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Community, as in freedom. This is an answer to Tony Curzon Price's article about the need for scarcity.After a few opening shots, Tony puts forward the following argument: “The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.”

Why communications companies should escape surveillance lawsuitsBy John D. Rockefeller IVArticle Launched: 11/01/2007 01:36:23 AM PDT var requestedWidth = 0; if(requestedWidth > 0){ document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.width = requestedWidth + "px"; document.getElementById('articleViewerGroup').style.margin = "0px 0px 10px 10px"; } In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, the Bush administration had a choice: aggressively pursue potential terrorists using existing laws or devise new, secret intelligence programs in uncharted legal waters.

Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 

We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.

who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.

The one element clear right through representative democracy’s advance across the world has been the centrality of popular rejection of autocratic effrontery, often exhilarating at the time but in retrospect a transitory pleasure. The structure of modern representative democracy (the form of state now called by that name) does not provide a clear model for any community to rule itself in freedom, let alone in reliable serenity and prosperity. What it provides is a practical basis through which to refuse to be ruled unaccountably and indefinitely against your will. Less steadily and on far less egalitarian terms, it also provides a framework through which to explore together what people should and should not attempt to do as a community. Virtually none of the elements of an answer to that question can come from democracy as an idea. Almost all have to be pieced together arduously from somewhere else.

Crudely speaking, the political appeal of democracy lies in its claim to realise political equality. (So, soberly speaking, does its potential political menace.)

A hi-tech eco-friendly office on common land in the east of Europe. Together the office community is drawn together to discuss the recent problems and issues besetting the community. They have all worked during the day and the weather is cool and bright as it is nearing the end of the year. They sit around waiting for the start of the meeting.

upposedly, the Kane & Lynch debacle was settled weeks ago, but it’s very possible that Eidos recently decided to pull future ad campaigns, which definitely could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for the bigwigs at CNET. Like it or not, the “professional” sites, whose opinions seemingly matter most, battle with the balance of journalistic integrity and advertising relationships day-in and day-out. And it should come as no surprise that it’s the “community” sites that are much more resistant to these influences because advertisers aren’t flocking to them as frequently.

I remember a story from an old college professor of mine who works for Time Inc.: Time magazine published an article that slightly badmouthed one of IBM’s computers, which resulted in the computer giant in pulling its advertising for the following three years. Whether or not the writer was fired, I don’t know.

His key finding: By thoroughly analysing the USA’s patriotic media coverage of the second War in Iraq (2003) and the contradicting Internet voices to be heard on the Mexican Zapatista revolt or the rise to fame of Arab news station Al Jazeera, Hafez illustrates how the media reinforces the process of globalisation – without itself becoming truly and fundamentally globalised.

Hafez’ intelligent and well-made book will be of interest to media or communication researchers, not least because the author manages to present his analysis in a highly readable way. After all, the recent scandal caused by the Mohammed caricatures published in Denmark and elsewhere in Europe would be a prime example for why the “dialogue between cultures” is ultimately bound to fail: for one thing, there are simply too many different notions of things such as the freedom of the press, or the freedom of speech and religion. According to Hafez, “What remains is, the attempt to demystify a great and grandiose idea by analysing it in a sober and unprejudiced way.”

Subvertandprofit.com “operates a black market for votes on social networking sites,” in the words of its 19-year-old founder, who goes by the pseudonym Ragnar Danneskjold. Ragnar told AZ contributor Derek Powazek that while some users of Digg.com “cling to democracy as the final ideal,” others “understand that their community is a wild anarchy...and I believe they like it that way.”

One of Lal’s most significant contributions to economic science is his recognition of cosmology as a factor endowment. This recognition enriches institutional theory by explicitly introducing religion and superstition into institutional settings and further illuminates the problems of path dependency. There have been great civilizations in the past, but none produced the Promethean growth that came with capitalism. The older agrarian civilizations grew extensively to the limits of their natural resources, but they lacked the innovation and creativity for the kind of intensive growth that capitalism generated. The reason for this lack is not that our ancestors had no instinct for enterprise, but that they were constrained by social norms and communal bonds and, as Lal asserts, by prevailing cosmological beliefs that suppressed individualism.

The second papal revolution occurred when Pope Gregory VII asserted the power of the church over that of the king or the emperor in the eleventh century. Lal argues, following Harold J. Berman (Law and Revolution [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983]), that this revolution set in place all the legal concepts and institutions needed for commerce.

This is year two of the Knight News Challenge, a contest awarding as much as $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. 

Ten years ago I stepped out of international business and into the think-tank community with a primary goal of getting reality on the table. I had seen more corruption, more money laundering, more financial crime than any one person should see in a lifetime, and I resolved to say what I wanted to say about this overarching reality. Why wasn’t reality already on the table? What is it about this subject matter that is so mysterious or so frightening that we hesitate to go there? Basically is it that we can’t see it or don’t want to see it?

This is the reality that we seek to get on the table. Illicit outflows from developing and transitional economies vastly exceed overseas development assistance going into developing and transitional economies. In my estimates, which I and others think are conservative, by a factor of ten to one. More analysis, better analysis in the future may make this a narrower picture or make it a wider picture. But no analysis will make this a pretty picture.

The thing is that every now and then we do something important. Like really important. We break a story, or house a discussion that changes a mind. I think that we serve an important role on-line. We're a pub where people gather to talk about the days events, and I think this has tremendous value. I think I still am here because there's a community here that I like. And besides, it beats flipping burgers.

And let me say that commitment to international action on justice means today to prevent genocide, the world must through the U.N, urgently act in Darfur.

Most of all my parents taught me that each of us should live by a moral compass.It was a simple faith with a fundamental optimism.That each and every one of us has a talent.Each of us a duty to use that talent.And each of us should have the chance to develop that talent. And my parents thought we should use whatever talent we had to help people least able to help themselves. And as I grew up surrounded by books, sports, music and encouragement, I saw at school and beyond how some flourished and others, denied these opportunities, fell behind. They had talent, they had ability. But they did not have the chance to fulfil their promise. They needed someone to champion them. They needed the support of people on their side. And is not our history the story of yes, progress through the fulfilled talents, even genius, of some but, yes, also of the wasted potential of millions for too many, their talents lost and forever unfulfilled?

Strip away the rhetoric about globalisation and it comes down to one essential truth: You can buy raw materials from anywhere,You can borrow capital form anywhere,You can engage with technology half way across the world,But you cannot buy from elsewhere what in the global economy you need most; the skills and the creativity of all our people – and that means that in education we must aim to be number one.

New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five.

But here is also the opportunity. At present, we are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact. Trust in journalists is not much above that in politicians. There is a market in providing serious, balanced news. There is a desire for impartiality. The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for the news being real news is not.

It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers. That is true up to a point. But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told. In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself. So it is true politicians are accountable through the ballot box every few years. But they are also profoundly accountable, daily, through the media, which is why a free press is so important.

He'd phoned twice the week before, and I'd returned the call to his hotel voice mail on both occasions, but we hadn't connected. So when the 350-pound biker widely known across the deep south as "Grizzly" called me again last Thursday, I was as prepared as could be for another of his semi-annual communications.

Britain’s future: Labour candidates’s view

I am agnostic on the need for a written constitution, because of the power it hands to the judges.

so I let's have a national debate.