The Nexus of 2024

CFP08: trip report

—

by

jon
in , , , ,

Part 1 of a series

cfp logoComputers, Freedom, and Privacy 2008 ended with me presenting Dear Potus 08 and circulating the letter to the presidential candidates for signatures, and then a closing plenary by Clay Shirky (notes below). It was exhiliarating as always, and I’m now simultaneously exhausting, revved up, and suffering from jet lag. So I figured I’d blog about it.

Even by CFP standards, this year was particularly chaotic — off to a late start, an endless string of challenges for program committee members that continued right up to the conference with a torn Achilles tendon for one person and a severe back injury for another, and appallingly bad wireless from the hotel who for some reason decided to reconfigure their system the Tuesday. And as always, in chaos there is opportunity. Generous sponsorship from LAMP, the Yale Law and Media Project allowed twenty journalists to attend with immediate results (Markus Beckedahl on netzpolitik.org and Renato Cruz on Estadão.com.br joined Kevin Poulsen and Ryan Singel on Wired as places for regular updates); and the timing in an election year was (almost) perfect.

Conference chair Eddan Katz asked Deborah to speak for a few minutes at the opening about CFP’s history, and one of the things she talked about CFP has from the very beginning tried to be a place where people with different viewpoints meet, and the end result is both better understanding and impact on society. The opening plenary, featuring Danny Weitzmann and last-minute replacement Chuck Fish as “surrogates” for the Obama and McCain campaigns respectively*, along with program committee members Ari Schwartz and Susan Crawford proved a great example. Excerpts from the steadily-growing CFP 2008 coverage page tell the story:

Gotta like that. I do feel bad for Chuck, whose was kind enough to fill in at the last moment, and probably didn’t mean to describe those who favor telco immunity as “selling indulgences”, but that said: the McCain spokesman’s clarification in Ryan’s followup article states their case clearly and articulately, and so the end result is to highlight the differences between the campaigns on this issue — one that we’ve been talking about at CFP since the mid-90s. [Back then, the focus was on FISA courts as infringements on civil liberties …] Yay us.

Update, May 27: see McCain vs. Obama on Tech Issues on Slashdot with the framing that “there’s some key differences that just might play at least a small part in your vote.“

Eddan was kind enough to let me ask the last question of the opening session, and so I followed up with a lead-in to Dear Potus 08. That’s a big enough deal that it’s worth it’s own thread; please see CFP08 trip report part 2: Dear Potus 08.

Wednesday afternoon, on Andrea Matwyshyn’s Charismatic Content panel, I talked about some of the things we were doing to make Dear Potus 08 charismatic in a textual kind of way. Jacqui Lipton of Case Law school talked about images and video; and Alex Bratman, who’s just finished his first year as an undergraduate at Wharton, stole the show both his discussion of how writing his paper knowing it was going to be on a wiki led him to take a completely different approach. Since one of the points I was making is the importance of experimentation, I also kicked off Get it on Slashdot! … no joy so far, but it’s early days.

Thursday was the all-day social network workshop. Aldon Hynes’ A Human Face and Due Process Online on Orient Lodge is a great summary; I’ll add my perspectives in a separate post.

Thursday evening, I rather embarrassingly missed the announcement of CFP 2009 in DC — chaired by Cindy Southworth of National Network to End Domestic Violence and Jay Stanley of the ACLU, with support from a bunch of people … including me, for online outreach. Oops. Apparently people clapped anyhow when my name came up.

Thursday evening and Friday morning was editing the Dear Potus draft, trying to select the common threads and an overall framework from the various tables. Susy and other program committee members took my initial draft and it steadily got better and better. Have I mentioned how much I love wikis?

