Liminal states

Kathy Cramer and Hank Wasiak’s new book is out, a gorgeous and well-focused follow-on to their Change the Way You See Everything, one of the Microsoft Ad Astra project’s signature giveaways.* In May 2007, we did an amazing two-day workshop with Kathy, Hank and his colleagues from the Concept Farm, and folks from Extreme Arts and Sciences and Telstar oriented around the “Hero’s Journey” archetypal narrative as a metaphor for innovation. We also steadily refined a series of Asset-Based Thinking workshops involving customer-focused brainstorming and problem-solving. So it’s safe to say I’m a fan.

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CFP2008 traditionally starts off with a day of tutorials.

I was on a panel organized by Lillie Coney of EPIC on E-Deceptive Campaign Practices: “Elections 2.0″, which was extremely interesting; I discussed examples of, and responses to, e-deception based on my activism experiences this election season, much of which I’ve blogged about here already.

Tova Wang of Common Cause moderated, and the other panelists included John Phillips of Aristotle, Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Ruchi Bhorwmik of Senator Barack Obama’s office, talking about the legislation he’s introduced banning certain deceptive campaign practices relating to knowingly and intentionally spreading false information about voting times and locations. The audience was extremely involved — and knowledgable — and the conversations during the breaks were great as well. Aldon Hynes already has an interesting followup post in Project VoteProtector on his blog Orient House.

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The Hillary Clinton group got overrun with trolls last night. A Facebook bug — that’s been reported and unfixed since February — prevented the admins from being able to react. I saved a snapshot of a series of 25 threads with sexist (and in many cases racist) subjects; I won’t quote them, but trust me, they’re vile. In the middle of this was a plaintive plea for adult behavior by an Obama supporter — with a bunch of responses from trolls. Sigh.

Update: Will Bower’s Glitch-Plagued Clinton Facebook Group Cries Foul; Obama Page Glitch Free in the Huffington Post has administrator Candy Elizabeth’s excellent open letter.  Why yes, now that you mention it, that is the same Will Bower who was mentioned in comments in How to respond when Facebook censors your political speech on Tales from the net.  Small world!

Members of the Clinton group migrated to a private group, always a good thing to do in a situation like this. This morning, the board seems calmer but it’s hard to know whether that’s just a temporary lull. There are aftermath threads like since only the trollzz are here thread and (in the Obama group) The Hillary group has become a trollfest.

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The intro of the No honorary doctorate for anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly Facebook group:

Wash. U. will honor anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly at commencement. WHAT?

This is the woman who lives the hypocrisy of having a career that takes her around the country lecturing “family values” groups on how women should stay home.

This is the woman who said of husband-wife rape, “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape [sic].”

This is the woman who described sex education classes as “in-home sales parties for abortions.” Do her views fit with the future the men and women of Wash U’s graduating class see for themselves and their peers? Probably not. Then why honor her with them? Wouldn’t having someone like her in the midst of Wash U’s female graduates be incongruous at best, offensive at worst?

Indeed.

When Jessica posted about this on Feministing this morning, she said there were 1100 people in the group; when I joined at 11 a.m., it was up to 1350, and as of 11:15 it’s over 1400. It’s already being discussed broadly (a Google Blog search on phyllis schlafly degree currently has 311 hits); a friend forwarded it to me from the Feminist Daily News Wire, saying “this’ll set the blogosphere on fire,” and I suspect she’s right.

The organizers have clearly thought ahead, labeling this group as a discussion group and setting up another, smaller, action-oriented group. They’ve also got contact information for University officials and the press, and some excellent tips such as (“Wash U Alums: Make it very clear to the administration that not only do you disapprove of their choice of honoree, this choice will lose them your contributions. Money talks.”) They’ve got a very clean website with links to key information, and an email list.

Looks like Wash U’s in for some excitement!

jon

There’s so much to write about for Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies that it’s hard to know where to start. At first I thought of focusing on “why the usual excuses are not good enough.” As the month of April went on, though, with brownfemipower’s and Blackamazon’s final statements, the growing list of women of color bloggers rejecting the term “feminism”, prof bw’s call for a Seal Press girlcott, open letters to white feminists from Jessica Hoffman and Ico … I realized that after all that, if anybody is still clinging to the usual excuses, it’s almost certainly beyond my power to reach them.

