"I am either out there, on barricades, or I am in Facebook."

http://boingboing.net/2013/12/23/euromaidan-a-facebook-revolut.html

"Now I am a rebel. Work, family, books, computer games - everything has been relegated to the backfround background. My wife supports me. Sometimes I am ready to start crying, reading a post on Facebook, and sometimes I shake with rage. I am either out there, on barricades, or I am in Facebook. It is the only news outlet I can trust. Sometimes it is nervous, sometimes depressive, or paranoid, sometimes full of romanticism, optimism, beautiful and tender stuff. Today it is angry.

It is Day 29 of #euromaidan. Imagine a medieval military camp on central square of a modern European city. It is cold, there is a central stage, there are free sandwiches and hot tea everywhere. Firewood is burning in oil barrels. It is clean and organised. Everyone is set, quiet, and free. Maidan at night.
Maidan is a Ukrainian word for square, or plaza, usually meaning the central plaza. Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnoti, where people went to prevent VFU from coming to presidency in 2004. Where people went to demand constitutional elections in 2010, when they were just about to be cancelled. So everyone knows where to go. I went, too."

   How Ukraine protests.  They seem to require a "leader" to organize on-the-spot protest tactics.  But they also simply rely on each other, for news, support, ideas.

Why did OWS choose to be leaderless? Comparing it to Civil Rights movement

http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2013/10/22/did-the-occupy-movement-reject-the-civil-rights-movement/


"Roughly speaking, the CRM deployed 'big organizations' in the pursuit of a clearly defined mission. The organizations were Black churches, political groups (e.g., the NAACP), and various labor and student groups. While there was no single leader, the CRM clearly has a leadership class that set the agenda and worked in a fairly top-down manner. It was also highly bureaucratic in that that they set a vast apparatus (the SCLC) to collect funds, conduct litigation, and distribute resources.
In contrast Occupy works on an explicitly decentralized plan. The movement strives to have a horizontal structure and leadership, in the traditional sense, is discouraged. There is no analog to the NAACP or CORE. It also has a very vague set of goals, at least in comparison to the CRM’s demands for voting rights and equality in housing and education."

I tried to deal with this regarding Anonymous' Project Chanology against Scientology in 2008.  They also did not allow "leader fagging."  One reason is that no one should receive more credit than any other person for the action, since it is a group action.  Another is that there is simply less need for designated leaders, since communication is so much simpler and cheaper now.  So I wouldn't say OWS rejected a method of organizing. I would say they utilized tools unavailable to the Civil Rights movement that made a leadership structure mute.

Crowd sourcing your civic duty

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theresa-bradley/el-hacker-civico-how-civi_b_4334088.html

"'We didn't just 'angry tweet,' we actually did something,' Soto, a 28-year-old IT engineer and social entrepreneur, said at the time.' Citizens need to understand democracy beyond voting every few years, and government needs to understand that we're willing to participate.'
Seven months later, Mexico's president appears to have heard them, hiring Soto and nine others to launch one of the world's first federal civic innovation offices, part of a broader national digital agenda to be formally unveiled today [Monday, 11/25, 1PM ET]. Building on a model pioneered in a handful of U.S. cities since 2010, Mexico's civic innovation team aims to integrate so-called 'civic hackers' with policy experts already inside government -- to not only build better technology, but to seed a more tech-minded approach to problem-solving across federal processes and policy. What began as outside activism is slowly starting to creep into government."

Making your tax dollars go further, one hack at a time.

collective action helps Philippines typhoon survivors

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/11/digital-drive-aids-philippines-relief-2013111554736683591.html

"Through a web-based platform, interactive maps created at headquarters are shared with local chapters who can then download the maps, turn layers of data on/off, and add additional data to tailor maps to their own needs.
'The American Red Cross has been utilising mobile data collection domestically in medium-scale disasters since 2007,' Banick said.
'Equipping and training field staff and volunteers to use GPS-enabled devices with pre-loaded damage assessment survey questions has enabled the production of digital maps that display survey results and photos of damaged areas.
'These maps can be updated in real-time as assessments are ongoing.'"

