Public Intelligence Blog

Tom Atlee

Wholesome capitalism?

What would wholesome capitalism look like?

“Wholesome” means healthy, in the sense of something that promotes physical and moral well-being. Wholesome capitalism would take into account the wholeness of people and the social and natural world we live in, and it would enhance that wholeness.

Some people think capitalism already does this. They note how good it has been at generating wealth. The word wealth, meaning abundance, derives from roots meaning well-being and wholeness. Many of capitalism’s advocates feel it should be freed from constraints so it can generate more wealth.

Others note that capitalism – while generating wealth for some – many or few, depending on its form in a particular time and place – nevertheless generates much suffering and destruction in the process. It reduces everything to money and maximizes financial return even if it has to degrade and destroy human and natural life to do it. Many of capitalism’s critics feel it should be undermined or overthrown.

Still others note both the blessings and problems with capitalism. They think we can have the wealth without so much suffering and destruction. Most of these people promote freeing capitalism’s creativity and productivity while restraining its rapaciousness in various ways – using everything from laws, regulations and taxes to moral suasion and consumer-shareholder activism.

In this article I advocate all three positions – odd as that may sound – but only after reframing “capital” and “wealth” to better reflect wholeness.

THE PRIMARY DYNAMIC OF CAPITALISM

The special gift of capitalism is its ability to create MORE – more products and services, more self-organized economic activity, more wealth. In systems science, this tendency to create more-ness is called a positive or reinforcing feedback dynamic.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bojan Radej

The Data Journalism Handbook is Out

6 months ago at Mozilla Festival 2011, the Data Journalism Handbook was born. Thanks for your interest in the book – I have great pleasure in announcing that the Handbook is now live!

The Handbook features contributions from over 70 leading practitioners of data journalism from every corner of the globe, from Japan to Finland, Nigeria to the US and from leading news outlets such the New York Times, Zeit Online, the BBC and the Guardian. The Handbook is an open educational resource, under a creative commons licence (CC-BY-SA) so please share it with your friends and remix it. We hope that it will encourage many budding data journalists to look at data as a source and give them courage to tackle it, as well as showcasing some great examples of journalism using data as inspiration for future stories.

You can find the handbook at: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/ 

Also available for pre-order is the e- and print version from O’Reilly Media – http://oreil.ly/ddj-e-print - so if you are interested in a version to read offline, take a look!

We will soon have the facility to submit feedback via the website if you spot any errors or have any improvements for the next version,

–
Lucy Chambers

Infographic impresario Lulu Pinney created this superb poster, which gives an overview of the contents of the Data Journalism Handbook.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Michel Bauwens

Phi Beta Iota:  This is one of the most elegant trenchant discussions we have seen on the imperatives for arriving at collective intelligence through open methods.   The entire contribution is below the line.

Debating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Power Law: Knowing Networks as an alternative to scale-free networks

John Steiner

The Tea Party Occupy Connection

A Small Movement with Huge Potential

Tea party, Occupy supporters find they have many similarities | DailyTidings.com

Tea party, Occupy groups find common ground in Worcester

Common ground for Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street? (2011)

John Robb

Techcrunch Interview

Posted: 28 Apr 2012 10:15 AM PDT

Sixteen years ago, Pingtan Island, just north west of Taiwan, was the center of Chinese military energies to intimidate Taiwanese voters against electing a pro-independence president. Major amphibious operations were staged, some with catastrophic loss of life by military personnel because of bad weather. This also was the first time China attempted to maintain continuous air operations over the Taiwan Strait. That also proved beyond Chinese capabilities.

These complemented the dramatic and sensational Chinese short range ballistic missile shots into Taiwan’s two main ports. The missile launches might be compared to the US launching missiles into Pearl Harbor to prevent Hawaii from seceding from the US.

A key difference was that the Chinese missiles were so inaccurate, that no one knew whether they would launch much less whether they would stay on target. The danger was that a ballistic missile might veer off course and strike Taiwan, rather than the ocean. The missiles were so unreliable that the risk of a stray missile was very real. With only luck, they did not hit land or ships in the harbor which would have sparked general war in 1996.

The US sent two aircraft carrier task groups to defend Taiwan in 1996, forcing the Chinese to back down and inflicting a humiliating political defeat on the communist mandarins in Beijing. At one point, during turnover, three carriers were present to defend Taiwan. The Chinese intimidation effort failed on every level. Even the weather was hostile to the Chinese.

This week China published details of its plans for the Pingtan Comprehensive Economic Zone (CEZ) through the approval and promulgation of the General Development Plan for the Pingtan CEZ. Mainland China officials have emphasized the “importance” of the plan and the CEZ.

The Chinese military fiasco during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis ensured that the communist party leaders would never again allow the People’s Liberation Army leaders to have their way in solving any national security problems.

Read the rest of this entry »

Patrick Meier

Civil Resistance 2.0: A New Database on Non-Violent Guerrilla Warfare

Gene Sharp pioneered the study of nonviolent civil resistance. Some argue that his books were instrumental to the success of activists in a number of revolutions over the past 20 years ranging from the overthrow of Milosevic to ousting of Mubarak. Civil resistance has often been referred to as “nonviolent guerrilla warfare” and Sharp’s manual on “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” for example, includes a list of 198 methods that activists can use to actively disrupt a repressive regime. These methods are divided into three sections: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research  to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (bit.ly/CivRes20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

Phi Beta Iota:  We continue to believe that the fastest — and perhaps the only near-term and non-violent — means to restore the Republic and restore democracy as well as moral capitalism in the USA is an Electoral Reform Summit that demands of our two-party corrupt Congress the Electoral Reform Act of 2012.  Learn more at We the People Reform Coalition.

John Steiner

This morning I got this note from Co-Intelligence Institute board member Lyn Manju Bazzell, who lives in Ashland, a town in southern Oregon’s Rogue Valley:

“A little news from the Rogue Valley:  went to a meeting with 200 people last night.  It was a panel of 2 Tea Party leaders and 2 Occupy leaders in the Rogue Valley answering questions from the audience. A very positive move for our area!  Jeff Golden put it together with some help and there is a desire for ongoing conversations for the Rogue Valley. It is an outgrowth of one of  his Immense Possibilities episodes that included these 4 people. Yea for Jeff  – he’s a mensch!

“Here are some areas of common ground that were shared by the panel:  Personal liberty issues; Homeland Security; Election reform – concern about voting machines; lobbying; self-reliance; importance of local action; concentration of power in the hands of the elites (a bit of difference re: who is really holding the power, with the Tea Party focused on government and Occupy on big business, but the identification of lobbying as an issues offers an open window into a deeper discussion; size of the military and our aggressive global orientation (this was a surprise to me for Tea Partiers).”

An hour later I received the following article from Lance Bisaccia:

Tea party, Occupy supporters find they have many similarities

Chuck Spinney

Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.

Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012

The Guardian’s recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.

Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It’s about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.

Read full story.

See Also:

Open Source Agency: Executive Access Point

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust