b l a s t u l a reblog++

What’s the smarter solution for bringing mobility to 21st century cities: bus rapid transit (BRT) or light rail? With questions this big, it’s important to consider all the perspectives.

A team of researchers at the World Resources Institute (WRI) recently produced a report that goes against the grain. WRI analyzed and compared BRT and light rail as two options for Maryland’s Purple Line Project, a 16-mile transit corridor that will connect the D.C. suburbs. In January, the Institute came down in favor of BRT, with a statement announcing that “enhanced buses … would cost less, offer similar services, and fight global warming better than light-rail cars.”

Our main question related not to what’s in the study, but rather, what seems to be left out. It’s a common observation that light rail delivers benefit beyond transit alone, in the form of transit-oriented development that springs up as a result of developers, business owners and homebuyers seeking proximity to the train stations.

The team at WRI was happy to share their take on this and other issues. I interviewed the study’s lead author, Greg Fuhs, and WRI’s senior transport engineer Dario Hidalgo, about BRT/LRT, transit prejudices, and how other cities can apply this analysis to their own planning process.

Julia Levitt: In your study, you found that BRT outperformed light rail in cutting overall CO2 emissions. How did you come to that conclusion?

Greg Fuhs: Our study actually corroborates what is already stated in the Maryland Transit Administration’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS): that BRT would be better on CO2 emissions for the Purple Line. This is a surprising finding to many, because it is often assumed that switching to an electric system such as light rail would reduce CO2 emissions. However, it is very important to consider the electricity source, and in our region the dominant source is currently coal-fired power plants.

So, while energy consumption from roadways would decrease with introduction of either light rail or BRT, for light rail the resulting emissions reduction is not enough to counterbalance the effect caused by the high electricity CO2 emission factor. In fact, CO2 emissions are projected to increase from business as usual with a light rail Purple Line. While this could change in the future with a major and permanent shift to low-carbon energy sources, for the foreseeable future we would likely continue to see higher CO2 emissions from light rail in this case.

JL: Critics of your report have pointed out that in North America, many people own cars, which gives them a choice that many riders overseas don’t have, and that people who have the choice of driving a personal vehicle are often inclined to find light rail cars an acceptable alternative, but are less likely to ride buses. What’s your take on this argument?

Dario Hidalgo: It is a common perception that a light rail system would attract more riders than BRT, and that is reflected in the demand estimations incorporated in the DEIS. However, I would raise two points:

First, in this case it is not at all certain that there would be a large enough increase in ridership to justify the significantly higher cost of light rail. For example, if we take just MTA’s ridership estimates, for the “Medium Investment” LRT and BRT alternatives we see a projection of 62,600 and 51,800 riders per day, respectively. That’s only about 20% more riders for light rail, yet the projected capital cost of the light rail system is more than twice that of BRT ($1.2 billion vs. $579 million), and also includes higher annual operation and maintenance costs.

Second, it is worth drawing a distinction between “buses” and “BRT.” The concept of bus rapid transit is not well understood in the United States, where there are only a few systems currently in operation. In reality, BRT would be designed more like a light rail than a standard bus system, with features like dedicated lanes, signal priority, pre-pay boarding, elevated station platforms, and efficient and comfortable vehicles that make it much more efficient and appealing than a traditional bus service. For the Purple Line, BRT would also offer travel times that are competitive with light rail. With a well-designed, well-operated, and well-advertised BRT in place, there is good reason to believe that many people would use and appreciate the system.

JL: Although your report shows that BRT will cost about half the amount of a light rail system, other studies show that light rail systems, because they are permanent structures, do more to encourage transit-oriented development. Was TOD a factor in the EMBARQ study? Do you think that BRT can facilitate and encourage dense development at a similar level?

GF: We did not look specifically at the TOD factor in our study. However, one cannot assume that transit-oriented development would be sparked by light rail but not BRT. For example, a recent study by the American Public Transportation Association looking at this issue considers both rail and traditional bus systems (although unfortunately it does not look at BRT specifically), and indicates that both can lead to significant positive land use changes. In any case, there is no reason to assume that LRT has a greater impact on land use than high-quality BRT if the systems provide similar travel times, capacities, and overall quality of service, as would be the case for the Purple Line. Moreover, developers can benefit from the shorter implementation time that BRT projects bring as compared to LRT.

DH: Also, regarding permanence, this is a somewhat relative concept. For example, there were thousands of miles of tram networks in the U.S. by 1940; much of this system was dismantled before 1970 with the rise of the automobile and suburbia. The forces behind development are not limited to the technology of transit vehicles, but also depend on factors such as accessibility, enabling policies, and background economics.

JL: Do you feel that the EMBARQ study comparing BRT/LRT can be easily applied to other regions and cities, or is this evaluation case-specific? What factors do you suggest other cities consider as top priorities when making their own decisions about public transportation?

GF: While certain general principles may apply to multiple locations (e.g., public transit is generally an asset to the community and its development should be encouraged), in reality every evaluation like this must be case-specific. After all, even if different locations have similar demographic and/or geographic characteristics, every local population has different needs and preferences and faces unique transportation challenges and political circumstances.

In considering public transportation projects, the first priority must be to determine if there is a need for a transit system to move people within the proposed corridor, and the entire decisionmaking process should be conducted in close consultation with the affected communities. Other important considerations include determining how much benefit a transit system could bring in terms of improved mobility, greater access to transport, incentives for economic development, and improved environmental quality. Further, and particularly in these lean economic times, the cost-effectiveness of the proposed system is a critical factor (especially in terms of competing for scarce state and federal funding). There is also evidence that urban infrastructure projects entail high risk of not meeting preliminary demand and cost estimates, and thus not realizing the projected cost-effectiveness. Such risks should be considered in the analysis and decision making process, but so far this has not been the case for the Purple Line project. Our study does attempt to quantify this risk by providing a sensitivity analysis of Purple Line cost and ridership projections, and we recommend that similar efforts be undertaken in future transit proposals.

In our study specifically, we emphasize that in this time of financial and climate crisis, cost-effectiveness, risk, and greenhouse gas emissions are especially important factors to consider. And in these three cases, BRT comes out as the better option for the Purple Line, as can be the case in other projects. Going forward, we would encourage decision makers and communities not to select a project based on perceptions, but on good analytics.

Photo: The bus rapid transit system along Insurgentes Avenue in Mexico City, a project of EMBARQ. Source: flickr/World Resources Institute Staff, CC license.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 10:22 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging: Bright Green

by Julia Levitt


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by Julia Levitt from Worldchanging: Bright Green on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment

Last Summer, curatorial research group Capsula embarked on the first of its Curated Expeditions, a series of research trips that engage with earthly phenomena through artistic investigation.

3 artists were invited to the scientific Zoo in Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia, in order to collaborate with scientists and other experts and study the impact of a total solar eclipse on animals and human beings continue

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

Inside Networked Movements: Interview with Jeffrey Juris by Geert Lovink - Jeffrey Juris wrote an excellent insiders story about the ‘other globalization’ movement. Networking Futures is an anthropological account that starts with the Seattle protests, late 1999, against the WTO and takes the reader to places of protest such as Prague, Barcelona and Genoa. The main thesis of Juris is the shift of radical movements towards the network method as their main form of organization. Juris doesn’t go so far to state that movement as such has been replaced by network(ing). What the network metaphor rather indicates is a shift, away from the centralized party and a renewed emphasis on internationalism. Juris describes networks as an ”merging ideal.” Besides precise descriptions of Barcelona groups, where Jeff Juris did his PhD research with Manuel Castells in 2001-2002, the World Social Forum and Indymedia, Networking Futures particularly looks into a relatively unknown anti-capitalist network, the People’s Global Action. The outcome is a very readable book, filled with group observations and event descriptions, not heavy on theory or strategic discussions or disputes. The email interview below was done while Jeffrey Juris was working in Mexico City where studies the relationship between grassroots media activism and autonomy. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University.

GL: One way of describing your book is to see it as a case study of Peoples’ Global Action. Would it be fair to see this networked platform as a 21st century expression of an anarcho-trotskyist avant-gardist organization? You seem to struggle with the fact that PGA is so influential, yet unknown. You write about the history of the World Social Forum and its regional variations, but PGA is really what concerns you. Can you explain to us something about your fascination with PGA? Is this what Ned Rossiter calls a networked organization? Do movements these days need such entities in the background?

JJ: I wouldn’t call my book a case study of People’s Global Action (PGA) in a strict sense, but you are right to point to my fascination with this particular network. In many ways I started out wanting to do an ethnographic study of PGA, but as I suggest in my introduction, its highly fluid, shifting dynamics made a conventional case study impossible. A case study requires a relatively fixed object of analysis. With respect to social movement networks this would imply stable nodes of participation, clear membership structures, organizational representation, etc., all of which are absent from PGA. However, this initial methodological conundrum presented two opportunities. On the one hand, it seemed to me that PGA was not unique, but reflected broader dynamics of transnational political activism in an era characterized by new digital technologies, emerging network forms, and the political visions that go along with such transformations. In this sense, PGA was on the cutting edge; it provided a unique opportunity to explore not only the dynamics, but also the strengths and weaknesses of new forms of networked organization among contemporary social movements.

At the same time, PGA also represented a kind of puzzle: I knew it had been at the center of the global days of action that people generally associate with the rise of the global justice movement, yet it was extremely hard to pin down. Participating individuals, collectives, and organizations seemed to come and go, and those who were most active in the process often resolutely denied that they were members or had any official role. Yet, the PGA network still had this kind of power of evocation, and, at least during the early years of my research (say 1999 to 2002), it continued to provide formal and informal spaces of interaction and convergence. In this sense, it seemed to me that figuring out the enigma of PGA could help us better understand the logic of contemporary networked movements more generally. On the other hand, the difficulty of carrying out a traditional ethnographic study of PGA meant I had to shift my focus from PGA as a stable network to the specific practices through which the PGA process is constituted. In other words, my initial methodological dilemma opened up my field of analysis to a whole set of networking practices and politics that were particularly visible within PGA, but could also be detected to varying degrees within more localized networks, such as the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) in Barcelona, alternative transnational networks such as the World Social Forum (WSF) process, new forms of tactical and alternative media associated with the global justice movement, and within the organization of mass direct actions.

In other words, the focus of my book is really these broader networking practices and logics, although these were particularly visible within the PGA process. Methodologically, then, I situated myself within a specific movement node—MRG in Barcelona, and followed the network connections outward through various network formations, including but not restricted to PGA. However, it is also true that the ethnographic stories I present are largely told from the vantage point of activists associated with PGA. This is because MRG happened to be a co-convener of the PGA network during the time of my research, but also because PGA activists were particularly committed to what I refer to as a network ideal.

In my book I distinguish between two ideal organizational logics: a vertical command logic and a horizontal networking logic, both of which are present to varying degrees, and exist in dynamic tension with respect to one another, within any particular network. Whereas vertical command logics are perhaps more visible within the social forums, PGA reflects a particular commitment to new forms of open, collaborative, and directly democratic organization, thus coming closer to the horizontal networking logics I am most concerned with. In this sense, PGA is definitively NOT a 21st century avant-gardist organization and has been particularly hostile to traditional top-down Marxist/Trotskyist political models and visions. PGA does reflect something an anarchist ethic, although this has more to do with the confluence between networking logics and anarchist organizing principles than any kind of abstract commitment to anarchist politics per se.

Rather than a networked organization, which refers to the way traditional organizations increasingly take on the network form, PGA is closer to an “organized network” in Ned Rossiter’s terms, a new institutional form that is immanent to the logic of the new media (although in this case not restricted to the new media). The network structure of PGA thus provides a transnational space for communication and coordination among activists and collectives. For example, PGA’s hallmarks reflect a commitment to decentralized forms of organization, while the network has no members and no one can speak in its name. Rather than a traditional organization (however networked) with clear membership and vertical chains of command, PGA provides the kind of communicational infrastructure necessary for the rise of contemporary networked social movements. The challenge for PGA and similar networks, given their radical commitment to a horizontal networking logic, has always been sustainability. This is where the social forums, with their greater openness to vertical forms, have been more effective. In this sense, I find PGA much more exciting and politically innovative, but it may be the hybrid institutional forms represented by the social forums that have a more lasting impact.

