Public Intelligence Blog

Michel Bauwens

People are raving about this as a possible alternative command and control system for the public to use.

Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

Jeff Atwood

Coding Horror, February 5, 2013

EXTRACT:

After spending four solid years thinking of discussion as the established corrupt empire, and Stack Exchange as the scrappy rebel alliance, I began to wonder – what would it feel like to change sides? What if I became a champion of random, arbitrary discussion, of the very kind that I’d spent four years designing against and constantly lecturing users on the evil of?

I already built an X-Wing; could I build a better Tie Fighter?

Today we announce the launch of Discourse, a next-generation, 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

The goal of the company we formed, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., is exactly that – to raise the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet through seeding it with better discussion software:

• 100% open source and free to the world, now and forever.
• Feels great to use. It’s fun.
• Designed for hi-resolution tablets and advanced web browsers.
• Built in moderation and governance systems that let discussion communities protect themselves from trolls, spammers, and bad actors – even without official moderators.

Our amazingly talented team has been working on Discourse for almost a year now, and although like any open source software it’s never entirely done, we believe it is already a generation ahead of any other forum software we’ve used.

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Berto Jongman

Emergency Response Centre: for a faster and more efficient European response to disasters

“With the unfortunately increasing frequency and complexity of disasters, EU Member States need to cooperate even more closely. The new EU Emergency Response Centre provides a state of the art platform that allows them to coordinate under the most extreme circumstances, enables them to tackle these challenges even more effectively and thus helps to protect our citizens,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission.

How Estonia became E-stonia

In some countries, computer programming might be seen as the realm of the nerd

World from Berlin: A ‘Clear Defeat’ for Google

A German high court has ruled that Google must remove automatically suggested search terms if they violate a person’s privacy. Editorialists at the country’s national newspapers see a defeat for the Internet giant and a victory for privacy law.

Introducing Strongbox

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.

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Jean Lievens

Warren Karlenzig: Collective Intelligence–Cities as Global Intelligence Platform

Social media and collaborative technologies–layered with smart systems combining geo-location data with human experience–will make cities the driving sustainability force in a dawning planetary era. Cities will anticipate new risks with rapid urban systems innovation based upon crowdsourcing, virtual and physical communities, and transparent markets sensitive to full carbon and resource costs. Creatively leveraging collective intelligence for clean energy, low carbon mobility and sustainable food and water, the new urban grid will enable high local quality of life, lifelong learning and vibrant green economies.

Jean Lievens

Micro Manufacturing, Third Wave Style…Perfect for Worker Coops?

In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits

By Chris Anderson

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.

. . . . . . . .

Click on Image

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

. . . . . . . .

Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.

This story is about the next 10 years.

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Theophillis Goodyear

This is a response to Owl’s post Owl: Public Awake, Major Media Shredded — the Revolution IS Being Televised!

CNN is having ratings problems. If their subterfuge in Boston becomes common knowledge they will loose credibility and even more viewers. It would be a shot fired across the bow of every other news network. All the prominent muck-raking journals, like Mother Jones, the Nation, etc., should work together and make it happen, just like a blitz in football where everyone goes after the quarterback at once. They’re already doing it, but they need to hit CNN hard, gang up on them! It may be a long time before there’s another golden opportunity like this. CNN is down right now. With a behemoth like that, this is the best time to kick the crap out of them. And there’s no mistaking the fact that they deserve it and in fact are inviting it by their repeated breaches of journalistic ethics. If the shoe was on the other foot they would be kicking the crap out of the little guy. It goes with the territory. They knew the rules when they started playing the game. The bigger they are the harder they fall.

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Patrick Meier

Web App Tracks Breaking News Using Wikipedia Edits

A colleague of mine at Google recently shared a new and very interesting Web App that tracks breaking news events by monitoring Wikipedia edits in real-time. The App, Wikipedia Live Monitor, alerts users to breaking news based on the frequency of edits to certain articles. Almost every significant news event has a Wikipedia page that gets updated in near real-time and thus acts as a single, powerful cluster for tacking an evolving crisis.

Read full post with screen shot.

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Jean Lievens

Collaboration and Peer Governance

By Hortensia Pérez Seldner, MPA 2014

Collaboration, Peer production, Peer networks, Crowdsourcing….the more I read about these topics the more I understand the enormous opportunities for social development and governance that are already out there. But at the same time, there are some new challenges to address.

For every new concept introduced in Government 3.0 I have the same reaction. First, I am all confused about it. Second, I start to understand it, but at the same time it always looks kind of utopian or not really applicable in the government field. And finally, I find some practical examples and ideas that allow me to think that these concepts are in fact both interesting and feasible.

. . . . .

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Source

Neal Rauhauser

Exploring e-International Relations

When I was checking out the Think Tanks & Civil Societies Program I noticed e-International Relations – the world’s leading website for students of international politics. They had an About page similar to that of Wikistrat, listing all of their volunteer editors and some additional information on them.

Last night I entered most of that information into e-IR-base, a Maltego graph. Those who want to follow along can download the graph file, get the free Maltego Community Edition, and do a portion of the things I do with it. The free version has very limited access to Paterva‘s transform servers, so I will provide the necessary intermediate files.

Click on Image to Enlarge

This is a top level view of the e-IR graph. What I say next presumes some knowledge of hands on work with Maltego.

The lavender dots are Person entities – a place for a first and last name, and like every entity you can makes notes and attach files to it. The blue dots at the upper right are URL entities and they contain links to an editor’s profile on the official site. Not everyone has a profile – this seems to be for people who produce their own content as well as work as editors. The five green dots are Twitter accounts, the five blue dots with an orange dot in the middle are LinkedIn profiles and an entity for the domain itself.

Maltego provides different types of entities, but here at the start we are only using Person, Domain, URL, and Phrase. Maltego provides a way to group different types of entities using colored stars – blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. This is useful for searching and organizing tasks – if you run a transform that starts with the five Twitter accounts shown here, but gets back over a thousand responses, how do you spot your originals?

Read full post with additional graphics and links.

Tom Atlee

Dear friends,

An invitation to speak has brought me back to some roots of my work I haven’t revisited in some time – the Iroquois Confederacy and its recognition of the intimate tie between democracy and peace – collective wisdom and collective tranquility.  Peace between people requires their respectful, insight-seeking conversation.  It requires, as Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Iroquois tells us, that “we meet and just keep talking until there’s nothing left but the obvious truth.”

Lyons also notes – to us self-proclaimed modern people – that “The Earth has all the time in the world.  We don’t.”  I strongly recommend his brief, vivid and moving video:
http://vimeo.com/50460060 (note for those who have trouble with online videos: in the lower right it give the option to use Flash or HTML5 video players).

Few Americans or people in other modern “democracies” realize how much our government structures owe to the Iroquois.  We talk about ancient Greece giving us democracy.  True, ancient Athens gave us the idea of “one man one vote” when adopting laws.  But some scholars suggest that the Iroquois gave us our federal system (an alliance of free states under one greater power), the idea of “balance of powers”, and much of our sense of personal privacy and liberty from government interference, as well as the idea of taking turns while speaking in an assembly.
http://www.co-intelligence.org/CIPol_IndiansOrigDemoc.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace

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