Happy Thanksgiving! I try to emphasize the gratitude part of this holiday and less of the consumption of turkey and everything else in sight. Don’t forget tomorrow is Buy Nothing Day – a great time to reconnect with your community and avoid the throngs who are beginning their yuletide season by buying lots of crap made in China.
If you are in Chapel Hill, stop by Internationalist Books who always have a fun program of skill shares, free food, swap meet, and no books for sale!
Thanks to The People’s Channel for inviting me and Brian to come and help lead a discussion about blogging for their Community Media Workshop Series. For folks who were there, here are some links related to our dicussion:
Each of the post listed above links to tons more resources here and on other sites. Please explore…
In honor of the holiday, I want shout out to my two favorite veterans: Jonathan Kuniholm: Iraq veteran, engineer, co-founder of the Open Prosthetics Project; and Stan Goff: veteran of numerous conflicts from Vietnam to Haiti, author, blogger, founder of Insurgent American, and co-founder of Bring Them Home Now.
I don’t believe either of them shares my view of militarism, but they have both learned the high cost of war both personally and societally. I appreciate their dedication to serve not just this country, but this planet.
I tried making some videos for election day as an experiment, and I think it went pretty well.
The first one is 16 minutes, I made it in my office with iMovie and my laptop’s built-in camera. I made 3 more with nothing but my cellphone (a $50 Treo 680) as I attended the victory celebrations of some of the candidates. They are shown here in reverse order:
I am loving http://blip.tv for how easy they make this.
Tomorrow (11/6/07) there are municipal elections all across the United States. The League of Young Voters (www.indyvoter.org) works to get young people engaged in elections so I thought that might be a good place to find information about where the local elections are going on.
To the contrary, they don’t even appear to be aware that there is an election tomorrow. Way to go, y’all.
So… anyone have suggestions for a central place to find information about local elections?
Last year my family was all together at Hannukah and so of course we made latkes. I took pictures in an attempt to capture my grandmother’s perfect technique. This weekend I got a request from Bill Averbach of The Austim Klezmorim, who wrote a song that is a latke recipe, asking if he could use some of my pictures. I said sure – as long as he gave credit to my family, which he did. Here is the video:
I’ve been struggling for a while with issues of free speech in the community of commenters over on OrangePolitics.org. Over the life of the site, there has been a small group of people who are generally screwing it up for the rest of us. Instead of informing and getting to know each other, the site devolves into nasty bickering which no-one wants to read except maybe the 5 people involved in it. I know I don’t want to read it, and that’s not just because half of it seems to be based on the premise that I am an evil dictator who is trying to control your life and ruin your neighborhood.
I often hear from folks who have varying success at ignoring the negative elements and usually just stop reading the site. I try to remind people that you can just read the posts and skip the comments (especially via RSS), but most OP readers don’t value that distinction very much. Lately the tension has gotten worse and some commenters have become increasingly toxic.
So as we are approaching the second major platform change to OP (from WordPress to Drupal), I’m starting to think about how to help the readers feed back into the system and have some collective say about what words and what behavior is or is not valued. It’s already going to be a great improvement that trusted users can have their own blogs on the site. I’m especially interested in Drupal modules that might help with rating content (both posts and comments), although I also accept that some manual moderation will probably be needed, especially in determining what goes on the front page.
Brian says that allowing the community to vote will encourage gaming of the system, and I think he fears that this could put the difficult people even more in charge. While this is certainly possible, I have more confidence in the commenters and especially the (silent) readers to balance this out and result in the right outcome most of time. This isn’t so much a wisdom of the crowd thing as it is a Buddhist thing, at least for me. I need to believe that everyone is essentially good. Otherwise I wouldn’t be working to amplify their voices, help them vote, help them make media, etc.
Continue reading “OP becomes its own worst enemy”
Thanks to the Triangle Community Foundation for bringing Rob Stuart to town and organizing today’s Civic Engagement and Technology Workshop. I really enjoyed seeing a lot of my old NC nonprofit friends as well as making new ones.
As promised, here are the materials I used in my sessions. First, my seven-minute overview of OrangePolitics. Then my network-centric advocacy presentation, which was referred to in our discussion of social networks. And here is a Second Life slide show that I prepared but didn’t end up using.
Finally, here are some of the social networking sites that I demonstrated. If you sign up for any of them, please look me up and say hello!
http://Facebook.com
http://MySpace.com
http://SecondLife.com (virtual reality)
http://Flickr.com (photos)
http://Twitter.com (mini-blogs)
http://Last.fm (music)
http://YouTube.com (videos)
http://GoodReads.com (books)
Learn more:
Pushing Power to the Edges
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network
http://www.netcentriccampaigns.org
https://lotusmedia.org/in/nptech/advocacy
Chapel Hill lost one of it’s greatest today. I probably would not be as involved in local politics as I am had it not been for Joe Herzenberg – trailblazer, advocate, friend. http://orangepolitics.org/2007/10/well-miss-you-joe
Watch me squint into the sun and say “um” 20 times a minute in this short interview with Leonard Witt of the Public Journalism Network about blogs and journalism. Short version: the future of journalism = trust. If people can’t trust you, they won’t read/buy you.