On our last Net Tuesday (December 1), we held the Philly Net Tuesday Book UNclub at Robin’s Bookstore.  The idea was pretty straightforward… We would discuss books in Net Tuesday’s scope of interest: social networking/media, nonprofit technology and social change.  (That’s the “biblio” part.)  And we would use the style of an unconference, in which participants set their own agenda.  (That’s the “social” part.)  As far as any of us knew, this wasn’t really done before.  (And that’s the “experiment” part.)

We were fortunate that Lindsay Tabas video recorded parts of the evening (and also led one of the book discussions).  She put together a really great, short piece that nicely captures the spirit of the evening.  Thank you, Lindsay!

A Biblio Social Experiment from Lindsay Tabas on Vimeo.

We had about 16 people show up, exhibiting our typical mix of techies and nonprofit/activist types.  And, thankfully, people were open-minded about taking part in an experiment.  We started with 3×5 cards with names of the 25 books that people had submitted to the Google spreadsheet over the previous month.  Then we added additional books suggested by the folks who showed up.  We eliminated those books from the spreadsheet that nobody present had read, or felt comfortable enough to generate a discussion, and came away with the following 9 ititles.

1. Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Steven Johnson
2. Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger
3. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky
4. Our Choice:  A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore
5. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide by Mark Warschauer
6. The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussa
7. The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web by Tamar Weinberg
8. The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by David Meerman Scott
9. Twitterville: How Business Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel

We arranged the cards into a 3 by 3 matrix for 9 breakout groups  (a 15-minute round of 3 breakout groups, followed by a second round, and a third).  Inevitably there was some chaos, especially during switching times, but discussions seemed quite engaged.  In fact, one of the most obvious problems was that 15 minutes was just too short for a discussion on almost all of these books.

So, this was our biblio-social experiment.  And, I believe it went fairly well.  We did some whole-group debriefing at the end, and the following constructive suggestions were made:

• Have more time to talk about each book, which might be accomplished in a couple of ways:
  • Talk about fewer books (i.e., fewer, but longer rounds)
  • Pre-select the books before the event, since the selection process at the beginning of the evening was too heavy and time-consuming.  This could be done with the group (crowd) still making the selection, as opposed to any individual.
• Narrow the subject focus more.
• Try this format with media other than books, like blogs, articles.
• Circulate information about the items to be discussed before the meeting, so people could do some prep if they wanted.

I think these are all great suggestions.  As an experiment, I think it was successful, and certainly worth trying again, incorporating some of these ideas.  But Philly Net Tuesday probably won’t return to this format before later next year at the earliest.  And, maybe this format could work elsewhere.  Anybody have the phone number for the Free Library of Philadelphia?

But how?  An electronic tagging system isn’t convenient on the subway where I do a lot of my reading.  So, I thought about jotting down these tags, along with their respective page numbers, on the blank pages at the back of the book.  Then, it occurred to me (duh!) that such an idea was called an index, that there already is one at the back of the book, and that it was created for the same purpose - to help me, the reader, re-locate items and concepts scattered throughout the text.  So, why not just annotate the index itself?

This is not such a radical idea, not so different from annotating the body of the book in the first place.  And maybe “everybody else” already does this. But it had never occurred to me before (nor to several others that I mentioned it to). 

from my copy of David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous

I realized that, though I had overcome my childhood qualms about writing in a book, I felt hesitant to mess around with the book’s index.  Its terse order and structure, its separation from the content of the text per se, and its accepted role of providing keys into that text, all conspire to imbue the back-of-the-book index with an authority distinct from that of the author’s written words.

And, as in information professional, I’m well aware that many (though not all) back-of-the-book indexes are constructed by conscientious professional indexers, who do a great job of identifying, disambiguating and articulating concepts that the author has carefully assembled for presentation.  But index quality is beside the point.  A back-of-the-book index - no matter how good it is - necessarily reflects somebody else’s conceptual framework and priorities.  Not mine.  A good index is a tremendously valuable tool, which I deeply appreciate and use.  But it can never reflect my own, changing intellectual perspective or emotional response.  Which is why different people’s annotations of the same book are different.

