dose

J’ai l’intention de participer à ces evenments:

• WikiWednesday (aujourd’hui, 16h30)
• Yulblog (aujourd’hui, 20h00)
• petit déjeuner des entrepreneurs web Montrealais (le 13 fev)
• podcamp toronto (le 24-25 fev)
• democamp montreal #1 (le 27 fev)
• democamp montreal #2 (le 29 mars)
• barcamp montreal #2 (april 28)

UPDATE: if you’ve got a project on the go, send me an email at hugh AT dosemagazine DOT com or comment here & I’ll add you to the list below.

Julien’s bitchin’ cause Montrealers aren’t talking up their projects, I think, or because we don’t have a more “official” community of geeks. (Not sure what the advantage is to that). I think the main thing is we have no fluoride in our water, so we’re less prone to zombie-like following. There’s tons of cool stuff going on, here is just a list of people I know personally who are doing great things, in no particular order:

• Brett Gaylor, vlogger making a movie about creative commons and remix culture
• Mike Lenczner, free wifi implementer, civic data guy, and location-based portal person…
• Julien Smith, Canada’s most popular independent podcaster
• MC Turgeon, Canada’s most famous podcaster
• Sylvain Carle, semi-pro blogger, open source guy, and almost-launched start-up worker-oner
• Austin Hill, dot-com dinosaur and soon-to-be newly-minted 2.0 fellow
• Patrick Tanguay, (yul)blog evangelist, CSS wizard, and soon-to-be-publicized project partner of mine
• Paul Shore, indie news pioneer, political get-active-ist, and film-maker
  
• Evan Prodromou, puttin the wiki back into wikitravel
• Boris and Jeremy, bringing international blogging and news together
• craig, shining an eye on media errors and corrections.

UPDATES (I don’t necessarily know these folks):

• AJ Kandy’s transcribing podcasts.
• Casey and Rudy who are Canada’s best-known videobloggers

There are many more, some of whom I know and forgot to mention; others I don’t even know. So, for my money anyway, there’s no lack of activity here, and I seem to run into people doing interesting stuff all the time.

From Maurizio, i got tagged. Shuffled itunes, to see what song plays as the background to various scenes in the movie of my life:

Opening credits
Relaxing with Lee - Charlie Parker

First day of school
I Heard You Looking - Yo La Tengo

Falling in love
Pump It Up - Elvis Costello

Prom/Grad
Next Lifetime - Erykah Badu

Mental breakdown
God Bless the Child - Billie Holiday

Flashbacks
Itaparica - Celso Machado

Getting back together
Vampire - Black Uhuru

Wedding scene
Almost Always Nearly Enough - Tortoise

Final battle
Lige Gould’s Double - Rufus Guinchard

Death scene
Deliver Me - Big Sugar

Funeral scene
Sleeping in the Devlis Bed - Daniel Lanois

End credits
High School Hierarchy - Local Rabbits

Finale
Speeding Motocycle - Daniel Johnston & Yo La Tengo

I’ll tag, oh, fling93, kara, julien, podchef, and, ah, bosko.

Oh, and just to piss him off, I will tag the short-tempered, but sensitive boris.

I’ve been chatting a bit with Austin Hill of late. I convinced him to join the advisory committee of the Atwater Digital Literacy Project, and we seem to be interested in many of the same things, mostly revolving around applying the power of online communities to idealistic goals. His Top Secret Project-Ojibwe (based on aboriginal gift-culture) is coming out sometime later this year, which if I understand is going to be one central project, with many little side projects, such as gifter.org.

Anyway, that project, plus the thinking I’ve been doing over the last few years, and my experience with librivox lead to this little epiphany the other day. Perhaps this is happening already somewhere (and I haven’t fully thought it through or fleshed it out, but there you go)… enough chatter, here’s the idea:

UPDATE: In comments below with Tracey, it appears that some ideas were misconstrued. The proposal is for a funding organization.

