If the World Bank was being created at the dawn of the 21st century, how would its basic model and operations differ from the mid-20th century institution which supports projects worldwide today? Since the foundation of the World Bank, two significant development have affected infrastructure financing. The first is the development of distributed infrastructure (DI) [...]
Fresh thinking is urgently needed. We can’t continue to tinker at the edges, particularly in the face of an economic downturn. Without bold new approaches, our public services will be over-stretched by the shortterm demands of the recession and overwhelmed by the long-term challenges of the future. What alternatives do we have to radical innovation? [...]
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Full blog post here. Orlov-style FSU full-on collapse is the usual model people go to after “business as usual but with less money.” Three factors create new options: 1> We’ve seen the FSU stuff and can learn from their experience 2> Non-authoritarian nations are likely to be vastly more resilient because of diverse power centers [...]
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There is a summary of this post here. Most of the people working on collapse scenarios are working from the current state and trying to maintain essential services at about the current level. On noting that this is impossible, in most cases a sort of Mad Max / Former Soviet Union model takes over. Dimitri [...]
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(from this blog post on Museum 2.0) Really, really significant implications to this model. I’ve been meaning to blog this for maybe a month and I only just got around to it, and I still haven’t crunched through all the implications.
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Actually, you don’t simply kill those earlier paradigms. What you do is turn them into components, then make the components into platforms, then place more fresh components on top. That is native web logic. (source)
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At the last meetup, I found myself in conversations about the spread of wifi in Peru, online tools for mapping infectious diseases, and how School of Everything could provide face-to-face back up for services like Appropedia and Akvopedia. It looks like other people had an interesting evening, too – judging by Pamela McLean’s blog post [...]
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Tuesday, February 17, 2009
USA Today reports on the 26 million newly jobless Chinese people leaving the industrial cities of the Pearl River Delta and returning home to rural villages in the provinces, and of the strain this is putting on Chinese society. For Lei Sanjun, 25, who spent seven years making sneakers in the coastal factory city of [...]
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Mark Charmer discussing twitter, ICT and water. Me on the future of poverty for Agit8. This is probably the best thing I’ve written.
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There are now three points at which you can stream my life.