And, with this modest insight, I feel liberated to “personalize” a book’s index, to merge my subjective tags with the indexer’s “objective” terms, to make an already useful access tool more personally meaningful.  And, in this flush of discovery, I’ve only just begun to identify ways to annotate a back-of-the-book index, including:

• adding new entries in their approximate alphabetical positions;
• alphabetically adding tags in “my language” and referring to their synonymous index terms;
• adding page numbers to existing entries (which the indexer had not considered significant enough to include);
• flagging existing entries, or specific page references of existing entries, that feel particularly important or interesting;
• highlighting references to other books, authors or concepts that I want to pursue independently;
• augmenting existing entries, or specific page references of existing entries, with additional info about why they feel important;
• drawing lines between two index terms and/or tags to reveal connections not expressed by the author or indexer.

Maybe this is interesting to nobody else but me.  But if you’ve annotated your books’ indexes, please share your experience.  Was it useful?  Do you have some tips?  Did you run into problems?  Have you discovered alternatives?

In both cases, I remarked to my wife, you have a bunch of skill-based enthusiasts who come together to share their skills. But she pointed out a key difference. Beadfest is produced by the trade publisher Interweave Press, and is not particularly interested in facilitating sharing of expertise among participants. It’s really designed primarily for one-way flow of expertise – from Interweave’s sanctioned “experts” to the paying attendees. I don’t know if it just doesn’t occur to the event organizers to facilitate expertise sharing among attendees, or if they deliberately avoid doing so, perhaps for fear of diluting their underlying marketing message. Regardless, though, they do not have the types of explicit networking labels used by the origamists at their convention.

HOWEVER, my wife noted, most of the women (and most of the attendees are women) tend to wear some of their own creations. And “How did you do that?” questions inevitably ensue. I take this as an indication that people’s innate desire to share what they know with others will find a way to express itself. Though they’re not wearing explicit, written labels, the jewelry itself nevertheless serves as a “networking hook” to invite connection and sharing among attendees. People want to share with their peers – even when their environment doesn’t necessarily encourage it. Beadfest might want to look at this as an opportunity, rather than a threat.

]]> http://communishare.org/2009/08/folks-just-want-to-share-what-they-know/feed/ http://communishare.org/2009/06/shirky-on-media-transformation/ http://communishare.org/2009/06/shirky-on-media-transformation/#comments Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:08:15 +0000 Seth http://communishare.org/?p=109 Perhaps I laud him too much (I see his name is quite big in my tag cloud), but here is a 17-minute talk given by Clay Shirky at the U.S. State Department last month.  It is the epitome of what gets me excited about this whole damn thing we’re living through.  “Web 2.0″ is just scratching the surface.

My strongest motivation for going was to meet and bond with other Net Tuesday organizers.  Officially, there are 33 Net Tuesdays around the world, and 14 were represented at the conference this year:  Austin (Billy Bickett), Chicago (Justin Massa and Dorothee Royal-Hedinger), Guayaquil, Ecuador (Eduardo Bejar) , London (Amy Sample Ward), Montreal (Peter Dietz and Jeremy Clarke), New Orleans (Jessica Rohloff ), Philadelphia (Ivan Boothe and myself), Phoenix (Sandy Sutton Andrews), Portland, ME (Alex Steed), Raleigh (Justis Peters, San Francisco (Rachel Weidinger), Seattle (Sarah Schacht), Toronto (Celina Agaton) and Vancouver (Eli van der Giessen and Joe Solomon).

Last year (at N2Y3) we had a hastily planned lunch with fewer Net Tuesday organizers, only a couple of whom were also here this year.  But this year, the conference organizers much more intentionally acknowledged the Net Tuesday organizers and helping us bond and share.  The kickoff was an entire day before the actual conference began just for us.  Not only did we get to know one another (particularly helpful before the conference got underway), but had plenty of time to discover similarities and differences among our programs, and to share aspirations for the future.  I felt (and feel) a genuine bond with the other organizers that I hope to maintain (we planned some collaborative opportunities before N2Y5).  Unlike last year, when the vast majority of the conference attendees had no idea what “Net Tuesdays” were, this year I felt appropriately validated.  We were acknowledged in the conference program, given specially colored conference T-shirts, and some of us played the vaguely satisfying role of “hosting” (introducing) some of the sessions.   Twice, in plenary sessions, we were asked to stand, and received applause.  In other words, we were much more clearly contextualized in relation to NetSquared.  I feel more pride in my role, and got the (much needed) shot in the arm to return to Philly and keep pushing forward Net Tuesdays and other Philly NetSquared initiatives.  The conference did its job.

