February 08, 2005
 Every network needs its epicenters. In October, I wrote:
The great glue of of this network is obviously the Net. But networks don't live by bits alone. Networks are made of people, and in order to do truly remarkable things, people need to get together, rub elbows, trade gossip, try out ideas, flirt, schmooze, encourage and learn to trust, admire and love one another. Conferences are great for this. Festivals sometimes can galvanize an entire Zeitgeist. But movements really rise or fall on the strength of on-going social occasions -- salons, showcases, the right bar, the right cafe, the place it's happening. These third places are the epicenter of any movement, no matter how tectonic in its effects.
But where are they today? I might venture a few guesses. I might suggest a few models (most famously, Aula). But above all, I'd be interested in hearing about the places you think worldchangers are to be found... >This is clearly an idea whose time has come. Katrin Verclas explains why:
Social reformers should heed the role great gathering and community places play in bringing us together as people and as movements. People want to come together -- writ meet-ups in the Dean campaign; there is a yearning for human interaction and community which is arguably the precursor of political activism. ... Amazing, open, warm and lively community spaces where people congregate, meet, converse, share, and have ideas and enthusiasm for each other
As she points out, networked American progressives are suddenly all a-clamour about the need for more epicenters.
Examples continue to come in. There's of course the aforementioned Aula, and London's the Hub. There's the215 Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto; Location1 and The Tank in New York; to a certain degree the Capitol Hill Arts Center in Seattle, Cafe van Kleef in Oakland and the Odeon in SF; perhaps the Forest in Edinburgh, as Jon believes. I bet the telecentros of Sao Paolo are pretty hopping, too. When discussing this topic a few weeks ago, a friend wondered if conferences aren't where the network meets -- and as I said before, to some degree I think that's true. But I still think that every community needs the space where people who do innovative, creative, risky, noble, worldchanging things get together and fuel each other's ardor. Meeting your allies -- shaking hands, sitting down and eating together, talking, laughing, getting to look one another in the eye, getting to know someone in all the rich, primate non-verbal ways which can only happen in actual physical proximity -- is powerful. Epicenters are tools.
Some, too, suggest that various networking events -- for example, Green Drinks or the PlaNetwork meetings -- are epicenters, but I think they lack a key informal, drop-in element. I think for an epicenter to really be the tool it ought to be, you should be able to show up any afternoon or evening and find someone worthwhile and interesting with whom to strike up a conversation.
So, where's the epicenter in your town?
If you don't have one, what do you wish it were like?
What's the best one you've ever visited?
(Posted by Alex Steffen in Your Turn at 08:01 PM)
(location one - where our own Drazen Pantic spends much of his time - makes the cut! :) -dm)
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unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
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Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
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