GL: We’re 3 or 4 years further now. What has changed since you undertook your research? The post 9-11 effect has somewhat leveled off, I guess, but the anti-war movement is also weaker. Is it fair to say that the worldwide ‘Seattle movement’ has weakened, or rather, exhausted itself? Please update us.

JJ: If you mean the visible expressions of movement activity, particularly those associated with confrontational direct actions, then I think it is fair to say the worldwide anti-corporate globalization/anti-capitalist/global justice movement has weakened. But it is not entirely exhausted. As I argue in my book, mass mobilizations are critical tools for generating the visibility and affective solidarity (e.g. emotional energy) required for sustained networking and movement building. However, activists eventually tire and public interest inevitably wanes. In this sense, movements are cyclical and the public moments of visibility necessarily ebb and flow. In terms of the global justice movement, events such as 9-11, or the repression in Genoa, certainly put a damper on the movement, but it would have slowed anyway. That said, mass actions have continued throughout the post- 9-11 period, while the anti-war and global justice movements have largely converged, although more so outside the United States. What we have seen is a shift toward the increasing institutionalization of movement activity combined with a return to “submerged” networking, to borrow a term from Melucci.

If we think about social movements in terms of these less visible, spectacular forms of action, then in many ways, the global justice movement has proven remarkably sustainable. In this sense, global justice activists have continued to organize mass actions, but at regularized intervals (every two years against the G8 Summit, for example, or every four years during the Democratic and Republic National Conventions in the U.S.). The massive 2007 anti-G8 mobilization in Heiligendamm, Germany, which I was able to attend, was a particularly empowering experience for many younger activists. At the same time, the global social forum process has continued to provide a more institutionalized arena for networking and interaction. Although the WSF itself has attracted declining media coverage, tens of thousands people continue to attend the periodic centralized global events (every two years or so), while local and regional forums have expanded in many parts of the world.

For example, the first U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta last summer, representing a key moment of convergence for a movement that was particularly weakened by the climate of fear and repression after 9-11. At the same time, countless networks, collectives, and projects that arose in the context of the global justice movement continue to operate outside public view, including local organizing projects and new media-related initiatives such as Indymedia. In sum, if we think about movements as those relatively rare periods of increasingly visible and confrontational direct action, then the global justice movement has perhaps run its course, at least for now. However, if we take into account the submerged, localized, routinized, and increasingly institutionalized (by which I mean the building of new movement institutions, not the existing representative democratic ones), then the movement remains alive and well, perhaps surprisingly vibrant after so many years.

GL: We can’t say that many practice “militant ethnography”. There is a limited interest in media activism but the life inside radical movements is not over studied. In the past decade this was, in part, also due to rampant anti-intellectualism. What is the intellectual life inside social movements like these days? What are the main debates and critical concepts?

JJ: The lack of “militant” ethnographic approaches to life inside radical social movements has to be understood not only with respect to anti-intellectualism among activists, which varies from region to region, but also the dominant academic traditions for studying social movements. For the most part, what many refer to as “social movement theory” has been the province of sociologists and political scientists, many of whom are committed to positivist theory building, using quantitative or qualitative methods, and thus tend to view social movements as “objects” to be studied from the outside. These scholars may support the political goals of the movements they study, but their theory and methods are directed toward other academics, not movements themselves. There has always been a significant counter-tradition, of course, including anthropologists who have used ethnographic methods to study popular movements around the world and a few politically engaged scholars who have gone deep inside the heart of radical movements, such as Barbara Epstein’s study of the U.S. direct action movement during the 1970s and 1980s, “Political Protest and Cultural Revolution,” or George Katsiaficas’ book on German autonomous movements, “The Subversion of Politics.”

Meanwhile, critiques of positivist approaches to social movements have become more frequent within the academy, while the recent push for a more public or activist anthropology and sociology have led to a more conducive environment for “militant” approaches to the study of social movements. At the same time, there has also been a noticeable trend toward self-analysis and critique among activists themselves. In my book I suggest that contemporary social movements are increasingly “self-reflexive,” as evidenced by the countless networks of knowledge production, debate, and exchange among global justice activists, including listserves, Internet forums, radical theory groups, activist research networks, etc. There is still a great deal of anti intellectualism, although as mentioned above, this varies by region. For example, in my experience, activists in the Anglo-speaking world, including the UK and the U.S., tend to be more suspicious of intellectuals, while those in Southern Europe or the Southern Cone of Latin America are more open to abstract theorizing.

There has been a general surge in activist research and radical theory projects linked to the global justice movement over the past decade, many of which have been associated with the social forum process. In this sense, there has been a blurring of the divide between academic and movement-based theorizing as evidenced not only in my own work, but in many other spheres, including the volume edited by Stephven Shukaitis and David Graeber, “Constituent Imagination,” the on-line journal Ephemera, or the newly created movement newspaper Turbulence. In terms of the main debates and critical concepts these vary widely depending on the particular network, region, or project. Given that we are dealing with a “movement of movements” or a “network or networks” the particular issues and ideas of concern to activists are shaped by the specific contexts in which they are embedded. My own work is no exception, as I was particularly influenced by the interest in networks, digital technologies, and new forms of organization among activists in Barcelona. It was through hours of collaborative practice, discussion, and debate that I began to see the network as not only a technical artifact and organizational form, but also a widespread political ideal.

It was fascinating to see how the concept of the network popularized by theorists such as Manuel Castells or Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri had seeped into activist discourse itself. Indeed, by the end of my time in the field the “network” had emerged as one of the key unifying concepts among global justice activists around the world, and many of the movement debates surrounded the pros and cons of network organizing, the divide between the so called “horizontals” and “verticals,” the struggle against informal hierarchies, the role of new technologies, etc. In other words, the theoretical concerns addressed in my book reflect the concepts and debates I encountered in the movement itself. At the same time, the specific theoretical languages and traditions through which these issues have been addressed vary greatly. For example, many Italian activists associated with the occupied social centers, and those influenced by them elsewhere, were particularly influenced by the Italian autonomists and concepts such as the multitude, immaterial labor, and precarity found in the writing of Hardt & Negri and Paolo Virno, among others. Some of the more UK-based radical theory networks have been particularly influenced by Gilles Deleuze as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome.

Although some movement pockets in Barcelona were in line with the Italian tradition, many of the Catalan activists I worked with were more familiar with Manuel Castells, and there was a general concern for emerging forms of participatory democracy. To the extent that there have been intellectual debates within the U.S. context, these have tended to revolve around direct democracy, on the one hand, and issues of race, class, and exclusion, on the other. The other critical arena for intellectual discussion and debate within the global justice movement has revolved around the social forum process. Here the key concept has been “open space,” which I view as a reflection of a horizontal networking logic inscribed within the organizational architecture of the forum. Proponents of open space see the forum as a new kind of organization, an arena for dialogue and exchange rather than a unified political actor. Critics argue the open space concept neglects the multiple exclusions generated by any political space, and undermines the ability of the movement to engage in the kind of coordinated actions needed to achieve tangible victories. The open space debate thus incorporates many of the concepts and tensions that are important within the movement, including networks, the rise of a new politics, participatory democracy, and tension between networking and vertical command logics.

Finally, activists have also widely debated alternative models of social change, particularly within and around the forums. Although traditional sectors of the movement are still committed to state-centered strategies of reform or revolution, there has been a keen interest, particularly among younger and more radical activists, in more autonomous forms of transformation based on “changing the world without taking power” to borrow a phrase from John Holloway. These emerging political visions involve a complex mix of traditional anarchism, autonomous Marxism, Deleuzian post-structuralism, and the post-representational logic of organized networks. The intellectual life within many (though not all) parts of the movement continues to thrive, and in many respects represents a far richer and more complex set of ideas and debates than those found within many academic circles.

GL: It is not hard to notice that you left the Italian intellectual influences outside of your writings. One could easily state that the bible of Seattle movement has been Negri/Hardt’s Empire (with Spinoza hovering in the background). No traces of Virno or Berardi either, no Lazzarato, not even an Pasquinelli or Terranova. How come?

JJ: I do address Hardt & Negri’s work, but not so much the others. This is perhaps more of a reflection of my particular approach to theory, as well as my anthropological concern for “staying close to practices,” as Chris Kelty puts it in his recent book on free software, “Two Bits,” than a statement of my affinity (or lack thereof) for Italian theory. Analytically, I take the emergence of distributed networks associated with post-fordist, informational capitalism (as analyzed by Hardt & Negri, Castells, and others) as a starting point, but I specifically examine how network forms are generated in practice and how they relate to network technologies and imaginaries. I use ethnography to generate another series of concepts that are closer to the networking practices I encountered in the field, such as the cultural logic and politics of networking. In this sense, I try to descend from the realm of abstract theorizing about networks, immaterial labor, capitalism, and so forth, to consider the complex micro-political struggles and practices through which concrete network norms and forms are generated in specific contexts, as well as the links between network norms, forms, and technologies more generally. Hardt & Negri are thus in the background, particularly their emphasis on the networked form of contemporary resistance, but I am concerned with a more concrete level.

At the same time, it is true that I am less convinced by the more ontological, Spinozan dimension of Hardt & Negri’s writing, given my emphasis on practices, circulations, and connections- the rise of new political subjectivities certainly, but I’m not so sure about a new historical subject. A second, more contextual reason why the Italian theorists are not more prominent in my book has to do with the fact that the particular Catalan activists I worked with most closely were less influenced by this tradition than theorists such as Manuel Castells, general writing on participatory democracy, or ideas developed through their own grounded networking practices. In this sense, although Empire has indeed been influential within many global justice movement circles, and has had an important impact on my own thinking and writing; it would be a stretch to call it, or any other single book for that matter, the bible of the global justice movement. The movement is too diverse and there are too many political and regional variations. Finally, to be frank, I was not aware of Berardi, Lazzarato, Pasquinelli, or Terranova at the time of writing this book, which is partly due to the specific intellectual and political currents in which I moved. It would be interesting to go back and address some of these theorists now, particularly Terranova’s “Network Culture,” and Ned Rossiter’s recent book, “Organized Networks,” which more deeply engages the Italian tradition.

GL: Do you see the networking practices amongst radical activists as something special? I mean, isn’t it terribly mainstream to use all these technologies? I understand that the network paradigm within the realm of politics is still something new, but as tools there is nothing that creative, or even subversive, about their cultures of use.

JJ: My contention is not that the networking practices I explore in my book are unique to radical activists, but they do form part of an innovative mode of radical political practice that has to be understood in the context of an increasing confluence between network norms, forms, and technologies. It is important to point out that, when I talk about networking practices, I am not only referring to the use of digital technologies, but also to new forms of organizational practice. Activist networking practices are both physical and virtual, and they are frequently associated with emerging political imaginaries. It is precisely the interaction between network technologies, network-based organizational forms, and network-based political norms that characterizes radical activism.

As I point out in Networking Futures, there is nothing particularly liberatory or progressive about networks. As Castells and Hardt & Negri show, decentralized networks are characteristic of post-fordist modes of capital accumulation generally, while terror, crime, military, and police outfits increasingly operate as transnational networks as well (see Luis Fernandez’ fantastic new book about police networks, “Policing Dissent”). What is unique about radical activist networking, however, is not only how such practices are used in the context of mass movements for social, economic, and environmental justice, but also the way radical activists project their egalitarian values- flat hierarchies, horizontal relations, and decentralized coordination, etc.- back onto network technologies and forms themselves. It is this contingent confluence that makes certain activist networking practices radical, not the use of specific kinds of technologies per se.

