Category: Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices

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Votetocracy (vote on bills)

04 Education, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Open Government, Reform, Technologies, Tools
homepage

http://www.votetocracy.com

Votetocracy is a place where every citizen can see every bill currently in congress, vote on those bills and send those votes to thier representatives. The site has been created by three regular citizens that felt it was time to get engaged with American politics. During our efforts to become more educated about our government we discovered that it was not all that easy. We found plenty of information. But it is written in difficult to understand political speak. We also found that it was not particularly easy to act on this information. When we found bills on government websites we had no measurable way to act on it. Sure, you could write a letter or contact our representatives, but had no real way of knowing that it would actually accomplish anything. These things felt like barriers. It was then that we dicided that there had to be a better way and Votetocracy is the the result of our efforts.

The site has the features neccesary for any citizen to find out what congress is working on. More importantly however is the ability to act on that information. We have created the site so that citizens can vote on the same bills as congress, send their vote to thier representatives with the click of the button.

We felt that there are three major areas that we could help citizens.

  1. Access to information
  2. Education about that information
  3. And to provide the ability to act on that information and measure the results

Related:
+ Public Markup
+ Whitehouse 2 (ended Dec. 2010)
+ Open Congress
+ Open Secrets
+ Sunlight Foundation
+ Sunlight Labs

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FuturICT Living Earth Simulator; EarthGame / Whole Earth Strategic Analytic Model

04 Education, Augmented Reality, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, Gift Intelligence, History, info-graphics/data-visualization, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Open Government, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Technologies, Tools, True Cost
go to the website

Today, we know more about the universe than about our society. It's time to use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth and discover options for a sustainable future. Together, we can manage the challenges of the 21st century, combining the best of all knowledge.

The FuturICT Knowledge Accelerator is a previously unseen multidisciplinary international scientific endeavour with focus on techno-socio-economic-environmental systems. The three main achievements of the FuturICT flagship will be the establishment of

  1. a Living Earth Simulator (global-scale simulation of techno-socio-economic systems),
  2. Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, scarcity of resources, emerging risks and conflicts, epidemics, etc.), and
  3. an Innovation Accelerator (identifying innovations early on, evaluating them across disciplines and supporting co-creation projects between different scientific disciplines, business, and governance).

Comment: This is not a new idea but has expanded to a great extent. The 2004/2005 proposal “Re-configuring the Global Organisms' Operating System Through Mobile Democracy” mentions a whole earth simulation of knowledge layers + mobile connectivity to access & add to systems so that more people are involved in the shaping of our world. The Earth Intelligence Network in connection with Medard Gabel has been advocating an EarthGame + a strategic analytic model to jump-start a prosperous world @peace.

Below was posted at the Games for Change forum on the subject:

Continue reading “FuturICT Living Earth Simulator; EarthGame / Whole Earth Strategic Analytic Model”

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Reference: Network Neutrality…Why Not…+ RECAP

Advanced Cyber/IO, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Internet, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), International Aid, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Mobile, Open Government, Policies, Real Time, Reform, Standards, Strategy, Threats
Jon Lebkowsky Bio

A note about “network neutrality”

by jonl on January 10, 2011

This is something I posted in the “state of the world” conversation with Bruce Sterling on the WELL…

I give talks on the history and future of media, and on the history, evolution, and history of the Internet. I gave the talk this week to a small group gathered for lunch in a coworking space here in Austin, and after hearing the talk a technologist I know, Gray Abbott, suggested that I say more about the coming balkanization of the network as the most likely scenario. The Internet is a network of networks that depends on cooperative peering agreements – I carry your traffic and you carry mine. The high speed Internet is increasingly dependent on the networks of big providers, the telcos or cable companies like AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Time Warner, and Comcast. They all see the substantial value supported by their networks and want to extract more of it for themselves. They talk about the high cost of bandwidth as a rationale for charging more for services – or metering services – but I think the real issue is value. When you see Google and Facebook and Netflix making bundles of money using your pipes, you want a cut. And if you’ve also tried to get into the business of providing content, it’s bothersome to see your network carrying other competing content services, including guerilla media distribution via BitTorrent.