• FrontlineSMS:Medic. First place winner. The main aspect of the project is equipping community health workers (CHW’s) in the third world with second tier (not “smartphone”) mobile phones when they go out to rural villages – many miles from the nearest clinic. Special software provides the CHW’s with access to medical records and lab diagnostics, enabling them to deliver a higher degree of service in the field and reduce the need to transport patients to a medical facility. They’ve already demonstrated this impressively in a trial in Malawi. This is cool enough, but what really blew my (and others’) mind(s) is that they are working with a team at UCLA to develop a new diagnostic procedure. Removing the lens and adding an LED light source, they plan to use the camera chip to diagnose malaria and other diseases in the field, thereby dramatically reducing the time required for diagnosis and treatment. They are looking at the mobile phone not simply as a communications device, but as a platform for repurposing its technology. And, finally, I want to recognize Isaac Holeman, one of the team, who Skyped into our Net Tuesday Philly meeting the following week – making for a great gathering. Thanks again, Isaac!
• The Extraordinaries.  Second place winner. The basic idea is to use your smart phone to identify and perform short “micro-volunteer” tasks, like translating (or transcribing) documents. The video “elevator pitch” gives a nice illustration of what they’re envisioning.
• VozMob – Mobile Voices, Voces Moviles. Third place winner. This is a platform for citizen journalism and community building. Utilizing a participatory design process, VozMob is currently deployed in immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Enable immigrants to share their stories via text, images or sound, the cell phones are being used to empower the community, to report abuses and to connect with family back home.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to get excited by some mobile apps. Some of the participants, it seemed to me, were driven primarily by the technology and finding a cool application for it. But what impressed me was how many of these folks had a deeply developed sense of progressive social justice, and saw the technology as a tool toward that end. (The VozMob folks were particularly articulate about this.) I was also impressed by the sense of mutual support and collaboration among participants. It was fun to watch and be a part of.

Actually, though, I’ve been thinking more about the idea of the idea (the “meta-idea”?).  In other words, the generalized situation I see is this:

An intelligent person (“originator”) has an idea that is:

• personally meaningful
• potentially “big” – in the sense of finding wide acceptance and/or making the world a better place
• not immediately intuitive (it’s complex enough that it probably requires more than an “elevator speech” to adequately convey it to most people)
• at a point at which the originator needs perspectives and expertise from other people in order to validate the idea and move it forward (or, alternatively, to become convinced that it should be abandoned).

I believe that this accurately describes John’s situation with smart accounts.  It also describes my own situation with a couple of ideas, but especially an idea for which I’ve been using the name “Dissemination Station”.  And, I’m sure it applies to many other people and ideas as well.

It seems to me that the challenge for John, me and other such originators is to:

• articulate the idea
  • in sufficient detail and clarity that it conveys its essence
  • briefly and simply enough so that people will bother to read it (or view it, listen to it…)
• attract people to learn about the idea, including those who would:
  • have valuable and needed perspectives and expertise
  • be willing to share their insights with the originator

John has articulated his idea on his website, as well as by submitting the project to the NetSquared conference.  He’s out there and pushing it.  I, on the other hand, have yet to articulate my Dissemination Station idea publicly – even though I first articulated the original version of it as a confidential product proposal to Telebase in 1995!  I suppose my own reticence to “out” this idea is rooted in a long-learned, hard-to-shake sentiment for proprietary knowledge (“It’s ‘my’ idea”), combined with the insecurity that it may not really be as good an idea as I’ve thought.  But a lot of good that silence has done – for me, for the idea (meme) itself or for the world.  Well, fuck that.  I’m gonna out the idea, starting on this website, and risk the embarrassment of imperfect description, the pain of discovering it’s really a dumb idea, or the frustration of losing “credit” to somebody with more ambition and fewer scruples.

Heads up.

What unites a rapper, a singer/songwriter, three jewelry-makers, a documentary on women in the media, a raffle, a silent auction, and a music video? Stumped? They’re all coming together for an Arts Free-for-All Party to raise money for filmmaker Hannah ‘helyx’ Horwitz’s documentary about American teens in Nicaragua.

