Press Release: “HTC, a global leader in mobile innovation and design, today unveiled HTC Power To Give™, an initiative that aims to create the a supercomputer by harnessing the collective processing power of Android smartphones.
Currently in beta, HTC Power To Give aims to galvanize smartphone owners to unlock their unused processing power in order to help answer some of society’s biggest questions. Currently, the fight against cancer, AIDS and Alzheimer’s; the drive to ensure every child has clean water to drink and even the search for extra-terrestrial life are all being tackled by volunteer computing platforms.
Empowering people to use their Android smartphones to offer tangible support for vital fields of research, including medicine, science and ecology, HTC Power To Give has been developed in partnership with Dr. David Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley. The project will support the world’s largest volunteer computing initiative and tap into the powerful processing capabilities of a global network of smartphones.
Strength in numbers
One million HTC One smartphones, working towards a project via HTC Power To Give, could provide similar processing power to that of one of the world’s 30 supercomputers (one PetaFLOP). This could drastically shorten the research cycles for organizations that would otherwise have to spend years analyzing the same volume of data, potentially bringing forward important discoveries in vital subjects by weeks, months, years or even decades. For example, one of the programs available at launch is IBM’s World Community Grid, which gives anyone an opportunity to advance science by donating their computer, smartphone or tablet’s unused computing power to humanitarian research. To date, the World Community Grid volunteers have contributed almost 900,000 years’ worth of processing time to cutting-edge research.
Limitless future potential
Cher Wang, Chairwoman, HTC commented, “We’ve often used innovation to bring about change in the mobile industry, but this programme takes our vision one step further. With HTC Power To Give, we want to make it possible for anyone to dedicate their unused smartphone processing power to contribute to projects that have the potential to change the world.”
“HTC Power To Give will support the world’s largest volunteer computing initiative, and the impact that this project will have on the world over the years to come is huge. This changes everything,” noted Dr. David Anderson, Inventor of the Shared Computing Initiative BOINC, University of California, Berkeley.
Cher Wang added, “We’ve been discussing the impact that just one million HTC Power To Give-enabled smartphones could make, however analysts estimate that over 780 million Android phones were shipped in 2013i alone. Imagine the difference we could make to our children’s future if just a fraction of these Android users were able to divert some of their unused processing power to help find answers to the questions that concern us all.”
Opt-in with ease
After downloading the HTC Power To Give app from the Google Play™ store, smartphone owners can select the research programme to which they will divert a proportion of their phone’s processing power. HTC Power To Give will then run while the phone is chargingii and connected to a WiFi network, enabling people to change the world whilst sitting at their desk or relaxing at home.
The beta version of HTC Power To Give will be available to download from the Google Play store and will initially be compatible with the HTC One family, HTC Butterfly and HTC Butterfly s. HTC plans to make the app more widely available to other Android smartphone owners in the coming six months as the beta trial progresses.”
NOAA announces RFI to unleash power of 'big data'
Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters
Pew Internet: “Conversations on Twitter create networks with identifiable contours as people reply to and mention one another in their tweets. These conversational structures differ, depending on the subject and the people driving the conversation. Six structures are regularly observed: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spoke structures. These are created as individuals choose whom to reply to or mention in their Twitter messages and the structures tell a story about the nature of the conversation.
If a topic is political, it is common to see two separate, polarized crowds take shape. They form two distinct discussion groups that mostly do not interact with each other. Frequently these are recognizably liberal or conservative groups. The participants within each separate group commonly mention very different collections of website URLs and use distinct hashtags and words. The split is clearly evident in many highly controversial discussions: people in clusters that we identified as liberal used URLs for mainstream news websites, while groups we identified as conservative used links to conservative news websites and commentary sources. At the center of each group are discussion leaders, the prominent people who are widely replied to or mentioned in the discussion. In polarized discussions, each group links to a different set of influential people or organizations that can be found at the center of each conversation cluster.
While these polarized crowds are common in political conversations on Twitter, it is important to remember that the people who take the time to post and talk about political issues on Twitter are a special group. Unlike many other Twitter members, they pay attention to issues, politicians, and political news, so their conversations are not representative of the views of the full Twitterverse. Moreover, Twitter users are only 18% of internet users and 14% of the overall adult population. Their demographic profile is not reflective of the full population. Additionally, other work by the Pew Research Center has shown that tweeters’ reactions to events are often at odds with overall public opinion— sometimes being more liberal, but not always. Finally, forthcoming survey findings from Pew Research will explore the relatively modest size of the social networking population who exchange political content in their network.
