Politics and Governance
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/27/2008 - 16:58Recently on the Group Psychotherapy mailing list I am part of, the question came up about whether members could copy portions of emails for articles they were working on. This brought up some very good discussions about copyright, privacy, and ethics. Underlying all of this was the question of how rules get made. One person observed how the group was reluctant to establish rules. Another asked why rules the list needed rules, at which point the first person rested his case.
With Second Life, there seems to be similar resistance to effective rule making. As I noted in my SLNN Reporters Notebook, people claim that Daniel Linden said LL keeps its policies deliberately vague because, "as soon as they draw a solid line, someone will walk up to the line, lean over it and spit over it."
Are these, and other examples of difficulties establishing online rules a function of the online environment? In an online environment, the question of authority arises. Who has authority on a mailing list or in an online community? Is it the moderators, the company that runs the community, some combination? If it is some sort of combination, how is that worked out? To what extent should rules be established by direct democracy or by a representative democracy where rule makers are elected? What role does the absence of cues that we receive in face-to-face interactions play in people’s resistance to rule making online?
Is there something bigger going on here? Do people generally resist rule making, not wanting to be the disliked rule giver? Does this happen independent of the means of communication?
Next week, there will be an E-governance barcamp in Boston. Steven Clift has been working on e-democracy since 1994. Yet these efforts all seem to get drowned out with all the e-politics. It seems like everyone wants to argue the political points, but somehow e-governance initiatives don’t get the same amount of focus.
Does it make sense to have an experiential mailing list focused on e-governance? Can virtual environments like Second Life or Central Grid establish effective e-governance? How useful will the e-governance barcamp be? It will be fun to find out.
Random Second Life Notes
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/26/2008 - 16:29OpenSim worlds lure Second Life’s outcasts (HT malburns Also, I had problems getting to Reuters Second Life earlier, but they are back.
I’ve started playing a little bit of Tiny Empires within Second Life. A Wiki about it is available here.
BlogHud was down for a little earlier, but seems back up now. With any luck my picture of the OMG! Opening in Second Life will be up soon. Also, SLNN.COM is down right now.
I am about to head offline for a bit. I’m not sure if I’ll be around for Walt’s art opening, but I’ll try to make it.
That’s about it for now.
The Enabling Act of 2008
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 20:41Here is the comment that I added on the Give em hell harry website concerning the reauthorization of the FISA act with retroactive immunity to Bush's corporate sponsors:
75 years ago on March 23, Germany's parliament passed the famous Enabling Act of 1933 which broadly expanded executive power and led to the formation of the Third Reich.
The current FISA legislation, while it is unlikely to bring about a dangerous totalitarian regime, is strikingly similar in that it sets supporters of the current executive branch above the law.
Those who love our country and our democracy must stand up and oppose the intelligence committee’s version of the FISA reauthorization, especially as it pertains to retroactive immunity for large corporate sponsors of the Bush administration.
Attention Data
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/25/2008 - 16:03718 unread emails. Following 183 people on Twitter. 467 friends in Facebook. 102 of them have recently updated their profiles. 145 unread messages in Facebook. 567 unprocessed updates and requests. 298 RSS feeds in Bloglines. 128 friends in Second life. 58 friends and 179 admirers in MyBlogLog. 70 friends and 40 communities in BlogCatalog. Spock, Wink, Plaxo, Pandora. The list seems endless.
I remember years ago teachers asking for my complete undivided attention. Now, everyone wants my constant partial attention. It seems unmanageable. Beyond that, I want to get as much constant partial attention from others as possible as well.
To get other people’s attention, I make sure that when I do something, it gets out to various places. I send text messages from my cellphone to Facebook and Twitter. Facebook also feeds twitter, in the event that I put something on Facebook directly. Both of them feed jaiku. Twitter feeds MyBlogLog, Spock and Plaxo. When I put up a post on Orient Lodge it feeds Facebook, in a couple different ways, as well as Twitter and Jaiku. When I take a picture with my cellphone, it goes to Facebook and Flickr. From Flickr I can send it to Orient Lodge. When I shoot video from cellphone, it goes to Facebook, Youtube and blip.tv. Blip can send it on to Flickr and to Orient Lodge.
