connecting*the*dots

I found this striking mural a few months back while knee deep in my late night Flickr ritual of browsing imagery by contextual navigation of topical tags. As the night wore on I drifted from tags like art to street art to graffiti, eventually resting on Malcolm X.

After staring at the shot for a few minutes, I realized why this particular image struck me — on two distinct levels:

• The mere existence of such a powerful representation of Malcolm X and his words embedded in the public square for all to see
• The absence of his complete representation, both physical and philosophical, due to elemental deterioration over time

In the real world — before the internet created another dimension for the documentation of expression and our collective histories — all atom based elements had a shelf life.

Street art, by it’s very nature, had even a shorter life span.

But here I was, stumbling across this deteriorating, real world representation, frozen in time (at what point in time I have no idea) by someone who made an explicit decision to digitize the real for the sake of posterity.

Without the internet, this work — this message — might have already drifted away from our consciousness.

Speaking of the message, only a few lines of Malcolm X’s quote remained legible in it’s original format. It seemed familiar to me, so I took a few moments to run a Google search of the words I could decipher.

Thanks to the collective participation of people publishing to the internet, within a matter of moments, I was able to piece together the original context of the quote from the mural:

“With every succeeding page, I also learned of people and places and events from history. Actually the dictionary is like a miniature encyclopedia. Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet — and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary.”

Context is knowledge, so I circled back to the image and added the text that would have surrounded the original quote on the wall if the wall were 50 feet high.

The Internet On This Day

Eighty-two years ago today, Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little to Earl Little and Louise Helen in Omaha, Nebraska.

Depending on your company, Malcolm X is often remembered as either an inspiration — an educated, revolutionary, evolutionary force — or an extremist that preached hate.

Without the internet, the latter of these two descriptions could easily edify his legacy for future generations to come.

With the internet, we have context of evolution and truth:

The Early Years In The Nation Of Islam

Debating At Oxford University

Returning From Mecca

A New Direction, Seeing Death In The Distance

The Assassination Of Malcolm X

Paying Tribute

Living In His Footsteps

Our Collective Responsibility

Prior to the internet, the reality of our lives drifted into the annals of time and both the discrete and general narratives of history were crafted by those with the power to publish and distribute knowledge.

Today, we must recognize the importance and responsibilities of living in a digital age.

It is our responsibility that we be vigilant in documenting our knowledge for the serendipitous discovery of our fellow man, both today and years into the future — no matter our focus or industry.

Because if it’s not us taking advantage of this platform, the traditional owners of history will be more than happy to seep into play and stake their claim.

And that would be a wasted opportunity to make his-tory, our-story.

Al Gore from:
The Assault On Reason

[…] “Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services.

It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet.

The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic.

We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.” […]

A few years old now, but as powerful as ever:

The reporter didn’t correct himself, forgetting to mention that the wall that Banksy addressed actually divides Palestine from itself *not* just Israel from Palestine.

In any event, Banksy went to town with his unique style:

(originally uploaded by FREEPAL)

(originally uploaded by FREEPAL)

(originally uploaded by the walker cleavelands)

He followed up the street art with a more traditional painting of Jesus & Mary unable to get to Bethlehem because of the Israeli wall:

(originally uploaded by FredR)

Classic.

In five days, it’ll be the four-year anniversary of “Mission accomplished.”

Unbelievable.

btw, Steven Connell is amazing.

I’m on the North side of Greensboro, watching Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War with 15 other engaged citizens. House parties like this were set up all across the nation by Free Press.

How simple was it? I received an email from my brother after he was made aware of the showing through their local action alert email newsletter.

In any event, it’s great to see so many concerned and engaged citizens — mostly strangers before tonight — coming together to ask tough questions. Actually, it’s much more hemming and hawing at the incompetence of our Fourth Estate than dialog between each other, but I’m sure that’ll come in a few minutes.

I’m furious watching this broadcast, but it’s nothing new in terms of knowledge. I’ve been blogging about this fucking mess before we invaded, while we invaded and throughout the occupation and opined about most of the concepts and players covered in this brilliant narrative by Moyers.

If you saw this documentary — or plan to catch it in the future — don’t waste your time getting mad with politicians making decisions based on self-interest and power plays. Instead, think about your personal relationship with the media, journalism and reporting and how it shapes your world view.

Kent Bye has been working on a project since the run up to war called, The Echo Chamber Project. Paraphrasing his thesis: he’s attempting to present a large number of perspectives about both the media coverage in the run up to war and interviews with professionals from a large variety of industries in a manner that can be contextualized, remixed and redistributed to the live web by world citizens.

Why is that important?

Because the current journalistic methodology of reporting and “coverage” from centralized business domains is responsible for pimping this war into fruition.

