According to a listserv posting,

"An NPR program, Justice Talking, recently hosted a debate between Michael Barnes from the Brady Center and Richard Gardner from the NRA over the question whether manufacturers and retailers of firearms should be exposed to liability arising from unlawful use of their products."

Link is here.  Should we see parallels to the Induce/Grokster debates?  Lessig op-ed along the same lines is here.

David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect (F2C) conference is taking shape.  Take a look. 

Complete connection, to everyone, all the time, isn't the optimal state for any network.  The most creative networks are the ones that are sparsely connected, allowing interesting and unexpected things to happen.  I'm not confident that more connection, for its own sake, is the top priority.  Certainly freedom to choose to be connected is crucial. 

Freedom to tinker -- now, there's a crucial freedom.  EFF's recent announcement of Endangered Gizmos caught my eye.  Watch for even more gizmos to join the endangered list, as law enforcement and the content industry join forces to turn the internet into a telephone network.

It's just not fair.

I've been informed that spyware is not going away any time soon -- the problem is enormous.  So saying "awwww, just relax" isn't enough of a response.  I stand (sit, anyway) corrected.

Hmm.  What would Ben Franklin do about spyware?  I'm reading the Walter Isaacson biography, which is a fine treatment of an elaborately enjoyed life. 

Franklin was all for civic engagement.  He was forever starting little groups to talk about things and then change the world -- volunteer fire brigades, philosophical societies, universities -- and he joyfully combined his social, civic, and work lives into a singular tapestry of meals, discussions, and outings.  He was a consummate networker.

He was also, of course, an inventor and a craftsman (a "leather apron" man).  He would have loved the internet.  What would he have done to fix this plague?

It's clear:  he would have tried to encourage small-group civic care and cooperation.  He would have started an ISP lending library.  He would never, ever, have assumed that any central authority was the answer.  Through elliptical conversation and gentle prodding, he would have gotten networks of networks to work together in clever, immune-system ways. 

He wouldn't have sought credit in the short run.  But, in the end, Franklin the crafty self-publicist would have ensured that everyone knew that his decentralized approach had provided the answer to spyware.  He was forever presenting himself to the public in canny ways.

Ben Franklin would have blogged -- pseudonymously. 

 

 

Last year spyware legislation overwhelmingly passed the House (399 to 1).  The Senate didn't act on it.  We're going to see a lot of activity on this front again this year.  But I'm not so sure legislation is such a great idea.

Three reasons: 

1.  Spyware is being conceived of as an assault on privacy interests, and draft legislation may be intended to set the stage for future broad privacy statutes.  But spyware is a different kind of issue -- it's about the imposition of an inappropriate, unsought-for relationship in code.  That relationship can only be dealt with, to my mind, by tort law and with the help of juries and judges. It's impossible to define "spyware" in a way that won't capture lots of helpful software.  The fact that FTC has been able to act with respect to spyware signals that a new statute isn't needed.

2.  The draft House bill, HR 29, takes a very heavy-handed regulatory approach.  It suggests that the FTC will spend an enormous amount of its resources (resources that could be spent bringing cases) on adopting a very detailed set of rules about the design of software.  It mandates notices for online applications.  These notices will be both annoying and ultimately meaningless (who will understand what it is they are consenting to?).  GLB for bits.

3.  And it won't work.  Bad actors will move offshore and won't follow the rules anyway.  Sure, a federal bill may preempt some wacky state approaches, but the cure may be both worse than the disease (design mandates for software! swirling useless notices!) and ineffective.

It's better to encourage evolutionary, adaptive, tool-based approaches to spyware.  Indeed, the evidence is that spyware attacks are diminishing due to better tools being used by ISPs and network operators. 

We have two models for viruses/attacks on our system:  inoculation (or search and destroy) and the immune system.  Let's go with the immune system approach: learning, memory, watching for unexpected data flows, and networks of helpful systems. 

 

 

Democracy, the play, is as much about democracy as internet governance is about governance.  

Democracy-the-play is about trust and betrayal, people divided against themselves, true love (the spy who comes to love his target), and feelings of nonexistence (both in the spy and in the spyed-upon).  The people never enter in except as upturned faces, shouting for Willy Brandt and applauding his speeches.

