Nearly
15 years ago I was asked to give a speech at a conference of Canadian
mainstream media types and 'content aggregators'. I quoted Marshall
McLuhan ("Information is always trying to be free") and told them that,
in 15 years, if they didn't change, they would be extinct. Specifically
I told them that they had to do more than regurgitate stories from the
newswires, and that if they wanted to be paid for their work they would
have to do something valuable -- either provide information content
that was actionable, or provide some service that added value. I
described seven ways to add value to information (see chart above):
Provide an actionable
alert about something new and urgent.
Provide an actionable
briefing about something new and important.
Provide the results of
a survey of informed people that has never appeared anywhere else.
Provide genuine
research that explores an issue in depth and gives readers/viewers a
thorough and useful understanding of the issue, and which asks
important and provocative questions.
Provide guidance on
what the readers/viewers should do about this information (something
more valuable than "be on heightened alert")
Provide a gauge or
measure by which people can self-assess what they know about an
important subject vs. what they should know.
Organize a real-time
event where people can engage with each other and with people who know
more than they do, about an important subject.
The media types laughed at me. They insisted "this is not what the
mainstream media do". I insisted that if that was so, they had better
start looking for a steadier job. As usual I was a bit ahead of my
time, but not by much. The mainstream media are drowning in debt and
losing readers every year, and their only answer is to try to find ways
to force us to pay for the same old content, what I call "worthless
news".
Bill Maher famously said "The
job of the media is to make
what's important interesting." And the above list provides seven ways
to do so. So why don't they do their job?
Well, for a start, it costs more to do these seven things, and media
companies are notoriously cheap (that's why, a century ago, media
barons were so wealthy). It's risky. It's hard work. It requires real
skills. And it requires the company to really know its readers/viewers.
The mainstream media fail on all counts. The alternative/indymedia, by
sheer force of numbers and the astonishing range of new technologies at
their disposal, are proving more capable of all seven ways of adding
value to information than the stodgy old media.
There are exceptions. Some local newsmedia do some excellent
investigative reporting of local issues (corruption, neighbourhood
pollution, local culture). The New Yorker provides great analysis on
important issues like government torture, American cultural phenomena,
and environmental issues. The NYT, in its weekend and special editions,
does some admirable long pieces and multi-part investigative series.
The Op-eds in both The New Yorker and the NYT are often insightful and
informative, not just empty rhetoric. So are many of the environmental
articles in Orion.
A lot of people are asking what will happen if most of the mainstream
media fold -- where will the raw 'news' that most of the new media
write about come from then? The reality is that most of the 'news' in
most of the mainstream media are not information items at all --
they're entertainment
items. In fact many of them are entertainment items about
the entertainment industry --
pure pap. Much of the 'news' comes from wire services that,
increasingly, use vast networks of freelance reporters, rather than
having their own staffs, so in the worst case after the mainstream
media's demise, freelancers (who already work for next to nothing) will
have to become part-time reporters, and earn their living doing
something else. In that case the raw news reports (most of which aren't
actionable in any case -- more worthless entertainment) will end up
being served up by millions of part-time freelance reporters, who will
provide their copy and multimedia free (it won't cost them anything)
just to see their name in the byline of all the narrowcasting blogs and
e-newsletters that will thrive once the newspapers and the remains of
real radio/TV journalism disappear.
A larger problem is that, even now, there is a dearth of skills at
doing the seven things that add value to information. Doing great
research is a rare ability, and insightful research is lost in oceans
of superficial, thoughtless regurgitation and academic esoterica. Few
people care to take the time needed either to do great investigative
work, or to think creatively and profoundly about what all the
mountains of facts really mean. And the short attention spans of most
of their potential audience is not a great encouragement either.
But it's interesting to see how, no matter how the intermediaries and
governments and corporatist packagers of drivel to dumbed-down
consumers obfuscate, trivialize, neglect and deny any obligation for
doing the real job of adding value to information (and making what's
important interesting), somehow there is always someone out their to
take up the slack. Government censorship has never been a match for
citizens' passion to know important truths. The education system can
never quite stamp out all the creativity and intellectual curiosity of
its inmates. And there is always someone out there prepared to risk
everything to speak truth to power, to the deceived, to the deniers,
and to the ignorant.
