Alan Gutierrez

From Instanley Great by Steve Levy, a story about the phrase coined by Steve Jobs, “Real Artists Ship”. The project mentioned in this article is the Macintosh.

Jobs’s speeches were punctuated by slogans. Perhaps the most telling epigram of all was a three-word koan that Jobs scrawled on an easel in January 1983, when the project was months overdue. REAL ARTISTS SHIP. It was an awesome encapsulation of the ground rules in the age of technological expression. The term “starving artist” was now an oxymoron. One’s creation, quite simply, did not exist as art if it was not out there, available for consumption, doing well. Was Engelbart an artist? A prima donna — he didn’t ship. What were the wizards of PARC? Haughty aristocrats — they didn’t ship. The final step of an artist — the single validating act — was geting his or her work into boxes, at which point the marketing guys take over. Once you get the computers into people’s homes, you have penetrated their minds. At that point all the clever design decisions you made, all the twists and turns of the interface, the subtle dance of mode and modeless, the menu bars and trash cans and mouse buttons and everything else inside and outside your creation, becomes part of people’s lives, transforms their working habits, permeates their approach to their labor, and ultimately, their lives.

But to do that, to make a difference in the world and a dent in the universe, you had to ship. You had to ship. You had to ship.

Real artists ship.

This is the definition of prudence for the knowledge worker.

I’ve created a sign up form for CHAT. This sign up form is based on software that I’ve developed, primarily Stencil, for those of you who want to look behind the sceens. For those of you who don’t, consider this a general purpose nonprofit or civic organization registration program. Please, help by suggesting features, and reporting programs in the comments of this post.

When I look at the Think New Orleans site statistics, traffic always plummets on the weekend, relative to the week. About a fifth of Wednesday traffic. Wednesday is always a busy day. My guess, the Internet is still an office tool in New Orleans. Also, who cares about the network when the players are away? There will be no messages from the city, state, feds, school boards, or planners.

People don’t care about your splashy intro, logo.

They don’t want your identity.

They want your knowledge. If you have a nonprofit that is worth it’s salt, one that has information that is worth sharing, you need to put it where people can find it.

If not, fine. A nice flashy splash screen is good.

It tells us immediately that there is nothing there.

I am creating weekly email newsletter for Think New Orleans. This is in addition to the subscribe by email option on the Think New Orleans weblog. It is a traditional newsletter. It arrives in email, on a Monday morning, to tell a person what’s going to happen in the coming week.

• Subscribe to the Weekly Think New Orleans Newsletter

This is going to cause some confusion. When people get my weekly newsletter, they are going to want a newsletter just like it for their organization. (I am working on a service that will publish a newsletter from a weblog. A real email newsletter, by selecting a specific tag, or tag feed.)

I avoid the term with neighborhood groups, because they are starting with nothing, or a poorly maintained web site. They eed a simple way to publish. A web site where they make frequent updates that look like email messages sounds simple to them. It is like a “newsletter”.

If I were to say “blog”, they might think of MySpace or personal diaries. They might search the web and come across an article like the following…

The second thing blogs do is - to invoke Marx - seize the means of production. It’s hard to underestimate what a huge deal this is. For as long as journalism has existed, writers of whatever kind have had one route to readers: They needed an editor and a publisher. Even in the most benign scenario, this process subtly distorts journalism. You find yourself almost unconsciously writing to please a handful of people - the editors looking for a certain kind of story, the publishers seeking to push a particular venture, or the advertisers who influence the editors and owners. Blogging simply bypasses this ancient ritual.

It creates more work. I’ve had people say, “I don’t want to blog”, or I’m sorry, “I can’t stop thinking of it as something that my son does”.

Some of the organizations for which I’ve established web sites, are further down the road, however.

Bill Knecht and Paul Schafer both know what a blog is. Bill Knecht already runs a very succesful email newsletter. He follows the ettiqutte of infrequent messages, and regularly scheduled announcements. They understand the concept, without quoting Marx. They were enthused about creating the Eracism Blog from the outset.

Thus, it’s not a hard and fast rule. The model for blogging is “conversation”. “Conversation” is the model for ERACE New Orleans. It is a good fit.

Other organizations are not looking to converse on the web. They converse in person. They want to use the web to publish and coordinate. For them it is not siezing the means of production, it’s posting the next meeting agenda.

If you build it, they won’t come. They can’t. They are on the phone to contractors. They are out at the neighborhood fesitival or a neighborhood meeting. When your focus is the people that surrond you physically, going online to communicate with them is not only counterintitive, it’s counter-productive.

California can throw up a web site, and if, out of billion users you get a hundred thousand, you can make bank. Our objective in New Orleans is dissimilar.

Here we are drawing from a pool of a million, few of whom have ready Internet access, many have no computer at all. You cannot count on these people to self-orgainze. Social networking software is designed to organize people around interests or personal objectives, not around neighborhood and civic objectives.

We cannot count on people to self-organize online. It won’t work. I hasn’t worked. It is not working.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that a smattering of NOLA bloggers and LiveJournal comunities amounts to government oversight or neighborhood planning.

The goal it not to build an online community.

The goal to reconstruct a familiar form offline community more commonly known as a city.

A neighborhood web site is no more an online community, than a neighborhood newsletter is an onpaper community.

Went back over the Eracism webblog adding the mix of extensions and services implement the civic blogging platform specified by Think New Orleans.

Over at Think New Orleans, I’m discussing my civic blogging platform. I’ve created a new weblog for Morwen Madrigal, otherwise known a Gentilly Girl, a community organizer from Gentilly.