I was happy to be invited to participate on the advisory board for Social Source Commons, a project of Aspiration Tech’s that collects, catalogs and distributes feeds of software tools useful in the non-profit community. The social designation is no accident – anyone can sign up and contribute. The newly formed advisory committee met today, with five of us on the call – two from Aspiration (Tim, who runs SSC, and Gunner) and three community advisors – one working with an org that does poverty outreach and two community consultants: Dan, Zac and I. Our sixth member, Sharon, who works with a non-profit that provides tech solutions for the disabled, couldn’t make it.

The conversation really focused on two very different questions, and what was interesting was seeing where they might connect.

As it stands, SSC is a user-developed online database of software applications. A new feature allows users to make “community toolboxes”, so that you can design a list of, say, your favorite fund-raising apps; all the text editors for the Mac; or hosted software with the best Ajaxy interfaces. But the feature isn’t fully implemented. It’s easy to make the lists, but a bit of a challenge to find the lists that others have made. So my critique is that what is missing was context. I don’t want to just list my favorite Mac text editors – I want to discuss the pros and cons. If you program in Ruby, you might prefer Textmate to BBEdit – there’s no place in the database for that kind of nuanced information. SSC provides the tools, but not the context, except in a limited fashion with the partially-deployed Community Toolboxes.

Dan had a completely different question. Given that the tiny non-profits and the communities they work with tend to be lacking in technical expertise, how can they use a very Web 2.0 interface to help themselves out? Is SSC designed to help those in the most need of software and advice, or those who are already well-resourced and conversant? (And I’m paraphrasing intensely here – Dan should comment if I’ve really missed his point!)

I think the answer to that either/or question is mostly yes. SSC is an interface for the geeks. Even if the user interface were customized for non-technical users, they would likely still be overwhelmed by the software data itself. This is a tool for the people who are tech-savvy and work in those communities to use in their research. So, getting back to the context question—which is huge, because it’s just not enough to have the data without the wisdom of the community—who can provide that?

And here’s what excites me about where Social Source Commons might be going. We can. NPTech bloggers. Non-Profits doing digital divide work. Community activists. If SSC develops middleware – widgets and APIs that allow us to interact more meaningfully with those feeds and toolboxes – the blogging community can provide the context. SSC moves into a more del.icio.us role, as a data intermediary.

Say you’re doing a project that involves using media players in low income communities to support education and communication, and you’ve built a good list of podcasting tools and mobile rss readers art SSC. You’ll be able to link to it from your website or blog, and write the how-to’s with detailed application data provided by SSC. This is useful.

These tools are under development – I’ll be beta-testing them at techcafeteria. Stay tuned.

So, last Wednesday I woke up, checked my email, and had three identical emails (two from friends, one from my Mom) encouraging me to sign a MoveOn petition to save NPR and PBS. After quickly verifying that this effort was for real (similar scams have been running on the net for years), I then fired off a blunt, impulsive reply to all three sources, saying, pretty much: if NPR is already largely owned by corporations, and PBS is censoring childrens shows about bunnies who actually meet lesbians, are they still good information sources? Hasn’t the time to save them already come and gone? And aren’t there much more trustworthy news sources out there, in magazines and on the net?

The problem is that the government now wants to fund/withhold funding based on how accountable the government-funded operation is to the majority party’s rhetoric. The reasoning of the Republicans gunning for the media is simple: if PBS and NPR are going to take money from the Government’s coiffers, shouldn’t they be more like Fox News? Bill Moyers, in a speech to the
National Conference on Media Reform on May 15, 2005, explained what he understood about the rationale for spending $10,000 of our tax money to pay for a study analyyzing the content of his show for liberal bias:

“I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it. ... Our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line.”

According to an article in today’s Contra Costa Times (6/20/05), per Pat Mitchell, CEO of PBS, it is unlikely that the funding will remain cut after review by the Senate, who have traditionally supported PBS and refused to make cuts in the past. If so, well, hooray! Maybe my choice to ignore the MoveOn petition won’t be the sole cause of the fall of the universe, as my decision (in California) to vote for Ralph Nader in 2000 apparently was.

But, what of the effects that won’t be overturned by the senate? The day after the Move On survey started bobbing up and down in my face, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that PBS is “hiring an ombudsman and revising editorial practices in the face of criticism that its programming has given short shrift to conservative views.” So I guess that the little bunny won’t be seeing any gay couples ever, and that Barney’s new theme song is going to be “I love the President, you love the President”.

My friend Jain responded to my slam on PBS with the protest that all she allows her five year old daughter to watch is PBS shows. So they need to be saved. (I didn’t mention that we took our just-turned-six son to see Batman Begins last night!). And it hit home to me that, while I know of great alternative media sources for news, and I have lots of alternative television (kid-safe) on my 200+ channel satellite subscription, there are a lot of people who can’t really afford the alternatives. There is a real digital divide. And the losers in the dumbing down of PBS are the people who are least capable of utilizing the alternatives.

It’s all an election strategy. The net savvy bloggers like me can do all we want – as long as the majority of the population, who are not reading this, are unaware that anyone is skeptical about our reasons for being in Iraq, or the wisdom of “personal accounts”, or the benefits of the energy bill. It’s not that PBS has a bias; it’s that it doesn’t have one. That’s the problem that the Republicans are trying to address. PBS is a symptom. Saving them won’t cure the problem – it might even exascerbate it.