the challenge as acutely modern.)

We must set the highest goals and pursue them diligently, steadily. So much human potential is squandered. Life is squandered. We’re more caught up in maintaining a status quo, or keeping up with the current than growing together.

We must ask what human dignity demands of us when we bear witness to poverty and human suffering.

My call to the world of social and civic entrepreneurs with whom I find myself in common cause: let us each pursuing the social good work ourselves one by one out of a job. That’s my vision for the not-for-profit and social entrepreneurs – successfully closing the books on as many causes as we can so we may turn to higher challenges with the full complement of human creative potential.

This is the great urgency I see. These are two compass points on the map I follow.

By: Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai

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!