Mixed Ink

The wemedia pitch it competition took place in Miami, February 2009

I want to tell you about Mixed Ink – a really good concept in collaborative authoring that I encountered on my travels a few weeks ago.

I was in Miami (‘ark at me!), touting a democracy project that I’ve been nurturing for years.

The conference I was at was designed to showcase bright ideas in the use of new media tools. With a high level of involvement from indie journalists, a lot of new commercial and social-enterprise spaces were being keenly eyed.

The emerging spaces that are being created as the mainstream media adjusts to the perfect storm that it thinks it faces over the next few years were of particular interest to all.

My project didn’t win the prize sadly (there were two prizes and 18 candidates). The winners were See Click Fix (a variation on the UK’s excellent Fix My Street) and The Extraordinaires. Both good projects – the latter is just soooooo, like, kick-ass (as we say in America) it’s eye-watering. Do have a look.

But the project that interested my slightly wonky head the most was Mixed Ink. I had a few talks while I was there with the founder, Dave Stern and the idea has passed all the relevant tests for me. More to the point, I like it a lot more now I’ve thought it through. I’d love to try it here – and I think it would have a more positive impact here than in the US.

Short version: They worked with Slate Magazine to crowdsource a draft of Obama’s inaugural address by getting 455 people to write bits, incorporate each others’ ideas and vote / game their text up into the final draft. Some gun-nuts are doing some  spEak You’re bRanes-type irreparable damage to the rules of grammar with it at the moment.

Slightly longer version? Oh, watch the video.

[vimeo 2674991] 

The bottom line for me though, is the widely commented-upon negativity of public debate in the UK – one area in which we provide a poor comparison with the US. Mixed Ink doesn’t provide a place to go to carp about an idea’s shortcomings. There’s no upside in bitching at your collaborators. It’s about competitive positivity. 

I can see that it requires a degree of engagement that a lot of other social media apps would avoid. It sets the bar fairly high. It’s for this reason – it’s slight lack of usability – that I love it. If you don’t care, and just want to donate the level of activism required to join a Facebook group, then Mixed Ink isn’t for you.

But if you want to involve an active group of people in reaching and expressing a common position, it looks just right. I’d love to find a project to work on with it in the UK to prove the concept over here. It’s done as an open-source application, but they can offer invitation-only versions hosted separately if needed for closed groups to experiment with.