Category: Collaboration Zones

Posted on

John Robb: 3D Printing of Weapons – Public Power by Printer

10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Hacking, Hardware, Liberation Technology
John Robb

Printing Weapons at Home for Fun and Mayhem

It's now possible to print functional weapons at home.  This is going to progress rapidly now.

Think: global file sharing of designs for servicable weapons, from pistols on up to ?, that can be printed at home.  What you can print — from the materials to the size/quality of the object to the completeness (snap together construction) — is already moving forward quickly.  The weapons effort will just be along for the ride.

Click on Image to Enlarge

“HaveBlue” has tested the first “printed” firearm and it works.  Here's his site, but it's VERY slow.   It didn't blow up in his face.

Granted, he used an older professional grade Stratys 3D printer to do it.   Printeres are much better now and handle many new materials.

Haveblue has been testing the “market” for distributing CAD/CAM weapons designs.  His post of an earlier design to Thingverse (a site for 3D printing design patterns) led to a change in their policy (although it hasn't been enforced).

Click on Image to Enlarge

Haveblue's work is based on the Solidworks files available for download from the CNCguns site.  Here's his earlier project:

Phi Beta Iota:  Violence should be a last resort — publics today are far from fully exploiting the use of public intelligence in the  public interest.  However, it bears mention that both Gandhi and Martin Luther King were quite clear:  non-violence is preferable to violence, but violence is preferable to continued oppression.  Most governments, including the European governments still favoring banks over people and refusing to honor the Iceland model, no longer represent their publics and have lost all legitimacy in the eyes of many.  We pray they will awaken to the reality that those governments that do not empower, protect, and respect the public, will ultimately be abolished.  In the meantime, they are merely ignored.

Posted on

Tom Atlee: Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy”

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Tom Atlee

Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy”

Below are highlights from Jane Mansbridge's IN CONTEXT article “Unitary & Adversary: The Two Forms of Democracy”, which was itself an excerpt from her book BEYOND ADVERSARY DEMOCRACY (1983) which has had a significant impact on my thinking.

I often use Mansbridge's distinction between (1) “unitary democracy” based on consensus arising from conversations about common interests shared by people who know each other and (2) “adversary democracy” based on majority votes among competing interest groups who may think they have little reason to take each other seriously.

Mansbridge clearly believes that adversary democracy must necessarily predominate in large complex societies where people don't know each other. However, she also believes its toxic effects should be ameliorated by the practice of unitary democracy at local levels and in official governing bodies, as well as through more cooperative forms of economics.

I think the landscape of democratic possibilities she was observing in the 1960s and 70s has been transformed by modern social technologies – conflict resolution, group process, organizational development, networked communications, journalism, multi-media storytelling and, especially, social microcosm design. These technologies are making it possible to bring unitary democracy to more issues and greater scales than ever before.

When I say “social microcosm design”, I'm referring to our ability to select groups of 10-1000 people whose diversity accurately reflects the diversity of a whole population or community. We are increasingly able to convene such “fair cross-section minipublics” in face-to-face conversation. Once we do that, we can apply powerful group processes – advanced forms of dialogue, deliberation, choice creating, etc. – to this smaller group in ways that evoke, reflect and activate the highest collective intelligence and wisdom of the population from which they were drawn.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Expanding our capacity for “unitary democracy””

Posted on

Patrick Meier: Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change

Advanced Cyber/IO, Cultural Intelligence, Geospatial, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier

Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change

The purpose of PeaceTXT is to use mobile messaging (SMS) to catalyze behavior change vis-a-vis peace and conflict issues for the purposes of violence prevention. You can read more about our pilot project in Kenya here. We’re hoping to go live next month with some initial trials. In the meantime, we’ve been busy doing research to develop an appropriate monitoring and evaluation strategy. As is often the case in this new innovative initiatives, we have to look to other fields for insights, which is why my colleague Peter van der Windt recently shared this peer-reviewed study entitled: “Mobile Phone Technologies Improve Adherence to Antiretroviral Treatment in a Resource-Limited Setting: A Randomized Con-trolled Trial of Text Message Reminders.”

Full post below the line.  Original source.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Evaluating the Impact of SMS on Behavior Change”

Posted on

Patrick Meier: Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Geospatial, Knowledge
Patrick Meier

Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge

I have been writing and blogging about “information forensics” for a while now and thus relished Nieman Report’s must-read study on “Truth in the Age of Social Media.” My applied research has specifically been on the use of social media to support humanitarian crisis response (see the multiple links at the end of this blog post). More specifically, my focus has been on crowdsourcing and automating ways to quantify veracity in the social media space. One of the Research & Development projects I am spearheading at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) specifically focuses on this hybrid approach. I plan to blog about this research in the near future but for now wanted to share some of the gems in this superb 72-page Nieman Report.

