Conferences http://www.orient-lodge.com/taxonomy/term/24/atom/feed 2008-05-20T20:51:26-04:00 I am not a Citizen Journalist http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3039 2008-06-29T09:53:10-04:00 2008-06-29T09:58:15-04:00 Aldon Hynes Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.

There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.

The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.

Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.

Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.

]]> Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.

There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.

The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.

Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.

Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.
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Introductions

So, although I’ve started off with a little bit more of a sense-making story, I will now hop into that unethical mode of trying to simply document and recount what happened, in a more or less chronological order. Those tuggings to be journalistic may sneak in here and there, but I will try to avoid it as much as possible.

Before convening, people gathered around a table with coffee, orange juice and bagels. I had a chance to have a good discussion with Wayne Sutton whom I had previously met through Plurk and Twitter. I also had a great discussion with David Mathison, who wrote the book Be The Media, which he is in the process of self-publishing. As we got to know each other we expressed the desire to remain in touch and exchanged Twitter addresses. David twitters as bethemedia.

We all gathered in a circle and the discussion started with each person getting an opportunity to introduce themselves. There were about forty people there. Only around four, however, had laptops that they opened and used. I didn’t bother to record much of this, since the details of the participants can be found on the Sharing the News Participants page.

However, there were a few memorable lines. One person identified themselves as a professional conversationalist and noted that “great conversations start in public spaces”. Others spoke about being drop outs or refugees from the mainstream newsroom.

Be the Media

David Mathison spoke first. He noted that the first half of his book was about personal media and the second half was about community media. With social media making the personal communal, I not sure how useful that dichotomy is, but it is an interesting way of looking at media. David spoke about Kevin Kelly’s idea of 1,000 true fans. David suggested that what mattered wasn’t reaching one thousand as a magic number, but having a large, and growing, fan base.

I’m not sure that my followers on Twitter constitute ‘true fans’ as Kelly would describe it, but I did note to myself that I am currently fifty-one followers short of a thousand fans.

David talked about the phrase ‘Citizen Journalist’ and the phrase ‘Citizen Correspondent’ was tossed out. He had a great observation about some work he had done with a community theatre. Instead of complaining about the kids not coming to you, you should go to where the kids are. He spoke about setting up events for the theatre in Facebook and drawing in some great people as a result.

He spoke about noting a great review of a play by a local paper. Later, someone from the newspaper called thanking him for driving traffic to their site, and he noted how this reversed the standard interaction between many arts organizations and local papers. Normally, it is the local arts organizations that are desperately seeking to get local papers to drive people to them.

Let me briefly editorialize for a moment. I think David’s comment about going to where the kids are is key. It matches my thoughts about political bloggers needing to step out of their blogging ghettos. You need to go to where the voters are, the shopping malls, their homes, and these days, more and more, their personal, non-political blogs.

This may also touch a little on thinking about the demand side for journalism, but I don’t want to foreshadow too much and potentially lose my ability to declaim any role as a citizen journalist.

Journalism in a Day

The next to speak was Doug McGill. Doug is not shying away from the phrase Citizen Journalism. Instead, he is seeking to strengthen the journalistic and citizenship aspects. He leads one day journalism workshops. You should check out his Largemouth Citizen Journalism Manual. In spite of my quibbles with him about the importance of “I went to a meeting” type reporting, I think Doug had a lot of important things to say and I would love to see his one day workshops spread widely.

I believe it was Doug who spoke a little bit incredulously about how some people asked ‘are you on twitter’ as part of their introductions, and about overhearing someone talking about SuperPoking someone else. Doug suggested that perhaps a good title for his talk might be ‘SuperPoking Power’, the twenty-first century phrasing of speaking truth to power. This is balanced by the importance of ‘talking to strangers’.

Talking to strangers isn’t a new idea. Instead, it is the old Greek concept of Xenia. In Ancient Greek, it was a civic duty, a form of patriotism. It was part of national security. You needed to talk to strangers, in part to find out what others think of your nation and to discover any emerging threats to your nation. Yet our country currently seems to be mired in the opposite of xenia, xenophobia.

Doug took the idea of xenia and applied it to journalists. “Journalists, like ourselves, need to start talking to people who aren’t journalists”, he suggested. “How do we convince people that media is the consumers job as well?” he asked. Journalism is citizenship. It isn’t professional accreditation. It has to be at the level of jury duty.

Doug summed things up nicely with “Something bad has happened in journalism…Journalists seeing themselves as objective observers is part of it…Journalists have stopped thinking of themselves as citizens.” Given all the displacement in the media ecology, it can be hard to think about the citizenship aspects of one’s job, but I think Doug has done something important in reminding journalists of their roles as citizens, and I hope to see many more discussions with Doug.

It also felt like Doug was practicing what he preached by joining in at the discussion at ‘Sharing the News’ and speaking to strangers like myself.

Wayne Sutton

Wayne was up next. Before he spoke, he talked about his nervousness on Plurk. Nonetheless, he did a great job. My sense was that he would talk a lot about things that I already knew about, Plurk and Twitter, Qik, Ustream and Seesmic, YouTube, Blip.TV, and Flickr.

He did a good job explaining the importance of all of these sites. People are creating content and putting it instantly online. They are streaming content online. They are breaking stories in microblogs. Journalists need to know more about these tools.

Yet even for an old hand at new media like myself, Wayne highlighted a bunch of different sites I haven’t checked out yet. When I can find some free time, I need to explore many of them.

Kyte.tv, Flixwagon.com, mogulus.com, Stickam.com, plazes.com, and tubemogul.com to name a few.

Of particular note is Mogulus, which as I understand it, allows livestreaming like Qik or Ustream do, but for multiple views of the same event. Also, tubemogul provides a tool for posting your video to something like fifteen different video sites. The list that it provides is a good starting point to see what else is out there for video besides YouTube.

Wayne also noted the book Media Rules by Brian Reich. Later, in Plurk, Wayne mentioned two other sites, a globme.com and a phreadz.com which I need to follow up with him on.

Len Witt

Wayne was followed by Len Witt. I first met Len at a Journalism That Matters gathering down in Memphis. Len was talking about his ideas for new funding sources for journalism. His focus was on ‘crowdfunding’, similar to what spot.us is doing and to some of the ideas that Krista Bradford and I had kicked around a few years ago in terms of funding investigative reporting.