Still, the structure of these Twitter conversations says something meaningful about political discourse these days and the tendency of politically active citizens to sort themselves into distinct partisan camps. Social networking maps of these conversations provide new insights because they combine analysis of the opinions people express on Twitter, the information sources they cite in their tweets, analysis of who is in the networks of the tweeters, and how big those networks are. And to the extent that these online conversations are followed by a broader audience, their impact may reach well beyond the participants themselves.
Our approach combines analysis of the size and structure of the network and its sub-groups with analysis of the words, hashtags and URLs people use. Each person who contributes to a Twitter conversation is located in a specific position in the web of relationships among all participants in the conversation. Some people occupy rare positions in the network that suggest that they have special importance and power in the conversation.
Social network maps of Twitter crowds and other collections of social media can be created with innovative data analysis tools that provide new insight into the landscape of social media. These maps highlight the people and topics that drive conversations and group behavior – insights that add to what can be learned from surveys or focus groups or even sentiment analysis of tweets. Maps of previously hidden landscapes of social media highlight the key people, groups, and topics being discussed.
Conversational archetypes on Twitter
The Polarized Crowd network structure is only one of several different ways that crowds and conversations can take shape on Twitter. There are at least six distinctive structures of social media crowds which form depending on the subject being discussed, the information sources being cited, the social networks of the people talking about the subject, and the leaders of the conversation. Each has a different social structure and shape: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spokes.
After an analysis of many thousands of Twitter maps, we found six different kinds of network crowds.
Polarized Crowd: Polarized discussions feature two big and dense groups that have little connection between them. The topics being discussed are often highly divisive and heated political subjects. In fact, there is usually little conversation between these groups despite the fact that they are focused on the same topic. Polarized Crowds on Twitter are not arguing. They are ignoring one another while pointing to different web resources and using different hashtags.
Why this matters: It shows that partisan Twitter users rely on different information sources. While liberals link to many mainstream news sources, conservatives link to a different set of websites.
Tight Crowd: These discussions are characterized by highly interconnected people with few isolated participants. Many conferences, professional topics, hobby groups, and other subjects that attract communities take this Tight Crowd form.
Why this matters: These structures show how networked learning communities function and how sharing and mutual support can be facilitated by social media.
Brand Clusters: When well-known products or services or popular subjects like celebrities are discussed in Twitter, there is often commentary from many disconnected participants: These “isolates” participating in a conversation cluster are on the left side of the picture on the left). Well-known brands and other popular subjects can attract large fragmented Twitter populations who tweet about it but not to each other. The larger the population talking about a brand, the less likely it is that participants are connected to one another. Brand-mentioning participants focus on a topic, but tend not to connect to each other.
Why this matters: There are still institutions and topics that command mass interest. Often times, the Twitter chatter about these institutions and their messages is not among people connecting with each other. Rather, they are relaying or passing along the message of the institution or person and there is no extra exchange of ideas.
Community Clusters: Some popular topics may develop multiple smaller groups, which often form around a few hubs each with its own audience, influencers, and sources of information. These Community Clusters conversations look like bazaars with multiple centers of activity. Global news stories often attract coverage from many news outlets, each with its own following. That creates a collection of medium-sized groups—and a fair number of isolates (the left side of the picture above).
Why this matters: Some information sources and subjects ignite multiple conversations, each cultivating its own audience and community. These can illustrate diverse angles on a subject based on its relevance to different audiences, revealing a diversity of opinion and perspective on a social media topic.
Broadcast Network: Twitter commentary around breaking news stories and the output of well-known media outlets and pundits has a distinctive hub and spoke structure in which many people repeat what prominent news and media organizations tweet. The members of the Broadcast Network audience are often connected only to the hub news source, without connecting to one another. In some cases there are smaller subgroups of densely connected people— think of them as subject groupies—who do discuss the news with one another.
Why this matters: There are still powerful agenda setters and conversation starters in the new social media world. Enterprises and personalities with loyal followings can still have a large impact on the conversation.
