Monthly Archive for October, 2005

Creative Commons Slovenija

Published by nesson on October 28, 2005 in harvard, rhetorical space and trust. Closed

This afternoon, sitting in CBKE center in Wroclaw, i’m on a video conference to Slovenia where Larry Lessig is speaking this morning. i will talk with him about the Net as an inflection point in information history, and about the way in which wealth produces law to protect itself, about how the “corporation” has enabled huge aggregations of proprietary information property in the last century, about how we are now in an environment in which the net permits the aggregation of public wealth, putting Free Culture in a downhill battle with proprietary forces, our challenge to be gentle with our enemies.

What is the idea. Meta – new architecture of the space in which our consiousness exists. Here’s a bit of audio .

The legal corporation, compare to man. The corporation does not die when the man dies. Corporate ties are contracts. Man’s is trust.

The net allows a new form of organization, not a function of the law of any state.

Compliment the brilliance of Creative Commons, its use of law to moderate the conflict between aggregated propriatary intellectual property and the power of free culture, its invitation to creators to feel themselves empowered to make discriminating responsible judgments about future use of their work, which, because they are responsible, are honored as a norm without the big stick of Law.

Law’s mission is to make an environment fit for individual, social and economic development. How does Law serve its mission in the age of Internet. Creative Commons exemplifies how Law can lead. Creative Commons is international, meta, above the laws of states even as it melds with them, a global movement with a conceptual legal structure for nourishing Free Culture – our global common wealth.

Terry Fisher for the Berkman Center is building a digital media exchange based on a compensation system for creators alternative to the transactional base of current commercial practice. This DME will be a Creative Commons exchange. It will give a choice to a creator about how to best benefit from creation. When it becomes a nuanced choice for a rent-seeking creator whether to market a work through traditional transactional means or through the alternative compensation system provided by the digital media exchange, then we will have peacefully settled the copyright war.

i want to talk with Larry about Governance of the Net. The strength of the net lies in its growth and generativity — yes, Z should be in on the video. The strength of the net will rest with those who grow it.

Where would you rest the power to control the architecture of the net?

The net of what? The net of shared values of peace, respect, love of learning, pleasure in sharing, of appreciation for diversity and culture, of Socratic truth and discourse.

Trust the net to the great universities of the world. Lead the universities to grow strong in cyberspace. Make them repositories of the value of connection, portals of access to and ability to contribute to a global common wealth of knowledge. Just as with the growth of the proprietary domain in the last chapter of our information history, the aggreagation of a great common wealth of knowledge built by and through our world’s great universities will express itself in norms and laws to support it.

Larry Lessig speaks as the first Berkman professor. Z speaks as the second. Segway to discussion of the disposition of Z’s digital track, credit to Barlow.

Billion Dollar Charlie CyberTalks with Friends.
–
a program for the Net?

******

Just off. It was a gas. Of course Larry was not there. i should have known, talk in the morning then off on a plane. But Renaldo and Urs were there in his stead, and both wonderfully eloquent. Thank you Maja.

******

Palfrey asks a question on his blog under the title “Entrust the net to the universities?”

Nesson: “Trust the net to the great universities of the world. Lead the universities to grow strong in cyberspace. Make them repositories of the value of connection, portals of access to and ability to contribute to a global common wealth of knowledge. Just as with the growth of the proprietary domain in the last chapter of our information history, the aggreagation of a great common wealth of knowledge built by and through our world’s great universities will express itself in norms and laws to support it.”

To Billion Dollar Charlie: Where does Billion Dollar Google fit in? Billion Dollar Microsoft?

Search is such a vital element of a functioning digital repository that i expect Google to fit very well. Already Google has shown great initiative toward the mamoth task of digitizing our existing print-on-paper knowledge base. On Microsoft i am less clear, but open to suggestion. Certainly much of the content of a digital commonwealth of knowledge will be in Microsoft formats, and Microsoft would surely be in the mix of companies participating in development and construction.

