Talk:Project One (San Francisco)

Sherry ... I just saved the entire article to my hard drive just as insurance that there is an offline copy in case of reversions, etc. Also, noticed that you probably don't know about the convention of typing 4 tildes (~) following your posts here on the talk page which causes wiki to put a date and time stamp on each one. Not a big deal but without it you will see posts followed with "Undated ... Autosigned by SineBot". You can also read the talk page guidelines above.Htfiddler (talk) 20:46, 5 May 2016 (UTC) Thanks for the backup. I know the convention.--SherryReson (talk) 02:13, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Ok, this is a mind dump of sorts.
We began with a 45 member Facebook group which is having it's intended purpose of stimulating memory and reinforcing connections. Now we have a week old wiki page for Project One. (Wiki entries are supposed to be 'encyclopedic' in style. Henry is acting as my technology guide wrt both FB and Wiki.) Augmenting and spinoff activity, both within and beyond Wiki or Facebook, seem likely:

1. A number of people have been talking about books (memoirs?) for ages, e.g., Ralph, Robert, Vickie, Jane. Our efforts might stimulate them.
2. Henry tF is talking about mounting a slideshow on You Tube. Various people have recalled the sound tracks we used.
3. Lynn has brought her P1 negatives out of storage and begun editing them. #I woke up the other morning imagining a mostly picture book with descriptions and reflections of various length.
4. I've been collaborating on podcasts (in Second Life) with a soon to retire physicist at the Exploratorium and - once he does retire - a series of hour long public conversations seem possible.

But back to the wiki: I've asked a number of people to write descriptions that I can integrate, with or without editing. (I'm saving the originals which may have other application.)

1. Rashid (Ray) Patch sent several paragraphs on Apples Day Care. The original is posted under Files in Facebook.
2. Ralph is writing short descriptions of Symbas, Ecos and One.
3. Vickie Elmer and I plan to talk next week.
4. Jane Speiser sent 116 pages of her memoir.
5. Burkhardt posted from his journal two entries concerning the 1971 oil spill.

What goes in our wiki articles?

• Remembering that wiki is styled as an encyclopedia, which organizations and whose names best belong in the overall P1 wiki article?

1. Wanting to include our response to the 1971 San Francisco Bay oil spill, I created a sub listing called 'Activism' which might better be called 'Collaborations.' So far I've seen nothing in print reporting or otherwise documenting this. From other things they wrote, it's possible that Stewart Brand and Ken Goffman will have some recollections. If I find the references and gather enough recollections, I may be able to write this one. The existing wiki entry doesn't mention Switchboard, Resource One, Symbas School or the Ecology Center ... or any coordinating communications function. JoAnn Silverstein may be able to help.
2. Resource One will very likely have a separate wiki article. There are existing entries for Community Memory and for Lee Felsenstein. Henry and I are establishing links. For the moment, I'm gathering references and bits of info. I've found references which wiki requires. Who can write bits of this history?
3. Symbas School may have it's own listing. Perhaps Ralph and Robt will write, but surely others will too. Meanwhile I have a roster, constructed from the memories of FB commenters who are looking through the several hundred photos sent to me and Henry by Ray Kraus.

• Ray Baltar, Bob Barlow, Lucinda Bentley, Anne Benveniste, Robert Burkhardt, Jr., Janice Burns, Adam Burtch, Eisen Chao, Edmund Chung, Daryl Dahlen, Billy Dally, Diane Dally, Noel Day, Jr., Michele Denis, Mike Ernst, Don Ernst, Janine Fales, Sean Fell, Madeline Ferrari, Mike Flores, Barbara Furnival (aka BF, now Lyn Shimizu), Carrie Gagliardi, Janice Garcia, Jordan Gaylor, Stacy Gaylor, Peter Gettner, Karin Gianoli, Jacque Goldman, Jocelyn Graef, Andrew Graef, Jacob Ireland, Ellen Irons, March Hajre, Jim LaFlamme, Michael Lasnover, Craig Mosher, Laurie Nelson, Brian Patch, Barbara Reilly (BR), Baron Rose, Judy Rosen, Jo Scandiffio, Karen Schneble, Ralph Scott, Robert Shackelford, Brand Shelton, Ally Shore, Jeremiah Skye, Cyd Slotoroff, Sandy Smith, Fred Taylor, Kate Thom (Fitzgerald), Robin Walter, Carole Whitrock, Charles (Chuckito) Zimmerman. Last names needed for Marco, Alex, Summer, Luz, Alan
  SherryReson (talk) 18:11, 30 April 2016 (UTC)SherryReson
  

Photos

1. Ray Krauss sent hundreds of digital files which I've uploaded to the Facebook group. He's promised to send the balance on a thumbnail drive. He and I recall spending a number of days scanning slides about 15 years ago. I'm hoping the thumbnail will include the 250 slides I've kept. (5/4/16).SherryReson (talk)Sherry Reson —Preceding undated comment added 17:52, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

References and Resources https://www.swords-to-plowshares.org/2014/11/05/jack-mccloskey-remembering-a-veteran-leader

Airwaves

Larry Bensky Community radio SherryReson (talk) 04:17, 20 July 2016 (UTC)

Switchboard, Ecology Ctr, Symbas, Resource One response to 1971 oil spill

Craig Mosher will write this section.SherryReson (talk) 02:29, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
Craig: Use four ~ to sign your contributions SherryReson (talk)

Comments from Facebook Ralph Scott: My memory says that One residents coordinated the extensive bird saving efforts with our home made phone system centered on the antique PBX located in Switchboard's 2nd floor space. An orange and white parachute brightened the area during that effort.

Adam Burtch: I remember that PBX had a strip of phototype that read "Lackey And Running Dog Dept."
Robert Burkhardt: RJBJR: Oil Spill 1: January 22, 1971: "Crises always seem to gobble down time, while sufficiently disorienting things that people lose sense of how long it was since, or what time it is now, or when it will be over, or whatever. Such with the oil slick here in the bay. Tuesday morning Ray Baltar and I headed out as spotters for the switchboard, going as far south as Pacifica, and as far north as Stinson (where I had a crushing experience). We established contact with bird cleaning centers, assessed for ourselves where the spill was having the worst effect (Marin), and began to piece together a gestalt of the whole thing: oil moving north, birds really beginning to pile up on the beaches, etc. As one might expect, ONE (including massive support from Symbas) put together a good service. We turned the second floor switchboard area into a huge communication network, maintaining a 24 hour service with thirty phones, about fifteen of which were general incoming, others private 'hotline' incoming, and the rest secret outside lines to get to our teams of spotters combing the beaches and centers, and as well keeping in touch with the distribution centers, the beaches, the SPCA, coast guard, KSAN, etc. Since that evening few of us have slept. Our world has been one of community, forged around the telephone lines, trying to link up trucks with ice or straw or cotton or mineral oil, trying to find thirty people to get to Stinson or elsewhere in a hurry, getting stuff to KSAN for emergencies (nurses, vets, special needs), and just developing a huge capacity to deal with crises. (to be continued)

Part 2: January 22, 197i "I have managed to maintain some sleep during the whole thing because it has been really necessary. Up at Stinson on Tuesday, about 4 p.m., Ray and I linked up with others from ONE, and were about to head down to the beach to pick up birds when a big 20-ton road grader got stuck in the sand and oil on the beach. Everyone ran to help. We had to push it backwards, and it needed mucho manpower. I was unfortunately too close to the front wheel, which caught my boot, sucked in my legs, and threw me down as it came up on top of me and stopped, pinning me beneath it. Things were hairy for a while and finally the driver dropped the big plow blade, which raised the front wheels sufficiently to pull me loose. Someone called an ambulance, and they took me to Marin General, where x-rays showed nothing, and to everyone's amazement I was released. No broken bones, just a slight sprain in the right ankle, plus plenty of aches and pains from the dead weight. So I've been sitting dealing with telephones since. And it has been really good. We put together a really first-rate organization. Ham radio operators, spotter teams, everything. We just put our lives aside for a few days and dealt with things. For those of us involved, it has been really fun, in addition to being incredibly draining. Logging hundreds of phone calls per hour can be a hassle."

Michelle Dennis Michele Dennis I worked the Pbx switchboard for that. It was one of my first real responsibilities!--SherryReson (talk) 04:07, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Ralph Scott's notes

--SherryReson (talk) 02:30, 6 May 2016 (UTC)

Social Service Referral Directory

Prior to the publication and distribution of the Social Service Referral Directory, social workers and other staff in San Francisco's many agencies relied on the personal rolodex, pamphets and lists in order to refer their clients for additional and appropriate services. Critical information within agencies changed frequently and successful referrals required up to date information. The idea for the SSRD came from Charles Bolton.

A design, development and implementation team at Resource One (Mary Janowitz, Chris Macie, Sherry Reson, Mya Shone) utilized their donated SDS 940 mainframe computer, programmed by Macie to handle information storage and retrieval. A standardized format and data collection process resulted in agency listings printed on 3-hole punch paper. Looseleaf binders were distributed to the participating agencies, who paid a nominal fee to be mailed a monthly packet including ten new listings and ten to 20 revised listings.

