dance party tonight - SW Madison & Park - 11:00

Happy New Epoch Eve! Some tents will be pitched starting at 11:59 p.m. tonight. People including me, other participants in the OPDX Reoccupation Working Group, and a few other people, are on board so far. With this post we are making our intentions public and inviting everybody to join and support this action. Naturally, we'd like to see at least a few hundred campers join us tonight and tomorrow. Locations discussed so far include Shemanski and Chapman.

We'll discuss this at the Occupy Spokescouncil tonight (St. Francis, 7:00), but we're not advocating having GAs or spokescouncils that pertain to these new camps. We'll peacefully inhabit space(s) in solidarity with 100% of our fellow beings, very much inspired by, infused with energy from, the recent wave of occupations, but without a central governing or decision-making body.

Please click to "join" this dance party event, and/or spread the rumor through whatever channels you're channeling :-)

https://www.facebook.com/events/256154804511444/258398704287054/

http://occupyportlandcalendar.org

josh.maurice@gmail.com

503-757-5194

another gloss on GGODD

I added this to a thread called "Musings on direct democracy and a global mind" on the "singularity" mailing list:

I've been blogging for a few years about direct democracy and global mind as vehicles for reaching AGI and Singularity (for example, this message to the incoming Obama administration in 2008: http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com/5136.html ) and I've been emphasizing the transition from textual to graphical internet interfaces as a key aspect. (See my blogs, http://jmmsynch.blogspot.com/ and http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com.)

I recently coined the acronym GGODD: graphical, global online direct democracy.

The next big step at this point seems likely to amount to an algorithm that routes/filters information in some kind of generally applicable way. I envision that your "working memory," or the current representation of your current situation, will be expressed as a series of URLs. Somehow the algorithm will calculate, from this data and from any subsequent moves (input) that you have made at your interface, an appropriate subsequent representation of your situation.

I've dubbed this hypothetical algorithm a "social graph transformation (or generation or evolution) algorithm" and it seems similar to Mark Pesce's "community entity exploration protocol," for which he hasn't released any code yet as far as I know. He has released the code for his Plexus Social Networking Protocol (http://plexus.relationalspace.org/).

See his paper from 20ish years ago, "Cyberspace" http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/www.html.

The closest I've come to modeling in a mathematically precise way this "Filter (Holy Grail)" was what I called "Algorithm Alpha" (http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com/19048.html).

With such an algorithm running at millions of interfaces, presenting people with more and more relevant data more and more quickly, the speed with which we will construct structural/graphical maps of our knowledge will accelerate and we'll soon be navigating through a kind of shared dreamspace/imagination/cyberspace.

GGODD: Graphical, Global, Online Direct Democracy

A correspondent, to whom I had mentioned GGODD in an email*, replied saying "I don't know if your email is about computers, community planning, political science..." to which I replied:

It's about all those things -- I'm thinking about algorithms for creating a new kind of worldwide web -- one that transcends textual interfaces, presenting a kaleidoscopic tableau of meaningful imagery through which we will navigate, enabling us to express many kinds of ideas vastly more efficiently, more precisely, more picturesquely. This, I anticipate, will serve as such an efficient system for planning/organizing our social/economic activities that it will quickly render obsolete the worldwide political structures currently operating. I've written several blog entries over the past few years that might flesh out the idea more, in the two blogs linked from my Twitter profile. You might also check out Mark Pesce at twitter.com/mpesce and http://nextbillionseconds.com/ .

* Here's that text from from my earlier email:
In the meantime, I'd be interested in your feedback about constructing a graphical global online direct democracy.

I've been blogging about algorithms for optimally filtering/distributing data streams online, as a key to the transition from primarily text-based to primarily image-based Internet interfaces.