Crowd-Sourcing – Page 35 – Public Intelligence Blog

Why The Elite Would Lose a Civil War

“Despite the fact that the banking elite wants to generate riots and stir social disorder in order to collapse the U.S. economy so they can buy up real assets on the cheap, if such chaos was to spill over into a full blown civil war, the consequences for the technocrats would be disastrous… In reality, even if a tiny minority of armed Americans chose to resist government oppression – the odds would be stacked hugely in their favor. Consider the fact that there are almost 100 million gun owners in the United States, who in total own over 300 million firearms and rising. There are only around 1.4 million active duty personnel in the entire US military – that includes the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. Even if you include national guard reserves, the total figure is less than 2.3 million. Even if just five per cent of American gun owners actively resisted in a civil war, that would be five million Americans – more than double the entire US military and national guard, many of whom are already engaged overseas. So even if the government used the military to fire upon U.S. citizens, the troops would be easily outnumbered.”

This part of the article reminds one of John Robb's super-empowered global guerilla*:

Continue reading “Owl: Why the Elite Would Lose a Civil War”

2013/02/15

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise – Tactical Manual for Changing the World – Chapter One

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

Swarmwise – The Tactical Manual To Changing The World. Chapter One.

Swarm Management: Somewhere today, a loose-knit group of activists who are having fun is dropkicking a rich, established organization so hard they are making heads spin. Rich and resourceful organizations are used to living by the golden rule – “those with the gold make the rules”. New ways of organizing go beyond just breaking the old rules into downright shredding them – leaving executives in the dust, wondering how that band of poor, rag-tag, disorganized activists could possibly have beaten their rich, well-structured organization.

On June 7, 2009, the Swedish Pirate Party got 225,915 votes in the European Elections, becoming the largest party in the most coveted sub-30 demographic. Our campaign budget was 50,000 euros. Our competitors had spent six million. We had spent less than one per cent of their budget, and still beat them, giving us a cost-efficiency advantage of over two orders of magnitude. This was entirely due to working swarmwise, and the methods can translate to almost any organized large-scale activity. This book is about that secret sauce.

A swarm organization is a decentralized, collaborative effort of volunteers that looks like a hierarchical, traditional organization from the outside. It is built by a small core of people that construct a scaffolding of go-to people, enabling a large number of volunteers to cooperate on a common goal in quantities of people not possible before the net was available.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise – Tactical Manual for Changing the World – Chapter One”

2013/02/072013/02/07

Dolphin: Second Campaign for Transparency Journalism

Crowd-Sourcing, Knowledge

Freedom of the Press Foundation Launches Second Campaign in Support of Transparency Journalism; First Campaign Raises Almost $200,000

Second Campaign Will Support Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Center for Public Integrity, Truthout, and WikiLeaks; Supporters Can Donate to Specific Secrecy-Busting Projects

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

San Francisco, CA – February 4, 2013 – Freedom of the Press Foundation is launching its second fund-raising campaign in support of cutting-edge journalism focused on transparency and accountability, after its first six-week campaign ended on Sunday with over $196,000 in crowd-funded donations.

The second campaign will feature three new investigative journalism organizations—Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Center for Public Integrity, and Truthout. This time around, donors will be able to support specific, secrecy-busting investigative projects that have been tailored for Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism aims to expand its groundbreaking report on secretive US drones strikes with its “naming the dead” project. The Bureau will provide accurate and verifiable evidence identifying as many individuals as possible killed by drones strikes, whether they are militants or civilians. Read more here.
The Center for Public Integrity plans to dig deeper into the secret and convoluted world of U.S. military budgeting and spending—now amounting to half the federal discretionary budget—and provide investigative reports on wasteful weapons systems, the financial relationships between defense contractors and members of Congress, and the explosion of military entitlement spending. Read more here.
Truthout will be sending their lead investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, to Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp over the course of the next year to cover the military commission trials of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. The commissions have been steeped in controversy since their creation, and have since become home to some of the ost excessive and arbitrary secrecy in recent memory. Read more here.

Continue reading “Dolphin: Second Campaign for Transparency Journalism”

2013/01/312013/01/31

Tom Atlee: Wisdom of the Fringes?

Crowd-Sourcing

The wisdom of the fringes?

In the end, I believe that those who call forth the most collective intelligence and wisdom will be those who can manifest – and help others manifest – two vital capacities:

1. the ability to include more of what is normally overlooked and excluded and
2. the ability to use diversity and disturbance creatively.

Obviously, these are not always easy to do. But then, neither is “Love your neighbor as yourself”. However, we all need to exercise these holistic muscles at least a little bit on our shared journey to collective wisdom.

These capacities are important because our world is whole, complex, interconnected, and always changing. It is seriously messy and hard to track. It is all too easy to overlook the many non-obvious, non-trivial factors that will – or could – play a big role in what's going to happen next.

In order to notice as many of these tricky factors as possible, we need to step out of our normal ways of thinking and feeling. That's why I advocate a bias towards inclusion and the ability, once we include some of those tricky borderline cases, to use the resulting diversity and disturbance creatively.

So this is an invitation to welcome into our midst some non-obvious, non-trivial people, puzzles, information, perspectives, and resources that we would rather not have to pay attention to but which – from some loftily objective perspective – we had better take into account if we want to achieve anything remotely like wisdom and transformational innovation. Mainstream business-as-usual – especially limited to our comfort zones – is just not going to cut it.

