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We believe that a free and open Internet can bring about a better world. To keep the Internet free and open, we call on communities, industries and countries to recognize these principles. We believe that they will help to bring about more creativity, more innovation and more open societies.

After reading your recent post, I thought you might find this interesting - especially the scanned interview that is included at the bottom of the posting. It's an old OMNI interview with Walter Stewart that was the first thing I read (at a young and impressionable age ;) about the prevalence of errors, fraud and cheating in science, the institutional barriers to tackling it, the often high personal costs to whistleblowers, the difficulty of accessing scientific data to repeat published analyses, and the surprisingly negative attitude towards criticism within scientific communities. Highly recommended entertaining reading - with some good examples of scientific investigations into implausible effects. The post itself contains the info I once dug up about what happened to him later - he seems like an interesting and very determined guy: when the NIH tried to stop him from investigating scientific errors and fraud he went on a hunger strike.

Two years ago this week, ThinkUp was born. Our first year we moved from alpha into beta, and our second year we graduated out of beta to great response. Today I'm thrilled to report that over 15,000 social media accounts are registered on over 5,000 ThinkUp installations around the web. ThinkUp's most well-known users include the White House, Martha Stewart, Steve Martin, Disney, and Pixar. Our birthday is as good a time as any to do an honest assessment of where the ThinkUp product, community, and code currently stands. Here's where we are.

In the past few years, digital technologies have revolutionized everything from the way we work to the way we educate, inform and entertain ourselves. In fact, millions of engaged citizens are using the Web to connect and collaborate around shared concerns and opportunities in their communities and in international forums and institutions. Now, as Canada readies itself to host the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT2012) in Montreal this October, we have a unique opportunity to mobilize large numbers of connected citizens to participate in a global, online conversation designed to elicit new ideas and innovations that could help address some of the world's most urgent challenges.

"These are the top 10 countries to request user data from tech companies in 2012. Guess who's leading the pack? In other national security news, The Atlantic reports "defenders of Edward Snowden's leaks got a bit trickier Wednesday afternoon, with revelations about his embarrassing past. Turns out, Snowden was once a teenager and, worse, that time period was encapsulated online.""

Synthesis is a think-tank devoted to using the emerging paradigm of complex networks in the social sciences to tackle social and public policy concerns. Over the past 20 years or so, social scientists have increasingly made use of advances in the natural sciences to make better sense of social systems. Fields such as network theory, non-linear mathematics and systems theory, which we refer to as the study of complex networks, give us much greater insights that help us make sense of social systems. Armed with a greater understanding, this collection of paradigm-changing toolboxes can help us to make better policy decisions, in the public, private, and "third" sectors.

It's impossible to grasp the consequences or outcomes of new technology, especially when that technology is developed by a twenty-something hacker. That much was already clear in January 2010, when Mark Zuckerberg told TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington that Facebook isn't just a place to connect with your friends. It was a place to be more public than ever before. "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time," he said. "But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner's mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it."

video worth watching