Volunteers, NGO's, and governmental bodies can work together to create helpful maps to show where help is needed most.  This saves on effort and helps with overall understanding of the facts on the ground.  Win-win for everybody!

cities get help from techie citizens

http://www.theguardian.com/local-government-network/2013/oct/01/cities-tech-us

"Local authorities in the United States can now engage with their communities in two-way dialogues achievable using smartphones, tablets, thanks to professionals embracing new managment models that focus on service delivery.
Thanks to well-developed GIS mapping systems, smartphones and tablets are helping enhance service delivery by allowing real time and location reporting of issues and service requests. For example, when citizens in Asheville, North Carolina want to report a pothole, streetlight failure or other problem, they can do so using a phone app developed for their community. The city of Philadelphia uses an app that lets people directly communicate their concerns and requests via social media.
In Utah, the city of Ogden has taken a different path with its smartphone app. The iOgden app also allows users to find local businesses and places of interest directly through their phone. By building features such as "eat here and shop here" into its app, the city has created a one-stop information destination for both residents and visitors."

Just make citizen input a little easier, and voila!  Citizens help out their own town.

Oakland California tries out direct democracy

http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget

They're gonna give direct democracy a try.

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf

What is the Community Democracy Project's plan? A participatory budgeting initiative to amend the city charter, which would go on the city ballot for the Nov 2014 election. It would create a direct democratic process for Oakland voters to be directly engaged in decisions around the budget. The platform for decisions and organizing is called the Neighborhood Assembly, which is a forum for education and engagement with the issues. It also allows residents and community organizations to interface with city staff and department representatives.
Residents 16 years and older that have attended at least one Neighborhood Assembly meeting can vote on the budget for allocation of general funds to each city department as a percentage. This will help get young adults engaged in decisions that affect them like parks, police, and after school programs. City Wide Committees, made up of very interested residents, would be established to deal with specific issues and to create proposals for spending discretionary funds that would also be voted on by city residents.
- See more at: http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget#sthash.HX2wcbuX.dpuf

Ok, so maybe it's not PURELY leaderless...""

http://www.develop-online.net/news/44746/Valves-perfect-hiring-hierarchy-has-hidden-management-clique-like-High-School

"Developers were originally left scratching their heads when the hugely-respected game studio went through a round of redundancies in February. It was seemingly uncharacteristic as not only did it drop important staff members, including Ellsworth and Steam chief Jason Holtman - but the business is built to value and support all developers thanks to a flat management structure.
It even has a lengthy management handbook that explains how this radical operation uses peer review and colleague ratings to hire and fire individuals.
It was this mechanism which Ellsworth battled against to hire her own team - and which she eventually fell foul of.
Her frank account of what happened - detailing the tough side of Valve's idealised structure, how it betrayed her, and why its hiring process are flawed - is 90 minutes long and well worth a watch if you have the time, especially as it details how Ellsworth managed to retail ownership of the hardware ideas she dreamt up for Valve - you can view the first part here."

I wrote about Valve's non-hierarchical structure before, but here is an insider's look at who actually has the power in the company.  But I would point out that this is human nature. People have different personalities, including how expressive and aggressive they are.  OWS tried to make it easy for even shy people to have input, but still human nature puts the shy and quiet people in the back as far as management goes.  Democracy tries to get around that by giving every person an equal vote.  But if you have a management structure where everyone is supposed to be "equal" then don't expect that everyone will have the same amount of input, just because people are people and differences will show.

Brazil protests; the government actually listens!

https://www.adbusters.org/blogs/manuel-castells-brazil.html

"ISTOÉ – President Dilma was right to speak to the nation on TV, convene meetings with governors, mayors and protesters to propose a deal?

Manuel Castells – Yes, she is the first world leader to watch and to listen to the demands of people in the streets. She showed that she is a true democrat, but she is being stabbed in the back by traditional politicians. José Serra’s Declarations (PSDB former governor criticized the initiatives announced by the president) are typical of the lack of accountability of politicians and misunderstanding the right people to decide. The political positions are not owned by politicians. They are paid by the citizens who elect them. And citizens will remember who said what in this crisis when the election comes.ISTOÉ – How to compare with the Brazilian movement that occurred in the rest of the world?Manuel Castells – There are million people protesting like that for weeks and months in countries around the world. In the United States, for example, over a thousand cities were occupied between September 2011 and March 2012. The difference is that Brazil has a democratic president Dilma Rousseff and as a handful of truly democratic politicians such as Marina Silva, is accepting the right of citizens to express themselves outside the bureaucratic controlled channels. The true meaning of the Brazilian movement is: it shows there still hope to reconnect citizens and institutions, if there is goodwill on both sides."

