short report from WTF london networked youth Open Space on world change

[chris macrae]

Back on 28 March I reported the 27 march Open Space convened by Josef
Coates-Davies and other London Cultural creatives who are mainly
twentysomethings though they let 50s's like me in! chris macrae,
wcbn007 at easynet.co.uk www.valuetrue.com


There was quite a remarkable interlude session on ESPIANS between the
open space slots and I've just been sent this aide memoire below which I
thought you might like to imbibe the spirit. There's also news of a
summer program in London of Open Space in the Streets - I quote Josef
here: "if you can do come and enjoy our coming global democratic
revolution (GDR) - the creation of new democratic media, money and
political systems that make the present (corporate captured) ones
obsolete and demonstrably illegitimate. Right now, as I write this
e-mail, I'm trying to manifest at least two large-scale open space (see
http://udoo.org/open_space/ ) forums taking place on the streets of
London on July 4th and September 11th, as a collaborative effort between
these (and numerous other) positive energies.  It will be a
demonstration *of* democracy (and of how a forum could/should really be
done).  The working name for the idea has so far been Pedipeace:
Democracy at the crossroads (see http://udoo.org/pedipeace/ )."


 Tav's Espian Vision Talk
On IRC in the weeks leading up to the conference, Tav had been promising
that he would deliver a broad overview of Espianity. And, to his credit
and my partial astonishment, he assembled everyone in the main hall for
his keynote on just that topic. Given that I was sans laptop at that
point, I scribbled the proceedings down hastily on several pieces of
paper.

ESP, Tav explained, is a collective that tries to ensure that people's
basic needs are met. When Tav was six, he lived in India, and
politicians were coming to where he lived and bringing sacks of grain
and provisions for the people saying that if they were voted into power,
this is what they would strive to provide for people. And so the people
voted for them, and this model of working left its impression on young
Tav; he was shocked. Tav continued to drive this point home by saying
"your right to vote means fuck all-er, pardon me-is a joke if your child
is starving". He said that twice.

The next point that he moved onto was that everyone should devote two
years of their lives to working together for the common good: one year
in late teens, and one year in mid-life with more experience, e.g. as a
doctor or a teacher. He produced what is possibly his favourite quote,
from Ghandi, who said "be the light that you want to see in the world".
No theories, Tav wants to go ahead and do it all now.

He was concerned with information overload too, saying that although the
internet allows us to communicate effectively, and people are forming
groups such as wikipedia and recyclopedia (the latter of which deserves
a story all of its own), "none of these have solved the problem of
overload".

Then we got to the initial steps of Esp, and the early days of the Plex.
Tav mentioned "Espra", which was his Freenode based first attempt at
making code for the Plex, but concluded that "Freenet was kinda the
wrong technology to back". The Plex is to be a new network based around
people's individual views of content. As an example, he noted that
everyone who attended the WTF on that day did so because they knew
someone who had recommended it. It's that kind of trust network that he
wants to model on the Plex. Someone asked about the specific kinds of
trust metrics afterwards, prompting him to slip into a dense piece on
the attack-resistentiality of his trust metric, and which was in
delightful contrast to his unspecific and meandering main talk, which
was nevertheless appropriate for the eclectic crowd.

He mentioned the six degrees of separation principle, and was questioned
on the matter and had to explain that it meant that everybody knows
everybody else on the planet through a path of six acquaintances or
less. In summary, he said that "trust is fundamental".

The next portion of the talk concentrated on shailas, which Tav had been
explaining to me a handful of times on IRC. My own term for them is
"cross contextual summaries" which I think captures the point better in
plain English, but Tav-reminding me of Ted Nelson and the like-is rather
enamoured with his terms (compare "Espia", "Plex", "Shailas" to
"Xanadu", "Zig Zag", and "Tumblers"). The purpose of a shaila is to
capture many aspects of an event, "forked across many contexts" as he
likes to say, and mark them up for language, range of opinion, level of
complexity, and so forth. The example that he used as to where a shaila
would be useful is in explaining cryptography to someone: the material
would have to vary according to your audience. Tav seemed unaware of the
Learning Objects phenomenon (though he won't be if he reads this article
all the way through), which is a very similar area of research. The goal
of both is to make it possible to reuse the best forms of content, and
to enable discrete and personalised searches depending on your own
particular needs.

The Plex is to be integrated with BitTorrent, which was the obvious peer
to peer aspect of it, and Tav ended up describing the Plex as a
"universal database of sorts". He talked about Lego, and how one would
build application blocks on top of the Plex. Someone in the audience
clearly didn't understand this, as they asked Tav whether the Plex would
be a website, a piece of code, or what. Tav tried to rexplain, and maybe
got his point across a little better.

The Toman Model was perhaps the least well-explained part of Tav's talk,
and was put across as being an effective method of open organization.
The explanation started out as focussing on how organization starts with
a seed group, the people who come together to form a projects (its
founders), and moved onto the dynamic characteristics of groups that
change over time based upon their ecological footprints. Someone in the
audience asked what an ecological footprint meant (or tav asked how many
people knew), and he went on to explain that it's the impact of a person
in hectares of land. Continuing on organizational metrics, he espoused
non-hierarchial forms of organization, saying that Espia would allow
everyone to be able to create a task and back it effectively. He talked
about liquid-democracies as an emerging area that could benefit from his
model, given that it's a non-heirarchial structure.

Grounding this in a clear example, Tav pointed out that often people
like to build roads across fields, and other people would rather retain
the field thank-you-very-much. Whose decision is it? Often, a local
referendum will take place, and the local people will get to vote, or
will at least lobby their local MP one way or another to represent them
in parliment. But as he pointed out, who really knows all of the issues
behind these things? What wildlife will be destroyed? What will be the
ecological ramifications? What will happen to commerce in the town
that's being bypassed? What will happen with respect to noise levels?
Who will benefit, and who will miss out? Most people simply don't know,
and many MPs, in Tav's view, simply don't care. A liquid-democracy will
enable one to "mix-match": you can find people to represent you on each
issue, or even represent yourself if no one else is standing up for your
point of view effectively enough.

In summary, he said that the Toman Model enables effective decision
making processes.

Trying to drive it home ("sorry if I'm rambling here", Tav was saying a
number of times by now), he explained that one of the aims of Espia is
to enhance culture. "Lots of people are into technology, but technology
is not the solution!" Over ten years of blogging is a long time, and
we're focussing too much on technology when what we were really built
for is "to run, to dance, to frolic".

"True power comes from us all and culture, and so many different things
can be done. We're conducting a war on ignorance. We're just a small
handful of people people, and most people don't even know about this
stuff. I was out at a rally, and I was walking by all these people
didn't know that there were two million people elsewhere in the streets
of London... it's like: what's going on? Pedipeace is one idea."

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