The original conference call has been rescheduled for Thursday, 28 August 2008 at 15:00 UTC. For reference, that’s 8:00 a.m. in Los Angeles and 11:00 a.m. in New York.

Again, please email me if you would like to participate. I will soon contact all of the original participants to inform them of the update.

I want to install a wiki for Outquisition collaboration. I have noticed that MediaWiki is popular, but PhpWiki is easier to install and update on my server. Any recommendations?

Seth Woodworth of the One Laptop Per Child project has graciously offered to host a conference call for Outquisition brainstorming. The purposes of the call are

1. to discuss the actual needs, both social and technical, which the Outquisition may address (and probably not solve),
2. to share information about people and groups which share intellectual space with the Outquisition and which deserve more support and partnerships, and
3. to learn about what One Laptop Per Child is already doing in the area of data extensibility and copyright licensing (for those of us who don’t already know). This is a potential area in which the Outquisition could light a fire.

Interested in participating? First, email me. Second, mark your calendar for Thursday, 7 August 2008 at 18:00 UTC. (For reference, that’s 11:00 a.m. in Los Angeles and 7:00 p.m. in London.) Third, in case we need to reschedule the call, check back here for updates.

Update: The call has been postponed. I am now driving home from the San Francisco Bay Area (where I spent a total of ten hours in Outquisition-related meetings). Sorry for any inconvenience. Stay tuned for further updates and information pertaining to the future conference call.

I have already received a logo proposal. (Thanks, Pete!) So I thought I should lay out some specific criteria for our logo. Since I believe in thematic consistency, and our name evokes the Inquisition, I feel that we should restrict the imagery to something European, something circa 12th century to 16th century.

And I agree with Gerbal, who stated some basic requirements.

A logo should be simple and distinct. Something that doesn’t require a skilled artist to reproduce and is iconic. Preferably something that is easily painted or stenciled on Outquisition projects, hqs, and offices.

What do we get when we combine all of these criteria? Horses, I say. [Medieval horseback riders with funny hats enter stage right.]

I found some images from which to draw some inspiration. Notice that the man pictured in this first image is holding a scale. What if we replaced the scale with a wind turbine, or another evocative object?

Anyone who can develop a mock-up logo which can then be turned into a full-scale vector image will receive my deep gratitude and, of course, acknowledgement on the web site.

Please keep in mind that these horse images contain much, much more detail than would be appropriate in our logo. I mean, we might be talking about nothing more than a silhouette.

Also, check out: 50+ Kick Ass Logos for Inspiration

The last one is from 20th century Russia, but it looks close enough.

Judging by some of the email I have received, I need to clear up a little confusion. This web site has no formal ties to Alex Steffen nor Cory Doctorow, though I have conversed briefly with each of them. In Alex’s case, it was about two years ago in Santa Monica. No one should think that either of them endorses anything going on here, until either of them cares to express his opinion. Of course, if and when they provide any input, I will welcome it.

The Inquisition has a bad rap, and for good reason. I like the name, “Outquisition”, because it indicates an awareness of everything wrong, everything undemocratic, and everything arrogant about a certain kind of proselytizing. The name also implies a motivation to learn from the past and to do better.

I am grateful for the energy that has been captured here. But I am grateful for a less-than-obvious reason: I see this moment as an opportunity for tech enthusiasts to demonstrate that we can, in fact, be agents of social progress. I will describe more fully what this means in a future post.

I have spent a lot of time (not to mention money) searching for the human and the social in the midst of the technical. All of that personal investment, combined with my own need to do something of value to others, makes me feel qualified to serve as a guide to what this movement ought to look like. But no amount of intellectual “guidance” is worth a damn if it does not help people to improve their lives on their own terms.

No one ever asked me to do this. So instead, I will do the asking: Will you please give this a chance? More specifically, will you please give me a chance?

