and as the project curator, what have you found? what methods of mediation were most effective? can you outline the model that you're finding most successful, or interesting, perhaps?
I'm afraid of, not yet, we have just launched the project. And I suspect, that whatever we happen to find out or fail to achieve, will be neither a perfect solution of the addressed problems, nor a bold prove of one "truth" or another about media. Personally I'm not interested in mega-prophecies, generalised diagnoses and search for salvations, but rather in escaping superimposed schemata, which often determine both our experience and attitude to media. In this sense Cool media hot talk show project in its essence is hands on experiment aiming at breaking certain conventional patterns, including the idea of participatory media platforms like the one which you outlined. Why for example "good" or successful participatory media should be necessarily related to communities building and establishing "positive" comfortable social relationships? I'm interested in how driving force of conflict of visions, interests and motivations can be used in developing participatory media scenarios aimed at production of polemical, or agonistic, inter/cross-cultural in a way public discourse rather than manufacturing communitarian consent or simulating multicultural quasi- dialogues in the "best" traditions of neo-colonialist paternalism (which mediatory institutions so prone to).
Mailing list, I find, to be a very successful public communication tool which, on the one hand, allows different modes of communication and participation (i also don't think that many announcements and lurking are bad or contra-productive), and on the other hand, through gathering people around common, shared, agenda it enhances the self- articulation, inclusion, cooperation. Syndicate/Spectre has done and does great job in this sense, it literally has played very important role in my life and carrier (can't miss here a chance to say Big Thanks to Inke and Andreas for keeping it up). But the strength of mailing lists is their weakness at the same time. They tend to homogenise discourse, naturalise promoted underlying agenda. I think, one of the reason why announcements dominate discussions on Spectre at the moment, is that quantity and disperse character of activities of subscribers, while being based on more or less the same premises, make it difficult to generate strong focal points for an engaging discussion outside of one's work, project..., which would not be read as self-promotion.
this is not a rant against wikipedia. it's a question about how the mediation works, and in what context it is most appropriate. systems like wikipedia seem dangerous tools for public dialogue because opinion parades as fact by virtue of the mass of contributors. it may be public discourse, or it may be a tyrany of the majority. i
Wikipedia is so far probably my favourite internet project. I see the positive sides of its "authority" in the very logic of knowledge production it proposes: open to contributions and questioning of those contribution, open-ended representation of knowledge which can be modified, distributed through numerous references, put in a relational on- and off-line context. Of course, it's not perfect. Why should it be? I go to wikipedia not to grasp a complete and right definition of a term, the pretence upon which traditional encyclopedias based, but to assist myself in contextualisation and re- integration of bits of knowledge I'm dealing with.
Btw, I have never had any troubles with posting announcements on Spectre from my subscribed address.
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