Damian: On tolerance.

“If everybody was forced to take 5 things they felt strongly about and argue the other side of the issue, the world would be a better place.”

Amen to that!

I am attending the Now We The People conference this weekend, and these things are usually the kind of events that allow me to meet reaaally interesting and exciting people doing great things, but also test my skills of tolerence while we listen to those that have such a narrow conception of how things are and how they can be improved - and this is on the left!

But, this conference comes highly recommended, so I am hoping there’s more of the former, and less of the latter, than the last one I went to.

Now if only I had a laptop with wireless I could blog the event. Oh well, maybe next time…

Great article on the Dean campaign: Steal This Campaign. It’s inspiring just reading about it! [via Jim Moore]

Jim Moore conceptualises the Smart Posse and the Instant Posse.

Interesting…

Jim Moore: Community, creativity, and the metaphors of political life.

“For the creative party, the challenge would be how to best provide a loving, celebratory community in which social creativity and love can flourish.”

For some time now I have been interested in how technology can be used to help in the growth of the global justice movement. Recently Jim Moore posted a thought provoking paper The Second Superpower. Joi Ito also posted another interesting article Emergent Democracy.

Both of these articles got me thinking, but I kept struggling with a couple of issues:

• How many people, outside of technologists, are likely to partake in a tech-based democracy?
• How many people, outside of activists, are likely to want to become more heavily involved in the political process?
• How many people, outside of the affluent “Northern” states (or even the more affluent within them), are able to participate in a tech-based democracy?

For my Communications and Information Environments class at UTS, I have taken on the topic of Information Inequality, interested particularly in the third point above. As part of our readings for that topic in the subject I read the first chapter of Digital Divide?: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty & the Internet in Democratic Societies by Pippa Norris.

It examines many of the issues that this discussion has raised for me, and it seems the book goes into greater depth on all of the topics. Looks like a must read.

Cafepress.com turns the propaganda around, so you can wear it on a shirt? [Via Dean]

Lee Felsenstein: HOW TO MAKE A REVOLUTION in three easy steps. [Via Scott Rosenberg]

Amen to that…