Jean Lievens: Open Co-Operativism

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Politics
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Toward an Open Co-Operativism

Pat Conaty and David Bollier, Commons Transition

“The power of open source principles, now proven beyond a doubt, is rapidly proliferating into many other areas of culture, production and social life.  The prospect of more participatory, socially convivial forms of production – accountable to communities and mindful of the larger common good – has never seemed more achievable.  Still, there are important organizational, legal and financial hurdles to overcome – not to mention cultural and political differences – that must be dealt with if co-operatives are to find common ground with digital commoners and peer producers.  Fortunately, there are emerging models such as multi-stakeholder cooperatives that could be vehicles for such cooperation.” Read full paper.

Antechinus: 50 Cent Folding Microscope

Innovation, Manufacturing
Antechinus
Antechinus

A 50-cent microscope that folds like origami

Perhaps you’ve punched out a paper doll or folded an origami swan? TED Fellow Manu Prakash and his team have created a microscope made of paper that's just as easy to fold and use. A sparkling demo that shows how this invention could revolutionize healthcare in developing countries … and turn almost anything into a fun, hands-on science experiment.

Tom Atlee: Open Space

Access, Governance, Innovation
Tom Atlee
Tom Atlee

What do we, as members of the dialogue and deliberation community of practice, have to be and do to enable our most positive transformational impact in the face of emerging global crises which fundamentally challenge our business-as-usual habits and systems?

We are now “opening space” for virtual Open Space sessions on the question of how we in the “D&D” community can better contribute to needed societal transformations.

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Global Ecovillage Network Updates

Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience

logo ecovillageGEN International Newsletter January 2015

Ecovillage Transition Strategies for Whole Systems Change

GEN has grown and evolved over the years. From more isolated ‘islands in the green’, ecovillages have transformed into highly vibrant and interconnected hubs and inspiring living and learning centers for high quality, low impact lifestyles. More and more, politicians are starting to appreciate the impact ecovillages have on their regions. More and more, ecovillages are recognised as participatory, community-based responses to our realities, e.g. climate change, loss of bio diversity or lack of social cohesion. Read PDF Newsletter.

Advance Order (15 Jan 15): Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response

Advanced Cyber/IO, Crowd-Sourcing, Drones & UAVs, Geospatial, Governance, Innovation, Liberation Technology, Resilience, United Nations & NGOs, Worth A Look
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

This book shows us once again why Patrick Meier is a thought leader in leveraging emerging technologies for social impact. His book captures the enormous possibilities and avoidable pitfalls of big data, social media and artificial intelligence in crisis contexts. Digital humanitarians can be powerful agents for social change but ground-truthing what we see and hear digitally is more important than ever.
—Aleem Walji, Chief Innovation Advisor, Leadership, Learning, and Innovation, World Bank Group

Phi Beta Iota: The book title and description from the publisher are misleading.  This is not a book about Big Data. It is a book about distributed human networks using open source information technologies to achieve situational awareness with a speed and precision that the entire US secret intelligence community (which costs $100 billion a year) cannot match.

See Also:

Patrick Meier @ Phi Beta Iota

Patrick Meier: MicroMappers – Toward Next Generation Humanitarian Technology

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Innovation
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

MicroMappers: Towards Next Generation Humanitarian Technology

The MicroMappers platform has come a long way and still has a ways to go. Our vision for MicroMappers is simple: combine human computing (smart crowd-sourcing) with machine computing (artificial intelligence) to filter, fuse and map a variety of different data types such as text, photo, video and satellite/aerial imagery. To do this, we have created a collection of “Clickers” for MicroMappers. Clickers are simply web-based crowdsourcing apps used to make sense of “Big Data”. The “Text Cicker” is used to filter tweets & SMS’s; “Photo Clicker” to filter photos; “Video Clicker” to filter videos and yes the Satellite & Aerial Clickers to filter both satellite and aerial imagery. These are the “Data Clickers”. We also have a collection of “Geo Clickers” that digital volunteers use to geo-tag tweets, photos and videos filtered by the “Data Clickers”. Note that these “Geo Clickers” automatically display the results of the crowdsourced geo-tagging on our Micro-Maps like the one below.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: MicroMappers – Toward Next Generation Humanitarian Technology”