Category: #OSE Open Source Everything

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David Bollier: The Former CIA Spy Who Discovered the Commons

#OSE Open Source Everything
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David Bollier

The Former CIA Spy Who Discovered the Commons

Thu, 06/19/2014 – 20:34

The Guardian today ran a profile of Robert David Steele, a former CIA spy who discovered the commons more than two decades ago and never looked back. Steele, a former U.S. Marine and CIA case officer who spent 18 years in US intelligence, is now, improbably, a vigorous advocate of “open source everything” – the title of his latest book. He brings the zeal of a convert to the mission of promoting the commons and open-source alternatives of every stripe.

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John Maguire: German Villagers Build Own Broadband Network, Connect Directly to Dark Fiber

Advanced Cyber/IO, Crowd-Sourcing
John Maguire
John Maguire

German villagers build own broadband network

Hacked off with slow download speeds the locals of Löwenstedt clubbed together the cash to build their own super-fast internet service to the delight of the village's tiny population.

Too isolated and with few inhabitants, the tiny village of Löwenstedt in northern Germany is simply too small to show up on the radars of national Internet operators.

So the villagers took their digital fate into their own hands and built a broadband Internet network of their own.

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Stephen E. Arnold: Elastisearch Open Source Rules Search — Bulldozing Content Processing

Advanced Cyber/IO, Software
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Elasticsearch: Bulldozing Content Processing

When I left the intelligence conference in Prague, there were a number of companies in my graphic about open source search. When I got off the airplane, I edited my slide. Looks to me as if Elasticsearch has just bulldozed the search and content sector, commercialized open source group. I would not want to be the CEO of LucidWorks, Ikanow, or any other open sourcey search and content processing company this weekend.

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Answers: Robert Steele to Kevjn Lim on Big Data

Answers, Data, Design
Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Kevjn Lim is an independent writer and Middle East foreign policy analyst at Open Briefing: The Civil Society Intelligence Agency. In the latter half of 2013, he was Turkey representative for the Syria Needs Analysis Project (SNAP), covering the Syrian crisis in the northern governorates and Turkey. From 2007-2011, he served as delegate with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in the Palestinian Territories, Sudan’s Darfur region, Iraq, Gaddhafi’s Libya and Afghanistan. He also taught modern languages (Hebrew, Arabic, French and Spanish) at both Trinity and Queens’ Colleges, University of Melbourne (2004-2006), and served as intelligence officer with the Singapore Armed Forces (2001-2004). Kevjn holds a BA and an Honours Degree (First Class) in political science and Jewish-Islamic studies from the University of Melbourne. He is currently doing postgraduate work in strategic studies. Among other languages, he is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian, as well as some Turkish, and is currently based in the Middle East.

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Patrick Meier: Zoomanitarians – Using Citizen Science and Next Generation Satellites to Accelerate Disaster Damage Assessments

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Design, Geospatial, Governance, Resilience, Science
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Zoomanitarians: Using Citizen Science and Next Generation Satellites to Accelerate Disaster Damage Assessments

Zoomanitarians has been in the works for well over a year, so we’re excited to be going fully public for the first time. Zoomanitarians is a joint initiative between Zooniverse (Brook Simmons), Planet Labs (Alex Bakir) and myself at QCRI. The purpose of Zoomanitarians is to accelerate disaster damage assessments by leveraging Planet Labs’ unique constellation of 28 satellites and Zooniverse’s highly scalable microtasking platform. As I noted in this earlier post, digital volunteers from Zooniverse tagged well over 2 million satellite images (of Mars, below) in just 48 hours. So why not invite Zooniverse volunteers to tag millions of images taken by Planet Labs after major disasters to help humanitarians accelerate their damage assessments?

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Jean Lievens: The Social Labs Revolution

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Resilience
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The Social Labs Revolution: A New Approach to Solving our Most Complex Challenges

The following is an excerpt from the introduction of the book, “What Are Social Laboratories?”

Zaid Hassan

Stanford Social Innovation Review, 19 May 2014

The Social Labs Revolution reports and builds on a decade of practical experiments in addressing social challenges that are complex in nature. These range from the sustainability of global food systems and child malnutrition to state collapse and climate change. Zaid Hassan, a co-founder of Reos Partners, makes the case that taking a planning-based approach risks almost certain failure. Instead he expounds on an experimental, prototyping based approach, social labs, that have proven more effective in addressing complex challenges.

The following is an excerpt from the book.

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