SuitWatch -- September 28, 2006

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DIY and the Open World Ecosystem

The Day Fire in Southern California started on Labor Day and has been burning across the Sespe Wilderness and the Los Padres National forest for most of September.  As of yesterday morning, its size approached 150,000 acres, or about 233 square miles.  It was 42 percent contained, with 59 miles of containment line still not built.  Close to four thousand firefighters and other professionals are fighting the fire.  They are armed with 226 engines, 45 bulldozers, 41 water tenders, 30 helicopters, 7 helitankers and 10 air tankers.  I watch these take off The estimated cost of suppressing this fire to date is $45,538,309.  It is the largest fire in the nation right now, and the largest in recorded California history.

Yet until yesterday no structures had burned.  That's because we're talking about some of the wildest wilderness areas in the world.  The elevation range is the same as the Grand Canyon's, and the topography is nearly as forbidding.  Maybe more so.  There are canyons that look like mazes and run thousands of feet deep.  Thick wooded mountains top slopes and cliffs of crumbling sandstone.  There are only three larger roadless areas in the 48 contiguous states - even though the fire began near the busiest Interstate artery in the West, and the whole area is on the approach path to Los Angeles International Airport.

Two weeks ago, when the winds were blowing westward, the Day Fire gave Santa Barbara the worst air quality figures in its history.  Overhead was an ominous river of smoke.  Ash fell like snow.  About an inch of it drifted on to the uphill side of my windshield wipers.

Yet the fire isn't my main subject here.  My main subject is the need to supplement -- or replace -- the broken official systems for distributing news about the fire.

Outside the large cities, there are no longer any local news stations worthy of the label.  Our only full-time news station in Santa Barbara is little more than an audio edition of the local newspaper, which is at war with its editors (23 so far have resigned), mostly just carried Associated Press stories about the fire, and lacks a useful website.  (Nearly all its "content" is locked up behind a paywall.) The radio station has no website at all.  The only large news station in Los Angeles, KNX/1070, is also busy with lots of other stuff.  As it stands today, only Ventura's KVTA/1520 http://www.kvta.com/ has any measure of local coverage, and it's minimal.

The Ventura County Star http://web.venturacountystar.com/ is covering the story aggressively, and features a confusing multimedia page http://web.venturacountystar.com/special/2006/09/fires/fire_holder.html of links, scrolling text and animations.  If there's an RSS feed, I can't find it.

The most "official" of the fire sites is InciWeb.org http://www.inciweb.org/, which aggregates and publishes "incident" news from a raft of agencies, including the Los Padres National Forest .  InciWeb's url for the Day Fire is http://www.inciweb.org/incident/475/.  Far as I can tell, nobody has been able to get onto it since Monday, September 25.  No new RSS feeds have gone out from InciWeb either.

Other official sites include the Los Padres National Forest http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/lospadres/, the Ventura County Sheriff's Department http://www.vcsd.org/day_fire.html and the Ventura County Fire Department http://fire.countyofventura.org/.  None of those have RSS feeds.

I could waste time looking at other local and regional media websites (including the many TV http://cbs2.com/firewatch/ stations in Los Angeles), but it's not worth the bother.  The problem with all of them is that they run static web operations, and what's happening right now requires Live Web coverage.  They need RSS feeds, and they need to point to, or aggregate, the independent work of citizen journalists.

A short list of those include Ojai Post http://www.ojaipost.com/, Robert Peake http://www.robertpeake.com/, OjaiBlog http://www.ojaiblog.com/, Bakersfield Californian http://www.bakersfield.com/102, Flickr shots tagged 'dayfire' http://flickr.com/photos/tags/dayfire, Technorati searches for blogs tagged 'dayfire' http://technorati.com/tags/dayfire, Libertatia Lab Reports http://libertatia-labs.blogspot.com/, Sounding Circle http://soundingcircle.com/, Doc Searls Weblog http://doc.weblogs.com/, MaryLu Wehmeier http://technorati.com/faves/dayfirehose?add=http%3A//www.hellomarylu.com/ and others I don't have time to list now.

Few of these are news organizations in the usual sense.  Yet all of them are in a position to report.  More to the point, all are DIY journalists -- what more of us are calling Citizen Journalists (and I call CJs).  In the same way as more eyes make bugs shallow, more CJs make more news available.

We've moved source coding into the open world, and the result is over 130,000 sources of building material http://sourceforge.net/ for a whole new networked civilization.  We have a system now that's pure NEA: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it.

We need the same for news.

This morning on my blog I stated my commitment to come up with a "River of News" http://www.reallysimplesyndication.com/riverOfNews (thank you Dave Winer for that metaphor, and the tech to make it start working http://www.scripting.com/2006/08/22.html#whatsNewForYourBlackberry3) for Day Fire information.  And later, for all live fire news, reported by anybody.  A live River of News page displays quickly, easily and without layout or graphical complications on your Blackberry, Nokia 770, Treo or other handheld Web device.

Then this afternoon, a few minutes ago, David Sifry http://www.sifry.com/alerts/ came through with the first Day Fire News River: http://www.sifry.com/dayfire/.  So a big thanks to him too.

Skoop Nisker used to sign off his newscasts with the line, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own".

Substitute "software" for "news" and you get my point.

-- Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Visiting Scholar with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and a Fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

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