For all the worthless news served up to us by the dinosaur media
conglomerates, there is more useful, valuable information available to
us today than ever before, and the magical thing about it is that the
people providing it are doing it not for money or glory, but because they care about the truth.
And the more they inform us, against all odds, the more we come to care
too. And when a connected, organized group of people come to care about
something actionable,
watch out: there is no stopping them. It's the phenomenon that has
brought down tyrants and empires, and brought us just about everything
that is worthwhile in our struggling society.
As Margaret Mead said: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful,
committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing
that ever has.
In
Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student,
with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best
subject, around 80%. Aptitude tests suggested I should be doing better,
and this was a consistent message on my report cards. I hated school.
As my blog bio
explains, I was shy, socially inept, uncoordinated and self-conscious.
My idea of fun was playing strategy games (Diplomacy and Acquire, for
fellow geeks of that era -- this was long before computer games or the
Internet) and hanging around the drive-in restaurant.
Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to
pilot a program called "independent study", that allowed any student
maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that
was an achievement in those days, when a C -- 60% -- really was the
average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their
grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of 'brainy'
students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring
group (the 'keeners') who did nothing but study to maintain high grades
(usually at their parents' behest); but the other half were creative,
curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The
chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school
walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my
energies into self-study.
To the astonishment of everyone, including myself, I did very well at
this. By the end of the first month of school my average was almost
90%, and I was exempted from attending classes in all my subjects. I'd
become friends with some members of the 'clique' I had aspired to join,
and discovered that, together, we could easily cover the curriculum in
less than an hour a day, leaving the rest of the day to discuss
philosophy, politics, anthropology, history and geography of the third
world, contemporary European literature, art, the philosophy of
science, and other subjects not on the school curriculum at all. We
went to museums, attended seminars, wrote stories and poetry together
(and critiqued each others' work).
As the year progressed, the 'keeners', to my amazement, found they were
struggling with this independence and opted back into the regular
structured classroom program. Now our independent study group was a
remarkable group of non-conformists, whose marks -- on tests we didn't
attend classes for or study for -- were so high that some wondered
aloud if we were somehow cheating. My grades had climbed into the low
90% range, and this included English where such marks were rare --
especially for someone whose grades had soared almost 30 points in a
few months of 'independent' study. The fact is that my peers had done
what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and
write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My
writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in
the school literary journal. On one occasion, a poem of mine I read
aloud in class (one of the few occasions I actually attended a class
that year) produced a spontaneous ovation from my classmates.
The Grade 12 final examinations in those days were set and marked by a
province-wide board, so universities could judge who the best students
were without having to consider differences between schools. Our
independent study group, a handful of students from just one high
school, won most of the province-wide scholarships that year.
I received the award for the highest combined score in English and
Mathematics in the province -- an almost unheard-of 94%.
The experience spoiled me for university -- I graduated in two years,
which was all I could bear, by taking extra courses and summer courses,
just to get through it. And the independent study program, despite its
extraordinary success, was not repeated in subsequent years. Part of
the justification for the pilot program had been to free up teachers'
time to spend with students who needed more individual attention; yet
the dubious reason we were given for its cancellation was that "it was
unfair to deprive the average students of the presence and example of
the more outstanding students".
All this is by way of introduction to my thoughts on PS Pirro's
excellent new book
on Unschooling, which is in
effect what my belated "independent study" experience was an example
of. Here's an excerpt to give you a flavour of the book:
The
world of the classroom is so unlike anything the real world has to
offer – with the exception of other classrooms –
that kids can excel at school only to find themselves utterly lost in
the real world. Some people think this is the result of failed
schooling, but a few of us suspect otherwise. We suspect that
this sense of displacement and confusion is actually the result of
schooling that succeeds in its most basic unwritten objective: to keep
you dependent, timid, worried, nervous, compliant, and afraid of the
World. To keep you waiting. To keep you manageable. To keep
you helpless. To keep you small.
Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo,
dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system
of command and control. Those in power don’t want
you educated. They want you schooled.
It is not up to teachers or school administrators to figure out what
you should be or do. It’s not up to the State, it’s
not up to your guidance counselors. It’s not up to your
parents. What you do with your life ought to be up to you. What you
learn ought to be up to you. How you navigate the world and
create your place in it ought to be your decision. Your life
belongs to you. School does its best to disabuse you of this
notion. Unschooling celebrates it. Unschooling puts the
responsibility for creating a satisfying life squarely where it
belongs: in the hands of the one living it.