There are probably a lot of other connections I’ve established that I’m overlooking right now. Confusing? You bet it is. It makes it even harder to track what is where.
So, what gets my attention? Well, this shifts frequently. I’m doing a lot in Second Life right now. I have TwitterBox running so I stay on top of my incoming Tweats and Second Life IMs. I’ve been playing a bit with Spock recently. Mostly I see tweats there that I’m already seeing in Second Life. However, I do see people’s updates in Spock. My experiences with Plaxo Pulse are fairly similar.
Right now, the feed that probably gets the most data is my Plaxo feed. However, since it is listening to a bunch of different feeds, it gets redundant data. So, as an example, 18 hours ago, I put up my post about Clinton, Edwards and the FISA legislation. 17 hours ago, Twitter picked it up. Then Plaxo Pulse picked up on both the link on the blog, as well as the link in Twitter. Four hours ago Jaiku picked up the feed from Twitter and then three hours ago, it picked it up from my blog directly. So, the same key piece of information shows up in my Plaxo Pulse four times.
This illustrates a few different things. One is the latency that it takes for information to get out through the network. It illustrates the duplication of messages. Yet not all the messages are duplicates. In some cases I post a quick message in Twitter without posting a message on my blog.
So, how do we aggregate, sort, filter, and make meaningful all this information without introducing more latency? How do we add something new so that, for example, if I find a new friend, I can get him added in all my social networks, get his statuses on Twitter, Facebook, track his RSS feed and so on? And for that matter, how do we plug it into other systems, like Pandora so that if my friends twitter or write blog posts about music, I can hear related music? I don’t know, but it does look like as the data that comes at us starts coming more quickly, we need to come up with better ways of processing attention data. Perhaps most importantly, how do we do it in a way so that people don’t simply turn off their computers and communication devices and walk away?
Clinton, Edwards and the Enabling Act of 2008
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/24/2008 - 21:44(Initially posted on DailyKos)
I don’t like attack diaries, but today is too important a day and the emails I got today were too important to leave without highlighting them. I am on the Clinton and the Edwards mailing lists. Here is what I got from the two campaigns:
Chelsea Clinton wrote to say:
I love talking to people who are thinking about supporting my mom -- about why I believe in her and why I support her as a young American, a woman, and her daughter!
I also love talking to people who already support my mom's campaign. Every day, when people tell me they're voting for my mom, putting their faith in her, using their voice to encourage others to support her and working hard for her, I grow more proud.
I've been campaigning with her across the country -- and I'm definitely planning on being at the next debate. Would you like to join me? The campaign is picking an online supporter to watch the January 31 debate in Los Angeles with me and to meet my mom. I know she'll be thrilled to meet you -- she is so grateful for how much every supporter has done for her campaign.
John Edwards wrote to say:
When it comes to protecting the rule of law, words are not enough. We need action.
It's wrong for your government to spy on you. That's why I'm asking you to join me today in calling on Senate Democrats to filibuster revisions to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that would give "retroactive immunity" to the giant telecom companies for their role in aiding George W. Bush's illegal eavesdropping on American citizens.
The Senate is debating this issue right now -- which is why we must act right now. You can call your Senators here:
I’ll give you three guesses about who I’m supporting. The first two don’t count, and if you are a major telecom corporation, the third doesn’t either.
One person responded talking about a pie recipe fundraising letter that the Edwards campaign sent out some time ago. Another person noted that an important aspect is the timing of the emails, and sending a fluffy email on a day like today is ‘tone deaf’.
I responded,
I think you captured some of my thinking quite nicely there. I actually think there is an important place for emails like the one that Chelsea sent on behalf of her mom, as well as the apple pie recipe that the Edwards campaign sent out.
My daughter Fiona was out on the campaign trail when she two years old handing out palm cards saying 'Vote for Mommy!' She had fun, she got people to listen to my wife's message.
This is about things like caring for our family. Yet, personally, I take the issue setting corporations above the law if they are serving a unitary executive branch very very seriously and so the fluffiness of Chelsea's email really grated at me today. On a different day, I might have found it cute.
Personally, I tend to think that a better name for retroactive immunity might be the Enabling Act of 2008. Perhaps we can manage to hold it off until March 23 and pass it as the 75th anniversary edition of a previous enabling act.
