[projectvrm] "Citizen-sovereign," and a way to pay for news—or anything

[Doc Searls < >]

From http://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/2019/02/11/sovereign/ on the ProjectVRM blog:

The Aspen Institute just published a 180-page report by the Knight Commission on Trust, Media and Democracy titled  (in all caps) CRISIS IN DEMOCRACY: RENEWING TRUST IN AMERICA. Its Call to Action concludes,

This is good. Real good.  Having  Aspen and Knight endorse personal sovereignty as a necessity for solving the crises of democracy and trust also means they endorse what we’ve been pushing forward here for more than a dozen years.

Since the report says (under Innovation, on page 73) we need to “use technology to enhance journalism’s roles in fostering democracy,” and that “news companies need to embrace technology to support their mission and achieve sustainability,” it should help to bring up the innovation we proposed in an application for a Knight News Challenge grant in 2011. It was, and still is, called EmanciPay. And it’s a citizen-sovereign way to pay for news, and all forms of creative production where there is both demand and failing or absent sources of funding.

We got to the second round that year, as we had the year before with the same proposal. But that was then. Maybe now that Knight and Aspen are cheering the citizen-sovereign bandwagon, it’s worth open-sourcing that original proposal. The idea was a damned good one then, and is a better one now.

So here it is, copied and pasted out of the last draft before we submitted it. Since much has changed since then (other than the original idea, which is the same as ever only more timely), I’ve added a bunch of notes at the end, and a call for action.

The proposal was for EmanciPay, and it went up on our wiki ten years ago, when we were working on ways for people to support public radio than by calling in during pledge drives. The money graf:

The idea of "micro-payments" for goods on the Net has been around for a long time, and if often brought up as a potential business model for journalism by an article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don't yet have, but very much need: micro-accounting for actual uses. These including reading, listening and watching.

It's still do-able, and more timely than ever, IMHO. And I know one among us has been working on an approach. It's an old one in a new context. Here's hoping he or she (not giving this away) will vet it with us soon.

Meanwhile, what I'm hoping to see is if citizen-sovereign has legs. It's buried at the end of that Aspen/Knight report (written, alas, in formal bureaucratese), but maybe some of us can surface it in our writings and tweetings.

If you're of a mind to support either that or EmanciPay, please point. Meanwhile, discuss.

Doc

Doc