I'm having difficulty getting on the IRC channel.
--- On Sun, 17/10/10, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: From the desk of Flicki Longstocking
To: "emilieduchatelet8@yahoo.co.uk" <emilieduchatelet8@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sunday, 17 October, 2010, 21:00
Good to meet you, Emma. I'm going to share with you a Google Doc listing our scientists and writers so that you can pick whom you'd like to work with; we'll also add your particulars after my associate Clark Robinson e-mails you with some general info and asks you about your scientific areas of interest. I'll also share with you a couple of other docs as you seem like you might be interested in our more general pursuits. Some of our more active participants idle on our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net #projectpm; download Xchat if you don't know much about IRC; I don't know what your main skill set is but you seem to be keen on science and politics (in the broader sense), so you'd most likely be of help to us in our ongoing discussions regarding how best to implement improvements in information flow. Below I've pasted a general introduction to Project PM; let me know
if you have any further questions and do try to make it to the IRC channel as that's where we're operating until the software is ready.
***
Project PM is an online entity designed to address problems of information flow in a variety of contexts while also perpetually expanding its participant base in such a way as to also maintain the high average quality of existing participants, all without central direction or leadership. This is to be accomplished by way of a communication/collaboration schematic I’ve developed for the purpose and which is best summarized as follows.
Participants A, B, C, and D are provided a widget which allows them to send or re-send an item - an idea, a blog post, input on a task - to however many of the others to which they’re connected, who will in turn have the option to send items to them. Upon receiving an item, each can “push” that item to whomever else they are connected, who will in turn have the same option. A,B,C, and D may each also invite anyone else to adopt the widget and connect with him or her, and will thereby bring in new participants with the same ability to send and receive items and connect to new or existing participants. Now let us say that A, who is very clever and possesses good judgement, invites Z,
who is similarly swell. But then Z brings in X, who is only moderately virtuous and tasteful and who later brings in Y, who is much less so. Y writes a blog post about how Obama is secretly from Tehran or finds a great article on crystal healing or some such thing and pushes the item to X, the person who brought him in. If X shows such poor judgement as to think this item worthwhile and thus pushes it to A, then A, who has better judgement, will refrain from pushing it forward to anyone else, thus stopping the item from making its way further into the network and bothering everyone with its nonsense. A might even opt to severe his widget connection to X lest he receive any further nonsense. Thus it is that the network may expand without limit while still ensuring that the information flowing through it is always of relatively high quality.
There are a few other factors worth noting. Any participant may connect to any other participant, regardless of how “far away” they are within the structure of the network, assuming that both agree to the connection. A participant can be connected to as many others as agree to the connection. In order to prevent good information from being regionalized as the network grows, a pushed item has a 20 percent chance of also appearing in the widget of a random participant elsewhere in the network, which may then be pushed around among those participants as well if they find it to be of use.
When the software is completed, slightly differing versions will be used by bloggers and by our general participants. The former will use it to better share their best posts while also being privy to the best posts of others, the titles of which will appear on the blogger’s widget which in turn is visible to his own readers to the extent that the blogger has chosen to push the articles he receives; meanwhile, readers have widgets which display headlines with links of those blog posts which have been pushed around the network a
particular number of times as set by the user, making it an aggregation tool that is not only crowd-sourced, but crowd-sourced among a particularly erudite and intellectually honest array of bloggers and other online commentators, rather than having been chosen by one or two editors or voted to the top by a huge group of internet users who have not been filtered for competence - thereby making it potentially the best source of news and commentary that has ever existed.
Meanwhile, our network of Project PM
participants necessarily connects the individuals themselves, rather than blogs, and items tend to be ideas or improvements in the context of loose working groups of participants collaborating on some particular task, such as our Africa Development Program or Science Journalism Improvement Program or one of many others that will be founded and furthered by groups of participants who will work within the context of the schematic and with other tools we’ll be adding. Organizations such as charities and NGOs in general may also join the network as a single party.
While we wait for the software to be completed, Project PM is operating in a more informal manner; about a dozen members are involved in setting up our various programs, building the widgets, recruiting new participants and advisers, and otherwise preparing for the integration of the hundred or so other participants we have on have on hand into what will eventually amount to an ever-expanding distributed think-tank made up of scientists, journalists, activists, software engineers, authors, activists, NGO workers, and combinations thereof, exerting soft power in a wide variety of contexts and otherwise serving as a sort of technocratic counterpoint to the other, lesser institutions that shape human society with the very mixed results that have presumably led you to inquire about Project PM in the first place.
-- Regards, Barrett Brown 512-560-2302
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