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November 19, 2002 - 3:31pm -- hydrarchist

Free of Value and Just for Fun! was the title of the conference that Jamie and I spoke at two weeks ago in Berlin. The orgainising group,Oekonux, was set up at a birds of a feather sesssion during the Masters of OS confernec in Berlin '99 and is dedicated to using lessons from the free software movement to devlop a borader social critique.

Stefan Meretz's interview was the first time that I cam into contact with their ideas, and the similarity to many of the threads we had been working on in the critical legal community was striking.

Our presentation described some of the legal tendencies in the last quarter century, specifically the tying of Intellectual Property Rights to trade and the targetting of individual end-users with draxonian criminal sanctions. Otherwise we gave a presentation of our proposal for the direct allocation of funds from users to producers as an alternative to copyright. The session went well, even if I felt that I ballsed up a few things, but the best aspect was th extensive audience participation. Two thirds of the people in the room took part in the discussion at one point or another and we felt proud to have been able to break from the lecture format and create an inclusive atmosphere. We met loads of cool people there as well, like Graeme, Chris, Saifi, Sven, Albrecht and Ingo (with whom I made a Spartan journey across berlin at 6.00 am, totally plastered in the vicious winter air which Berlin has a special nack at producing) and tons of others. You can see some photos of the vent at Chris's page.

Greme Seaman gave a speech entitled two economies where he described the way that transition between modes of production unfolded last time and compared it with what's happening now. He asked where might we see the voluntary non-proprietary model of free software spread into other parts of social life. As an examplele, he brought up the workers revolution in Portugal - he was living in a town under worker's control there at the time. There a plant owned by Alfa Romeo was taken over by the workers. Previously they had problems with poor part supply from other factories in France, and so one of the first things they did was to contact the other factory and demand better parts which they duely got. At a certain point they found that there wasn't really much demand left for motor cars and they decided that the production facility could be turned over to something else. An inquiry was made with the local residents as to what they felt would be useful to produce, and the answer was cookers. The plant's machinery was adapted and the factory began to produce said cookers.

The [point of this is that the workers were capable of organising production cooperatively themselves, integrate the feedback from their community and alter the tools at their disposal so as to satisfy the newly identified needs, steps very similar to what happens in free software.

Now given my own interests, this discussion left me agape. But the best was yet to come. Christain Beaupoli, an engineer, began to argue that in fact the account could be repeated for any number of tangible consumer items. From washing machines to motor cars, most of the cost, passed on to the consumer in the price, derives from the research and design part of the process, according to him up to 90% of the total costs. This R&D generates the blueprints which constitute the 'build' of the set of instructions necessary for the machine tools to produce the commodity. Furthermore, and with regards to the last 10%, most household appliances are principlally composed of common standard parts: sheets of metal, washers, nuts, bolts, simple circuit boards etc, with only a small proportion being in some sense unique to the product. In Germany -and assumably elsewhere- there already exist companies known as 'lohn-fertiger' who can produce these custom components on order. The obstacle for most putative free hardware builders is the lack of sufficient volujme to make it feasible to go to the lohn-fertiger with the prosp[ect of being taken seriously. Nonetheless in principle, the lion's share of tangible production is susceptible to the free software method, the other 9% is handled by the cheap commodity based production processes and only 1% requires dedicated development. Christain compared this 1% with the function played by the linux Distributions such as Red Hat, Suse, debian. Commercial distributoirs must collect adequate information to guide their production output of linux packages, make arrangements with distributors etc. Why not have companies which perform the same function for free hardware and allow them to make a living off the missing 1%?

You can read more about this at Christian's web page where the project has been given the provisional title of Flosh.

November 19, 2002 - 3:16pm -- hydrarchist

Ah yes. Last time it was spleen-venting weather, my New York tryst was coming to a sharp end and the world continued to go to hell. Now the rat is about to fall off the treadmill and my sorry ass is being hauled back for a second helping of punishment in the land of insecurity. In the meantime, it was Europa intermission and a first sally back to Berlin in seven years, with lots of shiny memories suspended in jeopardy over the rocks of reality. Ten years ago it was all squatting, street festivals and harassing the authorities under the strangely benevolent gaze of Alexanderplatz, bicycle theft at 9.00 in the morning, fighting the city’s candidature for the Olympics in an unholy alliance of upstarts and pensioners, tens of thousands strong; in short, an anarcho-teenage West World. When they started chasing us around Alexanderplatz for having no lights on our illicitly procured vehicles (the ignominy of it!) it was clear that the witching hour has passed.

A tad weird thus, to pad quietly around the city, knocking on doors of old friends, peeking in windows of old homes, like a burglar lost in the art, spellbound once again by the city’s charms. And then Jamie was there too of course, flying the skull and crossbones and keeping the ideas pumping. The gig that brought us there was

natalie.jeremijenko@yale.edu ramorxx@hotmail.com kate@bureauit.org leyladakhli@hotmail.com mimalot@hotmail.com

November 18, 2002 - 1:38pm -- hydrarchist

Ben Hammersley http://rdfweb.org/foaf/ http://www.benhammersley.com/benfoaf.rdf

http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/001536.html#001536

Matt Jones +44 7747 604200 ---- http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work http://www.disappearing.org http://www.warchalking.org

[1] "Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled." -- Ted Nelson

Cameron Marlow MIT Blogdex

Ray Ozzie http://www.ozzie.net/blog/2002/10/08.html#a70

I'm Scott Heiferman, and I run Meetup, a new platform that helps organize real-world group gatherings about anything anywhere

http://iwantmy.meetup.com.  Does geography matter? What role will geography play in the future of social software? * What happens when online communities turn into offline communities?

http://www.e-thepeople.org/a-national/article/12553/view

The history of democracy shows that big things happen when people gather.

Would love comments, suggestions, ideas on this.

And please spread the word about http://nowarwithiraq.meetup.com if you feel so inclined.

Ward Cunningham's Wikiman

http://www.benhammersley.com/archives/001530.html#001530

http://www.upl.cs.wisc.edu/~bethenco/halloween.html

(Via Danny O'Brien of NTK, who is guest blogging on Cory Doctorow's BoingBoing.)

Rusty Foster:

> One thing I've been asking myself for the past year or so is whether a > system like K5 could be used to create a new source of hard news, > collected, edited, and reported by nonprofessionals or some blend of > nonprofessionals and freelancers.

This is very much like what Dan Gillmor is talking about with his Journalism 3.0 idea. His original post is at http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_g...

Finally, IMC reporters get to be "insiders", even at events where they have no special access or privilege, like a protest. They get to be talked about by the Evil Corporate Media and feel important and dangerous. Some version of this is probably the main reason most reporters get into their line of work. Walter Cronkite has called it "having a front-row seat for history."

Community is the media within which reputation lives

It used to be that physical distribution was the expensive part of news. You needed big machines and big logistical systems so every word you printed or second of broadcast time had to count. The internet hasn't driven that cost down to zero, but has reduced it so drastically that perhaps every thousandth word or ten thousandth word has to count. Predictions of the imminent death of expensive industrial media were rampant.

But it didn't happen then, and it eventually became clear that lurking in the shadow of the cost of distribution was a second cost which didn't matter so much when distribution was such a yoke, but sprang out of the closet as soon as that was removed. That was the cost of production. Incredibly few people have the temperment to be a journalist or an editor, which by and large are shitty jobs that involve long hours, low pay, and a public image that aspires one day to rise to the glorious heights of "tarnished". Of the "uncredentialed losers, outsiders, dilettantes, frustrated lawyers, unabashed alcoholics and... creative psychopaths"[1] that do have the mindset for it, even fewer are actually capable of doing the work. The net didn't even threaten industrial media because it turned out that there was almost no one capable of producing a worthwhile product outside the existing news structure.

What we're seeing here, and where social software comes in, is the first attempts to route around the cost of production by combining the small contributions of a large number of more or less unskilled individuals to produce quality media. That idea tends to strike journalists as implausible in much the same way the automated loom struck skilled weavers as implausible, the automobile assembly line struck skilled mechanics as implausible, and the mass-produced die-stamped steel rifle struck the machinists at Enfield as implausible. But it's exactly the same process -- using technology to remove the skilled components from a production process. Instead of relying on the long editorial production experience in the head of one grizzled newsman, we're relying on the emergent consensus of a lot of inexperienced observers. I think the latter can pretty closely approximate the former, but it has a huge advantage in being able to do it for almost no cost.

The industrial media is in a fairly major upheaval right now. From the "golden age" ethos that news can and ought to be run at a loss as a public good and the responsibility of good corporate citizenship on the part of media companies, we've moved to today's drive toward profitability at any cost. The mass media has centralized and cost-cut at an increasing pace, and in the US, it appears that Mr. Powell's boy is gearing up to remove the last remaining FCC barriers to complete monopoly media control. The cost of profitability has been trust and quality. Saddled with the ironclad cost of distribution, broadcast media has only been able to significantly cut costs on the production side. So just when they're most threatened by the journalistic assembly line they're also chucking their basic advantage (production quality) over the side and alienating the news junkies who will defect to producing their own news if they're not served well enough by the media they're accustomed to.

