SCN: Now what?

[sc at sdf.lonestar.org]

Al Boss wrote:
> Democracy: Are there still things a bunch of smart, technically savvy,
> community-minded suckers (that's us) can offer, that'd help level the
> playing field a little bit, that'd help folks get some extra advantages
> they'd not otherwise have? Are there things we can do to help voices get
> heard? Do I even need to answer that?

Al,

SCN could help voices get heard. As an example, a few days ago
four City Council members did a walkthrough of Nickelsville, the
homeless encampment currently located on a city-owned Superfund
site on West Marginal Way.

NV's Web site has been down for a while, reducing their ability
to communicate with society. The day before the Council
walkthrough, someone on the West Seattle Blog (which most of the
people volunteering to help NV read) asked what things were like
down there these days, and were there any recent photos of the
place. Someone mentioned that a Facebook page had photos of a
second prototype tiny plywood house that they'd built. No URL,
just that it was on Facebook. Well, I found a handful of
Nickelsville related Facebook pages, most of them outdated and
none of them with that photo. Facebook has a zillion pages and I
somehow couldn't pinpoint that one in the morass of stuff there.

So the afternoon before the walkthrough, I posted my less recent
photos of a NB potluck a few weeks ago before the second tiny
house went up, at http://sc.sdf.org/ws/nickelsville/potluck/
where few people would notice compared to the exposure that SCN
used to have.

Simply put, it isn't on a site where hundreds of local
neighborhood and issue-oriented grassroots groups and their
members and readers gather, like SCN used to be. Even on the WS
Blog, stories often scroll off the front page into oblivion
within hours. They did film it, but they use a semi-accessible
commercial service to host their longer videos, called Blip.tv.
It has has a weird Flash-based interface that, unlike Youtube,
successfully defeats me. Since Blip's interface is designed to
actively prevent direct download of videos to watch, only
allowing people to stream them while being exposed to whatever
else is on screen surrounding it, I still don't know what WSB
reported.

Somewhere in all this, there is still a place for SCN,
especially if it could respond to requests to publish topical
material within a few hours. As another example, on Thursday I
attended a forum where nine of the School Board candidates
spoke, and made video clips of some of them speaking to the
small crowd. Obviously not everyone is interested in this, but
if the only practical alternative even for neighborhood-sized
commercial video publishers like WSB for long form pieces is
someplece like Blip.tv (they post the shorter ones on Youtube),
then I'd either have to use a service like that or pay
comparatively high data transfer costs at my small Web hosting
provider, to let an Internet audience see the questions and
discussions between the audience and these prospective public
officials.

If a group of us had a colocated box and thus enough bandwidth
to do something interesting with it in respect to citizen video,
that might be different. What is SCN's bandwith allotment at
SPL? Is it enough to let us provide services like, for example,
relaying live video from events, via someone's laptop Webcam
over a Wifi connection?

As a society, if the only people who have the modern equivalent
of printing presses for this kind of material are places like
WTV or The Seattle Channel, or outfits like Blip, where does
that leave us? People flock to Facebook because it's convenient
and has a huge audience, but in technological terms, regardless
of their business practices. you just can't do that kind of
thing on Facebook.

In the 90s, SCN was always afraid of being too up to the minute,
afraid of stepping on the toes of the ISPs. There was an ethos
of needing to be sufficiently trailing-edge to avoid that. Well,
to heck with that. No one wants to be like that all the time,
but that's all that SCN has been doing or the last 10 years or
more. No wonder you can't get anyone to care, or to contribute
much, or to waste their time on obsolete backwards-facing stuff
that they wouldn't want to use themselves and that doesn't solve
any of their own current problems.

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