Here are my very rough notes from this morning’s sessions at the NetSquared conference. To get more information, or to take part, visit the NetSquared remote conference site.
Daniel Ben-Horin
There’s something going on that isn’t incremental, a sea change. In our work over the last 19 years, we’ve worked with organizations where the obstacles are primarily financial.
A year from now the phrase Web 2.0 will live in the dustbin of dead soundbites. We use the term social web.
Angela Glover Blackwell
PolicyLink
We are gathering knowledge, etc. so that we can take action
a national research, advocacy and policy organization dedicated to advancing a new generation of policies supporting a more inclusive society
spend a lot of time looking at regions, economy,
people have taken charge of their own participation. not allowing traditional leaders to define that for them. lighthearted: American Idol – everyone is voting, I even did it myself one time.
When Katrina struck, Am people responded extraordinarily. Didn’t wait to be told what to do. 2.9B$ were sent to the gulf region.
Extraordinary gatherings around immigration. people aren’t waiting to see what the gov’t is going to do; they’re putting out front what they think gov’t ought to do.
Covenant with Black America. Every year for past seven years, on CSPAN in Feb, for about six straight hours, you can watch the State of the Black Union, moderated by Tavis Smiley. In 2005, decision to build a Covenant with Black America. Book came out of it. In 2006, largest audience CSPAN has. In a four-week period, shot onto the NYT best-seller list at #6. Shot up to number one. Has stayed there for 10 weeks. Not traditional leadership, but churches, neighbourhood. Last weekend, over 700 book parties across country. Black people all across country saying we can define what’s needed to improve life across America.
What does it mean? A huge challenge. Each of these things is about America coming to grips with race and poverty, the agenda that stumps this country more than anything else. People disappointed in leaders, newspapers, television.
We have opportunity to begin to say, society and tech are moving in new directions, something v big in common. Open up spaces, possibilities that have not been open before. Challenge us to think that what is possible is to go the last yards: let the wisdom of the people to set agenda and move forward. Don’t have to wait for politicians to set agenda, wait for books and resources; we can set agenda, put in our own information/
Combine tech advances with moral and political aspirations.
DBH: What are policy solutions that go beyond getting more computers into ppl’s hands, and get to equipping people to imagine?
AGB: First thing is to get comfortable with policy. people often uncomfortable, intimidated by policy. Would like people to think about policy as preemptive action. We often know what’s coming down the road. People who are living in poverty did not need the high waters of Katrina to know they are waste deep in poverty. You can take pre-emptive action to try to set up an atmosphere to avoid a bad outcome. We understood as tech became a way of life that we needed to do something in mid 90s: Landmark program made millions available to bring people online who were being left behind.
Then in 2001, saw 50% of people online, administration saw that as a glass half-full than a glass half-empty, started cutting back. We have the same need we had before. And we have a new need, because tech is moving fwd and have to make sure innovations reach people. Need resources at national, state and local level to disseminate technology. Advocates for understanding that kind of action is what govts need to do when they see a problem.
Forums at national and local level to disseminate tech. Policy often doesn’t change as an approach, but content changes. Need people who understand something about how to solve the problem. An infrastructure to allow people with knowledge to reach people who need it. Need intermediaries.
Universal service reforms to enable npos to have broad-band access to resources. Excited: SF Alice Griffith project, starting to wire in low-income communities. Starting with those most likely to be left behind. So often, if you solve the problem for those who are the most vulnerable, you actually solve it for everybody. Think of how many times you’ve been pushing a stroller, riding a bike, and been so grateful for curbs in sidewalk: those are there for the disabled.
Standards and mechanisms for data sharing. Liberate data.
DBH: Seems like tech policy is a secondary or tertiary issue. Gubernatorial candidate with tech background. Seems farfetched to think everyone here will vote for Wesley because he’s more techhed up. How does one frame the discussion in a way that makes people make tech issues a priority in their political action?
AGB: I want people to lead with the social agenda, their aspirations for people, a sense of what a just society looks like, can’t achieve it without hard work, the same investment, innovation, networking you need for anything tough. In those places, the tech comes in. A nuanced, modern sense of how to achieve the vision. There are people I admire for their vision, but I would not follow them, because they don’t understand the world is changing. They’re too comfortable with the things they understand, and not courageous enough to go the places they don’t understand. Don’t trust what can be produced working together. If people have a full social vision, the tech follows because it’s what’s necessary. It’s in the air. Technology is essential to achieving it.
