remake fields with tools and provisioned spaces;
open the path to a more fluid, functional and open society;
design tools and services that integrate the field
- making us visible to each other in value and success.

However, the best way to fight is for communities to deploy their own networks and to interconnect them.

Here’s an excerpt from their Community Funding Statement outlining their experience of funding relationships:

• External funding means someone else decides your organization’s priorities: A funder’s priorities may or may not match the desires and needs of a community or help to fulfill an organization’s mission.
• Fund-raising is work: Funding and fund-raising requires skill and creates organizational overhead to seek and manage money.
• Funding obscures failure: Bad ideas can live on as long as they attract funding or make for good public relations.
• Funding is an exchange, like any other: Funding has strings attached, whether organizations choose to discuss them or not.
• Funders are often “trendy”: Especially in information technology, grants follow intellectual fads and forgo long-term perspective.

The entire document is certainly worth a read, and they are worthy of community support. If I had a chunk of cash on hand, I’d send it over no strings attached.

Recently, CityCamp was convened in Chicago. It brought people from all over the continent and from as far away as the UK. It also brought a lot of Chicagoans out of the woodwork. There are aspirations for a more locally focused event.

It’s time to advance a synoptic view of our efforts in Chicago …. we need to map our mutual efforts and when describing our separate efforts to each other and to others, to do it in a way that paints a picture of how we are connected.

Towards that end, I implore you to join with me in advancing Civic Discourse and Collaboration in the Chicago Region, utilizing the e-democracy.org platform and model.

There are several things that need to be done:

1. Sign up here at the Chicago Region Civic Forum (CRCF) and post a self introduction http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chicago
   Also, acquaint yourself with the general e-democracy.org model. Feel free to ask questions.
2. Regularly share news, events and ideas pertinent to the issues of our fair City, and respond in a civic spirit to the unfolding conversation. Make this a part of your routine. Put your issues on the table!
3. Actively invite others to participate. We need to take this to the streets.
4. Entreat public office holders, candidates and their staff to join the forum. Our voices will be that much more likely to inform public policy.
5. Help establish community and neighborhood level local issues forums for more locally focused topics. I’ll help any group that commits to this aim. If you are ready to take this one on… join the Chicago Team Coordinating Forum here: http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/chicago-team and let’s take a hold of our democracy.

Here’s something fun I invite you all to explore and join in with if you are so moved: http://ow.ly/11y6A

These short URLs tell you next to nothing so I’ll offer a little context.

There’s a group of people I know convened together in open space in the cause of the “metacurrency project (MCP)” … their cause is heavily shaped by the question of play. There are technical dimensions to their work, but their work is aimed at making new things possible for humanity. If I could, I’d be with them now. I’m with them in spirit.

One quick point of entry to their world view (and my own) is in the contrast between Scarcity and Abundance as dominant meme. This is about the attitude in which we engage each other more than about how many resources their are in the world at any given moment. (It’s also a question of not being dominated by this contrast of scarcity and abundance.)

Even accepting some finitude, or relative finitude: as human’s in the application of intelligence we are meant to conduct ourselves in a stewardly manner towards life… that is to say, our behavior should be generative.

So, even though this group is in part engaged in a technical question – building software and protocol under the MCP effort – the larger challenges are social and ideational: how we might live together… opening the space not to offer a final answer, but to situate us in generative spaces of inquiry and infinite play… where the burdensome quality of tasks slip away and joy comes to the fore and where we collectively and selectively form responses and rules with a freedom to mutually adapt ourselves and the rules.

On the voicethreads platform you can add your own voice and your own vision.

Chris views Chicago’s policy on the public selling of art as a matter of free speech. I won’t make his arguments for him — you can read up on his campaign on his blog. I will say that I find his argument compelling, and that our city would be better if these policies were overturned.

Recently Chris was ticketed for his activity of selling art without a vendor license, within the Loop area. On another occasion he was arrested and charged with a felony for taping his encounter with the police. There is a recent article in the Sun Times with a plethora of comments from supporters of the Free Speech campaign and decrying the misapplication of the eavesdropping law. I urge you to add your comments to the article, and to spread the word on this valiant campaign.

Here’s the comment I posted.

Mr. Drew is undertaking a heroic effort to make our city better – not just for Artists, but for all of us. I want my city to be a vibrant cultural center, with artistic endeavor at every scale. The art he offers for sale is of the most humble and accessible form.

Art indeed is speech, and if Mr. Drew’s account of Supreme Court opinion on Commercial Speech is correct, then it is clear that the city’s peddler law is overly broad and therefore unconstitutional.

If the law were really about public convenience (i.e. for pedestrian traffic, etc.) why would seeking donations rather than a sale exchange make a difference? I’m not up to speed on the legal distinctions or constraints against regulating these other activities, so I’d love to be informed. Perhaps the Sun Times could do a bigger story, exploring the irony of the eavesdropping charge, along with the contrasts of civil rights and free speech pertaining to different classes of behavior and different public spaces.

This of course brings to mind the absurdity of specially designated “Free Speech Zones” established during large scale events. That’s something else that needs to be challenged.

I do hope that local media will take up the broader issues, and do us a public service informing us on this important topic. Spread the word, for Free Speech, whether you agree with Chris or not, this deserves public consideration.

“I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of one’s neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

In this, a lesson for the Digital Excellence movement, not unlike Daniel Burnham’s call to make no small plans.

Just last night I watched him on PBS (my alma mater) on a Dublin pub crawl.

He was my English teacher at Stuyvesant. It’s probably the proudest thing I mention about H.S. I’ve been so pleased with his successful second act career and the honor he received as a result. But I have greater honor for his role as a teacher. We were so lucky to have him as our teacher – and we knew it. I was in his creative writing class, and was so glad I got in the class. I don’t know how I heard or how I lucked out.

I do know that my deeper awakening to writing can in part be credited to him and his teaching manner.