Hi Barrett,

Good to hear from you. Hope all is well. 

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you. I have been inundated with work and personal. 

I will be out on break starting tomorrow. I will be taking everything that you have sent to me along with me to review. 

I promise to get back to you with some initial thoughts and ideas on things the week of the 20th when I return. 

Thanks again and take care. 

Best

Steve

Sent from my iPhone - Please excuse typos 

On Aug 7, 2012, at 1:20 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Stephen-

After a couple more unexpected pieces of work, I've finally begun
writing up the materials on the "pursuant system," as I'm calling it
for now, and will be sending you those as I finish them. The
introduction I've pasted below doesn't get into explaining exactly how
it works, but instead provides an overview, directed both at online
activists and non-activists, of what fundamental problems the
schematic will solve and what other value it should be expected to
offer to whom. Specifics on the design itself will require me to
finish up some charts along with appropriate text so will take a few
days still; I'll also be sending along sections dealing in greater
detail with the negative aspects of the existing activist environment
that the system is designed to minimize, and likely one or two more on
related topics. Expect it all within the next week or so, and do let
me know if you have any initial questions about any of it. Still very
excited about pursuing this and look forward to our next discussion.


Introduction to the Pursuant System

Effective, information-oriented online activism of the sort sometimes
engaged in by participants/informal groupings of Anonymous, as well as
by Telecomix and an increasing variety of other entities, has from its
beginning been organized and carried out most consistently within the
medium of internet relay chat (IRC), a format, and thus centralized
within a series of IRC networks that necessarily take on a variety of
individual characters relative to the others. Other mediums - forums,
video conferencing sites, Skype, Twitter, collaborative pads - are
also used, either in conjunction with IRC or to its exclusion, but the
format of separate chat servers in which activists work within the
confines of one or more channels dedicated to varying purposes has
been by far more central to the work and interactions of the most
active participants since online activism came into its own in 2008.
Between its historical status as the venue of choice for the
technically-inclined and its relative usability in terms of
information sharing, collaborative work, and socializing, IRC’s
dominance among online activists is unlikely to be seriously
challenged within the next five years - especially since little overt
attention has been given to the fact that IRC is almost certainly not