A devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. Two weeks later, on January 27th, a CrowdFlower was used to translate text messages from Haitian Creole to English. Tens of thousands of messages were sent by affected Haitians over the course of several months. All of these were heroically translated by hundreds of dedicated Creole-speaking volunteers based in dozens of countries across the globe. While Ushahidi took the lead by developing the initial translation platform used just days after the earthquake, the translation efforts were eventually rerouted to CrowdFlower. Why? Three simple reasons:
CrowdFlower is one of the leading and most highly robust micro-tasking platforms there is;
CrowdFlower’s leadership is highly committed to supporting digital humanitarian response efforts;
Haitians in Haiti could now be paid for their translation work.
3D printing provides an opportunity to change the way we think about the world around us. [1] It merges the physical and the digital. People on opposite sides of the globe can collaborate on designing an object and print out identical prototypes every step of the way. Instead of purchasing one of a million identical objects built in a faraway factory, users can customize pre-designed objects and print them out at home. Just as computers have allowed us to become makers of movies, writers of articles, and creators of music, 3D printers allow everyone to become creators of things.
This whitepaper is also available as a PDF and can be purchased on the Amazon Kindle Store.
EXTRACT
Ultimately then, the burden is on the community and the organizations that host the community not to blindly assume that copyright covers everything. This is not to say that copyright should be rejected, or that legal orders should be ignored. Instead, it is a reminder of the value of healthy skepticism. If someone is asserting copyright over an object, take a moment to consider if copyright can even apply in that case. Make assertions of infringement public so that the wider community can understand who is claiming what kinds of rights.
Published on Apr 17, 2012. This is the first half of an Occupy Chapel Hill Teach-In presentation by Dr. Sally Goerner with Mayor Randy Voller entitled Rethinking Capitalism: Replacing Trickledown with Healthy Networks. Examples of Democratic Free-Enterprise Networks (DFENs) and their deployment are illustrated.
Published on Apr 19, 2012. This is the second half of an Occupy Chapel Hill Teach-In presentation by Dr. Sally Goerner with Mayor Randy Voller entitled Rethinking Capitalism: Replacing trickledown with Healthy Networks. Examples of Democratic Free-Enterprise Networks (DFENs) and their deployment are illustrated.
great documentary about jacque fresco and the venus project — early articulation of need to restore natural economy instead of the artificial and very corrupt economy that does not properly value natural resources and human resources.
Paradise or Oblivion – A Documentary by the VENUS PROJECT
FOLLOW THE LINKS BELOW TO HELP MAKE THIS DREAM A REALITY
Imagine that the year is 1543 and you have just completed reading Copernicus’ newly published book, On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, that has attempted to convince you that your daily experience of the sun moving around a stationary earth is an illusion. What do you think the chances are that you would have accepted the Copernican argument that violates your direct perceptions?
Thomas Gentry, Nonlinear Dynamicist, 1995
Is Integral Science related to Paul Ray’s work on Cultural Creatives?
Yes, ISI is working toward the same Integral Society identified by Paul Ray (see Cultural Creatives, 2003). We believe Integral Science provides a clearer understanding of why Integral Society is emerging and a more solid foundation for understanding what the Cultural Creatives must do to make it sustainable.
Is Integral Science related to Ken Wilber’s vision of Integralis?
Though there are some overlaps, Integral Science’s empirical foundation leads to some different conclusions from Wilber’s Integral Psychology and Integralis. Both views, for example, integrate spirituality and the evolution of consciousness, Integral Science integrates them into a seamless view of physical reality, using serious work from across disciplines, and taking great care to logically connect the dots from different fields.
Why is Integral Society emerging?
What does Integral Science say about what it will be like? Great changes are driven into being by the failure of the previous system, a breakdown whose root cause is cultural decay and whose main marker is a web of crises popping up in every sphere. Vowing to find a better way, a new cultural thrust then builds itself up around a new noble vision and defining metaphor that it believes will avoid the fiascoes of the old.
Hence, today’s great change, like those of the past, is being propelled by crises felt in every field. Think of education, health care, politics, energy, the economy, community, justice, and the environment. Yet, while these individual calamities grab attention, it is slowly becoming clear that the root problem is cultural decay. Late Modern culture has become a malady and late Modern America epitomizes the result.
“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.”
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.
