Clay Shriky on a new form of democracy

If you don't know Clay Shriky, this is a good introduction to him.  He is explaining how open source systems could be used in a democracy.

Vancouver police and ICA finally catch suspect #1 in riots

http://www.theprovince.com/sports/Stanley+Riot+Most+elusive+suspect+finally+arrested/7304274/story.html

"After a cross-country hunt, cops arrested their “most-elusive” Stanley Cup riot suspect, found working at a Saskatchewan potash mine.
Clad in Canucks garb on June 15, 2011, the suspect was labelled by the Integrated Riot Investigation Team as IRIT No. 1. His image was the first posted on a website used to identify alleged rioters.
Still unable to identify this suspect at the first-year anniversary of the riot in June, IRIT re-posted the suspect’s image on a top-10 wanted poster.
And Wednesday — after a search involving officers in Manitoba, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan — Jonathan Stephen Mahoney finally arrived back in B.C. to face justice."

You may remember after the riots that the Vancouver police asked help from the public to identify those who participated in the riots that destroyed a lot of property and caused injuries.  The public responded massively by sending in photos and video they had taken on cell phones and other devices.  Other publics then helped identify people from the photos posted on the police web site.  Dozens of arrests followed, thanks to simple cooperation between the police and the community over the internet.

Plumbing Collective Action

http://hosted2.ap.org/PAHAZ/5715a04f327d44b9b9ab039463c2d9db/Article_2012-09-22-Zimbabwe-Water%20Crisis/id-c1c120aa070d4045a5828ab5d235033c

"Bulawayo City Council has asked its more than 1 million residents to flush their toilets simultaneously at 7:30 p.m. when water supplies are restored. City officials say "synchronized flushing" is needed to clear waste that would have accumulated in sanitary facilities which will have been affected by days of water outages.

Bulawayo's two main supply dams have been drying up because of drought conditions prevailing in the arid, southwestern part of Zimbabwe, raising fears of worsening water shortages before the rainy season starts in November.

Synchronized flushing was first introduced to Bulawayo two decades ago at the height of a drought that ravaged the southern African nation.

Residents told The Associated Press late Saturday that they weren't "aware" of the new system the city council was proposing. They said the whole issue wasn't properly communicated to them.

Old water pipes have not been replaced in years which saw world record inflation before the formation of a coalition government between longtime President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai."

I guess this doesn't have anything to do with the Internet, unless they were emailing people with a request to flush.  But this otherwise fits the pattern of ICA; a simple project a mass of people do together, and when the project is done, that's it.  

Is the Arab Spring dead?

http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/09/07/13686562-the-arab-spring-is-dead-and-syria-is-writing-its-obituary?lite

"Well, Syria is likely to become an even bigger battleground for a proxy war between Hezbollah, Sunni rebels, government troops, Iran and al-Qaida. And once Syria collapses – or even before – Lebanon could ignite as well.
My Iraqi friend was right. The Arab Spring no longer exists.  "

This is a really pessimistic piece saying basically that wars will consume any peaceful protests, so just give up, all you people who think you can change your government.

Yet, peaceful protesters DID change their governments.  So I'm not quite sure why the author insists that we need only think about war now.  This seems amazingly pessimistic after what happened in Egypt, Tunisia, and elsewhere.  Just give up on collective action that kicked out a dictator and brought the first elections EVER to Egypt?  I don't think so.  I'm more optimistic than that.

ICA used for safety concerns in Georgia

http://techpresident.com/news/wegov/22789/georgias-troubled-border-region-text-messaging-fostering-community-safety

"In Georgia, Elva is being used to collect and share information about daily life in nearly two dozen border villages that participate in a 'Community Safety Network' developed by Saferworld. They are focused on such specific topics as shootings by troops or border police, the presence of armed groups, detentions of people for accidental or deliberate border crossings, and acts of physical violence, along with more subjective measures of safety and security. The information collected can be quite granular, as in tracking how often security providers and human rights monitors visit each village and whether or not those visits include speaking to local residents or not. 'People in these communities don't have access to the internet,' says Jonne Catshoek, Elva's project manager. So, in each village, a volunteer community representative has been recruited to respond to a pre-agreed weekly questionnaire via SMS. Each response to a question is coded with a different letter, and reps simply send one text message combining all those letters to a short code to send in their reports, which go straight from the mobile company via VPN to Elva's servers. Below is a sample page from the weekly questionnaire, along with an example of what a summary text message might read. It's an ingenious solution to an ordinarily complex data-gathering problem."

