Smarty-pants nice guy David Weinberger (left) notes that the Publius Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society (which is now – wow! – 10 years old) is now live. The goal of the Publius Project?
This project brings together a distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists, technologists and still other experts, to write short essays, to foster an on-going public dialogue, and to create a durable record of how the rules of cyberspace are being formed, potentially impacting their future incarnation.
Weinberger himself gets things going with an interesting essay exploring tacit versus explicit governance as those terms apply to the Internet. Offline, we have a lot of explicit governance in the form of constitutions, laws, regulations, and the whole apparatus of the state that has been set up to enforce that code. Much of cyberspace, Weinberger writes, is governed without formal governance strictures. Echoing Lawrence Lessig, Weinberger writes that online governance is:
… mediated by software, and software comes with some abilities and not others. Code is constitution. Of course that’s true of real world media as well, but the media that we’re used to in the real world have been so limited that their implicit governance has felt more like limitations than possibilities. How can you talk about the affordances of a telephone system for social interaction without beginning with its overwhelming limitation: You can only talk, it’s really designed for talking to just one person at a time, you generally reach someone by interrupting her. Eventually you may get around to considering sending faxes and navigating phone trees by pressing numbered buttons, but the essence of the telephone is expressed by its overweening lack of ambition. Net applications, on the other hand, tend to be rich in possibilities. And even when they are not, we inhabit them with our own inventions. For example, if you were to write a user manual for Flickr, it’d have more sections than any normal person would want to read. And, even so, that’s not enough for us. Flickr lets us annotate photos by drawing boxes on them with notes attached. If you come upon a photo with concentric boxes drawn on it, there’s a very good chance you’ve come upon people who are arguing about some feature of the photo, using Flickr’s affordances in a way Flickr never anticipated. Flickr’s affordances are a type of tacit governance. So are the nested boxes effortlessly invented by its users. But it will not seem like governance until someone nests boxes in an “inappropriate” way, and someone else draws a box around them all and says, “Dude, stop inserting your spammy boxes in the middle of our conversation.” The moment at which Flickr has to post rules for using nested boxes is the day that the nested box norm has failed.
Responses to his essay are already up from Esther Dyson and Kevin Werbach.