A new collaboration application,
MixedInk, might help journalists, news organizations, activists and citizen journalists work with each other and with their communities.
In this video from MixedInk, the voiceover explains the point: "All the people trying to get heard just can't break through the noise. ... Now, massive groups can speak with a single voice."
MixedInk combines some features of a wiki, an online forum, a text editor and crowd rating to promote favorite versions of shared texts. As you write in MixedInk, it searches all other entries and displays text that is similar to yours. While writing, users can view, copy, edit and remix any text that's been added to the site. All the text is licensed with the Creative Commons.
In "Here Comes Everybody," author Clay Shirky explained "the power of organizing without organizations" and how it alters and dilutes the absolute hegemony of the managerial organization (the standard organizational model of the 20th century). Managerial organizations deal with complexity by forming groups in order to connect, share, communicate and create.
Today -- with the right tools -- creating, sharing, connecting and communicating can be decentralized and organized informally. MixedInk seems to be one of those tools. It's interesting because you can see how people are using it in real time. This shows how it really works in practice, not just in theory.
Netroots used MixedInk to write its National Political Platform for the 2008 presidential election. Background: Netroots is a left-leaning political group built on an Open Source creed. It aims for a group process that is open (anyone could join), democratic (you can vote remixed and original versions up or down) and transparent (you can see how it was collaboratively built).
Take a look at the Netroots site on MixedInk, and you can see much about how the process resulted in the platform submitted in August to Obama's campaign. MixedInk provides information about versions, contributors, etc. The Netroots Platform ultimately included 11 planks. It was started on July 18, 2008, completed Aug. 9, and involved 164 contributors who submitted 167 planks. The entire collaborative written structure got about 925 ratings to help shape the final document. There are statistics for rankings and each plank and contributor, as well as wiki-like notes on revisions and remixes. Even "runner-up" documents are viewable.
MixedInk synthesized a layered, collaborative remix of ideas from many people into one comprehensive document. Furthermore, the next time Netroots or a similar group sets out to create a platform, the data structure that MixedInk built around the collaboration is an instant (although basic) "knowledge base." By referring to it, Netroots doesn't have to reinvent the wheel when it's time to forge another platform.
For a contrast, see this work-in-progress from Slate: a collaborative draft of Barack Obama's upcoming inaugural address. This Slate MixedInk project began Jan. 3 and closes Jan. 17. Ratings are open through Jan. 20.
Netroots' collaboration on MixedInk began with a face-to-face session at its annual conference. While this group used new tools, it already existed as a group when it tried MixedInk's collaboration application. In contrast, Slate's is trying to collaborate first, while forming a group.
This has led to some problems. The more than 150 entries so far include several entries that are "troll-like" -- where the apparent intent of the contributor is not to engage in constructive collaboration. For example: "Most of you voted for me to fix the economy -- what I really want to do is take all your guns away and destroy America."
Checking in on Slate's evolving collaboration process suggests that contributors are using MixedInk's rating system to filter out trolling posts. Whether this rating tool will function like a comment moderation system such as Slashdot's will be a test of MixedInk's maturity as a collaboration tool.
