Digital-commons. Canada. Government. Website. Education. Transparency. Crowd-sourcing. Science. Justice. Crowd-funding. ChangeCamp. The EyeWriter. Posted by Justin on Friday, November 13, 2009 · Leave a Comment In case you haven’t already seen it floating around the interwebs, I had to post it. Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes.
The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art. The Stimulus Map: Open Data and enhancing our democracy. The subject of the distribution of stimulus monies has been generating a fair amount of interest. Indeed, the Globe published this piece and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald published this piece analyzing the spending. But something more interesting is also happening… Yesterday, my friend Ducky Sherwood and her husband Jim published their own analysis, an important development for two reasons. First, their analysis is just plain interesting… they’ve got an excellent breakdown of who is receiving what (Ontario is a big winner in absolute and per capita terms, Quebec is the big loser).
Second, and more interesting for me, is how their analysis hints at the enormous possibilities of what citizens can do when Government’s share their data and information about programs with the public in useful formats. This could have a dramatic impact on public discourse. There are, however, limits to Ducky’s analysis that are no fault of her own. Like this: Like Loading... PL 42/09: Transparent and open « Plinius. - “The Ford Story is a recently launched site committed to making Ford’s progress towards getting new high-quality, fuel-efficient cars, and trucks on the road today transparent and open. The site is completely powered by WordPress and uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates. … Our vision for social media is to connect consumers with the people of Ford and to allow them to connect with each other, providing value along the way.
We hope that as we turn The Ford Story into the social media hub for the company that this is clearer than ever. We know that WordPress is a widely respected, well-known, and community-developed platform in the social media space. It means that we’re more closely aligned with current trends and Web technologies …” Source United Nations University “We were excited when we found out United Nations University, a think tank for the UN system, had decided to use WordPress to power its OurWorld 2.0 web site.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Speaks at MIT on Open Data and Social Media (He’s Frustrated) « ResourceShelf. Open thinking » Roots of Connectivism – Siemens. Canadian Universities Too Closed Minded on Open Access. This week is International Open Access Week with universities around the world taking stock of the emergence of open access as a critical part of research and innovation. The basic principle behind open access is to facilitate public access to research, particularly research funded by taxpayers.
This can be achieved by publishing in an open access journal or by simply posting a copy of the research online. In recent years, many countries have implemented legislative mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period. While Canada has lagged, a growing number of funding agencies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Cancer Society, and Genome Canada have adopted open access policies. The result is unprecedented public access to cutting-edge research.
The first is the need for broader campus support for open access. Participation Camp, NYC: Open Government, Open Organizations, Open Collaboration, Open Data, and Apps For Democracy Participation Camp 2009, an unconference held at NYU’s ITP, is part of a broader vision of the organizers to position open government at the leading edge of an open organizations movement. For more on open organization Matt pointed me to David Johnson’s work and the Virtual Company movement, vermontvirtual.org. Matt Cooperrider (@mattcoop on Twitter) – the initiator and main organizer, and Suresh Fernando (@sureshf), and Stephan Dohrn (@sdohrn) – who worked with Matt on the virtual aspects of the conference, share an interest in open collaboration, the intersection of collaboration and technology, and “how practices in this space can scale up to a global level.”
Matt and Suresh met as a result of their deep commitment to the social venture space (see Suresh’s paper, “On the possibility of an open system mobilization platform”). Open Collab “We see that there is already a healthy movement of self-organized camps and conferences all over the world, but no thread that draws them together. Unfinished Business › Myths & Virtues of the Open.
It is almost trite to say that one embraces the open these days. It has become I kind of de rigueur position of the Interneterati. There’s lots of important reason we should embrace the open in any number of contexts, but it is high time (as with Design Thinking, innovation and a few other choice buzz terms) that we start to demand clarity, precision and empiricism of each other rather than continue to recklessly bandy about these terms as if there mere incantion were sufficient to make them either real or important.
This comes up because Dave Gray and I have been having a conversation about openess or the “open” as a value. We were disagreeing yesterday about whether there’s a sense in which we could say that Apple is open. So what is openness and why are we inclined to see it as a virtue? Let’s start with the “easy case” of open source software. Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software in all the ways that are socially useful. The Open Society Institute.