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social media and political action
by Michel Bauwens 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

http://technosociology.org/?p=263 A debate has been raging on the role social media—especially Facebook and Twitter— played in the apparently successful uprising in Tunisia. Most of the discussion seems to be centered around the use of the term “Twitter Revolution.” Zeynep: "people will be using social media tools as an integral part of politics during those times that politics takes to the frontstage like uprisings and elections. Evgeny Morozov’s argument is that these tools are not the best suited for promoting democracy, especially in authoritarian regimes, because they also strengthen the surveillance, propaganda and censorship. As I argued in many places, however, they also strengthen capacity for political action through multiple means:1- Social media lower barriers to collective action by providing channels of organization that are intermeshed with mundane social interaction and thus are harder to censor. 2- Social media can help create a public(ish) sphere in authoritarian regimes, thereby lowering the problem of society-level prisoner’s dilemma in which everyone knows that many people are unhappy but the extent to which this is the case remains hidden as official media is completely censored. 3- Social media helps strengthen communities as it is the antidote to isolating technologies (like suburbs and like televison) and community strength is key to political action. 4- Social media seems to have been key allowing the expatriate and exiled community to mobilize and act as key links between rest of the Arab sphere as well as Francophone parts of Europe and ultimately the rest of the world 5- Social media can be a key tool for disseminating information during a crisis. As we saw in the case of Iran, Burma, Moldova, Tunisia and others, the world had a strong sense of what was happening not because there were many reporters on the ground covering the events but because thousands of citizens armed with basic cell phones could record and transmit in real-time the situation on the ground. Yes, such reports are inevitably chaotic, and yes, the ability to disseminate information is not a sufficient cause for success, but it is surely a necessary one. In that sense, I respect Jillian’s sensitivity to any wording that seems to take the credit away from the accomplishment of the Tunisian people that came at a great human cost. However, as a material cause, as a key part of the media and information substrate in which the events took place, it seems clear to me that social media was crucial. About 20 percent of Tunisians have Facebook accounts which remained uncensored throughout the crisis. I find it hard to believe that the ability to disseminate news, videos, tidbits, information, links, outside messages that easily, transparently and without censorship reached one in five persons (and thus their immediate social networks) within a country that otherwise suffered from heavy censorship was without a significant impact. To say that social-media was a key part of the revolution does not necessarily mean that people used GPS-enabled phones to coordinate demonstrations; that is simplistic and misses the point in which social media shapes the environment in general. What it means is that the people acted in a world where they had more means of expressing themselves to each other and the world, being more assured that their plight would not be buried by the deep pit of censorship, and a little more confidence that their extended families, their neighbors, their fellow citizens were similarly fed up." -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: social media and social revolution
by Michel Bauwens 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003(a)yahoo.com> Date: Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:26 PM Subject: social media blog update, use as blockquote To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/tony-curzon-price/cupids-freedom-h… Tony Curzon Price: " How does the Net affect the leap of faith? Not, as the Net Utopians whom Morozov rightly criticises might have it, by making truth and transparency by themselves powerful and indisputable agents. Rather, they make the leap of faith easier and less risky by providing a ground where alternatives can become commonly accepted. The Facebook groups, the Wikileaks cables, the blogs all show that any one person is not alone in a particular set of beliefs about the regime. Another form of common knowledge is allowed to take hold. It is not indubitable, and it may have been infiltrated, manipulated and it may in time be switched off - as has happened in Egypt. But the reality of the critique of the regime is believed to be commonly shared. That moment of catching someone's eye and deciding it is OK to act as if you are in the presence of a common soul has been moved online. In just the same way as dating sites have transformed the world of love, so social media have transformed politics: through the greater ease of making common knowledge." -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: for sepp: open web book
by Michel Bauwens 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

hi Sepp, thanks for looking into this open web book! ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003(a)yahoo.com> Date: Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 7:48 PM Subject: for sepp To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> http://www.transmediale.de/content/open-web -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Anonymous Hacktivism and the Discourse of Human Rights
by Kevin Flanagan 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

