Peer2Politics

“The machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged not only for their contributions to efficiency and productivity and their positive and negative environmental side effects, but also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority”

"Individuals must have access to high-quality data about themselves and their communities. If certain groups routinely do not have data collected about them, their problems may be overlooked and their communities held back in spite of progress elsewhere. Given this risk, policymakers should begin a concerted effort to address the “data divide”—the social and economic inequalities that may result from a lack of collection or use of data about individuals or communities." (http://www2.datainnovation.org/2014-data-poverty.pdf)

"Justin believes open development is crucially important for long-term success and notes that two ‘flavours’ of open source are emerging. He says: ‘We are seeing a difference between open source and open development. So what we are seeing is some projects and entities who are saying here is the source code, it is under Apache licence or GPL or whatever but the decisions about how the code got to that state are behind some wall—it is not in public’. This means that a developer has all the requisite rights to edit, modify and redistribute the code, but doesn’t have any real understanding as to how or why the code developed that way in the first place. Justin says: ‘So you run into some bug and you are saying why is the code this way? There is no historical context or archiving or rationale…So, [with the open development method] what we are seeing is, that in addition to “here is the code” we are seeing “here are all the decisions being made in public”.’

"With the help of researchers, developers and entrepreneurs, primarily from Harvard and MIT and the Boston Community, we are building an open data platform to enable people to share all their personal data within a legally constituted trust framework. This framework will allow people to have their own personal data service that can securely store and process static and dynamic data about themselves. Governed by ‘privacy by design’ principles, all agreements of the trust framework support open authentication, storage, discovery, payment, auditing, market making and monetized “app store” services. The goal is to take all of these services and make them available within an open-source framework that can be “mashed up” to enable the development of high value applications."