Crowd trust is the trust I place in the crowd that has gone before me and not been burned. For example: EULAs. I never read them fully, I trust someone before me has already read it and if there was something there that was so wrong the crowd would make a fuss and get it fixed. What do you think about this?

Some colleagues will recognise the concepts listed below.

Taking a pragmatic approach, one can see where it’s going and why it’s going there.

The aim is efficiency, to be more targeted and achieve more where it matters most.

1) Clarify: – Identify objectives to do and Identify objectives to stop doing. Now execute both.
2) List tasks and activities: rank in order of importance, chop bottom 20%
3) Drucker question: If it’s a fresh start, would you do it the way you’re currently doing it?
4) Binary budget: Don’t spread it thinly, ranked objectives get full funding, unranked get no funding.

Now Skydive.

This is the new way.

The Athens anti-racism festival is happening right now and it’s being held in Goudi park, right across the street from where we live. Some of you may already know I’m involved in campaigning against commercial developments in Goudi Park and as such we were offered a booth and projection screen at the festival. First off, I was amazed at how many booths there were. It’s unbelievable how many people have a cause they’re passionate about. There must have been hundreds of booths. So many causes.

Image by brettwayn via FlickrOne booth I’d like to mention is the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) booth. For those who don’t know about the OLPC, in a nutshell, Nicholas Negroponte founded and leads a group of people that design and produce a cheap to make laptop.

While chatting to the guys there, I was struck by what I was told. This very noble project is in real danger, it’s being hijacked by commercial interests that support the Windows/Intel platform. Clearly, giving billions of poor kids a linux based PC is a real threat to Wintel so wintel is deliberately sabotaging development of distributed production and distribution of the OLPC.

Now I don’t want to misunderstood, what I’m getting at here is not about the hardware. Frankly if wintel can produce a cheaper box then let them be the winner, let them produce and distribute the the millions of PC’s necessary to bridge the digital divide and educate and empower the world. The software used is OLPC is based on open source software whereas Wintel is not. What you do when you give someone a closed source vs an open source software solution is you limit their options. You limit their opportunity to be creative. You say “let them be creative as long as they’re creative on windows.”

There’s no doubt that the internet and the social networks it helped create have done two things: brought people closer and brought about much more democracy.
A new political party in Australia called Senator Online is taking this to new extremes, it will allow each member to vote on each and every bill that is tabled at parliament. The majority vote by members is what the party representative will vote in parliament. Now that’s direct democracy !!

With lobbies, special interest groups, back room dealing and partisan voting marring the popular will, this new alternative will be hard to compete with. The party will have no political agenda as such but will act purely according to the will of its members, helping members decide how to vote by offering impartial online information on the pros and cons of each issue. Some might think that such direct democracy could easily take a negative route. What would prevent members from voting against a tax bill, could they strip away rights of minority groups?

The FAQ’s on the party website tries to answer these questions: To prevent a malevolent majority from overthrowing the country, Senator Online will only be represented in the upper house, The Senate. Here, the powers are limited to approving or rejecting bills. It is the Australian lower house, the House of Representatives that proposes and debates bills.

Web based democracy is new and untested and it is very likely that, as did social networks, direct democracy groups will evolve in unexpected ways and will have profound effects on how politics is done. Special interest groups, lobbyists etc will no longer try and influence legislators but will likely focus on the masses. But the masses are exactly that, MASSES and influencing them is a going to be a lot harder.