BACKGROUND
1. internet and distributed communities are very good at:
a) building software
b) sorting/managing/making info available (wikipedia/librivox)
c) massive peer-review, monitoring
d) democratic ranking (technorati by links, digg by diggs, wikipedia for info etc)
e) leveraging small-chunk work to make a big project cheap and easy

2. free softare, wikipedia, creative commons, librivox are all examples of PARALLEL structures, that do not concern themselves much with what is happening in the mainstream, instead focus on building something different, in PARALLEL.

3. government is increasingly (or always has been) removed from the actual desires of people - part of this is because the process is hidden from most people. it takes real dedication, time, effort to influence policy (hence pro lobbyists = money talks, not voices)

4. what does government do?
a) raises funds (tax)
b) plans policy
c) plans programs to implement policy
d) decides on budget allocation for different programs
e) (sometimes) implements programs
f) monitors progress of projects

5. this process is hidden, inefficient, and subject to influence peddling. But effectively it makes the rules, gets the money and spends the money.

6. while groups of individuals are not able to make the rules, they can raise money, and spend it.

7. charity UPDATE: AND FOUNDATIONS generally are subject to some of the same problems … and often only 30% (check #?) of money actually donated to charity goes to programmes - the 70% balance goes to administration, fund-raising. UPDATE: This is a systematic problem in how charities are funded.

8. much of the reason for 7 (above) is that getting funding is difficult, time consuming, inefficient, and requires massive efforts, publicity, management. loads of paper.

9. re: #4 … without replacing government, is there a parallel system that could be set up, that could do some of these tasks… with a model like #2.

10. YES! again, looking at the government’s role, the internet & open projects can be very good at:
a) raising funds
b) deciding on budget allocation
c) monitoring progress of projects.

11. Probably not so good at:
b) planning policy
c) planning programs to implement policy
e) implementing programs

(these all take more energy, time, on the ground effort … which is possible, but is not the real power of a distributed system).

PROPOSAL

An open-style charity “foundation,” that works as follows:
-Members pay $20/yr each ($50? $100?)
-This money goes into a fund
-You can donate more money, but no one is given more power because of how much money they have donated (but maybe some sort of moderation karma points, as with slashdot)
-projects “apply” for funding (eg atwater digital media), by posting project description, budget, plan
-Members can:
-ask questions
-make suggestions
-rank projects

-On an ongoing basis (maybe every 3 months?) the foundation does an open budgeting process, where members decide on allocating: short-term, and long-term funding to projects that have ranked well.
-Projects will be required to update progress and info on an ongoing basis, solicit input, etc, and further funding can be decided based on that. UPDATE: This process would be same as standard reporting process for most funding programmes, tho the idea would be to reduce burden on recipients, rather than increase.
-(an aside: When projects run into trouble, the Members that supported the project should be aware, and can possibly offer more concrete help UPDATE: idea here is just to give the individual “funders” a more direct connection with the recipients…but again should not result in more onerous requirements for recipients)

In this way a totally parallel system (to government & usual charity foundations) could be established to fund projects with a community of givers that:
a) funds itself, through membership
b) decides on where the money goes in an open process
c) monitors & provides feedback (and possibly more concrete support) on an ongoing basis (UPDATE: monitoring here refers mostly to standard financial oversight, that all funding agencies must do)
d) is transparent & efficient

NOTE: This principle should be applied also to an new open internet media production house too, to find a way to fund film-makers, musicians, etc, based on an open co-op system…film, music projects funded based on the interest of the Open Production House Co-Op members.

(cross-posed at TextoSolvo).

What is BarCamp?
“BarCamp is a … event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.” Sorta like a conference, but everyone is welcome, it’s free, and everyone is encouraged to participate and/or present something. Related to geekiness.

When is BarCamp?:
Saturday, October 21, 2006. 10AM - 6PM

Where is BarCamp?
486 St. Catherine W., Suite 303

How do you register?
On the wiki, of course.

So i had my first run in with a wikifascist and am exhausted by the whole thing. what a nightmare it must be to try to run that project - it’s so big, and has so many rules, so many acrimonious people. of course without the rules it would be chaos, without the people it would be nothing , but it is no fun when you run into petty-wiki-beurocrats, pedantic about enforcement of the particular half of the rules they are enamoured with.

