The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s (HOT) response to Haiti remains one of the most remarkable examples of what’s possible when volunteers, open source software and open data intersect. When the 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck on January 12th, 2010, the Google Map of downtown Port-au-Prince was simply too incomplete to be used for humanitarian response. Within days, however, several hundred volunteers from the OpenStreetMap (OSM) commu-nity used satellite imagery to trace roads, shelters, and other features to create the most detailed map of Haiti ever created.
Phi Beta Iota: US education, like the rest of government-dominated programs, is totally broken. Apart from the 22% now unemployed, another 22% can expect to be unemployed when the security state collapses and secret intelligence, defense, and homeland security are cut back to a quarter of their current inflated and dysfunctional numbers. An intelligent president with integrity would not leave those people handing–needed is an emergency Public Education program that gives all of those people (44% of the working public) a one year sabattical with structured online and face to face re-training–a PAID year of education funded by the huge cost savings that an intelligent President with integrity can quickly achieve. Howard Rheingold is the gold standard in this arena. Every university across America should be gearing up to offer a massive community-focused 21st Century retraining program.
We’ve just completed our very first trial run of the Standby Task Volunteer Force (SBTF) Satellite Team. As mentioned in this blog post last week, the UN approached us a couple weeks ago to explore whether basic satellite imagery analysis for Somalia could be crowdsourced using a distributed mechanical turk approach. I had actually floated the idea in this blog post during the floods in Pakistan a year earlier. In any case, a colleague at Digital Globe (DG) read my post on Somalia and said: “Lets do it.”
Phi Beta Iota: Act I was 1988-1993. Act II was 1993-2011. Act III began with the publication of NO MORE SECRETS with a Foreword by Senator Gary Hart (D-CO).
Below the line in full (or click on links to originals):
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Johnson is the author of Integrity at Scale, free online, whose many ideas are being integrated into the vision for a Smart Nation Act and the hub of the Smart Nation, an Open Source Agency and global Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) network of networks. He is a party to the on-going push to establish the Open Source Agency and create a more competent and ethical America.
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As I look at the Open Source idea, I find myself experiencing a fair amount of dissonance between a methodological vision of open source intelligence, at one level, and at a very different level, an aspirational vision that sees it as a way of disinfecting a misguided and corrupt set of bureaucracies.
One mission is potentially endorsable by the powers-that-be. The second mission is not. Ask people to endorse both and it isn’t likely that either will move forward. If corruption prevention is to be the mission, the open source agency will have to find a home outside of government. If transparency of intelligence is the mission, then perhaps it can find a home inside government.
My second source of dissonance has to do with design and scale. Open source intelligence is potentially as vast as all the server farms Google will ever own. How does a relatively modest site, squeezed in between State and Watergate, ever acquire the heft to handle the challenge? The scope of the mission and the scope of the agency seem out of sync with the scope of the real estate footprint.
Phi Beta Iota: The idea of an open hardware and open software handset phone will not die. When combined with OpenBTS and open mesh networks, this makes the Autonomous Internet and the resurrection of the five billion poor an immediate possibility.
This is the official home page of the GTA04 project. Its goal is to provice a high quality OMAP3 based motherboard for the Openmoko GTA01 and GTA02 systems. This includes providing a working bootloader and kernel/drivers. A preconfigured Debian image with LXDE is maintained as the basis for developing better GUIs and distributions.
