Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)

Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts.

From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the label rather than on the shirt. As I found myself saying to the Washington Post, "every new medium has the potential to be an art form." And as the Post added, "If Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde were still alive, they would probably all be on Twitter."

Part of the gift of aphorisms is remembering who said them. It matters that it was @biz who said “It's the messaging system that we didn’t know we needed until we had it.”

There's also a nice serial purchase opportunity. If this threadless/twitter program takes off, I see potential for a whole line of clothing by people whose tweets I admire. I'd totally subscribe to the @sacca collection.

This whole idea of fashion and social media seems to be coming up these days. Just yesterday, I had a great conversation with Chris Lindland, founder of Cordarounds, the short-run clothing design firm that started with horizontal corduroy (cordarounds), has moved into cool concepts like "bike to work pants", and crowdsources its marketing photography by inviting customers to send in pictures of themselves in the clothing they buy. Here's Chris:

Every clothing idea I release is designed to stoke some amount of Internet chatter. Where haute couture is inspired by art and hip couture is inspired by street culture, my products are inspired by Web communication. This conversational approach has been a necessity since the get-go, as I've never had the mighty monetary sledgehammer clothiers use to create product awareness.

While I'm sure that reads like Web 2.0 common sense to O'Reilly readers, it's a new approach for folks in clothing design.

Crowdsourced fashion design is the narrow end of the wedge. T-shirts are easy. But expect this trend to transform manufacturing as a whole over the next few years.

Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been the great proof point of the power of machine learning algorithms.

Earlier this week, Google made a nod to the other side of the debate, introducing a feature that they call "Rich Snippets." Basically, if you mark up pages with certain microformats ( and soon, with RDFa), Google will take this data into account, and will provide enhanced snippets in the search results. Supported microformats in the first release include those for people and for reviews.

So, for example, consider the snippet for the Yelp review page on the Slanted Door restaurant in San Francisco:

The snippet is enhanced to show the number of reviews and the average star rating, with a snippet actually taken from one of the reviews. By contrast, the Citysearch results for the same restaurant are much less compelling:

(Yelp is one of Google's partners in the rollout of Rich Snippets; Google hopes that others will follow their lead in using enhanced markup, enabling this feature.)

Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit.

Historically, the biggest block to the Semantic Web has been the lack of a killer app that would drive widespread adoption. There was always a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, in which users would need to do a lot of work to mark up the data for the benefit of others before getting much of a payoff themselves. But as Dan Bricklin remarked so insightfully in his 2000 paper on Napster, The Cornucopia of the Commons, the most powerful online dynamics are released not by appeals to volunteerism, but by self-interest:

What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present...

What I also find interesting about the announcement is the blurring line between machine learning and semantic markup.

Machine learning isn't just brute force analysis of unstructured data. In fact, while Google is famous as a machine-learning company, their initial breakthrough with pagerank was based on the realization that there was hidden metadata in the link structure of the web that could be used to improve search results. It was precisely their departure from previous brute force methods that gave them some of their initial success. Since then, they have been diligent in developing countless other algorithms based on regular features of the data, and in particular regular associations between data sets that routinely appear together - implied metadata, so to speak.

So, for example, people are associated with addresses, with dates, with companies, with other people, with documents, with pictures and videos. Those associations may be made explicitly, via tags or true structured markup, but given a large enough data set, they can be extracted automatically. Jeff Jonas calls this process "context accumulation." It's the way that our own brains operate: over time, we make associations between parallel data streams, each of which informs us about the other. Semantic labeling (via language) is only one of many of those data streams. We may see someone and not remember their name; we may remember the name but not the face that goes with it. We might connect the two given the additional information that we met at such and such conference three years ago.

Google is in the business of making these associations, finding pages that are about the same thing, and they use every available handle to help them do it. Seen in this way, SEO is already a kind of semantic markup, in which self-interested humans try to add information to pages to enhance their discoverability and ranking by Google. What the Rich Snippets announcement does is tell webmasters and SEO professionals a new way to add structure to their markup.

