Aldon, I see at as two different kinds of connection we are trying to enable:
(1) end to end individuals(friendster) (2) end to end group to group (blogging --deanspace) Both are critical. The latter is distributed, the former is centralized, and they work together. The former is simple, and moderated, and safe -- the latter is someone complex, nonmoderated, and highly expressive. I think that answers your concerns, which are critical. I think its also important to give people very safe, small steps for political engagement. Z Zephyr Teachout Internet Organizing & Outreach Dean for America [EMAIL PROTECTED] Meetup at http://www.deanforamerica.com/meetup Get local at http://action.deanforamerica.com Contribute at http://www.deanforamerica.com/contribute -----Original Message----- From: Aldon Hynes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, July 29, 2003 2:57 PM To: Zephyr Teachout; 'Joshua Koenig'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc Well, I'm trying to catch up on everything that happened over the weekend while I was off at the folk music festival. So, I'm sorry if I'm covering things that have already been covered, but I would like to throw in my two cents here. Zephyr, I respectfully disagree with you on the importance of public expression in whatever sort of space is created. The public expression is crucial in establishing a sense of a cohesive community and in facilitating different people in connecting. Let me illustrate: On Friendster, I am connected to 157232 people in my Personal Network, through 17 friends. However, friendster doesn't facilitate communicating with others in a manner that develops community. As such, I haven't made any useful new contacts. On the other hand, communities like www.ryze.com and www.ecademy.com do a much better job of promoting community through things like blogging. So, I strongly encourage facilities to promote blogging. Granted, there are other venues, including posting comments on the official blog, having your own blogs, etc., but I believe having blogs, forums, or similar tools as part of Deanspace will make it much more effective. Zephyr raises the issue of moderation. DFA doesn't have the staff to vet who posts or what posts remain if we have a giant network of people posting. However, following the paradigm of self organizing systems, and the example of DMOZ, I don't believe that is important. Every site that gets set up will have its administrators and/or moderators. This is no different than the close to 400 mailing lists that have already been set up. These moderators can be as controlling or free flowing as they feel comfortable with and fits their particular community. Part of the beauty of a truly distributed system like this, is that I can (or should be able to), as moderator of one system decide what content I pick up from other systems. This provides a natural feedback system. Those sites that develop a good sense of community through an appropriate level of moderation will end up producing more valuable content, which will get more widely distributed. So, that's my two cents on the role of blogs, content, moderation and community building within DeanSpace. Comments? Aldon -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Zephyr Teachout Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2003 1:53 PM To: 'Joshua Koenig'; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc This is fantastic. Thanks Josh! I believe that if we get this up and running, over 500,000 people will use it. I do -- over 1,000,000 on friendster, and they aren't trying to change the world :) The single biggest request we get from folks in the field is "how do I find other Dean supporters." This provides that means. It's a top priority for the campaign, and if we can provide other resources to help make it happen, ask me and I'll do everything I can do provide them. The one thing that I would change in Josh's model is just that we are not thinking of this as a place for public expression ("why I support Dean") not because we don't want that expression, but because (1) there are other venues for it, and (2) it drastically (or almost completely) eviscerates the moderation/management needs if we don't provide that space--if there is no "enter your own content here" but all pick and choose and links to forum, we don't need to vet who enters at ALL which is ideal (this is the big diff between us and friendster -- we don't have staff who can routinely check every new person and we don't have people who want to kill the campaign by posting obscene or harassing posts (that's the big concern, not dissent). I'm thinking that we'll just modify our extensive registration to include all these elements (we're modifying anyway), and then feed the Data to deanster. The tricks then, are (1) how to display the information (2) how to search Right? The critical thing for the search is that people who are currently online show up first, but if we start with a really clumsy search (almost like an excel spreadsheet) we could at least get going. We're a shoot first improve later campaign, in many ways, but esp. for this one -- the basic functionality will be heaven for people. It seems if we can do that and roll it out, we can then add other features like uploading contacts and rating -- but I'm not the programming guru. What do you all think? Zephyr Teachout Internet Organizing & Outreach Dean for America [EMAIL PROTECTED] Meetup at http://www.deanforamerica.com/meetup Get local at http://action.deanforamerica.com Contribute at http://www.deanforamerica.com/contribute -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Joshua Koenig Sent: Saturday, July 26, 2003 5:57 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [hackers] Draft Deanster Design Doc Here's a draft of my design doc for Deanster (a.k.a. the talend database, the visible volunteers, the "front room"). Please excuse the parts that aren't quite filled in yet and feel free to correct me where I'm wrong: http://www.hack4dean.org/phpwiki/index.php?TalentDatabase peace -josh ------------------------ Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
