reframing the planet

Alex Steffen makes a compelling case for reframing the arguments for environmentalism in terms that will resonate with a broad mass of humanity (or Americans, as he puts it) rather than with a minority of "progressive" thinkers.

Environmentalism has been getting sand kicked in its face on the political beach for too long now. How do we beef it up?

Environmentalism is in chaos. There are a number of reasons for this disarray: Outdated organizational structures and funding mechanisms, an extremely well-heeled opposition who understands that a little FUD goes a long way and a compliant, if not complicit, media.

But the biggest reason? Environmentalists no longer talk about right kinds of priorities, in the right ways, to the right audiences.

Earlier this year, I worked with George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute, exploring what sort of new "frames" the environmental movement needs in order to succeed. The time is ripe to share some of that work.

Alex goes onto focus on his proposed six key campaign areas: prosperity, security, luxury, health, progress and success. What Alex illuminates for me is the way in which a creative approach to communicating about even the thorniest issues to even the most apparently unlikely potential allies can allow your message to resonate with their deeper, undefended and more spiritful core. And who, at their core, does not want to see a healthful and happy Earth and likewise for its diverse inhabitants?

beyond email

Is the writing on the electronic wall for email? Roll on funky RSS-based alternative communication tools.

In another interesting development from [South Korea,] the world's most connected country, a new study indicates that E-mail is already on its way to extinction among South Korean young people, who consider it to be oh-so- unhip and stone-age...

Rebecca MacKinnon

online presence through embodiment

I've been thinking about presence lately. So many of us think that ideas, memes, concepts, speeches, posts, corporate objectives and mandates, venture capital pitches, and any form of communication can be stripped of the person delivering the message or perhaps if people come into play are strictly influential as a function of one's title and given authority. 

I am a fan of the Socratic method and believe we can only guide others to what is always there within themselves. Thus, there are really no experts, gurus or authority figures with all the answers but simply people because of their own centeredness point the way back to our own center.

Evelyn Rodriguez

One of the primary aspects of identity that doesn't make the transition from the offline to the online world is a physically-focused quality of presence. But can we not be spiritually and emotionally present online, I wonder? I feel we can, through our digital creations (words, images etc.)—although our audience loses the rich set of signals (facial expression, body language etc.) that arise in our physical body when we experience these feelings. Online presence can never substitute for offline presence, but it can certainly extend that offline presence (across boundaries of geographic and time, for instance).

Presence, or embodiment, is a really useful topic for discussion with regard to digital identity. Digital ID is construed by current initiatives such as Liberty Alliance and Identity Commons as a set of descriptions users make about themselves in order to facilitate their online experience from one website to another, saving them from typing in the same information repeatedly. What the Community Fabric IT initiative envisages, in contrast, is a situation where all content and relationships ascribable to a user or group of users within an online network—the way in which they are "embodied" in the network—are treated as an organic part of their digital identity, the boundaries around which are controlled by the user and enshrined by the network.

We have identity-through-embodiment in embryo in the blogosphere, where a person's identity is tied to the space and content they create and maintain. But because the http fabric of the underlying network itself does not support an organic, embodied approach to digital identity across the hyperlinked relationships between the self-integral islands of the blogs (and users and other web content), we need to develop a new infrastructure that allows true integration and fluid interaction between people's digital identity.

Digital embodiment. Complete creative and relational freedom, yet within a mutual respect for the boundaries of identity. That wouldn't be bad, would it?

Kids With Cameras' Zana Briski

This is such a great project, putting creative tools into the hands of the disposessed. It's exactly the kind of thing we want to get involved with in the online-offline area of i-together, helping people, especially kids, to showcase and network around their creative work.

English born Zana Briski came to the states and took up photography after earning a master's degree in theology and religious studies at the University of Cambridge. In 1997 she made her second trip to India, this time to start documenting the prostitutes of Calcutta's red light district. After developing relationships woth the communtiy three years later she began conducting a series of photographic workshops with the children of the Calcutta prostitutes. By 2002 Briski had formed Kids with Cameras, a non-profit organization to help educate the children of Calcutta's prostitutes and to empower other marginalized children worldwide through learning the art of photography.