Now there's an idea. When millions of your citizens take to the streets, you might want to converse with them and see what the problem is rather than depleting your tear gas stocks and ripping up tents.

Ok, you have your revolution. Now what?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/opinion/global/roger-cohen-from-no-to-go.html?_r=1&

"These movements have erupted in two of the major emergent powers of the 21st century where economies have been growing fast. I do not think this is a coincidence. Ordinary Turks and Brazilians, particularly young people, are reacting to a feeling of global forces beyond their control; they are reminding leaders swept up in boom times of the need for consultation and accountability; they are telling the hyper-connected financiers who have profited most that social justice — society itself — matters. By gathering, by occupying, they are asserting a shared humanity against atomizing development and the globalized shopping mall.

Can they get from 'No' to 'Go'? It will take organization on a scale not yet seen, decisions on objectives and, yes, leaders. But I do not see it all ending in pizza. From Tunis to Istanbul, from Cairo to São Paulo, something essential has already happened. Fear has fallen. That in itself is a game-changer." 

I agree that the protests are good at saying what is wrong, but not good at providing a fix. OWS tried to correct that by having General Assemblies to find solutions.  But that is the clunkiest method ever devised for trying to move forward.  

But I do believe there are solutions. Our current federal legislative system has frozen.  But local and regional systems are still viable.  It may take more local approaches to fix things as well as can be on that level first, while working on a solution for federal gridlock.

Protesters learn from others around the world

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/06/18/193101142/with-inspiration-from-turkey-brazil-discovers-mass-protests

"Tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets across the country Monday night, and more demonstrations are slated for the coming week. Brazil doesn't have a history of this kind of mass dissent, but it seems to be catching on very quickly.
'The social movements in the world are learning from each other,' said Marco Antônio Carvalho Teixeira, a professor at Fundacao Getulio Vargas in Sao Paulo. 'This is a brand new way of protesting in Brazil.'
The Brazilian protesters have a lot in common with their Turkish counterparts:"

That's one thing the Internet provides; instant information about protests elsewhere.

Please, Turkey, learn the LESSONS of OWS, don't just copy

http://roarmag.org/2013/06/assemblies-emerging-in-turkey-a-lesson-in-democracy/

"So what about the popular assemblies in Syntagma Square, Puerta del Sol and Zuccotti Park? Was that real democracy? When we asked Glezos, he looked at us with an amused smile on his face, and — to our great surprise — just said: 'No. This is not democracy. How can a few thousand people assembled in a square claim to speak on behalf of the millions that live in the region? This is not democracy — it’s a lesson in democracy. If this movement wants to survive, its direct democratic models will need to spread to the neighborhoods and to the working places. Only then will we start seeing the emergence of a genuinely democratic society.'”

I hope that Turks learn from OWS, but that they don't assume OWS was successful.  It was to me a movement that overextended itself horribly.  I hope Tukey will learn how to scale direct democracy, and not waste time trying to accommodate every single person instead of trying to actually accomplish something.

Social media and Gezi Park protests

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/june/turkey-qna-alemdaroglu-061313.html

"Is social media, then, also having a similar impact?
Yes. Similar to the Arab Spring, the role of social media is undeniable in the uprising in Turkey. I would not go as far as to say this is a social media revolution, as some have redundantly argued about Tahrir. But clearly, protestors in Turkey would not have been able to organize and make themselves heard this well and be able to undo the silence of Turkish media channels and their pro-government broadcasting, if they did not have access to social media."

I saw a slick video made by the protesters very similar to Anonymous videos; lots of fun, singing, dancing, but still determined to make their point.  I saw in photos similarities to Occupy Wall St.  They even had a nice library set up, that the cops came and destroyed.  Another thing about social media is protesters around the world can share ideas and methods.