Is it the end of News As We Know It? No, because collaborative models don't work in broadcast media. But broadcast (one-way) news is, I think, destined to become the red-headed stepchild of participatory media -- the kind of thing that's accepted as a stopgap in the absence of a good network hookup but not relied on for real information.

It's been a little quiet, so I thought I'd perhaps spur a little conversation and simultaneously enhance Matt's outboard brain.

The boggling and flummoxing book mentioned in http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work/mt/archives/000400.html#000400, "Cheap Complex Devices," is K5er John Sundman's second novel (and second self-published novel, which is a situation he certainly wouldn't mind changing). My review of it is at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/29/17621/1043, and John gave me permission to warez it to this list. It's a 1.7Mb PDF, so attachment is out, but download at http://www.kuro5hin.org/images/rusty/Cheap-Complex-Devices.pdf.* (It includes graphics and unusual type/layout stuff, so plain text is also out). John also has a recent article in Salon about being on the manual labor side of the dot-com bubble, building CMGI tycoon David Wetherell's Martha's Vineyard trophy mansion at http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/23/wetherell/index.html which is worth a read.

The point of all of this, from our perspective, is that the book is framed as the result of a writing competition between programming teams trying to create "HALs", or human language storytellers -- computer programs which are capable of writing novels entirely from scratch. Needless (probably) to say, this competition hasn't actually happened yet. But can it be far off? And is that sort of thing social software?

We've kind of cruised a little in defining what social software *is*, which is fair enough because that's always a difficult question. But we probably should, at some point, put a little thought into defining it, or at least penciling in some boundaries. Leaving aside the hypothetical HALs, how about IRC and AIM bots, whose purpose is to interact with people in a social manner? One IRC channel I spend most of my IRCing time in has a bot named zuul, who, among other thing, keeps track of who's been around recently. Ask it "zuul, seen rusty?" and it will tell you when I was last on, and what the last thing I said was. It responds to basic questions, and is programmable by anyone in the channel to respond to new questions or provide new kinds of information.

Is zuul social software? I think so, because it helps mediate group interactions between people. That's one boundary I'm pretty comfortable with.

Now what about a storytelling program? Is software social if it is designed to *act* in a social manner? That is, it's not there to help people, it's there to be a person (or a some subset thereof). In one sense, software that performs some function for a single user is no different than your standard single-user apps. But on the other hand, designing software that "acts social" is a whole different ball of fish than deciding what options to put in the _F_ile menu.

I guess my main questions here are: where's the line between applications, social applications, and social software? And how much do the latter two groups overlap in challenges and lessons? Has anyone here written or used software that is intended to mimic or create a person-to-person type of interaction? Is this beyond our scope?

Clay says Here's what I think:

Social software is any software that only works if its used by a group, or, put another way, social software is any software that treats triads different from pairs.

Three is a magic number. There are lots of differences between conversations between two people and conversations among three. I think the most important ones are:

1. Identity

Keeping track of identity is a cinch in pairs: Anything not said by me is said by you. In a group of three or more, however, this breaks down. I have to keep track of more than me/you. I have to keep track of two or more yous, so I need some ID handling mechanism to do that.

2. Audience effects

In a two-person conversation, everything I say _to_ you is also _for_ you. You are the sole recipient. In a group of three or more, there is always an audience, and you either tune your words to the whole group, or you speak to one person knowing someone else is listening.

3. Persistence

In a two-person conversation, if you leave, the conversation ends. The conversation has no existence separate from the participants. With three or more, any one dropping out changes the conversation, but it doesn't end it. The conversation is persistent.

So when the line I draw is around those three things. Group software designed to handle identity, audience effects, and persistence is my version of social software.

So I'd say zuul isn't social software in a standalone way, since it could function no differently from Eliza, but it is an embedded function within irc, which makes it different from eliza.

Rudy Rugles see http://idea-x.net for the public site). It's been rolled out at several large organizations, but we're always learning more about how to make the software better, but more importantly how to make our overall approach better. We've written lots about our ideas, but if you're interested in a relatively quick overview of our point of view, check out: http://idea-x.net/display_topic.php?topic_id=239

November 18, 2002 - 1:35pm -- hydrarchist

The last twenty five years have been charcterised by a continual expansion of the duration of copyright law, and the scope of intellectual property law in general. Broader economic trends in the same period underline that this is no simple matter of the tinkering with a regulatory system to exctract rent from a discrete aspect of production, but rather indicates the transformation of the mode of production as a whole, bringing some to propose that the intellectual property relation of this era is analogous to the wage labour relation that defined exploitation under industrial capitalism. The aim of these notes is more modest however, a mere outline of the changes that have occurred from a juridical perspective and an analysis of the political mechanisms by which this transformation was accomplished, and by whom.

Patent, copyright and trademark laws have historically been of national character, and their scope was a question of national sovereignty, hardly surprising given their centrality in education, industrial development and health. Countries fashioned their regimes to match their stage of development, the political priorities of their population etc.The attachment of the Trade related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights annex to the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs marked the definitive end of national control over IP rights. This agreement inaugurated an era where intellectual property rules were to be treated as simply another matter of trade. The bullying required to achieve this took place in the 1980s and was carried out principally by the United States Trade Representative at the behest of media conglomerates, pharmaceuticals and semi-conductor chip manufacturers.

The next level of Intellectual property expansionism was a fundamental reorientation of the law of copyright towards targetting end-users with criminal prosecution and stiff sanctions. Meanwhile, aspirant patent-holders drove the extension of patentable subject matter to include business methods and software.

Multilateral Treaties had been signed governing patents (Paris) and Copyright (Berne) but as is typical with international law there was no enforcement mechanism. In 1983, the United States hit upon a strategy that was to be pursued throughout the following decade: bilateral treaties would link trade and ‘respect’ for US intellectual property rights. The template for this was hammered out in the Carribean Basin Economic Recovery Act 1983.

Shift from crime to being defined as perpetrated against things rather than as a breach of the feudal order. W&H

“What was often at issue was not property, supported by law, against no property; it was alternative definitions of property rights.”

“The customs which are customs of the entire poor class are based with a sure instinct on the indeterminate aspect of property.” Marx, 1842 Debates on the law of the theft of wood.

The embodiment of knowledge in workers contradicts the standard theoretical meaning of a firm. In the neo-classical model, workers are not part of the firm. They are inputs purchased on the market, like raw materials or capital goods. Yet they carry the firm's information base, even though not permanently attached to the firm. Defining the firm as a locus of productive knowledge leads to a dilemma; what knowledge is particular to a firm. Arrow

The former communications minister, Ms de Valera, last year turned down a request from RTÉ for a fee increase of ?63 a year. She gave the go-ahead for a ?14.50 increase, which came into effect in September 2001. The income to RTÉ from licence fees this year is expected to be ?112 million. A fee increase of ?45 would yield an estimated extra ?51 million.

November 12, 2002 - 10:43am -- hydrarchist

Euphoria at the enormous quantative participation in the Social Forum has obscured the question of its quality. The Euraction hub, a self-organised creation of a dozen Italian and European groups, was conceived as a space both outside, and interlocutor to, the 'main event', where horizontal and ludic actions could find expression. As it turned out, the gigantic scale of the forum eclipsed our actions to a great extent. Nonetheless the Hub was characterised by the formation of new collaborations and a significant extension of contacts, though it remains to be seen how efficient such a form of international organisation will prove itself to be.

Some dues should first of all be paid: to the Italian friends from Milan, Roma and Bologna who did the lion's share of the work. Acknowledging their efforts is also an indictment of the manner in which the space was not in fact really self-managed. Most participants arrived on the wednesday, the eve of the commencement of the ESF, and thus were not in a position to share the basic logisitical tasks implicit in the action.These practical difficulties were exacerbated by the uncoopertaive attitude of the ESF whereby the keys to the space were received only two days beforehand, and simple necessities such as tables were not provided. Had we known this in advance steps could have been taken to look after our own needs directly, rather than depending upon the buraucracies and their mediators to provide for us.

Most of the workshops suffered from similar lack of organisation, exceptions to this were the Expertbase Project (who installed a satellite network link and distributed copies of their Make World tabloid), Yo Mango (who enchanted us all with their incitement to mass-partcipatory shoplifting and their crafty propaganda), and Candida TV (who established a pirate channel broadcasting in the vicinity for the 48 hours in which the Hub workshops were to take take place). What distinguished each of these projects was preparation, and the fact they had something practical to implement which directly involved others or responded to the needs of the event through practices of self-sufficiency (such as the satellite, the Yo Mango'd meals).

