PWGD.org - for liberty and justice

Knight News Challenge deadline approaching- they want you

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 06:34:19 -0500

And us. But they want you too.

Hi Ian,

Thank you for participating in last year's Knight News Challenge contest.

The contest is open for applications again, with another $5 million waiting for individuals with innovative ideas for digital experiments that transform community news.

Deadline is October 15, 2007.

You're invited to submit a new or modified application at www.newschallenge.org.

Winning entries must be innovative and have three elements:

1) Use of a digital media;
2) Delivery of news or information on a shared basis to
3) A geographically defined community.

read more

Technology won't be enough

Benjamin Melançon — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:23:30 -0500

Let's nip this one in the bud. I think tools for democratic communication are necessary for effective mass social movements, but not sufficient.

Way before the technology is in place, let's make it clear that the technology won't be enough.

With a network that has the potential to reach huge numbers of people, we (and be we I mean I) may be tempted to spend inordinate amounts of time crafting the perfect message to get it passed on to tons of people.

(Heck, I spend too much time hacking together imperfect messages now, with no hope of any distribution whatsoever.)

It's not going to work. Electronic communication is only a part of the network, let alone the movement of movements the network should support.

Knight Foundation to Award Millions for Digital Experiments in Community News

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 21:57:05 -0500

PWGD didn't get its project funded last round, but Benjamin Melançon got $14.1K to blog (after fiscal sponsor administrative fees), and look at this description: they're begging for our kind of ideas! Apply yourself or join PWGD in our proposal:

Knight Foundation to Award Millions for Digital Experiments in Community News

News Challenge Seeks Cutting-Edge Ideas from Anyone, Anywhere;

‘You Invent It. We Fund It!’

MIAMI – The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has launched year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news.

read more

Random Jury participation

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:21:28 -0500

The random pool would be a smart random. People who participate are taken out of the pool until everyone else participates.

People who don't participate in deciding what messages are important enough to be sent out to various lists would not be able to request to send their own message until they do jury duty!

Grand Plan

Benjamin Melançon — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 08:50:56 -0500

[Note from Benjamin: I write a new grand plan every time I talk about it. PWGD, technologically, is a very expansive vision, even in my head alone. It is bound to become both more expanded and refined as others work on it directly (rather than others' ideas filtering through me). For now, here's the outline vision of a Person With Grandiose Delusions.]

Communications network
- Random-jury moderated communication to decide what messages reach whom
- All messages posted to the web site and to people who want to receive all messages: PWGD is in legal terminology a common carrier

Community Currencies

Benjamin Melançon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:42:46 -0500

Proposed project: A technical infrastructure for local and online community currencies.

Community currencies have great potential to bring people more power over our own lives.

In physical communities, this is already in practice with success in making local economies work for the people who live in them.

In the online context, community currencies may make sense for economic communities, like the economic ecosystem surrounding the Drupal open source content management system.

A Tobin tax would probably be necessary to prevent currency speculation.

For regular people, the need to exchange would be pretty rare because the infrastructure should support payment in any currency, so people can choose to accept what you have.

Potential Projects

Benjamin Melançon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:02:08 -0500

This is the purpose of PWGD: to make great projects possible. Here are a few of our ideas, but once the bare PWGD.org infrastructure is up, the process of proposing will be open to all. (For now, please contact us.)

PWGD as 'scratching my own itch' - the foundation of open source software

Benjamin Melançon — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:31:02 -0500

They (Eric Raymond and Karl Fogel, anyway) say the best software starts from scratching ones own itch. PWGD is much more than a personal project of course, but here's one developer's underlying motivation.

I live in a large suburban town. Like any place and time, there are many circumstances, local, national, and global, that by any reasonable assessment need to change.

To change unjust, unfree, or otherwise harmful qualities, myself or anyone else needs to find people who give a damn about one or several of these things.

To do that in a suburban town takes an incredible amount of effort, which simply cannot be repeated by any one person or small group for every issue of concern.

John Melançon, 1928 – 2007

Benjamin Melançon — Tue, 29 May 2007 19:57:03 -0500

An original incorporator of People Who Give a Damn, and a guiding inspiration.

John C. Melancon in loving, living memory.

Al Gore calls for PWGD to launch

Benjamin Melançon — Fri, 25 May 2007 00:37:55 -0500

Not that he knows it yet, but that's surely a natural corollary of his excellent denouncement of television media:

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/10/1256/