PRISM

Anonymous influences the world

http://videogaleri.gazetevatan.com/21008_9_Everyday-Im-Capuling.html

http://webtv.hurriyet.com.tr/2/50372/23438530/1/thy-hosteslerinden-muthis-eylem.aspx

If you think Anonymous hasn't had an effect on protests since they took on Scientology, watch the above.

How Turkish protesters are using the Internet

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/10098353/Turkey-protests-how-activists-stay-one-step-ahead-with-social-media.html

"Protesters became more careful about communicating information privately after they realised police knew where they were, tracking public posts on social media. 'We were giving out information to police without realising,' Damla said.
After that, links and groups visible only to each other became the way they communicated their location or movements, though they were happy to denounce Erdogan's government and upload photos of alleged police brutality on Twitter or Tumblr.
The use of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which hide a user's location and allow them to view the internet undetected, has also seen a sharp increase in recent days.
One app, Hotspot Shield, jumped into the Apple App Store's top five in Turkey yesterday, a rise of 120,000 new users in a week, as the population seeks to keep mobile communications channels open in anticipation of further crackdowns and arrests"

This is a great explanation of how protesters are using the net.  Useful reading for the future.

Social media fueled protests

http://dmlcentral.net/blog/zeynep-tufekci/networked-politics-tahrir-taksim-there-social-media-fueled-protest-style

"There are also other interesting political commonalities to these movements, including their use of durable presence in public space as a form of protest, anti-authoritarianism as a uniting ideology, an '“anti-politica'” stance among participants, the participation and key role played by 'lumpen' elements such as soccer fans, the importance of anger towards cronyism, police repression as a spark and uniting theme, to name a few. Hence, this post is an attempt to take a bite out of a complex topic with a special focus on social-media and organizational styles of networked movements:"

And here are her 8 points:

1. lack of organized/institutional leadership
2. organized around a "no" not a "go"
3. a feeling of lack of institutional outlet
4. non-activist participation
5. external attention
6. social media as structuring the narrative
7. breaking of pluralistic ignorance and altering collective action dynamics
8. not easily steerable towards complex, strategic political action

A good read.

Social media is evil! says Turkish leader

 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/its-not-the-turkish-spring--just-twitter-says-prime-minister-erdogan-after-four-days-of-rioting-in-istanbul-and-beyond-8641777.html

"Erdogan also blamed Twitter for spreading unrest: 'There is now a scourge that is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.'”

Of course, maybe instead the things people are saying on twitter are actual sentiments.  Maybe they are statements of Turkish citizens expressing their views of their government.  And maybe they shouldn't be dismissed by someone who should be listening to the citizens.

Istanbul residents try to save their park

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2013/05/violence-tear-gas-greet-protests-save-one-last-public-parks-istanbul/65767/

"ISTANBUL — At midnight on Thursday, one of the few remaining parks in the center of this city was filled with people singing, dancing, talking, giving speeches, and preparing to camp out. Before dawn this morning, it was violently cleared by armored police spraying tear gas — a cycle that's repeated itself over the past few days as protesters seek to halt the demolition of the park and the building of a shopping mall there."

The protest has built largely from social media interaction.  And it's apparently still growing.

Open Source software catching on with government

http://www.futuregov.asia/articles/2013/apr/29/open-source-default/

"He noted that for the past couple of years, Open Source software has been helping public sector organisations become more innovative, more agile and more cost-effective by building on the collaborative efforts of Open Source communities.
The National Security Agency, for example, has used open source to reduce the cost of its high-security systems to drive better security. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a relatively new agency — has even gone as far as being ‘Open Source by default’, by releasing everything it does to the community."

People with like interests creating software that is better than the commercial variety.  The world is changing.

crowdsourcing; ya gotta do it right!

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/reddit-tsarnaev-marathon-bombers-wisdom-of-crowds.html?currentPage=all

"That proposition may be true. But Reddit’s failure isn’t evidence for it. To begin with, it’s a bit facile to frame this story as a competition between'the crowd' and 'the experts,' since the official investigation wasn’t relying on a couple of experts, but rather had its own crowd at work, one made up, in Bilton’s words, of 'thousands of local and federal officials.' More important is that the Redditors faced a simple, but insuperable, obstacle when it came to identifying the Tsarnaevs, namely that the two brothers were not, as far as I can tell, in any of the photographs that were widely available before Thursday morning. The footage that convinced investigators that the Tsarnaevs were prime suspects was the footage from the Lord & Taylor surveillance cameras, which hadn’t (and still hasn’t) been released to the public. This is an obvious point, but one that’s been overlooked: Reddit had no real chance of identifying the right suspects because it didn’t have access to the information that mattered."