GL: One could easily write a separate study of Indymedia and the Independent Media Centres, which were erected during all these protest events. You have not gone very deeply into internal Indymedia matters. These days, almost ten years later, Indymedia is not playing an active role anymore, at least not the international English edition. How did it lose its momentum and is there still a need for such news-driven sites?

JJ: Although I do address Indymedia and other forms of collaborative digital networking, it’s true that the main ethnographic focus of my book revolves around broader global justice networks such as MRG in Barcelona or PGA and the WSF process on a transnational scale. Largely for that reason I was not able to provide more in-depth coverage of the fascinating and very important internal debates and dynamics within the Indymedia network. Tish Stringer’s dissertation on the Houston Indymedia collective called, “Move! Guerrilla Media, Collaborative Modes, and the Tactics of Radical Media Making,” comes closest to this kind of analysis. I’m not sure what you mean when you say that Indymedia is not playing an active role anymore. If you mean that the novelty of the network has worn off, that particular collectives are not as active as they once were, or that it is no longer on the cutting edge of technological and/or organizational innovation, you may be right. But if you mean that Indymedia has a lower profile on the web than it used to or that activists no longer read or contribute to the various local and international sites, then I’m not so sure. Indymedia is nearly ten years old and certainly much of its novelty has worn off. At the same time, it continues to fulfill a key role of providing a space for activists to generate and circulate their own news and information, facilitating mobilization and continuing to challenge the divide between author and consumer. There have been heated debates within the network about the need to generate more reliable and higher quality posts, and I think this goal still remains elusive. In this sense, Indymedia remains very good at doing what it was initially set up to do, but it has not advanced much further in terms of pushing the bounds of its grassroots collaborative production process to generate the kind of deeper and more insightful reporting that some might wish for. For example, there had been a proposal to develop a kind of open editing system that would generate more accurate, higher quality posts without the need for a more centralized editorial process, but that proposal has yet to yield any concrete results, as far as I know. If this is what you mean by losing momentum, then I suppose it is true. However, this might be expecting too much. In my experience networks are often good at achieving the specific goals they were established for, but efforts to reprogram them midstream are often extremely difficult. It is generally much easier to simply create a new project or network than try to retool an existing one. In this sense, I would expect that further innovation with respect to alternative, decentralized news production is happening elsewhere. Indymedia thus continues to play a critical role for grassroots activists in many parts of the world, and, in fact, I think it is one of the most important and enduring institutions the global justice movement has left behind. At the same time, I think the desire to see Indymedia become something else, resolve all of its internal tensions, or forever remain at the vanguard of innovation is misplaced. Indymedia will continue to fulfill a key role in terms of creating alternative, self-produced activist news and information, but I think it is important to look elsewhere for new innovations, practices, and strategies. In my own case, I have recently become fascinated with the burgeoning free media scene in Mexico, which includes not only online news sites, but also a rapidly expanding network of Internet/FM radio stations, web-based forums and zines, digital video collectives, free software initiatives, etc. (my current research focuses on the relationship between alternative media, autonomy, and repression in Mexico). Some of the most exciting developments are happening within the free radios, many of which combine FM and Internet broadcasts to reach out to activists on a global scale, while at the same time more deeply engaging local populations outside typical activist circles. Many of these projects combine an open publishing component on the web with live streaming as well as more focused and directed reporting about local issues and wider national and international campaigns.

GL: Your research clearly shows that there is a direct and positive relation between autonomous social movement and network paradigms. However, on the Internet level this is no longer the case as of about five years ago or so. Activists worldwide have lost touch with the whole Web 2.0 wave and they tend to have neither a positive nor a critical attitude toward social networking applications, for example. There does seem to be a productive engagement with free software and perhaps wikis, but not even blogs have been appropriated. How come?

JJ: As I understand the question, you seem to be suggesting that the Internet has progressed over the past few years, but that activists from autonomous-oriented movements are not keeping up. They were once at the forefront of technological innovation, but this is no longer the case. Perhaps, but I’m not sure this is the most productive framework for looking at this, although the more specific question of why or why not certain groups of activists appropriate particular Internet tools is a fascinating one. This is a big question, though, and is also somewhat counter-factual. I can offer a few speculative thoughts based on my research and activist experience, but I suppose the best way to get at this would be to simply ask people why they do or do not use certain web tools. In general, though, if the argument in my book is right that contemporary activism involves an increasing confluence between network norms, forms, and technologies, I would expect that activists would be more likely to use those Internet tools that most closely reflect their political values and most effectively enhance their preferred forms of organization. In this sense, Internet listserves and collaborative on-line forums such as Indymedia facilitate decentralized movement organization and reflect values related to bottom-up organization, grassroots coordination, direct democracy, and the like. These sorts of early Internet tools facilitated movement organization and reflected the values of the movement. The question is whether more recent Internet tools, including social networking and video sharing sites, blogs, and/or wikis also enhance mobilization and reflect activists’ values. If they don’t, I wouldn’t expect activists to appropriate them, and thus would not be worried if activists are somehow not keeping up. In terms of free software and wikis, I think this is one area where, as you rightly point out, radical or autonomous-oriented activists have been deeply engaged. Both free software and wikis precisely reflect the kind of collaborative networking ethic that I explore in my book, and it should come as no surprise that so many radical or autonomous activists see their own struggles reflected in the struggle for free software or that so many contemporary activist collectives and projects use wikis- and the decentralized, collaborative editing process these tools allow. In my view, social networking sites are completely different. While non-governmental organizations, policy reform initiatives (such as those lil’ green mask requests to stop global warming on Facebook), political campaigns (look how many friends Obama has!) have arguably begun to make effective use of sites such as Facebook or MySpace, in my experience this has been less true of more radical movements. My book does have a MySpace site, which is linked to other books, projects, and organizations, and I do belong to an anarchist group on Facebook, but I don’t find much ongoing interaction and coordination on these sites. Many radicals I know use social networking sites in much the same way as other individuals do- to keep up with their friends and maintain interpersonal communication, but (and I might be behind the ball here), they are not as frequently used for collaborative kinds of organizing. It seems to me that not only are social networking sites extremely corporate, they don’t necessarily facilitate the kind of collaborative, directly democratic forms of organization and coordination that tools such as wikis or old-school listserves do. They do a good job of allowing radicals to keep in touch with their friends and broadcast what they are up to, but I don’t think they facilitate networked forms of organization or particularly reflect directly democratic ideals. I would say the same for blogs, which, with perhaps a few exceptions, are generally a personalized, broadcast medium, and thus not necessarily conducive to more collective, distributed norms and forms of organization. On the contrary, I would say video sharing sites such as YouTube (and similar non-commercial endeavors), do enhance decentralized, networked organization and do reflect radical activist values by facilitating the autonomous production and circulation of movement-related images, videos, and documentaries. Consequently, I have found, in my experience, that radical activists have made significant use of video sharing sites. The videos posted on YouTube from the No Borders camp last November in Mexicali/Calexico provide one concrete example. Rather than asking whether activists are keeping up with the latest Internet trends, a more useful question is perhaps whether the latest Internet tools facilitate distributed forms of networked organization and whether they reflect activists’ political ideals. To the extent they do, I would expect activists to enthusiastically take them up. To the extent they don’t, I would expect there to be limited interest beyond the individual level.

GL: The ‘distributed’ form of organization could also be read as just another expression of more individualism, and less commitment. There is a debate right now about ‘organized networks’ and how organization can be strengthened in the age of networks. Do you think this is possible or should we drop the ‘network’ in the first place?

JJ: I would say the distributed network form of organization reflects a particular strategy for balancing individual and collective needs, interests, and desires. Rather than less commitment, it reflects a broader shift toward what the Sociologist Paul Lichterman, in his book “The Search for Political Commitment,” calls “personalized commitment.” That said, it is true that diffuse, flexible activist networks have generally proven more effective at organizing short-term mobilizations and events than the kind of sustainable organizations needed to generate lasting social transformation. There is often a false debate between “movement” or “flexible networks” and “institutionalization,” as if there were only one way to institutionalize. Institutions are generally associated with the kind of centralized, top-down bureaucratic organizations inherited from the industrial age. However, if we see institutions more broadly as simply sustainable networks of social relations along with the organizational and technological infrastructure that makes such relations possible then there are many ways to institutionalize. In this sense, there is no necessary contradiction between sustainable organization and networks. The key is to create new kinds of sustainable institutions that reflect and incorporate the networking logics I explore in my book. For example, what would a political institution look like that is sustainable over time and able to generate more effective coordinated action, yet is still based on directly democratic forms of decision-making, bottom-up participation, decentralized collaboration, etc.? As I understand it this is the crux of what you, Ned Rossiter and others are talking about when you argue for the need to move toward organized networks, at least in the realm of new media. I agree that something similar is needed in the realm of political activism. I think there will always be a role for more flexible, diffuse networks to plan and coordinate specific actions. And there is nothing wrong with letting these networks fizzle out when they are no longer needed (in my experience old networks rarely die, they simply cease to provide a forum for active communication). However, I do think it is important that we build new kinds of networked institutions (contra institutional networks) that reflect the best of what distributed networks have to offer, but are more sustainable over time. At present, I think the social forums, with all their problems, are the best example we have of this new kind of organized network in the realm of political action. As I mentioned above the forums are hybrid organizations, combining vertical and horizontal organizing logics. Many radicals have criticized the social forums precisely because of the participation and influence of traditional reformist institutional actors. However, in my view, it is precisely at the intersection of these different sorts of political and organizational logics, and in the context of the associated conflicts and debates, that new kinds of sustainable hybrid networked institutions will emerge. This is why I have consistently argued over the years that more radical activists should engage the forum, even if from the margins, creating autonomous spaces to interact with the forum process while promoting their more innovative horizontal networking practices. Again, it is through this kind of ongoing interaction and conflict between different organizational logics and practices that new kinds of organized networks will emerge in the political realm. It is no accident that of all the projects, networks, and institutions that have been created by the global justice movement the social forums remain the most active and vibrant, despite, or perhaps precisely because of, the continued critiques. To go back to your first question, PGA remains closest to my heart, but the social forums may ultimately turn out to be a more lasting and influential organized network. One of the more interesting projects I have taken part in over the past few years, the Networked Politics initiative (http://www.networked-politics.info/), has been an effort on the part of activists and engaged scholars to think more deeply about how to develop new forms of politics and institutions that are sustainable yet reflect the kinds of networking logics and practices that were particularly visible in the context of the global justice movement.

GL: You got involved at the right time, and got out to write down your findings at the moment when the ‘other globalization movement’ had somehow lost steam. Do you agree? There is a certain nostalgia for Big Event days, which makes Networking Futures such a fascinating read. Where do you see the movements heading? We can all see that they are not dead, but the urge to continue as if it still were 2001-2002 isn’t there anymore. Is the network form making it more bearable to see movements disappear? You seem to have no problem admitting that “social movements are cyclical phenomena.” What topics and social formation do you see emerging? Would it, for instance, make sense to come up with a radical movement inside the larger context of climate change?

JJ: Yes, I think that’s right. I was extremely fortunate to have gotten involved in the movement when it was becoming publicly visible in Seattle, and then lived through what we might call its peak years from a unique position in Barcelona. I think the movement lost some steam, or at least some of its confrontational spirit, after the repression in Genoa, and then 9-11 obviously had a huge impact, although more so in the United States then elsewhere. Somewhere between 2002 and 2003 I think the social forums began to replace mass actions as the main focus of the movement, which reflected a shift, in my view, toward a more sustainable form of movement activity.

