Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Douglas Rushkoff at the Personal Democracy Forum: Second day invocation speech video.

Some notes. Paraphrasings, not exact quotations, so I'm just putting the whole thing in brackets.

[
Personal democracy is an oxymoron.

I'm on the here comes everybody side of this discussion. But it's the everybody that matters.

It's not the network.

It's the people.

The network is just a tool for people to be people again.

The problem with branding, the problem for top-down communication, all these Renaissance era ideas

What if community scaled better than corporations?

Clay Shirky thoughtfully (and of course without knowing) defines one of the key goals/purposes of PWGD better than I have been able to explain it: provide people the legal and practical business benefits of incorporation without the rigidity or hierarchy (and ideally with lower startup and overhead costs).

http://www.sparkminute.com/?p=335

Companies interested in making the world better, fairer, and freer for everyone.

(For "What other kinds of companies do you want to meet" at the Editor & Publisher conference this month in Las Vegas.)

Do Drupal to make dreams come true (in response to person before me, "use Drupal to make my dreams come true").

Contact Josh Wolf about collaborating on the open news network concept (person-to-person squared).

Contact Josh Wilson, David Cohn, others about quality, modular, e-mail mailing list software.

Godin again:

There are essentially an infinite number of good causes to contribute to, an infinite number of people to help, an infinite number of great records to listen to as well. The problem is finding them. Connecting. Feeling like you were successful and not missing something you really needed or wanted.

Forgiving the figurative use of the word infinite, this is again the role PWGD can and must fill.

Many, many groups need a robust web presence with community tools but lack the resources to pay for such a thing to be created and made to look quality.

Groups like these are also natural allies of

This would make Ning a main competitor / collaborator. They spent three years funded with millions of dollars building their system, but we have Drupal.

Other organizations will provide subsidized hosting for PWGD-enabled sites.

the distributed model, at least in this sense, will be baked in to PWGD from the beginning.

People won't have to visit the PWGD site to participate.

His latest blog, What happens when we organize, in it's entirety, emphasis added:

Most power occurs because one side is better organized than the other. Labor is usually less well organized than management, criminals are usually less well organized than the police and customers are always less well organized than producers.

Seth Godin was invited to join the Forbe's network of financial bloggers... by bulk e-mail:

I wrote her back, pointing out that she hadn't even bothered to pretend it was a personal note... just a mail merge missing my name.

She responded (this is the entire note):

I'm not sending these out. I have people working for me that send out 500 a day. Are you interested in joining, Seth?

[Very initial first rough start of a beginning of a draft.]

PWGD rules for being a PWGD service:
1. People rule. People who use your service can communicate with everyone else should they make a collective decision to do so. (This is why the democratically moderated communication is the base functionality.)
2. Free software (ideally, Affero GPL).