Saturday, February 15, 2003

Emergent Democracy Meeting. Today I participated in a very enjoyable conference call / chat / blogger event arranged by Joi Ito and using infrastructure from the socialtext team. The theme was 'emergent democracy', particular as it relates to blogs. Joi called it a 'happening' which is quite appropriate as it happened in several media at the same time. We were on the phone, 18 people or so, from Japan, U.S., Canada, England, France, and maybe somewhere I'm forgetting. And we were chatting online at the same time. And we used a WIKI as a place to coordinate the information. I really enjoy that kind of conversation that happens in a multi-dimensional way, even if it is sometimes hard to keep up with it all at the same time. But it gives everybody an outlet, even if we work in different ways.Some threads in the discussion were about what emergence really is. Is it like ants who collectively appear more intelligent than they do individually? Are we having conversations or are we creating structure? And we talked about tools. What tools do we have? What tools might we invent that better might allow useful democracy to emerge? And I guess that's mostly what we converged around. An intention to continue working on coming up with better tools and better infrastructure. And to keep talking about what it might be that we ought to do. [Ming the Mechanic] That sounds really cool!   1:42:11 PM    comment []

Damn, this is impressive - David Weinberger, whose poetic/philosophical descriptions of the Internet are without peer, has written an amazing cybercitizen's rant.  I'm posting this mostly so that I preserve the link and can go back to read it again, but the rest of you are free to follow the link too. [Ernie the Attorney] 1:33:16 PM    comment []