This lecture by Clay Shirky at Etech, a recent O'Reilly conference in San Diego, is really excellent and concerns how you manage web software that allows some degree of free posting by the public. He has some really really good ideas, many of which are very relevant to how Indymedia Centers manage themselves. Especially important is this concluding remark he makes:
Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.
(via José)
Posted by steev at Marzo 16, 2006 07:23 AM