[wsfii-discuss] WSFII-Calendar & NewsBlog :-)

[Julian Priest]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:40:15AM -0800, Jo Walsh wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 11:08:53AM +0100, Gregers Petersen wrote:
> > A new year does as always bring new aspects of everyday life - and 
> > the everyday life of "WSFII" is not different from this :-)
> 
> i absolutely love the new design and think the effect is great.
> thanks very much to anyone who worked on it.
> 
> BUT.
> 
> I do not like the repeated use of "we" one bit, or these references to

When it was written the Memorandum of Understanding now on the front
page of the site had a very defined "we" which consisted of the group
that spent the week developing the ideas of wsfii as expressed in the
MOU and Arun's closing speech.

http://www.okfn.org/wsfii/wiki/Wsfii2006Organisers

We (the members of the organisers workshop) wanted to make a strong public
personal commitment to making the wsfii series happen and that's why
it is framed so we-ishly. The members of the organisers workshop had a
lot of conversations about people taking responsibility for things and
then doing them..

We (tmotow!) did invite everyone at wsfii to adopt the MOU and sign up
to it so maybe all we are missing is a mechanism for specifying a
larger we?

Maybe we could hack your registration script into the page and have a
sig list of people/orgs who agree with it there?

Then the 'we' could be more 'those who can attach themseleves to
globally promoting free information infrastructures' - if you can live
with the term and the MOU and want to participate then you do.

> "the coord group" that do not identify the self-appointed organisers. 
 
Yes that could do with clarification. I take the point that the mode
of organisation of wsfii.london wasn't with a central commitee
deciding things, but more a provision of a space and an open
invitation to fill it.

That said there was at least one international meeting before the
event and in fact a fairly tight 'coord' group of people who did stuff
to make it happen.

Perhaps we should frame the coord group as made up of anyone who wants
to put time into organising wsfii events, and who takes the time to be
a member of the coord mailing list where adminsitrativa can be
discussed - and that has an open membership based on activity?

> who are we? 
> i cannot speak for you. 
> you cannot speak for me.
> can you really speak for we?
> 
> when someone i do not know says "we",
> i listen extra cautiously.
> 
> if we are, then so are they.
> does that need to be?

Good point, there's an oft abused power relationship in saying we,
which is at the base of representational democracy as a political
structure for instance. I'm trying to track down a possibly
misremebered Kiekergaard aphorism along the lines of;

'Governance is being able to say we'

but can only find this references to the dangers of another we namely
'The Media' which makes a similar point about hiding behind
abstractions..

"What rules the world is not exactly the fear of God but fear of
Man. Hence this dread of being a single individual and this proneness
to hide beneath one or other abstraction, hence the anonymity, hence
the editorial 'we' etc." - Soren Kierkegaard 'The Present Age'

We (tmotow) did talk about not wanting to be a representative
based process with delegates coming to speak _for_ communitites and
taking binding decsisions back to their communities in the manner of a
traditional summit process. More to provide a space for representing
activity and exchanging ideas and practices.

I still think there has to be a plausible 'we' for wsfii to make sense
and happen even if it is only agreement with the term 'free
information infrastructures'.

That term was intentionally loose to provide a space to explore
crossovers between disciplines etc.. but the danger is that if it is
too loose wsfii looses meaning as a grouping, no one will want to feel
part of it and so won't take the time to organise anything. If thats
the case we are better off with a narrower focus.

> it is possible to take any 'we' statement and rewrite it in a way
> which, for me, helps clarify what message is being sent. talking to
> "you" has a definite appeal. Perhaps that's just another kind of
> rhetorical trick, but i think it's a less slick one. 
> 
> If you ever got into 'e-prime' - a version of english which doesn't
> use the word "is" in a definitive way - i found trying to stay e-prime
> a fun and instructive exercise, both in being more considered about
> what i said, and in being able to deconstruct the statements of others.

Nice idea - it would be a piece of cake in Tegalog with no verb to be,
and a pain in Spanish with ser(essence) and estar(condition) and whole
tenses based on shades of possibility - you'd probably spend your
whole life in the subjunctive mood. 

http://www.usna.edu/LangStudy/spanish_subjunctive.html

> I strongly feel that Wsfii should be "we-prime".

Maybe it's as simple as using explicit 'we's' ie signatories, and
avoiding unquallified representation all using constructions like - 

'as part of the wsfii series my organisation wishes to propose'

more federal than representative kinda thing.

> what do you think?

only January 5th and already political/semantic distinctions ;)

chrs

~/julian

'Q. How many voters does it take to change a light bulb? 
 A. None. Because voters can't change anything' - David Graeber