PRIX ARS Electronica - digital communities

December 30, 2003 8:33 PM

On January 12th, PRIX ARS Electronica will be opening up submissions for a new category, "Digital Communities." I would like to gather support to have Metafilter.com submitted as an official entry. (More inside.)
posted by gen to MetaFilter-Related at 8:33 PM (12 comments total)

Prix Ars Electronica - Digital Communities

The new category "Digital Communities" - to be awarded for the first time in 2004 - encompasses the wide-ranging social consequences of the Internet as well as the latest developments in the domain of mobile communications and wireless networks. "Digital Communities" will spotlight bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, bridging the digital divide regarding gender as well as geography, or creating outstanding social software and enhancing accessibility of technological-social infrastructure.

If you would support this effort, please leave me any suggestions or ideas and hopefully we can collaborate on the submission via the MeFi Wiki?
posted by gen at 8:35 PM on December 30, 2003

Digital Communities give rise to group action and interaction, engender constructive contexts and social capital, and promote social innovation. An essential precondition for this is making the respective relevant technologies and infrastructure more widely accessible or perhaps even developing them in the first place. Digital Communities take part in efforts to achieve comprehensive human development, a key aspect of which is reconfiguring the relationship of power between citizens and political leaders, the state and its administrative bureaucracy as well as financial and commercial interests in the sense of increasing participation, strengthening the role of the civil sector, and establishing a framework for democracy to flourish.

Great idea--but do we really qualify? (I think something like Creative Commons or Alternet might be more of what they're thinking of.)
What do we have to do to enter?
posted by amberglow at 8:45 PM on December 30, 2003

Send quonsar with a stuffed monkey and a plate of pancakes. And tell them that if they don't take us... next time it'll be the elephant.
posted by languagehat at 9:08 PM on December 30, 2003

*packs bold and inspired innovations impacting human coexistence, monkey and pancakes*
posted by quonsar at 9:15 PM on December 30, 2003

Yeah, sounds like Creative Commons would be more at home there. MetaFilter isn't really about changing the world.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:27 PM on December 30, 2003

Nor are most communities, be they "digital" or not. It seems like they have an awfully narrow definition of community. That's their right, but I think it's a sad symptom of the increasingly prevalent thinking that if it isn't political, it isn't Important.
posted by majick at 12:00 AM on December 31, 2003

As I read through all of those criteria, I was saying, "check, check, check." MeFi's got all that. We have mad social capital, yo! Y'all who don't think we can do this don't spend enough time reading the job listings on Monster!

The only thing we're soft on, as I see it, is the community activism aspect. We aren't really getting butts out of chairs. Rather the opposite. Of course, there was that pizza deal in San Diego...
posted by squirrel at 1:26 AM on December 31, 2003

PRIX ARS.

huhuh uuhhuhuh. [/beavis]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 2:10 AM on December 31, 2003

Ah well, good points by all. I will not pursue this as the consensus seems as if this isn't a good match.
posted by gen at 8:52 AM on December 31, 2003

MetaFilter isn't really about changing the world.

But I suppose it does change little bits of it now and then. Looking through AskMe all kinds of lives are being changed every day.
posted by feelinglistless at 3:39 PM on December 31, 2003

Thinking about it, a case could be made for the action element--there are always things like the Iran earthquake donation or other helping things being posted, and we all educate and inform each other constantly, and AskMe certainly counts...It would have to be worded really carefully tho.
posted by amberglow at 4:01 PM on December 31, 2003

You mean yelling "MEFI ROCKS" at the top of our lungs wouldn't be enough?
posted by wendell at 6:44 PM on December 31, 2003