Escapable Logic

We like stories of ordinary heroes because they tell us heroism is within our grasp as well. (Why we aren't instead shamed by their implicit denunciation of our own failures to be heroic is beyond me.) But, while stories of the humble becoming heroes may appeal to us, a life like Parks' is all the more admirable: She didn't postpone heroism, waiting for the moment to happen to her. She became a worker for civil rights in a time and place where that took daily heroism.

The possibility of our own hero's journey is the most common camp fire tale, whether you're a hobbit or a 2nd class bus rider like Rosa Parks. As Dr. Weinberger stresses, everyday heroes are almost an insult to our personal complacency, and the more ingrained our passivity, the greater the insult. Unfortunately, most of us don't get it. Now that we've succeeded in building a culture of convenience and timidity, the notion of heroism is even further from our possibilities. But shame is dissatisfaction on steroids, so maybe there's some hope.

This event won't have ripple effects. The consequences will be tidal: on transportation, on agriculture, on lumber and other supplies, on retailing, on churches and on citizens across the country who will need to take on the burden of caring for refugees and helping others start new lives.

Katrina also forces us to face a subject even Democrats have stopped talking about, although it lurks beneath everything: class. When the dead are counted, most of them will have been poor. Count on it.

This thing is a huge reset button on politics as usual. Along with everything else.

Few of us imagined that there wouldn't be a lasting emphasis on fixing the problem: on September 1, we couldn't conceive that the Katrina calamity could fade so quickly from our national consciousness. The White House probably understood that better than we do.

Like it or not, Katrina's behind us, morphed into political maneuvering, fat contracts and trailer cities. The rapidity of the onset of our amnesia troubles me and so I've been thinking a lot about passivity in the face of important challenges. What Doc assumed - a tidal wave rather than ripples - did indeed flood our collective consciousness, for about a month. But then, unexpectedly, those of us with high hopes for a Web 2.0 solution to the Katrina disaster and its continuing diaspora, moved on to other matters. That's the real reason I posted my Clock is Running article a week ago Saturday. Most of us, myself especially, are unskilled at acting on a predetermined schedule, and we often don't recognize the promises we make in passing that are taken more seriously by others than by us. I believe that some proper community tools can help, but they haven't been built yet.

This is human nature. We all donated spontaneously so there's no shortage of public and private Katrina funds. And we've got a wiki, established on October 2 to support the Recovery 2.0 meeting that Jeff Jarvis convened at the Web 2.0 Conference on October 6. At that meeting - 90 minutes that I flew cross-country to attend - we were all galvanized by the quality of the attendees and our collective energy to make a difference. There were the guys from Yahoo! who spent 2 weeks at the Astrodome helping the Red Cross with their systems and data needs. There were several bloggers, like Brian Oberkirch, whose sites spontaneously collected reports from all over the country - not just names like the scores of survivor lists, but real clearing houses. As several have noted, Craig Newmark and Michael Powell and Stowe Boyd were there.

There's just one problem: the meeting, as evidenced by our wiki, hasn't catalyzed the grass roots activism we'd all like to see in response to the tragedy.

The Metrics of Engagement

For the last three years, I've been studying the mechanics of grassroots organizing: the Dean campaign in 2003, Spirit of America in 2004 and Andrew Rasiej's campaign this year. The elements that seem to matter are Membership, Conversation and Money. Here's what we know works:

I think our hope for Web 2.0 is that this is a spontaneous, viral process, but I'm not convinced. Whether it's Howard Dean or George Bush or Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there must be a combination of a compelling issue, online leadership, member outreach and a viral, visible conversation. I have great hope for the Katrina-based outrage to help us form Governance 2.0, but I now know that the current mechanisms for self-forming grass roots activism are inadequate.

If we don't form around the Katrina disaster, what will we form around? I sensed a slow uptake on the Recovery 2.0 wiki, so I spent a lot of time this week on a best-efforts analysis of its activity: creating an Excel model to count a new page as a full edit, with fractional credit for minor additions and corrections. The model's not perfect, since it's tedious to perform wiki forensics, but it conveys the idea.

