[hackers] Theme underway
I'm working on a theme called simpledean at http://www.siprelle.com/sandbox . As you can see, I don't even have all the parts where they need to go yet, but it's a start and I have to go to bed. My little girls are running wild... Lynn S.
RE: [hackers] Re: Legal Issues and dodo birds
Thing is, I recall Zack's first posts regarding this vision on the coffeehouse list. He was carrying on about decentralized organic networks and reeds law and so forth... I could hear the eyes roll. But he got my attention because I see the cosmos as an organic, adaptive, interconnected thing. A complex open self-organizing system so to speak. And the thing about open systems is that you start with some very simple ground rules and then you get out of the way. It'll make it's own rules from then on and if you try constrain it with boxes, or walls or straight lines it'll either overwhelm you or it'll die. But what it won't be is the same. As Zack and I have already discussed, I've been carrying a similar vision for a while. I've thought about it enough by now to realize that we get there, not with something overnight/revolutionary, but with small steps. Yes, in helping Dean we have to adapt to the practical issues of a transitional campaign (i.e. transitional between traditional politics and our stake in something more like the emergent democracy that Joi et al have been trying to describe and work through). So I say we do what we have to for Dean, and that might mean compromises, but we also think about a more (inherently) independent set of initiatives as well, which can be spun off from the same vision. There are already some other initiatives where these kinds of tools would be a good fit, but first things first? best, Jon
Re: [hackers] Code, Code, Code.
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:37:06PM -0400, Britt Blaser wrote: Why would we hinder our work by speculating on activities that our group as a whole will never pursue? My snap reaction to that is that it isn't all that useful to build a car until you have (or know you will have) roads to drive on. Given the target market, certainly *someone* has to be thinking about it, and according to the website, a4d was that someone. Could someone elaborate on the distinction between a4d and h4d, cause maybe I missed it... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Floridahttp://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c
Re: [hackers] Re: Legal Issues and dodo birds
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 02:43:07PM -0500, zachary rosen wrote: Astute observations CMR - I don't disagree with a word you said. If we are official, then we have sold out. That being said I remain almost completly unconcerned with the problems of such a close association. All through the process of deciding how official our organization would be come it was made clear that it would be a conscious choice, and to knowledge there was not one objection. Yes there are very real conflicts with this development community having such close ties with the official campaign, but in my opinion the problems are almost completly mitigated by the fact that this project is completly open source. Or maybe not. I think that, as I noted in my immediately previous email, delineating between a4d and h4d is probably something close to critical here. *I* tend to think a4d might get embroiled, but that h4d probably shouldn't, and that that split will make lots of people lots of happier. But what do *I* know; I just got here. :-) * Yes, HQ is very concerned about the name hack and in my opinion it is very probable we will change our name because of it. The fact that a _presidential campaign_ - the official campaign - is willing to embrace and endorse an open source development project is so outragously cool that name of the working group working on the tools isn't so important to me personally anymore. Besides, i would rather win this election than save the word hack. Speak for yourself. :-) * Correct, the fact that the development community is becoming somewhat official spells out conflict with the abilities for the communities using our software to voice their opinion. However, HQ has already stated and I truly believe that communities using our tools will remain unofficial, and thus unrestricted by the official campaign. There are very reall PR and legal reasons why this must be so, beyond perceivable conflicts between control over the campaign message. That doesn't seem to coincide with what I think I've heard Z say here in the last 24 hours. Now, I understand that Burlington probably doesn't *know* how to approach this; no one has ever tried, I don't think, to intersect something as free-wheeling as open-source with something as tightly-controlled as a presidential campaign. And yes, we can't afford to make as many mistakes here. And yes, we need strategic thinking. And yes, (alas) they're likely to have to come from the political side of the house. I think, as much as anything else, the job over here in hackland is going to be to get the questions down into single sentences without losing anything... At least, that's what I've done for clients for about 20 years, and it seems to work well. If I can help... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth[EMAIL PROTECTED] Member of the Technical Staff Baylink RFC 2100 The Suncoast Freenet The Things I Think Tampa Bay, Floridahttp://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 OS X: Because making Unix user-friendly was easier than debugging Windows -- Simon Slavin, on a.f.c
Re: [hackers] Re: Legal Issues and dodo birds