The name-calling has already begun. It does not bother me (yet), because I know that the name-calling is not (yet) based on demonstrable evidence. It would make me very happy if the Outquisitors with whom I find myself associating would strictly avoid those kinds of ad hominem assaults, even when those same Outquisitors are themselves targets of ad hominem assaults. Sometimes, the best way to respond to an insult is to silently show — not tell aloud — why one does not deserve the insult in the first place.

Emboldening a community of culturally sensitive tech enthusiasts who i) want to change the world and ii) do not deserve some form of ridicule is going to be difficult. To start, I would like to establish a few very basic rules, in the form of Three Ways To Know If The Outquisition Has Gone Horribly Wrong. I may add to this list if I think of more. The Outquisition is failing if

1. the vibes surrounding the Outquisition start to feel eerily similar to what one could expect to have been the prevailing mood during the original Inquisition. If the people in the frontier of the unsustainable begin to feel, as a result of our actions or our demeanors, the way Galileo must have felt while under house arrest, then we have a problem. Sadly, this could happen more easily than we might think. Missionary zeal, like fire, is a useful but potentially extremely dangerous thing.
2. we spend more time talking than listening. Even when someone is learning from you, be that person’s peer, not their teacher. Make genuine learning happen in the context of genuine partnership.
3. Outquisitors go for months without ever cracking a joke about the Outquisition. I mean, we’re a bunch of geeks who named ourselves after an ecclesiastical tribunal who want to go out and screw around with people’s light fixtures. There is serious work to do, but if we can’t laugh about it, then we have no business doing it.

I will be heading up to Palo Alto, California on Sunday, 3 August 2008. That evening afternoon might be a good time to hang out with any potential Outquisitioners Outquisitors in the Bay Area. If anyone wants to talk about some ideas over coffee or beer, send me an email.

Update: We now have a time and place. If you want to come, please email me and I will give you the info!

Who am I?

My name is Jonathan Pfeiffer. I will be starting the graduate program in global and international studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Fall. I blog at Multivoiced.

Why did I reserve this domain name?

Alex’s post yesterday prompted me to check whether outquisition.com, outquisition.org, and outquisition.net were available. Inevitably, I knew, someone would snatch them up and use them for good or evil. Why should that person, I asked myself, not be I? So I stopped at a coffeehouse on Saturday evening (about fourteen hours ago) for iced tea and domain shopping. I had no idea that anyone would discover this site so quickly, or that I would get hit by the esteemed Cory Doctorow himself on Boing Boing early in the morning.

What is the current status of this web site?

I barely had a chance to buy the domain names, install WordPress, find a cool temporary WordPress theme, sleep, and bathe. Meanwhile, quite a few very smart people have left comments. I am still digesting them, but one of my favorites is this one:

No pressure, but I’m expecting great things out of this.

What is my intention?

I want to motivate people who have tools and know how to use them to go out and share with people they might otherwise never have considered even speaking with, let alone working with. For a theoryhead overview of what best outcomes mean to me with respect to sustainability, read my 9 July 2008 editorial column. Obviously, the idea of the Outquisition will require deep probing and refinement by lots of people. This won’t happen without collaboration.

When I say lots of people, I mean it. Dale Carrico:

“The future,” writes science fiction author Bruce Sterling, “isn’t an alien world, it is this very world.” It’s the kind of insight that you never knew you needed to hear, until you actually hear it said. The future will be here, not elsewhere. And it will be shared. “The future is a process,” Sterling goes on to say. That process, whatever our wishes in the matter, will never amount simply to a process of scientific discovery or of engineers solving problems. Progress is not a wave for you to ride on or a Truth for you to die for, but a project that needs many collaborators to succeed.

I need your help.

To start with, we need an awesome WordPress theme — complete with a logo for the Outquisition. If you have any ideas, leave a comment or email me.

And most importantly, let’s keep the programmatic ideas rolling. I will try to figure out the best way to facilitate collaboration, via a wiki or however else.

Alex Steffen writes:

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.