So, who's Designing Cyberspace anyway?

• Cyberspace is evolving among our culture just now. Are there intelligent designers intentionally devising this new extension of the public domain?
• Is it public? Should it be? Up to where?
• Does it have formative Community Master Plans, Cyberspace Use Regulations and Construction Codes?
• Who says?
• Who can do what where how to whom there, and when will they be able to?
• Who else can or will be able to?

Space happens as dimensions and forces interact - a constantly evolving and morphing expression of interdependent origination.

Our culture has, throughout its evolution, regularly devised new dimensions of space.

• The distance of our hearing and the sweep of our vision.
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• The circle of light cast by a campfire, and the greater circle cast by a giant bonfire.
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• The racing edge of fire gone wild, and the dimensions of the smoky wind foretelling catastrophe.
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• The sound of bells cast of hard won ore, echoing and de-crescendoing down our valleys.
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• The brief bulletins of beacon fires and the mountain-speak of yodeling.
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• The directives of semaphore, and the inklings of intuition.
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• The distance a courier can run from the sea into the nearby mountains and say why he ran here before expiring.
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• How far a horse can run before you need to trade him off before proceeding.
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• And how many way stations it takes to reach the edges of safe domain.

I'll leave the reader to fill in the increments of new dimensions our predecessors left for us to inhabit, right up into the space we are currently devising among us - cyberspace.

Wise persons from ancient animists to Kevin Kelly, Thomas Berry, E. O. Wilson and Juan Enriquez have, each in their own spheres of interest, suggested that beings participate in their own evolution by acts of volition, creative synthesis and the cultural processes that shape habits, expectations and developments.

Kelly and Enriquez suggest that the technologies we have for ever been developing are evolutionary extensions of our selves.

Skeptical? Remember the last time you forgot your smart phone, were disconnected from the possibilities that exist only in cyberspace and felt incomplete? Ever experienced the technological equivalent of "phantom limb syndrome" - felt the vibration of a cell phone that wasn't in your pocket?

How much time do you spend in Mediaspace? Have you ever, of an afternoon, decided not to go stroll in the park, but to spend time visiting with friends in cyberspace?

What animal functions do you accomplish in cyberspace? Find community? Pursue politics? Make business? Store valuables? Have sex? How many generations of avatars have you spawned? How many web alter egos do you have? Has anything happened to any of them while you were distracted by reading this?

Hadn't you better go look in on the place where you can find them? Is your financial portfolio still where you left it? Has anyone kidnapped your identity while it was being conveyed from here to there?

What intrigues me is - Who's designing cyberspace anyway? Who decides where the new rivers of data will flow, and who can build on their banks and harvest their cataracts?

How is the pollution of those man-made natural resources noticed, defined and ameliorated?

Isn't cyberspace part of the Commons, that space too valuable to be owned, the life making place, the 3rd Place, the Great Good Place, depended on by all for the well being of this and future generations?

Who has the right to fence it? What constrains the behavior of those given the franchise to realize cyberspace? Does it become theirs? Am I trespassing if I find myself there?

Who told that troll he could make me pay to enter that commons?

Did you know that the USA has, even up until today, lacked a national broadband policy? The FCC is embarking on crafting one just now.

What ways do your communities shape the development of this new public right of way, the web commons?

Do you have access to its benefits? How would you have a say about it, as you expect to have a say about your meatspace Master Plan and Development regulations?

And are the answers to these questions acceptable to you?

Here are some links to web places where these issues are being grappled with:

• Designing the Intelligent Public Way
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• Designing the Intelligent Public Way - Bronx White Paper
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• National Broadband Strategy Call to Action

Our National Knowledge Infrastructure at Work Producing a National Healthcare Day of Service at the digital behest of our President

Today, June 26 is National Health Care Day of Service. Throughout the
nation, in public places, both "tangible" and "virtual", folk have
been organizing for weeks at the behest of Organizing for America (www.my.barackobama.com) - and for the benefit of the public commons.

Me, I'm writing the first draft of this at Kinko's, while copying flyers for distribution at a Health Care Reform Teach-in in my home town, White Plains, NY. I write this on my iPhone, which will
wirelessly post this for you to see.

This event was produced largely in cyberspace, and likely wouldn't have happened if I did not have ubiquitous access to information technology and the world-wide-web.

That we could do so is quite remarkable.

Having initiated an initial mobilizatipn meeting of 15 persons at my house on June 16th, in response to an email recieved from OFA, I networked, largely online and discovered the Westchester Health Care Reform Task Force (westchesterhealthcarereform.org).

I've met once in person with a small fragment of the membership, and we subsequently collaborated using our nation's Infomation and Communications Technology (ITC) systems with dozens locally and around the nation to produce this event

Most of our time together organizing has been spent in the nation's newest Public Commons, what I call "The Intelligent Public Way" (dipw.merdiandesign.com). I obtained a permit to set up our booth ina public park at the heart of White Plains' commercial district - with two phone calls and 5 emails - the permit was sent to me by email. The organizers developed hand out documents in an exchange of emails.

We've set up a google sites web collaboration site, and purchased a more elegant URL from register.com, from which traffic is forwarded to google. Go visit -www.westchesterhealthcarereform.org.

Well, handouts are printed, debit card retrieved from the walk-in copy machine.