Furthermore, during the demonstration there was nothing to differentiate us at the level of practice from the main body of the forum. Following the party on the friday night people were basically disinterested in strategising for the demo. Otherwise direct action was absent without leave, the sole exception being the invasion of the Forum Area proper by a 150 or so Hubbies on the friday - under the banner: Stop the World! Another War is Possible! - to raise the profile of the Hubspace and speak with people to convince them to come down and participate. The results were immediate and that night thousands converged on the hub for dinner, dancing and polymorphous pleasure in general.

20,000 participants had been anticipated by the ESF, but by Saturday morning the number had exceeded 57,000. The atmosphere at the Fortezza was unpleasant, with a character somewhere between a time machine and a trade fair. Every vintage of dislocated leftist was to be found, obsolete ideologies from the '30s, '60s and '70s littered the floor. Newspaper sellers abounded. The sessions themselves were unfathomably large, some attended by up to 4,000 people, and this format epitomised the representative nature of the ESF - the logic of the audience, the herd, and the orgainising hand to prod you in the right direction.

Although the Hub was physically nearby, the sheer volume of events and people at the the Fortezza generated a space of infoprmation overload - with a high ration of noise to signal - and little prospect that people would leave the establisehd enclosures to find other fare elsewhere. In this sense, we clearly underestimated the scale and composition of the Forum and were isolated from the main dynamic. Thousands of young and not so young people, many of them with no previous contestational practice, were present. Our concerns at the ideological nature of the Forum's organisers impeded us from focussing on the crucial work of communicative retransmission to those with no investment in the NGOs or old left. After returning to Rome we met some Argentinian friends and went to eat in the Social Space 32 in Via dei Volsci, there I met two young women with exactly this background and attitude: they went to Florence seeking contact with groups practicing direct action and self-organisation and had no idea that the hub even existed.

On a practical level, holding the party earlier in the week would have brought more partcipamts to the workshops which were otherwise sparsely attended. A comfy space where people could have hung out and socialised in less than ascetic conditions would also have been welcome. Many hub participants knew one another and this can nurture a form of intimacy intimidating to those with no previous experince of such a place. This discussion is obviously proceeding elsewehre related to the professionalisation of 'activism' and the crypto-hierarchies which are partially its product, but on an everyday level, in our spaces, we must be alert to the tendency towards closure towards the exterior which may sometimes appear like the natural expressio of social networks, or more worryingly, counter-cultural posturing. The latter was scarcely in evidence during the Hub, but the former was tangible.

Sunday's plenary was the moment for a candid recognition of this failure. Several speakers also articulated concern at the process of recuperation of creative social tensions by mainstream political forces who seek to colapse this desire and anger under their representative umbrella. Others underlined the need to understand that during the last twelve months the initiative behind the international dynamic has shifted from the grassroots formations to the forces around the Social Forum. In the shadow of the demonisation set in train in Genoa last year, there has been a general retreat from direct action and a corresponding return to the sterility of mass mobilisations which in concrete terms achieve little apart from temporarily allaying sentiments of isolation and impotence.

Another suggestion made during the discussion was that participation in high-profile international events such as Porto Allegre could be built on a local level. Thus the streaming of some of the sessions to local community or social spaces could allow particpation by those without the funds to fly, and generate discssion within a more territorial dynamic as opposed to the ephemeral cosmopolitan and polyglot encounters that these international events have become.

Whether the ESF constitutes 'a central constitutive force inside the movement of movements' now is a debatable claim, and one whose validity varies over the different regional zones. In France, Italy, Spain and perhaps Greece, the emerging hegemony of this alliance has advanced through a largescale integration social and environmental associations. Elsewhere, the Social Forums are almost non-existent (eg Germany) or transparently the vehicles for trotskyist manipulation (as is the case in Ireland and the UK). In the latter cases these groups are largely uninvolved in the significant social conflicts (such as those against the Nice Treaty in Ireland, or local action against the privatisation of social servioces), simply coattrailing the movement against capitalist globalisation or attempting to build united front style coalitions against the war in Iraq.

Even here in Italy, it remains unclear whether the Social Forums have the capacity to maintain any sort of dynamic, and highly doubtful that they can achieve material gains. Last month's mobilisation of nearly a million people in Rome by the Girotondini, and the mass demonstration of two and a half million in March organised by the Trade Unions. In short, the period since Genoa has been characterised by a diffuse mobilisation which has taken place under the auspices of different organisations. None of them, so far, have absorbed this numerical strength into local structures of any significance, so that the singularity of each of the subjects as yet appears to escape any straightforward process of institutionalisation.

The fact remains that the space for manouvere has narrowed significantlyin the last year, as groups obsessed with respectability have assumed a more dominant role in the organisation of these moments of visibility. A means must be found to remove the muzzle over direct action put in place by these forces. To materialise the differences in terms of action demands that we place more weight on synchronising exchanges of skills, knowledge and tools, this is an important aspect of our horizontality which could be expanded as a social process. The Days of Free Culture and Knowledge and the Subjugation of Scince to Human Pleasure and Health could be a moment in which this could be put into practice on an international level.

http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2002/11/107854.php

A similar fate awaited the Disobeddienti, installed in their own space at the Ippodromo under a program entitled 'No Work No Shop'. Personal accounts indictae that almost nothing happened there, although they did make a direct action against Caterpillar on the friday.

Myriad future collaborations were proposed during the ESF: networks against the war, a general European mobilisation on february 15, a Mediterranean Social forum in Barcelona and then another ESF, this time in Paris, grassroots unions invited the CGIL to build another general strike against the war, and also to co-organise a day of struggle against labour precarity.

November 11, 2002 - 11:35am -- hydrarchist

Minutes from Reclaim your Media Thematic Hub by blicero • Monday November 11, 2002 at 03:07 PM blicero@ecn.org

Minutes from Reclaim your Media Thematic Hub

RECLAIM YOUR MEDIA Euraction Hub 7th Nov 2002

Notes: this document composed in haste by multiple notetakers and summarised quickly after the meeting in order to facilitate further discussion, co-operation etc. The meeting took the form of a series of presentations of attendant groups' projects, gradually modified to be shorter and more focussed on practice. Discomfort was felt with the show-and-tell format, which might be avoided in future Hub workshops. The decision was made to split into interest groups (see bottom of this document for details) in order to work through the main themes thrown up by the session, and to address some not specifically raised here but thought to be important by a number of those present (again, see below for details.)

In short, it was emphasised in conclusion that the Hub is not intended to be a mini-ESF, a place for small groups to present their work, but one of activity and co-operative action. The opinion was raised that groups should focus on acting rather than representing themselves; on empowering speech rather than speaking for others. (This summary the opinion of the notetaker and not necessarily that of the whole group.)

The notes proceed chronologically through the workshop and are disjointed.

Z-Mag/Z-Net

our characteristic is trying to have our organization, our way of organizing the editorial part has to be consistent with the politics the project tries to support. We divide all the task so that each person has a mixed list of task that is similar to that of any one else and everybody feels empowered in doing different task. We think that this is a way to break the hierarchy that even in democracy can take place in spite of the equal vote and so on. So to us it was central to break down the division of labour, differently from other mainstream media. znet is compeltely different. We want to address femminism and change the structure of the movement from mainstream organizations. we have to get rid of racism and hierarchy in the movement. zmag, znet is all done in a decentralize non hierarchical way, everybody can partecipate on a equal basis.

Question about financing and growth.

A: started with private money they sell their productions now, the only exception is the website, people can donate on the web site and this worked brilliantly: subscribers get access to a BBS and a special article each morning.

comunicacio and liberinfo

a news agency that connects media and social movement to connect the alt media with the mainstrem. they are born in a political campaign against WB.Campaigns where have intervened: Genoa. Squats. Campaign against the World Bank in 2001. Jekyl & Hyde role due to the obvious risks involved with dealing with the media as anyone involved in such campaigns is aware.

Set up a site http://www.liberinfos.net. Also actions for Media Independence day on October 18th as Communic-Accion. Proposal to do two things: (a) To speak about the experience of mainstream in context of political campaigns, and then to further discuss ' liberifo'.

Descriptions will now be shortened as there is limited time in the session and there will be the opportunity to freely liase with one another later on the basis of affinity.

http://www.subtv

AK Kraak, gateway for independent television. Interest is in speaking with others from other video projects: how should it be used? Open publishing form. Not limited to the political activist sphere but seeking to touch other areas as well as such as artists, young film makers.

Gnu Global Vision

Italian project online at http://www.ngivision.org

Goal is to build up community of P2P clients that are connected with a network of FTP servers; with this network it is possible to find the archive and to download it so that anyone can pick it up from a personal computer. It is an archive divided by categories; from the website you can see the whole archive or different categories. There are currently 100 files available; the architecture is composed of FTP servers and P2P clients. Currently recommending the usage of DivX4, but are experimenting with the use of other codecs such as DivX5 (which may be too heavy on client PCs.) There are many technical obstacles to overcome currently.

