a) trust; b) wikis; c) the ten thousand; d) the heebie-jeebies; e) trust; f) transferable experiences; g) democracy

a) Trust

Stuff, especially stuff today, sometimes quite unintentionally subverts; turns upside down; terrifies; or, alternatively, with the former (perhaps) as backdrop, leaves one utterly disinclined to even take a look.

As if one was being persistently informed of impending disaster, only to put one’s head in the sand we all return to one day.

That’s me now, shrugging a tad.

I’ve written long and hard in other forums about the tiresome tendency of this latterday century to monetise everything we do: from easily clicked “likes” and rather more carefully crafted tweets (or not) to our sometimes very personal and even medically-orientated datasets – the bigger the org in question, the more it is tempted to make money out of us.

Sometimes without really notifying us of this temptation.  Or, maybe, instead, via a careful dressing-up of true motives.

But what if we could do almost the same – only shifting the frame for all our benefit?

What if everything we did online belonged to us – in perpetuity … everything from knocking photos about the ether and joyfully grinding out grand or small literature & knowledge (either way, in all cases, it’d be a matter of perception) to participating in both social and sociopolitical debate with people whom society used to consider our betters, and who were now rapidly achieving the democratic status of firmly polite and civil peers.

And not in a socialist, statist, corporatist sense … no, something quite different …  as individuals and as communities linked (not tied) together in common interest.

As discrete and quite separable individuals inside communities of shared goals.

To trust this vision is to take a leap of faith.

I accept this.

But it’s not a leap without prior experiences.

b) Wikis

And actually, this is no revolution, however revolutionary it may appear to be tinted as: journalists, students, teachers, lawyers, learners of all kinds, professions of every nature – all the aforementioned and billions more access the online encyclopaedia information & communication exchange we call Wikipedia, every day of their our lives.

So what is a wiki?  As someone said to me recently, Wikipedia has actually done a disservice to the possibilities that wiki software presents us with.

We all equate, I am sure, wikis with encyclopaedic treasure-houses of knowledge.  Those broken links.  Those effervescent accuracies, viewpoints and audit trails of disagreement.  Temporal resolution; permanent flux.

For me, and my mindset, a mindset you might not share, this is wonderful stuff.

But I appreciate how it might scare too.  Or simply make you say: why do I need this when I’ve got Twitter and Facebook?

For me, first and foremost, a hyperlocal wiki, a city wiki, a wiki as I am suggesting over at chester.website, is ownership of intellectual property at a massive and tiny level: both societal (ie belonging to the city and its people in question) as well as individual (ie one person’s endeavour and democratically reserved (copy)rights).

I’m standing between two waters, as the Spanish might say.

A damn difficult place to stand.

But the new – the brand new – always, only ever, comes out of the noise to be found generated by bringing different places up against each other.

So how do I see wiki software in hyperlocal terms?  As follows:

• A knowledge warehouse (as already acknowledged)
• A permanent, examinable and contrastable audit trail of local thought and its development
• A respectful repository of local identity, which strives – in its ideal state – to give voice to everyone who wishes to participate
• A way of owning the means of production – yes, I know this sounds socialist in the extreme, but what do traditional free-market economies and their companies acquire if not their means of production? 🙂

c) The Ten Thousand

Adrian reminds us of the limitations that the needs of true democracy place on the size of what we might term communities that remain useful to people like you and me.

Imagine what you could achieve if ten thousand people could own their own hyperlocal wiki, of the characteristics I mention … imagine how you might then create precisely the conditions that a civil and civic local democracy required to sustain itself permanently into the future.

OK then.

Let’s keep that thought alive – and now see where it leads us.

d) The Heebie-Jeebies

So those of you in Chester don’t have heebie-jeebies just contemplating the impact this might have on the city and its surrounding political and social ecosystem, let’s just say, and accept, that chester.website is a proof of concept – and could be transferred or ultimately located, focussed, uprooted to anywhere.  Let’s say it’s there to prove a point.  Let’s say Chester is just a proving-ground.

If we can think clearly, sincerely, frankly, without feeling fearful for what we already do, have, treasure and possess, isn’t it an idea worth contemplating beyond the context of simply hyperlocal?

If we can contemplate an enterprise (doesn’t have to be commercial, mind) where ten thousand people live, work and relate under the same fairly grand roof, why not presuppose we could do the same with ten thousand people living and working under their own roofs – but intimately connected by lightweight technology such as that which wikis provide?

Corporations would become intrinsically home-based institutions.

Micro-biz might even have the opportunity to forge close and long-term support networks whilst maintaining the freedoms they’ve always treasured – yet without some of the insecurities they’ve always had to fear.

e) Trust

The big stumbling block?  Trust, I think.  Don’t you?

And that, dear friends, is a common thread throughout IT’s short and sometimes bleedingly multifarious histories.

As well as a problem for our current economic dynamics and their related political actors.

We so yearn for trust; yet our societies so easily forget how to generate it.

No wonder Western civilisation’s levels of mental ill-health are rising so dramatically.

That’s me, shrugging a tad – again.

Let’s imagine.

f) Transferable Experiences

Imagine if chester.website‘s opportunities (ie the concept!) could be made to work for any community which required the trust-generating factors of transparency, auditable and trackable thought, reliable communication and an ownership of everything which located its democratic hub & nexus – as well as its expression of the same – within proper, real, extraordinarily ordinary individuals who were given the opportunity to express their voices, whenever they saw fit and whenever was seen to be fitting, to 5000-10000 peers of equal validity and extraordinariness.

And just imagine if the ownership of all of that belonged – in that perpetuity and forever I’ve already mentioned – to those 5000-10000 equally valid and increasingly communicative peers.

Not peers as in the House of Lords; peers as in the House of the People!

g) Democracy

In a way, democracy renewed – not by policy wonks, though.  Not by political professionals.  By people who, every step of the way, learn to take decisions about what they want to own, how they want to own it and who they want to own it for.

In a way, then, instead, a democracy renewed by using the very connectors (the backbone of the Internet, the interface of the web, the smartphones in our pockets along with their inimitable apps) we currently lazily contribute to in our fuzzily defined liking, tweeting and photo-posting; but using them in such a way that we benefit both ourselves and – directly – the communities we decide to settle in …

So wouldn’t you like to own a piece of the action for a change?

Wouldn’t you like to be able to define how everything civil, civic, creative, economic, local and hyperlocal grows and develops?

And if not actively participate, at least be able to easily check, at any time, what those whose hands it was in were actually doing with our economies, communities and people!