All that and more will be happening Saturday, March 14, from 6-9 at Saladworks on the Penn Campus, 3728 Spruce Street, 19104. Lee G the rapper/singer will host and perform, and songwriter Kevin Ricci will sing. Works by artists and jewelry-makers Julia Eckenrode, Lisa Horwitz and Danny Kulp will be offered at silent auction, and Horwitz’ documentary on the impact of media images of women on girls will be shown. Rounding off the eclectic mix will be a raffle of a CD set, and a showing of Sandsnake, a Lee G and Delon music video filmed and edited by Horwitz. In short, the evening offers a madly mixed arts menu making one fun party.
The event is part of a broader fundraising effort to support Horwitz’s trip to Nicaragua this summer with a group of Philadelphia teens who will work with a small community there to build a school. Their trip is part of buildOn, (http://www.buildon.org/) an organization that combines after-school service in teens’ home communities here in the states with raising money and sending volunteers to build schools (295 to date) in developing communities around the world. 13 Philadelphia area high schools are working with buildOn (http://buildon.org/RegionsChapters/USProgramRegions/USProgramsList.aspx) and a group of students from those programs are headed to Nicaragua this summer. Horwitz’s film will document their work and the impact it will have, not just on the community building a new school, but on the lives of the American teens. Horwitz knows this impact well, as she describes her own buildOn experience in Nicaragua at age 17 as “life-changing.” Part of the money will go to fund a solar-powered battery charger to allow her to film in the remote community which lacks electricity.

There is no cover, but contributions will be joyfully received.

Madly Multi-Arts Party Backing buildOn Film
Saturday, March 14, 6-9
Saladworks on the Penn Campus, 3728 Spruce Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

Contact for more information: Hannah ‘helyx’ Horwitz, 610-539-9359, hhconnects@gmail.com ]]> http://communishare.org/2009/03/madly-multi-arts-party-to-back-documentary-filmmaker-on-saturday-march-14/feed/ http://communishare.org/2009/02/why-nonprofits-should-promote-social-media-in-general/ http://communishare.org/2009/02/why-nonprofits-should-promote-social-media-in-general/#comments Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:44:35 +0000 Seth http://communishare.org/blog/?p=72 The NetSquared “think tank” topic this month is:

What do you think the role of nonprofit organizations is in the changing world of social media?

When I first read it, however, I mentally transposed “the changing” to “changing the” and read it as:

What do you think the role of nonprofit organizations is in changing the world of social media?

The two questions have different meanings. The first one asks about the role of nonprofits in the world of social media (a world which happens to be changing). The second question implies that nonprofits are actually causing that change. And I find this second question more provocative. (Answering one question kind of answers both, but I’m focusing on the second.)

One reason I find the second formation interesting is because many of us (NetSquared folks and others) are focused on how to use social media to benefit the world of nonprofits. But I never thought about asking the opposite question: How can nonprofits be used to benefit the world of social media? (And why should they bother?)

Well, as social media become more pervasive in our society, and as ever-new forms of social media emerge, I believe they will continue to create new opportunities for helping nonprofits that we can’t anticipate beforehand. And, if that’s true, then maybe it’s in the “self-interest” of nonprofits not just to utilize social media to help their own causes, but also to promote the use of social media in general.

When nonprofits employ social media tools they are by definition promoting social media. But, maybe they could go further. For instance…

• When inviting people to join your Facebook cause, provide links to resources about how they can get more out of Facebook for other purposes as well.
• While encouraging people to comment on your blog, provide links to services where they could start their own blogs, or where they could learn how to blog more effectively.
• On your organization’s podcast page, include information about how you made the podcast (tools, techniques, problems), which not only humanizes the process, but may inspire the user to take a leap and create her own podcast.

I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but I’m starting to see how nonprofits and social media exist in a sort of symbiotic relationship. And the lifeblood of that symbiosis, IMHO, is empowerment. Social media, of course, are the epitome of empowerment. (It’s more empowering to put your video onto YouTube than to simply watch someone else’s.) And nonprofits are about empowerment also – either directly (microlending to help a poor villager start a new business) or indirectly (realizing that your single voice is important in stopping global warming). So, as we all work to transform our world, perhaps we should be more aware (well, I am, anyway) that we should be thinking not just about how social media can benefit the world of nonprofits, but how nonprofits can benefit the world of social media. Ultimately, they may be one and the same.