So I started working on an essay building on the discussion in places like Melissa McEwan et al’s We write letters on Shakesville, Chris Clarke’s Is a humane online politics possible, and Theriomorph’s An ally 101 thread. not currently publicly available

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Andy Borowitz breaks the story in the Huffington Post:

In an act that campaign insiders said indicated an irrevocable break with his former pastor, Sen. Barack Obama today de-friended the Rev. Jeremiah Wright on Facebook.

It looks like all the fears about the divisiveness within the Democratic party are, if anything, understated. I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten. According to Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod:

“Every day, Rev. Wright was sending Sen. Obama new Facebook applications like ‘What Superhero Are You?’ and ‘What 1980’s Toy Are You?'” Mr. Axelrod said. “After awhile, enough is enough.”

Yeah really.

The One Million Strong for Barack group is reeling over the news. Discussion here.  Thanks to Wintana for posting this — there’s been a disgraceful lack of coverage in the mainstream media.

From The Angry Black Woman:

I call a Carnival. The Carnival of Allies. Where self-identified allies write to other people like themselves about why this or that oppression and prejudice is wrong. Why they are allies. Why the usual excuses are not good enough. I figure allies probably know full well all the many and various arguments people throw up to make prejudice and oppression okay. Things that someone on the other side of the fence may not hear. Address those things and more besides.

And when I say allies, I’m talking about any and every type. PoC can be (and should be) allies to other PoC, or to LGBTQ people if they are straight, or any number of other combinations. If you feel like you’re an ally and have something to say about that, you should submit to this carnival.

More, and a submission form, in Allies Talking.  Deadline is May 5, and she’ll be posting the links in the second or third week of May.  It’s a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, so I’ll almost certainly be writing something … I encourage others to as well.

Tales from the Net co-author Deborah Pierce’s Into the Lion’s Den — a privacy advocate’s work is never done (on her tribe.net blog) talks about a panel she was just on at ere expo, “the nation’s leading recruiting conference.” She was there for a debate with the CEO of a company whose mission is “to map every business organization on the planet, contact by contact”:

The CEO started by asking how many in the audience had heard of Jigsaw or had used Jigsaw. About half of the people raised their hands. When my turn came, I asked how many people had heard of Fair Information Principles*. There were about a hundred people in the room and about three people raised their hands. With this crowd I wasn’t surprised.

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Originally posted as a comment about The Day After.

There’s an interesting thread started on Feb 8 in the One Million Strong for Barack group on Facebook, How many Political Cards Hillary has played and whats more to come? I went back and looked at it today seeing how accurate it was; here was my summary:

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Like a lot of political sites these days, the Barack Obama Facebook page and One Million Strong for Barack group have been suffering from an infestation of trolls and hate speech. Obama supporters, like others, use Facebook to help with “get out the vote” work (for example posting links to information about polling places) and phonebanking — and get their questions answered. Especially with the key Ohio and Texas votes on Tuesday, the trolling’s a lot worse than just a nuisance: it’s an example of the dirty tricks described in How to Rig an Election.

The group’s admins are doing a great job of trying to keep things under control, and Facebook is apparently working on tools to help them. There are only a few admins, though, so in the short term, it seemed like a good time for a “community defense” effort. Building on Classy Williams’ earlier idea of a troll registry, I started up a thread, and sent out mail to a “secret” group of about 60 people who were concerned about the trolling. Here’s a greatly expanded version of what I said, with some background for non-Facebookers.

Originally posted March 3

Most recent update May 6

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Update, March 6: democracy largely (albeit imperfectly) prevailed in the LA County mess; 47,153 “double bubble” votes were counted in Los Angeles County. What about Ohio? We shall see …

Julia Rosen’s Victory post yesterday on Courage Campaign’s blog announced Dean Logan’s agreement to count every possible LA County decline-to-state ballot, and followup mail from Rick Jacobs today reiterates: we won!

After weeks of bad news, here’s the good news: Tens of thousands of “Decline-to-State” (DTS) voters — who intended to cast a ballot for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on Super Tuesday — will now have their “double bubble” votes counted by the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters.

And it’s because of you.

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The two-part series I posted on Tales from the Net and Wired’s How-to Wiki is starting to get some coverage.

Shai Sachs has an excellent piece on MyDD:

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about Facebook “censorship” of free speech. The Blackadder One case I wrote about a couple weeks ago was just an early warning sign of more trouble to come. Recently Jon Pincus has been posting a series of diaries at Tales from the Net and Liminal States about his encounter with problems very similar to those Derek Blackadder ran into when he tried to organize workers on Facebook. Pincus’s posts include a very good trail of documentation of the problems he’s encountering, which make this series one of the more interesting resources on Facebook censorship I’ve seen.

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