embracing apparent contradictions, diversity and change
{ Category Archives }
With over ten million users in just two weeks, and plenty of rave reviews, Google’s latest foray into social networking is off to a great start. Ever since it launched, I’ve spent most of my online time on Google+, and so far am very impressed from both the software engineering and business strategy perspectives. I think it’s on track to be a big success, so expect me to be talking about it a lot.
Unsurprisingly, I’ll start with diversity.
Two days after the San Francisco Youth and Entertainment Commission’s hearing on electronic dance music at San Francisco City Hall, Hillary posted the amended language of AB74 in the Save the Rave Facebook group. It’s a huge change. Instead of criminalizing all electronic dance music events over 3 1/2 hours long the way the original bill did, it’s now focused on ensuring that promoters have a safety plan — and it only applies to events with more than 1000 people on state properties. And a lot of the specific requirements are very sensible, for example the health and safety section should cover “whether the promoter should provide free water, whether the promoter should prohibit any person under 18 years of age from attending the event, adequacy of ventilation, attendance capacity, and exit signs.”
Hmm … where have I heard that before?
An activism group I know is thinking about setting up a Q&A (question-and-answer) site. What technology base should they use?
Here’s the functionality wishlist:
In general, open-source software with a fairly unrestrictive license (BSD-style) is preferable; if the GPL’ed or commercial tools for the job are better, that’s fine too.
Great discussion! Kudos to organizer Christina Gagnier, panelists Jack Lerner and Lisa Borodkin, and moderator Alex Howard (aka @digiphile).
What next? You can vote for or against individual rights at the Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights site, and you can also vote for or against the entire bill via Twitter. My post here has some thoughts, and there are also some questions on Quora (1, 2). We’ll propose at least one session on the Social Network Users Bill of Rights for this year’s ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference — June 14-16 in DC and online. Stay tuned!
A broadly-recognized social network users’ bill of rights will be a huge step forward for online freedom and privacy. For me, and hundreds of millions of others, sites like Facebook, Twitter, tribe.net, and free-association are how I stay in touch with friends and family. As Voces Contra Las FARC, Barack Obama, #iranelection, and hundreds of other campaigns have shown, social network sites are also vital for political activism. And yet, today we the users of the sites have only minimal rights.
— me, in It’s time for a Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights, June 2010
Today’s SXSW panel Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights: You Decide is a great chance to rekindle the energy on the #billofrights (as we like to say on Twitter).  Panelists Christina Gagnier, Lisa Borodkin, and Jack Lerner all spoke at last year’s ACM Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference last year when we crafted the document.* Alex Howard of O’Reilly joins them. Cool! Check out the #snubor hashtag!
I like what CFP has done because I think they’ve covered all the bases, and they’ve done it with language that 95 percent of Web users can understand.
— Terry Sweeney, A Manifesto in the Name of Privacy, Internet Evolution
Since last June, the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt have helped highlight the importance of social networks for political purposes, the Commerce Department has called for an online Privacy Bill of Rights — and ongoing news stories like A Chinese Activist and Mark Zuckerberg’s Dog continue to spotlight many social network sites’ challenges with free speech, and pseudonymity. With this year’s CFP scheduled for Washington DC in mid-June, now’s a perfect time to get serious about organizing.
ACTION ALERT: Ask Obama to veto the PATRIOT Act, April 5.
ACTION ALERT: Meet with members of Congress about the PATRIOT Act, April 18-May 1
Twazzup did a custom Twitter backchannel for Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference back in June 2009, and soon after that became the best way to follow the #iranelection protests. Later that year they were kind enough to set up getfisaright.twazzup.com and at least for me it remains the best way to follow the Patriot Act action on Twitter.
The buttons aren’t just refrigerator art, they let you see what words and hashtags are the most common … #p2 and #tcot are arch rivals (the biggest progressive and conservative hashtags) and unusually enough they’re in agreement right now: we are sick of Washington trying to sneak the Patriot Act extension past us rather than having a proper debate.
The “Most Popular Links” and “Popular Tweets” sections make it easy to see at a glance what’s going on — and you can click to translate foreign tweets into English. There’s also a useful (and pretty!) “community” section.
You don’t have to have a Twitter account to use Twazzup. If you want to join in the conversation, though, our If you’re new to Twitter page has some suggestions.
Please join us!
