Journal: Crowd Fund-Raising Here to Stay….
03 Economy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commercial IntelligenceCrowd-Fundraising For Causes Adds Up Fast
Phi Beta Iota: Excellent story, with $200,641 being the top funded project so far. Imagine the day when the public refuses to pay taxes but contributes to what it really wants, cutting out the carpet-bagging intermediaries. Missile defense and most Pentagon pork would NOT get funded by an informed engaged public. The game has changed.
Online:
http://spot.us (reporting)
http://pledgie.com
Reference: Innovation From, By, and For Africa
08 Wild Cards, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, IO Mapping, IO Sense-Making, Methods & Process, Mobile, Policies, Reform
Jerri Chou
Co-Founder All Day Buffet, The Feast, TBD and Lovely Day
Posted: December 10, 2010 12:39 PM
Innovation From, By and For Africa
Collaboration is never easy, particularly when dealing with complex issues like development. So imagine an attempt at galvanizing an entire continent to collaborate for societal change and innovation and the task seems daunting, difficult, if not impossible. Well turns out it's always worth trying and that the results can be greatly inspiring.
I'm talking about The Open Innovation Africa Summit (OIAS) I recently attended, hosted by Nokia, The World Bank and Cap Gemini. Over the course of three days, 200-plus leaders and innovators convened in the Rift Valley of Kenya, Africa to share, connect, and take action toward fostering innovation in and from Africa.
. . . . . . .
Facilitated by Cap Gemini's exploratory process, this remarkable body of people broke out into working groups to focus and dive deep into four specific areas:
- African Innovation Ecosystem
- Emerging Business Models for the BoP
- Human Capital — Education for All
- Mobile Information Society.
Worth a Look: Macrowikinomics Hyper-Transparency
Worth A Look
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
Posted: December 10, 2010 11:08 AM
Macrowikinomics: Thriving in the Age of Hyper-Transparency
This article is the fifth installment in series to be written by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, authors of the newly released book Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike calls it “A masterpiece. An iconic and defining book for our times.” The Economist says it's a Schumpeterian story of creative Destruction.”
The book argues that many of the institutions of the industrial age have finally come to the end of their lifecycle, and are now being reinvented around a new set of principles and a networked model.
Today's blog looks this new age of WikiLeaks and hyper-transparency
****
The arrest of Julian Assange doesn't change the new reality faced by governments and corporations that have always craved secrecy. Even if Assange is put behind bars for an extended period, others will be happy to take his place. Think of the whack-a-mole game at the arcade. Hit one on the head and another will pop up.
The WikiLeaks episode is just a hint of the world to come. We are entering an era of hyper-transparency. Courtesy of the Internet, people everywhere have at their fingertips the most powerful tool ever for finding out what's really going and informing others. They are gaining unprecedented access to all sorts of information about governments, corporations and other organizations in society.
Read rest of the posting that summarizes the reality and the value of hyper-transparency.
Reference (2): Income Inequality in the USA
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government
It is becoming increasingly clear that the United States passed through some kind of fork in the economic road in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and has now landed on onto an evolutionary pathway toward some kind of decline. The questions of what interplay of chance and necessity created the turning movement in the pathway of socio-economic evolution, how enduring that new pathway is, or where it is leading no one can answer; but with the advantage of hindsight, it is becoming empirically clear that most of the adverse economic trends of de-industrialization, deregulation, increasing debt, a collapsing trade balance, the stagnation of real wages, rising income inequality, etc., took a systemic turn for the worse during the five years between 1977 and 1982.
Attached are two reports (in pdf format) on one aspect of anatomy of decline: rising income inequality. They build on the seminal research (which can be downloaded here and here) of Professors Emanuel Saez's (Univ. of Calif. Berkeley) and Thomas Piketty (Paris School of Economics), which quantified and analyzed the size, nature, and effects of rising income inequality in the United States.
The first report has been prepared by the democratic majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress and therefore may be discounted by some as partisan — to those readers inclined to dismiss this report, I suggest that they compare its results of the Saez-Piketty analyses before jumping to any conclusions.
The second report is a non partisan analysis produced by Frank Levy and Peter Temlin of Industrial Performance Center of MIT.
Reference A: The Senate Report (2010)
Reference B: The MIT Report (2007)
See Also:
Journal: Financial Crime versus Financial Sense
Journal: Simpson-Bowles Deficit Reduction All Lies?
Journal: Rug Mechants & Tax Traps
Reference: Wall Street Does NOT Produce Value
Journal: Deficit Reduction Plan Hoses Everyone BUT the 10% at the Top
Journal: Deradicalizing Islamist Extremists, Internal Al Qaeda Critiques
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, IO Mapping
Deradicalizing Islamist Extremists
by Angel Rabasa, Stacie Pettyjohn, Jeremy Ghez, Christopher Boucek
RAND Monograph 2010 242 Pages Free Online or $26
Proactive measures to prevent vulnerable individuals from radicalizing and to rehabilitate those who have already embraced extremism have been implemented, to varying degrees, in several Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian, and European countries. A key question is whether the objective of these programs should be disengagement (a change in behavior) or deradicalization (a change in beliefs) of militants. Furthermore, a unique challenge posed by militant Islamist groups is that their ideology is rooted in a major world religion. An examination of deradicalization and counter-radicalization programs in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Europe assessed the strengths and weaknesses of each program, finding that the best-designed programs leverage local cultural patterns to achieve their objectives. Such programs cannot simply be transplanted from one country to another. They need to develop organically in a specific country and culture.
Broadside fired at al-Qaeda leaders
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
Asia Times, 10 December 2010
ISLAMABAD – A number of senior al-Qaeda members who had earlier opposed the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and some of whom were recently released from detention in Iran, have produced an electronic book critical of al-Qaeda's leadership vision and strategy.
The book, the first of its kind to publicly show collective dissent within al-Qaeda, was released last month. It urges the self-acclaimed global Muslim resistance against Western hegemony to open itself to the Muslim intelligentsia for advice and to harmonize its strategy with mainstream Islamic movements.
Journal: Michael Lind–Nobody Represents the American People
Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Policies
Topic:
Populism
Nobody represents the American people
By Michael Lind
Many Americans have come to the conclusion that nobody represents them in Washington anymore. They are right.
This situation is not the result of a sinister conspiracy by a single, unitary, all-powerful and diabolical elite. The origins of the disconnect are structural. The mass membership organizations that once represented ordinary Americans at the state and national level have been replaced by elite organizations that raise their money from a small number of billionaires rather than hundreds of thousands or millions of dues-paying members.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the first time we have seen this important idea presented so plainly. GroupOn might yet help solve the problem. What is clear is that the Internet has spawned the fragmentation of groups even further, without offering something like GroupOn that could bring them all back together issue by issue–this was the reason Earth Intelligence Network was created, to be a proponent for a World Brain and EarthGame that could connect all people with all relevant information, and in this way enable informed participatory democracy across multiple boundaries–Panarchy, the opposite of Anarchy. Electoral Reform is an important first step, but as the full article suggests, the public desperately needs some vehicle for representing all of the people all of the time.