THE FRINGES

Some practitioners of Open Space have a saying – “Welcome the stranger” – that hints at this. Open Space – like many other nonlinear “emergent processes” (e.g., The World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, Dynamic Facilitation) – has a quirky capacity to productively deal with the resulting diversity and disturbance.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Wisdom of the Fringes?”

2013/01/262013/02/07

SUBSCRIBERS — What You Can Get…

Crowd-Sourcing

Continue reading “SUBSCRIBERS — What You Can Get…”

2013/01/19

Journal of #SOCMINT: Inteligencia Colaborativa: Un Recurso para la Innovación Abierta

Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Knowledge

#SOCMINT Use Google Translate at top of middle column.

Si yo sé algo que tú no sabes sobre lo que tú estás trabajando y tú sabes algo que yo no sé, lo lógico sería colaborar. Pero, si yo te lo cuento existe el riesgo de que tú se lo cuentes a otros, impidiendo o reduciendo el beneficio que yo pudiera obtener por ello, o que revelándote una parte, me des las gracias y completes el resto por tu cuenta. Este es uno de los argumentos que el premio Nobel de Economía de 1972, John Kenneth Arrow, daba para explicar que en la actividad inventiva existe un fallo de mercado y justifica la intervención de los poderes públicos para que no se produzca una escasez de recursos en ella. El modelo de innovación de la “Factoría de Inventos” de Edison, donde todo se cocía internamente, incluso el carácter individualista y la fama de jugador duro atribuidos a éste, responden a un planteamiento cerrado de la innovación, una traducción del dilema presentado por Arrow.

Sin embargo, este planteamiento resulta contradictorio con la naturaleza creativa propia de la innovación. Crear es fundamentalmente asociar, conectar, explorar, cuestionar y relacionarse. Quizá por eso cada día aparecen más innovaciones y nuevas empresas fruto de procesos colaborativos y asociaciones no siempre evidentes, como pueden ser los casos de BMW y Peugeot-Citröen que están desarrollando un nuevo concepto de vehículo híbrido conjuntamente, Lego, que obtiene propuestas de nuevos diseños de sus clientes más acérrimos y finalmente fabrica los que tienen mayor demanda, o ESMT, una escuela de negocios de Berlín fundada por los propios negocios[1].

¿POR QUE NO DEBEMOS RENUNCIAR A LA INNOVACIÓN ABIERTA?

Continue reading “Journal of #SOCMINT: Inteligencia Colaborativa: Un Recurso para la Innovación Abierta”

2013/01/162013/01/16

Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Academia, Commerce, Corruption, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Governance, Government, Knowledge, Law Enforcement, Media

Following up on the excellent post, Mongoose: Moti Nissani on Who Killed Aaron Swartz? it is now clear MIT refuses to cut any kind of deal, and the prosecutor went nuclear on what should have been a matchbook case. Now it emerges that the prosecutor going after Swartz went after another young man involved with computers who also died, allegedly from suicide, as supposedly did Swartz. “Prosecutor Stephen Heymann has been blamed for contributing to Swartz's suicide. Back in 2008, young hacker Jonathan James killed himself in the midst of a federal investigation led by the same prosecutor. James, the first juvenile put into confinement for a federal cybercrime case, was found dead two weeks after the Secret Service raided his house as part of its investigation of the TJX hacker case led by Heymann — the largest personal identity hack in history. He was thought to be “JJ,” the unindicted co-conspirator named in the criminal complaints filed with the US District Court in Massachusetts. In his suicide note, James wrote that he was killing himself in response to the federal investigation and their attempts to tie him to a crime which he did not commit.”

So one scenario is, as mentioned by Nissani, that the government directly killed – by hanging – Swartz. But in light of this newly emergent pattern, perhaps it indicates another scenario equally sinister but more simple: that Heymann mercilessly and severely harasses his victims to death by suicide. No need to send in wet boys (a DOJ slang term for on-the-payroll DOJ killers specifically) to murder someone, just drive them insane or to self-destruction. The outcome is the same as someone putting a bullet in one's head. It's about prosecuting by persecuting. A capsule definition of what comprises much of what is called the US legal system. See this link for more:

Internet Activist's Prosecutor Linked To Another Hacker's Death

It seems like outrage at the official US government persecution-leading-to death of Aaron Swartz is picking up steam. Check out this excellent list of recent links from the Naked Capitalism site:

Berners-Lee Calls Prosecution of Aaron Swartz ‘Travesty’ Bloomberg. Notice how slanted the story is. Calls what he did “hacking” when was not, see here.
How the Legal System Failed Aaron Swartz—And Us New Yorker
TOWARDS LEARNING FROM LOSING AARON SWARTZ Center for Internet and Society
‘Aaron was killed by the government’ – Robert Swartz on his son’s death RT
On humanity, a big failure in Aaron Swartz case Boston Globe. Makes it clear MIT refused to cut a deal. I hope tech donors never give a dime to MIT again.

Continue reading “Owl: Aaron Swartz — Prosecutors as Persecutors — Call to End All Donations to MIT — Burn MIT to the Ground, Metaphorically Speaking”