Support Network: Customer complaints for a major business are often handled by a Twitter service account that attempts to resolve and manage customer issues around their products and services. This produces a hub and spoke structure that is different from the Broadcast Network pattern. In the Support Network structure, the hub account replies to many otherwise disconnected users, creating outward spokes. In contrast, in the Broadcast pattern, the hub gets replied to or retweeted by many disconnected people, creating inward spokes.
Why this matters: As government, businesses, and groups increasingly provide services and support via social media, support network structures become an important benchmark for evaluating the performance of these institutions. Customer support streams of advice and feedback can be measured in terms of efficiency and reach using social media network maps.
Why is it useful to map the social landscape this way?
Social media is increasingly home to civil society, the place where knowledge sharing, public discussions, debates, and disputes are carried out. As the new public square, social media conversations are as important to document as any other large public gathering. Network maps of public social media discussions in services like Twitter can provide insights into the role social media plays in our society. These maps are like aerial photographs of a crowd, showing the rough size and composition of a population. These maps can be augmented with on the ground interviews with crowd participants, collecting their words and interests. Insights from network analysis and visualization can complement survey or focus group research methods and can enhance sentiment analysis of the text of messages like tweets.
Like topographic maps of mountain ranges, network maps can also illustrate the points on the landscape that have the highest elevation. Some people occupy locations in networks that are analogous to positions of strategic importance on the physical landscape. Network measures of “centrality” can identify key people in influential locations in the discussion network, highlighting the people leading the conversation. The content these people create is often the most popular and widely repeated in these networks, reflecting the significant role these people play in social media discussions.
While the physical world has been mapped in great detail, the social media landscape remains mostly unknown. However, the tools and techniques for social media mapping are improving, allowing more analysts to get social media data, analyze it, and contribute to the collective construction of a more complete map of the social media world. A more complete map and understanding of the social media landscape will help interpret the trends, topics, and implications of these new communication technologies.”
Can We Balance Data Protection With Value Creation?
A “privacy perspective” by Sara Degli Esposti: “In the last few years there has been a dramatic change in the opportunities organizations have to generate value from the data they collect about customers or service users. Customers and users are rapidly becoming collections of “data points” and organizations can learn an awful lot from the analysis of this huge accumulation of data points, also known as “Big Data.”
Organizations are perhaps thrilled, dreaming about new potential applications of digital data but also a bit concerned about hidden risks and unintended consequences. Take, for example, the human rights protections placed on personal data by the EU. Regulators are watching closely, intending to preserve the eight basic privacy principles without compromising the free flow of information.
Some may ask whether it’s even possible to balance the two.
Enter the Big Data Protection Project (BDPP): an Open University study on organizations’ ability to leverage Big Data while complying with EU data protection principles. The study represents a chance for you to contribute to, and learn about, the debate on the reform of the EU Data Protection Directive. It is open to staff with interests in data management or use, from all types of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, with interests in Europe.
Join us by visiting the study’s page on the Open University website. Participants will receive a report with all the results. The BDP is a scientific project—no commercial organization is involved—with implications relevant to both policy-makers and industry representatives..
What kind of legislation do we need to create that positive system of incentive for organizations to innovate in the privacy field?
There is no easy answer.
That’s why we need to undertake empirical research into actual information management practices to understand the effects of regulation on people and organizations. Legal instruments conceived with the best intentions can be ineffective or detrimental in practice. However, other factors can also intervene and motivate business players to develop procedures and solutions which go far beyond compliance. Good legislation should complement market forces in bringing values and welfare to both consumers and organizations.
Is European data protection law keeping its promise of protecting users’ information privacy while contributing to the flourishing of the digital economy or not? Will the proposed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) be able to achieve this goal? What would you suggest to do to motivate organizations to invest in information security and take information privacy seriously?
Let’s consider for a second some basic ideas such as the eight fundamental data protection principles: notice, consent, purpose specification and limitation, data quality, respect of data subjects’ rights, information security and accountability. Many of these ideas are present in the EU 1995 Data Protection Directive, the U.S. Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) andthe 1980 OECD Guidelines. The fundamental question now is, should all these ideas be brought into the future, as suggested in the proposed new GDPR, orshould we reconsider our approach and revise some of them, as recommended in the 21st century version of the 1980 OECD Guidelines?
