Recently in Events Category

Nina Simon the author of The Participatory Museum and the Museum 2.0 weblog was in the Twin Cities this week to promote her book at an event hosted by the Walker Art Center. I was already at the Walker to give a public tour and decided to stick around and listen to what Nina had to say which was a good decision.

Simon spoke for half an hour about her work on encouraging participation by museum goers. I enjoyed her pragmatic, design-centric approach to the problems of encouraging participation and collaboration which showed off her engineering background.

She said that the typical museum is visitor agnostic. It is designed to give the same information to a 10-year old and someone with a Ph.D. The labels on the exhibits are the same for both visitors. But does this really make sense, especially in a world where technology and design are capable of so much more?

Simon advocates for three transformations of the museum:

1. From destinations into places for everyday use.
2. From trusted sources of information into trusted hosts for social experiences.
3. From places for seeing and exploring into places for making and doing.

Why don’t maker workshops and hackerspaces take place at science museums? Do the directors of the museums realize that these groups exist? Do the hackers bother to ask the museums for space or support? What about stitch and bitch groups who meet in coffee houses? Why shouldn’t they meet in a museum (or a library)?

I think the most important thing that Simon talked about was the reminder that “to participate socially you have to invite individually.” I can see this having significant repercussions for computer supported collaborative work, open science, and almost any commons based project that is taken up. My own experience from running book clubs, experimental courses, attending conferences, and more verifies her admonition.

She elaborated on all three of her transformations with examples drawn from various museums and libraries across the nation. Simon emphasized the need for design to interact with and respond to the community. An idea that works at one museum may not work at another if the infrastructure and the maintenance costs are not taken into account. If the Worcester City Gallery gets visitors to vote on their favorite paintings the success may be due to the ongoing responsiveness of the museum staff as much as the novelty of using voting to get visitor feedback.

I also liked her overall point that design constraints are sometimes useful. If you give the audience a completely blank page you may be disappointed by the lack of response. But if you constrain their activity in a useful manner you may be surprised by how much feedback you receive. Sometimes people need a seed from which to grow their participation.

Harry Boyte, a senior fellow at the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota, spoke to the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum on the topic Beyond the Knowledge Wars. The event was held at the Hosmer Public Library in Minneapolis.

Boyte began by discussing the cult of the expert, the ultimate outgrowth of the philosophical positivism and objectivism that dominated intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Objectivity became the byword for intellectual investigation, demanding the removal of all self-interest or awareness from the research process. He summed this up by the advice he once heard given to a sociology Ph.D. - “never research a topic that you are interested in.” The fear of contamination by personal biases and interests pushed academia to extol research over outreach.

There have been many critics of this ethos of detachment, but so far their impact has been minimal. The administration of the University of Minnesota bought into the “ponzi scheme of becoming the third best public research university in the world.” The result was the closing of general college. Further back in time Boyte described some of the changes to the coop-extension program which was transformed away from community building into an expert service provider. Another current of resistance was the tradition of the land grant colleges.

The cult of the expert is expressed in politics as mobilizing - get out the vote, door knocking and canvassing, robo-calls. It is the dominant political formula of our time. Mobilization was originally the strategy of the left, but now all politicians use it. It begins by defining an enemy, frames the issue as good versus evil using a simplified script, and then distributes it to the masses with the subtext that the masses are being victimized. It is the Nader and the PIRG formula, and recently it has been the Rove, Gingrich, and Beck formula. The problem with this view is that it treats people as stereotypes, labels, or abstractions. How will the Southern white male respond to message X? What will the soccer mom think of this commercial?

The apotheosis of this form of politics was seen in 2008 when Mark Penn told Hillary Clinton that the only way she could win was by accusing Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer. Clinton stepped back from that edge. John McCain had a similar moment when he took the microphone from the woman in Minneapolis who accused Obama of being an Arab.

The antidote to this problem, according to Boyte, is an organizing paradigm, a viewpoint that acknowledges the “irreversible, plurality of the human condition.” It is a return to the original meaning of politics - how to deal with people different than the self.

