tvol is Timothy Vollmer. I'm a bicyclist, cook, and policy guy residing in San Francisco, CA.
This work by tvol is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
We’re coming up to the presidential election’s primary season. Suppose we had a functioning democratic society. Let’s just imagine that. What would a primary look like, say, in New Hampshire? What would happen in a primary would be that the people in a town would get together and discuss, talk about, and argue about what they want policy to be. Sort of like what’s been happening here in the Occupy movement. they should formulate a conception of what the policy should be. Then if a candidate comes along and says, “I want to come talk to you,” the people in the town out to say, “Well, you can come listen to us if you want. So you come in, we’ll tell you what we want, and you can try to persuade us that you’ll do it; then, maybe we will vote for you.” That’s what would happen in a democratic society.
Occupy, by Noam Chomsky.
Western policymakers should rid themselves of the illusion that communism ended quickly—under the pressure of information or fax machines—or that it was guaranteed to end peacefully because the whole world was watching. The fall of communism was the result of a much longer process, and the popular protests were just its most visible, but not necessarily most important, component. Technology may have played a role, but it did so because of particular historical circumstances rather than because of technology’s own qualities. Those circumstances were highly specific to Soviet communism and may no longer exist.
Josh Begley, James Borda and I just launched a website called Kickstriker, a crowdfunding platform for activists and engineers working to resolve global conflicts. Here’s what some people are saying about it on the internet:
Dymaxion Chronofile is the most bomb-ass name of all time.
I went to SFMOMA on Tuesday to check out Sam Green’s (past work includes the terrific Weather Underground) new film “The Lovesong of R. Buckminster Fuller.” Well, actually I guess it’s technically not a film because there were only 2 live performances of it and it was not committed to tape. Pretty cool format actually, which I’ve never seen before. Same pulled some great documentary footage and photographs from the massive Dymaxion Chronofile (see title of this post) and mashed those together with some expert interviews to create a 60-minute live documentary. Green did the voiceover live (no notes) and commissioned Yo La Tengo to do the backing soundtrack live. I knew pretty much zero about Buckminster Fuller coming into the show. I know a little bit more now. I think one problem (identified by Green himself) was that Fuller’s entire body of work—and especially in the video footage of him speaking—is difficult to capture and condense in a way that lends itself for presentation in a documentary format. For instance, Fuller was known for giving nonstop 6-hour lectures on a variety of topics. Trying to capture the thesis of a 6-hour lecture and boil it down into a 20-second clip for a documentary is really damn hard. So, I was a little bit disappointed in the depth of the content of the performance. There were several video clips that reiterated (almost verbatim) Fuller’s main treatise that doing more with less (as put forth by his many inventions and design including the Dymaxion car and geodesic dome) will produce a more sustainable and humane world ecosystem. But, there was little time to delve deeper into his theories.
For the first time, perhaps ever, a U.S. citizen was assassinated by the CIA, on orders from the President, without a shred of due process and far from any battlefield; two weeks later, his 16-year-old American son was also killed by his own government; the U.S. Attorney General then gave a speech claiming the President has the power to target U.S. citizens for death based on unproven, secret accusations of Terrorism.
Greenwald in Salon, at http://www.salon.com/2012/05/01/since_bin_ladens_death/singleton/
Scholars contribute powerfully to society’s narrative over the long term, and constitute a separate wildcard. Much scholarship has moved from a property- and rights-based frame to a public policy frame, but this shift as yet is very shallow, and will remain so until a property- and rights-basis assumption is cut out from under today’s public policy veneer, and social scientists rather than lawyers dominate the conversation.
Future of Copyright, http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2012/04/30/future-of-copyright/
10 tips for applying for the Google Policy Fellowship
It’s that time of year again when we sift through hundreds of applications for the Google Policy Fellowship at Creative Commons. I’ve been helping with this process for the last 2 years. It’s a shame that Google is still asking applicants to list two organizations they’d like to work with. This is unfortunate because it waters down applications. Some of the strongest applications I’ve seen are ones that simply ignore trying to speak to two separate orgs and just focus on the one the applicant is most interested in. That being said, here’s a few tips. No snark intended.
1. You should mention the org you wish to work at within the body of your application narrative. For example, if you do not mention Creative Commons, we will not choose you.
2. If you do not list Creative Commons as your first choice, there is very little chance that we will choose you. I assume this is the same at all the other orgs. There are just so many qualified applicants, the probability of choosing someone from the second-choice pool is very, very low.
3. Please send us ideas and propose something that you’re interested in or would like to work on in your fellowship. The Google Policy Fellows do not make coffee.
4. Research the organization you are interested in. Sure, you won’t know as much as the persons reading the applications, but try to be able to speak intelligently on the subject.
5. Never use the phrase “intersection of technology, policy, and law” ;)
6. Everyone should have a website or some online web presence where the host organization can find out more information about you. Leverage the web to show us who you are, what you’re working on, what you care about.
7. It is assumed that you are a hard worker, have good ethics, organized, attentive to detail, etc. Don’t waste your time telling the reader this in the application.
8. Tell us why you want to be a fellow for our org up front. There’s plenty of time to to describe the classes you’re taking, but mention those as supporting evidence of your interest in the org, not as a way to fill up the application.
9. Do not make any excuses on any portion of your application.
10. If you have more than one grammar mistake in your application, the likelihood that any org will choose you approaches zero. Have a friend help edit your application. It’s a nice thing to do.
superhumanoids
in Oakland. awesome.
The United States is nominally a democracy, but it’s sadly ridiculous to think this means very much. To get at the value of WikiLeaks, I think it’s important to distinguish between the government—the temporary, elected authors of national policy—and the state—the permanent bureaucratic and military apparatus superficially but not fully controlled by the reigning government. The careerists scattered about the world in America’s intelligence agencies, military, and consular offices largely operate behind a veil of secrecy executing policy which is itself largely secret. American citizens mostly have no idea what they are doing, or whether what they are doing is working out well. The actually-existing structure and strategy of the American empire remains a near-total mystery to those who foot the bill and whose children fight its wars. And that is the way the elite of America’s unelected permanent state, perhaps the most powerful class of people on Earth, like it.
The Economist, In defence of WikiLeaks, 29 November 2010
