How to Save the World

Dave Pollard is intriguing in his analysis of THE SCRAPBOOKING PHENOMENON: BLOGGING + PERMANENCE?. He divines tactile, handicraft and socially intimate qualities in scrapbooking that form a counterpoint to virtual, largely text-focused and public weblogs. Could we begin to integrate elements of each medium somehow, I wonder?

The Second Superpower

This article on "The Second Superpower" by James F. Moore is a wonderfully insightful and inspiring analysis of how grassroots, networked, emergent democracy is rising as a transformative force in the world. Dr.Moore is fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman center for Internet and Society. He is also a member of the Leadership Council of Amnesty International USA.

i-together: a scenic tour

I thought I'd write something about i-together, the organisation I am planning (and now building) with friends. A lot of you will already know a lot of where we're at with the project, but sometimes it's nice to pause on the road to take stock and look at the scenery.

Here's a brief description of i-together itself:

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i-together is a platform, a space, a set of tools and a collection of ideas on, in and with which people can express and explore their identity and build community through relationship and co-creation.

i-together manifests both online, initially via existing weblog-creation tools and—when we've developed it—in our own original web-based software, and also offline, in grassroots projects helping people—especially kids—to develop creative projects which can then be shared and communicated about with other people around the world over the online i-together network.

i-together has commercial and charitable elements: i-together ltd. is responsible for developing, maintaining and supporting the i-together web platform (i.e. software), and charges a subscription fee along similar lines to weblog services such as Typepad. i-together ltd. channels a proportion of its profits into the i-together foundation, which works to help materially-disadvantaged people access the i-together network and develop the creative, social and IT skills necessary to make full use of it.

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So where are we at in this plan?

We have three potential trustees and an administrator for the foundation.

I am talking to two people in the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) world, with expertise in ICT in education (especially weblogging) and ASP.NET programming for education solutions respectively. Even more importantly, they share my fundamental vision of what i-together is about. We are discussing the possibility of collaboration and/or partnership.

I will be meeting with Blake Ludwig and Robin Daly of Global Generation, a charity that works with kids to encourage them to explore the global dimension of their identity (with particular regard to the environment—Blake is a Greenpeace friend of mine) to discuss a pilot project with kids in London and then possibly Africa and other overseas locations, utilising existing weblog and related software to develop a social and creative online network.

Talking of Greenpeace, my friend Jason Torrance is a Greenpeace Area Network Coordinator who is developing their Active Supporters Network. Jason is very supportive of the principles of i-together, as is another eminent Green thinker and do-er aquaintance of mine, Gary Alexander, a professor at the OU who has written a fascinating book on the potential of online networks to facilitate sustainable and healthy community: eGaia (you can read the whole book in .pdf format!).

Another potential project is with Children On The Edge, who run a school for ex-orphans in Romania, and are interested in partnering with i-together to forge a link between that school and another in Britain. We have a number of other Romanian contacts, too, so the Romania angle could prove fruitful!

I am working with Jonathan Clark to develop a new mock-up of the i-together web software. This should be ready within a few weeks, hopefully (it always takes longer than one expects).

I am also in touch with people who variously work with psychologically disturbed and physically disabled kids using art therapy, post-Freudian analysis and mythic drama. I feel that these kind of modalities could provide the ground-soil for projects with kids that then could link up with one another via the online i-together network.

Finally, my Sioux Indian friend Walking Eagle has a vision of helping kids from sacred sites around the world to link up with one another via an online network, so he was most enthusiastic when I told him about i-together!

I hope that paints a clear picture for you of where we are with everything. I haven't mentioned names where I felt it might impinge on privacy at this juncture. Please do add your comments to this entry by clicking on the link below this text—your ideas and feedback would be hugely appreciated. Hoping to talk (and work?) with you all very soon... : ))

Anger

A good friend of mine emailed me today about the issue of anger. It got me thinking: is anger a "bad" thing? Or do we just misuse it?

Not that I have the answers, but my provisional understanding of this issue is that there is a clear difference between experiencing anger, expressing anger, and reacting out of anger that is projected onto an external "other". The first two I would consider healthy so long as they arise out of a process of moving through "stuff" rather than cycling around a vicious circle with it. Anger is the mover of obstacles, they say. Most times, though, people fall into the projection trap, identifying the anger with an apparent cause (another person's action) rather that owning it as their own feeling.

I am always amazed at the ability of so many Japanese people I've met to refrain from expressing anger when the same circumstances would certainly arouse such a reaction from most English people (for example!). The trouble is, you can never tell for sure (unless you can see people's aura, which I can sometimes but not usually—it goes dark red when people get angry) whether a person's really not angry or just pretending! And denial of any emotion inevitably translates into energetic distortion and physical imbalance...

How to be honest about all our feelings without harming ourselves or others?