RE: IT ALL COMES DOWN TO THIS….

Published by nesson on October 27, 2005 in General and trust. Closed

So i get this email from my old friend, Matt Horan, who practices Law in Arkansas.

Last night I had a blinding revelation. I wish I’d thought of it thirty years ago. I would like it cut into stone and set somewhere on the law school campus.
I will defend a dishonest man against an honest man.
I will defend an honest man against a dishonest man.
But I will not defend a dishonest man against a dishonest man.

to which i replied, “why not?”

to which Matt replied:
Experience. Such cases take 70% more time and you end up not being paid because the dishonest men who was in bed together, and then had a falling out, and got all lawyered up, decide that they really don’t need to be paying their lawyers, and get back in bed together to screw the public. Then dishonest person A tells dishonest person B that his lawyer was all jakeleg and failed to plead accord and satisfaction, so dishonest person B uses that as an excuse not to pay his lawyer, and dishonest person B, to return the favor, tells dishonest person A that his lawyer failed to seek relief in quantum meruit, which was a slam dunk, and the only thing his jakeleg lawyer was really worried about, and dishonest person A uses that as an excuse not to pay his lawyer.

I say: when two dishonest men get to squabbling, let em fight it out The Old Fashioned Way. Do the gene pool a favor.

Yesterday, I was browsing the used book store and came across a book of Arabian Love Poems by Nazir Kabbani. Cool stuff. He’s an octogenarian leftist who likes to f*** women, and how he has ever escaped execution, I do not know. Some of his stuff reminds me of Ferlinghetti. I am going to have to investigate him further. He wrote one poem where he compared his love for a woman to a white horse. I am saying: waaaaaiiiiit a minute, what’s this white horse bidness with these dam Ay-rabs?!? The poem concludes, however, with these lines, which I like

If you knew the yearnings of horses

You would fill my mouth

With cherries, almonds, pistachios.

To which i replied: “Hope you don’t mind. i posted you on my blog. Such wisdom should be passed on by a Law prof.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/nesson/blog”

to which Matt replied:
I don’t mind, but still I think it needs to be cut into stone and set on the campus. See, there’s gonna be this nuclear flash one of these days, and the electromagnetic pulse of it is gonna junk the internet, the blogosphere, in fact, we will all go back to slide rules, which suits the crap outa me, since I do all my ciphering in my head anyhow, and get prettier numbers, at least, than the ones I get on my calculator, so called.

But I was saying: it needs to be in stone. It needs to slow folks down on their hurry hurry from the Hark to Austin Hall.

Cuttin’ stuff into stone is my new art form. I have developed this property and I have spent a lot of money gussying up a detention basin that collects rainfall before sending it downstream where it can’t be handled in a gulp. Well, it looked awful, so I set a stonesetter to rocking the sides of it. Then I looked at the hill above it, and I thought “wow, let’s make it look like the 13th at Augusta.” And then I thought, instead of azalea, cherry trees, dogwoods, redbud. Now, I am going to get A.E. Housman’s poem “Loveliest of Trees” cut into several stones, and am going to set it, piece by piece, into the hillside, among the cherry and the dogwood, and the redbud and the crepe myrtle and the forsythia and the sugar maple and the sumac and the….

But I am just starting.

I said, this place needs a Celtic Cross! So I have commissioned a local artist to make me one, and then, because I am so antic, I will have him inscribe, in Latin, “On a hill far away, stands an old, rugged cross,” which is the ARCHETYPAL Protestant Hymn, and I am going to laugh, laugh, laugh for the rest of my days as the two sides struggle over the text and just don’t get the joke, if it is a joke.

