archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Trying out the Ask500People polling / survey / crowdsmarts (collective intelligence is too clean a term for this) service, I thought I’d throw out a complicated question, but ask for a simple answer.
In light of the collapse of American – and now global – financial markets [which are melting faster than the polar ice caps, if anyone’s interested in what may prove to be a telling environmental parallel with dire implications for our collective future], I’m wondering “Is American culture healthy?”
Here’s the responses so far – join in!
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The NYTimes reports today in Obama Opts Out of Pub­lic Financ­ing for Cam­paign that Sen­a­tor Obama ”…raised $95 mil­lion in Feb­ru­ary and March alone, most of it, as his aides noted Thurs­day, in small con­tri­bu­tions raised on the Inter­net. More than 90 per­cent of the campaign’s con­tri­bu­tions were for $100 or less, said Robert Gibbs, the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor to Mr. Obama.“

Obama’s suc­cess rais­ing money with small dona­tions is a clear indi­ca­tor that crowd­sourc­ing is a viable approach to financ­ing what is prob­a­bly the most expen­sive and demand­ing type of elec­toral con­test ever seen — a U.S. pres­i­den­tial elec­tion cam­paign.

The old ways aren’t going away just yet — wit­ness McCain’s more con­ven­tional reliance on a mixed palette of pub­lic finance and unlim­ited dona­tions to the RNC — but suc­cess­ful crowd­sourc­ing of an elec­tion effort of this scale and dura­tion proves other mod­els — net­worked, dis­trib­uted / decen­tral­ized, bottom-up, etc. — can be effec­tive in the most chal­leng­ing sit­u­a­tions.

“Instead of forc­ing us to rely on mil­lions from Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ists and spe­cial inter­est PACs, you’ve fueled this cam­paign with dona­tions of $5, $10, $20, what­ever you can afford,” he told his sup­port­ers in the video mes­sage. “And because you did, we’ve built a grass­roots move­ment of over 1.5 mil­lion Amer­i­cans.“

And that’s a good thing. The rel­a­tive elec­toral stale­mate we’ve had in the U.S. for the last decade echoes the trench war­fare phase of World War One; grind­ing bat­tles of attri­tion between nom­i­nally dis­tinct com­bat­ants that con­sume much, accom­plish lit­tle, and yield no sub­stan­tive change for the peo­ple involved.

The next step is to apply this net­worked / crowd­sourced / dis­trib­uted financ­ing model to sup­port a cam­paign by some­one out­side the (dis­tress­ingly) com­pla­cent major par­ties. We’ve man­aged to change the feed­ing mech­a­nism, now we have to change the ani­mal it feeds.

“On average, a new record is added to the WorldCat database every 10 seconds. Watch it happen live…” Watch WorldCat grow
According to the About page:
“WorldCat is the world’s largest bibliographic database, the merged catalogs of thousands of OCLC member libraries. Built and maintained collectively by librarians, WorldCat itself is not an OCLC service that is purchased, but rather provides the foundation for many OCLC services and the benefits they provide.”
Here’s what went into the system while I was typing this entry out:
———————
The following record was added to WorldCat on 08/10/2005 9:08 PM
Total holdings in WorldCat: 999,502,692
OCLC Number: 61245112
Title: Theological and cultural studies in honor of Simon John De Vries /
Publisher: T. & T. Clark International,
Publication Date: c2004.
Language: English
Format: Book
Contributed by: SAINT PATRICK’S SEMINARY LIBR
———–
Some impressive WorldCat statistics from the OCLC site:
Between July 2004 and June 2005:

• WorldCat grew by 4.6 million records
• Libraries used WorldCat to catalog and set holdings for 51.9 million items and arrange 9.4 million interlibrary loans
• Library staff and users conducted 34.7 million searches of WorldCat via FirstSearch for research and reference, and to locate materials

Also:

• WorldCat has 57,968,788 unique bibliographic records
• 53,548 participating libraries worldwide use and contribute to WorldCat
• Every 10 seconds an OCLC member library adds a record to WorldCat
• Every 4 seconds an OCLC member library fills an interlibrary loan request using WorldCat
• Every second a library user searches WorldCat using FirstSearch

For us information types, it beats the hell out of the old population clocks that the U.S. Census Bureau still runs for the US and the world.
BTW, for the curious, “According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the resident population of the United States, projected to 08/11/05 at 01:24 GMT (EST+5) is 296,854,475”

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