The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture, and Politics
Our mono-cultural worldview is literally preventing us from understanding the deeper causes of our multiple crises. Author Andreas Weber, in the below essay, gives us a glimpse of the different scientific paradigm now coming into focus. He calls it “Enlivenment,” because the new sciences are revealing organisms to be sentient, more-than-physical creatures that have subjective experiences and produce sense.
Big Data, Disaster Resilience and Lord of the Rings
The Shire is a local community of Hobbits seemingly disconnected from the systemic changes taking place in Middle Earth. They are a quiet, self-sufficient community with high levels of social capital. Hobbits are not interested in “Big Data”; their world is populated by “Small Data” and gentle action. This doesn’t stop the “Eye of Sauron” from sensing this small harmless hamlet, however. During Gandalf’s visit, the Hobbits learn that all is not well in the world outside the Shire. The changing climate, deforestation and land degradation is wholly unnatural and ultimately threatens their own way of life.
. . . . .
There’s been push-back of late against Big Data, with many promoting the notion of Small Data. “For many problems and questions, small data in itself is enough” (1). Yes, for specific problems: locally disconnected problems. But we live in an increasingly interdependent and connected world with coupled systems that run the risk of experiencing synchronous failure and collapse. Our sensors cannot be purely local since the resilience of our communities is no longer mostly place-based. This is where the rings come in.
People everywhere have been organizing a more ethical economy, but they work in relative isolation, fragmented by geography, sector, and even organizational form.
Many organizations collect information about a small piece of these efforts. In every situation, there is another organization for which that information overlaps. In every case there is an opportunity to share that will strengthen all the organizations participating.
Sharing requires effort, it requires trust, and it requires infrastructure. The Data Commons is a cooperative of organizations that are sharing – sharing the costs of this effort, trusting each other with their information, and building infrastructure to make sharing is easy.
Members of the Data Commons Cooperative are principled economic organizations that want it to be easy to share with each other, and with the world, in the movement for a more ethical economy.
Examples of information overlap
Can Official Disaster Response Apps Compete with Twitter?
There are over half-a-billion Twitter users, with an average of 135,000 new users signing up on a daily basis (1). Can emergency management and disaster response organizations win over some Twitter users by convincing them to use their apps in addition to Twitter? For example, will FEMA’s smartphone app gain as much “market share”? The app’s new crowdsourcing feature, “Disaster Reporter,” allows users to submit geo-tagged disaster-related images, which are then added to a public crisis map. So the question is, will more images be captured via FEMA’s app or from Twitter users posting Instagram pictures?
This question is perhaps poorly stated. While FEMA may not get millions of users to share disaster-related pictures via their app, it is absolutely critical for disaster response organizations to explicitly solicit crisis information from the crowd. See my blog post “Social Media for Emergency Management: Question of Supply and Demand” for more information on the importance demand-driven crowdsourcing. The advantage of soliciting crisis information from a smartphone app is that the sourced information is structured and thus easily machine readable. For example, the pictures taken with FEMA’s app are automatically geo-tagged, which means they can be automatically mapped if need be.
While many, many more picture may be posted on Twitter, these may be more difficult to map. The vast majority of tweets are not geo-tagged, which means more sophisticated computational solutions are necessary. Instagram pictures are geo-tagged, but this information is not publicly available. So smartphone apps are a good way to overcome these challenges. But we shouldn’t overlook the value of pictures shared on Twitter. Many can be geo-tagged, as demonstrated by the Digital Humanitarian Network’s efforts in response to Typhoon Pablo. More-over, about 40% of pictures shared on Twitter in the immediate aftermath of the Oklahoma Tornado had geographic data. In other words, while the FEMA app may have 10,000 users who submit a picture during a disaster, Twitter may have 100,000 users posting pictures. And while only 40% of the latter pictures may be geo-tagged, this would still mean 40,000 pictures compared to FEMA’s 10,000. Recall that over half-a-million Instagram pictures were posted during Hurricane Sandy alone.
