Great wired article on Anonymous vs. Scientology. Occasionally hilarious with things like: “Just inside the doorway, he found church materials loaded onto a cart, which he mounted for a few seconds of simulated man-cart love before fleeing into the city’s streets.”
Seriously though, this could be a major direction for political activism – a dangerous mini-mob counteracting centralized governmental structures.
Update 9/18: recently came across CitySourced (presentation). A tool that helps people collaborate with the government. Directly related. Tim O’Reilley mentioned: Open311, FixMyStreet (in UK). I liked Kevin Rose’s response suggesting actionable items that people can take themselves.
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ORIGINAL POST
Spent several weeks ago with family… very good times. Had an interesting conversation with Garik and Lena about the state of politics in Russia, which tied in nicely with previous thoughts and discussions of government failure and how to deal with it.
The premise was that federal government is an entity that does not have serving its people as its primary goal. This means that governing structures on both the federal and local levels are inefficient and do not function as they should – meaning that they do not provide services and represent/provide for those whom they “govern”. That naturally leads to the question: if the government is not performing its function on the local level, can you enable self-governance?
Filed under Ideas, Info Management, Politics
Talking with Tianning about blogging – I bet a blogging platform (or just a plug-in) that would allow people to pay others to review and correct their posts for English could go a long way. It would work something like:
Author: I like eat food.
Author: (please edit – will pay X for corrections. Could be per-mistake model)
Editor: edits to “I like to eat food”
Author: reviews correction, accepts, money transferred to editor
This would allow for an excellent barter system since people with different languages could correct each other. It would also be a good system to throw onto the Amazon Turk.
Filed under Ideas
Idea: create a framework through which people in the developing countries could learn something and teach others. First application may be teaching/learning art-related things. However, could be applied to any field. Art may be one of the classes that would provide more of a pleasant feedback.
Purpose:
Is it really fair that people work on a per-hour basis? Having worked in a company where I have ownership, it feels like hourly compensation is a relatively poor motivator to work. Moreover, it is costly to the employer and, ultimately, might not be the best in terms of providing incentive.
So, I suggest the following, very simple alternative, which consist of:
Filed under Business
Nikita's Spot 