I am Clark Robinson, a retired lawyer from Chicago, working with Barrett Brown on Project PM.
Here is some background information on the project. In addition to a lot of text, I have included numerous links; you do not need to read everything to understand the project. I have marked a couple of the links as good places to start.
1. Here is an updated description of Project PM, September 16, 2010 by Barrett Brown, :
Project PM was originally intended to serve a narrow purpose: to reduce
the influence of those mainstream commentators who have done nothing to
merit the great influence they possess over the form and content of the
national dialogue. This goal itself was prompted by the months I had
spent in reading over the work of such people as Thomas Friedman and
Charles Krauthammer in the course of writing my next book as well as a
series of articles on the same general subject. During this time, it
occurred to me that a great number of our most influential commentators
have gained that influence despite a demonstrable and consistent
tendency towards making predictions that did not actually come true,
deploying self-contradictory arguments, accidentally misrepresenting
important and verifiable facts, and otherwise conducting their work in
such a way as to damage the public understanding. Meanwhile, there exist
other pundits whose confidence and honesty are just easily identifiable
but who nonetheless have not been granted anything close to the
numerical reach of their more incompetent counterparts at such places as
The New York Times and Washington Post. The problem, it seems, is that
those who would shift their attention to other, better pundits if they
knew about these failures have in fact not managed to learn of them, not
being consumers of those information outlets which are in the business
of pointing out such failures.
This problem - all the more significant for having damaged the
national understanding, and thus having been at fundamental fault for
some degree of the problems the nation has concocted for itself over the
years - has already been remedied to a small but noticeable extent by
the unprecedented increases in communicational possibilities that have
come about by way of the internet. In particular, a portion of the
blogosphere has proven itself effective in pointing out these deficits
to a considerable audience which has consequently abandoned those
pundits who have been shown to exhibit them. I think that this
advantageous process can be improved upon; in fact, Id argue that it
would be ridiculous to think that it cannot be improved upon.
Project PM originated as a means to identify and implement such
improvements in order to meet this aforementioned goal of lessening the
influence of those whose influence plainly ought to be lessened. This
was to be done by way of a very simple schematic whereby a significant
number of participating bloggers would be persuaded to bring up the
deficits of some or another commentator all at once and in tandem,
thereby prompting attention on the part of those mainstream editors and
producers who in turn would be hard-pressed not to address an issue
being widely and suddenly discussed by a large array of commentators
with a high level of collective notability. In this way, the blogger
array may in effect take temporary control of the mainstream medias
infrastructure in order to get across the general message to its vast
audience that the commentators on whom they are depending for
information are incompetent and ought to be disregarded.
To this end, I began contacting some of the better bloggers
(including traditional journalists who work in part through online
media) and explaining that shit be all fucked up and that maybe we could
unfuck it to some extent if we all got together and did our thing as
described above, or words to that effect. Having recruited a couple of
dozen such folks possessed of combined notoriety more than sufficient to
prompt the necessary reaction, and having designed a simple schematic
by which this would all be carried out, it occurred to me that a similar
schematic, backed by simple software, could also be used by bloggers to
greatly improve the means by which they communicate with one another.
Meanwhile, we had managed to recruit an even greater number of
non-bloggers possessed of various skill sets - many with extraordinarily
impressive backgrounds - and we were happy to note that such people
could not only be of assistance in helping to implement our main goal of
establishing the blogger network, but could also be organized in such a
way as to compose and pursue solutions to any number of related
problems.
This expansion of purpose was prompted by our desire for Project PM
to exist as an opportunistic sort of entity, taking on whichever tasks
are found to be most viable in light of whichever sorts of resources and
human capital have been made available to it. Although we remain light
on resources, the degree of human capital we have accumulated is
particularly humbling. Among the journalists and bloggers who have
agreed to participate or assist, we have Michael Hastings, the author
and war correspondent whose Rolling Stone piece on Afghanistan prompted
the near-immediate resignation of General McChrystal; Charles Johnson, a
pioneer of blogging conventions and technology who served as the
co-creator of the influential but idiotic blog consortium Pajamas Media
and whose gradual shift from right to center has been fraught with
hilarity on the part of his allies-turned-enemies; Allison Kilkenny, a
wonkish progressive whose radio program Citizen Radio, co-hosted with
husband and comedian Jamie Kilstein, has become an inimitable and
entertaining forum for honest-to-god policy discussions; and Dr. Juan
Cole, whose erudite blogging on Middle Eastern affairs has happily
translated into some degree of mainstream exposure. Among our
non-blogging participants, meanwhile, we have a former editor of The
Washington Post, a former CIA Directorate of Operations agent, a variety
of scientists and programmers and engineers, several flavors of lawyer,
various veteran political activists, and a great many people who lack
formal credentials but nonetheless have demonstrated a keen
understanding of the subjects on which we are focused as well as an
inclination to put that understanding to fullest use.
Over the past couple of months, Ive been working with many of our
participants in an effort to finalize and implement the blogger project
as well as the various other sub-projects weve adopted so far. The
process has involved an overlapping tangle of makeshift experiments in
online collaboration, the launching of various discussion groups,
research on emergent internet dynamics and related items of inquiry,
recruitment of additional participants capable of filling in any
remaining expertise gaps, determinations of legal framework, and writing
all of that down just now. Having meanwhile developed a more specific
idea of what we want to do and why and how, we have finally gotten to
the matter of when and decided that now would probably work. As such,
Id like to invite you to join one or more of the following working
groups by contacting me with your interest:
The Science/Journalism Improvement Project, which seeks to
match freelance writers with scientists in order to encourage the
production of more accurate science journalism.