The project is completely copylefted and are considering moving to an open publishing system like SubTV but have not yet achieved it. NGV is participating in the Hub TV and everyone is invited to participate ringing in materials etc.. The TV station will carry on for the entire social forum, 24 hours a day, copyleft and totally pirate. Join us.

International Solidarity Movement, Palestine

Trying to help and find the resistance for the Palestinians and to fight the occupation through non-violent activities; helping Palestinians to find the voice of resistance. How do we deal with the media? Sending reports and press releases. There is a media office which receives reports from different areas and sends out these bulletins . We also make videos and reports of what is happening; we are trying to purpose these documents legally and to disseminate them in a way which informs about what is happening. Everyone is invited to Palestine.

We send reports to the Internet through the mail list that we have, and to the press list that we have. Now the press have started to call us. Most of the time we also have video material available.

(Note today's meeting on disobedience in global war, in the hub this afternoon.)

Russian Indymedia Collective

Not solely from Russia. Also from Ukraine. The only Indymedia site working in Eastern Europe. Not focussed on big events - purposes of the site are to deal with the lack of critical media in Russia. To give non Fascist, non anti Semitic information. To bring together different activists from diverse social movements in Russia, who are not currently working together.

(Addition: most Russian media activism is with paper based publications. Not such access to video. But some internet access. Paper versions of Indymedia Russia have been made, in order to spread the idea to those without access.)

GreenPepper

4 times yearly. Environmental and social justice themes for each issue from an anti-capitalist perspective. The next issue is on migration, freedom of movement and borders. After that, water struggles around the world, pushing community struggles in the area of water and trying to promote that style of organisation as a new social form.

Future plans for a Spanish language version based in Barcelona. Also interested in coordinating a response from the World Summit on the Information Soceity.

World Summit on the Information Society

Nothing to do with alternative media projects. Could be a good place to campaign on media issues. Takes place Dec 2003 Geneva, then Dec 2005 in Tunisia. A summit in two halves equivalent to Rio, etc.

First half of the summit will take placce in a year's time but the most important debates have already started. There are regional meetings taking place right now, including a conf. in Bucharest this weekend. In Feb a meeting in Geneva which will be very important.

Involves state governments, northern and western governments, business sector, and 'civil society' - NGOS etc. and even some community radio interests. All these groups have different objectives and aims which define how they see the information society. Governments tend to focus on technology and access, its use for employment etc.; the business sector have similar interests - the spread of technology and access to it. Interests in creating a market economy and sustaining this. The problem is that the summit is organised by the ITU which is focussed on technological infastructure and has links with the business communities associated with the ITU. Unesco, more political and critical, would have been preferable.

Some aspects of early preparation are important. There is some kind of struggle going on and a desire to push community interests. This is coming from the civil society, NGOs.

What do we do about this? What could we work for in terms of this summit? Is there a campaign that we could start which would support civil society people within the conference so that more positive points are put on the agenda?

(Additional comment from worker previously inside the secretariat of the Summit who has left for 'ethica reasons'. Notes internal problems. That Southern countries are pushing for technology investment and ignoring free speech issues, etc. Also that the deadline for propsals is not yet closed. All propsals will be presented in PrepCon2 in Geneva in December. Interested parties should submit proposals before then in order to be represented at the WSIS.)

Wrapping up Comments

One topic not discussed: infrastructure and grassroots communications. E.g. Hub TV. Projects that try to think of ways of building infrastructures from the ground up. Experiments with detourning existing infrastructures and creating new ones.

This covers many issues - wireless to web radio, which tries to empower end DSL users to set up servers allowing them to share materials with others over the Net; to the building of a 'media jacket' allowing activists to have a tool which does everything they need.

The tendency to go into frontal presentations is egregious. Let us find a moment to facilitate a discussion about independent media infastructure. These thematic hubs are not about being a small version of the ESF. This is about finding a creative way of deploying your projects within the Hub space. The idea of this thematic session was to give quick presentations so that people could work out the affinities and produce activities together.

Lines are proposed on:

video, archiving, sharing;

WSIS campaign and all that goes around it- a network of alternative media that can help cover the event, etc.;

the creative use of community media infrastructures as an alternative to hierarchical representation.

Any other lines can be proposed and then worked upon. Coordinators should produce affinity groups and then post them up on the calendar.

These lines are broadly accepted by those present at the meeting.

Suggestion to meet later within different affinity groups. Notes that many interested parties are at the ESF and not at the Hub. By this afternoon they may have returned.

Proposal to talk about strategy in political communications and media campaigns... why we communicate, how we do it, and with and to whom. But is this questioning of communications practice something that should be carried across all of the strands? Should we speaking ourselves (from what position do we speak?) or empowering others to speak for themselves through development of media architectures?

The decision is made to split into groups. Are meeting tonight to ratify areas for discussion and find times to do a specific workshop. Can they be at separate times so that interested parties can be involved in each?

Once times are decided, workshops should be put on up on the calendar in the Hub space. Also send it out over the Hub mailing list. Please self-organise.

FreeDistro http://www.freedistro.org

The idea is to build a p2p fileshare commnuity around tstorage and distribution of independent materials. Have been considering available mechanisms for distribution (exisiting fileshare systems). Idea is to deliver films in different mediums (CD etc.) distributed broadly using magazines, infopoints etc. Would work with a portal which would guarantee quality and integrity of the file being downloaded.

November 1, 2002 - 7:42pm -- hydrarchist

The Model

Our proposal would function as follows. Each individual would have $200. That $200 would be derived either from a new tax, would replace existing monies given out as cultural subsidies by the state (where that is significant, thus not in the US), a tax deduction (such as 501(3)(c) contributions currently function), or from rebudgeting (from the military, prison or immigration services for example).

1. A portion (eg 20%) would be disbursed for the funding of a public infrastructure in the form of theatres, cinemas, concert halls, games halls, rehearsal space, instruments, tools, technology. The manner of allocation could be either (a) the state (b) an elected local committee (c) individuals. One could start with (c) and take recourse to (b) and then (a) where people were unwilling to take the time to perform the decsion making.

Preferably this infrastructure would not be under the aegis of the state but would be composed of people in the locality. Existing cultural spaces could also apply for a direct allocation.

2. The second and most important component is the direct allocation of cash by users to cultural producers. Our estimate is that this should account for 75% of all monies. People would be free to give their cash to anyone who registered as a cultural producer. It is important to underline again that the allocation of funds is entirely down to the free will of the user-donor and is in no way determined by what one actually consumes . Obviously this encompasses all existing professional and semi-professionalpractitioners, but could just as easily include the four sixteen years playing punk music in the garage at the end of the street, the weblog writer, the independent film maker.....

Such openess renders the system as described vulnerable to manipulation and gaming, as a result of which we propose the following.

(a) Threshold Setting a minimum threshold of donations that must be superceded before the cultrual worker can get access to the money ensures: (i) That schemes such as 'I'll give you my $140 if you give me yours' are foiled. (ii) That the amount of money is such as to actually allow the recipient to take some time free from work, purchase necessary eqipment. Where the individual to whom you make the donation fails to reach the threshold, the money could either: (a) go into a local infrastructure fund either in the area of the donor or the disappointed recipient. (b) go to a second order preference.

Choosing a basically arbitrary figure, we would propose $1000 dollars as a reasonable threshold to set.

(b) Recipients would be obliged to reveal their income from the sytem over the last year so that donors can weight their contributions equitably. Thus should one performer recieve 50 million, a potential donor may decide that her needs have already been adequately catered for, and to allocate the money to someone more in need.

(c) Anonymity The means by which the transfer of the monies is to be effected must be anonymised, principally so as to prevent people from being able to make reliable agreements with one another. An architecture which facilitates easy breaches of promises also makes it more difficult to game.

(d) Distributed Sponsorship Minimises determining power of any contributor, individual donations remain sufficiently small that they do not allow the tastes of the individual donor to determine the nature of the work crerated (unlike traditional patronage).

3. The last 5% (or perhaps much less) will be distributed according to a lottery between either (a) everyone on the register, or (b) everyone on the register who has not managed to supercede the threshold.

3a. The question as to whether an Arts Council style body would have any future in this paradigm is undetermined. Their may be areas, particularly those which lack a mass audience, which we as a group may decide should receive some financial support. It is difficult to predict what forms of self-organisation amongst cultural producers and users would result from a system of this nature, but they may be appropriate bodies to make such determinations should the public agree to the principle.

4. The quid pro quo for the user is that the cultual output of the recipients goes firectly into the public domain or perhaps a form of copyleft-like system (similar to the GPL). As a result there are no restruictions on personal use or copying. Users would also be entitled to integrate other people's materials into their own works (referred to in copyright law as derivative works). The only requirement on a next generation user would be to acknowledge the attribution of the original work. This is how the free software movement works currently, where the names of each person who has contributed to its development is listed in the program itself. Such a requirement has other significance as we will see later.

