The Includer

The Includer, if it ever exists, will write when and where it wants to.

Just like the laptop that I bought in March 2007 at Office Depot in Hyde Park, Chicago for David Ellison-Bey of Episode 3.  He was making good use of a Time Dollar Tutoring computer, which has provided thousands of refurbished computers to children and adults on the South Side.  But at 350 Mhz it was too slow for Video Skype.  I wanted to link with David from Lithuania through our European Union Global Utopias video bridge project.  So I splurged on a new laptop ($700) and bought the extended warranty ($200) and also a projector ($600).   The computer stopped working.  David misplaced his copy of the receipt.  Finally, this summer, my father sent us my copy from Lithuania.  I shipped the computer to the warranty company, which shipped it back, saying the problem was with the battery, which neither they nor Office Depot provide.  I purchased the battery online ($150) and the computer worked for me.  Yet I was never able to make sure it worked for David.

May the peace and blessing of Allah be with you.  I am trying to use the laptop for the first time, and I can’t get it to stay on.  The screen lit up a few times, then it clicks off.  I am at a lost as what to do. The green and orange light blinks on and off, that’s about all.  I don’t want to make it worst, maybe its the battery

God – who we met in episode 0 – are you playing sport with me?  Am I trying too hard?  Or should I try harder?  You won’t say.  No, you won’t.  I tell this to Professor Malcolm Duerod.  We travel by car backand forth between the Tuzla and Sarajevo campuses of AUBiH.  I went with Malcolm to the church services for the Roma.  A few hundred live in Sarajevo.  Pastor Reinhold has loved them, preciously, for ten years or more.

David writes on scraps of paper that wander like cats about the house. (See Episode 12).  I delight whenever he sends me one. How many people get letters from the ghetto?

I am glad you have a thick skin to take my criticisms. I need to speak on the things I had on my mind, that you seem to ignore by holding on to your thought, and not hearing me.  Like talking me into getting rid of my books and magazines without cataloging what I had, which is what I intended.  I know my house looked cluttered, but what you didn’t know or hear, was that I had books and things all over town, and had finally brought most every thing Home after many years and lost. The time and travels I had to acquire all I had over the years spread over this city, as well as deviling a filing system the way I wanted, for a purpose.

When my mother was kidnapped everything went haywire,.  [Episode 5].  I had no one to turn to, , and you befriended me at a time I was alone.  for you see people avoid you when you or someone is victimized in your family, I have observed this phenomenon over long years.  When you asked me to participate in your events, that was alright, for it gave me a chance to get to meet people and associate with people face to face, but then you loaded me up with e-mails I had no real int rest in and overload me with thing I wasn’t interested in and had no real time to participate in..  I had a program, but no one to help or volunteers, but you couldn’t see or understand, what can be good, can also be wrong, in the since that, that many do gooders can’t see the harm that comes from their own ideas of whats right and whats wrong, failing to fully understand fully the situation, never having been put in the same situation before, nor having lived under such conditions as I and others.

I never liked other people to give me advise unless I ask for it, nor do I give advice without being asked, then I study it out to fine the right advice, because if something goes wrong, they will blame you if it don’t come out right, another thing, to be a good leader, you must learn to be a good follower.

I feed on the words of my elder Moor.  I am an independent thinker who organizes other such.  Like David’s cats.  He knows their names: Blaze and Bear and Monkey Face…

I am heartened that letters pour into my lab, Minciu Sodas, even as I teach full-time in Bosnia.  Alex Rollin offers help at Franz Nahrada’s working group, Global Villages:

I built the FactorE site for Marcin [Jakubowski, the open source farmer of Episode 3].  Check it out.  If you want to use Open Source software, and you want to be part of a larger whole, then I will gladly make a copy of the site for you to use.  It is configrued with Drupal.

I am offering a COPY of the site at http://factorefarm.org. If everyone who wishes to invest in the LONG term viability of their web infrastructure works together, even just a little bit, then each can gain new insights into publishing and the knowledge of maintenance ‘arts’ can be distributed and honed.

