experiments and fully realized projects (institute as lab vs. institute as publisher)

All of our experiments are publishing projects. I think that the actual dichotomy is between experiments and tools. Some of our projects (without gods, gamer theory) have been about examples of what happens when we take text and either tweak it's purpose or it's form. Other projects (Sophie, Media Commons, Holy of Holies, Iraq Report) are about providing tools for other people to use.

This seems like the kind of project we are focusing on now. So my question: Istool-making something that we are capable of doing? If so, to what extent?

HOW WE PRESENT THE INSTITUTE AND HOW WE WORK IN THE WORLD

I would put another point down here: how we relate ourselves to the world of software development. This will partly derive from what we think our work will be (to what extent our work is tool-making). I want to talk about how we want to handle internal development, transitioning those projects to the open-source community, and how we would manage those projects. (if we think software development is a major part of our work).

as dan pointed out we tend to take the internet, and the WWW particularly as the givens in terms of "where" our work is located.

To elaborate on what I think Bob is referencing here: I said yesterday night that we need to be careful in the terms of how we conceptualize who we work with and who our audience is. A caveat: this is very much from my perspective. I'm not interested in technology as an end in and of itself; I'm interested in technology as a tool for human discourse. To explain this better, it might make sense to go back to Voyager, and look at how Voyager was a successful collaborator. There the process, as I understand it, went something like this:

1) Bob et al. found people who were able to think outside the box in various ways & came up with a new project.

2) The collaborator stepped back (this happened at different points for different projects), and programmers and producers turned the project into a finished product.

3) The finished product was distributed, in computer stores and book stores.

In our projects, we're doing step 1 and 2, in somewhat different forms. However, our step 3 has changed: instead of a CD-ROM, we have a website or something that's ongoing. This means our work doesn't finish itself, as Voyager's products came to completion. It also means that our collaborators need to stay involved with the project for an indefinite amount of time.

This may well be fine; this might just be the way the world has changed. But it's worth noting that this does constrain how we can collaborate with. Ken Wark is a joy to collaborate with because he's a very online person & willing to stick around to debate every person who comments on Gamer Theory. The LQ people need much more prodding: they clearly don't see things as an ongoing process, but as old-style (Voyager-style, if you will) publishing. There's a feedback loop here: we're not as excited about LQ because they're not into our style of working, and we don't think they'd be willing to stay with the project.

Because we are so technologically dependent (and Internet-dependent) we tend to choose people who are similarly taken with technology. We thought Gamer Theory would do well because there are a lot of people online interested in games. There are; they did make that project a success. I worry, though, that our attitude might be becoming "all those other people don't understand blogs/Web 2.0/the internet so fuck 'em". This is warranted: we shouldn't be wasting our time. But if our mandate is to change discourse, we need to be making an effort across all strata. This comes back around to Sophie in my mind: if Sophie is to work, everyone needs to be able to use Sophie, in ways that everyone can't (doesn't?) use the existing web. There is a lot of resistance out there to what we're doing: it might be useful to identify interesting pockets of resistance (as opposed to simple shoe-dragging) to see where we should be going to reach a broader audience.

To go back to Voyager, when they reached step 3, the CD-ROM was in the bookstore: anyone (with the right sort of computer) could pick it up & take it home. That was an enormous potential audience. I don't want us to be inadvertently cutting off potential audience simply by the mode in which we operate.