The problem with explicit metadata like this is that it's liable to gaming. But more dangerously, it generally only captures what we already know. By contrast, implicit metadata can surprise us, giving us new insight into the world. Consider Flickr's maps created by geotagged photos, which show the real boundaries of where people go in cities and what they do there. Here, the metadata may be added explicitly by humans, but it is increasingly added automatically by the camera itself. (The most powerful architecture of participation is one in which data is provided by default, without the user even knowing he or she is doing it.)

Google's Flu Trends is another great example. By mining its search database (what John Battelle calls "the database of intentions") for searches about flu symptoms, Google is able to generate maps of likely clusters of infection. Or look at Jer Thorp's fascinating project announced just the other day, Just Landed: Processing, Twitter, MetaCarta & Hidden Data. Jer simulated the possible spread of swine flu built by extracting the string "Just landed in..." from Twitter. Since Twitter profiles include a location, and the object of the phrase above is also likely to be a location, he was able to create the following visualization of travel patterns:

Just Landed - Test Render (4 hrs) from blprnt on Vimeo.

This is where the rubber meets the road of collective intelligence. I'm a big fan of structured markup, but I remain convinced that even more important is to discover new metadata that is produced, as Wallace Stevens so memorably said, "merely in living as and where we live."

P.S. There's some small irony that in its first steps towards requesting explicit structured data from webmasters, Google is specifying the vocabularies that can be used for its Rich Snippets rather than mining the structured data formats that already exist on the web. It would be more "googlish" (in the machine learning sense I've outlined above) to recognize and use them all, rather than asking webmasters to adopt a new format developed by Google. There's an interesting debate about this irony over on Ian Davis' blog. I expect there to be a lot more debate in the weeks to come.

Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow

I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend”-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network.

But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.

I don’t mind if anyone in the world reads my reviews, and they are in fact all public on the site, but for someone to “follow” my reviews (get notified when I write them), they have to be accepted as my friend, in which case I see all their reviews as well. Asymmetric follow should at least be an option on any social network. It’s the way the world really works. We never find ourselves in clearly delineated friend-circles, where everyone has or wants complete visibility with everyone else, or none at all.

If you’re even a minor-league celebrity like me, there are way more people who are interested in what you are doing or thinking that you can possibly keep up with. I can’t even keep up regularly with the 500+ people I do follow on Twitter; keeping up with the 400,000 who follow me would be impossible.

Asymmetric follow is why I use Twitter regularly and Facebook much less often. With Twitter’s model, I can find people I’m interested in, whether or not they know me, and learn about them and their lives and thoughts. Others can include me in their lists. You become “friends” with complete strangers over time, by communicating with them (responding with @messages for example), perhaps by mutual following. In fact, Twitter’s wonderful system of @ messages means that anyone can address me - and so I find myself having conversations with complete strangers as well. I actually follow my @ messages more faithfully than I do my planned Follow list.

On Facebook, I’m expected to approve every request, and alas, I turn down far more than I accept. Amazingly, few people who I don’t know even bother to explain who they are and why they want to be my friend. I sometimes do accept strangers who make a good case for why I’d be interested in them, but I always ignore those I don’t know who don’t bother to even say hello. Ditto for LinkedIn and Plaxo and all the other greedy networks that are clamoring for my time and attention while requiring me to take explicit steps to approve or deny each request.

(Meanwhile Dopplr has seemingly implemented a form of reverse friending, in which I am forced to see the trips of anyone who has requested the ability to see mine, a kind of Bizarro-world asymmetric follow that has rendered Dopplr completely useless to me.)

Asymmetric follow is also a good way to boost viral growth, as it encourages people to try the service without having to be an active user. We learned long ago from Usenet and mailing lists that there are always more lurkers than posters.

So, consider this a LazyWeb request to all social networks out there: even if you have your own ideas about how to organize social networks, have an option for users to turn on “Twitter-mode.” I think you’d be surprised how well it works.

