Remixing is as old as art itself. As digital technologies expedite the transition from passive consumers of text to an engaged, read/write culture, we explore the pedagogical benefits of the remix in relation to literacy and tackle the thorny issues of plagiarism and illegal appropriation.

I worked with Leif Gustavson, a professor from Arcadia University, who teaches pre-service graduate students studying education. His students regularly use MixedInk to craft collaborative reflections on their field work, remixing their unique ideas into one collective piece.

Leif started our EduCon conversation with an experiment in collaborative writing: the exquisite corpse. The exquisite corpse is a game that originated with the Surrealists in the 1920s, and, as André Breton describes, is a “game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations.” The game was named when Surrealists first played the game and came up with this phrase: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Reflecting on the exquisite corpse, Breton says: “What excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone…”

We played this game during our conversation at EduCon, resulting in a wonderful (or shall I say exquisite) set of exquisite corpses. Check out a few of my favorites below!

1.
A trampoline of brain sparks
Staring into the abyss
Ring fingers
Panicked
Snow crunches beneath me
I want more cake
Chocolate, melted and sticky
Groceries on the mind
Sense of wonder
Time
To engage completely
The unexpected fate

2.
Time stood still
Cold nose wet paw
A warm buzzing
Singing loudly
Yellow sunshine
Dynamism between rabblerousing
A little too close for comfort
Another knuckle sandwich
Rabbit poop
Group effort, one mind
Nice!

3.
Pressured body
Hidden by an open window
Missing myself, feeling old
Stinky grids
Through the wind
Showing creativity
Leaping off twitter cliffs
Tiny little redundancies
Stillness

4.
Falling lightly
Patience
Snowflakes dancing underneath
It became so important
A vast! Below!
Lithesome beauty
Feeling relaxed with green
With fallen leaves crunching beneath my feet
Quiet
Change the channel!
Breath of air
The pen explodes on paper

Pretty impressive! When we started the process, I noticed a bit of nervousness in the group. Very quickly, though, the process erased the stress, since we shared responsibility for the end product. The weight of writing was broken down into something manageable – and fun. In the end, we were struck by the surprising cohesion of the poems we created – what Nicolas Calas described as the “unconscious reality in the personality of the group.”

MixedInk enables exactly this sort of interaction – by encouraging people to build upon each other’s ideas, it removes the barrier of getting a first draft on paper. With MixedInk, original versions are just a foundation, the building blocks for something new. As one of Leif’s students said after using MixedInk, “In the end, you have this amazing explosion of thoughts and ideas that belong to a group of people.” I love how the exquisite corpse process leads to the same end – what another student described as “creating new meaning through the mixing of everyone’s words.”

Many thanks to Leif for helping us discover MixedInk’s surrealist roots!  If you have a collaborative writing experiment for us to try, please leave it in a comment.

If you’re going to be there, come visit on Friday, July 18th and Saturday, July 19th, and stop by our exhibition booth!  These sessions are just the beginning of what will be an ongoing, public process that will continue in the weeks following the conference.  The final, collectively written platform will be presented to the DNC before the convention in Denver.

If you want to be involved from the beginning but won’t be at NN, sign up at MixedInk.com, and we’ll email you the URL as soon it’s launched.

We’d like to thank the folks at Netroots Nation and wmtriallawyer for helping to organize this!

This effort builds on a growing movement to use online tools to make our government more transparent, representative, and accountable.  Both Barack Obama’s campaign and the RNC have launched exciting initiatives allowing people to help shape their platforms.  Using the Barack Obama website, Democrats can organize “Platform Meetings” in their communities, during which they can discuss and then submit policy “planks,” or one- to two-sentence policy suggestions.  These planks will be reviewed by the team writing the Platform and some will likely be incorporated into the final document.

The Republican Party also has an exciting grassroots-driven platform development effort underway.  The site highlights a range of issues and enables people to submit policies and comments that will be considered by platform authors as they prepare for the convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Also along these lines, 21st Century Democrats wrote their own Alternative Democratic Platform, which is currently being circulated as a petition.

We are thrilled to see the platform-making process opened up to the public – and proud that MixedInk will be the platform used by the Netroots.  MixedInk was built to enable exactly this kind of participation, and we look forward to seeing the results of these incredible people-powered efforts!

Don’t forget to sign up if you want to be notified when you can help create the Netroots platform.

It was especially appropriate that Meetup identified this as a theme, being huge innovators in the world of local, do-it-yourself organizing. For anyone who isn’t familiar with it, Meetup is a website with an elegantly simple premise: let people post an idea for a community meeting about anything – whether it’s saving the earth, starting a business, or knitting – and allow interested people in the area to attend. In hosting this event, the NY Tech Meetup (run by Scott Heiferman, the co-founder and CEO of Meetup) aimed to bring kindred spirits in the online world of organizing together.

The seeming legendary Clay Shirky was there to chat about Here Comes Everybody, “a book about organizing without organizations.” He made an interesting presentation, mostly about how much easier group action has become – and how often it’s happening these days. The simple fact that people with something in common can now find one another is a huge step. Philosopher William James once said “thinking is for doing.” Clay says “publishing is for acting,” meaning that publishing is increasingly used to gather and coordinate people.