There are many good points in this article. It's not that Redditors shouldn't have been crowdsourcing looking for the bombers, it's that they went about it in a haphazard way.  Crowdsourcing requires a bit of organizing to get things right.

crowd sourced military tank

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/04/darpa-fang-winner/

"The Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers have awarded $1 million to a team of designers who they believe have built an innovative drivetrain for a Marine swimming tank. The first Darpa FANG challenge has a winner.
The three-person team that won convinced Darpa that their design could outperform Defense Department requirements for the Marines’ future Amphibious Combat Vehicle — which, as it happens, just got an infusion of research and development cash in the new Pentagon budget. But Darpa didn’t only want to demonstrate that it could design a better swimming tank to take Marines from ship to shore in a combat zone. It wanted to demonstrate that the wisdom of crowds can boost innovation for major defense hardware."

The Wisdom of Crowds is catching on.

Anonymous' reputation has taken a turn for the better

http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/anonymous-digital-culture-protest

"Anonymous' successful leveraging of the press and social media helped them identify the four rapists in just a few hours, which they then threatened to disclose unless their demands were met. No hacking was involved as this time, Anonymous was apparently a friendly tip line.
They were able to get this information so quickly, wrote an Anon on Pastebin, because 'dozens of emails were sent to us by kids and adults alike, most of whom had personal relationships with the alleged rapists. Many recalled public confessions made blatantly by these boys in public where they detailed the rape of an inebriated 15-year-old girl.' Why this same information was not sent to the police at the time of the investigation over a year ago is not apparent, though Anonymous hinted it sent this information to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in a more recent release.
Despite a Canadian minister previously telling the media the case was closed and would not be reopened, by Thursday the tune had changed, proving the collective's efforts were not in vain. In addition to submitting new evidence to the RCMP and putting pressure on the Canadian Department of Justice, Anonymous organised a rally outside the Halifax police department on Sunday. Roughly 100 people attended, including Parsons' mother. Speaking on her behalf as her partner, Jason Barnes told Canada's Herald News in an interview, 'Leah's been… very happy with the things that Anonymous has done for us and really stepped forward and made this a large enough issue to make people think, and see it.' Out of all the operations recently carried out by Anonymous, #OpJustice4Rehtaeh has had an incredibly high 'effect real change' rate of just a few days."

Anonymous has become a sort of label put on non-hierarchical activism by some people to help brand what they are doing.  It's a good brand.

What has Anonymous been doing lately?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/anonymous-digital-culture-protest

"Anonymous' core strength lies in its PR tactics, not its boots-on-the-ground protests or actual hacking skills. Besides #OpJustice4Rehtaeh, in the last week Anonymous attacked North Korean social media accounts, then Israeli websites in solidarity with the Palestinians. While both operations apparently caused no substantial impact (North Korea is still a dictatorship, and Israel hasn't changed its stance on Palestine), they were both highly publicised, which is enough of a win for the group now primarily concerned with mobilising activists through the spread of information. If fact, Anonymous has been making headlines on an almost weekly basis for over a year now.
Australian security expert Stilgherrian calls this adoption of multiple causes, going beyond Anonymous's initial defence of internet freedoms, as proof they have become the 'Hello Kitty of activism,' but Coleman likens Anonymous's current, accepting form to something more organic: a fungus. "They refuse to die and they seem to bud in new places and situations," she explains. 'They spore and spread' around the globe because clicktivism is easy and fitting with our already established digital habits."

Anonymous still evolving.

Micromapping; a tool to crowdsource catastrophes

http://irevolution.net/2013/04/13/micromappers-for-digital-disaster-response/

"For example, say an earthquake strikes Mexico City. We upload disaster tweets with links to the Translate App. Volunteer translators only translate tweets with location information. These get automatically pushed to the Assess App where digital volunteers tag tweets that point to relevant images/videos. They also rate the level of damage in each. (On a side note, my colleagues and I at QCRI are also developing a crawler that will automatically identify whether links posted on twitter actually point to images/videos). Assessed  tweets are then pushed in real-time to the Locate App for geo-referencing. The resulting tweets are subsequently published to a live map where the underlying data can also be downloaded.  Both the map & data download feature can be password protected."