At the same time, there was also a move toward more local forms of organizing rooted in specific communities. To some extent I think the turn away from mass actions and the change in emphasis toward local organizing resulted from the critique of summit hopping that had been around since Seattle (if not before) but became increasingly widespread as the novelty of mass actions began to wear off. At the same time, regardless of any internal movement debates, it is increasingly difficult to pull off successful mass direct actions over time. The sociologist Randal Collins hypothesizes that movements can only maintain their peak levels for about two years, which isn’t too far off in the case of the global justice movement (say late 1999 to mid-2001 or so). In this sense, the shift of emphasis toward the forums and local organizing, although not necessarily conceived in this way, was a strategic response to the cyclical nature of social movements. Mass actions continue of course, but as I pointed out above, even these have become more regularized and routine. The movement has thus traded some of its emotional intensity for greater sustainability. Given this strategic shift, I would say the movement remains surprisingly vibrant. In contrast, as Barbara Epstein has argued, the anti-nuclear energy movement petered out when activists failed to make the shift from mass actions, which began attracting fewer and fewer people and eliciting decreasing media attention, to an alternative strategy. In many ways, the global justice movement is well placed to pick up steam again if and when the next cycle of increasing confrontation comes around again.

The global justice/alternative globalization/anti-capitalist frame is a good one in that it encompasses an array of movements and struggles, while maintaining a focus on systemic interconnections. I think it would be an error to revert back to single issue politics and struggles at this point, as such connections would be obscured and the social, political, and cultural capital of the global justice movement would be squandered.

Rather than organize a radical movement around climate change, for example, it would make more sense to organize around this issue in the context of a global justice frame. This was done to great effect by the European anti-war movement, which was a really a fusion between the anti-war and global justice movements. This connection was never really made in the U.S., partly due to the absence of a national level forum process, and both movements were worse off as a result. In terms of what specific issues I see emerging, that is always a tough call, but I think you are right that global climate change will constitute a key site of struggle over the next few years, as will alternative energy, particularly given the spike in oil prices. At the same time, in light of the current global financial and economic crisis, a broad anti-capitalist critique remains as relevant and important as ever. Moreover, if the history of previous crises provides any indication, we may well see the rise of a global democracy movement to challenge the increasing repression and authoritarian trends in many parts of the world. Whatever new forms of struggle emerge, I think they will be stronger to the extent that they can link themselves to a broader anti-systemic critique such as that represented by the global justice movement.

Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures, The Movements Against Corporate Globalization, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2008.

Promotional website of the book: http://networkingfutures.com/home.html.

ASU page of Jeffrey Juris: https://sec.was.asu.edu/directory/person/863914

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo

reBlogged on Oct 10, 2008, 9:05PM

Originally by jo from Networked_Performance on October 10, 2008, 11:05pm

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Jon Lebkowsky in March 2008. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Clay Shirky is an influential writer, consultant, and teacher focused on the Internet as a social platform. He’s one of the smartest thinkers I know about how people live, love, and work online. His new book, Here Comes Everybody:The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was just published by The Penguin Press. As an intro to Chapter 11, on “Promise, Tool, and Bargain,” he says “There is not recipe for the successful use of social tools. Instead, every working system is a mix of social and technological factors.” Clay and I had the following conversation early in March. We’ll follow up with an asynchronous conversation on the WELL for two weeks starting May 28.

Jon Lebkowsky: My first very general question for you is about how the web started changing around 2000. What are your thoughts about what was driving the changes, and how the changes have affected our experience of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is the sort of ancient history that got me doing the book. Here Comes Everybody is, in a way, a do-over. I wrote an earlier book – a very different kind of book, about online community – and I had the grave misfortune to have it come out in April of 1995. The book was all about Usenet, the WELL, Echo, and it was about all of the social components of the pre-web Internet. And in April of ‘95, no one wanted to hear about that stuff anymore.

In fact, I got pulled into the web, too. I taught myself HTML, like a lot of people. I ended up being Production Manager of one web shop, and Chief Technology Officer of another. In that period, ‘95 to 2000, the template for the social use of the web was really under-optimized. Everybody was excited about using it to distribute information, and everybody was excited about ecommerce. We were basically recapitulating these older patterns: point to point transactions, replicating newspapers, magazines and so forth on the web.

I think that the change that started in 2000 came about for a couple of reasons. One – HotMail brought us all to the realization that the web could be a new interface for existing social platforms. It wasn’t like email was one thing, and the web was the other. The web, in fact, was a general purpose interface.

The second thing is so many people were online by 2000, that you could actually start to get real social density, you didn’t have to do everything just point to point.

And third, critically: the money ran out. Instead of entrepreneurs saying “I’m going to start this new little web service, and I’m going to go raise $5 million in venture capital, and I’m going to have this big business plan,” people had to to ask themselves, “What’s a cheap way to do this? What’s a cheap way to accomplish my goal?” And, very often, the cheap way was to get the users involved. And once we started down that path, the possibilities just opened up.

Jon Lebkowsky: It was interesting to me that people didn’t just throw up their hands and walk away, when there really was no money flowing. People who wanted to innovate, and who wanted to publish content online, all hung in, and were finding ways to do it. They were passionate about it.

Clay Shirky: Absolutely. And certainly a lot of people who rushed in in the late 90s, when it looked like there was free money, rushed back out again. But the people who were left cared enough about some other goal than being dotcom millionaires that they stuck with it. And very often the goals that were left, when the people who were seeking a quick buck were gone, were goals that had real social ramifications. These were people who wanted to make the world better in some way or other, rather than just figuring out a cheaper way to deliver plane tickets.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mention how much higher adoption was by 2000, and of course we’ve seen it increase persistently since then, so that pretty much everybody’s online now. How does that change things, having this pervasive adoption of the web?

Clay Shirky: This is actually one of the things that first led me to try to describe the social patterns that ultimately ended up in this book.

There’s a big difference between having some people online and having most people onine. That’s a difference that appeals mainly to businesses, now the audience is larger. But there’s another difference between having most people online and having everybody online. The advantage of having everybody online is that in your social group, if everybody is online, then you can take it for granted that you can use online tools to coordinate the life of that group.

Small social groups have very high density. In a group of five or six people, pretty much everybody has an interface to everybody else. That’s a lot of interface. If even a couple of those interfaces can’t be bridged by email or instant messaging, then people will default to the most inclusive possible technology, which prior to the Internet was the phone.

If you were under 35 in the year 2000, and you made more than $35,000 a year, you were almost certainly online and so were your friends, and you could start to take it for granted that you could use the Internet to coordinate your business life and your social life. You could use it to coordinate visits to church, group buying pools, anything that involved a group. Suddenly it became possible, and not because the technology was in place; the technology had been in place for years. It was because the social density had finally caught up with the technology.

Jon Lebkowsky: With Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law, you’re really talking about an increase in potential value that can be realized as real value every day.

Clay Shirky: And the funny thing about the relationship between social applications and Metcalfe and Reed’s Laws is that social applications actually trailed them early on, because people don’t want to adopt technologies that cut out some members of the group. Why would you use something that excludes some members of the group? But once social density kicks in, social applications actually overperform Metcalfe’s Law, as predicted by Reed’s Law, because the Internet isn’t just about point to point connections, the way Metcalfe’s Law is. It’s also about group connections.

There was a famous example of this in the attempt to put MetroCards – to put digital card readers – in the New York City subway system. There was a very grim interim report from the Department of Transit, because they were using the token system and the MetroCard system at the same time, saying we’ve wired 80% of the stations, but we’re not seeing 80% of the users use MetroCards. “Oh woe is me, woe is me, this whole thing is potentially a disaster.”

And then you read on a little farther, and you realize they hadn’t put the MetroCard Readers in Times Square or Union Square yet, which are two of the busiest subway stations. So as long as anybody had to use a token in any station, they weren’t going to switch to the MetroCard. Social applications work exactly like that. Merely getting 80% of the people in your business on email meant that there were still significant conversations that you couldn’t have online. And so people wouldn’t make the switch.

Jon Lebkowsky: Well, sure. If you have a key member of your team or your group who just can’t or won’t adopt, just can’t get it, it just can’t work. You see this a lot with wiki. People want to use wiki for collaboration, but out of a dozen people in their group, three people are just totally wiki-resistant, just don’t get it.

Clay Shirky: That’s exactly right. And you bring up another important point. It’s not just the availability of the technology, it’s the mental availability of the user. If you’ve got the web, you can get access to a wiki, but if you’ve decided you are, as you say, wiki-resistant, it doesn’t matter. This is one of the many reasons that groups of young people overperform groups of older people, even given the same technology. In addition to access to the tools, just the set of the functions that go into doing the job – it’s more present among people who are more familiar with the tools.

Jon Lebkowsky: You talk quite a bit about public vs private, and the way we’re using the web for everything – we all have the same tools to publish in a fairly sophisticated way and we’re publishing in public, but not everybody is publishing with the same intention.

Clay Shirky: This is really a reply to all of those media outlets who are writing disparagingly about user-generated content, saying that the content of a weblog is dreck that no one would bother to publish in the print world. All of which is true, but irrelevant, because, of course, the people who are publishing the little observations about their trip to the mall in LiveJournal – they’re not talking to you.

The really big change here is that we’ve got a medium which scales from small groups – me talking to a group of my friends – all the way to “now I am making a public declaration.” And because previously, we had a world where, if somebody said “I love you” on the phone, you knew it was meant for you. And if somebody said “I love you” on the TV, you knew it was specifically not meant for you, because the mode of carriage lets us figure out how that message should be interpreted.

And that’s now broken. There are people having relatively personal conversations with their friends, yet they’re doing it in a public medium. But that’s no different from sitting around talking with friends in the food court at the mall. If you want to go down and find a group of teenagers chatting to each other at the mall, you can sit at the next table over and listen in, but then it’s pretty clear in that situation that you’re the weird one.

What we don’t yet have is a set of social norms for figuring out – in a medium like the web, which scales from intimate personal address all the way to full publication – which messages we should be paying attention to and which messages we should be ignoring.

Jon Lebkowsky: When you mention friends, it makes me think about how we’ve started to use “friend” as a verb…

Clay Shirky: Yeah, I’m going to friend you – yes, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: So are we changing the meaning of that word, of what it means to be a friend.

Clay Shirky: I don’t think we’re changing it so much as we’re adding to it, which is to say that I think people still have a sense of the old meaning of friend, as someone you would do a favor to if they were in some real trouble. We still keep that meaning around. I don’t think that sense has been denatured, but I do think that the word friend now includes someone who sent you a message on Facebook, and you friended them because why not?

There was an interesting period during the dominance of Friendster where people would talk about their friends, and then their friendsters, and their friendsters were people who they were friends with only on that site. So we may see some growing subtlety in people being able to signal, “Yeah, this person is actually a friend of mine, whereas that person is only a contact I have on Facebook.”

Jon Lebkowsky: Another major change I noted around 2000, when I first started using Ryze, and for all those years before that – I had been online by then for a decade or more – and I couldn’t see my online friends. And then Ryze created a social network platform where anyone could easily upload digital photos, and at the same time digital photos were more available, because digital cameras were coming out. Suddenly you had visual reference, and today nobody really thinks about whether they know what their “friends” that they never met face to face actually look like, because everybody has a pile of pictures online at Ryze or Flickr or Facebook.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, what we know about those people has been transformed.

Jon Lebkowsky: The experience seems to have more depth now than in the nineties, even though we had really powerful experiences that were text-based. Now we have so much more that we can do.

You said at one point in one of your chapters that our social tools are not an improvement to modern society, they’re a challenge to it? What were you thinking about there?

Clay Shirky: For the last hundred years, the key organizational conversation was, are big challenges better taken on by the state, by the government, raising taxes and spending the money, or are they better taken on by businesses operating in the marketplace. But the dot dot dot at the end of that sentence was because obviously people can’t get together and do these things for themselves.

There was a basic assumption, both in capitalist and communist theories of large scale action, that the complexities of ordinary life would defeat the ability of groups to come together and do things on their own.

It seems to me that what’s happened is that this thesis has now been rendered false in a surprising number of cases, and, maybe more importantly, a growing number of cases. There are places now where people are coming together and creating value for one another without doing it in either the framework of government or the framework of business.

