#OSE Open Source Everything – Page 121 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/132014/05/13

Patrick Meier: Latest Findings on Disaster Resilience – From Burma to California via the Rockefeller Foundation

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Latest Findings on Disaster Resilience: From Burma to California via the Rockefeller Foundation

I’ve long been interested in disaster resilience particularly when considered through the lens of self-organization. To be sure, the capacity to self-organize is an important feature of resilient societies. So what facilitates self-organization? There are several factors, of course, but the two I’m most interested in are social capital and communication technologies. My interest in disaster resilience also explains why one of our Social Innovation Tracks at QCRI is specifically focused on resilience. So I’m always on the lookout for new research on resilience. The purpose of this blog post is to summarize the latest insights.

This new report (PDF) on Burma assesses the influence of social capital on disaster resilience. More specifically, the report focuses on the influence of bonding, bridging and linking social capital on disaster resilience in remote rural communities in the Ayerwaddy Region of Myanmar. Bonding capital refers to ties that are shared between individuals with common characteristics characteristics such as religion or ethnicity. Bridging capital relates to ties that connect individuals with those outside their immediate communities. These ties could be the result of shared geographical space, for example. Linking capital refers to vertical links between a community and individuals or groups outside said community. The relationship between a village and the government or a donor and recipients, for example.

As the report notes, “a balance of bonding, bridging and linking capitals is important of social and economic stability as well as resilience. It will also play a large role in a community’s ability to reduce their risk of disaster and cope with external shocks as they play a role in resource management, sustainable livelihoods and coping strategies.” In fact, “social capital can be a substitute for a lack of government intervention in disaster planning, early warning and recovery.” The study also notes that “rural communities tend to have stronger social capital due to their geographical distance from government and decision-making structures necessitating them being more self-sufficient.”

Read full post.

2014/05/132014/05/13

Graphic: City Resilience Framework

P2P / Panarchy, Resilience

Source

2014/05/132014/05/13

Stephen E. Arnold: Hadoop Open Source & Big Data

Data, Software

The Hadoop Elephant Offers A Helping Trunk

It is time for people to understand that relational databases were not made to handle big data. There is just too much data jogging around in servers and mainframes and the terabytes run circles around relational database frameworks. It is sort of like a smart fox toying with a dim hunter. It is time that more robust and reliable software was used, like Hadoop. GCN says that there are “5 Ways Agencies Can Use Hadoop.”

Hadoop is an open source programming framework that spreads data across server clusters. It is faster and more inexpensive than proprietary software. The federal government is always searching for ways to slash cuts and if they turn to Hadoop they might save a bit in tech costs.

“It is estimated that half the world’s data will be processed by Hadoop within five years. Hadoop-based solutions are already successfully being used to serve citizens with critical information faster than ever before in areas such as scientific research, law enforcement, defense and intelligence, fraud detection and computer security. This is a step in the right direction, but the framework can be better leveraged.”

The five ways the government can use Hadoop is to store and analyze unstructured and semi-structured data, improve initial discovery and exploration, making all data available for analysis, a staging area for data warehouses and analytic data stores, and it lowers costs for data storage.

So can someone explain why this has not been done yet?

Whitney Grace, May 13, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

2014/05/072014/05/07

Tim Berners-Lee: Internet Magna Carta

Access, Architecture, Autonomous Internet, Culture, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Transparency

We Need a Magna Carta for the Internet

Huffington Post, 6 May 2014

These comments are adapted from a talk to the Net Mundial conference in Brazil on May 4.

“Twenty-five years ago, when the Internet had been running for 20 years, there was internet mail and net news and remote login, but there was no web. No web sites, web pages, links. So I invented the World Wide Web. As the project grew, I needed collaborators. To achieve that, I went to the Internet technical community.

Specifically, I founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a multistakeholder organization that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. W3C works on different aspects of Internet technology with numerous organizations, including the Internet Engineering Task Force, ECMA/TC39, IANA, and ICANN.

Hopefully you all agree that we have done a reasonable job. The Web, and its underlying Internet infrastructure, have been an enormous engine of growth and understanding for society. It has been the collaboration between these multi-stakeholder organizations which has made this possible.

