Social Source

Kaliya Hamlin, a friend of mine from various converenences, is involved in the planning/convening of an open space conference in Vancouver about single sign on, identity related issues. What do I mean by that? Well, I think Kaliya can explain it better. I agree with her that it is important for folks from our sector (social source, progressive technology) to be in on these discussions. The identity layer will really propell our experience of the internet to the next level.

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Kent Bye just posted his vloggercon presentation which includes a demo of his extremely novel "EchoChamber Project" -- "an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq..." Kent is developing a Drupal-based collaborative editing approach that will allow the greater community to share video resources and contribute their distinct voices and perspectives. With so many alternatives to state-run media, perhaps we'll see if Stephen Colbert is right when he stated at the recent White House Press Club Dinner: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."

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William Greider argues in The Nation this week that the reigning political ideology has died, that the sea change is already upon us for a complete shift of the political landscape -- a chance that will be squandered if Democrats revert to giving in to corporatist expediencies. Progressives need a solid plan now, or else. See The Future is Now Some tidbits: "The economy exists to support society and people, not the other way around. Only government can liberate them from the harsh rule of the marketplace, the demands imposed by capital and corporations that stunt or stymie the full pursuit of life and liberty in this complex industrial society. This very wealthy country has the capacity to insure that all citizens, regardless of status or skills, have the essential needs to pursue secure, self-directed lives. This starts with the right to health, work, livable incomes and open-ended education, and to participate meaningfully in the decisions that govern their lives. The marketplace has no interest in providing these. It is actively destroying them.

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Gunner of Aspiration Tech, founder of Penguin Day and co-creator of SpeedGeeking shows us how it is done!

I have watched in great sadness as well as some very real fear for my profession as I've seen software - and worse: process - patents gain hold in this country driven by forces of great wealth and power aimed at maintaining their wealth and power at the cost of innovation. I was in the software labs of the late '70s when things like object oriented programming, bitmapped displays, email, and modern operating system theory were being developed and nothing was even copyrighted. There was great excitement as people built on each other's work, creating new concepts - like inter-process communication (IPC as it was known) that are now mainstays of every computer and network in existence (even your cell phone has IPC in it, but it's so taken for granted these days that few even know about the great efforts that went into the creation of shared memory and socket-based communication systems).

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From the New York Times: The United States has spent about $1.6 billion on [port] security since Sept. 11, but only about a third of the 600 monitors needed nationwide have been installed, so only about 37 percent of shipped goods are checked for a dirty bomb or other nuclear device. The Coast Guard has estimated that it would cost about $7 billion to equip ports in the United States to comply with security standards.

Overall, the contents of only 5.6 percent of containers headed into the United States are checked by the gamma-ray machines or manual inspections, customs officials said. That leaves about 940,000 containers that are not inspected before they are driven out of the American ports.

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Every few days, or at least once a week, I scroll through my World Changing feed and read a few articles, forward them to a few friends, maybe blog one. Today I am going to blog a few, because there are a bunch stored up. So here they are: Alex Steffen rights about Cameron Sinclaire's Ted Prize Wish to create an open source design resource: collaborative solution-seeking is not only our best hope for solving the most profound problems facing our planet, it is our only hope.

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Way back at BarCamp NYC Chris Messina mentioned a paper called, An Economy for Giving Everything Away. It is not the most gripping read (and perhaps that is why it has taken me a while to actually mention it... I have picked it up and put it down a few times in the last 2 weeks) but it raises interesting ideas that apply to the concept of open source, and non-competition in open source markets.

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