5. There are alternatives available in terms of actually effecting the transfer of funds. Current regimes for the collection and disbursement of royalties rely upon collective rights organisations. These CROs have been criticised for the amount of the funds they absorb as administrative costs which amount to between 18-20% in the case of the United States. Furthermore, their allocational methods favour larger players in the market.

i. One possibility is to use systems based on the paypal or amazon mechanism to transfer the funds directly into a bank account established for the recipient. This could be implemented using the Trusted Third Party System common in public key cryptography. In this case, a bank account would be established in trust for the cultural worker, but she would not have access to the funds until a given set of criteria were satisfied. Under our model the first of these criteria would be the supercession of the threshold. Further requirements could be added, such as production of a given work by a specified date, or pending independent review by an agreed third party to verify the quality of the work.

ii. Another option is to license several CROs to carry out the distribution. They would compete with one another on several levels: a) The level of transparency to the recipients and the public b) The level of costs involved in their administration. c) Differing mechanisms of allocating funds to the different parties that contribute to a work. For example, one CRO could have a system whereby all of the funds contributed to a music group would go to the star lead-singer, whereas another would have an algorithm for paying session musicians, sound engineers, producers according a manadated minimum.

6. As was mentioned earlier, later creators are fully entitled to appropriate existing works for their own purposes, but are required at attribute their sources. There are several reasons for this. a) It allows users to modulate their contributions based upon who they feel to merit the cash. If Alice watches a film which she really hates, with the exception of a five minute passage which she loves and wants to support, then the list of footage with the respective creator attached allows her to make the contribution to the maker of that sequence rather than the film-maker, should they not be the same person.

b) In the transition period this would be particularly important, as cultural producers keen to commit themselves to the scheme will often find themselves integrating proprietary works which although they can distribute, they cannot agree to the re-use of. Such a taxonomy can make endusers aware of this and provide them with the necessary data to contact and perhaps make an agreement with the owner of the rights.

c) The list would also highlight the backend participation which may be relevant in the case of deciding which of several vying CROs one wishes to use to carry out the transfer of cash as was mentioned in 5.ii(c)

6.(b) Many cultural producers complain about the surreptitious use of their works by broadcatsers and other commercial organisations who do not remunerate them. Instituting such a practice of attributive lists would crete the opportunity to force commercial operators to do the same and account from where they derive their footage. Instead the system of credits is in fcat under massive pressure as broadcasters attempt to amximise their advertising time and install themselves as gatekeepers between the producers and the audience (as exemplified by their refusal to allow program-makers to include the URLs for their independent web sites).

Some Comments on the Model

7. This proposal began as a reflection on the position of musicians in the digital environment, principally becuase the rapid proliferation of MP3s and file sharing have thrown the music industry into something of a 'crisis'. Yet as many people are aware, few musicians have had a substantial income from royalties. This proposal was devised to deliver material self-sufficiency for musicians and the supply of pleasing things (as well as the possibility of ther reuse) for users, the interests of the music industry as such were not a concern of ours.

8. Whilst developed as a reflection on music, we were under no illusions that the consequences of digitization would be limited to that form. As access to broadband and wifi expands we are are already witnessing the 'napsterisation' of the film industry where some analysts claim over a half a million programs/movies are now being swapped every day. As we believe that the commodification of culture is a good thing in general, and argue that this proposal will help to close the gap between producer and audience, we claim that this model can be tweaked to cover essentially all forms of culture.

9. As broadcasters are not actually involved in a business model based on the selling of culture so much as the selling of audiences to advertisers, they should not be included in this arrangement and should have to pay creators for use of their work. This could be quite complex but no more than the problems posed by copyright adjudication currently.

10. Even if the copyright system was abolished in the morning, many of the same players would continue to dominate culture. The success of a work is to a significant extent a function of the amount of work put into marketing it, and the circuits of promotion that one has access to. The major music companies employ indy promoters to circumvent payola laws and ensure their presence on mass market radio, control many of the major urban music venues, many magazines and television stations which are employed to construct the star system. Our proposal cannot change that. What it can do is to uncouple the consumption-payment access which provides the means to continue funding this mechanism on the basis of a guarantee provided by the state (copyright law). the likelihood is that the majority of people will continue tpo give much of their money to the stars, but we do think that over time people will give more of thier money to local performers/creators or to those who have made the effort to share their work with them.

11. People often believe that this proposal is tainted by a certain statism. We argue the contrary as the crux of the proposition is the withdrawal or retirement of the state from two areas of activity: the maintenance of the regulated monopoly that is copyight and the allocation of public subsidies to culture through Arts Councils etc.

Positive Aspects of the Model

* Severing the relationship between consumption and remuneration renders superfluous the demand for a centralised tracking mechanism to gather infpormation on people's use of works. * No need for a progressively more punitive system employing criminal sanctions and intrusion into the private sphere. * Releases large amounts of materials to be used by next generation creators, lowering their costs and removing barriers to entry. * Spreads the distribution of monies in a manner such as to allow a far greater number of people to work full-time in production or at least to be able to take some months out of the year to be devoted to that purpose. ISSUES (PROBLEMS)

Fraudulent registrations as artists.

Gaming the system -- mechanisms for gaming the system... quid pro quo exchanges.

Forms of nepotism --

Stating having access to the data that the people are allocating. (mandatorily collected audio preferences.)

Tax: progressive, regressive or flat?

Childrens' rights should a certain portion of revenue allocation given to children

Non transferable.

Tracking downloads and reflecting those choices...

The compulsory licence question

Use of Paypal and Amazon

October 30, 2002 - 4:52am -- hydrarchist

Collaborative Journalism: Slashdot and Kuro5hin

The cost of printing, complexity of distribution and necessity for geographically dispersed coverage have historically reserved the production of news and commentary to media firms. The choice of what stories to publish lay with editorial departments whilst journalists were employed to collect facts and opinions, carry out fact verification (more recently using expensive specialised databases) and insert what analysis was deemed necessary.

The ease of publishing on the web creates the need for means to establish credibility. Publishers with existing offline reputations leverage their brands but new players have to build trust from scratch. In 2000, a weblogger named Kealey Nicole became well known in the blogging world for the diary she maintained charting her leukemia illness and ultimate death. Doubts as to the authenticity of the author grew and investigation by other webloggers discovered that the story was untrue. Readers who had followed her battle with a terminal illness felt tricked and upset, but this incident demonstrated the obstacles to credibility of personal weblogs. The unearthing of the truth however also underlined the ability for a diffuse mass to debunk fictions and identify the facts.

Collaborative weblogs on the other hand have all formed their own reputations and the software which they have used to organise the site is in most cases the means by which this is achieved. The advent of ubiquitous networks and the arrival of the commodity workstation in millions of homes and workplaces has generated a new form of journalism that is collectively produced using discursive software to harness the knowledge, fact-checking capacity and analytical skills of the user base as a whole. The most obvious offline analogy is talk-radio, if one can imagine it functioning with multiple incoming telephone lines and the ability of both audience and particpants to judge one another’s controbutions. This chapter examines two noteworthy examples user-generated content sites that demonstrate its advantages over traditional journalism in three distinct ways: relevance, accreditation and editorial review.

Slashdot: Accreditation & Relevance Description Slashdot was founded in September 1997 by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates as a news and discussion site orientated towards the technology community. Submissions are solicited from users and selected on the basis of topicality and the personal taste of the site administrators. Accepted stories normally consist of a brief description or commentary supplied by the submitter with one or several links that are believed to be worthy of attention. The piece is then posted either to the front page or one of the many sections that define more specific communities of interest within the slashdot universe. Each story is also allocated a topic categorisation, of which there are currently nearly a hundred ranging from ‘The Almighty Buck’ to ‘Movies’ to ‘Linux Businness’. Users follow up the initial submission with comments that often number in the hundreds consisting of information, elaboration, contradiction, tangential rambling or disruption. In order to impose some order on this load, the site employs a piece of free software called ‘Slashcode’, whose principal architect is Brian Aker.

Utterance - Initial Submission Filtering: Users submit stories using an online form, and about five hundred stories are submitted every day. Slashdot has several “authors” that filter the initial content and post the story if they choose to do so. There are about twenty authors that have posted at least one story, but there are five people that account for the bulk of the filtering. Refusal to publish may derive from technical errors in the assembly of the story (broken links etc.), failure to arouse the subjective interest of the slash team (1), lack of timeliness or because enough stories have already been published on that day.

Relevance: The site is divided into approximately 50 topics ranging from games to GNU is Not Unix. There are also 10 sections, the most popular being the “article” section. Other sections cover a certain area like legal issues (Your Rights Online) or are tailored to a specific purpose like reviewing books (Book Review). The submission form for submitting stories has dropdown selections for the topic and the section. The authors that receive the story have the discretion of moving the story to another location, posting it in multiple places or not posting it at all.

