Ironick

Activism Worthy of the Name

What I find most disappointing, irritating, and dismissive about Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted is that it sets the activism bar so high. He’s dismissive of any form of activism except “high-risk activism”: “Activism that challenges the status quo—that attacks deeply rooted problems—is not for the faint of heart.” And since “weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism”, he’s dismissive of such ties as well.

Gladwell dismisses (or at least denigrates) less risky forms of activism and the weak ties that can enable it. Weak ties (and the social media that supports and enables them) can lead to low-risk activism (say a donation to the Haiti relief fund, or voting for one candidate instead of another) or even medium-risk activism (submitting something to wiki-leaks).

Why in the world shouldn’t we celebrate and encourage such lower-risk activism? And it’s not just social media activities that fail the “high risk” test. Most marches and demonstrations in Washington are pretty low risk, so are they unworthy of our efforts? Are silent vigils? Are fund raising events like “walks for <fill in the blank>”?

Gladwell comes off as implying that only high-risk activism makes a difference and that any other form of activism is some sort of cop-out: “It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.” So if I’m not willing to risk my life in my activism, I shouldn’t even bother? Or I shouldn’t call it activism?

Sorry. I don’t buy it. I think every little bit helps change the world. Small is beautiful…even small change.

The technology of cooperation.

Via wirearchy , a great chart (or see smaller chart) showing a comprehensive categorization of all the various facets of social software. A great start on the idea of architecting emergence , which hasn't shown up in Google yet (though designing emergence is at least a blip). The chart comes from Howard Rheingold and is part of a report which is part of a project on cooperation .

Using the web to organize collective fundraising.

Via slashdot, an interesting new twist on the decentralization, mass innovation, social software them -- Fundable:

Fundable is a new service that lets groups of people pool money for various purposes in what are called "group actions." Similar to an online auction, a group action has its own page, describing how much money will be collected and what the money will do. No participant takes a risk: if the collection for a group action falls short of its target on deadline, all money is refunded.

Fundable's all-or-nothing approach to collecting money lets you participate in a group purchase or fundraiser without worrying about what other people will do. You will either get what you paid for or get your money back.

According to the slashdot article, Fundable has already succeeded in raising funds for OSS development.

Hmmm... I might use this to organize the next Gall Family Reunion. <grin>

The first technical blogs Internet RFCs! The key to innovative standards.

I don't know if anyone has already made this observation (please let me know who has), but I was just reading an excellent article on the history of email [or "history of the email" as I originally posted; which surprising someone searched on, so I'm including the text here] (from an interesting journal: Iterations: An interdisciplinary journal of software history), and the birth of the Internet's Request for Comments (RFC) documents as a collaborative medium struck me as a wonderful forerunner of today's weblogs:

A key feature of ARPANET design collaboration was the careful documenting of design debates. The Network Working Group, which solved problems in linking computers to the ARPANET, fully documented its work starting in 1966 to help solve problems that they expected other network users would later encounter.[26] By 1969, when the ARPANET became operational, proposals for technical and social norms for information exchange were instituted in the Request For Comments (RFC) documents that were soon distributed online. Graduate student Steve Crocker set the tone of the RFCs when describing a Network Working Group meeting (comprised mostly of other graduate students) about communication between host computers and IMPs: "I present here some of the tentative agreements reached and some of the open questions encountered. Very little of what is here is firm and reactions are expected."[27] In RFC 3 of April 1969, entitled "Document Conventions," Crocker wrote:

The content of a NWG note [the early name for RFC] may be any thought, suggestion, etc. related to the HOST software or other aspect of the network. Notes are encouraged to be timely rather than polished. Philosophical positions without examples or other specifics, specific suggestions or implementation techniques without introductory or background explication, and explicit questions without any attempted answers are all acceptable. … These standards (or lack of them) are stated explicitly for two reasons. First, there is a tendency to view a written statement as ipso facto authoritative, and we hope to promote the exchange and discussion of considerably less than authoritative ideas. Second, there is a natural hesitancy to publish something unpolished, and we hope to ease this inhibition.[28]