PS presents 50 reasons why schooling is, in every imaginable way, bad
for us and our society, and then 50 reasons why unschooling, which she
defines as "learning
without formal curriculum, timelines, grades or coercion; learning in
freedom" is the natural way
to learn. She argues that we are indoctrinated from the age of five to
cede our time, our freedoms, and what we pay attention to, to the will
of the State, so that we are 'prepared' for a work world of wage
slavery and obedience to authority. We are deliberately not taught
anything that would allow us to be self-sufficient in society. And in
the factory environment of the school, where teachers need to 'manage'
thirty students or more, ethics and the politics of power is left up,
from our earliest and most vulnerable years, to the bullies and other
young damaged psychopaths among our peers, to teach us in their
grotesquely warped way. As PS explains, it is in every way a prison
system.
Unschooling, by contrast, starts with the realization that you 'own'
your time, and have the opportunity and responsibility to use it in
ways that are meaningful and stimulating for you. When you have this
opportunity, you just naturally learn a great deal, about things you
care about, things that will inevitably be useful to you in making a
life and a living. Your learning environment is the whole world, and
you learn what and when you want, undirected by curricula, textbooks,
alarm clocks and school bells. You develop deep peer relationships
around areas of common interest, once you're allowed to explore and
discover what those areas of interest are. And the Internet and online
gaming allow you to make those relationships anywhere in the world, to
draw on the brightest experts on the planet, and to communicate
powerfully with like-minded, curious people of every age, culture and
ideology.
Many people argue that unschooling will only work for the very
brightest and most self-disciplined children. On the contrary, I think
we are all perfectly suited to unschooling until the school system
begins to beat the love of learning, the ability to self-manage,
curiosity, imagination and critical thinking out of us. By the time we
have reached the third grade it becomes much more difficult, and my
success in unschooling in twelfth grade was, I will agree, due to my
above-average intelligence and initiative -- most of my
intellectually-crippled peers just couldn't manage by that time without
the strictures they'd become accustomed to. They had long ago lost the
desire to learn, and to think for themselves.
If every child was unschooled -- given the chance to explore and
discover and learn in the real world what they love to do, what they're
uniquely good at doing, and what the world needs that they care about
-- then we would have a world of self-confident, creative, informed,
empowered, networked entrepreneurs doing work that needs to be done,
successfully. We would have armies of people collaborating to solve the
problems and crises facing our world, instead of going home exhausted
at the end of the day seeking escape, feeling helpless to do anything
that is meaningful to thems or to
the world. We would have a world of producers instead of consumers, a
world of abundance instead of scarcity, a world of diversity instead of
what Terry Glavin calls
"a dark and gathering sameness". We would have a world of young people
choosing their lives instead of taking what they can get, what they can
afford, what is offered to them. We would have a world of people who
are nobody-but-themselves, and who know who they are, and how to live
and make a living for themselves.
In the final part of her book, PS encourages us to check out
unschooling gatherings in our own area, and find out more, find out
what we can do to grow this important movement. She describes some of
the groups that are organizing travel adventures to enrich unschoolers'
experiences even further, and provides a host of resources for further
reading and exploration of the unschooling movement.
I'm growing increasingly convinced that if we have any hope of coping
with the crises that we face in this century, it lies in the
generations now in the "school system".
More precisely, it lies in getting them out of that system, and making
this the last generation of "schooled children".
Given the damage we've done to the world -- due in no small part to the
"education system" that has molded us -- damage that future generations
must reverse, it's the least we can do for them, and, at last, for
ourselves.
The
US Behaves Like An Emerging-Market Corporate-Crony Nation:
From a former IMF Chief Economist, in the Atlantic, a familiar story,
except that, unlike Russia and Argentina and other emerging nations,
the US is 'too big to be allowed to fail' (charts above are from this
article). This is essential reading, and the 'hopeful' scenario on its
final page is bone-chilling (thanks to Glenn
Greenwald for the link):
The
crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One
of the most alarming is that the finance industry has effectively
captured our government—a state of affairs that more
typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many
emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely
about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this
situation: recovery
will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy
that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true
depression, we’re running out of time...
"Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for
one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached
in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and
their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and,
most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country
rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling
shareholders."