Boyte offered some positive examples of resistance, such as the recent work by the Centers for Disease Control to promote community resilience, or the shift among development economists from only talking about government and market solutions to talking about community power. In St. Paul there is the Jane Addams School for Democracy connecting college students and immigrants and at the University of Minnesota William Doherty is working on a program for citizen professionals.

I basically agree with Mr. Boyte’s critique of the current situation, but the examples of hope seem very small bore compared to the scale of the challenge. I asked him about the reaction to his work among the business community and he basically said that he hadn’t presented the ideas to them. There were some local business alliances working on citizen business issues, such as the Citizens League and Target Corporation, but the overall scope was small.

The question I should have asked is how this message is going to be carried into the suburbs. I support his goals and the programs he works on, like the Jane Addams school and democracy promotion in Africa, but I see the center of the action as the suburbs for two reasons. Practically, the suburbs are where elections are currently won and lost in America. If we can’t convince suburbanites of this critique and the need for a more democratic form of education then change may never come. Ideologically, the problem is there are so few people in the suburbs who know what democracy. We, in the suburbs, are the ultimate ignorant consumers of government service. The attitude is “give me my driver’s license as rapidly as possible and then get out of my way, I need to go to work and pick up the kids for soccer practice.” There is very little citizenship in the suburbs, nor is there very much community.

The vision of a cocreative, relational, community-based future of education is enticing. I look forward to helping to build that future with Mr. Boyte.

Dane Smith, the president of Growth and Justice a local Minnesota think-tank, spoke to the Twin Cities Chapter of the IEEE Education Society on Friday. The event was held at the Bakken Museum on Lake Calhoun.

Mr. Smith began by laying out the assumptions made by Growth and Justice when considering education policy in Minnesota. Like many think-tank presidents he describe the mission of Growth and Justice as being bipartisan, neither conservative nor liberal. He believes, and so does his organization, that government can be a force for good in the community. Government investment in human capital can have a beneficial effect on the future. Smith contrasted this with the conservative view of Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, and his oft-quoted message that government needs to be shrunk and then drowned in a bath tub.

To burnish his conservative credentials Smith said that Growth and Justice doesn’t oppose business reflexively, as some liberal groups do. Growth and Justice has worked with business groups to call for a reduction in corporate taxes in Minnesota and to support transportation investment.

Given this background Smith described the report Smart Investments in Minnesota Students which was completed at the end of 2008. The goal of the report was to “Develop a progressive policy agenda that defines successful education outcomes, identifies who should be accountable for those outcomes, and shows how to improve educational results for Minnesotans, from early childhood through post-secondary study.” To accomplish this the organization partnered with nationally recognized education scholars to find positive education interventions that are supported by sound research, with the ultimate hope of increasing higher education attainment fifty percent by 2020.

Currently education is the largest state budget expenditure, accounting for almost half of the state outlays. The bulk of that money goes to salaries and compensation. Growth and Justice estimates that $1 billion has been cut from the education budgets across the state over the last 10 years since Jesse Ventura became governor. A study by the Minnesota Department of Revenue supports Smith’s claim that the Minnesota tax system has become more regressive over the last decade. The lowest income decile pays an effective tax rate of 14.9% where the top decile only pays 10.3%. If the tax reforms of the past 10 years were rolled back then an additional $2 billion dollars in revenue would be gained. Half of that would lead to the $1 billion proposal for education.

The education spending proposed by Growth and Justice divides into three parts: the early years of infancy through kindergarden and elementary education, higher education preparation in middle and high school, and the launch into life assistance for students moving into post-secondary education. Approximately $400 million would be spent on early intervention, $255 million on school-age intervention, and the final $340 million on the transition to post-secondary education.

For early intervention they propose nurse home visit programs, expanding child care access, social skills training, quality half-day preschool, class size reduction, and intensive focus on early skills acquistion. School age reforms would be more rigorous coursework, intensive tutoring, in- and out-of-school social support like mentoring, college prep curriculums, more parental involvement, and increased student counseling. The transition to post-secondary education would mean an increase in counseling services, teen pregnancy and dropout prevention, and need-based aid for higher education.

I was particularly surprised to hear that Minnesota now has the third lowest number of counselors per high-school student in the nation. I guess things change a lot over time. Overall I thought Mr. Smith gave a reasonable and cogent presentation about the difficulties facing Minnesota education and some of the reasonable reforms that might improve things.