In what sense are "the radical politics of Hardt and Negri or Agamben (for instance) are inimical to traditional human rights"? http://www.humanrights.ie/index.php/2011/02/03/anonymous-hacktivism-the-dis… Article by Illan rua Wall http://ssl.brookes.ac.uk/about/staff/prof.asp?ID=423 In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet presences (belonging to both states and corporations). They have continued to post a variety of curious videos to YouTube that threaten corporations and regimes alike (see for general information here and here, on Operation Payback see here, on Algeria; here, and on Egypt; here). In general, these messages seem to coalesce around the demand to stop attacks on free speech particularly through the internet. This ‘movement’ is strange to the ears of those associated with human rights as it seems to mix postmodern cosmopolitan demands for human rights with a radical political philosophy of the multitude. This is an uncomfortable mix on the face of it because the radical politics of Hardt and Negri or Agamben (for instance) are inimical to traditional human rights. I want to argue that this is not such a fundamental contradiction. What Anonymous seem to see is the radical democratic potential of human rights – this would be a potential quite distinct from the conventional renderings. The first point to note is that while Anonymous make statements and undertake actions they are not a unity. As Jean-Luc Nancy might say they are always instatu nascendi (always in the state of being born, always becoming, but never closed, finished or completed). They are a multitude in the sense that they lack a sovereign power that gathers them into a unified entity. They are certainly not an institution, or for that matter an organization in the sense of an IGO or NGO. They are not a ‘community’ in the traditional human rights language because they do not share the common bonds of place, ethnicity, or however we are defining community – if they are a community you can be sure that it is entirely inoperative. They appear much closer to the civil disobedients of civil rights movements than the Amnesty letter writing campaigns whose action is the raising of a pen and the licking of a stamp. However, they are also distinctive from traditional human rights characters. What is distinctive seems to be the lack of a leadership responsible for tactics or strategy and the lack of founding documents that would constitute an authoritative pre-constituted guide and identity. Some from within this multitude assert ‘founding values’ but none are authorized, precisely because such an authorisation would be a nonsense. The irony of this lies in many of their ‘communications’, not least the letter to Glenn Beck. There ‘they’ say; You see, Mr. Beck, we are not an organization. We have no leaders. We have no official spokesperson. We have no age, race, ethnicity, color, nationality, or gender. Anyone who claims to speak for all of us is, quite frankly, a liar. To be clear, the gentleman known as Coldblood was not sanctioned by anyone but himself to speak on our behalf. Of course the signature – Anonymous – that ends the letter is itself undercut, it is by its very signature demonstrating its own impossibility (think of Derrida’s Declarations of Independence). If no one is authorized to speak for the group – if they are legion and multitudinous – then there could be no hand entitled to sign. But this is all a little academic, let me get back to the human rights question. A fairly traditional rendering of human rights posits a utopia where every state respects and protects its properly constituted juridical subjects (see the preambles of the UDHR or ICCPR/ICESCR). Those who subscribe to this idea of human rights imagine Anonymous’s (impossible) declarations along the lines of Thomas Clarkson, Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, albeit on a less significant scale. Anonymous say ‘We will take sides. We will support people who strive for freedom of speech, assembly and communication,’ and in this the human rights lawyer hears a human rights defender. However, Anonymous does not simply fit such a characterisation precisely because of the simple multiplicity at their heart. I suggest that to understand Anonymous we should look to the idea of singularity as discussed by Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben. I’m not saying that this is the only way of approaching the question, however, it does put their statements in a different light. Nancy and Agamben use singularity in various ways, but one of the most important ideas is as an attack on the concept of the individual. The problem with the individual is that it posits a possessive subject, distinct from each other individual. The properties of this possessive subject must be protected by the state (See Locke Second Treatise). To this enclosed subject