Focusing on Twitter, the basic theme of the paper is that within any large social network, people tend to interact primarily within a small subset of more strongly connected, reciprocal relationships –which the authors refer to as “friends”. It’s hard to disagree with that basic premise, which we can readily observe in all our social networks, from the workplace to the neighborhood.

But, I have a lot of trouble with their conclusion. I don’t doubt “the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and folowees, and a sparser and simpler [“hidden”] network of actual friends”. But then they assert that

most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view. Thus, we need to find the hidden social network; the one that matters when trying to rely on word of mouth to spread an idea, a belief, or a trend. [emphasis added]

The authors show lots of statistical associations, but I think it’s a big leap to assume that degree of “influence” necessarily resides within that “network of actual friends”.

It is particularly ironic that the authors cite Mark Granovetter’s groundbreaking 1973 article The Strength of Weak Ties (which Philly networking pioneer Stan Pokras introduced me to nearly 30 years ago, and which Wikipedia refers to as “one of the most influential sociology papers ever written”). My understanding of Granovetter is that he would regard these “networks of actual friends” as exhibiting “strong ties” among themselves, and that many of them also have “weak ties” with members of other “networks of actual friends”. His main thesis is that weak ties can have disproportionally strong influence because they help to bridge between otherwise unfamiliar networks.

In my own experience (admittedly without the statistical backup) new social networks like Twitter only validate and reinforce Granovetter’s insight that so-called “weak” ties can have unexpected “strength”:

• Some of the people I follow on Twitter are my favorite authors and thinkers, who don’t have any idea who I am (a weak tie). But they’ve influenced me greatly with some of the ideas and references to resources from their tweets.
• The authors don’t even mention “retweeting”, the fairly common practice of “forwarding” a tweet. People retweet posts specifically in order to bridge from one of one’s networks to another. (Retweeting has little value within one’s own “network of friends”.)
• Because of the profusion of hyperlinks within tweets, it’s really easy to follow-up on any weak-link tweet that seems even a little interesting, thereby enhancing their potential influence.

Maybe my experience clouds my perspective, but I truly believe that Twitter and other Internet-enabled social networks make weak ties more important and influential than ever before. It’s great to have a circle of friends; and it’s really cool to also have a much, much wider circle of potential friends.

… is beguilingly simple. The Internet makes copying cheaper and [so Big Media] must meet the greater danger of illicit copying with more expansive rights, harsher penalties, and expanded protections. … [w]ithout an increase in private property rights, cheaper copying will eat the heart out of our creative and cultural industries.

This has a certain logic – but it also sounds way wrong. Why? Boyle is clear that he does not disagree with the basic idea of copyright, and admits that Big Media are harmed by illicit copying. But, he goes on to show how this thinking is “dramatically incomplete” – and bad for individual freedom and cultural expression.

• For one thing, although new technology enables the potential for harming copyright holders, it also enables potential for benefitting copyright holders (e.g., with new promotion and distribution opportunities). It’s not clear, on balance, whether the harms outweigh the benefits. (And, even if this could be accurately measured today, the balance will likely change tomorrow.) “A large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over which one’s control is much stronger.” Big media wants protection from the dangers, without regard to the benefits they receive.
• Another problem with the argument of the “Internet Threat” is that Big Media uses it to target the technologies which threaten them. Boyle describes the story of video recorders, which came on the scene in the ‘70’s with dramatically “cheaper copying”. Movie studios were “horrified” by video recorders, which they saw as a critical threat to their business model of tightly controlled distribution. In a famous suit against Sony (manufacturer of the Betamax), the movie studios sought to hold Sony liable because their machines could be used to violate copyright. Effectively, they wanted to be able to control the technology that threatened them. But the Supreme Court recognized that, since the technology could be used for legitimate, fair use purposes (like for time-shifting of TV programs), then the movie studios had no right to control the new technology. They had to learn to live with the existence of video recorders (and, ironically, figured out how to profit from them).

