MOVED to BigBatUSA [http://bigbatusa.org] / Electoral Reform
Venessa Miemis: Future of Facebook Survey Results
Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence
Future of Facebook survey results
Thanks to everyone who participated and responded to the 4 question survey for the Future of Facebook Project. Below are your results! We’ll be integrating these responses with the ones given by the experts for our final video and written report.
Phi Beta Iota: Weak signals, most fascinating are two. First, open source the code and open Application Program Interfaces (API) are the most hoped for immediate change; and second, social (peer to peer or P2P) commerce is the next hoped for big big thing.
John Robb: Bloomberg Cleaning Out OWS
09 Justice, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government
New Rules from Zucotti ParkMayor Bloomberg is moving to shut down Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Square tomorrow at 7 AM.
The ruse he is using: the need to clean the “park.” He has promised that Liberty Square will be reopened after the cleaning but nobody will be allowed to set up anything in park, nor will sleeping bags be allowed (click the sheet to the left for larger version).
This is going to get interesting. Will be working up some ideas for how this could play out. Let's start off with an assumption. This is Bloomberg vs. Occupy. One mind vs. many minds. The goal is to coerce him into changing his mind. Dissuade him. Get inside his OODA loop.
Go straight for him. Maximize the eviction's taint on Bloomberg's personal brand. Personalize the protest/eviction by attaching the blame to him personally. Pierce his shield of bureaucratic impersonality. Brand the eviction with the name: Bloomberg. This is/will be a global stage, use it.
Confuse him. Lots and lots of Flash Mobs. Shut down bridges and major streets. Overwhelm with volume/speed. Non-violent disruption. As soon as police arrive in force, disperse and reassemble at new location. Bikes + Kids. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. More flashmobs = more disruption. As long as the square is under attack, keep the city tied in knots. NOTE: If they lock down the area, flashmobs are the best way to participate (and get some exercise).
Connect with more people than him. Best way to do this: Eyes in the sky. Get a camera/cameras above Liberty Square. Stream the feed. The better the quality the more impact it will have. It will play across the world. Think about how important AJs video feed over Tahrir was when things got hot. Better yet, get AJ to cover it and stream it.
If you have additional ideas, add them below. Good training in tactical thinking.
Hoisted from the comments:
The flashmob tactic was tried here in Panama couple of years ago by the SUNTRACS construction workers union, and with very small groups pre-planted all over the city they drove the police absolutely crazy. Police would show up at location A, mob would disperse immediately, two text messages and now TWO flashmobs would block streets at different locations. They never followed up with it (preferring massive marches to display force) but it worked very well and with much less people than #ows has available. [courtesy: Okke]
Koko: Participatory Budget Takes Root in USA
03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Participatory Budgeting – A Method to Empower Local Citizens & Communities
“Participatory Budgeting” (PB) is a process that allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately a final vote. It was first implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1990, and has since spread.
PB has recently taken root in Canadian and American soils.
Chicago’s 49th Ward, for example, uses this process to distribute $1.3 million of annual discretionary funds. The ward’s residents have praised the opportunity to make meaningful decisions, take ownership over the budget process, and win concrete improvements for their neighborhood – community gardens and sidewalk repairs to street lights and public murals. The initiative proved so popular that the ward’s alderman, Joe Moore, credits PB with helping to reverse his political fortunes.
The wave is not stopping in Chicago, either. Elected officials and community leaders elsewhere – from New York City to San Francisco and from Greensboro, N.C. to Springfield, Mass. – are considering launching similar initiatives.
Sources:
“Government can’t solve budget battles? Let citizens do it.” Daniel Altschuler and Josh Lerner, The Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 2011.
“Chicago’s Participatory Budgeting Experiment” Nicole Summers, Shareable. April 6, 2011.
Student Researcher: Allison Holt, San Francisco State University
Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows, San Francisco State University
John Robb: Permanent Global Protest #ows
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Hacking, IO Deeds of PeaceJOURNAL: Permanent Protest #ows
One of the most interesting aspects of Occupy Wall Street (#ows) is the work it is doing to set up permanent occupations in EVERY city (over 1,000 locations globally, and growing) of note.