Accreditation: The initial submissions are not heavily scrutinized for accuracy. According to the FAQ, “[i]f something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience.” [1] As a result, those who comment on the story perform the accreditation of the initial story ex post. The most popular stories, those that generate the most comments and those that are most viewed, are listed in the “hall of fame.”

Utterance – Comments Moderation: Slashdot has a very sophisticated method of allowing the users to be moderators of the comments. Initially Slashdot had a limited number of moderators but as the number of comments grew it was necessary to implement an automated system to select moderators from the pool of users. Moderators are selected according to several criteria. First, they must have logged in - there is no moderation power granted to anonymous surfers. Only regular participants are selected (average users who use the site on a regular but not compulsive basis). They must have been using the site for a while (this defeats those who register only to moderate), and must be willing and in possession of positive “karma” (to keep out trolls and disruptive elements). Karma is a value assigned to a user based upon the quality of their contributions (defined by the ratings of their comments). If a user meets these criteria, the program assigns the user moderator status and they user receive five “influence points” to review comments. The moderator rates a comment of his choice using a drop down list with words such as “flamebait” and “informative”, etc. A positive word will increase the rating of the comment one point, and a negative word will decrease the rating a point. Each time a moderator rates a comment it costs the moderator one influence point, so the moderator can only rate five comments for each moderating period. The period lasts for three days and if the user does not use the influence points, they expire. The moderation setup is intentionally designed to give many users a small amount of power – thus decreasing the effect of rogue users “with an axe to grind.”

Filtering The site implements some automated “troll filters” which prevent users from sabotaging the system. The troll filters prevent users from posting more than once every 60 seconds, prevents identical posts and will ban a user for 24 hours if the user has been moderated down several times within a short time frame. Slashdot provides the user with a “threshold” filter allowing the user to block lower quality comments. The threshold filter is an accreditation filter because it is based on the external standard of the community rating from the moderation described previously. The scheme uses the numerical rating of the comment (ranging from –1 to 5). Comments start out at 0 for anonymous posters, 1 for registered users and 2 for registered users with good “karma”. If a user sets their browsing filter at 1, the user will not see any comments from anonymous posters unless those comments’ have been ‘modded’ up. A user can set their filter anywhere from –1 (viewing all of the comments), to 5 (where only the posts that have been upgraded by several moderators will show up).

Relevance: Relevance is also tied into the slashdot scheme because off topic posts should receive an “off topic” rating by the moderators and sink below the threshold level (assuming the user has the threshold set above the minimum). However, the moderation system is limited to choices that sometimes are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a moderator may have to choose between “funny” (+1) and “off topic” (-1) when a post is both funny and off topic. As a result, an irrelevant post can increase in ranking and rise above the threshold level because it is funny or informative.

Accreditation/Fact Appraisal: Every day the site receives 300,000 individual viewers and these users respond immediately to factual inaccuracies and provide corrections where necessary. A recent incident illustrates the power of this human network. As part of a ‘Switch-to Microsoft’ campaign, a testimonial by a so-called convert from Macintosh to Windows XP was published in conjunction with a photo. The marketing-style phraseology of the document aroused suspicions and research was instigated into the identity of the writer and the accompanying portrait. Shortly after (thirteen minutes later to be precise!), it was discovered that the photo was actually a stock photo from a provider named Getty Images, and the author of the testimonial was in fact a public relations worker payed to pen the testimonial. Further investigation disinterred many other stock photos from MS’s site and in some cases non-testimonial photos actually contained images of Apple computers. The incident was subsequently reported in the Associated Press and proved to be extremely embarassing for Microsft who as a result removed a number of pages from their webserver (5).

Elsewhere, this form of mass feedback may serve as an important counterweight to the alteration of journalistic convention confronted by the immediacy of network communications. News reporters are under pressure to produce their stories faster, leaving less time for fact-checking and consequently make more errors according to some scholarly studies (6).

Comments are accredited by ratings they receive through moderation. If a user sets a high threshold level, they will only see posts that are considered high quality by the moderators. Users receive accreditation through their karma. If their posts consistently receive high ratings, their karma will increase. At a certain karma level, their comments will start off with a rating of 2 thereby giving them a louder voice in the sense that users with a threshold of 2 will now see their posts immediately. Likewise a user with bad karma from consistently poorly rated comments can lose accreditation by having their posts initially start off at 0 or even –1. At –1 level, the posts will probably not get moderated, effectively removing the opportunity for the “bad” poster to regain any karma. The “hall of fame” lists the top 10 comments based on the rating they receive. It does not appear to be very effective because every comment has a rating of 5 making it likely that some (or many) comments with ratings of 5 are excluded. Also according to an employee of Slashdot, there is no real scheme for choosing the top 10 comments from the pool of all those rated at 5, they are chosen at random.

Early October 1999 the U.S.-based magazine Jane's Intelligence Review decided to submit an article to pre-publication peer review by the Slashdot community for evaluation. The article was criticized by Slashdot's visitors after which the editor withdrew the original piece and replaced it with one incorporating the critics' comments and corrections (see Leonard, 1999). This was a pure form of open source journalism: the use of so-called 'open' sources on the Internet to check facts. The term 'open-source' stems from the procedure to make software source codes openly available so that experts and regular users will find and correct glitches and modify the original code to their own benefit (O'Reilly, 1998). Open source journalism applies this principle to news stories - making them available for scrutiny and corrections before final publication (Moon, 1999). As Moon summarizes: "Advocates of open-source journalism proclaim it as the new journalism, perfecting all that is wrong with traditional journalism. Others strongly oppose use of open sources, claiming the tactic will hinder the practice of traditional journalism and allow experts to wrest editorial control from journalists and the outlets for which they write"

Moderators / Meta-moderation (M2) Filtering: Average users are selected to moderate according to the selection criteria mentioned in the previous section. The moderator selection scheme is specifically designed to minimize the effects of people with an agenda to mess up the system, or target a particular thread or poster. There is also an accreditation filter based on the meta-moderation accreditation scheme detailed in the next section. Any moderator whose ratings are consistently rated unfair will eventually be removed from the pool of eligible moderators due to bad karma.

Accreditation: Slashdot implements a second level of moderation (meta-moderation – M2) in order to weed out bad moderators. M2 works by making any user that has an account from the first 90% of accounts created on the system eligible to moderate the moderations. Each eligible user that opts to perform the M2 review is provided with 10 random ratings of comments and the user rates the rating as either unfair, fair, or neither. The M2 process affects the karma of the original moderator. Currently, 96% of all moderations are judged to be fair. At the beginning, that number was as low as 40% (?). In the first week that the metamoderation system was in place, that number improved by 20%. In the last year, it has hardly changed at all.

Actors Appropriation & Effort Level Original Developers: Sold Slashdot to Andover.net that became Open Source Development Network (OSDN). The creators of Slashdot were compensated for the sale of the site and were given jobs with OSDN whose principal source of revenue is from advertising. They receive 55 million page views a month and are regarded as the #1 technical news site (4), making them an attractive proposition to many advertisers.

Authors: Most authors are compensated employees of OSDN. There is at least one professional writer that regularly contributes, Jon Katz, who started contributing to Slashdot for free three years ago. He signed a paid three-year contract to contribute original content to Slashdot. Users are not compensated and retain all copyrights on their comments other than a license that allows them to be displayed on slashdot. Comments range from throwaway reactions to thoughtful and researched contributions. Moderators are not paid either, but the amount of work required is very small as only five comments are to be evaluated. Likewise, meta-moderation only requires review of ten moderations for fairness and is hardly time-consuming.

Collective Action Problems and Enforcement Devices Slashdot attracts a wide variety of troublemakers attempting to exploit the exposure they can receive by disrupting the conversation and increasing the noise-signal ratio. One technique used is to create a script to repeatedly post comments. To counter this slashcode contains a ‘Troll Filter’ which prevents multiple posts from the same IP address during short time frames. Another tool, the ‘lameness filter’, scans for poorly assembled posts using illegible characters and forms, and prevents their appendage to the story. Other attacks manipulate html vulnerabilities such as page widening scripts, and although this cannot be filtered out by the lameness filter the IP address will be logged and banned from the site.

The examples listed above concern problems related to maintaining usability of the site. Aside from this Slashdot has problems with user circumvention of its advertising boxes. As much of the site’s revenue depends on page impressions and ‘click-throughs’ to their advertisers, this activity is much more serious in that it undermines financial sustainability. This practice is common amongst a small section of the user-base and is very difficult to prevent, as its adherents typically are sufficiently skilled to counter preventative measures. Only the development of a stronger sense of community and realization that advertising supplies the finance for its sustenance can address this problem.

An estimated 50 trolls are active on the site (determined from IP addresses). There are complicated political dealings within the troll community -- they have their own sites and interactions with one another (e.g. geekizoid has a fallout with adequacy.org).

Site administrators supervise the meta-moderation process. Where users are deemed to be abusing their position they are punished with what has become known as the ‘bitchslap’; every comment they have submitted will be retroactively scored at –1, their karma will become negative and their default score of +1 or +2 taken from them. For most purposes the consequences of the sanction (performed by bots unleashed by Taco and Hemos) is to render the account functionally disabled.

Moderation Setup – many users, small amount of power

Moderator Selection – only average user can be moderator

Moderator Posting Restriction – moderator can not post in thread they moderate

M2 Moderation – check on moderation Potential for Degrading Quality of Information Troll Filter Initial Selection of Comments – if busy day and reach their limit

Other Community Aspects Registered users are also given a space to host a personal diary with the same comment and moderation features that apply to the site in general. As blogging has eveolved into a mass phenomena these diaries have moved closer to the centre of activity. Users link to their diaries from their comment templates and a slashbox is allocated on the front page to document new diary entries. In spring a new feature, ‘Zoo’ was developed allowing users to tag one another as friends or foes (determined either by acquaintance, conflict or agreeement in debate, and just about any other random reason). The system extends to more removed enemies (freaks) and admirers (fans). The result has been the emergence of multiple subcultures within the slashdot universe and lively comment and debate through the diary pages

Scalability With the rise in the number of users and the correlated increase in the number of comments discussions have progressively become unwieldy. Inevitably the moderation system puts a number of valuable users below the visibility threshold.. As the number of semi-experienced users whose every comment receives an automatic +2 swells, it becomes correspondingly more difficult for careful contributions from less prolific users to be discovered. Some users do however read articles at a –1 threshold, apparently for amusement value, so that quality contributions can be modded up (3).

One of the ways in which the site has been able to cope with the influx of users has been an increased development of special interest Sections as communities in themselves. A more manageable volume of comments combined with the sense of shared knowledge functions to maintain the coherence that often goes awry on a front page where stories often receive 800 comments.

Kuro5hin Where Slashdot provides evidence of the capacity of users to produce relevance and accreditation, Kuro5hin’s strengths lie elsewhere, namely in its production of high quality original articles and essays. Editorial input is peer produced and commentary takes a more refined literary and logical form than the discussion at Slashdot. Relevance and accreditiation functions are also performed collaboratively on k5 albeit to a lesser degree than Slashdot. The site is subtitled ‘culture and technology from the trenches’ and heterogenous in content as opposed to Slashdot’s relatively narrow tech-community focus.

History Rusty Foster who is author also of the free software ‘Scoop’ that provides the site’s functionality founded Kuro5hin in December 1999. Previously a spoke of the Open Source Development Network (like Slashdot), Kuro5hin went independent in the spring of 2001. Kuro5hin’s community has nurtured a distinctly cooperative form. They currently serve around 4.1 million page views a month

"Collaborative media" is a catch-all phrase for things like Scoop and Slash community sites, wikis, blogs, and generally all those interesting developing hybrid forms of news/discussion/community that continue to proliferate and mutate online. –Rusty

In short, I'm wary of people abusing the goodwill of communities to make money (whether for themselves or to donate elsewhere). Cf. the lilo/openprojects situation for another example.

Impact of growth on each is distinct: a benefit for slash in terms of its fact checking capacity, a problem for k5 potentially as the conversation becomes unmanageable

Structure/Financing Following seperation from OSDN, K5 forged a series of revenue mechanisms to finance the site, which are described below. Bandwidth and server space is provided in return for in-kind advertising. The software powering the site’s functionality is free software (under a GPL license) that is developed by a pool of volunteers, thus there are no development or licensing costs.The site admin has estimated the annual costs of maintaining the site at $70,000, his breakdown of that figure is as follows: $12,000: Operating expenses (accounting, corp fees, Paying Inoshiro a paltry sum for hosting our mail and DNS) $25,200: Taxes $32,800: Money rusty takes home

Revenues:Text Ads The site also offered users the opportunity to take out their own small text ads at prices such as $2.00 per page view and sought in this way to provide a means and motivation for people to contribute without either overwhelming the site in advertising or segregating the articles into public and private (pay per access). The low cost of text ads has inspired many users to buy them to share a thought, a joke, or to promote a piece of information, they rarely refer to commercial products and many people actually like them. Indeed many ‘premium’ subscribers nominate to keep their text ads box turned on even though they have purchased the right to eliminate it. The small size of the box also means that it is unobtrusive and thus does not provoke the apoplexy of anti-commercial network users.

‘Premium’ Membership At a cost of $//4/month users can become members. Subscribers receives access to eadditional features such as spellcheckers for their comment postings, the ability to turn off advertisements, notification of replies to one’s comments or stories and monitoring for new entries on your favourite diaries. Members’ posts are also identified by an icon acknowledging their support, lending extra prestige to their activity at least in the eyes of some users.

Donations As these mechainsms were inadequate to raise the necessary funds to guarantee the site’s survival, Rusty published a proposal to establish K5 as a not for profit 501(3)© called the ‘Collaborative Media Foundation’ in April 2002, and made an appeal for donations. In the following days over $35,000 dollars was raised through user contributions, and work on the establishment of the foundation is now quite advanced. Users are kept informed on developments by Rusty through his journal and of course stories on the web page itself. He has also promised to draw up the foundation’s by-laws and constitution through a process of community collaboration/consultation, and to fill some seats on the board through elections in which all financial contributors can take part.

Filtration Stories subnitted to K5 enter a voting queue. After registered users have entered their user-name and password on the front page they have access to these stories. In some cases the author will request editorial comment and assistance, otherwise registered users are simply asked to vote on whether the story shoul;d be posted or not. Comments can be added prior to publication, and a drop down menu allows spoecification as to whether the comments are of a ‘topical’ or ‘editorial’. Voters are asked to select between a +1 rating, 0 to reflect indifference or abstention, or –1 where they think the bstory should be trashed. Those who vote in favour of the story must also decide whther it should be voted to the front page or only to a specific section. On reaching a set threshold of votes, whther positive or negative, the story is automatically posted or dumped. If posted, the story gets front page publication if more than 50% of the positve voters expressed this preference.

kuro5hin will help you get chicks.

Moderation As outlined, filtration of the initial utterance on Slashdot is performed by a small and unabashedly subjective set of individuals, whereas K5’s community as a whole votes on articles pre-publication to determine whether the story shall end up in the dumpster, a section page or the front page. K5 can be described as democratic in form and this participatory character is not limited to the selection of stories featured.

Every user has the chance to moderate a comment once. In addition the evaluation method is transparent - user i.d.’s and assessments of previous moderators can be accessed by clicking on the rating at the top of the comment. Overall ratings are a mean of the collective user evaluations, that is the sum of the ratings divided by the number of moderators. This system of moderation may be more effective that slashdot’s where moderation power is assigned on a limited and ad hoc basis. Under that model it may happen that users with little interest in the moderation process get to alter the ratings and they can do so without being tempered by more attentive and reflective moderators. K5 ensures that those who care to moderate always have the ability to do so. The universal nature of voting powers assists also in negating the effect of ‘steering voting’ whereby a user employs the rating mechanism not to go give a fair judgement on the common but instead chooses a value with the intention of affecting the comment’s score, a practice which is regarded with distaste by most of the k5 core.

Slashdot, on the contrary, bestows moderation powers on a limited number of users each week, each of whom are assigned only five points to apply increase or decrese their peers’ ratings. Furthermore, the identities of those exercising moderation powers are occluded from everyone including the participant. Slashdot staff however have an unlimited number of moderation points at all times, and have been documented using the power this bestows to structure dialogue according to their own preferences.

Relevance is organised on SD by means not only of the numerical score awarded a post but also the adjectival rating connected to it as well such as :’interesting’, ‘insightful’, ‘offtopic’, ‘flamebait’, ‘informative’, ‘funny’. These indicators signal the degree to which the post remais germane to the discussion or digresses on an unrelated tangent. As in the case of numerical evaluation, this allows the user to parse what may initially be several hundred comments to filter what may otherwise be an unmanageable discussion.

Persistence Constructive participation is rewarded with ‘Mojo’, similar to SD’s karma. The average score awarded to one’s posts establishes the rating which will be allocated to the comment prior to peer evaluation. This average is not a media howver and greater weight is attached to more recent comment ratings. Once a user’s mojo exceeds a mathematically defined threshold (apparently 3.5 out of a possible 5) they become a trusted user. The only privelige this status accrues however is the ability to read comments rated below 1, and in effect trusted users become assistants in the filtering of spam etc. and oversee one another’s judgements to ensure that 0 ratings are not being imposed for reasons of personla hostility or ideological disagreement.

K5 does not provide this type of adjectival tagging and limits relevance filtration to the rmeoval of spam and duplicate posts. In most instances this is performed by the administrators, but trusted users can also rate a comment at 0. Where the collective assesment of a comment descends below zero it becomes invisible to all but trusted users, and will remain so unless some of them decide to vote it bak up to 1.