Continue reading “Reference: Network Neutrality…Why Not…+ RECAP”

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Weak Signals: Reality Sandwich Business Shamanism

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence

Business Shamanism

Daniel Pinchbeck

Using the tools of corporations to reprogram global society and distribute a new cultural operating system

Image by fdcomite, courtesy of Creative Commons license.

Now that the Evolver network and brand have established themselves to a certain extent, I want to look ahead to developments I hope to see in the near future, with this organization and other initiatives. For the next phase of development, I propose the term “business shamanism.” “Corporate alchemy” would be a viable alternative.

. . . . . . . .

We tend to forget that Roosevelt's New Deal was not a good-hearted gift to the working classes but a compromise to stave off mass uprising. The current oligarchy has determined that it will make no such deal this time around. I suspect they assume that the pulverizing of the populace with mind-numbing media, psychotropic drugs, police state tactics, and poison food had the desired effect. And they may be right.

. . . . . . . .

Phi Beta Iota: Below the line are excerpts.  Click on the title to read the entire rant.  The author is educated and thoughtful, his rant is provoking and worth studying.

Continue reading “Weak Signals: Reality Sandwich Business Shamanism”

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Trusted Bodyguard Executes Governor in Pakistan for Being a Blasphemer–Observations on Meaning for Church & State

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, History, InfoOps (IO), Key Players, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy

Pakistan: An elite police commando from the provincial police force who was assigned as a bodyguard for the governor of Punjab Province murdered the governor today in Islamabad. The commando dropped his weapon and surrendered to the police, bragging that he was proud he killed a blasphemer. With that, Pakistan's political crisis deepened.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: Trusted Bodyguard Executes Governor in Pakistan for Being a Blasphemer–Observations on Meaning for Church & State”

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Worth a Look: LibraryThing Online Public Library & Social Network

About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Augmented Reality, Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Geospatial, History, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Policies, Policy, Strategy, Threats, Tools
Home Page

Check it out

What’s Good?

  • Join the world’s largest book club.
  • Catalog your books from Amazon, the Library of Congress and 690 other world libraries. Import from anywhere.
  • Find people with eerily similar tastes.
  • Find new books to read.
  • Free Early Reviewer books from publishers and authors
  • Enter 200 books for free, as many as you like for $10 (year) or $25 (life).
  • Available in many languages: (others)

Phi Beta Iota: This is fascinating and has enormous potential from local to global.  It is what Amazon SHOULD have been, a means of harnessing the distributed intelligence of authors, reviewers, and readers.  Phi Beta Iota was created to meet this need for one collection, cataloging Robert Steele's reading across 98 categories.  We are contacting this group to suggest they create Global to Local Citizen Intelligence, Policy, and Budget Councils.

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Journal: From WikiLeaks to OpenLeaks–and Local News

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Open Government, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Tools

Micah L. Sifry | December 17, 2010 – 4:01pm

Back in 2009, Daniel Domscheit-Berg applied to the Knight News Challenge in the name of Wikileaks for $532,000 to fund a project to “improve the reach, use and impact of a platform that allows whistle-blowers and journalists to anonymously post source material.” At the time Domscheit-Berg was known to the world by the pseudonym “Daniel Schmitt” and made frequent appearances on behalf of Wikileaks alongside its editor-in-chief Julian Assange (including at the October 2009 Personal Democracy Forum Europe conference in Barcelona). Now, as is widely known, he and Assange have parted ways and Domscheit-Berg is part of a group organizing the launch of OpenLeaks.org, which is being described as more of a technological service provider to media organizations than as a central hub for leaks, and which is promising to roll out a detailed description of its organization and plans in January 2011.

It's illuminating to compare the 2009 Wikileaks News Challenge proposal–which made it to the final round of the prestigious program but was ultimately rejected by the Knight News Challenge judges–to Domscheit-Berg & Co's current plans for OpenLeaks. Obviously, until OpenLeaks starts functioning, we are comparing two different versions of “vaporware,” but in the same way that Wikileaks itself has evolved over the last year, I think you can see a parallel evolution how Domscheit-Berg and the others in his group are thinking about how best to expand the open information model as well.

Read fascinating article and entirety of the original WikiLeaks proposal….