The story: a project I’m committed* to, LibriVox, produces recordings of public domain audiobooks. Part of our cataloging process has been to add a link on the page of relevant text (so, for instance, when we finish White Fang, someone or other will go to the wikipedia’s White Fang page and add the link, usually right under the link to the Gutenberg text).

Now one of our volunteers added 37 such links in the past 2 months (without logging in). She got tagged as a “linkspammer” and warned with the following message:

“Please stop. If you continue to use Wikipedia for advertising, you will be blocked from editing. –Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 12:28, 11 March 2006 (UTC)”

What followed was a long drawn-out, and exhausting debate with said Mel Etitis, some of which you can find on his Talk page here: User_talk:Mel_Etitis; and the other half of that at my talk page: User_talk:Mackinaw.

Now wikipedia has guidelines regarding links & “linkspam.” (see External_Links):

Links to Normally Avoid:

• Links that are added to promote a site.
• A website that you own or maintain (unless it is the official site of the subject of the article). If it is relevant and informative, mention it as a possible link on the talk page and wait for someone else to include it, or include the information directly in the article.

And in this corner:

What should be linked to

• An article about a book … should link to the actual book.

This debate raged on and on all day yesterday. My favourite bit was this:
HUGH WRITES:

1. given: wikipedia policy states: “An article about a book…should link to the actual book”
2. given: librivox catalog pages contain “the actual book” in audio form.
3. then: the policy states that wikipedia “should” link to the librivox page.
so:
1. do you agree with 3?
2. and if so, are you saying that wikipedia articles SHOULD link to librivox catalog pages, but librivox volunteers are not permitted to make the links?

To which the wikicrat answered:

In short (though I’ve said enough to indicate that there’s more to it), yes.

At which point I had dreams of finishing The Trial, which has been stalled at LibriVox because of an equally …annoying… copyright issue.

Shortly after this, Jimbo Wales weighed in (after I sent him an email), very diplomatically:

I wonder
On the Librivox thing, they seem like good people, and good links, I wonder if you could give some advice on how we all (you, me, them) might all work together to have a group of disinterested Wikipedians go through as a project adding any and all relevant links?–Jimbo Wales 21:02, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

And a crazy kind of compromise was reached (involving us putting links into the talk pages, seeing if they were put up, then contacting the admin inquestion if they were not, so that he could put in the links); I agreed to the compromise, seeing no alternative. But everyone at LibriVox got pissed off at wikipedia, and for the moment no one seems to want anything to do with it. Which is ridiculous for many reasons, but I must say for the moment I agree. Very sour taste in my mouth.

So to finish it all off I posted this at User_talk:Jimbo Wales:

well, it looks like I jumped too soon to accept the Mel Etitis proposal: librivox volunteers didn’t react very well and there’s a fair bit of disenchantment over there about wikipedia right now. This is probably a drop in the bucket wrt wikipedia’s significant challenges, but it’s unfortunate that a big online community, based on wikipedia’s ideals, and working towards the same goals, should be transformed from great wikipedia boosters, to a group many of whom seem to be saying a version of: “my opinion of Wikipedia is much less right now than it was yesterday.” Tho I do realize that this was just a debate with one admin, not all of wikipedia, but disenchantment seems to be the pervasive reaction among core LV volunteers at the moment. which is too bad. and what that means is there aren’t any ready LV volunteers to post links to appropriate wikipedia pages (talk or otherwise) — at the moment, anyway, though that may change. Our cataloging process is kind of arduous; we had a step in there to add the relevant link in wp. Looks as though that step is gone now; and perhaps it contravened wp rules. (a solution would be to inform some non-LVer wp editor when we have a new file and let them add it if they wish).