Len asked, “Will we be able to create news with enough value for people to actually pay for it?” I glanced over at Jon Greenberg who is the executive editor for New Hampshire Public Radio and Helen Barrington, the program director for WFCR, the NPR station from Northampton, MA area, and thought, “Haven’t I heard that asked before, perhaps during a pledge break as I was driving up to Lowell?”

Later, in a side discussion with Jon, he noted that, yes, to a certain extent, that is the NPR model. However, NPR had the great privilege of establishing a history of delivering news with enough value for a long enough period to back up that request.

Len also made comments about the semantic web. I need to point him to Twine. I would love to hear his thoughts about how Twine relates to his ideas.

Howard Schneider

During a brown bag lunch, Howard Schneider spoke about the journalism school at Stony Brook University. He mentioned speaking with students, a third of whom trusted everything they read in the news, a third of whom didn’t trust any of it, and a third of whom didn’t know what to think. He came to the conclusion that what is most needed in a news literacy course.

Journalism schools have been focusing on the supply side of journalism, on who is producing the news. They also need to address the demand side and teach news literacy. They need to be teaching people how to tell if the information they are receiving is reliable. Howard spent the lunch hour talking about how he was approaching this at Stony Brook.

They set up a news literacy class which starts off by requiring to not view the news for 48 hours. Many students found this hard to do. They became anxious about what they might be missing. They found that the news was all around them and it was hard not to hear the news. Besides teaching the pervasiveness and importance of news, the little exercise also helped cleanse their pallets. They could now start looking for quality journalism.

The problem is that before you can judge the quality of journalism, you need to find some journalism. Too often, people confuse journalism with entertainment, propaganda, promotion, and other forms of communications. Howard noted video news releases, as an example of non-journalistic communications.

Howard proceeded to talk about what he was presenting as criteria for determining the quality of the journalism. Is the information verified or asserted? Who is making the statements, named or unnamed sources? Authoritative figures? Multiple sources or a single source?

I thought he was doing pretty well up until this point, but I started to get a little concerned. He did note that David Halberstam spoke with his class once, talking about the importance of unnamed sources and how he needed to address that with the class. I thought about the ‘authoritative figures’ that I’ve heard who too often do not speak the truth, as part of their efforts to maintain their authority. I thought about the dangers of group think and how multiple sources may not be, in fact, the most reliable.

It was interesting that later on, Howard noted that many students confuse the popularity of a story with its accuracy. He noted that for a while, the top story on Google about Martin Luther King, Jr. was by the KKK. I’m not sure that he put together his own admonitions about not confusing popularity with accuracy with his valuing multiple sources higher than a single source.

He spoke about the early reports coming out of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina where it was claimed that there was a freezer in the SuperDome full of bodies that had died as a result of the chaos after the storm. It turned out not to be true. Nonetheless, the reporter who broke the story was a well respected journalist. How had he gotten the story so wrong? Most importantly, he hadn’t opened the freezer, so ‘Open the Freezer’ became a mantra for Howard’s class.

Howard talked about the story of George Turklebaum, who had been reported to have died at his desk and wasn’t found for five days. This too, was a popular story, which keeps re-emerging on the Internet, but is untrue.

He spoke about recognizing biases and differentiating between bias and personal bias. He highlighted the work being done in implicit bias research. Looking forward, Stony Brook is researching how teaching news literacy affects numerous other aspects of the students’ lives, including future news consumption habits, overall GPA and civic engagement.

A lively question and answer period followed. One person asked, why not train students to do journalism, instead of just teaching a literacy course? After all, learning how to do journalism teaches literacy. Howard said that there just wasn’t enough time in the course.

There was a brief discussion of teaching to the test, and questions about whether it would be possible to get media literacy added as part of the pervasive standardized tests.

Howard asserted that fewer students than people imagine are reading blogs and even less are reading citizen journalism. I believe that research by the Pew contradicts this and it may be reflecting Howard’s biases or his lack of understanding about what blogs are and how pervasive they are.

I suspect that this may have impacted his thoughts on this. I suspect many students, when asked if they get their news from blogs would say no, even though they may have heard about a recent storm or earthquake from a friend’s Livejournal.

During the Q&A, his biases came through as he spoke negatively about citizen journalism. Citizen journalists are a single source, not paid, and not members of professional organizations, and therefore cannot be trusted. In other words, if you aren’t a boy on the bus, your reportage doesn’t count. His comments in this area were met with much hostility muttered under people’s breathes.

Fair Use

Next on the agenda was the discussion about Fair Use, particularly as it related to the AP v Drudge Retort case. Bob Cox of the Media Bloggers Association provided a background to the case and Robert Bertsche, a Boston based attorney who deals a lot with these issues and who represents the New England Press Association on these sorts of issues, addressed some of the legal aspects.

This was the topic that I was most interested in and my hope is that it can spawn a larger issue about establishing guidelines about Fair Use for online media, similar to what the Center for Social Media at American University did for documentary film makers and Fair Use.

Likewise, I hope that it can spawn a larger discussion about the need for better sense of ways of resolving conflicts over Fair Use, other than DMCA takedown notices and the need to address the lack of due process with DMCA takedown notices.

Both Bob and Robert spoke at length about the issues. I got a chance to speak about my larger goals briefly at the end of the talk. This is a big topic for me, which I’ve written about in the past and will write more about in the future, so I’ll save the rest of my comments on this for later.

The future of NENF

Many of the discussions went over their allotted time, so by four o’clock, the scheduled end time, the future of NENF hadn’t been discussed. People who didn’t have to rush off stuck around and talked a little bit about where NENF should go in the future.

While I may not or may not be a citizen journalist, and that may or may not be a good thing, I must say that the discussions that took place at NENF’s “Sharing the News” gathering was great. We need more opportunities for these sorts of discussions. They need to take place not only at conferences, but in the classrooms, the newsrooms and the living rooms of New England, and across the country.

]]> Impersonal Democracy http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3030 2008-06-23T15:28:56-04:00 2008-06-23T15:31:26-04:00 Aldon Hynes Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.

No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.

Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.

Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.

Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.

So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.

There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.

The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?

Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?

All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)

Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.

Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.

]]> Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.

No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.

Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.

Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.

Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.

So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.

There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.

The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?

Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?

All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)

Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.

Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.
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]]> High points and Low points of the Technology Management Conference, Day 2 http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3006 2008-06-12T10:38:07-04:00 2008-06-12T10:39:18-04:00 Aldon Hynes One of the bigger disappointments of the Technology Management Conference was Don Tapscott’s keynote speech Wednesday morning. Tapscott is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I really looked forward to hearing some profound reflections on how Wikinomics relates to the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the session was scheduled to start at 8 AM, and because of a collection of transportation issues, I just could not make it into New York from New Haven in time to hear what Mr. Tapscott had to say. I hope he did say something profound and enlightening and that others will write about it.

The most exciting high point of the show was talking with Michael Warner, CEO and Founder of Quantum 4D. Quantum 4D provides a data visualization tool using 3D models, that shift as a time series is played through it, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. It is still in an early stage and there were lots of things that I wish it had. For example, you load data into Quantum 4D in batches, instead of Quantum 4D connecting up to real time data feeds. Their presentation layer looks good, and they talk about the ability of users to collaborate in the three dimensional space that the data creates. We talked about taking the presentation object and incorporating it into other systems. Being the Second Life fan that I am, I suggested finding ways of presenting their model in Second Life so people could collaborate in a virtual world to work with the data. There was some resistance to this idea due to some of the bad press that Second Life has received.

We talked about using QWAQ as a collaboration tools and about looking at integration with other collaboration tools. We talked about pricing models and about different companies creating their own data spaces that they could share on a free or subscription basis. This was definitely the hottest software I saw there. My sense is that it is something that only innovators and visionaries are likely to get right now, and the challenge will be to see how it develops, scales, gets documented, builds its community, and on and on, before it becomes the tool of choice by early adopters and the early majority.

After seeing such an interesting and compelling presentation, I was wondering what the Open Source Update panel had to say. The panel was made up of luminaries, Roger Burkhardt, CEO and President of Ingres, Randy Hergett, director of engineering for Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, Roger Levy, SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell, Marcus Rex, CTO of The Linux Foundation, and Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. Unfortunately, it was too much like so many other panels, where the moderator asked lots of questions and didn’t really provide an opportunity to let these people shine. I left the panel without having heard anything new or interesting.

The final highpoint was the marketing effort of FTEN. They describe themselves as “an independent non-broker dealer application service provider (ASP) that offers these sophisticated solutions to Clearing Firms, Broker Dealers, Prime Brokers, Hedge Funds and Proprietary Traders.” They boast about their access, speed and control. Their swag was little stuffed pig toys with wings. They had women dressed as pigs with wings at their booth and they even gave away helium balloons to members of the press to try and get reporters to their booth. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or innovative about their platform, but I do have to compliment them as having what seemed to be the most sought after and talked about swag.

Today is the final day of the Technology Management Conference. I’m working up in Connecticut today and won’t make it in. However, I was glad about what I did get to see, as well as the chance to connect with many old friends at the show and look forward to next year’s SIFMA Technology and Management Conference and Exhibition.

]]> One of the bigger disappointments of the Technology Management Conference was Don Tapscott’s keynote speech Wednesday morning. Tapscott is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. I really looked forward to hearing some profound reflections on how Wikinomics relates to the financial services industry. Unfortunately, the session was scheduled to start at 8 AM, and because of a collection of transportation issues, I just could not make it into New York from New Haven in time to hear what Mr. Tapscott had to say. I hope he did say something profound and enlightening and that others will write about it.

The most exciting high point of the show was talking with Michael Warner, CEO and Founder of Quantum 4D. Quantum 4D provides a data visualization tool using 3D models, that shift as a time series is played through it, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. It is still in an early stage and there were lots of things that I wish it had. For example, you load data into Quantum 4D in batches, instead of Quantum 4D connecting up to real time data feeds. Their presentation layer looks good, and they talk about the ability of users to collaborate in the three dimensional space that the data creates. We talked about taking the presentation object and incorporating it into other systems. Being the Second Life fan that I am, I suggested finding ways of presenting their model in Second Life so people could collaborate in a virtual world to work with the data. There was some resistance to this idea due to some of the bad press that Second Life has received.

We talked about using QWAQ as a collaboration tools and about looking at integration with other collaboration tools. We talked about pricing models and about different companies creating their own data spaces that they could share on a free or subscription basis. This was definitely the hottest software I saw there. My sense is that it is something that only innovators and visionaries are likely to get right now, and the challenge will be to see how it develops, scales, gets documented, builds its community, and on and on, before it becomes the tool of choice by early adopters and the early majority.

After seeing such an interesting and compelling presentation, I was wondering what the Open Source Update panel had to say. The panel was made up of luminaries, Roger Burkhardt, CEO and President of Ingres, Randy Hergett, director of engineering for Open Source at Hewlett-Packard, Roger Levy, SVP and General Manager of Open Platform Solutions for Novell, Marcus Rex, CTO of The Linux Foundation, and Michael Tiemann, VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. Unfortunately, it was too much like so many other panels, where the moderator asked lots of questions and didn’t really provide an opportunity to let these people shine. I left the panel without having heard anything new or interesting.

The final highpoint was the marketing effort of FTEN. They describe themselves as “an independent non-broker dealer application service provider (ASP) that offers these sophisticated solutions to Clearing Firms, Broker Dealers, Prime Brokers, Hedge Funds and Proprietary Traders.” They boast about their access, speed and control. Their swag was little stuffed pig toys with wings. They had women dressed as pigs with wings at their booth and they even gave away helium balloons to members of the press to try and get reporters to their booth. I didn’t find anything particularly exciting or innovative about their platform, but I do have to compliment them as having what seemed to be the most sought after and talked about swag.

Today is the final day of the Technology Management Conference. I’m working up in Connecticut today and won’t make it in. However, I was glad about what I did get to see, as well as the chance to connect with many old friends at the show and look forward to next year’s SIFMA Technology and Management Conference and Exhibition.
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]]> Unstructured Data http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3003 2008-06-10T19:40:55-04:00 2008-06-10T19:42:12-04:00 Aldon Hynes Just about every year, I find a key theme from the Technology Management Conference (TMC), and this year’s theme seems to be unstructured data. Other years, compliance seems to be an issue, such as the year after Sarbanes Oxley took effect. Another year seemed to be about phone turrets, but that might have been because I was in the market for phone turrets that year.

So, I’m not sure if it is because I am attending TMC this year, in part as a blogger, or if it is just that much more prominent, but unstructured data turned out to be a key part of my discussions.

When I picked up my press credentials, there was a press release from Firstrain announcing the FirstRain Blog Monitor. The press release talked about the proprietary FirstRain MarketScore Algorithm “to conintually analyze and identify the most impactful blogs from the hundreds of thousands across the broad web”.

Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain was quoted as saying, “Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light”. The press release ended with a pointer to Penny’s blog.

NewsEdge was also on the first floor of the show. They are a news searching tool that has been around for several years. They do not current crawl blogs as part of their real time news, but they do have the ability search blogs and they hope to add blog crawling by the end of the year.

At the other end of the spectrum was NewsWare. They do not track blogs because “blogs don’t factcheck” a spokesperson for the company said.

Not far away from NewsEdge and NewsWare was Dow Jones Newsfeeds. They were touting their Solutions for Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading. In essence Dow Jones is taking key reports and providing elementized newsfeeds that are especially interesting to algorithm traders. I keep hearing good stuff about their feeds and it was my first chance to get details. They do not include information from blogs in their elementized news feeds, however they make extensive use of it in other products, such as Factiva.

In addition, the Dow Jones representative spoke about “Generate”, a Boston based firm that Dow Jones recently acquired which dynamically tracks information on around 4.7 million executives, ties it together with other news data to provide a solution something like what you would expect from a businessman’s mashup of Google and LinkedIn.

All of this led to a particularly interesting company, JackBe. JackBe provides an ‘Enterprise Mashup Platform’, that gathers information from many platforms on the web and within the enterprise so that it can be presented as a widget that a company can use internally or externally. They have done work in other businesses and are starting to explore providing their technology to the financial services sector. They were the most interesting tool I found on the first day of TMC for structuring unstructured data. It will be interesting to see what day two brings.

]]> Just about every year, I find a key theme from the Technology Management Conference (TMC), and this year’s theme seems to be unstructured data. Other years, compliance seems to be an issue, such as the year after Sarbanes Oxley took effect. Another year seemed to be about phone turrets, but that might have been because I was in the market for phone turrets that year.

So, I’m not sure if it is because I am attending TMC this year, in part as a blogger, or if it is just that much more prominent, but unstructured data turned out to be a key part of my discussions.

When I picked up my press credentials, there was a press release from Firstrain announcing the FirstRain Blog Monitor. The press release talked about the proprietary FirstRain MarketScore Algorithm “to conintually analyze and identify the most impactful blogs from the hundreds of thousands across the broad web”.

Penny Herscher, president and CEO of FirstRain was quoted as saying, “Blogs are where many of the most intriguing questions, trends and ideas first come to light”. The press release ended with a pointer to Penny’s blog.

NewsEdge was also on the first floor of the show. They are a news searching tool that has been around for several years. They do not current crawl blogs as part of their real time news, but they do have the ability search blogs and they hope to add blog crawling by the end of the year.

At the other end of the spectrum was NewsWare. They do not track blogs because “blogs don’t factcheck” a spokesperson for the company said.

Not far away from NewsEdge and NewsWare was Dow Jones Newsfeeds. They were touting their Solutions for Algorithmic and Quantitative Trading. In essence Dow Jones is taking key reports and providing elementized newsfeeds that are especially interesting to algorithm traders. I keep hearing good stuff about their feeds and it was my first chance to get details. They do not include information from blogs in their elementized news feeds, however they make extensive use of it in other products, such as Factiva.

In addition, the Dow Jones representative spoke about “Generate”, a Boston based firm that Dow Jones recently acquired which dynamically tracks information on around 4.7 million executives, ties it together with other news data to provide a solution something like what you would expect from a businessman’s mashup of Google and LinkedIn.

All of this led to a particularly interesting company, JackBe. JackBe provides an ‘Enterprise Mashup Platform’, that gathers information from many platforms on the web and within the enterprise so that it can be presented as a widget that a company can use internally or externally. They have done work in other businesses and are starting to explore providing their technology to the financial services sector. They were the most interesting tool I found on the first day of TMC for structuring unstructured data. It will be interesting to see what day two brings.
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]]> Technology Management Conference http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/3000 2008-06-09T15:08:31-04:00 2008-06-09T15:10:42-04:00 Aldon Hynes As many of my friend microblog from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m preparing to head to the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008. SIFMA is the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association. It was formed by the merger of the Security Industry Association and the Bond Market Association. I’ve gone to the Technology Management Conference for many years as part of my work with Wall Street firms.

However, this year, I’m wearing a slightly different hat. I’m going as a member of the press, a credentialed blogger. I’ll be looking for things similar to those that I looked for when I went as a Wall Street technology executive, what is the interesting hot new technology. Other years, I’ve simply explored the exhibit hall, which is typically more than a full days work in and of itself. This year, I’ll try to attend some of talks as well.

At first glance, the talks don’t sound especially interesting. Perhaps the most interesting will be discussions about computing capacity or open source software. Yet there are bound to be surprises, and by being on the press list, I’m getting little hints here and there. So far, the most interesting press release has come from Tick Data which is announcing the availability of “trade and quote data for equities traded on Japan’s six major stock exchanges back to January 2003”. I was always fascinated by this sort of data and have been trying to gather it for the stock exchanges in Second Life. Tick Data’s press release says that “the firm expects to expand its coverage further into this region in the near future.” This sort of data illustrates just one of the reason why Wall Street technologists are always looking for more compute power.

Will there be other interesting innovations reported out of the Technology Management Conference? We’ll have to wait and see. It probably won’t bring as much excitement as talk about the next version of the iPhone, but it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out.

]]> As many of my friend microblog from the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, I’m preparing to head to the SIFMA Technology Management Conference 2008. SIFMA is the Security Industry and Financial Markets Association. It was formed by the merger of the Security Industry Association and the Bond Market Association. I’ve gone to the Technology Management Conference for many years as part of my work with Wall Street firms.

However, this year, I’m wearing a slightly different hat. I’m going as a member of the press, a credentialed blogger. I’ll be looking for things similar to those that I looked for when I went as a Wall Street technology executive, what is the interesting hot new technology. Other years, I’ve simply explored the exhibit hall, which is typically more than a full days work in and of itself. This year, I’ll try to attend some of talks as well.

