People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.
Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.
Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.
Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.
What this post is about: Society’s collective intelligence needs to be able to see clearly what’s going on and take action about it. Both NSA surveillance and corporate suppression of activism interfere with that vital dynamic. This post clarifies what’s going on in these dynamics and suggests strategies to counter them and increase society’s collective intelligence.
Any healthy living system will try to weed out challenges that threaten its functioning. That’s what immune systems do: they preserve business-as-usual in a body.
But this natural maintenance activity of a system can be counterproductive:
(a) when changing circumstances demand adaptive responses, when the system NEEDS to change its business-as-usual – and
(b) when the system has been parasitized by something that is using it for the parasite’s own purposes at the larger system’s expense.
Ashley Hutchinson has an excellent article on the NWP site, illustrating how content curation can be effectively used to move students from passively memorizing information that they have no interest into, to become active investigators of a topic to uncover its different facets and critical evaluators of the same in light of their own values.
Her key goal was to find a way to make “research” something fun to do for her students.
“I wanted students to be able to funnel their interests into a more authentic academic experience so that they could learn about what they want to learn about and become empowered as researchers, both casually and formally.
To do that, I needed to remix their idea of what research is, transform it from something boring and arbitrary into something rich and useful.
When I don't know something, I look it up… So I called this an “argument curation” project, and not just to sound fancy; they were actually identifying arguments and curating resources that helped inform those arguments.”
The beauty of this approach is that students need to check and research the different aspects of a story, to see it through and to develop their own viewpoint relative to it. And here is the a good example of how this can be achieved:
Back in 2003 visionary artist Anne-Marie Schleiner wrote an inspiring paper entitled “Fluidities and Oppositions among Curators, Filter Feeders and Future Artists” describing the future role of online curators as nature's own filter feeders. Anne-Marie is clearly referring to curators to and filter feeder in art world, but her rightful intuitions are equivalently applicable to the larger world of information, data, digital and content curation as well.
But let me explain better.
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First. The term “filter feeders” is used in nature to describe a group of animals which thrives on its ability to filter organic matter floating around them. From Wikipedia: “Filter feeders are animals that feed by straining suspended matter and food particles from water, typically by passing the water over a specialized filtering structure. Some animals that use this method of feeding are clams, krill, sponges, baleen whales, and many fish (including some sharks). Some birds, such as flamingos, are also filter feeders. Filter feeders can play an important role in clarifying water, and are therefore considered ecosystem engineers.” From Wikipedia: “In marine environments, filter feeders and plankton are ecosystem engineers because they alter turbidity and light penetration, controlling the depth at which photosynthesis can occur.[4]”
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Second. If you re-read this last sentence slowly and look at what it could mean if applied to the field of content curation, it would read to me something like this: “In large information ecosystems like the web, filter feeders/content curators and content itself are ecosystem engineers because they: a) directly influence our ability to inform ourselves effectively and to discern truth from false and useless info (turbidity) b) shed light and clarity on different subjects which would otherwise remain obscure (light penetration) c) determine our ability to make sense of our own generated information streams (photosynthesis).” A very inspiring parallel indeed, giving a way to visualize the true importance and role that curation, disenfranchised from the confines of museums and art galleries, could have on the planetary information ecosystem. Anne-Marie writes: “Most web sites contain hyperlinks to other sites, distributed throughout the site or in a “favorites” section. Each of these favorite links sections serves as a kind of gallery, remapping other web sites as its own contents. Every web site owner is thus a curator and a cultural critic, creating chains of meaning through association, comparison and juxtaposition, parts or whole of which can in turn serve as fodder for another web site's “gallery.” Site maintainers become operational filter feeders, feeding of other filter feeders sites and filtering others' sites. Links are contextualized, interpreted and “filtered” through criticism and comments about them, and also by placement in the topology of a site. The deeper a link is buried, the harder it may be to find, the closer to the surface and the frontpage, the more prominent it becomes, as any web designer can attest to. I am what I link to and what I am shifts over time as I link to different sites… … In the process, I invest my identity in my collection – I become how I filter.” Anne-Marie vision (2003), pure and uninfluenced by what we have seen emerge in the last few years, paints a very inspiring picture of the true role of content curators and of the key responsibility they do hold for humanity's future. Inspiring. Visionary. Right on the mark. 10/10
If you are looking for your ideal content curation toolkit here is my new completely updated supermap, listing in over 30 categories all of the tools and services you may need to curate any content, from video to news. This new supermap includes all of the tools and services that were already listed on NewsMaster Toolkit, with the addition of 25 new tools and with a much better organization of categories and labels. My choice for organizing and recreating this supermap has now fallen on Pearltrees, the only content curation tool that can easily handle most of my key requirements for such a large collection of tools. Nonetheless there are over 400 tools listed in this supermap, Pearltrees makes it a breeze to navigate through them, and to add new ones to the relevant branches. The supermap is now being updated daily.
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P.S.: I already feel the need for having a PRO account, which could allow me to further edit the pearls collected, to preserve original web pages saved, and to add images to pearls that weren't able to capture one from the web.
Enjoy the new supermap here: http://bit.ly/ContentCurationToolsSupermap. Try it out and let me know what you think. (*and if you think I am missing some tools or can improve with my taxonomy, feel free to send me in your suggestions!)
Two articles follow: one posits a seemingly global anti-US opposition, an Anti-American Network (AAN), and the other posits that political warfare is the answer to the Middle East portion of the problem. IMHO, both are worth considering. Further believe that, with respect to Boot & Doran's approach, (a) coverage needs expansion to cover all the opponents Hirsch posits and (b) political warfare is a necessary but not sufficient component of our response and an NCTC-centric structure is probably not the way to go. We already have policy in place to deal with these kinds of things but it probably needs revision in light of international and domestic politics. In my view, what we need is national leadership (read: POTUS and Congress) with the guts and principles of Britain's WWII leader Winston Churchill supported by an Executive Branch organizational structure combining the best features of their Special Operations Executive (SOE) and Political Warfare Executive (PWE), one authorized, directed, and capable of covertly, surgically and virtually “setting our adversaries ablaze.” Neither the currently tasked organization nor U.S Special Operations Command, or even the two together, is presently that structure.)