Who Will Cut The Gordian Knot of Healthcare Billing?

In a story about open source medical records systems, I couldn't help but be struck by the irony in the following statement:

Referred to by health care quality guru Philip Longman as an "unrecognized national resource," VistA's open source code is constantly being improved and updated by its users. However, John Halamka MD, Chief Information Officer at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, is quick to note that VistA is not designed for complex billing scenarios that challenge large hospital systems because the VA is a single payer system unlike the health system for the general public.

It's true that VistA is designed for hospital management and patient care rather than billing, but isn't it a sign of something wrong when the billing tail wags the dog of care?

For so many problems in our society, solutions are dismissed as impossible because they would require changes that people don't want to make. That's why change so often comes from outside. Perhaps the simplicity of VistA is a feature, not a bug. In its early days, the internet was cited as inadequate -- too lightweight for serious networking -- by proponents of complex, over-built systems. Where's Alexander when we need him? Gordian Knots are everywhere.

Overheard: @edjez on innovation in mobile

Question: When you plug something in do you say “I’m using electricity” or “I’m using the wall socket”? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of innovation in energy…where the discussion centers on the design of plugs & sockets.

Eduardo Jezierski, in Phones Don't Change the World, People Do.

P.S. It's unbelievable that more people don't follow Edjez on twitter, or read his blog. He doesn't blog or tweet often - he's out saving the world. He's worth paying attention to.

Overheard: @andrewsavikas on DRM

There are a lot of things I come across in my day that are too long for twitter, and too short for a regular blog post. Inspired by Nat's "Four Short Links", I thought I'd occasionally share great tidbits I've read or overheard. Here's the first.

In a discussion on the Reading 2.0 Mailing List, Andrew Savikas uttered this gem:

There's a difference between "shouldn't" and "shouldn't be able to". Personally I believe publishers "shouldn't" use DRM; but that doesn't mean I think they "shouldn't be able to" if that's their choice (just so long as I have the choice *not* to). The market will sort out the rest.

This reminds me of Henry Spencer's gem from the early days of Usenet, "If Unix didn't let you do dumb things, it wouldn't let you do smart things either."

Wordle visualization of my Tweetstream

Mike Hendrickson (@mikehatora) sent me a nice Wordle visualization of my tweet stream, dating back as far as Twitter keeps it. As you can see, I retweet a lot. It's also interesting that many of the repeated words are not concepts or topics, but people's names (in the form of twitter handles.) This is one of the interesting things about twitter: it's a reflection of a community of shared minds, rather than of shared ideas.

(Tweets were retrieved using this python script.)

Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. Camera angles, pacing, editing techniques, lighting, location shooting, special effects: all these innovations make the movies (and television) of today very different from the earliest movies. YouTube is pushing the envelope even further. Why should books be any different? (Aside: Bruce Sterling just published an amazing rant on this topic - how the context of pulp magazines shaped the content of early science-fiction.)

In our work at O'Reilly as authors and publishers, we've long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book, not just its price or format.

A sample from my latest experiment, The Twitter Book, can be seen below.

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there's no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn't imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn't be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

The idea to write the book in powerpoint came to me while I was thinking about how quickly I write a new talk: I generally use pictures as visual bullets, to remind me about the order of my main points; I know what I want to talk about when I see each picture. And pictures are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story. All I needed to do, I realized, was to write down some notes equivalent to what I'd be saying if I were giving this as a talk. (And in fact, I will be using portions of the book as the basis for my talk later today at the Inbound Marketing Summit, and a few weeks later at the Twitter Boot Camp.)

Of course, having the amazing Sarah Milstein as a co-author really helped. She immediately grasped the concept, and because she knows just about everything there is to know about the twitter app ecosystem, tools, and techniques, she actually provided much of the meat of the book. This allowed me to spend time on giving my perspectives on points that particularly matter to me, or that demonstrate my approach to twitter.