I was under the (perhaps mis)apprehension that all this had been hashed out with the hackers, but it sounds like it may not have been. Of course it's a tough choice. You guys have two choices, really: (1) work w/the campaign (2) work outside the campaign Hmmm... I was going to respond to some of the other messages, but I think CMR already hit all the important notes. So I'll talk simply about working with/without the campaign. I don't think it's as simple as that. Here's the deal as I see it. Hack4Dean as an organization is highly informal.In many ways, there is no us. We have no leaders. We have no qualification for membership. We are an ad-hoc collective of individuals motivated by common cause, but we are by no means an official organization. It's quite unlikely that we will en masse agree to work under or be independent of the campaign. There are also many facets to what we envision, and it's similarly unlikely that all those facets would fall under direct campaign purview, or that the campaign would even want them to. For example, the tool (the kit) we're building will not be owned by the campaign. It must not be. It will be a free-standing unit of open source software. Much of it is copyrighted by the original Drupal people and the new stuff belongs by default to whoever coded it. There's nothing for the campaign to gain from owning this part of the movement, by owning the kit. Where it does make sense for the campaign to step in and own things is on the meta level: the ideas of the Visable Volunteers (MetaDean Talent) and a Dean Space central aggregator (MetaDean) are both good ones for the campaign to run. The campaign can also promote the kit much as it does meetup, and of course once the network is up and running the campaign will be a major source of content. You at HQ are right to be cautious about how all of this is implemented, about how the Sites will be hosted and who will offer support. But as I see it, it's really not something you want to try to control. On the one hand you won't be able to -- the genie is already out of the bottle as they say -- and on the other hand, the more controlling force you exert, the less participation you will have. Maybe the campaign needs to have a party line on these issues, a stance they're sticking with; something that will legally protect you from whatever any individual might attempt to do with the products of our collective efforts. Individuals can either toe that party line (and work under the campaign) or remain independent, which means they are not allowed to coordinate. I see the main advantage of working with the campaign being, from a political point of view, that the work you are doing can not only win the presidency but transform politics. Because there is a driver behind it -- Dean -- it will grow exponentially. I'll have to respectfully disagree with you here, Zephyr. As much as I like Howard Dean and want him to win the presidency, the truly transformative power of what we're doing comes from it's ability to be picked up and used by any campaign by any party anywhere in the world. If it's just a DeanTool this will not happen. It will need to die (and hopefully be reborn) on election day. If it's something else -- the virtual town hall -- then it has a life and an impact that reaches far beyond Decision 2004. In my vision, Howard Dean will not just mention Meetups on the stump, but setting up Dean Community Sites. I really believe this is the next phase of the revolution -- and I'm sorry if you're feeling some of the constraints, but I hope you decide that they are worth it. I think we all share this vision, but at the same time I strongly doubt the campaign exercises any direct control -- legally or content-wise -- over Meetup. Similarly, IMHO our effort needs to be fundamentally independent from the campaign for a time (as it has been for the past months and functionally still is now), until it is mature enough that we (the hack4dean working group) can release our code. At that point, the campaign is free to pick up the ball and run with it, and various elements of this group will be free to do the same, to pursue whatever other dreams they have for this movement. We're not there yet. From my recollection, this project has always taken a longer view than the Dean campaign. When I first started, there was significant doubt that Dean would even make it to the GE, yet I/we continued to work because we felt our project had more to do with the spirit of the Dean campaign (participation, empowerment, community) than with the actuality of it's success or failure. Even if Dean didn't make it, I thought, our project would help carry his energy forward. Now with Dean as a frontrunner, we run the risk of turning too much in the opposite direction. To my mind, it's of the utmost importance that the effort of developing this kit be an all-volunteer Free software effort. Once this
Re: [hackers] Code, Code, Code.
Britt said it much more succinctly than I did. I agree with this 100%. cheers -josh Gentlepeople, 1] We are developing a toolkit using open source tools. Free. As in speech AND beer. 2] The toolkit will include the simplest, most portable installation process we can provide. 3] Nodes built with the toolkit will encourage users to spin off new nodes fractally. 4] Anyone who wants to use/steal the tools to use for any other campaign will do so. 5] The Dean campaign is not a user of the kit and not even a beta tester. Some of us will be. The campaign is ONLY the first beneficiary of the first beta nodes. 6] The business of Hosting has nothing to do with our effort. After the kit is done, anybody can do whatever they want with it. If anyone on this list wants to host the kit and make FEC filings (or not), that's their business. It is not the business of this list, which is firewalled from hosting issues in fact, in our process, in our interest and under the law. 7] Dialogue expended on hosting issues is stolen from coding. 8] Lawyers can't hack code - they're way out of their depth. Hackers can't lawyer - Ditto. Zephyr wants us to work with them as they introduce us to concepts beyond our experience, like flyering and tabling and canvassing. Things we need to know to help our future users (perhaps including individuals in this list) to serve one campaign or another. They want to be able to refer people to tools they've helped envision. Why would we hinder our work by speculating on activities that our group as a whole will never pursue? IMHO, Britt Politics is the art of controlling your environment. Participate! Elect Howard Dean President in 2004! http://www.outlandishjosh.com/politics/dean/
RE: [hackers] Dean Media Network