I am also going to salt other bits of poems into the ground in the development where walkers can see them…”Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost, a stanza from Keats’ “St. Agnes Eve,” a line from a Billie Joe Shaver song I greatly admire “Swarm in a loose herd, like the wild buffalo.” A line written by a dead friend of mine: “The end of style for honest men is clarity.” A stanza from Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October,” which talks about mothers walking their children, which I hope will happen.

See, cutting things into stone is one big momento mori. I thought to myself, what are they gonna cut into my stone: “He helped white folks argue about money?” And I decided that what I wanted it to say was something like “He cut other folks words into rock so you, pilgrim, might stop thinking about money so much.”

Anyhow, the development is going great guns, and I am not using realtors to sell it which pisses them off. I tell them they should be happy because the people who are buying from me are going to be selling big-ass houses, and they will get the commission offa that, but they don’t see it that way. Because I am saving the realtors’ commission, what I do is, I get a price with my buyer, and we spit on our palms and shake on the deal. Then I give them a contract with a lower price, and I ask them to make a donation to local schools with the difference. They’re on their honor. I think of it as force multiplying. So far, I’m told that a local Catholic school that is on hard times and schools a lot of poor immigrant kids got $20,000, and that a program that trains poor folks for jobs got $4500, and a nursing program got $6000, and it just kinda rolls from there. I think it will be interesting to see just what develops out of this, probably nothing, but maybe, maybe, maybe something.

Berkman Center Clinical Program in Jamaicacharlie’s angels

Published by nesson on October 17, 2005 in General, harvard, jamaica, rhetorical space and trust. Closed

Jackie Harlow, Diane Lucas and Alex Lee — Harvard Law atudents, in Jamaica for five days work on a clinical assignment. They are documenting the concerns of inmates and relatives upon entry into GP, General Penitentiary.
Here is their audio impressions of the first two days.

Jackie Harlow’s Journal
— first entry
— second entry

A t 02:02 PM 10/22/2005, Jacqueline Harlow wrote:
Thanks for asking about the journal entries. If you think they are helpful to the project, then I absolutely don’t mind that they’re posted. Also, while I think that the content itself should probably be left as is, I would like to correct some of the many typos if that’s possible. I may be digging myself quite a hole by leaving the content as is – at some point I disparaged patent litigation as a career – but I think that rawness adds to the entries. Besides, if I start editing the posts, that might steal the thunder of the forthcoming critique.
😉

X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
From: Jacqueline Harlow
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 16:30:10 -0400
To: Charles Nesson
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.623)
X-Virus-Scanned: amavisd-new at harvard.edu
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.0.2-soc_rev_28 (2004-11-16) on terri
X-Spam-Level:
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-30.6 required=4.0 autolearn=no
version=3.0.2-soc_rev_28

I do recognize that there is a chip on my shoulder tone to the journal entries. I took that tone intentionally, although perhaps naively.
When I started writing, I saw the establishment as an impediment to what Kevin is trying to do. The bureaucracy we witnessed at the Commissioner’s office on Friday, combined with Kevin’s clear frustration with the Department reinforced that impression. The Commissioner and his colleagues provided an obvious antagonist for the story I was telling. And treating them as such, while sometimes an oversimplification, made the story an easier one to tell. Super hero takes on stagnated, unfeeling establishment to give society’s cast-offs a voice and a second chance. I sought to generate interest in the story by playing up a conflict between old and new. I wanted to excite people about what Kevin is doing, and point my finger at an institution that everyone should work to change. While I still see some worth in that approach – especially for my own growth – I think it was shortsighted. I didn’t spend enough time thinking about who my audience would be and what I wanted from them (more on that in a few paragraphs).