But even there, we saw real benefit in the format of the book. As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture. It's hard to coordinate a complex narrative (even single authors sometimes lose track of their plot details); much easier to work on things in standalone units that share a common, "interoperable" format.

I first explored this modular approach to the book in Unix Power Tools, a book I wrote in 1993 with the explicit goal of emulating the hypertext style of the web in a print book. The book consists of a thousand inter-linked articles. In the print book, the "hyperlinks" were in the form of cross references to individually numbered articles. In online versions such as the one at Safari books online, the cross references are expressed as real hyperlinks.

Similarly, our "Cookbook" series of technical books (whose format was originated by Nat Torkington in 1998 with the first edition of the Perl Cookbook), effectively creates a database of answers to common problems.

In 2003, Dale Dougherty and Rael Dornfest developed the Hacks series, another approach to books as collections of loosely-related pages. The Hacks books provide a collection of tips, tricks, and documentation on the problem-solving approaches of cutting edge users.

Of course, modularity isn't the only thing that publishers can learn from new media. The web itself, full of links to sources, opposing or supporting points of view, multimedia, and reader commentary, provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online. Crowdsourcing likewise.

But I like to remind publishers that they are experts in both linking and in crowdsourcing. After all, any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It's just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven't realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn't write Harry Potter; it was the work of a welfare mom.) But again, we've failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

I don't exempt O'Reilly from that criticism. While we've done many pioneering projects, we haven't fully lived up to our own vision of the ebook of the future. For example, Safari Books Online, our online library, recognizes that the reference work of the future is far larger than a single book. But we've done a poor job of updating the works in that library to be more "web like" in the way I've just outlined. It is still primarily a collection of books online. (We're adding video, more web content, and working to update books to be more link-rich, but we're not as far along as I'd like.)

Take a look at any ebook, and ask yourself how it could be richer, more accessible, more powerful, if it approached the job it was trying to do with fresh eyes, and a fresh approach.

Many of the products that result won't look like books at all. After all, Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Brittanica, Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel. What job do publishers do? And how can new media help us do it better?

Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO

The news has now been leaked that President Obama intends to nominate Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. The Federal CTO will be an assistant to the President, as well as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently-named Federal CIO, to develop and implement the President's ambitious technology agenda.

According to one background document I was given access to, the White House describes the relationship between the CIO and CTO roles as follows:

The responsibilities of the CIO are to use information technology to transform the ways in which the government does business. The CTO will develop national strategies for using advanced technologies to transform our economy and our society, such as fostering private sector innovation, reducing administrative costs and medical errors using health IT, and using technology to change the way teachers teach and students learn.

Some in Silicon Valley have hoped for one of their own, a CTO with a deep technology pedigree and ties to the technology industry. For example, the Techcrunch coverage leads with the title Obama Spurns Silicon Valley. This is a narrow view.

I've been working for much of the past year to understand what many have been calling Government 2.0, and in that process, Chopra has been one of those who have taught me the most about how we can build a better government with the help of technology. He is an excellent choice as Federal CTO, for many reasons:

1. Chopra has been focused for the past three years on the specific technology challenges of government. Industry experience does little to prepare you for the additional complexities of working within the bounds of government policy, competing constituencies, budgets that often contain legislative mandates, regulations that may no longer be relevant but are still in force, and many other unique constraints. In his three year tenure as Secretary for Technology for the Commonwealth of Virginia, Chopra has demonstrated that he has these skills. In fact, last year, the National Association of State Chief Information Officers ranked Virginia #1 in technology management.
2. The role of the CTO is to provide visionary leadership, to help a company (or in this case, a government) explore the transformative potential of new technology. Try a few of these Virginia technology initiatives on for size:
   • the first officially-approved open source textbook in the country, the Physics Flexbook.
   • integrating iTunes U with Virginia's state education assessment framework;
   • the Learning Apps Development Challenge, a competition for the best iPhone and iPod Touch applications for middle-school math teaching;
   • a Ning-based social network to connect clinicians working in small health care offices in remote locations;
   • a state-funded "venture capital fund" to allow government agencies to try out risky but promising new approaches to delivering their services or improving their productivity;
   • a lightweight approval and testing process that allows the government to try out new technologies before making a full, expensive commitment.
3. Chopra demonstrates a deep understanding of the idea that the government is an enabler, not the ultimate solution provider. From the list of initiatives above, you can see that Chopra grasps the power of open source software, Web 2.0, user-participation, and why it's better to harness the ingenuity of a developer community than to specify complete top-down solutions. In a conversation with me a couple of months ago, he expressed his enthusiasm for the idea of a "digital commonwealth," a recognition that technology can help us to come together as a society to solve problems and create value through common effort. (See my post yesterday, The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale.)