In 2003 Briski and co-director Ross Kauffman completed their first film, Born Into Brothels, a snapshot (sorry, bad pun) into the groups work in Calcutta. In the past year the film has won over 17 film festival awards, including the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Documentary Audience Award and being shortlisted for the IDA award, the press are already talking about a possible Oscar nod for this stunning film.

Following the success of Born into Brothels, Zana Briski and the Kids With Cameras staff are mounting a campaign to provide a combined educational and residential facility for the children whose lives were touched by the workshops, and for children like them around the world.

If funding is found, the Kids with Cameras School of Leadership and Arts will operate under the principles of leadership, compassion, wisdom and artistic exploration. The Home and School will provide a safe space for learning and expression, away from the dangers and degradation of the city’s red light district. Teachers will empower the city’s forgotten children by encouraging academic excellence, leadership qualities, participation in sports activities and studies of the arts.

Zana Briski and her efforts are truly World Changing.

Want to see more? Starting December 8th Born Into Brothels makes its theatrical release to selected cities around the country.

attached photo by Tapasi, 11

From Cameron Sinclair at WorldChanging.

Technorati This favelet

From Dave Sifry.

We've just made it easier to find out what people are saying about anything on the web, anytime. The new Technorati This favelet can be used in three ways to put the power of Technorati to use on any web page you're browsing:

1. Select some text on any web page. Click the Technorati This favelet and it will search over 4.7 million weblogs for that text.


2. While browsing any web page, click the Technorati This favelet and it will show you what bloggers are saying about that page right now.


3. If the browser window is empty when you click the Technorati This favelet, it will ask you for a keyword or URL to search for.

Get the favelet.

We've been using them internally for a while, and it really makes a difference in my web browsing experience to get a quick view of what people are saying about any particular article, web page, company, keywords, or blog post.

Sounds useful... downloading now.

Grokster Radio

Judith Meskill writes about Grokster Radio, a "Listener Centric Web Radio Aggregator"

A Grokster-like file sharing functionality figures into my vision of a low key, IM-like, desktop ‘peeps presence panel’ that allows me to click on a friend, family, or business cohort’s name to access their photos, prose, ponderings, priorities, presentations, patterns, projects, etc. all in a pull-down menu with permissions, privacy, and protection.

Awesome alliteration, Judith. : )

global spiritual evolution

I have exchanged emails recently with Evelyn Rodriguez of the wonderful Crossroads Dispatches blog about i-together and the evolution of branding, and we agreed that I could share my most recent reply to her on my blog. Evelyn's words are in blue:

what's driving you to do this?

A conviction that I can only be truly myself in being deeply aware of and engaged with my holistic nature as a human being, in the sense that I am at once an individual, a member of a family, part of groups of friends and communities of common interest, English, European and... human. And beyond that, a spirit. : ) Furthermore, it is not enough for that awareness and engagement to be solely intellectual—it must be experiential. And while there is one human being on the planet who is not in that state of expanded experiential awareness and engagement, then—paradoxically—no individual can be completely in that state, for the very reason that the organism of humanity functions holistically (although of course we can have a whole lot of fun on the way, riding the waves of transformation). That's where i-together comes in.

What's the end-goal?

Global spiritual evolution.

Your purpose?

To facilitate the end-goal of global spiritual evolution by providing tools and spaces, online and offline, for people to explore their multi-dimensional identity through co-creativity and relationship. We're starting off with three main areas of focus:

1) an online-offline integration project with kids and blogs, working with NGO Global Generation: integrating i-together's online dimension with our roots in the physical world.

2) an i-together "next-generation del.icio.us" social, semantic bookmarking service, developing what we believe is a uniquely effective and simple way for people to build and share natural-language based rich semantic constructs and to archive, share and discover the web content they and others categorise with those constructs: we aim to make the whole process as easy as Google, so discovering, storing and sharing ideas on the web becomes radically easier even for computer newbies.

3) the Community Fabric IT network infrastructure open initiative, which aims to foster the values of creative and relational freedom within of a mutual respect for boundaries of identity amongst a diverse spectrum of socially-enabled network solutions (including i-together): this is a techie-focused aspect of our work, but facilitates the i-together platform becoming as integrated as possible with resonant yet different platforms (such as ethical travel sites, local directories, social content management systems, semantic and respectful ad services (!) and so on), allowing people maximum choice of services without compromising the integrity of their digital identity.

