Social networking and citizenship
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Via Cesperanza, who writes:
I feel like we’re the bookend generation, where things that got made there (mass media, intellectual property, industrialization, “the invention of tradition”) get unmade or remade here; and here we go, this is the 19th century enclosure acts all over again, except this time, the fields are virtual.
The article she’s pointing to is Element’s post on User Generated Content and Ownership: the User as Citizen, and wow, I want this to be picked up outside LiveJournal.
She proposes:
Any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base.
and
Mandate user representation on boards of directors - and make sure it’s a voting, not an honorary, position. Create clauses to protect users from the very first seed of a new startup idea, and make sure it’s in the official agreement when venture capital signs on. Bindingly set aside a percentage of stock at every IPO to be offered first to the active, long-term user community, with a maximum number of shares per real person (rather than user account). Create explicit avenues of communication from the user base to the managerial decision-making structure, and commit to honoring the concerns of the community. Create a user issues ombudsperson, if the company doesn’t have one already. Commit to informing the user base of important changes in advance, and providing a reasonable period for comment whenever possible - and be prepared to justify any situation in which business needs deem it impossible.
Read the whole article; it’s fantastic. The IPO thing reminds me a bit of VA Linux in 1999 or whenever it was, handing out stock options to the open source software contributors who’s written the code their business relied on. Ah, those were the days — but have we seen anything similar since?
The thing that intrigues me — looping back to Ces’s post — is, if we’re re-living the 19th century, will we have Luddites too? What constitutes smashing the spinning jennies in the social networking space? I suspect — having just shifted most of my attention off LiveJournal and into this blog here that you’re reading — it’s somewhere in the free software/open standards space, except that it’s not going to be disruptive enough against the MySpaces and Facebooks until it’s as easy to create as an account on those systems.
Relatedly, Smuffster, over on LiveJournal, is working on a set of WordPress tweaks to make it as much like LJ as possible, to ease the transition away from LJ for those who are facing the sort of issues Elements was writing about. So far she’s done the following (mostly taken from this post here:
- OpenID logins
- threaded comments and emailed comment replies
- user icons
- <lj-cut> and <lj-user> tags understood by WordPress
- locked posts
She’s current dealing with friends lists and how to read them; she wants to find out whether any web-based feed aggregators (eg. Google Reader, etc) support OpenID authentication to feeds, so that you can read your friends’ LJ feeds including friends-locked posts.
I’m really excited about what she’s doing, in terms of providing a viable alternative for LJ users who want to wean themselves off the corporate teat. Stand by; I’ll definitely be posting more information about her project when she’s got it into a releasable state.
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