The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The internet will really have to be the people's property…
Complete book by the chapter below the fold.
Continue reading “Sepp Hasslberger: Toward a People's Internet”
Patrick Meier
5.0 out of 5 stars World-Changing Book Documenting Intersection of Humans, Technology, and Policy-Ethics, February 2, 2015
This is a hugely important work, one that responds to the critical needs outlined by Micah Sifry in The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) and others such as myself writing these past 25 years on the need to reform the pathologically dysfunctional US secret intelligence community that is in constant betrayal of the public trust.
Digital Humanitarians are BURYING the secret world. For all the bru-ha-ha over NSA's mass surveillance and the $100 billion a year we spend doing largely technical spying (yet only processing 1% of what we waste money on in collection), there are two huge facts that this book, FOR THE FIRST TIME, documents:
Micah Sifry
5.0 out of 5 stars Should Be Top Ten Book Across All Progressive Communities, October 5, 2014
This is one of the most useful important books I have read in the past couple of years, and I am stunned that the publisher has failed to properly present the book for purchase on Amazon. This book should be one of the top ten books across the progressive communities of the world.
I rate this book at SIX STARS, which puts it into the top ten percent of the 2000+ non-fiction books with some DVDs (139) I have reviewed at Amazon. This is an *amazing* book of passionate informed truth-telling and in my view, it should be the starting point for a totally new conversation among all progressive minds going into the future.
I read this book on the way back from The New Story Summit as hosted by the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. While the book is deeply supportive of my own views on the desperate need of the distributed progressive community for tools and methods that bring together all minds and all information into a coherent whole, attending the summit and listening to the leaders of major progressive organizations including the Global Eco-Village Network and Transition positioned me to better appreciate this book by Micah Sifry.
QUOTE (34): “…has not made participation in decision-making or group coordination substantially easier.”
Continue reading “Review: The Big Disconnect – Why the Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet)”
Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell (editors)
5.0 out of 5 stars Common Sense Of, By, For the Community, October 5, 2014
From a second reading after attending The New Story Summit at Findhorn Foundation in Scotland.
QUOTE Stephan Duncombe (104): “”Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” But waiting for the truth to set us free is lazy politics. The truth does not reveal itself by virtue of being the truth: it must be told, and told well. It must have stories woven around it, works of art made about it; it must be communicated in new and compelling ways that can be passed from person to person, even if this requires flights of fancy and new methodologies.”
I bought this book at Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC, along with Michel Sifry's The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) that I am reviewing now, both of these books are huge, and the Sifry book relatively unknown when it should a “top 10” reading for all progressives.
This book (Beautiful Trouble), at 138 pages in pocket size (3/5ths of a normal pocketbook), is an utter gem. At a minimum it forces reflection. Produced by a team of people and organizations, this is a community resources in every sense of the word.
Continue reading “Review: Beautiful Trouble — A Toolbox for Revolution”
Brett Goldstein and Lauren Dyson (editors)
4.0 out of 5 stars Superb on Open Data, Missing Important Context And Index, July 6, 2014
This is a superb collection of individual very short contributions. Absolutely worth reading and strongly recommended for purchase and sharing.
Some take-aways:
Continue reading “Review: Beyond Transparency – Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation”
Bart Baesens
5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Overview of Analytic Applications — Focused on Consumer, Contains Math, May 22, 2014
Bottom line up front: a superb book and a truly great overview that is easily understandable to me except for the fraction of the book that is math.
Right away I like the structure of the book in relation to analytics. Use Amazon's Inside the Book feature to see that structure. I also appreciate the clarity and integrity demonstrated by the author in touching on major obstacles to big data analytics, among which are past biases in policy and collection and the absence of critical values needed to test NEW hypotheses. The author is brutal in a low key manner (which is to say, very professional) in evaluating the different types of data streams and the problems with each of them. Getting the raw data is a challenge — cleaning that data is a greater challenge — making sense of swiss cheese data with a host of underlying intellectual cancers is the greatest challenge of all.
5.0 out of 5.0 Stars One visionary's way out of the Corporate Feudalism/International Conflict trap
By Herbert L Calhoun on April 1, 2014
In this book, the author, drawing extensively on his intelligence and military background, has cleanly written an easy to follow book, that outlines a careful course of action for developing a new kind of global information sharing infrastructure. To be headquartered at the UN, this new infrastructure would make it possible for every organization (and through them, everyone) on the globe to share open-source intelligence equally as a free public resource. If it is successful, this new global brain could transform our world from its current insecurity-driven and corrupt corporate dominated lose-lose, economic and conflict trap, into a much revived win-win strategy for bottom-up collective survival in a peaceful and sustainable world economy.
At least that is the theoretical hope and vision. On paper, and in principle, it is a stunningly sexy and attractive vision, one that, should it prove operationally testable and feasible, could indeed have the important side benefit and advantage of creating new bottom-up wealth, energizing the world economy and easing world tensions by reducing mistrust and fear back down to the noise level.
