A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 6/9/13 8:02 PM
The web is fundamentally a peer to peer network, as are human relationships. Let’s look at a recent activist website built for the G8 protest in London https://network23.org/stopg8. It is a one way approach – a directing tool for a small minority of unknown and unknowable people to direct the majority of people, with limited ways for the majority to talk back or take part in the web organising.
WordPress the tool used here is a a top-down tool, original a single user blogging platform, thus its useful for hierarchical opaque organising, which goes hand in hand with “closed security” minded geeks and activists – the problem oveasuly lies in the fact that such tools restrict peoples online involvement and this leads to a dampening and shrinking of offline involvement or the moving of open organising onto the closed web of Facebook etc. Wordpress is fine for a noticeboard site or personal blog but not for any form of self organising or group networking, its broken as a way of building a dynamic social moveme
A more obvious activist approach would be to use opentools such as wikis and forums, and self organising web spaces to build a creative movement “open security” model were people could could build “trust” by activity feeds. A tool for this would be single sign in site built on liferay such as http://visionon.tv
“Closed security” gives the dangerous illusion of anonymity were non exists, this both gives control to a small group of unaccountable activists and dampens self organising – the life blood of activism.
“Open security” widens ownership and builds spaces for creativity, its based on transparent trust networks. It builds security as the is no foles sense of anonymity – if you wont to organise something “spiky or norty” you whisper at the back of the pub.
The is no security in centralised activist infrastructure as you don’t know who actually runs them and you don’t know who is upriver of their hosting providers. The is a clear danger that this pseudonymous is mistaken for true anonymity and this danger comes at a clear organising cost. At the moment we have a clear failer of activist web culture, which can be seen in the shrinking of activism ( and its replacement with clicktivism) – post a comment if you would like to have a go at fixing this.
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 5/22/13 8:17 PM
Made 2 films with nearly a million views each on youtube, in both cases part of the reason they are “successful” is because people are hating on them.
More than thirty climate activists and local residents took mass direct action to prevent excavation work on Britain’s biggest ever open-cast coal mine at Ffos-y-fran in South Wales.
Many people are learning to live sustainably, without money. In this video, they discuss their struggles, how they got to and developed kew bridge eco-village.
Published Date 5/21/13 2:07 PM
Its interesting how parasitic traditional media is, an idea or a news story will come out in a sub-culture (contemporary media) weeks or years before it becomes a “story” in traditional media. This time lag – together with the general lack of connection in traditional media to where story’s come from/break is noticeably dysfunctional in our new connected world.
This parasitical behaver will continue in-till we solve these issues in contemporary media:
* financial support for the production of grassroots per-per media – something like flattr is an example of an attempt to solve this problem.
* Ethical norms of linking and aggregation in per-per production need to solidify and be coded into contemporary media projects. An example of this would be the OMN project.
* a general discrediting of traditional media as a reliable source of information – shifting peoples behaver of linking away by providing better working contemporary media projects. An example of this would be the http://visionon.tv project.
The current connections between contemporary and traditional media are largly broken, do we try and fix it or not is the relevant question? Do we actually need these old gate keeping institutions and if we do, are they flexible and lean anufe to survive anyway? I think diversity of strategy’s are probably helpful here.
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 5/18/13 10:29 PM
Am thinking about getting one of these to covert into a live-in open media centre. They vary from 7-9m in length and have seating (like sardines) for 30-60 people.
Proposed mission would be to:
* remove most of the seats to open the space up
* paint it so it wasnt bright orange (need a good weeks dry weather to
do this)
* put in some very basic live in space, bed, table etc.
* fit some basic solar panels, batterys etc.
* steam punk it up a bit.
This would be done wombling style if anyone wont’s to help.
They are fresh off oil rigs so should be in working condition with all survival gear in them. It seams that one of the reasons the is a lot of surplus lifeboats is that oil rig workers are getting fat (PDF) so the current lifeboats aren’t large anufe.
Am going up to Scotland to have a look (and maybe buy) end of the week, then put it on the river lee/canal to do the rest of the fitting out over the summer.
Outline cost of liveaboard in the UK
BSS costs (4 years) £150
insurance (1 year) £120
Gold licence, all rivers and canals (1y) £643 (less for only rivers or canals)
Craning off truck into water on river lee £142
Red diesel Propulsion is about 0.75ppl
Licence initially would be continues cruising – Optional cost Mooring £1000-5000 (1y)
Here is the law on continues cruising – you can stay for two weeks in many spots http://canalrivertrust.org.uk/media/library/633.pdf
Here is the width of canals – Red and blue are good for the lifeboat size wise – Gray likely not http://www.jim-shead.com/waterways/mwp.php?wpage=Inland-Waterways-of-England.htm
The is breakdown cover for boats like the AA – river rescue
Things to look at:
Lifeboat dft (PDF)
A river that needs crossing political and tech blogs – On the political side, there is arrogance and ignorance, on the geek side there is naivety and over- complexity
My videos are on these two youtube channels visionontv 3,832,876 views and undercurrents 22,689,976 views
Published Date 5/18/13 1:10 PM
A presentation of the idea of the Open Media Network and where it currently is
The OMN is owned by nobody and run by nobody. It is merely a set of “stupidly simple” open standards, open databases and working practices.
We are building some hubs to flesh the network out.
Currently there are over 20 sites in the network. And OMN embeds on such sites such as New Internationalist and Games Monitor. These embeds are using the OMN customisable video player.
How can you get involved? What is there at the moment? Let’s highlight some of the applications you can currently use:
http://link.openworlds.info is an open database of links to radical projects. These can be added as an embed on websites to create the interlinking that is so important to the open internet’s health. This will be federated.
http://news.openworlds.info is a newsflash service to widen our networks outside facebook. It is building into an open data and open access federated network. You can grab an embed for your site sidebar.
http://visionon.tv Auto updating quality controlled video embeds with playlists (eg http://globalviews.visionon.tv/embed), drawing from a huge database of radical video. This is a working federated network.
http://blog.openworlds.info This is the first stage of an open blogging network.
http://fund.openworlds.info Open funding network – is a place for media activists to get small amounts of cash for their projects and equipment.
All of these applications actively need development work.
Please have a look at these links for more information and background on the network.
Here’s an entertaining piece of polemic on the problem we face.
Here is an outline of possible OMN solutions
Why ethical aggregation and conversation?
It’s all based on an ongoing understanding of the political history of the internet
A bit of humour
Published Date 5/16/13 1:59 PM
Over the last 10 years I have found a lot of intolerant and prejudiced attitude toward the impact new technology will have on our work and society. A recent conversation sparked off this thought. Our society has foundation myths – and they aren’t the bible any more – consumerism and selfishness/paranoid narcissism it seems to me – we are Thatchers children.
Many of the conversations about the impact of the open web and corporate social networking with people are like a conversation at the edge of a cliff. Its high and the cliff edge is crumbling into the maelstrom of the sea far below, am on the edge of the cliff looking out and the person am having the conversation is standing on thin air. Our foundation myths are about not looking dowen which make this issue invisible, and explains the reaction, people don’t what to see, if they look down they fall, not a nice feeling.
How to work through this will-full/wishful ignorance driven by narcissistic fear and denial? Its clearly unhealthy for us as a society in the medium and long term, but it is a useful coping strategy for the individuals and organisations in the short term.
Thought please?