Published Date 10/17/12 1:13 AM

Our project is basically about technological standards – It isn’t about what people do with these standards – the standards them selves lean in the direction we politically desire inherently.

And these technological standards will not be brought about by technology, but the social use of technology, so we are creating a community of people around these standards – and it is this community that will create the technological standard. The technology by it self is powerless and will wither with out being embraced by an active and affective community.

So to repeat it is a technological project, which can only come out of a community project. If we treat it as only one of these (as people commonly do, then neither will work).

Published Date 10/7/12 6:28 PM

Reflections on looking around the room at the 2012 NUJ DM conference – The union is by far the most democratic I have found, but this democracy is embedded in a deeply ingrained bureaucratic tradition. The is the establishment who have to keep the day to day of the union, there largely invisible agenda is hidden by the need to keep the whole thing running. Then the are a group pushing an agenda that is clearly rejected by the majority of the union that takes up a lot of time, they then feel victimised and build conspiracy around what seams to be mostly inefficiency. If they were building “transparency” I would support them much more actively if they were constructing… The problem is that they criticizes and add bureaucracy to a already over bureaucratic union.

The outcome of all this is much smoke and noise with little accountability, so as a newcomer you are put in the uncomfortable position of largely supporting the powers that be. And the root needs for change and renewal are lost from the conversation and decisions of the union. 

Published Date 10/6/12 12:13 AM

Some feeling about my personal experience of old school democratic trade unionism.

Friday Night

Had an interesting, disquieting conversation tonight at a social event after the work of the NUJ delegate meeting. I had been visiting the delegate meeting room every so often to dip in to try and engage with the process, and each time I had failed, due to bad sound, complex and obscure timing, and the opaque and ritualistic language used. Being me I looked around for a space were I could help out and found the students making media about the event – joined in there and worked with different students to make and distribute 6 video reports that day.

Back to the conversation in the bar, the overly serious youthfull man I was talking to, seemed surprised and a bit disapproving of my action. His convincing argument was that I had been mandated and “paid” to participate in the DM process, travel, accommodation and food being covered by the union. Its a strange feeling for a horizontal like me am I obliged to do work through this process?

Am more interested if the traditional union is flexible enough to work with a diversity of strategy as the current one is simply inappropriate for many people’s view of a contemporary union. As I see it my “work” at the DM is to see if I can work in this space and perhaps more importantly can this space work with me and people like me. The old problematic divide between the horizontal and the virticalist, think, the NUJ might be one of the few union’s that has wiggle space, we will see.

Saturday

I’try again to engage with what am now appreciating is “power politics” the ritualistic fight for notice, resources and power. After a nights sleep, understanding, of my own aversion, and the democratic nature of this anti-consensuses process. Today it is the funding debate, get up early to be there on time, lets try and make it work as good to respect the attempt.

Going better, helps to talk to my fellow delegate sitting next to me. Much of the noise has the flavourer of sectarian infighting. By asking members you CAN find your way around the process. But its a Q. of motivation to engage and stay engaged. Is this the best we can do as the left?

Published Date 10/3/12 10:05 PM

Thinking about the NUJ delegate meeting. We all agree we need a union, but it isn’t obvious what its role is. Used to be about negotiating with the bosses, but now we are all our own bosses so a bit schizophrenic to be negotiating with ourselves. Where are we now?

The digital age is in transition. Many in the new media are working for nothing, for nothing, where we should work for nothing for something. What is the something we should be working for? To repeat as the majority of people in the media (for a while) will be paid nothing would be good if they were working for something to help them be paid something in future.

Huffingtion Post and the Guardians’ comment is free – are not good models for being paid in the future. They are both about investing in somebody else’s brand. Of the two the Guardian is less evil but still evil (in the digital sense) and the huff po has sold out already to AOL?

Where have we come from? With power in a few hands, in the Wapping dispute the industry had the technology and used it to smash the union. Now failing industry is breaking the union, but the difference is we own the technology. Why don’t we use it.? The transition is painful and the outcome is uncertain. With the new media, with everybody becoming their own journalist, the same forces are still struggling for control.

The Murdoch worldview has been internalised by our current traditional media. We are now in the space of the rebirth of gatekeepers in social networks such as Facebook. The new gatekeepers are the algorithms which currently have none of the mythical journalistic values that existed in the late 20th century. If we think of the new digital commons as traditional media, Twitter is like the Guardian, Facebook is like the Times, Youtube is ITV and Vimeo is the BBC.

What is the role of a gatekeeper?

In the 20th century they were the newspaper bosses and their chosen editors. All we had as an alternative media was street-corner leaflets and limited-print-run papers

After the Second World War the old-boys network was progressive. During the 1980’s this progressivity was stifled as we forgot why social democratic polices were enacted in the 20th century.

Anachronisms: the BBC is a media that can theoretically put you in prison if you don’t pay a media tax….what a strange way to fund media! Commercial media is full of advertisements, that interrupt which we are learning more and more not to accept. Currently with modern web browser Firefox 14,052,425 users use adblocker and chrome over 8 million users. None of these 22 millions people even see the ads that media producers hope will keep their empires from crumbling. These are the LIVE reported numbers for two web browsers. The real numbers are much higher.

In the digital transition things change fast. Indymedia was created by open publishing software created in Australia, trialled in the UK at Reclaim The Streets and then came to public attention in Seattle and rapidly spread around the world. Indymedia was unmediated cooperative journalism, and at its core was the idea of self-publishing to a shared open-process space.

Blogging was technology that allowed the flourishing of a more libertarian internet, your own space in the digital commons. But again the libertarian dream was fractured by the technical reality. You still had to be a geek to run your own server so the vast majority of bloggers went the one-click route of corporate hosting. And the rigour of DIY led to the fading of the blogging dream. Where indymedia only needed a minority of people to publish occasionally for it to flourish, blogging needs the constant care of the individual to stay alive.

Social networsk: the introduction by snobbery, to the consuming of the crowd.

The tradition slogan of “United we stand and divided we fall” has been true throughout the digital transition. In indymedia we were united, in blogging divided, etc. myspace came up from the bottom, where facebook came down from the top (Harvard, MIT, the redbricks, regional). myspace was a horizontal mess, facebook a rigid dictatorship.

The future for media sees a wholesale de-professionalisation of media production and distribution. This can actually be a positive. The numbers of full time paid media producers will fall as a proportion by a factor of 100, that is for every person paid to produce, distribute media at the turn of the century, only 1 in 100 will be paid to do it in the future. The logical transition of digitisation will bring a shift from a small elite (paid) minority to a large amorphous (unpaid) majority.

At the moment each website is an island isolated, and what brings them together is corporate search engines, corporate algorithms in social media, and to a lesser extent real people linking real sites. (link to left linking article). What we should be doing is the ethical aggregation of individual bloggers through subject hubs. Then it is up to the audience if they like there news from different algorithms, editorial teams or individuals and we can mix and match so that probably the best outlets will be just this – a genuinely balanced view. And if you are interested in a subject you can find a hub that covers it. From this each person has a voice and the people who write, research, and scoop the best will be seen, but without removing the lesser voices. It will encourage minority voices by giving them their own space. What it does is re-create the internet as a publishing platform. It builds the semantic web ad-hoc, rather than top down. Tthis is the only way anything of value has ever been built on the internet, so let’s get to it.

Am not arguing simplisticallly that the old ways are not important or still appropriate, rather a balance need to be struck that is very different to the balance most professional journalist are currently working with. Its more a question of priority for the limited time and resources we have. At the heart of this argument is the statement: DO IT YOURSELF! It’s a positive statement if you want to be empowered. At the heart of the DIY project is empowering and inspiring people to do things for themselves with out mediation or hierarchy to filter or control them.

Think of Gutenberg and the translation of the Bible into English, of the transition from canals to railways. Technology change is a constant and we are currently going through a digital transition of media, which is an opportunity, as well as a disaster.

Published Date 10/2/12 4:28 PM

My last report on the NUJ conference was Graysky thinking. Lets look for a moment at some Bluesky thinking for the NUJ.

The nutcracker – The union and money

A few blue sky ideas:

* Have a roll out of support the union buttons on members blogs and sites and have the revenue offset the membership fee of that member. This would motivate them to push the buttons into visibility. Self interest and the greater good pushed together.

* Hard one to pull off and would need to be centrally negotiated. Use something like http://flattr.com on members story’s in corporate media, get an agreement with publications to do this and do a revenue split with the journalist and the union. 

* Humm… who is going to buy me a beer to come up with more.

Launch a micro-union for citizen journalists, open media people.