That goes for you too, Franz, Andrius, and Gary. You guys are leaders in the sense that you are responsible for the first impressions of many people, even though your main job is representing the information of others. Using Ning shows a certain lack of investment in critical infrastructure. Not only that, but, your information presentations on Minciu are not order in a consistant way that others might access.

There are no excuses for using Ning or other proprietary platforms (including Yahoo groups!) for information management now. So, in a world where that is true, you just have to state your case, and help will appear.

I call up Alex.  In ten years, I haven’t found any programmers to help me.  Yes, I met several who fashioned project management software for a better world, like the Open Idea Project and the Espians of Episode 9.  Oh, do programmers flock together! and away from me! and my reality!

Yes, I have worked with Drupal (CivicSpace).  Chris Messina, the wunderkind, encouraged me to give it a try.  Chris champions our lab and its “obscure Lithuanian philosopher”.  He credits An Economy for Giving Everything Away (which I wrote with David) as an influence for the BarCamp movement.  Unfortunately, my attempts to apply Drupal to “get things done” were disastrous.  Kerry Santo, the homeless wonder of Ecademy, invested her hope and grief in me.   I ran into trouble (as with Zope and Plone) whenever I wanted to customize anything “outside the tin can pantry”.  I couldn’t replace the word “user” in urls, change the layout of forms,  relate disparate modules, include outside data in the header, or embed pages from outside of the system.  I also got burned ($1800 unpaid) by a client (Chris Winn Consulting) and his client (Rights Working Group) when he hired me for a collaborative site.  What they really had in mind was a content management site, a site for publishing content, which I believe is all that Drupal ever is.

So, instead, I have cobbled together for Minciu Sodas a mix of sites that actually get things done.  We have an RSS stream from our 30 Yahoo groups, thanks to Carp and Grouper.  Some 30,000 letters so far!  At our wiki, people leave comments, thanks to a simple feature that I spent a day to code.  And so we have 14 comments from people interested in Marcin’s Compressed Earth Block Press.  Whereas I don’t see any participation at Alex’s site for Marcin.

Alex says it’s because Marcin hasn’t embraced his system in place of his blog.  I can understand why!  Marcin’s blog is the most inspiring I have ever seen thanks to posts, photos, videos, ideas and visions by Marcin, Brittany and their comrades on their hard won progress towards a Global Village Constructor Set.  Why replace that?

Marcin’s farm is his mind.  David’s house is his mind.  My lab is my mind.  I like my mind.  I want help with my mind.  I don’t want to move out of it.  I don’t want to turn it upside down.

I have set up Ning with the hope that I might access an ID system that we could use for logging into our wiki and web pages that we build.  Ning might also be helpful for our work in small teams.  I ask Alex if he might set up a Drupal instance so that we could access a small table, for example, where our group leaders could store short comments to key letters in our archive, and we might thereby generate updates to share across our lab.

Alex says yes and no.  He would help me help somebody else.  But he won’t help me or Franz because we are simply networkers.  We don’t actually do anything.  Yet we could help, for example, Graham Knight of Episode 11, who makes the solar powered battery rechargers.

I look forward to next steps.  Alex will engage Graham.  I will share my vision for our lab’s website.  I will engage builders (like Sam Rose and Todd Kelsey) and networkers (like Franz Nahrada, Pamela McLean, Chris Macrae) to look for political solutions, which is the big challenge.  What infrastructure might advance our separate efforts?

Chris Macrae can’t keep up with our emails.  He’d like one advocate for each of our efforts.  Graham agrees to advocate for DIY Solar.  Would Graham not benefit if networkers like Chris had tools designed for them?

Oh, do-gooders!  Let us please work together.

Malcolm sat on the bus with an Islamic linguist.  He told her my plans for when I teach statistics next semester.  I and my students will collect data about the villages they know in Bosnia.  We’ll design a Global Villages Index.  We’ll support Franz Nahrada’s vision of a network of peace villages in the Balkans, like the El Camino Real, stretching from Athens to Vienna.  She told Malcolm that before the war, certain Bosnian villages were known for their goodheartedness, welcoming all in need.  We might revive that!