Motivations?

A love of humanity and of the Earth. Great personal pain (which manifests physically... another story).

What are you hoping to see in the world
ideally?

People creating and relating in wonderful ways I couldn't even dream of right now. A planet that keeps turning without throwing us off as a species.

I must admit my whole thinking about marketing is going some radical
transformation. I'm not anti-advertising, but I'm not so sure it's
necessarily the best way to engage individuals with a company. I'm
sure you've also been following the branding-is-dead-is-not-is-too
debate as well.

Can we understand "brand" as the visible identity of an individual, group or organisation? Taking that as given, let me suggest this:

Brands online may be understood in terms of the digital content (media and information) and relationships attributable to them by any given person (the relationships including that of the person in question to the brand). And the concepts of content and relationships begin to merge when one considers contextualisation of one brand's content within that of another (as, for instance, when a blogger hosts an ad...). So a brand's identity varies according to who is doing the perceiving and their co-creative relationship with the brand.

As I wrote above, I am interested in creating tools and spaces for people to explore their identity through manifesting it in co-creativity and relationship, and I just can't understand the concept of "brand", commercial or otherwise, as being intrinsically any different from that of "manifest identity". It's just that the word "brand" has traditionally been associated with a manipulation of "consumers" by "business" to want certain things or lifestyles. As you've written yourself so persuasively, that model is on the way out now.

Given the evolution of suitably-equipped social content management systems, I don't see why adverts couldn't eventually become just another type of content that people could choose to contextualise within their personal or community space as they wished, subject to the permissions criteria set by the advertiser. And wouldn't that be an amazingly powerful way for people to transform and transmute brands, mingling with those brands their own creative voice?

simple semantics

Sriram Krishnan follows up on Adam Bosworth's post with a piece on The Tyranny of the Geeks.

A year ago, I read up a lot on the Semantic Web and RDF. I have to admit that I didn't understand any of it. Any of it. Ontologies, RDF, OWL, what not. However, you see blogs and enclosures getting the same effect with only a fraction of the complexity. I dont need smart agents to find what I want - I just search in Google and it is usally smart enough to give me what I need. I dont have high hopes for the semantic web unless they simplify and do it real soon.

That's just what we intend to do at i-together.

Adam Bosworth's Weblog: ISCOC04 Talk

This talk by Adam Bosworth is wonderful stuff. Quoted here is just the last paragraph of a masterly survey of trends on the internet.

You want to see the future. Don’t look at Longhorn. Look at Slashdot. 500,000 nerds coming together everyday just to manage information overload. Look at BlogLines. What will be the big enabler? Will it be Attention.XML as Steve Gillmor and Dave Sifry hope? Or something else less formal and more organic? It doesn’t matter. The currency of reputation and judgment is the answer to the tragedy of the commons and it will find a way. This is where the action will be. Learning Avalon or Swing isn’t going to matter. Machine learning and inference and data mining will. For the first time since computers came along, AI is the mainstream.

[...]

I encourage all of you to act your dreams with open eyes. I encourage all of you to dream of an internet that enables people to work together, to communicate, to collaborate, and to discover. I encourage all of you to remember, that in the long run, we are all human and, as you add value, add it in ways that are simple, flexible, sloppy, and, in the end, everything that the Platonists in you abhor.

Suw Charman explodes blog myths

A blog is no more a diary than an empty notebook is a diary.

[...]

Blogs are a lightweight content management system which are easy to use, have strong archiving, cross referencing and search facilities, and are cost effective and flexible. That is what they are. A diary is what some people make them.

Exploding the diary myth: Corante > Strange Attractor >

Universal Internet identity system sought for everyone

Marc Canter relays a report from the Vancouver Sun on Skip:

[...]

[Skip is] designed to be the backbone for the flow of information about your globally unique personal identifier (or gupi), which will release as much or as little information about you as you permit, depending on the situation.

Sxip (pronounced skip) will carry the data back and forth between you, the website asking for the personal information and your trusted homesite -- such as a bank or perhaps a government agency or even a major site like Google or whoever you believe is trustworthy.