Later on Friday morning, I substituted for Jennifer Urban and moderated the panel on Hate Speech and Oppression in Cyberspace. Elizabeth Englander of Bridgewater State College’s Massachusetts Aggression Research Center spoke on cyberbullying; Ann Bartow, of the University of South Carolina Law School and the feministlawprofs blog, talked about her experiences and potential legal approaches. The audience was very engaged, and there was a lot of discussion — including of Lori Drew and Ariel Waldman’s recent blog post about Twitter refusing to uphold its Terms of Service. Another excellent session, and a good chance for me to drop a reference to Owen Fiss’ The Irony of Free Speech.

And then the Dear Potus 08 wrapup and Clay’s talk. When I was describing what I hoped would be the “story arc” of the conference to the program committee, I said that the hoped-for ending is something along the lines of “we kick off this very cool activism and education social computing project, Clay talks about how social computing lets activists and educators change the world, and then everybody gets fired up and goes out and changes the world”. The first two steps went very well indeed. As for part three, we shall see.

There’s a lot more, of course; I’ll be blogging more about this over the next few weeks while I recuperate. It was as always great to see so many old friends and acquaintances — and make new ones. In the past, the energy and connections have dissipated as the conference ends. Hopefully, this year with blog and presence on social networks, we’ll be able to keep the discussions, connections, and impact going all year round

jon

PS: We attempted to record audio for all sessions, and video for a lot as well; despite the student assistants’ best efforts, there were lots of problems with the A/V equipment, and so we’re still not sure what we’ve got … or when we’ll be able to get it up. Others also recorded the sessions, though, so hopefully it’ll be okay. We shall see.

* the Clinton campaign was invited to send somebody as well but alas wasn’t able to schedule it

Comments

4 responses to “CFP08: trip report”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    notes from Clay Shirky’s closing plenary … i didn’t get most of the Q&A, and missed a few other things, but on the whole i think i did okay

    Clay Shirky’s closing CFP plenary

    Thesis of Here comes everybody: group action just got easier.

    Barrier to ad hoc groups: transaction costs. The internet lowers these costs.

    Example1: HSBC offered college students penalty-free checking in the spring. Over the summer, they changed their policy. They had two advantages: information and coordination — students were spread out. There was the usual media outcry; but nothing actually happened. But they hadn’t reckoned with Facebook. Thousands of people joined the group. They wrote up detailed instructions about how to change your bank account — HSBC lost their infomration advantage. Then they started online protests. They started planning an in-person protest for the fall … by then HSBC had caved.

    William James: “thinking is for doing”. This change is going on in media: “publishing is for acting”. Media isn’t just a source of information; it’s also a site for action. What Facebook shows is that every URL is (potentially) a link to community.

    Example 2: 2006 Minsk ice cream flash mob; photos show secret police dragging kids out. It was illegal to join in a group in the main square. They managed to force the state to act in public, under the cameras. Media as a site of action — action as a site of media. “Nothing says dictatorship like arresting people for eating ice cream”. Takes advantage both of accelaration of publishing *and* shift from advance planning to spontaneous action.

    Example 3: Twitter. If people know you’re being held, you’re not held as long. Egypt example. Interesting dynamic of social software. Tools like MS Word and Photoshop have roughly the same effects anywhere around the world. By contrast, social software has very different effects on context. The same technology used in the US for lolcats is used by Bahraini activists to mark up Google maps. In actions where group action is restricted, anything which enables group action is often repurposed for this. Ethan Zuckerman: “tools that are designed specifically for activists are usually the first things governments shut down”; but gov’ts can’t shut down twitter, flickr, … because they’re so broadly used.

    Lessons for activists — wiki discusion of “rules and tools”

    1) some animals are more equal than others.

    Slashdot: first place to get large scale reputation and karma right. Typically get hundreds to thousands of comments. Suffers from the tragedy of the (rhetorical) commons. Once there’s a large audience, there’s a temptation to get that audience’s attention — even for those whose *only* goal is to get attention.

    Slashdot’s Gestalt: members defend readers from writers. People who care more than average about Slashdot as a whole (post, meta-moderate, etc.) become “members”. They then give those members power to do more moderation.

