Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Can the grassroot be in control?

Jon Lebkowsky offers another piece of the CivicSpace value proposition in a Web 2.0 recap/rant. The quote is from "Web 2.0 Social Web: who is in control?" by Donna Bogatin, ZDNet.

The relationship between Web 2.0 Social Web property owners and Web2.0 Social Web user contributors, in fact, is inherently symbiotic.While each side needs the other, however, the relationship is not oneof equals; Social Web contributors are dependent upon the“free” infrastructure graciously offered by Web 2.0properties.

Part of the CivicSpace value proposition is that CivicSpace pushes the control of the infrastructure of the social web further out to the edges.

CivicSpace On Demand will provide an instant website, online community, central CRM database, online donations and email newsletters. Rather than rely on News Corp (MySpace), you can actually operate your own social web. We want to give the grassroots some control over the social web and empower them to use it for social change purposes.

The holy grail of this line of thought is identity owned by the user-- software like Flock and various identity efforts are pushing toward this. Until then, we are happy to provide a little more disruption in the system by trying to push power and control out to the edges of the network.


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