Comments and Suggestions for Gresham Meggett Oral History Project Kick-Off Meeting, Criminal Law

Gresham College: Gresham Meggett Oral History Project Kick-Off Meeting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Ii8Iwc-As

This would be much better and more accessible if there were English captions and transcript. The auto translations to other languages is something that Google/YouTube does pretty well. Desegregation and oral history are global cross-cutting issues of interest to most cultures. But (oral history aside) the spoken form of this presentation makes it hard for the computers to translate. Unfortunately speech to text translation needs human help.

Writing down what was discussed here and placed openly on the Internet has the added benefit that the text is picked up by the search engines and search and recommendation algorithms.

site:YouTube.com (“desegregation” OR “de-segregation”) has 10,600 entry points today (Google search, 22 May 2022) And you probably have not considered finding and connecting with those groups many doing similar things. Probably a fair level of duplication learning methods and best practices. All small and never growing larger or gaining impact.

site:YouTube.com (“oral history” OR “oral histories”) has 236,000 entry points.

site:YouTube.com (“oral history” OR “oral histories”) “African American” has 3,840 entry points. I look at groups like this to see where there are opportunities for global collaboration. The African American experiences with slavery and segregation might well be good lessons for all cultures world wide – if the material were organized and accessible. Just putting stuff on the Internet is NOT publishing. It is actually counter to finding and understanding the deeper lessons and human issues.

(“oral history” OR “oral histories”) (“African American” OR “African Americans”) (“desegregation” OR “segregation”) has 447,000 entry points. There is much good in those many fragments. But it is essentially inaccessible to the roughly 4.9 Billion people in the world with some level of access to the Internet.

site:loc.gov (“oral history” OR “oral histories”) (“African American” OR “African Americans”) (“desegregation” OR “segregation”) has 6,950 entry points. The Library of Congress “ought” to be a leader in global indexing and tagging of content on the Internet. But it is not allowed to help globally, only people from Congress or who can physically get to the buildings.

site:loc.gov has 3.35 Million entry points. It is as though they had torn pages and chapters and sentences from a random collection of books and documents and pasted them on the walls of their building. It is that hard to navigate and find. And much is out of date. The exact same thing is true (uncurated, unindexed, unorganized fragments dumped on the Internet with less effort, editing and thought than for a print publication). Sorry to belabor my own thoughts. For 24 years I have tried to do what the original Internet Foundation was supposed to do – make the Internet a tool for the human species to survive and prosper.

Without a transcript, captions and chapter index, this material is really hard to absorb. Without context and linkages, it is isolated and not very effective.  Yet this particular bit of oral history of people trying to understand and change things like segregation will be online still in a thousand years. Indexed and organized it will be more useful and cut down on the decades and centuries needed for change, when every group is doing their own isolated bit.

I am NOT criticizing. I applaud your efforts and just wish the many such efforts were connected and accessible to the world. Which is about 7.9 Billion now. The countries who have not grown out of hate and warfare might learn from what you have found. Just trying to understand might help. You can only try.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

Gresham College: Criminal Law – There are alternatives at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61Vr7t4uMPo

Leslie Thomas, Is there a sustainable way to continuously improve what we have now and nudge it in the right directions, globally, for the verifiable good of all?  Cost it out, find efficient methods.  Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation