Collaboration Zones – Page 1322 – Public Intelligence Blog

INTERNET-ENABLED ASYMMETRICAL GIVING

A flip side: the asymmetrical gift

Yesterday I bummed you out with a riff about favors becoming impossible to fulfill. Worth a thought: the alternative, the good news that comes with the bad, is the massive asymmetric gift.

A gift is not a favor, because no recompense is implied or expected. A gift is just from me to you, that’s it.

The internet makes it easy to give gifts to large numbers of people at very very low cost. Editing a wikipedia article, for example, is a gift for the ages, one that might be seen by a million people over three years.

This leads to a new clause in the social contract. In this environment, we expect that civilized participants will give. Just because. Because they can. Because the gift makes all of it work better.

While mass favors have to fade (too easy to ask for, too unfair at scale), mass gifts show up to change the equation. Gifts are easy to scale, now, the more generous, the better. For all of us.

Below the Line: Asymmetrical Mass Favor Asking, the Bad

Continue reading “Asymmetrical Giving, Social Contracts, & the Internet”

2011/02/202011/02/20

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Phi Beta Iota: With a tip of the hat to Rolling Stone and author Matt Taibbi, reproducing the entire article was the only way to show the emphasis added by Brother Chuck. Updated to add photo and observe that this particular article is rocketing around the Internet. See also our review of GRIFTOPIA.

UPDATE: Three comments from Facebook:

Robert Smith Socrates became disheartened. Machiavelli was on to something – power corrupts. I suspect that a true and totally transparent democracy of ideas and information are requisite groundwork for an enduring democracy.
Robert David Steele Vivas Transparency, truth, and trust. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both understood, Will Durant says it best (see my review of his Philosophy and the Social Problem)
Lynn Wheeler In the late 90s, got asked by NSCC (before they merged with DTC) to look at improving integrity of trading transactions (in part because had recently done something similar for payment transactions) … after putting some amount of work int…it was suspended. The comment was that a side-effect of improving the integrity would have also greatly increased transparency and visibility (which apparently is antithetical to trading culture … some x-over with recent RS article focusing on secrecy as a fraud-enabler).

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, 16 February 2011

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That's right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

Entire Piece with Emphasis from Chuck Spinney Below the Line

Continue reading “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP”

2011/02/192011/02/19

Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources

03 Economy, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence

Dear friends,

Recently I've seen a swirl of information (mostly on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv) about participatory budgeting. Below, you'll find a sampling of this info, in relatively raw form. I do not know enough to sort it all out, but it looks really fascinating.

Most of this material is about online public budgeting exercises, but some of it also describes the kind of face-to-face, seriously empowered mass-participatory civic budgeting processes developed in Brazil which have spread widely in the last decade or so.

I had no idea there was so much activity in this arena. Given

(a) the attention currently focused on the budget crisis,

(b) the dire impact of that crisis at all levels of government in so many places,

Continue reading “Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources”

2011/02/192011/02/21

MIRROR: How to Communicate & Restore Collective Power if the US Government Shuts Down the Internet

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Mobile, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Real Time, Strategy, Technologies, Tools

HOW TO COMMUNICATE IF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT SHUTS DOWN THE INTERNET

02-07-2011 8:48 pm – Wallace

Liberty News Online

Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.

This is what happened in Egypt Jan. 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.

———————

PREVENTIVE MEASURES:

Continue reading “MIRROR: How to Communicate & Restore Collective Power if the US Government Shuts Down the Internet”

2011/02/192011/04/11

Reference: Wireless Mesh Internet–A List

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Mobile, Real Time, Technologies, Tools

16+ Projects & Initiatives Building Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networks

For those interested in alternative internet infrastructures, I’ve been assembling a list of projects and initiatives working to build mesh network solutions, as well as communities and resources around this topic. I’ve also posted this on Quora. Please feel free to add any projects I’ve missed. We’re hoping to understand the landscape of this initiative and how these projects & communities can better coordinate their efforts, in preparation for the Contact Conference in NYC this October 20, 2011.