[...]

I recommend reading this informative article in full.

Gene Smith on Personal information architecture

Gene Smith writes about "Personal information architecture"

One meme that's gathering a little steam is Personal Information Architecture. Peter has mentioned it, and I've thrown it around in some comments on other blogs. It comes up most often in discussions about Flickr and del.icio.us, and how they let us extend our own way of classifying things into the social sphere.

[...]

If there's one thing we're seeing in the social/ethno/folk classification space it's the blurring of individual and group construction of knowledge. Social classification leverages our personal information architectures, the systems we use to keep track of the bits we like, for our communities.

Value in open networks

Ross Mayfield muses on the value of open networks:

The value of the network [when it is a platform and open] grows in something closer to Reed's Law of group forming [rather than according to Metcalfe's Law]. Flickr and Del.icio.us represent different groups, where what is spliced [into a Feedburnercombined RSS feed] is not just the value of the original authors activities, but their participation in the group and options for interactions with others. For example, they can with almost zero effort, copy to amplify a bookmark. Search costs for better bookmarks are reduced because of collective activity in these separate groups.

Japanese bar-code reading phones

Wow! I'm watching Japanese satellite TV (the study of Japanese language and culture is a hobby of mine) and there's a news article about a new use of camera-equipped mobile phones to read special bar codes on all sorts of products and things. The example they're showing at the moment is a sign at a zoo by a bird enclosure—the bar code on the sign triggers the phone to download short videos of that particular animal doing various "unusual" things (like trying to break open an egg..?!). And everyone under the age of thirty-five (say) in Japan has a camera-equipped mobile. The presenter of the programme is saying now that the barcodes are modified for identical products according to geographic region of distribution, allowing companies to track that information as users access the linked-to content... And now an "expert" is saying "yes it's great to be able to get all that info, but watch out for the cost of your phone bill!"

When it comes to mobile sophistication, the Japanese are about two or three years ahead of Europe and America, in my opinion. The possibilities of mobile-readable barcodes struck me a year ago, but I had no idea they were being implemented so comprehensively already...

Community Fabric initiative launches!

I am delighted to announce the launch of the Community Fabric initiative! Community Fabric envisions the evolution of a common approach (a set of API definitions and a structured query language) to the issue of processing digital content—including digital ID information—that preserves both the integrity and freedom of diverse online communities of users and the information they own or administrate.

Community Fabric will allow users of compliant applications to enshrine boundaries around their content and identity, utilising Community Fabric's pervasive permissions system ("Security Services"). At the same time, Community Fabric's methods of processing data ("Data Services" and a Community Fabric structured query language) will remain agnostic to the specific way in which data is represented (RDF triple stores, relational databases etc.) within any given compliant application's database, thus facilitating the interoperation not only of diverse ontologies within a given meta-data representation (which is the remit of, for example, Kendra and i-together) but also of diverse representations themselves.

Granular and multidimensional identity. Complete freedom within a mutual respect for one another's boundaries. Shall we make it happen?

N.B. communityfabric.net is coming soon—Community Fabric is an open initiative that is entirely independent of i-together. : )

digital ID—as easy as 123?

This Wednesday I went to a rather good lunch of Lebanese food generously bought by Daniel Harris of Kendra for his fellow collaborators.

There I met Romek Szczesniak, a network security programmer working for Atlas Internet and Neil Harris, who has built the KendraBase semantic database querying system.

They told me, amongst other things, about a digital identity initiative called ENUM that is being instigated by the Internet Engineering Taskforce and the International Telecommunications Union.

ENUM is to map phone numbers onto domain names, potentially solving the problem of namespace allocation for a global system for digital identity management at a blow:

ENUM (RFC 2916) is the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol that will assist in the convergence of the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the IP network; it is the mapping of a telephone number from the PSTN to Internet services--telephone number in, URL out. ENUM was developed as a solution to the question of how to find services on the Internet using only a telephone number[...]

And the great thing is that this use of a phone number as a focus of digital identity on one hand gives rise to two startlingly attractive benefits:

1) ENUM is able to harness the vast pre-existing store of personal identity information (name, address, region and country) stored in telephone directories across the world—which, incidentally, typically allow people to go ex-directory to preserve their privacy should they so wish.