RIAs, information architecture and accessibility

I've been talking to some friends in the RIA (Rich Internet Application) field recently about accessibility issues around Flash-based richly interactive clients.

Flash has had something of a bad name for accessibility (to disabled people) for a long time, but recently Macromedia has added a number of features to the Flash development environment and Flash Player in this department, making it possible for visually-impaired people to access content via screen-reader software, for example (although only on Windows XP, to date...). Steven Webster of iteration::two assures me, also, that Macromedia are taking further steps to enrich Flash's accessibility, which is clearly a positive thing.

I would like to look at this issue from a slightly different angle here, however. It seems to me that if we clearly differentiate the user experience information architecture (which I'll call UEIA for brevity) from the UI-specific implementations of that UEIA, we can subsequently envisage an app that deploys a UI—predicated on the UEIA—tailored to the preferences and requirements of each user not only in terms of interactive modalities (i.e. mouse or screen-reader operated), but also in terms of which discrete facets of the UEIA are made accessible, and whether separately or in combination, via various interactive metaphors.

The UEIA of the app could be defined in an XML document. As well as expressing the options available to the user in each app usage scenario, this document would classify each option according to its sense-specific nature (if applicable): for instance, a content layout option would be tagged "visual", but a multiple-choice menu "informational".

Given such a framework, it would be relatively easy to construct the app so it auto-generated machine-readable image-free html pages as a UI alternative to a Flash-based visually-focused one, with text boxes and links substituting as necessary for visually-specific interactive metaphors in the Flash UI (for which read "drag and drop"). The Flash-based UI would cater for all sighted users, whereas the html UI would be for screen-reader access by non-sighted/sight-impaired users and for spidering by search engine bots.

Let's take an example app where the UI for sighted people allows me (a sighted user) to drag a block of text around within a certain area of the window and drop it in the layout position of my choice—here drag and drop functions as a visual layout tool. However, I may also drag the text block onto a "Favourites" icon to add it to my favourites list—now the same drag and drop has become an information tool.

Because drag and drop is not a binary-state function like a button, nor necessarily tied to a single, discrete data field like a text box or menu item, but more analogue and multi-faceted, it can combine visual layout functionality with information organisation and app control functionality. In our example, two discrete facets of the information architecture of the user experience have become "hard-wired" together in a single UI modality. This is a good thing for sighted users (it's intuitive), but a bummer for a non-sighted or visually-impaired user, who want to be able to access just the aspects of the app that are not exclusively visual.

Now, because our example app gives these users the option of accessing alternative html-based pages tailored to their particular requirements, they can navigate the app content and options relevant to them via a screen reader. So when such a user wished to add the same text block to their favourites, they would choose a "move to favourites" option; the irrelevant "reposition within layout" content layout option, tagged as "visual" in the UEIA schema, would simply not be presented to them.

Perhaps we can have the best of both richly-visual interactive and accessible worlds, after all?

Graffiti

Found written on a toilet door:

"THERE IS NO WAY
TO HAPPINESS
HAPPINESS
IS THE WAY"

To which someone had added:

"There is no way
To hope
Hope
Is lost on the way"

To which I added:

"There is no way to faith
Faith is in the way"


My first graffiti.

A September wedding

My sister's getting married! Not that she and her fiancé have just decided this, but they've now set a date for September 25th, which apparently is highly astrologically auspicious.

Marriage, huh?

Hmm.

I wonder if I'll ever get married? : )

Walking Eagle

I met a man called Walking Eagle on my National Express coach journey to Glastonbury last Friday evening. Walking Eagle, a Sioux Native American, turned out to be Walking Talking Eagle, scarcely pausing for breath for five hours as he divulged to me his mission of global healing through a kind of intercontinental geomancy.

Jetting tirelessly around the world, Walking Eagle, or Wombli Moni, digs up collections of stones from a sacred site in one country and buries them in a sacred site in another, making spiritual ritual with the native inhabitants in their own tradition. Through this activity, he believes he is aiding the activation of the Earth's own energy (or "chakra") centres, which itself stimulates humanity to develop a sense of global identity. Well, they do say "leave no stone unturned"...

Wombli's journeys so far have taken him as far afield as Antartica, South America, Greenland and India and, having been given £1000 cash the previous day by a woman he'd known for just half an hour, he was due to fly out to Mongolia on Sunday, there to work with the native Shaman. He talked about moving beyond the seven "bodily" chakras of the Earth to the eighth and on to twelve and then thirteen—he obviously has his work cut out.

I do find this stuff fascinating in relation to my own project to create a global online/offline social and creative network ("i-together"), and particularly pertinent was Wombli's idea to get kids living around these sacred sites hooked up with each other over the net, sharing ideas, learning and creativity with each other.

I got his email, so watch this space!