I gave a talk at Supernova, a brief talk on the Perl programming language. I was pointing out that the Perl programming language, which has been an absolute mainstay of the web from the earliest days, is held together by love. It’s not held together either by government intervention or by corporate investment. It’s held together because a bunch of people love Perl, and more importantly, they love one another in the context of Perl. They like being part of a community that makes this language work, and work better.

The idea that this could create a programming language as good and as powerful and as ubiquitiously-used as Perl is new. One of the big shifts, and one of the reasons I wrote this book – this is a non-techie book, instead of writing for my usual audience of folks, programmers and engineers, I’ve actually tried to write it for my Mom – to explain why this is a big deal. One of the things I think is happening, is that the pattern of groups being able to come together and do things for themselves is now spreading outside of the technical and geek communities, and is becoming a general social capability.

Jon Lebkowsky: You mentioned love as a motivator and social glue. Do you have a technical, operational definition for love?

Clay Shirky: You know, I don’t. (Laughter.) I have the same definition that the supreme court used to have for pornography, which is I know it when I see it.

That’s actually an interesting question, I should take that seriously. Right now it’s defined largely by negation, which is to say, when people come together and do things together without obviously being motivated by either requirements or payments… if I’m doing something, and it’s not because my boss told me to do it, or I’m doing something and it’s not because I think I’ll get more money at the end of the day, if I do it – then almost by definition I’m doing it for love.

That strikes me as kind of an unsatisfactory definition, and there is so much work yet to be done on motivation. In part it hasn’t been done because neoclassical economics assumes that most human motivations can be backed into money, so that you can use money as this kind of universal calculator, even if there’s no money involved in the actual transaction. And we now know that to be false, from a lot of research and behavioral economics. There are some jobs where people will do the job better if they’re not paid, which is to say if they sense they’re being asked for a favor and are participating in community building, they’ll actually do a better job than if they’re simply given money to do the work.

Jon Lebkowsky: Isn’t this like the work of Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John Smith with communities of practice?

Clay Shirky: That’s exactly right. Communities of practice is one of these great patterns of demonstrating, to the consternation of many neoclassical economists, the degree to which people will go out of their way to help each other with no obvious return.

The community of practice that I love is the high dynamic range (HDR) photography people on Flickr. Back in the old days, if some new photographic technique came along, it would take 5-7 years to spread from someone’s photo studio to photo magazines, and finally to widespread visibility in Popular Photography, and the average darkroom.

You could see the high dynamic range technique, where you take multiple exposures of the same scene and combine them to get the brightest brights and the darkest darks, rip through Flickr, where people were posting these photos, and someone would come along, and say “Oh, my god, that’s the greatest photo I’ve ever seen, I love it. How did you do that?” And then you had these threads that were thousands and tens of thousands of words long with pointers to external software, and other people posting images in the thread that would help illustrate things.

This community sprung up around high dynamic range photography, and they essentially explained it to themselves in the course of about three months. HDR photography went from being something that a handful of people knew how to do to a general technique that any photographer who’s willing to spend an afternoon on Flickr could pick up and understand. And the speed of that spread wouldn’t work if money were involved.

The awareness and the growth in expertise actually happened faster because people weren’t asking for payment in return for value. They were asking to participate in a community that loved this stuff. I think we’re going to see a huge amount of experimentation with those kinds of advantages, which will appear in all kinds of new places.

Jon Lebkowsky: In my own work, I’ve been looking at and thinking about how these sorts of things happen, especially in business environments. And we know that they do happen, and now there’s a body of work… like Verna Allee and the value network people, who are saying, “We don’t really have a way to capture that value, or quantify it, so how do we do that?” Are you familiar with the value networks body of work?

Clay Shirky: Yes, and one of the really interesting patterns that jumped out at me, doing a book about large scale collaboration, is that very often really large-scale collaboration, whether it’s a Wikipedia or Linux or what have you, involves a small number of people who care an enormous amount, and then a large number of people who only care a little bit, but who are participating, who are adding their value to the overall work product.

What the value networks work seems to be to point to is ways in which you can create some of this kind of benefit without having everybody participating in a formal community of practice, and also getting more heterogenous kinds of skills and values involved. Everybody who’s in the HDR community of practice on Flickr is (a) a photographer and (b) experimenting with HDR. But once you get to something like Wikipedia, there are people who are fact checkers, and there are people who are sentence editors, and there are people who are content creators. You get a kind of division of labor that’s really quite different, and makes the whole more valuable, in part because of those differences.

Jon Lebkowsky: There’s a whole interesting question about kibitzing, about lurkers in a community and the extent to which they actually add value. And, of course, many lurkers are never 100% lurkers. Even if they don’t uncloak in public, they’ll email people who are having conversations, and drive things along. There was something in your writing, an idea that suggests the shape of a fried egg, where you have a cluster of real activity in the middle, and you have a sort of supportive community around it that’s less involved, but still contributing.

Clay Shirky: I haven’t used the fried egg analogy, but I love that. And the observing community is the pool from which the participants are drawn, even if a majority of the people in the observing community never become participants.

Jon Lebkowsky: We’ve been thinking about that in Austin, where there’s an active community of bootstrap entrepreneurs. One thing we’ve been talking about recently, that I had been thinking about for a while, is the idea that you could potentially do the larger things that people normally grow monolithic corporations to do… that you could cluster and aggregate networks of smaller companies to collaborate to do these larger things. Instead of having a big company with departments, you just have a network of companies that have figured out how to organize so that they can really depend on each other. And that gets to the issue of trust, which you talk about…

Clay Shirky: What you just said is, in my mind, the key piece of economic analysis, which is when the transaction costs are down, then the ability of smaller groups to find one another and bind themselves to one another as needed goes up. And once you get those two things happening at the same time, you can actually start figuring out when you’d be better off decreasing the size of the group and increasing the discoverability of the interface.

Jon Lebkowsky: How would this relate to the question of trust, and how you get the group to come together and to work? How would that relate to your trinity of plausible promise, effective tool, acceptable bargain…?

Clay Shirky: A lot of it starts with the plausible promise, with telling people, if they come together, they can actually do something successfully. And very often modest success matters more than audacious goals.

If you look at the original document proposing either Wikipedia or Linux, the most striking thing is how incredibly modest the original requests were. But that was enough. It was enough to get people involved. And then, if you can do that, and in many ways that’s the hardest thing to do… then you get to the problem of figuring out which tool to use, and what bargain to use.

The tool is relatively simple, which is to say there’s a few classic misakes to avoid – if you want people to converge on some sort of shared work product, don’t launch a mailing list. If you want people to diverge and generate lots and lots of competing ideas, don’t launch a wiki. But fitting the tool to the job is in many ways a matter of looking out and seeing who else has got a problem similar to yours and what tools are they using.

The bargain is the hardest one of all, particularly around this idea of subdividing into smaller groups that then interact with one another. Because the bargain really says, “what are the users’ expectations of one another over the long haul? &ndash as opposed to anything that the site’s founder or host can promise.

Getting the culture right is really an art, and not a science… which is to say that your early culture is going to be set by the people who happen to come around, and you’ve got to work with that while, at the same time, keeping your eye on wanting to have a culture that can scale up over the long haul.

Kathy Sierra has a fantastic example from Java Ranch, which was a site meant to host friendly conversations among Java programmers. They wanted to get away from the kind of supercilious snarkiness that characterizes a lot of technical communities. So they have a terms of service you have to accept to be part of the community, and the actual terms of service, in its entirety, is “Be nice.”

And that was their way of saying, “We can’t enforce every little jot and tittle of user interaction. We know people are going to say things that may upset one another. All we’re going to say is, our standard of behavior is that you should be nice to each other, and if we see that not happening, we’re going to intervene.”

It’s such a beautiful rebuke to all the lawyerese of you can’t do this or that, where people try to enumerate everything that could go wrong. Because what they did, I think, in that model, is that they managed to streamline the kind of thing that has to go into a long-term user bargain, into a very simple to understand concept, and I’d like to see more of that and less of the “we had the lawyers wrote the terms of service, and suddenly it’s fifteen printed pages.“

Jon Lebkowsky: We have everybody online now publishing with the same forms of media, everybody’s got access to everything, and you’ve got mass communication on one end of the spectrum, and on the other end you have very intimate but still public conversations, which is kind of interestingly weird. Is that a gradual continuum? How much are people really confused about the kinds of conversations they’re having?

Clay Shirky: This is an experiment I want to see run, but I think this is a very interesting question. Here is my hypothesis: that one of the things that people create some kind of really deep mental model for is modes of communication. People my age and older have a very good sense of when to call someone on the phone, and when to send them a personal letter, and when to go see them. But we don’t have such a good sense of when to email them, or IM them, or Twitter or what have you, because all of that stuff was invented after we had already solidified our sense of the media landscape. All of those things are still new.

One way to test this would be to see whether fifteen year olds today have a literally more intuitive sense of when to call, when to SMS, when to email, and when to IM. And I think they do. I think that the confusion around media is largely with people who have grown up in the environment we grew up in, where television is one thing, whereas the phone is another thing. The medium that reaches groups isn’t a communications medium. The medium that is a communications medium doesn’t reach groups. When all that has gotten overturned, it looks strange to us that people having group communications in a public medium – you know, these half a dozen friends, are all Live Journaling one another about their trip to the mall, or the party last Friday. But to those kids I don’t think it seems weird at all. And if that’s true, then that’s the kind of generation gap that came up around the use of the telephone or the use of the telegram, and I think it’s something society will have to weather for thirty years. If I’m wrong about that, which is to say, if increased numbers and kinds of media actually lead to increased social confusion, then I think that society is going to have to develop some formal methods of etiquette in order to figure out how to manage all of this proliferation of new communications options we’ve gotten.

Jon Lebkowsky: Twitter has turned out to be a very interesting communication space. I really didn’t get it, didn’t have the right experience of it for the longest time, because I was just using the web interface. Occasionally I would activate it for my phone if I was stuck in traffic and bored, and wanted company.

But I recently started using Twitter via IM using GTalk. and that’s an entirely different experience, in that you really get the flow of conversation, seeing comments as they’re posted.

One of the interesting things about Twitter is that you have this continuum that we were talking about… you have some people who come to Twitter only because they want to broadcast, to announce something to the world, or at least to their network. So they’ll show up and post a url, “this is my latest blog post” or whatever. But they don’t really hang out and have conversations. More often, though, Twitter users have public conversations where they’re talking either to everybody, or to a specific person through a public reply. And you have people who want fairly intimate conversations and will go to direct messages, which are private. So there’s this whole spectrum of experience you can have on Twitter.

Clay Shirky: I think like everybody, when it came out, I started playing with it, but it seemed to me that most of the action and gone private, but I had not tried to use the GTalk interface. I’ll have to give that a try.

Jon Lebkowsky: What is the problem of filtering, and how has it changed? You talk about a priori filtering in the publishing world, and how filtering is now more after-the-fact.

Clay Shirky: The problem with filtering is, now that there’s not bottleneck for production, there is no way to filter in advance. You can’t filter the good from the mediocre in advance, simply because it’s too expensive. No one has the cash needed to simply keep on top of everything that’s coming down the pipe, because now everybody has a pipe.

So filtering has now gone to this post-hoc thing. As good as it has gotten, with things like PageRank and del.icio.us and Technorati, and so forth, we’re still in a world where the average experience of wandering around the web is of being exposed to all kinds of things that are really kind of irrelevant. The searching and sorting problem hasn’t yet settled itself down.

One of the things I try to explain to people when they say how much junk there is on the web is to use the analogy of a book store. You go into a book store and your experience of the book store is, “oh, I went right to the section on philosophy, and I went right to the books on Plato, and there they were.” So I know that there’s all this great literature in the bookstore.

But if you picked up that book store, and you shook the contents out into the street, and you waded in and started picking books at random, you’d find Chicken Soup for the Hoosier Soul and Love’s Tender Fury, and all of this stuff. In fact, our experience of the book store as being a site of a lot of really good content is in large part because we’re really good at ignoring 99% of what’s in there. If you’re not going to the book store for self-help books, you don’t have to look at them.

