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.

City ownership isn’t “monopoly” – that’s just the distraction of the duopolists. City ownership would be a civic service aimed at the public interest, not at the narrow interest that tries to squeeze the most money out of the copper infrastructure or cripple the Internet and stifle creativity because they can’t adapt.

The first rule of any network from a business perspective – buy or build your own when you can – don’t rent. That’s the mistake cities have been making for years. If it’s good enough for the private sector to own their own networks – let the people benefit from the same economic logic.

This was a reaction to some of the ideas expressed on the Seattle Post Globe.

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?

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

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.

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.

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!