Our technical community achieved this contribution with little oversight from governments. In fact, our “OpenStand” vision is that the right way to build a technical infrastructure for society is through multi-stakeholder technical groups where decisions are made in the public interest and based on technical merit. Discussion is open. Documents are available for free on the web. In W3C specifically, companies commit that as the standard emerges, they will not charge royalties to those who implement it.

The web needs to remain a system which exists without regard to national borders. Today most of the work is already done in the non-national Internet technical community. I was also pleased to hear that ICANN is beginning a dialogue to create a multi-stakeholder review process to replace that of the U.S. government. That is appropriate because ICANN services the global public interest.

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2014/05/052014/05/05

Jean Lievens: Stacco Troncoso Shares Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Education, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Spectrum, Transparency

Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons

Here’s an excellent summary, written by our good friend Helene Finidori from the Commons Abundance Network, on FLOK Society’s historical significance for the Commons and P2P movements. The article was originally published in STIR magazine and Helene has kindly given us permission to republish it here.

This column was published in STIR’s spring issue and is available to buy here

With the Free Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society project, peer-to-peer commons-based economics have a good chance of being institutionalised in Ecuador, or in other words, of entering at a nation-state level through the front door. This would be a world first.

Ecuador may not be particularly advanced as far as urban P2P dynamics are concerned, but its indigenous and rural communities have a long history of sharing knowledge. And since the election of a progressive government in 2007, the country is politically ahead in its determination to continue developing an economy based on the creativity of its citizens and on the sustainable leverage of its internal resources.

The focus here is to transition away from cognitive capitalism where value is commonly extracted via technology transfers through intellectual property rights mostly held by large foreign companies, generating dependencies on the global north and increasing the internal social divide. The goal is to shift towards a ‘social knowledge economy’ where knowledge is freely accessible, produced and shared through co-operative and open processes, and where the resulting knowledge commons can be built upon to accelerate innovation and the distribution of wealth.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Stacco Troncoso Shares Helene Finidori on FLOK Society and the Commons”

2014/05/052014/05/05

Gordon Cook: Policy Paper on Connectivity

Access, Advanced Cyber/IO, Architecture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Governance, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Spectrum, Transparency

Policy Paper on Connectivity

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3 Technical Background
3.1 Peering and Transit – How thousands of Networks become the Global Internet
4. Special Issues in Connectivity
4.1 Access for Scientists
4.2 Access for Rural Areas
4.3 Access for Citizens via a Civil Society Stakeholder Body
5.The Ecuadorian Political, Economic, and Infrastructural Framework
5.1 Existing Infrastructure and Policy Goals for Unbundling, Structural Separation and Sale of IRUs
5.2 Celec EP (Corporación Eléctrica del Ecuador – Celec EP)
5.3 Telconet
5.4 CNT
5,5 CEDIA – The Ecuadoran University Network necessary for global connectivity to Collaborative Science
5.6 Formulation of a Vision for “Higher Education”
6. Alternative Models
6.1 Case Study 1: Brazil, Netherlands
6.2 Case Study 2: guifi.net
7. Policies to Assist the National Broadband Plan and Strategies for Expanding Internet Use
7. 1 Policy Goals of the Broadband Plan and the Three Basic Strategies
8. Ecuadoran Policy Recommendations
8.1 A single overriding basic principle
8.2 Policy for Bringing guifinet to Ecuador
9. Bibliography
10. Why I Withdraw this Paper [Extract Only]

Full Paper with All Notes and Active Links DOC (24 Pages): Cook on Connectivity

Full Text NOT Footnotes NOT Links Below the Fold

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2014/05/04

Steve Denning: Three Strategies For Managing The Economy Of Access

Access

Three Strategies For Managing The Economy Of Access

Forbes, 2 May 2014

We live in an exceptional moment in history. Gigantic changes are under way in society. Everything we do is being re-invented—how we live, how we work, how we play, how we communicate, even how we think and how we feel.

The first thing the Internet did was to begin eliminating the middle men, the markups and the margins of the traditional vertical value chain. Suddenly you could buy stuff online—first books and music, and then almost anything—cheaper, and often quicker, than in a physical store.

This was horrible news for middlemen and physical stores. But it was just the beginning.

Continue reading “Steve Denning: Three Strategies For Managing The Economy Of Access”