Check out this excerpt from Clay’s book about Meetup here. He makes the point that Meetup groups can’t be organized top-down – being self-organized is key: “Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.” The book is brand new and promises to be an inspiring read. Update: Check him out on the Colbert Report…

A bunch of interesting online innovators presented at last week’s Meetup, but I was most excited about ThePoint. The Point is a brilliant new website run by Andrew Mason in Chicago that’s based on a few basic principles: (1) People want to stand up for themselves and their beliefs (2) standing up for yourself is usually a waste of time, because you’re just one person and it’s hard to be heard, and (3) people don’t want to waste their time. So he figures that people are generally being pretty rational when they skip out on standing up for themselves.

Here’s how his site solves the problem. Say you love KFC, but you want them to treat their chickens a little better. You don’t want to boycott the place by yourself, which would certainly deprive you of that deep fried goodness without much chance of sending a strong message to KFC. So you head to ThePoint, sign in to the “Tough Love for KFC” campaign:

“KFC, your chicken is so tasty. Your biscuits are so buttery. Your colonel is so regal. You’re hard not to like. But maybe you could be just a little nicer to your animals?”

And you pledge to stop eating there if KFC doesn’t adopt the suggestions of their animal welfare board only if 1,000,000 join the movement.

Now you know you won’t be forgoing those tasty morsels for naught. You can assume your actions are sure to mean something when pooled with a million like-minded souls. So ThePoint allows you to be sure the conditions exist for your actions to be meaningful.

But this tool is not confined to social movements – you can use it to make anything happen that requires cooperation. For example, you can use it to organize your neighbors to build a new community garden, only if 1,000 of them pledge $10 each to pay for it. Pretty cool. PledgeBank, a UK-based site, provides a service that’s similar to ThePoint.

This whole people-powered online revolution thing seems to have caught on in the news this week as well. There’s an interesting article in the Guardian, “People power transforms the web in next online revolution.” Like Clay’s book, the article looks at how we are going to organize ourselves “without the trappings of traditional organizations.” It talks about flash mobs – when a group of people gathers somewhere to do something random together, like smile in October Square in Belarus. Flash mobs have affected elections in Spain, Philippines, and South Korea. In China, flash mobs are staging campaigns despite 54,000 cyber police, and it seems it will soon be impossible for even the most totalitarian governments to stop people from organizing. Update 4/16/08: Check out this story about a student twittering his way out of jail in Egypt! The article also discusses Wikipedia and other movements to make information openly accessible, including the Encyclopedia of Life (about all the Earth’s species) and the Public Library of Science, an open-access journal.

At MixedInk, we certainly plan to play our part in helping folks self-organize and harness their collective power. We just came up with an exciting idea that could make our democracy a little more people powered, which we submitted to the NetSquared Mashup Contest. It’s called Government by the people. You can help us win by voting for us! Anyone can register as a NetSquared user, making them eligible to vote – the contest is being decided, appropriately, by the people.

Update 4/16/08: Check out Seth Godin’s interesting article on the power of organizing.

Last week, I was at the Networked Journalism Summit, a conference organized by Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn, “bringing together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism” at CUNY.

In a word, it was…awesome (sorry, I’m an entrepreneur, not a journalist!). It was both encouraging that so many really smart people are experimenting with ways to democratize the media, and a relief that no one has yet been able to find all the answers – meaning that MixedInk can help to provide part of the solution.

The big unanswered questions that seemed to keep coming up were:

1) how the media will be able to make money without sacrificing journalistic quality and integrity (and whether advertising revenue will ever be sufficient);
2) how professional and amateur journalists can coordinate and divide responsibility effectively to produce high-quality, accurate content; and
3) how the public can be motivated to contribute in a way that adds value.

From MixedInk’s perspective, the event was unquestionably a success. In the afternoon, I manned one of several ‘tool’ tables, sandwiched between DayLife and Topix, two other innovative startups in this space. A number of leading media outlets dropped by our table and expressed very strong interest in viewing a demo when it’s ready next month. Several said they would even test our platform with their readers. Though it depends what comes of these initial conversations in the next couple of months, I’d say Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn accomplished their goal of focusing the event on action rather than talk.

Amid the excitement, there was a potentially depressing moment during one of the morning sessions. Jay Rosen, the brilliant NYU journalism professor and founder of newassignment.net, was asked whether there’s any way to avoid using a community leader to tightly moderate and channel contributors’ energy in a productive direction. To my dismay, and likely that of others in the room, he responded, “The dream of a self-perpetuating content production system is an illusion.” He might well have been describing MixedInk, though we would say our content production system is “community led” rather than “self-perpetuating.”

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to speak with Jay later in the day, but if I had (and managed to keep my wits about me), I would have said something like this: “With all due respect, we look forward to proving you wrong, Jay. Relying on heavy moderation is not scalable, it’s less democratic and it may even be less meritocratic. Given the right structure and application, the community can be trusted to produce quality content. We won’t hold it against you, though, if we’re ever lucky enough that you want to work with us ” (Yes, I would have smiled and winked at the end.)

You can find a lot more detail about the day in the following accounts:

• Jeff Jarvis’s post mortem
• Scott Anderson’s (of the Chicago Tribune) version
• NPR’s take (audio)

Thanks again to Jeff and David for putting this fantastic event together – and for highlighting MixedInk as an innovative tool in the new media arsenal.