And because the filtering problem on the web is so enormous, and because we’re still in relatively early days of figuring out how to solve it, we can’t yet get to that happy state where the stuff I’m not interested in doesn’t show up. It takes a much more active stance in terms of searching and grooming and so forth to zero in on the good stuff.

So it seems to me that the problem of filtering is going to remain one of the key problems of the age, for the next few decades, in part because the volume of material people are producing is still going up. And once we get a relatively good solution for filtering the web, for example, along comes Twitter – here’s this new medium that we don’t have these filtering tools for. How do you figure out what to read and what to ignore and what to save and what to throw away, and so forth? That problem is coming up now, and is going to keep coming up over and over again for as long as we’re on this ride. We keep going to a place where there’s so much more content this year than last year, so a lot of our old strategies are broken.

Jon Lebkowsky: It seems to me that one of the real problems of filtering is that, to the extent we feel that we have to filter and set up filters, that we’re liable to exclude things that we didn’t know we would find interesting.

Clay Shirky: That’s right. And designing filters with a certain amount of serendipity involved is a key part of this. But even then, even with some serendipity, it is so easy to have the amount of content radically overflow any strategy that we’ve got for sorting the stuff that we care about from the stuff we don’t care about. Even with a serendipity meter built in, we still have to work hard to get this right.

Jon Lebkowsky: Where do you see things going? You’ve written a good analysis of where we are, but what comes next?

Clay Shirky: The ladder that I develop in the book is how much does the individual have to coordinate themselves with the group to get an effect. So the simplest thing is sharing, right? Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube, Napster… my ability to share with millions of others and then for all of us to profit from that requires very little coordination from me. That pattern is very easy to bootstrap.

The next pattern up is collaboration, where there actually is some more coordination required between me and other people. This is Open Source software, this is Wikipedia, and so on.

The pattern that strikes me as being most radically different from what we’ve had before is collective action, the pattern where the group comes together, and stands or falls depending on the actions of the entire group. Every member of the group is affected by the action of the group as a whole. I spent a lot of time looking, in particular, at the political prostests in Belarus that are using the flash mob model for protesting. It seems to me that the collective action model, where the group isn’t just a loose collection of individuals, it’s actually a unit, has not yet seen a lot of traction. There have been some interesting experiments, but most of the interesting work there is still in the future. And that’s what I’m watching out for – what’s coming with the future of collective action, because I think there’s a huge amount of work still to be done there.

Jon Lebkowsky: When we were doing the Extreme Democracy book, and as a precursor to that we were having the emergent democracy conversation, the Joi Ito thing. The big question for us was emergent leadership.

Clay Shirky: Yes.

Jon Lebkowsky: How does that work. How do we actually have leaders emerge, and how does the group know – how does a flock of birds, for instance, know which bird is in the lead at any given time.

Clay Shirky: One of the big surprises about the Open Source movement is how many of the projects had a benevolent dictator for life at their head. There are a few that don’t, like the Apache Foundation. But Perl and Python and Ruby and Linux and on and on had the charismatic, technically adept founder at the head. How people find and identify those leaders, and what lessons we can take from the technical community to the nontechnical community, I think is a really big open question.

Jon Lebkowsky: We had a sort of laboratory for thinking about this with Howard Rheingold’s Electric Minds, the business he created around an online community. When Howard realized that he needed to do something with Electric Minds, that it really wasn’t working as a business, the question was, where does it go? He got a buyer who agreed to honor the community. Then the question was, if Howard was going to become just another community member, who was going to lead? It’s a long story, but in the end, the community found that the benevolent dictator model seemed to work very well.

Clay Shirky: Yes, absolutley. And it locks the “benevolent dictator” out of participation. Stacy Horn, who founded Echo, had this problem. She could not go out and socialize with her own users, because she was the owner, and everybody kind of behaved weirdly around her. So she ended up having to mainly consign herself to conversations that were only populated by people who remembembered when Echo was just a few hundred people, so that they wouldn’t treat her so weirdly. But she couldn’t, in fact, be just an ordinary member of the community.

Jon Lebkowsky: That’s interesting. Howard’s next thing, of course, was his semi-private Brainstorms community, where he’s the door. Everybody comes through him, so he knows everybody who comes in. That weirdness that Stacy Horn experienced may have been there to some extent with Electric Minds, but it’s absolutely not there at Brainstorms.

Clay Shirky: No, because you’re already going through Howard on the way in, so you’re sort of aware of that.

Jon Lebkowsky: Yeah, and even though he’s still kind of the benevolent dictator, he’s a member of the community. The problem you run into is when you have some people in the community that feel you need to throw a person out, because they’re misbehaving – this has been a big deal on the WELL, for instance. In one case, there was a guy who was trashing the commons on the WELL in a big way, but because of the strong tradition of free speech on the WELL, the managers didn’t want to just throw him out, and there was a quandary – what do you do about this guy? Because you didn’t really have a strong benevolent dictator who would just throw him out. You had to have a process, and the process extended the pain.

Clay Shirky: It’s a dilemma, deciding when the needs of the group trump the needs of the individual. And it’s a tough moment, nobody likes that moment. It’s anti-democratic in one way, and yet all groups require that, because all groups acquire the kinds of trolls that you’re talking about here.

Jon Lebkowsky: The tragedy of the commons.

Clay Shirky: Yeah, exactly.

Jon Lebkowsky: And you made a strong case, I think, in your writing, for the need for governance. Obviously there is always some governing principles in any group, whether they’re formal or informal. It’s a problem when we try to put those principles aside.

So in closing, how do you think governance is going to play out in the future? The Internet is a big laboratory for governance models. What impact could that have on our actual, formal mechanisms for governance?

Clay Shirky: The biggest impact will be if we find some way to defer to groups, to allow groups to come together and make some choices for themselves that the government defers to. Or, if we start regarding the output of groups as being legitimate expressions of the will of the people.

Many people have floated this idea of a policy wiki, or the notion of doing the national budget using the wisdom of crowds. Those experiments would be, I think, the most radical. On the way to that, even before the really radical stuff, I think the big change is going to be just the number of times that people start to pull together and have success, as with this airline passengers bill of rights – after the industry fought it off for eight years, suddenly in eight months a little group came from nowhere with no budget and no staff, and actually succeeded in rewriting the law. [Author's Note: Since this conversation, the 2nd Circuit Court has struck down the NY State Passenger's Bill of Rights. Now the test of the people vs the airline industry moves to Congress and the Supreme Court.]

I think the big change in government is going to be with people getting some sense that if they come together, they can actually do things for themselves.

Jon Lebkowsky: I think that’s really important. I think the problem that we have, even within the Democratic party, is that there’s a set of people who’ll say, say screw the will of the people, the people don’t know what they’re talking about. We know what’s best for them.

Clay Shirky: The superdelegates, in a way, were set up specifically to keep people from sending unelectably liberal candidates into the general election. But it’s such a bad fix for that problem. Now that that system might actually kick in, I think everybody in the Democratic National Committee is trying to find a way to back away from it. Because I think the amount of attention, and the number of new voters they turned out… if they were to actually have the election go to someone who hadn’t been ratified by the people, I think it would be a catastrophe.

The Worldchanging Interview: Clay Shirky is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:03 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

This article was written by Robert Katz in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Jessica Flannery is, in many ways, an accidental entrepreneur. Had she not met a guy named Matt at a DC conference in 1999, the entire enterprise she's known for (Kiva.org) might not exist today. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Jessica for an interview on Thursday here at Pop!Tech 2007, where she agreed to share many of the other fortunate "accidents" that have marked her journey.

The best part about interviewing someone like Jessica Flannery is that I don’t have to tell and re-tell the Kiva story. After all, NextBillion.net was one of the first web sites or blogs to even talk about Kiva, the peer-to-peer microfinance web site that Jessica co-founded with her husband, Matt (ok, that’s a smidge of story, I admit). What’s more, Sara Standish – a former NextBillion writer and current MBA candidate – conducted a long interview with Kiva principals including Matt, Premal Shah, and Krista Van Lewen. And Kiva has been featured in a slew of mainstream media – from Newsweek to BusinessWeek to Oprah to NPR.

Since the basic story of Kiva is well known, Jessica and I decided to focus our conversation on some of the lesser-known aspects of her journey and the business it has spawned.

A special thanks to Jessica Flannery and to the Pop!Tech press folks, who helped make this interview happen.

Rob Katz: Why did you take two years away from Kiva to attend business school?

Jessica Flannery, Kiva.org: To be honest with you, it’s the result of timing more than anything. When I applied to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford in 2005, I was working at the school and Matt was full-time with TiVo. Kiva was just a nights and weekends projects. We started it with 7 businesses that I met in Uganda and $3100 that we raised through friends – and we raised it by spamming our wedding list.

So in the fall of 2005, I entered business school. About two months later, we got slammed on the blogosphere – mostly through NextBillion, Worldchanging, and BoingBoing – and Kiva took off. I was in the middle of my first semester, but I strongly considered leaving school. After all, Kiva was a dream for me. After conversations with professors and administrators at Stanford, and long talks with Matt, we decided that I would stay in school and Matt would quit TiVo to concentrate full-time on Kiva.

RK: Why Matt, and not you?

JF: I admit that it didn’t necessarily make economic sense. Matt was earning a paycheck, while I was costing money in terms of tuition and living expenses while at school. But fundamentally, Matt is a true visionary – which makes him better suited to run a high ceiling social enterprise like Kiva. And on a practical level, Matt could program the alpha and beta versions of the web site, while I couldn’t.

Ultimately, my decision to stay in school was a good one. After all, there’s no better place to be while starting something than business school. Stanford’s community of students, professors, and outside experts provided a great test bed in which Matt and I could develop and grow Kiva. It also took over six months – from November 2005 to April 2006 for Kiva’s platform and deal flow to be sufficient to support us. By April 2006, I was nearly finished with my first year of business school. So from both the theoretical and practical side, my staying in business school was definitely the right choice for me, and the right choice for Kiva.

RK: You have a bachelor’s degree in English and a passion for international development. Why did you go to business school in the first place?

JF: Honestly, I happened into business school. To understand how I ended up at Stanford, you first have to understand how I ended up in California – and that goes back to 1999. In 1999, while a senior at Bucknell University, I attended an interfaith conference in Washington, DC, where I met a really nice guy named Matt. We stayed in touch throughout the year, and when I graduated from Bucknell, I moved to California to be closer to him.

When I got to California, I moved into an 11-person group house on Sand Hill Road. My rent was $200 per month (we eventually got evicted). But I moved to California to be 3 miles from Matt, instead of 3,000 miles. I had no job – so I took copies of my resume over to the Stanford campus and walked around.

My first job in California was temping at the Center for Social Innovation. It was a directed accident, if you will. I knew I was interested in international development, so when I read a little about the Center for Social Innovation and what it does, I decided to walk in. The accident part of it was that they needed a temp. My temp job became a contract job, which became a permanent job.

RK: How did your work at the Center for Social Innovation develop from temp job to Kiva to business school and beyond?

JF: Well, the first thing I did with the Center was help coordinate the Global Philanthropy Forum. I was a 23-year old, moderating sessions with Fortune 100 CEOs – and it worked. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I kept working at the CSI for three years, watching students go through business school. At first, I wasn’t jealous – I cared about changing the world, not driving core competence in search of profits.

But after a while, core competence – and incentives, profit maximization, and all those other b-school concepts – started to make sense to my own personal mission. These business school students, contrary to their stereotypes, actually cared about changing the world. Not only that, but they were getting my dream jobs – managing and running non-profits – when they graduated. So that’s how I became interested in business school.

RK: What about Kiva?

JF: Kiva was, in some ways, born out of necessity. Matt and I had a relationship problem: he wanted to do high-tech startups, and I wanted to do microfinance in Africa. We knew that we had this problem when we were dating, but we were in love, so we got married anyway and decided to figure it out as we went along.