The Africa Project,
which is concerned with producing self-perpetuating solutions by which
to improve education and standard of living in the context of
Sub-Sahara, such as a program to distribute guides with plans for
locally-implementable engineering techniques and to encourage the
further distribution of those guides by the recipients themselves.
The Software Project, members of which will hammer out details regarding the proposed software for the Project PM blogger network.
2. We now have an IRC channel, #projectpm, where you may join in live discussion with us. The channel is most likely to be active in the afternoon and evening. Here are some instructions about gaining access:
IRC
stands for Internet Relay Chat, and it is one of the oldest
communication methods on the 'net. As such it's an appropriate venue
for our talks, and to some extent, an appropriate example of a
successful distributed information system (it was IRC networks that
reported through media blackouts during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt and
the first Gulf war). Basically, it's a network of chatrooms all across
the world. You connect using a special IRC client, just like you used
to have to have an email client to use email. You connect to a public
IRC server (in our case, irc.freenode.net),
which hosts thousands of "rooms" and users jumping around between them.
Once you're connected to freenode, you join our room, which is called
#projectpm (all IRC rooms start with a #).
Here are some specific instructions for those of you who are new to IRC, on either a PC or a Mac:
1) Download and install the Firefox (http://getfirefox.com) web browser if you haven't already.
2) In firefox, navigate to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/16/ and install the Chatzilla plugin. Chatzilla gives you IRC within the browser. Firefox will prompt you to restart the browser.
3) Once the browser comes back, navigate to irc://chat.freenode.net .
Note the irc:// at the beginning of the URL! This is what tells
firefox that you are connecting to an IRC server, instead of a website.
A new window will appear. It takes a few seconds to connect, and it
will give you a lot of text while it does so. Once it gets to
End of /MOTD command.
Congratulations, you're connected to an IRC server!
4) Now join our chatroom, by typing
/join #projectpm
into the bar at the bottom of this new window, and hitting enter. Note
the "/" at the beginning: this is what identifies it as a command for
your IRC client instead of just a regular message. Your screen will
display:
And that's it! You're now in chat. Type hello and hit enter. :)
If you're brave, you can try this yourself with some more full featured
clients. Really what you need to know is that you want to connect to
Freenode (irc.freenode.net or chat.freenode.net), and join the channel #projectpm. For PC: I would recommend Xchat or mIRC. For Mac: I recommend Colloquy, hands down.
3. Here is some information about Barrett Brown's writing:
Barrett will be publishing an new article soon in Skeptical Inquirer in
which he discusses in detail the Science Journalism sub-project being
developed as part of Project PM. ( http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/ )
Barrett's next book, Hot, Fat and Clouded, The Amazing and Amusing
Failures of Americas Chattering Class will be published later this
year. His first book, Flock of
Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design and the Easter
Bunny is no longer available in paper, but a Kindle edition is available
from Amazon.
4. Here is some information about current activities at Project PM:
Software project -- we are designing a program which will support the blogger/journalist network component of Project PM
If you are interested in this part of our efforts contact Barrett (barriticus@gmail.com) or myself (robinsonchicago@gmail.com),
and we will share with you a spreadsheet capturing our current design
discussions, and will welcome your comments and suggestions. Science journalism project --
This project will
improve the quality of science journalism by coupling freelance journalists and
scientists while utilizing media contacts to achieve publication.
Scientists and
science-based practitioners (such as healthcare professionals and engineers)
will work with freelance journalists in identifying story ideas; research; and
contacting qualified sources, both for background information and quotations.
Participating
scientists will see increased media attention to their area of expertise,
publicity for themselves and their institutions/sponsors, and by-line credit if
the level of contribution merits such recognition. Also, there is
the bonus of not getting heartburn reading media reports that mangle their
areas of knowledge.
Participating
journalists will produce articles of greater accuracy than the current norm. Furthermore,
higher quality articles will result in an increase in published works.
Participating media experts will help get articles published. For example,
they can strategize the best publications to contact, provide contact
information for particular editors and/or publications, help formulate the
pitch, and provide assistance in getting the piece sold.
We are enlisting interested scientists and freelancers in order to create a
database with their areas of interest and expertise. Eventually, pairs
will be created based on this database. Each pair will decide on the
particulars of the articles to be produced and on their collaborative
processes. However, unique to the Science Journalism Project is an explicit
recognition that journalists and scientists dont always work on deadlines in a
similar way. Therefore, mutual respect and understanding will be necessary to keep
to deadlines.
If you are interested in this project contact Barrett or myself.
Africa Development Program --
The goal of the Africa Development Project is to improve the standard of living in the non-developed areas of Africa. Unfortunately
while the world around us moves a mile a minute, there are parts of the
globe where advancements are made much more slowly, such as in parts of
Africa. This
has resulted in many hardships that most living in developed countries
dont think twice about such as access to drinkable water, food, and
electricity to name a few. With
the help of those who have experience in matters such as these, we aim
to not only raise awareness these plights, but to provide
cost-effective, simple solutions to remedy these difficulties to as
great of an extent as possible.
The group working
on this includes people with varying backgrounds, including work in
Africa and in online support of philanthropy, as well as those without
such experience who are interested in learning.
If you are interested in this project contact Barrett or myself.
Other current activities:
In addition to the IRC channel, we have a website in the works; and we will soon be needing writing and administrative assistance with that.
Do
not hesitate to (and I hope you will) reply with questions, and if you
would like to describe your skills and interests, that would be great.