    Patterns:
    1) move comments to a spearate page
    2) treat readers and writers differently
    3) let users rate posts
    4) defensive defaults — e.g., hide 0 and -1 by default

    2) short/long and small/large

    long reputation both
    short neither moderation
    small large

    for small/short groups, reputation and moderation can be harmful: you get an inert system. for small/long, the key is individual participants: who’s trying to advance the group, and who’s getting in the way.

    3) not all enviornments are the same

    one of the biggest mistakes is to assume that all environments are the same, and deploy something heavyweight like Slashdot where it doen’t make sense

    as of late last year, nobody had replicated Slashdot

    4) not all users do the same thing

    wikipedia page: 5000+ edits, 2200+ users
    most active user: 350 edits.
    most participants have made only one edit

    the temptations are to design assuming all the users are the same; or do 80/20 rule and ignore the needs of the 20%. the onesies and twosies on the page add up to a huge amount of work

    wikpedia lowers the cost of a single pass: if you see a comma missing, it’s no overhead to fix it. similar thing happened with coalition for passenger bill of rights. subdividin participation into tiny chunks and syndicating things incredibly broadly is now an option.

    Starting things

    sharing: youtube, nature, del.icio.us: i’m doing this for me, and my actions are creating aggregate value

    cooperation (wikipedia, linux): people altering their behavior to synchronize with others who are also changing their behavior

    collective action: the outcome has value to the group; the group stands or falls as a whole. the hardest to get going

    something i noticed after finishing the book: the world is filled with sharing examples. there are a bunch of well-understood collaborative examples: open source, wikis. for collective action, almost all the examples we have now are about stopping things — Filipinos turning out against the government; HSBC protests.

    what’s the difference between cooperation and collective action? not sure, but here’s a thought:

    the collaborative production successes we have all center around intellectual property. the thing that makes this possible is the licensing structure — GPL, Creative Commons, GFDL. we don’t have an equivalent for group action in the real world.

    front porch forum in vermont: make it easy for towns to have online bulletin boards. for example, what to do about sidewalks. gap: there’s no equivalent license, no way for law to defer to the group. for example, a group can’t sign up for a bank account; it can only be one person. if however the group walks out and incorporates, no problem. the law recognizes corporations as social structures.

    what i’m wondering is whether it’s possible to use corporate structure to let a group come together.

    tantalizing examples: “the virtual company project”, trying to let groups come together, take on their own governance rules, invest in sweat equity, and get recognized by the state.

    UK: the community interest company; for-profit companies with social goals. right now, if i took over ben and jerry’s and introduced ground-up-kitten ice cream … i could do that. community interest companies can write things into their bylaws in a (relatively) inalienable way.

    somewhere between a bet and a hope: this is going to happen.

    ——-

    Fred Lane: front porch forum. The political aspects are interesting: officials get access to all their consituents. This service has jacked up the levels of involvement and activism to new heights.

    Clay: I use it as the benchmark example, because it’s the right software and hte right environment. The social transformation we’re going through matters more than the technological one; these tools don’t get interesting socially until they’re technologically boring. what’s the most interesting social technology of 2008? email! people forwarding the links around.

    Greg Vetter: I’d add Mozilla as an example — moving to a for-profit entity. Resonates with my research. (not clear if they wrote anything into their bylaws?)

    Dave Reed: from my experience on boards, including a community-focused startup, the thing that’s missing is the overhead. it’s now taken me over a year to form a non-profit. how to reduce this?

    Reply
  2. Liminal states » CFP08 trip report (2): Dear Potus 08

    […] 2 of a series; please see CFP08: trip report for part […]

    Reply
  3. hitel Avatar
    hitel

    Good read. I discovered your website from a google search, and was glad i did. The details has helped me immensely.

    Reply
  4. высота установки полотенцесушителя Avatar
    высота установки полотенцесушителя

    ценно ) клас что есть интернет, такое можно узнать!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *