Activism: Early Tuesday morning, the petition to the U.S. Administration to fire Carmen Ortiz reached the prerequisite 25,000 signatures. Carmen Ortiz was the prosecutor that drove the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, which many mean contributed or led to his tragic suicide. The U.S. Administration, by its own rules, must now take the petition seriously and respond to it.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.
This is what we have found to date. Please let us know if you find another handbook that helps further the concept of public intelligence in the public interest. The historic contributions are the “best in class” offerings of over 750 speakers at the annual international conference on “National Security & National Competitiveness: Open Source Solutions,” (1992-2006).
Back in the mid-90's I discovered Jim Rough's Wisdom Council formathttp://www.co-intelligence.org/P-wisdomcouncil.html and began promoting it through my network as a way to increase the co-intelligence of a community. I loved the design of it – every 3-12 months randomly selecting one or two dozen ordinary people to reflect for a few days on what their community needed and to bring their conclusions back to their community. It is promoted today by Jim's Center for Wise Democracy
There are many different initiatives that are using the term “Wisdom Council” these days, and all of them have their own gifts to offer. What I particularly appreciate about Jim's approach, is that instead of tapping the wisdom of a group of elders, it is about tapping the wisdom of ordinary people, on behalf of the larger whole. The basic idea is to gather together a diverse microcosm of that larger whole. This microcosm is then invited into a conversational “greenhouse” environment, where they are supported to engage their best creative efforts toward understanding and addressing the needs of that larger whole.
By 1999, however, I was becoming concerned that I knew little about Dynamic Facilitation (DF), the process used in the Wisdom Council. I decided to take one of Jim Rough's workshops, which happened to be during the same week of the big 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. It was an exciting week, during which I realized that DF could have transformed people's efforts to deal with the WTO.
I came away extremely impressed with DF's potential. Over the following years I took a few other DF courses and was involved in some gatherings using DF, including a Wisdom Council in Ashland, Oregon. I came to the conclusion that DF was the most powerful process I'd ever seen for transforming conflict into breakthroughs – a skill sorely needed in our world today.
I've written my own description of the process here. I invite you to explore it and the descriptions on Jim's website. In this video interview, UK consultant Alex Nairn offers an excellent description of DF. If you want to delve further into it, check out the DF manual by Rosa Zubizarreta. She's agreed to offer my readers a free pdf of the 2008 version, for which you can contact her through her website. (I coaxed Rosa to a DF training early in 2000 – and it changed her life. She returned the favor by helping me create The Tao of Democracy.)
The University of Maryland has just published an important report on “Social Media Use During Disasters: A Review of the Knowledge Base and Gaps” (PDF). The report summarizes what is empirically known and yet to be determined about social media use pertaining to disasters. The research found that members of the public use social media for many different reasons during disasters:
Phi Beta Iota: It has come to Phi Beta Iota's attention that too many people are searching for Mini-Me daily, rather than reading that day's postings.
Mini-Me is just one of over 25 contributing editors, each committed to the truth — public intelligence in the public interest.
Below are a couple of posts not by Mini-Mi that are Mini-Me-esque in nature. Bottom line: Mini-Me is one of many important contributors, do not neglect the others, please. We will no longer use Mini-Me to improve dissemination of Mongoose, Owl, or others, they are each a “brand” in their own right.
Nature is not a drag on growth – its protection is an unavoidable prerequisite for sustaining economic development
Tony Juniper
The Guardian, 9 January 2013
One of the greatest misconceptions of our time is the idea that there is somehow a choice between economic development and sustaining nature. The narrative developed by the chancellor, George Osborne, since the 2010 general election provides a case in point. He says environmental goals need to be scaled back to promote more growth.
The reality we inhabit is somewhat different, however. One hundred per cent of economic activity is dependent on the services and benefits provided by nature. For some time, and during the last decade in particular, researchers have investigated the dependence of economic systems on ecological ones, and in the process have generated some striking conclusions. I tell the stories behind their findings in my new book, What has nature ever done for us?
While many mainstream economists suffer from the kind of delusions that make it perfectly rational for them to accept to liquidate natural systems in the pursuit of “growth”, different specialist studies reveal the huge economic value being lost as decisions and policies that are geared to promoting economic activity degrade the services provided by nature.
For example, as we struggle to cut emissions from fossil fuels, one study estimates that the value of the carbon capture services which could be gained through halving the deforestation rate by 2030 is around $3.7 trillion. And the wildlife in the same forests has huge value too – about 50% of the United States' $640bn pharmaceutical market is based on the genetic diversity of wild species, many of which were found in forests. And it's not only the genetic diversity in wildlife that brings economic benefits.
Among other things, wildlife also helps to control pests and diseases. The cost of losing India's vultures has been estimated at $34bn, largely because of the public health costs associated with their demise, including increased rabies infections. The annual pest-control value provided by insectivorous birds in a coffee plantation has been estimated as $310 per hectare while the annual per hectare value added from birds controlling pests in timber-producing forests has been put at $1,500. Great tits predating caterpillars in a Dutch orchard were found to improve the apple harvest by 50%.
The services provided by animals, such as bees, doing the pollination work that underpins about one trillion dollars-worth of agricultural sales has been valued at $190 billion per year.
