Maybe not enough people understood what you were doing — maybe not enough appreciated what was at stake.

Maybe you can communicate your vision more clearly now.

Maybe you have refined your vision or your methods.

Keep pushing, and keep reflecting on your aims, your method, your motivations.

As ever this rests upon a heap of confusion.

Let’s clarify a few things so we can be sure we aren’t distracted. There are bigger things happening (or not happening) in the world as our attention is consumed by this latest media event.

I’ve already said that there is a big difference between Treasonous acts and Whistleblowing (whether against Government or Corporate abuse of power and the public trust). Our legal system should reflect that distinction.

I’m going to go expand that statement to include the other big “T” … Terrorism.

We don’t need to go into the details of whether this was a case of whistleblowing. It’s more like a massive data dump. But as an analogy it should be instructive. The point about whistleblowing is having a fair and impartial hearing under due process of law, whether in the corporate sphere or a matter of state. The expectation of such a hearing, a true separation of powers and a more general atmosphere of transparency would transform our political culture in the best possible ways.

Another important distinction: those who publish the material, and those who leaked it. These are very different acts, and should be regarded differently. Some have called for the “destruction” of the publisher, some are engaged in illegal activities trying to suppress the website. As for the person who leaked the material, I return to the question of due process of law.

If we speak in favor of Law and Order (upholding claims of secrecy, and the necessity of state secrets and moreover the stiff punishment of those who break the pertinent laws) then let’s set aside the vindictive calls for persecution and violence that ignores due process or makes it into a mockery.

And let’s take that notion a little further — due process is not just following the letter of the law and procedures. It involves a judicious reading of the letter of the law such that higher human values are served or weighed against each other. This sort of reading of the law can lead to a rewriting of the law that is all part of an ongoing evolution of the human spirit. It’s the basic mechanics of the common law and we should not be so quick to dismiss such deliberations as judicial activism. It was once the consensus that common law was in evolution and progressing to a higher state. There are ways in which our society has fallen, but we cannot deny the possibility of further progress of human values. The law as written and enforced is not always right.

Lastly, let’s not confuse privacy and secrecy. Secrecy is a matter of policy. No Government agent creating a document or other record in the course of their duty has any expectation of “privacy” … these documents are internal, and that’s not the same as privacy. Recognizing that secrecy is a matter of policy is to see that it’s not a right. It’s a combination of circumstance and policy, and policy can be changed at a pen stroke.

All in all most of the confusion comes down to a certain kind of authoritarianism we all to readily adopt and allow to excuse further abuse of power. Consider the lengths the Administration went to in attempts to quash the Pentagon Papers and to persecute and prosecute Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo. This is a dangerous thing. If we’re really on the side of law and order, let’s moderate the rhetoric, and let’s not be distracted.

• Invitation — attend the most important event in the Community Technology/Digital Empowerment Sector in a decade – we’re rebuilding a movement – and we need your commitment and enthusiasm.
• Invitation — spread the word – Let us know who is up and coming but who may have never connected to the national/global movement and Invite them! Help fund their travel! No one is late to the party!
• Invitation — help us (re)build the movement in any way you can! If you are coming from out of town – let us know!

Three tracks:

• Broadband: Expansion & Inclusion
• Tools and Platforms
• Collaboration Models and Community Building

Special Honorees: Carl Davidson, Julia Stasch and Rep. Constance Howard
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee

Registration: http://dexcon2010.eventbrite.com/

As a recognition of our common heritage, past members of the network are eligible for the early bird rate.

For more information or to donate/volunteer contact Pierre Clark. (312) 473-0373 or registernow@digitalexcellence.net

We believe that a new way of working together is emerging and that our message to our communities is more pertinent than ever, and that we are stronger when we establish resources in common and share solutions freely across the network.

This is not a relaunch. It is something more profound. We honor the heritage of our field by finding a way forward, one suited to our present situation, one that builds upon what we have learned.

We have much experience in this community, and we are clearly ready to refactor, rebuild and reboot the movement and the network. We will determine the functions, services and capacities we need and desire for the field, and we will coordinate efforts to bring them online in a manner that serves the field as a whole, building upon capacities already under development when possible and operating from a perspective of shared, open stewardship.

We’re looking to grow our field, and to demonstrate it’s relevance to every facet of community and civic life. Many are engaged in the work and have not found us, their peer-community. We’re looking to establish a way for them to find us as we found each other, and for all to find a way to take up a meaningful share of the work.

We would love for all who wish to come to be there. This is an open call to everyone serving our field. You are invited to join the working meeting on October 30, or to step up in any way that may support this effort. (All are likewise invited to attend the Digital Excellence Conference, October 29: http://dexcon2010.eventbrite.com/)

Many have already expressed support for this endeavor, but not all are able to attend. For some, the obstacle is scheduling, for others there are fiscal constraints. Perhaps we can find creative ways to address the latter.

There will be several channels for involvement leading up to and following the meeting. First among them is a discussion list: http://groups.google.com/group/rebuild-reboot All who wish to attend or otherwise support the work should subscribe and participate. Please signify on that list whether you plan to join us for the meeting or if you can support this effort in some other way.

Please also spread the word on this meeting and the conference. Tell us who you think should be there. Better yet, tell them.

Michael Maranda
Rebuild-Reboot Committee

This first statement on Open Stewardship is crafted along the lines of an invitation – an invitation to Stewardship. It addresses the audience of the Coalition of the Willing film authored by Tim and produced in an innovative collaborative process led by Simon Robson, and released appropriately in waves.

Open Stewardship has been taken up enthusiastically by my colleagues in the Digital Excellence movement as an expression of the principles that have guided our work since the beginning of our early work towards a Community Benefits Agreement (never realized) and the architecting of the Principles for Digital Excellence. Together we look to the landscape in Chicago and out to the wider global community technology movement and see great opportunity for new models of cooperation and the development of commonly held resources that transform the information-action ecology.

At the Chicago COUNTs NetSquared Camp @IIT (Sept. 12) some friends and I will be facilitating an Open Stewardship Session in the afternoon (from 2-4pm), hoping to arrive at a comparable invitation to Stewardship and field-building in the Chicago Social Benefit Sector. Join us and together we will set the stage for a Chicago Revival.

Open Stewardship is my life’s work, and I invite you to engage me on this.

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.

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