The journal entries are meant to reflect my feelings at the time I was experiencing them. Even the entries written or completed later always refer to the present, to today. I intentionally did my best to avoid reflecting on my experiences when writing the journal. I wanted to capture the passion of the moment. I wanted to minimize the degree to which I polluted the raw experience with reflection. Before writing about any particular day, I would sit with my eyes closed, listening to my favorite works from Beethoven and Chopin, and floating back in time to the day I planned to write about. Doing my best to raise the emotions of that day to the surface. I did this for myself more than anyone else. The trip was an opportunity for me to see a world where people dedicate their careers to doing something good for the world.
For the past few months I’ve been putting off accepting an offer with a law firm that I like as much as someone like me can like a law firm, hoping that I might find something better to do with my life. I really wanted to capture the feelings I experienced to help motivate me to follow my heart, not to take the easy road of drafting district court briefs challenging the validity of patents for ridiculous sums of money.

Sometimes I questioned my approach while I was writing, but for the most part it seemed to make sense. And it made it easier for me to write – so often it’s a simpler task to cut than to mend, to question rather than to explain. Retrospectively, I think the tact I took revealed my lack of experience, and probably did more to impeach my credibility than to excite people about the story. The good versus bad theme is never the whole story, and likely my audience recognized that. I’m sure that many who read the journal walked away with the impression that I am young and emotional. Fiery and impatient.
Perhaps even closed-minded.

I wrote as though I was speaking to myself, or to an auditorium of college students that I wanted to incite to action. I was not thinking about the importance of appealing to leaders and academics with my entries. I wrote an impassioned and sometimes indignant stump speech, not an objective report. I should have offered more nuance to my readers.

This is especially so given the purpose of the Cyberstrategy Conference. Business leaders are unlikely to want to invest in a program if they see it as a maverick, anti-establishment program. They would rather hear a story about how Kevin is helping the Department to evolve. About how he is working with the Department to create opportunities and improve how the Department works. Likely, they don’t want to be associated with an attack on the government. Similarly, the intellectuals and academics interested in the story are probably interested in building relationships instead of tearing them apart. In reforming the system from the inside, as well as the outside. I imagine that it would have been more productive for me to provide a deeper, more analytic characterization of my experience. I’m still not convinced that there is no place for what I wrote, however. Rather, I think it needs to be examined critically, and then explained.

I would be OK with Kevin reading the journal. Less so with the Commissioner and Mrs. Jarrett. Not because I disparaged those two, but because I was not fair in my treatment of them. I did not ask how they ended up the way they are. Nor did I emphasize the importance of their work or the good that they have done. I took cheap shots for the purpose of inciting my readers, and didn’t bother to paint the full picture. I thought about that sometimes when I was writing, but never did anything about it. As for Kevin, again, I’d like to fill out my discussion of Kevin a bit more. I have a lot to say about him. I might be guilty of turning Kevin into a one-dimensional character just as I did with Reese and Jarret. Even though he received much more favorable treatment, I’d still like to tell that aspect of the story better.

I think that it would be a great exercise for me to write a few entries reflecting on the experience as a whole. Putting the puzzle together, analyzing the dynamics of the situation more thoroughly, and exploring my own emotions and reactions. Perhaps one on SET, another on the Commissioner and Mrs. Jarrett, one on Kevin. I hope to have time to do this soon.

Thanks for posing these questions. I’m terribly interested in your response to my answers. A little nervous too, because I suspect that you’ll have many things to say that I haven’t even come close to thinking about. That’s where the learning comes in, though.

As an aside, I’ve been thinking about law as poker. I think that I think about the game in the wrong way. I tend to look around the table and ask “what result do I want from everyone here” without taking enough time to appraise the situation or really think through my goal (is what I think I want actually what I want? is it the best outcome possible?). I am generally thorough in thinking about how I am going to get what I want out of the other players, but that doesn’t really matter if I’ve misjudged what it is that I want. I think that I tend not to forecast far enough into the future. Two moves ahead instead of six. It doesn’t help that I can be rather strong-willed, and can turn into a pit bull when I feel provoked. Those two I have been working on. But it wasn’t until this week that I started thinking about the larger faults in my poker strategy.