   This digital commonwealth approach can be seen in Virginia's approach to rural broadband. The Virginia Information Technology Agency has developed a "broadband toolkit" that fosters cooperation between public agencies and private companies, identifying the location of public sector radio towers that can be used for free by broadband providers in order to reduce their costs, and areas with zoning rules that allow for public sector use of private radio towers.

   The digital commonwealth reflects an understanding of the dynamics that have led to technology successes like Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone app store: the platform provider creates enabling technology, "rules of the road," and visibility for participants, and then gets out of the way, leaving room for third parties to create additional value. This is a great model for all future government technology efforts.

4. Chopra understands that government technologists need to act more like their counterparts in Silicon Valley. As Micah Sifry notes in the TechPresident blog, quoting from a Governing magazine article about the Virginia venture capital experiment:

   "More important, and more unusual for the bureaucrats," says Governing, "he gives them permission to fail. You can't innovate, Chopra tells them, without taking a gamble every now and then." He adds, "We need to fundamentally change the culture of government in which change is measured in budget cycles to one in which change is measured in weeks or months."

5. Chopra is a practical innovator. He's not chasing technology for its own sake. I like this quote from a recent Federal Computer Week story:

   Understanding the process or service is always the most important factor, with technology running second. “Service sector innovation is the most important question,” Chopra said. “I’m not as excited about whether or not it’s emerging technology.”

   In my own conversations with Chopra over the past few months, this focus on "service sector innovation" has seemed particularly fertile. Our economy increasingly consists of service jobs. Improving the effectiveness of those jobs is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Chopra wants to put technology to work to make us better at health care, at education, at creating a vibrant economy. These are also, incidentally, the goals of the Federal CTO job, as described in one briefing document I reviewed:

   One of the primary responsibilities of the CTO will be to leverage American ingenuity generally and new technologies in particular as engines for job creation and economic growth. The CTO’s priorities will include expanded use of technology to boost broadband access, reduce health care costs, enable novel job-producing industries, remove barriers to technological progress, and create a more transparent and interactive government.

6. Chopra has a real focus on measurement, and on figuring out what really works. For example, the social network for remote health care workers mentioned above was the result of data showing an unusually high turnover rate for these workers. As I once wrote, in If Google Were a Restaurant,

   Web 2.0 (or "Live Software", as Microsoft has so insightfully called it) depends on creating information feedback loops. This is the practical plumbing that makes possible Web 2.0 systems that get better the more people use them.

   If we are truly to remake America's economy with the aid of technology, as the Obama administration has promised, we need to embrace the culture of transparency and feedback. The Federal transparency initiative is a central part of the plan. While there's a long way to go, the recovery.gov initiative, to report on the progress of Federal stimulus spending, is a critical step in building the electronic nervous system that will help us to understand what we're spending, where it's going, and what we're getting for all that money. Under Chopra's leadership, Virginia has been in the forefront of driving stimulus transparency down to the state level. stimulus.virginia.gov was one of the first state-level stimulus sites, and has served as a model for other states.
7. Chopra has specific expertise in Health Care IT. This is one of the most critical areas where we need to see technology innovation in the coming years. Unless we can get Moore's Law working in health care, it will eventually bankrupt our already-tottering economy. $19 billion has been allocated to Health Care IT in the stimulus package. We need someone who can help us spend it wisely!
8. Chopra is incredibly charismatic. This is essential in a role that depends on persuasion rather than outright authority. As Sean Garrett said in an excellent post on the 463 blog:

   I highly recommend watching a good portion of the video below. It's from this year's Congressional Internet Caucus conference in September.