it is then necessary to add context, history and relation. However, a singularity is always both common and unique – I share language, for instance, but at the same time craft it on my own tongue. Singularity is unique, but not absolutely unique (to be absolutely unique would be to be unique in being unique). Rather each singularity ‘cannot exist through consisting by itself and in itself alone’ (Nancy The Sense of the World p71). The uniqueness of singularity is constituted by its very being-with-others. It is a differential uniqueness. This interrupts any reduction to the individual. Singularity ‘is not a matter of adding to a postulation of individuality or autonomy a certain number of relations and interdependencies, no matter what importance one may attach to such an addenda’ (Ibid. p71). The singular is always a play of the unique and the common, but this ‘play’ is itself different each time. Each singularity is different from the next, while maintaining the sharing of the in-common. Perhaps most importantly for my purposes here, singularity is not reducible to an identity, nor is capable of being represented (be that politically or juridically). A singularity is singular, it is not defined by a common property, by its ‘being red, being French, being Muslim… but only in its being such as it is’ (Agamben The Coming Community p1, see also p85-7). If a singularity cannot be represented then it resists the reduction to its functions (eating, talking, associating, living, drinking). However, this is precisely the reduction necessary in human rights, which claim an authority because they represent the essence, nature, dignity or function the human. The human speaks, eats, lives, sleeps, drinks, associates and so has right to these which must be protected by an overarching state. The politics of singularity resist traditional human rights methods of representing the victimhood of an individual to a ‘higher authority’ in order to seek redress. This brings me back to Anonymous, because, most of the time, they do not seek to represent either themselves or others. They talk about human rights, but theirs is a much more radical action. As multitude they are not good juridical subjects dutifully applying (or helping others to apply) to a state’s tribunal to vindicate its rights. There is no half-hearted request to consider the case before a toothless international tribunal. Anonymous seem to see themselves as protector of ‘the people’ from the intensive state power of surveillance, censorship and discipline. They demand the right to speech and association of others, they seem to want to facilitate resistant democratic action rather than patriarchically protect the possessive individual. This is direct action for human rights, certainly, but it is also anti-statist and even anti-sovereign, in the sense that it strikes against any state or corporation that it sees infringing on free speech or association. What is more, it seems to me that the human rights they claim are not the end of the story, they are a strategy. If association and speech can be facilitated, Anonymous seem to hope that people will overturn the existing political relations. This is why they attacked so spectacularly those who targeted Wikileaks. This is why they have since supported the Algerians and Egyptians. It seems to me that Anonymous understand their role as facilitating political action by generating and defending spaces of contestation and organisation. With this, they go beyond the traditional radical political critique of human rights. Many have argued that the danger of human rights is that they evacuate extensive demands for social justice and replace them with demands for minimal reform (see for instance Brown States of Injury or my interview with her here). Take for instance the rights to food, shelter or health. These were once the very stuff of socialist utopia. In human rights, at most, they become the possibility of irregular bread or flour, the prohibition of the demolition of a slum or the freedom from toxic sludge being dumped in your back garden. While these are indeed laudable goals, the critique continues that they cannot be substituted for extensive demands for social justice. When these demands are translated into rights they are pacified by being brought within the gift of the government and judiciary. However, this is precisely what Anonymous seem to avoid. It is in their multiplicity, their inability to be represented, their refusal to just become another neatly organised NGO, and their refusal to evacuate the political through rights that makes them interesting. The rights they claim are traditional, however, through their a-legal actions they seem to generate a different sense for human rights. Theirs seems to be an interest in rights for world-creation: ‘whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse… to rebellion…’.

