I was sorry to miss this appearance in Second Life, where a crowd also gathered, but I had a RL meeting. I've long been a critic of Beth Noveck, whose collectivist theories and disdain for individual rights I find alarming:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2009/02/the-coming-col...

I find it chilling that she has come to power in the White House. I never dreamed that someone could come that close to the very *president* with these extremist notions of privileging groups over individuals as if something "transformative" occurs in online collaboration, as if some ecstatic "wiki" will fix everything without recourse to deliberation or checks and balances from the three branches of government and the free media.

Noveck's OSTP blog is a dense, wonky, sectarian morass, not only because of the contributors, some of whom tend to be of the UFO, marijuana, birther types (although they are quickly sequestered from view), but because Noveck herself has set up detailed and dull formulations framing issues as *she* sees them, and then an elaborate forums rule set that is straight out of the awful Internet culture of Digg or Slashdot or Second Life, or indeed, any game where geeks rule.

After you submit a comment, all the fanboyz are entitled immediately to abuse-report you or "flag" you if they don't like what you write. So instead of having a thoughtful moderator, or trusting the First Amendment to work on this government website, as it should, people are turned into police informants and can rat on each others' posts. Then mods secreted behind the firewall, put posts they don't like on a flagged page where they are buried (presumably some are deleted if they really fall afoul of the TOS, but one can't know).

That the TOS indistinguishable from any typical unconscionable TOS of any private corporation's game or social media is now taking over instead of the Constitution of the United States is of course lost on most of the people posting there.

If you are double-plus-good, and type the sort of meaningless blather couched to sound tekkie and officious about the extra-special goodyness of Collaboration and Leveraging and Empowerment and Knowledge Management Systems and such, then your post goes up the approval ranking system and becomes more visible. If you are critical and skeptical God forbid disagree with the original poster or any of the fangirlz, you are voted down and made to disappear. Soon, you will fall into a memory hole.

As I've noted before to you, Nancy, on your own blog, Noveck, just like Clay Shirky, has let the mask slip on her collectivism and crowdsourcing jazz of late, as she struggles with the real turbulence of the firehose of democracy let loose on these Gov 2.0 pages. These people don't REALLY want "Here Comes Everybody" -- they want to invoke the mobs as a kind of populist concept, but make sure there's a hardy and trusted cadre that can vote the inconvenient types down and unplus their posts. Noveck has all sorts of "nuanced" ideas of how to make this take root.

We all "get" that people who constantly spam a board with UFO birth certification nuttiness affect the discourse but in America, the basic premise of free speech is that it is free, and that the good will drive out the bad. You need not fear bad speech, you should merely promote good speech. This need not be done artificially with geeky voting and plusing systems but by building up networks of posters who are thoughtful and informed.

Small wonder Saul Hansell, an opensource groupie at the Times, has loved up Noveck in this blog post, appropriately titled:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/can-the-wonks-beat-the-trolls-o...

The very concept of "troll" is outdated and is used by geeks in various settings to try to delegitimize critics and try to silence dissent. It harks back to the days of the Well and such when the first coders struggled with the mob showing up online, mainly anonymously, and were celebrating "openness" and anarchy themselves -- except when it applied to them. They hated making rules that sounded like the institutions they were supposed to be reforming and even overthrowing.

It would be one thing if Noveck was just a wonky professor with extremist ideas of the Marxian type you find in every university these days, and she served her time in the 4 years Obama has before the right-wing returns, pushing papers -- or in this case, pushing pixels and bytes, "until the grown-ups come to get us."

But the horrible thing is that wikitarianism can do an awful lot of damage and begin to bleed even more into the body politic with some of this oppressive culture. Instead of issues being framed from the grassroots up, they are being framed from not even the astroturf, but from phony grassroots idealogues who dub themselves the advance guard, the New Class who frames the People's issues for them, as they are incompetent and can only write about dope and UFOs and birth certificates, see. Then from there, after the framing process is totally grabbed, then set up all kinds of "votes" that are not yes/no propositions, but "vote up" or "vote down" or "flag" -- making some ideas more visible merely because they've been flash mobbed by fanboyz that always collect and rule sites like these unable to submit to a rule of law over the mods themselves.

Perhaps it's quite telling that out of her many proposals, Noveck slipped in a crowdsourced notion that the CIA shouldn't get a veto on what is declassified or not.

Typical. An agency that in fact is a part of an elected democratic government, under the oversight of the executive and Congress and judicial branches, that has a mandate from these institutions to decide what should be classified, no longer can have a veto. Instead, we will have the Tyranny of Whoever Shows Up to flashmob a wiki.

I just remember that I read a good article about the "crowdsourcing" concept. Apparently, there's this application called "Idea Scale" to crowdsource ideas, and US government is using it, too. Check out the full article here, it was very informative with regards to how to crowdsource innovations,

Top 5 applications to “crowdsource” personal & small business innovations

Cheers,