[Other stories this week on the economic crisis and bailouts in
particular:
An
Economy Where Almost Everything is Free:
ABC interviews Wired's Chris Anderson on how in the next economy,
you'll give everything except premium 'wraparound' services away for
free, and 'make money from zero', and Jeff Jarvis on the transition to
Peer Production, "giving
up control of your customers"
(actually, giving up control of your enterprise to your customers).
Click on the 'Show Transcript' button to view the full text. Thanks to Cheryl
for the link.
Why
Sharepoint (and Other Overengineered 'Groupware') Almost Never Works:
Nancy summarizes the finding of just about every user I know that deployed
groupware solutions are always suboptimal.
Message to companies: Stop deploying these tools, and use simple,
ubiquitous, user-friendly tools for social networking instead.
Shhh!
Mexico is Not a Failing State:
Yeah, let's
not get Mexico mad at us by suggesting that it is,
or they might let loose their corrupt cops, gangster governments, drug
mafia, starving and angry farmers, and tens of millions of economic
refugees on us.
Obama
Plans to Make Canada-US Border Crossing Even More Bureaucratic:
For both our sakes, we should cancel
NAFTA now. It never worked,
except for the corporatists. And it's looking more and more, in
Afghanistan and elsewhere, as if Obama is just as clued out about the
futility of imperial wars and massively complicated "security"
processes and bureaucracies as Bush was.
From Jeremy:
"Foresight reads weak signals, not major reports - Arie de Geus said
'act with foresight:
act on signals rather than on pain'."
From Michael Wiik:
"We know our body is more aware of reality
than we are. It sees more than we see. It hears more than we hear."
From children's story
writer Philip Pullman: "We don't need a list of rights and wrongs,
tables of do's and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt
not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
Christopher
Allen has his
article on social networks and power
laws up today, and it's worth a
read. He makes the point that the size
of a group or network is only one
part of the social dynamic,
because not all members of a group are 'equal', and, particularly in
larger groups, a small proportion of members tends to dominate. This is
all according to the Power Law theory (Clay Shirky is most famously
associated with this), which is illustrated above: Most members of such
groups fall in the "long tail" to the right side of the curve; each of
them has relatively little influence on the group as a whole, but
collectively, because of their large number, this "tail" can be long
enough to "wag the dog" (if
they're sufficiently organized and enabled and inclined to do so).
What interests me, more than the non-egalitarian nature of such groups
(especially hierarchies), are the power
dynamics of groups that are purportedly
equal. We have been
conditioned by the multiple hierarchies in most of the groups we
participate in (including families, workplaces, and recreational
teams), to wait for 'leaders' to present themselves (or be assigned) in
the groups we are part of. We tend to find self-organization
opportunities (or necessities) bewildering -- there's kind of a tacit
"who's in charge" question floated, a 'holding back' waiting for
someone to direct the group.
It doesn't take long, however, with a bit of practice in Open Space or
in unorganized collaborative activities ("pick-up" sports, karaoke,
dances, and some collective work-bees), we quickly re-learn the art of
self-organization. Once you get used to self-organization, it's hard to
put up with 'organized' groups again, with their bullies, louder
voices, self-designated leaders/followers and wallflowers. So you get a
complex power dynamic working:
The people who are
used to holding sway (people normally in a position of wealth or power)
will naturally talk first, and start to display dominance behaviours
(talking loudly, interrupting, aggressive body language, pulling rank,
assigning tasks, making decisions 'for' the group)
The people who think
they have something to say but who are unable or unwilling to exercise
dominance behaviours to 'compete' with the first group will disengage,
and their behaviours will show it (looking away, multitasking, crossed
arms, moving towards exits, daydreaming)
The people who want to
curry favour with the first group will start exhibiting submissive
behaviours towards them (leaning forward body language, nods)
The people who are
overwhelmed and reluctant to contribute out of fear or shyness will
start exhibiting non-directed submissive behaviours (legs drawn up,
self-touching, intertwined fingers) and trying to decide who to defer
to; anything they are coaxed to say will be immediately discounted or
ignored
Some of these signals and dynamics are quite subtle, and many of them
are not even noticed by others. If you have come to prefer
self-organized egalitarian groups but work for an organization where
this is rarely or never authentically practiced (most hierarchies
pretend to have/tolerate egalitarian groups, but this is only for
effect, and such groups actually have little or no real authority),
this can be so exasperating as to make you culturally incompatible with
the organization -- you'll find hierarchical group activities so toxic
you'll quit, or your rancor or disengagement will get you fired.