Jackie, The strong points that shine out to me from your journal entries so far are your willingness to engage and honestly report, your strong narrative sense, your fluency and power in expressing yourself. You are open to the experience before you. You engage me as a reader and allow me to share your adventure. You give me opportunity to feel what you are feeling and to learn with you. Here are points for you to consider. You write with what seems a chip on your shoulder. Do you recognize this? Is this intentional? What is your motive? What does this say to your reader about your identity? Is this expressive of your feeling at the time, thus a contemporaneous report, or does this express the wisdom of your reflection? Are you comfortable with Kevin, Mrs. Jarrett and Major Reese reading your account? Who are you imagining as your audience?

charlie

On Oct 22, 2005, at 1:25 PM, Charles Nesson wrote:

Jackie, is it okay with you that i am posting your journal entries? http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/nesson/blog
i apologize for not asking this of you sooner. If you want me to take them down, or if you want to edit, please let me know.

To: Charles Nesson
From: Jacqueline Harlow
Subject: a pop quiz
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2005 22:03:06 -0500

JOLT hosted a talk by Annalee Newitz tonight. Annalee started her
talk by saying that she was going to make certain assumptions, and
that her assumptions are right. Period. My knee jerk reaction was
to want to argue with her about her position. To criticize it and
cast it into doubt. But I caught myself. And I started thinking
about questions I’d like to ask, constructive questions that would
help me to get at why Annalee takes the position that she does and
who she is. Once I did that, I started listening – really listening
– to what she had to say, and how she was saying it. Looking for
little nuggets of Annalee’s truth, and her story. Not only did that
simple change in perspective make the talk enjoyable, but it also
helped me to see things differently, to hear what was being said, to
learn and absorb what I would likely have missed otherwise, and to
get to know Annalee and the audience in a way that I wouldn’t have
otherwise.

At 08:54 AM 10/21/2005, you wrote:
Charles Nesson wrote:

> Ethan, your blog is awesome. i see an energy that no other medium
> could so gracefully express. The flow of intelligence and engagement
> is almost frightening.
>
>
You’re wonderfully kind, Charlie. I’m cheating today – all I really have
to do is be a scribe, as the folks Andrew Zolli puts on stage at
Pop!Tech are consistently excellent… indeed, tomorrow Rebecca will be
on stage.

Hope the rest of your Jamaica trip was as wonderful as the beginning.
Take good care.

-E

—
Ethan Zuckerman | ezuckerman@cyber.law.harvard.edu
Research Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
413-441-3380 | http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog
http://globalvoicesonline.org | http://worldchanging.com

JAMAICA COALITION

Published by nesson on October 17, 2005 in jamaica. Closed

To: John Palfrey
From: Charles Nesson
Cc: Ethan Zuckerman
Subject: Re: Jamaica

Palfrey Lights a Candle in my Mind
You wrote:
* There is just an amazing corps (core) of people that Charlie’s drawn around him. Marguerite Orane, HBS 1985 or so, is at the head of the line, in my view, for sure — she is a dynamo, a great partner to Charlie, as organized as the best advance guy in the Clinton Administration, hard-working, charming, devoted. Right there with her are Kevin Wallen and his best friend, Tafawah, both born leaders, first-rate public speakers, young articulate men, passionate about their country and their culture, cyber-savvy —each would make a compelling candidate for party leader of a young, reformist movement. The Commissioner of Corrections, Major Reese, who spent two days straight with us, as far as I could tell, believes in what Charlie is trying to do, and is leaning into it with his staff and his own time.

zing flash of insight. i see your thought.

Jamaica is riven with garrison politics. There is war to the point of gun down killing between JLP and PNP. Are you able to envision a young reformist movement taking shape in way that would resolve it?

