Archived: the KIP project

Images and links may no longer operate. Meant as an archive only.

CHECK OUT KIP, IT’S FOR ALL OF US

I have an idea. It’s good for people and good for democracy in the social age. And it’s fun to play?

I noticed we lack the infrastructure to make sense of news and current affairs today, leading to dire real consequences for people and society.

I thought about how I build trust in the sources I follow and ‘play’ the news. I do this for myself every day, as an infovore it’s a calming and even fun way to process what I see out there on my feed… I realized we can do it together with what I’ve built and patterned.

I want to gamify the learning of the world’s complex dynamics - with a daily online brainteaser the public can play, backed by an educational framework for journalism in the social age.

I wonder who’s connecting dots for you in media literacy, critical thinking, civic responsibility, holding power to account?

Disinformation tracks with current affairs and is employed across many fields, but we lack a unified solution...essentially, we are all frustrated sense makers.

KIP (“Knowledge Is Power”) aims to solve that with a current affairs framework for The Fifth Estate, for citizens, and for game lovers.

👇 Here’s my plan to provide a unified solution to the disinformation on social media that harms us as information citizens and voters — harming our democracy in the process.

Knowledge Graph As A Service

👈 Here’s the information ecosystem that the KIP platform aims to connect, showing data flow and network actors to technologies and end user interfaces and opportunities. We can do this today.

KIP means to bring civic participation media/generative content to strategic partners, like schools and organizations.

Our news and information landscape has changed. Our map makers have changed.

This is a playing board we can all use to parse and process news and current events, with KIP’s core value unit being a digital playing card. A bit of news currency. A bit of information that deep receipts can be attached to.

The KIP platform helps people find better information and make sense of this moment, with a pathway to renewed credibility and civic engagement for all.

I believe when it comes to news and current events, in order for us to act collectively in our best interests we need to get on the same page … and the same playing board.

““As much as we want to hold institutions accountable, citizens are constantly left to their own devices. Thinking holistically and user-centred is a necessary step for us all.”

— Scott DeJong, a public scholar making and studying games about disinformation

I also want to give credit to the people who help us understand what’s happening and what we can do about it.

CASSANDRA AWARDS to recognize our sense makers

I’m proposing a new information award for voices explaining this moment best. These are the ones who emerged for me as I used the KIP framework.

I nominate the above voices for the first Cassandra Awards to recognize sense makers among us in this information war. Listen to a 5 minute narration of the bigger picture they created for me here. It’s the big thing, the biggest thing. It’s so big it’s hard to see, hard to have one image capturing it. I strung together a narrative of quotes of the bigger picture that I took years to capture in my framework.

Who would you nominate for a Cassandra Award?

If I were writing the book on 2020, this would be the BLUF

“We are at war but most Americans don’t realize it and even fewer know the American president was installed to destroy us.” #fridaymorning #quoteoftheday #TrumpFailedAmerica #TRUMPDestroyedAMERICA #BookBoost #amwriting #Election2020 #VoteForOurLives pic.twitter.com/STOHuisOnF

— Trust is a license. Renew it. (@actuallyreal33) July 17, 2020

This is how a book written by the ‘generative journalism” account/“knowledge service in an infodemic” I contribute to would start. I believe that’s called BLUF: bottom line, up front.

What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?

TBT, '80s Meatpacking District fashion, society, film production

Remembering an arty, downtown jet-set of the late '80s....at the first fashion show of an emerging Houston designer, featuring the granddaughter of a woman who was married to Howard Hughes.

Here's what the New York Times reported about a later event by the same emerging designer.

And here’s what Cathy Horyn wrote in The Washington Post about what she called the “first show” of B. Moody (but clearly it wasn’t the first show, 👆that was, in 1987.)

What we mean when we say "Berkeley"

Much of what I and my Berkeley-native peers experienced growing up there was being duplicated in alternative communities everywhere, and also much of it was a product of the times. We didn't know that.

Berkeley is revealed in its "byzantine cultural complexity" by secular Jewish homegirl author of new book about going undercover in Jerry Falwell's evangelical church.

"If you’re from Berkeley...you know the muscle of the Berkeley Left is actually made up of a million fibers, often flexing at cross purposes — the Green Partiers, the Clintonites, the Obamaphiles, the Slow Foodists and Dumpster Divers, the Second and Third Wave feminists, the Marxists, anarchists, and Revolutionary Communists, the vaguely apathetic left-leaners, the merely apathetic."

Read the Berkeleyside article here.

"The first time I saw a bowl of table grapes I had a panic attack. ~ KOKO MULDER"

Connecting through social media with the diaspora of Berkeley kids, and comparing our upbringings. Read the New York Times article here.

Freedom of the Internet demonstration, TBT

Odd to see this Internet ban memory from my final days as an expat in Istanbul at a time when America is voting to save or kill Net Neutrality tomorrow.

A photo author, journalist & mid-east politics expert Hugh Pope took of me midway in the march from his Istiklal apartment.

What Hugh Pope wrote about that day:

Some pictures of demonstrators on Sunday 15 May 2011 calling for reform of Turkey's new conservative internet laws in Istanbul's Istiklal St today - the biggest, loudest and happiest protest I've seen in more than a decade of living in the city center. Some signs were funny too: "Dawkins is a scientist, not a pornographer, you retard!" "Your Internet is being cut according to Islamic regulations" (carried by the two gentlemen in chador-like garb, punning on signs in religious-minded meat shops) "EnSUCKlopedia" (well, roughly), "Censorship for Security is like Sex for Virginity" and "Hands off my porn". 

Unless the government backtracks, a whole new system goes into force on 22 August. Internet providers will be obliged to offer every subscriber four filters of varying severity, and forcing Internet cafes to choose which sites can be accessed in advance. Any attempt to bypass such regulations will be criminal, and all Internet providers will be responsible for enforcement. 

The liberal Radikal newspaper, for instance, compares this coming system to that of China, Iran or Cuba. This appears to be a new turn for Turkey, which has so far been ambivalent on Internet freedom - YouTube was banned for what seemed like years, but even the Prime Minister noted that it was easy to use a proxy server to reach it. But from 22 August even proxies will be banned ... and all this in a country negotiating to join the EU! 

Not only Turks are concerned. Turkey's expat harem's Queen of Social Media, Anastasia Ashman, peeled off the crowds to visit and tweet from our windows overlooking the crowds of tens of thousands (see picture). At the same time, her Internet guru husband Burc managed to get my wi-fi system working properly for the first time in five years. So a big catch-up for me and I hope the demo will turn into a giant step forward for Turkey.