2) ENUM will be accessible to people in the developing world who more and more are leapfrogging desktop computing to mobile phone and mobile-device based computing. Mobile phones are often shared by materially-impoverished communities in the developing world, and ENUM would allow those communities to share a digital identity along with their mobile phone.

It seems to me that with a protocol such as ENUM at the core of digital identity, many of the issues around interoperating meta-data ontologies and namespace allocation could in principle become a lot more readily solvable.

And rather than attempting to construct a single, monolithic and centrally-administrated system for digital identity management, would it not be preferable (and more realistic) for us to envisage a diverse patchwork of digital ID representations, each with unique characteristics suited to their particular area of application, yet at the same time fitting into a common, unifying framework such as ENUM? (Microsoft themselves, infamous for Passport's attempted ID lock-in are now seemingly moving towards just such a patchwork approach with their Infocards initiative for Longhorn).

In this way, users could retain almost complete freedom in how they construe their digital identity and who hosts and administers that information for them, whilst simultaneously benefitting from the ability to take that identity from one web application or platform to another. Finally, the integration into such digital ID management solutions of pervasive permissions security systems would allow users to control who can access which aspects of their digital ID.

The challenge, inherent in this scenario, of facilitating the interoperation of diverse meta-data ontologies is what the W3C's Semantic Web project is attempting to solve, as is Kendra and, from a somewhat different angle, i-together.

handbags with a difference

Well I think I've just about seen everything now....

When my friend Julian told me about these purses and handbags suitable to market to the Goddess worshippers and priestesses who  arrive in Glastonbury for the yearly Goddess conference, I didn't really believe him.

Sometimes it all goes just that little bit too far.....  The mind boggles. It really does.  I look forward to the outrage that's unleashed when the male genitalia wallets and handbags go on sale! (if that ever happens)

Anyway check this out if you dare....R18 in fabric design. The (almost) porno handbag.

What else can I say?  Maybe...Goddess bless?!

Quoted from Cath Vause

10x10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time

Image grids were the starting point of my vision for i-together's software (now developing with a rather different focus...), so it's intriguing to find this related yet very different use of them:

10x10™, a picture of recent world news presented as a gridwork of images. Updated hourly, 10x10™ currently pulls its images from RSS feeds of Reuters, NYT International, and BBC World,

"...and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input."

Via Dawn Danby at worldchanging.

those were the days

"The sketch opens with Zippy peeling a banana..."

Creative Commons killer app

Neeru Paharia

Leveraging the Internet Archive's generous offer to host Creative Commons licensed (audio and video) files for free, we recently completed the 0.96 beta version of The Publisher, a desktop, drag-and-drop application that licenses audio and video files, and sends them to the Internet Archive for free hosting.

When you're done uploading, the application gives you a URL where others can download the file. It also is able to tag MP3 files with Creative Commons metadata and publish verification metadata to the Web.

Via Joi Ito

What if?

Great piece on "What if Kerry Had Won?" by Alan AtKisson. His conclusion:

The US President, despite the brou-ha-ha of the last two years, does not run the world. The US President is just a very powerful player. The President is just someone who makes important decisions that change the context for the long-term work of innovation, diffusion, and transformation -- the creation of a world that can work for everybody, and nature, over generations. The Great Work, as geologian Thomas Berry called it.

And you know what?

So are you.

regroup

I logged into the #joiito irc channel around 7.15am to find that Bush was approaching victory. But, strangely, what struck me in that moment was not the tragic prospect of another four years of state-sponsored torture, oppression and envionmental rape, but rather the vigorous surge of the debate on the chat channel. And then my girlfriend texted me after her Northern Line tube journey to work to say "what a buzz on the train... kids on the way to school are talking about not wanting bush and about the trade center, about how powerful america is, how ny and california are cool. good to hear their passion and intelligence."

I am encouraged to remember that this emergent democracy stuff simply cannot be stopped, for it flows around obstacles and dissolves monoliths. In my deepest truth I oppose nothing, I simply co-create with everyone else. Including Republicans. Including George Bush. But having fun and having heart.