Collective Action Problems Free riding in the context of these programs has little effect. As the central resource for journalism is attention, there isn't the same pressure as on a limited resource such bandwidth or processing power.The added value brought by users is their judgement (as expressed in their moderation activity), their submissions (adding to the pool upon which the filtration will be performed) and their creativity (in the case of k5 which relies upon its participants for its primary matter).

As Slashdots revenue base hinges upon its advertising sales, no user is in truth a free rider, as at the very least she is another viewer whose page impressions are worth as much as a registered participant. Nonetheless readers who are not signed in receive only static pages, allowing savings in terms of CPU usage.

Gaming: K5’s feature of awarding moderation powers to every user, and requiring their transparent exercise, brings problems of gaming and disruptive behaviour in its wake. The simplest method to game the community is through the establishment of multiple userids, thus acquiring the ability to mod others down systematically and mod oneself up. Likewise for the determinations made in the story queue. This vulnerability is inextricably linked to the unreliability of email addresses, in that thyey are easy and free to set up, requiring only that the individual be sufficiently determined as to take the time to do it. Requiring verifiable personla information would raise the barrier to particpation and raise privacy issues (where for example would such information be stored, who would be responbsible were it to be disclosed etc.) An alternative solution would be the use of a trust-metric as exemplified by advogato.org. There users are organised on three tiers: apprentice, journeyman and master. Lower-order users become trusted as they are certified by their higher order peers. In this way, trust is deeply imbricated in reputation accumulated over time, or in some cases through real-world cooperatioon or acquaintance.

Revenge rating, unfortunately, appears to be the cost of transparency in the voting process. A significant number of users become incensed when they find themselves rated down, and exact vengeance through systematically tracking their ‘antagonist’s’ posts and voting them down without reference to the quality of the comment or story.

Trolling is usually considered a nuisance but each user-group tends to have its favourite trolls, some of who have refined a subtle and skilled method of inflaming or otherwise distracting others. Where the behaviour is unwelcome, trusted users can award them a zero rendering their posts invisible except to other TUs, who have discretion as to whether to bring them back to visiblity or to allow them to languish. In general however, K5 discourages the promiscuous application of the zero-score vaporisation, preferring to reserve that fate for any spam found on the site.

A Democratic and Deliberative Medium? This difference in corporate form and community character is reflected in the distribution of power in the two sites. K5 is democratically self-managed, whereas slash maintains a high level of centralised control over key functions, namely: - reservation of the filtration function to the site administrators - unlimited number of moderation points for the administrators allows them to affect the rating attached to a given comment, determining its level of visibility. Slashdot also has paid employees.

Revenue Structure Slashdot receives a high revenue from banner ad sales and a smaller amount from its merchandising activities. They also have a subscriber program which allows users to turn off the advertising boxes.

Motivation Conversation has been the core network activity since the advent of email and usenet. Likewise communities of interest have been a constant and appear in manifold forms from news-groups, BBS, mailing, lists, IRC channels etc. The basic desire to exchange and show off knowledge, to win the respect of one’s peers, to particpate in a niche community of people whom share your interests fuses with the pleasure of instant publishing and thus instant gratification. From this perspective collaborative media sites represent a refinement of a pre-existing culture. The innovative aspect of this is the intelligent software fashioned to the spcific needs to manage conversation fluidity and attenuate information overload. Furthermore the tools allow the user to tailor the degree of their involvement

Lastly, many weblogs do not correspond to the descriptions provided above, and shpould not be seen as journalism engines in any sense. Whilst Slashdot and K5 may function group logic machines’, personal blogs tend to be vehicles for the expression of highly subjective editorial statements. This is not to discount the value of the alternative viewpoints articulated there, but rather to underline that not all weblogs are capable of producing the same form of collective discussion, be it for lack of critical mass, software or social protocols. “When I say collaborative, what I mean is that the site, as a “product” (to use Doc’s least favorite term) is the result of the cooperative efforts of many different people. “

The traditional print press employs journalists to cover a broad ‘beat’ that they have the background to write about to varying degrees, but the purpose is broadly to match coverage with competency. In this sense we can compare the process to the assignation of tasks within a firm. As we argue elsewhere this is often not the way to optimally allocate labor. In the weblog format, writers self-select themselves for the investigation, description and critique of areas with which they are familiar, in a manner not dissimilar to that seen in free software development. A newspaper can never have the resources to employ ‘experts’ in all areas, and in any case develops a product for a mass-audience rather than a collection of special interest users. This lacuna is filled by niche monthly or quarterly publication or trade journals. Collaborative weblogs’ effectiveness derives from their capacity to present expert knowledge combined with rivalrous interpretations to a mass media audience in a timely manner. Thus in the wake of the WTC disaster K5 could draw upon its user base to publish articles relating to the history and reality of anthrax threats by doctors, and evaluations of changes in airplane security by pilots.

The willingness of readers to check the accuracy of claims – with the tools of the web such as Google and databases to assist them – and to contest interpretations occurring in a technological framework that allows an immediate feedback loop is what makes collaborative web sites powerful. The immediacy makes the writing of the story more a process than a finite task, which distinguishes it from a newspaper’s letter column, where corrections, clarifications or complaints are published several days later, if at all. As much news has a short life-span in terms of reader interest, such amendments will often be in vain, as interest has wandered of elsewhere.

Social Protocols and Socialization Effects Many online versions of traditional media organizations recognize this and provide the option for users to add comments. The process of assembling the article remains reserved to the media-organization’s employees, which is understandable as their existence is in a certain manner hinged upon their claims to be uniquely qualified to perform this function. Because of the fact that newspapers have been a one-way medium aimed at a passive audience their users have been socialized into interacting with them in a limited and bounded way, whereas mass-collaborative blogs were conceived exactly as a means to maximize participation. Weblogs remain based around sources/articles in the traditional media, which may result from the capacity of the mainstream to set the discursive agenda, or because individual sites do not have either the resources or the desire to provide the type of punctual reportage that specialist news organizations do. In fact one of the precious aspects of a site such as K5 is that it provides a discussion forum whose content does not mimic the mainstream, leaving time for elaborate and deepened reflection.

(1) Your story just might not be interesting! Slashdot elaborates on the last criteria – “[d]eciding the interest level of a story is a very subjective thing, and we have to take into account not only the intrinsic interest of the story itself, but what else is happening that day.” [1] (2) (3) Conversation with Jeff "Hemos" Bates on 15 March 2002. (4) According to @plan [get link] (5) The first story on Slashdot: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/14/1232229 The comment discovering the stock photo: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=4447391&sid=42252 The followup (including the link to the AP story quoted above): http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/15/0044255 A long list of stock photos used in Microsoft PR (some are also fake testimonials): http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=4448357&sid=42252&tid=109 (6) The Utter Failure of Weblogs as Journalism http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/11/232538/32 http://www.scottandrew.com/weblog/2001_10 (7) Advogato trust metric

Native to the web Vetting Insurrection of the gifted amateurs. Compare to talk radio with multiple parallel lines Debunking Disclosure can be slow because of the need to maintain integrity, or because the financial model is determining everything.

Put in something about RDF/RSS feeds. See this ridiculously long-winded post by me [slashdot.org] for a detailed analysis of /.'s I find it ironic that it was a critisism of the comment system (Post of Doom) as the Troll Post Investigation Controversey regarding Maldas comments on the commercial value of comments in the context of the costs of bandwdth, processing power etc. stop punishing those who post with higher subscription fees. Rewards (extra features) make people feel happier then threats ("big ads or money!").

October 30, 2002 - 4:51am -- hydrarchist

NGOs can set themselves the objective of campaigning in a hard-cop--soft-cop fashion for reform of patent or other intellectual property offices. The soft cop NGOs can take their seats on policy committeeswithin the walls of the patent office and seek to push for changes in patent administration that: (1) demand resistance to the strategic litigation games of the multinationals; (2) demand effective application of the tests of patentability in the public interest; (3) demand that human rights, such as rights to health and indigenous rights, are taken seriously in patent determinations; and (4) inisist on denial of patents to companies which do not adequately document the know-how needed to work the invention properly once the patent has expired. The fourth point is important so that others can exploit the information in tha patent that society has received in exchange for the grant of patent privelige and so new generations of inventors can stand on their shoulders. The hard cop NGOs can attack the patent office (and indeed the soft cop NGOs) from outside the walls, accusing them of regulatory capture. Experience in other domains with combating regulatory capture by big business, for example with environmental regulation, suggests that persistence over a long period with this strategy of hard cop and soft cop NGOs competing for politcal influence is what produces public-regarding reform.

P.205, Information Feudalism

October 29, 2002 - 1:30pm -- hydrarchist

Check out this interview with democratic blogging pioneer Rusty Foster. He set up Kuro5hin(pronounced 'corrosion') and wrote much of the initial GPL software, Scoop, which runs it.

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