A compilation of governance tools that
might deserve a programmer's attention
The Revolution will be Engineered
- Assertion Processor - RSS feeds of facts that matter
- Constituents' Issues Assessment and blog archives of comments
- Explicit vertical and horizontal linkages among like-minded individuals
- A citizen-based Administration elected by a citizen-based campaign
- Citizen-based (not faith-based) programs for training, jobs & mutual
support
- Peer-to-peer vigilance through our personal sensors and shared video archive
- of terrorism
- polling place coercion
- brutality by armed and unarmed bureaucrats
1. Assertion Processor for the Great Centrist Party - Part D
Danny Ayer to the Rescue - The W6 Vocabulary & the QuestionGarland
Ben Hammersley connected the
dots between my Assertion
Processor plea and Danny Ayers' brilliant QuestionGarland solution.
First, Danny Ayers' concept:
Think of something. Call it an idea. Draw a circle,
and label it with the name of that idea. From that circle draw 6 radial
arrows. Label them who, what, where, when, how, why. At the end of those
lines write an appropriate label : i.e. for who write the name of a person
or group. Etc etc. That's the Question Garland.
...I reckon if this vocab is used somewhere like a weblog, then you're
halfway to the 'Assertion Processing' Ben and Britt have
been talking about. E.g. (quoting Britt) "Yesterday he
pointed out an important truth: no one's going to be elected by hating
Bush." In the first part of the sentence there's a link to a statement
- woo-hoo! a URI:
http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/12/14#powerFromThePeople.
In the second part there's a proper noun, 'Bush'. So if we already had
Dubya in our person table, we could automatically extract the simple statement:
#powerFromThePeople w6:who #Bush
It doesn't capture the
human nuance, what's actually being asserted, but the basic 'related' is
there.
Aha! who, what, where, when, how, why! The
prime directive(s) of journalism. When Ben and I first discussed
the Assertion Processor at the Intermezzo Café in Philly, we too felt that
the whowhatwherewhenhowwhy architecture was a guide to the answer, but we
were thinking less specifically than Danny, and therefore less usefully,
IMHO.
Commenting on Danny's structure, Ben remarked:
Continuing on with the Assertion Processor idea, I think Danny’s
contribution may have cracked it for me with his introduction of the W6
vocabulary.
To recap: Britt
wants a system to aggregate assertions about
political figures, in order to create a database to, well, in the old
phrase, fact-check their
asses. I
posited the way to do this would in in RDF, naturally, and that there
are really three different levels of information we can retrieve from a
news story:
1. Data about the story itself, as a separate
object. Its author, its
date of publication and so on.
This is usually supplied, or could be without
fuss, automatically at the point of creation.
2. The Who, Where and When
of the story. These are either proper nouns (George Bush, Washington,
Republican Party), or are roughly parsable dates
(September
11, 03/04/76, Last Tuesday)
These could be retrieved automatically with,
among other things, fancy regular expressions. Shouldn’t be too
hard, anyway.
3. The Why, What and How of the stories.
Tricky. Why, and How, I would
suggest, are too complicated a set of potential actions, with too many
ways to express them in natural language, to make
their collation worthwhile or efficient. In other words, let’s
leave them out and let the reader do some work.
And here we are, back at the beginning again. The complications
of our shared frailty causes us to seek truth when there is none (except
among the prematurely convinced, but that's another rant). I agree with Ben
that there is no truth to be discerned here, but the utility is lost if we
don't encourage articles to assert the truth or biases they think they're
exposing.
I can't imagine some grand namespace in the sky that reveals
the "truth" to us by showering us with the inconsistencies of our enemies.
The point here is that there are no external enemies. As Pogo said so long
ago, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
It's an assertion processor! There
is no way to mediate in the questionable processes by which biased authors,
editors and reviewers populate assertion feeds to sell their biases to
the
rest of us. Just as there's still no consensus on Sir
TBL's dream of a semantic
web to deliver us from ignorance (I know I got that wrong, but you get
the drift).
Who predicted Google? How about this new Vivisimo's
results for Assertion
Processor, which discovers the themes embedded in results themselves
and organizes the results according to that discovered "namespace"? See how
it discovers that I've been blathering on about assertion
processors, leavened by Ben
Hammersley's treatment whereby he applies
actual knowledge and perspective to the problem, which has never slowed me
down! (Be sure to click Vivisimo's [preview] link
in each result for an instant glimpse of the found page).
The Proof is in the Put-In
So I'm less focused on the establishment of an orderly system
than I am on the set of tags to encourage liars to streamline their biases:
None of us is to be trusted, my precioussss.
My hopeful cynicism suggests
that
we embrace and extend Danny Ayers' QuestionGarland (who,
what, where, when, how, why) with some additional tags to let
the expositors sell us more efficiently on the outrageousness of their
assertions. What is there about some otherwise lifeless lump of ASCII text
that causes it
to
be worth
the author's effort? Without some animating force, it's not worth our time
either. Those elements of outrage must include the kinds of data that excites
people at a cocktail party or sells books: sex and money and intrigue:
- <moneyPaid>
- <payor>
- <payee>
- <scapegoat>
- <wretchedExcess>
- <cynicalGreed>
- <whiningVictim>
- <statuteViolated>
- <wrongedSpouse>
- <fiduciaryViolation>
- <rampantConflictOfInterest>
I'm kidding around a little but not a lot. We are drawn to
the media based on its power to push our buttons. There is a characteristic
to outrage as there is to beauty and grace. Just because they're hard to
describe
is
no excuse to abandon the quest.
These are the elements that journalists strive for even as
they attempt to push their master
narrative of omniscience and objectivity–the
dominant myths of the press, as Jay
Rosen is so masterfully teaching us.
Jay, could you put an oar in here? I'm sure there's some small
set of tags that captures the traditional six Perry
White questions included
in Danny Ayers' QuestionGarland but also feeds out the crucial elements of
cynicism, greed, Pollyanna optimism
and self-victimization that marks our delusional responses to life's challenges.
12:02:58 AM 
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