I'll send this off (over radio waves that comprise part of that Intelligent Public Way)

[Just got home and editted the typos too challenging to correct on my iphone. The day was a success - 25 volunteers handed out 175 fact sheets, sold 12 bumper stickers, and got 113 postcards written out which will delivered by hand to Senator Schumer. We engaged about 250 people in discussions on health care reform, including one gentleman who felt it a foolish undertaking.]

Teillard De Chardin suggested that our species would build the "noosphere", the global sense organ / nervous system / space in which the earth would know herself, allowing us to inhabit her more wisely. And so we have. That nervous system, the Intelligent Public Way, the Web Space Commons, made this event possible.

How cool is that?

People in Iran, China and other nations are seeing this commons being proscribed by authoritarian governments. Many of us take our access to these systems for granted. Still others among us have no access to this public space where most information flows and transactions are effected in our time.

We can do better.

These ICT resources are largely in private hands, and those private owners do not have the same interests as the commons do in terms of the shape of this new nervous system. It's not that the incumbent owners are venal - the public realm has also failed to devise the cultural and political means to tell them what is needed, and how these systems should be integrated into our cities as an infrastructure to enable Community, Cultural & Commercial development.

Can't blame the marketplace for not having sold us what we haven't, as a national culture, told them we want.

Here in the USA, we're just beginning to craft a national broadband strategy (www.bb4us.net). We're the only developed nation in the world without one.

How silly is that?

Enjoy,

Bice C. Wilson

Beginnings - Teaching Kiteflying in Bed Stuy, 1977

The most formative experience underlying my life-practice occured on a blustery March afternoon in 1977.

I was crossing the one big lawn on the campus of Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

I saw 2 young boys attempting to fly a kite.

Unsuccessfully.

Walking over to them I noted that they had come from the nearby neighborhood (whose residents were largely structurally poor or working class and neglected) and were wearing those imitation Artic Jackets, blue with orange lining in the hood, and fake wolverine fur trim. Both were black, maybe 7, or underdeveloped for 12.

They were playing with one of those diamond shaped, wax paper kites on a balsa wood cross that many of us know - the ones with a space ship image on them. It was put together in ways not shown on the directions, and not flying.

I offered to help. They gave me the kite. I put it together correctly, and found some trash paper nearby to use as a tail to counter the gusty winds.

The string they had was a spool of industrial thread from their mother's piece work sewing at home. It was strong enough. I made a yoke, tied on the tail and the spool to the yoke and handed it to them.

Now, for anyone who knew kites and the wind, this was a day that required no running to get a kite skyborne. Merely holding it facing the wind and letting go would suffice.

They were unable to loft the kite. They had no idea how to address the wind.

I showed them, and walked away to the sound of their excited directions to each other as the kite danced above them.

As I left them I was mindful of how much I had learned in my childhood about the fundamental interactions of the pattern of life by flying kites, sailing, playing with snow runoff rivulets on the hills of White Plains, spending days knee deep in living streams, days watching wildlife in the saltgrass marshes and exploring the dwindling woodlands for ponds full of reptiles, and similar playful activities.

Fluid dynamics, flows, dams and catastrophic failures of blockages, how the invisible wind can change the fate of kites. Cycles of life, struggles, birdsongs marking boundaries, fish sheltering in the eddies behind boulders.

I expected that the boys had not lived in places and cultures where those lessons came readily to hand. And yet, I knew that they had internalized other aspects of the pattern of life that I could not imagine.

I reflected on the fact that our urban environment often fails to celebrate the very forces that can teach us, vicerally, how life works: The storm runoff I spent days knee deep in, treated as waste, and shunted into a pipe as soon as possible to be mingled with our effluents and expedited into our waterways to cause rapid flooding, and close beaches when the underground rivers were in spate.

Places barren of life other than human and our domesticated companions.

The plazas where invisible winds undress people, blow over furniture and make kites of abandonned plastic bags.

Having studied the incremental development of NYC, I knew that, as each farm was monetized and sub-divided, it was assumed that there was no need to celebrate the pattern of life - one was surrounded by ever dwindling but reliable living systems, and besides, it was miracle enough to gather millions of folk into a city and have toilets and under ground sewers to eliminate epidemics.

Life, in that sense, was a problem we had solved successfully.

Before I arrived a block away at my apartment, I had picked up kite string at the art supply store, and I'd made several commitments to myself:

1. To always have kite string at hand in case the next boys did not have adequate thread (and I have done so to this day - it's just down stairs)
2. To devote my practice to re-integrating the passive didactic learning that arises from the celebration and mindful enhancement of the pattern of life, which we are each of us always an ephemeral expression of.

And I have done so to this day, in everything I have done since.

• Building Meridian Design Associates, Architects (www.meridiandesign.com)
• Living an integrated life in my communities. (www.westchesterhealthcarereform.org)
• Pursuing the practical application of powerful ideas, such as:
• Bio-regionalism (http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1561&context=ced/places)
• Archeoastronomy (http://sites.google.com/site/meridianmusicproject/)
  
• Evolutionary Urbanism (http://dipw.meridiandesign.com/, http://sites.google.com/site/dipwbronxwhitepaper/)
  
• Living in Long Time (sustaining family, marriage, partnerships, community, places)
  

That is what I do.