The purpose of this article is to explain how Warchalking has become obsolete. It is being replaced by Wi-Fi Zones that are being fueled by home networks, corporate networks, and even pay phones. The Internet will be all around you in all places but you won't ever need to care about Warchalking. Let's bury the idea and move along.

Every new website begets more websites. If I have one, I want my friend to have one, so I can point to it. And so they can point to my site. Someday I'll be able to walk a network of friendships, automatically knowing that each of us has mutual friends. It'll be cool.

The idea of a free-form rich-text team-based project collaboration environment has been around for quite some time. The solutions for a persistent collected place for asynchronous communication are now viewed as an obvious tools for teams. However, we've been recreating the same environment with different programming tool sets. The project Weblogs is envisioned as a team-based circumstance-driven, even idiosyncratic, environment for supporting history-making. Yes, project teams make history. Out of nothing they create something. Successful teams innovate, learn, and evolve along the way. However, success is not the usual outcome for teams. All too often teams get discouraged, drift from their purpose, are disengaged or detached from one another and their customer, and oh...then go on to something else before finishing. The p-log can be the instrument the team uses to keep their focus during the game.

...his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future -- years ahead of schedule. The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semi-structured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group formation.

Steven Johnson, author of Emergence, and other things, asks the right question: ...So the question that I'm wrestling with is this: let's say we decided that the existing power-law distribution isn't quite fair enough, or that there's some other justification for encouraging a more egalitarian spread (equality of results, and not just opportunity.) If we decided that this was our goal, how would we go about doing it? What architectural changes would fight against the power law trend, without doing it in a command-and-control kind of way?
Clay's piece suggests that perhaps the distribution is inevitable, but I doubt it. Clearly, to get a more even spread, there has to be a mechanism that amplifies the signal of new arrivals, since the 80/20 split is usually the result of early arrivals getting a disproportionate share of subsequent links... Amplifying new signals, Dave Sifry's approach, is invaluable. But lets also recognize that helps the medium's health for publishing (Political Networks), while communication (Social Networks) and collaboration (Creative Networks) remain. And the real question is when social and creative network activity generate phase transitions into the political network.

The Google PageRanking mechanism is the most successful collaborative ranking mechanism there is, but what I want is to do a personalized version of that kind of thing, based on choices I've made about other people, other websites, or about anything else, like books or movies or brands of shampoo. I want not just to get the aggregate 'best' choices, chosen by all websites in the world. I want the best choices by people I know, like, respect or trust, or by the people that they again know, like, respect or trust. And I want a similar, complicated huge matrix calculation that adds all of that up, just for me. And for you.

...[T]he tools and protocols of the Internet have not yet developed the necessary features to allow emergence to create a higher-level order. These tools are being developed and we are on the verge of an awakening of the Internet. This awakening will facilitate the anticipated political model enabled by technology to support some of the basic attributes of democracy, which have eroded as power has become concentrated within corporations and governments. It is possible that new technologies may enable a higher-level order through emergent properties, which will enable a form of emergent direct democracy capable of managing complex issues more effectively than the current form of representative democracy."

Simultaneously, we were using freeconference.com for voice, Greg's ARSC for chat, and Socialtext's new access-controlled public Workspace wiki (hi! socialtext.com is live!) for note-taking and collaboration persistence. We identified the need for a mailing list, and of course, there will be blog entries, a TopicExchange pingpoint, etc. Jerry M., David I., the red/green virtual cards in ARSC worked beautifully -- thanks for that tool/process. and the process. Joi Ito moderated, and pushed towards a convergence of interest on tools for emergent democracy rather than any particular political viewpoint, while still trying to let the group's sense of itself self-organize.