While some agency people sent in information as programs or capacities or locations changed, maintaining current information -- and adding listings -- depended on project staff making direct telephone contact with agency personnel. Listings were sorted alphabetically behind tabs and index pages provided an overview regarding neighborhoods, languages spoken, types of service and other critical criteria.

Joan Lefkowitz joined the team early in 1974, then Katerina Lanner-Cusin came on board. The team negotiated with The United Way of the Bay Area, who assumed responsibility from <year> - <year>. When the United Way determined they were unable to maintain it, the heads of San Francisco Social Services and the Zellerbach Family Fund met to decide on its disposition, resulting in its move to the San Francisco Public Library. SFPL renamed it the Community Services Data Base (?) and maintained it as an online database for several more years. Sometime in the ‘90s the library decided it was too duplicative of other resources and discontinued it. People in the social services world wish it still existed and Lefkowitz, now the Library's Web Service Manager, commented that the SSRD represented a “ground breaking use of technology” SherryReson (talk)

SF VVAW

I added Bob Hansen and Paul Cox to the VVAW section Rashid Patch (talk) 05:53, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

List of people

Here I removed a list that included at least some living people because it didn't have any sources (see WP:BLPSOURCES). It's also not entirely clear to me what it's a list of (but that's not why I deleted it). So before putting it back in, any name on the list needs a reliable source and IMO, someone should write a sentence preceding the list to explain what it is. I advise against including non-notable people (i.e., people without a wikipedia article) in the list unless they're frequently mentioned by name in reliable sources covering this topic. —PermStrump(talk) 10:46, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Resource One: Whole Earth Demise

Markoff's version is misleading in several regards. The decision to drive to Moore's house flowed directly from the outcome of the community meeting, which I believe occurred in the ECOS offices. At that meeting, the fund recipients, while supported by people from Project One, were not part of it. Moore was already freaking out about the prospect of once again, releasing the funds. I've written to Markoff and will check other sources before posting in the article. SherryReson (talk) 23:27, 4 August 2016 (UTC)

References

Resource One

In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism,Fred Turner provides a philosophical and historical context for both Project One and Resource One.

"At a time when the Vietnam War had widely discredited the military establishment, the Catalog offered them a way to imagine their own research not only as an extension of the academic-military-industrial collaborations that had spawned the ARPA community, but as a variation of the New Communalist project of working in small, forward-thinking groups to develop new forms of consciousness and community with the aid of small-scale technologies.

The Catalog performed similar ideological work within two other groups that would play an important role in imagining the use of computers in counterculture terms: the People's Computer Company and Resource One.

(pg 114-115) In the summer of 1971, Felsenstein joined Resource One, a gathering of former staffers from a volunteer switchboard and computer programmers who had left the University of California at Berkeley in protest of the invasion of Cambodia; Resource One was also a project partly funded by several thousand dollars Fred Moore had taken home from the Catalog's Demise Party. At Resource One, Felsenstein and others sought to establish public computing terminals at several locations in the Bay are, with an eye toward creating a peer-to-peer information exchange. Ken Colstad, a member of the project described its aims in a 1975 issue of the People's Computer Company thus: "Such a horizontal system would allow the public to take advantage of the huge and largely untapped reservoir of skills and resources that resides with the people.... [It would] counteract the tendencies toward fragmentation and isolation so visible in today's society." On the next page, in an article entitled "A Public Information Network," Efrem Lipkin made a similar point: "People must gain a sense of understanding of and control over the system as a tool....[Computer] intelligence should be directed toward instructing [the user], demystifying and exposing its own nature, and ultimately giving him active control.

The concept of building a peer-to-peer information system and the idea that individuals needed to gain control over information and information systmes had been features of both the New Communalist Movement and the New Left for some time. Yet the notion of doing these things with computers was relatively new, at least outside the walls of SRI and XeroxPARC.SherryReson (talk) 00:38, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

For those who hoped to turn computing machines towards populist ends, the religion of technology espoused by the Whole Earth Catalog offered an important conceptual framework and source of legitimation. In the early 1970s, for example, Lee Felsenstein began to design the Tom Swift Terminal-- a freestanding, easy to use terminal that would be as easy to repair as a radio. Although it was never built precisely to Felsenstein's first specifications, the Tom Swift Terminal design ultimately drove the creation of an early personal computer known as Sol. Felsenstein envisioned the Tom Swift Terminal "as something that could be printed in the Whole Earth Catalog. As he saw it, the Terminal would be "a way to do things. It might be built with technologies developed in the centers of American industry, but it could be used by individuals for their own purposes. With the Catalog and Brand himself as models,, the Tom Swift Terminal offered Felsenstein the chance to see himself not simply as a trained engineer, but as a Fulleresque Comprehensive Designer.