Ross Mayfield generously set up Recovery 2.0's free Socialtext wiki on 10/2. The following chart (history) shows the contributions by "insiders" and the nascent Recovery 2.0 community. Greg Burton, the valued admin and chronicler of the effort, should be considered the wiki's sponsor - the chief content guy who exhorts the community to get on board. He made 18 entries through our meeting on October 6th, and 26 people had registered within a week (though several registrations include useful info):

If you visit the wiki, you'll see that there was some anticipation for results from an nTen meeting in Washington, DC on October 17 as the logical next step, but there've been no entries since 10/13 except for 3 comments and 2 minor edits to pages that Greg set up on 10/2.

This is disturbing because the wiki is the only home I know of for the Recovery 2.0 initiative, and it's basically dead. Frankly, it's not likely to revive because, no matter how irritating it is for Web 2.0 junkies to acknowledge that this little effort has stalled, it's not enough of an irritant to inspire the required level of dissatisfaction. And if we are not thoroughly dissatisfied with our progress, there will be none.

This is what I was whining about in my Clock is Running post and what Brian Oberkirch was seeking in his plea to the citizens of Web 2.0, Time for Web 2.0 Developers to Swing for the Fences? I speak with Brian a couple of times a week, as we try to lay the foundation for fixing the Gulf, and I know he feels even more frustration than I do at our Katrina amnesia. After all, he's down in Slidell, surrounded by the destruction and by his homeless neighbors. Appropriately, Brian posted that message at his blog, Like It Matters - Wherein we daydream about marketing and technology that treasures relevance. At Doc's invitation, Brian is chairing a panel at the Syndicate Conference, on Dec. 13th in San Francisco: Emergency Syndication: Lessons of Katrina. We'll be discussing the spontaneous responses to the Katrina effort. We'll be joined by Zack Rosen, a leader of the Katrina People Finder project, which was certainly the most effective Web 2.0 response.

But in some ways, it seems as relevant to discuss our collective quiescence in the second month after Katrina. Consistent, persistent action is the key to real change, if change is our purpose here. Online mechanisms that create persistence is the only way to counter the myriad resources that reinforce the status quo, powered by big bucks, political power and inertia. The "Status Quo" has a plan for the future, supported by people who are paid well to show up every day to sell us their vision and to minimize realities they resent. Without a countervailing balance of power, Web 2.0 activism will go nowhere.

As both my readers know, I've been working this year on a collaborative tool designed to forge a shard of dissatisfaction into a sharp sword to slash through any Gordian knot that a group might want to explode. Our toolkit is positioned to lift up the desperate Katrina diaspora, which is why I'm working with Brian Oberkirch. However, like the rest of the erstwhile Recovery 2.0 participants, our development team of ordinary people has been unable to maintain extraordinary focus. We are dedicated, but we too have suffered from the perverse triumph of business as usual impeding progress that matters. Like so many first worlders, our team is entirely too satisfied with itself to apply the intensity that great work requires. We'll get there, but 2005's lost opportunities cry out for a higher level of dissatisfaction than we've been able to master.

The Genius of Dissatisfaction

The paper is full of interesting stuff, but this observation near the end, about how to motivate yourself to tackle difficult challenges, jumped out at me:

A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous dissatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the dissatisfaction from self worth -- otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

"Generate enormous dissatisfaction" with one's work -- well, gee, that's something most ambitious people know how to do, one way or another. But such dissatisfaction quickly blossoms into neurotic self-doubt. Ergo Kay's careful recommendation to "decouple the dissatisfaction from self-worth": that's genius.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said that "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Perhaps the same applies to Kay's opposing emotions of dissatisfaction and self-worth. And why not? Few of us are geniuses and all of us - genius or not - are subject to Sturgeon's Law, that "90% of everything is crap."

Which reinforces Blaser's Second Law - There's no such thing as a resourceless task: people and companies dream up projects and make promises all the time, but most of us fail to commit the resources to do what we represent. It's because most of us are full of crap most of the time and most of what we do is crap. As John Robb pointed out recently, also quoting Rosenberg's Alan Kay link, "Enormous dissatisfaction with your own work is almost a prerequisite for the attempt."

Maybe Microsoft's slogan should have been, "What are you dissatisfied with today?"

Why Aren't We Ashamed?

Reset, Interrupted

The Metrics of Engagement

The Genius of Dissatisfaction