Databases vs. Documents… Diebold Decides?
Friday, February 15th, 2008Sascha Meinrath has an interesting account of the Voter experience in Maryland. He asks a very important question: since when do databases trump official documents?
Archive for the ‘social justice’ Category
Spielberg boycotts Olympics
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008“Sudan’s government bears the bulk of the responsibility for these ongoing crimes but the international community, and particularly China, should be doing more,” Spielberg said in a statement. “China’s economic, military and diplomatic ties to the government of Sudan continue to provide it with the opportunity and obligation to press for change.”
GNP: Gift National Product
Saturday, February 9th, 2008I was following a thread on Handmeon where the idea of a Gift National Product came up. A friend offered an interesting statement:
A Gift National Product would indeed be a more inspiring fiction than the conventional GNP that increases with every broken window and devastated nation.
“Washington is the party of money.”
Thursday, February 7th, 2008This was David Cay Johnston’s closing statement when interviewed on Bill Moyers’ Journal in January, 2008. 
David Cay Johnston is an investigative reporter for the New York Times and author of Free Lunch. Listening to this interview segment for the second time, I reflected upon the discipline of community informatics and the practice of civic entrepreneurship (as well as new modes of philanthropy).
If social justice is the scale with which we are to measure our effectiveness and our national character, we must not blind nor bind ourselves in a hyper-localism amounting to a head-in-the-sand response to the many policy shenanigans now written out as the law-of-the-land, or passed over - de facto - in the exercise in neglect by those who are entrusted with enforcement of the law.
The extent to which Washington has been the party of money, irrespective of the party nominally in charge, has led to a long-standing regime of laws (and enforcement) at odds with principles of sound governance. This scenario has given many a strong motivation to dismantle government. We have long been distracted by conflicts over the legitimacy of entitlement programs, while we have overlooked the institutionalization of rampant profiteering at the expense of the people and our long term interests.
As citizens, community informaticists, civic and social entrepreneurs and philanthropists, what is our response to the challenge of restoring justice and good governance to the nation?
Yes, we can. We will. Si, se puede!
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008Getting to Scale
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
GiftHub addresses the hypocrisy of Social Investing … summing up the challenge of our moment in history with this comment: “I do not claim to have an answer, within the context of an unchanging system, diddling at the edges with atomized investor and consumer choices. If there are answers they would have to be in scale with the problems, such as environmental depletion and collapse.”
Justice is the scale that matters. I have the image of Ma’at: the heart, a feather. Do we have an answer that goes beyond diddling at the edges?
The Upward Spiral - Life
Thursday, January 31st, 2008I’ve meant to come back to this for some time. Adventitiously, the Upward Spiral has been coming up a lot lately. This piece is a kind of parable on Life and Ecology.