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thinkahol *

Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power - 1 views

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    This document presents details on the wealth and income distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two distributions as power indicators. Some of the information may come as a surprise to many people. In fact, I know it will be a surprise and then some, because of a recent study (Norton & Ariely, 2010) showing that most Americans (high income or low income, female or male, young or old, Republican or Democrat) have no idea just how concentrated the wealth distribution actually is. More on that a bit later.
thinkahol *

Building a Distributed, Decentralized Internet - A Roadmap - P2P Foundation - 1 views

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    In an email discussion about building a distributed, decentralized internet, the question came up whether it is better to use facebook with all its inherent controls and dangers to privacy, or whether it would be a better choice to abandon it. My view, which I stated, was that for now, I prefer to communicate, but I am conscious of the dangers.
Johann Höchtl

Peer-to-Peer Governance, Production And Property: P2P As A Way Of Living - Part 1 - 0 views

  • Such free cooperation can only be hindered ‘artificially’, through either legal means ( intellectual property regimes) or through technical restrictions such as  Digital Rights Management, which essentially hinder the social innovation that can take place.
  • The expansion of peer production is dependent on cultural/legal conditions. It requires;open and free raw cultural material to use; participative structures to process it; and commons-based property forms to protect the results from private appropriation.
  • In most cases, distribution beats decentralization and centralization as the best way to deal with  complexity.
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  • The sphere of commons-oriented peer production, based on stronger links between cooperators, think Linux or Wikipedia, usually combines a self-governing community, with for-benefit institutions (Apache Foundation, Wikimedia Foundation, etc…), which manage the infrastructure of collaboration, and a  ecology of businesses which create scarcities around the commons, and in return support the commons from which they derive their value.
  • Finally,  crowdsourcing occurs when it is the institutions themselves which attempt to create a framework, where participation can be integrated in their value chain, and this can take a wide variety of forms. This is generally the field of co-creation.
  • We must note that monetary value that is being realized by the capital players, is – in many if not most of the cases, not of the same order as the value created by the social innovation processes.
  • peer governance requires a priori consensus on the common object. But society as a whole lacks such consensus by definition: it is a decentralized collection of competing interests and worldviews, rather than a distributed network of  free agents. Therefore, for society at large, there is no alternative to a revitalized democratic political scenario based on representation.
Johann Höchtl

Google search index splits with MapReduce * The Register - 0 views

  • Google Caffeine — the remodeled search infrastructure rolled out across Google's worldwide data center network earlier this year — is not based on MapReduce, the distributed number-crunching platform that famously underpinned the company's previous indexing system. As the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft work to duplicate MapReduce through the open source Hadoop project, Google is moving on.
thinkahol *

Tomgram: Barbara Ehrenreich, On Americans (Not) Getting By (Again) | TomDispatch - 0 views

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    The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.
Parycek

Working the Crowd: Employment and Labor Law in the Crowdsourcing Industry by Alek Felst... - 0 views

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    Abstract:      This Article confronts the thorny questions that arise in attempting to apply traditional employment and labor law to "crowdsourcing," an emerging online labor model unlike any that has existed to this point. Crowdsourcing refers to the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the "crowd," in the form of an open call. 
Johann Höchtl

Open Knowledge Foundation Blog » Blog Archive » Rethinking Open Data: Lessons... - 0 views

  • You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.
  • Ongoing maintenance and distribution of the data hasn’t been budgeted for almost all the data sets we have today. This attitude has to change, and new projects give us the chance to get it right, but most existing datasets are unfunded for maintenance and release.
  • there are at least five different types of Open Data groupie: low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data, transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government, citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better, open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people, and wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

  • Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 
  • Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation
  • Potential loss of privacy Invalid data
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  • 1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere
  • The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.
  • The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.
  • Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.
  • Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 
  • People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.
  • The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.
  • many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation
  • Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do
  • The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!
  • "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.
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