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thinkahol *

As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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    MADRID - Hundreds of thousands of disillusioned Indians cheer a rural activist on a hunger strike. Israel reels before the largest street demonstrations in its history. Enraged young people in Spain and Greece take over public squares across their countries.
thinkahol *

The movement to smother solidarity : Johann Hari - 0 views

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    Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists - and they are trying to give it the force of law.
thinkahol *

Muslim Americans Find Their Voice Amid The Shouts : NPR - 0 views

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    In towns across the country, the voices of those who don't want mosques built in their neighborhoods are growing louder. The open expressions of hostility have become so loud in recent months, that a coalition of Muslim groups is taking steps to remind people that American Muslims are Americans -- the same as anyone else.
thinkahol *

Israel: Street power | The Economist - 0 views

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    AFTER months of speculation over whether the Arab spring would spread to the Palestinians, it has spread, in a way, to the Israelis. Rothschild Boulevard, a pleasant, leafy thoroughfare that meanders through Tel Aviv, with offices and commodious flats on either side, has oddly become a colourful encampment, seething with talk of people-power and social revolution. The tent-dwellers, a mixed bunch but with a preponderance of young, educated, middle-class families, are demanding-above all-affordable housing. Their protest, now into its third week, has sparked sleep-outs and demonstrations around the country. The movement seems to be growing daily, despite the torrid summer heat.
thinkahol *

Daily Kos: Over 150,000 Protesters Take to the Streets in Israel as Pressure on Netanya... - 0 views

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    Over 100,000 protesters swarmed the streets of 11 cities across the country, dancing to performances by some of Israel's most popular musicians and screaming angry slogans at PM Binyamin Netanyahu. The protests, which began as a response to the country's housing crisis, and have since spread to a host of social and economic complaints, are posing the greatest threat to  Netanyahu's rule as he grapples, unsuccessfully, to quell the growing discontent.
thinkahol *

A prime aim of the growing Surveillance State - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

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    As economic anxiety and social unrest increase, control over Internet technology and communication becomes vital
thinkahol *

The Xtremes: Subversive Recipes for Catastrophic Times | Common Dreams - 0 views

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    "In just a few short months, we've witnessed people power in action. From the Middle East to the Midwest, movements have risen up to overturn tired dogma and challenge entrenched power. Many of us were inspired by these events. And many of us were surprised. Perhaps we were growing skeptical that people power could still work. Maybe we had forgotten a vital fact about our world: that bold citizens, united around a common mission, can still come together to create major change against enormous odds." - 350.org (April 7, 2011) "Even when people are willing to take action in concert to redistribute the pie, whether by Gandhian mobilization or use of force, this may resonate falsely, for the pie is disintegrating. Its recipe and ingredients are obsolete. And freedom attained in harsh austerity, characterized by intense competition for food, will be doubtful or of little comfort." - Jan Lundberg ("Social Justice Activists Must Take Into Account Ecological, Cultural, and Economic Transformation")
thinkahol *

Astra Taylor on the Unschooled Life - YouTube - 0 views

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    Raised by independent-thinking bohemian parents, Taylor was unschooled until age 13. Join the filmmaker as she shares her personal experiences of growing up home-schooled without a curriculum or schedule, and how it has shaped her educational philosophy and development as an artist.
thinkahol *

BANKING ELITE Revealing quotes from those who know - 0 views

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    "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson 1816
Johann Höchtl

Opening Data.Gov with a new open source version, Open Government Platform (OGPL) - Greg... - 0 views

  • The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on May 21 that Data.Gov partnering with the Government of India National Informatics Centre has produced an open source version of Data.gov
  • The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on May 21 that Data.Gov partnering with the Government of India National Informatics Centre has produced an open source version of Data.gov that is being made available today, the third anniversary of Data.gov. The open source product, called the Open Government Platform (OGPL), can be downloaded and evaluated by any national Government or state or local entity as a path toward making their data open and transparent
  • The Open Government Platform (OGPL) is a growing set of open source, open government platform code that allows any city, organization, or government to create an open data site
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    data.gov is now an open source stack
Johann Höchtl

Open Data More Valuable Than Big Data, Gartner Says - 0 views

  • "Big data is a topic of growing interest for many business and IT leaders, and there is little doubt that it creates business value by enabling organizations to uncover previously unseen patterns and develop sharper insights about their businesses and environments," David Newman, research vice president at Gartner, said in prepared remarks. "However, for clients seeking competitive advantage through direct interactions with customers, partners and suppliers, open data is the solution. For example, more government agencies are now opening their data to the public Web to improve transparency, and more commercial organizations are using open data to get closer to customers, share costs with partners and generate revenue by monetizing information assets.
  • The company's report noted that enterprise architects could play an important role in fostering information-sharing practices
  • Gartner suggested open data application programming interfaces (APIs) are a lightweight approach to data exchange. These APIs can be new sources of revenue, spur innovation, increase transparency and improve brand equity
Johann Höchtl

U.S. unveils plan to make online transactions safer - Technology & science - Security -... - 0 views

  • In a draft plan released Friday, the White House laid out an argument for a yet-undeveloped, voluntary identification system and set up a website to gather input from experts and everyday Internet users on how it should be structured.
  • In a draft plan released Friday, the White House laid out an argument for a yet-undeveloped, voluntary identification system and set up a website to gather input from experts and everyday Internet users on how it should be structured.
  • Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the unfettered openness of the Internet is what allowed it to grow and prosper but also created security gaps that need to be addressed.
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  • the opportunity is there to make things more interoperable and more uniform
  • The draft plan is part of an administration effort to promote cyber security both within the government and among society as a whole.
Johann Höchtl

The Government 2.0 Forecast For 2010: 7 Predictions | SocialComputingJournal.com - 0 views

  • Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.
  • Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.
  • Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.
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  • Cloud computing will go big. While many agencies will just use the technologies internally for now in order to have public options later, there is tremendous interest in the cloud
  • Government portals (rightly) continue to incorporate social media, but deep engagement will be elusive for now. I've seen many overhauls of government portals this year, including Utah.gov and the Department of Defense, prominently incorporate social media right on their home pages. To be clear, these are major advances for the government to make on the internal/external boundary and I encourage them.
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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