Internet governance is about making rules for information flows online.  It's not about affecting the behavior of individuals (the traditional province of governments).  It's not about the prerogatives of sovereignty, because there is no sovereign in online space. It's about what is allowed to be seen and understood, by machines and people.  In the largest sense, it's about making rules for the membranes that allow information in and out of networks. 

With democracy-the-play, we can understand the title as an indirect signal of division -- everyone gets to speak, no one is understood, parties rise and fall (it's better than football, the spy claims at one point), countries spy on one another.  At any rate, the narrative, multilayer quality of the title is apparent.

So far, with the title "internet governance," we're taking the words themselves at face value.  Sure, this is all about governance.  We know what that is.  We live with it every day.

But just like the play title, the words "internet governance" should be understood much more as a narrative, multifaceted phrase.  The words say something about information flows and permeable membranes.  We say we're governing, but we're actually planning on acting in a way that wouldn't be similarly possible in the offline world:  creating barriers of code that will, we assume, constrain thought in constructive ways.  No more bad or destructive information flows, if internet governance all works out.

It all depends on context.  If you saw a play called "internet governance," you'd be thinking nuanced thoughts about what those words really meant.  Maybe, forty years from now, such a play will be produced on Broadway.  Who will be the key characters?  And what will the story line be?        

Google is going into VoIP.  They see the power of their brand -- they must -- to connect people as well as web resources, and BT isn't doing much for fear of undermining their landline business.  This is big news. 

Why aren't all of the major content companies (like the studios) using their brands to connect people?  Bright colors, well-loved logos -- why not use them to make great, simple, really useful tools available for publishing videoblogs, sending voices across the oceans, and engaging in other entertaining forms of connection (as well as meaningful civic dialogue)?

 

Watch for floods of briefs coming in tomorrow and again in late February.  What's at stake?  Whether a manufacturer (or software developer) with the ability to incorporate a technology that would limit infringement of copyrighted material should be obliged to do that.

This ties closely to the CALEA debate and the FBI contention that online services should be designed with their needs in mind.

Law enforcement and the content industry would be happy to see innovation happening here "according to the rules."  They'll say that even sonnets and sonatas were written with rules in mind. 

Different kinds of rules for sonnets and sonatas -- rules intended to set up expectations that then could be broken.  My expectation here, for what it's worth, is that although law enforcement and the studios will claim some victories early in the game, they'll be defeated in the end by the complexity of the system with which they're grappling.

If you don't own a car, and you don't have anywhere to go in particular, and you have plenty of books to read, a snow emergency isis a very pleasant thing indeed.  The news is alarming; correspondents standing in the dark with earflaps covered in snow, talking loudly and earnestly into their microphones.  They have new graphics:  BLIZZARD 2005.

I remember the blizzards of 1996 and 2003.  In January 1996, people were skiing down Connecticut Avenue.  I remember seeing Marion Wright Edelman trying to figure out how to go to work.  The snow piled up outside my office window, looping around the beige metal railings that passed for architectural detail in that building.  The firm effectively closed for an entire week -- the managing partner, perplexed, said, "Where did those hours go?"  No one fired us, no lawyers did anything, and it didn't matter at all.  (I think things would be different today.)  STORM COVERAGE.

In February 2003, I walked across town to visit a friend.  The snow was piled high in the streets -- plowing was apparently impossible.  When I got there, finally, we sat and talked for a long time.  

(Picture of Washington Square North from www.nyclondon.com, by R. Gardiner)

 

There are great technical entrepreneurs out there, and there are great policy people who really care about the net, but the two groups don't communicate as well as they should.  Yesterday I was at a policy group meeting that was dedicated (in part) to discussing how to communicate with the "online community."  And one person there said, "What's Slashdot?"

It's not a big deal, not knowing what Slashdot is.  But this moment shows we've got a gap of sorts.  We're at a turning point in the history of the internet, and the techies and the policy people need to meet up.

Today at the vloggercon lunchbreak, I witnessed another sort of gap.  Someone's mother called.  The person who answered the phone took the phone from his ear and handed it to a friend across the table.  "Here," he said, "explain to my mother what this conference is about."  The person across the table gamely took the challenge, introducing herself to the mom on the phone and doing her best to explain the video blogging phenomenon.  But I wasn't listening closely, because I was laughing too hard.  

Mind the gap.  We've all got a lot of learning to do.

(thanks to Mary Hodder for this post title) 

 

Watch out for Calif. Sen. Murray's SB 96.

 It covers operating systems.  It probably covers Big Sur, once the redwoods are fully wireless.  We're going after technology wholeheartedly now, without bothering to think whether that's a good idea.  Broadcast = good; P2P = bad. 

Ed Felten has a good post on the bill.

The content industry would like to make any technology that doesn't monitor for copyright infringement illegal -- and that includes the internet.

Phooey.  I'm going offline now for 36 hours.  Not out of pique -- really -- just going out of range for a while.  I'm sure there will be lots of offline festivities to watch in the meantime.

Thematic Blog Entry coming up. 

I have it on good authority that the state AGs are circulating another brief in connection with the Grokster case, to be filed against Grokster on January 24.  This brief will probably be much like the one they filed [pdf] in support of the petition for cert:  P2P = pornography; technology (even software and devices with substantial noninfringing uses) should be designed to avoid infringement; P2P = spyware; P2P = crime; Aimster was a great decision .... same kind of thing.

I don't understand why the states are getting involved at all.  Don't get me wrong; state prosecutors are vitally important.  But the Grokster case really has nothing to do with pornography, spyware, or crime.  Instead, it has everything to do with the free flow of innovation.  Should new technologies have to prove that they're monitoring for copyright infringement?  Does the copying machine have to ensure that no one is using it for "unauthorized" purposes?  Or should copyright owners go after the behavior of end-users instead?  These are the Grokster issues.  I'm not sure why the states feel the need to get involved, and I bet that some key tech/manufacturing interests are hoping that they don't file another brief.

Next:  David Isenberg is putting together a great conference called Freedom to Connect for March 30-31 in DC (actually, in Silver Spring, but it's really convenient).  I'm looking forward to participating, and I urge you all to sign up early and often.

A central message of the conference -- and of this Thematic Blog Post -- is that freedom to connect devices/applications to the internet is central.  Conditioning the provision of devices/technologies/applications/connections on adherence to a set of rules is a destructive trendlet all over the world.  The content industry wants this (see Grokster).  The telecom industry wants this (see Bellhead/Nethead).  Law enforcement wants this (see CALEA rulemaking).  It's a good idea to shed light on this trend.  David Isenberg is working hard to bring people together to have a good talk and see a lot of demos, and he is to be applauded.

(Finally, any time someone invites you to go to the Village Vanguard, say yes.)

Jeff Jarvis has suggested tagging people (following up on all the talk about new Technorati tags).  I'm all for it.   (Of course, we do this in social situations all the time.  But it's good to cast light on the idea.) 

Tagging of objects (or people) allows the social level of the protocol stack to emerge.  It's not just about applications -- it's about people, groups, and metainformation.  Tagging doesn't diminish people, particularly if we have tags that you can write to as well as read.

The NANOG list today was the virtual equivalent of a nearby nocturnal car alarm:  "panix.com has been hijacked!" (whoo-WEE, whoo-WEE); "those jerks at VeriSign!" (duhhhhh-WHEEP, duhhhh-WHEEP); "no one's home at Melbourne IT!" (HANK, HANK, HANK, HANK).

Finally, on Monday morning in Australia, the always-competent and helpful Bruce Tonkin calmly fixed the situation.  So the rest of us can get some sleep now.

But as we nod off in the quietness, let's consider just exactly what happened here.  A savvy NY ISP had its domain name hijacked and moved from Dotster to Melbourne.  Somehow this happened without either Dotster or Melbourne getting any official notifications.  As a result, email directed to panix.com domains was redirected to Canada.  VeriSign said that the registrars in question would have to get involved in order for the situation to be reversed.  Melbourne IT was closed and seemed to have no emergency contact information. 

This was a very bad day for panix.com.  And, I think, a bad day for Melbourne IT (but thank goodness for Bruce).

Panix.com should have had its names locked down so that changing their nameserver information required a login to the the registrar.  (Panix said they did do this, but somehow this status was changed by someone -- maybe the hijacker.)  Melbourne IT should have been reachable.

Some on the NANOG list have suggested that ISPs should cooperate to point to the right information without waiting for registrars/registries to tell them what to do.  This is, of course, the secret to the DNS:  ICANN isn't in charge; the ISPs are.  If they decided not to point to whatever ICANN denominates as "authoritative" information, no one could say Boo to them.  It's up to the ISPs what to do.

On the other hand, I think the real lesson here is that customer service (24/7, someone answering the phone and dealing with nocturnal virtual car alarms) is everything.  It is, in fact, law. 

This may seem like an overstatement to you.  But look at it this way:  how often do you see a cop on the streets online, walking by and noticing that something's amiss?  You don't.  You're online anyway, because the law of customer service is taking care of you.  Most things get resolved without the involvement of any central authority, whether it's ICANN, the FTC, the FCC, or a federal judge.

I hope that panix users are feeling confident in panix today -- they should, because panix did everything humanly possible to fix this situation.  And peaceful acclamation to all customer service people out there.  You're the law and we believe in you.

It seemed important to re-read the Sony decision today.  Taking another close look at that case reminds me how careful the Court was to extend the boundaries of copyright liability only to include (as secondarily liable) those who were doing everything but the actual infringing. 

So, for example, someone who produced a script, sold the resulting motion picture to others, and then expected that it would be commercially exhibited (with the exhibition and the reproduction the infringing acts) is seen as someone who has done everything possible other than the final, implementing act of infringement. 

And someone who is in an ongoing relationship with the direct infringer and is knowingly facilitating the infringement (again, "doing everything but") is a contributory infringer.  Such an actor falls within the very tight circle drawn just outside direct liability.

I don't think the Sony Court would have created an "inducement" standard.  They would have gone to Congress rather than make something like that up. The Court at that point was very nervous about expanding the statutory monopoly of copyright.

I also re-read the Grokster 9th Circuit opinion again today, and it's hard to see how the 9th Circuit misread Sony.  Reasonable minds could certainly differ on this point, I am sure. 

I know that twenty years have passed, but I think this statement from the Sony Court may still be right:

It may well be that Congress will take a fresh look at this new technology, just as it so often has examined other innovations in the past. But it is not our job to apply laws that have not yet been written. Applying the copyright statute, as it now reads, to the facts as they have been developed in this case, the judgment of the Court of Appeals must be [affirmed].

This is an important case, this Grokster situation, and the problem may be that Grokster is an unsympathetic "client" for many people.  But this often happens in important cases -- we're stuck with actors who we don't altogether like.  The principles here are very similar to those in central First Amendment cases.  What kind of speech (or innovation) should be filtered out?  Who gets to march in what parade?  Who gets to decide what filters are appropriate? 

It seems as if we need to be just as careful as the Sony Court, and just as mindful of the importance of the internet as the CDA Court.  None of this is easy.

Recently, the World Trade Organization challenged US decisions to declare online gambling by US citizens illegal, claiming that these restrictions violate trade promises that the US has made. James Thayer has published a very clear overview of the issues here.

The US interprets the 1961 Wire Communications Act, written to address betting on sports over the telephone, to cover online gambling, and some site operators in the US have been prosecuted under this interpretation. Antigua made the argument to the WTO that the US was providing half of the world's customers for online gambling services, despite the illegality of this activity under US law.  Antigua wants to help by providing gambling and betting services to the United States, but argues that the US has condemned such services as illegal.

Under an exception to the WTO's General Agreement on Trade and Services, members are permitted to adopt measures that are "necessary to protect public morals" even if they do not meet "market access" or "national treatment" standards of GATS, and the US has argued that its position with respect to gambling fits within this exception. So far, the WTO has dismissed this "public morals" argument, perhaps because online gambling is so easily available in the US.

Could it be that the global reputation of the US as a trade partner will be affected by this?  DOJ takes the position that it should be able to govern information flows (like gambling) online.  Gambling is unquestionably going on. 

US citizens like gambling. 

I went to a fine concert this evening that ended up with everyone (two fiddles, one banjo, one guitar, one mandolin, drummer, and a simian cellist) standing in a row at the front of the stage playing away.  Plenty of eyebrow cues were going around, and when the simian cellist didn't have enough to say the mandolin guy picked right up.  The crowd loved it.

Kenosis is a way to distribute BitTorrent distribution, so if one tracker fails the next will pick right up.  As far as I can tell from the description, it provides a secure, distributed, and stable platform for p2p BitTorrent anonymous filetrading.  Nodes in its network communicate how "close" they are to each other.  No more centralized tracking.  Plus the comments reveal that the authors want to make a lot of progress on distributed trust -- so you'll be confident in your downloads. 

I bet the crowd will love it.

