That’s the flyer for the first salon in our Beyond the Web Series at the Ostrom Workshop, here at Indiana University. You can attend in person or on Zoom. Register here for that. It’s at 2 PM Eastern on Monday, September 19.
And yes, all those links are on the Web. What’s not on the Web—yet—are all the things listed here. These are things the Internet can support, because, as a World of Ends (defined and maintained by TCP/IP), it is far deeper and broader than the Web alone, no matter what version number we append to the Web.
The salon will open with an interview of yours truly by Dr. Angie Raymond, Program Director of Data Management and Information Governance at the Ostrom Workshop, and Associate Professor of Business Law and Ethics in the Kelley School of Business (among too much else to list here), and quickly move forward into a discussion. Our purpose is to introduce and talk about these ideas:
- That free customers are more valuable—to themselves, to businesses, and to the marketplace—than captive ones.
- That the Internet’s original promises of personal empowerment, peer-to-peer communication, free and open markets, and other utopian ideals, can actually happen without surveillance, algorithmic nudging, and capture by giants, all of which have all become norms in these early years of our digital world.
- That, since the admittedly utopian ambitions behind 1 and 2 require boiling oceans, it’s a good idea to try first proving them locally, in one community, guided by Ostrom’s principles for governing a commons. Which we are doing with a new project called the Byway.
This is our second Beyond the Web Salon series. The first featured David P. Reed, Ethan Zuckerman, Robin Chase, and Shoshana Zuboff. Upcoming in this series are:
- Nathan Schneider on October 17
- Roger McNamee on November 14
- Vinay Gupta on December 12
Mark your calendars for those.
And, if you’d like homework to do before Monday, here you go:
- Beyond the Web (with twelve vexing questions that cannot be answered on the Web as we know it). An earlier and longer version is here.
- The Cluetrain Manifesto, (published in 1999), and New Clues (published in 2015). Are these true yet? Why not?
- Customer Commons. Dig around. See what we’re up to there.
- A New Way, Byway, and Byway FAQ. All are at Customer Commons and are works in progress. The main thing is that we are now starting work toward actual code doing real stuff. It’s exciting, and we’d love to have your help.
- Ostrom Workshop history. Also my lecture on the 10th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize. Here’s the video, (start at 11:17), and here’s the text.
- Privacy Manifesto. In wiki form, at ProjectVRM. Here’s the whole project’s wiki. And here’s its mailing list, active since I started the project at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center (which kindly still hosts it) in 2006.
See you there!
Nice article