Slow and Steady…

In trying to push Planet Parecon forward there is some debate as to whether we should remain at www.austinpps.org/blogs, move to another (new) site like WordPress or Blogspot, or use the already existing Z blog facilities. We also need someone to be an organizer on the project until it has enough momentum (aka content) to be self-sustaining. That means soliciting content, following up with authors, helping newbies set up their blogs, etc. We’ve been discussing the issue on an email list of ParSoc organizers and I’m going to copy our remarks below. Before that, though, a couple of recent updates.

First is that one of the technical problems referenced below, namely that Planet Parecon erases its culled entries after a week, has been fixed retroactively and should hold onto entries for a year. Yay! Second is that Z now has a Planet Parecon RSS feed/channel created. I’m not really sure how that happened since we were still discussing whether we would like that to happen. It’s also unclear how the content is being selected, as their swath seems much broader than ours aimed to be.

Regardless, here’s what we’ve emailed about so far:

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1st email, by Marcus:

On Wednesday 21 January 2009 18:57:59 Marcus Denton wrote:

Hi everyone,

I wanted to send out an update on Planet Parecon (www.austinpps.org/blogs) and get some feedback from you all about a way forward. This is longer than I intended but please read and let us know what you think!

When we started this project a few months ago the idea was that it would be a place where multiple blogs about Parecon and Participatory Society would be aggregated, and that specifically the blogs would come from people who were involved in parecon/parsoc organizing and activism. Even though it has stalled out some, I still think this would be really helpful and motivational for those of us trying to get parsoc off the ground as a more cohesive movement. One quick example: recently Vancouver posted to their email list that they’re having a meeting the same day as we are. Hearing that kind of stuff is great!

We have gotten some good content from Dan (Austin), Steve (London, Ontario), and Caraugh (Cape Town), and I’m continuing to blog as well. Several other people, many on this list, also expressed interest in getting
involved and writing. I still think that we have enough potential writers out there that a commitment to more or less one entry a week (maybe even less) would give us pretty consistent and valuable content, enough to begin building a regular audience and helping inspire parsoc activism. I have personally found it very valuable in pinning down thoughts that would normally just bounce around my head to no specific end.

But to make a short story shorter, we’ve basically had trouble on this end in keeping up with people who have expressed interest and getting them involved, as well as doing upkeep on the Planet Parecon website (fo instance, it formats the entries in an aesthetically unappealing way, and also erases all the blogs every week or so instead of just adding new ones to the top of the page).

One idea I had was to have something set up within ZNet, but unfortunately they cannot (at least right now) import external RSS feeds, and to blog within ZNet you have to be a sustainer, which requires a minimum $3 monthly donation. Chris did say they will link to any site we have from their parecon, parsoc, and vision/strategy pages, so that’s good, but it doesn’t solve the two problems above, and also for some reason I don’t think we can aggregate their own blogs’ RSS feeds.

Another idea could be to set up a separate blog, like on WordPress or something, and whenever people post on their own blog they post it again there. Or, since we want to keep this as easy as possible to encourage more content, one of us can be a point person and do the posting when notified of a member’s post. I’d be happy to do that, or maybe we could rotate it around.

The other idea is for someone else to take over. Dan could probably help with the setup, but it’d be good if the new person had some technical knowledge, or if we could find a simpler system. This person would also be the contact person and would follow up when people express interest in writing, would gently prod people for contributions (if we decide that’s what we want and they have agreed to post), perhaps would solicit content from other writers and get them involved, and would let us know how it’s coming along, at least until it is strong enough to be mostly self-sustaining.

What do you all think?

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2nd email, from Dan:

Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:59:55 -0600
Subject: Re: [ipps] Planet Parecon update

Marcus is being a little too nice to me here.

I’d like to apologize for getting a bunch of people excited here and then spectacularly dropping the ball. I have excuses–mostly work going up and health going down–but I should’ve found a more graceful way to ask for help.

I still like this idea as a project, and if anybody (Caragh or Steve perhaps?) would like to take on a leadership role (social, technical, whatever), I’ll hand over any keys I can think of.

Dan

PS. I’d like to especially apologize to Steve and any other London (Ontario) PPS’ers–Marcus told me last night that I had neglected to put a link to the London PPS on the planet page.
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3rd email, from Mark:

— On Sat, 1/24/09, Mark Evans <markevans13@hotmail.co.uk> wrote:

My feeling is that we are better off using the existing facilities within Z.  This is because Z is a very broad progressive community so when we post a blog or article that advocates ParSoc vision / strategy it can be seen by lots of people who will be interested in the issues we cover but who may never have come across ParEcon etc… before.  Moving away from such great facilities and community seems to me to be a little conterproductive.

Maybe Im missing somehting but it seems to me that this is just duplicating existing facilities and i dont see any advantage in doing so.  This is not to say that I am against organising for a participatory society “outside” of Z.  It is just that I think that if we are going to create new organisations they should have a function that goes beyond what Z is doing.  Ive speculated about what such an organisation might look like and how we might create it here -http://www.zcommunications.org/blog/view/2401

Mark

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4th email, from Marcus:

I guess my first preference would be to have a blog aggregator that is located outside of Z but is linked to by them. Obviously it wouldn’t be terrible to use the Z facilities, but I would prefer we have some space because being separate would allow for Z’s influence to be incorporated but also allow for other perspectives and influences to be included. I worry some about too heavy of a Z “stamp” on things. For instance, Michael’s influence is going to be very strong within Z, and I wonder if that would temper criticism of parecon, especially among newcomers. I also find Z to be quite vision-heavy. And I love vision, but there’s more to it than that, and I want Planet Parecon to be about finding out the insights that come from trying to organize around these ideas.

I also am a little concerned that if people have to join Z and pay $3+ to blog we will have fewer (and different) contributors than we would otherwise.

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5th email, from Marcus:

Also, I’d like people’s input as to whether Planet Parecon should be abbreviated Plarecon, Planecon, or something else. Obviously that’ll be necessary for this project to ever get off the ground

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6th email, from Dan:

The main reasons against using Z as the host are technical.  The Z space software doesn’t seem to do RSS very well, either internally or externally.  That means that using Z is pretty much an all-or-nothing
affair.  Everybody would need to have a Z account, and we wouldn’t be able to use the hosting facilities that a lot of the PPS’ have for themselves.

Marcus has traded some e-mails with Chris to see if they would add a feature to allow posts from external RSS feeds to be aggregated, and I think they were encouraging, but I’m not sure what the timeline is.

Dan

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