These early RFCs sent a welcoming signal to others interested in contributing to and improving the ARPANET. Brian Reid, later a Carnegie Mellon graduate student and a participant in MsgGroup, told them "I did not feel excluded by a little core of protocol kings. I felt included by a friendly group of people who recognized that the purpose of networking was to bring everybody in."[29]
[emphasis added]

See especially the bolded section, which beautifully describes the tone of a modern weblog entry. This reinforces my belief (see my previous entry on WS-Complexity) that the open-ended collaborative process shaping today's Web services specifications (WS-*) is following in the footsteps of the IETF collaborative process that was an essential, but usually overlooked, part of the Internet's success versus formal standards organizations' collaborative efforts such as ISO's OSI.

Such collaborative standards development refute the notion that "Standards, by definition, can't be innovative". See my comment disputing this.

Trustworthy Opinions.

The Review of Reviews. In the New Your Times Editorial Page for Tuesday, August 3, 2004, there is an editorial about Amazon.com's Real Names program, which is "designed to prevent reviewer fraud, your reputation depends on what others say about what you say." This is another example of the emerging trend towards mechanisms for ensuring what I am calling "trustworthy opinions". (I'm sure there's already some other name for it out there, I just haven't seen it.)

Another example is the very sophisticated system used by Slashdot, which has arguably one of the most challenging signal/noise ratio problems of any site, given the volume of postings and its empassioned and technically clever posting (i.e., gaming the system is built into their genes). It uses a combination of automatically selected distributed moderators, meta-moderation (i.e., moderating the moderators), karma, and friends/foes tagging (i.e., trusted/untrusted) to enable very fine-grained filtering of useful, trusted content from useless, untrustworthy content. For an interesting history of how Slashdot's moderation system evolved see How did the moderation system develop?

Communication: less control = more effectiveness.

Microsoftian Randy Holloway writes regarding Microsoft's new blogging friendly policy:

The more you try to control the message, the less effective the message will be. The reason is that people today can tell the difference between valuable information and canned marketing material.

Picked this up via a post in Richard Gayle's blog. I wish all companies were so open to giving up some control (hint, hint). That reinforces a good article ("A Better Longhorn Through Blogging") on how Microsoft bloggers are opening up Microsoft's development process and making it more transparent by writing about it as they do it.

Sun Wants to Shine on Blogs: The PR Power of Weblogs.

Apparently, Mark Bauhaus (Vice President, Sun ONE Java Web Services) wants to the chance to appear on Mitch Kapor's influential blog. (Or perhaps just his PR flack wants him to.) Interesting use of Google to discover that it was Mark, given that Mitch redacted the email. The phrase "disruptive competitive advantage" was the giveaway.

A Simple Guide to the A-List Bloggers.

Hilarious because its so true. It's amazing how many of these bloggers I have come across in my brief time blogging.

Origins of Weblogs

Brett Simmons at inessential.com observes that weblogs are ten years old. Two commentators point out even older examples, including the first web site: info.cern.ch. This led me to the follow observations.

Blogs are just a continuation of an Online/Internet tradition that can be traced back to bulletin board systems (BBSs) and newsgroups.

 

If one wishes to draw distinctions, I would distinguish the beginning of blogging with the first "popular" blog-specific software tool. Any claims as to which tool that is?

 

IMO the essence of blogging is in one's approach to creating blog content, not whether the content is chronologically ordered. Otherwise, any website with a list of chronological events qualifies as a blog.

 

What distinguishes blogging from web site development generally is its emphasis on generating periodic (daily) observational/commentary content with minimial technical knowledge required. Thus, the mere fact that someone posted her observations to her web site on a daily basis, still wouldn't fit the paradigm of blogging, if she used general purpose web site development tools to do so.

 

What has made blogging the mass market phenonomenon that it is, is the non-technical ease of use of its tools.