A DREAM FOR REALNEO

In the Late Fall of 2003 Norm Roulet, at the invitation of Ed Morrison, introduced the REALNEO social media concept using the open source Drupal platform to a crowd at REI in the Peter B Lewis building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland Ohio. Until Norm’s introduction of Realneo, the REI forum had been (trying) to use wikis for their internet communication.

I happened to be in that audience, and I logged onto Realneo as user No. 53 - four years and four weeks ago.

I believe Realneo is fairly unique as a literary vehicle. Slowly, very slowly, Realneo has been getting its collective act together.

WHAT MAKES REALNEO GO

Over the four years I have been writing on realneo the site has always been a pretty fragile technological platform. But the social platform – the very loose association of volunteers interested in the realneo way - has been immensely strong. That strength has shown itself in a number of ways:

In all these four years there hasn’t been any need for, or use of, censorship of anyone’s material. Sure, Realneo has had spammers try to log in as users to post links to their commercial sites. A few of those folks get through every month or so and occasionally they have to be blocked.

Realneo has had only a user or two get into an on-line brawl with another user and leave Realneo.

Realneo has had only a user or two delete some of their own material (I think this is fine to do as long as no one has posted a comment to your material – once a comment has been posted to your material, your deleting your post imposes a rude waste of time on the commenter)

Realneo has had a constant stream of cogent material about politics, the environment, art, culture, finance, human interest, etc. During summer a few writers drop off the internet – and without any spoken queue – other writers come on line. It has amazed me that a well managed business – where there is an established hierarchical chain of command – probably doesn’t run as smoothly as realneo – where everyone - and no one - is responsible.

Realneo has had many, many friendships develop.

Realneo has, I believe, instilled a lot of pride and heightened the collective responsibility of many in our community by providing a respectful, convenient, free platform for them to air their ideas (and for them to relieve their frustration – frustration brought on by the silence of the conventional media about those ideas).

So, because of the dynamics outlined above, looking for, or controlling site content, has not been necessary and, consequently, has not been a time consuming problem.

YOU GO RIGHT TO THE TOP OF THE HOME PAGE - ONLY TO BE “DRIVEN DOWN” BY OTHERS

Everything anyone posts goes to the top of the home page without moderation. Your typos won’t be corrected, your logic won’t be either. Get serious, be playfull, be creative, use your head and your heart when you write, and Google will find you here on Realneo. If you don’t like what is on the home page – then, as Norm says, “drive it down” by posting material you believe is more competent or important. (There has been a debate lately about whether events should go to the top of the home page. For now the consensus seems to be that events should hit the home page – but in the future they may go just to the calendar).

WHERE IS REALNEO GOING?

Realneo has operated as a de-facto cooperative from its inception, but without the legal framework of a cooperative . This fall several of us long time realneo’ers established Real.Coop as a registered State of Ohio not for profit cooperative. The top level domain real.coop has also been registered. We are not finished with the task of organizing the Real.coop yet. We need to establish our by-laws, a board, a transparent on-line accounting system for our finances, and make other business decisions.. The intention is that Realneo will eventually be one “chapter” (North East Ohio) of a larger Real.coop organization.

As an Ohio not-for-profit cooperative Real.coop will not be required to pay taxes. Right now Real.coop is funding the server costs for Realneo from donations received from a number of realneo writers. Most recently, the hat was passed at the Deweys pre-holiday face2face time [1]. (thanks to all who attended and contributed). I believe that donations to Real.coop will eventually be determined by the IRS to be tax deductible (from the donor’s federal taxes) – but at this point the concept of an on- line educational/literary/communications/media cooperative is a new animal for the IRS. There are cooperatives which are both tax exempt and to which donations are federally tax deductible on the donor’s federal income tax. – like a fire prevention cooperative or certain domestic fraternal societies [2] More research will be done in this area with the objective to develop Real.Coop as both a tax exempt educational/literary cooperative and a IRS 501 c of some kind.

If, sometime in the future, Realneo develops any income stream, that steam will first go to pay expenses, and then any surplus will be returned to the coop members. Members will be compensated in return for their content, and how that content was used by the public. Developing a fair method – which is in line with the cooperative philosophy [3] – of compensating for digital content, is going to be a new and complex undertaking. There are already others thinking about this issue and even filing patent applications [4] for METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR COMPENSATING ONLINE CONTENT CONTRIBUTORS AND EDITORS. (you can read the entire patent application on the USPatent website here [5])

INVITATION TO TREMONT WRITERS AND EVERYONE ELSE

About a month ago I got a call from a west side of Cleveland friend who told me that a fellow named Frank Giglio was about to have his house demolished by the City of Cleveland. I went over and met Frank on a Sunday, and wrote about his plight on Realneo [6]. A week or two later a west side web site named Tremonter [7] closed (thankfully, the archives of Tremonter are still live) , leaving many in the community - which had relied on the Tremonter - without their customary mode of communication.

During the ensuing weeks Realneo has fortunately been able to accommodate where Tremonter left off, and host many conversations about Frank Giglio and other dynamic issues in Tremont.

I noticed I was reading details of another part of Cleveland about which I was not that familiar. I was able to compare what was being discussed in Tremont with what was being discussed in other areas of Cleveland and North East Ohio. The new voices on realneo were providing another compass, another important and passionate perspective.

IS IT TIME FOR REALNEO ORGANIC GROUPS?

One of the big headaches with Realneo is keeping its drupal in tune. Besides the usual server freezes, there is the every two year or so version upgrades. And there are many plug-in soft ware modules to drupal – modules like calendar, image, book, etc etc but each module takes hands-on installation and test proofing.

There is also a set of modules which will allow organic groups – groups similar to the group which Jerleen1 has set up on Yahoo [8]. Realneo does not presently have the organic group modules installed, and it will take some tech time to do so. Realneo has had its tech help generously donated over the last year and a half, and we are not in the position to request more of our webmaster’s time.

JUST A SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP IDEA

Not to distract from what Jerleen has set up on Yahoo, but rather to provide a more robust, flexible, interactive platform which is part of a larger North East Ohio cooperative, what if those of you Tremont people who might be interested in a realneo/Tremont organic group helped pay for the installation of the necessary modules. Another advantage of Realneo is here everyones’ content is owned by them – not by Yahoo. I think a couple of hours of tech time is necessary, and if there is interest, I will ask for a budget number.

If anyone wishes to follow up on the organic group idea, please feel free to send me a private email by hitting my contact link on Realneo, or continue the discussion in comments right here on Realneo. And/or we can set up another face2face meeting in Tremont soon.

REALNEO BIG PICTURE

Every organic group that is developed on Realneo will bring readers to the other material on realneo. This will make Realneo more like what a newspaper used to be. And then as print news continues to shrink, Realneo, with many organic groups, will pick up the slack.

That’s the HAPPY NEW YEAR dream anyway…