Projects:

– Open Mesh Project – building a mesh network for Egypt
– Open Source Mesh – group looking at how to build a reliable open source meshing software
– B.A.T.M.A.N. – better approach to mobile ad-hoc networking; routing protocol for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks
– Roofnet – 802.11b/g mesh network in development at MIT CSAIL
– GNUnet – framework for secure p2p networking that doesn not use any centralized or otherwise trusted services
– Dot-P2P – a free, decentralized, and open DNS system
– SMesh – seamless wireless mesh network being developed at John Hopkins University
– Coova – open source software access controller for captive portal (UAM) and 802.1X access provisioning
– Babel – a loop-free distance-vector routing protocol for IPv6 & IPv4
– SolarMESH – solar powered IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN mesh network and relaying infrastructure solution
– WING – wireless mesh network for next-generation internet; partially built on Roofnet
– Daihinia – a tool for WiFi; turns a simple ad-hoc network into a multi-hop ad-hoc network
– P2P DNS – building a distributed p2p DNS system
– Digitata.org – develop an inexpensive infrastructure (low bandwidth internet terminals) for basic internet exposure to children in African countries
– Netsukuku – an ad-hoc netowork that uses only WiFi connectivity and a specifically-built adddress system that allows direct communications between machines without resorting to the HTTP protocol
– Tonika – open source organic network project; administration-free platlform for large-scale open-membership (social) networks with robust security, anonymity, resilience and performance guarantees

See more links (communities, resources)….

2011/02/182011/10/22

Donald Trump: Making Sense

11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Reform

Donald Trump says he might run for president. Three reasons he won't. (CSM)

Donald Trump considers running for President (Helium)

Fox News Poll: Trump for President? (Fox)

What's He Really Worth? (NYT 2005)

Images of Donald Trump (Google)

Structured Web Hits

Draft Trump for 2012 (Offers sign-in for petition)

Phi Beta Iota: If Trump runs on a pledge of Electoral Reform, announces a Coalition Cabinet prior to 1 September, challenges all other candidates to do the same, and then holds a balanced budget bake-off, he wins as an Independent. This is the one person we have seen who is credible and not a piss-ant wrapped up in No Labels and other similarly fraudulent schemes.

2011/02/182011/02/21

Hillary Clinton: Torn Between Dictators & Rhetoric

02 Diplomacy, 07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Mobile

clinton tech — What's Wrong with This Picture?

UPDATED: Robert Smith comment at Facebook:

“WHAT? Dictators $10 billion, Democracy lovers $25 million, hypocrisy priceless.”

Phi Beta Iota: It is actually much worse than that. Our estimate of the cost of US being best pals with 42 of 44 dictators is closer to 500 billion, and that is a very conservative estimate. The cost is roughly divided between US taxpayer money being given away for the wrong reasons, and the “true cost” to the world–and ultimately to the USA–of an unethical, uninformed, unstrategic foreign policy that is in no way, shape, or form focused on creating a prosperous world at peace. Not to be naive, we realize that we have a government Of, By, and For the Banks and their Corporations. That is what needs to change, non-violently, on the basis of Internet Freedom and Freedom through the Internet. In passing, we are not amused when people steal our ideas and offer to help the US Government do for $3 million what we are doing for free. Three Internet Freedom URLs with links below the line.

Clinton Pledges $25 Million for Net Freedom Fighters

Spencer Ackerman

WIRED February 15, 2011

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed on Tuesday to invest $25 million for developers to build tools that will let online dissidents get around “thugs, hackers and censors.” It’s her attempt at giving teeth to the so-called “Internet Freedom Agenda” that she unveiled last year.

Read rest of the report….

Continue reading “Hillary Clinton: Torn Between Dictators & Rhetoric”