Maybe if we all have the ability to participate in a methodology that allows for easily stitching together unbundled clips of perspective, reporting, coverage, etc. and contextualize it with our own knowledge and narrative, we can make a real dent in the mainstream business as usual.

Maybe we can even replace TV as we know it today.

Kent and I rapped about a bunch of the possibilities last year. If you have some time, check out the interview.

Andy is going to post an audio file of the conversation we just had post-viewing (which was really interesting). I’ll link to it as soon as he posts it himself.

UPDATE: Andy just posted the post-viewing conversation.

(direct link to the first pod of the seven part series)

From 2000 to 2003, I lived just down the road from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, first in Park Slope and then Gowanis.

As consistently penetrating as the New York City media is, not once did I even hear a whisper about the toxic issues my former neighbors in Williamsburg have been dealing with for decades now.

Instead, I reveled in the culture. Now I’m thinking, at what cost?

Gotta love that “self-interest” angle of capitalism, eh?

UPDATE: I’m currently watching part 6 of this 7 part series. Be sure to watch it all. It’s beyond disturbing. Greensboro residents are worried about strip clubs? Try living next to Radiac Research Corporation — a nuclear storage facility, where the radiation level can be pick up from a geiger counter flipped on at the front door.

It also resides across the street from an elementary school.

Scary stuff and great reporting.

(originally uploaded by Major Clanger)

(originally uploaded by MatthewBradley)

From an email I received the other day:

[…] “Our hope is to learn things that we can pass along to other people doing civil disobedience — turn this whole experience into a template that will make it easier for the next round. Our inspiration is the “barefoot lawyer” movement in China and Uganda.” [..]

- Liz Seymour -

Liz was one of the brave group of local protesters that were arrested at the Greensboro anti-surge rally a few months back. After I read Isabella’s post about why she decided to be arrested, I immediately signed up to grab the bus down to DC for the protest in late January.

On the way back from the march I met Liz for the first time.

We’ve gotten to know each other a bit more over the past few weeks at the Monday night Food not Bombs dinner for the homeless at the Greensboro Public Library. You see, Liz spends her days walking the walk — living in a collective house with six friends while making meals all week for folk around town who might otherwise go without.

Yeah, I can already hear what that little voice is saying in the back of your head:

“What a hippie!”

You need to tell that voice to shut the fuck up.

If you’d like to meet some real people — people who both stand up for what they believe in and live their lives accordingly — Liz and her co-defendants plan on holding a rally and press conference at 5pm outside the Greensboro courthouse tomorrow following their trial for civil disobedience.

Good luck, Liz, Isabella and everyone else involved.

Everyone.

A few weeks ago, Molly asked me if I would be interested in speaking with a group of students at Weaver Academy, a local high school here in Greensboro. Her friend, Meredith Newlin, is a teacher of rhetoric and writing at the school and Molly felt that our two worlds — full of words — were meant to collide.

I’m a teacher wanna-be, so I pretty much agreed to do it on the spot.

So after a bit of back and forth, Meredith and I were able to schedule yesterday as the day for the meeting. I made my way over to the school just after 1pm and was graciously received by her entire class.

Can I just say how cool it is to vibe with young minds?

I mean, we started in the typical lecture/audience model, where “Mr. Coon” began as the guest speaker for the day as the deliverer of wisdom. But after only 15 minutes of my back-story, the kids and I found ourselves immersed neck deep in a conversation about what it means to have a voice in the midst of the information revolution.

Yeah, 11th graders.

Meredith was great, as she guided the conversation from the back of the room, making smart bridges of relevance to her curricula — how rhetoric and solid writing skills can lead to both personal growth and new opportunities in the age in which we live, but it was the kids that led the direction of the conversation.

As we bounced from idea to idea, we spent a decent amount of time talking about social networking (every kid is on MySpace) and blogging (only a few kids actually blogged) and the power both hold nowadays, which quickly segued into a conversation about The People, Yes.

A Little Ditty About…

Over the past month or so, I’ve been hitting the library every Monday night at 6pm to catch the Food not Bombs homeless dinner, with laptop in tow to both present to the group when possible or pull people off to the side to introduce the ideas behind generating a voice, blogging and building community.

After giving the kids a bit of such context, I ventured into sharing some ideas and direction that I’ve yet to share with the majority of my board — such as opening up The People, Yes to all Greensboro residents, while diving deeper into more areas on the other side of the digital divide, like the city/county jail system (a Ndesanjo idea, I must confess).

I also mentioned that at some point in the near future, we’ll be looking to sign up volunteer blogging mentors, acquire digital cameras via donations and open up the project for either individual or local business sponsorships of bloggers.

