It took me most of my young life to figure this out. After growing up as a precocious political junkie I got jaded pretty early. I grew up in a rural conservative family but somehow, deep-down I’m an urban technophile who often hopes there’s no problem that walkable neighbourhoods and Twitter hashtags can’t solve. In [...]
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Yesterday a new website launched, Action London 2010, providing Londoners what promises to be a textbook perfect case study on dos and don’ts of civic engagement in the digital age. They say (and have demonstrated they are) working to improve the site quickly, to their credit. I wasn’t going to post this but I eventually decided to lay [...]
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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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First I’m going to straight-up admit I don’t have the disposition for them. I just don’t like sitting or standing in any audience or crowd. But I have reasons as well. In a way, the bigger the crowd, the less social it becomes. Of course it’s social in a really basic way, but there isn’t [...]
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Some thoughts culminating out of the last post about how open standards emerge… a recent post by fellow Londoner Bill Wittur on some open government basics… the latest post on the Google blog defining their notion of openness… and a book I perused a couple days ago by Beth Noveck on open collaborative government. There’s no way I [...]
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I’ve been meaning to do one of these Open Yale Courses online for a while. I’d love to watch Robert Shiller’s course in financial markets (I think Shiller is great but I’m undecided how much I can really tolerate hearing about financial markets…) You can also view Paul Bloom’s introduction to psychology. I haven’t looked at many [...]
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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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