   Chopra may not be a Valley guy, but Silicon Valley is going to like him a lot. He's energetic, insightful and can speak the language (again, watch the video). He's no bureaucrat.

   And, just because you didn't previously work for a chip company or an Internet start-up doesn't mean that you "are not a tech guy" as I just read another blog. Chopra spent a bulk of his career seeing technology in action (for better or worse) in his work in the health care industry and knew that it could and should do better to bring change to the massive sector.

   I couldn't agree more. Aneesh Chopra is a rock star. He's a brilliant, thoughtful change-maker. He knows technology, he knows government, and he knows how to put the two together to solve real problems. We couldn't do better.

The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale

I've been working a lot lately to imagine what Government 2.0 might look like. One of the most inspiring and thought-provoking stories I've read recently might not look like a Gov 2.0 story, but it is: Island DIY: Kauai residents don't wait for state to repair road.

Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government help, so business owners and residents on Hawaii's Kauai island pulled together and completed a $4 million repair job to a state park -- for free.

In fact, governments, like corporations, are vehicles for collective action. We pay a government, or a business, because it's an efficient way to tackle projects that are larger than a single person or group of friends can take on. But let's not forget that we ourselves are the raw material of collective action.

Traditional communities still remember how to do a barn raising. Those of us who spend our time on the internet celebrate wikipedia, but most of us have forgotten how to do crowdsourcing in the physical world.

The internet provides new vehicles for collective action. A lot of people pay attention when social media is used to organize a protest (as with the recent twitter-fueled protests in Moldova.) But we need to remember that we can organize to do work, as well as to protest!

Especially striking in the story are the cost and time-savings:

"It would not have been open this summer, and it probably wouldn't be open next summer," said Bruce Pleas, a local surfer who helped organize the volunteers. "They said it would probably take two years. And with the way they are cutting funds, we felt like they'd never get the money to fix it."

And if the repairs weren't made, some business owners faced the possibility of having to shut down....

So Slack [owner of a kayak tour business in the park], other business owners and residents made the decision not to sit on their hands and wait for state money that many expected would never come. Instead, they pulled together machinery and manpower and hit the ground running March 23.

And after only eight days, all of the repairs were done, Pleas said. It was a shockingly quick fix to a problem that may have taken much longer if they waited for state money to funnel in....

"We can wait around for the state or federal government to make this move, or we can go out and do our part," Slack said. "Just like everyone's sitting around waiting for a stimulus check, we were waiting for this but decided we couldn't wait anymore."

Now is the time for a renewal of our commitment to make our own institutions, our own communities, and our own difference. There's a kind of passivity even to our activism: we think that all we can do is to protest. Collective action has come to mean collective complaint. Or at most, a collective effort to raise money.

What the rebuilding of the washed out road in Polihale State Park teaches us is that we can do more than that. We can apply the DIY spirit on a civic scale.

Aneesh Chopra, the Secretary for Technology of the Commonwealth of Virginia, recently told me why he liked the term "commonwealth" better than "state": commonwealth emphasizes the value that we create by coming together. Technology provides us with new ways to coordinate, new ways to govern and to regulate, but we should never forget that these are merely means. The end is a better society. And that starts with us.

We need to rediscover government as an enabler, not a solution provider; as a platform for our own innovation, a lever for our own work, not as the deus ex machina that we've paid to do for us what we could be doing for ourselves.

If you know of other great civic DIY stories, let me know. I want to feature technology in my Government 2.0 activism, but I also want to feature the simple DIY spirit.

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