Another tool for people to work together online to make the world a better place.

Is "socialstructing" our future?

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/09/marina-gorbis-bio-hackers-cr.html

"We are moving away from the dominance of the depersonalized world of institutional production and creating a new economy around social connections and social rewards—a process I call socialstructing. Others have referred to this model of production as social, commons-based, or peer-to-peer. Not only is this new social economy bringing with it an unprecedented level of familiarity and connectedness to both our global and our local economic exchanges, but it is also changing every domain of our lives, from finance to education and health. It is rapidly ushering in a vast array of new opportunities for us to pursue our passions, create new types of businesses and charitable organizations, redefine the nature of work, and address a wide range of problems that the prevailing formal economy has neglected, if not caused."

The Internet makes socialization so much easier and quicker that it has to have a profound effect on society in general. This may be the first book that tries to deal with that.

causes.com - tools for collective action

http://www.causes.com/

"Support for every cause

We’re here to back you up, 24/7. Head to our Help Desk for FAQs and a Getting Started guide, or check out our blog for success stories and tips on running campaigns."

looks useful.

How the people in Nairobi are taking charge

http://www.mapkibera.org/blog/2013/03/21/how-slum-communities-came-together-to-help-prevent-election-violence/

"We believe that we have the responsibility to share with Kenyans and the world what is happening in some of the most misunderstood, often mis-reported and largely marginalized places in the country – the urban slums of Nairobi. We strongly believe that people have a right to speak for themselves and to write their own stories. Ordinary citizen reporters empowered with mapping skills navigate their neighborhoods to bring news and stories of happenings within the slums".

This site shows several ways the citizens of a locality are taking it upon themselves to make their lives better.  

Github spread open source

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/03/github/

"As people who were once just users become producers, they’re re-shaping the culture of open source. GitHub, I believe, is doing to open source what the internet did to the publishing industry: It’s creating a culture gap between the previous, big-project generation of open source and a newer, more amateurized generation of open source today."

"This workflow is very empowering: It encourages individuals to fix things and own those fixes just as much as they own the projects they start. It also gives all users an identity in the new open source culture; GitHub is actually the number-one identity provider for peer-based production over the internet in more than just code."

I'll have to keep up with Github!  Another tool for making collaboration easier.

Can leaderless company framework lead to success?

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/13/03/03/2144241/can-valves-bossless-company-model-work-elsewhere

I posted about Valve before, but here's another look at their leaderless organizational system.

Operation Sandy and Open Source

http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/the-means-of-production-how-free-software-organized-occupy-sandy/

" How do we out-compete the government using open-source tools? I can tell you that with Occupy Sandy we already did it. We had a better system up within a month — for managing work orders, inventory, requests, workflows. What if we had had that during the occupation? How much easier would life have been for managing the Zuccotti Park experience if there had been people trained in such a system? We’d have had vehicles, warehouses and kitchens all coordinated in a way that was sustainable and easy to plug into. If we can do that, it’ll become competition between us and other systems. Then we’re on the path to the type of changes that people in the open-source world realize is coming."

Another piece of the puzzle.

Hackers; the new Civil Libertarians?

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510641/geeks-are-the-new-guardians-of-our-civil-liberties/

"A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are building one of the most vibrant civil liberties movements we’ve ever seen. It is a culture committed to freeing information, insisting on privacy, and fighting censorship, which in turn propels wide-ranging political activity. In the last year alone, hackers have been behind some of the most powerful political currents out there."

Whatever Gabriella Coleman writes, I believe.

Obama promotes ICA

http://www.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2013/01/22/obama-inaugural-speech-liberal-government/1854459/



"In reference to his second-term agenda — including immigration, women's and minority rights, energy, education and, somewhat surprisingly, climate change — Obama made an aggressive defense of activist, liberal government.

While Americans have 'never relinquished our skepticism of central authority,' Obama said they also know 'that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.'"

Ok, so I lied. But he got close!  Collective action.  Nice.