Category: P2P / Panarchy

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Yoda: Best 10 Countries for the Internet – None in Africa

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Economics/True Cost, IO Impotency, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

A start, this is.

Phi Beta Iota:  Open Everything (especially OpenBTS, Open Cloud, Open Data, Open Hardware, Open Software, and Open Standards) are the next big leap, or the Internet of Things will be in the service of the elite rather than the 5 billion poor whose entrepreneurial energy can only be harnessed when ALL of them have a free cell phone with Internet access and can receive a free education one cell call at a time.

Also vital in the development of Internet IMPACT as opposed to ACCESS, is the emergence of whole system analytics and true cost economics.  Only when ALL have access to true cost information can corruption begin to be detected and eradicated supply chain by supply chain.  The nuclear and tobacco and seed industries are three examples of how government corruption and media lies have created massive profit for the few with massive externalized costs to the many.

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Tom Atlee: Collective Thinking About Public Affairs

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Tom Atlee

Collective thinking about public affairs

(NOTE: In this essay I intentionally subsume the thinking processes of official decision-makers into the thinking processes of the citizenry as a whole. I realize that official decision-makers can and do make decisions independently of the will of the people, unless that public will is united and organized. But elite decisions made independently of the public do not qualify as “public thinking” – at least in any democratic sense – and in this essay I am attempting to explore the nature of public thinking so that it can be upgraded and empowered to impact public policy. So here we will look at the thinking processes of the entire population and mini-publics thereof as they go about living a relatively democratic life.)

How can we think clearly about the collective thinking processes of a whole population in a democracy? How do populations reflect on public issues and come to conclusions about collective action and public policy? What follows is one framework for sorting out the different dimensions of public thinking and the quality of that thinking process.

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The most basic form of public thinking is, of course, what goes on in the minds of individual citizens as they think about public affairs. We see manifestations of this – commonly called “public opinion” – in polls, in voting, in online “citizen input” sites, and in various other visible forms of citizenship that reflect the opinions of individual citizens in the population as a whole.

Public opinion evolves in a message-rich environment that includes – at the next higher level of public thinking – news media and commentaries from pundits and partisans, on talk shows and blogs, and in online forums, letters to the editor, and public hearings. This public thinking often takes the form of mediated or witnessed conversations: Diverse (often polarized) voices express their views to each other while being directly or indirectly witnessed by the public. Our society depends heavily on this kind of media-driven interaction to collectively reflect on its public issues and shape the views of its citizens and decision-makers.

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Michel Bauwens: When Growth Outpaces Happiness (Corrupt Mis-Appropriation of the Benefits of Growth)

03 Economy, 11 Society, Culture, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
Michel Bauwens

When Growth Outpaces Happiness

CHINA’s new leaders, who will be anointed next month at the Communist Party’s 18th National Congress in Beijing, might want to rethink the Faustian bargain their predecessors embraced some 20 years ago: namely, that social stability could be bought by rapid economic growth.

As the recent riots at a Foxconn factory in northern China demonstrate, growth alone, even at sustained, spectacular rates, has not produced the kind of life satisfaction crucial to a stable society — an experience that shows how critically important good jobs and a strong social safety net are to people’s happiness.

Starting in 1990, as China moved to a free-market economy, real per-capita consumption and gross domestic product doubled, then doubled again. Most households now have at least one color TV. Refrigerators and washing machines — rare before 1990 — are common in cities.

Yet there is no evidence that the Chinese people are, on average, any happier, according to an analysis of survey data that colleagues and I conducted. If anything, they are less satisfied than in 1990, and the burden of decreasing satisfaction has fallen hardest on the bottom third of the population in wealth. Satisfaction among Chinese in even the upper third has risen only moderately.

Read full article.

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Yoda: Social Science and Biology Share Contagion Meme

Economics/True Cost, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
Got Crowd? BE the Force!

A NEW KIND OF SOCIAL SCIENCE FOR THE 21st CENTURY

A Conversation with Nicholas A. Christakis

EDGE, [8.21.12]

These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a variety of discoveries and opportunities that offer tremendous prospect for improving the human condition.

NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS is a Physician and Social Scientist, Harvard University; Coauthor (with James Fowler) of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives.

Phi Beta Iota:  The social sciences are the moral and intellectual runts of the academic litter, with public administration being the bottom feeders unable to even define a discipline or establish laudable norms.  Computers are stupid — governments and corporations have very deliberately avoided the necessary investments in true cost economics, whole systems analytic models, and multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information-sharing and sense-making (M4IS2).  This is a very positive development, but it is highly unlikely that major progress will be made in the absence of an Open Source Agency (OSA) guiding a global “Open Source Everything” renaissance of thinking–of intelligence with integrity.

See Also:

Peer to Peer (P2P) at Phi Beta Iota

Social and Biological Networks

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

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Eagle: President Obama Tells the Truth – A Good First Step – But Can He Turn On A Dime & Force Electoral Reform in 30 Days?

Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics
300 Million Talons…

Republicans pounce on Obama remark: ‘You can't change Washington from the inside'

He has not been able to change the ‘tone’ in Washington, Obama says, calling that ‘disappointing.’

President Obama — who ran his 2008 campaign on the promise of “hope and change” — made a surprising admission after four years in office on Thursday: “You can't change Washington from the inside.”

Republicans immediately pounced on the president's seemingly off-the-cuff remark, which came after Mitt Romney's campaign had endured days of attacks over the GOP candidate's own unscripted comments at a secretly-recorded May fundraiser.

“His slogan was ‘Yes we can,'” an energized Romney declared at a rally in Sarasota, Fla. “His slogan now is ‘No I can't!'”

Obama made the comment in response to a question about his “biggest failure” at a Univision town-hall forum in Miami on Thursday.

In a nod to the mostly-Latino audience, Obama first mentioned his inability to pass immigration reform, before admitting to the larger failing.

“Obviously, the fact that we haven't been able to change the tone in Washington is disappointing,” he said.

“And I think that I've learned some lessons over the last four years and the most important lesson I've learned is that you can't change Washington from the inside,” the president continued. “You can only change it from the outside.”

Read full article.

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DefDog: Bottom Up Sharing of Books – A New Model?

Crowd-Sourcing, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
DefDog

Further to the comment on Owl's previous post, “displacing the advertising model of book publishers; and those who pay for localized printing will be incentivized to donate the books to their local library….” it may be that the official libraries, too few and limited as they are, will be displaced as well.

The man who turned his home into a public library

By Kate McGeown

BBC News, Manila, 19 September 2012

If you put all the books you own on the street outside your house, you might expect them to disappear in a trice. But one man in Manila tried it – and found that his collection grew.

Hernando Guanlao is a sprightly man in his early 60s, with one abiding passion – books.

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They're his pride and joy, which is just as well because, whether he likes it or not, they seem to be taking over his house.

Guanlao, known by his nickname Nanie, has set up an informal library outside his home in central Manila, to encourage his local community to share his joy of reading.

The idea is simple. Readers can take as many books as they want, for as long as they want – even permanently. As Guanlao says: “The only rule is that there are no rules.”

It's a policy you might assume would end very quickly – with Mr Guanlao having no books at all.

But in fact, in the 12 years he's been running his library – or, in his words, his book club – he's found that his collection has grown rather than diminished, as more and more people donate to the cause.

Read full article with photos.

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Patrick Meier: Social Mobilization via Six Degrees of Separation with Comment

Collective Intelligence, P2P / Panarchy
Patrick Meier

Six Degrees of Separation: Implications for Verifying Social Media

The Economist recently published this insightful article entitled” Six Degrees of Mobilisation: To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?” The notion, six degrees of separation, comes from Stanley Milgram’s [small world] experiment in the 1960s which found that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people in the US. Last year, Facebook found that users on the social network were separated by an average of 4.7 hops. The Economist thus asks the following, fascinating question:

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