Think about it – Kiva marries the high-tech startup world with microfinance. It’s the perfect solution to Matt and my relationship problem, and I can honestly say that it was born out of love. I would never have been able to get my head around Kiva had I not worked at the Center for Social Innovation, where these kinds of social innovations were part of the standard, day-to-day office talk.

RK: What do you want NextBillion.net to know that we don’t already?

JF: Pursue your passion. Peel away the boundaries between you and the people you want to work with. If you do that peeling, you can build connections that change you and change the world. In the course of pursuing passion and peeling away boundaries, you become vulnerable. Don’t fight it. Strive for vulnerability – beautiful things can happen out of it. In that same light, here’s my one-liner: never, ever think you are better than anyone else. If you can live like that, and work in the BOP context, then you can really change things.

Pop!Tech - Interview With Kiva’s Jessica Flannery is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:21 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

This article was written by Hassan Masum, David Zaks, and Chad Monfreda in September 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

As the ecosystem services meme trickles down from the science and policy worlds to on-the-ground programs, it’s informative to peek behind the curtain to observe its evolution.

One group working very hard at mainstreaming ecosystems services is the People & Ecosystems program of the World Resources Institute. WRI has been at the forefront of this type of research for many years. Its Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (PAGE) project was the precursor to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and many of their publications carry weight in both the scientific and policy communities.

Here we interview WRI staff who are all playing a vital role at the interface between academic theory and real-world practice: Karen Bennett, Charles Iceland, Evan Branosky, and Stephen Adam.Keep reading to see their thoughts on how the ecosystem goods and services idea plays out in a policy environment.

Chad: What is the World Resources Institute, and what kind of work is it doing related to ecosystem goods and services?

Karen: The World Resources Institute (WRI) is an environmental think tank that goes beyond research to find practical ways to protect the earth and improve people’s lives. We like to say that we’re “working at the intersection of environment and human needs.”

Work on ecosystem services is therefore a natural fit for our organization. We have an institutional focus on developing and disseminating information about ecosystem services, and helping government, business, and multilateral institution decision makers use this information to achieve their development goals. We’re also working to align regulatory and economic incentives with ecosystem stewardship, through establishing markets for ecosystem services and other price signals.

On the information side, we just published a report titled Restoring Nature’s Capital: An Action Agenda to Sustain Ecosystem Services. It is a broad action agenda based on the key policy, institutional and governance implications of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment findings. We’re working now on a guide for public sector decision makers on how to use an ecosystem service approach.

Charlie: We have a similar project working with the private sector to help them use an ecosystem service approach to analyze their business risks and opportunities. We’re working with six multinational companies to assess the ways they depend on and impact ecosystem services in order to build a business plan based on that analysis. We hope to publish the methodology at the end of the year.

Stephen: Another recent report was Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being which overlays maps of poverty data and ecosystem dependence to visually see the links between nature and the poor. We’re now working to build another layer onto these maps – financial flows – to see how fiscal allocations line up with need.

Evan: On the markets side, we’ve developed an online trading tool, NutrientNet, to manage nutrient use in the Chesapeake Bay region. It has tools to allow estimations of the cost and amount of nutrient reduction credits achieved through specific projects. Right now we’re working in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Michigan; work is being done now to roll out the system across the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Hassan: Valuing ecosystem goods and services is getting an increasing amount of mindshare, but the idea can seem abstract. What do you see as some ‘gold standard’ examples where valuation was done well - examples which are worthy of being emulated and expanded upon?

Karen: I think what has proved successful in valuation is cases where services are valued in comparing a set of policy options. The most famous example here would be of New York City’s water supply. Instead of building a US$6-8 billion plant as initially proposed, New York City decided to spend $1.5 billion to restore the watershed in the Catskill Mountains. This isn’t to say that the watershed is worth $1.5 billion; the project provides additional services such as carbon storage and recreational and cultural services at no additional cost. The point here is that decision makers saw that the Catskill watershed, if managed appropriately, could provide the same water purification services as the planned filtration plant, but at much lower cost.

If you want a model where an exact dollar value is placed on services, then there is a project that WRI is currently undertaking that I believe does get a lot of things right - a project placing a dollar value on coral reef systems. The program uses only existing data and can be adjusted to work for nearly any level of available data, so the process is replicable in nearly any location. A method like this is much more meaningful and useful to decision makers than methods that may be more theoretically sound, but are only performed once.

Evan: WRI has also worked with state governments to efficiently allocate limited funding for conservation programs. At the state level (and, indeed, the federal level too) farmers demand more money to fund conservation practices than is available. To address this funding shortfall, WRI worked with Pennsylvania to run two “reverse auctions” - scenarios where sellers compete to supply buyers with a good or service instead of the traditional auctioning approach. In Pennsylvania, their reverse auction awarded $486,000 to farmers who implemented conservation practices that reduced Phosphorous (P) run-off by 92,000 lbs. Using this approach, more farmers were enrolled and more P was reduced than would have been possible through traditional funding allocation methods.

David: Markets and payments for ecosystem services are coming into place across the globe. What do you see as the opportunities and challenges of governments, NGOs and producers and consumers of ecosystem services as these systems are put into place?

Evan: Markets present many opportunities for both the producers and consumers of ecosystem services. By their very nature, markets are efficient, meaning they provide the largest amount of a good to the largest number of consumers for the least price. In terms of ecosystem services, markets often provide a least-cost means for achieving environmental goals. Markets also provide an incentive for violating facilities or individuals to reach further than just the “low-hanging fruit.” Firms are often required to make minimal pollutant reductions, but markets can motivate them to go further.

Markets can also complement the efforts of existing government programs. US Farm Bill Conservation Programs award grants to farmers for the implementation of agricultural best management practices (BMPs), which are meant to mitigate some of the harmful effects of agriculture on the environment. Water quality trading achieves the same purpose, but offers another source of funding: purchasers of credits pay for the establishment of these conservation practices.

There are two big challenges to the establishment of these programs. One is a lack of political will. The other is a lack of information on the key decision points that must be reached when a program is developed. Since these programs are generally still in their infancy, the successes and hurdles of market development have not been widely circulated.

Karen: Another challenge of establishing markets that is particular to ecosystem services is the question of how to handle trade-offs. As the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment pointed out, historically certain services (mostly provisioning services such as food or timber) have been enhanced at the cost of other services. How do we ensure that this won’t happen with the ecosystem services featured in markets?

There is also the matter of geographic scale. The use and preservation of ecosystem services is not zero-sum. For example, the coastline protection service of a wetland in Maryland is not necessarily equal to the coastline protection service of a wetland in Louisiana. Nor does protecting one service nullify over-use of the same service in a different location.

Hassan: It’s interesting how you’re talking about valuations at a number of different spatial scales: from a local ecosystem (the Chesapeake bay watershed), to a region, to a country as with your Kenya atlas, to global valuations. You could also consider various time scales, e.g. since the time horizon on which benefits are being measured directly impacts the value of ongoing services.

Which of these spatial / temporal scales do you feel we understand best, and which pose the greatest challenges? And how might we in the future integrate valuations done at different scales into a coherent framework?

Charlie: The selection of spatial and temporal scales should be issue-specific. For example, if you are looking at water availability and flows, it makes more sense to look at catchment-level data, rather than state or national-level data. Similarly, the temporal scale would be different when looking at a forestry operation, where rotation cycles are quite long (30 years in many cases), as compared to an agricultural operation, which might see several harvests per year.

Stephen: In terms of starting to get at a coherent framework to deal with these, the tool I mentioned earlier involving financial flows mapping, Funnel the Money, is attempting to handle scales by hosting different spatial and temporal data.

One of our biggest challenges is data availability. Traditionally, governments and researchers haven’t collected data designed around ecosystems, so one solution colleagues at WRI are pursuing is to create standardized ecosystem indicators. Funnel the Money’s solution is to allow users to add new data, e.g. geo-spatial, statistical, photos, and commentary, which will start piecing together data at different scales - similar to a wiki or blog. The end goal is a comprehensive tool for policy-makers to make informed decisions on resource distribution to help the poor.

Hassan: You’ve told us some of what you do, at a conceptual level. Now please tell us, what does it feel like to work on ecosystem services at a personal level?

How tough is it being in a field so new, that’s still taking shape? What kind of reaction do you get when you walk into a company, institution, or politician’s office? What’s the community of people working on this issue like, and what conferences or other venues do you share ideas at?

Evan: I work mainly on markets, and for that area the idea of “paying for ecosystem services” is not as new as one may think. Cap-and-trade was first proposed as a means to efficiently regulate environmental externalities in a Resources For the Future white paper in the 1950s. Water quality trading has been around since 1984, when the State of Colorado instituted a trading program in the Lake Dillon reservoir. The driver was a state-imposed phosphorus regulation.

I’ve found that potential stakeholders understand the concept of trading quite well. This is due, in part, to the advent of carbon markets. The main criticism (and sometimes, skepticism) is more focused on the regulatory driver and design of the market. No one argues that emissions trading is a tool to efficiently regulate CO2; they argue instead about the science of global warming, the regulatory driver behind the program, the design of the market structure, and the market’s geographic scope.

There are 21 active water quality trading programs in the United States today (though not all have facilitated trades), approximately 11 inactive trading programs, 13 states with full trading policies or developing policies, and increased engagement from the Environmental Protection Agency with regards to trading. People at all levels of government understand the concept; they just need to see a functioning, robust program in order to accept that trading can achieve environmental goals. This will need to be overcome by the development of cohesive regulatory drivers, which is an incredible challenge.

Karen: I came upon the field of ecosystem services mostly by accident. I had a friend who recommended my current position to me, and that’s really how I ended up working on ecosystem services. Pretty amazing luck!

I’d always been interested in working in the environmental field, but every issue used to be a separate problem that needed fresh work to find its solution. The ecosystem services approach provides a framing for every issue. It’s a complex, dynamic system - just like our natural world. It is a new area, and like I said it is complex; a lot of the underlying science and economics is still being figured out.

When I talk to decision-makers or other people already in the environmental community, they’re sometimes wary of a new term (”how does biodiversity fit into this model?” “Is climate change an ecosystem service?”) Even more difficult is the fact that we’re asking people to change their entire mind set, from the traditional approach of protecting ecosystems from development to protecting ecosystems for development. But mostly, I’m glad that I was fortunate enough to stumble upon this new framing and will be able to witness its coming of age.

Stephen: Working with and promoting a new, or re-packaged, concept like ecosystem services is wonderful and overwhelming. The study of ecosystems marries ecology, business, communications, and numerous other disciplines, and so the ecosystem services concept can be hard to figure out for oneself, much less to explain to someone new to the area.

What I’ve found is that people can be pretty savvy when it comes to separate issues like deforestation or coastal run-off, but not when explaining the benefits (financial especially) derived from ecosystems. Helping people make these connections to ecosystems is one of the most enjoyable parts of the job.

Charlie: Our corporate partners have been quite amazed to discover how deteriorating local ecosystems, along with the services they provide, are literally shifting the landscape in which their companies have traditionally operated. These shifts pose daunting risks to the companies, but they also present potentially lucrative opportunities for those that are able to move swiftly and intelligently to capitalize on them.

Chad: Thank you so much Karen, Charles, Evan, and Stephen. You have given us a lot to think about in this interview, and just to round things out we’d like it if you could touch on one more question: How do you see the field of ecosystem goods and services evolving in the coming decade or two? And what do you think most needs to be done to move research and implementation forward?

Charlie: The main indirect drivers of ecosystem degradation include population growth and economic development. These indirect drivers influence direct drivers of ecosystem degradation such as habitat transformation, over-exploitation, pollution and climate change.

I think we have reached a level of population growth and economic development that is forcing us to confront trade-offs among competing uses of ecosystems and make difficult choices among competing economic development priorities. Will we use the forest to maximize carbon sequestration, or do we convert it to forest plantations to produce paper and wood products, or do we cut it down altogether to make room for oil palm or grain cultivation? Do we use available water for human consumption, to maintain ecological functions, to supply industry or to supply agriculture? Do we accept that everyone will buy an SUV or do we heavily discourage this by imposing large taxes on gasoline?

