Mind the Gap
There are great technical entrepreneurs out there, and there are great policy people who really care about the net, but the two groups don't communicate as well as they should. Yesterday I was at a policy group meeting that was dedicated (in part) to discussing how to communicate with the “online community.” And one person there said, “What's Slashdot?”
It's not a big deal, not knowing what Slashdot is. But this moment shows we've got a gap of sorts. We're at a turning point in the history of the internet, and the techies and the policy people need to meet up.
Today at the vloggercon lunchbreak, I witnessed another sort of gap. Someone's mother called. The person who answered the phone took the phone from his ear and handed it to a friend across the table. “Here,” he said, “explain to my mother what this conference is about.” The person across the table gamely took the challenge, introducing herself to the mom on the phone and doing her best to explain the video blogging phenomenon. But I wasn't listening closely, because I was laughing too hard.
Mind the gap. We've all got a lot of learning to do.
(thanks to Mary Hodder for this post title)
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One Response to “Mind the Gap”
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“the techies and the policy people need to meet up.”
I completely agree with you. But myself, I've found it very hard to do efforts in that direction.
As a techie, I don't have much “status” among the policy set, and
there's times it's acutely clear that not being a “club member” puts
me at an extreme disadvantage among the social maneuvering.
Similarly, there's subtle economic effects. I literally can't *afford*
to put in certain types of unpaid work that policy person would do,
because it's an investment to their careers, but it's basically just a
waste for mine.
Maybe if someone is a tenured professor, or a dot-com millionaire,
these problems aren't significant. But that makes the talent pool much,
much, smaller.
In my efforts which eventually *won* a (temporary) DMCA exemption, because I wasn't part of a policy organization, I ended up spending hundreds of dollars *out of my own pocket* to fund the advocacy, not getting public recognition (until the very end), and really not having the work respected in a way it would have been if it were an organizational project. End result: I'M NOT DOING THAT AGAIN!
Which is rather a sad commentary on your point