DBH: PolicyLink and TechSoup have a schizoid nature. Neither is a Web 2.0 web site. Started years ago, not heavily interactive. Both organizations have developed a web 2.0, web service, web-based site built on Drupal. We have NetSquared, and you have LouisianaRebuilds.info, an incredible site about supporting efforts to rebuild. What has it been like to have a foot in both web worlds?
AGB: We are very aware that existing site hasn’t taken advantage of possibilities. Invited after people saw our 10 pts for ethical rebuilding in the Gulf. LR.info has a lot of interactive capacity. As we thought about our own site, put a toe in the water and put up a form on our own site. Really struggling. But as we see all the possibilities on the other site, see that we need to make the move. Interactive with all the communities we deal with to understand what we need to do. Struggle all social change organizations engaged in: we’ve put ourselves out as representing those who are vulnerable, left behind, voices not heard, done it for decades. It’s very threatening that those voices can be heard directly, not through us. But if we believe what we’ve been saying, this is the most exciting moment we’ve ever had. …To be able to serve. Because really what we are is servants to people trying to improve their lives. Next step: use those new techs to achieve what people are trying to achieve. We’re going the next steps: slowly, thoughtfully. Exciting, participatory technologies. Voice, participation and agency. In the end, we want people to be agents for change on their own behalf.
Lucy Bernholz: Big areas of likely disruption?
Howard Rheingold: Tied to technology and ways of acting. Emergence of blogosphere. Katrina response; Zack Rosen has a great story about the Katrina people-finder site. Immigration: youth demos organized trhough MySpace; medium becomes a conduit for collective action. Open-source: Benkler’s book suggests this is moving beyond software. Wikipedia. Omidyar and Skoll reinventing philanthropy. SARS: defeating Chinese govt’s efforts to keep a lid on it, scientists’ self-organizing efforts. Toyota fire. Presidential election in 2004: fact that Dean campaign sputtered doesn’t mean forces there will go away. All coming from same source. Earliest days of this combination of techs and literacies.
Paul Saffo: I recommend you take the word “information” and IT out of your vocab. Info revol’n moving into a different phase. This is about media. Two decades of info revolution morphing into a new media. This parallels a moment, just over 50 yrs ago, when advent of TV triggered the explosion and maturation of mass media. Now personal media: profoundly different from mass media, and even from 90s. Pers media offers a two way trip: you get to answer back, in fact you have to, or you don’t have the experience. The downside for all of you is that the big companies have figured this out. This is a much tougher time than in the 80s. Crowds may move fast, but the establishment may move faster. Think about MySpace organizing the marches in LA or elsewhere. But it didn’t have an impact on the bills in congress, just ticked off people. This is potent stuff, and may not lead to the results people want.
HR: If I was an organizer, I’d take advantage of the fact that all those Hispanic youth became politically activated and have a connection to participatory media. Develop a public voice that will connect them to the public sphere. People who have been activated need to think about action that can be brought to bear on power structures.
LB: How do we make it a sustainable, long-term push to catch up to the establishment?
PS: This is a good time to think about the kind of world you want for your children 20 years from now. The suits are busy in Washington; net neutrality is just the latest. We all have to become policy wonks, because the biggest wonk is going to win. I don’t just mean washington, but the suburbs of Geneva, and WIPO.
HR: Have to echo that. Potential of network tech, digital tools to democratize access, is not necessarily going to be realized. When the Christian Coalition came out in favour of net neutrality… just one battle in terms of who will control access to technology. First, defend this opening that techn has brought us. Beyond that, important to connect young people with possibilities for their future and keep those possibilities open. They know what fun their happening on youtube, myspace, IMing. They don’t know that’s threatened. A huge educational necessity right now. I’m assuming everyone here understands, but you need to educate your constituencies to educate their constituencies. The ones under 25 years old, under 20 years old, this is the world they’re native to. The decisions made now will decide the world they live in.
