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‘European citizenship’ is a ‘constituent’ process that emerges, develops and is constantly elaborated within social practices. How does the practice of the commons effect it? This week’s guest feature reports back on an experiment conducted last September in Teatro Valle. 
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It's a great paradox that the moment the United States needs government the most, we don't seem to have one anymore. As a student of public administration, like many of my generation, I was motivated by John F. Kennedy's call to public service. I "asked not what my country could do for me" and, despite my concerns about the direction of our foreign policy in the 1960s and 1970s, I went to work for the Environmental Protection Agency in the late 1970s asking, "what can I do for my country?" Six months into Ronald Reagan's term, after he defined government as a problem rather than a calling, I was gone. I was not alone; many left and many who were needed never arrived. State and local governments continued to attract the best and brightest of our young people, but fewer and fewer seemed interested in working in our nation's capital. Most headed for private nonprofits and for-profits. In Washington, public service went out of fashion, replaced by the ambition-fueled revolving door.
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‘If representative democracy is only to choose every four, or five, or six years the person who’s going to do everything they want without taking popular will into account... we are in a sort of trap and I think that’s certainly the case today for Europe and elsewhere.’
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Corporations are created by state-issued charters. Where corporations are violating their duty to the public trust — for example by pouring climate-destroying greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere — governments have an obligation, to stop them from doing so or to revoke their charters.
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By now barrels of ink and miles of ones-and-zeroes have been spilled parsing the “political narrative” of October’s 17-day-long shutdown of the federal government. But you can ignore most of what you heard from the capital’s political pundits. Here’s the thing to remember: This was not a classic Washington political “standoff,” “impasse,” “stalemate,” or any of the other euphemisms used to describe how Tea Party radicals tried to hold the country hostage to their hatred of federally subsidized health care.
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The Pros of Posting Onlinestudents are writing for a real audience – not just the teacherwith no passwords to keep up with, parents and relatives can simply access the workwhen students know anyone can see their work, they will try harderstudents can easily share with their peers using social media and other meansvisitors from down the hall or around the world can comment and collaborate
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In October, while the US government exhibited maddening levels of dysfunction with a shutdown, the global sharing movement ramped up and demonstrated that if we want to get stuff done, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.
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Why do we turn to nonprofits, NGOs and governments to solve society's biggest problems? Michael Porter admits he's biased, as a business school professor, but he wants you to hear his case for letting business try to solve massive problems like climate change and access to water. Why? Because when business solves a problem, it makes a profit -- which lets that solution grow.
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Clay's amazed that President Obama was allowed by his staff to get up and compare Healthcare.gov to Amazon.com on October 1st, when the site was already beginning to fail. Worse, he drove more people to a site already buckling under its traffic load. That's not a technology problem, that's a problem with political culture, and an inability to tell the boss the truth. Clay expects change within the government's technology leadership.
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Governments around the world are still lagging at opening data and even less are offering data via APIs, accessible in machine-readable format, according to a new annual index released by Open Knowledge Foundation today.
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As I define it, government is nothing more than a consensus system which allows individuals to express their collective will and address concerns that cannot be solved merely on the basis of individual preference.
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In line with the expressed wish of our King, his highness Willem Alexander, to improve ‘verbondenheid’: cooperation and connectivity between people, I have established ‘het Ministerie van Digitale Infrastuctuur‘ (ministry of digital infrastructure NL #MinDigInfra) ‘van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden’. Such ministry must provide leadership and policy on the continuity and improvement of the digital infrastructural facilities that enable our interwoven communities, society and business ventures to flourish and create wealth in a trans-local and transnational context.
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If the so-called "sharing economy" grows into some significant piece of the U.S. economy at large – as many of its advocates predict – Wednesday will mark the day when Congress first began to inquire about just what it all means.
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So for instance, if you read technology journals you learn that in robotics labs for some years there have been efforts to develop small drones, what they call “fly-sized drones,” which can intrude into a person’s home and be almost invisible and carry out constant surveillance.
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There is no question at this point that Healthcare.gov, from the planning stages all the way through to its launch, has been a disaster. It seems it has only successfully managed to expose the deeply rooted tech problems that plague Washington's IT infrastructure. However, media theorist and scholar Clay Shirky took to his blog to frame the issue differently. In his view, the collective delusion that allowed the site's planners to expect a perfect product without testing it ensured its botched debut. "This is not just a hiring problem, or a procurement problem," he writes. "This is a management problem, and a cultural problem."
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Sharing economy enthusiasts gathered together at an event put together by Let's Collaborate! and Suits to Silicon Alley last week to talk about the growth of the sharing economy and the subsequent implications with government in New York. Many peer-to-peer platforms face problems with outdated government laws designed for more traditional B2C industries or face no laws at all.
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The ideal capitalist product would derive its value from the ceaseless unpaid labor of the entire human race. We would be dispensable; it would be indispensable. It would integrate all human activity into a single unified terrain, accessible only via additional corporate products, in which sweatshop and marketplace merged. It would accomplish all this under the banner of autonomy and decentralization, perhaps even of “direct democracy.”
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In current protest culture the estranged ideologies of anarchism and progressive populism are coming together around a critique of the neoliberal “corporate state” and a new imaginary of mass insurgency.
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David Bollier discusses the launch of a major strategic research project to "fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador" based on the principles of open networks, peer production, and commoning by the government of Ecuador.
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The British people are not stupid. They know that neoliberal, neoclassical ‘free market’ economics does not work, even if they don’t use those terms. In a survey by YouGov, the leading public opinion pollsters in the UK, more than two-thirds of those asked wanted the railways, the energy companies (gas, electricity) and the postal service (Royal Mail was recently privatised for a peppercorn price and is now controlled by American offshore hedge funds) renationalised.
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As we learn more about what went wrong with the design and launch of Healthcare.gov, a few broad principles have emerged about how to fix the procurement system so this kind of debacle -- which isn't the only non-functional Web site the government's bought, just the highest profile -- doesn't happen again.
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