From David Bollier:

At a time when representative democracy is increasingly revealed as ineffectual, phony or both – a kabuki theater of empty formalisms that disguise the offstage conspiracies of corporate/state elites – many people look to the Internet for salvation.  After all, the Internet is far more open, participatory and meritocratic than the closed, corporate-dominated process of our formal democracy. 

But even with these capacities, the Internet is not a solution because in the end the Internet is only a hosting platform.  A basic question must be answered:  How should a more serious deliberative democracy be structured in online spaces? 

Let the record show that the insurgent Pirate Party in Germany has made some significant progress on this problem.  Its new open source software platform, LiquidFeedback, is credited with helping the Pirates host more open, participatory and serious internal debates about party policies — and to organize themselves to take action in conventional political arenas. 

The makers of Liquid Feedback characterize their platform in a mission statement as “a bridge between direct and representative democracy.”  They believe the software “has the potential to empower the ordinary members of mainstream political parties, making these parties more attractive to… Continue reading »

This novel model of collective participation has turned Spain into one of the countries closest to the P2P society ? . The 15M have kick-started initiatives such as Goteo ? , a crowdfunding platform, Nockin ? , a search engine for P2P services, Kune ? , a platform facilitating cooperation, or Nolotiro ? , a platform for the exchange of used goods.

Republished from Bernardo Gutiérrez in Open Democracy. The original article has links to the projects:

“One year after its outset, the Spanish Revolution has survived the victories of the ultra-conservative People’s Party (PP) in the municipal elections of May 22, 2011 and the general elections on November 20. The PP got the best result in its history, but – with only 1 in 3 Spaniards voting for them – can hardly claim to be representative of the population. The poor mobilization especially of young voters by the parties is contrasted by the intense political participation of youths in the streets.

During the eruption of the 15M movement in May 2011, when the streets of Spain were filled with ‘indignados’, a technological innovation took place that went almost unnoticed: the Tweetómetro Yes We Camp ? . The collective Platoniq ?… Continue reading »

Though Rick Falkvinge’s understanding of the left seems primitive and erroneous (the left does not demand ‘sharing with the poor’ but rather structural fairness), this is an eloquent statement of the values and ‘ontology’ (state of being) that are the characteristics of the Pirate sensibility. It is excerpted from a keynote to the German Pirate Party conference.

Rick’s basic idea echoes a conviction I have had for some time: there is a difference between the state of consciousness for which sharing is a ideal to strive for, and the state of consciousness in which sharing becomes a default and unproblematic practice.

Rick Falkvinge:

“The net is the greatest equalizer that humankind has ever invented. In fighting for its potential, we are already better at equality than any other party. Not just in Sweden, not just in Germany, but in the world.

Those who call themselves left-wing say you should share with people who are poor when they are in need. We don’t think like that – for we share with everybody, all the time. We don’t share out of pity with the poor – we share because it is who we are, and because we feel it creates a better world.

When people’s… Continue reading »

Description

“There are two aspects of every policy: a cognitive policy and a material policy. Material policies consist of the nuts and bolts, what is to be done in the world to fulfill policy goals. For example, the details of a health care plan, or a plan for getting out of Iraq. Material policies each have a cognitive dimension, often unconscious and implicit. This includes the ideas, frames, values, and modes of thought that inform the political understanding of the material policy. For example, consider the following questions: Do all Americans, just by their very existence, deserve health care, just as they deserve police protection? How does focusing on health care differ from emphasis on health insurance? How these questions are answered plays a crucial role in what the material details of health care policy should be.

Cognitive policy is about the values and ideas that both motivate the policy goals and that have to be uppermost in the minds of the public and the media in order for the policy to seem so much a matter of common sense that it will be readily accepted.

This framework motivates a Continue reading »

After the emergence of ‘citizen scientists’ and ‘citizen journalists’, what we need now are ‘citizen citizens‘, argues Eric Liu:

Excerpt:

“The work of democratic life — solving shared problems, shaping plans, pushing for change, making grievances heard — has become ever more professionalized over the last generation. Money has gained outsize and self-compounding power in elections. A welter of lobbyists, regulators, consultants, bankrollers, wonks-for-hire, and “smart-ALECs” has crowded amateurs out of the daily work of self-government at every level. Bodies like the library board are the exception.

What we need today are more citizen citizens. Both the left and the right are coming to see this. It is the thread that connects the anti-elite 99 percent movement with the anti-elite Tea Party. It also animates an emerging web of civic-minded techies who want to “hack” citizenship and government.