Continue Reading »
Talk about “ripped from today’s headlines” … here’s an excerpt IÂ was just editing last night from g0ddesses.net, my comic novel-in-progress. The scene’s set on a discussion forum that’s modeled after Hacker News:
![two question marks](https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3043/3006348550_3bb10dda55_q.jpg")
Today, I saw a link on HackerNews to a Read Write Web story Quora for the Enterprise:Â Two Contenders:
Last week we asked whether we needed a Yelp for the enterprise. Ed Borasky* suggested that Quora could fill the role of providing crowdsourced reviews of enterprise software vendors. Focus.com, a more business-centric questions and answer site, could possibly do this as well.
But what about Quora for the enterprise?
Indeed!  And reading further in the story, discovered that one of the contenders is “is applying gamification principles in an attempt to drive adoption”.
Nice to know I’m in sync with the Zeitgeist.
Life imitates art.
Am I the only person out there who takes a step back every few months to observe how I’m starting my online and day decide what kind of changes I want to make?
If you haven’t ever done this, it can be very illuminating. Back in 2008, for example, when I was doing a lot of political activism, I looked where I was getting my news, and quickly discovered substantially more interesting and diverse perspectives.  More recently I’ve been focusing on writing Tales from the Net, and also laying the groundwork for a new startup and/or consulting gigs, so have been thinking a lot about how to adapt.
So here’s how I’m currently starting my online days. The order varies, and sometimes I leave some of these out, but it gives the basic idea. I’d love to hear what others think about this — or what you do. Continue Reading »
Also posted on The Seminal and Pam’s House Blend
The most recent skirmish on the Patriot Act reauthorization battle ended badly for civil liberties.  Despite passionate speeches all around in the Senate Judiciary Committee public hearings and classified briefings, in the end, only Senators Feingold, Durbin, and Specter stood up for the Constitution. As Marcy Wheeler says, we got rolled.
At the same time, though, the social network activism I discussed in Can Skittles fix the Patriot Act? and on the Get FISA Right blog highlights the opportunity to broaden and recharge the civil liberties community.
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Care2, OFA and other social network sites:
It’s a powerful narrative. Social network sites epitomize the wave of the future, Obama’s strength in 2008, and youth. They’re overwhelmingly in favor of civil liberties. And civil liberties supporters are getting organized there. As we continue to make progress, every political consultant and politician thinking about a primary or general election challenge in 2010 or 2012 will be paying attention.
Social network activism for civil liberties has made great progress so far. Some simple steps from organizations and bloggers can take things to the next level. Before getting to the suggestions, though, I’d like to discuss the diversity aspects in a little more detail.
Continue Reading »
An as-yet-unnamed potential startup company is planning to develop some revolutionary software that relates to how people work together. One of our first steps is to set set up a research community and making some ethnographic observations — in other words, getting an understanding of how people work today. We’re especially trying to get a diverse set of participants: not just techies, not just straight white guys, not just Microsoft-related people.
At the end of the first round of observations, we’ll provide all the participants with a summary of our findings. And as a way of showing our appreciation, we’ll also give each participant a free copy of our first product once it’s available.
Interested in being a part of it?
To start with, we’d like to spend about half an hour on the phone with you interviewing you about your experienes related to meetings. We’re very early on in our thinking about product lines, so it’s important for us to hear a lot of different perspectives.  We’ll also ask you to spend a couple of minutes online after the meeting: quickly double-checking our notes, filling out a quick survey, and sharing any additional thoughts.
“Fight for me!”
— a privacy-loving Facebook friend, wishing me luck at the conference
Here’s our opportunity to realize the promise of the Net that was so present in 1990s when CFP started.
— Deborah Pierce on the CFP blog
The program for this year’s Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference is outstanding even by CFP’s high standards. The mix of technology, legal, policy, and activism perspectives is particularly strong this year, and with the new administration and Washington DC location there’s significant involvement by government employees for the first time since the 1990s. As well as CFP regulars like Jennifer Grannick, Jim Harper, Ed Felten, Nicky Ozer, Alessandro Acquisti, Stewart Baker, and Lillie Coney, speakers incude first-timers like Marcy Wheeler, Dori Maynard, Paul Ekman, Shireen Mitchell, Rebecca Mackinnon, Nancy Scola, and Ari Melber. Don’t take my word for it — check out the program and prepare to be impressed.
Best of all, with streaming video, the #cfp09 Twitter backchannel ,* live-blogging, and a community wiki, the conference will be more accessible onine than every before.   Kudos to Katy Nelson of the ACLU and Robert Guerra of Freedom House for taking the lead with the video streaming, and to all the volunteers of the online visibility team for all the great work on the blog, Twitter, and Facebook. The online schedule has details, we’ll do our best to keep the web site updated regularly, and the Twitter feed will be best way to keep up what’s going on.
