clay shirky - ted 2013

perhaps how we get those 3 day care centers back.. getting *enough people to believe this:
at 1:46 - huge..
q: what made them think they could get away with something like that?...
a: all human history prior to now.
Clay made this comment in regard to Martha Payne, who set up a simple blog neverseconds where she reviewed her school lunches and talked about healthy eating for children. She hoped to raise a few hundred pounds for her favourite charity, Mary s Meals.
and then she was asked to end her blog...

"This morning in maths I got taken out of class by my head teacher and taken to her office. I was told that I could not take any more photos of my school dinners because of a headline in a newspaper today.

I only write my blog not newspapers and I am sad I am no longer allowed to take photos. I will miss sharing and rating my school dinners and I’ll miss seeing the dinners you send me too. I don’t think I will be able to finish raising enough money for a kitchen for Mary’s Meals either.

Goodbye,

VEG"

After 7 million blog hits, one council led banning, being the number 1 story on every news site worldwide and having raised over £115,000 for Mary s Meals, Martha is one of the biggest news stories of the year.

*enough people - because without enough people, yes we'll get there, but in a much longer amount of time.. because without the adjacent possible of a city, we give up on what we want/crave/know to be good

what happens when a new medium puts a lot of ideas into circulation

seems everything we try is under the guise of leading to world peace
what all these ideas of world peace got right...
what they got right... more circulation (media) of ideas
what they got wrong.. more circulation - (media) more arguing...

we are a pro- printing press society

how do we square these two things... leads to more arguing - but we think that's good

i study social media - which means - i watch people argue
our invisible colleges - for better arguments - open source

open source programming - 3 parts [programmer, source code, device]

problem - keeping social chaos at bay
aversion control system - one owner.. many workers.. org

linus torvalds - everyone has access all the time
so this creates access.
torvalds said no... when you adopt a tool, you adopt the management philosophy in that tool - and he wasn't going to adopt anything linux didn't buy into

then he said - i think i know how to write an aversion control program for free people - https://github.com/
lives up to promise of open source

this brings the chaos back... but what git does - creates a long string of numbers and letters.. tied to every single change, without any central coordination. signature tied directly to particular change.
programmers in two places, each can make changes, and merge after the fact
cooperation without coordination
what this means to allow communities to come together.
enormity and complexity no longer sends us running.

the ruby community - doesn't look like an org chart - looks like a dis-org chart
yet out of this community, using these tools, we can create

this is huge to getting more things that matter done.
but also in regard democracy - and esp in regard to the law...

harnessing didn't happen big, quick, or fast,
have to look on the margins

us tax codes - one law dependent on all the other laws

when you go to git hub... and look around the edges - people experiment with political ramifications of a system like that
for updating and fluidity sake
used to further development of legislation

would love to say when the tools are in place - innovation is happening - but that's not true

problem is power - the people experimenting don't have legislative power, the people with power aren't experimenting

there is openness, but
transparency is openness in only one direction

being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens

what kept her (martha payne) there was political will - the expectations of the citizens that she would not be censored..



ts elliott - one of most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a style of prose. shirky says - new style of arguing.

are we going to let the programmers keep it for themselves..


via doug belshaw