I moved from a ThinkPad (corporate issue) to a Toshiba in December 2002.  When that Toshiba crashed to the floor as I was moving out of Washington, DC in May 2003, I got a ThinkPad of my own.  Now that ThinkPad T40 is dying -- terrible power issues, caused (I think) by the delicacy of the power cord connection.

So it's time for yet another ThinkPad, this time a T41, which I've had for a while but haven't really used.  I've been laboriously moving email files over, and running into lots of memorable messages.  It's not quite as rich as looking over snapshots, and it's less emotionally intense than reading old letters, but it has a certain impact.  So I'm on hiatus as a blogger as I move into this new machine.

This really should be easier.  I know, I know, if I had a Mac....

Businessweek has a lengthy and interesting article about how The New York Times is doing.  Answer:  they're in a bit of a trough at the moment.  I admire the Times for believing that "quality journalism pays in the long run."  I think they're right.

I also think Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor are right that blogs and citizen journalism are important and transformative.  I think the Times will figure out its relationship to the online world eventually, and it will be a more interesting one than exists right now. 

I'd pay for the Times online. Dan Gillmor asks:  would you pay?

Raise your hand if you would like to be at CES.  You could be strolling those aisles right now, looking at sixy gajillion new gadgets.  Although I understand blogging isn't permitted by the CES organizers (and apparently wireless access isn't encouraged either, according to the Post's Rob Pegoraro), somehow Engadget has managed to have someone there.

But strolling/scrolling through the Engadget entries, I'm not as enthusiastic as I thought I might be.  More and different openings to bits.  More and different and faster ways to combine those bits.  Surely we're just waiting for the Interface that will disappear, just as the net has disappeared.  You're not "on the internet" any longer, you're just "online."  Or just reading, or whatever.  These boxes don't look fun from a distance.

What did get my attention was the Alter Ego mirror.  It's not at CES.  It's a gadget that reacts to a person.  It shows that person an image of themselves, and learns from the expression of its subject.  Then it frowns unexpectedly, like a frightening doppelganger or a menacing bus driver.  Now that's fun. 

 

Part of today's complex festivities included a presentation about networked reactions to drugs.

It was chilling.  (Speaking of chilling, don't get me started on medical errors.  Did you know that there are between 50,000 and 200,000 deaths per year in the US that are caused by straight-out avoidable errors?  Wrong drug, wrong leg cut off, wrong treatment.  If there are that many deaths, just imagine how many mistakes are made that don't lead to death.)

The problem with administering medications is that 70%-90% of proteins communicate with one another.  So if you do something that you think is inhibiting X protein, you may also (in some downstream reaction) be cheering up Y protein, and thus causing the exact opposite effect of what you wanted in the first place.  This is the Vioxx story.

There are lots of levels of this, from simple double-edged sword effects -- like the conflicting downstream effects -- to feedback loops/synergistic effects in which there are two or more stable states in which two drugs can coexist.  If you want to drive the system to one of those states (to make the patient well), you may have to find a third drug that will get you there. 

Or you could try to map incredibly complicated genomic interactions with drugs to figure out how to control the fate of various cells.  Sure -- 13,000 genes, 32 drugs -- just draw the picture.  With some funding assistance.

These are all very brave and optimistic efforts to figure out what a highly-connected network does when medications are added in.  The lesson I took away was this:

We really don't know whether any particular drug will fix any particular problem, or whether it will instead/also cause a different problem down the road. 

Whenever we try to manipulate a complex system, we're shooting bullets in the dark. 

Mary Ann Allison of the Allison Group coined "gecyberschaft."  Here's her idea:  sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies described village society before the Industrial Revolution (gemeinschaft) and urban society afterwards (gesellschaft).  Allison doesn't see these as oppositional systems, but rather as stages in evolution -- and she thinks we're at a big punctuation point prompted by the information revolution.  The new society is gecyberschaft.

So if your unit of community in gemeinschaft was the village, it became "friends and family" in gesellschaft, and it's now your "primary attention group."  You pay attention to that group (or groups, I'd hope she'd say) and to "groups of purpose" -- groups neither bound to a place nor to a particular bureaucracy.

In gemeinschaft, your status was ascribed (based on birth); in gesellschaft, it was achieved; and now, in gecyberschaft, it's assessed.  Very interesting stuff.