PS: Been a bystander, a forecaster at the institute, watched this closely. Big believer in grassroots, people power, amazed in how tech has come through. We need something else, and need tech to help us get it: elites. Social movements don’t happen unless there are elites. We need that small number of thought leaders who are charismatic, public, better than political heroes at articulating visions. Thing we’re all fighting against is attention span. Chronic, society-wide attention deficit disorder.
PS: Still waiting for first signs of the cyberjetting president. Whenever you have a new tech, someone comes along as the first to grasp the potency as a medium.
HR: Jimmy Wales an interesting emerging leader. 300 days a year on the road. Instead of spending all his time with leaders, spends his time meeting with local groups of Wikipedians. Ability to ID a community that can take advantage of these platforms. What other platforms (tagging, videosharing) allow communities to form, and how can you get them to whitewash that fence? Need to have some residue of hierarchy, but can be pretty small if you have other mechanisms to make decisions. Omidyar an interesting experiment, first 25k then 50k. Pretty chaotic: no decision-making mechanisms. After 10k posts and a lot of heat, decided how to spend the first 25k. Try experiments in which you let go of power and allow groups to seize their own power.
PS: Challenge is to listen to these emergent new media — blogs, by the way, transitional media on their way to something else; the scratchpad of history — listen to it carefully. ask what it wants to be. think of how politicians used microphones in first half of the century: shouted. with radio, they all shouted, and it was a disaster- – except FDR, who knew it was more powerful to whisper than to shout. Jimmy wales, etc. are people who have learned to whisper in new ways.
LB: Fundamental challenge between access and inaccess. How will it challenge the fundamental challenges of our time? Still seems to be one group of people talking about changes for other people.
PS: Putting way too much hopes into it. When a new tech comes along, it’s either going to usher in world peace or be the end of civilizations. At turn of century, assumption (“airminded”) that not seeing national boundaries would user in world peace. Nobody told our strategic bombing forces in World War II. Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog because of that photo from space; now we’re militarizing space. …Is this just going to become a vaster wasteland with little pockets of optimism?
HR: Being constantly accused of being a technological optimist, how can you be an optimist if you understand history but I am hopeful, which is a choice. Survived my period of nihilism. Has to be in the hands of kids. Tremendous potential in participatory affordances of tech today. That’s why there’s such a largely unknown to the public battle for control of them, and it’s global. Spain, Korea, Phillippines — elections tipped by technologies. Not always going to be used for democratic purposes. When I say literacy, most people think set of skills, but they’re also the entrance into a community. The community that emerged around the alphabet created the world we’re in now, for better or worse. The community emerging around tech now will create the world we live in tomorrow, for better or worse. Mobilize hope, before it’s too late.
PS: Don’t drop your guard. Constant vigilance is the only way to go.
(questioner) I look at MySpace, cell phones and IM, and I see a massive surveillance network. What happens when MS, to earn DoD contracts, agrees to make it a licensing condition that their software can’t be used to criticize the gov’t? What happens when carriers refuse to carry packets inconsistent with gov’t policy — e.g. air traveller told by US court he can walk?
PS It’s better to have people who are conscious and concerned at these companies than people who don’t think about the implications…
HR Always-on panopticon. Political side, not hardware or software, is the place for influence. Whatever happened to mistrusting your govt? Fear of the tyrant, fear of the mob. Need to elect leaders who can go back to those principles. I don’t have a lot of optimism about putting a stop to the technological capabilities of surveillance. No barriers other than time.
PS We’re at war. And when Americans are at war, our collective IQ drops by about 30 points. I don’t think you’ll be able to slow, much less reverse the electronic surveillance, until we’re no longer at war.
HR Mobile phone is really the means of access to the internet and to each other. SMS a deceptively simple tech. Knowing if taking your crop 2 hours in one direction rather than another one means you’ll feed your kids makes a tremendous difference. Subsistence farmers, fishermen have been screwed by middlemen who have that information when they don’t.
PS The techs that will have the biggest impact in the next five years are the ones that have been failing for the past 15.
HR Concentrating on two things. Catalyzing an understanding of cooperation and collective action across different disciplines at CooperationCommons.org. Working on a public resource around educating youth on participatory media, and hope to make it public in next six months.