Why is government in America so hack-worthy now? There is a giant literature on how interest groups have captured our politics, with touchstones texts by Mancur Olson, Jonathan Rauch, and Francis Fukuyama. The message of these studies is depressingly simple: democratic institutions tend toward what Rauch calls “demosclerosis” — encrustation by a million little constituencies who clog the arteries of government and make it… Continue reading »

Excerpted from David Graeber:

“The US press seems to have decided that the Occupy movement is no longer a story. Pretty much no matter what we do. In New York, on May Day, something between 50,000 and 100,000 people marched through the streets – we don’t know the exact numbers because most papers didn’t report the event at all, and therefore, didn’t bother to make estimates. In California, there were blockades and walkouts. In Seattle, one band of protestors relived the famous Black Bloc actions of November 1999, smashing many of the same corporate windows – and even that didn’t make national news!

But in a way it hardly matters. Occupy is shedding its liberal accretions and rapidly turning into something with much deeper roots, creating alliances that promise to transform the very notion of revolutionary politics in America.

During the first two months of the occupation, camps emerged in every city in America, there was an explosion of press attention, and, at the same time, a vast influx of money (at one point, OWS in New York was sitting on over $0.5m, almost all of it from donations of under $100 each). Those months also saw a veritable invasion from… Continue reading »

By Warren Te Brugge:

“My Arms Wide Open® is a Canadian Federally registered foundation that I established to work with mothers, children and youth to crate change in the communities by creating sustainable community based businesses, education systems and infrastructure built entirely around the needs of their communities.

We start within each community by facilitating our Iziko Labahlali (Hearth of the Community) program that focuses on mindset, helping the participants to see themselves as deserving, contributing members of their communities. Through the course of the program we identify needs and skills within the community and then work to develop opportunities to establish economic activity around those needs to build autonomous community based enterprises, transferring in the gaps in the skills required. We make the initial seed-loan start-up investment and set up a management board comprising of members of the community and commit to a full 5 years of working alongside the employee members of the community as they earn out the shares of the company. In rural South Africa, as we set up these endeavours we do not use a co-op model for this because of the high incidence of co-op failures generally.… Continue reading »

Zoe Romano is one of the founders of the OpenWear project. She is interviewed here by Costa Rican design and fashion researcher Oscar Ruiz Schmidt:

ORS: Do you think that designers resign to authorship by making their work methodology open?

ZR – That’s one of the main thing we need to clarify: open-source doesn’t mean to resign authorship. It’s more about opening up the codes to creating collaboration. The more you involve people transparently in a process the clearer it becomes who started the process, who’s collaborating and who’s doing what. Exactly the opposite of what happens in the fashion system where is functional to have a single entity getting all the attention, being it the brand or the fashion designer, while hiding the complex work behind each product and the various skills behind innovation (that is always a collective process). We are finally realizing that open innovation is able to revitalize stale innovation processes happening in established enterprises.

ORS: If a designer places all of his methods online, can he still make a living from selling his clothes?

ZR – Actually, in the last 20 years most of the small-scale designers have been having problems in make a living from selling… Continue reading »

Book: The Neighborhood in the Internet: Design Research Projects in Community Informatics. John M. Carroll. Routledge. 2012.

Overview

Today, “community” seems to be everywhere. At home, at work, and online, the vague but comforting idea of the community pervades every area of life. But have we lost the ability truly to understand what it means? The Neighborhood in the Internet investigates social and civic effects of community networks on local community, and how community network designs are appropriated and extended by community members.

Carroll uses his conceptual model of “community” to re-examine the Blacksburg Electronic Village – the first Web-based community network – applying it to attempts to sustain and enrich contemporary communities through information technology. The book provides an analysis of the role of community in contemporary paradigms for work and other activity mediated by the Internet. It brings to the fore a series of design experiments investigating new approaches to community networking and addresses the future trajectory and importance of community networks.

This book will be of interest to students of sociology, community psychology, human-computer interaction, information science, and computer-supported collaborative work.

Source: Stephen Carson and Jan Philipp Schmidt

The challenges faced by higher education around the world are daunting and cannot be met by the traditional institution-based education system. For the current model to meet the needs of future generations, we would need to build and fund thousands of new universities. And yet the past ten years have demonstrated that there is another way. Scalable education on the web is increasingly possible, largely through the use of commodity software that is easy to use and available freely or at low cost to anyone.

Consider: Stanford and MIT recently started offering free online courses, and both universities enrolled more than 100,000 users. In one Stanford course, on artificial intelligence, 25,000 users completed all required homework assignments and received a certificate for their participation.

Not only is online learning beginning to scale massively, but it is also beginning to do so at almost zero marginal cost. The expense of adding an additional student in a campus setting remains relatively stable. In online learning, however, the cost of adding one more user is often so close to zero that it can be ignored. Even the issue that seems to resist low-cost scaling… Continue reading »