Anarchogeek

I find the process of how groups form and articulate themselves to be very important as we settle in to a networked society. I think if we can create systems which take advantage of this end to end network, we can use this to create new social organizations which are more egalitarian. The ability for people to find and associate themselves with other like minded individuals easily across geographic, national, and even potentially linguistic barriers is amazing. Now that the dot com boom has died down we can the get to fun part of using the net to do amazing things instead of just using it to sell more ads.

With indymedia we’ve faced a real need to tackle the problems of forming groups. We’ve got a news philosophy which embraces everybody’s ability to become their own journalist. The problem is that some people write what seem to be conspiratorial rants or espouse political perspectives which are off the wall.
In the American news media you know a story is credible if the New York Times runs a story on it. Once that happens the story gets picked up by other papers, radio stations, websites, and the TV news. Because we represent both a politically dissident perspective and advocate a model for the news with is fundamentally participatory we need to develop a different model for what is credible. For example, Slashdot has one model. They take hundreds or thousands of potential article submissions a day and have a group of editors who pick the most interesting or important 25 of them for each day. With indymedia sites, we have something vaguely similar. Each local site has an editorial group which makes decisions on which stories to feature and promote. Those go in the center column. All of the other stories stay up on the site and are listed as being news, where as Slashdot deletes them. There are still serious problems with the way we do things. When you look at an article you have no way of knowing the history of the author, what other people think of this or the author’s work, or generally assessing the credibility of what’s stated in the article. With the New York Times you don’t need to know the author. The history of the institution embodies all the credibility. With indymedia for us to develop credibility we need to realize that we can’t have the single monolithic institutional credibility that a traditional news organization has. We advocated many people becoming involved in the process of journalism. We often don’t have any connection with, nor have we even met or confirmed an identity of the people who submit news articles to our site. The solution I’d like to come up with is find a way to allow groups of users to form and let them to the work of determining specific credibility. With EBay a buyer or seller has credibility ranked based on their history of delivering the goods. With news credibility isn’t such a one way street. What may be credible to me is both irrelevant and totally non-credible to you. The thing that is true is that these opinions about what is credible and what isn’t tend to be held by groups. For example one group of people might think that any article about Palestinians dieing under the Israeli occupation is ipso facto anti-semitism. An opposite group would say that all stories of Palestinian suffering and massacres are legitimate and credible. A third group might find credibility and relevance in some stories and not others.

The point of this is that news and what is a credible telling of truth is relative. For indymedia and other projects such as p2p journalism to work we’ll need to find easy ways for groups to form opinion and articulate it about the work. Those opinions will then need to be made easily accessible to users outside of any of the groups.

For more info about crediblity you can read my posting on Indymedia, Credibility, & Covering Palestine from a couple of months ago.

I’ll finish up with a little story about how groups can form. It’s not directly related to online group forming but I find it interesting to mull over. To understand it you’ve got to get a little background first. In Argentina a year ago the government shut down the banks to prevent a run on deposits after years of recession. In a country where the cost of living was roughly the same as the US or Europe there was overnight a restriction to $1000 a month on withdrawals. The government then after a time converted much of people’s savings deposits in to long term government bonds. This whole process tended to upset pretty much everybody who had a bank account. People weren’t able to pay rent, car payments, or even buy enough food to feed their families. Many companies weren’t able to pay their employees. Economic activity shrank by %70 in one month alone.

Now the point of this isn’t to dwell on the economic problems of Argentina but to understand how groups formed as a result. As people got upset about this situation they would go out on the street in front of their houses and bang pots and pans. It was an “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more” type statement. Because everybody else was in the same situation other people would here this and come out of their houses banging their pots as well. Pretty soon you’d get a whole neighborhood standing on the street corners banging pots and pans. One day some of the people got even more desperate and started marching downtown to the presidential palace. When the TV and Radio reported on this, other people got the same idea and joined them. It didn’t take more than a day and the president partially responsible for the mess was forced to resign. His palace and the congress were besieged by the pot banging protesters.

Once they got rid of the president the banking problems didn’t go away. The banks were still locking down their deposits and economy was in shambles. But now there was a critical difference. Everybody had watched their neighbors come out of their houses to join them. They knew they were in the same situation. Now when they came out to bank pots in protests they started talking. People who hardly knew their neighbors before started trying to do something about the problems because the government had failed them. Over the last year these assemblies, asambleas in Spanish, have organized protests but they’ve also helped workers reopen closed factories, setup community soup kitchens to feed themselves and their neighbors, work with hospitals to make sure there they are stocked with medicine and supplies, organize open non-money based barter markets, and generally tried to support their community and keep society functioning.

While the asambleas weren’t organized online, they are groups which formed from a specific constituency, for specific reasons. Then the groups have evolved to continue to serve their members. The most significant thing about the asambleas is they were not planned or organized by some outside group but they really arose organically out of the pot banging protests without leaders dictating their growth. In this way it seems similar to how many online groups for around specific interests or activities.

For more info on asambleas in argentina read an interview i did about them with dru. Dru’s also on the group-forming list although he hasn’t contributed much yet beyond his introduction.

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