At first glance, the talks don’t sound especially interesting. Perhaps the most interesting will be discussions about computing capacity or open source software. Yet there are bound to be surprises, and by being on the press list, I’m getting little hints here and there. So far, the most interesting press release has come from Tick Data which is announcing the availability of “trade and quote data for equities traded on Japan’s six major stock exchanges back to January 2003”. I was always fascinated by this sort of data and have been trying to gather it for the stock exchanges in Second Life. Tick Data’s press release says that “the firm expects to expand its coverage further into this region in the near future.” This sort of data illustrates just one of the reason why Wall Street technologists are always looking for more compute power.

Will there be other interesting innovations reported out of the Technology Management Conference? We’ll have to wait and see. It probably won’t bring as much excitement as talk about the next version of the iPhone, but it will be interesting to watch and see what comes out.
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]]> Crossing the Chasm without Jumping the Shark http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2978 2008-05-24T08:06:19-04:00 2008-05-24T08:09:58-04:00 Aldon Hynes The recent issues around Twitter have led me to ponder how companies can cross the chasm as their product appeal grows from the innovators and early adopters to bring in the early majority without jumping the shark.

There are many different issues to explore here, but given that it is Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and I should really be getting on the road for a camping trip, I’ll try to have a brief exploration of the issues here, and then, perhaps, explore them in more detail later on.

To me, the interesting topic to explore is how the growth affects the dynamics of the company, both with the management of the company, and the larger group of stakeholders.

]]> The recent issues around Twitter have led me to ponder how companies can cross the chasm as their product appeal grows from the innovators and early adopters to bring in the early majority without jumping the shark.

There are many different issues to explore here, but given that it is Saturday morning of Memorial Day weekend, and I should really be getting on the road for a camping trip, I’ll try to have a brief exploration of the issues here, and then, perhaps, explore them in more detail later on.

To me, the interesting topic to explore is how the growth affects the dynamics of the company, both with the management of the company, and the larger group of stakeholders.
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Yesterday saw reports that Twitter has received $15 in second round financing. How will Ev and Biz handle the influx of cash, the management of new employees, the dealing with venture capitalists, and other issues that second round financing can bring in? Based on recent tweets by them, it looks like they will handle it nicely by going sailing together and getting pleasantly tipsy.

However, not every company handles this well and the group dynamics within the upper management of technology companies can get pretty nasty. Years ago, I worked with a management consultant who introduced me to many issues in group dynamics. I learned about the Tavistock and AK Rice Institute and their relationship to the Group Relations tradition, the work of Wilfred Bion, and the The International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations (ISPSO). She has gone on to form a consultancy, CenterNorth that focuses on “multidisciplinary executive coaching, change management and strategy consultancy”. I would love to explore how to approach the changes that a management team faces as their company crosses the chasm, but that is better left for Sharon and her team.

Instead, I want to focus on some of the discussions that have taken place amongst the stakeholders of Twitter. These are users of Twitter that have been discussing the recently frequently occurring outages, and the issues of Twitter’s Terms of Service.

At Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, Elizabeth Englander and Ann Bartow led a great discussion about Hate Speech and Oppression in Cyberspace. Stakeholders of any emerging social site online are likely to run into these issues and it seems as if dealing successfully with these issues is an important part of crossing the chasm without jumping the shark.

A company that doesn’t deal with this well, by coming up with lame excuses like “We’re just a communications utility” while ignoring the community of their stakeholders is likely to run into difficulties. These difficulties may or may not be legal issues.

Most terms of service are written with conditional clauses about how the company “may deal with harassment issues on a case by case basis”, or something like that, allowing them wiggle room if they do not act. Yet the actions by State Attorney Generals against large social sites about deception provides an interesting legal avenue. Even the conditional clauses may set up an expectation of safety that may not truly be there. In addition, a company that does not adequately address Hate Speech and Oppression in Cyberspace runs into the difficulties of essentially saying, “We are a cyberharassment friendly zone”. That is not a message that companies concerned about their stakeholders wants to get out.

In severe cases, there may also be commerce issues. A standard argument is that these sites are run by private companies that can treat their users however they please. Yet, in physical space, a company that refuses to allow in or properly serve customers because of race or gender many face legal action on discrimination. The argument that companies can act however they want falls flat.

The session discussed the idea of taking takedown notices from the DMCA, adding a little bit of due process, and applying it to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. To maintain Section 230 immunity, a company would need to show that it is adequately, and with due process, responding to takedown requests of hate speech and oppression in cyberspace. Another idea was to apply the idea of restraining orders to cyberspace and perhaps adding something like that to a modified Section 230.

The final plenary session of Computers, Freedom and Privacy was presented by Clay Shirky. His book, Here Comes Everybody may also provide insights into how companies can cross the chasm without jumping the shark. I was tempted to title this post, “Look Out, Twitter, Here Comes Everybody.” He touched on Twitter, noting that "The front page of Twitter is a monument to the inane,” and yet he went on to illustrate how Twitter has proven to be a very powerful and important organizing tool.

Many folks on Twitter have recently been bringing up earlier works of Shirky, including a reference to Bion and Shirky’s corollary to Godwin’s law. I must admit that the description of Bion that Shirky gave in 2003 didn’t really fit with my experiences with Bion’s thinking through the Group Relations community and it was fascinating to get such a different perspective.

Godwin’s law states "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." I can’t find the reference to Shirky’s corollary, but essentially it is that as any group grows, so will the calls for moderation.

Shirky presented an interesting four quadranted Gartnarian representation of how to treat people differently based on the level of engagement with a social site. He noted that the wrong level of moderation makes you inert.

Shirky talked about how a small, short term social sites need neither moderation nor a reputation management system. Small social sites that exist for a long time benefit from reputation management systems. Large sites that exist for a short time benefit from moderation and large sites that exist for a long time benefit from both.

This brings us back to the issue of crossing the chasm without jumping the shark. A social site starts off as a small short term site. To attract the innovators and early adopters, it probably needs to avoid moderation and reputation systems. Yet as the site exists for a longer time, crossing the chasm, drawing in the early majority, it moves from being a site that is best with no moderation or reputation system to a site that is best with both. Failing to add these tools may prevent the early majority from entering in. Adding these tools may push away the innovators and early adopters that keep the site vibrant and compelling.

It is a difficult line to walk, which perhaps brings me back to “the human side of strategic leadership”, to borrow a phrase from CenterNorth.

