What are FAQs?
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, as you are likely already aware. What you probably also know is that the FAQ page pretty much always includes the answers to those questions, not just the questions themselves. So technically they should be called Frequently Asked Questions & Provided Answers. “FAQPA” doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, so we’ll be sticking with FAQ.

Who cares which questions are asked most frequently?
Well, you do, in theory, and we do too. The idea is that you think like other people do, more or less. So if MixedInk makes other people wonder about certain things, there’s a good chance that it makes you wonder about the same things. Instead of you and every other person with a question asking separately and us sending you each an individual response, why not save everyone the time and just gather all the questions and answers in one place?

Why spend an entire blog post on FAQs?
Good question. We just wrote the FAQs for our site, and we were so excited to share them with you! But we realized we probably ought to wait till the site launches (soon!) to do that. So this was sort of a consolation prize.

So can we at least see some of your FAQs? You promised a “sneak preview” in the title of this post.
Sure! Here’s a taste of what’s to come:

Why use MixedInk?
In order for your opinion to matter, you have to lump yourselves together with lots of other people by voting, signing a petition, going to a rally, etc. That means you have to give up control over the message you deliver. MixedInk helps you express yourselves together without losing your individual, nuanced voice. Since MixedInk is democratic, it ensures that you have more control over what you say together.

For companies, nonprofit organizations and campaigns, it can be difficult and expensive to wade through thousands of emails, blog posts, comments and phone calls to understand what stakeholders are thinking and saying. MixedInk provides a way to harness the energy, ideas, and opinions of their most passionate members, consumers, and employees.

How many people can participate in responding to a MixedInk topic at once?
In theory, there’s no limit to the number of people that can contribute at the same time.

How can the software automatically put so much text from so many people together?
It can’t – we don’t automatically assemble a collective piece of text. We just give users the tools for them to do it themselves, by working (playing, really) together.

Is it simple majority rule?
For now, yes. Later on, we’ll make it possible to see how contributors can be divided into different camps based on the opinions they express. In the meantime, any contributor who feels he or she is in the minority can set up a new topic and ask that only those with shared views participate.

Can I republish a final collective response written using MixedInk?
You certainly can – and we hope you do!

All text that is authored by a group using MixedInk is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can republish the content as long as you mention: “This text was created by [number] people using the democratic collaborative tool at MixedInk.com. It may be republished only if accompanied by this addendum.”

If you are republishing it online, you must also include a link to the page where you found the text.

That’s all?!? You teases!
If you’re so anxious to find out more, why haven’t you signed up to be a beta tester yet?

Right. So how did you write the FAQs for MixedInk, which hasn’t launched yet, given that you don’t know which questions are actually going to be “frequently asked”?
OK, smarty pants, you got us there. We don’t know which questions will be frequently asked. We had to guess. But we’ll update the FAQs later when we find out what questions people actually ask.

Do other sites abuse the FAQs like this?
We don’t know for sure, but it sure seems like it to us. We feel lucky if half of the FAQs are remotely relevant to our concerns, so we’d bet they were also written without actually being “frequently asked.”

That doesn’t justify the practice of determining FAQs without user input, however.

If your collaborative writing software is so darn great, why don’t you just let your users write your FAQs?
Hmmmm… we hadn’t thought of that. Seems like a good idea. Maybe we’ll try that when we are fortunate enough to have users.

Other sites’ users could write the FAQs for them, too.
Another good idea – you’re full of them. Maybe we should hire you.

Where can I find your FAQs after you launch?
We’ll put them up here: http://www.mixedink.com/faq. (Note that this link will not work until we launch.)

Where should I go if I’m tired of reading this senseless drivel and actually want to learn something about FAQs?
Here’s a few sites we consulted as we constructed our FAQs:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ
http://www.querycat.com/ (database of FAQs from the entire internet)

Is your blog always going to be this…playful…from now on?
Probably not. Must be the holidays

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups – a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Thirty family members and friends of the MixedInk team recently came together to test our software. It was very exciting to finally see MixedInk in action at this scale after much hard work and internal testing. Watching an interesting discussion take shape and participating in the eventual synergy that emerged over the five-day period was an extremely rewarding experience.

Together the participants addressed the following question: Is the US government ever justified in using torture? Why or why not?

(We chose this topic because we know people feel strongly about it. Having a topic that encourages vigorous discussion makes testing our software and concept easier).

Participants wrote, edited, and recombined responses to the topic throughout the test. With a total of 44 responses and 296 ratings in the end, the group had a vibrant brainstorming session and a fascinating exchange. Through a process of mixing and rating each other’s responses using MixedInk technology, the test participants collaboratively sculpted a collective opinion on the selected topic.

For those who are curious, we’ve pasted the text of the collective response below.

This is a major moment for MixedInk – this test provided definitive proof of our concept. We learned a ton from the test and are now tweaking old features and adding new ones based on the test and on the feedback we received. At this point, we plan to continue testing it with different and bigger groups – let us know if you’d like to help shape MixedInk by getting involved in future tests at testing@mixedink.com. We’d love to get your input!