As you may know, notice and consent are often taken as examples of how very good intentions can be transformed into actions of limited importance. Rather than increase people’s awareness of the growing data economy, notice and consent have produced a tick-box tendency accompanied by long and unintelligible privacy policies. Besides, consent is rarely freely granted. Individuals give their consent in exchange for some product or service or as part of a job relationship. The imbalance between the two goods traded—think about how youngsters perceive not having access to some social media as a form of social exclusion—and the lack of feasible alternatives often make an instrument, such as the current use made of consent, meaningless.
On the other hand, a principle such as data quality, which has received very limited attention, could offer opportunities to policy-makers and businesses to reopen the debate on users’ control of their personal data. Having updated, accurate data is something very valuable for organizations. Data quality is also key to the success of many business models. New partnerships between users and organizations could be envisioned under this principle.
Finally, data collection limitation and purpose specification could be other examples of the divide between theory and practice: The tendency we see is that people and businesses want to share, merge and reuse data over time and to do new and unexpected things. Of course, we all want to avoid function creep and prevent any detrimental use of our personal data. We probably need new, stronger mechanisms to ensure data are used for good purposes.
Digital data have become economic assets these days. We need good legislation to stop the black market for personal data and open the debate on how each of us wants to contribute to, and benefit from, the data economy.”
Some may ask whether it’s even possible to balance the two.
Enter the Big Data Protection Project (BDPP): an Open University study on organizations’ ability to leverage Big Data while complying with EU data protection principles. The study represents a chance for you to contribute to, and learn about, the debate on the reform of the EU Data Protection Directive. It is open to staff with interests in data management or use, from all types of organizations, both for-profit and nonprofit, with interests in Europe.
Join us by visiting the study’s page on the Open University website. Participants will receive a report with all the results. The BDP is a scientific project—no commercial organization is involved—with implications relevant to both policy-makers and industry representatives..
What kind of legislation do we need to create that positive system of incentive for organizations to innovate in the privacy field?
There is no easy answer.
That’s why we need to undertake empirical research into actual information management practices to understand the effects of regulation on people and organizations. Legal instruments conceived with the best intentions can be ineffective or detrimental in practice. However, other factors can also intervene and motivate business players to develop procedures and solutions which go far beyond compliance. Good legislation should complement market forces in bringing values and welfare to both consumers and organizations.
Is European data protection law keeping its promise of protecting users’ information privacy while contributing to the flourishing of the digital economy or not? Will the proposed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) be able to achieve this goal? What would you suggest to do to motivate organizations to invest in information security and take information privacy seriously?
Let’s consider for a second some basic ideas such as the eight fundamental data protection principles: notice, consent, purpose specification and limitation, data quality, respect of data subjects’ rights, information security and accountability. Many of these ideas are present in the EU 1995 Data Protection Directive, the U.S. Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) andthe 1980 OECD Guidelines. The fundamental question now is, should all these ideas be brought into the future, as suggested in the proposed new GDPR, orshould we reconsider our approach and revise some of them, as recommended in the 21st century version of the 1980 OECD Guidelines?
As you may know, notice and consent are often taken as examples of how very good intentions can be transformed into actions of limited importance. Rather than increase people’s awareness of the growing data economy, notice and consent have produced a tick-box tendency accompanied by long and unintelligible privacy policies. Besides, consent is rarely freely granted. Individuals give their consent in exchange for some product or service or as part of a job relationship. The imbalance between the two goods traded—think about how youngsters perceive not having access to some social media as a form of social exclusion—and the lack of feasible alternatives often make an instrument, such as the current use made of consent, meaningless.
On the other hand, a principle such as data quality, which has received very limited attention, could offer opportunities to policy-makers and businesses to reopen the debate on users’ control of their personal data. Having updated, accurate data is something very valuable for organizations. Data quality is also key to the success of many business models. New partnerships between users and organizations could be envisioned under this principle.
Finally, data collection limitation and purpose specification could be other examples of the divide between theory and practice: The tendency we see is that people and businesses want to share, merge and reuse data over time and to do new and unexpected things. Of course, we all want to avoid function creep and prevent any detrimental use of our personal data. We probably need new, stronger mechanisms to ensure data are used for good purposes.
Digital data have become economic assets these days. We need good legislation to stop the black market for personal data and open the debate on how each of us wants to contribute to, and benefit from, the data economy.”
Crowdsourcing voices to study Parkinson’s disease
TedMed: “Mathematician Max Little is launching a project that aims to literally give Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients a voice in their own diagnosis and help them monitor their disease progression.
