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The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of "Terrorism" - Glenn Greenwald - Salo... - 0 views

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    That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly.  When an airplane was flown into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, it was immediately proclaimed to be Terrorism, until it was revealed that the attacker was a white, non-Muslim, American anti-tax advocate with a series of domestic political grievances.  The U.S. and its allies can, by definition, never commit Terrorism even when it is beyond question that the purpose of their violence is to terrorize civilian populations into submission.  Conversely, Muslims who attack purely military targets  -- even if the target is an invading army in their own countries -- are, by definition, Terrorists.  That is why, as NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language.  Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.
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

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.
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