Category: Worth A Look

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Worth a Look: Books on Government Secrecy

Worth A Look
Berto Jongman Recommends...

Government Secrecy

Susan Maret, Contributing Editor

Emerald Group, January 2011

$164.95 shipping within 2-3 weeks

Government secrecy (GS) is a significant social, political, and policy issue and often presents as a barrier to civic participation, public right-to-know, historical understanding, and institutional accountability. This volume examines GS in a variety of contexts, including comparative examination of government control of information, new definitions, categories, censorship, ethics, and secrecy's relationship with freedom of information and transparency. It investigates GS in terms of its current theoretical descriptions as power over and concealment of information (Bok 1983), a ‘tampering of communications' (Friedrich 1972), the ‘compulsory withholding of knowledge, reinforced by the prospects of sanctions for disclosure' (Shils), or Georg Simmel's (1906) idea of secrecy creating the ‘possibility of a second world'. Following the introduction this book is divided into the following six sections: Government Secrecy: Theoretical Musings; Government Secrecy and the Media; Government Secrecy and Technology; Freedom of Information; Government Secrecy: Current Policy; and Ethics. Articles are sourced from around the world and include some from USA, Mexico, Africa, Israel and Britain.

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Worth a Look: Program on Liberation Technology

Academia, Civil Society, Commerce, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Technologies, Worth A Look

http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu

http://twitter.com/Liberationtech

Lying at the intersection of social science, computer science, and engineering, the Program on Liberation Technology seeks to understand how information technology can be used to defend human rights, improve governance, empower the poor, promote economic development, and pursue a variety of other social goods.

See Also:

Autonomous Internet (36)

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Collective Impact: Alignment & Powerful Results

Gift Intelligence, Worth A Look

Greetings!  I hope this finds you well.  There is a new reality upon us. We all sense it and we each experience it in our own unique way.  We are more connected than ever and are discovering new ways to combine our power that are literally changing the world.  Witness the youth-led, networked revolution started in the Middle East demonstrating the power of collective action.

We don't have to all agree on everything to advance our vision for a just and sustainable world.  We can make this happen by participating in networks that promote the social good.

“Individually we’re a drop; together we’re an ocean.”

What we need are supportive, transparent networks that offer mutually reinforcing activities such as educating, informing, communicating, transacting, and sharing.

I recommend two such networks:

Ideal Network:  Saving is Good; but Saving While Giving is Ideal!

The Ideal Network combines group buying with giving back to local causes.  This social enterprise makes daily deals meaningful and grew out of our work on the Interra Project

For each sale, 25% of the purchase price goes to support local community projects.  Yes 25%!

We launched four weeks ago in Seattle and have already generated more than $4,000 dollars in support of 16 great causes:

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Worth a Look: Cathedral vs. Bazaar (structure-design & public outcomes)

Communities of Practice, Videos/Movies/Documentaries, Worth A Look

The world is assembled along the lines of certain logics.  Human organisations are also outcomes of such logics.

Some organisations are assembled following the logic of the “cathedral”.  Other organisations are assembled following the logic of the “bazaar”.

Cathedrals are organised as military-inspired command hierarchies.  Superior humans give orders, which must be executed by subordinate humans.  Bazaars are self-organising, based on voluntary co-operation among humans.  Like molecules in a chemical reaction, humans join wherever their efforts are needed.

Cathedrals separate consumption from production.  Consumers are not to understand or modify the products they consume.  Bazaars allow humans to be both consumers and producers.  Consumers are encouraged to create new products out of the products they consume.

Cathedrals cannot emerge unless the free spread of knowledge is prohibited.  The underlying knowledge of products or production must be locked, and not released in public.  Bazaars cannot emerge unless the locking in of knowledge is prohibited.  The underlying knowledge of products or production must be kept public.

These two logics have always existed, yet humans have debated them only since the late 1990s.  Computers, specifically software programming, has served as a laboratory for this discussion.

“Cathedrals” and “bazaars” have led humans to interpret their social history in new way.  During the past couple of centuries, cathedrals have expanded, at the expense of bazaars.

However, programmers have proven that the bazaars can be more effective and creative than cathedrals.  Other humans are now exploring how to use this same logic generically, in non-computer contexts.

In the face of such experiments, humans can hope for a 21st century civilisation assembled in novel ways, less dominated by the hierarchies of the past.

See Also:

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