Patients Voice Analysis (PVA) is an open science project that uses phone-based voice recordings and self-reported symptoms, along with software Little designed, to track disease progression. Little, a TEDMED 2013 speaker and TED Fellow, is partnering with the online community PatientsLikeMe, co-founded by TEDMED 2009 speaker James Heywood, and Sage Bionetworks, a non-profit research organization, to conduct the research.
The new project is an extension of Little’s Parkinson’s Voice Initiative, which used speech analysis algorithms to diagnose Parkinson’s from voice records with the help of 17,000 volunteers. This time, he seeks to not only detect markers of PD, but also to add information reported by patients using PatientsLikeMe’s Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (PDRS), a tool that documents patients’ answers to questions that measure treatment effectiveness and disease progression….
As openly shared information, the collected data has potential to help vast numbers of individuals by tapping into collective ingenuity. Little has long argued that for science to progress, researchers need to democratize research and move past jostling for credit. Sage Bionetworks has designed a platform called Synapse to allow data sharing with collaborative version control, an effort led by open data advocate John Wilbanks.
“If you can’t share your data, how can you reproduce your science? One of the big problems we’re facing with this kind of medical research is the data is not open and getting access to it is a nightmare,” Little says.
With the PVA project, “Basically anyone can log on download the anonymized data and play around with data mining techniques. We don’t really care what people are able to come up with. We just want the most accurate prediction we can get.
“In research, you’re almost always constrained by what you think is the best way to do things. Unless you open it to the community at large, you’ll never know,” he says.”
Selfiecity
New Project aimed at investigating the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world: “Selfiecity investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods:
- We present our findings about the demographics of people taking selfies, their poses and expressions.
- Rich media visualizations (imageplots) assemble thousands of photos to reveal interesting patterns.
- The interactive selfiexploratory allows you to navigate the whole set of 3200 photos.
- Finally, theoretical essays discuss selfies in the history of photography, the functions of images in social media, and methods and dataset.”
L’intelligence d’une ville : ses citoyens
Michel Dumais: “Tic toc! disions-nous. Bientôt la centième. Et avec la cent-unième, de nouveaux défis. Ville intelligente, disiez-vous? Je subodore le traditionnel appel de pied aux trois lettres et à une logique administrative archaïque. Et si on faisait plutôt appel à l’intelligence de ceux qui connaissent le plus leur ville, ses citoyens?
Pour régler un problème (et même à l’occasion, un «pas d’problème»), les administrations regardent du côté de ces logiciels mammouth qui, sur papier, sont censés faire tout, qui engloutissent des centaines de millions de dollars, mais qui, finalement, font les manchettes des médias parce qu’il faut y injecter encore plus d’argent. Et qui permettent aux TI d’asseoir encore plus leur contrôle sur une administration.
Bref, lorsque l’on parle de ville intelligente, plusieurs y voient le pactole. Ah! Reste que ce qui était «acceptable», hier, ne l’est plus aujourd’hui. Et que la réalisation d’une ville intelligente n’est surtout pas un défi technologique, loin de là.
LA QUESTION DU SANS-FIL
Il y a des années de cela, la simple logique eut voulu que la Ville cesse de penser «big telcos» afin de conclure rapidement une alliance avec l’organisme communautaire «Île sans fil» et ainsi favoriser le déploiement rapide sur l’île de la technologie sans fil.
Une telle alliance, un modèle dans le genre, existe.
Mais pas à Montréal. Plutôt à Québec, alors que la Ville et l’organisme communautaire «Zap Québec» travaillent main dans la main pour le plus grand bénéfice des citoyens de Québec et des touristes. Et à Montréal? On jase, on jase.
Donc, une ville intelligente. C’est une ville qui sait, à l’aide des technologies, comment harnacher ses infrastructures et les mettre au service de ses citoyens tout en réalisant des économies et en favorisant le développement durable.
C’est aussi une ville qui sait écouter et mobiliser ses citoyens, ses militants et ses entrepreneurs, tout en leur donnant des outils (comme des données utilisables) afin qu’ils puissent eux aussi créer des services destinés à leur organisation et à tous les citoyens de la ville. Sans compter que tous ces outils facilitent la prise de décisions chez les maires d’arrondissement et le comité exécutif.
