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:
As a general comment, organizational cultures do not change until the organizations collapse, the leaders die or retire, and a new generation with new internal values derived from external reality is empowered. Installed leaders will always go for what they learned 20 years earlier, doing the wrong thing righter. It is a very rare leader that empowers and protects their “Wild Ducks” to achieve revolutionary change among static mind-sets.
Last week Leah Lynn Plante was arrested and placed in solitary confinement for remaining silent during a grand jury trial. Due to the secrecy of the proceedings, little information has come to light about her or her two friends, Katherine “Kteeo” Olejnik and Matthew Kyle Duran since the story went viral last week.
However, word was just sent out from Leah's supporters that she had been released, although unfortunately her two friends still remain behind bars.
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.
According to a report by 6ABC, Banana Boat is recalling a line of its spray on products after reports of people catching on fire after applying the sunscreen.
According to the HuffingtonPost, 23 varieties of Banana Boat UltraMist are being pulled from store shelves “due to the risk that the lotion can ignite when exposed to open flame,” said the 6ABC report.
One public-spirited global company, “Energizer Holdings,” is out there on the front lines, trying to protect earthlings from the heinous effects of sunlight, and what do people do?
Whine. About spurious issues such as an extremely limited number of cases in which sunscreen products made by the manufacturer of Banana Boat products have caused people's skin to burst into flames.