One way to view all this is that the new technological and social developments of the Internet represent entirely new “industries”. And, if established industries feel threatened by that, they can either adapt or perish. But, they should not control the playing field for newcomers. “Imagine”, opines Boyle, “if we had given the lamp-oil sellers the right to define the rules under which the newfangled electric light companies would operate”. We are, together, creating a new world of information and social relations. Exciting. Challenging. Profound.

Jeff describes his process in a 4-minute video, and it works like this: Each person receives a “Personal Social Networking Toolkit”: a baggie with 2 blank, self-adhesive name tags, one sheet of blank tiny labels (about 0.5″ x 0.75″?) and a pen.

1. On the first name tag, each person writes their name, plus a “personal tag line”.
2. On the other name tag, other people affix “tags” (which they’ve written on their own tiny labels) about that person that they’ve learned from their conversation.

In other words, in the first mode, people tag themselves; and in the second mode, they tag each other. All of these tags are what I referred to in my other post as “networking hooks”. The second mode is useful — because how people tag one another may reveal networking hooks that the original person may not have considered when tagging herself. So, as the event progresses, each person (ideally) accumulates additional tags resulting from their encounters with more people. More networking hooks (and more types of networking hooks) provide more opportunities for people to strike up conversations and to make meaningful connections. Great.

I like the idea, but it felt a bit awkward, and I noticed that some participants didn’t tag anybody else. So, here is a brainstorm of ideas that Jeff or others may want to consider when doing something similar in the future.

1. Include a clipboard in the kit. This would make it much easier (and therefore more likely) to write on the tiny labels. (And the clipboards can be returned for future use.)
2. Do something to identify the tiny tags with their respective authors. Ideally, this would mean having people’s names on all of their blank tiny tags, but it could be as simple as having all the tiny tags on each sheet indicate an identifying number. (All of my tiny tags have a 17 on them; all of yours have a 22.) This is more analogous to electronic social networks (where you can see who has created a tag or comment). Not only does it tell you who wrote each tag, but it silently encourages people to be more prolific in their tagging. (”Boy, I see #22 has done a lot of tagging.”)
3. I would have needed 4 hands to really take advantage of the breakfast. As anyone who’s been to a buffet reception knows, it’s hard enough to juggle a cup of coffee and plate of danish while talking to somebody. Add to that using a pen to write on a label. It can’t all be done at the same time. I opted to keep my pen ready and got really hungry. Others ate a nice breakfast, but weren’t doing any tagging. I think an ideal environment would have a number of standing-height tables. Then, as people walk around, they can more easily put down their coffee to write a tag.
4. Finally, I’d love to see this idea applied to a speed networking scenario. You know, the kind of event where you have 2 minutes to exchange business cards and talk to another person; then move on to the next person for 2 minutes; and so on. Imagine also encouraging people to tag their partner before moving to the next one. Not only would this add useful networking hooks, it would encourage people to listen to one another in a particularly purposeful way.

I believe (as does Jeff and many others) that tagging can be a useful practice in certain face-to-face situations. How else can this concept be applied?

Last night, I joined my wife to attend the keynote panel at the Franklin Institute, entitled “What is the purpose of school?” It was a really impressive group of panelists, including African-American scholar Molefi Asante who has authored over 65 books; Jeff Han, inventor of the multi-touch screen; and Stephen Squyrers, Principal Investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Their comments and subsequent discussion were very interesting, and I’m glad I went. BUT, I’m disappointed that this powerful panel discussion, within this really progressive conference, never even questioned the premise of compulsory schooling.

The idea of compulsory schooling is so ingrained, so taken for granted that we fail to remember that it is less than 300 years old — the tiniest of slivers of human history. Its logic is compelling and attractive: “We need compulsory schooling to prepare young people for a complex world. And, besides, what else would we do with all those kids?” And I don’t have an easy answer for that (certainly not conveniently contained within a blog post). But lots of others have been thinking about this. I’m sensitive to it because my undergraduate honors thesis 30 years ago (yikes!) focussed on three authors (Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and John Holt) who boldly and lucidly questioned compulsory schooling.

And, now, a just-published book by John Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction, apparently does the same. I haven’t read a book about education for many years. But I’ve become aware that I’m not hearing anybody around me raise the issue of compulsory schooling. And, my own ability to articulate the arguments is rusty. Maybe time to get the book. (And if anyone else has read it, please let me know what you thought.)