Bref, une ville intelligente selon le professeur Rudolf Giffinger, c’est ça: «une économie intelligente, une mobilité intelligente, un environnement intelligent, des habitants intelligents, un mode de vie intelligent et, enfin, une administration intelligente».…
J’invite le lecteur à regarder LifeApps, une extraordinaire série télé diffusée sur le site de la chaîne AlJazeera. Le sujet: des jeunes et de moins jeunes militants, bidouilleurs, qui s’impliquent et créent des services pour leur communauté.”
OpenRFPs
Clay Johnson: “Tomorrow at CodeAcross we’ll be launching our first community-based project, OpenRFPs. The goal is to liberate the data inside of every state RFP listing website in the country. We hope you’ll find your own state’s RFP site, and contribute a parser.
The Department of Better Technology’s goal is to improve the way government works by making it easier for small, innovative businesses to provide great technology to government. But those businesses can barely make it through the front door when the RFPs themselves are stored in archaic systems, with sloppy user interfaces and disparate data formats, or locked behind paywalls.
What are a business’s current choices? They can pay for subscription based services that are either shady vendors disguised as officious sounding associations, or have less than stellar user interfaces.
The sum of these experiences? The barrier to entry is so high that the small companies who are great at technology are effectively turned away at the door. The only ones who get through are those that can afford to spend employee time scouring for the right RFPs.
But the harm to business isn’t the big harm. Government contracting becomes an overlooked area by the transparency community, (especially at the state and local level,) because the data isn’t available en-masse unless it’s paid for commercially, which comes with a restrictive usage license.”
A Natural History of Human Thinking
New Harvard University Press Book: “Tool-making or culture, language or religious belief: ever since Darwin, thinkers have struggled to identify what fundamentally differentiates human beings from other animals. In this much-anticipated book, Michael Tomasello weaves his twenty years of comparative studies of humans and great apes into a compelling argument that cooperative social interaction is the key to our cognitive uniqueness. Once our ancestors learned to put their heads together with others to pursue shared goals, humankind was on an evolutionary path all its own.
Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today’s great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.
A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.”
Tomasello argues that our prehuman ancestors, like today’s great apes, were social beings who could solve problems by thinking. But they were almost entirely competitive, aiming only at their individual goals. As ecological changes forced them into more cooperative living arrangements, early humans had to coordinate their actions and communicate their thoughts with collaborative partners. Tomasello’s “shared intentionality hypothesis” captures how these more socially complex forms of life led to more conceptually complex forms of thinking. In order to survive, humans had to learn to see the world from multiple social perspectives, to draw socially recursive inferences, and to monitor their own thinking via the normative standards of the group. Even language and culture arose from the preexisting need to work together. What differentiates us most from other great apes, Tomasello proposes, are the new forms of thinking engendered by our new forms of collaborative and communicative interaction.
A Natural History of Human Thinking is the most detailed scientific analysis to date of the connection between human sociality and cognition.”
Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons
New book by David Bollier: “In our age of predatory markets and make-believe democracy, our troubled political institutions have lost sight of real people and practical realities. But if you look to the edges, ordinary people are reinventing governance and provisioning on their own terms. The commons is arising as a serious, practical alternative to the corrupt Market/State.
The beauty of commons is that we can build them ourselves, right now. But the bigger challenge is, Can we learn to see the commons and, more importantly, to think like a commoner?…
The biggest “tragedy of the commons” is the misconception that commons are failures — relics from another era rendered unnecessary by the Market and State. Think Like a Commoner dispels such prejudices by explaining the rich history and promising future of the commons — an ageless paradigm of cooperation and fairness that is re-making our world.
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating examples, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:
With graceful prose and dozens of fascinating examples, David Bollier describes the quiet revolution that is pioneering practical new forms of self-governance and production controlled by people themselves. Think Like a Commoner explains how the commons:
- Is an exploding field of DIY innovation ranging from Wikipedia and seed-sharing to community forests and collaborative consumption, and beyond;
- Challenges the standard narrative of market economics by explaining how cooperation generates significant value and human fulfillment; and
- Provides a framework of law and social action that can help us move beyond the pathologies of neoliberal capitalism.
We have a choice: Ignore the commons and suffer the ongoing private plunder of our common wealth. Or Think Like a Commoner and learn how to rebuild our society and reclaim our shared inheritance. This accessible, comprehensive introduction to the commons will surprise and enlighten you, and provoke you to action.”