Design – Page 30 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/08/04

Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Education, Governance, Hardware, Innovation, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Software, Spectrum

Huh?

Overheard in the World Cafe:

Speaker A: My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.

Speaker B: Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations. Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman. And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.

Speaker A: Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.

Speaker B: As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app? Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP”

2013/08/042013/08/04

Jean Lievens: Avaaz from Brazil — Voice of the People

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Brazil’s Vinegar Revolution: Left in Form, Right in Content

Part 4 of 6: Avaaz – Be the Change the Global Elite Want

by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013

In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:

Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.

Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.

Read rest of Part 4.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a political analyst based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, Radio Del Sur and Inn World Report. His blog can be reached at Metrogael. Read other articles by Gearóid.

2013/08/022013/08/02

Jan Lievens: 3D Printing an Aston Martin

Design, Innovation, Manufacturing, Software

3D Printing an Aston Martin

We recently heard about a Solidoodler in Auckland, New Zealand, named Ivan Sentch, who’s building an entire car from scratch with the help of his Solidoodle, 2nd Gen 3D printer. When we saw photos of his project in progress, it was a bit hard to believe that this was his first time using 3D printing or that anyone would undertake something so massive with a desktop 3D printer. Leave it to one of our users to baffle our minds. We’re not sure if it’s insane, brilliant or both, but it’s certainly impressive.

Read rest of article.

2013/08/022013/08/02

Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, Politics

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

Swarm Management: Following a high-profile event, your swarm just tripled in size in a week. You have twenty thousand new activists — new colleagues — that are all waiting for instructions from you, personally. They’re waiting for instructions from you because your name is the only one they know of. There are no MBA classes on how to handle this situation: those people talk about the challenges you encounter when growing by more than 10 percent a year. This is how you handle 200 percent growth in a week.

Swarmwise chapters – one chapter per month
1. Understanding The Swarm
2. Launching Your Swarm
3. Getting Your Swarm Organized: Herding Cats
4. Control The Vision, But Never The Message
5. Keep Everybody’s Eyes On Target, And Paint It Red Daily (this chapter)
6. Screw Democracy, We’re On A Mission From God
7. Surviving Growth Unlike Anything The MBAs Have Seen (this chapter)
8. Using Social Dynamics To Their Potential (Sep 1)
9. Managing Oldmedia (Oct 1)
10. Beyond Success (Nov 1)The whole book is available for purchase from Amazon.

Full text of chapter below the line — this is a world-changing book.

Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: Swarmwise Chapter Seven”

2013/08/012013/08/01

Patrick Meier: 100 Resilient Cities — Data Science and Tactical Resilience

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Data Science for 100 Resilient Cities

The Rockefeller Foundation recently launched a major international initiative called “100 Resilient Cities.” The motivation behind this global project stems from the recognition that cities are facing increasing stresses driven by the unprecedented pace urbanization. More than 75% of people expected to live in cities by 2050. The Foundation is thus rightly concerned: “As natural and man-made shocks and stresses grow in frequency, impact and scale, with the ability to ripple across systems and geographies, cities are largely unprepared to respond to, withstand, and bounce back from disasters” (1).

VIDEO

Resilience is the capacity to self-organize, and smart self-organization requires social capital and robust feedback loops. I’ve discussed these issues and related linkages at lengths in the posts listed below and so shan’t repeat myself here.

How to Create Resilience Through Big Data [link]
On Technology and Building Resilient Societies [link]
Using Social Media to Predict Disaster Resilience [link]
Social Media = Social Capital = Disaster Resilience? [link]
Does Social Capital Drive Disaster Resilience? [link]
Failing Gracefully in Complex Systems: A Note on Resilience [link]

Instead, I want to make a case for community-driven “tactical resilience” aided (not controlled) by data science.

Read full post and watch vidoe (2:49).

2013/08/012013/08/01

Berto Jongman: 3_D Map of the Universe

Design, Earth Intelligence, Extraterrestial Intelligence

3-D Map Of Universe Shows Positions Of Known Galaxies In Unprecedented Detail (VIDEO)

An international team of astronomers and astrophysicists have created a video spotlighting their new 3-D map of the known universe. The map was created from a collection of galaxy redshifts — observations of light emitted from galaxies as they move away from the earth.

“In terms of moving — pardon the pun — pictures, this is by far the best I have seen among numerous motion pictures showing where we are at, literally and figuratively, in the biggest picture of all,” Ian Steer, co-leader of the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database of galaxy Distances, commented on the video on Vimeo.

As seen in the video, the map shows the location of all the visible galaxies in our universe as far away as 340 million light-years.

Read article and see multiple videos.