Master Metaphors
From Banyan Project
The Banyan Project is organized around three master metaphors, the Banyan tree, call and response, and community organizing. Each metaphor offers insight into the Banyan concept.
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Banyan Tree
A banyan is a fig tree (Ficus benghalensis) whose branches produce slender vines that grow downwards. Once they reach the ground, they take root and grow into subsidiary trunks that hold up the horizontal branches and allow them to spread for great distances. A single banyan can thus grow to cover more than an acre. Here's a photo of one that covers a city block in Maui, Hawaii. The banyan tree is the central metaphor for this project.
In the biological banyan, the main trunk is the progenitor of all the tree’s branches, which spread and spread as the tree matures, and of the supporting subsidiary trunks that establish themselves locally across a broad territory.
In the metaphorical banyan, the main trunk will provide the DNA that determines the standards for all the tree's widely distributed sources of news and service journalism -- its branches and subsidiary trunks -- but without tightly controlling the direction of growth. As with the biological banyan, growth will be opportunistic -- where the the soil welcomes the roots of a subsidiary trunk, where the sunlight reaches the leaves. Thus the Banyan Project is akin to the Web, with its main trunk taking a role akin to that of the World Wide Web Consortium. And its branches and subsidiary trunks will scale opportunistically, where fertile soil and sunlight are welcoming to new journalism efforts.
In journalism terms, 1) the branches may be seen as news, service journalism and investigative reporting on projects of national interest, done by as many entities as there are branches that form; 2) the subsidiary trunks may be seen as local news-originating franchisee/licensees, as many as there are trunks that form; 3) the main trunk is the project’s lightly controlling center, ensuring the integrity of journalistic and 2.0 software standards shared by the branches and subsidiary trunks.
Trust growing out of integrity is what fertilizes Banyan’s growth. The entity wants to be a co-op because that is the most trustworthy form of business enterprise: Banyan's reader/users will be its owners, so there can be no structural conflict between the interests of Banyan's owners and the interests of those it serves. Banyan's entire structure must be grounded in integrity, and every decision that’s made must be examined for its impact on Banyan's trustworthiness.
The banyan metaphor offers some nice overtones for journalism of integrity to associate with: 1) It was under a banyan tree that the Buddha was said to be sitting when he achieved enlightenment; 2) in India banyan trees are a symbol of permanence; 3) the word banyan comes from Sanskrit meaning trader, because traders found banyan trees a good place to spread their wares.
Call and Response
Call and response is a standard practice in many folk musics, most familiarly the blues.
As a metaphor for the Banyan Project, the call is a comprehensive daily news and feature report that comes together in the Project’s 2.0 platform, drawing from many if not all parts of the sprawling tree to meet each reader/user’s preferences and geographical orientation.
The response comes when the reader/users engage with the journalism; responses can range from a shrug, to clicking approval of the story, to commenting, to joining a discussion group on the issue the story advances, to starting such a group if none for the issue exists, to emailing writers and editors, to offering further suggestions for future stories on the same issue, to volunteering photos or video or reporting, to submitting an article for publication.
The reader/users' responses provide nourishment for the next day’s call. The call and response metaphor is at the heart of Banyan's Relational Journalism.
Community Organizing
Community organizers bring people together to exert their combined power to make change that benefits their community self-interest. Through its sophisticated software platform, Banyan will provide civic-networking tools that enable committed reader/users to self-organize.
Banyan’s aim is not merely to provide journalism that informs better life and citizenship decisions, it also aims to provide people with tools that help them use the power of networking to strengthen democracy both in reader/users' municipalities and in communities of interest they form around issues. Social theorists and observers of America’s culture dating back to de Tocqueville have marveled at how we form voluntary associations and have seen these associations – from civic and fraternal organizations to co-ops and mutual insurance companies and so on and on – as the seedbed and lifeblood of democracy. Banyan will be a seedbed of such voluntary associations. It will engage the hands as well as the mind in democracy.
The Prius
All traditional publishing businesses are complex combinations of systems, but Banyan synthesizes an unusually large number of them. In an era of uncomplicated Web journalism systems, some find Banyan's complexity off-putting.
But Banyan sees this complexity as crucial to creating a stable, scalable, and sustainable journalism enterprise. An automobile with an internal combustion engine is a complex combination of systems, and the Prius, with two kinds of engines and an unprecedented mechanism to optimize the way they work together, is the most reliable car on the road.
