Understanding Both The Porous And Non-Porous Web

Dave makes some important points in his post "New media and how to use it" (now shouldn't that be "New media and how to use them" Dave?). I was going to post a point-by-point engagement with each paragraph of his excellent analysis, but then - as is my wont - decided to approach the subject more tangentially.

I experience the world in pictures and feelings. I see structures and connections physically whilst I walk and move on this planet; I'm terrified of flying by plane because I imagine everything that is going right going wrong. I can see wheels in motion, tyres burning, windows resisting the pressure of almost-vacuum.

And so it goes on.

And all these things I can sense simultaneously.

Sometimes it can be a bit of an information overload.

What I really mean to say is that my world is very plastic, very physical, very ever-present. The Internet is - for me - one very physical example of these physical and ever-present worlds I am talking about, even though most people see it as a virtual world; a poor and unhappy substitute for the real.

Dave is right, however, when he argues:

At MembersNet I’ve debated with several people who have in the past believed that being active on the internet can take the place of pounding-the-pavement activism. I seriously disagree with that - and moreover, where being an internet warrior takes over from real activism, I think it damages our sense of collective responsibility and decision making.

At a personal level, I'm interested in, and fascinated by, both porous and non-porous worlds, both the porous and non-porous web. Let me explain the little experience I've had of both. Firstly, in the open source software world, the porous web I first experienced. For a short period, I was involved in the highly political community of OpenOffice.org (more about this project here, more about the product here). This project is fundamentally a Microsoft Office spoiler - and it spoils Microsoft very well. Highly compatible, highly reliable, highly innovative - and highly free (in both senses of the word). In retrospect, being part of such a project was a great training-ground for anyone interested in getting involved in the ups and downs of progressive politics.

The interesting thing about this community was that, as with all open source communities, they chose from the very beginning to be open. The vast majority of mailing-lists, web pages and other organisational tools were - and still are - visible to the outside world; open to the project's direct competition in this case, without a doubt. In the traditional corporate world of secrecy, lawyerly regulation and court action, releasing your marketing ideas onto the web before you actually put them into practice would be commercial suicide. But, here, for some reason, it seems to work.

There is in fact an organisation called Sourceforge (the site itself here) which is basically an online ecosystem for ideas generation, in this case in the form of software code. But who's to say we couldn't do the same for political ideas in the form of political organisations, tendencies and groupings?

The structures that Dave suggests we might create to tie us all together in a progressive community of bloggers could do worse than to start with the above model to enable the relationships he proposes:

[...] If bloggers are going to begin banding together, to create associative structures which allow the dissemination of information, there also should be accountability for how those structures are used.

The community of bloggers should, therefore, be self-regulating. Each blogger, once accepted to the group, would be able to vote on the small group who would be in charge. If a communal resource is established, such as a video-camera for video-blogging, allocation of such a resource would be an important question. This aspect is, I feel, very important on the grounds that we shouldn’t be trying to cultivate an individualist stance. Every blog is not an island - they are connected by a movement. How we work online should reflect that.

So what would the undeniable upsides of such a porous community be? Where the community identified and filled its niche (which could be small or quite grand) effectively and intelligently, you would get a flood of unstoppable ideas, motivations and contributions from crowd-pleasing outsourcers (here and here). Just what you'd want from political activists in fact.

And just what you got from Obama's campaign.

So it's precisely the porous nature of such communities that drives them. It's precisely the enthusiasm and sincerity such open sites generate that truly convinces others to spend their free time participating in macro-projects like these - whether they be bashers of Microsoft like OpenOffice.org or knockers of Republicans like Obama's multitudinous online presences.

There is another side to the coin, however. Most recently, blogging on the Labour Party's own intranet for members, Members Net, I spent around two years of my life writing "The Cogwriter" blog (unbeknownst to me this name is apparently a registered trademark of some religious sect). There was actually a reason for the name I chose. The reason was a machine I invented. This machine I decided to call the "cogwriter" - after our blessed and venerable "typewriter". That is to say, instead of a writer of words, I imagined a writer of "cogs". You can find out what I mean by "cogs" and by this "cogwriter" in the short essay which originated that name and which I republish here.

In the essay in question, I identified blogging as an individual but mainly text-based activity (remember that I wrote this article at least three years ago) whilst anything else on the Internet, anything which would aim to stretch the writer any more, was always going to end up being a lumbering example of machine art, even when the result appeared to dance. The skills required to set up and design a website would mean that very few truly creative individuals would be able to program, design and content-create Internet output by themselves. Thus it would be that anything else, like that machine art por excelencia of the 20th century which is cinema, would involve the author subsuming his creation to a greater good in an inevitable machinery of such "cogs" and creativity.

Two years of blogging on Members Net, an example of a non-porous web if there ever was one, have allowed me to see both the advantages and disadvantages of creating community in such a way. Dave has the following to say on the subject:

Labour Members Net was discussed briefly but it was largely agreed that it was badly designed, poorly run and attracted far too many armchair types. It didn’t have a huge selection of resources and what good resources it did have were largely only available to people selected by their CLP and given the correct passwords. Even then, it’s uses are still limited.

Whilst agreeing with the specifics, I would take issue with what I believe is Dave's conclusion (even where this is only implicit). Although Members Net is an example of a non-porous web which as a consequence of its software code - its constitution as Lawrence Lessig would say - suffers the not always given but nevertheless often necessary consequences of closed systems, that is to say, their tendency to encrust and form intellectual cysts, I would still argue that the non-porous web has a place.

Dave in fact even seems to suggest this himself, in a heavily modulated way, I grant you, when, as I mentioned and quoted earlier, he suggests we create new structures to communicate. The following is a brilliant idea:

My suggestion last night was that a group of bloggers would elect a small executive committee to oversee both email lists, to represent a point of contact for people looking to disseminate information and to organise investigative efforts by playing to people’s strengths. For example, if tipped on a story, they could pass the tip onwards to someone who could a) find out more about it and b) do it justice in the writing.

As is this:

Additionally, as was suggested last night, the NUJ run technical training courses and courses on news and production values. If they were willing to help train bloggers, many of whom are very supportive of or even members of the NUJ, then we might actually have a chance at dramatically improving the quality and range of blogging output all across the Left.

As far as I’m concerned, bloggers should regard themselves as journalists. We’re never going to win over the newspapers to a left-wing agenda so let’s build our own centres where people can find reliable information, reported in an accessible way. That’s not to say we should surrender political views - our ideologies should be incorporated into our stories. However at the same time, we need to escape from the rather formulaic methods of analysis that plague a lot of the left-of-Labour parties.

I'm conscious that this post is extending itself - and equally conscious that I have not entirely synthesised my points of view. So perhaps it is time I simply stated where I would like us to be, perhaps two or three years down the line:

• firstly, Dave's idea of an alternative news organisation which communicates internally in a non-porous way to develop and generate alternative news is worth pursuing and setting up
• secondly, an alternative news organisation which generates its own intellectual property and training materials to develop its own people, in both porous and non-porous ways, would be a great step forward to guaranteeing a better progressive future
  
• thirdly, the need for us to continue engaging in a porous way with the outside world (as Andrew Regan has suggested we do here), so that we may renew our ideas and thoughts in competition with those very many others we surely need to allow ourselves to compete against, is absolutely key if we are not to ossify and fossilise into cliques, bands and platoons of tidily and comfortingly - but, generally, counter-productively - received opinion

Finally, but not least, I would like to bang the drum again on the importance of software code. As I said previously, Lawrence Lessig argues that in worlds such as the Internet, software code is the equivalent of an online constitution. It tells you what you can do, how quickly you can do it, who you can do it with and who can find out. It can free you up or tie you down. It can work to make you special and different or it can work to make you simply another number on someone else's list of potential customers.

Software code is the key to it all.

If we seriously believe in owning the means of production, we must believe in owning and developing the code.

And that code must be free - not free as in beer but free as in liberty.

Edwin Schlossberg is quoted as saying:

"The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."

We could equally argue that the skill of politics is to create a context in which other people can breathe.

So let's be even more ambitious than you suggest, Dave.

Let's do all you have thought of in your brilliant piece of writing - yes, of course we must, because you are practical as well as ideological, on target as well as idealistic - but let us also aim to build my beloved "cogwriter" and - thus, in the process - liberate the manufacturing process of that regenerative online progressive thought which, as a society, we so dearly require.

If in three years, since I wrote that essay, the web can change so radically, just think where we might be during even the next general election campaign.

Owning the means of production, prizing the inviolability of the non-porous web - where this has an appropriate constitution and adds value to our ability to get ahead - and coupling all this with the sincerity and openness of the porous are, in my opinion, quite simply the keys to winning the battle for the hearts, minds and souls of the British public.

This is not a battle for the Labour Party any more. This is a battle for a whole new generation of voters. And by talking about it in public rather than behind virtual closed doors, we have freely decided to engage with the opposition on an open battlefield of our very own making.

For this is open source politics.