This is a great example of ICA and crowdsourcing being used to a good purpose.  A simple concept that requires little from each individual but collectively produces a useful tool for the whole community.

Will Diaspora ever beat out Facebook?

http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/2012/08/27/announcement-diaspora-will-now-be-a-community-project.html

"Diaspora has grown into something more than just a project four guys started in their office at school. It is bigger than any one of us, the money we raised, or the code we have written. It has developed into something that people all over the world care about and are inspired by. We think the time is right to reflect this reality, and put our code where our hearts lie.
Today, we are giving control of Diaspora to the community."

It will be interesting to see how an originally small group effort gets turned into a crowd-sourced effort.  I look forward to the day that Diaspora replaced Facebook.

does Internet free speech require a minimum amount of critical evaluation to work properly?

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-17/india-bans-bulk-texts-in-attempt-to-stanch-fear-migrant-exodus

"The government banned bulk phone messaging for 15 days, Home Secretary R.K. Singh told reporters in New Delhi yesterday. Ninong Ering, a ruling Congress party lawmaker from the state of Arunachal Pradesh, said in parliament yesterday that about 20,000 people had fled cities including Mumbai, Bangalore and Pune, and demanded action against those spreading rumors."

So maybe this was something that was taken for granted. One thing I noticed about Anonymous is that they critically evaluated most everything, and even tended toward "that's bullshit" even before evaluating things.  But perhaps there are some societies or cultures where critical thinking is not ingrained enough to reject common rumors online.  Just because someone says something on the Internet, it shouldn't be taken as truth immediately, just the same as in real life.  It seems to be a common problem among human beings.  Even on www.4chan.org's /b/ channel, this warning is needed; "The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."

Video activists change the course of revolution

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/syria-video-activists-media-war?CMP=twt_gu


"Across Syria hundreds of video activists – most of them young, male, and technologically savvy – have joined the revolution against the Syrian government. 'The regime is fighting the people in two ways. One is with the army. The other is with the media,' Yahya Abdulrahman, a physics student from Aleppo University explained.
The 21-year-old, who is from Aldana, north of Aleppo, added: 'There are parts of the Free Syrian Army that are fighting the regime. But there are other parts fighting the regime's hackers.' Aldana is without an internet connection, so Abdulrahman, also a video activist, typically gives his Nokia memory card to Mohammad to upload.
Abdulrahman took his first video of a demo on Aleppo University's science campus. He said he got the job because he was tall and good at running. During his second assignment, however, the security forces caught and arrested all of the students involved. 'I was shooting video. Five guys grabbed me," he recalled.'"

When the government says such and such is happening, and the people upload videos showing that's just a big fat lie, it deflates the mighty power of government propaganda instantly.  A few guys with cameras and Internet access can overcome an entire department of trained propagandists.

Should ICA activitists be paid?

I'm going to talk off the top of my head here about an idea that combines two trends I see. One is that jobs are being taken away by technology and people doing things much more cheaply or even free.  The other is that ICA creates amazing, useful product, but nobody gets compensated for making it.

So, is there some way for ICA activists to get compensated for their work, even when they do it voluntarily despite no compensation?  It's an question I have no answer for, but I think it may point to a monumental change in our economic system.  If people are doing things they like and want to do, and this activity enhances society, are these not the people we want to support?  If jobs are becoming scarce because of technological changes, isn't there some way to compensate people who are helping society, rather than forcing them into some job where they're uncomfortable and less committed?

Like I say, this is just a synapse going off in my head. I don't know where to go with it yet.

The media helps spread the word

ICA is powerful and all that, but boy can the media sure help.  My site on Lisa McPherson, who died at the hands of Scientology, generally has been getting about 75 hits per day.  After the news broke that Katie Holmes is splitting from Tom Cruise over Scientology, the hits have shot up to 4500 on the first day, and have been over 1200 per day since!  The media have stiff competition nowadays with bloggers, facebook, et al, but they can still pack a wallop.