Jim Carroll wrote:

"I don't believe that Ned is about freedom of speech. It's about cultivating peace and bountiful prosperity. In a garden, this would involve pulling the weeds to let the delectables grow. We haven't finalized the ground rules, but hope to soon, and that will clarify any misunderstandings, and avoid future surprises. Thank you Brad. This event has reassured everyone at Ned that the noise that existed at Omidyar.net is something that's entirely avoidable."

"Cultivating peace" is quite a different metaphor from "making peace." "Cultivating peace" leads to a set of metaphors reinforcing a Manichean view of the world where peace is maintained by expelling undesirables and fencing them out. "Pulling the weeds" follows the frame that the problems are always "them."

I'm in awe of Jim Carroll's technical abilities, yet I'm more skeptical of his techno-utopianism. Ethan Zuckerman wrote a blog post " Fred Turner: the rhetoric of cyberutopianism" a review of Turner's book From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

I may be really off the mark in reading into Zuckerman's piece, but the meaning I draw from it is that cyperutopianism fails because it devolves from oversimplification of complex systems.

"Noise" in my view is not "entirely avoidable" nor am I convinced that avoiding noise entirely is desirable. Certainly I don't believe that all that's needed is a technical fix.

One of my great pleasures of discovering Omidyar.net was meeting RicHARD Makepeace here. RicHARD demonstrate that peace is not a static state but rather a quality in dynamic systems.

I love to garden, so I love gardening metaphors. But the specter of "pulling weeds" when it come to community building strikes me as wrong. One of the foundations of Omidyar.net is:

"Every individual has the power to make a difference."

"Pulling the weeds" yuck! The questions the cadre of organizers should be asking are about processes that enable and empower participants rather than how high to build the walls and what special privileges the cadre of right-thinking decent "owners" should have.

The difficulty with "noise" is the plain fact that people often disagree. Communities will always be noisy. It seems to me the task isn't to banish noise but amplifying positive actions.