* Very low fees

* Self help

* Horizontal web organising

* Open to any one

Technological leadership

At the moment members activity’s are fractured amongst many different websites and corporatist social networks. Everybody knows this is a failed strategy, could the NUJ help to lead the momentum to jumping off this sinking ship?

Use a small amount of its resources to fund a openmedianetwork for the membership. This will provide a bag of tools for members projects.

* use an existing opensource tool such as liferay (http://liferay.com) to provide tools to its membership.

* it has OPEN drag and drop working to build websites in hours rather than days or months

* the CMS can host as many websites and user blogs as are needed, it will build a single login in and single activity stream experience out of the box. And is scalable on modest resources.

* it is opendata and open standered so users can leave if they grow beyond its scope or expand functionality as they need.

Published Date 9/13/12 3:34 PM

“The BioLite CampStove, designed for outdoor adventure and emergency preparedness, makes cooking on wood as clean, safe and easy as petroleum fuels while powering electronics off-grid.”

I love tec like this, clever idea made real BUT it takes around 5 minutes to boil 1 liter of water and and will take something like 3 hours to charge a smart phone by USB, so you need to boil over 30 liters of water to charge one iphone – thats a lot of tea…

Find out more

This worth reading to go with this view time and libertarean/liberals view of who created the internet

In the 1970s the military looked at a problem – how to keep communication working in an anarchic environment (a nuclear war). Their solution was to work with this environment not work against it. They built an anarchic network – the internet. This network was small and insignificant compared to the traditional centralised networks that existed and continued to grow. Limited Background

In the late 1980s an individual at the anarchicly-organised CERN borrowed an idea that would make it easer to navigate, HTML, the based of the World Wide Web. Few took any notice. Limited Background

In the 1990s people started to build unexpected things with this open network and open standards and surprisingly these things grew and grew… In the end they pushed all the centralised dominate networks to one side where they shrank until they largely disappeared. Thus the single internet as we know it today was born. It was an unplanned birth coming from the DNA of anarchists thinking.

By 2000 the dotcom boom expanded the internet to every corner of the world. It was driven by a very different world view – much like the world view that had built the very networks that the internet had pushed aside so easily. It was an attempt to enclose the new commons, to partition it into walled gardens with gates and ticket desks. But the network that had been set-up to flourish in anarchy and togather with the overlay of open standards of WWW resisted and in the end simply pushed this dotcom boom into a dotcom bust. Limited Background

The internet expanded again, filling up more areas of our lives, and encroaching on our economic system. The network which was created for anarchy and the open standards that embedded anarchy started to touch everything. Our society is based on ever-expanding markets, and the internet was a HUGE market. Increasingly it was replacing existing markets with piracy, which wasn’t a market at all. The internet is a giant copying machine and the copies are practically free. Where markets are based on scarcity, the new digital world, grown from anarchy, was based on abundance. In a world of abundance there is little for the market to buy and sell. Very limited backround and background

Round three of this fight by the old society to grasp control of the new manifested in a much more subtle walling and gatekeeping structure: corporate social networking and the fight against piracy (copying). It was an invisible but relentless push to remove the “disease” of anarchy from the core of the web (and large parts of socierty) and to bring the old order back into control. Today both Twitter (2008) and Facebook (2009) can only survive if they continually grow, and increasingly control the information flows and users access. As they do this the walls and gates that are currently mostly invisible will come more into view. I think the interconnected open web that is the internet would shrug this off as before if this was the only threat it faced. But there’s another side to the attack, the fight against piracy, which is an (largly invisible) fight against the open standards and digital logic of the web. It is leading to new laws that reach into and rend asunder the anarchist internet (the one built to work in the anarchy of nuclear war). It will do this by changing the underlying open standards that the net is built on and by rolling back to the days of the pre-internet, the age of closed intra-nets. Then Gate-keeping will be built into the DNA of this network. And this change will snuff out the anarchy and replace it with bureaucracy. The unintentional (largly unseen) experiment in complete social change will fade and die.

What choice do we have? Now we have many, soon we will have few, and in the end we may have none.

if anyone can help find backup articals to link for this please add them to the comments, thanks.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/05/tim-berners-lee-internet-off-switch?CMP=twt_gu

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/hold_ye_front_page/science/article2684625.ece

http://hamishcampbell.com/navigate/-/asset_publisher/m8lZ/blog/the-web-as-political-ideology