Within minutes of sharing the nuts and bolts of the project, kids began asking about how blogging actually worked and one even volunteered to work on the project itself (what up, Cory!). Quite honestly, the amount of interest in the project was amazing and proved consistent with the feeling I have that once I can focus on TPY with all my attention, it’s going to be an extremely rewarding experience.

Until then, I’m relying on the folk who have stepped up to date, and that list is growing each day.

Back to yesterday: To give a bit more context surrounding the afternoon, here’s a few links to illustrate some of the ideas that we rapped about:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing speech and reading from Carl Sandburg’s, The People, Yes! at SXSW last year (my influence to start TPY)
• Introducing the notion of tagging meta-data to information these days through poetry
• How we can watch our rhetoric and writing grow and evolve through simple constructs like tag clouds

Just as we began to dig in and discuss different options for starting a blog, the hour and a half came to an end and the kids left for their next classes. Meredith asked me to speak a bit to her next class of ninth graders, which I was all too happy to oblige — we even have a Where’s Waldo-type photo to prove it:

Meredith and I are going to arrange another time for me and her kids to get down and dirty with blogging software, which will hopefully empower her class with a collaborative blog and/or individual ones for any of the kids who want to start publishing their Peter Bradyesque voices.

With the passion and curiosity of these kids, Roch won’t know what’s hitting him. ;)

(originally uploaded by Akcelik)

sponsored by…

every man has a vocal chord
but not every man has a voice
some choose to live life that way
others simply have no choice
with too much to think about
too much goin’ on
too much tryin’ to survive
too much watchin’ their own get gone
so what’s the worth of words
these mere utterances in time
these rearranged thoughts
in both rhythm and rhyme?
i’ll tell you their value
but you probably won’t hear me
being caught up in the matrix
you’ll just craft reason to fear me..

when i’m struggling to get by
and trying to fly
but instead i get high
and dance that fine line
it’s the words that come save me
like dry turkey in gravy
i flip back to my quest
and push along like scorsese
to craft a moment in time
script the next one to follow
not some hollow ass production
of bling pursuit do i wallow
in the mire i find the depths
the inspiration
the desire..

to live by the pursuit of the grade
A
performance bonus
A
white picket dream
A
life with no compassion
A
way to drown out the screams
the shit just ain’t for me
and i know i’m not alone
so pick up your pen
your pad
your phone
dial me into your realm
put on your friday night best
cause when we hit the streets
it’s all about the people
yes..

It’s time to get down and dirty with real political discussion.

Nick Reville just pinged me a few minutes ago, pointing me to a new Participatory Politics Foundation project called Open Congress.

Don’t look now folks, but we’re about to 2.0 the hell out of government.

I’ve dropped that phrase a bunch of times online, added some potential feature flavor in a comment thread and even spoke to dev friends about what it would take to build something like this, but there’s no need now; this puppy looks like it’ll grow strong legs moving forward.

And from a first glance, I really like the approach that PPF took to legislation being the primary object of focus in the domain.

The original idea for my project was to position a domain around the 535 seats within Congress and pull in information and data that contextualized the job that individuals were doing in their role serving their constituents — keeping a record of all current and future seat information.

I hoped that if we could build a rich interface for displaying information about and by representatives — voting records, financing, news events, press releases, blog posts, video, audio, etc. — then a Digg-like rating system could work with an “on the job” algorithm to rate each representative. They would then be forced to step up and be more transparent with their rationale for, say, voting against the will of their constituents on particular legislation.

I still think that approach is important, but it should be secondary if we, the people, are participating in a democratic institution.

The actual job focus of our representatives is the business of the people — the legislation that shapes our lives within a representative democracy.

So if you design a domain with too much of a focus on the Senators and Representatives, you just might create an even greater echo chamber for rumor mongering and feeding polarizing bloggers gallons of liquid for their pissing wars, whether they’re Democratic or Republican.

With this approach — legislation first — bloggers are given the opportunity to track what matters first and foremost. And if our representatives fumble within those processes — like a Ted Stevens with his Bridge to Nowhere — then we can hop on them like flies to shit.

What I’m hoping happens now is that other political transparency domains — like Jim Harper’s WashingtonWatch and Denise Roth Barber at FollowTheMoney — ping Nick and crew, with an invite to share their data for the OpenCongress interface.

As Robert DeNiro so eloquently stated in Brazil: “We’re all in it together“

(originally uploaded by annette 62)

In Newcastle, UK.

UPDATE: Sorry for the crappy image, but annette 62 seems to have left flickr, so the clean copy went with it. In its place is a scaled up version of a cashed thumbnail.

The text on the billboard reads:

EVER THOUGHT OF JOINING?
TALK TO SOMEONE WHO HAS
(added graf) LOST A SON IN IRAQ