The biggest barrier to change remains Tim Pawlenty and his no-new-taxes pledge. The effective tax rate in Minnesota has declined over the past decade but the economic boom promised by the conservatives has failed to materialize. We know what doesn’t work, now we just need to have the courage to try something different.

I shuffled off to an early morning Citizens League meeting on Thursday to hear Alex Cirillo Jr., vice president of community relations at 3M, talk about the Principles of Innovation. I went because I’ve been interested in this topic for at least ten years. I was also interested in seeing what the Citizens League would be like.

Cirillo began the session with a short 15 minute presentation, a time limit he admirably fulfilled. In that 15 minutes he gave us a good bit of information to think about. He defined innovation as “the use of knowledge to achieve an output that is new or novel, a pragmatic result.” To have an impact it must be transformational - large in scale and important in depth.

The key to innovation in an organization is mindset. “It is driven by a system of principles and practices which support and encourage the coupling of systems and creativity to solve a problem.” 3M accomplishes this through corporate values and social connection. Networks and the interfaces between groups are important roots for innovation.

His seven principles for innovation are:

1. Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should! The world doesn’t need a swiss army couch, even if it is possible. Timing and the need for an outlet are as important to successful innovation as raw creativity.
2. Resign yourself to the fact that there is no such thing as an LTQF (Long Term Quick Fix). This is where non-linearity and lack of control come in. See Glenda Eoyang on complexity
3. Be multilingual. Need to be diverse and bring a lot of people into the conversation. More perspectives means more success.
4. Be clear about the context in which you are working. Keep perspective. Situational awareness is needed to see what kind of innovations are needed.
5. Know when to think in black and white and when to think in color. More diversity.
6. The thing you should work hardest at is building confidence in your people. Be a teacher. Education and culture are important.
7. Be personally committed to making yourself and those around you excited about innovating. Be excited.

After the presentation we took twenty minutes to talk about the most important transformation needed in Minnesota and the people that should be at the table to talk about it?

My group talked about two major themes: productivity and sustainability. Who will be the workers of the future? How are they going to support us and the economy? Which naturally led to a discussion on education. I cautioned that focusing on education as a young person’s activity is foolish. We need to keep our eye on productivity for everyone, for all ages. Education is important but part of the problem is that education is built for a business world built on hierarchy. If we don’t change the expectations of the business world while we change education then our efforts in education may be moot.

Some of the people we wanted to invite to the table were young people, scientists, poets, grandmothers, engineers, designers, futurists, single mothers.

I asked where we should convene these meetings and we mostly agreed that all organizations need to open up, go out, and get diversity?

We reconvened as a large group and shared our ideas from the table conversations. I thought the whole event was quite well-done. They stuck to the schedule and accomplished a lot.

The question is what impact this will have. Most of the people at the event were self-selected because they were already members of the Citizens League. Going forward will require more and different people.

Finally Cirillo reminded us that “innovation is a contact sport.” We need to get out there and talk to people in order for it to work.

Cross-posted at TES Consulting, here.

Never have so few been so sure of their own rightness. That is my reaction to this morning’s meeting of the MN Futurists. I’m sorry to say this, because I like the principle of the group, but the reality today was a bunch of old white men exercising their sense of dudgeon.

The topic of the day was immigration, a sensitive issue to be sure. Some of the initial presentations raised good issues about the immigration policy of America but the discussion was quite different. For a group of amateur futurists there was a remarkable level of certainty about the nature of the problem and the possible solutions.

My jaw almost fell out of my head when one of the audience members told everyone that we had to look at the problem from a systems perspective and then, in the very next breath, linked the problem of affordable housing to the poor family culture of non-white people. He argued that housing requires a job, which requires an education, which requires a family structure that values education and therefore we should require all adult immigrants to participate in ESL immersion classes as soon as they arrive in our country.

A real systems perspective emphasizes all the parts of the system when looking for a solution or a point of intervention.

In the systems perspective, once one has identified the system as a separate part of the universe, one is not allowed to progressively decompose the system into isolated parts. Instead, one is obligated to describe the system as a whole. If one uses separation into parts, as part of the description of the system properties, this is only part of a complete description of the behavior of the whole, which must include a description of the relationships between these parts and any additional information needed to describe the behavior of the entire system.

Further, in a systems perspective one should be careful about considering the system in the context of the environment and not as an isolated entity. Thus one should include the interactions and relationships between the system and the environment.

The presenter to the group, Elizabeth Glidden, responded that as an expectant parent she would need to spend a minimum of $200 per week on childcare. The only way for a family to do this and afford housing is for both parents to work.

Our interlocutor from the audience replied that a significant number of people choose homeschooling. (2% to be precise. Does this person really understand the meaning of significant?) Some families “find homeschooling to be a cheaper alternative than the public schools.” Cheaper? In what possible way is homeschooling cheaper than public school or daycare.

When people say something is cheaper they usually mean that it costs less or saves money. So you have a family with two incomes. They spend 30% of their monthly income on housing. Then they have a child and they decide to homeschool. Is this really “cheaper?” At best homeschooling is only cheaper if you consider the labor of the stay-at-home parent to be completely uncompensated. A homeschooling family may indeed be spending less money per month because they don’t pay out money for childcare. But the tradeoff for that is a significantly lower savings rate.

The group dynamic in these situations is really interesting to observe. Most of the people who speak up in this group have been coming for a long time and each of them has a particular ideé fixe into which discussions inevitably bend. People don’t listen to each other because they’ve heard all the arguments before.

The anti-immigration arguments boiled down to three points:

• Immigration is bad because diversity causes cultural division and balkanization. See here for a refutation.
• Immigration is bad because it leads to increased consumption of natural resources. A Hmong person driving an SUV in St. Paul has a much bigger carbon footprint than a Hmong person still living in Laos.
• Immigration is bad because current federal policy is rooted in deception. The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 led to a dramatic increase in immigration, especially non-white immigration, so therefore the people who wrote the law must have intended to change the cultural composition of America. I call this the conspiracy theory. Refutations to take place on your own.

The only interesting argument in this bunch is the second. It’s clear that people in the United States consume much more natural resources and produce more pollution than people in the rest of the world. But to say that immigration is the cause or solution for this problem is a big jump.

All Americans have been living a cadillac lifestyle for many years, even before the legal changes of 1965. For any individual immigrant the marginal increase in resource consumption and pollution is trivial compared to the overconsumption we’ve all been living with. Shutting off immigration to this country isn’t going to solve the environmental problem. It might be part of the solution but it is hardly the end of the discussion.

I called this entry “Sense of Authority” because I was so astounded by the certainty with which all of these people spoke about the future. I’m not even sure if I can call this futurism because it bears so little connection to the complex systems view of futurism that I hold. I think it’s more accurate to say that the tropes of futurism and engineering (systems perspectives, statistics) became cloaks for political positions.

Given the age of most of the participants in this group my experience may be representative of what future studies used to be. If the profession were founded today things might be very different.

There were more silly things said today but they will have to wait for another post.

I attended the fifth Social Media Breakfast at the Minneapolis Public library this morning.

Jon Gordon from FutureTense started things out with a Q&A about technology and media. Most of the questions surrounded the new NPR API and the social media activity at Minnesota Public Radio. He mentioned the changing attitudes among journalists about social media. Perceptions are shifting slowly from not letting media employees speak online to accepting off-the-record conversations about anything.

This reminded me of how I felt when I read or heard last year about journalists not voting in order to protect their impartiality. I thought then that the idea was stupid. I’d rather have a journalist vote and be upfront about his or her participation than someone who tries to hard to appear above the fray. The question is how much disclosure do we need or want? Does a journalist have a responsibility to tell the audience how she voted? What will happen when media organizations start publishing their raw interviews and material on the web for remixing and analysis?

Paul Saarinen (I would’ve gotten the spelling correct, it’s just like the architect Eero Saarinen, even if I’m not from the range) spoke about the parallels between social media and game playing. I remember first hearing this from Ed Vielmetti in 2005 when he compared Wikipedia to an MMORPG. Just like pornography leads the way in Lively so gaming leads the way in online social interactions. To the hippies who started the WELL and influenced the hacker movement this is probably no surprise.

Meg Canada and Jody Wurl finished the morning off by showing off how hip librarians are to social media and networking. I remember encountering a lot of librarians when I first started to read and write blogs five or six years ago. Jenny Levine at The Shifted Librarian has been blogging since 2002. Canada and Wurl toured some of the highlights on the social media booksphere LibraryThing and Bookspace. I was surprised at the low number of hands raised when we were asked if anyone was on LibraryThing. I guess I’m spoiled by the high ratio of superpatrons in Ann Arbor.

Almost everyone at the meeting was on Twitter during the meeting. A twitter search for smbmsp gives a good trace. To test the geek quotient of all those people I think we should setup an IRC channel next time and see how many people know what we are talking about.

I drove into the Weisman Art Museum last night to listen to Harry Boyte and Don Shelby talk about re-inspiring citizenship in the 21st century. Boyte just released a book called the Citizen Solution about the growing movement to reconnect ourselves to politics and the communities we inhabit.

Shelby started things off by recapping an anecdote about his third grade teacher from the forward to the book. He speculated about Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg address - especially the emphasis on the famous phrase “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Did Lincoln emphasize the noun or the prepositions? Is it about the people or the functions of people?

Boyte stood up to tell us about his book and work. He’s seen all of the stories and complaints about the contemporary American loss of citizenship: Bellah, et.al. Habits of the Heart, Putnam’s Bowling Alone, the claims that we are being siloed into partisan and information niches (True Enough by Manjoo), that there has been a decline in mutual trust. (Some of those references are mine.) The Civic Health Index, produced by the National Conference on Citizenship showed an uptick in charitable giving after 9-11 but since then has noticed declines in trust in other people and charity.

Boyte believes there is another story to be told in parallel to the declension narrative. This is the story of self-organized citizens working together to create civic agency, working together to create something outside of, or beyond, predetermined solutions. It’s an emergent phenomenon of people coming together to accomplish something.

Amir Pinnix concluded with his story of becoming a citizen athlete. He spoke about growing up as an only child with his mother in Newark, New Jersey. When he moved to the University of Minnesota he felt that something was missing on campus so he and a friend started SCOPE, Student Committee on Public Engagement. He told us to never give up and never stop trying to improve the world. I particularly liked two quotes “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and “you can’t lead folks unless you love folks, you can’t save folks unless you serve folks” (from Cornel West). Pinnix was an impressive speaker so I expect he’ll go far in the future. Google suggest this Star Tribune profile for further reading.

After this we broke into small group discussions at our tables. There were about 8 or 9 tables of 5-10 people. At the tables a staff member or student from the Humphrey Institute posed three question to us.

1. What responsibilities accompany being a citizen?
2. What do we believe is meant by the idea of grassroots politics?
3. What is your dream for the future of our country?

The discussion at my table focused on local community building, reaching out to our neighbors both in person and via technology, trying to create an environment in which we can be open to the possibilities inside ourselves and others.

I was impressed by a story from one my tablemates about her experience moving to a new community. She was initially wary of some of her neighbors asking question about her life. But she realized later that they were the local leaders of the community neighborhood and were asking so they could include her in the community. I thought this summed up the risk and fear that we all face when acting as a citizen? It’s hard to reveal ourselves to others and discouraging when our revelations are met with silence.

I didn’t get to pose my final question to the larger group because time ran out. But I wanted to ask Harry Boyte what if we act and nothing happens, then what?

So what went well at PublicRadioCamp last Saturday?

Back in February Dan Gillmor stopped by Minnesota Public Radio to talk about the future of journalism. The setup was standard interview fare - two people at microphones in front of a crowd sitting in an auditorium. The reaction to the event was immediately negative - people complained about the lack of interaction with the audience and the back channel chat on Twitter was devastating.

Last Saturday a smaller group of people met in the same location for Public Radio Camp. The setup was completely different. Butcher-block paper on the walls, ubiquitous wi-fi, tables, movable chairs, and about thirty people who were interested in improving media not just talking about it.

So which one of these events was more successful? As usual it depends on your goals, audience, and perspective.

I felt the Gillmor event covered material I already knew. There was minimal interaction with the audience in a conversation that was ostensibly about how the audience is becoming more powerful than journalists. The journalists in the audience seemed to mostly be fearful about the future of their profession.