Yet even before we arrive in Sarajevo, I have learned that, quite possibly, Professor Stephen Jenkins (of Episode 12) will teach statistics.  I may have lost my job.

What can I say?  Sasha Mrkailo of Serbia has just agreed to work again for our lab, a small project, to identify a Balkan fund that might, through the university, fund my work on our help room or other projects.  But I need to dream new dreams.  What good might I do?

Oh, do-gooders!  Thank you for blessing our chat room with your work together!  Serina Kalande and Daudi Were and activists from around the world came together to made great use of our chat room

Solana: This past week, I helped make a world map of HIV-positive bloggers. We asked Global Voices bloggers to find links in their countries, and people were surprised how many bloggers there were. :: Even in places where it’s a big taboo. I was a little sad we didn’t manage to find more links in Africa.  …  We came up with the idea for this chat only a week ago, if we had more time it would have been good to invite more positive bloggers to share their experiences here. I think we should be sure to involve them in the writing of the Guide.

Patrick Karanja: I think an important aspect of blogging should also be to make people understand that one can live long after HIV dIiagnosis. Most of the information around is on prevention (which is very important) but alone does little to eradicate stigma. In Africa, for example, people fear DEATH. Stigma comes because people start imagining you are on your way to a guaranteed death soon. :: Noone want to be associated with death.

Daudi: we seem to have identified a few issues – the debate over control of information in the blogs – promoting leadership amongst the HIV/AIDS community … it looks like the sections of the guide are almost writing themselves

Serina:  I’d like to thank Andrius for letting us use the chatroom … next chat will be on the 9th of February, we’ll mail out details through the Rising Voices mail list … Join the Blogging Positively Group on google as well, that is the base for the guide … Threads of this conversation will also go on at the ActALIVE yahoo forum

Solana: would anyone with links to hiv+ bloggers please email them to me solana.larsen AT gmail.com so I can include them on our world map

What a rare instance of various people of various forums working to include each other.  They succeed because they are including those who can’t join us.  They are Includers.

I include Mark Glaser and Gary Kebbel.

I was just discussing with Gary your blog posts on Idea Lab. We both think that you should try to focus your posts to the idea of “The Includer” and not focus as much on your personal stories or the stories of other people in your life. I think references to personal information is fine from time to time, but I have noticed that many of your blog posts on Idea Lab veer into the personal and away from the focus of The Includer. If you can try to stay focused on that idea in future blog posts, we would really appreciate that.

Don’t think of us as people!  Think of us as machines who listen, record, hold and share one’s hard won wisdom.  David writes:

I have the laptop next to me, and it still won;’t come on and stay.  I have been messing with this about 3 hours or more, and trying not to get frustrated, and this one is making a gong sound every other stroke.

But David, let me read you the messages left for you at your wiki page, where we put up your funeral service, which you asked me to conduct.

Thomas Simpson: Dear Bro. David, This is your child in Spirit who you cared for when we all lived on 166th street in New York. It was sad to hear of Fannie’s death, but good to read your poem dedicated to her. I know that this web page is in preparation of your funeral while you are still alive. I hope that it is not too late to hear from you just one more time…YOUR SPIRITUAL SON, THOMAS JR.

Elder Kendall Cox: This is his nephew and I would like to say add a prayer for my Uncle David’s home going preperation. God Bless.

Oh David! They found you and called you.  You trembled in wonder, after thirty years, to hear from your godson!

David, write us!  May Allah send you a new Includer, model Charles Williams of Episode 9, a machine of good heart and noble specs.  He speaks!

• I am now employed full-time as a computer instructor and employment coach in Chicago (south).
• I help approximately 30 adults per month learn basic computer and job search skills.
• Call me at 312-560-2592 (cell) or email me with your job leads: labor, office, manufacturing, entry-level, etc etc. Especially need job leads for our people who were historically excluded.
• I also promote and market businesses at my web site www.shopsouthchicago.com. Please participate.
• Blogs and promoting sustainable agriculture and vegetable gardens and so on…. My current project is at www.trialwebsite.biz

David, speak to me!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.