I think that ecosystem degradation is going to force us to develop a much deeper understanding of the role of ecosystems in economic development, and of ecosystem service trade-offs inherent in development and land-use decision-making. So I see the field of ecosystem goods and services moving forward at a brisk pace in the coming decades, spurred by the necessity of addressing the difficult problems that we are already beginning to encounter in our daily lives.

Evan: I think the “ecosystem services approach” will become the premier method for dealing with environmental externalities caused by societal processes like the many Charlie just mentioned. The ES approach spans many areas of public finance, including taxes, regulations, and markets for ecosystem services. As environmental problems become increasingly widespread and larger in scale, public policy that incorporates ES thinking through these traditional schemes will become absolutely necessary.

Smart tax policy, carbon trading, and nutrient trading brings people together and provides economic incentives for pollutant reductions. Therefore, they are efficient, fair, and politically palatable. In order for this to really take off, we need a large, successful program to become established. Ideally, it would address a major environmental concern and be accompanied by intense public outreach and education - something akin to a thriving Kyoto Protocol followed by an ecosystem-focused “An Inconvenient Truth” might do it.

Stephen: Based on my experience, what’s most needed to move implementation forward is political buy-in. While some individuals, businesses, and local governments will adopt ecosystem-minded policies and practices, it’ll take a progressive federal government to allocate the necessary funds and create incentives for long-term programs oriented toward ecosystem goods and services. The debate over ecosystem goods and services will no doubt continue over the next decade, but government intervention and support is vital in the mainstreaming of ecosystems.

Karen: We’ve already said that this field is still new and uncertain, and, like Stephen said, the debate on ES will almost certainly continue for the foreseeable future. But what is also certain is that ‘business as usual’ is no longer enough. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment finding that nearly two-thirds of ecosystem services are degraded demonstrates that humanity has been squandering its natural assets. In fact, we have treated many as if they had no value at all.

Like Charlie said, humanity is now facing a different set of challenges than it did a half century ago - challenges that existing institutions and ways of making decisions cannot handle. Fifty years ago, the costs of lost services from converting natural landscapes to production may not have exceeded the benefits, but in this new century, that will no longer be the case. Thus comes the realization that we need a new way of managing nature, a paradigm shift that challenges past assumptions and practices. Everyone - government, business, civil society, research institutions - will have a role to play in this new regime. Implementing this will be disruptive, but letting things continue the way they currently are will not ensure that nature will be able to provide services to support human well-being far into the future.

Moving Ecosystems Services from Theory to Reality is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:57 AM)

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Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

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This article was written by Regine Debatty in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I have yet to find any trace of ungainliness in The Institute for Applied Autonomy. The anonymous activist group believes in the importance of disseminating knowledge, encouraging autonomy, and developing methods of self-determination through artistic expression and application of military-like technology to the topics of criminal mischief, decentralized systems and individual autonomy.

You might have read or seen one of their pamphlets or spray painting robots, or participated to the protests during the 2004 US presidential campaign by using their TXTmob system.

StreetWriter

“The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) was founded in 1998 as an anonymous collective of artists, activists, and engineers united by the cause of individual and collective self-determination.” Why did you decide to stay anonymous? How much does that anonymity serve your objectives? Is it part of a strategy?

Initially, we embraced anonymity as a defensive tactic, as many of our projects exist in a legal grey area. Working collectively and anonymously seemed natural to those of us with backgrounds in direct-action politics and the hacker and cyberpunks communities. Groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and native Hawaiian activists Hui Malama gave us a model for action that was both publicly engaged and effectively anonymous.

We’ve also found anonymity to be a useful tactic in dealing with the press. Many journalists seem to be more interested in writing about artists than about the art they create – this is particularly true when the work has explicitly political content. By refusing to provide any personal information about ourselves, we control the kinds of narratives that journalists create about our work and the issues it engages.

iSee enables users to avoid CCTV surveillance cameras. Some UK-based artists working on ideas of counter-surveillance for the broad public have discovered that in fact most people are totally comfortable with the idea of surveillance in public space. Have you noticed anything similar when you have deployed the project in several cities, both European and American? Did you notice different attitudes towards surveillance according to the country?

It’s true that many people are comfortable with surveillance of public space, especially when confronted with the usual choice between privacy and security. With iSee, we tried to subvert (or at least complicate) this binary. Initially this meant focusing on the mechanics of surveillance, pointing out that in practice CCTV surveillance has had very little impact on actual crime and that it is subject to the biases of system designers and operators, which means it often gets used to ogle women and single out youth and minorities for scrutiny. Ultimately though, the camera-avoidance part of the project became less significant than the data-collection and visualization aspects. We held workshops in which participants used our tools to create interactive maps of their city’s surveillance infrastructure. This activity asks a very different set of questions than simply “Does CCTV make you uncomfortable?” Instead, it points to the lack of any kind of baseline data about surveillance. Before we can have an intelligent conversation about CCTV surveillance, for example, it would be nice to know how many cameras are in operation, where they are, who owns them, etc. For the most part, this information simply doesn’t exist – In most countries, cameras are put up by individual building owners and their data is increasingly managed by third-party private companies. In effect, we have an emergent infrastructure of video surveillance that is growing on an ad-hoc basis, without any public discussion or oversight. The only way we have any information about the number and location of surveillance cameras is through the efforts of grassroots activists and concerned citizens.

Apart from surveillance and counter-surveillance, what are the issues you find worth fighting for/against?

We’re generally interested in the intersection between technology, public policy and social control, and with building systems that facilitate freedom of speech and public acts of dissent. This encompasses a number of related issues including surveillance, public space, and law enforcement. We’re also extremely interested in the ways that technologies and scientific knowledge are produced, which has lead to an ongoing engagement with academic research labs and with the funding agencies that support them.

Your robots have a very peculiar look. Little Brother has a cute metal tin look, while the GraffitiWriter just looks efficient. What or who guides the way you design robots?

We employ what might be called a kind of “tactical aesthetics,” in which aesthetic decisions are determined by the intended goals of a particular project. Little Brother was intended to distribute subversive literature to unsuspecting audiences, so we tried to make him really cute and engaging.

GraffitiWriter on the other hand leveraged techno-fetishism to confer a kind of legitimacy to robot-mediated criminality, so it needed to look like a “cool” robot. While functionally similar to GraffitiWriter, Streetwriter was intended as a clandestine graffiti writing machine so it looks fairly innocuous, appearing to be an ordinary cargo van. The latest version of StreetWriter, which we call SWX, was intended for the very specific purpose of infiltrating the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge which lead to a particular kind of sleekness in the design, with a glossy white exterior and laser-cut aluminum logos.

GraffitiWriter invites the public to spray paint graffiti on the pavement. How much are people ready to forget that they are well-behaved citizens and contribute to this piece of “street art” protest? Which kind of messages do you receive? Mainly love messages or rather angry complaints?

You’re referring to our “Rogues Gallery” project in which we took our GraffitiWriter robot to public spaces across the United States and Europe and offered it for use by the general public. One of the things that was so interesting about this project was that so many people were wiling to participate! We’d simply show up unannounced in a public park or city center, drive the robot around, and invite people to use the machine to spray paint messages on the ground. Virtually everyone we encountered was willing to give it a try, even though what we were doing was clearly illegal. To us, this seemed to be an interesting inversion of the usual narratives about technology extending human abilities. With Rogues Gallery, the robot overcame certain kinds of social conditioning not because of its mechanical capabilities but simply because it was seen as legitimate, based on the assumption that anyone possessing a robot represented some large research institution which probably had the “right” to spray its messages on public space, rather than simply being a couple of crazy people who built a machine in their garage. Imagine if we had tried the same experiment without a robot, using only a few cans of spray paint – no one would have participated because the action would have been clearly understood as an illegal act of public defacement.

What are the best locations to unleash a contestational robot?

It turns out you can release them almost anywhere. Although, I’d probably be careful around airports these days.

With the kind of public art/activist projects that you develop, things might not always go the way you foresaw. How much do you learn from the way users behave and interact with your pieces? Could you give (an) example(s) of unexpected and unwelcome/delightful experience?

Because our work mostly happens in uncontrolled environments, we’re almost always surprised by the way our projects unfold. The Rogues Gallery project we just discussed is a good example – our initial idea for the GraffitiWriter robot was to be able to spray paint in places that are too dangerous for human activists, like banks, shopping malls, and government buildings. We had anticipated that if there were any problems with authority the robot would be sacrificed rather than the person. However, during its initial public deployment on the steps of the U.S. Capital Building, the robot and its human operators were detained by one of DC’s finest. Surprisingly, the presence of the high-tech looking robot confused what might have been a straight-forward arrest. At that point in 1999 it was unthinkable that juvenile delinquents would have a robot at their disposal. We probably fell between the categories of having to file a complicated report or needing to call for backup, so the officer let us go. In that moment we discovered that the robot functions best not as a covert writing machine but rather as a way to engage the public in participating in subversive activity using a powerfully legitimizing technology. There’s a bit of the Stanley Milgram experiment here, only using robots rather than lab coats as the symbol of legitimate authority.

Similarly, with TXTmob the SMS-broadcast tool we created for use by
protesters at the 2004 Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we found many examples of unexpected use. Because we worked closely with several activist groups to design the system, we had a pretty good idea of how it would be used by protesters. However, it quickly became clear that it was also a really important tool for journalists covering the protests. Because so many of the actions were spontaneous and short-lived, occurring all over the city (for example, groups of demonstrators mobbing convention delegates who were spotted eating at local restaurants), there was virtually no way for sympathetic journalists to know what was going on. Once the journalists started using the SMS system, however, they were able report on all kinds of sit-ins, street theater, and demonstrations. As a result, the quality of reportage for the Republican National Convention in New York was better than we’ve seen for most recent demonstrations in the United States.

Terminal Air is a visualization system developed for mapping the movements of planes used in the CIA extraordinary rendition program. How can the project help counter the extraordinary rendition program practice? Has anyone ever tried to silence the project?

There are several components to the Terminal Air project. It is primarily an installation that examines the mechanics of extraordinary rendition, a current practice of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in which suspected terrorists detained in Western countries are transported to so-called “black sites” for interrogation and torture. Based on extensive research, the installation imagines the CIA office through which the program is administered as a sort of travel agency coordinating complex networks of private contractors, leased equipment, and shell companies. Wall-mounted displays track the movements of aircraft involved in extraordinary rendition, while promotional posters identify the private contractors that supply equipment and personnel. Booking agents’ desks feature computers offering interactive animations that enable visitors to monitor air traffic and airport data from around the world, while office telephones provide real-time updates as new flight plans are registered with international aviation authorities.

Seemingly-discarded receipts, notes attached to computer monitors, and other ephemera provide additional detail including names of detainees and suspected CIA agents, dates of known renditions, and images of rendition aircraft.

The project was inspired through conversations with extraordinary rendition researcher and author Trevor Paglen (Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA’s Rendition Flights – Melville House Publishing). Data on the movements of the planes was compiled by Paglen, author Stephen Grey (Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program – St.Martin’s Press) and an anonymous army of plane-spotting enthusiasts.

The main goal behind the Terminal Air project is simply to raise awareness about extraordinary rendition, to call particular attention to governments, airports, and private contractors who are complicit in its operation, and to recognize the ongoing efforts of various journalists, activists, and citizens who are continuing to uncover and document it.

We’ve also amassed a large database of flight log information, which we make available to the public. So far, no one has tried to interfere with the project (indeed, public reception has been quite positive), but it’s still in the early days – the first installation of the project was in March, and we anticipate a few high-profile shows this fall, so we’ll see what happens.

Any upcoming project you could share with us?

We’ve got a few things in the works, but generally prefer to announce projects after they launch rather than beforehand. We’ll let you know!

Thanks IAA!

Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:19 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog environment