Other interesting nuggets from today's virtuousic series of presentations by Yaneer Bar-Yam:  creativity requires some separation (differences, strength of weak ties), not complete connection.  So membranes are particularly important in complex systems.  They are always properties of the collective, and beautiful examples of emergent behavior.

Thermostats are profound entities.  They seek a goal -- and the whole notion of goal-seeking doesn't fit with linear ideas.  And they're only as complex as they need to be.  They worry about their one task (regulating temperature) and don't concern themselves with their complete environment (humidity, open doors).  So they're successful in a complex systems sense as well as profound.

And a good thing too.  

Too much complexity for one day.  But it was a good day, and very productive in terms of my obsession with networks v. hierarchies and how to govern the internet. 

The key insight from today (after a few hours on the benefits of networks, all of which I am confident you know about already) (or you wouldn't read a single blog) has four steps:

1.  There is always a tradeoff between scale and complexity.  Systems that are highly complex at fine-grained scales are not as complex at coarser scales.  (Bar-Yam says that complexity is the amount of entropy in a system.)  Example of this might be a human being -- it takes less information to describe a human being at full size (someone you're talking to from a foot away) than it would take to describe the vat of atoms that is that human being once you grind him up.  (sorry for grisly image -- it's standard).

2.  Both environments and systems have measures of complexity at different scales.  So:  an ocean is not very complex when seen from above at a low resolution -- it's uniform across the earth.  And a tanker, as a system, is not very complex.  But a coastline is complex, and a group of guerrilla fighters is complex.  A rigid hierarchy is not very complex, because it can't be any more complex than the individual who's at the top.

3.  If there's a mismatch between the complexity of an organism and the environment it's dealing with, it's in trouble.  This is why pure hierarchies can't deal well with complex business environments. (and as time goes on those environments get more complex as everyone reacts to everyone else).  This is why trying to control food distribution centrally doesn't work.

4.  Once you've discovered the gap or the mismatch, the next step is synthesis:  the only way to create systems that are more complex than what an individual can understand is evolution.  Free markets do this; you can also set up frameworks that prompt evolutionary processes.

The big news today was the Charter decision by the 8th Circuit.  Some nice gratuitous statements about the constitutionality of the entire subpoena process.  Bravo to all.

 

We're studying three key questions:  (1) how do interactions give rise to patterns of complex behavior; (2) how do we describe complex systems; and (3) how do complex systems arise through evolution.  Our instructor, Yaneer Bar-Yam, is unafraid of building models in Excel spreadsheets on the fly in public. (He should really use RuntimeRevolution.)  We had foxes eating sheep, droplets absorbing other droplets, lots of pixillating pointilism.

One simple point that I enjoyed today:  all of statistics is based on bell curves and non-interacting elements.  That's just not how the world works.  Parts do interact.  There was a good story from a participant about being told in a research project about the behavior of college students that he/she was not allowed to assume that the students could talk to another.  Nope-- that would invalidate all the assumptions under which the research grant had been obtained.

I also love fractals.  I'm not sure where that will get me in life, but they're great.  Same with neural networks and the strengthening/weakening of synapses.

There's a lot of modeling going on in this course.  From my perspective, models are just fine as projects.  But they don't really help at all with hard questions.  Take policy debates.  No one will ever be explicit about what their interests are or how much they care.  So you'll never be able to say:  here's a model of how things may work out given everyone's desires.  All your assumptions are infinitely attackable. 

And models are based on rules being applied to helpless colored squares, as far as I can tell.  My question today was:  why can't the elements make rules for themselves, based on what they're learning?  No answer yet.

   

Yesterday, I tried to define a complex adaptive system -- I said it was made of autonomous agents whose interactions produced emergent properties that couldn't be explained by looking at the agents individually.  The guy I was talking to was a string quartet player (a real one), and he said, "Like a string quartet!"  Exactly like a string quartet.

I'm attending a class put on by the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) at MIT this week  Big title:  Complex Physical, Biological, and Social Systems.  The syllabus says it will be a "coherent program."  Here's hoping. 

Dan Gillmor is stepping out into his new world of citizen journalism.  His new blog is off to a fast start and will undoubtedly be launching many great conversations.  But the important thing is that it's easy to tell that Dan's whole heart is in this project -- even though, as he puts it, "the larger framework has yet to be developed, much less built."  We're lucky to have him around.