Chris Heuer's Insytes

I said that about a week ago when a friend’s sister had not shown up for a party she was expected at and then was not heard from again (despite numerous calls) for several days. She was starting to worry about her, and where she might be and if everything was ok or if she has been in an accident or something terrible happened. Once she finally got her on the phone after some prodding from me, her sister was pretty nochalant about the whole thing – it was then that I realized – anger is a better emotion than worry…

It is an interesting question I think – what are you mad about? when you look out at the world around you, is it the environment, your industry, the government, your neighborhood, or an issue of great personal importance? What systems do you feel are broken that could be made right through the use of Web 2.1/Open Web/Social Media technologies? There is a huge opportunity to work together with the open source community to help non-profits and people with ideas cross their traditional organizational boundaries and connect their knowledge to make things right.

Chris Messina is working on a big part of this with a project called CivicForge that will be a big step forward towards connecting those Noble Pursuits with people who have the technology skills to make it happen. Since we are moving towards collaboration with BarCamp in this regards, I thought it might be best if we spend the first half of the next event BrainJamming in small groups figuring out what is really making us angry. Then we can spend the second part of the day talking about available technologies and open source approaches that can be key contributors towards making it right. When we leave the next BrainJam, we can all blog about what makes us angry (start that now), what is needed, the insytes we developed together and how we would like to go about solving that problem. By doing this we are communicating to the open source community our ideas for projects that need their support. Closing the loop from problem to solution.

It doesn’t always have to be this way – we will make a difference.

I am still thinking about doing 1on1 BrainJamming around passions – perhaps these emotions can be used the same way in this regards – being passionate about solving the problem because you are mad as hell may be an even more powerful way to think about this.

This approach does more than support our broader goals of making the emerging media and community tools more accessible to a wider array of people. It is almost like demand aggregation for CivicForge – a call to arms across the communities of poeple who care as well as the organizations. A way to bring them together across all boundaries except the one that unites us all.

This approach will also support what Jeff Jarvis is doing with Recovery2 and what TechSoup is doing with so many important projects like NetSquared (which you should all attend on Tue8nov2005:6-8pm). It is quite amazing because we are all working towards the same goal, and are able to do so in the commons that is tagging, blogs, wikis and issue focused communities.

There is no more time to worry – it is time to get angry and time to do something about it to make it right.

Technorati Tags: ad-hoc collaboration, brainjamming, brainjams:3dec2005, brainjams:bayarea, CivicForge, NPTECH, open source, Recovery2, The Open Web