From TreeHugger:

According to a weighty new UN report (it’s 6,300 pages long and includes submissions from 2,500 experts) uncovered by The Independent, the world stands poised to enter a new era of peace, prosperity and empowerment. Increased democratization, economic and technological advances and medical breakthroughs have the potential to bring millions out of poverty and make the world “work far better than it does today”.

It concludes by castigating world governments as being “inefficient, slow and ill-informed” and reiterates a common refrain for more international cooperation and, most important, a “global strategy”. Without this, it says, neither climate change nor international organized crime, among others, will ever be resolved.

From the P2P Foundation – a quote from David Eaves:

“The open web is a social value. It’s not a fact, it’s not necessity, and it’s not a requirement. It’s a value – one that a growing community of people believe in and are willing to fight for.”

Further on in the article glimpses of Anarchism:

* that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization

Sound like Alvin Toffler’s arguments to me – from the site.

The old model of policy design was one of getting a centralized group of smart experts in the room to solve problems. Yet the complexity of globalized politics requires decentralized problem-solving approaches that can operate locally, inexpensively, and be distributed widely across lay knowledge networks. A model for design’s role in generating these networks is Sussam Preja’s Kit-o-Parts developed for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. Because the environmental graphics of the LA Olympics was highly distributed across the city, too much for one or two design firms to handle, and did not have a lot of money, Sussam Preja created this Kit-o-Parts that design subcontractors could use and assemble in any way they thought appropriate, yet still result in a unified look and feel for the Olympics. I propose the creation of a Policy Design Kit-o-Parts that lay people could locally adapt, yet still result in a unified visual language to support sharing and comparison of policy problems and solutions.

Always impresses me. It’s nice that he includes it in the Foundation’s RSS feed.

Now I have new header graphic which is a Wordle generated tag cloud of his feed.

@amyknapp My kid is awesome. Im really lucky. But the other moms at school dont appreciate her ‘A is for Anarchy’ shirt much. Whatevah.

about 16 hours ago from txt in reply to amyknapp

Found here: (Spontaneous Order might be a good alternative to the use of the word Anarchy – which, wrongly, has negative connotations)

Hayek’s two general themes are that the managed society does not work and that it is incompatible with freedom.

He argues that there are two types of order:

CONSTRUCTED ORDER (example: government planning)

SPONTANEOUS ORDER (prime example: the market)

Hayek, believes that whilst the role of the state’s constructed order is important, it has to be limited. This is a position very like Adam Smith’s and you will find it useful to compare Hayek and Smith.

Hayek says that constructed order generally goes wrong if it does any more than provide favourable conditions for spontaneous order. The most important favourable condition to spontaneous order is the rule of law.

- 50,000 years of cultural transformation are going to compressed into about 20 years.

- hyperconnected world enables successful behaviours to be quickly oberserved and copied becoming global and nearly instantaneous.

- does not allow for privacy, secrecy and ownership – tenets of Liberalism.

- Liberal era knowledge is scarce, new order more something is shared more valuable it becomes.

- we are asked to believe that somehow politics will be different – it will not.

- Thomas Hobbes war of all against all.

(have to check out Hobbes. found so far:

Hobbes imagines a state of nature in which each person is free to decide for himself what he needs, what he’s owed, what’s respectful, right, pious, prudent, and also free to decide all of these questions for the behavior of everyone else as well, and to act on his judgments as he thinks best, enforcing his views where he can. In this situation where there is no common authority to resolve these many and serious disputes, we can easily imagine with Hobbes that the state of nature would become a “state of war”, even worse, a war of “all against all”.

Link to video.

Heard an interesting Ideas on CBC last week. There has to be a movie made about the life of Jack London.

Dave Winer expains why this is needed at Scripting.com

Twitter is to identi.ca as an exclusive country club is to a public swimming pool. We might be denied access to Twitter’s platform for whatever reason, stated or unstated. This isn’t hypothetical, they actually put it in writing. However, they’ve said they’ll recind it. But then they could rescind the rescinding. It’s a lot like Apple’s policy with developers for the iPhone which might go something like: “We can’t let just anyone develop for this.”

identi.ca is different, like the Internet itself, no one gets to say whether or not you can develop for the platform. Sure one particluar instance of identi.ca might block your app, but they can’t all block it. (Not entirely true, by the way — just a lot less likely. Email, an open protocol, does effectively block some spammers from dumping mail through open relays. The real world sometimes forces across-the-board restrictions.)

To understand where we’re at, remember that software is a process, you can’t judge it by where it is today, you have start with that, and judge how it’s evolving. Twitter is struggling with finding a happy scaling place and a business model that sustains it after venture capital. As a corporation, they have incentives that an open source project doesn’t have. They’re more likely to pay attention to users’ needs than an open source project that’s more likely to tell you to fix it yourself. Though the lack of a business model has made it less likely that the company views its users as customers. They’ve been polite, even playful, but the service has been pretty awful.

I believe we need both. Single-party systems suck, I like (at a minimum) two parties. Everyone benefits from competition, users, developers, even the entities providing the service or product.

Speaking of Twitter check out this real time tag cloud of subject posts at Twitter.

A line I heard on the weekend that is sticking in my mind. There is something to this. The NDP does not have a hope in hell going head to head against the Liberals. The only way they could maybe garner the support needed is to face up to the fact that it is a 100% protest vote they are seeking. Not a bad strategy in my mind.