Palfrey’s Jamaica Report

Published by nesson on October 16, 2005 in berkmania, General, harvard, jamaica and rhetorical space. Closed

October 16, 2005
Pegasus Hotel, Kingston, Jamaica

i left Alex, Diane and Jackie last night looking sharp in company with Kevin and Amilcar, heading to the Quad for a taste of Kingston night, and awoke this morning fully refreshed. Email from John Palfrey greeted me. John had come to Jamaica with Ethan Zuckerman to lead a session on Google Juice for our CyberStrategy conference. As i read his email, i recorded, mixing, pausing in spots to think, interupted by a phone call from Alex. They’d come in at 4 a.m. and were a bit slow in rising, breakfast in 15. Here is JP’s email (with his permission). But first – Thank you JP, for your support and leadership. This is for me a work of art. What a champion you were when you were here. The high point of the whole event was your riff on the welcome Jamaica gave you, medium and message woven in narrative integration of the entire event.

From: John Palfrey
Subject: Jamaica

I’ve always held that Charlie is the most exceptional teacher I’ve ever had. I left Evidence, circa 1999 or so, with three things: 1) the power of narrative in all things related to the law; 2) the fact that it’s fiction that the law can come by any single, reliable version of the truth; and 3) that it pays off to think big, to take intellectual risk, particularly when you’re thinking about things cyber-. (OK, so I didn’t learn all that much about the hearsay rule in Evidence; just as well since I did not become a litigator anyway).

During my time at the Berkman Center, I haven’t gotten the Jamaica project. I’ve wanted to. I’ve listened with interest when Charlie’s come to talk about it. I’ve enjoyed meeting Trevor Rhone, Kevin Wallen, Commissioner Reese, and others who have come through Cambridge. I loved Becca and Wayne‘s blog entries while they were there, in the year or so before they got married. But I’ve struggled to make heads or tails of the project overall; it does not fit my image of a Project, for which a Proposal can be written, and Benchmarks set, against which Metrics can be achieved.

I’m awfully glad to have had the chance to go to Jamaica this past week, and deeply grateful to have been invited. It’s a remarkable place.

Charlie has around him an extraordinary group of people — that’s the main message, about the people. I also got the very clear sense that the Jamaica project has a trajectory, that it’s going someplace, if Charlie sticks with it, and that it has a real narrative to it. There’s intellectual risk all over the place, and too many things to try to string together easily, but a great deal of promise. What specifically?

* There is just an amazing corps (core) of people that Charlie’s drawn around him. Marguerite Orane, HBS 1985 or so, is at the head of the line, in my view, for sure — she is a dynamo, a great partner to Charlie, as organized as the best advance guy in the Clinton Administration, hard-working, charming, devoted. Right there with her are Kevin Wallen and his best friend, Tafawah, both born leaders, first-rate public speakers, young articulate men, passionate about their country and their culture, cyber-savvy — each would make a compelling candidate for party leader of a young, reformist movement. The Commissioner of Corrections, Major Reese, who spent two days straight with us, as far as I could tell, believes in what Charlie is trying to do, and is leaning into it with his staff and his own time.

* The event went beautifully. Read Ethan’s live-blog post, if you haven’t yet: , for color and for the dead-on description of it as a “geeky academic benefit concert.” Marguerite and her partner Robert pulled together 90 people, and a half-dozen or so sponsors, who paid real money, to spend a day talking about cyber-strategy for companies, for the tax authority (long story!), and for the country. The proceeds went to Kevin’s non-profit, SSET, that’s training prisoners to use computers. John Deighton of HBS was absolutely perfect for the crowd, which was lively and intelligent and engaged. Charlie’s vision of a fund-raiser — raising Jamaican funds, to be clear, not aid from the US or elsewhere — seems to have come to fruition (I haven’t seen the books on it, but there certainly seemed to have been money churned up). It was a complicated story to tell, of brand/identity/cyberstrategy for companies benefiting prisoners who need job skills and the fulfillment that creativity using computers can provide, but it came together, amazingly enough.
* It couldn’t have been better to have Ethan there, who knows his stuff, both technically and in terms of the challenges facing developing countries. Very impressive performance on the substance, but also just such terrific company.

