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thinkahol *

Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks - YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Oct 11
     
    Between Occupy Wall Street, in New York, and the other cities it's spread to, as well as the October 2011 movement that just began here in D.C, something seems to be happening in this country. Earlier at Freedom Plaza Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, tells us what this could lead to.
thinkahol *

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Oct 11
     
    I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:
Johann Höchtl

GovHubOrg/CensusShapeConverter - 0 views

github.com/...CensusShapeConverter

open data geodata spatial US census opendata

shared by Johann Höchtl on 06 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Johann Höchtl on 06 Mar 12
     
    KML shapes of any US state, city, or county, made possible by the U.S. Census
Johann Höchtl

Open Data Business Models | Jeni's Musings - 0 views

www.jenitennison.com/...172

open data business case tennison

shared by Johann Höchtl on 19 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • I find business cases for data publishers much more compelling than examples of how open data can be used. For a start, I don’t think it’s possible to predict how open data will be used or what that will mean in terms of economic or societal impact: the wide world into which it’s released is just too complex to know.
  • One argument I’ve heard made about government open data is that releasing it can help organisations avoid the costs of Freedom of Information requests.
  • The reverse of cost avoidance is finding sponsors for open data publication.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The freemium model has been used with some success for web-based services; it might also work for open data.
Parycek

It's Not the Campaign Any More - 0 views

www.americanprogress.org/...web2.0_memo.html

us opengov participation case

shared by Parycek on 25 Jun 10 - No Cached
  • Parycek on 25 Jun 10
     
    How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far
Parycek

SMALL CHANGE Why the revolution will not be tweeted - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...101004fa_fact_gladwell

socialmedia socialnetworking socialnetworks activism facebook Gladwell

shared by Parycek on 28 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns
  • There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
  • The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,”
  • But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires
  • social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
  • There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars.
  • The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.
  • it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability
  • Parycek on 13 Dec 10
     
    Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell
Johann Höchtl

Canalys: Android Takes OS Lead in US Market for Q3 | Android Phone Fans - 0 views

phandroid.com/...es-os-lead-in-us-market-for-q3

canalys IPhone Android USA smartphone marketshare

shared by Johann Höchtl on 01 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Android Takes OS Lead in US Market for Q3
  • Android is up 1,309 percent from this time last year and now holds an impressive quarter of the smartphone market.
  • android outsold iphone almost 2:1 that too in a quarter where new version of iPhone was released.
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...government-20

gov2.0 datasf open government

shared by Johann Höchtl on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • 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
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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.
thinkahol *

US Uncut's Anti-Austerity Protests Hit Bank of America - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/rong-against-bank-america68108

US Uncut's Anti-Austerity Protests Hit Bank of America

shared by thinkahol * on 01 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Mar 11
     
    As a voice at the megaphone of the Portland protest said, "The United States does not have a deficit problem. The United States has a revenue problem." According to a 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office, 25 percent of the biggest corporations pay no federal income tax. B of A, the recipient of $45 billion in bailout funds, shuttles its would-be tax dollars into 115 offshore tax havens. Meanwhile, budget deficits are cited as justification for pay freezes for public workers and cuts to heating assistance programs, Social Security, and other social safety nets.
thinkahol *

Debt deal: anger and deceit has led the US into a billionaires' coup | George Monbiot |... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...us-debt-deal-tea-party

Debt deal: anger and deceit has led US into a billionaires' coup | George Monbiot Comment is free The Guardian

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Aug 11
     
    The debt deal will hurt the poorest Americans, convinced by Fox and the Tea Party to act against their own welfare
thinkahol *

Want to cut big government abuses? Start with defence contracting | Michael Shank | Com... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...us-military-contractors-sigir

Want to cut big government abuses? Start with defence contracting | Michael Shank Comment is free guardian.co.uk

shared by thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Aug 11
     
    We have the evidence: the hardpressed US taxpayer is being fleeced by profiteering contractors and corrupt military personnel
Parycek

Infographic: Can I Use That Picture - 0 views

thevisualcommunicationguy.com/...raphic_CanIUseThatPicture2.jpg

copyright infographic

shared by Parycek on 13 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Parycek on 13 Aug 14
     
    Terms, Laws and Ethics for using Copyrighted Images
Johann Höchtl

Open Data Has Little Value If People Can't Use It - Craig Hammer - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/..._data_has_little_value_if.html

open data value people use HBR

shared by Johann Höchtl on 30 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought
  • So how can we support "data-literacy" across the full spectrum of users, including media, NGOs, labor unions, professional associations, religious groups, universities, and the public at large? Here's one approach. It's time and resource intensive, but crucial — institutionalizing data literacy across societies.
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