When it comes to online social sites, I am normally an innovator or early adopter. I’m a big fan of Twitter, and I hope that they can find a way to successfully cross the chasm without jumping the shark. Hopefully these thoughts will be helpful. Yet if they can’t pull it off, someone else will. Microblogging is to compelling to die because the leader can’t manage change.

]]> #cfp08 A Human Face and Due Process Online http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2976 2008-05-23T07:44:16-04:00 2008-05-23T11:14:40-04:00 Aldon Hynes If I were to summarize the ‘Activism and Education Using Social Networks’ track at Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, I would boil it down to putting a human face on advocacy organizations and seeking due process online. What was most interesting was that during the discussions, I watched these processes happen online.

Eric spoke about the new ACLU Blog, “because freedom can’t blog itself”. He spoke about the difficulties in working out the policies of what could get written by whom for the blog. He noted the contrast between traditional advertising, expensive, glossy, and not reaching the younger generation, and online content. He noted that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are not all that fancy in their graphical design, yet it is the user generated content and the first person perspective that is so compelling. As he spoke about this, he brought up the ACLU’s Flickr page, which to my surprise, included a picture of a good friend of mine. I quickly posted a link to the Flickr photo on my friend’s wall in Facebook. Ah yes, the power of the personal.

We broke into hands on sessions and I spoke with many different people. A neighbor, who is active in town politics and works for Yale was there and I spent some time talking with her. A friend of one of the conference organizers from Tribe was there and we talked a little bit. I showed a few people Second Life and talked about the role of Second Life in disability rights advocacy.

This led me to a fascinating discussion with Dr. Linda D. Misek-Falkoff from the United Nations and the Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding. She spoke about RatifyNow.Org, a website to support the global grassroots efforts to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has a wonderful set of videos of people in the U.N. talking about the convention. She also understood the importance of putting a human face on large organizations. She took a quick video of me saying hello to ambassadors and activists fighting for the rights of persons with disabilities.

The afternoon led to a brainstorming session where the topic of social network service providers failing to provide adequate due process was discussed. In particular, Facebooks tendency to ban people automatically because they try to send too many messages, add too many friends, or similar activities. A friend of mine was recently banned this way, and has gotten nothing but automated responses to his requests. A few of us are talking about setting up a group to address this issue.

As this discussion was going on, I received a Twitter from Andy Carvin about Ariel Waldman’s blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Specifically, the post centered around Twitter failing to deal with harassment issues.

At a previous session at CFP there were some great discussions around the issue of cyber-harassment and it will be a topic of one of this morning’s sessions. Around an hour later, a bug report was reported on GetSatisfaction and the blog post got Dugg. The next hour saw the article make the front page of Digg and an hour later Jason Goldman of Twitter responded,

Twitter does not get involved in these disputes between users over issues of content except in limited circumstances. Twitter is a provider of information, not a mediator. Specific physical threats, certain legal obligations, privacy breaches of specific types of information (e.g. SSN, credit cards), and misleading impersonation are some cases where we may become involved and potentially terminate an account.

This only added fuel to the fire. Evan Williams of Twitter twittered.

Note: Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they're saying/assuming is true.

This too, fueled anger at Twitter, already under lots of criticism for its spate of recent outages. It is worth noting that 12 other people noted on GetSatisfaction that they have the same problem, almost as many people as work for Twitter.

About three hours after this, Biz Stone, stepped in and said

The fact that so many of us can have differing opinions without having even reviewed the content we're discussing highlights the difficulty of this issue. In fact, Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.

All of this returns back to the issue of due process. The fact that so many people are so concerned about this highlights the importance of the issue. Biz states, “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” This harkens back to the issues of Section 230 and communications utilities not being liable for content.

Yet it misses a very important point. Twitter, like Facebook and Second Life, which have also have similar issues, is not just a communication utility. All of them are communities. They are communities dependent on privately run communication utilities. These communities lack recourse to any sort of due process.

Biz’s comment about determining the line between update an insult not being something that either Twitter nor a crowd could do well seems ill advised to me. Someone needs to make that determination. Twitter can try to do it. Twitter can encourage the crowd, the community, to join in the effort to determine the line. If that doesn’t happen, the line is likely to be repeatedly brought to the courts and to legislatures to be decided. Either that, or the community will simply move to some other communications utility which provides better recourse to due process. None of those options seem particularly good for Twitter.

The activism panel at Computers, Freedom and Privacy spent time struggling with putting a human face on organizations and in seeking due process in online communities. The ACLU seems to understand these issues very well. Let us hope that corporations like Twitter, Facebook, and Linden Lab makes some progress on this topic as well.

]]> If I were to summarize the ‘Activism and Education Using Social Networks’ track at Computers, Freedom and Privacy yesterday, I would boil it down to putting a human face on advocacy organizations and seeking due process online. What was most interesting was that during the discussions, I watched these processes happen online.

Eric spoke about the new ACLU Blog, “because freedom can’t blog itself”. He spoke about the difficulties in working out the policies of what could get written by whom for the blog. He noted the contrast between traditional advertising, expensive, glossy, and not reaching the younger generation, and online content. He noted that sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr are not all that fancy in their graphical design, yet it is the user generated content and the first person perspective that is so compelling. As he spoke about this, he brought up the ACLU’s Flickr page, which to my surprise, included a picture of a good friend of mine. I quickly posted a link to the Flickr photo on my friend’s wall in Facebook. Ah yes, the power of the personal.

We broke into hands on sessions and I spoke with many different people. A neighbor, who is active in town politics and works for Yale was there and I spent some time talking with her. A friend of one of the conference organizers from Tribe was there and we talked a little bit. I showed a few people Second Life and talked about the role of Second Life in disability rights advocacy.

This led me to a fascinating discussion with Dr. Linda D. Misek-Falkoff from the United Nations and the Center for Cross-Cultural Understanding. She spoke about RatifyNow.Org, a website to support the global grassroots efforts to ratify the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. She has a wonderful set of videos of people in the U.N. talking about the convention. She also understood the importance of putting a human face on large organizations. She took a quick video of me saying hello to ambassadors and activists fighting for the rights of persons with disabilities.

The afternoon led to a brainstorming session where the topic of social network service providers failing to provide adequate due process was discussed. In particular, Facebooks tendency to ban people automatically because they try to send too many messages, add too many friends, or similar activities. A friend of mine was recently banned this way, and has gotten nothing but automated responses to his requests. A few of us are talking about setting up a group to address this issue.