So I guess it’s now up to the wikipedia community to decide whether the LV links should be there or not, and if they should, who/how they should get there. for reference, here is the LV catalog page:

http://librivox.org/catalog

There *is* a wikipeida policy question here, though, worth looking at, re: linking:
wikipedia has prescriptive and proscriptive policies about links. The prescriptive says: “an article about a book … should link to the actual book,” (see external_links) ie if there’s a gutenberg text, (or I would argue, a LV recording) , ie the “actual book,” it should be linked from the article. The proscriptive policy says, among other things, that, “Wikipedia is not a mirror or a repository of links, images, or media files.” So in deciding whether or not a link like this ought or not to be included, it seems to me the process should be: “is it the actual book”? Yes –> include it; No –> then evaluate based on other criteria.

Perhaps I am wrong. There’s a question of process over content (ie who can add the link, versus whether the link should be there); and the claim (from the admin) seems to be that process wins over content.

And now I have first hand experience of the joke about wikipedia & saussage: you may like it, but you probably won’t like how it’s made.

UPDATE:
A different, reasonable, admin stepped in and we had a long and productive discussion. I explained LibriVox; he explained wikipedia policy. The upshot is still crazy in my opinion:
the links *should* be there, but *LVer shouldn’t* make those links … but it is explained in a sensible way. Wikipedia makes the rules. If you are interested, you can check WAS_4.250, and also my talk page here: Mackinaw

*Joke:
Q: what is the difference between committed & involved?
A: when considering your breakfast of bacon and eggs, you can be sure that a chicken was involved, but the pig was committed.

Just reporting a couple of interesting facts. Last year, Exxon Mobil had revenues of $42 million per hour. And each hour of every day of the year they made $4.1 million in profit. (Year-end revenue $371 billion, $36.1 billion in profits).

Apparently, that’s quite good, for a company trying to make money. To put that in perspective, one hour of Exxon’s profits would be enough to hire 225 people at $10/hr, 35 hrs a week for a full year. If you had a really big project needing people paid at $20/hr, say, you could take the Exxon’s 2005 profits and hire 990,000 people (assuming 35 hr workweek, 52 weeks a year). If you wanted to be generous you could pay 200,000 people $100/hr for a year.

I don’t know exactly what I mean by all that, but it sure seems like Exxon Mobil makes lots of money.

So one part of me says: “blogging is a waste of time.” Not that there is no value in blogging but that it takes away lots of time from work and other constructive pursuits (which certainly it does).

But I also notice that I become much more blog-prolific when I am busiest, most creative, and most productive. An article about LibriVox appeared in Wired.com last week, and it’s been bananas at the LibriVox forum since then. We’ve had a 10x uptick in traffic, with a correlated increase in newbie forum postings - all requiring monitoring of one kind or another. There are other forum moderators there, all handling things admirably, but LibriVox is my baby, and I just can’t seem to stay away.

At the same time, I’ve been blogging way more than normal. Chapter 1 of novel #2 has revealed itself to me, and I have written the first draft - about 7,000 words of what I think could be a very good novel (much better than Blind Spot). I wrote a letter to a publisher I’ve been planning to contact for a long time, and more exciting ideas about CBC 2.0, Broadcasting 2.0, are percolating into a coherent proposal, which you’ll all see oulined here shortly. Plus I have almost finished hammering out my contract with the little publishing house for the top-secret non-fiction book I have in the works.

My particular brain seems to work best in a frenzy, with many things going on; ideas just start pouring out of me when I am in that situation (unfortunately, I usually don’t have time to implement many of my brilliant ideas, and I usually get stuck after launch with a half-done great idea - which by the way is why collaborative web projects are so cool, others come in with complementary skills & personalities). But I’m not too good at, for instance, a day of plodding work. I need space and freedom in my thinking process, then as many things bubble away, and then gel, I spew it all out pretty quick. For instance, when I am writing fiction, I can do about an hour and a half at a time. Maybe two hours; but I need a fair bit of time around that to get anything out of the time I am writing. If I get four hours of fiction writing in a day I am well above average.

Anyway, all that to say that blogging — both reading and writing — sometimes, is part of a hyper-creative, hyper-productive spurt, as it was today. And now I’m cooking a nice roast (spencer steak), from Joe the Hungarian butcher on St-Laurent. That guy is amazing. I sense a little audio/video project coming up.