At Public Radio Camp everything was turned around. People were enthusiastic about public radio and the information they hoped to get from it. They were interested in expanding participation and bringing more people into the conversation. Finally the format was based on open space and left people alone long enough to let them self-organize.

Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.

I went down to the Minneapolis Convention Center for day 1 of the National Conference on Media reform this afternoon. I skipped the Larry Lessig morning plenary and arrived at about 1 p.m. I wandered through the displays in the ballroom, ate half an over-priced burrito and then headed for the first afternoon panel session.

Panel 1 - Free Speech in the 21st Century

Josh Wolf kicked things off with his account of being imprisoned for refusing to testify before a federal grand jury in 2006. Naturally he concluded his talk with a call to support a federal shield law protecting people who do journalism, not just people who are employed as journalists.

C. Edwin Baker made some short comments about First Amendment legal theory. The First Amendment only protects us from government interference with speech. If a corporation seeks to curtail free speech then you’re legally out of luck. Corporations also argue that the first amendment protects them from coercive legislation that might regulate their right to merge, etc. There are two clauses in the First Amendment: one protecting individual speech, the other protecting the institutions of the press.

Caroline Fredrickson spoke about the ACLU free speech campaigns. I was intrigued by the case of the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act that is being promoted by Joe Lieberman. The bill attempts to prevent radical Muslim extremists from spreading their message in America. YouTube was asked to remove some videos as a result of this effort. Videos that violated the community terms of service were removed but others were not.

I was tempted to ask about the intersection/overlap between free speech and website terms of service. What is the case law on this issue? How easily can a website remove content that it deems inappropriate? Would this ever become a first amendment issue? If there are any constitutional lawyers who read this please feel free to leave a comment.

Panel 2 - Legislation 2.0: Self-Governance and Policy on the Open Internet

This panel was even better. Right in my personal bailiwick: open-government and all other open knowledge endeavors.

Micha Sifry kicked things off with a short movie showing a nifty use of Google Earth to display congressional earmarks for the defense industry. This was just the beginning of the cool stuff the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

Andre Banks began by describing his project Color of Change which was formed after Katrina to improve the presence of the progressive black population in government. He described the case of the Jena 6 as the perfect storm for online activism. From there Color of Change has made great strides to intervene in the criminal justice system on behalf of the black population.

Matt Stoller went next and talked about a blogging project that took place a year or two ago. Senator Dick Durbin agreed to participate in an online forum around a bill under consideration in Congress. I forget the topic of the bill but the upshot was that new internet tools could penetrate the conversation in Washington D.C. with enough work and persistence.

Russell Newman, a former staffer for Senator Durbin, recounted his experience with the public conversation about the bill from inside the sausage factory. He concluded by emphasizing the banality of policy making: it really is all about access, and a common sense evaluation of legitimacy.

Micha Sifry mentioned a few other projects of interest including qik for streaming video from a cell phone and Open Congress for tracking bills before Congress.

In the Q&A I asked about the sustainability of a project like Open Congress and the transfer of tools like it to the local level. The software that runs Open Congress is open source so it’s available for people to setup on a state or local level. I smell yet another potential project. Long-term sustainability is still up in the air.

One of the most interesting questions from the audience was about dividing resources between old and new institutions. Sifry responded that he would give most of the funding to new institutions. Liberals need to be more adventurous and stop giving to institutions because of sentimentality or past achievements. Others on the panel disagreed and discussion ensued.

One-on-one brainstorming

Instead of going to the Minnesota caucus I met with James O. in an ad-hoc session to discuss his ideas about communicating liberal ideas to the mainstream. He was full of very interesting proposals and thoughts, ranging from recasting the Superman story, creating a new form of found political poetry based on haiku, starting a new political party, and forming a new 24/7 news channel. It was a fun and interesting conversation. I showed him a couple of social software tools like delicious and Twitter. I wish him the best of luck.

Two ideas I really liked were doing a children’s book based on Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. I replied that it would be great to make it into a stop motion animated video. I encouraged James to think more about cultural peer production as a method to get his ideas into the world. Perhaps we will work on it together.