Global Culture

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks giving hints about what this project is, mostly because I wasn’t quite sure how it would evolve. However, a number of conversations I’ve had with people interested in the idea have helped shape the idea. So here it is, first draft:

• This project will create an ecosystem of organizations, some of them non-for-profit, some of them for-profit and others just for-fun
• Global Culture blog: remember that ‘old’ saying blog globally, act locally? Well this blog is the voice of the project, and it is supposed to have a global voice. A voice that speaks about issues that affect us all just the same. At some point, I will register a non-for-profit organization to support the activities around this blog, mostly seeking funding from NGOs and others that may decide what we talk about is worth supporting.
• Migrant bloggers: I hope to recruit many, but will settle for just a few people that are in the process of migrating to Toronto (act local, remember?). They need a job but are always questionned for not having enough ‘Canadian’ experience, so this will be like their first job here. Even better, the only skills they need (other than knowing how to blog) are already part of their cultural heritage. Their mission will be to function as aggregators for content coming from their communities of origin, tagging, localizing, making that content relevant to their new home. Bringing a wealth of cultural knowledge to their adopted communities. I imagine some of them may even make some serious money in the process, which would be great
• Blogging Workshop: I can’t assume that every person that will be interested in participating will know how to blog effectively or even find appropriate content to tag, so for now the plan is to run workshops to teach the techniques. I guess we’ll need Blogging 101, Tagging 102 & Microformats 201 at the very least
• Metro-bloggers and other local sources: there are already tons of blogs and other sources having very local conversations. We don’t need to create more. They are the source for all information we will ever need.
• Cultural Mashup: (think Culturati) this is the tool that does the magic, using all the information aggregated by bloggers to map the difussion of cultural memes across communities, helping people understand how a culture establishes itself in a foreigh place. I can think of other interesting applications of this tool, but only time will tell.
• Graffiti Neuronal: since there are many complex technical issues that will need to be solved, I’m deferring all those discussions to the blog of my alter ego. Self-adapting folksonomies, microformats for cultural documentation, localization of tags are all things we wouldn’t want to read in this blog, right?

I have to acknowledge being inspired by Miss Rogue and her new Citizen Agency project. A lot of what you read in this blog is probably inspired by the same vision of seeing people empowered in a world dominated by large corporations. I’m too convinced that technology is an important component of a project like this, but education and action need to be core as well.