Here's a quick overview:
Navigation of the complex legalities of sleeping/living in an urban, public space (park, square). Every major city has a thicket of regulations in place to prevent people from congregating, let alone sleep overnight.
Defusing provocations from police to prevent more aggressive action. The police made a couple of attempts at provocations already (lots of pepper spray, lots of beatings with batons, and lots of arrests) in NYC. So far, the protesters just took it and didn't fight back.
Acquiring provisions. On-line support has helped the protest acquire many of the food, water, and other items it needs (although its unclear how many locations get anything approaching the level of support seen in NYC).
Food preparation. By keeping the permanent group small, the need for food/food prep stays manageable.
Shelter. Most locations selected prohibit tents. Lots of variants (cardboard, tarps, etc.) have emerged. This is going to be tougher in winter in the northern climes, but not undoable with small numbers of overnight residents.
Defense. Currently, the occupy movement is strictly adhering to the regulations and non-violence to avoid being ejected from their locations. The best medium term defense is a flashmob.
Media. 24x7x365
Local Governance. Open source. Consensus needed. Leaderless (pitch in if something needs doing, but don't assume you are running the show).
A permanent camp in each location means that there is a gathering point for HUGE protests in the future (quick response to shocks/events/etc.). Also, protests that span hundreds or thousands of cities simultaneously.
Pretty cool dynamic developing: a protest Horde?
John Robb: Occupy (Insert XYZ) – Capitalism’s Crisis
Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, GovernmentOCCUPY (Insert Your City Here): Protesting Capitalism's Crisis
Let me spool you up on what's going on with the Occupy movement.
It's an open source protest (there's lots about how open source protests and insurgencies work on this blog, in posts all the way back to 2004). So, it's not like the protests you've seen in the past (just as the insurgency in Iraq was different than 20th Century insurgencies).
This protest is more like what we saw in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc. You know, the protests that toppled governments. The big difference between this protest and those protests is that it's not directed at governments. It's aimed at companies. Not just any companies, it's aimed at the banks that run/own the global economy. The heart of the global Capitalist system.
So, why have governments suffered disintermediation (either consciously or subconsciously by these protestors)? This protest is ignoring governments and standard political processes because:
- governments are much weaker than the global economy (they are bankrupt, hollow shells of what they were at the end of the Cold War),
- they are too ineffectual and/or corrupt to change anything even if they are coerced (see the US, Ireland and Greece for recent examples),
- too little will change even if the government changes parties (see the US for how lame politics and politicians have become).
What Occupy is Really About
The real reason we are seeing this movement right now is because
Capitalism, the last great ideological system, is in crisis.
This isn't merely a crisis of outcomes (economic depression, financial panic, etc.), it's a crisis of BELIEF. While people generally believe in the idea of capitalism, a critical mass of people now think that the global capitalist system we currently have is so badly run, so corrupt, so terrible at delivering results that it needs either a) a complete overhaul or b) we need to build something new.
In short, in its tiny way, this protest may be the start of a reformation of the church of capitalism.
A splintering that may change everything…. For better or worse depending on how well you did in the old, corrupt system.
Tom Atlee: Dawning Realizations re Occupy Wall Street
Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Dawning realizations re Occupy Wall Street
It is slowly dawning on me that I've seen events very similar to Occupy Wall Street.
The first time was on the Great Peace March in 1986 which started out from Los Angeles as a hierarchical mega-PR event with 1200 people and tons of equipment. It suddenly and traumatically went bankrupt in the Mojave Desert two weeks later. 800 marchers went home. 400 marchers didn't. It took them (us) two weeks sitting around an BMX track in Barstow to reorganize with no formal leaders (but tons of ambient leadership) and little support (but tons of vulnerability that soon attracted grassroots support). As we re-started our 3000-mile trek with 400 people, it turned into a 9 month miracle of self-organization (I mean, where DO you put 400 people each night 15 or so miles further down the road?!!), out of which came my first experiences of and ideas about collective intelligence, which led to my life work today. The lives of hundreds of other people were transformed by that March, whose emergent troubadours sang “echoes of our care will last forever..”. The folks at Occupy Wall Street are doing a similar experiment in passion-driven self-organization.
The other comparable events I've seen were run by Open Space and World Cafe – especially Open Space.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Dawning Realizations re Occupy Wall Street”
