The circumstances underlying this manifesto are stark and compelling: We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communical decision-making. Power was centralized in the hands of increasingly specialized “elites” and “experts” who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over coummunity resources that they ultimately looted.
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The corruption of the commons led to the loss of integrity between and among individuals, organizations, and community. Artificial paradises made up of objects and possessions were substitute for true community based on authentic hear-to-heart relationships. Secular corruption is made possible by information asymmetries between those in power and the public. In the absence of transparency, truth, and trust, wealth is concentrated and waste is rampant.
ECO 92 and its discussions led to the structuring of sustainable development around three main pillars: the environmental, the economic and the social. But what is the role of culture in this trinity? Is it subsumed within the social field? Is it an additional 4th pillar? Or, Is there a possible new configuration? In Brazil, we have been exploring these themes in several ways.
During Rio+20, the Ministry of Culture will deepen the exploration of these themes by holding the ‘Unconference: Culture and Sustainability in the Rio +20’ on June 14th and 15th in two warehouses in the port area of Rio de Janeiro.
Themes and Curators:
– Creative and Sustainable Cities – Tiao Rocha
– The Development of Culture to Human Scale – Patrick Belloy
– Traditional Knowledge and the Culture of Sustainability – Alfredo Wagner
– Digital Culture and Sustainability – Michel Bauwens
The concepts of “design” and “association” in this article, related so fundamentally to the creation and contextualization of important information, seems closely related to the idea of open intelligence and the larger meme of open everything. So, fyi.
Joe Costello, author of the new book Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy, has a message for America: our political economy must be democratically reformed. As we confront a moment of massive historical change, Costello explores, among other things, how electronic information technologies are transforming industrial economies. He explains how the understanding of this shaping process, or design, can help us meet the challenge of the next economic era. Hint: We're going to have to wake up to our power as citizens to get there.
“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
Humanity's great agrarian era produced agrarian government systems, economies, and cultures. Human life and human identity derived overwhelmingly from the processes of farming. The much shorter two-centuries old industrial era redefined life. The processes of production and consumption became the overwhelming dual identities of individuals and our institutions that evolved to foster the processes of unlimited industrial growth. As we move into the design economy, increasingly the most imperative questions will be what are the roles, identities, institutions, and processes of design.
My colleague Robert Kirkpatrick from Global Pulse has been actively promoting the concept of “data philanthropy” within the context of development. Data philanthropy involves companies sharing proprietary datasets for social good. I believe we urgently need big (social) data philanthropy for humanitarian response as well. Disaster-affected communities are increasingly the source of big data, which they generate and share via social media platforms like twitter. Processing this data manually, however, is very time consuming and resource intensive. Indeed, large numbers of digital humanitarian volunteers are often needed to monitor and process user-generated content from disaster-affected communities in near real-time.
Meanwhile, companies like Crimson Hexagon, Geofeedia, NetBase, Netvibes, RecordedFuture and Social Flow are defining the cutting edge of automated methods for media monitoring and analysis. So why not set up a Big Data Philanthropy group for humanitarian response in partnership with the Digital Humanitarian Network? Call it Corporate Social Responsibility (CRS) for digital humanitarian response. These companies would benefit from the publicity of supporting such positive and highly visible efforts. They would also receive expert feedback on their tools.
On the next few pages I list a wide range of “opens” within each of the layers illustrated in the Open-Source Pyramid (Figure 1), strictly to illuminate the wide-ranging, near-universal nature of this meme. This is not a complete list! The order below corresponds to Figure 1, where the source information can also be found. [All endnotes removed, generally one per comma de-limited open].
Aspects
Open Access. Generally legal right to view, read, transit.
Participation. Generally open right to contribute or utilize.
Transparency. General visibility of detail to any who wish access.
George Martinez for New York's 7th Congressional District
About
The Bum Rush premise is simple: Controlling politics without money is power, people power.
Our goal is to create an open-source, crowd-sourced DIY campaign. All of the resources we need to accomplish this goal are available to us due to the fantastic technology that we now have access to. We started this campaign with no money, and are using our resources in a very efficient and frugal manner.
Our resources come directly from our people. We look toward whomever is involved. We are not seeking to hire anyone. We are seeking those who like us want to see a game change in politics.