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p2p lending via mobile phone
by Michel Bauwens 03 Feb '11

03 Feb '11

hi sepp, thanks for having a look: http://www.wiseclerk.com/group-news/countries/germany-what-is-fidorpay-and-… -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: [LeftLibertarian2] Ways that the Egyptians are overcoming the internet block
by Kevin Carson 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

Numeric IP addresses for social media sites still work, as do dialup connections. If nothing else, the catastrophic economic effects of the shutdown in Egypt are a lesson on why the power elite will probably delay such a response until -- as in Egypt -- it's too late. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: donaldm <libertree(a)gmail.com> Date: Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 7:16 PM Subject: [LeftLibertarian2] Ways that the Egyptians are overcoming the internet block To: LeftLibertarian2(a)yahoogroups.com This is from Barlow's page. I'm no techie but perhaps people here can spread this, explain how its done or write an article on survival of the internet in case it happens somewhere else, like here. RT @xenijardin RT @dylan20: 20 ways 2 circumvent the Egyptian government's internet block: http://j.mp/ffdCsa via http://j.mp/hG9I5K ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LeftLibertarian2/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: LeftLibertarian2-digest(a)yahoogroups.com LeftLibertarian2-fullfeatured(a)yahoogroups.com <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: LeftLibertarian2-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html

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new venues for mini-enterpreneurial designers
by Michel Bauwens 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

I'm hoping someone can mention this on our blog, see http://thinkvitamin.com/design/the-game-just-completely-changed/ James? -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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digging social media revolution text
by Michel Bauwens 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

Dear friends, this text here, http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/social-media-and-social-revolutions-what-is-t… had 18 facebook likes and 18 tweets in just a few hours, thanks for considering 'digging' it, since this would reach a new audience! Michel -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Re: [P2P-F] <nettime> Dror Kamir: Egypte, brûle-t-elle?
by Michel Bauwens 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

thanks Dante, Michel 2011/2/2 Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson(a)gmail.com> > Writing history before, or as it happens... ? > > " In the list of things that Wikipedia isn't there is a > paragraph saying "Wikipedia is not a newspaper". Indeed, Wikipedia > did not function here as a newspaper, but rather as a tool serving > the organizers of the demonstrations. " > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Geert Lovink <geert(a)xs4all.nl> > Date: 2011/2/2 > Subject: <nettime> Dror Kamir: Egypte, brûle-t-elle? > To: nettime-l(a)kein.org > > > > Dear nettimers, > > I wanted to share this story with you all. It ran on the Critical > Point of View mailinglist that belongs to the Wikiresearch network > with the same name. Dror Kamir is an Israeli Wikipedian with lots of > knowledge of the 'region', and, like many in that part of the world, a > colorful (online) personality and complex political agenda (as they > say...). > > Greetings! Geert > > PS. somewhere in March-April the CPOV reader will be out. The > publication reaches the final stage of copy-editing. > > Begin forwarded message: > > > From: Dror Kamir <dqamir(a)bezeqint.net> > > Date: 31 January 2011 7:55:41 PM > > To: cpov(a)listcultures.org > > Subject: <CPOV> Egypte, brûle-t-elle? > > > > Hi, > > > > I suppose you have all noticed that Egypt is going through rough > > time, but I wonder if you looked into the history of the article > > about the events. It almost seems as if the article preceded the > > actual events. The article on the English-language Wikipedia is > > entitled "2011 Egyptian protests". It already exists in 39 languages > > (incl. English). In Arabic and Egyptian-Arabic it is entitled "The > > Egyptian Revolution of Wrath" (the demonstrations on Friday were > > called by the organizers "Friday of Wrath"). > > > > Now to the interesting part - The demonstrations were planned via > > FaceBook for about a week, and "D-Day" was Tuesday, 25 January > > (which is a public holiday in Egypt). The first version of the > > article on the English Wikipedia has a time stamp of 13:26 25 > > January 2011 (UTC I presume). The person who initiated the article > > is nicknamed "The Egyptian Liberal" and according to his userpage he > > is an Egyptian who lives in Dubai and speaks both Arabic and English > > as mother tongues. "The Egyptian Liberal" worked very fast to enrich > > the article, and it was practically written in the course of the > > events. In the list of things that Wikipedia isn't there is a > > paragraph saying "Wikipedia is not a newspaper". Indeed, Wikipedia > > did not function here as a newspaper, but rather as a tool serving > > the organizers of the demonstrations. > > > > An equivalent article was initiated on the Arabic Wikipedia 3 and a > > half hours after its English counterpart. It was initiated by > > someone who apparently lives in Egypt, but "The Egyptian Liberal" > > joined him quite soon. The article on the Egyptian-Arabic Wikipedia > > emerged only on 28 January, two and a half days after its English > > and Arabic counterparts. It was initiated by a person who lives in > > Egypt, and he is also the main contributor, but "The Egyptian > > Liberal" had his share here too. > > > > These are just my first observation, which I find interesting > > because it is, in my opinion, another stage of Wikipedia losing its > > encyclopedic characteristics. > > > > Dror > > > > > > בתאריך 31/01/11 17:07, ציטוט Maja van der Velden: > >> Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List > >> > >> In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable > >> goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than > >> 250 languages? Sure. But another number has proved to be an > >> intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest > >> that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of > >> contributors are women. > >> > >> More here: > >> > >> > http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&… > >> > >> Greetings, > >> > >> Maja > >> > >> > >> _______________________________________________ > >> cpov mailing list > >> cpov(a)listcultures.org > >> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org > >> > > > > _______________________________________________ > > cpov mailing list > > cpov(a)listcultures.org > > http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org > > > > > # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission > # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, > # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets > # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l > # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org > > -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: Give Thimbl The Open Web Award!
by Michel Bauwens 02 Feb '11