No to Torture

In the wake of 9/11, we have begun to speak a new language. “Patriotism” means blind devotion to any government policy; to “support the troops” means to never question an interminable war; and “torture” means making the world safe for democracy. (heh, heh, heh). We are living in a world of contradictions and are facilitating it with a language of opposites. It is easier to accept an unwarranted war, corruption, and torture when they are cloaked in words like democracy, strength, and safety. But eventually we will run out of platitudes and be left with nothing but the bare truth of our actions.

Torture has fallen prey to the cover of new speak. By saying we’re protecting our way of life from terrorism, we have become terrorists ourselves and what once was abhorrent to Americans has become acceptable. The question in real speak, though, is what security do we truly gain from the use of torture? Of the multitude of tools in our security arsenal, torture is one that has been shown to fail — people will say anything to get themselves out of the situation. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism, where people are often motivated by martyrdom, and just a bit more courage as a tortured prisoner can earn a handsome payoff in the afterlife. In embracing torture as a society, we therefore lose not only our honor, but also our precious resources as we waste time and money following false leads.

Even if torture were shown to be an effective information-gathering tool, however, it still would not be a sound security policy. When we commit torture against prisoners, we place our own soldiers at great risk as we forego our authority to demand protection for them. Today other countries can easily follow our lead in playing semantic tricks to determine where the Geneva Conventions apply. If that were the case, and our soldiers were being tortured at the hands of another countrys interrogators, be sure that this discussion would need not occur; our collective outrage would be unanimous.

More importantly, we cannot discuss torture without examining what it means to be part of a society that allows it. Many claim that we need to rethink our domestic policies, and even internationally-accepted norms, given the new threats we face. We disagree. In fact, it is only at times when we are scared for our safety that we must recall the importance of our civil liberties. It is during these times that it is easiest to forgo our most important ideals for the illusion of safety and expedient answers to complex challenges.

The American justice system relies upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And we have a very high bar for guilt; a jury must be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. The implicit understanding is that we, as a society, would prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongly punish someone who is innocent. We depend upon our right to due process of law to ensure that our government does not overstep its bounds. When we allow torture of someone suspected of a crime (or suspected to be privy to critical information), we corrode this deep foundation of our country by exacting punishment based on mere suspicion. Not only does it undoubtedly lead to the torture of many people with no, or little, connection to terrorist networks, but it also leads to a dangerous temptation to blur the distinctions. And just like that, we begin down a slippery slope of disintegrating civil liberties.

Nearly everyone agrees torture is generally wrong, but there is still a great temptation to allow torture as a last resort in extreme cases. Torture, however, is not an acceptable government policy even in these scenarios. We have seen time and time again that seemingly normal people can do awful things. We saw it during Milgrim’s famous psychology experiments, we witnessed it during the Holocaust, and we stood speechless more recently when we learned of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. If we condone even a single case of torture, how will we then stop it from expanding? Who is to be the judge? Any policy that allowed torture would be subject to abuse. Enforcement is extremely difficult to imagine, given that these prisoners would be punished without the benefit of being tried in court, and an interrogator could always argue there was good reason to believe the prisoner had valuable information.

There is a short list of countries that permit torture, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Uzbekistan. It is not a club that the

United States should wish to join. As we seek to remain a world leader, we must remember what it means to be American and the moral authority it could command. We should not throw it all away in exchange for nothing more than a second-rate intelligence tool. It’s time to speak clearly and realize that torture debases not only the victim but also the core of all we, in real talk, hold precious in America.

As is clear from this example, the group of our friends and family that created this lean to the political left. Note that MixedInk is emphatically nonpartisan. Our tool will be available to any group wishing to express itself together regardless of its opinion.

We recently asked you to pick our new logo, and the response was pretty incredible – if we learned anything, it’s that people have pretty strong opinions when it comes to design! Thanks to all 181 people that voted or left comments.

Here is the winner, with some slight tweaks we made based on your feedback. As you’ll notice, we’re now using this logo all over the site.

It was a tight race. The winning logo got 33%, with the second place finisher at 29% and the logo we had been using at 23% (we keep waiting for someone to bring up hanging chads). Given the fact that there was no clear consensus, we may revisit the issue later on. If you’ve got more ideas or advice to share, let us know in the comments or by email.

And don’t forget to sign up to be a beta tester here!

We trust the wisdom (and design sense) of the crowd – so we want your opinion.

Help us choose a logo for MixedInk! Vote for the version you like best in the poll below before the end of the week.

When you vote, keep in mind what MixedInk is: a democratic writing tool that enables groups to express collaborative opinions. It’s sort of like a wiki, only lots of people can contribute at the same time, and the end result is a more democratic reflection of participants’ viewpoints.

Lastly, if you’ve got any more specific improvements to suggest, then put them in the comments. We’ll be reading closely!

If you want to continue to be a part of MixedInk’s growth, please sign up! We’re currently looking for beta testers.