Taking the Pulse of the Boston Marathon Bombings on Twitter
Social media networks are evolving a new nervous system for our planet. These real-time networks provide immediate feedback loops when media-rich societies experience a shock. My colleague Todd Mostak recently shared the tweet map below with me which depicts tweets referring to “marathon” (in red) shortly after the bombs went off during Boston’s marathon. The green dots represent all the other tweets posted at the time. Click on the map to enlarge. (It is always difficult to write about data visualizations of violent events because they don’t capture the human suffering, thus seemingly minimizing the tragic events).
Visualizing a social system at this scale gives a sense that we’re looking at a living, breathing organism, one that has just been wounded. This impression is even more stark in the dynamic visualization captured in the video below.
Surveillance and parasitism harm society’s collective intelligence
What this post is about: Society’s collective intelligence needs to be able to see clearly what’s going on and take action about it. Both NSA surveillance and corporate suppression of activism interfere with that vital dynamic. This post clarifies what’s going on in these dynamics and suggests strategies to counter them and increase society’s collective intelligence.
Any healthy living system will try to weed out challenges that threaten its functioning. That’s what immune systems do: they preserve business-as-usual in a body.
But this natural maintenance activity of a system can be counterproductive:
(a) when changing circumstances demand adaptive responses, when the system NEEDS to change its business-as-usual – and
(b) when the system has been parasitized by something that is using it for the parasite’s own purposes at the larger system’s expense.
Entire post below the line, with links.
Continue reading “Tom Atlee: Surveillance and parasitism harm society’s collective intelligence”
Peers will build on key aspects of the movement that Shareable, as a pioneering sharing movement organization, helped shape. Peers’ mission is to make sharing the defining economic activity of our time. They will do this through grassroots campaigns to make sharing more visible, grow the number of sharers, and legalize sharing.
What's Next for the Sharing Movement?
Neal Gorentio
Shareable.net, 31 July 2013
With the launch a promising new sharing movement organization called Peers today, it’s a good time to reflect on the character of the sharing movement.
Peers will build on key aspects of the movement that Shareable, as a pioneering sharing movement organization, helped shape. Peers’ mission is to make sharing the defining economic activity of our time. They will do this through grassroots campaigns to make sharing more visible, grow the number of sharers, and legalize sharing.
Let’s take stock of the movement. We have something special here. Sharing is deeply empowering. It’s fun and fulfilling to connect with others in such a mutually beneficial way, and sharing also helps us meet our needs. It’s rare that a movement has such powerful psychological and economic personal drivers. On top of this is the fact that we urgently need to share. Poverty and resource depletion are today's defining challenges. Sharing is a systemic fix that can address these challenges simultaneously.
With mainstream media coverage of the sharing trend, millions of people are waking up to the potential of sharing. Cities are waking up to it too – the mayors of 15 major cities recently signed a Shareable Cities Resolution promising to advance the sharing economy in their cities. This builds on the plans of Mayor Edwin Lee of San Francisco and Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul who have shareable city initiatives already underway.
We should appreciate the strengths of this movement and build on them. Here’s more on what we have to build on and how we can build on it.
Peer to Peer Inside
Peers puts the soul of the sharing economy into its name. Peer to peer dynamics form the basis of a new, liberating social contract.
The old social contract bound citizens to large hierarchies like nations and multinational corporations. In this contract, citizens gained the protection of hierarchies in return for obedience, labor or taxes. Citizen’s rights were protected by intermediaries like labor unions, courts, and elected officials.
This contract favored the powerful from the start, but now they’ve completely broken it. The powerful — mainly big business in Western-style democracies — have co-opted or weakened the intermediaries designed to protect citizens. The elite are now almost completely free to consolidate wealth and power even more that they already have — all at grave expense to citizens.
I know this, you know this, and the multitudes know this. As a result, we’re seeing an unprecedented level of social unrest around the world.
As they have always done in crises, people are turning to each other to survive. What’s different today is that a new coordination mechanism — the Internet — enables individuals to create, share, and govern directly with one another using networks instead of hierarchies.
With this, a new social contract is forming based on peer to peer relations, which the P2P Foundation has been exploring for a decade. Instead competing with sharp elbows for rank in the hierarchy, individuals are empowered to face each other as equals and ask a simple but revolutionary question — “what can we create together?”
A Revolution For, Not Against
Complete text below the line.
Continue reading “John Lievens: What's Next for the Sharing Movement?”