It’s hard to mentally envision the “public domain” because, while we may think about intellectual property itself, we tend not to conceptualize its opposite, the “outside” of intellectual property. The public domain, Boyle says, is “not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by [intellectual] property law” (p. 40-41). The public domain is, rather, the vast majority of our culture. (Language itself, for instance, is part of the public domain. You don’t have to buy “English, Professional Edition”; it’s just there for you to use as you wish.)

The whole justification for the government granting copyrights and patents – which are, in effect, monopolies – is to provide a form of “protection” in order to encourage authors and inventors to put forth the time, effort and expense to create new works, and then to receive reasonable recognition and reward in return. But, in summarizing Jefferson’s warning about this protection, such monopolies “should be tightly limited in time and should not last a day longer than necessary to encourage the innovation in the first place.” (p. 21) In other words, some protection may be useful, but it should be as temporary and limited as possible.

This has provided me a metaphorical image. I think the public domain is like a coral reef. The vast, beautiful majority is comprised of long-dead coral animals. On the edges, here and there at any given time, are living coral polyps. The live a little while and then die, their calcified remains adding incrementally to the overall coral reef. The living coral polyps need some protection to do their job. But their lives are temporary. If their lives were permanent, the reef wouldn’t grow. And the collective result of their temporary “production” is the giant, diverse coral reef for others to use and enjoy (ignoring, of course, the tragic ecological threat posed to real coral in the real world).

This is not a perfect metaphor for lots of reasons. But it’s helped me construct a mental image for the public domain: vast, beautiful, diverse. And, to the extent that intellectual property is justified and useful (which is an argument in its own right), it should be limited and temporary in order to enrich our shared public domain as soon as possible.

This is one reason Creative Commons make so much sense. Enabling individual creators to determine for themselves the limits of their copyright is a much more nuanced and efficient way of applying “just the right amount” of protection for each creator’s work. The government’s current one-size-fits-all system is both heavy and ham-handed by comparison. In order to protect the very few creations that might (another argument) warrant extensive protection, it “overprotects” all creative works, and, in so doing, squanders the dynamic potential of our public domain — the “basis for our art, our science and our self-understanding… the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural worlds.” (p. 39)

… in the Library of Congress’s vast, wonderful pudding of songs and pictures and films and books and magazines and newspapers, there is perhaps a handful of raisins’ worth of works that anyone is making any money from, and the vast majority of those come from the last ten years. If one goes back twenty years, perhaps a raisin. Fifty years? A slight raisiny aroma. We restrict access to the whole pudding in order to give the owners of the raisin slivers their due. But this pudding is almost all of twentieth-century culture, and we are restricting access to it when almost of all of it could be available. (p. 12)

I’m reminded of an ethical case study posed back in Library School: You’re an academic librarian, and a faculty member comes to you at the end of Winter term, wanting to take home a rarely used reference book over the break. What do you do? The teacher, Kris Subramanyam, was incredibly meticulous and precise in all his doings. So, I assumed that the “right” answer (i.e., the one I thought Dr. Subramanyam wanted to hear) was to hold firm to the rule that reference books don’t circulate, and tell the faculty member in effect, “tough shit, you can’t take it home”. I was both surprised and challenged to hear Dr. Subramanyam discuss the subtleties of the situation… that since it was a rarely used book, and few people would be around during the school break, it would be reasonable to allow the faculty member to take the book home. The overarching purpose is to help patrons get the information they seek; rules can serve that purpose, but they shouldn’t get in the way of it. This opened my eyes to realize that the best librarians distinguished themselves not by being best at following arcane rules of librarianship, but by exercising mature judgment (wisdom) in helping to meet the information needs of the people they served.

And so it is with copyright. Clinging blindly to the rules ensures that none of us can fully enjoy the vast pudding of 20th century creative output, even if the copyright holders have no objection or cannot be found. But our culture would be better served by a more subtle, wiser and user-centered approach to managing our cultural treasure trove. This is not just a trivial matter of making voiceovers for old movies. I believe it speaks to the intellectual, creative and cultural environment that we must develop in order to successfully confront the political and ecological crises that face us. But that’s another story.

