Alejandro@Oxford

On last Tuesday’s International Herald Tribune, the President and founder of the Davos World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, wrote an opinion article titled “Shaping a post-crisis world.” He outlines the five objectives of this year’s meeting in Switzerland:

Support governments, particularly the G20, in the measures they are taking to face this crisis.
Look to the world [...]

Today’s New York Times included a very interesting piece by Jim Rutenberg and Adam Nagourney about how to transform the community network formed around Obama during his campaign into something more valuable in actual policy-making.
A good step forward is the establishment by Obama’s aides of a group outside the administration – it will part of [...]

Nathaniel Whittemore writes on change.org a piece on how the whitehouse and government can learn from the startup model. Let’s have a look at his 5 recommendations:
5. Do more with less
With the pressure of financial failure constantly looming, startups – social enterprise or pure business – need to be lean. In fact, according to famed [...]

Wow, that was a quick and victorious campaign. A few days after mySociety, Unlock Democracy and enoughsenough.org started the campaign to stop UK MPs from hiding their expenses, the government has withdrawn the Freedom of Information Parliament Order that exempted Parliamentary expenses from the Freedom of Information Act. This is a swift victory for the [...]

Wow, that was a quick and victorious campaign. A few days after mySociety, Unlock Democracy and enoughsenough.org started the campaign to stop UK MPs from hiding their expenses, the government has withdrawn the Freedom of Information Parliament Order that exempted Parliamentary expenses from the Freedom of Information Act. This is a swift victory for the [...]

True to their commitment to communicate through the Internet Obama’s spirit of change, the New Media team of the new president has already open then new WhiteHouse.gov website to the public, just seconds after Barack Hussein Obama swore in as the US 44th President.
On its first blog post, the director of New Media for the [...]

mySociety.org, the non-partisan platform for development of democracy websites – theyworkforyou.com, fixmystreet, etc. –, is launched a campaign to stop British MPs concealing their expenses. As they say in their entry post on the matter:
Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for [...]

Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain I rediscovered what Aaron Swartz wrote in his blog Raw Thought about Wikipedia a couple of years ago. It is a six-part article on wikimedia and wikipedia, which includes a section on Who writes Wikipedia? which I found interesting and quite relevant again when the Wikipedia foundation has managed to get [...]

It seems that the US state department is starting to use widely wikis to coordinate activities and share knowledge. This step towards collaborative intelligence by a very important body of international action and regulation is quite relevant, for it is not only that the knowledge people at different levels in this department will be more [...]