As this discussion was going on, I received a Twitter from Andy Carvin about Ariel Waldman’s blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Specifically, the post centered around Twitter failing to deal with harassment issues.

At a previous session at CFP there were some great discussions around the issue of cyber-harassment and it will be a topic of one of this morning’s sessions. Around an hour later, a bug report was reported on GetSatisfaction and the blog post got Dugg. The next hour saw the article make the front page of Digg and an hour later Jason Goldman of Twitter responded,

Twitter does not get involved in these disputes between users over issues of content except in limited circumstances. Twitter is a provider of information, not a mediator. Specific physical threats, certain legal obligations, privacy breaches of specific types of information (e.g. SSN, credit cards), and misleading impersonation are some cases where we may become involved and potentially terminate an account.

This only added fuel to the fire. Evan Williams of Twitter twittered.

Note: Before joining a mob, you might want to check if everything they're saying/assuming is true.

This too, fueled anger at Twitter, already under lots of criticism for its spate of recent outages. It is worth noting that 12 other people noted on GetSatisfaction that they have the same problem, almost as many people as work for Twitter.

About three hours after this, Biz Stone, stepped in and said

The fact that so many of us can have differing opinions without having even reviewed the content we're discussing highlights the difficulty of this issue. In fact, Twitter recognizes that it is not skilled at judging content disputes between individuals. Determining the line between update and insult is not something that Twitter nor a crowd would do well.

All of this returns back to the issue of due process. The fact that so many people are so concerned about this highlights the importance of the issue. Biz states, “Twitter is a communication utility, not a mediator of content.” This harkens back to the issues of Section 230 and communications utilities not being liable for content.

Yet it misses a very important point. Twitter, like Facebook and Second Life, which have also have similar issues, is not just a communication utility. All of them are communities. They are communities dependent on privately run communication utilities. These communities lack recourse to any sort of due process.

Biz’s comment about determining the line between update an insult not being something that either Twitter nor a crowd could do well seems ill advised to me. Someone needs to make that determination. Twitter can try to do it. Twitter can encourage the crowd, the community, to join in the effort to determine the line. If that doesn’t happen, the line is likely to be repeatedly brought to the courts and to legislatures to be decided. Either that, or the community will simply move to some other communications utility which provides better recourse to due process. None of those options seem particularly good for Twitter.

The activism panel at Computers, Freedom and Privacy spent time struggling with putting a human face on organizations and in seeking due process in online communities. The ACLU seems to understand these issues very well. Let us hope that corporations like Twitter, Facebook, and Linden Lab makes some progress on this topic as well.
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]]> #cfp08 Why not? http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2975 2008-05-22T09:10:56-04:00 2008-05-22T09:12:18-04:00 Aldon Hynes "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" This famous quote of Robert Kennedy paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw sets the tone for this mornings sessions at Computers, Freedom and Privacy.

The plenary panel will be discussing "an inter-networked communication infrastructure that could facilitate the creation of a modern surveillance society". It sounds like a fascinating panel, and looking at things, I am sure people are bound to ask the question, Why? There are plenty of explanations, which I hope will get explored.

A parallel track is Activism and Education Using Social Networks. It looks like a small turnout of people, many of whom I already know and are already very active online. Yet this is the dreaming of things that never were and asking why not.

]]> "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" This famous quote of Robert Kennedy paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw sets the tone for this mornings sessions at Computers, Freedom and Privacy.

The plenary panel will be discussing "an inter-networked communication infrastructure that could facilitate the creation of a modern surveillance society". It sounds like a fascinating panel, and looking at things, I am sure people are bound to ask the question, Why? There are plenty of explanations, which I hope will get explored.

A parallel track is Activism and Education Using Social Networks. It looks like a small turnout of people, many of whom I already know and are already very active online. Yet this is the dreaming of things that never were and asking why not.
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]]> #cfp08 Networking http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2972 2008-05-21T07:44:14-04:00 2008-05-21T07:45:31-04:00 Aldon Hynes One of the important aspects of any great conference is the networking that goes on. However, this rarely gets listed in articles about conferences. For the journalistic types, it isn’t especially newsworthy. Yet it actually fits quite nicely with blogging. So, with that, let me highlight some of the people that I ran into at the conference yesterday.

The first session I went to was Mike Godwin doing his spectacular introduction to constitutional law for geeks. I took copious notes and may write up a more detailed post about that session later on. For those acquainted with Godwin’s law, the session was small enough to avoid any direct reference to Nazi’s.

Via Twitter, Jon Lebkowsky joined in. Jon has been to many CFPs in the past, but couldn’t make it this year. I first got to know Jon through Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid and have remained friends ever since. Also at Mike’s session were Nancy Scola and David Isenberg. Both of whom I’ve know for quite a while through blogging and it was great to catch up with them. Nancy introduced me to Jennifer Mercurio, Government Affairs Director of Entertainment Consumers Association. We had a good brief talk about Second Life, the Video Gamers Voter Network, and related issues, and I hope to follow up on these discussions going forward.

In the evening, there was a reception which included Jack Balkin. Jack, of course, was in constant demand, and I didn’t speak with him as much as I would have liked. However, I did have a great discussion with Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office. He will be the keynote speaker on Thursday and I look forward to hearing him then. I mentioned Epic and my experiences at UBS which seems to fit nicely with his talk. We talked a little bit about the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”, and pondered whether the actions of the RIAA or MPAA were really promoting the progress of science and useful arts.

I also picked up ‘Scenarios for the Future” published by the European Patent Office and look forward to reading it.

As the evening wore down, I also spoke with Gavin Baker, Ben Masel, and several other people.

I’m sure there will be plenty of additional interesting networking today. As a quick comment to anyone from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, Wordless Wednesday, BlogExplosion, or other sites that bring people to my site for very quick visits, if you’ve made it this far thank you. I would also encourage you to follow the links to some of the folks I met yesterday. You might not get an EntreCard credit, but you might find some very interesting write.

]]> One of the important aspects of any great conference is the networking that goes on. However, this rarely gets listed in articles about conferences. For the journalistic types, it isn’t especially newsworthy. Yet it actually fits quite nicely with blogging. So, with that, let me highlight some of the people that I ran into at the conference yesterday.

The first session I went to was Mike Godwin doing his spectacular introduction to constitutional law for geeks. I took copious notes and may write up a more detailed post about that session later on. For those acquainted with Godwin’s law, the session was small enough to avoid any direct reference to Nazi’s.

