Slashdot Mirror
Hemos & CmdrTaco @ O'Reilly P2P Conference
Well, we try to avoid posting stories about Slashdot, but I figured at least a couple of people would want to know that we'll be speaking at the O'Reilly P2P conferences. For those of you registered, we'll be speaking at the collaborative journalism panel along with Dan Gillmor (Hi Dan) and Dave Winer (Hi Dave) and moderated by Katie Hafner from the NYT (can you fix that required login thing?). Anyway, it's on Thursday, Feb. 15, 11:15-12:00, in San Francisco. Come on by if you are attending the conference.
I've been fascinated by the peer-to-peer concept for a long time. Like the open source movement peer-to-peer offers every member of a community the chance to contribute to that community the best way they know how. I love to see sites like slashdot, kuro5hin, and metafilter all thrive, it's encouraging to know that people will contribute to a project for no other reason than for the sake of contributing. It's a shame I live on the wrong coast to attend this conference.
Hierarchical business models are clumsy beasts. To have an editor, five assistant editors, a handful of associate editors, a copy editor, a content editor, and a fleet of executive assistants to service them, all just to publish a small document or website is ridiculous. Perhaps some of you aren't yet too old to have forgotten your high school newspapers. Perhaps you were even a part of yours. Weren't they just terrible?
My school is very uptight about controversial opinions being expressed among its students. It offers us an opinion board and a newspaper but it censors both on a very regular basis. The student newspaper is essentially nothing more than a vehicle of propaganda. The opinion board has been partially reclaimed by a band of students who regularly point out the idiocy of the administration and the poor treatment of the students. But still, our administrative staff doesn't like it. They talk amongst themselves of "those unappreciative kids" in the halls.
Many of the frustrated voices in the school community, student and teacher alike, are reaching their breaking point. I've been working hard over the past several weeks to lay the groundwork for a new student newspaper. One developed by and for the so-called counter-culture of the community. I put together an initial team of people whom I believe will best be able to launch the project and since then we've been working on developing a publication and distribution model.
We have no official backing from the school, obviously, and our resources are limited to our home PCs and printers. There is no hierarchy, the entire publication is built on user submission. That means that we have gone out and asked certain individuals in the school community to contribute articles and media to the first edition. It is hoped that after the paper premieres there will be enough interest in the project to generate submissions without our having to beg for them. You see then, that the submission model is very similar to that of slashdot or kuro5hin. A team of moderators would then sort through the submissions and choose the best articles for the text publication. In addition to the text publication there will be an online supplement in which all submissions, even those not included in the text document, will be published.
To print over four hundred copies of a five to ten page document is no small task. We have adapted the idea of distributed processing to this problem. Rather than force one individual to spend the time and money to print four hundred copies we will instead have each contributor print twenty or so copies and then compile each set of twenty into the final group of hundreds.
We have no choice but to distribute the document peer-to-peer. Any other distribution would most likely be against the rules of the school and, of course, we want to obey the rules. This means that everyone, moderators and contributors, will handout copies to people in the school eventually reaching near complete distribution.
And so, after that long-winded and, I'm sure, entirely uninteresting preamble I actually want to pose a question to the slashdot community. What problems do you foresee a project like this facing? What hurdles have other projects based on user submission had to overcome? Is there a significant difference between user submission in real space as opposed to on the web? Is this project even feasible at all? We're really going at this by the seat of our pants, please tell me if you think we're also going ass backwards.
yay for ultra-mega-mega long posts,
-zak
Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.
1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?
No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.
I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.
Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.
2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.
There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.
As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.
I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
Regardless of what anyone's views of what Mitnick did or didn't do, there is much truth to him saying that the entire first section of her book (I assume you're speaking of Cyberpunk) was by and large potentially libelous material, speaking of incidents like they were the absolute truth when, in fact, they were, at best, third hand information. How would you feel if you were awaiting trial and someone labeled you as the "Dark Side Journalist"?
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC