Category: Communities of Practice

Posted on

Journal: PowerShift–USA Elite Not Interested!

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Threats
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Military Superiority Fading, Analyst Says

‘Pax Americana' yields to Asia

By Tom LoBianco, November 19, 2009 >Pg. 10

Phi Beta Iota: The tragedy of this story is that the military-industrial-congressional complex continues to be in denial about the changing nature of power in the Information Operations (IO) era.  Alvin Toffler first captured the information or soft power aspect of the shift in power with his book Review: Powershift–Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century and then many years later, Revolutionary Wealth (Hardcover). He spoke to OSS '93 about this topic,  see  1993 Alvin Toffler on National Knowledge Power and in the same year, published 1993 Alvin Toffler, “The Future of the Spy” in War & Anti-War in which the concept of the “rival store” of public intelligence was emergent, challenging the monopoly of the secret world on “decision-support.”

Continue reading “Journal: PowerShift–USA Elite Not Interested!”

Posted on

Journal: Librarians and The Accessibility Paradox

Academia, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Methods & Process
Full Source Online
Full Source Online

Fortunately, most librarians have gotten used to the fact that the Internet is a tremendous boon to researchers and that free information is a fantastic idea. Sure, we haven't yet reallocated our organizational resources to recognize this fact—our staff time is much more likely to be devoted to acquiring and messing about with purchased information than in making good information from our archives, our labs, or the web more easily available.  [Emphasis added.]

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.
Barbara Fister

We need to separate our value—the way we curate information, champion its availability in the face of intolerance of unpopular ideas and economic disparity, and create conditions for learning how to find and use good information—from the amount of money it takes to acquire stuff on the not-so-open market. We need to be quite clear that good information is good information, no matter how it's funded. And we need to find creative ways to partner with those who add value to information and find sustainable models for the editorial work that can make good academic work better.

Continue reading “Journal: Librarians and The Accessibility Paradox”

Posted on

Journal: Fake Gold Bars from China to India, Made in the USA–Federal Reserve and Bank of NY Accused–Meanwhile, Prison Planet and Bullion Vault Say No

02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 06 Russia, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Full Story Online
Back-Up Copy Online
Original Online Source
Original Online Source

Phi Beta Iota: We are NOT making this up.  People from around the world are starting to send us this stuff, and we love it–this clearly demonstrates the power of public intelligence in the aggregate, and the importance of multiniational information-sharing and multinational sense-making, the bulk of which is not now and never will be “secret.”  We would not be at all surprised to start seeing Goldman Sachs and Bank of New York executives dying like flies, with former Secretaries of the Treasury and Chairs (and NY Governors) of the Federal Reserve having pride of place on the hit list.  The Russians and Chinese (and soon the Indians) all have a right to take “extreme exception” to the state-sponsored crimes the above document discusses.

Preliminary Rebuttal
Preliminary Rebuttal

The Rumor About London Good Delivery Gold Bars That Are Allegedly Filled with Tungsten

BullionVault says: Accredited custodians only take in bars from other accredited vaults, and metal only enters the system from accredited refiners. Even when they bear the correct bar stamps, large gold bars are not usually accepted from people outside the Good Delivery circuit, which is why taking a Good Delivery bar into private possession seriously dents its value.

Phi Beta Iota: Hubris cannot be discounted, and since the Federal Reserve is part of the Good Delivery Circuit and its integrity has been severely impugned, this issue must join the matter of pre-9-11 gold evacuation from the World Trade Center as requiring further investigation.

Posted on

Worth a Look: WiserEarth Multilingual

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Uncategorized
WiserEarth_logo

Hello!, Hola!, Bonjour!, 你好! (Nǐ Hǎo), Buongiorno!مرحبا (Marhaba), Здравствуйте! (PRIvet), Guten Tag!
안녕하세요 (An nyoung haseh yo),こんにちは (Konnichiwa), שלום

WiserTongues: Help WiserEarth become multilingual!

Why speaking English isn't enough

Did you know that 60% of the WiserEarth Community comes from outside the United States? This is great news as we always wanted WiserEarth to be a global resource for the nonprofit environment and social justice community. However, most of the hundreds of thousands of people coming to the site each month are from English-speaking countries. This means that we are not reaching out enough to the billions of non-English speakers who could use WiserEarth to help them in their nonprofit and sustainability-focused work.

We want to enable members of the worldwide community to use WiserEarth in their own language. Only by doing this can we help to grow the connections among our international community and support their work.

What can you do?

Continue reading “Worth a Look: WiserEarth Multilingual”

Posted on

Journal: United Nations a “Dumb” Elite Organization

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 11 Society, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Key Players, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

UN food summit ends with ‘crumbs' in hunger fight

By FRANCES D'EMILIO (AP) – 1 hour ago

ROME — The head of a U.N. food agency expressed regret Wednesday that an anti-hunger summit failed to result in precise promises of funding, and critics said the meeting had only thrown crumbs to the world's 1 billion people without enough to eat.

Continue reading “Journal: United Nations a “Dumb” Elite Organization”

Posted on

Journal: Material Poverty (AF) vs Moral Poverty (US)

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Key Players, Policies, Reform, Strategy, Threats

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Afghans say poverty, not Taliban, main cause of war

Jonathon Burch – Wed Nov 18

“ Half our people have been driven mad–always in fear.”

KABUL (Reuters) – Most Afghans see not Taliban militants but poverty, unemployment and government corruption as the main causes of war in their country, according to a report by a leading aid group released on Wednesday.

After three decades of war, Afghanistan remains one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. It is also one of the most corrupt. Unemployment stands at 40 percent and more than half the country live below the poverty line.

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Retired military officers cash in as well-paid consultants

WASHINGTON — Six months after Marine Lt. Gen. Gary McKissock retired in 2002, he did what many other ex-military leaders do: He joined the board of directors of a defense contractor, a company doing business with his former service.

McKissock also had a second job. The Marines brought him back as an adviser, at double the rate of pay he made on active duty. Since 2005, the Marines have awarded McKissock contracts worth $1.2 million, in addition to his military pension of about $119,000 a year. McKissock is one of at least 158 retired admirals and generals the Pentagon has hired to offer advice under an unusual arrangement.

Continue reading “Journal: Material Poverty (AF) vs Moral Poverty (US)”

Posted on

Journal: Web War II

Communities of Practice, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Real Time, Threats
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Web 2.0 Expo: O'Reilly Warns Of Web War

Paul McDougall November 17, 2009

Internet visionary fears an end to openness as Internet rivals consolidate power.

The Web, which began life as an open community where information and tools were freely shared across geographic, political, and social boundaries, is in danger of becoming segmented into a federation of closed camps led by a handful of increasingly powerful vendors, said Internet pundit Tim O'Reilly.”We're heading back into an ugly time,” said O'Reilly, during a keynote address Tuesday at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York City.

O'Reilly said efforts by Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Apple, and other tech vendors—as well as publishers like Rupert Murdoch's Dow Jones—to create closed communities around their products and services are jeopardizing the freedom, and the spirit, of the Web.
Continue reading “Journal: Web War II”