Zach - I think you're thinking that the DMT is going to be the central data storage site for all Dean related media; that's not really the purpose of DMT. Their entire purpose is simply to allow for seamless access to widely distributed content across all the media nodes - and at a variety of locations, not just on one centralized server. - Jason -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of zachary rosen Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 4:09 PM To: Ka-Ping Yee Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Dean Media Network Well... I am all for starting simple, and scaling things up. But I have to say - i don't like this design much at all. We are designing this network to be distributed for a reason, now would be a good a time as any to reiterate them. * Edge to Edge principal: Distributed networks are much more flexible and powerful than centralized ones, period. * Reed's Law: The more content is tied to communities the stronger the commmunities are. Reed's law tells us that having many satellite communities within a large social network you will a vastly more powerful network. * It's sexy: Nobody has created a distributed web network like this before. We get to be the firsts. It is an incredible opportunity - why cop out now? Yes, the role of tracking the metadata for the media on the network really isnt that big of a task, so having a central DB do the task rather than a distributed DB won't kill the whole project :) But i completly disagree with your observation that a centralized system is much easier or would save us a lot of time. Every node is going to have to host the media anyways. This means every node will have to have a utility for uploading and pruning media. Then it makes very little sense to me to not also assign the metadata to the content on the nodes as well and just aggregate like the rest of the network content sharing functionality. I think DeanMediaTeam is great. They are fulfilling a very important task. There is a very large need for a community organized around the creation of dean media, and it think they will do a hell of a lot for this campaign. I also think they would be the perfect choice to maintain the global media repository that tracks all the media on the network. I don't think they should be the central authority, spoke-and-wheel, broadcast-center to ALL network dean campaign media. -Zack On Wed, 23 Jul 2003, Ka-Ping Yee wrote: Hello all, I had a discussion with Alison about the media module recently, and we talked about a story for media syndication that i'd like to air here. I am also working with the Dean Media Team (http;//deanmediateam.com/), which is coordinating creative talent to produce content in a variety of forms (videos, signs, business cards, and so on). At the moment, i see myself as the bridge between H4D and DMT; i don't know of anyone else who's deeply connected to both projects. There's a convergence we're approaching that could either turn into a conflict or into a nice synergy, and i see my role as trying to help things work out smoothly. With the Dean Media Team, i'm developing a database to gather URLs to the media, with two main functions: (a) to enable people to find relevant media in formats and at mirrors that work for them, and (b) to give people a place to work collaboratively on media projects. (You may have seen the rough SQL schema i posted earlier on this list.) Those two parts -- metadata and collaboration -- constitute the technical work for the DMT. The metadata half will store things like category keywords, file formats, sizes, bitrates, and URLs to media. Sound familiar? That is just what we were talking about building for the media module. So we can save ourselves a lot of work by using this metadata database. (In fact, duplicating this work would probably generate harmful confusion.) It seems to me that the DMT picture consists of metadata and collaboration, while the H4D picture for media is about metadata and syndication. The metadata piece is the common part. The interesting conclusion is that we don't really need to build anything special in order to syndicate media. I propose that we just use the existing article syndication functionality. What the DMT database will give us is a persistent URL to use to refer to media items, so viewers can go to that URL and find an appropriate format and mirror. Once we have persistent URLs, then all you need to do to syndicate a media item is to simply post the URL of the media item in the text of an article. Then any stuff we do for articles (syndication, rating, etc.) will also apply to media posts, for free. I like this solution because: (a) It avoids conflicts between two projects trying to do the same thing in different ways. (b) It decouples the two parts: the metadata part doesn't depend on the syndication part, because it's only
RE: [hackers] Dean Media Network
Bittorrent might be a bit above the understanding of the general user (ie, Jane). While I think the theory of Bittorent is great, the execution of it leaves something to be desired, at least at this point. ;) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeff Kramer Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2003 5:06 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [hackers] Dean Media Network Well, let's see if we can reach agreement on just one key issue: Jane is attending a meetup for teachers tonight and wants to show them a video of Dean giving a speech on education issues. She wants to play it on her iMac. The meetup is in one hour. She has DSL. Where does she go to find it? -- ?!ng Has anyone thought about bittorrent? You could have a central tracker, but if I digitize a speech, I can throw it up on bittorrrent, submit it to the tracker, somebody verifies that that's what it is, and then it gets swarmed around. Not great for streaming stuff, admittedly, since it gets downloaded in random chunks. -- Jeff Kramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.keika.co.uk/
[hackers] And now for something completely different...
I'ld like to thank everyone for their work on different themes. I've loaded Dean01 and bluesky into my sandbox, along with my own theme. Feel free to come by and compare the three themes with somewhat live data. I've also set up a poll, http://ahynes1.homeip.net:8180/drupal/index.php?q=node/view/20 in my sandbox. It's purpose is to get a better view of the age distribution of Dean supporters. If you haven't voted, please do and encourage others to do so. Yesterday, I ended up in a chat using a web-irc tool that indianafordean has up. It turns out that indianafordean is using Drupal. You should check out there site at http://indianafordean.org/ and check out their chat at http://indianafordean.org/chat I mentioned Hack4Dean a bit with them in my discussions yesterday. I got the impression that they are watching from a distance. Hopefully we can help them and they can learn from us. As a final note, I will be around this evening, but I am leaving early tomorrow morning for Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, where we will be listening to some good music, and doing some flyering/tabling (depending on how things work out). Because of this, I shall be unavailable for the next several days. Aldon