In the opening piece of the report, Craig Silverman writes that “never before in the history of journalism—or society—have more people and organizations been engaged in fact checking and verification. Never has it been so easy to expose an error, check a fact, crowdsource and bring technology to bear in service of verification.” While social media is new, traditional journalistic skills and values are still highly relevant to verification challenges in the social media space. In fact, some argue that “the business of verifying and debunking content from the public relies far more on journalistic hunches than snazzy technology.”

I disagree. This is not an either/or challenge. Social computing can help every-one, not just journalists, develop and test hunches. Indeed, it is imperative that these tools be in the reach of the general public since a “public with the ability to spot a hoax website, verify a tweet, detect a faked photo, and evaluate sources of information is a more informed public. A public more resistant to untruths and so-called rumor bombs.” This public resistance to untruths can itself be moni-tored and modeled to quantify veracity, as this study shows.

Full post less two graphics below the line.  Original post.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Truth in the Age of Social Media: A Social Computing and Big Data Challenge”

Posted on

Search: future of osint

#OSE Open Source Everything, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Future-Oriented, Hacking, Information Operations (IO), Key Players, Liberation Technology, Mobile, Policies, Threats

For reasons unknown to us, Google search with source=phibetaiota are superior to internal Word Press searches.

Here are top three hits using the above formula.

Search: The Future of OSINT [is M4IS2-Multinational]

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

OSINT Generic (Category Table at Phi Beta Iota)

OSINT is passe.  Governments and vendors to government have wasted 20 years and perhaps 25 billion dollars in that time.   The refusal to focus on machine-speed translation and inserting geospatial attributes at all points of collection across all collection disciplines, while also refusing to accept multinational human sources unemcumbered by the idiocy of the clearance bureaucracy, have left governments in the stone age.  The next big leap is going to be M4IS2 that routes around governments or — if governments reconnect to their integrity — embraces governments as beneficiaries of M4IS2 (they will never be the benefactors, but one Smart Nation could transform everything overnight).  The biggest change in our own thinking has been the realization that education, intelligence, and research must be reinvented together, and that Open Source Everything is the only agile, acalable, shareable, and affordable means of achieving the necessary pervasive transformations.

See Also:

Continue reading “Search: future of osint”

Posted on

Reflections on Data as the New Oil BUT No One Is Serious About Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, Machine or Man-Machine Translation, or M4IS2

All Reflections & Story Boards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Information Operations (IO), Knowledge
Robert David STEELE Vivas

It is fashionable now to talk about data as the new oil (or dirt), and to proclaim breathlessly that the ever-increasing masses of data allow for ever more wonderous things to be done including my personal favorite, situational awareness.

However, no one is yet serious about holistic analytics (which also implies a holistic collection management strategy and a clear definition of both what is to be collected and what is to be done with anomalous data encountered in passing).  Neither is anyone serious about True Cost Economics, Man-Machine Translation, Global Near-Real-Time Crowd-Sourcing (for observations, translations, and culturally-grounded  interpretations) or M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).

I cannot help but recall my briefing to the National Research Council in 1994, when I was asked to comment on the US Army's multi-billion dollar communications plan for the future.  I pointed out the obvious: the US Army was assuming that all data would be generated from within the US Army or other US Government systems, and was making no provision for ingesting and digesting data from the 99% of the data sources outside the US Army.  Of course they blew me off then, and they still do not get it today, 22 years later.

Continue reading “Reflections on Data as the New Oil BUT No One Is Serious About Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, Machine or Man-Machine Translation, or M4IS2”

Posted on

Michel Bauwens: Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, P2P / Panarchy
Michel Bauwens

Collective Presencing: A New Human Capacity

This is the first in a series of articles introducing the phenomenon and practice of Collective Presencing, a new capacity evolving in humanity at this time. Great thinkers have foreseen its coming—we recognise it in Aurobindo’s descent of the supramental and Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. But what exactly do those terms mean? Where these gifted individuals intuited and envisioned the birth of this new collective capacity at the dawn of the last century, we are now starting to be able to describe it from experience.

Click on Image to Enlarge

While many might recognise the phenomenon from transpersonal group work and other such practices, so far as we are aware, this is the first attempt to articulate it as a path and a set of capacities that can be intentionally developed…

this is one of the best and finest descriptions I have read in a long time. Thanks Helen…AC

Via Anne Caspari

noble gold