connecting*the*dots

(shot by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

So the world has woken up and discovered Twitter.

I’m not gonna front, I’ve only been Twittering for a few months now. I sat on the sidelines for the last year or so and watched Tara and Chris pimp it, but I just couldn’t figure out how it fit into my world.

Well, I think I’ve finally got it… and then some.

While a bunch of people out west have large numbers of close friends that use Twitter incessantly, I don’t. Most of my peeps from the NYC and Greensboro area don’t view communicative technology through quite the same lens as left coasters (we’re all a step or two behind on that front). So my friend list — while filled with people I consider to be friends — aren’t folk that I know extremely well or interact with on a daily basis.

So I’m now getting a chance to familiarize myself with colleagues from both across the country and the other side of the world.

That’s actually quite cool.

Sure, sometimes their Twitters are as dumb as mine, but that just gives me more insight into their varied personalities. Those Twitts about eating PB&J or screaming at a cabbie only confirms that we’re more alike than different. And when they do drop science and briefly enlighten the world as to what they’re working on, well, that’s the gold mine of Twitter.

Chris Messina stuck that nugget of a thought in my head the last time we hung out at Citizen Summit. He implored me to use Twitter and keep him (and anyone else following me) in the know with what I was doing with The People, Yes.

The conversation got even deeper once we all started discussing ways to bridge the digital divide locally, and before I knew it, I was thinking about Twitter implementation within the TPY interface.

So check this out:

That’s a John Ford special for you.

He took Alex King’s Twitter Tools beta plug-in, tweaked the partially functional plug-in code to post Twitters to my Wordpress blog with an appended category and styled the category with a CSS class.

So now every time I SMS to 40404, not only do I add to the stream of consciousness on Twitter, I’m documenting those fleeting thoughts straight to my blog.

The term “live blogging” just evolved big time overnight, as did “citizen journalism” (and if they’re smart, so will the “mainstream media“).

Now imagine how this could impact folk on the other side of the digital divide — people without moment to moment access to laptops or desktop computers, but armed to the teeth with cell phones.

Did I mention that John Ford is the man?

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. ;)

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“

Billy, what’s up?

Dear Meetup Member,

The Organizer of Blogsboro– The Piedmont Triad Bloggers stepped down without nominating a successor. The 120 members of the group need a new Organizer. You can keep the group going by taking over as Organizer….

Talk to me, man.

UPDATE: Billy and I spoke this afternoon about the Meetups.

It was never Billy’s intent to let the Blogsboro Meetup cancel itself; he was just a bit stressed and wanted someone else to pick up the organizing duties. Monthly coffee hours are going to continue for *anyone* who’d like to participate. We’re moving the management of the Blogsboro group to Upcoming.org (Meetup charges a $20 monthly fee, Upcoming doesn’t).

So if you’re local to the Greensboro area and are interested in citizen media — any shape or form — feel free to join the group.