My sense is that this cultural tension is creating a constant power
disequilibrium in many organizations:
People who are at the
top of hierarchies are finding it harder to attract and retain
sufficient obedient submissives and patient sycophant climbers
Hierarchies with too
many ambitious dominants are being crippled by more and more violent
dominance competitions (leading to high burnout rates)
Some former
egalitarians are being seduced by increasing power and wealth to behave
like, and finally become, top-of-hierarchy dominants
Mostly-egalitarian
groups are being exhausted by the need to constantly reprove/expel
incorrigible dominants and 'bring out' incorrigible submissives
Picture a society made up of equal numbers of chimps (hierarchy,
top-down organized culture) and bonobos (egalitarian, self-organized
culture). Yes I know these are somewhat exaggerated sterotypes. The
chimps had worked fine together when they were a monoculture, because everyone
quickly learned their place in the hierarchy and decisions were made
and followed accordingly. The bonobos had worked fine together when they were a
monoculture, because they worked out everything by consensus without
power dynamics.
But now they're mixed together, and worse, the older members of the
diverse culture are mostly chimps and the younger members are mostly
bonobos. The dominant chimps are unhappy because the bonobos won't
defer and obey. The submissive chimps are unhappy because it looks like
chaos -- no one is clearly in control, telling them what to do. And the
bonobos are unhappy because the dominant chimps are bullying and not
listening, and the submissive chimps are not participating and speaking
up.
In the real world, the power dynamics are at once much subtler and much
more complex. There is no truly egalitarian culture, and many of us
have blind spots as to our use of and acquiescence to power. Nor is
there any truly hierarchical culture -- we don't always defer to people
higher in the hierarchy (especially if there is no direct line of
responsibility or authority), nor do we always want or expect people
lower in the hierarchy to defer to us. Besides, position in the
hierarchy is usually subjective and context-determined. So in fact the
power dynamics and cultural tensions described in the bullets above are
ever-present in almost every group or organization to which we belong.
So 7 and 50 may be ideal sizes for Work Groups and Enterprise Groups,
but their success will be strongly determined by the cultural mix and
power dynamics of the group members. That's even true, the idealist in
me acknowledges with a sigh, when the Group is substantially
self-selected. We cannot know the personality and power culture of
people until we've worked with them in a variety of situations. And of
course, we don't even know ourselves perfectly, nor how we can delude
ourselves, or be seduced, to act in ways very different from those we
claim to espouse. Some of the constant power struggle will be going on
inside each of us.
BLOG Bottom-Up Democracy:
Selecting Our Representatives Face to Face
There
has been a lot written lately about the need to reinvent our economy
from the bottom up -- community-based natural enterprises owned and
operated by people right in the community, providing local products to
local customers, responsibly, sustainably, and powerfully connected,
with each community only exporting goods that are excess to the needs
of the community and importing what cannot reasonably be produced in
the community.
A major problem with this ideal is that our political and economic
systems are to some extent inseparable: As long as we have a top-down
political system whose officials are disconnected from local economies
and citizens and beholden to very wealthy and powerful multinational
lobbyists, that political system is going to be at loggerheads with a
bottom-up community-based economic system. This political system will
do everything in its considerable power to disrupt and destroy an
entrepreneurial economic system that would take away all its financial
funders' power, wealth and influence. In fact, our political system has
already and always done so -- trade regulations, legal
indemnifications, tax breaks, corporate 'rights' and massive subsidies
are all skewed in favour of multinationals and against the interests of
local enterprises, labour, the environment and local communities.
Many anarchists (that is, people who believe the less government the
better) espouse simply eliminating government power and infrastructure,
but that actually plays right into the hands of the corporatists, since
it essentially leaves corporations to govern themselves. You only need
consider Exxon Valdez, Bhopal, GMO, well-financed climate change
deniers, all the Bush war profiteers, and all the corrupt and
incompetent bankers that gave us the current economic collapse, to see
what deregulation and self-regulation produces.
A few political thinkers have suggested that we could replace
the current hierarchical political system with its precise opposite --
a bottom-up democracy where each community would pick its own
representatives from among people they knew well, those representatives
would in turn pick their representatives at the next-higher level, face
to face, and so on. This approach has some obvious problems, but let's
see how it might work.
Suppose we designed a computer to create two hundred Regions of
one-two-hundredth of the total number of eligible voters in a country
each, in such as way as to make them as contiguous as possible (i.e. no
opportunity for gerrymandering). So, for example, suppose the US has
200 million voters. Each Region would have one million voters. Each
Area in each Region would have ten thousand voters, and the Areas would
be computer-generated in the same way. There would be 100 Areas in each
Region, or 20,000 Areas in the country as a whole.
Now suppose that within your Area, comprising the ten thousand voters
in your contiguous area, you could self-select to belong, with anywhere
from 75 to 150 others, to a designated Community. You would have to
choose one, and if you didn't want to do so, you would be automatically
assigned, by the same computer program, a Community of the 100 people
in your immediate contiguous proximity. Every four years you would have
the opportunity to self-select a different community, or stay with the
one you were in (provided you were still living in the same Area).
Next, every four years, your Community members (75 to 150 people) would
get together and select a Community Representative (CR) from among
their own members. The one hundred (or so) CRs in an Area would get
together and select an Area Representative (AR) from among their
members. These CRs would also constitute the government of their Area.
The one hundred (or so) ARs in a Region would get together and select a
Regional Representative (RR) from among their members. These ARs would
also constitute the government of their Region. And the RRs would
constitute the federal government, and select a President or Prime
Minister and a Cabinet. Powers would be allotted to the
President/PM/Cabinet, to the Federal Government (the 200 RRs), to the
100 Regional Governments (each with 100 ARs), to the 10,000 Area
Governments (each with 100 CRs), and to the one million Community
Governments (each with 75-150 voters/members). Hopefully with no
overlap!
Could this work? Imagine if you could choose 75-150 people from among
the ten thousand voters living closest to you to constitute your
political Community. Can you imagine self-organizing this way? Can you
guess who you would choose as your CR? Is s/he currently an elected
official? Now draw an Area around where you live consisting of about
ten thousand voters. Who might the 100 CRs in this area select as their
AR? Is s/he currently an elected official? Could this whole system be
corrupted by party organizations preying on citizen indifference to
corral people into faux communities they could control?
Now consider that your Community (unlike your Area or Region) is made
up of people who are not necessarily living contiguously -- they are
people from all over your Area. What powers and authority, currently
residing with some anonymous group that just happens to live in the
same town or neighbourhood, would they have, and what kind of power
shift would this represent?
I have a pretty good idea who I would end up with in my Community. I
also know who would aspire to be our CR, and I think I know that the
person we selected to be our CR would not be one of those politically
ambitious members. It would, instead, be someone we trusted, someone we
would choose precisely because they lacked
political ambition.
Imagine if it worked like this all the way up -- CRs, ARs, RRs, all
selected because they were modest, trustworthy individuals. Would we
have a real democratic political system, immune to lobbyist influence,
party bullying, manipulation and power politics?
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY People
who have inspired or informed me frequently over the past few months.
For my full blogroll/online reference library, see
here. [* indicates
people I connect with in real time, f2f, via IM, Skype or SL chat.]
- original research,surveys etc.
- original,well-crafted fiction
- great finds: resources,blogs,essays, artistic works
- news not found anywhere else
- category killers: aggregators that capture the best of many blogs/feeds, so they need not be read individually
- clever, concise political opinion consistent with their own views
- benchmarks,quantitative analysis
- personal stories,experiences,lessons learned
- first-hand accounts
- live reports from events
- insight:leading-edge thinking & novel perspectives
- short educational pieces
- relevant "aha" graphics
- great photos
- useful tools and checklists
- précis, summaries, reviews and other time-savers
- fun stuff: quizzes, self-evaluations, other interactive content
Blog writers
want to see more:
- constructive criticism, reaction, feedback
- 'thank you' comments, and why readers liked their post
- requests for future posts on specific subjects
- foundation articles: posts that writers can build on, on their own blogs
- reading lists/aggregations of material on specific, leading-edge subjects that writers can use as resource material
- wonderful examples of writing of a particular genre, that they can learn from
- comments that engender lively discussion
- guidance on how to write in the strange world of weblogs
My book is available to US buyers
from the 
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
MY GRAVITATIONAL COMMUNITY
