Rebranding Development-in-a-Box
Thursday, July 13, 2006 at 1:32PM DiB is the phrase Steve DeAngelis and I have used up to now to describe a rapid reconnecting of a post-conflict/disaster/whatever state to the global economy/global info grid.
We do get a certain push back on the term, primarily on the word "development" and the implication that something so complex can be so summarily packaged up and dropped on somebody's doorstep. That's the Left's problem. The Right's issue is more one of commitment--as in bucks and oversight implied. A middle-ground resistance centers on the implied-but-wrong assumption of top-down planning.
In sum, all this resistance says to me that "development," like democracy, is just too loaded a term for our purposes, so I'm going to start describing it more as Connectivity-in-a-Box (connectivity is my phrase for obviating the up-front demand on democratization anyway, and it's always worked wonders for me in that way by steering the discussion to where it needs to go instead of bogging it down in debates on cultural norms), which I think comes closer to Steve's old term, "civilian infrastructure insourcing," a great but a bit too technical phrase.
Why now?
I'm writing a new article on the subject that should get some good coverage, so it seems a good time to switch. Also, today Steve and I are meeting with an organizer of a major global conference and we're pitching the concept.
In the end, I think CiB is a much better fit, for carrying both less baggage and for narrowing down our goals more realistically, plus it plays into our "standards and metrics" argument better, plus it more accurately captures the promise of rapidity, which is crucial. So CiB deflects the Left on hubris, the Right on pricing, and the Moderates on centralization fears.
Plus it addresses all the feedback we've gotten on the term from wordsmiths who fear we pick too many unnecessary battles with the phrase while burying the lead, which is really the connectivity interface.
Reader Comments (2)
How about modernity widgets? They come in a box, you put them together in a way that makes sense for your own society and you end up with a machine you can live with that connects you to the world. If you need it, there's a nice tech support hotline too, 1-800-Enterra.
We've actually toyed with modernity as a word, but it comes with a lot of weird intellectual baggage that, quite frankly, I'm somewhat ignorant about.