I can't get an SMTP connection, is the router blocking me?

It's not us, it's upstream.

Oh so is there an alternate outgoing mailserver connection?

Yes you can try sbc.global.net.

What's the password?

It id's your ip addresses.

Ah OK.

Wait, I overheard what you said, I have a clear port on 557.

Will that work with riseup.net?

Hey let's try right now.

That's the scene here, a rich soup of geek brainpower, all looking in the direction of nonhierarchy, free software, activism, and nonprofit development. The winner of the "travelled the farthest to get here" was a software developer from Mali; I just left a workshop where anti-authoritarian coders from Brazil Indymedia talked about community access points used by the Landless Movement in squatter camps to organize for services and against the government. Plenty of NYC radicals and Bay Area visionaries and Canadian protestors.

Jonah and I made great progress in strengthening Icarus' tech infrastructure, meeting a NYC anarchist who is likely to be our new Drupal developer, hanging out with people from her consulting firm, and learning about a worker collective internet hosting company we can switch to.

Most enlightening to me was hearing high level uber-hackers talk about the very same problems we are having with Icarus. Everyone uses email though it is incredibly inefficient. Task management is a nightmare. How do we make decisions on line? How can we include people who do not have a comfortable relationship with computer tools? How do we deal with founder's syndrome? Aren't some hierarchies - such as differences in skill levels -- natural and how do we make them not oppressive? Why is the internet connection down?

It was anthropologist brain candy as more than a hundred computer mensches got down with their funky language and customs. grazer. rss bloc. activecollab. usability. remote decision making. task manager systems. pegspace. change.org. e-riders. And there were no disposable coffee cups and I could ride my bike to the conference every day and it reminded me of sitting in front of my Apple II Plus (48k memory - k, not megs) at age 14, playing Aztec and smoking pot and figuring out how to write sniper simulation games in Basic.

One highlight: someone who referenced a Wisconsin study showing that the more meetings you go to the more likely you are to be depressed. Now that's' some info I can use as I build my case for Movements Without Meetings. Anyone got the URL for that study?

Check this wiki entry for a summary of one of the workshop discussions. 

 -- will


"You are not alone" is a mantra that applies to more than just extreme states of consciousness. The Icarus Project's ongoing wrestling match with dozens of communication tools is being repeated across the non-profit sector. We don't have our heads up our ethernet ports, this is simply the state of affairs in the early 21st Century. As I write here, The Organizational Digital Divide is a really important problem, that Icarus can actaully be part of solving.

It is really important for us all to consider the politics at stake in all of our decision making. We must view our work as part of a larger ecology of activists and advocates, working towards developing sustainable models for social action. Technology is a part of this equation, and the tools that we choose should reflect our values, as inevitably, their features will embody the values of their creators. Obviously free software and free culture play prominent roles in this line of reasoning, but that complete argument is for another post.

Will and I had a very productive and enlightening time at the 2007 Aspiration Nonprofit Tech Development Conference. We hung out with radical techies, made some promising bridges with the openflows collective, and met some of the openplans crew in person.

The conference proceedings were all tracked in the conference wiki, but some of the highlights and projects to keep an eye on include -

more to follow...

~ jsb