Yeah, after re-reading that e-mail, I agree that it was weird. I use as an excuse that I was on leave for 5 days, my mailbox had over 400 new messages, and I was shooting from the hip a lot in replies this morning.
Seems to me that a journal devoted to the role of technology in social change would be on the cutting edge in using technology to change the way technology is used to accomplish social change. (Sort of a "Do as I do," instead of a "Do as I say, not as I do." For example, a book on how to be a technical writer will exhibit all the elements of good technical writing in explaining the process of technical writing.
An effective journal on using technology for social change will use technology to change the way social change is done. (That sentence is easier to understand if you've been exposed to the concept of meta levels.)
The way to be successful (and make money) with such a journal is to use the King C. Gillette approach. Give away the razor and sell razor blades. The way to make money on a social change business is to give away the concepts and make money on the implementation tools. A good deal of current social change takes place in the way that information is managed and the way collaboration is done. Sell tools that make those processes cheap, easy to use, and effective, and the world will beat a path to your door. Try to make your money off both razors and razor blades, and the modern King C. Gilletes will eat your lunch.
A point I was trying to make in my original message is that in the current world you either lead in using technology to manage change (whether it be personal life style, business practices, or macro social change), you follow someone else's lead, or you get steamrolled by the major technological changes that are taking place at a very rapid rate all over the world. If organizations don't understand the role of modern technology in modern social change, and don't use this technology to manage social change, they run the risk of becoming very much like the Amish. That is, very different from the rest of the world. The major difference being that the Amish choose to be different, and actively manage the process of being different. And even the Amish use their Mennonite neighbor's telephone in emergency situations.
So, a journal stuck in the technological processes of print media is going to fail sooner than later, regardless of its focus or how it controls its content.
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>>While the points you make are often very true, I'm not sure whether they address the issues raised in Michelle's blog article
<http://www.zenofnptech.org/2007/04/how_do_we_do_ma.html>. The most salient points for me are these: 1) Will the new journal that focuses on technology and social change be intellectually viable if it is not published in the spirit of open source? 2) Will the new journal be financially viable if it lacks a revenue stream to support it? I see these as tremendous challenges for many extremely worthwhile
projects in the field of information and communication technologies for he nonprofit sector, and I strongly encourage everyone to read
Michelle's article and the discussion that is arising in response to it.>>;
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post.