Pg 117-118 ... (Brand, Rolling Stone and Spacewars) The programmers and engineers at PARC and Resource One had long distinguished between "hackers" (those who figured things out as they went and invented for pleasure) and "planners" (those who pursued problems according to a set and less flexible stragegy). Brand picked up on this distinction and mapped it onto the larger, New Communalist critique of technocracy. Hackers, he wrote, were not mere technicians, but "a mobile, new-found elite, with its own apparat[us], language and character, its own legends and humor... in his feature, Resource One appeared to be not a fringe group of ex-hippies, but a central player in a new computer movement.SherryReson (talk) 19:10, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

References

Over Unity Claims

The section on Eric Dollard Labs contains a rather casual reference to violating the fairly well established 1st and 2nd thermodynamic laws. After checking the listed source, I didn't find any information supporting that claim. I've cited it as dubious, and would recommend removing references to "over/unity" energy production. Fieromechanic (talk) 15:11, 11 April 2019 (UTC) Just saw this. Thank you. Can you suggest appropriate text for that section? SherryReson (talk)SherryReson —Preceding undated comment added 03:35, 20 July 2019 (UTC)

I myself witnessed some of Dollard's experiments at Project One. His instruments recorded "over unity" effects. I cannot validate them. I did not state that those results were verified by peer-review or experimental replication. I do not say the results were factual. I only state that that is what his instrumentation showed, and what he claimed. Dollard is still experimenting and lecturing, and has a following online in the "alt-energy" scene. - R. Patch, resident at Project One 1971 - 1978 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2600:1700:A8F1:4C20:25BF:DE98:5FE5:8B84 (talk) 22:03, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Related Projects?

I notice that there's no mention of two related communes that were spinoffs of Project One, Project Two and Project Artaud. Project Artaud is an artists community rather than a technology one, and is still going today. Project Two I know less about, but was known for some extreme sexual and lifestyle experimentation and has a rather dark history in that it had some connection to the crimes of the child molester Luis "Tree Frog" Johnson - the mother of Alex Cabarga was one of the members of that commune, and basically gave the boy to Johnson, who was groomed into Johnson's partner in crime.

Project Artaud probably should have an article of its own, but both are worth mentioning somewhere in this article. 92.251.232.163 (talk) 16:29, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

The Russian Orthodox church in the Haight-Ashbury had a world-class men's choir.

This was heavily promoted by the Buckminster Fuller axis in the CIA, particularly Edgar Applewhite, who were working against the Russian Communists. This group of spooks were in constant contact with the Russian Orthodox Church within the Soviet Union through the very active Orthodox community on the Greek island of Athos.

Buckminster Fuller might deserve another turn in this story through the connections with Wavy Gravy (Hugh Romney Jr.) and Peter Rabbit of Colorado. both transients -- today's word might be "influencers" -- through this scene.

Later, the Athos Orthodox folks became embroiled in the corruption of a Greek banker active in a Socialist government elected after the fall of the Colonels, and all sorts of scandal have ensued.

I speculate, but do not know, that the Athos folks lost their bearings somewhat as the Patriarchate in Moscow made their way from the ambiguities of the Soviet era, through enthusiastic cooperation with the Andropov-Yeltsin transition, and now into the uncertainties (at march 29, 2022) of the Putin, uh, administration.

One must sympathize. It must be an easy maze to get lost in.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 15:58, 19 March 2022 (UTC)

"stimulating memory and reinforcing connections."

Stimulated memory is very inventive, and not all the claims in the article are plausible. The idea that the first computer bulletin board was made in 1973 seems ridiculous to me, but it may have a foundation on an idiosyncratic definition of "computer bulletin board."

Many of the aims of this family of communities see to me sane and decent, but there is a strong streak or irrationality and some untruth close to the middle of it all. The theories of physical reality associated with Dollard and Farnsworth are incorrect even though their aficionados are able to produce some impressive Hollywood effects with very high voltage direct current. An earlier generation of electrical wizards had made careers in the silent movies, and Tesla himself lived for some time off money from investors he impressed with his talk, but big sparks stopped being boffo once sound and color came along.

The article makes several offhand references to "agencies" and other nameless entities. I think that the well-endowed Glide Memorial Church would deserve at least a walk-on part with a couple or more named actors in this play. I saw the Village People perform the fine pieces that Donald Trump has used in his campaign onstage at Glide in 1967 or early 1968. It was all a fertile seed-bed -- or perhaps a luxuriant show window. I'm not sure we can be certain which it was.

Under "connections," I think we should all remind ourselves from time to time that The Haight is represented in Congress by the Speaker of the House, Hon. Nancy Pelosi.

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 15:33, 19 March 2022 (UTC)