I’ve read some terrific books lately. Books which have excited me (to a degree similar to how Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society radically and profoundly woke me up in 1977). And as I read these books, I highlight passages and think about how these ideas fit into my own ever-emerging paradigm…. And then they’re gone. The two most exciting books I’ve read lately (twice, and still have more to get out of them) are:

· Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

· Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger

And, currently, I’ve just begin another book about intellectual property called The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle, which is hot off the presses (publication date: December 8, 2008!). I’ve finished the preface and first chapter and stopped. I’m anxious to continue (and admit to skimming ahead), but the practice I want to try – hopefully repeatedly, but at least once – is to pause after the chapter and blog about it. I was thinking about this as I was reading it, and I noticed that my attention was focused in a different way. My highlighting and annotation was more purposeful. I already know what I want to write about. So, here we go…

Its biggest drawback is that it was published way, way back in the year 2000 – eons ago in Internet time. But, as I read it, it still seemed fresh and interesting, and didn’t seem out of date, until we “… take a tour of the various conversational modalities the Net offers”: e-mail, mailing lists, newsgroups, chat and web pages”. Let’s call these “Group A”; they are all great and unprecedentedly important tools which have dramatically empowered people by liberating their voices and making possible fluid, dynamic and serendipitous human connections.

But what feels dramatically and profoundly missing, what hadn’t been invented (or at least weren’t popularized) back in those olden days, are blogs, podcasts, videoblogs, Twitter, social bookmarks, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Craig’s List, much of what passes for “social networking” and much, much more. These are “Group B”.

The absence of Group B tools in the book struck me harder than I would have expected. Group A tools are not out-of-date clunkers; they are all mainstays of the cyberworld. And in retrospect, it certainly seems like Group B represents a natural progression and evolution of empowering Group A communication tools. But on the other hand, something about Group B feels deeply and profoundly different.

So, what’s different about them? All I come up with at the moment is that, when you speak through the tools in Group A (except for “web pages”), you have some degree of sense and control over who the audience is. Sure, it’s likely you don’t know all the readers in your mailing lists or newsgroups (and not knowing much or most of the audience is a critical part of their value). But, you likely have some sense of who the audiences are, because each mailing list, newsgroup or chat channel has some sort of name, identity, purpose. And you have some control over who hears your message, at least to the extent of being able to quit one mailing list or join another.

But Group B tools enjoy an audience of the whole world. Put out a blog post (like this one), or a Flickr pic or even a Craig’s List listing, and anyone can see it, link to it, love it, hate it. These newer tools carry voices anywhere, everywhere. Sure, groups of audience do emerge (a Twitterer has a certain number of followers; a podcast has a certain group of RSS subscribers). But these “groups” form even more dynamically, organically and unpredictably than the groups who subscribe to a mailing list or newsgroup.

Relatively speaking, a newsgroup is a silo. A blog is an open door.

But I don’t think this quite captures it. What am I missing? What do you think?

But I’d never heard the phrase civic capital before hearing it used to describe the effect of Barack Obama’s successful “netroots” campaign. The On the Media interview below with Marshall Ganz describes how the Obama campaign helped to develop civic capital among its volunteers:

It talks about how, at “Camp Obama”, volunteers were trained to articulate their own personal narratives, because it’s “from their own stories that they’re most effectively going to be able to engage others.” Ganz goes on:

… a whole tier of volunteer leadership were cut into the action …there was a level of empowerment, of volunteer leadership at the local level, that is a theme that’s run all through this campaign. And that’s why you see the responsibility, the enthusiasm, the creativity. And that’s why when the campaign is over, as it is now, this isn’t going to go away.

The term civic capital is new to me. (And I’m not the only one. Interestingly, there’s no Wikipedia entry [yet] for civic capital, though the Wikipedia article for social capital was started way back in 2002!). So, it seems to me that civic capital is a form of social capital – one that is self-consciously focussed on the improvement of the community or society of which its members are a part. It certainly wasn’t invented by the Obama campaign. (A quick Google search cites the term used a number of years ago; and — even without the term itself — the reality of it no doubt goes back as far as civil society.) But the Obama campaign exposed and exploited it. And, to the question of whether we can use civic capital to help transform our society into one that is more just, green and peaceful, there’s an obvious answer: Yes we can.