This is the talk I delivered at Oekonux, an open source hardware type conference in Manchester this weekend. Here is an MP3 audio version of the talk. Here are the slides. They ask the questions that the talk attempts to answer. Here are the 10 questions we addressed. 1. What is Poverty? 2. How can [...]
Three observations. 1> Collaboration is not about what you do when things go right. 2> Crowdsourcing isn’t about what you know you want in all cases. Sometimes it’s about people who have totally unexpected angles just appearing to help. 3> I’m done on marketing. I’ve got a serviceable understanding of the very elementary basics of [...]
Open Knowledge Foundation in London (UCL) in the morning. Oekonux in Manchester in the afternoon. A little insane in terms of timing. There will be audio and probably video up as soon as possible after each talk. One thing that I’m doing for a change is substantially talking without visual aids. I thought long and [...]
Recently – and I blame twitter for this 
– I’ve had really bad information overload. This should not be that much of a surprise. Six and a half billion people, something over a billion of them online, many of them very, very smart with whole lifetimes of thinking and research behind them: there is [...]
Does a really nice write up of the Hexayurt Project.
The likelihood of the penal system in the UK and other Western countries facing similar challenges in the current climate to the ones former Soviet countries faced post-collapse is moderate to high. Crime rates and imprisonment rates have no correlation – high or low use of custody is a question of political will and nothing [...]
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? [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]