Via Twitter, Jon Lebkowsky joined in. Jon has been to many CFPs in the past, but couldn’t make it this year. I first got to know Jon through Gov. Dean’s 2004 Presidential bid and have remained friends ever since. Also at Mike’s session were Nancy Scola and David Isenberg. Both of whom I’ve know for quite a while through blogging and it was great to catch up with them. Nancy introduced me to Jennifer Mercurio, Government Affairs Director of Entertainment Consumers Association. We had a good brief talk about Second Life, the Video Gamers Voter Network, and related issues, and I hope to follow up on these discussions going forward.

In the evening, there was a reception which included Jack Balkin. Jack, of course, was in constant demand, and I didn’t speak with him as much as I would have liked. However, I did have a great discussion with Konstantinos Karachalios of the European Patent Office. He will be the keynote speaker on Thursday and I look forward to hearing him then. I mentioned Epic and my experiences at UBS which seems to fit nicely with his talk. We talked a little bit about the copyright clause of the U.S. Constitution, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”, and pondered whether the actions of the RIAA or MPAA were really promoting the progress of science and useful arts.

I also picked up ‘Scenarios for the Future” published by the European Patent Office and look forward to reading it.

As the evening wore down, I also spoke with Gavin Baker, Ben Masel, and several other people.

I’m sure there will be plenty of additional interesting networking today. As a quick comment to anyone from EntreCard, MyBlogLog, Wordless Wednesday, BlogExplosion, or other sites that bring people to my site for very quick visits, if you’ve made it this far thank you. I would also encourage you to follow the links to some of the folks I met yesterday. You might not get an EntreCard credit, but you might find some very interesting write.
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]]> #cfp08 Project VoteProtector http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/2971 2008-05-20T20:46:24-04:00 2008-05-20T20:51:26-04:00 Aldon Hynes After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, volunteers self organized a project on the Internet to help people find missing loved ones. Hurricane Katrina disproportionately affected poor people and African-Americans. This afternoon at Computers, Freedom and Privacy there was a workshop on deceptive campaign practices. Many ideas were presented and it struck me that perhaps a project similar to PeopleFinder, let’s call in VoteProtector, should be created.

The groundwork was laid by discussing ways that people have presented deceptive information in an effort to suppress votes, particularly of the poor, minorities, and increasingly, of the youth. Tova Wang of Common Cause and Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center led a discussion including Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of Aristotle, Jon Pincus of Tales from the Net, and Ruchi Bhorwmik who works as legislative counsel to Senator Barack Obama.

Many stories were told about spreading false information in efforts to discourage voters from voting or telling them to vote at wrong locations or on wrong days.

A lively discussion followed about different ways of addressing this. One part of the solution is to get more people aware of 1 866 Our Vote, a phone number, and a website that can be used to get people to report voting irregularities and seek help. The problem is getting more people to know about this, to know about their voting rights and to work together to fight deceptive practices.

It struck me that a project like PeopleFinder focusing on these issues could be a powerful way to do this. People could create tools to mashup reports of voting suppression efforts. These efforts could quickly be brought to the attention of the press in the area of the attempted voting suppression. Voting rights, on a state by state basis could be explained. What are the rules about registering to vote? What sort of identification do you need do you need to bring with you to the polls? What are your options for early voting, absentee voting, and provisional ballots?

What are the rules about voting if you’ve been convicted of a felony? I believe some states allow felons to vote. Others do not. Many have rules about felons being able to vote after they have served their time, and perhaps done a few other tasks to get their voting rights back.

Techniques to make encourage voting and discourage voting suppression could be discussed, such as the great idea of getting a group of people to go to the polls together. If you go as part of a group, you are less likely to be turned away, and you are more likely to stand up for your rights if challenged.

This could then be promoted across all the social networks, not only Facebook, which serves a demographic which is perhaps less likely to run into voter suppression activities, but also MySpace, Hi5, and many other sites that have a tendency of getting overlooked.

So, anyone want to pick up the Project VoteProtector ball and run with it?

]]> After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, volunteers self organized a project on the Internet to help people find missing loved ones. Hurricane Katrina disproportionately affected poor people and African-Americans. This afternoon at Computers, Freedom and Privacy there was a workshop on deceptive campaign practices. Many ideas were presented and it struck me that perhaps a project similar to PeopleFinder, let’s call in VoteProtector, should be created.

The groundwork was laid by discussing ways that people have presented deceptive information in an effort to suppress votes, particularly of the poor, minorities, and increasingly, of the youth. Tova Wang of Common Cause and Lillie Coney of the Electronic Privacy Information Center led a discussion including Jenigh J. Garrett of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, John Aristotle Phillips, co-founder of Aristotle, Jon Pincus of Tales from the Net, and Ruchi Bhorwmik who works as legislative counsel to Senator Barack Obama.

Many stories were told about spreading false information in efforts to discourage voters from voting or telling them to vote at wrong locations or on wrong days.

A lively discussion followed about different ways of addressing this. One part of the solution is to get more people aware of 1 866 Our Vote, a phone number, and a website that can be used to get people to report voting irregularities and seek help. The problem is getting more people to know about this, to know about their voting rights and to work together to fight deceptive practices.

It struck me that a project like PeopleFinder focusing on these issues could be a powerful way to do this. People could create tools to mashup reports of voting suppression efforts. These efforts could quickly be brought to the attention of the press in the area of the attempted voting suppression. Voting rights, on a state by state basis could be explained. What are the rules about registering to vote? What sort of identification do you need do you need to bring with you to the polls? What are your options for early voting, absentee voting, and provisional ballots?

What are the rules about voting if you’ve been convicted of a felony? I believe some states allow felons to vote. Others do not. Many have rules about felons being able to vote after they have served their time, and perhaps done a few other tasks to get their voting rights back.

Techniques to make encourage voting and discourage voting suppression could be discussed, such as the great idea of getting a group of people to go to the polls together. If you go as part of a group, you are less likely to be turned away, and you are more likely to stand up for your rights if challenged.

This could then be promoted across all the social networks, not only Facebook, which serves a demographic which is perhaps less likely to run into voter suppression activities, but also MySpace, Hi5, and many other sites that have a tendency of getting overlooked.

So, anyone want to pick up the Project VoteProtector ball and run with it?
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