02 Feb '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. <dk(a)telekommunisten.net> Date: Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 7:00 PM Subject: Give Thimbl The Open Web Award! To: "Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. Subscriber" <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> (Mailing list information, including unsubscription instructions, is located at the end of this message.) __ //////////////////////////////////////////////// http://www.thimbl.net/award.html # Why Thimbl should win the Transmediale/Mozilla Foundation Open Web Award The Telekommunisten Collective thinks that people should finger each other often as possible. Maybe even several times a day, hell, why not once an hour? As often as you like! People thrive on interaction with other people. Mutual stimulation is a deeply felt human need, a key characteristic of what makes us human. Imagine that instead of reading your status updates on Twitter or Facebook, your friends would just finger you instead. The Finger protocol was originally developed in the 1970s as a way to publish user and status information, such as who you are, what you're working on, and what you're doing now. This is how the relatively few folks with access to networks posted pithy personal bios. From when colourful polyester pants were still groovy until the 90s people used to Finger each other all the time! Finger evolved into a completely decentralized system, where any user could finger any other user as long as they were both on the Internet. There were no big companies in the middle to control these users, or monitor them, or try to turn their personal data into money. Fingering was a personal matter between users, direct and unmediated, and nobody really knew exactly who was fingering who. Promiscuous, right? Sadly, these heady days of open relationships slowly came to an end. Finger software was developed before the Internet had many users, and before development was driven by commercial interests. The idea was bold, but the software was primitive. Capitalists and their desire for profit have no interest in such freedom and promiscuity and chose to instead fund centrally controlled systems, in which they are intermediaries. Investors wanted control, so that they can commodify and monetize these relationships. Instead of users fingering each other with reckless abandon, people are now stuck with centralized, privately owned services like Facebook; chaperoning their relationships, imposing user policies on them, and monitoring and monetizing their conversation. Back in June 2010, Telekommunisten had had enough! "People must be freed from these puritanical, controlling, consumerist, profit-seeking cults", they thought. If witchcraft, wet shaving, rocker hair and skinny jeans could make comebacks, why not Finger? The Thimbl project was born, and immediately started working on giving the project an online identity and releasing tools to create a microblogging platform built on Finger, that groovy 70s protocol. In October, Telekommunisten received the news that Thimbl was one of three projects nominated for Transmediale/Mozilla Foundation Open Web Award and almost immediately, Thimbl broke on Hacker News and the project started to attract significant interest. Thimbl started popping up all over the place: P2Pfoundation, ecopolis, alt1040, O'Reilly Radar, OneThingWell, Ecrans, reboot.fm... Evan Prodromou from competing service identi.ca even took a playful swipe at us! Finger was becoming cool again. The masses were longing to finger each other! In a few short months, without much in the way of a marketing strategy and with a budget that could be stored in a matchbox, Thimbl has managed to gather over 250 followers on Twitter - the very service it someday hopes to compete with - and has been the subject of hundreds and hundreds of tweets. Thimbl even has a small following on identi.ca, which is closer to the heart of Thimbl than the service with birds and whales. The thimbl.net website has over 300 'Likes' with its Facebook button and the Telekommunisten Facebook fan page is abuzz with talk of Thimbl. The project has even gathered over 100 votes on the Drumbeat platform. Not bad for a project that was completely unknown to all but a handful of people when the award nominations where announced! Still, the problem remains: Capital will not fund free platforms like Thimbl. Even with the buzz Thimbl has, building a community big enough to actually create a viable platform without financing is a major challenge. Wouldn't it be great if Thimbl could actually win the Open Web award? The endorsement of Transmediale and the Mozilla Foundation would be a tremendous boost for the project, perhaps enough to give the community the needed escape velocity to break free from centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook and make Finger the once and future king of personal status updates! Transmediale and The Mozilla Foundation had a great idea: instead of having a jury decide the winner of the award, present three projects to a community engaged with the open web and its technical, political and artistic dimensions. Mozilla had recently launched the Drumbeat project, just for this purpose, as a hub for projects that embrace the open web to get support and find contributors. So it made perfect sense for Drumbeat to host the voting for the award. Drumbeat is a fantastic initiative from Mozilla and has a really promising future. However, Drumbeat is a relatively new platform. As a result none of the projects received much attention from existing Drumbeat users or from the Transmediale community jumping on to Drumbeat to participate. The idea that an impartial community would consider the three projects and select a winner didn't quite work out. Instead, it has become a competition to rally the existing supporters of the three projects to sign up to Drumbeat and vote for them specifically, without genuinely considering voting for the others. This means that, honestly, the vote count is about as impartially meaningful as a Florida election run by Diebold. Thimbl is up against two cool projects as candidates for the Open Web Award; Booki, the book publishing platform behind FLOSSManuals and many great book writing sprints, and Graffiti Markup Language, a project to enable analysis and archiving of graffiti writing which has the support of many awesome, large and active communities like F.A.T. Lab and eyebeam. If the open web award is really meant to give well-earned support to existing, successful projects like Booki and GML, then we will celebrate their success with them at the award ceremony in a few days. We readily concede that Thimbl has not yet achieved anywhere near what these projects have and that our community is much, much smaller and far less known. Unless we succeed in our desperate bid to convince Lady Gaga to dump Polaroid and instead dedicate her star power to the cause of ushering in a new golden age of rampant fingering, we are very unlikely to win based on Drumbeat vote count. But if Open Web Award aspires to "clearly demonstrate the unbound potential of the open web in ways that can spark new thinking and practices," as stated, then, damn it, Thimbl is the most about the open web! We live and breathe the open web, directly addressing the technical and social issues facing the open web in every aspect of the project, in the code, and in our manifestos. We talk to anyone who will listen about how the open web is not just critical to the future of the Internet, but to society itself. And people are beginning to take notice. Selecting Thimbl for the Open Web Award at Transmediale would be one heck of a powerful spark. Igniting the new thinking and practice that led to the idea of Thimbl with a clear and bold statement of support for an open web that is truly open! The multitudes are trapped and frustrated, clinging to their social interactions within sterile, commercial platforms, longing for wanton, unbridled realms of contact. Join us in inscribing upon on our banners the revolutionary slogan, "Don't be a Twit, it feels good to be fingered!" Give Thimbl the Open Web Award! With Kind Regards, Your Telekommunisten. http://www.thimbl.net ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (psst... pass it on) -- The following information is a reminder of your current mailing list subscription: You are subscribed to the following list: Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends. using the following email: michelsub2004(a)gmail.com You may unsubscribe from this list at any time by visiting the following URL: http://freshsent.info/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/u/friends/michelsub2004/gmail.c… If the above URL is inoperable, make sure that you have copied the entire address. Some mail readers will wrap a long URL and thus break this automatic unsubscribe mechanism. 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