* We met a lot of people who have keen interest in using “cyber” strategies to grow their businesses and to make new connections between different people. We heard about Super-Plus, the 35-store grocery chain, still a family business, which has set up a remittance system where you can pay for groceries online in Brooklyn or North London and have them delivered in Montego Bay; RJR Communications with its three radio stations and one television station and now an internet presence that streams cricket matches and World Cup qualifiers for a subscription fee around the world; and What’s On Jamaica, nowhere on Google but which I’m convinced could pull off a great local Craig’s List play. The local merchant bank, DB&G, has a senior executive team that’s got vision and interest in using cyberstrategy to accomplish their goals for growth.

* Perhaps most important of all, Charlie has three students on the trip, doing clinical work. Alex, Diane, and Jackie are interviewing people involved in the prison system. I can’t imagine a richer, and more raw, place to learn about the law in a way that we never, ever, could do by reading Goldberg v. Kelly. Charlie says it was Fern’s idea, which I credit, but it’s also no doubt his inspiration. I have no idea what they’ll come up with, and hope of course they’ll be safe as they go about their work, but I am confident that they’ll learn something that they otherwise would leave law school without experiencing.

Bottom line: I don’t claim to have “gotten” the Jamaica project in during 42 hours in Kingston. But I did see Charlie in all his glory there, with lots of promise in terms of ways to make his projects in Jamaica have impact. It’s made me (re-)think about how we define success in what we do. If we can declare victory where we’re learning and teaching in innovative ways about our field of inquiry; taking some intellectual risks; creating networks; and stimulating thinking, the Jamaica project certainly fit the bill this week.

-JP

—
John Palfrey
Executive Director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School
jpalfrey@law.harvard.edu
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/

October 15, 2005

Published by nesson on October 15, 2005 in berkmania, General, jamaica and rhetorical space. Closed

So there was Ethan, consummate geek, long stringy hair, awewome physique, blogging away at the front of the room, on stage before a dynomite audience doing a duo with Palfrey. They are leading a session on Google Juice. Amilcar, videographer, will fill in clips, message going out in a bundle of ways. We play the game of life on stages, one really real, one virtually virtual, one really virtual, one virtually real. Ethan and Palfrey before us at the same time blogging to the world, multiple audience to follow his adventure. Palfrey starts by describing his warm welcome to Jamaica. In a minute has us all laughing, feeling good, ready to ride with him and Ethan in search of the secrets of Google, quest for the power of GoogleJuice. Their energy is infectious. In the real audience a good piece of the strength of Jamaica in a mix not previously seen. In the virtual audience many still to be counted.

CyberStrategy — a concept now in the lexicon of Jamaica.

Yesterday a follow up day, Deering Bunting & Golding, young bankers for the wealthy around a conference table at their offices, John Deighton masterfully draws out the essence of their business, setting up the click of insight. When it comes we see them get it: CyberStrategy goes beyond IT.

This is the cover to a book telling the story of Anthony Ashwood, aka Fines, produced by Dawn Vaz (edited by Fern), who gives an inmate’s view of Reverence for Life taking root in the Kingston prisons. Reverence for Life formed the foundation on which the SSET program is growing. Fines and Dawn were with us at the Pegasus, autographing and selling the book.

Journal Entry: October 14, 2005

Published by nesson on October 14, 2005 in General. Closed

Welcome to Second Life. We hope you’ll have a richly rewarding experience, filled with creativity, self expression and fun. The goals of the Community Standards are simple: treat each other with respect and without harassment, adhere to local standards as indicated by simulator ratings, and refrain from any hate activity which slurs a real-world individual or real-world community.

