People Who Give a Damn

Sam Boyer on A movement-oriented structure for groups.

On why groups are important:

Many products depend on community, on adoption within a tribe, on buzz--these products aren't viable when they first launch, precisely because they haven't been adopted. "Being used by my peers," is a key element of what makes something like a fax machine a viable product, and of course, your new tool isn't.

With enough patience and push and consistent enthusiasm, these products have a shot at crossing the threshhold. But if the mindset is "see what works and do it more," you'll often discover yourself giving up long before that happens.

"Journalism is the work of communicating facts as stories. Facts do not compel people to action. Stories do. The ethical responsibility of journalists is to tell stories consistent with fact."
-me (this goes for Visions Unite broadcast model too)

Talk Description: *
[The talk will cover the concepts of the below, but shorter and better and more specific where it matters and the presenter will be better looking than and more articulate than i am in reality, too.]

Our software is free.

We are free.

Both are in part because we are craftspeople who can be compensated quite well. We have remarkable control over our work, and we have time to put into building Free Software and the community around it.

This fortune and freedom is historically crushed out of every trade.

Wow... just wow... this looks to be the decentralized infrastructure that People Who Give a Damn / Visions Unite needs to match its decentralizing of power!

Unhosted is a project for strengthening free software against hosted software. With our protocol, a website is only source code. Dynamic data is encrypted and decentralised, to per-user storage nodes. This benefits free software, as well as scalability, robustness, and online privacy.

A Drupal developer asked outright what people thought of attempts to monetize. I responded to icanlocalize's blog:

For-pay support is definitely a model with promise and worth trying. Try to avoid keeping key pieces online and proprietary though; that i think is bad for the ecosystem.

The concept of giving circles is out there, and gaining popularity, and there's a site trying to coordinate them: http://www.givingcircles.org/

Annual reports are to be filed on or before November 1st of each year: http://www.mass.gov/sec/cor/Functionality/annualreport.htm

Minutes for at least annual meetings must be kept, and available at request, but are not filed anywhere. We should publish these online.