Dear People Who Give a Damn,
The third National Conference for Media Reform, held this month in Memphis, Tennessee, was incredible. Three thousand five hundred people who really give a damn about media, and what a lack of truth can do to democracy, freedom, and justice.
You can hear practically all of it for yourself (and I'm catching some of the sessions I couldn't attend) here:
http://www.freepress.net/conference/=full_schedule07 [1]
The closing speech by Van Jones (mp3) [2] catches some of the breadth of purpose and energy of hope.
PWGD was there, represented by me to the best of my meager abilities. I had some terrific conversations one on one with people, and in small groups, with people who liked the PWGD idea.
In large sessions, though, I had trouble introducing the concept of many-to-many communication, suggesting this would aid collective decision-making, describing how that would give power to people over many issues that matter, and then explaining that we have a good shot of doing this on a huge scale.
See, I probably did better in that sentence than I did all conference.
My attempt at boiling down the specific approach, spoken over the objections of an overzealous moderator trying to cut me off in Q&A, is here for what it's worth:
Democracy needs many-to-many communication. Without it, self-government lacks us. PWGD proposes an online community in which people can 1) see peers' recommendations and make their own and 2) ask the community, represented by a random jury, to send important news to everyone in a given geographic or interest community.
Fortunately, I had awesome flyers made by board member extraordinaire Stacey Kendall ( http://pwgd.org/files/Flyer1%2001-09-07.pdf [3] ) which I handed out, 200 of them one at a time, face to face, and with usually at least a brief conversation.
I met (or got to see again) lots of cool people and learned of many other projects. Some weren't even directly represented at the conference, like ShiftSpace [4], recommended by Ash Hogan, who was there.
Here's a quick roll call of important connections made:
- Wally Bowen, of Mountain Area Information Network [5], Asheville, North Carolina and its new national non-profit internet provider, OpenZuka [6].
- Susan Gleason of Yes! Magazine [7], who again encouraged me to get in touch with the activist tech provider RiseUp [8], itself represented at the conference.
- Marty Kearns of MediaVolunteer [9], which articulates an unconscious motivation of PWGD: people want to help a cause, not necessarily join an organization. MediaVolunteer will be a great group to work with.
- Scherazade King of Boston's Project: Think Different [10].
- Jeff Huling of Project Censored [11], who expressed a lot of interest, and would want me to remind everyone of a National Shopping Boycott from April 15 to April 22 to end the war in Iraq and impeach the President and Vice-president [12].
- Connie Julian and others of World Can't Wait [13] (for Bush to retire).
- Elena Everett of North Carolina's Independent Voices [14].
- Rodney Peoples and a woman whose name I've misplaced of the Nashville Homeless Power Project [15].
I also reconnected with some folks for whom Agaric Design will be working on web sites:
- Currents of Awareness News [16] and Free Speech TV [17] (together!)
- Action Coalition for Media Education [18] (ACME).
I'm sure I've left plenty of people out, I met so many people I haven't gotten through all the names and cards I exchanged.
And now, as it turns out, the bad news. After word that the Related Items [18] proposal was moving forward, I finally asked today about the big proposal, and just now got a response:
Many-to-Many community news did not make it to the next round. The main reason was that the proposal needed more focus on specifically what you wanted to do with the grant money. There is a paragraph that talks about the new modules you would create, and if that were more of the focus of the application, it might have fared better -- but I don't want to second-guess the reviewers. I can say that now is a good time to be thinking about what to apply for in the 2007 News Challenge.
The plan for PWGD has never been based on foundation support -- certainly not continuing foundation support -- but it would have been a nice jumpstart.
Partnerships are where our future lies, so now the call is: what can PWGD provide that will most quickly prove useful in connecting people? Particularly with our potential partners in mind...
- ben