Wroclaw META

Published by nesson on October 13, 2005 in rhetorical space. Closed

Sitting at a magnificent table that snakes around the room at ECLET, listening to Mike Botein talk American sex and censorship, i am blogging with my screen projected to the room. i walked along the river earlier this morning, recording my thoughts in preparation for the session i am about to lead just a few minutes from now. Here is Wroclaw1 and Wroclaw2.

And here is my host, Jacek Golaczynski, walking me into the building where the ECLET conference on Electronic Media is meeting, Wroclaw3.

Darius Adamski now describes the European situation. Wherever there exists a governmental body with jurisdiction over media, politically correct censorship rulings are the inevitable result. How else could a political body possibly be expected to respond to an outraged citizen complaint? What explains why some European states are sensible and others not?

Pictures at http:///www.tew.de/
password “eclet”

CyberJournalism

Published by nesson on October 10, 2005 in General and rhetorical space. Closed

Journal Entry October 10, 2005, New York Law School, New York City, New York State, United States of America, Planet Earth: For the last view days I’ve been participating a conference called State of Play, organized by Beth Noveck and David Johnson. This morning, I’ve been walking and thinking about what i would say today at a gathering hosted by Cam Stracher, a former student and friend now teaching journalism law at NYLS. I recorded and mixed my thoughts to a message on cyberjournalism.

This afternoon i am back in the Millenium Hilton Hotel across from the empty hole of Ground Zero with the talk behind me, but recorded by a video camera operating in the room, its digital feed going i know not where, and by my SONY Walkman (my iRiver got swiped and is gone), its output right here. The music is matmos-action-at-a-distance.

Here are my notes, which may help you hear and think and link to what you are listening to.

speak as eon, d of c, timetraveller
avatar in the game of life
shakespeare made the connection though it’s hard to grasp
we are players on the stage of the game of life
we are medium and message
we are code

when i was an undergraduate i took a course on UNIVAC
made a tool with digits, zeros and ones, SORT,
i taught the machine,
welcome to the cyber age
teach the machine to do different things in different ways
cyber — an extension of hands and thought
welcome to cyberspace

what does it mean that we can write in bits and leave our mark
journalism,
what business are you in
who are you
what is your identity
what is your avatar

here, in the game of life we play
and there
in Second Life

i would like to have better explained Ren Reynold’s taxonomy of cyberspace. Here is email that includes his explanation and tells you a bit about him:

To: Ren Reynolds
Re: SoPIII: four worlds theory

Ren,
Good to meet you. Even better to have your thought on initial sort of virtual and real into four catagories, as i heard them, ludic, civil, social, real. Do these conform to vv, vr, rv, rr?
[snip]

At 02:21 PM 10/9/2005, Ren Reynolds wrote:
Charles,
Good to meet you just now at NYLS. We were talking briefly about my Four
Worlds Theory. I thought it would be a good idea to just send you the
link, so here it is:

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/08/the_four_worlds.html

The ‘theory’ is really a taxonomy that I’m hoping will aid discussion
and I hope will, at least for legal purposes, become a working ontology
though which we can have useful discussions about what is occurring
within these spaces. At the bottom of the discussion thread there are
some interesting points and dimensions that might make it a more useful
tool – I purposely made it broad rather than be fine tuned and technical
about it to promote discussion, I am going to begin to populate it with
more technical lego-philosophical concepts.

Just a little background on me, I have been writing about the ethics of
technology for some years now and recently have focused on the computer
games and virtual spaces. In commercial life I used to be the global
head of strategy for Internet for Cable and Wireless when it was the
largest ISP in the world.

I’m very interested in brining these two areas of experience together to
work with groups that are seeking to think about these issues and have
an impact on public policy. I’m looking to form some relationship with
the Oxford Internet Institute to further this.

Ren
www.renreynolds.com
game studies bibliography: www.ren-reynolds.com/bibliography.htm
terranova.blogs.com

October 11, in Kingston. With morning comes an email from Beth Noveck with a link to blog of my talk at State of Play. Thank you thank you –m law.