Rick is the founder of the first Pirate Party and is a political evangelist, traveling around Europe and the world to talk and write about ideas of a sensible information policy. He has a tech entrepreneur background and loves whisky.
While the US invasion of Iraq about a decade ago was based on public-facing lies about nonexistent weapons arsenals, the underlying reasons for the invasion were much more dire. Iraq had found the US’ Achilles Heel, and would bankrupt the US if not stopped.
Anna is the Party Leader of the Swedish Pirate Party and a writer. She has previously worked as manager of a book publishing house, and lives in Järfälla with her girlfriend and several cats and dogs. When not planning how to fix the world, she can be seen writing something.
Anna Troberg
I never intended to become a politician. I most certainly never intended to become a party leader. I did, however, have the desire to change the world for the better. I was never one for small ambitions. But being a self confessed literary snob, I expected to change the world with nothing less than literary finesse. The mere thought of picking up an unrefined and blunt tool like politics… The horror. The horror.
However, life rarely turns out the way you expect it to. Some years ago I became the head of the Swedish branch of a Nordic publishing house. We mainly published fiction. But the world of publishing is not all it is cracked up to be. I attended publishing meetings where publishing decisions were made based on the cup size of the author. Big cups meant a signed contract. Small cups meant no contract at all.
After the highly successful 1st International Commons Conference, there will be a second and even larger international gathering focused on the Economics of the Commons, in Berlin, May 2013.
Organized by the Commons Strategies Group (with support of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung and the FPH – Fondation pour le Progrès de l’Homme), there was a preparatory meeting in Bangkok, October 12-14. You can find a text and and series of essential questions prepared by the Commons Strategies Group for the Bangkok meeting, in our Community Knowledge Garden, and in the Commons Rising community forum, where you can engage in the conversation about them and suggest yours.
The 49 questions are organizied in the following sections:
First, I want to express my sincere gratitude to the dozen or so iRevolution readers who recently contacted me. I have indeed not been blogging for the past few weeks but this does notmean I have decided to stop blogging altogether. I’ve simply been ridiculously busy (and still am!). But I truly, truly appreciate the kind encouragement to continue blogging, so thanks again to all of you who wrote in.
Now, despite the (catchy?) title of this blog post, I am not bashing crowd-sourcing or worshipping on the alter of technology. My purpose here is simply to suggest that the crowdsourcing of crisis information is an approach that does not scale very well. I have lost count of the number of humanitarian organizations who said they simply didn’t have hundreds of volunteers available to manually monitor social media and create a live crisis map. Hence my interest in advanced computing solutions.
The past few months at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have made it clear to me that developing and applying advanced computing solutions to address major humanitarian challenges is anything but trivial. I have learned heaps about social computing, machine learning and big data analytics. So I am now more aware of the hurdles but am even more excited than before about the promise that advanced computing holds for the development of next-generation humanitarian technology.
The way forward combines both crowdsourcing and advanced computing. The next generation of humanitarian technologies will take a hybrid approach—at times prioritizing “smart crowdsourcing” and at other times leading with automated algorithms. I shall explain what I mean by smart crowdsourcing in a future post. In the meantime, the video above from my recent talk at TEDxSendai expands on the themes I have just described.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Meier, an absolute pioneer in crisis information management that leverages shared geospatial foundations and brilliant innovative collaborative networks of open source software and a melange of common hand-held cell phones, has bracketed two of the four pillars of advanced intelligence. The other two are the whole system model that assumes nothing, and the true cost documentation that assumes nothing.
It is harder to organise a political movement to help young people than old people. Young people are less susceptible to being organised and they lack the patience for the hard graft of a long political campaign. They are more likely to be seduced by the weak ties of social networking and the false promise of slogans like ‘We are the 99 per cent.’ Nonetheless, these are the victims who need the most help and who lack the clout or visibility to be heard among the more pressing demands being made by the more militant elderly. They are the 5 per cent and we should do something for them.
London Review of Books has an excellent critical analysis by David Runciman of the Occupy movement and the 99% versus 1% narrative.
So how were we duped? Mainly by not paying attention. The 1 per cent didn’t conspire to rip everyone else off. They got their way by walking through the door we left open for them. We were too distracted and disorganised among ourselves to put up enough resistance. What the 99 per cent have in common is that they don’t have enough in common to make a difference politically, compared to the very rich, who are a well-organised bunch. The 99 per cent are a lot more numerous than the 1 per cent; they are also a lot more divided, and it’s the second fact that counts.
