We had an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day, about the lack of attention given by the media to lesser-known election candidates. Partially aside, it was the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see for a while — a lively backchannel discussion about how local politics news is covered — and I hope [...]
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blogging,
conversation,
elections,
ideas,
journalism,
leadership,
linking,
politics,
reporting,
social media,
twitter
The whole process relies on failure. People have to be willing to accept failure and admit to mistakes, or the process won’t work properly. If we artificially hide information to deny failures — whether it’s done in the name of positive thinking or is simply a manifestation of anti-social self-interest — then the process becomes [...]
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conversation,
decisions,
failure,
fallibility,
open government,
open society,
openness,
process
Steven Johnson has an excellent column in the New York Times, on the iPhone and the mixed merits of open and closed platforms. He begins with a reference to Jonathan Zittrain’s work on “generativity,” (familiar to readers of this blog) i.e. “the ability of a self-contained system to provide an independent ability to create, generate [...]
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apple,
conversation,
craftsmanship,
criticism,
dialog,
ethics,
generativity,
innovation,
ipad,
iphone,
jonathan zittrain,
love of learning,
markets,
openness
A few of us travelled from London to a ChangeCamp event in Toronto Tuesday night to help design a civic engagement toolkit: We see the municipal elections in 2010 as an excuse to gather people together to have real dialogues about the future of our communities. We believe that open source approaches can enable those conversations [...]
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change,
changecamp,
co-creation,
collaboration,
collaborative democracy,
conversation,
democracy,
ldnbeta,
participation,
politics,
rhetoric
Part of a new series I’m starting to explore social, creative, and economic opportunities specific to London Ontario. Recently I posted about the benefits of educating citizens to think like journalists. Since then I found a lot of great examples of a collaborative approach to journalism — not just between professionals and amateurs, but between [...]
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cities,
collaboration,
conversation,
cooperation,
journalism,
news,
opportunity,
organizations,
social media,
web
I’ve sort of been on vacation so I’m a little late with this. Here’s Paul Romer making his case for charter cities: The TED Blog (via Design Thinking) conveys the gist better than I possibly could. It’s about making ways to change the rules: China, he says, demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of working with rules. [...]
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charter cities,
cities,
conversation,
democracy,
design thinking,
ideas,
libertarianism,
paul romer,
rules
by OpenConceptual on 07-04-2009
in reading
Read Carlin Romano’s piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Obama, Philosopher in Chief” (via aldaily). The article includes a number of useful references for further study (if you haven’t read them already). Adding to Obama’s speech in Cairo (as well as at Buchenwald and Omaha Beach), here are some key books mentioned: Kwame Anthony Appiah, [...]
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barack obama,
books,
conversation,
cosmopolitanism,
dialog,
leadership,
openness,
philosophy,
politics,
pragmatism
Whenever I do a ‘humour’ post like my last one I worry for a moment about whether people will continue to take me seriously. Usually I overcome those reservations with the thought that anyone who would dismiss me for being funny (I mean, for trying to be funny) aren’t the people I’d appeal to anyways. [...]
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conversation,
creativity,
humour
by Brian on 12-26-2008
in civics
That’s my proverbial t-shirt slogan for the new year. It’s a prediction for what 2009 will represent in historical terms, as well as a personal mantra. As a prediction it’s by no means original, but I think most people don’t appreciate either the tremendous volume of changes we’re about to experience or how the changes will become manifest. We might say something [...]
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2009,
change,
conversation,
friendship,
intp,
new year's resolutions,
personality,
socializing,
society
Remixing the Generation M Manifesto
by OpenConceptual on 07-11-2009
in commentary
David Eaves did something awesome. I didn’t clue into this possibility when I blogged about Umair Haque’s Generation M Manifesto. He literally remixed and edited it. I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree [...]
Tagged as: conversation, david eaves, dialog, familiarity, generation m, manifestos, orientation, remix, thinking alive, umair haque