Commons
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Communities Notes
A winning non-strategy When I headed to the Bay Area in 1984, years of success and championships followed for the 49ers, the A's, and the Giants. When I came to Boston in '07, the Patriots went undefeated (except for the Super Bowl), and the Red Sox and Celtics won championships. Then the Pats and the Continue reading
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My Three Hooks
For many years, I attended an annual gathering of folks who wanted to save the Internet for future generations. Aspirational guidance was provided by the metaphor “big hooks:” ones meant for catching big fish. Since I was a kid, my life has always been about big hooks, especially ones that maximize personal and collective agency, Continue reading
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Wednesday, 25 June 2025
Toward new dances in the online marketplace. Dig CC Signals, from Creative Commons. It's good stuff. Go read it. Also this, which calls it "A New Social Contract for the Age of AI." Here's a .pdf presenting current thinking and planning behind the project. The CC Signals Implementation page is where the work comes closest to Continue reading
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Real Agency
I nominate agency as Word of the Year for 2025. I don’t nominate agentic, which is suddenly hot shit: See, agency is a noun, and agentic is an adjective. And, as Strunk and White taught us, Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs… it is nouns and verbs, not their assistants, that Continue reading
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What Works After a Disaster Happens?
When Hurricane Helene hit Western North Carolina, the Swannanoa River rose three storys above its shores, all but erasing the town named after the river, and leaving hundreds homeless. But the challenge for Swannanoa was not just recovery. It was regeneration. For that, Swannanoa’s residents formed new kinds of partnerships and problem solutions that could Continue reading
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How communities without one can build a local library
That’s what Charlie Schweik and friends will be talked about in the Beyond the Web series at Indiana University, hosted by the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. The salon was held at the latter for locals and on Zoom for the world, at Noon Eastern time on Wednesday, December 4th. (Upcoming salons are Continue reading
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Going Local With Open Networks
If you’re tired of moaning (or celebrating) the after-effects of the U.S. election, or how all of us seem trapped inside the captive markets of Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, and other feudal powers, take in a talk about something constructive that’s nowhere near any of that, but serves as a model for economies and Continue reading
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Think Globally, Eat Here
Fifteenth in the News Commons series. This semester’s Beyond the Web salon series for the Ostrom Workshop and Hamilton Lugar School at Indiana University is themed Think Globally, Eat Here—Small Solutions for Big Tech Problems. I will give the opening talk, about the News Commons (subject of fourteen prior posts here) at noon (Eastern) next Continue reading
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We Need Whole News
Third in the News Commons series. Journalism is in trouble because journals are going away. So are broadcasters that do journalism rather than opinionism.* Basically, they are either drowning in digital muck or adapting to it—and many have. Also in that muck are a zillion new journalists, born native to digital life. Those zillions include Continue reading
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We Need Deep News
First in the News Commons series. Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. — Thomas Jefferson News is the first rough draft of history. — Countless journalists “Breaking the News” is the title of Continue reading
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Is Mastodon a commons?
Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this: Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon Continue reading